Joe the Developer doesn't need a certificate - <AUTHOR> http://gojko.net/2009/09/22/joe-the-developer-doesnt-need-a-certificate/

<comment><USER2> > Joe the Plumber heard that you can make more money programming than plumbing > and decided to suddenly become a programmer.

Where did Joe the Plumber get that misinformation?

<comment><USER3> From a certified developer.

<comment><USER4> From a developer certifier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Woah. People usually oppose certification because it creates barriers to entry. (In particular, I subscribe to this point of view even though I'm a long-time programmer.) Now this guy opposes certification for the _opposite_ reason - that it makes entry into the profession _too easy_. In a better world this would've been some kind of clever postmodern provocative trick, like Alan Sokal or whatever, but something tells me this is for real.

<comment><USER6> An anecdote.

Back in late 90s I managed to get second best score in the country (for that year) in Visual Basic exam under Microsoft Certified Solution Developer program. The catch was that I had have never written a single line in Visual Basic nor had I have any substantial database development experience.

So, yeah, it is entirely possible to get certified and not know a thing about a certification subject. Guy's got a point.

<comment><USER7> That's just an example of a bad certification process. Being able to provide an example of bad certification does not invalidate the entire concept.

<comment><USER8> Can you give an example of a _good_ certification process for developers? I can't think of a one I would hire based upon.

<comment><USER9> How about making the person taking the certification create working, readable programs, and have them submit their answers electronically. Like how programming assignments were in college, except without the rife copying between the participants. I think this test would weed out many people from the very beginning.

<comment><USER7> You're talking about programming and creating programs. That would be a really, really useless certification.

<comment><USER9> _That would be a really, really useless certification._

Please explain?

The ancestor post by huhtenberg says he obtained certification for Visual Basic although he never wrote a single line of it before. My suggestion for the certification process is to actually use the skill at question, and using that as a basis for obtaining the paper that says "Yes, I can do this proficiently", where the skill in question is software development, not memorizing book knowledge. Why not test software development by making the test taker develop software?

<comment><USER7> Because there is no objective measure for "quality" within an individual implementation within a language. The best we can hope for is some guarantee that people know what the tools and techniques available to them are, and that they know the factors that influence software quality.

That would be more valuable than being language certified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've always wondered if the "barrier to entry" was a way to stem the tide of offshoring of IT jobs. If it somehow becomes more difficult for people outside the United States or Europe to become "certified", and large companies start insisting that their work be done by "certified" developers, you'd effectively make it more difficult to hire offshore developers.

Of course, that assumes that it is more difficult to become certified overseas, and I doubt that would ultimately be the case. It'd probably still be financially advantageous for outsourcing firms to invest in the means to certify offshore developers.

<comment><USER11> Actually from my experience with offshore companies, they often provide more certified developers and architects and they use this number or ration as a selling point. Sadly I cannot point to any source or statistic to support this.

<comment><USER12> Didn't Microsoft used to use a "quota" system for their certification, too? They determined how many people, per country, they would allow to be certified, and if too many got the passing mark, the raised the requirement "appropriately" for following exam-takers; but not based on bell-curve stat's, etc, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Joe the Developer is entrusted with writing code that can cost people money and cause damage. In some cases, it can endanger lives and businesses.

Joe the Developer doesn't need a certificate, but "we the people" (as in the people who have his software inflicted upon them) would rather he did.

The certification argument seems to forget whose benefits from certification. It's not the developer - it's the people who are able to ensure that there is a baseline level of competence among software developers entrusted with certain kinds of development work.

I'm all for certification.

<comment><USER13> >> "Joe the Developer is entrusted with writing code that can cost people money and cause damage. In some cases, it can endanger lives and businesses."

That's what tests are for.

<comment><USER14> NO, that's what proper design & development process is for. Testing is only a (small) part of that process and as we've known for decades, you can't test quality into a product. Hell, just a few minutes ago, someone brought me a piece of code that has been HAMMERED on for the last nine months and it still has a bug that wasn't noticed until today!

gdp is right: certifications are useful _if they are rigorous, targeted and demand useful knowledge and training_

I doubt most developers would say that licensing pilots or physicians is useless but that's essentially the same thing as claiming that certifying programmers is useless.

<comment><USER15> When a pilot or a physician makes a mistake, there is no chance for someone else to correct it. That's why these professions (physicians especially) require expensive certifications, and continuing expenses to keep these certifications current.

Engineers are probably a better comparison: while engineers do have expensive certifications, they aren't the ones doing most of the engineering. Instead, they're the ones verifying that the engineering (done mostly by non-certified engineers) meets the design requirements.

<comment><USER14> So because there's a chance for someone to fix a bug is a reason that certifications are useless in software? Not buying it for a second. Whether or not the bug can be fixed is immaterial: it may have already caused thousands of $$ of problems even if fixed. Tell that to a business whose eCommerce site has been down for a day because of a dumb error by an inexperienced programmer.

As far as your comment about engineers being a better comparison and axod's comment that "most software is fun..." (WTF!!! do you think businesses expend millions of dollars yearly on IT so they can have "fun?"), I call bullshit! As someone with experience and in both hardware and software engineering, I can assure you that most engineering is verified by non-certified (I assume you mean PE's) engineers.

I live daily with software that _has to work._ Serious bugs are not tolerated in medical devices. The attitude that "oh, we can fix that in the next release, just tell the operator not to hit F8 before F7 or they'll misdiagnose the patient" simply doesn't fly around here.

Sorry for the rant, but attitudes like this are exactly why software development isn't taken seriously by most professions!

<comment><USER15> You're making a leap here. The chance for someone to fix a bug does not make developer certifications useless. The chance for someone to catch a bug during review, before it harms anyone (which is what I was referring to) _still_ does not make developer certifications useless. The latter does, however, decrease their marginal utility. This is why it's an apt comparison to engineering: an engineer can't "patch" a defect in his design once it's been produced, but he can have other engineers look it over beforehand.

Now, what I mean by "certified" varies a bit across disciplines. The professional engineer cert is a general certification, which is generally much less useful than specific certifications for particular disciplines. The considerations in electrical engineering are considerably different from those in, say, structural engineering. While there is also significant overlap, you're not going to get a general-purpose "engineer" who can verify both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've always said that certifications are a base level of competence for a job, not a proof of expertise.

When a senior dev rants about how they don't need a certificate, I agree, but counter them with the question: If certificates are so easy to get and meaningless, why haven't you bothered to get them?

Note: I can think of a number of reasonable answers why not... but their response to that question is often enlightening as to exactly what kind of dev they are.

<comment><USER17> In my opinion, they signal different things to different hiring entities.

To a big corp, it signals that you play by the rules, and that a 3rd party has vouched for you.

To a small company, it signals that you don't learn by yourself, and expect things spoonfed.

I'm not saying either is wrong, but they are different mindsets, large companies have more need to order than small companies.

<comment><USER18> _To a small company, it signals that you don't learn by yourself, and expect things spoonfed._

I don't think they say that at all. Now, I do get that impression about some people that list tons of training classes on their resume (especially the ones that list training classes without an accompanying certification).

Personally, I hold an MCBDA, MCITP, and A+ certifications. I pepared for the MCDBA and MCITP on my own through a combination of books, websites, and hands on toying with the systems. I prepared for the A+ in a peer group. I have had a mentor that taught me a tremendous amount, but I never took formal classes for any of it, or expected any of it to be spoonfed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's my view that certification is an attempt by non-programmers to find some substitute metric that allows them to measure a programmer's worth instead of using the only metric that should matter, the quality of their actual work. I'm not convinced that this is necessary or even possible.

Could someone please explain to me why a market-based meritocracy for programmers isn't good enough? The good programmers either establish a reputation and references by doing quality work for other companies, or they can provide examples of code they wrote independently.

I think that the lack of mandatory certification is one thing that has allowed software to become such a vibrant field. It's as much an artistic or creative profession as an engineering profession. For the jobs that require engineering precision, a developer's work (or an artist-for-hire's portfolio) should be sufficient qualification.

</comment><comment><USER11> My personal uneasiness with certifications is partly due to the fact that so many people in IT organizations were fired without credentials. There are technical or college or even graduate degrees in subject related to what needs to be done in IT. It is just sad that after ignoring them for so long, they now turn to these commercial offerings who often don't focus on the real problems at hand in the sense that the problem is rarely technical.

That and also that several people (and I don't want to generalize because they aren't all like that) I have met with such certifications have belief that there is a "one true way" or recipe of doing things and are uneasy to adapt or step out of this course. Maybe it creates in these people the false conviction that there is an infallible answer to all problems.

</comment><comment><USER20> A former field service rep of mine now runs ads on the local cable news channel selling mortgage refinancing packages.

I was sitting there one night thinking 'I know that guy.' And I did. He looks good on tv too. Lost some weight, big smile, nice clothes, smooth delivery -- same as when he used to say, "I not really sure, let me call Colorado and escalate this."

</comment><comment><USER21> Having previously been a CCNA, I would say that Cisco has some of the best certificates around. If you have a CCIE cert nearly every door is open to you.

</comment><comment><USER22> If only these opinions were carried in the WSJ, FT, etc.

</comment><comment><USER23> Many people got certificates because it is very hard, difficult and annoying for them to show their abilities or repeat a moderate-difficult task.

