Jazzed-up Microsoft is cooler than before: Reuters/Ipsos - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/21/us-microsoft-poll-idUSBRE91K05P20130221 <comment><USER2> Bit of a non-issue really, surely?

As for Microsoft being perceived as "cooler", maybe it's because their parents are all using Apple products (mine, well into their 50s, are MacBook and iPhone users, and my 62 year old aunt is the same). Maybe it's something to do with how they get hand-me-down devices and so associate Apple with two/three- year-old tech.

Interesting though that they count 18 - 29 as "young adult". I'm 29 and consider myself well over the technological hill compared to the whippersnappers working in tech now. It also seems kind of pointless to ask 18 - 29 year olds what they consider "cool"; I'd have thought an age group like 13 - 18 would be more informative.

</comment><comment><USER3> 'But Google Inc's Android brand did even better, with a full 70 percent giving it the thumbs up.'

Always wondered how many of the Android users really knew that it's from Google. Any stats?

There was even a great discussion about how Google was planning to kill the Android brand. Maybe they have realized that people don't associate Google with Android.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5256888>

Edit: Added link

</comment><comment><USER4> What would really be cool…

Build the windows UI On top of Linux and open-source the whole thing.

And for mobile, put Windows apps on android.</comment>


Open Sourcing 223GB of Driving Data - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/udacity/open-sourcing-223gb-of-mountain-view-driving-data-f6b5593fbfa5#.qwv1wn3jv <comment><USER2> Data cannot be open sourced. Source code can be. You may want to learn what "open source" means before your next headline.</comment>


When Seeing Isn't Solving – Detroit's Foreclosure Crisis in 18 Slides - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XV65qjWS43TXafrUSGBKtbObU0Jkue_ij99s47e0AHo/edit <comment><AUTHOR> Here's the money quote and why solving the problem is so damned difficult:

"If everyone in Detroit paid their property taxes on time to the city, then the county would be in worse financial condition. This is not a strong incentive to solve the problem."

Jerry is a good friend of mine. He came to Detroit just as the recession (or in Michigan the depression) hit. I first heard of him when he made the public statement that Detroit's problems could be solved with better data. He was roundly mocked and derided.

However I had the opposite reaction, I've got to meet this guy because he's right. Change has come much more slowly than either of us could have predicted once policy makers had better data.</comment>


Understanding Victimhood Culture (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://quillette.com/2018/05/17/understanding-victimhood-culture-interview-bradley-campbell-jason-manning/ <comment><USER2> Just an observation on the authors names:

Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning

Bradley ... ... ... Manning

.. and the topic - victimhood culture.</comment>


Pretentious tool for working and relaxing (disclaimer: for hipsters only) - <AUTHOR> http://hipstersound.xyz/?cafeteria <comment><AUTHOR> with silly name</comment>


View HN Stories coming from a specific website, using site paramater - <AUTHOR> https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fantasytote.com <comment><USER2> Nice try.

<comment><AUTHOR> :)</comment></comment>


Faker.js – generate fake data in the browser and Node - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Marak/faker.js <comment><USER2> This reminds me of an old project of mine[0], this generates Arabic names.

[0] [https://github.com/RaedsLab/Tunisian_Name_Generator](https://github.com/RaedsLab/Tunisian_Name_Generator)

<comment><USER3> Curious why you made this. Just checked it out. Why the phone number?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been using this in conjunction with chance.js making it very easy to generate complex data sets

[http://chancejs.com/](http://chancejs.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks interesting and very useful. However my only question is what is the license of those generated avatar?

<comment><USER6> The avatars come from UI Faces: [http://uifaces.com/](http://uifaces.com/)

You have to give your consent in order to appear there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I used this at one point when I needed a large synthetic "customer" dataset, and found the sample size to be somewhat limited. I had to munge first/last names with added random characters. But looking at it now, it appears that's improved. For example, there are about 3000x500 first/last name combinations, for a total of about 1.5M possible full names (for en_US). However, if you need, say, as many unique last names as possible, 500 might still be too few. Still, a nice project.

<comment><USER8> Faker.js now supports something like 30+ locales.

This should expand the amount of name combinations considerably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> for PHP [https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker](https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker)

</comment><comment><USER10> I always liked this library. Wrote a tutorial around the concept of it on websesign tuts a few years back, though I'm not sure how dated it is in relation to the API now ([http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/filler- content-tools...](http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/filler-content- tools-tips-and-a-dynamic-example--webdesign-12258)). Anyway, it deals with one way the library could be used in the browser, in combination with other filler content services, to aid "designing" in the browser.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why would I want to use this? Is this for test data or for obfuscation?

<comment><USER12> Could be used for both. I've used it for generating test data in unit/integration tests and also for obfuscation where production-dumps are needed.

It's useful for having in development as well, when you need to have X number of forms and X number of users but you don't want to have to manually create that every time you re-create the environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It can help a lot when writing UI/Selenium tests with mocked/fake backend (as long as the application data model is well defined). i also wrote a similar library around es6 generators that defines application data structures as plain JS objects and generates data objects out of it using fake random data [https://github.com/dmitriiabramov/sharkhorse](https://github.com/dmitriiabramov/sharkhorse)

</comment><comment><USER14> Faker.js is pretty great. I wrote a simple package to generate fake data for MySQL tables. It's rather basic, but it's been useful to me. It probably wouldn't be hard to stick a DB abstraction layer in front to use with other backends.

[https://github.com/michaelmior/mysql- faker](https://github.com/michaelmior/mysql-faker)

<comment><USER15> Similarly I wrote a tool that uses Faker to generate api fixtures :) Why go stright to the DB when you can test your api at the same time?

[https://github.com/MusicMapIo/Mokr](https://github.com/MusicMapIo/Mokr)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good idea. Can anyone comment on this vs traditional QuickCheck like tools? We use property-based testing as our default. It seems like Faker is a less composable version.

</comment><comment><USER17> +1 for using hook.io for the hosted API. I just love this service and think this is a great use case for it. Will support it on kickstarter.

<comment><USER18> Hook.io is still a thing? I didn't hear anything about it after the drama back in the days.

<comment><USER17> Until I googled it just now, I actually didn't know about this whole drama. I've been using it for the last year and had a really good experience.

(Drama: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nodejs/Rl3drk9YQ_Q](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nodejs/Rl3drk9YQ_Q))

<comment><USER18> Nice to know.

I used it for a project before the drama and switched to vert.x after it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The age and avatar are not at all synced. Just a heads up if you're gonna be using this outside of testing.

</comment><comment><USER20> The only one anyone needs - is the list of fake todos, generated using [https://github.com/bahmutov/fake-todos](https://github.com/bahmutov/fake- todos)

See demo at [http://glebbahmutov.com/fake- todos/](http://glebbahmutov.com/fake-todos/)

<comment><USER21> "avoid cleaning bird" was in my fake list. I don't know whether it looks disturbing or nonsensical.</comment></comment>


Tell HN: GitHub should take responsibility for publishing AWS keys - <AUTHOR>

It's a common problem, happens all the time, and the AWS keys are in a known format.<p>GitHub should take some responsibility for preventing publishing of AWS keys. <comment><USER2> GitHub is just a host of the repo, the owner has ultimate responsibility to insure they are not uploading their private keys, as other Git code repo hosts and software providers would also need to accommodate the enhanced security requirements. If they took on this task then they would also need to insure people are not uploading other private information (e.g. database passwords, API keys, etc.). Yes, it may be better for the entire Github community in the long run but becoming a source code security company may not be something that GitHub wants to get into at this point.

It would be nice if there were pre-checks client side on git status, diffs, branches, checkout, merges, init, add and commit that could quickly be checked to warn the user about the potential issue. Something like this would be a nice addition for helping user's audit their code for vulnerabilities that they may not have known about. Though this would turn Git into a security product too.

Creating the extensions required for this might be a little complicated for the average user but if something were created, secured, reviewed and regularly updated this might be something that can be matured into easy to use git extensions or something officially supported by Git or GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think I agree. It would instill good will if git could detect what appeared to be a private key in your code when doing a `git push` and warned you "This file appears to contain a private key, are you sure you want to push this commit? (y/n)" but the responsibility of maintaining security of their keys ultimately lies with the user _using_ those keys.

Otherwise you're putting github in a scenario for fault that doesn't originate with them and that's rather unfair IMO.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps some git pre-commit hooks that could easily be installed via homebrew?

<comment><USER3> That gives me an interesting weekend project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's like saying Kwikset (or any lock manufacturer) should be responsible because I left the key in my deadbolt and someone used it to break into my house.

I do agree though that a pre commit check would be nice but it isn't GitHub's responsibility.</comment>


Hire talent, not five years with Java - <AUTHOR> http://gillesleblanc.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/hire-talent-not-five-years-with-java/ <comment><USER3> Once upon a time (1969-ish), my father was hired as a programmer. He was an electrical engineer by training, but had zero programming experience at the time. Given a shortage of programmers, IBM placed an ad in the newspaper, hired smart people, and taught them how to program. Assembly. On mainframes.

40+ years later, companies are in a similar situation, but instead, given a shortage of engineers, they are simply whining about it. Presumably, with tools that are 40+ years better that making it "easier" to program, such a system of the past would be reasonably replicable today, no? I've seen a few things pop up here and there - hungryacademy and such, but, by and large, this is the exception far more than the rule. Once upon a time, companies would hire and develop talent, investing years to develop the talent with years of rewards on the end for both sides of the deal. Now? Companies expect hires to come fully trained, ready to deliver from day one, at their own expense (and much debt to the banks). Employees have no loyalty (and for good reason).

