Making shit work is everyone's job - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3163-making-shit-work-is-everyones-job <comment><USER5> I've found myself saying "not my job" the other day. I took this as a confirmation that it's time to leave the company (something I felt was approaching for some time now).

This is because I'm very much the guy that "makes shit work" (comes with being a jack-of-all-trades kind of hacker, or maybe just with giving a damn about my work). "Hey, remember how we've set up that postfix-to-python email bot three years ago?" - I do. "Hey, the finance data import on the MIS is broken" - Ok, let me have a look .. there, I fixed it. This I don't mind. In fact I quite enjoy it.

However, in turn I do expect something back. The first and obvious thing I expect is that you don't mind that the software project I'm working on is going to be a few days delayed because I spent time digging in the bowels of some open source tool or staring at Wireshark. The other, and maybe not so obvious thing I expect is that you a) listen to my suggestions and b) don't get in the way of me working efficiently. What this means is that if I suggest you should go with solution A and not solution B (which your pricey external consultant suggested) and I take the time to show you several good reasons (not my job either, but comes with giving a damn) why solution A will work reliably and solution B will come biting you in the ass later, then you at least hear me out.

And then when solution B comes biting you in the ass and you come to me to work it out, at least give me the means to sort it out properly instead of forcing me to follow your pricey consultant down the slippery slope of exceedingly horrible workarounds, all of which I have to handhold him through and waste massive amounts of time because he can't use email and needs to do schedule a conference call in several days time with subjects such as "confirm the VPN is working".

Because once I'm sufficiently annoyed, I will gladly tell your consultant that something "isn't my job" just so he stops bothering me. And then I write my notice, because I don't like working like this.

<comment><USER6> You spoke from my heart! Really, you do!

<comment><USER7> Mine too! Your thoughts are spot on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe this is a response to some comments to their previous post <http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3162-the-on-call-programmer>?

I think they're completely missing the point of those comments, but regardless of that, I think there's a bigger point to be made here.

Over the years, I've noticed there are two types of developers: the ones who only want to work on interesting code/new projects/etc, and the ones who get shit done.

The first guy does NOT want to do any maintenance, only wants to work on new projects so he can get things "his own way", throws a hissy fit or refuses to do it outright when he has to dig through tons of horrible legacy code, etc.

And the second guy just gets shit done. No matter what it is, he understands that it just NEEDS to be done, and does it. He will not take it silently - sometimes, just like the first guy, he will be loud and obnoxious in voicing his opinion that this code totally sucks, what moron wrote this, and we should totally rewrite it, etc.. but then he sits down, rolls up his sleeves and does it (and then works on re-writing it in the right way, if there's time).

The first guy might be a much better programmer than the second. He will pass a technical interview with flying colors, he's usually up to date on all the latest technology, he's good and he knows it.

But after a few years of doing this, I will hire the second guy EVERY TIME.

<comment><USER9> Just curious: How would you differentiate between the first type and the second type of programmer when you hire him/her?

<comment><USER8> Good question. That's what I'm struggling with right now. There really is no way to determine this accurately at interview stage - a smart person will always figure what kind of answer you're looking for. One way is to have them describe in detail what they're doing at their current/previous positions - <USER2> they mention legacy code/doing support or maintenance, ask for more details. See how they're describing it - matter-of-factly, or in a negative way.

However, there really is no _good_ way to do this, other than to hire somebody for a trial period and have them do actual real world tasks. That's what I try to do most of the time, but unfortunately it's not always possible. If someone has better ideas, I would love to hear them.

<comment><USER10> Personally, I've found a sense of humour to be a reasonable indication - person 2 is more likely to be able to step back, smile, and say "okay, this is horrible and it's going to go badly for these reasons. But if I had to do it, I'd X the Y with Z". If they can do that and laugh about it, I get a sense of levity and perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's all well and good until you're the only one who makes "shit work" - <USER3> then you can't do your job because you're doing everyone else's job.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is deflect the person away from you and towards the code's owner just so you can get your own work done.

Sincerely, jaded (nearly ex) large company employee

<comment><USER12> Sounds like the classic free rider problem.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like the classic large corporate environment to me.

<comment><USER13> Happened to me at a small company as well. Actually it's probably more of a small company problem as "not my job" doesn't really work if there isn't anyone else to pass the job to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You will never get rich or successful if you listen to this advice: according to Gervais Principle[1], you will end up as looser.

Of course, you should tell others to behave like that.

[1] [http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais- principle-o...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or- the-office-according-to-the-office/)

<comment><USER15> Over-achievement also fits into the clueless tier. The clueless can't get rich or into upper management except by accident, but they can have successful careers as long as the psychopath upper tier sees them as useful.

In the GP corporate hierarchy, the losers tend to do the minimum required to keep their jobs. If they start making stuff work beyond their immediate job responsibilities, that's not classic loser behavior.

At one point in that series of essays, the author talks about behaviors of the psychopath. In a startup environment, the psychopath puts in a lot of effort and gets things done because that's the fastest path to getting the company off the ground.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> 37signals is catching flack for yet-another-blog-post not applying to larger institutions, but this mirrors Facebook's culture in which every employee is "QA" by serving them the latest trunk if I'm not mistaken.

Sometimes people overanalyze generalized statements to hear themselves talk. This is just how 37s makes "making shit work" everyone's job to build a great product. Apple and Fb do it their own way. And so forth.

The key ingredient is empowerment (and recruiting). Employees must be trusted to own the product and customer experience without micro-managers getting in the way by shuffling papers and responsibilities.

</comment><comment><USER17> This idea of "everyone pitches in" works only if everything else is going well too. I'm happy to pitch in to help fix something, but if the rest of the gang steadfastly refuses to do anything to make their stuff better in the future - in other words, if they keep writing piss poor code knowing that I'll be the one to "pitch in" when it crashes - then thanks but no thanks.

I'm truly grateful when others step in to fix something I broke, but I then need to learn from them so I don't do it again. I was working with a team recently and kept breaking some of their git process with my check-ins. Code worked, but I was doing something that went against their flow. Took me a while to sort it out, and I felt bad because it was costing one of the other guys time. I finally grokked what he was asking for, and I've caused much less downtime.

His attitude initially was "hey, that's no sweat - I can fix this up". That started wearing thin by the 4th mistake, and I could tell. I felt bad, but eventually got to the point where I'm not slowing them down anymore.

I've been on teams where other people continually write crap code - <USER4> bothering to even check if it works - then _I_ have the bad attitude for not fixing it: not being a "team player", etc. That's gotta work both ways.

So, yeah, "not my job" isn't a great attitude. You do have to ask tho, when you see that attitude, how much of it is endemic to that person, and how much of it is caused by something more systemic in the organization?

</comment><comment><USER18> Not sure I understand the reasons for pointing the obvious, especially using such ambiguous line of reasoning.

I disagree with:

"Oh, that's not my job," is the sound of doom. Maybe not imminent doom, but doom indeed.

because I have seen multinational companies [revenue $25B, $43B], where culture and many employee's attitude was "Oh, that's not my job,". These companies Net Income is billions of USD. Not sure I see how they are doomed. I would be glad to be doomed with $1B of annual income [after taxes].

I think it is important be realistic and understand that instilling such [make shit work] attitude is only possible in a small start-up or bootstrapped company, and only when most of the senior people posses such attitude.

As for the bigCo:

\- It is statistically not possible to have A players with can do/will do attitude, when the company size grows above certain threshold. So eventually you pick-up some B/C/D people, who would start playing games.

\- I have tried several times to put together a small team of doers within bigCo - it never works in the end because overall culture overpowers and draines you.

\- My advice for a doer would be simple - either [1] calm down to avoid burnout [inevitable when everybody is dumping on you] or [2] run and find a place where your attitude and strengths will be appreciated, or even better, find a place and run....

</comment><comment><USER19> This happens all the time in big companies, people are especially wont to throw the shit over the fence to another team they don't work with. I found it interesting how Steve Jobs dealt with this reality.

 _The janitor gets to explain why something went wrong. Senior people do not. "When you're the janitor," Jobs has repeatedly told incoming VPs, "reasons matter." He continues: "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering." That "Rubicon," he has said, "is crossed when you become a VP._

[http://onproductmanagement.net/2011/05/12/leaders-dont- make-...](http://onproductmanagement.net/2011/05/12/leaders-dont-make-excuses- crossing-the-rubicon-of-product-leadership/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I am totally a 'make shit work' kind of guy, regardless if it's my job or not, because I wouldn't be happy otherwise. But the other side to this story is my friend Chad Meadows, who is the most competent person I know. Chad will specifically take on lower-paying roles because he doesn't want to deal with the paperwork and related crap that comes up. Chad will put 110% into his job, but he'll refuse to do the crap he isn't being paid for--which is totally reasonable.

This case sets up a more generalizable rule, which is that if you're expected to make shit work, you should be compensated for it. When you're in a startup, making all the shit _is_ everyone's job description, and it's part of your paycheck, too, in the form of equity.

</comment><comment><USER21> Seth Godin talks about this in "This Is Broken" (<http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_this_is_broken_1.html>).

</comment><comment><USER22> The problem with this attitude is that you have to be sure you actually know what your doing. I used to have this sort of macho attitude where I was sure I could fix any technical problem ever.

I saw it as a personal insult if anybody I knew took _any_ technical problems to anybody other than me. The problem with this is that you will often end up out of your depth flailing around in the waters of diminishing returns.

