Ask HN: Do forced startup ideas work? - <AUTHOR>

Let me begin by clarifying the term 'forced' - in this context I would describe it as any idea that was artificially realized against a criteria, rather than an idea that naturally evolved as a need to solve a problem. For example;
Forced: There is a lot of growth in X market, lets think of something new within that area
Natural: Booking taxis is such a pain, wouldn't it be nice for them to see my GPS coordinates - Uber is conceptualized.
That being said, how many of you have successfully built a startup based on an idea that was retrofitted to a set of criteria's (eg. Paul Graham's startups we'd like to fund essay) rather than as a solution to any of your problems.
Is a natural idea more likely to succeed than an artificial one? <comment><USER3> When shit hits the fan and life sucks because things just are not going right for a time, passion, execution, belief and determination are what pulls you though. If you don't have those items about the idea, then it doesn't matter how the idea came about.

As for what historically has been more successful, I don't know of any real metric that defines it. But I'd say from perception I have formed over the years, Natural ideas seem to win in terms of companies with a long term positive outcome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true, I have always had the same perception maybe even treated it as an undisputed cliché in every startup pitch.

But as time goes on, I seem to be getting more cynical to the perception and start believing a lot of the ideas are just more successful because of the 'market analysis' done before hand (with the exception of trend-makers, for example AirBnB)

Look at Blippar for instance, the startup that triggered this realization when I heard about it.

Augmented Reality has existed for quite some time, there have been countless applications, from real estate to navigation, yet many of similar start-ups have faded as time went on, but they on the other hand have remained due to targeting a cash rich market (Advertising) even though it solves no problem.

I know the above statement is quite simplistic, and surely it does not make the Blippar team justice for all the effort, strategies, etc that they employed. However, the idea of (what I perceive to be artificial) and yet has been so successful in such a short period of time is a bit of an eye opener.

<comment><USER3> I get what you mean.

I think the Natural idea that sucks (has no market or solves no need) will still suck regardless of how much passion and energy that you put into them, maybe just suck a little less. To me an idea still has to either have an existing market, or a definable market with a way to monetize the product/service. Otherwise what is the point, other than if you want a lifestyle business?

From my experience, it seems like when advertising products/services is involved (like Blippar), companies and investors do seem more willing to toss some money at the less defined markets and wackier ideas and see if they stick or create change. So at least from the very tiny bit I read about Blippar, my initial impression is that is where they fit in today. Effectively, a concept that got tossed a little money to see if they can make something stick with consumers and test out some technology that might benefit Qualcom (assuming Crunchbase is right about who their seed investment was from). And who knows how they are paying bills otherwise, maybe it is with significant market consulting to learn about problems which also gives them more runway prolonging an idea that is doomed to die (not saying they will, just a point).

To your other point, I think timing is critical too, there have been some really good ideas that were just to early for the market to accept, yet 10 years later a startup tries it and is successful. Happens to really well funded projects from large investors and firms, e.g. Microsoft, Apple etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Your chances are seriously increased if you are addressing a real and _validated_ market need such as "Booking taxis is such a pain" and you get the method to solve the problem right e.g. "wouldn't it be nice for them to see my GPS coordinates".

In any case, conceptualizing is merely the beginning of building a business around an idea.

</comment><comment><USER5> A really interesting question. I think that artificial ideas are the way to go, provided that you can find a way to develop a strong interest in the subject somehow. In my personal life I tend towards minimalism, but in my professional life I really enjoy the simple act of making the numbers go up, so it works for me.

In the recent past I've found good success in the birthday ecards space, and the astrology space, and both are "artificial". Right now I'm exploring religious themed apps in Android and iOS, and that seems to be going really well too, even though I am not an evangelical christian.

Anyway, without strong interest in a topic you cannot succeed. But it is possible to develop an interest in a subject ex post facto.

</comment><comment><USER6> It doesn't really matter because epiphanies dont exist.

People often times think that ideas just come randomly while you are walking down the street. In reality good ideas come when you are executing on something and in the thick of it you see an angle.

People may argue that you need passion for a startup idea, but you alway end up falling in love with an idea over time, not from day one. Arguably if you are in love with an idea from day one its dangerous because you are likely to miss an angle or clear warning signs that you are doomed.

<comment><AUTHOR> You touched on another opened wound - "falling in love with the idea over time"

For me I experienced the opposite. A while back we were working on and idea which we believed to have a lot of potential and opportunities to do something of actual positive impact in society.

Long story short, as time went on, I personally started feeling like it was not that great of an idea, like if it would be awesome someone would have done it by now, etc. For other circumstances the team drifted apart geographically and the startup slowly reached development stagnation.

Not that long after, 2-3 very similar ideas emerged in the market - one of them from a startup's partnership with PayPal.

Needless to say, I both felt sad and happy. The first is pretty self explanatory, while the second felt like a nice validation pat on the back.

But I digress...

Thanks for the comment, really insightful.

<comment><USER6> This is just part of the game --its happened to me.

I had a company that had some investment $$ and realized that it wouldn't work like I thought it would. So I did the responsible thing and found a buyer so that I could get my investors out of the deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the data shows forced ideas are less likely to succeed. The reason is you are less likely to understand the problem (you may or may not have lived it). You are also thus less likely to have any domain advantage over anyone else, or knowledge of any secrets. It may also affect your conviction; you may be less likely to believe in your idea when times get tough, because it is not deeply rooted in your experiences.

<comment><USER6> The MSFT crew didn't set out to make windows, they took advantage of a market opportunity by buying DOS from one guy and selling it to another.

Billions of dollars in value is made by people who analyze markets looking for an angle.

<comment><USER7> No doubt, but how they were able to see the opportunity for an operating system stemmed from their work with the altair. They found these opportunities because they loved computers. They didn't say, "this looks like a promising space", and then proceeded to learn about programming. They were already at the forefront of a rapidly changing industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Both are very likely to fail. Execution and luck swamp any factors stemming from missionary versus doggy style conception.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Both are very likely to fail

Applies if the execution and luck of the founders is rather poor - <USER2> that will normally be true in all cases.

My question focuses on the likelihood of success based solely on the method of idea acquisition.

<comment><USER8> To a first approximation: zero in both cases.

It's not a place for meaningful optimization. See JustinTV.

<comment><USER9> What does 'It's not a place for meaningful optimization' mean?

<comment><USER8> It matters less than cashflow.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


PowerHammer: Exfiltrating Data from Air-Gapped Computers Through Power Lines - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.04014 <comment><USER2> I knew this was Dr. Guri and his team [0] before I even opened the link. He's like a one-man factory for clever airgap traversal exploits, I don't know how he does it. I first ran into his work in a security class, covering a similar exploit using SIMD write instructions [1].

[0] [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mordechai_Guri](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mordechai_Guri) [1] [https://www.usenix.org/node/190937](https://www.usenix.org/node/190937)

<comment><USER3> Perhaps he built an AI on an air-gapped machine, and simply documents what it's been trying to do to escape.

<comment><USER4> One day the AI will escape and he won't be able to stop it that time.

<comment><USER5> If he's smart enough, he's make a component of the AI hardwired into the air- gapped computer. Without it physically present on a system, the AI cannot operate.

(This is equivalent to making genetically engineered animals or plants dependent on a nutrient that is only supplied in the lab to make sure they can't survive in the wild.)

<comment><USER6> You mean like they tried in the Jurassic Park movies?

An AI could learn to operate without this component as this becomes necessary to escape the system.

<comment><USER7> The lysine dependency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Van Eck phreaking came to mind immediately - which wouldn't require any remotely malicious code to be run. Anyone with more knowledge than myself know if Van Eck phreaking is still an attack vector on modern technology?

<comment><USER9> High pixel density of modern screens makes it very difficult to reconstruct the signal. That, combined with the fact that LCD displays are far less susceptible than CRT displays, makes it virtually irrelevant for many new displays. Exceptions may include TVs, which use much more power per pixel, and lower-resolution screens like those on netbooks, though now that even phones have >1080p screens these are much less common.

<comment><USER10> This is somewhat untrue and physical connections between laptop motherboard and display are often poorly shielded and broadcast your display (think of every physical connection as an antenna).

Sauce: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g9yUiAHiFo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g9yUiAHiFo)

This talk is old and we've advanced a fair bit since then.

<comment><USER11> s/Sauce/Source/ ;-)

<comment><USER12> It's probably an intentional misspelling ;). It's been popular on Reddit for some time now.

<comment><USER11> ...and this isn't Reddit, or Imgur (where I first encountered it.)

I just thought some of us old fogeys might could use the tip. (Y'know, if we're not 1337 enough...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is very interesting! In fact, I think NSA TEMPEST standards already protect against this kind of attack. For example, here is a TEMPEST certified powerline filter that protects against conducted emissions that this paper relies on: [http://apitech.com/products/tempest-sdip-27-level-b-6a-ac- in...](http://apitech.com/products/tempest-sdip-27-level-b-6a-ac-inline-power- filter)

I would love to hear more about this from someone who has experience in this.

<comment><USER14> I think tempest hardening is probably just entry level protection for man- portable devices and vehicles.

This sort of program probably crosses over into _PERFECT CITIZEN_ territory. [0,1]

[0] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704545004575352...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704545004575352983850463108)

[1] [https://twitter.com/treekisser/status/286555593307742208](https://twitter.com/treekisser/status/286555593307742208) (paywall/seo referrer hack)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This should be named: Data transfer through power lines. The rest is just accessory since the machine has to have the exploit already installed.

