Dear HN "Who's Hiring" responders - <AUTHOR> This is just a friendly note/advice/rant to everyone responding to the HN Who's Hiring listings.
I've been asking around and I hear the same thing over and over again from people/startups/companies that list their positions in the HN Who's Hiring: applicants are putting zero effort into their emails.
Just in the past hour, I have personally received 8 responses for a business development position that were simply "Hi, saw your listing on HN, here is my LinkedIn. Call me."
Guys, this kind of email does not get you hired. It will especially not get you hired when your LinkedIn profile is set to super private and the only thing I see is your picture. Even worse is when you don't even bother to send an email to the poster directly and it's instead just BCC all the emails in the Who's Hiring thread. And even worse is when you apply for a position that's not even the one being offered. Take the time to actually read the posts: just because a listing contains the word "developer" does not mean it's a software developer. Business Developer != Software Developer!
Some friendly advice: if you at least click on the links in the posts, take a look at the startups' sites, and just mention in your email "I see your product/service X, and think it's interesting" the value of your email and the chances of getting contacted in regards to the job shoot up infinitely more.
HN Who's Hiring is not CraigsList. It's mainly quality people posting because they know there are quality readers looking to get hired. Put a tiny bit of effort into the emails you throw out, it's an investment that will pay back greatly! Remember, this is the first impression you are making on someone who might be your future employer! You're often not dealing with HR staff/agencies, and will be likely directly in touch with the person you'll be working with/for should you be hired. Show some effort, make it look like you at least care.
Yes, it's not easy to sit there and read about each of the companies and what they're working on, but it is a hirers' market and if you don't show the initiative and stick out as someone who is earnest about becoming a valuable member of the team, why would anyone bother replying? Especially when startups are looking for the top talent (whether they need it or not is besides the point), HN is full of A-list developers/founders and A-listers only hire other A-listers. Your "meh, here's my info, you do the research about me and if you're interested call me up" is not the kind of attitude that inspires confidence and will not get you a job.
I know for a fact that HN is chock-full of quality talent both hiring and looking to be hired. It is sad that this is the sort of response people posting job listings have been getting. For the sake of the entire community, put a little bit of effort into your email shots. It's better (and is a smarter investment) to look through the listings, get a feel for what companies are working on stuff that would interest you, and spend a couple of hours drafting 10 personalized emails explaining why you are the answer to the question than to simply ctrl+f "developer", ctrl+c, bcc, ctrl+v, rinse, repeat, send.
tl;dr if it'll take the company more effort to reply to your email than you put into sending it, you're doing it wrong. <comment><USER2> I was absolutely with you until

      but it is a hirers' market

which, even if it is (and that's debatable), is not the correct reason for anyone to behave differently. In this case, applicants should not be reading the actual postings because it's a hirers' market and hirers are now somehow considered royalty. Instead, applicants _should be_ reading them because it's basic curtesy and not doing it ends up wasting everybody's time. If it became an employees' market over night that rule would still apply.

Having the upper hand (imaginary or real) should not play a role here. This is a bad place for expectations of entitlement.

<comment><USER3> It is absolutely a hirers' market if the market is for a low-level coder. Many people, especially coming from an engineering background, have the requisite programming and computer science experience to do what you need.

It's a hirees' market at the rockstar level, as always.

<comment><USER4> As someone who's recruited heavily at the entry level, you're mistaken. Even substantial number of computer science graduates lack the capability of basic coding (i.e. "here's the detailed specification of this function; go implement it"). There is substantially more demand than available talent.

SF, New York, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, etc. all have huge talent shortages. Even developer markets that were relatively soft in the past such as Poland and India are starting to become competitive as the war for talent becomes more global.

<comment><USER5> For London I strongly disagree.

When start-ups, profitable ones, are offering £35k + bonus + stock options (worth £0), for senior developers, in Central London, there's not a talent shortage.

Similarly skilled developers are getting £35k+ & bonus outside of London, where the cost of commuting/living is significantly cheaper, in established companies with full benefits packages, that don't expect them to work 50 hour weeks. Inside London, those devs who are working in finance are getting paid £45k+, big bonus, gym, laundry, etc. thrown in, with the same workload expectation.

Experienced (and good) Senior iOS developers in London are regularly being offered less than £40k.

No surprise many talented staff have left London, for equivalent salaries, less stress and cheaper cost of living (especially as they hit the age where kids appear in the picture).

No surprises many younger devs look at the £25k starting salary in London, where transport and rent will cost them £1000/month, vs. £25k out of London, where it will be more like £500/mo, and decide that London is not worth losing £6k/yr _after tax_.

<comment><USER4> As it happens I also used to run a developer recruitment startup (CoderStack) in London, so I'm intimately familiar with the market.

While there are certainly companies trying to hire iOS developers at 40k, there are also companies trying to hire iOS developers on 80k+ and iOS contractors on day rates of £500/day.

What you're probably seeing is selection bias. That is the crappy jobs (i.e. low pay) stay on the market far longer than good jobs. Hence you end up thinking that crappy jobs represent a large proportion of the job market than they actually do simply because they stay around longer.

<comment><USER5> You are right, I'm almost certainly exhibiting selection bias. As we all know, the best jobs don't even go on the wider market, such as jobs sites, but are filled by word of mouth referrals, or conversations at events.

But if I go and search: [http://www.technojobs.co.uk/search.phtml?page=2&row_offs...](http://www.technojobs.co.uk/search.phtml?page=2&row_offset=10&keywords=senior%20developer&salary=0&jobtype=all&postedwithin=all)

You will see most senior dev roles advertised with a range, that seems to average out about £45k. That's for the whole country, and London seems no different.

Personal experience with London based recruiters was that despite jobs advertising £60k, the number that the recruiter had from the client was actually lower. When asked about the requirements for getting the top end of the pay scale, "Well, they really only want to pay low 40's", was something I heard time and time again, and caused me to not apply, time and time again.

Crappy jobs? Maybe.

EDIT: Also, I've seen an expensive corporate salary survey (shh, don't tell HR), and whilst London mid-senior people have seen a good bump to their salary in the last 2-3 years, the averages there were approx: junior ~£28k, mid-level ~£36k, senior ~£47k, architect ~£60k, dev lead ~£72k).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps you should interpret it as feedback that its not a hirer's market. In a market where most people have many opportunities the incentive to respond with a high effort response is very low. The better thing to do would be to consider the casual emails you get as leads to a potential hire - you'll have to put the effort in. Additionally what you are seeing is likely not by mistake - its an indication that hiring right now for applicants is in many cases more of a numbers game than it is about crafting a great cover letter. That being said I honestly don't think you are doing yourself much good with this sort of message - I'd just do the best that you can with what you get back.

<comment><USER7> There is a difference between "low effort" and rude. Not taking 30 seconds to actually comprehend the position and have enough background to actually write a meaningful email basically would rule you out of me hiring you since it says a lot about how you would be to work with.

<comment><USER8> You should see the kind of messages I get from recruiters.

<comment><USER9>
       "Dear Anthony, Thankyou 4 ure notes in LinkedIn about
        contacting u - much easier to know that you're approached
        all the time. U r too experienced for my role, but if you
        know of any mid level Python / Linux developers happy 2
        discuss referral $$if I can place them:) Happy Friday!"

(Actual recruiter message on LinkedIn - I keep it around to remind me why I don't talk to recruiters)

<comment><USER10> I had a good laugh at that quote, but now I'm thinking: is it legit to cite one or more persons doing their job poorly to dismiss the entire profession? Do you keep around bad code to remind you why you don't talk to programmers? Examples of quack medicine to remind you why you don't talk to doctors?

<comment><USER9> Essentially every recruiter message that I've received on LinkedIn follows one of two patterns:

a) Hello, you do Python, do you want a job? (with no position details, salary, reason to join, etc.)

b) a) followed by a clumsy attempt to fish details of my contacts (I don't connect with recruiters).

So, er, yeah - "Ha ha, profession!"

<comment><USER10> I don't doubt the abundance of bad behaviors. I was just doing a literal parse of your logic.

<comment><USER9> There actually really wasn't any logic in that statement.

I'm not saying "I have this message from a recruiter, therefore all recruiters are scum." It's a _reminder_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like this: _tl;dr if it'll take the company more effort to reply to your email than you put into sending it, you're doing it wrong._

I don't particularly care whether it is an employer's market or an employee's market. My rule of thumb is that if your email is going to email@example.com, you can send anything you want. But if you are sending an email to a person by name, it is a matter of courtesy to write a personal note.

Likewise, if that person replies to you from their personal email, you deserve more than an obvious form letter, even if it's just a single sentence.

<comment><USER12> Totally. Your scraper/emailer for Who's Hiring should at least include a sentence like, "I particularly like the part about [random string from posting]". I mean, _come on_ , that's not much harder than fizzbuzz ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I completely agree that it's courteous (and often more effective) to give the communications you send the level of attention you'd like them to receive.

But is this true?

> it is a hirers' market

I hear a lot about the war for talent and devs having to beat away recruiters with a stick.

> Take the time to actually read the posts: just because a listing contains > the word "developer" does not mean it's a software developer. Business > Developer != Software Developer!

