Ask HN: Why firms don't train workers anymore - <AUTHOR> Some economists cite structural factors as to the reason why unemployment has persisted at these elevated levels around 10%.  By structural they basically mean job mismatch: workers who have skills in one area are in surplus even though there are jobs in demand, though they require a different set of skills.  One way to rectify this predicament is to have firms more willing to expand their applicant pool and train those they do hire for those jobs.
It has become common wisdom in hiring that firms would rather leave a position unfilled than recruit someone who didn't fit the job requirements.  A new hire must hit the ground running so-to-speak and therefore he should not expect much handholding on the part of the employer.  So, if you are not a perfect match and can't already do everything stated in the job description, don't expect to get a call back.
I wonder why this move away from on-the-job training has taken place.  It used to be that firms would accept a wider range of applicants after screening for basic intelligence, competence, and ability.  They would take their new recruits and train them for upwards of several months.  After successfully completing the training, the new employees would be ready to take their place alongside their fellow co-workers.  This training not only produced better employees, it also engendered more loyalty as workers could see the firm invest time and money into them and would reciprocate with their work effort.
Now, it seems like most firms give new employees at most a few days to become acclimated with them and most of that time involves processing employment paperwork for the new worker.  Since, the worker cannot expect to be trained by the firm in any meaningful way, one shouldn't expect much loyalty from him should a better opportunity arise.
One reason given as to why firms have reduced their training is because they fear that after investing in the worker, he might just bolt to a competitor which may reward him with better pay because it didn't have to budget for training.  However, to take that POV, you must assume that workers are only satisfied by more money, when there are multiple factors that workers take into consideration when deciding on where to work, including how the firm treats them initially. <comment><USER2> I'm a more "traditional" type of employer -- I have technicians, they go to homes and businesses, they set things up and solve problems, and I don't mind hiring under-experienced techs so long as I think they're willing to learn.

I have a pretty good hunch why a lot of businesses aren't interested in doing this anymore: there is an extreme amount of external pressure not to do it. If one of my techs doesn't know how to do a particular thing right away, the client doesn't want to hear that. Instead, they want to hear that I'll give them a discount on the tech's time. If the tech makes a mistake, I have to cover the costs for making up for it. Even if a tech knows how to do something, but they're just out-of-practice at it, and they take 3 hours to do something that I could do in 1, I probably won't bill the client for a full 3 hours.

It creates a hardship on the business. The culture around the customer- business relationship in the U.S. has changed from the stereotypical 50's ideals to one where the lower price usually wins, and if you're competing on price, you can't afford to train people.

It doesn't help that there are an awful lot of people out there now that seem to think that they're worth a lot of money even if they don't know how to do a job. Go ahead and try telling a potential employee for a technical position, "Well, you're not familiar with any of this, but we're willing to train you if you're willing to start at $10/hour". Unless they're in high school, it probably won't fly.

Or, as another anecdote: one of the things that my business offers its clients is professionalism. Techs are supposed to show up polite, friendly, clean, and dressed for business casual. Repeatedly nagging my techs about their appearance hasn't helped; they still show up with bed hair, with cargo pants, with t-shirts not tucked in, despite that I pay them better than any of my competitors. I'm gonna have to get mean about this soon, and that makes me a little sad.

<comment><USER3> You're going to make them tuck in their t-shirts? Seriously? Unless you are getting actual customer complaints, that just seems like a stupid power- tripping way to ruin morale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think part of it is flatter organizations and cutbacks in middle management. My manager is a VP who reports directly to the CEO; all his reports are individual contributors. He's the sharpest I've worked for, but he only hires a handful of very senior developers (unusually, I think our average age is around forty) because he wears a lot of hats and doesn't have a lot of spare time to mold journeymen to deliver well, in return for savings on salary that isn't going to be that large over time.

In a way I feel bad that we aren't doing our part to ramp up the next generation, but it would be hard to take the hit for doing so and still deliver on our current obligations. The alternative would be have his reports manage apprentices, but none of us is eager to make the compromises needed to get a stable system out of an army that's still developing good taste. If this problem is becoming acute, wages for junior devs will drop enough that someone can probably do that and eat our lunch (like outsourcing but without the language and timezone barriers).

<comment><USER5> _I think part of it is flatter organizations and cutbacks in middle management._

I think you're right - you need excess capacity in your senior/middle management layer that can absorb training. I would also add "cutbacks in general". Taking in green people means hiring somebody a significant amount of time _before_ you really need them. This means that if you are in the "don't spend a dime until you really really have to" mode, you will wait until the crisis hit and then you will want somebody who can start being productive TOMORROW.

It's a shame, because taking in inexperienced people means potentially ending up with a "perfect" person because you don't have to work against any previously acquired bad habits, you can inculcate him with your own ethic and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As far as I'm aware from the economics blogosphere, arguments about "structural unemployment" are popular these days mostly in right wing think tanks. And they only seem popular there because hypothesizing that there are tons of jobs available for the unemployed permits one to reject Keynesian/Monetarist prescriptions for further fiscal/monetary stimulus.

I haven't run into any serious economist who believes in the idea, and certainly haven't read any proponents of the idea who are able to justify why this rate is allegedly 5-6 percent higher now than two years ago, or at pretty much any previous point in American history for that matter.

I wouldn't mind talking about this if others are interested. To me, the simplest evidence that this argument is dishonest is that its proponents don't seem to be acting consistently with their beliefs. If they really are right that the natural unemployment rate has risen, any further stimulus or monetary expansion will result in significant inflation which will need to be headed off by the Federal Reserve, and which would permit the organization to divest itself of its fairly risky mortgage-backed securities in the process. And this would be a zero-risk way to drive a stake through the heart of pretty much every left-leaning empiricist out there too....

<comment><USER7> "As far as I'm aware from the economics blogosphere, arguments about "structural unemployment" are popular these days mostly in right wing think tanks."

Actually, I heard Bill Clinton talking about the same thing on the Daily Show this past week.

<comment><USER8> All mainstream US politicians are fairly right wing.

<comment><USER9> This is a bit like saying that every city in the US is fairly warm.

Yes, if you compare them to McMurdo Station in Antarctica, they are. Relative to each other, there are warm cities in the US, and cold cities in the US; Minneapolis, while not nearly as cold as McMurdo Station, is cold by US standards.

Similarly, while US politicians may all be "right wing" in comparison to their European equivalents, there are most certainly politicians who, in the relevant context, are not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think there's still significant on-the-job training for technical areas other than programming. Aerospace engineering firms want an engineering major to have learned the basics of what engineering is, and have a solid grasp of the relevant mathematics and physics fundamentals, but they don't expect anyone to come in ready to work on a particular airframe or engine or whatever. They expect to train people in their particular software packages, design philosophy, methodologies, huge catalog of existing designs, ongoing studies, etc.

One recruiter from a big engineering company who I talked to as an undergrad said that they preferred applicants who _didn't_ have too much specific experience exactly on target, because then they'd just have to un-learn what they'd learned in order to get integrated into his company's way of doing things, since big engineering firms have often accumulated decades of in-house practices, which vary a lot between companies.

<comment><USER11> This is true in my case as a recent engineering graduate. The company that hired me also hired another recent grad and we haven't really been applying anything learned in school so much as general skills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > I wonder why this move away from on-the-job training has taken place.

> One reason given as to why firms have reduced their training is because they > fear that after investing in the worker, he might just bolt to a competitor > which may reward him with better pay because it didn't have to budget for > training.

The underlying reason for this situation is a good question. While I don't know the answer, it should be noted that, once we have such a situation, it tends to be self-perpetuating. Workers have no incentive to be loyal to companies that won't be loyal to them, and vice-versa. The first one to try being loyal to the other, will often get burned.

So dealing with these problems means that we have to fight not only the underlying reasons for the situation, but also the self-perpetuating characteristics of the situation. Not easy.

Another note: HN has generally been rather down on the tenure system in American universities. While I agree that tenure has its problems, it does address some of the troubles you point out. Universities and professors (excepting those with temporary appointments) seem to me to be much less afraid to invest in each other than modern businesses and their employees are. Eliminating tenure may very well give significant benefits to universities; however, it also introduces the kind of problem that you are discussing.

EDIT: Still another note: A recent post (I _think_ it was on HN) discussed alleged secret agreements among various tech companies to avoid hiring each other's employees. This is yet another unfortunate outgrowth of this situation.

<comment><USER13> Of course the solution to the predicament is simple: contracts. Alas, as with so many things, a well-armed third-party is getting in the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Firms haven't started to realise it yet, but by excluding the trainable people, by insisting on this glass ceiling of "two years' experience," they aren't doing themselves any favours.

The lucky handful of geeks with "two years' experience" already under their belt are not going to sit back and let the employer dictate how much, or how little, they are going to get paid. The employer wants to pay them as little as possible - but the candidate can ask whatever the market allows, as much as possible, and if his name's that good, he will be able to gouge the employer for as much as he can get. And if the employer listens long enough, he'll find that all of the others will all seem to be adopting the same gouging tactic, for exactly the same amount - like a cartel structure.

Basically, you're going to end up with a small clique of experienced coders circulating between firms, raking in the money and coming up with the same tired code they've been peddling to the same firms from day one. The incentive to come up with original solutions isn't there - they're not after hiring newbies who might have something new that could knock them off their perch.

