Interview questions for QA managers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.testmunk.com/10-interview-questions-for-qa-managers/ <comment><USER2> This doesn't seem right to me:

> 3) How do you determine which devices and OS versions we should test on?

> This should generally be an easy question for the candidate. Good candidates > will point to app analytics as the best measure, looking for the most used > devices for their particular app. Another good answer would be to check the > app reviews where people might have complained about specific issues > happening on their devices. Less creative candidates might simply suggest > "looking at the top devices" on the market

Looking at top devices is also incredibly important, and it seems foolish to dismiss that strategy.

What if your website doesn't work on iPhones, and so you have no iPhone users? What if, because people can't even sign up on an iPhone, they don't bother complaining about specific features not working?

Surely it makes more sense to test based on your target market, rather than the subset of people who are self-selecting to use your product?

Ideally you should be looking at both usage and market data. If your target market contains lots of iPhone users, but everyone's on Android, this points to a potential problem.

<comment><USER3> Plus, at early stages, you may not even have a user base yet. At that point, as you say, look at top devices for your demographic.

<comment><USER4> thanks for the feedback! I just did an update and elaborated on this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is actually awful. A QA manager should be asked how testing is integrated into the development process, how to infuse quality into everything, how to hire/train/retain testers, how to estimate for QA. Writing test plans is an antiquated approach so I'd rather hear what they've done that works and why.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hmm. I find proposed answers to these questions somewhat... unexpected. Lacking, in fact. They focus so much on technical ability, and seem to ignore the human side of being a manager. Starting with the first one... "1) Let's say you are the first QA manager joining our startup. What are the first three things you would do?" The kind of things I'd expect to hear here would never be of the kind 'write a test plan'. And I hardly believe anyone would be able to contribute a test plan right away, would they? I expect ability to write a test plan, or setup a process where it is created and managed, to be rather easy to check by just asking someone to do a test plan on an imagined scenario. The answer I would like much more would be: '1\. meet the team', '2\. understand the product, its vision, goals', '3\. understand current dev/QA setup and code before I proceed'.

In other words, it seems to me that the first things to do should be to see where we are, connect with people rather than making things up. How can you propose first actions without at least basic understanding of where you are?

I like questions 5+ much better, but still these seem more suited for interviewing an experienced individual contributor, not a team manager.

How about setting up a team? How about hiring? How would you define and split tasks, assuming we agree on tasks? What kind of testing would you personally do, which would you delegate to QAs and which would you require to stay on the dev team? What would you do in situation X? (any difficult multi-optimization problem where people, technical and philosophical issues are to be considered)

I can imagine a great individual contributor to ace every single question on ths list, and then fail utterly when he has to manage even 2 people effectively.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, good point.

This has been added: "It is important for the QA manager candidate to ask questions of his own regarding the current process and the challenges facing the organization that led to the search for a QA manager."

The questions don't go into further details of managing and leading a team, there is a whole set of questions that are more tailored towards hiring a "QA team lead" \- might be a follow on blog post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The issue of where to draw the line between developer testing and QA testing is an interesting one.

I think it's best to answer it in reverse and start with a bug.

Did the bug make it to production? Is it a critical path? Was it covered by the test plan? Was it covered by a functional/unit/integration test? Was it clearly defined in the product requirements? Was the behavior clearly defined as part of a business objective?

Most bugs could have been discovered earlier in the chain. The earlier the better. Many times bugs are a result of systems failure, bad communication, assumptions, etc.

I think the two most important concepts in QA are 1) answering the question of "can we ship this now?" and 2) encouraging systems thinking so that all of the processes related to executing business goals in a software company can be continuously improved upon.

<comment><USER8> I manage a QA team where there was none until very recently. If you have any reading on point #2 that you'd recommend, it'd be hugely helpful to me.

<comment><USER7> I'm not aware of any specific reading... but I'll share a few more thoughts:

The key is to not make it a blame game. Every bug that is discovered on staging or production should (in theory) trigger a root cause analysis of some kind... because it means that one of the earlier processes failed.

If you have manual QA people, it's mostly just improving the QA plan and adding edge cases and domain knowledge, but it can also sometimes be that there are data bugs or integrations on production that are not on staging, slightly different on staging, etc.

With every bug there is an action plan for how to fix the bug, but that is separate from the knowledge that we gain about our system because the bug occurred. Maybe the fix is to get someone to manually clean up some dirty data that wound up on production due to someone forgetting to validate/clean input data ... that's great but from the QA perspective you might have learned that several of your steps failed.

So I think the main thing is considering bugs opportunities to learn about the system as a whole. The philosophy behind chaos monkey at NetFlix is that even a well tested, solid system needs to be resilient, so any opportunity to make your system stronger (regardless of the cause) is a good thing. In particular, any bug found before it hits production is a win overall.

I'd also add that it's important to let the knowledge flow back out of QA and into the product team, etc. QA people often end up becoming internal domain experts who catch lots of issues, but that is something that quickly exceeds what one person can remember/understand as a system scales, so organizational learning/practices pay off big.

<comment><USER8> I really appreciate your comment. One of the more exciting parts of expanding has been getting the opportunity to think about systems and processes at a higher level now that I'm not the only one fighting fires. I'll take this advice to heart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pretty much stopped reading when the answer to the first question involved writing test cases. Testing does not have to mean churning out hundreds of test cases, they are inefficient and not that effective at finding bugs. If a QA Manager ( or tester ) had such a strong attachment to them then the interview would be over. Definitely stopped reading when answer2 was 'detailed test cases'

<comment><USER5> True dat. My company has an awesome QA practice and test cases are never written. Testing is automated where appropriate and otherwise based on acceptance criteria of stories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a pretty good list. It's a bit self-serving on the technology questions as well as the general line of questioning for TestMunk (understandably).

If you are really hiring a QA Manager, also consider asking them about their team structure/building philosophy, elaborate on the technical requirements for those roles, if they have experience developing a testing process that works with your company/group's development process. What experience they have with problem hires and how they've dealt with them.

