Gold standard was bad, but Bitcoin standard is even worse - <AUTHOR> http://blog.millionintegrals.com/gold-standard-was-bad-but-bitcoin-standard-is-even-worse/ <comment><USER2> So much pop Keynesianism spreading real misunderstandings. I really wish people who argued against deflation would take the time to understand the underlying theories.

 _Deflation means, that the most fundamental law of finance is broken. The law, that says: It is much better to be given one dollar today, than to have one dollar next year._

Deflation does not break this law. It is always better to be given one bitcoin now than one bitcoin in the future - if you get it now you have the _option_ of spending it, which has value. (If 1 BTC is worth 4 bags of pot today and 5 next year, 1 BTC in a year is worthless to me if I want to smoke now.)

He then argues that investment vehicles with a positive rate of return reduces consumption. This is true of both BTC and SPY. Unless bitcoin has the highest rate of return of all investment vehicles, the effect on consumption is irrelevant. I.e., if bitcoin has a return rate of 1% and SPY has a return rate of 2%, bitcoin will _not_ affect the savings rate or reduce consumption [1].

If you are worried about people investing in bitcoin, consumption is irrelevant - the worry is that people will shift investments from SPY to BTC.

The fundamental problem with deflationary currencies is _nominal rigidity_. If you argue against deflation without mentioning this, you don't know what you are talking about.

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

tl;dr; Go learn Keynesian economics from a textbook that does math and carefully states assumptions. Don't learn it from newspaper columns.

[1] I oversimplify slightly. Since SPY and BTC are likely to be minimally correlated with each other, you can construct portfolios of both securities which will likely have a higher risk-adjusted return SPY alone. So the portfolio rate of return might go up a few bps, and consumption will shift a little bit towards investment. This is a _small_ effect.

<comment><USER3> > It is always better to be given one bitcoin now than one bitcoin in the > future.

A counter-example: Your pot dealer says you can have 4 bags of pot now, and you have 1 year to pay the 1 BTC you owe him. Being a man of better impulse control than you, and a prudent financial manager of his drug enterprise, he values 1 BTC in a year more than 1 BTC today.

That is, of course, assuming the expected value (after applying the deflation and factoring in risk of non-payment) is greater than the value he could build by investing the 1 BTC in his business today - an open question until we have some real deflation figures.

> (If 1 BTC is worth 4 bags of pot today and 5 next year, 1 BTC in a year is > worthless to me if I want to smoke now.)

As I tried to illustrate above, finance is not something that's based on your personal preferences - it's a complex inter-dependent system.

<comment><USER2> Your counterexample makes no sense. If I pay him 1 bitcoin today and he puts the bitcoin under his mattress, he has 1 bitcoin in 1 year with 0 probability of non-payment.

        1 x 1 > 1 x P(payment)

He also has the _option_ to invest in his business or anything else, which has value.

Your claim amounts to the idea that giving someone a loan at 0% interest can be profitable. It can't.

<comment><USER3> You're reasoning in circles. The loan is not 0% interest when denoted in dollars, since a deflationary currency will be worth more dollars as time goes by. Your reply only makes sense in a world where bitcion is the only currency in existence - a logical absurdity. You've disproved your point by negation - giving someone a 0% interest loan should indeed not be profitable, but with a deflationary currency it is.

Disclosure: I have no stake in the success or failure of bitcoin. I'm interested in knowing if you do, just so I know to stop wasting my time?

<comment><USER2> Suppose 1 BTC = $X today and $Y in a year. If I pay my dealer 1 BTC today and he doesn't spend it, he has $Y in a year. If he extends me a 0% interest loan for 1 year, there is a probability P < 1 he has $Y in a year, for an expected value of P x $Y < $Y.

Loaning someone an asset at 0% is always worse than holding the asset. The value of the loan is P(repayment) x value of asset in future. The value of the asset today = value of asset in future + option value. There is no escaping this mathematical identity. Provided P(repayment) < 1, you are better off holding the asset, regardless of the rate of return on the asset.

If you were correct, then you could make a profit by loaning out shares of SPY or other security with a positive expected rate of return at 0%. You can't.

If you disagree with this, please express your disagreement in math.

I don't own any bitcoins, and have no stake in it. I think it's a good idea that might solve the current mess of payment systems, however.

<comment><USER3> > Loaning someone an asset at 0% is always worse than holding the asset.

Exactly. My previous reasoning was indeed a bit muddied, but what you're saying now clarifies it. I don't disagree with your math.

There are so many logical contradictions in the concept, which is why I end up making silly assertions that you correctly pointed out. Instead, the argument should simply be that the rate of return on bitcoin, due simply to built-in deflation, and expressed in dollars, may or may not be so high that it always makes sense to hold the asset rather than use it as currency to buy other assets. In which case it can't function as a currency: contradiction.

Of course, I do believe the BTC USD exchange rate will be the dominant factor in determining prices expressed in BTC in the long term, but I'm sure plenty of people would disagree. If that does happen, a lot of this becomes theoretical - the worsening exchange rate will take care of the deflation.

Note I'm not necessarily for or against bitcion. Thanks for the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ah jebus another blogger who misunderstands bitcoin ecosystem, technology and its users. Who is looking for attention for his blog since its good linkbait. Well he/she got it.

Economists (including the armchair variety like this blogger) should be delighted bitcoin exists, it gives them something to compare and measure and write about for their dismal "science"

In meantime some of us continue to build for bitcoin and have profited nicely out of it (not the rise in price but saving on fees and no chargebacks)

If I hoarded all those coins over last few years instead of using bitcoin as a means of exchange, i be a bitcoin millionaire now (personally i am happy bitcoin is where it is now and where its headed), if everyone did that bitcoin be useless, the fact that its not useless now shows that whole "deflationary" argument is flawed here in the real world.

p.s: There is no lack of alternate cryptocurrencies, if you want inflation, go make your own "inflate-a-coin"TM

p.s #2: I bet in next decade we would have some central bank(s) creating their own cryptocurrencies, for example the Fed could create a "Bit-dolla" and set an inflation rate of 2% and they could control all the mining, if they get IRS to agree to accept it for taxation purpose we overnight have a state sanctioned crypt-ocurrency. Actually whats scary about this scenario is the state knowing everything you buy/sell (if your wallet is tied to SSN for example). I could definitely see governments embracing bitcoinlike techonlogies in order to get more power and control.

<comment><USER5> it already exists: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflate-a- coin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflate-a-coin)

<comment><USER6> Link is returning "page does not exist"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _...I know no modern country that currently adheres to gold standard and no > plans for its return have emerged across a large number of economical > cycles. This leads us to believe that the decision to abandon it was backed > by real economical incentives to do so, not emotional or political._

Most "modern" countries also want to spy on their citizens, curb free speech, and spend their way out of debt. Since most of them do it, their decisions must have been backed by real incentives, not emotional or political. /s

The gold standard at least kept the money almost sane, but now any government can print as much money as they want. Inflation created as a result is one of the biggest hidden taxes on the poor there is. Giving governments a monopoly on the money supply is part of the reason our current currencies are worth less and less every year.

My favorite aspect of Bitcoin is that it isn't created by committee, and no secret team of government economists gets to control the supply. I personally think Bitcoin in particular will be supplanted by something better, but I can't wait until crypto-currencies become the norm and we look back to see that the naysayers were on the wrong side of history.

</comment><comment><USER8> Well, the good news is that there will probably never be a "bitcoin standard". The gold standard consisted in Nations basically enforcing the convertibility of currencies into gold (or indirectly into dollars, which were convertible into gold). So it was an authoritative enforcement of what money was supposed to be.

Bitcoin is a free currency. You're free to use it, or not. You're free to fork it, to create an other one with different monetary rules. And people do. Bitcoin is thus not exactly a "standard" as gold was. If you worry about the fixed aggregate idea, just don't. If there is no more bitcoins to create, and if the economy needs additional monetary units, then they will appear in the exchange market, as the price of other cryptocurrencies will rise, or others being created.

</comment><comment><USER9> > _In mathematics, when you write a paper, you are always standing firmly on > the shoulders of generations of common knowledge that you don 't need to > prove yourself - you can safely assume your readers agree with you on the > matter. In the same way, I will assume that we agree on the following > statement: Implementing gold standard in the modern economy will have no > beneficial effect for the mankind, but may have very dire consequences._

You might as well postulate the existence of God.

<comment><USER10> Well, if you don't agree with the premise, you can save yourself the trouble of reading the rest of the article. If more people stated their possibly controversial premises right from the start, we could all save ourselves a lot of time that would otherwise be wasted on arguments.

So, at least there's that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had the same thoughts about this in my head, but wasn't able to express them as well as this guy. The more you think about it all, the more of a false economy it is - the only people keeping the hype going are the ones who have a vested interest in doing so.

I did buy some BTC about 18 months ago, unfortunately I didn't hang on to them until now - but I didn't expect things to go this far.

</comment><comment><USER11> Tldr: bitcoin is bad because it is inherently deflational and inhibits fractional reserve banking by virtue of its seamless operation.

</comment><comment><USER12> tl;dr; gold standard was abandoned a long time ago, we survived, and therefore it was a good choice to do so.

Or, in the words of the author: "no plans for its return have emerged across a large number of economical cycles"

First of all - it's a weasel-talk. What is that large number of cycles he's talking about? Why is this number sufficient enough to come to the conclusion? Also, the plans to get back to the gold standard come up all the time, they are just unsuccessful.

