How Heroku Works - <AUTHOR> https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/how-heroku-works <comment><USER2> Re: The Rap Genius Question:

"""A random selection algorithm is used for HTTP request load balancing across web dynos""

bit more....

"""and this routing handles both HTTP and HTTPS traffic. It also supports multiple simultaneous connections, as well as timeout handling."""

</comment><comment><USER3> """"If you're using some established framework, Heroku can figure it out. For example, in Ruby on Rails, it's typically rails server, in Django it's python <app>/manage.py runserver and in Node.js it's node web.js."""

Been working in node for years now, have never named anything web.js. Why not index.js, server.js or app.js?

<comment><USER4> Yeah I think that's a relic of their very early Node.js beta. Now they look for package.json ([https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack- nodejs/blob/maste...](https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack- nodejs/blob/master/bin/detect#L4)) and you define the command to start the app in the Procfile.

<comment><USER5> Dang - thanks for catching. Fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not trusting a company that has a record of inaccurate documentations, and a record of ignoring customer complaints until got hammered hard (enough)

<comment><USER7> Well, they're obviously working on improving their documentation and have made public statements about some of the high-profile complaints. Is that not what you want? Or would you prefer they do nothing so that you can continue making tired accusations against them?

<comment><USER6> How do you know they document accurately this time? 'Obviously' as compared to what? Except if you have internal access to their source code and be able to verify against the documentation.

I am always happy to give honest mistakes a chance, but not to a company who ignored customers complaints for years, sold inaccurate tools for big bucks, and tried to obfuscating documentation to hide the change of algorithm in request routing at dyno level. Sorry, I just find these acts are bordering evil, and my money will go to other businesses. If you are not so sure what I am talking, read the following link and see how Heroku's CTO and COO responded to complaints.

[http://news.rapgenius.com/Lemon-money-trees-rap-genius- respo...](http://news.rapgenius.com/Lemon-money-trees-rap-genius-response-to- heroku-lyrics)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8>
        For example, dynos are cycled at least once per day

Why so often? I wonder if this is just to protect against memory leaks leading to poor performance from poorly coded apps or if it's an issue with their infrastructure.

<comment><USER9> I have yet to see one rails app that doesn't leak memory like crazy, this is the easiest way to maintain sanity :)

<comment> ryan-allen Stop using RMagick!

<comment><USER9> Trust me, I don't use rails at all anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Terminology: Dynos are isolated, virtualized Unix containers, that provide > the environment required to run an application.

... also known as "process".

<comment><USER11> Actually I believe the containers are implemented with something similar to [http://lxc.sourceforge.net/](http://lxc.sourceforge.net/) which is more akin to a process level chroot, and kernel resource limits. This also the same technology that fundamentally underpins Docker and some other similar super- lightweight virtualisation technologies. With lxc and buildroot, for example it's trivial to create a self-contained 20Mb image for running a PostgreSQL server. With all the security guarantees [sic] that would be provided by paravirtualisation.

<comment><USER10> (this reply is for jschulenklopper too)

Certainly, it was provocative of me to imply it was that simple : when you have to deal with processes at this scale, you can't do it without any sandboxing if you want to avoid users messing with one another.

It's still the basic scheme, though : when you rent dynos, you actually rent processes. That's the heroku business model (with all the deployment sugar on top of it, of course), and I'm always surprised people are ok to pay that much to rent processes.

Of course, one could argue you can spawn multiple processes in a dyno. But 1. thoses processes have to consume very low memory because of low memory limits of dynos and 2. this could lead to boot up nightmare.

Before the "rap-genuis-gate", the company I worked for then had scalability issues with heroku, being the later described router random timeout problem. Our dyno costs were already very high, even when using hirefire, so adding more dynos sounds not a good option.

We tried to replace thin with unicorn, which was later the proposed solution from heroku. But even with two unicorn workers, we reached memory limits. Even worse : when dyno booted unicorn master process, it considered itself ready, while unicorn was still spawning its children, so it ends up with more failed requests.

Bottom line is : using (and paying for) a heroku dyno is basically the same as using a process on a dedicated server. That may not be a problem, provided heroku clients are aware of that, and are not sold dynos as if it was what we all know as virtual servers.

<comment><USER12> > when you rent dynos, you actually rent processes

True; more dynos, more processing capacity. I was replying to the suggestion that dynos _are_ processes, but they aren't. Agreed, in common discussions this distinction doesn't matter much, and you correctly mentioned that it is possible to run multiple processes in one dyno.

> using (and paying for) a heroku dyno is basically the same as using a > process on a dedicated server

Partly true. Using an Heroku dyno is basically the same as getting a small (although 2X dynos have 1 GB memory allocated) temporary virtual server in which a limited number of processes run, often just one. No running process equals to no dyno, I think.

Paying for an Heroku dyno is basically the same as renting (and releasing) a small virtual server for the duration of a running process (and for possibly very short periods of time). That is especially true for one-off dynos: a dyno only for the duration of one command, but those are charged just like web or worker dynos.

Normally, we aren't paying for processes on (dedicated or virtual) servers, but are buying the server capacity whatever we do with it (limited by the server resource allocation).

So that is indeed one of the differences between Heroku's PaaS solution and other IaaS offerings (and we both agree on): paying for the (running) processes instead of paying for the capacity made available for you.

<comment><USER13>
      > ... getting a small... temporary virtual server in which
      > a limited number of processes run, often just one.

Is it "often just one" process running because of some limit enforced by Heroku, or is it simply because, well, many people don't bother to spawn additional processes? Do additional processes "wait" for other processes to finish before proceeding? (I'm about to run another experiment on Heroku...)

<comment><USER12> Heroku enforces a 512 MB memory limit (or 1024 MB on the 2X dynos), so that limits the practical number of processes running in the same dyno... especially if those are (heavy) full-stack web applications. Additionally, processes share the same CPU, so you'll not get the same performance as two processes in their own dynos.

See [https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/process- model](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/process-model) and [https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rails- unicorn](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rails-unicorn). Unicorn forks multiple OS processes within each dyno to allow a Rails app to support multiple concurrent requests. Generally no more than 3-4 processes will fit in one dyno.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's my outsider's analysis of how Heroku works (well, worked in 2011) from a couple years ago: [https://www.quora.com/Scalability/How-does-Heroku- work](https://www.quora.com/Scalability/How-does-Heroku-work)

<comment><USER14> Has the whole or parts of the architecture been made available as open source?

I want to create a container based PAAS architecture myself, based on docker etc. Does anyone recommend a ready made solution similar to heroku, to serve ruby web apps.

<comment><USER15> [https://github.com/ddollar/foreman](https://github.com/ddollar/foreman) is what is used for the local testing, but also for the actual running of the app on the Cedar stack. One could use Foreman and Docker and AWS to make a pretty reasonable PaaS.

(I'm working on a S3 static-site-only version of Heroku so people don't have to serve static sites behind 3 layers of web servers.)

<comment><USER16> > S3 static-site-only version of Heroku

You mean...a CDN?

<comment><USER15> No. I mean a command line tool mimicking the Heroku Toolbelt API but for static sites.

<comment><USER16> Ah, s3cmd then!

<comment><USER15> s3cmd is to ec2 as what I'm working on is to Heroku.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Since _Heroku 's Ugly Secret_ I don't trust this company.

[http://news.rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly- secret-l...](http://news.rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret- lyrics)</comment>


Guy Kawasaki on how he built Truemors for $12,107.09 - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/GKawasaki/how-i-built-a-web-20-usergenerated-content-citizen-journalism-longtail-social-media-site-for-1210709 <comment><USER2> Not to be rude or anything, but what exactly is Truemors now? I guess it got acquired, because when you visit the URL you get redirected here.

<http://truemors.nowpublic.com/>

A cursory review of the content shows a moderate number of submissions, extremely light "interest" (e.g. the number one "greatest" truemor has 5 "interested" points -- maybe I don't understand what that means?) and almost zero participation in the way of comments.

So some company overpaid him for what appears to be an extremely lackluster product? Is there more to it than this? Because if not, this falls in the same category of Ethan Hawke giving a presentation called "How I Got My Novel Published and You Can Too" -- i.e. useless.