Fun fact: this mistake apparently gets made on the hiring side too -- last November there were some jobs posted on StackOverflow Careers with titles like "Children's Development Programming Executive" (it was for developing children's tv/video programs).

<comment><USER14> I don't think it's even meaningful enough to be false. Buyer's Market/Seller's Market is a phenomenon of markets with easy substitution and very sticky prices, like houses or street vendor hotdogs.

Both the jobs on offer and the people applying are quite specialized and mostly just looking for a very good match given the massive up-front costs of hiring or taking a new job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I totally agree with your rant, but the fallacy is that you are posting with the absolute expectation a certain level of talent to apply, when this is not the case. HN attracts under-qualified programmers along with high-quality programmers, and I suspect there are far more of the former than the latter. You're more likely to get the low-quality programmers because they are more likely to be looking for work, especially in a field where who you know can get you a job easier and with less effort than sending off resumes to companies.

I didn't apply anywhere, but if I had, I would certainly write a well thought- out cover letter because I would rather not apply to everyone and I understand my chances are quite a bit lower than the company's expected talent level of the baseline applicant, so I would want to focus on places where I have a semi-decent chance. If you are applying to a job via HN, then it is a given that the company is setting a high bar for talent.

<comment><USER16> That's totally true ! Moreover when you know for sure that the guy who read your mail is himself a very good programmer, that he saw dozen of little guys like you, we really have to make intensive efforts in our letters.

But we also have to keep in mind that's only a mail : an article won't be read. So, even if we fall in love with some startups (HN startups have such amazing projects, I spend hours reading your blogs about your work), even in this case we can't send a poem in your honor. The letter have to be well balanced.

... and that's how I spent four hours for sending only one letter to one company. Faith in the fact that the good work pay, you know what it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've applied to many positions (internships) advertised in these threads with a lot of effort to craft each email for each of them. I don't speak english so often so it took me a very great amount of effort to do this. Got only 1 reply, the others didn't even bother saying "Thanks for applying" or anything.

I don't know if this behavior is normal but I would expect a bit more from hirers advertising on HN. Especially when they ask for very specific things that I know I got on my CV.

<comment><USER18> I don't think that's an "HN employers" thing as much as an industry thing.

I've been unemployed for nine months, though I've only been seriously applying for jobs in the past three. (I consider the first six months a well-deserved vacation. Employers apparently consider it the mark of the unemployable. C'est la vie.) I've received exactly zero (0) replies to job applications that weren't automated "we got your application" e-mails. Even at a company where my CV was handed directly to a manager by a friend who worked there, the manager stopped communicating with me after his initial "we'd like to set up a time to talk to you" e-mail.

I completely understand that employers get bombarded with applications for every single position they post. (When our department posted a [low paying] Linux sysadmin position, we received over 100 applications, of which maybe 25 had anything to indicate that the applicant had ever used a computer, let alone Linux.) But a simple "thanks but we're not interested" e-mail would certainly be nice when you've been eliminated as a candidate for a job...or were never actually a candidate to begin with.

The silence of the job search quickly becomes deafening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I sort of agree with you, but there's also a form of over expectation from recruiters and HR services. In order to pass the screening tests, sometimes applicant must have demonstrated skills to save the world, and have proven track records of having done so. 3 times. I read this linkedin blog entry a few days ago where it was said that in order to be considered worthy of an interview, the applicant must show how much of a difference he brought in his previous job. This is completely silly. Not everyone can claim to have raised the company income by 235% by successfully reorganising from scratch the workflow of the engineering team. I am only slightly exagerating. Maybe that's just me taking things too literally. Or maybe I suck at what I do, but everywhere I worked, success was more the result of good teamwork than of the efforts of one single person. Yet simply stating that one is a good team player is not enough.

Yeah, everyone can say: I am a good team player. And every HR can say: Our company provides the best working environment. Hypocrisy on either sides leads nowhere, but it seems like it's still the expected standard.

I think that a linkedin profile can be enough. And if the profile isn't publicly accessible, there might be a good reason: privacy. So why not simply ask? At least it would show that the application is being processed. Or perhaps there's an option somewhere on Linkedin which let a user directly grant access to his profile to people handling job offers when they apply, and you just rant about those not seeing that option.

</comment><comment><USER20> Can we make a trade? Who's Hiring posts will have a clause that says, "Sorry, but we're only looking for folks willing to relocate to X. Don't contact otherwise", in exchange you get better emails? Sounds fair to me.

<comment><USER21> Most of the posts specified a location, and mentioned whether remote workers were acceptable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> That's rather unfortunate.

I'm not sure if it's now a hirers' market or not; I'm not out for a new job at the moment, but I would never, ever send an email without tailoring it specifically for the place I'm writing to. At the least I'd go to their site, see their products/services, look at the demos and look into their history.

      >"Hi, saw your listing on HN, here is my LinkedIn. Call me."
      >...just BCC all the emails in the Who's Hiring thread.

This is just plain rude! It shows not only a lack of respect to the company they're applying to, it's just a lack of manners altogether. Even if someone isn't serious about applying (and by the looks of the emails you got, they weren't) there should be some basic etiquette at play when communicating professionally.

Email isn't Twitter with more chars.

</comment><comment><USER23> Completely agreed. I'm trying to hire software developers who are willing move to Amsterdam (at the company's expense, complete with work permit!), and respondents show all the enthusiasm of a dead fish. The company I represent repeatedly rejects candidates who don't seem excited about the opportunity and if they saw these original emails, they'd reject many of the candidates out of hand.

Instead, we work with the candidates to coach them on how to present themselves to a company and how to improve their CV/resume. As it turns out, most of our applicants _are_ excited about the opportunity, but they've never been taught the basics of how to hunt for a job. I'm not sure why that is. Are programming jobs always so plentiful that people assume no effort is required? (Actually, that _is_ sort of true. I came to programming after a decade of mostly service jobs and I'm inundated with recruiters without even trying, but I still remember my days of living on pot pies and ramen, so I put effort into applying).

TL;DR: many people dream of living and working in Europe and I'm handing them the opportunity on a silver platter, and I _still_ get the "here's my CV" three-word emails.

</comment><comment><USER24> Are you insane?

What kind of place do you come from in which jobs are rarer than developers? Aren't you normally paying recruiters through the nose to access me?

(For the record, I'd write a good message if I felt like the job was for A-listers, but the reality is I just read a lot of them and I can tell that most of these places aren't there.)

<comment><USER25> Your second line sounds self contradictory, so I'm not 100% sure which imbalance you think is implausible, but I've live in 2 US cities that definitely had a surplus of developers, and 1 that definitely had a surplus of jobs (the latter being the one I believe to be more common). They both happen.

<comment><USER24> I meant that jobs are in greater supply than developers - developers are rarer than jobs. This is true where I live at least (in London.)

Having said that good jobs seem as rare as good developers...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I tested this and when I send two line replies to the ads in the hirin thread I get a better response than when I send my CV. Go figure.

<comment><USER27> Probably because once you send the CV they have enough (!) data to make a decision on whether you would be good fit, but with a two line email they can either disregard it or ask for more.

<comment><USER26> That's probably it. Plus there is an added benefit of a reverse filter. I don't want to work with any company that will, at the least, exchange a couple of emails with me. Any company who disqualifies me from just looking at my CV is not a good fit. Team chemistry for me is very important. I don't want to work in a place full of incompatible personalities. Not fun.

<comment><USER28> Plenty of places with good teams may have poor hiring practices.

<comment><USER29> How can a place get a good team if their hiring practice is poor?

<comment><USER28> Hiring practices aren't a constant. They may have changed their practices for the worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So you put zero effort into a attempt to reach the top-echelons of software developer/entrepreneurs and you expect the applicant to customize a resume? The person you'd like to hire most likely has a job, as well as a few offers a week from people that are actively seeking them out.

If you really want to reach this type of employee, you'll have to send individualized notes saying you have an open position, that you already understand the person's capabilities and why your company would be a great place for them to work.

tl;dr If you expect to reach the best employees by putting a few paragraphs on Hacker News, you're doing it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've talked to some people who have tried, and the ultimate conclusion was that adverse selection works against you: the people you think are really bright on HN don't end up applying, and the people who reply usually have some problem that makes them unappealing. This is true of all places you could look to hire people, though, so you shouldn't have any higher expectations.

<comment><USER31> "the people who reply usually have some problem that makes them unappealing," said the obese and unattractive man about the dating site he uses to find dates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> As one additional data point to consider, anyone who has had their information posted to any of the job boards, or ever submitted once to a consulting company, gets dozens of solicitations a day where it is obvious that the person (if not robo mailer) saw a keyword and thought it wouldn't cost anything to send a "personal" request for you to reply. Even if you are a 100% match you often won't hear anything back.

Given that, I can't say I'm surprised that many people feel that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander...

</comment><comment><USER33> I should probably post a "Dear HN 'Who's hiring' posters". And put following content.

With the same token that you say HN is not a CraigsList, when an HN-responder puts an effort in going through their product and writing a personal note inquiring about a possible opportunity at their company, posters should have the courtesy to respond to the responder acknowledging that in-spite of their good/bad profile they can't hire him/her.

I know these two advices are from me to you and you to me. All the remaining folks who have been one-liners will continue to be so.

