India's richest man has moved into world's biggest private residence  - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20101014/bs_yblog_upshot/indias-richest-man-has-moved-into-worlds-biggest-private-residence <comment><USER2> While impressive in numbers and facilities, the building looks ugly from outside. IMO YMMV.

<comment><USER3> ugly?! the building is beautiful!

<comment><USER4> Well, he did say IMO YMMV. I happen to agree that it looks pretty nice, at least on its own (although it might be trying a bit too hard to look modern), but it's definitely pretty polarizing architecture, so opinions going either way are not surprising.

<comment><USER5> When I saw it I thought that was the slum he was demolishing to make his house.

It looks like a building that is so dilapidated the walls are crumbling and fell off.

Maybe it's better in person?

It also looks like a Jenga game in progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The funny part is I'm sure a chunk of the 600-person staff exists to care for the rest of the staff (food, cleaning, health, etc). So he has staff for his staff!

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting way of giving charity.

Instead of just giving money to 600 people, he gave them jobs. And don't forget his suppliers too who also have jobs.

<comment><USER7> The problem with this is that it does not add any realy value to the economy. During the great depression in the US, thousands and thousand wandered the streets selling apples, however this did nothing at all to help the economy. Wouldn't it be better if he paid his workers more, allowing them to spend more money more efficiently and create more useful jobs that way?

<comment><USER5> No. I wouldn't be better. Of course this adds value to the economy.

And if he overpays his workers he causes local inflation which can have very bad effects on other workers, since these privileged ones can spend more, which raises prices for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What an eye sore

</comment><comment><USER9> Kudos for being successful enough to afford to build it.

That said, a 27 story building with a staff of 600, 9 elevators and 3 helipads as a personal residence for your family of 5? Methinks a tad excessive.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wondered if they were showing a building still under construction.

</comment><comment><USER11> Meh..

</comment><comment><USER12> There is no way a 26 floor building in India cost $1 B.

<comment><USER13> This is Mumbai. Land is comparable or possibly more expensive in some areas than NYC. Land alone (assuming it's at least a 30-40k sq. ft. piece of land) might have set him back by a cool 150M+.</comment></comment>


How Top CEOs Cope with Constant Stress - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/video/2011/04/how-top-ceos-cope-with-constan.html

<comment><USER2> By remembering how much they get paid...</comment>


Bring It On - a Comment on Competition - <AUTHOR> http://blog.earbits.com/online_radio/bring-it-on-a-comment-on-competition/

<comment><USER2> tl;dr: when you only have an idea, you're afraid of competition, when you have a mature product you're confident you can handle big players moving in your niche</comment>


The Cost of Entrenchment: Why CEOs Are Rarely Fired - <AUTHOR> http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2674 <comment><USER2> Interesting. One critique of the paper---the notion that a higher level of equilibrium firing would making being CEO less attractive (and hence lower the talent level) seems wrong, or at least incomplete. First, more firing would make more space at the top, increasing the probability of getting the job in the first place. Second, in a world with more firing, getting fired would be less of a negative signal. Getting canned would still be bad, but my guess is that it would be more like losing an NFL head coaching job e.g., you become an offensive coordinator, coach in college, move to a different team etc.

<comment><USER3> I'm not convinced that perceived availability of jobs leads to an improved talent pool for _headhunted_ Fortune 500 CEOs; it's not as if suitable people are declining to consider interviewing for positions because they've heard that there are many more vacancies for programmers or equity analysts.

Assuming that the board isn't certain of hiring the best candidate, lots of space at the top is going to make any individual companies' talent pool worse by ensuring that other companies snag some of the best available talent for their own vacancies.

This selection problem (and your argument about signalling) might partly explain why larger companies are more willing to fire and loss-making companies are apparently no more likely to fire than profitable ones - a loss- making small company is much less confident in their ability to hire an outstanding replacement than a profit-making larger company with a board perceived as trigger-happy.

<comment><USER2> Agreed - in the short run, it wouldn't have an effect for the reason you highlight (the pool is fixed). I was thinking more about the long run, where a change in CEO probability alters the career choice of people deciding say between going into business or going to medical school, becoming a lawyer etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Ann Rand fanboy fantasy thought permeates so many of the trustfunded hipsters here.

<comment><USER5> > so many of the trustfunded hipsters here

How are you identifying "trustfunded hipsters" and how do you know that you're correct? Or, are you just assuming something about people whom you don't like that lets you feel good about yourself?

Data point - I don't have a trust fund and I'm too old to be a hipster. My parents are comfortable now but grew up below "dirt-poor".</comment></comment>


Trump's WeChat ban threatens Apple's smartphone sales in China - <AUTHOR> https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Trump-s-WeChat-ban-threatens-Apple-s-smartphone-sales-in-China <comment><USER2> It would be trivial for the admin to say that Apple only has to block wechat from the US app store, and trivial for Apple to implement it. There's little to gain from blocking wechat in china, so I don't think they will cut in their own flesh.

Unless there are ways (via VPN etc) to temporarily switch a phone to the Chinese appstore and install wechat for a US phone this way.

<comment><USER3> Would it be legal for American companies to ignore American laws on foreign land? It doesn't sound plausible

<comment><USER4> A presidential order is not a law, and if unconstitutional like this one, never has to be obeyed anywhere.

<comment><USER5> _never has to be obeyed anywhere_

That's not how it works. It has to be obeyed until invalidated by a court.

You can't just tell a law enforcement agency, "I know the president said _x_ , but that's unconstitutional."

Law enforcement is not lawyers, or constitutional scholars. That's for the judiciary to sort out.

<comment><USER4> You have it backwards, law enforcement has to go to court to attempt to have WeChat removed from Apple devices. They can't just confiscate random iPhones to scrape it off their storage, and they aren't bursting into Apple HQ to force its removal from their servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a very short-sighted move, it will lead to lower investments from China to US in tech and other sectors.

<comment> abc-xyz Does that mean western organizations will finally stop censoring western people living in western countries? Will they finally stop banning people for voicing support for democracy in Hong Kong? Or for condemning concentration camps in Xinjiang? Will they finally stop ruining their products in their attempt to be granted access to the Chinese market? Will western employees finally be able to 'like' a tweet thanking their company for listing Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan on their website without being fired?

<comment><USER7> I sure hope so. I have not agreed with this administration on hardly anything else, but I agree with this. The United States has its own dark history of censorship and oppression, but authoritarianism poses an even bigger threat.

At the moment, China is a huge market for technology and entertainment, and companies who refuse to do business with them, accept investments from them, etc. on moral grounds clearly cannot compete with companies who are willing to bend over backwards for the chance to dip their hands in the infinite money bucket.

We cannot let an authoritarian government exert so much control over our technology, movies, television, games, and social media. If we do, democracy is already lost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is meaningless. If Wechat is really banned Tencent (or a shell company owned by Tencent) will just spring up another app with a different name that connects to the same data centers and put it on the App Store. Wechat is pretty much the RPC-equivalence of Facebook+Whatsapp with Paypal integrated, used by pretty much everyone on the mainland as well as RPC who are overseas but still want or need to be part of the social networks, or just anyone that wants or needs to do business with people in China.

If people actually believe enforcing a ban like this will in any way hurt Tencent or CCP then that is just ridiculous. This will only accelerate the already growing Anti-American sentiment in China. And the new Wechat app with a different name will be out maybe in a week or something.

Wechat is a very different case as compared to TikTok with vastly different use cases and user groups. The reasons behind why people use the two apps are fundamentally different.

<comment><USER9> > If Wechat is really banned Tencent (or a shell company owned by Tencent) > will just spring up another app with a different name that connects to the > same data centers and put it on the App Store.

IIRC the executive order doesn't address WeChat/TikTok directly, but instead forbids interactions with their parent companies. I _think_ this means that the ban can't be worked around by just reskinning the app. Not sure how it would work with shell companies, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hmmm, China bans western companies, but complains when the behavior is reciprocated.

<comment><USER11> China doesn't ban western companies because they're western, but because they refuse to follow local laws. LinkedIn and Bing show that when a company follows local laws, it can operate.

WeChat and TikTok are being banned simply because they are Chinese.

<comment><USER12> As in when Apple iTunes movies and books were suddenly shut down in China after six months of legal operation, with no explanation?

