I have no side code projects to show - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-have-side-code-projects-show-you-ezekiel-buchheit <comment><USER2> Here's a little example what happened to me:

I interviewed with a company. Naturally they asked for my side projects which I showed them. We talked about technical challenges, scaling, interesting bits of codes - all these kind of things. They were really excited. I passed the interviews and got the job.

Fast forward a couple month, still working on my side projects, some of which started generating a couple hundred bucks a month. My boss started asking me to stop any side projects and put all my time thinking about the company instead. I refused and said that I am 100% there during my work hours but what I do in my private time is not related and even the reason why I got this job in the first place. My boss didn't like that at all and even tried to figure the exact times out when I would work on private stuff to hold it against me. I eventually quit.

If your company wants to see side projects but dislikes the idea of you actually working on them after starting, you are doing something wrong.

<comment><USER3> It depends on your point of view. The boss wants the most sophisticated talent he can get, and he doesn't want to pay anything for it. Every penny he pays, and every second of your life he doesn't get for it, is a failure in his eyes.

Since the 1980s, employment has become a game. Employers don't like it if you realize this and play them right back, of course, but there's not really any other option. Their viewpoint is dominant and essentially universal. In response to monumental productivity multiplication due to technology, they froze wages, destroyed pensions, cut benefits, and extended the work week. They believe if an employee becomes irreplaceable, they have become expendable. Keeping employees dispensable is weighed as far more important than keeping skilled talent. Read books written by managers for managers. Their actions aren't random or stupid, most people just don't understand their reasoning.

And if you only get one tattoo in your life, I highly recommend this centuries-old quote from The Rubiyat of Omar Khayaam: "Make game of that which makes as much of thee."

<comment><USER4> I think this game is much more openly recognized in SV without too much cynicism. The average tenure is probably around 3 years, and people move between companies often. This serves both the employee by diversifying their skillset, and it serves companies by facilitating knowledge transfer for certain techniques, particularly around scaling and operations for larger tech companies that individuals can't get through mere education or even small- scale work.

Consider that we openly talk about Bus Factor as a way of explicitly quantifying the indispensability of certain people; but the solution is not to get rid of them, it's just to train more people on those aspects. Of course there's still some amount of Machiavellian maneuvering, but at least while talent is thin on the ground employees still have enough leverage not to get screwed—not as badly as most non-unionized employees anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I want to work in a group where they appreciate that I was basically born to code. That despite my youthful features, I have still been coding for over 30 years. That I can do many tasks in an hour, that other people would take days to do. That I will spend an extra 3 hours to put a cherry on top, just because I can. I may even do it on a Saturday, because code is what I like to do with my spare time too.

So when the last company I interviewed at asked me "what is the difference between range and xrange in Python?" I just kind of rolled my eyes (on the inside). To me this is like asking a professional translator "what is the difference between 'si' and 'sí' in Spanish?" They were not interested in the thousands of lines of code I have on GitHub for my side projects, nor in a recent project that got me 15 seconds of fame. I ended that interview by saying "I don't think I'm a good match for this job".

Different companies have different cultures. It's good to be able to identify the kind of culture you want to work in, and even better to be able to respectfully decline an opportunity because it doesn't work for you. Don't become bitter and think that all companies want you to be a coding robot, just because Google and Facebook do (or seem to; I'm not sure how many of my friends who work there actually have that many side projects either). There are plenty of jobs that will work for you that won't work for me, and vice versa.

<comment><USER6> The range/xrange question was likely to check if you were a fraud.

Having interviewed close to a hundred people in a year for a senior C dev position I can _assure_ you that people lie like you wouldn't believe. They cheat with take-home tasks, they show others' code as their own. And that's in the system programming circles, where the level of professionalism is typically much higher than in app/web development areas. We got burnt really bad when a brilliant dude whom we relocated across the country turned out to be the laziest moron I've ever had a misfortune to work with. So you bet we started most of the interviews with fuzz-buzz kind of questions.

<comment><USER7> On the other hand, I'm a skilled dev with only a smattering of python experience, but if you asked me this question I'd have no idea and wouldn't think twice about looking up the python docs for both. What are you actually asking?

P.s. I don't believe anyone actually fails fizz buzz.

<comment><USER8> I suspect failing fizz buzz typically is caused by nervousness. I've one gotten so nervous in an interview that I'm certain I couldn't have implemented fizz buzz either at that time. I've also seen it on interviewees. As the interviewer it also sucks because you can't be sure it's nervousness.

<comment><USER9> If someone is the type of person that gets nervous in an interview, these are the people that really need to do good side projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have worked at a prestigious tech company, and I know what OP is talking about.

A lot of very talented people don't have side projects, and they don't do any coding outside of work. They don't go to hackathons. They don't bother to learn the newest reactive javascript framework. They go to yoga classes after work. They talk about TV shows they watched last night during lunch.

But they EXCEL at what they do at work.

I can say that this is really a subjective thing. When you make a judgment about these people, it actually tells more about yourself than the person being judged.

When I saw these people who are super talented, but "waste away their lives" just climbing up the ladder I just couldn't sympathize. Also personally I like them but I would never think about starting a company with them.

That's why I understand where OP is coming from, and he's right in a lot of cases, but also I think he should understand that not everyone will agree with you on how you view your life. People like me can't stand not working on my own project, but there are also super talented people who are perfectly fine with living a balanced and stable life. Talent and intelligence has nothing to do with how you live your life.

So, I think no one should judge anyone else. The company who didn't hire this guy may have lost a talented person, but in many cases talent is not what companies need the most.

For large companies like Amazon (which OP seems to work at) this type of employee is the ideal choice since they get the talent AND stability.

But for startups, the concept of stability doesn't really make sense anyway so it's a different story. If I was doing a startup and had to pick the first employee, and was given a choice between a passionate, right out of the college guy, and an experienced and talented engineer who wants to live a balanced life, I would definitely choose the former. (Although the best case would be to find the third guy who's passionate AND talented)

<comment><USER4> Having spend the last decade living the startup life, and now searching for something more stable, I have to say you're setting up a false dichotomy between passionate and balance-seeking. They are completely orthogonal, you can be passionate and work widely varying hours; you can also be indifferent and work widely varying hours.

On a tangent, I don't really like the word passion anyway. What makes me a good programmer is not my passion for it, it's my curiosity and motivation. My motivation is a primary factor in my performance, and that probably is 80% influenced by context, and 20% by the content of the task itself (at least for most things that fall within the standard purview of programming tasks).

Finally, you don't mention talent for the new graduate. That is a _huge_ factor. If the new grad is not extremely talented, they will never produce anything of value. If they are highly talented they can likely power through a lot of things, but they also need to make good decisions about what to work on since time allocation is the single hardest thing about getting early traction for a startup. Yes, all else being equal, take the guy that wants to work 16 hours a day and has no other distractions, but if the veteran who wants to work 30 hours a week has better business sense and a smarter idea of what to build and when, then that dwarfs the code quality consideration.

<comment><USER10> Sorry that it came off that way, I tried to make myself clear with "I can say that this is really a subjective thing. When you make a judgment about these people, it actually tells more about yourself than the person being judged."

From my experience, all these brilliant, intelligent, and talented people (who don't do extracurricular activities related to coding) have completely different motivations than myself. My point is that it's fine that they do, and it's fine that I don't think that way either.

I'm just saying that there are people who are fit for certain type of situations, and some people--no matter how talented they are--are not fit for certain jobs just because their life values are not compatible with the situation. That doesn't mean the employer who made that decision is an idiot. They're just not compatible, and that's fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When I started programming, I had side projects coming out of my ears. It was pure recreation.

After getting a "real" programming job, where I had to deal with design-by- committee, power struggles, keeping up appearances, etc. I didn't dare jump back into recreational programming--I'd never go back to my actual job.

Even now, working for myself, I have to be very disciplined when I crack open the "fun" code, because I know it will be very painful when it is time to go back to the code that pays the bills.

</comment><comment><USER12>
        > For every one of those
        > folks there are thousands
        > of amazing, solid
        > developers

This does not match my experience.

Also, for every genuine genius in the world, there are a whole bunch of pretty average people who think they're really smart.

</comment><comment><USER13> > When companies say they want "passionate developers" that are coding in > their free time, when companies say they want "the best," I get nervous. > It's a myopic approach to team building. It's a subtle way of requesting > human machines.

I take issue with this.

I don't write code in my spare time for fun, I have a family.

When I do write it, and when I do Open Source it, it's because it makes my life easier. It makes it easier to check my email, track what I still need to do on the house, and cut out half my work tomorrow, so I can take some leave and be with my family.

I release it to the wild so that others might benefit, and I can pull it out when recruiters ask to see my code, even if they can't understand it, which is most of the time.

<comment><USER14> I've had a few companies ask me for my Github account, so they can see what code I've written. I never give it out, because I think the request is pointless to start with.

A friend of mine, who works for a well-known technology giant, recently told me about a Linux guru they interviewed and hired. He was amazing in the interview, and they gave him an offer on the spot. When he started working, however, he constantly turned in sub-par work. A couple of months later, one of the members of the team who had interviewed this guy flew out to where he was working, and discovered that the guy sitting in the cube doing the work was not the guy they had interviewed. It was someone else. The guy went through quite an effort to cheat his way into a job, but when he was discovered, he was immediately fired.

