Workplace Wellness Plans Offer Big Incentives, but May Cost Your Privacy - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/22/649664555/workplace-wellness-plans-offer-big-incentives-but-may-cost-your-privacy <comment><USER2> > Few expect employers will stop offering wellness programs outright — because > most hope the programs will hold down health costs by getting workers to > take steps to improve their well-being. Critics, however, point out that > studies show little evidence that workplace wellness programs achieve these > goals.

Insurers like Oscar are very savvy pioneers of what wellness programs actually do: select for healthier pools.

What difference does it make if your insurance costs $4,700 instead of $6,000 this year, if you're so healthy you don't use a dime of it? Oscar's investment exit horizon is nearer than the time it takes health 28 year olds to turn 55 and chronically unhealthy.

How does it select for healthier pools? Older people don't like being told what to do, or to have to use technology like fitness trackers and apps. It's that simple.

As long as gratuitous technology and wellness selects for healthier pools, an insurer's bottom line doesn't care if wellness actually improves health outcomes. At least from an accounting point of view.

Obviously, we should support efforts to make people healthier. But I'm just trying to point out why insurers do this.

<comment><USER3> Your comments about Oscar do no make sense. Oscar offers insurance in the individual marketplace. As such they are not selling to companies but to individuals directly who don't have insurance through their employer. This means their members do not partake in these types of wellness plans. Also, as part of that marketplace, Oscar can't legally use the members previous medical history to underwrite/rate their policy. This means Oscar has little to no insight to whom they are offering their products, their goal is to get enough healthy people to offset the costly ones.

Also an insurance company who offers commercial group insurance, i.e. sells insurance to companies, does not have their bottom line really impacted as much as you would think. This is based on the fact that they are currently acting as middleman in the system and any increase in costs is merely passed along, hence continually rising cost of healthcare.

<comment><USER2> > This means their members do not partake in these types of wellness plans.

Oscar members get discounts for walking a certain number of steps a day, and other somesuch things. They are functionally equivalent to employee wellness programs, in that consumers (be they individuals or business) are offered discounts in exchange for fulfilling some behavioural change that intuitively seems to make people healthier, even though there's little evidence that it does. I'm speaking to their prevalence in the industry.

I get that it matters from an accounting point of view that they're an individual marketplace insurer versus a whatever. It doesn't matter from the point of view of why insurers generally like these programs.

> Oscar can't legally use the members previous medical history to > underwrite/rate their policy.

Oscar does a lot of things to select for healthier pools. Their marketing is carefully tuned to a particular kind of healthier customer. You're underestimating how goddamned savvy they are. That's not illegal, but it's effective.

There has recently been a rule change that allows insurance pools that are "guild"/union targeted, like only plumbers or insurance offered for the Writers Guild of America (WGA). Surely you see that, if that average writer is 28 years old, and the average plumber is 45 years old, I don't need to look at their medical history or anything to know which pool is healthier?

Even if I pick a pair that's the same age, I bet you the average highly paid programmer at 28 (for my hypothetical programmer's insurance) is going to select for a healthier pool than my 28 year old warehouse and teemsters worker insurance.

> Oscar has little to no insight to whom they are offering their products.

I think when they place an Instagram ad, they're pretty much guaranteed to be "offering" their products to a younger audience than the average American. I don't need to look anything up to get that incredibly cost-impacting insight.

Or maybe I'm targeting iPhone versus Android, and iPhone users are just wealthier on average and therefore just healthier on average.

I get that ANY American can buy their insurance. I'm not going to litigate the role of marketing, because it's pretty obvious that it matters.

> This is based on the fact that they are currently acting as middleman in the > system and any increase in costs is merely passed along, hence continually > rising cost of healthcare.

From the article:

> The Cleveland Clinic's Rogen, who credits the wellness program for holding > medical costs almost flat for the past five years...

I guess I'm just trying to explain why. Your business specifically is a middleman in a system, and you're passing costs along. But there are some actors who, by their accounting have held costs "almost flat," whatever that means.

I'm speculating as to the mechanism by which costs can remain flat, DESPITE your accurate picture of a continually rising cost of healthcare.

<comment><USER4> _discounts in exchange for fulfilling some behavioural change that intuitively seems to make people healthier_

I think Oscar is less concerned with whether walking so many steps makes you healthier and more concerned with your ability to walk so many steps as a rough indicator of your health. This is especially useful given the above- mentioned fact that Oscar isn't allowed to underwrite based on your medical history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With the ACA's pre-existing condition guarantees under threat, it is in every individual's interest to keep as much of their medical information private as possible. The way insurance companies make money is by avoiding elevated risk, after all.

On a related subject, I wonder whether ISPs are selling browsing history to insurance companies.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was about to get free Fitbit from work program. And then I heard work would have access to data in Fitbit. Nah, screw that.

<comment><USER7> If I got a free one from work, I'd just put it on my dog.

<comment><USER8> Wouldn't work for me. My dog is incredibly lazy. :)

<comment><USER7> The trick then is to catch a neighborhood squirrel and attach it to the animal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks like a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't. Privacy of health related information is critical, and as with other things, the people who are relatively poorer would be the worst hit. There's probably no escaping being further exploited or discriminated against.</comment>


New MIT database promises faster websites and more reliable data - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/fresh-data-1014.html

<comment><USER2> This is not a database -- it's a cache.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, the HN article title is inaccurate.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the best ways to cope with startup stress? - <AUTHOR>

Startups can take quite a toll on one's mental state. What are the best ways to cope with the stress and keep focussed on the product and growth? <comment><USER2> Exercise. Make sure you to get that Serotonin when you can.

<comment><USER3> I'd agree to this. Daily exercise(For me, running) has the biggest positive impact on my mood and helps to keep my mind off work for the entire duration of the run.

<comment><USER4> What they said. Times 10.</comment></comment></comment>


Does Twitter "Own" 140 Characters? - <AUTHOR>

I'm doing a startup and one of the fields will be a space for a short blurb of text - right now it's 100 characters (and counts down a la Twitter) but I've been thinking it may make sense to make it 140 characters... people are used to that length at this point, and it'd make sharing content from Twitter on my site easier.
However, I don't want to draw comparisons to Twitter (even in the sense that it's just one component of the site) because I'm not trying to compete with them.
Can apps beside Twitter use the 140 character limit without people immediately thinking of Twitter, or of your site as a secondary service? <comment><USER2> I think of 140 as the limit of SMS messages. Not twitter.

<comment><USER3> It's 160 (ref: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS> )

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. IIRC, Twitter went to 140 for space for an ad or something... I've been trying to find other services that aren't affiliated with Twitter who use 140 characters and have come up empty.</comment></comment></comment>


Kid Pix – The Early Years - <AUTHOR> http://red-green-blue.com/kid-pix-the-early-years/ <comment><USER2> It was awesome application then. My dad purchased it and it was lots of fun for long time. It was one of those magical apps that opened the world for 7-8 year olds :) The rubber stamps enabled you to create whole worlds etc.

Got my first baby last year and when I started looking for good iOS apps for children, I first tried to search for Kid Pix and was disappointed that there's no iOS version.

I know my toddler is too young for that kind of sophistication but still would buy iOS version of the app :)</comment>


Habitus: Combine multiple Dockerfiles into build and deployment workflows - <AUTHOR> http://www.habitus.io/ <comment><USER2> Repository: [https://github.com/cloud66/habitus](https://github.com/cloud66/habitus)

</comment><comment><USER3> is this a superset of features that integrates with docker compose?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope. Habitus fixes the things that are broken. Docker-compose is a way for composing your services (using images). Think of Habitus as the step before using Docker-compose. It helps create Docker images without leaving traces of secrets, libraries you don't need, and other components utilized in the creation of a stable image before you start to compose your container services.

</comment></comment><comment> awinter-py how does this compare to grammarly/rocker?

<comment><AUTHOR> both projects fix stuff that's broken when it comes to creating docker images efficiently. With build.yml you can separate all the steps to make it more readable, and then put everything into the Dockerfile. Rocker has a similar sort of feature called the Rockfile. Habitus provides an additional solution for getting secrets in and out of your image and squashing the image afterwards.</comment></comment>


Great Retsina, an Oxymoron No More - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/dining/drinks/retsina-wine-greece.html <comment><USER2> Important to know that retsina is drunk almost exclusively with food. Mixed with meat, it's actually delicious. In fact I think I've never seen anybody having just a glass of retsina on its own. But everyone has the cheap Malamatina in the fridge. Be more open minded - like olives, it's acquired taste, but rewards the brave. It's delicious ;-)

</comment><comment><USER3> I also first tried retsina at Souvla. I don't know what the bad stuff tastes like, but I liked the kind they had there. I now grab a bottle to take with me every time I get food to go.

</comment><comment><USER4> Retsina seems to come with built-in geofencing for me: I like it when I drink it in Greece, and not when I bring it back home - even if I try to drink it in Greek weather and with similar food.

<comment><USER5> Same with ouzo and raki. Even in SoCal that has very similar climate and terrain, I find it hard to get the same enjoyment. Something about having it on the beach right by the crashing waves.

<comment><USER6> Not to mention that having 25cl of raki after lunch isn't really a sustainable day-to-day habit unless you are on the beach :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most retsina that makes it to the US isn't very good, but it's always been fine when I drink it overseas. Frankly even when it's bad it's pretty good. Like vinho verde.

