Ask HN: Is there anything you like about recruiters? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> \- You can ask hard salary questions beforehand without offending a recruiter. Nothing worse than going through a long process to find out the company expects to pay below-market.

\- You can set salary expectations with the recruiter directly without causing offense.

\- Companies that can afford to pay a recruiter have passed a filter to show they are motivated and have budgetary flexibility.

\- Often, companies that are growing faster than they can hire are great places to work. They will have more opportunities going forward, and stock that is worth more. To paraphrase Gordon Gecko, "growth is good!"

\- You can work with several recruiters and line up a number of interviews in a short window to get multiple offers to ensure a strong salary.

<comment><USER4> > You can ask hard salary questions beforehand without offending a recruiter. > Nothing worse than going through a long process to find out the company > expects to pay below-market.

This right here is invaluable. When I talk to company recruiters (inside a company) I try to get an idea early on whether it's a waste of time due to below-market pay. I've had my share of people who were honest and open about it and those who give me the "we pay market rate" nonsense. I take that as dog whistling for below-market.

When talking to independent recruiters they're usually quite happy to give up this information, and/or find me positions more suitable. It tends to be more amicable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Completely opposite experience here. Nothing good ever came from the recruiters (unlike the direct contacts with the companies). Usually they are hiring for the most undesirable roles/ problematic companies, they misrepresent the roles to the candidates and the candidates to the companies.

The most annoying thing is however when they cold email you saying "I have this great role for an awesome company". Without saying what the company name and the role is.

<comment><USER6> That is a really good point a truly annoying experience and a very common occurrence. Very often I get messages that specify the requirements and some buzz words but no mention of company or product that the potential candidate would be working at. I'm wondering if it's a thought through technique as it almost seems like a bait just to get people on the phone.

<comment><USER7> They won't tell you the company up front for a few reasons.

The actually company doesn't want to be inundated with resumes without being filtered by the recruiter.

Most companies don't have an exclusive agreement with the company. If they told you the company up front and you decided to apply directly. They won't get their commission.

In the same vein, if another recruiter caught wind that the target company is hiring, they may try to contact the company directly.

Of course they want to get people on the phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think recruiters are great. I've been working with them for almost 20 years. As long as they are local recruiters working with local companies. I have 20 recruiters all from different companies in my contacts.

\- They have always asked me for permission before submitting me to a company.

\- My application never goes into a black hole like it would if I were applying for a company directly. I don't think I've ever been submitted to a company by a recruiter without going through the entire process -- resume submittal, phone screen -> in person interview -> offer. Unless I decided to stop the process somewhere.

\- Going through a recruiter is the only way that I've found to filter based on salary requirements. Most job posting don't include them and it's only at the offer stage that you even know if you and the company are in the same ball park.

\- I'm able to just sit back and wait for jobs to come to me. I don't have to scour career sites.

I have had recruiters that don't understand that no means no and that while money is the an important reason I work, it's not the only reason. Recruiters were shocked last time that I took a job that wasn't in the top of my pay range but offered more autonomy (the architect at a small company as opposed to just another developer at a large company), and a better commute with little travel.

<comment><USER8> I've had trouble finding recruiters in general.

How do you find yours? Or do they find you?

<comment><USER9> Find and message them on LinkedIn. Pay for the messaging plan; it is way more effective than stuffing your message in the connection request. Also, be prepared to talk salary and have a resume on hand.

LinkedIn is their tool of choice these days. StackOverflow Careers is another popular option for them. Facebook Jobs _might_ pick up steam, so I'd experiment with that too.

<comment><USER10> and ask people around you what recruiters put them in the company, and how was their experience with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you want to move to a new town, and just need a job to get you there, they can help. If you get surprised by a layoff, and just need a place to sit and collect a paycheck for 6 months while looking for something that will last, they can get you a short-term gig.

That's all I've got. They won't make your career, they won't make you happy, but they can help you cover the bills when you are in a bind.

</comment><comment><USER12> I love recruiters. One of the things I find myself missing when I conduct job searches without their help is that they manage the process so that I don't have to. The big thing that I don't do myself that they do, is collect feedback. I'm not all that great at interviewing so it takes me a little while to ramp up so I can make a really good impression.

Feedback allows me to look in the mirror and analyze my flaws. I don't begrudge them their fees.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've had exactly _zero_ fruitful interactions with recruiters as a candidate.

Direct contacts have always worked best, and although I got a couple of interesting offers through recruiters, those were all the result of a prior interaction with their customers.

</comment><comment><USER14> There is nothing I like about recruiters after understanding that they are in the business of finding and selling people for their own profit or their company's profit.

I find them to be pushy, inconsiderate, unthoughtful, and lacking real, hard skills that are useful to society. I find it interesting to think that in colleges / universities there is not a career path to be a "professional recruiter" like there is for "doctors, lawyers, engineers". Most people do not go to college to be a "recruiter".

In fact, after many terrible experiences with them, it is my goal to develop software which can completely replace human recruiters and automate their jobs.

It must be a hard day at work to do the following:

Task: Find candidates for a list of positions Steps To Complete: #1) Search LinkedIn, Other professional databases, Google, and other sources #2) From #1, write a list of prospective candidates #3) Email or call prospective candidates to discuss the position and optionally set up an interview #4) Connect the prospective candidates with the client company.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yes! I love (external) recruiters.

Why?

Besides being incredibly interesting people, their sole purpose in life (as a recruiter) is to find you a job at the highest salary possible.

Why? Their commission, and their company's profitability, is wholly dependent on it.

This is important. They not only know how much you're worth in your given market, but because they are salespeople, they are likely connected to recruiters all around the country (US) that can provide you with that information in any market. They will also attempt to keep a long-running relationship with you, as they know that, eventually, _you_ will be in the position to buy their services and are more likely to get that sale if they help you out now.

They literally benefit on both sides of the fence.

Recruiters helped me get to that coveted six figure land in leas than two years after graduating school. They helped me land jobs at some of the best companies in the country. They've taken me out on so many free lunches. They're great.

Now, I don't like _all_ recruiters.

Robot recruiters are pretty useless (the ones recruiting from India for massive orgs that can afford to waste money). They collect your resume and go poof. Avoid them.

In-company recruiters are nice people, but, unfortunately, have the exact opposite motive: to hire as many people as possible _as cheaply as possible._ They will say whatever they need to say to get your body into a seat. They are the kinds of salespeople I don't like working with, since they work purely on volume and don't have time to get to know you.