In the meantime, businesses find themselves financially in a hole paying for these bloated whales, they're just as much in the dark as they've always been, their programs are just as rubbish, nothing new seems to work - why should it? Working code costs more money, so you might as well just issue new patches - and folding left and right.

There's more money to be made running a cartel of consultants than by opening the jobs market to newcomers, offering them training and keeping the market fresh, competitive, adaptive and, most of all, viable.

</comment><comment><USER15> The form of training has changed. At my old shop, there'd sometimes be a guest expert who did a talk on an interesting subject. If you wanted a tech book, you could buy it on the company's Amazon account and read it as much as you liked. Some companies do a sort of buddy system were you're helped along by a mentor while starting out or learning something new.

I think this change came with the realisation that you're worth more to the company building something than sitting on your ass training for something you _may_ come across with in the future. Therefore, if it's directly relevant you'll get training but otherwise you'll probably have to do it in your own time.

</comment><comment><USER16> Well, for programming, employees without experience generally slow down the existing employees and rarely turn into good workers.

Let's examine the typical job applicants to see why:

1) Has experience, resume and portfolio.

2) Has no professional experience, but has worked on open source projects and has a nice portfolio.

3) Has no professional experience and hasn't worked on open source. Has a personal portfolio that's pretty basic.

4) Has no experience at all. Has education.

5) Has no experience of eduction.

1 has shown ability to do the work in the past. Will hit the ground running and is generally a good hire.

2 and 3 have shown not only that they know how to program, but they are self- driven and don't need someone to tell them to what to work on. Will also hit the ground running and are often a good hire. 3's sometimes disappoint as they get in over their heads pretty quickly.

4 and 5 have shown no ability or drive. They haven't even attempted to program anything they were specifically told to. There is no chance they will hit the ground running, and it's unlikely that they will have any innate ability.

Why on earth WOULD people hire 4s and 5s?

In short, non-technical professions hire people and train them all the time. Nobody is born knowing how to flip burgers and fry fries at the same time. But technical professions rarely get anywhere hiring anyone that doesn't have experience of some kind.

<comment><USER17> What would a programmers portfolio look like?

<comment><USER18> Any publicly accessible repository containing code you've written (e.g. your Github repos), products or websites you've built and exposed to users, technical papers you've published, and technical talks you've given.

<comment><USER19> Interestingly, these are things I suspect the majority of programmers don't have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Well, you assume that training actually produces results. It might well be that after spending considerable time and money on the new employee he's still not a very good match for the original tasks. Then you are stuck with a loss and an employee you can't fire (since, for example, the 'testing' period is something like 2-4 weeks -- this might depend on the country/state, etc.).

Or, training does work but the investment is usually so big (not just on the trainer but the lost productivity of the team members involved) that the employee would need to stay employed a number of months/years at least, to recuperate costs. So if the employee resigns before that (since he gets a better offer) you are still in the red.

I've personally had people work for me that didn't actually fit the task, but only because they were quite smart and I was certain they could pick up the domain (any domain) quite fast.

But right now, for example, I'm looking at CVs of student candidates and I'm reluctant to invest in their training because I have a small company and the risk of them leaving after they are trained is high.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why do you fear an employee would leave you after you invested in training him? Unless you are particularly abrasive, most employees would look favorably at an employer who helps them advance in their job than one who doesn't invest anything at all.

<comment><USER20> From what I've seen students here like "big brands". So most would pick working at BigCorp "in the first years" (or so they say). They seem to value the stability BigCorp provides and they also assume they'll learn a whole lot at the job. Being a small company means I don't "look" as stable nor as impressive in the CV.

This means that generally students see the 1st job as something transitional. It also means that a big chunk of the CVs I get are from people that didn't/couldn't make it into BigCorp, ie. people I also don't need.

Changing jobs is also a traditional way of getting a raise and I wouldn't want to get into the counter-offer game too early.

But this time I think the problem is the CVs I've been receiving aren't that great, so I am reluctant to invest in training because I'm reluctant to pick any candidate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> At one time there was a stigma to changing jobs too often. Well, that's still true, but whereas people look at you funny for changing jobs every few months in 2010, in 1970 people who changed jobs every four or five years were regarded with suspicion.

As a result, your employer was much more confident he could see a return on his training efforts. In 2010 we expect people to jump ship when they find a better situation - why would would I invest money in someone's career when they may be working for my competitor next week?

</comment><comment><USER22> I find it interesting that firms choose to not hire anyone at all over hiring and training someone. That means it's either a luxury hire uncritical to the business's survival, or they equate hiring and training with a negative ROI. Or both.

To those here who run a business, is that how it is?

<comment><USER23> While I don't have a business, your question assumes that those doing the hiring are acting rationally. Whereas most business trends are caused by people uncritically following what others are doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If this is about factory work, yes, training is necessary.

If this is about software development it's not clear to me what sort of training we are talking about. I've had to train myself at every job, that's part of what I do. I can't imagine how training would work. Classes in some programming language perhaps? It's much faster for me just to pick up the syntax of a language over the weekend and then fill in the blanks on toy projects or while doing maintenance.

</comment><comment><USER25> There's plenty of training available once you're in a company, because most companies understand that there's a large cost to losing an employee who's proven that they are intelligent, have a good work ethic, and are easy to work with.

There's very little appetite for training new workers until they've proven those same things.

In essence, on the job training might be in short supply, but on the job retraining is not.

</comment><comment><USER26> this doesn't seem like an Ask HN. you basically made a blog post conveying your position on something. except you did it here under the guise of Ask-ing HN something. ;)

<comment><USER27> Is it a no-no thing on HN? (kinda newb here)</comment></comment>


Nick McKeown on how he can finance an altruistic spam blocker - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/21/CMR8P8A78.DTL <i>"We are looking for Bay Area people with innovative ideas who have put them to use. Please e-mail candidates to email@example.com."</i> <comment><USER2> Its called "challenge-response" or C/R, for short. Its been around almost as long as email has and its not new or innovative. Nick would have had some trouble productizing that even if he wanted to, in that its a terrible "solution" that almost nobody wants.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> _"We are looking for Bay Area people with innovative ideas who have put them to use. Please e-mail candidates to email@example.com."_</comment>


Rovio opens new game studio in London - happy-go-lucky http://www.rovio.com/rovio-opens-new-game-studio-london <comment><AUTHOR> Can anybody explain why Rovio -a finnish company- is going UK while hard- brexit is coming closer ?

<comment><USER2> Specifically, no - but as a resident I find it hard to imagine that all the potential that London and the UK has to offer the world will suddenly and absolutely evaporate leaving it a desolate wasteland of squandered capacity.

The money must flow, after all.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Bitcast.io – A marketplace for web development tutorials - <AUTHOR> https://www.bitcast.io/

<comment><USER2> Massive feature missing: last updated date.

I would NEVER buy a screencast, tutorial, or anything on web development without knowing EXACTLY when it was last updated. For example, the paid Ember screencasts claim to go over the Ember router - how do I know whether it was the old beta router, the RC1 router, or the RC6 "Promise-ified" router?

<comment><USER3> _I would NEVER buy a screencast, tutorial, or anything on web development without knowing EXACTLY when it was last updated_

Sadly that's exactly why the last updated date usually isn't listed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You guys really need a "Date Published" field on each screencast and a "Date Updated" if it has been updated. I was about to buy the Backbone + Rails bundle but I was apprehensive because what if it's really outdated? Lynda.com displays a publish date, it's useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> We overlooked that but completely agree, and we're adding that ASAP. FYI, the Backbone + Rails videos were produced recently and are very up to date – I went through all of them myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why are people willing to pay for screencasts(of any quality), but NEVER for a well written article over the same thing.

I personally hate trying to learn things from videos. I can't search it. I can't copy and paste code from it. I can't skim over it. Later review and skimming ahead is lousy, at best, impossible at worst.

The only thing screencasts have going for them is that they are (in general) easier to create than a well written article. The difference for readers/viewers though is substantial.

<comment><USER6> We do pay for well-written articles. They're called books.

Also, video can be a powerful tool. The combination of seeing a thing or a process, hearing a narration about it, and observing another human being interact with it, provides more bandwidth across a wider spectrum of our senses. For some people, it is easier and faster to learn this way, in the same way that it is easier to learn from a tutor than from a textbook.

<comment><AUTHOR> Amen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this done by the people at Treehouse _[1]_? It looks like the design/layout is very much inspired by them, at the least. If they are not associated to Treehouse, they may need to think about making their design a bit more unique, because some might try to call that out as a rip.

[1] [http://teamtreehouse.com/](http://teamtreehouse.com/)

<comment><USER8> Although we're all big fans of Treehouse, we're definitely not associated with them. I'm sorry you feel that it could be called out as a rip, but our in- house designer develops everything from scratch. I think it's safe to say that both landing pages are pretty typical.

<comment><USER7> I think it's just things like:

-The color scheme: [http://bluetide.pro/DWYp/5BcKpQnl](http://bluetide.pro/DWYp/5BcKpQnl)

-The hexagon cut for images/icons: [http://bluetide.pro/VZYM/3VbvSuxF](http://bluetide.pro/VZYM/3VbvSuxF) , but then using circles for avatars: [http://bluetide.pro/LOFC/4Np9xUmq](http://bluetide.pro/LOFC/4Np9xUmq)

-The wide button styles: [http://bluetide.pro/yzft/L49wdKTr](http://bluetide.pro/yzft/L49wdKTr)

And yes, these are common things in general, but I think they stick out more to me because the products are in the same realm.

