How I survived being a $220k/year intern - <AUTHOR> https://matt.sh/commit-this <comment><USER2> I don't understand people who write things like this. If you're unhappy leave, if you think the corporate culture is wrong, either participate in fixing it, or get out. I honestly can't stand people who self righteously sound the alarm about how they can see all of the things wrong with everybody else. It sounds especially childish when you are making so much money.

<comment><USER3> Rachel had something about fixing corporate culture recently (hint: you can't), and sometimes really you can't leave. Some are shackled to their jobs through their visa, others because of healthcare needs (their health insurance has favourable terms, and they need to care for a family member), and others because of the nature of the industry (university faculty comes to mind, especially post-2008).

The fact that you are paid does nothing about the _ennui_. You clearly never held a no-show job before.

<comment><USER4> Insider club here? Who is 'Rachel'?

<comment><USER5> Hi?

<comment><USER6> hiya rachel. you good?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Something smelled fishy, so I did a bit of follow-up. This dude is leaving out a huge detail to make his employment troubles be a pivotal problem when...it's not.

Let's footnote a coupleo f his "Story of Pivotal The Employment"

> Hired

To contribute to Redis

> All My Work Is Owned by Another Employee? What?

The primary redis maintainer, not a pivotal employee?

> Let's Organize Instead of Being A Hobby Project

Let's misrepresent the philosophical position of the OS project maintainer on the best way to move the project forward.

> Two Days of Work to Clear 4 Years of Issues Ignored By The Creator Because > Laziness

A bunc hof those issues have fundamental problems that the creator explicitly drilled into and explained ([https://github.com/antirez/redis/pull/1906#issuecomment-5145...](https://github.com/antirez/redis/pull/1906#issuecomment-51452143))

<comment><USER8> I don't understand. Does the fact that the author of the project in question is antirez change anything about the authors experience?

<comment><USER9> Given that they were tasked to contribute to a very popular open source project, the author may have been able to get past their perceptions of mismanagement at Pivotal. But part of their complaint seems to be that they were not able to contribute as much as they wanted. Different people adapt to such a situation in different ways.

<comment><USER8> If Antirez was an 'employee' at pivotal at the time, and was apparently very hard to work with (of course we only see one side here), them I can sort of understand the authors frustration.

If Pivotal hired someone to contribute to Redis who then wasn't actually allowed to contribute, that's even more silly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I work for the "Labs" (Services) portion of Pivotal and I've seen this guy's stuff on HN before...

Can't comment on what non-services teams are like at Pivotal but the services organization is pretty spectacular.

Pivotal's got problems just like every other organization does, but this guy seems to be mad as hell and blowing things a _bit_ out of proportion.

<comment><USER11> > but the services organization is pretty spectacular.

Overall, the org looks decent on Glassdoor.

<comment><USER12> Separately from this specific case, Glassdoor is a very imperfect way to evaluate an org. Companies will encourage employees to juice the reviews ([https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/01/22/companies-gaming- glas...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/01/22/companies-gaming-glassdoor- reviews-to-look-better-investigation-finds/)).

Anecdotally, Glassdoor will often remove negative reviews for paying employers by giving flimsy excuses like "They are against the 'Community Guidelines'" (something that's so broad it's impossible to hold them to specifics). The "features" they advertise for paying employers are all above-the-board though.

<comment><USER13> Adding another anecdote, I worked for a company which paid Glassdoor to remove a bunch of negative reviews. The score jumped from 2 to 4 overnight and a bunch of well-written negative reviews disappeared.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some people would be happy if their first job was to be at a customer service desk or even stacking files for experience with a decent salary in order to get their foot in the door to a internship at a FAANG company. Where as here we see a very arrogant developer paid top dollar for a less demanding role and yet still complains about their employer and chose to work there for over three years.

Every company has problems and you don't have to stay there even if you hate everything under the sun about them. Perhaps he was too focused on hate- watching his company's culture to even think about quitting.

</comment><comment><USER15> I get the sense that the author is somewhat toxic in the workplace and his managers didn't have the power to fire him, so they gave him as meaningless a job as possible to get him to quit.

I'm also surprised he isn't more concerned with anonymity. I know if he applied for an open role at my current company, based on this post he would not be hired.

</comment><comment><USER16> > I worked from home for three years with a $220,000 salary, traveled a total > of six times, two SF, one Seattle, three to Europe, and contributed > thousands of lines of features/fixes/optimizations to high profile projects, > all the while never being granted responsibility greater than what you'd > give a middle school intern.

But... that all sounds like a lot of responsibility doesn't it?

<comment><USER17> None of it implies responsibility.

<comment><USER16> > contributed thousands of lines of features/fixes/optimizations to high > profile projects

What's more responsible than pushing code to a high-profile project? Responsible for the product's performance, security. Responsible for what the customer sees and experiences. Responsible for keeping their data safe and guarding the company's reputation.

Responsible enough to be allowed to work independently from home.

Responsible enough to travel the world representing the company in-person.

<comment><USER18> My reading was that those were to open source projects the company didn't control.

<comment><USER16> Contributions required by paying customers as a result of a commercial support contract.

If he's pushing to Redis he's responsible for the integrity of probably billions of dollars worth of data. That's a _massive_ , _international-scale_ level of responsibility, in the name of his employer. That's huge responsibility!

<comment><USER19> And to boot, he has a portfolio of work he can show potential next employers instead of it being blackholed in a private repo forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The only interesting thought I've had while reading this pretty mundane post is "man am I happy to not be working with that dude".

<comment><USER21> Right. A guy who'd give up fifty grand just so he was free to write a rant.

<comment><USER22> It's actually 50k of time off (not made clear other than in the contract at the bottom), which is not exactly the same thing.

<comment><USER23> What does "50k of time off mean?" They were going to give him vacation time accrued or something else?

<comment><USER22> irrc 50k at the rate of his salary until he got a job, may be mis-remebering.

<comment><USER23> Oh so they were going to pay him 50k to sit on his butt for X amount of time. I don't know if I would really consider that leaving money on the table, personally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think "Matt" thinks he's a bit cleverer than he is. It's not clear what he's talking about.

He also uses the word "fraud" ad nauseam. One place I worked actually used Pivotal Tracker, and I found it worked pretty well from the end-user perspective. Wasn't ground-breaking software or anything, but it at least worked. I could see my tasks at a glance a lot easier than with, say, Basecamp.

Just another person with an axe to grind.

<comment><USER25> For what it's worth I think Tracker is a very small part of the overall Pivotal business. I think their main focus is their cloud computing products.

I love PT and I've used it for 6+ years at my last two jobs.

<comment><USER26> Yeah I've used PCF and their open source stuff a lot, and i've never had an issue with their stuff not working. Pair programming and TDD lends itself to code that works well and is pretty well documented. No complaints

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Blog posts like this are usually best interpreted as the bitter ranting of an ex-employee who was let go. The author himself was semi-notorious (possibly still so?) in the Redis community for being a bit of a self-serving demagogue (to put it nicely).

Generally speaking, if an individual was a remote, WFH, IC employee whose manager didn't even talk to them for a year, they probably don't have the working knowledge to do much critiquing of the company at large.

It should also be noted that Pivotal was acquired by VMware for ~$2.7B.

Points like this:

> At the other end, you have employees who create your products being treated > like unwanted interns because development and engineering isn't given > recognition for generating revenue. Obviously only sales and executives are > money makers. Developers are just an unneeded, low skilled, interchangeable > burden reducing your profits because they have non-commission-based > salaries. Why not just fire all your developers then sell what they made > without fixing or improving anything—wow, infinite profit!

Coupled with him making $220k/yr in salary (no mention that I saw about equity) doesn't seem to gel. The entitlement is strong with this one.

<comment><USER28> > It should also be noted that Pivotal was acquired by VMware for ~$2.7B.

This doesn't mean much. Both Pivotal and Dell were controlled / belonged to Dell at the point of the acquisition, so this was more of a Dell-internal restructuring than an acquisition on the open market.

That said, I agree that the OP is way over the top to be taken seriously.

<comment><USER29> Wait, so how much did Dell buy it for?

<comment><USER30> I think GP poster means "both Pivotal and VMware were owned by Dell."

IIRC Pivotal's stock price collapsed, it didn't seem to have much of a future as a public company, and so Dell consolidated it into VMware to save face.

<comment><USER29> gotcha, I looked it up, apparently EMC spun Pivotal out from an internal dept, but still maintained a majority stake in the company, then Dell bought both EMC and VMWare, and at some point Pivotal went public, but then I guess due to poor performance the price dropped so dell had VMWare buy it all back.

I'm guessing that's what OPs referring to when he says that the customers and investors were the same, probably most of their customers were other Dell companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > contributed thousands of lines of features/fixes/optimizations to high > profile projects, all the while never being granted responsibility greater > than what you'd give a middle school intern

Am I being a bit dim or did they immediately contradict themselves here?

<comment><USER32> A lot of people, I suspect including the author, consider "responsibility" to exclusively mean the power to tell other people what to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Being paid a lot of money for not having any responsibility sounds good to me. This guy sure seems angry about it though.

