Ask HN: How do you "fix" the curse of the gifted? - <AUTHOR> I saw one post today in HN about failure, on the comments someone linked that e-mail that Eric Raymond sent to Linus saying that he suffered from curse of gifted programmer...
I thought it was interesting,, reading the e-mail felt like it was a grandpa lambasting me for being a childish.
Yes, calling myself might sound arrogant, and I am arrogant anyway, but I am gifted, and I know that because it is obvious:
In my entire school life, I never felt challenged unless I sabotaged myself, before the sixth grade, I would pass every single class with A or A+ without doing any effort, I never made my homework, and my parents got called constantly to visit the principal because I was utterly lazy. After the sixth grade, I started to gradually have lower scores, and my behavior worsened, in high school in the two last years I actually went to school, plopped my head on the desk, and slept.
And yet, I never failed.
My first non-internship job, I submitted my resume for junior iOS programmer.
Got hired as solutions architect and R&D head.
Then I noticed that every time I looked to other programmers working, I thought they were amazing, but my bosses always think I am amazing, because they can throw random shit at me, I say I cannot do it, and I do it anyway.
Yet, I only learned to use version control in 2012 (I started to code in 1993), I am always amazed by other people design, it took me 6 years using a C++ compiler before I touched std, I make code mostly by trial and error, I make lots of sloppy mistakes, I am sure that if I was coding 30 years ago when you had only three compiling attempts on a mainframe my code would never run, yet, everywhere I looked, I never find someone that can be my mentor.
I rarely feel challenged.
What is the point of being extraordinarily gifted, if in most cases I don`t feel challenged,. and in the end, I don`t accomplished much more than a average joe? <comment><USER2> There's actually a bunch of people smarter than you that doesn't want to work with you because you're an arrogant little schmuck below their level.

Figure out who those people are, become humble enough to start learning from them, rise to their level, rinse and repeat.

In general it might be important for you to realize that modesty is an incredibly valuable skill that will allow you to continue to interact normally with people as your skill level is rising. The more modest you are the more awesome people will let you become without starting (wanting to) sabotage you.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had to edit my submission to make it shorter than 2000 characters.

But I rarely worked directly with people that I wanted to learn from, usually I always end in positions where everyone else wants to learn from me.

And that is horribly tiring, I want to learn, not to teach all the time

Of course, right now I don`t have a choice, being a startup co-founder means that I am the leader anyway, but I had a couple of past jobs that I tried to end as grunt and failed, I always end falling up...

<comment><USER2> First off: greatness is not one-dimensional. Remember that you're comparing everybody against your chosen dimension(s) of excellence. Adding a another dimension is certain to make you a beginner in something again. You're a co- founder now so you might want to consider sales (in the broadest sense.)

Secondly, I can guarantee that even in your chosen dimension of excellence there is someone in your town that out-classes you. Try calling the top consultancy in your area, ask them who their best programmer is and buy him dinner. If you can't learn anything from him/her than I'd bet on you being a bad learner.

As a general conclusion: if you keep on improving and taking on bigger challenges then at some point you _will_ reach your limits and you _will_ find something you can't succeed at. It took me almost 30 years but when you get there you'll realize a) who exactly is 'better' than you and b) the degree to which you've been slacking all your life before that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sorry to be blunt but you are not "gifted" - you might have experienced being the most intelligent person in the room, but that's dependent on the other people in the room.. Applying for a junior iOS job and instead be offered a solutions architect role speaks more about the company you work for than your skills.

I'd advise trying to zoom in on what excites you about your current role, and look for opportunities at a larger company that will stretch you and engage you with people of equal or greater ability.

</comment><comment><USER4> Arrogance is not the problem, even if it points you to the easy way (low quality C++ code as you presented)

The problem is you not only that you are not challenged, but you don't love what you do - when you enjoy something, doing it is its own reward, and you want to be better and won't tolerate low quality.

Maybe that thing is code - maybe it's not.

I would suggest you try something totally different - but something that interest you. Only you can answer what it is - maybe it is economy, or physics, or wrestling- whatever, deep down in yourself, you know you really want to do, but maybe are afraid to do because of the consequences on your beliefs or on yourself.

Find that, do it, and the problem will solve itself.

</comment><comment><USER5> 'I make code mostly by trial and error, I make lots of sloppy mistakes' - maybe you're not as gifted as you think

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought of that possiblity... I many times cringe at my own code, and every time I get a task, I feel that I have no idea on how to do it.

But I never failed to do what needed to be done, and I always get praised in the end.

And trust me, this is absolutely horrible, I am always feeling I am not good, yet I am always getting more and more pressure on me, with people throwing more and more crazier shit at me believing I can do it,

I had one job where I was asked as first project to develop alone a geo location augmented reality library for iOS.

I had no idea on how to do it, and it took my three months, and I thought I was slow. When I was done the CEO of the company gave me a 10% raise and praised me for a whole week saying that what I did was really fast and that his other workers would not do that fast... I did not knew if I felt great for the praise, or bad, because I was feeling that I did not deserved the praise and that I was like cheating the guy out of his money.

<comment><USER6> Stop defining success in terms of praise from others. At best you'll spend your time doing unfulfilling work and not learning much, and at worst you'll be manipulated.

From the discussion in this thread I don't believe that you're a particularly effective developer - it seems you're used to playing the hero programmer role and have been too poorly managed for anyone to question that. Your descriptions of the C++ STL show that you don't know what you don't know, and if I were working with you I'd be asking all sorts of questions about what was going to jump out of your code and bite us further down the line.

You're probably smart and have a lot of potential, you just need to realise that there is a vast amount that you don't know.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know there are lots of stuff I don`t know.

What bothers me very much is that there are seemly noone ever to look at my code and say what I could have done better, or tell me what I should be knowing.

In fact I asked as birthday gift to my grandmother to import the special edition of Bjarne book because I concluded that the only way to improve my C++ pratically now is just work my ass off trying to learn the whole damn thing, because noone will teach me.

And not wanting to be too much pedantic, but std != STL

<comment><USER6> ... having said that, on a good team there will be a culture of code review. Have you ever asked for feedback on your code?

<comment><AUTHOR> I rarely get a good team.

Not the lack of the good, but the lack of a team.

Usually I am tasked into solo or soloish positions.

But I think this is kinda expected, considering what I work with ( mobile games and non-web apps, where most of the time one coder is enough, also small indie games for other platforms, that rarely have more than one coder )

<comment><USER6> So, at least we've got from 'I'm too gifted to learn from anyone' to 'I'm in a difficult position without access to peers to learn from', which sounds more plausible and is probably worth sticking with.

I guess you have two options really - find another job that will give you access to a team, or start doing something to give you contact with programmers outside of work, whether that's getting involved with an open source project, finding a meet-up to go to, taking a class, etc. In any case, approaching it with an appropriate level of humility is probably a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Submitted a resume as a junior IOS programmer and got hired as a "solutions architect" and "R&D head"? That doesn't even make sense.

Sorry but I smell troll-bait here. I'm flagging this post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Alright, I will explain this ( because I am bored right now, not because I feel that I need to defend myself )

I had previous internships as iOS programmer, and thus I thought that for my first non-intern job, it would make sense to apply as junior programmer.

I applied, and got accepted by the HR and whatnot.

The CEO for some reason then read my resume personally, and he saw that I`ve built a entire arcade (even the carpentry) by myself, also he saw that I was not a CS graduate, but a Game Design graduate, and finally, I had lots of old projects that I made to create stuff.

He called me in person, to explain why he wanted to change my job role, he explained what wanted from ,e and how much money he would give me (he offered 60% more than I asked, granted that still was lower than market rates).

He told me, he noticed I was more of a inventor, than a good academic style programmer. and that he already had 35 CS people on the building, he needed someone different and passionate for creating stuff, as head of the R&D division he was intending to create (until that point all his income was from outsourcing contracts).

I actually had a great chat with him, we spent some hours talking about our tales of inventing stuff, I felt that the guy wanted to innovate, and was bored with the company current role, and missed a mad scientist type of friend

That would give me problems later, as I felt entitled to frequently drop into the CEO office to chat, or present results and skip my boss, and this quickly eroded morale of other workers as they thought I was a favourite, soon I started to get sabotaged by other workers... Kinda nasty, and took my a while to realize what was happening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Set targets for failure. Chances are you'll also have a deep fear of failure, and while your boss thinks he's pushing you, you know you're really taking the safe option. Wake up and realise that. Quit your job if you have to. Find some fear and constantly push the boundaries of your comfort zone.

(On an interesting side note as a previously devout Atheist, I found that finding my spiritual side and a Faith really helped. That was a big surprise for me.)

Find a meaningful goal that motivates and drives you. For me it is helping the homeless and dispossessed. Set yourself small, regular targets to achieve things - reward yourself when you achieve them. Find a partner that when you're around him/her you feel compelled to do great things, someone that won't buy your bullshit, and ask them to support and push you harder.