Just some food for thought! :)

EDIT: And don't get me wrong, I don't mean this in a bad way. It's just something to be aware of that I noticed. I really like the idea of the product, in general! Good luck with it! :)

<comment><USER8> Zach - Thanks for the feedback, we'll definitely take a closer look at things like this in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This may get shot down, but why no PHP? I know its not cool and trendy but it works dam well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Josh, Zach here (one of the co-founders). We personally don't use PHP very much but we're more than open to hosting those screencasts. If you have any recommendations or would like to post some yourself please let us know.

<comment><USER10> Also adding Go([http://golang.org](http://golang.org)) would be great.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're definitely planning on adding Go. Do you have any screencasts that you enjoy in particular that'd you'd like us to add?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am actively trying to watch some videos on Bitcast at the moment. I love it by the way great concept and great way of setting it all out although I am hitting a wall with a 404 when trying to view a video.

GET [https://data.sublimevideo.net/js/kcvkz080-beta.js](https://data.sublimevideo.net/js/kcvkz080-beta.js) 404 (Not Found)

This makes it quite hard to watch the videos.

<comment><USER11> This was the first video in the AngularJS bundle FYI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One thing I learned from watching MicroConf presentations online: Make it about them (the users) not you. The title reads "We Love Screencasts". According to the marketing gurus this should instead focus on your audience (because we only care about ourselves, you know).

Oh and it seems the favicon has an odd white background :-?

Other than that, the site looks extremely sleek :)

<comment><USER8> Stephanos2k, thanks for the feedback! We definitely weren't trying to make it about ourselves but instead demonstrate our passion for screencasts and the screencasting community. That is, after all, why we created Bitcast.

We're always looking to optimize our front page though, so we'll absolutely take your feedback into consideration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand why y'all chose the screencasts niche as opposed to, say, music education.

What's your reasoning, and how you plan on differentiating yourself for content creators from, say, a YouTube Partner network?

<comment><USER8> Hey, one of the co-founders here.

No particular reason - all four of us are web developers, and we quite simply, we each badly wanted a platform for web development screencasts to exist.

We differentiate ourself from YT in a few big ways. The first is our focus on developers. A YT Partner can post videos exclusively on development, but it's obviously impossible to include code markdown or have meaningful software- related tags. We also feature the ability to offer both free and paid videos; it takes a lot of time to make quality screencasts, and many of the developers we've spoken to have found YT insufficient for monetizing their content.

<comment><USER14> I think this is an excellent idea and will do really well. If you have developers who can walk us through real projects that can go live in the wild it will do really well. This can be like the Themeforest for screencasts. This will supplement nicely with Treehouse/Code School/Net Tuts videos because it looks like you guys will show how to do some of the rarer or less widespread tips and tricks that the big guys usually don't cover. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Joseph, having developers release screencasts where they work on actual projects is definitely a big goal of ours. People often underestimate how much you can learn by watching someone who's an expert in something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Should be renamed "A marketplace for Ruby on Rails tutorials".

<comment><USER8> Izztmzzt, I'll admit, we do love Rails :). Naturally, a good percentage of our initial content turned out to be Rails centered, but the large majority of our content library is not.

We're looking to expand into all of the areas that our users are interested in, which topics would you most like to see?

<comment><USER16> I'm a rails and ios developer myself. I'd love to hear screencasts on building webapps using Go. If u have this, then take my money.

<comment><USER8> We're hard at work on it! Who are your favorite Go screencasters currently?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really like this, please make more videos more towards Python and Javascript.

I would love some PHP but that's asking for to much.

</comment><comment><USER18> This makes me sick. Web development tutorials should be free and open for the sake of learning and spreading information (as per the last 10 years).

<comment><USER19> Why? There's plenty of successful pro screencasters: RailsCasts, PeepCode, Destroy all Software, etc. Some have free content, like RailsCasts and Ruby Tapas.

Producing a decent 15 minute screencast takes hours of preparation. At decent billable rates, that means hundreds of dollars per episode. Plus these are videos with real value, that if they do their job, allowing the watcher to earn tens of thousands of dollars more per year.

As for free tutorials, you're a Google search away an essentially limitless library (many of which were written by some of the screencasters that make you sick). I've learned from free material, but I also feel that that an on-point screencast is worth a few dollars. That's why I'm more than happy to pay for RailsCast, Tapas, CodeSchool, and more, every month.

As for "should be free", I really don't know where you get this. In a world where information is a scarce resource, perhaps. That's not the world we live in, and I hope all that can add value all the best in selling their expertise.

<comment><USER8> Thanks bdcraven, we completely agree. Even before the rise in screencast popularity, writing a good book on programming took just as much effort, if not more. Authors certainly didn't give those away for free either.</comment></comment></comment>


An Introduction to Godel's Theorems (Second Edition) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.logicmatters.net/resources/pdfs/godelbook/GodelBookLM.pdf <comment><USER2> If you're uninitiated and simply want to grok where true-but-unprovable comes from, I recommend: [https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-godels-incompleteness- the...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-godels-incompleteness-theorems- work-20200714/)

Wolchover is masterful here. The layers of abstraction keep piling up, and I had to read the last part more than a couple of times to really get it, but then you have it.

<comment><USER3> Just going to echo @dwohnitmok here in saying that this is a pretty 'meh' article. Understanding Godel's First Incompleteness Theorem is actually very accessible, I wrote about it a few years ago[1]. His second is _much_ more involved and laymen won't have the required tools to grasp it. In my opinion, the easiest way to understand it is probably using Löb's Theorem, but that's neither here nor there. Either way, I'm of the opinion that arithmetic coding is very confusing and shouldn't be used to introduce people to Godel.

[1] [https://dvt.name/2018/03/12/godels-first-incompleteness- theo...](https://dvt.name/2018/03/12/godels-first-incompleteness-theorem- programmers/)

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure this is equivalent to Gödel's theorem. Actually, I'm not sure this is a correct proof of anything at all, merely a sort-of demonstration of Richard's paradox.

First, for reference, let me quote First Incompleteness Theorem: "Any consistent formal system F within which a certain amount of elementary arithmetic can be carried out is incomplete; i.e., there are statements of the language of F which can neither be proved nor disproved in F." (from Wikipedia)

Now back to your post.

Obviously, f' is not in T and it is not computable. But neither is T. It is incomputable merely by being the list of computable functions, which we cannot construct because of halting problem and stuff like that.

And your definition of f' relies on having T. So we don't in fact have seen "statement f'". So, the direct connection between Gödel's theorem and your construct is not obvious to me, because first is about constructable, but unprovable statements, and second seems to be a faulty (i.e. mathematically uninterpretable) construct itself.

<comment><USER3> > I'm not sure this is equivalent to Gödel's theorem.

It is. In fact, I've seen it proven this way several times (mostly in CS-y papers), but it's definitely not common. My post is in fact based (almost beat-by-beat) on this UC Davis lecture: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JeIG_CsgvI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JeIG_CsgvI)

<comment><USER4> Your plain and confident statement "it is" doesn't really address any of my concerns, and I just explained why, as it seems, it actually isn't.

P.S.

I did some random googling, and while I'm not sure, all this story seems to be based off of Paul Finsler's work, which he himself thought to be the priority for an incompleteness theorem (Collected Works Vol. IV., p. 9), but didn't seem so to Gödel (and, seemingly, the majority of those who had to say something about it).

If this indeed is the same thing, it would explain to me why this "proof", which doesn't seem to me like a proof at all is so widespread. But, again, I'm not sure I'm reading into it correctly, and operating under assumption that if somebody could provide something more weighty than "it is" statement, I could be persuaded otherwise.

<comment><USER3> > Your plain and confident statement "it is" doesn't really address any of my > concerns...

Your concerns aren't really valid (for example, the computability of T is irrelevant). These are questions I already answered before on both HN and in the Disqus comments. Further, metalogic was my area of focus in school, so I'm quite familiar with intricacies here, and don't really feel it's useful to get _too_ deep into the weeds. But don't take my word for it; Dr. Gusfield's paper (that the lecture is based on) can be found here: [https://csiflabs.cs.ucdavis.edu/~gusfield/godelproofreviseda...](https://csiflabs.cs.ucdavis.edu/~gusfield/godelproofrevisedarXiv.pdf)

The ideas in this proof have been well-tread by Scott Aaronson, Peter Smith, and Michael Sipser. My curt "it is" is also meant to nip in the bud -- _correct_ \-- claims that it's not _exactly_ what Godel proved (the OG variant is actually slightly stronger). Why I'd want to nip these in the bud is that in school, you technically learn the weaker variant (albeit starting with a Henkin construction of Godel's _Completeness_ Theorem). Sort of like this[1]. But the difference between the two is _so_ nuanced, it's not even really worth bringing up unless we're in a graduate seminar.

[1] [https://hal.archives- ouvertes.fr/hal-00274564/document](https://hal.archives- ouvertes.fr/hal-00274564/document)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is a nice, short proof, utilizing the conceptual framework of "Computation".

[https://www.scottaaronson.com/incompleteness.pdf](https://www.scottaaronson.com/incompleteness.pdf)

See chapter 3.

<comment><USER6> Yes, that Scott Aaronson paper was an eye opener for me.