Btw, I am a graduating student from IIT Delhi, who have applied to many startups that interested me with a personal-note and list of projects I have done with clickable-links. While about 10% of posters responded saying that they did like my profile but can't take it further because of visa, remaining 90% never responded.

While I am not the best engineer, when my detailed & clear personal application doesn't get an acknowledgement reply, I can imagine why responders are just sending one-liners. If posters want to hire, they will hire from one- liners. No point of detailed-personal application.

On a side note, my profile with links to projects is <https://gist.github.com/sravfeyn/13534c67812183235a2c/> I am hunting for an engineering position at a start-up with product-innovation.

<comment><USER34> You should get someone to proofread your writing. Your English is very good, but there are still a few things that sound weird. People spend 30 seconds skimming your CV/profile/resume. If you can make it more readable, it can only help your cause. I'd recommend going to fiverr.com and finding someone with a lot of good reviews to proofread your CV, profile, and cover letter.

<comment><USER33> Hey, thanks for taking the time to read and give such a valuable insight. Can you tell me what sounded weird. I have made a Google Doc, if you have minute please leave comment in the Doc. [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mab- wHgNyTzGGBTdRiiY9yKZ...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mab- wHgNyTzGGBTdRiiY9yKZoBDBkPspTyzVQpYFOuQ/edit?usp=sharing)

I will have it proofread by my friends.

<comment><USER35> Consistency is important. There are multiple styles (Chicago, APA, MLA, AP, etc) - picking one and sticking to it makes your writing more readable. Subconsciously, a reader will come to expect certain constructions or a particular flow (e.g., serial/Oxford comma or not). Think about consistency in areas such as document layout/structure (bullet points or prose), sentence structure, word choice, and punctuation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> There is then the other scenario when candidates put out a well thought out letter after few hours and only to hear no response, black hole. I, for one, do not really get systems like jobvite and no email and direct human contact for hiring developers who you "value".

</comment><comment><USER37> > _tl;dr if it'll take the company more effort to reply to your email than you > put into sending it, you're doing it wrong._

No no no, they're doing it right.

All those lame responses? You think you're gonna get better behavior after hiring?

It's not a response so much as an organization intelligence test. You hire 'em, you get what you deserve.

<comment><USER31> Cuts both ways. Stupid hiring process - you think you'll be treated better after getting hired?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > "it is a hirers' market". It's NOT a hirer's market; what planet are you > living on!

<comment><USER21> It is in most of the world. You're presumably living on planet Valley?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> To those who are applying for a biz dev role like this: do you honestly expect to get a job where you will be selling for your company (whether it be vision, product, etc.) when you cant even sell yourself to get a job?

Finding a job isnt a game of percentages. Or atleast finding the right job isnt (imho). Find the 2-3 jobs you really want and spend the time to make the recruiter believe you could actually sell for their company one day.

</comment><comment><USER40> I found out about my current employer (Monetate) through a HN "Who's Hiring" post, and we've hired several other developers who first heard about us here. I agree with OP that HN readers have a reputation for quality, and I'm surprised that he's seeing so many low-effort responses. I've seen several employers set up "nerd hurdles" that require potential applicants to do something that takes a modicum of effort (and talent) before they can apply -- e.g. coding challenges. Maybe that can help weed out less-serious applicants.

<comment><USER41> > _"I agree with OP that HN readers have a reputation for quality, and I'm > surprised that he's seeing so many low-effort responses."_

This shouldn't be that surprising - if indeed you're looking at a pool of highly qualified people you should _expect_ to see less effort in applications.

There's a line to be drawn at being professional, but if the individual is experiencing extreme demand for his/her services, do not expect them to sell you _that_ hard.

> _"I've seen several employers set up "nerd hurdles" that require potential > applicants to do something that takes a modicum of effort (and talent) > before they can apply -- e.g. coding challenges"_

I'd be careful about this. I've done some of these when they tickled my fancy, and I've done them when I was impressed by the company enough that I actively _wanted_ to work for them.

Almost everyone in the HN Who's Hiring posts are _not_ in the above category. I'm sure you're working on cool stuff, but one paragraph is not enough to get me to salivate at your position, and not enough for me to invest a considerable amount of time.

If you want applicants to put in more effort, consider marketing yourself as someone worth said effort. It is most certainly _not_ a buyer's market right now (not in the HN crowd anyways). Most Who's Hiring posts don't even include anything meaningful about the employer.

"We're in SF and looking for a Rails guy" is not a very compelling sell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Your advice is basically common sense. I would find it hard to believe that you are actually reaching anyone here, though. :( If you're the type of person to send out the "meh" emails, are you really likely to be the type of person that reads this kind of post and says "AHA! I shouldn't do that?"

</comment><comment><USER43> Where does one draw the line? How is one guaranteed on the ROI of drafting a good response.. I used to go the extra mile, spend time writing a good cover letter, personalizing my resume for the job and most of the time I did not even get a response.

</comment><comment><USER44> And while you (the hirers) are at it you might as well put in your listing if J-1 interns are welcome ;)

I lost a couple of hours (yes, I bother to write an proper answer) writing mails only to find out that interns from overseas are not welcome.

<comment><USER16> Yes. Please do that, dear hirers. That's such a deception to know that "It would be OK, if only you were an US citizen".

That hurts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> >> tl;dr if it'll take the company more effort to reply to your email than you put into sending it, you're doing it wrong.

from my side of the table, when I was interviewing (about 6 months ago), probably 8 out of 10 startups that I applied to and interviewed for didn't bother to contact me again - not even a polite "thanks but no thanks". I'm not arrogant enough to think I'm the perfect fit for every company I apply to or even that I aced every interview, but I would think common decency dictates at least a response or acknowledgement after an in person interview.

Two sides of the same coin, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER46> I constantly hear people complain about how few applications they get a response on. Yet, I've always had a pretty great response rate when I start applying.

This advice/note/rant just clarified a potential reason for the differential.

</comment><comment><USER47> Yea I discovered this from the seeking freelancers post, I had to stipulate that people drop at least a link or resume, otherwise I was getting emails like "I write Python. Email me. Thx."

Please folks I get that you are in demand but not pasting even a link in the email is just plain lazy and a little rude. You don't realize it but you are actually competing with 30 other people per listing, HN gets more exposure than you think...

</comment><comment><USER48> the people you want to hire don't need to be told this

</comment><comment><USER49> Poor cover letters are really one of my pet peeves.

Dear Applicants: Why would you send me what is very obviously the same cover_letter.doc that you send everyone? What do you think it says about you as a candidate if you couldn't be bothered to replace "Dear Hiring Manager" with my name? And that little informal note in the body of your email ("Hi, saw your ad on X. See my attached cover letter and resume"), that effectively becomes your cover letter. It's the first thing I read when you apply. Make me want to open your resume right away.

So what should you write in the cover letter? Not single right answer, but here's an idea: Most jobs--especially at startups--are really about solving a problem that the hiring company has. Sure, the job title might say "DevOps Ninja" but if you read carefully you can figure out that what's really going on is the company has grown rapidly and needs to get serious about its messy, hacked-together infrastructure. Address this in your cover letter. Talk about how organized you are and how you once recabled a data center in a weekend, etc.

<comment><USER31> If you want someone to get serious about your messy, hacked-together infrastructure, then please put it in the job ad rather than requiring people to become psychic or claim they are Gods of Engineering in the cover letter in order to pique your interest.

Because we demand that everyone guess what you want and turn the sales knob up to 11, you are getting a lot of applications from people who could better disqualify themselves, and lots of dishonest bullshit to filter in applications. If we would all be more honest and just say what we mean then this would all be easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Funny, as all the emails I get from recruiters are basically one-liners with some fluff and they've clearly not read my profile. However, I agree with you, except that it's not a hirer's market for good engineers. I know. I've been trying to hire as many people as I can for the last few months. I've found a few.

</comment><comment><USER51> I feel like, with a few word replacements, this post and all the replies could come from /r/OkCupid.

<comment><USER52> I came to roughly the same conclusion from the emails I received from my "How to Hire Me" post. People make all of the mistakes there that they make with online dating. From an abstract point of view it is the exact same problem.

<comment><USER51> Right, with similar failure modes. For example: people firing copypasta emails to reduce the writing cost per-application / per-message.

When I have an OKC account, my strategy is just to write the first half-funny sentence or two that come to mind, shoot off the message, and move on.

Even when I apply for jobs and write a cover letter, what do I do? A dating site message with a funny accent.

        Dear Companyboss,

        I write in reply to your advertisement of <date> in the Foobar Herald.

        I am <skills/titles>. While working at <previous employer>
        I used <technology/skills>.

        I have included my CV and I look forward to your reply.

        Yours &c &c

Writing short messages isn't because the writers are lazy. It's a rational strategy that maximises coverage and minimises the emotional cost of being rejected after making a large investment.

<comment><USER53> Absolutely - you need a minimum of a cover letter to indicate which job you're going for and where you saw it. The resume should then do the talking for you - if it's nothing but a dot-point list of skills, it needs rework.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> That sort of email only doesn't work if the resume is bad, or like you say, if they have their profile settings wrong. If it's a good resume, a brief email is preferable.

