Atlassian gets IPO share price of $27 - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/atlassian-gets-ipo-share-price-2015-12?op=1 <comment><USER3> It's refreshing to see a tech company IPO that isn't VC backed and actually can sustain itself with its profits.

Maybe I'm just naive but I find it strange how so many companies focus so long on acquiring users and not on making money, thus forcing them to continue to get outside funding. For something like Facebook I can understand how this makes sense, but it seems as though this strategy is currently the norm rather than the exception.

<comment><USER4> Full disclosure: I'm on the iOS team at PlanGrid.

We're a YC-12, VC-backed company. We were profitable within a year of the seed round. We still have the bulk of our Series A in the bank but went ahead and raised a $40 million Series B because terms were extremely good (low dilution plus we can ride out any downturn). I suspect some of these high valuations are simply investors paying a premium to buy in, not an expectation that the company is or isn't worth that much.

When I walk around SF with my PlanGrid shirt on it isn't other people in tech that say hello or know who I am... it's the guys working at construction sites. People in hard-hats and boots who tell us our software has changed their lives.

The tech press and insular SV community obsesses about the ultra-unicorns. Some of us are just busy quietly solving people's needs (usually in industries that have been long-ignored by SV/tech) and we're doing quite well for it.

There may be a bubble but if you build something that provides real, immediate value to customers then the rest of it is just noise.

<comment> semi-extrinsic I see PlanGrid is aimed squarely at professional constructors. Is there any benefit in using it for small, private projects, or is it too "enterprisey"? Say you're building e.g. a garage. And can you ELI5 what "free for 50 sheets" means?

<comment><USER5> PlanGrid co-founder here. It's definitely useful for a project of any size, but the value definitely scales non-linearly with the size of a project.

If nothing else, if you have a construction project that has paper plans, PlanGrid is the best way to make them digital, shareable, usable by multiple people.

<comment><USER6> This wasn't readily apparent to me after watching your video so I guess I'll ask here - what do you think is the core value of PlanGrid?

Is the point to be a full document control type solution (e.g. - in the same vein as Aconex) or is it a collaboration tool focused on construction? It appears to be the latter?

I guess I could just ask one of the guys I know from DPR...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Has anyone looked at the prospectus? The founders are going to do very well.

Michael Cannon-Brookes Shares - 69,732,090 Percentage - 37.7%

Scott Farquhar Shares - 69,732,090 Percentage - 37.7%

Well done, gents. Well. Fucking. Done.

<comment><USER8> How many employees get to split the remaining 20%?

Well done, founders.

<comment><USER9> * How many employees get to split the remaining $1.1bn?

(The new valuation, according to the OP)

<comment><USER8> Actually (and please correct my arithmetic wherever it's wrong), the prospectus shows 96.1% to founders, directors, officers, and VCs (page 146).

At $5.8B, the founders stake is $2.1 billion each, and the 1300 employees share $226 million.

It's good to be a founder!

<comment><USER10> Australia makes it incredibly difficult to give equity to your employees - they literally get double punished and it's often better for the employee not receive. The Australian Taxation Office will charge on receipt.

So you get 1% of the company and it's last investment round was $10M - <USER2> you get a $100,000 tax bill that year! Even though it's all only paper value.

Then if you do liquidate you're taxed again on the gain!

It's a huge problem and there are a lot of folks in the startup community trying to get it rectified.

<comment><USER11> That's not true. The company gets 10M. The shareholder still received nothing, and thus has no tax liability.

When the shareholder sells their shares they will be taxed.

I don't understand your scenario at all... :\

<comment><USER12> His scenario was the company raises at 10M and afterwards gives 1% of it's shares to the employee. Actually I think most countries would treat that as taxable income which is why companies usually give options not shares once they get going.

<comment><USER11> That is still not a taxable event. Even if it's shares and not options.

The shares won't be taxed until they are sold.

I know this, because I've worked in an Australian company and been given shares and they made no difference to my tax liability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13>
      Atlassian was founded in 2002, but it hasn't taken any outside
      investment. The last two funding rounds from Accel and T. Rowe Price
      were done to let employees sell some of their shares, and Atlassian
      says the cash wasn't used for operations.

That's impressive!

Pre-IPO discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10708908](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10708908)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is interesting because the valuation is:

\- Either driven partly by what Slack is valued at (and then you add the other parts of Atlassian to get its total value)

\- It really is this valuable, which would make Slacks billion-dollar + valuation a lot more legit than when people were nay-saying about it

\- Just investors throwing money around because money is still 'cheap'

I still think that some savvy retail investors understand the tech market a lot more better now. This company is not burning through cash and shooting for super, super long-term growth (Twitter and it's ilk) so this feels more like a Microsoft listing than a Facebook listing.

Good on them for building something legit and something people would pay for (instead of advertising revenue).

<comment><USER15> Slack seems like a great product but here are some interesting facts:

\- Atlassian has more than 10x the revenue of Slack[1]

\- JIRA and Confluence account for substantial amount of Atlassian's revenue. Two products that don't even compete with Slack[2].

I think Slack is a current silicon valley darling so people love to make this comparison but it doesn't directly compete with Atlassian's core business. It also has an order of magnitude less revenue.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/slack-expects-30-million- reve...](http://www.businessinsider.com/slack-expects-30-million- revenue-2015-7)

[2] [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000155837015...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000155837015001685/filename1.htm)

<comment><USER16> I really like Slack but I think it will be troubled in the short/long term in the same way Dropbox is now. It is innovative but many others will catch up it soon.

<comment><USER17> In my experience, HipChat / Jira / Confluence is a nice stack to work with. What advantages does Slack offer over these?

<comment><USER18> Jira is definitely a pleasure to use. We only just started it a while ago and I'm often pleasantly surprised by the things I can do with it and just how convenient it is to work with. It's quite a change given that we previously used Mantis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's a global hackathon going on right now at Atlassian. Keep a eye on [https://twitter.com/hashtag/shipit33](https://twitter.com/hashtag/shipit33)

Memorable tweets so far:

1) Founder of the company last night calling it quits and heading out for a beer. [https://twitter.com/mcannonbrookes/status/674734326571921409...](https://twitter.com/mcannonbrookes/status/674734326571921409?s=09)

2) Insanely clever marketing by the jira team: [https://twitter.com/Atlassian/status/674964465717260288](https://twitter.com/Atlassian/status/674964465717260288)

Reply with your favourites! ;)

<comment><USER20> Having a bit of fun with the building lights during that hackathon: [https://twitter.com/sebr/status/674917395798949888](https://twitter.com/sebr/status/674917395798949888)

(Disclosure: am an Atlassian employee, though not in the photo or that team.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Maybe HipChat will finally have chat notifications on iOS [0]. A messaging app. Probably one of the many reasons people migrated to Slack.

Meanwhile, latest update reads: _" New: Scumbagify support! Prefix any emoticon with (scumbag) to show how you really feel"_

[0][https://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions- ideas/sug...](https://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions- ideas/suggestions/3830661-iphone-don-t-seem-to-be-receiving-any-notification)

<comment><USER22> Atlassian is quite slow to move forward on their products, including their acquisitions.

In some cases -- Bitbucket Cloud -- they really never do. Whenever I think about Bitbucket, I think of [https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/8548/better-ci- inte...](https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/8548/better-ci-integration- add-a-build-status)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Tech IPO's of any kind always have my interest, but I have a hard time finding out what IPO is happening and when it is happening.

How do some of you track these things?

<comment><USER24> The stock markets have trackers:

[http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/activity.aspx?tab=upcomin...](http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/activity.aspx?tab=upcoming)

[https://www.nyse.com/ipo-center/recent-ipo](https://www.nyse.com/ipo- center/recent-ipo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How much could they grow? It's not clear to me, unless they suddenly have much more ambitious plans and new categories of product, how big the market is that can sustain infinite growth over time for them. The market is very specialized for them, and if they try going after non tech their products directly then go up against many other players already entrenched (and it's not like JIRA is some shiny beacon of ease and apple-like perceived simplicity -- if they rebuilt from scratch maybe they'd have a better chance)

<comment><USER26> My impression is that they're after dominance and becoming utterly entrenched, and that they've got a pretty good shot at it. They've had stellar growth over the past couple years. They currently strike a good balance between "creating value" and "extracting value", from a business perspective. Compare to older companies, like Oracle, which are much more focused on extracting value.

They're also used both in startups and in established firms, which makes me feel confident about their growth.

<comment><USER27> Confluence is used quite a bit internally at Oracle and given the extent of the company's usage, I wouldn't be surprised if they're making a killing off it and other enterprises.

<comment><USER28> My employer (large financial institution, 15000+ employees) uses confluence and jira enterprise-wide, as well as others that are more developer-centric. I'd say we're paying some of their bills on our own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> On the one hand, it's great to see a company do so well making solid basic development tools.

On the other hand, I recall that everybody hated using JIRA. It was sooo slooow and so many little input boxes in the UI. Has it improved in the past 5 years?

<comment><USER30> We use self-hosted so YMMV but I've never really considered it to be that slow. It's a solid tool and at the top of it's field IMHO. I'd love (seriously) to hear what others are using we looked at a few alternatives but none of them held a candle to JIRA and that's before you consider the integrations with other Atlassian products.

