How to Pitch a Journalist Successfully - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailymuse.com/entrepreneurship/finding-your-voice-with-the-media-how-to-pitch-a-journalist/

<comment><USER3> Most PR is not news. Writers for daily papers and blogs may run something they know isn't news to meet a quota (I've been in that situation), but the best way to pitch us is to give us something that's actually news.

My advice:

1) We're not all the same, no one can speak for all journalists.

2) Edward Bernays, a spin doctor so good he convinced the world that he invented PR, told Stewart Ewen that the job of PR is to instruct clients on how to "just interrupt... the continuity of life in some way to bring about the [media] response" (Ewen's book _PR: A Social History of Spin_ ) In other words, your job is making news. Easier said than done, but worth keeping in mind.

3) Read William Zinsser's book _On Writing Well_ and apply it to all your communications. Specifically, write what you mean as simply as you can. Look at this for an example of what not to do: [http://boingboing.net/2012/02/06/edward-norton-and-daria- wer...](http://boingboing.net/2012/02/06/edward-norton-and-daria-werbow.html)

What does that Norton quote actually say? "I liked working with these companies." That's not revealing or funny or interesting. The vast majority of executive quotes I see in press releases are like this. All they really say is "We think we have a good product." _Yawn_

4) Speaking of which, we hate quoting from press releases. Get someone important, like the CEO or CTO, to write a blog post that we can quote from.

5) I'm pretty technical for a journalist, but don't assume even the most technical of us are going to be able to decipher your string of buzzwords and jargon. Knowing what each word means individually doesn't mean we'll know what they mean when you use three or four of them together as a noun. Keep it simple.

6) Think about your subject line as a headline. Why would a reader read want to read your story? If a reader would want to read it, I as a journalist will want to read your e-mail. I get too many e-mails that just say "News from [some company I've never heard of]" or "big data announcement, time to talk?" I'd also throw a specific date into the subject line. Examples: "New open source operating system launches Tuesday" or "Data Released Today Shows MindFuck is the Fastest Growing Programming Language on the Web."

6) Even tech blogs want people stories. If you're stumped on how to pitch something in an interesting way, think about people. Things like ERP and tape backup are inherently boring. Find a fresh human angle. "How a big customer avoiding disaster with our solution" is a boring story. "How Dr. Steve Made a Medical Breakthrough by Studying Archival Data" or "How an Average Jane Worker Catapulted Her Career with a Simple Manufacturing Process Tweak" could be interesting stories.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm a journalist, not a tech journalist though.

We write for the readers.

Some pointers.

1\. Use the Who, What, When, Where and How. Who are you. What do you want. When is it happening. These are the three most important points to get across.

2\. Press releases are usually technical jargon that makes no sense to readers. Explain what your product and service to help the readers. E.g. iPod can hold 1000 songs, not 10gb of songs.

3\. Think of the readers and pitch it such that your story will be exciting to the readers.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think it's important to remember what journalists are looking for - a story. I've had journalists basically admit to me that they don't have time to put together all the stories that they need, so they look for interesting stories that are easy to understand. A common problem that we had early on was that the media didn't understand our data - so we worked to refine the story down to a simple sentence that just about anyone could understand - and we tested it with people outside our company.

I think the problem with most PR is that it isn't a compelling story - but the people go to the trouble of doing a full PR release (including throwing it on the wires) for something that really isn't news and will never get covered. For items like that, the blog is a perfect outlet combined with social outreach.

In my opinion, it is also worth measuring the impact of your PR - not by number of article placements, but with a brand awareness survey of your target buyers. Yes, it costs money, but you can do it these days for a surprisingly low amount of money (like $1000). This can give you a benchmark for brand awareness among your target buyers and you can then measure the impact over time.

Finally, I think the reason to hire a PR person is because they have the relationships with the media outlets that you target. Yes, they can help with messaging, etc - but at the end of the day it's about whether or not they can pick up the phone and call XXX and have them take their call. Not something for all startups naturally - and as @brackin said at the top, developing those relationships yourself is very powerful.

</comment><comment><USER6> Make relationships, it's simple as. You can very easily do this on Twitter but it's similar to investors in the sense that they won't pick up on you without an intro or building a prior relationship.

To get the most out of journalists at events you have to do your research. I went to TC Disrupt and got almost no press at all but did start some relationships. Six months later I went to LeWeb and prepared and was able to get an interview on the Wall Street Journal, TNW, Huffington Post, France 24 TV (CNN of France) and many other publications.

All I did was research who was going to be there and emailed them telling them about me and my startup. They then lined me up as a target to interview rather than me having to follow them. If their editor already knows about you before they go filming then you have a better chance as the editor has the real control, if they like what you've said in the email or call then the chances are they'll be wanting to get a lot from you as they think it'll be used.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is appalling pabulum. It has no more to do with pitching a journalist successfully than wearing nice clothing to the interview has to do with getting a job.

Every pitch should have dual goals:

1\. Ideally, you'd like to get covered. 2\. Absent that, you'd like to increase the likelihood of getting covered in the future.

So you should think of your pitch as being more about making your company look worth writing about. In particular, don't breathlessly oversell a minor piece of news.

If you're a native English speaker, you should strongly consider going without a PR firm altogether. They're the sort of outfit who follow the cookie-cutter advice in the post linked here and think they're adding value. They also are very bad, with few exceptions, at finding credible ways to make you sound unique.

<comment><USER7> Here's a link with some of the reasons for my opinion:

[http://www.strategicmessaging.com/five-kinds-of-public- relat...](http://www.strategicmessaging.com/five-kinds-of-public- relations/2010/02/28/)

(First time I've posted a link to Hacker News. I'm curious to see what happens ...)

<comment><USER8> You can do an after action report tomorrow. I would like to see it, especially if it doesn't involve 10k hits. I think only the crazy stuff gets reported and it skews public perception of what it means to post a link here. My links never get anywhere near the traffic that gets reported around here until people seem to think that kind of hype is the norm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The thing to consider about a press release is it's a way that other journalists know every other journalist has gotten the news, and thus, is a way to guarantee that not many people will write about you (journalists are driven by the scoop). If what you have is actually 'news' and not just propaganda, give an exclusive to someone at a major daily. That beats a press release. Don't worry that the story they write hasn't got your contact details, the best journalists are like hackers, they can get any information they want. So the people that call you the day the story has run (and for this you must fit with the journalists schedule and resist talking early) will be a selection of the best and most interested journalists.

<comment><USER3> This works, but as I journalist I'd like to add that we hate being scooped and we hate hearing about news for the first time on a competitors site.

An alternative approach would be to give one publication an exclusive, and then as soon as the story runs send out the copy of a blog post from someone within the company (preferably a founder or the CTO, assuming it's a tech company) to journalists and say "we're going to run this on the company blog in an hour, but feel free to run a story with quotes from it now." That way we have something other than the competitors' story to quote from and we don't feel totally shutout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Asking it here instead of commenting in the blog for more eyeballs:

1\. The (only) media covering startups for my target market happens to be funded by the same investor and in the same company group with the startup I'm competing with. How to deal with this?

2\. How to deal the case where you get reply from more than one media near simultaneously (after you BCC-spam them). Promising each of them "exclusive info" seems weird right? Should you honestly reply the rest, "Sorry folks, one media already replied."?

<comment><USER7> 1\. One journalist at a time. Journalists often have very different integrity and biases than their employers.

2\. I don't understand why you think you need to offer exclusives at all. So I don't really understand the question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's really not that hard. If the news is actually interesting to me - <USER2> assume (that if i'm a reflection of my readers) it will be interesting to them.

Basic product pitches, 500 words context setting shit and partnership stuff is often not interesting. Something i've never heard of before, something that will improve the way I work and live - that's what I crave.

Pitch me on that - and I'll write.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is it just me, or is this title missing a 'to'?

How to pitch a journalist - surely I can't be the only one thinking that this contains instructions on how best to throw a journalist 10 meters in any direction...

I've noticed this quite a bit in American posts - words clearly missing, but no one cares

<comment><USER9> The English language is a flexible thing. Some think that "y'all" is not 'proper', but name another single word second person collective pronoun in English. Some English in America also has "write me" instead of "write to me".