Active developer with daily practice does not required any certifying papers. Good developer even didn't hide his code. Piles of high quality code. Look at the people who bring us linux, freebsd, openbsd and thousand other projects.</comment>


Ask HN: What's on your Cyber Monday shopping list? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Currently on Sale: Bitdefender Box ProtonMail Plus GlassWire Pro

Waiting for Sale: YubiKey 5 NFC Anker Charger and Cable Wireless Mouse USB hub Synology Expansion Bay</comment>


RIAA Admits It Wants DMCA Overhaul; Blames Judges For 'Wrong' Interpretation - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111108/00352916675/riaa-admits-it-wants-dmca-overhaul-blames-judges-wrong-interpretation.shtml <comment><AUTHOR> I've been thinking for a while that RIAA is the _single most destructive force_ against our freedoms in the past few years, perhaps even more so than the Government itself with the Patriot Act and whatnot, because RIAA is trying to push all these restrictions at a global scale, trying to convince as many Governments as possible in the same time to accept them (think e-G8), to make people think that if so many accept them, then they "must be right about that".

If it were possible for them to fund a scientific experiment like LHC, that would create a blackhole in the middle of the Earth, that would _finally_ stop piracy, I think they would do it.

What I'm trying to say is that they could care less if they bring down the whole Internet and kill it, as long as they just "stop piracy" - even if actually achieving that would lower their sales. But they are too short- sighted to even think about that.

With things like RIAA, it's no wonder people are protesting against Wall- Street rather than the Government itself. Because sometimes the companies behind the Government, can do a lot more evil by controlling the Government, than the Government itself would if they just wanted more power.

<comment><USER2> The RIAA can do precisely nothing without the government thoughtfully doing their bidding.

RIAA/Wall St/other evil corporations: "Hey, could you fuck people over to improve our bottom line? Please?"

Joe Biden/Orrin Hatch: "Done. Anything else you want?"

The politicians pushing the RIAA's agenda are more or less the same people pushing things like the Patriot Act (Joe Biden, Orrin Hatch, etc). To me, they all look like different symptoms of the same problem.

<comment><USER3> The true pushers of the PATRIOT Act were the guys in the DoJ who wrote the thing; it was all written up and prepared far in advance of an anticipated wartime condition which would allow them to get it passed without trouble.

<comment><USER2> Yes, the patriot act was being kicked around in some form since at least 1995.

 _"When I was chairman in '94 I introduced a major antiterrorism bill--back then,...I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up [the PATRIOT act] was my bill."_ \- Joe Biden

<http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/rhetorical-question>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Every ten years, the media companies "upgrade" their copyright protection via Congress, as technology outstrips their content controls. Now they want to circumvent the courts altogether. This has got to stop; it serves no purpose and only alienates (and, often, criminalizes) consumers.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's absolutely terrible that every branch of the government has been compromised except the courts and now we are relying on them more and more to affect policy. With the other 2 branches able to determine who sits on the bench I feel it's only a matter of time before the courts won't even bother to defend our interests.

<comment> steve-howard The courts aren't exactly doing a stellar job of watching out for the interests of individuals, either.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but what we have is a batshit, crazy legislative branch and a Newspeak executive branch. Compared to the other 2 the courts have the dubious distinction of being the least likely to ride roughshod over the Bill of Rights.

<comment><USER6> You don't like any of the three branches and compare the executive to a totalitarian Big Brother.

What do you suggest as an alternative?

<comment><USER5> I didn't mention Big Brother you did. I'm speaking of the fact that the Obama administration says one thing while doing another. Saying they'll back off from medical marijuana dispensaries and then go full hilt on raiding them. Saying they'll do a serious investigation into the lead up to the Iraq War then sweeping it under the bridge. In fact, with the warrantless wiretaps, broad surveillance powers, and continuation of Bush laws that he promised to repeal, maybe Big Brother is apt for this administration.

And God forbid we get an actual, real criminal investigation into the financial crisis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They never learn. Technology has been winning the arms race with them for years now. Every time they try some new law, tech works around it.

Can't stop the signal.

<comment><USER8> > Every time they try some new law, tech works around it.

> Can't stop the signal.

No, they can't. But they can make life worse for the vast majority of the population, possibly with a minor profit, at little or no cost to them. So they do.</comment></comment>


The Database Administrator is dead - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/kennygorman/2013/12/12/dba-dead/#!pPtRD <comment><USER2> I guess I had better tell my colleagues that our jobs are all dead! Wait, it's an absolute statement for a headline, so it's actually "absolute crap".

> These days, the technology decision maker is the dude with Sublime Text open > and a cloud control panel up in Chrome.

And when he is successful and gets clients, and a few thousand rows in his database, he realizes that he needs someone to keep that database alive. He needs someone to figure out how to make the cartesian product queries he's written into efficient queries.

At first, he hires a consultant for a few one-off gigs. However, then he's paying someone $200[1] an hour, typically with 8-16 hour engagements. After getting sick of that cost, and still lacking any kind of long term caring about his product, he comes to our team, and hires us to be his DBA, albeit remotely.

Business as a DBA is booming. Nobody thinks they need a DBA, but the reality is that you really can't afford to not have a DBA. We have customers coming on board with no backups, no high availability plans, no disaster recovery plans, queries that are performing cartesian products (and thus taking minutes against very small datasets), and no monitoring. (And yes, a good portion of users come to us while using the "solution" proposed by the OP (like AWS RDS), for many the same problems.)

We set them up with comprehensive backups, automated failover solutions, and 24x7 monitoring. Suddenly, their DB is no longer the primary source of downtime. They're no longer loosing customer engagement because their frontend takes seconds to render. They're no longer in the position of loosing their entire company because some junior developer accidentally dropped their users table in production.

In short, DBAs are a required part of your business, if you're using a database. You just haven't been burned bad enough by a poor database setup to realize it.

[1] Actual hourly rates for a planned engagement. Emergency rates are closer to $450 an hour. Why so much? You can't get a DBA from a college, from a technical school, or from any other form of formal education. Most DBAs these days are grown internally from developers or system administrators who decide to (or are forced to) specialize while on the job. There are single-digit thousands of us world wide, and we're in high demand.

<comment><USER3> I disagree. _dedicated_ DBAs are on their way out.

Databases are becoming pretty good at managing themselves and the marginal performance gains from tuning usually are easily offset by throwing bigger kit at the problem or throwing more cash at the plan you are on.

<comment><USER2> Often the act of throwing "bigger kit" at the problem requires specialized tuning of the DB to be able to take advantage of it.

More memory? Increase the buffer pool size.

Faster HDD? Tweak the settings that determine how many disk operations are attempted every second.

Bigger CPU? Figure out the point of diminishing returns on the number of CPU cores for your DB, and start sharding onto multiple DBs to make sure you can use all of the cores.

SAN? But I thought you wanted performance. ;)

Plus, what gives you the best DB kit for the buck? I could probably tell you that (I am a DBA, and get paid to answer those questions), but do you know? Do you know where to find out?

<comment><USER4> Databases definitely require knowledgeable tuning. But so do most other complicated moving parts in a modern infrastructure - web servers, app servers, kernels, cache servers, etc. Sysadmins manage those quite successfully. In my experience, they also manage databases quite successfully. The idea that a database is a special beast that requires special keepers is a holdover from a dark age.

<comment><USER2> > The idea that a database is a special beast that requires special keepers is > a holdover from a dark age.

As are most databases (which are 10-20 years old).

Compared to a webserver, a DB is significantly more complicated, and significantly more important to your average business. Nginx takes a nosedive or performs poorly, and nobody really cares. Your DB takes seconds to respond to basic queries, and your entire business suffers.

I'm guessing you've yet to be bitten by DB performance issues that couldn't be resolve by adding indexes or basic query profiling. I'm glad to hear it, because it's not fun to have to set aside your day job and dive beneath that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think someone's spent too long in tech-startup-land and has forgotten that there's a whole bunch of businesses outside of that, some of which don't have access to reliable internet connectivity and need to keep going even if the Internet's down.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you are working on confidential data, it is very likely that your security policy does not allow you to store it "in the cloud", or to hand it off to a third party without the kinds of contractual obligations that will perplex and confuse anyone trying to sell a best-effort service.

Thus your databases will be in-house, thus you will hire one or more DBAs and depend upon their expertise.

<comment><USER7> >> If you are working on confidential data, it is very likely that your security policy does not allow you to store it "in the cloud"

The regulations will change with the times, hopefully.

We stored little more than names/emails and non-identifiable/non-sensitive data at my last job. The 'security auditor' for one client wouldn't let them sign with us because our servers were hosted at Rackspace, so the servers were not under our control and a Rackspace employee could access our data, since they managed our servers.

<comment><USER6> It's not a matter of regulation. It's a matter of liability. As long as the company running the database-as-a-service won't accept full liability against breach of privacy for the information stored there by clients, clients can't store confidential information there.

And who wants to do that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The cloud is killing all the low-level admins. Mail administrators? Backup operators?

Moving to BYOD will continue to reduce the numbers of administrators as well. Eventually you'll have two groups of IT staff, a very small group of high- level engineers who build and implement everything, and then a very large group of low-skill helpdesk type people who reset your accounts and fill in your login information on your device.

Amazon's Mayday support service shows this already. Soon, a form of this will be on every product you can think of. Office, Windows, every tablet and computer in your office.