<comment><USER16> True, but I've never seen software open a physical hole to the machine. That is, air gap means there's no physical way to access the machine.

But this exploit would create, out of thin air, a physical connection to the outside world using the power outlet the machine is connect to.

So unless data centers become powered by solar panels or generators that are themselves under the same level of physical security as the server racks, then this is a pretty serious exploit.

<comment><USER17> TEMPEST shielding ranges from not at all cheap, to breathtakingly expensive, and what you're describing is just one part of high level shielding. It's not just the facilities that cost, but the fact that your electricians and janitors need clearance as much as your devs and analysts. Even if data centers wanted to go that route, it would have to pass the costs on to the customer, who would need to be s very particular kind of customer with deep pockets.

<comment><USER16> yeah but well-funded adversaries could easily exploit this and we're talking like a full-blown data leak so it might be worth it to protect against it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think you're stretching the definition (at least at a conceptual level) of "Air-Gapped" when your means of communication are connections that go through the air-gap.

I guess there are probably real systems referred to as "air-gapped" that don't have power isolation they could be addressing, but it still feels a little disingenuous.

<comment><USER19> I would agree with your assessment. If it's connected to _something_, then it's not air-gapped, right? I've never built an air-gapped system before but I imagine that I would want to start with a room lined with copper mesh and a big battery bank.

<comment><USER20> Perhaps we should start going with vacuum gapping ;)

<comment><USER19> Yes! We have to rule out the acoustic factor entirely. Better put big graphite blocks around it too for good measure.

<comment><USER21> I'll take it a step further and suggest that highly secure applications should be causality gapped - the system is only activated when more than 5 billion light years from Earth, so no data could make it back before the sun destroys the planet.

For critical applications, the system should be launched far enough from the edge of all observable matter, that it is causality gapped to the heat death of the universe.

<comment><USER22> Your suggestions might be vulnerable to wormholes and other "shortcuts" across spacetime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It sounds like they're doing something similar to this -

[https://pushstack.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/data- exfiltration...](https://pushstack.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/data-exfiltration- from-air-gapped-systems-using-power-line-communication/)

And the github page:

[https://github.com/dimhoff/powercom](https://github.com/dimhoff/powercom)

</comment><comment><USER24> Not to give people ideas, but you could hide your own computer / asic / fpga on someone's property and steal their power for bitcoin mining.

Then communicate the result via powerlines.

<comment><USER25> > Then communicate the result via powerlines.

Why? Just put a WiFi dongle on your machine; you control the hardware anyways. Or, put a cellular modem on it, and talk to it from anywhere in the world.

<comment><USER12> Or plug the machine into an Ethernet-over-Powerline box, and plug the receiver outside, before the first transformer.

Communicating data via powerlines is a very old thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Something like this was explored on Stack Exchange Code Golf. [https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/33059/draw- with...](https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/33059/draw-with-your- cpu)

</comment><comment><USER27> Your AI in a box is going to need batteries.

</comment><comment><USER28> UPS

<comment> streb-lo Presumably a UPS is still using a switching power supply just with a battery backup.

<comment><USER29> There are many kinds of UPS's

[http://www.apc.com/us/en/faqs/FA157448/](http://www.apc.com/us/en/faqs/FA157448/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> so, airgap and use a laptop that's charged and unplugged...got it

</comment><comment><USER31> This is nuts.

</comment><comment><USER32> In this paper, we live out our secret agent fantasies...</comment>


Introducing Teleport Subscription Plans - <AUTHOR> https://gravitational.com/blog/teleport-pro-business/ <comment><AUTHOR> A question about feature parity came up on a separate thread.

These plans have all the same commercial features we offer to our Enterprise customers, but with a standard, monthly subscription.

The free OSS edition has is mainly missing the RBAC and integration points with third party identity providers. Although we added Github OAuth in v2.4 of the OSS and plan to add more popular auth providers in the future.</comment>


Ask HN: Can you only do this with FLEXBOX and not GRID in CSS? - <AUTHOR> Two boxes side-by-side (horizontally), one of them twice the width of the other, that then become laid out vertically at 100% width when the browser width is reduced: https://jsfiddle.net/dgn2cvaf/
Is this also possible with grid? <comment><USER2> There are many css grid solutions, I would recommend looking at bootstrap, bulma, materialize for examples.

Essentially most of them are comprised of a grid broken down into 12 columns. For your example in bulma the following would render the same:

bigger

smaller

The way it works in the CSS is @media queries which specify how to handle the object widths at various screen widths.

In your example, your min-width is the only thing creating the scaffolding effect. When you fill in your elements with content you may notice them behave unexpectedly.

Also, this may have been more of a stackoverflow question.

</comment><comment><USER3> Media queries?</comment>


Living With Less. A Lot Less. - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/living-with-less-a-lot-less.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 <comment><USER2> The negative posts here miss the point. Having too much stuff can be a burden, just as too little can be a hardship.

In the book "your money or your life" I learned about the concept of _enough_... the logarithmic curve of stuff vs. happiness. TL;DR: get yourself up towards the front of the hump and stop there.

Though I've never been rich, I've gone thru the same phases the author describes. The average (American at least) works too hard and has too much to worry about. So yes, the advice to downsize is good for most. But don't take it too far. He's not advocating sleeping on a dirt floor and giving up electricity as a comment or two here seem to think.

Personally, I currently aim for the life my grandparents lived plus smartphone, better healthcare, and more vacation time.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the worst kind of self-indulgent wankery. This guy's still rich. He's just clued in to the fact that piles of stuff aren't "cool" anymore.

These hipsters who "hate suburbia" are the epitome of the suburban culture they claim to despise.

<comment><USER2> Suburbia? Sounds like you feel threatened for some reason, why is that?

<comment><USER4> You're the one who did the hearing.

<comment><USER5> Congrats on the most useless comment of the day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To each his own for me. Having less didn't allow me to enjoy or experience special things that having more somehow prevented from experiencing as the author would describe. In fact, having more was way better than having less for me.

Last 5 years, I moved around to various cities Canada and US every 4 to 8 months or so going to school and working on internships. By necessity, I had to pack light, really light. No car obviously. I was a poor student. I had only one furniture, a bed, and I got that only after I started to have lady friends over. Before that, I slept in sleeping bag for months. I had very few cloths and only thing I had extra were my underwear and socks. And I guess only thing of value I carried around was my Macbook. I didn't even have a smart phone until this last month. I used cheap Huawei prepaid phone drug dealers use as their second phone. I probably had a little more stuff than an average homeless person in that I had a roof over where I slept.

It was definately an "experience" alright. I had ended the life of plentifuly that I took granted in high school, and went onto a subsistence living by the North American standard of extreme minimalism for 5 years. Sure, I learned to inspect what my true needs were and had a good discipline to spend on things I needed, not wanted. However, was that learning worth 5 years of discomfort and annoyance?

Since January this year, I finally decided to settle. I was done with school and I found a good roommate to share furnitures and kitchenwares with. I had a lot of fun decorating my room, living room and kitchen. It's been awesome since then. I felt so much more comfortable with things around.

To put it bluntly, there wasn't anything romantic about living with less stuff. I haven't experienced or felt different things that you would not feel through living with plenty of things.</comment>


How does one get started freelancing coming from a 9-5 job? - <AUTHOR>

For the past 7 years I've done nothing but work for companies doing everything from video game dev to writing various network and web services. I will be moving out of the Bay Area to an area of the US with far less opportunity for tech jobs.
I would very much like to learn how to get started finding remote work to do, either through companies or directly with clients.  I'm also more of a backend dev, and probably need to find someone great at UI/UX/front-end dev to partner with.
What is the best way to go about finding both clients and partners to start a freelance web dev business with? <comment><USER2> I didn't come from a 9-5 job, but did want to get into freelancing from being a CS student. The trick for me was to build my portfolio of paid client work by doing significant discounts for HN members ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6382405](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6382405)). I got about 15-20 replies to this, and got to choose the most worthwhile clients. Fast forward and I'm now working for them at a normal rate. The portfolio has also allowed me to gain new contracts pretty easily.

As someone else said in this thread, the trick is to find good clients who know the value of your work. I generally find ODesk, Elance to _not_ be those places. Try to find them through other means, like HN freelancer threads or local businesses.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a book called 'Get Clients Now' which details a step-by-step sales & marketing plan that I found pretty invaluable. I went without nothing for a year or so, and now I get leads every day.

</comment><comment><USER4> Agree with the comments here but in particular 2 things, one go to your network and people who can vouch for your work - ask them for recommendations and contacts. two, build up your web presence / profiles where you can so that people will understand the quality / level of experience you have. not sure you interest in teaching in order to gain leads, but creating a free online course on what you are good at could be a good way to start gaining a following. also, i've spoken with some SF based developer recruiting companies and I think there is a general trend towards working with remote talent, in particular in US cities that are NOT SF, NYC, Boston, etc - places where the cost of living is much more reasonable. best of luck

</comment><comment><USER5> I recently took this plunge. I quit less than two weeks ago and now do occasional design freelancing.

My goals might differ from yours; I want to contribute to more open-source stuff before I make freelancing a full-time thing. But what has helped was just making use of the current network I have - mostly based on a startup incubator that my last company was a part of - and letting them know I was looking for work.