<comment><USER3> It never had many customers. You could pretty much upload a picture of your next bowel movement, create a login system, if you had the PR machine that is Guy Kawasaki behind it, get at least 80% as many users as Truemors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The 2nd slide that dropped the line

"How I built a web 2.0, user generated content, citizen journalism, long-tail, social media site for $12k"

made me want to vomit, all I see is How I Buzzword, buzzword, buzzword..

<comment><USER5> Pretty sure he was lampooning that point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've always like reading Guy's material. He often has very thoughtful pieces with plenty of actionable advice.

That being said I'm not impressed with either of his 2 most recent startups, truemors.com and alltop.com.

I'm not sure if its the idea or the implementation--but neither jump out at me as significant. I guess I expect more from Guy considering he's a world-known VC/author/blogger.

<comment><USER7> As much as I like Guy, I don't think Truemors or Alltop would have received as much attention as they have if they were built/marketed by anyone that didn't already have Guy's stature.

In other words, I wouldn't rely too heavily on these sites when considering "best practices" scenarios.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you connect the bad facts, you'll find that they had to go thru a bad patch too.

 _Site hacked in 3 hours of launch

Yahoo recommends not to use its hosting after 36 hours

Labeled 'the worst website ever' after 2 days_

<comment><USER9> It happens. Remember Cuil?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why so many haters? We're entrepreneurs. Let's study what Guy did well and learn from it. If he's willing to be open with his numbers, I want to learn as much as I can from it, don't you? And if the big lesson is that building a personal brand helps launch a site, let's do it.

<comment><USER11> Why? He increased noise.

Another meritless product wrapped in buzzwords competing for attention in the space that others have created.

He has acted as an entrepreneurial spammer.

<comment><USER10> IMHO every entrepreneur who takes a shot should be praised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know what he meant by "55 domains to 'surround' truemors.com" ?

</comment><comment><USER13> I could have built it for "only" nothing.

</comment><comment><USER14> software dev - $4500, legal fees - $4824.

Even on a shoestring budget, the lawyers get half.

</comment><comment><USER15> Step 1: Be Guy Kawasaki

Step 2: Spend about $10,000 more than you need to because you're already independently wealthy through non-startup means (read: AAPL)

Step 3: Get much more attention for your startup than most people would because you're Guy Kawasaki

Step 4: Sell as soon as it's feasible

Step 5: Profit

<comment><USER16> What? That's not a legitimate PROFIT strategy. You missed a vital step.

<comment><USER15> You're right, I left out this:

Step 6: ???

Step 7: Profit! (Again)

<comment><USER16> yep. that's better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Guy got robbed

<comment><USER18> Yaw, $399 for a logo is insane. I'd have made it another of those things that you skimp on to brag about.</comment></comment>


Federated Learning for Drug Discovery - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2020/09/17/major-pharma-companies-including-novartis-and-merck-build-federated-learning-platform-for-drug-discovery/ <comment><USER2> Is there an open source platform like this for us to learn from?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can check out the substra orchestration back-end which this is built upon [https://github.com/SubstraFoundation/substra](https://github.com/SubstraFoundation/substra)

disclosure: I work for a partner</comment></comment>


Russian scientists report new DNA under subglacial Lake Vostok - bra-ket http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57573314/russian-scientists-report-new-dna-under-subglacial-lake-vostok/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is so exciting. I've been waiting on the results of the opening of Vostok for YEARS! It's one of the few "untampered" natural subterranean lakes left on Earth and arguably the oldest. If there's DNA in there, it has existed in an anaerobic environment for a very long time, and, as the scientist said it's unlike anything on Earth because these conditions are essentially unique on Earth.

Really exciting times :). Can't wait for some more confirmation and the eventual photos!!!

<comment><USER2> Is it possible for life in Vostok to be genealogically isolated from life elsewhere on Earth, so that life evolved from nothing multiple times?

<comment><USER3> I believe the estimates for how long Lake Vostok water has been isolated cap out at around 25 million years. Although that is an incredibly long time, it isn't anywhere close to long ago enough to ensure a sterile condition when it was first isolated (It would need to be several billion years to proceed life as we know it already blanketing the planet).

As I understand it, the prevailing notion is that abiogenesis happened only a single time, or at least only a single time that stuck. The life that already exists does a pretty good job of ensuring that any primitive re-developed life never has a chance to actually get started. You would need to completely sterilize the environment to have a shot at witnessing abiogenesis again. _Maaaybe_ all life in the lake died, rendering it sterile, and then new life formed, but that seems super unlikely to me. Why would the existing life die if there was enough nutrients/energy to allow new life to form? _(Also, 25 million years is probably far too short of a timeframe to see abiogenisis bootstrap DNA based life)_

<comment><USER4> Agree with that, but would also like to throw in a scenario where there wasn't a sterile environment, but conditions were harsh enough for all present life to die, leaving you with a 'sterile' thin soup containing the building blocks of DNA based life.

That might shave a bunch of time off of the time needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oki-doki, so I looked at some Russian sources and it looks weird. The RIA, the Russian Reuters, says [0] that

1\. This is based on the analysis of a "technological" water that accidentally got into a drilling column (whatever it is) dating back to May 2012, and _not_ on the specifically collected samples from a recent drilling that will be arriving to St. Petersburg in May of this year (apparently it takes 6+ months to ship them).

2\. "You have to understand that only a bacteria DNA was found, not the bacteria itself." This is what the representative of the science agency said. Literally.

So.

I wouldn't be getting too excited. This reads like a PR or a vanity piece rather than a proper science report, meaning that is probably aimed at securing additional funding or something along these lines.

(edit) Also, doesn't the process of comparing DNA to the database samples smell a little like CSI bullshit to anyone? This is not my domain, but I would imagine that there's hardly a comprehensive database of a DNA of all existing life forms on Earth. I assume there's a way to see that a DNA is "alien", but why bring up some imaginary database if you are making a serious scientific announcement.

[0] <http://ria.ru/science/20130307/926380740.html>

<comment><USER6> > I would imagine that there's hardly a comprehensive database of a DNA of all > existing life forms on Earth.

An annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences is available from the DNA DataBank of Japan (DDBJ), the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and GenBank at NCBI. They are basically all three the same database and they exchange updates on a daily basis. However, small timelags in propagating data between the database centers causes minor differences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "If it were found on Mars, people would call it Martian DNA. But this is DNA > from Earth"

Yes... yes indeed.

<comment><USER8> I want to give this guy the benefit of the doubt and assume his english isn't great. He probably means something along the lines of: 'this DNA is so weird it could be Martian.'

<comment><USER9> It's not, though. I'd imagine Martian organisms would have a much lower shared proportion of DNA than the 86% mentioned in the article, assuming they even used DNA in the first place.

<comment><USER10> Highly likely that Martian "DNA" would be different in several fundamental aspects (for starters, the triplet codons would have entirely different "dictionary" meanings in terms of amino acids, or perhaps there would be no triplets but quartets instead or even something completely different) that it wouldn't even make sense to talk in terms of percentages -- it would be like saying a rock is 50% similar to a blue whale.

<comment><USER11> Both could contain high percentages of calcium. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > "The researchers said that seven species of bacteria were found in the > frozen water in 2012. The DNA match to any known organisms never went past > 86 percent, so it is considered to be an unknown form of life. Anything > under 90 percent is considered enough to designate a new species."

Is that 90% figure standard convention? Where did it come from? I'm not too familiar with this field, so is that basic textbook stuff? It seems arbitrary.

</comment><comment><USER13> Were these bacteria living because of a heat source that was keeping the lake liquid, similar to life around deep sea vents?

Could there be life under our feet, fueled by the heat of the molten core with bacteria flourishing in fresh groundwater, or do these types of thermophiles require salt that wouldn't exist there?

</comment><comment><USER14> I've been waiting for the results of this search for a while now. I'm hoping to see reportage soon from a more credible source than one which refers to some country called "Great Brittan"! Do they have interns writing this stuff or something?

</comment><comment><USER15> Is anyone else concerned that they have contaminated the lake with modern bacteria?

<comment><USER14> Yeah. Little bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not being an expert in the molecular/cellular/biological department. Is there any risk that this new DNA strand could harm current life? (I am thinking infections or some weird mutations, similar to every scifi movie I have ever seen)

<comment><USER17> There is always a risk. However, these bacteria evolved in an extremely hostile environment. The probability that they developed mechanisms to infiltrate a multicellular organism and fight off its immune system is practically infinitesimal, although non-zero.