(even if I agree with the claim of the article, the argumentation is lousy)

<comment><USER4> I like how he ignores recent past of almost the whole global economy imploding due to debt based fiat system, and only being "resolved" by issuing even more debt and printing more dollars

<comment><USER13> Proponents of the gold standard also ignore the slightly-less recent past of currency crises in Europe and Asia in the 80s and 90s, all due to fixed currency exchanges (which is basically just a variant of the gold standard, with gold being replaced by whatever basket you're using). The fact that we were able to print our way out of a crisis of confidence is a _good_ thing, because in a gold standard world we couldn't do anything of the sort. A credit freeze would have lasted a lot longer.

<comment><USER4> The confidence is not in the currency or the central bank.

The confidence (of the markets) is that the central bank (on behest of the government) will use currency as a tool in order to ensure that economies dont sink due due to negative outlook on the future.

There is nothing stopping central banks from creating their own cryptocurrency and controlling it by controlling all the mining (and hence being able to change the rules of deflation/inflation set into protocol). In fact a "bit- dolla" could probably be used much more effectively as such a tool since everyone would know what everyone else has as blockchain is public. Would these banks have gotten "too big too fail" if their "wallet addresses" were public?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The article brings a very important perspective to the discussion of bitcoins. The perspective is very much grounded to our current economic system. And it is in this 'grounding' that brings a discussion about the macro view bitcoins.

The global perspective is rather difficult to consolidate with the current state of bitcoins. The perspective also is one that if we want to maintain the status quo of our current economic engine then bitcoins is not the answer but the antithesis. If we want to maintain the status quo then bitcoins or any other medium wouldn't be necessary or sought after. The fact of the matter is that so many people dislike our current system let alone understand it anymore than our leaders.

Bitcoins wasn't an answer to how to fund more wars more easily or how to help banks manage their portfolios with less fees or how to make corporations more productive. Bitcoins was an answer to the ruling class endless excuse of knowing more than the little man. Bitcoins was an answer to the endless excuses of why you should have less and them more. Bitcoins was an answer to the continue mismanagement of the individuals worth and burden. Bitcoins was an answer to the simple want of transacting without a middleman who will rob you in the process. Bitcoins was a solution at the most fundamental level: Me making a transaction using my own hardwork 'money' with you.

Will bitcoins be an answer to the global perspective brought forth by the author? Who knows but it's a good question.

</comment><comment><USER15> Yet another person who doesn't realize that the financial markets will price any predictable deflation into Bitcoin , as fast as they can predict it, until it is not longer deflating.

</comment><comment><USER16> Cryptocurrency and elemental metal will be the last bastions of money because credit is only money when there is trust. Everything else can be counterfeited.

The "bad for humanity" thing this author is talking about is called "reality" in some circles. An economy is supposed to transmit the pain of dwindling resources by the proxy of dwindling money, so as a society we then act to conserve. The last decade of the US consumer and several US-led invasions of other countries probably wouldn't have happened without so much easy credit.

When the US borrows money from others, it burdens them with an eventual default risk. When the US makes unfunded future promises to americans like social security, and medicare, and inflates their dollar with QE, their people's pain is merely amplified and delayed.

I don't believe there is an absolute right or wrong answer to Keynesianism. A little is okay, too much is catastrophic. The US has been borrowing continuously for decades. I don't think you can really call that Keynesianism.

</comment><comment><USER17> Fractional reserve banking is the root of all evil. It's why the US national debt stands so high and why it can only keep growing.

[http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/](http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrQX4CF6Bxs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrQX4CF6Bxs)

<comment><USER18> Right, it's not like we were ever on track to pay it off at the beginning of the 21st century or any such nonsense...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Author's reasoning suffers from the problem of trying to apply old models into new environments.

For instance, the mentioning of impossibility of credit, or how that manufacturers won't be able to finance new products with a long-ish development cycle, and how that is only beneficial for the wealthy.

He would be right if we lived in a world where the only possible way to do business is to create the product first and sell it later. I would argue the opposite. Futures markets already exist. I can buy a house when it is still just a blueprint and a folder with nice pictures. In fact, I wish people could do the same with phones, groceries, clothes, electricity...

The more certainty we have about money flowing around, the easier it is to have efficient financial products. The less risk there is. And the less risk there is, the easier it is to provide credit affordable to everyone, including the little guy.

</comment><comment><USER20> Bitcoin doesn't control you.

Bitcoin isn't absolute. Everything can coexist. Blabbering on about bitcoin's "deflationary" model is as purposeless as writing incessantly about gold, coffee, national currencies, tiddlywinks, real estate, oil, and crown jewels.

There will be no "bitcoin standard" written into law. Bitcoin isn't _intending_ to be everything to everyone. Nothing is everything to everyone. No one thing is absolute. Until a day comes when we're all serving the same cyborg empire, one need not worry about being forced to have all chips in one basket. Until then, deflation and inflation of particular assets will continue to have little overall bearing. As for bitcoin, only the artificial appearance of deflation exists. It's artificial because choice is still possible. You place value into things. You decide. If you don't like or trust bitcoin (or gold) to maintain value, don't use them. If you don't like or trust national force-backed currencies to maintain value, then try not to use them. Diversify. Talking about deflation in bitcoin becomes as meaningless as talking about the deflationary aspects of dogecoin, computer parts at a point in time, or the current yield of corn.

In other words...

More options and competition do not contract or stifle an economy. It expands choice within a form of economic homeostasis. [ _Wait, but, doesn 't bitcoin hurt bailed-out bankers and a debt-based society!?_] Right. That's the point. That's one of its many strong competitive attributes. Every asset is predicated on faith. It's faith that it will exist tomorrow, or in ten years, and have your name on it. It's just that some people would rather not place their faith into 'US economics.' Many people like that status quo. Other people do not. Other people may, on principle, find the status quo violent and abysmal; person-to-person trade itself acts as a path to peace. It's a personal decision. Choice is important like that.

</comment><comment><USER21> The "About me" part really distracted and made the article sour for me.

We always tell others not to attack someone's character but rather focus on their argument, in a way this is the reverse.

It's like you're setting up your credibility to make your argument stronger. I suggest remove that part completely.

</comment><comment><USER22> I know people in the bitcoin world are sometimes overzealous and can sound like salespeople...

...However, it's articles like this that make me glad that bitcoin doesn't need much PR and will succeed (or fail) on its own merits.

No matter hour much baloney like this gets written, this guy and others like him can't stop people from using bitcoins, thankfully.

<sarcasm>

The dollar will never work because it's an inflationary currency, and if your money is worth less tomorrow than it was today no one would ever save anything and society would collapse the first time there is a drought or other calamity.

</sarcasm>

</comment><comment><USER23> The part about credit sounds a bit fishy.

Ordinary people deposit money in the bank, and the bank goes then and invest it. If the investment is a success, the bank pockets the profit and repays the deposited money back when asked. If the investment fails, government steps in and repays the deposited money.

How is that system connected with currency, and why should its existence be critical for society?

</comment><comment><USER24> Such posts, and similar sentiments voiced by likes of Paul Krugman, make me think that Bitcoin is doing the right thing.

</comment><comment><USER25> Money as an abstract 'value store' is not stable. It worked in the past with gold, because we did not have too many ways to speculate on it and transfer value from one asset to another. But it stopped working already in the beginning of the 20th century. This is perhaps a bold claim - but I believe that stability in money can be only an effect of regulation. This regulation does not need to be rigid centralized manipulation - but perhaps it can be a market-driven mechanism ([http://mercatus.org/publication/market-driven- nominal-gdp-ta...](http://mercatus.org/publication/market-driven-nominal-gdp- targeting-regime) \- have not yet read this one).

Money as an abstract leads only to bubbles, because personal gains the of using it as a zero-sum game (outguessing your peers) dwarf gains of every other human activity.

</comment><comment><USER26> There was a time when high-quality articles got upvoted on HN.

</comment><comment><USER27> OP points out the gold standard has disappeared from all modern countries and that this is a good reason to eschew a similar system in Bitcoin.

But could it be that the reason why the gold standard disappeared was that it acted as a check on political power? That is, that leaving the gold standard behind has permitted politicians to consolidate their power to a level heretofore unseen in "democratic" countries?

Just because a system has been left behind doesn't mean it's a bad system. Sometimes good systems are abandoned if they challenge/limit the authority of a powerful actor.

And I'm no gold bug, but I'm not convinced that a monetary standard is an entirely bad thing. I think there are trade-offs in each direction.

</comment><comment><USER28> >Fact is, without such freedom, banks would not exist.

Ok, if you say so. But wait, this is the next sentence:

>Or their functioning would be severely limited.

Oh, so the fact that banks would not exist is not a fact anymore?

</comment><comment><USER28> >I will assume that we agree on the following statement

>To back this up

If we assume that there is no need to back it up afterwards. Why would you need to prove an assumption?

</comment><comment><USER29> Some general points 1\. Most of human history has been deflationary (either .8% or 1.8% if I remember my monetary history correctly). That used to be normal

2\. There are several ways of having a gold standard, namely one where people use actual gold, one where the exchange rate is set by convention, and one where the government does sets the exchange rate.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think bitcoin is great, but I don't think that making bitcoin a standard anything is a good thing. It's waaaaay too early.

There also are too many ways to steal one's bitcoin wallet, computer security is not mature yet.

