Outbox Is Shutting Down - <AUTHOR> http://blog.outboxmail.com/post/74086768959/outbox-is-shutting-down-a-note-of-gratitude <comment><USER2> " senior leadership of USPS made it clear that they would never participate in any project that would limit junk mail and that they were immediately shutting down our partnership."

This part is really interesting. Why would USPS do that ? Can someone from outbox elaborate on this ? I would love to get rid of the junk mail that I receive on a _daily_ basis in my mailbox. It is crazy and I have to waste time in taking it out of my mailbox, sorting through them to ensure they indeed are junk and then throwing them into my recycle bin. Not to mention that the recyle bin then needs to be placed bi-weekly outside to be picked up. It is time we had a donotcall.gov equivalent for junk mails.

Sad to see these guys go. The business model sounds like something I would have tried as a user. Funny though that never heard of them personally. Guess need to watch more Jay Leno!!

<comment><USER3> Employee unions at the USPS worried about further job losses due to technology. Can't do anything that would decrease revenue, even if it means technological progress.

<comment><USER4> This comment is garbage. Do you think the CEO of USPS wants to decrease revenue? Hell no.

<comment><USER5> Imagine you're the CEO of a business that is bleeding cash left, right, and center, and someone comes to you with a plan that will reduce your revenue 20% while reducing your costs 50%. You don't think you'd consider that plan even for a second?

I'm not saying such a plan would work for USPS, and definitely not saying Outbox could have brought that sort of value proposition to USPS, but reducing revenue is not always a poor business decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I may be wrong, but my impression of Outbox has always been that they were designing an impressive solution to the wrong problem.

Sorting my important mail from my junk mail is just not something I need help with. And the extraordinary wastefulness in my mind of paying a company to follow postmen around and take back the mail just delivered to my box seems so ecologically wrong that I couldn't support it on that ground alone.

<comment><USER7> This is definitely my view.

I'd honestly be happy just to see a service in the "use us as your mailing address" market with lower and less byzantine pricing than Earth Class Mail ($20/mo plus $5/mo for searchable PDFs, $1.50/piece to actually scan mail, $20 to deposit a check, $4.95/mo to shred mail, $0.30/mo/piece to store mail, etc.) and without the subtly deceitful tactics of VirtualPostMail (auto- applied promo codes that hide what the actual ongoing service limits are, big listed pricing that actually doubles after 3 months, etc).

<comment><USER8> The VirtualPostMail pricing page may be confusing, but I think calling it deceitful is a stretch. I think the prices are reasonable for the service they provide. It may even be cheaper than it looks, as I don't think they enforce the storage limits (I've definitely had stuff sitting there for many months with no fees). It's true that their web app could use an overhaul, but it was nicer than ECM's at the time I compared them.

(I have no affiliation, I've just been a satisfied customer for a few years.)

<comment><USER7> Well, that's why I said _subtly_. It's not blatant about it, but it is a deceitful approach.

These kind of tactics are familiar to me from previously working in the web hosting industry, where the tricks of "the eye-catching price is actually the temporary one, you have to look in the details for the real price" and "a coupon code makes it look like your service can do more than it can" are very common.

So is the aftermath, with many people who are confused and upset when the "temporary" part runs out but not _quite_ confused and upset enough to cancel the service.

<comment><USER8> The half-price for the first few months is misleading, I admit. I'm a careful reader so it didn't bother me.

The coupon code thing is a little weird, but I don't see how you can complain about it: it only increases your limits. It's just a way for them to offer two types of plans: one for people who like to scan most mail, and one for people who don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Better title: "Libertarians Find Out Delivering Mail Is Hard and Expensive"

<comment><USER10> Classic Bob the Angry Flower:

[http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RmsoUYOh5Ak/Tx7K8aL_b5I/AAAAAAAAAW...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RmsoUYOh5Ak/Tx7K8aL_b5I/AAAAAAAAAW0/Y5v4MlpYdzg/s1600/Bob_the_Angry_Flower_Atlas_Shrugged_Part_2_comic_strip.gif)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> WHAT.

This is really disappointing - first time in a while I've seen an "we're shutting down" announcement and been really, truly, genuinely disappointed by it.

Physical mail is but one of many small parts of daily life that's increasingly feeling like an anachronism.

The fact that we have to regularly physically go to our mailboxes, open them, receive physical paper communication, and then shred/dispose/keep it all is annoying. I was really looking forward to Outbox growing and spreading to other cities.

(BTW: It's worth noting that my rejection of paper mail doesn't mean I reject the notion of the nice parts - hand-written letters, greeting cards, wedding invitations. Those are great. But I'd be totally happy seeing a high quality digitized version of those appear in the email inbox.)

I do hope someone figures out a good solution here, because I'm certain there's demand for this service in some form or another.

(edit: As a friend pointed out - $5/month is probably far too cheap. Earth Class Mail starts at $20. I'd gladly pay that for Outbox - probably more.)

<comment><USER12> Totally agree with this. Their business never made much sense in charging only $5 to "undo" what USPS does, but it worked great and is really useful when travelling. They should have tested a $19.99 price point before shutting down. I'm not sure i would have kept paying it for too long, but worth a shot.

<comment><USER13> I'm unfamiliar with the specifics of their service but if $5 wasn't working out they wouldn't be able to solve it by simply increasing the price.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, i guess it was just too crazy of an idea to work. I personally would have paid $20/month for at least the next 6 months as I am travelling a lot and get tons of value from remote mail access. I agree, though, that with the general value prop if its not worth $5 for most people, it is certainly not worth $20! As a side note: I'm surprised they only had 2k users with a 5M investment round. Seems like they burned cash in some expensive marketing channels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "total yield from the waitlist was under 10 percent" that's 10% paying customers that's definitely not as bad as they made it sound.

I'm a little surprised why did they think it would be a cheap operation. They send someone to pick up the mail from your house, that's insane. Of course that will be expensive. And it's only $5 per month. There are a few old school services that do the same but they ask the customer to redirect their mail to a specific new address. I wonder why outbox didn't go down that route.

Definitely sad to see them go.

</comment><comment><USER15> I read this kind of quickly but did they actually say that they raised $5,000,000 6 months ago, decided in that time that their business model would not work then decided to go into 'stealth mode' and work on their next fancy?

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm an Outbox customer and am really sad to see it go. I did it expect it though. In fact, every time I thought of Outbox it was always accompanied with worry about them shutting down. I just couldn't see how they could afford to do what they do when customers only pay $5 per month.

I didn't read the entire post yet but I wonder why they never tried to or considered raising prices. I would of paid substantially more for the service.

I don't see all that much value in the service for my personal mail but for my business mail, I purchased a UPS mailbox and have all mail sent there and outbox takes care of it for me without me having to go there all the time. I just renewed my UPS mailbox for the year too!

</comment><comment><USER17> Just a FYI there are a handful of companies already doing something very similar. Except instead of physically picking up your mail, they receive it on your behalf (made possible by USPS form 1583 [1]). Then they digitize and forward (you pay S&H.)

[1] [http://about.usps.com/forms/ps1583.pdf](http://about.usps.com/forms/ps1583.pdf)

<comment><USER18> I'd been wanting something like this as I have a few physical mailboxes but rarely need the physical mail itself. Do you have any useful links to the 1583-based providers?

<comment><USER19> I used to work for one of the Commercial Mail Receiving Agencies (CMRA) as defined by the Form 1583. Here's a non-comprehensive list:

myus.com, earthclassmail.com, usglobalmail.com, bongous.com, usamail1.com, maillinkplus.com, usa2me.com, usabox.com, reship.com and probably 50 or so other.

The google keywords you want to search with are "mail forwarding" or "international mail forwarding" or "virtual mailbox" to get started. Not all of them offer pictures of the mail or scanning, but some of them definitely do.

It's a REALLY fractured industry because there's essentially zero M&A activity. The Form 1583 is a giant pain to fill out and it ties you to a specific both company and address. Furthermore if you decide to switch from one to another you can't take advantage of the USPS' normal "fill out this form to get your mail forwarded" feature because as far as the USPS is concerned that's the CMRA's problem, not theirs.

In fairness to the USPS it's a really tough task to determine not only what address mail is going to but what person's name (and box/suite/apt/whatever number) it's going to at that address. Then once you figure that out, you have to figure out if that's one of the probably 500 people who are on the "forward" list at any given time. I know because I built a system to that and more for the company I worked at and it wasn't foolproof. So if it can't be automated easily the only alternative is to have the postal worker on the route do it. Where I worked we got many thousands of letters a day, it would have taken our mailman/woman half a day or longer to go through everything trying to match recipients up against the list of 500 people who want forwarding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is sad to see. As the co-founder of [http://www.paperkarma.com](http://www.paperkarma.com) who's had to deal with some of the same issues (USPS regulations) I was keeping an eye out & pulling for them to succeed. We need further legislation to enable citizens better control over unsolicited mail. You guys built a great service & should be very proud! [edit: spelling]

<comment><USER21> I absolutely love PaperKarma. Keep up the good work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Seems really strange that they're shutting down. With a substantial customer list and some infrastructure that's hard to build, that's a business that could be sold for something -- perhaps not substantial exit money, but still.

