Ask HN: How do you use Amazon Echo? - <AUTHOR> What are your main use cases and go to questions for Echo? How effective and useful it is?<p>For those who also have Cortana/Siri/Google and Echo which one is most useful? <comment><USER2> Initially, my wife and I just used it for weather, music, and to occasionally order an Uber.

But we just had a newborn, so I built a custom skill for us to serve as log of our son's activities. So our primary use is now that.

Demo:

\- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CqBmjxOFCQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CqBmjxOFCQ)

\- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHaTUm9sQpM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHaTUm9sQpM)

The first custom skill I wrote that calls out to an API to do CNAM (caller ID) lookups. So when I get calls from a weird number, I can quickly get the corresponding name (if there is one). This was mainly an exercise to see how Alexa/Echo would pronounce various names and abbreviations.

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity, is logging newborn activities a common thing? Do most parents do this? What is the value in knowing the counts and times of your newborn's routine? Is there a good use case for historical data or trends?

<comment><USER4> Yes, the EPS log (eat, poop, sleep). The first thing a Dr. will ask you if your baby is not feeling well is are there any changes in any of these.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wrote a custom skill so I can say "Alexa, ask the bus stop, when is the next bus?" ... and she responds "x minutes" for the bus-stop outside my house. I use it everyday - such a time saver!

<comment><USER6> For those interested, here's an integration with Alexa and One Bus Away, with instructions on how to build your own skill that uses the library.

[https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway- alexa](https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway-alexa)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I live in Australia and imported an Echo.

AFAIK Amazon only sells the Echo in the US, and a lot of the functionality is locked to the US, this makes it unusable for certain tasks (like dealing with time, dates, calendars and alarms).

The Echo won't let you change it's timezone to an Australian one (hacks like setting a timezone to one of the US military bases around the world no longer work).

So with the Echo assuming I'm living somewhere in the US, what do I use it for?

\- Telling the time. Having said all the above, I do use it for telling the time, but I need to say "Alexa, what's the time in Sydney Australia?"

\- Finding out the weather "Alexa, What's the weather like in Sydney Australia?"

\- Controlling the Lights. "Alexa turn on the lights?"

\- Reporting Revenue from Shopify (I've built a custom app) "Alexa, ask Shopify what were the sales?"

I'd love to hear more from others outside the US as to how they use their Echo!

<comment><USER8> German Echo user here.. I googled a bit a while ago and found a perfect solution for the timezone-thing. It turns out that you can (via some request tinkering) set the timezone to whatever you want, instructions here:

[http://www.echotalk.org/index.php/topic,228.msg1081.html#msg...](http://www.echotalk.org/index.php/topic,228.msg1081.html#msg1081)

edit: typo.

<comment><USER7> Perfect, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Kitchen appliance, basically. Timer, play music, listen to news, add stuff to my shopping list.

The kitchen is the perfect spot for it because my phone and tablet are usually in the living room or on their chargers in my bedroom, and Siri doesn't work anywhere near as well in a big, noisy area like a kitchen. The microphone is so much more accurate and reliable than the Apple Watch on my wrist (which doesn't say much, because the Watch is so bad at this sort of thing.)

<comment><USER10> Interesting, my Apple Watch is virtually perfect. It actually really surprised me the other day, I was listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History the other day, and forgot what a satrap was, and it wasn't clear from the context. Paused the podcast, asked what a satrap was, and it returned a definition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have the echo hooked up to a Harmony Hub[0], it's a universal remote that controls devices via IR or wifi that the echo can trigger via IFTTT. The Harmony Hub UX is annoyingly overdesigned IMO which makes it more complicated than it should be, but it still works pretty well. I can use it to turn up/down the volume of the tv, hit pause on the Apple TV when I get up to do something, turn on/off the fan if I get hot/cold, etc.

The TV use is pretty neat since it takes so many clicks to navigate those menus. I'm hoping the echo will integrate natively with Apple TV or Fire TV, it would be sweet to be able to say "Alexa, play the latest Game of Thrones" and have it just start.

[0] [http://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/harmony- hub](http://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/harmony-hub)

<comment><USER12> I've also got mine hooked up to my harmony hub. I've got a program on my network pretending to be a bunch of smart lightbulbs. So I can say "Alexa, turn {on,off} TV".

I think I could do volume control by simulating a bulb that supports brightness but I haven't tried that yet.

<comment><USER11> Nice, is there a github link to the program?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Main reason why I bought it was to use my phone less at home.

Main use cases: * Managing my shopping list (not necessarily for ordering on Amazon) while I'm in the kitchen and/or cooking * Calendar/Newsflash/Weather in the morning * Timer for cooking/workouts * Ordering an Uber (main reason why I use primarily Uber vs. Lyft because there's no Lyft skill right now) * Switching lights on/off (WeMo)

Would use it more if there would be (good/easy to use) skills: * Public transportation arrival/departure times * Controlling my Sonos (I know the workaround but a better integration would be awesome)

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't. I think people who do are crazy.

<comment><USER15> Judgmental tone notwithstanding, I resonate with this. The idea of an always- on, always-connected gizmo that I can't audit and that listens to everything in my house gives me the creeps. Why are security-aware people not bothered by this idea? Am I missing something?

<comment><USER6> Hi,

The echo does allow you to see a history of all previous recordings sent to Amazon (Settings > History), along with the actual voice samples that were sent.

Now granted, I don't think you'd be able to ensure that all packets that were sent corresponded to what is displayed there, but you can estimate it based on the sizes of packets and maximum data that _could_ be sent. Would a proxy server that you controlled resolve your concerns? Or is it more "I don't know what's happening on the backend"?

<comment><USER16> > The echo does allow you to see a history of all previous recordings sent to > Amazon (Settings > History), along with the actual voice samples that were > sent.

Wow, that makes it even more creepy. Imagine e.g. your significant other accessing this log and finding things they aren't supposed to find.

<comment><USER6> You are able to delete items from this log; this is no different than your browser's search history. You simply cannot have this both ways though; you can either be ephermal, or you can be auditable.

I personally find the log to be very useful and interesting (as well as a free annotation source for my own projects).

I guess the main take away from this thread is that some people are just going to be creeped out by this sort of technology. And that's okay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have the echo. For me, the annoying part is when you play music at a slightly loud volume, it can't hear you anymore. So i have to physically go up to the device (I didn't buy the remote). Other than that, I also use it to add household items to my shopping list.

<comment><USER18> Agreed, setting any volume above 7 or so completely torches all voice recognition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Same as was most everyone else has listed: kitchen timer, play music, occasionally ask her the time. A new skill was recently released that lets you control your alarm.com system and I have Vivint (ugh) which is backed by Alarm.com so it works. I've played with that a bit, but not as much I'd like. Oh and shopping list from time to time, but the mobile app is terrible so it's not much fun to use once you're actually in the store and trying to shop.

<comment><USER20> _Her_. Beautiful. :)

<comment><USER21> This comment squicks me out so, _so_ much. Not so much that the Echo as a product has been humanized, but because that seems like it was its _purpose_. You have this little thing sitting in your house that you bought, nominally to make your life easier. But all that other "make your life easier" stuff is icing on the real cake here, which is Amazon having, quite literally, a voice in your house that will sell you stuff at the slightest opportunity. Was that Amazon's goal? Maybe not intentionally, but it seems to be the end effect.

I don't know why that comment made me think that, but it casts the Echo in a much less wholesome light for some reason. I suppose it's because once people start to humanize it, they will start to bond with it, which means they are less likely to get rid of it. That comes off as just a little ethically dubious to me.

<comment> squeaky-clean >Amazon having, quite literally, a voice in your house that will sell you stuff at the slightest opportunity

I don't see how the second half of this statement follows the first. There's a big difference between "can" and "will". The Echo doesn't do this. You could make this statement about anything. With a forced OTA update, your phone could become nothing but an advertisement tomorrow morning. That new intern your company hired? They could secretly just be a shill for Microsoft who will try to sell you upgraded office software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wish there was a seamless assistant from place to place.

Home -> Car -> Work. But I wind up using Echo at home, Siri or OK Google in the car (depending on what I'm doing), and nothing at work.

I use my Echo to play music. I uploaded my music collection to Amazon Music for $25/year and also have some Prime playlists.

I use her to find what day a date is on, like what day is June 16th. (Did this once to double check the end date for something).

I use Echo to check the weather before I leave every morning. I ask the time ALL THE TIME. I use her when I'm cooking for unit conversions. And I've set timers with the Echo quite a few times. I've got one going now actually.

I also got some Philips Hue lights and use Alexa to turn my lights on and off. I want to get a Trackr since it has an Alexa integration so I can find my keys.

