How to Avoid Problem Clients - <AUTHOR> http://www.nicholasreese.com/problem-clients/?utm_source=getresponse&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=downloads&utm_content=How+to+Avoid+Problem+Clients

<comment><USER2> I'm having trouble getting past the fact that this guy was, basically, running a spam business. Email marketing is spam, to a first approximation, and while there are ethical email marketers out there, I don't know enough to be sure that this guy was one of them. Which means I'm getting good advice from someone whose ethics are under a cloud; it colours my view of the whole article.

<comment><USER3> ETFB --

Hey man, author here.

I'll admit, starting out (back in 2006) the business was a little shady with regards to can-spam, but for the specific MLS area my business served, it was the norm for realtors to send eblasts to each other. (the MLS sold the email list on the basis of "prior business relationship" because all the realtors were apart of the same area board.)

That said, in 2007 I sent out a double optin request, and nuked my list from ~40K to ~5k to really make sure things were above board.

This crushed my business, so I spent ~$15k in Adwords building a double opt-in list of customers that wanted email updates about luxury properties.

That was the REAL value and how I was able to scale the business past 6 figures and sell it in 2010.

I appreciate your concern even though I despise ad hominem arguments. ;)

<comment><USER2> Reply to all but the last clause of the last sentence: good for you! I was going to add to my original comment that nothing else about your site felt shady or unethical, so the chances were very good that you were one of the non-shonky email marketers. I've got a couple of your other pages open in tabs now because I suspect you have some good advice for me. I'm please to have it confirmed that you considered those issues of ethics and put your money where your mouth is.

Reply to the final clause: to be employing an ad hominem argument I'd need to be bringing up something about you that's irrelevant: "I won't read an article by a guy with blond hair, because a blond guy once ate my cat" would be classic ad hominem. But I think your history as a (suspected) spammer is definitely relevant when the matter in question is your eligibility to give advice about customer relations, so I stand by it as valid, and not ad hominem. And on the flipside, your explanation of where you went with your pseudo-spamming career makes your articles more credible, don't you agree? It works both ways, which an ad hominem argument doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _I wanted more customers who were focused on results, instead of price._

... and also trust you to provide the right solution. Good clients tend to know what the want at a high level and trust you to take care of the rest. Problem clients tend to micro-manage and are looking more for a robot. Usually those projects are unsuccessful for the same reason telling a heart surgeon how to perform surgery is disastrous.

</comment><comment><USER5> Don't oversell what you can offer. It's amazing how perfectly reasonable customers become "problem clients" when you can't deliver what they bought.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. I'm currently working for a company that won a major contract based on products we hadn't built but thought we could if the client asked. Add senior management who have their focus on another product and this makes for an unhappy client and an unhappy place to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree with setting high prices.

Back when i was selling realtime data backup software I was wondering how come the highest priced package pulled the biggest total number of sales. Today I realize i should of set price 10x more and I'd probably sell more.

I also recommend attitude "there are no problematic clients" vs "how to avoid something". Quite often in my experience the "problematic" and complaining client suddenly spent large amount of money on order.

<comment><USER8> One of the best pieces of advice I've ever heard "The client isn't problematic, you're just not charging enough to make it feel worthwhile."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Setting your prices high is alleviating the symptoms without understanding the root cause.

Most companies get troublesome clients because they've miscommunicated their value preposition and didn't set out clear rules that govern their business relationship.

People tend to believe in the same fallacy about employees by saying you have to hire the absolute best. I think it's a sign of laziness of management who rely on their employees to know what they're supposed to do without every being clearly explained what you want them to do. When you make your expectations explicit, most people raise up to the challenge and perform beyond wildest imaginations.

Unfortunately, that's hard work on your (employer's part).

We've taken the same approach to qualifying clients—there are certain criteria that we look for and certain rules that we make expressly clear to every client before they agree to work with us. These have absolutely nothing to do with the depth of your wallet and yet, we get absolutely delightful clients time after time.

</comment><comment><USER10> Great article.

I don't agree that you should focus on anything less than the "Give me results" clients. First off, you know what they say is the problem with goals? You'll probably reach them. Meaning, you're setting your ceiling. I've found that if you hand pick your clients, you can make certain that you have clients who focus on results. Most consultants talk about word of mouth as the main way that they get new clients, but I dislike that approach. The reason is that you're letting clients choose you. My best client is a client that I picked and cold called. I knew they were making lots of money and I knew they needed what I was selling. Selling something as a consultant is about specialization. Specialization doesn't necessarily mean that your experience is focused in one area. It means that you can present yourself as an expert in one area.

Here's something counterintuitive that I've found that goes along with this article: Clients who pay the least are usually the most demanding. I used to lower my price when people complained, but I quickly realized that my price was a filter blocking bad clients. Plus accepting a lower price really led to likely bad outcomes because when the going got tough, the voice in the back of my head said, "These guys are paying you less than your other jobs", then I suddenly felt completely unmotivated to work hard for them.

Here's a really good book about consulting that helped me. Not focused on software consulting, but a lot of the concepts are the same: [http://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-Consulting-Alan- Weiss/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-Consulting-Alan- Weiss/dp/0071622101/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I would add only a single thing to this list: make sure to do your due diligence on potential clients. Look them up and see who they are before you accept work with them.

</comment><comment><USER12> The other point of clients is not that they're inherently good or bad, but that handling them determines the dynamic of the relationship. If a consultant appears eager and willing to do something for nothing, they can't blame the client. Never offer something that would lead to resentment; say "no" instead.

On the otherside, the value of hot to crazy (money to bullshit) has to be there.

</comment><comment><USER13> There's an excellent book that goes into depth around this subject: Implementing Value Pricing by Ronald J Baker. Highly recommend it to any business owner who deals with clients.

</comment><comment><USER14> In business, the simple way to get rid of problem customers and maybe to avoid taking them on in the first place, is to ensure you have per customer pricing and agreements. For example, client A is a good customer, so a support ticket for them costs just $150, but client B is a right royal pain in the backside and so their support ticket cost is $550. Similar scaling for development etc. Keep raising prices till they go or stop calling so much, as required.</comment>


Project Wedge: a smart projector for tablets - <AUTHOR> https://campaign.projectwedge.com/project-wedge-a-smart-projector-for-tablets

<comment><USER2> This looks pretty awesome. It's something I can see us using in our office where people want to show stuff on their iPads to a group. I'm sure there are ways, but this looks pretty nifty to me (just to clarify: I don't know anyone behind this project).</comment>


Show HN: Hacker News TLDR - <AUTHOR> http://hn-tldr.herokuapp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> There are similar projects out there but I wanted to play with some APIS and to try out Python 3s async IO library.

Uses the Aylien text analysis api to summarize and the Hackernews api to get the articles

Code here: [https://github.com/Bachmann1234/hn- tldr](https://github.com/Bachmann1234/hn-tldr)

[http://aylien.com/](http://aylien.com/) [https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)

<comment><USER2> Nicely done :)

I would give it a try for other communities as well.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to escape extremist discourse? - <AUTHOR> When discussing sensible matters (global warming, globalization, choice of JS framework, etc) the discussion is often monopolized by extremist participants' ideas. Usually because they are so out of touch with reality that more reasonable participants think they ought to counter those arguments.
This creates a situation where the original ideas from reasonable participants are not the focus, the extremist dominates the train of thought.
It's likely that reasonable participants will have ideas that need refinement. However, they are robbed of the opportunity to do that because there simply isn't space to focus on it. Again, the extremist ideas dominate.
Pseudo real world example: Party A in a certain country is in favor of immigration and wants to discuss a plain to accept refugees. Their ideas are good for at most 10k refugees but could be refine to support receiving 100k. Because anti-immigration extremists will dominate the discourse, these ideas won't get the exposure and refinement they need. Then, there is an actual need to receive 500k refugees and nobody is prepared because time was waste refusing extremist bombs, which in turn plays to extremists advantage because now 500k refugees will arrive and it will be a huge mess, validating their claims that immigration is bad.
How to escape this cycle? <comment><USER2> In your "pseudo real world example" who is to say that allowing tens of thousands of "immigrants" into the country is not the "extremist" position?

Maybe, just maybe, the one who says "that's a bad idea" is actually the "reasonable participant".

<comment><AUTHOR> That was a bad example. Discussing immigration is not my point.

Have you ever been in a discussion where someone is clearly the outlier and it's accepted beyond reasonable doubt that his ideas are extreme?

Another example, imagine you're discussing religion acceptance and a extremist say whoever doesn't follow his religion should die since their are infidels. How do you avoid that completely stupid idea from dominating everything?

<comment><USER3> Outliers are always wrong, and groupthink is always right?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't expecting this thread to be a troll magnet but now it seems obvious.

Perhaps I shouldn't have given any examples, as it seems I have only drawn the attention of those who care about the examples and not my underlying point.

<comment><USER2> You're about fourteen years old, am I right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What do you mean by "extremist" ideas? What makes someone who thinks their country's immigration policies should be crafted in such a way as to provide maximum benefit to their country's own citizens an extremist?