<comment><USER4> Part of it is the difference in programming culture. With startup culture, which has many good aspects, also came the idea that the death march should be the norm. Meaning, 20-somethings should be working 80 hour weeks on a regular basis and projects should be shipped at the soonest possible moment it's even remotely feasible to do so.

This sort of working environment has no slack, no capability to operate effectively in apprenticeship mode, and little leeway to allow long ramp up times. And as a result it has become more difficult to positively advance the state of the industry or the average skill toolset of coders.

It's the classic problem, when you spend all your time in emergency mode fighting fires you don't have the cycles to be able to make improvements to systems or to other coders as well.

<comment><USER5> While I agree with your overall message, the

 _> (...) death march should be the norm. Meaning, 20-somethings should be working 80 hour weeks on a regular basis and projects should be shipped at the soonest possible moment it's even remotely feasible to do so._

has got me puzzled: in my (limited) experience and from what I've read, a death march is exactly the opposite of shipping early. The usual story goes: a deadline looms, or a milestone slips, a middle manager decides to whip up his team instead of reporting it. Overworked team members can't meet another deadline, the client and/or upper management is kept in the dark about the problem, no extension of deadlines for sake of good metrics, rinse and repeat.

``It is done when it is done'' and shipping early is a panacea, not a cause of the problem.

<comment><USER4> Death march is often the norm, and when more effort is needed the only option is a super death march or just giving up.

And yes, it's not a good way to work. Nor is it even a fast way to work. It's a an equilibrium point that is reached when certain initial conditions in regard to the value that is placed on the appearance of work and dedication are higher than craftsmanship et al is valued.

For people who are immersed in that world view it seems perfectly logical that adding more hours worked will make everything better. But the paradox is that it doesn't, it often makes things worse, for a whole laundry list of reasons. People become physically and emotionally exhausted by the pace, there's no room for higher level improvements which are often the only way to achieve orders of magnitude gains in efficiency, productivity, and quality.

There are a handful of companies that do things right and at those companies employees tend to stick around for not just a few years but decades and the products they make tend to have an outsized impact on the industry (valve, blizzard, 37signals, pixar, etc.) But it's still so hard to fight against the conventional wisdom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of one section of the Stripe article on hiring: "Hire People instead of roles". I couldn't agree more with both authors (Stripe and OP).

 _"One thing that's worked well for Stripe is bringing on people who didn't have an immediately obvious role in the organization. If you can think of one thing this person can do, then there's probably ten more you're not thinking of that he/she can do two months from now. Focusing on hiring to fill a role could make you more likely to sacrifice quality just to get someone with the right skill set."_

[http://firstround.com/article/How-Stripe-built-one-of- Silico...](http://firstround.com/article/How-Stripe-built-one-of-Silicon- Valleys-best-engineering-teams)

<comment><USER7> I think the most interesting bit of the Stripe article was that they did most of their hiring via referrals. That's really one of the very few ways you're going to be able to hire "people" rather than specifically to certain job descriptions. Their recruiting method matches their strategy. All too often companies will say "we hire people, not roles" but then post all their jobs on job boards where the specific role is well defined. :-/

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Who is the target audience for this sort of advice?

The people who will understand this figured it out long before they were in a position to hire other people. It's just obvious and is repeated so much (don't hire for specific experience) that it is a cliche.

The people who don't get this will never get it, even if you paste stickers that say it on the windshield of their car and whisper it in their ear as they fall asleep each night.

So it's all great to repeat this for the 3 newbs who joined our community in the last 5 minutes and haven't heard this 80 times already this week, but it shouldn't be on HN's homepage.

<comment><USER9> There are also people who get it but don't care. Not all companies need, want, or can keep the most talented developers. For them, it is fine to have someone who just has "5 years programming with java". This advice is too general and doesn't apply to everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here is another active discussion of company hiring procedures here on HN. Most of us have been hired for at least one job in our lives, and all of us who have built up an organization have had occasion to hire someone else before, so we all think about this. I searched the comment thread to see if anyone has linked to the Hacker News FAQ on this subject. The last full posting of that FAQ was a while ago,

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923>

and the tl;dr of the FAQ is "If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test."

"Reasons for being selective when choosing personnel selection procedures" (2010) by Cornelius J. König, Ute-Christine Klehe, Matthias Berchtold, and Martin Kleinmann backs up this advice:

"Choosing personnel selection procedures could be so simple: Grab your copy of Schmidt and Hunter (1998) and read their Table 1 (again). This should remind you to use a general mental ability (GMA) test in combination with an integrity test, a structured interview, a work sample test, and/or a conscientiousness measure."

[http://geb.uni- giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri...](http://geb.uni- giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/preprint_j.1468_2389.2010.00485.x.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER11> Some of the best developers I have worked with weren't Computer Science or Software Engineering graduates, but had Engineering or Electronics degrees. However, some companies wouldn't hire them because their degrees didn't fit their definition of correct.

All the points made about years of service not equaling ability are absolutely proven, yet ignored by many - I'd rather work with someone who can break problems down, ask the right questions and think logically - as opposed to someone who can force a program to work because they know the syntax. Some of this is how candidates are interviewed too - technical screenings alone rarely find someone who is good at software development.

Writing a syntactically correct program quickly, is the not the same as writing a good piece of software.

</comment><comment><USER12> In general, this article belongs among the best articles nobody will read.

It looks like I might finally get a job as a Django/Python developer after 3 years of unemployment. Encouraged by my local course for unemployed, I visited the company personally and handed them a dead tree CV and cover letter. I was mildly amused to find they seem to be just 3 guys in small dusty room. I ended up on a job interview of sorts I wasn't prepared for. It ended with a talk about games, Fallout and Counterstrike were mentioned. The best part for me, I got a homework assignment to test my skill.

<comment><USER13> It is embarrassing that in this day and age a dead tree copy of a CV, handed in in person is what gets peoples attention, but it does.

Also maybe print it in an unusual size -- that way they can't file them away for "maybe later" as they won't fit and they are forced to have the CV on their mind. An unusual color might also prevent it from getting lost in the stack of resumes.

<comment><USER14> I'm not a fan of unusual sizes and colours. That said, printing on a decent linen paper (on the correct side!) has helped me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I used to complain to the HR department at my last company about this kind of stuff all the time.

Even after working at the company for almost three years, I wasn't technically qualified for any of the job postings on the site. I had friends who didn't apply just because they didn't have all the skills in the "required" section of the job posting.

Luckily, the developers in charge of interviewing and hiring people seemed to understand that hiring someone smart was better than hiring someone with "experience" in random technologies.

</comment><comment><USER16> The issue is that "tallent" is nebulous, and difficult for companies to both define and measure. How does a company determine one's capacity to adopt new technologies? How do they adequately determine who is "smart" and who is not? The reason companies resort to hiring based off of experience is that experience is a reasonable if imperfect proxy for skill, and because someone who has worked with a technology for some given amount of time can be reasonably expected to have attained competency in it. Experience is quantifiable and the link to ability is solid, making it an efficient metric for use in hiring.

Obviously, the best case scenario would be for companies to deduce who will have an affinity for certain technologies before they actually use them, but that's too complex and involves the type of decision-making to which HR departments are averse.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is similar to Joel Spolsky's Smart and Gets Things Done [0], but less comprehensive.

[0] <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/05.html>

</comment><comment><USER18> Let's also clarify why experience is misleading in general. The candidate might have no experience but could have been an early programming enthusiast with tons of projects under his belt. Current recruiting systems reject such talent or offer them very poor packages.

</comment><comment><USER19> Perhaps the better approach to solving this problem is to stop repeating it on tech blogs, and start moving to publishing and discussing it in HR blogs and similarly appropriate, targeted mediums. As stated elsewhere[1], this is undoubtedly the existing mentality of the audience to whom this article is written. Those who actually need this advice are the existing and future HR managers and departments who are in charge of hiring.

I spent some time about a year-and-a-half ago building up and managing a small internal development department at a mid-size corporation. I was involved in finding talent to fill development roles in the company twice. The first time, I sat in on an existing search and interviews for a role in a different department. The process could not have been more broken--the position had been open for roughly one year, and the interviews yielded no hirable candidate (as judged by the individuals making the hiring decision). The second time, I led a search for positions freshly opened for my department. The process could not have been more smooth--three strong candidates were hired within three weeks. The only significant difference between the two hiring pushes was the approach --the first was focused entirely on a candidate who had _n_ years of experience on platform _X_ ; the second focused on candidates who showed the greatest talent and aptitude in previous professional and personal projects, and gave the greatest indications they were a great fit for the personality of the team.

After we completed our hirings, the VP of HR pulled me aside to mention she'd never seen anyone conduct interviews like we did (she sat in on a couple after hearing about how we'd done the first candidate interview), and was impressed by the way the candidates responded in the interviews. She could "feel" which candidates were going to be hired, even though she had no knowledge of software development. We discussed the differing approaches between hiring for talent and hiring for _n_ years of _X_ experience. She intuitively understood the difference, but had not ever seen it in practice as intentionally as we pulled off.

Programmers understand this. Small businesses who are predominantly programmer-driven or -dependent understand this, too. Even big businesses who are primarily technology-focused show signs of getting this as well (a recent round of interviewing with an Oracle company surprised me with how much they were focused on the _right_ things).

The proverbial dragon to slay here is the HR departments, managers, students, and training programs lacking this advice as fundamental practice. Perhaps we need to see more process-oriented and manager-level technologists joining up with HR professionals to advance the point. Maybe HR departments and educational efforts could start creating Developer Advocates to assist in crafting better approaches and more finely tailored practices to support development/engineering talent. These might be the vanguard of producing better job descriptions and interview processes to hire talent that is more competent, productive, dependable, and retainable.

