Ask HN: I'm a non-tech founder, would you recommend me working with freelancers? - <AUTHOR> I'm thinking of hiring freelancers to build my MVP. Is that a good idea? Any advice would be much appreciated <comment><USER2> It could be, if you do it right. As a former freelancer and now consultancy owner, I suggest you to:

1\. Avoid cheap freelancers.

2\. Always start with small tasks to test a freelancer. Assume a freelancer is unreliable until proven otherwise by his actions.

3\. Make a wireframe yourself, then hire a designer to design it, then hire a developer to develop it. To save money, you can skip the designer, but the end result will be ugly. You need to decide what you want to build and specify how it will look like BEFORE hiring someone to build it.

4\. If you don't want to or don't know how to make a wireframe, consider hiring a good consultancy to do it with you. They're more likely to have this skill than freelancers.

I believe essentially you need help building your MVP, and your options (freelancing, full-time employee, co-founder, or consultancy) are just different ways of getting that help, they don't matter as much as finding someone you can trust, and managing expectations, especially your expectations.

<comment><USER3> In my experience, the expensive freelancers can be even worse than the cheap ones. They often take a well padded amount so they could outsource it to someone cheap.

<comment><USER4> Here is an anecdote that maybe others can relate to:

We hired an expensive design firm that had done the work and designs of other companies in our sector. Those companies had decent UI and a good amount of users.

The company spends a lot of time doing something like a vision quest to accomplish branding, and UI designs take a long time.

The UI was nice to see come together, but it was clear their designer had no experience with this kind of product and target audience.

The branding and logos and typefaces are top notch. It is all congruent with a story and has good rationale behind it.

Now, the external development firm we work with also has designers in it. The work we do with them is billed at $60/hr when that designer is involved, so the designer is probably getting $40. In the scale of cheap vs expensive when it comes to designers, this is not considered cheap, but it is much less than the prior "enterprise design firm". Cheap would be the $5 talent in Pakistan on Fiverr. This designer is able to crank out UI designs in a day, we can review them and modify them midflight using collaborative tools, and I am much more satisfied.

This isn't my first experience with this, but my thoughts are that design is hit or miss. It just comes down to creative vision, experience, or the series of templates the designer has. Doing a contest or getting proposals will get you a better distribution of possibilities, and the designer's process and pipeline is more important. The $5 Pakistani can also be good. You just need an efficient way to get design samples.

<comment><USER5> Here's another anecdote about using freelancers for this: When I wanted a logo for studyswami.com, I went to fiverr (or something similar) and asked several different designers for a logo. With all of these logos in hand, I brought them to a group of people who shared what they liked and didn't like about each one.

After a bit I had a decent idea, and hired an expensive designer and gave her a clear idea of what I wanted. She then did a brilliant job, producing three or four outstanding logos. I think the logo I chose is one of the best out there anywhere.

The problem with the expensive designers is that they are hampered by the limitations of creative brainstorming as much as anybody, yet is a big part of your cost. They usually give you a limited number of designs- like 3 or 4- to choose from, and you're 'stuck' in that circle of thinking.

So if you can clarify what you want for cheap you'll better use the talent of the experts, IMHO.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure studyswami is that great of a logo though.

First, it has too much detail going on. Should just reduce the number of green pages to one on each side, and increase the overall sizing. You should be able to make out all the details of a logo, 50px50px, from a distance of 24" from the monitor.

Second, all good logos work in a square-based format. Study Swami is closer to a rectangle. Perhaps trimming the overall size left/right would be better, the overall theme of it is good

Third, I think the center black line on the person is distracting. It doesn't really add value in my opinion, and both blue lines should be joined

Fourth, the color schema does evoke trust (blue and green), but I think a color gradient schema from top to bottom might work slightly better (perhaps teal, book pages uptop are lighter shade, book pages bottom are darker). Use of some shadows might elicit better effects

Fifth, I think the person should be a completely seperate color than the book, but that's just my opinion

Sixth, the curvature on the person could use some slight improvements with golden ratios. I think the person's arms should be going up not down, but again personal opinion

Seventh, I think the site overall, the text ligature and font-family should be something simpler like calibiri or Arial

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As a side note you do make good points though. Personally, I am not a great logo designer I just use 99designs.com, and modify the end result in .AI if I need too.

You can usually find great logos and portfolio templates from designers, but you need a strong creative vision and design aesthetic regardless

<comment><USER5> Just an aside, not really to your overall point: The dark line down the middle of the person is simply the background showing through.

And I appreciate your comments on the site fonts. Those are entirely my fault.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a former freelancer myself: here's what i hate about clients:

1\. Know what you need. Don't go to a freelancer assuming he understands, or cares, about your product as much as you do. 2\. Be clear on every single functionality about what you need. If there's something you did not define, the freelancer will mostly always choose the easiest to implement and probably most unwanted option 3\. Have a wireframe. Always use a wireframing tool to make a "flow" of how your app will work. If you can't use mock up tools, use powerpoint, but please have something ready 4\. There is nothing like a cheap, or expensive freelancer. It's mostly all experience and knowledge. What you want is someone who can make what you need, and has done similar work before. A good question to test out someone's basic tech knowledge is to ask them if they know the difference between, hashing, encoding and encryption.

<comment><USER8> Totally disagree with you. What you're describing is a code monkey, in which case it's a commodity and a race to the bottom.

A "freelancer" that charges top rates will give you all that you say the client should have come up with: they'll sit down with the client, understand where they're coming from and why they're building what they're building, and come up with a complete solution, not just code.

As a freelancer you'll also land much better clients with that approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My opinion is that if you're going to build a technical company you need a technical co-founder.

Would you start a construction company without a technical co-founder, and just hire freelance carpenters to build the first few houses?

<comment><USER10> I recently had a house built, which exposed me to a dozen general contractors (people/companies referred to as builders). Not a single one of these small shops had a carpenter on staff. They were all basically project managers that subcontract all labor and earn their fee by adding 20% to however much is spent.

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't call GC's non-technical. They know all of the pieces that it takes to get the thing built and the community of construction workers have multiple general skill-sets. The best part about your GC might be that he knows how to hire the right people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The worst part about being non-technical is that you can't really tell who is good and who isn't.

I'd recommend getting a technical founder on board, at a very generous share. The product will also need to be pivoted and iterated on a lot. With a freelancer, they might disappear with a halfway done job.

<comment><USER12> And how would you assess the skills of a technical founder when you're not technical yourself? IMAO luck is the factor here.

> they might disappear with a halfway done job

So? At least that is possible with a freelancer, not with technical founder who has a generous share but fails to render good results.

<comment><USER3> Ideally register the company when there's something to show. Even if the company has been registered, this is where vesting kicks in. Agreed that it's probably harder to fire one, and worst case, you might have to abandon the company and start a new one.

I know that most people won't build things for "equity" but it is a form of investment for the technical co-founder. That said, a lot do take salary as well as equity, and it's a balance between which they prefer.

There are some benefits - like being easier to gain investor confidence, if you do have a technical founder. I think that makes it worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I help run a company (turtle.ai) that intros startups to vetted freelance devs.

We have a several non-technical customers that went from nothing to an MVP with paying customers. Here are some suggestions for building an MVP with a freelancer:

\- Make sure you've got designs first. It's 10x cheaper to iterate on designs than code.

\- Start with a low budget, ideally less than 10-15k. This constraint forces you to prioritize what is important and launch quickly. Launching quickly is critical so you prioritize features based on real feedback. By delaying launch, you risk sinking money into features nobody cares about.

\- Work in weekly iterations. Jump on a call with the freelancer each week to check on progress and set priorities for the upcoming week. Keep a close eye on the budget to make sure costs aren't getting out of control.

\- Get someone you trust to review the code early on to make sure the freelancer is doing a good job. If the code is an unmaintainable mess, it will be hard to add other developers to your team as you grows.

Having a CTO is the ideal but is not always possible at first. Once you have a product with traction, recruiting a CTO becomes easier. It separates you from the founders who have nothing more than ideas.

</comment><comment><USER14> 1\. Hire a technical auditor: someone who can set standards before the project starts and checks that the freelancers are sticking to them. This can be a more expensive engineer but you pay for less hours.

2\. Split your project into weekly/bi-weekly deliverables that are useful to your users as standalone features (lookup INVEST in the context of Agile)

3\. Have all code be checked in to your Github account

4\. Have your auditor check each deliverable to make sure it complies with the standards defined before the project

Writing from a phone so couldn't add more details. If you have questions I'll elaborate here.

</comment><comment><USER15> If you pay consultants or freelancers you're going to get exactly what you ask for, and you're definitely not going to be getting anything _better_ than that. Your mvp will likely be a pure standalone piece of software that you can never build upon and any changes that you want made will get very expensive very quickly. If you have a technical product and it's doing something more complicated than shuffling data around it's probably not in your best interests to outsource your development.

External developers are going to be incentivized to build exactly what you tell them to build then charge you fees for maintenance and modifications. Building a quality product is not going to be a focus because that's not the way they get rewarded. These are, of course, not impossible problems to overcome, but you have your work cut out for you to mitigate these structural issues.

