How to answer 'what is your greatest weakness?' in an interview - <AUTHOR> http://fragile.org.uk/2013/01/your-greatest-weakness/ <comment><USER2> _...it requires a great deal of honesty and openness...An interview is a place for none of those things._

Wrong. It's exactly the place for both of those things.

For every instance in the class QuestionsAskedToMe, including "What is your greatest weakness?", I have a simple rule: Just tell the fucking truth.

If you're so concerned that the telling the truth in an interview can come back to haunt you, then you shouldn't be interviewing with that company in the first place.

[My answer: I am very impatient. I always have been. People close to me have even pointed it out. (My brother reminds me for every time I make a hasty decision.) Sometimes this has served me well, but it's also caused problems when working with others. I have made a lot of progress trying to be more patient, but I still have a way to go.]

<comment><USER3> It's kind of funny that your honest answer is the stock slightly dishonest answer that most people give while answering that question.

<comment><USER4> Second only to (I invest too much in my work|I care too much|I overcommit myself).

I find it hard to be honest on this kind of question without sounding cheesy or insincere. Revealing personal weaknesses to complete strangers is extraordinarily difficult. Ironically, answering dishonestly can itself be quite revealing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't believe how much negative feedback there is for this question, and I'm even more surprised at how rude the suggestions have been for responding to this question, like walking out, or making fun of the person asking the question.

I've had to do a couple of interviews in my time, and when I ask this question, it's usually at the tail end when we've evaluated their technical skills and we're convinced they have the chops for the job.

So now all I'm evaluating is if they'll be a good cultural fit and when I ask this question, I'm not really evaluating what their responses are, I'm evaluating how well they respond to it.

If someone responds by storming out, then obviously they aren't going to work well if a team or programming problem comes up, which is a little out there which they don't like.

If they read a prepared textbook answer, then I know they like to be over prepared, which might be a good / bad thing depending on the position they're applying for.

But if they chuckle, then think about it for a bit, and give me an honest answer, it tells me that even though they have come up against something ridiculous, they're willing to give it an good go and try their best to work the problem (which I think is a good trait to have, especially in an engineering environment).

Interviewing is a lot more than giving a correct answer, even more so when trying to figure out if someone will be a good cultural fit or not.

<comment><USER6> There is _NO_ reason for thinking that someone who walks away from the "weakness question" would walk away from difficult or tedious work.

That is a dishonest rationalization that _you_ have bolted on to hide your _real_ motives.

You want to know how much the candidate will _take bullshit from YOU_. And that is why you ask the question.

It is a useless question for any other purpose, such as assessing talent.

<comment><USER5> > That is a dishonest rationalization that you have bolted on to hide your > real motives.

Wow, personal attacks already. I'm an engineer so interviews I've done have been to find engineers to work with, not to boss around ...

> It is a useless question for any other purpose, such as assessing talent.

As mentioned above, usually when this question comes up talent has already been assessed and we're just looking for cultural fit.

It's actually a lot harder than it looks to asses if someone will get along with you, so sometimes asking "out there" questions are a good way to tease people out.

<comment><USER6> _Wow, personal attacks already_

It _is_ dishonest to say you are checking if someone "is a cultural fit" when what you actually mean is "will take my crap".

God forbid you do your job and try to work with "difficult" people; you'd rather pass on the greatest engineer in the world than do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My answer to this one won me my current job; THEM: So what would you say is your biggest weakness? ME: Well, I think it's rather obvious and rude for you to ask that... THEM: <Shifty, uncomfortable silence> ME: <Comic eye-roll> Clearly it's food! THEM: <Laughter>

I'm slightly overweight (probably a lot of devs are), so it worked well...feel free to steal my routine...mileage may vary based on condifence/comic-timing.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's definitely a mediocre question, but I don't see why so many people get defensive about it. Is it really that hard to think of one or two personality traits that keep you from steamrolling through your day?

My answers may very well be different in 5 or 10 years, but for now:

1) If someone asks me for a time estimate, I always try to immediately come up with a rough number, which never takes into account "the last 20% takes 80% of the work." I'm trying to get better at not committing before having a spec, but I still have that habit.

2) I tend to get lightly emotionally invested in the code I'm currently writing. If I've spent two or three days working on something and find out that the requirements have changed, or that I need to architect my solution a different way, I usually need to work on something different for a day before I go back to it - otherwise, I stress out about having just wasted that effort.

Any interviewer that finds these answers unacceptable either shouldn't be asking the question, or is representing a company that I absolutely would not want to work for.

<comment><USER9> > I don't see why so many people get defensive about it.

Because it's a trap. The question isn't trying to see how much you know, or how good you'll be in the job. It's taking you at a vulnerable point and asking you to implicate yourself.

In addition, there's no good truthful answer. If you give a real weakness, you get beaten in interviews by those who lie about being a workaholic. If you dissemble, then you feel the interviewer has just forced you into a lie. This is infuriating for those who value honesty.

<comment><USER8> I can see that. Do interviewers really fall for the "I'm a workaholic" line, though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "I don't react charitably to bad interview questions. I tend to get pretty indignant and perhaps make a mockery of it. In some ways though this can be thought of as a positive since it tends to act as a filter against me taking bad jobs."

</comment><comment><USER11> I would go with this: My biggest weakness, hmm, if it is .. what I think it is, I rather feel that I should not share it, because, I feel that while I'm fixing something, I should not promote the fact that I'm open. Similarly to how, when you are fixing something in a apartment, while trying to sell it to a customer.

if the other person is still not convinced yet, I would carry on and say:

Well, honestly, it is something not that big, which is proven by the fact that your experienced eyes have yet not caught it, so yes, in a way, I can say, the question should not be what is your biggest weakness, but instead, does it make you unqualified for this (job/opportunity/etc), and the answer would be NO, it doesn't.

its actually a general question, towards your self-confidence. Because any experienced person knows, that weaknesses can be overcome, failures made up for. What matters is the awareness of it, and will to change.

<comment><USER12> If I heard a BS answer like this, and I do from time to time, interview would instantly be over. Sure I might carry on out of a sense of decorum, but you just lost the job. Good luck with your search.

And by the way, your answer did in fact reveal a weakness. What your answer just told me is that I can rely on you to give me patronizing answers instead of being direct. And that, my friend, does in fact make you unqualified to work for me.

<comment><USER13> I think the patronizing tone is well-deserved in the second "carry on and say.." portion. Here's a shorter honest (from me) answer that resembles rikacomet's first section I would probably give at first (after all, good companies can still have crappy hiring practices): "I don't know you well enough to reveal that information." If the interviewer persisted, then I'm with the rest of the group here who are done with the interview at that point, screw how good the company might have been on the inside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm surprised at the comments here. Cliched as this question is, it can help demonstrate your ability to identify areas for improvement and show how you're addressing them.

The best way to answer this is: 1) Identify: "Addressing large groups of people is something I struggle with" 2) Importance: "It's something I want to get better at, as my job often needs me to collaborate with a wide set of stakeholders" 3) Action: "I've joined the local Toastmasters/started presenting at XX user group etc"

It's not a negative question - it's a good opportunity to show your candor and dedication to self improvement and learning - something us developers do anyway.

</comment><comment><USER15> "Do you want the rehearsed, canned response you have heard a hundred times already or a real answer that would immediately disqualify me in most interviewers eyes?"

<comment><USER16> They want you to be perfectly honest, forthright, and to candidly tell them exactly what they want to hear.

<comment><USER15> No they don't, they wouldn't ask stupid questions if they did. They are playing a game. If they really want honest answer then the question they are asking is "Please tell me the reasons not to hire you so I don't have to do any thinking."

<comment><USER17> Reread the comment :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've always wished I could quote Trainspotting:

 _The truth -- well, the truth is that I've had a long-standing problem with heroin addiction. I've been know to sniff it, smoke it, swallow it, stick it up my arse and inject it into my veins. I've been trying to combat this addiction, but unless you count social security scams and shoplifting, I haven't had a regular job in years. I feel it's important to mention this._

</comment><comment><USER19> I am surprised by all the "If they ask this stupid question, you don't want to work for them."

It is hard to say why any potential employer might ask this question, but if it were me, I would be looking for some indication that you have an understanding of your own limitations. A stock answer or an attempt at redirection would not impress me. Of course, I don't expect you to incriminate yourself.

</comment><comment><USER20> Being truthful is a good thing in interviews, you're there to judge fit as much as they are. Hiding things helps nobody since the relationship will just blow up 3 months down the line ... do you really want to waste 3 months of your life in a job you don't like? Of course not.

Therefore, the only real answer is "I don't like bullshit questions."

</comment><comment><USER21> I tell them I dont have any greatest weakness. I say, I've been in this business long enough to develop strategies to deal with it.

Other times I say sales. That's why I'm in programming.

Either answer usually gets them off that topic.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's a BS question, but one thing that has always served me well is to choose a weakness that isn't fatal and is relatively easily remedied.

For example, if you're apply for a job where you have no direct reports, your weakness can be "I don't have that much experience in formal leadership, but I've had numerous examples in my past of informal leadership in teams, so I'm confident that given the opportunity, I could quickly come up to speed."

<comment><USER9> > one thing that has always served me well is to choose a weakness that isn't > fatal and is relatively easily remedied.

In other words, lie? The question is directly asking for your biggest weakness, not one that's palatable.

This is why so many people find the question infuriating: it can't be answered honestly. Everyone has weaknesses, but no one wants to explain them in competition with others who might lie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "I sometimes give smart ass answers to stupid questions."

