Why 90% of Startups Fail  - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2013/02/04/why-startups-fail/ <comment><USER2> This is a terrible example of an infographic. The VERY LEAST the person who created it is to do side by side comparisons.

Comparisons should be done on a similarity basis. You don't compare apples to oranges, and you don't compare Shopkick to Airtime.

Such a simple rule. And in explaining why startups fail, this "infographic" is of no use. At all. There are no quantifiable data, or in any fact, useful information.

All this "infographic" does is to present some historical facts in a colourful manner. And is of no use to people willing or wanting to dissect a startup for reasons of failure.

This is making me irrationally angry. BRB</comment>


Ask HN: Worthwhile/badly needed open source projects? - <AUTHOR>

I remember reading (years ago) a list of what someone thought were projects that were badly needed. It stood out because "PDF Viewer" was high on the list because at the time there weren't great choices on many mobile platforms or all OSes.<p>In your opinions, if someone wanted to spend time on free/open source work that may not be glamorous but would really be a benefit to the world at large, what should that person consider? <comment><USER2> The Free Software Foundation maintains a priority list of projects they think are valuable in the way you mention.

<http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, great! I do remember checking this out at some point. The focus seems to be on having FOSS versions of free/freemium applications that may exist as closed-source entities now (which doesn't surprise me). It'd be nice to see another list of real needs or improvements for other reasons besides lock-in or licensing philosophies. Although, if I wanted a list like that I guess I could just look for problems that startups are actively working on.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's another application for our technology? - <AUTHOR>

My co-founder and I are developing hardware that will read diagnostic information from the OBD2 port on consumer automobiles and upload it to the internet via WiFi once the vehicle is parked. We are currently targeting customers who want an easy way to monitor their vehicle fleets for fuel theft, but we would really appreciate any other ideas regarding application of our technology. Essentially our system retrieves diagnostic information from vehicles (fuel information, engine statistics, etc, generic list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OBD-II_PIDs), and then creates web-accessible graphs with the data.<p>Is there data from your car that you'd really like to see? Let us know so we can build it for you! And if you're in the Boulder/Denver area of Colorado and have a car fleet, let us know if you're interested in acquiring a beta device to try out the system (my email is in my profile). We appreciate any advice! <comment><USER2> Hey Mojoe!

It's great that someone is finally doing this! Which company are you founding? Is it Fleetio or Automatic or something else? I've been trying to make a prototype of something similar to this using a raspberry pi and an OBD-II interface. Regardless, I've been kicking this idea around for some time so I'll toss a couple ideas at you that I've come up with.

-Environmental footprint/impact. OBDII offers emissions information (I think) and you could do some really cool "green" stuff with it if you wanted to go that direction.

-Could you make an easy-to-use API for the device and sell it to developers? This could be profitable, but might create competition for you...

-Online car problem troubleshooting? Upload the error code and specific car information to your site, and you can diagnose the car without having to pay for an expensive mechanic to look at it right away. (Kind of like bargl's idea)

-Assuming it could interface with a mobile device, you could mount a tablet in your car and display realtime information

-Reminders such as oil change or similar maintenance

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi msprague, thanks for the enthusiasm! We're actually discussing possible approaches to a public API for developers. We're still in early development and don't have a name yet, but if you send me a note at the email address in my profile we'll keep you up to date on our progress.

<comment><USER2> I don't think that there's an option to make your HN email public (yours isn't listed), so if you reply to this comment with it I can email you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, noob mistake. stech.joe+hn at gmail dotcom

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Would love to learn more. We have a fleet management software product (Fleetio - <http://www.fleetio.com>) and would love to discuss future integration capabilities. tsummerville at fleetio dot com

<comment><AUTHOR> I've seen your product, it's very slick. We'll definitely contact you about possible integration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don´t know what information is available (and english isn´t my first language, so I may not know some terms), but off the top of my head, I think some performance data could be used to know if the engine needs adjustments (comparing fuel comsumption against what is expected for the usage might help), alerts for when the brakes need replacement, the locations where the car was turned off (to track if employees went where they were supposed to at the time time they were supposed to (a problem at my job)).

      Probably could have worded it better, but I´m out of practice with the language.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like the idea of comparing fuel consumption to usage -- this could be useful to hypermilers <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy-efficient_driving>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think there are a lot of things you could have this upload. Any sort of tracking, door locking/unlocking, automatic pushing of engine data.

You could also create a user interface that maps and assigns people to the cars they are using to work with drivers and get stats on the drivers in the fleet (i.e. who drives like crap).

On a larger scale you could also map when cars seem to get issues and create a metric of common issues for cars so that it could improve diagnostics in the future. Man this is just a really awesome idea!

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice ideas! I like the concept of mapping drivers to vehicle stats, and creating a database of issues that occur under specific conditions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You could do some kind of weather app with the ambient air temperature and air pressure readings?

<comment><USER7> Yeah!

Now that Weather is in the game with apps for the two most popular smartphone platforms, Kenny is looking to the next frontier: cars.

Voice-activated weather apps for the car would be "very useful and specific to the driver," says Kenny. "This will be a very interesting platform for us."

>> [http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/talkingtech/201...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/talkingtech/2013/03/06/weather- channel-now-bigger-on-digital/1949345/)

;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What kind of information is available? It sounds really cool btw.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, we're excited about it! This is a list of many of the parameters that can be obtained: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OBD-II_PIDs>

There are many more manufacturer-specific parameters, but we don't currently deal with those.</comment></comment>


One electron universe - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe <comment><USER2> On a tangential note, according to QFT, there is only one 'electron field' permeating the entire spacetime; individual electrons are 'excitations' of that field.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always loved this idea. It's seemingly completely ridiculous but completely astounding at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's a visualization of that electron in action: [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TuringMachine.html](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TuringMachine.html)</comment>


Micro-Multinationals: Why Slide and RockYou are tapping global talent pools - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_6376320

<comment><USER2> If it weren't for visa issues, we'd tap into this pool, too.

<comment><USER3> I like the idea in general, but it's probably not fair game to make statements that imply something false.</comment></comment>


Airplanes, oxygen and the media - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2009/09/25/askthepilot335/

<comment><USER2> While I appreciate the article, it's somewhat hard to take the author seriously when he begins by angrily pointing out that it's impossible for pilots to adjust air flow within an airplane, and then goes on to describe all the ways in which pilots can adjust air flow within an airplane.

<comment><USER3> I'd like to note that those are two different adjustments. The claim is that pilots adjust the mix of fresh and recirculated air. The author is talking about adjusting the incoming flow volume of new air. Airplanes don't have "recirculate" the way a car does for max A/C, and so to talk about the mixture of fresh/recirc air is meaningless.

All those little air valves above the seats in a plane are letting in only conditioned air newly drawn from the atmosphere through the engines, with no recirculated air mixed in. The pilot can change the total amount of new air coming in, but that's not the same as somehow making only 20% of that incoming flow fresh air. The only place the air already in the plane is going is straight overboard, through valves run by the pressure controller.

(I'd also point out that the fuel savings from a low-flow setting will be minimal, because modern large high-bypass turbofan engines can bleed a LOT of air without much of a performance cost. The bigger the airplane and its engines, the smaller the savings.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "If the original title ends with the name of the site, please strip it off, because the site name will be displayed after the link anyway. If the title begins with the site name, you can leave it on if you prefer."

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

this person's submissions often have this problem, so i think it's time for a reminder.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops! Thanks and noted :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Teaching kids to code using the Raspberry Pi and JavaScript - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
I am teaching a free course to 16 kids, ages 12 to 15 at my local library to program, using the Raspberry Pi and JavaScript.
So far, I've held 2 out of 7 days, with a new course taking place every 3 weeks. I am writing all of the materials before each course, aiming to have the material ready about a week before we meet. The content is released under a CC license, and publised at http://kodegenet.no/#/courses/courses_raspi (Norwegian), including text, figures and screencasts.
The general idea is that each group of 4 kids will build a remote controlled car (with on-board Raspbery Pi computer, and hosting a Wifi HotSpot). The Pi will control the motors, and expose a webapp that can be accessed via a computer, or a smartphone. THe intent, being that its a fun project that can serve as the basis of getting the kids to grasp what technologies that are powering our IT world, while not getting bogged down with too much boring details.
It's a bit of an ambitious project and I have no idea if we will be able to meet the deadline in 7 x 2 hours, but I think it will be great fun for the kids regardless :)
What do you, the HN crowd, think? I would love to hear your feedback and thoughts! <comment><USER2> This is really cool. It's great to see more programs for kids to learn to code and/or create interesting things.

Filming and asking the students what they think before and after the program might be a good way to get some great feedback and be useful for future promotion.

</comment><comment><USER3> That is the kind of stuff that should be in the school curriculum! Good on you for doing something cool and useful for the kids.</comment>


A new multi-branch algorithm to render rational-exponent Mandelbrot fractals - <AUTHOR> http://www.arcfn.com/2011/12/new-multi-branch-algorithm-to-render.html <comment><USER2> I'm kind of worried that the images you are generating are just artifacts of your approach rather than getting at the fundamental nature of what is going on. The first thing that worries me is that your fractals don't look properly Mandelbrot-ish to my eye. Admittedly I've only ever looked at integer power Mandelbrot-like sets before, but all that I've ever looked at were either completely uninteresting or had snowmen somewhere.