If you're Chinese, you'll appreciate the casual contempt openly expressed in the frequently referenced epithet "laiwai" 老外. And ask any foreign businessman in China if they're discriminated against.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/technology/apple-no- longe...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/technology/apple-no-longer- immune-to-chinas-scrutiny-of-us-tech-firms.html?_r=1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Apple can issue a custom certificate with unlimited installs to sort of side load it outside AppStore. Similar to enterprise certs.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the most creative use of IFTTT you've seen? - <AUTHOR> I know some folks are hardcore fans of https://ifttt.com/ - what are the most clever uses of IFTTT you've seen or heard of? <comment><USER2> Not bragging here, but a while ago I used IFTTT to create a system where I created a quasi-alert system for a local legend/mentally ill guy who wanders the subway in my city. Everyone knows him, but sometimes he disappears for a month or two and people online start to talk about where he went.

I began wheatpasting a photo of him with a QR over his mouth (he often says the government/big corporations are trying to kill him) and the phrase "have you seen me?" around the subway stations he's usually on. The QR code went to an SMS #, which caught an IFTTT trigger to turn that SMS into an email (to an anonymous Gmail account) which, upon receipt, caught another IFTTT trigger and posted the text of their message to a Tumblr account -- one seamless workflow. This way, people could in more-or-less real time keep tabs on him and how he's doing.

It went well until the police took down the posters, of course. Haven't thought of a way around that, yet.

<comment><USER3> You put up posters encouraging random people to track a paranoid mentally ill person? Did you not think that might have harmed his mental health to see those posters of himself and have people pointing him out to their friends without understanding it? It'd be creepy enough for a normal person to see such posters about themselves.

<comment><USER2> Nah, most people are just genuinely concerned about him, especially when he disappears. I'm in China -- if I did this in NYC, I wouldn't have done it. But that type of malicious intent is far, far less here. When he's gone, there's lots of talk online about where he went and people start looking out for him. I just made a way to scale and centralize it.

<comment><USER4> You should set up some kind of tipjar so you can use donated funds to help buy him some food.

<comment><USER2> Collecting funds is quite prohibited (or heavily regulated, I should say) in China, otherwise I absolutely would.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love the idea of IFTTT (and automation in general) but everytime I go their website, I just sit there for 30 minutes and realize that most recipes would annoy me more than they would help me. Maybe I just have no imagination.

<comment><USER6> I'm in the same boat. I think IFTTT is a great idea, but whenever I need something it does, I find myself using Cron jobs and web triggers instead.

<comment><USER7> What do you mean by web triggers? Watch on a web page? What do people use for that?

<comment><USER8> Some services can be configured to GET or POST to a URL of your choosing when something happens. E.g. you can ask Github to "GET <http://my- site.org/action/> whenever you push commits to your repositories. If you control my-site.org, you can have the /action/ script do whatever you like. These "push" notifications are super- simple, reasonably low latency, and don't require polling.

I did something similar when taking an operating systems class. Linux kernel compiles take quite a long time, so I set up my site to send me a text message when I "GET /compile-done." Then, a quick "make ; curl <http://my- site/compile-done> would drop me a text message and I could get a sandwich or something until it was done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a pretty in depth write up of how I use IFTTT and Evernote to collect my digital breadcrumbs. I particularly like that every month I get a screenshot of my last.fm chart. It's amazing how much music can spark your memory.

[http://aaronfrancis.com/blog/2013/2/26/how-i-use-evernote- an...](http://aaronfrancis.com/blog/2013/2/26/how-i-use-evernote-and-ifttt)

<comment><USER10> After reading your article I'm now investigating around that Doxie stuff, thanks for this. The wife regularly pesters me because she wants to scan stuff but I've always thought scanners where device from the 90s, never occured to me they actually evolved (SD card, dropbox, etc)

<comment><USER9> I've had a really good experience with the Doxie. I may upgrade my SD card to the wireless one, but other than that I'm super happy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When I was running for adminship on Wikipedia, I had it so every edit made to my election page was sent to me as an email.

This took an anxious week and turned it into full blown 24x7 nightmare. ;)

</comment><comment><USER12> I was really bad at recording mileage, so I set up IFTTT to save my foursquare check ins to Google Calendar.

Then at the end of the year I have a full list of everywhere I went and can give to my accountant.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have one where it grabs my Instagram photos and stores them in a folder in Dropbox and then my screen saver uses that folder as a photo source to display.

</comment><comment><USER14> I really like IFTTT. None of my recipes are really all that clever, but they save me money and time, which is why I like IFTTT.

I have about 10 recipes searching classified or bargain sites for various things I intend to buy, but don't need urgently, and get an alert sent to Pushover when matches are found. The sites do not allow you to search and email results, but you can search and generate an RSS feed.

After Google Reader was announced as shutting down I made recipes for my favourite sites and push the articles to Pocket. Offline articles ready to go every morning.

And then there's all the Ingress passcodes I get automatically forwarded to Pushover...

</comment><comment><USER15> I archive Google Reader starred items to a Google spreadsheet by date, title, url and feed title.

On Fridays around 4pm I have an automatic tweet going out asking what's happening that night. Nothing too fancy.

I archive any Instagram photo I like to Drive also.

<comment><USER16> > I archive Google Reader starred items to a Google spreadsheet by date, > title, url and feed title.

You know you can just browse your starred items, right?

<comment><USER15> Yes. But it's handy for sharing links and, once reader is gone, be central location for similar items.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I haven't found any IFTTT recipe that would be particularly useful to me. However, I've set up a few useful jobs on Zapier, for instance I have CircleCI automatically create a GitHub issue upon build failures using Webhooks.

</comment><comment><USER18> I built this automated twitter account: <https://twitter.com/SEOguru101>

It uses RSS feeds to spit out content. I've only sent maybe 5 tweets in the accounts entire life.

</comment><comment><USER19> I get an email if the weather shows it'll rain tomorrow. That's kinda nice. Also, anything I star on Google Reader saves to Instapaper, but that wont' be useful very much longer.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, I find automatic email / notifications for things like weather help you acquire an ambient, almost sub-conscious awareness of things you wouldn't be able to glean from the environment. Not IFTT, but I like PM software like Trello for this too.

I wonder about other things that are nice to have an ambient awareness of. It can't be too many things, otherwise you risk overwhelming yourself with notifications / beeps / things to check / glowing orbs, but I bet we all have a bit of room for more of that.

<comment><USER19> Even better than IFTTT for weather is the iOS app Dark Sky. I have it set to give me a push notification whenever it starts raining in my area. THAT'S a useful feature so I remember to grab an umbrella if I don't notice the rain yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think the integration of Philips Hue gives an opportunity to do some creative stuff. Once there was also a recipe to automatically create a list of people who engage in conversations with you, but i think it doesn't work anymore after the changes in Twitter API/terms.

<comment><USER22> I'm excited about the recent integration with Hue. I used to have a little mechanical timer that would turn a lamp on when it was time to get up in the morning. I don't have much use for it this time of year since the sun is up before I am. But if I could set IFTTT to set a lamp indicating the weather forecast for the day right when I wake up, that would be cool :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a good thread. Thanks for asking this question. I'm curious to see more answers.

I simply have no imagination when it comes to things like this. I really wish i did. I could probably make my life much easier if i did.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've played around with IFTT and Zapier and found both quite limiting. I wished I could just write code to connect the APIs exactly the way I wanted. Has anyone else had a similar experience?

<comment><USER25> I'm building a platform to enable just that for businesses. It's mostly geared towards marketing integration and automation but could really be used any way imaginable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> When it comes to deeper integration zapier work's better in my pov.

<comment><USER27> Zapier is more for business uses; IFTTT is typically not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> You might check out this topic on Quora:

[http://www.quora.com/IFTTT-1/What-is-the-coolest-IFTTT- Recip...](http://www.quora.com/IFTTT-1/What-is-the-coolest-IFTTT-Recipe-ever)

<comment><USER29> Sorry, Quora DIED for me the day they introduced this: "You must sign in to read past the first answer".

\---which they sprang after years of collecting good stuff from good-spirited folks. Thanks but no thanks.

<comment><USER30> That is the day I deleted my account.