</comment><comment><USER24> How about, "That's not a very good question for a variety of reasons, so I'm not going to answer it. This is both an answer and a meta-answer."

<comment><USER25> Sadly, that just invites a discussion. Laughing it off nips it at the bud and allows everyone to climb down from the idiot tree.

<comment><USER26> Most of the time you get a baleful stare because it's off-script.

Would you want to date a person or marry a person who was physically unable, or grossly offended by you raising a discussion about the idea that an interview question isn't optimal? If not marry, then why work with them 8 hours a day for the rest of your lives?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Actually just ask what is your greatest strength, that will be your greatest weakness. Non-intuitive but happens to be true most of the time. First exposed to this at a religious program for 'finding your gifts' and again a couple of times at various executive off sites.

Nobody minds answering the question.

</comment><comment><USER28> I always thought that the response by Daria Morgendorffer (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daria>) was one of the better ones to this question.

Q - "What is your greatest weakness?"

A - "My inability to answer stock questions with stock answers."

<comment><USER11> well thats a risky answer, without the buttering tone. If he is in the bad mood just that day, or out of focus, you are out 9/10.

<comment><USER28> It is risky, but unless you are desperate for the job (and that shows to the interviewer) any company asking this I probably don't want to work for anyway.

BTW I have said this a few times. Usually I get a laugh out of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think the question is not designed for engineers who work with computers and do not need to sound right but instead for salesmen and other professionals who work with people and need to sound right.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Site is slow, article text.

"So, Mr Johnson, what would you say is your greatest weakness?"

Worst. Interview. Question. Ever.

In isolation, it's an interesting question to ask yourself, it requires a great deal of honesty and openness on the part of the individual and it requires trust that there will not be repercussions for the answer.

An interview is a place for none of those things. Candidates need, and are expected to, go out of their way to impress their interviewers and actively admitting weakness is a high risk strategy.

And yet it's popularity remains, company's still ask it and candidates still find a thousand and one tortured methods to say "I'm a workaholic". In a novel attempt to get around this, Data Connection used to ask for your three greatest weaknesses. I'd love to know what they gained from this.

So how should this question be answered? From personal experience, responding 'My left elbow' sadly does not work.

In comes down to framing, strengths and weaknesses are pretty much alternate views on the same characteristic. Above a certain level of competence it is rare to find people truely good at certain pairings.

For instance, think those people who you admire for their vision. These people are inspiring, charismatic they lift you up and show you a world that you dimly knew existed but couldn't quite realise. Wonderful people, but tell me, how are they on detail? How good are they are dotting the Is and crossing the Ts and meticulously going through the minutiae of a project, ensuring that everything is as it should be. Not so much huh?

Clearly there will exceptions but Richard Branson, just isn't a details kind of guy and nor should he be. Conversely I want an Accountant to be exactly the opposite, they need to get down to the details.

Since the question is now framed in terms of strengths it is much easier to answer. Just figure out what strength of yours you wish to highlight, determine how that makes you weak and then go for it.

Not convinced? Here is an example.

Imagine for instance the Great Remallo, Lion Tamer extraordinaire, sitting for an interview. His CV/Resume contains plenty of past experience dealing with many different types of lion and as the inventor of the lion proof cape he clearly knows his stuff. As the final question of the interview the Circus owner, Mr Top, fires out the big kahuna:-

Mr Top: Mr Remallo I have one final question for you. Tell me, what is your great weakness?

The Great Remallo: Well, Mr Top, if I had one weakness it would be that I seem to have trouble accurately assessing the level of danger I might be in at any given time, even as a small child when I used to play in traffic. Actually it's something that really helps me as a lion tamer, I should think that if I ever truley understod the peril I put myself in everyday I would be petrified and never even enter the ring.

Still not convinced? Let's try the same question for a Software Developer.

"My biggest weakness is that I can't stand not knowing how things work, it used to drive my family crazy as took everything I owned (and somethings I didn't) apart in order to see what was going on under the hood. To this day I really struggle to take things at face value if I can't look and see what is going on. I suppose it's one of the reasons I became an engineer in the first place, this drive to understand how things works stands me in good stead when wrestling with a gnarly code base or diving deep into library code, bug hunting."

I'm sure you can come up with something better yourself. Just remember if you reframe the question as an opportunity to talk about strengths, it's then just a question of determining the flip side to that strength and using it as an in.

Anyone else got a good answer to this question?

</comment><comment><USER30> Ask yourself whether or not you want to be working for a company that sieves through applicants using washed up interview questions from a 1950's HR textbook.

<comment><USER11> well, no question is the old or new, or perfect or not. I believe that what actually happens is that, the person in front of you, has the job you want in his pocket, all you have to do is convince him to take it out, and give it to you. So to convince himself, as long as he doesn't ask you, personal questions, have you ever kissed a girl? you are to deal with it.

<comment><USER12> I would argue that if somebody asked me that question, it is a signal that I do not, in fact, want the job. It's a red flag that management is not capable of adequately assessing talent, and that you are likely to be surrounded by bozos if you get the job.

In a seller's market, (in this case, the market being labor), the applicant is often interviewing the company just as much as they are interviewing the applicant.

<comment><USER11> indeed, but the job is not about working with the person who is asking the question, but with others, and in a big company, not always, one guy recruits all alone, based on one question. Would you stand up and leave on hearing that question? really?

<comment><USER12> Yes, because I'm good at what I do and in demand. I'm not going to say I can just pick where I want to work, I'm not that good, but I do have the luxury of being picky about the opportunities I am presented with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Easy, the answer is: "You of all people are never gonna know!"

</comment><comment><USER32> chocolate

</comment><comment><USER26> The best response to this question is: "yeah... I think we're done here?". The retards who think this is a good way to filter a good programmer from a bad programmer are idiotic enough to offer you a job because obviously you are exactly the kind of kick-ass person who can shock people awake and repair the defective nature of their company, the fact that working there would be like working at Initech from Office space.

The real source of the question is to sense your desperation levels. If you answer it the canned response way: "turning the negative into the positive". It's a sign across your forehead that says: "please....please.... I'm desperate! Please dominate me!".

Seriously. Just try it once. Laugh at them and excuse yourself, you'll fall off the chair in memorization when you see the job offer pop into your email inbox. I've done it.

It'll leave you with existential questions: wondering who the hell designed this idiotic physics engine we've found ourselves in. How can people survive making these calibre of poor decisions from day to day?

<comment><USER25> This is absolutely true, and goes for any silly question like 'where do you see yourself in five years?', 'why should we be working with you?', and the like. If you drive conversation to topics that you think should be discussed, you will be respected for it.

<comment><USER26> Think about it, answering the question: "What's your weakness" politely is "toleration of incompetence". Programmers are not hired as cheerleaders or sensitivity assesment personnel. We are not expected to beat around the bush and be "feel-good" companions. We are expected to get in, get shit compiled, get it working, get it fast and get the hell out. WTF are they doing asking us questions more suited for a hired female companion/prostitute?

The lack of toleration for complete incompetence is what people need. If not- tolerating incompetence loses you out on that interview, seriously, you DO NOT want to work there. They will steal your soul away, and you'll wish you were dead after a few years of working there.</comment></comment></comment>


Istio: An open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices - <AUTHOR> https://istio.io/ <comment><USER2> HN Discussion on the announcement post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14410533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14410533)</comment>


The ethics of cloning: Why 'original' isn't always essential - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/europe/the-ethics-of-cloning-why-original-isnt-always-essential/

<comment><USER2> Using a similar idea is one thing, but cloning is another. They don't just take the concepts, they rip of the design as well. If you look at the Samwer's version of Fab (which is shut down now), they completely ripped off the look and feel, you can see a screen cap and read this article [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-29/the- germany-...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-29/the-germany- website-copy-machine)

<comment><AUTHOR> I keep thinking, why the "original" companies don't sue the clones ? Remember when Zynga sued Vostu ?

<comment><USER3> Because suing someone who operates--and serves customers who are--entirely outside of your legal jurisdiction is extremely difficult, expensive, and still has a low probability of success even if you're in the right. This was basically the reasoning behind SOPA's "let's just take their domain away if we can't sue them" provision.

Imagine for a second if Samsung only sold phones in Korea--do you think Apple would have bothered with a suit?</comment></comment></comment>


TeenSafe phone monitoring app leaked thousands of user passwords - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/teen-phone-monitoring-app-leaks-thousands-of-users-data/ <comment><USER2> This is absolutely inexcusable- requiring customers to disable two-factor auth and storing passwords in plaintext? Seriously, there should be a minimum level of competence required to run a business...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It looks like TeenSafe kept Apple IDs and their corresponding passwords stored in plaintext. The service required parents disable two-factor authentication on those Apple IDs for the service to work.</comment>


This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New Frontier Of Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/162/generation-flux-future-of-business

<comment><USER2> One of the most brilliant articles I've read in a long time.</comment>


44-Part VueJS Tutorial on YouTube - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4cUxeGkcC9gQcYgjhBoeQH7wiAyZNrYa <comment><USER2> Wow, 44 videos is a huge effort. I'm among the crowd wanting to learn Vue in 2018, I'll give them a try :) .

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks a lot for this! looking to give a try in 2018. How do you recommend understanding these tutorials?

Something like: understand a single video concept, do some programming on that concept, read a book(chapter) on that concept and then move on to next video?</comment>


Ribbons (2007) - frosted-flakes https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/cmd-ribbons <comment><AUTHOR> When the ribbons first came out, all the techies I knew groused about them with all the technical reasons that people have mentioned here (which I feel are mostly weak arguments and reek of resistance to change). I wasn't sure myself.

