What makes a good excuse? - <AUTHOR> https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/what-makes-a-good-excuse-a-cambridge-philosopher-may-have-the-answer <comment><USER2> Here is a story of the principle in action and working.

When I was deep diving into rhetoric (for a course), I needed a good excuse for an appointment at my thesis project. My thesis supervisor was being very unfair and not respecting my time at all by being non-negotiable and simply demanding when I would be there and when. The things I did were not related to my thesis and it felt very disrespectful (especially when I contrasted it with my computer science thesis). It made me feel like an unpaid temp worker, because I simply was one (that has never happened before or after and I have done 5 theses in total). At one point I really needed to get out under an obligation.

I used 2 principles:

\- the one in the article and

\- hide your lie in as much truth as possible

She was a psychology thesis supervisor and not all that knowledgeable about computers.

I told her my computer completely bricked itself and that I needed my code on there (I didn't back it up) because there was an assignment tonight that would simply be the difference of studying for one extra year or graduating that summer. She knew I was doing multiple study programs, a fact that I communicated well in advance. It would take at least 24 hours to get my data back based on past experience.

She was really pissed, but because she couldn't blame it on me but on my computer she didn't make me go there. She did ask me to come another day which was fine by me, since it was at a moment when I had a lot less going on. She never held it against me.

<comment><USER3> If she is as you described, I'm surprised that she didn't didn't simply say "failure to prepare on your part is not an emergency on my part".

<comment><USER2> Two things:

1\. I don't think she'd think about backups and I didn't mention them.

2\. I simply wouldn't have come and was prepared to drop the thesis and simply redo it next year. In retrospect, it's the only thesis that didn't teach me much (other than how to cope with a very unfortunate situation) and was very unfulfilling. I'm a bit ashamed I went through with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Link to paper: [http://paulinasliwa.weebly.com/uploads/1/9/0/4/19046427/fina...](http://paulinasliwa.weebly.com/uploads/1/9/0/4/19046427/final_submission.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> Higher/ moral priorities. Time sensitivity.

</comment><comment><USER3> Article is a lot of word to say "rationalization makes a good excuse". If your excuse seems justified, it will be accepted.

</comment><comment><USER6> I cannot believe someone gets paid to study what is common knowledge that kids as young as 8 9 years of age know of. When they want to skip school they don't say I don't feel like it, they say they are poorly.

Is it more official now as Cambridge said it? How is this helpful in any way towards the common good?</comment>


Program Synthesis Demo - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/sumitg/pubs/mobisys13.mp4

<comment><USER2> The demo is neat, although the flashy, impressive part (NL->program) predates this particular piece of work. For example, Greg Little's "sloppy programming" is from 2008-ish: [http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/projects/keyword- commands/in...](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/projects/keyword- commands/index.html)

Le and Gulwani's paper does cite Little, but the refutation is a bit weak.

> Little and Miller propose a code completion tool that synthesizes the most > likely Java expression in a code context from a set of keywords [23]. Smart- > Synth is different, in that it synthesizes a complete script and does not > require extra contextual information.

From the video, a "complete script" appears to be 1 or 2 simple expressions. And not requiring contextual information sounds like it can't take advantage of contextual information.

</comment><comment><USER3> And a link to his homepage where you might find more work on program synthesis [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/sumitg/](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/sumitg/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I expect this will lead to a whole new category of bugs: "I wasn't precise enough in saying what I wanted, so now the code doesn't do what it should."

Interesting technology, but I doubt it will ever replace or even be used in a proper piece of code.

<comment><USER5> But it would be a good alternative to bash one-liners.

<comment><USER4> oh absolutely, if they can get it general enough to do that. If they manage to include this in powershell (since it's MS), they could have the worlds greatest command line.

"Get all current running processes, select the ones that use over 5% CPU, and display them to me sorted descending by CPU usage"

More verbose than the normal, but damn it would make things easier for the non-initiated.

<comment><USER6> The danger is that you wind up with another AppleScript - something that might _read_ more easily for the non-initiated, but is no easier to write, because it only accepts one particular finicky subset of natural language while dishonestly implying that it'll magically understand all of it.

<comment><USER4> I would hope that Microsoft is smarter and has learned from those mistakes. It does seem to be their intention to do it with full natural language processing. We'll have to wait and see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pretty neat. I noticed something a bit off about the "tint a random photo blue" example around 2:22. Two of the three search results are fine, but the second search result is

        pics := media -> pictures
        pic := pics -> random
        pic -> tint (colors -> sepia)
        c := colors -> blue

All the components are there but not in the right order -- it still tints with the default color.

<comment><USER8> Isn't that the point though? That the search results show different possible interpretations of the text entry, and this is one of the possible ones?

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't say "Tint a random photo sepia, and then set an arbitrary unrelated variable to blue" is a possible interpretation of the text "Tint a random photo blue".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The animated (translation) transitions seems everything but ergonomic to me.

For instance, static touch controls grid are pretty efficient, see:

[http://www.malacria.fr/pdf/gutwin14-fasttap.pdf](http://www.malacria.fr/pdf/gutwin14-fasttap.pdf) [http://www.malacria.fr/video/fasttap- video.mp4](http://www.malacria.fr/video/fasttap-video.mp4)

<comment><USER11> Interesting research. Of course, you could always hack the Home button to act as a Command key and hold the device in landscape orientation without having to give up a piece of the screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This system could be used together with speech recognition (Siri, Cortana, etc. personal agent) to automate tasks and write little apps on a mobile device.

</comment><comment><USER13> Very interesting demo. It reminds me of Microsoft Australia's work with on(X)... but this is closer to code completion on steroids.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have attended one of Sumit's guest lectures, and his work on Flash Fill is pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER15> So this is what we were all working on at ICFP last year :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Am I the only one hearing Daft Punk's [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfH3erWacsQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfH3erWacsQ)?</comment>


Intel drone fireworks – first step towards drone billboard - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/07/technology/intel-drone-fireworks/index.html <comment><USER2> Hurry up AR and IRL ad block.</comment>


Ask HN: Do I work on a project that people love, but I have little interest? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Should-you-work-on-an-project-that-people-love-but-in-an-area-you-have-little-interest-in I've been working on a project with a talented team for 3 months. User testing has revealed that we solve some crucial problems in the space and people love our service.
But this is by accident.
Pro: We built something cool and people love it.
- That's why we've spent so much time on it. That's why some of our team withdrew from college.
Con: We have very little interest in the space.
Question - do we continue working on this? <comment><USER2> No.</comment>


Lavabit founder, under gag order, speaks out about shut-down decision - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/lavabit-founder-under-gag-order-speaks-out-about-shut-down-decision/ <comment><USER2> Bravo to the man for standing up for what's right. No form of coercion like that should be allowable.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be awesome if he just moved his business OUT of America.</comment>


Show HN: My first iPad app "HckrNe.ws" - <AUTHOR> http://www.hckrne.ws/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Here are some promo codes: RAJM9FF3YWJX WXX73HKP96X6 PJ36N4HHPWMA 79AE9H9WHAA3 F3XHAX9FK3E6

<comment><USER2> Not too bad but some of the settings aren't sticking. I.e. setting "Open Full Site Automatically" isn't setting at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, added to bug list.</comment></comment></comment>


How the Trump Campaign Built an Identity Database and Used Facebook Ads to Win - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-the-trump-campaign-built-an-identity-database-and-used-facebook-ads-to-win-the-election-4ff7d24269ac#.u4717rfe2 <comment><AUTHOR> This story is especially interesting because of what the major narrative was during the election:

[http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-scorning-of- data-...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-scorning-of-data-may-not- hurt-him-but-itll-hurt-the-gop/)

Trump essentially bluffed people on the strength of his digital marketing game.</comment>


Schizophrenia in America and early intervention treatment - <AUTHOR> http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/stop-the-madness/ <comment> anti-shill schizophrenia has much better outcomes in developing nations than in the USA. In developing nations, the patients are not fed a regimen of powerful drugs that may calm symptoms but that have serious negative effects over the long term.

The love of a strong family is what helps schizophrenics. That is not something america has to offer much anymore....america is about money, not people, and prescribing drugs when there is an insurance plan is what happens in america...and when there is no insurance, there is the freeway overpass and then prison.</comment>


Fearless concurrency in your microcontroller - <AUTHOR> http://blog.japaric.io/fearless-concurrency/ <comment><USER2> I really hope rust gains a foothold in the embedded market. We need these features badly. As uCs get more powerful (you can get 200mhz chips for a few dollars) with more RAM and complicated networked peripherals, it's a no- brainer to have these features available in a safe way. Currently if you have an application relying on dynamic memory usage, for instance, most developers will write their own simple memory management, usually in which you have an array that various things hold pointers to and get's freed all at once. All that just to spread some memory around, and concurrency is an even dirtier word than the heap...

<comment><USER3> Otoh controllers cost almost nothing, so you can get safe concurrency just by duplicating the CPU.