I'm not there yet, but as someone who can relate, I feel like I'm finally starting to get there. As Generation Y, I feel we buy too much of our self- confidence in our abilities to "hack" everything. The sad realisation I made (after years of fighting it) is that there is no substitution for hard work - sure you should still work smart, but that doesn't absolve you of the need to word HARD. Really hard. Get up and give me 10 pushups! Good point... regular physical exercise helps too. Don't wanna gym? 20 mins a day, do something... squats, long walk, reconnect with nature.

Hopefully one day the fear of not achieving enough will be greater than the fear of failure. Good luck :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> It took you 6 years before you touched std? what std are you talking? as in the namespace std::cout, std::cin, etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes.

I still don`t use cout and cin actually. I prefer printf. I don`t know what are streams exactly (but I bought Bjarne TC++PL and it will arrive next thursday, and then I will read what it is...)

In fact, I still rarely use std, when I use it is vectors.

I never used std interators (I think they are fugly, and I like to use while() instead of for )

And I don`t know what else std do beside iterators, streams and containers.

<comment><USER10> As far as the C++98 standard library goes I think vectors are by far the most useful construct it provides because they're like arrays but manage memory for you.

Lot's of people prefer printf to cout/cin.

Iterators in my opinion are a bad idea because there are so many cases when you need to do index arithmetic. The idea of having common interfaces for data structures with very different performance characteristics is one that probably seemed great to some people at the time but it doesn't work too well in practice.

The C++11 standard library seems to have a lot more features that may be very useful, like regular expressions, but I haven't started using it yet and if you care about cross-platform code it probably won't be truly useable for several years.

EDIT: Had a nagging feeling I was forgetting something when I wrote this. Yes of course std::map is incredibly useful it's definitely something one would need to implement if it weren't in the library.

<comment><USER6> Although I kind of agree with you that iterators for vectors aren't really very necessary, for std::list, std::map, etc. I think they're quite a sensible way of sequentially accessing the data - you'd pretty much have to re- implement them if they didn't exist. In the case of maps, I don't actually think the container implementation is specified enough to allow you to get away with any less abstraction - it technically doesn't have to be a BST, although I guess you could argue that the containers should have mapped to precisely defined data structures in the first place.

C++11's type inference does make STL iterators a lot less ugly, by the way. Also (referring to the initial post), there's no reason you have to use for rather than while when using iterators (while(v != c.end()) ...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> OK, I can see how some people might regard this as "humblebragging" or whatever. But I think it's a valuable discussion, so have an upvote.

I'd say that being "gifted" is relative. Relative to my high-school senior class, I'm fairly sure I was "gifted" in terms of IQ or whatever. I definitely experienced the whole thing of "coasting" a bit and relying on my inate smarts, and not studying and applying myself as hard as I could have. I was mostly bored shitless in high-school and my grades reflected it. So, yeah, I was "that kid" who always got the talks from his teachers "You could accomplish so much if you'd just apply yourself". I mean, I'd goof off all year, rarely turn in any homework, cut class constantly, goof off, almost fail, and then make it up by acing the end of year exams. Drove my teachers batty.

BUT... relative to the population of HN readers, I expect that I am - at best - fairly average. Everybody here was smarter than most of their peers in H.S., and there are some folks who post here who are just off the charts (pg himself, for example). So for me, it's not too hard to stay humble by simply paying attention to what's being said around me here, and the articles that get posted here.

 _What is the point of being extraordinarily gifted, if in most cases I don`t feel challenged,. and in the end, I don`t accomplished much more than a average joe?_

Hmmm... so, for me, college was a whole different experience than H.S., for example, exactly because I had more control over my direction and I could _choose_ things that did challenge me. I sought out the things that A. I found interesting and B. challenged me. I've also always had this "thing" where I tend to jump into the deep end of the pool and take on challenges that should be (and sometimes are) too much for me.

After a lot of years of doing all sorts of shit career wise and having some bizarre adventures (ask me about my years as a volunteer firefighter sometime), I've reached the conclusion that the best path forward for me is to start a business. So I've been working on Fogbeam Labs for about 2 years now and that's been a tremendous experience. I've been forced to branch out into so many new areas and fields and learn so much, that it's just ridiculous. But it's also fun and exhilarating in it's own way.

I guess if there's a point to all that, it's to say "Yeah, I understand where you're coming from... but realize that - no matter how gifted you think you are - there probably are big challenges out there for you. But you have to take some initiative and seek them out".

</comment><comment><USER12> Is this you? <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh awesome post, and hell yeah.

I work making games, I never figured the point of using unit tests.

Also yes, multiple inheritance and that shit is pure evil... Once I tried to make a game engine using very strict OOP. It took me two years to make a barely working game... It is great to impress employers, but I don`t plan in ever writing code like that again.

But I won`t say this is not only good thought. I feel many times that I should know more, even if is to know why I am not using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Show me the code.

Then let's talk about how gifted you really are.</comment>


Why You Need HTTPS for Your Site, Today - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Merrily/why-you-need-https-for-your-website-today-d9582c75d58c#.3q4jl9mcy <comment><USER2> Nicely elaborated article! It is always important to have security at every stage but SSL Certs make online communication fortified.

</comment><comment><USER3> To protect your website's user information!</comment>


Ask HN: Work on Palm Mojo Application Framework  - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN,
I was given the access to the Palm's SDK for development for the Palm Pre. I am wondering if other people in the Bay Area with access to the SDK, would like to meet up once/twice a week at some coffee shop, library or any other place and help each other out.
It would be a good opportunity to learn, teach and network with fellow developers and maybe even create teams for future.
Cheers. <comment><USER2> I'm not in the Bay area, but if you'd seed on TPB I'd be happy to share what I learn.</comment>


Cicso Lawful Interception Architecture [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://cryptome.org/2012/09/cisco-lia.pdf

<comment><USER2> You uploaded a website as a PDF document...

Did you mean to link to the actual design guide?

[http://www.cisco.com/en/US/technologies/tk583/tk799/technolo...](http://www.cisco.com/en/US/technologies/tk583/tk799/technologies_design_guide09186a0080826773.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> I did. Now, I can not change. Let me try to submit this again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this available in Cisco's site itself?

[http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/12_2sb/feature/guide/ht_...](http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/12_2sb/feature/guide/ht_ssi.html)</comment>


South Korean 'Mock Funerals' Seek to Ease Life's Stresses - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/south-korean-mock-funerals-seek-to-ease-lifes-stresses/ <comment> guard-of-terra "a sign that the country, once one of the world's poorest..., has grown affluent enough"

In case you didn't note that for the last few decades South Korea was a rich country (especially by PPP).

</comment><comment><USER3> In case anyone would prefer a video, here's a Vice documentary about the same thing:

[http://youtu.be/ejEaJUEOhjs](http://youtu.be/ejEaJUEOhjs)

</comment><comment><USER4> Bizarre connection, but this reminded me of what Steve a Jobs said to the founders of Dropbox when he offered to buy them out. "What you have there is a feature, not a platform".

I'm not saying he was right or wrong in that case, that's a separate issue, but in the article at hand it seems like mock funerals aren't a service that can support a business on its own. It makes more sense as an adjunct to a main business 'platform' such as actual funerals, but maybe also e.g. Health resorts, religious retreats and such. Maybe that's a useful lens through which to look at any new business idea.

<comment><USER5> I'm interested if Steve Jobs said that because he wanted to get Dropbox on the cheap, or because he really believed it.

Perhaps both: the only way to know would be to compare Dropbox's valuation at the time with the offer present; if said offer was ever extended.

<comment><USER6> I think we'll see in the years/months ahead that Dropbox is indeed FNAC. It's only survived this long because the unit economics aren't _that_ bad - <USER2> hardware costs are not anywhere near what O2O companies like Postmates or Instacart burn. But in the end, if they don't have any lock-in capabilities (such as collaboration features), the service won't be sticky in the face of price increases - the tech for seamless syncing across platforms is now table stakes.

<comment><USER7> >they don't have any lock-in capabilities (such as collaboration features)

paper.dropbox.com aims to be such a feature.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but so far I haven't seen how it's sufficiently differentiated from Google Docs. There's a well-funded startup, Quip, in this space as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Are You Evil? Profiling That Which Is Truly Wicked - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=defining-evil&print=true

<comment><USER2> FTA: _"I wouldn't release E or anything like it, even in purely virtual environments, without engineered safeguards," Bringsjord says. These safeguards would be a set of ethics written into the software, something akin to author Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" that prevent a robot from harming humans, requires a robot to obey humans, and instructs a robot to protect itself—as long as that does not violate either or both of the first two laws.

"Because I have a lot of faith in this approach," he says, "E will be controlled."_

Uuummmm, has this guy ever actually _read_ any Asimov? Did I miss the joke?</comment>


Why you have (probably) already bought your last car - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45786690 <comment><USER2> So frustrating to me that otherwise smart people keep buying into this narrative, including software developers and tech people who should know better.