It wasn't because of the correspondence between Godel's theorems and the halting problem, although for a computer programmer Aaronson's formulation turns Godel's inscrutable theorem into something easily accessible. (Oh, and for the curious, the reason Godel's theorem is so hard to understand is he needed a computer programming language for his proof but there were none lying around back then, so he invented his own. I strongly suspect he wasn't thinking of it as a series of executable steps, let alone a programming language whose most important property is to be readable. As a consequence it's bloody terrible.)

No, it was because it Aaronson made it plain both the halting problem and Godel's theorem are really statements about the difficulty of reasoning about infinities. The infinities are really well hidden in both approaches, but once you uncover them it's like seeing the elephant in the room - it all becomes obvious. And it also becomes evident they aren't particularly relevant to anything you are likely to encounter here on earth. That's because there are no infinities in our corner of the universe. And, there there is no halting problem for finite, bounded systems. For some reason, no one ever tells you that.

This paper, listed here on HN recently, explains it much better than I can:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0411418](https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0411418)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A Couple of comments here on "this isn't an introduction, its a book!!", for anyone who checked here first, that is the _title_ of the book, and while I can't speak to Smith's coverage, if you're going to "introduce" someone to the incompleteness theorems, a book is how you're going to do it. They're two of the most significant theorems in modern mathematics, maybe all of mathematics. Logicomix is fine, but I'm not pushing anyone to actually _learn_ these theorems through a graphic novel or a blogpost. As far as book alternatives, an interesting and useful way to get your head around what Godel was doing is to try to read Gottlob Frege, his notation isn't that hard to parse, and it marks the origin point of modern mathematical logic and the attempt to do that which Godel proved impossible.

Foundations of Arithmetic is easily readable with only a slight amount of contextualization for someone with a high school level mathematical education.

</comment><comment><USER8> For a shorter (but still fairly thorough) introduction by the same author, I recommend:

[https://www.logicmatters.net/igt/godel-without- tears/](https://www.logicmatters.net/igt/godel-without-tears/)

I found this super helpful when I was studying Gödel's theorems in grad school. (Fwiw, the 3rd edition of Boolos & Jeffrey's _Computability and Logic_ is also great and takes a somewhat atypical approach to the proofs.)

</comment><comment><USER9> I can recommend Peter Smith as an author; I was part of a small reading group with him while we were all getting to grips with Cambridge's Part III Introduction to Category Theory, and he's definitely good at identifying the difficult bits and breaking them down.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's a book! I was expecting a short paper along the lines of [0] or [1] but this is going to take a while to evaluate. Nonetheless I like the surface- level presentation and it seems like the author takes the time to carefully explain each concept in detail.

[0] [http://tac.mta.ca/tac/reprints/articles/15/tr15.pdf](http://tac.mta.ca/tac/reprints/articles/15/tr15.pdf)

[1] [http://r6.ca/Goedel/goedel1.html](http://r6.ca/Goedel/goedel1.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> I need to learn more about Godel and read the books about him. From the outside, he almost seems like an intellectual rebel, showing how systems are broken when people assume they aren't. With his completeness theorems and his Godel metric, he seemed to be excited by logical exotica. I find the Godel metric and its closed timelike curves to be an interesting case study of general relativity. This is just me spitballing here, as I have not yet dove into the many books I have on him.

</comment><comment><USER12> 402 pages is one incredible introduction!!

Godel's theorems are fun to study though. What other theorems have equally blown your mind?

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a book, if someone wants to introduce himself to the field and its actors I suggest Logicomix.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why does the author use "sound" instead of "consistent"?

<comment><USER15> It's more or less explained in 1.2. A system is "sound" if it's consistent AND can only prove true things.

To see the difference between sound and consistent, suppose you have a formal system A which you know is sound. You can then (by Godel's construction) make a proposition G that says A can't prove or disprove G. We know that G is true because A can't in fact prove or disprove G, by construction.

Make a new formal system by taking the axioms of A and adding the negation of G, that is, B=A+not(G). B is consistent but not sound. It's consistent because A can't prove G, so adding not(G) as an axiom can't possibly lead to a contradiction. And it's not sound because it can prove a falsehood, namely not(G) (granted, it's a _very_ easy proof, since it's an axiom).

Scott Aaronson calls systems like B "self-hating" [1], because they "believe" they're not consistent (even though they are).

[1] [https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=710](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=710)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I read this, but it seems incomplete.

</comment><comment><USER17> How clear the writing!</comment>


The End of Cloud Computing - <AUTHOR> https://a16z.com/2019/11/15/the-end-of-cloud-computing-2/ <comment><USER2> Pattern finding by an investor with no real understanding of technology.</comment>


Grandmother knows best about Crohn's Disease - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2011/10/10/seth-roberts-grandmother-knows-best-about-crohns-disease.html

<comment><USER2> I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease a little over a year ago. I went through pentasa, remicade, all the usual medications and they semi-worked but for the most part not really worth their side effects.

My Dr. told me that diet has nothing to do with Crohn's disease, but like the guy in this story, I read Breaking the Vicious Cycle and got started on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. I've been following it strictly for the past ~6 months and I am literally symptom free (with no drugs). Besides the strict diet, you wouldn't even know I have the disease.

The few times I've cheated on the diet, symptoms noticeably come back. So at this point I'm pretty sold on the benefits of SCD for Crohn's patients. Regardless of what my Dr. says.

</comment><comment><USER3> What the write of this article says is very understated. I have a friend with Crohn's Disease, seeing the effects first hand I would not wish this on people I hate, my friend missed most of his high school years because of this, the steroids that he had to take allowed him to grow a full beard in a week, he was weak, tired and could not function in society let alone find a job that could compromise for his condition

</comment><comment><USER4> My wife was just hospitalized for a Crohn's flare. She was on Pentasia in the hospital an then Flagyl when she got home. Nasty stuff that Flagyl is.

Diet certainly can alleviate some of the symptoms, mostly in dealing with the preventing of obstructions.</comment>


Google Play Store in Numbers - <AUTHOR>

I want to share with you all, my latest on-going project, which is a scalable, distributed and colaborative Crawler of the Google Play Store:
https://github.com/MarcelloLins/GooglePlayAppsCrawler
Feedbacks and questions are welcome <comment><USER2> Good work. One thing: personally, I would change the title to "Show HN: Google Play Store in Numbers" . Otherwise, it looks like a news article.</comment>


The Problem with "Them" - <AUTHOR> http://www.erickarjaluoto.com/blog/the-problem-with-them/ <comment><USER2> The "Us" vs "Them" problem goes back way before pickup culture.

Despite the painful process of being sold services I didn't want, I got a great car quickly that has held up for eight years. The service department at that dealership is more competent than average. I would consider buying a car at that dealership now -- with the caveat that this dealership just got bought by the car dealer who runs all the other new car dealerships in town. The new owner is disciplined and clearly knows how to run a tight ship (he is good at being a car dealer.)

It will cost you something, but many people value a hassle-free experience. My frugal mother in law usually leases a Toyota Corolla or similar Toyota vehicle and never has to get dirty changing her own oil, buying tires from Tire Rack , etc.</comment>


The Terrifying Lessons of a Pandemic Simulation - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-terrifying-lessons-of-a-pandemic-simulation <comment><USER2> There is an interesting amount on behind-the-scenes IT going on for just this sort of disaster, and others, in the government sector.

We don't hear about any of it, so we assume nothing is being done. But the reason it's kept secret is so that people don't start freaking out at scary tabloid headlines.

For example, there is a thing called "the black web" (different sectors have different names for it). Many U.S. government agencies have websites ready to launch in the event of a catastrophic calamity like a pandemic or a radiation leak that affects millions.

Source: Two people I worked with who worked on one of the projects.

<comment><USER3> its a good practice. This week, our town had a algae based toxin problem with their water. They sent out emergency alerts via text, email, the school district callouts, etc. I got texts forwarded from 8 friends/family.

Everyone referred you to the city's home page. The site buckled under the load, and was completely unresponsive for hours. If it was a more urgent emergency, the lack of information could have led to people being harmed.

I was hoping they would switch to a less dynamic site for alert pages, perhaps use a CDN or edge proxy like cloudflare, etc. But no, it appears demand just died off, and they are still doing the same thing. They just put out info on where you can go to national guard filling stations to fill up water bottles, and their home made .net based website is back to taking 10 seconds to render the home page.

<comment><USER4> We had a water problem and I didnt know about it until days later.

No local TV and not reading the paper + no facebook= living somewhere else?

I knew all about HN, but no clue that we couldnt use water.

<comment><USER5> This is where Twitter excels. It's the best way I have found to get local breaking news. Don't bother following any media outlets either, it's counterintuitive but their feeds are mostly marketing garbage with extra click tracking/redirects and excessive dupes. Pick a few local journos whose articles or reporting you like and follow them instead. Those, plus random friends and other local people will give you all the news you need almost instantly. I don't even turn the TV on when something big happens any more, I just check Twitter.

<comment><USER6> That assumes you live somewhere that has local journos to speak of. I only live about 40 miles outside of a major US city. But there's no real local news source. I'd only find out about an emergency because of a auto-call from the local emergency services or because it was such big news that it was covered in the Boston Globe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The opening paragraphs of this article really remind me of the film Contagion, which IIRC tried to portray a pandemic hitting the current world as realistically as possible.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_\(film\))

<comment><USER8> It's even more accurate than I thought when I saw it. I assumed the the visualization of the virus was stupid movie crap, then I worked in bioinformatics and realized it was [https://pymol.org/2](https://pymol.org/2) . One of my friends worked for the state health department, and she said that the level that R0 was explained was spot on as well.