That said, they were charging less than what the service cost to provide, and -- judging from the comments here -- less than what their customers valued their services for. So perhaps they didn't have a good idea of what value is and how to sell it.

<comment><USER23> _" With a substantial customer list"_

FTA: "we serviced a mere 2,000 customers in two relatively small markets"

<comment><USER22> 2,000 customers is substantial, especially when the feedback from those 2,000 seems to be "I would like to pay you more money"

<comment><USER23> Not in startupland it isn't. pg's hockey stick growth and all that.

<comment><USER22> I get the startupland thing. The point I'm making is -- couldn't they have tried Flippa or something? Startupland isn't "valuable asset land" when it comes to folding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There is one small nugget in the article that demonstrates exactly why they failed:

"This final challenge—product market fit"

They invested a very large amount of money, and put the most important challenge at the very end.

"This final challenge" should never, ever, ever be the final challenge. Product-market fit should be the first challenge. Everything flows from matching the product to the market. The fact that they believed this was "the final challenge" shows that they were making decisions in the wrong way -- a way that brought them failure.

I only hope they consider profit/market fit BEFORE they spend more of their investors money.

</comment><comment><USER25> It sounds like their original business model got shut down due to positioning: they pitched it as reducing postal spam, and in the proces they attracted unwanted attention from the USPS, who profit from postal spam.

Meanwhile, Earth Class Mail ([https://www.earthclassmail.com/](https://www.earthclassmail.com/)) seems to be going strong following the same "digitize your mail" approach. They don't seem to build their business around spam reduction specifically, just around paper reduction, which doesn't threaten the USPS.

</comment><comment><USER26> Clearly there is no need for physical paper mail/envelope delivery to most people's home. With just a few exceptions, I haven't received a single piece of USPS physical mail "directly" since 2003. I was moving that fall, so I had picked up a PostOffice Box (And I had been using paytrust for all my paper bills since 1999) - and when I moved back to the Bay Area - I just never told anyone what my home address was, and put a big "DONOTDELIVER" on the post office box that came with my apartment.

The _only_ exceptions to that, were in 2010, when I needed to get a California ID, and they would only mail it to my home address. Soon thereafter I started getting Jury Summons (Ironic for this Canadian) - with those two exceptions - no paper sent directly to me, couldn't be happier.

Pro Tip - A Post Office box at a "friendly" POBox location will throw away all your junk mail (probably in violation of some kind of USPS statute) and for a small fee, remail it to you anywhere in the world. Never have to change your address ever again. Never receive any direct mail.

</comment><comment><USER27> Very sorry to hear this outcome, and I wish the best for the team. Perhaps you can sell standalone products? There is still value in never having to touch paper, and I would have been a happy customer had I known the wait list was done. It was such a promising product!

Most interesting quote to me, and thank you so much for the candor.

> _After several months of testing and refining, we reasonably concluded that > we were executing well and collecting good data—it told us that there wasn't > enough demand to support the cost model. Our monthly operating deficits were > too high, and even though we continued to get better at acquisition, each > small success actually saw our cash curve decline further because our > density remained flat. For longer than we would be willing to tolerate, we > would lose money for each additional customer we gained. Despite the massive > interest in our company, we learned that the product we built did not find > fit in the market we targeted._

P.S. I am doubly sorry to hear that the USPS shut down the partnership due to threatening unwanted!! ad revenue... this is making me feel even more sad.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm terribly sad about this. I was eagerly anticipating their rollout to my market and would've happily paid more than the $5/month charge for the benefit of never opening another piece of junk mail again.

</comment><comment><USER29> I am a current customer of Outbox and also a customer of VirtualPostMail (VPM) for both personal and business mail. And I am a former EarthClassMail (ECM) and PayTrust customer.

Since many seem to be asking about alternatives, I have generally positive views about VPM and ECM. They get the job done, though neither of them will blow your socks off from a technology standpoint (e.g., search, image resolution). I used ECM for 2 1/2 years and then switched to VPM, which I've been using for the last 2 1/2 years. VPM is considerably less expensive than ECM (which probably targets pricing for SMBs rather than consumers).

For reasons I can't grasp, I consider dealing with physical mail one of the most undesirable "life maintenance" activities imaginable. In 2000, I started using paymybills.com (became Paytrust/Intuit) -- basically VPM for bills only plus online bill pay. I paid ~$10/month and easily would have paid double that. I emailed them around 2001 and suggested they expand to provide the same service for all mail. When Intuit acquired Mint, I emailed Aaron Patzer a suggestion that they look into doing to mail what Mint did for financial information. He put me in touch with a product manager he said was looking into this, but apparently it never went anywhere.

When I heard about ECM, I signed up for their service in a heartbeat. It wasn't perfect, but I considered their service to be (barely) worth the $800-$1000/year I paid them. When I learned about VPM, I quickly switched to them and remain a generally happy customer and average about $200/year in fees.

Similarly, I signed up for Outbox the instant I heard of it, wanting to test it out on the trickle of mail I still get at home to see if it might be an improvement on VPM. The one thing I never got from Outbox was peace of mind that they would be around for the long haul, so I thankfully never cancelled my VPM service. I sent Outbox an email in March 2013 inviting them to charge more because I knew today's announcement was inevitable if they did not make some fundamental changes. I never understood why they wouldn't scan bulk mail I wanted open (you had to have it delivered). But I was cheering for them and am sad to see it come to an end.

[Edit: typo]

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm surprised nobody has mentioned yet the Seinfeld scene with Kramer and the Postmaster General about junk mail:

[http://www.siyumhaseinfeld.com/eps/season9/905-TheJunkMail.h...](http://www.siyumhaseinfeld.com/eps/season9/905-TheJunkMail.html)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nKlzQo3Wqo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nKlzQo3Wqo)

</comment><comment><USER31> This is one of those things that seemed sorta cool (but not really) and probably the future will look more like it than what we have today. But then you start thinking about the cost to operate it and trying to get people to pay for very marginal value. And it's pretty easy to predict demise. I'm sure folks will say that's not always the case so please provide some examples.

</comment><comment><USER32> Crazy. Some of the comments on this old TechCrunch article about the economics of Outbox look Nostradamus-like

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/25/outbox-digitizes-sf- snail-m...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/25/outbox-digitizes-sf-snail-mail/)

It just never fully made economic sense. Especially with the overhead of undoing something that was just done, mail delivery.

</comment><comment><USER33> With the listed problems getting to breakeven density, marketing traction, and a mention of an email marketing campaign for what is a physical->electronic mail service, I can't help but wonder if Outbox had ever ran a physical junk mail campaign for targeted physical addresses in order to push up the customer density. (not meant as a criticism, just idle curiosity)

</comment><comment><USER34> A truly great service. I'd even be willing to pay 3-4x. My apt building is from the early 1900s and my tiny mailbox overfills after 1-2 days -- it's been wonderful to not have to come back from vacation to a clogged box. Outbox has saved me all kinds of time and patience and am terribly sad to see them go. Best of luck to the team in their next project!

</comment><comment><USER35> Hey everybody. Earth Class Mail is currently running a promo (OUTBOX2014) for people feeling aimless in the wake of Outbox's closure. It'll give you two months free and waive your sign-up fee. Shameless plug, I work there. I can vouch for the service, though; it's legit, and we're working really hard to grow the company.

<comment><USER36> ECM is still a bit pricey for many individuals (although if you travel, or order a lot of stuff online and need it reshipped, it is a great deal.)

For a startup, especially a smaller one w/o an office manager or formal office, it is an amazing value. The SF office in particular is very helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Damn. I have a post office box located in SF that's my main mailing address, but I live in Seattle right now. I suppose it was my own fault relying on them exclusively and not having a backup plan, but does anyone know any service that does something similar to outbox mail? I'd love to keep using my SF address.

</comment><comment><USER38> For those who have no idea what Outbox is, here is their original landing page: [https://web.archive.org/web/20140116081115/https://www.outbo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140116081115/https://www.outboxmail.com/)

</comment><comment><USER39> I despise mail. I check it once a month and my box is crammed the max with ads and the important mail items are crumpled. I would unsubscribe from all mail if such a thing was possible.

I loved Outbox and will miss the service, however I do agree with the poster below. 5$ seemed like a steal.

</comment><comment><USER40> Very sorry to see them go and it was a beautiful product. However, this is no surprise at all. More surprising is that they were able to raise money for a business model that is fundamentally unsustainable (negative gross margins).

</comment><comment><USER41> What a shame, I was really excited to try out their service. I never considered that USPS would ban them from providing their service, but I'm sure it has something to do with all the revenue that the USPS makes from spam mail.