<comment><USER34> also giving up a $50k severance package doesn't sound as exceptional when you've already collected $660,000 from them. Yeah it's still a lot of money, but apparently being able to promote his blog with anecdotes from Pivotal was worth the $50k to him...

<comment><USER35> It makes me suspicious of a person who passes up $50k because they would rather write a rant on their blog. What type of personality does that?

Sure the agreement was one sided, and maybe it even had questionable legal basis and would be unenforceable, but guess what, so do many other contracts consumers sign every day, and those don't usually net us $50k!

<comment><USER36> _> passes up 50K_

If the author had another job lined up already, the severance package wasn't worth much of anything -- it only paid out until he had a new position. So, probably closer to passing up $0 than to passing up $50K.

Still a bit of an annoying personality. If you know you won't get any $ from the severance package, just send a "thanks but no thanks" message to the person off-boarding you. Don't harass some poor corporate lawyer 2 years of out law school with inane demands for preferential terms on the severance contract for an individual contributor.

<comment><USER32> I think you're giving the system too much deference here. If an individual contributor is important enough that the company wants to give them a gag order, they're important enough to ask for preferential terms about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It was hard to get at the main bullet points from the rant.

I found that what he did - his job description as he put 'Matt as a service' \- to be reasonable.

Support, bug fixes, documentation, and development. It would be nice to see more companies have someone completely own a small piece.

Often when I contact developer support, I talk to someone who clearly does not know anything about the product I'm talking about. It would have been nice to talk to Matt at that time.

Conversely, having the developers directly talk to customers gives them more visibility to how their products are being used. This is both fulfilling and enlightening.

</comment><comment><USER38> Should be tagged [2017]: while the article itself doesn't have a date, the next in the series ("How Dumb Must You Be To Work For Pivotal in 2018?") notes:

> Previously (December 2017): Pivotal Empolyment 2013-2016

<comment><USER39> Also here[1] it's listed with the date 2017-12-16. It's confusing that the article appears to have 3 titles: "Commit. This.", "How I Survived Being A $220k/year Intern", and "A Senior Developer Who Couldn't Commit Code". Also obviously confusing that the article page itself is undated.

[1] [https://matt.sh/](https://matt.sh/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I really feel the need to rebuke hacker news commenters on this. The number of comments shouting "You made 220k! STFU!" is ridiculous. I don't care how much you pay me, you don't get to treat me like shit. Once you reach a certain salary a job is more about fulfilment/ego/interest/motivation than $$, there's a reason we're not all whoring ourselves out on street corners for an extra couple of dollars in the evening.

What the author is talking about is a real issue - there is a very significant portion of enterprise (and b2b) software that basically adds little or no value compared to a competitor. Often the money is made by leveraging relationships with contacts in large corporations who frankly won't notice the money is missing - and for a plethora of reasons are more incentivised to push for buying something than to actually see the company succeed. I've personally seen sales organisations pay hundreds of thousands to external contractors when we had more competent staff literally sitting waiting to be asked to do the work. Even then, there's a hell of a lot of software out there that isn't difficult and isn't interesting, so the defining feature of who provides it is what their sales organisation looks like.

The result of that dynamic though, is the engineering organisation can be crap- because they're not where the company derives its value. Which might not be what an software engineer wants to hear, but it's true. (as an aside, find out what sales folks are paid at your current job - it's probably more than you).

</comment><comment><USER41> > "I worked from home for three years with a $220,000 salary"

I stopped reading right there. I really don't want to hear someone in this situation complain. Suck it up or find a new job - take a pay cut if you're really that unhappy. I've worked for shitty companies for a fraction of that salary.

Hell, It's taken me over 15 years to get to a salary even within spitting distance of that amount - and I've never been able to work from home.

</comment><comment><USER42> > _I Passed Up a $50,000 Severance To Write This_

I wish he had taken the $50K. We would have all been better off!

(As noted in the article, the $50K severance would have been tied to a non- disparagement agreement.)

<comment><USER41> $50k to not write an alcohol-fueled angry screed on my personal blog sounds like a pretty fair trade to me. I'd take it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> If anyone is tired of getting $220k/year, i could take it!.

\---

I think sometimes developers have drink so hard the kool aid of changing the world and all that, and if is not happening, then get sad. But why?

Maybe because I have a long time in this industry, but this is what I do: If see an opportunity to improve things (without need to convince others) I do. If need to convince others, and succeed, great. If not, but the environment is okey, I keep going.

<comment><USER44> _I think sometimes developers have drink so hard the kool aid_

I think a lot of people just have no perspective. I'm fond of this movie scene:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlHlKi2dATw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlHlKi2dATw)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> > That's okay though, just hand off the company to your bloated, slovenly, > zero-posture assistant whose name literally means "I'm going to rip you > off."

This is where I got lost. I worked at Pivotal from 2014 to 2017. There's a lot I can say about Rob Mee but this is just a bizarre and wrong attack given that he 1) Founded Pivotal labs and lead it through the EMC Acquisition, 2) Was responsible for creating a first-tier services company with a name to rival Thoughtworks and a reputation that to this day bumps my resume to the top of many recruiters' lists by virtue of just seeing "Pivotal" on it.

Edit: Quote from one of the prior posts in this "series".

> Future employers judge you on your past employment. Having any extended > tenure at Pivotal on your CV is a negative mark against you.

I have absolutely not had this experience. None of my former coworkers have had this experience.

On the other hand, people who write blog posts like these... might have this experience.

</comment><comment><USER46> No interns make that high of a salary. That means they value his work/skill. It's clearly a management problem but this is a hard problem. In fact it's different for everyone. Some people like well structured management and others don't. On top of that he was remote, which makes it even harder.

His rants are mostly in sales. Engineer ranting about sales is like Sales people saying Engineers are pointless. (Btw both are very common perception). Now that I've done both ends I can share that sales people are doing that for a reason. At the end of the day, high end sales are all politics and you need to be good at the game.

This type of rant is what interns do.

<comment><USER47> Interns also don't read articles properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I survived a job that amounted to fixing keyboards for $35k/year but kudos to you for surviving your $220k/year internship. I'm sure it was brutal.

<comment><USER47> It's even more brutal reading articles properly and realising he wasn't an intern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Damn I had an offer from them years ago. I should have took it. I don't mind making that much for doing little that's plenty of free time for my side projects....this guy could have used his time wisely and never complain about it ...you can't force companies to be good employers or successful at what they do obviously this company had major red flags you could have left quietly long time and find a more fulfilling role ...otherwise shut up and take the money and use that free time to do great things if you are capable

</comment><comment><USER50> > At the other end, you have employees who create your products being treated > like unwanted interns because development and engineering isn't given > recognition for generating revenue. Obviously only sales and executives are > money makers. Developers are just an unneeded, low skilled, interchangeable > burden reducing your profits because they have non-commission-based > salaries. Why not just fire all your developers then sell what they made > without fixing or improving anything—wow, infinite profit!

Funnily enough I've worked in a company that did just that, they developed a TV software that puts ads on the streaming of soccer games and the software was 5 or so years old with no software team. They had a person who did support and was there for a long time and would always have 2-3 developers on the payroll who wouldn't stay more than their probation period. I left within 2 weeks but the company owner was very rich and seemed pretty OK with how things were...

</comment><comment><USER51> this seems old, but to be honest, the "work got boring" part is not unique to the company described.

i have this nagging feeling that we have tons of issues, and overly complicated systems created today because very talented and smart engineers are being giving the most mundane tasks to do on a daily basis...

</comment><comment><USER52> Why is this at the top of HN?

</comment><comment><USER53> Can anyone elaborate on "and proudly brags about his criminal acquaintances in the news"? It's a bullet point in the section about, presumably, antirez.

</comment><comment><USER54> > At founding, the company allotted about 13% of company stock for employee > ownership.

Is this meant to be disparaging? it's actually above average (of 10%).

Note that at each finding round, and as needed if you make too much money (don't spend money fast enough to require another round), you allocate another chunk. The 13% isn't fixed for eternity.

That's like the first paragraph. It's already clear author doesn't understand how companies work.

</comment><comment><USER55> Sounds like a person who is really bitter. Good thing he wrote this as a warning sign to all future possible employers or managers.

</comment><comment><USER56> Imagine giving up 50 racks to complain about getting $220k per year. If you don't want the job, I'll take it.

</comment><comment><USER57> While lots of organizations are not great, and some are even dishonest, something about the guy's tone suggests the demotivator from despair.com:

[https://despair.com/products/dysfunction](https://despair.com/products/dysfunction)

</comment><comment><USER58> I worked at this company overlapping this time frame.

Although the post is emotionally-charged,it's totally on point.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think everyone is hyper focused on the 220k number, which is not that unusual for a VC-backed Silicon Valley startup.