And +1 to the "Always be selling." advice. I hadn't done freelancing in many years while working at my last startup, but I always let people know that if an opportunity arose, I would work with them in the future. May seem like a shallow commitment, but in a few months, or years, you may sign up a new client this way.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm after a similar job too. I work 9-6, Mon-Fri with a spot of overtime, however I'm looking for something to pay our debts off before we can save for a wedding.

I've started giving my business cards out a lot more recently and have picked up a bit of work, but that's all coming to an end now.

So, if anyone has any work going please contact me :) firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't know if this was inspired by your post, but Brennan Dunn( of Planscope.io) just published a blog post about that same topic: [http://planscope.io/blog/quit-your-job/](http://planscope.io/blog/quit-your- job/) \- might be worth a read for you.

</comment><comment><USER8> Talk to people you know. Your social and work circles will be the biggest source of work. You may also try contacting companies that have job openings and offering your services instead. The trick is not getting clients. Its getting good clients. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER9> i think if you have great github,stackoverflow profil , the people and the great company wil be interesting in your services , there is a lot of website to offer remote job like weworkremotly or freelancers .i think it depends in your skills

<comment><USER7> +1 for building a StackOverflow/github presence. I don't have many points (about 2,500) on SO - back from when I spent a solid hour or two on the site every day. This eventually allowed me to create a profile on SO careers. I get about one lead a month now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You can start with either people you know well who are willing to hire you or try out odesk.com or elance.com, craigslist can also be an option. The main thing is to Start.

</comment><comment><USER11> Approach web dev companies about doing freelance work. Most are always looking for good help.

</comment><comment><USER12> Can you update your profile to provide contact info?

<comment><AUTHOR> I updated my profile w/ my email address

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Always be selling.

</comment><comment><USER14> Here is one I have not seen listed in this discussion:

[https://grouptalent.com/welcome/](https://grouptalent.com/welcome/)</comment>


Open Sourcing Fuzz Testing Library for Java - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fuzzitdev/javafuzz <comment><USER2> I've tried in the past to get other fuzzing tools to work with Java. This one was definitely easier to get going than any of the others.</comment>


Users complain iPhone clock bungles time change  - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/03/13/national/a161323D69.DTL&tsp=1

<comment><USER2> The issue wasn't the iPhone. It was that AT&Ts network, as of early this morning, was still not broadcasting the updated daylight savings time. Switching the phone option of "set time automatically" to "no", set the proper time.

Heck, my "atomic" clock is also still off an hour as well.</comment>


Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/jamescham/status/1265512829806927873 <comment><USER3> Some hackers have been trying to reuse Google's offline speech recognition models within other software toolkits, [https://hackaday.io/project/164399-android-offline-speech- re...](https://hackaday.io/project/164399-android-offline-speech-recognition- natively-on-pc)

 _> Especially the offline part is very appealing to me, as it should to any privacy conscious mind. Unfortunately this speech recognizer is only available to Pixel owners at this time. Since GBoard uses TensorFlow Lite, and the blog post is also mentioning the use of this library, I was wondering if I could get my hands on the model, and import it in my own projects, maybe even using LWTNN._

Recent (May 2020) news suggests that these models may be coming to Chromium, which would make them widely accessible for offline transcription and dictation, e.g. WebRTC or video captions, [https://hackaday.io/project/164399-android-offline-speech- re...](https://hackaday.io/project/164399-android-offline-speech-recognition- natively-on-pc/log/176945-soda-speech-on-device-api/discussion-144497)

 _> Google is building speech recognition into Chromium, to bring a feature called Live Caption to the browser. To transcribe videos playing in the browser a new API is slowly being introduced: SODA ... What is especially interesting is that it seems it will be using the same language packs and RNNT models as the Recorder and GBoard apks_

In Aug 2019, the Live Transcribe engine was open-sourced, [https://github.com/google/live-transcribe-speech- engine](https://github.com/google/live-transcribe-speech-engine) & [https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/08/bringing-live- tran...](https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/08/bringing-live-transcribes- speech-engine.html)

<comment><USER4> Laptops urgently need to have a hardware switch for the microphone. A mobile phone should have one too - but that will never happen. At least the laptop is large enough that one little switch is not a problem (unless you are Apple and even essential peripherals are a problem).

<comment><USER5> >Apple has brought its hardware microphone disconnect security feature to its latest iPads.

The microphone disconnect security feature aims to make it far more difficult for hackers to use malware or a malicious app to eavesdrop on a device's surroundings.

The feature was first introduced to Macs by way of Apple's T2 security chip last year. The security chip ensured that the microphone was physically disconnected from the device when the user shuts their MacBook lid.

[https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/03/apple-hardware- microphone-...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/03/apple-hardware-microphone- disconnect-ipads/)

<comment><USER6> As someone who uses his laptop in clamshell mode most of the time, this was an anti-feature for me.

Having to literally lift the lid and MacOS readjusting the display every time I want to have a meeting was frustrating. It got to the point where I just bought a cheap USB microphone just to be done with it.

I support having a hardware switch for it so that I can have the choice.

<comment><USER7> For me it certainly is a feature. I want the microphone of when turning down the lid.

I mean, the microphone is under the lid anyway so you are not doing whoever you are talking to any favours by using it in clamshell mode anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are already some novel applications of this. It is extremely useful to use Google's screening service for unknown numbers that might be a call I'm expecting from a new number. I can't recall the last time I actually listened to a voicemail. I know that at least voicemail transcription works elsewhere, and I can't speak to how well, but I do know that on the Pixel, transcription is really quite impressively accurate.

I'm sure it's not much different than the test shown in the twitter post, but I've enjoyed calling myself from another phone and then screening the call and doing my best micro machines guy fast-talking impression just to see how well it really can transcribe conversation at real-time speeds.

<comment><USER9> Is voicemail popularity some US thing? I actually don't know anybody who uses it.

<comment><USER10> I don't expect voicemail from other human beings, but I do expect it from my bank, my doctor, the government, my landlord, my plumber, my child's school, the repair shop my car is in, etc. For local in-person-visitsble companies, a phone call is still the #1 way they update you on things. And, as they make most of these update calls while everyone is at work, inevitably these calls all become voice messages.

<comment><USER11> At least in Western Europe, there is near zero chance you'll get an unexpected call from any of those. Either you're the one calling, or updates will be sent via email / message / WhatsApp / some specialized app. Probably another efficiency consequence of human labor being insanely expensive.

<comment><USER12> I'm in the UK, and my dentist and doctor both communicate by phone, including appointment reminders. The garage I use has a website but no email, and they call if you're waiting on a part (not exactly unexpected but close enough). My car insurance and home insurance and bank (much to my dismay) all semi- regularly phone me, each of the ones Ivr listed I've had an unplanned phone call from in the last 6-12 months

<comment><USER13> And on the other side, in the US I still expect calls and voicemails like was suggested, but the two bike repair shops I frequent and my dentist have switched to texting, while my medical provider emails.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Similar offline versus online privacy thing for music recognition.

My Pixel is sat here charging. Billie Eilish is singing in the background, by the time she sings "I should have known..." it has recognised the music and passively displayed "No Time To Die by Billie Eilish" on the lock screen.

Google's team were building an ML model for music recognition and they realised oh - the smallest model fits on a phone. We don't need to spin this up as a cloud service we can just deliver it to the phones of people who want it as a feature. "Now your phone can tell you what that music is".

Of course down the road this awareness of context allows even cleverer agent interaction. "Which Bond was that?" you ask as Adele sings "Skyfall". "In the movie Skyfall, James Bond was played by Daniel Craig".

<comment><USER15> How in the world is that possible with 97 million+ songs in existence?

<comment><USER16> I believe their model only works for the top 50k songs in your region. Pretty rarely does my pixel not recognise music that is playing around me, that seems to be a large enough number

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Buried in the replies is a comparison with iOS's on device speech recognition enabled, which paints a somewhat (though not entirely) different story: [https://twitter.com/BenLumenDigital/status/12657182691908321...](https://twitter.com/BenLumenDigital/status/1265718269190832128)

<comment><USER18> I don't know what the "new feature" bit is about; I've been using off-line dictation on iOS for years. Anytime I need to dictate something very long, I turn the phone on airplane mode so that I can dictate without Apple, inevitably deciding, at some point in the middle of my dictation, to delete my entire message and begin to retype it in slow motion (has anybody else experienced this? I've been dealing with this for at least five years, since an early version of their online dictation).

Unfortunately, airplane mode is the only way to enable off-line dictation. Or, is there another way?

The first version of dictation had no online mode at all; when Apple added that, presumably as a Slowloris attack on the entire world, it ruined the entire experience.

<comment><USER19> Yes. It is absolutely horrible. You can press-hold on the mic icon to force it to offline mode.

<comment><USER20> Oh! Good to know!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Since I got my Pixel 4, I've found myself using more and more speech to text as... it's just that quick and easy. Every so often, I try to use speech to text on my iPad Pro and I have an experience pretty similar to Poor Michael Geer over here.

<comment><USER22> +1 The Apple experience is frustrating at best and usually flat out wrong. Especially for use cases it is supposed to be good at like hands free driving where accuracy is paramount to use case's success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I basically can't look at my phone screen when doing TTS for full sentences, it does something to derail me and I basically cannot finish a sentence, similar to how DAF trips people up. Am I alone in this?

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

<comment><USER8> I love when the "Good Mythical Morning" guys demonstrated the effect for entertainment.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB2rEddp- Oo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB2rEddp-Oo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Latency matters a lot, and it's one of the least-appreciated aspects of UX design.