I also set up IFTTT and have a trigger for Alexa to call my phone so I can find it when I lose it.

Do I like the Echo? YES. I'm considering giving one as a Christmas present this year.

</comment><comment><USER23> I connected the Echo to my home automation startup API to control my entire home. I can ask her stuff like:

\- Control the lights, TV, AC, or smart device in the house.

\- Is anyone in the swimming pool? (I'm processing CCTV cameras)

\- Who's home? (Geo-fencing and OpenWRT Wi-Fi data)

\- Where is the people in the house? (I'm doing indoor locationing with RSSI signals)

Is fun and I keep adding cool stuff on it.

<comment><USER24> Tell us more. Is this open source?

<comment><USER23> I'm planning to make it open source but I gotta make it more structured first, is kind of dirty and a mess.

If you want to follow up the project, I'll be adding it to my blog/portfolio as soon as I release it: [http://www.cabada.mx](http://www.cabada.mx)

If you want to see more of it, like videos, images and screenshots, I've got some in that site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> every morning I say, "Alexa, news" and that's pretty much it. Occasionally I ask for the weather (for which I still have to specify the city, because Alexa doesn't understand "Set my home [location] to [current city]". Once I used it to order a whisk, which was pretty cool, I'll admit.

If I have a question which I think a voice assistant could answer, I pick up my phone and use the Google app 100% of the time because it is so much better than Alexa it's not funny. It regularly outperforms my expectations, where Alexa regularly underperforms them.

<comment><USER26> If you go into the companion app and set your location, it should give you the weather for your city automatically when you say "Alexa, what's the weather".

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've been meaning to expand Alexa's abilities to be more tailored to my life, but in the meantime, these are the things I use:

      * Light control through Philips Hue: "Alexa, turn on lamps", "Alexa, dim hallway lights to 50%"
      * Assistance when cooking: "Alexa, start a 5 minute timer", "Alexa, how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon?", "Alexa how many grams are in an ounce?"
      * Entertainment control through Logitech Harmony Hub & IFTTT: "Alexa, trigger Netflix", "Alexa, trigger FireTV", "Alexa, trigger shutdown"
      * Getting ready: "Alexa, how's the weather?", "Alexa, will it rain tomorrow?"
      * Easy music controls: "Alexa, play some music", "Alexa, play songs by Imagine Dragons", "Alexa turn it [up|down]"
      * Enabling laziness:
        * When I wake up but don't want to open my eyes: "Alexa, what time is it?"
        * When I'm already in bed and want to close lights, TV, etc...: "Alexa trigger naptime"

Things I wish I could do (and probably could do if I spent the time to make it so):

      * Control colors/scenes on my Hue lights: "Alexa, set the scene to warm", "Alexa, set the scene to variety"
      * Use fine-grained controls on my TV and devices: "Alexa, play Daredevil on Netflix", "Alexa, turn down the TV volume by 5"

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't do smart home, which seems to be the main use for it – instead, I use a simple remote control to turn on/off my lights, which is way easier for me than saying "Alexa turn on bedroom light" and waiting for it (I've tried this and unplugged the smart outlet the next day).

I only use it for two things:

• Weather and sometimes news in the morning as I'm getting ready.

• As a Spotify player that I can control from my sofa / bed / elsewhere through Spotify Connect, so basically a quasi-Sonos.

Other than that, I haven't really found any good uses for it.

</comment><comment><USER29> Nobody said yet, so here's mine: "Guess the Number" [1].

My 4 year-old loves it. He learned to count to 100 and got a lot better in understanding higher/lower numbers by playing GTN with Alexa.

It quickly became our favorite pastime when outside; we now turns on who'll be Alexa :)

[1] [http://echoskillstore.com/Games/Guess-The- Number/76](http://echoskillstore.com/Games/Guess-The-Number/76)

(ps: unfortunately it's buggy as hell. I'm considering developing a new one, just to fix it)

</comment><comment><USER30> I use it to set alarms, control my lighting, and check the weather. I find it kind of useless for music since it doesn't have a lot of the bands I listen to (it only plays "samples"), and it usually cycles the worst tracks first for some reason. I wish it would integrate with Google Play or have a non-Cloud (ie. local network) API. I've written my own home automation gateway (turn on the tv, set mood lighting, control blinds), but I'm unwilling to open it up to Amazon's cloud.

<comment><USER31> Do you have Amazon Prime? My Echo automatically plays from the Prime Music library which seems to have all the music I listen to (full songs, not samples). I've also integrated mine with Spotify though since that's where all my playlists are.

<comment><USER30> I do. It can't find "Django Django", "Cloud Control", etc. There are dozens of others, but I can't think of them off the top of my head.

Even if it did have a full library, it nearly always picks terrible, garbage songs from artists when shuffling them. I just told it to shuffle "Foals", and I don't think I've ever heard this song before. I don't like it, whatever it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Weather, kitchen timer/alarm to start something at a specific time, control a few LIFX bulbs, the common household shopping list, a bluetooth speaker. Occasional sports scores.

The microphone is really good and I can talk to it from a room over, so it's the sort of thing I can ask it about the weather as I'm walking to the door to put the leash on the dog and not break my stride.

I wish the Amazon shopping list had a better API, because I'd like to use that list for things outside of the Echo app.

</comment><comment><USER33> Not made by me, but someone in my office created a Lambda function, so we can ask Alexa if a meeting room is free, and it links into the Google Calendar API to check.

It then uses a library to say how long until it is free in a human like way.

You can also ask it to find if any rooms are free in the building, and most importantly if the pool table is in use or not! As well as that, there is even a web cam above the table that counts the balls, and can tell you who is winning!

<comment><USER34> sounds like you work at either the most or least productive office in the world :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I use it for kitchen related lookups, timers, and music. The music selection sucks, so I often end up just connecting my phone via bluetooth.

My only custom use was to write a WOL task that targets my Steam Machine so I can turn it on without leaving the couch. The machine is a frankenstein, so it doesn't have any fancy IR receiver or whatever people typically use to remotely turn on a game console.

</comment><comment><USER36> I have an Echo Dot in my bedroom. Here's what I use it for:

1) Lights - all of my lights are on WeMo switches. They turn on automatically at sunrise (note - they're energy-efficient LEDs), and they turn off automatically at 10:30. Whenever I want them on or off outside of this pattern, I use Alexa.

2) Music - I used to use Chromecast Audio on my speakers, but it took so long to connect - get phone, open spotify, find playlist, connect to speakers over network (after realizing phone wasn't on wifi and had to be reconnected), then hitting play. With Echo, I just say "Play <foo> on Spotify" and it works. This functionality is good for mornings when I'm not specific about music, but does not work well when there is a specific album you want to listen to. (Side note - I also use the sleep timer to automatically turn off music if I'm listening to something before sleep).

3) Alarm - I prefer using Echo over my phone to wake up in the morning.

4) Calendar - I listen to my schedule for the day while getting dressed.

</comment><comment><USER37> I never got into the habit of using Siri as it requires more interaction and voice recognition success rate with my light accent is somewhere around 75%.

Echo on the other hand is awesome and picks up commands way better and knows more answers. My regular use cases are limited to timers, alarms, listening podcasts and dimming lights with Philips Hue.

I wrote my own skill to return arriving bus schedules. It was surprisingly easy with Lambda and I open sourced the code with a tutorial: [https://github.com/jorilallo/muni-alexa- skill](https://github.com/jorilallo/muni-alexa-skill) Disclaimer: code is somewhat sloppy as I wrote it in ~1h based on Amazon's tutorials :)

When it comes to skills, the Alexa app is horrible: very flaky and buggy, clearly Cortana (not native) and there's basically no discovery for skills. There's some great reddit threads where people list good skills.

</comment><comment><USER38> My son uses it to answer random trivia questions. See: [https://twitter.com/ethank/status/730809136972079105](https://twitter.com/ethank/status/730809136972079105)

Of note: for a great hardware product, it has terrible software.

</comment><comment><USER39> I have an Echo as well as an Echo dot.

I use it mainly for managing smarthome devices, which is great. I control all the lights with it (Phillips Hue), as well as my AC/heating (Sensibo), remote controls (Harmony), outlets, and just about anything on IFTTT too.

It also manages my timers & alarms (which are also linked to my lighting system), music (great speakers on this thing), to-do list, and is useful for other random tasks you might google, e.g. kitchen measurement conversions.

It's really useful to me as is, but will get a lot better once custom skills are allowed to run in the background. It can also be kind of frustrating when Alexa doesn't hear you properly or do what you want, but yelling "ALEXA, SHUT THE FUCK UP!" and having it work, is quite satisfying.