Admittedly the article is a bit rant-filled, but I have also heard other people say Pivotal is (was?) a bit weird, especially regarding taking pair programming a bit too far (another blog example: [http://mwilden.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-i-dont-like-pair- pro...](http://mwilden.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-i-dont-like-pair-programming- and.html))

I am a bit surprised at all the criticism of the author and saying that "I wouldn't hire the guy because of this post". Consider the asymmetry of power between employer and employee. Companies often put up self-praising blog posts describing their perfect hiring process and how great they are, but often they are a big messy hairball inside. In the US, people very rarely work up the courage to criticize them, because they have mouths to feed, health insurance to pay, and can't afford the expensive lawyers to combat the large companies' legal teams. So we should encourage those who speak out, or at least not punish them more for doing so. In fact, I think the only reason this person is comfortable doing so is that they have probably enough left over from that 220k/year to be comfortable speaking out.

<comment><USER59> I wouldn't want to encourage anyone else to write such a rambling "speaking out" blog post that you can't really take anything away from. There are good ways to write such blog posts, e.g these accounts from an ex-Apple employee[0], that nicely lay out what was going wrong. I tried to extract similar information from this blog post, but failed, as it was filled with so many detours, vagueness, and subjective name calling about the company in general rather than an actual retelling on how he personally was supposedly mistreated.

[0]: [https://techreflect.net/2019/12/10/aperture-senior- qa-2004-2...](https://techreflect.net/2019/12/10/aperture-senior- qa-2004-2005/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Having grown up in and around both, it's interesting how many people who complain about mental jobs would fare in physical jobs that are far worse.

It's good to work thru your feelings, but for many people feelings are a luxury, having access to opportunity to improve yourself in anyway is a privilege.

</comment><comment><USER61> The interesting thing to me is that they had an open-source support business getting requests to buy their services, which the salesmen dropped because it wasn't the most lucrative deal they could be doing. But presumably there's a viable business in that particular type of support.

<comment><USER32> In my experience, those kinds of support contracts are mostly valuable (and mostly intended to be valuable) as a way to shove your foot in the door at large companies. Often they're not valued at all, and exist just as a legacy from when the company was younger and any sale was a good sale. It's not surprising to me that an incoming lead whose first question is "what are your prices" would be considered a waste of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> This article takes "tech bro" to a whole new level of entitlement.

</comment><comment><USER63> We engineers need to organize ourselves. We make piles of money for companies, yet we are too often voiceless.

</comment><comment><USER64> I wonder how widespread this phenomenon actually is, anyone has similar stories to share?

<comment><USER65> Extremely, and not just in tech. Most people just don't want to admit it because most people need to feel like they "earned" their money. The reality that many, even most in some companies, people get paid simply to maintain a social system is a troubling thought for a lot of people.

You can easily work for a decade at some companies and contribute absolutely nothing if you know how to play the politics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> title really needs the leading 'How' from TFA

</comment><comment><USER66> I'd comment, but if I did, I'd likely exceed the boundaries of my own agreement with a different company.

</comment><comment><USER67> the weirdest thing to me about pivotal is that they require full-time pair programming. how do people survive in that company at all? i can't fathom being yoked to someone (literally) 40-50 hours a week.

<comment><USER68> When working alone remotely from home, I simulate pair programming with a methodology I call "The Stranger". I sit on one of my hands until it becomes numb and tingly, and then it feels like somebody else is typing and moving the mouse!

<comment><USER67> lol I get the reference

</comment></comment></comment><comment> astro-codes fuck this was funny

</comment><comment><USER69> I find this post to be relatively unimpressive. He spends a great amount of time complaining about how the company was shit in a way that implies he was personally offended, but the title says he got a generous salary for little expected work. It's not clear to me why he is bitter about anything. I have no doubt that the company was genuinely poorly run. His observations about problems in the sales culture are likely true. But he could have left any time and instead chose to stay there for 3 years. And I get that leaving a job isn't always an option for people but those reasons don't feel relevant for his situation.

Author reads as overly entitled and arrogant imo.

<comment><USER70> While I don't disagree with most of what you're saying, this idea that people should (or can) just leave employment, needs to stop. This is not the way most of the world works and many people are "stuck" in very shitty situations that don't have many opportunities, out.

But with regard to the rest of your comment, absolutely. This guy is a knob.

<comment><USER16> > this idea that people should (or can) just leave employment, needs to stop

I don't think this applies when you are pulling down nearly a quarter of a million dollars a year - then I think you probably have quite a lot of freedom to just walk out the door anytime you want.

<comment><USER40> It doesn't matter what your salary is, if you've got a big old mortgage and a wife and kids then losing your income is _really scary_. What if the job search takes longer than you expected? What if it takes much longer? He's already remote working, that massively narrows down his options. It's not as simple as just "get another job" and every day he doesn't have a job, bills are piling up.

<comment><USER69> I feel like all of those concerns are nullified if you just don't quit your job before lining up another... which is what people usually do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> > .... shady "customers, but also investors, but also customers." It's > convenient having combo customer/investors. If quarterly numbers look bad, > just ask your customers, who are also investors, to buy more services to > prop up their own investment. After all, they wouldn't want their investment > decisions to look bad, right?

That's not shady, to me, it is a common practice and does take advantage of the accounting practices that different stakeholders use. This is what all of tech is doing with VC portfolios. That startup that delivers lunch to your startup, do you think that was random? It is an incestuous movement of money around VC portfolio companies to merely print higher revenue numbers so they can sell them one at a time for 10x those revenue numbers.

Pretty much nothing is organic, so I can't make a distinction for this particular practice. The market can bare it.

Honestly, it should be a _more_ common practice for market participants to be taking pseudo-activist roles in their investments. Just because _you_ are used to passive investments - and probably can't do anything else - doesn't mean it is the best strategy for your portfolio.

Not making any opinion about the other problems with Pivotal, just pointing out how this section isn't validation for the complaints.

<comment><USER72> Just because it is common doesn't mean it's not shady.

And depending on what the "pseudo-activist role" entails, that could be a massive conflict of interest. If a person at Company A is steering business toward Company B because they have an investment in Company B, that could easily conflict with their obligations toward Company A.

<comment><USER71> This

> so I can't make a distinction for this particular practice.

was meant to be a rebuttal to this

> just because it is common doesn't mean it's not shady.

so I think you walked right into it.

> If a person at Company A is steering business toward Company B

and that's company A's problem

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> There are a lot of interesting and useful takeaways from this article that are being overlooked because of the jealousy of, "boy, I wish someone paid _me_ 220k to not really do anything while working from home!"

</comment><comment><USER74> "jUsT QuIt yOuR jOb" -hn

With no second thought on any outside life factors.

<comment><USER16> Someone who earns _nearly a quarter of a million dollars_ a year can probably quit their job and continue to support themselves and any outside life factors for several years if they want to.

<comment><USER11> The other doesn't seem to be in SF, but have you seen what a mortgage payment is in SF?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> So much whining in this thread.

It is possible to make $220k/year and also be unhappy. Deal with it.

Beyond a point, money won't increase your happiness. Riding out a terrible job where you're underutilized and overpaid because the job pays well isn't "grit".

It's dishonest. It's opportunism. It's cowardly.

</comment><comment><USER76> Having worked for a strange startup with plenty of cronyism and nepotism, I honestly think there needs to be some kind of government oversight to make sure that executives aren't squandering investors' money or worse that the investors are in on some kind of shell company.

<comment><USER32> The point of private investing is that the investors get to do that kind of oversight on their own. There's a whole world of public companies to work for, if you're looking for government oversight to double check the investors' work. (Although Pivotal seems to have been a public subsidiary for at least part of the author's story.)</comment></comment>


Loopt Embraced by Verizon; Starts to Spread Its Mobile Wings - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/28/loopt-embraced-by-verizon-starts-to-spread-its-wings/

<comment><USER2> Painful metaphor in the title, but great news! Congrats to the Loopt team. I'm sure working with the carriers has been a tough battle.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd be _very_ interesting in someday reading about what it took to make these partnerships happen. And what actually comes of them.

When Boost got Loopt they created an entire ad campaign about it. Sprint got Loopt almost a year ago and the only mention on their site is a paragraph in a Word document.

I'd also love to know how long it took Loopt to convince Verizon to let them in. Or maybe I'd hate to know.

<comment><USER4> You have no idea about the drama that occurs to get placement in a WAP deck. So many stakeholders, so little space, and everyone firmly believes their priority should have top billing. Cutting a deal with ANY telco is a herculean feat.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've heard much the same, although I think this will start to change for the better after the iPhone App Store goes live.

My prediction (and hope) is it ushers an era where consumers expect to have the ability to install any application they want on their mobile device, without having to go through their carrier to do so. I think carriers will start to lose that power and Apple will drive the change.

The best solution is still to stay off deck in the sense of offering a WAP- based web application rather than something that is installed. But this obviously wont work for some type of applications (Loopt is one of them). Loopt is doing great though, I am excited about their success.

<comment><USER4> The WAP deck will only be important as long as the current handset install- base is present. The iPhone changed the industry from day one, but the realities of mobile web are still present, at least for the next year.

Loopt is in a position to be on the cusp, with a leg-up over all the new comers BECAUSE they wrangled the WAP deck before the turnover.