<comment><USER31> I've started to use Youtrack on recent projects and like it. A few quirks, but it's a breath of fresh air compared to the most recent JIRA version. (As context, I've advocated and run JIRA installs as an eng lead for ~10 years.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> As someone who knows relatively little about how the stocks works, and this stage of a business' lifecycle... what benefit does Atlassian get by going public?

<comment><USER33> Liquidity. You can't buy a house with stock certificates.

<comment><USER34> not much of a problem for the founders [http://www.domain.com.au/news/billionaire-mike- cannonbrookes...](http://www.domain.com.au/news/billionaire-mike- cannonbrookes-buys-centennial-park-mansion-20150415-1mlle0/)

<comment><USER35> Depends.

He can now take out a loan against his shares for $300m if he wanted, which is something he probably couldn't do before, since the stock wasn't that liquid. And he might not have been interested in selling more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The ticker is TEAM for those wanting to play along at home.

<comment><USER37> And don't use Google Finance, since they can't seem to add new listings until several weeks after the IPO

[http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=team](http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=team)

<comment><USER38> [https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ATEAM](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ATEAM)

Looks fine to me?

<comment><USER39> With the NASDAQ: prefix it's good now, but yesterday morning at IPO the data was missing. It seems like they get it within 4-8 hours of an IPO, at least that's been my experiencing following MTCH and FIT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm 28 and I've never invested so much as a dime. I quite like Atlassian, and I think I could afford to lose $27 if it came to that.

Forgive me for the really elementary question, but how do I actually go about buying shares?

<comment><USER41> Open an account with any stockbroker and they will purchase the shares "on the market" and hold them for you until you want to sell. They charge for this service so you want one that caters to beginning investors and has low fees for the kind of purchase you want.

Personally, I use Charles Schwab, which is one of the largest US consumer brokerages and has a pretty good reputation. For beginners I usually recommend ShareBuilder (no, wait: recently renamed "Capital One Investing") as they have lots of features for beginners including purchase plans with little to no fees for small amounts and no maintainance fees. But (full disclosure) I may be a biased source: I work for Capital One.

<comment><USER40> Thanks for the info! I take it there's no DIY approach here, and that for all intents and purposes, I must go through a broker?

<comment><USER42> Online discount brokers like Etrade, Schwab, Ameritrade, etc are about as DIY as it gets. Load up funds from your bank account and pick your stocks!

Notably, Robinhood is a new startup that doesn't charge any fees and has nice mobile apps: [https://robinhood.com/](https://robinhood.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Interesting that it seems they IPO'd in US though they are mostly located in Australia? Can employees in other countries cash out on their stock options or are they compensated in different ways than in the US?

<comment><USER44> I know a big issue we have here in Australia is that you're taxed on stock options before they're actioned.

[http://www.brw.com.au/p/business/tax_on_start_up_share_optio...](http://www.brw.com.au/p/business/tax_on_start_up_share_options_unjust_46LLxyUfnvXJINrZCwYt6O)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I like Atlassian and we use JIRA, Confluence and Stash.

Do I think Atlassian is worth $6bn? No. I planned to buy ~100k in stock at the open, saw the $27 open price, and cancelled my trade.

Is this a nice result for the founders? Yes. :)

Starting price on IPO day means little. It was flat the entire day. The way to judge these is in a couple of weeks (2-3 weeks) to see where the market really values it. See RACE for an example. That had a stronger IPO day "pop" and... here we are. :)

<comment><USER46> $6bn valuation isn't that much for a product suite that seems integral to so many in the tech sector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Once a company has gone public is it common for lots of staff who have stock to quit?

<comment><USER9> Want in? [https://www.atlassian.com/company/careers](https://www.atlassian.com/company/careers) ;) When a company has had 30% growth per year according to their F-1 filing (This is a ballpark - please check the filing), you don't need to wait to get hired. More seriously, in a Forbes article last year Scott Farquhar said some employees would be able to buy a house, so there are probably some people who want to pursue some personal projects. I expect Syndey real estate to become very expensive, but I also expect such companies to have some retention policy, like progressive vesting and post-IPO lock-in period.

<comment><USER48> "Scott Farquhar said some employees would be able to buy a house"

To be fair, it _is_ Sydney ;)

<comment><USER49> Sydney is one of the most expensive housing markets in the world [1].

It was actually much higher in the list, but the weak Australian dollar means that the US dollar stretches quite a bit further.

I seem to recall that cost of living in Sydney is also one of the highest in the world, but didn't find any sources on that.

[1] [http://www.globalpropertyguide.com/most-expensive- cities](http://www.globalpropertyguide.com/most-expensive-cities)

<comment><USER50> Sydney 7,250 per m^2

Prague 4,569 per m^2

And now add earnings to that and Sydney is not that expensive. Pure price per m^2 says nothing, the important thing is how much m^2 I can buy with my average salary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> As a side question, I wonder if this means GitHub will go for their own IPO.

</comment><comment><USER52> Can someone please explain what would be the reasons for Atlassian to IPO? Is it to return money to investors? fund new things (such as?)?</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any Swift source/book you would recommend? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I really like Advanced Swift: [https://www.objc.io/books/advanced- swift/](https://www.objc.io/books/advanced-swift/)

I also visit their workshops and trainings, whenever possible. I'm a European so it's not always practical to visit the States for CocoaConf and such.

</comment><comment><USER3> I recommend Swift Style [https://pragprog.com/book/esswift/swift- style](https://pragprog.com/book/esswift/swift-style)</comment>


Ask HN: Advice about Masters. Have you done one? - <AUTHOR> I have been thinking about doing a Masters lately. I am interested to see what other people here have studied and how they found it.<p>EDIT: I have a Bachelors degree in CS but my exam results were poor. I am not sure if this makes it a no go for me. I have been working as a software engineer since college for about four years. <comment><USER2> I have done one, in CS. There are several stats missing. Which country do you wanna do your MS in? Also I would suggest a cross vertical study if you do go on to do it.

I would say its another piece of paper that says you are credible. I recommend figuring out data wise CS vs non CS Figure out which geography Finally you havent answered why you want to do your MAsters

<comment><AUTHOR> I had a few paragraphs written out but I decided not to post so much information. I am in Ireland right now. I found some old HN threads and found [http://omscs.gatech.edu/](http://omscs.gatech.edu/). I am researching into that at the moment.

I am big into self improvement now and I am constantly learning. My thoughts are if I am learning, why not earn that piece of paper while doing it?

I think I am most interested in the following areas: text analysis, data retrieval and analysis, AI and machine learning, analytics, and security.

<comment><USER2> Excellent point. First answer to why you need a piece of paper cost(time and monetary) Pro -network I hope you decide on doing a cost benefit analysis and keep doing projects on the side. You will learn a lot .</comment></comment></comment>


EFF Wins Petition to Inspect and Modify Car Software - <AUTHOR> https://supporters.eff.org/civicrm/mailing/view?reset=1&id=1234 <comment><USER2> "It's absurd that we have to spend so much time, every three years, filing and defending these petitions to the copyright office. Technologists, artists, and fans should not have to get permission from the government—and rely on the contradictory and often nonsensical rulings—before investigating whether their car is lying to them or using their phone however they want," said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. "But despite this ridiculous system, we are glad for our victories here, and that basic rights to modify, research, and tinker have been protected."

<comment><USER3> The system sucks, but it's the system we have, and it costs money to fight these battles. If you like the result here, consider setting up a recurring donation to the EFF.

<comment><USER4> My "recurring donation" is to buy every humblebundle and give everything to the EFF.

<comment><USER5> I should do that. It would probably surpass whatever contribution I would end up giving them directly byquite a bit. I do want to support the developers though, so maybe I'll do 70% EFF, 25% devs, 5% humble tip (gotta keep the lights on).

<comment><USER6> By the time a game hits a bundle the impact on the developer's bottom line is almost negligible. If you want to support developers, buy their games when they come out. Doing otherwise is "nice," but ineffective.

<comment><USER7> $5 is still $5 if you buy a game after the fact. I don't see how joining early purchasers helps game developers more than otherwise.

<comment><USER8> If games sell well early into their release, the devs would be elated and motivated. Also they would get more money at the time they are hoping to get it.

<comment><USER5> The vast majority of the games in the humble bundles would never get _any_ money from me. It's some or nothing, and I assume they would prefer "some".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It should be noted that this is a very limited ruling. Only the owner can modify the car, and you can't go to a mechanic or third party to modify it (or inspect it), which will greatly restrict the application.

Also this doesn't apply to Entertainment or Telemetrics portions. So your car could be straight up spying on you, or your manufacturer can leave unpatched security holes in your "Entertainment" system (which has already been used ( [http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that- think/transportation/syst...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that- think/transportation/systems/jeep-hacking-101)) to remotely hack your car), and there is nothing you can legally do. You can't even deeply look into the system to find such vulnerabilities.

I mean a win is a win, but this isn't as big as one would hope.

<comment><USER10> Fortunateyly the software in your 2015 honda civic is nearly or completely identical to all other 2015 honda civics, though.

I agree that its unfortunate, but being able to inspect the software in your car is nearly as good as being able to inspect other's or have other's inspect yours if you have the same make and year.

<comment><USER9> Well there is probably a pretty big difference between the normal civic, the hybrid civic, and the natural gas civic, but I don't think there will be lots of per car model/line differences, just that the inability to contract out things means that modification is limited to technical minded people (and no, artful dodges like "The mechanic will set it up, and the owner can push the button" are unlikely to fly).