If cheating was my thing, and I really wanted to get a job via nefarious means, so I could worry about my job on a daily basis, how hard would it be to pay someone to write a bunch of Github code for me? Exactly, which is why the request is pretty dumb to start with, I think.

For a bunch of smart people, we engineers sure have a hard time figuring out how to interview people and ascertain their skills.

<comment><USER15> Hi, I was really interested in this story:

>A couple of months later, one of the members of the team who had interviewed this guy flew out to where he was working, and discovered that the guy sitting in the cube doing the work was not the guy they had interviewed. It was someone else.

This seems absolutely incredible to me (just in the slang sense, I don't mean that I'm incredulous). I mean it's way more than enough for the company to sue for fraud the (highly qualified) person who showed up to the interview, or to sue the person doing it. TBH if I were that company I would likely sue for damages. I mean it's just so blatant and goes so far.

I've never heard of this. So I would be curious if you would reply with a somewhat more detailed write-up (maybe 1 or 2 paragraphs) of anything else you know about that case! But, maybe you've mentioned everything already. (You said a friend of yours told you about this case, so I realize we are reading this third-hand.) I would just be really interested if you could mention anything else you remember.

<comment><USER16> There have been a few stories over the past few years of people outsourcing their own jobs, but I'm not sure whether any of them have actually been shown to be based in fact. That said, this could be the same kind of thing - did the guy in the cube hire the "guru" to interview, or did the "guru" interview then outsource to the guy in the cube?

<comment><USER15> oh I didn't even think about that. fraud either way :)

I think outsourcing is one thing - but being an _employee_ who is on payroll and physically shows up to warm a butt in a seat, goes a lot farther. Regardless of whether the cube guy paid someone to do his interview, or the guru hired a body double after getting hired, it's pretty insane. do you have any links to anyplace you read about the same thing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The entire drive to hire "passionate developers" makes me very nervous. It's a double edged sword and most people don't want to see it. Yes, passionate developers are more likely to stay up to date on technologies and are also more likely to put in extra time. However, they are also much more likely to use technology that isn't ready yet and overcomplicate things because of some misguided aesthetical sense or best case spend way too much time gold plating the wrong thing instead of providing business value. The cost of those things is generally much higher than someone going home sightly early or not knowing the very latest JS framework.

Edit: phone auto correct shenanigans

</comment><comment><USER17> I've built a ton of side projects.

No one has ever shown anything more than a nodding interest in them, as they lead me to a whiteboard and ask me to regurgitate a couple of pages from Crack the Coding Interview.

<comment><USER18> Then it sounds like you're interviewing at the wrong kinds of companies

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> As someone who _does_ have a bunch of pet projects, I appreciate the author's sentiment. I often wonder whether my programming world presence (GitHub, HN, &c.) accurately reflects the kind of person I am (or perhaps want to be).

<comment><USER20> hint to the young: contribute anonymously.

go to interviews and talk abou range vs xrange.

it might never happen, but when one employer decides to go crazy and try to blame you for leaking code (that you may have written even before joining them) on open source projects, you are going to regret skipping the silly interviews by showing your open source persona to them. best thing you can do is keep it to yourself. then when you really need it, say for a research grant, then go public.

<comment><USER19> I appreciate the advice, although with the jobs I've had so far I've been sure to tell my employer in advance about my open source work.

Maybe I've just been lucky, but all have been either okay with it or actively supportive (even when concurrent with in-house development). That being said, I've been careful to avoid open-sourcing projects that I think come to close to hired work.

<comment><USER20> what you describe is the common sense absolutely everyone have.

but it means little when dealing with crazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I agree with the author. You can't judge the passion of someone by his behaviour, that's silly. You can be as well a passionate programmer when you don't code home than when you do.

However, coding home has one - big - perk: it's almost the only way for you to code something from scratch. Alone. You and your code. You and your progress rate. You and your bugs. You and your choices. You and your mess. Nobody to smooth any angle.

I believe coding from scratch - alone - makes you a completely different kind of programmer indeed. But it has nothing to do with passion. Nothing at all.

I think (I can be wrong, still trying to validate that) that "number of projects from scratch" is _the_ metric that tells the ultimate level of a programmer. In other words, if you've almost never coded anything from scratch (below say 40-50 projects), I do believe you are not very good at programming. Conversely, I know from experience (my own) that coding from scratch can make you so good, that you would find Amazon SDEs complete novices (I know from my own experience at amazon) and this before your 30's. It can make you better than principal engineers before your 30's. It can make you so good that TDD, OOP and agile development sounds like novice exercises to you. It can make you a programming master and beyond.

Could you be as good without coding from scratch really? Well, ultimately maybe but not as fast. Coding from scratch is so painful, so hard, so stressful, so frustrating that maintaining code or adding small to medium sized features is a baby step in comparison. Now of course, if you add something pretty big to an existing code base or make a god damn big refactor, you're doing the same thing as coding from scratch basically. The thing is that it's rare you 1) add that big a feature to an existing codebase 2) alone, in a big company.

I'm pretty sure the author has passion for programming, probably as big as anyone else. And balanced life is good for skills as feeling great makes you more creative amongst other thing. It's just that coding home makes you write a type of code that is 100 times more difficult than the one you do in big companies. Paradoxically, I'm pretty sure interviewers don't, at least consciously, know that.

<comment><USER22> there another side to it. coding alone making all decisions on the fly and as needed can also be very relaxing. in the big company, most of the work is getting agreement; fighting legacy code; planning transitions; making sure everybody is on the same page as they contribute...

<comment><USER23> Exactly. I have seen people who are fantastic developers when working on solo projects but start to struggle when placed in a business/group environment. Once things like business priorities start informing what people are going to be working on when, once folks need to start coordinating with other developers and their own quirks it starts going downhill

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Part of the process for me has been to try to do as much of my job as possible in the open source world.

Naturally, I can't open-source any private business code. But if I'm doing my job right, I'm building libraries and reusable code that isn't tightly coupled to business logic -- and there's no good reason to avoid throwing all of that on github, and have it be used by as many people as possible.

Of course there are going to be companies that aren't onboard with the idea of open-source. It's taken a lot of places a lot of time to get to that stage. But are those the places you really want to work?

</comment><comment><USER25> I am generally suspicious of someone who has no sample code to show. You can't take a few hours a week for a month to put a small project together as a demo of your abilities?

Skip the novel writing for a month and instead create a 10 hour project that shows potential employers you know what you're talking about. You can use it for years so it's well worth the time investment.

For most jobs you don't have to have a ton of active side projects or contribute to open source. You should have _something_ to demo though.

<comment><USER26> Most, but not all people who are employed have contracts which assign ownership of everything they do, including in their spare time at home on their own equipment, to their employer. And yes, a very small number of states consider such standard clauses to be unenforceable.

Most candidates who show their previous code, either written for their employer, or from side projects that are still within the scope of their contract, are violating non disclosure clauses of their contracts. Someone who has sample code to show is likely an unreliable candidate who thinks nothing of violating his signed contracts. Such candidates should not be hired.

<comment><USER27> Most employers who include such clauses and aren't open to negotiation are violating common decency. Any company so incredibly tone-deaf is likely an unpleasant employer that thinks nothing of treating their employees poorly. Such companies should not be serviced by professionals.

<comment><USER28> That doesn't make his point moot though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm not sure I like the tacit implication that folks who do lots of side projects are superior engineers or are very passionate about "coding".

The assumption that "lots of side projects" is somehow a positive attribute (from an employer's perspective with regard to "types" of engineers) is very much a flawed one.

</comment><comment><USER30> I stopped reading when the author referred to the amount of people living in cities as "a tiny puddle" of the larger population. That's not even a little bit accurate.[1]

No, this is nothing more than pity-party because one person wants to fit in and be recognized for something they aren't. I am glad you think your dog business,and art, and running makes you equal to or better than someone who is passionate and dedicates themselves to their interests. You aren't that person. that's okay. but don't try and form the world to fit your views. You aren't the best developer, you don't want to be, move on.

[1][http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press- releases/2015/cb15-33.h...](http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press- releases/2015/cb15-33.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> I totally agree with this. If you can do the job well, who cares what you do in your free time.

I've been on the other side (the hiring side), so let me give my perspective. It's okay to not have side projects, or a presence on Github. It is perfectly okay to say "I don't have a very active Github account, but let me tell you what I enjoy about programming". "Show me your side projects" is a (poor) way of asking, "show me that you are passionate about your job". I'm not looking to hire the elite, but I _am_ looking for someone who will be happy to come to work.

<comment><USER32> I disagree with the article and the notion that asking for a portfolio is about passion. I guess it does add insight for that, but really only shows basic proficiency. I wouldn't hire an artist, writer or designer without seeing a portfolio of their work so why would I hire a software developer?

I too have been on both sides of the hiring discussion. Because anyone can write anything on there resume, there are only two way to know if someone can code. They can write some code of they can show some code they have written. As both an interviewer and interviewer I would rather work with real world problems and discuss real world solutions.

