Fix Things, Never Force It: Lessons From Grandpa - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/fix-things-never-force-it-lessons-from-grandpa/276873/

<comment><USER2> It really grates on me to get to the end of a heartfelt article like this and smack right into a corporate plug like "…and that's why I created iFixit.com - your free repair guide for everything!"

I'm not begrudging the founder of a company the opportunity to talk about who he is and why he created his business, but the way you do it matters. Is this an article about iFixit.com? Fine, I'd probably be interested in that, go ahead and let me know, then tell me about your grandfather who inspired you.

If it's an article about your grandfather, then just say something like "he inspired me to create my own business that helps people learn to fix things." You don't have to give yourself a plug. Lastly, if you absolutely _must_ plug your company name, at least try to do it without making it sound like a line of ad copy. After a few hundred words tugging on my emotions and making me care about your personal story, it feels like a betrayal of my trust at the end to leave me wondering if I just read an advertorial.

<comment><USER3> This community doesn't really seem to have a culture of making smooth plugs. I see pretty brazen plugs on a regular basis.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, but this is _The Atlantic_ , a 156-year-old magazine with a reputation for literary and journalistic excellence. It's discomfiting to get to the end of an article in a publication of its caliber and be left wondering "what did I just read?"

<comment><USER4> _" a 156-year-old magazine with a reputation for literary and journalistic excellence"_

They've been coasting on that reputation without maintaining it for a decade or more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not an old man, but I'm not young anymore, either. Maybe it's "these kids today", or maybe it's that I now live in an urban/suburban area much different than rural area where I grew up, and where I spent the start of my adult life. But for now the inability of those around me to fix things stands out to me. Fixing a leaking faucet, laying a laminate floor, putting a roof rack on a car, all of it gets hired out by nearly everyone I know. Or just throw stuff out and buy a new one.

Maybe it's because we're all making good money now and choose to spend our time doing something else while someone gets paid to do the things we choose not to. Friends were going to put in laminate floor. I told them, "it's so easy, you'd be embarrassed to pay someone else to do it". They were going to pay someone anyway until the contractor flaked out. To their credit, with a lot of my tools and guidance, they went ahead and did the job, and got a lot of satisfaction out of it.

I'm not lamenting anything. It's more an observation of how many in my current circle are surprised I can install my own garage door opener, and how it would be assumed I would of course do so by those around me not so many years ago.

<comment><USER3> I think it took hold so quickly because it is a self-reinforcing cycle. Picture a well-to-do father who makes good money and spends too much time at work. He elects to outsource things like laying tile and repairing his car, because he spends little enough time with his family as it is. As a result, what opportunity do his children have to learn these things? Thus, over the course of just one or two generations, you move from "valuing your time" to "completely unable to perform repairs".

It doesn't surprise me, either. My father was very much that type of father. I luckily picked up a lot of the skills on my own volition, but already I choose to pay someone else to replace my radiator when I could do it myself, even though I am yet unencumbered by family duties.

<comment><USER5> That's a really good point, not only does it not get done DIY-style, it doesn't get passed on. I think that's where the problem lies with some of my friends: they don't even realize DIY is an option because they've never known anyone to do such things. It's one thing to think "yeah, I could do it but I choose not to" (I think it myself at times), it's another to not even know that a professional is not required.

As for family time, and I say this as one without kids, if the kids are old enough I can't think of a more valuable way to spend time than teaching your kids to build something.

<comment><USER3> _I can 't think of a more valuable way to spend time..._

Well, this firstly requires the kid is interested, secondly that the task at hand is approachable by a kid (e.g. painting instead of transmission work), and thirdly that you have the time to tutor them while you make the repairs.

Not to say it should not be done, oh no! But it is not always an option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _> He went to work for IBM, overseeing the construction of their big plant in South San Jose. A while back, the entire compound was razed. They replaced it with a Lowe's and a parking lot._

Let's thank the baby boomer generation, a.k.a. The Dumbest Generation of Narcissists In The History of The World[1].

[1] - [http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/10/the_dumbest_generatio...](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/10/the_dumbest_generation_is_only.html)

<comment><USER7> I live down the road from that Lowes. Let me tell you, it is pretty convenient. In fact, that entire area (much more than just a Lowes and parking lot) is the old Hitachi hard drive plant - it is now being converted into a massive number of homes and shops[1], which South San Jose needs.