I am now a little older and wiser. For example, recently I was asked by someone if I could take a look at their Exchange server problem after I was done fixing something else. Of course the Exchange Server had not been configured by me but rather by a 3rd party consultant but they assumed I would be able to fix the issue quicker and cheaper.

Now I have a reasonable grasp of email (well I wrote a basic POP3 server in Java as a college project). But I have never used Exchange before or taken any courses on it. And I had no understanding of this particular Exchange setup. I could probably have fixed the issue after a bunch of RTFM, but would it have taken me 10 minutes? 10 hours? 10 days? I have literally no idea.

There is also the risk of bumbling into doing something that seemed right but would have screwed something up and had the guy who originally set it up badmouth me.

In the end, I just did some basic diagnostics on the users computers looking at mail headers etc in outlook when this was fruitless I offered to call their 3rd party consultant and describe the issue to them as I saw it but insisted I could not do anything further than that.

</comment><comment><USER23> _Making shit work is everyone's job_

Would someone diagram "shit work" for me?

Is it noun verb or adjective noun?

<comment><USER24> Noun verb. You could replace "shit" with "stuff."

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Once the mentality cements, everything is eventually someone else's job, and > they're being a toad for inconveniencing you with it.

There's so many parts to this that they actually need unpacking.

Someone discovers a problem... are they responsible for it?

Someone can't do an aspect of their work... how hard have they tried before seeking help? How busy is everyone else?

There's five things broken, is the new one higher priority than the other four?

You can tell when the situation's right: several people volunteer to help, one steps up, responsibility is shared. Likewise, when it's wrong, there's that awkward... silence...

I'm glad to read even a short post about this. My feeling is that people are mistaken if they think they can give away responsibility for something. Someone must choose to _take_ it from you, and in all cases you share responsibility for getting it resolved.

</comment><comment><USER26> "Oh, that's not my job," is usually what folks say when they _can't_ do the "shit" that needs to be done.

It's what people say when they want to save face and not be labelled as someone who "can't do it".

It's a defense mechanism.

<comment><USER27> I think you're right most of the time, but I wonder if there's not also a certain personality type that like that, regardless of their actual competency level, that prefers doing as little as possible.

I wish one of my ex-employers had been better at filtering out that type of people.

<comment><USER28> There's also a certain personality type that just really wants things to be done by the right person. That's something I need to consciously overcome: this is not rightfully my job, but I'm going to do it anyway, because that's the most useful thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > programmers will wake up in the middle of the night if a sql query tipped > over and needs an urgent rewrite until faster servers can arrive

I sure as hell don´t wanna work there.

</comment><comment><USER30> I run into this all the time at work. I'm the guy who makes "shit" work at our under-manned start-up. Lately I'm finding it to my detriment because

a. management releases shit as-is instead of using it as a temporary solution and dedicating resources to finding a better permanent solution

b. other developers hit me over the head with their pedantic view of how it should have been implemented, which would probably thrown the project months or even a year off-schedule

It's a thankless job.

</comment><comment><USER31> I sometimes find myself saying, "That's not my job" in the same sense that Murtaugh would sometimes say, "I'm too old for this shit." Nevertheless, it's easy to complain that employees in large companies don't care about the big picture; in many cases, the organization itself tends to punish people who go beyond their mandate to get stuff done.

</comment><comment><USER7> Okay, I will make shit work. No problem. The fix will take a little time, but it will solve the issue permanently. What do you mean we don't have time for that? Sure, this is something the consultant can work on. Just remember he wrote this code originally. [puts headphones on and starts looking for another gig]

</comment><comment><USER32> Now what if the leadership are the ones telling the grunts in the trenches "it's not your job"?

</comment><comment><USER33> The problem with that philosophy is that one bad apple spoils the bunch.

</comment><comment><USER34> Just don't break it while you're trying to be a hero.</comment>


Mt. Gox and the Mother of All Short Squeezes - <AUTHOR> http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/05/20/2162507/mt-gox-and-the-mother-of-all-short-squeezes/ <comment><USER2> > There was, however, one problem with such a plan. Any market where you > yourself are the chief liquidity provider and in which flows remain pretty > one-sided is also a market where you end up taking on the risk, regardless > of whether or not you're front-running your customers, benefiting from > privileged information or setting withdrawal limits — this is largely > because you're dealing with paper profit creation. In some cases, a self- > fulfilling feedback loop might even occur in which no matter how much > bitcoin you pre-buy to sell to your customers at a premium, the underlying > capital needed to acquire the bitcoin becomes proportionally ever larger in > ratio terms. So you end up short-squeezing yourself to ruin.

So they speculate that he started with a bitcoin shortfall and attempted to buy bitcoins on his own exchange to buy his way out of the shortfall, but in doing so exacerbated the problem by increasing the price of bitcoin because mt. gox was really the only buyer of any size on teh exchange?

I can't think of another market where this has occurred. Can anyone else come up with a similar scenario that's played out like this in the past?

Worth reading the referenced article as well:

[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/05/19/behind- the-...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/05/19/behind-the-biggest- bitcoin-heist-in-history-inside-the-implosion-of-mt-gox.html)

<comment><USER3> I as also trying to understand this. I think what they're saying is that MtGox had more demand for bitcons than supply -- and the whole market did generally. When demand increases faster than supply, the price must rise. So by losing 80kBTC, they were in the same situation as if they had shorted 80kBTC. They benefit from the price going down, and suffer from the price going up.

And moreover, to act as a liquidity provider when the market movement isn't random, but instead most people are buying BTC which is going up, is also a money losing position -- MtGox is the only seller of BTC which keeps rising. I think this implies they were buying BTC off-exchange.

But since MtGox users are buying more than selling, MtGox doesn't have to convert their cash back into BTC -- MtGox's losses are occurring in BTC and are essentially invisible, but when they lose money in BTC, they are effectively increasing their short position.

I'm not fully seeing how the feedback loop would operate, I think you'd need to factor in MtGox's total capital, their short postion, and the market size ... I can see how their position gets worse and worse.

I can't think of any historical precedent though. The final result is kind of like the Salad Oil Swindle, but the path taken is different.

edit: maybe a bucket shop in bull market would be a similar mechanism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there a way to read this article without signing up for something?

<comment><USER5> click the web link above</comment></comment>


Rural Americans can't check email or use credit cards because of slow Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/11/17/rural-americans-cant-check-email-or-use-credit-cards-because-theyre-still-stuck-with-slow-internet-officials-say.html <comment><USER2> Don't worry, under Pai's new standards, ISPs will add extra fees for the ability of your internet connection to process credit cards. No extra guarantee of reliability of course, just extra fees. And no your city can't help because the same political party regular accepts bribes from said ISP to prevent local votes from mattering.

Fox News spun this into an anti-tax spiel, of course.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting article.

> Some small-town residents say it's nearly impossible to do simple tasks like > check email and stream videos. Eric Pelka, a post office employee in Julian, > Pa., told Fox News at times they had to turn seven to eight people away a > day because of poor Internet connection.

I'd also wager that it stops some people from moving to the area. I recently was looking to move to a rural area and a make or break factor was internet. I passed on so many beautiful locations because there was no internet available.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely. I'd love to live in a less populated area. The requirements would be:

Gas and grocery within 30 minutes (should be easy). Doctor within 30 minutes. Usable internet (stream SD videos).

<comment><USER5> There's 5000 emergency rooms and 3500 Walmarts in the US.

So the first two don't narrow things down a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What I read from this: Lots of image and javascript-laden webpages are leaving people out in ways their developers may not be aware of. Why should you need broadband to pay your credit card bill? You shouldn't. Yet when I think of the heavy web UI I see when I pay my cards, yes, it's not surprising.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can't even imagine living in an area without 3 supermarkets in walking distance and broadband cable/4G.

As someone once famously tweeted: "why would you live there". Although I guess you can see the stars at night?

<comment><USER8> You live there because you don't have to put up with the crowds that necessitate having three grocery stores. I mean, $DEITY H. $DEITY on a pogo stick, you need _three_ stores from which to buy your food or you can't imagine living here? You're being sarcastic and it went right over my head, right?

<comment><USER9> I totally don't mind crowds, but I do mind most everything needed daily be available within a walking distance, and the ability to find that particular item in one of four grocery stores closest to my apartment. This, and never having to drive. (So I live in New York.) </offtopic>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem is line attenuation 90% of the time in middle america</comment>


Should i blog about web2py? - <AUTHOR>

It's my favorite web framework besides rails especially since I can use it with mongodb or google app engine but I'm not sure if ppl would read it. I have a lot to say but worry<p>since its everyone <comment><USER2> if you blog about it, let me know, i'll love reading about it!

</comment><comment><USER3> Just go ahead and do it - getting 3-4 odd replies on here telling you what to do isn't a convincing argument for/against doing it.

For what it's worth; you'll probably get more traction/responses on a web2py community than on here.

</comment><comment><USER4> Go for it. I love to read it, learn from it.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd be happy to read :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Who doesn't like on HN especially the people downvote me so much.

</comment><comment><USER6> JUST DO IT!</comment>


List of Inventors Killed By Their Own Inventions - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_their_own_inventions

<comment><USER2> Wikipedia is amazing.

I was going to write "For all its faults..." but I suddenly realised that Wikipedia has never been anything less than fantastic in anything I've experienced. All the bad stuff has been related to me 3rd hand and the vast majority of it seemed to be coming from cranks with axes to grind.

I'm saddened that it isn't celebrated more, but take solace in the fact that it has, fairly quietly considering, become a fundamental part of the internet and our society.