<comment><USER13> I sympathise with Daniel Hunt in my heart though I rationally see where you're coming from. If I were to give a nice blank canvas as a gift to a child and they were to smear excrement all over it, in my gut I'd be annoyed but I could probably be talked around to the idea that it's a valid form of self- expression, even if it's not my cup of tea.

However, saying "I could care less" when you mean "I could not care less". There is no justification for such a heinous crime. Murderers can be rehabilitated, electro-convulsive therapy can take care of all manor of criminal perversions, so save your death penalty for when it is really in the public interest. For the unconvinced, the Guardian newspaper made a little video:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2010/may/20/la...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2010/may/20/language- usa)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> few pointers: Never, and I mean, never ever, call a journalist after you sent them your news and ask them if they got your mail and when they will write about it. It's a sure way to get you blacklisted. Target your mail. A tech- blog needs other information than a local newspaper. Set up a page with pictures and link to them.

And: Get a professional PR person. You might be good, but if you let your pr be handled by "guy x in marketing" then you are no better than those companies who let their IT be handled by "my sisters brother, he really knows his way around the internet".

<comment><USER7> Your fist paragraph is good. The second one, as stated in my own comment to the main, I vigorously disagree with.

<comment><USER3> I can't say what the best long term strategy is, but I can say that as a tech journalist I almost always prefer to hear from someone involved in a company rather than a PR firm. But hiring a full-time internal PR person isn't the same thing as hiring an agency.

As inthewoods wrote, the reason for hiring a PR person is for their contacts. Agencies will make a lot of claims about how many contacts they have, but I've heard they'll often stick low-priority accounts with junior PR people or even interns (and the quality of pitches and press releases I've seen from well known agencies about unknown companies seems to confirm this).

Jagermo wrote: "i get a lot of mails from marketing people who think they know what journalists want. Most of them do not."

I get a lot of e-mails from PR people who think they know what I want, and few do. I get a lot of the same from marketing, but a lot of journalists end up in PR or marketing at some point in their careers and they often do know what other journalists want. Some people just seem to get it, whether they've been journalists or not, and some don't. I imagine it's easier to keep track on who's doing what and how good they're doing if they're internal and not outsourced to an agency, but I wouldn't know.

FWIW, some of the best pitches for startups I've gotten have come from investors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Bookmarked! Great work. Thanks.

I'll add one thing that I've found so far:

They can take a long time to respond. One site got back to us several weeks later. A few days or more is very common.

Of course no response at all is by far the most common result, but just because they don't respond within a day or two doesn't mean they aren't interested. They get a TON of emails...

<comment><USER14> excatly. And it does not mean, that a journalist doesn't notice you. If a similar story comes up, he might remember your mail and call you up out of the blue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> great stuff as usual tdm!</comment>


TLS 1.3 might be renamed TLS 2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tls/current/msg20938.html <comment><AUTHOR> More on that here: [https://github.com/tlswg/tls13-spec/pull/612](https://github.com/tlswg/tls13-spec/pull/612) it appears that a majority of people are supporting this change.</comment>


"What is it with pet supplies and Internet booms?" - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2007/06/18/online-pet-supply-company-raises-10m-even-as-sectors-growth-plummets/ <comment><USER2> Upvoted for title.</comment>


Hiring Fresher CEOs - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdu_5SKZjAPeWWrG6l3bOShddYMfrLFgZVgztnkHMa5SjQENw/viewform <comment><AUTHOR> I am hiring freshers who know to apply to this role. I am hiring freshers who are aspiring to be founders. I am hiring freshers who are aspiring to be a CEO. I am hiring freshers who love to solve a variety of problems. I am hiring freshers who don't suit 99% of jobs out there.

Please share this and help me find the future CEO's.

Role description in the link below

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apply here tinyurl.com/freshceo</comment>


How Hard Could It Be?: Unfocused and Unabashed - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/magazine/20071001/how-hard-could-it-be-unfocused-and-unabashed.html

<comment><USER2> Joel optomised this article so well it was published in "October 2007"!

I watched Aardvark after purchasing a copy and was probably responsible for some of the fun Joel describes sending the DVD, OS. One of the things that struck me watching the film was the project was just so straightforward. It was bland. I don't know if it was because the programmers where so good? Joel was overseeing the specification? The idea was predefined? There was no coding frenzy of _Coderush_ , no blood in the water like _Startup.com_. No grungy craziness of e-dreams.

Then again maybe thats the point. A great example of _"software management"_ in releasing a version 1 product. The movie was still like eating cardboard though. (5.5/10)

\- coderush <http://www.amazon.com/Code-Rush/dp/B00004T128>

\- startup.com <http://en.wik> ipedia.org/wiki/Startup.com

\- edreams <http://www.kosmo.com/blogs/TimsBlog/2004/04/></comment>


Ask HN: Why is there still guessing involved in "Make something people want"? - <AUTHOR> On the bottom of Y Combinator's website, it says "Make something people want." There are troves of data about the American consumer and information about people's desires is so public and easy to obtain. Why is there no easy way to figure out what people want so you can just focus on building said thing? <comment><USER2> _" If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse'"_ ~~ Henry Ford

OK, that's likely apocryphal, but the overall point is kinda valid. People don't always know what they want - _because they don 't always know what is possible_.

So the real question requires digging deeper... it's not enough to know "I want a faster horse", you need to know that they really mean "I want to get there faster, and be able to travel much further without having to stop and feed/rest the horse, and I want to travel inside a heated/cooled conveyance, and I want music while I'm in transit" and so on.

Now you might argue "Well, the customer _could_ have said all of that" and in a pedantic sense you'd be right. But the typical customer wouldn't have had the imagination to even _think_ that stuff because it would have seemed like science fiction at the time.

I think that's the real key to entrepreneurship: combining deeper insights about what people _really_ want/need (based on their words and/or observed actions) with a deep understanding of what's possible at the bleeding edge of technology, and using that combination to build something awesome.

Of course that's easier said than done. I mean, I have no idea how to do it myself. But one can keep trying...

<comment><AUTHOR> I think your comments have serious merit. That being said many people are focused on building a faster horse that nobody even wants. Isn't it strange that this is still a thing?

What I am saying is that the "deeper insights about what people really want/need (based on their words and/or observed actions)" aren't really that deep when you consider the amount of information available. Its surprising to me that people like you and me rely on people's claims to develop a hypothesis and test ideas. Shouldn't it be easy to get insights on a large portion of the population?

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I think you have a point. I'm not sure existing data is enough to generate ideas about all potential new products though, since behavior is shaped by what things/ideas/knowledge we have access to today. That is, what data is going to tell you that somebody wants a product that they can't even imagine yet?

So I'd think consumer behavior data / demographic data / etc. is a useful guide, but I'm not sure it's sufficient in and of itself.

All of that said, Alan Kay said something interesting in a set of lectures[1][2] he did a year or so ago. He brought up the idea of basing new product ideas on "Human Univerals", or universal aspects of human nature that really don't vary. A writer named Donald Brown wrote a book literally titled _Human Univerals_ [3] which catalogs a number of these (a lot of them are pretty obvious though: food, shelter, sex, etc.). Kay suggested reading this book, pick one of the human univerals, and figure out a way to use technology to address that.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ)

[2]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e8VZlPBx_0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e8VZlPBx_0)

[3]: [https://www.amazon.com/Human-Universals-Donald- Brown/dp/0070...](https://www.amazon.com/Human-Universals-Donald- Brown/dp/007008209X)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Everything that people want that you can easily figure out already exits. Startups have to create things that people don't even know they want.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think that is necessarily true. You might be able to tell using information from a data broker like Acxiom or search engine data that people are not satisfied with the current options for buying LED strips, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most aren't as good/perceptive as they claim. Also, it became clear many years ago that founders usually need everything spelt out for them. Any product that "hits" usually does so due to luck rather than skill. Also, "me too" is consistently louder than vision.

While mountains of data may exist, most don't seek it out, and even if they did, wouldn't know how to process/interpret what's shown.

That is, it's all wide open if you know where to look. While some major offerings are satisfactory enough to make it harder to break in, many aren't that great or there's room for competing products.