Here's the _actual_ status quo: after a decade of research into autonomous cars specifically (not to mention the decades of AI and systems research before that), we are _barely_ at the point where a car can function safely with Level 2 autonomy, in good conditions.

These prognostications about eliminating traditional cars are assuming reliable Level 5 autonomy in _all_ conditions. And unlike most software, you can't just get 99% of the way there and call it done. If you want to remove the steering wheel, it has to work ALL the time (or close enough to make no difference.) They say that 80% of the work is in the final 20% of the project? We haven't even finished the first 30% of the work yet.

Even more than that, nobody seems to be talking about the fact that to get this to work reliably, you basically need full general intelligence (unless you can manage to turn the road system into a closed system, like rail is). For example: following verbal or gestured instructions from a police officer or construction worker. We don't even have _theories_ on how to build intelligence like that, yet.

Will it happen eventually? Sure, probably, eventually. Will we get a lot of use out of Level 2 and Level 3 autonomy in the mean time? Already happening. Will we be taking robotic taxis in the next 20 years? No way, not with current approaches absent a breakthrough in general AI.

<comment><USER3> > following verbal or gestured instructions from a police officer or > construction worker.

If they don't broadcast it with a valid signature, just ignore them, they're not authorized to give any instructions.

> turn the road system into a closed system

You can turn it into a "closed enough" system, with every vehicle having a radio locator, and everything else being treated as an unknown obstacle... that someone could get fined for putting it on the road.

<comment><USER4> You've never encountered a citizen flagging down traffic because of an obstruction just past a blind hill or curve?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Honestly, I bought my last car a decade ago.

Cars aren't that great for a lot of reasons (my stress level, my city's livability, the environment), and getting rid of the idea of car ownership was one of those huge life decisions that I made that I've never, ever regretted.

I don't use car sharing services - that whole industry is toxic for the drivers, I sometimes take public transportation, and every few years, I take a flight.

Everything else is done by bike. I'm happy, I'm healthy, and I'm looking forward to the rest of my life without owning another car.

<comment><USER6> But where do you live?

<comment><USER7> Read the article in his profile, you'll find your answer in 10 secs. And yeah, with _that_ profile, in _that_ location, I take his point. But not everybody is _that_ lucky :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm increasingly starting to wonder if the autonomous cars will get the chance to "win" before being replaced by "flying cars". There's half a dozen companies at least that are aiming for first flight in the next 2-3 years, and Uber-like services in the 2025 timeframe. Some, like Lilium have demonstrated flying prototypes.

Companies like Lilium are claiming they'll be able to compete with and eventually beat Ubers current pricing, and fly you at speeds of 300km/h....

If that comes through, it will have a vastly more disruptive effect than autonomous cars. E.g. I live about 10 miles from the centre of London, and that's about a 1 hour commute. A one hour flight at 300km/h would make most of England viable to live and work in and still have commuting distances similar to what Londoners consider perfectly viable commuting time today...

It has the potential to change the dynamics of both the housing and labour market dramatically. And who knows what it will do to e.g. downtowns when most of the country suddenly is within 20-30 minutes or less of one of the half a dozen or so largest city centres.

To a European used to seeing American sprawl as an example of emphasising the car over public transport the prospect of something that can multiple acceptable travel distances by a large factor over the car is a bit scary...

<comment><USER9> Flying cars will always be less efficient (and thus, more expensive) than driving cars due to the physics of it. I wouldn't hold my breath on flying cars replacing driving cars, just as airplanes haven't replaced trains.

<comment><USER8> > Flying cars will always be less efficient (and thus, more expensive) than > driving cars due to the physics of it.

As it stands, for cars, the typical energy use is 3k-4k BTU per passenger mile. Commercial airliners use 2k-3k BTU per passenger mile. Of course those get their efficiency from packing more passengers in. But the point being that a statement like the above only makes sense when comparing comparable vehicles (the bad numbers for cars is in part because cars on average have less than 2 people in them; fill a car up, and it will do better per person than a typical plane).

However the best reported numbers I've found from test flights of electric planes is energy use as low as below 1300 BTU per mile (these numbers will also vary wildly by number of people; most prototype models in progress are for 2 people, including Lilium, though their next version will be a five seater).

Part of this is due to totally different design constraints. Of the 12 in- progress models I'm aware of, the heaviest is about 1/4th the weight of the lightest Tesla. The lightest is about 1/6th the weight of the lightest Tesla. E.g. the two-person version of the Lilium was 400kg without passengers.

Part of this again is that the cost of purchase vs. cost of operation calculations are entirely different: Most of these are designed for the hire operator market or as luxury items, and they're not even possible if they weigh too much, so much more money gets spent on expensive materials to push weight down. Their assumption is that they'll get the operational costs down far enough to amortise the increased finance costs of buying it.

<comment><USER10> Yes. The Uber Elevare white paper looks at this issue, and the stylised numbers are:

Car: 1 mile/kWh

Flying car: 2 mile/kWh

Electric car: 3 mile/kWh

(Electric engines are much more efficient than combustion engines.)

So, it's not too bad, plus ground based vehicles (according to the same study) have to drive on average 1.4 miles for 1 mile distance "as the crow flies".

However, the numbers above are for fixed wing flight, as far as I can tell. Drone-like hovering flight is less efficient.

Still, I think that's not the main problem. Regulation, battery specific energy, ATC are bigger hurdles.

[https://www.uber.com/elevate.pdf/](https://www.uber.com/elevate.pdf/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One word, that I think/hope is becoming important to more people these days, "privacy" (not mentioned once in the article). Unless these things can be used without identification, I seriously hope they don't become the only, or even a common, transportation option.

<comment><USER12> With electronic license plate readers everywhere, you already lack privacy in a private vehicle. I wish there were a way one could drive anonymously yet still be held responsible for hit and runs, etc, but that doesn't exist.

<comment><USER11> Somewhat true, but is that data for sale on the open market? I mean, I wouldn't really be surprised if it was, but I'm hoping it isn't, at least in most places. I'm OK with government officials having access to data via a system of checks and balances, not so much with just anyone that happens to have a few bucks. Just because we've lost some privacy in one place, doesn't mean we should just stop caring, that's how things have gotten as bad as they are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hate to say this but.. There will never be autonomous cars. Human psychology, and unpredictability, will doom it all. We can build amazing AI technology, but we will never be able to account for Jenny after six mudslides in a Geo Tracker, or the random decision making of even the most well intention human driver.

Furthermore, if you haven't read "Industrial Society and Its Future"[0] you should. It makes a very good point that society as we know it today cannot and will not support a car-less reality.

[0]. [http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf](http://editions- hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> As a layman, I think this title is way off, even if the internal concepts of the piece are reasonable. We're a long way from fleets of autonomous vehicles being ubiquitous enough that I can expect a vehicle of the specs I require to be available in the same amount of time as I could start one in my driveway. Maybe this isn't fully informed, but my impression is that even an early automobile was strictly better than a horse, for the riders in the moment.

That said, the average person may have bought their second-to-last car. But I bet you we end up owning passenger/cargo modules that dock at our houses for transport platforms to pick us up in.

<comment><USER8> As someone who lives without a car: you don't really need to be able to just start one. The big differentiator in my experience is whether or not the wait is _consistent_.

I will ditch a cab company if the waits become too variable, but will happily accept a few minutes longer wait, as it's not really a matter of whether it's 3 minutes or 5 or 10, but knowing that I need to think about it at least that much in advance. If I regularly go to book one 3 minutes in advance and 25% of the time it turns out to take 8, that's more annoying that if it's consistently a 10 minute wait.

As long as it's consistent, it becomes habit very quickly to order at the right time in advance.

<comment><USER15> That's also a great way to sum up the problem with many forms of public transportation in the US too. The light rail and buses near my home are reliably unreliable, sometimes they are right on schedule, sometimes they arrives 10-15 minutes after schedule, and sometimes they arrives somewhere in between.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I believe car leasing will become more popular than buying as automobiles become more technology than machine. Who wants a gadget car with 3 year old technology? People can't even keep phones that long.

<comment><USER17> There is a less favorable reason you are right. Cars are getting more expensive and people can't afford them even with ever lengthening loan lengths...</comment></comment>


Twitter Bootstrap Code Clip Marketplace - <AUTHOR> http://www.bootclipper.com

<comment><USER2> Bootsnipp.com creator here... I really do not appreciate that somebody just ripped off my idea completely, the layout, the thumbnails styles, etc.

Maybe you can change it up a little? There is also Foundation by Zurb that does not have a site like bootsnipp, feel free to make that isntead =)

</comment><comment><USER3> See also: <http://bootsnipp.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah this was built off bootsnipp idea. On bootsnipp you can't upload your own code.