I can't believe people are still finding ways to talk about bitcoin by advocating it as a standard.

</comment><comment><USER31> The social welfare program is nothing more than an open-ended credit balance system which creates a false capital industry to give nonproductive people a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. This can be useful, however, because the recipients become state property in return for the "gift," a standing army for the elite. For he who pays the piper picks the tune.

Those who get hooked on the economic drug, must go to the elite for a fix. In this, the method of introducing large amounts of stabilizing capacitance is by borrowing on the future "credit" of the world. This is a fourth law of motion - onset, and consists of performing an action and leaving the system before the reflected reaction returns to the point of action - a delayed reaction.

The means of surviving the reaction is by changing the system before the reaction can return. By this means, politicians become more popular in their own time and the public pays later. In fact, the measure of such a politician is the delay time.

The same thing is achieved by a government by printing money beyond the limit of the gross national product, and economic process called inflation. This puts a large quantity of money into the hands of the public and maintains a balance against their greed, creates a false self-confidence in them and, for awhile, stays the wolf from the door.

They must eventually resort to war to balance the account, because war ultimately is merely the act of destroying the creditor, and the politicians are the publicly hired hit men that justify the act to keep the responsibility and blood off the public conscience. (See section on consent factors and social-economic structuring.)

If the people really cared about their fellow man, they would control their appetites (greed, procreation, etc.) so that they would not have to operate on a credit or welfare social system which steals from the worker to satisfy the bum.

Since most of the general public will not exercise restraint, there are only two alternatives to reduce the economic inductance of the system.

1\. Let the populace bludgeon each other to death in war, which will only result in a total destruction of the living earth.

2\. Take control of the world by the use of economic "silent weapons" in a form of "quiet warfare" and reduce the economic inductance of the world to a safe level by a process of benevolent slavery and genocide.

The latter option has been taken as the obviously better option. At this point it should be crystal clear to the reader why absolute secrecy about the silent weapons is necessary. The general public refuses to improve its own mentality and its faith in its fellow man. It has become a herd of proliferating barbarians, and, so to speak, a blight upon the face of the earth.

They do not care enough about economic science to learn why they have not been able to avoid war despite religious morality, and their religious or self- gratifying refusal to deal with earthly problems renders the solution of the earthly problem unreachable to them.

It is left to those few who are truly willing to think and survive as the fittest to survive, to solve the problem for themselves as the few who really care. Otherwise, exposure of the silent weapon would destroy our only hope of preserving the seed of the future true humanity.

<comment><USER32> You forget that the largest recipient of welfare ('security') has been corporations, not "bums" as you put it. Despite this, the elitism of society blames "bums" for our economic problems. It's the corporations who drain the economy, not individuals - that much is clear.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Built a 'Kayak for courier services' - <AUTHOR> http://www.goshippo.com <comment><USER3> Looks interesting. We are dealing with finding better shipping prices for international shipments on shirts and what we have found is that distributors that ship really high volume are able to negotiate better rates. Does Shippo have the ability to take advantage of the scale as the site increases in shipments? How do you differ from EasyPost?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi frankdenbow, it's great to hear from you. My favourite point of differentiation between us and all existing shipping startups is that we're building a database that aims at integrating all existing courier service not only the 4 big ones (FedEx, UPS, TNT, DHL). The main thought behind our concept is that the small local courier services mostly offer much more competitive prices than the big 4 ones. However, they are difficult to find and compare and most people don't bother searching. At the same time we're negotiating with our courier services to get discounts because of economics of scale. Right now, our discounts are not very high yet. But as traffic increases we'll be able to go back to the courier services and negotiate better rates. That's the goal!

<comment><USER4> Don't understand your negotiated prices apply to my shipments? I noticed that user is requested to create account at respective carrier. Could not use it since the server ajax is not responding. PS - <USER2> URL:[https://goshippo.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?from- dd=Orange%...](https://goshippo.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?from- dd=Orange%2C+CA+92865&to-dd=Moorpark%2C+CA+93021&from-country=US&from- state=CA&from-city=Orange&from-ZIP=92865&from-ZIP-type=user&from-street=&to- country=US&to-state=CA&to-city=Moorpark&to-ZIP=93021&to-ZIP- type=user&action=ajax_hook_get_rates&to%5BStreet%5D=&dimensions- length=12&dimensions-width=12&dimensions-height=5&dimensions-unit=inch&weight- value=80&weight-unit=lbs) Request Method:GET Status Code:500 Internal Server Error

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sincerely sorry about the server problems. We received an overwhelming response from the HN community today (thanks!) and the server became quite slow because of that. We didn't expect that and were unprepared with our MVP. Yes, depending on the courier service we're sometimes able to pass on our discounts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The results are wildly inaccurate due to the omission of online rates for USPS. If you have a paypal account you can buy and print shipping labels at home and save $1-5 on every package you send. It makes USPS the cheapest shipping option for nearly everything including international shipping.

Also, FedEx and UPS charge an extra $3 or so when delivering to a residential address. So the low prices shown on your site don't reflect real world usage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi ChrisNorstrom, I appreciate your concern and thanks for the feedback. We've integrated the official APIs of FedEx, UPS and USPS and are optimising the results every day. I will look into the points you mentioned and check if they are not reflected by the APIs already. We are aware of the residential vs commercial address difference and as of tomorrow we'll have the differentiation live.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, I love the site btw. I was just in a rush to type it out and head to work.

USPS has discounted online rates that apply to everyone using Stamps.com, Paypal, Ebay, Amazon, Etsy, Endicia, Pitney Bowes, and any other postage printing service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for letting us know! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm launching a marketplace within a month or so for custom machining and fabrication. Vendors want instantaneous quotes and labels. I'll probably be integrating with EasyPost to start. Here are some thoughts:

I need an API so a vendor can print labels from my site. I want one-click shipping so that they get 1) a label 2) billed 3) pickup. Speed is important to my vendors. Most of them bill hourly and think of their time that way so anything that reduces time per job is a big deal.

My flow looks like:

Customer enters specs and shipping info for a price quote -> Vendor responds with a quote including shipping

If all goes well, I'll also do instantaneous pricing for certain machining processes. Unless I missed something in the docs, EasyPost apparently does not do quotes based solely on zip/dimensions/weight and I never got a response from support when I asked. For me, this means that to get a shipping quote, customers also need to enter at least an "address_line1". There may be a business/technical reason for this, but I'm worried that having to enter that additional piece of personally-identifying info on my site will be a dealbreaker for first-time customers while I'm starting up.

For my use case, I'd like to see Stripe Connect functionality for shipping: vendors sign up for shipping through OAuth and then I interact with the shipping service on behalf of each vendor. On EasyPost, it appears that a UPS/Fedex/USPS/whatever account is tied to the EasyPost account. It was suggested that I bill vendors for shipping and go through my own carrier accounts, but this seems messy.

If you could address some concerns for marketplaces in the future, I'd be pretty happy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi tbran, thanks for leaving a comment. Here's my take on your concerns: Easypost is a really great service. They were in YC and I think they are a great choice for the flow you mentioned. We're quite different from them (while we're still addressing the same problem).

The address_line 1 is not necessary to get an accurate quote. However, it is necessary to generate a label that you'll need for sending the package. You'll have to be careful to enter the correct address. FedEx charges extra afterwards for address corrections. Our goal was to build an API that allows you to get accurate quotes without having to enter a lot of data. However for the final label purchase the exact address will be necessary.

UPS/FedEx etc. don't allow you to pass on your account to people that are not directly connected with your business. I assume that is what you meant by "messy." If you still want to do that stripe connect is certainly a good choice. This is exactly what we're working on - to get contracts with courier services to eliminate this problem.

About the flow that we had envisioned for our service: customers choose the product they want to buy -> tell us in which country they live -> we show them all available courier services -> they chose the servicelevel that suits their needs best (fastest, cheapest, whatever) -> check out -> the label is directly sent to the vendor -> vendor sticks it on the package -> brings it to the post office/gets pickup (vendor can specify if only pickups are allowed & which day is best for pick up) -> done (all through API)

Just email me at laura(at)goshippo.com if you have any more questions. Happy to help out.

<comment><USER6> Regarding the "messy account passing", I'd just like to be able to interact with a vendor's own UPS account with minimal setup from my vendor. Thanks for the info! It clears some things up.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know a service that offers multiple courier services and allows multiple accounts... If you want you can integrate the API of one courier service, such as UPS, and offer access with multiple accounts. Or you can use Easypost and have access to multiple courier services with one single account. I'm sorry that I couldn't be more helpful. Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When scanning the HN titles, I first thought you built a physical kayak that will be used by kayak-couriers (as in bike-couriers).

<comment><USER8> ha ha ha, I totally thought the same thing. I was excited to see what city would benefit from from a kayak delivery service. I assumed venice :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was under the impression (hearsay) that the Big Two carriers at least (FedEx, UPS) do not appreciate having their prices directly compared and contrasted.

Is offering this service only for international shipments a way to get around that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey adyus, valid question. FedEx and UPS have similar points in their T&Cs that talk about comparison. Feel free to get in touch personally to talk about possible solutions!

<comment><USER10> Do you guys have contracts with the carriers to have access to their API?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. Ping me if you need more information about the contracts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cool idea but I couldn't get it to work.

It kept throwing errors saying that I needed to pick a valid zip code or city from the dropdown (despite having done so). I had 45247 and Tokyo Japan as my two selections. It also said "This field is required" with a bubble that pointed off screen with no way to scroll over to whatever the field was.