The most important lesson I learned when I worked with a formal HR department to hire new people is that _they care_. They really do. They don't want to hire terrible candidates who are going to be miserable, hate their jobs, and drag down a team. They want to empower people to improve professionally while taking care of a company's needs. We need to start working with and spreading this advice among the HR professionals who will increase their value to both companies and personnel by including it in their standard procedures.

[1]: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5441337>

[edit: forgot link & punctuation error]

<comment><USER20> I don't think you're wrong. But could you define talent? That's something that bugs me endlessly. Talent gets thrown around recklessly everywhere. Is talent smart and gets stuff done? Is it more than that? I feel pretty confident I can identify "talent" but the blog post you are responding to isn't written for me or you, it's written for people who are already doing things the wrong way and content with it.

We say hire for talent as though talent is self explanatory. I don't think it is. Maybe we generally feel like we know talent when we see it but that's not satisfactory advice if what we aim for is to give advice to people who struggle to hire good people. If you are the kind of person who hires for X years of experience you probably aren't the kind of person who feels confident identifying talent outside of a solid definition.

<comment><USER21> "Hire for talent, train for skill" means to screen for more general intelligence and problem-solving aptitude rather than specific buzzwords. You want smart people who will pick up anything you throw at them quickly, not just people who have hit all the keywords in their resume.

It may sound squishy, but it's really not. You can tell smart people pretty quickly from talking through logical problems with them. Dumb people will ask irrelevant questions and want you to hold their hand and walk them through it. Smart people will ask smart questions and deduce a path to the solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Talent is a function of experience. It's not that you shouldn't hire for experience - you should. The problem is that the model most people have for quantifying experience is flawed.

As it says in the article, 5 years of experience for one person might be the same as 1 year for another.

To solve the problem, we need to borrow an idea from RPGs: experience points.

<comment><USER12> Funny, I think it's the other way around. Experience is a function of talent. Talented people gain xp points faster and therefore level up faster. Or rather, they have lower xp requirements for new levels.

<comment><USER22> It could be that way... I doubt it though. I don't believe anyone is that innately talented. Try picking up a few musical instruments that you don't know how to play. Genius is learned, not inborn. You need to be lucky enough to win a certain IQ and have all your fingers and toes, but after that it's perspiration.

Find me a child prodigy genius who didn't come from a well to-do family who paid for tons of tutoring. Find me one from a slum. (hint: you probably won't find one)

<comment><USER23> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan>

> Without a degree, he left college and continued to pursue independent > research in mathematics. At this point in his life, he lived in extreme > poverty and was often on the brink of starvation.

<comment><USER22> >Born at Erode, Madras Presidency (now Tamil Nadu) in a Tamil Brahmin family of Thenkalai Iyengar sect[2][3][4] Ramanujan's introduction to formal mathematics began at age 10.

"Brahmin" are the elite hindu upper class.

I would credit you with contradicting me but you haven't.

However, that's a pretty interesting link. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER24> >> was an Indian mathematician and autodidact who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions. Living in India with no access to the larger mathematical community, which was centred in Europe at the time, Ramanujan developed his own mathematical research in isolation. As a result, he sometimes rediscovered known theorems in addition to producing new work. Ramanujan was said to be a natural genius by the English mathematician G. H. Hardy, in the same league as mathematicians such as Euler and Gauss.[1] He died at the age of 32.

\-- no formal training \-- developed his own mathematical research in isolation.

We're talking talent here, upper class or no. Talent is talent ,even when it is not discovered. In this case ,it was

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sadly I think it only just occurred to me that I might be one of those 1 yr / 5 times people. Only because my job was mainly CRUD work. I did get to do some other stuff but it was not often. That place closed down and I've been looking for work since. Feeling like I must not have learned enough (or the right stuff) since I have had many interviews and not gotten any offers.

How much of an average developers time isn't CRUD? How do you get the experience to do other things[1] unless you needed them for that one off project?

1\. Unless you are talking along the lines of specializing in something idk what these things might be.

<comment><USER26> You have my sympathies. One thing that might help it to pay attention to your attitude and demeanor. One problem is thinking that you are humbly begging for a job and that they are in control of the process. A bit more of a chip on your shoulder may help. Sure some my be put off by an "attitude", but if you arent having any success, why not? It may make you look like a can-do person.

<comment><USER25> So if I'm reading this right: Act like I'm a pro and can solve all their problems.

My biggest issue is with confidence. It probably shows in interviews. I know that given the chance I can do just about any work (some might take more time but I am willing to put the effort in).

One of the other threads recently was about questions during interviews. I learned that there are a lot more things I should be asking about that I wasn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This 100%.

I have 6+ years experience now and am going for senior dev roles.

4 of those years are PHP and I feel company's and recruiters pidgin hole me as a "senior php dev".

I feel like I have to continue down the php stack + web dev path or take a pay cut even though I have non professional experience in mobile for example.

I understand where they are coming from but a little less narrow mindedness would be nice.

-gets ready for the 'no one other than a php shop wants to hire a dev with most their experience in php' jokes-

<comment><USER28> Yes. I increasingly get the feeling that I'm stuck in .NET-land because that's the only thing that recruiters feeding off of LinkedIn seem to care about when they "network" at me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The key issue is probably time investment for companies. Using years of experience is the easiest way to judge 'ability', and it can be judged by someone non-technical that can ask simple questions about experience - <USER2> every applicant is not wasting the time of a tech team member. Pay a fresh grad 30K to review resumes and waste their time instead of your 120K tech lead.

A trend these days is using interests as a predictor of talent. Most of my clients (recruiter of engineers) could see two identical levels of professional experience, but if one of those candidates is writing Haskell at night that is the one getting the interview. The intellectual curiosity and interest in complex subjects seems to be an indicator of ability and/or talent. This could be something easy to teach HR and recruiters, and I always ask candidates about tech hobbies or "What do you run at home?" to get some insight.

Most below average engineers are probably not assumed to be researching complex concepts in their spare time.

To think that companies or individuals will not continue to use experience numbers in evaluating talent is overly-optimistic, but I think judging based on interests is becoming a useful means.

</comment><comment><USER30> I would agree with OP, until when I has become a hiring manager myself. I do understand years of experience may not equal to competency in certain skill sets. But if you are going to run a hiring post, what kind of metrics could you use, on top of years of experience?

Putting something too generic (e.g. intermediate programmer, mid-level, etc.), you tend to attract a lot of non-relevant, hello-world sort of people.

Putting a laundry list of language features? You are afraid you could unwittingly weed out people you want, let alone the first person to complain would be the recruiter in HR.

Most hiring managers, myself included, just use years of experience as a guidance so that the candidate can get a feel of the expectations. I did hire candidates with lesser experience but with good technical competencies. Therefore there is no harm to try if you are confident you are a good fit. In fact, I will be really impressed if someone can sell and market oneself intelligently. Surprise me!

<comment><USER31> When I read resumes, and I don't mind personally sifting through hundreds a week, I look for a narrative. If there's a cover letter, that helps create the narrative. I want to see personal, professional growth on a resume. I wonder about time gaps and seeming to do the same job repeatedly but they're not deal-killers at the resume screen stage. I look for increased depth of knowledge and increased scope of influence. Both of those things make someone more senior, rather than having just repeated the same year x-many times.

If someone can sell me his/her story in the cover letter and resume, I follow up on that in a phone screen. I'm still looking for more proof of someone being "passionate" (overused term but often part of HR doctrine) and showing that they grow and grow and grow.

This has never made any sense to any recruiters I've worked with and has sometimes been a hard sell to others when I wasn't the hiring manager but I honestly don't know how else to screen for "has a lot of potential but maybe doesn't know our stack yet".

I'd love to hear how other people do this. I'd especially like to hear from someone who doesn't focus solely on what's in someone's Github repos.

<comment><USER32> That's interesting, and I suppose my resume shows that, although there are ups and downs, i.e. a very demanding job followed by one not so demanding.

What I do is to express a narrative in each job, showing how I did stuff that made a difference. I'm most proud of this ending to a sentence in my resume: " _[my work] provided half of company revenues and enabled another quarter (out of $5 million for FY92)_ " (it did go along with some demanding work, technically, and human factor for GUI/workflow).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Here's the strategy we feel is working pretty well for us.

First of all, our tech stack looks like this:

Java/Spring(MVC)/MyBatis/Hibernate/etc

Ruby/Sinatra/ActiveRecord/etc

JavaScript/Angular/etc

A bit of SQL (MS)

We look for candidates of all skill levels who have experience with any "systems" programming language (Java/C/C++/C#) and any scripting language (Ruby/Python/JS).

Once we've found a candidate that has any level of experience with both a scripting and systems language, we send them a small coding project. The coding project is very easy. Any experienced programmer would be able to solve it in about an hour. We tell the candidates to solve the problem in any programming language and that the goal is to show off problem solving, testing and design skills.

Once we've received the code, we review it for the above stated qualities with an emphasis on clean, readable and well-tested code. We're not too hard on these code reviews, we just want to try to eliminate obviously poor fits. People who write no tests are immediately eliminated. Hugely over-architected solution? Eliminated. Code is bad enough the person might not actual be able to program? You get the idea.

Once the person has passed this stage, they come in for an in-person interview. They are asked to bring their laptop. When they arrive, the dev manager will show the candidate to the room where they will be interviewed, talk a bit and then come get two developers for a coding interview.