Also it throws hassles at researchers, some cars have a lot of different combinations of things that might change the ECU software from engine choices to different model lines (Sport models often have different tunings) to even the type of gearbox (Manuals have different tuning than automatics which are different than CVTs, and advanced CVTs actually communicate with the ECU in complex ways that are only activated on the higher trims). No one is going to actually own 8 different Honda Accords just to legally work on all the firmwares. While I have no doubt that a lot of shortcutting will occur (i.e. people will dump the firmware and post it, and if and only if an issue is found will researchers bother to become nominal "owner" of a particular model) it adds a hassle, and a tinge of illegality which is completely unwarranted.

<comment><USER11> > and no, artful dodges like "The mechanic will set it up, and the owner can > push the button" are unlikely to fly

What about selling/renting devices that the owner connects in some obvious way and pushes a button?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > EFF also won an exemption for users who want to play video games after the > publisher cuts off support. For example, some players may need to modify an > old video game so it doesn't perform a check with an authentication server > that has since been shut down

I think this is the real story for many HN readers.

<comment><USER13> Yep. I can answer questions on this if you'd like. I also clarified what's legal in a comment below.

<comment><USER14> Snarky, but, does "shut down" include when big launch games are overwhelmed or said systems suffer other availability events?

<comment><USER15> For legal purposes, I _think_ it would apply when the official servers are shut down and there are reason to believe they will not be restarted.

For example if the company is out of business, or they announced they'll close it permanently, it got effectively abandoned and there's been a very long time without any official statement on if/when they'll bring it back up, etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I recently put a turbo on my van since I live high in the mountains where the atmospheric pressure is low and the performance loss is noticeable.

Of course the ECU needs adjustments to the fuelling tables (you need to run rich under boost to prevent detonation), spark timing tables, as well as a patch to the OS to allow the use of a different manifold pressure sensor (default OS doesn't recognise press above 100kpa).

I guess this was illegal.

I have heard rumblings from the professional engine tuners that the OEMs are already starting to lock down ECUs. Not only via DRM, but by having enough checks in the code that modifying parameters to up performance results in error codes and limp home mode. They expect to be having to go to after market ECUs soon.

Some of them would have cost more than my whole project:

[https://www.holley.com/products/fuel_systems/fuel_injection/...](https://www.holley.com/products/fuel_systems/fuel_injection/dominator_efi/dominator_ecu/parts/554-114)

Fortunately there are more DIY friendly set ups:

[http://megasquirt.info/products/diy- kits/](http://megasquirt.info/products/diy-kits/)

But it seems a waste to have to throw away a perfectly good ECU because the OEM (or gov) decided to lock it down.

<comment><USER17> I'm a dealer for Holley ECU products. They're fantastic! But you are correct, people in my industry are now forced to tell the modern hot rodder that step one (for the most part) is purchasing a $1200+ computer replacement plus rewiring their car in order to do anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> They also got an exemption for modifying of abandoned games whose activation systems are long since gone, as well as extending/clarifying the jailbreaking exemption.

<comment><USER13> I actually worked on this part of the exemption. It was granted in two parts. First, fans may now reverse engineer and host servers for games that are no longer hosted online. Metal Gear Solid 4 is a perfect example, but there are plenty of others. This is now legal, and considered fair use. MMO's are exempted, and defined as games where the world is persistent reguardless of number of players connected (IE, is the game played in rounds, or is state reset in the world often... more than once a month, for example). It was a crude way to define the differences, but MMO's were a sticking point, so we have to come back to them later.

Second, museums and archives are now permitted to circumvent copy protection in the pursuit of preservation. This means that huge stores of old games that are otherwise unavailable are now legally preservable by institutions like Stanford, The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, and Archive.org. Of note is the fact that the Atari ST catalog of software was preserved on pirate disks, and we've yet to find any other way to save some of those pieces of software, aside from just preserving the pirate disks. This does not mean these titles can be redistributed, only that they can be modified for the sake of preservation.

Additionally, this means museums can preserve devices that circumvent copy protection, such as floppy-to-SNES devices, which we have a few of at the MADE. Modded XBoxes can now also be preserved in an institution.

The bits that help museums means a great deal for preservation of digital assets as a whole. This was a lot of work to get done, so a huge thanks goes out to the EFF, Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Archive.org for all their hard work to get this done!

<comment><USER19> > This does not mean these titles can be redistributed, only that they can be > modified for the sake of preservation.

But once the copyright expires on the disks, they may then be redistributed?

<comment><USER13> Then they would enter public domain. Copyright, however, lasts a very, very long time. Longer than the history of computing.

<comment><USER20> It sounds like archivists could image the disks and transport those across mediums, in the interest of archival, as long as they didn't distribute them, though. Am I mistaken?

<comment><USER13> You are correct. We can now do just about anything we want short of redistribution or commercialization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> When will DMCA-1201 be repealed for good? This unconstitutional garbage should be abolished.

An interesting read on this: [https://web.archive.org/web/20120220014712/http://www.macfer...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120220014712/http://www.macfergus.com/niels/dmca/cia.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> Three interesting tidbits from the Wikipedia article about the Librarian of Congress:

> _There is no official term limit for the Librarian of Congress, but in the > 20th century a precedent was established that Librarians of Congress are > appointed for life._

> _There is very little legislation for the Librarian of Congress or rules > regarding who should be selected for the position. In 1989, Representative > Major R Owens (D–NY) proposed a bill in Congress that would set stricter > requirements for who may be appointed. (...) This bill did not pass._

> _James H. Billington has served as Librarian of Congress since 1987, and > announced plans to retire from that post in 2015._

This sounds to me as if the position hadn't really been designed for the amount of power that it has been given now by the DMCA. With a vacancy apparently right ahead, wouldn't that make it the next prime target for lobby efforts or corruption?

</comment><comment><USER23> I was initially happy about this until I saw that the primary reason was the VW scandal. Why are our laws only ever put into check when a controversy like this breaks out? We have to wait for the really bad abuses before anyone ever dials back the bullshit.

<comment><USER24> I wouldn't say that this was the primary reason, as the EFF has lobbied for this before and set the process in motion before that became public. It just provides a well-known recent example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10459316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10459316) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10459113](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10459113).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, first time submitting, I didn't spot those ones.

<comment><USER25> Welcome to HN submitting! We hope you'll submit as many intellectually interesting stories as you can find.

The links in my comment above were just to point out related links of interest, not at all to suggest that you shouldn't have posted this one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> [https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-wins-petition- inspect...](https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-wins-petition-inspect-and- modify-car-software)

</comment><comment><USER27> Don't get me wrong, I'm pleased with the progress - but doesn't this just mean they'll make it harder to crack?

<comment><USER28> This is just the same old issue of DRM as before: create a system that works when the user is running it like they're supposed to, but doesn't reveal anything when they're not. And it's never worked. Probably can never work. Cory Doctorow talks about it in his talks on eliminating DRM. Basically, at the end of the day, the only real means we have of making DRM "work" is using laws (which, of course, doesn't stop criminals, only people who are trying to do things legally).

<comment><USER29> It worked pretty well for DirecTV, which is a more analogous scenario than normal computer software.

<comment><USER28> >It worked pretty well for DirecTV

You're going to have to explain what you mean by that, is there some story of DirecTV successfully preventing people from analyzing firmware?

<comment><USER29> Yes, famously. Google "DirecTV black sunday". DirecTV successfully killed off the (huge) DirecTV piracy community, not just by frying the old hacked cards, but by deploying new cards that have mostly withstood more than a decade of intense analysis.

<comment><USER30> Ahhh memories. What started as a "write a byte now put the card in any box for TV" escalated into complicated custom electronics, MITMing the stream, with a computer required to sit in the middle to lend its processing power. All the while, some unsung heroes out of the Matrix able to look in realtime at the DV-S stream flowing across their screen, able to spot a new Agent Smith barreling at the card and alert the world via IRC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Shouldn't this be mandatory and be part of the overall safety audition of the car? They have physical crash tests of cars to assess the robustness that match certain criteria.

</comment><comment><USER32> While I agree with the idea that you should be able to inspect most anything, and not be prohibited from fiddling with anything thats yours, I don't understand how security would be handled?

The software of the car is a component of the car just like any other, and while I can certainly mechanically disable the brakes on my car, it won't be safe for road use if I do (It would never pass an inspection). Since no one could be expected to debug/inspect my software modifications for errors, one would have to assume that any car whose software doesn't match the official one, _may_ be unsafe for road use, and thus can't be allowed on the road?

Also: isn't firmware of this kind pretty hard to read without having access to encryption keys? The petition just wants it to be _legal_ not for the manufacturers to be forced to make it easy?

<comment><USER11> Well, you can repair your car's mechanical brakes yourself now. If you disable them (accidentally or otherwise) and render the car unsafe, the results of that are your responsibility. Is there a reason why software modifications can't be handled the same way?

<comment><USER22> Well, the whole point of car inspections is that "your responsibility" is not enough. It's possible that you as the owner of a modded vehicle are perfectly fine with the risk of an accident, but the other potential participants of such an accident might not.

I think the question has a point: Modified ECUs are different from modified brakes, because the modifications could likely not be found in an inspection - in fact, according to the exemption, it would be illegal for inspectors to check the ECU. So I wonder how that problem is handled.