This is how I got screwed by Google and regressed in my salary curve. (Mind you, the decision to work there was mine. I mean, who _doesn 't_ think about working at a place like that?)

So I usually go around them by messaging managers on LinkedIn and establishing rapport that way. By going this route, those recruiters become a formality instead of a gate, and you are way more likely to get paid at or over market. They are also much nicer to work with, since all they need to do to get their checkmark is move the process along and get your offer signed.

That is how I recovered from my mistake at Google and had one of my best working experiences to date.

<comment><USER15> Recruiters don't get paid if you don't get hired. They are not incentivized to get you the highest salary, they're incentivized to get you _hired_.

<comment><USER9> The bigger the salary, the bigger their commission is. So, yes, they are incentivized by salary as well.

Not the case for _internal_ recruiters.

<comment><USER15> Yes, that's technically true:

You sign at 100k, they make 20% so: $20,000

You sign at 110k, they make 20% so: $22,000

No deal, they make 20% so: $0

Do you think they have much incentive to make that extra $2k, while introducing more risk, and not spending time on the other openings they're working?

<comment><USER9> Of course they do. If they can negotiate with the hiring manager to place you at the higher salary, and have a fairly good chance of doing so, then they will.

Why? Two reasons:

1\. Because they are salespeople. In sales, you never leave money on the table if you can avoid it.

2\. Good engineers are really hard to find, which is why the companies that use external recruiters do so in the first place.

Oh, and yes, external recruiters will negotiate salary on your behalf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yes, there are a lot of things that I think good, solid recruiters bring to the table.

Here's why: I have a great relationship with a couple recruiters that have a) introduced me to opportunities, and b) helped me fill roles as I was hiring. In my past four roles I've worked with a small number of recruiters to place engineers with my team — they know I'm respectful of their time, clear about my expectations, etc. and therefore they work hard to deliver good candidates, filter out the resume "chaff", and communicate realistically about what candidates they see being available. And when it was time for me to move on, besides my own meeting people and talking with different companies, this same set of recruiters supported me through introductions and potential roles. They've helped me as much as I've helped them. Mutual respect is abundantly required when working with recruiters.

I think, though, this requires a willingness to ignore the recruiters that tend towards being ambulance chasers (your cybercoders level), and not- insignificant amount of time "interviewing" and building up relationship with any recruiter I work with (on both sides of the table.)

</comment><comment><USER17> Tbh most recruiters (from startups to large software companies) I engaged with so far have been attentive and respectful, sometimes even very nice on a personal level. I find it quite hard to judge them professionaly as I do not know what they know. So what do you dislike about recruiters?

</comment><comment><USER18> I think the problem is that the incentives generally aren't aligned and it's in your interest to be informed anyway about the opportunities near you. If you're employable spend a few hours or so and do your own research. Make a list of interesting companies that meet your criteria and contact 'em directly. You get to know you are making the more informed choice and from the money they save on not using a recruiter you can try to leverage a starting bonus or additional compensation.

I'd _maybe_ pay for a recruiter that would be willing to do this for me but that isn't how they work. They get reqs and fill them which works for them and their clients but really isn't in your best interests.

<comment><USER7> _I think the problem is that the incentives generally aren 't aligned and it's in your interest to be informed anyway about the opportunities near you._

How are their incentives not aligned with yours? They want to find you a job that is a good fit for both you and the company so you stick around for at least a year so they can get their commission. Your incentive is that you want a job that meets your requirements.

They give you the initial lead. It is still your responsibility to close the deal.

<comment><USER18> There is a difference between filling the reqs they've been given and finding you the best job in your area (or even outside for remote/relocate).

They could have a SWE job for, say, Disney and suggest hey that is the best fit but there are at least hundreds of places near me who need software engineers they aren't going to consider because they didn't hire them.

If you do your research, interview at several places you find interesting, and negotiate you're are almost certainly going to a find a place you like better and be better compensated because you're working within the entire possibility space and they're working within their client list.

<comment><USER7> Looking at my spreadsheet that I used to track jobs I was applying to last year, I started the process (phone screen -> in person interview -> offer) with 16 companies using 7 recruiters. I had six phone screens in one day. The next week after coming back into town, I had three in person interviews in two days. I had the offer combination I wanted within two weeks with the right combination of salary/technology/commute/title.

Those 16 only represent the companies I actively engaged with, there were others I didn't pursue because they didn't meet my requirements. Similar with recruiters. The 6-7 recruiters only represent the subset of 20 that had anything interesting at the time I was looking.

As far as negotiating, if you have studied the market, and interviewed at a lot of places - by talking to lots of recruiters and former coworkers you kept in touch with - you basically know your salary range within 3%.

If going in, you were realistic with your salary requirements, and you set a minimum with your recruiter. Negotiation isn't necessary. You should be able to get your market value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> From my experience (on the hiring side), the good recruiters were autonomous and sourced qualified people. Bad recruiters wasted my team's time and brought and endless stream of unqualified candidates. It seemed like the good ones were 1 in 5.

<comment><USER7> If you are actually "bringing in" unqualified candidates and interrupting your team by asking them to interview people who are not at all qualified, that is your fault, not the recruiters.

A 30-45 minute phone screen that you do one on one could quickly filter out those who don't meet the minimum bar for the job.

I went to one interview three years ago without a phone screen, a phone screen would have been better for both sides. After 20 minutes in the on site interview, I couldn't even feign interest anymore. I just went through the process after the first 20 minutes so the recruiter -- that I had worked with off and on for years -- wouldn't look bad.

I said I would never waste my time going to an in person interview without a phone screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've had deeply mediocre experiences with recruiters in tech - but my girlfriend was recently looking for a private equity job. She interviewed at ~15 places, and most of these interviews were placed by "headhunters" (i.e. recruiters).

According to her, it is deeply impractical to look for a PE job without enlisting the services of a top-tier recruiting firm.

I like these recruiters! Most people in PE are looking for jobs based on 1) prestige and 2) salary, but she was optimizing for a less rat-race-y function - and they were able to help her find a job that she really likes.

</comment><comment><USER21> In HBO's Silicon Valley, Gilfoyle starts getting all kinds of gifts couriered to him from recruiters just so that they get noticed. Is there any truth to this?

<comment><USER10> You can get dinner with the recruiters after you are placed, or before if you go far enough in the interview stages.