<comment><AUTHOR> > That is, it's all wide open if you know where to look

I believe you are right. My whole point is that I am surprised that process is not easier.</comment></comment>


Cai Gengyang.com in Lisp - <AUTHOR>

Ok, So I have decided to focus and master Lisp after reading Paul Graham's material.
The first thing I want to do is to create a personal site like Paul Graham's www.paulgraham.com.
Where do I start? I am currently using Lispworks Personal Edition on my MacBook OSX Yosemite Version 10.10.2.
How and where do I start work on this project? If anyone can enlighten me, I would appreciate it very much.
Also trying to get answers in comp.lang.lisp ... <comment><USER2> You seem to jump between ideas a lot, you have to get at least somewhere with something before following the next idea.

HN isn't the best place to ask for this kind of advice, better find a community specialized in the environment you want to use and look there + ask _specific_ questions on Stack Overflow.

That said, you should try to find and use basic resources on your own, people are way more willing to help you with specific problems than with "I have this idea, what do I have to do?", like this or your post yesterday asking for step-by-step to build a specific python website. You likely won't get a good answer to tht, unless someone magically knows a tutorial that uses exactly that example.

Follow a few tutorials or simple examples, then try adapt them for what you want to do (e.g. for the python-image-site thing, there are tons of Python website tutorials e.g. for blogs and such. Follow one of those, then modify it or try to build an image site among similar lines), ask specific questions if you get stuck. (e.g. for python, reddit has /r/learnpython).

<comment><AUTHOR> I got banned on Stack Overflow for asking what the moderators deemed to be "low-quality" questions. I plan to master Lisp first ... it seems to be the most powerful language. Just trying to find a way to create a personal site using Lisp ...

<comment><USER2> re Stackoverflow: yeah, that happens, but if you have better questions you can always create a new account. Just make sure to actually ask fitting questions!

re lisp: a bit of an odd choice for first web development, but if you feel comfortable with it why not.

re "build a site in lisp": Okay, what have you searched for and found out by now?

<comment><AUTHOR> detaro,

Just going through the exercises in this book by Paul Graham : [http://ep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/onlisp.pdf](http://ep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/onlisp.pdf). --- There doesn't seem to be anything in there about web development for Lisp though ...

Also saw this book on static web development by Adam Tornhill : [http://www.adamtornhill.com/articles/lispweb.htm](http://www.adamtornhill.com/articles/lispweb.htm) \--- do you think this will help ?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Intel's Medfield will dismantle ARM - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/113123-how-intels-medfield-will-dismantle-arm <comment><USER2> The article overstates the case against ARM in the mobile marketplace. Counterpoints not mentioned are: 1\. The single company Intel can never match the wide variety of SoC (System on a Chip) components that the diverse ARM fabricators will offer. 2\. The ARM fabricators will remain close behind Intel with regard to lithography generations. 3\. Intel's Medfield has not been independently benchmarked on shipping mobile devices. 4\. Industry partnerships established for the previous Intel mobile part did not create any notable results. 5\. In order to dismantle ARM, Intel would have to significantly underprice commodity ARM fabricators - which would destroy Intel's historical margins. Note that Intel sold off a former ARM-compatible division - XScale - for this reason. 6\. Furthermore some ARM partners plan to invade the x86 server market with low power, but capable alternatives to Intel servers, thus enlarging the potential ARM market and possibly counter- disrupting Intel's highest margin business.

<comment><USER3> I think point 2 is the most important -- and I think you're wrong. Intel is already way, way ahead of TSMC, GloFo, and Samsung -- and the gap, if anything, shows signs of extending.

Price will definitely be important, but judging by how hard Intel is coming into this segment, I can only assume that it's willing to match or get very close to ARM component costs.

<comment><USER4> It looks like a worse ISA will win because it happens to be owned by the owner of the better lithography process. In a really efficient market, those would not be tied. Microsoft using Windows to push Office was bad for society. Why is Intel good for society?

<comment><USER5> The old RISC vs CISC is completely dead now. Intel have now shown they can match ARM's equivalent powered CPUs in terms of energy efficiency, and that was the last argument the RISC proponents had in the argument.

Intel's chips are internally RISC, with the only overhead of decoding and fusing the ops and the transistors to do this. And despite this overhead, they're still miles ahead.

The only argument left then is the actual instruction sets at asm level, and here, CISC has an advantage, because they can do so much more in one instruction (take memory addressing modes for example), so they're more compact from an executable point-of-view and instruction cache point-of-view.

<comment><USER6> CISC isn't necessarily more compact. Since there are more instructions, each instruction takes up more space. For example in ARM's thumb encoding, each instruction takes up 16 bits. A typical x86 instruction takes much more space.

I wonder how much of an x86 chip is dedicated to handling legacy instructions or largely unnecessary instructions. How much saving could be achieved by a radically simpler instruction set (for example no neg/call/ret/push/pop/bcd instructions). If you look at the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_instruction_listings> then most of the instructions seem unnecessary. Does anybody have some information about this?

<comment><USER7> > I wonder how much of an x86 chip is dedicated to handling legacy > instructions or largely unnecessary instructions. How much saving could be > achieved by a radically simpler instruction set (for example no > neg/call/ret/push/pop/bcd instructions).

It's been a long time since I was in a closely related biz, but back then, the answer was "not much if you want to go fast".

Instruction decode isn't a huge deal. Micro-op sequencing isn't a big deal if you're going out of order (and many risc instructions tend to get broken into micro-ops).

The number of architectural registers used to be a big thing, but X86_64 is good enough. (I don't know if anyone got around to renaming memory.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm guessing that Intel cut Motorola a really sweet deal to get them to sign an exclusive contract. The decision probably had little to do with Intel being a better platform, and more to do with cost per chip.

Let's face it - Windows 8 running on ARM was a pretty big wake up call to Intel. They knew that they had to have a major win, or risk getting disrupted in the near future. So they called up Sanjay Jha, and figured out what it was going to take to get an exclusive contract.

When you look at it, Medfield is 3 year-old desktop chip technology, which itself wasn't exactly new (the Atom had some improvements, but wasn't a radical departure from what preceded it). Intel isn't bringing anything new to the table - they just keep shrinking the same old chips, and reducing power requirements. At the core, they are still a PC chip company - they just figure out how to shoehorn those chips into smaller and smaller platforms.

The new ARM-based devices (such as Tegra 3) are actually much more innovative and better-suited to mobile devices than Medfield. I think that we will see a lot more innovation in chip design from ARM licensees going forward (such as the low-power 5th core on the Tegra 3), and this will eventually disrupt Intel from the bottom up.

<comment><USER9> "So they called up Sanjay Jha, and figured out what it was going to take to get an exclusive contract."

Not to take away from the overall point of your comment, but isn't Google in the process of finalizing[1] their purchase of Motorola Mobility, so wouldn't Google have been deeply involved in the decision. In essence a phone to Jha, Rubin, and Page.

I think it's too early to tell weather Medfield is a hit or miss. Anandtech seems to be impressed with the Medfield Platform[2], so far based on what they have seen

"Intel finally did it. After almost five years of talking about getting into mobile phone form factors, Intel went out and built a reference platform that proved what they've been saying was possible all along. Furthermore, Intel also finally landed a couple of partners who are willing to show their support by incorporating Medfield into their product portfolio. The releases are still a few months away at the earliest (possibly even longer for Motorola) but it's much better news than Intel has ever reported before in this space.

The partnerships aren't out of pity either: Medfield is fast. I firmly believe had it been released a year ago it would have dominated the Android smartphone market from the very start. Even today it appears to deliver better CPU performance than anything on the market, despite only having a single core. GPU performance is still not as fast as what's in the A5 but it's competitive with much of the competition today, and I fully expect the dual-core version of Medfield to rectify this problem.

Based on the data Intel shared with us as well, the x86 power problem appears to be a myth - at least when it comes to Medfield. I'm still not fully convinced until we're able to test a Medfield based phone ourselves, but power efficiency at the chip level doesn't seem to be a problem.

Medfield and the Atom Z2460 are a solid starting point. Intel finally has a chip that they can deliver to the market and partners to carry it in. Intel also built a very impressive reference platform that could lead to some very interesting disruptions in the market.

While I'd like to say that Intel's Medfield team can now breathe a sigh of relief, their work is far from over - especially with more competitive ARM based SoCs showing up later this year. I'm really interested to see where this goes in the next 12 months..."