<comment><USER2> Yes you can. This update was pushed a day ago. <http://bootsnipp.com/submit>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One great thing that you can add its a preview of the code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Ill add that right now. Its my side project so I haven't had that much time for it recently. Let me know if you would like to help.</comment></comment>


The First Exoplanet Detected Using the Special Theory of Relativity - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2016/04/-einsteins-planet-the-first-exoplanet-detected-using-the-special-theory-of-relativity-a-weekend-feat.html <comment><USER2> This looks cribbed from a 2013 press release: [https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2013-12](https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2013-12).</comment>


Inferring IFR of Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.00495 <comment><AUTHOR> This seems to be a vastly lower estimate vs this one! [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3590771](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3590771)</comment>


Very simple solution to reduce truck fuel consumption - <AUTHOR> http://www.ephicas.eu/

<comment><AUTHOR> Note that side-panels are not new, but these are wings.</comment>


Preliminary Experiences Crawling with 80legs - <AUTHOR> http://atbrox.com/2009/11/04/preliminary-experiences-crawling-with-80legs/

<comment><USER2> I've been using 80 legs heavily for the last 6 weeks. I've held off a blog post to give them a chance to fix some issues I've hit, but overall they're an awesome service.

A massive plus is their helpfulness. Shion, who commented on this post, even wrote a bunch of custom code for me!

</comment><comment><USER3> An interesting development might be the emergence of services that effectively function as 80legs resellers. Shortly after 80legs's debut, some guys from my company approached a vendor at a conference who offered SEO-focused crawling services. The tool is in alpha and we are still waiting for an invite, but based on the data points that this tool is capable of harvesting, as well as the price point (very similar to 80legs) I began to suspect that their custom code relies on the 80legs backend.</comment>


Bug: HN Doesn't Give 404 Errors - <AUTHOR>

  $ curl -i http://news.ycombinator.com/thisdoesntexist
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
  Cache-Control: private
  Connection: close

  Unknown.
 <comment><USER2> Your title has a bug. On HN, all pages exist.</comment>


The Soviets Built a Doomsday Machine. It's Still Working. - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/09/the-soviets-built-a-doomsday-machine-its-still-working/ <comment><USER2> It's not a _machine_ per se. It is basically a system that grants launch privileges to the personnel at the launch site under certain conditions that almost certainly indicate a nuclear attack against the rest of the military infrastructure. To launch or not to launch is still a decision made by a human.

<comment><USER3> The fact that you say " _almost_ certainly indicate a nuclear attack" is not terribly reassuring. Depending on whether the result of the analysis the system performs is correct or not, "doomsday" could be short for either "exact revenge on doomsday" or "cause doomsday" :P

<comment><USER4> Apparently on the US side, the SAC commander would receive a phone call that a nuclear attack was under way, and he would be given 2-3 minutes to decide if the warning was valid (all warnings turned out to be false in hindsight, obviously). I'm not sure I like that system a whole lot better.

Edit: Also see Stanislav Petrov, who correctly identified an attack warning as false: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ok, this was interesting, but he only dealt with the "they built it" half of the title. I wanted to know more about the "It's Still Working" half. Who is controlling this system now that the Soviet Union is no more? Who is maintaining the components, and their interconnects? Is there any reason not to tear it down and, if not, why hasn't it been?

<comment><USER6> One of the reasons to have the machine is actually to prevent Russian hot- headed generals from pushing the "launch" button too quickly. That is why the existence of the machine wasn't really made known to the West. It makes perfect sense to still keep it online. Perhaps, because it is online, we haven't seen WWIII yet.

> Who is controlling this system now that the Soviet Union is no more? I would > guess a branch of FSB or FAPSI (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAPSI>).

> Is there any reason not to tear it down and, if not, why hasn't it been? > They will, as soon US will tear their systems down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> More discussion in: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=836952>

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow, this is another of those ingenious inventions which result from the fact that a system realizes: I can and will fail, and if this happens, bad things happen. and thus, they built a gigantic doomsday "machine", which then lowers the probability of such a failure. Such systems always make me happy :)</comment>


How One Man Has Explained Almost Every Internet UFO Theory - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-one-man-has-explained-almost-every-internet-ufo-theory <comment><USER2> "This is outer fucking space." \- James Oberg</comment>


LocalStack: A local AWS cloud stack. Develop and test your cloud apps offline - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/localstack/localstack <comment><USER2> Are these re-implementations?

Or does Amazon offer the source code for these services?

Not meant as a critical question, I don't understand the origins of this repository and really how it can be.

<comment><USER3> From the readme:

> LocalStack builds on existing best-of-breed mocking/testing tools, most > notably kinesalite/dynalite and moto.

Kinesalite and Dynalite are LevelDB-based reimplementations of Kinesis and DynamoDB, and Moto is a mocking library for many AWS services including S3, EC2, etc.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Okay then, I guess.

I did read it, but I've never heard of a "mocking tool". This is new ground for me.</comment></comment></comment>


The End of Agile - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/08/23/the-end-of-agile/ <comment><USER2> It works pretty well for me but that's because we refuse to engage in bullshit.

No estimates. No sprints. No Jira. No bullshit!

What we do? Retro, grooming and planning. Standup everyday in front of a Kanban board with post-its. And we help each other. That's it!

Seriously, how hard can it be? Building software is not the same as a Ford model T assembly line

<comment><USER3> As usual no one can agree what agile actually is. Is what you are doing agile? Some would say no. Some would say yes.

Someone will likely says agile is a lot of shit and someone will reply saying "you are doing it wrong" without giving any indication of how to do it right.

<comment><USER2> again here is my opinion... The minimum requirement for doing agile IMHO is to have retros and to iterate the process all the time until it works. That's it.

But what agile is or is not is just semantics. It's irrelevant I think. Who cares if we all follow the same set of rules? People selling certifications that's who!

<comment><USER4> Same! Whenever I have to explain what agile is I start with retrospectives. It's the one rule that is mandatory. Standups, sprints, JIRA boards, grooming/refinement sessions and everything else in a heavyweight framework like scrum is there to support the principles of agile, but none of it is actually necessary. IMO every software developer should read the Agile Manifesto ( [https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html](https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html) ) every once in a while and consider whether their process is actually working for the team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Agile has nothing to do with what is described in the article.

Agile is not dead and will be more important going on. "Agile" (apostrophes intended) is and will be kept alive by countless managers of different levels that would like to emulate successful organizations but don't want to spend time and effort actually understanding what makes them successful.

Please, read something like "Pheonix Project" (Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford) or "The Goal" (Eliyahu Goldratt) to get better informed about what Agile is.

My understanding of Agile is that it is a shared understanding, commitment for porsuing goal of serving your organization and your customer as efficiently as possible. Hopefully, serving your customer is tantamount to serving your organization, if your organization's values are right.

Agile is not a process. Agile is a drive to seek most efficient process. Agile means you are honestly critical of what you are doing and are constantly learning and adjusting to get best possible outcome.

Scrum or Kanban happen to be one of ways to implement Agile but they are not equivalent to Agile. Agile precludes any single set process because every product, customer and organization is different and so it is not possible for a single set process to be best possible process.

Scrum or Kanban are anti-Agile in my opinion because they tend people to get complacent with the process (yes, we have implemented Scrum so we are Agile). Being complacent is opposite to what Agile is -- constantly seeking better process.

</comment><comment><USER6> Honestly, the part about agile I dislike the most is a dedicated scrum master role. They have very little to do if they aren't split between multiple teams and instead try to come up with weird ways to add value which usually don't add any value. We had agile coaches at my company recently and it was one of the more painful experiences of my career. They would try to add all these different flavors of grooming, planning, standup, and retro that usually just led to developers being uncomfortable and wanting to work from home. I'm not saying agile doesn't work, but it doesn't need to be a full time job and take up that much of developers time and they sure as hell don't need to inflate the process and methodology just to feel better about themselves.

<comment><USER7> > Honestly, the part about agile I dislike the most is a dedicated scrum > master role

That's not a part about Agile, but about Scrum.

Also, the "dedicated" part isn't even essential to Scrum.

> We had agile coaches at my company recently and it was one of the more > painful experiences of my career. They would try to add [...]

That's a different issue than a dedicated ScrumMaster role, and anti-Agile, as team ownership of process is central to Agile. Consultants external to the team (whether internal to the org or external there, too) trying to impose process is the antithesis of Agile. There might be a role for coaching in Agile, but it certainly isn't process advocacy.

<comment><USER6> Fair points, I tend to conflate agile and scrum since they seem to be coupled together. I get that the dedicated part isn't a requirement, it just seems to be part of most implementations I see. I guess my problem is more with people's implementations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > work methodologies are moving towards an asynchronous event model where > information streams get connected, are mapped and then are transformed into > a native model in unpredictable fashion

Probably the most insightful quote from the article.

</comment><comment><USER9> Agile died the minute someone who never coded anything for money could get a certificate proclaiming them an expert.

</comment><comment><USER10> No development methodology can eliminate the fact that building software is hard, and complex data systems quickly grow exponentially in complexity.