And I've seen some people receive gifts around me from other companies (small things like chocolates). Nowhere like the SV show.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> They're always positive people. I always enjoy talking to them even though they do not represent the real culture of a company. As soon as you start the iterviewing process then the tone drops and people are cold and competitive with absolutely zero communication skills. Sometimes I ask myself - am I really working in the right department? Developers really suck. And I'm one of them :)

</comment><comment><USER23> First party recruiters are fine, if incompetent in technical matters.

Third party recruiters are usually scummy salesmen types.

<comment><USER7> Third party recruiters are all salesmen - yes. Scummy - not all of them.

You just have to understand their incentives and who there customer is - <USER2> company not you.

Your incentives and the recruiters incentives are partially aligned. The more your first years salary is, the more they make. But they don't care if you make the most possible. They would rather leave some money on the table to get their commission and not take the chance you get a better offer from another company.

They could care less whether the job is the best for your long term career goals. Two jobs ago I was working for a large well known stable company but was severely underpaid - over 20K based on the market value. Some recruiters said I should "settle" for a 10K increase and most companies wouldn't be willing to give me a 20K+ increase. I told them I wouldn't start with the process with any company unless they were willing to offer me at least that minimum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Two of my previous positions were obtained through recruiters

When they know what they're looking for and have some experience it's great

Some are crap, but that's on every profession

</comment><comment><USER25> They're a means to an end. If they bring a job to me I'll make sure they get the credit/income from it if I'm hired.

</comment><comment><USER26> \- They tend to be genuinely nice people.

\- They usually make hiring managers lives easier for finding candidates.

Those are the only two things I can think of.

</comment><comment><USER27> I like when they are in permanent vacation.

</comment><comment><USER28> You can use them to get a job.

</comment><comment><USER29> Yes, they find me work.

</comment><comment><USER30> Nope. Nothing at all.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nope.

</comment><comment><USER32> I love using third party recruiters to negotiate compensation for me.

I like that they can simultaneously act as consulting firms and get me short term gigs on the side even though they just placed me at a company.

I like that I can get them paid and they can get me paid, by stretching compensation demands.

Fast interviews.</comment>


20 Podcasts Worth Listening To - <AUTHOR> http://www.johnwittenauer.net/20-podcasts-worth-listening-to/ <comment><USER2> Do you listen to all episodes of the listed podcast? Or is there a few ypu listen regularly and the rest not so frequent. I find it hard to keep up with more than 7-8 shows with frequent posts.

These are the ones ive stuck with * econtalk * ezra klein show * conversations with tylor * ft alphachat * nature podcast * hbr ideacast * the daily

The ones i dropped out * waking up with same harris * recode decode * a16z (not coz of quality but the presentation style keeps pissing me off) * startup school radio (again i loved the show but for some reason too much of aron schwatz was a downer, anyway the show is dead for now)</comment>


Ask HN: Please review my new startup. [Free account for HN community] - <AUTHOR> http://www.customerfind.com <comment><USER2> Hey Zack, Firstly let me say that I love the idea. I can see it being very valuable. I am working on an idea myself, and I can definitely see us using this service once we are ready - who knows when that will be. I am sure you know how that process goes.

Secondly, I must also commend you for charging from the get-go. The price point seems good, what I was looking for though was a 'pricing page' that tells me what I am getting for my $20/mo and other plan options. I would also like to see other options, say only 3 or 5 keywords with a more limited account for $10/mo. Couple that with a 15-day free trial (7-days I think is too short) and you reduce the risk significantly for the customer. Imagine I am able to add a few new clients in the first 15 days...that's significant value-add.

Thirdly, I am sure you guys have thought about this already but I can see other things like 'recommended keywords' based on 'successful keywords' that the user has chosen. Those can be derived by finding a 'high correlation' between those keywords and other successful keywords chosen by other users for example.

Fourth, I am not too perturbed by your site design. You can always do a re- design, I would focus more on adding features to the $20 account, because it seems a little feature light at the moment.

That's all I can think of right now. Good job. I would love if when I am ready to use it (maybe a few months from now) I could get the 7-day free trial...or who knows maybe by then you have implemented a 15-day free trial on all accounts :)

One last thing...did you find the cofounder you were looking for and did you go it alone on this project? Would love a similar post to your hiphopgoblin post :)

<comment><AUTHOR> > Thanks, keep me posted.

> Yeah, I agree. I'll consider changing it depending on how things go with > this first round. The important thing is to demonstrate the value up-front.

> Actually, what I am planning on doing is mining the data from tweets of > users who have followed-back. Then, looking for common bigrams...

> I guess I could make the "keyword suggest" account $30/month and a "light" > account $15/month. I don't want to add features just for the sake of adding > features, but I do agree that there should be multiple account options - > c.f. the study of The Economist alluded to by Dan Ariely in _Predictably > Irrational_

> Yes, that's possible but if not just email me: email@example.comøm

> Found a couple great candidates but geography seemed to be a problem for > everyone. I am actually moving to NYC now and would be open to finding a > cofounder there, with whom I could partner up on projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Free account for HN community" should read "Free _trial_ account for HN community" in my opinion, as the former is rather misleading.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. The OP might also consider a longer trial than 6 days. I'm not sure I can really evaluate the system in that time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some feedback: 1\. It is not clear to me what happens after updating the keyword list. Would the program then go find people and follow them based on those keywords?

2\. "People you have followed (controlpanel.php?p=following)" is empty. Shouldn't this fill up instantaneously?

<comment><AUTHOR> The program then goes and finds people and follows them based on those keywords, yes. It does so periodically with a cron job so no, it would not fill up instantaneously.

How can I communicate this clearer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is one problem: After I authenticated my twitter account, I got the following error message: """ You registered the Twitter screen name foobar but authenticated the Twitter screen name fooBar. """

I'm sure you know you should convert strings to lowercase before comparing them! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Whew. Fixed. Anyway, your free account has been activated

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems like a great idea that would really give start ups a leg up when starting with the twitter world.

I wonder if the hubspot app has something like this? This is great because it takes one piece of functionality and lets users roll with it.

Just launched - will let you know how it goes. LiranBaron at gmail dot com

</comment><comment><USER7> <script type="text/javascript" src="[http://code.jquery.com/jquery- latest.js></script>](http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js></script>);

This lagged hardcore the first time for me. Pretty sure you are not supposed to hotlink this in production?