<comment><USER32> The simple solution for safety I think is to just include the software checksum/signature in the approval documents for a car model.

At an interval check, the inspector does the usual sampling tests (brake effect, emissions, looks for rusty brake lines etc), and then validates that all critical computers (ECU's and other systems such as computers related to brakes etc) run software that match the signature of the manufacturer, and that it is the latest version of the sowftare. After a recall such as the VW case, the inspector could fail cars that haven't upgraded to the latest version (which would be required since the original one is known to be cheating on emissions).

This _is_ a bit harsh compared to other modifications: an owner can put on a set of extra lights or cool wheels without necessarily failing an inspection, whereas even changing a single bit of the software would immediately fail it in this case.

I can't see any way around this though, apart from separating programs into critical (brakes, ECU) /non-critical (Media, nav,...) software, where only the critical software would be checked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It seems insane to me that we could allow private corporations to buy and sell data that our government would require a warrant or court order to obtain.

If cell phone service were free that would be one thing, but for these companies to be "double dipping" like this is pretty disgusting.

<comment><USER34> It seems insane to me that we could allow private corporations to buy and sell data that our government would require a warrant or court order to obtain.

You're not seeing what is going on behind the scenes... they are all in cahoots the money is just a bonus.

You're not seeing what's going down behind the scenes - the spying is for us.

On the NSA/spying...

The (mass surveillance) by the NSA and abuse by law enforcement is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY)

Brezinski at a press conference

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWTIZBCQ79g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWTIZBCQ79g)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wow. I didn't expect the Librarian OF Congress would have a say in this case, but he/she does: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librarian_of_Congress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librarian_of_Congress)

<comment><USER15> Copyright works in mysterious ways...

<comment><USER36> This is the sixth time this has process has taken place in its current form -- it's not exactly something new.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act#Anti- circumvention_exemptions)

<comment><USER37> I thought you where going with a Matrix joke for a second there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Will this have any effect on the John Deer issue?

<comment><USER39> I'm not a lawyer, but the EFF mentions tractors in their press release:

> We are pleased that analysts will now be able to examine the software in the > cars we drive without facing legal threats from car manufacturers, and that > the Librarian has acted to promote competition in the vehicle aftermarket > and protect the long tradition of vehicle owners tinkering with their cars > and tractors.

<comment><USER36> Indeed, this is the issue on which John Deere weighed in on the other side (trying to prevent this decision from coming out this way).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> man, this would be great. my dad is a huge car guy (type of guy that parks way in the back of the parkinglot) I wanted to get him a new key fob for his bday next week, $300 bucks.

now I am trying to mod an old key fob to work with the new one and have no idea how. it would be nice to encourage this sort of thing so there is more info out there. i am not even sure if it is possible to use an mk4 or mk5 key with my mk6 style one. why? no info.

I found a youtube video with the taredown which only exists because a modder sacrificed his $300 key to figure out how to do it properly.

i wish there was more info on how the software worked both for security and modification.

</comment><comment><USER41> Has there been an analysis done as to how the LOC exemptions with interplay with the TPP anti-circumvention requirements?

Will the LOC still be able to grant these? If not, the year-long delay may be just long enough that there is actually never an open window.

</comment><comment><USER42> While I agree with the premise of all of this, when it comes to modifying car software, who now maintains the liability? If a hobbyist were to modify something incorrectly and cause a malfunction of the car which in turn injured another, or damaged property, who is liable?

Surely it cannot be the automaker, they did not intend for that. Insurance companies are going to fight it, maintaining that unauthorized changes were made which would release their liability.

Inspecting auto software for problems is great, allowing hobbyists to tinker with their software seems problematic.

<comment><USER43> > If a hobbyist were to modify something incorrectly and cause a malfunction > of the car which in turn injured another, or damaged property, who is > liable?

The hobbyist. Why would anyone else be liable for something a person did that then failed and caused harm?

> Insurance companies are going to fight it, maintaining that unauthorized > changes were made which would release their liability.

The insurance company covers the car so you'd have to consult what their terms are in regards to modifications as plenty of people modify their cars today just not the software. I can't imagine a software change would be radically different to a hardware change in the insurance's eyes unless it's something incredible like an autopilot.

<comment><USER44> >The hobbyist. Why would anyone else be liable for something a person did that then failed and caused harm?

The hobbyist isn't the one with money. The manufacturer will be sued, and they usually settle because there is probably something they could have done that would have made the failure less likely, injury trials are bad press, and jury sympathy is always on the injured little guy's side.

This is how it plays out with physical products, I don't see why it would be any different with code.

<comment><USER45> That's not what happens if a hobbyist modifies e.g. the brakes, then the brakes break and the car crashes - if you modified the thing, you're responsible for the issues your modifications cause.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is really good news. Wow.

</comment><comment><USER47> Excellent development!</comment>


How A Scammer Got Condé Nast To Pay $8 Million With One Email - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.forbes.com/williampbarrett/2011/04/03/conde-nast-paid-8-million-to-scammer-who-sent-one-email/

<comment><USER2> I could not get through that article with all the "clever" references to Condé Nast publications. When did Forbes turn into the NY Post.

<comment><USER3> I agree. Part of me thought it was a "clever" attempt at SEO. to pair each of their publications with this scam topic. Or was the author just trying to be "cheeky" ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would have been a pretty interesting story if the author hadn't ruined it with his, "haha, look how clever I can be" style with all the references to different publications. Whatever happened to journalists just reporting a story?</comment>


Java Repository – A-Z of Java - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dubesar/CompetitiveJava <comment><AUTHOR> Learn A-Z of Java with just one single repository | Ultimate help to the JAVA community | Contribute as well as learn.</comment>


Ask HN: Joining as 3rd co-founder, seeking advice - <AUTHOR> I am a somewhat specialized engineer, currently working at a leading startup in the field.
A couple of months ago I was approached by an entrepreneur and his protege. They've been working together for a couple of years, and have just started a new startup in the same field.
They've asked me to join as technical co-founder with 20% equity, but are reluctant to give me the third board seat. The entrepreneur will be the chairman of the board, and the protege will be the CEO.
I've tried to start companies in the past; while they were commercially unsuccessful, I did learn a lot about customer discovery and product development. This entrepreneur has previously built a company to nine figures in revenue and IPO, and I think the protege would make a good CEO.
While doing my diligence, however, I happened to speak with the founder of another company that this entrepreneur was involved in at the early stages as an investor. This founder advised me not to work with this person, but wouldn't tell me why.
I'm really excited about building the technology, and I believe they could sell it (they have a large network of potential customers), but I'm a bit worried that something may be amiss.
Therefore, I have the following questions:
1) Does this seem like a fair arrangement? 2) Is there anything that I'm missing and/or that I should be worried about?
3) What other advice can you give me?
Thanks HN! <comment><USER2> [random internet remarks]

      20% equity != 20% control

Taking the offer means accepting that the business people don't rate you as someone worth sharing business control. That may or may not mean that you are someone worth sharing business control...i.e. their assessment may be inaccurate. It may be an intolerable blow to your ego. But that's the world described in your question (there might be more to it, but that's all I've got).

If the offer comes with a market rate salary, it smells like an above average deal and probably reflects a board that doesn't want you distracted. It also reflects a board that has adequately capitalized the company for operations (and that's the metric of the "business person" in a company). A market rate salary is plausible compensation for the risk inherent in not having business control. If the salary is below market rate, it smells closer to the "two business 'guys' hire a programmer" end of the developer-as-entrepreneur risk spectrum.

There's nothing amiss. It boils down to whether or not you trust the two partners, your objectives, your current career and economic position, and your assessment of the risk. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Is there anything that I'm missing and/or that I should be worried about?"

\- Does the company already have any assets (tangible or intangible) or any revenue? (This would help you to value what the existing founders have already done.)

\- How will all founders' shares vest over time? (see [https://avc.com/2018/03/founder-vesting/](https://avc.com/2018/03/founder- vesting/) for a sense of what can go wrong if founders' shares don't vest)

\- Will any/all of you be drawing a salary? At a discount to market? (market salary + 20% equity is very different from zero salary + 20% equity).

\- Are there different classes of shares, or just one class? (i.e. are the shares you will get on the same footing as the shares the existing founders have)

"This entrepreneur has previously built a company to nine figures in revenue and IPO"

Can you talk to any co-founders or very early employees of that company? Did they get rich together?

</comment><comment><USER4> By the sounds of it the first thing you might be missing is how good your current role might be...

You're clearly not being considered as an equal partner, which depending on what you're considering walking away from, whether the others have already put funds and sweat equity into the project and how relatively unique your respective talents actually are (and when/if you can reasonably expect to start earning a decent salary) might be acceptable or might not. You might be able to negotiate the equity percentage but probably not that starting assumption. The job title split also sounds suspiciously like the "chairman" might not be doing as much day to day work as you and the CEO, though again in some circumstances he might be backing it heavily enough for that not to matter. (It's probably difficult for you to provide much more detail without it being identifying though)

Seems perfectly reasonable to ask prospective cofounders about their experiences with all the startups they've previously founded or invested in, and possible his answers on that (or even just the tone of how he talks about people he's worked with and backed in the past) could be revealing, particularly if, unbeknownst to him, what you're really trying to find out is why someone he invested in thinks you should steer clear.