</comment><comment><USER42> I always thought it was absurd that they actually had people picking up your mail from your mailbox. I wanted a "Google Voice" for mail. Just let me give out some proxy mailing address that goes straight to their scanners.

</comment><comment> nezza-_- Shouldn't one of the first sentences of the article contain a deadline on how long the service will remain functional? It's the most important thing current users have to know.

<comment><USER43> Good point. We link to our FAQ w/ the dates. I've included it below. We will stop service on Monday January 28th. [http://blog.outboxmail.com/post/74086747774/customer-faq- for...](http://blog.outboxmail.com/post/74086747774/customer-faq-for-outbox- ending-service)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> One of the best letters of this kind I've seen. I like how they were up front about the mistakes/miscalculations they made, and what they learned from it.

</comment><comment><USER45> Why would they not pivot to being an Earth Class Mail competitor? At that point, they are not competing with or undermining, but rather contributing to the USPS.

<comment><USER46> I'm looking into Earth Class Mail and alternatives right now, and I think more modern/advanced competition could definitely do well (and leverage most of what Outbox has built).

Right now these services mostly target a very niche market of expats, travelers, etc, but I could definitely see an argument (just from a convenience perspective) of why this could be greatly expanded to a much more general audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> When you control the mail, you control... information!

</comment><comment><USER48> What pain-point was Outbox solving and was it really that painful to get you to pull out money for a scanning solution...

</comment><comment><USER49> Is it just me or today seems to be a day a lot of startup shutdown announcements have made it to the hackernews homepage

</comment><comment><USER50> sorry to see it go. USPS should have bought it or integrated it (but I saw the blog post about them saying "we'll never do that")

Hell, I would have still paid for the service for the archiving and online filing part even if they continued to send junk mail.

</comment><comment><USER51> Man, seems like this is "Useful Startups Going out of Business" month...

Good luck guys.

</comment><comment><USER52> That is unfortunate, I would have loved to use this service.

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm sorry, who is shutting down? Never heard of them</comment>


"How can I hire freelancers without paying the money they ask?" - <AUTHOR> http://answers.onstartups.com/q/29154/12903

<comment><USER2> You might want to fix the title to reflect the actual article. This reads like "How can I exploit some freelancers"

</comment><comment><USER3> It's like this: <http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p.html>

<comment><USER4> Thanks that was a good read. Why is our profession so plagued with this problem? no one would think of asking other professions to work for free. Is it just that we are inundated by it that we don't see it happen to other professions or is this a problem that overwhelmingly affects freelancers in the technical and creative trades. I understand not having the money to do it, but take for example auto repair. If you don't have the money to fix your car you don't go to a mechanic and beg for free work. Even if it is a commercial vehicle you don't go to the mechanic and say fix it and I will give you a (generally small) cut of profits. No you either come up with the money or you learn to fix the car yourself. Now granted mechanical skills are easier to teach than artistic skills. Some people just don't have the eye for art. But the issue still stands why do people feel it is acceptable to ask for free work in digital mediums, when they would never do so in the physical world?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Answer: No.</comment>


Instant access to your shell init files - <AUTHOR> http://emacsredux.com/blog/2020/07/16/instant-access-to-your-shell-init-files/ <comment><USER2> I'm all for Emacs tips and tricks, but this just seems unnecessary. Using find-file (C-x C-f) along with tab completion to open your .bashrc or whatever is literally several key strokes. Does anyone really edit their shell config that often to warrant binding it to a key to shave off several milliseconds?

<comment><USER3> Or, alternatively, builtin recentf [0] or bookmarks [1] features

[0] [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/RecentFiles](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/RecentFiles)

[1] [https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Bo...](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Bookmarks.html)

<comment><USER4> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I put it on F2

      (defvar init-files-list nil)

      (defun my-rotate-list (l)
        "Return list L with the first element moved to the end"
        (nconc (cdr l) (list (car l))))

      (defun edit-init-files-el ()
        "cycle through init-files-list, visiting each file"
        (interactive)
        (find-file (car init-files-list))
        (setq init-files-list (my-rotate-list init-files-list))
        (delete-other-windows (selected-window)))

      ;; elsewhere
      (append-list 'init-files-list
                   '("~/.emacs.d/init.el"
                     "~/.bashrc"))

      (global-set-key [f2]      'edit-init-files-el)  ;; cycles init.el -> .bashrc -> ...

this is actually simplified, I append different startup files depending on the system I'm using, and I have a keys.el file devoted specifically to my key definitions that I put in the init-files-list</comment>


Are you counted as one of the Unemployed? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mint.com/blog/finance-core/a-visual-guide-to-the-financial-crisis-unemployment-rates/

<comment><USER2> The U6 calculations are frightening enough. What's even worse is that this infographic was done a mere 8 months ago.

U3 ('official rate') jumped from 7.2% to 9.6% since January.

Check out this infographic via Calculated Risk to see how bad it is in some states: [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_pMscxxELHEg/SrOono9ZxiI/AAAAAAAAGX...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_pMscxxELHEg/SrOono9ZxiI/AAAAAAAAGXs/ayorkJAeibU/s1600-h/StateUnemploymentAug2009.jpg)

 _Fourteen states and D.C. now have double digit unemployment rates.

Illinois, Indiana, and Georgia are all close.

Four states are at record unemployment rates: Rhode Island, Oregon, Nevada, and California. Several others - like Florida and Georgia - are close._

[http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/09/unemployment- rates...](http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/09/unemployment-rates- california-nevada.html)

<comment><USER3> Indeed. The U-6 rate is now 16.8% (seasonally adjusted).

<http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Where do I stand? I was laid off last week, so I decided to start my own software company (anyone need good web development done?). I don't have any paying clients yet, so I guess I'm employed, but making $0.

<comment><USER5> You're available for freelance work and there isn't a link to a page where you talk about your experience, your capabilities, and your rates in your profile?

This is a huge, huge pet peeve of mine: if you are a freelancer, you _must_ have a link to your portfolio/marketing page everywhere online. I strongly advocate for people to put their rates, as well as their experience, capabilities, languages, links to your GitHub repos, etc., online, but I won't hate you if you don't (I just won't hire you).

If you're not currently accepting assignments, say that on your marketing page. But to neglect the opportunity for people who you interact with to find out _how to hire you and why_ is just insane. Insane. (Plus, your link to Artisan System 404s - or does the Comcast intercept, at least - for me.)

<comment><USER4> You're right, I need to do that. I totally forgot that we even had mini profiles on here. I'll add my company on there.

<comment><USER6> Is that your home address? If so, get a PO Box.

"Leftnode Software is a new, small, and socially progressive software company". Why would you even mention that you are socially progressive? I do my best to shelter my clients of my political views. I don't mind theirs, and I wouldn't want them to not pick me because we disagree politically.

<comment><USER4> Socially progressive in the software market == we like open source software and contribute back to it. I'll make it more evident.

No, thats a real business address, we have a real office.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, that part confused me. I thought you meant politically progressive, which is fine, but might turn away customers.

<comment><USER4> I am politically progressive, but you're right, I should make the distinction more obvious.

<comment><USER7> Your package includes "Google Email - Gmail"; try to rephrase that so clients don't think you're charging them for a @gmail.com signup. Don't even mention google, just call it "your own email@example.com email".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It will be interesting to see how the climate impacts YC applications? Will increased unemployment alone lead to higher rates of applications? How will the demo skew? Young folks who can't get a first job? Early thirties folks who are hitting a wall with promotion freezes? Or does it go the other way with people less willing to start something if they have a job already?

</comment><comment><USER9> There's also a company "birth-death" adjustment that tries to account for startup job creation...some argue that it is overstating employment.

[http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/06/birth-death- adjustment-...](http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/06/birth-death-adjustment- goosed-nfp/)

<http://www.bls.gov/web/cesbd.htm>

<comment><USER10> The "birth-death" model does overestimate employment - just take the example of the fellow who posted at the top of this thread. Laid off yesterday, starts a new software venture today. 0 income. And probably won't have any income for a few months at least...

So yes, new businesses are probably being born at a rapid clip just because people don't have any other options for employment at this point, so why not start something? But the vast majority of those businesses being started now won't show any income for many months... and many of them will just go under (as is always the case).</comment></comment>


Hiring Is Broken - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@evnowandforever/f-you-i-quit-hiring-is-broken-bb8f3a48d324 <comment><USER2> Yikes... Interviewing sucks but half the reason interviewers ask these types of questions is to see your attitude and how you respond. Writing an Instagram clone in Angular doesn't really tell me much about your problem solving skills when faced with a unique problem.

> How many people can actually write BFS on the spot, without preparing for it > in advance?

Ughhh, should I tell him?

> why would they ask me this question, what does breadth-first search has to > do with front-end development

Tree data structures are really common in front-end.. like the DOM or JSON.

<comment> y-c-o-m-b This feels condescending.