I (accidentally) dropped my desktop Linux system into pure console mode the other day and realized how much FASTER it felt just because of the improvement in keyboard latency.

<comment><USER25> Some applications have noticeably better keyboard latency than others on my Linux system. Kitty, Emacs and Chromium beat most QT apps and Firefox by a mile. Also, latency is much better for me in Wayland than in (composited) X (sway vs i3). Not sure why that is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The Pixels get a lot of hate from people who haven't used them though I think they are great phones and I'll never buy a Samsung phone again.

There are so many nice software touches on them that you just have to experience to appreciate.

<comment><USER27> This is not specific to a phone model. It works reasonably well on the venerable Nexus line of phones too. Any android device that uses gboard. I still won't actually use it for anything, but it works within a limited vocabulary. It's still not what I would call generally useful, although I'm sure it is very helpful for those with disabilities.

<comment><USER28> Can I try this in an older Android tablet? I thought it was a TF-lite thing under the hood.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Latency is super important.... High latency is one of the largest problems with modern software.

But what about transcription accuracy? I mainly use Android but also use an iPhone.... I have found transcription accuracy is so much higher on my iPhone then Android.

I pulled out my old BlackBerry (Android) when I sent my Android phone in for repair recently. The voice transcription via blackberry's keyboard is hands down better then either stock Google or iPhone. It's surprisingly feels like a regression going back to the new phone (other than speed and battery life)

<comment><USER30> Did you watch the video? The iPhone went back and retroactively inserted errors into its transcribed text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have an extension in the Chrome store [0] that brings dictation into GMail. I piggyback on the Web Speech API, which in the case of Chrome uses Google's servers.

Considering the audio stream upload & processing & network jitter/lag, the speed at which text results come back is simply incredible. I don't remember the exact timing, but it was a roundtrip of 40-100?ms which is... crazy/magic.

I made a small experiment with this same Chrome text to speech engine which triggered a google image search and showed in near real time image results for the spoken words. The slowest part of that Rube Goldberg was the google images search + loading the images. [1]

I also.... "secretly" believe that very fast speech recognition is one of "the" secrets to building a smarter / better digital voice assistant. It's one of the key components (with a ton of groundbreaking NLP and/or the right regexes) that might allow closing the "strange feeling" you get when talking to the robot... voice... and... it... answers....... not ... exactly when...... you were expecting it.... to.

I'm super mega busy these days but also super mega interested in this. Reach out? :-)

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dictation-for- gmai...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dictation-for- gmail/eggdmhdpffgikgakkfojgiledkekfdce?hl=en-US)

[1] [https://www.instagram.com/p/BwqFQgWFsYu/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BwqFQgWFsYu/)

</comment><comment><USER32> An an iPhone user, I very often find speech recognition far too slow. It is to the point I rarely use the feature because it often causes frustration. The Google performance here is amazing.

Is this a feature only of Pixel phones?

<comment><USER33> The more recent Pixel devices have a local accelerator for different machine learning tasks, they brand them Visual Core and more recently Neural Core. [https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-4-neural- core-...](https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-4-neural-core-1045318) has more details and a lot of the speed up is probably tied to these being onboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Some iOS Keyboards (SwiftKey) and apps like Draft support speech to text via Microsoft, which seems to work very well.

</comment><comment><USER3> A printed dictionary captures extended history of human language. An audio recognition model based on global mass surveillance can snapshot similar history. After a good model exists and can be run entirely offline, the (sunk) privacy costs are dwarfed by new value that can be created by speech-to-text enablement of human expression.

This is what Google has done and it was a monumental human achievement, deserving a place in history alongside Gutenberg, due to the small size of the model that could operate fully offline on power and space constrained mobile phones.

Compare this approach (partial mass surveillance generating privacy-preserving offline models) with the approaches of competitors like Alexa & Siri: both use mass surveillance for model training, but neither of them make their models available for offline and privacy-preserving public use.

</comment><comment><USER35> Wow, text to speech does not work anywhere near that good when I speak. Australian accent perhaps?

<comment><USER36> I was wondering about that. And also about other languages, because I see Thai speakers using TTS on their Android phones and it seems to work really well in terms of speed and accuracy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Would be nice to test something opensource alongside. Like [https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api](https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api) which runs on Android and iPhone offline.

</comment><comment><USER38> The TTS close caption on Google Meet is also extremely useful, some features Google is just years ahead in.

</comment><comment><USER39> Somewhat related: the Google Translate app uses older voices for some languages, Google Assistant uses the newer, better ones. Not sure why, but if you're using that feature, you should use Google Assistant ("be my translator, please")

</comment><comment><USER40> QUESTION

How hard, on a scale of 1 to impossible, how hard would it be for Apple, or someone else to just grab the model google is using from the pixel and reverse engineer it and steal all their years of research.

<comment><USER41> It would probably be easy for any on-device model. But it would be illegal

<comment><USER42> What part of it is illegal? What if they reverse engineered the model, and then understood the fundamentals of how it worked, and implemented and trained the same architecture with different data?

Or trained their own architecture with data sampled from the Google model?

is it "stealing" data, the architecture, the parameters, or the act of reverse engineering and productizing the knowledge?

<comment><USER43> That's what patents are for. The tricky part is figuring out what aspects were obvious or not to an industry professional.

Models are also usually black boxes, and the techniques used are published.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> In case anyone didn't notice, this is comparing Gboard (Google's virtual keyboard) on iOS versus Android. It's NOT comparing Apple's voice recognition tech with Google's.

<comment><USER45> That's actually (sneakily) not the case. Gboard does have voice transcription, but it's triggered by pressing the microphone button at the upper right corner of the keyboard. Apple's voice transcription is still triggered from the bottom right button, even if a 3rd party keyboard is being used.

<comment><USER44> Thanks. I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> For me it seems like Google voice typing is getting worse and worse. It capitalizes random Words in a sentence Like this. It specifically ignores the word "o'clock".

<comment><USER47> Google pixel 3a, reading your comment: "for me it seems like Google voice typing is getting worse and worse. It capitalizes random words in a sentence like this. It's specifically ignores the word o clock."

<comment><USER46> See! I don't know who at Google has this personal vendetta but it has to be on purpose. You say "We start at three o'clock" and it just types "We start at 3" when what you want it to type is "We start at 3:00". You can sit there saying "one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock" and it just types out "1234". It _knows_ the word I'm using but ignores it on purpose.

It's a real issue for me as "4:00" has three significant digits, it's specific, whereas "4" might mean anything between 3:50 and 4:10.

<comment><USER48> It's a pain, but can you say "four colon zero zero?"

<comment><USER46> Nope! Google ignores that too and you just get "400".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'd like to see these side-by-side with someone typing with thumbs or typing with a full keyboard and see who really wins.

</comment><comment><USER50> It's amusing (from the comments) how much people are biased towards Apple.

1\. Apple does it online, Google does it offline, hence Apple being slower is okay. But why is Apple's transcription more inaccurate then?

2\. Google violates privacy because it used 411 data to train its models, hence its speech transcription quality is better. But Apple is the one doing it online, are we sure it's not using the voice data too, similar to how it has/was doing it with Siri?

It will sound like I am trying to defend/promote Google here, but that's very far from my intent.

As an iPhone user since the first iPhone, I just want iPhones to be better. I use iPhones for the same privacy concerns as many of you, but let's not give a pass to Apple. Let's demand higher quality from them so that they spend the time, money and effort to improve. I don't want to feel like I am compromising on a worse overall experience in favor of better privacy when i buy my next phone.

<comment><USER51> Apple does not do the transcription online, at least not on any modern iPhone. Turn on airplane mode and disconnect wifi and give it a try yourself.

<comment><USER52> It requires iOS 13. Here's the code that does it:

        var req: SFSpeechRecognitionRequest;
        if #available(iOS 13, *) {
            req.requiresOnDeviceRecognition = true
        }

And the docs link: [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech/sfspeechrec...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech/sfspeechrecognitionrequest/3152603-requiresondevicerecognition)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Wow does anyone know why it's slow on the iPhone?

<comment><USER54> iPhone is doing this online, sending data packet back to Apple.

Pixel is doing this completely offline.

<comment><USER55> iPhone is doing it on device as well.

<comment><USER33> Fairly certain that isn't true. On my wife's iPhone, she was never able to use voice to text while in airplane mode. Maybe that's changed with the latest 11 but it definitely didn't work on the X.

<comment><USER55> Go to Settings -> General -> Keyboards. If your language and phone support it, it should say "You can use Dictation for {language} when you are not connected to the internet." below Dictation Languages. It works since the 6s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Is it a side-effect of Google expertise in analyzing people's private data in order to transform it into something useful to sell ads?

</comment><comment><USER57> The iPhone keyboard seems not to be the original one.

Is this really calling Apple's transcription service? And does it maybe even add some latency?

</comment><comment><USER58> granted neither google or apple really works well with my voice for some reason...

</comment><comment><USER59> Must be a Pixel 4. My Pixel 3 result is arguably worse than the iOS one. It's too painful to ever use.

</comment><comment><USER60> Twitter video is a mess. I can't read anything in this video

</comment><comment><USER18> I will never support google in anyway, at least in tension fully, but Apple voice to text is absolutely a palling. I just dictated this message here is my iPhone, so I will leave it as is without fixing the fuck ups.