<comment><USER55> That was my thought, and has been my experience as well... In the past when looking, I've usually done about two sentences, and attached my resume. My personal site has my resume in a few different formats, so they can take their pick... I haven't updated it in a while, as I'm pretty happy where I am, and the past 3 jobs I've had started without any down time after the prior job.

I would say it's definitely an hiree's market. I've removed my profile pretty much everywhere I have ever put it up, and still get 3-5 contacts a day. This is without the newer projects I've been working on (and newer technologies/frameworks).

I think that given how much developers are simply pursued by recruiters who put in no effort, I think that a few sentences and an up to date resume are an appropriate introduction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> It's funny how both hirers and applicants think they are the ones who set the rules. This thread is as bad as the "if you're a recruiter..." posts.

</comment><comment><USER57> Whenever I send a "cold" email trying to illicit some type of response that is good for me, I like to add some product/company thoughts and ideas. First, it shows that you've spent a bit of time thinking about the company. Second, you've delivered value to that person and create a situation where the person feels they SHOULD respond to you.

</comment><comment><USER58> > if it'll take the company more effort to reply to your email than you put > into sending it, you're doing it wrong.

Oh so true.

</comment><comment><USER59> I completely agree. If I'm looking for a job seriously, I won't make my first impression saying "call me" it will be an email asking questions about the person posting the information's thesis research...

</comment><comment><USER60> TL;DR's should go at the top of the text, not the bottom.

</comment><comment><USER61> I totally understand it's frustrating.

But I don't think you can change them with a post like this and I don't think you should, or that you even want to. People that would be doing this (regardless of whether they follow your advice or not) aren't the people they want to hire anyway.

If this post is the reason why they try, then they're not good candidates either way. If they follow this advice they're only making it harder for you to weed you out. Sure - that's what they want, but not what you want when you're hiring.

</comment><comment><USER62> I'd take the opposite approach: be glad when applicants send such poor cover letters because it immediately lets you know you should NOT waste your time on them. Some one who would send such a bad boilerplate cover letter is lazy for not sending an actual letter, technically inept for sending links to a private LinkedIn profile, and has a poor theory of mind regarding what an employer would like to see. This especially bad for a communication-heavy position like BD.

The much scarier prospect is if that applicant actually read this and sent you a real cover letter. The applicant hasn't actually improved their poor skills, they've merely learned a trick to conceal them. This makes it harder to filter them out and you'll end up wasting more time on them if you brought them in for an interview. Ever scarier, while juggling 100 other startup tasks, you might let a bad candidate slip through the cracks, into the interview process, and then actually hire them. You just lost about 1,000 company workhours across your team in trying to cajole the bad person into being useful before you finally give up and let them go.

<comment><USER63> Cover letters are useless. Really, try to have some empathy for people trying to get jobs in a tough market (I guess this doesn't apply to the currently employed or developers...). You have to apply to a LOT of stuff, and employers almost never give the courtesy of a confirmation or any sort of response/rejection. It takes a LOT of time to put contact info into Word, change around your cover letter template, save, and attach.

Ask for a resume, that's it. You can shoot a note back asking "Tell me more about yourself." if you want to know more. Then it's worth the time to write one up. Then you can ask for references, and transcript, etc., if that's your thing.

<comment><USER64> They're not useless. I discard any application I get that doesn't have a cover letter. I'm WAY more interested in your cover letter than your resume as it tells me a lot more about you than your dot-point-resume will ever tell me.

To be fair, the job ads I place specifically tell you what to put in a cover letter. So if you reply without one, then it's a super quick filter to see that you didn't even read the ad.

If you don't want the job enough to read the ad, I don't want you enough to read your resume.

<comment><USER65> I discard any employer that requires a cover letter. Cover letters don't tell you anything. If you think they do, you don't know how most people write them, and you probably miss a lot of good candidates.

It's an unreasonable demand. You're not the only place that I am applying. Either I send all fifteen of you a generic cover letter (which is likely no better than not sending one), or I customize it for each of you, which probably takes about another hour per application. It takes you 5 minutes to read.

If you like my application, I have to cut time out of my work day for everyone at your company to call me back, usually at least three times (recruiter initial contact, manager contact, technical phone screen). After that, I take a couple of my paid vacation days off work for on-site interviews. I have to make arrangements for someone else to look after the kids because I'm out of town overnight and the wife does shift work. I have to work a few more weeks to replenish those vacation days if it doesn't work out. All the while, I still have timelines and can't tip my current manager off that I'm looking elsewhere. Again, multiply this by a few companies - maybe three or so get to that point. That's costly, but necessary and understandable. At that point, there is serious consideration for a working relationship, so such demands on a candidate's time are more reasonable. And don't forget, at least one of you likely has some sort of programming assignment or problem set that you use after the phone screen, which I will spend several hours on.

To top it off, I'm going to guess that you don't even have the decency to post salary range in your ads. And, your recruiter is going to try and ask me about my salary history, but fail to mention the budget for the position, and my first indication won't come until there is an offer letter.

So, anyone who does this, thanks for self-selecting!

<comment><USER66> You're doing it wrong. I just want a quick note explaining briefly who you are and why you're applying. It shouldn't take more than five minutes.

Seriously, try hiring someone, the influx of irrelevant applicants and those who won't take even thirty seconds to read your ad is truly dispiriting. If you make even the tiniest effort with your application, you will stand out, guaranteed.

<comment><USER65> I dont think I'm doing it wrong. I do what you say, a quick note. Maybe two sentences. That's not a cover letter though, like GP is requiring. It's certainly not _more_ information than is on my resume. The thought of a cover letter that exhaustive is a little bit crazy, frankly.

If it sounds like I'm complaining, it's not because I'm frustrated, but because it's slightly offensive to see that being demanded. In my experience, their internal recruiters monitoring inbounds are usually ringing me before my finger is even off the send button. They don't seem to look for or care about a cover letter, and I haven't had trouble getting offers, even from top tier companies. And honestly, I don't even think I'm that impressive. From what I can tell, anyone who has fogged a mirror at a half-respectable tech company already will at least get a phone screen these days.

When I was previously involved in hiring, I don't recall ever seeing cover letters on inbounds either. When asked in person by potential candidates, I always told them not to.

<comment><USER66> _I dont think I'm doing it wrong. I do what you say, a quick note. Maybe two sentences. That's not a cover letter though, like GP is requiring._

You and I may disagree on this point then; I consider what you describe to be a cover letter.

 _In my experience, their internal recruiters monitoring inbounds are usually ringing me before my finger is even off the send button._

Honestly, I think you include more than you're letting on. Whether it's a short sentence in your application email, something tailored in your CV, or a short cover letter - basically, stuff you think is unimportant because it takes you 30 seconds to do, for maybe a grand total of a few minutes per application, and so you assume that other people are also doing this.

I think that the sheer number of people who make _zero_ effort means that even small stuff like including the person's name, if listed, at the top of the email _really does_ make a difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Not sure what you expect when you're seeking "business development" applicants. These are normally the kinds of guys who'd rather bullshit with you over the phone than give up any real details about themselves.

</comment><comment><USER68> Perhaps it was an April Fools' joke, because if anyone were serious about the position, they wouldn't put:

"Hi, saw your listing on HN, here is my LinkedIn. Call me."

</comment><comment><USER69> in related news, "Report: Unemployment High Because People Keep Blowing Their Job Interviews" [http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-unemployment-high- be...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-unemployment-high-because- people-keep-blowi,17803/)</comment>


With Shale Oil Production Like This, Who Needs Trump? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-02-26/with-shale-oil-production-like-this-who-needs-trump <comment><AUTHOR> "As Thomas Reed, chief executive of JKX Oil & Gas Plc, pointed out at last week's International Petroleum Week conference in London, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have both been in use in the oil industry for around 50 years. What is really new is not just combining the two techniques in a single well but, more importantly, the industrialization of the process of drilling and completing wells.

The long lead-times, complex development plans and huge up-front capital requirements associated with conventional oil fields simply don't apply in the shale sector."

</comment><comment><USER2> US and Canadian companies never stopped drilling in the oil slump. Instead they drilled down and left the last XX feet to the oil there/capped.

That's one of the reasons that OPEC won't be as effective as they want to be.

Of course if OPEC is that successful, I imagine the US will just find a way to export more instability to the region. Forcing them to need more income.</comment>


Show HN: DeepRadio lets you search and clip radio snippets - <AUTHOR> http://deepradio.radiocut.fm/ <comment><USER2> RadioCut is a platform where you can listen to past and present radio shows and you can cut and share radio segments you enjoy with your friends. We think this is the new way to listen to radio: on-demand and social.

Imagine a Spotify for radio. Imagine giving listeners the power to select their favorite moments and making them viral hits online.

That is RadioCut

We launch the site on October 2013 in Argentina. Since then, we have a 12% monthly growth. Today we are the third site where people listen to radio online. We have more than a million sessions per month.

But the most important thing is that these users make 12 thousands cuts per month and this quantity also is growing. They are not passive listeners. They listen to, rewind, forward, cut and share bit-sized audios with their friends.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! I am head of business at Deepgram (YC W16) and I'd like share a new project that we've been working on with RadioCut: a startup that allows users to clip radio snippets.