Until I saw some non-IT people using them for the first time. They LOVED them. They could easily see and get things done way better than before. The people who didn't have the confidence to poke around in traditional menus had no problem looking through the ribbons and trying things out. In many cases they started doing things that they had no idea existed. The ribbons really opened up these tools for the users, which is really the whole point.

In the case of the ribbons, the techies who rail against them are unequivocally wrong. The arguments against them are the same ones we heard when going from DOS to Windows. It completely loses sight of the point of IT, which is to allow the users to be productive (and no, just because it broke some muscle memory you had, that is not an argument that it broke productivity, that's an argument that you don't like change), not to force people to remember random incantations because the greybeard says is "the right way" to do it.

<comment><USER2> > Until I saw some non-IT people using them for the first time.

It shouldn't be surprising that people who hadn't any prior experience would be fine with ribbons, since it is mainly the people who had experience with the same applications but without ribbons that saw the decrease in their productivity.

> and no, just because it broke some muscle memory you had, that is not an > argument that it broke productivity, that's an argument that you don't like > change

And that is a very good argument, change for the sake of change (or worse, for something inferior) is a waste of time. Building muscle memory is a _very good thing_ when it comes to UIs, the _entire point_ of Windows having a standardized UI in the first place was that people who spent time to learn some program's UI they could apply the same knowledge on another program's UI that they hadn't used before.

Ribbon works against that and as a quick example check File Explorer, WordPad, OneNote (the Windows 10 app) and Windows Paint that all use ribbon-ish interfaces that come with Windows. They all look different, have different tabs and even their default state is different. The closest they have in having a common UI is the File tab and OneNote doesn't even have that.

Ribbon applications not only do not look like other applications but sometimes they do not look like older versions of themselves, since they had to move stuff around to make space for new or changed functionality.

And not all ribbon implementations even behave the same - Windows itself probably comes with 3-4 different implementations that all have little weird differences and that doesn't count all the 3rd party implementations (i think there are more ribbon implementations out there than applications actually using ribbons :-P).

<comment><USER3> On that last point, it sounds like the Fluent Design team is working hard to merge all the Ribbon implementations. That ongoing effort is interesting to watch because it is going to move everyone's cheese again soon in Word and Excel (and PowerPoint), as the modern Fluent control is the "Simplified Ribbon" control that OneNote today uses (and Outlook optionally; and all the Word/Excel/PowerPoint web apps that people don't pay attention to). (As the Fluent design team decided 2D ribbon layouts were too complex both for implementers and users; the 2007 Office implementations had a ton of work put into UX testing the 2D flows and basically no other Ribbon implementation did.)

It feels ironic/iconic that the Simplified Ribbon just looks like a menu bar and single command bar again, but with the years of insight that "tabs" instead of "menus" gives people a better sense of "space" than traditional pull down menus used to.

<comment><USER2> Merge all implementations or have all of their programs use the same implementation? I find the former a little weird since there is, e.g., an MFC implementation and then a Win32 implementation (available as a COM object) and AFAIK those two are completely separate (i think the MFC predates the Win32 one and was made by some external company) and "modern apps" use XAML which is completely different from the MFC/Win32 stuff.

<comment><USER3> Bit of both, I believe. On the one hand, Office as the first Ribbon adopter has to maintain a lot of backwards compatibility (especially for add-ins), and so likely can't move all of its ribbons to a single implementation (though OneNote supposedly is using the WinRT/XAML control). Plus the React Native for Web control (Fabric UI) will always have to be a different from platform- specific implementations.

But the impression I have is that "soon" the MFC/Win32 one and the WPF/XAML ribbon implementations will both be marked deprecated and developers encouraged to use the WinRT/UWP/XAML one (which OneNote supposedly will continue to share moving forward), with Win32 (and WPF) developers expected to use XAML Islands.

(Where "soon" is some release milestone I'm fully not sure about. WinUI 3.0 General Availability, presumably? I _think_ that's still scheduled for "second half 2020".)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I confess, I am a ribbon hater. For three main reasons:

1) It kills muscle memory by changing the size and location of the buttons depending on the window size. And not just the size, but also their shape, appearance and place in dropdown hierarchies (i.e. top level versus behind a dropdown). So even after years of using MS Office with the ribbon I still hunt for commands.

2) It encourages multiple copies of the same command. So instead of learning the one place font-size (e.g.) shows up, you end up hunting every time through 3 or 4 tabs for the place you saw it last.

3) The UI features it was meant to replace was left in the program further increasing the number of areas you have to search through. Looking at Powerpoint as an example, it has the ribbon, formatting panes, traditional formatting dialogs, and the right click quick options menu. There are features available on all of them, but there are also options missing on some but not others. Sometimes I find myself hunting through 3 or 4 of these places for some obscure (e.g. table padding) option.

This opinion is based on using the ribbon in MS Office, which was the first and (I would hope, based on the team's resources) best implementation. Maybe somebody uses the ribbon to its fullest.

I buy their pitch that they studied beginner users and those people had an easier time with the ribbon. But for advanced users, this interface is a nightmare. And can't really be avoided.

<comment><USER5> I couldn't agree more.

I hate the ribbon so very much. You stated the many problems with it better than I, but here's why it actively makes me angry:

It takes a lot of space, and seems to always make it very hard to find the things that I need to use. If I have no option but to use the ribbon, my productivity using that software plummets because I so often have to take a lot of time to find the operation that I need. It's incredibly frustrating.

<comment><USER3> Did you know you can scroll through Ribbon tabs on most (every?) implementation with your scroll wheel? I've been surprised how often that seems to differentiate between people that think finding things in a ribbon is hard/slow versus easy/quick.

Beyond that, have you tried navigating a Ribbon via keyboard? It has also surprised me how many people that liked the old menus because of keyboard navigation don't realize a lot of the same tricks and navigations work exactly the same (Alt, arrow keys, Esc, letters, etc).

<comment><USER5> > Did you know you can scroll through Ribbon tabs on most (every?) > implementation with your scroll wheel?

> Beyond that, have you tried navigating a Ribbon via keyboard?

Yes, to both of those things. Scrolling through the ribbon tabs doesn't address or ease my issue with the ribbon (which is trying to find the operation I want). The problem isn't how quickly I can scroll through the ribbon, but that finding things in it is hard. That said, a good UI solution wouldn't require me to scroll anything like that in the first place.

Keyboard shortcuts let me bypass the ribbon, which is good, but they don't help me with things that I don't do all the time because I won't remember the shortcuts. Aside from the waste of screen space, the ribbon doesn't bother me when doing the routine things.

<comment><USER3> Not just keyboard shortcuts, but keyboard navigation: you can press-and- release Alt and then "walk" through the Ribbon by keyboard: press arrows to switch tabs, move through sections of commands, drill into dropdowns, then Escape to "go back up" a level.

In terms of finding specific things, every version of the Ribbon in Office has had an accompanying search box (today labeled "Tell me what you want to do", and since the beginning labelled with a light-bulb icon, the last remnant of Clippy iconography, RIP). I still think it would be great if search results had an option like "Show me where to find this on the Ribbon next time", but the icons in the search results are the same as on the Ribbon and sometimes just seeing the icon in the search results can help you find it better the next time.

<comment><USER5> > you can press-and-release Alt and then "walk" through the Ribbon by keyboard

Ah, I see. That doesn't really address my issues, though.

> every version of the Ribbon in Office has had an accompanying search box

It does? I can't find anything like that in O365 Word at all (I haven't checked the other apps). Regardless, that just underscores how bad the ribbon is -- a search function shouldn't be necessary.

<comment><USER6> The search box is at the very top and in the middle of Word. With the text "Search".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> frosted-flakes I stumbled across this page when I was in early high school, and for someone new to computers in general it was a fascinating read. It taught me that user interface design is something that people actually do for a job and that when done well is delightful to use. Oh, and it set an example of clear, instructive writing with illustrations done right that I think influenced me quite a lot.

Some people don't like the Ribbon, but I love it. As a new user back in the day and a "power user" today, I think it's loads better than the semi-random arrangement of cryptic menus and toolbars we had before.

In my opinion, Microsoft Word 2007 did it best. Later iterations did away with the app button and menu in favour of the obstructive "backstage" menu, and I don't think the flat design does it any favours.

<comment><USER7> > I think it's loads better than the semi-random arrangement of cryptic menus > and toolbars we had before.

we had meaningful, sensibly grouped, sets of standard icons, but graphics designers got bored and thought those should be updated.

i like the ribbon but i think standard icons are better.

<comment><USER8> > sensibly grouped

That joke seriously made my day! Where is the global settings/properties menu for Firefox? Photoshop? Eclipse? Premiere Pro? Android Studio?

Between those 5 apps, some of the same category or even same vendor, you can find that one very ubiquitous entry under: Tools, File, Window, Edit, File but there's 4 of them.

<comment><USER9> So instead of replacing the entire menu paradigm with ribbons, how about just grouping things better, wouldn't that solve the problem?

On Mac OS for example the "Preferences" item is always in the same location and has the same shortcut, throughout first party and third party apps.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I think at least half the problem is that among those 5 cross-platform applications, only some of them try to respect the native UI standards on all platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was always surprised at the hatred that many (most) "power users" expressed toward the Ribbon design.