<comment><USER2> You're not wrong, but this is sort of like saying that CPU's cost nothing, so just replace your i5 with 4 celerons. Distributed programming is even harder than multi-threaded programming if you need tightly coupled communication. Imagine you need to read an ADC (think oscilloscope output if you're not familiar) at 1MB/s and also need to be analyzing the data while talking to other devices on various peripherals about what you've found. You'll have to use Direct Memory Access most likely so communicating that data stream over SPI to another microcontroller might not be the best idea unless you have a lot of extra RAM to buffer everything in.

Edit: and the real reason you don't want to do this is because the EEs and manufacturing engineers on your project will try to kill you. Two uCs means two codebases and two devices to program during production, plus extra testing, more complicated design, and more parts to place (uC, crystal, caps, etc)

<comment><USER4> All problems disappear with enough speed. Eventually the main loop is fast enough that you can poll.

If you're doing something truly cutting edge your competitors aren't better than you are so you can afford that second uC and more parts.

Most of engineering judgment is finding the point where the goal is ambitious enough to keep up with or pass the competition while conservative enough that it'll likely work, or at least you won't get sued.

<comment><USER2> In abstract this is true, but in real life, you get presented with a microcontroller and are told to make X happen in Y time. The current trend is where microcontrollers are becoming fast enough to essentially be bare-bones computers. Maybe they're so fast that you can poll a dozen sensors fast enough to respond to an event, but now clients want you need to drive a graphic display with all the system performance stats in real time and stream cat videos via UDP to it whenever the user gets bored.

Being able to squeeze the full potential out of these devices is getting harder and harder with current methods. Safe concurrency and memory management can allow developers to fully utilize their hardware without needing a grey beard to write some unreadable assembly that you later find out was just a plagiarized version of the Windows ME memory manager.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Amazing writeup. Note the previous submission here as well: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14225614](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14225614)

Rust actually gives me some hope that we might see better low-level code portability between some of these microcontrollers.

In theory I could develop a project on a beefy TI microcontroller using higher-level Rust primitives/libraries and port it over to the cheapest microcontroller I can find that still fits my I/O budget/speed/memory/timer constraints. All that without having to use a RTOS or having to drastically re-write interrupt/timer code to whatever system the new controller uses.

Does Rust support Atmel AVR through LLVM yet?

<comment><USER6> > Does Rust support Atmel AVR through LLVM yet?

See [http://dylanmckay.io/blog/rust/avr/llvm/2017/02/09/safer- mic...](http://dylanmckay.io/blog/rust/avr/llvm/2017/02/09/safer- microcontrollers-almost-here.html) for an overview; 4.0 has been merged, but see [https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues/37609#issuecomment-...](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues/37609#issuecomment-297031521)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's a very nice use of Rust's safety. This tasking model is a common way to write programs for very small machines, but with this, it's safe. People have a very hard time getting all that priority-level adjustment right.

It's not concurrency, though. It's asynchrony. Two things never happen at at the same time.

Modula I for the PDP-11 did do all this in 1979. In addition, it computed the worst-case stack for each task, so you were sure you couldn't run out of memory if enough preemption occurred. Today this is mostly an issue on very low-end machines, but this code is for machines like very low end ARM processors, where you might run out of stack. Some test fixture to force worst case stack use, with all the priorities stacked up, would be useful.

<comment><USER8> "Its not concurrency". I would argue that. Its not parallelism (at least not in the current state, but the RTFM-core language that originated this work offers true parallelism, implemented onto of Windows Threads, and Pthreads (Linux/OSX). On multicores, deadlock freeness is not guaranteed, but the rtfd- compiler detects potential deadlocks at compile time for the implementer to fix (so no spurious deadlocks from a system passing compilation). As the multicore implementation is being based on threads, response time analysis for such systems are basically out the window... (Also such multicore systems are very hard to predict, due to cashes, etc...) /Per

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice article. Some good insights, as well as beginner how-to steps.

The embedded industry has proven to be very resistant to innovations and modern code-writing practices. Some platforms I coded for didn't even support/allow C99 standard. C++ is gaining some foothold (mbed, for example). Developers don't feel the urge to catch on with times, like in other industries. And yet, now they are expected to write secure IoT systems.

Hopefully Rust can demonstrate its worth and convert key industry specialists who would blog about it. Personally, I'm still waiting for perfect opportunity to apply it on medium-sized project before I fully commit (secretly I'm still rooting for Nim).

<comment><USER10> It was my understanding that C++ was being abandoned in the embedded world in favor of C due to the failure of UML. See for example, the intro of this (possibly outdated) article: [http://embeddedgurus.com/state- space/2008/01/object-based-pr...](http://embeddedgurus.com/state- space/2008/01/object-based-programming-in-c/)

Is this changing now?

<comment><USER11> I don't think that article is particularly outdated. The subsequent development of and cost drops for ARM Cortex-M processors has changed the scene a bit - but they had ARM V7 TDMI units then which were comparable.

But at no time has UML tooling been the driving factor behind the industry's adoption or lack of adoption of a language.

The problem with C++ and other high-level languages has always been that it's hard to see how much a line of code costs. Incrementing a pointer to an array in C has a transparent, short runtime, compared to moving to the next element in a C++ collection which may accidentally invoke a dizzying indecipherable mess of template objects, overloaded operators, and STL dependencies. Or in other languages, you may need a large operating system and runtime to be loaded.

High level languages do handy magic things for you under the hood. If your engine bay is measured in terabytes of storage, gigabytes of RAM, gigaflops of computational power, hundreds of watts of electrical power, and seconds of acceptable interaction time, those magic things that let programmers build useful features faster are nice.

But when you're trying to get guaranteed responses in microseconds from milliwatts of electrical power in a few kilobytes of RAM, you're likely going to be hand-picking everything under the hood. No magic allowed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The RTFM language was created ... to develop real time systems for which > FreeRTOS didn't fit the bill.

I'm curious how they determined FreeRTOS wasn't appropriate for their use cases?

<comment><USER8> Hi There. A number of factors. 1) FreeRTOS is ineffective, in many cases you have to code around the kernel to get sufficiently good response times. 2) FreeRTOS does not offer any means to schedulability analysis, as the internal overhead is very hard to predict and data dependent (and lacks proper characterisation). 3) The threading model as such is not particularly suited to concurrent programming (RTFM is event driven, reflecting the reactive nature of the hardware as well as the application). 4) Thread based programming is hard to get right, see e.g., [https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-...](https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-1.pdf)). 5) Regarding FreeRTOS, the current license disallows to make comparisons with FreeRTOS without their permission, how about that for starters!!! /Per

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Neat to see given I submitted RTFM-core recently:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14294408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14294408)

So, the author learned from it, ported it to a safer language, and release the results. Although Ada/SPARK Ravenscar did embedded concurrency, the author certainly builds on modern methods for achieving similar (possibly better) results in Internet of Things. Good work. :)

<comment><USER8> Thanks! RTFM-core embeds C code, and is as such not particularly safe. However, as an experiment an object (component like) abstraction RTFM-cOOre was drafted (along with a prototype implementation). The cOOre language "could" be safe (just using rtfm-core/C as an intermediate representation). But developing and "selling" a new language requires huge amount effort and resources. Many of the sought features for the cOOre language are already in place with Rust (just that the concurrency model was not there). So that is where it all started, RTFM for Rust, is at present just a subset of the rtfm- core language, but extensions towards timing semantics and object orientation are already in the making. Disclaimer: Myself being fairly new to Rust, so all the Rust type system wizardry is due Mr. Japaric. /Per

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> (That font! My eyes! Small grey thin sans-serif body text means you hate your readers' eyes.)</comment>


Bored? Goby helps you find things to do - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-10359329-248.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

<comment><USER2> Maybe I'm missing something: Why does the "Goby" link actually take you to Bing?

The Graphic links to Goby, but it seems USA only.</comment>


Ask HN: How's the Self Driving Uber Test in Pittsburgh going? - <AUTHOR> Curious <comment><USER2> I've seen what looked like one cruising around Oakland. I was very tempted to flip them the bird because I'm just a bad person and kind of disgusted by certain aspects of uber, but I just stood there and gawked. There were lots of sensors/cameras on the car and I didn't want them to use facial recognition to greyball me in the future.

edit: can you imagine down the line, the wealth of data self driving cars will collect? They could be subsidized/integrated with palantir, so a city or some company will own a suite of cars and sell that data to 3rd parties. Police departments will pay big money to get city data out of self driving busses/etc so they can have better surveillance.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have no inside information, but I've bicycled past them on occasion and felt comfortable enough. Lots of friends posting about riding in them and the experience seems to have been positive for them as well. There are so many around that it no longer registers as something surprising to see one.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like their self-driving car tests are going great:

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-tech-crash- idUSKBN16W...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-tech-crash- idUSKBN16W0UZ)</comment>


Analysis of compensation, level, and experience details of 19k tech workers - <AUTHOR> https://huyenchip.com/2020/01/18/tech-workers-19k-compensation-details.html <comment> compiler-guy This is terrific work, but the early claim that, "As far as I know, this is the largest data on compensation and level details of tech workers." makes me wonder if he isn't aware of the other data sets, or wrote imprecisely.