Developing and maintaining a large project will be difficult, no matter your approach.

Which is not to say that all approaches are equal.

Part of our problem is that we want a development/management approach that works for all types of problems. There isn't one.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Perhaps the last major holdout of such applications is with the category of games, and even there, the emergence of a few consistent tool-sets such as the Unreal Engine means that there's increasing convergence on the technical components, with Agile really only living on in areas such as design and media creation." \- In practice, I haven't seen the use of Unreal Engine promoting the end of agile or vice versa. If what he's saying here is that using off the shelf game engines means no more need for programmers so no more agile (except for content) then he's dead wrong. Every game that I've ever worked on using Unity or Unreal have a significant amount of programming work involved. Some of them have used agile and others less so.

</comment><comment><USER12> The team I'm on uses Agile, but in practice it's a combination of Agile, Kanban, and Waterfall. The tasks we work on are usually pretty big and undefined. And it's nice to meet every couple weeks to plan out a sprint. But an overall waterfall-like list of objectives drive everything, and we're not strict about adding or removing things from the sprint. So I don't know what system fits us best. Agile encourages us to document tickets so they can be worked on, which is nice.

</comment><comment><USER7> > The Agile Manifesto, like most such screeds, started out as a really good > idea. The core principle was simple - you didn't really need large groups of > people working on software projects to get them done.

That's not the core principle of the Agile Manifesto. In fact, nothing even vaguely like that is included in the _Manifesto for Agile Software Development_ [0] or the _Principles behind the Agile Manifesto_. [1]

Now, to be fair, there is a study or set of studies which shows that, for software projects within a certain broad size range, a team size of 5-7 gets the project done fastest, and that larger teams not only take more man-hours for the same size project but more calendar days, and that study is broadly influential in setting team sizes in teams that claim to be practicing Agile or Lean development; that's not a, much less _the_ , core principle of Agile, though, just a piece of empirical evidence that became available when Agile (at least the name, of perhaps not the actual philosophy) was becoming popular.

Agile has kind of the same problem as Marxism; the theory is, and the is quite critical in both cases, bottom up, but most of the practical implementations throw that out and are top-down.

With Marxism, this might seem like a bigger problem because it is _every single implementation_ that claims the name has the problem, but in a sense it's a little _easier_ to distinguish the problem in practice as being separate from Marxism itself because at least all the real world implementation point to a particular revision of the theory which contains the diversions from the original (Leninism). So at least you can point to Leninism and say it's the problem distinct from Marxism. While there are a few bottom- up Agile implementations where the teams really are self-organizing and empowered, the norm is top down implementation of something that at least superficially resembles Scrum, without any real control of process in the team, but there is no clearly diverging theory that unifies the top-down one; they don't claim to be practicing Agile-Leninism but instead plain, vanilla Agile, though their practices are in no way grounded in the Agile Manifesto or Principles, but instead the same canned-process management approach against which Agile was a reaction. So it's a little harder to distinguish based on what the implementors say is their philosophy, though it's still possible to distinguish the substance.

[0] [https://agilemanifesto.org/](https://agilemanifesto.org/)

[1] [https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html](https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html)

<comment><USER13> > there is a study or set of studies which shows that, for software projects > within a certain broad size range, a team size of 5-7 gets the project done > fastest, and that larger teams not only take more man-hours for the same > size project but more calendar days

I'd like to read those studies. Do you have a cite?

<comment><USER7> That specific finding was from what appears to be the 1997 QSM study [0], though the description I am familiar with it from (Mike Cohn's _Succeeding in Agile: Software Development Using Scrum_ , 2010, describes it as covering projects in 2003-2005 (the author, organization, and number of projects in the analysis, and the one result chart from the study that is in the article on the web [1] match between the book and the 1997 one, though, but the chart showing time to complete by team size isn't shown in the article.)

[0] [https://www.qsm.com/blog/2019/4-key-studies-team- size](https://www.qsm.com/blog/2019/4-key-studies-team-size)

[1] [https://www.qsm.com/articles/team-size-can-be-key- successful...](https://www.qsm.com/articles/team-size-can-be-key-successful- project)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Agile is nowhere near an end...

People just aren't willing to admit the parts of it that are Kool Aid, and the parts that are useful because it's a profit machine (books, training, merch, etc)as well as a methodology for getting things done in projects.

I have never seen anyone implement agile fully in my world, it's usually 50% or below in terms of adoption rate. Passing around a hockey stick is a gimmicky thing, and I've always avoided the silly ideas, i want to go to work, stick to the points, get things done right and then go home... Sprint Poker, passing a hockey stick, agile toys, going to Agile conferences etc can be left to agile coaches if you ask me.

<comment><USER15> If capital-A "Agile" ever ends, it will be replaced by something with a different name that takes exactly the same form. How do I know? Because I'm old enough to remember before there was capital-A "Agile", and the original XP/Agile manifesto came along and within a few years was bastardized into exactly what came before it: the expectation that with enough meetings and unreasonable enough demands, software development could be a perfectly predictable, cookie-cutter endeavor, as uneventful as manufacturing sheet metal.

<comment><USER14> Agreed, before Agile there was Waterfall, RUP, and many other theories of assembly line management processes. They are all based on starting universities for the way to produce a product, and these paradigms all came from auto makers... It's a constantly spinning wheel... Can't be stopped...

</comment></comment></comment><comment> end-of-remote It can't come fast enough. It's a worthless methodology, band-wagoned to irrelevance.

Mark my words, remote work is worse, and will destroy careers.

</comment><comment><USER16> Agile was never a thing, it was always a how.

</comment><comment><USER17> Re-</comment>


Security of critical phone database called into question - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/security-of-critical-phone-database-called-into-question/2016/04/28/11c23b10-0c8d-11e6-a6b6-2e6de3695b0e_story.html?postshare=2121461890367505&tid=ss_tw <comment><USER2> Having written several of these systems, there is nothing special about this software (NP databases). They maintain records of where a phone number is homed, nothing else. There is more information in the white pages.

In fact, NP databases typically won't have access to all phone numbers anyways, only those for customers who have changed providers. Everything else would be covered by the default routing rules.

In the US, the central database is not involved in call control (I've never seen a design that was). Since phone companies are very risk averse, they don't generally allow software they don't control into the middle of their interactions with the customer. Phone companies will have their own mirrors of the database and purchase (typically bespoke, typically outsourced) systems to perform the in-call lookups.

Reading up how the US works, it's an exception based system, with records only for ported numbers [1]. A typical record will look like:

(408) 555 1212 -> (715) 555 1212

The destination number is not a phone number, and has the granularity of a single switch. No names, or anything else.

I'm guessing this isn't about information leakage, because there's no information to leak. This isn't about DOS because the national database isn't involved in call control. This isn't about serving warrants either, it's operated locally.

I can only imagine that this is a trade barrier masquerading as security, since switch software is produced offshore, and that's riskier.

[1][https://www.npac.com/number-portability/how-lnp- works](https://www.npac.com/number-portability/how-lnp-works)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Now Telcordia, a Swedish-owned firm, is being compelled to rewrite the > database computer code — a massive undertaking — to assuage concerns from > officials at the FBI and Federal Communications Commission that foreign > citizens had access to the project. These officials fear that if other > countries gain access to the code, they could reap a counterintelligence > bonanza, learning the targets of U.S. law enforcement and espionage > investigations.

I hope they didn't use an open source database because otherwise the bad guys will have access to that too!

Seriously how stupid are the people in charge of this kind of thing if they can't differentiate between programs and data? Now having a fear that there may be back doors somewhere in there is a valid concern, but the answer to that is sunlight on the code and layers of least privilege on the execution environment.

<comment><USER4> It's a federal project. How likely do you think it is that there'll be no vulnerabilities which a review of the source code could expose?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The "database computer code" they are talking about is not the actual database software (e.g. oracle, postgres, or whatever). It's the proprietary code used to keep the data in the database accurate, up to date, distributed, etc. And the code used for communicating with the service providers, co-ops, LSMSs, etc.

This may seem a small thing and may be somewhat conceptually similar to DNS. But in reality it is an entire ecosystem of it's own with complexities that are not readily apparent. The incumbent (Neustar) has no obligation to share it's IP with Telcordia.

"The database is significant because it tracks nearly every phone number in North America, making it a key tool for law enforcement agencies seeking to monitor criminal or espionage targets."

This statement is potentially very misleading. The NPAC does not "live" route telephone calls. The NPAC is the database of ported phone number and various characteristics about them. The database is replicated to LSMS databases at the service providers. When you make a call it does not route through the NPAC. It routes through the service providers, period.

While the NPAC could be helpful to law enforcement for knowing which SP manages a particular number and various other characteristics about that number, it would not be helpful as some sort of one-stop shop for wire tapping.