<comment><USER5> The "WAP Deck" represent the idea that people should find their mobile services or "content" from a startpage when the go online on their phone. this make no sense for anyone who know how the internet grew. Google overtook Yahoo when they still believed that the internet should be organized like a directory, like there were a limited "shelf" space. That wasn't true and it wont be true for mobile either.

Admob, one of the largest mobile ad network has a monthly reach of 50 million unique users, that's about the size of one of the largest carriers in the world.

I'm certain that the concept of "Carrier WAP Deck" will not grow in the same pace as the open mobile web....

Congrats to Loopt! :)

<comment><USER4> Agreed. (Plus Admob is amazing. We see fantastic results with them) My one rebut to your Google-Yahoo metaphor is that there is less specific input with a phone, it's more contextual. With a keyboard and mouse its easy to navigate the web, but a number pad (or touch) and limited screen space means your navigation takes a hit and relevance becomes all the more important. For that reason the WAP deck is still clinging on and even players like Google and Yahoo are striving for a portal strategy in the mobile world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> pg's instinct that Loopt is the biggest YC success story so far looks to have been spot on. (I think there are a couple of others that could catch up, though.)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is going to be an interesting point in Loopt's history. How this verizon deal comes around and how they embrace the iphone, android, facebook and myspace platforms will determine their success as a company. I think there is a ton of potential here, and the people working at loopt are smart guys, but that doesn't mean this is a slam dunk.

I think it will come down to money. How long can they go on what they have, how much new investment can they gather in the current economic conditions, and how they can monetize these new platforms where the market will bear advertising but not subscription fees.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think Loopt will be able to put mobile networking on the map if they build out their web presence and integration.

That is, as long as they don't have a privacy gaffe. Beacon on FB is one thing, being perceived as spying through people's mobiles is a company killer.

</comment><comment><USER8> The scary thing is that most people who will use Loopt will never know that a small team of co-founder/hackers around their age created it. They'll just use it.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's kind of strange that Loopt seems to only be on closed, non-GSM networks. Shouldn't it be easier to reach out to the more open devices?

</comment><comment><USER10> Awesome news. Up until today I've been skeptical of PG's exuberance about Loopt, but now they've got it made.</comment>


List out of Lambda - <AUTHOR> http://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/03/list-out-of-lambda <comment><USER2> For people who are interested. The theoretical foundations for this is lambda- calculus created by Alonso Church.

Encoding integers with lambda is called the curch encoding: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_numerals>

Functional programming in general is built upon the foundations laid out by him.

Actually the domainname of hackernews (ycombinator) has a lot todo with lambda calculus.

<comment><USER3> Losh doesn't use Church numerals, though, he represents numbers as lists. The fact that lists are also represented as functions is a diversion; his number three doesn't represent a function f -> x -> x that returns the threefold composition of its first argument applied to its second.

<comment><USER4> I didn't get too much into the original article but my impression is that he is using Scot encoding (essentially a 1-to1 translation of pattern matching) instead of church encoding (somethign equivalent to folds).

Scott encoding doesn't get much publicity but its perfectly valid and much more intuitive, IMO.

<comment><USER5> Also this encoding is cool:

[http://okmij.org/ftp/tagless-final/course/Boehm- Berarducci.h...](http://okmij.org/ftp/tagless-final/course/Boehm- Berarducci.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
       "If you ignore the practical issues of computers like size, weight, cost, heat,
        and so on, what do you really need in a programming language?"

One instruction

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer>

<comment><USER7> You could have run with a one-point basis: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatory_logic#One- point_ba...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatory_logic#One-point_basis)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Turing-completeness, of course. After that, it's all a matter of allowing you to stay as focused as possible on the task at hand: some reasonable way to express your chosen paradigm, library support for things ancillary to your actual task, and some measure of support in the tools you find useful.

<comment><USER9> > Turing-completeness, of course.

Lots of useful programs can be written without turing completeness. It can be useful, but only for a limited problem domain.

<comment> peter-fogg It actually can have some benefits -- a language without any unbounded loops or recursion isn't Turing-complete, but you do get a static guarantee of termination. NASA, for example, writes much of their C code only with bounded recursion. So they can't compute some things, but they can be sure that the Mars lander never gets stuck in an infinite loop.

<comment><USER10> have you got any sources telling about this? I can't seem to find any. Would be a nice read

<comment><USER11> Here's the official NASA JPL C coding standard

<http://lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/JPL_Coding_Standard_C.pdf>

Page 10 describes loop bounds and recursion limitations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's always cool to see an accessible demo of the lambda calculus, but to nitpick... Isn't it cheating a bit to say this doesn't use Object when, in JavaScript, the persistent _arguments_ object exists and is even explicitly accessible? You're just hiding Object instantiation behind function calls, and using syntactic sugar to access the local object.

I'm not totally sold that objects are a "bigger" language feature than closures, conceptually.

<comment><USER13> I'm having to reach back into the dustbin of my mind, but I seem to recall implementing an object system using only closures at one point. As I recall, it had all of the "normal" features of objects - inheritance, member variables, methods, etc. It was done with closures and the members were accessed in a message-passing style (in scheme, (myobject 'show) for example).

Based on that, I think that closures and objects are probably equivalent in their expressive ability. Could be wrong though, like I said it was a long time ago.

<comment><USER14> Inheritance can be a bit tricky to fit in, as I recall, but it's quite elegant to implement basic classes and objects with just closures.

<comment><USER15> A very simple and elegant way to handle inheritance is to give each object a pointer to another object -- let's call it "prototype" -- and delegate any failed member variable or method lookups to the prototype. This is how JavaScript's object system works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's better to think of map without thinking of looping. I think its a good idea to think of it as converting a container of A to a container of B. It doesn't matter how it happens, and the container might be empty, or only big enough only to hold 1 item. Loop is beside the point.

</comment><comment><USER17> Seriously, what I need in a programming language depends on what I intend to achieve with it.

I use blocks in Objective-C and "closures" in Applescript.

        to lambda(aStatment)
        	script intern
        		say aStatment
        	end script
        end lambda
        set a to lambda("applescript…")
        set b to lambda("knows how to …")
        set c to lambda("make a closure if not a lambda…")
        tell a to run
        tell b to run
        tell c to run

</comment><comment><USER18> Solid intro into the lambda calculus. Wasn't so into the js examples, but after reading the other comments, I can totally see how a functional/mathematical syntax would have been very disorienting for someone not familiar with the lambda calc. Since those people are obviously the target audience, js seems fitting.

</comment><comment><USER19> Having used scheme before, and gone through some of SICP, it was neat to see the topic expressed in JS. I think it came through fine, though I'll always have a love for Scheme!

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm a bit turned off by the syntax, but lambda calculus is always fun

</comment><comment><USER21> great read, thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER22> I get that JavaScript is a popular language, but burying a fundamental concept under a cluttered and confusing syntax like JavaScript, when it's much cleaner to explain the math using sensibly notation.

Ugh. It's nice that Steve is reaching down to his audience, but it would be nice for the audience to step out of their muddy sandbox once in a while.

<comment><USER23> Agreed. I can't understand how something like

        function(x) {return function(f) {return f(x);};}

can be considered easier to comprehend than

        λx. λf. f x

<comment><USER24> The grouping of expressions is clearer to many readers in the JS example. Unless you've spent a decent amount of time grokking the lambda calculus, the second line could be any of:

        (λx. (λf. f)) x
        (λx. (λf. f) x)
        (λx. (λf. f x))

The lambda calculus notation is weird. Using "." to separate parameter and body is unusual. The scope of the body isn't obvious.

JS is painfully verbose, but it's a verbose syntax _many_ people have already put the time in to internalize.

<comment><USER5> Put the brackets in the lambda syntax then. It would be unambiguous and still clearer than the Javascript syntax.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Moral Peril of Meritocracy - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/moral-revolution-david-brooks.html <comment><USER2> > What happens when a 'gifted child' finds himself in a wilderness where he's > stripped away of any way of proving his worth?

You primarily prove your worth to yourself, and if that capability is stripped away then you get depressed. You learn helplessness. The author is conflating proving your worth to proving your worth to others. Then he goes on to make an insane conclusion to shed the self, dissolve the ego.. This is the type of guidance that gives gurus and pseudo-counselors a job for life.

I have a commitment to my family, and I know deep down that it's primarily because of the benefit to my own well-being. I had kids because I wanted them. So what I benefit? If I'm a good dad, everyone wins. There is no other motivation mechanism in the natural world.

<comment><USER3> But how do you know your own worth? Worth being a social construct requires the evaluation of others. You cannot give yourself worth any more than you can 'give' yourself material wealth in a thought. The value of self worth is in direct proportion to the defined ego: the thing the creates the distinction between the "I" and "Them". Ergo, if you give yourself a worth, you are feeding your ego an illusion of social acceptance of the 'Other'. The way to move beyond the whole craving situation is to reduce the desire for the self- worth (i.e. putting the ego on a diet).