<comment><USER9> I'm an infectious disease epidemiologist - their explanation of R0 (which is occasionally a silly concept but that's another story) is one of the better ones, and the one I use in my classes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of this game, Plague Inc [1], where you can simulate a plague that starts silently until the symptoms become too strong and starts a race between the deadly decease and the governments looking for a cure together and closing borders to prevent it from spreading.

[1] [https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/22-plague- inc](https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/22-plague-inc)

<comment><USER11> One of my most frustrating memories was Madagascar shutting their borders down at the first sign of disease in any other country. The bane of my teenage existence.

<comment><USER12> That was originally Pandemic 2, which Plague Inc cloned.

[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shut-down- everyting](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shut-down-everyting)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We were 1 homeless person away from Ebola in the US, the ambulance in Dallas picked up a homeless guy along with the guy who had Ebola. The homeless guy wandered away from the hospital. While Ebola isn't always transmitted by close contact, if it had been I bet there would have been thousands of people within a few days with it. How many doctors or hospitals even recognize Ebola when a random person walks in the door?

<comment><USER14> Ebola transmission is almost always from patient to a close caregiver. While the latter often are family members in Western Africa, someone bleeding from all orifices will get to an ER much faster in the US. Some transmissions from the index case would certainly be possible, although even standard hospital practice goes a long way towards inhibiting it.

I doubt a diagnosis would take more than a day, especially if the patient recently traveled or the hospital is near a major hub. Medical professionals are as obsessed with such diseases as we are.

Once the threat is known, I have no doubt that any decent medical system would contain it within a few days at the most. Ebola isn't the Sci-Fi threat you might think, requiring Biohazard suits etc. Basic precautions work well, finding possible contacts will be much easier, and the tendency of Americans not to attend mass events helps tremendously: Cars instead of public transport, Netflix instead of crowded bars, small families in suburban houses instead of large families in shared apartments, Wall-Mart instead of markets, etc

<comment><USER15> All somewhat true, but there are a few key areas where America does attend mass events that can help spread diseases quickly. The top three examples in my mind are the trifecta of public schools, large office complexes, and churches (esp mega-churches).

These all feed and overlap each other. Something can spread through the public school system's children quickly into parents, who take it into large shared office building environments (think typical complex of skyscrapers full of tenant companies sharing hallways, elevators, sidewalks, lunch spots, etc), and once a week completely different insersectional sets of these adults and children then gather up in a large church and disperse into the trifecta.

Hospitals themselves are another factor. Those with family ties end up randomly visiting hospitals a few times a year on average for their eldery relatives' or childrens' sakes, where they pick up a ton of chances at diseases.

<comment><USER16> During a serious outbreak of something more transmissible than endemic disease like the flu (and all the various viruses that give us colds), people would freak out and attendance to all those things would plummet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> From this article, it seems like the simulation was acted out by people who were _formerly_ in leadership/advisory positions in the US government.

How likely is it that current leaders heed their advice when an outbreak happens? Wouldn't it be more useful to have the people currently in power preparing for this?

Honestly asking - I have no idea about the modus operandi of Washington bureaucracy.

<comment><USER18> People who currently have these jobs are generally too busy to spend all day wargaming through a simulated pandemic. You'd be lucky to sit them down long enough to play the board game Pandemic. What probably ends up happening is that this gets turned into a written report that some staffer has on hand to pull out and brief the key decision makers on. As the article points out, the learnings from these exercises sometimes get turned into actionable policy, e.g. Bush implementing continuity-of-government plans.

The most similar thing I know about personally is military contingency plans. My dad was a Marine Corps officer and, among other things, worked on contingency plans in the late 1960's. There are standing contingency plans for almost every conceivable military operation the US might perform, ranging from amphibious landings on the fjords of Norway to capturing any given small Caribbean island. The plans don't always get followed, though. My dad spent a lot of time developing a contingency plan to capture the island of Grenada, and he spent the rest of his life bitterly insisting that his plan was far better than how that operation actually turned out!

<comment><USER19> That's actually really cool. What was his plan like compared to the actual operation? Also, what kind of methodologies would one use to plan something like this?

<comment><USER18> He passed away some years ago so I'm just going off my recollections here.

His main complaint was that the actual operation used an unnecessarily large cross-service force (largely for political reasons; the Air Force and Army didn't want to miss out on the chance to get involved) when his plan required less than a division of Marines with accompanying air support.

The contingency plans themselves are highly classified, and none of the plans nor the associated maps and whatnot are allowed to leave a specifically secured facility, making this one of the few times in his military career that my dad couldn't just take home his paperwork at the end of the day. In the case of the Grenada plan, there was already an existing plan that is reevaluated and updated with new intelligence, doctrine, etc. on a periodic basis.

One detail of the plan my dad mentioned investigating was a standing tank (i.e. a large barrel for storing liquids) in the middle of a field on the island. The old plan entailed securing the tank and using it as temporary fuel storage, but my dad was suspicious. It turns out the tank was in the middle of a sugar cane field. It was a molasses tank. Probably not safe or feasible for fuel storage.

Even writing this out, I find this story a _little_ hard to believe, but that's the level of detail the military, at least, puts into their contingency plans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Even within the artificial confines of the simulation, there was a lack of > leadership. Everyone agreed that the President had the final word on > everything in general, but nobody seemed to be responsible for America's > outbreak response specifically. The table returned endlessly to questions > about who would brief Congress; who would be capable of authorizing an > emergency deployment of military tents as civilian isolation units; who > would call state governors to try to ensure a coördinated national response; > and who, even, would attend all the funerals.

</comment><comment><USER21> >Some of the day's dilemmas revealed vulnerabilities that are hardwired into the American system. Some private hospitals, for instance, turned away Clade X patients in order to protect their shareholders. (By the end of the simulation, American health care had been forcibly nationalized.)

GL HF with that. What really would have happened is that the government does what it always does: throw money at the problem. Every hospital gets x dollars to prepare or gets x dollars per confirmed diagnosis. Change like that never happens during a crisis, always after.

<comment><USER22> History does not back up that statement. During the Civil War, WWI and WWII certain parts of the economy were nationalized. It would be safe to expect that in a sever pan-epidemic that the health care system would be nationalized.

<comment><USER21> I was thinking of the 2008 financial crises. Rather than nationalize banks there was a bailout. In 911 there was no nationalization of airports or airlines just more money to set up security theatre. I suppose it could be argued that the DHS personnel are a nationalized rent a cop operation but that sems like its something new not something appropriated

<comment><USER22> Airport security was nationalized after 9/11.

During the 2008 financial crises, the government did not nationalize the banks but it did "nationalize" how some of the banks did fail. Banks that could/would survive, were told to absorb banks that could not/would not survive with money that the government provided and dictated how much it would be paid back. Technically, not nationalization but pretty close.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This sort of reminds me a of a story Danny Hillis has told about Shell Oil and how they were the only major oil company that handled the 1980s oil glut [1] at all well, because the executives had played through a simulation of it. He talked about this in the 2000 game developer's conference keynote [2] (from about 12:30 - 15:26). I've transcribed that bit below:

 _I think sensible business people are also playful business people. And I think that any great development project, or any great engineering project, you can feel it, you can walk into the room and see people playing around, and you can see if they 're acting seriously.

There was actually an interesting case, I don't think they would think of this as a game, but it was literally a game development story: Shell Oil.

Shell Oil -- in the 1980's, there was a time when the price of oil took a big dive, now Shell Oil it turns out was the only company that handled that situation well, and here's why:

Before then, oil was going up, up, up, and in order to be a good oil company you basically had to drill wells as fast as possible, increase production capacity as fast as possible, and pretty much all the oil companies were doing that. The strategic planners at Shell Oil realized that the price of oil might start going down, and that was bad news that no one in the oil industry wanted to do, nobody really wanted to believe it. So they thought about how to get these Shell Oil executives to actually pay attention to it, and they realized the only way they would actually pay attention to this idea was in the context of play.

So what they did is they basically built a simulation game of the oil industry, and they had the Shell Oil executives sit there in the game and put in their assumptions and play it out sort of like SimCity or something like that, of what oil prices would do, according to their assumptions. So they all played little roles, like one of them was an oil sheik, and another one was OPEC, another their competitive refineries, things like that, and they played out the consequences of various games. And one of the things that happened is in every one of their scenarios, the price of oil would crash. And everyone started laughing and they thought this was really silly, because of course everybody knew this wouldn't happen. But after they played this game a while, they started realizing that there were patterns that would happen. They were able to learn in the safety of a game what they really couldn't ever think in the danger of a real spreadsheet they were running the business with.

And in fact, that's what play lets people do. It lets them learn in safe situations things that are actually going to be useful in life. And in fact, in that particular example, Shell Oil realized from their playing that it was actually plausible that the price of oil would collapse, they took some steps to scale back some of their refineries and things like that, and they were the only major oil company that was actually in good shape when that happened._

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_oil_glut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_oil_glut)

[2] [http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014862/2000-GDC-Keynote-Dr- Dan...](http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014862/2000-GDC-Keynote-Dr-Daniel) (requires Flash. The whole talk is pretty good, and immediately preceding this bit is are funny anecdotes about Richard Feynman and Marvin Minsky)

</comment><comment><USER24> The best pandemic simulation was Corrputed Blood Incident[1].

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

</comment><comment><USER25> How did it end? Did they run out of cubes, player cards, or have 8 outbreaks?