<comment><USER8> I couldn't agree more. The most apt analogy to explain this to non-tech folks I can come up with is how the automobile went from a hobby toy for the mechanically inclined to a tool people use everyday.

There will always be a place in the world for engineers who understand how to get the most of out an internal combustion engine and ways to improve it, just like for database engineers. But we don't all need our car in the shop twice a month having parts tuned. Nor do the vast majority of databases hitting performance limits that would require full-time DBAs.

Consulting is a great business decision when you reach hundreds of GB in data. In-house when your tossing around Tera or Peta-btyes. By the way, I can whole- heartedly recommend [http://www.pgexperts.com](http://www.pgexperts.com) if your having Postgres issues. After speaking with a few of their core engineers at DjangoCon 2013 I would consult with them anytime I had PG performance issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> TL;DR: Cloud-based DB co-founder says that most of his customers don't employ a DB admin.

Um, it would only be surprising if they _did_ , that would surely indicate that his company wasn't doing a good job.

<comment><USER10> True.

But most of these folks didn't have DBA's or even OPS engineers before they became customers.

Mostly they are teams of developers, they have developed the application and have (I think correctly) worried about the customer experience, code base, IP, performance, etc.

They do want the database driver API (in this case MongoDB) to just work beyond the interface. Backups, scaling, filesystems, etc they want to be part of the service, and just handled.

This is true for new business and it's true for businesses that are developing _new_ apps or _new_ projects or even projects that can't scale out on other infrastructure.

Full disclosure: I wrote the article in question ;-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The DBA is essential for big companies, not only Facebook or Apple. The author of the post works for a database-as-a-service provider, it's just marketing.

<comment><USER12> Exactly.. Why bother optimizing your database, just spin up more servers (which we will happily continue to squeeze your opex budget dry)!

It seems cloud/SaaS is the new answer to throwing hardware at the problem. Something about the inefficiency grinds at me. I do get at certain scales, it makes sense.. But it's not always obvious where that line is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am a database administrator.

I somewhat agree with the conclusion which essentially says having your on premise DBA is on the decline.

Hiring DBAs has always been tricky for employers anyway. It's a position of responsibility (to protect the business' data) that is hard to know you've hired the right person for, difficult to replace, and difficult to allow to take any vacation/leave since there will seldom be more than one.

What I don't agree with in the conclusion is that by moving off premise it's all moving to datastore-as-a-service. Large amounts will also move to remote DBA as a service (consulting firms).

</comment><comment><USER14> If they define DBA as a guy who sit in a room 9-to-5 for a $100k+ salary, then, yes, there is a recession, you know. But usually (or rather unusually) DBA is an engineer, who could do much more than looking at EXPLAIN output and tune some variables once in a week.

I have been Informix DBA for years and I could tell that we were the strongest guys in a team, because in order to do our job we had to understand (abstract out of running system) the data-flows, access pattern (and especially locking issues), actual server's topology (disk controllers, channels, hard-drivers) data partitioning (where this or that table-space lives, what's else on this volume, this channel, this controller) what are the access patterns for each table, how indexes are utilized, etc.

We also have patched, compiled and installed all the required software (have you ever tried to compile Informix support into PHP4? you definitely should.)) and to teach coders how to use it, and then deal with access patterns of silly scripts, etc.

The claims that some crap like MongoDB (of all things!) service could replace skilled, productive, (but, yes, quite expensive) professionals is, of course, utter nonsense (what else we could expect from MongoDB?).

DBAs and Sysadmins (real ones, not these clowns who use nothing but chef or puppet and doesn't know how ./configure && make works) are becoming extinct purely from economical reasons, and all these cloud services, ironically, require even more knowledge to deal with, because all that virtualization crap messes everything up even more (google for redis on EC2 for a change).

Sadly, idiots are taking over the world slowly but steadily,)

<comment><USER8> __DBAs and Sysadmins (real ones, not these clowns who use nothing but chief or puppet and doesn't know how ./configure && make works) are becoming extinct purely from economical reasons__

As long as we're insulting people ... it's going to be 2014 in three weeks. __Who compiles anything for PHP4? __Boasting about an ability to handle other people 's messy scripts sounds like an anti-pattern to me, and your recommendation to your org should be to develop a plan to refactor anything dependent on a library that has been deprecated for 6 years and actively out of development for 5.

I also feel like the vast majority of folks claiming merit badges as DBAs in 2013 are the product of failed technology roadmaps and technical debt with no plans to pay it off. I'm sure there are still places where true, full-time DBAs are worth their paycheck, but in my experience these are far and few between with the current status of OSS database options and hardware performance.

<comment><USER14> > As long as we're insulting people

People may assume whatever they wish.)

> Who compiles anything for PHP4?

It was long ago, but you probably wouldn't believe how many people are scared to touch anything, leave alone to perform even a necessary security update - "what if it stop working?!"

Unfortunately, frustration, which sometimes influenced wording of some of my comments, is based on a quite long time in the industry, and I never asked for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The DBA may be dead, but he has a lot more life in him than "MongoDB database- as-a-service" is ever likely to have....

</comment><comment><USER16> DBAs have specialized knowledge related to the maintenance and optimization of a particular SQL engine. Developers see the database as a black box where data gets stored, but there is a lot going on under-the-hood to keep the data reliable, consistent, secure, redundant, and available.

The last thing you want is a full transaction log during peak hours.

</comment><comment><USER17> > These days, the technology decision maker is the dude with Sublime Text open > and a cloud control panel up in Chrome.

My sublime text is open and I have a cloud control panel open on chrome, am I the technology decision maker? Nobody told me that here on the company.

Wait... maybe nobody told me because... I'm the decision maker D=

</comment><comment><USER18> Persistence ignorance introduced by mainstream ORMs about 5-7 years ago have turned the new generation of programmers blind to the fact database IS part of your application. Records you save don't get sucked into a magic black box that just responds to your queries as your app needs grow.

DBAs are not going to go anywhere. Sure, you can scale the DB in the cloud quite a bit in and perform well but it's not free :) In the cloud, you would be literally paying for your bad design decisions in terms of hard dollars rather than performance issues.

Most start-ups or in house apps are fine while the salary(dba) => cost of cloud. However, that magic condition starts returning false pretty quickly if you are doing any non-trivial data management.

</comment><comment><USER19> Who organizes how the data is stored? In some companies, the database is largely ignored until performance and scaling is an issue. At that point a DBA is brought in and the next months or even years are spent fixing the design so the entire product can perform properly and grow.

</comment><comment><USER20> The world is definitely changing for the DBA to which he made a very good points. I feel he graced over a big facet in a single line of the article which had to do with Apple/Facebook and large companies.

The banking world doesn't give their data to others and organization of ATM data, market data, customer account data, etc is only getting more complex and requiring excellent organization and management for terra data analysis to protect cusomters for fraud and worse.

</comment><comment><USER21> So, a thought experiment.

Pick any data storage system you like - MongoDb, Redis, Riak, whatever.

Now, you get to place a bet. In the future (let's say 25 years) what will still exist: your choice of NoSQL, or the standard database with schema, SQL, access, and so on? If you choose wrong, you die.

Now you get to see the future and see if you die. Which are you betting on?

<comment><USER22> Sometimes you just bet on red AND on black to stay safe while keeping the wheel rolling and the drinks coming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The DBA is not dead! They just look and smell that way!

But in all seriousness, if your app uses a database, you are incompetent not to employ an expert to help with the database, whether advising on the query plan of those non-performant queries, or what is the best setup for the current stage of the business and app, they are very useful.

<comment><USER24> Most people don't need dedicated DBAs and worse the DBA often never has sufficient domain knowledge of the problem to make an intelligent suggestion anyway.

DBs performance is complicated, yes, but the vast majority of it is extremely simple. It's just none of this simple stuff has to be learnt until it's too late and the cost of fixing it has dramatically increased.

There's a certain level where you need a DBA and that bar has been getting higher for years.

What we really need is to demystify DB performance, which for the most part is fairly simple.

What you need to do is teach your developers how to read those query plans. Show them how to find the expensive queries. To give them tools to easily see what queries their ORM is spitting out. To show them how to use a SQL profiler.

Tell your developers how query plan caching actually works. How a clustered index works and what you should and shouldn't put it on. Explain how indexes work. Explain how DB pages actually work and then it's obvious why certain indexes are a bad idea. Explain how relational keys are very important for the DB engine and leaving them off is not an 'oops', it's a serious mistake with long term consequences.

And that's at most a few days work. So why do you need that DBA?

Aside from that you need someone who knows how to maintain a DB, but again that's not particularly complicated and once it's done you can forget about it apart from the occasional sanity check that it's all working properly.

<comment><USER25> So basically train them to be DBAs?

<comment><USER26> No, train them to _use_ the database properly. A DBA is the person who keeps the databse running, much like a sysadmin is the person who keeps the server running.

<comment><USER27> That's a naive view of both DBAs and sysadmins these days. They both do much more than just keep things running. Sysadmin has mostly turned into opsdev. Same with DBA.

<comment><USER26> _Sysadmin has mostly turned into opsdev._

Not in places large enough to value loose coupling (e.g., if keeping your servers running comes out of a different budget than improving your applications).