</comment><comment><USER8> The only association i have with the drink is Roald Dahl's autobiography _Going Solo_ , in which he alternates among flying against italians and germans in the battle of athens and trying not to die, getting strafed in his own airfield by germans and italians and trying not to die, and getting absolutely shitfaced with other RAF pilots on a hillside with retsina, and trying not to die.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can we have a " (2019)" added to the title? It's not real news, but some have already read this 18 months ago.</comment>


What to expect from Elon Musk's Mars colonization update this week – The Verge - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/26/16360348/spacex-elon-musk-iac-mars-colonization-interplanetary-transport-system <comment><USER2> Just guessing here, but watch for a significant date: July 16th, 2019.

That's the 50th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11. It's also 6-12 months on from the projected date of Musk's translunar tourist trip on a Falcon Heavy (which I'm willing to bet will be delayed a few months, minimum, because no new launch vehicle _ever_ flies on time, especially a crew-rated one).

I don't expect a lunar landing in 2020. It'd require the development of a new lunar module, space suits, and a mission profile and training in only two years, which is almost certainly very difficult if not impossible (not only for today's sclerotic NASA but also for SpaceX — agile management will only get you so far). It'd also require at least two Falcon Heavy launches to put the stack in Lunar orbit — Falcon Heavy, even in non-reusable form, has a significantly smaller payload than Saturn V. But a circumlunar flag-waving flight ( _sans_ lander) over the anniversary of Apollo 11 is entirely possible, using a single Falcon Heavy and Dragon 2.

It's also a date within the term in office of Donald Trump (or Mike Pence, depending who's in the Oval Office by then), which means there's some chance of convincing the current POTUS that he can get to make a historic phone call in front of the TV cameras. Trump is of an age to have young-adult memories of Apollo and I can't see the idea _not_ appealing to him if he can find a way to take credit for it.</comment>


These robotic skiers hit the slopes in style - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/02/these-electronic-skiers-hit-the-slopes-in-style/ <comment><USER2> So funny how people (or at least, me) immediately try to 'humanize' everything. Watching the video and seeing that robot crashing into the fence I felt bad for it and started wondering insane things about pain.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a really good example of how difficult robotics are.

Technology wise we are leaps away from developing robotics that are meaningful in terms of cost and value.

Fun video though.

</comment><comment><USER4> Oh great. Now my robot wants to go skiing.</comment>


Is there a Silicon Valley advantage? - <AUTHOR> http://tparang.blogspot.com/2009/12/is-there-silicon-valley-advantage.html

<comment><USER2> _Most of the founders of successful Bay Area startups are not "locals", but first generation "immigrants" from other parts of the US/world._

Very true. When I started representing startups in the Valley in the mid-80's, the overwhelming majority of the founders were "locals." Since 2000 at least, this pattern has decidedly shifted, at least for the companies I represent (with a clear majority now being either immigrants or from first-generation immigrant families, many from India).

There is also a decided international emphasis today in terms of Valley companies using resources (people, investment sources, etc.) not at all centered in the Valley as they used to be.

The Valley connection does remain important in many key ways, however, as noted in the post - in my judgment, it is still by far the best place to be for a significant number of startups.

A good, balanced post on this issue.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've spent a dozen years each in the Boston and Washington, D.C. areas, working at various startups in each, and I have lots of friends who've spent time in Silicon Valley. Here's what I've noticed:

In California non-competes are all but unenforceable (there are exceptions but they don't make much difference). It's hard to express just how much of a difference this makes (I've experienced the reverse in the above areas); go back to the beginning of the Silicon part when the Traitorous Eight left Shockley, followed by so many leaving Fairchild and e.g. founding Intel. I've read that the cross-fertilization between companies had a lot to do with the rapid developments in that field.

Silicon Valley is said to have a better attitude towards failure and the most savvy set of VCs on earth (OK, the latter is less important nowadays).

On the other hand, it's said to be rather ageist, not that that would be unique.

All in all, if I had been capable of dealing with the traffic I would have moved there, it sure looked and looks to be the best place for startups. The only place? Clearly not, and I suspect its advantages are somewhat less important nowadays. But I'm sure for a whole lot of fields it's still the place where a startup has the best chance of success.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's undoubtedly a silicon valley advantage when it comes to doing actual silicon. Presumably there's an advantage on the software (and particularly internet startup, as is the focus of the article) side of things as well. I find it hard to believe that so many companies are spending the extra $$ for a fancy mailing address.

So how much of the advantage is just having a pool of experienced talent locally available? How much of a difference does being able to sit in front of a white board and hash out an idea with a coworker face to face make for an internet company? Is the nearby presence of hardware companies still a significant advantage in some way? Did all these people just move to silicon valley because it made sense to go where everyone else in the industry went?

I was a bit disappointed that the article didn't really try to address these points.

How</comment>


Game interface infringes copyright - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080715-popular-wow-automation-tool-infringes-blizzards-copyright.html

<comment><USER2> Oh, the WoWGlider case. I'm gratified to hear that the DMCA violation theory was rejected. I'm still worried to hear that the judge validated the copyright infringement theory. As sleazy as I find botting tools to be, I think that counting copying a piece of software into RAM in order to run it as copyright infringement is a dangerously broad interpretation of copyright law.</comment>


Ask HN: At what point do bootstrapped/pre-seed founders need to pay themselves? - <AUTHOR> If I form a C-Corp with a co-founder, at what point do we legally have to pay ourselves?
We want to set up a corp for IP assignment while working on it part time, and are still weighing how long we want to try and bootstrap before getting outside funding.
Do we need to pay ourselves minimum wage? At what point do we need to? <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: IANAL. This is not legal advice.

Legally, as soon as a corporation exists and both parties are contributing work to it. In practice, this is very commonly bent - it's very common to find startups that aren't paying one or more cofounders, even ones that are years old. The main reasons to pay yourself are:

1\. You can be in violation of minimum wage laws otherwise.

2\. Contracts require "consideration" (i.e. exchange of something of value) to be valid; there's a chance that one person could argue that their IP agreement is null and void if they aren't paid.

Both of these are civil actions, not criminal, so they require that a founder bring suit against the company to be enforced. The vast majority of the time, when things are going good you can ignore them, because no founder has an incentive to sue their company. The place where it very frequently bites founders is if one founder leaves or is forced out, or the company is hanging on by a thread and then turns things around. At that point, unpaid wages become a (potentially very serious) liability, which creates negotiating leverage for the departed founder, so they can say "Ha ha, give me lots of equity or I will sue and blow up your latest financing" and you'll have to do as they say to avoid an expensive and distracting lawsuit. Up to you how comfortable you are running this risk: in the case where everything goes well, they're not gonna sue, and in the case where everything goes to shit there's not gonna be anything worth suing, but in the middle case where things almost went to shit but you pulled through it could be worth millions.

As an aside, it helps in your mental accounting if the founders are getting paid. It's very easy to fall into the trap of "my time is free, so I will do this task myself and avoid paying this outside vendor to save the money" even if they could've done it much more efficiently than you. I've fallen into this trap very frequently, and in practice this is probably a much stronger argument for paying yourself than the legal risks.

<comment><USER3> At least in Spain #1 could be a problem because you have to pay social security for people.

If know about companies hiring founders as contractors or as part-time workers to comply (the later case is quite unethical but... people do it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This may or may not apply to you but in the UK you can get R&D tax credits, so it's beneficial to pay yourself so you can claim back a portion of your salary as tax credits. This works even if you personally loan your company the tax free allowance (which is about £10k) that then gets paid back to you.

</comment><comment><USER5> iirc our accountant informed us at one point that the minimum wage laws don't apply to "owners" of a company. This is California.</comment>


Time formatting and storage bugs - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bugs <comment><USER2> It's weird that the 2036 NTP problem isn't called out in the article, but is linked to in the categories at the bottom. I conjecture that, like the article, this will be overlooked and have bad consequences. Fortunately, I'll be retiring that year.</comment>


Ask HN: Which email service do you use for multiple custom domains? - <AUTHOR> I've taken advantage of Zoho's email service for a custom domain.  I now have new side project (different domain) that I'd like to add email to, with another project coming in a few months.  So, I'm trying to figure out what my options are with respect to setup and cost.<p>I'd prefer not to pay $5/user per domain if possible.  Should I run my own mail server?  Any advice is much appreciated! <comment><USER2> I currently use Google Apps for business. You can associate multiple domains to a single account and have a single user ($5 per month) that has multiple email aliases from each domain.

So for example, if you set up Google Apps for ExampleA.com, you can then add/verify additional domains under that account. Once you have done that, you can create a user on ExampleA.com (i.e. email@example.com) and have aliases for the other domains (i.e. email@example.com). While all the mail comes into one inbox (I set up rules to dump each domain to a separate folder to make it easy), you can customize the TO field to allow you to send from any of the addresses. In the end you only pay $5 for all the email addresses though (or at least $5 per user you set up if you want to have more than one user on the account).

It may not be the perfect solution, but it is effective and inexpensive. I don't have worry about it, it works great with my Android phone. The only downside is that if you later decide to separate out the accounts it can be a little bit of pain and confusing.

<comment><AUTHOR> This definitely sounds like the most cost effective solution.

What does the process look like when you're changing the FROM field when composing an email (e.g. sending from firstname.lastname@example.com and then another email from firstname.lastname@example.com)? I'd hate to forget to change it and send out an email from the wrong email address. But it would be nice to manage all emails from one account.

<comment><USER3> If you're using their web service it's simply a dropdown box to select alias to send from.