This is really a list of questions of a principal test engineer. A good manager should be able to answer them, too, but it's far more important that they can make a group of QA engineers perform well (otherwise you should be hiring a QA lead).

</comment><comment><USER11> 11\. There are two number 3s. Or this is an attention to detail trick for QA managers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most of this is pretty good. Some of this is a little old-school.

There are a couple of things I disagree with, speaking from my own experience as a test lead. The biggest is the definition of "a good testcase."

If you define your test cases at the specific UI widget level, they have to be updated whenever any UI change happens, period. Since you usually end up with a number of test scenarios for a given area of the UI, that usually means that a UI update actually requires a number of test updates.

That has the same maintenance as UI automation tests, but without the benefit of a widget map, reusable functions, or an automated callout when the test is wrong. And as anyone familiar with the test automation pyramid knows, UI automation tests provide a huge scaling issue with maintenance even _with_ those. Echoing that scaling issue into your test documentation is a huge mistake.

Tests should be defined at the level that makes the intent of the test clear to an experienced tester or user--no more, no less--unless for some reason you're shipping them to an inexperienced audience like an outsourcing firm. That usually means being very specific about input data, and -if- it's microtesting UI behavior (tab from here, end up here) being specific about that. Everything else, generalize. You do not need to spell out stuff 123abc for the person who's been running tests for you on a daily basis.

Maybe you don't write it at "check that signin works," but maybe more like "check that sign-in works with a valid username/pw, at no more than 2 seconds latency."

But you know, if you don't care about latency, just say "Check that valid sign in works." That's _fine_. You only have to get specific about what kind of _invalid_ data should trip it up, and even then "without a digit," "without a symbol," "with less than 8 characters," that's all fine too. The test will get executed correctly if your tester isn't a total loss.

Also, people suck at manual regression testing but are great at shortcutting and will wander off a script that specific anyway. So you may as well accept that and write them at the level they'd execute. What you lose in repeatability, you 100% gain in maintenance and productivity.

Repeatability is overrated when humans do it: take advantage of the fuzziness. It's more coverage. Just make sure they can write a good enough bug report to tell you what they actually did that caused the issue. If you want that level of repeatability and definition on the tests, do it with automation. At least there you can define a widget map and some flow-encapsulation methods.

Honestly, if I didn't get the job with at least the nice and less-ranty version of that answer, probably not the right company for me anyway. If you're not legally IEEE-compliant or an aerospace/medical company, wasting time benefits nobody.

One of the most exciting movements in QA is context-driven testing. It has 7 tenets here:

[http://context-driven-testing.com/](http://context-driven-testing.com/)

...but they all boil down to "do the right thing for what you want done, and quit being so damned dogmatic about it." That includes not generating artifacts if nobody else will read them, and not defining tests past the level of detail needed to make them effective.

QA has a crappy reputation because it's slow, ponderous, and often not very effective. Maybe part of that is because people are updating overly-detailed docs all the time because other people have told them they should, rather than because they really need to.

If you need that level of product documentation, write the product documentation and refer the tests to it. At least that way you have "single point of truth" for flow. Fragmenting and repeating the docs across a bunch of disparate tests is just like copy-paste coding: a maintenance nightmare.

I'm personally in the middle of helping my org move to checklist-based tests. They can be used as loose regression tests, or as missions for exploratory testing, and only have to be updated when the basic layout of the app changes instead of every single flow detail. It'll get us out from the currently crushing maintenance of reviewing and potentially updating 6000+ micro- documented UI tests on every release, and will be a huge win.

People really should compare this sort of thing to coding maintenance. We've learned so much there that can be applied here as well.

<comment><USER12> Which organization do you work for? How long have you worked there? Take a few minutes to read over what you just wrote and see if it makes sense to anyone else besides you?

<comment><USER3> What part can I explain to you better?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I haven't worked in a continuous integration environment but why would that fall on QA?

<comment><USER14> Because depending on your level of CI integration, many of the automated tests that QA writes can be run as part of the CI process. Developers are really bad at maintaining CI systems, so it usually falls on the QA team to ensure new tests are included in the CI workflow.

Ultimately, it's QA's job to certify a release. With CI, that certification is often done in an automated fashion. Thus, QA should have ultimate responsibility for the configuration and execution of the tests as part of CI.

<comment><USER3> That doesn't really work, though, because the test cases need to be updated at the same time a code checkin that would modify their assumptions happens or that checkin won't pass. Really, for the most part developers have to at least be skilled at updating the CI tests if not creating them in the first place.

Plus, good unit or component tests are generally written to validate architectural and interface assumptions, not so much business rules and requirements. That's what most people really run in CI, not so much full-stack systems integration or user acceptance tests.

The types of tests you would use to do heavy acceptance verification often don't run that well in CI due to either having ecosystem concerns that can't/shouldn't be mocked, or because they simply run too slowly (most UI test frameworks fall into this).

At the end of the day, everyone really needs to know how to do some level of testing, at least at to verify their own assumptions about the work they're generating.

Edit: and you don't necessarily use CI to validate a release--you do in Continuous Deployment, by necessity, so that covers a lot of HN's web startup audience for sure.

But my experience is the majority of other kinds of companies need a release acceptance pass to independently verify a final bundle against requirements.

The type of QA described in this document wouldn't mesh with a CI/CD-only organization anyway. In those orgs, just write the tests and run a code coverage tool. You don't really have a process step that would allow you to do much with this kind of documentation or rigor anyway, since it's build/push/results/deploy.

<comment><USER14> If you build your workflow so that you build a branch with a certain user story, you don't merge back to trunk until the tests are also written. It's actually pretty easy to manage (at least with Git).