(I'm afraid I'm having a hard time putting into words what's bugging me, and alas I need to work, so I'm skipping what would be a much longer middle section to this post in an ideal world.)

So I'd really like to see what happens if you make a particular branch choice and stick to that branch, for non-standard branches. And I'd like to see Julia sets. And I will try to get on implementing that stuff myself when I get the chance. :)

<comment><USER3> I understand what you're saying, My motivation is that I want to find the "fundamental nature" rather than artifacts or pretty pictures. The regular z^2.5+c fractal has obvious artifacts when you pass over the branch cut, and I hope that my technique is more "true". (These terms are all hard to define, but I think I mean the same thing you do.) I've explored different escape bounds, for instance, to make sure that isn't causing artifacts. (The bound causes huge artifacts with negative exponents, by the way.)

It bothers me too that my fractals are less Mandelbrot-ish. I suspect this is due to all the branches overlapping and obscuring the details. I'm currently working on a couple ways to separate out these branches. Unfortunately just picking a different branch doesn't help, since it just moves the discontinuities. One plan is to display the fractal on the Riemann surface in 3D to separate the branches. The other plan is to crawl along the edge so you can continuously move from branch to branch without jumps. Julia sets are also on my list of things to do if I ever have time.

If you do experiment with this, let me know what you find out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good stuff! Along with Saupe and Pietgen, his landscapes (fractals rendered in 3D) gave me a necessary fix as needed. Nice to see him back in to it.

<comment><USER3> I think you have me confused with someone else? I haven't done anything with 3D landscapes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find it odd that using both branches is "new", or more precisely, that people weren't doing it before. I would have guessed this would be missing a lot of information.

And I agree with one of the commenters in the post: you could get a decent speed up (at the loss of "truthness" of the image) by choosing randomly the branch as you iterate (or for every point getting only a fixed depth-number of iterations with randomly chosen branches.)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the comments (I'm the author). I did a bunch of searching and couldn't find anyone else who has used these techniques. I'm sure someone will let me know if this has all been done before.

I haven't had much luck yet trying to randomly select branches; the image comes out terribly noisy. But a combination of fixed-depth and random might work; I'll give it a try.

Edit: in case anyone is wondering why I used C# for this... I started off all nice and open-sourcey using OpenGL, GLUT, C++, and Linux, but discovered that my graphics card locked up, a problem that might be fixed if I upgraded to the latest version of Linux. I decided not to spend my evening upgrading, so decided to use OpenGL on Windows instead. Rather than install the whole gcc envirnment, I figured I'd use the free Visual Studio C++ Express, which worked fine. However, it was difficult to get even a primitive UI with GLUT, so I figured I'd switch to Windows Forms, which lets me create simple dialogs easily. But it turns out that Visual Studio C++ insanely doesn't support Intellisense, which makes it very hard to use Windows Forms. So I decided to try C#, which is working out okay so far - it's extremely similar to Java. For the 3D fractal display (which I hope to finish soon), I was going to use DirectX, but discovered after a lot of investigation that it's been replaced by something called XNA. And to use that, I need the free Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone (which despite the name also works on the desktop). So far that seems to be working okay, but I may end up rendering the 3D fractals in POV-Ray or something.

Now that I write that down, it seems like I've tried a crazy number of different software stacks. Does anyone else end up doing this?

<comment><USER5> I use plain C and a small set of plotting functions I created to generate PPM images. If I were to create 3D stuff I'll probably settle for generating POV files automatically or something along this lines... But my usual thinking is: get it done. If it is open sourcey, better, if you need some proprietary stuff and you get it done (and it's for you!), what's the problem?

Also, Montecarlo things have this noisiness, comes with the algorithm :/ Usually it is a tradeoff: I have an algorithm that creates sharp images of bifurcation loci, but is awfully slow. If I turn on the randomness, it can go between 4 and 10 times faster, but the images are no longer sharp and crisp. The advantage is that adding this kind of "Montecarloing" is just adding a ?: condition in some for, together with a special flag and a mod operation: easy to do and no need to add nasty inner loops!</comment></comment></comment>


Why the iPhone Will Fail - <AUTHOR> http://adage.com/columns/article?article_id=117355 <comment><USER2> 2 points:

\- When anyone writes a story about something failing, they need to define what they mean by fail. Do they mean loose Apple millions, or not sell a zillion a week? I suppose the fairest means of judging failure here, is to use Apple's target of 10m in the first 12 months. Which will of course require the pundits wait 12 months before declaring failure...

\- In The Design (nee Philosophy) of Everyday Things, Donald Norman cites a designer who says it takes about six iterations of a new technology before it reaches a state where it has had most of the issues worked out and is ready for public acceptance, but because of the initial failures, most new technologies never get used more than once or twice (I'm unable to find the quote in the book currently, but can look again if anyone is interested). To put this in context, I don't think touchscreens have done their 6 iterations yet, and the current failures are making pursuing this difficult. Some things _are_ the way of the future, but they require someone to risk failure in order to get them there.

</comment><comment><USER3> He neglected to mention a massive convergent success: phones and digital cameras.

<comment><USER4> I was just going to mention that.

Instead, I'll mention that he's clearly eating his own dogfood: press coverage of the iPhone has been mostly glowing, and he expects success (readership) through his divergent opinion.

I guess it worked. I read his article (up until it became obvious that he was purposefully overlooking the cellphone camera counterexample), and I wouldn't have read it, had it sounded positive. I don't have time to read any more iPhone Messiah stories.

I feel the same way about the iPhone that I do about almost all Apple products. They're great, they're usually the best, but I'm a freaking pobrecito. I can buy a new surfboard, custom-shaped for my body by the best pro in Ecuador, for half the price of an iPhone. A bargain-basement cellphone is free with even the cheapest plans, I have a $60 mp3 player that works just fine, and I've built capable linux laptops for $300.

I couldn't care less if the iPhone flops and I'm not the kind of person to buy one. But if I had to bet, well ... I don't want to bet against Apple right now.

</comment></comment><comment> patrickg-zill I notice that the author does not touch on the success of the Blackberry devices. Further, the reason "convergence" devices never work is that only failed products are tagged as being about convergence - if it creates a new market segment, then it is not a converged device.

<comment><USER5> Precisely. Products do not fail _because_ they are converged. A product will fail or succeed based on how well it is able to satisfy users' needs, etc.

<comment><USER6> One reason they may not satisfy a user's needs is simply because they're converged. No one wants a cellphone/coffee mug or a pocket knife/baseball, no matter how "well" converged. One reason the iPod was so great was precisely because it did one thing. I do agree with the author that convergence is the biggest risk, I just think Jobs can handle it. He's hyper aware of these issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was talking to one of the Iphone sw team members last weekend, and according to him, what is phenomenal about the phone is the UI - unlike anything out there. A complete change over all other phones on the market. He says the tv commercials do not come close to capturing what it is like to use the phone. We'll find out soon enough.

<comment><USER8> Any idea (from anyone) on how easy it is to use while not looking at it? Muscle memory, tactile feedback, sounds, mistake avoidance/forgiveness?

<comment><USER7> The Ipnone sw team member mentioned that because the keys are created as graphics with the touch screen, it would be very hard to dial the phone while driving - not recommended. So I don't think there is any kind of tactile feedback, but I'm sure there is an audio one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure I agree with him, but his thesis isn't entirely mistaken, and the guy (Al Ries) has been around the block a few times. I think the main problem with his argument is that the iPhone isn't _primarily_ a convergence device.

</comment><comment><USER6> _"car phone...You might have thought it would eventually converge with the automobile. It did not."_

Tell that to the companies making millions on onStar and similar services. Though I'll admit it took a while.

</comment><comment><USER9> steve jobs has failed massively before and it never stopped him. when john carmack's Daikatana failed, he had over 20 years of experience in the game industry -- people like them don't stop because one of the many, many things they've worked on in their long careers don't pan out precisely they way they would have liked. thank god for people like that.

i'm certainly going to wait at least a few months to get an iphone, though.

also, i'm skeptical of people who put raw ascii characters like "~ ~ ~" instead of using an HR element. this is HTML, people, use what's available. scoble does it too and i always mentally discount punditry bullshit from people who don't understand the medium they make predictions about.

<comment><USER10> 1) He probably couldn't use HTML 2) HR sucks unless you can style it. 3) You don't need to understand HTML to be a good pundit 4) The tildes look nicer anyway. 5) The...

Actually screw it, I'm just going to downvote you.

<comment><USER11> It is just being nitpicky instead of engaging the substance of an argument, but if you ever go to a blog and see that the writer doesn't know how to use the blockquote tag, don't you just think, "This guy doesn't know what s/he's doing…"?

<comment><AUTHOR> This guy doesn't seem to know much about HTML, and yet... I think I'd consider that he's a guy who does know a thing or two about what he's doing, in his areas of expertise:

<http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/experiments.html></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Meet the Dumbest (or Unluckiest) CFO of a Venture Capital Firm - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital-cfo/ <comment><USER2> Or luckiest, considering that he or she will not be named, and once again, someone gets away with absolutely unacceptable behavior.