<comment><USER3> _cranks with axes to grind_

Every wikipedia critic I know used to be a huge wikipedia fan until something they deeply cared about was either screwed up, vandalized, or deleted.

I bet one internet cookie that if/when this happens to you, you will be as passionately anti-wikipedia as you are now pro-wikipedia.

<comment><USER4> This seems odd: I don't know any person who is a directly anti-wikipedia, but I do know several people who are against wikipedia. They don't active talk bad about it, but they're the type of people who say "You can believe anything written on there, it was just written by people". Due to the ease of editing, they feel that it means nothing is fact-checked.

On the other hand, I know one of the administrators there, and he has shown me several pages of the hate-mongering he gets, mostly for just being an admin. Some of it has merit (for example, a good chunk of it was because of one particular article he moderated, and the side that lost did not lose gracefully), but most of it is just people jumping on him because they feel they are being denied their right to, well, write.

I rarely see any well thought out, cohesive arguments for re-structuring wikipedia. Most of what I see is little more than "I hate that admin, he said I wasn't notable enough for a page. Lets go egg his house!"

<comment><USER5> _I rarely see any well thought out, cohesive arguments for re-structuring wikipedia._

I see no reason for an internet encyclopedia to copy the shortcomings of a paper encyclopedia as closely as wikipedia does.

Paper and shelf space are expensive and limited, you have to limit the articles and the article size.

On the other hand, HD space is cheap and text small and easily greatly compressed.

Searching in paper is hard. Searching on a computer is easy. There's no reason to have one article be THE article. Articles could be write only, unmodifiable, and search-able by their contents, their ranking by the general public, their ranking by a group of experts, their ranking of any selected group, by the hash of their text, etc.

There could be some built in redundancy, like a short encyclopedia style article on top of an incredibly deep Ph.D level dissertation article.

In short, I find wikipedia cludgy and inexplicably mimicking the short comings of paper.

<comment><USER6> > I rarely see any well thought out, cohesive arguments for re-structuring > wikipedia.

Yes, there are a few (such as the examples to improve citizendium). The first would be to remove anonymity. If the editors are know it would improve quality and would help to bring in specialists from fields.

Currently WP is now a vehicle for anonymous slander. Lies simply get repeated. Things do not have to be true – it just have to be on another website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Franz Reichelt (1800s – 1912), a tailor, fell to his death off the first deck of the Eiffel Tower while testing his invention, the coat parachute. It was his first ever attempt with the parachute and he had told the authorities in advance he would test it first with a dummy."

He did.

<comment> n-named I'm having a hard time up modding you for this comment on this site.

<comment><USER8> It's not that tricky. You just click the ^

<comment> n-named The comment is mean. It's not intellectually stimulating. I meant I don't think it belongs here. Downmod me if you like for expressing that opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Phew, no computer scientists on the list.

<comment><USER10> Maybe Turing was killed by a time travelling robot he later invented?

<comment><USER8> Well, he _was_ killed by the government he helped save from Nazi conquest.

Not quite killed by his invention, though.

<comment><USER11> Actually the time traveling robot's mission was to come back as a young man, known as Arnold Murray. with whom Turing would become infatuated. The purpose of this mission was an evolution of the continued misunderstanding of the philosophical nature of the Turing test and it's human centric definition of intellect. The robot's inventor figured that if he proved the robot was "at least as intelligent" as Turing by causing him to fall in love with it, it would thereby pass the Turing Test.

A similar robot was sent for Church, but he couldn't understand it's lisp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think in this discussion of the Titanic, the phrase "[the design] proved to be much more sinkable than he had anticipated" is probably against some sort of wikipedia guideline. You're not _supposed_ to be laughing...

</comment><comment><USER13> _Thomas Andrews (1873 – 1912) died with 1,516 others when his innovative, "unsinkable" design for the RMS Titanic proved to be much more sinkable than he had anticipated._

Seems to be a little violation of NPOV, and a very sad one at that, but I can't help but grin.

</comment><comment><USER14> There are less than two dozen names. I expected the list to be longer, given the breadth of human creativity and propensity for risk taking.

</comment><comment><USER15> Perillos of Athens and his brazen bull are prominently missing. Perhaps one of the oldest and creepiest stories of that kind.

<comment><USER16> According to Wikipedia (haha), he was tortured in his device, but it didn't actually kill him.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazen_bull>

<comment><USER15> Oh, OK. It's been a while since I read that story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> No robotics section yet...

<comment><USER18> _There is one very important difference between what can be built as an experiment and the commercial Segway: The commercial one has a lot of safety features, redundancy and fool-proofing. Mine has none whatsoever (Well, it does have a kill switch so it doesn't go zooming away if I fall off, and it does shut down if it finds itself tipped more than 45 degrees.) Those details are kind of important, and you should think about them carefully before considering building such a thing yourself. With a scooter like this, if it stops working for any reason (software crash, hardware failure, low battery) you will fall, hard, and probably on your face. Imagine zipping along at 10 MPH, and suddenly the platform you're standing on stops dead. Oh, and there's a T-bar in front of you to trip you up if you start to run. So you really shouldn't try to replicate this experiment, and I can't be responsible for what happens if you read this and try to build something._

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> _Percy Pilcher, English aviation pioneer died flying a waterlogged glider when potential investors had been invited to watch._

Talk about a bad demo day ...

</comment><comment><USER20> Hoisted by one's own petard...

</comment><comment><USER21> Reading this, I kept stumbling over typos and awkward sentence constructions. The content was interesting, but I feel like the writing was much worse than your average Wikipedia article. I wonder why.

<comment><USER15> It is peppered with sarcasm and smirks, which is generally not what you find in a good Wikipedia piece.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thomas Midgley, Jr. seems like the most unfortunate.

</comment><comment><USER22> Happy to see no software inventors (yet).

<comment><USER23> Nothing wrong with the software, it's the user who's at fault.</comment></comment>


Tech Education Con - barry-cotter https://jacobinmag.com/2019/01/stem-coding-bootcamp-education-scam-philanthropy/ <comment> barry-cotter > It makes sense that these companies are playing the long game on skills and > wages. Labor is among their most expensive costs, with tech worker salaries > running to the low six figures at Facebook and Google. But with few workers > possessing the skills to do these jobs, a competitive salary is the only way > that tech companies can compete for talent today.

> There is no reason tech workers should expect disproportionately high > salaries to be permanent, however. Execs are already doing what they can to > suppress wages. The shorter-term strategies are clear. Tech companies > collude via anti-poaching schemes to keep wages down. They use non-compete > disclosures to push wages down by forbidding workers to get jobs from > competitors. They also take advantage of the H-1B visa, hiring immigrant > workers for cheaper than their American counterparts.</comment>


Sigmund Jähn, the first German to travel into space - <AUTHOR> https://www.zeit.de/wissen/geschichte/2018-08/sigmund-jaehn-first-german-in-space-gdr/komplettansicht <comment><USER2> The German movie "Good Bye, Lenin!"

> > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Bye,_Lenin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Bye,_Lenin)!

made Sigmund Jähn pretty well-known in West Germany, too. In the story of the movie, the protagonist convinces a taxi driver (who is or resembles the cosmonaut Sigmund Jähn, the first German in space and Alex's childhood hero) to act in a false news report as the new leader of East Germany and to give a speech about opening the borders to the West.

If you can read German, read the following article at Heise about the 40 year celebration of Sigmund Jähn's space flight:

> [https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Ich-hatte-einfach- > Gl...](https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Ich-hatte-einfach-Glueck- > Vor-40-Jahren-flog-Sigmund-Jaehn-ins-All-4141535.html)

On 1999, the German band "Die Prinzen" (which was quite popular in the 90s and 00s) created a song "Wer ist Sigmund Jähn?" to celebrate this "unknown cosmonaut":

> > [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY6uRERGWBw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY6uRERGWBw)

<comment><USER3> Speaking of, this 2003 movie is doing a great job illustrating resurgence of nationalism in Russia circa 2014-2018. It's also a fun movie.

<comment><USER2> > this 2003 movie is doing a great job illustrating resurgence of nationalism > in Russia circa 2014-2018.

Could you elaborate on this point somewhat more?

<comment><USER3> Sure thing.

Spoiler alert.

One of main characters of "Goodbye, Lenin" is an East-German woman who earnestly worked building up the Socialist society and earned high-ranking position, but then she fell into a coma to wake months up after the wall came down. Most of what was built during the soviet times has been or was being thrown out - cars, furniture, food, TV programming, clothing, display advertising. So basically all that she worked for, and was proud of, was thrown to the trash.

This undermined her life-long accomplishments, sense of importance, sense of self. Except that it didn't, because her son hid everything from her, as she lay in bed recovering, he draped he windows, brought in old furniture and food, created(!) fake TV program for her, and even brought in kids to pose as Socialist-era uniformed boy-scouts. Eventually unable to keep up the charade he made a video in which Western Germany begged, and was allowed to join Eastern Germany. He took the video of Easterners jumping over the wall to the West and reversed it - it was the Westerners now jumping over to the East. She came to accept the new unified-Germany reality, under these terms, and recovered from her illness.

Russian citizens suffered two big problems since the wall fell. First, in the 90s the economy was devastated by the governmental mismanagement, pervasive corruption, and general feebleness of the state. Second, in the oughts the economy improved (thanks to oil prices), but the populace started feeling that Russian contribution to and influence on the world is unappreciated, and maybe even mocked by the west. The the cold war's end, which started out like a truce between equals, was now looking more like a defeat (the theme fo treachery came up as it always does), the turning point there was ascension of the Baltic states to NATO. The industrial achievement of the older generations looked increasingly less important, and there were very few new industrial achievements (see "Dutch disease"). The recent military campaigns did not deliver, and when the subject comes up it goes all the way back to WW2. The soft foreign influence waned with the collapse of the Eastern block and flailing economy. The science was pretty much defunded in the 90s and it took a big hit.