And you're right -- this is for a continuous deployment workflow, which many large companies are moving towards as a next step from Agile. Continuous deployment is ultimately a business capability; rather than have your product guys focus test features, etc. you can just use a hypothesis-driven approach to set up A/B tests and go with what works. This works even better if you're an old-guard company with millions of users already. It short-circuits a lot of the hand-wringing and political maneuvering around product features when you can say "Eh, let's just break off 5% of our user base and test both versions of this for a few days".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> May be any personal question which may express your sense on "compromise". If you say i am deep rooted with perfection, have a added value.</comment>


Netflix-like pirate sites offered more video than the real Netflix, feds say - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/jetflicks-offered-more-video-than-netflix-but-it-was-all-pirated-feds-say/ <comment><USER2> Isn't that the point of their being used?

</comment><comment><USER3> Netflix number of offered titles depends of geolocation</comment>


Ask HN: What is the easiest and cheapest way to create a startup landing page? - <AUTHOR> I have been struggling for a while with this. I want to launch a landing page to validate a startup idea i have. Most of the services that provide templates have one or the other thing missing. The website builders are insanely expensive I feel. Any one hacked their way around here? <comment><USER2> landen.co is really great.</comment>


Data science on a chromebook - <AUTHOR> https://simplystatistics.org/2017/08/29/data-science-on-a-chromebook/ <comment><USER2> Instead of showing people what can be done with a restricted computer, why not encourage them to use non-restricted computers instead? Data science on a Chromebook that has Linux installed would be better.

<comment><USER3> A seatmate on a recent long flight had an Asus Chromebook with Linux side- loaded via Crouton, and was doing exploratory data analysis in Jupyter notebooks (mostly using R). Response seemed reasonably snappy. The trade-off for him was long- battery life and a laptop he wouldn't cry over if it didn't survive the trip, vs. being restricted to doing analysis on (relatively, for him) small data samples.

<comment><USER4> I use mine full time for systems eng and devOps type tasks. All GUI tasks are handled by chrome with the exception of my password safe which is an android app. I use crouton for a shell and ssh to local host with the ssh extension.

I love it, it's clean, lite, updated all the time. It's the reverse of my old workflow which was a browser on linux. Now I run linux on a browswer (same thing really) and google handles drivers, battery life, copy/paste, font rendering, graphics card management/ x11 configuration. . . . All the things that suck or take real work about using a linux laptop.

Super fast setup too. I can wipe it when I'm going somewhere and have it up and fully ready to use in 10-15 minutes. (mostly I don't, but there are times when that seems like the best option.)

<comment><USER2> Linux isn't that difficult to use any more. I didn't need to do any special configuration with my current laptop. Battery life is about 11-13 hours. ThinkPad t460. 24 Gb of RAM. USD $1,900 including tax, shipping, and a 4-year, next-day, at-home repair plan where they will drive to my home to fix it on the next business day, even if I spill coffee on it.

I don't understand why people encourage the use of restricted technology. If consumers say that restricted technology is okay (by buying it and recommending it), eventually we won't have a choice any more.

<comment><USER5> Did you manage to buy this machine without paying the Microsoft levy?

One of the few things I like with Chromebooks is that you don't pay a license for software that's bundled with it.

<comment><USER2> I don't know how the price is calculated behind the scenes. I paid a total of $1,900 and am happy with what I got for that price. I completely deleted Windows 10 when it arrived and installed GNU/Linux.

You do pay for Chromebook software with your data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Chromebooks are going to be awesome whenever Webassembly comes to maturity.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's also very simple and quick to run a Jupyter notebook on your VPS, accessing it from your browser. It's how I do deep learning work from my Air. There are AMIs with tensorflow+ already installed.

</comment><comment><USER8> At $20/mo in DigitalOcean services that are only required if you're running on a chromebook, why not just run on an inexpensive PC? It's seemingly long-term more expensive to do it this way.

<comment><USER9> From the article: "One of the best parts about the fully cloudy/Chrome OS requirement is this means that from the user perspective everything is always in sync. I log off the computer at home, come to work, log on and its like I'm on the same computer." So using a single computer wouldn't provide that, unless you took it with you which the author would apparently prefer not to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wrote the first versions of CoCalc on a chromebook, for use in data science _education_ (mostly my own classes initially)...

</comment><comment><USER11> I haven't tried it, but as developers, isn't using a small screen all day everyday becomes stressful after some time?

<comment><USER12> It very much depends on your workflow and the tools you need. If you rely on a full-fat IDE, it'll probably be a disaster; if you're mainly a command-line user, you might be pleasantly surprised. A small screen can be quite relaxing, because it constrains the amount of visual clutter. If you've got a giant 4k display, there's a temptation to fill all those pixels with distracting and non-essential information. A little 11" screen forces you to focus on what's essential.

I wouldn't want to read a book-sized newspaper, but I also wouldn't want to read a broadsheet-sized novel.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the Smartest and Quickest Way to Learn a New (Spoken) Language? - <AUTHOR> I've decided I'm going to learn a brand new language as my "Personal Challenge" for 2017.
Candidates are German, Spanish, and last preference Gujarati (my Dad's native language).
How do I go about this as an Adult? I want to learn fast, and efficiently. Are there any proven "Language learning Hacks"? I saw Ankhi or Ankha cards mentioned on some forums. Not sure that will work for me.
Please, give me some hacks or tricks you've used personally to successfully learn -- to read and speak -- a new foreign (to you) language. Also timelines - i.e. how many hours or days or months of time investment to see noticeable results, which would be that I understand someone speaking in that language, and also am able to respond / speak back my response in the same language. <comment><USER2> Regardless of hacks to make real progress you will need to spend a lot of time. Here's some quick tips...

        1. Move most of your media consumption over to the new language.  Movies/books/internet/twitter/etc..

        2. Plan on an hour a day of active study

(can be 30mins morning/night). And atleast an hour of non active study (listening to some dialogue, media consumption, etc)

        3. Learning phrases is much more effective than learning words, although eventually you will need to do both

        4. Learning by audio is much better than reading

atleast in the beginning (for an advanced learner reading would make more sense to get more advanced content)

5\. My suggestion is after you get 200 or so basic vocab and phrases down then make some short dialogues of things you want to know how to say / converse. Get those translated or checked by a native (lang-8, etc). Create an audio recording of those and listen and repeat over and over every day till you have deeply learned them. They will become automatic and you will be "fluent" at those.