In my opinion, product oriented startups needs someone to build it and someone to sell it. Startups that don't have both bases covered are exceedingly unlikely to succeed. You're likely to successfully build an MVP, sell it, and make minor modifications only to hit a wall about 6-12 months after your initial release. Past that point your product won't be able to keep pace with your sales. This is manageable but without someone technical to drive that transition you'll probably mess it up.

Best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER16> Remember the M (Minimum) in MVP. It doesn't have to be great. It just has to show you, your customers and your investors that you have given some though to how your product will work in practice.

Developers generally don't want to build an MVP, so they will indulge your insecurity by adding features you don't need right now, adding time, adding cost, and sapping your energy. It's hard as a non-technical founder to fight back against this. You don't know what you don't know.

Instead, I always advise non-technical founders to build their MVP by themselves using a WordPress template. There are literally thousands of templates, many of which are clones of existing applications For example, here's an Uber clone [1].

Using WordPress will allow you to 1) take control of the MVP process 2) create a look and feel for your site 3) test out various plugins to improve functionality 4) if the plugins don't do what you want you can then hire a WordPress developer to make the missing functionality, which will be a much lower cost than getting them to build the whole thing.

And it's scalable. I built [https://newslines.org](https://newslines.org) with WordPress, which was able to handle over one million page views _in one day_. Total customisation developer cost: less than $10,000 (and that was for a ton of work).

[1][https://buildify.cc/taxi-uber-lyft-driver-wordpress- themes/](https://buildify.cc/taxi-uber-lyft-driver-wordpress-themes/)

<comment><USER17> Any other interesting ones like this people are aware of?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> No, unless you have experience managing them. You may end up wasting money and time and getting nothing. I heard cases when people do not even get the source code.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm a freelancer been working on both projects which succeed or failed. The outcome depends more on the founder however a freelancer can easily be blamed.

My few cents are:

1\. Hire a freelancer if you have not enough budget to hire a studio / agency which is 2-3 times more expensive.

2\. Hire a good freelancer. How much a website or app costs is not a secret. Hire a freelancer which goes by that budget and time.

3\. Make sure the freelancer has done similar projects like yours.

4\. Call the freelancer, have a chat, make sure you like each other.

5\. Start with a one week task. If you like the outcome go for the next week. And so on. Reduce risk by divide et impera.

6\. Make sure the deliverables follow standards / best practices. In other words: avoid vendor locking. If the project has to be picked up by someone else make it sure it is possible.

7\. Make the freelancer you first employee / co-founder. Many freelancers would go by this scheme.

</comment><comment><USER20> Yes and no. Remember, good programmers always work with good entrepreneurs. If you have money, you'll find a programmer. If you don't have any funding, why programmer should bother working with you? Show who you are by raising some funds for MVP. Most programmers will be happy if you raised only $10K for their MVP, because often they work on their own MVPs without any funding (and not interested in other folks who can't provide any resources like cash, engineering time, etc).

If you "but I need MVP first so I'll be able to talk to investors", drop me a line firstname.lastname@example.com, I have MVP.

<comment><USER21> In the US, after just taking into account Federal (24% more than likely) and FICA (15.3% including the employers side). $10K is only around $6000 after taxes and that doesn't include state taxes. How many good developers would be willing to put work in for that amount?

If I'm already making enough where I am already over the SS maximum and I wouldn't pay the 12.4% on SS, the extra money is probably not worth my time.

<comment><USER20> Well, for me (I am developer) it's important that my co-founder can raise money, can sell the product on the early stage. If it's possible, it gives motivation to code the product. So it's not about the money, but about motivation. I will have some sort of guarantee/confidence that when product is finished, at least we'll make few sales.

<comment><USER21> He wasn't offering to make the developer a cofounder or give them equity. He was just trying to hire someone.

Sure if a new company was trying to get off the ground and they needed investors, I would be much more willing to invest my time for an equity stake than I would be to invest the equivalent amount of money to hire a good developer.

But, a net of $6000 with no upside is not exciting to me I don't even own the code so I could throw it out in a private [1] repo that I could use as part of my portfolio to show at an interview.

[1] I wouldn't just put it out in the open but I would want it to be something I could optionally give read access to show off my work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> You are going to get a system based on the architectural opinions of someone else. There is no way around that. Even in the comments already posted here, the advice is sprinkled with opinions that may or may not be correct for you.

So it all comes down to working with someone you can trust. Whether that is an individual freelancer, someone you hire to run the freelancers, or outsourcing it all to a firm... you need to put your trust in them. If you have a good way to vet whomever that is, sure, it can work. But if you don't even have enough tech knowledge to do that vetting, I would recommend against using freelancers.

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't think it is. Hire a good software developer that match these criteria:

\- is not a freelancer

\- but is willing to do it in their free time

\- genuine believes your idea is worth pursuing

\- is interested in learning more about the tech that they will use for the MVP

Make this proposal: freelance paid by the hour as trial to become CTO/co- founder.

Pay the average market rate (more than the cheapest from Upwork, less than the experienced ones that freelance to big companies).

This way you attract someone interested in your success, that will create software of good quality and still will get a good deal even if your startup fails ( some money and learning).

I did this and was able to find very good developers. The startup failed on the business side, but it was a fair trade.

Ultimametly though I learned to code and I am bootstrapping a web app that I build on my own. I recommend this above all. But I understand it is not for everyone.

The problem with professional freelancers is that they can not be interested in your startup's success. You need a developer thinking about the product, not just the code. Or you can get a "tricky genius" kind of dev. That realizes your wishes exactly according to your specifications, but still manage to not create what you want. They just take the shortest path to their payment. I got burned a whole $20,000 once like this.

</comment><comment><USER24> I tried many times, I thought my odds were better being a technical founder, yet it didn't ever quite work out. It's not just about the abilities or whatnot. The relationship between you and a contractor is just so different than that with a co-founder or a dedicated employee. Will you feel comfortable bothering them with seemingly unimportant details? Will they keep thinking how to do things better?

I generally try to be a nice person and never wanted to be THAT terrible person who tries to get a lot done for no $. But then you still feel like you're wasting your money and feeling scammed is not a great feeling. You have to pick between being a douchebag and a foolish people-pleaser.

I think contractors are great for large organizations that need to quickly scale up (and down) their tech force without hiring. Money isn't a problem for them and relations with employees in a large organization are transnational already so it's not going to be that much worse.

If you're trying to save money, then no don't do it. The best way to save money is to convince somebody to just do it for you.

</comment><comment><USER25> My 2 cents:

1/ On your side, you need to make sure you know what you want (at the very least the big picture)with a rough idea on priorities and communicate it to your contractors well. Reserve some time for questions on their side and be generally open. In return, listen to their technical feedback and take it on account when weighting on decisions. After all, you hired them because they have some level of technical expertise that you don't have.

2/ On their side, your contractors must be comfortable with showing their progress on a regular basis. This is tremendously important so you can see how things are moving, catch problems before they arise and overall steer the whole ship if need be. It is also really important that they are able to explain what they are doing and why do they do it in this order as after all they are working for you.

Finding this balance will essentially make sure the contractors have what they need to fill your expectations while making sure on your side you actually have what you are paying for.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm in your shoes now. I'm a UX designer trying to launch my app. The dev I hired is okay but he is not top notch. He frequently misses things that I have to catch. It is tiring but I put up with it because the alternative is much more expensive. My advice would be to triple your budget from whatever you have in mind. Developers are not robots, they can't estimate down to the dollar like a designer could (not that you'd want that). In all of my experience of working with devs, projects tend to run well over timeline and well over budget. So if you have say a 5k budget for your app, best assume it'll cost 15k and take 3 times longer to complete.

Another note: as a designer I have found developers to severely lack attention to detail. I get it. I've done dev work myself and know what it's like to look at code and the difficulty of switching your mind to making sure every is per spec. I have worked around top notch developers and have yet to come across one with the attention to detail to never miss anything. You better be on your feet all the time and double and triple checking yourself. The product will likely never be delivered in the form you hope for.

Last thing: spell the shit out of every task. Organize in pivotal or what have you. Having an idea of how something should look or function will not always carry over to the person you describe it to. It'll be clear as day in your mind and they will only have a slight clue as to what you imagine. Spell it out to the letter - function by function, detail by detail, item by item. I know this sounds harsh but if you don't do this you'll lose a lot of money fast without a finished product. The only devs who are reading this now and thinking this is fken ridiculous are the devs who are much more experienced and are likely at the top of their game - not a freelancer type you can ever afford for an MVP. I dream of working with a dev like that but like I said I have yet to come across one. Maybe they all work at google amazon Facebook, who knows?

So, expect delays, expect going well over your budget and be prepared to hand hold throughout the whole project.

</comment><comment> barry-cotter You have given little information so probably you don't have anything valuable, on average. If you have real customers, a number of people who have committed to pay for something well defined via a letter of intent or real expertise in some business then by all means go for it.

If you work with freelancers it could work out if you're good, lucky or both. Don't do that. Find someone who doubles your chandlcebif success and work with them instead.

You could A. Get a job B. Work on upwork or some other Market for Lemons C. Do Lambdaschool.com D. Do open.appacadenmmy.io E. Sell a technical cofounder on you

E means showing how great you are, how much you know about your target market or how big it is or how many potential customers you have for a _detailed, particular_ idea.