So the choice seems to be between stupid whiteboard processes or portfolios. I suspect there is a reason writers and painters don't have auditions and perhaps that same logic maps onto programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I always go through an extreme opposite hiring experience. I'm not on linkedin by choice. Currently I use my SO developer profile as my online resume. But the lack of a linkedin profile and associated connections makes it look like I'm not a professional in the view of certain employers. I have a decent bunch of side projects, and a moderately active github profile and I have gotten all my jobs including my current one based on that. I don't regret not being on linkedin. I'm just happy showing my side projects for my coding knowledge as I cannot show code I have worked as a part of my employment. Also I believe when talking about code written as a part of employement, it all boils down how effectively one communicates/talks to the potential employer than how actually we did it. This is one of the reasons I try to maintain side projects independent of my day job.

For me, the whole idea of proving oneself as professional by being on linkedin has been a biggest turn off. Coupled with this, when I look at some of the people's linkedin profile and the actual attitude and proficiency they demonstrate in their jobs makes linkedin look like a ridiculous circus.

<comment><USER34> > when I look at some of the people's linkedin profile and the actual attitude > and proficiency they demonstrate in their jobs makes linkedin look like a > ridiculous circus.

Can you share some examples?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Once I was not accepted for a job because I had very good side projects. They said I was a risk to them, because I could stole ideas, contracts or be a competitor. Today I have my own business, if we compete, it's just in hiring talent.

</comment><comment><USER36> Just go work somewhere else. Luckily for many of us, demand has been outpacing supply for years.

If the market was worse, then it wouldn't seem so strange. Lots of other professions require a portfolio of work.

</comment><comment><USER37> Wait, I thought Amazon is NOT the place for work/life balance. Why is a guy that wants work/life balance working at Amazon?

<comment><USER38> I worked for a remote office of AMZN's and found that the office I was at had great work/life balance. At any big company, work/life balance will be very team-dependent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I am passionate about code. But, most of my github is little hacks to solve some particular need or scratch some particular itch, without any need for overarching design or maintainability.

The good stuff (including libraries and frameworks) is all in my professional career.

</comment><comment><USER40> I feel like if you use open source libraries and are a decent developer you'll naturally end up submitting a PR to Github at some point. I find bugs in almost every open source library I use and have had so many PRs to fix them.

<comment><USER41> It depends on the projects you're touching, of course.

I've contributed bugfixes to GNU less, GNU screen, and GNU emacs, and GNU make. None of those would be easy to dig out references for, and none of them use github.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Wtf is a boutique app firm?

<comment><USER16> A boutique app firm is a small company that builds apps for clients. Generally those clients are going to be smallish businesses (probably mostly less than 1000 employees).

Some examples from my area include a small grocery chain (5-6 stores) with their own app and a local credit union with their own online banking app with support for mobile deposits via photographs of checks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I notice the article is from LinkedIn Pulse.

I dislike Pulse because it's mandatory content on "my" LinkedIn page, which I find a bit obnoxious.

So I avoid visiting Pulse stories in order to discourage that entire aspect of the site.

</comment><comment><USER44> > I've made it a point to add to my resume and online profiles the other > things about which I am passionate. The silly art project that I launched in > Austin. My dog business. Running, painting, writing. It's important to me > that these attributes be valued by my workplace

Good luck mate, that's got nothing to do with software development. If you don't love software development then applying for a software job at a software firm probably isn't the best idea. Many small buisnesses need software people who are pasionate about other things. Many of these things include "Running, painting, writing" but a software shop writning software owned by people in the software industry populated entierly by people who absolutly love writing software probably isn't the place for that.

</comment><comment><USER34> I actually don't mind being a human machine. Not that I've had the chance yet. I'm still in college to get my CS degree and would fall into one of those people where "coding is a Craft". I genuinely love programming. I don't have a family, or really desire one. My weekend plans always consist of building another project of my own. A place that will let me code all day, give me a nap room, a shower, some salary, and food sounds like a dream. It's unfortunate that it costs so much money to get to the cities that promote this.

I think the author is just realizing that this field isn't for them. Tech moves fast and to stay on top of it you have to move fast too. At least for modern tech. Maybe that author would be more comfortable being a COBOL programmer, or an embedded systems one.

<comment><USER45> > and would fall into one of those people where "coding is a Craft".

Dude(ette), you're still in college. You don't even know what it's like to have a real engineering job yet.

Do me a favor, save this post and look at it in 5 years.

<comment><USER34> I've interned at a multibillion euro company for a couple of years. I have an idea of what it's like.

<comment><USER46> Lol try having the CTO say when the billing system you look after hits its first 5 mil a month "this had better be right other wise we are both out of a job"

<comment><USER34> I don't understand the joke...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why our brain values halloween, even if it's expensive (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.lemonade.com/blog/brain-values-halloween/ <comment><USER2> Because these disguises do not disguise; they reveal.</comment>


Science Fiction becomes a WORD - <AUTHOR> Episode 5 of SciFi Thoughts podcast: http://lancerkind.com/podcast/005-science-fiction-becomes-a-word/
Starting with episode 1, SciFi Thoughts covers the origins of the science fiction genre.
https://lancerkind.com/series/scifi-thoughts/ <comment><USER2> I thought it was _two_ words.</comment>


Boston Planning to Murder Potholes - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/13/boston-planning-to-murder-potholes-with-your-phones-acceleromet/

<comment><USER2> this is going to go over so well when auto manufacturers start jamming phones in moving cars.</comment>


IPhone Apps: One Month And 60 Million Downloads Later. But Not One Of Them Is A Killer App - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/11/iphone-apps-one-month-and-60-million-downloads-later-but-not-one-of-them-is-a-killer-app/ <comment><USER2> Can someone define "killer app"?

This article claims that "Super Monkey Ball" might have sold $3 million worth of software in a month. But that's not "killer", I guess.

The classic definition of "killer app" is "the app that, by itself, makes you buy the platform". But it's kind of hard to tell how well specific third-party apps are driving phone sales when the phones are selling approximately as fast as they can be made.

And, of course, the killer app on a Web-enabled phone will always tend to be _making phone calls and using the web_. If "more popular than MobileSafari" is the benchmark, it will be very, very hard to reach the benchmark.

Finally... _one month_? They say that good software takes ten years. One month is 0.83% of that time. Give the market some more months.

<comment><USER3> To be fair: it's one month from launch. The SDKs were in developers' hands much earlier. And the general details of the platform architecture were in public hands (via the work of the jailbreak folks) much earlier still.

To some extent, MobiltSafari is already the iPhone's killer app. Nothing else it does is really all that shockingly great. But a web browser isn't going to be killer for more than a smallish handful of people. It's not "killer" in the way that SMS texting was, for example. Will there be another? The jury hasn't come back yet.

<comment><USER4> SMS texting is a killer app but a web browser that is actually useful and productive on a small mobile screen is not? What color is the sky in your world?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Critical thinking 101:

First, why not see how long other successful platforms took to get their first 'killer app'?

Apple II: First released, June, 1977. Killer app (visicalc) released: May 1979.

PC-DOS: released in Aug. '81, first killer app (lotus 123), Jan 1983.

Mac: released Jan '84, first killer app (Aldus Pagemaker), sometime in 1985.

Second, what do unit sales have to do with expectations for a killer app?

It's a little early for tc to complain about a killer app.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think there are two killer apps on the iPhone. Mobile safari with multi- touch and the gmaps app with multi-touch.

I don't use any other app on a daily (or even weekly) basis with the possible exception of the Yelp app and the WeatherBug app.</comment>


Will the symbol 'Ћ' replace the word 'the?' - <AUTHOR> http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/201650/will-the-symbol-ћ-replace-the-word-the/

<comment><USER2> Short answer: no. This guy dumped a boatload of money into a silly idea, like many other people.</comment>


Through the Looking Glass (Part 1) - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/through-the-looking-glass-part-i-2a710a865c67 <comment><USER2> There are so many lines in the post series that don't make very much sense if you understand the YC program.

> We'd aim to have 4 to 6 developers on the project within the first few > weeks, and had a substantial budget to achieve this.

What budget?

> The hiring process began immediately with advertisements going up on social > media

As the CTO, would you not be able to contribute more to this project?

> One of the huge benefits of the YC program is the ability to experiment with > scaling ideas.

Talking about looking into scaling before having anything usable or users? Time would have been spent better actually building a prototype to prove the concept.

> As the first Demo Day approached, despite being a director and CTO, I was > instructed not to attend due to not being part of the initial interview > process.

I kind of suspect at this point in the post series, that the author wasn't really a "director" or "CTO".

After reading the lessons in the third post, sounds like the author just jumped at the chance to be part of YC without much knowledge of what he would actually have to contribute.

</comment><comment><USER3> Three mistakes that lept out at me, some of which the author seems to identify towards the end: using new technology, allowing themselves to get politically sidelined by missing meetings, and getting too heavy into process.

It seemed like they'd have been better served by pushing back on the YC advice (requiring them to be at meetings), by picking boring technologies (python, Java, JS), and by stopping work on all of the other stuff (studio projects, etc.) that proved to be a distraction.

That said, the introduction of the Dwayne fellow really seemed like the root of most problems that weren't YC-caused.