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe what I'm getting at is how to avoid that unproductive ideas dominate the discussion. But not only unproductive, specially harmful ideas that freak everyone out and play into people's fears, robbing them from the opportunity to have a rational discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nobody reading HN will ever have any effect on these sorts of policies. It's best to stay out of it all and do something more productive with your life.

<comment><AUTHOR> My example was a bad one. These discussion happen at all levels and dominate the discourse. Even if counter arguments are provided, in the end everybody loses.

Sometimes ignoring works, but not always if the extremist is a more able talker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Acceptance?

A conversation will be dominated by whatever it needs to be dominated by to go where it needs to go. Assuming you know best and labeling what runs contrary to your ideas as extreme suggests you're looking for validation, not conversation.</comment>


Executive order: for every new regulation, two must be revoked (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-signs-executive-order-requiring-that-for-every-one-new-regulation-two-must-be-revoked-234365 <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13771](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13771) doesn't make it clear what the longer-term effects were.

</comment><comment><USER3> If only we could do this with the C++ spec.</comment>


Tetris LED Tie (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.billporter.info/2013/06/21/led-tetris-tie/ <comment><USER2> So far, I have successfully avoided wearing a tie, but if I _had_ to wear one, this one would be rather high on my list.

</comment><comment><USER3> Now This is what technology should be used for.. not for spying on and oppressing people..

(Love it)

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, it's no more tacky than any other tie.

<comment><USER5> This is from 6 years ago.... how did this necro happen. Also, if you want to see similar projects to this you should check out embedded systems classes. UCR has a course where all the students build their own game, device, or machine. I have seen some super impressive projects there. Some are on youtube.

<comment><USER6> _> how did this necro happen_

This year Tetris has been around for 35 years, so anniversary based nostalgia is bringing up a lot of old related links.

This is usually happens more for full decade-a-versaries rather than halfs like this, but 25 happens as it is a quarter of a century and 35 (i.e. this case) seems to resonate with people too (perhaps because it is seen as half a lifetime?). In five years time these links will be back even more so (four whole decades), ten years from now maybe less so, but fifteen years from now it'll be 50 years and the world (assuming the upcoming WWIII leaves enough of us and relevant tech knowledge alive) will be tetris-nostalgia-batshit.

That, and it is the sort of great "cool sad" project that is worthy of people being reminded of occasionally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would definitely buy that for the fireworks mode.</comment>


Google just published 25M free datasets - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/google-just-published-25-million-free-datasets-d83940e24284 <comment><USER2> Discussed here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22130874](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22130874)</comment>


Using VimWiki as a distributed, encrypted lab notebook for programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/2012/11/23/vimwiki/ <comment><USER3> I have a similar system for a lab notebook / to do list, but without encryption. I use a light weight wiki, Zim <http://zim-wiki.org>, and setup the directory in my Dropbox folder. That way I'm able to use the full wiki on my desktop, laptop, and work desktop. Because the pages are plaintext with simple wiki markup, I can also view and edit them on my phone.

Zim is also nice for me in supporting LaTeX equations (via a plugin) and being written in Python, I've made a couple of custom tweeks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, and using dropbox was something I was looking at for vimwiki as well, but the whole "stored in the cloud" thing and the whole "NDA, sensitive data" thing didn't mix (especially in the EU, where you have a whole host of other things to worry about).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A difficulty I have with wikis is I find that tree structure data of this sort gets stale easily, and requires a lot of tending to avoid this.

A tool ppl might find useful that uses a flat structure: saga. All it does is creates directories in a way so they will always sort in chronological order.

Example:

        $ saga python pattern socket client
        /home/cturner/saga/20121124.myhostname.myusername.ac.enter.some.terms
        $

This turned into a long reply, so I blog'd the rest.

        http://trogrd.tumblr.com/post/36378631988/saga-revisited

<comment><USER4> Correction to editing error in parent. The resulting directory would be called /home/cturner/saga/20121124.myhostname.myusername.ac.python.pattern.socket.client

(thanks kartik)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Fark. Apparently landing on HN at 1800 on a friday is a fast way to kill your server :D Think it's fixed now... though it might not be a speed demon...

</comment><comment><USER5> Not to take away from any of the ideas, but (I believe) there is still no electronic substitute for a dated, numbered-pages paper notebook to establish that you did something and when you did it (for legal purposes).

Love these: [http://www.amazon.com/Computation-Inches-Numbered- Quadrille-...](http://www.amazon.com/Computation-Inches-Numbered- Quadrille-35061/dp/B000F78JLU/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely; and I keep mine still for doodles that become patent ideas (signed and dated), for taking cornell notes of meetings and phone calls, and that kind of thing. I prefer these though: <http://www.leuchtturm1917.com/en/content/medium-notebook> (and the dotted paper is more useful than the squared). Tried moleskins, tried Paper Blanks, tried a few others, but the 1917s are the best I've found...

...but they've become my first draft, rather than my only notebook. It's just too easy to grab a chunk of an email or a graph's png or a code snippet and lob it into the vimwiki; and it's where I work up most of the stuff that goes into papers or patents.

<comment><USER6> I'm a big fan of Doane Paper. Lines AND Squares. <http://doanepaper.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I haven't even kept a log like this, how useful do you find it? Is it similar to making a lot of small commits that you can search against?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's similar I suppose, but you'd have to be committing every 30 minutes or so (maybe your memory's better, but I find if you asked me to summarise what I did in the last 30 minutes I can fairly quickly; if you asked me to summarise my day, I'd forget half the stuff I did). And you'd have to be always working on the one code base (I've worked in places where you wouldn't have been doing that) or else you'd have entries scattered all over the place.

But yes, if you did those things, you could have that log in the commit logs, but it wouldn't be a fantastic resource - it's more useful to me to have that in a local file here, with just my entries (as opposed to having to extract my entries from the entire team's), in grep-able plaintext.

And you'd also be missing the notebook part of the picture; the stuff in there shouldn't be in commit logs (you're talking about notes from meetings, design notes, patent notes, paper notes, that sort of thing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use org-mode for 'partial' literate programming. It's partial since I only note down the general structure of c++/java classes as a sketch, not actual codes, except for Lisp. I occasionally push the files to Gollum, a git-based wiki supporting org files for mobile reviews.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've seen some folks do that, and hats off to them; but I learnt vi before emacs, and despite trying to learn emacs a few times over the years, I just never did get to the point where I'd feel comfortable using it for work. So org-mode was always out for me. But it works well for others...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is interesting; my site provides something sort of similar, but with JIRA integration. I've been considering a pivot where the data is stored on the local server. Rather than using JIRA credentials, you'd define your own TODO list, and log 15-30 minute intervals with notes on what you've done. The hard part is creating the reporting faculties; there's lots of those for JIRA already.

If anyone's interested in something like this (structured time-tracking and task-based note taking), drop me an email and I'll let you know when I get to that point.

<comment><AUTHOR> It sounds interesting, but one of the things I didn't want was something tied to a specific system. This is a notebook that goes across several jobs - <USER2> depending on where you work, you could be using JIRA, or Mantis, or bugtac or something homegrown, or someething horribly legacy. So I didn't want it tied to anything specific, but to be a standalone tool.

Mind you, if you were working a lot with JIRA, I could see the appeal...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> TLDR: Notational Velocity to vimwiki.

I was using NV, but the Find-Next feature stopped working from OSX Lion. I then renamed the file extensions to ".wiki". I used some perl scripts to remove the spaces in file names and camel-case them. Used "ls" to create an index page with links to each note. Now i can access my notes both through vim (using vimwiki) and through NV.

vimgrep and the ack plugin are good replacements for NV's search.

</comment><comment><USER11> There was a discussion on HN a while back on maintaining a programming journal except this one advocated a pen-and-paper approach. Might be a good place to get ideas on the what and how-to aspects of maintaining a journal.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4448361>

</comment><comment><USER12> +1 for VimWiki; I don't use it like this author, but it is one of my favorite Vim plugins.

<comment><USER13> How does the VimWiki plugin improve it?

I have used vim for journaling and as a wiki, but I only used standard vim features. For example "gf" is practically for a flat file wiki-it opens the file named after word currently under the cursor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Vimwiki, amongst other things (and I'm still learning) supports not just its own wiki syntax, but also markdown and mediawiki (there's an option to be set and it has to be after v2.0); it has a decent diary system with automatic index page generation; it can automatically convert the entire wiki+diary into html if you want that; and it has a few other nifty things like checkboxes for to-do lists and the like. Worth taking a read through the features part of the project website at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What are "cambridge format notes?" Couldn't find anything obviously that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, feic. It's Cornell format notes - for some reason I keep calling it Cambridge, I don't know why. Google Cornell Note Taking System, and learn it; if you ever have to take notes at a conference, seminar, lecture, meeting, phone call or anything else where people are talking, it's the best method around.

<comment><USER5> This right here made the whole month of reading HN worthwhile. Thank you.

<comment><AUTHOR> My pleasure. I just wish someone had shown me the cornell system before year one of college :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> vimwiki + dropbox user here too. I was a big time OneNote user until I needed my notes on all the major platforms at once. I realized that I would much rather keep them in a text-based format, rather than in a proprietary encoding with no API, even though I think OneNote is a fantastic tool.