I've been developing for well over a decade as full stack engineer. I've worked as a successful software dev at some big corporations (like Intel, and yes it was fulltime for several years) and almost always outperformed my peers. I work in finance now where everything is about managing portfolios for people - lots of numbers and heavy calculations.

I have no fucking clue how to write a BFS. I've never needed to know how to write a BFS. I will probably never need to know how to write a BFS. Coders like me write business applications where these things are literally never an issue. If there's something I need to know and don't, I simply research it. That's the point he's trying to make. Don't interview people on algorithms they will never ever use. It's as simple as that.

There are more productive ways to interview someone; for example take a bug in your product and see if the candidate can fix it. Or if you're worried about sharing proprietary info, then make a sample program that simulates a bug or feature that your application will use and observe the candidate working on that.

<comment><USER3> The theoretical interview was never about writing a BFS. Its about how you approach answering the question.

<comment><USER4> The fallacy here is that you are actually getting to observe people's problem solving approach when asking them questions like this (vs their ability to talk) and that your subjective perception of someone's problem solving ability in those situations maps to actual job performance at all (vs your own biases).

<comment><USER3> The entire point is that I _am_ gauging their ability to talk with me through something they may or may not be uncomfortable with. This has worked well in the past and most people deal with this favorably.

If their response is "this is stupid, no one has to know how to do this" and storm out with the same indignation that is present in half of these comments then they are not the ones who dodged a bullet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The thing that appears to me, most overpoweringly, is the bitterness.

I understand, I've felt bitter about interviews before, I'm sure some interviews were unfair. But I also recognize this bitterness is a weakness of mine, unproductive, unattractive.

The way the author indulges in this resentment would make me very cautious about recommending him regardless of technical capability. An employee who has low tolerance for the massive randomness/unfairness in the world probably would get sick of most companies pretty quickly.

<comment><USER6> This was my impression as well. There were likely real issues that made the process annoying, but the tone of the post is basically "how dare you ask me those stupid questions at the interview you invited me to?".

On site interviews usually evaluate not only technical competency but also whether that person is OK to work with, especially during crunch times. Being able to point to a few github projects is good, but not sufficient. When faced with a question one cannot answer staying positive and trying a few options is often sufficient to get off the hook.

<comment><USER7> It _is_ insulting to someone with tens of thousands of lines of public code in open source. You can work at a tech giant for half a decade and slip under the radar with no way to prove or disprove your competency there unless you can get references from the job, but for those who have put out tons of work for free having those who want them to write code for them asking for grade school pop questionnaires is an insult to their expertise.

You don't ask a published drug researcher with patents or papers written to build simple molecules out of building blocks during the interview, but in software even senior engineers are asked to regurgitate things from CS202 for decades on end instead of actually acknowledging their accomplishments or talking about their legitimate capabilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > I really wish companies would be more transparent about their candidate > rejection reasons

I always wish this too. At my previous job a (also at BigCorp) candidate reached out to ask why they hadn't been selected so I started putting together a little email for them trying to give polite feedback and encouraging them to apply again in a few years (they were great, but we needed a more senior role and had no open junior positions at that time). I asked my boss to review it and make sure it was okay, and he told me that under no circumstances do we ever give candidates feedback because if you say one wrong thing it's a lawsuit waiting to happen. Having been on the interview side where I really wanted to know how I could have done better, I was a bit angry on behalf of the candidate.

<comment><USER9> > under no circumstances do we ever give candidates feedback because if you > say one wrong thing it's a lawsuit waiting to happen

Wow, how widespread is this? I've _always_ asked for feedback and I've gotten meaningful feedback _maybe_ once.

<comment><USER10> Universal, for all the companies I've worked at.

<comment><USER11> Seconding this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hiring is hard. It's very difficult to figure out what combination of activities/questions will correlate to actual job performance, not to mention uncover someone's day-to-day personality when their guard is up.

With that said, my interview process basically is:

* 30 minute intro call to dive into the CV a bit and see if it's worth everyone's time to go further

* 1.5-2 hour pair programming exercise using the actual language & framework they'd most likely be using for the job

* If that goes well, 30-60 minutes to meet with the team and figure out if everyone will get along

That's it. No whiteboarding, no FizzBuzz, no algorithms. If we make a mistake we try to recognize it within 6 weeks of the person starting in that position.

<comment><USER13> This seems like a reasonable process. However, for me personally, I have a big portfolio of side projects with open-source code. And it irks me if a company asks me to prove my programming skills by wasting my time doing some silly tests, where if they just read my code we would be able to skip it. From all the places I've worked, the companies with the better programmers were the ones where they actually looked at your past code and had hardly any exercise or test.

I think the 6-week "probation" period is an excellent idea. Since most of the time you can recognize if they are a good fit or not.

<comment><USER14> One problem I have with this is that tons of people like to push the "GitHub is my resume" thing, but 75% of the time they have 25+ "forked" copies of major open source projects with maybe one or two extra commits on top.

It can be a real drag to try and suss out who actually has real contributions or real original work on their GitHub. Our approach for hiring is to actually have people cherry pick out one or two items they're really proud of and have them send a brief overview / sample.

That approach is also nice, because it gives you a great interview starting point to dig into a technical item that they (should be) comfortable with and passionate about.

<comment><USER15> Your cherry picking idea is fine, but your reasoning for it is bs. If someone wrote the code (or read it enough to grok it), asking them some questions on the internals will sift out who just copied some free repos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think developers complain way to much about the interview process. The fact of the matter is that it's very clear what type of questions will be asked for most technical interviews and there is a wealth of resources available to prepare. The ROI on spending a couple of weeks preparing is definitely worth the possibility of a substantial raise at a big technology company.

I can't think of another industry that is as high paying as software development, with such a low barrier to entry (formal education matters less and less) with such transparency regarding the interview process (books, blogs, literal guides from the company itself). And HN is flooded with a couple of posts like this every single month, is it perfect? No. What is? At the end of the day this just looks like entitlement.

<comment><USER7> It is a total failure of industry to ask people who are productively writing software one day to waste dozens of hours learning to dance an artificial interview game to get hired somewhere to start writing productive software again weeks later.

If the candidate has no resume and nothing to prove they have any skill then yes, give them a rigamarole. But for don't ask a staff artist to speedpaint you the view out the window with crayons in a lined paper binder in half an hour. They give you their porfolio, you inspect it, and if they are accredited and recognized you don't waste their time on quizbowl.

Arguing about it though is mostly pointless. The awareness is out there that these companies are throwing away not just the on hand candidates they turn down for failing their charade game but also the legions of potential employees turned off by the theatrics and immaturity of software hiring. The OP is absolutely right to say interviewing in tech is _draining_ because you go from thinking yourself competent on the outside to interviewers trying to beat you into a sobbing mess on the inside. Its adversarial from the start at almost every company, it certainly contributes in large part to the lack of women participating in development, and businesses seem to be just fine with the outcomes since they know what they are doing is awful but so long as they are "hip" and popular they can get away with it, with an endless list of potential hires to give the rigamarole to.

<comment><USER17> > if they are accredited and recognized

This jumped out at me. What do you think is analogous to that accreditation in the software industry?

<comment><USER7> A portfolio of shipped code, preferably open source. No different than how an artist might have to jump through a lot of shit to get hired if they don't have a substantial show of work, but if they do, you are often fast tracked into employment.

That doesn't preclude spending some time to insure your candidate isn't plagiarizing their cited works, but that is a problem other industries have solved well for years without turning the process into an adversarial circus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can we get a (2016) added to this?

Also previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11579757](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11579757)

</comment><comment><USER19> > _The first round started with introductions, followed by a coding exercise — > write a maze solving algorithm. What the fuck?! Seriously? Mind you, this > was an interview for a front-end developer position and I am not a recent > college graduate anymore._

If you balk at breaking down a relatively simple and straightforward problem into approachable steps that a computer can interpret, then what exactly do you think that programming is? You don't need to _know_ the algorithm. You need to be able to think like a problem solver. And if you can't do that, then what exactly are you doing?

> _Anyway, that did not go too well, obviously, because it has been a long > time since I took an Artificial Intelligence course in college_

You should be able to do this even if you've never done it before. You have a start, you have an end, and you have decisions to make to get from the start to the end. That's the literal definition of programming.

The only people I know who think that basic pathfinding is some voodoo dark magic artificial intelligence problem and not just a simple straightforward algorithmic process that you should be able to do in your sleep for the rest of your life immediately after the first week of Intro CS 100 are not software engineers.

<comment><USER20> > If you balk at breaking down a relatively simple and straightforward problem > into approachable steps that a computer can interpret, then what exactly do > you think that programming is?

Programmers tend to be good at putting their head down and solving a problem. They tend to be very bad at live coding for someone whose job is to judge you.

A hiring process that measures you on the latter rather than the former is broken. It's like interviewing a novelist by asking them to extemporize a speech for you.

It's very annoying that every attempt to make the case against the latter is met with people equating it with the former. _They 're very different skills._

Maybe for some people evaluating performance in live coding is a good proxy for evaluating their programming ability in general, but it's pretty obvious that there are a ton of excellent programmers for which it's a _terrible_ proxy.