Which has been annoying on occasion - but less occasions than I'd've thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> My friend and I built a thing that alerted me when my dryer was done, called Toasty Knickers. We hooked up the dryer to an Arduino. Our first attempt was Arduino->wifi->email->IFTTT->SMS but it was pretty flaky. We finally got it down to Arduino->wifi->Pushover. It worked out really well!

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/xd1zputlwz10d72/2012-12-19%2000.57...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/xd1zputlwz10d72/2012-12-19%2000.57.52.mov)

<comment><USER32> Awesome, how did you hook it up to the dryer?

Also tidy your laundry room! :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Haven't seen any interesting use of it.

I tried to use it to crawl photos and news and put it to my google drive, but in most cases I ended up with thumbnails and intro-texts. :\

</comment><comment><USER34> Living in Texas and recently having bought a somewhat nice car, hail is a big concern for me. I have several recipes that monitor the weather.gov feeds of the counties in my area for the word 'hail' -- if it catches instances of that word, it'll send me a SMS.

Example feed: [http://alerts.weather.gov/cap/wwaatmget.php?x=TXZ103&y=0](http://alerts.weather.gov/cap/wwaatmget.php?x=TXZ103&y=0)

</comment><comment><USER35> made a learning tool based totally around IFTTT and Zapier: <http://becomeabuilder.com>

</comment><comment><USER36> I have only two recipes: I get emails for reddit replies and messages, and any post I save in reddit gets added my to Pocket queue. Both are fairly standard actually. I wouldn't call them creative. I often look at the website, and it makes me think of the awesome things possible, but I then realize I really don't need that much automation or mashups.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> These are the most popular uses reported by IFTTT [https://ifttt.com/recipes?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sort=popular](https://ifttt.com/recipes?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sort=popular)

If you change your Facebook profile pic > change twitter Text me the weather every morning Star ★ a Gmail, send it to Evernote

</comment><comment><USER37> I created a Twitter bot for reddit's Bitcoin community with IFTTT: <https://twitter.com/redditbtc>.

I also have the weather for my area texted to me every morning, which is pretty handy. Another recipe of mine is to automatically forward my App.net posts to Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER38> A few weeks ago, when _why the lucky stiff's website was updating, I had a realization:

His site was hosted on GitHub pages, so I could get the RSS from his commits, feed it through IFTTT, and have it text me whenever he pushed new content.

While his site is 'gone,' the repository still exists, so I still have the trigger active.

<comment><USER39> possibly dumb question: how is that better than subscribing to the github rss feed?

<comment><USER38> I don't use RSS on mobile; getting a push immediately so when I'm not at a computer is helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I used to have few recipes each taking tweets from my account tagged with #reN, retweet them with a new hashtag re(N-1) -- for tweets that I wanted to reach a wider audience.

Example: #re2 would get auto-retweeted for two days in a row.

Around the time I got this working correctly, twitter kicked ifttt out. _sigh_

</comment><comment><USER41> I have setup a trigger based upon our local city's reporting of water line breaks/repairs since they use a specific hash tag on Twitter. When they post one, I get an SMS message. If my residence will be affected, I let my wife know.

</comment><comment><USER42> I read the IFTTT in the title at first as IFFT and got really excited for a moment.

<comment><USER43> Me too. I assume this is the inverse fourier transform transform transform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Automate your house with ifttt: [http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514941/home-tweet- home-...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514941/home-tweet-home-a-house- with-its-own-voice-on-twitter/)

</comment><comment><USER45> I was the first early adopter to stop using the service.

</comment><comment><USER46> I use it to post to Google Calendar when I take an Instagram photo. Not sure how clever that is, but it might be useful in the future

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As a follow up question - did anyone use IFTTT in a way that helped them make money?

<comment><USER47> When I was video blogging it reduced a 1h daily process to a 5m one, so depending on how you value time. In my case, my alternative was to pay a PA £15/h, so there was some [small] money attached.

I had socialcam on my phone post to YouTube. ifttt picked up new youtube videos and posted them as wordpress posts. Feedburner then picked up the RSS item and tweeted it.

So making a 5m video ended up taking exactly 5m and everything else was cobbled together as a chain of services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I've setup alerts when a certain TV show is available for torrenting</comment>


FSFE convinces 1125 public administrations to remove proprietary software advert - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/660693/ <comment><USER2> Good, persistent, grass-roots activism leading to success. Nice!</comment>


French Senate wants ban on free book delivery - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/french-senate-limits-online-book-discounts/2014/01/09/feadc44e-7923-11e3-a647-a19deaf575b3_story.html <comment><USER2> Doesn't Jeff Bezos own the Washington Post?</comment>


I'm afraid to write my first post on Medium - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/who-what-why/b28408f464d0

<comment><USER2> Someone should make a meta-medium just for medium posts about medium.

<comment><USER3> I'll drink to that.

</comment></comment><comment> workhere-io _And I think we can both agree that this first post was a colossal failure._

Sorry to say, but that's pretty accurate. The author doesn't appear to have anything to say.</comment>


The Problem with Problems - <AUTHOR> http://000fff.org/the-problem-with-problems/

<comment><USER2> Another trigger for tech companies is "curiosity" instead of deliberate "problem-solving".

The software or hardware engineer "tinkers" with something simple. And then, a lightbulb goes off and the "toy" looks like it is well-suited to solving a particular problem.

Larry Page wasn't looking to solve a "problem of inefficient advertising expenses." He was satisfying an intellectual curiosity about applying the citations (e.g. Erdos #) in research papers to web pages. (One could argue that you could reformulate "The Problem" to be " _retrieve more relevant weblinks than AltaVista_ " but for my example, I refer instead to the "ad dollars problem" because that's the one that pays Google's bills.)

Maybe it depends on the person. One type of person sees a "problem", then he/she deconstructs that into components and try to make a viable business. That's definitely where a lot of B2B businesses get started.

Another type of person simply tinkers and experiments and "solves problems" as a side effect.

<comment><USER3> Thats a very good point and I guess that sometimes you have a combination of someone who understands a problem and know off someone else who came up with something (maybe even from another field) and combine the two for a solution. I think there are plenty of examples of that although I can't remember anyone right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While not directly the point of his article I found the example of time tracking to perfectly line up with my experience.

The hidden problem exists because there is a disconnect between the people who fill out those timesheets and the people who consume them.

The people who fill them out can't use the data. As a result the data is almost never correct and is largely useless and the people who consume them are picking out the wrong patterns from bad data.

The only reliable unit of measurement for time tracking is days spent. Anything else is measuring a largely made up number.

Further more they feed this idea that cramming at the end of a project is a good way shorten the time. Since you are tracking hours not days it's a short step to just upping the hours without upping the days as a short cut. But none of these apps give any data on the quality of those hours spent.

<comment><USER3> Author here.

Exactly and and so if people aren't aware of this it will just be considered annoying but just the way things are.

<comment><USER5> This is where passion for the work is a mark for quality. A person who loves what they are doing works long hours from the start and is never done because they always can make it better.

<comment><USER4> That isn't the mark of a person who loves what they do. It's the mark of a person with an unhealthy obsession. Working long hours is neither necessary for a quality product nor healthy long term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have proof this is true. I have 35+ years experience in micro data processing. I have mentored several young people and seen them rocket to the top. I understand it is our nature to push away from parents to strike out on our own. I also understand why older people resist change. Magic happens when the young seek to understand the wisdom of their elders and elders hold on to explorer spirit of their youth.

<comment><USER3> You sir, just made my day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd cast it more as looking for inefficient processes than as outright "problems" as most people who are not developers and doing their day to day jobs don't even perceive things as an issue so much as just how things are.

I've developed a few small software things that have saved people hours a week.

For example, I built a free tool [1] that lets you export a tagged subset of bookmarks from Pinboard into a nice format for inclusion in a webpage or Mailchimp newsletter. The person who I built this for wasn't really complaining about "gee, it takes me a couple hours to collect all these links, format them, etc." but when I saw their process, sheesh.

1 - [http://www.bigbadassresourcelist.com](http://www.bigbadassresourcelist.com)

<comment><USER7> Neat tool! It would be nice to see some examples of the result somewhere on your site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I realised long ago that the problematic quality of a problem stems solely from the perception that it represents a problem at all. If you consequently refuse to cast a situation as a problem, it ceases to be one.