</comment><comment><USER27> There are "studios" that have been setup inside a few accelerators that would be the only way I'd do this. They aren't cheap, but they're generally people with some startup experience who know how to crank out code and not give you as many headaches along the way.

I would not use a random contractor, and would only use the above as a last resort. It's cliched, but if you can't convince a technical person or two to join your team early and go in with you on it, it's going to be tough to convince others too. Think of getting a few people who know how to build things as your first investors (even if you're paying them... you should be paying them unless you are splitting equity like founders).

</comment><comment><USER28> If you understand tech well enough that you can spar with them then yes.

I have built several products with freelancers. My primary area is design but I understand technology well enough that I can help solve potential problems I can even code a little (mostly php, javascript and scripting like css and html) I can also look at lover level languages like objective c code and understand kind of what is going on.

If you are building something technically complex I would say you are much better of finding at tech-co-founder or at least have some friends in the tech business you get advice from.

If you are building simpler things then you should be fine with just running it yourself.

</comment><comment><USER29> There is no clear answer. It depends.

First of all consider a Freelancer as a mercenary. He doesn't care about your cause, he cares about getting paid for it. That means most of the times he will cut corners which may not be obvious at first but will come up later (e.g. security, scalability etc). This can usually be avoided by not going for the cheapest options but again there are no guarantees.

On the other hand you may find a capable freelancer who has a good professional ethic. Who may even end up being one of your first employees later.

</comment><comment><USER30> If you are going to start a software company, you need a good software development team, and a team that consists only of a nontechnical entrepreneur and freelancers has an obvious leadership disadvantage compared to a team in which top management has a good grasp of what they are doing.

Are you sure that your business/product idea is sufficiently aligned with your skills and knowledge? If not, why do you expect to be able to compete with experts?

</comment><comment><USER31> First you need to find a technical co-founder you can trust. I saw a few founders fail because they thought they can manage communication with developers alone.

</comment><comment><USER32> It can be hard. I would recommend you to search for freelancer that would like to be engaged into your project. While working on startup you need to put heart in what you are doing, often working much more than needed. You will have a problem with freelancer that is doing only his tasks and nothing more.

</comment><comment><USER33> It is possible to build an MVP in this way - my suggestion is to take a small project with clearly defined deliverables and shop it to 3-5 minimum developers as a super alpha of whatever it is you are building.

In this way you are able to test the quality of the outsourcing company you are using / freelancer.

Also, as a note to anything - if it is not working out - fire quickly.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER34> We ([https://ideatostartup.org](https://ideatostartup.org)) have helped several non-tech founders build their MVP and can help you too.

</comment><comment><USER35> Best path here is getting cheap prototypes you like from the bottom market (fiverr or similar) and make them mod / improve by a local, skilled freelancer you trust and know in person.

</comment><comment><USER21> There are companies that you can outsource the entire development to. They will do the project management, find the developers with right skillset, etc.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm a consultancy owner where our engagement mode slightly resembles a freelancer model. There are a few things you should keep in mind (some of which have already been mentioned in this thread):

1\. Don't participate in the race to the bottom on price. The goal with most MVPs, in my experience, is to build something that can feasibly be expanded beyond the MVP point. If you work with someone inexpensive, you're likely to wind up with something that, even if it meets your goals, will be difficult to expand upon beyond the initial scope. Of note, you should bear in mind your growth plan beyond the MVP. For example, do you want this freelancer to stick around long enough to help install an internal team? If so, you almost certainly want someone with management/hiring experience, not necessarily a recent code bootcamp grad.

2\. Don't work with someone on a fixed-fee if your business has any possibility of adjustment. There are plenty of shops and freelancers out there who grossly misunderstand what it means to be "agile." Agile software development isn't just about the tools and processes one uses to build software -- it's about alignment with the business at any given point in time, and an engineering team's ability to adjust as your business realities change. For example, as you're building your MVP, if you discover that feature X is critical to a large customer using your product, you're logically going to want to introduce it to your MVP scope and prioritize it accordingly. Working with someone on a fixed fee incentivizes scope-freezes when the work is started, which might have financial advantage for you in the short term, but can greatly hinder your ability to adjust as the world changes around you and your business.

3\. Work with people who are aligned with your business. Someone who isn't willing to understand the actual business machinations at play behind your MVP is not going to be understanding of your priorities, and won't be able to make informed technical recommendations. You might not think you're looking for a CTO-like figure or anything of that ilk, but when first building out a MVP that you hope to grow beyond that, this level of insight is extremely valuable.

3a. When working with consultancies in particular, do not try to offset monetary payment with stock/equity. It's a clear red flag for us.

4\. Work with people you can trust. If you don't have someone in your network, go out of your way to build that trust.

5\. Have an idea of what you want, but be willing to listen. Some of us have done user research a million times and know what people don't want to see in a product, and the good ones are going to bring such things to your attention. You know your business better than outside people/organizations, but they might know something you don't.

I'm happy to have a conversation about this with anyone interested. Email in profile.

</comment><comment><USER37> I've built 40+ web-apps in the last decade through freelancing and then had my own web-firm with a team of 8 developers all remote. I got tired of building MVPs and so switched to AWS Training and Consultancy since my passion is with educational training.

What kills projects and drives up costs was:

Client doesn't have a clear vision of what will sell. This is evident since they have multiple business models or they keep changing features to tweak the business model. Have one business model and be confident that you won't change anything. If you have to change then you didn't do market validation and you are wasting money on development.

Client's don't understand the scope of what goes into a app and when you ask them to block out the pages they need come back with only 30% and then an estimate is made based on whats presented. They never think about the admin panel, the auxiliary pages, support pipeline, on-boarding flow. If you can find an "Interaction Designer" who can not only wireframe but design end to end flows this will migrate developer waste.

Bringing in a technical advisor, developer, designer mid project always inflates budget because they provide conflicting advice, try to over architect over process, or now we have two sources of truth, the advisor and the client. If you want to bring in more resources you need to understand you'll be expected to adjust the budget and pay more since you made more work for freelancer/firm than previous.

Flipping the coin I have been brought into projects as a technical advisor, and I have found developers totally lieing about their work by logging fake hours or outsourcing when they are not allowed to. I helped the client gain visibility by showing them how to read git commit history, what a sprint should look like. Re-estimate out tickets and gauge an alternative velocity to help the understand if the speed of the developer matches their cost. What a good/bad commit looks like. But I don't tell the developer what to do, create tasks or make in detail architectural decisions.

AWS, Rails and NodeJS are good as your primary stack since bootcamps churn juniors as low as 2.5K CAD on Rails and NodeJS. AWS is good since it gives you full visibility and helps you enforce good practices so you have less technical debt down the road.

I've hired developers out of bootcamps, hired them off of upwork, randomly cold-emailed developers I liked. I get them from everywhere. Its a 1:40 ratio to find a developer with good work ethic.

I care about work ethic and best practices/good habits first and developer experience second.

I would suggest getting lo-fi sketches of every possible page in desktop for your admin, marketing, support, onboard, auxiliary and core pages.

Then you get a developer to code them

Then after the functionality is in place you bring in a UX designer to polish the designs.

If you have the money I would get a Interaction Design on day 1.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm not a programmer. I have a certificate in GIS. I've blogged for years and I know a little HTML and CSS.

Here is a comment about prototyping without writing any code:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18400363](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18400363)

I was advised to start a _design doc_ on my own. It's kind of an idea file to flesh out what you are trying to do.

I am personally leery of hiring a freelancer to code something up for things I want to accomplish, but maybe I will change my mind someday. That's just where I am mentally currently. It's not intended to suggest that where I am currently is some Final Word.

Here is some of why I am leery:

1\. In GIS school, I learned that a proper Geographic information system was integrated into the workflow of an organization and maps were generated by people needing them, people who have a purpose for the map. The information they want to convey with the map matters and serves a goal. In an organization where GIS is some department where other people send requests for maps, you get a "map shop." Map shops wind up being places that produce pretty maps.

A good nap will be described as beautiful by many people. Good design is functional and has aesthetic appeal in the vein of something well engineered. But a pretty map isn't necessarily a good map. In fact, prettifying a map because making the map is all you do typically makes it less useful.

So what I learned is that good maps are made by people who are creating the map for a purpose, not people who get paid to crank out maps. The person with that purpose is the best person to make that map.

2\. When you hire it out, you miss out on founder development. Good companies are made, not born. "Self made men" go through a substantial process to get there.

The single most important element in a business is _paying customers_. If you don't have that, you don't have a real business. You maybe have an expensive hobby.

Doing things yourself has a lot to do with interacting with the target market and thereby learning what you need to do differently. Hiring someone to code it up may have it's place, but it may also deny you those valuable interactions with your intended customers while you focus on having code rather than focusing on having a thing that accomplishes a particular objective. Code may end up being that thing that accomplishes that objective. But it may not be.

You might try collecting stories of things that were founded without initially having code. Craig's List started as an email list.

Having said all that, I will suggest that if you do hire someone, you do your homework as outlined by others in comments here. Make sure you know what you want them to do for you. Don't just throw an idea at them and expect them to make magic.