There are extremely detailed and very large sets of this sort of data available if you are willing to spend large amounts of money and sign big nondisclosure agreements. All the biggest companies share into these sets and know what everyone is paying everyone else.

So the companies don't have an advantage just because they negotiate with many people themselves. They know because they get industry reports about what everyone else is doing.

This doesn't change anything about his points. If anything, it makes them stronger. But better data absolutely is out there.

<comment><USER2> This seems like a great argument in favour of unionizing in order to level the playing field a bit.

If companies cooperate in this way even when they might otherwise be competitors, then so should workers.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it would work to be honest; going by Dutch unions, they will make it so that everyone working in industry X will get the same compensation (or, compensation tiers based on e.g. experience and position). This won't work in the US because the same job will pay $200K in SF versus $50K elsewhere. The people in SF won't want to give up their cushy wage and conditions so that someone in a less fortunate area can earn more.

<comment><USER4> This is why German unions often negotiate for different geographic areas independently. This way, different costs of living are factored in.

<comment><USER5> But the Netherlands is actually one big city so this wouldn't make much sense. The Netherland is as economically independent from Germany as Hong Kong is from China.

<comment><USER4> My point was merely that there are models for solutions for the problems the parent post saw for the USA. I did not want to claim that this works for the Netherlands, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Tech favors the young. For people with more than 15 years of experience, > there's practically no correlation between years of experience and income > (corr < 0). After 15 years of experience, you either retire, switch to > management, or change career.

I've never quite understood the dynamics of this. Do people mostly self select? Is there organizational pressure to do this? Is the constant rate of change in terms of technology too exhausting for people to keep up (More senior engineers are def capable!)? In my experience I've seen a it of all of these, but honestly not enough examples to see clear patterns (...precisely because I've only worked with people in their 20s and 30s).

<comment><USER7> Mostly self selection. This data is -extremely- off. Who is most likely worried about their salary, or most likely to search about it and compare?

If I had to guess, the median salary for a software engineer in the USA is about 100k. For 15 years experience, probably about 150k. Yes, you might make 200k in the valley sharing an apartment, but for every one of those are three in Salt Lake City, Denver, Dallas, etc who are content with much less.

Most software engineers in the US don't take this survey. The ones who do have something to prove.

<comment><USER8> It's frankly crazy that software people make only 100K.

Yes, I know the industry is huge, and has many different areas and levels of difficulty, and required skill. But it's nuts that people don't bat an eye paying even a mediocre lawyer $200 or $300/hr (my dumb-ass condo lawyer charges $365/hr) and somehow software engineers, who have to do crazy feats of applied math, manage absurd levels of complexity, deal with ridiculous deadlines, and work on increasingly critical pieces of the global economy, work for the equivalent of $50-60/hr.

This can't go on, it seems only natural that pay is going to keep going up, especially when people realize how hard and complicated this stuff is, and how much demand for it there is, in terms of how much power and competitiveness it gives businesses, and how relatively few people can really do it at even a passable level.

My property manager quoted me $90/hr to change a lightbulb. My jaw almost hit the floor.

<comment><USER9> > t's nuts that people don't bat an eye paying even a mediocre lawyer $200 or > $300/hr (my dumb-ass condo lawyer charges $365/hr) and somehow software > engineers, who have to do crazy feats of applied math, manage absurd levels > of complexity, deal with ridiculous deadlines, and work on increasingly > critical pieces of the global economy, work for the equivalent of $50-60/hr.

This isn't mysterious: the legal profession is controlled by a corrupt guild engaged in regulatory capture, while engineering is more or less an entirely free labor market.

<comment><USER8> Completely agree.

Just not sure what the endgame is. Attorneys and many other professionals are REALLY entrenched. They're kind of in the sweet spot of, enough money to be influential (unlike most traditional trade unions), enough members to have national lobbying clout, but not big enough to be considered "big and bad".

It's the same deal with realtors, doctors, attorneys, architects, CPAs, and other jobs considered "upper middle class".

I just can't help but think something has to give with these kinds of work over the next 20 or so years. If companies like Uber can figure out a way to break another massively corrupt guild (taxis and medallions), there have to be ways to route around many of these professions decidedly customer-hostile behaviors.

<comment><USER10> >Just not sure what the endgame is

Automation? Presumably most of the non-ambiguous parts of the legal system could eventually be translated into computer programs. If smart contracts ever really took off this might happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Indeed surveyed 1,000 women in the field and found that the main reasons > women leave tech are: advancement opportunities, wage disparity, and work- > life balance.

I wonder if they leave because of a _perceived_ wage disparity/lack of advancement opportunity. Actually, everyone should be wondering that and we should try to get hard evidence. This report suggest that there isn't much of a disparity, and it's generally very hard for anyone to get to very high levels. If we had good statistical evidence that women aren't discriminated against when it comes to promotions and compensation, then more would likely stay. If we had evidence that they were, well, then we could do more.

I do have less sympathy for women who have an opportunity to work in tech than for women working as waitresses, or as social workers, or maid.s Women leaving tech are doing so probably because they can afford to. But most women out there aren't that lucky. What I'd like to see is the government doing more to make it possible for all working women with families to better balance their lives. Probably the best thing they can do is extend the school day and school year and provide stipends for child care. Mandating that more women get board seats isn't going to help the single mother working at the grocery store cashier very much.

<comment><USER12> I really don't understand how wage disparity can be given as a reason in the current market, assuming that you're a software engineer. If you don't like how much you make, go find a new employer. I know it's not that simple, but it's doable. Just quitting your career altogether doesn't make any sense, unless you never enjoyed it to begin with.

>If we had good statistical evidence that women aren't discriminated against when it comes to promotions and compensation, then more would likely stay.

I live in SF, and I "only" make $150k a year. All of my friends in the city make at least double what I do thanks to RSUs. Some make three times as much. Three of them are women (!!!!). I've accepted that I'm probably never going to get into a company that pays that well, and that's fine.

I still have a very comfortable life. I'll probably wash out if there's another downturn, but I'll have saved up enough money to comfortably start over and do something else.

The idea of quitting because I earn significantly less than other people with the same years of experience (or less) is insane. I can admit that they're better engineers than me. That's why they get the big bucks.

<comment><USER13> > I live in SF, and I "only" make $150k a year. All of my friends in the city > make at least double what I do thanks to RSUs. Some make three times as > much. Three of them are women (!!!!). I've accepted that I'm probably never > going to get into a company that pays that well, and that's fine.

This isn't statistical evidence, this is an anecdote about you and your friend circle.

<comment><USER12> You completely misinterpreted that part of my post. I'm not going to quit tech just because I know that I make significantly less than other people. It doesn't even make sense as a reason for me to quit.

I don't even understand how you could have seen that as an attempted refutation of statistical evidence, as opposed to my actual point, which is that I'm not going to quit tech because I know that I make way less than other people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The sample seems skewed towards expensive cities and high-paying companies. I realize that FAAAM are big companies, but I find it hard to believe that they make up for as much as 40% of the tech workforce. The same goes for those cities.

</comment><comment><USER15> > "After 15 years of experience, you either retire, switch to management, or > change career. I hope that this analysis can guide people in making > important career decisions"

What do I need to make out of this sentence? I am 5 years in my dev career, 33 years old currently. I don't want to go into management if possible.

<comment><USER16> I'm almost 10 years older and still doing well as a non-manager. Have colleagues 10-20 years older than me too in the same boat. Don't worry too much about it and do what you enjoy. You will probably have to deal with people a bit more, and every day life is less about coding and more about meetings and strategic plans.

<comment><USER17> For me, it's not about doing well. I know I'm doing well making over 3x the US median family income, even if that means I'm paying approximately the US median individual wage per year in rent. It's about how I was chronically underemployed for several years before I broke into the tech industry, to the extent that my ability to retire at a normal age is in question.

I would like to know what the rate of increase of pay vs years of experience is for both SWEs and engineering management. I'm a senior engineer right now, and, the next level is probably about 3 or 4 years away if things go as expected. Am I doing my bank account a disservice by not switching to management now?

My impression is that it's probably far easier to make the jump from M1 to M2, possibly even to M3, in those 3 years than it is from senior engineer to staff engineer. At some point, my career level will plateau, no matter what I do, but I want to find the place that leaves me with the most money at age 67 (full retirement age in the US).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This seems a bit off. With 20 years experience I was getting 120k in San Francisco in 2015. This is for an expert C, C++, ObjC/Swift, Python, Java, LUA engineer who has worked the whole stack and shipped many products of all sizes.

Eventually I left the city entirely because it was too damn expensive.

<comment><USER8> You don't seem to be too bothered by this. I've had wild swings in pay myself, worked places big and small. Maybe saying this to others in the thread: there's more to life than how much money you make.

I agree SF is getting way too expensive, it seems you either work FAANG or get out. At least, that's how it feels, and I think the city is worse for it, with every passing day.