<comment><USER4> ... after a simple confirmation process to connect the account (involves a confirmation link received by the target email host).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why are tech people freaking out about coronavirus? - <AUTHOR> https://10mohstech.substack.com/p/why-are-tech-people-freaking-out <comment> chupa-chups The intelligent ones aren't freaking out but are computing

* economic impact of fear of a pandemic

* economic impact of shutdown of > 60,000,000 people in china to the rest of the world

* economic impact of panic of people not educated enough to judge real risk of becoming infected

* media inertia

* china specific cover-up tendency

* actions in china

* 2nd and 3rd derivative effects of fear of a pandemic (i.e. delayed/missing deliveries of required medicines)

* fear-caused outage of food etc., since the delivery chain may collapse if fear raises into a critical level

etc.pp.

In other words: from my POV (and my peers), nobody really fears the virus itself but the effect it causes to the social environment.

<comment><USER2> I fear the virus itself. Not so much for me as I'm healthy but it could easily take out my 80 something parents.</comment></comment>


A Scheme to Encrypt the Entire Web Is Actually Working - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/04/scheme-encrypt-entire-web-actually-working/ <comment><USER2> The other big factor driving universal encryption is HTTP2. Currently, the major browsers only support HTTP2 over TLS [1], and many of them have no immediate plans to support unencrypted HTTP2. HTTP2 allows one to drop a lot of the HTTP latency workarounds we're familiar with - image spriting, JS module bundling, CSS concatenation. It may soon be _easier_ to setup an https- only website than an http or mixed http(s) one.

[1] [http://caniuse.com/#search=http2](http://caniuse.com/#search=http2)</comment>


Flabbergast: a programming language for generating configurations - <AUTHOR> http://flabbergast.org/ <comment><USER2> This looks nice and the syntax is very similar to HOCON. One thing I like about HOCON in general is that everything is "overrideable"/"mergeable". This is nice because I can have a config set of defaults that needs no other config to run. From skimming the manual here I see that I have explicitly say something is a template or not. But I definitely like that I can make it clear that I require values.

Looks great. Sorry, I don't have much more feedback than that, but I will say I fear the typing and inheritance may make it more complicated than configuration end-users want to deal with.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting! The missing piece seems to be versioning on the libraries, for example:

lib:apache/aurora/0.5.x

Without this, I can imagine a new version of Aurora introducing a new required config field, the Flabbergast library being quietly upgraded to handle this, and then users seeing inconsistent behaviours.

Remember that config file formats are one of the least well-behaved pieces of a software's public API (prone to breaking changes in even MINOR releases), so it seems sensible to build this in from the start.</comment>


DeepMind's StarCraft 2 AI is now better than 99.8 percent of all human players - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/30/20939147/deepmind-google-alphastar-starcraft-2-research-grandmaster-level <comment><AUTHOR> Frustratingly there's no sources linked to, but it looks like this story was placed with several sites (eg Verge, Independent, BBC, Yahoo Entertainment) and possibly embargoed until 6pm (given the similarity in publication times for a story that would take more than a few minutes to edit!)

<comment><USER2> I think this is the deepmind release [https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaStar-Grandmaster- leve...](https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaStar-Grandmaster-level-in- StarCraft-II-using-multi-agent-reinforcement-learning)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - I'd only seem the health one at the top of their blog when I went earlier</comment></comment></comment>


SoftBank Nearing Deal to Sell Arm Holdings to Nvidia for More Than $40B - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbank-nearing-deal-to-sell-arm-holdings-to-nvidia-for-more-than-40-billion-11599928360 <comment><USER2> [https://archive.vn/gI81d](https://archive.vn/gI81d)

 _SoftBank Group Corp. is nearing a deal to sell British chip designer Arm Holdings to Nvidia Corp. for more than $40 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, the latest in a series of big asset sales by the Japanese technology conglomerate._

 _The cash-and-stock deal being discussed would value Arm in the low $40 billions, the people said. The terms under discussion would mark a big win for SoftBank, which bought Arm four years ago for $32 billion and had struggled to jump-start growth in the business._

 _Arm and Nvidia have been in exclusive talks for several weeks and a deal could be sealed early next week, the people said—assuming it isn't derailed at the last minute._

An $8+ billion ROI through this sale, wow. I wonder what the final terms of the sale will be, if it's just a straight exchange cash for business or if they'll maintain some kind of stake in Arm or NVIDIA. I'm not a financial person, I don't know how these things typically work. Though I guess the real fun begins with the potential legal proceedings on whether to allow the sale at all.

<comment><USER3> It will almost certainly include a very large equity component.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> On the surface this makes complete sense given Nvidia's CPU ambitions but I wonder what advantage it truly gives them in practice. Apple has already shown you can make the best Arm chips without owning it.</comment>


Instagram Account Devoted to Destroying Bird and Lime Scooters - mark-ruwt https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbj7xb/theres-an-entire-instagram-account-devoted-to-destroying-rideshare-scooters <comment><AUTHOR> "Our big picture for shared scooters and bikes is to create a culture, together with the community, where people view scooter and bike sharing as their own," said Caroline Pruitt, Lime Spokeswoman. "But not too literally, as they need to keep paying us."</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone from Xamarin want to comment on the MS Announcements today? - <AUTHOR>

Just wondering what Xamarin's plans are in light of Microsofts major .Net announcements today.  Anyone from Xamarin care to comment on all this? <comment><USER2> I'm not from Xamarin but their latest blog post sounds positive: [http://blog.xamarin.com/microsoft-and-xamarin-expand- global-...](http://blog.xamarin.com/microsoft-and-xamarin-expand-global- partnership/)

<comment><USER2> And migueldeicaza commented on another post here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8596226](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8596226)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2014/Nov-12.html](http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2014/Nov-12.html)</comment>


How I Made It: Evernote CEO Phil Libin - <AUTHOR> http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-76869824/

<comment><USER2> I've read a few in the LA Times "How I Made It" series, and I'm not impressed. It's not BAD stuff: I, too, hate passive aggressive signs. It's just that the article doesn't describe how anyone made anything. If I hadn't read the title, I would have no idea _why_ the article was written.</comment>


First impressions about Graal VM - <AUTHOR> https://blog.frankel.ch/first-impressions-graalvm/ <comment><USER2> For those not reading the comment section:

Regarding the example benchmark: It is mainly testing the performance of the String::compareToIgnoreCase method, which has a very different implementation in Java 9 and beyond compared to Java 8 (due to the "compact strings" feature). The method generally is not very complex, so it is not ideal for compiler comparisons.

...

The largest workload tested on Graal is currently the production use of Graal at Twitter where they get somewhere between 12% (CE) and 24% (EE) improvement.

<comment><USER3> I actually checked Play! on akka-http on Graal (maybe I write a Blog about it). Just the "Hello World" of Play! and I've seen like 25% improvements in request/s with CE. I think a full Scala Codebase get the most out of Graal. However running Play dev mode with Graal EE didn't worked well it sometimes had strange Class issue's where it tried to search a "java.lang.Boolnae" class (notice the misspelling)

I also looked into what else Graal is capable of and it's cool to run C programs or even curl on top of it. Sadly I wished the NODE.JS integration would've been better. I wished I could run angular universal on top of Graal within Play! so that Play! would've been able todo the same thing than .net core with it's angular integration (just without running node!). However Graal can only run "pure" JavaScript ([https://github.com/graalvm/graaljs/issues/2](https://github.com/graalvm/graaljs/issues/2)).

(native-image does not work with Scala 2.12 (Scala 2.12 emit's indy which does not work with SubstrateVM) or even Play! on 2.11 did not work)

<comment><USER4> You can use ScalaJS.

[https://github.com/greencatsoft/scalajs- angular](https://github.com/greencatsoft/scalajs-angular)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I played with it a few weeks ago, mostly interested in Python and the article I read and the Graal home page didn't make it clear that the Python support is not even close. I tried a "print 'hello world'", and that didn't work at all. sys.stdout.write did work. I then did a simple test of startup time and Python was an order of magnitude faster than Graal.

The Graal Python prints a warning when you start it that it is a very early state.

So I tried Ruby, and I was able to do a simple print, and the startup time for Graal vs Ruby was about the same.

Looks like Java is the real target right now. A very interesting project, looking forward to seeing where it goes.

<comment><USER6> Re the startup time: native images are intended to reduce startup time of _Java_ code, as they AOT compile _Java_. Other languages are not, AFAIK, AOT- compiled, and so reducing startup time is not a goal -- overall performance is.

<comment><USER7> We get this confusion every time we talk about native compilation. GraalVM can do ahead-of-time compilation of Java code. That Java code could be an interpreter for JavaScript, written in Java. But GraalVM cannot do ahead-of- time compilation of JavaScript. We struggle to always make this clear.

And it's actually more complicated than that:

Of course GraalVM _can_ compile JavaScript to native code, it just only does it at runtime, as a JIT.

GraalVM can _run_ JavaScript during ahead-of-time compilation, so you can run your JavaScript program so far, and then compile it at that point with all its state compiled into the image. We use this to do things like pre-initialise libraries ahead-of-time so when you start to run everything is set up and ready to go.

Finally, the mathematical trick we use to compile JavaScript to native code at runtime, which is called partial evaluation, or more formally, the First Futamura Projection, has a theoretical more advanced variant called the Second Futamura Projection, which could be implemented in GraalVM to, indeed, compile JavaScript ahead-of-time to native code. But implementing this practically is an open problem and not really our goal.

<comment><USER8> I wish people stopped using niche terms as a) if they were common knowledge, and b) as if they were crucial to the discussion at hand. It's much more intuitive to explain what's going on and then say that what is described is also known as ___.