To me, the greatest thing about it was that it exposed every Ribbon action with an easily discoverable and repeatable key-sequence. Just hit the Alt key once, and every top level category's hotkey showed up as a hover. Hit that key, and the commands on the ribbon (or next level dropdown) were displayed. "Paste Special", a very common action, became Alt+H+V+S. And you didn't have to do finger twisters like Ctrl+Alt+V (all held down together) to achieve it.

And again, almost EVERY command was available in this way.

Sure, you could create your own hotkeys in versions of Office before this, but the Ribbon brought almost every command within easy reach of those that hate removing their fingers from the keyboard. It wasn't quite VIM (no command mode), but it was a far sight better than anything than had existed before in Office, where most of the advanced UI had been buried away in difficult-to- automate AND navigate (either by keyboard or mouse) modal dialogs.

And by exposing most of the UI to the keyboard, it also enabled easier automation via utilities like AutoHotkey.

All-in-all, it was a power user's dream, but I definitely see how it was harder for a mouse user to develop the muscle memory on the Ribbon vs an icon bar. That, however, I believe is simply a matter of having nearly 100% of the UI be available via the Ribbon, vs. the 20% (or less) of icon bars. The always present trade-off between power and ease-of-use, at least for the mouse user.

<comment><USER12> FYI, that was how the menus worked in previous versions (Alt-f for the file menu, etc.), so ribbons didn't expose any new functionality in that regard. In fact, Microsoft bent over backwards to ensure that _every_ old pattern people had used would continue to work exactly the same way.

<comment><USER11> I thought about mentioning this, but Menus still had a tendency to dead-end into modal dialogs more often than not. A Ribbon command could still end up in a modal, but often times the Ribbon design allowed more functionality to be present in a non-modal way.

I worked for Lotus/IBM when Word Pro was being developed, and they came up with the concept of a non-modal floating property bar (they called it the "Info Bar") that pretty much eliminated modals entirely. While I don't recall whether or not it was very keyboard friendly (I was still a mouse user at the time), it definitely showed me that there was a better way than "modal dialogs everywhere".

When I moved on from IBM and had to use Office, I remember how grating it was every time I ended up in a modal dialog, so this was one more reason I was excited to see the Ribbon come along (more than a decade after Word Pro's Info Bar).

I've never looked to see, but it wouldn't surprise me if some of the MS developers for Office 2007 came from Lotus/IBM, since it was a few years earlier that IBM had really given up the Office Suite fight for good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I still despise the ribbon. I really would rather just have the old Office 2003 and previous configurable toolbars, that took up a quarter or a third of the vertical space.

The only thing that I hate more than the Ribbon is the way that newer versions of Office products will flash you to a full-screen page when you click on the File menu. All I ever want to do there is do a Save As, and they have shitted up the simple job of popping a save file dialog with all kinds of OneDrive and Sharepoint nonsense.

<comment><USER6> [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/archive/blogs/jensenh/the-s...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/archive/blogs/jensenh/the-size-of-things)

Word 2007 document area: 1007 x 573 pixels Word 97 document area: 979 x 573 pixels

Excel 97 document area: 1004 x 581 pixels Excel 2007 document area: 1008 x 534 pixels

<comment><USER13> With all of the images broken/missing (they appear to be linked to a domain that is owned by some domain squatter that is trying to get me to install a skeezy Chrome extension), it's hard to actually compare, and tell what toolbars are enabled on the old version.

But in Word 2003, everything that I ever had on the toolbar would fit into a single row, and Word 2016's ribbon uses the same icons, and is three rows high.

<comment> frosted-flakes You can collapse the ribbon. Then pin all your commonly-used buttons to the Quick Access _Toolbar_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I look at the change to ribbons through the lens of: "Would they have done it if they had viable competitors?", and I have to think that there's no way MS would have. Everyone would have laughed their way right over to Word Perfect.

Perhaps it makes things easier for new users, but only without competitors where they able to shoe-horn it in for everybody.

Now I use it on a Mac where there are still menus on the top and I can get stuff done. I wish there was an option to enable the menus (and fine, leave the ribbon if you must) on Windows.

</comment><comment><USER15> When the ribbon was introduced, Microsoft asserted patent rights and asked for a license in order to use it. In fact, you were not allowed to use ribbons in your app without a license.

You can read about that here: [https://web.archive.org/web/20100719112606/http://blogs.msdn...](https://web.archive.org/web/20100719112606/http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2006/11/21/licensing- the-2007-microsoft-office-user-interface.aspx)

Since then, license text has mostly disappeared from Microsoft's site. The license page no longer exists. You can't apply for one. I personally last saw text referring to a license requirement in the ribbon MFC samples distributed with Visual Studio. But the question if Microsoft requires a license or asserts patent rights seems to still be open - there has been no statement from Microsoft, and a quick google shows lots of people asking the same question.

* [https://office-watch.com/2018/can-microsoft-office-ribbon-us...](https://office-watch.com/2018/can-microsoft-office-ribbon-used-developers/)

* [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/563312/is-the-ms-ribbon-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/563312/is-the-ms-ribbon-office-ui-license-worth-worrying-about)

* [https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/02/Ribbon-UI/](https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/02/Ribbon-UI/)

* and me: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14095662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14095662)

<comment><USER3> The impression I have is that Microsoft let the patent expire at the basic 7 year mark (~2014) as they deemed their UX R&D investment had given them enough lead over competitors in the Office suite space (the primary applications that required a paid license and were not allowed the free license). Around that time Microsoft added Ribbons to Win32 and WPF as freely available controls with no additional license. Fluent Design also seems working to add Ribbon controls to all UI control toolkits with no mention of licensing or patent rights (and seems to be working to move even Office to shared controls).

<comment><USER15> I hope you are right. I know that the ribbon control in Visual Studio 2017 still refers to needing a license.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> frosted-flakes I've changed the title to reflect that this was originally published around 2007 and I don't think it has changed significantly since. The date 2007 isn't shown on the page, but I first read it around 2008 and it was published for Microsoft Office 2007.

Edit: it may have been published in 2008, since at least one of the linked pages has that date.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think ribbons are one of the great UX failures of the Microsoft Office suite.

An alternative arrangement of functions are property palettes like they are used in CAD tools, Adobe Photoshop, Open Office, or Apple Pages. There, functions are not globally aranged in ribbons like "Start", "References", but are presented in the context of a selected object.

For example, if I have selected an image, the topmost palette shows properties applicable to an image. In addition, I get tabs with options for the placement of the image in a text frame, and for the page the text frame is located on. Very neat, not at all arbitrary, but reflecting the hierarchy of the objects I am working with.

<comment><USER6> That's how it works in Office. In if you select an image (might require doubleclick) it shows stuff to do with that image.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm so happy new interface don't use ribbons but just CSD headerbars now. What a terrible UX this stuff was.

<comment><USER18> > What a terrible UX this stuff was.

Based on what? I see a lot of strong comments here, but little reasoning.

UX is more than feelings.

<comment><USER19> The below is my experiences based on menus+toolbars vs ribbon bar. Some detail will be subjective but I've tried to add enough detail that can explain why people considered it to be a "bad" UX:

Things were more discoverable in menus and the written title in the menu is often more descriptive than an icon glyph (granted some items in the ribbon bar does also have labels). You then also had the glyphs on the toolbars for power users.

It meant that super frequent tasks you'd learn shortcut keys for. moderately frequent tasks you'd learn the toolbar icon. And infrequent tasks you could still find through the menus.

The idea of the ribbon bar was to make things more discoverable but the issue is having everything presented in one workflow where icons are different sized, some with or without labels and some hidden behind popup menus on the ribbon bar, you make it harder for people to systematically search for something specific that they can't recall where the option is.

Another benefit with the toolbar was customizability. That was great for people to morph the UI around their requirements. This isn't possible with the ribbon bar -- it's a one size fits all approach so for some people it will work well but there are so many people that don't fit well.

<comment> frosted-flakes > granted some items in the ribbon bar does also have labels

Nearly _all_ ribbon buttons have labels. That's part of the point of ribbons (there's no room for labels on traditional toolbars). The only buttons that don't have labels are well-known ones, all of which I think are on the Home tab.

> Another benefit with the toolbar was customizability.

The ribbon (at least in Office) is _far_ more customisable than traditional menubar+toolbars. Every part of the ribbon can be customised, and the Quick Access Toolbar exists so that the common buttons that _you_ use can be accessible even when the ribbon is collapsed.

I don't know why you dis-like the ribbon, because none of your arguments make sense.

<comment><USER20> "Every part of the ribbon can be customised" Afaik, that is not true. I tried to do that just today with Outlook; I cannot remove the ribbons (ribbon groups??) that I don't ever use, Send/Receive for example. (When you're connected on a high speed connection, what's the point of that? But you can't get rid of it.) Likewise, in Word I'm pretty sure you can't remove things like the Mailings ribbon. (Mail Merge? How 1980s...)

Also, if I'm not mistaken you can't add commands to any of the existing ribbons; you have to create a new one, even if you only want to add one command.

It's been a long time since I've used a version of Office with menus (sigh...), but IIRC you could change every part of it.

So on the contrary, if my memory serves, the menu was far more customizable than the Office ribbon. (I don't know about toolbars, I never used them.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A stunning disregard to millions, maybe billions of human hours spent learning a menu-based UI of incredibly powerful and feature rich office applications, where ultimately there is no obvious place for an option, feature or toggle; at least offer consistency to make the learning worthwhile.

At the very least preserve the option to keep the old menu. But no, the boardroom was convinced by a shiny presentation. Out with the old, in with the new.

Now, trivial features are easier to find, advanced features are..somewhere else. So you can't discover the advanced features next to the more common ones.