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks... changed to google repository

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like this if only for the fact that the idea was born of necessity.

For me at least it seems the ideas always come when I'm busy building other projects.

It also seems pretty relevant to where online marketing is headed.

Best of luck

</comment><comment><USER9> I would get rid of the horizontal bar.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:126.96.36.199) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 GTB5

</comment><comment><USER10> Am I missing something or hasn't this already been done by others like Twittermass?

</comment><comment><USER11> Great app, it seems. Just curious, what do you mean by "whitelisted by Twitter"?

</comment><comment><USER12> Feedback: Let the user choose the language of the keywords.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd love to check it out: pete at carrotsticks dot com

<comment><AUTHOR> activated

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Registered alexanderdblom AT G MAIL

<comment><AUTHOR> activated

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh oh. Seems to be down now.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's back up. I think my webhost just restarted apache or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow. Your website is a _very_ blatant ripoff of Basecamp's design. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but yours is a little over the line.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, it means the guy is smart and is borrowing strength from what he knows works. 37 Signals published their conversion rates from the highrise landing page for a reason. Goal at this stage is to see if people will sign up for the concept. Once he proves that out (i.e. customer development), I'm sure he'll invest in some of his own graphic identity, logo selection, color schemes, etc.

<comment><USER15> So you're saying that, until I have the time to invest in my own branding, I can just use the Coke logo instead?

<comment><USER17> No, he's saying you can imitate a design that is not protected by trademark; quite unlike the Coke logo.

They do declare copyright on the design, but that doesn't protect against designs that are merely similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> jacob.coby at gmail.com

<comment><AUTHOR> activated

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> fdcleary at gmail

<comment><AUTHOR> activated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> email@example.com. Excited to check it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> activated

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> flooha at gmail

<comment><AUTHOR> activated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> liranbaron at gmail dot com thanks

</comment><comment><USER21> uvince AT yahoo.com

thanks for the free account!

<comment><AUTHOR> activated

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> austin [at] beatnex [dot] com

<comment><AUTHOR> activated

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> ekpyrotic at gmail dot com

<comment><AUTHOR> activated

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> contact at tallstreet.com

<comment><AUTHOR> activated

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> tonyhuynh29 at gmail

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> STEPS TO GET YOUR PAID ACCOUNT

1\. REGISTER ON THE WEBSITE

2\. WHEN YOU GET TO "STEP 3", WHICH ASKS YOU FOR PAYMENT, POST IN THE THREAD WITH YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

My new website is CustomerFind.com.

Remember my web app HipHopGoblin.com? Well, about a month ago, I wrote up a blog post detailing what I had learned and posted it up on HN [<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=824905>]. In part, I explained how I had used Twitter to promote the website: I scanned for artists mentioning certain keywords, and then auto-followed them. This got me a lot of exposure, and a lot of gratitude from people who were glad to find the site.

Then I got contacted by the CEO of a web site, asking for me to sell him my scripts. "Sure," I said. "I can package them nicely and include the MySQL db- creating scripts."

"No, no," he refused. "I want a hosted solution." And thus was borne CustomerFind.com.

After a month or so of work, this is iteration #2 in my startup, this time having a paying customer from day 1. And I'm offering a 7-day free trial for all HN readers. Just reply to this post with your email address and I'll hook you up.

All feedback and criticism welcome, as well as suggestions for future directions of the product. I'm thinking of evolving it into a CRM tool, so you can communicate with the people who have followed you back (and are clearly interested in your product). But I don't want to write it unless I know that many will pay me for it ;)

Again, all comments welcome. Thanks for taking a look.

<comment><USER26> doesn't twitter ban people for doing this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. In my experience, no. There are many other apps that do the same thing, and this one is especially geared towards finding high-quality keywords. In fact, we only follow 25/day, so that we can slowly figure out which keywords work and which ones don't. The ultimate goal is to follow keywords that convert at 20%+, which is easily doable.

That being said, Twitter reserves the right to do whatever they want at any time. But this is non-aggressive, and we're discouraging "spammy" behavior.</comment></comment></comment>


Want to lead a team? Learn how to trust. - <AUTHOR> http://www.hubba.com/want-to-lead-learn-to-trust

<comment><USER2> cool!</comment>


Ohmm Mining: Turn Flared Natural Gas into Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://upstreamdata.ca/ <comment><USER2> A few years ago, I wondered if my electrically-heated office could instead be heated with bitcoin mining hardware. It would effectively be free electricity, right?

What I found out from sources like [1] was, because the bitcoin mining difficulty is constantly increasing, the BTC a bitcoin miner produces reduces exponentially. So even with free electricity, a miner that makes BTC worth a total of $361 in 24 months, will only make $10 more if run for 99 months.

And if you only need to heat your office 25% of the year? Well, the mining difficulty will keep on rising even when your hardware is turned off, so it'll be obsolete after 24 months anyway. But it'll only have produced 25% the BTC in its fixed useful life.

So if buying retail mining hardware is already questionably profitable† _even with free electricity_ , buying it and only running it a fraction of the time is even moreso.

This company must be getting a great price on mining hardware if it's profitable to install and run it only a fraction of the time.

[1] [https://calc.randomcrypto.org/?h=bitmain-s9j-14.5&hr=1450000...](https://calc.randomcrypto.org/?h=bitmain-s9j-14.5&hr=14500000000000&hc=625&hp=1350&er=8736.77&sd=19-05-30&d=36)

† Which seemed to be the case when I researched this, although bitcoin prices can vary a lot of course.

<comment><USER3> At some point Bitcoin mining difficulty either:

1\. must hit a ceiling and the rate of increase will significantly slow,

2\. or Bitcoin mining will break SHA-256 and render it insecure.

I find 1 to be a the most likely outcome however the most plausible path for 2 would be a novel cryptanalytic attack on SHA-256 which could be exploited to increase mining power. It seems very unlikely that 2 would occur because mining power approaches the brute force limits of SHA-256.

<comment><USER4> No. There is no way for Bitcoin mining to "break SHA-256 and render it insecure". There isn't enough energy in the whole SUN to do that.

<comment><USER3> Well Bitcoin mining could "break SHA-256 and render it insecure" by:

1\. exploiting cryptanalytic weaknesses in SHA-256,

2\. successes in new computing paradigms such as a large scale quantum computer using Grover's algorithm.