So far it's worked fine for me, even though I wish it supported Markdown out of the box (there's a plugin for it somewhere), rather thank its custom markup. It's somewhat painful to have to remember yet another syntax to achieve the same exact thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> vimwiki does support markdown out of the box as of v2.0, though you have to set an option for it...

let g:vimwiki_list = [{'path': '~/my_site/', \ 'syntax': 'markdown', 'ext': '.md'}]

<comment><USER15> I've been using vimwiki for a while now and had no idea about this. Thank you so much!

(Now if only I could figure out how to get Vim Touch on Android to correctly format vimwiki pages...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've always found hard to write scheduled log entries. I feel more confortable with task driven logs, think about a log made by commits of a repository of my work life.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think mercurial is overkill for this - much simpler to just use dropbox.

<comment><USER18> Dropbox lacks major features if you try to label it a DVCS, and it's nowhere near as flexible. Most notably, it has ZERO merging support - conflicts result in silently duplicated files (with an added timestamp).

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly, and you're also assuming I could trust the data to dropbox. Sorry, but no, I'll trust photos and nonsensitive personal data to it without too much worry, but NDAs are legal contracts and the whole cloud storage thing and EU law are murky enough to make me just step away from the keyboard. McGarr's (an Irish solicitor) has a good summary here: [http://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2009/09/11/cloud-computing- eu...](http://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2009/09/11/cloud-computing-european- data-protection-dangers/)

<comment><USER17> Fair enough with respect to NDAs in your case, but they don't really apply in mine. As for it missing features of a fully-fledged DVCS, meh. What you're talking about is basically a glorified TODO list, which in most cases you'll be the only one updating. Furthermore, you'll usually be updating it from one place at a time. On the rare occasions I get a conflict, it's usually a simple matter to resolve. I do use Mercurial for managing other stuff like environment configs and program settings though.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Tale of Two Financings (Recounting two raises) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.profitably.com/post/4064020554/a-tale-of-two-financings

<comment><USER2> I know that a lot of folks come to the comments section before deciding if they want to read the article and I just want to say please do read it, especially if you are based in NYC. Very informative and a lot of details so that you get a good sense for the time and effort involved in fund-raising.

Thanks profitably guys, I saw you pitch a couple of times at the hatchery and Startup2010 and you have come a long way. Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for that 'Neil' :-) Its been my experience that raising money can feel like a cross between prostitution and social work!

What you probably realize however is that by this point you no doubt have a really really good idea of why _you_ think your company and your plan will be successful and you can defend that belief across a wide array of threats to its success. This is really really valuable in itself.

I've talked with CEO's of companies that were funded by a single angel who could not articulate their companies value proposition beyond a few web 2.0 buzzwords. No understanding of what the risks were, how they would know if they were mitigating risk or making it worse, and no clear idea of what 'success' meant for the company.

A bit silver lining-ish I know but true!

</comment><comment><USER4> Excellent read and insight to what you guys must have gone through. Congrats!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The good news is that we're hiring: <http://profitably.com/jobs>.</comment>


How to recognize a super-company when you see one. - <AUTHOR> http://torusoft.com/blog/how-to-recognize-a-super-company

<comment><AUTHOR> My business partner wrote this article. It really helps put things into perspective when reading any analyst's commentary on Apple.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone know of a client package/dependency manager for javascript? - <AUTHOR>

As time goes on, I seem to collect utilities libraries like underscore.js or jquery. For any project that I work on, I'd like to have the dependencies for these libraries tracked and then have them automatically added to the project that I'm working on. It seems that I end up having copies of different versions of each utility in different directories all over the place. Doing any kind of development on the underlying utilities ends up being even more painful as I end up copying things around (or using symlinks).
It makes a little bit of sense to just put everything on a central server and load them from there, but then I end up keeping track of what depends on what.
Ideally, I should be able to specify a dependency and have a package manager download the files, keep them in a central location and allow easy development (just the normal package manager features you've come to enjoy).
Does anyone know of a project like this? <comment><USER2> dojotoolkit.org has a well baked module system. You can use just the smallish dojo core, then edit your scripts to use dojo.require.</comment>


Raising Money Using Customer Development - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2009/11/05/raising-money-with-customer-development/ <comment><USER2> Great post. In particular, I liked the part about the "Hierarchy of Proof" in pitches:

 _On the bottom, and least convincing are statements about your "idea."

Next are hypotheses – "I think customers will care about x or y "

Better are facts from customers – "We interviewed 30 customers with 20 questions"

Even better is "Customer Validation"– "We just got $50K from a customer" or "we got 100,000 users spending x minutes on our site"

Finally if you're ever so lucky – "Everyone's buying in droves and we're here because we need money to scale and execute"

If you've actually been doing Customer Development at a minimum you're at step 3 or 4. If not, you don't have enough data for a VC presentation. Get out of the building, get some more customer feedback, spin your product and go back and read the book._

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, these slides from IMVU's investor pitch are awesome: <http://steveblank.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/slide1.jpg></comment>


Ask HN: APIs for finding company information? - <AUTHOR>

Do you know of APIs or tools for looking up company information? That is:<p>- Given a business name or domain name<p>- Return:
  - <USER3>
  - Number of employees
  - Location(s)
  - Type/field of business
  - ...<p>Or,<p>- Given a series of constraints such as:
  - <USER3>
  - Number of employees
  - <USER4>
  - Type/field of business<p>- Return matching businesses <comment><USER5> You may want to look at CrunchBase. You can read through their API here: <http://www.crunchbase.com/help/api>

<comment><AUTHOR> Crunchbase is quite useful and the APIs are nice (although sometimes flaky), but it only covers a small subset of the companies out there. I was looking for something more general - eg. find all auto-repair shops within 50 miles of location x.

<comment><USER6> _I was looking for something more general - eg. find all auto-repair shops within 50 miles of location x_

Try contacting a Yellow Pages company to see if they have an API. They probably only make these available to select partners, though.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the best online learning subscription for S/W Developers? - <AUTHOR> What service or subscription do you use to stay up to date? Do you learn from services like TreeHouse, CodeSchool, EggHead.io, PluralSight, Lynda etc. I would love to hear and learn from your experiences. <comment><USER3> I've only used pluralsight but it's ridiculously good in my opinion. I was asked at work to trial a couple of courses from some providers and in the process was signed up for the pluralsight free trial. The company decided overall it was too expensive, but I was hooked so I bought a subscription with my own money. It has definitely been a tangible boost to my career. I'd be interested to hear others experience of how other providers.

<comment><USER4> How is plularsight compared to something like Coursera or Udemy?

<comment><USER5> Coursera and Udemy are not subscription based.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've used Safari Books, Pluralsight and Egghead.io.

Pluralsight was pretty good. I got a lot out of a number of videos. Since they cover a variety of topics, it was great to spin up on something when I needed it. For instance, I was working with Redis and needed to pick up Lua so I took an hour, watched a video and was on my way. This was about a year ago and their selection around Javascript was a little lacking for the topics I wanted but that has probably changed by now.

Safari Books is fantastic if you like to read. They also have a ton of books on other topics so it makes it a much wider resource depending on your goal. At the time, I was doing quite a bit of "intrapreneurship" so it was nice to grab a book on product development, business and entrepreneurship.

I currently have a subscription to Egghead.io which is way more front-end focused. Around Christmas, they tend to offer a year long subscription for a reduced price which I picked up. The topics don't tend to be as varied as Pluralsight but I think the depth of a lot of them is really good. For instance, I got more out of the Egghead videos around Angular and React than I did from Pluralsight.

<comment><USER7> Pluralsight got me up and running with StreamInsight so much faster than if I would've had to slog through manual pages and the sparse blogosphere myself. It can be difficult to find content that isn't web related and I'm glad it was there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Safaribooksonline.

I really like the learning paths based on actual documentation (for instance From Developer to Architect, or From sysadmin to data engineer are very good).

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you please provide examples/info about going from developer to architect learning path?

<comment><USER8> This is the ToC from the developer to architect tutorial (I thought it was a learning path):

Architectural Patterns

        - Design Versus Architectural Patterns,
        - Layered Architecture
        - Event-Driven Architecture
        - Service-Oriented Architecture
        - Microkernel Architecture }

Pitfalls

        - Architecture Anti-Patterns, Part 1
        - Architecture Anti-Patterns, Part 2
        - Tooling and Documentation

Soft Skills

        - Architectural Decisions
        - Architecture Refactoring
        - Meeting Hacks

Continuous Delivery

        - Continuous Delivery Defined
        - Deployment Pipelines
        - <USER2>

The "Design Versus Architectural Patterns" section is comes from the book "Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture". Other sections are cherry picked from books and videos.

The best part (for me) is that all sections have an estimated time you need to read / watch the content.

Hope this helps

<comment><USER9> Do you feel that Safari Books Online is still going strong since being acquired by O'Reilly Media? I heard something about big layoffs last year. I'm pretty excited about trying it out but also wondering if it will be a stable learning resource well into the future.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dictionary bookmarklet defines any word on a page - <AUTHOR> http://lingro.com/docs/browser-tools.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Lingro is the fastest and best web dictionary that I've used. I'd been looking for a good one for a while.</comment>


Show HN: Convert any CLI program to a Web service - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dongyx/c2w <comment><USER2> Interesting.