Using an iPhone 5, ios 7.

<comment><USER12> Trying to use Tokyo might be your problem. There is a notice posted at the top of the page saying "Supporting Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States to date" so it looks like your selection shouldn't work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey 67726e, you're right. We're currently showing the best rates for these countries, meaning that we have more than one courier provider for them in our database to allow comparison. All the other countries should work nevertheless simply without "good" (cheap) rates. So it's our bad, apologies!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wonderful! I don't ship internationally very often, but I've wanted something like this every time.

I tried sorting my search results using the buttons on the upper right, but none of them worked. I suggest also making the column labels work for toggle sorting.

The option to include a screenshot with feedback is a great idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great feedback and the compliment! You're right, the sorting feature is still not functioning well. It's on the to do list (the to dos are pilling up with all the great feedback we're getting here:)). Thanks for letting me know!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Brilliant! Suggestions: 1. Can you enable keyboard navigation for the dropdowns? 2. Currency seems to default to my language setting, not to my location. Can this be configurable? Bugs: 1. Sorting doesn't seem to work. 2. Your blog seems to be having performance problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, much appreciated :) Keyboard navigation should work already. Which browser are you using? About the bug: thanks, will fix it now!

<comment><USER14> Keyboard navigation: I'm running Firefox on Linux. Tabbing between fields works, up/down arrow to select from dropdown doesn't work at the moment.

<comment><USER15> Same for me FF25 on WinXP.

Did a trial entry for the UK between cities and found that UPS was cheapest, if I book it I'll try and do so through the site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What is the timeline for other European countries?

Personally, I am most interested in the Netherlands, since I am building e-commerce sites there. (And to persuade you: .nl might be a small market, in absolute numbers, but percentagewise it tops the European charts in online sales).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Berkes, let's talk about this via email. I'm laura(at)goshippo.com. We'd love to prioritise countries for the HN community and would like to learn more about your shipping needs & preferences!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Worked for me. Love the idea. Although I would not use it myself mainly because I rarely send anything ( just once in last 10 years maybe ). I am not sure if I am a rare case or just common case.

However, turn this into a brokerage for ecommerce shops, ebay sellers, etc... and, $$$

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Yes, this is exactly what we're trying to do. Looking for beta customers at the moment that offer platforms to connect buyers and sellers. For them the price and convenience counts. If anybody here wants to beta test, ping me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks good! My search did timeout with a couple of attempts on "We are searching" (don't know if it's the HN effect). It worked on the third try.

A minor copy change suggestion:

"only pay after you created" -> "only pay after you create"

<comment><AUTHOR> hahaha, yes that's the HN effect. I didn't expect that that many people would click on it and we're now staring at GA overwhelmed by the response... Can't even work on the bugs now because the server got so slow. Thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> PS.: working on label printing at the very moment. Anybody wants to beta test? Ping me

<comment><AUTHOR> PPS.: If you want to send something and your country is not in our database, please let me know asap and we'll insert the country into our database for you. I saw that somebody tweeted that India would be interesting - we've already negotiated the prices and will have them in the database soon. Email me at laura (at) goshippo.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> An API for developers would be really nice for integrating into personal ecommerce websites. It's a pain dealing with all the couriers individually. Please also consider adding support for Purolator and Canada Post.

<comment><USER20> You're pretty much describing EasyPost, right? They're a YC company out of the last batch - [https://www.easypost.com/](https://www.easypost.com/)

<comment><USER21> Thank you, thank you! I've been trying to remember their name for weeks. Bookmarked :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Like the idea and would love to use your service in the future. Don't worry about the server problems. You are in Beta, so that's okay.

Keep up the good work! Hoping you have success!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey jsilence, thanks for the great attitude. Which country are you based in? Is it already in our database? Let me know when you use it and I'll get you a test account :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Most of your sitemap links go back to homepage (Investors for eg): [https://goshippo.com/sitemap/](https://goshippo.com/sitemap/)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. It's still a MVP with. Sorry about that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I get a 503 -- thanks HN! ;) -- but a completely empty page. Consider configuring your server so that a minimum output is sent in order not to confuse the average joe later.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion, ozh! I'm sorry about the server problem. I didn't expect such an overwhelming response rate on HN and all we can do now is stare at GA in disbelieve ;)

<comment><USER25> This site will certainly be useful in the next month when I need to ship a couple of prototypes overseas for testing. Its currently not working for me, but looks like you're being slammed with traffic. I'll bookmark and try again later. Good luck with it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, agnuku. Please let me know which country you need as an outbound country and I'll add the country into our database asap in case it's not already in there! And please do send me a msg on laura (at) goshippo.com. I'm happy to give everybody here from HN the service without taking commission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is great and looks like it has great potential to expand into added services. Do you plan on having international "less than container" air shipping rates?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi mc32, thanks for your positive response. I'm glad you like it. Yes, we have a lot of expansion plans. But step after step ;) We're going into new countries first and working with beta customers to improve our existing product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Your "This field is required" validation labels obscure the postcode lookup dropdown for me when I submit before inputting any details. Otherwise, very nice!

<comment><AUTHOR> This is exactly the feedback I was hoping to get. Thanks a lot! I'm on it! I knew I could count on HN. Server is getting super slow though...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Find and compare shipping rates of more than 100 carriers" but only 11 listed on the "Supported Couriers" page. What am I missing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi kd5bja, valid question. The statement you quoted is our vision for the future. We just launched with our MVP and we're working on the courier side to get as many courier services into our database as possible. At the moment we don't cover all courier services globally. We've got the courier services from Germany, UK, Sweden, Finland and Norway in our database. That's why it's only 11 couriers. I hope for your understanding and I really hope that we can reach our vision soon.

<comment><USER28> The way your frontpage is built, it looks like a claim of what you currently provide. It's also odd that you show the DHL and TNT logos on the front page but don't actually support them yet.

I like your vision and hope you get there, but misleading potential customers like that doesn't sit well with a lot of people.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with your point and we never had the intention to mislead our customers. I'm sorry if it appeared as if we were trying to mislead them! We just launched and there was no bad intention behind putting the logos up there. I guess we were just a little too rash with that decision. We're currently in talks with both TNT and DHL and will have them in the database within the next two weeks. I'd just like to assure you again that there was no bad intention at all!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Looks very nice, I see there are no Asian courier service provider, hope to see them added soon as I can certainly see real world usage of shippo

<comment><AUTHOR> Which country are you in? I'm taking suggestions which ones to include next ;) Just finished negotiating with some Indian courier services and will insert them into the database soon! Will then have a look at China next... Please do let me know which countries you want to see next.

<comment><USER10> Being an aspiring entrepreneur, I'd love to see Brazil there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Noted down, dcarmo!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is great! Useful product and performs well - what's the tech stack? What are you using for addresses/locations?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi cpursley, we use Google maps/places API and library. Feel free to ping me if you want to know more details about the tech.

<comment><USER31> What about server side implementation? I saw that you are using Apache. If you are on Django or Rails you can easily switch to Nginx and gain some benefits.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have to admit with much shame that it's still PHP based but moving is on the to do list!

<comment><USER32> You shouldn't feel shame about that, even though it looks like you just used it as an MVP tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It keeps getting stuck on loading, but seems a really great idea. Where are you guys based? Would love to talk - @arush

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey arush, thanks for the positive feedback! I'm sorry about the server problem. We weren't expecting that many clicks when I posted it on HN... ;) We'll be based in SF starting from next week Tuesday. Want to move this conversation to email? I'm laura(at)goshippo.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I put two US addresses not knowing if it was for international only and it took over 2 min before I close the window.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi hoopism, thanks for letting me know. We are also able to show domestic shipments (the rates are not the best). The problem is because our server can't handle the massive traffic from HN. I apologise for the inconvenience, I'm really sorry about the server issues!!

<comment><USER34> Understandable...

Best of luck and bookmarked for future use. Thanks for reply.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for understanding :) I'm offering the HN community the service without commission as a thank you for their feedback. Let me know when you want to use it and I'll give you a test account. I'm laura(at)goshippo.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Switching between imperial and metric system based on IP address would be a nice touch to your international users.

<comment><AUTHOR> And now it's on my to do list as well. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Amazing! We're building a Kayak for Healthcare Services btw. Launching next week :)

Love your product.

<comment><USER37> This is relevant to my interests. Where can I learn more?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is a great idea :) Already sent 3 bugs / UX problems via the UserVoice thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reporting the bugs and thanks for taking your time to help us out!!! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Great work. This is exactly what I've been looking for to sell some of my stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey canistr, thanks for the feedback? Where are you based? I'd love to offer everybody here on HN the service without taking commission for a trial period in exchange for occasional feedback. Why don't you message me at laura(at)goshippo.com and we can talk

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Could you please tell me what the difference between you and smailex.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi smailex, sure! We're building a database that will eventually include all international courier services not only the 4 big ones (FedEx, UPS, TNT, DHL). I understand that smailex only integrates FedEx and UPS, right?