[1] [http://www.sjdistrict2.com/index.php?option=com_content&view...](http://www.sjdistrict2.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=249:village- oaks-san-jose&catid=1:latest-news)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow - that was a very meaningful contribution. It certainly shows Kyle Wiens to be a man of purpose.

</comment><comment><USER9> Not exactly the same thing, but this reminds me of advice from my own grandpa, who was handy with tools on his farm. He saw me straining to loosen a nut with a wrench. "Don't use force, just get a bigger hammer," he said and handed me a pipe to fit over the end of the wrench to increase my mechanical advantage.

<comment><USER10> Sticking nuts and bolts are the _perfect meditation_.

Pedant alert: consider a beefy breaker bar or a torque wrench for that mechanical advantage. A pipe slipped on the end of a wrench has a habit of slipping off or breaking the wrench, and possibly causing injury to mechanism, mechanic, etc.

But yeah, I'm with ya. It's amazing the satisfaction we get from doing stuff ourselves and from the "working smarter" stuff our elders can teach us, if we'll only slow down, ask, and listen with care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love this. It brings back many memories of my own grandfather, a former railway engineer teaching me how to set up model train tracks, how to properly hammer nails, how to drive and so many other things.

I definitely don't regret choosing software for myself, but I cherish all he taught me.

</comment><comment><USER12> In high school auto shop we had a different (and contradictory) mantra: "Make it fit!"

Sometimes you've gotta force it...</comment>


Coffee market report (October 2019) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ico.org/documents/cy2019-20/cmr-1019-e.pdf <comment><USER2> Unspectacular, but interesting. I definitely like ICO for International Coffee Organization...

</comment><comment><USER3> How to buy true quality roasted beans that don't cost so so so much money?

<comment><USER4> My biggest piece of advice is to roast your own beans. It's not that difficult, although you need a place where you can generate a lot of smoke.

Most of the price in coffee is distribution. Even fair trade farmers make very little money. There are some distributors who work directly with farmers and if you buy green beans from them, the price is not very high. There are many places on the internet where you can buy them.

You can store green beans for a whole year, or even more, with no problems. After you roast the beans, the flavour develops for about 5-10 days and then gets worse. After 2-3 weeks, the coffee isn't very good. When you buy roasted beans, often it is already 2 weeks old before you get it.

Some people like 2 week old roasted coffee beans because it is less acid and many unfamiliar flavours have gone away. But once you get used to freshly roasted coffee, it's much, much better and it's hard to go back.

If you know a place that roasts its own beans, you can usually ask to buy something that was just roasted (maybe only 1 or 2 days ago), but often it is expensive. I usually buy coffee beans in Japan at a company called Tonya. They will roast the beans for you while you watch (they have a nice fluid bed roaster that can do small batches). It's also not very expensive.

But, if you don't have that kind of place, it's best to roast your own. There are many websites on the internet that will show you how to do it.</comment></comment>


A Web Site Designed  MILESTONES, INVOLVEMENT, IMPORTANCE & TIMELINE - <AUTHOR> http://www.simplesquare.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/A-Web-Site-Designed.pdf <comment><USER2> That would be Waterfall, in a prettier format. What's the point of this?</comment>


Follow up: Will program Ruby for food - <AUTHOR>

A little background
A week ago I did a little social experiment here in HN: I asked for food & shelter in exchange of some Ruby programming, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3007650
Even tough I stated little about me and my skills (it was a very broad and general announce), I quickly got some answers here in the comments, some of them read with real concern, others where helpful, and others were just curious.
But, to tell you the truth, I think the most valuable ones were the ones I got directly in my email. I think it says something about people that actually took their time to visit the profile of an unknown guy and send him an email.
In there I received various offers from various places around the world (even Mexico my own country!): USA, Brazil, Amsterdam and Germany. There were some offers for remote tutoring too (never done that, but I think I'm good at mentoring so, we will see how it goes if it flies).
The decision
After and initial sort out, some early emails & chats, I decided on a german team: Daniel + Nicole (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dakna).
We have been in communication and we all are looking forward to making this experience possible. They told me the arrengements for my stay over there are been taken care of already. What can I say? Never been to Berlin, I'm so excited!
What I noticed is that my plans rang with them, even said they'd love to do the same some day, and I hope they will.
What are you up to, really?
My plans as of now:

  1. Travel to some place where I can be of help during 1 to 3 months.
  2. Blog about it and maybe make a reputation (or
     destroy it in the process, hehe) by letting my
     hosts share how the experience was for them.
  3. ???
  4. Profit & repeat!