Having once been a part of a great project, and no longer struggling to eat every day, people now wanted to get back the sense of importance and glory. And so a virtual parade of past achievements was deployed to sooth the pain, both in the movie and in the real life. A huge part of the modern-day Russian media coverage is dedicated to the achievements of the old days: WW2, the noble Tsarist regime, the heroic Bolshevik regime, the classic literature, the scientists of earlier centuries, the soviet-era cosmonauts, etc. It's quite a mix really, and can be baffling at first but there is a thread tying them up - pride and dignity. And it's not just the government either - you will find a ton of nostalgic material on social media, even predating the 2012 change in policy. I think the government is responding to the nostalgia trend they mined from the social networks, and extending it, which I think is rather innovative.

So anyway, I thought of this all when I was re-watching the movie recently, and the puzzle pieces came together for me. Maybe they will for you, maybe not.

<comment><USER4> > The the cold war's end, which started out like a truce between equals...

Maybe it was taught that way in Russian schools, but I don't know anyone in any part of the West who considers the end of the Cold War to have been a "truce between equals." The Soviet Union collapsed. The Russian Federation is the internationally recognized successor state to a failed empire. It was so in the 90s as much as it is so today.

<comment> em-bee the cold war itself started out as a truce between equals

<comment><USER4> Thanks, that makes more sense. I clearly parsed the sentence badly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, what a fantastic thing to see that photo of a cosmonaut wearing the the old DDR patch. For me it's a curiously sentimental mix of the idealism of modern day progress and forgotten historic nostalgia. The first of which I still believe in, and the second of which seems more of a ruefully likely prospect to have to consider as I age.

Thank you for sharing the article.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if studying to become an astronaut around the world (like for NASA or JAXA, etc.) there is required reading on Jahn or if they just become fans of a cult hero like him?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tbh, taking the example of a country that didn't disappear, very few people in France would know who the first Frenchman in space was. Then he was not relentlessly hyped by a state propaganda apparatus.

In the grand scheme of things, all but Gagarin and Armstrong are also ran...

<comment><USER8> I wonder how much the UK public remembers the first Britons in space Helen Sharman, curiously it was the Soviets who sent her to space.

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

<comment><USER9> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronauts_by_first_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronauts_by_first_flight)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The first and only Afghan in space now lives in Germany. He was an officer in the soviet-created air force in the 80s.

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

When Anousheh Ansari went to space as a paid "tourist", first Iranian in space, it was on like page 10 of Iranian newspapers in Tehran, because she is both an American citizen and quite firmly a political opponent of the current Iranian government system.

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

</comment><comment><USER11> Probably because when his country was annexed to the federal republic 28 years ago, the new governors decided that everything that took place in the 40 years before was worthless and had to be forgotten. Well, everything except the bad things like the state security, which we have to remember every day. That's why we have the Stasi museum and things like that.

<comment><USER12> I remember a lot of east germans who rather wanted to be "annexed" than living further in the dull DDR. But if you want, we can build the wall again. I heard the american president is also a huge fan of walls nowadays.

<comment><USER11> Well, that doesn't change anything about how the reunification was done and how the East Germany history was summarized into the wall and the state police, leaving everything else out of the picture, as this article points out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As far as I know he was also the last east german to travel to space, or wasn't he?

<comment><USER2> > As far as I know he was also the last east german to travel to space, or > wasn't he?

This issue is somewhat subtle. Let us look at the list of German astronauts:

> > [https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Liste_deutscher_R...](https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Liste_deutscher_Raumfahrer&oldid=181491223)

If you consider "East German" as "born in the GDR", also Ulf Merbold, the second German in space, who is seen as the first West German in space, is actually East German. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was recently in Mongolia, and one of the more memorable sights (in a country packed to the brim with them) awaited me next to the station building in the godforsaken town of Choir, a heat-blasted former Soviet military base in the middle of the Gobi Desert. The scenery all around was rocky desert, battered commieblock apartments and barbed wire... and a solitary silver Socialist Realist statue of Jügderdemidiin Gürragchaa, the first & only Mongolian in space, proudly springing off into the skies.

[https://driftingclouds.net/2018/07/07/from-siberia-to- tibet-...](https://driftingclouds.net/2018/07/07/from-siberia-to-tibet- ulaanbaatar-gorkhi-terelj-and-the-gobi-desert/) (photo towards the end)

Mongolia, too, seems very much like a country trying to forget its long Socialist era, and there were no statues of the guy to be seen in the bright lights of Ulaanbaatar.

</comment><comment><USER14> I always wondered why the west didn't push a west german citizen to go to space with one of the later missions, given how much Jähn's flight was considered a success of socialism by eastern propaganda.

Quite a propaganda qoup, I'd say.</comment>


Now a Giant, Google Works to Retain Nimble Minds - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/technology/29google.html?_r=1

<comment><AUTHOR> What I wonder is, how much of this is simply inevitable? As a company grows larger it is bound to have more bureaucracy and become more sluggish. The best and brightest, especially those looking to work somewhere that is more agile will inevitably leave which causes a slow and painful brain drain in the company.

I have to think this has happened at most other tech companies in the past. I am sure at one time, Microsoft was looked at as a great place to work. Apple may have experienced a similar brain drain, especially in the 90s when Steve Jobs was out.

Then I have to wonder how you can counteract it. The only thing I can really think of is maybe if you ran the company like a decentralized flat organization where teams/products are virtually autonomous. I can only think of maybe one case where this has worked out, but its outside of tech.

<comment><USER2> what case are you referring to?

<comment><AUTHOR> Berkshire Hathaway. Almost all of the business units are run by hungry entrepreneurs that live and breathe the business. They sold to Berkshire as a means of cashing out but most of the managers love to compete and stay on. As a result, they get to operate with an unusually high level of autonomy, I believe some of the managers only communicate with the home office once a year.

I think though the only reason that works is because Berkshire is buying great businesses with great managers at the helm. When you get into turnarounds/distressed businesses you end up having to roll up your sleeves and get involved much more frequently.

<comment><USER3> If you want to run a decentralized conglomerate, you have to look at what service you're providing the managers who actually run the business units. Otherwise, they're better off remaining independent, and you'll end up with a portfolio of mediocre businesses that consume more than they produce.

For Berkshire Hathaway, that service is liquidity. Buffett provides businesses with a large lump sum of cash, enough to ensure that they and their heirs will never have to work again unless they choose to. In return, they can continue running the business exactly as they did before. For many entrepreneurs, that's a very useful service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The story about Google engineers taking offers from Facebook is seriously overblown. Google is a huge company (>10k employees) and there's always going to be some amount of churn. People don't work at a single company for their whole life anymore. Sure, Lars Rasmussen leaving was newsworthy, but was it really surprising to anybody after the death of Google Wave?

Overall Google still hires orders of magnitude more people than it loses.

</comment><comment><USER5> They're missing the _real_ story of what's going on right now. Because of a variety of circumstances, like...

* recession

* weak job market

* convergence of mobile/web/social technologies

* cloud computing reducing startup costs

... we are experiencing one of the biggest technological entrepreneurial boom times in history. That's why Google can't hold onto their brightest developers... but it's probably also happening to every big company in the computing industry.

<comment><USER6> While it's true that we have entrepreneurial boom, I don't think it's caused by the things you listed.

Recession/weak job market for programmers is a thing of the past, at least in Silicon Valley. See the hiring volume of Google and other established companies and Google and others publicly declaring it's a "war for talent". In a recession a company doesn't give 10% raise to every employee and has 2000+ open jobs.

Startup costs for web-based companies have been ridiculously low for the past 5 years. Several years ago I've been leasing a decent server for $100/month. Reducing this to $50/month has no meaningful impact on startup costs.

As to convergence - I don't see how that's relevant. There's always some "next big thing" that fires up people's imagination and fueling their startup ambitions.

If I were to opine, I would say that the biggest reason for the boom is stratospheric raise of Y Combinator and other companies following that model + raise of TechCrunch which focuses on reporting happenings in the startup world.

<comment><USER5> You've got it backwards. Techcrunch and YC are not in any way responsible for the economic environment that has been forming over the past decade. We're experiencing the second wave of the tech boom from the 1990's. TC and YC are cheerleaders for what was already occurring.

* Recession/weak job market for programmers is a thing of the past, at least in Silicon Valley.

The job market is weak, in terms of quality jobs and pay. Outside SV the job market for job seekers is absymal. There are many skilled programmers who don't live in SV and can earn more money developing websites and web apps than they can in the job market. Companies are being left with open jobs and unable to fill them because the talent is being eliminated from the job pool.

* Reducing this to $50/month has no meaningful impact on startup costs.

I was referring to the large-scale cloud computing, not replacing virtual dedicated hosts with VPS. I don't have exact numbers but I'd gamble that it costs 2 orders of magnitude less money to develop a large-scale datacenter than it did a decade ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the outside, as a mere user of Google's services, it seems like unless you're working on something like Chrome OS, the most/best you can do as a developer is make sure nothing breaks. What are the biggest stories you read about Gmail?

At Facebook on the other hand, virtually any internal project could change, well, everything. There's an excitement to that which Google can't/won't offer. Facebook's business is change; all they think about all day is how to change things. Google has a vested interest in things staying the same (again, with the exception of Chrome OS).