</comment><comment><USER5> >are reluctant to give me the third board seat.

I wouldn't be too hung up on this. If push comes to shove it sounds like you'd lose every vote 2 to 1 anyways.

<comment><USER6> On the other hand, it seems unwise for them to not give OP a vote, because it means no tiebreaker vote. Unless they're planning to give it to investors later which could be worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A known quantity is offering you a 20% stake, that's huge. However, they aren't offering you control; those seem like the terms. Previous success is correlated with future success - so, the opportunity is sounds great. If you can't live with that, don't do it.

The terms are great, but it doesn't sound like what you want. Realistically, a board seat is a huge ask, and 3 people from the company on the board, isn't typical, especially at this stage.

</comment><comment><USER8> Equity seems a bit low. I'd push for equal shares across the board. Is this fully diluted percentage?

Try to get to know them better and form your own opinions of them.

</comment><comment><USER9> > This founder advised me not to work with this person, but wouldn't tell me > why.

This could be a Giant Red Flag, or simple personality clash.

If you can, follow-up with the Founder for a confidential 1:1.</comment>


Win32 Assembly Programming Using RosAsm - <AUTHOR> http://sebastien.kirche.free.fr/rosasm_mirror/RosAsm/applications/YeoHhs/geocities/index_geo.htm <comment><AUTHOR> IMHO RosAsm was one of the more innovative assemblers available --- it came with a pretty full-featured IDE that also had a pseudo-intelligent disassembler, and allowed embedding the source code into the binary itself. Its syntax departs from the traditional one-instruction-per-line and feels somewhat more high-level.

Sadly it seems you can only find remnants of it and its history with Google, and more may still be around, but just not easily found.</comment>


Ask HN: Cryptocurrency w/ Built-in Guaranteed Basic Income - <AUTHOR>

Would it be possible to build a Crypto-currency that  also has a built-in tax system that goes into a pool and pays out dividends to users... Taking a 2.5% cut, and redistributing that monthly to all users.. The only problem is we'd need to have a way to ensure non-duplicate accounts, which takes anonymity out of the equation...
I honestly feel that bitcoin-like currency will topple governments--because when everyone is using a global currency, they won't be able to control the power via money.
I'm very intrigued by a Guaranteed basic income, but what if we could launch a lite-coin clone that actually gives free coins to people on a monthly basis, and rewards businesses that accept the coin.. We could have a tax, plus instead of just mining for coins--the system could actually have a master account --a dispensary of sorts that creates 1 coin per active account per month, and dispenses that coin to recipients. --- Active means-mined, or bought/sold via coin..
Still thinking on the subject, but would something like this be possible? Any other suggestions on how to make it better? <comment><USER2> Well, the obvious problem is you're proposing a self-destructive currency. Do you really want to opt into a currency system which will inherently lose value? and be non-anonymous to boot? You're building in a tax & welfare system ... creating a government, in an intention to topple governments.

I'll pass. I like my cash anonymous & stable. If you want part of mine, earn it by trading something I value.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting concept. I actually have a theory that the next stage of crypto currencies will have this "sort of thing" built in. An idea I've had recently is that I want a cryptocurrency where each user has his own blockchain. In other words, no universal ledger of all transactions on the system.

The other important concept is that (not saying I have all the answers) each person is free to spend his / her currency as they please. No "mining". But the "ledger" can be synchronized with what may resemble "FOREX markets" but the point of these markets isn't to allow you to trade other currencies on other block chains, but it's to help determine what that individual's currency is worth.

If done right, then theoretically the person(s) who are right in the middle of the bell curve have the most valuable currency, and those at least one or more standard deviations from the center have less value.

The catch is that those people who you transact business / exchange currencies with, the "currency markets" will generate the exchange rate and convert the money into your currency units.

Theoretically the "currency markets", there would be many of them, and likely there could be many within a geographic area comparable in size to a U.S. County.

Ultimately the overarching goal would be that those who spend too much or too little will ultimately pay the price with a loss in currency value.

I think one of the keys here will be to try to create a set of checks and balances to help ensure people can't just create tons of accounts, and start using them all. So perhaps a concept of "type" of transaction will be important. For example, the blockchain shows how much the individual spends on "housing", "food", etc...

</comment><comment><USER4> That users must have one and only one account is something that belongs more to the real world than to the virtual one. And probably for that you will need government cooperation, maybe from all of them for this to work.</comment>


A story of how we failed in YC S17 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@siilime/through-the-looking-glass-part-i-2a710a865c67 <comment><USER2> Part 3 has a TL;DR, and part 2 has some of the more crucial elements outlining where the failures were. Altogether it aligns with advice typically given to startups looking to apply to YC, but as a post-YC story, it perhaps has more resonance.

[https://medium.com/@siilime/through-the-looking-glass- part-i...](https://medium.com/@siilime/through-the-looking-glass-part-iii- bafa050b7e3)

</comment><comment><USER3> What a trainwreck. Is this actually common? Obviously only one viewpoint but i was in cringe from day1. Buzzwords. No product. No customers. CTO not attending meetings. What?

<comment><USER2> Not at all common. Few startups typically get accepted into the program if they're in that much of a pre-development state.

Unfortunately YC and Silicon Valley is still rife with buzzwords over content. Many of the YC alumni parties are full of founders proudly professing their YC failures.

CTO (myself) couldn't attend as it was made clear that YCombinator wouldn't allow anyone who wasn't there during the interview stage to attend the YC meetings. That alone was a huge issue. As for the interview itself, I simply couldn't attend; it was impossible for me to fly out on that date, and no other interview slots were available by then.

That's not to say it doesn't happen. There were other startups in S17 that had no product, but they had customers who were already signed up. It seems every batch gets larger, but the quality of much of those batches seems to decrease.

The desire to get into YCombinator seems to push founders to make mistakes and rush ideas along that simply aren't ready.

As the author, cringing seems the correct response to what was happening.

As far as buzzwords go, it often became a running joke in the house. Every week we'd be told to add another buzzword to the pile, with each buzzword having a perceived value impact on the startup for VCs and investors. That is relatively normal among startups, and something I was fairly determined to avoid during development.

<comment><USER3> I just tried to put myself in the author's shoes. I think i literally had 12 moments i would have packed up and went home. Starting with the decision to apply to YC with nothing. And i don't consider myself a quitter.

(A few other questionable things like rust for a POC with no users. Why? Does someone claim to out POC Python with rust?)

<comment><USER2> I'm the author. Don't underestimate the willingness to support a friend's project. Over the few days since I was asked, I went back and forth between declining and accepting. I (incorrectly) assumed we'd be rejected from YC, and that was a mistake.

Actually, Rust was the second choice. First was Go, which was exponentially easier to hack together a product as it was simply a matter of piecing services together. But, the first developer we on-boarded (Ravi) was a Rust developer, and we already had plans to utilize Rust in some areas later on, so we tried to see how quickly we could apply it.

Note at the end of part 3 lists using Rust in an unproven area as much as we did for a PoC as one of the mistakes I made. Not sure why raise Python as an option as it was never on the table, except to say a YC coach suggested we use it. Go, Swift, and TypeScript are more than suitable for rapid development, and were the other languages we were using.

In retrospective, with the lessons learned, we can apply Rust a lot quicker now, than we could of at the time. Although I still wouldn't as it simply offers too many challenges compared to using our first choice: Go.

<comment><USER4> Why not just take an open source slack competitor and build off that? Like [https://github.com/zulip/zulip/](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/) ?

And there are a million open source kanban implementations too...

<comment><USER2> We had specific requirements that would have meant we would have spent a significant amount of time re-engineering parts of any open source option to make it fit to the insurance market, essentially taking longer than building our own, and this is ignoring the bigger issues.

We could have integrated into an existing solution like Slack using their APIs, but unless the UI was specifically designed to fit the specific market it wouldn't be a worthwhile replacement for existing products.

As for the kanban, that was an easy UI to build. As you pointed out, there are plenty of options there. We actually didn't need to use a third-party as it's really simple to build a good kanban UX from scratch.

The complications with our project were not in the UI specifically; there's literally thousands of clones of those types of projects, and more each day.

Our complications were in developing a very specific user experience, tailored for a specific type of customer's workflow, needlessly tightly-coupled to a monolithic distributed ledger platform with no API, that depended heavily on both private and public networks containing cryptographic signatures.

Trying to conceive of a solution to a problem that didn't exist is also one of the major issues. Our customers didn't need a new messaging platform, secure storage solution, or kanban board. They needed a secure way of writing contracts and agreements, that were then financially binding. The solution was entirely wrong for the problem we were tackling.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cabin Fever - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabin_fever <comment><USER2> Blaise Pascal said, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

[https://thecatholicspirit.com/commentary/wordonfire/the- coro...](https://thecatholicspirit.com/commentary/wordonfire/the-coronavirus- and-sitting-quietly-in-a-room-alone/)

</comment><comment><USER3> An awesome resource for long term effects of quarantine is this paper from The Lancet: _The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence_ [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(20\)30460-8/fulltext)

I personally try to set little goals every day. Routine is really important. Maybe study a new subject and/or work on a side-project. Also exercise (basic cardio) - some sunlight (open a window if nothing else is an option), and/or smoke weed to reduce anxiety. Smoking weed and drinking coffee is a combination that keeps me productive for tasks that require deep thinking. (weed alone just makes me complacent and lazy).