@dongyx Problems I've stumbled upon: 1) the website dongyuxuan.me has a bad SSL cert. 2) The sub-site [https://dongyuxuan.me/posts/c2w.html](https://dongyuxuan.me/posts/c2w.html) where GitHub points to doesn't work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I will fix them while I have time. The link can be visited with plain HTTP .</comment></comment>


Show HN: "No Barking" Spotify App to skip all songs by Pitbull - <AUTHOR> http://www.brianshaffer.com/fun-with-spotify-apps-skip-any-song-by-pitbull/

<comment><USER2> Don't use spotify, but anything to avoid Pitbull is fine by me.</comment>


Novena: A Laptop with No Secrets - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/portable-devices/novena-a-laptop-with-no-secrets <comment><USER2> I've been following the Novena since it's conception, it's a neat idea, and even though it's not 100% open source, it's closer than everything else we have. And the fact that you can just build hardware ontop of what's already there due to the FPGA and massive IO bus is downright neat. They've already demonstrated stuff like an oscilloscope.

Also, Bunnie is a very cool guy, his blog is a wealth of information on hardware design, and Chinese manufacturing process. If anyone can make a laptop that has every component open source, it's him. might take time, but hey.

<comment><USER3> Good to know that he's working on something new post Chumbie

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's not a laptop with no secrets or fully open-sourced. There's the hardware components internal operation, the FPGA tools, and so on that need to be open. Incidentally, the things with the biggest risk, too. Freescale operates DOD- certified fabs in U.S. on top of it with major sales to U.S. govt. Whatever subversion risk Intel poses we must assume Freescale does as well.

It's actually a laptop for FPGA hackers with incremental steps in the direction of an open-source laptop. That's great. That they made FPGA development a bit easier _plus_ made a more open laptop is extra great. So, let's give them props they deserve while acknowledging it's still untrustworthy hardware and there's plenty of ways to go.

<comment><USER5> It kills me that it has no working GPU. :(

I found the wording about XFce to be weird: They claimed to not use Ubuntu because they needed XFce, but ...

[http://xubuntu.org/](http://xubuntu.org/)

<comment><USER6> The GPU is being worked on. The Mesa driver is being worked on as we speak by a number of people including rmk and jnettlet, with austriancoder's experimental repo located at [https://github.com/austriancoder/mesa-1](https://github.com/austriancoder/mesa-1). If you want to get technical, we already have fully open-source 2D acceleration, and we routinely use the 2D GPU to e.g. do colorspace conversion and 2D scaling on video.

I went with Debian because we knew some Debian people. At one point I considered moving to Ubuntu, because they package "Firefox" and "Thunderbird" (instead of rebranding them) and they have Chromium as well. There were lots of teething problems, though, ranging from their Xorg modesetting driver refusing to use generic KMS on a non-PCI system, to strange oddities when no initrd was present, to the desktop straight-up crashing when logging in (turns out Unity assumes GL is present and has no fallback.) Ubuntu seems to make many assumptions about running on standard x86 hardware, and was rough around the edges. We could have polished it, but it seemed easier to stick with Debian.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the explanation. Debian makes sense in that light.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > This open-source requirement of ours ended up influencing the selection of > almost every piece of hardware, including the main CPU, the battery > controller, and the Wi-Fi module. For example, we couldn't use Intel's x86 > microprocessors because they can accept firmware updates that we cannot > debug or inspect. Instead we chose an ARM-based Freescale i.MX6 system-on-a- > chip, which has no such updatable code embedded. (A system-on-a-chip, or > SoC, is similar to a microprocessor except it has more of the supporting > hardware, such as memory and peripheral interfaces, needed to make a > complete computer.) The i.MX6 does have some code burned into it to > coordinate the computer's boot-up process, but this firmware can't be > changed, and its unencrypted binary code can be read out and analyzed for > possible security problems.

I'm confused. They claim the open source requirement prevented them from going with an intel chip, but then they say the reason why was because intel could push firmware updates. Furthermore, the Freescale SoC has firmware built in, but it's not open source.

Is this what we consider open source these days? Sure, a good whitepaper is nice, but it's not open source. Don't get me wrong, this is still nice effort on the open front, but calling this a "laptop with no secrets" seems like a stretch.

<comment><USER8> People are afraid of the Intel Management Engine, and you can read about it here: [http://libreboot.org/faq/#intel](http://libreboot.org/faq/#intel)

It is a dense and very detailed text, but basically your Intel CPU contains Active Management Technology (AMT) which lets remote users control your computer, which may or may not be what you want, and there might be backdoors hiding here.

It also includes Intel Boot Guard, which prevents users from installing their own firmware (such as libreboot and coreboot) because it needs to be signed with a key from Intel.

The page sums it up like this:

> In summary, the Intel Management Engine and its applications are a backdoor > with total access to and control over the rest of the PC. The ME is a threat > to freedom, security, and privacy, and the libreboot project strongly > recommends avoiding it entirely. Since recent versions of it can't be > removed, this means avoiding all recent generations of Intel hardware.

<comment><USER9> Also see Joanna Rutkowska's recent paper: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10458318](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10458318) (fun reading).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How in the world does a SMART-compatible Samsung SSD _not_ have secrets?

Did they never read any of Snowden's leaks? :(

[https://www.google.ca/search?q=nsa+hard+drive+firmware](https://www.google.ca/search?q=nsa+hard+drive+firmware)

<comment><USER11> It seems that you don't know that they are aware about the topic. In fact they proved the possibility of running arbitrary code on some sdcards' microcontroller:

[http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554](http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554)

<comment><USER10> Well, I read through the entire article and despite the detailed attention lavished on CPUs and GPUs, there was not a single mention of their disk's security.

It's disappointing that if they are "aware" of the problem, they didn't mention it to their audience in an article about their device's security, don't you think?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We need a cheap general purpose Novena-like laptop.

I'd argue a really good place to start from is a custom Rockchip machine (like Asus C201, which is now supported by Libreboot). Add a free GPU (or finish the Lima driver) and we are ready to go.

</comment><comment><USER13> I like the project, but I'm not a fan of the designs they're going with for the first run - I'd prefer a model more similar to the one they first teased a few years ago, if only in terms of form factor [1]

[1]: [http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/01/Open...](http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/01/Open-Source-Laptop.jpg)

<comment><USER6> There were a few issues with that design. One was that we never really got hinges working. I bought some friction hinges, but couldn't settle on a way to attach them. The temporary bodge was to 3D print some chucks with an angle on them to use.

The other was that it was difficult to get past airport security. The German agents seemed to at least appreciate that we'd built a laptop that we can trust.

Finally, it was nigh impossible to access things like the FPGA and the serial ports. I find myself using GPIOs all the time to do things like bitbang SWD, and being able to do that by reaching around the screen is handy, not to mention being able to mount the thing being debugged under SWD directly in the case, so it's much easier to take with me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm hoping this is the start of a trend.

The true start will be once the lowrisc SoC is out, and open hardware devices using it start to flood the market.

</comment><comment><USER15> If the heirloom version didn't sell out so quickly I might have bought one. Fortunately for my wallet they were gone fast!

Might be worth laser-cutting a case out of nice wood for one though. Hmm.

</comment><comment><USER16> I´m looking for a laptop that is easy to repair and has open source hardware.

Preferably there would be something like the ITX standard for laptops with different standard designs. Like a ultra book, notebook and different screen sizes. If there was standardized screen you could easily repair your laptop.

All hardware should be open. The firmware should be open with known checksums. Open boot loader. Open source operating system.

All components should be upgradable so that once the laptop speed wise is obsolete by moores law it should be easy to dissamble and recyle the materials. Further you should be able to reuse components which does not age that fast as the cpu and mainboard, for example the keyboard, mouse and display.

We throw a lot of electronic garbage, that ends up being exported to cheap scrap yards in China and Africa, this needs to change if we do not want a junk yard planet.

<comment><USER17> Fairphone is doing something similar with their upcoming phone. Although the hardware is not open. They should talk with OP.

[https://www.fairphone.com/phone/](https://www.fairphone.com/phone/)

<comment><USER18> Thanks for sharing. Just looked on their site, but can't see when the Fairphone 2 will be coming and what other OSes it will be able to run additionally to Android 5.1. Any idea?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why didn't they use an open source CPU? Eg: OpenSPARC

<comment><USER6> Aside from the fact that we're familiar with Freescale and ARM, many other chips we "could have used" are unobtanium. While it's true that there is a source-level implementation, I can't find any T1 or T2 parts available for purchase. It's the same reason why we went with an A9 instead of an A15 or a 64-bit chip: You just can't buy them unless you're a big company. And if a small two-person company can't buy them, how can we claim it's open source hardware if you can't buy them either?

The other possibility would be to fab a chip ourselves, but that's a whole other order of magnitude in terms of cost and complexity, and the result isn't that great in terms of speed and available peripherals. Plus, when you fab a chip like this a lot of the hardware blocks are IP provided by the chip foundry, e.g. flash controllers and DRAM cells, and those are always closed- source. It just moves the whole thing one turtle down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting, never heard of this before. I have backed a pitop on indigogo with the plan of switching out the pi for a beaglebone to get closer to all open components.