 What do you need?
As I said in my previous post, I need a place to sleep and food. That's the basic stuff, if something else can be provided I'll be happy to have it. If I can be helped with travel expenses then I can get there faster.
Also, I'd love to make some money after I've proved myself to whoever I'm working with, if that is possible, but it is not necessary. Right now I think it is enough for me to go around the world knowing new places, meeting new people, and appreciating cultural differences.
Maybe, after a while, if everything goes as planned and a network is established, well I'd love to do it with less friction and maybe with a little pay thrown in?
Personally I can say that I want to start this project with my best effort, really make a difference wherever I go, help make your prototype (or app) a reality. If you need tutoring or mentoring I want to make sure you really learn what needs to be learnt. I think I have the skills necessary for this if you really want to do it too.
A little more about me
I'll talk a little bit about my expertise: I consider myself a full stack developer, from backend all the way to frontend. Mix in a little of web design, UI design, UX concerns. Some people would said: Well rounded.
Currently I work with:

  Operating system: Ubuntu 11.04
  Database: PostgreSQL
  Editor: Emacs 24
  Code versioning: git
  Language: Ruby 1.9
  Web framework: Rails 3.1
  Browser: Chrome dev channel
  Client side stuff: Javascript, backbonejs, underscorejs,
  jqueryui and soon I'll add Coffeescript to this list.
 I'm also interested (not proficient) in: game development, AI (will take the AI class that starts on October 10th, so if you are interested we could be study partners too!), mobile dev, security, procedural generation, and the interaction that could come up between this areas.
I'd like to get into some of these: photography, drawing, paiting, electronic music. Area of expertise exchange anyone?
Well, that's it. Any questions you have, you can reach me in the email provided in my profile, or comment here.
--
Best regards, Víctor
Blog | http://lobotuerto.com/blog <comment><USER2> hey Victor,

sometimes you just meet someone with similiar desires, plans and values. this is what the internet is all about: connecting those people, so the result is more than the sum of all parts.

we are glad to have you on board and are excited that you decided on us. looking forward to make it happen and pick you up on the airport. like tim ferriss said: travel lightly :)

nicole is cheering all the time ("victor is coming, wohooo") and I'm really happy as well.

see you soon.

daniel+nicole</comment>


Paul Rand's NeXT Logo (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://www.logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul-rand <comment><USER2> _There is nothing about the IBM symbol, for example, that suggests computers, except what the viewer reads into it. Stripes are now associated with computers because the initials of a great computer company happen to be striped._

I hate to disagree with legends of their fields, but the IBM logo _did_ make people think computers because the stripes looked like things that were familiar from computers of the era.

For example, it was common for computer displays at the time to have space between the character lines. If you tried to create the letters IBM in a very large size on an early computer terminal, you would get lines between them because room was left for character descenders.

I had relatives who worked for IBM in upstate New York in the 60's through the 80's, and they identified the stripes as being reminiscent of the green bar printer/ teletype/ terminal paper that was commonly used.

<comment><USER3> I always associated the logo with the horizontal lining in dot matrix printers.

<comment><USER4> Apparently you can still buy these new.

<comment><USER5> Very useful for businesses that rely on multipart forms. They still exist, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Apple "rainbow" logo is timeless. SGI cube logo was fantastic. NeXT logo? I never understood all the buzz around it, to me it is no better than original colorful Windows logo.

<comment><USER7> I don't think highly of the NeXT logo either, but this comment on the article makes a good argument:

"Considering how well recognized the NeXT logo is in the industry even though it was a minor company with barely any market, the logo is as remarkable as their products were"

<comment><USER8> The Steve Jobs effect. That's why the logo became famous.

<comment><USER9> I have the same reaction. I think that as consumers of media, we hear about Next through the history of Steve Jobs' career and the history of Apple, and media about those subjects is all over the place. I've never seen it out in the world, or encountered some salient cultural reference it was attached to, or saw it in anything outside of its status as a chapter in the history of Apple.