Our project is called DeepRadio ([http://deepradio.radiocut.fm/](http://deepradio.radiocut.fm/)) which allows users allows users to search for keywords and phrases in a number of past radio broadcasts.

For example, a user can search radio broadcasts for mentions of 'FBI' and the app would take the user to clips where the words were spoken.

I would love to get your feedback on how to make this more useful. Thanks!</comment>


Is Google Dow for anyone else? - <AUTHOR> I can't use YouTube either.<p>FYI I live in LA and using Spectrum <comment><USER2> [https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/youtube.com.html](https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/youtube.com.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Works for me</comment>


New scientific device creates electricity from snowfall - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/best-in-snow-new-scientific-device-creates-electricity-from-snowfall <comment><USER2> A lot of comments here seem to be missing the point. This isn't supposed to add electricity to the grid. It just makes a self sufficient weather station to measure snowfall. Which is cool.

A lot of times you'd want to measure such things away from the grid without having to worry about batteries.

Something I'm curious about is whether similar tech could be used to self sufficiently measure pollen.

<comment><USER3> Yeah the electricity output isn't the point but the fact the power generated is the raw signal. I wonder mostly about the accuracy and precision of such a sensor. Even its "not snow" triggers could be scientifically useful. Imagine if say it was sensitive enough it could identify particulates and tell where heavy metal pollutants land on the tarp.

<comment><USER4> Well I know that lysimeter based snowfall measurement systems can be a real pain for remote stations in winter, so to me this is the exciting bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> * A new device - snow-based triboelectric nanogenerator, or snow TENG - creates electricity from falling snow, among other potential uses.

* Richard Kaner (highly influential and cited scientist) and team used 3D printing to design a device that combines silicone with an electrode.

* Thanks to "the ease of fabrication and the availability of silicone" the device, which is essentially a small sheet of plastic, could be produced at low cost.

* It can work in remote areas, doesn't need batteries, and could be used in solar panels, or self-powered wearables for tracking athletes.

PS. Yesterday posted on [https://bullets.tech](https://bullets.tech) \- I'm looking for people interested in science to help us writing summaries and selecting scientific content

</comment><comment><USER6> See also:

Lord Kelvin's thunderstorm: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin_water_dropper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin_water_dropper)

Vaneless ion wind generator: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaneless_ion_wind_generator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaneless_ion_wind_generator)

</comment><comment><USER7> How does it work, exactly? Can you just attach a lead to a blob of silicone and begin consuming the energy as soon as snow exposure begins?

</comment><comment><USER8> UCLA is finding ways to handle all the snow they see

<comment><USER9> The amount of power they will be harvesting will probably lead to revolution in measuring miniscule amounts of power :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does it rely on the user moving around to knock off snow that accumulated?

</comment><comment><USER11> tl;dr: Snow is positively charged and gives up electrons. Silicone is negatively charged. When falling snow contacts the surface of silicone, that produces a charge that the device captures, creating electricity.

This appears to be more useful for wearables than as a replacement for solar panels in the winter. I can't imagine the amount of power generated could be that great. It reminds me of one of those stationary bikes hooked up to a toaster.

<comment><USER12> "This appears to be more useful for wearables than as a replacement for solar panels in the winter."

That's a degree of bullshit so high that it has me seriously questioning what otherwise sounds at least reasonable. Yeah, I know, every science paper has to connect itself to some fashionable area of research that will excite the grant writers, like renewable energy or climate change, but the idea that it would ever be practical to capture that much power from snow is absurd. This is a particularly tenuous connection. The upper bounds on this technique are tiny; any advantage it may have is in its ability to deliver tiny amounts of power to places that would otherwise have none. If snow had any significant amount of energy in it, we'd know, because we'd get shocked when we stood in it.

I think I'm going to settle on feeling bad for the scientists that they've done such interesting work and were forced by the system to spew such heavy bullshit on top of it to keep getting funded.

<comment><USER13> >>If snow had any significant amount of energy in it, we'd know, because we'd get shocked when we stood in it.

But....we don't get shocked when we stand out in the sun? And yet solar power is a real thing!

I am sure people scoffed back in the 1800's when scientist first worked with solar power.

<comment><USER12> "But....we don't get shocked when we stand out in the sun? And yet solar power is a real thing!"

The reason I said "shocked" is not that shocking is the only way that energy can manifest itself. It's because it's the way that _significant static electricity_ manifests, the claimed mechanism being used to obtain power.

You _can_ tell just by standing in the sunlight that it has substantial energy, because _you get warm_ , along with anything else in the sunlight. Therefore it has at least enough energy to do that. Not to mention power the ecosystem.

"I am sure people scoffed back in the 1800's when scientist first worked with solar power."

With all due respect, you do not appear to be in a position to be lecturing people about this sort of thing. You may not understand how energy works, but some people do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Despite my strong skepticism of this technology being used as a replacement or even supplement for solar panels anytime in the near future, I really admire the creative thought process that led them to get even the miniscule results they did.

I'm not a chemist or phyhsicist in any regard, so I can't say whether this could be the stepping stone to something more large scale down the line. Could anyone shed light on whether there are any physical limits given the materials used (slilcone, snow, etc.) to how much energy you could extract?

<comment><USER15> In the paper, the product produces 0.2 mW/m^2

Solar panels produce 175W/m^2 for comparison.

If this ever produced 1W/m^2 I'd be shocked.

<comment><USER12> And that's the production during snowfall. Even here in Michigan, the sun shines a great deal more than we literally have snow falling. And if the snow is falling all day, it's going to be a light snow that probably isn't reaching 0.2mW/m^2.

Plus, if I'm seeing the physics here in my head properly based on their description, you can't just stick this out in the snow like a panel and get a consistent 0.2mW/m^2 even under optimal snow conditions. As the snow accumulates on the collector it'll insulate the collector from the rest of the snow. You really want the snow to be _brushing_ the collector and then departing having given up its excess charge, not _accumulating_ on it. Sunlight obviously does not present this problem, since it basically _is_ 100% made out of charge (if you'll pardon the sloppy terminology, asp precision wouldn't really buy anything here), so there's no additional mass to dispose of, just any waste heat issues that may arise.

I'm pretty sure that in real conditions the difference between the two would be another two or three orders of magnitude larger, which is why my other post is so grumpy. It's multiple orders of magnitude obviously not even remotely feasible, to the point it's almost insulting that it was said.

<comment><USER15> I'm pretty skeptical as well that this is useful for really anything. That energy density is so low that I can't think of a single application where either batteries, solar, wind, or some combination of the above wouldn't both work better and be cheaper.

Just to put a little perspective out there, 0.2 mW/m^2 means that 1 square meter of this stuff would take 600 days in ideal production to match the amount of energy stored in one charge of a single rechargeable AA (~3Wh).

1 clear day, plus a tiny solar cell and a AA and you can get 600 operating days of energy really easily.

And here's the thing, if this thing gets buried, it isn't going to generate electricity. So you have to imagine an environment where the snow is constantly melting, you can get a giant sheet of this stuff, and for whatever reason there is no battery chemistry that would work.

You could say "Well, it would make a good snow detector".. but even that it somewhat silly. Because, again, if it gets buried it won't be detecting more snow. So now you need some complex rigging to keep it from collecting snow so it can register that snow is falling. Why not a camera? A weight sensor? etc. Plenty of pretty cheap and low power equipment can do just this without the additional concerns introduced by this piece of tech.

This thing is useless. Maybe interesting to make, definitely not practical for really any application.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 100% useless but very clever nonetheless.

<comment><USER17> We've asked you several times to please comment more substantively. Would you mind trying a bit harder?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cute. Remember the fad for "energy generating sidewalks"? That got far enough that there's a startup.[1] It's useless as a power generator, so they figured out how to market it as a hype generator. "Pavegen creates high engagement with citizens by converting their footsteps into energy, data and rewards." They're on Instagram, etc.

[1] [http://www.pavegen.com/](http://www.pavegen.com/)

<comment><USER19> ...it still generates energy. It's a small amount for a small application, but it's purposeful energy.</comment></comment>


Fuck Cloud Messaging - <AUTHOR> https://telegra.ph/F-Cloud-Messaging-09-13 <comment><USER4> > Instead, they have this warped reasoning where they don't allow any program > to run in background, except theirs, "to save the battery".

Looking at the landscape of shit software out there, I find this justification entirely plausible. If iOS & Android didn't lock this down, phones would be running 4-5 different poorly implemented push platforms (or more). Battery performance on mobile would be utter crap.

There is a big balancing act going on here. People want phones that do the thing they are supposed to do. They also want battery life to be _excellent_ and the device to be secure by default. It's impossible to give 3rd party devs 100% access and meet those 2 demands.

<comment><USER5> It's easy to implement a software solution that punishes poorly behaving apps and allowing the rest.

<comment><USER6> No matter how good the push implementation is, it is still best to only have one connection that the phone has maintain. 5 great push services still takes 5 times the battery that 1 great push service would take.

<comment><USER7> > 5 great push services still takes 5 times the battery that 1 great push > service would take.

This is true with current implementations, but it doesn't have to be true.

Coordinated CPU wakeups and radio packet timings would mean the power consumption from waking the radio would be not much larger with 5 apps than 1.