The Futamura Projections can be explained in about three lines and is not at all a complex concept to wrap your head around.

Casually inserting these terms in a forum where most people likely haven't had much exposure to partial evaluation terminology makes it sound like you want to either forcefully polularize these terms or make yourself sound more important.

...not saying you intended either.

<comment><USER9> I think you are wrong about this. Contrary to a normal conversation, specific vocabulary used on the internet can be instantly looked up. This allows for diving more into the topics if they interest you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a nice video where Twitter engineer discusses performance improvement with Graal. Twitter runs thousands of JVM and found massive savings in time and cost with the move [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR5NDkIZBOA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR5NDkIZBOA)

<comment><USER11> Here is a more recent one.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7yIUkP5LiQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7yIUkP5LiQ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been thinking about this a lot - binary interfaces.

We have this problem of one standard binary interface, the C ABI. It is the only standard binary interface. If I want to write a library that can be used by any language, I have to export a C interface.

There have been solutions, such as Corba and COM, but cross language support never really took off. We end up with ports of libraries. There are tons of libraries ported between C++, Java, C#, etc. All because they live in their own world. Using a C++ library in C# requires exporting a C interface and then hand wrapping the library with pinvoke.

Before I read about GraalVM I was under the impression that WebAssembly would accomplish this.

</comment><comment><USER13> So, does it have tail calls yet?

<comment><USER7> Yes you can implement tail calls using exceptions.

<comment><USER14> what would performance look like?

<comment><USER7> If you throw and catch an exception in the same compilation unit it just turns into a jump instruction, so fine.

<comment><USER13> If I understand what you're saying, you're suggesting that a single self-tail- recursive function can be rewritten using an exception thrown and caught within the function.

That's something, but what about a set of mutually tail-recursive functions? Of course one can always use a trampoline, but then you have to pay the cost of consing thunks. It would still be worthwhile to have true tail-call instructions in the bytecode.

<comment><USER7> Truffle frames are just Java objects, so when the exception returns us to the root of the method, we can create a new frame to run an entirely different method.

We aren't looking to modify Java, so we aren't the people to ask for a tail- call instruction in the bytecode.

<comment><USER13> Oh, you're heap-allocating frames? You know what I'm going to ask about next, right? First-class continuations :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> TL;DR: for the author's test, Java 9 had better performance and creating native code didn't work. So not quite there yet, but interesting to watch.

<comment><USER7> Yes there's some reported bugs.

We build entire JavaScript, Ruby, and Python interpreters using the native code generator, so we do know it works for non-trivial applications and libraries. I've also used it to do things like compile the third-party Apache SIS geospatial library for use from a native application without issue.

The author's tried just one benchmark - there are many other benchmarks and use-cases. Twitter report it's around 11% faster for their real and extremely large codebase, so we also know for other people it's significantly faster.

<comment><USER16> Out of curiosity, dynamic class loading seems like one of those things where you would need to embed an interpreter in the application itself. So how does one deal with such cases?

<comment><USER17> Dynamic class loading is not supported on SubstrateVM because there is no infrastructure built-in to parse bytecodes, interpret them, etc. Adding those in SubstrateVM would defeat the purpose of having a thin layer VM. But, you are right: you could have an interpreter in the application itself. However a simple bytecode interpreter would have very bad performance. In fact that's how Truffle languages run on SubstrateVM. As far as SubstrateVM is concerned the Graal/Truffle stack is an application, albeit an application that knows how to interpret/compile other languages. So an interesting exploration path is having a Truffle based Java implementation that could be embedded in the image on demand, and which could load classes dynamically. You could still compile your known Java classes AOT and defer the dynamic classes to the interpreter. You might pay the extra cost for memory footprint, code interpretation/warmup/compilation time, etc., but you would be able to slowly migrate more Java code from dynamic compilation into AOT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can somebody please explain me in plain english, how this is different from vert.x? Even Graal seems to be OSS, I would rather use Eclipse foundation project (vert.x) than anything from Oracle.

</comment><comment><USER19> Are there any scientific papers by the Graal team?

<comment><USER7> [http://www.graalvm.org/community/publications/](http://www.graalvm.org/community/publications/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Numbers speak for themselves

No, microbenchmarks _never_ speak for themselves.

<comment><USER21> What if the only code you run is microcode ? IF 60-70% of a given run-time ends up in the same few small dozen functions, it's certainly worth benchmarking them.

<comment><USER7> One problem is that testing these functions in isolation and with synthetic data is not the same thing as testing them in your real program and with real data. Modern JIT compilers like Graal are extremely sophisticated and will look at your program in ways that are not easy to understand.

Even just preventing a powerful compiler like Graal from optimising away your microbenchmark is going to be a challenge - Graal currently defeats the state- of-the-art JMH for example, and most people wouldn't even going as far as to use JMH.

I have many examples of microbenchmarks that Graal (when being used as a JIT for Ruby in my case) will optimise away that people will find very surprising.

[https://twitter.com/chrisgseaton/status/619885182104043520](https://twitter.com/chrisgseaton/status/619885182104043520)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your favorite hot sauce? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> While it's on the sweet side (typical habanero sweet/fruitiness), this scotch bonnet pepper sauce has a wonderfully rich pepper flavor.

[http://www.bushabrowne.com/product_pukka_hot_sauce.php](http://www.bushabrowne.com/product_pukka_hot_sauce.php)

Sriracha and standard Chinese red pepper sauce are staples that should always be available.

However, if heat is the goal without compromising flavor, nothing beats Bailiff Brutality.

[http://www.honestfoods.com/bailbrutsal.html](http://www.honestfoods.com/bailbrutsal.html)

It claims to be a _salsa_ , but don't be fooled. It's hotter than Dave's Insanity _by volume_. This sauce is insidious. The chunks of roasted pepper and tomato trick you into putting a couple spoonfuls on your burrito. The oil base delays the burn... allowing you to eat _more_. At about 10+ minutes after eating the "salsa", the Capsicium filled oil finally starts to hit the nerves and it hits you with at least a half hour of increasing pain. This sauce gives you time to think about the situation you put yourself in _before_ hitting you with the pepper heat. And then it does it to you again six hours later.

But the best part - which you're not going to believe - is the it really does have an outstanding roasted tomato/pepper flavor. I like it for the taste, not the insane heat.

</comment><comment><USER3> Best thread ever. I'm about to open up a container of Del Real "Salsa de Molcajete Roja" that I got from costco, that's pretty good. My favorite is from a local place here in Santa Barbara - "Hot Salsa" from the Santa Cruz Market - so hot, you cant stop eating it!

</comment><comment><USER4> Marie sharps, imported from Belize. Made from prickly pears and available on Amazon. Comes in many variations, but all are smooth and the prickly pear provides a nice base to give them all a great flavor. This particular one is my favorite:

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0000DG56O](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0000DG56O)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been waiting for this question for some time now!

The hot sauce I have in my desk at work is

Arizona Pepper's organic harvest jalapeño pepper sauce.

Contains red ripened jalapeño peppers, vinegar and salt and tastes exactly how I imagine hot sauce would.

I also like the habanero version from the same brand for its smoked flavor.

Both are sugar free which is important for me and taste amazing without being overwhelming.

</comment><comment><USER6> My favorite is Desi Hot Sauce by [Curry Up Now][[http://curryupnow.com](http://curryupnow.com)].

1/22 is [National Hot Sauce Day][[https://m.facebook.com/nationalhotsauceday/](https://m.facebook.com/nationalhotsauceday/)], btw.

</comment><comment><USER7> Tabasco for anything Mexican-y, or with eggs. Franks (x-tra hot) for anything American, like pizza. Sriracha for anything Asian.

Lesser known brands are always good too, but I can never go wrong with this holy trinity.

Lately, I've been absolutely in love with Trader Joe's brand habenero salsa. It's perfect on everything.

</comment><comment><USER8> Aardvark Habanero from Secret Aardvark ( [http://secretaardvark.com](http://secretaardvark.com) ). It's not overly spicy, but has a lot of flavor. If you're in the Pacific Northwest, it may be at your local grocer.

</comment><comment><USER9> After much trepidation and finally trying it, I like Cholula's original sauce the best of all of the hot sauces I have tried. I may try the others though.

[http://www.cholula.com/](http://www.cholula.com/)

<comment><USER10> Cholula is my favorite, too.

I love trying out all the sauces at Firehouse subs, but the one I buy for home is Cholula.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [http://www.elyucateco.com/products/salsas-picantes/salsa- ver...](http://www.elyucateco.com/products/salsas-picantes/salsa-verde)

</comment><comment><USER12> I have two favorites. There's the basic sriracha (and various gourmet knock- offs). I also really like the smoked chipotle version of Tabasco. It's cheap, not super-hot, and has a terrific flavor.

</comment><comment><USER13> Gochujang

I prefer a bit of sweetness in my sauce. Sour.. not so much.

</comment><comment><USER14> Encona hot pepper sauce.

It has a great kick to it, but also a really deep and unique flavour. At university I went through a bottle a week!

</comment><comment><USER15> Sriracha

Also hijacking this to ask for a good BBQ sauce? :)

<comment><USER10> I like sweet baby ray's at your local store.

If you want something more special, check out this sauce from my local famous bbq joint. It's slightly spicy, and they've been around going on 100 years. Hard to get a seat in there.

[http://www.mcclards.com/shop.html](http://www.mcclards.com/shop.html)

<comment><USER9> Sweet baby rays is a good BBQ sauce. I use it for broiled boneless chicken thighs and it never disappoints.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Salsa Lizano - From Costa Rica. Not overly spicy but goes well with everything! Available on Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER17> Tabasco.