3\. or turning the local galactic cluster into computronium for SHA-256 miners. Although at that point we have bigger problems. =)

If you think SHA-256 will not be broken anytime soon then that suggests that you believe that mining difficulty increases will slow down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Or burn it, pretty much the same. Anything furthering bitcoin going to result in much more electricity use, so flaring might be preferable environmentally.

Microgenerators or fuel cells (both complicated by source stream being unscrubbed) would be better. If grid tie is the issue, would be more interesting and productive to advance trapped energy source storage methods, either thermal/kinetic, hydrogen separation (of source stream or splitting local water), or other chemical.

One thing is that you don't generally have a bunch of completely isolated wells - usually clustered smaller platforms or a giant one with tie-backs.. point being they share infra, though, so you can probably have a bunch of wells in the same field sharing some energy storage infrastructure. What the _net_ energy saves would be is a great question.

<comment><USER5> Too late to edit, but "Microgenerators" should have been "microturbines"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the idea of:

> conserv[ing] sources of wasted energy without the need for invasive > infrastructure (pipelines, power lines, etc).

However, it isn't just a matter of dropping one of these skids onsite and leaving, since these skids need to be connected to a power source, not a waste gas source. So that waste gas _first_ needs to be converted to power, and then that power routed into the skid.

This _is_ much easier than running lines out to the main grid to get rid of that generated electricity. And a 750 kW generator probably isn't going to be the main cost centre. Neither does bitcoin require particularly high bandwidth by normal standards, but they are quite high for a remote location, and doesn't seem to be mentioned in the blurbs.

It would also still be competing against cheap energy sources, since bitcoin cost is essentially your input energy cost. And even if the gas that powers the generator is "free", there are still a large number of costs with doing anything remote…

<comment><USER7> For those wondering just like me, 750 KW generator yields $657K worth of electricity during a year assuming 1kWh=0.1$

I'm guessing these rigs are at least $500K+ and you have to take into account things breaking like they always do.

Btw, these rigs definitely don't look like they would be able to provide appropriate cooling in a hot climate, but maybe that's not where they are going to be used.

<comment><USER8> Based on the .ca domain as well as the fact that they talk heavily about Alberta, I'm betting that they're targeting the Canadian market. While Canada can get warm in the summer, it's no Texas, and it's markedly colder during the winter. I don't think that they're too worried about their equipment overheating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if protein folding might be a better use of such ideas and energy.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home)

<comment><USER10> Grid Coin is built on that idea:

[https://gridcoin.us/](https://gridcoin.us/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Deeply skeptical of this but I'm curious about the practical aspects of consuming the excess gas. What volume of gas is being expelled over what period of time and how does that compare to the 750kw consumption of the rig? Is there a storage vessel as part of the rig or at the drill pad to buffer gas that would normally be flared? All of this affects what capacity factor can be achieved which determines whether this can be made economic, ie the difference between having to move the rig every few days vs letting it just sit in one place for months on end sipping gas.

<comment><USER12> > What volume of gas is being expelled over what period of time and how does > that compare to the 750kw consumption of the rig?

I have no numbers, but the flares are apparently pretty easy to see from space:

[https://geology.com/articles/oil-fields-from- space/](https://geology.com/articles/oil-fields-from-space/)

And I've heard from first-hand reports that the amount of heat and light being thrown off by flares is staggering. Like, feel-it-from-a-hundred-yards-away hot. (Of course, I'm just some guy on the internet -- do your own research, grain of salt, and all that).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The founder was interviewed on this podcast - [https://overcast.fm/+OBZna2NS8/5:16](https://overcast.fm/+OBZna2NS8/5:16)

To summarise points that are missed in the comments and maybe not well describe on the website:

This is based in Canada. The vast majority is heavy oil in unconsolidated sand. This cannot be pumped, so there are commonly no pipelines.

During the process of extraction a lot of low value methane escapes from the oil. Canada has limits to the amount of venting a well can do, so if they reaches the limit they have to either slow the well's production or spend money on building a flare.

Both options have an economic cost. These mining units are addressing this.

</comment><comment><USER14> How does it connect to the internet?

<comment><USER15> Starlink obviously.

<comment><USER16> You laugh, but existing satellite internet like Viacom is probably doable. $50-70/month with a 40GB/month soft cap should be good enough with a local Stratum proxy. Latency is high, so you could lose a small amount due to stale work units, but it's not a big amount.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Others in the oil and gas industry are looking at this too. Natural gas is cheap and plentiful, natural gas generators (that can burn Y grade) are common. Vertically integrating around power seems the logical next step in bitcoin mining. I'm waiting to see the first bitcoin mining company that builds their own ASICs and drills their own wells.

<comment><USER18> I'm sorry this is off-topic, but there's no other way for me to contact you.

I read your comment in one post about salaries: "Your comment really saddens me. There's so much more you could have. There's no reason why what I make has to be an outlier. I'm so so so not special. Many people have come on HN to say exactly what I've said and have achieved outsized results. Jesus, is patio11 really that incredible of a guy? I mean, he's really nice and pretty smart but dude he made his start with a bingo card creator. Our mindset is our greatest limitation."

I'd like to send you a letter. Could you please drop me an email at xplosiveoctopus (at) gmail.com?

Thank you for your time, Ryanmarsh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you invent a money printing machine, then why not just use it yourself instead of trying to sell it to other people?

<comment><USER20> Obviously because you can make more money selling it then keeping it to yourself. If the purpose of the machine is to make money why chose the least effective way of making that money just to prevent others from making money as well?

Incidentally this is also the reason that people sell profitable companies even though they are "printing money" every year.

<comment><USER19> The point is that if you can make more money selling machines than printing money, then it isn't a very good money printing machine, and you're just another bitcoin scammer, refusing to eat your own dog food, selling an impossible dream to suckers.

To purpose of simply using the machine yourself instead of selling it isn't preventing others from making money, it's to avoid wasting your own time and money on sales and marketing and customer service and hiring employees and paying for their health care and leasing office space and manufacturing and shipping products and giving refunds to unsatisfied customers, when you could just be shoveling money directly into your bank account instead, without all the overhead.

If the machine was really so great, then you could just print all the money you needed, and give the machines away for free.

Now if you could invent a machine selling machine, then you'd have something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well... they could have converted it in electricity, either directly on the grid or by using a battery system (like the liquid batteries used to store solar in Australia). Converting it into Bitcoin is hardly the best choice for ourselves and our planet.