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/12/2630134/googles- acquisiti...](http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/12/2630134/googles-acquisition- of-motorola-mobility-paused-by-eu-to-get-more) [2][http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield- atom-z246...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield- atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones/6)

<comment><USER10> > Medfield is fast. I firmly believe had it been released a year ago it would > have dominated the Android smartphone market from the very start.

Unfortunately, ARM is fast enough. The iPad can run an internet browser, and Angry Birds, which is all tablets are really good for. Gamers want better 3D, and maybe a physics chip, where ARM may have the edge. Number crunchers SSH into a real computer. The thin client may have had a few false starts, but it seems to be finally emerging for real.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This feels rather overblown to me.

Intel is entering a market. Agreed.

This will mean that ARM has to compete with them. Agreed.

This will be good for the consumer. Agreed.

And Intel will completely wipe the floor with the current market monopolist. Nope, sorry, you lost me there.

Sure, they _might_ be able to outflank ARM, but they haven't managed to do that so far, and ARM are the experts in this space. Intel have tried to outflank experts before, and their graphics processors don't seem to be the market leaders.

<comment><USER12> Intel has the largest share in the PC graphics market, over 50% of the total.

<comment><USER13> They have the largest share in not providing decent graphics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> ARM produces a design people incorporate into their chips. I'm not entirely certain you cannot take an ARM core and enhance it if you pay the right fees (when I worked on them, I don't think we did, but we just need a core to do management for our hardware-based video decoder).

Not sure if IBM fabricates any chips for people right now, but we used UMC and TSMC, so it's really not about ARM for the manufacturing process, it's about those two companies. I don't know what UMC and TSMC are advertising as their current process, it might be a little behind Intel, but I'm sure they'll continue to shrink processes.

The question is why would an x86 processor need to be put on your phone? I guess because the history of Intel so far is all x86, their other processor lines have all been phased out (I hesitate to say failed, but that might be the right word). Intel really doesn't want to compete on low-power, low-margin chips, they like making money on the desktop and server.

From my limited experience, ARM is vastly easier to work on than x86, as far as assembly programming is concerned. I personally hope this chip fails, because I'd prefer not to have x86 polluting the world anymore than it already has.

<comment><USER15> > I'm not entirely certain you cannot take an ARM core and enhance it if you > pay the right fees

You can. There are at least two licenses, a core license and an architecture license. Qualcomm has an architecture license; the Scorpion (Snapdragon's ARM core) is an ARMv7 core somewhat similar to an A8, but is not actually an A8. Companies with core licenses have also modified them; the Samsung/Apple/Intrinsity Hummingbird/A4 used an A8 core modified by Intrinsity to work efficiently at 1GHz; TI later followed suit. Intrinsity's main business model, in fact, was optimization of other peoples' core designs.

<comment><USER14> Ok, cool, I should have looked it up, but the sentence in the article was "Except for Qualcomm, which makes its own ARM-compatible cores, every other ARM chip on the market uses reference CPU cores", which I didn't think was true (and I don't think 'compatible' is the right word for Qualcomm, probably 'extended' ?).

Also, he talks about this future 22nm process from intel for 2013, as though the other fabs are going to sit at 28nm forever (even though Intel is also currently at 28nm).

It just seems like a poorly written article, or someone who copied a little too much from Intel's PR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _In short, if Motorola didn't think that Medfield was competitive, it wouldn't have agreed to make a bunch of Medfield-powered phones and tablets._

Either that, or Intel paid it a bunch of money to make it worth their while.

<comment><USER17> Exactly, or they're just making a mistake - like Logitech did with their Google TV boxes, which cost them $100m in operating profits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _Consumers, for the first time ever, will actually have a choice — just like > AMD and Intel on the desktop, you will be able to pick a smartphone or > tablet with a CPU that best suits your needs._

Consumers don't particularly care what CPU is in their smartphone or tablet.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm sort of biased towards ARM, but I'm still very impressed by how well Intel is doing. The history of computers is littered with the corpses of the companies that brought down by competitors with cheaper, not as good solutions. Look at 3.5" hard drives, x86 vs the RISC machines, etc. And mostly they failed to do anything because competing when they still could would have eaten into their profit margins. But here Intel is devoting actual resources to a smaller, cheaper, less powerful offering.

<comment><USER2> Intel's SoC Atom part will not, in my opinion, be priced below ARM parts competing for a particular manufacturer's design. Intel is a high margin company and I think will sell high-priced Medfield on the basis of higher performance. Intel is the high-priced market incumbent in this case - and may well be disrupted soon by certain ARM low-power servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The spec's I don't think tell the story here. It's going to come down to price and marketing.

Intel still has some very strong brand recognition with their 'intel inside' campaign, and though most people don't actively look for intel chips when buying a computer, they do recognize when the computer they are buying has it, and it makes them feel comforted (much like McAfee or Norton etc. etc)

The hardware manufacturers will build on a competitive price point. I suspect Moto's dedication to Intel was driven more by price than by performance.

Not to say that I don't believe intel will perform, and I also disgree with the article, and I think javascript performance is hugely important to the end user.

</comment><comment><USER21> 14nm in two years? Whoa. That's going to be huge for the server market.

Imagine 24 cores per chip with the same power draw as they have today for six cores.

<comment><USER2> Actually, I think the Moore's law benefits of continued chip feature shrinkage will be felt most strongly in personal devices. For example, to perform voice recognition, Siri must send the raw waveform to a cloud server for processing, because the local CPU and RAM are insufficient for acoustic and language modeling. With a couple more CPU generations, i.e. say four years, I expect mobile devices to perform these sort of calculations locally. Beyond speech recognition is machine vision - object/scene detection and recognition. Currently, wireless bandwidth limitations preclude a realtime cloud-based facility for machine vision, but more capable mobile device CPU/GPUs could enable local processing.

In general, Moore's law progress enables less expensive cloud servers to perform the same tasks, but that same progress enables mobile devices to perform new categories of tasks!

<comment><USER22> _"Currently, wireless bandwidth limitations preclude a realtime cloud-based facility for machine vision"_

I do not think that is all what stops it. Just as speech recognition, machine vision is quite different from computer graphics. We _know_ how to make graphics orders of magnitude better; just look at Pixar's latest movie. 'All' we have to do to bring that to your phone is do it more efficiently.

For speech recognition and machine vision, I am less optimistic. Reason? I never hear about, say, "almost perfect, but it takes a 1000 CPUs a day to process a second of sound" for speech recognition or object recognition.

I wonder why that is? Is it because there are problems we haven't solved yet, or because nobody approaches the problem from that side?

<comment><USER2> For clarity... I am an AI developer. Recently I added a feature to my dialog system so that if I have not typed anything into the dialog web app in a while, the system begins capturing frames from the webcam and performing face detection using JavaCV. If a face is detected, then face recognition is performed on the clipped greyscale face. If the face best matches mine from the training examples, then the system uses Google speech-to-text synthesis to say hello to me, "hello Stephen".

A smartphone cannot practically do this because JavaCV will not run fast enough on an ARM CPU and wireless bandwidth limitations preclude sending whole realtime captured phonecam frames to a server. But, when Moore's Law permits, JavaCV will run on the mobile CPU/GPU combination - and my phone could say hello to me when it recognizes me.

I know that Google is working on face-recognition phone-unlocks - but I wonder if their implementation involves a cloud server and one-time sending of a captured frame?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hmm. Does Android have fat binaries for the NDK? I can see Motorola et al getting a lot of complaints about games not working...

<comment><USER23> Android doesn't use 'fat binaries' by the strict definition of the term, but the APK format that apps are shipped in can include multiple individual builds of both the main app and required libraries so you could pack x86 and ARM builds in a single APK.

FWIW, there are already Android devices out there on x86 -- all of the currently shipping Google TV devices are built around Atom. The NDK isn't officially supported on those GTV platforms but it isn't difficult to get it working in practice.

Also, any complaints for this would probably be directed at Google (though I guess Google and Moto will be the same company soon anyway) because arch filtering is generally handled by the Android Market, so for users with these devices they just won't see the games showing up at all on their local install of the Android Market (since the market will be filtering out anything NDK based that doesn't have an included x86 build), so it looks like a market issue (if they already know the game exists), not an app issue.