<comment><USER27> Opsdev != dev</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How we got over funded in just 1 week on Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> http://www.scirra.com/blog/79/how-we-got-over-funded-in-just-1-week-on-kickstarter?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=LinkToBlogPost&utm_campaign=BlogSubscription-19-4-2012 <comment><USER2> I read about Spriter last week on some gamedev forums. There is definitely a strong need for the functionality Spriter will provide within this niche, hence the successful Kickstarter. I thought the video was also very compelling and well-made. I'm looking forward to the release of Spriter.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. Congrats and thanks for sharing your story. You scored $42k, well above your $25k goal.

What do you plan to do with the additional windfall?

</comment><comment><USER4> Congrats! You guys are based in London, but I'm guessing you could go on Kickstarter because you have a company registered in the US?</comment>


JuliaGraphs – Graph analysis in Julia - <AUTHOR> https://juliagraphs.github.io/ <comment><USER2> Hi - I'm one of the core developers of LightGraphs (and other packages in the JuliaGraphs ecosystem). Happy to answer any questions.</comment>


How to Read a Legal Opinion: A Guide for New Law Students (2007) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1160925 <comment><USER2> In first reading legal opinions when I started law school, I was handicapped by subconsciously imagining law to be a knowable _engineering_ discipline, with accepted rules that could be learned and predictably applied. That's true to a certain extent, but only in roughly the sense that Ptolemaic astronomy is also true to a certain extent.

One might say that the practice of law is more akin to weather forecasting than to engineering. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said, "The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law." [0] The basis for prediction is, in essence, looking to the outcomes of past power struggles between people who wanted what they wanted and sought to enlist others — courts, legislators, executives, the populace — in their cause.

Equally famously, Holmes said: "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, and even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics." [1]

[0] O.W. Holmes, Jr., The Path of the Law, 10 Harvard Law Review 457 (1897), [https://www.constitution.org/lrev/owh/path_law.htm](https://www.constitution.org/lrev/owh/path_law.htm)

[1] O.W. Holmes, Jr., The Common Law, [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2449](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2449)

<comment><USER3> > In first reading legal opinions when I started law school, I was handicapped > by subconsciously imagining law to be a knowable engineering discipline, > with accepted rules that could be learned and predictably applied.

That seems to be the fatal weakness of every legal discussion on HN: too many people here think this way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > This means that Ameri- can legal opinions today are littered with weird > French terms. Ex- amples include plaintiff, defendant, tort, contract, > crime, judge, attorney, counsel, court, verdict, party, appeal, evidence, > and jury.

I had no idea!

<comment><USER5> To be honest, I didn't know any of those were french words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can anyone suggest a book a lay person can read to be better educated about how to understand/engage with rigorous law? like save for reading a civ pro, con law, and torts book i don't know what i should do.

<comment><USER7> You could try reading a torts book. Since nobody but lawyers ever wants to do what you describe, the only books that get written are for law students and professionals. Learning it halfway isn't actually very useful. No-one wants to hear outsider perspectives on cases, they are pretty much never good, so nobody wants to create a hive of lay-yers ready to go spreading their terrible takes by giving them a book of handy hints. Case in point: most HN legal discussions. Call me elitist but truly we are blessed that more people don't try their hand.

A big problem is that your natural tendency to gloss over details has to be beaten out of you, mercilessly, before anyone will trust you to make an argumentative summary. You won't make much progress with the attitude that you can just learn general principles and be slightly better at reading; you have to get comfortable diving right down to details and coming up for air later.

Torts books are good because they start with the creation of torts and build, they don't have to assume too much knowledge. And the judges are often unbound by technicalities for the same reason. Hence 1L students can read them. You'll get a great impression of what it means for judges to create law. Downside: there are no new important torts cases popping up that you'd want to read.

<comment><USER6> my goal is simply to be better able to navigate the legal system, rather than to pontificate.

>You won't make much progress with the attitude that you can just learn general principles and be slightly better at reading; you have to get comfortable diving right down to details and coming up for air later.

it's a little presumptuous of you to imagine that 1 i intend to be so cavalier 2 that i don't already know how to be detail oriented. fwiw i took the lsat and scored 97% - while not exactly translatable to writing a summary brief i think i'm quite capable of diving into the details (if we're to believe lsac).

>Torts books are good because they start with the creation of torts and build, they don't have to assume too much knowledge.

suggestion for a good one? should i also get the e&e?

<comment><USER3> > it's a little presumptuous of you to imagine that 1 i intend to be so > cavalier

Considering you ask for a book for a "lay person" on "rigorous law", I don't think that was presumptuous at all. cormacrelf's point is that there is no such thing. If it's written for a layperson, it can't be rigorous; conversely, if it's rigorous it requires more than a lay understanding of law. Asking for such a thing indicates an unfamiliarity with the depths that constitute rigor in the legal profession.

<comment><USER6> >Considering you ask for a book for a "lay person" on "rigorous law", I don't think that was presumptuous at all. cormacrelf's point is that there is no such thing

i laid out exactly what i thought was presumptuous

1\. that i'm cavalier

2\. that i'm not comfortable with detail oriented analysis.

>"lay person" on "rigorous law"

there is no mention of rigor in cormacrelf's post. rigor and detail are not synonymous.

>If it's written for a layperson, it can't be rigorous

is this a feature of "the law"? i can point to many rigorous math books that do not require a specialists understanding of the math (read: they introduce all the necessary ideas).

<comment><USER7> I was trying to get across why such books don't exist, and why it might take more effort than you might think.

The reason those math books exist is that people who understand the Riemann Hypothesis halfway are not a huge danger to themselves and others. If you wrote a law book designed for lay folk, it would fly off the shelves into the hands of people who become self-represented litigants who would then screw up their lives and give bad advice to their friends. Half-baked legal ideas about what you are or are not allowed to do also get relied upon in practice, with disastrous results. Whatever "navigate the legal system" means to you, that's what it means to everyone else.

Of course, there are thousands of mostly government publications out there that do a great job explaining what your rights are in different situations. I don't have a problem with these, because they don't give anyone the power to read a case and think they know what it means for them.

When it comes to "introduc[ing] all the necessary ideas", I was also making the point with torts books that the ideas are not able to be easily isolated from just learning the law. I would also argue that there is no such thing as "rigorous law" in the sense that it implies some law that is not rigorous that could still be usefully practiced. Hand-wavy explanations in math are pedagogical; hand-wavy arguments in law are either unsupported or appeals to bigger or competing principles, of which the latter is absolutely still "rigorous law" and has to acknowledge the omitted details anyway. If you don't have the depth of knowledge, you end up in the former category pretty quickly. If you wanted an academic perspective with normative arguments about what the law should be, then sure, but that's not "navigating the legal system".

(Also, I can't recommend a torts book. Wrong jurisdiction probably.)

<comment><USER6> >If you wrote a law book designed for lay folk, it would fly off the shelves into the hands of people who become self-represented litigants who would then screw up their lives and give bad advice to their friends.

the same could be said about very many things - from biology to auto repair. it's a very strange position to take on education because the converse is also possible - the more educated someone becomes the more humble they become about how nuanced/subtle the topic really is.

<comment><USER7> I bet car manufacturers wish people would stick to the guidance they distribute for the engines they make. But it'll never happen. There will never be a professional organisation to weed out bad or fraudulent mechanics, so people are always going to need the basic knowledge to work out when they're being conned. Medicine, law ... professions that self-regulate are justified in caring that people don't try to DIY, because they present a credible and reliable way.

You might be tempted to argue protectionism, but that only really flies when some specific job is so completely studied and process-driven that you don't need the professionals any more. Not exactly the case when you're talking about interpreting appellate cases or similar, judging by the context of Kerr's article.

I don't know what you mean about humility. (Oh - re those new readers. Yes, it's possible someone will read Law For Dummies and back out recognising the vastness of their incomprehension. But those people were likely to hire a lawyer for real problems already. We're worried about the people who want to confirm that they'll be fine without seeking advice. Unless you just lace it with recommendations to seek a lawyer, in which case congratulations, you are a local renting tribunal's public information officer.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Data Structures and Algorithms Problems - <AUTHOR> http://www.techiedelight.com/list-of-problems/ <comment><USER2> One nitpick (and this applies to almost every site of this genre, i.e. geeksforgeeks, hackerrank, etc.):

The code listed as "C++" is essentially C with ostreams. If I were interviewing someone and they claimed to know C++, and then used "sizeof(A) / sizeof(A[0])" to get the size of an array, I'd question how much C++ they actually knew. I understand that the focus here is mainly on problem solving and not language specific patterns, but when you advertise the site as a coding interview helper I think that the solution code should reflect that which should be written in an actual interview.

<comment><USER3> > _If I were interviewing someone and they claimed to know C++, and then used > "sizeof(A) / sizeof(A[0])" to get the size of an array, I'd question how > much C++ they actually knew._

Or they've spent a lot of time in embedded systems development. Many of us write rather C-ish C++ because of the limitations of older compilers and the age of the code bases.

<comment><USER2> Genuine curiosity because I don't have a whole lot of experience with embedded systems: Why not just use C then?

Either way I would argue that using sizeof in that way is a sketchy practise.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Integrated development window manager - <AUTHOR> http://acha.ninja/integrated_development_window_manager.html <comment><USER2> I regret that the author mentioned Plan 9; this has prevented my usual smug post about how Plan 9 was doing this 20 years ago.