Very cool project :)

</comment><comment><USER21> I have one of these machines and it's been great fun so far to hack on. The development process and the continuing work of the community has been great to be a part of.

</comment><comment><USER22> Nice effort, but software rendering is a no go in 2015.

</comment><comment><USER23> 1\. Open does not mean ugly.

2\. C'est trop cher!

3\. Is it a manually-capsuled desktop-style laptop?

4\. Is it light enough to carry?

5\. Where can I get one?

</comment><comment><USER24> The expression "GNU/Linux is a special version of Linux" sounds a big strange to me. GNU/Linux is an actual OS, not a version of the Linux kernel. That's really the wrong way to explain things.

<comment><USER25> Maybe this was meant to distinguish GNU/Linux from other Linux userlands, such as Android?

Apart from that, for the layman "Linux" is generally understood as the whole Linux distribution, not just the kernel or the OS.

Still, even from that perspective this wording is quite confusing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's sad that it's been 25+ years in the making to finally get something sort of okay, and even then it's ridiculously expensive by contrast of closed source. Why can't we have something thinkpad-like for the cost? Don't they know they'd make metric craptons of money on something like that?

<comment><USER27> You might be looking for the Libreboot X200, a FSF-approved refurbished Thinkpad X200.

[http://minifree.org/product/libreboot-x200/](http://minifree.org/product/libreboot-x200/)

<comment><USER28> all out of stock?

<comment><USER8> Yes.

The author of libreboot, and owner of Minifree (former Gluglug) said that he would complete all current orders, so he would mark them as out-of-stock.

You can buy a X200 and free your laptop yourself if you dare :) You can swing by #libreboot on Freenode if you have any interest in the project.

<comment><USER29> Of course, I dislike how libreboot doesn't do microcode updates anyway. ARM processors have no microcode at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Possibly slightly off topic, and not something I would normally comment on, but wow - what a lot of adverts! Desktop browser and aside from the full screen ad you need to click through on load, about 3/5 of the screen is adverts.

I've been torturing myself over the idea of having a single banner ad on my site (decided not to for now), but this is something that makes me want to finally give up and install an adblocker.

</comment><comment><USER31> It looks terrible. These are the kinds of machines that bring bad name to the concept of free/open source hardware. Nothing that is the fault of Bunnie, but something that reflects a sad reality.

<comment><USER32> This is a machine for early adopters - not the followers.

<comment><USER31> The sad part is that we are talking about "early" adoption with just 2 months to go for 2016!</comment></comment></comment>


Astronomers Find First Evidence Of Other Universes - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/421999/astronomers-find-first-evidence-of-other-universes/

<comment><USER2> Universe = everything. Including new universes.

</comment><comment><USER3> 2010</comment>


Atlanta Gets Its Own Y Combinator In Shotput Ventures - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/25/atlanta-gets-its-own-y-combinator-in-shotput-ventures/ <comment><USER2> I'm one of the Shotput Ventures partners, and I'm looking forward to a great first "class" in Atlanta. We've got an interesting group of partners, with recent business hits in software and web svcs, complementary skills and backgrounds, and good networks. Check out our partners. I think we'll be excellent mentors for our hacker teams, primarily because we love what we're doing and want to help young hackers to build stuff people want and to dare greatly. We appreciate all that YC has done to innovate and evangelize the business model. I'm an especially huge fan of pg's inspirational writing and simple writing style. There are plenty of talented and determined hackers out there who need our mentoring and connections, and it's going to be a ton of fun working with them.

<comment><USER3> A slight criticism, looking at your application: asking me to fill out a PDF resume for a founding team is irritating and time-consuming. Is there anything that a PDF form can give you that you don't get from having applicants fill out relevant information into a text box? Drafting a PDF means that now I've got to spend time making my typography look pretty, getting things organized in a nice way, and generally spending more time on presentation than I'm putting into just conveying information.

One of the things I _loved_ about the YC application was that it didn't require external files - excepting the Posterous video, which is a supersimple email-and-receive-link system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> See pg's comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528924>

" _The root of the problem is that people think seed funding is regional. They think they're starting the YC of St. Louis, or wherever. Then after they get started they realize that in fact the seed firms are all drawing on the same national applicant pool, and that the default fate of the nth seed firm is not to be the YC of St. Louis, as they'd expected, but to be the YC of the nth quality bucket._ "

Not that I know anything about this venture yet, but the regional-centric commentary immediately made me think of this comment.

Edit: Seems Michael Arrington concurs: [http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/25/atlanta-gets-its- own-y-...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/25/atlanta-gets-its-own-y- combinator-in-shotput-ventures/#comment-2670076)

<comment><USER5> In what may be heresy here on HN I am going to partially disagree with PG. Regional YCs may indeed be of the nth quality bucket, but that does not necessarily doom them to failure anymore then not attending Stanford or MIT dooms a hacker to failure.

The proof as they say is in the pudding. TechStars seems to be doing just fine so far. Let's see what Shotput's births before we call their babies ugly.

<comment><USER6> YC ignores a lot of good ideas because it's really focused on BIG ideas. YC wants to build Paypal, not 37signals. They lean toward ambitious infrastructure ideas which also have a higher failure rate. But there is a huge number of great ideas with lower risk/reward ratios that will still make stellar companies. I say bring it on... it's a great time to be in the HTML writing business. :)

<comment><USER7> We'd be happy to have funded 37 Signals. We funded Wufoo, which is very much like 37 Signals, and we'd be delighted to fund more companies like that.

<comment><USER3> But Wufoo still deals with a Big Idea: namely, something that's creating a large infrastructure on the Internet. 37signals is a private, internal service: they make things that appeal to closed niches. On the other hand, Wufoo is something that's more public, in a sense.

Maybe it's just a matter of what YC companies get named more than others, but the ones that immediately come to mind are big-problem companies. Reddit for finding news online. Disqus for comments. Scribd for document indexing. Wufoo for forms. There aren't as many niche sites (versus something like TechStars, which had a cooking site) - or am I just missing lots of niche YC sites?

<comment><USER8> even the smallest niche can be huge.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. Furthermore, niche users tend to be more fanatic about the sites they use if they're done well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Got accepted into Georgia Tech just the other day. And this news made my day today. Is that sad?

<comment><USER2> Congrats. GaTech is a great school with really smart students. But what's most important is what YOU do at GT. I hope you will take full advantage of this great opportunity, enjoy learning, and keep an open mind and an open heart. Don't worry about whether or not others think you are "cool." Have the confidence to love yourself and to be a beacon of loving-kindness toward others. Congrats!

<comment><USER9> are you kidding me? I have to be cool. :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I view all these "regional" YC knock offs as just early stage angels.

<comment><USER10> I attended their open house, and I didn't get the impression they are just early stage angels, although if thats all they are that would still be great, because there are very few of those here. Many in the investment community in the southeast have been openly hostile towards the need for more early stage capital, let alone willing to fund seed stage companies.

Anyway, my impression from talking with the Shotput guys was that there was a lot of value add they were providing. I would suggest actually contacting them if you are interested, as I think you'll be surprised and impressed. Most of these guys are active advocates for our region's startups and do everything they can to mentor and open doors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does Shotput Ventures use the "exploding term sheet" we were warned about?

<comment><USER12> They accept applications till April 10 [1], so the answer is no.

[1] <http://www.shotputventures.com/program-timeline-2>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Dear Paul Graham,

Everyone but you sucks.

Allow me to explain. I either live in the valley or want to live in the valley. I idolize you and love this site. You are the smartest guy on planet earth, and anyone that copies you is pathetic because they could never be as cool as you. Who do they think they are!?

Now that I've impressed you with flattery and have defeated your enemies on your behalf, I'd like to tell you about Project Tomacco. With your help, we can caffeinate tomatoes and hook every college kid on a healthy alternative to coffee. Did you know tomatoes have antioxidants that fight cancer? Thats right, we're helping to prevent cancer. We're going to change the world, Paul, one tomato at a time.

Is there a way to attach a spreadsheet to a comment on hacker news? Because my projections are going to blow you away. If we get one percent of the tomato market you're going to be a very rich(er) man, Paul.

Signed,

Valley Hater

<comment><USER12> For those who may not be able to pierce @rjurney's smoky satire, this is indeed satire.

I have to agree with the spirit of what he's trying to convey in this comment: news.yc would be a more interesting community if a majority of the people didn't default to PG's opinion on everything in general (this is my anecdotal observation and might be incorrect) and YC clones outside the valley being of nth quality bracket in particular (this is a pet peeve since I live outside the valleY) without giving it some thought for themselves.

In fact PG himself seems to spend quite a bit of time thinking about how the valley can be recreated elsewhere seeing how he has written about it in more than one article and says:

"How hard would it be to jumpstart a silicon valley? It's fascinating to think this prize might be within the reach of so many cities."

Surely trying to recreate YC outside the valley can only help?

<comment><USER7> _Surely trying to recreate YC outside the valley can only help?_

Well, no, actually. YC being in the Valley doesn't actually do that much for the Valley. I explained why here:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/maybe.html>

It's the stage after YC that makes the Valley what it is-- the angel stage. YC could be anywhere. We contributed as much to Silicon Valley when we were in Boston.