</comment><comment><USER3> which company? What's the point of publishing then?</comment>


Ask HN: What's up with performance? - <AUTHOR>

I've noticed a lot of broken connections and laggy performance today. Is it just me?  Seems a bit rough yesterday.  It's a sunday which usually has relatively light traffic for most sites, so I'm wondering what is going on... <comment><USER2> HN is probably up for another upgrade.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468595>

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe we take unrestrained pleasure in news for hackers on Valentine's Day. :)

Hmm. But no, it's not just you.</comment>


Show HN: Pump Ups, Birchbox for the supplement industry - <AUTHOR> http://pumpups.com

<comment><USER2> This is a great idea. I think you should also give a little better description of what will be included in the box. I probably would have bought it if I knew what brands were being delivered to me. For example I have been wanting to try Syntha-6, which I see is in your photo, but I have no idea if that is what I would be getting. This may be part of your business model.

</comment><comment><USER3> Would you consider having an ingredient blacklist? I, and most likely other bodybuilders, do not want specific ingredients in our supplements (i.e. artificial sweeteners, etc). Or this could be an opportunity to have a different line of pump ups as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> On the homepage it says $5/month and then $10/month on registration. What's the thinking here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well we've A/B tested several pages, and showing $5/month + shipping on the homepage converted better than just $10/month with free shipping. We may just change it to say $10/month with free shipping so there is no confusion.

<comment><USER5> I'd say if $5/month + shipping is testing better, just make the checkout page say $5 + $5 shipping and maybe put the $5 shipping somewhere on the homepage as well in the description text.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. It just seems like you're pulling a fast one....as a potential customer all I really focus on is that dollar amount per month....I don't really factor shipping into the cost of your service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the feedback. Just had an internal discussion here and we all agreed that even though it may convert better, we don't want customers to have that feeling of shadiness when they get to the checkout page. We've changed it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Career advice for a family member? - <AUTHOR> My uncle is in his 50's. He graduated with a B.S. in EE and went into sales, where he excelled. About 6 years ago he got laid off and has been struggling to find a job-- he can't even get interviews despite a stellar resume. He went through some health problems and what not but continues to apply to jobs. Despite the fact that he was at director level in his past jobs, he is open to entry level jobs in sales/marketing. What should he do? <comment><USER2> By 2020, 40% of US workers will be doing gig work of some sort. He needs to be looking for an intermediary service, like UpWork, Textbooks, Task Rabbit or Amazon Flex [https://flex.amazon.com/](https://flex.amazon.com/).

He needs to let go of the idea of having a job per se and go find work that pays.

</comment><comment><USER3> If he's still open to technology, I would recommend picking up Salesforce. As a Salesforce admin with experience working in sales, he could be a valuable asset to a company. The admin certification is not as difficult to pick up and many people within the industry see the industry experience to be a big asset.

</comment><comment><USER4> That sounds similar to my uncle's situation. BS in Engineering, laid off during the recession, health issues.

He's had to take whatever job he can get, currently pretty close to minimum wage. And that's after hundreds of applications since 2009/2010.

Hope they both can find a job (or a better job) soon. I'd like some good advice too.

</comment><comment><USER5> Whats about self-employment? May be your uncle may offer some kind of service or consulting in sales/marketing for businesses or other entrepreneurs? I know some examples when after retirement people started their own business and became successful.

</comment><comment><USER6> Take a civil service exam.

A fifty year old is a dead man walking to any company.</comment>


IOS Swift Tutorial - <AUTHOR> http://jamesonquave.com/blog/developing-ios-apps-using-swift-tutorial/ I'm putting together a set of tutorials as part of the process of learning Swift. I invite anyone and everyone else to join me. <comment><USER2> nice!!! this lingo is so clean and user-friendly as compared to objective-c...and reduces the no of lines substantially.</comment>


Asus made a crypto-mining motherboard that supports up to 20 GPUs - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/30/17408610/asus-crypto-mining-motherboard-gpus <comment><AUTHOR> Asus announced the H370 Mining Master motherboard, which is specifically designed for cryptocurrency mining. It supports up to 20 graphics cards — yes, 20 — along with streamlined connectivity by allowing USB riser cables to plug directly into the PCB over PCIe.</comment>


Show HN: Email that self-destructs when forwarded - <AUTHOR> http://nofwd.com <comment><USER3> Right-click -> Save Image as -> forward to anybody you want

Most email readers block images by default

Disabled persons who rely on screen readers and other assistance technologies just got screwed, thanks.

Answering by quoting your email just got really hard.

Some email services download images for you and don't link to your server.

I've read your email at the office, now I can't read it at home, or on my iPhone, or vice versa.

Your email picture service is down or has server trouble, no recipient can read such mails anymore.

Cryptographic email signing becomes meaningless as the recipient can't parse the signature and message body to verify the hash.

A lot of spam filters might screen out emails that are nothing but an image.

Searching trough email by text will never find those emails because they contain no text.

Devices with small screen sizes (iPhone and the like) can't re-layout the text (as in word wrap), making such image emails really painful to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll try to address as many of these as I can. I've broken a few of these into groups below, as I think they have similar solutions.

====

I) Where's the utility of this tool?

> Right-click -> Save Image as -> forward to anybody you want

1) The purpose of this demo is just to establish if anyone finds this type of service useful. There are many ways to expand this technology so that it becomes far more complex to defeat.

2) Perhaps I've sent this information to many people, but I've automatically watermarked each image. Now I can track the information leak back to you and carry out some more traditional corrective procedures...

3) Maybe this product just isn't for you? Perhaps this product is best suited for companies and government organizations, where clear policies and penalties already provide effective deterrents. This service would just supplement these policy-instruments with additional automated protection, auditing and watermarking.

===

II) Minor technical challenges:

> Most email readers block images by default

It's easy enough to turn images on, in the most widely-used clients. Just looking at my inbox, embedded images are far from uncommon in emails.

> Answering by quoting your email just got really hard.

Answering by quoting email works great, if you're alright with quoting everything. The SMTP integration supports full HTML emails and shows the quoted email very similarly to the way that Gmail does.

====

III) Accessibility vs data protection tradeoffs. These are fine:

> Disabled persons who rely on screen readers and other assistance > technologies just got screwed, thanks.

> Your email picture service is down or has server trouble, no recipient can > read such mails anymore.

====

IV) Solvable problems:

> I've read your email at the office, now I can't read it at home, or on my > iPhone, or vice versa.

This is solveable. See my other comment.

> Searching trough email by text will never find those emails because they > contain no text. Devices with small screen sizes (iPhone and the like) can't > re-layout the text (as in word wrap), making such image emails really > painful to read.

NOFWD keeps an archive of the messages you send through it (which you can choose to delete or disable if you wish.) You can search this.

====

V) Are these really a problem?:

> Some email services download images for you and don't link to your server.

Really? I'd like to know which. Haven't seen this happen yet.

> Cryptographic email signing becomes meaningless as the recipient can't parse > the signature and message body to verify the hash.

> A lot of spam filters might screen out emails that are nothing but an image.

<comment><USER4> I still think the right click save as is still the most troubling. Besides that you missed a couple of points, I'll help identify them here.

-Most people prefer to have emails off to stop the kind of tracking you mentioned in your watermarking point. Advertisers do this all the time.

-Could you elaborate on the quoting? I think the original poster meant that once you SEND a mail through nofwd the receiver cannot easily quote part and reply to you as they could with a text email. I think you're confusing the person doing the quoting with the original sender.

-III) is a matter of personal preference I guess. You mentioned that you see this working in government situations, there's no way they would implement this technology if there was no fallback for their disabled workers. Lawsuits everywhere!

-The archive you keep at nofwd.com - is it viewable for the receiver? I think once again you've confused the person doing the searching.

I'm pretty undereducated on the whole subject, I just noticed a couple things you might want to go back and address in your rebuttal. I hope you find a userbase for your system!

 __Edit: I guess the biggest issue I see with the system is that it takes away a HECK of a lot of great functionality from email (copy-paste, embedded replies, privacy as you must show images, accessibility, etc.) while adding a paper thin layer of security. Anyone can just save a copy of the image, or even screenshot their computer. If it's really critical, they can just manually re-enter the info (assuming its something as trivial as sales numbers or a condensed strategy). It seems like nofwd.com is to emails what drm is to media, something that inconveniences legit users while not stopping people from getting around it at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My weekend project: <http://nofwd.com>

I created this project because I was tired of seeing my friends violate the confidentiality of our private conversations, by constantly forwarding our emails to third parties. As you at HN will understand, 100% unbreakable rights management of digital content is physically impossible. That said, I think that this tool has great value, at least for people who face the same problem that I had.

Currently, you can use this tool manually, via the demo page, or you can integrate with your email client via the SMTP integration method. I'd like to find some way to streamline the setup process for the SMTP integration. Any ideas?

Other applications for this service:

\- Use in addition to email disclaimers and confidentiality agreement footers at the bottom of emails.

\- Watermark emails for tracking purposes.

\- Supplement existing internal corporate policies for information disclosure.

\- Provide additional auditing support for email access-control.

\- Delete email messages after they have been sent.

Caveats:

\- Currently detects all access attempts from the same computer as one single recipient. Likewise, accessing an email account from multiple devices will be detected as multiple recipients. I.e. each computer == one recipient.

\- No real website design yet.