<comment><USER4> That, and the fact that he wasn't meeting with the YC teams. If you're the CTO, it doesn't matter that you missed the initial meeting. The founding team should all go and meet.

<comment><USER5> (Apologies in advance for sounding harsh. I have extreme empathy for the author. But this lesson is so easy to ignore that I had to really amp up the contrast before I could focus on it myself. So it seems worth stating plainly.)

 _" You must have at least 10% equity in the startup to be considered a founder by Y Combinator. Only founders can come to interviews if invited or attend batch events if accepted."_ \-- [https://www.ycombinator.com/apply](https://www.ycombinator.com/apply)

If he couldn't attend, it was probably because he didn't have the requisite equity.

Joining as a founding member with less than 10% equity in a startup without a product or customers -- _after being ambivalent about joining_ \-- seems like a really bad decision.

One hard lesson I've learned over the years is that _status matters_. And in the startup world, equity is a huge marker of status, outside of its potential monetary reward. The initial conditions under which you join a project act as a non-negotiable _upper_ bound on how much say your collaborators will let you have on the big picture. Regardless of how much you contribute afterwards.

Some reading on status for other aspirational-Vulcan types like I used to be:

[https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/march7/sapolskysr-030707...](https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/march7/sapolskysr-030707.html)

[http://www.meltingasphalt.com/social-status-down-the- rabbit-...](http://www.meltingasphalt.com/social-status-down-the-rabbit-hole)

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003J5653Y](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003J5653Y)

Tl;dr - humans are pack hunters. They can't survive outside packs, not really. As a result, the topology of the pack has a powerful warping effect on our brains. You can't break out of it. It is as real for humans as gravity. Within a group there's no "being so good they can't ignore you."

This is not to say that being low-status is always bad. Just that it's worth being very clear-eyed about your status in a group. If you aren't going to the YC dinners, you aren't the CTO. Not really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >To make the situation more difficult, we were told that, even though we still had no product, the target for the next Demo Day, in 2 weeks, was a working messaging product, with secure file storage, "like Dropbox", and 15 business customers using it.

This doesn't seem... real? I've been involved with three different companies during their time in YC and while I never attended any of the actual YC functions this kind of a deadline for such a lofty target seems out of line with my experience. Maybe things have changed in the past few years.

My internal "What would PG/JL do/advise" model seems to really suggest the opposite of what I'm reading in this article. Weird.

</comment><comment><USER7> Mistitled? Looks like title should be "Through the Looking Glass \- And into YCombinator"

<comment><USER8> We've reverted the title from "How to destroy a startup by applying to YC (as well as other mistakes)". Submitters: the HN guidelines ask you to please use the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait. We sometimes make exceptions for blog posts when the submitter is also the author, but it's not clear if that's the case here, and making the title more baity isn't the right way to customize it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What, you found out later, were the biggest gaps in your education? - <AUTHOR> Things that, when you learnt about them, it was most surprising your previous education had never mentioned?
e.g. For me the biggest ones have been:
1. The Crusades. They seem absolutely huge in influence, the single most influential phenomenon in the history of the West, in the formation of Europe as an entity, in so many ways. Never mentioned in all my years of schooling. (see the Crusades chapter in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds, Guizot's History of Civilization in Europe)
2. The huge influence of Rousseau (French Revolution, Romantics, Nazis, the modern consciousness etc etc) (see Damrosch's Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius)
and I guess also:
- the real character of US foreign interventions since the 1890s and US role in the world (see Chomsky's political books, and the voting record in the UN GA & SC)
- (a musical one - I'm a musician) that equal temperament wasn't universally adopted until recently, the mid-late 19th C. Not in Bach's time, like I'd been taught. <comment><USER2> I spent six years at an all-male boarding school before heading off to university. That meant I was six years behind in my social development with girls.

Education is not just academic knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER3> How to talk to people. And related skills - how to make small talk and how to read body language. These are critical skills in business and for life in general, but even two years of business education did not "teach" me these skills or even the fact that these skills were going to be critical for me soon.

<comment><USER4> What Everybody Is Saying by ex FBI agent Joe Navarro can help [https://g.co/kgs/cBUfjS](https://g.co/kgs/cBUfjS)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The existence of curriculums whose existence is not even mentioned and therefore framing education in a very narrow way.

Here are some types of curriculum: [http://thesecondprinciple.com/instructional-design/types- of-...](http://thesecondprinciple.com/instructional-design/types-of- curriculum/)

</comment><comment><USER6> 1\. A rational critique of capitalism.

2\. Decent philosophy and theology classes.

3\. Managing money as per Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez.</comment>


Gmail IMAP access is suddenly v slow - <AUTHOR>

Is it just me? Is the beginning of the end of IMAP support? Time to switch to FastMail? <comment><USER2> I'm in the same boat as you. Mail on my phone hardly even shows up at this point...</comment>


How not to recruit for a startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.wepay.com/blog/2011/09/21/how-not-to-recruit-for-a-startup/

<comment><USER2> Recommendation: Neither the word 'career' nor the word 'job' appear anywhere on your front page. The best I can see is a contact us page. I had to do a google search to find your jobs page:

<https://www.wepay.com/about/jobs>

<comment><USER3> duly noted - will update

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This recruiter's blunder gave you a great hook for this blog post, which is certain to bring in some well qualified applications. So, in some sense, this was a successful relationship.

<comment><USER3> I sent him a "thank you" email for that exact reason. Seriously.

<comment><USER5> What about the Atlassian approach [0]? They give the recruiters a chance to prove that they can deliver excellence and if not, both parties know it won't work out. I think it's a good model for the employer and the job-seeker.

p.s. I found out about this via this video: [1], scroll for transcript.

[0] <http://www.atlassian.com/about/careers/recruiters.jsp>

[1] [http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2011/09/from-0-100million...](http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2011/09/from-0-100million- with-no-sales-people-the-atlassian-10-commandments-for-startups.html)

<comment><USER6> That probably works because Atlassian hires so many people that they too are in a position to play a numbers game with recruiters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You need to closely screen and supervise your recruiters. Start with an open- ended question: "how would you go about sourcing candidates for XXX position", "how would you screen them", "how would you entice them"? Listen closely to what they say and if you do not feel comfortable this would yield you the candidates you are looking for, fire the recruiter and look for one that would understand your needs.

Recruiters, like any other service professionals, are always trying to sell you on their experience, but you owe it to yourself to closely inspect their claims and methods. If recruiter is any good they won't be offended and would cooperate.

Contingency fee recruiters are especially renowned for sloppy work. If they only get paid when they place a candidate their only incentive is to sell you the first warm body they find. This type of attitude you have to nip in the bud.

<comment><USER8> You almost need a recruiter to recruit recruiters...

<comment><USER7> At the end of the day the responsibility for recruitment is with the company management. Recruiters could have a role to play, but it is above their pay grade to decide what kind of candidates you want. They could surely help sourcing and pre-screening though. But if you are going to use recruiters you have to manage them carefully. Recruiter not given clear direction is poised to waste your time and money trying to place the first wrong candidates they come across.

<comment><USER9> The whole point of using a human is that they should be able to intelligently handle some level of screening that's hard to automate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the reality is that recruiting firms suffer from the same market dynamics as SEO consultancies and, I suppose, startups in general. The good ones are so valuable and so lucrative that they can be selective about their clients and have virtually no need to do outbound marketing.

Which means that any recruiter you can reasonably expect engage on a tactical basis is going to be drawn from the adverse selection pool.

</comment><comment><USER10> Employees that you gain through a recruiter, you will probably lose through a recruiter.

Building a company is hard, hiring lots of good, loyal people in a short time is a lot harder than scaling some software.

<comment><USER11> Loyalty is probably the last quality you should be looking for as a hiring manager at a startup. Granted, you want people to be loyal, but it also has a loose correlation to incompetence, mainly because incompetent people tend to (rightly) fear losing their job more than people at the top of their game.

Better to hire the best you can by other criteria and let the chips fall where they may.

<comment><USER10> Interesting, I think it would be one of the first.

The reason why is that people that you hire early and that put together the core of the company will have a bunch of extremely important knowledge that will be very hard to transfer to another new hire. If a start-up spends a great deal of time replacing people that were hired and that left just as fast that would seriously affect continuity.

It is for that very reason that in later funding rounds it is not unusual to ask these people to sign on for an X number of years in return for some stock with a vesting period.

<comment><USER11> You should hire the most skilled people you can, period. If you can get a brilliant developer or designer for 6 months, that's better than hiring some schlub just because he'll stick with you.

Perhaps more apropos, skill is more of an unwavering quality than loyalty. The way to make a great developer loyal is to give them interesting stuff to work on and have the right culture. If loyalty is your metric, it's more effective to worry about your office conditions than to try to pick the right candidates.

I'm a prime example. At 33 I've only had 5 jobs since I was 20, so I look incredibly loyal as an employee. But there's a reason I stayed at each of those jobs for so long. I would not suffer a pointy-haired boss for a single day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At a previous job, when they kept sending crap candidates, we told them we would stop working with them if they didn't filter them properly.

We did that to 3 recruiting companies. 2 of them shaped up and only send decent candidates. The other lost our business.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is so funny. A while ago recruiter (expensive one) which was working for me to fill up a senior position in my team (I was a dev manager in a big company) sent me an email trying to recruit me...