<comment><USER2> You know your worth (in the moment) primarily as the felt experience of your calm-energy level. When it goes up, you're firing on all cylinders in a non- manic way, you are at your 100%. That is a person who is experiencing their worth. If that is driven by the evaluation of others (as you perceive it), then what happens to you if you are around manipulative people who want you to behave in their best interests at the expense of your own? And since you can assume that you will generally find yourself around such people, I can tell you that narrative, 'worth is a social construct requiring the evaluation of others', is a path to misery.

You sure can include the opinion of others, you should to some degree as we live in a society, and our safety and support depends on other people, but you should make an assessment of the people who are making judgements on you. If you are around criminals, gaining their approval is likelier to land you in jail, which will lead to a future with diminished calm-energy. (Though if you cannot escape savage circumstances outside then maybe jail is better for you).

<comment><USER3> I know what your saying, but I think it's still reversed. What is this "worth" of "calm-energy level"? I like being calm, but I find no rewarding value (aside from a better mood). Instead, what I'm defining is that your sense of calm arises from when you just stop looking to define yourself (and your worth). The calm is a byproduct of feeling more connected between things- which necessitates the awareness of worth to diminish. How can one thing and other thing have worth if they are all the same, interconnected thing? Seeking self-worth is predestined to make you never find it. This is a bit similar with self-love, where love is something you 'allow' to happen (instead of 'giving'). Loving yourself is allowing yourself to be yourself, which is why it's also called self-acceptance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's a new way to spell oligarchy, or do ladders on mountains roll from the bottom up? Articles like this spell out a painful economic correction of overheated speculation, add that to EU tensions the eventual Yuan float and the standard 4 year political blackmail play being rolled out again to hedge against hyperfinancialization. Irresponsible and jaded advertising to keep the lights on, preying on the naive, miseducated and historically blind public. If you like this guys mountain he might sell you his bridge to get across.

</comment><comment><USER5> It considerably understates the case to say that I carry no brief for David Brooks, but even so, I can't argue or even quibble with anything he says here.

</comment><comment><USER6> Has some interesting ideas but also some I disagree with strongly.

Very little in our society is truly a meritocracy. Even when he starts using that word he simultaneously describes self-promotion and politics. Those are the things that are rewarded, and it is strange that he conflates them with merit.

</comment><comment><USER7> > [...] while our educational system generally prepares us for climbing this > or that mountain, _your life is actually defined by how you make use of your > moment of greatest adversity._

That statement is giving me a lot to think about. Thanks for submitting this link.

</comment><comment><USER8> There was a recent episode of the New Economics Foundation podcast "The Myth of Meritocracy" [1] that had a lengthy discussion in the U.K. context. I read a little of Jo Littler's "Against Meritocracy" [2] book.

[1] [https://neweconomics.org/2019/08/weekly-economics-podcast- th...](https://neweconomics.org/2019/08/weekly-economics-podcast-the-myth-of- meritocracy)

[2] [https://www.routledge.com/Against-Meritocracy-Open-Access- Cu...](https://www.routledge.com/Against-Meritocracy-Open-Access-Culture- power-and-myths-of-mobility/Littler/p/book/9781138889552)

</comment><comment><USER9> None of this discounts a meritocracy, it simply discounts the notion that the only goal in life is monetary. If you look at many organizations (non- corporate), position and reward don't come in monetary or positions of power, but in fulfillment. Doctors Without Borders, Buddhist monasteries, etc. etc. Yet all of these will reward effort and merit in some way or another, unless I'm missing something here. While this was a sweet little story and all, merit has function and the baby shouldn't be thrown out with the bath water.

</comment><comment><USER5> Of course, whether or not the philosophy described in the article has merit, one has to ask what purpose it might serve the author and the publication to produce this article now.

Me, I think it's to have something to point to when the recession hits, and then say "See? It's not so bad. You'll be better off for it. Don't worry about _why_ this happened, or why things like this seem to _keep_ happening. It's an intensely personal journey you're on, and the last thing you need to be worrying about is how those of us who enjoy a comfortable life in walled enclaves keep effortlessly doing so while everything you had is now gone."

That's just me, though.

</comment><comment><USER10> > I can now usually recognize first- and second-mountain people. The former > have an ultimate allegiance to self; the latter have an ultimate allegiance > to some commitment. I can recognize first- and second-mountain organizations > too. In some organizations, people are there to serve their individual self- > interests — draw a salary. But other organizations demand that you surrender > to a shared cause and so change your very identity. You become a Marine, a > Morehouse Man.

The second mountain mindset sounds like a great mindset to get indoctrinated into a cult with. And what types of people are more likely to get indoctrinated into a cult? Those in what the article describes as the "valley". Those going through harsh times.

I'm not saying you should only serve yourself, but the mindset the author describes as the 2nd mountain is pretty terrifying.

Love is unconditional, but you still need to think for & about yourself. Also I'm not cleaning a room twice.</comment>


JSON API – A Specification for Building APIs in JSON - <AUTHOR> http://jsonapi.org/ <comment><USER2> This is a hypermedia-optional, not-quite-RPC, not-quite-REST style spec that actually corresponds rather well with the kinds of JSON-on-the-wire, HTTP-as- a-protocol APIs that people in the 2010s tend to cook up. Their FAQ backs this up by saying: "(...) JSON API is an attempt to formalize similar ad hoc client-server interfaces that use JSON as an interchange format."

Because this style of HTTP API is very common, this spec is more useful than it may seem. It's no secret that most "RESTful" APIs are not REST because hypermedia is an afterthought or missing completely. Specs like HAL and JSON- LD are intense in the sense that the problem domain requires careful ponderation, so most people don't go that route and never reach level 3 of the Richardson Model [1]. XML has fallen out of favor, JSON has schemas now (wow), RPC hasn't become fashionably mainstream again (although specs like gRPC, protobuf, Thrift have been trying). Code generators and WSDL-reimaginings like Swagger and RAML make it easy to spew JSON across the wire, so this spec forms a useful baseline, for sanity's sake.

[1] [http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.htm...](http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Previously posted numerous times:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5653706](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5653706) (135 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9280058](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9280058) (107 comments)

<comment><USER3> In fact, one of those posts were by the submitter of this post. On the surface, this looks like a way to game the system of collecting points by posting things that are bound to be voted up a lot.

<comment><USER4> A quick scan of history shows the same thing (for example, I saw jwt.io submitted more than once, so I suspect this is a strategy)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ainar-g To me this looks a lot like XHTML/XML serialized into JSON. I just don't see the benefits.

</comment><comment><USER5> Oh boy, please don't ever build an API like this.

</comment><comment><USER6> There's trend with a lot of "standards" right now to pretend they are somehow anti-bikesheding (like standardJS does) when in fact they are yet another _cause_ of bikesheding.

It's an arrogant, and quite silly, thing to sell as a "feature". What it tells me is there is likely a ton of not very well thought through choices that are polarizing and have no real justification other than the author(s) thought it was a good idea at the time.

In fact I find it's often a sign I should avoid whatever system it is (and I've generally been proven correct, long term).

</comment><comment><USER7> An Application Programming Interface?

Isn't that sort of like Calling Procedures Remotely?</comment>


Working Around the Java Double.parseDouble Bug - <AUTHOR> http://blog.headius.com/2011/02/working-around-java-doubleparsedouble.html

<comment><USER2> From the comments of above post:

A bug report for the same bug from almost 10 (ten!) years ago: <http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4421494>

<comment><USER3> Now this is even worse:

State 5-Cause Known, bug Priority: 4-Low

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't the same bug exist in the BigDecimal to double conversion? It has to turn a precise value into an approximate double using a similar algorithm, no?

        return base.scaleByPowerOfTen(exponent).doubleValue();

<comment><USER5> My understanding is that you are correct. I believe that BigDecimal.doubleValue() does the conversion by (wait for it…) converting to a string and parsing with Double.parseDouble(). Real quick:

scala> val y y: java.math.BigDecimal = 2.2250738585072012E-308

scala> y.doubleValue() __Hangs __

This is one of those "harder than it looks" problems.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I went back to my code and realized there was a precision problem I had to fix for numbers approaching 64-bit minimum. Once I fixed that issue, it went back to hanging again :(

I updated the post, and I'm looking for new alternatives now.

<comment><USER7> maybe its okay to lose some precision as everybody knows that doubles are already inaccurate? :)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#Accuracy_problem...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#Accuracy_problems)

<comment><USER7> edit: i mean: normalize(!), check if it is textually the bad magic number, then either use builtin conversion or use your solution. a? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> i didn't think much about this, but couldn't we just check whether we have a string "2.2250738585072012e-308" to parse, and then decide, call the builtin function or not.

at least, just check the input hash against a hashcode[1] of "2.2250738585072012e-308" and then call either custom function or the native one.

normalizing, parseInt, cunstructing a bigDecimal may be a bit more expencive than the native func (don't know for sure)

(and did anyone check whether it hangs on French (?) locale where there is a decimal comma, not dot?)

[1] two hashcodes, with small and big "E"

<comment><USER8> Not really, since you can come up with lots of ways to express 2.2250738585072012e-308 as a string: 0.22250738585072012e-307, 0000000.22250738585072012e-307, 0.222507385850720120000000e-307, and so on. As long as it's the same double, it seems like it should trigger the bug in the same fashion.