Mojo Picon from Canary Island is also great. Not quite hot, but Papas arrugas con mojo picón is a gratis dish.

</comment><comment><USER18> Tabasco for general hot sauce

Tabasco Chipotle for Tacos, can't eat them without it now.

<comment><USER18> For tacos try La Tiara White Corn Taco Shells, they are a must have now for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Blair's After Death Sauce. Very hot but with good flavor.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Piqué" sauce, exclusively at Sol Food bodega in San Rafael. Cholula available at Safeway and everywhere else.</comment>


The Web is inherently an inadequate application development platform. - <AUTHOR> http://pinderkent.blogsavy.com/archives/82 Is this even a valid argument today? <comment><USER2> ...just like the first microprocessors were.

<comment><USER3> Isn't it more fair to compare microprocessors to server-based applications, and not just to HTML with javascript, which is only one way to do it? In practice, it is the only way right now, if one wants users, but considering how painful and limiting it is, will things stay this way?

Unfortunately, I couldn't RTFA because it's down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "What's missing is the support necessary for large-scale application development."

This is exactly what Google Web Toolkit aims to solve. But its amazingly under-appreciated and I'm still not sure why.. I suspect the learning curve is a put-off to many developers. Or simply b/c it uses Java, that could also be it.

"The only way to fix many of these issues would be to strip away the browser, to strip away JavaScript, to change the nature of HTTP and the related conventions."

Supposedly HTML5 aims to do some of this. W3C is reconsidering this new standard to address some of the inherent problems being described.</comment>


How to patent a product and avoid being hurt by it - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea about a nice product and am in the process of developing it with a small team, I never patented anything, how to start, can I DIY? On the other hand the patent will disclose my most sensitive info that could be very risky, what should I do about it to make it a worthwhile effort? <comment><USER2> > how to start

Maybe here: [http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/howtopat.htm](http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/howtopat.htm)

> can I DIY

Yes. But you also state "I never patented anything". The patenting rulebook is extremely lengthy ([http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/index.html](http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/index.html)) and not written to be easy to grasp by someone who has "never patented anything", so the process can be quite daunting.</comment>


Mast Brothers: An Insider's Account of a Wholesale Debacle (Part One) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/shelf-life/mast-brothers-debacle-4eb138a0da05 <comment><USER2> Cautionary tale to tame your ego.</comment>


What Makes the Expat Lifestyle So Addictive? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/expat/2015/06/21/what-makes-the-expat-lifestyle-so-addictive/?mod=e2fb <comment><USER2> I lived 6 years in Stockholm, and despite being from Denmark, so the cultural differences aren't enormous, this article is definitely right on target. It's kind of like being part of an international community, and if it was a nation in its own right, it would be the most tolerant and friendly you could imagine. Because becoming an expat takes the kind of social courage you only find among such people.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone have resources on this topic?

<comment><USER4> [http://www.reddit.com/r/digitalnomad](http://www.reddit.com/r/digitalnomad) ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Because parsing xml is just so fun? ;)

[http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html](http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html)</comment>


Yet Another "How to Travel" Guide - <AUTHOR> https://kvtoraman.wordpress.com/2020/02/01/how-to-travel-like-a-prowhich-is-me/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, I'm open to your travel suggestions or feedback about the post. The world is ours.</comment>


Detroit Police Chief: Facial Recognition Software Misidentifies 96% of the Time - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dyzykz/detroit-police-chief-facial-recognition-software-misidentifies-96-of-the-time <comment><USER2> Of _course_ the technology isn't going to solve most cases.

But what this is saying is that they have a 5 % "hit rate" using the technology.

That's _way_ better than mugbooks and has little added personnel time for the search process. That 5% catch rate is "free" except for what they pay the contractor.

So as long as it's properly seen as identifying _candidate_ suspects rather than definitive suspects, it can be a big win. It's a tool. Any tool can be misused.</comment>


Trading coding for designing - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know of any site where a programmer who knows his limitations as a designer can get in touch with a real designer to have a site design created? I'm looking to trade my coding skills (say building the backend for a site, or performance tuning a site) in exchange for the work done. I'm not looking for a partnership or a joint venture or anything, just a one-off straightforward exchange of skills and time... Thanks for any pointers! <comment><USER2> What is wrong with exchanging money for work?

It gets you into economical thinking, makes you think harder of what this exchange of service entails, when you're done, and manages any asymmetries in the value of work done.

</comment><comment><USER3> shoot me if it doesnt work out.

</comment><comment><USER4> buzz me :)</comment>


Harvard University Won't Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-university-wont-require-sat-act-for-admissions-next-year-11592272825 <comment><USER5> I have a hard time understanding the logic here. GPAs are essentially useless, so what else do we have to go off of? "Hollistic admissions" processes seem to be even more skewed towards rich kids, as they have far greater opportunities outside of the class room to pad their resumes in exactly the way that colleges look for. This seems entirely backwards to me.

If there is a systemic bias in test scores, it is still better to have the test score there so you can quantify it, and adjust your admissions policy to account for it. By throwing out the test entirely you are flying blind.

<comment><USER6> How else are you going to keep the Asians out?

<comment><USER7> You are probably being facetious, but my wife is Vietnamese and her parents were boat people who fled the communists, didn't speak any English and had no money, then her dad got a job washing dishes, learned English at night, got into college, then got into medical school, started a chain of clinics, and retired a millionaire. You would not believe how much they despise current "progressive" politics and speaking with them about politics is basically impossible. They and their community / family follow what is happening with things like Harvard and partially as a result they are die-hard Trump supporters (among other things like their belief in religion, police, etc.).

I do not agree with all of these opinions, I am just telling you how this community, which is mostly still poor and not "model minority", views a lot of what is coming out of elite institutions in the name of progress and equality.

<comment><USER6> Why wouldn't they feel that way? As bad as Trump may be, he isn't trying to keep their kids from following the same successful path.

<comment><USER8> The same successful path that begins with the US welcoming non-white, non- English-speaking refugees from countries they've bombed? Trump is not actively on the record against all of that?

<comment><USER9> If they're refugees from South Vietnam, they probably wish the US kept bombing so they didn't have to flee the communists.

Hell, if they were well off in South Vietnam before the communists came, it just goes to show that if your family had the mental foundations necessary for success, even if you hit rock bottom you still have the attitude to climb back up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I highly recommend watching the video by Scott Galloway on The College Implosion. [1]

"Colleges have become luxury brands and are adopting a strategy of artificial scarcity to create irrational margins"

There's a large movement right now where many are saying the large tuition fees for Zoom lectures aren't worth it.

Colleges sell themselves for the experience and are a luxury lifestyle brand almost, but with covid the lifestyle aspect of it is wiped out, so its reasonable that students are asking why they'd pay such high premiums.

I think removing SAT, ACT casts a wider net and hopefully allows more students to enroll, what's the scaling limitation if everyone's doing lectures on Zoom? Presumably everyone's also getting graded electronically in some way.

[1]: [https://youtu.be/d8kwzSTITP0](https://youtu.be/d8kwzSTITP0)

<comment><USER11> I don't get it, aren't most colleges non-profits? Why do they seek such high tuition fees if they're not profiting? Or are they, somehow?

<comment><USER12> "Non-profit" doesn't mean you don't make any money, it means you _spend_ all your money. I went to a tiny liberal arts college you've never heard of, with a 1300-student enrollment today. The president makes well over half a million dollars a year. There are half a dozen deans making anywhere from $75-250k. A career services department run by a six-figure employee who has never held a job outside of that college (for real). They're technically a non-profit but with a sticker price of $40k a year and actual per-capita revenue somewhere in the high $20's, that is a lot of money to spread around to administration while you have 150-person lectures taught by a $25k/yr adjunct.

<comment><USER13> Is this RPI?

<comment><USER12> No but I've actually heard very similar experience to folks that went there, although I don't think it qualifies as a liberal arts college.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's not really a good thing. What they are doing is changing a known transparent standard for entry to something completely arbitrary, ad hoc, and opaque from the point of view of the applicant. Also, the applicant pool will rise because there is no SAT filter.

Having said that, I don't think it's a big deal because nobody _needs_ to go to Harvard. In fact, if you aren't affluent enough to afford Harvard tuition, or if you don't have a full scholarship, Harvard tuition is not worth the degree and student loans you end up with.

<comment><USER15> Harvard doesn't offer academic scholarships. If you can't afford Harvard tuition it's free - e.g. if your parents make less than 65,000 (20% of Harvard students) you don't pay anything. So yes, it's actually massively worth it if you can get in, because you graduate with no debt and have a name-brand diploma and access to an extremely well-connected group of people. It's the kids who go to second- and third-tier institutions and take on massive debt who should reconsider college, not the ones going to Harvard.

[https://college.harvard.edu/guides/financial-aid-fact- sheet](https://college.harvard.edu/guides/financial-aid-fact-sheet)

<comment><USER16> As someone who was accepted and got to see their financial aid package, I have to mention that it's extremely generous as well. They don't just cover room and board and tuition, there's an understanding that you're poorer than your peers at the university so there's general spending money, money to buy winter clothes, money to fly home 2x-3x a year.

This is a rounding error for Harvard, but I didn't realize how limiting not having that would be at the school I ended up going to (which only covered tuition and most of room and board).

<comment><USER17> So where was better than Harvard for you?