Regarding design candidates, there are some very very good designers working in big corporation and they don't have online portfolio or personal site (in many cases because HR does not allow it). For example, as far as know, designers working at Apple (which are probably people you want to hire) will not have online portfolio or personal blog site.

<comment><USER14> How could a startup take that sort of chance on someone, though? Hiring and firing is the most important job you have as you scale beyond a small team. A big mistake at this early stage could sink a startup, while getting it right could be the key to explosive success. Without a portfolio, you're guessing.

Also, someone who excels in the corporate world, where there are a dozen people working on the website, a dozen people working on any given project, and a couple of managers to make sure it all blends seamlessly, may not do so well in an environment where they are expected to create and deploy without guidance or oversight.

<comment><USER13> I completely agree that startup should minimize chance on hiring wrong people (that is reason I'm arguing that pay in startup must be market rate (no 20% less as many startup try) - otherwise your are gambling with the most important asset you have).

Yes, without a portfolio, you're guessing, but the problem with requiring candidate to have portfolio is that you will narrow the search to consulting/freelancer group which might not be the best pool of candidates.

Also many intelligent people which had startups or consulting end up working for corporations (Comcast, Apple, Oracle, etc.) because... because they are very very good and corporation pay with gold to get these kind of guys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> An open ended question I've wanted to ask for a while: when a startup (all of a sudden) needs to hire a bunch of engineers, what kind of things do those engineers work on? What requirements change so rapidly that doubling headcount becomes necessary?

<comment><USER16> It's not so much requirements changing as simply the timeframe for implementation. As I work at WePay (with the author of the post), I can at least comment on our specific growth needs:

* UI. As your customer base grows (along with your company's reputation), the overall expectation of a quality product grows with it. Bugs that are a minor irritation for some people are dealbreakers for others, especially when you're taking on an industry giant - so minor problems make you lose customers (often permanently, given the "tried them three years ago, buggy, will not come back" attitude of most people). We're taking on PayPal - which, while not exactly known for a quality user experience, is extremely stable. We found this problem increased by at least an order of magnitude when we launched our stores product.

* Testing. Front and back-end. Like above, growth = reputation = expectation of quality. Gotta keep things stable, and there are some things that have absolutely zero margin for error (I've spent three days to produce a three-line patch, simply because I had to be aware of and handle dozens of different scenarios, and making an error could result in the wrong amount of money ending up in an account. Yes, it worked correctly)

* Support. If you're dealing with people's money, it's kind of a big deal. I'll let you use your imagination.

* Fraud. A non-trivial portion of our payment review involves human screening. With a couple hundred payments per day, that's manageable. Hundreds or thousands per hour? Not so much. We have to make smarter automated rules to avoid human screening where possible, and improve the UX in our back-end review panels so that humans can make intelligent decisions faster where necessary. Good code can replace (or free up, or avoid the need for) several human reviewers, and good human reviewers are just as hard to hire as good programmers. This and support are currently our tightest bottlenecks, since they directly limit the number of payments we can process in a day.

* UX. Not so much "is it pretty", but "does it do what I want?", "will I use it again?", etc. A huge percentage of our user base is virally acquired (ex. someone who previously made a donation comes back and sets up his own donation campaign and starts collecting money), which costs us nothing. The more we can entice users to stay engaged or engage their friends, the faster we can grow. If we can turn a payment receipt into a customer acquisition medium (customer meaning person collecting money, not paying), that's more users at effectively no cost to us.

* Scaling (in the traditional code sense). Not just server load, but weird problems that simply don't happen except at volume - database row locking, update collisions, etc. Detecting and fixing those types of problems is much harder than most people would think.

* Sales + Marketing. Not only expanding your markets, but making sure that as you're spending more on those efforts that your spending is effective. Have you saturated a tiny niche? You need more niches, and bigger groups to go after.

* Compliance and legal stuff. Did you know that as your annual payment volume increases, you have to adhere to stricter security guidelines for PCI compliance? While we've always held ourselves above and beyond the strictest guidelines, you still have to deal with compliance audits and such that don't happen at lower payment volume.

* Analytics and metrics. We're past the point where we can randomly guess at what's working and what's not. While we don't hold ourselves up with internal red tape and politics, we do actually need to measure the efficacy of the changes we're making. It's no longer a single new customer bumping the graphs by 20%, so we need pretty fine-grained measurements for this kind of thing (thankfully, we have enough volume where we don't need to let stuff sit in production for weeks to get a statistically significant sample size)

There's plenty more than that - most is quite general, though some is very specific to our company (fraud, in particular), and obviously not all of it is specific to engineering. My day-to-day is around payment stability and related back-end services, which also includes fraud management and our admin panel. Working 50+ hour weeks - quite a bit less intense than the 80+ I did during YC, but actually sustainable - simply doesn't allot me enough bandwidth to do everything that I need to do (I'm only commenting because the original post is a thinly veiled recruiting attempt and I've got desks that need filling). I have to solve problems like "an API call to a credit card processor timed out, how can I resume this automatically in a way where I know we will not accidentally charge a card twice" and "what changes do I need to make to ensure that a data integrity check never fails?" while at the same time architecting data models for new features, interviewing developer candidates, refactoring old systems for reliability and future-proofing, and providing our support team tools that allow them to do their job but don't allow them access to sensitive information (see again: PCI regulations). And I don't even touch the front end anymore.

Obviously, we're hiring. wepay.com/jobs :)

<comment><USER17> For those reading, working at WePay was an amazing experience. They're a talented, high energy team, moving fast and aimed for success.

@Firehed you guys might also want to post your openings at <http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs> too. Miss you guys!

\--Andrew M

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you really want to get some amazing results from the recruiter do this:

1\. Go into their office and sit down and do some database searches with them. Sift through a mountain of resumes and then show them what to look for and what to ignore. Be sure to note down searches that bring back decent results.

2\. If you have existing staff that you want more of give the recruiter their resumes and sit each of them down to do an interview with the recruiter so they can be profiled.

3\. Once you have a stack of perfect candidates that they can use as a reference do some analysis and look for the previous employers that are statistically significant and add all of these to a list for headhunting. Also add any special skill sets that someone in the past may have which would predispose them to having skills you are after now.

4\. Sit down and write the recruitment ad together with the recruiter so it "calls" to the candidates you want. Make sure they CC every resume that comes in so you can quickly flick through them and ask them to screen any that look interesting. Recruiters will often reject perfect candidates because they do not fit the profile exactly or they miss something interesting.

The recruiter should now have a pile of information and reference points that they can use to seed numerous searches that have a much higher likelihood of delivering candidates of interest. If a submitted candidate is not right make sure to give feedback that can be used to further refine the search.

</comment><comment><USER19> I had seriously considered applying there 6 or 8 months ago, until I read this:

[http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/php-founder-rasmus- lerdorf-...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/php-founder-rasmus-lerdorf- joins-group-payments-startup-wepay/)

I've had enough professional nightmares as a result of Rasmus' technical decisions in the past, so I didn't pursue it further.

Food for thought for anyone considering working there (if indeed he's even still there - I haven't kept up).

</comment><comment><USER20> I've yet to meet a startup that had a good experience dealing with recruiters, at least when it comes to finding designers. I think the problem is that a lot of designers are self-taught and the ones that have the best credentials might not always produce the best work.

So I think design recruiting should be done by designers, and that's why I built Folyo (<http://folyo.me>). Companies that have submitted an offer have received an average of 8 replies each, and they're all from good designers with solid portfolios.

(By the way, if you're wondering WePay was one of the early users of the service, but the designers who replied were not in the US, and the visa issues proved to be too big an obstacle)

</comment><comment><USER21> This is so true. Having been on both the hiring and hired side, I take any requests from recruiters that are sourcing candidates for small companies with a gigantic grain of salt. It's unfortunate, but I know so many recruiters that, while well-intentioned, are just clueless about great candidates.

It's a litmus test I use for early-stage companies: who is doing the recruiting? At early-stage companies, having the right people is ultra- critical. It's not work to be outsourced at that stage.

</comment><comment><USER22> First, on the mail to the existing employee: get it, ha ha, recruiter so stupid. It's generally kind, though, to make room for the capacity for human error: it seems like a safe bet that the recruiter made a mistake and didn't think that would actually work. People make mistakes, even recruiters(!), especially when they send a fair amount of mail each day (which every one does, some smart and targeted, some dumb and spammy).

We're a boutique shop, we're super-careful, and we still make mistakes: one of my recruiters sent a mail about Client A to an employee of Client B. She screwed up - she saw an old resume that didn't have Client B's name, and didn't double-check on LinkedIn. The employee was pissed, Client B was pissed, I was pissed, my recruiter was embarrassed, but we all got over it, because we're adults.

Second, on finding an agency you like, I wrote a blog post on this a month back: [http://roosterpark.com/blog/hiring-a-recruiter-how-to- choose...](http://roosterpark.com/blog/hiring-a-recruiter-how-to-choose-your- staffing-firm/). dmk23 is right that you should be asking real questions: I've included some examples in the post. (I've never even submitted this to HN before. Wonder why.)