The coding interview is somewhat on a per-candidate basis, but fundamentally the two interviewers will review the code beforehand and find places for improvement. Improvements might be refactorings to make the code cleaner or new features if the code is particularly well-written. We first have the candidate give us a code walk-through and explain what's happening, thought processes, etc. Then one of the interviewers will pair with the candidate for a while and switch out with the other interviewer after a while.

The whole process thus far is an attempt to, as closely as possible, simulate what it would be like to work with this person on a real task. No writing quick sort on the white board. Writing code, at a computer, with an IDE as a pair. Google stuff, whatever your normal workflow is. We just want to know what it's like to work with you.

After the pairing part of the interview, we do a more informal group interview with the rest of the team. We're currently 7 people counting the development manager, a scrummaster/QA and a PM/QA. So the group isn't too big. This is an opportunity for more high-level and philosophical questions. "Why do you want to work here?", "Anything in particular you dislike about Java?". Maybe if they're more senior, I'll have them explain OOP to our designer to see how well they can mentor. At the end of this section, we open it up for questions from the candidate.

So far we've had particularly good success with 1) not wasting our time with people who can't code, can't test their code or are poor at designing the structure of their code; 2) finding good cultural fits - if someone doesn't like pair programming or TDD, we'll be able to figure that out as part of the interview; 3) not arbitrarily eliminating people because they didn't study their CS textbook ahead of time or aren't comfortable writing syntactically correct code on a whiteboard.

<comment><USER34> >Hugely over-architected solution? Eliminated

For a code interview I can see myself over-engineering a solution even though my day-to-day coding style is all about flexibility and readability. In my mind being able to over-engineer shows an ability to code.

<comment><USER35> > In my mind being able to over-engineer shows an ability to code

Huh, very mixed feelings here. My gut reaction is to reply that "it also shows poor judgement", but there is some truth to what you are saying. The middle ground would be where you can actually explain what you are trying to achieve with the over-engineered bits.

<comment><USER34> What is over-engineering for a toy example is good coding for some problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> There's also the case of asking for N years of experience where the technology has been around for N-1 years.

</comment><comment><USER37> This resonates a lot with some experiences I have had, and the reluctance to take a very small risk on whether someone with talent will be able to pick up a new technology is something I do feel a lot of companies are losing out from as a result. However at the same time I'm quite sure recruiting is a very hard thing to do, as there does seem to be a big shortage of both skills and talent in our industry. I suppose you have to always consider the context of what you are recruiting for. But personally if I was given the choice I would go for someone that clearly has talent and ability to learn, as long as there is some evidence available to show for it.

</comment><comment><USER38> I think "years of experience" dates back to the era of widget factories where it actually made sense.

<comment><USER39> Why did it make sense then?

<comment><USER40> _Why did it make sense then?_

Age and maturity. Most people didn't even finish high school and started work at about 15. "5 years of experience" meant you were getting a 20-year-old-- likely, for a working-class male before 1960, to have settled down and gotten married, and to either have a child or be planning to have one.

<comment><USER41> In the days of guilded craftsmen, apprentices weren't allowed marry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Phone interview with company developing Flex or Silverlight widgets?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah Silverlight :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> If you are not hiring developers based solely on their portfolio of previous projects they authored. You are doing it wrong. Every prerequisite requirement for developers is inherently flawed.

1\. A degree. While degrees are nice and prove somebody is considerably "intelligent" and not a "complete waste of time", many talented programmers, especially the ones you want to hire; are fully capable of teaching themselves without a lecturer.

There are some developers who have already studied the dragon book and have a sophisticated understanding of how operating systems work because they hack on Linux.

A developer may make a very reasonable and logical decision not to go to college because they dont want to accumulate debt, for an education they already possess, and ultimately waste time not working on their software projects.

A degree doesnt mean they are a good programmer, and a lack of one doesnt mean they are a bad one either.

Im not saying college is a bad investment, rather recruiters should not turn away an applicant just because he passed on that, as they see it, inherently flawed "life experience".

2\. Years of experience. Assuming the project is well documented... If it takes a developer longer than 2 weeks to figure out how to use a project's api, even if they have no prior understanding of the technology.

They are not a good programmer.

If you are looking for a developer to actually understand the internals of a project well enough to be able to commit, even linux shouldnt take 5 years of studying before a talented developer is able to visualize whats going on.

Real developers spend almost all of their time reading code and studying something they havent learned yet.

if they cant adapt quickly to your projects, while perhaps even teaching themselves the new technology along the way unbeknownst to you. (new programming language, library dependency api's, network protocol, etc)

They are not a good programmer.

3\. Previous Work Experience [as {insert stupid job title here}]: First, there is nothing sillier than job titles for programming positions. The only valid titles that should ever exist for a programmer's job are Hacker, Bit Composer, Code Poet, Git Wizard (seriously, this is the only valid specialized hacker position)

Second, Just because Bob has 30 years of work experience as "Lead Programmer" at "FooBarly inc.", that doesnt mean he is a better engineer than 21 year old, no work experience, Alice.

While Dino Bob may be able to write optimized, neat, software. And although he might able to debug rather complicated bugs, and ultimately lead a team to write a program that does what its supposed to.

Alice may have been an exceptional, innovative, and disruptive programmer who could have not only written the software but innovated the concept into something beyond the scope of the original concept design.

There are some hackers out there who can see data structures and algorithms like a painter can see the scene painted on the canvas before they make the first stroke. Innovation requires an exceptional level of creativity and the ability to abstract an opaque idea into a deep, detailed conceptual model.

People cant be taught to think this way. Much like a professional musician, whom despite practicing each day for hours to perfect their art; will always lack the skill of a virtuoso mind like Mozart. Many people are great engineers, but could still lack in talent against someon who was just born with an exceptionally creative and brilliant analytic mind.

These are the kind of programmers that you cant afford to let your competition snatch up. Yet you just foolishly tossed Alice's resume in the trash because Grandpa Bob has credentials and she doesnt.

Interview Quiz: When given questions like, "given two arrays, find all the elements in one array that are also in the second array". in attempt to talent scout.

A good programmer will claim the real right answer is either the obviously simple choice or the theoretically most efficient, and well tested sort algorithm that can be found using google.

If comparing two arrays is seriously a performance bottleneck that requires optimization, you might as well skip the bs and go with the best. We arent solving problems if they no longer exist, and a programmer not solving problems is a programmer wasting time.

4\. Portfolio A portfolio is the only valid option to consider when you want to be absolutely sure you hire the best developers.

If the person hiring cant identify what good code is, then your startup is screwed anyways. You dont need a degree to build a portfolio, and if somebody does choose to college they get to build their portfolio as part of the class projects.

If a developer doesnt have a portfolio or if the software in their portfolio doesnt actually do anything useful then you know they arent a real hacker.

Hiring a programmer should only ever be based on the quality of software they have authored.

Like Linus said, "Talk is cheap, show me the code".

<comment><USER44> Often the majority of a programmer's portfolio is code that is intellectual property of former employers and they can't show it around. In fact, most times they're not supposed to have that code in their personal laptops.

<comment><USER32> Indeed. Some of my portfolio is from dead companies where I got permission from the rights holder, some is where I got permission to use a few foundational files that showed e.g. how I do things to improve error reporting and debugging but none of the company's secret sauce. But neither would have been possible without my having been in the field for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Here's a relatively novel idea (I guess): Outline exactly what you need the developer to do, and have them send in proof that they can actually do it.

Previous projects, personal github experiments ... Most capable programmers will have something interesting to show.

Right?

<comment><USER46> Good idea but I think part of the point of the article is that the job will change. So to "Outline exactly what you need the developer to do, and have them send in proof that they can actually do it" is, again, to attract people with 'experience' that happens to fit that particular job description, rather than talent.</comment></comment>


Upcoming Startup Incubator Deadlines - <AUTHOR> http://kaljundi.com/2010/02/19/upcoming-startup-incubator-deadlines/

<comment><USER2> Please add any others I have missed and I'll update the list.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, that's a pretty awesome list.

</comment><comment><USER4> Any advice on how to decide which to apply to, aside from relocation issues? Some are more targeted (i.e. Startl), but do people apply to as many as are viable for them?

<comment><USER2> Try to dig into the content part: who are the mentors, lecturers, what activities take part. Forget comparing the money, it is mostly for living costs. Think who can take you to next level in 1-3 months time, what help you need.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, and just like schools a good idea is to apply to as many as you can. If you don't get into the program that you want, you can still have an amazing experience connecting with others and building your company at another incubator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is the $25,000 investment for 8% from ioVenture a bit too little for the equity? At least YC only takes 2% to 3% for the same amount.

<comment><USER7> YC takes 2-10% , "usually 6-7%' for $17,000-20,000

<http://ycombinator.com/faq.html></comment></comment>


Newly released incident reports detail US Navy's 'UFO' encounters - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/13/politics/navy-ufo-incident-reports/index.html <comment><USER2> Like many of you, I am a skeptic.

But here's the thing with these videos, like the "tic tac" one. Somebody somewhere who is smarter than me should be able to say what these things are. Missile, drone, balloon...these are obviously none of these things, based on the science of using my eyes and brain. So what the hell are they?

The fact that no one can come up with any plausible answer, makes me think we have no idea whatsoever what they are.

UFOs indeed.

Anyone care to make a case?

<comment><USER3> I like the idea of ground-based laser-generated plasma.

Culminate many ground based lasers and point them all at the same voxel in space, use your magic methods to create a ball of plasma at that spot with the lasers[0], move the voxel around as fast as the ground based lasers can track it for the illusion of instantaneous acceleration and cartesian-coordinate style movement.