</comment><comment><USER9> The key takeaway:

«It is my guess that there is a potential goldmine of problems we simply don't know of because the people who are exposed to them aren't connected with the people who have the opportunity and willingness to solve them. … Perhaps the real power of diversity in business isn't hidden in gender but in age»

<comment><USER3> Yes.

I thought I wanted to take people through the thought process and the things I did to get there. Not sure if it worked, but it allowed me to get my thoughts down on paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This touches on so many things I've been saying...

I describe really interesting problems as "fish don't know they live in water". The people who have the problem and deal with it every day don't even recognize that it's a solvable or that pain reduction is possible.

</comment><comment><USER11> _> "Are the older and younger generations wildly underutilizing each other as resource?"_

I actually think that the older generation is far better at utilizing the younger, than vice versa.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps, but the young just have the upper hand in todays market. They don't even have to solve real problems and still people are throwing money after them.

<comment><USER11> Yes but the ones who figure out how to solve real problems (e.g. by teaming up with the older generation) will be far more successful than those who don't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Problem is there because someone is not willing to pay for solving it*

* sometimes (very rarely) there is money but no solutions exist

<comment><USER5> Maybe not so rarely. The tech bubble of some years back was money in search of a solution.</comment></comment>


The hidden costs of engineering time in technical interviewing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.interviewing.io/you-probably-dont-factor-in-engineering-time-when-calculating-cost-per-hire-heres-why-you-really-should/ <comment><USER2> You could say:

"It is a funnel, you look at the stages, and at the end there is a great engineer that is usually working for a long period for the company.

Each level has expenses and conversions. Go an optimize keeping in mind the constraints."

But what I noticed is that is all about your company specifics and how you overcome the trade off...

For example the average new startup in unsexy industry has problems to get any body in the funnel. Getting somebody that know how to write some code can be a challenge... interview is more about persuading them to accept the job.

Great "sexy" companies have ton of people applying and would do everything they ask them to do. The problem for the company is to efficiently select those people.

When you have enough candidates, somebody may think: "We can save time and make accurate evaluations by giving a screening test offline to evaluate most of the relevant skills of the person!". Unfortunately the test takes on average 10 hours to finish.

Result: mediocre candidates desperate for a job try so hard to get everything done, but the great engineer has plenty of options and does not want to spend 10h on a test. In the end all great people that you would like to hire quit in the process.

<comment><USER3> I always wonder... Would you take a job if you heard 20-40% of people who accepted the job were fired within the first month?

If an organization was good at firing fast, would people be willing to take a job there? Would you be able to truly assess an engineer within a month in a way you wouldn't in an hour?

The first two weeks are usually a wash. But you might be able to get more signal in that second two weeks?

Does that same equation hold true if it's contract to hire? Would you take such a job?

<comment><USER4> I mean, we have plenty of people take ~this offer every year. The term is more like 3 months, and we call them "interns".

For people who already have full-time jobs it seems like a much worse deal, though. I certainly wouldn't take it, at least - it makes very little sense to give up the certainty of my current job in exchange for being maybe unemployed in a month.

<comment> barry-cotter That's absolutely not the same. An internship has a defined start and end date and you need to do something egregious not to make it to the end. In that sense it's more like a short term contract than anything else and contractors get paid a lot more than salaried employees to compensate them for the risk involved.

Most internships are for hiring, not the labour the company gets from them. They function as three month long interviews but unlike a short term contract leading to hire it's _expected_ that they won't immediately convert into a job as students return to university for another year. They're also far more opaque to other employers on a cv. If someone did internships at three different companies over their degree they could have wanted to see many different companies or they could have performed below expectations at all three places. If you see their cv you won't know.

<comment><USER4> It still sounds awfully similar. If you're firing ~30% of hires after the first month, then you're clearly treating it as an extended interview. And the first month of any job (in software, at least) includes a lot of training/ramp-up, so you don't expect to get much labor out of that period. The main difference is just that an internship has a several-month unpaid leave starting 3 months after hire.

I suppose it diverges more if you consider internships prior to the final one due to the weird optionality on following intern seasons, but I think that's a minority of internships due to the hiring goal (once you start looking at 2+ year lead-times before a potential full-time start date it becomes much harder to justify).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've suggested to recruiting firms that they should hire (or retain) a couple enterprise architects and have them meet with the technical managers looking for developers and let these highly experienced engineers pre-interview candidates based on the hiring company's needs and only refer people who can pass the enterprise arch's review. The time saved by the hiring company to not have their in-house archs, team leads, and engineers tied up interviewing candidates should MORE than make up for the premium such pre-interviewing would demand.

(Something else that would help is paying employees a lot more than $500 for making an in-house referral. I know of cases where locally where in-house referrals could have happened but by referring through a chosen recruiter got the referred a $1000 referral fee instead of his company's $500 referral fee... but that's a separate rant.)

<comment><USER6> Internal referrals are great. The problem is that, if you increase the fee too much, it's going to get harder and harder for employees to prioritize referring someone they know would be a great fit for a position (and get a nice spiff in the process) versus randomly referring people they vaguely know on the off-chance they'll get a multi-$K payout.

<comment><USER7> I've never seen a referral bonus come without a requirement of te new employee staying at least 6 montha or a year.

<comment><USER6> In most places, less than 6-12 months implies a pretty serious mismatch of expectations of some sort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why use the cost of an engineer hour?

The correct metric is the opportunity cost of that hour - the lost productivity for that hour.

As an approximation take total revenue and divide by total engineering hours.

If you are hiring engineering because engineering is a bottleneck (not just hiring due to churn), then the metric is realistic. It would still be an underestimation in his calculation because he isn't including the hours taken to get new hire up to speed (oppositely assuming hire is due to churn).

<comment><USER9> _As an approximation take total revenue and divide by total engineering hours._

This does assume every hour spent on engineering is equal, and that's not even close to true. In most companies about 50% of the hours account for 99% of the revenue. Companies spend _lots_ of time on things that don't make any money, and in some cases they knowingly spend time on things that lose money.

If you can identify the waste then you can _easily_ find engineering time to spend on things like hiring with no impact on the bottom line at all.

<comment><USER10> > This does assume every hour spent on engineering is equal, and that's not > even close to true. In most companies about 50% of the hours account for 99% > of the revenue.

Yeah, the other 50% is interviewing. :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't forget the candidate's time as well. You should only bring them onsite if you think (from phone's screen etc) they're probably worth hiring so if they don't work out you should be improving the upstream screening for everyone's benefit.

<comment><USER12> Why should a company value candidates' time?

Edit: To be clear, corporations are morally bankrupt slow AI whose goals are increasingly tangential to ours. However, their proponents must have _some_ justification for valuing what we value (in this case, candidates' time), or else admit the above moral bankruptcy.

I am not being sarcastic, I am challenging this forum's many corporatists to reassure me that corporations are motivated to accommodate a basic decency represented by valuing candidates' time.

Downvotes on a simple question, as usual, evidence this forum's continued inadequacy as a harbor for empirical discussion.

I am not trolling, nor sarcastic. I am simply ignorant of the corporatist argument for valuing candidates time.

<comment><USER13> Depending on the other options your candidate has, you could be filtering out the best candidates. You could also ruin the company's reputation.

I've seen close friends have all-day interviews, or require spec work (requiring higher end hardware and a couple days of dedicated work) as part of the interview process. Peers blow off those companies or knock them down a tier when seeking work.

Just having an all-day interview can make scheduling way more difficult, delaying it until that other job with a 2-hour interview has happened and moved onto negotiating benefits.

<comment><USER12> > Peers blow off those companies or knock them down a tier when seeking work.

Unless I am mistaken, this only happens when candidates' experiences are shared, and only impacts business decisions if shared widely.

<comment><USER13> The situation is I apply to 4 jobs, 1 requests spec work requiring a couple days of dedicated time while the rest are happy with what's in my portfolio. That 1 job is less of a priority compared to the others.

The same applies to 8 hour interviews or multiple interviews. It might not be common place, but I've learned to ask upfront about the start-to-finish hiring process.