<comment><USER12> Here's my train of thought about why Shotput, if successful, would help Atlanta:

\- There is really very little seed stage funding in Atlanta (unlike the valley)

\- The people who choose to startup in Atlanta AND need seed funding usually do so because they want to live in Atlanta for the foreseeable future (or have to, for some reason). If they didn't, they would just move to the valley since getting seed funding is so much easier there.

\- Therefore, after seed funding, they are likely to stay in Atlanta (The round 1 funding scene in Atlanta is better than the seed funding scene..although not optimal)

\- Hence, Atlanta will be one startup ahead because of Shotput Ventures

The gist is that if first time entrepreneurs were going to leave Atlanta after seed stage, they would likely have done so at seed stage since seed stage funding is so much harder here.

<comment><USER7> Unless they restrict applications to people from Atlanta, they'll get them from all over the country. Meanwhile, most groups from the Atlanta region won't apply only to Shotput, but also to the other seed firms.

So unless they restrict applications, there will end up being little local component, just as with every previous seed firm. Techstars intended to be the YC of Boulder. But IIRC only 4 of the 20 startups they've funded so far have been from Colorado. As far as I know, the same thing has happened to everyone after them as well.

The seed funding business isn't regional. People would like to believe it is, because it's 20x cheaper to run a YC than to do what you'd actually have to do to make startups stick to a particular city. But it isn't.

<comment><USER12> OK You've got a point. But let us say only 20% of the applicants stay in Atlanta. That's 4 more than otherwise would. Also, as I said before, once you pass the seed stage, it's easier (but not valley easy) to get the $1M you mention in "Can you Buy a Silicon Valley". It will help long term.

Basically, if we could at least get the ease of raising seed funding in Atlanta at parity with the ease of raising 1st round for a startup with revenues, it would be a significant win for us.

I do agree with you that if there were more VCs funding at the $1M level in Atlanta, we could keep all the Shotput applicants here and maybe a bunch of startups would move from across the country to Atlanta. But since politicians are unlikely to be as enlightened as making the $1B investment you mention in your essay would require, we'll have to attract private investors. If 1 of those 4 startups has a big successful exit, we'll probably get 1 more large fund to come to Atlanta.

<comment><USER7> _But let us say only 20% of the applicants stay in Atlanta._

This assumption is off by an order of magnitude. YC funded 61 startups in Boston. Only 3 are still there, and 1 of those is talking about moving to SV. So the assumption should be more like 2-3%.

<comment><USER12> I was basing it off the 4/20 TechStars number but o.k.

This is getting me depressed. I am off to go write some code to work it off!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Free online resume creator based on LaTeX - <AUTHOR> https://www.cvsintellect.com

<comment><USER2> This breaks with non-ASCII characters. Hard. The ö in my name becomes "ouml;" – some HTML encoding mangling is present there somewhere which really shouldn't be happening in 2013. There isn't even a reason to even use those entities in HTML. The ß in my street name manages to remove the rest of the street name completely from the output. I'd suggest you should test that data entered on the web site goes through unmangled to LaTeX and then use XeLaTeX to stay clear of Unicode problems (and also for better font support).

Fun facts:

      - ö gets mangled, ö (o and U+0308) results in "o?"
      - ü doesn't get mangled and survives in the PDF for some reason
      - When you return to the page all of ö, ü and ß are replaced by their HTML entities

Date formats could use at least ISO 8601 as well.

You can enter math mode and do fun stuff, but with people not knowing that it's LaTeX underneath this probably just invites fun errors when people use $ to mean $.

I've written my CV in LaTeX 1½ years ago (mostly because I didn't have a good- looking template in Word and was too lazy to build one myself) and I remember that I had to fight hard against moderncv to get it to do the things I wanted. It's not exactly flexible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for spending your time listing everything here. means a lot! sorry for the non-ascii bit. we will fix it as soon as possible.

<comment><USER2> If you need further help with finding such issues, I have at least a little experience in testing encoding/charset/Unicode stuff as well as i18n issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is extremely kind of you! we will try to resolve the issues and get back to you if we need some help there. thanks again!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We got a lot of feedback through our feedback form which sadly is anonymous. Though a lot of them were positive there was one particularly negative feedback. We thought it touched on a lot of important topics and we should respond to it. Since most of the traffic today has been from ycombinator we are putting it here hoping for the person to read. sentences starting with - is feedback recieved while >> is our response.

\- Felt compelled to fill in "Personal" section, even though specifying Gender, DOB, Nationality is very unprofessional. Only because it is a section that cannot be removed, and became a Giant Bold "PERSONAL" at the bottom of my resume that was empty -- so if I can't remove it, I guess I better have -something- there ! >> agreed. have listed it as a bug to be fixed in next release! sorry for that.

\- so then I fill in some hobbies, at least, and it won't wrap along the margins correctly, as though I shouldn't have so many interesting hobbies for these templates? Looks very bad when everything else does wrap, makes it look shoe-horned. >> agreed. the list of hobbies & languages are supposed to be small. if you need a full fledged hobbies / languages space you can create a custom section for it & list everything there :) as for wrapping. we will try to fix it.

\- holding multiple positions and titles in a single company, as many as 4 in 3 years, and 3 in 3 years for the next job, I prefer to list them in descending chronological order under the same section, describing the various 'accomplishments' underneath as opposed to describing 4 different "jobs". \- i had to forgoe this information, and instead list all 3 or 4 titles as a single sentance, comma-seperated, which word wraps with a hyphen and looks confusing. I guess I would have to pick my "favorite" title, and stick with it. >> agreed. will brainstorm on how we can fix this. how would you do this in linked-in? it would be another position right? we are asking this as we are trying to keep 1:1 compatibility with linkedin since that data will need to be copied in the same format here.

\- No place, really, to list the "business unit" or "department" under which those titles were held. Both the titles and the department are far more telling about the employment history than any bulletpoint can say. \- I would also have to add a comma, and a business unit/department, after "Company", if I wanted this information present. I do, it is very vital information, especially in a large corporation like $#!^, where discovering which dept. to contact for verifying employment would be impossible otherwise. >> agreed. we missed location of office & department in positions. will add them soon.

\- A number of times 'preview' did not reflect what I had recently saved. I did notice the baloon tip to save the first time I changed templates. I'm very sure I saved it vigorously before preview. Feels like I'm hitting a server farm that isn't replicating quickly enough. >> we are on Google App Engine (GAE) with 3 idle instances & with auto scaling feature of GAE (best in class) this should not have been the case. But we went totally viral today! We will see what we can do about this.

\- preferred page breaks on sections are needed, I don't like seeing a single bullet point on the top of page 2 describing something I did at a job on the bottom of page 1. I might be tempted to simply remove an accomplishment to make it break where I'd like! Only to decide against it, or other padding methods, because I decide on a different template or add or remove another line above it. >> agreed. we are brainstorming on pagebreaks & greater control on footers.

\- Here I've avoided the privacy invasion of Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, and all of these other data mining whores, but just to provide you feedback I'm suddenly pushing data through Google anyway. Makes me consider where my data is actually stored -- an AWS cluster, a google app engine database? Now I'm going to have to go back, re-login, and anonymize my data I've provided you. sigh. >> we chose to store data on GAE since it provides the best security that can be provided. Its certainly much more than what a 2 member dev team can provide. as for the data, we promise not to share that data with anyone without your consent. is there anything more we can do in this regard?

\- after completing the anonymizing of my information, as account deletion is not possible and it became evident that you do not store my data on servers that you own, and I cannot trust your third party cloud providers, esp. after reading your privacy policy, whoever mysteriously they may be. For this reason I would never store my resume with your service. You must assure me that your servers are physical equipment that you own, in a facility that is owned and operated by a legitimate business with an address and phone number that a human is known to answer now and then, not some lowest-cost cloud provider. >> we are on cloud. (GAE & AWS to be more specific) and we are there not because they are cheap. they do cost quiet some money! we chose them because we think they actually can provide much more security, reliability & performance that a small dev team can with an owned instance of sever & database. we would surely think of having our own server, database etc. when we actually can afford them.

\- Nobody likes seeing & in their resume when editing. It looks like it decodes correctly in preview, but why should we have to be confused by it in editing? As software engineer, I feel compelled to correct it each time -- it frightens me that it could become doubly-escaped, becoming && later when I'm not looking, when the & in & gets re-encoded again sometime later, and make me look like a real idiot to a prospective employer. >> agreed. will add that as a bug to be fixed in next release.

\- I would not pay for your service: #1: Privacy and #2 Templating issues (described in previous feedback) -- my own resume made in MS Word simply looks much better. >> have a look at some samples made on our site: [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Modern.p...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Modern.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Leadersh...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Leadership.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Euro.pdf](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Euro.pdf) and if you prove us your similar looking template on word doc is better after print we will shutdown the service. period.

\- I would recommend your service to others: who don't really care about who has their address, phone number, date of birth stored on some-random-harddisk, and have a very difficult time in MS Word. When I worked as a tutor in a college, I assisted at least 100 students with their resumes each quarter -- you would want to consider advertising in such spaces, though many would be inaccessible by you by their tax-funded nature: Workplace placement programs and libraries, for instance. >> yes students are our first goto market since they would be our early adopters. we are thinking on how we can reach them.