I think it's also important to think about where you were working. See my other comments in this discussion; I don't think it's accurate to say "underpaid", "underused" maybe, but not "underpaid".

<comment><USER18> Actually it does bother me, because it means that employers have been lying to me when they said that this is normal. And if they lie about that, it means that they are deceptive and untrustworthy.

I'm autistic, so this is an area I have trouble in.

<comment><USER19> The incentive is huge to not tell you the whole truth, like "this salary is normal _but for this company_ ".

To give an example: I spent almost two years making a hilarious $13k annually in Poland(where I'm from) while my employer was charging our US customers standard rates, so multiples of that.

When I switched jobs in 2015, my salary went up 2.5x.

This whole time I was making 40% of the market rate and nobody bothered to tell me.

<comment><USER20> > this salary is normal but for this company

My HR guy was open about it. Our company and others were in a data sharing collective. You pick a title, a region, and experience level and it shows stats on thousands of other companies. By the time you drill down, maybe a dozen companies match.

He showed me that for a senior software developer in Orange County at the time (around 5 years ago?), the data showed that I was being paid above median at $120k/yr (pretty sure that was my rate at the time). The problem? I had an offer on hand for $150k. The HR guy was locked with, "yeah, but the data here shows you are already paid above what we should." The CEO helped us meet in the middle. Good choice for me to stay. Base salary is now way higher than what we were talking about then, plus the company went public and I got a start up lotto ticket.

Anyway, yes. The company has a limited vision too of what your salary should be, even when they have more data available to them. The only way to see your market rate is to check the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> These numbers are close to double that of Europe. Only self employed consultants get near the bottom edge of those incomes.

<comment><USER22> Salaries in the US are pre-payroll taxes, post in EU. Also not included in US salaries: daycare, healthcare, college savings.

Is see this trope all the time, but it's an illusion. Compare apples to apples.

Edit: Payroll tax != income tax. Most people aren't even aware the employer is paying this. It's the light blue bar in the chart in this article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax)

<comment><USER23> No, these are double or more than pre-tax London salaries. I'm not sure about continetal Europe, but the convention in the UK is to report pre-tax salaries.

Healthcare is complicated. Most cushy tech jobs in the US come with the premiums included. But in the US there is always a significant risk of large and unpredictable medical expenses. (Especially when you consider that there's no guarantee that you'll keep your job!) That one is difficult to put figures on.

I don't personally care about daycare and college savings as I'm not planning to have kids.

<comment><USER24> Employer's NI is 13.8%, so multiply a normal 'pre-tax' salary by 1.16. Then again, the Americans are presumably getting health insurance so it'd be a wash.

I have a sense that Americans are just better at negotiating (taught to do it, and actually do it) than Brits. Anecdotally I know a whole bunch of people who could be earning a lot more (not only in software), but they have this sort of meekness that leads them to believe whatever number the other party says is what they have to take.

Individually that may not make up all of the difference, but collectively it probably does (e.g. the market depressing effect if most people don't bother).

<comment><USER23> >so multiply a normal 'pre-tax' salary by 1.16

I don't follow the logic of this. The amount of your quoted salary that you get to keep (for a typical SE salary) is going to be somewhat higher in the US than in the UK. (Not massively higher - Americans often inaccurately apply the stereotype of high tax Europe to the UK.) Whether the deductions are for employee or employer taxes is moot from a financial point of view.

<comment><USER24> If someone says "I earn 50K" in the UK then they mean that's their salary after employer NI but before income tax and employee NI. The cost to the employer (in straight cash terms, not including related stuff like a desk, computer, etc etc) is more than that figure.

It's not fully pre-tax, but we call it pre-tax, just pointing that out.

<comment><USER23> Ok, but that doesn't seem to have anything to do with US/UK pay disparities. US pay also doesn't include all the taxes and other expenses being paid by the employer in relation the the employee. E.g., the employer's portion of the health insurance premiums won't be included.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Tech favors the young. For people with more than 15 years of experience, > there's practically no correlation between years of experience and income > (corr < 0). After 15 years of experience, you either retire, switch to > management, or change career.

Does the evidence indicate they "retire, switch to management, or change career"? The evidence doesn't seem to contradict the idea that they stay in their same jobs being paid the same amount as someone with 15 years of experience.

</comment><comment><USER26> As a for a person living in Central Europe, it's somewhat depressing to see these numbers.

<comment><USER27> As a person in Eastern Europe I also kind of envy this but then I remember that the cost of living here is way lower and I am leading pretty good life with the money that I make so it ain't that bad. It is better to just enjoy life instead of being constantly worried if you make enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Referenced [https://www.levels.fyi](https://www.levels.fyi) is very interesting. Some values are hugely different for comparable levels in different companies.

</comment><comment><USER29> That quote about 15 years being the end is bunk. Lots of people are individual contributors for decades, many after trying management and deciding it wasn't for them.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is significantly off for at least Amazon/AWS & MSFT. I know Amazon employees often get AMZN shares as bonuses ranging from single to triple digits.

Current AMZN share is at 1864.72USD. It is not unheard of for an L4 to get 5 to 10 shares as bonus. I have heard of L6 getting 150 shares. That is significant.

</comment><comment><USER31> Self-reporting can always lead to bias.

In fact, if the goal of sites like levels / glassdoor / etc. is to make salaries more transparent, wouldn't it be a decent strategy for everyone to just pump up their numbers, when reporting?

</comment><comment><USER32> Section 2.2 "As level increases, the percentage of female software engineers decreases" is something that has always worried me. With daughters who seem technical, what career advice am I supposed to give them? Who are they supposed to go to for better career advice? Etc.

This story "An alternative argument for why women leave STEM" discusses a work-life-balance which, I guess, could apply beyond academia to tech workplaces? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22077603](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22077603)

</comment><comment><USER33> 25 years in RF hardware design. I think I'll now just go shoot myself.

</comment><comment><USER34> > I'd also like to restate the disclaimer: just because there's no evidence in > the data to support something, doesn't mean that something doesn't exist.

Huyen, this applies to other hypotheses as well. Work life balance and life goals by the early 30s can be just as substantial of a factor than assertiveness in offer negotiation.</comment>


End-of-Life Announcement for CoreOS Container Linux - <AUTHOR> https://coreos.com/os/eol/ <comment><USER2> Fedora CoreOS seems like it has some pretty significant restrictions

> It does not yet include native support for Azure, DigitalOcean, GCE, > Vagrant, or the Container Linux community-supported platforms.

> The rkt container runtime is not included.

> Fedora CoreOS provides best-effort stability, and may occasionally include > regressions or breaking changes for some use cases or workloads.

<comment><USER3> This is the Red Hat "stay in business" business model, not the CoreOS "make it up in volume" business model.

<comment><USER4> How is breaking compat good for business?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yet another instance of RedHat buying something I used/liked and killing it off and offering a shitty alternative. And yet another reason I've tried to avoid giving RedHat money over the last 20+ years.

<comment><USER6> I'm especially sad since I finished porting some of our Docker infrastructure to CoreOS _today_. I guess I missed the proverbial writing on the wall.

Thank god Flatcar Linux looks to be a viable alternative and easy changeover.

<comment><USER7> How did you miss the announcement back in July? [https://fedoramagazine.org/introducing-fedora- coreos/](https://fedoramagazine.org/introducing-fedora-coreos/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> well, good thing there is [https://www.flatcar- linux.org/](https://www.flatcar-linux.org/)

<comment><USER9> > In fact, if CoreOS Container Linux disappeared tomorrow, it would have very > little impact on the Flatcar Container Linux project.

Well we will learn how true this is very shortly.

<comment><USER10> Chris from Kinvolk here. Our Flatcar builds are already completely independent of CoreOS builds. This is quite exciting for us as we can finally start updating the included software versions. We've been doing this a while for the edge channel ([https://www.flatcar-linux.org/releases/](https://www.flatcar- linux.org/releases/)) and have been waiting to do that with the other channels.

<comment><USER11> it would be cool if [https://github.com/coreos/container-linux-update- operator](https://github.com/coreos/container-linux-update-operator) would also be part of flatcar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting that they are yanking AMIs on 1st Sep.

> New CoreOS Container Linux machines will not be launchable in public clouds > without prior preparation.

Are people here moving to FlatCar or Fedore CoreOS?

<comment><USER13> FlatCar. I'm using coreos-cloudinit for configuration, and that seems to be deprecated with no proper replacement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Fedora CoreOS. Oh my. I din't even know Fedora Core is not the full name of the ordinary Fedora OS any more...

<comment><USER15> 12 years have passed. Glad that you woke up.

<comment><USER14> I still don't feel like Fedora CoreOS is a good name choice for a new OS distinct from what used to be named Fedora Core. Perhaps they could name it after another kind of hat or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What about RancherOS? Is that a viable replacement?

<comment><USER17> I'm surprised more people aren't mentioning RancherOS. It's a great "Docker Only" OS, like many of the other options mentioned. It doesn't have the market that CoreOS did, that's for sure, but still a great tool. It's tiny and being actively updated.