I'm not saying its unwarranted or even a hidden cost to the business--just that it raises the burden and likely will filter out qualified candidates. I do think networking and shared experiences you mentioned should be thought about. That's often the best/cheapest way to get qualified candidates (why referral bonuses are a thing). If candidates are telling each other informally or on something like GlassDoor how onerous the interview process is, you have to compensate by reaching out with things like ads and job fairs and do the filtering yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't think that time is very hidden. You have to sift through a ton of resumes and then spend hours and hours interviewing and phone screening. If you have actual work to do it's pure misery. I also don't have time to really think about my interviewing technique.

I would much prefer if we had a "hiring department" who are technically knowledgeable, talk to applicants, maybe give them tests and build up a pool of candidates who then can be interviewed by the actual engineering teams.

</comment><comment><USER15> A bigger question about recruiting and engineer time, is whether they are effective at weeding out unproductive candidates. I'm not a recruiter, but I have interviewed a number of folks, and I still find it very difficult to determine if someone is good or bad. Folks that sound good during the interview, may just be good at communicating ideas, which is an important trait, but is still just one trait.

Even after you hire them, and you see them under-perform, it can be difficult to know if it's because of some intrinsic problem (e.g., just not so smart, or laziness), or if the problem is with the employer (e.g., not managing work, lack of communication, poor team integration). Yes, there are obvious stars and duds, but the middle is a vast gray area.

As engineers, we naturally try to turn hiring and performance assessment into an analytical questions that have clear answers, or that at least can follow a clear process. However, it still seems like voodoo.

</comment><comment><USER16> Great article! Add to it the moral cost of interviewing multiple subpar candidates and improving the fit of candidates at the top of the interview process has a huge impact.

This is one of the reasons that many companies work with us at Insight (insightdatascience.com), as the interviews to join the program are done by Data Scientists and Engineers.

</comment><comment><USER17> Sometimes interviewing a candidate as a team can have small benefits such as strengthening / making explicit what values are important to the team among the participants. This assumes that the team is operating in a full transparency, which is often seen in a small startup. I had the experience that after being eng. interviewer a few times I felt more glued and aligned with the team.

</comment><comment><USER18> To be fair... $150 an eng hour? That's a 312k salary. I don't think that is accurate. And a recruiter makes 200k salary on average?

These numbers are a bit nuts.

Agree with a lot of what is written tho, but not this crazy number.

<comment><USER19> It's not a $312k salary unless the person takes no holidays, sick days, vacation and has no benefits or other fixed costs associated with their employement.

<comment><USER20> Are holidays and sick days not paid in the US?

<comment><USER21> Often not unless they are negotiated or the company is really pushing it's work/life balance as a job perk

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> village-idiot Hiring manager here: we talk about the opportunity cost of interviewing a lot.</comment>


Operation Troll The NSA - <AUTHOR> http://trollthensa.com/ <comment><USER2> What they need is for the site to randomly generate a more unique phrase for each person that loads the page.

Basically, come up with a list of trigger words and then work them into innocuous sections of text in a random manner. That way "they" can't filter out the text being sent.

<comment><USER3> Yea, that sounds quite obvious right? If the supposed fake hate speech is a constant then all they have to do is put an if statement somewhere to make an exception about this specific email.

<comment><USER4> Yep, seems like an easy thing to bypass. Might be better to search for these keywords within tweets or fb updates and create a script based on that (re- scrape every x users so that it changes).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh look, it's Jam Echelon Day again. [https://www.google.com/search?q=jam+echelon+day](https://www.google.com/search?q=jam+echelon+day)

<comment><USER6> oh look, governments keep enacting shitty ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Who comes up with these? Do you really think they won't check the sha of that text against something? Imagine the 100 billion dollars of "Buy boner pills @ onlinepharmacy.ru" type emails which make the 68.6% of all the email sent worldwide, do they really think that they can top that?

if (mail.sha == "6ead421c0d8c4e36dbe5c4f5b2f14d93fa634da65f024f6440e4cafc13e7d0e4") irs_audit(mail.sender);

<comment><USER8> They still have to waste CPU cycles comparing either the plaintext or the checksum as you suggest.

If nothing else it makes their server room A/C more expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You're lucky that the NSA has no way to read everything you're planning on the internet, or else it would be all a waste of time.

<comment><USER10> he set the private=true meta tag on the site. YESH!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Occasionally call phone numbers at random.

Ask about the weather. How was the ball game? Don't take long.

Then hang up.

Associations networks will hate us if we all do that.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you're an emacsen, M-x spook will do the trick

</comment><comment><USER13> > F my life, right?

Better censor yourself or the NSA will think you're rude. If what you want to say is "fuck" man up and spell it out.

</comment><comment><USER14> This seems like a joke that got overdone - I can imagine someone saying 'hey it would be funny if the whole world emailed each suspicious shit to troll the NSA' across a dinner table but any more than that and it stops being funny

</comment><comment><USER15> "They" will just filter out that specific script.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is this really relevant to HN? There's nothing of substance in the content at all.

Reddit is a much more relevant platform for mildly interesting stuff that's happening on the internet. I wish the mods would be more aggressive with moderating submissions.

</comment><comment><USER17> Until they add an ignore rule specifically for this text.

<comment><USER18> Indeed. This would need to go through one of automatic writing app we see from time to time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If the NSA is monitoring these channels already they probably have already dealt with a volume of traffic equal to what this individual proposes.

</comment><comment><USER20> They left out the word "jihad".

</comment><comment><USER21> This "operation," is just ridiculous and childish, and worst case say it could actually pose a risk...I'm definitely a supporter of privacy, just closing ur facebook, using linux, and turning off your phone during precious conversations (reducing ur digital footprint)...that will do more than creating an unnecessary risk like this.

<comment><USER22> Turning off your phone doesn't disable the microphone. You have to physically remove the battery.

<comment><USER21> I know that was the case with Nextel phones, is that the same with iOS devices?

<comment><USER22> There's no evidence to the contrary, and Apple was named in the PRISM scandal, so you have to operate under the assumption that it is. Sell it and buy a non- smartphone with a removable battery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not advocating the use of a spam bot, but surely it uses would be more efficient ...

</comment><comment><USER24>
      Is it down for anyone else?

<comment><USER25>
        HTTP 200</comment></comment>


Don't Over-React to the Facebook Patents License - <AUTHOR> https://blog.fossa.io/dont-over-react-to-the-facebook-patents-license-629f708f2221 <comment><USER2> >Unless a company decides to sue Facebook (or accuse its products), the termination trigger has no actual effect.

What if Facebook actually breaches your patents? What if they sue you? You can't counter-claim if your tech is based on React, because you'd lose the grants.

<comment><USER3> Also: What if a company you are in a legal dispute with gets acquired by Facebook? This is a threat even if you _don 't_ expect any conflict with Facebook.

<comment><USER4> Likewise this could be a concern if a company -- especially a big one -- is looking to acquire yours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to extend my thanks Apache Foundation. By questioning and scrutinizing the patents / license clause they cleared up a bit what Facebook's intent was there. A lot of people have been claiming it is just corporate boilerplate, get over it, etc, etc. At least in the case React that's not the case. There is a strategy there and one where FB hopes to inoculate itself against being sued for patent violations.

It is also interesting that for some libraries like RocksDB and zstd they didn't mind changing the license too much. So some projects are more strategic then others it seems.

Now I am not blaming them or saying they should change the license, it's their code, they can do whatever they want with it. It is just that the idea of it just being boilerplate legalese can be safely ignored from now on.

</comment><comment><USER6> > I do represent Facebook on open source matters, but I did not draft the > BSD+patents license grant.

On what planet is this not a conflict of interest? Why isn't this at the top of the article?

Are there any people out there who don't work for Facebook or use React code who are willing to defend the patent license? I don't think so.

<comment><USER7> FWIW: Heather represents a _lot_ of companies, including many staunch competitors to Facebook as well. For example, she's represented Google in open source matters, etc.

I don't think it's fair to say "she works for facebook", and she's a very honest and reputable person.

If you want to engage on the merits, i'd engage on the merits. Attacking her because she has a ridiculously long client list is silly (she's probably the top open source lawyer in the country in terms of who she has represented).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As pointed out before, Facebook's license only terminates with respect to patents (not copyright) if you sue them for patent infringement. So ... given that, the important question is what are the actual patents that cover React?