Maybe the coding challenges Google faces just don't have the sex appeal Facebook's have. Maybe the "slowing down" they say Google is going through isn't about size or the limitations that come with. Maybe Google's just not as cutting-edge, not as thrilling as it once was. Maybe working for Zuckerberg and his 500 million closest friends, changing the way we communicate, and with a _chance_ at being part of something revolutionary, is now most thrilling thing out there. Maybe by a lot.

<comment><USER8> I seem to have taken the same set of facts and arrived at the complete opposite conclusion from you. Facebook is sitting on one of the most popular, trafficked web sites in history and what have they given us: IM, photo sharing, a Twitter clone, a FourSquare clone, a social bookmarking knockoff, and now, wait for it ... e-mail!! "A _chance_ at being part of something revolutionary" ... talk about understatement.

Say what you will about Google, they have _failed_ at more original concepts over the past couple years than Facebook has attempted over the course of its entire existence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "And like many big companies, Google has been acquiring new technologies, like Android, instead of inventing them."

Google acquired Android? Did I miss something or should that be reversed?

<comment><USER10> <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/android>

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the link. Totally missed that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No new information in the article, I wonder why so many newspapers keep rehashing this 'story'.

<comment><USER12> Because they like these types of conflict narratives. It has a really good hook: Underdog vs Giant Corp who not long ago was everybody's favorite.</comment></comment>


Young web dev asking what language to learn? - <AUTHOR>

Over my summer break from uni I want to go away and learn a language which will further my skills as a web dev. What's the best to learn? JavaScript, Ruby, PHP? Any good books or sites which will help me learn one of the above. Is there something else I should be thinking about? <comment><USER2> I'll try to help you giving you my point of view. It's a polemic subject I hope it doesn't start a flame war.

JavaScript is a very important language for web development. You can build web apps using it exclusivelly (called single-page applications) or running on a web server (with Node.js). I wouldn't advise any of these approaches to someone just learning web development, though. Single-page applications will required understanding and possibly implementing server APIs, and Node.js is a bit too new for beginners, or at least that's my perception.

Ruby (with Rails) is possibly one of the most popular choices nowadays for web development. I think the Ruby language itself is probably harder to fully grasp than others. But there's a lot of learning resources, just look for Rails books, tutorials and videos.

PHP is a very practical language, to extremes. It's newby-friendly and has been very popular. I have reservations about it because I think beginners are attracted to it and they don't know enough about pitfals (like, for instance, global variables) and end up creating code that can be very hard to understand, debug, maintain, not to speak keep safe against exploits.

Another popular option that's missing from your list is Python. It is a very good language, relatively simple to learn with less mystery than JavaScript or Ruby, for instance, and that promotes better code quality than PHP. Frameworks such as Django, web2py and Turbogears provide good foundations for web development (each in its own style). Django, for instance, has a great tutorial. And there are tons of learning resources about Python, such as <http://learnpythonthehardway.org/>

So my advice, is, either learn enough Ruby to start playing with Rails, or try Python, possibly with Django.

Myself, I'm currently very happy with C# over the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC stack.

Good luck and feel free to ask any further questions.

<comment><USER3> If you decide to go with Python, consider a micro framework like bottle.py or Flask. There is less to learn to get productive. If you do anything non- trivial you will end up using a database. MySQL, PostgreSQL are most used. You may want to look in to a noSQL database like MongoDB. I find working with MongoDB very productive, especially when you are figuring / learning things on the go.

Recommended by others in this thread as well but try Coffeescript to write your Javascript and use JQuery for code that works in different browsers.

<comment><USER2> For an absolute beginner, I think a more integrated solution might provide a less frustrating learning curve. Selecting, learning and integrating a full web stack is no trivial task.

<comment><USER3> The larger frameworks might have a better out of the box experience because of the 101 videos and tutorials. Smaller frameworks do have some getting started material as well. I find you are also learning a lot about how to do it the framework's way (HTML helpers, ORMs) while not really learning the underlying technology (HTML, SQL). That's going to hinder you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow ... there are so many possible answers but I would definitely start with Javascript. Don't learn the whole language, just the "Good Parts". And that would be my first book recommendation - "Javascript: The Good Parts".

With that foundation, you could learn Coffeescript, NodeJS, JQuery, etc. Since you're talking about server side software, Javascript combined with NodeJS will give you both client-side (browser) and server-side capabilities.

You should take a look at the industries you want to join when you graduate to decide what back-end language you should learn. If you're working in a Fortune 500 company you're going to see lots of Java/J2EE. RoR is highly touted but not as wide-spread as you might guess. PHP and Perl are still widely used and there are popular Python frameworks as well.

Have a fun summer and good luck!

<comment><USER5> I agree. As it stands now it would make the most sense to learn JavaScript, then I would learn jQuery if I were you, then move into sockets and node.js. You could then use this one language for the frontend and server-side.

Don't learn Java. The applet is dead. [Java Hate]

<comment><USER4> Whoa! ... The Applet is definitely dead, but I included that in my list of languages for the back-end server (and in Fortune 500 environments). It may not be considered cool, but there are still a lot of companies using it.

<comment><USER2> You're right, and "a lot" is an understatement... there is a whole lot more than a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Whatever language you choose, I think you need to at least be able to work a little with javascript, since it's ubiquitous on the web.

As for myself, I picked Java and GWT for a first app since I'm familiar with Java. Going this route exposed me to the full stack of web development(front/back, server admin, security, databases, etc.) rather than staying confined to a language specific tutorial. In the process I found I needed to use javascript quite a bit (using Facebook APIs, integrating with Mixpanel for analytics, etc.) Now I'm looking to learn more javascript, as well as a sexier web language like python or ruby haha.

Anyway, the front-end of a web application will be HTML, CSS and javascript; the backend is what will have the other languages like php, ruby, etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> Don't just learn; master.

HTML, Javascript, and CSS are a given. You have to learn them. To be good, you have to know them like the back of your hand. You need to know how far you can take them before they break, which means you need to break them. Over and over again.

Next choose a backend platform. This is where the magic starts happening. You can choose any of the popular platforms; it doesn't matter as much as you might think. You won't be able to make the magic until you MASTER your backend language. Take it over the limit. Break it. Over and over.

There will be a steep learning curve. There will be times where you hate it. You will get confused. You will get in over your head. Don't worry, you have to. All of the people you admire have been in over their heads. Being in over your head is your job.

Expectations grow steadily and the quality of our tools do not. The people that make it in this industry are the ones that can figure out how to create better experiences using our relatively over-complex and wonky tools.

When you run out of ways to break your platform, try getting closer to the metal.

<comment><USER7> I work in C#. Sometimes through asp.net, sometimes through sockets, sometimes through WCF, sometimes in client applications, sometimes in windows services. If you're cool with sticking to windows, c# is great.

I hear Java devs are making the most right now.

<comment><USER7> The best advice I can give you is this: if you can't build it, you can't understand it. If you can't understand it, you can't rely on it. If you can't rely on it, it has no place in your application.

In my experience, this is the most common separating factor between code monkeys and great engineers.

Learn to make your own everything. Even if you USE the third party one, know how it works through experience. Anything less, and you are a technician.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm still a student myself and won't pretend to know which is best, but I can share the resources I've been using.

There are two great interactive courses on Udacity.com that will be helpful if you choose Python. The first course teaches you how to build a basic search engine while learning the Python language. Sergey Brin even makes an appearance. The second course is on how to create a web app using Python taught by a co-founder of Reddit (Steve Huffman). Both are totally free and incredibly high quality.

Codecademy.com will teach you Javascript for free. The Javascript tutorial is really great, but the jQuery tutorial has mixed reviews.

Finally, the de facto place to learn Ruby on Rails is railstutorial.org. The content is freely available as HTML, but the PDFs and screencasts are well worth the money.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER9> I think you'd do well to pick just one, learn it and then build an app or two that exposes you to the whole stack - from HTML to SQL. Web development is a big world, and the language used on the server is only a very small part of the whole picture.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is what I would love to do, learn a language while making something useful, sounds like a daft question but can anyone suggest a app to build and maybe where to start? Rest I can pick up. Again comes to the question what language do I build my web app in?

<comment><USER2> The obligatory first project is the To Do app. :)

And I second this advice, you are starting, so try and learn a single language that can enable you to develop a working application; that will lead you to the other parts of the stack (wich would include, among others, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON objects, a server-side language, SQL and a lot of such crap that only nerds like us can really love).

<comment><AUTHOR> Please forgive me here, but how would I start an app. A website I can do but starting a app and I'm lost!!

<comment><USER9> So, a standard functionality for web applications is commonly referred to as CRUD. Many applications exist solely to let users Create records, Retrieve and Update existing records or Delete records. It's a very common pattern that, while it isn't very interesting in and of itself, will give you exposure to all the parts of a web application without bogging you down in questions of functionality (what does it mean for all the associated foo's if a bar record has its created date deleted?).

To do this, you'll need some mechanism to store records (usually a database of some sort, but flat files can work), some sort of server process to handle user requests (this is where a framework like Rails and possibly a server to contain this process come into the picture) and a web interface where users can actually input data into your system. If you hear the term "full stack" before, it roughly means this picture (and note that this doesn't really correspond to MVC if you've heard of that).

The canonical example in academia is to do a course scheduling app: students enroll in college and register for classes. Other typical options are the aforementioned to-do application or inventory for a store. Really, this is just window-dressing though - if I were you, I'd think it's a fine goal to have a good understanding of everything that happens from the moment a user first sees the interface to your app until the moment the database is done storing their changes.