Plus it's got good RPi support for all those serious Big Software Company deployments /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can someone recommend an immutable Linux distro, which offers auto-updates out-of-the-box and supports arm64 on RPi?

Have been searching for something like this for a while for a personal project, but unfortunately neither Flatcar nor Fedora CoreOS seem to support arm64, RancherOS does not to seem to offer fully automatic updates.

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "immutable" but you might find NixOS ([https://nixos.org/](https://nixos.org/)) interesting. However, it might not be the best experience at the moment for the Raspberry Pi 4 ([https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/63720](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/63720)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I mean this makes sense, right? Fedora Silverblue exists. Or are they totally separate products?

<comment><USER21> Silverblue is an effort to bring this technology to the desktop AFAICT. Fedora Atomic Server uses some of the technology for server workloads, but maintains some traditional structure and architecture.

CoreOS is intended to be a "new" architecture for servers if I am not mistaken. I may be :-)

<comment><USER22> CoreOS was built using Gentoo / ChromeOS / Chromium OS family. There is a minimum set of services to run containers. Rootfs is read-only. Updates are done atomically by updating the standby rootfs, and the swapped at boot.

There is no package manager. You bring everything else with images and containers. If tools are not found on the distro, you have to get them yourself by starting up an image that contains those tools.

The build system that builds a new release is Gentoo. All the packages that are there gets updated, though the final release does not contain emerge or anything that actually can compile or build anything.

After CoreOS got bought out by Redhat, they started porting over those ideas using the Fedora build system (so Redhat packages, yum, etc).

I think the CoreOS Container OS will live on inside GCP as the customized container os as the default distro used on GKE (managed Kubernetes).

Edit: I see someone mention FlatCar. Neat. I guess that is more of a successor project than the one used in GKE.

<comment><USER23> >"I think the CoreOS Container OS will live on inside GCP as the customized container os as the default distro used on GKE (managed Kubernetes)."

I found this interesting. Does anyone have any insights how or why Google ended up choosing CoreoS for their GKE offering?

<comment><USER24> Historically CoreOS was the first OS you could easily PXE boot and have a working container host without performing installation. This was supported not as a secondary thought, but specifically designed to make scale out easier.

A lot of these concepts and benefits apply when you consider cloud images as opposed to PXE boot images. With CoreOS, there was little difference in configuration with these two patters, if the infrastructure had the same topology you could essentially use the same config (VM or Baremetal).

Google Ventures also invested money in CoreOS at one point.

<comment><USER23> Thanks for the insight. I was wondering what the two patterns are exactly that you referred to here:

>"With CoreOS, there was little difference in configuration with these two patters, if the infrastructure had the same topology you could essentially use the same config (VM or Baremetal)"

Also are re "cloud images" VMs then, similar to AMIs in AWS?

Cheers

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What did CoreOS offer that say ClearLinux, or good ol' Debian do not?

It seems like the only difference is you've gottta `packagemanger_xyz install` a couple packages...?

<comment><USER7> My team at a Very Large Software Company runs CoreOS for two main reasons:

1\. Reduced attack surface due to a very slim OS with no package manager.

2\. CoreOS Ignition, a killer app OS provisioning/customization tool. No weird barely-documented kickstart scripts, and no long build and upload times for OS images. We can make changes/customizations to our OS and have them deployed in a cloud within literally minutes. We consider this a competitive advantage.

<comment><USER26> I think kickstart is quite well documented, both upstream and in RHEL:

[https://pykickstart.readthedocs.io/en/latest/https://access....](https://pykickstart.readthedocs.io/en/latest/https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en- us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/installation_guide/sect-kickstart-syntax)

Any concrete examples of stuff the existing docs do not cover ?

<comment><USER7> I've maintained both kickstart and ignition professionally. The documentation and readability of Ignition is absolutely way better than kickstart.

A simple example would be downloading a binary file and checking it's hash during boot, with retries if the connection is flaky. Three lines of declarative state in Ignition vs complex scripting in kickstart.

<comment><USER26> Ideally one uses mainly kickstart commands to configure the system during the installation - then the installer (Anaconda) takes care for everything for you. If you use custom scripts with kickstart, you are pretty much on your own, like with any other custom script.

BTW, maybe open an RFE to include a helper script in the installation environment for easy & robust file downloading ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> stuff that is happening with CoreOS is a complete NIH show. it's really akward what they are doing.</comment>


"You Don't Understand Ordinary People" - Feynman Gives Advice to Wolfram - <AUTHOR> http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/06/you-dont-understand-ordinary-people.html <comment><USER2> Wolfram is damn smart. I'll give him that.

He also made a pile of money on Mathematica. I'll give him that as well. It was classic "solve your own problem" entrepreneurship. He needed a better computer algebra program, so he wrote one, then started selling it.[1]

But he's a crank. He wrote a couple good papers in the 80s, then hasn't done anything decent since. He published A New Kind Of Science in 2002, which was supposed to change the world; except that half of it was nonsense and the other half was stolen from other people. (<http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/>)

Feynnman (kinda) calls him out on this: Complexity research doesn't need its own institute, because complexity research is a pseudoscience that means whatever you want it to mean, like how the homepathy quacks have latched on to the word "quantum".

1: Wolfram Alpha is the same thing. Wolfram wanted a natural language parser, so he wrote one. Except it doesn't work worth a damn, because natural language parsing is a hideously difficult problem, which probably requires strong AI.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link to Cosma Shalizi's review of A New Kind of Science; I greatly enjoyed it. I'm also quite fond of this Amazon review:

<http://www.amazon.com/review/R6B8KO2M32P8G>

<comment><USER4> One thing to keep in mind is that probably all the bashing of "A New Kind of Science" has more to do with the perception of Wolfram being arrogant or self- centered than with actual merits (or lack of them) of the book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My favorite Wolfram "dig" went something along the lines of: "The question is who will become self aware first: Wolfram or Wolfram Alpha.", eluding to the fact that apparently he is pretty impressed with himself and happy to share it. Can't remember who said it though. Anyway, this post just made me remember it.

</comment><comment><USER6> The bit I particularly like is the fact that Feynman was also one of the great minds who _did_ understand ordinary people.

I regularly dig out his lectures on pop-physics for a refresher :D

<comment><USER7> Exactly....I swear Feynman could have encountered the proverbial pig farmer and talked for several hours and left, and if someone told the farmer who they were talking to later, they wouldn't believe them, they'd just say he was an extremely interesting guy. He could find interesting things about almost any subject, and get everyone excited about them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Classic Feynman: "with one exception, fall madly in love!"

<comment><USER9> Someone once said that madness was necessary for creating. Does anybody know who it was? Can't find it.

<comment><USER10> It's interesting because Wolfram quotes Feynman as saying:

"Peace of mind is the most important prerequisite for creative work."

<http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/recent/feynman/>

<comment><USER11> Peace of mind can just as easily be interpreted as "comfort within one's madness."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That was a priceless post. Turns out Feynman was wrong on one thing though. Wolfram does like being the boss. Possibly very much.

<comment><USER13> Wolfram learned to like it in the process..

<comment><USER14> Citation, please.

<comment><USER15> The impression I got from this talk: [http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/recent/ycombinato...](http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/recent/ycombinatorschool/) is that he became a businessman reluctantly.

<comment><USER12> I don't read reluctance into those comments at all. Just look at the comments on personnel management. It's clear he likes it. The early remarks about the "stupid decisions" being made at the first company are a clear sign. Most business leaders know it's culturally not cool to talk like they enjoy leadership. To me, Wolfram went to the _enfant terrible_ school of management. At least he turned out to be competent enough to last.

<comment><USER16> you make it sound like a good thing.

<comment><USER12> Which thing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you haven't read any of Richard Feynman's books, I highly recommend them. They're not only fascinating, but with a wonderful sense of humor, as well. I particularly love the chapter in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" about his safecracking exploits. Not only did it show his physical skills and dexterity, but his ability to do social engineering, as well. Great stuff.

In "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" he talks a lot about the investigation into the Challenger explosion. Amazing writing on such a serious topic, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER18> Feynman is one of my few heroes. This is an interesting situation. Feynman was right and Wolfram did what he wanted and was successful. Perhaps by taking Feynman's advice to heart. Who knows?

<comment><USER19> The advice was good; however, you can take a path that is not sensible yet succeed by sheer willpower, huge amounts of luck or to a lesser extent great ability.

Advice like this is intended to maximize the probability of success. To put it into a HN familiar example, don't be a single founder because single founders are x% less likely to succeed. The fact that single founders can and do succeed all the time does not make the advice bad, it just shows it to be the generalization that it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd like to see a transcript of the letter this was written in response to.