</comment><comment><USER40> I've got Echo sitting on my desk. Sometimes I ask her how much gas left in the car (via Automatic). Weather. Asking to remind me something only to remember next day that that thing is called "timer". When remember what I need to say, I'll ask her to set temperature on my ecobee to one I want.

As to Siri - I use it slightly more:

      - tell my wife I'm on my way.
      - ask my wife what to buy in the grocery store.
      - wake me up tomorrow at 5am
      - delete all alarms

and many many more.

To sum up: since I don't use Google much, Echo is mostly useless to me. I can't do much with it, and getting mostly "Sorry I could not understand your question."

</comment><comment><USER41> For timers and alarms: waking up, setting a time limit to an activity (e.g: reading), cooking, taking breaks or 15 min naps. ("Alexa, set a timer for 15 min", "Alexa, wake me up at 7 am").

I live near a stadium and traffic is heavily affected by it, so you can ask when is the next game to have an idea of how much traffic is going to be ("Alexa, when is the next <team name> game").

Also, weather. "Alexa, weather forecast".

You can connect it with your google calendar. "Alexa, when is my next event".

You can also order a cab from Uber, order a pizza from Domino, and other things.

In alexa.amazon.com there's a section called "Things to try". That can also answer this question.

</comment><comment><USER42> I use mine much more than I expected. The number one thing I love is Pandora integration -- ours is outside the kitchen, so virtually every day I can holler for it to put on an appropriate Pandora station (with both hands dirty / full of dishes) or for it to set a timer.

I also updated a Python script that emulates Belkin Wemo devices so I can control HomeAssistant and various http enabled home automation devices around the house. For anyone interested: [https://github.com/n8henrie/Fauxmo](https://github.com/n8henrie/Fauxmo)

</comment><comment><USER43> In order of use:

\- Timer

\- Play specific radio programs or stations

\- Play music I've uploaded or stuff on Prime

\- Check weather

\- Check upcoming calendar appointments

\- Ask for definitions/encyclopedia entries (the logic is good ... I once asked how old Reagan was at the beginning of his first term and got the correct range)

\- Checking game times or if a local team is playing that day

\- Ask about local traffic conditions

I don't use the shopping list feature. I don't like opening the Alexa app, and my wife and I split shopping duties according to destination store.

I've looked at the IFTTT scripts but did not see any that looked appealing or useful for us.

I would love to see phone/messaging capabilities built into the Echo.

</comment><comment><USER44> I use it to play white noise to soothe my newborn (hands free control is a great benefit when the baby is crying!).

Other than that, lots of use from the kitchen. As a timer, to listen to music, control my Hue lighting....

I also coded up a custom Skill to control my Anova via a little Bluetooth proxy I wrote[1].

[1] [https://github.com/erikcw/pycirculate](https://github.com/erikcw/pycirculate)

</comment><comment><USER45> Primary: fancy kitchen timer.

</comment><comment><USER46> I wrote a skill that lets me ask what tech events are coming up, or are on a given day. Took half a day, and most of that time was spent figuring out aws lambda for the first time and writing the scraper for the event list I was pulling from. Now before I leave for work I can ask if anything is happening tonight.

</comment><comment><USER47> I use it for exactly 3 things:

* Weather (do I need a jacket or umbrella?)

* Music (I never used Prime Music before)

* Checking how long until my train arrives. This is by far the most useful application for me; I use it every morning. I bought the Echo so that I could develop a Chicago train app (CTA Tracker), but there seems to be one for every major city now.

</comment><comment><USER48> I use it to play music, set timers when cooking or when we need to leave, games for the kids, to spell words, ask what time it is in other time zones/cities, and to help enrich Amazon's passive listening analysis of my life so they can provide me with better shopping experience.

</comment><comment><USER49> it's a good solution to listening to the radio for me, it'll tune in any fm or am station by call letters, so i can keep up with news and everything. its great to be able to tune in more than just the local stations. a young relative loves to hear new jokes on echo as well.

</comment><comment><USER50> It's excellent if you have kids friend's coming over. We used to have to keep track of who had to go home when, but now they just come in, say "set an alarm for <time>" and go off and play.

</comment><comment><USER51> Hmm, I have yet to explore any of the skills, but need to.

I tell it to control my Hue lights, and ask it jokes, and occasionally ask it for the weather - though Dark Sky is a lot better for weather data.

So it's not used a ton really.

</comment><comment><USER52> A typical day:

"Alexa, what's on my calendar?" (Integrated with Google cal)

"Alexa, how is the commute?"

"Alexa, when do the Warriors play next?"

"Alexa, set an alarm for 7:30pm"

"Alexa, how much wood does a woodchuck chuck?"

</comment><comment><USER53> I set a lot of kitchen timers and alarms. I also use it to play music.

It seems to work pretty well for my use cases. With alarms and timers, the accuracy is about 100%. With music, it's maybe 70%.

</comment><comment><USER54> Music, timer, weather, lights, alarm, sport scores & schedules.

</comment><comment><USER55> Music in bathroom .

Weather

Sleep music on timer at bedtime.

Traffic conditions before I leave for work .

News while I brush my teeth.

</comment><comment><USER56> Mostly music, timers and weather. I don't use the questioning very much. I'd like to use it for talk radio/podcasts with something like Antenna Radio.

</comment><comment><USER57> I listen to my flash briefing (news podcasts/summaries) every morning, and occasionally reorder bulk items like paper towels and toilet paper.

</comment><comment><USER58> npr, baby rhymes, control nest, some skills occasionally, as a bluetooth speaker at parties, weather forecast, find nearby places

</comment><comment><USER59> I use it with WeMos to toggle lights in my house. I lot more fun than using light switches :)

</comment><comment><USER60> I'm sort of disappointed that no one uses Alexa to practice their poetry declamation.

</comment><comment><USER61> One that I haven't seen mentioned: "Alexa, how do you spell X?"

</comment><comment><USER62> All the lights in my apartment and alarm clock.

</comment><comment><USER63> How does it do with non-native accents?

<comment><USER64> Works great with a slight East Indian accent!

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> It fills a spot in my Wish List.

</comment><comment><USER66> Not at all</comment>


Video: Building the New Facebook.com with React, GraphQL and Relay - <AUTHOR> https://developers.facebook.com/videos/2019/building-the-new-facebookcom-with-react-graphql-and-relay <comment><USER2> The talk starting @ 3:30 was good, relevant for anyone using React / graphql right now.</comment>


Ask HN: What is your SaaS disaster recovery plan? - <AUTHOR> My small startup is submitting an RFP response to a large organization that requires we have a disaster recovery plan. I've Googled around a bit and haven't found anything that seems like a good example. I'm curious how the HN crowd deals with this sort of thing.<p>Any input is appreciated! <comment><USER2> DR plans are a critical business component for larger companies to do business with you, it is a checkbox type item they must check off. Essentially they are looking to know that the business has planned for disasters and have a written methodology to manage & mitigate it. You can find DR plans online to use for a template, the key things you need to answer is where are there single points of failure in your system and how do you mitigate them. And then where you have redundancy how does it give you the ability to recover from or mitigate a disaster.

The DR plan doesn't have to be crazy complicated or long, but companies know there are deficiencies in your solution (they have them in their own), what they are wanting to be able to check is that you recognize the deficiencies and that you have thought about how to protect their data and their access to the system.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response. Can you provide an example of a template? I can't find one that seems like it would cover everything I would think a company of this size would be interested in.

<comment><USER2> I think you are overthinking things, making yourself more concerned than need be. Big companies are checking boxes during the RFP process and want to make sure you have thought through problems. No one can tell you everything you need in your DR/BCP (disaster recovery/business continuity plan) without understanding your solution and problem space.

[https://www.smartsheet.com/disaster-recovery- templates](https://www.smartsheet.com/disaster-recovery-templates) . -- Has lots of different templates to start from or get ideas from.

DR plans could be as simple as a couple of pages or as complex as a few hundred (though I find those useless personally). Answer the key questions, if you are using the cloud to host you are in luck because it simplifies things drastically. If you are self-hosting on your own co-located servers, then you are in for a bit more work. AWS and other clouds have products to assist you and also have templates to help you answer key questions usually. again you have to use what you need from it and customize it for your company though.

I am not trying to be a dick or anything and I hope it doesn't come across this way, but the DR plan for a small SaaS company with one or two employees will be drastically different then one with 100, 1000 or more employees. So having no clue what you do, what your product does, or what size deal this is it is hard to help point you to a specific template that might be more helpful.

Just a note on the RFP process (if you don't already know).