<comment><USER22> I guess one reason it's not already been done is because of physics. You can capture the flared gas and convert it to electricity on site, but you still need to be able to deliver it to the consumers for it to be valuable. But electrical power is lost when you transport it over long distances due to wire resistance, unless you convert it to really high voltage. Maybe all the infrastructure required is just not worth the money.

Bitcoin doesn't have this problem, all you need in order to make it liquidable is an internet connection, which any gas/oil field probably already has.

<comment> J-dawg Got to admire the creative thinking involved in this. Are there any more "practical" potential uses? Some industrial process that requires lots of power but not too much other infrastructure?

<comment><USER23> CO2 sequestration?

<comment><USER24> Could a coin backed by stored CO₂ work?

<comment><USER23> I promise to pay the bearer the sum of 1 ton of C02 on demand?

<comment><USER24> Well, Bitcoin doesn't work that way either. I was thinking more of a "you get a coin for X tons of CO₂" \+ hype to make these work as currency, but I suppose it's just a weird version of existing carbon trading solutions.

<comment><USER25> Kind of silly to make this a coin. Because you'll fundamentally need an external system to audit CO2 sequestration and manage issuance, the auditor might as well be a centralized issuer.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Make your terminal look more fancy - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/stevemao/prompt-so-fancy <comment><USER2> For feedback, this might make a good "Show HN".</comment>


Ask HN: I want to scrape a web page... - <AUTHOR>

I'm a RoR developer and have a project where I need to scrape a webpage, specifically a University's course list page, to populate a database. I've never scraped a webpage before, are there any pointers or guides that anyone can recommend? I don't even know where to start. <comment><USER2> If you only need to scrape one University's one course list page to populate one database, your best bet is probably copy-paste with some tidying up with your text editor of choice. If you need to do more, I would look into Hpricot or Nokogiri, both Ruby libraries for parsing HTML. Then just download the page content, pass it to your parser of choice, and go wild.

<comment><AUTHOR> well... it's a big University... the largest in the country actually, so there are thousands and thousands of classes. I think copying/pasting may be time prohibitive.

Is it possible to setup a crawler that would iterate through what could be hundreds of pages, with the same HTML structure, and download/parse the page?

<comment><USER3> Yes, that is exactly what the crawler should do. I had no crawler experience a few months ago but wanted to do the same thing. I didn't know Ruby so I want the Java route. Now it's trivially easy, I just wrote a crawler last night to pull a bunch of info off hundreds of pages for my next app.

First start with how you yourself would get at each page of data. If it all starts from a head page figure out how to get to each link, follow those links and repeat until you are at the data pages. Then point your crawler to the head page and code in the patterns. If the pages are not all linked from a head page but have a url pattern figure out how to pull down the info needed to fill in the url pieces, pull that info down then visit each page filling in the pattern with the data you now have.

I can't give any Ruby guidance but if you have general questions on web scraping you can shoot me an email.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is awesome... time to dive into hpricot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most every option is documented here: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2861/options-for-html- scr...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2861/options-for-html-scraping)

You'll likely find this tool handy once you choose your framework: <http://www.selectorgadget.com/>

Another quick and dirty way: [http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2008/10/data-scaping- wik...](http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2008/10/data-scaping- wikipedia.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> I see people are saying use Hpricot or Nokogiri and you have gone on to choose Hpricot. Not a good choice. Hpricot was the work of the hacker _why who has now disappeared. But even before he disappeared nokogiri overtook hpricot in performance. He even tweeted "caller asks, "should i use hpricot or nokogiri?" if you're NOT me: use nokogiri. and if you're me: well cut it out, stop being me".

So please, use nokogiri it's a great library and the only thing I really miss from ruby-land in python.

</comment><comment><USER6> Just write yourself a Ruby script that downloads a webpage. Then parse the downloaded content with Ruby's equivalent of BeautifulSoup (a forgiving HTML parsing library).

That's pretty much all there is to it. You'll want to manually inspect the HTML from the page you're scraping to find patterns. For example all courses are in <li> tags, etc.

Let me know if you need more help. But I think as a first step write a program to download a web page.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've never written anything like this... Is there a function like CURL that downloads the page as a string from a URL?

<comment><USER7>
      require 'net/http'
      require 'uri'
      output = Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse("http://www.google.com"))

<comment><USER8> curb is a lot faster than net/http

require 'curb' c = Curl::Easy.perform("<http://www.google.com>) puts c.body_str

<comment><AUTHOR> So apparently accessing a secure URL isn't straightforward... No login is required, its just an HTTPS but it won't go in curb.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wasn't an SSL problem but a cookie problem...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recently did something similar using anemone to crawl the website, and Hpricot to scrape each individual web page and add to the database.

Anemone is great because it can focus your crawl to only url's that match a certain pattern, which really helps you traverse a small portion of a larger website (like a University site). You can also do specific actions on pages that match a certain pattern.

For scraping, anemone natively supports nokogiri, so since you're coming from a blank slate, it might be easiest to learn nokogiri. Before discovering anemone, I had already written what needed to be done on each page in hpricot, so my code is a bit messy, but it's not that difficult to get anemone and hpricot to work together.</comment>


Trump is desperate to punish Big Tech but has no good way to do it - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/?p=1679542 <comment><USER2> This, from the Ars comment thread:

" ... xkcd:1357 applies, thankfully."

[https://xkcd.com/1357/](https://xkcd.com/1357/)

<comment><USER3> That comic always rubbed me the wrong way. I think that there's two big things:

1\. Regardless of whether the First Amendment legally compels it, I don't think that a healthy democracy can exist in a society that doesn't have tolerance for unpopular speech.

2\. I disagree that citing free speech means that you are saying that "the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it isn't literally illegal to express". What if you applied that same logic to other rights? For example, is Black Lives Matter saying that "the most you can say about black people is that they shouldn't be killed"? That would be ridiculous.

Basically, I think the comic misses the point: the First Amendment establishes the absolute minimum amount of tolerance for a society to not be authoritarian. It doesn't on it's own define the full extent of what constitutes the right to free speech in a healthy democracy.

<comment><USER4> Why is it repeated that Twitter is somehow a public space? It's a commercial platform. Post on your own blog if you want more freedom (to spout hate).

<comment><USER5> >Post on your own blog

Hosted by blogger/google? Hosted by Wordpress? On your own website with a domain purchased from name cheap with a MasterCard?