<comment><USER16> I went to Hopkins to study bioengineering. This ended up being a tactical mistake - the media hype around the field gave me unrealistic expectations, the life of an underpaid academic no longer seemed appealing, coursework was incredibly difficult and graded on a harsh curve.

But it was incredibly useful because it took me off the default track. Had I gone to Harvard and enjoyed its attendant grade inflation and reputation advantages, I'd probably be floating around McKinsey and feeling self important right now.

Instead, I had to ask myself some difficult questions about what is important to me and how to make it happen in my life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's often good to question assumptions. I happened to do well on SATs/ACTs, so I could be biased in their favor. But, I was curious--what is the actual predictive value of SATs/ACTs on college outcomes such as say GPA or graduation rate. This study would suggest that it's actually more predictive (at least in Alaska) than test scores: [https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/projects/project.asp?projectI...](https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/projects/project.asp?projectID=4546)

Has anyone else found other studies? I would be shocked if there isn't some kind of meta-analysis. Before getting into any discussion about social issues, let's see whether the tests are actually predictive. Or, if it's just a cargo cult.

My intuition was that these tests (ACT/SAT) would help to normalize for different levels of schools, but I will go with data over intuition.

In some sense, this move by Harvard will allow for a natural experiment to see if there are actually changes in outcomes when GPAs are/are not considered.

<comment><USER19> The UC system has dropped SAT/ACT as well because the Regents determined them to be racist. In spite of internal studies at UC schools that determined that the way the test scores are being used is not racist or discriminatory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> important to consider distinction between test blind and test optional like harvard is doing.

test blind - don't even consider SAT/ACT even if submitted

test optional - will be considered if submitted, but not required.

My view is that more colleges will start going test optional as August rolls around, but only colleges that have committed to eventually phasing out testing (UC system) have gone test blind for next year.

</comment><comment><USER21> The SAT has always generally been a test showing how well you prepared for the SAT. For top schools all viable candidates had very good scores so it wasn't much use.

It was just one of those things everyone did because everyone did it. With more opting out that momentum goes away and increasingly now people are asking "so why did we use this test again?"

Likely won't be long until the SAT just disappears entirely and replaced with nothing, or subject tests or some other exams more practically linked to placement in certain programs.

<comment><USER22> > The SAT has always generally been a test showing how well you prepared for > the SAT.

I don't know about the SAT specifically, but in my country we also have standardized admission tests and, from my appreciation, it's good at measuring 2 things:

1\. General Intelligence.

2\. How well you prepared for the test.

Sure, (2) may be an undesirable artifact but I think that intelligence is a good way --if not the best-- to select people for college.

<comment><USER23> 2 isn't an undesirable artifact. You want highly motivated hard working people applying to your university course. People have this idea of some genius slacker but you know what's better than a genius slacker? A genius who works hard. And frankly, most people aren't geniuses anyway.

<comment><USER24> You don't even need to raise the bar that much. A normal intelligence person who works hard is much better than a genius slacker. My experience is that a lot of people at the top of their high school classes get/stay their based on 1) general intelligence, 2) memorization skills, 3) socioeconomic advantages, 4) compliance. Of those factors, only #3 has a particular bearing on future success. At university, those who tend to be most successful as students tend to be those who are intrinsically motivated to work hard and study, and also those with socioeconomic advantages. After university, those with socioeconomic advantages tend to succeed regardless of their educational background, so there are fundamental reasons to investigate the systemic unfairness and discrimination in our society. Without trying to sound snarky, this is as linked to movements like BLM as it is to Harvard's discrimination against Asian applicants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm a Canadian who went to an ivy for undergrad, and have always found the American attachment to the SAT a bit puzzling. I'm also puzzled at the widespread view that by removing the SAT some grave injustice or lowering in standards is inevitable. Canadian universities manage to admit students mostly just based on high school grades just fine. (Yes, there are provincial final exams but those scores often are not available for admissions since they're taken in the 12th grade). The SAT itself was an odd exam for me, unlike anything I ever had to take in Canada. The SAT IIs (and AP/IB exams) on the other hand seemed like they assessed things more reasonably. The SAT's heritage as a poor attempt at an IQ test which then morphed into whatever the heck it is today, makes its utility somewhat out of place compared to what most other countries do.

One issue that's brought up is heterogeneity in high school grading practices, but somehow Canada manages. In any case, for "elite" schools, what has always helped the typical middle / upper-middle class applicants are AP scores (if you have a few) and of course SAT IIs as well.

<comment><USER26> The most competitive universities in Canada, like McGill and UBC have 46% and 52% acceptance rates. Canada has more of a culture of going to college in the province you grew up. To compare that to Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. that have sub-10% admittance rates and have to review tens of thousands of applications is failing to realize the scope of the problem these schools face in selecting students.

<comment><USER25> I'm very familiar with the scope of the admissions challenge and it's not really an issue of number of applicants. Most universities already have an understanding of different high schools (though often biased to wealthier communities). As for Canada, specific programs at Canadian schools can be quite selective - for example EngSci at the University of Toronto has a ~10% admission rate. Other programs are more like state schools in the US. Most elite schools in the US are still pretty regional heavy. For example 35% of Stanford undergrads are from CA and something like 30-40% of Harvard undergrads are from New England and the mid-atlantic.

<comment><USER27> Can confirm, some programs and unis are very selective with very low acceptance rates but the average student doesn't usually have too much trouble getting into a relatively good program without having to do standardized tests

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Caltech is doing this -- actually, they're going test blind -- for two years. I think that's pretty notable, since I trust them to be interested in only admitting students that can pass their physics classes.

<comment><USER29> I'm a PhD student at Caltech. There's also a push to eliminate the GRE as a requirement for graduate admissions, in much the same way as some people want to eliminate the SAT as a requirement for undergraduate admissions. In my opinion both proposals are well-intentioned but ultimately bad ideas.

<comment><USER30> Why are they bad ideas? I took the SAT and GRE for undergraduate and graduate schools respectively and neither was worthwhile preparation for anything I studied. If we want to put up barriers to entry then I think we can find better and more predictive ways than measuring general pattern matching skills with the SAT and GRE.

<comment><USER31> To quote Scott Aaronson:

 _Admissions to the top US universities—and hence, most chances for social advancement in the US—will henceforth be based entirely on shifting and nebulous criteria that rich, well-connected kids and their parents spend most of their lives figuring out, rather than merely mostly based on such criteria. The last side door for smart noncomformist kids is now being slammed shut._

<comment><USER11> It reminds me of a section of Thomas Sowell's book Discrimination and Disparities.

It was talking about automatic background checks for applicants at businesses. Some people wanted such processes to be illegal, on the grounds that they were supposedly racist.

In reality, automatic (i.e. _indiscriminate_ ) background checks actually resulted in more blacks being hired. Even if the local black population had a higher or much higher percentage of people with bad marks on background checks, being able to screen them out and allow those blacks with no bad marks to apply was made easy.

Without automatic background checks, employers fell back on their own biases, resulting in fewer blacks being hired.

The SAT is like an automatic background check. Without this indiscriminate screening, the schools have more ability to discriminate based on biases.

<comment><USER32> Credit checks had a similar impact for minority and disadvantaged communities. Before, if you wanted to get a mortgage or a car loan, the bank would assess you based on a number of factors. Many banks explicitly used race as a criteria for denial. Now, with near instant credit checks, race has been removed as an explicit criteria, rightfully leading to much higher rates of loans and mortgages for minority and disadvantaged communities. Are credit checks anywhere close to reliable or fair? Can you correlate race based on zip code or other factors? Yes, these methods are not anywhere close to 'good enough'. But they are miles ahead of the explicit racism that preceded these form of financial product applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Ah, those pesky standardized tests.

Sure they're the hardest part of admissions to game and are a major part of establishing an even intellectual playing field for applicants, but it just looks so bad when we discard a much higher proportion of qualified Asian applicants than qualified applicants from other groups! We were even sued over this issue and the suit is going to appeal!

And we're trying so hard to increase the numbers of admitted applicants from other groups but their standardized testing scores just aren't up to snuff...

I know! Let's just get rid of the tests! Then we can enforce whatever arbitrary (and race based) standards we want without annoying complaints that we're discriminating against qualified applicants.

What's that? By enforcing artificial "race" quotas we're just further dividing people based on race? Nonsense, our humanities department tells us that reifying race and obsessing over it is the best way to achieve a post racial society!

<comment><USER34> The problem is that standardized tests worsen the gap between the privileged and not. Test performance correlates strongly with how much prep you receive. Wealthy, white & asian students have the advantage there.

Not to mention that I am not convinced these tests strongly correlate with one's ability to successfully complete an undergrad degree.

<comment><USER33> What's harder: gaining admission to a prestigious private high school that costs $50,000 a year or getting a few cheap SAT test books, watching some free YouTube videos and practicing for a few weeks?

The point is that the SAT can be practiced for (to a small extent), but the resources necessary to improve one's score are cheap and widely available. It's one of the most equitable aspects of college admissions we have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This makes sense: Harvard has a huge issue with discrimination against Asian Americans, who are not represented according to their ACT/SAT score distribution. If Harvard could waive away these scores, they can continue their admissions policy that favor students from wealthy families who pay full price, and are likely to be institutional givers after graduation by focusing on admission factors that are much less accountable, like "personality".