6\. Rinse / Repeat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


As Court Fees Rise, The Poor Are Paying The Price - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2014/05/19/312158516/increasing-court-fees-punish-the-poor

<comment><USER2> For all of the courts crying bankruptcy I have on simple fix:

Stop fucking charging so many people with crimes. The actual cause here is so obvious. Why not just stop putting people in jail so often and for so long? Reduce the number of felonies we arrest people for. Reduce the case-load and the cost of running a court goes down.

Magic!

This should also tell you something:

 _Some judges and politicians — even ones with reputations for being hard on crime — are starting to question whether the use of fines and fees has gone too far. The new law in Colorado was passed on a near-unanimous vote of Republicans and Democrats._

This is one of the most dysfunctional state-houses in the country. When two sides so ideologically opposed come together on any issue everyone else in the country should take note.

<comment><USER3> One of the hardest things you can possibly do in this country is enact a change that will lead to fewer jobs.

Prosecutors, police, and various administrative staff would suddenly have little to do and would need to be cut from payrolls.

As much as I would like it for our country to put a sense of justice ahead of "jobs", it's not going to happen.

<comment><USER4> The core problem is that people think that "jobs" are good. Jobs are terrible. Productivity, health, education, these are the things we want, if you really just want jobs take every unemployed person and give them instructions to walk around a football field all day for minimum wage.

<comment><USER5> You need _some_ mechanism of getting money into everyone's hands, since everyone needs to spend money on food/housing/etc. The market has demonstrated it isn't up to the task. Either 1) we let poor people starve, 2) we give them money, or 3) we make work for them. I like #2 (basic income). The people I meet outside of the tech bubble tend to like #1 or #3. Which camp are you in?

<comment><USER4> I think that poor people starve because the powerful keep them from living freely. Every person should have the right to set up a farm on unused land, but this gets complex in a modern society.

Therefore I subscribe to geolibertarianism. Use land taxes to implement a basic income.

But let's not spread lies about how we need jobs. We don't. We need houses, and food, and comfort.

<comment><USER6> Nobody wants to farm in this day and age.

<comment><USER7> Drop by Boulder sometime...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a classic perverse incentive: local governments profit from crime.

I think all fees (and fines and proceeds from auctions of confiscated goods) should bypass local governments entirely and go directly to the state general fund to lessen the incentive to "make crime."

One example: parking tickets. Parking tickets stopped being about fairly distributing a public good decades ago. Parking tickets are now a revenue stream for cities -- and that's it. Local governments have long since forgotten their original intent.

Confiscated goods are an even more outrageous problem. Even if you aren't convicted of a crime, a police department may decide to keep your cash and your property. Often, you have to sue to get it back.

I'm convinced that if these revenue streams bypassed local governments completely, suddenly they would be a lot less interested in their enforcement.

</comment><comment><USER9> The Nation recently ran a story along the same lines:

[http://www.thenation.com/article/178845/town-turned- poverty-...](http://www.thenation.com/article/178845/town-turned-poverty- prison-sentence)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is just disgusting, on several levels.

A 700% rise in incarceration alone should be a sign something has gone seriously wrong with our domestic policing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Sorry, I do not see how they can charge for public defender, let alone jail time. I did have a relative charged for a in car breath analyzer but that I can understand.

Its not more damning than impound fees that cities allow towing companies to charge. There are all sorts of ways they have to separate you from your stuff, permanently.

I am all for not permitting governments to run court systems unless they are funded by taxes. If you cannot maintain that level of service you should be disbanded.

</comment><comment><USER12> The fees are absolutely ridiculous.

My wife got a ticket a few weeks ago for having a brake light out.

County has a standing order that allows routine citations like that be paid outside of court for $15 and showing a receipt for repair (or new bulbs in this case).

That $15 turned into ~$60 after everything else that was tacked on, and of course had to be paid in person, etc.

Thankfully not a huge deal for us, more for time than cost. But there are a lot of people in our county that an unexpected $60 and having to miss work to pay it would ruin their month and possibly get them fired.

</comment><comment><USER13> I was going to say that this is a regression to the US having debtors prisons, but then discovered in Wikipedia that the practices of the original article are already named as such. It also gives a list of policies for each state.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors'_prison#Modern_debtors....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors'_prison#Modern_debtors.27_prisons_.281970.E2.80.93current.29)

</comment><comment><USER14> They're wrong about the defendant being the customer. The courts are becoming businesses that produce criminals and then sell them to a mix of private contractor prisons, debt collectors, and sweetheart deal service providers like the electronic monitors.

The defendants are the raw materials. They're being captured and sold to modern-day plantations. This statement gets less hyperbolic every year.

</comment><comment><USER15> I became a process server in the Waterloo Ontario region (where Blackberry is headquartered) after hearing about the crazy rates process server companies were charging in the area.

Those in need of this essential service are typically cash-strapped single moms and dads. The cost of hiring a "traditional" Process Server is north of $150 - or $50+ an hour.

My service provides court document delivery and signing of the affidavit for a fraction of the price. It's an affordable alternative, and my clients seem grateful for it.

If you ever need family/civil/small claims court papers served in the Waterloo Ontario region, consider Due Process: [http://dueprocess.ca](http://dueprocess.ca)

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a call for competition in court services, as would be provided by the customary law. For more information see Hasnas[1] and Benson[2].

[1]: [http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm](http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm)

[2]: [http://mises.org/journals/jls/9_2/9_2_2.pdf](http://mises.org/journals/jls/9_2/9_2_2.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER17> "It is good to be the king", specifically to have the monopoly on violence.