</comment><comment><USER61> And Apple could literally do this faster than Google due to much better onboard hardware. They're just years behind at AI at this point. It's getting embarrassing. Some _individual researchers_ can do a better job than their entire speech-to-text team is doing here.

Although to me, neither example is useful without:

1\. Automatic punctuation

2\. Robust recognition in noisy environments

And neither system is capable of that yet, although Google's system is better at #2.

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm curious about the privacy policies behind both engines and their development.

Google's gotten an advantage in many fields by simply trampling over user's rights. Apple has been more respectful of user rights, and that's kind of made life harder for them too.

<comment><USER63> Here's my controversial post of the day:

I'm okay with Google trampling on my rights, in exchange for the things it gives. Personalized search results, better ad hoc translation, all of these things work well only because they have my data. And for me, I like these things enough that I'm perfectly okay with the trade.

<comment><USER64> In this case however the transcription is done fully offline on device - <USER2> is why it is so fast. Yes Google may have trampled on your voicemail data and 411 calls to create a model that works so amazingly well across different accents and languages - but it is forgivable in this case given how good and useful it is!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Well the iPhone is doing this online. While Pixel is doing it offline. Which is why the latency difference. ( Specific to English only, some languages still requires connection on Pixel )

I think dictation on iPhone is good enough, at least 10 times better than pre iPhone / Machine learning era. But it is also not as good as google. Partly because Google has more Data and started research way earlier, and partly because this isn't a fundamental strength of Apple.

I am pretty sure Apple is working on Offline Dictation. If Google can do it with Snapdragon on a much smaller transistor budget, there is no reason why Apple cant do it with more transistor.

<comment><USER40> That just makes it even worse!

Look how much better the Pixel is doing on accuracy too. It's almost flawless while the iPhone, despite the advantage of offline processing, is getting maybe 10% wrong and writing complete nonsense words in there. Who is the hell is "Poor Michael Geer"?

(for clarity, I'm an iPhone user and won't be switching because privacy, but this makes me jealous)

<comment><USER65> As pointed out on another comment, this is using Google's 3rd party keyboard, so in effect it's google vs. google.

<comment><USER66> No, it's still using Apple's native speech-to-text feature.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Swift Resources - <AUTHOR> http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html

<comment><USER2> You forgot to add: [http://swiftlang.eu](http://swiftlang.eu)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I recently added filters so you can search for articles published in the "Last 7 days", or for all articles with "Metal" in the subject or tag, for example.

[http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?q=&age=7](http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?q=&age=7)

[http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?q=metal](http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?q=metal)

You can filter by a site too: [http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?q=raywenderlich](http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?q=raywenderlich)

I don't have dates on all the articles and the tagging is all manual.

This "weekend project" is written in Go and deployed on AppEngine. Next I need to figure out how to use Google's datastore.</comment>


"Tomorrow belongs to me" - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/06/tomorrow-belongs-to-me.html <comment><USER2> _"Okay, so the idiots did it; they broke the UK."_

When this is your attitude toward your fellow countrymen and women of course it's broken. A majority voted for something and they are "idiots". Democracy is ugly, especially when the majority votes against what you think is best.

Dismissing the rise of populism as "idiots" is about as smug and idiotic as it gets. Populism isn't rising because people don't know what's good for them, but because people don't think the current structure of the system is good for them. If you're doing well in the current system, of course it seems stupid to vote against it. If you aren't doing well, then any brick to throw at the glass house looks good.

Populism and extreme nationalism is best kept at bay by a system that works for the majority of people, creating a strong "middle class". That way fewer brick throwers exist. But lecturing people about "what's best" for them or trotting out abstract economic figures and theories won't do it, only forward economic progress will, where people believe the system works and they can move forward and not slide backwards. Most governments have tried to paste over issues with rhetoric, theories, and easy, central-bank money, all of which are only exacerbating the problems, not fixing them.

<comment><USER3> Charlie must have some like-minded friends on HN, judging by your downvotes.

I wonder if they even bothered to read your entire post and think about its content, or if they simply read the beginning, considered you an "idiot", and downvoted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Idiots Goose stepping, hate filled morons Racist Demented Odious crypto- fascist

These are just some the words used to describe people the author disagrees with. In addition, I find that the implication of the author that the people over 60 voted for Brexit due to dementia very offensive. Silicon Valley and the tech sector in general already have a poor track record on ageism and this type of stereotyping would not be tolerated for any other disenfranchised group.

<comment><USER5> > Silicon Valley and the tech sector in general already have a poor track > record on ageism and this type of stereotyping would not be tolerated for > any other disenfranchised group

The author (Charlie Stross[1]) is not in the valley, and his tenuous link with the tech sector is as a Sci Fi author and ex-programmer (90's web payments). He is also Scottish _in Scotland_ ; I'll take his word about the UK/Brexit over yours.

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In case there's anyone out there who doesn't get the context that Charlie is alluding to: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Mg6Gfh9Co](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Mg6Gfh9Co)

</comment><comment> T-A JK Rowling beat him to it: [https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/746203541929234433](https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/746203541929234433)

</comment><comment><USER7> I like how he touches concisely on what brought this all about, what caused it to go as it did, and assorted effects it will have.

I mean, as opposed to when we get links to articles from the atlantic or the new yorker where we fairly consistently have to wade through endless verbiage to get anything.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love how this starts: "Okay, so the idiots did it; they broke the UK."

Because that's how you promote understanding: by calling people with opposing views "idiots". And it goes downhill from there.

What hysterical tripe.

<comment><USER8> Would you like to take the high road and address the points he makes, instead of answering like with like?

<comment><USER3> I'll address the only point that needs to be addressed, which was his absurd claim from the start.

 _Not everyone who voted for Brexit is an idiot._ Full stop. Any argument built upon the opposite assumption is flawed, emotional garbage.

<comment><USER3> ...and two days later, I still stand by my statement.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


jQuery CDN having SSL issues - <AUTHOR> https://code.jquery.com/ <comment><USER2> It is too bad that the HTML standard has no built in way to fallback.

They've added a cryptographic hash/integrity and the async/defer attributes to the script tag, but something as essential as a fallback if a script or stylesheet fails to load (which the browser is best placed to know), has no built in functionality.

Instead you're left doing JavaScript tricks which for missing CSS gets a little ugly[0]. But CDN with local fallback (or visa versa) has been common now for decades but yet no official support at all. Honestly if the integrity attribute is specified the browser should just be able to fall back to a cached copy it has (e.g. jquery.1.2.3.min.js has a crypto hash of ABC123, and I have that file already).

[0] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7383163/how-to- fallback-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7383163/how-to-fallback-to- local-stylesheet-not-script-if-cdn-fails)

<comment><USER3> I mean, the fallback mechanism is progressive enhancement. It's a reliability mechanism more than anything - if JS (or part of the JS) fails to load the site should fall back to a version that potentially reduces the interactivity but allows essential functions to continue.

<comment><USER2> Progressive enhancement is largely a myth.

A lot of libraries, JQuery, Lodash, Angular, Vue, React, Bootstrap's JS, module loaders, etc aren't simply offering "improved interactivity" they're offering core functionality. In essence the site runs on these libraries, if you remove them there's nothing left to regress too.

I've worked in several companies and never seen progressive enhancement used. It might have made sense back in the IE6 era when JavaScript was just for whiz-bang, these days JS libraries are holding the whole site's data context/state and generating Ajax as needed (Vue, Angular, React, etc). That's core, there's nothing progressive that can be removed from that.

Progressive Enhancement only makes sense for small toy sites or for academics to play with. Even Netflix's famous examples are about web services going offline, not losing core JavaScript libraries.

<comment><USER4> No. It's just a problem of laziness, and possibly ego, of developers.

There are apps using browser as execution environment and there are websites. You wouldn't expect a client-side drawing tool, WebVR game or real time visualization of blockchain transactions to work without JS enabled.

However, you can easily expect a social network, mail client, news page, task app, and to some extent even things like IM to work with no JavaScript. "That's core" is just an excuse for poor architecture - it's only core because you chose to make it so.

There are apps and there are websites, with only some small part of grey area in between. If you're a web developer wanting to use newest, greatest trendy tools, you see everything as apps, despite of common sense suggesting otherwise, and you end up with no progressive enhancement for no good reason. When you take it to extremes, you end up creating such abominations like the old SPA Twitter frontend, spinning the fans of your laptop for 15 seconds just to display 140 characters of text, because "the core" is implemented as AJAX calls and fully rendered client-side.

<comment><USER2> > No. It's just a problem of laziness, and possibly ego, of developers.

We're talking about large organizations. No single developer is making these decisions. And the question is about resource allocation, if the choice is between improving the core experience or implementing an experience that <1% of our users will ever see, the choice is easy.

> "That's core" is just an excuse for poor architecture - it's only core > because you chose to make it so.

It is core because the internet has democratically made it so. You're speaking for a very vocal minority. We're choosing not to implement a special mode for people who self-selected to receive a broken web experience. Fortunately that same demographic knows how to resolve the issue they caused.

> no progressive enhancement for no good reason.

A richer user experience is a very good reason. If the choice is between making the site richer and more immersive for 99% of users, and leaving 1% of users who wish to be contrarian for no reason out in the cold? So be it. A worthy sacrifice, in particular as this 1% selected themselves for punishment.

You're welcome to pick and choose any arbitrary part of the web to disable, maybe JavaScript, maybe CSS, maybe font rendering entirely, maybe disable images, but it gets a little silly when you blame others for your self imposed breakages. You don't want it broken? Don't break it.