<comment><USER7> as people wrote that getting this double from integer part and then applying scale doesn't cause problems, i assumed that the problem in parsing that specific string, but not in that particular double value, which can be represented differently</comment></comment></comment>


How do you add periods when texting? - <AUTHOR> These are the methods I'm aware of:

  - Tapping the space bar twice (I only recently learned of this)
  - Switching to another keyboard page for punctuation
  - or on phones with keyboards that support it,
       using the period button next to the spacebar
 <comment><USER2> I double space but this can occasionally be annoying when double spacing serves another useful function (like in markdown) so I can imagine some people do disable the shortcut. In that case (and if the keyboard doesn't show a period on the first page) another method you could use would be to set up your own text replacement macro (ios: settings, general, keyboards, text replacement).

</comment><comment><USER3> Using the period button next to the spacebar (Android)

</comment><comment><USER4> Switching to the punctuation page and hitting the period button (iPhone).</comment>


Ask HN:  What's with all the articles about scoring with women? - <AUTHOR>

Did y'all just hit puberty, or is that special someone in need of some not-so-subtle hints? <comment><USER2> this is part of the general 'frat boy club' feeling that I think YC might have. Hell, even PG says he prefers to go with athletes.

I think this is driving off some people we probably don't want to drive off.

I went to one of the YC presentations a while back, and I took my girl (She's an embedded systems programmer who is actually a /whole lot/ nerdier than I am; both in the sense that she is more skilled than I am with technology, and in the sense that she is less socially skilled than I am.) Anyhow, one of the founders was impressed by her, and wanted to recruit her. She ended up meeting the guy the next day, and my girl was really irritated, because the guy trying to recruit her kept going on about how they needed a woman to help make things move more smoothly on a social level, to add feminine energy to the startup, and other bullshit like that, rather than respecting her (rather impressive) credentials as a technical person.

I mean, the guy ended up losing out on what would have been an excellent employee because he couldn't turn off his preconceived notions after meeting and talking to a person.

That's the thing about stereotypes. We're all a little bit racist, and we're all a little bit sexist, but if you can't turn that off after someone proves that they understand what they are talking about, you have a problem that will cost you money.

</comment><comment><USER3> How many is "all"? There's been like 2 in 2 days, right? And the Ebert one came from the other one.

This site has a lot of topics that generate 3-4 posts back and forth, then it dies out. No big deal.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hacker News is about more than just hacking code and computers. Social skills need to be learnt too, and learning other ways to do things, especially from those who've more experience, is surely a good thing.

You might laugh at the idea of learning to be social from articles on the internet, but it's little different than learning from the internet about raising capital or good coding practices.

And no, we didn't just hit puberty. However, it is spring, and the mating season has started for the animals, including humans.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't know about you, but I actually find them interesting. I like to have meaningful and deep discussions about "facts-of-life" and these kind of articles bring on such discussions.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think some people here view it as another system for hacking.</comment>


The Ultimate Game Freak – Interview With Pokemon's Creator - <AUTHOR> http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2040095,00.html <comment><USER2> I'll take the downvotes, as someone's got to say it:

Moral of the story? Call yourself Satoshi and you will do all the great things!

P.S. Can "downvote risk" be quantified? Is it even a thing?

Back to work...</comment>


Ask HN: Legality of Republishing News (a la Google News) - <AUTHOR>

We're working on a service that would benefit from displaying current news headlines and summaries along with other content, some of which is advertising (this is not for a web site, but I can't get into too many specifics).
We've looked at every major news source's RSS feeds, but none of their terms of use allow for non-commercial use. One lawyer told us we had as much right to use the headlines and summaries as Google News does and that "non-commercial use" meant that we couldn't resell the content. I find this hard to believe.
So my question is, where's the line for what we can freely use and what we can't? Does Google News get special treatment because of the traffic it drives? <comment><USER2> We use feeds at NewsCred. We've done a lot of research into fair use, and it all depends on the factors mentioned by nostrademons in the comment below. Really depends on what you are planning on doing with/around the news.I would suggest just going for it - if you get sued, you'll get the publicity!

</comment><comment><USER3> Fair use is an exception to copyright, so it still applies even if a feed says "you can't do anything with this data". I don't know whether fair use applies in your case.

Google News certainly gets special treatment, but in the opposite way you intended: they've been sued by newspapers and newswires for behavior that appears totally legal to many observers. <http://news.cnet.com/2100-1030_3-6174008.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> You'd take the word of random hackers on the Internet over that of your lawyer?

Fair use is complicated, and depends on a lot of factors like:

a.) how much of the original work you take

b.) how much of your work this constitutes

c.) commercial or non-commercial?

d.) do you have a positive or negative impact on the original copyright holder's business?

There likely isn't a "right" answer until you get sued and a jury decides one way or another. But I think it's highly likely that a lawyer you're paying for can give better advice than we can.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is not the lawyer's area of specialty.</comment></comment>


The perfect storm: building a crypto-utopia in Puerto Rico [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/changingmediasummit/video/2018/aug/09/the-perfect-storm-building-a-crypto-utopia-in-puerto-rico-video <comment><USER2> I doubt you can get two crypto enthusiasts to agree on a common plan.

But, more significantly, a "crypto utopia", when realised in an actual, physical, location, also needs to be a "non-crypto utopia", i. e. a functioning, equitable society.

Both the randomness of the process that led to the current crop of crypto- tycoons, as well as the nonrandom factors that mattered make me think this experiment will suffer some well-known social problems and end far before having the chance to fail for entirely new, exciting reasons.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this another example of the crypto-currency version of disaster tourism, whereby crypto advocates (to use a polite term) see somewhere that's undergone some kind of societal collapse and start making plans for how their favourite coin can save the day?

I suppose it's more plausible than starting your own crypto-based nation like Liberland, if only just.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just embarrassing; First learn spanish!

as dangerous as a missionary</comment>


Blank screen if kids yell too much - <AUTHOR> http://superuser.com/questions/545329/my-kids-yell-too-much <comment><USER3> I'm don't have enough information to know whether I like the attempt to silence his kids. It would be easy to see kids that age getting out to control to the point that damage to the computer occurs and noise is almost always the first step towards that.

But holy crap! Half of this place seems like they want to be raising robots, not individuals who all have their own needs and will need to be taught and treated differently. Worse, I have a strong feeling most of them haven't talked to a kid in years, much less ever raised one.

And these people are not just giving advice, but being highly judgmental. Saying the father is _wrong_. I raise four kids with my wife. Two kids as a single dad would be twice as hard at least.

Go walk a mile and see how your "build a robot" methodology works for your kid.

(Sorry about the rant. I take fatherhood and other people judging it _very_ seriously. I came from an abusive household, and that is the only kind of environment I would openly judge a father for. This is _not_ abusive, even if it offends somebody's sense of logic.)

<comment><USER4> This. Got into a moderately long discussion with a co-worker about filtering out access to MySpace (it was a while ago :-) and chat access for my kids when they were younger. They were of the opinion that I was really damaging my kids by creating this barrier between them and the 'real world' and it wasn't like they weren't going to get there eventually. The conversation meandered into manners, swearing, all sorts of things. It was only then that I realized they didn't actually have kids, and said as much "So, you don't actually have kids do you?" and they sputtered a bit and admitted that no, they didn't. But they had a couple of nieces and nephews they knew pretty well and kids were kids. I just thanked them and ended the conversation.

If you are not a parent, evaluating parenting strategies is not possible, just like evaluating sexual positions if you're a virgin just doesn't work out. You need to be 'experienced' as Jimmy Hendrix famously said, to flip the bit in your brain associated with that experience before you can effectively evaluate different choices. Sad but true.

<comment><USER5> _If you are not a parent, evaluating parenting strategies is not possible_

As devil's advocate, i would argue _this is not true_. There are externalities to any strategy. And one can judge the impact of strategy X on people outside the immediate family. This is perhaps a caveat outside the scope of the context, but when evaluating things generally is worth pointing out.

<comment><USER6> I think it's not quite _literally_ true, but if you wanted to evaluate parenting strategies and were not a parent, you would have to put a lot of effort into observing parents (as opposed to just thinking about it a lot).

<comment><USER7> Since it's all just anecdotal anyway, I also like to think back to teachers and other adults. As a general rule, those who treated me "as an equal" (not an actual equal, but without condescension or trickery that wasn't for the purpose of humour or pain/fright relief), I loved to learn from, did never mind to be corrected by. The rest? I found holes in their facade and had at them. Nature abhors a vacuum, and strong children abhor fake authority. Weak parents think disrespect is the problem, when often enough it's their own weakness. Children aren't "programmed" by nature to be a pain in the ass, far from it. They are "programmed" to learn, to be curious, and to love even. It actually takes quite a bit of fuckery to destroy that, but our society is good at it. And then those kids become parents and perpetuate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I saw this yesterday and run this script all night:

while true; do sox -t .wav "|arecord -d 1" -n stat 2> /tmp/tmp; echo -n `date +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S"` " "; cat /tmp/tmp | grep "Maximum _amplitude" | cut -d ":" -f 2 | tr -d '\n'; cat /tmp/tmp | grep "Midline_ amplitude" | cut -d ":" -f 2 | tr -d '\n'; cat /tmp/tmp | grep "Rough *frequency" | cut -d ":" -f 2; done

and got this: <http://i.imgur.com/oD6ZKIg.png?1>

Interesting things: When my neighbor walks in his apartment above mine, it creates a amp peak with low frequency.