<comment><USER15> In my experience, the average user is only dimly aware, if at all, of Google's involvement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Exaggerated title and claims attract impressions. News at 11.

</comment><comment><USER25> lolololololol

To me, the articles main support for the rise of Intel as a mobile chip competitor are: 1). Motorola made a deal 2). Intel can leverage their own manufacturing process/plants

The first is stupid. Considering how much Motorola bent over for Microsoft, this is probably more Microsoft doing Intel a solid to get into the market rather than a purely "logical" financial long-term decision by Motorola.

The second I can't really argue about with any real knowledge. However, upgrading plants is fucking expensive. By ARM separating themselves from that portion of the chip business, they have basically enabled a secondary competitive market of improving ARM designs. Intel has locked themselves into the position of Overseer of all-best-designs, and whether or not this is true, it will lead to comparative stagnation in innovation.

I'm might be wrong, but I honestly think that Intel will lose simply because their mentality depends too much on an idea of limited competition. They are too used to AMD and legacy slaves; the switch to open-source and web-based systems will lead to insane competition and crunch their profit margins like a nutcracker.</comment>


Lost considerable amount in Freelancer.com - <AUTHOR> I have been working in Freelancer.com for the last couple of years. earlier there were some cases where suddenly the Freelancer.com authority reversed my earning and when I sent a ticket to them requesting explanation they simply responded by saying the client utilized unauthorized source of fund, to avoid such client they have reversed the client's money.
in this way the earning and Freelancer service deducted from my fund vanished. since those amounts were less than $50 so I took no headache, but on 7 July 2018 I got the big smash. I raised the issue to the Freelancer.com authority by sending several tickets but no response received from their end. and I am sure my hard earning is totally lost.
do anybody can suggest me whether there is any way to recover the money? can I take any attempt with the help of any legal procedure? any suggestion will be of great help and highly appreciated.
jomagmaj <comment><USER2> Write a post about your story with some screenshots, dates and all the details you remenber (what they replied by mail...). Publish it here (and elsewhere). You can do it anonymously (probably better).

Find a lawyer around you if possible.

Don't deal with them in the future.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh, man. Sorry to hear that. Same thing happened to me a while back. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15625028](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15625028)

Fortunately, I had direct contact with the client and he paid me through an online payment platform. My client had used a bank account from a different country than the country listed on his freelancer account. They banned his account without even notifying him. I couldn't even reach him through their platform.

Read through the comments on the parent thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624677](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624677) Specially this [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15626790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15626790)

And stay away from freelancer.com. You can always find new clients there, but contact them directly after that becasue, obviously they don't have any kind of protection for us so, why should we pay some additional fees if we are going to get screwed anyway ?

Good Luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> Hire a lawyer and go after the client directly, if you can actually find them. If they used a stolen card to pay there's a high chance their entire profile is fake and they're hiding behind a proxy.

</comment><comment><USER5> What was the amount on this one?

Depending upon that, it may be worth hiring a lawyer.

Either way, never forget you are beholden to the middle man when you play in marketplaces/walled gardens.

<comment><USER6> Also remember that if you hire a lawyer and involve the marketplace, you will surely be permanently banned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember about a guy that when something similar to you from upwork.com. The article was posted on Medium and it received quite an attention, try to seek it out.

Good luck.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you repeatedly do in your SaaS that you wish was automated? - <AUTHOR>

What do you wish that your billing / subscription management system did that you repeatedly build & wish was automated already? <comment><USER2> Handle invoiced/wire-transfer payments / verifying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you explain what you mean by verifying? Do you mean reconciliation of invoices?

<comment><USER2> Make a callback when the payment hits your account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I use stripe and their API makes it just so easy to do everything already.</comment>


Sick of Your Shit, Apple - <AUTHOR> https://www.stilldrinking.org/sick-of-your-shit-apple <comment><USER2> An apt reminder that just because you can publish and share to the web, doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

<comment><USER3> My thoughts exactly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I loved reading this, but, yeah, there's an AppleCare for unexpected random freak accidents and another that covers true accidents.</comment>


John Carmack discusses the art and science of software engineering [2012] - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.uw.edu/ajko/2012/08/22/john-carmack-discusses-the-art-and-science-of-software-engineering/ <comment><USER2> Something wrong with dup detection? I submitted this link after this one, but HN didn't redirect me to this one. My later one: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10211380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10211380)

This and my later link look the same to me:

      https://blogs.uw.edu/ajko/2012/08/22/john-carmack-discusses-the-art-and-science-of-software-engineering/
      https://blogs.uw.edu/ajko/2012/08/22/john-carmack-discusses-the-art-and-science-of-software-engineering/</comment>


Ask HN: I hate my new job, Need some advice - <AUTHOR> I'm a PHP developer with about 3-4 years experience , living and working in UK, About 2 months ago i had to move to Manchester, because of a personal situation, so i had to leave my job ( which i regret now ), I was the lead developer of a high exposure web application and i enjoyed what i was doing over there , architecture design, coding, testing, monitoring ..., I was really motivated, keep myself updated everyday, learning new things everyweek and use them in projects right away. Anyway when i moved to Manchester i had many job offers ( hard to find developers in UK i guess ) but i accepted a digital agency offer ( without actually knowing what i have to do everyday ) , Salary is about average ( £26k ) but i don't like my job at all, creating pointless websites for clients, jumping from Magento to Wordpress to Drupal and now, I'm not only developer, I have to do some designing ( which isn't my thing ) and integrate them into CMSes. I'm doing the junior developer's job now and its hurting me, I feel pain everyday i want to go to work, and i just want to kill time to finish the day and count the days waiting for weekend to come ... I know I should have done more research before joining this company, its my own fault to put myself in misery, I feel bad for this guys , They have probably spent a few grand for recruitment agencies fees to hire me and if I want to leave them and it takes them another month or two to find a replacement for me. I have good amount of job offers , But I don't know what do to now, I hate my job and I feel bad to leave them, What would you do if you were in my place ? <comment><USER2> Think hard: Can you take control of your work and mutate it into something you care about and gives you a degree of satisfaction?

If not, take another job and leave now. Don't hang on, be willing to help find your replacement, be honest and up front.

If there is a chance that you can take control and change the job then go to your boss and say what you think should happen to make the company stronger, better, and offer to help them do that.

If they don't enter a conversation with you about it: leave.

If nothing seems to be happening within days: leave. Accept no excuse.

But if things improve, you've made your job better and helped the company.

But don't feel bad about leaving. You've done some work, you've been paid for that work at the agreed rate, and so you owe them nothing.

Be prepared to try to take control of your own work, and your own future. You are of value - the job offers make that clear - and if your current company doesn't agree, then agree to part.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment, Its a small agency but five managers observing and interfering into everything, Iv'e tried to change things, I know I'm not perfect but my experience didn't matter to them and they decided to do things as they were.

you made me feel better.

<comment><USER2> You're welcome. If you can't take control, and you hate what you're doing, you have to get out. Take a day to plan a definite exit, make a plan, then put it into action. Be clear that you will help them find a replacement, make sure you have somewhere to go.

If you're about to start looking for work you should put contact details in your HN profile, including a pointer to an up-to-date CV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> J-dawg This may be counter to a lot of the comments here, but please, please, please don't hand in your notice until you have another job offer. I did this a few years ago, and ended up doing crappy temp jobs for months. My savings ran out, I lost all confidence in myself and became visibly nervous in interviews. This created a positive feedback loop as I became more and more desperate. It took me years to fully recover from the experience. I should add that I was not a developer at the time (I came to programming somewhat late), but I think this advice applies to any job.

I never fully appreciated the suspicion you're treated with if you're not currently employed. I don't know if this is a cultural thing (I'm also in the UK). It raises a whole lot of extra questions that you really don't want to have to answer. I've read that some employers even use it as a filtering criterion.

So by all means listen to the other responders and make a definite decision to leave, apply to every job you can. Book some annual leave to attend interviews. But please don't resign until you've accepted another job offer.

<comment> UK-AL As a developer though, there's plenty opportunity to freelance and contract.

Don't have to be tied to employer.