</comment><comment><USER18> Even in my hardest libertarian days, I still thought that the court system is exactly what taxes should be paying for.

</comment><comment><USER19> I encourage everyone to support RECAP and Operation Asymptote.

[http://www.plainsite.org/asymptote/](http://www.plainsite.org/asymptote/)</comment>


Web Based Syntax Highlighter - <AUTHOR> http://dpaste.com/

<comment><USER2> How is this differnt/What benifits does it offer compared to the many other pastebins available these days?

</comment><comment><USER3> I wrote a github's gist clone in python. Live here: <http://pastgit.research- infrastructures.eu>

fork it from here: <http://github.com/mmikulicic/pastgit>

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's a plug for my pastebin: <http://privatepaste.com> which supports custom hosts with different defaults, <http://hn.privatepaste.com> or <http://python.privatepaste.com> for example.

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://dpaste.de> is a much nicer alternative pastebin, which spawned from this one.

Also, it's worthy to note that both were originally built for the Django community. I too wonder why this was posted (and why it's on the homepage, heh.. it's really not much different than other pastebins.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice. What I don't like though is that you can view everyone's pastes by just changing the url.

</comment><comment><USER7> WHY IS THERE NO C?! :)</comment>


Physicists Say Consciousness Might Be a State of Matter - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/physics/physicists-say-consciousness-might-be-a-state-of-matter/

<comment><USER2> Chris Adami of MSU makes similar claims about life: that it is a phase of matter. AMA with him here (this question among others is asked):

[http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/236ap1/science_ama_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/236ap1/science_ama_series_im_chris_adami_the_guy_that/)</comment>


Data Scientist Interviews - <AUTHOR> http://www.datascienceweekly.org/blog/18-data-scientist-interviews-volume-1-april-2014

<comment><USER2> Hi, I'm an adjunct instructor at the data science bootcamp Zipfian Academy[1].

It seems there's still a lot of confusion as to what a data scientist is.

Data Scientists are typically analysts who know some combination of matlab/python/R that come up with predictive models to achieve some sort of business objective.

This is usually related to a businesses' profit center. The work is typically anything beyond A/B testing using basic classifiers to figure out things like churn prediction, handling data quality, all the way to doing object recognition.

Data Engineers typically work on the JVM/distributed systems to handle data at scale and implement models for data scientists in production.

With respect to deep learning, I'm also the author of a java based distributed deep learning solution called deeplearning4j[2]

I think people throw around deep learning because it's the new thing, but it really can be more accurate.

This is due to not needing to do feature engineering[3] and feature extraction[4]

Also, if you're interested, I will be giving talks at both hadoop summit[5] and OSCon[6] this year around distributed deep learning if you have any specific questions as to what all of this stuff is. Data Science is an amazing field to be in right now.

For those of you who are interested in neural networks in general, Ersatz holds a great meetup (videos/tech talks recorded!)

Happy to answer questions!

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

[2] [http://deeplearning4j.org/](http://deeplearning4j.org/)

[3]: [http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring10/cos424/...](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring10/cos424/slides/18-feat.pdf)

[4]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_extraction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_extraction)

[5]: [http://hadoopsummit.org/san-jose/speakers/](http://hadoopsummit.org/san- jose/speakers/)

[6]: [http://www.oscon.com/oscon2014/public/schedule/detail/33709](http://www.oscon.com/oscon2014/public/schedule/detail/33709)

[7]: [http://www.meetup.com/SF-Neural-Network-Afficianados- Discuss...](http://www.meetup.com/SF-Neural-Network-Afficianados-Discussion- Group/)

<comment> datasci-fi How can you possibly teach data science in 12 weeks?

<comment><USER2> Little late on the reply. It's non stop 9-6pm everyday for 3 months. This would be you quitting your job to learn the whole data science stack (SQL all the way through machine learning)

Since the focus is on practical/hands on, with only the needed theory, concepts are retained enough on a practical level to become a productive junior data scientist.

Note that our acceptance rate is also very low though. We are bringing in people who already will have phds or some sort of a software engineering background. The job placement is worth it though. We are seeing avg salaries of 115-120k starting. The problems being solved are also really interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thinking people (as oppose to those dedicated to promotional activities) should stop using the term "data scientist". All scientists are data scientists, otherwise we would call them philosophers. Data for the sake of data is not a science. While you are at it, please also stop using the term "big data", (often people mean: do something with the data), if you need to use a computer cluster and MapReduce because the data doesn't fit in your Mac, then refer to distributed data stores and computing systems. Also, please drop the term "deep learning" when you refer to using more compute power to run more complex models. Thanks.

<comment><USER4> "Deep learning" has an actual meaning, which is the use of neural networks with multiple hidden layers. (Networks with one hidden layer can theoretically approximate any mathematical function, but it's the investigation of deeper networks, with more, that has reinvigorated neural net research over the past few years). I'm sure it is being misused, but there is a legitimate, technical meaning to it.

"Data scientist" seems to be a way for mathematically literate programmers to separate themselves from the teeming masses of commoditized ScrumDrones. It seems to mean, "this person is smart enough to deserve dibs on the most interesting work". Perhaps it's an attempt to back to the R&D culture that existed before biztards commoditized us and our work.

Most of the fuss around "data science" makes me think of the Fundamental Theorem of Employment. If you're hired for a job, it's typically either (1) to do a job the person hiring you can't do for himself or (2) to do a job he doesn't want to do. Type-1 workers are respected and have autonomy. Type-2 workers are generally ill-regarded (because the boss thinks he can do the worker's job). "Data Scientist" seems to be a way for a programmer to say, "Only hire me for Type-1 work".

I can't say I'm a huge fan of the title's existence, because most companies use "data scientist" as Biztard for "person who does watered-down machine learning", but I suppose the current climate is an improvement over the AI winter.