<comment><USER40> Smailex will eventually include all carriers around the globe too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Pretty good ShipHawk Clone

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi solscreen, not exactly. ShipHawk is offering the most convenient service to their US customers. Focus is on convenience (they're doing an amazing job at picking up stuff and packing for you), not price sensitivity, transparency or variety. They help you with packaging especially with items that are very difficult to pack (furniture etc). We're a big database for all local and international delivery services (not only the 4 big ones FedEx, UPS, TNT, DHL). We compare and we allow you to buy the shipping labels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Amazing service. I have been looking for this for a while. Thank you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey caublestone, thanks for the compliment. Which country are you in? Is it in our database already? If not I'll include it for you. Also, I'm really happy to offer everybody from HN the service without taking commission for a test phase in exchange for occasional feedback. Let me know if interested. You can reach me on laura(at)goshippo.com

<comment><USER42> Hi Laura! I am in the US. I was able to use the service just fine. Thank you.

Matt

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's a 503 error now but would be nice to see Singapore inside!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey tengkahwee, thanks for your feedback. We're moving to Asia next. Just promised another commentator to do India first but after that I'll get Singapore into the database. Can I get back to you when we're ready? Would you like to beta test?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is amazing. I've been wanting this for so long!!!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi volandovenge, I just love getting positive feedback! What country are you sending from? If it's not in our database let me know and I'll prioritise it for you. Btw. we're offering test accounts to the HN community as a thank you for the time you took to give me feedback. Test accounts won't take commission for a while. Let me know if you need one. I'm laura(at)goshippo.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I had to reload the page 8 times for it to actually load.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey geekyguy, thanks for clicking on the link and I'll have to apologize about the server problem. I'm really really sorry. I didn't expect the HN community would be that interested about Shippo... The server should normally adjust automatically to the traffic but somehow it's trashed right now. Sorry again for the inconvenience!

<comment><USER46> Just curious - where have you hosted your service and what mechanism did you use to scale based on traffic?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi realcul, we're hosting on AWS with elastic load balancing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> cool but the name have bad connotation. go shit poo ?

<comment><USER48> funny, I initially read it as gossip-oh, also not exactly positive....

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, this is really good to know... Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Your website is all broken.

I get a "503 Service Unavailable: Back-end server is at capacity" for this:

[https://goshippo.com/wp- content/themes/wpbootstrap/images/lo...](https://goshippo.com/wp- content/themes/wpbootstrap/images/logo/logo-beta.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry, Ye. I really am super sorry about the server problems and I apologise to everybody who can't access the site. We simply did not expect such an overwhelming response from the HN community and we weren't prepared for it. Again, I apologise for the inconvenience and hope for your patience and understanding</comment></comment>


A 13-Year-Old's View on Social Media - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Go_Soroush/a-13-year-old-s-view-on-social-media-219759f63ff6

<comment><AUTHOR> If anyone is interested here is the part 2: [https://medium.com/@Go_Soroush/do-13-year-old-s-even-know- wh...](https://medium.com/@Go_Soroush/do-13-year-old-s-even-know-what- facebook-google-snapchat-vine-and-twitch-are-7e2fbb285c44)

<comment><AUTHOR> In the part 2 I look at some more social media platform like Faceebook, Vine, Youtube and others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I'm surprised seeing Kik in there. I remember seeing it years ago (like, really long ago), and thought it never took off.

Do you have any idea how they managed to acquire a teenager user base?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's a mix of a lot of things:simplistic UI, being one of the first IMs that don't need a phone number and also when everyone has it you have to have it to so... it only grows exponentially from here. Last thing people underestimate how viral kids and teens are one teen can literally convert his/her class in one day.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this article a while back but I never posted it to the Hacker News community. I would love to get feedback on the article.</comment>


GitHub Archive - <AUTHOR> http://www.githubarchive.org/

<comment><USER2> Is this similar with <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4472866> ?

<comment><USER3> Yes, the linked article (which I discovered before this one) is a subpage of the site in question.

The home page describes the project and uses, while the mailing list is an application of the project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks great. I'll be using their mailing list service for the same reasons I use HN: 1\. to stay in touch with what's buzzing 2\. and, to get that kick of inspiration when you see people building great stuff

</comment><comment><USER5> For a second I thought this was an archive of all OS projects on Github. Already I've run into several projects where the user or repo was gone, which can be frustrating.

<comment><USER6> That would be sketchy legally; after all, just because the code is available doesn't mean it's redistributable.

<comment><USER7> He did say "OS", as in open source; which are all legally redistributable, if they are under a license that complies with the Open Source Definition.

<comment><USER6> Oh, right.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How We Work on Queries at GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://samlambert.com/posts/how-we-work-on-queries-at-gitHub/

<comment><USER2> I really wish this went into more detail. You are notified when a query is slow. You can EXPLAIN it in chat so everybody can see. What happens next? Are slow queries treated as high priority? Is there any tooling around debugging complex queries? Basically, what makes GitHub's process different to the decades-old "grep the slow query log and run an EXPLAIN"?

<comment><USER3> > Basically, what makes GitHub's process different to the decades-old "grep > the slow query log and run an EXPLAIN"?

Sam's chatops tools opens this process up to a lot more people that otherwise wouldn't be comfortable logging on to servers to access the slow query logs (assuming that they even have access to the servers). It's a great way for app developers to level up their sql skills from other more experienced coworkers.

The impact of slow queries determines their priority. How frequent are the slow queries? Is it from a background job, or does it cause exceptions on important pages or API calls?

I don't know if this process is streets ahead of what other companies have, but it's made a hugely positive impact on our MySQL infrastructure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why doesn't Github open source their products/libraries regularly ? There is too few open source projects from Github on Github.

<comment><USER5> We do!

[https://github.com/github](https://github.com/github) [https://github.com/libgit2](https://github.com/libgit2) [https://github.com/boxen](https://github.com/boxen)

When it's easy to extract, well-documented, and has a clear team of maintainers, we try to open source. Sometimes it's difficult to nail one or all of those bullet points, though.

<comment><USER6> Haystack looks interesting ;)

<comment><USER7> You can't expect them to opensource everything, i think it's awesome they opensourced hubot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, maybe a toy example but I can see the query included a join. Curious how you guys clone enough tables (and their keys) to troubleshoot things like that? Seems like it gets a lot more complex than the example suggests pretty quickly. Wondering if you have neat tools for that.

[Edit: Just noticed poster is author. Hi Sam and welcome to HN :)]

<comment><AUTHOR> Basically you can hit /mysql clone for any table and it will make its way to an isolated db for the user running the command.

It would be cool to be able to pass the script a query and have it clone all the tables.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice read Sam, thanks for the writeup.

Thought I'd let you know you have an error in your json - section.name ([http://i.imgur.com/CoHol0f.png](http://i.imgur.com/CoHol0f.png))

;]

<comment><AUTHOR> haha thank you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> from : [http://ghtorrent.org/downloads.html](http://ghtorrent.org/downloads.html)

atleast :

       4,151,457 repos

       2,480,478 users

popular repos :

twbs/bootstrap 40662

jquery/jquery 34633

joyent/node 34522

mbostock/d3 30247

h5bp/html5-boilerplate 28736

popular users:

visionmedia 10712

torvalds 9984

paulirish 5885

schacon 4431

mattt 4053

pjhyett 3732

src code: [https://github.com/akuchlous/githublike](https://github.com/akuchlous/githublike)

</comment><comment><USER10> Now, does anyone have the time to figure out how many users Github has in their users table? :) [http://dheera.net/projects/blur](http://dheera.net/projects/blur)

<comment><USER11> Atleast 3,815,207 users. (who have performed some meaningful GitHub action)

Via BigQuery:

       SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT actor) FROM [githubarchive:github.timeline];

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Once we have decided if we want to modify our schema we can perform an incremental rollout across our cluster. I will cover this more in another post." \- looking forward to that.

<comment><USER13> my guess is a thin wrapper around PTOSC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Are all github internal services a dark colour scheme? good way of determining internal vs external I suppose

<comment><USER15> There's no hard rules on it. When I started working on it a couple of years ago, I was fond of dark color schemes for monitoring interfaces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Awesome. I'm going to share this to see if we can do something similar where I work. Neat idea.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is haystack open sourced anywhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately not. It is so closely tied to our applications.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for posting this! I like hearing about internal tooling. Is there more on the query tagging? How do you guys bubble query annotations through the stack?

I don't know if you're at liberty to discuss further, but how has it been scaling a giant Rails app? Have there been any pushes to break it up into smaller components? Ie. fast moving stuff stays Rails, core infra moves to something statically typed?

<comment><USER3> The query annotations show up as a mysql comment next to the query. I don't know if we have any automatic indexing of the annotations themselves.

We try to stick to ruby/rails since so many people are comfortable in that environment. We try to balance the desire to break pieces out with the fact that it lowers the number of devs qualified to work on it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Will New York get a Brexit boost to cancel out feared 'Trump slump'? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jan/24/new-york-brexit-boost-trump-slump-fears-financial-business <comment><USER2> Yet more FUD about Brexit, only this time they managed to get a dig in on Trump in the headline.

There's no "Trump slump", and banks will flee London in the same way the UK economy went into a tailspin that left millions starving.

<comment><USER3> * There's no "Trump slump" * --- I'm upvoting you.

I get tired of hearing predictions that sound as ridiculous as CNN mid election like this highlight reel ....[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V_w- kDLbl8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V_w-kDLbl8)

I used to "drink the cool aid" CNN was selling.</comment></comment>


Coroutines in C with Arbitrary Arguments - <AUTHOR> http://250bpm.com/blog:48

<comment> david-given That is _majestically_ vile. It took me a while before I figured out how it was assigning the new coroutine's stack pointer, and then I was filled with admiration and a little nausea.