<comment><USER3> Yeah but that didn't work well for him. I know people who love freelancing, but it would give me anxiety. Hedging your bets with a more solid prospect like working with a company isn't a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Life's too short. Find something you enjoy and leave. At least in the US, if you weren't performing or if you were bringing the team down, that alone could be enough for the company to let you go. Sometimes loyalty doesn't get you very far.

Basically, if you're not happy, find something that makes you happy. Otherwise, your days may be numbered anyway, but not at your choosing.

</comment><comment><USER5> Worked in a similar situation for a while. I feel your pain. You have three choices, I followed this progression:

1\. Stick it out. You'll become stupid. Remember those hard problems? The ones where you woke up early in the morning, excited to solve? Yeah, those. After a while, you won't be able to solve them anymore. You're out of practice. You can get the skill back, like any other skill, but it's a scary feeling. And it makes the drudgery even worse.

2\. Realize this is a business like any other and there are ways to use code to leverage for more cash. I was lucky to be working with only one CMS engine we were using for a bunch of clients, so optimizing was easier. This seems like it may be an even less viable option for you than it was for me. And it didn't work all that well for me, although it was fun for a little while.

3\. Get out. This is where you'll end up eventually. But 2 months on a resume looks a lot better than 10, and that's 8 months you'll never get back. And the agency should have negotiated with the recruiting firm that they get your fee back if you leave within 3-6 months, and if they didn't, well, that's on them for being foolish. Your responsibility is to you. When I finally decided this, my life got a lot better, really quick. Good luck. My email's in my profile if you want to talk offline. :)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised that developers are hard to find and yet the salary offered is £26k (~$40k USD). I guess I'm missing a lot of cost of living context, though. $40k is still paycheck-to-paycheck territory in most major US cities unless you really cut down on all expenses.

<comment><USER7> No, that's really what low-end PHP devs get paid.

<comment> UK-AL The trick is not to be a low-end php dev.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I relate deeply with you. I am a junior dev with master degree and accepted my first job in a big company without discussing my duties or activities. I asked several times what will be my everyday job and never received a clear answer. I end up doing maintenance on +10 years old application, trying to understand the architectural vision of the people in the begin-mid 2000's. It's hurt me everyday.

Long story short: never accept a job without knowing your daily activities/responsibilities. Never trust the website of a company or the job ad. Ask questions and ask to meet the people you will work with (or at leat a team leader).

I plan to quit this job and I am sending applications. What do you think about leaving before having another job and how to keep busy between two jobs and explain your decision during future interviews?

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been in a situation like yours once. I was really upset and didn't know what to do. By that time I was reading a Derek Sivers's book Anything you Want and I was feeling so much connected with the author that I've decided to send him an e-mail telling my story and asking for some advice/guidance. For my surprise, he replied my e-mail on the next day. I think his answer fits to your question, and by the way, it was exactly what I did and it couldn't have been better.

Mr. Sivers's answer: "Quit now. If your heart's not in it, get out. Be honest with [...]. You're not helping them or your self by doing something you're not excited about. :-)"

Don't be afraid to quit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly , I think that's the best thing to do, I just didn't have the courage to do it. I have 3 months notice period, So I guess I better hand my notice in this week ..

<comment><USER10> 3 months notice even though you started only a few months ago? Is that legal?

I don't know anything about UK employment laws, but at least here in Finland the notice period is capped based on length of employment (e.g. only a month if you've been less 2 years, up to 6 months for 10-year careers).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Next time try and find out what the job entails before taking it! I guess you are permanent, in which case the recruitment company won't get their full cash until you've been there a few months and you will still be on probation so you could leave easily.

Surely a few months of bad work isn't the end of the world and you are learning more about what you actually want to be doing. Salary isn't amazing, so you could certainly do better. If you really care about your employer you could talk to them about your woes, but do they have anything more interesting to offer?

Best start looking for a contract job now and you can find out whether you like the work first without committing to a longer stay.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment, You are right it was completely my mistake to accept this job before knowing exactly what's my responsibilities. I was promised that at least I'll spent 80% my time coding and 20% supporting, but in the past two months it was always bug fixing and boring server management stuff ..

Yeah I'm permanent , at-least it gives me a bit of peace of mind if they haven't paid full cash to recruitment agency. I'm going to talk with my manager today but as you said I don't think they have anything more interesting to offer.

<comment><USER12> Don't beat yourself up about accepting the job - it was the the employer's responsibility to paint a realistic picture of the duties and establish a good fit so as to avoid this situation.

Hand in your notice now and move. You can probably not even mention this role in interviews, because your previous long-term role is still recent. If you find another long-term job you like, you can just leave this as a small gap on your CV, or explain it away as some traveling time, sabbatical, etc. Leaving after six or twelve months is a bit harder to explain away and looks more like job-hopping.

Obviously be as nice as you can about this, offer to help find / interview your replacement, etc, and hopefully they'll return the favour by letting you get to interviews during the day and being flexible with your notice period.

<comment><USER13> Apart from the tricky issue of the P45 (if they still have those); A tax document that lists your previous employer and salary details, which you have to present to your next employer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In the short term you'll probably end up feeling guilty about it but it's much better to work somewhere where you don't hate the environment.

Before I started my current job, I already had an accepted offer from another company (Company A). While I had some regrets about accepting the first offer too quickly I put it down to the second company (Company B) reacting slower and that they should probably have moved a bit quicker if filling the position was really a priority (they're interview process took much longer because the CTO was on holiday during the process).

Eventually I did start working at Company A but realized within the first day that my co-workers had almost no passion and some of them had very questionable work ethic. After two weeks I contacted Company B and asked if they would still be interested in me working there and had the difficult conversation with my manager. At some point one of the directors had me explain to a client that I was leaving by my own choice - to this day I'm not even sure what this accomplished.

I ended up being much happier at my current company and didn't have to work in an environment that I hated.

Close friends even commented on noticing a change in my demeanour within the first few days of starting at Company B.

Overall while I would do it again but I think it's also taught me to be careful when accepting a position as well as that it's much easier to rescind an accepted offer before you've started adding value to a company than resigning afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER15> FYI: £26k is not average for 3 years experience. I know kids straight out of coding bootcamps that started on £10k more than that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably in London, But in Manchester 26-30K seems average.

<comment><USER16> I'd agree. With that much experience, this is average for most places north of Birmingham.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm where you are right now; I like my boss but I don't like the job, and instead of using my talents they are keeping me chained to a sales desk where I cringe every time a sales call comes in. I do my job and do it well, but I could be a much greater asset if they would use me for what they hired me for. So, I'm looking for another job and my boss knows it. Now, he's having me train other existing employees to do my IT and repair duties as they have time, and is planning on hiring another salesperson.

It's my personal opinion that the owner is being cheap; we recently lost our lead sales rep and that's why I got chucked into that role. The rep who left was making three times what I am (he had been with the company for 20+ years) but instead of hiring a replacement at base pay or raising my pay to a level where I could accept the extra duties, he is cheaping out. Now, he's losing me because of it and he admits that he regrets it.

So, I say if they refuse to use your real talents and pay you what you're worth, it's definitely time to move on.

</comment><comment><USER18> Well, that's agencies for you. Most of them are terrible places to work and it won't get any better.

Don't worry about recruitment fees. They don't get paid before you complete your probation period.

</comment><comment> UK-AL Digital agency jobs are the worst. Its often quantity rather than quality. Pumping out the cookie-cutter projects, often managed by marketers and graphic designers rather than senior devs.

<comment><USER19> This. They pay terribly, the work is usually boring CMS and cookie cutter tasks, and there is undue stress because the overpaid account managers can't even run a basic plan and leave all the coding work till the last minute, even when they knew about it months ago. Grab a nice cup of tea, maybe a rich tea or two, pen and paper, make an exit plan, execute it, and good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My 2p, quit asap. Start interviewing for the other jobs and enjoy your downtime in between jobs. It's not going to get better for you and now you know what working at an agency is like. Appreciate the lesson and move on.

As far as what your current company feels, consider this. Are you producing at the level you know you could? If not, is it really better for them if you stick around? I just heard an example of this from the Design Details podcast where Kim Bost left Etsy to go to a smaller company in arguably a more socially important field. She wasn't enjoying herself not was she capable of doing her best work so she left after 4 months on good terms. It's better for both sides to quit early.