I do freelance writing. I vastly prefer to get short, concise instructions that give me a clear set of parameters for the piece. I hate getting multiple pages micromanaging details.

So spell out the big picture stuff. Avoid micromanaging, if possible.

Last, good communication is a big part of successful freelance work. Try to find someone you click with. They can't give you what you need if they don't really understand what you have in mind.

Edit: See also this current post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18480115](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18480115)

</comment><comment><USER39> I would invest a few days or weeks and write a detailed and precision spec. Then you can work with freelancers. The biggest risk is scope creep because it sours relationships quickly. If you invest the time to write a spec, there is far less risk. A spec is a narrative and a list of specific screens and functions. I have run a dev shop for 10 years and can help you with a spec if you're interested.

</comment><comment><USER40> in my previous team, our founder was not technical. she hired an experienced freelancer (they had a history of projects together) then that freelancer managed her team/ hire process.

take away from this

1\. hire a developer you can trust.

2\. he can build a team

3\. don't use Node for backed (my personal opinion)

4\. keep an eye on how much everyone is getting paid.

if you need help hit me up at akshay.deep0{at}gmail.com

I have been freelancing from 7years now.</comment>


App marketing insights from the 2013 App Promotion Summit - <AUTHOR> http://www.apptamin.com/blog/app-promotion-summit-insights/

<comment><USER2> Biggest insight - 'go for sustainable app marketing strategies not just burst download campaigns'</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any US bank with a consumer facing API? - <AUTHOR> I want a bank or service that gives me direct access to transactions data over API.
There was a great Ask HN about this a year ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12359560), but no easy way to get API access to my own transactions as a regular consumer.
Anyone know of something like this? <comment><USER2> The EU is mandating considerable openness including API access for customers this year. PSD2 may come to US customers of international banks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Afaik [https://plaid.com/](https://plaid.com/) allows you to access transaction data

<comment><USER4> But Plaid doesn't offer banking services, just balance and transaction data from traditional banks (as well as some other services like authentication). Used their API for a side project and recommend it.

Dwolla is another player in this space. [https://www.dwolla.com/](https://www.dwolla.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Simple Bank allows you to export your transaction data as json, but I don't think they have a public API.

</comment><comment><USER6> The transcation data you seek is proprietary.

<comment><USER7> But it's your own transactions.</comment></comment>


What's your favorite editor to hack with? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I love TextMate on the Mac. Personally I think it's the best thing since sliced bread :)

The only problem is that it's not cross platform and it's not available when you're connecting over SSH into a server to fix some problems. I use Vi most of the time to just edit configuration files, etc, but I found it lacks the power I need for doing serious hacking (for all the vi lovers out there, I'm willing to admit this is due to my ignorance).

I'm re-trying to learn Emacs to do some Erlang hacking but I've always been turned off the by the relatively cryptic key combinations.

<comment><USER3> Why regular Vi and not Vim?

<comment><USER2> You are right, I actually use Vim not Vi, I don't like Vi much as it doesn't seem to like certain things, like key movements in insert mode.

<comment><USER4> there are no movement commands in insert mode (to my knowledge) in vi

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Vi. The simplicity, speed, and the fact that it is installed on any *nix system by default are my favorite aspects of Vi. I've played around with Vim, but haven't migrated to it because I just don't use the features.

At times, I have been tempted to move to Emacs due to all its cool features but have not yet, maybe some day. Emacs in slime mode has been great to use while learning lisp.

<comment><USER6> Petsonally, I can't imagine being without "zz" to center my view. I don't know if Vi has an equivalent. "zb" and "zt" are nice, too.

<comment><USER5> I use Ctrl-U and Ctrl-D to reposition the screen with respect to the cursor, and it works out great.

I can see how what you describe 'zz' doing would be nice though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Emacs (<http://www.io.com/~jimm/emacs_tips.html>).

</comment><comment><USER8> Lately I've been using Komodo edit from ActiveState, for a few reasons: It's free (but not open source), cross-platform, optional vi (or emacs) key bindings, built-in FTP support, cool "toolbox" feature, code completion for a few scripting languages...

And it is based on the Mozilla platform, so it has extensions just like Mozilla products.

</comment><comment><USER9> i'm a schizophrenic:

emacs - as a user, for lisp, xml, text, html templates, everything that takes time. Launched at morning.

vi/vim - as a root/admin, for editing config files, especially on remote machines

notepad.exe - on windows, very rarely

<comment><USER10> I'm basically the same, although I have viper and vimpulse modes switched on in emacs. (Years after switching from vim I still thought non-modal editing was an aberration, so I gave up trying to brainwash myself.)

And (very) occasionally I use ed to make small changes. That's mainly just to demonstrate my 1337ness to the one person who cares (me).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> vim. if you're hacking rails in vim, make sure to check out the rails.vim plugin (<http://rails.vim.tpope.net/>). it rocks. also, for general-purpose web dev, use the matchit plugin (<http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=39>) to balance your xml/html tags.

</comment><comment><USER12> Clay tablets (in my lame attempt to be more hardcore than the 'vim and proud of it' club)

</comment><comment><USER13> I've been using 'e' a bit. It's supposed to be the Textmate equivalent on Windows:

<http://e-texteditor.com/>

Intype is another editor that's trying to bring Textmate to Windows, but it's not as polished as 'e':

<http://intype.info>

</comment><comment><USER6> Vim.

At work, it's Visual Studio 2005 + ViEmu + Visual Assist.

</comment><comment><USER14> I generally use vim and have the ViAllOver input manager to add vi commands to other text editors.

<http://www.dabble.org/viallover/>

Unfortunately, ViAllOver won't work in Komodo, TextMate, etc. since many editors don't use NSTextView.

</comment><comment><USER15> I was following intype from the beginning (because of the snippet functionality to tell you the truth) but while a usable version didn't came along i had to learn another one, so i went with emacs... if was love at 42th sight.

</comment><comment><USER16> Notepad2 on Windows ( <http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html> ), the best replacement for Notepad.

vi on nix

</comment><comment><USER17> I use vim and gvim.

</comment><comment><USER18> vim, obviously.

<comment><USER19> Bah! Visual editors are so new-school.

You should use ex :)

<comment><USER20> Sam is the coolest of the non-visual editors, but it's deceptive because it comes with a graphical mode. If you run with that off, though, it's ed on steroids.

<comment><USER19> ex is the same executable as vim/vi these days.

<comment><USER20> are you sure this was meant to be in reply to me? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Depends what I'm hacking. I actually use both vi and emacs -- vi for quick edits and emacs for more serious work. Eclipse for Java but nothing else. I'll resort to ed if I'm on a system where I don't have my emacs customizations and vi isn't vim.

</comment><comment><USER22> Vim

</comment><comment><USER23> emacs

Visual Studio for C#, though I haven't used it in awhile. Also sometimes IDLE for Python and Dev-C++ for C. (Though for C I mostly use emacs now)

</comment><comment><USER24> PluggableTextMorph

</comment><comment><USER25> (g)Vim

</comment><comment><USER26> Kate, mostly. Vim when I need to do a quick edit (I use xterms for a lot of stuff I do) or when logging in remotely.

</comment><comment><USER27> emacs for general purpose and languages. Eclipse for Scala and Netbeans for Java. DrScheme for MzScheme.

</comment><comment><USER28> Eclipse. Plenty of good plugins available for many languages, excellent SVN/CVS integration.

</comment><comment><USER29> currently I'm learning Emacs, and I'm loving it. For quick tasks (i.e.: config file, glue scripts) if emacs is not running (i.e.: connected on a server) then Vim.

For really stupid things, cat ;)

<comment><USER24> Hmm, I've always found it odd how many people say they use emacs, but not for "quick" tasks. It's not like it takes long to start it up -- on my machine, emacs -f kill-emacs takes 0.12 seconds.

<comment><USER29> On one of my old machines, development server not my desktop:

      edu@galileo:~$ time emacs -f kill-emacs

      real    0m1.421s
      user    0m0.092s
      sys     0m0.052s

      edu@galileo:~$ time vim --cmd :q

      real    0m0.016s
      user    0m0.008s
      sys     0m0.004s

I have to add that if I run again emacs it loads pretty fast, but the first time it's slooow.

      edu@galileo:~$ time emacs -f kill-emacs

      real    0m0.136s
      user    0m0.068s
      sys     0m0.044s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> the same as my favorite editor for everything... vim

</comment><comment><USER30> Nobody else likes using ed sometimes?

</comment><comment><USER31> emacs

<comment><USER32> I learned it for Slime, and started using it for everything else when every other editor felt crippled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> vi - preferably elvis, because I'm a contrarian (and it comes as standard with Slackware)

</comment><comment><USER34> NetBeans, ;)

</comment><comment><USER35> irb/ghci/drscheme, and then just copy-pasting into something stupid like pico.

</comment><comment><USER36> TextMate

<comment><USER37> I've started using e Text editor for Windows; as it supports the TextMate bundles.

<comment><USER38> Another vote for e. I love it, Snippets are the bomb, and the textmate bundle support is great as well.

<comment><USER36> the next step is to move to osx :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> textmate, bundles are great

</comment><comment><USER40> SlickEdit

</comment><comment><USER41> Smultron.