<comment><USER3> Yes, the latest work on NN is a breakthrough for sure. So are the advancements in distributed computing and storage that make low-cost scalability possible. However, we should resist getting sucked into marketing terms and buzz words. Terms like "self-driving car" are good because they are descriptive, accurate, and imply a paradigm shift. On the other hand, I may be wrong, for example the term "microprocessor" seems to have trascended relative size and is used to refer to a type of computer processor on an integrated circuit. Language evolves but perhaps we can influence by choosing good meaningful names when we can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is the difference between data scientist and statistician? Have you ever seen data scientist, like with a PhD? Have you ever seen statistician with PhD like [https://statistics.wharton.upenn.edu/programs/phd/](https://statistics.wharton.upenn.edu/programs/phd/) ?

<comment><USER2> I would like to add where I teach[1], our data scientists get hired at places like tesla . Many of our students tend to be bachelors or phds. You don't need an phd to do data science. It is more about hands on skills.

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

Edit: Cabinpark is right and I should clarify. Statisticians typically don't have the proper computer science fundamentals to be able to deal with the programming required to run the right experiments. They may have an understanding of the distributions, t tests, ... but may not be able to use the tools out there that the broad field of data science requires.

<comment><USER6> That doesn't answer the question.

When I hear the term data scientist, I assume that the person has extensive training and background in statistics and mathematical modeling. I work with large data sets all the time as a scientist and can run all the standard statistical tests but I would hardly consider myself a data scientist.

<comment><USER2> Realistically, most "data scientists" that people hire aren't going to have that full background.

I think the problem with a lot of data science teams out there today is the hiring. Not a lot of people understand what the role of a data scientist should be and they expect these people who can do hadoop end to end, extensive CS skills, know all of the latest advanced machine learning algorithms, and know stats like the back of their hand.

Many employers will not need or use that full pipeline, and if they do, they are probably capable of hiring hadoop engineers as well as more traditional analysts who are deeper in the math with the models.

That analyst is someone with a specialized background and some form of training in scientific computing. This does not need to be a full blown masters/phd.

Realistically, you can get away with having a decent programming background, a clue about the landscape of the machine learning algorithms, and enough statistics to know when you're going down a rabbit hole with respect to research.

I think it more comes down to having the right mindset with problem solving. Much of this is also going to be domain specific.

The term data science is ambiguous at best, as it is a new field. I think over the next few years we'll come to see more specialized roles over time that will help clarify the sandbox that is data science vs data engineering among other disciplines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For easy reading: [http://wayfinder.co/pathways/535d479d8760ec110089a874/15-in-...](http://wayfinder.co/pathways/535d479d8760ec110089a874/15-in- depth-interviews-with-data-scientists)</comment>


Command-Q - <AUTHOR> http://clickontyler.com/blog/2011/08/commandq/

<comment><USER2> Saw this, figured that on the off-chance this saves me some aggravation that that aggravation would be worth $3.99. Saw the words "my store" and realized that in all likelihood I'd have to type out my entire credit card number, billing address, email address, potentially create a password, and came to the conclusion that _that_ level of immediate aggravation would offset the potential of saving me future aggravation. Went to the App Store hoping that I could pay you there with a sum effort of maybe 25 key presses, total. Found that I couldn't and was disappointed. Please get this on the App Store, let me give you my money.

<comment><USER3> So you didn't want to fill out a form on the developer's website but you had plenty of time to come here and complain? Seriously, a minute of typing your info is too much trouble?

<comment><USER4> He had a minute to come here and offer some astute advice that has the potential to improve the developer's bottom line.

<comment><USER3> Ok well I agree with that point. It just came off really whiny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just today I was wishing that Chrome's Hold-to-Quit functionality was an OS- wide feature. Thank you very much for creating this, it was an instant purchase in my book.

<comment><USER6> FWIW all: in Chrome, the setting is in the Chrome menu, not in preferences.

Screenshot: <http://paulirish.com/i/fcba70.png>

<comment><USER7> But it should really be in Preferences...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Ever hit ⌘Q and accidentally quit an application when you really meant to press ⌘W and close a window?"

At first I was really puzzled when I read this sentence...Q and W are so far apart on the Dvorak keyboard! ;-)

<comment><USER9> But Q is right above left-⌘ (and W above right-⌘) -- convenient for accidental mashing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> App Shortcuts -> \+ -> select app, menu entry is usually "Quit <appname>", and set it to cmd-ctrl-q, or something similar.

(There's probably a more generic way by editing your _~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict_ , but I'm not sure what the appropriate selector would be)

Of course, these just change the binding, the 'hold to confirm' is quite a nice UI feature.

Edit: The reference I was remembering is <http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/hacks/disabling-quit-rewriting/> and appears to still work in Lion. Still on a per-app basis though.

<comment><USER11> Since "Quit <appname>" is different for every application, my workaround is to rebind "Hide Others" (or "Show All") for _all applications_ to CMD+Q. Every application has a "Hide Others" (or "Show All") and these menu items are pretty harmless.

<comment><USER12> I balked at it too, but then I really thought about it and I only care about this in a handful of apps so I just set each shortcut separately. I think I did iTerm2, Chrome, TextMate, and a few others.

It's interesting (for me) that others are doing this too though. I didn't do it because I lost something accidentally - really which apps don't ask you to save important things? - but because I wanted to embrace Lion's hidden Dock lights, which I enabled. If it shouldn't matter if an app is running or not then I shouldn't have to quit so I'm trying to break the habit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you're looking for other nice and useful little Mac keyboard command utilities, I implemented shake to undo: <http://www.natestedman.com/post/shake-to-undo-for-mac-os-x/>

<comment><USER14> LOL! I didn't even bother to check if it's real or not, but just the though of shaking the life out of my laptop to make it undo sounds like fun! I'd never use it, but thinking of it makes me laugh. Thank you.