It's impossible to interact in public spaces without also touching private entities. That doesn't mean that we should just let corporations determine what 'right speech' is.

<comment><USER4> A purchased domain with a purchased server counts here as private property. Self host if you must.

We should definitely allow property owners accept or refuse certain behaviors on their premises. If you step onto my lawn and spout similar nonsense, I'll kick you out all the same. Stand on your own soil if you insist on shouting low quality and ill informed troll comments.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ego-Driven Development - <AUTHOR> http://deliberate-software.com/ego-driven-development

<comment><USER3> Sometimes it's not so much "NIH syndrome" as "Everything else really, truly is crap". Scottschulthess mentiones that all CMSes are terrible. Some of my colleagues, for example, needed to spin up hundreds of virtual machines very very quickly, and as it turns out, OpenStack is absolute crap. So they took 2 weeks and wrote something a fraction of the size of OpenStack which can have hundreds of virtual machines running in the time it takes OpenStack to boot up 1/10th as many... and crash.

<comment><USER4> Would they consider open sourcing what they made? Sounds very interesting.

<comment><USER3> They're working on it, and I'll make sure to post it on HN when it goes open source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ""Not Invented Here" syndrome: Expressed most commonly in a desire for everything needed to be developed in house. E.g.: "Need a CMS? Let's make our own from scratch!" Perhaps, you work at a place where all your teammates do is constantly bring you bad ideas. Are they really all terrible? Or are only your ideas good enough for the organization? Not Invented Here can also apply to your own head, not just the organization."

The answer is yes, they (CMSes) are all terrible. :)

"No dedicated QA for externally-facing software: Someone who is experienced at breaking software should have a crack at it before it goes to users. Developers (including me) are too enamored with their own work to really take the time to break it, so someone with a sense of pride in finding problems needs to be given the task."

Having dedicated QA is not always good. In fact it is often counter- productive.

"Low Joel Test score: The Joel Test remains a great indicator of institutional ego. A team that scores low on the Joel Test does so because someone along the way decided that, "nah, we don't need that here, we are special", and almost certainly they are not. I have yet to hear of a team with a legitimate reason for a low Joel Test score."

The joel test is actually quite out of date. Specifically the stuff about fixing bugs before writing features, hallway usability testing, testers, having a 'spec', and having a bug database are all not necessary or good to have in all cases.

<comment><USER6> > Having dedicated QA is not always good. In fact it is often counter- > productive.

Maybe 'dedicated QA' is a bad but a developer must at least be point man for test, even if the responsibilities aren't 100% of their workload. One could argue that having a horde of peons to click randomly is counter-productive, but teams >6 or so need a specific dev responsible for automating test. Its too specific a domain, and intermittently demanding, and to force all devs to split the duties.

<comment><USER5> Sure. Though I probably would spread the automated testing workload among the whole team as opposed to appointing one person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is the other side of "NIH syndrome".

In order to "save development time" and implement "best practices" a company decides to use an "out of the shelf" package from a big name vendor (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, etc) and customize it to their needs. Some initial customization is done and some shortcuts are taken to make the project go live.

Fast forward a couple of years. The custom code added by the company complicates upgrade paths and vendor support. The business demands more and more functionality which the package does not support "out of the box".

The customization initially implemented turns out to have been technical debt in disguise. They bypassed the recommended usage of the package or platform which resulted in performance problems. Eventually they end up having to re- work everything "the right way" in order to get vendor support or fix the performance problems.

This is specially prevalent in corporate IT departments in large corporations.

Moral of the story is that "off the shelf" platforms are not a silver bullet. If you don't understand the platform and the business requirements you will have problems later on.

I don't know how many times I've fixed performance problems of "off the shelf" packages by simply writing code which replaces the OOB code with a couple of SQL queries/stored procedures and only does what the business needs, bypassing features which the customer does not need in the present.

<comment><USER8> There will always be problems and headaches with off the shelf software, but the thing is that even with all of this you may still save over building it yourself. I worked for years on a Siebel implementation, and even with these issues it was worlds better than the previous incarnation which we had built in house.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used to apply the Joel test religiously, but I've gradually come to the opinion that dedicated QA is a net negative. It creates a natural opposition between two halves of what should be the same team, and removes the focus that comes from knowing that what you create will be what's deployed. It also adds friction that goes against the agile "deploy early, deploy often" approach.

<comment><USER10> Anecdotally, I can say that I've seen the issue with QA causing code deployments to take far longer than they should. For example, right now we have code (one small feature) that QA wants almost two full weeks to test. I was just telling one of our QAs that I hope we start getting much better automated test coverage so that manual QA time can be brought down to a much more reasonable day or two before releasing code to the public.

<comment><USER11> Some of it comes down to incentives/culture. If QA gets yelled at when bugs go out, they're going to take a conservative approach.

It's funny, though, to hear you "hope" you start getting better automated test coverage. :) It happens pretty often that QA is the sole owner of automated tests, which has its own set of potentially bad incentives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > developers and managers repeatedly act as if established best practices do > not apply to them

... and rightly so. A junior programmer might be better off always following "established best practices", but I expect any developer worth their salt to be able to know _when to break the rules_.

<comment><USER13> Is it really a best practice if there's a better way of doing it?

<comment><USER14> "Best Practices" are not always well defined or applicable. In some cases there are conflicts among different practices. Even worse, there are cases where one person believes something is a best practice and another believes it to be a bad practice.

The reality is that there isn't really such thing is a 'best practice.' There are only practices that have been found to be 'less wrong' than other ways, and perhaps even 'useful.'

Whatever your development practices are, the important thing is that you have and maintain the flexibility to adapt to what the particular situation needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Add two more to the list:

1\. No documentation

2\. Over-engineering

I believe EDD affects everyone from the large corps right down to the one and two-person teams. Take a look at highest upvoted hacker ideas here: <http://www.todaystopthing.com/hackerideas/top>

They tend to satisfy the "technically challenging" and EDD trap. Now check out the flop ideas: <http://www.todaystopthing.com/hackerideas/flop>

Some of these products exist and are profitable. "Simplifying" a problem/solution doesn't make it any less of a project worth pursuing. Great read +1.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hmm, just playing devil's advocate here but I'll bet that a huge list of successful people topped by the obvious like Gates, Zuckerberg, and even the humble Wozniak have used all of these elements some or most of the time in their development lives :)

Generational differences abound and manifest in management trends as people reach an age of influence. Born in the 50/60's - you're more likely to be a lone-wolf type. Born in the 80's/90's and you probably consider teamwork and connectedness to be instinctual. Not claiming either is correct but certainly projects beyond a certain scale can only be completed by a structured team. Too, those who prefer to work alone are not automatically egomaniacs.