</comment><comment><USER42> Intype.

</comment><comment><USER43> vim

</comment><comment><USER44> TextMate

</comment><comment><USER45> stone & chizzle

</comment><comment><USER46> Kate

</comment><comment><USER47> Scite

</comment><comment><USER48> eclipse

</comment><comment><USER49> jedit

<comment><USER30> I prefer to use jEdit when I'm working on a project that I move between several different machines to work on - if I know I'll be developing on a mac, linux, and windows machine it's good to keep some sense of organization the same inside the text editor and it's plugins.</comment></comment>


Toys 'R' Us Champion Larian Steps Forward with $100M to Save Stores - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-23/toys-r-us-champion-larian-steps-forward-with-100-million <comment><AUTHOR> Smart move by the CEO of the company that makes Bratz dolls and Little Tikes. He is right when he says that without Toy"R"Us the toy industry is going to have two terrible years: grown-ups might prefer to shop for toys online, but (small) children need physical stores to pick their toys (and tell their parents what they like)</comment>


The Economics of Climate Change - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574559491076961008.html

<comment><USER2> I agree with the article that any global policies have to be very well-founded since they involve very large sums of money, but these research grants? It's pocket change.

My guess is that at the bottom of this there's actual data that shows worrying trends that the involved scientists think are important to continue doing research on, and that some of them fudged it, exaggerated a bit, and polished it a bit to make it easier to "sell" it to the politicians in charge of handing out the grant money.

But that there's some sort of malicious conspiracy to fool then entire world that everything is going to hell? For what's practically pocket change that pays the salaries of a large group of scientists? No, that makes no sense.

And what have they spent the research money on? Hookers and blow? Of course not, it's been spent on climate research and taking us closer to understanding what's happening and what, if anything, we can do about it. Spin-off effects of this is that money has been going into research projects for cleaner energy, more efficient energy use, alternatives to fossil fuel, and all these things are undeniably good.

The media hype, that I could live without, and the Copenhagen Climate Conference is becoming I don't know what, but I hope that cooler heads prevail and that actual non-fudged data and science is used there, because there is of course a lot of that, just because the leak showed one instance of bad data, it doesn't mean that the entire thing is bad.

<comment><USER3> It might be pocket change to Google or J.P. Morgan. In the academic world, those are career making amounts.

And big grants do give financial rewards to the PI. Say I get a $10 million grant; my university will take about $5 million off the top in "overhead" (to be spent on overpaid administrators, student stress counselors, the latino student center, and maybe even education). I turn to them and say "give me a 50% pay raise or I leave". The university then compares the cost of a 50% pay raise to half my grant, and gives me a 75% raise.

<comment><USER4> Saying science grant money goes to latino student centers jumps out as odd. Where has this happened?

<comment><USER3> As I explained in my post, universities take about half of any grant given to them as "overhead". Sometimes it goes down, but rarely below 25%. The overhead is taken from the grant and put into the general fund of the university.

The general fund of the university is used to pay for things like football coaches, the LGBT.* Formal Ball or rock concerts (note: these are all real examples).

In theory, the overhead only pays for facilities and administrative services necessary to use the grant (e.g., rent and electricity for a lab). In practice, the overhead taken is vastly more than what such services actually cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I get the feeling that the entire purpose of the CRU email leak is to create FUD leading up to Copenhagen. What exactly was the motive of this anonymous whistleblower? If the person who leaked these emails had the best interest of climate research in mind why were they conveniently leaked right before Copenhagen? I do not believe this leak was done in the interests of clarity because I believe the timing of this leak was significant to the whistleblower. I do hope this leak leads to more openness in climate research. But I don't think openness was the motive of the leaker.

I also doubt any analysis of these emails and their conclusions so close after the leak. It will take time and analysis to understand how the supposed infractions and rigged data actually affected the dialogue surrounding climate change. It's not enough to say someone fudged data. What we need to see is how that fudged data affected the actual debate over the climate's change. And that analysis should take longer than a week.

</comment><comment><USER6> "But in this decade, according to one of the leaked documents, the total shot up to £11.8 million,"

Holy shit, ELEVEN MILLION POUNDS??? They must be criminals. Nobody makes that much money legally.

Just think how many weather stations, researchers and assistents you could buy for that. Oh wait...

But yeah, research involves a lot of politics.

<comment><USER7> If only there was some organization on the other side that could afford that sort of money. They'd easily be able to get scientists to produce the results they wanted.

<comment><USER6> Only like every oil company on earth? You don't seriously believe what you wrote?

Not even sure if there are not skeptics on government grants - why shouldn't there be? Do you have any insights into who is researching, and on whose money?

However, a honest question: who benefits from belief in global warming, and who benefits from belief in global not-warming? I have a hard time coming up with big industries benefiting from global warming belief, but there might be some?

<comment><USER7> Sorry, I was being sarcastic.

But it is one thing to suggest that a scientist's work might be influenced by who's financing the work. It's quite another to suggest, as this article did, that scientists would delibratly concoct a hoax just to secure more funding.

And if it really were the case that scientists are fabricating scares for a few million pounds, why are thry not also fabricating reasuuring theories to secure funding from those with an interest in maintaining the status quo?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reading that article I was actually shocked at how little money was being spent studying climate change.

Meanwhile, being a "skeptic" is good money these days:

<http://tinyurl.com/22go3n>

<http://tinyurl.com/yzgojux>

<http://tinyurl.com/2kzqd7>

<http://tinyurl.com/2ozbrc>

<http://tinyurl.com/yhealhs>

<http://tinyurl.com/mrmb9j>

<http://tinyurl.com/yfq5tam>

<http://tinyurl.com/yhuhceh>

<http://tinyurl.com/yf8pekp>

(not spam, all links relevant in terms of providing some balance)

<comment><USER9> There's no need for URL shorteners here

<comment><USER10> True but the links are quite relevant and telling.

<comment><USER11> But they're still short and anonymous. Besides relevant and telling, they would be more _appealing_ if they weren't shortened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "For the world's economy, of course, trillions of dollars are now at stake in pursuit of emissions reductions based on the flawed science that these leaked emails have helped lay bare."

From what I've read about them the emails lay _little_ bare about the science - more about the politics of trying to keep down the FUD-slingers and easily- publicized, some-what contrary findings.

Further, a huge increase in funding does _not_ constitute evidence that it is being used for "flawed science".

The future of powerful data and analysis of climate changes is in sad shape if (unsigned) articles in WSJ.com by persons of unknown scientific credentials become the guides for world policy.</comment>


Ask HN: Stripe where users pay for time they spent in the App - <AUTHOR> Are there any services like Stripe, where users don't need to buy monthly subscription? Instead they will pay only for time they spent in the App. Payment protocol on "crypto currencies" provides an ability to do that. User will be not overcharged, app's owner will be sure that he will receive money from user for the time spent. For better explanation please see, https://blog.request.network/introducing-continuous-payments-a61132332984<p>Does anybody need that service? I need a feedback from you guys <comment><USER2> Quit creating accounts just to ask this same question.

<comment><USER3> I agree, but this is not real question. It's just a disguised add for a service.

(To the OP:

It's ok to post your service here if the post is interesting and you don't repost it too many times, and you don't try shady things like pretending to ask a question or creating new accounts to avoid the spam filters.

Many times an interesting post about how you solve one problem in the implementation of your app is better here than a generic post. Specially if the problem is specific to your kind of app, but generic enough to be useful in other apps.

)</comment></comment>


SnS Crystals Open Pathway for Improved Next Generation Solar Cell - <AUTHOR> https://scitechdaily.com/sns-crystals-open-pathway-for-improved-next-generation-solar-cells/ <comment><AUTHOR> >Growth of Large Single Crystals of n-Type SnS from Halogen-Added Sn Flux

[https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.cgd.0c00617](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.cgd.0c00617)</comment>


Apple's Priority Queue - <AUTHOR> http://amro.co/apples-priority-queue

<comment><USER2> > I believe Apple does all of these things to encourage developers to do a > better job testing their apps prior to submission and to prevent high volume > developers from hogging the review team's time.

I'm kind of tired of bring this up, as I'm sure others are tired of the same sort of comments, but the App Store has been bothering me quite a bit lately. This doesn't seem like the way things should work. We shouldn't be spending time thinking up clever and logical explanations of what hoops Apple puts the very developers that make its platform interesting through.

Am I wrong? I don't (yet) write iPhone apps, and I am honestly seeking sane opinions of those who do.

As a student, I am currently learning everything I can about everything that goes on my computer and how it works, and realizing that almost _nothing_ I currently know would be possible without all the open-source tools that are used in every one of our courses (none of the lab machines in the CS department here run Windows). The very core idea of being able to tinker and learn about each moving part of software, like a mechanism made of semi- transparent gears, is what attracted me personally into the industry in the first place. Developers' ideas seem to only be guided by what they are able to dream up and code, and anyone can participate and improve things collaboratively creating something beautiful and useful.

And now I'm learning that one of the supposedly more exciting ways to make a living using the acquired knowledge is to do things in very particular restricted ways, according to the rules set out by one company, using the tools they deemed fit. Perhaps I'm overdramatizing, but there is just something very fishy about the entire concept, and I can't tell whether my confusion stems from lack of knowledge, the fact that I'm looking at it from a fresh point of view that others are just too deep in the trenches to see, or both.