<comment><USER21> Here's both letters: <http://elzr.com/posts/wolfram-feynman>

<comment><USER22> "Wolfram did not follow Feynman's advice. Not only did he establish an institute but he also founded the company Wolfram Research, makers of the widely used Mathematica software system. Contrary to Feynman's expectation Wolfram has been a successful CEO for many years. Within this environment he has managed to pursue ambitious directions in basic science, particularly through his 2002 book A New Kind of Science. He has also been happily married since the early 1990s."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The NKS seminars and forums Wolfram has tried to create are exactly the sort of thing he said he wanted to do back then. They are weak institutions because they are dominated by him and his ideas; they're like a debating society in North Korea. Maybe you'll get a new angle on how awesome is the Glorious Leader, but there will be no surprises.

</comment><comment><USER24> What does the "RPF;ht" at the bottom stand for? (I vaguely recall this being an old convention of something?)

<comment><USER25> 'ht' is Helen Tuck, the secretary at Caltech's Theory Group for many years; that mark indicates she typed the letter. I was there many years after Feynman passed away, but I have fond memories of Helen and some of the stories she had to tell about the "old days".

<comment><USER26> [http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/336/articles/Volume%202/05...](http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/336/articles/Volume%202/05-16-02/tuck.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Despite ignoring Feynman's advice, Wolfram seems to have done well enough, at least financially. Whether his sanity has lasted is another question entirely.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think Feynman gave him _HIGHLY ACCURATE_ advice, but you have to dig deeper to understand.

Although Wolfram has done quite well for himself, this is beside the point.

You might want to read both sides of the conversation:

<http://elzr.com/posts/wolfram-feynman>

and then read this article:

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/wolfram_pr.html>

in particular, starting here:

"in the spring of 1992, he became, in his own words, a "recluse."

So, he figured out a way to get away from the administration and concentrate on the science.

I suspect that Feynman's advice probably helped Wolfram steer a clear course through all this.

</comment><comment><USER29> I wonder if we will ever get to read such transcripts in this age of private emails and ephemeral conversations.

<comment><USER30> For every person who has gchat set to never document anything, there's another neurotic packrat like my brother who saves all of his chat history so he can go back and show people how prior conversations went whenever there's a disagreement over what was said.

<comment><USER31> I used to do this. I have a wonderful memory for conversations I've had with people. I ended up turning off chat logging in every app I used because it just became a little too destructive to relationships.

Calling somebody out with cold hard facts works better on to-catch-a-predator than when it's people you enjoy being around :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> i thought this was in response to Wolfram Alpha.

<comment><USER33> Feynman was dead for many years before Wolfram Alpha came out. That would have been some feat to communicate with him then:)

The letter is also dated: October 14, 1985.

<comment><USER34> I think the grandparent meant for the comment to be taken in jest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> brilliant man, and one of my heroes/idols

</comment><comment><USER36> Who is the Feynman of our time?

<comment><USER37> Sorry man, I think he was a one-off from the factory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> From YC speech: "I think I had about 15 employees by then."

</comment><comment><USER39> Very cool site. <3 HN for these little gems.

</comment><comment><USER40> Richard Feynman is kind of a jerk.

Edit: What I mean is:

How condescending is it to write someone a letter saying that they don't understand people, and they should try falling in love?

<comment><USER41> _How condescending is it to write someone a letter saying that they don't understand people, and they should try falling in love?_

Under ordinary circumstances, pretty condescending. However remember that:

a) Wolfram was a 26-year-old at the start of his career and Feynman was 68 years old and easily one of the most respected scientists in the world.

b) Wolfram wrote to Feynman for advice. To get _any_ response from someone that many levels above you is doing pretty well.

c) Wolfram started it -- he was the one who talked about ordinary people being "stupid fools" whom he couldn't tolerate.</comment></comment>


Shopify vs. Magento - <AUTHOR> https://www.jeffreytalajic.com/blog/shopify-vs-magento <comment><USER2> As someone that had to deal with Magento in production, it had serious scaling issues. I noticed more than 150 SQL queries to make a single purchase, with an abundance of lock contention issues... enough that they alone will bring a SQL server to its knees.

It's great for selling one or two items per hour. If you are unfortunate enough to have a popular product, then your options with Magento may be limited. You can't easily shard a shopping cart. Once you max out at 48 cores and SSD RAID, you're stuck.

Fortunately, for us, the problem resolved itself once we turned away enough customers.

<comment><USER3> Wow. That makes me feel a lot better about all those API routes where I have to make 2 or 3 database calls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had to touch magento2 once. Never again. At a local installation, everything is so slow that developing makes zero fun. Even the official demo-shops have a pageload of about 5 seconds minimum. Not to mention what happens when you visit them via mobile.</comment>


Code sober, get things done drunk - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexmuir.com/2011/11/code-sober-get-things-done-drunk/ <comment><USER2> I have personally programmed a lot while tipsy (never drunk, I am not sure I would want to read that code in the morning) and it allows me to get over the humps of writing that utility function that needed to be written but I was putting off, it allows me to just start putting code down in vim without really worrying whether or not it is good enough...

Let me quantify good enough a little better. I am a perfectionist, I tend to write my code methodically and slowly and over-think and overanalyse every last line, I refuse to write a piece of code if I don't think it is good enough.

When I drink alcohol it takes away all of the above and lets me just write the damn code. Most of the time (there have been times that I've been closer to drunk than sober) the code works exactly as required and it passes code reviews without issues. It compiles, it works, and is the "perfect" code for the situation. Sure three months down the line it may need to be re-factored a little bit to add a new feature that was decided on by management, but in the mean time it has shipped.

Now, please don't take my example and think that you can become a better programmer by simply going out and buying a bottle of vodka. It most likely won't work. Should you give it a try? Sure, what have you got to lose? Just don't become dependant on alcohol as a way to function in everyday life. Been there done that, and it is not pleasant at all.

<comment><USER3> My experience has been really similar to yours. I also was plagued by perfectionism, reworking things endlessly when I was younger. A beer makes it go away, commit to a design decision that is not necessarily ideal because it probably doesn't have to be ideal, and move forward.

I find it helps me focus as it stops my mind from wandering off down infinite stacks over minor issues. Like caffeine though there's a certain precise narrow level where this happens and if you go over that level it doesn't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My first thought is that you're opening yourself up to litigation. I drink wine and occasionally code with a glass of wine - the easy stuff, and I only commit the next morning. However, making strategic decisions, dealing with human issues and sending external communications is a bad idea.

Someone I'm close is a former CEO and majority shareholder of business that generated 8 figure yearly revenue. His advice to me was to "never hit the send button until the next morning". I'm inclined to give you the same advice.

Alcohol lowers your inhibitions and your sensitivity to the needs and feelings of others. It's a wonderful social lubricant but it also leaves you occasionally cringing the next morning as you remember what you said. Usually there's no record of it other than fading memory. Emails are on the record, so you may be cringing for a long time if you get it wrong and it could be expensive.

<comment><USER5> You wouldn't sign an email with "Also, I'm drunk right now" but that's effectively what you've done here.

Kudos for honesty, but you've now put a time stamp that says, roughly, "I acknowledge being under the influence on Nov 27 2011, and further, this allowed me to behave differently than I normally would." Anyone you've interacted with today can go back to it. It's not just that you might be making bad decisions - you are publicly acknowledging that those decisions were made while drunk.

<comment><USER6> I think that the advice "Don't hit send until the next morning" is sound not only for post-booze emailing, but for anything done late in the day. Driving whilst overly tired (for example) is known to pose similar risks to driving under the influence of alcohol.

Although mmaunder has only mentioned holding off on emails due to drink, there are many other reasons why one might author an email one evening, but not send it in the morning (e.g. the need to check a fact with someone who has already gone to bed or is otherwise unavailable). That mmaunder was drunk is not an conclusion that can inevitably and reliably be drawn from such a timestamp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm the other way round - I try not to send emails etc when I'm drinking, because I think my social behaviour changes a lot more than my programming ability does (it's easier to write a message, but much more difficult to judge if it's the right thing to say).

I find that after a beer or two I'm much more likely to stay motivated to work on the same project, rather than procrastinating or switching to something else. Keep in mind that the line between there and being _drunk_ can be surprisingly thin.

(Homebrewing and working from home are a great combination to find yourself drinking when you shouldn't be)

</comment><comment><USER8> Sounds to me like a recipe for a bad habit.

If you have a problem doing "awkward" things like firing people, paying bills, etc, you need to figure out the root of your anxiety and deal with it.

If numbing yourself with alcohol is how you get through, you may find yourself turning to the bottle more. Alcohol isn't tea or coffee, and boorish behavior isn't a measure of whether alcohol is affecting your life.

<comment><USER9> Why does _"having difficulties firing people"_ have to have a "root cause" other than _"you think of yourself as a fairly decent guy and understand the effects getting fired has on somebody"_?

This is just pop psychology mumbo jumbo.

<comment><USER8> Having difficulty firing someone is normal -- I'm not suggesting that it should be fun. Drinking Gin to give yourself the nerve to fire someone probably isn't fine.

If you have a job to do, you need to be able to do it. If the psychic toll of doing your job requires that you hit the bottle, you probably don't belong in that job.