I have no idea what are those approx. one hour long periodic variations in the frequency, maybe my computer's fan or me snoring.

Anyway, pretty useless...

<comment><USER9> I look at that command line and feel amazed at what you can do with a command prompt. These are the two things that strike me as incredible:

* You didn't write a single line of code (well technically you did write _one_ ), nor researched about sound APIs or any kind of sound analysis algorithms or theory.

* You used several tools that just seamlessly shared their inputs and outputs and each one _worked as supposed_.

Granted, you need to know some bash and figure out how every utility works and the right command line switches to use, but still, pretty impressive.

<comment><USER10> This is the advantage of living at the command prompt. If you're mostly working through GUI (or CUI) interfaces that hide those details it can be somewhat convenient in the short run but you trap yourself: the effort needed when you want to do something complex that requires that knowledge is now suddenly much greater, because first you need to learn how to talk to each of the components of that pipeline before fitting them all together. I'll still need to check a man-page or two for less familiar functionality or a less familiar utility, but that's much better than checking five (the number of commands in the above pipeline that are passed at least one switch) and that's assuming you know which commands you'll want to be using in the first place.

<comment><USER11> Two things to note, though: 1) the script as given doesn't actually generate graphical output, just a text file; 2) something like Quartz Composer would be perfect for doing this with a GUI.

<comment><USER9> I have used Automator before (I think this is what you refer to) and also graphical programming languages as LabVIEW (not for scripting, of course ;) and I still feel very constrained when compared to using a command line or writing a script. I feel that the gain in simplicity comes at the expense of flexibility: when chaining program blocks/elements together you are constrained to what the original designers of the language thought were the most common use cases.

<comment><USER11> You need to do less thinking and more listening, friend. When I say Quartz Composer, I mean Quartz Composer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Fast forward to 2030...

      ...
      for (int month = 1, month <=12, month++)
      {
        printf ("You never call. I'm your Dad you know. :-( ");
      }

<comment><USER13> This is appalling. Without knowing the OP's life circumstances or much about the dynamic of human relationships for that matter, jumping to this kind of conclusions only make for a witty post, at best.

Raising kids who will want to "call their Dad" once grown up is hardly about letting them make as much noise as they wish at age 4.

I sometime envy how some people view life as a simple If-Then-This-That... Much easier to sleep at night that way.

<comment><USER12> Well, that's how I feel about automating the parenting of 4 and 5 year olds. I'm not saying he should let them make as much noise as they wish - <USER2> he probably should, some of the time, I'm a quiet-loving person myself. I am saying that he's better off telling them in person. If he's tired of doing so and automates that task away they're learning something from the experience, but not necessarily what he intends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have noisy kids. Three of them. They make lots of noise when playing games, when watching TV, and right now are making lots and lots of noise (at 7.33am on a Saturday morning) by playing in a cardboard box that holds a bathtub (we are remodeling a bathroom, it goes in Monday).

Kids are noisy. I have dealt with it by installing a solid door at the end of the hallway. No scripting required. Occasionally I tell them to quiet down if they get out of hand. Kids are noisy, that is just part of the experience.

<comment><USER15> _I have dealt with it by installing a solid door at the end of the hallway._

Read the comments on SuperUser. He's a single dad. Being unable to hear what your 4 year old kids are up to is a bad idea when there's no one else to monitor them.

<comment><USER16> My parents suggested that it was when we had gone quiet that they started to worry. My recollections of childhood seem to confirm this heuristic.

<comment> X-Istence I was recently talking to my boss, and my dad confirmed this, it is absolutely true that when suddenly the kids are quiet that you start worrying as to what they are up to =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It seems wrong to teach your children that the machine is a person.

Why not tell them "I put a script in the machine that will shut down the screen if you yell too loud"?

Same result, more truthful method.

<comment><USER18> > It seems wrong to teach your children that the machine is a person.

In 2100 your comment will be evidence of wild anti-AI sentiments popular in our backward times.

<comment><USER16> ahahahahhahaha yeah okay

when duke nukem forever is ported to common lisp running on the hurd

suuuuure

Edit: More seriously, trends in AI seems to be running towards statistical analysis and away from anything that might resemble actual "sentience"--even were we to define such a thing. I doubt that an overgrown Bayes engine would take offense at anything I do.

<comment><USER19> Brains also tended to run towards statistical analysis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great answer: "You have done this so many times manually that you feel you need to automate it... Doesn't that suggest to you that this method isn't working? "

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I feed my kids every day and they still want more. Feeding must be wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The children are four and five.

Who is monitoring them while they are playing video games?

It's reasonably easy to calm children down when you need to, you just need to learn some techniques. These techniques would probably require someone to be in the room for them to work, but once you've succeeded in calming down the over-boisterous behaviour they'd be okay.

And, of course, children enjoy being boisterous, so I hope they get opportunities to let off steam in a more appropriate setting. Soft play rooms[1] are good, as are parks and gardens and some games in the home.

The adult could investigate various parenting courses. "Webster Stratton" is an example of a respected course.

[1] In the UK you might have a Sure Start centre near you with a soft play room for hire. These are lovely because you will be in the room with your child alone, and you can really enjoy the experience. There are also commercial providers such as Play Barn which will be full of screaming, crying, poorly supervised children and stressed harried parents. This is, for some people, a hellish experience.

</comment><comment><USER22> Um......

Get a stick. Stand over child. If child makes noise, hit child with stick. Repeat until child quiet, becomes adult, or gets stick. If child gets stick, leave home.

And that is the "British" way. :)

<comment><USER23> _was_ the British way

<comment><USER22> Ah, the good olde days!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I would be careful with the solution of turning off the screen. My young cousins would go straight for the reboot in such a situation.

<comment><USER25> Even if the game continued to make sounds? That should give him at least a moment's pause.

</comment></comment><comment> glass- Children make too much noise. Children don't get to use the computer for a week.

Eventually children will learn and stop making too much noise. This is a parenting problem, not a technical one.

<comment><USER26> When you use this manipulation to get your way to your kids, the kid watches you, and you find yourself the lab rat of a psychological manipulator far more capable then yourself. And the kid uses tricks you never heard of to shape your behaviour. Which causes a feedback loop of who can trick the other into doing what they want better.

Then you end up with a dysfunctional family. Funny joke, but there are serious child education problems in this joke. It's like laughing at a baby seal getting kicked around by teenagers. It's hilarious to people who are emotionally present-oriented. yolo, if it feels good, then it's good.

<comment><USER27> > _When you use this manipulation to get your way to your kids, the kid > watches you, and you find yourself the lab rat of a psychological > manipulator far more capable then yourself. And the kid uses tricks you > never heard of to shape your behaviour. Which causes a feedback loop of who > can trick the other into doing what they want better._

It's not a manipulation or a trick.

It's a "reward system". You get X only if you do Y. Period.

It has worked wonders for ages. Still does in most parts of the world. The US has a messed up system that ends with annoying, over-self-indulged, entitled children and adults.

<comment><USER28> > The US has a messed up system that ends with annoying, over-self-indulged, > entitled children and adults. [citation needed]

<comment><USER29> Walk outside. My god, yesterday some guy didn't like me walking in the crosswalk, when he wanted to make a right turn so he swerved into the oncoming traffic lane to make his right (and cut me off). This versus wait 5 seconds.

Annoying, over-self-indulged and entitled. Also damn dangerous.

<comment><USER28> Where I live in America, pedestrians seem highly obedient of walk signals and drivers seem highly observant of crosswalks.

You got me as far as "confirmation bias". Still looking up that citation?

<comment><USER29> Where I live in America, Seattle, has a amazing reputation for pedestrians being highly obedient of walk signals and drivers being highly observant of crosswalks (and generally polite).

But in fact everyone I know who commutes on foot has been hit by a car in the last 5 years. No one's been hurt badly, thankfully. (I don't think anyones even gone to the hospital in that time period - unlike the bicycle commuters I know.)

I know that's small sample size - and poorly chosen - still it suggests bad things.

<comment><USER28> > still it suggests bad things

Well, _yeah_. Human beings are not equipped to operate motor vehicles safely, and there is a mountain of evidence to support that fact. It doesn't have anything to do with parenting, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Have fun automating something that will prevent them from smoking or something, since you haven't taught them to listen to you, but to the computer by then.

<comment><USER20> Hooking up a smoke detector to the XBox should do the trick :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> How about a feedback headset where the local loop from the microphone has such high volume that a whisper is rather loud.

Of course that won't work if the game doesn't need a headset but you could disable external speakers and make it only work via the headset.