<comment><USER3> For Historical background: An awful lot of money in software/computing has been made in proprietry systems.

Where Open Source is supported by companies is where it is a complement to their main line of business. So Google support OS browsers so that people will be online more and click on more ads. IBM likes Linux because people might buy more IBM hardware. 37signals makes web-apps and benefits from Rails. There's enough of those complements (plus altruistic applications -- think Torvalds or _Why) that we have a full ecosystem that everyone benefits from.

The money is in the closed source stuff (Google doesn't OS adsense or their core search or cluster stuff, IBM doesn't OS zOS or WebSphere, 37signals doesn't OS basecamp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't agree with this at all. If there's any preferential treatment that I've seen in the review line, it has everything to do with which category the app is in and how popular the app is.

I've self rejected an app that was in the top 20 of a category many times. I can't even think of a time we submitted an update that we didn't self reject at least once. This app still gets much quicker review times for updates than another app which is much less popular.

I guess I'd like to see more than "here's how i think it works" and instead some explanation as to why this guy thinks it works how he thinks.

</comment><comment><USER5> I see the same patterns.

I'd add this: when you receive the "your app needs more time to review" email, it seems like your app is bumped into a "needs supervisor approval" queue.

In my experience, it takes up to 24 hours for Apple Developer Relations to call you and explain the cause of the hold up.

I've seen this multiple times and it's always for some specific situations that are not explicitly covered in the guidelines - i.e. they need further clarification about copyright ownership, or maybe they just need to explain what needs to be changed in order to pass their review.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like a cargo cult. Make the 'right' motions, and if the gods smile upon you, your tribe will prosper -- or your app will be approved.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm even convinced that updates are processed programatically in many cases, and that a human doesn't even see it if it marches certain criteria.

We ran a website that let users create their own iPhone apps so bugfixes to the platform required 55+ apps to be rebuilt and resubmitted at the same time. Emails for all 55 apps would come in at the same time every time they changed state (30 or so seconds to receive all 55) and was very consistent through all of our updates.

FWIW, some more anecdotal evidence

1) after the switch to 4.0, updates to my apps that added background audio and support for the high res screen were through in 2 days. during this same period, normal bug fixes took around 12 calendar days

2) just updating images and names can take upwards of 3 weeks for non-popular apps (you think it'd be the opposite)

</comment><comment><USER8> To me, it sounds like the author reading too much into the (rather opaque) process to try and make sense of it.

Sometimes its fast, other times its not. Its usually consistent, but sometimes they mess up. Thats all we know for sure.

FWIW, my experience is app reviews take the same amount of time -- a week, plus or minus two days. This is regardless of if the submission is of a new app or an update for an existing one. Recent update, fixing something that caused a rejection or the first update in a few months.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough. I'm certainly going only from my own experiences and the review process certainly is opaque. I asked @pschiller so perhaps he'll grace us with some info. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would also add that if your app requires Apple to update its internal approval guidelines it will take you forever to get approved. So if you're innovating on your app's business model or something like that - be prepared.

</comment><comment><USER10> We've been getting 2-3 week update approvals and it is killing us on getting bug fixes out. Last year we'd often get 3 day updates. If there is a priority queue, We are on the wrong end of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think most developers were seeing 3 day approvals at times last year. I recall Apple boasting about their fast turn-around at some point (high 90th percentile in 7 days, IIRC).

<comment><USER5> We got a three day turnaround last year after the iTC holiday shutdown. Submitted on December 29 or 30 I think, and it was approved by the 2nd of january. Guess everybody was trying to get in before the holidays, and then just took a break, meanwhile Apple had beefed up their team for the holiday spike.</comment></comment></comment>


Continuity for Android – SMS from PC, Mac, Tablet - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pplconnect.mobi&hl=en

<comment><USER2> Why should I trust this company with my text messages?

I use 2FA heavily (as everyone should), and having my SMS sync to an unknown cloud would be a security nightmare.</comment>


Toyota Wants to Put a Robot in Every Home and Make It Your Pal - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-26/toyota-wants-to-put-a-robot-in-every-home-and-make-it-your-pal <comment><USER2> I think if companies want to figure out how to make people want robots/assistants in their life as more than just tools, they're going to have to start figuring out how to give users options again. My assistant is personal to me, not the same as everyone else's. The hardware is really almost secondary to this, I'd consider a rectangular box my friend if it had it's own personality, and wasn't the same as everyone else's rectangular box.</comment>


Show HN: A network monitoring system (packet analyser, sniffer) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rcorcs/netmonitor

<comment><USER2> I strongly suggest to include some minimal documentation (intro, build instructions and basic usage). Otherwise, What are you exactly showing ? A github repo ?</comment>


Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts Are Broken (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://research.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html?m=1 <comment><USER3> Previous discussions at [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Nearly%20All%20Binary%20Search...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Nearly%20All%20Binary%20Searches%20and%20Mergesorts%20Are%20Broken&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

</comment><comment><USER4> That line from the C/C++ "fix" is an atrocity; `low`, `mid`, and `high` should never have been declared as signed integers in the first place, since array indices are never negative. It's unfortunate that in Java there is no other option than to use signed ints.

<comment><USER5> For C99, the correct type for an array index is size_t. unsigned int isn't guaranteed to be big enough, while size_t is guaranteed to be large enough for the target architecture.

<comment><USER6> Here's some code you can compile, it shows the problem:

      #include <stdio.h>
      #include <stdint.h>

      int main() {
        printf("size_t bytes: %u\n", sizeof(size_t));

        size_t high = SIZE_MAX;
        size_t low = high-1;
        size_t mid_correct = low+(high-low)/2;
        size_t mid_incorrect = (low+high)/2;

        printf("low: %.ju\n", low);
        printf("high: %.ju\n", high);
        printf("low+high: %.ju\n", low+high);
        printf("(low+high)/2 -- incorrect: %.ju\n", mid_incorrect);
        printf("low+(high-low)/2 -- correct: %.ju\n", mid_correct);
      }

On my 64-bit machine, I get:

      size_t bytes: 8
      low: 18446744073709551614
      high: 18446744073709551615
      low+high: 18446744073709551613
      (low+high)/2 -- incorrect: 9223372036854775806
      low+(high-low)/2 -- correct: 18446744073709551614

<comment><USER5> This is a great illustration of the actual bug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Programmer: "The bug is in the choice of data type. Use unsigned ints to index arrays."

Computer scientist: "The bug is in the language. Signed integer overflow behavior should have been defined in such a way as to guarantee correct functionality in cases such as this."

Me: "Use int64s for this sort of thing. It's still broken, but I'll be retired or dead before anyone notices."

Engineer: "The bug is in the documentation. The program is correct but should have been specified for use with element counts no greater than INT_MAX / 2."

Mathematician: "A solution exists."

Manager: "Ship it."

<comment><USER8> Mathematician: "I conjecture that a solution exists."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm surprised about the suggested solution for java:

      int mid = (low + high) >>> 1;

I suppose things like this is why the ">>>" (unsigned shift) operator exists - but it's a bit odd when the value it works on is considered signed by the language, and implemented as two-compliment signed in memory.

What's interesting to me is that this allows the sum to overflow, and would fail with the ">>" operator as far as I can tell (signed shift) - just like the original code would fail with simply dividing by 2.

Guess it shows java's "system language" roots - in that one might expect there to be a way to be alerted to overflow when working with signed integers - <USER2> the solution here is to use a special operator to "fix" the problem.

Maybe it's just me, but it's a solution that would feel more at home in assembler, than I personally think it does in java.

<comment><USER10> I agree it would be very surprising to see that line in a java codebase. >>> seems more like an answer to a java trivia question than something you'd come across on a regular basis.

<comment><USER9> Thinking a bit more about this, I think what feels off about it to me, is the invisible "type gymnastics" \- it's something that might be a bad idea, but feel more natural, in assembly (that byte is what you decide it represents at any given moment). The individual numbers are signed ints, the sum overflows and is treated as an "unsigned two's complement binary" and shifted down to a signed int...

It feels like subtle subversion of java's admittedly strange type system for numbers (mix of raw integer types and boxed numbers is never going to be pretty...).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So what 'bout this? It's the latest glibc.

[https://fossies.org/dox/glibc-2.25/stdlib- bsearch_8h_source....](https://fossies.org/dox/glibc-2.25/stdlib- bsearch_8h_source.html)

<comment><USER11> The problematic line is:

__idx = (__l + __u) / 2;

__idx, __l, and __u are all the same type and the addition of __l and __u could cause an overflow resulting in a nonsense value assigned to __idx.

<comment><USER6> Seems like it's still an open ticket:

[https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=2753](https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=2753)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > int mid = low + ((high - low) / 2);

That may fix things in the case of searching a sorted array, but binary search can be used more generally than that. I think that fix might not work for some of the more general applications of binary search.

For instance, suppose f(n) is an increasing function from the signed integers to the signed integers, with f(a) < 0 and f(b) > 0, and you want to find an n in (a,b), if such n exists, such that f(n) = 0. Binary search on [a, b] is a reasonable approach.