\- I would actually pay for your service if you did anything more useful than templating (and the formatting and limitations previously mentioned were resolved). For instance: providing shorthand.com/firstname-lastname URL's for a web version, exporting to .doc, and finishing out the many unfinished concepts already here. >> yes. we know you would not pay for the currently running software online. and thats why its free :) we have premium templates & public resumes in our roadmap. but we are still thinking on a path to choose.

\- Your pintrist referral link at the bottom just makes you look like a cheap, cheap, attention-seeking whore. >> yes. sadly we are in attention seeking mode right now & we would not make any balls about it. we have worked on this for a year now & we think it can serve the people for good. we want it to reach as many eyeballs as possible and get as many feedbacks as possible.

Thank you for your time. Appreciate it. Hope this reply makes you feel much better about the whole thing :)

<comment><AUTHOR> personal is no more a mandatory section.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks good. My old CV originates at Linkedin labs, which had some nice templates a few years ago. Using LaTeX is a particularly nice touch, because now I can tell recruiters that I really don't have a Word version of my CV.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes :) Its a step towards changing the way CVs / Resumes are made!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Coincidentally I was experimenting with LaTeX for writing my resume today, so this caught my eye.

In the screenshots, I see the same problem that I was facing with an [offline tool][1]:

There are too many hyphens all over the place! For example in this screenshot: [https://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Classic...](https://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Classic.png)

... you can see "Devel-oped" "function-ality" "con-version" "expo-sure" "communi-cations"

Most other word processors can justify text without too much hyphenation. The TeX system seems to work differently (at least by default).

[1] [https://github.com/mwhite/resume](https://github.com/mwhite/resume)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. We see your point. Will see if there is an alternative for that. Not sure wether we want to do away with hyphens. They look pretty good. [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Classic....](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Classic.pdf) we will get back to you on this. thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It looks potentially a very good application, however, I'm unable to sign up as I use a personalised domain and get this message:

Incorrect domain of Email-id! (only gmail, yahoo, msn, outlook, rediff, hotmail are supported for now).

Do you have plans to support a greater number of domains soon?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes. this is basically to stop people from signing up from mailinator kind of email ids. For now you can either use a gmail, yahoo, msn, rediff, hotmail or even do OAuth signin from facebook & linkedin. You can even try without sign- up :)

<comment><USER6> I feel a bit insulted that I can't sign up with my own domain. That's a bad move.

<comment><USER7> This. I use my own domain for all of my email, and don't like to give out my gmail email address. This is a really bad idea, and should be one of your top priorities to be changed. Getting "bad" emails is part of the cost of doing business, so stop hiding behind the "it costs us money to send emails" line. So what?! You are eliminating users by doing this, which in the long run costs you WAY more than sending to some non-existent emails. Just validate the email addresses so you know they exist, and maybe re-check in 30 days - that would probably eliminate most of the "testing" emails from your system.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes. we realize that we might loose some users just for the sake of not having an email acc wit a popular provider. for some reason we assumed that users would have an acc with one of them and use it or try without signup..we dint think of the users who would want to signup but with an alternate email of theirs. back to drawing rooms on this! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wrote my post University CV in LaTeX using TeXnicCenter/MikTeK because I have used LaTeX for my thesis and I liked the output compared to Word. Then recently I had to rewrite it completely in English and since I had no LaTeX system installed on my computer I tried to used the Europass CV [http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/it/documents/curriculum- vi...](http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/it/documents/curriculum-vitae) It is a nice system because you can edit it online, it saves information in your browser so you can continue editing it and you can even reupload the PDF and repopulate the fields (it seems to have additional XML data inside). Unfortunately I resisted just a month using it (I didn't like the spacing/format) and then decided to completely rewrite the CV (this time using Libre Office).

This is interesting, and maybe I'll give it a try, but how are you planning to monetize it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for giving it a try :) For the monetizing bit. Frankly we have no idea! we wanted people to LaTeX and make amazing resumes. We are thinking hard on how to keep this going. Premium templates, Paid publicly hosted resumes are some of the ideas we have. Not sure what way we will be treading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting concept. There are a lot of cv builders on the market, building some high quality premium cv's could be a viable business but getting noticed is quite hard so pushing the LaTeX angle on the site might be a good way to find a niche.

(disclaimer I am the cofounder of sharelatex.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the feedback :) we have been thinking on how to push it. Its time saving, quality is amazing. We want to leverage LaTeX usage but people outside academia are not very aware of it. But we will rethink about it!

<comment><USER10> What about markdown? As long as the service is new, I would be scared of having my CV depended on your app. Yes, I know LaTeX, I also know it's a pain to set up if you are applying "non standard" formatting.

By the way, I don't know where are you from, but this tool looks cool enough for Nordic countries. In particular, you could target easily carrier centers in Danish universities ([http://bss.au.dk/knowledge-exchange/career- centre/](http://bss.au.dk/knowledge-exchange/career-centre/)). These centers offer free advice for students' CV. I see this service being advised or even used there (like the students upload his CV on the system and gets help virtually).

<comment><USER11> My CV is based off of this project:

[http://mwhite.github.io/resume/](http://mwhite.github.io/resume/)

I write it in Markdown, and then build it into both a PDF and HTML. Then I use Github Pages to publish both with a simple push.

<comment><AUTHOR> We preffered LaTeX because of its stunning results. You should look at sample resume we created [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Modern.p...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Modern.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Leadersh...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Leadership.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Euro.pdf](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Euro.pdf)

<comment><USER11> This project converts Markdown to LaTeX to PDF.

<comment><AUTHOR> oops sorry for the premature reply. too much hap in a day :( a wysiwyg / rte is something we worked hard towards since that was the most easiest way to fill in data. we will have a closer look at it and get back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's one good looking website. And you can skip all registrations, go straight for the meat, which is also great. Are those templates all your own design?

Unfortunately, the preview doesn't work for me. Do you have some problems or is it a matter of only half-filling the form?

BTW What's "Pincode" in the contacts section? Zip/postal code?

EDIT: No, got it. You need to click save on each section. Unfortunately it doesn't handle non-ascii characters.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Clicking on the save is not very evident. While once you know that you need to click on save that info is redundant and hence we have kept it hidden when you are not on the form. We are thinking of ways of making it more evident the first time. For the non-ascii bit. We are in beta (just a month being public). We are working on making it perfect! :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is the summary: 1\. handle non-ascii characters 2\. check if we can do something about hyphens 3\. try and make tex script downloadable 4\. make click of save after data entry evident the first time 5\. personal should not be a mandatory section 6\. make delete of objective intuitive 7\. fix date format display on UI 8\. add latex packages in credits page (sorry missed that :-/) Please feel free to add if we missed something... Keep em comin! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> 7 & 8 is fixed and is online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> 'Date Display Type' under 'Settings' should have consistent sample date:

10/2/2013 [Numeric]

10/Dec/2013 [Short Month]

10/December/2013 [Long Month]

Probably there's a typo in first sample. Also DD > 12 helps unambiguously identify DD from MM.

<comment><USER14> Additionally, the second and third "date display type" are not common at all (to the point that they seem made-up). For common date formats check CLDR data: [http://st.unicode.org/cldr- apps/v#/en/Gregorian/562f98c4c6b2...](http://st.unicode.org/cldr- apps/v#/en/Gregorian/562f98c4c6b2e321)

Obviously, date formats are different for each locale; en-US: MM/DD/YYYY, en- GB: DD/MM/YYYY, de-DE: DD.MM.YYYY.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes. we realize that. currently you can configure it to DD/MM/YYYY, DD/MMM/YYYY, DD/<full month>/YYYY & choose to compute durations between dates. we will give more configurations soon. thank you for your time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why would I not use this in place of ShareLatex?

[https://www.sharelatex.com/user/subscription/plans](https://www.sharelatex.com/user/subscription/plans)

I know this is focused on a specific domain, but you have serious competition with these dudes.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) We are in a specific domain and understand the problems better 2) You dont need to know LaTeX to use our site. 3) LaTeX is code you will need to maintain it while here its just data that needs to be updated. 4) Changing template in LaTeX can be hard, its a re-write, here it would be 2-3 clicks 5) we will introduce custom templates which you will not find anywhere :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very similar to this one: [http://cvmadeeasy.com](http://cvmadeeasy.com) Pro: no need to register, you can re-upload your CV later on to modify it. Con: there is only one template, for the moment.

And the design is inspired from moderncv, a great LaTeX package :)

<comment><AUTHOR> nice indeed :) all the best! when you say inspired its not LaTeX underneath?

<comment><USER16> Thanks :)

At first it was using LaTeX to produce the PDF, but now it is just HTML/CSS templating, and the pdf rendering is done using wkhtmltopdf.

Actually, handling special characters was one of the reasons to switch to HTML.

<comment><AUTHOR> oh ok. We will try to stick with LaTeX :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Something's wrong with the fonts. Anything I bash out using the "Classic" template comes out typeset in Computer Modern, rather than Century Gothic as outlined in the example.