Stack:

Python / Tornado & adisp.py / Nginx / Nginx scripts / Redis / Postgresql

So HN, what do you think?

<comment><USER5> Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C. Voila plaintext (or in your case, a readable screenshot of the plaintext - I've been experimenting with the site meanwhile), let me forward _that_.

Moreover, I very much prefer my e-mail textual - some of my e-mail devices may be severely constrained in bandwidth and screen size; text compresses, transmits and scales way better (also: insert standard accessibility rant here).

Also, what of nomadic users? "Oh, your smartphone already accessed the one copy [for added fun, try "and didn't save it"]? No way to read the e-mail anywhere else, tough luck."

You have addressed the above as caveats - however, there one more thing that bothers me, immensely - the immediate, silent and complete retraction capability: "I never said that" is bad enough, "I never sent you an e-mail like that" would be worse. For dealing with certain people, I like to have a local copy of what was written, just in case they change their mind later. Even if I kept local copies of the screenshots, I like my evidence searchable, too - eyeballing a bunch of images to find a specific e-mail is distinctly suboptimal.

On the other hand, if you are facing the _one exact problem_ of people mindlessly forwarding your e-mail, verbatim, this might be a useful mitigation technique. It's a nice project, but not useful for me - it would solve problems I don't have, while saddling me with other problems I don't want to have.

As for "no real website design" - I actually _like_ the clean and minimal design :)

<comment><USER6> If you read the site, they convert it to an image. Usability for this sucks, no searching, no copying.

<comment><USER7> Nothing can stop someone simply saving the image and sending it as regular email. If it can be read, it can be copied. No point pretending otherwise.

[Edit: fix stray question mark.]

<comment><USER8> Well, you could pursue legal action under the DMCA for those sorts of actions in principle, but other than that, there is no need for a question mark on your first statement.

It is, if you like, the exact problem that copyright enforcement and digital rights management (DRM) have. No matter what you do, if you send me a threat and I really want to forward that to the police department, I can always hit "Print Screen." Simply showing X to me enables me to copy X. If you let me play music out of my headphones, I can always in principle connect my headphone jack to a computer's microphone input and get a lossy-but-acceptable DRM-free copy, because my headphone jack does not implement DRM. (In the early DRMed days of iTunes we used to do this with burning music to CDs, which iTunes allowed.

Just allowing a kid to enter the movie theater allows him to smuggle in a camera and post the video on BitTorrent. Just seeing is always sufficient for lossy copying, if only because we keep a lossy copy in our memories. (I've discussed this elsewhere but I'd prefer not to linkspam myself.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Personally I would hate to receive email like this, if I viewed the email on my phone I won't be able to view it on my work computer. If I'm working from home the next day I won't be able to view the message (ever again!). If I want to view the email in several months time I'm assuming it's highly unlikely I'll be able to.

Maybe there's a market for this, and if so good for you, but my honest feeling is that any desire for such a 'protection' is better solved by either talking to the person on the phone or in person, or getting them to sign an NDA, or if the recipient is so untrustworthy then don't engage with them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Temporary solution: If you have multiple devices, you can create an account on NOFWD, and log into nofwd.com from each device. Now, NOFWD will see all of your devices as a single entity, and not self-destruct your messages that you view. This behavior can be ended by logging out again.

Long term: More generally, I want to expand the fingerprinting and management technology, so that the system can automatically learn users and not flag false-positives. Imagine how Paypal or Facebook detects that you're not logging in from one of your usual locations.

NDAs and other legal contracts are one existing solution to this problem, but those are very slow and heavy-weight. This is meant to be very fast and light- weight. Neither solution is bulletproof. Instead of choosing though, you could use both!

<comment><USER9> The problem with your multiple device solution is that it puts burden on the recipient, who's highly likely to have any idea what NOFWD is. The fingerprinting solution you outline next is highly flakey as well, as it would require a critical mass of users to gather the necessary data, and even then the kind of algorithms you'd need are orders of magnitude more complex than the ones Facebook etc. use, as those catch instances of users logging in from foreign countries (or perhaps states), and would not catch cases where the 3rd party is in the same city, a very likely case.

A typical scenario I imagine is that the recipient will lose the message, and end up emailing or calling back for the same information, which will annoy all parties (or possibly worse, they'll lose the information and ignore it forever), as well as require the information be transmitted more times than usual (something someone security conscious probably won't like).

I hate to be so critical of this service, but I just can't see this being useful. I wouldn't call this hitting a nail with a sledgehammer, it's more like hitting a nail with a six foot ceramic feather.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this really needed?

It really inconveniences the recipient. They cannot copy and paste the email. This can sometimes be important. Often private emails contain usernames, passwords or urls.

You cannot view emails on multiple computers without first yourself going out of the way to register multiple devices..

There are many scenarios where forwarding the email is important. You may want your solicitor to look at it whatever.

It seems to me the best use of this service is just to send people some hate mail as it makes it difficult for laymen computer user to forward it to someone who can do something about it.

Email isn't a secure platform, if you don't want what you write getting out there don't send it, use another medium, avoid sending emails to untrusted people.

Making the email an image means I probably won't read it.. I guess that is one way to stop me from forwarding it.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is that you don't use this for all of your emails, just the ones that you don't want forwarded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd accept it if it had only false negatives in "different person" detection. False positives are not really acceptable with this method now that we've got people using webmail/clients/mobiles.

For example, my client at work is on all the time - it will happily pre-cache all the images. But the same message will be visible on my mobile too - <USER2> happens when I open it there? If I got an error, I'd probably check with website for accessing the same mailbox - what would happen after 2 "forwards" - image deleted?

This is a reality of today's offices, not an edge case I'm afraid. It will also fail for shared email accounts (for example "info" or "support" type destinations). Or auto-forward while someone is on long vacation will do exactly the wrong thing - let someone else read it, but not the real recipient.

</comment><comment><USER12> This has been done a dozen times before.

I worked at Authentica around 1999-2000. They got it working decently enough and were later bought by EMC. <http://www.emc.com/domains/authentica/index.htm>

The problem is that the data can be grabbed by image tools, etc., so you end up getting in a race to hack all sorts of libraries that can grab the screen, save text, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, this solution obviously addressing a burning need. May I ask, were previous solutions free and work on nearly all email clients?

I don't really see any major race happening. The best information grabbing tool already works great - people's eyes. The purpose of this tool is just to make forwarding a little harder, and add auditing and watermarking for environments where this added information can be acted on.

</comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell You're using a CNAME at the root of your domain for your DNS. This is invalid. Anybody who is using the Unbound DNS server and also has DNSSEC verification enabled, will not be able to access your site. All lookups will lead to a SERVFAIL.

</comment><comment><USER6> What is the unique fingerprint made of? If I upgrade my windows software (for example), will I still be able to read the email (which is an image!)

And if I buy a new computer, then import my backed up emails, will I still be able to read it?

</comment><comment><USER13> Just need to find a niche where this doesn't completely piss everyone off. I'm sure they are out there, the government and legal ones you mentioned sound promising.

I also like the sound of the watermarking idea or sending slightly different text to find leaks.

Best way to get adoption of a product make it the law for people to use it!

</comment><comment><USER14> I really feel that this is not what email is for. An email is an historic document, atomic, and linked to a specific time of sending. When you forward a mail, you're not sending that actual mail, you're creating a new mail that references the original. In other words:

web = procedural

email = functional

<comment><USER15> Some email clients allow you to attach the original email as an attachment when you forward/reply rather than embedding the text - I guess in that case you are arguably including a copy of the original.

<comment><USER14> Quite right, and interesting, because you're then sending a copy of the email as defined by MIME. What you're not doing is modifying the original - as soon as you do so, it becomes a different email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Seems redundant, Outlook has that feature built-in.

(try deciphering a mail that went through multiple outlooks)

</comment><comment><USER17> Does IP Address and Mail-Client identification play a role in your reader- fingerprint?

What would this mean for people in your LAN and using the same version of Mail-Client as yours?

</comment><comment><USER18> Lotus Notes has this feature for a long time. You can disable forwarding.

But of course, you cannot prevent anyone from screen printing and forwarding.

</comment><comment><USER19> DRM for email.</comment>


Password storage disclosures - <AUTHOR> https://pulse.michalspacek.cz/passwords/storages <comment><USER2> Nobody seems to be using Argon2 [0].

Argon2 was the winner of the Password Hashing Competition [1].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argon2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argon2)

[1] [http://password-hashing.net/#phc](http://password-hashing.net/#phc)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's essentially a grading system based on:

a) how well passwords are stored - ie hashing algos and options, with plaintext as a fail

b) how well the company communicates the policy - a publicly available password storage policy is required for an 'A'</comment>


Dow 28,000,000 - The Unbelievable Expectations of California's Pension System - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703315404575250822189252384.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTSecond

<comment><USER2> A 10% return is not unbelievable.

Between 9% and 10% per year gets you to 28e6 by 2099.

I would use 6% as a nice conservative number, but I would not sell much business as a fund management sales guy saying that.</comment>


JPMorgan Banked Millions for Ghislaine Maxwell, as It Had for Jeffrey Epstein - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-22/jpmorgan-banked-millions-for-maxwell-as-it-had-for-epstein <comment><USER2> Non-paywall link: [http://archive.today/s5jE9](http://archive.today/s5jE9)</comment>


Show HN: KISS IDE – A simple web based IDE - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/derrybryson/kisside <comment><USER2> Reminds me of Geany, my go-to lightweight IDE before I switched to Sublime, then vim: [https://www.geany.org](https://www.geany.org)

</comment><comment><USER3> humorously, this makes the front page of HN the day I try out Eclipse Che, at the other end of the spectrum.