<comment><USER10> NeXT was also the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser, and on which Carmack wrote Doom. Not bad for a platform far smaller than SGI or Sun I'd say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really liked NeXTSTEP machines we had back in the uni - everything about them was thoroughly exciting _except_ for the logo. It just stuck out like a sore thumb. Like someone forgot to replace a placeholder before signing off the design into production.

So as much as I like Rand's work (and as cool as his business card was in its audacious minimalism), the Next logo is just too full of itself. As it is actually detached from the very product it was designed for.

<comment><USER12> I don't see it, but I only see pictures. Like this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube_Turbo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube_Turbo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If curious see also

2018 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16889051](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16889051)

2015 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440589](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440589)

2010 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1247653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1247653)

2009 (1 comment) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=969189](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=969189)

(Everybody seizes on the same bit...)

</comment><comment><USER14> > "I asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, 'No, I > will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. You don't have to use > the solution. If you want options go talk to other people.'"

Surprises me Jobs would ask this, a demand for options, especially three options is usually a sign of a weak creative director lacking confidence.

<comment><USER15> I don't find it surprising for Jobs, especially at that younger point in his life. He always wanted control; early Apple, NeXT, late Apple, that remained true across his entire professional life. Wanting Rand to present options is another way of trying to have control over the process, to try to get more influence over what the final product is. It's why Paul Rand wouldn't provide options, he wasn't willing to cede that control; it was Rand's way or the highway.

<comment><USER16> I wonder if this was a key moment in Steve Jobs becoming Steve Jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The black cube (as a Platonic ideal) was a Steve Jobs design statement (as the form factor for the first NeXT computer) and informs the logo design. The logo has richer significance within that context. To me, it is Steve Jobs saying that a computer doesn't have to be prosaic and as technologists we can aspire to more profound ideals.

I still have a few stickers left on a sheet that came with my first NeXT cube. When I get a new laptop I cover the Apple logo with a NeXT logo. But it's less and less often that anyone recognizes the homage.

<comment><USER18> The NeXT logo should be on one of those pins and stickers they give out at WWDC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I came across this restaurant's logo not too long ago... [https://nextfood.ca/](https://nextfood.ca/)

It's like someone said, "Hmm, NeXT Computer isn't using that logo any more... let's just tweak it a little so it's not identical."

</comment><comment><USER20> I always liked Sun Microsystems logo just cause it's like a puzzle where the pieces fit nicely. That U shape makes up the word "SUN" and it's shaped into a box.

Not sure it has anything to do with computers, but neither does an apple with a bite taken out of it (unless you factor in the Alan Turing lore).

</comment><comment><USER21> The key insight about the NeXT logo is that it had to be iconic and memorable and invoke culture -- which it is. It's mission was not to satisfy some tech nerd's OCD about what looks techy.

</comment><comment><USER4> At first I read this as "Rand Paul" and was slightly confused.

</comment><comment><USER22> Rand kind of talks about the nebulous nature of design here:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta4ef1xBeMA](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta4ef1xBeMA)

Paraphrased, 'If I designed the IBM logo with Old English instead of stripes, people might have thought it was a good logo too'.

Rand talking about various famous logos he designed:

[https://youtu.be/LxiDNdM2-bM](https://youtu.be/LxiDNdM2-bM)

On the ABC logo (second half of video):

[https://youtu.be/LxiDNdM2-bM](https://youtu.be/LxiDNdM2-bM)

</comment><comment><USER23> I know this is about Paul Rand, but: The article links to an excellent interview with Steve Jobs. Enjoyed watching it.

</comment><comment><USER24> That short video of Paul Rand arriving to present the logo was part of a program that I saw years ago (maybe on PBS?)

Does anyone know what that program was?

<comment><USER18> The PBS program was called Entrepreneurs, here's the full segment with NeXT: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kehU0zrWRI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kehU0zrWRI).

<comment><USER25> That's really cool. It makes me nostalgic for the innocence of the 90s in business and doing anything really... now everything is just copies of copies of low quality trash, where competition is super high and everything has been done 92042 different ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I remember hearing back at the time there was a snarky reply to the NEXT logo circulated within apple. The same logo, but replacing the last two letters to read NEVR -- to suggest the project was not going to ever amount to anything. Can't find any trace of it now with a quick google search though.

</comment><comment><USER27> The title should be NeXT not Next.

Had me thinking we'd found some previously unreleased work of his or something.

<comment><USER13> Corner case. Fixed. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> 90% of these designs honestly look bland and very forgettable.