Added benefit : many radars capture artifacts from plasmas, so it'd look like a bogey to many systems out there.

even cooler : they don't need to be ground-based, just well coordinated. A bunch of planes, boats, drones or even missiles could be the laser beacons, too.

Imagine a bunch of missiles lazing what is basically a light-show to spook people in the air and on the ground as a psy-ops weapon, ignoring the decoy aspects of a instantaneously created radar-positive bogey.

The idea reminds me of Macross or something similar.

[0]: [https://www.wired.com/2007/05/plasma-laser- uf/](https://www.wired.com/2007/05/plasma-laser-uf/)

<comment><USER4> A Japanese company built a prototype system that can draw 3D objects in mid- air using UV lasers that excite the air into a plasma where the beams cross:

[http://www.burton-jp.com/en/index.htm](http://www.burton-jp.com/en/index.htm)

I think they can project images about 10-20 feet up in the air (see the demo videos on the web site). Much longer ranges like kilometers are probably possible. Very long ranges like drawing in the upper atmosphere would probably encounter the same problems the Star Wars program did, difficult to hold a beam together given air turbulence. I've been thinking about using the same technique to create a TV screen floating in mid air, though it could only be used outdoors (due to ozone generated). It might also be possible to use something like this to draw a dome over a yard that keeps insects out. Probably too dangerous to allow kids near it though, the lasers are fairly high power and since they are UV the beams can't be seen. It may not even require lasers, focused beams of high intensity UV light might accomplish the same thing.

I would think if this was used to create a UFO the UFO would sparkle a lot and might be fairly transparent, instead of looking like a solid object.</comment></comment></comment>


The Best Investment Since 1926? Apple - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/business/apple-investment.html <comment><USER2> No way. Bitcoin.</comment>


Tesla Model S and Model 3 comparison - <AUTHOR> https://www.tesla.com/compare?redirect=no <comment><USER2> I couldn't stop feeling like this page is nothing else but a promotion for "Model S" which is "superior and now" rather than the other car which is "inferior and 1 year later". Price would've been the biggest (and only) reason for "Model 3" but it's not shown on the page. Added extra details for "Model 3" is a nice trick to boost virality of the promotion aimed at its target audience -- potential Model 3 buyers. Well done, Tesla marketing. Well done.

<comment><USER3> I think this is in reaction to the confusion over Model 3 being the "next version" of the Model S. People might be holding off on buying the S because they think that the 3 is better.

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/845278449811939328](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/845278449811939328).

When asked why he named it Model 3 in that thread, his response was: "Because I was a dumb idiot and didn't realize at the time that it would cause confusion".

This mistake seems to have stuck with him -- he made a joke about it two months later when talking about naming his boring machines: [https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/860378029515718660](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/860378029515718660)

<comment> GuB-42 It is should have been Model E, like it was originally intended.

But I heard that some people didn't like the idea of S/E/X...

<comment><USER4> No, it was because Ford holds the trademark for Model E: [http://insideevs.com/ford-motor-company-filed-for-model-e- tr...](http://insideevs.com/ford-motor-company-filed-for-model-e-trademark- rights/)

<comment><USER5> Why not drop Model from the name? Porsche 911 vs Porsche Model 911. Tesla S vs Tesla Model S.

<comment><USER6> To me that looks more like a mistake from Porsche than an idea to replicate

<comment><USER7> I set it as no more a mistake than "Boeing 747" is over "Boeing Model 747" or "Mazda 626" or "Nissan GTR"

But "Tesla S" doesn't roll off the tongue as nicely.

<comment><USER8> Turns into 'tessless'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mods: pretty glaring typo in the title, it says "TELSA" and not "TESLA" (caps for visibility). Please fix if possible, thanks.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure what was already known.

This page shows both the model S and the model 3 side by side:

      Car length: 196.0" vs 184.4"
      0-60mph Acceleration: as quick as 2.3s vs 5.6s
      Range: 249-335 Miles Range (EPA) vs 215+ Miles Range
      Supercharging: Free Unlimited Supercharging vs Pay Per Use Supercharging
      Passengers: Seating for 5 Adults + 2 Children vs Seating for 5 Adults
      Cargo: 30 cu ft Front & Rear Trunk Cargo Volume vs 14 cu ft Front & Rear Trunk Cargo Volume
      Displays: Driver Display + 17" Touchscreen vs 15" Center Touchscreen
      Customization: 1,500+ configurations vs <100 configurations
      Delivery timing: 30 Days or less vs 1+ year

<comment><USER10> No driver display in model 3? This will be a big disappointment for many people.

<comment><USER11> Almost every vehicle, even budget sub-compacts, have driver displays now. The utilization of that display varies from nigh useless (odometer, oil minders, etc.) to very useful (navigational directions, at-a-glance music selection via steering wheel based controls, etc.).

Removing this display from the Model 3 seems like a design choice intended to artificially distinguish and demote the Model 3 from the Model S.

<comment><USER12> It's a design choice toward a self-driving world, where instantaneous road notifications are less important to a person in a car than they are today.

<comment><USER11> That's something that I hadn't considered. Have we received confirmation that the Model 3 will be available with the optional full suite of self-driving sensors?

On the Model S, this includes two high-priced options:

1\. Enhanced Autopilot ($5000) quadruples the number of cameras from 1 to 4 and adds 12 ultrasonic sonar sensors and additional computing power to crunch the data.

2\. Full Self-Driving Capability ($3000) doubles the number of cameras from 4 to 8.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, Tesla has confirmed that the Model 3 will have the same self-driving hardware suite as S/X. No details yet on the software activation cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm really interested in the topspeed.

For german customers all the current gen EVs(Bolt/i3/Leaf/Ioniq) with a topspeed of 140-150km/h are to my opinion not really save to drive on the Autobahn as you don't have some speed buffer to overtake someone who's driving 120-130km/h fast enough.

If Tesla manages to give the Model 3 a top-speed of 200km/h that would be a game-changer and make it a viable car for me. The Model S is viable in that regard, just too expensive for me personally.

<comment><USER14> Do you really need to overtake someone doing 130 km?

<comment><USER15> No, at least not for me: My plan is buying the Model 3 and then engaging the autopilot in such a case - and just travel behind whoever is driving with 130 km/h in front of me.

So for me - a reliable autopilot for the Autobahn is _much_ more important than the top speed.

<comment><USER16> My reply has been downvoted to oblivion. Let me try again.

1\. Tesla autopilot has a disengage rate of 182 in 550 miles. This cannot be safe in anyway for any kind of driving [http://blog.caranddriver.com/in-the- self-driving-race-waymo-...](http://blog.caranddriver.com/in-the-self-driving- race-waymo-looks-to-be-way-out-in-front/)

2\. Apart from the fatalities there have been many other accidents with Tesla [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/05/another-driver-says- tes...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/05/another-driver-says-teslas- autopilot-failed-to-brake-tesla-says-otherwise/)

[http://grist.org/business-technology/whats-the-point-of- self...](http://grist.org/business-technology/whats-the-point-of-self-driving- cars-if-you-still-have-to-drive-them/)

3\. [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/03/the- custo...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/03/the-customer-is- always-wrong-tesla-lets-out-self-driving-car-data-when-it-suits)

4\. Check YouTube for any number of autopilot crashes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you're one of the people who put down the $1K refundable deposit, how do you feel about this page? I understand they're trying to push Model S sales, but don't do it at the expense of customers willing to wait years and put a hefty deposit down.

This strikes me as a rare misplay by Tesla. The Model 3 comes with a glass roof standard so it's conveniently left out of the premium options section -- that's pretty misleading. By the tone of the spec table, you'd think a well- equipped Corolla will be competitive with the Model 3.

<comment><USER18> I'm one of those people. I think the deposit was put down in a moment of excitement, which has since died down quite a bit. Not only am I one of those people who gave them a deposit, I'm also likely one of those people who they meant to target: I drive a BMW 3-series, which would be the Model 3's main competitor.

Now given all that, this display made me really not excited about the Model 3. Electric car is nice but that's the only thing the Model 3 has going for it when compared to the 3 series. I don't see them emphasizing self driving and the acceleration is kind of just par for course, which shouldn't be the case for an electric car. Given Tesla's reputation for a Spartan interior, what am I getting out of it other than it being electric? The way I see it, I'm better off waiting a few more years to see if things improve. My current 328i has given me 5 years of good driving and no headache at all. Better integrating with smartphones would be great but the latest 3-series offers that as an option already.

So I have to wonder, why a Model 3 over a 3-series?

<comment> crush-n-spread Personally I could never drive a ICE car when an equivalent electric vehicle presented itself. I would never forgive myself. Everyone needs to get to electric cars as soon as possible or we cook and die here on Earth. It makes the arguments about the interior seem really tone deaf. Again, personally.

EDIT: Autopilot and constant software updates are huge.

<comment><USER18> I think your response is a bit narrow and takes my response out of context. It also ignores a number of other issues to make electric cars look better than they really are.

1\. Electric cars use a lot of copper and lithium. Mining of both are horribly polluting. The worst EPA superfund site is a former copper mine. Lithium mining is also pretty bad. However they are at least localized.

Electric cars still need power, most of which still comes from carbon emitting sources. Until the world switches to renewables, electric cars still generate carbon indirectly. California and other areas are much better about this but Tesla Model 3 customers don't all live in CA.