<comment><USER13> It's all real, the code is here: [https://github.com/NateStedman/shake-to- undo/tree/master/Sha...](https://github.com/NateStedman/shake-to- undo/tree/master/Shake%20to%20Undo)

As you can see, it was all committed at once, which is the proper way to develop software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This makes no sense to me. It says it stops cmd-Q from losing your work. Every program I have seen asks if you want to save unchanged edits before it closes the window following reception of a quit. Now, Lion has a new paradigm available for quitting, but it autosaves and versions all unsaved edits, so you also don't lose your work. How are people losing their work from pressing cmd-Q? In 25 years of using Macs off and on I've never had that problem.

<comment><USER16> The only issue I've had with this is Google Chrome, but you can reopen the program and Command-Shift-T to reopen all previously open tabs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems to suffer the same limitation of Chrome's Hold-to-quit in that it doesn't work while in the application switcher.

<comment><USER18> True, but I actually see that as a "feature". It's the one keyboard way you can quickly quit an app without going through the hold-and-wait. But I'm sure your workflow probably differs from mine. Noted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very cool idea. I don't know if I'll personally use it; as a dvorak user, it's harder to accidentally hit cmd-q when you mean it hit cmd-w. Then again, it's also easier to hit cmd-q some times because the q sits just above the cmd.

</comment><comment><USER20> Doesn't Auto Resume in Lion render this useless?

<comment><USER21> No. Auto Resume doesn't actually do anything, as far as I can tell. Just re- opens the document.

<comment><USER22> In a supporting app it autosaves all state, which is quite a bit more than just "re-opening documents". The ideal Apple is working towards is making the running state of an application irrelevant. They'll probably never get there entirely, but we've seen that it can work in practice on iOS. The friction for quitting is certainly decreasing by leaps and bounds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would have loved to have had this a year ago, or two, etc., but my accidental quits haven't been nearly as frustrating since upgrading to Lion. I can still see this being useful, though, especially with apps that are slow to implement resume functionality.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've been wanting/needing something like this forever. One thing I noticed is that the '30 days' menu item isn't removed until the app is restarted. Maybe you could automatically restart the app after registration?

<comment><USER18> Will do. Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It would be great if there was a way to bypass or disable CommandQ temporarily.

Like an option in the menu, or something else (not sure what) for people like me who have the menu bar icon disabled.

</comment><comment><USER26> Can I marry you ? And then divorce for asking $3.99 for it ? Great stuff, too expensive, bought anyway.

</comment><comment><USER27> Doesn't work on Leopard (10.5) if you stay a wave or two behind like I do. Drat.

</comment><comment><USER28> This seems like the kind of thing Apple will integrate into OS X in 3.. 2.. 1...

<comment><USER29> I actually think it's somewhat unlikely that Apple will add this, due to their deprecating quitting.

They don't want you think about quitting applications at all, they want to hide that under the rug.

Making quitting more explicit (like this app) seems to do the opposite of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Exactly what I need!

</comment><comment><USER31> The idea is definitely good, but I think the "problem" it solves might be overrated - after all, if an app has unsaved content, it will ask you to verify your action, so you never really lose anything but a second or two of time restarting the application the few times you do this mistake, if at all.

<comment><USER32> Not necessarily true. Often there is application state that you don't want to lose, which isn't saved. For example if you have open IM/IRC windows or if you have multiple opened Documents that you are reading that are saved.

Though I think a better way is just to save _all_ state when quitting no matter what your application does.

<comment><USER33> Lion is definitely on the way to fixing this.</comment></comment></comment>


Lying and Hiding in the Name of Privacy - <AUTHOR> http://customercommons.org/2013/05/08/customer-commons-research-92-of-people-engage-in-some-behavior-to-hide-personal-data/

<comment><USER2> Really a high percentage of people who lie on such sites. But I can understand them :-)</comment>


A Performance Analysis of Python WSGI Servers - <AUTHOR> https://blog.appdynamics.com/engineering/a-performance-analysis-of-python-wsgi-servers-part-2/ <comment><AUTHOR> Just wondering how these benchmarks are relevant for real world Django apps? If they are realistic they seem to point to Bjoern as forgotten gem that deserve much more love. Isn't it?

</comment><comment><USER2> (May 2016)

<comment><AUTHOR> So? Not even a year old.

<comment><USER3> Your parent is just providing the date as context. Often if a submission isn't from the current year, the submitter will include it in the title. It's not a comment on the appropriateness of the submission: it's just metadata.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Suggest resources for writing desktop applications - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> Like best practices, architecture.

I was thinking about looking at Vs code or atom's code</comment>


TheSixtyOne (YC W09) Is Building a Digg For Indie Music - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/09/thesixtyone-is-building-a-digg-for-indie-music/

<comment><USER2> As a regular user (and big fan) of thesixtyone, I was happy to see this article because now I finally know how to embed songs!

 _You can email a song link or embed the entire stream on another page. (Although, it is not easy to find these options. You have to click on the tiny "comments" link to open them up). For instance, I've embedded "Repetition Kills" by the Black Ghosts below. It would be better if you could embed entire playlists._

Edit: After successfully embedding a song I tried sharing it over twitter, and I have a request. It would be great if clicking Post Song to twitter would automatically convert the link to a tinyurl link.

<comment><USER3> "It would be better if you could embed entire playlists."

I can't actually work out how to do playlists - do they support them?

<comment><USER4> hi guys. embed were sorta thrown together qnd a few months ago, so they're still fairly basic. we plan on redesigning them and adding embeddable playlists in the near future.

<comment><USER3> Are there regular playlists (i.e. on site not embedded) ?

<comment><USER4> yes, there's a tag-based playlist system -- just favorite a song to begin.

<comment><USER3> Oh okay I think I finally worked it after toying with things off and on over 20 minutes - a "tag radio" list has appeared when I'm in a radio section and if I click one of those tags music will play continuously. I guess by playlists I meant ones I create.

In any case I think this feature needs to be a lot clearer.

<comment><USER5> I think you're on the home page. For an example, you can see my personal tag playlist named 'mellow':

<http://www.thesixtyone.com/tags/song/show/sam/mellow/>

Or go to your profile and click on the tags that appear to your right.