<comment><USER29> Someone looks at a piece of "art" and says, "I could do that."

Sure, but could you convince someone to pay you $100k for it?

<comment><USER28> The price does not make it better work.

I see very little effort to create a memorable logo. All these logos look very much alike and neither of them feel like they have any soul to convey.

There is a hint at minimalist design, however I'd argue that minimal is easy to learn, hard to master.

What do you feel when you look at it? I feel nothing. They are just printing out their name in different variations.

Don't get me wrong, I am not somebody who thinks good design is easy. Never said that. I do however believe that a brand needs some kind of character and uniqueness to their brand and these illustrations feel extremely generic.

<comment><USER30> I would encourage you to find an old NeXT computer and see the logo in flesh. It adds a ton of personality to an otherwise unremarkable black box.

Keep in mind that this logo was done for a very physical medium. And you're viewing it through an entirely digital medium - something neither Jobs nor Rand could have envisioned back then.

I would like to think that if Rand was designing a logo for the digital age, his approach would be entirely different

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> That NeXT logo looks awkward and amateurish. I could have done a better job making a next logo and I have never designed a logo in my life.

<comment><USER32> How about you give it a shot and then we'll discuss it here?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do you still use HN? - <AUTHOR> Personally, I've deleted Instagram, curbed my Tweets, don't use Facebook anymore, and trying my best not to be social on social, but Hacker News is one of the resources I can't stop coming back to. I know I am not alone. Anecdotally, I've met many people who do the same.<p>I don't know why though. What makes HN special? Is it the constant curation, the old-school design, the constantly updated front-page? I can't figure it out. <comment><USER2> You can have actual intelligent conversations with people who think. You can read ideas that differ from your own, from people who can tell you why they hold those ideas. The knowledge available here is remarkable. (I was doing some research on some number-theory-type stuff. I asked a question here. A Cambridge PhD gave me some pointers. Gave them to me, a random nobody on the internet with a BS, no affiliation, and no academic work for the last 35 years.)

It doesn't always work that way. Sometimes you get ideological wars. Sometimes you get people who Just. Won't. Listen. - who are, on that topic anyway, just going to argue their position to the end of the earth with scorched-earth tactics. Sometimes people come here to do ideological battle rather than to have an actual conversation. That happens here more often than I'd like. But it's still better than anywhere else that I've found.

<comment><USER3> Yeah the mods here kill flame wars pretty quickly. At first I was put off by it but HN has a really good community because of it.

You can have nuances in discussion here. I don't know of any other places online where that is possible. It's also possible to have a civil disagreement. It's a credit to the mods and community rules.

<comment><USER4> Props to Dang, who is so active that I sometimes wonder if he's an AI

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The quote goes, "If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room". HN is an enormous room where I'm confident I'll never be the smartest person, ever, and that is invaluable for someone's curiosity. Every day I get to converse with and learn from intelligent people (many of whom are also as curious as I) I would've never had the privilege of interacting with in person or another online forum.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm an ordinary person from France. I don't work in IT but HN has helped me to get a hard as steel general culture (sorry , I'm french, not a good english speaker !).

1\. Top quality articles and research paper every day, in every domain of science 2\. The real news, I mean, the news that matter 3\. Very informed opinions in the comments.

HN is the top of the top of the web !

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, does it mean France doesn't have. its own version of HN-type community, or it's just that HN covers the world, which makes it more interesting?

<comment><USER7> Both actually!

There is no HN type community in France (that I know of). And the openness and international aspects of HN are incomparable

<comment><USER8> Interestingly enough, I just saw this the other day posted on HN: [https://www.journalduhacker.net/](https://www.journalduhacker.net/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I use HN because it's the one place I can find a variety of intelligent discussions on different topics that don't devolve in name calling, flame wars, doxing, etc. The latter is why I only use Reddit for pop culture related topics, since the political and cultural ones there devolve into absolute hell. Same with their equivalents on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

At least on HN, you know that everything from a discussion on web design best practices to a talk on the changing role of journalism in the modern world will have some form of civility to it. And that the people involved will be at least trying to have an intelligent conversation rather than fighting over red team vs blue team tribal politics.