</comment><comment><USER21> My advice, leave your job, if you say there is high demand, you have one more excuse. One thing I've learned about working as a coder for more that 12 years is, if you don't like your job, you MUST quit, you spend more time at your job than you spend at your house, you can't be in a place where you feel sad most of the time, because you will feel sad most of the day. Quit and go try to work for a startup, they don't do high traffic/popularity work on agencies. Or do remote.

</comment><comment><USER22> £26k is not a great salary. I'm not talking about Silicon Valley or even US scales, but that isn't good for saving money to buy a house in the UK. Make sure your next offer is competitive, and be creative in making it so, i.e. "This is my base for this work, for other ... in and above this role, that I've been consistent in, I'd like to expect an adjustment" and base this adjustment on the money value you achieve, or proxy it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for advice, Yeah I accepted it only because this company seemed like a nice place to work, which might be for designers but not for me ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There are plenty of jobs in/around Manchester, you shouldn't have a problem finding something you at least enjoy. Concentrate on that first, working out your next career step is much easier if you're in a job you don't hate.

It's worth meeting up with other like-minded people, there are plenty of tech talks at madlab[0] that will be full of people who are hiring or know who is hiring.

Additionally, check out some of better-known agencies for vacancies[1,2,3,4]

[0] [http://madlab.org.uk/](http://madlab.org.uk/)

[1] [https://www.fabric.co.uk/about/recruitment/](https://www.fabric.co.uk/about/recruitment/)

[2] [http://www.worshipdigital.co.uk/web-developer- manchester/](http://www.worshipdigital.co.uk/web-developer-manchester/)

[3] [http://www.magmadigital.co.uk/contact/career- opportunities/p...](http://www.magmadigital.co.uk/contact/career- opportunities/php-developers-php-5-object-oriented/)

[4] [http://www.studioskylab.com/careers/wordpress-web- applicatio...](http://www.studioskylab.com/careers/wordpress-web-application- developer.html)

Disclaimer; I know nothing about the PHP landscape, so you may already be at one of the above, or they may be terrible employers. Take care and make sure you don't take a backward step.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks HN People, You certainly made me feel better. I'm going to hand my notice today ! Now I know what kinda of work should i look for next time ! Cheers !

</comment><comment><USER24> This is the biggest danger of working in PHP actually. A lot of people do very cool things with PHP (despite the haters) but more people do the exact exceedingly amazingly boring work you describe. When interviewing for a PHP position you have to be very careful about what you're getting into.

EDIT: Not saying that there is no boring work in other languages, but in PHP it's more common.

</comment><comment><USER25> Just quit. It's not worth it. Sure, you may feel bad for the company but just know it's not like they'll go bankrupt if you leave _(right?)_. I had to do that once, it was painful and I never had to do that before. Though I did try to work things out at first, after a month on the job it was clear it wasn't going to pan out. I even found out that someone else quit after 5 days for the same reason not long ago. I couldn't even do the 2-week notice thing, I just called my manager into a private office one Friday evening after everyone else left and just said, _" I'm out. This isn't at all what I thought it was going to be"_. I put in my email to the manager that the whole thing was totally my fault[1]

Looking back, it was definitely a case of me ignoring the warning signs and being too hopeful.

1\. At the time, I didn't see it that way... but I just don't like putting people in bad situations. I was leaving for a better gig, why not help the person taking the fall have a softer landing?

</comment><comment><USER26> Don't worry about the company, they need a motivated and happy worker and from what you've written, you're not that. They also may not be on the hook for the fee if you leave within a certain amount of time.

Plan your exit, whether that's now or once you land another job, and don't look back.

</comment><comment><USER27> It looks like you really hate this job. "I feel pain everyday I want to go to work" is not a healthy way to feel. It seems to me that the only correct answer is to take another job.

There's no worse hell than spending 1/3 of your life doing something you hate, and spending 1/3 of it dreading that soon you have to go back soon. (The other 1/3 is sleeping). It just wasn't a good fit, that comes with the territory of hiring. They'll understand.

It's really honorable of you to consider the company's time/money/feelings, but sticking around will just be delaying the inevitable and making yourself (more) miserable.

</comment><comment><USER28> TLDR version: find another job.

If you hate your job, you better leave it. No matter how professional you are, it will show up on your quality of work, you will start slacking off eventually, and it will make you worse programmer than you are now. The fault is entirely on the company who hired you. They've seen your CV, they knew what kind of work you were going to do. I doubt they've even asked about this stuff. So it isn't your fault, and staying at this job will only hurt you. So you should find another job (but be more careful in choosing your next company).

</comment><comment><USER29> I think the "fail early" advice is applicable here.

I left my (quite rewarding) job of 3 years to travel and it was a very difficult decision. In retrospect I should have left much earlier, but instead I waited until I owned several big projects. I quit a few months after receiving their "employee of the quarter" award, still feeling pretty guilty about that one.

If it's obvious that the situation isn't sustainable and that you'll have to leave sooner or later, sooner is preferable from all sides.

</comment><comment><USER30> £26K seems pretty low, there are many graduate entry jobs with a higher wage than that. I do agree with the top comment though, If you can make a change, if you can improve the job your doing at the moment then you may find its better than another job you could end up with. I'm not really speaking from experience, but talk to you managers and see what they can do for you. Im sure they wouldn't want you to quit, and if they aren't fussed then you know its not the job for you.

</comment><comment><USER31> It looks like you're on the verge of quitting anyway, so why not march into your supervisor's office and tell them exactly what you just told us?

Ask them if there is a position within the company that's better suited for you, or propose to create one that benefits both you and the company. If none of this is in the cards, at least you tried to work it out with them instead of just sending them a notice and going away. At this point you don't have a lot to lose, do you?

</comment><comment><USER32> The question that comes to mind is, is it more the job or Manchester? By which I mean that if moving to Manchester is a source of unhappiness, then switching jobs may mitigate the issue a bit, but won't solve the whole problem. Of course, Manchester may be fine, but I only bring it up because it is at the head of your post, and it is presented as something about which you did not have a choice and things about which we have no choice can be sources of unhappiness.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER33> Nothing to worry about: find a great new job and move on. You don't owe your current employer anything. You clearly don't like your current job, so change it.

You'll feel so much better afterwards.

Recruitment fees are none of your concern. And frankly, working for a digital agency, what did you expect? Pro tip: for your next job, ask for more money. The higher your salary, the better you are treated.

</comment><comment><USER34> Don't feel bad for them. Their recruiting process failed, or their internal processes have failed, if they brought someone in and can't make them happy. They're a business. Mistakes happen. It won't put them out of business to lose you - especially if you give them a comfortable notice.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was a bitter experience for me, Also I've learnt a great lesson : Don't trust recruitment agencies any more.

<comment><USER34> Some recruiters are really good. Most suck. Good recruiters will carefully match candidates to positions. Bad ones will throw whatever has a chance at the problem.

Find good recruiters and only use them. Ask for recommendations from friends if you don't know any. Recruiters are highly valuable because lots of jobs are never really published.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Do not stay in that job any longer than you have to.

It's not good for you (you're missing out on better opportunities and developing your skills), and it's not good for the company (you're not motivated and your work effort is not 100%).

</comment><comment><USER36> Get a job that's not an agency but has an in-house product (you seem to enjoy that much more), then leave.

Give them a few weeks' notice, you don't owe them anything else really.

</comment><comment><USER13> £26k is the UK average salary for an experienced developer, in 2015 (not 1995)? Don't think I'll be moving back anytime soon then...

<comment><USER37> £26k is definitely on the entry-level side. I'd expect most graduates to be looking for that kind of sum in their first role. I have 8 years experience and my salary is more than double that.

OP - it sounds like you're worth way more than £26k ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Gimme gimme</comment>


Technical Books I Love - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@marksaroufim/technical-books-i-%EF%B8%8F-4af8f3ddd205 <comment><USER2> "About a year and half ago I quit my awesome high paying job as an Applied Scientist at Microsoft..."