</comment><comment><USER26> Those wily blue cubes, getting out of control.... usually, it's the black disease cubes that outbreak.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic_(board_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic_\(board_game\))

</comment><comment><USER27> >Rear Admiral Tim Ziemer, had been removed from his position as the head of global health security on the White House's National Security Council after the Trump Administration cut funds for fighting pandemics.

The present administration isn't interested in preserving the status quo in the event of a pandemic. They are interested in preserving the whiteness of America. An epidemic that they can shape the response and resources around to cull the immigrant, native and slave-descended population would serve their supremacist vision.

4,600 are dead in Puerto Rico due to their negligence. [1]

4,600 is a __conservative __estimate.

1\. [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1803972](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1803972)

<comment><USER28> [http://andrewgelman.com/2018/06/01/data-code-study-puerto- ri...](http://andrewgelman.com/2018/06/01/data-code-study-puerto-rico-deaths/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What was the lesson?</comment>


Using online choice experiments to measure changes in well-being [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/15/7250.full.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> "We find that WhatsApp, Facebook, and digital maps on phones are highly valued by our subjects with median compensations for losing 1 mo of access of €536, €97, and €59, respectively. Other applications such as Insta- gram (€6.79), Snapchat (€2.17), and LinkedIn (€1.52) are valued an order of magnitude lower and Skype (€0.18) and Twitter (€0.00) have very low median valuations. (Average valu- ations or valuations for any given consumer will typically differ from median valuations.) In follow-up interviews, respondents reported that the strikingly high values for WhatsApp reflected its tight integration into their daily lives for coordination with family, friends, colleagues, schoolmates, and others and the high compensation needed for being digitally separated from this network."</comment>


Ask HN: Is it feasible to observe an LCD with a camera and verify UI elements? - <AUTHOR> I thought maybe somebody here has experience witt his.<p>We do a lot of testing of devices that have LCD screens. Right now the testing is done mainly manually. To automate the tests basically two things have to be done:<p>- Press buttons. I think that can be done with a 3D printed fixture and something like Lego Robotics.<p>- Read the screen with a camera: Are there libraries that allow understanding of screen content (buttons, text boxes and so on) even under variable lighting conditions? We have tried screenshots but for that the device had to be in a totally dark enclosure and the brightness couldn't change. I am also interested in screen transitions like progress screens or splash screens that change quickly) <comment><USER2> I imagine a webcam capture to a window could then be inspected with a tool such as [http://www.sikulix.com/](http://www.sikulix.com/)

I was attemping to scrap a Flash newspaper website with PHP and found it wasnt possible easily with Curl, so i wanted to automate navigating chrome and the Flash app using Sikulix about a year ago ... So I imagine Sikulix or a similar tool could be the glue you want to marry your robot tool with information you inspect from the webcam/LCD screens.

Sounds like a fair amount of work though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sikulix looks pretty good but it seems it takes screenshots with the OS. For us the tested device is a black box so we need a camera.

<comment><USER2> Eh? I just mean sikulix would be your driver -- your business logic. So you setup a webcam to record your LCD screen. The webcam feed is displayed on a desktop (OS) and a custom sikulix screen interprets whats on the webcam window and sends commands to your bot or device.

<comment><AUTHOR> ah. One level of indirection. That can work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Bug report generated automatically by the system:

BUG #4123 moving little black dots

There are occasionally, random black dots a few pixels wide, moving slowly and apparently in a brownian movement, across the screen. (This is not limited to the tested window).</comment>


No Evidence That GMO Crops Unsafe to Eat - <AUTHOR> http://www.seeker.com/no-evidence-that-gmo-crops-unsafe-to-eat-1805202741.html#news.discovery.com <comment><USER2> The GMO debate really has nothing to do with modifying the crops genes, the great GMO question is whether the pesticides and herbicides those crops are then fumigated with are safe to eat.

Fortunately, people smarter than us are working on exactly that. There is a lot of ongoing research on these topics.

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=pesticide+toxicity](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=pesticide+toxicity)

[http://www.organic- systems.org/journal/92/JOS_Volume-9_Numbe...](http://www.organic- systems.org/journal/92/JOS_Volume-9_Number-2_Nov_2014-Swanson-et-al.pdf)

<comment><USER3> >The GMO debate really has nothing to do with modifying the crops genes

Maybe for you. This makes a big (and stupid) assumption that agribusiness giants are working in your best interests. It also makes some smaller (also stupid) assumptions that agribusiness giants and scientists know what they are doing, are infallible, and never make mistakes.

<comment><USER4> Who is doing that assumption?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Too bad that "no evidence it is unsafe" is not the same as "hey, it's safe."

There's a difference in the mindset on the two sides of the Atlantic ocean. In the US it's:"If you can prove it was not safe you can sue the hell out of them. Until then: sell it." In Europe it's currently: "Unless they can prove it is safe, it may not enter the market."

The former is good for business, the latter might be a little overprotective, but in the end keeps people safe.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not only that, baby powder is good for babies. Sarcasm</comment>


Ask HN: Rate My App (Bingo Card Creator, Now With Extra AJAX) - <AUTHOR>

Hideho everybody.  I know it is a weeeee bit off the beaten path of the type of applications we usually see here, but I thought I'd see if you guys had any comments on my summer project.
http://staging.bingocardcreator.com
Click on either the "Use Online" or "sign up free" to try the web version. <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://staging.bingocardcreator.com>

What is it: Bingo Card Creator is desktop software (written in Java swing) I wrote three years ago that, well, makes bingo cards. It is mostly used by very non-technical teachers and parents -- something on the order of 1,800 paying customers and about 100k free trials floating around out there.

What is new: While this app was a very good choice for desktopification 3 years ago, these days I thought I have both the skills and the OSS libraries to actually make a fair go of webifying it. So I thought I'd try making a version in Rails.

Feature-wise the desktop version is still superior but I think the ease of use of the web app is fairly compelling. (Your comments are appreciated.) As of the next release of the desktop version it will feature integration with the web app (allowing people to, e.g., save their cards on my server so they can move them between computers, etc). That feature is not demoable today.

Things that I rather like about the web version:

1) Live preview on card editing. (Prototype + Prawn + ImageMagick if you were wondering.)

2) Guest logins, with an "upsell" while you're waiting for cards to print. (Not a feature I would have included normally, but HN has convinced me of the utility.)

3) Copious backend analytics.

4) Time from front page to bingo cards coming out of printer: less than 30 seconds.

N.B. This is not the production system, since I want to do some tighter integration with the rest of my site and a bit of load testing prior to launch. Anything you do will eventually be wiped.

</comment><comment><USER2> I think you've manifested nicely a good business idea. I tried the web version as well as the Mac download and although I didn't send anything to a printer the Print Preview in each case looked functional. I like how in both versions you: de-dupe the word list, give the user a Cards Per Page option, and make the center square and game title customizable.

One small observation I have about the web version is that in Step 1 the "words you've added" section felt a little redundant. The user already sees a nice preview of the Bingo card as it is being updated. So each word the user adds to the card eventually appears on the screen three times. Since the Bingo card updates lag the "words you've added" updates the resulting user experience is a little confusing. But functionally everything I tried in this step worked, so good job on the word-lists controller - methods new (post) and edit (put) handled my mistakes (e.g., too few words) flawlessly.

Steps 2 and 3 in the web version made sense and the resulting pdf I downloaded looked great. You make a decent case for registering during step 3. At first I didn't understand the line "use 604 bingo activities any time you want to" but I soon realized that's a reference to your library of premade cards, which I tried and thought was a super feature.

When you introduce this web version into the home screen layout, you might want to pump it as the #1 option above the PC and Mac versions. Otherwise it might be too confusing because while the copy on your site is well-written it's pretty verbose. I would want to abstract out some of your sales pitch and whittle down the benefits - although this is maybe personal taste. As you iterate you might try to get the "a picture is worth a thousand words" screenshots higher in the flow. Also you should update those screenshots because the end result today looks significantly better than your images. That may be affecting your conversion.

As I understand you, the sole reason for purchasing a license is to remove the watermark and footnote. I notice however that neither the watermark nor the footnote seeps into the Bingo card. Since people are already using a scissors or a paper cutter to trim the (multiple cards per page) hardcopy it seems trivial for them to also crop away your branding. Assuming it's technically feasible I might inconvenience the nonpayers a bit more by positioning my watermark directly on the cards. But I see you have 1,800 paying customers - so it is me who should be asking you for suggestions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments.

 _the "words you've added" section felt a little redundant._

While this is subtle, it is alphabetized to give teachers a quick way to figure out whether they've missed something. The downloadable version doesn't need it because the combo box is alphabetized automatically.

 _As you iterate you might try to get the "a picture is worth a thousand words" screenshots higher in the flow._

I have A/B tested this one extensively. Having it is better than not but the other text is more important. However, I'll be taking the occasion to do some major copy rewrites, so I might be in a testing mood again soon.

 _As I understand you, the sole reason for purchasing a license is to remove the watermark and footnote._

You may not have noticed the 15 card print limit in the trial version. That is the overwhelming reason people purchase. The watermark and footnote are actually unique to the web version (implementing them in Java was hellacious so I stopped trying). 15 cards was chosen to segment the market such that parents with blogs would spread the software for free but teachers with classes couldn't get a lesson out of it without paying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd suggest less text and more big bright green buttons. It may seem ridiculous, but people just don't read instructions. They'll avoid text like the plague until they aren't sure what they need to do, then frantically scan. Then give up.