The plan9port plumber is not especially hard to work with; the main problem is teaching Unix programs to talk to it. I think you could use "xdotool" and "xclip" to feed into plumber in the same way, although then the problem becomes distributing _just_ the plumber without all the other associated plan9port stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it has always irritated me that most modern IDE's require a plugin or a poor quality built in terminal to give simple 'jump to error location' messages. It is a lot of fun to have magic shortcuts in any window on the whole OS with minimal program specific code.

I have wanted this functionality on linux/BSD since I saw Russ Cox do it in acme on plan9(port), I just didn't really have the will power to pull in a whole OS userspace on top of my current one.

<comment><USER2> I use acme as my IDE because it is basically a tiling window manager. I keep an acme window open in my source directory, and type things like "go build ." there. If there's a problem in the code, the output goes to an Errors window and I can just right-click on the line numbers to go where I need to go. Because I have the plumber running, I can also right-click on URLs, image paths, etc to have them automatically open in the appropriate application (browser, image viewer, etc).

Of course, my colleagues think I'm insane because my editor encourages mouse use. I think they're insane because they bought a mouse but never use it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I use plan9's plumber on Linux and bsd, with a simple st patch to plumb the selection with a right click. The tricky part is to deal with relative paths.

Sending to an existing vim session, at path:line:col requires the « remote » features and some plugin.

[https://st.suckless.org/patches/right_click_to_plumb/](https://st.suckless.org/patches/right_click_to_plumb/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I have wanted this forever.

I wonder if iTerm can be customized to do this. At the very least after mouse selection and right click.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is very cool! There must be a way to do it on mac, too. Does anyone know the equivalent commands to grab the current window title, and grab the clipboard or currently highlighted text?

<comment><USER6> I think I have all the parts.

I will see what I can do about it this weekend.

[https://github.com/feep/godothecorrectthing](https://github.com/feep/godothecorrectthing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Has anyone found a nice tiling window manager like this that works on macOS?</comment>


Ask PG: Do you ever get overwhelmed? - <AUTHOR> I just saw the story "Y Combinator-Backed Zenefits Gives Small Businesses A One-Stop Shop For Finding And Managing Employee Benefits" on Techcrunch, and was quickly reminded how difficult I found my short stint in that line of work to be (office side of managing employee benefits). YC is investing in such an incredibly large variety of startups, and getting into many different big industries. I can barely imagine the kind of work it must be to research everything so you can make good decisions<p>Between maintaining HN, being a VC who many founders look up to for advice, etc., doesn't it ever get a little too much? If yes, what do you do to keep your composure? <comment><USER2> There are around 20 people working full or part time for YC now, including 5 of us doing what I used to do alone in the old days. There are 47 startups in the current batch, which works out to less than 10 apiece. So things are actually pretty easy right now.

Last night's server troubles took more out of me than anything I've had to deal with in YC proper.

<comment><USER3> A different way to frame the question: "what keeps you up at night?" (beyond the very uncommon event of HN being down)

Massive quantity of emails? YC startups that aren't the rare runaway success? YC startups that are the rare runaway success? Meta issues around YC? Something unrelated to YC? Pressure to live up to the pg legend irl? Not being disciplined about avoiding overworking? Something in your private life that's not appropriate to share? Anything?

<comment><USER4> After Elon Musk mentioned his sleeping patterns on a couple of recent interviews (answer: 6 hours a night), I've been curious to learn about the sleeping patterns, diets and work habits of exceptionally productive people.

I wish biographies on the world's most influential people discussed this (or at least I would like to read scientific studies on this)... Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are famously fond of burgers so I'd expect unfortunately diet habits have more to do with where you live than what you accomplish :(

<comment><USER5> When I was at college I read that Margaret Thatcher slept just 4 hours per night, and I was so envious, wishing I had that extra time every day. Three years ago my wife and I had twin girls and that meant very little sleep at night for me (night shifts were my responsibility as my wife still kept her paid job). In the last year the kids sleep fine, which means I get to sleep better, but strangely I still wake up after four hours without any need to. A few months ago I learned that Thatcher had twins as well :-)

<comment><USER6> The cynic might say having only four hours of sleep didn't do her any favors, based on some the decisions she made in her time as PM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I watched an interview with the Reddit founders and at a couple points they were close to tears overwhelmed with the kind of community they had helped enable. When I first saw this Ask PG, I thought that's the kind of "overwhelm" the OP was asking about. This forum alone and the number of people it touches would be enough to overwhelm me from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER8> PG isn't alone. YC do have staff, so it's not a one-man operation. If PG were running everything by himself then yes, he probably would be overwhelmed but there are a lot of people PG can call upon to help him out.

</comment><comment><USER9> btw, there is a mood, like so-called flow, when you just do it, just as best as you can, without even worrying of anything. It is like surfing - you just keeping your balance and going with a wave.

Being overwhelmed is a side-effect of fears, doubts and ignorance - what they call insecurity. As long as one tames them, uninterfered awareness is what remains.

It is like a performance of professional musician or painter - you just do it out of habit.

Just doing with relaxed mind is also called Zen.)

<comment><USER10> That is not Zen. Zen is a state of meditative absorption, that is incomparable to any wordily happiness.

see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhy%C4%81na_in_Buddhism>

<comment><USER11> Equanimity is one of the effects of Zen practice and also has an effect on daily life.

Wordily life - mental life is a false dichotomy: both are impermanent and inseparable. Is pain in a finger something of matter or something of mind?

<comment><USER10> What is actually wanted to say is this: Zen is a blissful state that can be reached during meditation, which is said to feel like a 30 minute orgasm. Thus it is not the same as flow.

I just wanted to point that out, because people seem to be using the word Zen quite liberally for everything that is related to being in the present moment. This might lead to misconceptions.

<comment><USER12> "a blissful state that can be reached during meditation, which is said to feel like a 30 minute orgasm. Thus it is not the same as flow."

Nor is that the same as Zen</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would a web technology only Linux Desktop UI be feasible? - <AUTHOR> Whether you like it or not, I think we're in the middle of a transition of cross-platform software to the web stack.
Electron apps have enabled Linux as a desktop platform for many use cases. And while they have drawbacks, I think this trend will only gain momentum in the future.
I see web technologies pretty much as the remaining subset of tech that is not (yet) controlled by a single entity with commercial interests and monopolistic tendencies.
Wouldn't it make sense to go all in with what we have now and create a new kind of desktop OS that is web first (or only) in terms of UI?
An Electron app could easily be retrofitted to run in an environment like this and web content could become a first class citizen in a desktop environment. This would also eliminate one of the primary concerns with Electron, namely that each app has to carry its own instance of Chrome with it. The browser engine could pretty much be standardized and there wouldn't be a need for this anymore. Backends could run securely, in a containerized environment.
I know there's Chrome OS, but what I am talking about is more like an open alternative that doesn't rely on the cloud so much and still allows you to build full-blown native backends. Just the frontend and window server would be HTML5 only and embrace modern web technologies. <comment><USER2> It actually already exists. It's called Jadesktop. It runs the whole UI in a webkit process I belive.

[https://github.com/codesardine/Jadesktop](https://github.com/codesardine/Jadesktop)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's good reasoning, I think. Would love to see an experimental prototype.

At the same time, I feel like the DOM presents us with some hard to overcome performance problems (like single-threadedness), and the current batch of declarative view libraries is actually making things worse (in terms of performance).

I think these hurdles will be overcome eventually – but I feel at this point, the stars are not aligned yet…

</comment><comment><USER4> ChromeOS can now run full-blown Linux apps thanks to Crostini, and alongside Android apps. If you haven't taken a close look lately, I'd recommend trying again. This is without "jailbreaking" the device too mind you. ChromeOS devices can be put into developer mode to gain local root and allow for Linux apps natively rather than via a VM.

Regardless, that implies Google believes your thesis (at least until they shut it down) - that web UIs are far along enough to support a whole operating system.

<comment><USER5> ChromeOS "system UI" is not written using web technologies so I do not think this is a good example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Firefox OS[1] and now KaiOS[2] might be of interest to you.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER7> Depends on what you want to do on your desktop. If that includes running a DAW or doing high-end video rendering or editing, good luck doing that in such an environment. Or, for that matter, effective large scale software development (not the IDEs as much as the compilers).

It's not that the (G)UI can't be done with web tech, it's that the backend has to be native to be fast enough (or rather, not to get users cursing that the software stack is stealing 10% of their system horsepower). That means non- interpreted, non-sandboxed code running on the bare iron.

</comment><comment><USER8> Both Qt and Gkt have js based stacks already, more interesting is that we could get some unifying milieu on Linux/BSD for local apps build with Wasm [https://webassembly.org](https://webassembly.org)

</comment><comment><USER9> Current GTK-based desktops like GNOME are already configured with JS and CSS. They are just not fully browser-compatible.

</comment><comment><USER10> given how inefficient electron apps tend to be, a better question would be "how many organs are you willing to sell for memory in this dystopian web desktop future"?

<comment><USER11> I don't think you would need Electron in the situation OP is describing...

> Just the frontend and window server would be HTML5 only and embrace modern > web technologies.

<comment><USER10> My point is that this would then be just a bigger electron.