RFP's can be awesome, or they can suck the life out of your company. If you are answering an RFP for a < 5 figure/month deal it is almost always a losing proposition. Most true enterprises will spend 100-250k without needing an RFP. Government, or government agencies are different of course. But RFP's can take you a few weeks to put together properly so you have to weigh the opportunity against the cost to respond. Not saying don't do it just recognize and evaluate the costs. I responded to some RFPs where they required you to be on- site for the question/answer session or you would be disqualified, so now add in air travel and hotel rooms, plus the RFP costs. Some of our RFP's were really awesome and we spent a week putting an answer together and got a decent deal out of it, others we took a month and spent $15-20k only to be told we didn't qualify (when in reality the company already had their chosen vendor and just had to check the RFP bid box), so just guard your time and money when doing RFPs, and try to get a feel for the situation. And remember, probably a good 50% of the RFP process for enterprises is box checking, and once you get past that stage they'll be more open to working with you.

<comment><USER3> Alternative point of view: We went through the RFP process and failed to win the job. However, we did tick all the boxes in terms of company structure, security, processes, etc, which was helpful because another team in this company contacted us and was delighted to find they didn't have to go through a long process to buy our software.

> If you are answering an RFP for a < 5 figure/month deal it is almost always > a losing proposition.

I was against going through the first RFP at all but it worked out in the end. I don't necessarily disagree with this statement on face value but my experience illustrates that sometimes playing the long game can work out for you.

<comment><USER2> Yea, totally agree, it can work out at times.

One thing I almost always would try if I lost the RFP was to get put on the approved vendors list. If you just try to get on the approved vendors list many times it is very hard with a ton of hoops to jump through with no real near term payoff. But if you answer an RFP and lose, ask to be put on the approved vendors list, many times you can get it with little issue (I did that a lot). What this does is minimizes friction for others in that company to hire your company or purchase your products later on, which can be super valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always wondered if larger orgs have options to fallback to other cloud providers? If AWS goes down, or part of AWS, are there automatic fallbacks to azure for example?</comment>


Ask HN: Companies hiring rails interns - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Duplicate. User added more detail to his/her question in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8650381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8650381)</comment>


Nuclear fusion device's first test with hydrogen declared a success - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/nuclear-fusion-greifswald-1.3431541 <comment><USER2> Do I understand correctly that they haven't actually fused anything yet, just verified that the stellarator can power up without immediately exploding?

What's special about the Wendelstein 7-X? I know stellarators as a concept aren't new. Is this a significant result, or is it just a handy opportunity for a media event?

<comment><USER3> I don't think they generated any fusion reactions, I believe they used just natural Hydrogen rather than Deuterium and Tritium (which would normally be used for fusion fuel). Also, magnetic confinement fusion reactors don't explode, they are like pencils balanced on their points, when something goes wrong or they "lose containment" the pencil falls over, the fusion conditions dissipate and reactions stop. This test was just one step along the way of verifying the plasma dynamics and heating capabilities of the system, it'll be a while before they do fusion reactions, and it will never produce energy from fusion. But be aware that making fusion reactions happen is easy, it's the matter of creating a self-sustaining fusion reaction that's hard.

In magnetic confinement fusion there is a big problem of confinement stability. You are trying to confine a plasma, which is electrically charged and thus an electrical conductor. Electric current generates a magnetic field. This is actually made use of in tokamak designs, which are the most straightforward magnetic confinement systems. However, tokamaks suffer from a fundamental flaw, that plasma current produces a feedback instability loop making it very challenging to attain plasma confinement longer than a few seconds or minutes. That's problematic because the shorter lived the fusion plasma is the more the initial (externally produced) heat as a proportion of the total cumulative heat of the plasma over its lifetime adds up. Short lived plasmas don't spend very long producing fusion heat to "pay back" the energy used to heat up the plasma to fusion conditions to start with.

A stellarator is basically a way to twist the magnetic fields around the fusion plasma tube in such a way so that the trajectories of ions in the plasma will stay inside the confinement volume, without requiring any current in the plasma. This makes the system potentially much more stable but at the cost of a very much more complex arrangement of magnets. The longer the plasma can be confined the longer fusion reactions can be sustained, making it easier to generate more power than was put in to raise the plasma to fusion suitable conditions (high density, high temperature).

<comment><USER4> > This is actually made use of in tokamak designs, which are the most > straightforward magnetic confinement systems.

Wrong! The most straightforward magnetic confinement systems are :

\- Simple toroid design -> Have some flaws that make useless and Stellerator is a evolution of the idea, fixing it with twisted magnetic fields.

\- Magnetic mirrors -> Two simple coils separated, so the combination of the shape and the more dense magnetic field on the center of the coils, works like a mirror for charged particles.

Also, at nearly the same time (around 1955) that the Russinas was begin to experiment with the Tokamak design, the British was experimenting wit the "ZETA", where the contaiment magnetic field comes ONLY from a current on the plasma.

<comment><USER5> Huh, that last part sounds kinda interesting. Pardon my scientific ignorance, but is that 'self-containing plasma' phenomena the reason why our Sun hasn't exploded yet?

<comment><USER6> Gravity is the reason the Sun hasn't exploded. It's way too big and heavy for the energy from its fusion reactions to push it apart.

<comment><USER5> Ah, thanks for that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe it is a dumb question but does fusion really matter that much? I mean that nuclear reactors are ridiculously expensive to build and maintain and fusion only removes the cost of fuel acquiring and disposal. It might be 20%, 30% or even 40% cheaper but still not a revolution, no "Free energy for everyone". Are people over-hyped?

<comment><USER8> Fusion removes disposal. Right there is worth it—much of the fearmongering surrounding this hugely efficient energy source would be ameliorated.

<comment><USER9> The fuel is also much more environmentally friendly to extract. Tritium is hard to purify, but you don't need much of it, so it is probably more difficult to extract the steel for the reactor's structure than the fuel during its lifetime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just love the name of the device. The Stellerator.

<comment><USER11> It's actually stellarator from stella, star.

<comment><USER12> Given the post on encabulators the other day, I at first thought it was a riff on that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13>
       > German Chancellor Angela Merkel [..] who holds
       > a doctorate in physics, personally pressed the button
       > at Wednesday's launch of an experiment they hope
       > will advance the quest for nuclear fusion, considered
       > a clean and safe form of nuclear power.

<comment><USER14> I take it Gordon Freeman wasn't available.

<comment><USER15> Brilliant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> She's also the head of the "Christian Democratic Union" party...

<comment><USER17> The name came out the the desire to unite catholic and protestant groups after WWII in a centre party. They've been open to non-christians since inception, and they decided to keep the "Christian" in the name to emphasize their concern over the Christian image of man, from which they derive their view that human dignity is worthy of protection as it is given by God.

They do seem conservative by comparison to their main opponent party, the SPD, which has Marxist roots, but compared to say US politics, they would be considered moderates. In that sense, it's disingenuous to take them out of the German political spectrum (which is much more moderate than the US), and judge them by name alone.

She's certainly not a bible thumping Christian denying global warming. [0]

[0][[http://www.environmental-watch.com/profiles/angela- merkel/](http://www.environmental-watch.com/profiles/angela-merkel/)]

<comment><USER16> > they derive their view that human dignity is worthy of protection as it is > given by God

q.e.d.

> compared to say US politics, they would be considered moderates

compared to the US politics, probably all german parties are considered moderates

Till the AfD showed up, CDU/CSU were the most conservative parties (besides some really small ones that never got over 5% of the votes) in Germany.

> She's certainly not a bible thumping Christian denying global warming

That's true, but there don't seem to be much countries in the world, besides the US, where you could get voters which such comments...

My point was just, that the parent poster quoted this text, that made the impression Germany is so advanced that we even have a physicist as Chancellor, while Merkel in fact is a member of a christian party.

<comment><USER18> > > they derive their view that human dignity is worthy of protection as it is > given by God

> q.e.d.

Why would you use q.e.d. with out a reference. I know I am strange in that I studied Greek and know a decent amount of Latin but how were you using q.e.d.?

Also can we please not lump ALL Christians into the same boat it feels kind of like calling all Muslims terrorist. For Global warming the Bible is very clear that we are to protect the Earth which many Bible Global Warming protesters claim to upheld.

<comment><USER19> > Why would you use q.e.d. with out a reference. I know I am strange in that I > studied Greek and know a decent amount of Latin but how were you using > q.e.d.?

The claim was that the CDU is somehow christian. The argument against that was that they aren't actually christian, but that they rather get inspiration for their politics from christian theology.

Now, if your opponent presents an argument for your position as if it were for their own, there isn't really any need to restate that argument, you can simply point out that your position has been demonstrated.