If anyone needs help working on a fun foss project I have time to spare :)

edit: also timebox both your work and your fun activities. (timeboxing one alone isn't enough IMO)

<comment><USER4> Are you not concerned about smoking making covid19 symptoms more extreme?

<comment><USER3> maybe I should be. but having stopped cigarettes 25 years ago, and my weed consumption not being regular (often have breaks of several months) I'm not too worried. Maybe baking cookies in these times would be better but it's not the same :-/

<comment><USER5> I read something on Reddit that said marijuana is an ACE2-inhibitor, but I can't find any research on it or anything about it. No idea where the guy got his information but I keep looking around. Does anyone else know if this is just completely false information?

<comment><USER6> [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6487561/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6487561/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> People talking about going "stir crazy" is just bewildering to me. Working from home has been a dream come true. I am happier, less stressed, and easily 2x more efficient and productive. The ability to sit quietly in my apartment alone for extended periods of time is literally the only thing in the world I have ever wanted.

<comment><USER8> The gap between the extremes of introversion and extraversion is wide. Most people, of course, sit somewhere in the middle. Though there seems to be another axis at play here—what if you were forced to stay at home but not alone? For many people the office is a more peaceful place to work than home. And even people who like solitude do not often like being forced to stay inside, without being able to go for a walk, without access to nature and so on.

<comment><USER9> >And even people who like solitude do not often like being forced to stay inside, without being able to go for a walk, without access to nature and so on.

Is that actually happening anywhere outside of China?

<comment><USER8> Well, it is for those who are ill and/or quarantined. Or disabled, or incarcerated… I was not only referring to this current situation. Plus the curfews in place in France and Italy are very close to being total lockdowns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I imagine under a tight lockdown, this is way more pronounced for apartment dwellers. Being able to just sit in your backyard seems like a big difference.

<comment><USER11> I absolutely agree. I have a 5 year old at home due to closed kindergarten. Both my wife and I are supposed to be working from home for the next few weeks and without our garden I think we'd be off the wall by now.

Sending the lad outside to play in the sunny weather, while I can watch him from the window next to my workspace, is making a huge difference.

<comment><USER12> We were in the process of finding a house to rent before this all went down. Now we're stuck in an apartment with our stir-crazy toddler and are both supposed to be working full hours from home. It's.. difficult, to say the least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Business as usual for shut-ins, hikikomori, cellar-dwellers, 24/7 gamers etc

<comment><USER3> some re-energize themselves by going out and sharing with others what their day was like, others need isolation in order to recover from a busy day. Most aren't on either extreme of that spectrum but somewhere in between.

I think you don't need to be a shut-in or 24/7 gamer for this to not have much of an effect on you. I used to be on the far end of this spectrum of needing to share and have others around me in my first 30-40 years and as I got older I changed within a time-span of 5 years that I'd rather stay home. I can still wear my party-hat when I need to and do enjoy it but if given the choice now I rather spend time with my own thoughts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been having to deal with this lately; I've never really been someone who likes working from home. Typically when I've told coworkers that I'm "working from home", I'm actually "working from McDonalds" or something, and I just don't feel like taking an hour-long subway ride for whatever reason.

Now that everything in NYC is closed or on restricted hours or whatever, I have been getting a little stir-crazy, especially since my already-too-low amount of exercise that I got from my commute to work has now been reduced to "me walking downstairs to my basement", which has made it very difficult for me to sleep.

To combat this, I ordered an exercise machine last night, to at least allow me to get an approximation of what I'd be doing at the gym, and hopefully ameliorate the sleep issues, but I have no idea how I'm going to deal with 3+ more weeks of this quarantine.

</comment><comment><USER15> That article links to another called "Piblokto"—a cultural-specific hysterical reaction.

I'm suspicious it's a real thing and the article mentions there is heavy skepticism around it, but it's a strange article to read nonetheless.

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

</comment><comment><USER16> Yesterday evening I needed to get out of the house for a while. I've been a remote worker for two years so working from home is nothing new but most days I'd end up outside of the house for errands or just going down the street to say hi to neighbors. Instead I went out and drove around. Even twenty minutes of a change in scenery helped out quite a bit. Back when I lived in a midrise condo in the central business district of a large metro, it would have been much more difficult to achieve this small bit of scenery change without passing through spaces shared by a couple hundred neighbors. Cabin fever is going to be distributed unevenly throughout this event.

</comment><comment><USER17> How does it differ from excruciating boredom?

</comment><comment><USER18> So, aside from irritability and perhaps paranoia, are there any more symptoms?

It's fun that you can't be diagnosed with it as it's not a defined medical definition but how can you know if you're on the slope to experiencing something like this?

<comment><USER3> speaking only from my personal experience it can trigger depression, loss of motivation, and a feeling of an "empty head". e.g. place me in front of a window I'd stare out of it for several hours and if you would ask me what I'm thinking about I wouldn't know. Also increased anxiety when the quarantine is over.

<comment><USER19> > place me in front of a window I'd stare out of it for several hours and if > you would ask me what I'm thinking about I wouldn't know

Isn't that called meditation?

<comment><USER20> Meditation is an intentional pursuit; it's about focus rather than daydreaming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py As always, the inuit word for this is best

I would use a product called 'Piblokto' almost no matter what it did

</comment><comment><USER21> I've lived in a lot of places in my life, and spent at least some time in seclusion in each one. And I _have_ experienced the "cabin fever" feeling before... but not everywhere I've lived. In some environments, it happened easily and immediately; in others, it never did. I've tried to think about my environment at each juncture to figure out if the situations where I _did_ experience "cabin fever" had anything in common.

Every time I experienced the symptoms described in the article (restlessness, lightheadedness, insomnia, irritability, etc.) I was living in a modern, rather-well-sealed apartment building; or was on a long road-trip in a modern, rather-well-sealed car; or was on a long plane flight; or was staying in a modern hotel room in a high-rise; or I was camping in a tent or camper- trailer.

Meanwhile, I've never experienced these symptoms while living in an old, drafty brick building (repurposed office building); or while living in a Victorian-era farmhouse; or while staying in a low-rent motel; or while camping under the stars.

My conclusion is that "cabin fever" is a feeling you get when your living space is not well-ventilated. Specifically, when there's no way to create a through-draft of air, so even opening windows won't force out the air deeper in the home—leading to that air becoming stale, creating a built-up "cloud" of CO2, other gaseous bodily wastes, and exhaled aerosolized water droplets (you know, those things that viruses travel on.) It happens faster when more people are cooped up together in a small space, because this cloud of stale air gets denser, faster; and because there's less time when everyone is gone at once, where the air can "recharge" by slow through-insulation-barrier gas exchange.

If the problem is stale air, then just "going outside" is only a temporary fix, because the air will usually be just as stuffy when you return (unless you leave for hours and leave your windows open and fans on.) On the other hand, you _can_ be fine while inside indefinitely, if you open a window and then sit right beside it, where the outside air can reach you. _But_ this will only work if there's enough wind to push the air into the house a small bit; _and_ it seemingly has no effect—possibly for purely-psychological reasons?—if the air outside is humid, as it is in e.g. Hong Kong. (But going outside in humid places still works for temporary relief. Weird.)

And that last realization leads me to the secondary conclusion that the (or my, at least) human physiology is responding mainly to aerosolized-moisture- content in the air (in some way that's distinct from responding to the evaporated humidity) as a proxy metric for the other, harder-to-sense air- quality measures. So, in theory, you _might_ be able to reduce the qualitative of "cabin fever" just by buying a dehumidifier.

But really, I wouldn't recommend it; there's pretty good documentation about the subtler, less-self-apparent effects that a high CO2 concentration in a room can have on people, and on how much CO2 does tend to build up in closed or not-well-ventilated rooms—especially people's bedrooms at night.

Relevant links:

\- Tom Scott's _This is Your Brain on Stale Air_ — [https://youtu.be/1Nh_vxpycEA](https://youtu.be/1Nh_vxpycEA)

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome) (when this same thing happens in offices)

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_shui](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_shui) (which, at its practical core, seems to be about arranging the contents of living spaces to avoid having objects act as _baffles_ to the through-flow of air)

<comment><USER22> Both my current and previous landlord cheaped out on windows, which were badly sealed in both cases leading to these apartments being rather pleasant to be in for longer(think days).

Well, at least after we bought a Roomba which took care of all the dust generated by people and animals inside.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: SF Hackers where do you work out? - <AUTHOR>

After reading a post about strength training [1] I'd be curious where people in SF work out.<p>[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4971196 <comment><USER2> Valencia Street Muscle = cheap and more free weights and barbells than any other gym I've seen. But is old school, broken and dirty. I guess thats what I love about it.

Embarcadero YMCA, also pretty cheap (compared to equinox and other alternatives in SF) and I go here to go swimming and play basketball and lift before heading to work. It's clean so the fiancee will go here (but not valencia st muscle.. where someone in nothing but a codpiece once worked out next to her)

<comment><AUTHOR> Do they have bumper plates?

<comment><USER2> No, wish they did. But nobody is complaining if you just drop them on your olympic lifts. They haven't changed the carpet since the 70s, you can see where everyone else drops them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Gold's Gym on Shoreline in Mountain View next to Google. $20/month and plenty of barbells for the serious lifter.