And, if you really want a language recommendation, I'd go with either Ruby using Rails or Java using Play.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Learn JavaScript. It's the hottest language for the web right now, and you need it to do anything client side.

Learn PHP. It's the most ubiquitous language on the web, and you will never have trouble finding a library or OSS app that does what you need.

I'm not really sure about Ruby. It's a good language but it doesn't have the traction that it used to (outside of HN of course), and it has a weak reputation.

It never hurts to learn more languages. Learning a language will make you a better programmer in every other language you already know.</comment>


Ask HN: How to get contracts signed. - <AUTHOR>

I'm making contracts for professional services work such as analytics consulting. What's the easiest way to get a document signed by both parties?
Enterprises are still doing the print, sign, fax thing and some like comcast are using clunky web tools. There must be a better way!
I see a few apps in the appstore that allow you to sign on iPhone. I was also wondering if something like "I agree to this contract" in an email would suffice.
Wondering if anyone has a good app or process recommendations? <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: My web development company built the website for these guys, but the backend is all theirs.

<http://www.recombo.com/>

These guys help you to perfect contracts, from building the forms (as complicated as you need, they do hospitals, financial services and more so yours should be a piece of cake) to sending them, sending reminders and making sure the client follows the correct funnels.

That aside: <https://www.echosign.adobe.com/en/home.html>

Echo sign is what we use here for our employment contracts, it's all legally binding and it's fast and easy.

<comment><USER3> I've used both Echosign and docusign. Either one seems to suit your use case well; replacing back and forth faxes or email sending.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I did <http://www.tractis.com>. You have both high end digital signature with certificates and one-click signature.

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.docusign.com/> ?</comment>


Why is the #1 headhunter app Pealk shutting down today? (Answer: Linkedin) - <AUTHOR> http://www.rudebaguette.com/2012/06/26/linkedin-killed-pealk/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=hackernews&utm_campaign=hackernews

<comment><USER2> Well that seems very underhand of LinkedIn. I realy hope Pealk setup a rival to LinkedIn and then block there access.</comment>


De Millo, Lipton, and Perlis on the Limits of Formal Methods [1979] - <AUTHOR> http://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/misc/p271-de_millo.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> I find this paper a rather useful antidote to Dijkstra's propaganda of formal methods, and I am puzzled why it does not get (re)published on HN nearly as often as Dijkstra's essay. I believe it deserves a wider audience.

I'm not aware of any real world success story for formal methods in the 30 years since this paper was published to make me doubt its conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER2> Dijkstra's response: [http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD638....](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD638.html)</comment>


What's 'The Deep State' Trump Keeps Referring To? - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/4692178/donald-trump-deep-state-breitbart-barack-obama/ <comment><USER2> So is it Trump supporter's contention that Barack Obama, a lawyer with a few years in the Senate, was capable of getting a stronger and more effective grip on the government apparatus than a seasoned businessman with decades of experience in managing multi-billion dollar organizations?

Ok, I'm pretty sure that's not the impression Trump was trying to give during his campaign.</comment>


iPhone App Beta Testing Problem:  People not willing to give their iphone/ipod touch id. - <AUTHOR>

Out of five people who expressed interest in testing my app, none seem willing to give me their iphone/ipod touch id.
It seems that this is a problem with the beta testing method required for iphone apps.  People feel as if giving away their device id is a privacy/security risk.
Info on how beta testing works (see section on adding beta testers): http://furbo.org/2008/08/06/beta-testing-on-iphone-20 <comment><USER2> is that how they feel, or is finding their ID too much of a pain in the ass?

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't know. When I asked them to send me their device ID, I received no replies.

<comment><USER3> Did you give them instructions with screenshots on how to do it?

Anyway, just send you an email with my UUID. Happy to support a fellow developer.</comment></comment></comment>


It's the community, stupid - <AUTHOR> http://integratedcode.us/2015/10/16/its-the-community-stupid/ <comment><USER2> Community: How humans, like ants, use emergence to create things of value that no one mind is smart enough to pull off alone.</comment>


The Other Children of Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/01/the-other-children-of-silicon-valley/433869?single_page=true <comment><AUTHOR> _" Why disadvantaged kids get left behind, and a simple policy solution:"_ ~ [http://m.bbs.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/12/16/2372732215...](http://m.bbs.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/12/16/2372732215621310.abstract) [0]

[0] [https://twitter.com/JonathanLWai/status/693892639880548352](https://twitter.com/JonathanLWai/status/693892639880548352)</comment>


Linear Programming in Python with CVXOPT - <AUTHOR> https://scaron.info/blog/linear-programming-in-python-with-cvxopt.html <comment><USER2> If you're interested in model generation time, have a look at JuMP ([https://github.com/JuliaOpt/JuMP.jl](https://github.com/JuliaOpt/JuMP.jl)). More discussions on the speed of modeling languages at [http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.1431](http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.1431) and [http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.01982](http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.01982)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting -- any idea how the performance compares to Ipopt or Gurobi?</comment>


Wondrous oddities: R's function-call semantics - <AUTHOR> http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2006/01/20/wondrous-oddities-rs-function-call-semantics

<comment><USER2> Huh, never seen that before. And as usual, when I (or anyone else) sees a new language construct, you wonder--when would I use that?

The blog post is right though. I imagine if you needed default values that were more dynamic, you can move that code into the method with R's function- call semantics. Therefore, you'd need to do less preparation of dynamic default values outside of the method, thus making libraries and APIs easier to use.</comment>


How Megaupload was Investigated and Indicted - <AUTHOR> http://nikcub.appspot.com/posts/how-megaupload-was-investigated-and-indicted

<comment><USER2> Great article. This might cause some downvoting, but perhaps they really did bring all this upon themselves and the Anonymous attacks are not warranted in this case. Who stores those kinds of emails in plain text on American soil?</comment>


Difference between Google and Amazon towards customers (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 <comment><USER2> 2011</comment>


Apple Launches iTunes Store in 12 Countries in Asia Today - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/sg/pr/library/2012/06/26Apple-Launches-iTunes-Store-in-Hong-Kong-Singapore-Taiwan-Nine-Additional-Countries-in-Asia-Today.html <comment><AUTHOR> Apple TV is also available.</comment>


Mystery gas discovered near center of Milky Way - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-08-mystery-gas-center-milky.html <comment><AUTHOR> >Cold gas in the Milky Way's nuclear wind

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2595-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2595-z)</comment>


Show HN: If I had Moola  - <AUTHOR> http://www.ifihadmoola.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I usually build apps. This is my first attempt at a content driven website. It's similar to the chive, but extracts the things which I like the most about the chive (architecture, travel and girls) and focuses entirely on them. Let me know what you think!

</comment><comment><USER2> Simple but fun. Allow voting like in 'hot or not' or something, perhaps show a random pic on the front page. Can we post pics or just you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Good ideas. I was planning on having user submitted pics here pretty soon.</comment></comment>


China's Weibo is ahead of Twitter when it comes to mobile - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/twitter-weibo-mobile <comment><USER2> > Twitter ... 82 percent of MAUs are mobile. Weibo ... 89 percent of MAUs on > mobile.

7 percent. Stop the presses.

Article then compares Weibo's growth with Twitters. More or less, Weibo is Twitter, X years behind. And then there's the kicker, which solidifies the click-baity-ness of the article:

> Twitter ... which is blocked in China</comment>


Enterpriseification - <AUTHOR> https://blog.licensezero.com/2019/04/24/enterpriseification.html <comment><USER2> To be absolutely clear, neither of these "License Zero" licenses are open source or open source compatible in any way whatsoever.

Both explicitly violate the first principle of the Open Source Definition ([https://opensource.org/osd-annotated](https://opensource.org/osd- annotated)), free redistribution.

We have the open source licenses we do for a reason. They've been vetted. They work. They meet established criteria. It's okay to consider new ones, but the process for that isn't just to make something up and hope it works.

Amateurs have no more business playing lawyer and writing general-purpose software licenses than they do playing doctor and handing out surgical advice. It's not thought-provoking, it's dangerous and harmful to people who don't understand why licenses like this could cause them huge unmitigated legal headaches down the road.

<comment><USER3> I'd agree that Prosperity is not an open source license, but I still emphatically maintain that Parity is.

Moreover, the arguments against them I've heard haven't been based in lack of free distribution or OSD 1. Anyone is free to redistribute Prosperity- and Parity-licensed code.

Amateur is ad hominem, and also simply incorrect. I won't pretend my views are consensus, but I have spent a lot of time with OSD, and the result has been disappointment, not reverence. See:

[https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/05/OSD-Copyleft- Regul...](https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/05/OSD-Copyleft- Regulation.html)

[https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/04/23/OSD- wontfix.html](https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/04/23/OSD-wontfix.html)

<comment><USER4> > I'd agree that Prosperity is not an open source license, but I still > emphatically maintain that Parity is.

It's very clearly not.

> Moreover, the arguments against them I've heard haven't been based in lack > of free distribution or OSD 1.

While I see arguments on OSD 1, I'd agree that's not the _clearest_ problem. Clause 3 of Parity runs directly contrary to OSD 9. (Oddly enough, Parity _might_ just be the odd license that manages to be a Free Software license without being an Open Source license, though, as the Free Software Definition doesn't have anything equivalent to OSD 9, even though the two definitions usually either both fit or both don't fit licenses.)

<comment><USER3> > It's very clearly not.

You're not the only one who's said it's not, and I'm not the only one who's said it clearly is.