> Also can we please not lump ALL Christians into the same boat it feels kind > of like calling all Muslims terrorist. For Global warming the Bible is very > clear that we are to protect the Earth which many Bible Global Warming > protesters claim to upheld.

The problem with christianity (or any religion, for that matter) is that it tends to encourage people to believe things for bad reasons. Now, there might be christians who don't, but that doesn't change that a vast majority of them do. Therefore, it's perfectly reasonable to lump them all together, at least in this regard, when making general statements. The problem is not whether some christians believe that the bible clearly tells them to protect the earth (while other christians ironically equally fervently believe that the bible clearly tells them that they don't need to do anything because god will take care of it), it's that they think that the bible telling them something is a good reason to act accordingly. That is an irresponsible method for trying to obtain knowledge, and it's outright dangerous when other people are affected by the results.

If I feed a starving child because my horoscope told me that I should, then the fact that feeding a starving child is good does not change the fact that the reason why I do it is still bad, and that acting according to astrological advice is not a reliable way to do good, and might well lead to bad consequences in other cases.

<comment><USER18> q.e.d. means in Latin quod erat demonstrandum, meaning "which is what had to be proven". q.e.d. is used at the end of Philosophy (I was a Theology Student) arguments and in science. It seemed strange to see that used here on Hacker News and I have no idea what you were trying to say. I am asking what did you mean by q.e.d.?

>The problem with christianity (or any religion, for that matter) is that it tends to encourage people to believe things for bad reasons.

You have a strong bias against religion without data. To me it just seems that you really don't care about religion and your reflecting your negative feelings on a subject and building a straw-man out of it. The vast majority of the world and almost every person of historical significance were religious. This idea that religious people are lesser and clearly not enlightened isn't very different then racism.

> bible clearly tells them that they don't need to do anything because god > will take care of it.

There is no reference in the Bible for that and it isn't the basis of people's belief why they are against Global Warming (It is based on Conservative Pro- Business politics and not religion (In the US that is they identify as Republicans as they believe all good God Fearing Christians belong :( ) [http://www.ibtimes.com/what-do-christians-have-against- clima...](http://www.ibtimes.com/what-do-christians-have-against-climate- science-410202)

<comment><USER19> > I am asking what did you mean by q.e.d.?

I didn't mean anything by it, that comment wasn't mine. But the comment used it exactly as you defined it: 50CNT tried to show that the CDU is not christian by mentioning that they follow christian doctrine. Given that that is actually an argument for the position that the CDU is in fact christian, there is no need to provide any further arguments, k__ simply concluded: QED.

> You have a strong bias against religion without data.

How do you know what data I have?

> To me it just seems that you really don't care about religion and your > reflecting your negative feelings on a subject and building a straw-man out > of it.

Well, I can assure you that you are mistaken.

> The vast majority of the world and almost every person of historical > significance were religious.

Your point being?

> This idea that religious people are lesser and clearly not enlightened isn't > very different then racism.

Could you please show where I made any such claim? Or was that an attempt to build a strawman argument?

> There is no reference in the Bible for that and it isn't the basis of > people's belief why they are against Global Warming (It is based on > Conservative Pro-Business politics and not religion (In the US that is they > identify as Republicans as they believe all good God Fearing Christians > belong :( ) [http://www.ibtimes.com/what-do-christians-have-against- > clima...](http://www.ibtimes.com/what-do-christians-have-against-clima..).

You missed the point: I don't care what the bible says on the topic (nor what specifically you think it says), but I notice that others care and try to justify their actions on that basis, which is irresponsible, as nobody has demonstrated that that is a way to obtain reliable knowledge about the world (plus there are plenty of examples to the contrary). That people claim equally loudly completely contradictory conclusions from their respective reading of the bible just is further evidence that it might not be that reliable a source of information.

<comment><USER18> I am not trying to be mean or arguing as much as I want to have a dialog about what you communicated and what you mean which isn't the same thing normally.

> How do you know what data I have?

The old academic in me is you don't have any unless you show some.

> I don't care what the bible says on the topic (nor what specifically you > think it says), but I notice that ...

You are claiming purposeful ignorance and insight on the same subject. If you don't care and then go one to make an argument which you have claimed no real knowledge about. Just don't get involved in discussions when you don't care about the data.

> That people claim equally loudly completely contradictory conclusions from > their respective reading of the bible just is further evidence that it might > not be that reliable a source of information.

Because people DON'T read the data and refuse to look at it. Just as frustrating is to see Excel spreadsheets of data from an original data set with no idea how they got to their conclusion. You are in one sentence just dismissed 90%+ of knowledge. Statistics, Science, all soft sciences etc.... And in fact this all comes back to data. Look at the data or walk away but don't argue from a point of ignorance and base it on personal experiences, belief systems, and emotions.

Hope you have a good day and know I am not trying to get you to believe what I do but I am trying to encourage you to look at the way you are presenting yourself. I do believe you are trying to communicate A but you are being perceived to hold to B.

<comment><USER19> > You are claiming purposeful ignorance and insight on the same subject. If > you don't care and then go one to make an argument which you have claimed no > real knowledge about. Just don't get involved in discussions when you don't > care about the data.

First: "not caring" in this context means that I don't consider the content of the bible to be relevant to this argument, which is not to be confused with lack of knowledge, aka ignorance.

Second: I very much care about the data. Now, do you have any data for me to look at?

Now, to avoid any confusion, let me re-state my claim: The bible has not been demonstrated to be a reliable source of knowledge about the world. Therefore, it's irresponsible to make decisions about your or other people's lives based on information from the bible.

<comment><USER18> This is certainly different then being respectful of religion. I am more then able to go into details and such but I don't think this is the place for it. If you want you can email me at mtelesha at the big G company email account.

If you want information on historical facts and academic inaccurate information and myths by lazy academics dipping their toes in a discipline they don't know about I would love to. I have a ton of those stories. The academic discipline of a Biblical Scholar (I am more of Theology trained aka more history facts and figures and philosophy based) I can lay out a decent academic data.

Just so we are clear this would be non-proselytizing and more of an fact finding from academia. It really is an awesome study and many academics and PhD of the Bible are not even Christians but are fascinated by the historical data and the academic discipline.

<comment><USER19> > This is certainly different then being respectful of religion.

Do you think that there is anything wrong with that?

> Just so we are clear this would be non-proselytizing and more of an fact > finding from academia. It really is an awesome study and many academics and > PhD of the Bible are not even Christians but are fascinated by the > historical data and the academic discipline.

Now, if you actually could demonstrate the reliability of the bible as a source for knowledge about the world, I certainly would be extremely interested.

The problem is that you are exhibiting many of the common signs that usually indicate someone lacks understanding of the philosophy of science and more generally of epistemology, so it's extremely likely that you are going to trot out the same old arguments that I have heard endless times, and that have been refuted over and over. So, my suggestion would be: Go, get yourself a few books that explain that stuff, and learn what the arguments of the "other side" actually are, that should make for a far more productive conversation. If you like watching videos, this might also be a good place to start: [https://www.youtube.com/user/SansDeity/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/SansDeity/videos) \- in particular: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAQFYgyEACI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAQFYgyEACI) , [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwG7LJTTZFc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwG7LJTTZFc) , [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNIfzlzmJ8Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNIfzlzmJ8Y)

Also: Yes, the bible certainly is an important book to study due to its influence on society, and it (or rather, the many versions of it) certainly has/have a history that can give many interesting insights. All I am disagreeing with is that it provides reliable knowledge about the world that is in any way fundamentally different from any other (ancient) book. And just as one can study the iliad without believing that Zeus actually existed, it's perfectly reasonable to study the bible without being a christian, of course.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Health Month for Sale on Flippa - <AUTHOR> http://healthmonth.tumblr.com/post/24004326829/health-month-is-up-for-auction-on-flippa-com

<comment><USER2> Anything Buster touches is awesome! Sad to see that it needs a new home. Hopefully someone in the HN community can pick this up and run with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are so many people and companies interested in the gamification of health, surely someone will snap this up.</comment>


Amazon Machine Learning vs. Google Prediction API (and Competitors) - <AUTHOR> http://www.louisdorard.com/blog/machine-learning-apis-comparison

<comment><USER2> Do any of these services give you any insight into what variable drove the decision? I get that they can tell you the target variable (e.g. these people are likely to buy), but can they tell me that the age and gender fields had a higher correlation than income or education?

<comment><AUTHOR> Most of them can. I have a doubt for Google Prediction, need to check... Also with BigML you get a decision tree model which allows to "explain" predictions with a list of decisions based on the values of the fields (see #3 on [https://bigml.com/features](https://bigml.com/features)).