<comment><USER19> > _Programmers tend to..._

Please don't generalize about people this way. It's not useful, and it's almost certainly a bad idea to hand-wave away not being able to think through something trivial with an audience.

If someone asks you to identify whether a bird in a photo is having a good day or a bad day, then it's reasonable for you to say "Wait, what?" Because that's a research problem that covers a whole host of different subjects (bird psychology, for one) and doesn't have a solution.

If someone asks you to implement efficient image segmentation, something that you probably don't know how to do unless you have a PhD in computer vision, then it's reasonable for you to say "I don't know how to do that but I can go home and research how to do it".

But OP wasn't asked to solve a hard problem. OP was asked to solve an incredibly simple problem and got angry about it.

> _It 's like interviewing a novelist by asking them to extemporize a speech > for you._

OPs given scenario is more like interviewing a novelist by asking them to put a handful of words in an order that constructs a grammatically sound sentence. If you can't do that, then they don't want your novel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "I really wish companies would be more transparent about their candidate rejection reasons."

There is just too much legal risk from doing so. Too much risk of wording being misinterpreted and being turned around to be discrimination etc. To provide feedback you'd have to have so much oversight and absolutely ridiculous levels of paranoia about the potential interpretations of what you'd said that the risk is just not worth it.

The value giving feedback to candidates provides to the company is next-to- nothing as well, especially for the larger companies.

<comment><USER22> "There is just too much legal risk from doing so"

How about having them sign an agreement that the candidate would under no circumstances sue the company for the rejection? I would sign it in a heartbeat if I received some feedback.

<comment><USER23> Most state explicitly do not allow a person to give up their right to sue based on discrimination. Such a contract would be unenforceable and perhaps even used as evidence in a discrimination case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There is a hiring infrastructure which is sort of like those dating apps that say they want you to find true love but really they want you to keep dating. I am thinking of a lot of HR at companies, recruiters, and people that enjoy interviewing. I have worked at startups that weren't really growing that fast but we're always interviewing to fill in the churn. Interviewing feels productive, feels like a company is growing. They say: We only accept the best so any test is reasonable. This tends to discount people's accomplishments and the idea that smart people can learn.

The internet makes it possible screen a zillion candidates, so like dating it feels like there are a million fish in the sea. Why value anyone's time when there is so many to consider? I was thinking about putting my CV for a very senior role and before you could put it in they made you take this like web IQ test. Seriously? I would worry about anyone who go through that for a job that expected more than ten years high level experience. Pass.

</comment><comment><USER25> The core problem IMHO is that a great many of the people hiring developers are not themselves developers and have little to no technical knowledge. Companies depend on these ridiculous hiring processes because many decision makers believe it allows them evaluate candidates that they have no other way to evaluate. They see Google using these approaches and figure if it is good enough for Google it is good enough for them -- not realizing that Google is an entirely different situation with needs that don't match their own (Note to 99% of companies in existence, you are NOT Google and Facebook). I speak from experience. I have been hiring and managing IT staff for 20 years. I also happen to have 25 years of experience in development and infrastructure. One of my priorities when taking over an IT division is to get rid of these useless tests and I have received push back from internal recruiters, HR, and non-technical management every time I have attempted to do this. It requires moving a good percentage of of the hiring process from non-technical management to the IT staff and its not an easy change. Recruiters and non- technical management see it as a threat to their positions. Until there is a realization that you have to know something about a topic to judge the skillsets of others I don't see this improving (I expect that to happen... never).

</comment><comment><USER26> I disagree with the OP's premise. Yes, nobody is going to write a BFS or `Math.pow()` on the spot, but it's way too easy for people to bullshit about their experience to rely on that alone, so BFS and `Math.pow()` is what we've got to work with. While I'm a proponent of giving interviewers a bit of homework and making the interview a pairing session, there are plenty of people that complain about this being free labor (even if it isn't). OP mentioned earlier that looking these up is easy enough, so what's the harm in looking these up before the interview so you can get that out of the way?

Also, failing five face-to-face interviews smells of personality or culture fit issues, not tech issues, IMO. I've interviewed tons of people over the years, and the ones that pass the phone screen but fail the tech screen usually failed due to poor culture fit (or padding their knowledge a little too much). I would see if it's possible to message one of your past interviewers and ask for a honest opinion of what they thought of you. While you're unlikely to get a response (giving interview feedback is, sadly, a big HR no-no), some people might budge on your offer.

Good luck?

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm not exactly a gifted programmer or anything but a BFS seems pretty reasonable in an interview depending upon the amount of rigor / efficiency being demanded. I remember doing it for one of my very first interviews where I was asked to implement a website crawler and hold onto URLs. Having written a lot of them while trying to scrape sites for info before every other site had an API, this was super fast for me and was a very practical problem. It's not like they're asking for a topological sort of a graph where you can use Prim v. Kruskal and now you have to make sure you remember that near the neurons that activated your memory of your 3rd week of sophomore year 2nd semester when you had a really nasty cold. If you haven't heard of breadth- first v. depth-first that should be simple.

I do this problem constantly on my laptop when I'm looking for files and start getting annoyed at how long a search is taking. You start applying -maxdepth to a find command and fumble through directories perhaps and do a for loop. This is how I wind up doing a crude variant of k means clustering using cut, sort, uniq, and some creative use of awk when trawling through a bunch of log files.

But I do feel that anyone pretty serious about programming as a career understands there's little to be gained by more or less bitching about the state of hiring and a lot more to be gained by spending a few hours or so working on some problem sets occasionally. We're all busy and have to keep our technical knowledge up to date of course, but almost every well paid professional has to do this (doctors and lawyers are required to do this to even practice, in fact). I don't bother interviewing for FAANGS because my brain's fried and burn-out makes working on interview prep an order magnitude harder, but I don't go around blaming everyone for acting in their own self interest either.

</comment><comment><USER28> In this regard, A lot of interviews are designed to test soft skills.

I know many recruitment teams aim for soft skills first because they don't want to bother their technical staff if a candidate is not a good match.

Many algorithm questions are designed intentionally to see how you tackle an uncommon problem or even an unfair situation and to see if you have a strategy to solve it. Of course, a candidate invited for front-end position at a decent company knows how to tackle his common tasks regardless of how complex they are in comparison.

However, that is definitely not true about all interviews. Many companies just copy these interview formats without understanding what is the actual idea behind them. Or how to facilitate these interviews correctly with different candidates from different cultures in different situations.

But you shouldn't go to interviews with this assumption. I'm sure at least one of those BigCorps had a professional recruiter.

After all, hiring a professional recruiter is as hard as hiring a good software engineer.

<comment><USER29> This is a good answer. I was talking to someone at a company that actually used questions like this.

He asked me a question like "You're shrunk down to a couple inches in height and put inside a blender. How do you escape?"

My response was "Is there anything else in the blender? Can I see anything nearby?"

He told me that I "already passed", but if it was an interview, we'd probably have a 1 or 2 minute conversation about it and then move on. The fact that I didn't start rattling off ideas, but instead asked smart questions, was what he was looking for.

It's easier to take a measure of someone if they can't figure out what they're being judged on. If they know how they're being judged, they optimize for just that one thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I believe the fundamental problem is, most organizations interview in a style similar to testing in college: ask a question about a technical topic, evaluate if the answer is correct. This doesn't correlate especially well to how well a candidate will program if you hire them, but it's the method people learned in school for evaluating someone's knowledge of a topic, so it's what they use. Most developers, and most managers, have almost no training on how to interview well in order to determine who would be a good candidate, so they fall back on the only halfway-similar experience they have.

Now, this raises the question of why our society's method of educating people (or determining if that education has been effective) is not very well correlated to their real-world performance, but that's a whole 'nother conversation.

<comment><USER31> The weird part is that this is almost exclusively found in organizations that think of themselves as "tech"-y.

I work somewhere on the border between neuroscience and machine learning. Interviewing in a "neuro" group usually involves a lot of talking--what you've done on project X, how would you approach Y, what do you know about Z. Coding does come up, but in the context of stuff that I've done or would do on the job.

Applying for a very similar job in a tech company usually starts with me reversing strings on a whiteboard or abusing C++ templates to calculate factorials or something....

<comment><USER32> Exactly. I worked in Business Intelligence and having both an accountant and a programmer background, whiteboard coding never comes up in interviews. Its more domain knowledge that's important, which is mostly about finance/accountancy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Breadth-First Search (BFS) and Depth-First Search (DFS) are actually both pretty interesting algorithms (although relatively simple for the basic cases - there are some variations), partly because of their applications.