If a < 0 and b > 0, then that mid computation could overflow on the subtraction.

<comment><USER13> I'm tempted to suggest

        (low / 2) + (high / 2)

but then I have to think about rounding error. Ugh. I guess you could write a bunch of nested `if`s to handle the parity errors, assuming you know how your language rounds when dividing negative numbers. (I wouldn't be surprised if C leaves that "implementation-defined".) If you're really searching an arbitrary range, maybe just use bigints. Then at least you can stop worrying about overflow altogether.

<comment><USER6> That won't get you the middle, these are integer divisions.

<comment><USER13> Yes, that's why I said: "but then I have to think about rounding error. Ugh." Because integer division rounds. (Or truncates, if you prefer.)

<comment><USER8> Rouding error can be taken care of:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14908117](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14908117)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't think that is broken. The algorithm is sound conceptually. I was almost looking for some type of theory where all mergesorts and binary searches could be improved.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. This was a very underwhelming article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> (High-low) works, well if we consider this from a pointer pov!

</comment><comment><USER17> Won't this line have similar issue?

      return -(low + 1);  // key not found.

</comment><comment><USER18> A more modern version of this is: nearly all discussion about sorts that claims computers can't do search in better than O(n log n) are wrong and have been for some time.

Edit: I'm quite surprised I'm being modded down given the magnitude of what I'm implying. I suspect someone doesn't understand what I'm saying.

<comment><USER13> The O(n log n) bound only holds for comparison-based sorts. It's not a matter of time; it's an assumption/precondition of the proof.

<comment><USER18> Right, but a generalization of discrimination-based sorts didn't exist until earlier this decade. So it was a reasonable statement to misinterpret or relegate to "say you have a 30m character string you wanted to sort as quickly as possible" interview questions.

I certainly didn't realize how generalized discrimination-based sorts were. Many people I've talked to outside of the Haskell community don't know at all. I'm still working through the papers, the base of that chain is like 86 pages long!

This search fallacy has been corrected. I'm mentioning one that hasn't.

<comment><USER13> Huh, is this the stuff you're talking about:

        http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/ansatte/henglein/papers/henglein2011a.pdf
        http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/ansatte/henglein/papers/henglein2011c.pdf
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz9ZlZIRDAg
        https://hackage.haskell.org/package/discrimination

I didn't know about this until I read your reply and googled; I thought you were just obliquely referring to radix sort or something like that.

<comment><USER18> Yes that is it. And it's really a variation on radix sort as well. They're all in the same general family.

I can't believe I got down voted for this thread. What does it take?

I guess I should just post it.

<comment><USER11> Given how few of those posting tonight appeared to understand the import of what Joshua Bloch wrote, I wouldn't take it personally. I'm slightly shocked by it, but I wouldn't take it personally...

<comment><USER18> I did post it, I even said provocatively, "O(n) general sort" in the title. Sadly the point gods were not kind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Classic programming defect !

</comment><comment><USER20> I wish it was worth a lot to be good at systems programming these days. It seems like the huge salaries are for rails senior devs. I spent like ten years getting really good at this stuff (the (low + high)/2 line jumped right out at me) but nowadays it feels like being really good at trivial pursuit.

It's interesting how much things have changed in the last decade. I wonder what next decade's "Rails" will be? Could it be possible to predict?

<comment><USER21> I wish it was worth a lot to be good at assembly these days. It seems like the huge salaries are for c++ devs. I spent like ten years getting really good at this stuff but nowadays it feels like being really good at trivial pursuit.

Edit: Did not mean to "mock" the OP, just merely trying to showing that you can apply that thought to almost anything in the programming world by replacing the technology/language names.

<comment><USER22> Are you mocking the parent poster? Why?

<comment><USER20> Nah, I thought it was a good point. It's easy to forget that we either change or become obsolete. It's one thing to know it abstractly, but it's hard to make any lifestyle changes, especially if it involves switching to a job in a completely new domain.

[http://thecodist.com/article/the_programming_steamroller_wai...](http://thecodist.com/article/the_programming_steamroller_waits_for_no_one) is a good essay on this.

EDIT: previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7204515](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7204515)

<comment><USER21> That's an amazing article. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER23> Yes and no. My response to that article is "The more things change, the more they stay the same." There is no steam roller. The fundamentals are not changing. So much touted (even here on HN) as new and innovative are little more than re-hashed versions of what we were already using 5, 10, 20, 30 years ago, just prettier. Sure the syntax is always changing a little, and the frameworks and tools are evolving, but at a fundamental level the job of a programmer is little different now than it was in any of those eras. I have no doubt that a competent programmer from then, if picked up and plopped in front of a MacBook in 2017 could do a little reading up and perform proficiently in most programming jobs today. Probably more proficient because 1. they've seen it all before including the bugs and pitfalls and 2. I'd argue programming is much easier today than it ever has been.

EDIT: I _swear_ I did not read the top comment in the (newly) linked HN discussion of that article before I wrote my response. I agree completely.

<comment><USER24> I really wonder about this. It seems true to me that it's easier now and anyone who could do it back when it was harder could do it now.

But then, I wonder if it just seems that way to me because I'm a product of "now", which makes me more proficient in how we do things now, which makes it seem easier. It's possible neither is easier, that they are just different, and for everyone, the other seems harder than the one they already know.

I'm not trying to argue that this is the case: I could see it being either way and I sincerely wonder which way it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The bug isn't in your algorithm; the bug is in your language, which doesn't provide arbitrary-precision integer arithmetic by default.

<comment><USER26> Big integer by default is a terrible idea. Just look at Python 3.

<comment><USER27> Python 2 was bigint by default. Not even going to deconstruct your argument past that

<comment><USER26> I didn't say it wasn't...?

<comment><USER27> I didn't say you didn't say it wasn't

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> * for arrays with counts over a billion if you choose to use signed 32-bit integers for array indexes.

Not that it isn't a potential problem, but it's a narrow issue.</comment>


Show HN: Littlebox, a pure CSS icon library – worth continuing? - <AUTHOR> http://littlebox.cabmaddux.com

<comment><USER2> EDIT: To the author, the download and email icons are the same.

This is fantastic. A feature you might not have realized is that it works well with NoScript users. With font-faces considered harmful[0], these icons can be delivered to the user, vulnerability free.

[0] [https://hackademix.net/2010/03/24/why-noscript-blocks-web- fo...](https://hackademix.net/2010/03/24/why-noscript-blocks-web-fonts/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much! I had no idea at all, I'll definitely look into it. Great to hear there's another positive for the project.

I'll take a look back at the email and download icons, good eye.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So, the million dollar question: is it faster to use these, images/sprites, icon fonts? The trade-off I'm assuming is download/load speed vs. cpu load?

<comment><USER4> Don't forget about compatibility. You can be reasonably sure that font icons will display the same everywhere. CSS-based icons are all over the map compatibility-wise (display issues across browsers).

<comment><USER5> Sure, but font icons can only be one color. Can you give an example of a compatibility issue?

<comment><USER4> Font Awesome allows stacking: [http://blog.fontawesome.io/2014/09/25/custom- file-types-with...](http://blog.fontawesome.io/2014/09/25/custom-file-types- with-stacked-icons/)

Here's their demo but with some color added: [http://codepen.io/anon/pen/VYQMea](http://codepen.io/anon/pen/VYQMea)

But yeah, you're typically stuck with one color. Here's a demo that shows off multi-color fonts (Firefox only): [http://pixelambacht.nl/2014/compyx-a- multicolor-8bit-font/](http://pixelambacht.nl/2014/compyx-a-multicolor-8bit- font/)

That technique could be used to make multi-color font icons if it were cross- browser compatible. Maybe one day. But I think SVG icons are where things are headed.

As for compatibility issues, there's one listed on this page: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9047846](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9047846)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks great but the first thing we see when we load the page is a couple lines of instruction and an icon which is not obvious/ just looks like a square and it's confusing.

If you want more people to use it, take the section that has the picture of ALL the icons, and move it to the top of the landing page. Just put some text like "LittleBox something about these icons people will like" in big letters.

I almost left the page. I am glad I scrolled down because I really like them, and I can use the flags in one of my projects.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you liked building it, then it's worth continuing.

The icons look great.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, a great point. It's not a bad creative outlet.

Thanks for taking a look!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> First off, I think this is an awesome portfolio project.

As far as being worth continuing, I would say it's worth maintaining but not adding to (beyond compatibility) moving forward. It's a great example of what you're capable of, and maybe some might even use it seriously, but I know I'd start worrying about every little "wish they had/did this" comment that came my way. That leads to burnout.

</comment><comment><USER9> It looks really great, changing color via CSS is neat!

maybe you could put the license information on that page! (The github page says it is MIT License for those who wonder)

btw the french flag is backwards (Blue - White - Red is the good one)

EDIT: Thanks for the flag fix benjamin!

<comment><AUTHOR> For sure, thanks for taking a look! And good eye on the French flag! I'll get that fixed up.

I'll make sure to add license info to that demo/download page. Thanks again, a huge help!

<comment><USER10> Aditionally, with the flags, I noticed that you have Switzerland as a rectangle. I know that's not an uncommon representation of it, but its flag is actually a square.