[http://www.eclipse.org/che/](http://www.eclipse.org/che/)

<comment><USER4> Have you tried the on premise IDE [https://www.eclipse.org/che/docs/setup/getting- started/](https://www.eclipse.org/che/docs/setup/getting-started/) ? It's kinda cool but I don't see any pricing. Awesome if it is free!

<comment><USER5> It is free but the IDE isn't exactly finished yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The ultimate "KISS" IDE for me is vim :)

But nice try!

<comment><USER7> how is vim simple?

<comment><USER8> Vim is simple. It's just no easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If it wasn't so reliant on Apache or PHP I'd be more willing to try it out.

Unfortunately, I've experienced nearly every nightmare with the two, thanks to work, bad code, and absent documentation.

I don't want them on my machine.

Any plans for a self-contained bundle?

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Only the backend is written in PHP (it is very simple PHP) and that may change (probably Python, maybe Node.js). It's only a small part of the code, most of the code is javascript that runs in the browser. Initially, I am working on Apache and PHP because a lot of what I work on is Wordpress, but Nginx certainly supports PHP as well. Note that it doesn't require your code to be written in PHP, only that your server has the correct modules installed. If you use phpmyadmin you have already pretty much installed everything needed.

<comment><USER9> I wasn't meaning to criticise the use of PHP at all.

But creating some sort of bundle with a portable PHP and server, just a zipped folder or something, would hugely reduce the barrier to entry, and reassure people like me who shy away from part of the tech stack.

<comment><USER10> Use a container to package the dependencies and runtime, so you don't need to install them on your OS.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


10% unemployment yet every startup in NYC struggling to hire - <AUTHOR> http://jonsteinberg.com/15-unemployment-yet-every-startup-in-nyc-is-s

<comment><USER2> Could it have anything to do with most of them likely only wanting to hire people geographically in (or near) NYC? And hand-in-hand with that, the startups don't really want to pay something adequate for someone with the necessary experience to live modestly within commuting distance?

I know more people who have offshored engineering/dev work to India and the like than send work to developers in Nebraska, Kansas, Alabama, etc. Then they complain about the less than stellar work, with timezone diffs, English proficiency, cultural differences and so on.

There's a pretty large pool of people who are willing to work remote and - gasp - even travel to your main office sometimes, but who simply aren't going to uproot and live in NYC to make $100k. For someone raising a family, they could make $75k in Omaha or Tupelo and have a _much_ better quality of life.

[http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=c%23&l=nyc](http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=c%23&l=nyc) [http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&l=nyc](http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&l=nyc)

9400 Java jobs in NYC, but only 900 are estimated at $150k or higher.

Cost of living between Omaha (at 75k) and NYC: [http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=75000&city1=531370...](http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=75000&city1=53137000&city2=53651000)

Cost of living between Nashville (at 80k) and NYC: [http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=80000&city1=547520...](http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=80000&city1=54752006&city2=53651000)

You need roughly $150k in NYC to have an approximate lifestyle. Yet only 10% of the jobs pay that.

The concept of 'hiring' itself may be due for a makeover, and a 'JIT' approach to company development may be in the cards for companies struggling to hire the right people (which they'll likely lay off the moment things go south again).

<comment><USER2> Adding on:

We've also had a housing crisis which is keeping many people chained to their current regions due to underwater mortgages and no housing sales. 5 years ago people could move their families across country for a good job. Even if they _want_ to now, they can't. This is just not acknowledged by most companies.

I was approached a couple years ago by a company that was starting up - 'ex google founders' and all that. The product/service was pitched to me as a collaboration/communication tool to help remote teams work more effectively. Sounded great, but I was not allowed to work remote. I had to upsticks and move to SF. To work on a remote collaboration tool. WTF?

<comment><USER3> There really is a _huge_ difference between working in person with someone and working remotely. I've seen misunderstandings that could waste literally weeks of programmer time get corrected by a 15-minute pair-programming session.

It doesn't really surprise me that ex-Googlers would insist you work in person. As a large multinational, Google feels the pain of distributed teams more than many companies, which is probably why they're founding their startup. It'd probably sink their startup if one of their key employees was not working in person with them.

<comment><USER4> > I've seen misunderstandings that could waste literally weeks of programmer > time get corrected by a 15-minute pair-programming session.

Are they things that wouldn't have similarly been resolved by remote pairing?

<comment><USER3> With what tools? In theory, if you have a shared screen, and real-time voice communication, and remote whiteboards, and ideally real-time video, it should be basically the same as being there. The technology to do this is very, very expensive at the moment, though, which is presumably the raison d'etre of this startup.

You also miss out a lot on serendipity. Many of the best ideas that eventually become actual Google products happen because a bunch of folks are hanging out over beers, or they're sharing the latest cool thing they've stumbled across on the Internet, or they're shooting each other with nerf darts before going home. This sort of relaxed socialization seems to be exactly what you need to get creative ideas to bubble up to the surface. When you have to feel like you're "on a call" to get together with someone, you don't get this sort of spontaneous idea generation.

<comment><USER5> >> With what tools? In theory, if you have a shared screen

VNC, emacs

>> and real-time voice communication,

telephone

>> and remote whiteboards, and ideally real-time video

projector, webcams, monitor

>> The technology to do this is very, very expensive at the moment, though, which is presumably the raison d'etre of this startup.

When you are considering $75k versus $150k per year, the above is not expensive

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's because "every startup" is lazy and afraid to take risks. In the programming world, for example, everyone wants to hire someone who has 150 years of experience with each of C, C++, Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, OCaml, Haskell, and node.js. Problem is, that is not possible. So the position goes unfilled.

If programming shops were willing to hire people fresh out of college with English degrees and teach them programming, they would probably do really, really well. But nobody is willing to do that, so college grads go without jobs and startups go without employees.

(Also, startups expect you to really drink that Kool-Aid. They want you to work 12 hour days, skip weekends, not take vacation, and "be loyal" to the company. Why would anyone do that when they can work 9-5 for 4x as much money at an investment bank?

Ironically, even the investment banks can't hire anyone, but that is for other reasons.)

<comment><USER2> That's another really good point. There's not much in the way of apprenticeship in software.

Companies will often pay for relo expenses for someone, providing they stay for X years (else they repay the relo money back). Companies could do something similar with education, whether it's local college classes, inhouse training, etc. If you leave within the first year, you pay the company back those expenses. Or... have retention bonuses for people for staying past 1 year, and invest in education for people at lower wages. Many companies would find some real gems out there, waiting to be discovered, and would engender far more loyalty than most currently get.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure I am following this. If you want to attract actual talent, you have to pay full relocation. The good ones have stable jobs they enjoy. And they are going to pay their own relocation for a new job that may not work out? I don't think so. The only people that pay their own relocation are the desperate and the completely untalented.

As far as having to pay back if you are laid off or the company is otherwise dissatisfied due to their own lack of having a decent vetting process, ha ha ha. Indentured servitude. That's a new one. I'm sure that will get the best of the best. Not.

<comment><USER3> Relo packages are a perk that's given out to those with a certain amount of experience. I got one last time I changed jobs, but I barely squeaked in (official policy was that it's only for candidates with 5+ years of experience, I had 4 years, they said "We'll work something out"). And I would've had to pay it back if I worked at the company for less than a year.

The vast majority of my friends did not get relo packages, because this is their first job out of school. Companies don't typically offer relo for fresh college grads.

I thought this discussion was about junior engineers?

<comment><USER8> If you can't find employees, you have to get out of the mindset of "perks" that employees are lucky to get and start offering what it takes to get what you want.

Or keep whining there's no employees.

One of these paths is more productive than the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Perhaps the reason startups are struggling to hire in NYC is not because there are too few hackers but because there are too many startups. Most hackers simply do not have aspirations to work 80 hours a week to make some MBA jackass rich off of his website which promises to revolutionize the world for apartment brokers, attempt to make print media relevant online, or sell last year's handbags at a discount.

<comment><USER10> I worked at a profitable, medium size company with a startup-like hacker culture and it was still very difficult to hire talented programmers despite being able to offer interesting work that provided a net benefit to society, normal hours, free soda and career development. We'd have to go through many, many candidates who looked good on paper (lots of experience, top tier education) but were awful once you presented them with basic programming problems. It was actually pretty demoralizing to have to reject the volume of people that we did.

I do agree that there are a lot of silly startups these days, but it doesn't mean that there isn't also a shortage of quality hackers.

<comment><USER7> Wow free soda! I can't imagine why top talent wasn't beating a path to your door!

<comment><USER11> free soda is typically an indication of a place that has not yet become institutionalized. Most startups have this perk and at some point some manager comes in and kills it off for <insert reason of the week>. It is a sign that things are changing which often coincides with top talent moving off. A canary in a coal mine if you will that there might be good developers there.

<comment><USER10> Yup, exactly. See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750>

<comment><USER7> I do agree with you that canceling soda programs means doom is assured and it's time to bail, as with a dead mine canary.