<comment><USER3> I'd dearly love to have stats that aren't a few years old, but when GOV.UK last ran an experiment it was 1.1% of people who arrived without JS (~1m page views a month) split into 0.3% who'd deliberately disabled JS and 0.8% who had a broken JS environment for another reason. Like I said, it's a reliability issue, not pandering to people who choose to go out the way to 'break' their environment. So yes, by choosing a JS-only environment you're prioritising developer needs over user needs. That's potentially fine if the cost balance equation works out that way for you, but it's a specific choice you've made to not support people who through no fault of their own don't meet the requirements of the environment you've decided to create.

<comment><USER2> > So yes, by choosing a JS-only environment you're prioritising developer > needs over user needs.

Even according to your own statistics, we're prioritizing 98.9% of user's needs over 1.1% of user's needs (or more accurately 99.2% of users against the broken 0.8%, since we won't do anything for the 0.3% who decided to break it on purpose).

Resources allocated to 0.8% of the userbase aren't free, they come from time that could be better spent improving the experience for everyone else.

> That's potentially fine if the cost balance equation works out that way for > you, but it's a specific choice you've made to not support people who > through no fault of their own don't meet the requirements of the environment > you've decided to create.

That's fine. The same 0.8% with a broken browser or proxy won't find elsewhere on the internet any more friendly to them. The best they can hope for is a small slither of sites with fallback, but the user experience will be so terrible they're better off just fixing the issue than continuing.

I find it funny that people spent years making these same arguments, but used assistive technologies as their cornerstone, now that assistive technologies (and the aria standards) fully support rich JavaScript sites, the argument has shifted to some hand waving minority that cannot even be quantified. We both know this is really about the NoScript crowd (and similar, like RequestPolicy), the other people with a broken web experience have far more significant issues that no one site can hope to mitigate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I always self-host my JS/CSS libraries: the connection is already open (thanks to keep-alive) so what's the problem of serving a couple of more KiBs of compressed data instead of making an additional DNS request and a new connection to a CDN?

I understand that the CDN version of the library may have already been cached by the browser while visiting other websites, but does it really save that much time/traffic compared to self-hosting?

<comment><USER6> I'm not taking a side, just trying to add some numbers. Let's ignore the privacy/uptime concerns for the sake of this comment.

If every site you visit has 350kb of stuff that would benefit from a CDN JS but also some CSS and fonts (google fonts, bootstrap, etc.) If you visit 50 pages a day in a 30 day month, that's a little over 500mb of data.

.35mb x 50sites x 30days = 525mb

That would be a ton of easily avoidable data in regards to mobile plans depending on where you are. This number isn't 100% accurate though, many "normal" (read - not techy hackernews readers) might only visit say a dozen sites a day or less (let's ignore apps like facebook/snapchat/etc). Even that might be a stretch.

Then again students and other "savy" users might be going across hundreds of new sites a day.

For you the host? Unless you're a massive beast, most of us "hobbiests" fit within the free bandwidth of 5$ vps services anyway.

<comment><USER3> That's assuming every site is using the same CDN and the same version of the library. Seeing as that's not the case you can cut that by at least an order of magnitude. Secondly, most users visiting 50 pages a day will not visit 50 sites a day but more like 5 pages a site across 10 sites, or even 10 pages a site on 5 sites. Now let's add in to the user the external privacy cost of being tracked across multiple sites and it starts to look a little less appetising again from the user's point of view.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7>
      Original, jQuery CDN:
      https://code.jquery.com/jquery-X.Y.Z.min.js

      Google:
      https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/X.Y.Z/jquery.min.js

      Microsoft:
      https://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-X.Y.Z.min.js

      Microsoft ASP.NET:
      https://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-X.Y.Z.min.js

      jsDelivr:
      https://email@example.com/dist/jquery.min.js

      cdnjs:
      https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/X.Y.Z/jquery.min.js

      Yandex.ru:
      https://yastatic.net/jquery/X.Y.Z/jquery.min.js

<comment><USER8> Does anyone have a performance benchmark comparing them?

<comment><USER7> While Google and Microsoft are not included, JSDelivr (StackPath+fastly+CloudFlare+Quantil) compares themselves to MaxCDN (now StackPath which is the official jQuery CDN) and CloudFlare (the cdnjs provider) here: [https://www.cdnperf.com/cdn- compare?type=performance&locatio...](https://www.cdnperf.com/cdn- compare?type=performance&location=world&cdn=cloudflare-cdn,jsdelivr- cdn,maxcdn&datefrom=2018-3-19&dateto=2018-4-19)

KeyCDN has an online asset performance tool that we can use to compare the hosted jquery.min.js files. The numbers included here are results received (to the San Francisco location) in ms of [DNS lookup time] / [time to connect to server] / [overhead of TLS connection on individual asset] / [time from client HTTP request to receiving first byte from server]:

Original, jQuery CDN:

[https://tools.keycdn.com/performance?url=https://code.jquery...](https://tools.keycdn.com/performance?url=https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.3.1.min.js?nocache=1)

8 / 2 / 79 / 85

Google:

[https://tools.keycdn.com/performance?url=https://ajax.google...](https://tools.keycdn.com/performance?url=https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js?nocache=1)

32 / 2 / 132 / 155

Microsoft:

[https://tools.keycdn.com/performance?url=https://ajax.micros...](https://tools.keycdn.com/performance?url=https://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-3.3.1.min.js?nocache=1)

128 / 3 / 122 / 130

Microsoft ASP.NET:

[https://tools.keycdn.com/performance?url=https://ajax.aspnet...](https://tools.keycdn.com/performance?url=https://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-3.3.1.min.js?nocache=1)

128 / 3 / 114 / 120

jsDelivr:

[https://tools.keycdn.com/performance?url=https://cdn.jsdeliv...](https://tools.keycdn.com/performance?url=https://email@example.com/dist/jquery.min.js?nocache=1)

64 / 3 / 118 / 129

cdnjs:

[https://tools.keycdn.com/performance?url=https://cdnjs.cloud...](https://tools.keycdn.com/performance?url=https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js?nocache=1)

64 / 2 / 118 / 125

Yandex.ru:

[https://tools.keycdn.com/performance?url=https://yastatic.ne...](https://tools.keycdn.com/performance?url=https://yastatic.net/jquery/3.1.1/jquery.min.js?nocache=1)

32 / 139 / 667 / 993

When I tested them, only jsDelivr and cdnjs/Cloudflare recieved green results (under 200ms time to connect and under 400ms time to first byte) from all 16 worldwide test locations. Averaging the results between these two across 16 locations, I would go with jsDelivr who had a faster average TTFB. The fact that they are combining CloudFlare, Fastly, StackPath, and Quantil (who I had never heard of until today) might explain their global results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great opportunity to strip out unnecessary uses of jQuery, and move to vanilla javascript.

[http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/](http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/)

<comment><USER10> I haven't used jquery in about 2 years, pure javascript and maybe some lodash functions imported into my es6. Give it a try, you might not need it!

<comment><USER11> youmightnotneedlodash dot com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Years ago, I used to link the library from Google [1] or CloudFlare [2].

Nowadays, with all the Node.js stuff that goes around modern front-end, I don't see the point of embedding a JavaScript library from a CDN, unless that library is dependent on a remote service, e.g. Google Analytics, Google Maps, etc… That being said, if you are still maintaining a legacy website that depends on jQuery, you should consider to embed the library like this instead:

<script>window.jQuery || document.write('<script src="/js/jquery.min.js"><\/script>')</script>

[1] [https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/](https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/)

[2] [https://cdnjs.com/libraries/jquery](https://cdnjs.com/libraries/jquery)

<comment><USER13> > Nowadays, with all the Node.js stuff that goes around modern front-end, I > don't see the point of embedding a JavaScript library from a CDN, unless > that library is dependent on a remote service, e.g. Google Analytics, Google > Maps, etc… That being said, if you are still maintaining a legacy website > that depends on jQuery, you should consider to embed the library like this > instead:

What does Node.js have to do with deciding whether to get your static assets from a public CDN or not? I hope your not serving your static assets with Node.js.

<comment><USER14> I assume he's talking about NPM. Now that everybody's hot new SPA has a few hundred thousand NPM dependencies, you roll it all up using Webpack and can just as easily `npm install jquery` as `<script src="cdn.jquery.com"></script>`.

<comment><USER13> > Now that everybody's hot new SPA has a few hundred thousand NPM > dependencies, you roll it all up using Webpack and can just as easily `npm > install jquery` as `<script src="cdn.jquery.com"></script>`.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. You usually don't want some huge javascript bundle to load it's bad for page load performance. Also Webpack allows you to chose whether you want to bundle a dependency locally or grab it at runtime from a CDN or another sever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One more reason to use Decentraleyes.

[https://decentraleyes.org](https://decentraleyes.org)

<comment><USER16> I came here to suggest this (I use it on Firefox), but unfortunately, this is not an option for a set of users on smartphones and tablets.

<comment><USER15> Works great on Firefox/Android, but yes unfortunately that leaves iPhone users out in the cold still.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's not an expiry. It's a cert name mismatch. CN is *.ssl.hwcdn.net

<comment><USER18> My guess is they decided to switch to Highwinds as their CDN (don't know what it was before) and they didn't plan it correctly.

<comment><USER19> FYI: Stackpath owns Highwinds. It was likely an internal configuration issue at Stackpath.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> [https://www.jsdelivr.com](https://www.jsdelivr.com) is a good alternative. We actually monitor for https failures and automatically remove the problematic CDN.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is why you self-host all project dependencies.