It needs coordination, but the coordination doesn't have to be done inside a service daemon as it is now, and it doesn't have to go through one shared cloud service provider as it is now.

<comment><USER4> > It needs coordination, but the coordination doesn't have to be done inside a > service daemon as it is now, and

It more-or-less does need to go through a single daemon, or it would be nearly impossible to coordinate the requests.

> it doesn't have to go through one shared cloud service provider as it is > now.

This is more true, for example you could have an open protocol and an app could register with the push daemon. It would be impossible to consolidate push notifications or throttle them for bad actors though.

<comment><USER7> > It more-or-less does need to go through a single daemon, or it would be > nearly impossible to coordinate the requests.

A single daemon, or a single kernel, it doesn't really matter which.

I'm thinking a few socket() options. The kernel already coordinates coarse- grained timer wakeups between processes; it's not that outrageous to think it could nudge multiple pinging sockets towards each other then coalesce timings.

The underlying mobile network registration for notifications is already quite low level.

> It would be impossible to consolidate push notifications or throttle them > for bad actors though

At least at the moment, I don't think there's a need to consolidate push notifications into the same packet for different apps. The rate of notifications isn't high enough to matter.

For keepalive pings (if the underlying radio network can't provide events to piggyback on), and consolidating pushes (if that is needed), voluntary cooperation on timings among good actors would allow incoming packets to arrive around the same time, and the mobile base station could, if a protocol was agreed, queue and coordinate the transmission time of those packets as a group, or coalesce them into a specially-addressed packet representing the group.

For throttling bad actor pushers, the device itself (kernel or daemon) could block sockets and source IPs that are sending too fast.

Presumably there's already some mechanism in place for things like SYN attacks. If there isn't, bad actors already have a way to drain your battery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the more insidious things Google has done here is that they force you to use the Firebase SDK to implement Cloud Messaging / Push Notifications.

This SDK has "Google Analytics for Firebase" enabled by default, and they use dark patterns to make it seem like having Analytics enabled is required: [https://imgur.com/a/Nk2KhFo](https://imgur.com/a/Nk2KhFo)

Of course, if you do enable analytics, then Google sucks up your customer data (including in-app purchase behavior!) for their own data collection and advertising purposes. Also, you're required to tell your users this is happening, but of course developers don't know this. (More dark patterns in how Google reveals that they steal your analytics data for themselves: [https://imgur.com/a/R0K71Zn](https://imgur.com/a/R0K71Zn))

<comment><USER9> As far as I know to add Analytics to your mobile project you need to explicitly do that in Android studio or Xcode.

Enabling it in your project like you show on the screen does basically nothing as long as you don't have analytics SDK in your app.

<comment><USER8> When you go to add the SDK, Analytics gets added by default. The setup flow makes it seem to be required. But also the previous screens (when creating a Firebase account) appear to imply that Cloud Messaging won't work correctly without analytics.

[https://imgur.com/a/Fl919Wm](https://imgur.com/a/Fl919Wm)

<comment><USER9> > For an optimal experience with Firebase Cloud Messaging, we recommend > enabling Google Analytics in your project

This is stated right before the steps you show. Only the one who doesn't read will blindly add analytics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> On the other hand, when I used Android (2010s), I remembered using tools that required root – or even custom OS builds – just so I could prevent apps (like Facebook) from running in the background and draining my battery doing who- knows-what network activity. In this case, I much prefer today's heavy-handed platform restrictions on background processes to yesteryear's permissive but perpetual battery-drained Android ecosystem.

Edit: the article references this HN thread, which I'm sure we'll end up rehashing: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22310319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22310319)

<comment><USER11> Surely they could have put in a switch in a sub sub sub menu that allows the user to still have the freedom to have apps with background processes though?

The thing I hate is megacorps slowly infringing and removing device/OS freedoms in the name of some stated "good cause" (security, malware prevention, battery life, etc.).

<comment><USER10> There is such a setting: [https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/6068458?hl=en](https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/6068458?hl=en) Although perhaps it is not respected correctly by the OS?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have had this enabled for KDEConnect in past but it still used to fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't see the authors point, battery life is important. A phone is not a Unix server or a desktop PC. This is the same reason iOS doesn't allow apps to have arbitrary background execution time.

And phones know your location virtually 100% of the time because of cell tower triangulation. That's part of being a phone, not a google hypocrisy.

<comment><USER13> You can leave a socket open in the background (although you do need a periodic keep alive but the period can be pretty long.) to receive push messages without draining the battery (as long as the server doesn't spam it.).

The real problem is pushing everyone towards unconfigurable closed software that would otherwise abuse full access to the device. Because people can't trust what they run on their phones the apps can't be given any more privileges than a random web page.

<comment><USER4> > You can leave a socket open in the background (although you do need a > periodic keep alive but the period can be pretty long.) to receive push > messages without draining the battery (as long as the server doesn't spam > it.).

This only works on a platform where apps can run in the background indefinitely. Small memory, limited CPU, and battery life means apps have short life-spans on phones.

This is why there is a push notification service for mobile platforms.

<comment><USER13> Modern phones have as much memory as most people's laptops.

The reason apps have to have short lifetimes on people's phones is because they're encouraged to install untrusted software as native apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My biggest problem with FCM is how hostile it is to open source and self- hosted services. If you want to push a message to a phone, you don't just need to be registered with Google; you need to _be_ the app developer. App developers cannot allow third parties to push to their app, because they'd have to give them their FCM credentials, which is a no-no.

So the only way to get push notifications on, say, apps that provide a client for generic protocols or self-hosted services, is for either the app developer to run a proxy gateway (which inevitably runs into scalability issues forcing them to start charging for it or require registration with free quotas), or for you to create your own build of the app. I ended up having to do that with Linphone, rebuild it under my own app ID with my own FCM creds, just so I could get push notification integration with my own SIP server instead of having to keep a background SIP connection open to receive calls.

This is completely silly, with the only free endgame being everyone has to compile their own apps and have one app installed for every potential provider, even if they share a protocol.

<comment><USER15> > they'd have to give them their FCM credentials, which is a no-no.

trivially addressed via a proxy, which you'd want anyway to properly monetize it

<comment><USER7> GP: "open source and self-hosted services"

There's probably no wish to monetize, just to distribute working apps for free.

You're right that the issue is easily addressed with a proxy.

But now you need to maintain and pay for a proxy in perpetuity, for other people to use who aren't paying anything.

Even if it's cheap, maybe you don't have the time. It will break occasionally. Knowing there are people who may depend on it 24x7x365 is burdensome too. You'd like to have vacations.

It's not very open source friendly if other people can't just take your software and run it themselves without depending on you.

Those other people can avoid depending on you by registering themselves with FCM, but having to do that is not open source or self-hosted friendly either, which was the GP's point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> GCM doesn't work in China, so the Android ecosystem there is very different from the world.

Before manufacturers come up with there GCM alternative, each apps actually have there own service to handle push messaging. It is fine when the number of apps is small, but drains a lot of battery when it gets larger. So manufacturers started to introduce some aggressive strategy to kill background processes to save batteries, but it also makes small developers' app less usefull. It is because apps from big corporations usually get a pass, while others will be killed. Now, as far as I know, manufacturers have their own GCM alternative now as an alliance.

So I think even if you don't have it, you eventually need one, because it is too inefficient to let each apps handle this by themselves.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why not start using OpenPush which is decentralized [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22306174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22306174)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Apple is even worse. There is a singular service, there's, and using it costs $100/year. Rate doesn't matter ... and Mozilla can run theirs for free.

I'm just glad my pinephone shipped and everything on my phone _actually makes sense_ now (even if I have to compile things and write a few config files.)

<comment><USER4> > Apple is even worse. There is a singular service, there's, and using it > costs $100/year.

You say this like it's some egregious burden. Compared to the cost of building an app and shipping it $100/ year is a fraction of a drop in the bucket. It's less than 1 developer hour.

If you are capable of building an app with push service, the cost is trivial. If you aren't capable, it's irrelevant.

<comment><USER17> $100 is actually a really big deal in developing countries and lower-income areas. How many of us started working on software to experiment with for _free_ growing up? Arbitrary cost barriers like this are honestly an impediment to learning, and in my opinion, even harmful to Apple in this case. Why wouldn't they want more people to learn iOS programming and Swift programming.

<comment><USER4> The cost to learn to program on Apple's platforms is the cost of an iPad or Mac. The $99/ year is only required if you want to deploy an app to the App Store or use Apple's cloud services.

<comment><USER18> I will get downvoted for saying this, but I don't care: STOP defending Apple. The amount of egregious things Apple has done over the years is amazing. Not only do they charge developers for publishing apps EVERY year, but they also make up arbitrary rules in the name of "Privacy" or "Better user experience". Oh Please. You want to give people Privacy? Use open protocols for your shitty iCloud so that people KNOW just how much data you are are giving your Siri- shit voice assistant. Want better user Experience? Let me transfer music and ebooks to MY iPhone without having to use your joke of software called iTunes. And trust me, I used to be a big fan of theirs. But after they started glueing everything to their "computers", I had a wake-up call. The macbook used to be a great product, and then they started glueing everything to it and shoving the iCloud into it. Slowly, they killed their own product.