Here's why it matters. In my mind, there are basically three scenarios:

(1) There are no patents. This seems the most likely scenario. Patents are public. As far as I can tell, no one's pointed to an actual React patent yet. If this is the case, then the patent grant is irrelevant. Facebook can't revoke a license for a non-existent patent.

(2) There is a patent (or will be) -- but it covers some relatively new, hyper-specific feature of React. Generally speaking, patent examiners force patent prosecutors to narrow the claimed patent to avoid prior art. So in React's case, you might end up infringing the patent by using React but only if your copy of React comes with JSX, per-component state, context, and the new fibers stuff. So in order to get around the patent, you could fork React and remove per-component state or maybe you pin React to a version prior to the introduction of fibers and use that. This would super annoying for a large code base, but if Facebook actually was infringing your patent (and you thought it was a big enough deal to bring in expensive lawyers), forking React is a (relatively) small price to pay. Remember that Facebook's copyright license isn't subject to patent revocation, so forking to work around a patent is totally allowed.

(3) There is a patent, and it's huge. So huge, that you can't really fork React to work around it without completely destroying what makes React work. But here's the kicker. If such a patent existed -- for the sake of argument here, let's say the patent is for components or shadow DOM -- then it probably also covers Vue.js, Angular, or whatever other framework you might want to use. That's terrible! But it suggests that the real problem isn't Facebook's PATENTS license, but the underlying patent itself (which OSS advocates should be trying to kill). At any rate, this seems unlikely -- there's lots of prior art for React out there.

</comment><comment><USER9> > If you want to fling patent claims at a company that developed and released > a great piece of code, removing the code from your business seems like a > reasonable price to pay.

That seems to be the main point: Do you agree that you shouldn't be able to sue a company whose open source code you use or do you not? Everything else is just .. noise?

<comment><USER10> What if you bought a car that exploded and sued the car manufacturer, and then you weren't allowed to own or drive any of that manufacturer's cars anymore?

<comment><USER11> Bought versus 100% free.....

<comment><USER12> Cars are just computers with wheels, and are bound by similar restrictions. So let's amend the scenario:

The car you bought gets in to a car accident because of software running on the car, which is licensed to you in similarly revocable terms to the shrink wrap currently on the market.

Both this software and React are software licensed to you in this case, should you be legally disallowed from ever purchasing a car from that company again? What if it's a cloud service that powers the car in some fashion which you want to sue over?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The opening lines of the BSD license: > Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

So do I have the permission of "redistribution and use" in the BSD license or don't I?

If yes, the patent license was unnecessary, as I've got a license to copy and _use_ the software from the BSD license.

If no, then it isn't the BSD license anymore.

I believe facebook's lawyers intended the latter, the no answer.

So no one can redistribute React under BSD, as they cannot proof the permissions of the BSD license. Therefor React is not BSD licensed.

<comment><USER14> You've got copyright rights to use it, but that doesn't mean you have patent rights to use it.

This is true of BSD licensed software in general, the author can grant the copyright to copy and use it because they own that, but there may be patents that cover the relevant area which they may not own and so they cannot grant a patent license. As far as I know the BSD license is not normally thought to contain an implicit grant of patents that the author holds. If companies thought that it did, they would probably set up separate companies to funnel all their open source contributions through so that there could be no misunderstanding about patent licenses.

Regardless, if I thought I was depending on an implicit patent license that had never been tested in court for some important piece of software my company was using, I'd be more nervous than if that patent license were explicit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Its not just React - its React Native and Caffe2.ai as well. And these are more dangerous.

Arguably, Reactjs can be replaced by something else. But a mobile app in the wild cannot be replaced easily or quickly. And more so if you are using something like caffe2go (deep learning on the smartphone).

Or the data and training sets that you build around caffe2.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think quite contrary is true. Strong reaction to this is the only way.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think the amount of controversy Facebook is receiving on this is justified. The patent license could maybe be adjusted, but people's interpretation on this seems to be geared towards spreading FUD over facts.

<comment><USER16> The provided licence is a discriminatory licence that favours only one party - Facebook. I believe that it could not be called an open licence.

Author argues that the situation is not that bad and it is still somehow an open licence or even when not then it is still acceptable. I believe that it is neither of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Defensive termination provisions of the scope in the Facebook grant are very > common in patent licensing, OUTSIDE of the OPEN SOURCE LANDSCAPE.

(Emphasis mine) yes this is why people are up in arms. This isn't common in the open source ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER18> Given the number of people advocating on HN that software shouldn't be patentable, I'm surprised at how many people now consider it vitally important to be able to use software patents against Facebook. If you do not believe in using software patents, this patent clause should not affect you in any negative way.

<comment><USER19> There are also defensive patents. If you don't defend them, you can lose them. If Facebook (or a company that they acquire) starts by infringing your patents, then the PATENTS file would seem to apply.

I haven't heard anyone address that scenario yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Note: this is not legal advice. If this possibility concerns you, consult a real lawyer.

Nice apples-to-oragnes comparison of the WebM PATENTS to the React PATENTS. The only things they have in common is the scope of the grant. The revocation clauses range from fair and sane in the WebM case to extremely overreaching and unpredictable in the React case.

The WebM PATENTS causes revocation for litigation against Google for patents covered under the grant.

The React PATENTS causes revocation for litigation against Facebook for ANY patent, regardless of whether the patent was covered by the grant or not.

The WebM PATENTS causes revocation if "you or your agent or exclusive licensee institute" sue Google. That's pretty much limited to you / your company / a subsidiary of your company using the code.

The React PATENTS causes revocation if "you (or any of your subsidiaries, corporate affiliates or agents) initiate directly or indirectly, or take a direct financial interest in, any Patent Assertion" \- this is where the React PATENTS clause shows it's teeth. "Corporate Affiliate" has a wide definition. For example, a shareholder is a "Corporate Affiliate". So if you own Company A as your startup and use React and also own shares in Big Company B as an investment, then if Big Company B sues Facebook, guess what, Company A loses the patent grant. Or more likely, loses the license and is then hit up for license fees or is then sued if they continue using React.

</comment><comment><USER21> Heather Meeker is one of top lawyers in Open Source...most of the other people in this conversation don't have a background in this and should be ignored

<comment><USER22> Heather Meeker is a lawyer who represents Facebook. I have a background in this (although I am not your lawyer, so please do not take anything in this post as legal advice). The license is a serious issue for a subset of software companies and private developers.

Interestingly, most of the posters correctly identify the core concern. If you've invested significant resources into developing React projects, have IP, and Facebook infringes your IP, you're in very hot water.

Most businesses aren't competing with Facebook or patenting business critical innovations in spheres Facebook will be operating in. Using React in all of those cases is a non-issue.

For these people, the license's restrictions seem very minimal, so dumping React in the Open Source bucket seems reasonable.

For others, this restriction is an existential threat. This is why other people have an issue with the license being considered open source.

<comment><USER7> "Heather Meeker is a lawyer who represents Facebook. "

As mentioned, Heather has represented a ridiculously long list of clients, including many strong competitors to Facebook.

If she says it's her personal opinion, you can take that to the bank.

In fact, given how many client she's represented, i'd say she's probably _less_ biased than most folks. She's pretty much seen and dealt with it all.

<comment><USER22> I don't agree with your premise, that a variety of clients makes a representative inoculated against bias. If anything, it makes certain biases more pernicious as you examine the circumstances of your selected client roster while increasingly discounting other stakeholders.

I've seen this bias arise in senior practitioners with successful practices across industry groups.

In any event, her person is somewhat tangential to the important point: the react license is a substantial issue to a subset of people and organizations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There is certainly some confusion about this issue and some concerns about Facebook's intent. The gist of the article comes down to "don't worry, nothing has changed." While that is very nice, it can paraphrased as "Don't worry Facebook has always had a gun pointed at your head." Also, it is not until the end of the article that the author tells us she represents Facebook.

It would be very helpful to get some clarity about a scenario where many people have concerns: (text copied from another comment)

"What if Facebook actually breaches your patents? What if they sue you? You can't counter-claim if your tech is based on React, because you'd lose the grants."