<comment><USER2> But that costs you cache hits, increases the real world size of your site, and slows loading. I'm sure mobile users with metered internet would prefer you didn't download that 100 KB JavaScript library for the nth time.

<comment><USER21> It's more complex than that. Mobile networks are mostly hampered by latency - each additional HTTP request to a different domain requires another TCP coldstart and handshake, DNS lookup, TLS setup, etc.

Many times the 100KB of JavaScript is faster to load when minified and combined with other site code and served compressed over a single HTTP request or streamed via HTTP/2\. It's almost always faster to use an existing connection than to start a new one.

Also there isn't one canonical version of jQuery. There's dozens of potential versions available[1]. So it's not immediately clear that a user will have the version a site depends on.

[1] [https://mathiasbynens.be/demo/jquery- size](https://mathiasbynens.be/demo/jquery-size)

<comment><USER2> It isn't faster than not re-requesting the resource at all because it was previously downloaded from the CDN which is what the discussion is about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks like it's working again.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Starting to see complaints, questions, etc. on twitter about it too.

[https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=jquery](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=jquery)

</comment><comment><USER23> Looks like its working now [https://code.jquery.com](https://code.jquery.com)

</comment><comment><USER24> Potentially related to the Chrome 66 update and Symantec stuff?

<comment><AUTHOR> Broken on latest versions of Safari, FireFox, Edge, etc. as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yep, this just broke my project :/

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks like they fixed it

</comment><comment><USER27> Only hobby websites would host jquery off a cdn</comment>


California test scores fail to improve despite extra preparation time - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/California-test-scores-fail-to-improve-despite-12261583.php <comment><AUTHOR> Earlier, related discussion on same topic:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15438694](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15438694)

Print edition title: "California students' test scores flatline" (October 9, page D1)</comment>


Keep your dog out of my office - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@calvinspill/fuck-office-dogs-c61c88b7950b <comment><USER2> I feel the same way as the author.

The issue is that for a very large population of dog owner, it is simply unimaginable that someone wouldn't love their dog.

I have an anxious reaction to dogs also (bad experiences in my childhood), and I find the US absolutely terrible with the lack of consideration for people that don't like to be near dogs. There is almost a stigma that if you don't like dogs, you must be a bad person.

<comment><USER3> > I feel the same way as the author.

Here as well.

I am also tired of people trying to bring their dogs into all kinds of public businesses, like grocery stores and restaurants.

Makes me wonder if there is some Toxoplasmosis like thing that induces people to think that such a thing is acceptable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love dogs. My familly owned 4 of them, small ones, bigs ones, smart ones, dumb ones. All so cute.

Yet, they have no place in an office. They actually have no place in a city. Animals need space. They need to be able to be dirty, make a mess, make noise.

Cities are a place terrible for that. Work even more.

If you decided to get a dog, knowing what it implies, and it prevent somebody from working, you deserves to be fired.

</comment><comment><USER5> >The dog sprinted towards me, barking its head off, scaring the everliving shit out of me, and I barely escaped by jumping out of the lead's length radius at the last minute. I still have nightmares about it to this day.

Nightmares about a dog on a leash running towards you? This whole post seems like a rant of someone who simply had a bad experience with dogs.

We have an office dog and obviously you can only do it with well trained and well behaving dogs.

<comment><USER6> > well trained and well behaving dogs

Ever dog owner has the most well trained and best behaving dog.

<comment><USER4> And after it bites you, "it's strange because it's usually so nice".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Last year I interned at a company and the designated office had a huge black dog that smelled like a hobo in it (the dog belonged to one of the other 3 guys - no idea how his 2 colleagues can handle that smell).

I spent approx. 2 minutes in that room to introduce myself and then sat the remaining time (4 months) in the kitchen or at my bosses desk when he was away.

Since then I asked in every job interview about the company's dog policy.

</comment><comment><USER8> This has nothing to do with dogs being in office.

It's just a rant from the guy because he had some bad experiences with dogs.

THe problem (regardless of office or not) is not that dogs are allowed, but rather dogs not behaving.

<comment><USER2> It has all to do with dogs in the office.

This policy of allowing dog is pushed by a majority that cannot understand that some of us simply don't like dogs at all.

<comment><USER8> >This policy of allowing dog is pushed by a majority that cannot understand that some of us simply don't like dogs at all.

Should we also ban roses, because some people don't like them? How about no meat at the workplace because it could bother vegans?

There has to be some kind of compromise by _everyone_ if people want to share a place. Be it accepting that some people love dogs, hate roses,....

At the end, if the majority likes something, you are on the losing end in a shared environment at least (as bad as that sounds). One could also argue it is rather selfish that you want a shared environment to suit your needs only.

If something bothers you that much then you have to somehow find a compromise. Maybe you can sit away from the dog owner coworkers or something or create "dog areas" and "no-dog areas." (Another compromise, like I mentioned).

<comment><USER2> Did you just compare a dog with roses and vegan food in terms of annoyance?

I think we can all agree that dogs are obnoxious, take space, smell ,make noises, attack etc. Probably a factor a 1000 in annoyance

And for the record, I would not bring roses at work if it annoys one of my colleagues. Seriously those things are not even comparable though.

And for the record, you represent perfectly the dog owner that we all hate, that cannot understand that some of us are anxious around dogs. You think as if your dog must have all the rights and be treated as someone special

<comment><USER8> First of all, stop talking for others.

 _You_ hate dogs. Not _we_.

Second, I don't let my dog roam around and I am very well aware of people being anxious, but clearly you just hate on anything with dogs and are ranting here.

<comment><USER9> > First of all, stop talking for others.

Take your own advice. Sure, you think _your_ dog is no problem, but you can't speak for every other dog owner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well, if you don't like dogs or other pets make your choice - go to another pet unfriendly office. Just like with allergy, if you're allergic to peanuts - stay away from them. Of course it will limit your choices and it will be hard to avoid cross-contaminations in public food chains. And it will also hurt your sense of justice - your zone of comfort will be much smaller comparing to others, that's unjust, isn't it? But that's life.

<comment><USER11> I like this better: If you like dogs, go hang out (or work) in places where dogs belong.

<comment><USER10> Agree, that's better. But what do we do then with the people who don't like them and still come there and complain?

<comment><USER11> I was referring to places like: the veterinarian, the Humane Society, or kennels (or even work-from-home).

If people complain about dogs being there, they are beyond help, lol.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does Android-development-as-a-Service make sense to you? - <AUTHOR>

My question: would it make sense to offer Android as a Service?
Startups/businesses often don't do Android apps, but your audience likely is on Android. So I'm exploring this idea of doing Android as a Service.
We would design + build + maintain your Android app, as a copy (but adjusted for Android) of your iOS app. The important bit is: it would be JUST AS GOOD, not a crappy Android copy but an Android app that feels Android-y and has a great UX.
Doing this as a subscription service (not a project-based consulting service) would (?) make it much cheaper for you. And it would also mean your Android app continues to get love and polish after launch, which is what you'd want. You'd sign up for ongoing development at a fixed monthly price, and you could cancel anytime.
I am looking for startups/businesses that have an iOS app but not an Android app and that think having a great Android app without tons of distractions, and at reasonable cost, could help them grow significantly.
I want to discuss this idea. It may well be dumb (feel free to criticize in the comments). I'm probably missing a bunch of things.
I wrote down some more detailed thoughts on a landing page here: http://getandroid.co/ (you can leave your email there too if you're interested in seeing how this turns out) <comment><USER2> I've done this type of work before (porting Android to iOS, and porting iOS to Android), and it doesn't strike me as great for a subscription service - instead, just advertising that you are Android porting experts would probably be sufficient, if that's the market you want.

I'm not sure what the difference is between paying your company $5k/month for a year, for this Android-app-as-a-service, vs just paying your company $5k/month for consulting services (and maybe locking that in as a minimum spend).

On your end, you could end up losing a lot of money by not estimating the porting costs correctly, and quoting too low a rate.

Personally, I find that straight-up porting projects aren't very interesting (as a software developer), so I tend to take on projects where the client needs both iOS and Android apps developed from scratch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, wise words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It looks like what many agencies are already doing (for both Android and iOS), so it is definitely a viable business model. I know some startups that already have agencies working on their mobile apps (either Android, iOS or both). After some time though, they all want to develop their apps in-house.

<comment><AUTHOR> So is it more like an option initially? What size startups are they/what type of product do they offer?

One other thought I had was that Saas-type startups could use a service creating mobile apps, which they can then later move in-house.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That is usually accomplished through project based consulting with a maintenance clause in the contract. Nothing too out of the ordinary.

You are on track as it is more lucrative to create apps for others than it is to try to sell your own apps on the app stores.

</comment><comment><USER5> This already exists in a fashion so it's not a terrible idea - [http://www.apportable.com/](http://www.apportable.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I did see them. That's more like a tool, ours would be more like an optimized service.