</comment><comment><USER23> Recruiters really aren't the best route for hiring designers anyway, but you know this. ;)

<comment><USER24> dribbble!

<comment><USER25> Absolutely. I think spending some time looking around dribble is a great way to find people. It seems to be where designers hang out these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So after trying to use a variety of recruiters at tastylabs, we have discovered that the vast majority of recruiters do no recruiting, but instead just do sourcing and leave it up to us to actually filter and recruit.

So far as I can tell, they just get resumes off linkedin and make calls all day. Very low-value for us.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's more likely the recruiter just didn't realize that the employee had already been placed at WePay. For whatever reason, communication at recruiting firms is terrible. I suspect it has something to do with recruiters not wanting their coworkers to steal their commission.

</comment><comment><USER28> Recruiters are playing a numbers game and don't have the bandwidth to be filtering candidates. The "only send me candidates with a portfolio" criteria is completely objective. Imagine a recruiter trying to decide if a programmer is any good? (e.g.: "I'm sorry, but the client [for this job writing java software] is looking for a candidate with Oracle 9i experience"...when my previous job had been using Oracle 8i. It wasn't a DBA position and SQL had not changed much, and both companies were using ORMs anyway!)

For a startup, I think your early employees are so critical that you have to do the recruiting job yourself. I know it is seductive to think that you can outsource it, but you really can't.

These days you've got an entire social network -- LinkedIn -- designed to have people help refer other people for jobs.

Further, it was very early in my career that I just completely gave up on working with recruiters, and long before social networks even existed. I think that other good programmers probably are the same way-- why send your resume to people who will retype it with typos just to remove your name, lie to you, and send it randomly to hiring managers without talking to you first?

Perfectly good blog post and amusing story. But I think that the startup culture would do well to evolve away from using recruiters and rely more on networking.

<comment><USER29> _But I think that the startup culture would do well to evolve away from using recruiters and rely more on networking._

The problem with that is that it makes it even more incestuous and hard to enter from outside. Yes, yes, if you can't find an employee to introduce you, you're not trying hard enough, etc, just like pitching a VC.

But seriously, given how hard a time we're having getting new blood now, making it _harder_ to get in is negative progress. It's a lose.

<comment><USER28> You make a good point. I wasn't intending to promote incestuousness, and to limit potential hires to ones who got referred.... if I ever get an email out of the blue from someone looking for a job, I'll help them, and I'll be keen to see if they might be a good fit. Someone with some gumption like that is automatically more interesting to me than someone who comes from a recruiter.

Also, kids in high school, new college grads, self taught hackers.... show me someone with a strong drive and I'm half sold.

So, no, I didn't mean to imply any sort of incestuousness... I'd like the opposite. I'm interested in a lot of people that reciters would filter out. "No college degree? Trashcan!" For me, its "No college degree because he spent the four years building a crappy startup that totally failed stupidly? Hire 'em!"

PS- please don't take this as me trying to recruit. I'm not. We're not ready for that, yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "First, if the candidate didn't have an online portfolio, personal site, or blog, I didn't want to see a resumé. "

The author is an idiot.

ETA: I had a program manager who thought that having a blog meant the developer was an accomplished/published author. The developer quit for having to work 10 hour days after the first week and a half. Again, idiot.

<comment><USER31> I agree with the author. If they didn't have an online portfolio, personal site, or blog, then I probably wouldn't want to see a resume. To me it shows that they're driven and they trust their work enough to have it public for anyone to judge. You also get a sense of what the person is like, rather than what their experience is like.

<comment><USER32> I'm ambivalent about this. Requiring an online portfolio for a designer does make sense, but a blog? The only "drive" that attention whoring on a blog shows is the drive to get attention.

<comment><USER33> He said " _or_ blog," not " _and_ blog" — some people prefer to show off their work in blog format rather than a traditional portfolio.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stephen Colbert Weighs in on SOPA - <AUTHOR> http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/403465/december-01-2011/stop-online-piracy-act

<comment><USER2> Part two is here: [http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report- videos/40346...](http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report- videos/403466/december-01-2011/stop-online-piracy-act---danny-goldberg--- jonathan-zittrain)

</comment><comment><USER3> Unavailable in Canada. The bordered internet sucks.

<comment><USER4> Also unavailable in the UK. So, presumably, this is US-only. <ironic> Definitely one way to stop online piracy. Hopefully, it'll be set free on youtube within 24-hrs. Funny old world we live in at the moment.</comment></comment>


Why I'll miss a world where books make the first move - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2261955/

<comment><USER2> Yeah, yeah. Enough with this. Why do all criticisms of e-readers by book lovers seem to be overly nostalgic? The problem is obvious to me: These people are book lovers. That is, they love the books themselves more than the information in them. This leads to criticism like "oh, but you can't get that feel and smell you get when you open a book" or "you can't show off your intellectual awesomeness to your mates-to be" as opposed to constructive criticism like "note-taking on e-readers is still much more cumbersome than normal books". For those of us who like cheap, waste-efficient and accessible information, this is an improvement. The rest can go hang out with the people who complain that youth is decadent and that we're amidst insurmountable moral decay.

<comment><USER3> Of even greater concern to me than the loss of the tactile experience that books give to readers is that, to my knowledge, there's nothing equivalent to the public library system for e-readers. Libraries are important for any youth, but particularly for poor and disadvantaged youth. They're a _huge_ democratizing force, providing mountains of information and education for free to even the poorest members of society. Thanks to the prevalence of DRM on ebooks, I think the odds are against us seeing anything as universal and far reaching for ebooks.

Ebooks are great for the privileged middle and upper class. But thanks to DRM they lack the lend-ability and share-ability of real books, and they require a relatively expensive ebook reader. Even if libraries have the ability to lend every ebook ever published, it'll still require kids using the library to have a relatively expensive and fragile e-book reader. With real books, all they have to bring is an inquisitive mind.

With real books, even poor and disadvantaged children have access to books, not just through libraries, but also through borrowing, and sharing books from friends, relatives, neighbors, etc. And because most books are cheap to the point of damn near disposable in our society, most kids can count on getting gifts of books, hand-me-down used books, etc. Heck, it's pretty easy to scrape up an enough for a paperback on an allowance, lawn jobs, etc.

This worries me a lot. While I know that the circumstances I grew up in are very privileged compared to most of the world, we were poor by US standards. My family was often on some form of public assistance, and there's no way in hell I could have afforded a Kindle, Nook, etc. if such a thing had existed in those days. Growing up, the local public library was my teacher, my escape, my best friend. I'm saddens me to think kids in the near future may not have access to that same wonderful resource.

<comment><USER4> What about the internet and hand-me down computers?

It's about 40 bucks a month for a decent internet connection right? Maybe the computer is worth three furniture pieces.

<comment><USER3> Geesh! How out of touch with reality are you?!? Do you have any idea how many families in the US can't afford $40 bucks a month? That's assuming that the parents are supportive of buying a computer and an internet connection. If not, the kid on his own is fucked if he's gonna need a computer and 40 dollar a month internet connection to get access to the library.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh come on, not enough social information? _How much more social information do you people need?_ Want to know what someone listens to? No need to trawl their car's floor for album covers -- not only do they have their favorite albums on Last.fm, they have a scrobble of every play made in the past couple weeks. There's already a "favorite books" section in Facebook, how long until ebook readers have live integration with the rest of that?

</comment><comment><USER6> A similar piece by James Wolcott was posted to HN last year or so.

I do have the urge to see what people are reading around me (usually on public transportation) and find that aging eyes have done more to impede me than e-readers. Maybe if I rode through a more prosperous end of town it would be different.

</comment><comment><USER4> It would be interesting to live in a world where a library is just a storage of e-reader made to look like books.

Just pick up an e-reader and it will sync to your phone looking at your wishlist and selecting the first one off the bat. Or use your phone to choose the book you want to read on the spot.</comment>


Reciprocal Space a.k.a. K-Space a.k.a. Reciprocal Lattice - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_lattice <comment><AUTHOR> Excerpts:

"In physics, the reciprocal lattice represents the Fourier transform of another lattice"

"In normal usage, the initial lattice (whose transform is represented by the reciprocal lattice) is usually a periodic spatial function in real-space and is also known as the direct lattice. While the direct lattice exists in real- space and is what one would commonly understand as a physical lattice, the reciprocal lattice exists in reciprocal space (also known as momentum space or less commonly as K-space...)"

"The reciprocal of a reciprocal lattice is the original direct lattice, since the two are Fourier transforms of each other."

<comment><AUTHOR> Update: Strange idea: What if this is the pattern that atoms, or rather, centres of atomic force (call them by whatever name you will) are laid out inside of elements?

In other words... what if this is the patterning of space that creates elements?</comment></comment>


Written in the skies: why quantum mechanics might be wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080515/full/news.2008.829.html <comment><USER2> unfortunately you have to pay to read the article. Too bad.

<comment><USER3> Here's an excerpt:

        But Valentini thinks that the stalemate could be broken by analysing the cosmic microwave background — the relic radiation left behind after the Big Bang. The cosmic microwave background contains hot and cold temperature spots that were generated by quantum fluctuations in the early Universe and then amplified when the Universe expanded.