It's actually initially a bit surprising that BFS has such a simple algorithm using a queue, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread and in the Wikipedia article about it [1]. Might be non-intuitive on first look, but then turns out to make perfect sense.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadth- first_search](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadth-first_search)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth- first_search](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth-first_search)

<comment><USER34> And this being front-end, ie. JS, you can just use map/flat in a loop to get breadth first traversal.

       function bfs(list, cb) {
           while (list.length > 0) {
               let i = list.find(cb);
               if (i) return i;

               list = list.map(i => i.cn || []).flat();
           }
       }

<comment><USER33> Interesting, thanks. The Go Programming Language book also has a couple of nice examples of DFS and BFS, in the middle chapters. One is for sorting courses by prerequisites, and the other is for a web crawler, IIRC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Many (most?) programming jobs are about understanding the tools and libraries of an ecosystem well enough to build something useful.

When I interview people, I want to know if they can think. I want to know what their attitude will be like (to work with/near them). I want to know what gets them excited (in the context of work, mind you).

The older and/or more things a candidate has done in their life, the more accumulated wisdom they will have. This will translate into making better choices earlier (about approaches to problem solving). Testing against university compsci concepts is more likely to get a candidate who will either ignore a well tested and commonly understood library in favor of rolling their own (less-maintainable) code.

</comment><comment><USER36> This guy probably got a negative reaction because he says "hiring is broken", when what he meant was "my strategy for getting hired is broken." The goal of "hiring" is for companies to satisfy their needs, not to guarantee that every smart person that comes their way gets a job. A "hiring is broken" article coming from the position of a hiring manager would carry more weight.

Also I've never heard of this guy, not sure his handful of Medium articles and cookie-cutter tutorials is sufficient justification for his belief that Google should be lucky to talk to him.

<comment><USER37> I've had a 100% success rate at getting an offer once I realized the problem was _me_. (And I've had some bad interviews in my life before I got there, for sure.)

If the company doesn't extend an offer, it's because _I_ didn't show them the value I can deliver their organization. Either I didn't present myself as a teammate that makes the group stronger or I didn't present the technical skills to make them realize the talent I bring individually.

Maybe I'm lucky -- it's a low sample size.

But I suspect that we all can do better at interviewing and at selling ourselves. Traditionally, that's a weakness in engineers.

It's also why, when I'm interviewing, I try to remind applicants what I need: give me something, anything I can use to sell you to my manager -- to argue "yeah, this cool guy is the right business choice". Help me help you. If you can't, you won't get hired.

<comment><USER38> You are lucky, it's always possible to fully show the value one can deliver but for there to be another candidate who they decide will deliver more value.

I agree that it's common for interviewees to sell themselves well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Usually the people that says hiring isn't brokens are the ones that benefit most from it. Algorithms and programming are not one and the same. The overlap but knowing algorithms tells me nothing about your knowledge of programming.

You know what I would be more interested in candidates knowing? Solving problems that have no immediate answers. For example, understanding how to architect a program without using a framework, Debugging a bug even though you know nothing about the library you are using (eg. Be able to read code and race the problem), and understanding the difference between algorithm and architecture in overall performance of a system.

You can memorise algorithms. You can't memorise problem solving and architecture. Albert Einstein said something along the lines of, "Don't memorise knowledge that you can look up in a textbook."

What have you learned since becoming a programmer? Did you push your knowledge of programming or are you rushing to the next hype framework? I see many more of the latter than the former.

Knowing algorithms is like optimising for the flow of water for your tap in the house without understanding how the pipes layout affects the overall output. And that's the problem when you only work on one small section of the program your entire career.

Apologies for the rant..

</comment><comment><USER40> _I was asked to write a function findSum(array1, array2, sum) that returns true if two numbers from two sorted arrays add up to a given sum. I was able to solve it with my eyes closed using a double for loop — O(n²) time complexity. For the remaining time I was able to reduce the time complexity by converting arrays to hash maps, then finding the difference by subtracting sum from the first list element and checking if that difference is a "key" of the second hash map._

OK, I can accept the fact that in some environments, knowledge of BFS (and the ability to implement it from scratch) can be considered a must-have skill for a front-end developer. (Not in _all_ environments. But granted, in _some_ environments).

But can someone please explain how the need to implement a function like _findSum_ in less than O(n²) -- and in particular: to be able to whip out the sorting trick necessary to achieve it, while standing in front of a shitty whiteboard with strangers staring at you --

Can reasonably occur in an actual front-end engineering role?

</comment><comment><USER41> Yikes as an engineer and not a hiring manager, I do NOT want to work with this person, and I would thank the hiring manager that passed.

It's not even just the attitude. It's the competence too. If you can't code a BFS on the spot, sorry... that feels like far too low of a bar.

<comment><USER42> You really should walk into your office tomorrow and ask your team mates to write out BFS on a sheet of paper in half an hour (and take away their phones/laptops). I have a feeling you would be quite surprised at the outcome.

<comment><USER41> It really depends on what you do but I doubt your average graphics programmer wouldn't be able to do it in a heartbeat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Tech job interviews: the Tinder of labor marketplace

[https://medium.com/@carlosreutemann/tech-job-interviews- the-...](https://medium.com/@carlosreutemann/tech-job-interviews-the-tinder- of-labor-marketplace-d5ea644e0501)

</comment><comment><USER44> Why does nobody get it?

The coding interview is not about memorizing algorithms!

The coding interview is about demonstrating that you can think from first principles and DERIVE an algorithm!

If you understand the problem and the strategy for solving it, you don't need to remember the algorithm.

<comment><USER45> A lot of those algorithms were research questions that people spent a large amount of time on. The best way to prepare for these types of interviews is doing tons of practice problems until you get the pattern recognition to know what algorithms and data structures apply and fill out the code. Some things like DFS are pretty easy to derive from scratch, but others require more thought and very few people will be able to do it under pressure in an interview.

<comment><USER44> Are you seriously trying to tell me that you remember the code for quick sort?

I know what it does. Mechanically. I can visualize the recursive divide-and- conquer in my head.

I can implement it in any language.

All you have to understand is WHY the algorithm works.

<comment><USER45> I know how quicksort works well enough to write out some pseudocode quickly. Then once I've got the structure I can implement it. Same with lots of other algorithms, but if I had never heard of quicksort there's no way I would be able to come up with it during an interview.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> On the other end of the spectrum, I have little software engineering experience but having dabbled in competitive programming, I can solve almost all algorithmic interview questions optimally within minutes if not seconds. I still failed half of my interviews though (including Google even though I believe I answered every question perfectly). Perhaps it's due to my presentation, or my lacking portfolio, or perhaps the positions have simply been filled.

On another note, OP seems to rely on recruiters to approach him? Wouldn't it make sense for OP to actively apply to positions which may have better fit?

</comment><comment><USER47> This candidate reminds me of someone who went on a date and is bitter they didn't get a call back for a second, despite their qualities that obviously made them the right choice as a partner. Dating must be broken...

<comment><USER48> Totally agreed!

This dude most play League of legends

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> The 2016 discussion on this very article [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11579757](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11579757)

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm going to join in and say: you should be able to puzzle out the pseudocode for a BFS, not from "memory", but by thinking about the structure of a tree and asking yourself what would be required to touch each node at each level before moving on to the next level. It's not fantastically difficult, and if you can figure it out just by reasoning about trees then you're a smart problem solver that I'd like to work with.

</comment><comment><USER51> I think the real reason programming interviews have become torturous is to discourage people from changing jobs. It's a kind of unspoken anti-poaching agreement.

</comment><comment><USER52> I used to feel like the author of this post, but trees have come up at each of my last few jobs.

BFS is a trivial algorithm and you really should know it. It is only a few lines.

Do you work with things that have dependencies? Do you work with hierarchical data? What about hierachical apis? Tree traversal is a powerful tool, and not knowing how to use trees is a sign you may take the stick-and-rock route when it comes to solving problems

</comment><comment><USER30> Is it just me, or is HN, normally a much calmer and more reasonable forum than almost anywhere else on the internet, actually a little bit flamey and ranty when you get on the topic of tech interviewing? I've seen reasoned conversations about world politics, war, gender issues, etc. etc. on here, and never as much sturm und drang as on this issue. I do not necessarily exempt myself from this statement, btw.

<comment><USER53> Sunk cost fallacy/hazing mentality. "If I spent 6 months of my life memorizing programming problems to get a job at Google, then everyone should have to".

<comment><USER30> I have a similar impression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> The google interview really isn't that bad. In fact it's kind of unfair in the sense that someone who just did leetcode for a month can pass it while also being a terrible coder.

It's true the interviews don't test your real coding abilities. It's probsbly very low signal you aren't going to go in and write spaghetti algorithms (but they will at least be fast).

<comment><USER55> >In fact it's kind of unfair in the sense that someone who just did leetcode for a month can pass it while also being a terrible coder.

That isn't unfair, that's just a bad interview.

<comment><USER53> It is very unfair to people that have other obligations than doing leetcode for a month.

<comment><USER21> If you can pass a Google interview just from doing leetcode for a month, you got some bad interviewers there.

Last time I interviewed there I got pushed on just about every aspect of knowledge I had, going back over a decade+ of experience.