There is likely zero evolutionary drive in such an environment to evolve above basic anaerobic life sustaining adaptations and it could even be the case that any evolution that isn't geared towards maximizing survivability in such an environment are actually detrimental. Chances are that any functional mutations will either optimize current processes (and thus help survivability) or create new processes or chemical pathways. The latter would usually expend more energy and could very well cause the mutated species to die off prematurely because their "improvement" is too much to handle in this low energy environment.

Of course, this doesn't preclude the bacteria being so strange that our immune system wouldn't know what to do about it but after 25 million years of sequestration with no "predators", it is unlikely that they developed such a uniqueness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Jurassic Water Park: Jeff Goldblum fights off rampaging algae.</comment>


Ask HN: Those who left software development for a different technical field? - <AUTHOR> I dont hate programming per say, but I hate everything that comes with the job. I hate the work, developers, the culture among developer teams. I also despise the leetcode interview. I know that good DS/A skills are important. I know why they exist and are so popular. I know that there are plenty of jobs that don't use them (but the reality is that the best paying and most interesting do). But at end of the day, I'd rather spend my time learning and working on cool projects than boring myself on some algo site so that I can compete with a bunch a quasi-competive programmers.
All that said, I still do enjoy programming and work on a number of cool projects for myself. I've started to wonder if I should do something else for a living and relegate programming a hobby I can still enjoy on the side.
There are plenty of stories of people going from programmer to some business position, whether that be management, sales, BA, etc., but I'm not really interested in any of that stuff. In fact, I think I would hate that more than programming. I've been interested in other fields since a kid, programming just won because of accessibility reasons. I've always enjoyed natural sciences (through school, I struggled in math, hated language arts classes, but always excelled in science). I also contemplated a couple going into a other engineering fields as a teen that I've retained an interest in. There are also some IT domains that look interesting (honestly I'd probably be a better network engineer that software engineer), but I don't think I could stomach starting at the bottom of that field. I expect a pay cut if I switch fields, but entry-level IT pays pennies.
I dont think I've ever heard of anyone doing anything like this. Googling only shows people doing the opposite going from X to software development. Everyone wants to be a programmer these days. Maybe it's the money and prestige.
Has anyone made a transition from software to some other technical field? <comment><USER3> You and I are in the same boat, except I've grown to hate not only the culture, but programming too. I've not heard of former devs breaking into other technical fields, but I have heard of them getting into stuff like farming, construction, or trades (electrical, plumbing, etc.). I wish I hadn't spent my 20s dwelling in anxiety. I wish I had moved around, become a trail guide, or got into scuba diving, or even joined the coast guard. Sadly the best I can hope for nowadays in my 30s is to program in a domain I don't totally despise.

<comment><USER4> My VP Engineering quit and opened a Falafel joint.

<comment><USER5> Sounds more fulfilling than a stand ups to be honest. Better stories too.

<comment><USER4> He's very happy. Best falafel in the Midwest (did a tour and charted every recipe, then created his own).

Keeps his crew for years - the normal term is months, especially in a college town. He's brought his management experience from Engineering teams to food prep and cooks and servers, some of who've never been treated like professionals and peers in their lives.

Does catering too, and supplies restaurants with 'snack packs' which are very popular around here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just left cloud software development to be the jack-of-all-trades only computer person at a local shop. I love it. I spend all day helping people instead of fighting jira.

<comment><USER7> I have a related experience: a few years ago I built a website for a local music store, and I still do the occasional maintenance task for them. Their gratitude and happiness with the product has made it one of the most fulfilling technical projects I've ever done.

Advantages of being "the technical person" for a non-technical project/business/etc:

\- You get out of the insular, one-upsmanship-steeped technical culture

\- You can implement things exactly the way you want to

\- You're probably much less abstracted away from the people you're actually helping

It's the third thing that I think is most important. In most tech jobs you're either gently swindling your customers through A/B tests and "conversion metrics", or you're doing "tech for tech's sake" which can be fun but ultimately feels empty. It feels really good to directly help real people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not me personally. I have two friends that did.

One is a project manager for a small construction firm. Last time we had lunch together he told me the industry is ripe for some good software, but the owners don't want to buy it. He started working on a free and open source tool.

The other ran so far away from software none of us are sure where he went. He's vanished off of all social media and only occasionally answers texts.

</comment><comment><USER9> I know of one programmer who went from writing software to building cars, rockets and a solar grid. I hear he's doing quite well.

<comment><USER10> When did Carmack get into solar???

/s

<comment><USER11> Come on, Carmack isn't interested in solar. Not when we can literally mine the energy straight from _Hell_ , do you know how many btus we're talking about here?

...I'm now being told trying to extract energy from Biblical Hell is a bad idea?

<comment><USER12> Is Hell based heat exchange a second law violation? Ignoring the obvious angry, cold demons

<comment><USER11> Downvoters aint ever played Doom, hah.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am a programmer but I prefer physical object business.

During Corona self isolation, I started creating and selling filament:

I documented the journey here: [https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your- filament-at-ho...](https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at- home-for-cheap-6c908bb09922)

The price of filament is still going up.

Since selling filament I am working partime, mostly doing maintenance (updates/patches) existing application.

<comment><USER14> Is this viable in the long term? Why can't the major plastic manufacturers push you out of business thanks economies of scale and lower prices?

<comment><USER13> I never think about what will happen in future, tomorrow I might as well fall under the bus and die. Planning way ahead doesn't help me, I just jump into whatever I find interesting then ride the tide till it's no more.

You can also check on YouTube there is a Canadian I think? Company called ProtoPasta which also makes filament in small shop.

Filament market I think, isn't big enough for the large companies to dominate.

And other thing is logistics, I make locally I can offer cheaper rates to local buyers shipping locally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I went from Software Engineer to Solutions Architect a few years back, and can't be more happy.

a) You are still coding somewhat, but just prototypes. It is fun to use the APIs your company builds and help customers with it b) You learn a ton about business. I would call this position more professional consultant, since in the right company, you learn about deals, how much a company pays for what and what value they get out of you

You finally work with people and not nerds who never grow up. You can touch code, but also learn soft skills and make connections. Personally, the money was equal if not better. You finally work on the profit center of a company and not the cost center. After I switched to Solutions Architect, I come here every now and then and be so happy not to do this fulltime anymore. I don't care what you build at the weekend anymore.

I am also more free after work. There is no special new tool I need to learn after the job to get a job in 3 years from now. The people skills I build with my wife, kid and friends are so much more valuable now. So socializing replaced hacking on a new project. Which also did good for my mental health.

<comment><USER16> Did you switch within the same company? I have made attempts to apply to Solutions Engineer and Developer Advocate roles to match how my personality has changed over time, but have found that no one responds to my resume / applications, even when I have spent several years teaching, consulting, and building content and demos on the side to supplement my engineering experience and prove I can do the job. I immediately get responses and enthusiasm when I apply as Senior Software Engineer, but it seems people are skeptical of why I would want to change to Solutions Engineer or Developer Advocate when the title is not already on my resume.

<comment><USER15> No, and I had the same responses. I applied at 12 Solutions Architect roles, and 1 company replied and offered the interview process.

I actually don't know how people choose Solutions Architects. One tipp would be to go on LinkedIn, look for the Solutions Architects at the company you apply for, and ask them how they got hired or just look at their CV.

Right now it can be that the market is dried up and this sales role is especially hard, since many fields don't have active customers any more (or won't get new ones in quite some time)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Life is short, do what makes you happy is what they say, right?

I've begun the transition from sysadmin into nursing to hopefully a NP certification. Maybe I can blend my background of cloud security and Kubernetes with medicine somehow. Or not.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here is a cool suggestion:

I love doing manual labor for the physical challenge. In many such jobs the apps are crawling into the work flow. I'm sure they exist but what I've seen is lots of management and programming effort not producing the smoothness possible. I'm entirely convinced now that one cant get the design anywhere near perfection without experience doing the work. (where ofc substantial experience is better than some)

A manager together with an intelligent person with substantial development skills can design an UI where things that happen more frequently are easier to do. Then in the real world low frequency tasks may require 8 other people to wait 30 seconds while you tap buttons. It is not a big loss but it feels wrong. With some tasks it would be more convenient if you could operate the phone with one hand.