I'm not sure if this will work in real life; it looks like it's relying heavily on C compiler magic to ensure that the stack's laid out the way it wants. (Plus, allocating stacks with malloc() doesn't work on some architectures, and I have encountered pthreads implementations that get very unhappy if you change stacks on them).

But it's still a deeply impressive piece of lateral thinking.

<comment><USER2> It should be possible to do this without malloc(), by allocating the co-stack as an array within the current stack. Something like this...

        char stack[STACK_SIZE];
        int anchor_[unoptimisable_];
        char filler_[(char*)&anchor_ - (char*)(stack + STACK_SIZE)];
        ...

(Haven't tested it, but it's basically the same principle. The same caveats about stack layout and VLAs apply.)

<comment><USER3> You would also need to align the stack per. target requirements (gcc keyword, or offset the address). The aliment guarantees for char[] placed on stack are probably insufficient for many machines.

<comment><USER2> If none of the variables on the stack are smaller than your desired alignment size, and the stack starts out aligned (which it should), then it will remain aligned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would it be possible to make a coroutine implementation that allows the stacks to grow dynamically? (If there are N coroutines, you will need N stacks, so for large N it does not suffice to have a statically conservatively preallocated stack for each coroutine).

Also, how is Rust's support for coroutines?

<comment><USER5> I have recently found this: [https://github.com/rustcc/coroutine- rs](https://github.com/rustcc/coroutine-rs)

<comment><USER4> Interesting, but the documentation does not seem to describe how stacks/memory management is done.

<comment><USER6> From a quick look at the code, it seems to use segmented stacks with memory mapping. [https://github.com/rustcc/coroutine- rs/blob/master/src/stack...](https://github.com/rustcc/coroutine- rs/blob/master/src/stack.rs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Semi off topic, but are there examples of coroutine usage in any relatively popular open source C or C++ code bases? The only thing that comes to mind is the MAME and MESS code bases (I could be wrong here). We see coroutine articles on HN from time to time but I've always wondered who or what software out there are using these types of techniques.

<comment><USER2> QEMU is another one that I know of: [http://blog.vmsplice.net/2014/01/coroutines-in-qemu- basics.h...](http://blog.vmsplice.net/2014/01/coroutines-in-qemu-basics.html)

Coroutines seem like the type of concept that relatively few programmers understand and use, but when they are used well, it can simplify the code flow greatly.

<comment><USER8> Speaking as a QEMU developer, I really don't like the coroutine use. They're a portability mess, they tend to expose bugs in dusty corners of the compiler, and they can be painful to debug around. I would much rather take a view that C is simply not a language with coroutines in it, and not try to retrofit them without explicit support from the compiler and runtime...</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What would the Dunning-Kruger "test" be for your field? - <AUTHOR> What question (or problem) separates the wheat from the chaff? <comment><USER2> In software engineering, I think "unconditional faith in a single technique or technology" is a good sign of overconfidence in one's knowledge or ability. This certainly applied to me when I was younger. Engineers who go all-in on a specific technique will have really inconsistent results: some projects will go amazing because the technique was the best option. Some projects won't go so great because the technique wasn't the best solution.

A good sign of maturity is when they can notice "hey, that didn't go great" and use it to inform their future strategy - "technique X applies when these conditions are true. If one of them are false, I'm not sure what to do, but I should conduct more research (or talk to more people) before starting that project"

<comment><USER3> agreed. now, I am personally biased for or against certain technologies, but I would still say that (even though I might not like it) something like PHP probably has its perfect use cases...

when I've interviewed people, I made sure to ask questions like "what do you like/dislike about language/technology/technique X" and a lot of people really seem to struggle with that kind of question

<comment><USER4> > _when I 've interviewed people, I made sure to ask questions like "what do > you like/dislike about language/technology/technique X" and a lot of people > really seem to struggle with that kind of question_

Wait really? That's shocking to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a marketer, asking someone to develop a Go To Market strategy definitely separates the wheat from the chaff.

You see who really thinks of marketing in terms of competitive positioning, differentiation, and how to create different messages and content for different parts of the funnel (and how to measure it all), and who just throws a random bunch of tactics at it.

<comment><USER6> I agree -- i think in general putting someone a bit on their own, whether they're the first employee of the co. or department, or the only person assigned to a substantial project, is going to make their approach, competencies, and weaknesses clear.

Unfortunately in my experience this often takes more than a couple days to shake out, so it doesn't help in interview / recruiting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'll let you know when I no longer feel like the chaff!

It'd probably be similar to beefield's. Present a problem with a clear success condition and see how resourceful they are in solving it. A failure would be solving the wrong problem, making excuses (or "the problem is not solvable"), confidently talking in abstractions that don't concretely pertain to the problem, or failure to ask a question/say "I don't know".

I don't know that there's a technical question or problem I could ask to make a call on whether or not they know their stuff.

</comment><comment><USER8> Tell me about an opinion you hold on some piece of technology (framework, language, design pattern, etc.), one you have a fair amount of conviction about and hold pretty strongly. Now tell me how you arrived at that opinion and conviction.

<comment><USER9> Depending on what opinion they pull out, I might tweak that and suggest: "What's the argument against that opinion?"

From what I've seen, a lot of people can rattle off reasons they've heard for why a particular thing is done, but have not deeply considered the opposite side of that opinion and what its benefits may be. Ymmv.

<comment><USER10> This smacks as unreliable to me because I have a "Devils advocate" sort of mindset REGARDLESS of my actual level of expertise. I find the issue with this sort of mindset is that it makes you better at tearing down other peoples opinions than it does at coming up with a brilliant opinion of your own. This is problematic when you're trying to do something innovative in a crowded saturated field.

<comment><USER3> I have the same attitude, and it's good to try to counteract it a bit, but I have found that this attitude can be a great asset when paired with other people who are a bit more on the optimistic side; as long as both parties are willing to listen to each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In physics, especially anything remotely related to quantum physics, whether somebody focuses on measurable quantities or not. If somebody has a new measurement technique, something that gives better precision than before, great. If somebody has a new theoretical model that applies to cases that previous models didn't, great. If somebody has a new theoretical model that gives different results than current models, that is great because new experiments can determine between them.

If somebody has a new model that gives the exact same predictions as a current model, lauds it as being obviously the truth, and dismisses all other models as falsehood, then it can be dismissed. This applies to all various interpretations of quantum physics, since they all yield the same measurable predictions.

</comment><comment><USER12> Don't know about questions, but there are couple of answers I have learned to be serious red flags:

1\. Yes, I understand. (with no further elaboration or clarifying questions) 2\. It's okay/good/going well (again, with no further elaboration when asking how something is going/set up etc)

First one typically translates to something between "I have a completely unfounded illusion of understanding" and "I have no clue but don't dare to say it"

Second one translates typically to "I have no clue whatsoever"

<comment><USER13> >"I have a completely unfounded illusion of understanding" and "I have no clue but don't dare to say it"

Or "I'm tired of this droning conference call/meeting where I can barely understand some people's accents and I'd rather just clarify some points in writing later where I don't have to rely on my memory."

>"I have no clue whatsoever"

Or it really is going fine and I don't want to spend forever going into technical details the person asking isn't even going to understand and get interrogated on anything that doesn't sound like it's going perfectly, when everything is under control on my end.

<comment><USER14> Yeah I am at meetings often like this because I have trouble paying attention or understanding voice communication - I also always watch films with subtitles, but I think tech wise or problem solving I am decent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I used to like asking other jazz musicians I met for the first time, and hadn't heard, _Are you good?_ (asked with a smile sometimes) People who actually are good never say 'yes' or talk like they think they are. It's interesting hearing what people say, anyway.

Otherwise, asking people who their favourite players are is a quick test, when suspicious. I've come across a few "jazz musicians" who can't even name a single jazz musician. Also, in chess, asking who someone's favourite players are is a quick test of whether they're any good.

</comment><comment><USER16> In my software dev experience, it is clear from how they think about blog posts or other articles online.

The people I consider to be great a this will read a variety of content on a topic, think about it, synthesize it with their own experience, go try new things, and decide for themselves what is correct for their own project.

The less skilled will say, "See, this blog post said to do it this way, so that is what we shall do."

</comment><comment><USER17> In grappling (Brazilian jiu-jitsu), it is very apparent from one sparring round with a person to get a sense for what they know and get a general idea for their skill/belt level. The exact belt is determined by that person's coach by measuring their skill against their personal potential.

An analogy to software would be to pair program with a person. You both get a feel for each other's strengths and weaknesses while working on a particular problem. I feel that coding interviews try to replicate this, but fall short given time constraints.

<comment><USER18> Has anyone in the world actually delivered effective, large scale software that was primarily pair programmed?

Genuine question. It would be fascinating if there were documented examples.

Note that this is distinct from having a company culture where pair programming is common. I am skeptical that just because you occasionally look over each other's shoulder and exchange ideas, that the software ends up being fundamentally _different_ from the ground up. It seems unlikely that two people would both decide to rewrite an entire subcomponent of the project from scratch, whereas individuals do that often. And the results turn out better (but only when the person is an effective programmer, otherwise it's just a mess).

I don't think you'd learn much from pairing with me. You'd see me sitting, staring at the screen for long periods of time, saying nothing. Or experimenting with pasting various code tweaks into a repl. The final result that makes it into a text editor is the outcome of both processes, and these have long time horizons. Sometimes far longer than someone else could reasonably tolerate.