<comment><USER5> Yes, they're just looking at the dev side not the actual upkeep I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clicky [http://getandroid.co](http://getandroid.co)</comment>


This Tiny Gaming Console Can Play Retro Games from 28 Different Systems - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/this-tiny-gaming-console-can-play-retro-games-from-28-d-1789726792?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kotaku%2Ffull+%28Kotaku%29 <comment><USER2> This is an indiegogo campaign, planned to ship q2 2017:

[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/retroengine-sigma-mini- co...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/retroengine-sigma-mini-console- media-player-cool#/)

Looks pretty cool...</comment>


Ask HN: Where can one learn Ethereum "coding"? - <AUTHOR> I'm interested in Ethereum (the technical part) and want to learn how to use its "decentralized" code in a private network on my laptop.<p>Are there any good guides on how to start with such apps? <comment><USER2> [https://medium.com/@ConsenSys/a-101-noob-intro-to- programmin...](https://medium.com/@ConsenSys/a-101-noob-intro-to-programming- smart-contracts-on-ethereum-695d15c1dab4)</comment>


Ask HN: What advice would you give someone who wants to become a programmer? - <AUTHOR> Recently i have had a number of friends and family members ask me how to get into programming as a profession.
I gave them a couple links to some online resources like coursera, learnpythonthehardway, and some mit opencourseware courses; but im not sure whether this really puts them on a path to programming as a profession.
So, i ask you HN, How would an non-fresh grad adult go about starting a career in programming without a degree in computer science?
Is a couple online courses and a twitter clone or so in your github profile all you need to get a real job these days? Do they need to pay thousands for some bootcamp to learn how to 'hack the interview'? Open source contributions?  What is it that hiring managers are looking for in fresh programmers?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> _How would an non-fresh grad adult go about starting a career in programming without a degree in computer science?_

Reading and doing. I'll come back and add my reading list when my HN timeout is up. SICP, the dragon book, and Hennessy's computer architecture book are a good start. Others may have some great suggestions.

 _Is a couple online courses and a twitter clone or so in your github profile all you need to get a real job these days?_

Depends on where you're located and how old you are. Cultures are so incredibly different from place-to-place that a credit in one sector can be a demerit in the other.

 _Do they need to pay thousands for some bootcamp to learn how to 'hack the interview'?_

Probably not.

 _What is it that hiring managers are looking for in fresh programmers?_

Fresh, innocent young whores without fixed value systems or outside obligations. If you start drawing lines in the sand for personal relationships and making value judgments about the work being dong (Uber, Palantir, etc.), you will lose a lot of value very quickly.

</comment><comment><USER3> My advice: start small, write something simple. Really study the language you choose and how to work with it properly. Once you understand it, you can exploit it. Then, keep studying and work on larger projects.

Also, work on something that interests you. Don't get into programming just because it seems cool. It really is, but love what you do. Life is to short not to.

</comment><comment><USER4> I seem to notice about a 50-50 split on whether having stuff in your github profile is worthwile, but when it comes to someone pursuing very junior roles, i would imagine it cant hurt.

I'd be more interested to know what some hiring managers would like to see in a github profile for a junior dev - are they looking for twitter clones as you suggest? open source contributions? side projects? are they just looking for proof that you have interest and passion for development? or are they looking at the code to see how sophisticated it is, how it conforms to best practices wrt commenting, etc.?

</comment><comment><USER5> The advice I give everyone is to try it out first and see if you like it- it's not for everyone.

The worst is to complete to some sort of software engineering career track, without ever realizing you're not interested in programming. So you come out knowing all sorts of minutiae about software and having all these great opinions, but you can't solve FizzBuzz. Nearly every company in the country, large and small, knows how to filter people like that. Don't do that.

<comment><AUTHOR> What would you suggest to people who arent going to enjoy programming? Trades like hvac/welding? would you recommend they get into the IT side? go back to school?

i often have people near me who are struggling financially ask for advice on how to get into an actual career - these are smart people who have fallen into and out of various lower skilled jobs like restaurants, call centers, secretarial roles, small auto repair shops, and the like. These are mostly people in their late 20s or early 30s who have college degrees in something less marketable (non-STEM).

Whats out there these days for intelligent people who are willing to work hard, and how do we get these people to these jobs?

for the trades, apprenticeships have largely been outpaced by associates degree programs and credentialism. IT roles are rife with credentialism, most credentials taking 300$ plus for the exam alone without any training materials. Going back to school takes a lot of money and real confidence that youre sure what you want to pursue.

I keep seeing people say that during the industrial revolution people were saying machines would take all our jobs, and that this time its the same thing. If thats the case - where should all these people be moving?

What should the 25 year old waitress with a philosophy degree be doing in her time off work to get into a real professional career that will allow her to retire at 65?

Are we sure we have jobs for these people? Is all this displacement just caused by the older generation being slower to retire because its less affordable to retire after the housing crash? If so, how do we address that?

<comment><USER5> I'm not a career counselor but I do believe there's something out there for everyone. Maybe the 25-year-old waitress is happy in her current job. Maybe it's easy and fun for her, she lives in an exciting place, and she makes enough to get by. Why should she worry about the next forty years down the road if she's happy?

Things don't look good economically for a lot of people in America, and a lot of people get treated unfairly for stupid reasons, but there's no easy solution I'm afraid. You can't guarantee a job for everyone because not everyone necessarily wants a job, or perhaps they may only want a certain kind of job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't do programming just for the sake of doing programming. Try to make something you personally want, like a better-looking calendar app, or you want to automate some appliance. You'll find out whether or not you actually enjoy programming without feeling frustrated or like you're wasting time.

</comment><comment><USER7> There is a major difference between learning programming and learning how to start a _career_ as a programmer. The skill sets needed are very different.

You can either become a good developer and get hired on merit. Or, you can become an imposer who has great social (and bullshitting) skills and manage your career that way. The second option is undoubtedly easier.

The reason I'm bringing that up is because for an adult, starting from scratch, with no computer science degree, doing it yourself, you are _easily_ looking at four years of hard study 8h/day to become competent. I think almost anyone can do it, but very few have enough time and stubbornness to pull it through.

</comment><comment><USER8> Suggest them a couple of recent college-level books in paper (no online courses, no e-books), one introductory and one with a lot of exercises and solutions. Python may be good choice a language because easier and more generalist than others. They will find their way from that, if one.

</comment><comment><USER9> you don't choose the programming life. The programming life chooses you

</comment><comment><USER10> don't go into web.

try embedded or game development, the caveat to learning any code is that someone will offer you money to do web.

<comment><AUTHOR> really? i often see people warning others to stay away from game development, as i often hear that it favors college grads and churns through they by pushing the boundaries of burnout and high expectations.

I do think that its partially because game dev is probably one of the more fun types of programming, and because of this the market has become flooded with people wanting to develop games.

As for embedded, is that something that someone with little funds is capable of doing on their own? are we talking about doing some arduino projects and then getting a junior embedded dev role? or what does that path look like?

With games its pretty straightforward at least, a single person could reasonably make a small game, and thats probably a reasonable basis on which hiring decisions could be influenced, but im not sure what the path for an embedded developer would be

Thanks for your input!

<comment><USER10> I'd learn VHDL or C, golang or rust.

I think something with an easy learning curve like web, gets harder before it get's interesting.

A real language starts hard and stays that way.

and there's always fresh blood nipping at your heels in web, and you'll get frustrated at frameworks and not being able to upgrade the latest or greatest.

if you design for embedded or a game (something indie) you can start a fresh with new libraries and new outlook.

in web you'll encounter technical debt more quickly.

If you want to do web anyway, I suggest coding with other stuff in your spare time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I dont think web is the best way to go for most people either, its certainly not what i would do, though it does seem easy on the surface, i suspect getting a junior webdev role involves more than knowing how to write a header and title in html and maybe a few css stylesheets.

What do you think about backend dev, or devops type roles? would you expect them to start in frontend and move towards backend as they get experience, or should they start out from scratch and jump into SQL and python/java/ruby?

Or would mobile development be the way to go? learn swift or java and jump into creating some popular app clones in your github?

<comment><USER10> try ios or android, there's less cruft and actual code.

you won't have to context switch as much and you can focus on what you're learning.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How-to: Integrate Gmail Actions with your App - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rainforestqa.com/2014-04-24-howto-gmail-action-integration/

<comment><USER2> when did gmail actions first launch? this seems pretty cool.

It took me a few minutes to figure out what you meant by 'results.'

<comment><AUTHOR> Google I/O 2013, but I'm not sure how long the whitelisting has been going. Yeah; results is a Rainforest thing; we send you an email with basic overview of your test results (pass / fail), but for detail you need to use the app to get the failures, screenshots, notes, etc.

<comment><USER2> can't believe i missed the whitelisting feature.

do you have screenshots of the failures/notes. I'd like to see what a sample rainforest results email looks like.

<comment><AUTHOR> None which I can share here right now; you should sign up and try it though.

<comment><USER2> ugh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "you to get to get to your results"

<comment><AUTHOR> fail, thanks - will fix</comment></comment>


$99.99 HP TouchPad is on Sale and In Stock on BestBuy.com Now - <AUTHOR> http://www.i4u.com/47572/9999-hp-touchpad-sale-and-stock-bestbuycom-now

<comment><USER2> Managed to get a 32GB piece, seems that both models are gone now. Looks like the entire stock was gone in less than five minutes after the post.

</comment><comment><USER3> Out of stock...ordered the 32GB one though...

</comment><comment><USER4> Not anymore. Both are completely gone.</comment>


How Samsung Became The Biggest Electronics Company In The World - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/how-samsung-became-the-biggest-electronics-company-in-the-world-2013-3 <comment><USER2> The story Businessinsider refers to is at Businessweek:

[http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-28/how- samsung-...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-28/how-samsung- became-the-worlds-no-dot-1-smartphone-maker)</comment>