I also find it one of the few places online where I can find, how best to say this, obscure/personal sites, articles and content written by people knowledgeable or passionate about a topic. Links on Reddit are about 40% mainstream media outlets, 50% YouTube/Twitch and 10% stuff from other sources. The links on Hacker News are far more varied, and far more supportive towards independent creators.

</comment><comment><USER10> The discussions on here are what keep me coming back. I often dont even read the article, just jump into the discussion. Provides a lot of interesting perspectives from people who clearly think and can articulate those thoughts. As an aside: I am not IT but I do work in tech.

</comment><comment><USER11> I come here exclusively to read the comments and sometimes participate in them. I often only end up clicking a link because I need more context to read the comments.

The comments are often insightful and intelligent. Its interesting conversation, from people with different backgrounds, different opinions etc. As opposed to most other forums, HN is heavily moderated and the crowd it draws helps. Sometimes I see a comment that looks out of place and an hour later it is either down voted into oblivion or removed already.

I also use HN to pick technology. I search HN for threads relevant to the technology I am thinking of using and read the comments to see what people think. This helps me get a whole bunch of different opinions and thoughts that I otherwise wouldn't have access to.

I also love the minimalist look of HN. If they'd change it, I'd be incredibly upset. It's one of the last places on the internet that always loads in an instant and doesn't distract me from the only thing that's important: the content.

<comment><USER12> I also rarely click through the links. Often the discussion of the headline draws enough people asking interesting questions and giving interesting, qualified answers that I learn far more from the discussions in the comments than from the actual linked page!

</comment></comment><comment> non-entity Incredibly detailed and well written technical articles. I still have a very well detailed description of the UEFI boot process saved on here that I need to get through.

</comment><comment><USER13> Surround yourself with people smarter than you. I'm not that smart though... so it might not be a compliment...

It's simply discussion around links, and isn't dominated by competitive people trying to get top comment like Reddit/Imgur is.

There's much more emphasis on innovation and technology, rather than cat pictures. I think this rather serious and neutral nature of Hacker News is why I keep returning

</comment><comment><USER14> For the discussions under each article. It helps me see a lot of interesting perspectives.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh yeah, that's something I've started to spend a lot more time on now. Sometimes the threads are hard to read/follow, but once in a while there are such gems in the comments, it's definitely worth it.

<comment><USER15> Sometimes the sheer number of comments is daunting too. Seeing some discussions reach three, four, five, even six hundred comments is almost a deterrent. I'll usually look at the first few top level threads to see if anything interests me if not, I'll move on.

I also wonder how it's possible that big of a discussion is happening in the middle of the day. I usually take a break from coding for 5 or 10 minutes, pop over to HN, refresh and see if anything sparks my interest. Then I notice some article has gone from 1XX to 3XX comments and am just like 'huh...'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Perhaps due to its connections to business, some influential people hang around HN. For example, once I got a response from the CEO of Namecheap (my web host) in a thread related to their services. It was very informative and I can't imagine getting that kind of interaction anywhere else.

You don't get that on places like reddit because the standard of discourse is generally lower and it's not worth their time.

Also: the moderators are consistent, clear, professional, and easy to talk to.

</comment><comment><USER17> > I don't know why though. What makes HN special?

Cry baby echo chamber is not the preferred normal behavior here. This is exactly why I deleted my Reddit account (r/programming).

</comment><comment><USER18> I never got addicted to social media. I have Facebook, twitter, Instagram, reddit, HN, digg etc etc, but I rarely if ever use it. Although I do read reddit and HN regularly, I never felt a desire to delete it in order to curb the usage. Haven't posted anything on Facebook in two years, on Instagram in almost a year, on Twitter in 4 years.

<comment><AUTHOR> I use Twitter a fair bit to DM with people that I find interesting, on Twitter, but lately it's become too much of a firehose of opinions, rarely backed up by data or even sound logic. Now I try to use it only once a day, or even a few days. So far, so good.

Instagram on the other hand, that got out of control quickly. I found myself browsing through the feed and liking a lot of content, only to eventually realize that what I really wanted to do was to BE in places that I was liking; spending time on Instagram certainly wasn't going to get me there faster. That was the point where I deleted it.

Suspending the account, deleting the app... none of that has worked for me with Insta, there was always some pull to get back into it. Once I deleted the account, some number of months ago, I haven't had the need to even think of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's the one forum where people seem to attack ideas not each other. :)

A lot of people that people can look up to are here too. Lots of famous engineers, computer scientists professors, data scientists, you name it.