> Clause 3 of Parity runs directly contrary to OSD 9.

There is nothing clear about OSD 9, or at least nothing to do with the reach of copyleft:

[https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/05/OSD-Copyleft- Regul...](https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/05/OSD-Copyleft- Regulation.html#osd9)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Holy cow, what a rambling mess this blog article is. Perhaps I'm just tired after a long, arduous day negotiating corporate life. Does anyone know what the author is trying to say?

<comment><USER3> The author does!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This post makes more sense if you know what license zero is.

> License Zero is a new way to support open software developers.

Contributors can choose from two new licenses, Parity and Prosperity, that make their work free for not-for-profit or open-source users, then sell private licenses to other devs who want to use for profit or in closed source. Everything happens through a simple, dev-friendly interface.

[https://licensezero.com/](https://licensezero.com/)

<comment><USER7> I'll add a blog post that describes his thinking and main licenses pretty well:

[https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/10/26/no-other- terms.html](https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/10/26/no-other-terms.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The name "license zero" might be a bit too close to the CC0 license. Maybe a rename might be a good idea? It also doesn't describe the license accurately.

<comment><USER3> The project's been going for a while now, and I haven't heard of anyone confusing License Zero, or one of the public licenses it stewards, for CC0.

I called the project "License Zero" to reference its impossible goal: reduce the marginal cost of dual licensing, over simply receiving a public license, to zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I work for an OSS enterprise software vendor which competes with other OSS enterprise software vendors.

The characterisation that license indemnity is the bulk of our value added is, putting it mildly, an incomplete one.

<comment><USER3> If I implied as much, could you mention where in the post?

The table under scope specifically addresses differences in _licensing_ expectations, rather than related services like maintenance, support, training, and integration. The string of questions under Scope mention the call for a broader, vendor relationship behind the code. I mention that Tidelift layers on maintenance assurances, aside from the license.

This post is inside baseball, and I'm surprised to see it on the front page of HN. But I'd like to make it clearer if I can.

<comment><USER10> Commenting unofficially as an open source fan inside a globally giant enterprise, your post (a) made sense, (b) was circulated to folks much less familiar with these concerns.

The table was particularly helpful, and at least this global enterprise is well aware of all the other nonsense it didn't cover. I would have found adding those to the table to lessen your focused point about license openness and pitfalls vs. need of the ecosystem to be sustainable.

<comment><USER3> I suppose I might have listed "form a company to commercialize" as one of the approaches, and tagged it as the one with greatest flexibility to add more offerings on top of license rights. I think License Zero, Tidelift, and other "sustainability as a service" offerings exist largely because the overhead of company-based commercialization is so high, and it doesn't scale well down to very small open source projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Did anyone elseo reado that as a blogo posto?

<comment><USER11> I guess not then. The arrow icons after every link make it really hard (funky?) to read.</comment></comment>


OMG Ponies (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail) - <AUTHOR> http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon_skeet/archive/2009/11/02/omg-ponies-aka-humanity-epic-fail.aspx <comment><USER2> With every passing year, I'm more and more convinced a language approaching Haskell's pedantic-ness is A Good Thing. A language where Joda is the most convenient option, where all numerical quantities have units, and you have to make an explicit option to do "unsafe" things. Naturally, the goal of the language is to do as few unsafe operations as possible.

I think lisp is a good example: Most lisps have a full numeric tower that automatically converts between ints and bignums and ratios as appropriate. You don't have to think about the floating-point representation of 0.3 unless you wrote (double 0.3) in your code somewhere. Correctness should be the default, because it's much easier to trade some correctness for performance. Going the other way is much harder, and most people don't need performance.

This goes a long way, but now I notice the biggest obstacle is "legacy systems". The only time I get in trouble with the Clojure numeric tower is when I want to store a Ratio in the DB.

<comment><USER3> >a language approaching Haskell's pedantic-ness

I believe the word you're looking for is "pedantry".

/pedant

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "due to rainfall thousands of miles away, my unit test had moved Greenland into Argentina. Fail."

Argentina's 11-day notice for changing their DST rules wreaked all sorts of unexpected havoc. It's sort of awesome (small worlds are more fun) and also totally exasperating.

</comment><comment><USER5> The video, for those that missed the link in the second paragraph: <http://vimeo.com/7403673>

<comment><USER6> WAAAAY more entertaining w/ actual sock puppets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Unicode has its own special line terminator character as well, just for kicks_

<clippy>It looks like you're trying to refer to NEL, which is in Unicode because it was distinct in EBCDIC, and who doesn't want lossless round-trips? </clippy>

<comment><USER8> Unicode also has separate Line Breaks and Paragraph Breaks somewhere around U+2000.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's important to note that choice of language affects a lot of these issues. For example, the unicode issue in Python:

      >>> s = unicode('Les Misérables','utf-8')
      >>> print s[::-1]
      selbarésiM seL

<comment><USER7> Nope, Python fucks this up just the same, even in Python 3:

      >>> print u'Les Mise\u0301rables'[::-1] #2
      >>> print('Les Mise\u0301rables'[::-1]) #3
      selbaŕesiM seL

Almost no implementation will fuck up LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE U+00E9, but nearly all programming languages will royally fuck up a COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT U+0301 even in much easier cases like string length. Almost all implementations that claim to be UTF-16 are actually UCS-2, and can't handle surrogates in the slightest.

<comment><USER10> You can get the correct result by normalizing the string first:

        >>> import unicodedata
        >>> print unicodedata.normalize('NFC', u'Les Mise\u0301rables')[::-1]
        selbarésiM seL

<comment><USER11> That's in some sense even more broken: Not all combined characters have a normalized form, so the result is even less predictable. (I don't have an example ready.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I saw this presentation at the London DevDays where Jon gave it.

I was quite far back, and when he walked on stage with the sock puppet on, I assumed it was one of those wrist support gloves that you use when you get RSI because you won't just stop typing all day long, even though you're harming yourself.

After all, I thought, it's Jon Skeet - he never stops typing, surely? :-)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm embarrassed. I admit it, I forgot Turkish upcases 'i' to İ. But the core teaching, which is "if it involves internationalization or talking to humans find a library written by a legitimate expert and use it instead" is true gold.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, but who expects to need a special library for uppercasing some seemingly Latin text?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article really was entertaining. These are all common problems for new C# programmers.

Doubles in .net are IEEE 64-bit (8-byte) double-precision floating-point numbers . I've written a few different comparers to deal with problems like the one he demoed. He should have typed it to be a decimal if it was currency or he wanted it to have an exact value instead of be a double-precision floating-point number.

As for the reverse on the string. He reversed the characters, which are defined in .net as char / byte. Not unicode. If you want to play nice with unicode in .net you need to parse it as unicode. A hugely common mistake for all of us who have done some internationalization in .net.

I remember or sorts of trouble with java.util.GregorianCalendar back in the day. Ugh.

I'm not defending .net or C#. I'm just not surprised he ran into these newbie problems. You guys should see the evilness that is Access, the inconsistencies there make this look like nothing. And it's a black art with almost no documentation anywhere.

<comment><USER16> Jon didn't run into most of these problems so much as answer others who did run into them on stackoverflow.com or the MS newsgroups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> he sums it up quite well at the end.

 _if you write a lot of code under a set of assumptions which then changes, you're in trouble._

I think the key question is: do my assumptions differ from my customers assumptions, if so where?

</comment><comment><USER18> I've gotten to the point where I automatically dislike anything containing the phrase "Epic Fail."

<comment> brown9-2 Same here, but you should really look past that in this case.</comment></comment>


Top 6 Getting Things Done Software - <AUTHOR> http://blog.capterra.com/the-top-6-free-getting-things-done-software/?utm_medium=Social_Media_Amp&utm_source=HackerNews_Amp&utm_campaign=CapterraSocialAmp <comment><USER2> Is there an app which can motivate me to use these apps?

I recently started using redmine, set up many projects and tasks and milestones installed the android app. I updated everything meticulously for a few days, then I missed two days, then four, then a week, then a month. Now I just can't get myself to use it.

This was my second attempt at getting my shit in order, but I keep faltering. Is there any hope for me?</comment>


Microbiomes raise privacy concerns - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/microbiomes-raise-privacy-concerns-1.17527

<comment><USER2> I propose that we collect this data on dogs when people register them, so that when the owners leave shit on the sidewalk they can be identified and burned at the stake.

<comment><USER3> Some places are gathering DNA evidence from dog faeces in order to prosecute irresponsible owners.

[http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2015/apr/2...](http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2015/apr/28/dna- testing-dog-poo-have-to-be-barking-council)

<comment><USER2> Outstanding. Now if they can just get behind the burning at the stake part of my idea we'll be in business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > "Right now, it's a little bit of a Wild West as far as microbiome data > management goes," says Curtis Huttenhower, a computational biologist at the > Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, who led > the latest study1. "As the field develops, we need to make sure there's a > realization that our microbiomes are highly unique."

This is the important part to me. I see a bunch of personal health data experiments and they look really exciting. Then I look at their privacy policies and how they're going to protect my data and it's usually really terrible.

It's really off-putting to see people being so cavalier about health data.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, and in related news dogs sniff poo because it really is the equivalent of a doggy tweet.

As others have pointed out this is probably much more temporal and thus less useful from a privacy invasion standpoint, but eventually if someone tracks this and locks in seasonal variations it might pose a modest "threat". For me, the interesting thing is how much of a person's "scent" is derived from their microbiome? If you can tie those things together then tech that is replacing bloodhounds for identifying scent trails might be able to "home in" on someone if trained on a recent piece of clothing.