<comment><USER17> You are certainly correct that there is probably a huge list of successful people who have used these elements, and that is fine, but that doesn't mean I want to work for them! I have heard people say working at Apple is horrific, as that ego is permeated into everything they do. Sure they (used to) turn out great work, but at the cost of a terrible work environment. Check out the book Good to Great [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_Great#Seven_characteris...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_Great#Seven_characteristics_of_companies_that_went_.22from_good_to_great.22), notice that first thing? Humble leaders. Notice what is happening to Apple lately without that massive ego whipping them onward?

As to the generational differences, I had not noticed only the older devs wanting to "cowboy" while the younger devs "cooperate". Usually, it has been a variety of both doing both. I will have to keep my eye on that though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> every software company in the US is using pair programming ? is that wrong not having pair programming ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pair programming is a great way to get new developers up to speed with the code-base, but the team that is going to be using it long-term needs to apply it with discipline.

<comment><USER8> I have always thought the concept was great, but I have struggled with how to implement it.

<comment><USER17> My preferred method for training right now is "promiscuous pairing" [http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...
As for hardware setup, the best I have used is: machines with cloned monitors, two mice, and two keyboards, both side by side so the developers can talk in low tones and not bother anyone else. I do this now at work, and it is a lot of fun, and it really averages to be that we get done more than twice what we would work normally alone.

<comment><USER19> @JackMorgan and @dmiladinov, you two have eerily similar timing and views on this one :) Any chance you're co-workers and happen to know Steve?

<comment><USER17> Well, I am Steve, the author, and yep, we used to work together a few years back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a great article. I have never heard of this, but it's so true - <USER2> for the insight.

</comment><comment><USER21> Hmm, I can tell I work for a company that do that. Thats sad :(</comment>


Post: Are you hacking with a purpose? Join us to transform education forever - <AUTHOR> http://supercoolschool.typepad.com/blog/2010/04/are-you-hacking-with-a-purpose-join-us-to-transform-education-forever-.html

<comment><USER2> Putting technology in schools (particularly elementary schools), at best, costs a lot of money for little gain. At worst, it can hurt education because it takes time away from learning the basics (reading, writing, and arithmetic).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I agree - but we are not targeting elementary schools :) So far more than 300 schools in fields like biotech, dating & a lot of niche topics have been created.</comment>


Pilot-wave quantum theory gains experimental support - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/pilot-wave-theory-gains-experimental-support-20160516 <comment><USER2> I'm not a physicist, but it was my understanding that pilot-wave theory and Copenhagen QM make _identical_ predictions (each is a mathematical reformulation of the other). If that's true, then how could any experiment favor one over the other?

(Each lends itself to a different set of intuitions; maybe one of those sets could prove to inspire better hypotheses for research?)

</comment><comment><USER3> this isn't theoretical, but is a nice visualization of the ideas behind the pilot wave/particle system

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmC0ygr08tE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmC0ygr08tE)

the plot at 1:40 is where my mind was blown.

</comment><comment><USER4> Where is the experimental support?

<comment><USER5> I think this is the paper, which is very briefly mentioned: [http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/2/e1501466.full](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/2/e1501466.full)</comment></comment>


TechCruch50 Drinking Game - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/14/wittc50-the-techcrunch-50-day-two-drinking-game/

<comment><USER2> Making fun of people is so fun! Look at all those losers out there presenting their ideas to the world! Staying home and getting wasted is so much more valuable, especially if you have a blog!</comment>


New Ways to Control Your Experience on Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/2016/new-ways-to-control-your-experience-on-twitter <comment><USER2> Going to put on my tinfoil hat here for a second:

The "quality filter" feature seems to be pretty vague. It gives examples of country of origin/automation/etc, but it seems like that could be used for any number of purposes, not that I'm going to dive into conspiracy theories.

</comment><comment><USER3> Now that these are public, is there any reason to want to be verified anymore? IIRC, except for proving you are you (and not an imposter), nothing else is different.</comment>


The Quantum Suicide Experiment - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/moments-of-passion/the-quantum-suicide-experiment-db0b39bd4d98 <comment><USER2> The thought that splits could only occur at "important" junctures in our insignificant lives is ridiculous and absurd.

Therefore if such things were to occur they would have to be happening at every infinitely small moment of time for every particle and therefore there would be infinite alternate universe's in fact more universe's than the collection of all types of infinity</comment>


Ask HN: Small responsive css framework with scss/sass - <AUTHOR> What is your current go to responsive css framework that has scss/sass support and has a relatively small file size? <comment><USER2> You should give Baseguide a try. It has all the essential base components and is very flexible.

[http://basegui.de](http://basegui.de)

<comment><AUTHOR> the grid did not display quite right on my mobile, a nexus 5

<comment><USER2> Thank you for reporting this.

What browser are you using on your nexus 5? Feel free to open an issue on GitHub with a detailed description and maybe a screenshot. [https://github.com/slavanga/baseguide/issues](https://github.com/slavanga/baseguide/issues)</comment></comment></comment>


Savioke Unveils Its Delivery Robot - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/savione-saviokes-delivery-robot#.U-pEzKTGWIg.hackernews

<comment><USER2> So, that looks like it's got a LIDAR with some sort of downward facing sensor. The small compartment means it's not competition for our QCBot but I bet there'll be a SaviFOO which is.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems like a waste to use a robot for room deliveries when hotels have much more labor intensive things to transport, namely sheets, towels and laundry.

I know some hospitals are experimenting with robots to assist staff by transporting items like food and linens.

<comment><USER4> For those who are interested, the Aethon Tug and Vecna QCBot are the major players in this space. I believe Panasonic is currently developing one as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great, I always feel bad when I need to bother other humans. But I can totally see myself ordering robots around to of my bidding.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks like it is extremely basic. For example it can't open doors, push elevator buttons or climb stairs.

<comment><USER3> You don't need to push elevator buttons. Delivery robots usually have a central controller system that connected to to the elevator system, so it can plan routes and call the elevator when a robot arrives.</comment></comment>