There was an awful lot of bullshit trivia questions buried in it, though, and a bizarre obsession with apparently expecting me to know every argument flag for a CLI off the top of my head.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> If I had to resolve BFS problem I wouldn't bitch about it like this guy, because the only thing you need to know is how to move across the tree. The rest - you can come up with that - it's not that hard and it's showing your thinking process.

<comment><USER57> Yeah, precisely. BFS and DFS are part of a very small collection of algorithmic questions I consider fair game — but I would never ask them directly. Instead I'm likelier to ask something like pretty printing a directory structure, so a function that prints out something like

        bin/
          sh
        usr/
          bin/
          local/
            bin/
          var/
          ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Here we go again. This bickering is never ending. Personally I have stopped caring.

</comment><comment><USER59> One of the things that I wish we could meet in the middle on is getting the option to use your favorite text editor or IDE during these interviews.

</comment><comment><USER60> This article is from 2016. We are in 2019, I'm curious what happened to the author, did he eventually found a job? switched career?

</comment><comment><USER61> I don't get the entitlement of people who try to interview with Google. The ROI of a few months (or in my case years) of preparation for a Google interview is huge. In Google you are supposed to work on things for a year before it comes to fruition (and you get promoted), but people are patient. Getting to know a few algorithms is like real work: you put in the effort and you get a nice paycheck at the end.

<comment><USER62> Well firstly, Google's plan is not to hire people who are well-prepared, it's to hire people who are smart and familiar with working day to day with the concepts that are used in Google's interviews. If a significant number of people spent months prepping for the interview Google would have a serious problem with their interview process - unable to find the truly talented engineers amongst the naturally gifted.

But secondly, if months of prep is required to work at Google what you're saying is they're selecting for young people, rich people, male people - ie, all the people that can afford to be spending their spare time on interview preparation as well as holding down a day job. Go explain to a mother of 2 that the reason she can't get a job at Google is because she can't spend her evenings and weekends on hacker rank despite a job at Google never really requiring work at evenings and weekends.

<comment><USER61> What you say may be true, but there's a loophole for women that Google does specifically: at least in the Zurich office interns are 90% female. Also Google made a new category, called step interns (interns who are in the first years in university). They generally just need to be young, have good reviews, and this way they just need to get through 1 interview when they are converting to full time engineers.

As for old people: don't even try, Google has a huge age bias.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Why is this article popping again now? It's from over 2 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER64> Something the author might not realize. It might be name discrimination for why he's struggling.

</comment><comment><USER65> Why is it that people who post on Tedium find it hard to hire people or get hired?

Maybe the problem is that they are writing on Tedium.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f4oJ- DQdSY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f4oJ-DQdSY)

</comment><comment><USER66> I stopped reading in the middle.

I sympathize quite a bit with his frustration, but he does a good job of making it difficult to sympathize with him. He goes on about how there are books written on how to interview at Google, yet it's patently clear he didn't even _try_ to read one of them. It's one thing not to know BFS on the spot because you didn't want to prepare. It's another thing to be totally _shocked_ that they asked the question. A few minutes of searching the Internet, or casually browsing the table of contents of several books, would give you an idea of what they want you to know.

And not to defend Google or other companies, but frankly, BFS is not some super complicated academic problem that only smart people can code on the fly. It is one of the more basic recursive[0] algorithms there. So even if you haven't memorized it, it's not ridiculous to expect you to "derive" it.

And equating maze solving with AI. Really?

I've gone to interviews without preparation, just because "Why not?" However, I don't go on a rant when I do poorly on it.

[0] Actually, it need not be recursive.

<comment><USER10> BFS isn't really suited for recursive solutions. Trying to do so usually amounts to trying to write BFS with a stack only.</comment></comment>


Creating a PostgreSQL Database in C - <AUTHOR> http://www.codedrome.com/creating-a-postgresql-database-in-c/ <comment><USER2> Why though? The article never gives a scenario where this would be prudent. Would it be as an alternative to using SQLite as a library?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point; the use cases for this are rare and specialized. If you have written software in C with a database backend which is to be distributed to third parties you'll need to provide a setup program which not only installs the software but also creates the database. You might wish to do this in C as well, although a scripting language like Python might be a better choice.

Another possible scenario is if you need to create some sort of DBA GUI along the lines of pgAdmin, either because you have specialist requirements, just as a programming exercise, or because you think you can do better!

However, the main purpose of this article is as a lead-in to further articles on CRUD which has obvious and widespread uses.

The article provides a simple introduction to the subject, as well as creating the database schema which I'll use for future articles.

To answer your question "Would it be as an alternative to using SQLite as a library?", PostgreSQL is an industrial strength RDBMS which can hold its own against SQL Server and Oracle in a client/server environment so you wouldn't use it for standalone applications.

<comment><USER2> Makes a lot of sense. Don't get me wrong I love Postgres and would use it as my go to if my use case outgrew what SQLite could give me in the case of shipping an application.</comment></comment></comment>


Wind Power Without the Mills - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/billtucker/2015/05/07/wind-power-without-the-mills/ <comment><USER2> I have repelled (using Industrial Rope Access) off hundreds of multi-megawatt Wind Turbines on $1B+ wind farms around the world to inspect and repair the 13+ ton fiberglass blades and wanted to give my 2 cents. [A clarification: Wind Turbines generate electricity, Wind Mills mill flour. It's a small but important detail.]

Operation & Maintenance expense is my biggest issue with new technology. I have met many design engineers that have never been inside of a nacelle or even visited a wind farm. In the real world generators and blades break, hurricanes, lightning, shit happens. Cranes are extremely expensive and a 2MW "mast" that can compete with today's technology is going to be crazy tall. How to repair a lightning cable? Cranes are over $10k per day and cables take a few days to fix.

Today there is a 26 story ladder in the interior of the support tower that people climb up to fix hardware in the nacelle. To inspect the blades we then rig our anchors to the generator, pop out the top hatch and repel over the nose cone and down onto a blade in the "down" position. The only specialized hardware needed is anchors, carabiners, ropes, harness and helmet.

Vortex Bladeless would be impossible to inspect and repair using this method, yes drones are great for inspection, but what about repairing a stress crack on the tip? You would need a crazy tall crane that is even more expensive and with cranes the wind speeds need to be a fraction that of Industrial Rope Access. This means your available repair days are even less and the turbine has to be shut down for longer for the fix to occur.

I am all for new technology and crowd financing, but there are many practical obstacles this team needs to overcome in the design phase to build a product that can actually scale in the real world.

Also, feel free to AMA if you have specific wind turbine questions.

<comment><USER3> It is certainly a valid point that maintenance costs are a huge burden on wind farms, that said, you cannot really jump to the conclusion that 2MW of generation capability would be deployed as one giant tower. From the web site it seems it would be 2x 1MW towers but it could easily be 10 separate 200kW towers or even 100 20kW towers. The density of a this with respect to wind turbines seems a bit higher.[1]

That said, their web site makes them out to be idealistic dreamers (I know that sounds judgemental but it is the impression I got from it). If Google were still running the RE<C initiative I'd suggest they put a couple of test units next to the data center at The Dalles (its on the Columbia River and was always windy whenever I visited there). If they can build a 4 - 10kW one and its something you can stick in your backyard, I would expect that they can build a small business out of that to develop the expertise to build the big ones. I worry that if they try to do too much too soon they will become overwhelmed.

[1] Caveat the amount of energy you can pull out of a moving mass of air at STP is finite.

<comment><USER2> Most wind farms are on leased land and the fee is based on the MWh generated. Farmers want to maximize revenue from wind harvesting while minimizing crop harvest revenue loss. Remember roads are built between turbines for big cranes and trailers to deliver and install the turbines and there is parking underneath the turbine for maintenance workers.

Having 500 4kw systems cuts into harvest revenues as do 10 20kw systems as the equivalent square footage lost to generate 1MWh is an order of magnitude larger.

Also, wind turbines blades in colder climates tend to accumulate ice in the winter and thus are permitted to be located away from populated areas. Some big chunks of ice have been flung hundreds of meters. The larger the blade the further the distance you need to put your structure for safety reasons. These masts shouldn't be put on buildings (vibration) or near populations (ice).

<comment><USER4> It sounds like you are attributing the same space usage for these types of generators as wind turbines, when it appears they could be much more closely packed. I wouldn't expect ten of these to use ten times the square footage as the wind turbines. Additionally, I wouldn't expect ice to be flung as far (but I'm not sure what the oscillation is really like), but from the design, maybe ice poses other challenges to these.

<comment><USER2> MWh/sq.ft.

I am attributing larger footprint usage to trying to generate a similar power output given current wind mast technology. 10 wind masts alone don't take up the same space as 10 classic turbines, but the the number of wind masts necessary to generate the equivalent output of 10 classic turbines is greater that 1:1 due to wind swept area per turbine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Again? AGAIN? Another "no blades! save the birds!" technology that's little more than a concept.