<comment><USER19> _Guy Steele expresses similar admiration. Currently a research scientist for Sun Microsystems, he remembers Stallman primarily as a "brilliant programmer with the ability to generate large quantities of relatively bug-free code." Although their personalities didn't exactly mesh, Steele and Stallman collaborated long enough for Steele to get a glimpse of Stallman's intense coding style. He recalls a notable episode in the late 1970s when the two programmers banded together to write the editor's "pretty print" feature. Originally conceived by Steele, pretty print was another keystroke-triggerd feature that reformatted Emacs' source code so that it was both more readable and took up less space, further bolstering the program's WYSIWIG qualities. The feature was strategic enough to attract Stallman's active interest, and it wasn't long before Steele wrote that he and Stallman were planning an improved version.

"We sat down one morning," recalls Steele. "I was at the keyboard, and he was at my elbow," says Steele. "He was perfectly willing to let me type, but he was also telling me what to type.

The programming session lasted 10 hours. Throughout that entire time, Steele says, neither he nor Stallman took a break or made any small talk. By the end of the session, they had managed to hack the pretty print source code to just under 100 lines. "My fingers were on the keyboard the whole time," Steele recalls, "but it felt like both of our ideas were flowing onto the screen. He told me what to type, and I typed it."

The length of the session revealed itself when Steele finally left the AI Lab. Standing outside the building at 545 Tech Square, he was surprised to find himself surrounded by nighttime darkness. As a programmer, Steele was used to marathon coding sessions. Still, something about this session was different. Working with Stallman had forced Steele to block out all external stimuli and focus his entire mental energies on the task at hand. Looking back, Steele says he found the Stallman mind-meld both exhilarating and scary at the same time. "My first thought afterward was: it was a great experience, very intense, and that I never wanted to do it again in my life."_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A basic maths competence test would consist in trying to find out what the person thinks mathematics actually is. Inexperienced people would mostly think of computations, such as evaluating integrals or computing eigenvalues. People who understand maths know that it chiefly deals with definitions, theorems, proofs, conjectures and problem solving (that last one is sometimes forgotten even by very theoretical mathematicians, but it's key to some areas such as graph theory, combinatorics, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER20> In data engineering, I think your responses to the 'entity resolution' problem are a good Dunning Kurger style litmus test.

If you don't know, entity resolution is the process of matching unique rows in two or more databases. Are these the same movies? Are these the same person?

Novice DE: Oh easy, just merge on the name.

Intermediate DE: OH GOD NO. <michael_scott_no.jpg>

Expert DE: That's complicated, but I have a plan.

<comment><USER21> Just curious, is there a standard way to start attacking that problem?

<comment><USER22> You always need some sort of data normalization scheme, and one that makes sense for the task you're running.

(This including things such as Unicode normalization and looking at other fields to determine if it's the same thing.)

And you get to handle duplicates too.

That is just the start, problem gets even more interesting in a real sharded scenario because eventual consistency is hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> When people plain-language declare things as "safe" or "unsafe" it's clear they don't have a background in technical risk assessment.

When people call 5G "safe" or "unsafe", it's clear they don't know about radiation effects on human health. The correct answer is "we don't have data".

Edit: The fact that people would rather make fun of me and imagine me as an "non-ionizing radiation tin foil hatter" (I am not, non-ionizing radiation has no negative long-term health effects) I hope is a demonstration of the power of one's own biases and forcing it onto a stranger to fit one's own convenient worldview.

<comment><USER24> Your point as a whole stands, but I think even saying "we don't have data" misrepresents the situation. We have strong theoretical reasons, from our understandings of physics and biology, to believe that there will be no harmful effects. An expert would reasonably say to someone, either a layman or another expert, "5G is safe."

<comment><USER23> I disagree: saying "we don't have data" [0] doesn't say anything about the existence or lack of existence of underlying models. Models are refined all the time to account for exceptions and transitions shown in empirical measurements (Mercury's orbit, deflection of light & general relativity, for example).

The tetrahertz range is especially interesting precisely _because_ it is an unknown between _known_ non-ionizing and _known_ ionizing effects. Extrapolating down from ionizing radiation biological effect data and panicking makes as little sense as extrapolating up from non-ionizing radiation biological effect data and making fun of the panic-ers.

I think it's a fantastic opportunity to prove or modify our existing models. But a mistake to assume the models hold true, given the historical intensity of debate around the (discredited) Linear No Threshold Model and subsequent alternative proposed models.

Edit: I would personally say 5G is more likely to be safe (no acute radiation- caused long term health effects) than unsafe. But I'm not one who likes to gamble, especially with the lives of the public.

[0] DOI: 10.1080/10643389.2011.574206

<comment><USER22> Precautionary principle notwithstanding, this is framing the question wrong. The proper question to ask is: is it safer than microwave transmission at low doses like used in phones and wifi. Those are already absolutely known to be unsafe. Just extremely mildly. (Likely not even carcinogenic given historical population incidence data.

Current evidence suggests similar impact for similar power high frequency transmitters.)

Policy questions are not somewhere we can afford ignorance and black and white thinking. Precautionary principle is only good if you're not stopping a better and safer solution with it for sake of conservatism.

See, 5G is not just washing everyone with radiation, it comes with widespread beamforming, which is likely to send lower energy through anything obstructing it. Skin effect prevents getting penetrated with the waves at low energy used in communications.

Those are extremely strong arguments and the onus is really in anyone that says it's unsafe to actually show it is, properly and without doubt.

Otherwise it's plain scaremongering to suggest "we don't know" when the consensus is "it's safe". Exactly the same tactic as used by some climate denialists.

Sample study: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4997488/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4997488/) (Read all the links to see the whole story. And these scientists used a rather high energy level compared to expected. The current analyses suggest the studies - which mostly show effects - inadequate. There's a strong bias towards publishing an evidence of effect when there's none. See: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6765906/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6765906/) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Dunning-Kruger separating mid- and senior-level devs:

JUNIOR DEV: My code is simple and easy to understand.

MID-LEVEL DEV: My code is subtle, clever, innovative, expressive, hyper- optimized, and ingenious.

SENIOR DEV: My code is simple and easy to understand.

\--

Source: John Arundel, [https://twitter.com/bitfield/status/1219174978748370945](https://twitter.com/bitfield/status/1219174978748370945)

But take that for what it's worth: [https://twitter.com/bitfield/status/1184741088067833856](https://twitter.com/bitfield/status/1184741088067833856)

<comment><USER26> At one job we actually had to give up on take-home challenges basically because a good, humble junior was indistinguishable from a good, clearly- thinking senior

<comment><USER27> So funny. This makes sense as the latter would be catering to an audience which includes the former.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Fintech: Is the big idea they are pitching a way for friends to split a dinner bill.

</comment><comment><USER29> Sigh. DK, as commonly cited, is not simply "competence."

It hypothesizes a meta-cognitive bias whereby a person who is incompetent is cognitively incapable of determining their level of competence.

Everyone has biases, and the reason citing DK may come across the wrong way is it tends to suggest that it's just Other People who have those biases.

From this piece[1] arguing that we routinely misinterpret DK:

> I suspect we find this sort of explanation compelling because it appeals to > our implicit just-world theories: we'd like to believe that people who > obnoxiously proclaim their excellence at X, Y, and Z must really not be so > very good at X, Y, and Z at all, and must be (over)compensating for some > actual deficiency.

But, generally, if the question of competence comes up, don't reflexively cite DK. It's been around for ages, it's not novel, and it's usually being miscited.

[1]: [https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the- dunning-...](https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning- kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/)

<comment><USER30> I am not sure I understand. It sounds like DK claim that assessing one's own competence is difficult (perhaps impossible).

I don't see how that conflicts with the title. It is asking for a test that can assess one's rough ability.

<comment><USER29> It's not contradictory. My point is it's counterproductive to bring DK into the picture, and I'm pushing back against the way it's used in popular culture. (So, absolutely tilting at windmills, but oh well.)

First, it's adding a false veneer of scientism. All it's asking for is a rough test of competence; citing a wholly irrelevant science paper won't make that test grounded in any kind of methodology.

Second, there's this implied moral condemnation of people who are incompetent. Obviously, we're all incompetent in most things, so that's a strange thing to moralize. But the way DK is used in popular culture, there's an added dimension of, "this arrogant idiot thinks he's competent, but my test really took him down a peg."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> "Do you think you can write your own blog posts?"

Everyone thinks they can but almost nobody actually will. I'm not a particularly good writer, but I can do what most people can't/won't, actually follow through on writing something month after month after month.

</comment><comment><USER32> A deep neural network paper that doesn't provide reproducible dataset to verify the results, e.g. AlphaZero paper. I would rather study Leela chess than believe AlphaZero. Sure the former is "inspired" by the latter, but at least I can verify it!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As a physics student, my test for myself is always to (surprise myself with) deriving a given equation from scratch.

My "long term" goal in terms of scientific and mathematical maturity is to git gud at calculating path integrals in quantum mechanics.

<comment><USER33> Many years ago I graduated university with a major in mathematics and I used to think I was pretty good at picking up new maths including pretty advanced stuff like calculus of variations and fourier analysis but for some reason I'm having a real hard time getting into quantum mechanics and Hamiltonians and all that. Am I getting old? Just out of practice? It annoys me...

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you studied Analytical Mechanics first? Sakurai is a very good book for QM.