The ribbon was the time when you could start to tell when websites or software products had a new generation of product people taking over and changing things around. You could feel the touch of a designer who hasn't loved or really used the product much. All workflows have become weaker, dumbed down. The important "save as..." icon, where I quickly place the thing somewhere else before I proceed with my fleeting thought, is sabotaged by the delay on the click on "File", the confusion why a menu opens slowly from the left, the hunt downwards to my all-important click. Then, force me into a discussion where to save the file. "Maybe in the cloud as that is what we're selling?" Just no.

Now I won't ever go the extra mile and learn every last feature of an application. Learn it, become fluent, yes. But my learning can only be invested in permanent knowledge. Be it BASH or programming fundamentals. But your UI, no thanks.

<comment><USER22> I always thought Jobs was prescient to mandate that the menu bar appear as part of the OS chrome on MacOS and not an individual application's chrome like it was on Windows. Always-on menu prevented bored UX folks from EVER removing the menu from the screen. Always active menu has felt clunky on Mac since the advent of multiscreens and very wide screens, but I still appreciate this UX design tenet.

The discoverability heavyweight champ always was and always will be the menu.

I wonder if Jobs ever discussed Always-on menu publicly and contrasted it with Windows' approach.

<comment><USER21> Great point, makes me admire Jobs even more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looking at this, it's clear a LOT of thought went into this, and it looks great.

Computer geeks that hated this didn't realize how good it was because they were familiar with the previous generations and don't like change.

The Word/Office 2007 UX design is probably some of Microsoft's best design work ever.

<comment><USER5> Can we dispense with the "you hate it because you don't like change" argument yet? It's an easy way to write off other people's opinions and often it's not even close to being true.

It's particularly unlikely to be the reason when we're talking about something that was introduced about 20 years ago because it's not "change" anymore. Everyone is used to it now, and those that still dislike it don't dislike it because "it's new".

<comment><USER23> It's still new for some of these geeks that were already very experienced with computers around the time when Ribbon was introduced. They've just kept hating it since.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> jerome-jh I remember spending 1/2 hour (really!) with my wife looking for the "print" menu entry after installing Office xyz, that first had "ribbons", on her computer.

That's the kind of change that makes you hate computers, and computer programmers.

</comment><comment><USER24> The explicit goal of the ribbon design effort was to better manage the complexity. Rather than simplify the underlying products.

Such is the conceit of Microsoft.

I watched the "The Story of the Ribbon". Twice. Just to be sure I properly understood what happened. [https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09](https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09)

It's a great example of a series of rational decisions yielding a terrible end result.

Because they started with the wrong question.

IIRC, Jensen Harris said Office (or maybe just Word?) had something like 2,000 (or 20,000?) individual operations (commands plus modifiers). Their initial premise was to better organize and present that dizzying number. Create the perfect visual language taxonomy.

Instead of first trying to figure how to reduce that number.

\--

It's been a long, long time since I've used Microsoft products. I used to be quite the Word buff. But you'll get the gist of this example:

Embedding an image within a body of text is a common task. With Word, it just fucking sucks. There's an option for every little thing. Dozens of settings to tweak. And predicting where that image lands, especially with reflow, is more launch and pray than anything rational or deterministic.

But really, there's just 4, maybe 6. different ways any sane person would want that image to be anchored. Just show a preview of those options and let the user pick the result.

If someone needs something more fancy, they should opt to use a desktop publishing app, which is actually built for this kind of work.

But no.

Word has to be all things to all people. So consequently becomes nothing for anyone.

\--

TLDR: Microsoft hates their customers.

<comment><USER25> as simple as possible _but no simpler_</comment></comment>


A good website to get virtual Visa/MasterCard - <AUTHOR>

I need to create a virtual(prepaid) debit card to make online purchases and pay for services online(amazon, heroku). I don't want to use my regular credit card and I don't want to get a card from any local bank.
Is there a good website that allows you to do that? I've tried Entropay, but I can't load funds to that card from my credit card b/c of some bank to bank issues.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Most big chain grocery stores and Walmart carry prepaid cards now and you can load them right there. Also, try greendot.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, greendot.com is exactly what I need, but I'm not a US resident. Is there something similar for EU citizens?</comment></comment>


Who Made That? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/magazine/2013/innovations-issue/

<comment><USER2> Anyone who argues that innovation has stagnated in the last 50 years is ignoring the thing that has changed the innovation process the most. Computers aren't just an innovation in themselves, but also provide a tool for the design of new things which is completely unparalleled in the past. Maybe we haven't seen the step-change of the internal combustion engine (at least in physical designs), but that doesn't mean that innovation is stagnant.

Pointing towards useless inventions as proof that we're not solving the big problems is utterly ridiculous. We may remember the 19th century for the industrial revolution, but the victorians were churning out countless useless inventions at the same time. Just as we don't remember the victorians for their moustache guards, it seems to me that this decade is far more likely to be remembered for the self driving car than the popcorn gun.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd love to see a "who made that" google glass app, where you can look at any object and glass will generate a paragraph on the origins of the object.

If you could find a way to isolate the object from what the camera sees / white out the rest of the image, you could search for similar images on google to figure out what the object was. Then scan wiki / a few other sources to generate origin info.

<comment><USER4> I would never make it out of the house. It would be like contemplating your hand while in an altered state of consciousness.

My wife would find me after a week, looking at the p-trap under the kitchen sink, saying,"whoaaaaa..."

Then she would run fast and far, because she knows I don't forget these things and I love to share the info with anyone who will listen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is anyone else stuck on advertisement? :S

<comment><USER6> NAVIGATION - upper left

<comment><USER5> Actually the Navigation toolbar disappears on Advertisement in Chrome. But thanks anyway :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very pleased to have spoken to the author of the section on "keys" and locks for a good long while. Seeing the final product, and knowing now how brief he was going to have to be, I am impressed by his committed interest. We talked for at least a solid hour and covered everything from the ancient Mesopotamians to every modern variant of the mechanical lock. That he would want to know everything in order to write a brief synopsis, I think, speaks highly of him.

</comment><comment><USER8> Not you. You didn't make that.</comment>


Math vs. Anti-Semitic Propaganda - <AUTHOR> http://blog.joeol.com/2014/08/04/math-vs-anti-semitic-propaganda/

<comment><USER2> "the data also implies that, under certain assumptions, the civilian to combatant ratio in the current conflict may be at least as low as 1:1"

As low as that? Well thank goodness. I was worried that there was some kind of atrocity going on but apparently only half the dead are civilians.</comment>


Christchurch NZ: Mass Shooting - <AUTHOR> https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/111313938/live-coverage-police-attending-evolving-situation-in-christchurch <comment><USER2> More gun toting incel throwbacks who cannot cope with the reality of modern demographics.</comment>


Quantifying the impact of the Twitter fake accounts purge – a technical analysis - <AUTHOR> https://elie.net/blog/web/quantifying-the-impact-of-the-twitter-fake-accounts-purge-a-technical-analysis <comment><USER2> > For example, if an account had 1,000 followers pre-purge and 900 post-purge, > its followers base loss would be: 900/1000=0.1, or 10 percent.

Did you mean "For example, if an account had 1,000 followers pre-purge and 900 post-purge, it lost 100 followers. Its followers base loss would therefore be: 100/1000=0.1, or 10 percent."

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish one could get the dataset and see how many bots some specific people, like politicians, might have had as followers.

<comment><USER4> I find it interesting that the bots preferred Obama, even on a percentage-of- followers basis. What's the explanation? Were Obama's twitter numbers being pumped at some point? Do bots just use Obama's account as a default-follow for legitimacy?

<comment><USER5> might be the function of the default follow feature and when they were created

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have to say I rather enjoyed the snide, _" Determining how those accounts were able to make such an impressive recovery is left as an exercise to the reader."_ in relation to users that saw large number of bot followers previously banned, followed by them rapidly gaining huge numbers of new followers... somehow.

<comment><USER7> I don't imagine the creators of the bot accounts were too upset by Twitter eventually banning millions of their creations. Now they get to sell millions of additional accounts to the same people all over again.

It doesn't take any fancy machine learning to figure out what is happening.

<comment><USER8> Brilliant. Twitter gets let off the hook by appearing to be "doing something" and people who charge for followers get a revenue boost by this new form of planned obsolescence. Twitter users get screwed by either getting caught up in the purges or having to pay even more money to bot creators to inflate their numbers, likely pricing many out of the market. Seems like a good time to short Twitter stock...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I didn't expect the number of followers loss to be over half a billion. Makes me wonder how many accounts were purged. Even if each of the purged account followed 100 of the account measured, it still means millions of accounts were purged.

<comment><USER10> Twitter accounts were trivially easy to make. Bots could easily churn out tens of thousands or more in just a few hours. The whole service is lousy with bots.

<comment><USER11> I tried to create multiple accounts (from the same IP mind you) about 3 months ago and many of them required me to verify a phone before registering or got flagged shortly after as potential spam, which was accurate.

I was curious how easy it was and for me it wasn't super simple especially the phone verification step.

<comment><USER10> The phone verification step appeared when Twitter finally realized (way too late) that they have a bot problem.

A few years ago (before the 2016 election) they didn't give a crap.

They've only started purging bot accounts in the past year or so. There was an uproar from the Fox News crowd about how they were being unfairly targeted by liberal Twitter because their subscriber counts were dropping like flies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think we should lose sight of the fact that many human users are being caught up these "purges". I lost my twitter account because they determined I was a "bot" somehow. I didn't want to give them my phone number to prove that I was a human so I ended up having to make another account. Social media has become incredibly toxic in the past few years with hate speech and the self- proclaimed social justice heroes who think banning anyone for wrong-think is necessary to "save Democracy". The whole thing is a mess.