I'd also widen the width of the page - fullscreen gives more space for communicating and will help your app feel more professional.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've enjoyed your transparency with sales figures for your downloadable app, I hope you continue the service for this new online version.

I would like to add that some UI polishing would make this quite nice. More prominent call to action pushing the online version, too.

</comment><comment><USER5> You should find a UI guy, but I like the concept... a lot

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. My UI guy and I are sitting down together on Saturday. "Pretty" has never been my forte, so I pay other people to do it for me.</comment></comment>


Xtal: typed array indexing DSL in Tcl - <AUTHOR> http://tarray.sourceforge.net/xtal_lang.html <comment><USER2> The database-like approach to filtering data in lists and associate arrays is done nicely, especially being able use boolean expressions and operators in the same syntax as a list index. The '%' is a count operator, and the '@@' is a token for the content, for example in the code below:

        % Employees[@@.Age > 35 && @@.Salary < 70000]

That returns a count of all employees over 35 and making under 70,000$. The syntax IMO has a nice combination of conciseness, expressiveness, and readability.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm wondering if Xtal would be an adequate replacement for R; I am not an R expert so I couldn't say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Tcl is the little language that could :)

I always like seeing neat projects in Tcl. Perhaps it's because of the nostalgia of being 13 and hacking away at eggdrops?</comment>


Some clients are evil and their work is toxic - <AUTHOR> http://hossgifford.com/fast-good-cheap/

<comment><USER2> I've found that the best thing to do with these people is send them offshore. Let them see what cheap, "fast" work looks like. Let them have all their preconceptions shattered, and their sense of what it takes to build software modified towards reality. Let them get all the frustration out of their system until they're ready for you to show them what _good_ , genuinely fast work looks like.

The quickest way to accomplish this is to tell them your rate upfront. They'll go "ouch", at which point you can gently point them towards rentacoder, safe in the knowledge that they'll be back in 6 months time with a bit of perspective and a willingness to pay your extortionate rate so long as you promise never to put them through anything like what they just suffered ever again.

<comment><USER3> I think smart offshoring can be a good idea. If they want the stuff for 1/10th price than they will not get quality. But if they want the stuff for half price they in fact can have at least as good qualty if not better. You can find the top talent here in Eastern Europe for half of the salary usual in the U.S. I know this, because I've already worked in the 'West' doing absolutely the same work for much more money than I can earn here. Honestly the real bottleneck of (smart) offshoring is communication. If communication is solved then it can work well.

<comment><USER4> _If communication is solved then it can work well._

That's a big _if_. For most projects, the work is not that difficult in a technical sense. The hard parts are accurate communication and managing change over time. IMO these factors are much more likely to cause project failure than some pure technical hurdle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I once made the mistake to work as contractor (Ruby) for a company that fits in the article's description. The customer was unable to deliver me input for serveral months but begged me to sit in their office all day. Just sit there and do some research (no kidding). Then around 6 weeks prior the launch date (which was not communicated to me upfront) the hurry started and it was totally rediculous: No specs, no clue, no decision making. I spent 4 weeks (including weekends) working ~10 hours (+1.5h commuting) per day to fix the sh*it as far as I could so that we had something to launch. Code quality was horrible of course.

I felt totally burned out after the launch and there was not even a big financial neither emotional reward in doing this exhausting mess to save my customer's back from his angry client. Three days before my contract ended, the general manager had a conversation with me in his shiny office. He told me, that they wanted to extend the contract for 6 months (~60.000€).

I answered: Thank you, but not under this circumstances.

Best decision for my physical and mental health in the last 5 years. If you've a choice: DONT DO IT.

Life is simply too short do work for such types of (in the end) losing companies and ruin yourself.

<comment><USER6> Did you give the general manager a feedback like this in the end, or did you think it more prudent to keep your cards closer to your chest?

<comment><USER5> I gave (naive) feedback how they should improve their work with their customers, improve hiring people, make sure employees are motivated and whatever.

The general manager even told me that most things I said were true but he's not able to change it. As the company is inside a large publishing group and they've some large portal sites running, they're quite job-save for the next 5 years I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting article but the title is a little misleading.

Before I clicked, I thought they were talking about doing work for cigarette or oil companies. I worked at a company that was pitching services to a cigarette company, and --nobody-- involved felt good about doing the pitch.

But back to the point, one of the speakers at the Business of Software series once said "When someone tells you the work you do is easy, they probably have no idea what they're talking about". Being in services, I think there's at least one person at every client who thinks that everything I do is overpriced and easy.

You can't blame clients for wanting to get the 'most for the least' from their vendors. Interesting that they know they're not capable of doing it themselves to hire a vendor. Yet after that decision, they don't seem to know enough to not disrespect the work you do.

<comment><USER8> I agree. High client expectations are hardly evil.

Without a patron, everyone competes on fast, good, and cheap. It drives efficiency and innovation, e.g. Google.

The responses to clients with unrealistic goals is the same as to those with practical ones -- find out the "why?" and provide a detailed proposal with realistic terms.

If your proposal is rejected,being indignant is counterproductive. It's just business.

<comment><USER7> Actually I would argue the market winners tend to be at the opposite ends of the spectrum. The best (arguably the most expensive) and the cheapest generally have the easiest time.

Everyone in the middle is fighting for the rest of the market, which, as the Jersey Shore boys put it, is full of grenades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While we've all come across these kinds of clients and it is probably in our best interest not to become involved in a working relationship with these clients, I disagree with his classification of them being 'evil' and 'douchebags'. I've found that many of these individuals are just naive to the effort involved in taking their (website|product|application|widget) from an idea to a tangible working product. They are able to envision 'something' in their minds, and because they are able to do that they consider the job at least partially done. Many of them have never done our jobs, and even those that have probably fall at the long tail end of the hockey stick and can't appreciate the difference between someone that learned HTML in 24 hours and someone who can create a design that creates value to their product (same goes for us backend folks).

If someone says to me 'I'd like to build X, and my budget is Y, and my timeline is Z' and they're not completely obnoxious in their approach, it's not very difficult to have a conversation with this individual, ask a few questions, and get a better understanding of what 'X' really is and how 'Z' came to be (assuming Y is either non-negotiable or you don't have the experience to know what you're worth). You might find that this individual isn't even aware that a product (yes I'm mostly talking web properties here) can be broken down into pieces to fit into a continuous timeline, where those smaller pieces are easier to manage and deliver on.

With all this in mind, I've avoided doing consultancy work for the better part of the past 6 years because I got worn out at the time of dealing with what the OP had described about. After 6 years, I have learned a lot more about myself and have acquired soft skills that I didn't have before (and learned from a great PM). Those 6 years have also helped me realize that humility, when used properly, can help distinguish between the arrogant and the naive client.

<comment><USER6> And the naivety works the other way, too. I had a friend who organized big company events, setting up sound systems, light, hiring catering, and musicians, getting an ice castle for the lobby, such things.

Clients had absolutely no ability to gauge what stuff should cost. So the company overcharged heavily on a lot of technical stuff (like renting out lights or speakers), but could offer a supreme service. (One other `trick' was to make sure that their hired hands always wore suits, did not smoke, and looked respectable in general. They hired the same students as anybody else, but could charge much more for their work.)

<comment><USER9> Without a doubt your 'appearance' can go a long way towards dictating your rate. Your appearance can be comprised of:

\- How you dress \- The language you use \- The presentation of your proposal \- Once you have the gig, the manner in which you conduct business

It's no secret that if you want to charge more than your competitors, one of the best ways to do so is to build an image that compliments that idea.

<comment><USER6> Yes. And the clients where happy with them, because they also went the extra mile and gave top-notch service for the whole event (and not only dumping some equipment on them) --- but they charged a top-notch price, too.

(And on of they ways to charge the high price was not too charge a high price only for the staff that really matters and costs, but may not be visible to the client beforehand---but they charged a lot for the stuff where the naive client can _imagine_ that it's expensive. If they did not offer the high quality in the rest of what they did, this would have been a rip-off, but it turned to be more of a cross-subsidy. (And since they only sell packages anyway, it does not really matter, how the invoice explains the high fees.))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As an IT Director I apologize and here's why:

I will outsource anything that the stakeholders are being unreasonable about. Specifically to show what an "easy/quick" project will cost. I won't throw you to the wolves but there are many IT people that will.

So always protect yourself, even from the in house technical staff. Yes they'll understand the challenges you face, sometimes all too well.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wanting it fast, good, and cheap is also a red flag for lots of other little bonuses, such as:

      - You will constantly wait for them to make a decision.
      - It will be your fault they took so long to make a decision.
      - They will have emergencies of their own making.
      - It will be your fault they have emergencies.
      - They will commit to little or nothing on paper.
      - It's not their fault because they never committed to that.
      - You think you have specs; they think you're prototyping, so...
      - You will do much work 2 or 3 times.
      - They will constantly change priorities.
      - They will forget they changed priorities, so...
      - They will complain when a lower priority isn't done.
      - You won't get paid on time.
      - You will spend lots of time trying to get paid.
      - They will always find some excuse to not pay.
      - You may never get paid.
      - If it's good, it's because they thought of it.
      - If it's bad, it's because you suck.
      - You can't win.

Honestly, I wish we could tattoo these people to save the next developer all the heartache. Listen to OP; as soon as you realize they want it fast, good, and cheap, _run_ the other way.