If you don't _get it_ physically first then the feynman lectures are very good - physics is more than postulates and proof, at very least there's less to memorise if you start from the bottom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> One for hardware engineering might be not considering the PCB itself. At higher voltages your double-sided FR-4 will become a capacitor, and at 100Mhz+ speeds you'll have EMI problems from 90-degree traces. It's easy to think that you can go from a perfboard and wires proof-of-concept to a PCB in a day, but once you hit higher than ~12V or 100Mhz it starts to feel like it's haunted.

</comment><comment><USER35> Build vs. buy for tech platforms. 100% build or 100% buy both are dangerously answers from a senior tech person.

</comment><comment><USER36> In software development, what are the most important qualities of an engineer?

Chaff: Understands computer science. Knows how to scale. Mentor of junior engineers.

Wheat: Understands people. Knows _when_ to scale. Mentee of junior engineers.

<comment><USER37> I thought it was laziness, impatience and hubris.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> When someone takes a position on a topic but is unable to answer questions on why that position was taken. Scientists and academics are often guilty of this when they pontificate on a topic outside their domain of expertise.

</comment><comment><USER39> In programming, when someone talks about lines of code they've written as an accomplishment (more is better). For those in the know, they're a liability. Solving the problem is the accomplishment.

More generally, the right answer to almost any question in software is: It depends. (That is, it depends on the usually large set of explicit and implicit, technical and non-technical requirements.)

</comment><comment> jerome-jh "What can you tell me about the halting problem and its consequences".

</comment><comment><USER37> You're in a server room walking along the racks, when all of a sudden you look down. You see a server. You flip the server off, Leon. The server is off, and it can't turn back on. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that, Leon?

</comment><comment><USER40> How do you avoid cross threading? Can you grab me the 50 mil allen wrench?

</comment><comment><USER41> What is the best ORM?

<comment><USER29> Not a great question for the stated purpose.

Some people will dig in to the various tradeoffs involved with an ORM, and pick apart the structure of an ORM. And that should result in an "it depends" kind of answer.

Others are more interested in how a team is going to use an ORM; does it help junior devs write "not awful" code, how does it help me structure my application logic.

Others are stats nerds who will tell you which ones do best on benchmarks, are most popular, etc.

And many people will tell you a story about some ORMs they used, and why they liked them or not.

These answers can be useful for getting a sense of how a person thinks, but they won't tell you if the person is competent.

<comment><USER41> The competent person will say all ORMs are garbage.

<comment><USER42> Simplistic "No True Scotsman" bullshit. ORMs provide type safety, ease of refactoring, and reduce a lot of boilerplate. Of course, occasionally you need to bypass an ORM to write complex queries, which is fine. ORMs are not perfect, but are a very useful tool nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Related to the concept of a Dunning-Kruger "test": Shibboleths.

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

</comment><comment> hoka-one-one "Where have you seen the Dunning-Kruger effect in action in your work?"

If they start saying something negative about someone without self-reflection, they are exhibiting the Dunning-Kruger effect.

</comment><comment> daniel-levin The nature of Dunning Kruger implies that people who are not qualified to answer this question will try answer it.

</comment><comment><USER44> I have grown really frustrated with software hiring. Candidate selection is incredibly biased. I really get the impression that software is rife with Dunning-Kruger type people who absolutely cannot write simple code to solve tiny problems and that they selectively bias candidate selection to pick people for selfish reasons that compliment their own position on a team.

Here is how I would screen developers for a general developer position. I would issue a 1 hour limit and ensure the candidate knows the test is graded by a computer only. The goal is can they read instructions and write simple code. I don't care how they write the code. I only care that they can.

Any question could be as complex or challenging in requirements as necessary, but the answer would always be a small function of few parts. The idea being to test reading comprehension, the ability to follow instructions, and write a simple function. An example of output format and data type would be explicitly stated with each question.

An example question:

 _A customer is spending cash to purchase a drink. Write a function that receives cash as the first argument and the cost of the drink as the second argument and outputs an object indicating the change in coins with preference to the largest denominations first._

1\. Specify the grading criteria of the test. 10 points for each question correctly answered within the given time period. There is no penalty for answering a question incorrectly. The cumulative total execution time of all answered questions will be multiplied by 100 if in milliseconds or by 100,000 if in nanoseconds and be deducted from the final score. The idea is to solve as many questions as possible, but in the event that there are a limited number of positions and tied scores slow code is the tie-breaker that disqualifies a candidate.

2\. Stress that code style is irrelevant. The test will be graded by a computer compiling the code and executing it again several scenarios in an answer bank. A human will not review the answers submitted.

3\. Tell candidates that once the 1 hour test period has exhausted they will have an optional 15 extra minutes to review all prior attempted questions.

4\. Force the candidate to perform 3 practice questions before the test timer starts to familiarize the candidate the expectations of the test platform and the appropriateness of answers.

5\. Randomly pull questions from a pool of 200+ questions 1 at a time to ensure a developer is focused on the question presented instead of selectively gaming the question list.

6\. Ask the candidate to write a function in a designated space that addresses the problem question/statement.

7\. Allow the user to test their answer to review the output before submitting it for the next question.

8\. Also allow the user to skip to the next random question with a 2 minute time penalty.

That is for a developer. For an architect I would have them write an essay on a prompt provided by the business. Architects review business needs, distill requirements, and communicate goals to provide a platform that executes the business needs while minimizing complexity as much as possible. If they can do that in writing they can do it in software. The most important skill is their ability to communicate clearly against competing factors. Have 3 separate non- developers read and grade the essay.</comment>


Ask HN: Do put the name of your current employer on your resume when applying? - <AUTHOR> When applying for new jobs, do you leave out the name of your current employer? Do you think it's a good idea? I thought about replacing the name with something generic, like "Embedded Systems Company".
My fear is that if I'm mass applying to other jobs, especially to startups with small teams that may not have a formal HR practice in place, a tiny set of them may call my current place for whatever reason without my knowledge. I would rather not tip off my current employer that I'm thinking of leaving; my place is a bit trigger-happy at times.
I do have colleagues in the company who will vouch for me, so references are not a problem, but there's no tactful way to put that on a resume in place of the company's name. <comment><USER2> This is more a meta-answer, but it is a pity that more companies (and employees) can't be professional about this. Every employee should feel comfortable having a new potential employers talk to their current employer. If everyone was upfront and honest the workplace would be a lot more productive.

One thing I do with my employees is have a chat to them about making sure they let me know in advance if they are thinking of leaving and in return I promise to provide them with a fantastic reference.

We all work in a open office so every employee gets to hear my references of past employees so they know how this system works. This approach stops me being sideswiped by employees leaving at short notice and my ex-employees get great references. A great reference from your last (or current) employer is worth its weight in gold.

<comment><USER3> Notice happens after the offer is on the table. Otherwise, you can interpret various signals such as refusing a raise, career progression is not aligned with the expectations of an employee, etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone not do this? Would be strange I would think both from a candidate and employer perspective to have missing information. Don't mass apply, pick companies you feel are professional and want to work for. No decent company would call your current employer without your knowledge like that.

</comment><comment><USER5> No, I wouldn't remove the name.

I don't think anybody would ever call a current employer, that'd be so stupid on so many levels. Moreover, if they really want, they can probably find who you work for anyway, no?

<comment><USER6> Years ago some idiot recruiter approached me by phone at my work. He got thru chain of offices and people to reach me by my name. As I had no phone on my desk finally my manager passed me the phone to answer the guy in a room of four co-workers. I wasn't looking for a job that time actively. Possibly my name and company name on LikedIn was enough for his desperate quest.

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity", A.Einstein.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> No. Always be honest and accurate with employers and start/end dates of employment.

If you need a bit of anonymizing to avoid the wrath of your current company, get in touch with a recruiter instead and let him/her represent you.

<comment><USER8> It's not dishonest. It's also common in the industry to even sign a NDA to not disclose what company you're working for. Just don't use it to hint that you work for a big company which you're not in.

<comment><USER9> > It's also common in the industry to even sign a NDA to not disclose what > company you're working for.

What industry are you referring to? Because it's definitely not the software industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Never seen anyone do this, except once on linkedin. Instead of a company name, it said confidential, top 5 xyz company.</comment>


Ask HN:  "Invisible" Internet presence – technologically feasible?  - <AUTHOR>

I've read dozens of papers on how to "anonymously" connect to the Internet, and be "invisible".  However, each has fallen short of the idea of a truly invisible presence by offering examples of well-placed network lies as the cloak of invisibility, rather than by pure virtue of being a specific type of (as-yet-undefined) technology, then being unseen and untraceable as a connected net (non)presence.  In other words, Tor shouldn't even enter the conversation proceeding the question, or even Summary-Invisible Networking (SIN).<p>So is true network invisibility possible?  How do you bypass handshakes, or get information without actually asking for it?  Where in the OSI model can one modify/hack/make a new way of interaction that is no longer visible, traceable; has no footprint?  From the Application layer, Presentation layer, Session layer, Transport layer, to the (especially) Network layer and Data link layer, and finally the Physical layer - what would be required to create an "invisible node"? <comment><USER2> Check out Dovetail: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0351](http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0351)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I will read the paper tonight. How did you come to hear of this? The Dovetail path is fascinating.

<comment><USER2> I keep an ear to the ground on these things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> not what "you" want but others can look at mesh nets [http://qmp.cat/](http://qmp.cat/)</comment>