<comment><USER12> Fortunately for Twitter, the bots lacked the tenacity and capability for repetition that the humans had and did _not_ create new accounts.

<comment><USER13> I assume you meant to add a /s to that</comment></comment></comment>


Mozilla demos BrowserID-authenticated video call in Firefox with WebRTC support - Suraj-Sun http://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/04/webrtc-efforts-underway-at-mozilla/

<comment><AUTHOR> looks great</comment>


Ask HN: How do well funded startups fail? - <AUTHOR>

Any examples of startups that raised hundreds of millions of dollars but folded eventually? <comment><USER2> It depends to some extent on what you mean by "folded eventually"--- if they managed an exit, but it soon became obvious that the exit was way too high and the company crashed shortly thereafter, does it count? Or are you looking purely for companies that raised a ton of VC and then died, leaving the VCs holding the whole bag?

For the 2nd category, the largest I know of was kozmo.com, which burned through about $250 million in VC dollars, in about 3 years, before going under. Boo.com also managed to torch an impressive $150m in 2 years. Flooz and Broadband Sports deserve honorable mention in the ~$50-60m category.

The biggest immediately-post-IPO bankruptcy that I can think of was WebVan, which went bankrupt within six months of a $375m IPO, after having burned through about $800m in total funding.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, depending on how you look at it, Bebo was bought by AOL for $850m when it was still in it's startup stages (fairly late stages, mind you). Recently it was sold to Criterion Capital Partners LLC for a tiny $10m.

Sure it didn't fold, but this project was massively funded and ended up flopping. Definite fail.

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot- com_bubble#List_of_companie...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot- com_bubble#List_of_companies_significant_to_the_bubble)

</comment><comment><USER5> hrm - i wasn't able to find any doing a quick search on Crunchbase (<http://www.crunchbase.com/search/advanced/companies>)

keyword: deadpool, Funded Min Size: 100,000,000</comment>


Books you shouldn't read when starting out as a programmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.travisswicegood.com/index.php/2009/12/01/books-i-don-t-recommend-if-you-re-starti

<comment><USER2> I disagree that _Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture_ is an excellent book. I found it to be poorly written and appallingly edited. (Martin Fowler is capable of much better.) More importantly, the patterns themselves give an impression of coherence and well-understoodness to a space that is in fact incoherent and poorly understood. This results in people thinking and talking more about patterns than about the problems they're actually trying to solve with software. In other words, the whole enterprise (pun intended) is premature optimization at a meta level.

 _Refactoring_ is better because it's on a smaller scale and thus able to deliver roughly what it promises.

As far as the enterprise-OO space goes, though, the best book by far IMO is Eric Evans' _Domain Driven Design_. One reason it's better (apart from being superbly written) is that it's much more exploratory: it doesn't pretend to have figured things out, but rather offers principles you can use to figure things out. Also, the principles, though deep, are easy to understand (as opposed to "enterprise application architecture patterns" which get more confusing the more you try to understand them). In fact, the only weak spots in DDD are the points at which it veers closer to the PEAA approach.

(Disclosure: I worked with Eric for several years. But my high opinion of his book was not caused by this; it was the other way around.)

</comment><comment><USER3> God don't read anything about patterns or refactoring. That'll sap all of your creativity and cover you in a tight fitting straight jacket. Read a language spec. That gives you the building blocks. Then go away and play with them.

<comment><USER4> I read the Gang of Four Design Patterns book straight out of college when I had a job as a dev lead at a small lifestyle software startup. Man, I tried to make every problem fit into that mindset.

I'd do things like hand-roll my own XML parser in PHP (never mind LibXML bindings, etc) while trying to make sure I was observing the Visitor and Command patterns, oblivious to the silliness of the situation.

I also missed the understanding of dependency injection (or just management in general) that would have made that hellishly large Flash project so much easier to test and assemble.

Somehow I still managed to get a lot done. I feel in retrospect, that the Design Patterns are good to know about, but I don't know about whether anyone should intend to implement them.

<comment><USER5> Patterns are primarily useful when you refactor to a pattern once you've gotten through the implementation to the point where you realize that applying the pattern would improve the code you've already written and make it clearer/more flexible/easier to extend. Starting with the intention of implementing a given pattern is almost always the wrong thing; recognizing when you've inconsistently half-implemented something very similar to a well- established pattern can actually help improve your code.

Unfortunately, people do often attempt to start from the pattern, which gives the whole idea of patterns a bad name, since most people's primary exposure to them comes from Some Guy In The Office Who Just Read The Gang Of Four Book And Now Tries To Use Patterns For Everything He Does. And everyone, rightly, hates working with that guy or his code. The same thing happens with XP/Agile/TDD, where most people's exposure to them is from some annoying zealot rather than someone a little more experienced and pragmatic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Glad to hear I'm not the only one with a copy of _The Pragmatic Programmer_ on its way to tatters as a result of chronic re-reading; I'd begun to think I wasn't getting out of it what I should be. I likewise recommend it to other programmers, new or otherwise.

I avoided _The Passionate Programmer_ when it was called _My Job Went To India_ , deterred by the title and lack of reader recommendation. Maybe I'll give it a look now. Somewhat related, I found _Land The Tech Job You Love_ to be a comprehensive and insightful resource.

<comment><AUTHOR> I avoided the first edition too. Dave Thomas' blog post about the new edition is what got me to read it.

I've yet to read Land the Tech Job You Love. I know I should, I just sort of have the tech job I love :-) At any rate, they're both supposed to be very complimentary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does one know a great book with out consuming some junk? We learn when we do it wrong up much more often than when do it right. It is not always clear in the beginning that putting business logic in with the view or the data layer code will later be impossibly difficult to untangle. I would suggest read what you want then do what you think is best. It doesn't matter if it is completely correct. (whatever correct is) Some good peer review will keep the bad trouble away, or at least the decision to keep it will be made with the eyes open. Nothing will create a great programmer faster than untangling those darn tangles.

</comment><comment><USER8> Good lord, the article doesn't actually contain the proper titles of the books!

<comment><AUTHOR> Please do tell? Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (PEAA), Refactoring, Refactoring to Patterns, and the various Pragmatic books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Twilight, because it's god-awful.

Oh, you meant _programming_ books. Never mind!

<comment><USER10> I understand that this is off-topic, but is it really necessary to downvote it to invisibility? It's a silly joke. It costs you two seconds of your life to read it, and none for laughing if you don't find it funny. Just move on.

This place can be awfully humorless at times.

<comment><USER11> I think it's meant to be. Much as I love a bit of humour, take a look at reddit. Endless pun-threads and stupid jokes do drag down the quality of conversation - and people are no doubt afraid of the slippery slope.

As things stand, I like HN the way it is, and if I feel like something a bit more laid back then i read proggit.

<comment><USER10> A reasonable answer, but I keep thinking that there has to be _some_ middle ground between pummeling the occasional (and clearly not mean-spirited or cruel or nasty) joke and the barbarian hordes of _pick your least favorite other place_.

 _Edit_ : Based on the voting, I'm clearly in the minority, so I'll leave it alone in the future.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Encryption must come standard - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mobitar/encryption-must-come-standard-b5ba7b87a422#.anfm5sa80 <comment><USER2> I agree completely with the sentiments of this article, but it didn't touch enough on what's preventing the mainstreaming of cryptography and security.

The two big reasons I see every day are:

1\. Cryptography is difficult to use effectively, and it's not getting easier fast enough.

2\. Cryptography and security are seen by users as the developer's problem, and seen by developers as the user's problem.</comment>


How to make an email signature that makes you seem like a dick - <AUTHOR> http://charlieharvey.org.uk/page/email_signatures_for_dicks <comment><USER2> I have seen people that prints every single e-mail, so I use a similar environmentalist sentence.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article itself is way too judgemental.</comment>


The Lilium Jet – The world's first all-electric VTOL jet - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohig71bwRUE <comment><AUTHOR> I must admit I was extremely sceptical when I first heard about them, thought them way too ambitious, but getting an electric prototype that small to fly with vertical takeoff is pretty impressive.

(Disclaimer: not affiliated in any way, just living in the same city)</comment>


Rosetta Spacecraft Hours From Rendezvous With Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko - <AUTHOR> http://www.universetoday.com/113654/rosetta-orbiter-less-than-500-kilometers-from-comet-67p-following-penultimate-trajectory-burn/

<comment><USER2> See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8136225](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8136225)</comment>


The industry's magic bullet for robocalls is currently useless on an iPhone - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/20/20875500/stir-shaken-robocalls-ios-13-apple-call-verified-currently-useless-iphone <comment><USER2> I much prefer the other option that Apple added to iOS 13: [https://www.cnet.com/how-to/this-new-ios-13-feature-stops- st...](https://www.cnet.com/how-to/this-new-ios-13-feature-stops-strangers- and-spam-callers-from-ringing-your-iphone/)</comment>


Dabo Desktop Application Framework - <AUTHOR> http://dabodev.com/ <comment><USER2> is wxwidgets a good framework? Has it been embraced by many startups?

<comment><USER3> It's decent, but I switched to Qt when the licensing changed and definitely do not regret it. YMMV, but I find it the most pleasant and complete GUI toolkit of any language. wxWidgets makes you do more stuff manually. For example, I've found sending custom events to be a fairly complex and error-prone process, requiring badly-documented macros, while Qt makes it a breeze with the signals/slots mechanism. Qt also offers much better integration with VS, eclipse, etc. wxWidgets does have a fairly usable stand-alone designer.