Student's for Fair Admissions is in the process of suing Harvard over discrimination, and their website (with legal filings) is probably the single best source of information on Ivy League admissions: [https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/updates/](https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/updates/)

<comment><USER36> >This makes sense: Harvard has a huge issue with discrimination against Asian Americans, who are not represented according to their ACT/SAT score distribution. If Harvard could waive away these scores, they can continue their admissions policy that favor students from wealthy families who pay full price, and are likely to be institutional givers after graduation by focusing on admission factors that are much less accountable, like "personality".

Please. This is about affirmative action for people who aren't Asian or White. Not wealthy donors. The argument is that lack of privilege causes poor SAT scores which is preventing certain minorities from realizing their potential, and that this justifies selectively lowering the bar and allocating additional resources.

But this is all based on a conflation between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity.

<comment><USER37> > Not wealthy donors

Harvard's admission rate is <6% for general population - that includes affirmative action ethnicities. Harvards admission rate is >30% for "legacies" which make up one in six of their students, and even higher for donors. These are the kids who get in while being thick as a brick. The injustice is not primarily the black kid with 1400 SAT getting in over the east Asian kid with 1580 -- the injustice is the hundreds of CEOs/senators' kids being assured admission even being dumber than a sack of hammers.

<comment><USER33> I would expect legacies to have a higher admission rate. They are a subpopulation coming from homes with intelligent parents, likely grew up in intellectually stimulating environments, and were probably focused on the Ivy League before many of their peers had even heard that term.

There is definitely some application boost legacies get simply by virtue of being a legacy, but their applications are probably quite strong in general. So it's unlikely that dropping the SAT was meant to cater to them.

<comment><USER38> This should be easy to test, right? Look at the percentage of students admitted to Harvard whose parents went to Harvard vs. the percentage admitted whose parents went to some other similarly-selective school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Very considerate of them. Now the affluent parent won't need to abase themselves to bribing and fabricating sports credentials[0], it will just work out on its own.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_briber...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_bribery_scandal)

</comment><comment><USER40> Very mixed feelings on this.

I got terrible grades throughout high school (despite taking AP classes), and the only reason I was able to attend college was because I had very high ACT scores (perfect in English, and 2 points away from perfect in Math).

The way I see it there are two kind of perspectives you can take on this: A) I was a lazy kid who skated by and short-circuited my way through college or B) the school system failed me and I shouldn't be punished by not being able to attend college.

Honestly, I tend to gravitate toward option A, but it does make me wonder how much weight we should really assign to GPAs.

</comment><comment><USER41> This recent trend of eliminating the SAT/ACT reads to me like: "Let's eliminate these measures that allow high performing students to objectively differentiate themselves, in favor of a more opaque admissions process where we can implement discriminatory policies without scrutiny."

<comment><USER42> >allow high performing students to objectively differentiate themselves

Except the argument by people is it's NOT objective. I think the argument goes something like this: rich kid gets full time tutor privately or through school and is able to do significantly better on the SAT/ACT because they have _specifically_ prepared for it.

It doesn't mean they are smarter, or even a better student. It means they have been prepped better for it than their peers that don't have the same luxuries.

If 95% of the time a student scores higher after taking an expensive prep course, does that mean scoring higher really means much? Especially with SO many people taking the test, that little bit makes a difference where are you on the curve.. perhaps people are thinking that the kids whose parents can afford the time and money to give them a slightly advantage on the test doesn't translate into that person being a better student.

<comment><USER41> This is a myth. Almost nobody, even among "rich kids", gets a full time tutor for the SAT/ACT. Most just use the same cheap tools everyone else does - <USER2> Barron's test prep book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Let's talk practically, this will hurt people who did best on SAT (asians and jewish people who studied hardest, not rich white people) and help those who did poorly (blacks and hispanics).

The SAT isn't perfect and you can prepare for it (to an extent), but its alot better than GPA or any other measure as atleast it's consistent between schools.

It was actually introduced to help be more egalitarian and meritocratic. And its been shown to correlate pretty well with general purpose IQ tests as well as later success in life.

Removing it will no doubt help them discriminate more against asians and jewish people. they introduced meritocracy and it produced a result they didnt like for certain races so theyre removing it.

</comment><comment><USER44> So now they can have exactly the demographics they want. Those pesky objective criteria kept creating inequality.

</comment><comment><USER45> Predicting a human being's ability to "succeed", regardless of domain, is very difficult.

The insights from YC's process might be useful. While intelligence is important, it isn't the most important variable. What matters most is a determined-to-succeed-at-all-costs team.

In the case of education, it makes sense to have some kind of threshold for general competence (GPA for instance) which is required, but subsequently to focus more on the "team" aspect of education. What kind of culture are you attempting to build on your campus? What kind of people are you trying to form? That's the purpose of education, not technical mastery (that comes later).

Having said that, even a group like YC could use a standardized test to accurately measure that intangible force behind grit/determination, the force that drives a person to be a creatively unstoppable force of success. Of even more value would be a measurement contextual to environmental factors: i.e., higher or lower scores depending on what kind of people you are surrounded by, what kind of tasks you are confronted by.

To do that you'd probably have to model (predict) society itself, and then you'd have implemented Foundation. In other words, this is a problem much harder than whether or not to use standardized tests for college applicants. We don't know how to predict the future of individuals and societies. It may be impossible. But if you're looking for an embarrassingly ambitious startup idea, this sure seems like a good candidate.

</comment><comment><USER46> Ultimately this gives the admissions committee a lot less transparency in terms of whom they choose to admit.

In light of recent scandals, I am not sure that is a good thing. It may be well-intentioned today, but will ultimately be to the benefit of legacy and donor applicants, and to the detriment of others.

Perhaps Harvard with its endowment doesn't need the money and won't give in to the temptation, but this also sets the standard for other universities - <USER3> many of them could use the money.

</comment><comment><USER47> I suspect this will help "privileged" kids more than disadvantaged ones. They have parents that can pull strings to get high school grades inflated or attend special schools for "bright" kids that inflate grades and have the support to get good extracurricular activities to appear well-rounded. And they have help writing college application essays, etc.

</comment><comment><USER48> There's a lot of commentary here about larger trends towards not requiring the SAT, but Harvard says this isn't part of a larger trend. They just don't want to require students to go to a testing center in the middle of a pandemic, and nobody knows at this point what remote administration options will be available before 2021 applications are due.

</comment><comment><USER49> As an Asian who went to an Ivy, I welcome this change.

Yes, it will mask a policy of keeping the proportion of Asians lower than a race neutral policy.

Yes, it's racially discriminatory.

Yes, it's somewhat unfair to Asians who are trying to get in.

But no, being fair isn't the point of these schools. Nor is having the most academically excellent student population. If you want that, go to Berkeley or CalTech.

The point is to provide an exclusive and desirable brand name. If the school ended up being 50% Asian like Californian colleges, it would be less diverse, less interesting place to go to school, and lose a lot of the cachet. I wouldn't want to go to a college that is 50% Asian and 1% black over a college that reflected the demographics of the country.

Asians parents need to learn that life isn't just about testing better and having a better resume. Their kids will learn that lesson later on in life but time they learned it earlier.

<comment><USER50> The problem with laying bare this purpose of these institutions is it destroys their credibility. If everyone knows it's just a social club, and that is formalized, it loses its prestige. It's beneficial to students who are enrolled due to family gifts that some students are enrolled due to being truly academically skilled. It furthers the impression the gift-giving segment may be skilled as well.

<comment><USER49> Again, it's the prestige of the social club that gives them credibility - <USER4> the academic excellence of its students. The students who have mediocre grades but very rich parents actually might actually have a better chance at success and bring more prestige to the university than the academically excellent student who have poor parents.

<comment><USER50> That might be too much of a reduction. You need academically successful members of your institution to get eye-popping headlines like "X discovered at University Y". Those PR pieces are partially responsible for the prestige. Concur on the point of family wealth helping institutions.

<comment><USER49> "X discovered at University Y" happens in graduate schools - not at the undergraduate level. And when you're admitting students in graduate school (excluding MBA and JD), you want the most academically successful members. There is no affirmative action for the physics Ph.D program at Harvard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> In other words, they'll gladly accept heaps of additional application fee money while padding the "hardest college to get into" stats

</comment><comment><USER52> I struggle to understand how this benefits applicants. So long as SAT/ACT is accepted at all, students should (and, mostly likely, will) continue to take them. This is a very obvious illustration of game theory and the Prisoner's Dilemma. [1]

Refusing to accept SAT/ACT scores would cause a profound change. Whether or not that is advisable is a separate discussion. The question begs, if we eliminate the SAT/ACT, and we decry GPAs as non-standardized, then what?

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

</comment><comment><USER53> I remain skeptical that admissions committees can distinguish between great students and good students through their personal statements. (Not that the SAT would have helped there either)

<comment><USER54> The objective here isn't to identify good students. That's just the cover story.

The objective is to select on criteria other than intelligence. For example, race.

<comment><USER53> Seems like a very idealogical thing to argue without evidence

<comment><USER54> You're not wrong. But there's no evidence arguing the contrary either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> "Not requiring" is about ratings. It allows schools to increase the amount of applicants making the school seem more selective. Meanwhile, they only report the test scores of good test takers, so the average increases too.

For a school like Harvard, once you're in it's hard to fail out. If you have a 4.0 GPA, the SATs won't help you keep from failing. So better for them to only report the 1500s and not the 1300s.

</comment><comment><USER56> What a weird way to attempt to be "egalitarian" \- Harvard's only purpose is to be selective and exclusionary. You can't be both.

<comment><USER57> I am cynical enough to believe it's a loophole to keep overachieving Asians or Indians from owning a rightful slot instead of a son or daughter of a wealthy donor, politician, or celebrity.