2\. I was trying to answer the initial question from the perspective of a potential customer of the Model 3. If someone is as passionate about the carbon emitting issue as you, they can already do that with Nissan Leaf, BMW i3, or Chevy Volt. They don't need to wait nor pay more for the the Tesla Model 3. So within that context, the other things that make BM3 3-series what it is matters. These things include the interior, etc.

3\. BMW already do updates over the air but not nearly at the rate that Tesla does. Tesla really has embraced software whereas other carmakers treat it as an overhead. I really hate how Autopilot is presented. It's not really self- driving because they keep telling you to be involved in the driving process. Until they can confidently say it's completely autonomous, it's more of a novelty than an useful feature.

Edited: Kudos for being so passionate about the issue. It does matter to me and which is why I still haven't completely dismissed the Model 3 as a choice.

<comment> crush-n-spread Hey thanks for the reply. Sounds like you've also thought quite a bit about this. I'd like to offer my thoughts on your numbered points.

For 1, you're right, we have to mine minerals to get these cars to work. I'm not really sure how much more polluting the production of Lithium and copper is compared to steel, but I assume it's bad. _However_ in the long term I assume most of those polluting mining processes could be electric, could they not? The point is that long term you could make mining those minerals completely clean.

For 2, you're right there are plenty of electric cars you can buy right now. And obviously Tesla interiors aren't terrific, we all know that. The main reason I would choose Tesla is that EVs are their bread and butter. Chevy and Nissan have an interest in keeping ICE cars going, so supporting them doesn't align with the goal of making all cars electric long term.

For 3, you pretty much hit the nail on the head with Tesla being a software company where other companies see software as a cost center. As far as the autopilot goes, you should cut Tesla a little bit of slack, because while their software is not true-to-the-name autopilot, they are also limited by regulators with how much freedom they can give the driver to rely on the software. So in many places where autopilot falls short of being true autopilot, it's likely due to regulators holding them back.

So that's my take on things. I'm in my early 20s, and I take you to be a gen Xer. You know, as an aside, I am really disheartened by Gen X's lack of passion for climate change, no offense to you. I love HackerNews but I get a little sad when I see people blow it off. I strongly believe that how we handle this climate disaster will define humanity's fate in the 21st century, but coming here people seem very relaxed about the whole thing. Oh well. Cheers.

<comment><USER18> Haha. Not really, I'm actually a millenial (on the older end of the spectrum though). I can see what you may think I'm Gen X though. It may surprise you to know that I'm actually an environmentalist as well. I was definitely more active and passionate about it when I was younger. Time and other priorities have dulled my passion over time -- regrettably.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Tesla is just desperately trying to push Model S sales this quarter. That's probably also why they added back free supercharging to the Model S recently.

<comment><USER20> Model S supercharging for new vehicles is free only "with referral" \- if the owner induces someone else to buy a vehicle too (tracked via a referral code). They didn't add back free supercharging as part of the original purchase.

This only strengthens your main point.

<comment><USER21> It seems like it'd be pretty easy to find a referral, however.

<comment><USER22> I believe most Tesla YouTube videos include referral links as owners get a monetary kickback for the referral. It wouldn't surprise me if enthusiasts that haven't bought a Model S yet are going to go through one of those links as opposed to an outright purchase from the website, especially if the supercharging limits are known.

<comment><USER23> You can only do five referrals per code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was at a Tesla dealership the other day, and the "sales associate" or whatever they call them was really pushing me away from the Model 3. He said, "Think of it like an electric Civic. It has no luxury features. The dashboard is a flat board like a picnic table. It has no speedometer or any gauges in front of the driver (it's all on the touchscreen in the middle). It doesn't have air conditioning on the passenger side, or even a glove box. The entire $30K of the car is for the battery."

It almost made me want to pull my Model 3 reservation.

<comment><USER25> Which location was this?

<comment><USER26> Nice try, Elon

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> As an operations person, I love how lean this car program is. They really stripped the car program down to just the necessary components and options to hit the price point they want. By limiting complexity I think they'll have the best shot at achieving the huge undertaking of scaling car production.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm being redirected to [https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/](https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/)

EDIT: [https://www.tesla.com/compare?redirect=no](https://www.tesla.com/compare?redirect=no) works

<comment><AUTHOR> It only shows the content on the US version. You'll need to pick "America" on the popup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I will happily be wrong about this, but isn't a lead time of a year for a "mass market" vehicle a bit of an ask. Last time I bought a car the "lead time" was a week.

<comment><USER30> I bought a car 2 months ago, and if you wanted to change even the simpler thing the delivery time went to 1+ month. This was for the best selling brand of cars in Spain that delivers almost 500.000 cars a year.

<comment><USER31> Seat?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It still needs to compete with a $35k-ish sedan, which will have a driver display and power liftgate.

<comment><USER33> If given the choice I prefer a non-powered trunk opening. Opening and closing a trunk provides no hardship for me, and doing it myself is much faster than waiting for a mechanism.

<comment><USER34> > much faster than waiting for a mechanism

Are you in a race to get going? I can't see you being in your seat, buckled and engine started before the mechanism closing? Not being snarky, it's just not that compelling a reason - to me.

<comment><USER35> It just feels useless. I find it annoying to wait for a trunk to open when you can just do it yourself and faster. One less thing to break, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Seems that many people think that the Model 3 is the 'new' and 'best' car. They are constantly point out that if people want the best Tesla car it is still the Model S.

</comment><comment><USER37> Best part:

>Although it will be our newest vehicle, Model 3 is not "Version 3" or the most advanced Tesla. Like Model S, it is designed to be the safest car in its class.

Gotta applaud the honesty.

<comment><USER31> They just try to push as many people as possible into Model S since margins there are higher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I shared this note 2 months ago on my linkedin. Still valid today. [https://www.linkedin.com/hp/update/6256148575126986752](https://www.linkedin.com/hp/update/6256148575126986752)

Tesla is facing a potential big problem. New buyers are holding off and are waiting to see the final specs and price of the Model 3. This could harm a lot Tesla sales until Elon Musk reveals to the public the Model 3.

I also believe Tesla did a mistake by naming the Model with a number. In the mind of many people, 3 is what comes after 1 and 2 (S & X). People are used to this because of the iPhone naming convention.

Tesla is reaffirming that the Model 3, despite its name, is not a version 3. It will be the entry level of the brand and if people want to buy the best performing car that Tesla can produce, they should buy a S or a X now.

<comment><USER39> I disagree. While there may be some that are holding off, they will know the specs in the next couple of months. At that time those people will be queued up and either buy the S,X or the 3, and totals sales wont be impacted at all

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Is it normal for a car company to make a luxury model and an economic model that looks so similar?

I'm wondering if that's one of the reasons they feel the need to put up this comparison: they're not differentiating much on external looks, so they have to make it really clear that they're differentiating on features.

<comment><USER41> Virtually all near-luxury to luxury manufacturers do exactly this.

For these two Tesla models in particular, the headlights and trunk line are key differences between the 3 and S, and are clearly identified by enthusiasts. But the majority of the design is part of the brand's consistent motif, making them look very similar to laypeople.

To laypeople, the BMW 3 looks nearly identical to the 5; the A3 looks nearly identical to the A6; the C-class looks nearly identical to the E-class; the ATS looks nearly identical to the CTS; the XE looks nearly identical to the XF; and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is a misconception that the Model 3 is the most advanced Tesla model simply because it is the newest Tesla model. This was cannibalizing the sales of the Model S more than Tesla expected it to. Buyer who could afford a Model S or Model X were waiting for the Model 3 because they were under the mistaken belief that the Model 3 would offer all the newest, cutting edge technologies and self-driving capabilities.

As Musk said via Twitter, the Model S is on Gen. 4, and continues to offer the most advanced technologies.

That said, most people are waiting for the Model 3 because they can't (or do want to) afford a $100,000-$165,000 (with the self-driving packages) vehicle.

<comment><USER42> I really want to meet the person that thinks a $35k car is going to be better than a $100k car...

<comment><USER43> Well, there seems to be a misconception that there are hordes of people who are legitimately confused about the subject.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The salient difference is the free use of supercharger for Model S.

<comment><USER45> Hmm, in my case, not at all. Depends on your location and use case.

In my London situation, 95% of my journeys will be within 50 miles easily.

I imagine it's more of an issue in the US and similar.

<comment><USER46> In my London situation, 80% of my journeys will be within 20 miles.

However, I don't have a garage or even a house. I park on the street and I would need at least 1 weekly trip to some charging station.

In the 5% times I go over that distance, I will need to stop to charge when leaving and coming back ( considering I have never driven in the direction of a SuperCharger, so the only one available is in London )

So well, it was already a stretch to adapt my lifestyle to accomodate a Tesla, this missing feature is like a mail from Musk explaining me I'm definitively not the target demographic for his car.

<comment><USER45> Accepted, I wouldn't want to be solely dependant on a supercharger. I'm not even sure I need a supercharger. Has to be home-charging for me.

It's possible, at this point in time, that maybe you aren't the demographic. I wouldn't blame Musk for that, really. More of an city infrastructure issue. I mean, I don't see a huge push towards generic charging points all over the city despite things moving in that direction.

There was some green deal thing a year or two ago where they were subsidising charging points at home ... of course, they scrapped that ... I guess that wouldn't help you anyway.

Maybe you're better off with a hybrid and get a Tesla when either the city charging situation improves or your home situation changes.

<comment><USER46> > I mean, I don't see a huge push towards generic charging points all over the > city despite things moving in that direction.

In London at least, the push is to get less car on the road, regardless if they are electric or not. There is no need to encourage electric adoption, only discourage cars and discourage more the one that are not electric.