<comment><USER9> There is a keen difference between not being able to fire somebody while sober, and preferring to not do so. Similarly I _can_ not drink at parties, but I can do so as well, so I do.

You are mistaking responsible drinking for dependancy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, sounds like a really great idea to handle business communication while being intoxicated...

If you write 20 lines of BS code, it does not really matter. Thanks to your VCS you revert and finito. On the hand, one wrong email can haunt you, because it affects people. There is no undo.

<comment><USER11> Do you drink regularly? I don't know anyone who gets 2-3 drinks in them and becomes an entirely different person.

<comment><USER12> I'm having trouble understanding your comments. The article doesn't talk about "entirely different people", we're talking about drunk people. No matter how drunk you are, you don't become an "entirely different person", but you lose the social inhibitions that prevent you from writing the types of emails that offend customers.

And I'm not sure where 2-3 drinks comes from, either. 2-3 drinks get some people drunk, but not large people or regular drinkers. That's not really relevant, because even large people or regular drinkers start to lose those social inhibitions after 3 quick drinks even if they aren't yet 'drunk'.

<comment><USER11> I think the subtext of my comment was pretty straightforward: after 2-3 drinks, you're not going to send radically different emails to customers; you're certainly not likely to torch relationships.

If anything, over the last several years, what I've found is that _stress_ is far more likely to hurt relationships than intoxication. After a frustrating day, I'm way more likely to be clipped, snippy, abrupt, or unhelpful. _That's_ the stuff that clients and customers remember.

I drink pretty regularly and can't think of a single time that intoxication has harmed a business relationship (indeed, I routinely take clients out for beers, like most other businesspeople do --- if alcohol and "loss of inhibition" was such a force for chaos, one assumes this would be less of a time-honored tradition).

On the other hand, I can think of many times where stress has damaged relationships, sometimes permanently.

I picked 2-3 drinks out of a hat. I know the guy who wrote this post drank 4 glasses of gin before getting on a plane (I'd throw up if I did that; alcohol and air travel don't mix with me), but 2-3 seems like a pretty reasonable casual evening of answering emails.

<comment><USER12> OK then, I'll just disagree with you.

People are surprisingly easy to offend over email. I know that I've offended some when sober. Sometimes it's because I'm too terse. Sometimes it's because they're reading something between the lines that I didn't mean to say. Sometimes I phrased things poorly. Sometimes I wrote it the email in anger.

Add 2-3 drinks in the mix and I'd probably double the number of offended customers.

Taking customers out for drinks is a completely different situation. It's a lot harder to be misunderstood in face-to-face conversations, not to mention that the customer is drinking along with you.

<comment><USER13> _People are surprisingly easy to offend over email. I know that I've offended some when sober. Sometimes it's because I'm too terse. Sometimes it's because they're reading something between the lines that I didn't mean to say. Sometimes I phrased things poorly. Sometimes I wrote it the email in anger._

It sounds like beer is accentuating (not causing) a problem with email etiquette. Your point and Thomas's point are orthogonal: (1) two beers can make you terrible at things you are already bad at and (2) two beers wont make you terrible at things you aren't bad at. Because the bottom line is that people aren't easy to offend over email. I've written 1 email that has offended someone in the last 5 years and that was mostly intentional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "We Brits believe that alcohol has magical powers – that it causes us to shed our inhibitions and become aggressive, promiscuous, disorderly and even violent.

But we are wrong. In high doses, alcohol impairs our reaction times, muscle control, co-ordination, short-term memory, perceptual field, cognitive abilities and ability to speak clearly. But it does not cause us selectively to break specific social rules. It does not cause us to say, "Oi, what you lookin' at?" and start punching each other. Nor does it cause us to say, "Hey babe, fancy a shag?" and start groping each other.

The effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol. There is enormous cross- cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol. … In … the vast majority of cultures, … drinking is not associated with these undesirable behaviours … Alcohol is just a morally neutral, normal, integral part of ordinary, everyday life – about on a par with, say, coffee or tea. …

This variation cannot be attributed to different levels of consumption. … Instead the variation is clearly related to different cultural beliefs about alcohol. … This basic fact has been proved time and again … in carefully controlled scientific experiments – double-blind, placebos and all. To put it very simply, the experiments show that when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol. …

Those who most strongly believe that alcohol causes aggression are the most likely to become aggressive when they think that they have consumed alcohol. … These experiments show that even when people are very drunk, if they are given an incentive (either financial reward or even just social approval) they are perfectly capable of remaining in complete control of their behaviour – of behaving as though they were totally sober. …

If I were given total power, I could very easily engineer a nation in which coffee would become a huge social problem. … I would restrict access to coffee, thus immediately giving it highly desirable forbidden-fruit status. Then I would issue lots of dire warnings about the dangerously disinhibiting effects of coffee. I would make sure everyone knew that even a mere three cups (six "units") of coffee "can lead to anti-social, aggressive and violent behaviour", and sexual promiscuity, thus instantly giving young people a powerful motive to binge-drink double espressos, and a perfect excuse to behave very badly after doing so."

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15265317>

<comment><USER15> Although many studies have shown that people given a placebo will often behave as if drunk, this doesn't prove that the effect of alcohol is purely psychological. Although people will begin to behave as if drunk, my understanding is they will tend to behave in a manner which they would normally feel slightly inhibited from.

When someone has actually consumed alcohol they will be more likely to perform actions which there is a high (rather than medium as with the placebos) social pressure against.

I can see the coffee example working for both consciously using alcohol as an excuse for socially unacceptable behaviour and the type of results seen when placebos are given but not the more extreme responses associated with higher intakes.

Old paper but a good one is The Psychology of Drunken Excess (<http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/48/1/18/>) but afraid I don't think it's available without paying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of this XKCD, aptly titled "The Ballmer Peak": <http://xkcd.com/323/>

<comment><USER17> I have noticed a similar effect in other areas myself. On example is bowling. Sober, I am terrible, but after a few beers I rock the lane; right before I start to wobble and fail to hit even a single pin :P

<comment><USER18> I have the same problem with pool. Usually before the second pint I'm crap, 2-3 is the sweet spot, after that is downhill.

But damn, I used to be in a couple leagues and those 2 pints really put me in the zone.

<comment><USER19> Pool and bowling will both improve after a couple of beers - your muscles will relax and you'll start to throw/shoot straighter. It's all technique with these two sports.

I don't need to point out too many beers will affect your technique in an equal and opposing fashion..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I work at a startup that has an amazing office, with a full bar and eight taps for draught beer. This makes it easy to knock back a few while coding throughout the day/night. I'd dare say, that the availability of free drinks coupled with a culture that promotes drinking as a social lubricant is just about the most tempting atmosphere possible.

Surprisingly, people do not take advantage. I think some less mature people may like to brag about how much they can code whilst drunk, but it's just like any other drug: If you can do X, Y, and Z incredibly well while under the influence, odds are you'd do even beter while sober.

If you can "get shit done" while drunk b/c you're no longer afraid of the awkward situations, odds are you'd do even better at handling them sober.

We've never had an awkward situation where someone checks in epically bad code due to being sloppy-drunk that I'm aware of, but that's b/c people are largely self-policing and they realize that what you an manage to do drunk, you can dominate sober.

I don't wish to sound like a prude. We do enjoy the refreshments, but usually after-hours, or at least when doing exploratory R&D, perhaps playing with a new design. To do your best work on the most important projects at a startup, you really to to bring your "A" game.

</comment><comment><USER21> > _But I think that doing some of the shittier tasks around a startup is > easier after a few drinks._

And when you realize that the drinks are just an excuse, you will be one step closer to enlightenment.

<comment><USER11> I don't think this is a fair comment at all. Drinking definitely does alter distractibility.

<comment><USER22> I think jpdoctor has a valid point. The brain is highly suggestible. It's possible to trick yourself into feeling sad, happy, irritated, bored, excited, or any other state of mind. I could probably conjor up the kind of carefree, impulsive state that alchohol induces just by mindfully directing my thoughts for a few minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a pretty interesting article, it's sort of taboo to discuss this in engineering, whereas in business and politics the function of alcohol in getting things done is taken for granted.

Like that author, I also find it much easier and faster to deal with uncomfortable emails when drinking. I also am able to crank out dreary but needed documentation, and it's also when I generally write proposals and cover letters, things with a social component to them needed. It's very helpful and saves a lot of time, just don't go overboard.

</comment><comment><USER23> For those who didn't spot it, I assume that the title of the post is a take on the quote attributed to Hemingway, "Write drunk; edit sober."

</comment><comment><USER24> I used to say: "There's nothing wrong about coding while being drunk, just don't commit!". But now, it'd be more "There's nothing wrong about coding AND commiting while being drunk, just don't push it!"

<comment> X-Istence You can push. I do. It just goes up to the server into my personal "clone" of the actual project. The Ci server can then pick it up, run it's thing and I can see output from that and then decide whether or not I want to file a merge-request into mainline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just don't get too drunk.

A theory floating around HN a couple days ago was that a few drinks help you focus because they are a tax on your mind. It makes your mind disregard distractions (like second thoughts etc.) because otherwise it simply couldn't function.