<comment><USER58> Is "owning" a typo for "earning"? I don't see how anyone can own a slot.

To add to your cynicism, university exams started as way to select WASPy prep school students instead of "overachieving" Jewish public school students. See, the tests included a section on Latin, which was much more often taught in private prep schools than public high schools.

To detract from your cynicism, the intrinsic assumption is the SATs are meaningful indicator of "rightfulness."

My understanding is that at best it shows a correlation with the first year of college, and that high school grades show a better correlation than the (gameable) SAT.

Don't know if the WSJ article covers any of this - don't have a subscription. But the header suggests this change is only for the next year, as a response to the pandemic, and not (yet?) a long-term change, so it likely doesn't touch on these issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Keyword seems to be require. I would think it's still a factor. If you forego the tests you should be prepared to prove yourself by other means I guess. I wouldn't take those chances though if I wanted in to Harvard. Although maybe I don't understand the function of 21st century university anymore.

</comment><comment><USER60> Harvard can be corrupt. There's a very average girl in my town who wouldn't get admitted to grad school at Harvard if her dad wasn't a law professor at Harvard.

Regarding asians. It's not about race. Diversity in academia is important for many reasons. It's not about being asian, it's about living in a rich family at a top school district, regardless of your race. A poor kid from a bad neighborhood cannot compete with that. The key is to find those who can close the gap. Taking someone's background into consideration is the right thing to do. There's some subjectivity in the process, so it's not ideal and someone would always be upset, but it's better than just looking at test scores.

To give you an example. I have friends who live at one of the top school districts in MA. In the last 3 years of their daughter's high school, they optimized her acceptance to college. Spending a lot of money on private lessons, making sure she volunteers in the right places since it looks good on the college application, paying money for a local expert to help her with the admission essay, etc. This is on top of the fact that she is already at a great high school who is optimized for getting its students into top schools.

<comment><USER61> "I have a very average girl in my town who got admitted to grad school at Harvard only because her dad is a law professor at Harvard."

I'm not saying Harvard isn't corrupt, but admitting professor's kid isn't really the best indicator of corruption. It's nothing unusual in many schools and they don't hide it.

<comment><USER62> I can understand the employment perk of making tuition free for employees' kids, but I'm less sure about reserving a slot. If I can make an analogy: as an employee of Verizon, I get a 50% discount on service, but when a new iPhone comes out, I'm not allowed to purchase it until after it's widely available.

I would think the child of a college professor likely already has an academic leg up on your average kid. Those kids maybe even more than others really should have to have the grades to get in.

<comment><USER63> I think a better analogy would be like a world class chef not wanting to feed their kids McDonald's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> There are two conflicting attitudes for Prestige universities

A) Ivies/Standford are better than regular universities because they have resources, powerful alumni and well connected students B) They should let XYZ in because they have great test scores

If B was really the most important A would no longer be true.

</comment><comment><USER65> [http://archive.is/mTOUo](http://archive.is/mTOUo)

</comment><comment><USER66> It's amazing to me ivy league universities have done this in the face of uncertainty and extreme anxiety now that we have evidence that elongated sustained anxiety and chaos in one's life can reduce someone's IQ, I just didn't think they would be so blatantly obvious to do if when something globally devastating enough happened to be distracting to even rich white people as well, when students coming from poverty are dealing with distractions that are often worse regardless.

Sometimes it truly takes a rich white person to experience something before they believe it can happen to anybody else, and then they make a decision everyone else benefits from. Here's to new beginnings.

I'm curious how well rich white students who have never been exposed to chaos and uncertainty of this magnitude will fair in comparison to incoming students who have been dealing with it their whole life, a much better IMHO indicator for success in this "uncertain" times.

</comment><comment><USER36> The only value colleges can hold comes from the rigor that ensures scarcity of degrees. Lowering the bar in a naive attempt to bring college to everyone only devalued the degree, and now we are seeing the slow decay of even our most prestigious universities.

No good will come from ignoring the natural distribution of intelligence.</comment>


Verizon cuts prices on Palm Pre & Pixi, offers free mobile hotspot - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/01/verizon-offers-deals-to-move-palm-phones/

<comment><USER2> The free mobile hotspot feature makes Verizon my favorite carrier by far. That and the much better 3G coverage than AT&T make this a great deal even without considering how good the device is. If Palm could just increase the number of useful apps in their app store I think the Pre Plus could be good competition for the iPhone. It has a more open app store, a better notification system, and multitasking. The only thing it doesn't have until it's release for AT&T is data and voice at the same time, but so far I don't think I've ever used both simultaneously on my iPhone so I don't think I'll miss it.</comment>


State of the Art - Call It 'Creating Apps for Dummies' - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/technology/personaltech/12pogue.html?pagewanted=2&8dpc <comment><USER2> People seem to think the hard part of programming is the syntax. Remembering your semicolons and so forth. But logic is logic. If one of these is to succeed, it will be because it has made it easier for more people, or more kinds of people, to add the skill of programming to their toolbox.

The essence of programming is describing a desired result in a precise and repeatable way. People have been doing this for centuries and it's always been difficult. Computers only seem special because for most of their history, you've had to employ a fair bit of arcana just to get to the central logic. But now matter how much of that you brush away, there remains a nut of irreducible difficulty that no tool, no matter how powerful, will ever get rid of.

A WYSIWYG Word processor certainly makes writing easier, but it can never make you a writer.

We teach children how to write. Why don't we teach them the rudiments of programming?

</comment><comment><USER3> Single page: [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/technology/personaltech/12...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/technology/personaltech/12pogue.html?8dpc=&_r=1&pagewanted=all)

The link given in this submission is to the second page, and the link on that second page to the "single page" version is broken.</comment>


Ask HN: How much do you earn from side project or passive income? - <AUTHOR> What is working for you and how much is your income from side project and/or passive income? <comment><USER2> I have a small pile of SaaS products [1] that combine to bring in the equivalent of a nice Senior Dev salary (though far less than I would actually bring in were I to take a full time gig in the Bay Area).

I did a "passivity test" recently where I essentially took October off, just to make sure I still could. I'd do a morning email spin, then shut down and go bouldering or just play with the kids all day, averaging just shy of two hour weeks. Monthly Recurring Revenue grew on its normal path.

This month, I'm back working 6 hour days, 4 days a week, building the thing that will take up the slack [2] once those other products plateau. Fortunately, it's been raining a lot, or I might still be out climbing every day.

I'll reitorate once again that as a software developer, you absolutely should build one o' these SaaS things. It'll change your life.

[1] [https://www.s3stat.com](https://www.s3stat.com) & [http://www.twiddla.com](http://www.twiddla.com) [2] [https://unwaffle.com](https://unwaffle.com)

<comment><USER3> Do you have any advice for getting started?

In my current role I'm an Jr Dev, and have only recently graduated and started working full time but this sort of thing interests me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Between $150-250/month from Amazon associates referrals from [http://hackernewsbooks.com/](http://hackernewsbooks.com/)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for creating that by the way. I've subscribed to it, and my library of books to read is growing quite a lot as a result!

<comment><USER4> Glad you like it. My personal to-read list is also a bit too long now..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a few [1] Android Apps that bring home around £90 a month. Ironically, the ads from one app (I don't like ads as a business model that much) make as much as the other 4 combined.

I also wrote a book [2] about game development in Haxe, and self-published it on gumroad. That brings anything from £40 to £150 a month.

[1][https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=leoncvlt&hl=...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=leoncvlt&hl=en_GB) [2] [http://discover-haxeflixel.com/](http://discover-haxeflixel.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> If you don't get many replies here, there was this thread last month: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12720636](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12720636)

</comment><comment><USER8> Currently ... I aim for $1/day :), but my site is only a week old. I need to figure out SEO for a site like mine, as I don't have content. Right now it is all AdWords traffic. It's amazing ... I literally submit my bids and I have clicks within 60s.

I'd love to know if users would pay for something like unlimited multi-day search or ... more data like UV Index.

[http://www.averageweather.io/](http://www.averageweather.io/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Related: [https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses)

</comment><comment><USER10> I recently developed/launched [http://framestr.com](http://framestr.com). It's an online form software that I developed, originally, for a few lead generation websites that I own. It currently generates around $950 / month.

<comment><USER11> how long did it take you to get to $950

<comment><USER10> Sorry for the delay... about 6 weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My site for learning tricks started making money last month: [http://spellogram.com](http://spellogram.com) after around 2 years of existence. I didn't put a lot of effort though.

<comment><USER12> Around 5$ per month from ads

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have one project so far [http://www.json-gen.com/](http://www.json-gen.com/) started one month ago. It is service that provides mocking REST JSON response. Could be used in front-end testing. Current income is 5$

<comment><USER14> I just released beta version of [https://test-api.net](https://test-api.net). Until now don't have any concrete plan for monetization but planning for adding new features so that i can monetize it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Made [https://enlight.ml](https://enlight.ml) \-- a site to teach people to code

an ad on each page. I expect it to generate about $50-100/month

</comment><comment><USER16> Not software, but I have a rental property that earns me about $400 a month in mortgage principle paid. The renter is a relative who's been there for several years.

</comment><comment><USER17> I get around $150/month from my e-book sales: [http://emberjs- book.com/](http://emberjs-book.com/)

</comment><comment><USER18> i have a number of side projects, none of which truly require my time anymore... income ranges from a few hundred a month of a couple thousand.

<comment><USER19> Do you mean the income varies on a monthly basis, or between projects? If monthly, why does it differ so much?</comment></comment>