I wish there was something similar for business/economics.

</comment><comment><USER20> Because when I see an article about some obscure topic I'm interested in, but know very little about, there's a high chance someone knows so much about that topic and will make some outstanding post to add to the conversation.

</comment><comment><USER21> I keep my social media accounts only as utilities with reddit the only exception. I've found Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, and now HN to be awesome communities of people smarter than me and actually building stuff. The world needs more people building stuff.</comment>


99Lime HTML KickStart / CSS Framework - <AUTHOR> http://www.99lime.com/

<comment><USER2> Looks like this might be a nice alternative to Bootstrap.</comment>


Advent: real event sourcing made easy in Node (ES + CQRS + Redux philosophy) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cayasso/advent <comment><AUTHOR> This project is very opinionated, is my take on using Event Sourcing in a simple way after using and playing around with some of the other NodeJS projects out there. I would really like to get input from the community. There is an example in folder in the repository. Thank you!!!</comment>


So you want to start a startup? Here's what you are missing - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/life-learning/attention-wantpreneurs-heres-the-one-thing-you-are-missing-a46539213e96

<comment><USER2> Totally agree. Building up my startup solo at the moment, but on the lookout for a solid co founder.</comment>


Show HN: MaterialPass (Material Passport) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/IfcXtreme/MaterialPass <comment><AUTHOR> Advanced materials not only for Design but also for Simulation

MaterialPass materials as digital catalogs not only hold Physically Based Rendering (PBR) textures/colors (Metal - Roughness) but also hold extra Data/Information like mass, weight, water consumption, etc, and anything we see today (or will see tomorrow) as Psets and Qtos in Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and other schemas for "simulation" purposes

What do you think about?</comment>


How RedGate hired 10 geeks in five weeks - <AUTHOR> http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2010/08/how-redgate-hired-10-geeks-in-five-weeks.html

<comment><USER2> Summary of the flash movie: The flyered Cambridge, gave away 600 ice creams from an ice cream truck, drove some trucks around town with banners and advertised in newspapers and on Spotify telling people they'd get a free iPad if they submitted a resume and were invited in for an interview. They gave away a lot (how many?) of iPads and they got their 10 geeks in less than 5 weeks.

What's missing: they don't say how much they spent on the advertising and freebies.

<comment><USER3> For the benefit of those outside Cambridge, it's also worth knowing that Red Gate is the local rising star software business. I have now lost track of how many friends, former work colleagues and friends-of-friends have wound up working there, but it's a lot.

If I've heard about it from that many different sources, so have many other good people with relevant skills in the local area. You have to factor that word-of-mouth effect into any thinking about how successful any additional recruitment drives they've been running have been. If I hadn't gone freelance, I might have applied myself, but it wouldn't have been because of ice creams or iPads, it would have been because the company has a reputation for being a decent employer and hiring good people.

<comment><USER4> I've heard many, many good things about Red Gate, and know people who work there.

There's one reason I reject them immediately as a potential employer: they're a Windows-only shop.

<comment><USER5> Indeed.

We are just around the corner from Red Gate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure what the point of this is. I can get 1000 resumes and 10 geeks in a week advertising on hotjobs but in the end it is the quality of the person that matters. I would rather see the result of this a year from now.

<comment><USER7> We've had a hard time finding quality candidates. In my experience, the Craigslist job board seems to be dying out. Is hotjobs your first stop in the hiring process?

<comment><USER8> I think savvy developers will increasingly want to dispense with the commitment that being hired entails. If there are so many companies in such dire need of talent, why can't talented developers become highly skilled migrant workers? I just think it's too difficult to keep a talented person satisfied, in one job, for years on end -- the ability to ramp-up and ramp- down without the overhead of a full-time employment relationship or sleazy middle-men, is the future of software employment, I hope.

<comment><USER9> Generally speaking, I agree with this but there's a downside too. Don't be surprised if you get tossed out on the trash heap the minute you turn 40 or 50 and are no longer perceived as a young, alpha engineer.

Things like blogs and github are great learning resources but I think they're also starting to skew people's expectations of the average programmer.

<comment><USER8> _Things like blogs and github are great learning resources but I think they're also starting to skew people's expectations of the average programmer._

What? Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER10> The demographics of the typical programmer-blogger are not representative of the typical programmer. And writing a blog is not correlated in any way with talent or productivity.