From the NPAC site: "LSMS (Local Service Management System): The system owned by a service provider and which receives data broadcast from the NPAC/SMS. The LSMS provisions the service provider's downstream systems, such as its LNP call routing database. The LSMS is a mechanized system used (primarily) to receive data broadcasts from the NPAC/SMS."

</comment><comment><USER6> And I'm sure you can't pay an American to do those evil things foreigners could do.

I mean seriously what could any person do to such a project. You can't add a backdoor because your code gets reviewed (if it doesn't, then that's where you should start worrying about the integrity of the program). Furthermore, I hope that the programmers (foreign or not) do not have access to any real data.

<comment><USER7> Who code reviews the code reviewers?.......

<comment><USER8> There's this thing called a reputation. If you suck at your job you get a bad one. A bad reputation gets you passed over for raises, promotions, jobs and other opportunities for career advancement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Perhaps I don't understand the number portability system enough, but it sure sounds a bit like the DNS system (in that the number portability system is used to refer queries to specific phone numbers). If I'm right, isn't the DNS worked on by people who are not U.S. nationals? Ah well.

<comment><USER10> Related: E.164 [0], if you're curious.

[0]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.164](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.164)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why is it okay for a foreign company to work on the project, but not foreign nationals?

<comment><USER12> > Seven other foreign citizens, including a British engineer, also worked on > the project, although it was the Chinese engineer who raised red flags for > officials.

Apparently it's OK if it's a Swedish company or there are British people working on it, but not them Chinese!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Trust us with the backdoors and all the data we're collecting on you. They'll be safe," they said.

</comment><comment> awinter-py > compelled to rewrite the database

is 'compel' a synonym for 'paid'?

<comment><USER10> Not necessarily. See also "bribed", "extorted", "blackmailed", etc.</comment></comment>


House Votes to End N.S.A.'s Bulk Phone Data Collection - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/14/us/house-votes-to-end-nsas-bulk-phone-data-collection.html?module=Notification&version=BreakingNews&region=FixedTop&action=Click&contentCollection=BreakingNews&contentID=34380121&pgtype=Homepage <comment><USER2> Let's be clear about what the "FREEDOM Act" does. It does not make NSA Bulk Collection of phone data illegal. What it does is rearrange the laws and request process and more carefully enumerate and define procedures by which the NSA may acquire and query phone records that are stored in bulk.

It also focuses primarily on phone records and one phone record program. There are dozens of phone record programs and hundreds of different types of signals that are collected that are not subjects of the "FREEDOM Act".

Now (like it presumably was before) the NSA will not have full takes of all American phone records. They will force companies to keep these records for them though, and they will continue to have the ability to query them.

It doesn't matter if nobody is watching 99.5% of CCTV footage. If CCTVs watch every square inch of a city and record it for later possible inspection, that's surveillance. It does not matter if human analysts do not inspect 99.5% of the bulk data. It is still surveillance.

It was also surveillance when the KGB forced private citizens to keep tabs on one another. It does not matter whether it is Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, Dropbox, Facebook, and Comcast doing the surveillance on compulsion of the Fed. All of our data and communications are being stored and processed.

It is still, categorically, surveillance.

<comment><USER3> I guess you have an ideological bent that considers it a shuffling of deck chairs. At the end of the day, I would rather have private companies holding the records than government for reasons that should be obvious.

<comment><USER4> > I would rather have private companies holding the records than government > for reasons that should be obvious

They are certainly not obvious to me. With government, there is a democratic oversight, you can (at least in theory) vote to have these records destroyed or stop collecting them and so on.

However, when private company does it, what kind of control do you have over them? Especially if they are 3rd party.

<comment><USER5> Government has a monopoly on violence. Private companies do not.

<comment><USER6> In the theory from which that line originates, it is definitional rather than descriptive: under that theory, whatever has a monopoly on _legitimate_ use of force in a territory is _called_ the State, whether or not it is the thing that purports to be "the government" or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The fight is long from over, but everyone should be calling for Snowden's unconditional pardon and then a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

<comment><USER8> It is not actually true that good outcomes from Snowden's actions eliminates all his culpability. In fact: we don't even know how culpable he is --- we haven't seen the last Snowden disclosure yet --- so it's pretty difficult to come to the conclusion that he should be unconditionally pardoned.

<comment><USER9> Exactly right tptacek... people forget that Snowden isn't just disclosing NSA spying. For example, he disclosed intelligence about a failed al-queda plot that:

 _revealed that the United States intercepted messages between Ayman al- Zawahri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden as the head of Al Qaida, and Nasser al- Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, discussing an imminent terrorist attack_ [0]

And as a result, they may have changed communication methods.

He's had other questionable discloses as well.

0\. [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/30/us/qaeda-plot-leak-has- und...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/30/us/qaeda-plot-leak-has-undermined- us-intelligence.html?pagewanted=all)

<comment><USER10> You mean the journalists, who vetted and chose to publish the material, disclosed this. As has been discussed exhaustively, Snowden didn't disclose anything himself, opting to rely on the expertise and judgement of partner journalists to select which items to write about. Keep in mind, many times more items were withheld than not.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure how this is seen as a positive thing. Journalists, with, on average, limited knowledge of infosec, holding in their possession classified documents. Lots and lots of classified documents. I'd wager a guess that at least a handful of these journalists were holding said documents on a system that had its share of known vulnerabilities.

I'd be absurdly happy to be proven wrong, but there is a very high chance that every single document snowden distributed is on sale to the highest bidder, and has been for a while.

<comment><USER12> There is zero evidence that the data was stolen from these journalists and sold to the highest bidder. Since there is zero evidence, you have to cinsider yourself wrong for now.

<comment><USER11> Ah, I am not so sure about that. [1] These are just things publicly available on google in a 3-minute perusal of search results.

Paragraph 15 [0]

[1] [http://politix.topix.com/story/6798-who-stole-computer- from-...](http://politix.topix.com/story/6798-who-stole-computer-from-glenn- greenwalds-home)

[0][http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/world/asia/china-said- to-h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/world/asia/china-said-to-have-made- call-to-let-leaker-depart.html?hp&_r=0)

<comment><USER12> Even still, no claims by any government agency or any other source have been laid that the data in question was stolen from Greenwald or his team. Believing that the data was stolen and sold is mere conjecture.

<comment><USER11> I guess you didn't read the links.

> Two Western intelligence experts, who worked for major government spy > agencies, said they believed that the Chinese government had managed to > drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to > Hong Kong, and that he said were with him during his stay at a Hong Kong > hotel.

I believe that qualifies as a "claim by a government agency"

<comment><USER12> actually, i did read it (you seem to assume a lot of things). speculation by two ex-intelligence experts hardly confirms that the data was stolen. Believing the assumptions of two experts is no better than believing your own assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cool. They're stopping that one spy program everybody knows about.

How many more do you think there are that are even more egregious but they don't have public pressure to end because nobody realizes they exist?

<comment><USER14> There's also the possibility this is all a Limited Hangout - COINTEL Tactic

Ignore video - read description. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wApOHk92Ds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wApOHk92Ds)

I only bring this up as it is within the realm of possibility. Especially with the massive media narrative surrounding the entire thing. Although it seems a _little_ too conspiracy theory for people to sink their teeth into the possibility.

The sheer amount of spying operations makes me think its sincere on Snowden's part. If it were truly a limited hangout operation, why would they release so many programs? Why not only 1 or 2? What would they be trying to distract the general population from? What could their agenda be behind doing this at all?

The closest "agenda" they could be trying to push is the "necessary backdoors to circumvent encryption then we wouldn't need all these spy tools for mass surveillance" pitch that kinda flopped for obvious reasons.

E:

To clarify there can be other reasons for a limited hangout. For example, to test the water of the governments control over the population. How many people have you seen that hold the opinion Snowden is an American Traitor who should be killed?

That is a red flag to me that there are Americans who trust the government enough to forego their own privacy for promised security, even when the security has failed to be delivered. This is good testing grounds to see "how far the government can push things" to keep control over the population. Knowledge is power - and the government is collecting it en masse on its people.

We've learned enough from history that brutal dictatorships end in downfall of the leaders. What about a complacent "ownership" where the 99% slave away for the 1% in rather blissful happiness of their situation? It's not all bad, they make a decent living after all, why would they ruin it with a revolt? If I were part of the 1%, that would be my goal. Keep the 99% happy and make my life an easy one where I can do anything I like.

All speculation and philosophical thinking to spark discussion of course.

<comment><USER15> At the very beginning I thought Snowden was a plant, mostly because he claimed to have hundreds of thousands of docs but was releasing very few, but as time went on and more kept on being leaked I realized it couldn't be.

<comment><USER14> The American population tends to forget about incidents mere months after they happen. Small releases over time was how Snowden made sure that people did not forget about it. I believe he even stated that was why he handed over the documents in large groups, but not all at once.

I do not think he is a plant. * _Puts on my conspiracy hat_ * But maybe that's what they want me to think?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is it just me, or did anyone else have to double-check to see that this was an ANTI-spying bill and not a PRO-spying bill? I wish bills were required to have descriptive names.