Facebook could make a definitive statement about this. Or, representing Facebook the author could spell out exactly why this cannot happen. Yes?

</comment><comment><USER24> > [...] provides more protection for the contributor (Facebook) against > software patent claims of licensees. It's odd that a community so opposed to > software patents would find this objectionable [...]

While confusion about the license might be behind some or most of the community reaction, the fact that the license refers to litigation over any patent, not just software patents, neutralizes this punchline. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this clause positions Facebook to fight any patent infringement suit with a software patent infringement suit, which is not in the spirit of the opposition to software patents at all.

</comment><comment><USER25> The arguments made in this article are misleading in my opinion.

The article claims that the Facebook patent grant is no big deal because:

      (1) Yes, it has defensive termination, but defensive termination is standard.
      (2) Even Apache's own Apache 2.0 License has defensive termination.
      (3) And while Facebook's defensive termination language is on the broad side, it is similar to IBM's CPL 1.0 (an OSI approved license).

The first two points are completely true, but the third is misleading at best.

First, IBM's CPL patent grant triggers termination if you sue a _project contributor_ for software patent infringement. Facebook's patent grant terminates if you sue _ANYONE_ if _ANY PART_ of your patent claim relates to _ANY_ product or service of Facebook or _ANY_ of it's corporate affiliates. That's about as broad as you could possibly get.

Does that mean that suing a Facebook shareholder like Microsoft for patent infringement totally unrelated to Facebook could invalidate your React patent grant? Who knows? I bet your lawyer hates you for asking.

Second, the article claims that the "CPL is already approved by the Open Source Initiative as compliant." Using the CPL 1.0 as a point of comparison of what is a normal OSI-approved license is completely silly.

If you check the OSI site, the CPL is technically classified a "Superseded license" which means it's not intended for further use. It was formally replaced by the Eclipse Public License (EPL) _about a decade ago_. Most notably, the newer Eclipse license has a _much less strict patent termination clause_.

So why did Eclipse go through all the work to re-write their license and replace CPL? This is important - I'll cut and paste directly from the Eclipse Public License FAQ [1]:

      "Why was the EPL written?

      [..snip..] it addresses concerns some Eclipse Foundation members had with how the CPL deals with possible patent litigation."

In other words, the CPL 1.0 had the exact same patent grant criticism lodged against it - _so Eclipse ditched it and re-wrote the license and deprecated the earlier license_.

So saying that "Facebook's license is normal" because it's a more broad version of a license that OSI suggests you no longer use is pretty misleading in my opinion.

[1]: [https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#WHYEPL](https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#WHYEPL)

</comment><comment><USER26> It amazes me the number of people saying that nobody should be worried, that this license is nothing and even that libraries that do not use this license are riskier.

They added this license for a reason and they will use this leverage as much as they can and if you don't see that you are in denial.

If you cant move away from it, then stick with it. If you can move away or are still building your product just pick another framework and move on.

</comment><comment><USER27> I call bullshit

> Unless a company decides to sue Facebook (or accuse its products), the > termination trigger has no actual effect.

Please everyone, don't rely on this advice.

<comment><USER28> It's right there in the PATENTS file on github. It's also only 33 lines long and quite easy to understand

[https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS](https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Great read. Facebook doesn't deserve all this flack directed at them, and I wish more people offered this kind of technical breakdown

<comment><USER30> This breakdown cherry picks comparisons, is written by someone who discloses they represent fb in license matters and denies the nature of reality between 2013 and today.

I looked at react during the first hype was alerted to its license terms right here on hn by other people who understand the difference between software with a termination clause for those who sue to gain exclusive/royalty rights to the particular software and software with a termination clause for those who sue a particular party engaged in a significant amount of unrelated activity.

All that has changed recently is that more people are questioning their strange assumption that it doesn't matter since it is incongruent with fb again putting a recent rework and then substantial defense into something that "doesn't matter".

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > for [some licenses], bringing a patent lawsuit can result in termination of > the copyright license as well — forcing one to stop using the code

No. Copyright law is concerned with distributing copies and preparing derivative works. Copyright law does not give a creator the tools to forbid anyone from using their copy—that too is within the realm of patents. The way that copyright law can _effectively_ regulate use is indirect; it prevents someone from receiving a non-infringing copy to do anything with. If you are found to violate a license (say because it's a reciprocal license and you didn't provide source code for your own changes), then even a revocation of that license can't revoke your ability to continue using the software, because that is not something regulated by US copyright law. The copy you received was prepared and distributed to you legally. Filing a patent suit, or otherwise running afoul of the license doesn't change that.

There's a really pernicious cargo-culty thing going on where people keep describing a bifurcated situation, where the BSD is your "copyright license" and "PATENTS.txt" is your "patent license".

BSD is a license. It deals with rights reserved for copyright holders—the right to make copies and prepare derivative works. It also deals with (one of the) rights regulated by patent law—the right to use. It grants you both. PATENTS.txt is an additional grant.

<comment><USER32> IANAL, but in _MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc._ the court considered that running software involved copying it to RAM and therefore required a valid license. Congress has since made an exception, but only in the circumstances of computer repair.

Regardless, the distinction in this case is mostly academic, since React is almost always used in client software, which must be distributed.</comment></comment>


YC(W12) hiring interns for summer hacker house - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupsummerinternship.com/ Spend the summer working and living in a 3,400 square foot warehouse in downtown Mountain View as a frontend engineering intern, backend engineering interns, highly skilled product designer, mobile engineer, or energetic salesperson! <comment><USER2> Is the job market so flooded that highly skilled labor is now offered for free? These kind of jobs skills are worth 70k, easy. Most kids are better off quitting college and working in the market, for pay, than finishing their degrees. Clever, though, to pay nothing for highly skilled labor under the guise of 'opportunity'. I think I'm going to adopt this strategy for hiring.</comment>


Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability - <AUTHOR> http://www.usernique.com

<comment><USER2> What are you using to determine whether *.io domains are "free" vs "taken"? It seems to be incorrect.

      http://www.usernique.com/io/x
      -- "free"

      http://www.nic.io/cgi-bin/whois?query=x.io
      -- The domain is unavailable for use.

<comment><AUTHOR> just checking the return code on a GET request. src is on github if you're curious. You're right though, looks like the domain lookups need a bit of work.

<comment><USER3> You should do a "whois" lookup for the domain. The return code for a 'get' request on the domain has no bearing on its availability -- many parked domains do not even have DNS configured, let alone HTTP.

<comment><USER4> I'd be wary of doing automated whois lookups, which might be considered abusive / against terms of service depending on which server you hit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. This doesnt sound like a quick fix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Idea is awesome. I like how the usernames are generated in the first place. It doesn't work, however. I've been looking for simple things that I can hack up to help me learn ruby, so I made a little Ruby version using this idea. "UNameGen"

<https://github.com/scrapcode/ruby-unamegen>

</comment><comment><USER6> I love, it has some great user name suggestions. It would be great if it would check some more sites.

</comment><comment><USER7> Apparently etune.com is available... cooler than any of my domains, and randomly generated. Nice.

<comment><USER8> Nope. etune.com is taken. Some of the "available" results being returned are not correct.

<comment><USER9> I noticed this too. It said "ely.com" is available, which was strange because most (all?) 3-character .com's are registered. And yeah, ely.com is registered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sweet! I love this name: etabocagi

Sounds like an indigenous tribe or something

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems like every username starts with vowel.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it's very basic. If you check out the src, you can see that it is vowel, consonant, vowel... Basic, but it kinda works.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any feedback would be really cool...

<comment><USER11> You should add more services! I wrote <http://handlehelp.com> which checks for username availability across multiple sites. It's open source[1], so you can use some of my checks if you'd like.

[1]: <https://github.com/kyleconroy/handlehelp>

<comment><USER12> Regarding the reddit check, a username can be unavailable for registration even if there is no profile, after an account is deleted the username is reserved forever. Not sure if there is any way to check if a username is actually available with out trying to register it. For example "citricsquid" is unavailable on reddit but your service reports it is available.

<comment><AUTHOR> Damn, I only just added the reddit check. Looks like I might have to revert that...

<comment><USER11> Just found the API that reddit uses to check for usernames[1]. I'll be adding it to handlehelp right now.