I don't know about dabo, but having used both toolkits, and now that Qt is LGPL, I don't see any serious reason for choosing wxWidgets over Qt. Personally I use it from C++, but if you want Python I'd suggest having a look at <http://wiki.python.org/moin/PyQt> .</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Meeting with acquirer / competitor. How much tech to disclose? - <AUTHOR> I'm CTO of a startup. Hoping to find a few people who have been around this block.
We're worth around $20M at the moment, vs our competitor's worth of around $100M. They're ahead of us in some ways, but we beat them on others (including some of our analytics). They've expressed interest in acquiring us, and we're giving it fair consideration.
We have a getting-to-know-you meeting in a couple of weeks from now. How much tech detail should I extend? We have NDAs on both sides, but obviously (at least to me) those are worthless in terms of protecting us from them implementing disclosed ideas. CEO (who is non technical) isn't as concerned. <comment><USER2> none</comment>


Ask HN: Exercising stock options with imminent new round of funding (AMT panic) - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I am likely looking to leave (within the next few weeks) the startup I am currently working for, and go to one of the top 4 for several reasons.
(Un)fortunately, the startup appreciated considerably since I joined 3 years ago, and now the cost of exercising my option + AMT tax would be around ~110k (I calculated the value manually and also used TurboTax to simulate the transaction, it turns out ~40k for exercising + ~70k for AMT).
Now, on top of this insane amount of money that I have to pay out of pocket, there is even a bigger problem: The math I've done for the taxes is based on the 409A valuation of the company done at the last round of funding (Series B) a year ago (it's still the official number HR provided me). I have reasons to believe a Series C will be imminent (i.e. a month or two away).
The question I have is: if I leave, say, two weeks from now, and write a check for $40k to the HR department for exercising my vested options, can I use the check date as "exercise" date, meaning that I'll be sure the valuation for AMT purposes will still be the one of the Series B? Or will I have to wait until the board & lawyers approve the whole thing, which could mean the FMV will likely have increased by then because of the Series C (and I will be effectively screwed, because the AMT tax portion would be much larger?).
In other words, would this timeline work?
- (April 2017) I leave the company and pay $40k for exercising
- (May 2017) The company raises the Series C, increasing its
value
- (June/July 2017) Lawyers/board process my exercise and send me the certificate saying I am a stock owner
- (at some point between August 2017 and April 2018) I pay $70k to IRS, even if the FMV is increased
Thank you <comment><USER2> You should call a tax lawyer ASAP. This is above HN readers' pay grades.

FWIW, we had a similar situation at Zenefits, but were advised it would probably be all right if we exercised before the company officially started raising $.

George Grellas comments on Hacker News frequently, he may be a good option.

I'd also look into secondary markets for selling some of your shares to offset the tax burden.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the precious information!

I thought about asking here because it's not the first time HN saves my "life" by providing proper perspective on important decisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Talk to the stock admin at your company. They will provide you with an exercise form.

> can I use the check date as "exercise" date, meaning that I'll be sure the > valuation for AMT purposes will still be the one of the Series B

Correct, it's whatever date you'll have on the exercise form, but still, talk to the stock admin for the most recent common stock valuation.

You don't have to disclose your departure, your ISO exercise is an independent event and can happen at the advice of your tax advisor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

I'm absolutely also going to get in touch with HR and also get a proper tax accountant.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the fnid in the URL? - <AUTHOR>

What's it used for and how is it calculated?
Ex: https://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=ErFrwPqYY6tmu1v2had2pg <comment><USER2> HN is written in Arc, a Lisp dialect. One programming idiom in Lisp is "continuations." If you click on that link, you execute the identified continuation.

This idiom is widely used internally in HN, most commonly for e.g. stateful things like showing the 4th page of someone's comment history. (That could arguably be done in a non-stateful way, but it isn't.)</comment>


ReactNative becomes more relevant in the enterprise after Xamarin's acquisition - <AUTHOR> http://www.cio.com/article/3038253/mobile/microsoft-acquisition-opens-door-for-cross-platform-mobile-application-development.html <comment><USER2> Poor title: React Native has about 3 paragraphs out of 13 in the article, which is all about Xamarin's acquisition.</comment>


Ask YC: What's up with Startup School? - <AUTHOR>

Last year's was April 19, but this year's hasn't been announced yet.  Is there still going to be one this year, or did AngelConf take its place? <comment><USER2> Perhaps you didn't see pg's announcement.

<http://ycombinator.com/party.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> What? My question was about startup school, not the summer funding cycle.

<comment><USER2> This link then.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494520>

<comment><AUTHOR> Aha. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Defaulting to hire on credentials will put you out of business - <AUTHOR> http://carlosmiceli.com/defaulting-to-hire-on-credentials-will-put-you-out-of-business/ <comment><USER2> I didn't go to college, though I grew up in a college town and eventually even worked for a while as the college's lead web developer. I've been developing software professionally for customers and clients since I was 14 (currently 25; so, for 11 years).

Once, when I was applying for a job, I ran into someone with the same perspective as Bryan Caplan's from this article. I had made it through a few interviews and tests into the process at this company, everything was going well, when at some point I mentioned my not having a college degree. I didn't even realize it until later, as by that point in a process people are usually satisfied (or not) with my skills and experience to make the lack of a degree mostly irrelevant.

I was asked to have a call with the CTO of the company. The call became a 45 minute lecture, wherein the CTO questioned the sanity of everyone who had hired me previously, urged me to consider not applying for jobs in this industry in the future, and suggested going to college as my only viable option. The call lasted 45 minutes, with me in shock and unable to believe that someone could be so rude, and not knowing how to end it politely. Still, to this day, I'm amazed. Not so much at the basic idea, not even that someone would admit to being reliant on it, but just that someone could be so rude.

Thankfully, I've avoided such dramatic rejections since, and my lack of a degree has, if anything, continued to serve as a nice filter, keeping me away from jobs where I'd be working for insane people. I've had no issues finding good positions despite my not having a degree; in most cases, my experience, portfolio, and references are what really matter. And, now that I'm focusing on working for myself/entrepreneurship, I'm not going to have to worry about it at all for the foreseeable future.

I like the explanation given, about "credentialism". It's not just confused or inept HR departments that rely on the credential of a college degree to guide their work. It's also young CTOs at technology startups trying to justify the time and money they (recently) spent earning their credential.

<comment><USER3> I received a similar lecture from a former employer, except it was by email, after I had handed in my resignation.

He wanted to make it quite known that I wasn't qualified to work in the industry (even though I worked for him in the industry just fine for several years and I was the one leaving the job on my own accord?) and that I wouldn't be able to find another job without a degree. Even though I deep down knew everything he was saying was not really based in any reality, the things he said were actually pretty hurtful at the time.

I had no trouble walking into another job that provided far more interesting work, and paid considerably more, for people who showed a much greater appreciation for us to be able to work together. I still don't know what the purpose of that email was. Sad to see me go, I guess?

<comment><USER4> Emailing people who are leaving more than a nice to have worked with you or let's connect on linked in always seems like a giant lose lose proposition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The one piece of data that having a college degree communicates is that the person with it did something they didn't have to do, it took longer than a few months, and it involved a wide variety of tasks. As such its a useful way to prove you can do something that takes a long time to do.

I agree however that there are people who haven't chosen to do that who have shown that ability in other ways. And there are people who have neither a college degree nor any long term project in their history which often indicates they are unwilling to put up with any inconvenience.

But the message that there is no silver bullet that will make sure all of your employees are "great" is true. If you assume that credentials are that bullet you will eventually get populated with a bunch of highly credentialed and ineffective bozos who will drive out the good people and leave behind an empty husk of a work force.

<comment><USER6> In a similar vein.

GED recipients have been less successful than originally anticipated. Social scientists were surprised because these are people who are intelligent enough to pass the curriculum but they weren't achieving greater success than other dropouts. In trying to understand the gap, what they focused in on is that life success isn't just intelligence, its soft skills like stick-to-it- iveness, willpower, concentration, etc. The GED recipients were talented but unfocused. And the same habits that kept people on track to graduate were the habits that led to life success.

How is that relevant? It's relevant in that college signals more than conformity. It signals soft skills that matter. A willingness to slog through sometime tedious, un-exciting work. Which is what companies need sometimes.

So while I'm kind sympathetic to the argument, its a bit too black/white IMO.

<comment><USER3> > In trying to understand the gap, what they focused in on is that life > success isn't just intelligence, its soft skills like stick-to-it-iveness, > willpower, concentration, etc.

Do you have more information about these studies? I have always assumed that to be true. When you look at successful people, it is the indicator that stands out most often. I'd love to look at the formal research.

<comment><USER6> here are a couple papers.

<http://ftp.iza.org/dp6580.pdf>

[http://www.economics.uci.edu/files/economics/docs/micro/f07/...](http://www.economics.uci.edu/files/economics/docs/micro/f07/tsai.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting stuff. Personally I'm from the camp of people who don't put a lot of stock in credentials. I wouldn't go so far as to say they carry _no_ weight, but I certainly don't weight them particularly heavily, especially if I have anything else whatsoever to go on.