So please, stop defending them. They are doing really shitty things that will just become stains in computing history.

<comment><USER4> I'm not "defending Apple" here, I'm pointing out simple economics. A typical app costs upwards of $50,000 in developer time to build. Even if you are building your own app, we're talking about a person with valuable skills investing months of their personal time. This idea that for a typical developer $99 is a huge burden is just not an issue.

This is true if you love Apple or hate them deep in your soul for a million burning reasons.

<comment><USER19> And not everyone lives in the US. How much do you think it costs in USD for an app developer in a developing country to create an app, and how much is that $99/year as a percent of yearly income?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> amar-laksh Ever tried to send a push notification to your phone? How hard can it be? - <USER2> least locally, KDE Connect([https://kdeconnect.kde.org/](https://kdeconnect.kde.org/)) got you covered.

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't allow you to send custom notification though. I am using GSConnect on desktop btw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Apple has this solved for iOS 14

[https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10113/](https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10113/)

</comment><comment><USER21> This is one of those subtle ways the Play Store protects its monopoly. Sure, you _technically can_ install an app without using Google Play Services, but notifications won't work.

<comment><USER22> But to not be misleading, that does not mean you will not get notifications in apps that need them. The F-Droid version of Telegram will still notify you when someone writes you, and mail programs will still show a notification about incoming mail. There are alternative solutions.

And there is microG, to hook into the Google way of doing things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I still see apps that poll from time to time. Most of them require keeping a notification active to prevent their service from getting shut down. Surely under such a regime you could send a "push" notification to the phone. Not sure how easy it is to listen on android though.

<comment><USER24> Doesn't Android have a local notification function like iOS does?

<comment><USER25> It does. You have to keep one running (with it being impossible to dismiss) if you want to prevent your application from being shut down. That's what GP is talking about.

<comment><USER23> To be fair I believe you can now "mute" these permanent notifications and you still get the same user experience, although with an extra step.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's funny how he's even imagined implementing his own push server. Only because Android. On iOS people have already taken for granted that you must go through APNS.

Also, this is not just about push. The problem is that Apple and Google de facto own the edge user interface: phones.

<comment><USER13> It doesn't have to be this way. You can buy pine phones now and they actually work.

<comment><USER27> But does it work at scale and with the UX of the other platforms? If so: why hasn't it taken off yet?

The technical part is not the hardest part; it's the "everything else".

<comment><USER13> Personally I don't like the UX of other platforms at all so I don't see why that's a requirement.

It hasn't taken off yet because it's only barely started shipping.

<comment><USER28> One of my friends has one of these and says it's horribly unstable and the LTE usually doesn't work. I imagine there's still a lot of work to be done to make it usable for technical people, much less non-technical people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This article is just lame. OP couldn't seem to figure it out but you can implement a background service.

>why not shutdown location and frequent play service updates as they aren't helping my phone battery either

They do. The recommendation is to use the location library that batches GPS use instead of manually calling it per app. The playstore uses heuristics to know when to query for updates and when to download. Its better that the OS batches these sorts of things.

There may be some valid critique but this article is devoid of anything useful.

</comment><comment><USER30> Any end-user tech that requires a listening port on the internet will:

A: Never work, because NAT isn't going away (even with increased IPV6 adoption). Even locally it will work less and less because "block all incoming connections" host firewall configs will eventually become the norm.

B: Be a security risk waiting to happen (EX: Chromecasts using UPNP to expose themselves to the internet, which were immediately blasted with broadcasts from one of PewDiePie's wretched fans).

</comment><comment><USER31> Via a PWA seems like the Notification API works with no 3rd party [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Notificatio...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Notifications_API/Using_the_Notifications_API)

<comment><USER13> This is for locally generated notifications only. Push messages are different, last time I checked Mozilla operates a free service to relay push notifications.

<comment><USER31> I suppose the OP should comment, but I read that although local push was tried there was a wider view about using walled services. the Push API does solve that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is the most significant hurdle to do proper decentralized smartphone applications today. Me and some friends were sketching on something that could be used for grassroots movements and peer-to-peer marketplaces - <USER3> notifications is the one thing making it practically untenable.

<comment><USER12> Open source a push server, boom, problem solved.

<comment><USER32> Unless there's something I'm completely unaware off, there's still no way to make that work without root (Android) or jailbreak (iOS).

<comment><USER12> You can connect your third party push server to APNS no problem, it's fine all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've never looked deeply into this notification thing but people seem to conflate saving the battery and having only one notification server.

If energy used by firing up the CPU frequency plus the 4G radio to send some packet is the main battery drainer, why not just synchronize the poll of multiple notification servers?

The CPU will be waked up, a few data packets will go to a few notification servers, then in the common case of no notification everything goes back to sleep.

If it's the network that wakes up the phone when some packets are there (as WiFi energy saving does), if synchronized in time (NTP goog enough) it should also work and be energy efficient.

Probably naive, curious about real world measurements in this area :)

<comment><USER34> Just one issue - there are timers on connections regulating how long a connection can be kept alive before a packet is required. Larger timeouts are better for phones, but require more resources on the servers/networks.

Google/Apple work directly with carriers to extend the timeouts for their push services so the phones aren't required to send keepalive packets every 30 seconds to keep the connection alive. Carriers won't be willing to do that for every random server out there.

This is just one of many ways these push services are carefully designed/operated to save as much battery life as possible. If you had more than one notification service, battery life would degrade to the worst performing one (the radio would be forced to wake up to keep _every_ notification service alive... Even if the Google one could go minutes between the keepalive packets)

(Another is the way Google batches low priority notifications... Sending a push message won't immediately wake up a phone - it delays to try to batch as many messages as possible. This scheme breaks down if messages aren't all routed through a single server)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Can't we move to IPv6 where there is no NAT ?

<comment><USER36> Not if you have an ISP, that won't ever support IPv6. There are a lot of us (in the US) in that boat. It's hard to play with unavailable tech.

edit: removed stuff about Push via SIP, that might be too incorrect to be helpful. Also removed some pondering about trying msg.exe over IPv6. I was probably fishing for trouble there.

<comment><USER35> They're going to have to move to IPv6 : with Europe running out of IPv4 addresses, and a lot of third-world countries never having had enough of the in the first place, soon enough an IPv4-only connection won't be considered a real Internet connection any more...

<comment><USER36> They're not. Over 10 years, our ISPs went from "imminent deployment" to "looking into it" to "what is IPv6?".

In 2030 we won't have native IPv6 and it won't be on the drawing board.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> We just need an SMTP extension that says 'this email is a notification. Delete after x days'. The rest of the mechanism is there. Apple and google will follow. Emails may not be instant but most notifs are not urgent. I know there are 1000 other protocols out there, but email is the only one that s widely used and hasn't been bastardized or wallgardened

</comment><comment><USER38> Related (Android):

[https://dontkillmyapp.com](https://dontkillmyapp.com)

</comment><comment><USER39> If I have 50 apps on my device and 30 of them are keeping connection to their mothership-server — they will indeed drain my battery in hours. I can't imagine a plausible solution for that problem except centralized notification service.

</comment><comment><USER40> Things like this explain some devs I encounter solve networking things which could be done on a LAN level using multicast for instance instead through the cloud.

</comment><comment><USER41> For anyone who's worked on an IoT platform built in Android this is a huge pain that's nearly constant.

</comment><comment><USER42> I really dislike the "to save the battery" reason. Lets also disallow games to save the battery ?

<comment><USER12> We are talking about background execution time.

That's something that is hidden from users, they put their phone in their pocket and two hours later their battery charge is substantially diminished. They don't understand why or how to stop it.

They know playing a game for hours straight reduces battery charge.

<comment><USER42> Okay, I get it, author provides another analogy as well thogh, probably more apt. Their own location services.

<comment><USER12> No they didn't. Location services are a necessary part of being a phone.

It's called cell tower triangulation and your phone needs to do it constantly, or you can't receive or send calls.

<comment><USER43> You're posting shallow dismissals while seemingly having no idea what you're talking about.

The complaint about location in the article is about Google's tendency to bug you to turn on GPS and leave it on, happily draining the battery but for Google's own surveillance purposes. Having a GPS fix is not a requirement of the cell network.

Cell tower triangulation is something the network can do as a result of your phone connecting to cell towers. While connecting to a cell tower is mandatory for cell communication, an open baseband could make it a point to only connect to one tower at a time (although a single tower will still have some location information due to sector antennas).

<comment><USER12> > Hey Google, why not shutdown location and frequent play service updates as > they aren't helping my phone battery either

Doesn't mention GPS. That may be what the author meant, but certainly could be written far clearer.

Still, Google isn't using GPS all the time, their power management strategy can't allow that. It's likely only using it when its deemed necessary. Android is tuned to balance offer users the most functionality possible with longest battery life. If it did not iOS would destroy it in battery life tests.

Triangulation is necessary to determine which tower to connect to and when to switch to a new tower. It's why they are called "cellular" phones.

<comment><USER43> > _It's likely only using [GPS] when its deemed necessary_

The entire point is that Google encourages you to leave the setting on, meaning you'll be doing GPS fixes more than what the user actually considers necessary.