[1]: <http://www.reddit.com/api/username_available.json?user=foo>

<comment><AUTHOR> awesome, good find!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Problem with Job Titles: Part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.workshape.io/the-problem-with-job-titles-part-ii/

<comment><USER3> Great article, and fascinating insight into the analysis of your data. Its definitely a problem both ways. Companies hiring can't be sure their initial hook will return appropriate candidates. Then candidates looking for a suitable role can't really be sure what they are applying for will suit their skill set and desires. Your classification of roles and candidates is certainly a much more complete approach for ensuring various parties get what they want, good work!

</comment><comment><USER4> looks like a trend towards more general skills than highly specialised people, I'm calling that a win for cross stack engineers.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting posts.

I'm not especially keen on the title "Software Engineer", though I accept by now that it is deeply entrenched. While the title "Engineer" doesn't carry the same general expectations of specific education and credentials as "Lawyer" or "Physician", it does carry those expectations within more narrow titles - <USER2> "Structural Engineer" means something very specific and people do have specific expectations for it. It's a complicated topic, but I'm one of those people who thinks that programming has deeper roots in math than engineering, and I am unsettled by the idea that the PE people would be able to leverage their control over the word "engineering" to gain control over who is allowed to call themselves a "software engineer", and then use this power, through scope creep, to start to restrict the practice rather than just the title. I lean against the idea of formal exams (a "bar" for software). I'm not completely opposed to it, but if it happens, I'd prefer to establish it completely independently of any professional _engineering_ accreditation, since I just don't think computer science, or even the modern practice of writing software, is sufficiently similar to engineering to be considered a subset of the PE exams.

Software Developer is fine. I never minded "Programmer", I guess some people feel it's a low status sounding term that focuses too much on writing code rather than the other tasks that are equally or more important to writing good software.

Now, that second part there does hint at why job titles and especially (not mentioned in these blog posts) job _descriptions_ ("job cards") can be so essential for software developers. As I've gotten more "senior" in my career, I have found my job card to be an essential line of defense on more than one occasion. There are a lot of people out there who want to put software engineers (I'll revert to the commonly used term here) in a box. They want to see the programmer as the worker who can execute someone else's vision, but they will try to deny the programmer the autonomy and decision making authority that comes with a more senior role.

There is, of course, a limit to autonomy on all sides, and there are grey areas between technical and business decisions, but it helps enormously to have a document that lists what it is you were hired to do. Job cards for more senior technical workers often have phrases like "establishes system architecture", "evaluates and determines technology choices", or even more deliberately ambiguous things like "works with business units to align business goals with technology" (where autonomy can clearly overlap). But it makes it clear - the technical side engages collaboratively with the business unit, but it isn't simply there to execute whatever it is the business unit tells it to do.

People often don't like job cards because they imagine the phrase "that's not in my job card." However, I've found that's not really the problem, at least for me. I'm more that happy to do things that aren't in my job card if that's what needs to be done. But I have found myself in a position where I'm saying "that _is_ in my job card." A business leader may want to take a decision that at least (according to the organization) requires my input, and tell me how it is going to be. If this escalates, it's very useful to have a signed, sealed and delivered document establishing your role in the organization.

<comment><USER6> > I lean against the idea of formal exams (a "bar" for software). I'm not > completely opposed to it, but if it happens, I'd prefer to establish it > completely independently of any professional engineering accreditation, > since I just don't think computer science, or even the modern practice of > writing software, is sufficiently similar to engineering to be considered a > subset of the PE exams.

Too late, the first NCEES software PE exam was in 2013. It uses the IEEE/ACM Software Engineering Book of Knowledge as a base and seems close to what the old IEEE CSDP certification was trying to do. It's intended (as I see it) for formally trained engineers who are working on software-intensive projects rather than developers who want to do engineering work. Your point about having someone besides NCEES do the licensure was tried (IEEE) and at least for now will not be happening going forward.

To your earlier point, I do expect someone calling themselves an engineer to have a basic grounding in chemistry, physics (mechanics, E&M, thermo), heat and mass transfer, calculus, etc.—basically, the first 2 years of engineering education common to all disciplines. I also expect that they're respecting professional standards and ethics. I realize that "software engineers" feel like they're an exception and it irritates me to no end, but I also don't see the cat being stuffed back into the bag at this point.

edit: One frustration I've had recently was in hiring an engineer on a software-intensive medical device project, and getting a bunch of web developers applying for the role. I needed someone with an actual engineering background, and tried filtering by including engineering undergraduate degree as a requirement and "professional engineer" as a preferred requirement, to no avail. If Silicon Valley wants to call everyone off the street a software engineer, that's fine, but I need a job title to use in hiring for safety critical software projects.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for your response.

I feel ambivalence about the use of "engineering" in software. We do have "sound engineers" and "special effects engineers", consistent with a vernacular use of engineering to mean "the ingenious use of technology" (made up by me). Within that context, the term software "engineering" really isn't especially outrageous. I think that the public is not threatened by this use of the word, since they are not confused by the difference between a sound "engineer" and a licensed structural engineer. However, software "engineering" could slip into that grey area.

One thing that makes me worry less is the restructuring of the FE exams to reflect the body of knowledge in the various fields. For instance, Industrial Engineering is now substantially different from Mechanical even at the FE level. Another interesting thing I learned is that certain fields are just title based - I believe that this means you can't represent yourself as an "Industrial Engineer" in a professional context if you aren't a PE, but there isn't a practice restriction (at least that is how I interpreted it, because I don't do either it doesn't really affect me).

But one other thing I would like to mention - while I phrased my argument in the context of not wanting PE to gain control over software licensing, I do agree with you about the term "engineering". I do agree that you should have a background in those things you mentioned to be using the title where "engineer" implies this sort of background, and it is hard earned.

So I'd agree that software engineers may be grabbing a title they don't really have rights to, though I would still argue that software has far more in common with math (even math theory, like abstract algebra) than heat and mass transfer.

Oh one more thing - your description for the intended use of "software engineering" as "formally trained engineers who are working on software- intensive projects" sounds reasonable - it covers software for specific engineering systems. My worry is of scope creep - the initial process is limited, highly relevant, and justified, but it later morphs into an "I'm licensed and you"re not" situation. If that happens, I'd almost want to see some math body establish a degree requirement and math background (including things like abstract algebra and real analysis), along with very intensive algorithm questions, as a counterbalance (au contraire, mon frere, _you 're_ not licensed).

I read Milton Friedman's bit on "abolish the AMA" and enjoyed it, but ultimately, I support limited licensing and credentials to protect the public - however, I do feel that scope creep really is a serious risk here.

<comment><USER6> > We do have "sound engineers" and "special effects engineers", consistent > with a vernacular use of engineering to mean "the ingenious use of > technology" (made up by me).

And railroad engineers! Can't forget them! :)

> One thing that makes me worry less is the restructuring of the FE exams to > reflect the body of knowledge in the various fields.

I don't know anyone that took their discipline-specific FE exam instead of the general one. Way back in undergrad, it was suggested that the general exam was easier. Do you know what the advantage is of the discipline-specific FE exam?

> Another interesting thing I learned is that certain fields are just title > based - I believe that this means you can't represent yourself as an > "Industrial Engineer" in a professional context if you aren't a PE, but > there isn't a practice restriction (at least that is how I interpreted it, > because I don't do either it doesn't really affect me).

That's certainly the case for systems engineering, which feels related to IE, but IE has a PE exam and systems engineering doesn't. You look at the projects that systems engineering is applied to, and they're certainly the sort of critical things (like aerospace) that you would want oversight over. I guess those in charge see the systems engineering trade association handing things fine without NCEES getting involved. Long live the industrial exemption I guess.

I'm curious to see what happens to software consultancies, and if perhaps principals are going to need a PE like you would see at other engineering firms even if they're not handling safety or mission critical projects. A PE certainly helps in qualifying as an expert witness. This point goes towards your concern over scope creep, certainly a valid one.

<comment><USER5> The FE exams changed very recently - I'm not sure if there even is a general FE exam anymore, though there probably is an FE common core to each exam.

[http://ncees.org/about-ncees/news/ncees-announces-changes- to...](http://ncees.org/about-ncees/news/ncees-announces-changes-to-fe-exam/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>