<comment><USER11> I don't see how that would be a problem, if each app didn't have to bundle a browser, and could instead just use the system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Like Windows 95?</comment>


Why You Didn't Get the Job - <AUTHOR> http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2012/06/20/why-you-didnt-get-the-job/ <comment><USER2> This is pure awesomeness. I've rejected people for all of those reasons but haven't ever put them together so succinctly.

The one that can really swing my vote one way or another is the lack of passion. To be clear you are probably passionate about _something_ , and I don't mean "getting paid to work here." For example when I was with Google (and even earlier at Sun) I interviewed candidates who were passionate about wanting to work at the company but were not passionate about any thing in particular the company was doing. Their passion was 'to be employed by <company X>' and I would ask them "Ok, so lets say we hire you and you've achieved your goal, now what are you hoping to achieve?" only to get crickets. That is always hard to get past.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reading. I've received many of these responses lately on some job candidates and thought there was some value in compiling them for engineers that may be interviewing. I could certainly see where candidates might get hung up on working for a particular employer without necessarily being as passionate for their role there. I don't see that too often as I tend to recruit for smaller software firms, but I'm not at all surprised that you would see that at Google, Sun, Apple, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting part about the "fanboy" complex, where programmers insist on working with specific technologies.

Unfortunately, some segments of the recruiting industry do encourage this behavior. Once a programming language or framework is established, it can be difficult to get a job without direct experience. There's a short, narrow window of opportunity when a technology first appears where nobody has much experience and people can learn on the job, and that's the magic moment to gain experience. Queue the stampede. For instance, when EJB hit, a lot of Java devs thought that if they didn't gain experience with this new technology quickly, they'd be shut out. And I did start to see job postings that specifically required EJB experience, not just general java experience.

I get the feeling that the industry has moved away somewhat from this type of skills matching, but hacker news can give you a distorted view on how things work. Lack of experience with a specific technology is less likely to hurt you here than with a consulting/body shop attempting to put square pegs in square holes. But even this article recommends that you gain deep experience in a technology and avoid becoming a "jack of all trades" (while at the same time advising against being a fanboy for a specific technology). This isn't necessarily inconsistent - there is a meaningful difference between being a fanboy to the exclusion of all else and being an expert with depth in a particular technology, but it can be a tight line to walk.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well said, and I could claim some guilt in years past about jumping on the next big thing and encouraging my network to learn what seemed to be on the horizon. I still keep track of trends and will mention them to candidates, but I now try to tell engineers (particularly younger ones) that they should try to experience several languages and tools to become better at the overall craft. Deep engineering experience seems to be acquired by seeing variety.

I think the fanboy comment would be attributed to someone today walking into an interview and saying they 'only want to work in (specific language)', which would be a turnoff to most companies. Having passion for a technology is good and engineers will always have preferences, but being willing to help out where you can will have greater value.

</comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands What a great read. I've recently run the gauntlet on interviewing and I'm acutely aware of all of these. I only have one issue which is about the section on "Candidate showed a lack of passion".

I'm completely passionate about development. I do freelance work, I build stuff outside of my 9-5 job, I go to conferences and meet-ups locally. But I know developers who are much better JavaScript and Ruby guys than me. They have more experience, but don't do nearly the same amount of stuff outside of work that I do. Does that "lack of passion" about the industry and their profession make them a less worthy candidate than myself?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I was uncomfortable with that too. There are two sets of people I know: Folks of the kind that you mentioned who are incredibly good programmers but who have other interests outside life. In fact one of the smartest coworkers I knew spent half his time at work and the other half time in a band and he was extremely productive. Another group are the people who have a personality which doesn't exude visible signals for passion: They probably never hang out at meetup groups or conferences, but they quietly hack away in their own time without tweeting about it or whatever. From a macro perspective they are "passionate" for sure but are susceptible to false negatives especially in the highly noisy interview setup.

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot has been written about passion lately, and even another recent blog post of mine is relevant ([http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2012/04/17/how-employers- measure-...](http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2012/04/17/how-employers-measure- passion-in-software-engineering-candidates-and-how-to-express-your-passion-in- resumes-and-interviews/)). I don't think passion has to be demonstrated by 'only' doing coding 24 hours a day, or going to meetups every day. I know very good technologists who don't attend meetups or hackathons, but you can tell in how they talk about technology that they have passion. It's hard to quantify, but I think for the most part good companies tend to get it right more often than not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another one to add is personality. Generally at the end of the interview there are two questions I have to answer:

1) Can the candidate do the job?

2) Can I work 8-10 hours a day, 5 days a week, under stressful situations with this person?

I've had candidates just rip apart their past co-workers and previous companies. Sure you might have some gripes with how things were done at your previous company, but make sure you don't end up portraying yourself as someone that is difficult to get along with.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not sure where this one fits in (passion? commitment?) but having a candidate mention that they "don't do overtime... ever" half-way through an interview when nothing has been mentioned about over-time is a serious turn-off.

Sure - people have families and not everyone is geared up for 18-hour work days - but sometimes the sky is falling and companies need an employee that isn't going to disappear out the door at 5:01 PM when the place is burning with a "well that's me for today! good luck guys!"

<comment><AUTHOR> If a candidate says they are 'never' willing to work overtime, they are probably in the wrong business. I can't say I've ever had someone tell me never. Most engineers understand that there are going to be at least some support or production situations that need to be addressed beyond standard biz hours. I wouldn't say that is passion or commitment - having some expectation of at least occasional overtime is probably just a minimum requirement.

<comment><USER7> Just to clarify, if someone stayed late to fix something on Tuesday and then clocked off early on Wednesday in lieu, would that count as overtime in your definition?

<comment><AUTHOR> It would in mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What the heck is going on in that top image?

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting read, seems to nail the main points really well.

P.S Why is the Wordpress stament at the top in Ruby?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Would you rather see it in something else?

<comment><USER10> I would rather it was a logo. Currently, it comes off as kind of precious. It was actually quite distracting. I came to your blog to read an article, and found myself presented with this bit of text, which I initially mistook for the beginning of the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it will be a logo at some point, this site and my company site are rather new and works in progress. I sincerely appreciate the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> An overly large sense of entitlement and lack of passion are the two biggest red flags for me. Someone with a great attitude but lack of skills can be trained; someone with a bad attitude can't be fixed (at least not by the hiring organization).

</comment><comment><USER7> Great article, though I do some of these things and have never really had trouble securing work, some examples:

 _Candidate has wide technical breadth but little depth_ and related: _not uncommon, particularly for folks that have perhaps bounced from job to job a little too much_

I think this describes me, though I'm not sure how to define technical depth here. The only benefits I can see (technically) from staying at a company for more than a year or so would be greater domain knowledge and perhaps a greater understanding of the long-term implications of architectural decisions.

As for technical depth in terms of skill, IME I've found that job-hopping has dramatically increased the speed at which I've been able to gain expertise. For example, I've worked at some places where, for cultural reasons, there's no call to do fat-client javascript applications, with more of a focus on server-side technologies like stored procedures. Conversely, where the front- end stuff was more important, I got much better at organizing large javascript codebases and creating web services to interact with them. Had I worked at only one or the other, I would have lacked technical depth in the area I was missing out on.

 _Candidate displayed a superiority complex or sense of entitlement_ -

Guilty as charged! Unless I'm being hired as a consultant, I generally tend to wrap-up interviews when I realize the technical staff I'd be reporting to don't have as much technical ability as I do (for my own, entirely subjective measure of technical ability). Also, I don't work with PHP, Java or anything related to Microsoft.

I'll also disqualify companies where I feel like they have bad process, or if there's any social weirdness in the interview (I've experienced everything from off-the-cuff anti-Semitism to the interviewers shouting at each other). I don't mind a flexible work schedule, i.e. I work late on a Tuesday and then I go home early on a Wednesday, but overtime without pay is not an option.

 _Candidate talked more about the accomplishments of co-workers_ -

Programming of any significance is a team sport. Sometimes a potential hirer will ask "Do you have any experience with problem X?" and my answer is often "Yes, alongside other developers" or "Not directly, but I was involved in discussions about X when we were dealing with it at #{company_name}" or even "No, but I was talking about X with #{someone} at #{some_tech_meetup} and he said they were trying #{some_solution} which sounded like a sensible strategy. I think it's probably better than #{other_solution} because it means that #{benefit_of_first_solution}".

As long as I discussed some of the tradeoffs of various options and managed to adequately demonstrate my understanding of the technology, I think the interviewers were happy. I feel somewhat uncomfortable taking _full_ responsibility for achievements at any company I work at, because in practice it involves mulling over ideas, discussing pros and cons and coming to a solution together.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points. Depth is hard to measure, but generally I find that clients will ask a question about a specific programming topic and start off basic. When the candidate gets that right, they go a little deeper with the second question and the candidate fails. It's like being able to name all the baseball teams but none of the players - that would be breadth but not depth. You might come across as a baseball fan initially, but not on further review.

RE: entitlement - I don't think what you are describing is a superiority complex as much as coming to a realization that you are more senior than the person - no complex, just a fact I'd say. Companies that have bad process should be off limits for you as well, I don't think that is entitlement but rather some basic expectations. Not being willing to work at all with PHP, Java or MS could be perceived as entitled if everyone else has to dive in on those from time to time.

Agreed with your ideas re: co-workers. The key being that you demonstrate the understanding. It's not so much about claiming responsibility as it is about being curious about your surroundings and interested in things beyond your individual contribution to the project.