In my current job it may seem like time for a task is limited so we do a half- arse job. If it later turns out we do have time we want to get back to it but we cant. Checking a box means the job is done (we drink coffee in stead) no one would dare explain to the managers how the real world works. To them a job that takes 100-306 min always takes 203 min. Explaining a hundred tiny annoyances is waaaaaay to much work. Imagine a conversation about sessions that expire after 30 min while 5% of the tasks take slightly longer.

Also common is a complete lack of context with the current task. If the app knows I'm hammering floor boards with nail type 42 it can anticipate a need to order more nails. This feels empowering while navigating to the nail section of the supplies section then scrolling over a list feels as if it interrupted your actual work.

You can only do perfection if the entire feedback/testing loop takes place in the head of a single person. If one has a lot of experience one can sometimes encode the tricks of the trade.

</comment><comment><USER19> From first-hand experience working in Silicon Valley, I've seen some people move into independently wealthy "landed gentry" lifestyles, and certainly some younger people who left tech jobs to attend law school, but few or no people who left software for a different, but still remunerative career.

</comment><comment><USER20> How about becoming a primary or a secondary school Math teacher?

<comment><USER11> I also want out of tech; I started 15 years ago as a help desk analyst, now I'm an Engineering Manager. The burn out is real, the golden handcuffs are real and I'm just tired of being in this _kind_ of work, thoroughly sick at what I'm seeing in the tech industry from a career perspective, tired of standups, tired of sprint planning, tired of retros, scrum, "technical recruiters", the resume skill rat race, interviews, interviewing...[trails off]...

As recently as _this morning_ I was talking to a friend who teaches pre-calc at local high school and tutors part-time independently about potentially making this very career pivot, to the point where I'm legitimately looking at financial aid and scholarships to potentially just go back to school and get a BSc in Maths and Physics so I can go be a school teacher and geek off with kids about science like I do with my nephew whenever I'm babysitting him and we spend hours playing Kerbal Space Program

<comment><USER21> Uhh my understanding is that, as a teacher, you're mostly policing a bunch of youngsters who are not happy to be in the classroom with you. If you get a couple of pupils who are into what you're teaching it's considered a blessing, otherwise it's squeezing water out of a stone.

<comment><USER22> Not to mention you can't just teach what you want, you have a program to follow. You will also be judged by various test results, so you can't focus on the few bright people in the class, you have to address the rather long tail of under-performers.

<comment><USER23> Not every teacher has a choice, but perhaps this one does. There are good schools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Get some hands on experience with cloud computing - either AWS or Azure - <USER2> leverage you're combined skills of development and cloud to get a role in the cloud consulting department of either Microsoft or Amazon. No algorithms studying required. Pay is good, abc permanent remote work is possible.

Pre-Covid there were a lot of other consulting roles available, but they seem to have dried up.

</comment><comment><USER25> I am a software engineer for 10 years, and have been dabbling in audio engineering / recording / mixing for the past couple of years. I haven't made the transition, but I wouldn't rule it out in the future.

I'd probably never stop coding though. It would just be a matter of switching from pro to hobby, and vice-versa.

<comment><USER26> Sonic Pi might interest you if you don't know it already. It's an alternative to DAWs where you use ruby code to make music

Here's a demo [https://youtu.be/KJPdbp1An2s](https://youtu.be/KJPdbp1An2s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I write firmware for micro-controllers and deal mostly with engineers, techs, other sane code monkeys, and an occasional customer. My occasional dealings with actual mainstream software developers is generally unpleasant.

I would suggest firmware or some other job where software is part of the product not the product.

<comment><USER28> I agree 100%. Sometimes, it's not the type of work but the people you're working with. In the embedded space, you work with a lot more electrical and computer engineers, who, in my opinion, are "generally" a lot more tolerable. My worst experiences so far in both my career and in school were when I had to work with straight CS people. There's a certain personality that gets pulled in to it that can be toxic and hard to work with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Maybe it's the money and prestige."

Do you have any examples of prestige?

I wish I had either one. I have never recieved any prestige in my career. The money is ok, but there are trades that pay more than what I make, especially if you factor in cost of living.

</comment><comment><USER30> Not answer for the exact question, but I am trying to own a project and a software engineer and its much more bearable than a common job with the issues it comes.

</comment><comment><USER31> Have you considered finance? Pay is good and the work is can be challenging.

<comment><USER32> Opportunity cost high: MBA.

<comment><USER31> That's not true, most people don't have MBAs in finance.</comment></comment></comment>


Trapdoor commitments in the SwissPost e-voting shuffle proof - <AUTHOR> https://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/vjteague/SwissVote <comment><USER2> > The implementation of the commitment scheme in the SwissPost-Scytl mixnet > uses a trapdoor commitment scheme, which allows anyone who knows the > trapdoor values to generate a shuffle proof transcript that passes > verification but actually alters votes. This allows undetectable vote > manipulation by an authority who implemented or administered a mix server.

I do not understand why this does not get more votes. Maybe because the title was related to cryptography and did not mention the vulnerability.</comment>


PayPal Reports a 29% Jump in Earnings - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/technology/paypal-reports-a-29-jump-in-earnings.html <comment><USER2> Stock is getting slammed after hours.</comment>


Show HN: Wagtail, our new Django CMS - <AUTHOR> Wagtail is a new, open-source Django CMS focused on flexibility and user experience. It was originally built for the Royal College of Art, but now we're able to share it with everyone. See
https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail
and
http://wagtail.io (marketing site)
and
http://www.rca.ac.uk/ (first big site built on Wagtail)
We're really proud of the user interface, and we hope that Wagtail will make it easy for Django developers to build beautiful, modern sites. Feedback very welcome!
Tom Dyson, Technical Director at Torchbox (Wagtail developers) <comment><USER3> [https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail](https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail)

[http://wagtail.io](http://wagtail.io) (marketing site)

[http://www.rca.ac.uk/](http://www.rca.ac.uk/)

<comment><USER4> This HN no-link-doctrine is really annoying...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did the whole vagrant setup demo thing - this CMS looks unbelievably nice. Kudos to the design team. Stock Django admin (even with Grappelli) is kinda ugly now.

Like others mentioned, a live demo is definitely preferable - not many will go through the vagrant setup.

Also there's a bug when trying to view a sample page:

'embed_filters' is not a valid tag library

But good stuff otherwise!

<comment><USER6> oops, hazards of working off a live Git repo there :-) Fixed now - please run a git pull / pip install -r requirements/dev.txt and try again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The first thing I look for on a marketing site for a CMS is the link to the demo, which isn't there.

Generally, I think demo videos don't fill this void and this one does a particularly bad job, unless maybe played at half speed.

Apart from that, Wagtail looks very interesting and I'll take the time and install the demo app. Thumbs up for choosing Postgres and integrating CoffeeScript and LESS.

<comment><AUTHOR> The video is intended to pique the interest of CMS choosers with short attention spans... you're right that it's a poor substitute for a real demo, and we'll try to get something up as soon as possible. What's the best practice for refreshing the content on demo sites? I worry that a scheduled content reset will confuse people who are halfway through trying publishing a test page.

The CoffeeScript and LESS integration is a tricky one. We like LESS but we're worried that npm / lessc is an annoying dependency, and we're considering switching to SASS / SCSS, which has a pure-Python compiler, unlike LESS. Opinions very welcome.

<comment><USER7> An idea for a content reset, would be to warn the user before it actually happens and/or having a visible countdown widget that tells you when reset happens.

I see that the npm dependency might draw away people, maybe provide and add-on that depends on npm and makes it easy to integrate CoffeeScript, LESS, SASS?

<comment><AUTHOR> > An idea for a content reset, would be to warn the user before it actually > happens and/or having a visible countdown widget that tells you when reset > happens.

Right, that doesn't sound too hard, we'll aim to add that.

> I see that the npm dependency might draw away people, maybe provide and add- > on that depends on npm and makes it easy to integrate CoffeeScript, LESS, > SASS?

Or perhaps we'll just ship the compiled CSS / JS and provide instructions for people who want to use LESS etc in their Wagtail sites.