</comment><comment><USER4> where can a hacker hobo take a decent shower for free nowadays?

</comment><comment><USER5> 24 Hour Fitness, because its cheap and everywhere.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> World Gym Potrero Hill</comment>


This Is Your Life, Brought to You by Private Equity - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/02/business/dealbook/this-is-your-life-private-equity.html?pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12204077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12204077)</comment>


Microsoft's Bing Adds Some Zing - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/microsofts-bing-adds-zing

<comment><USER2> FWIW, Google does pretty much the same thing with weather searches.</comment>


Facebook dumbs you down - <AUTHOR> http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-42027-113.html

<comment><USER2> I could see this having a correlation with not finding your schoolwork interesting and wasting your time surfing Facebook. It's not that Facebook makes you stupid, it's that Facebook usage is a good metric for failing to pay attention to school.

<comment><USER3> These points are made in the article about the same topic referenced from <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=561653>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://xkcd.com/552/>

</comment><comment><USER4> I think Facebook is safe, since nothing can truly dumb you down more than MySpace pages and the comments on any YouTube video.</comment>


Show HN: CloudPano – 360 Panorama Gallery Viewer for Everyone - <AUTHOR> http://www.cloudpano.com <comment><AUTHOR> Feedback appreciated!

Direct link to the app: [https://app.cloudpano.com/](https://app.cloudpano.com/) Demos: [https://app.cloudpano.com/tours/HnwX1BwRCO](https://app.cloudpano.com/tours/HnwX1BwRCO) [https://app.cloudpano.com/tours/IfLUP2LTpy](https://app.cloudpano.com/tours/IfLUP2LTpy) [https://app.cloudpano.com/tours/F_bT4A587K](https://app.cloudpano.com/tours/F_bT4A587K)

I created this to allow realtors and photographers to make 360 degree tours of their properties. The Tour Editor is pretty robust and I also allow whitelabeling.

Feel free to play with a demo. Its free to make demos and up to three commercial tours.

The goal here is to get 360 tours to be ubiquitous. So far, we have had users make everything from residential properties for sale, cars for sale, and even vacation photos.

The marketing website I am really hoping to get right. I dont think its there yet. Open to all feedback. Right now this is completely bootstrapped by me and my partner and developed by me.

The most challenging aspects of this have been: automated whitelabeling solution, overestimating users' competencies, and learning Three.JS.

The most enjoyable aspects of this have been: Setting up infrastructure from ground-up, coming up with extremely novel and quick implementations because I am limited to a few hours a day (I have a full-time job right now as a tech consultant), and learning how to triage and prioritize my own software project to get users with as little features as possible. We are hustling!

Our user growth and revenue have been increasing each month, right now we are looking for mentorship and connect with other entrepreneurs. Its hard to develop a start-up on the side and I'm ready for the next step! We are based in Houston, TX :)</comment>


How Are Function Components Different from Classes? - <AUTHOR> https://overreacted.io/how-are-function-components-different-from-classes/ <comment><USER2> I was wondering if the issue in the example with the class had anything to do with "this" not being bound in window.setTimeout call?</comment>


Whitman and Fiorina, Candidacies That Did Not Compute - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/us/politics/07bcweber.html?src=twr <comment><USER2> What's odd is that they didn't even win more than other Republicans _in Silicon Valley itself_ , let alone elsewhere in the state. If you look at the numbers for Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, they did no better than non- tech Republicans (30-35%).

I don't think they're good examples of how a "silicon valley candidate" would do, though. They were both candidates who were popular in the business world but didn't resonate in Silicon Valley at all; Fiorina was actually actively unpopular with engineers. So you can't necessarily draw conclusions from this result to how a candidate that SV saw as one of its own would be perform.

<comment><USER3> I was a bit surprised by the demographics. I knew Fiorina was unpopular locally over the way she ran HP, but thought she ran a much better campaign than Boxer and that she would do rather better outside the Bay Area than she did - but I wouldn't be surprised if she ran again.

Conversely, I thought Valley folk might overlook Whitman's (reputedly) abrasive personality in favor of a fairly successful tenure at eBay, although her campaign was a disaster on wheels from the start. Spending $140 million of your own cash only to be decisively rejected...ouch. For that much she could have just bought Somalia or something, their entire budget last year was about $11m.

<comment><USER2> I think Whitman might've done better in the Bay Area if she hadn't tacked as much to the social-conservative right in the Republican primary (or had successfully backed away from that in the general election). Supporting Proposition 8 probably cost her a few points in the region just by itself. On the other hand, not supporting it probably would've sunk her in the primary.

<comment><USER3> I wonder why she ran with the Republicans at all. She could have run as an independent; plenty of California voters are equally annoyed with both parties' poor legislative and administrative record.

<comment><USER4> Third-party candidates can't have Presidential ambitions. Not being a major- party candidate would hamstring her credibility in a national campaign.

<comment><USER3> Ross Perot made a reasonable fist of it; the only major obstacle is money. Of course, an independent candidate won't have the political network necessary for effective governance, but even that could be spun into an asset; if she had won the governor's spot and performed with reasonable competence that would have sold better than any partisan merit badge.

I don't think that getting heavily defeated at the polls outspending your opponent ~5:1 and changing positions repeatedly is much good for her national credibility either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whitman's very candidacy was an insult to those of us who have gone out of our way on many occasions to discharge our civic duty of voting. I'm sorry, Meg, you don't just wake up one morning, having never participated in the political process, and say "hey, you know what, I'm so great, I should be governor". It was an exercise in ego from the get-go, and thank the gods that the voters saw through it.

BTW I'm no Jerry Brown fan either. The candidate I would actually have liked to vote for was Tom Campbell. Had Whitman not blown him out of the primary, maybe I could have.

</comment><comment><USER6> The biggest problem with these candidacies is that they did not follow the valley way. Ebay and HP didn't spring up overnight driven by a huge ad budget. They solved problems real people had starting small and growing as they delivered. Neither of them had the experience of winning a spot on the city council. The tech industry unlike Hollywood doesn't lend themselves to being a household name. It's easy for an actor to launch a political career because they are already well known to the public.

Those candidacies are the quintessential VC fueled hype company. Whitman probably wouldn't give a fresh startup $140 million in the seed round and expect them to use it wisely, so why would anyone expect a different outcome?

It has nothing to do with the Valley and everything to do with how the campaign was grown.

<comment><USER3> Oddly, maybe Whitman would have done better if she had started later. She was running commercials every single break for months before Brown even started advertising- I think people literally got tired of her being on TV all the time.

Repeating the text of her then-current advert _verbatim_ during the debate didn't help either; she came across as very scripted. I wonder if it was her campaign or her own preference to keep the media at arm's length? I've heard her speak before and she struck me as pretty personable, and I didn't expect her to be so stiff and formal during the election campaign. Her last ad had the line 'I'll treat you [the voters] like grown-ups,' which is how you speak to a ten year old.

I'd rather like if Brown would hire her as his business adviser or something, because she had a few good economic ideas, like reducing the cost of business registration and suchlike. But that's probably not happening, they don't seem to like each other much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Frankly, I consider it a "win" for all of us that people who try and buy political seats from their own cash fail.

I don't know what it is but I find it deeply unsettling when the likes of Jon Corzine pump so much of their own money into these things, particularly when they're former business types.

You have to expect that if they're putting in $60+ million of their own money they expect to get that back at some point.

<comment><USER8> Were it not the case that contemporary politicians essentially can't win without spending millions of dollars, I'd agree with you hands down.

But as it is, either they're billionaires that fund themselves, or they get funded by Wall Street, Telecoms, Big Oil, Tech, Defense Industry, other billionaires, etc.

I think I'm more comfortable with a billionaire spending his own money, than a non-billionaire completely in the pocket of some particular industry.

At least with the former, the payoff they're looking for could alternately be fame, love, legacy, or simply because being in government is the one thing they haven't done yet (besides maybe going to space).

With the latter, the payoff will certainly be shaping the laws in their favor, sometimes at the expense of the country or overall economy.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to get a startup job in SF as a non-technical guy - <AUTHOR>

So, I recently graduated college with a BBA in Entrepreneurship and a BS in Economics.  I want to get out to the Bay Area and get a job or internship at a startup.
Anyone have any advice on this? Anyone here done it themselves (as a non-techy)?
Skill set now includes being a 'highly motivated self starter' who knows a bit about data analysis (with STATA) and I'm functionally illiterate in Python.
I've started and folded a couple ventures of my own and would like to learn from folks who are successfully doing it now.
Tips would be very much appreciated! <comment><USER2> I graduated with a degree in Business and looked for startup jobs a few years back. It is difficult because:

1) Startups generally don't hire "business" people. You'd have to have a very specific role like marketing or customer service or community management.

2) Following #1, startups won't hire you unless you have experience in those fields (or hard skills). Startups don't have the resources to train you, and will never let a complete noobie have reign over any of their program.

Unfortunately your skill set as you described it above falls short, because pretty much everyone says they have passion, and you lack hard skills.

My suggestion: starting gaining experience through your own small projects. Identify which field of work you specifically want to work in. Build a product or service, ship it, try to get it blog coverage or press, run a Facebook/Adword campaign and optimize it. Build a mailing list. Build a FB fan page following. You need to build a body of evidence you can show startups come hiring time. "These are the things I've done, and this is what I can do for you."