And to the extent that I do care about, say, a college degree, I definitely am not of the mindset that "You have to have gone to an Ivy League school, or you're obviously a dolt who will never accomplish anything". In fact, I think recruiting at less prestigious schools could be a source of competitive advantage, especially for cash starved early-stage startups. Why try to compete with Google and IBM and Cisco and Microsoft, etc. for grads from Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Brown, MIT, etc., etc? Forget that, we will probably recruit at schools like North Carolina Central[1], Shaw[2], St. Augustines[3], Peace[4], Meredith[5], Wake Tech[6], Durham Tech[7], UNC-Pembroke[8], Fayetteville State University[9], NC A&T[10], Winston-Salem State[11], etc. There's talent to be had everywhere, and I doubt we'll be finding a lot of Google recruiters on those campuses.

[1]: <http://www.nccu.edu/>

[2]: <http://www.shawu.edu/>

[3]: <http://www.st-aug.edu/>

[4]: <http://www.peace.edu/>

[5]: <http://www.meredith.edu/>

[6]: <http://www.waketech.edu>

[7]: <http://www.durhamtech.edu>

[8]: <http://www.uncp.edu/>

[9]: <http://www.uncfsu.edu/>

[10]: <http://www.ncat.edu/>

[11]: <http://www.wssu.edu/>

<comment><USER8> As for the Bay Area, I've consistently been impressed by Cal Poly SLO guys I've met.

Their education is so much more practical and real-world-ready than my Ivy League engineering education (which was largely theoretical in nature).

<comment><USER7> I mean, I have nothing against Ivy League schools, or their graduates. And I won't even say that I think they are _overrated_ so much as I think other schools, and their graduates are _underrated_. I also think there are a lot of other factors that affect the extent to which someone is a valuable employee, beyond sheer academic ability. Attitude, work ethic, personality, ambition, perserverance, cultural fit, etc. Net-net, my personal belief is that a firm can hire recruiting largely from schools that are _not_ the famous, elite "top tier" schools, and still hire plenty of smart, talented, successful people.

Maybe time will prove me wrong, but we'll see...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've interviewed a fair number of people for tech positions over the years and one of the fastest lessons I learned was that the correlation between a CS degree on the resume and technical ability is basically non-existent. More so, among the best devs and engineers I have worked with one was a physicist by training and several had no college degree whatsoever. Credentialism is a sucker's game, if you fall victim to it you'll be at a competitive hiring disadvantage. Hiring is tough, but it's also one of the most important things you can do as a company, make sure to put the right amount of effort into it.

P.S. As the article points out, falling victim to the credentialism trap as an employee is also a sign of conformity. Some companies want that, but hiring extremely talented non-conformists is an easy and excellent way to kick the competition's ass in many cases. The future of technology is almost never created by conformists.

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's the thing: for the typical job listing, there are dozens, or hundreds, of applicants. Maybe more.

You do not have the time to do a full-fledged investigation of every one of them, or bring them all in for a lengthy interview. You just don't. You need some filter to reduce the number to something more manageable, and degree/school is a straightforward way to do it.

Also recognize that 99% of jobs, even technical jobs, do not require (1) a one-in-a-million technical skill which is (2) easy to identify and measure.

Is filtering by degree flawed? Absolutely. But that's an academic argument. The question managers face is: what's a _better_ way, subject to real limitations of time and resources?

Last but not least: in my experience, most jobs require navigating some amount of bureaucracy and difficult people. Someone completely unwilling or unable to make these "compromises" probably would be better working for himself, and not within an organization.

<comment><USER11> Filters should be created and maintained based on their efficacy, not on how easily they can be applied.

Yes, it's impossible to interview _every_ applicant, but a company focused on minimizing time spent and resources used instead of maximizing recruitment of employees who can create the most value is doing it wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article made me think about my own recent process getting hired at a startup. We certainly have mostly degreed and credentialed employees but we have at least one senior member who dropped out of college to co-found the company. I think a mix of both types is the right approach. To quote FAKEGRIMLOCK: THIS LAW 9: FIRST BATMAN, THEN ROBIN.

</comment><comment><USER13> One thing I absolutely do not agree with is Bryan Caplan's laughably narrow- minded view on people that do not attend college.

Not everyone turns 18 and suddenly has everything they need but simply decides not go to because, like, non-conformity, man!

It is just as likely that <insert life> happened. Is someone who decided to raise an unexpected child a non-conformist? The oldest child staying home to work because the breadwinner in the family died... clearly that person is a non-conformist.

Are you serious?

<comment><USER14> For that matter, is someone who went to trade school or got an apprenticeship or went into a manufacturing job a nonconformist?

Equally laughable is the idea that "going to college signals conformity to organizations that want you to be a conformist in order to work there".

Right, that's exactly what going to, say, Deep Springs, or St. John's, say, signals. I signalled conformity by going to a school with a rep for weirdos and grinds, and concentrating in something widely agreed not to have much direct relationship to the business world (and which has an observable correlation with disputatiousness and disrespect for ipsedixitry)---of course!

It's true that going to college is the default option for people in the middle class or above (or who wish to join the middle class or above), but it's simply fallacious to conclude that if you don't go to college you don't go out of nonconformity. Your action doesn't conform, but that doesn't in any deep sense make you a nonconformist. (The person who decides to raise an unexpected child might well be very much a conformist.)

Caplan strikes me as one of those people who can't distinguish between the novel or unusual and the praiseworthy.

</comment></comment><comment> old-gregg Worked pretty well for Google, no?

While reading "In the Plex", one fact stood out: nearly all of their early hires were well-respected CS figures from 1st grade universities. Not only you had to be smart, but you had to have good grades from a good school to get hired by Google early. The only exception I could find was Salar Kamangar. At least that was my impression from reading the book.

<comment><USER15> Isn't the early Google work a good definition of a Hard Problem, though?

[Startup X] does not need a CMU PhD to build the latest Node app. The domain is blocked at my office so I can't read the article, but I'd argue that spending the extra money on "10x" talent does nothing but shorten your runway.

<comment><USER16> On the other hand, the investment in [Startup X] is partly justified by the idea that spending money on "10x" talent is a chance for "100x" returns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fundamentally credentials make sense to me. If we were designing an employment system from scratch, some form of independent standards and certification would be difficult to pass up. It would aid accurately sorting skilled/trained people into appropriate areas of work.

I say this with no credentials whatsoever, so I'm not just trying to be part of the 'credentialist conspiracy'.

In practice our existing system just isn't fulfilling that purpose enough to justify the enormous amount of money being spent. Accurate signalling on knowledge/skill level has been lost in the noise of wealth/conformity signalling.

</comment><comment><USER16> There are many sources of competitive advantage, which includes but is not limited to good hiring practices and the development and retention of talent.

Companies which were not dependent on cheap/competitive talents were able to get away with many inefficient work practices. Companies which are not dependent can and will still do that. Introspection is stressful and costly, change even more so.

"This is why great designers, salesmen or computer programmers are still highly valued": A very narrow selection of professions where productivity is very sensitive to variations in ability.

</comment><comment><USER18> Thank god Andrew Carnegie didn't live today. He'd have never gotten a job other than his first one: shoving coal into an oven. The same for all of the people who started companies before degrees existed.

</comment><comment><USER19> HR departments are largely the problem.

Even if you have a savvy, dynamic, progressive team in a large company - looking for coding/sales/marketing savants - HR will typically not even pass candidates resumes if they don't have a BA/BS etc.

<comment><USER20> I'm always amazed how much HR filters before it even gets to the relevant manager who actually needs the hire (and knows what he/she needs from them).

<comment><USER21> The worst HR filter I've ever head came from Microsoft somewhere between 1990-92. There recruiter informed a group of CompSci students gathered to hear about careers at Microsoft, that people graduating from our school were only allowed to apply for jobs in customer support. I think the professors were more ticked off than the students.

<comment><USER20> wow...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Over forty comments on credentialism so far, and nobody has mentioned the elephant in the living room, Griggs v. Duke Power Company. Pardon me while I feign surprise.</comment>


Does mod_pagespeed make your site faster? Find out without installing anything. - <AUTHOR> http://torbit.com/proxy.php

<comment><USER2> Slightly redundant to use a proxy to check for a speed increase from mod_pagespeed, is it not?

The added latency from the proxy is likely to counter the benefits of mod_pagespeed...

<comment><USER3> Probably more useful as a "Does mod_pagespeed break my site?" test.

<comment><USER2> Agreed, should probably be advertised as such.

<comment><USER3> It is. It was just a poor choice of a title for HN. That text isn't the page's title.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It may be just me but this proxy made sites load much slower.

<comment><USER5> People love open proxies, especially if those people also like terrorism, porn and cracking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> it's interesting to be able to surf around and see which sites are faster and which ones it breaks.</comment>


How do you find motivation to sell your life for peanuts? - <AUTHOR>

Many of you work for peanuts. How do you rationalize that? What do you do to be able to look into the mirror every morning? Is an hour of your life really worth 50 bucks?<p>Not trying to be rude, just trying to force myself to work on a project. <comment><AUTHOR> Try changing your perspective. See each 50 bucks as an opportunity to do something of benefit to you, rather than focusing on wasted time of life.

</comment><comment><USER2> Wow, I don't even know where to start. This OP is so insanely arrogant and ignorant, I can't even find the words to describe it.

<comment><USER3> I actually got a good laugh out of it personally.It sounds like something an honest kid would ask. Refreshing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 50 bucks an hour doing something I like is a lot better than nothing.

</comment><comment><USER5> go work in foodservice for a little perspective.

<comment><USER6> But that's exactly the point! We're not working in foodservice. We have much better competencies. Less than one million Americans have the abilities required to be programmers. (That's less than 0.5% of the population!)</comment></comment>