<comment><USER8> +1 for compiled CSS/JS. I'd love that and it would get me up and playing with it much faster, personally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, were you hired to make a site for the RCA and decided to build a CMS first? I'm interested in how this came about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, sort of. We evaluated the options of sticking with their commercial CMS or switching to a famous open source CMS which we're very familiar with, but we estimated that it would be cheaper to build the site they wanted from scratch in Django. When we'd finished it felt like a lot of the work was reusable, and the RCA kindly agreed to let us open source the project. We've spent the last few weeks extracting it into a standalone package, but there are definitely still some rough edges: documentation, obviously; more tests; i18n.

<comment><USER10> This is pretty awesome. A non-PHP CMS is long, long overdue. I know there already are some, but I think the challenge is that non-technical types are still more able to quickly get started by just dragging some PHP into their shared hosting service and turning it on. I hope this will change, and a project like yours is key to making that transition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congrats on open sourcing this. It looks great! I'm very pleased to see a Django app where the design hasn't come as an afterthought.

I'm just about to test it out but I have a question – how easy is it to to integrate this into an existing project?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Wagtail is just a collection of apps which can be added to a standard Django project. Serafeim's tutorial demonstrates this: [https://gist.github.com/tomdyson/8974456#creating-and- config...](https://gist.github.com/tomdyson/8974456#creating-and-configuring- your-project)

Note [https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo/blob/master/wagtaild...](https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo/blob/master/wagtaildemo/urls.py#L46) (from the example Wagtail site). To incorporate it into an existing app you'll just need to adjust the URLs so Wagtail isn't taking over the whole URL space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Quick tip on the video: I felt it moved a little too quickly. I tried keeping up with the text, and it seemed to get pulled away from me as I was about 2/3rds through each time. At the end I was slightly dizzy :/

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. It's my fault - I kept asking our video guy to speed it up! We're working on a proper 3 minute walk through right now. It should be ready in the next day or so.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the promised walk-through: [https://vimeo.com/86719782](https://vimeo.com/86719782)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Really nice. One question:

One feature I always wanted implemented in whatever CMS I was using was the ability to enter, say, a comma-delimited list of page titles, select the parent page and template to use, and have the CMS generate those pages in one go, instead of having the content editors hit the "New page" button fifty times.

I used to work for a large medical company, and they're departments always had special requirements, with lists of sub-pages to create for their department. Three hours later (it was a Java-applet-based CMS :( ), I was just about done with creating their pages.

<comment><USER14> Wagtail is open-source, so there's nothing stopping you/someone adding that functionality - indeed, it'd be pretty trivial do to as a Django management command that would work something like:

         ./manage.py create_page_stubs path/to/your/list.csv

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone got a working dockerfile for the demo? Took a stab at it, but it doesn't work :(

[https://index.docker.io/u/oyvindsk/wagtaildemo- incomplete/](https://index.docker.io/u/oyvindsk/wagtaildemo-incomplete/)

[https://github.com/oyvindsk/docker- playground/tree/master/do...](https://github.com/oyvindsk/docker- playground/tree/master/dockerfiles/wagtaildemo)

<comment><USER15> ALmost works now:

docker run -p 8000:8000 oyvindsk/wagtail-demo

[https://index.docker.io/u/oyvindsk/wagtail- demo/](https://index.docker.io/u/oyvindsk/wagtail-demo/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice presentation on the marketing side.

Is there a live demo anywhere or plans for one? In particular to try out the admin functionality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yes, we'll have a live demo soon, and a more in-depth video of the admin functionality even sooner - hopefully in the next few hours.

If you have Vagrant and a reasonable internet connection, the easiest way to try out the admin UI is to clone the demo site at [https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo](https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo), which includes a range of example content types.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems really good! Are you planning to compare it with other CMS (especially Django-CMS)? I would like to see its performances (with or without varnish).

Would you like to add OAuth support or other auth mechanisms like CAS? =) I didn't find documentation for the "WAGTAIL_PASSWORD_MANAGEMENT_ENABLED" option.

<comment><AUTHOR> Django CMS definitely has more features than Wagtail (and contributors, and impressive example sites). There's a large grid of CMSs and features at [https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/CMSAppsComparison](https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/CMSAppsComparison) which we haven't added ourselves to yet. We want to resist getting into a CMS feature race - the focus for Wagtail is providing a thoughtful and attractive user interface, and making it as easy as possible for designers to build beautiful sites. As for performance, we haven't done any proper benchmarking, but it feels very fast!

We already support LDAP auth, and CAS and / or Shibboleth is on the roadmap for the near future. More importantly, we'll have proper Sphinx docs soon, with details of the features that are already available.

<comment><USER18> > We want to resist getting into a CMS feature race - the focus for Wagtail is > providing a thoughtful and attractive user interface, and making it as easy > as possible for designers to build beautiful sites.

Yes, please keep that focus. A well-focused project is both refreshing and produces extraordinary results. You also appear to have a 'bigger-picture' view than many CMS creators - i.e. on the designers and the people who end up using it, not just the developers.

Congratulations Tom!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very nice! Thanks for the good work! Will check it out.

Feedback: I hope for some good documentation like a starter tutorial and video screencast so more people can understand your CMS and use it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! In case you missed it elsewhere there's a tutorial by Wagtail contributor Serafeim Papastefanos here: [https://gist.github.com/tomdyson/8974456](https://gist.github.com/tomdyson/8974456) but we're working hard on official docs and a proper screencast.

<comment><USER20> > To follow this tutorial you will need to have Python 2.7 installed with a > working version of pip and virtualenv.

Is that true in general for this CMS, that Python 2.7 will be needed? Python 3 isn't supported?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we focused on Python 2.x support for initial release. I'm afraid we haven't even tried Wagtail on Python 3 yet. Having said that, at Torchbox (where Wagtail originated) we have a general if somewhat vague principle that - as responsible Python developers - we should support the adoption of Python 3, so 3.x support is certainly a goal for the project.

If anyone has time to test Wagtail on Python 3 and report any problems to [https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail/issues](https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail/issues) that will accelerate the work!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Would you gents (upstream wagtail guys) be interested if I took a shot at integrating pelican into this? I'd like a static blog and semi dynamic site and <3 django.

<comment><USER22> That sounds very delicious to me. this CMS to build sites, and S3 static to host them :)

<comment><AUTHOR> The Royal College of Art (for whom Wagtail was originally developed) have commissioned an 'archive' feature, which will take a snapshot of the whole site, or a sub-section of it, and export as standalone HTML with all assets. We're planning to extend this feature to support publishing to S3 / Github Pages / SFTP etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Thanks for the hard work. We need more CMSs in Python!

</comment><comment><USER24> What's API support like? IE if I wanted to create a search widget that uses JSON. Have you considered something like Django REST Framework?

<comment><AUTHOR> As it happens, the predictive search already returns JSON, but we don't have a general purpose API yet. It's on the list! Pages are just plain Django models under the hood, so Django REST Framework would be a good fit.

<comment><USER21> Having used piston, then tastypie, and now django-rest-framework for a number of json rest services, drf is hands down the nicest. Also, Tom Christie (main author) is super responsive via twitter or IRC so you can get bugs fixed / prs merged super fast. I literally can't recommend it enough

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Looks really nice.. I can't wait to pull and try it out. Just out of curiosity: Is the marketing site also built using Wagtail??

<comment><AUTHOR> I was hoping no-one would ask that :)

No: the marketing site ([http://wagtail.io/](http://wagtail.io/)) is a single static HTML page. But we're about to add a blog, so we'll convert the whole thing into a Wagtail site, hopefully next week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looks great. One thing that I find not so good is: There are no tests.

It would be hard to convince anyone to contribute without some unit tests.

<comment><USER6> There are some [https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail/blob/master/wagtail/wagt...](https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail/blob/master/wagtail/wagtailsearch/tests.py) \- but not enough, we know. We're on it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wow, this is really beautiful. Just in time for my next project: a tiny ERP to manage my sister's bakery.

Thanks for open sourcing this. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Please let us know if you end up using it. We'll post a Wagtail t-shirt to your sister's bakery!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nice! I was just reevaluating the django cms world and happened to stumble on this post.

Any support for multiple languages, yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi eknuth. There's a brief mention of this elsewhere in the thread: "[Wagtail does support multiple languages] but it doesn't (yet) do anything clever like link different language versions of the same article. On a related subject, we're starting on i18n next week, with the first localisation - Greek - following shortly."