<comment><USER7> > Depth is hard to measure, but generally I find that clients will ask a > question about a specific programming topic and start off basic. When the > candidate gets that right, they go a little deeper with the second question > and the candidate fails.

My experience bears this out. In one of the best interviews I had the interviewer essentially picked items off my CV and asked me more and more about them until I was forced to say "I don't know". This was supposedly deliberate (i.e. they wanted to see a) how much knowledge I actually had and b) what I would do at the limits of it). I came away from that interview with no idea of how well I did, but I got the job!

> Not being willing to work at all with PHP, Java or MS could be perceived as > entitled if everyone else has to dive in on those from time to time.

In a tougher market I might be singing a different tune, but at the moment there's just so much work out there that I think the average developer can afford to be a little picky, or entitled as it were. Not saying it's right, it's just what it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't disagree, it is currently a seller's market in most places if you are skilled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great article but I have to wonder.. is it actually relevant today? With the huge demand for engineers and the utter lack of even somewhat qualified engineers, I wonder if people actually are still having a tough time landing a job?

<comment><USER13> Whenever I hear/read these comments, my first thought is always that the speaker/poster is from The Valley, and assumes that every place is like The Valley (or that everyone with technical skills wants -- or can -- move to The Valley). In other words, "The Valley" isn't the answer to life, the universe and everything.

[Also, there can't be that high of a demand for engineers, because I've been denied jobs for the most trivial of reasons. I was denied a job once for not being able to answer a Python trivia question about something that took me 5 minutes to learn from the Python documentation.]

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> amazing!</comment>


Interesti.ng. The first .ng domain name has been registered. - <AUTHOR> http://oonwoye.com/2010/12/30/first-ng-domain-name-registered/ <comment><USER2> It's only a matter of time before the Nigerian authorities realize how much money they can make from allowi.ng TLD registrations.

<comment><USER3> Wonder if they allow single-letter domain names. I'd love to get i.ng and just go nuts with it. ti.ng would be pretty good too.

<comment><USER4> I wanted urm.om, but Oman didn't seem like the kind of place that go there.

<comment><USER5> omnomn.om would have been the one!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like Dyn.com will be managing the .ng TLD. (old press release)

[http://dyn.com/open-dialogue/press-releases/nigeria- chooses-...](http://dyn.com/open-dialogue/press-releases/nigeria-chooses-dyn)

</comment><comment><USER7> I call bi.ng. Nobody else take it, please.

The traditional high-value domains have been nouns, which sort of makes sense because we used to have a 1:1 relationship between companies and their sites. Now it's 1:* relationship, with individual sites for particular actions. Opening up a TLD that fit well with those verbs would be very pleasant. Oo mentioned some company-centric ones in the article (e.g. Googling) but I think much stronger ones would be along the lines of shari.ng and golfi.ng.

<comment><USER8> what is bi .ng? nigerian bisexuals association?

<comment><USER9> I only accidentally upvoted you. Now everyone is going to think this is worth upvoting since people already started to. I wish we could take our votes back.

<comment><USER8> and now it seems it's yourself who's being "accidentally" upvoted...

anyway, do you have anything to say about the topic?

do you consider vandalizing local top-level domains with meaningless BS (that local people might have used for something relevant to them) appropriate?

<comment><USER9> I don't care if I get up voted or down voted for what I posted. I simply didn't want your retarded comment getting a wave of up votes because I accidentally help start the process. I would do the same to any useless "funny" comment I saw on here.

<comment><USER8> at least my "retarded comment" was on topic. usefulness depends on whether you got the idea or not. but as you refuse to comment on topic, I assume you haven't even read what we're talking about.

<comment><USER9> The parent comment to your original comment was not the topic of the article, so I'm not sure why you keep dragging that into the discussion. You commented on his comment and I commented on your comment. Your comment was useless to the discussion. My comment was useless to the discussion as well as it was a meta-comment about how I up voted you on accident. Now we're in a long chain of meta-comments.

<comment><USER8> I'm sorry, so far the only one who haven't written a single word about .ng or ccTLDs in general in this topic is you. I have to end this "retarded" back- and-forth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What is the reliability of TLD registrations in other countries? While it seems like a nice idea to have a clever name, have there been problems working with foreign registrars?

<comment><USER11> Your domain name is subject to seizure no matter where you register it, and that was proven to not be theoretical recently in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I didn't see a date when this would become available for everyone.

I tried registering an Estonian domain once (.ee TLD), but require the business to be registered there. Don't countries realises domain names are just that, names. The ending really means very little to people. Who thinks all .tv domains are companies from Tuvalu?

<comment><USER13> Well, Tuvalu sold their TLD to a private business...kind of a different situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> poopi.ng

</comment><comment><USER8> yay! let the DNS system abusi.ng begin!</comment>


Reddit's 'The Button' hit zero - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/thebutton/comments/38q43k/after_1008316_clicks_the_experiment_has_ended_at/

<comment><USER2> What was the point of this experiment?</comment>


Show HN: Open source alternative to LaunchRock - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/codelitt/launchpage-rails

<comment><USER2> That's cool and was very much needed. Good thing they decided to go with Ruby, which makes it possible to run cheaply on Heroku.

For those looking for an even more simple solution to this problem (with less features, of course), buy a domain name, host an HTML page on Amazon S3 and use the Mailchimp form.

<comment><USER3> Very cool project OP.

@uniclaude: the HTML page on S3/CloudFront and MailChimp direction is built into my project called Gulp AWS Splash, which is another LaunchRock open source alternative at [https://github.com/niftylettuce/gulp-aws- splash](https://github.com/niftylettuce/gulp-aws-splash). I did a similar Show HN not long ago for this.

Adding in Heroku 1-Click Deploy and purify-css today!

<comment><AUTHOR> Woahhh! That is awesome. Looks like you've put a lot of work into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're going to the trouble of setting up and deploying a Rails app, which you will then inevitably need to customise and style to match your content, how much more effort is it really just to start from scratch..? (Personally I'd probably use Sinatra for something like this and I would expect the front- end prettifying to take longer than the back-end...)

<comment><USER5> Somebody with ruby knowledge could create a Docker image.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup. Here are Dockerfiles that should work for both the DB and the Ruby app (in their respective directories):

[https://github.com/codelittinc/dockerfiles](https://github.com/codelittinc/dockerfiles)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Forgive me but why go after LaunchRock? It seems like the point of LaunchRock is to serve people who wouldn't have the tech skills (or desire) to deploy a Ruby app, or possibly even a static HTML app by themselves?

<comment><AUTHOR> No intention to go after anyone. Yes, LR and this project serve completely different audiences. It was just the least-wordy way I could think of to describe it.</comment></comment>


Will Your ID Soon Be a Microchip Under Your Skin? - <AUTHOR> http://www.singularityhub.com/2009/07/02/will-your-id-soon-be-a-microchip-under-your-skin/

<comment><USER2> I don't want a chip in me and I'm obviously not the only one

<comment><USER3> What if it could self-regulate drug delivery so you wouldn't have to take a pill every four hours?

What if it could track and store fine-grain biometrics and thereby better help your doctor make treatment decisions?

What if it could monitor your health, and contact your doctor if you're incapacitated?

What if it could save your life in some other way?

<comment><USER2> All good and well but to go at your list in order:

I am in a healthy state at this point in time I don't find taking pills or medication at specific intervals hard or even bothersome, I can even time it out with my cellphone reminders.

As it goes with the healthy state I don't think this much matters if it could do that over say one of those annoying heart monitors a friend has to do every year I'm sure he would do it but that isn't really what we are discussing.

This is already a lot of what ifs and this is something I most definitely would not want as it would also require that my exact position be available so emergency services could get to me.

I'm all for life and everything but if I need a chip to save me I'm probably in the middle of nowhere away from any contact or emergency services that could get me in time.

I am really fine with the current U.S. identification system as I had my identity stolen once by an illegal immigrant but it was easily solved with a birth certificate, social security cards and a credit lock. These devices factor in too much extra risk especially since it says its basically the same technology as the wireless poll paying system how do you know you won't walk by someone and your identity is just taken like that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a rfid chip in my wrist. One of my friends owns a chain a piercing shops and offered it to me for free so I got it done.

I unfortunately haven't had time to build anything to make use of it though so it's been of little use to me except as a conversation starter but he has his set to unlock his apartment door.

Range isn't huge a couple inches is pushing it so I'm not really worried about tracking me(I don't rub my wrist against every rfid receiver I come across). Besides with facial recognition available today if someone wants to track me around a city they would do a lot better using security cameras than trying to install rfid receivers everywhere.

<comment><USER5> _I don't rub my wrist against every rfid receiver I come across_

Really? If I had an rfid chip, that's exactly what I'd be doing, just to see what happens.

<comment><USER4> I did that a bit when I first got it but most of the time I forget its there now a days. It's like my tattoo when I first got it I noticed it every time I moved my arm. Now unless someone points it out I forget it's even there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yeah, There's no way I'd let a microchip under my skin.

"If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresisting-ly allow itself to be boiled to death."

(Also yes, for those of you pedantic enough I'm aware the story is not biologically accurate, but the metaphor remains valid)

</comment><comment><USER7> Good thing those chips are in no way spoofable from a distance.

Oh wait...