> _Triangulation is necessary to determine which tower to connect to and when > to switch to a new tower._

No, it's really not. It's hard to even figure out what you're trying to describe here.

Yes, the baseband sees the signal strength from each nearby tower to know when to switch between them. But the baseband doesn't itself have a map of cell towers. If the list of visible towers is used for client positioning, it happens on the application processor. The work of deriving a location from the towers is not necessary for cell network communication.

<comment><USER12> Your points on the actual details of what how cellphones work is exactly right, but it's trivial to calculate location from those values. My point was that your phone is not powering up any additional hardware, or doing anything extra in software to burn battery life to estimate your location, the information is already there. The phones application processor is already monitoring them if only to keep your radio strength meter display accurate.

And Google should encourage you to keep GPS on if they do a good job managing its power usage. Users aren't always going to know when the app they are using is going to work better with more precise location data. This is a user friendly feature.

Circling back around, the author is still wrong that allowing installed apps to run unrestricted background network processes is anything like the OS carefully managing location accesses to minimize power usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Another pointlessly aggressive rant. Like it or not, FCM provides unified push mechanism, aggregating communications for every app using it and ensuring least resource usage . Open Push, or whatever it would be, will need to make sure all apps used same server(s) and, preferably, single connection kept alive, otherwise some apps will get notifications , others wont, and it will be seemingly random.

<comment><USER45> It's currently on the main page of Hacker News with 61 points and lots of attention turned to it. Sadly, as long as people find this needlessly aggressive tone appropriate, we'll keep seeing this kind of stuff everywhere. It's like clickbait, fewer people would click on this if this was titled 'I have some issues with cloud messaging', I know I wouldn't.</comment></comment>


Does the digital divide have a silver lining? (Hint: Yes) - <AUTHOR> http://codeforamerica.org/2012/05/24/does-the-digital-divide-have-a-silver-lining/

<comment><USER2> "The digital divide isn't merely a binary chasm. It's a divide of convenience, attention span, and logistics."

That's not all-- it's also a divide of knowledge and interest in digital technology. Particularly, the kind of technical knowledge and interest that allows people to innovate and build on these platforms (as opposed to just turning into consumers).

This is where I think the difference between Desktops and Mobile devices stands out on this subject-- Desktops are way more tinkerable and teacher- friendly. I can show someone hands-on how the hardware and software of a desktop computer work together much easier than I could on a mobile device (where are the form factors and modularity?). And I think that makes a big difference in terms of getting people interested in _building_ versus consuming.

So as the gap of Internet access narrows in some communities, I see more people embracing tech as consumers and less people understanding or learning about it. Mobile penetration figures are a little misleading because it's not marking close of the Digital Divide as much as just making it look a little different.

While I think mobile devices are an excellent way to get previously- unconnected people on the Internet, access is just one of many issues that make up the Digital Divide. In many ways, its an issue of future socioeconomic progress moreso than an issue of getting more people online.</comment>


Show HN: mod((prime*prime-1)/12) - <AUTHOR> Looks like every prime number multiplied by himself minus 1 is exactly divisible by 12. Figured out that few months ago. <comment><USER2> (Except for the prime numbers 2 and 3, of course.)

</comment><comment><USER3> 11 x 10

<comment><USER4> 23×22=506 506÷12=42.16666...

Nope.

This is why mathematical statements need proofs.

<comment><USER2> (23x23-1)/12 = 44.</comment></comment></comment>


JQuery 1.5 Released - <AUTHOR> http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.5.js

<comment><USER2> Thanks everyone! The full blog post and release notes will be coming later this afternoon (EST).

<comment><USER3> <http://blog.jquery.com/2011/01/31/jquery-15-released/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Linking directly to the source, that's true Hacker News style :)

<comment><USER5> All I needed was the source to see what changes were made :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess there's be a blog post coming up soonish, but for me the big deal is integration of a templating language. We experimented with the MS-written templating plugin that's now been integrated and it seems pretty good.

<comment><USER7> Beware of Microsoft's jQuery-tmpl templates, if you care about being able to render your views with reasonable performance. You can benchmark 'em yourself here:

<http://jsperf.com/dom-vs-innerhtml-based-templating/73>

TL, Didn't Benchmark: Two orders of magnitude slower (approx) than other engines. On the iPad, for example, jQuery-tmpl was able to render a small template 181 times in a second, whereas Eco, at the other end of the scale, was able to render the same template 11,549 times.

<comment><USER8> I don't see why its relevant how fast it can render templates: Wouldn't anything more than once or twice a second be sufficient for general needs?

Edit: I also want to point out that the linked page above is user editable, and allows remotely hosted javascript (by design). Beware :/

<comment><USER7> In JS web apps, the most common speed constraint you'll encounter is how fast you can render views and update the DOM. Imagine trying to render 500 list items ... say, contacts in an address book -- you don't really want that to take 3 seconds on an iPad. If it works for your needs, that's fantastic, but it's nice to be aware of the performance relative to alternatives that accomplish the same goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The real question now is: When will Google APIs have this hosted on their CDN for developers to use?

<comment><USER10> If you don't mind another CDN, Microsoft seems to be hosting it: <http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.5.min.js> (that domain is cookie-less too)

<comment><USER11> This is incorrect, Google's CDN is cookie-less too.

        $ curl -I https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js
        HTTP/1.1 200 OK
        Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=UTF-8
        Last-Modified: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 20:40:52 GMT
        Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2011 20:03:57 GMT
        Expires: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:03:57 GMT
        Vary: Accept-Encoding
        X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
        Server: sffe
        Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000
        Age: 51530
        Transfer-Encoding: chunked

<comment><USER10> You misunderstood me. You can access the Microsoft CDN from two domains: microsoft.com and aspnetcdn.com. The former has cookies, the latter does not.

From [http://www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary/cdn.ashx#ajaxmicrosoftcom_ren...](http://www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary/cdn.ashx#ajaxmicrosoftcom_renamed_to_ajaxaspnetcdncom_8):

 _The CDN used to use the microsoft.com domain name and has been changed to use the aspnetcdn.com domain name. This change was made to increase performance because when a browser referenced the microsoft.com domain it would send any cookies from that domain across the wire with each request. By renaming to a domain name other than microsoft.com performance can be increased by as much to 25%. Note ajax.microsoft.com will continue to function but ajax.aspnetcdn.com is recommended._

<comment><USER11> Ah, ok. Thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> <http://bugs.jquery.com/roadmap>

<comment><USER13> <http://bugs.jquery.com/milestone/1.5>

<comment><USER14> [http://bugs.jquery.com/query?type=feature&component=unfi...](http://bugs.jquery.com/query?type=feature&component=unfiled&milestone=1.5&or&component=unfiled&type=enhancement&milestone=1.5&group=status&col=id&col=summary&col=type&col=owner&col=priority&col=version&col=resolution&desc=1&order=type)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very readable code, I'm sure I could learn a lot by perusing it :)

<comment><USER16> If you want to do that, I recommend starting by watching Paul Irish's "10 Things I Learned from the jQuery Source" [0] and "11 More Things I Learned from the jQuery Source" [1] as he does exactly that.

There's also jQuery Deconstructed [2] to navigate the jQuery source in... an interesting manner.

[0] [http://paulirish.com/2010/10-things-i-learned-from-the- jquer...](http://paulirish.com/2010/10-things-i-learned-from-the-jquery- source/)

[1] [http://paulirish.com/2011/11-more-things-i-learned-from- the-...](http://paulirish.com/2011/11-more-things-i-learned-from-the-jquery- source/)

[2] [http://www.keyframesandcode.com/resources/javascript/deconst...](http://www.keyframesandcode.com/resources/javascript/deconstructed/jquery/)

<comment><USER15> Wow thanks, I'll read through those first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Excellent news. My kudos to the jQuery team. Great work.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know what the new features of this version are? I can't wait for the blog post and haven't been following development closely :)

<comment><USER16> The jQuery 1.5b1 announcement is probably a good start, it lists _a lot_ of stuff (though not all new features, in fact most of it is bugfixes from 1.4): [http://blog.jquery.com/2011/01/14/jquery-1-5-beta-1-released...](http://blog.jquery.com/2011/01/14/jquery-1-5-beta-1-released/)

The most important new features are probably: the rewritten $.ajax [0] which returns a promise [1] in the manner of e.g. Mochikit and the subclassable jQuery object [2]

[0] [http://blog.jquery.com/2010/12/28/jquery-community- updates-f...](http://blog.jquery.com/2010/12/28/jquery-community-updates-for- december-2010/)

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promise_(programming)>

[2] [https://github.com/deadlyicon/jquery/commit/4024e67d0f352e4a...](https://github.com/deadlyicon/jquery/commit/4024e67d0f352e4a095f93456bc8e6da63e10759)</comment></comment>


How to retain ownership of code for a project - <AUTHOR>

Hello everyone,
I am in the process of creating a web based application for an academic mentor. The problem is we did not discuss ownership details and it seems as though the network administrator does not want to invest any resources in helping facilitate the use of the program, if they do not retain ownership of the code.
I'm kinda of new to this but does anyone have any good advice out there on how to approach this? <comment><USER2> The network administrator? For a school, or what? That sounds strange.

How about asking your mentor for advice?</comment>