<comment><USER2> That's good to know...I'm preparing a data set to test them now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Have you guys been able to try both and compare them?</comment>


DNA sequencing in a holey new way - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8291185.stm <comment><USER2> I'm an investor in a company called NABsys that's doing this type of electronic sequencing with nanopores today; it's definitely a cool space with profound implications for genetic sequencing. If anyone's interested, let me know and I'd be happy to intro you to the NABsys team: <http://nabsys.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Actually this technology is revolutionary, I have been following it for sometime. I think you got a very good investment, but some patience will be needed as well. The team at nabsys looks impressive.</comment></comment>


Google CEO Suggests You Change Your Name to Escape His Permanent Record - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_ceo_suggests_you_change_your_name_to_escape.php

<comment><USER2> While I don't agree with what he's saying, I do appreciate his honesty in speaking out his mind.

</comment><comment><USER3> i found this very interesting - i think it is a good idea - something similar may be true for religion as well which is -inherited- but most people become disillusioned with their -official- religion when they grow up and ponder about what they really want in a religion and they should be able to change it</comment>


DNA-based chemical compiler - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.04790 <comment><USER2> Ok, that is amazing. How long before llvm has dna support?

Once that happens you will be able to make a self hosting dna builder, and have a bunch of high level languages along for the ride :)

<comment><USER3> Hmm. On the one hand that'll be great for cosmetic surgery and furries (grow compatible but different body parts in vitro); on the other hand, do we really want to live in a world of constant security patches for our DNA because someone's found a new vulnerability that hackers can exploit? Or worse, CSS for limbs?

<comment><USER2> Or worse, have to deal with viruses...

Oh, wait....

<comment><USER3> Natural viruses aren't malicious; they even have evolutionary pressure to become self limiting. Artificial ones, not so much.

Natural ones also appear far more infrequently than computer viruses, and I'd expect the same pattern with artificial organisms.

<comment><USER4> The same is true for computer viruses! Being a huge menace to your computer host is a good way to get yourself deleted. The best computer viruses are careful and spread silently.

<comment><USER5> And in both cases I'm sure we haven't even found the most silent virus there is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't the title a bit misleading?

> Hence, our attempt to convert high-level code to assembly code takes us > __one step closer __to completing the dream of making a chemical compiler.

</comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of Nuskell, a chemical reaction network to "DNA domain-level strand displacement" compiler build by Stefan Badelt et al in Erik Winfree's lab at Caltech.

[https://github.com/DNA-and-Natural-Algorithms- Group/nuskell](https://github.com/DNA-and-Natural-Algorithms-Group/nuskell)</comment>


Virtual webcam – play a video in e.g. Zoom - <AUTHOR> https://rmsol.de/2020/04/25/v4l2/ <comment><USER2> This reminds me of using OBS to make entirely custom virtual cameras and when Shopify's CEO offered $10k for feature support.

[https://github.com/obsproject/obs- studio/issues/2568](https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2568)

</comment><comment><USER3> I couldn't get v4l2 to work for some in-browser apps. But this one I could: [https://github.com/webcamoid/akvcam](https://github.com/webcamoid/akvcam)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thy for sharing will also try that out

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can't you just share the screen in zoom or Skype?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you can share your screen in zoom and skype. At first, I wanted just to play "a funny" video over the webcam (instead of my face), for my colleagues. And sharing the desktop over the webcam was just a "nice to have" feature, in the case, the application does not support screen sharing.</comment></comment>


CV Compiler is a robot that fixes your resume to make you more competitive - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/21/cvcompiler-is-an-robot-that-fixes-your-resume-to-make-you-more-competitive/ <comment><USER2> I took the dive and let them hack away at my LI. No telling what kind of spam I'm going to get now. That said, wow! This is _terrible_.

The first thing that they say I should improve on is: Must-Have-Words. Here is their list of those words: Deployment Security API Scalability OOP Continuous Integration (CI) Availability Docker SOLID NoSQL Configuration Management (CM) Robust Tuning Algorithm Web services Networking Design Patterns Unit testing Open Source AWS Hadoop Continuous Deployment (CD) REST Big Data Agile TDD Machine Learning Microservices Artificial Intelligence GitHub.

They also say that after I pay for the service I'll get access to the other fields of things I am missing. Those include: Niche IT Skills, Numbers, Online Presence, Technological Proficiency, Typos, Soft Skills, Your Old Projects, URLs.

They do say that I have a good amount of 'Action Verbs'. But that I need more of them and give the examples of: Devised Debugged Utilized Upgraded Assembled Overhauled Redesigned Coded Rebuilt Maintained Initiated Solved Investigated Developed Architected Trained.

Again, once I pay, I'll unlock a few more categories, which are listed here: Resume Size, Accomplishments, Your Most Recent Roles, Abbreviations, Outdated Tech, File Format, Summary/Objective, Employment History, Short-Term Jobs, Marital Status, Religion, Broken Links, References, Teams

In case you haven't really read through that list I'll highlight the 2 most INSANE items there that should make any HR department dive for the pepto- bismol: Marital Status, Religion. Now, I don't know if they are warning AGAINST including those fields or encouraging including them. However, that they are items that are there at all speaks to the 'demographic' that they are targeting: complete numbskulls. Not a single person that can fog a mirror would ever include those 2 fields in a CV in the English speaking world.

<comment><USER3> > Utilized

lol

One of the only people I've ever interviewed where I cut it short was a guy who admitted he lied and put "MongoDB" on his resume to get it past any robots that were screening.

Anyway, that massive list of must-have-words reminds me of the old days on the internet where web pages would have a block of content near the bottom that contained many keywords written in the same color as the background. Now I am wondering if that's the direction resumes go for some short period of time.

<comment><USER4> >Anyway, that massive list of must-have-words reminds me of the old days on the internet where web pages would have a block of content near the bottom that contained many keywords written in the same color as the background. Now I am wondering if that's the direction resumes go for some short period of time.

That's essentially the purpose of my "Technical Skills" section.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi > Now I am wondering if that's the direction resumes go for some short period > of time.

It is. I have (reliable) reports of CVs listing words like "Stanford" in white on white background, to pass the automated filtering at some companies.

<comment><USER5> I'm tempted to do this, but openly. Like a bold heading that says "Buzzword Section." Maybe with a parenthetical explanation that although it makes no sense, there are no lies in it.

<comment><USER6> I've been doing that for years - my resume has a block labeled "buzzwords" immediately after the contact info and just before the job history.

My resume is also kind of aggressively old-fashioned, a single page of 80-column ASCII text, because that's the kind of person I am and I figure anyone interested in hiring me ought to know what they're in for. :-)

<comment><USER7> How's that working out for you?

<comment><USER6> It works really well. I've never had to spend more than a couple of weeks looking for a job.

<comment><USER8> Cold-search or are you consistently being referred to by friends and former co-workers? Because if the latter you CV document might not even factor in your success rate

<comment><USER6> It is mostly the latter, as you'd imagine, and therefore most people encountering my resume already have some reason to pay attention. I think that lets me get away with being more opinionated in the way I present myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Slightly tangential but I believe the resume situation is another part of the "broken hiring in tech":

1\. There is a whole cottage industry of resume writers. My CV got me mostly where I wanted and then some, but of course the professional "resume reviewers" told me it's awful and I need to pay them $50 to make it noticeable at all.

2\. The "importance of results" makes people willing to bend the truth and then resumes start looking very sleazy. I saw CVs of interns from Silicon Valley darling companies who claim in every line how they saved millions of dollars here and there. Hard to believe frankly.

3\. And what do those results even give us? If resume A says "Implemented ETL tool that improved customer acquisition 420%" and resume B says "Implemented ETL tool to work with customer data in Java", there is no reason to believe candidate A is at all better than candidate B. Well, they are better at resume writing or hiring resume writers. Or maybe they are good at office politics and were able to put themselves on impactful projects. But will they pass the FizzBuzz?

<comment><USER10> We hire interns and co-ops regularly. Often times, the local university forces them to redo their resumes in such a cookie-cutter way that they appear near identical to eachother. It's utter garbage to boot.

First question we ask: do you have a copy of your ORIGINAL resume? The ones who understand what we mean and actually have it are off to a great start.

<comment><USER11> In my resume writing business, I get a ton of kids who've taken their cues from the student books put together by university career centers. Everything possible is jammed onto one page in as small a type as can be minimally read. Real disservice to the applicant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you're still sending in resumes cold you're doing it wrong.

You need to either apply through connections or turn "cold" job postings into warm leads by finding someone in the company to refer you. How? You can find people on Twitter, LinkedIn, I've even found employees of companies I'm interested in on HN and reached out to them to establish rapport and get interviews. Get creative. I've also written blog posts about companies I'm interested in that lead to job opportunities.