[http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/02/video-hacker-war- drives-s...](http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/02/video-hacker-war-drives-san- francisco-cloning-rfid-passports/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Unless they can embed a cell-phone in my skin, I'd rather use my phone as an ID card / cash / credit card. For someone that wants to steal my identity, it is much easier to slice off my arm than to guess my password.

<comment><USER4> Would the threat of slicing off your arm not work equally well in getting you to give up your password? It certainly would for me.

<comment><USER8> Passwords are better in a number of ways. If the data is really important, you can always carry around a suicide pill, and know that if you die, your data dies.

For more normal data, you have the opportunity to give up your data in tiers. If someone threatens to cut off your arm, give them a password that unlocks most of your data. You can have another password for the super-secret stuff. They are happy that they got your data, and you get to keep your arm (and super-secret data).

Basically, you can have decoy passwords and accounts, but you can't have a decoy arm-with-RFID-chip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why not just a watch?

Or a keychain, or a ring?

Or an ID with rfid in your wallet?

Why the intrusiveness?

<comment><USER4> I am far more likely to lose all of these things than the lower quarter of my arm.

<comment><USER10> In nearly 35 years, I have not lost a watch, nor a wallet. I have nearly lost a finger a few times (don't turn on a drill while you are messing with the chuck).

I have also lost a lot of skin from different parts of my body.

For a chip to stay, would need to be somewhere inconvenient and deep. Certainly nowhere convenient that a reader could reach, unless its RFID style in which case I have other concerns...</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: HyperGAN 0.6.0 "MultiGAN" - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/255BITS/HyperGAN <comment><USER2> This is an implementation of generative adversarial neural networks. The aim is to allow developers to use generative and discriminative networks in their applications.

This is exciting because the possible applications of generative content are vast and largely unexplored.

<comment><USER3> Creepy cool. In a good way. Super impressive and thanks for making the repo public!</comment></comment>


We strip news of bias so it's just the news - <AUTHOR> https://www.theknifemedia.com/ <comment><USER2> It's just a blank page... if that's joke then it's not very funny.

<comment><USER3> Hit refresh; I got the same first time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Absence of bias" is a useless concept. A news outlet must make choices about which topics to cover; what facts to report about those topics; which sources to trust, which to use skeptically, and which to ignore; which claims to treat as settled fact and which as disputed (and then it must decide how to contextualize disputed claims); and so on, ad infinitum. What would it mean to cover news without introducing an editorial viewpoint in this way? There is no such thing.

If talk about "bias" is to mean anything, you need to be specific about concrete forms of bias you're trying to rule out, and how.

<comment><USER5> Although the "how" part seems to be "via our proprietary process", they _are_ pretty specific about what concrete forms of bias they're trying to rule out. They list that, with a few examples, here:

[https://www.theknifemedia.com/our- process/](https://www.theknifemedia.com/our-process/)

The first stage ("the spin") is just identifying words and phrases which add spin with a positive or negative valance - this part could easily be automated with a dictionary search or by training a neural net. (There should probably be a Chrome plugin for it.)

The other two steps are more tricky and would seem to require a human editor's eye. "the slant" involves noticing when one perspective is put in an article to the exclusion of other, similarly valid perspectives which have been left out - to do that you'd have to either be a subject matter expert or combine enough stories from different sources to identify the universe of _possible_ takes. "the logic" involves noticing when conclusions don't follow from the facts presented; this also would appear to require somebody carefully reading and understanding the story.

So my guess is that step 1 is fully-automated now (but being tweaked) and steps 2 and 3 need human editors with some algorithmic assistance (which they're trying to increase over time) - at least, that's how I'd have set it up...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You should talk to a social scientist to see if there's any such thing as "unbiased" in non-scientific endeavours. I mean, everything is biased, and removing the bias is _itself_ a biased operation.

<comment><USER5> I dunno, I think parts of their coverage would seem to demonstrate otherwise.

For instance, consider their Oscars article:

[https://www.theknifemedia.com/world-news/how-did-the- oscars-...](https://www.theknifemedia.com/world-news/how-did-the-oscars- coverage-rate-hint-it-was-biased/)

Scroll all the way to the bottom to find their attempt at an "unbiased" article ("the raw data"). Now, maybe Oscars reporting is a special case and you can't do this for other kinds of articles, but isn't it worth a try?

Full article follows:

> The 90th Oscars awards ceremony airs to an estimated 26.5M viewers

> Jimmy Kimmel hosted the 90th Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday night. The > "Oscars," or Academy Awards of Merit, are given annually to "honor > outstanding artistic and scientific achievements in theatrically released > feature-length motion pictures," according to the awards' website.

> This year's show was aired live from 8 to 11 p.m. eastern on ABC, to an > estimated audience of 26.5 million viewers. It is the lowest number since > the 1990s when the viewership data began being collected. The 2017 awards > had 32.9 million viewers.

> Besides speaking about the nominated films and filmmaking, some presenters > and award recipients spoke about other topics. While hosting, Kimmel made > jokes about Fox News, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

> Best actress award winner Frances McDormand spoke about "inclusion riders," > a stipulation that actors can put in their contracts to ensure gender and > ethnic diversity among cast and crew members of film projects that they work > on. Presenters Kumail Nanjiani and Lupita Nyong'o spoke in support of > "Dreamers," referring to recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood > Arrivals. Award winner Kristen Anderson-Lopez spoke about diversity and > gender representation in the songwriter category.

> Award winners include:

> Guillermo del Toro's "The Shape of Water" won for both Best Picture and Best > Director. > Frances McDormand earned Best Actress for her role in "Three > Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri." > Gary Oldman won for Best Actor for > his role in "Darkest Hour." > Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez > received the Best Original Song award for the track "Remember Me" in "Coco." > > Alexandre Desplat won Best Original Score for "The Shape of Water."

> Sources: Breitbart, Fox News, The New York Times, The Oscars

One thing in there that has a tiny whiff of bias is mentioning the huge drop in viewership. _IF_ there is some more favorable way of estimating the event's impact or importance, then including that bit would count in their framework as "slant". Did I miss anything else?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you want unbiased news the best thing you can do is get them directly from a news agency, like Reuters or AP.

<comment><USER8> They are slightly better, but not a full solution.

For international news they follow the trends of the markets they serve, so you will find the same biases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I get a blank screen. I assume you're just down, but I enjoy the kabbalistic implications.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm interested in this project.

What do we know about the people behind it? Any developers on the team frequent this site?

[https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/05/the-knife- of-...](https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/05/the-knife-of-aristotle- isnt-just-a-fake-fake-news.html) is representative of what I found when I tried to research the site and its founders - is it an accurate portrayal of the company and its people?

</comment><comment><USER11> Well let's think about this a little bit, because I like the intention, if not the execution.

I think the fundamental issue here is that this site doesn't have a clear concept of "bias," and perhaps because there isn't a useful clear-concept of bias.

For example, If you throw out all subjective claims, well then you throw out morality too. If you throw out speculative claims, well nothing is known 100%, so you ultimately draw an arbitrary line.

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:thekni...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:theknifemedia.com)

</comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash For a site that claims to be unbiased, it sure does spend a lot of real estate saying that other places are more biased. Isn't that a bias in and of itself?

<comment><USER8> > _For a site that claims to be unbiased, it sure does spend a lot of real > estate saying that other places are more biased. Isn't that a bias in and of > itself?_

First, no, if it's a fact, it's not a bias.

Second, they don't say they are unbiased in everything (e.g. in how good they thing they are etc). Just that they put out unbiased news.

Their's isn't some meta-discussion about bias in general.

<comment><USER13> I don't accept it as a fact that this source is less biased than some of the news sources they critique. After reading some of their analysis, I find their articles to have little context, and to be less informative than other sources. At one point they criticize a news source for directly and accurately quoting a person with first-hand knowledge of an event, because they believe the source used "biased language." This kind of language policing is flat-out ridiculous. Are news sources expected to alter quotes to make them "less biased?"

They spend a lot of time arguing about using words like "historic." Well sometimes a thing is historic, and the word is appropriate. For example, North Korea has indicated that they're willing to negotiate giving up their nuclear arms. If Trump manages to strike a deal with Kim, that will be historic, and it would be accurate to describe it as such.

It would be strictly less informative to present it as bare data points without context. Here's how such an event might be reported "without bias."

President Donald Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un today. They discussed nuclear disarmament. Kim agreed to give up North Korea's nuclear arms program in exchange for a normalization of relations.

That sounds like an unimportant, bureaucratic event, barely worth reporting. In fact, it would probably be the most important thing this administration has accomplished, and everyone (even people who don't care for the current administration, such as myself) will have to recognize that this is historic and impressive. Whatever complaints I may have about him, Trump would be remembered as the man who finally solved the North Korean crisis, which many of us thought to be unsolvable. Any article which fails to place such an important event in historical context will be less informative for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Twitter banner covers half of page, making it unreadabl3 in landscape mode. Portriat seems fine.

</comment><comment><USER15> How can you say it's not biased? It's clearly white-washing!</comment>


Show HN: Online Simple Linear Regression Calculator - <AUTHOR> https://webdva.github.io/online-linear-regression-calculator/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a minimum viable product that I made for an HTML5 based simple linear regression calculator that can work in your web browser. I intend to iterate on the design as the project was only born three days ago.</comment>