        Using the principles of quantum mechanics, cosmologists have calculated how these spots should be distributed.

        However, Valentini's calculations show that the hidden-variables theory might give a different answer. "Any violation of quantum mechanics in the early Universe would have a knock-on effect that we could see today," says Valentini.

        Almost all measurements of the cosmic microwave background seem to fit well with the predictions of quantum mechanics, says Valentini. But intriguingly, a distortion that fits one of Valentini's proposed signatures for a failure of quantum mechanics was recently detected by Amit Yadav and Ben Wandelt at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (see 'Deflating inflation?'). That result has yet to be confirmed by independent analyses, but it is tantalizing, Valentini adds.

        "It's far too early to say that this is definite evidence of a breakdown in quantum mechanics — but it is a possibility," he says.

I don't get it. If a theory has great predictive and explanatory power, it's not really "wrong". Better, more accurate models are a good thing, as is nipping bad ones in the bud before they have a chance to take root. But when you have a theory that is pedagogically viable and empirically verified, that's a much better point to progress from than rejecting anything which isn't completely bulletproof and without flaws.

Didn't Einstein say "all models are wrong,some models are useful?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great. These are incredibly exciting new developments.

There was a great one I read a few days ago about our conception of space as a continuum being an approximation. Space might be better understood as being quantized.

[http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080514-black- holes.htm...](http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080514-black-holes.html)

There is also the idea of doubly special relativity, in which there is a shortest unit of space, which all frames of reference measure the same that is analogous to the speed of light being the fastest light can go and all frames measure the same.

When I studied philosophy in college, my interest was philosophy of mind/consciousness studies. My papers were mostly papers that examined the philosophical implications of assuming space was quantized and doubly special relativity were true on theories of consciousness. I had to waste entirely too much effort arguing that philosophers should pay really close attention to the science when doing mind or ontology. I'm excited to see that these developments are unfolding. This means there is a huge space in academic philosophy to merge this new information in physics with philosophical theories about consciousness, spacetime, and ontology.

These developments might indicate that once in a generation revolutions in physics and philosophy are imminent over the next five to eight years (assuming the academic philosophers can hold the circle jerks long enough to hear and grok what the physics people are saying.).</comment>


Now Hiring - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@zip/now-hiring-50e2f743c594

<comment><USER2> Needs much more specificity wrt the young white guy requirements; you're not optimising enough. You want young white guys, but that's way too general. You need them to be unmarried (no kids, either) with no negotiating skills, and into algo, dubstep, typography, and expensive road bikes. Low self-esteem is also crucial.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Passable, but full of cliches. The race and sex references are also lazy and overdone.

<comment><USER3> I find that "Dear Future Homejoy Engineer"[1] sets a high bar.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794956](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794956)

<comment><USER4> Oh dear god, I remember that. I wonder how that conversation went internally after that....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "top-tier rich white men" this is not funny, this is stupid. I stopped reading after that.

</comment><comment><USER6> I really did not understand much from the article. What do they exactly want? ELI5 anyone?

</comment><comment><USER7> As a fairly new person to the tech industry, I have to say that the average tech job from a dev perspective has a very laid back feeling and usually they try to cater to my happiness. Maybe this is because of who I'm applying to though.

</comment><comment><USER8> I thought this would be an article about the state of hiring in silicon valley or the tech industry. Is this supposed to be sarcasm? It's actually hard to tell and makes the author look bad.

</comment><comment><USER9> Remind me of poor peter

</comment><comment><USER10> Lol, reminds me of my last start up job...

Good thing I quit.</comment>


The "Chad" bug - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+MarcBevand/posts/fBfCsaXReH5 <comment><USER2> This is remarkable. I always find it interesting when bugs like this occur.

It reminds me of a hackathon I attended where a food ordering startup (I forget the name, but they were chosen to feed us dinner that night) had a similar bug, which baffled me beyond belief. Without going into crazy detail about my password, it typically follows a certain pattern but is never the same across websites. For some reason, the website kept saying my password was invalid. It met all the password requirements that the website asked for (length, capital letter, etc.).

I forget the exact details, but it ended up being the exact location of a capital letter, the location of a number, or some combination of both. I could never figure out how a bug like that could even be coded up. My best guess is that it was some poorly-formed regex.

> Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular > expressions." Now they have two problems.

<comment><USER3> Besides the usual regex aches and pains, the grammar for email addresses is _far_ more complex than most people realize. According to a highly-voted Stack Overflow answer [1], the current RFC-specified grammar for addresses can't even be matched with regex alone. Combining the edge cases of the grammar with (say) Unicode normalization sounds like a recipe for hours of fun.

[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/201323/using-a- regular-e...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/201323/using-a-regular- expression-to-validate-an-email-address)

<comment><USER4> I find that quite unbelievable. When I had a similar problem last year, the first resource I found was a W3C specification[1] about <input type=email>. The specification clearly states that email addresses should match:

        /^[a-zA-Z0-9.!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+(?:\.[a-zA-Z0-9-]+)*$/

Since this is an official W3C doc, I see no reason why people shouldn't use this.

Edit: There is also a version by WHATWG[2] here:

        /^[a-zA-Z0-9.!#$%&'*+\/=?^_`{|}~-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9](?:[a-zA-Z0-9-]{0,61}[a-zA-Z0-9])?(?:\.[a-zA-Z0-9](?:[a-zA-Z0-9-]{0,61}[a-zA-Z0-9])?)*$/

It apparently does a more thorough validation than the W3C one in the domain part, but the difference between the two is not apparent in practice.

[1]: [http://www.w3.org/TR/html- markup/input.email.html](http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/input.email.html) [2]: [https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/forms.html#e-mail- sta...](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/forms.html#e-mail- state-\(type=email\))

<comment><USER5> The email input regexp is only about matching the atext@domain subpart of the syntax. The full email address parsers are about parsing the full allowed syntax you can put in an email to: field that includes address lists and display names.

Also W3C produced HTML specs are hardly gospel about email-related things (but I don't know whether there's anything wrong in this case).

<comment><USER4> But the question is, if a signup form is asking for your email address, will you type in your name, a pair of angle brackets, and then your email address in between? That's simply not what the web developer wants here.

<comment><USER6> Will I type that in? No. Will I copy-paste my email from my address book program? Quite possibly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I bet there's a hashtable involved somewhere, and Chad's address just happens to hash to, like, 0x00000, and it turns out when that happens, there's a bug.

As a workaround, I bet you can use CHAD@... or chad+blah@...

<comment><AUTHOR> A hashtable bug seems possible.

(Hangouts Dialer still does not see him if saved as CHAD@. It sees him when saved as chad+bla@ but it's annoying because then his email is wrong in my contact list as his email provider does not support + aliases.)

<comment><USER8> You could try chad()@. () is an empty e-mail address comment which, by the RFC, is supposed to be ignored during delivery. Not every mail server supports it, but it's worth a try until they fix that bug.

<comment><USER9> Email address comment? What the hell were they thinking?

<comment><USER10> Think about pre-outlook days, you may want some notes to remember who you are emailing.

<comment><USER11> I'm thinking about it. Still doesn't make sense to put it _in_ the address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's a pity there's no way to report bugs like this to Google.

The only way I've found of getting anything resolved is to forward issues to a friend inside the company, or hope that you can write a blog post which gets enough attention.

I get that filtering and testing millions of random bug reports from all corners of the Internet is hard - but it's a problem which Google desperately needs to solve if it wants to retain the trust of its users.

<comment><USER13> (Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.)

> It's a pity there's no way to report bugs like this to Google.

This is a popular myth.

General instructions are here: [https://www.google.com/tools/feedback/intl/en/](https://www.google.com/tools/feedback/intl/en/)

In this particular case, it's an android app, so what you do is tap on the hamburger menu, hit "help and feedback", then "send feedback".

<comment><USER12> Having reported many bugs this way - I don't think I've ever had a response, let alone seen anything fixed.

Looking at Android (OS) issues - [https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list?can=2&q=&sort=...](https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list?can=2&q=&sort=-stars+-opened&colspec=ID%20Status%20Priority%20Owner%20Summary%20Stars%20Reporter%20Opened) \- it's clear that the majority of bugs are ignored. Even when they're well described and affect multiple users / devices.

<comment><USER13> We do not routinely release information about what happens to bugs, so you should not expect a response. I've certainly seen bugs reported on these channels be fixed. I cannot release any statistics.

> Looking at Android (OS) issues - > [https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list?can=2&q=&sort=...](https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list?can=2&q=&sort=..). > - it's clear that the majority of bugs are ignored.

A quick glance at that page appears to disprove this claim. If you flip it to display "all issues", there are 206689 bugs in that tracker at the moment, of which 44583 are open. That tells you that 79% of all bugs filed have been closed - so, at least 79% of bugs were not ignored.

Note that this tracker is for the operating system only, and does not include any of the Google apps that the feedback system covers.

<comment><USER12> > We do not routinely release information about what happens to bugs, so you > should not expect a response.

Which goes back to my original point about customer trust. If you know I've reported a bug, why would you deliberately not tell me that it has been fixed?