<comment><USER13> Strongly disagree. I got my first job at apple, and a job at another unicorn by cold submission. I find as an engineer, cold submission on a website will often get me in contact with a recruiter quicker than any other method.

<comment><USER14> My experience is similar to yours. I found a couple jobs I was interested in the last time I did a search. I submitted my plain-text resume with no buzzwords (other than maybe "Go") and immediately heard back from both. My interviews were done within a week or two. I took one of the jobs.

My advice for engineering candidates with some experience is to just talk about your past work in paragraph form. If Docker or whatever was an important part of your work, it will probably come up. If it's not mentioned, you're probably not the expert in that area that they're looking for. Saves everyone some time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "We found that many job applications were being rejected without even an interview, because of the resumes. Apparently, 10 seconds is long enough for a recruiter to eliminate many candidates"

What exactly does he think the purpose of a resume is? If someone does not have the necessary background or experience for a job, moving forward to an interview is a waste of time for all parties involved.

<comment><USER4> When I was an engineering recruiter, 10 seconds hit the nose.

If anybody wants to writeup a ruleset that mirrors the (definitely fallable) process I used to use, here's the rules:

1\. Candidate probably local? {check address, if listed, else check location of previous roles} (required by our clients)

2\. Candidate doesn't need sponsorship, probably? {check address, if listed, else check location of previous roles to ensure >5 years working in US, compare against university location} (required by our clients, and saturated market anyway. didn't like this one but that was the job)

3\. Candidate has proper job title? {check last job title, ensure it's not >1 year ago, check previous job titles, ensure has had job title for some required amount of time}

4\. Candidate has clean work history? {check for gaps between roles, or length of each individual role, look for big gaps or many short jobs} (not necessarily a disqualifier, but will be asked about)

5\. Candidate has specific keywords required by position? {scan each job in earliest->oldest chronological order, ensuring recent and decent time spent on {{TECHNOLOGY}}}

If I've gotten to bullet point 5 I'm probably already tapping their phone number into my phone, and doing a final scan for

6\. Red flag? {look for political opinions on the resume, opinions of their previous bosses, proudly listed membership of organizations like the KKK (it's happened), too many spelling errors, rants about the job hunting process, odd demands surrounding salary or compensation or work style, or just general signs of weirdness/assholeness/difficult-to-deal-with-ness}

<comment><USER16> What's with this obsession with "gaps"? What are you trying to screen for? Is everyone supposed to be working non stop from their first job until they retire or die?

I can sort of understand if it's been years since the last position and the individual is applying for your company after being away from the market. But a gap in the middle of the job history? Why do you care ?

<comment><USER4> > What are you trying to screen for?

People that can't keep a job, or get a job, often. It was Oil and Gas, so turnover was expected (projects finish, everyone goes away), but if consistently over the last decade or 2 they couldn't get on another project, it was a red flag. Not disqualifying, but a red flag.

If it was a big gap ten years ago, nobody cares. If it was a single big gap less than 5 years ago, probably nobody cares, I'd just have to ask about it, because my client would want to know.

<comment><USER17> How big of a gap is a "big gap"? I have a 6 month gap before my current employer (of 2.5 years) because I spent some time doing stuff other than work with my savings. Should I fill that with "freelance, travel, and open source" or some such (even though I didn't do all that much freelance work)?

<comment><USER4> I would leave off the months on your resume so that it doesn't look like a gap.

Or, put "2016 - Present," and then if they ask about what kind of notice you need to post, say "oh, I actually don't work there anymore, woops, I forgot to take off the 'to present' on my resume, thanks for bringing that up."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> TODO: write a counter-compiler that recognizes resumes based on the stylistic "improvements" suggested by this tool - and mark them for rejection accordingly.

<comment><USER19> Why? The whole interview process is a dumb game full of bullshitting and half- truths. What does it matter if a robot helped you come up with them?

<comment><USER20> To be honest, looking at resumes now is a bit like 'find the bullshit' from a hiring perspective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Professional resume writer here that comes with 20 years of experience in recruiting and hiring for tech startups. I have no fear of being replaced by AI anytime soon, and I don't have any knowledge of this company but can certainly vouch for their statement about other resume firms trying to upsell a service based on a shoddy review.

I often have clients that come to me with perfectly good resumes that tell me some online rating system said it was terrible. A resume can be somewhat accurately 'scored' for fit based on matching keywords, but the tech isn't mature enough yet to say if something is simply good or bad.

Not to mention the different tastes from different companies. I write a bit differently depending on who the target audience is for a resume. I don't know if these review companies account for that at all, but they don't seem to.

</comment><comment><USER22> Tried it with my current PDF. Didn't really manage much other than "use more keywords that employers like!"

<comment><USER4> Are you comfortable sharing your resume so we can compare this report with the output? I'm gonna give it a shot and will do a write-up after my 9am.

<comment><USER22> Sure - [https://rjp.is/resume.pdf](https://rjp.is/resume.pdf)

<comment><USER23> Shouldn't the period go outside the parens?

> Capable of understanding business requirements and working with the team to > achieve the best solution (technologically or pragmatically.)

<comment><USER24> I'm no expert. I've no idea with regards to parens, but with quotes, this is definitely a UK/US difference.

In the US, a terminating/trailing period or comma goes inside the quote, "like this." — Whereas in the UK we do it "like this".

Personally, and as a programmer, parsing the UK usage makes more sense to me logically, and I find the other way to be mentally jarring. Just my 2p.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great. Now everyone will juice his resume with something like this and we'll all end up in the same relative positions we were before, except 1) actual resume information density will be lower, as we'll have decreased the SNR through keyword juicing, and 2) anyone not paying attention to these tools (and focusing on work instead) will be unfairly penalized in early-stage hiring filter.

This is the best timeline.

<comment><USER26> I don't think this follows. To a degree, it's already true, because a lot of tech interviews just boil down to "have you learned all the pet CS questions in Cracking the Coding Interview?". A CV just gets you the interview.

Of course you're right, some companies have software to filter CVs by keywords, and often it's as dumb as if the ad says "experience with Puppet", you need to say "experience with Chef, which is like Puppet". This is just playing the game, like everything is.

Why do they do this? If you've been involved with hiring, you know the number of terrible CVs even a small company will get is shocking, so I'm sympathetic to automating things a bit. A lot of them are minimal effort, but that's the best case. Worst case is a flat out lie, because it takes more effort to catch - usually during the interview.

So if we accept that CVs aren't just useful for raw information, but also convey some kind of measure of diligence (e.g. spelling), which you want in a programmer, then knowing about tools is also a useful measure. So I don't think it's going to be as bad as you make it sound.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This seems like a great way to harvest lots of resumes to sell to recruiters.

If you're working on your resume, you're probably open to a new job, right?

</comment><comment><USER4> Ok, I gave it a shot. For reference, here's my resume (google doc link so I don't have to PDF bomb people, and because I never bothered to transfer this thing to HTML): [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A3Ns93sbE8v70hCt7yWJigoi...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A3Ns93sbE8v70hCt7yWJigoiL0sQZNTtMPr9zVtkoqM/)

Apparently I have only 7 of 30 "Must Have Words." I have TDD, Open Source, API, AWS, GitHub, REST. I should include, according to this site:

, Security , Scalability , OOP , Continuous Integration (CI) , Availability , Docker , SOLID , NoSQL , Configuration Management (CM), Robust, Tuning, Algorithm, Web services, Networking, Design Patterns, Unit testing, Hadoop, Continuous Deployment (CD), Big Data, Agile, Machine Learning, Microservices, Artificial Intelligence.

I use "enough" action verbs that "emphasize my tech skills":

engineer develop architected engineered code built

But I could add some more:

Debugged Upgraded Assembled Rebuilt Investigated Trained Devised Programmed Maintained Designed Redesigned Applied Utilized Overhauled Initiated Solved Reduced

Now it's got some freaky little pie chart thing that I don't understand, but it says that to applicant tracking software, I look like a "Other 16%, Back- end (Javascript), QA, Cloud Computing, Front-end" guy.

Looks like I have to pay to unlock some other things, like it says it found typos, something about soft skills, something about resume size, dunno. Mildly interesting, though I find this fairly useless compared to just having someone professional look at your resume. I'm not sure adding the word "Unit Testing" to my resume increases my chances at getting into netflix, I already list my unit testing frameworks and my testing experience at electric imp, though I suppose it will be missed by a non-programming recruiter just scanning for keywords, so that keyword stuff is probably the best advice this thing gives.

</comment><comment><USER28> Next episode of Silicon Valley: we find out that they are literally using "machine learning" - adding those words to resumes to get them picked up by recruiters.