... and is already reduced to spamming Amazon affiliate links.</comment>


Y Combinator Challenge #16 - A form of search that depends on design - <AUTHOR> http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/y-combinator-challenge-16/ <comment><USER2> No one ever seems to give any mention to Viewzi, a Dallas based visual search engine that is pretty awesome from both a design and technical standpoint. <http://viewzi.com>

Even though Viewzi is still in beta, the overall apathy toward them from the tech crowd seems to point to the conclusion that maybe people don't really want a design oriented search experience.

Regardless, good luck to Viewzi and others who feel called to create a new approach to search, but the bottom-line remains... Branding is key, and Google is one of the most well-known and trusted brands in the world.

In addition, even if you were to come up with some innovative new approach, Google or some random programmer with BOSS could easily implement similar features and render your hard work worthless. (see: Cuil)

Search doesn't need fixed where it isn't broken.

EDIT: I'm also tired of hearing people say that Google has no sense of design when it is one of the most well-designed sites on the web. There is an art to knowing what not to include, and Google does this better than anyone on the web.

<comment><USER3> I am not finding Viewzi to be very intuitive. This is not what I expect from a search results page:

<http://www.viewzi.com/search/hurricane%20tracking>

What am I supposed to do next?

<comment><USER4> Yeah it is not well designed.

I think people confuse design with style. Just because something has style doesn't mean it is well designed.

<comment><USER2> I'm assuming you can't beat Google with 'style' alone, so my use of 'design' pertains more toward the UX and process by which you finally get to the results. Viewzi is pretty innovative by allowing the user to choose where the results are to be pulled from and how they are to be displayed.

I think Viewzi's UX is quite brilliant, but the look on the other hand is too heavy and flashy for my minimalistic taste.

From a design standpoint, Google is so successful because they match their clean and simple look with their basic and straightforward UX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wanted to post a general discussion going about creating a search engine since the Ycombinator crowd is a good crowd. How do you guys see Google scaling in comparison with how the web is expanding so much? Do you think they will keep indexing the web and adding new content? I personally don't see that to be very scalable. What do you think Google is thinking about the future in terms of incorporating so many webpages into its index. Obviously Google is using a "pull" mechanism where it crawls and indexes. Do you guys see like "push" mechanism like RSS that will work better and how would that affect the search result? Is there any way besides index to achieve a different kind of search engine? Another kind of content retrieval system is like the Digg where the user "pushes" the content to Digg and therefore it is supposedly more relevant and interesting, but the disadvantage of that becoming a search engine is there isn't a lot of content that the user submits compared with like Google. For instance Digg cannot support query like "c# string replace" while Google will do that very easily because it crawled and indexed the MSDN api pages already, while Digg users might never submit that same page to Digg. My main concern is supporting so many content with different query and being very comprehensive search engine like Google without this huge index and crawling restriction? Any clues? I'm not dreaming about this and I actually want to make it a reality somehow.

<comment><USER6> In my opinion, yes, Google will keep crawling the web and indexing in a similar (but continually optimized) way for the foreseeable future. Here's why - let's say you work at Google and come up with an entirely new way to do search. Here are your options: 1 - Go to Larry/Sergi with the proposal to completely rip and replace millions/billions of dollars of infrastructure and knowledge in favor of a completely unproven new idea. The cost and risk are so huge they'd never go for it. 2 - Go to an outside investor with the proposal to build it from scratch. If it's truly an amazing, innovative new approach, they might fund it and you'd be able to build it from scratch without the political nightmare of trying to rewrite the core product of a multi-billion dollar public company. This is exactly what both the Cuil and FriendFeed guys did (and yes, FriendFeed is very, very, very much a Google competitor).

One thing I always think about is in 100 years (or 1000 years), will we still be opening a web browser, typing a few words into the same plain Google text box, and hitting the "Search" button to get a page with 20 blue links and a bunch of ads? I doubt it. So there's definitely a better way to do search, we just haven't discovered it. My personal opinion is that some combination of social search (i.e. FriendFeed) plus human-powered search (i.e. Wikia/Mahalo) plus semantic search (PowerSet) will be involved in the next evolution. Of course, if I knew exactly what that looked like, I'd be on a beach right now instead of hanging out here on Hacker News. :)

<comment><USER5> Good reply. Thanks for replying. I personally think it ultimatily boils down to content that the search engine has. That is the index in this case for Google. I think the semantics and the semantic web will make a huge difference. How I look at it is that because Google's result for "c# string replace" [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=c%23+string+replace](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=c%23+string+replace) is much better than Mahalo's <http://www.mahalo.com/C#_string_replace>, Google is good. I was thinking about how the search will be in the next 2-3 years. The main problem I see with is the discovery of new content in search engine, and I think Google basically brute forced the whole thing by trying to index everything and hope that the results are there and which works alright for the query above. It basically boils down to 100 thousand crawlers and huge index. If social search engine cannot discover this page <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fk49wtc1.aspx> for this query "c# string replace" for instance, it is game over. Google is alive because of these kinds of results. My main concern is how to discover new content and without the burden of updating the index and bruce forcing the whole thing by indexing every word on a webpage. I know Google indexes pieces of webpages but still it is ton of words to index. I just see huge problem with creating huge index like Google and maintaining that index which is also a lot of work. Also I don't have the resources (money) to create a huge index, which is another main reason.

Good discussion by the way.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I had some thoughts a while back on one way this could work using social search: [http://tchblg.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/why-friendfeed- deserv...](http://tchblg.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/why-friendfeed-deserves-a- one-billion-dollar-valuation/)

Basically, you'd get results back that are from conversations posted by your friends, side-by-side with traditional results from a search engine (using something like Yahoo's BOSS). Then, if you still didn't get the answer you are looking for, you can broadcast the original query out to your online contact list to see if anyone within your social network knows the answer. You wouldn't get instant results, but it would likely be a very good, trusted result. This probably works better for things like opinions (what's the best Chinese restaurant in Seattle?) vs. a fact-based search like "C# string replace".

I would seriously avoid trying to take on Google or MS or Yahoo by trying to out-index them. Cuil has millions in the bank and some of the world's foremost experts in search at the helm, and things aren't looking all that bright so far. There are lots of problems to solve in the world and lots of approaches on how to solve them - solving search by out-indexing Google should probably be pretty darn low on your "problems to solve today" list.

<comment><USER5> I will definitely check out your links. Out indexing Google or Microsoft live search is definitely out of the question for me just because of the amount of data among others. Social search with like Yahoo BOSS might work. I will look into fact-based search using social search and conventional search or some kind of combo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The best articles on competing with Google are from Rich Skrenta:

[http://www.skrenta.com/2007/03/how_to_beat_google_part_1.htm...](http://www.skrenta.com/2007/03/how_to_beat_google_part_1.html)

[http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_...](http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_t.html)

<comment><USER5> Great article. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This UI design is critical to search engine is just nonsense. All that matters in search engine is the result. You can have the crappiest interface and the best result, you will become billionaire. Simple as that. Design in search engine doesn't matter at all. All that matters is the result.

<comment><USER8> Design matters because I need to be able to interpret the search engines results as quickly as possible. Google's lightweight design really shines because it loads instantly and I can usually look through the result page very quickly and figure out which link is the most relevant to my query and click on it.

However, that's not always true, and I sometimes have to click on 3 or 4 links to figure out if I need to refine my search or not. If someone found a better way to organize the search results, so that I can determine which ones are relevant faster that would be a big win.

I do agree with you that the quality of the search results are a lot more important though, but presentation definitely does matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It wouldn't open links in a new window (FF2, linux); and I could find no way to extract the URL of a found page.

Cool design though. Expectation management: I felt delight at the effect, then disappointment that it didn't animate the it fully (maybe it's my low-power subnotebook though).</comment>


Why Is It So Hard to Exit Skype? - <AUTHOR> http://www.arunhasablog.com/2011/11/30/why-is-it-so-hard-to-exit-skype/

<comment><USER2> I heard a while back they use your computer as a connection point to other Skype users. That's why I chosen not to use it over my 3g connection. Probably not true, but would make sense in this case to make it difficult to quit!

<comment><USER3> Skype does use p2p and if your computer/connection is good enough they will even make you a supernode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is normal behaviour for chat programs, no? Perhaps not the dialog box.

</comment><comment><USER5> The one that kills me on OSX is it nags you on shut down. That is a huge aggravation of mine anything that interrupts seamless boot-up or shut down.</comment>