Just an fyi :)

<comment><USER11> And in the "pedantic++" category: check out flag proportions, too. See for example [https://flagspot.net/flags/nl-lu.html](https://flagspot.net/flags/nl- lu.html), which explains the difference between the flags of Monaco and Indonesia (buried in a discussion about the flags of the Netherlands and Luxembourg): same colors, but different proportions.

So, Belgium should be 13:15 ([https://flagspot.net/flags/be.html](https://flagspot.net/flags/be.html), for US flags 10:19 seems best for all uses ([https://flagspot.net/flags/us- size.html#prop](https://flagspot.net/flags/us-size.html#prop)), etc.

But that certainly is just a fyi :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd stay away from css to create images personally. it's just too hackish. seems like wikipedia implements some sort of svg to png conversion on the fly. that is preferable for me. css isn't even good at what it's intended for. I certainly don't see it solving more problems.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if SVG is more suited to something like this...

<comment><USER14> I was completely amazed when I recently checked browser support for inline SVG; almost all current browsers support them! [1] So I decided to use inline SVG for icons and logos. It's extremely fast (no separate network request, images embedded in gzipped html source), and as a bonus I can style the images easily using CSS (eg. change colors on hover/active state)

Example see here: [http://jsfiddle.net/Lszz5392/1/](http://jsfiddle.net/Lszz5392/1/)

The nicest part about this is that I can use Adobe Illustrator (or any other vector editor) to create the graphics, and then paste them straight into HTML.

[1]: [http://caniuse.com/#feat=svg-html5](http://caniuse.com/#feat=svg-html5)

<comment><USER15> It might sound weird but I actually like to draw simple SVG images using text editor. SVG is well suited for that, it's readable and compact.

<comment><USER14> Yes, I've done that too. What's even nicer is that you can write scripts that generate SVG. Drawing symmetric things like a gear can be very cumbersome in a vector editor, but it's really nice if you draw it with a script. (And I was finally able to make use of all the math & geometry I learned in school)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> cs- Tested your page on an i3, all 4 cores are at 60%+ that's not very good... probably affects only the animated ones still

<comment><USER16> That doesn't sound right. My 2520M stays at about 8%, using Firefox. That's still relatively high, but in reality there would only be a few on the screen at once.

<comment><USER17> I can confirm that an i5-4200U (decent < 1000$ notebook) goes from 2-4% lowest proc frequency to 14% max proc frequency (and the fan starts). Using Firefox. It is clearly noticeable. Of course YMMV

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nice.. with gz transmission, looks like it's under 9kb, which isn't bad at all for an icon set.

</comment><comment><USER19> Certainly continue! I think there's a lot more you could do, and I really like them so far.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I agree might be interesting to try to capitalize further on animating/coloring individual elements and work on scalability. Just trying to gauge how much time to invest.

The feedback is a huge help!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The flag icons are super nice.

As for the "littlebox icon set", from my standpoint (mostly designer) no. In an icon set I am looking for a) feel and b) perfect balance between each icon so everything feels connected.

That in itself is super hard to get right, even when not limiting yourself to CSS to do it. While this is an impressive feat it doesn't get there for me on either front, compared to what's available out there. So unless there was a very specific reason not to resort to an actual font and/or graphics, I wouldn't consider this one.

<comment><USER21> Brazil's flag looks really weird. I would say it's unusable...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It seems really well done. However I can't help but think "is this really a use case for CSS; or more of a neat hack?". Is that why you're asking if it's worth continuing?

<comment><AUTHOR> True, may just be a neat hack. The opportunity to work with individual elements of an icon independently and the challenge of the constraints was the initial draw to the project. Maybe there would be a use case for the simple icons and icons that would really benefit from coloring individual elements (hence the flags), but I think there are definitely plenty of drawbacks and it's pretty hacky in some places.

I also don't have a great understanding of some of the technical drawbacks and compatibility issues that have been brought up here, so this HN conversation has been an enormous help.

I think you've hit on my main question. Thanks for the feedback and for taking a look!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Oh yes absolutely. Theses are fantastic icons, really well done man.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much, feels good to hear they hold up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Nice work. I'll add 2 more to the mix (bookmarked these while searching for pure CSS icons recently). To answer the title, yes I'd definitely use one of these

[http://nicolasgallagher.com/pure-css-gui- icons/demo/](http://nicolasgallagher.com/pure-css-gui-icons/demo/)

[http://saeedalipoor.github.io/icono/](http://saeedalipoor.github.io/icono/)

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm going to be completely honest as a UI/UX developer. I already feel completely overwhelmed with viable and awesome options. If you aren't heavily using this, at least make sure it isn't interfering with your life. This has nothing to do with what you've done, just how I feel about more icon libraries in general.

</comment><comment><USER26> Really nice icons, good job !

One suggestion for animated icons: add "animated" and "stopped" states if you didn't already.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I've tested "stopped" states and have it on my ToDo list, but need to just take a moment and get it done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some of the currencies look a bit off for me: [http://i.imgur.com/GhjPBr7.png](http://i.imgur.com/GhjPBr7.png)

I'm using Firefox on Arch. I guess it could be something to do with me not having the right fonts installed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah there are three currency icons that change a lot between browsers because part of the icon is a character. Definitely doesn't really work. Having trouble finding a way to create the central shape with the 3 available elements. May need to scratch them until I can.

Thanks for taking a look at it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nice. A comment on the flags: I find the green of Italy indistinguishable from the blue on other flags, maybe make it lighter or something? And France is inverted: it's blue, white, red and not the other way around.

<comment><USER28> I do not find the green of Italy indistinguishable from the blues. Maybe you should take a color-blind test (seriously, not being a jackass).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Nice work. But your german and french flags have the wrong order of colors.

</comment><comment><USER30> Continue Cabell, these are very nice set of icons with a small file size.

</comment><comment><USER31> Quick PSA: The audio player on the site is an actual audio player.

</comment><comment><USER32> Nice - although they break up a bit if you zoom the page, sadly.

</comment><comment><USER33> It's a neat trick to be able to do this using only css, but SVG is really the more suitable technology fort his type of graphic.

</comment><comment><USER34> Not if this is anything more than an academic exercise. Nice effort, but SVG and, to a lesser degree, icon fonts, are better for this sort of thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely good for working on a few weird CSS oddities and helped me get better acquainted with GitHub and Bower. I figured being able to work with individual elements within the icon might be a plus over icon fonts, but definitely not as reliable. Otherwise, I also couldn't come up with much over SVG either. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> nicely done, these are pretty cool. like anything interesting in css i'm not sure if they're practical, but they're cool regardless of the practicality.

>to set your own color, simply set the icons border color in your CSS, like so: .lb- _, .lb-_ ::before .lb-*::after

could you use border-color:inherit on the :before and :after pseudo-elements, so it's just a single selector change to change the color?

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, that makes a ton of sense, definitely cleaner than what I've got going now. There are plenty of places to clean it up, but that would be a big one.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Can you make a bat signal icon with animation?

</comment><comment><USER37> This is awesome! If there wasn't a compatibility issue, i'd use this immediately.

</comment><comment><USER38> Love it. Also removed bloat bc you can easily kick out icons you're not using.

</comment><comment><USER39> The swiss flag should be square.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, thanks for catching that! I'll fix it up.

<comment><USER40> There are some more problems with the flags. The colours of the french and german flag are in the wrong order. The icelandic and norwegian flags are missing the white line around the cross. The class for the netherlands shouldn't be lb-flag-holland.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> keep it going. They look great.

</comment><comment><USER42> I like the flags, but wanted to the colour of some flags issue too.

</comment><comment><USER43> These look amazing! Keep up the awesome work! I love CSS icons.

</comment><comment><USER44> Great work! Definitely worth continuing.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is very cool

</comment><comment><USER46> nice. lot of work!

</comment><comment><USER47> These so called icons are not even images. What's the point if you cant save them do your hard disk ????</comment>


Uber's Seattle woes: union battle could see company leave another major city - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/05/uber-drivers-union-seattle-legal-battle <comment><USER2> Unionizing sucessfully or causing Uber and Lyft to leave the market seems great by me, both Uber drivers I know here in Seattle hate the gig, as Uber essentially needs them to be idle ~40% of the time to keep pickup times below 10min on average. Combined with both of them leasing cars through Uber (which I told one of 'em not to), its a real nightmare caused by Uber.

If this causes Uber and Lyft to leave town as they don't want to allow any room for drivers to organize, allowing the multitude of other ridesharing apps (which don't take anywhere near a 30% to 45% cut) to take their place like what happened in Austin would be fine for Seattle.</comment>


British Govt Plans to Launch App for Brexit – Doesn't Work on Apple Devices - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-46043668 <comment><USER2> The government is creating issue after issue for themselves.

Just another example: EU citizens in the UK automatically get "permanent residence" status after 5 years (if the meet a few requirements). They can apply (with a fee) to get a certificate from the Home Office.

It would have been very simple to decide that these would automatically convert to the new status with the existing certificates accepted as proof.

But, no. They will have to apply again as described in this article...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Brilliant - government decides to launch an app half of the population can't use because they thought that Apple would just happen to unlock NFC use in a future update or that they could convince them to do so.</comment>