There are constantly _amazing_ technologies just around the corner that will definitely totally be awesomely better than existing 3 bladed horizontal axis wind turbine technology. And they'll always be less expensive than current technology somehow. Trust me, getting the cost right at this stage of the technology curve is almost impossible, and founders and technology developers are notoriously optimistic.

Yet they are always a few kW (this one is 4 kW) rather than 2 or 3 MW (a factor of 1000), and are always "just a few years away". And will never be a commercially successful product outside, perhaps, small scale demonstration and greenwashing projects.

We didn't get to the standard model of wind turbine by accident. It took decades of engineering and refinement. And yes, we still have a lot to learn. And yes the current technology has problems.

<comment><USER6> Decades? I would say it took centuries at least. The basic design hasn't changed since the middle ages.

<comment><USER7> Well maybe changing the basic design of wind turbines would be somewhat like changing the basic design of wheels but still today's wheels are better than medieval ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This says 'Because there is no contact between moving parts, there is no friction. Therefore no lubricant is required. No replacement of spare parts either.'

However, there are animations that show it wobbling.

This implies that it's made of a flexible substance. I'm not being so pedantic as to suggest that the fibres or crystals etc. of the substance are moving parts (though surely there is friction between them), but I do have a query:

In my completely anecdotal and limited experience of household bendy objects vs. household hinges; hinges win the longevity battle every time, even without regular application of lubricants. Also, when a bendy object fails, the whole thing needs to be replaced. On the other hand, when a mechanical part fails, I can replace the part and keep the rest of the object.

Can these things therefore really be cheaper to maintain than a mechanical wind turbine?

<comment> david-given How to make tall, stiff objects wobble safely is pretty standard technology these days --- all tall buildings do it, and very tall skyscrapers are carefully tuned and damped to wobble in exactly the right way. This is partly because of wind, and partly earthquakes. Here's a terrifying video of a skyscraper farm in Japan swaying gently after an earthquake in 2011. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQaHyY9-Fuw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQaHyY9-Fuw)

So I'd say it's at least _plausible_ that these generators could be built.

<comment><USER9> Build them out of skyscrapers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's called the "Magnus effect" and is not new at all: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_effect)

There are airplanes and boats that use this technique too: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship) , [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flettner_airplane](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flettner_airplane) , [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcyone_(ship)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcyone_\(ship\)) , [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Ship_1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Ship_1) ,

Wind mills and green energy is great, so go for it - just don't try to patent the "Magnus effect".

</comment><comment><USER11> The comments here are amazingly negative -- personally, if I was to live off the grid, the 4kW, 40', 220lb version sounds pretty great to me. At 220lb, you could easily raise/lower the thing as one person with some sort of mechanism for installation/service. I'm really curious how much it'd cost in comparison to solar. Maybe someone can estimate with the "80% less maintenance cost, 53% manufacturing cost" than wind turbines bit.

<comment><USER12> > I'm really curious how much it'd cost in comparison to solar.

For a 4kW sized solar system, you'd be looking at ~$6K-8K USD before your 30% federal tax credit (plus state incentives, if available). Your solar system would have _significantly_ less maintenance requirements, consisting of rinsing the panels with a hose 1-2/year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Also relevant are these awesome wind kits google is developing: [http://www.google.com/makani/](http://www.google.com/makani/)

<comment><USER14> The makani team is serious business. They keep building larger and larger prototypes and are nailing their predicted power curve every time. They have internal expertise to build (almost) everything in house, and have already demonstrated autonomous operation. They recently unveiled the wing from their under-construction 600 kW model, which should fly sometime this summer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here's another article with a short video that show a prototype working.

[http://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/article/the-power- of-...](http://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/article/the-power-of-the- vortex-20150407)

</comment><comment><USER16> Are there any numbers on how much it generates compared to a traditional design? I imagine it generates less electricity but it costs less so there's a trade-off.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think you have to separate joy of the tech from practical matters here.

Regarding the practical matters, it looks like they are three orders of magnitude from being on par with the three-blade vertical design.

So while this idea may be worthwhile in some niches like mentioned in the article, it's currently not a replacement for the giant, towering, 3 MW and up turbines erected these days.

And just like other wind-turbine replacement ideas (like kites or vertical- axis designs, but there are many more, just check Wikipedia), they probably never will. As I understand it, part of the beauty of the three-blade design is that by scaling the blade length linearly, you get a quadratic gain (pi r^2 area swept) in energy harvested.

<comment><USER18> Getting kites to work has proved challenging, yes. But the beauty of the design is that they have in principle better scaling properties than a wind turbine. Don't count them out yet.

As for the parent design, could be interesting. I cannot imagine a possible justification for not building it out given the urgency of renewable power to our present needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember hearing about something similar in '08 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMojRXK14jU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMojRXK14jU) which became [http://www.humdingerwind.com/](http://www.humdingerwind.com/) \- I wonder if they are related? Seems like a really interesting idea.

</comment><comment><USER20> Always found it odd that wind capture/generation shapes resembled centuries old windmills. Great to see some (expected) innovation in the space. With non- moving parts, no noise, and won't sent people into epileptic shock around sunrise/sunset, it looks like a winner. (if you've never driven past a windfarm in the morning or evening, the flashing is incredibly irritating).

<comment><USER5> Let me do a quick word substitution.

> If you've never driven past __trees __in the morning or evening, the > flashing is incredibly irritating.

Shadow flicker is a siting and operations problem. It's based on geometry (sun angles and turbine locations), wind conditions (turbine direction) and weather conditions (cloudiness). If we consider residences, schools, churches, and so on as discrete shadow receptors, flicker can be minimized through careful siting of the machines, and eliminated at those sites through programmatic controls (curtailment).

</comment></comment><comment> mark-r The problem with these things is always in the scaling up. Either things don't scale linearly, or you run into some fundamental limit where the tech doesn't yet exist to solve it. Even if the bigger systems don't pan out, it's still cool and useful.

I wonder what's the size of their prototype? Hard to tell from the picture.

</comment><comment><USER21> One of the great things about wind turbines today is that they capture power over the entire disk of wind the blades touch.

I suppose using this system means blocking the wind with something akin to a forest, with a small space between "artificial trees".

</comment><comment><USER22> If they have managed anywhere even close to their claimed cost reductions then this is very cool. Wind is already on par with oil in terms of EROEI.

<comment><USER23> If oil were the primary fuel for electricity generation, you'd have a solid point.

Assuming that we were to compare it to natural gas, for which you may have used oil as a proxy, this provides some substantiation to your claim: \- [http://www.theoildrum.com/node/1863](http://www.theoildrum.com/node/1863)

But the calculations here don't reflect that peak power generation doesn't reflect peak demand. So, we've looking at adding in battery's costs too.

At the end of the day, if a greedy capitalist can make a bigger buck (with or without government subsidies) with wind than they can with coal or natural gas, they will.

Given that the efforts to bring new capacity on-line fluctuate (dramatically!) with the comings and goings of government subsidies, my guess is that they aren't quite the competitive economic wonder, at this point, that they are touted to be.

YMMV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> oscillating: [https://youtu.be/2_5K4kmnsL4?t=75](https://youtu.be/2_5K4kmnsL4?t=75)

</comment><comment><USER25> Wind engineers: why isn't "save the birds" as simple as a ring-enclosed sandwich of mesh screen, blades, mesh screen?

<comment><USER26> Because generally the birds don't really need saving from wind turbines.

Numbers from an unverified source: [http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green- science...](http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/wind- turbine-kill-birds.htm) (other sites seems to agree on the cats vs turbine numbers)

Alternatively, from a source you might expect to be very biased in favour of birds: [http://www.rspb.org.uk/forprofessionals/policy/windfarms/](http://www.rspb.org.uk/forprofessionals/policy/windfarms/)

<comment><USER27> A problem with the estimates in the U.S. is that turbines disproportionately affect legally-protected birds, and so the numbers are suspected to be severely under reported.

<comment><USER28> So what? If they're too stupid not to fly into a giant blade, then maybe it's ok that they die.

<comment><USER29> Let me introduce you to a wonderful concept:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem)

Enjoy the next three days of reading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't understand how they can have no moving parts?

<comment><USER30> It has moving parts, just not moving parts in contact with one another. From what I understand the outer segment is flexible and oscillates because of vortex shedding, and a magnetic coupling between the flexible outer segment and the fixed inner one generates power. So the outer segment is mobile, but it never touches the inner segment.</comment></comment>


YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy - <AUTHOR> https://unherd.com/thepost/professor-karol-sikora-fear-is-more-dangerous-than-the-virus/ <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23257870](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23257870), which was posted earlier, but was flagged. We'll turn off the flags on that post.</comment>


How Dozens of Companies Know You're Reading About Those NSA Leaks - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/third-party-resources-nsa-leaks

<comment><USER2> This is what I said about gravatar when it first came out, the ad networks/analytics software are just obvious.</comment>