<comment><USER7> When you're dealing with anyone outside the Fortune 10,000, money is still not something that is just thrown around willy nilly. So, in the grand scheme of things, --everyone-- wants it fast, good and cheap, __if it's possible __.

If you can educate your prospect on why it's not possible, they'll usually come around and even be reasonable about things.

So I would say if the prospect wants it fast, good and cheap, and it smells like they're going to be __clueless dicks __about it, then run the other way.

With respect to many of the bullet points above, I would also say that you have to vet your prospects just as much as they are vetting you, and protect yourself with a contract that isn't heavily in favor of the customer (i.e., you're entitled to stop work if you're not paid on time, that you have an exit clause, etc., etc.) More often than not, you also have to put your bad cop hat on and manage the customer. I've seen so many projects fail because the Account Manager or PM was too scared to say anything to control the scope of the project.

<comment><USER12> You're correct, but you're missing the point that many clients interests are not aligned with either yours or even their organizations. When someone _refuses_ to commit to decisions in writing, even in an email, then you are a pawn in some game they are playing. You're being set up to fail and to be scapegoated because they believe that this will advance them in the organization quicker than you succeeding (e.g. the project's sponsor is a rival of theirs). That is why they are best described as toxic.

<comment><USER7> I would agree. Client interests are rarely aligned with yours.

If the economic relationship, however, between you and the client is genuinely fair (i.e., they need you as much as you need them) then you're actually in a position to push back and get balanced results.

I tend to find that most services companies are more obsessed with the 'close' than they are with making sure the relationship is going to work (i.e., vetting them, asking tough questions back) before signing on the dotted line. You also have to acknowledge that a high percentage of those who take on toxic clients and projects did it to themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> And he didn't even go into mentioning that these people that want fast, good & cheap are experts sneakscope ops, it's totally right to pull out or severly limit the deliverables.

<comment><USER12> _experts sneakscope ops_

What does this mean?

<comment><USER14> "Scope creep" - adding more and more work.

<comment><USER13> Yep also was a little typo, I meant "expert sneakscope ops" not experts. My bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have to ask, do you really use phrases like "nurturing ecosystem where all parties benefit and grow from their relationship" with your clients? Are you referring to their relationship to their customers, or your relationship to the client?

'Fast', 'good', and 'cheap' are all subjective terms. Each one works against the other two, for sure. That's a fact that your client will have to discover. I completely agree with the suggestions in other comments to prompt your client to use offshore talent -- then they'll truly learn that Fast+Cheap != Good.

I've worked with these kinds of clients, and their opposite: large, established financial institutions who insist on working with 'Big Name' consulting firms: IBM, Accenture, etc. These firms make projects that would be 6 months of interesting effort into 2 or 3 year-long efforts, costing multi- millions, with a ratio of documentation/artifact to useful code being about 5:1. In the end, the deliverable is generally of mediocre quality. Great software does not come from financial institutions, nor from those operating on the fast and cheap. You won't change that reality, and I think you'd grow weary trying to do so.

I'll warn you now: 90%+ of your clients will be some combination of the above -- mostly the fast/cheap type. You'll learn, over time, how to work these kinds of gigs. Think of your bottom-line (money, experience) gain. Don't look to your client to fulfill your career goals -- 'tis not their role. Apply your own sense of 'fast' and 'good', and remind your client that your expectations are to be paid in-full and on-time, every time.

...and keep looking for that next gig.

</comment><comment><USER16> It sounds to me that he doesn't see this from the toxic client's point of view, and is at risk of passing up work that he views as toxic, but really isn't.

We just had a quote in for some mailshot work for us that looked awfully highly priced for what it was as everything on the quote had things that we could do ourselves with mailchimp, but the key thing that we would've relied upon for them to do that we couldn't do ourselves (mailshot template design, modifying the content to maximise attention) wasn't even mentioned on the quote.

When bidding, it's sometimes easier to justify your prices by highlighting the value in the things your potential customer _can't_ do, rather than the stuff they can and try to do it cheaper than their internal guys. There are toxic clients out there and they should be avoided, but sometimes cheap, good and fast means cheap enough, good enough, fast enough and (most importantly) takes care of my pain.

</comment><comment><USER17> However accurate this post is, it represents something I don't understand at all. How often do we see posted here a rant about how terrible it is to deal with some clients. That in and of itself is not bad. A venting space is necessary. That said, I don't care how good you are, if I was a prospective client who a) was savvy b) had heard of you c) read your personal blog which you maintain as part of your professional profile... I would personally not be excited about doing business with someone who called a business opportunity a douche bag (/prick). I know that "hacker culture" prides itself to a certain degree on counter-culturalism, but isn't there a place for class any more?

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure I understand. Is it the language that offends you, or the venting about a client? Because you already said the latter is "not bad" and "necessary." But getting that upset that somebody uses very mildly offensive swear words in an informal, personal setting seems a bit petty and kind of juvenile, certainly not something I would expect from most adults. I don't know, maybe the words "douche" and "prick" are more severe in some places than in my neck of the woods? Because over here, they're roughly on par with "jerk."

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Larry Niven said there are two bumps in a writer's career:

\- In the beginning, a writer should accept all work he can get, because he needs to develop his skills, and any work will do that, regardless of how well paying etc.

\- But then the writer needs to learn to turn down _bad work_ \- that's the first bump.

\- And later, he needs to learn to turn down _good work_ , because there's a limit to how much you can handle - that's the second bump.

The submission here is talking about the first bump. It's not necessarily right for everyone, at every stage; though of course it's good advice and worth knowing about (btw: I always interpret the "fast" as meaning performant - ie. fast software not fast development - but the latter makes more sense for work in general.)

Note that most writers have a day job (or are independently wealthy, as Niven was - for a year), so it doesn't apply to a professional full-time contractor... but it may apply to you if you are a student, hobbiest or moon- lighting contractor.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wish I could upvote this multiple times; the article is spot on.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why not set a minimum price per hour, and if the customer can't afford you, then say good-bye with no hard feelings?

He is not evil and toxic, he just needs someone cheaper and may need to adjust his definition of "good" and "fast" accordingly.

There are good reasons to take work for less than your normal fee. I do it to learn sexy new technologies I would not have access to otherwise. (i.e. if you have Exadata and need a cheap, good and fast DBA send me and email!) As long as you know what you are getting out of the deal, all is good.

Calling someone a douche-bag, evil and poison because he asked for reduced rate? Giving a condescending rant about it? I don't think its professional and I'd never treat potential customers like this, even if I disagree with their way of doing business.

</comment><comment><USER22> Let's just slow down a minute.

Any manager who _doesn't_ want work done fast, good and cheap is a bad manager. Fast, good and cheap are all good things and something that everyone involved should strive for on all projects.

You can't have them all in the real world, of course. And good managers will be realistic - I think that's what this article is saying. But even given that you have to trade off some of these points doesn't still mean you don't want it as fast, cheap or good as possible _given the constraints_.

Even if you decide to sacrifice "cheap", for example, there's nothing wrong about negotiation to still get the best rate possible.

<comment><USER12> Actually no competent manager thinks in terms of "cheap" but in terms of ROI.

<comment><USER23> "Cheap" implies "high ROI".

<comment><USER12> No it only implies low initial cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The best thing to do to avoid crap like this is charge a decent hourly rate and don't let the clock run too long before you get your first check. They will not waste your time.

<comment><USER7> It depends on the situation.

Oftentimes the people you're working with don't know how much you're being paid (their superiors don't talk to them about how much you're paid because they're afraid members of their team will just want to leave because they think they're underpaid). Those people will still waste your time.

At the end of the billing period, you'll be asked to shave hours because you didn't notify someone higher up that your time was being wasted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I accepted a job at a company where, during the interview, one of the interviewers said "we are looking for someone who can do work fast, good and cheap and we don't want any excuses."

I was thinking of bringing up the point that it is impossible to get all three but didn't and accepted the job.

What a big mistake. I ended up leaving half a year later although it was a good experience learning the types of people I don't want to work with.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've always lived by this - [http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/clients- or-grinders-...](http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/clients-or-grinders- understanding-the-three-market-types) \- which says much the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Off-topic: I like the look of that page.

</comment><comment><USER27> Am I the only one who finds those left-side magazine-style quotes from the article distracting? I don't think they add anything to the article.

<comment><USER28> I like the format, but agree it could have been done better in this particular case.</comment></comment>


The Kiev fraud factory stealing senior citizens' savings - <AUTHOR> https://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/fraudfactory/ <comment><USER2> Many people overlook one moral problem we have in the post-Soviet Union countries. Business, money making of any kind in general and just about any life efforts apart from "struggling for the victory of Communism", were portrayed by Commies as inherently evil. Young generation is not affected by it directly, but they life in a culture that was, and so the deal is, when you are into money making, you are free from any moral barriers - it's same thing as crime (and quite literally, doing most business you have to commit actual crime because the markets - prevalent prices - will not let you work lawfully, as everyone is breaking laws). I seen very serious people wearing suits, with absolutely no kind of criminal record or intentions, saying in a friendly conversations things like "it's a business, moral things aren't applicable here".

As a side note, working with people from high-trust societies is always a fun experience - they struggle to understand how you can productively cooperate and be on best terms with people for many years not trusting them a tad bit. The idea that in Russia people live that way all their lives, sometimes even with their spouses and parents, is just perplexing to them :)</comment>