Probably the vast majority of working programmers either don't write a blog, or don't blog about programming (but about their cats, kids, and steam-engine building hobby).

<comment><USER11> I'd be willing to bet that writing a blog about programming is positively correlated with programming talent and productivity, for at least one reason: it shows interest in the subject, and the extra attention compounds over time.

The typical programmer has little interest in the profession other than as a monthly salary, and spends most of their life doing copy & paste-level implementation and reimplementation of business rules into straightforward code and UI. Domain knowledge is usually (a lot) more valuable than coding ability for these people. Sure, the kernels and architectures of the systems these typical programmers work with are designed and implemented by people you would probably more recognize as hackers, but there is so much more drudgework that needs to be done to make it all a useful piece of corporate IT infrastructure. There are armies of these people doing it, and the work isn't interesting code-wise.

These typical programmers, as a rule, don't blog about their work.

<comment><USER12> Rather than just believe in an unproven hypothesis why don't you test it out?

Find the interesting-code projects you actually use or have heard about (maybe Apache, Cassandra, Google's Bigtable, etc), find out who did the majority of the coding and then try to find their blog.

How many people work on Apache? How many of them have blogs? Do you even care that they blog? Wouldn't you hire any of them anyway?

Avinash Lakshman and Prashant Malik were the guys that wrote Cassandra when it was still an internal Facebook project. I can't find blogs for either of them. (Though they did write one blog post on the Facebook Engineering blog.)

Doug Cutting wrote a lot of great code for Hadoop. He has a blog here: <http://cutting.wordpress.com/> but hasn't touched it in nearly a year.

Jeff Dean has done some amazing work at Google ( <http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html> Now THAT is one hell of a resume) and I can't find a blog for him either.

To me, it seems mostly random whether the person has a blog or not. It would be an interesting project to catalog and analyze how many do and don't. Then you'd have a real answer rather than a wild guess you believe religiously rather than scientifically.

<comment><USER11> You have it backwards. You are looking at the cream of open source developers, and then asking whether they have blogs. But the question isn't whether blogging is correlated with coding excellence (i.e. whether top tier of devs blog or not); it's whether coding ability is correlated with blogging (i.e. is blogging more associated with above median devs or not).

There are over two million programmers in the US alone. My proposition would be true if more people in the top half of that distribution blogged about coding than in the bottom half, and I don't think that's an unlikely suggestion. Even if you think whether someone blogs or not is random, the subject of the blog is not. People's estimation of their ability is correlated with their ability (Dunning-Kruger effect notwithstanding, check the paper's graph - perception is compressed but not inverted), and I think it's conservative to say that people who think they know more about a subject are more likely to talk about it.

To make it clear, I'm talking about blogging as a signal of ability, not ability as a signal of propensity to blog (which is what you suggest measuring). Since there are a lot more people coding than blogging about coding, it would be unlikely in any case to find a high proportion of bloggers at any level of the ability scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was expecting to see a mixergy-style talent story where they got 10 geeks with intuition and little spending. I don't see the intuition or talent here.

<comment><USER14> Likewise - I actually think they were very unimaginative. All of that stuff is expensive and obvious. I was thinking we'd see some scoured GitHub/SourceForge/etc. type of stuff or a programming competition, maybe even a super-poach of a good team.

Karma ++ to whoever put up a "hire geeks on the cheap" post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it okay if I love computer science and programming but don't like being called a geek? My activities and interests bridge several cultural divides. I don't like being simplified.

</comment><comment><USER16> Are they that desperate for developers in the UK? If so, how does a Canadian get a work permit!?

<comment><USER10> Cambridge is a nice town, but their "desperation" will be that most developers in the UK will head straight for London.

<comment><USER17> Shortage of good developers in London too though.

<comment><USER10> Shortage of _good_ developers everywhere :-) But at least in London you know that they are in the same city, somewhere.

<comment><USER11> It's probably easier to travel to and from Cambridge and North London than it is to cross the city for work though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know if RedGate will sponsor a visa for foreign candidates?

<comment><USER19> They normally don't, but if you're a smart, hard-working developer, then I'm sure they'd consider it (even if your programming expertise is in a field that doesn't match what they do).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So another VC-backed company bribed a bunch of interviewees with free stuff.

<comment><USER21> RedGate are bootstrapped.</comment></comment>