<comment><USER26> I don't find alcohol helps me at all; it takes an edge off me for several days. I very rarely drink, almost only at special occasions and then matched wines with meals and that kind of thing.

But I do find that being somewhat tired helps me get into a certain kind of "getting things done" zone: when the creative planning is not necessary, and mostly the grunt work of pushing things through to implementation remains.

<comment><USER11> Being tired makes it easier for me to do public speaking and sales presentations. I've never locked up in the middle of a presentation when I've had a bad night's sleep beforehand. It's almost getting to be something I optimize for: set up travel so I'm as tired as possible before presenting.

<comment><USER27> Heh, yes, I can confirm this. The one time we met you said that you weren't sleeping well (since school had just started) and, as a result, were talking more than usual.

Whenever I'm low on sleep, I'm mostly just irritable and more prone to making mistakes, although once, when particularly sleep deprived, I found myself reading the back of a shampoo bottle as if it were a cooking recipe. A couple minutes in, I realized it wasn't a recipe, thought to myself something like "Snap out of it!" Not more than five minutes later and I was reading the "recipe" again.

Anyways, personally. I'm certainly neither more productive nor more talkative when sleep deprived.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If the problem is that you are too timid to get things done normally, the solution is not to get drunk. The solution is to get some balls.

<comment><USER29> yeah, really! We don't need that crap to code especially. Do you think people that do free solo or base jumping will get tipsy just to get more ballsy? no, they get over their fears and that's much more rewarding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've coded twice while buzzed and had great results. I think it may have done something to curb my ADD, which led to some serious focus and feeling of motivation- I was able to focus on problems without other distractions floating in my mind. I figured the code quality would have suffered, but that wasn't the case.

I rarely drink so I would not do this regularly, but I would like to find a less destructive way to achieve the same coding euphoria.

<comment><USER31> Maybe this is true..

people with ADD/ADHD who get lightly buzzed might have boosted their focus.

I have noticed that when I drink a single IPA beer and I can think better, write code better, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Reminds me of that scene in Citizen Kane where the reporter has to get completely passed-out drunk to write the review of Kane's starlet wife's opera.

</comment><comment><USER33> Great that it works for you... I'm usually totally off the rails after a drink - I get so relaxed that nothing can bring me back to work, I can't even talk with people... also I fall asleep short after.

Lack of sleep, on the other hand, does exactly what you describe - I don't anguish over every detail and just get stuff done (usually pretty well, too)...

</comment><comment><USER34> Well I'm drinking Absolut Vodka right now, but that's just 'cause I'm hung over. Writing code is the farthest thing from my mind right now...

Seriously though, let's start a discussion about better coding through chemistry in general. Nicotine patches? Smart/nootropic drugs? Supplements? Preferred caffeine delivery vectors? Etc. What works for you?

Anyone tried Modafinil?

<comment><USER35> I've tried Adderall, Ritalin, etc, and sometimes I'm able to concentrate on the things I need to get done, but unless I'm really careful about saying focused I end up going off on tangents and writing the most amazing but useless code for several hours.

Experimenting with crazy metaprogramming techniques, writing over-engineered utility libraries, experimenting with new technologies, writing epic blog posts, etc. That said, I've learned a lot about programming by going off on those tangents.

<comment><USER36> Yep - stimulants will give you amazing focus, but you need to make sure that focus is trained on the right thing first. It's best to take them after you're more-or-less on track, or at least committed to a plan. If you just take them while going through a "morning routine" and haven't decided what you're going to be doing, you can easily burn a day on tangents.

(As a third party, you can notice this behaviour in others if those folks are prone to calling you with all sorts of great ideas and things they're going to do today, but by the evening, they're discussing how to improve TLB cache hit ratios for their Ruby-on-Rails app.)

But if you get on track, wow, stimulants can make an amazing amount of difference. They're great for getting a large amount of work done, as well as dealing with complex problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> A general piece of advice I've found helpful is "Write code like you're going to have to fix critical bugs while drunk at 2 in the morning."

<comment><USER38> Just about the worst habit I get into is to push major new code live into production and then go out to 'celebrate'. I've fixed so many production issues on a blackberry that was ssh'ed into a server while sitting at a bar counter that I don't even want to think about it. Now I know to push code during the most boring times of the week and go out to celebrate the lack of issues another night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Just personal experience here, and you're not me so I'm sure itdoesn't apply and please feel free to ignore it, but I did this and it was great for a while. Then shit shows up and I start drinking to cope with problems I should've been facing head-on instead. At the end I had to give it up entirely. Nothing major broken in my case, thank God, but relying on the sauce to write your emails or get you on a plane reminds me of a reflex I wish I hadn't developed.

</comment><comment><USER40> _I've tried coding drunk. It was a disaster - even a couple of beers had me really struggling to produce anything worthwhile. I decided coding was like driving - you need all your faculties to work. [...] I've read things where people brag about coding drunk, and frankly I've been jealous that I couldn't do it. Or code tired, fuelled by nothing but pizza and coffee._

I'm reading Uncle Bob's latest book: "The Clean Coder". In chapter 4, "Coding", he writes about his set of rules and principles for coding (behavior, mood, and attitude while writing code). About 3 AM code, he writes:

 _The worst code I ever wrote was at 3 AM. [...] I remember feeling so good about myself for the long hours I was working. I remember feeling dedicated. I remember thinking that working at 3 AM is what serious professionals do. How wrong I was! [...] The moral of this story is: Don't write code when you are tired. Dedication and professionalism are more about discipline than hours. Make sure that your sleep, health, and lifestyle are tuned so that you can put in eight good hours per day._

I think this is solid advice. He later says that "The Zone" (aka "flow") should be avoided, which is more controversial... ;)

</comment><comment><USER41> That, my friends, is called a ballmer peak. there is a great xkcd comic about this (<http://xkcd.com/323/>) as well as a great quora thread ( <http://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-truth-to-the-Ballmer-Peak> ). Just dont take it too far when you read this :)

</comment><comment><USER42> I suppose it goes without saying that marijuana is quite a bit better for coding than alcohol?

</comment><comment><USER43> I agree. Remember we're all programmers, which means we all sit around thinking about how to be perfect all the time, because it's out job, which is a FUCKING INSANE thing for humans to do by and large, and can easily lead to analysis paralysis.

I love approaching work from both the hyperfocused left brain and those mental states where I'm not quite so worried about semicolons, so to speak.

</comment><comment><USER44> Great point on taking care of the monotony a few drinks in. How you're coping with disliking flying is a whole other conversation haha.

</comment><comment><USER45> Just look out for those typos...

</comment><comment><USER46> Actually, this is why proof assistants are so great. You drink a couple glasses of champagne at someone's PhD defense reception, and you can go back to your office and try as you may, it won't let you prove anything incorrect.

</comment><comment><USER47> Dear ....

I admire the work you have put into our project, thank you very much for your efforts. However at this point we would like to look elsewhere for a different perspective. We have a certain style in mind that we do not think you will be able to provide.

We are sorry to have to say this, but unfortunately we will not be able to take advantage of any further contributions from you. The contributions to date will be compensated in full.

The very best of luck with your future prospects.

Sincerely, jfkdsjfls fjdsklfj

\----INSTEAD OF-----

I'm afraid your writing style doesn't fit with what I'm looking to publish. That's not a criticism of your style, it's just a reality. I'm sorry not to be able to go any further. I wish you all the best and will, of course, pay you for the the work you've done so far. If you'd like to have a chat with me that's fine, you've got my number.

</comment><comment><USER48> I had my current job by sending an email to a company while being drunk, finally i'm very happy with this job, do things while being drunk and you will not regret it ;)

</comment><comment><USER49> There are so many reasons why this is a dumb idea.

</comment><comment><USER50> I personally wouldn't be bragging that I turned someone away for their poor writing skill by using an excerpt from a rejection email that includes a comma splice. Real hypocritical. I can only imagine that the publication he referees has the reading level of your average YouTube comments section. Or maybe "getting things done" drunk, like coding drunk, also doesn't work for the author -- but being drunk, he believes it does.

<comment><USER43> It's only hypocritical if he also said that the editor must necessarily have the best grammar at any publication, which is of course ridiculous. Only grammar nerds think grammar = good writing.</comment></comment>


Join YCombinator News - LinkedIn Group Here! - <AUTHOR> http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/3426/750DD96C11B4 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi All, Thanks for your interest, and I just got notification this morning that we are up and running on LinkedIn. If you previously sent me an email, you can join the group simply by clicking here.

If you want to be added, go to the link above to join or simply send me an email with your First Name, Last Name and Email Address to firstname.lastname@example.com.

Finally, there were a couple of people who asked about getting the list of emails to use to start a newsgroup, or email chain. Since I didnt ask people for permission to do that, I'd suggest simply starting a new thread and people can submit their info there if they want to.

Thanks a lot, and happy networking, Eddie

PS I resubmitted this so the actual link can be in the title.</comment>