However, soda, coffee and toilet paper and soap in the bathroom are very small things. Listing them in an ad as one of the key benefits of working for a company is also a mine canary, one that says the company has very little to brag about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I agree with the author that programming (not just "tech") literacy should be part of every curriculum, I don't think this will solve the unemployment problem.

Technology is very good at creating value, but not very good at creating jobs. All 72 tech companies in the S&P 500 combined employ about 2.3m people [1], whereas just Wal-mart employes about 2.1m people. Those numbers are worldwide employment, but for reference, the US had 15m unemployed in November.

Even the breakout, unimaginable success that is Google only employs about 28,000 people. And I'm sure that for every hire Google has made, they've displaced many more people that used to depend on print advertising. (To be clear, I'm not saying that technology is net bad for the economy. Technology creates a lot of value for the individuals that work and invest in it, and for the economy as a whole. However, technology is not a massive creator of jobs.)

So unless startups become a multiple of the size of the entire S&P 500 technology sector, they're not going to make a noticeable dent on unemployment.

[1] I compiled a spreadsheet ([https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AqpDDf0Sr4EXdDJMZEt...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AqpDDf0Sr4EXdDJMZEtYWUJjcTRNNkxMRS1YZGRrd0E&hl=en&authkey=CJflxN0N)) based on information available on Wikipedia[2] and through Google searches

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies> and individual company pages

<comment><USER13> Yeah, but walmart people will soon be replaced by robots. More and more automation will create more and more unemployment among uneducated.

It's pretty fucking hard to automate programming. Heck, we can't even solve voice and character recognition.

<comment><USER14> We have automated the hell out of programming (compilers, shared libraries, higher level languages, etc), but as soon as we do that, they just expect us to be more productive :)

I think it will be still be a long time before robots replace humans, even at Wal-Mart-like jobs. There are a few places where it's appropriate (self checkout, for instance), but there are things that humans do without batting an eyes are very very hard or expensive for robots (spoken communications, visual and auditory classification, spatial navigation and obstacle negotiation).

Humans aren't really that expensive honestly. Considering that the rent on a few servers from EC2 can equal the hourly wage of a Wal-Mart employee, it's going to be a while before these equations start working out.

<comment><USER15> It's not just self-checkout, but things like vending machines (big in Japan, will eventually be big everywhere else; this is starting to occur now with DVD rental vending machines) and robot warehouses (Kiva already does pretty well with this). Also Amazon and Netflix. Their warehouses may not be run by robots, but are extremely automated. This also applies to food - there's no reason automats can't make a comeback. I also don't doubt for a second that one of the first things Google will do with self-driving cars is automate the trucking industry.

You're absolutely right about people not being very expensive though. Labor costs actually make manual manufacturing in China less expensive than in fully roboticized factories in Japan or the USA for many things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sure, the U.S. could be promoting education in the science & engineering, but blaming undergraduate institutions for not filling cubes (or exercise balls, yoga mats, etc) at a startup is completely off base. The job market is rough for recent graduates who were all but promised that the world is hungry for the skills their universities have tried to imbue upon them for an extremely large sum of money. Perhaps a small startup run by the campus Business School "idea guys & girls" less than a decade out of undergraduate school themselves is not the most secure option for someone whose student loan interest clock just started ticking. Should anyone be surprised that a senior or recent graduate might rather wait the several months to hear back from a large consulting company (who are also in hiring mode due to layoff too many people in 09 & are feeling client pushback on their broken offshore/onsite models)? The talent pool isn't as shallow as you would think. Startups buzz about "how to interview and retain a rockstar gurus" and end up looking for a walk-on- water engineer to work long nights for beans & equity with no guarantees for success. Smart kids are malleable, and even if they leave college learning Ruby, Common Lisp, or whatever the flavor of the week is, they will need to grow on the job. Take a chance, offer competitive or better-than-market compensation, and grow your talent from eager minds that buy into your vision enough to feel financially comfortable and invested in the success of the organization.

<comment><USER17>
      > Sure, the U.S. could be promoting education in the science &
      > engineering, but blaming undergraduate institutions for not filling cubes

More to the point, blaming higher education isn't filling the cubes _right now._ How is ranting about higher education going to solve your business's immediate needs? Even in a perfect scenario, where higher ed. _is_ the problem, and even if a solution to the problem was implemented, how long would it take to see results? Are you going to just let your business languish until then?

(Note: 'you' is a generic you, not the poster. My comment was just inspired by misreading his first sentence on first glance.)

<comment><USER18> I think there is also an alignment problem between what the purpose of higher education is supposed to be and what employers are expecting from entry level employees.

College is not job training, it is a place where you learn how to learn stuff. The reason people believe otherwise is because college is really expensive, so it has to be viewed as an investment that will get you a job and deliver appropriate training.

Learning how to learn is important, it lets you move forward in whatever you take on. College as it is, is not a trade school, which seems to be what employers are expecting.

A degree in engineering or CS will churn out someone who has a strong analytical mind and the ability to learn more. Places that are hiring may need to adjust and accept that this is what the market is at the entry level, instead of complaining that the skills are not available at the price that they're offering. Companies might be better off offering less and expecting less (at the start, you might not get someone who can start churning on your application immediately) and growing talent in the process.

Also I've started seeing a lot of companies acting like the work they're doing is on the level of Google, when it's not and interviewing like they are and that's what they need.

Basically, it seems like a lot of employers have expectations that are way off the mark.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think your points are fair. However, I see lots of practical coursework at even purely liberal arts school. Architecture, accounting, chemistry, etc. all have direct and practical learnings.

Why not just try to inject a little tech and software thinking into the economics, marketing, sales-oriented, and management classes taught both undergraduate and graduate.

And why not teach code, as a way of learning to learn, in middle and high schools?

<comment><USER18> Definitely good points.

Regarding education at the high school and middle school level, I never had required programming courses, but we did have a Pascal course in middle school, and in high school we were offered (and I took) C++ computer programming courses at the Honors and AP level. This was at a public school, and I don't see why that can't happen at more schools.

I think introducing some type of programming into the college level for ALL majors would be valuable. I don't know if you need to inject that directly into the curriculum, maybe a series of "Development For Dummies" clubs taught/marketed by young CS and Engineering students could help bridge the gap. Maybe in exchange those students could run clubs that might open CS/Engineering students to more than analytical thinking as well.

<comment><USER7> One big problem. No one that is a capable enough developer to teach computer science is going to be teaching at a high school. And more pay isn't an answer, the problem is bureaucracy and endemic stupidity in the institutional structure of public primary and secondary education.

<comment><USER18> I think it depends. My teacher for the AP class was a former student/MIT graduate and was starting his own business. This was as exception from the norm, but it's possible!

Maybe having teachers that teach single classes on a volunteer basis?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yes there's a mismatch between the jobs available and the skills of the unemployed. But the rest of the article is pretty much wrong.

Plenty of people aren't cut out for programming or just don't like it. Trying to force them into jobs where there not a good fit isn't good for anyone.

Business schools should teach a wide range of case studies from a range of sectors. Yes that includes farming and food logistics.

The beer company InBev ships $36 billion dollars a year of beer. That's more than market cap of Facebook. The Beer industry is probably worth more than the combined value of every startup featured on Techcrunch in the last year.

Let's not exaggerate the importance of our industry in the wider scheme of things.

</comment><comment><USER20> The skills he mentions in the article should be taught on the job, not in college. The other problem I noticed, especially when it comes to fresh undergrads, is some companies want people who already have some exact skillset yet don't want to do any training of their own.

<comment><USER21> This is one of the things big engineering firms in other areas do better, I think (though they do some things worse). A company like Boeing doesn't expect you to come out of college having exactly the skills needed to design a 787 or run a wind-tunnel test. Partly this is out of necessity, because they use a lot of in-house software packages, equipment, and proprietary methods that your university couldn't teach you even if they wanted to. So they focus more on whether college graduates have a solid grounding in engineering principles, rather than whether they know how to work exactly the stuff Boeing is going to want them to do.

Similar story at petrochemical firms; my dad is a process engineer mainly for PTA- and polyethylene-manufacturing units, and they surely don't expect most incoming hires to know how the PTA synthesis process works, or even necessarily to know what PTA is (it's a chemical used to make polyester). They just expect a general chemical-engineering background; they don't want to have to teach the _entirety_ of what engineering means, what process modeling is and how you might use it, what debottlenecking is, etc., but they don't expect incoming knowledge to be very specific.

<comment><USER22> Working for one of the big defense contractors at the moment, they definitely prefer to hire fresh grads. They will burn 6 months of you being completely unproductive on their dime to train you in the blink of an eye. Thats $50k to them before you even did anything. Plus they have a process for everything and have experienced guys holding your hand and checking your work.

They also figure once you start out there with good pay you will become out of touch with the market rate, and they raise you extremely slowly compared to the market, so that by the time you have been there 5 years you are a bargain to them. Most people just don't keep enough connections outside the company and are incapable of moving on.

So they look at the total cost over 5, 10 years+ and hiring a bunch of new grades and training (even paying for grad school) is cheaper for them.

Startups don't have that luxury. 6 months from now, we might be out of funding. And if we care about what happens 5 years from now, we're super rich. So lets hire better people first. And they don't have the luxury of a fixed process and senior engineers to check everyones work.