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Are there any developer docs? How extensible is it? How we do integrate 3rd party apps into the wagtail admin?

<comment><AUTHOR> Developer docs: currently [https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo/blob/master/README.m...](https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo/blob/master/README.md) and this tutorial from contributor Serafeim Papastefanos: [https://gist.github.com/tomdyson/8974456](https://gist.github.com/tomdyson/8974456)

Clearly this isn't enough and we're working on proper Sphinx docs which should be ready in the next few days.

Extensibility: it's just a Django app, so you can include it in your existing project, or add your own apps / views / middleware etc. There are some hooks, e.g. for including your app into the main admin navigation - <USER2> [https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail/blob/master/wagtail/wagt...](https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail/blob/master/wagtail/wagtailadmin/templatetags/wagtailadmin_nav.py#L68) for an example of where a hook gets called. It's a good candidate for developer docs!

<comment><USER29> That looks interesting. I've got a CMS which shares some philosophical similarities to Wagtail. It's a lot clunkier and uglier though. I wish I had the time to add some polish. I think the 'pages have types' idea is spot on and something all the other Django CMS's I've seen seem to get wrong. (too much freedom for the user to create 'Frankenstein pages' by arbitrarily combining blocks).

The editor and image library is very nice.

I feel you've gone slightly too far in the 'flat and beautiful' direction. Some UI elements lack affordance and I think usability has suffered slightly at the hand of aesthetics.

Finally I still feel there's a case for not completely replacing contrib.admin but that is a complex debate and I can see in your specific case you probably made the right decision. I'd really like to see if I could achieve some of your elegance without abandoning (or reinventing!) contrib.admin.

Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for your thoughtful feedback. We're pleased with the UI but obviously it's not perfect - I've just started using slack.com which is also pretty flat but feels like a new benchmark for usability. I'll discuss it with the design team, and if you have any more specific feedback we'd love to hear it.

There are still a couple of Wagtail features which rely on contrib.admin. We have to decide whether to smarten up the contrib.admin UI or pull them into the Wagtail admin. Is your CMS available somewhere public?

<comment><USER29> Not public public but there's a Git url, I'm happy to share if you drop me an email: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Python 2 or 3?

<comment><USER31> Classifier say 2:

        'Programming Language :: Python :: 2.7'

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Does it support handling multiple sites? If not, do you have any plans for adding multi site feature?

<comment><USER6> Yes, multiple sites are supported - there's a single tree for all pages in the system, and any number of sites can be 'rooted' at different points in the tree. (Currently this is configured in Django's own admin interface, but we'll be moving this into the Wagtail interface proper.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> After watching your marketing video I now know why I don't get much done. You guys work fast.

</comment><comment><USER34> Just tested out the demo site on local machine. The admin pages look gorgeous!!! Great work!

</comment><comment><USER35> Why is npm listed as dependency ? Just curious. Congrats on this, it looks awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> We currently need npm for lessc, as part of django-compressor, to compile LESS. We want to reduce the dependencies as much as possible, so we're looking into converting to SASS / SCSS, which has a pure-Python compiler, or simply shipping the compiled CSS / JS files for people who don't need to change them.

Thanks for the congrats!

<comment><USER24> Can we use our own frontend stacks to design the frontend?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, absolutely! Our first principle for Wagtail is that it should in no way impede design decisions.

LESS is (currently) used for the admin UI, and the compiler / compressor is available to the front-end if you want it, but you can easily plug in your own compilers or use plain CSS if you prefer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Really excited for a CMS that takes the writing experience into account

</comment><comment><USER37> Does it support content in two languages?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but it doesn't (yet) do anything clever like link different language versions of the same article.

On a related subject, we're starting on i18n next week, with the first localisation - Greek - following shortly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Brilliant name! Good work chaps!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! It's named after these lovely little birds which hang round our offices (near Oxford, in the UK) from spring to autumn:

[https://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/families/pipits.a...](https://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/families/pipits.aspx)

<comment><USER30> You missed out on a great naming opportunity:

        pip install pipit

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Frameworks on frameworks on frameworks.

<comment><USER40> What's the third 'framework'?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This looks interesting, but I can't take it seriously. From what I can tell, you haven't written any tests at all.

<comment><USER42> So a CMS that works as the client requires and has a very nice UI can't be taken seriously because it has no tests?

That's a _very_ developer focused mindset.

I'm glad it's been open sourced and I hope to see tests added by them or the community, but it's not a deal-breaker for me.

And if you contribute tests I hope they'll be full functional tests to spot cross-browser regressions, JS breaks and the rest ;)

<comment><USER43> Clients do care about having a stable and bug free software. Tests is one of the best way to achieve this.

<comment><USER42> I know and I agree, but I feel tests often cover the wrong thing, or what the developers feel is most important. Unit testing libraries within the system: great. Leaving the rest: not so great. Or aiming for 100% code coverage: uggh.

Playing devil's advocate here: Testing the system throughout to ensure components play nicely together and that functionally the system works as expected - this is in my opinion more important than unit testing.

<comment><USER21> There are two types of tests.

unit tests - most common and are tightly tied to the code. integration tests - simulate example user behavior and test the pieces work together as expected. For this type of app, selenium is the best tool for the job and splinter is an amazing python abstraction ontop of selenium. For instance, I have Jenkins setup splinter to run chrome and Firefox tests headlessly using a frame buffer (xvfb) to test the apps I'm responsible for as part of $dayjob.

Both types of tests are necessary and equally important.

[http://splinter.cobrateam.info](http://splinter.cobrateam.info)

<comment><USER42> I applaud your view. Here in the PHP universe we're only starting to exit the "Everything must be unit tested" phase of programmer evolution, and integration/functional testing is still a novelty.

I've not come across Splinter before, that looks interesting. I've been using PhantomJS via CasperJS but my tests so far have been brittle...

<comment><USER21> Well we used to be in the same boat and then... A new developer wrote a few new bit pieces of code that were supposed to work together. He overly unit tested each piece discretely, but they didn't work together. So when we pushed it out to staging and I manually tried to look at things, the entire design was wrong and would never work.

From then on, the next task said individual worked on was setting up selenium and write integration tests. Now we are in a pretty sweet place.

We have unit tests, which verify each discrete thing works as it is expected to and make refactoring large swaths of code a breeze. Then we have integration tests, which run on IE (in a windows vm that is on our build server), firefox, and chrome via xvfb. It even helps us catch those obnoxious conditions where javascript runs fine in "real browsers" and fails on IE's lameness. Give it a try :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Technology Will Never Fix Education - <AUTHOR> https://chronicle.com/article/Why-Technology-Will-Never-Fix/230185/

<comment><USER2> I agree with this. I have been involved in writing software for online standards based testing. The software was being used by schools. But, it never took off. After many years of bootstrapping, the founders sold the company. I can summarize from my experience that software/hardware combinations in the classroom was difficult to scale because of : 1\. Not enough fund to buy the hardware. 2\. Not enough interest from teachers to move to a software based testing. 3\. Not enough pressure from school district to move to software based testing.

Just my .02 cents.

</comment><comment><USER3> Something stood out to me regarding the anecdote about students not following through with online learning courses. Could it be that students lose interest because of the curriculum? I thought the Hole-in-the-Wall project highlighted the importance of exploration and play in self-directed learning. It seems to me that curriculums and spontaneity don't mix well.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you stop the "employee mindset" when pursuing entrepreneurship? - <AUTHOR> I seem to get some comfort from having an authority figure to work with and offload some of the responsibilities to that I would have as an entrepreneur. Also the authority figure can be a source of pride when they acknowledge my work.
I find that if I am unemployed it is really bad for my self esteem.
How do you get out of the employee mindset and let go of the needs fulfilled by being an employee? <comment><USER2> I get it. As an entrepreneur you get validation from customers, and you hold yourself accountable to them. The customer is the "authority".

To be honest this is one, of many, reasons I prefer to find and talk to customers before I even start to build a product. Having people you can talk to and run ideas past and get feedback from makes you focus on not disappointing them and giving you some feeling of needing to be accountable.

That all said, being an entrepreneur can be quite lonely and it is easy to get depressed, so you have to find ways to find balance for yourself and prevent it. I am actually reversed from you in that I find it actually easier being a founder than an employee, but in both cases you just need to find coping mechanisms that work for you.