I had a breakdown earlier this year and managed just fine over 2 months without the car. We fixed it because there is just no convenient way to go see the family or move children around easily and safely.

The fix for that however is probably coming from a combination of Uber-like services and automated car rental ( as long as they get to your home and back to the rental lot, you can manage the rest of the way ), rather than personal car ownership electric or otherwise.

We are not quite there yet, but considering my last car lasted me 15 years and counting, if I have a next one, it will be my last.

edit: BTW, no blaming Musk. It's not his fault if his products are desirable outside his target demographic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I think musk dropped the ball here. A decontented 35-40k model 3 should be available. They should also allow you to option the price up for luxury and performance like the A4/S4/RS4 or 320/328/335/m3. That should make this vehicle both profitable and more aspirational.

<comment><USER48> > That should make this vehicle both profitable and more aspirational.

Don't want to be too aspirational until it's actually available for sale. Otherwise everyone aspiring to own one will just wait.

<comment><USER47> I'm not sure that most car buyers in that price range actually wait. People buying a 40k car probably need it as a daily driver.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> 35k with no free use of supercharger, makes me think it doesn't worth it. I don't want to buy model 3 to be only around my town.

That's the biggest downside, from my perspective.

<comment> bjelkeman-again Paid for supercharging, where I live, is still cheaper than petrol. Filling at home is about 1/5 of the price per km compared to an BMW 330i. If I would have to do paid for supercharging it would still be less than half of the price for a petrol km. [1]

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/6ddqln/fuel_co...](https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/6ddqln/fuel_cost_comparison_bmw_330i_vs_tesla_model_3/di28aco/?st=j365h3u0&sh=848dc74d)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I find it interesting that there is no mention of autopilot.

<comment><USER51> [http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/03/tesla-is-underselling- autopil...](http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/03/tesla-is-underselling-autopilot- capabilities-on-model-3-says-analyst.html)

<comment><USER52> Option 1: Autopilot isn't where Tesla wants it, and they are trying hard to get it up to snuff, since so much has been made about how far ahead of everyone else Tesla is.

Option 2: In the opinion of a Tesla analyst who works for a bank that underwrote Tesla capital raises, it's a strategic move because the Autopilot is _so awesome_ that it will eat away at Model S sales, though the mechanism by which that happens is unclear. And of course, Elon Musk is known for keeping things close to the chest.

I mean, it _could_ be option 2, but I know where I'd put my money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is all about managing expectations. Getting a model 3 is not getting a mini model S. I like it, and the approach.

</comment><comment><USER54> Can 5 adults and 2 kids really fit in Model S?

<comment><USER55> With 2 in the trunk, rear facing.

<comment><USER54> too bad they are taking this out for Model 3.

<comment><USER33> There's not enough room for it. The Model 3 is much smaller than the Model S.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Tesla customers remind me of Apple customers.

The model 3 better be high quality... it's part of their reputation, despite tech challenges.</comment>


Show HN: Speaker Wire Gauge Calculator Web App - <AUTHOR> http://www.speakerwirecalculator.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> My first experiment with all Angular formulas and calculations. Please provide feedback! Thanks.

<comment><USER2> Why do you embed an ad with a referral link?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am trying to get ranked high on Google and to ultimately get a little money to keep the site going.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't work for me. Always returns "You need AWG wire" with the value missing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Weird... Thanks for the feedback. It must be a javascript issue in your browser or maybe it's not working on that particular browser. What are you using?</comment></comment>


Stomp.io for social adventures (launch conference) - <AUTHOR> http://stomp.io

<comment><USER2> This is _really_ cool. I've been waiting for something like this to come around for a while. Planning dates with friends will be so much easier. "Hey, want to go to a movie?" "Nah! Let's go squirrel fishing instead."

I really hope it can stay focused on user-curated fun-adventure-type stuff.

The interface is quick and clean. Great job! Love the about page:

      Who are we?
      [insert a little text about why we are so fucking awesome]
      [UPDATE: We've been too busy coding to get around to this]

p.s. I work at a local Boston startup. Is it cool if a bunch of us join you for the trampoline adventure?

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the kind words. And yeah, uhm... the about page isn't quite done yet ;-). Didn't seem like the most important thing haha.

We'd love to see you at the trampoline adventure!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm enjoying this site. I already found 2 things I didn't know were around me, but wanted to do.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is pretty amazing because just yesterday I was wondering if such a site exists. I am always trying to find more adventures wherever I go.

Too bad that the Android app crashes on my MyTouch 4G when "Loading Challenges". Is there any way I can help in debugging this?

<comment><USER3> Oh no! Really sorry about that. Just make sure to submit a crash report and we'll get _right_ on it. Or feel free to email us at support at our domain dot io.

<comment><USER5> I did hit the "Report" button. Let me know if you did not get the report or if it is useless and you need further testing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I too have been waiting for a site like this. Great work. I can see this having great virality through the brag factor on social networks (Facebook).

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm gonna go squirrel fishing right now!

</comment><comment><USER8> Wind tunnel ride...that sounds awesome!</comment>


Should You Become a Full Stack Developer? - <AUTHOR> http://logz.io/blog/full-stack-developer/ <comment><USER2> This is a clickbait, SEO-style spamblog loaded with keywords and not much substance. Avoid clicking.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article is horrible, don't bother clicking through.

But the 'full-stack developer' is an interesting beast. Web development is obscenely complex, that inherent complexity is compounded by developers that don't take the domain seriously and designers that should probably just stick to Photoshop.

My feet-first introduction to 'real' front-end was fixing a designer's awful HTML / CSS over the objections of the client who wanted me to just let him do his job. I had to redo the layout and re-style the whole project, because it wouldn't work at all with IE's box model. Took a whole day and at the end of it the client admitted I was right and we were able to move on. There was no way the designer was ever going to fix his broken code.

I feel like "full-stack" is this year's "rockstar", "ninja", "10x" programmer. Weasel words that employers use in the sole aim of short-staffing their departments.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are some weird items in the 'need to know lists':

Frontend:

* CSS, CSS3, and SASD # I assume that is supposed to be SASS?

* Go # Why for a front end engineer? It's not even on the backend list.

* Python # Why? It's a nice to have for general scripting but not required for frontend work

Backend:

* C and C++ # Not generally important for full stack web dev

* Ruby on Rails # Why is Rails in the middle of a list of languages? The language is Ruby

* Perl # Why? may be useful but not a must know

* MySQL and NoSQL # Why is MySQL contrasted with NoSQL?

<comment><USER5> And no ops or deploy tooling listed at all...

As a working full stack developer, I can definitely say that to my employer, that is what makes the difference between me being a full stack developer and a web developer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Should You Become a Full Stack Developer?

Should You Even Read This?

</comment><comment><USER7> > CSS, CSS3, and SASD

Wait. Hold the phone. What's SASD? Styles And Stuff, Dog?

<comment><USER3> Seeing as how 'd' is right next to 's', my guess is that they meant 'SASS'.

<comment><USER7> Syntactically Awesome Styles, Dog

<comment><USER3> You misspelled "dawg."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The idea of being a full stack developer has been around for a while. It's good but it only covers one dimension - the vertical.

The real win is to go horizontal. The same people do market analysis, design coding, testing, and prod support. We can't all be experts, but most of us can develop enough skill to do this. The elimination of hand-offs removes delay and miscommunication.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why must front-end developers know Python and Go?

<comment><USER10> I don't know about Go, but Django is relatively popular. It's a stretch, but I could see it being useful there. But we might as well include any language that has a Web framework then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't like seeing a bullet point like "MySQL and NoSQL" after "Postgres" and "MongoDB". This kind of thing breaks the category pattern, and makes me wonder if the author knows what NoSQL is.

</comment><comment><USER12> Complete rubbish article, I want my 3 minutes back.

</comment><comment><USER13> They must know a bunch of <LIST of LANGUAGES>

What about concepts? Like distributed systems? Big-O? thread safety?

</comment><comment><USER14> So a full stack developer is pretty much a web developer with a wide breadth of experience?

</comment><comment><USER15> The whole poster's account is linkbait. The content is so bad it is a joke.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wasted my five minutes reading this...</comment>


Under Construction (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/under-construction/ <comment><USER2> I was just thinking about these the other day. The other thing that died off was "web rings". From back in the days when search engines were rubbish, so you'd have to find one site that was approximately what you were after, then click lots of links until eventually, at about 4 or 5 degrees of separation from the original search, you might find what you were originally looking for. I know, it seems barbaric now.

Reciprocal links between similar sites were much more important in those days. In fact, the web was generally a friendlier, less commercialised and siloed place, because cooperation between webmasters was the only way anyone would ever find your content.

What I find sad is that now Google is becoming more commercial and heavily gamed through SEO, the first page of results is increasingly likely to be full of links to buy a thing than information about that thing. And because there is much looser interlinking between sites now, it's a lot harder to find information any other way.

<comment> martin-adams I also think a shift is that the web is very content driven now, so rather than linking sites together, you link content together.

<comment><USER2> [https://xkcd.com/741/](https://xkcd.com/741/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I started offering hosted guestbooks as a Perl CGI script, backed by a homegrown pipe-delimited text file database, in the 1990s. I moved them over to PHP and MySQL in 2002. 11,000 of those guestbooks are still linked from live websites, and about 600 have had people add new entries in the past year. I added reCAPTCHA a few years ago to keep the spam to a minimum, otherwise they look essentially the same as they did in the 1990s, with a variety of neon fonts on custom tiled background images. I plan to keep hosting them forever.

<comment><USER4> C'mon - we need some links to examples. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "..this is one of those occasions where we should be thankful we've moved > forward."