Any chance to make an option to download the LaTeX code for manual tailoring?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just dropin a mail (through contact us) requesting for the Tex script. We will be happy to provide it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> _Have a look at some of our awesome templates_

…which use hyphen in date ranges

<comment><USER2> I guess not even LaTeX users can be expected to have any form of typographical training. After all, they usually tell you that LaTeX handles everything automagically far better than you could do on your own ;-)

<comment><USER19> _After all, they usually tell you that LaTeX handles everything automagically far better than you could do on your own ;-)_

I got bit by propaganda too last year.

I am a little nervous at the moment because I am picking up latex again in some weeks after months of not using it and I wonder what has changed and what I have forgotten since then.

<comment><AUTHOR> Go for it! You would not repent it for sure :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How different is this from the existing options like Resumonk? [0]

[0] [http://www.resumonk.com/resume_templates](http://www.resumonk.com/resume_templates)

<comment><AUTHOR> We haven't come across anyone who uses LaTeX for creating your resume and is free. And why is LaTeX so special? Here are a few reasons: [http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex](http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex) and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX)

<comment><USER20> I know the significance of LaTex as I use it regularly for my work. I am not sure what something Resumonk uses - doesn't look like LaTex. Great, so LaTex seems to be the niché.

Have you seen templates hosted at "LaTex Templates"? [0] I would be curious to know if you're using them or plan to use them in the future.

[0] [http://www.latextemplates.com/](http://www.latextemplates.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes they usually use HTML and then convert it to PDF. This leads to a lot of problems in alignment etc & the print quality is also not great. And for the LaTeX templates. We are currently using existing templates. We plan to allow create custom templates soon :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice work!

Suggestion: A lot of requests going to the server when creating a resume. Use local storage for storing the data and send it to the server once when user clicks the save button.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are thinking of local storage. There were multiple challenges related to it. Sending all data at once would make save slower. and when you save some small change a lot of data would have to be resaved at once. By splitting the data save into chunks we thought would give best performance - user experience balance. We will rethink on this and get back to you. thank you for your time :)

<comment><USER21> There is overhead for every request, one large request is generally faster than several small ones of the same size.

You have to be smart to send the data that is changed or client side compression is another option.

<comment><AUTHOR> by chunking data to be saved we dont have to send all the data at all. so when you are saving personal info your position related data is not sent to server. but we send all personal related data again to save. this we thought reduced lot of complexity on the backend and gave best user experience by reducing number of clicks for saving data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great tool for academics! Cool that you can add special sections like patents.

(disclosure: we are building a tool for researchers to write better papers: bohr.launchrock.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Amazing :) you should have a look at our credits page [https://www.cvsintellect.com/public/page/credits](https://www.cvsintellect.com/public/page/credits) on what we used to build this tool. You can ask for any further information which we will try our best to provide them! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Some insights on how to make a good resume: [http://practicaltypography.com/resumes.html](http://practicaltypography.com/resumes.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the post. we will have a look at it and get back. we have tried to incorporate as many professional cv "rules" as we could.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Any chance of opensourcing this? This could be great as a tool for teams that participate in tenders that have common projects (link against project database).

<comment><AUTHOR> We are thinking about this. We want to open-source most of the stuff but not the security related code. Infact we have started an open-source project to teach our learning from the project [http://cvsintellect.tumblr.com/post/57157924548/open- source-...](http://cvsintellect.tumblr.com/post/57157924548/open-source-at- cvsintellect). We will think a bit more on this and get back to you. Thanks for your interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The template previews don't work for me: if I click on a template picture, I get a preview image of about the same size as the thumbnail I clicked on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. For now you can use these links for template previews: [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Modern.p...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Modern.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Leadersh...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Leadership.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Euro.pdf](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Euro.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Standard...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Standard.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Article....](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Article.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Classic....](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Classic.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Contempo...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Contemporary.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Urbane.p...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample- resumes/Urbane.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How to I delete Objectives section? I am in 'Manage Sections' but how do I delete it?

<comment><AUTHOR> just dont fill anything in that section it wont appear on your resume! :)

<comment><USER13> 'Remove Custom Section' \- So Objective is not custom section. Hmmm.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes. we will remember to make it more intuitive. Thank you for your interest!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is very good, but there does not seem to be any way to download the tex script?

<comment><AUTHOR> [copied from below post] just create your resume and drop in a mail through contact us and we will send you the tex script :)

<comment><USER26> Sure, but consider adding a feature to download the tex script.

<comment><AUTHOR> surely! thank you for your time :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Great app! Is it possible to have the LaTeX code generated ?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes as we mentioned in one of our above comments just create your resume and drop in a mail through contact us and we will send you the tex script.</comment></comment>


U.S.: 62 mpg for cars by 2025 - <AUTHOR> http://chicagobreakingbusiness.com/2010/10/u-s-plan-calls-for-62-m-p-g-by-2025.html

<comment><USER2> It always irks me that in 1908 the Model T Ford got 25 MPG and now over 100 years later we are barely doing any better.

In 1993 Ben Rosen, (former chairman of Caltech as well as Compaq Computer) founded Rosen Motors with his brother Harold, and by 1997 had a car in testing that could achieve 45-80 mpg ( <http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-18675990.html> ) It was a really cool idea. Sadly a number of issues killed the company even though initially funded with $24M. Still, 15 years ago this 2025 goal might have been met if only their business model was better thought out.

Stepping off my soapbox... feet nice & clean.

<comment><USER3> According to Wikipedia the Model T had a curb weight of 1,200 pounds. Needless to say it didn't have, oh, seat belts, let alone a whole bunch of safety features that add serious weight to modern cars of its class.

Compare to, say, a ~2,600 lb 2003-8 Toyota Corolla that gets equal or better gas mileage.

<comment><USER2> True, it was a much lighter car, but it also lacked the high-tech machining that we see today. That such huge advances were made in all aspects but mileage is somewhat telling as to the priorities of the industry. Sell cars & sell gas, lots of it.

Once public outcry for better mileage got loud enough (in the last decade basically) have we finally seen greater increases in MPG. Of course the oil & auto companies still fight mandatory MPG improvement legislation tooth & nail.</comment></comment></comment>


Benchmarking Load Balancers: Nginx, HAProxy, Envoy, Traefik, and ALB - <AUTHOR> https://www.loggly.com/blog/benchmarking-5-popular-load-balancers-nginx-haproxy-envoy-traefik-and-alb/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious if anyone has a theory on why Envoy comes out so far ahead of the rest in term of throughput</comment>


Google's Experimental Homepage Fades To A Single Word  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/05/googles-experimental-homepage-fades-to-a-single-word/ <comment><USER2> Do that many HN readers use the Google homepage anymore? My searches are all entirely through my browser search field.

It seems like a cool feature for "power users" but I'd think that most people that still use the homepage would be newer users.

<comment><USER3> I go a step further and use FF's nifty "Add a Keyword for this Search..." feature (Right click in the Google search box and pick that option).

The keyword that I pick is usually a single letter - G for Google, A for Amazon, I for IMDB, W for wikipedia.

I completely remove the search field from FF's toolbar. To search Google, its Alt (or Apple) + L (focus shifts to search box) type g followed by search terms. Similar for every other keyword I have defined

<comment><USER4> Unless you find yourself short on screen space, or frequently have to type really long URLs, the Ctrl+K combination to get straight to the keyword box is equally useful for those who use one search engine (Google in my case) significantly more than the others. I don't know what the Mac equivalent would be.

<comment><USER5> > ...the Ctrl+K combination to get straight to the keyword box is equally > useful for those who use one search engine...

It's actually not. When typing in either the keyword box or the URL box, it shows similar previous searches in a dropdown. The URL box's method is superior:

For suggestions, the keyword box does a "StartsWith" query against your previous searches. The URL box does a "Contains" query.

The keyword box has a delay between when you stop typing and when previous searches are displayed. The URL box does not.

(Firefox 3.0. Can't speak for other versions.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me a while back I was experimenting with a UI fading trick I called "proximity". UI elements would be faded out proportional to how far away the mouse pointer is. In my own jQuery-like API it looks like this:

            // Ramp up element opacity as mouse gets closer
    	jf('#foodiv').resizable().proximity( {
    		mousenear : function(el,distance){
    			var _opacity = distance/600;
    			jfutil.setElementOpacity( el, _opacity );
    		}
    	});

I'm guessing someone has already made a jQuery plugin to do something similar.

</comment><comment><USER7> I noticed this earlier today. 95% of the time I use Google I use the search bar, but earlier today I went to the Google homepage expecting to click on a link - I thought something was wrong with the page and/or Safari at first. It took a few moments before I moved the mouse and everything faded in.

If it confused me, I'd have to wonder what less experienced users' reactions might be...

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting, considering, most people still haven't found out that you don't have to click the "Search" button for the query to execute.

<comment><USER9> Really? I didn't realize most people were that ignorant. I've always typed then hit enter and everyone I know does as well.

Anyway....

<comment><USER10> Many people also click the "go" button after typing a URL into the address bar of a browser.

<comment><USER11> I only use that button when I copy/paste a URL using the mouse.

<comment><USER12> Chrome's address bar provides the insanely awesome right-click -> "Paste and go" option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is the single word really necessary? I mean, it already says "google.com" up in the URL bar, so you know what you're looking at.

<comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure that in user tests most people don't know what the URL bar is.</comment></comment>