<comment><USER23> I would also be willing to bet that the skills being learned during this training period are far less portable than most coding skills. If your startup teaches you how to crank out a crud RoR app in six months you can probably walk out the door at that point and get a 25% salary bump from another startup that now does not need to spend six months training you. If you learn the details of your specific cog at Lockheed in six months you are not going to be able to go to General Dynamics and apply the same skills as soon as you walk in the door.

<comment><USER22> That is completely true. It only gets worse the longer you stay in one group. After 20 years of doing 1 little piece of a giant puzzle (of which there is only one and there are no competitors), can you really go anywhere else and be anything other than entry level? And how do you give up $120k for $60k as an entry level guy elsewhere even though after 20 years you should be making $180k.

It is a giant trap for those that aren't aware of it from day 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Programming is a rare and economically valuable skill. It's hard to train people to be programmers.

</comment><comment><USER25> NYC startups are struggling to hire because there is a real shortage of skilled labor in the country including technology labor. The 10% unemployment reflects a surplus of labor that would normally be taken up by manufacturing jobs which we don't have since we became a service economy. The 08 crash was an excuse to fire legacy employees. We will never get the jobs back that we've lost.

</comment><comment><USER26> So far, on Hacker News, the conversation has focused on hiring programmers, but the original article is broader than that:

"Despite all this unemployment, every startup I know needs to hire not only engineers, but also sales and operations team members. And this is not just bubble seed startup dollars at work."

In 2008 I tried to find a good marketer to work with a client of mine. This is a difficult task. There are many people who claim they understand online marketing. Finding anyone who is any good is very difficult. The noise to signal ratio is amazing.

Likewise when it comes to fundraising, pitching to investors, etc. It is tough to find the few people who are good.

Possibly part of the problem is that, even in this economy, the folks who are truly good are making really good money and don't want to invest time with a startup.

No doubt there are many folks out there who will one day prove their talent but they have not yet had the chance. The question then becomes, how to find them?

</comment><comment><USER27> Part of the issue is that the 10% unemployment rate is not equally distributed across all demographics.

If we generalize the desired startup labor pool as college-educated adults over the age of 25, the national unemployment rate drops to 5.1% (<http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm>). I can't find a great source, but I'd also wager that when you factor location (NY metro) and industry (technology), the unemployment rate drops even further--almost to the point of natural unemployment.

If you fit this profile you shouldn't have a difficult time finding work, and hence we have a "war for talent" in the face of high, national unemployment.

</comment><comment><USER26> Responding to previous comments, I would advise against using an Indian firm for a startup. I think overseas firms can do well when assigned routine work, like putting in a CMS where all the requirements are straightforward, or handling inventory and accounting. For exceptional circumstances (which is what a startup faces) you want people who can meet everyday in the same room.

Geographical distance is a major problem for small startups.

I worked on a project last year where the project manager was thrilled at the idea that he could hire Indian programmers for $10 an hour. I was in New York City, we had another programmer in North Carolina and another in Europe. The "CEO" was an investor who attended meetings 2 or 3 times a month. The project manager was basically the CEO, but he had no real power, since everything needed to be decided by the CEO. Myself and the project manager would have 3 hour conversations and decide on something, but then need to explain it to the CEO, whom we only saw a few times a month.

The project went nowhere.

From this, I conclude, it is best to have small team working in the same room, when doing a startup.

The team in India was unusually bad. Every time they committed code to Subversion, something broke and I would have to fix it.

<comment><USER28> Duh, You are right; if someone wants to hire lots of cheap Indian labour for $10 an hour, you will get bad programmers. I think, at that rate you will get bad programmers anywhere in the world.

I am building (<http://solaro.com>) and we just launched our application out of beta. Development happens from India and surely there are kinks and warts, but at the end of day it works.

I think there are lot of things people get wrong when doing outsourcing:

1\. Going cheap. Good programmers are costly. In India you will have to fight with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe and likes for the talent, you can't pay cheap and expect good programmers.So, please do not come to India, if goal is to stay cheap.

2\. Not involving the team. You will have to bring down your walls and involve everyone intellectually. This is real, if people aren't involved with the product, you are going to get crappy result. I am saying nothing new, but what already Jim McCarthy said in Dynamics of software development. But this is more true for projects, where your team is spread across different geographical locations.

3\. Iterate. Short iterations, deliver, continuous integration and continuous deployment. Do not sleep on the project.

4\. Small teams, do not build a large team just because it is cheap. I know I am saying the obvious here, but I have seen people getting it wrong too often.

5\. If the client (or product owner) is located in different geographical location, he/she has to work harder than everyone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> 1) because all us smart NYC programmers got the hell out of there during the "Silicon Alley" days.

2) Practically anyone who lives within 100 miles of Wall Street and can program, and isn't a completely dysfunctional human (and many who are), is doing something in the financial sector. It's a huge brain drain, and it's practically impossible to compete with on the basis of salary. To boot, you can't easily motivate these folks with options because A) NY doesn't have a reputation for churning out tech winners and B) these same people study finance for a living, so when you offer them some options or founder's stock, suddenly you're into a discussion of volatility premiums and Black/Scholes analysis of the present-day value of said stock/options.

It's just not a suitable place for a vibrant startup community.

</comment><comment><USER8> How many startups really need rockstar ninjas? I mean _really_ need them? As in the business will succeed if you have them and fail if you don't. I bet that number is actually very small.

But everyone thinks they're the special case.

<comment><USER3> Having worked at two startups that died either because they could never attract skilled senior engineers or because they lost them, I think the number is quite large.

There're lots of ways for a startup to die and relatively few for it to succeed. The value of having a skilled senior engineer (or "rockstar ninja" as you put it, though that term has connotations that don't really describe the type of early engineers you want) is that they can see many of those failure modes ahead of time and avoid them. And when they do end up in a dead-end, they can quickly backtrack and fix the problem instead of wondering "what do we do now?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Are you sure startups in NYC are struggling to hire?

A years ago, I was in the states under a F1 visa. I was looking forward to do an internship in NYC. I couldn't even get an interview. I spoke with at least twenty recruiters.

I was at that time an active OS contributor, I had commit access in projects like Rubinius or in Sputnik Tests (Google conformance test suite to test V8). I had also two years of commercial java programming experience, and personal projects in rails, sinatra and django. This was just after I finished a internship at Google.

What compensation was I asking for? Enough money two rent a room and buy food.

<comment><USER31> Oh god, recruiters. They will kill your dreams every time. They have _zero_ ability to judge skill. They are basically car salesmen. If your resume doesn't fit their template, you will never, ever get work, and you could be a damned genius with recommendations from others too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If kids in the NYC metro area don't have an opportunity to learn programming in grade school it's because the schools suck. Perhaps if parents cared about their children's education, they could just relocate to a more forward- thinking part of the country. I was tutoring AP Computer Science to the kids of Vietnamese immigrants in the midwest 12 years ago. I took "C" and "Hypercard" class in junior high school 20 years ago and I lived in a farming town in the middle of nowhere.

The real reason NYC has a shortage of engineers is because engineers don't want to live there. Aside from one or two cool startups and the Google office, most tech jobs in the area are in finance or "agency" style work.

"...selling digital media, trafficking ads in DART, negotiating CDN prices with suppliers, creating P&L's where the COGs is Akamai, tracking and filing bugs in Pivotal Tracker..." sounds like exactly the "Boiler Room" sort of startup most people with other employment options want to avoid.

<comment><USER22> I don't know if teaching code in school really matters at all. I never took a class in programming in elementary, middle, or high school. I didn't take a class in programming until junior year of college.

I got my first job at a startup writing code when I was a freshman in college.

I was an engineering major, and I taught myself how to program in middle school, but never did I ever take a class on it.

Of all the various things I have learned, learning programming has one of the lowest barriers to entry of any. I really think it is a waste of money to focus on it in school. Most of the kids that I knew who took AP Comp Sci were ruined by it. A multiple choice test for basic programming? Yuck.

<comment><USER9> AP CS is heinous, yes.

I disagree with the rest, though. I would agree if I thought the other classes were worthwhile, but about 70% of my junior high and high school was filler at best. At least if there had been programming classes I could have taken those instead of truly pointless stuff like the JV girls volleyball coach teaching "social studies" via VHS tapes.

<comment><USER22> See in my opinion, with the limited resources they have I'd rather see them fix your social studies class than add programming. There just aren't that many people that are going to be doing software development, but we probably can agree if everyone knew more about history, politics, and government this country would be better off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "There's a massive misalignment between the labor pool and the job pool, and I blame our undergraduate institutions"

I don't, I just think the Rent Is Too Damn High.

<http://www.rentistoodamnhigh.org/>

<comment><USER33> Actually, the price of good engineers being high + high unemployment speaks precisely to a misalignment of supply/demand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Good, let them struggle.

Maybe someday they will learn that the only developers aren't young and just out of college.

There are plenty of good developers that are self taught, and there are also plenty of good developers who aren't in their 20's, but if you every look at the "about us" of these startups, and they have pictures, what do you see?