TL;DR: It's a good one, but EFF and others feel it doesn't go nearly far enough to curb spying.

<comment><USER17> > "TL;DR: It's a good one, but EFF and others feel it doesn't go nearly far > enough to curb spying."

Actually, it's NOT a good one. To quote Rep. Justin Amash on USA Freedom: "H.R. 2048 actually expands the statutory basis for the large-scale collection of most data"

* [http://tumblr.fightforthefuture.org/post/118897240668/justin...](http://tumblr.fightforthefuture.org/post/118897240668/justin-amash-on-usa-freedom-h-r-2048-actually)

<comment><USER18> Amash is emerging to play a Ron Paul esque role of which both Paul's supporters and detractors made incredible use:

He's the only one who is strangely saying something different than the rest.

At his young age, it's possible to imagine Amash breaking Paul's record for casting the largest number of sole nays.

<comment><USER19> He also goes through the hassle of explaining his votes. Which is nice to see and understand his thought process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Being a libertarian, I don't want to do all the knee-jerk stuff on here in response, but for context we must remember that bulk data collection was never authorized in the first place.

So it very well may be that metadata collection ends under the Patriot Act and continues under some sealed executive order from the G.W. Bush years.

If watching DC over the last decade or so has taught me anything, it's to be very careful noticing the difference between what things appear to be and what they actually are.

ADD: Just to be clear "Congress votes (and the president signs) a law to outlaw bulk data collection" is one headline. "The House of Representatives fails to authorize some forms of bulk collection by no longer continuing certain provisions" is another. The House is not voting to end anything.

Mr. Headline Writer Person: please do not confuse these two completely different scenarios.

</comment><comment><USER21> Wake me when the president signs a bill into law that ends the Patriot Act, once and for all.

To be honest, we should have standards and secret courts and "national security" letters are the very thing that the constitution was designed to stop. (the fourth amendment and the like were meant to put an end to the equivalent of that era.)

Signing or voting for any continuation of the Patriot Act should be considered an unforgivable act by anyone who values freedom.

<comment><USER22> > (the fourth amendment and the like were meant to put an end to the > equivalent of that era.)

Do you know off hand the name of those era's equivalents? Just some search terms to get me going would be appreciated. I'd like to learn more about the historical precedent.

<comment><USER23> I haven't finished reading it yet but this appears to be a good read with sources [https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/generalwarrantsmemo.p...](https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/generalwarrantsmemo.pdf)

It's linked to from this page which also may help [http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/07/nsa-spying-is- exactly...](http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/07/nsa-spying-is-exactly-the- kind-of-thing-which-caused-the-revolutionary-war-against-king-george.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm so confused. What about this?

[https://www.usafreedom.fail/](https://www.usafreedom.fail/)

<comment><USER25> Oh I see what they did. Patriot Act section 215 was up in June 1, 2015. So they did this "USA Freedom Act" a month before to extend that to 2019. [https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/hr2048/text/ih#li...](https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/hr2048/text/ih#link=VII_705_a_~T1&nearest=H3970213DCD8B4A7C9D2AC368B1ADFDCA)

"Section 102(b)(1) of the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 (50 U.S.C. 1805 note) is amended by striking June 1, 2015 and inserting December 15, 2019."

So no need to fight that Patriot Act fight for another 4 years.

It is definitely time to switch to SB, HB and numbers for bills and no propagandistic naming of bills for sure so they can't get this fast track mentality. They are also pushing through TPP with strong-arming while presenting this false NSA good news as a top story.

<comment><USER26> > It is definitely time to switch to SB, HB and numbers for bills and no > propagandistic naming of bills

I think this is what should happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Good. Domestic spying means less and slower social progress, because the leading edge of social progress will be seen as dangerous and programs like what NSA have been running will be used to crush it in the early stages of development. There is a real cost to living in a panopticon.

<comment><USER28> This re-enforces the spying apparatus by giving them rules they otherwise made up for themselves. This bill doesn't give you any privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is the Freedom act even relevant at the moment? Since a district court ruled that the bulk collection is already illegal under the current law and Rand Paul and Ron Wyden are threatening to filibuster the renewal of the expiring Patriot Act, it seems that civil rights hawks currently have the upper hand, or at least an advantageous bargaining position. Why pass another law that could be skewed to give the intelligence agencies more loopholes?

<comment><USER30> The district court decision is anything but established precedent.

<comment><USER31> Not sure why you both wrote "district court". It was the Second Circuit: [http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/NSA_ca2_20150507.pdf](http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/NSA_ca2_20150507.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm not 100% sure, but I think that a legislative end to the program moots any currently running judicial challenges to it. So, if Congress shuts the program down, the Supreme Court will never get to weigh in on the constitutionality of the whole thing.

If I'm not wrong about _that_ , I would _much_ rather let the damn thing run for a few more years and have the Supremes kill it for good.

<comment><USER33> The risk, of course, is they might rule it's legal.

<comment><USER32> It seems that that risk is small: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/senate-intelligence- ch...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/senate-intelligence-chair- constituents-i-dont-care-what-you-think) (Paragraph four is most relevant, but 'graphs one through three also make good reading.)

Moreover, recent court cases at all levels make it clear that the Judicial system is pretty sick of surveillance methods that rely on _creative_ interpretations of law.

If the Supremes don't get a chance to weigh in and stake this behavior through the heart, Congress will soon dismantle some or all of it, only piece the programs back together over the next few years[0].

[0] Much as Ma Bell pieced itself back together (sans Bell Labs) after the breakup.

<comment><USER33> You're most likely correct in that they would rule it illegal, though I don't think we should underestimate the court's ability to produce convoluted decisions to support the _status quo_. See _Gonzales v Raich_.

<comment><USER32> Agreed.

I think it's totally worth the risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Or not: [https://www.usafreedom.fail/](https://www.usafreedom.fail/)

</comment><comment><USER35> Such sophistry from The Paper of Record. Honest headlines might be:

House Declines to Let The Patriot Act Expire as Planned

or House Votes to Extend the Patriot Act...Again

or House Votes to Extend the Patriot Act, Attempts to Curtail Worse Excesses

Here's a hint, NYT. When Milton Friedman said "Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program," he was being critical not descriptive.

</comment><comment><USER36> So the Senate will pass...this bill?

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/op-ed-why-the- eff...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/op-ed-why-the-eff-is- pulling-its-support-for-the-usa-freedom-act/)

<comment><USER23> See the EEF's response [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/landslide-vote- house-o...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/landslide-vote-house- overwhelmingly-passes-usa-freedom-act-without-amendments)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> _... And in related news, NSA internal leadership votes to continue bulk data collection anyway._

Call me overly cynical, but I suspect that the legislative branch lost meaningful influence on the executive in this area some time ago.

<comment><USER38> Hell, the executive _and_ the chain of command _both_ would have a hard time forcing the hand of a recalcitrant NSA: " _Joint Chief Smith, we 're happy to discuss your objections to our policy, but first we'd like to review some saved communications we have that document some of_ your _conduct. On page 2, we cover your first year at West Point..._ "

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> > A compromise of some form must be reached before June 1, when the provision > of the Patriot Act that allows the N.S.A. dragnet expires.

Actually, it would seem the best outcome would be to prolong things past the 1st...

</comment><comment><USER40> What happens to records already collected?

</comment><comment><USER41> well its about time.

but i am sure they will come up with another clever name for it and just keep on doing it.

</comment><comment><USER42> Great, but what about bulk collection of Internet traffic which is even more critical?

<comment><USER43> And should we expect a rise in the VOIP industry to get around these proposed changes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> so... only phone data collection then. what about everything else?

</comment><comment><USER45> Is Obama going to veto this? If he does that would be out of character and alarming. At the same time, he has never really shunned the NSA at all.

</comment><comment><USER46> It gives me some hope for this country that this issue doesn't fall along the normal party line divisions.

<comment><USER47> I suspect this is always the case when both sides feel equally vulnerable to an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Is it me or is this a misleading title?

</comment><comment><USER49> Great, so now all the people who make phone calls in the US will be safe from metadata collection of their contact graph...

...unless they make them on a smartphone OS from a PRISM partner vendor like Google or Apple.

Or call someone outside of the country that only holds 4% of humans.

Or make the call on Skype or Facebook.

Or send an email.

It's progress, I guess. But is it meaningful progress?

<comment><USER8> There is zero evidence establishing that a source appearing in PRISM implies that their smartphone OS is backdoored.

<comment><USER50> Snowden said directly, twice, and it meshes with my own speculation from having worked at two of the implicated companies, that PRISM is the NSA-side codename for an efficient warrant process and nothing more.