</comment><comment><USER5> Well I certainly won't be going #2 next to my murder victims anymore.

<comment><USER3> Many criminals do leave excrement at the crime scene. This is something to do with adrenaline?

[https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=rdLJw9Pgt70C&pg=PA182&lp...](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=rdLJw9Pgt70C&pg=PA182&lpg=PA182&dq=excrement+burglary+crime+scene&source=bl&ots=bkCVzXC69y&sig=RHWkL7IB6HFErrVufP30qJWeVqQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=vT1SVY7VJcaksAHbrICAAg&ved=0CDwQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=excrement%20burglary%20crime%20scene&f=false)

(Sorry for lousy source. There's probably something better available.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So if you're concerned about your privacy, you'll need to get a stool transplant every few months.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think this is slightly exaggerated. Microbiomes are very dynamic and can change very often.

<comment><USER8> This is definitely the case, even changes in diet and antimicrobial therapies can change things quite drastically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just change your diet, and the microbiome will change.

</comment><comment><USER10> That's a wolf.</comment>


Why is VC funding expected to dry up? - <AUTHOR> We all read the Sequoia letter. Nobody can question their wisdom. Their advice is obviously based on  decades of experience. But what are the underlying dynamics to this? The crisis isn't expected to last more than a couple years. VCs have horizons of 7-10 years. They have already raised from their LPs and need to invest over a certain period of time. It would make sense for MicroVCs and Angels to be fearful of strecthing their small bank accounts, though not the best ones I would think. So what's the logic here? Are VCs gonna take advantage of the fear for tougher terms? At least for early stage hardtech companies in development, the crises shouldn't matter. They can spend next 18 months in their labs or garages building while the world recovers, taking advantage of cheaper talent to hire if needed. Thoughts? <comment><USER2> I think the issue is that a lot of the money spent by VC's (collectively) in the last 5 years or so, has not been especially well-spent. Not just in the normal "lots of small bets, only a few of which will pay off" kind of way. Instead, in the "lots of really big bets, most of which have no chance of paying off at this level" kind of way.

The alleged "black swan" of Covid-19 is really just an excuse for what has been obvious for a while now, which is that a lot of recent VC money was 5-10x what it should have been, and as a result a lot of otherwise potentially reasonable business ideas have become value-destruction-machines.

So, I think it is still clear that a savvy VC could make money by investing now...in good ideas, funded at an appropriate level. The problem is that many of them are setting on 10x the amount of money that they can do that with.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe that what it truly is. Both the VCs and open market investors have been expecting a depression. May be even wishing for one because the long bull run was just making everyone nervous. They were just missing a trigger. Likes of WeWork didn't do it, trade war somehow didn't do it. Surprisingly a virus did it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We are about to go through a period where investors will question every investment a lot more. Investments that looked promising at the beginning of the year will look bad because the demand for the service or product will dry up and there won't be any possibility for an investment return. So investors will be looking to back out when and where ever possible. While the money that has been given will likely be spent any new money won't be given out as easily as before.

We're also going to see a credit crunch where the lenders will make it hard for borrowers to borrow money and many lenders are going to go bankrupt because borrowers won't be able to pay back their loans.

Also, the VC's will also deal with a cash crunch too. Many of them have lost a lot of money and asset value. They just don't have the money they had at the beginning of the year.

It's going to suck for a while but we'll get through it the same way we have in the past.</comment>


ThiIsLike Shows an Editable Web of Associations - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/thisislike_shows_an_editable_web_of_associations.php <comment><USER2> "ThisIsLike" is showing some interesting uses of user-driven (semi-search- like) data collection.

But it doesn't seem quite ready for prime-time crowdsourcing: for example, to suggest a new "this" requires not just creating your own account, but *using their 'contact us' form to apply for the account. ?¿?</comment>


How long are you going to keep your dirty business phone? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.aircall.io/post/79958613803/aircall-fun-facts-how-long-are-you-going-to-keep-your <comment><USER2> I used to have two phones (one for work, one personal[0]). I appreciate the appeal of consolidating that into one just out of convenience. "You're carrying around too much bacteria" seems to be a rather weird argument even to bring up.

[0] In my case, I needed access to both iOS and Android, so this wouldn't really have helped anyway, but that's separate.

</comment><comment><USER3> You know what I hate ? Posts on HN of a company's website where after you read the whole thing, you still have no clue what they're doing.

The use of we're reinventing/we're disrupting or things like that.

A landing page with whoop whoop colors, fancy words and bacteria talk. Aiming at reducing the number of phones to just one, using expressions like "phone solution" (what does that even mean). Many startups fail miserably to tell you how it works, simply. And no, no amount of CSS or infographics will remediate that.

Now: On the link, you actually have to click to the main site to make sense of it. Then, it shows you a sort of screen, but it's not a phone (it's part of the image. The layout is broken. I have to dezoom to 33% to see there's a whole image, but I can't read what's in there and I can't zoom on the specific image. Just awful).

Then, there's the wrong argument provided: Frigging bacteria. For one, do you know how many bacteria there are ? The argument is weak.

And two, there are phones that have dual SIM(heck, there are even triple SIM phones) so the argument cancels itself out. You're pushing the wrong piece of chess.

Show me how it works. A frigging prototype. An actual phone (since you said the "phone solution" is on your "existing devices". Why there's no image of an iPhone or an Android phone with the product installed).

I hate those links. So to sum it up:

-Weak arguments (Bacteria. Many people don't care given the already huge number of bacteria they deal with already. And tow, there are multiple SIM phones).

-Awful page layout.

-No info:

 _No info on how the product works._ No info on the price. _No demo (photos of at least how it_ should* look like because I think there isn't even a product and it's a test balloon, just to test the waters).

Aaaand the use of one of the most hated expressions in my book: "We're reinventing". Heck, even Nikola Tesla didn't use that expression and I mean, he's TESLA !)

<comment><USER4> "a solution is a homogeneous mixture composed of only one phase" \- a liquid phone, that sounds cool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This ad just makes me think there is some money is making a phone with some antibacterial properties, not that I need to eliminate phones.

</comment><comment><USER6> It seems odd to me that people still need separate phones for personal/business. Aren't there services that allow you to set up a separate number that goes straight to the same phone? I know Google Voice does that, and lets you even set filters so that it (for example) only rings during business hours and goes straight to voicemail otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER7> Steering wheels have 9 times more bacteria than a public toilet seat. That's 967,402 bacteria! Well by cutting the number of steering wheels per person to 0.1, over 104,345 billions of bacteria will be removed from earth by doing so. Those bacteria will never know what hit 'em.

</comment><comment><USER8> Are people really suffering from the bacteria on their phones?

Genuine story: I started using a smartphone about 4 years ago and a nasty skin condition I had went away within a month and never came back. I suspect that it was bacterial or fungal and there was a little war in which the bacteria on my phone won. Exposure to bacteria can be a good thing. I suspect perfect hygiene is bot going to do much for your immune system in the long run.

Oh and this is the shittest pitch I've ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER4> You don't expect me to do my dirty business on my regular phone, do you? ;)

</comment><comment><USER9> can't find info on pricing or countries available... so... close tab.

<comment><USER10> techcrunch is that way -->

you're on a startup incubator's community forum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There may be a lot of bacteria on my cell phone ... but they're _MY_ bacteria. I avoid using other people's phones for just this reason (and don't share my own).

</comment><comment><USER12> Dual SIM phones exist. Or am I missing the point here entirely?</comment>


Romantic lies about passion and entrepreneurship - <AUTHOR> http://blog.michellelaralin.com/romantic-lies

<comment><USER2> I've been saying things like this for a while to people. Thank you for illustrating it so well.</comment>


A Docker engineer got so many threats the company hired security to protect her - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/death-rape-threats-for-docker-engineer-2016-4 <comment><USER2> Is this going to be another article that Hacker News tosses on the pile of "chose not to believe"? Here's hoping this is finally the one that makes people realize that these things are happening irl.

<comment><USER3> Shrugs, speak for yourself.

I was at a tech talk last week, 40 devs, 1 woman, 39 blokes.

You don't have to be a genius to see there is something off with that ratio.

I've rarely seen more than 1-2 at any of the tech events I've gone to there.

I've also heard the crap some programmers say about women (not all but enough to leave a bad taste).

Prior to working in the tech industry I worked in the retail industry and the gender split was pretty much 50/50.

<comment><USER2> See gozur88's comment.

<comment><USER3> I think a lot of people when they succeed in a field want to believe it's entirely because of who they are not what they are.

It's hard to admit that some of your success might be because of your gender/colour etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The news here (if you can call it that) is that Frazelle seems to have left because Docker was tolerating her being harassed, instead of supporting her like they said they would. You have to read between the lines to see it, because she's not coming out and saying so, so there's really not enough there to hang a news article on.

</comment><comment><USER5> >It's worth repeating: this person received horrific threats because she's good at her job and out teaching others how to use an up-and-coming programming technology.

That's just not believable. There has to be more to the story than that. Nobody gets harassed _because_ they're good at their job and go out teaching others etc, etc.

<comment><USER6> I think it's believable. Go read the Twitch comments when a woman appears on a popular stream.

<comment><USER7> I was just about to make the same suggestion. Twitch chat is basically as low as it gets. I have absolutely no problem believing that someone would make death/rape threats out of the blue after seeing how women are treated by a random (large) Twitch chat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> how was the company supposed to react anonymous people harassing her on IRC?</comment>