People (bloggers) always write about how startups should hire generalists, but in my opinion, it doesn't happen because startups are far more attracted to specialists whom they can shoehorn into generalist roles. Its less risky for them because that specialist has demonstrated depth of skill and competence, vs a generalist who shows less depth, but broader range.

Best of luck

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, makes sense to me. I'm working on a handful of things right now. Most are in the ether, but should be coding them out in the next couple of weeks. From there I will follow your advice.

As for the generalists v. specialists thing, again makes perfect sense. Telling folks "pay me I am smart, nice, and learn quickly" is a lot less quantifiable than "I got XX users in YY months, let me do that for you."

Much appreciated

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It really depends on your skills, but I'd think about sales and/or biz-dev positions. Why?

\--Sales is a huge value-add to most companies (whether a five-person startup or a Fortune 500 co.). You're responsible for revenue, which is something that most companies will want lots of at some point or another.

\--Because you're responsible for revenue, you can personally make lots of money. In SF, a good salesperson (even at a startup) can easily make $75-125k/yr in their first year or two. If you go to a larger company, have specialized experience, or are exceptional at sales, it's not uncommon to be making $150-200k+/yr after a couple years.

\--Arguably, even more important than the financial benefits, you'll learn a ton about business. Even if you don't see yourself becoming a career salesperson, it's a great base to launch a career in operations, account management, strategic partnerships, revenue/sales management, or to become a CEO/COO/CRO of your own company someday. Sales is valuable because every company has to do it - whether pitching investors, negotiating a contract, selling SaaS products, partnering with other companies, etc. It's all sales on some level.

Feel free to email me if you'd like to discuss further. Happy to chat with any non-technical folks on HN about career options or opportunities. More info and my email is in my profile.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot! I'll drop you a line very soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Your post would have fit me pretty closely ~ 7 years ago. Personally, I got into tech by getting exposure to online advertising with a side project. This led to an internship and then a full-time job in advertising operations.

My advice: apply for entry-level roles in tech companies on a business/operations focused team. Hustle and learn something new every day. For me, that has meant launching side projects, learning Python, advanced Excel skills, reporting automation (VBA and Python), becoming an expert at the industry-standard ad servers, and learning how all the pieces of the online advertising ecosystem fit together.

Depending on your interests and current skillset, you may want to adjust your own path accordingly.

Feel free to reach out to me directly as I would love to help.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that all makes sense to me. I've got a couple of side projects that I am working on now, none of which are live yet though. And I appreciate the invitation, would it be fine if I contacted you through fitspot? assuming you are the email in the FAQ?

<comment><USER4> I just updated my profile. Feel free to reach out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Michael Wolfe gives some ideas here: [http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-find-non- technical-job-opportu...](http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-find-non-technical- job-opportunities-at-a-startup-that-is-pre-series-A/answer/Michael-Wolfe)

<comment><AUTHOR> Bookmarking this! Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1\. find a reasonable part of California to find residence. 2\. Get job for cheap residency. 3\. get accepted to bay area college masters program. 4\. move to bay area. 5\. network shit out it while in masters program.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sign up for AngelList ([http://angel.co](http://angel.co)) and set up a career profile that emphasizes your data skillset and startup experience. You should be an interesting candidate for Product Management and Growth positions, so start by contacting those.

AngelList makes it easy to quickly contact many companies, but I highly recommend you pick just a handful of highly interesting prospects and reach out with a note explaining why you'd be a great fit.

<comment><USER8> +1

AngelList is awesome.

network for intros, preferably warm. failing that, just email the CEO directly. write a kickass email pitching yourself and detailing your skills. tactfully follow-up.

network some more.

founders have (and want to see) passion and hustle. show them you have these qualities and you shouldn't have trouble landing a paid internship if not an entry-level role.

last resort: get a few unpaid internships at startups you love. if one doesn't turn into a full time offer, you'll have some awesome experience you can use to get the attention of other startups.</comment></comment>


Scaling Facebook vs. scaling LinkedIn - <AUTHOR> http://thestandard.com/news/2008/07/01/facebook-and-linkedin-talk-about-scaling

<comment><USER2> Following the link: [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-9980569-80.html?part=rss&#...
Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook said:
"...through that process we were able to lock in prices today and carry those prices forward as all the commodity components costs drop."
Is it just me? Don't you want the new future pricing as commodity component costs drop? Why lock in and carry forward today's prices concerning technology?
Please help me with this one.

<comment><USER3> I can only assume he's got a fixed price on whatever the vendor's equivalent machine is at any point in the future. So in a year's time he'd be getting more power, but he would still be paying x dollars for y U in a rack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _Using PHP as the primary development language_

I'm not sure that's true. PHP is certainly the language that generates the HTML the user sees, but I REALLY doubt all the computation on the social graph (i.e. the clever/resource hungry bit of Facebook) is done in PHP.

<comment><USER4> _But one of the reasons we're very lucky is our engineering team has selected to use PHP as the primary development language. That allows us to use a fairly generic server type. So we, with a couple of exceptions, have three main server types and run a fairly homogeneous environment, which allows us to then consolidate our buying power._

Scary, but that's what he said. Could be why they need another $100 million for servers. ;)</comment></comment>


Ask HN:Why is it so rare to see job ads asking for generalist programmers? - <AUTHOR>

When I look at programming jobs I often see companies looking for a specialist in technology X or technology Y. I understand the need. Companies need to launch products ASAP and they need people already comfortable in the chosen technologies.
However, in my opinion, they are neglecting a powerful workforce. Those guys or gals who have a breadth-first approach to learning. People fascinated with many fields of our trade. These people, sometimes neglected, could be crucial for the long term success of the company.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> You have to understand the reason why the company is hiring. If they are looking for a specialist, that's because of a pressing need. They probably exhausted their network and now are throwing money at the problem by a job ad.

When hiring a generalist things are more relaxed. If they wait a little bit more someone from their network will pop up. So generalist posts tend to appear on job listings a lot less.

</comment><comment><USER3> The last thing a business wants is to hire more people. This means less money for the owners/shareholders. Companies don't hire until they are forced to, and by that point they are facing a very specific blocking problem. People are extremely greedy and their motivations are to get more money as fast as possible, not find some long term success or to do a business idea fishing expedition. I think to myself, "in what cases would a criminal pay someone money" because that's the lowest common denominator of when an employer will pay someone. By keeping this perspective, I'll never misunderstand the employer's motivations or goals.

</comment><comment><USER4> Speaking from an enterprise perspective I'd say the reason most companies do not hire generalists is because the corporate structure is not well equipped to handle such resources. Very few companies grok the concept of internal consultants (which is exactly how a generalist will have to function in order to be leveraged properly) and fewer still know how to foster that sort of talent.

On top of this, a company by its very nature will tend to pigeonhole employees. It is costly to do knowledge transfer, its costly to move employees around, its costly to train employees, and in reality it is inefficient to not leverage prior experience as much as possible.

Even though we are in the "information era" companies still very much function as if we were standing on an assembly lines.

</comment><comment><USER5> Most companies organize technology around tools because the people making the decisions about technology at the highest level often don't really get technology; even CIO/CTOs are often from a tech-focussed business management background, not a strong engineering background with management skills layered on top.

You see the opposite at some places. Google, for instance, will generall yhave listings that mention a desire for "experience with" (or sometimes "significant experience with") some specific set of technologies but rarely specific _years_ of experience with particular technologies, but also ask for _X_ years of general experience in the field and/or a specific degree level.

Google appears (from their listings) to prefer to hire _generalists_ with some experience in the the area of immediate need, whereas most companies frame their listings to focus on specialists without much emphasis on breadth.

</comment><comment> alok-g I am a generalist spanning both hardware and software (with expertise on many sub-fields within these), and so this highly impacts me in spite of the stellar reputation I have amongst those who know me.

Many of the answers here point to a potential solution: Develop a specialization in generalization, like taking on an architect or multidisciplinary role. More thoughts on this are welcome. :-)

<comment><USER4> I absolutely agree that going for an architect role is the solution to this problem. The key to becoming a successful generalist is to learn how to bring technologies together. If you can paint the picture of how integrate different systems/tools/languages/teams/etc then you have a very valuable skill to an organization. Unfortunately this means not just being good with technology but also being good with creating or refining specs, understanding business processes, juggling priorities, and all the other good stuff that is needed to handle complexity in the work place.

<comment> alok-g Thanks for these inputs. :-)

Of all the things you mention for complexity in the workplace, the hardest I find is understanding business processes since they are often industry- specific (specialized) themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My ex-girlfriend graduated awhile ago from Ohio state with a degree in computer science with most of her college work done in an obscure language event there. Needless to say had problem find a job. I told her to go to comlumbus state(a community college) and take vb.net class. Viola job with the state. Employers are looking for that person that will go above and beyond.

<comment><USER7> I'm amazed that someone with a computer science degree cannot learn vb.net on their own.

<comment><USER8> More likely her resume wouldn't get past hr without the class listed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You're a manager and realize (reluctantly) that you need to hire another programmer...

What's the strongest indication of success? If someone already on your team recommends them.

So, my theory is, programmers at companies know other generalists, and recommend them (successfully) for generalist positions.

And the reason you see job postings like you do (technology X and technology Y), is because the people who work at that company don't _already know someone_ who knows those technologies, and is looking for a job.</comment>