> so, at least 79% of bugs were not ignored

Well, take a look at some of the ones which have been closed - [https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/2on1fe/google_c...](https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/2on1fe/google_closed_11889_android_bugs_last_48_hours/) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8803118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8803118)

I know a good many people who work in Google - they're all smart and dedicated. But there's something about the corporate culture which imposes a "don't listen to external feedback" mindset.

It's your OS and they're your apps - you can do what you like with them. But don't be surprised when users stop trusting you to listen to their concerns.

<comment><USER14> > If you know I've reported a bug, why would you deliberately not tell me that > it has been fixed?

Sounds like a typical fallacy of end-users looking at software. Assuming that the developer deliberately is denying you a feature, rather than having simply not spent the engineering time to make it possible.

In this case, for instance, it could be that the pipeline to get from external feedback channels to Google's internal bug-trackers very one-way and its hard to go back. Or, there's a disconnect between when the fix ships and when the ticket is closed, and keeping track of the entire chain of data requires some work. Or, there's no easy distinguishing features on bugs that came externally to make them easily identifiable once fixed. Or, there's no process yet for an automated response that says the bug is fixed (should it provide more detail). Etc.

<comment><USER12> Hence, my first comment.

> I get that filtering and testing millions of random bug reports from all > corners of the Internet is hard - but it's a problem which Google > desperately needs to solve if it wants to retain the trust of its users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if this is related to i18n or country lookup. Chad is the only semi- common English-language name that's also a country name, that I can think of.

<comment><USER16> Jordan, Georgia. I feel like if this were the cause then the bug would be a lot more common.

My guess is the dialler hashes some parts of the contact to get a UUID, but for this contact it happens to be outside the range the dialler can look at - perhaps off-by-one, where the dialler looks for UUIDs of 1 and above and this happens to hash to 0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Somewhat similarly, I encountered a possible bug in Google Docs many years back. I was reorganizing my documents, and I temporarily changed one of the names to "delete". Poof -- I could not longer find it anywhere (or even search for words that I knew were in it). I forget how I got back to it (maybe via my browser history), but I changed the name a bit, and then the document was "found".

This could have simply been a race case unrelated to the filename, but it's much more amusing to speculate that it was due to hack introduced during development. I now regret not trying to reproduce it, but I was pretty frustrated after I found my document again. I did contact support, but didn't hear anything back.

</comment><comment><USER18> This reminds me my favorite name while testing: "McNulla". I have seen quite a few webforms which had a regex to remove any NULL string, because of which it would not take this name as it has a "Null" string in the name.

<comment><USER19> I knew a family w/ the last name of "Null" from high school. I wonder, from time to time, if they have suboptimal experiences using the 'net.

<comment><USER20> Obligatory: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3900224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3900224)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > _I exported the contacts and looked at the raw Google CSV data. One of the 2 > problematic contacts had a whitespace character at the end of its phone > number. I removed it. Bingo, Dialer can now find it!_

This is kind of horrifying. Google being tripped up by trailing whitespace?

</comment><comment><USER22> When I was setting up an account on Comcast's website, I was consistently getting an nondescript internal server error when submitting the form.

Took me quite awhile and many failed attempts to find that Comcast will throw an error when your requested username contains "comcast".

<comment><USER23> i wonder if that is to stop people from using names like comcastSucks or worse.

<comment><USER24> It may not have been the rationale, but it sure must be the most common use- case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular > expressions." Now they have two problems.

jwz's wit was a lot of fun in the early 2000s but that quote is too often used wrong.

This quote is not about regexps, it's about using wrong tools for the job. Using it without context makes it sound dumb. "Well, what if regexp is exactly the right solution for that problem?".

<comment><USER6> A regexp is almost always the wrong solution. It's a way of representing a finite state machine _that obscures the states_ , which are the only valuable part of the state machine abstraction (they're inherently incomprehensible otherwise). And most implementations these days have random extensions, meaning you have all the performance and safety issues of a turing-complete programming language - but a much worse UX. They may have made sense in the days of ed and the teletype, when a terse incomprehensible expression was better than a slightly longer readable one, but they don't now.

<comment><USER25> > A regexp is almost always the wrong solution.

That's quite a sweeping statement.

Sure, complex regexps can be hard to read but state machines are just hard to read for humans in general, whatever the form.

What do you recommend for parsing simple text entries, then?

<comment><USER6> If there are no existing libraries, parser combinators. More verbose but so much more readable, and they make it much easier to parse into an actual structure rather than a list of match groups.

<comment><USER25> > More verbose but so much more readable

First of all, "more readable" is extremely subjective.

Second, there are a lot of different parser combinators, all with very different syntaxes.

Finally, parser combinators are readable by people familiar with them and regexps are readable by people familiar with them. Regexps are also much more widespread and approachable. And very often, writing a parser combinator to parse a simple text entry is way overkill.

There are many good reasons why regexps are so popular.

<comment><USER6> > Finally, parser combinators are readable by people familiar with them and > regexps are readable by people familiar with them. Regexps are also much > more widespread and approachable

You don't have to be familiar with them to find something like:

        def emailAddress = userPart ~ "@" ~ hostnamePart ^^
          {(username, at, hostname) => EmailAddress(username, hostname)}

clearer than any regex. Named capture groups help a little bit but I've never seen people using them (and they don't have a consistent syntax across regex implementations either).

> And very often, writing a parser combinator to parse a simple text entry is > way overkill.

Disagree. They can be very much a one-liner.

<comment><USER25> I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't know parser combinators tell you the snippet above is readable.

First of all, what language is this? Well, I know, but you seem to forget that the parser combinator syntax varies per language. What's the equivalent syntax for Java? Or for Python? What about a language that doesn't have a parser combinator library? Or one that has several ones, all slightly different?

I think you're falling prey to the specialist fallacy: you're obviously very comfortable with parser combinators but you've forgotten how long it took you to get there and you now see them as an ultimate solution to all problems without realizing their downsides.

<comment><USER6> > First of all, what language is this? Well, I know, but you seem to forget > that the parser combinator syntax varies per language. What's the equivalent > syntax for Java? Or for Python? What about a language that doesn't have a > parser combinator library? Or one that has several ones, all slightly > different?

I very deliberately didn't mention the language or the library, because I think the snippet is readable without knowing that. Minor syntax differences between libraries matter when writing, but not when reading, and reading is more important. (And it's not like there aren't several slightly different implementations of regexes)

I'm not that committed to parser combinators - I'd be happy to consider alternatives - but anything where you a) name the things you're capturing b) can easily combine several small parsers to make a bigger parser will have a huge readability, testability and maintainability advantage over regexes.

<comment><USER26> > anything where you a) name the things you're capturing b) can easily combine > several small parsers to make a bigger parser will have a huge readability, > testability and maintainability advantage over regexes

I think many regex libraries have named captures and in most languages you can either concatenate regexes or build regexes from strings which in turn can be built from concatenation. Furthermore, I thought building regexes by concatenation of smaller pieces was a commonly recommended technique for improving readability (I have no data on whether the recommendation is commonly followed or not, of course).

<comment><USER6> I've never seen either of them in real-world code. Concatenation is something but I think it's a lot less flexible - if you have a parser for something and want to make a parser for a comma-separated list of that thing, with parser combinators that's one call, whereas with a regex I don't think the string- manipulation is straightforward, and would the named capture groups still work if they were now being hit multiple times?

<comment><USER26> You're definitely right that concatenation is less composable, and I agree that parser combinators are more powerful. I was just pointing out there are somethings you can do in regexes to make things more readable.

And about captures inside repetition: I don't see any reason they couldn't capture a list of strings instead of a string in dynamically typed languages but in all regex libraries I'm aware of they do something that seems useless to me: they only capture the last occurrence! (They probably just overwrite the capture on each repetition.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I didn't get the reference. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_(paper)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_\(paper\))

<comment><USER28> Ohh, I didn't get it at first either. Thought of the country.

Best image to explain a hanging "chad": [http://images1.fanpop.com/images/photos/1400000/Halloween- ho...](http://images1.fanpop.com/images/photos/1400000/Halloween-how-i-met- your-mother-1469279-1008-758.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Do people with other android version or the phone make face the same issue while using this email id ?

</comment><comment><USER30> Many sites don't support the plus in email addresses ("+" = comment, supported e.g. by GMail). Not so funny if the register process works but the login or password reset features are broken.

Example: a site let me register and login with the plus. But resetting the password was hard, I had to escape the plus to get it working.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is that "chad@" or "chаd@" (homoglyphs)?

<comment><AUTHOR> No homoglyphs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> So, when computing power increases, we just add useless parsing at every level of software, decreasing performance and causing bugs like these.

</comment><comment><USER33> I also see this with one of my brothers' names which is Olly <surname>.

</comment><comment><USER34> A potential workaround...quote the local part:

"chad"@example.com

It seems to be supported by Exchange, gmail, and a few other MTA's I tested, and gets routed to the right place.

</comment><comment><USER35> Was it the Chad?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_79BtELxB2k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_79BtELxB2k)

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if this is the only case where the name/first name of the contact is exactly the same as the recipient's address.

</comment><comment><USER36> regex bugs are bad, I have been bitten by one before. Its pure technical debt

</comment><comment><USER37> The Lando system?

</comment><comment><USER38> Android is a wasteland.</comment>