</comment><comment><USER3> "having an authority figure to work with and offload some of the responsibilities to "

I wouldn't call this an employee mindset necessarily. For me, employee mindset is:

\- Need a specific set of duties defined for you and you are expected to deliver.

\- You are not willing to take risks. You like/need that "delusion" of a secure job/paycheck. I put delusion in quotes because as an entrepreneur, I actually think it is more risky being in a job than doing your own thing. But this is not for everyone.

\- You like "structure". The job of an employee is to follow structure/processes while one of things that an entrepreneur does is to set those processes/structure in place.

\- You don't really care how the business makes money. You just want to get your job done and GTFO. That is employee mentality. Nothing wrong with it but not entrepreneurial.

\- You only look at the short term and lower level stuff. That is employee mentality. If you truly want to be an entrepreneur, look at the bigger picture while work on the shorter term targets. For example, if you cannot visualize where you want to be in 12 months, being an entrepreneur will be tough.

\- You don't know exactly why YOU want to be an entrepreneur. I call it the "Everyone around me is doing it so why not me" wantra-preneur. Once in a while, every employee at a company thinks about throwing in the towel and starting their own thing. I mean who wouldn't these days, right ? Being an entrepreneur is glorified a lot. But the fact is that most people have no clue WHY they want to do it. It is because they have not defined what it means to THEM. That is employee mentality.

If you can work on these things and you make a conscious effort to improve yourself, you surely can stop the employee mindset. All the best.

</comment><comment><USER4> So, first, you are not unemployed. You are working.

Second, think of yourself as working for equity (This is why you should guard your equity from dilution as much as possible, it is real money). I.e. a regular employees usually work for 100% salary and 0 % equity. As a founder you switched this formula, you work for 0 salary and 100% equity.

Third, at least until you have customers, you might want to "hack" your brain (which wants you to be an employee) and join a co-working space with regular employees. This might bring more "regular job" feeling.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's ok to feel like that, totally. And it's not easy to become your own boss, you have to learn how to manage yourself and that will take time. You also need to change your expectations for rewards: you are no longer working for salary, you are working for profit now, which means that you have a different feedback loop now. As soon as you get used to this new feedback loop, you will be more comfortable with you new role.

</comment><comment><USER6> One, perhaps unpopular, opinion is there is nothing wrong about staying and employee and not trying to build your own company.

Ask yourself why you want to pursue entrepreneurship. Perhaps you can meet those desires while still wearing an employee hat (ie a side project FOR FUN, or lead a new product development project under the umbrella of your employer).

</comment><comment><USER7> Find your target total money you need to make and then work on making it, hopefully doing something you love. If you do it through employment or startup does it really matter?</comment>


Falling Into The Pit of Success (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.codinghorror.com/falling-into-the-pit-of-success/

<comment><USER2> The trouble is entropy: there are many more ways to screw it up than there are to get it right.

At least in the Java world I see stackoverflow as part of the problem more than part of the solution. Using tools like Maven and Spring involves understanding how they work, which means reading the manuals cover to cover over and over again.

If your intro to this tech have a 20 module project that's been worked on developers from Mr. Cowboy Genius to the Guy Who Got an MS in Artificial Intelligence because He Didn't Have Any Natural Intelligence. All of these guys write XML by cut and pasting from Stack Overflow so of course the build process works only 20% of the time and it's a terrifying thought to get anywhere near the wiring.

Put some czar who knows something in charge of these cross-cutting concerns and you find these technologies are just fine.

<comment><USER3> Maven haters gotta hate. Same goes for a lot of Java detractors. The tech works just fine, but you can't grok it with a two paragraph blog post. Not as bad as PHP however, where it's far too easy to learn just enough to be dangerous and the lurking dangers are manifold.</comment></comment>


The Metaverse of Fitness - <AUTHOR> https://insider.fitt.co/issue-no-90-the-metaverse-of-fitness/ <comment><AUTHOR> The future of exercise looks more like Fortnite than fitness as we know it.</comment>


How to use Instagram effects on your photos with Photoshop - <AUTHOR> http://7labs.heypub.com/tips-tricks/how-to-use-instagram-effects-on-your-photos-with-photoshop.html <comment><USER2> I remember doing similar things on a pirated 4.0 in '98 or something.

In 2012 I wonder which user of professional $700 graphic design software needs a tutorial on how to modify a photo, or why would some amateur 'enhance with Adobe Photoshop(tm)' while a free app on his phone can do it in a second. Really, who is this tutorial for?

<comment><AUTHOR> @zalew This tut for those who aren't having an iPhone or Android device in order to run instagram. :)</comment></comment>


Task Manager in Bash - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/magtastic/bashtodo <comment><AUTHOR> A few line script I made, to manage todos, if anyone is interested.</comment>


Demonsaw – Secure sharing platform - <AUTHOR> http://demonsaw.com/ <comment><USER2> It's closed source (i'm not asking for FOSS, just being able to compile myself) and there is a business behind it. It talks about protecting my privacy. Tell me how I should believe that.

<comment><USER3> According to the FAQ:

>Is demonsaw going to be Open Source?

>This was the question that I was most asked at Defcon. Demonsaw's foundation is built off of DemonCrypt, which is open-source and available for free on GitHub (MIT License, also developed by me). Demonsaw itself builds upon DemonCrypt's functionality and creates a graphical interface for users.

I can't find that repository though (this is the closest thing I could find: [https://github.com/eijah/demonsaw](https://github.com/eijah/demonsaw)).

<comment> mike-cardwell From a security point of view, "partially open source" is no better than "closed source".

<comment><USER3> I agree, however if the lib is indeed open source (which I'm not sure of), then it should be easier to create a fully open source clone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Slightly related, one day after the Demonsaw release party with John McAfee: [http://gawker.com/john-mcafee-arrested-while-armed-and- high-...](http://gawker.com/john-mcafee-arrested-while-armed-and-high-as-hell- on-xa-1722563654)

> The shootout with the police was highly exaggerated and in fact no one was > even hit by a bullet, let alone harmed by one. The Police knew me and I > don't believe their hearts were truly in the shootout, as it is not included > in the official report. When I ran out of ammunition, I surrendered quietly > and the officers and my self had a cigarette together and joked about my bad > aim.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty sure this happened _before_ the release party. They joked about it during Eijah's (demonsaw's author) talk at DEF CON.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would've been much more inclined to take this seriously had the testimonials not all been from John McAfee. After all he's been in the news for in the past few years, I'd treat a promotion by him as more harmful than helpful.

<comment><USER6> Pretty sure that's tongue-in-cheek.

</comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell Just watched the demo video on [https://www.demonsaw.com/documentation.php](https://www.demonsaw.com/documentation.php)

This is not user friendly software. It's geek friendly certainly, but not user friendly.

</comment><comment><USER7> The presentation software may be closed, the crypto is open.

There was even a workshop to build your own.

[https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-23/dc-23-workshops- schedu...](https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-23/dc-23-workshops- schedule.html#Eijah)

Most of the posters were obviously not at Defcon based on the comments and general ignorance.

</comment><comment><USER8> So everything is transferred through the Demonsew 'router'? And by everything I mean all searches and file transfers?

</comment><comment><USER9> Eijah here. Just finished up defcon and traveling all day today. Be glad to do an AMA tomorrow to answer all your questions. Will upload the MIT open source Demoncrypt code to git tomorrow (sorry didn't sleep much this weekend). In the meantime you can contact me directly @demon_saw or eijah at demonsaw dot com.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sorry it took a bit longer - still recovering from lack of sleep at Defcon. Demoncrypt code updated in git: [https://github.com/eijah/demoncrypt](https://github.com/eijah/demoncrypt)

</comment><comment><USER10> Ubuntu 14.04

noel@Aspire:~/Downloads/demonsaw_linux64$ ./demonsaw ./demonsaw: error while loading shared libraries: libxcb-sync.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

</comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me a lot of eMule but without being able to see the IP address of the people you are sharing with.

I wonder if the servers you connect to are required to log the traffic though?

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm wondering how much github would tolerate projects that use the site just for the issue tracker.

</comment><comment><USER12> What problem does this solve exactly?

(As others have mentioned), it's closed source, so who is going to trust it with personal data? I'd much rather trust bittorrent sync than this but this point is really irrelevant. This isn't mom and pop software.