<comment><USER49> Calling them warrants when they are issued by the FISA rubberstamp court (or are NSLs) is quite a stretch.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Discuss HN: To tweet - twote - tweeten. Let's get it done. - <AUTHOR>

Tweeted doesn't sound good. Twote is much better. <comment><USER2> I don't imagine they want to form a range of tenses for Tweeting, given their international audience and the ridiculously vast differences between languages here.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the correct term is "Twet", as in, "That message has been twet" or "Did you see my tweet? I twet it three hours ago."

<comment><USER4> My gf says tret instead of treated, and it drives me mad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Twat.</comment>


Ask HN: Most desired programming skills in a startup? - <AUTHOR> My career ambition at this point is pretty straightforward: I want to join an ambitious startup as a programmer. And I want to get to that point ASAP. My current job doesn't allow much time for programming, so I'm teaching myself Ruby at home.<p>My question is, what skills do startups most look for, and when will I know I'm ready to start applying? <comment><USER4> _I want to join an ambitious startup as a programmer._

No you don't. This may be what you think you want, but it's not what you really want.

Why do you want to join an ambitious startup rather than creating your own?

Why does the startup you join need to be ambitious?

Why does it need to be a startup?

For that matter, why do you want to join as a programmer rather than, say, a graphic designer?

If the answer to the above questions is "because this is a route to making lots of money", then what you _want_ is to make lots of money -- and you happen to have identified "joining an ambitious startup as a programmer" as a way to pursue that goal. Similarly, your goal might be "to change the lives of millions of users", "to become a world-famous hacker", or "to work with a bunch of really cool people".

But whatever you want... well, it's almost certainly not "joining an ambitious startup as a programmer".

\</comment><comment>--

Now that I've finished ranting about desires vs. routes towards satisfying those desires: The above is actually relevant to your question. The skills looked for vary dramatically from startup to startup -- a startup which is likely to make you a millionaire isn't necessarily going to be looking for the same skills as a startup which is full of really cool people. Once you've identified what you find attractive about startups, _then_ you can start thinking about which startups currently exhibit those traits, and what skills they look for.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I suppose to elaborate, I want to become a skilled hacker and I want to push myself in a project that I care about with people who are passionate about what they do. :)

<comment><USER5> Then you will gather those skills based on what's interesting to you, not based on what's marketable to a startup.

I have never gone out of my way to learn a computing skill specifically for a job (or even for a "dream"). All was always out of personal interest. By that method, I have accumulated a skill set (including Ruby/Rails programming) that has allowed me to start my startups when the opportunity was there.

You should be wary of even being a programmer if your primary driver to learn new things is what might be useful to your career. All good programmers I know and know of would be learning and applying their programming skills whether or not there was money involved.

<comment><USER6> I agree with you, but I don't think it invalidates the OP's question. There are dozens of topics in computing I could learn right now that I would be interested in, and I think pretty much every HN reader could say the same. If some of those would help their career and others wouldn't, I don't think it would be fair to blame them for learning the one that would help their career.

<comment><USER5> I doubt you can draw such a clear distinction.

I'm sure if Paul Graham had asked an equivalent of this community what he should learn to increase his market value, "Lisp" wouldn't have been the answer. At the time, probably C++ or Perl. Yet he used his knowledge of Lisp to gain a competitive advantage for his company, and it ended up making him rich. C++ and Perl may have helped him too, but that's actually less likely, since they wouldn't have given his company its competitive advantage of nimbleness and rapid changes.

You can't know in advance what will be worth learning. Except, you can: if you want to learn it, if you have a desire to understand how it works, and if that desire is storng enough to spur you to learning it, it's worth learning.

I'd add an extra indicator actually: if everyone tells you it's worth learning, chances are it's not. If everyone tells you it's a waste of time, chances are it's worth learning. Why? Because people in aggregate will point you towards popular options (duh) - and those will probably give you less of an edge. This makes the OP's question even less valid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In ANY organization these skills matter: SQL - MOST Important - If you can fix a SQL problem (mysql, sqlserver, oracle) you ARE THE MAN. Administration - <USER2> you rotate the log files and fix the problems? Can you assign the correct permissions to a directory in centos, redhat and windows (03, 08) server - <USER3> are "teh" man. I can code in C++, Java, C# & Python but I get the most praise (and raise) from fixing common mis-configurations on our web servers and databases (things the "admins" don't know how to fix) and this is usually a combination of batch files, dos and or *nix shell scripting abilities.

Programming is such a small part of the job, understand the OS and the DB and you own the house!!!!

In the end, if you can simply read the hot fix readme files and apply them correctly, you are valuable. Hello 6 figure income!

The administrator/programmer is a God among boys.

<comment><USER8> Not exactly sure why you're being downmodded.

If I follow, you're just saying (if a little enthusiastically) that DB/server administrator skills for hackers matter in a startup.

You'd be right - at each startup I've ever been involved in I've done everything from written code, configured the server, fixed the server at 3am, answered the phones, licked stamps for invoices (ok, not in modern times) and fetched coffee.

Startups generally don't have enough scale to hire one trick ponys.

In a younger founder/early employee, I'm not looking so much at programming ability as entrepreneurial spirit and a willingness to get stuff done. Even the coffee run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> All of them. Or, none of them.

Basically, you need to be able to do everything. From graphic/ui design/css, to html, to the MVC stack, to the database, to the system administration and the networking.

For a startup, being a jack of all trades is far, far more valuable than a specialist. How much use will a startup have for JUST a programmer that won't touch the database or the servers? If I'm hiring a developer who is ostensibly going to be coding in Rails all day long, their ability to do design and database work is just as important (if not more-so) than their actual experience in Rails.

Take a look at the stack above, and learn more about whichever one you're least comfortable with. If you've never touched photoshop before, download their 30 day trial and at least familiarize yourself with it (good frequently- used "beginner's" task: making a transparent PNG of something like an arrow). Never set up a linux system? Clean out that old windows box and install Debian (server) and set it up as a file system.

Rinse and repeat.

</comment><comment><USER10> I will first defer to cperciva's advice, but I'd like to add that the people most in demand around the bay area right now are generalist who are particularly sklled at designing and building good user interfaces for webapps. There are many talented people working at levels further from the user, and this skill is both truly in demand, and wonderful to have.

</comment><comment><USER11> Don't be just a programmer. Be part designer, part manager, part innovator and always suggest big ideas.

I think finding people who are masters of all trades (or important ones anyways), is more important than just finding rockstar programmers.

Best of luck

</comment><comment><USER12> It wasn't clear to me, is Ruby the first language you've learned? How many mini-projects have you tried, to see what you're capable of? You're better off starting with such projects, than leaping into anything big.

Versatility is important. Try to do many different things in your programming. Even if you don't like some problems, think about how you'd solve them.

At a startup, you'd be one of few employees so you could have many different tasks given to you. If you have experience or gut feelings on how to approach several problems, you're more likely to be able to jump in and not take time flipping through manuals.

<comment><AUTHOR> To answer your questions: PHP is my first (and only other) language. My scope of mini-projects is fairly small.

Thanks for your advice. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ability to learn new things quickly & Fearlessness to fly in the face of conventional wisdom.

I'd say think of a cool project, a cool app you could write, and make it. That will be worth a lot more than learning any specific language.

</comment><comment><USER14> (1) breadth of system/code understanding, so you can contribute anywhere needed.

(2) consilience, which I will arbitrarily redefine here to mean being able to keep the overall goal/strategy in mind even as you work on every detail. Then, you know when to cut corners and when to spend effort on key differentiators. (Or more generally: able to manage yourself once you know the mission.)

(3) speed, either because you've got such total mastery of some area that you can do expert work at an amazing rate, or because you can immerse yourself in learning something new and race through demonstrable progress, niggling details and usual engineering detours/affectations be damned. (This is a variant of the PG "could you describe the person as an animal?" test.)

</comment><comment><USER15> Start with Verilog, go on to Assembler, follow that up with C, then study C++, then learn python, study HTML/CSS. Only go this route if you're pretty smart, otherwise just learn PHP.

</comment><comment><USER16> Well, if by skill you mean fluency in a language/framework, Flex hackers are in very high demand right now. I mean, like crack in the ghetto on the first of the month type demand.

</comment><comment><USER17> Best programming skill to do things from scratch (that's what startups do): instead of over-engineer get things done in a simple way.

</comment><comment><USER18> You have to be able to learn anything, fast and only do things the right way, the first time.

<comment><USER13> Doing things right the first time? When does that ever happen?

I guess if you design your code on paper first and write it all out by hand, calculate bottlenecks etc based on cpu timing manuals etc....

Most people take a more iterative approach afaik.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> competence, initiative and reliability.

</comment><comment><USER20> for loops.

</comment><comment><USER21> Being good at learning new skills quickly matters more than which skills you know now. (Unfortunately it's hard to demonstrate in an interview and everyone _says_ they are good at learning.)

However, if you focus on this, and just learn whatever specific technologies are convenient for you, then you could later spend only a short time (perhaps a week or two) learning specific skills targeted to a startup you want to apply at.</comment>