In all seriousness I think it would be interesting to explore the latent space of their model, and try to explain it- what does it think the magic words are?

</comment><comment><USER29> Given how this thread is going I thought I'd mention a resume review robot I actually like.

I use Novoresume.com to build my resumes and I find it's resume suggestions to be pretty useful. It's free for one page resumes too. I am not associated with novoresume in any way, I just like the product.

</comment><comment><USER30> Ever since I had a run in with an extremely "motivated" team of head hunters my belief has been that resumes are almost useless.

I was responsible for hiring a team a while back and, in retrospect, believe I put way too much faith into my practice of filtering candidates by resume content.

</comment><comment><USER31> Thought I'd shout out my product, [https://resumeworded.com/score](https://resumeworded.com/score), here. Gives a similar, but much more detailed analysis of a resume.

<comment><USER20> I do not care about signing up until I see the value your product would bring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> So the more successful this company gets, the less effective it becomes?

<comment><USER4> Wait, I don't get it, why?

<comment><USER33> Because as resumes coalesce around their (admittedly, really fucking terrible) conception of what a good resume looks like, they all start becoming completely indistinguishable from each other, which makes them worse. As someone who's sat on both sides of the table (screening resumes, interviewing, hiring, and applying/being interviewed) a lot recently, the worst thing you can be isn't being inexperienced, it's being boring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It seems like they just analyzed a million resumes and then try and make your resume match theirs. Doubt they graded all million of them thoroughly, so whats to say the quality was good? Why should you want to match those million resumes?

Also, if you are using ML to try and make your resume closer to the ones that are analyzed, aren't you making the resume more average, not making it stand out more? If everyone uses the service, and adds all these keywords to it, then how are they of any value?

<comment><USER17> More importantly, every job posting or resume may mention stuff like "git", "CI", "Docker", "OOP", and whatnot. But I would argue that for many roles it's hardly an important thing to list on your resume. Just because it's mentioned doesn't mean it's important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Microsoft Office just added this capability via LinkedIn, fully automated.

Open a resume in Word, an assistant pops up.

Good luck agains _that_.

<comment><USER24> "Hey, it looks like you're writing a CV"

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> We're gradually getting to a point where the hiring process is merely about bots outsmarting other bots.

</comment><comment><USER37> "allowing you to shine to recruiters at Google, Yahoo and Facebook"

Wait, Yahoo? People still try to get hired there?

</comment><comment><USER38> Improving your resume is a nice tag for also getting competitive intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER39> Does it drive anybody else crazy when resume and CV are used interchangeably?

<comment><USER40> In the British English 'CV' and 'resume' _are_ interchangeable.

I know in US English 'CV' means something more in the academic community, but it doesn't here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> lovely looking website. Interested to see what segment of the engineering community this service will prove greatest value to.

Likely a lot of connected, visible, high profile engineers won't need this, but they are the 'conspicuous minority'....suspect a lot of folks will find this useful

</comment><comment><USER42> Tech Crunch looks like advertising.

</comment><comment><USER43> So seo for resumes?

</comment><comment><USER44> I once made a buzzword generator thingy, so here's some suggestions, use them wisely.... and by wisely I mean in the form "I like to $A $B $C of $D, $A $B $D $C and use $D to $A $B $C", if you want to refer to past positions simply add a "d" to the verb. But before you do, _put on a seatbelt_ , your career might just go vertical! (up, I mean vertical in the upwards direction)

$A:

appropriately, assertively, authoritatively, collaboratively, compellingly, coherently, competently, completely, continually, conveniently, credibly, distinctively, dynamically, efficiently, generally, holistically, horizontally, interactively, literally, objectively, organically, practically, professionally, progressively, provably, quickly, radically, rapidly, seamlessly, strategically, synergistically, theoretically, totally, uniquely, vertically, sequentially, non-sequentially

$B:

actualize, administrate, aggregate, architect, benchmark, brand, build, communicate, conceptualize, contextualize, coordinate, create, cross- pollinate, cultivate, curate, customize, deliver, deploy, develop, disintermediate, disrupt, disseminate, drive, e-enable, embrace, empower, enable, engage, engineer, enhance, envisioneer, evisculate, evolve, expedite, exploit, extend, fabricate, facilitate, formulate, foster, generate, grow, impact, implement, incentivize, incubate, initiate, innovate, integrate, iterate, leverage, maintain, maximize, monetize, negotiate, network, optimize, orchestrate, pontificate, position, productivate, productize, productivize, promote, pursue, re-engineer, recaptiualize, reconceptualize, recontextualize, redefine, reinvent, repurpose, restore, revolutionize, scale, seize, strategize, streamline, syndicate, synergize, synthesize, target, transform, transition, utilize, visualize, whiteboard, ideate, update

$C:

abstraction, analysis, application, aquisition, archival, assessment, benchmarking, certification, clustering, computation, computing, convergence, conversion, correction, counting, debugging, decentralization, definition, demonstration, deployment, development, diffusion, discovery, display, distribution, enforcement, engineering, enhancement, exploitation, extension, fusion, identification, indexing, integration, interaction, interfacing, marketing, processing, production, protection, recognition, redefinition, research, response, separation, solution, support, tracking, transaction, transfer, transportation, updating, visualization

$D:

addiction, advice, alignment, authority, bandwidth, big data, bullshit, certificate, change, chemicals, clients, coherence, communication, confusion, content, convergence, data, deniability, e-business, e-commerce, education, encryption, energy, entertainment, estimation, eyeballs, equity, exposure, fear, feedback, greed, health, ideas, information, intelligence, knowledge, mindshare, music, networks, partnership, plausability, privacy, productivity, public relations, quality, quality assurance, reduction, relaxation, research, sales, security, software, space, speculation, stability, standards, storage, sustainability, synergy, technology, traction, traffic, transparency, trust, vacation, visibility, warfare</comment>


Ask YC: 4th Roommate in Silicon Valley in Startup House - <AUTHOR>

so, not using hackernews as a psuedo craigslist, but tons of us are often making the journey out to the valley.  We're a group of 3 startuppers looking for a 4th roommate sometime in early May.  Email:<p>jason [at] publictivity.com <comment><USER2> Hacker Classifieds: one of five big ideas on my big idea wall. If someone makes it before me, that would be awesome. It's something I want to use, not just something I think other people would like. If nobody else builds it, it will be a good learning experience for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not to barge in on Jason's thread, but if anyone else is looking for roommates in the area, please contact me (email address listed in profile.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Not interested, but out of curiosity, which part of the valley are you looking to end up in?

</comment><comment><USER5> cool. emailing. looking.

</comment><comment><USER6> sent</comment>


OHm – Om with Haskell in the middle - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/boothead/oHm/blob/master/README.md

<comment><USER2> Thanks Alex!

I really need to put a bit of effort into documenting this, but the idea is that an immutable stream of events is folded over into a model which virtual- dom then renders into the UI.

There are a couple of minimal examples here:

[https://github.com/boothead/ohm-examples](https://github.com/boothead/ohm- examples)

specifically the cannonical todo mvc one:

[https://github.com/boothead/ohm-examples/blob/master/todo- mv...](https://github.com/boothead/ohm-examples/blob/master/todo- mvc/src/Main.hs)

It's really awesome to be able to use the excellent pipes, mvc and pipes- concurrency in the browser!</comment>


Einstein's Advice to His Son on How to Accelerate Learning - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/how-to-learn-anything-faster-according-to-albert-einstein.html?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits <comment><USER2> How does this qualify as an article on Inc.? It's a few paragraphs with a bunch of links to other Inc. pages and a few other sites, but there is absolutely no value added to the raw quote.

<comment><USER3> This site was absolute garbage on my smartphone. Want to share the main quote?

<comment><USER4>
      I am very pleased that you find joy with the piano. This and carpentry are in my opinion for your age the best pursuits, better even than school. Because those are things which fit a young person such as you very well. Mainly play the things on the piano which please you, even if the teacher does not assign those. That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don't notice that the time passes. I am sometimes so wrapped up in my work that I forget about the noon meal. . . .

\-- Albert Einstein

Enjoy!

<comment><USER5> Hacker News should update its CSS. That was unreadable, with only four words visible at a time.

<comment><USER6> I don't think it's the CSS that's the problem. The commenter formatted the paragraph as code by indenting it with spaces. Code usually doesn't need wrapping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> See I am a smart scientist therefore I know what makes me smart and these few pithy words can make you smart as well. It's more or less appeals to authority...

<comment> Method-X His advice is to work on things you enjoy. The more you enjoy it, the more you learn. Cliche as it may be, it's still very sound advice.</comment></comment>