On the other hand, those who would like to use it seriously (pirates, hackers, those who value privacy) will laugh at it, not only because it's closed source and thus all claims the author makes are unverifiable, but also because the architecture is crap.

So, summarizing, is there anything of substance besides hype and famewhoring here? I think not.

<comment><USER13> Time is your friend. Just wait and watch. It's ticking, one second by one... but in a friendly way it does it's "ticking job" or... maybe better "tickling job" ? You choose, what fits best for your case.

btw, seems that the open core CPP project is available through site's Download section... under title with big letters named "Crypto for Hackers: The Workshop"

as is denoted here: [https://github.com/eijah/demonsaw/issues/2](https://github.com/eijah/demonsaw/issues/2)

<comment><USER7> Yeah. It was a workshop at Defcon. There seems to be a huge lack of awareness in this thread!</comment></comment></comment>


The man who declared the 'end of history' fears for democracy's future - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/02/09/the-man-who-declared-the-end-of-history-fears-for-democracys-future/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_end-of-history-1040am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory <comment><USER2> I think the issue is really about the super rich (the 1%) now own and control 98% of the worlds wealth and resources and rest of us (99%) are attacking each other over the remaining 2.</comment>


Ask HN: Starting over from scratch.  Coding recommendations? - <AUTHOR>

What frameworks, languages, and databases should I consider?<p>Scalability is a major consideration of course. <comment><USER2> Don't you think it would be a good idea to consider the problem you're trying to solve first?

If you start by specifying the tools first you're almost guaranteed to be wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see. I may have been misunderstood due to how non-specific the question was. I guess I'm asking if there are newer technologies that the community is becoming more in favor of.

For web, which is what this project requires, I've typically used PHP and MySQL as my trusty go-to. I know Facebook has used it successfully to a certain extent, but I'm wondering if a Ruby MongoDB approach would be better for the long term.

In short, I'm wondering if I'm using a chisel when there's a jackhammer out there.

<comment><USER3> Long term for web apps is JavaScript and REST because it gives you a common service back end for mobile and other consumers of your services. Take a look at Require.js, Backbone.js and jQuery build a webapp with them that communicates with some REST services. For content based sites, the Python web projects are coming on strong and ROR has a lot of mind-share.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like both of those. A lot.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Second Biggest Bitcoin Exchange Closes - <AUTHOR> http://tradehillblog.com/2012/02/13/tradehill-suspending-trading-and-returning-client-funds/

<comment><USER2> "Closes" is probably not the right word, they hope to get the site running again. But it's a bad sign anyway.</comment>


Phishing app hits Android market...3 weeks ago - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/operating-systems/92331/phishing-app-hits-android-market3-weeks-ago <comment><USER2> There has to be some fault laid on the people who installed this app too. If I download an Adobe AIR application that is suppose to tie to my bank accounts, and that app turns out to be a phishing app, who's fault is that?

When you download the Bank of America app, you click on the link on the Bank of America website and it goes directly to the Android App Market where I can download the application. That is all the vetting I need.

There is obviously going to be some issues with the Android App Market since it is completely open, but I would rather take the risk, vet claims myself and not be limited to the apps I am offered.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but you (and most of us on HN) are more cautious than the average consumer–ALL of whom use mobile phones.

You really think everyone is going to visit the Bank of America site first? People will simply Google "BofA app for droid" ... then they may land on an unauthorized phishing app.

<comment><USER4> I agree completely. How long will it be before there are many competing apps with the same branding? For instance, you may soon have 5 different Bank of America apps, and consumers who are less discerning have a 4 in 5 chance of selecting the wrong, malicious app. Perhaps the best way to combat this is taking the approach that Twitter has and "verifying" accounts. Otherwise certain industries chance at thriving in the Android app community could be compromised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps smartphones with app stores need an OS-level keychain of sorts?

You could then teach users to only give passwords via the proper OS interface. (One which would be able to display some sort of 'trust phrase' established earlier by the user.)

If the phishing app doesn't collect and retain your usernames/passwords directly, risk is mitigated.

It wouldn't hurt to prominently display certified sources either. Some sort of interface cue that the App you're downloading is verified to have been signed by the same people who run the site it's trying to access.

<comment><USER6> I haven't acutally read what those application do in detail, but afaik apps cannot read data from other apps (that is, it's not possible for a 3rd party app to read the credit card information you entered in another app, atleast not without you granting it the permission to do so). So, i suspect those were apps that pretended to be official (so, yes, phishing apps ;) ). Just wanted to clarify :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The choice between the Android store model and Apple App Store model is a false dichotomy. I see no reason why it wouldn't be possible to combine the two - provide an open app store like Android, but for critical apps (email, banking, etc) have some sort of verification process. The computer industry has done a good job helping users determine if a website is secure (lock icon, yellow bar in some browsers) and I think the same can be done for the various app stores by training users to look for a lock or checkmark in the app's description.

<comment><USER6> This. I think it would be very beneficial to have some sort of approval for critical apps. But, in regard to some stories we've all read about the apple approval process, i really wouldn't like to see that on android.</comment></comment>


Slaves to the algorithm - <AUTHOR> http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/steven-poole-can-algorithms-ever-take-over-from-humans/

<comment><USER2> from the article "Suppose you are in a self-driving car going across a narrow bridge, and a school bus full of children hurtles out of control towards you. There is no room for the vehicles to pass each other. Should the self-driving car take the decision to drive off the bridge and kill you in order to save the children?"</comment>


Stop hesitating. Just go for it - <AUTHOR> https://betterthansure.com/stop-hesitating-8b6ba11da355#.c6quybiqr <comment><USER2> Isnt it that like 95 % of startups fail, but sure lets justbe as optimistic as the hedge fund manager or whatever</comment>


Facebook's Advertising Is Starting To Spiral Out Of Control - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/07/01/facebooks-advertising-is-starting-to-spiral-out-of-control/ <comment><USER2> This is not my experience at all.

I have noticed an increase in the number of ads but also not anywhere near what the author demonstrates.

I have to ask though, how many connections does he have through his Facebook account? And how many of those connections are 'good' (active) users of the site?

I can see why his page would be all ads if the connections he has on the website aren't producing any content...? In which case, sorry... I don't think this is Facebook's problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ads on Facebook always remind me of a phone solicitor calling me when I'm eating dinner. I think people will have a limited tolerance for people pushing ads to them while they are talking to their friends and family.</comment>


What three books have you read that shape how you run/plan to run your company? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> [http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers- Launching/...](http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers- Launching/dp/0615373968?tag=dedasys-20) \- this is still _the_ book for bootstrappers, as far as I'm concerned.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'll check it out.</comment></comment>


Building a Job Classification system from scratch - <AUTHOR> https://www.truework.com/blog/engineering/2020-04-01-job-title-classification-system/ <comment><USER2> How does your system compare against the SOC system or LI's?

<comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: I worked at LinkedIn. Currently, Linkedin's job classification system doesn't have open API. You can check their documentation but they won't provide access to it. So if you want to use it in our application that'll be difficult.

SOC is a good basis but our API allows you to correct for errors, synonyms, etc... That makes our approach way more robust. We plan to provide a mapping from our classification system to the SOC at a latter time.</comment></comment>


Developer built a neural net for high frequency trading and it makes $3500/mo - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/stock-trading-bot <comment><USER2> The claims made in this interview are extremely suspect, it just not make sense. Absolutely no relevant details are included. The developer claims he was able to built an AI trading strategy that is profitable 95% of the time. No technical details about the strategy or platform for trading is provided. A few trading buzzwords thrown in a few places. The rest of the interview is platitudes and inspirational hacker talk

I think IndieHackers needs to investigate the claims and be provided proof, otherwise this appears to be a fake project for the developer's own publicity. If IndieHackers are fine with that, I will stop visiting as I cannot trust that the content is not just shallow, exaggerated claims to raise peoples profiles.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a made up story that the developer cooked up. And the site owner did not verify a single thing before publishing anyting.

</comment><comment><USER4> What API can be used for this? Apis for realtime data, and actual trading.

<comment><USER3> Look at interactive brokers.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Saturn Work – A freelancing marketplace for caricatures - <AUTHOR> https://saturn.work <comment><USER2> This is great. Do you plan to do this for other things also: Like freelancer for painting?

<comment><AUTHOR> Only if we succeed at caricatures</comment></comment>