</comment><comment><USER35> I still say, the tech market reigniting and the quantitative easing are strangely well timed. I have to wonder if the tech market is being inflated, because it is the one market that has not suffered decades of neglect. It could be a good thing, as the world does need investment in technology if we are going to hit the next whatever revolution now that the information age looks to be at the least maturing, investments in science seem to be the natural course to bring on the advancements for the next age. Unfortunately some of those ages dawned with investment in science for less than peaceful purposes. So if the industry is being inflated, then I supposes it is better than massive investment in military spending to bring about the next age.

</comment><comment><USER36> Every startups is struggling because very few of those 10% live in NYC and have the relevant education or background.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. You're right about that

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've hired a few technical employees in the Chicago area, and I found that it's almost impossible to find someone with basic reasoning skills. Most people I interviewed had very poor eyes for details, had a hard time spotting or understanding their own mistakes, making sense of novel situations, thinking abstractly or generalizing from specifics etc... This was true even among CS graduates from schools with decent reputations. I don't know why the pool is so bad or if it has always been this way.

<comment><USER7> How much do you pay, what relocation is offered, what interviewing expenses do you cover, what benefits are paid, what severance package is offered, and do you provide engineers with all the tools, books and training they request.

You don't need to answer me, just answer these honestly to yourself and that will tell you why you can't find anyone competent.

<comment><USER37> If qualified applicant need assurance of all these things before even applying, that confirms in my mind that such applicants have the privilege of scarcity.

Has your hiring experience been substantially different from mine?

<comment><USER7> From what you describe yes. I am able to hire talent I need, but I do offer competitive pay and benefits in line with what other places that are able to hire are doing. It's standard for serious firms to cover interview expenses for example. We also do recruiting rather than just tossing ads out and hoping for the best, which is ineffective since the vast majority of job _seekers_ in IT are looking for a job because they don't have one. The ones who are not seeking but who are open to change are the ones to look for. I meet them on blogs, at conferences, and by contacting them after reading articles they have published.

Hiring a very good developer is like hiring a very good actor, which doesn't come for peanuts and which will be worth much more than their salary, whereas hiring an average one will be worth less than their salary. 7/8 of the people that get CS degrees in the US are not fit to develop software at all. Of the remaining 1/8, nearly all of them have found a place they like and are not looking to move without incentive. But that doesn't mean there's a shortage. It just means you have to pay market rate and treat them respectfully and make sure all hygienic issues are dealt with. Low pay is poor hygiene. Lack of full relocation is poor hygiene (Why should the new employee subsidize the cost of coming to work for you? They shouldn't.) Absurd contractual terms such as claiming ownership of things they do on their own time is poor hygiene. An office full of dimwits is poor hygiene. Clueless management is poor hygiene. Not providing proper tools is poor hygiene. Hygiene issues are ones that need to be taken care just to not be a lousy place to work. Get all this taken care of and then one can start thinking of actually making it a good place to work. Having a good reputation as a place to work is hard to get, easy to screw up, and is worth a lot to convince someone with skills that it is worth the massive risk to uproot their life, leave a job they like and come work for a new venture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've noticed that many startups want people that are: a senior developer in new technology X, is good at Photoshop, and can design customer facing webpages. They also want to pay you well below market wages (because you should be happy to work for a fun company that has a fooseball table) and give you company equity in place of sub-market wages (which is a joke, because most startups are out of business within 5 years).

</comment><comment><USER39> Because those 10% of unemployed folks are definitely highly-skilled programmers. Right.

</comment><comment><USER40> <http://twitter.com/#!/charlesju/status/10722704009199617>

High School dropouts are 15.7% unemployed. College grads are at 5.1%, basically full employment given job changes. <http://bit.ly/3FWnbX>

<comment><USER41> That's not "basically full employment" -- it's the highest unemployment rate among college grads in the last 2 decades.

Here's a BLS report that shows that more clearly: [http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?request_...](http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=get_data&reformat=true&from_results_page=true&from_year=1992&to_year=2010&Go.x=2&Go.y=9&initial_request=false&data_tool=surveymost&series_id=LNS14027659&&series_id=LNS14027660series_id=LNS14027689&series_id=LNS14027662&output_type=default&original_output_type=default)

<comment><USER40> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment>

"The idea that the full-employment unemployment rate (NAIRU) is not a unique number has been seen in recent empirical research. Staiger, Stock, and Watson found that the range of possible values of the NAIRU (from 4.3 to 7.3% unemployment) was too large to be useful to macroeconomic policy-makers. Robert Eisner suggested that for 1956-95 there was a zone from about 5% to about 10% unemployment between the low-unemployment realm of accelerating inflation and the high-unemployment realm of disinflation. In between, he found that inflation falls with falling unemployment."

<comment><USER42> You can't take the American labor force's NAIRU and apply it to college grads --historically, they have lower unemployment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The resume/interview hiring process is severely broken in US. It is not the schools, it's the companies hiring, they are looking for some perfect holy grail but really need to just start hiring people and pick through the chaff. These startups deserve what they get making it impossible to even find their 'perfect employee'.

</comment><comment><USER44> That 10% is the broader unemployment rate and includes all occupations. I believe the latest stats from the BLS peg unemployment among software developers at about 4%. Most good developers are gainfully employed, it's up to you to entice them away from what they're currently doing.

<comment><USER7> "Most good developers are gainfully employed"

I agree, but I'd say that _all_ good developers who want to be employed are employed.

Companies bring up 10% unemployment because they think "Gosh with all this unemployment there will be lots of 'hungry' developers and we should be able to hire top talent for $80k or some other piddling sum."

The fact is that unemployment among competent developers (and marketers and sales) is 0%, so if a company wants to hire one they've have to pay more than the other guy and offer better working conditions. The incompetently run companies don't comprehend this, they are much too "bargain" oriented on non- commodity products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> From my view the real problem is how valuable will English majors be at my startup. How long will it take them to get up to speed where someone doesn't have to hold their hand anymore.

I am really weary of hiring someone with zero programming experience. But not as apprehensive about hiring a programmer with little experience but some experience.

I'd be more likely to hire someone who was a self starter when it comes to learning programing over and English major who just couldn't find a job.

</comment><comment><USER46> I know a number of quite proficient programmers with degrees or backgrounds in the classics. Some, to be sure, are of the generation where 8th-grade programming class wasn't really an option. I'd much rather see the primary and secondary schools teach human languages and mathematics than see them try to teach coding.

</comment><comment><USER47> Then again, maybe the cranberry farmers and beer shippers are the people who are really running the world.

</comment><comment><USER48> TL;DR version of anything like that: Those people aren't the ones that startups want to hire right now.

</comment><comment><USER49> They prefer to hire a _highly skilled wage slave_.

</comment><comment><USER50> To those hiring in NYC - I just relocated to the east coast from CA and am looking for opportunities in NYC. Feel free to reach out.

</comment><comment><USER51> Let's see....bad weather, high rent, high cost of living, lots of wall street jackasses, too many damn tourists, and plenty of terrorist threats. And we haven't even started talking about silicon valley's tech culture and close proximity to Asia.

<comment><USER52> Let's see...incredible food, 24/7 nightlife, culture like nowhere else in the world, one of the largest and richest parks in the country, probably the best public transportation system in the country, a _hell_ of a lot of convenience (drop-off wash-and-fold on every street corner, etc), a diverse and interesting population, easy access to not one, not two, but THREE separate international airports (JFK, LGA, Newark), and easy access to Europe.

<comment><USER53> You listed nothing of interest to the typical startup programmer.

Having a bunch of ways to travel doesn't do any good for people who are spending most of their time holed up in one spot. They won't be flying all over the place.

Night life? Have you MET many geeks? Plus that would cut into work hours.

Drop-off laundry? That means I have to take it somewhere. I'd rather have washer/dryer in the apt., then I don't have to lug it anywhere. Who cares about folding.

A diverse and interesting population -- very few of whom work in or understand startups. You don't have time to socialize anyway, and if you did, listening to people talk about finance or fashion is not "interesting".

Incredible food... This can be had in ANY major city. But nobody in a startup wants a 3 month waiting list to get into NY's trendiest new spot, so none of that stuff matters at all.

Culture... again, staring at a computer all day.

Parks? Yeah, like they don't have that anywhere else.

Not compelling in the least.

Look at Google's perks to get an idea of what developers want. Basically: get everything else out of the way so I can develop! Get rid of interruptions and distractions and extraneous TRAVEL -- I don't want to spend my time carting my jiggly fat physical body from place to place so that I can physically do the same thing in another place.

It's the same for ANY discipline. Olympic swimmers have the same deal -- eat, sleep, train. Being "well-rounded" is essentially training for social skills.</comment></comment></comment>


Crazy HTML element animation with PhysicsJS - <AUTHOR> http://paalasmaa.net/

<comment><USER2> Cool demo ;-) Tried to bounce the head off screen but that worked out differently...</comment>


Scott Allen has passed away - <AUTHOR> https://www.heraldmailmedia.com/obituaries/k-allen/article_665bb053-7264-58eb-a5ec-521501443cd4.html <comment><USER2> Scott touched & improved the lives of countless people and their families. His courses & talks have always been very high quality. They also have had some of the longest shelf lives of any courses I've came across.

When it comes to educators in writing software, Scott is at the top level. He was doing it before the gold rush of people doing it for money & fame. His quality was amazing, he was incredibly humble & very kind.

</comment><comment><USER3> He was a super nice guy and a great teacher.</comment>