</comment><comment><USER32> Now if only this worked with other peoples' kids on Xbox Live...

<comment><USER33> I have a solution for that. The more a person says "faggot" the more images of men kissing they see in the game. A homophobic 13-year-old would be totally horrified by this whereas a reasonable adult that (somehow) didn't use the word as an insult wouldn't care.

<comment><USER34> > _A homophobic 13-year-old_

Do you seriously think 13-year-olds are homophobic? They just repeat what their peers say like parrots. It doesn't really matter to them what it _means_ as long as it sounds offensive and they can pronounce it.

<comment><USER33> If peer influence is the cause the perceived shame of viewing men kissing will have the same effect.

Also what I presented is not a serious solution to kids acting like jerks. Kids would just invent new words to get around a filter like that.

They need some kind of JerkRank algorithm to allow players to rate other players and machine learn what kind of people are compatible to game with each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Can anyone explain how the OP's solution works, in particular the chvt 3/7? I looked up chvt and it seems like it would switch a different terminal into the foreground, but this raises more questions than it answers.

Like how does he know what 3 and 7 have on them? And would this work on a windowing system? And why does it appear as if the screen has turned off?

<comment><USER36> Are you running linux currently? You have a number of virtual terminals, commonly Ctrl+Alt+F1 through Ctrl+Alt+F7, with 1-6 running text consoles and 7 with your X11 session on it.

If you boot into the GUI and spend all your time there, then although 1 will probably contain remnants of the boot process, 2-6 will be unused, a blank screen with some text in the corner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> What's up with those submission title editing lately? There was nothing wrong with the original one, and the new one is so "inspring" that I wouldn't even click there unless for checking is this yet another title edit.

</comment><comment><USER38> Good lord, just discipline your children.

Set clear rules, make sure they understand those rules, and follow through with enforcing those rules.

<comment><USER15> You left out the most important step: make sure kids understand the reason for those rules (other than "because I say so"). Speaking from my experience with my parents, yours is a great recipe for having your kids think you're an asshole when they're older.

<comment><USER38> I don't think my parents are assholes. Sure, I did when I was a teenager, but that's because I was egocentric and had poor impulse control - in short, a teenager. Thank god my parents were doing their job instead of trying to be my buddy.

<comment><USER39> Because explaining a reason to teenagers (who despite having a lot of bluster, are usually fairly bright) is somehow asking too much.

You use terms like "because I said so" with a 2 year old who _literally_ can't understand why you shouldn't play in the street.

Don't insult other people's intelligence, much less your kid's. There's no excuse for that.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, but...

Funnily enough, my 2 year old understands _exactly_ why she shouldn't play in the street; Every time we go for a walk around the block and a car passes us, she tells us all "look out for that car, it might hit us!".

And then again, I know plenty of other 2 year olds who can barely talk, let alone say something like that.

And then I know 2 year olds who have dexterity and body awareness that makes my daughter look like she's walking around with a blindfold and her arms tied together.

If being a parent has taught me anything, it's that kids are just _incredibly_ different from each other. Oh, that, and that nothing good can ever come of a parenting thread on Hacker News ;) So many strongly held opinions from such small samples (often zero!).

<comment><USER19> Kids are also like the parrots, though. They can say things they don't understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> 4 and 5 year olds make lots of noise. When they are not making noise and being extremely quiet, they are doing something they shouldn't. Why would you want to screw up this parenting warning mechanism?

</comment><comment><USER41> This makes me so happy. I've got my first on the way in about a month. I'll have to bookmark this for future use...

</comment><comment><USER42> SNR is way too low in this discussion thanks to non-parents posting. Peace out.

</comment><comment><USER27> Beat them when they yell?

</comment><comment><USER43> Wow... why did this guy think it was a good idea to have children if he didn't want children? "Hi, I need a script to kill fun. I hate when children are having fun."

<comment><USER44> To be fair, no one has the first clue what they're getting into when they have kids.

<comment><USER22> And its only once you do have them that you realise how much you didn't want them...

<comment><USER20> Or vice versa, how much you wanted them.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I suppose I do like one of my kids. Hmm, good point.

;)

<comment><USER20> I'm guessing you only have one kid :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


My Co-Founders Took Away Everything I'd Created. Here's What I Learned - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/my-co-founders-took-away-everything-i-d-created-but-i-made-the-muse-successful-anyway-ece31e0578f6

<comment><USER2> Name and shame</comment>


Synching of SENT mail over multiple devices (iPhone/MacBook) - <AUTHOR>

I'm just starting my own law firm and looking to be quite mobile. I absolutely need to have all my email (sent mail included) synched on both the Mail app on my iPhone and Thunderbird on my MacBook. I need basic web-hosting as well, preferable in the same package. So far the only provider I have found that offers this multi-device synching is GoDaddy, through Microsoft software. Both Namecheap and Network Solutions told me no such synching was possible with their services.<p>Cheers, and any input is greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> I use Google Apps. The archives on Postini are HIPAA compliant and as you say various bar associations have blessed this.

Previous to my career as an owner of all things Apple I used hosted BES (actually awesome and cost-effective if you run your life on Blackberries) and before that I owned a Windows Server and my own BES which was just a giant ball of expense and aggravation.

Small law firm. All Mac. Contact me and I will share what worked and what didn't work for us.

Works: Daylite by marketcircle.com.

Strongly desired: tinfoil-hat level paranoid email. Wish I could find that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depending on the kind of law firm you are running I _might_ think twice about hosting on google apps vs your own equipment as the law is fuzzy around getting access to those types of services vs something that is physically on your property like a small business server. That being said google apps will do this like the other poster said.

<comment><USER4> For a small firm, there's really no way around having someone else host your email. Whether you get an IMAP server or Exchange, it's going to be cost prohibitive to host it yourself, so you'll have to pay a hosting company to manage it for you. I don't see how that would be any different than Google hosting it, and it would be significantly more expensive.

In my experience supporting law firms, they all use Exchange hosted in their own rack on-site, but I've only worked with firms with 10+ attorneys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Checkout google apps for your email hosting - it will do exactly what you need

<comment><AUTHOR> Concern has been expressed by some Bar associations (including mine in Washington) about using Google for professional legal email communications for privacy reasons/potential seizure of client information - like many governing bodies they are extremely vague about what we can and cannot use though...

The only privacy policy I found for Google Apps is extremely short; I wish that I could just use the service though! We'll see.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Mission Control Plus for Mac - <AUTHOR> https://fadel.io/MissionControlPlus <comment><USER2> Any plans to ever publish this in the OSX App Store? Don't mind paying $2.99 there. Not willing to risk on closed-source projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> The downloaded app from the website ATM is notarized by Apple and checked for any malicious content.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you listen while you do your job? - <AUTHOR> I am curious what's rolling into your headphones while you do your job: music, books, ted talks...<p>I am tired of listening to music and useless stuff. Maybe I can learn something new while I work. <comment><USER2> twit.tv I listen to it's a nice radio level stream of tech</comment>


Show HN: Automated online dead man switch - <AUTHOR> https://www.deadmantracker.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> OP is me.

What is it? Oh god, it's another online dead man switch. Yeah but it's better (I think) and free (with the ability to pay if you want to). You can have it send an email, or download the app on either app store and receive notifications via push notifications. It even tracks your location if you want it to.

Why? There's a popular dead man's switch already out there (in fact there's a few) but they're old, dated, and limited. This has been a passion project for me that I've been building as a side project for nearly a year and today I completed the first thing that users might pay for - secure file storage that get released when your dead man's switch triggers.

I know what you're thinking for file storage - is it secure? How does it work? The short answer is - it's not secure unless the user encrypts the files and sends the decryption key to their chosen recipient (which is what I recommend in the 'Articles' section in a couple of written pieces).

Target audiences: Initially I wanted to target myself. I'm going travelling soon and I wanted a way to tell my family if something happened to me automatically and I wanted the ability to track my location as I travel through countries and then see a nice map at the end of it. So I made a nice side project that was fun for me to build. Then my friends said it was a good idea and I should have people sign up. Then other people said it would be useful for their elderly parents so they knew if something happened to them. Then other people said it would be useful for them on nights out in case anything happened to them on the walk home. Then other people said it would be useful to make sure their kids were ok when they're away from home. The problem with current services is that they're not that friendly to the ordinary user. There's no explanations, there's no guides. Services like this that can bring real benefit need to be simple which is what I hope I'm doing.

And THEN before I even marketed the product (this is my first 'official' marketing of the service) a domestic violence non-profit got in contact me with a request to create an alternative version of the app that could sit on a victims phone without raising suspicion from their abuser. They could then safely trigger their dead man's switch if they felt they needed to to automatically send an alert to their support network, or have it trigger if their phone gets destroyed. This is what I'll be working on next and it's partially what paying users will be funding - so I can work with charities for providing real benefit to people that need it. In the future? I want to keep adding features that fit the service that benefit people and provide a quality niche product.

About me: Obviously I'm not a designer. I'm a backend guy mostly with tons of experience in everything except design, so I keep the design simple.</comment>