Have we _really_ moved forward?

In 20 years time, will today's parallax-scrolling, advert-laden, click-bait sites look any less ridiculous?

Rotating skulls have not gone away..they have just changed appearance!

<comment><USER6> Oh yes, the 3MB click bait news article with practically zero content. To think you used to be able to fit an encyclopaedia on a floppy disk!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just like enjoying the delight of using Cool Retro Terminal (for short bursts) ... you too can turn any web page into a mid-90's geocity-alike unpleasant mess here: [http://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/](http://www.wonder- tonic.com/geocitiesizer/)

Consider what it does to this HN discussion about Under Construction) [http://www.wonder- tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=...](http://www.wonder- tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=1&music=3&url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12334868)

<comment><USER8> Cool Retro Term is my guilty pleasure. I spend an awful lot of processing power just to make my terminal look older and less reliable.

But somehow, to me, it doesn't feel right to use IRC from anything other than a fuzzy and flickery orange screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you go to the guestbook [1], you'll find this gem: _You know, I would have hooked this up and made it work, but I 'm scared of the horrors you monsters would write here._

1\. [http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/under- construction/guestboo...](http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/under- construction/guestbook.htm)

</comment><comment><USER10> From the article:

 _> But the horrible truth is that this really was how these websites were. They all looked like this, every little one of the fuckers._

Well, no. Many websites did not bother to include all that stuff. But these didn't bother to do a lot of styling at all. Original browser style. Very ugly, but at least informative and not nearly as distracting as the sites described in the article.

<comment><USER2> Also, some websites looked more like this:

[http://www.ozones.com/](http://www.ozones.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd totally forgotten about the Book of Mozilla easter egg ('about:mozilla' in Firefox's url bar). Just re-checked, and yup it's still there, albeit a different text.

<comment><USER12> about:robots is still around, too. That one seems unchanged from when it was first introduced, including using the older style of Firefox error page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Article missed loads. Like the fact that a h1 would pretty much take up all the screen real estate back then because 800x600px resolution was luxurious back in the day. So no one used h1,h2 etc. They just bolded text instead for headings.

And used pixel fonts to get the font size down to a readable 10px to squeeze in text navigation where icons didn't cut the mustard.

Having said that the default grey background was there for a reason - it was a sane readable default. I find many modern sites still difficult on the eyes compared to their unstyled counterparts.

The lack of an underline and visited colour change on links disorientates me. It's all mystery meat navigation.

Mystery meat navigation is a whole other section of history missing. Some websites were made entirely in flash. Others just had a splash page. And many of these flash sites required you to hover and click about like a lunatic trying to find web content.

Oh the good old days...

<comment><USER13> Then there was webpagesthatsuck.com where you could see the latest mystery navigation idea from someone who should know better. Or some multinational site looking like a geocities homepage.

I never could decide if the design of pagesthatsuck was deliberate satire or accidental, but it was always an ugly site itself.

It used to be fun back then browsing sites like clientsfromhell, the similar programming one who's name I now forget, and pagesthatsuck over lunch. Nowadays that's much less satisfying. Time was you could kill 20 minutes looking at some awful sites and terrible VB code. The comments were usually most fun. Now they've all reduced content so much that you get about 1/4 the content in a long column that takes 1/5 browser width. Of course now a clean modern site with 3 mile long ad interstitials between each piece. Progress?

Oddly haven't visited any of those for years now!

<comment><USER14> > the similar programming one who's name I now forget

[http://thedailywtf.com/](http://thedailywtf.com/) maybe?

<comment><USER13> That's the one! Seems to be more browsing friendly than last I remember it. Far better than the other two currently are.

<comment><USER14> It used to be much, much uglier - I think they had taken inspiration from the default ASP.NET error pages...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> phatak-dev Loved the office space reference. Marquee one of the feature I learnt which made others go crazy. Back in days it's all about HTML not about JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER10> From the article:

 _> Which side won? Like any good mutually-assured destruction, we all lost._

This is true on so many levels.

</comment><comment><USER15> This page should be the first site on the History of the WWW Webring.

Reminds me of the homepages I used to design with frames and image maps, wierdly-tiled backgrounds, and tons of <FONT> tags of course. Good times were had by all.

</comment><comment> d--b Frames! The article missed them.

Oh boy, did I love frames.

That, and fixed backgrounds

<comment><USER6> Frames were brilliant. It's just they had a few unpleasant side effects, that could have been ironed out given the will. One html menu/navigation as a frame that was editable in one place without resorting to programming languages/constructs for file includes. Piecemeal content aggregation via frames may, just may have been a better approach to web page building.

<comment><USER16> I really prefer just keeping a standard heading with an index link in it. Most people open pages in new tabs now anyway so you get the same effect for less.

<comment><USER17> At the time most popular web browsers didn't have tabs. If you wanted to have two pages open at once, you had to open them in separate windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The best part is:

> (while writing this article, I discovered that if you Google for the phrase > "blink tag", you get... well...)

You should definitely do this.

<comment><USER17> Google has some more search easter eggs, like 'askew' and 'zerg rush'

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Status bar abuse. Back when web browsers (and most other applications) had a status bar across the bottom of the window, there was a JavaScript API that could manipulate the text displayed there. A common trick was to "scroll" a message in the status bar by constantly updating it with all the letters shifted to the left by one.

</comment><comment><USER19> I got dizzy when looking at the bottom of the page where the space (stars etc..) background is used. I'm quite glad sites aren't made like that anymore. I also love to be reminded of the following:

"Moving items attract the visitors' eye. This is a well-established UX principle."

</comment><comment><USER20> What a shame, the web counter seems to be broken. Having mostly forgotten about them, it hit home for me to see those silly things mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER21> Well, some things don't change. Back then we had a ton of misinformation on poorly done personal home pages and fan sites, now have a ton of misinformation in poorly done news articles and social media posts.

Always fun to look and see which of the 226 different ways to get Mew a Pokemon site would post, or which of the equally large number of ways to get the Triforce in Ocarina of Time you'd see on a Zelda site.

Topsites were another big thing there too. Bit like webrings, except clicking on the button would vote the site you're on up the rankings and make it more likely to appear on others. These fell apart about as quickly as webrings did, especially when people gamed the hell out of them.

There was also:

Awkward Javascript animated objects moving around with the mouse cursor. Those were pretty big at one point.

The inevitable blink tags, which got so annoying that browsers dropped all support for them.

Jokey 'I agree to proceed to this site' splash pages, where the other link would send you to Google. Or perhaps something like the Barbie website.

Sites hotlinking to images and resources on other sites. Which then made a comeback for a while on Myspace, and still remains a large issue on internet forums. Bonus points if the original webmaster got so annoyed with the bandwidth costs, he replaced the image link with a porn picture instead.

Various awkward ways to try and 'block' right clicking, as if this could 'protect' the content from thieves.

Songs or sound effects playing in the background, which usually gave you quite a shock if you speakers were up and you moved to another site:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM1BJVN8zD0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM1BJVN8zD0)

Various extremely basic HTML tutorials that basically said how to add bold text, italic text, underlined text, images and links.

Javascript used for 'password protection' (in the slightly later days). You can probably guess why this wasn't the best idea in the world.

Oh, and fanlistings. Where you had a big old list of people who liked something (a series, a game, a celebrity, a band, etc), and you could send an email with a name and contact address to be added to it.

It was certainly a different era then, though a surprising amount of stuff common then is actually still around. For example, this site still seems to offer webrings:

[http://www.webringworld.org/](http://www.webringworld.org/)

And sites like Bravenet still offer everything that was popular in 1996 or so.

<comment><USER22> I really did try to find an active webring while writing the article, but there aren't any. webringworld.org doesn't actually offer any real services.</comment></comment>


What Y Combinator Startups Actually Do, Based On Their (Unpronounceable) Names - <AUTHOR> http://betabeat.com/2012/08/what-y-combinator-startups-actually-do-based-on-their-unpronounceable-names/

<comment><USER2> I predict this is going to be a serious love or hate thing. Lots of upvotes, tons of negative comments.

As hilarious as it is, it's all subjective of course.

Let's take some names we all know and love and apply the same thought process:

Amazon: A live webstream of some pretty trees and maybe a really big river.

Nike: Greek Goddesses are running companies? Awesome. Whatever she's selling, I've no doubt she'll be victorious.

ebay: Beachfront property on the interwebs?

Ok so maybe I lack the comedic talents of the author but my point still stands: The author has no point.

</comment><comment><USER3> Meh, this could have been funnier. Startup names can border on the absurd, and it's good to lighten up a little. If people can get all worked up about "ipad", then some free association on "BufferBox" and "Everyday.me" before launch might be a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER4> "IMGFave: Sony attempts a Twitter client." Nope, when Sony does it they have much Sonier names. Like "Timescape."

<comment><USER5> I would pay $13 to watch "Timescape" in 3D.</comment></comment>


Atoms – HTML5 Apps – Stop writing code, start dragging it - <AUTHOR> http://atoms.tapquo.com

<comment><USER2> I like this and bookmarked it, but I have to say that the extended "atom" metaphor is kind of confusing.

"Atoms" are already called elements. "Molecules" are called many things (components, widgets, templates, etc.). And most baffling of all, you're calling apps "organisms"?

I totally get the end-to-end branding thing, and I even like it when it's done simply (e.g. "Droplets" on Digital Ocean).

But in principle, all it's doing is forcing us to learn a new language that isn't adding anything to our understanding or simplifying anything -- all it's doing is maybe, slightly strengthening your brand.</comment>