<comment><USER3> Right thanks :-) I see now I can just go to my profile and "listen to radio" to play my favourites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Long time artist user of TheSixtyOne.

It has seriously driven more people to my music than anything else has. Granted, I don't play the myspace 'thanks for the add' game.

<http://www.thesixtyone.com/devin/>

</comment><comment><USER7> I experimented with combining the "Digg model" with indie music when I created Contrastream and although I have been too busy with another start-up to flesh out the idea, I still believe there is a lot of potential. I still find it difficult to find new indie music.

The next level may be a combination of scraped content (hypem) and social voting.

I recently met up with the founders of another startup trying to tackle this problem at <http://cherrypeel.com>, and they seemed excited about it as well. Hopefully there is some money to be made from it to make it sustainable.

</comment><comment><USER8> i use thesixtyone when i'm coding, have a lot of trance and techno. feel free to listen to my radio: <http://www.thesixtyone.com/jmtame>

i keeps it fresh!

<comment><USER9> I've gone through most of their library of classical. Found many good new artists. My favourite find is definitely Edgen: <http://www.thesixtyone.com/#/edgen/>

It's "epic" music. Reminds me of starcraft terran background music. This is one of my favourite songs: [http://www.thesixtyone.com/edgen/song/Kings+and+Kingdoms+-+D...](http://www.thesixtyone.com/edgen/song/Kings+and+Kingdoms+-+Dragons/27327/)

<comment><USER10> There needs to be a new name for orchestral music written recently. "Classical" feels wrong for music written in 2009.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does this do any sort of relating how one user likes music to how another user likes music?

It seems to me that this would be a necessary element, unless you're willing to cater so thoroughly to one specific defined community that you don't care. (Is that the case?)

<comment><USER8> I don't think it uses Collaborative Filtering technology, but each user has their own radio which is basically a list of their favorite songs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Music is a terrible choice for a voting system. The homogeny of opinion for sites like Hacker News or even Digg is way higher than any sector of music listeners, and it's this homogeny that aggregators depend upon to remain useful. To put it another way: without curators, you need to all think alike.

The only way I can see this site working is for rankings to be calculated on a per-user basis, based upon the votes accrued from the user's neighbours. This would go some way towards the mental filter I use for music recommendations from friends: do I trust this person's music taste?

<comment><USER4> "homogeny of opinion" has a lot to do with how you implement your voting system. people may call us "digg for music," but, backend-wise, we're far from digg.

<comment><USER12> I'd love to hear more about your voting system...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just started fooling w/ it and MIA "Paper Planes" is at the top along w/ the FLOBOTS "handlebars." Are either of these guys indy? Could a Rolling Stones song make it on here? If there is no criteria by which you are too big, won't it degenerate into the top 40?

<comment><USER14> Are you assuming their intention is to keep the sixtyone.com music community closed to major pop artists? Would that be such a bad thing? How would they then handle an indie act that becomes bigger down the road? Who or how would they measure a band's "popularity"? I think it would be great to see major artists branching out and using different distribution mechanisms. Please, leave it up to me to decide what music I want to listen to, not some third party who decides if a band isn't cool enough anymore for their community or me.

<comment><USER13> The title reads "digg for indie music" so yes, I did assume that it was for indie music.</comment></comment></comment>


The death of retirement is looming – and the fallout will be disastrous - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/16/death-retirement-striking-lecturers-pensions <comment><USER2> > _Many skilled young people have realised that things are getting worse in > the British workplace, and have decided to head for more attractive places > such as Australia – which also happens to have one of the world's best > pensions systems._

This is poorly phrased. Australia's pension scheme is fairly strict. Payments are adjusted for both non-pension income and assets, with low thresholds for sharp reductions.

This is in part because Australia has a compulsory retirement savings scheme, the superannuation guarantee (aka "super"). These do not provide defined benefits, but do enforce a minimum amount of savings taken from income and placed into superannuation funds.

Almost none of the skilled young people who the author projects moving to Australia are going to benefit from the pension. And quite frankly, I don't see "a pension in 50-something years, _maybe "_ being as compelling to a depressed pom as "sunny weather and better food".</comment>


Later Stage Advice for Startups - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/07/later-stage-advice-for-startups/ <comment><USER2> I think really good advice to late stage companies, before any of this stuff, is, "Have you actually found product/market fit?" If so, what is the product, what is the market?

I have spent a lot of time with startups (as an employee), and I have never seen this question answered properly, at least up close.

Very often product/market fit becomes "We've solved all these peoples' problems and they pay us money." The problem? The problems and the people are all different. I've witnessed so many companies turn themselves into specialized consulting companies thinking they've built the product that's going to take them to the finish line, when all they've really done is networked their way into solving a bunch of separate business problems for their network. A product should be so good that your users are almost embarrassed to file support tickets.

IMO, sama is wrong to suggest founders take their eye off the product ball at all (even just a little) until they are 1000% sure they've built a machine that will scale, and now all they have to do is scale it.

<comment><USER3> In theory I agree, but when are you ever 1000% sure of _anything_ in business? Also, the thing which scales to 100k users does not necessarily scale to 1m let alone 10m.

Given that the article is titled "Later Stage Advice" and it says things such as switch from not caring at all about marketing to caring about it a little bit _once the product is working_ I think Sam's advice is properly qualified.

But your point is well taken; I've seen it to, but I'm not sure what the solution is. In general I think the advice of staying focused and minimizing burn attempts to address this, but in practice these choices are rarely easy. Sometimes you need to try a bunch of different things, but then you can be saddled with maintenance costs or blowback from customers if you yank the rug out. Also, if something appears to be working and you start to hire to support growing the business in that direction you can get screwed if you hit some ceiling of market appeal.

The cases where a company is so compelling and viral that there is a clear path to scaling are the exception. For every Instagram there are probably 1000 companies that are still considered successful by their founders but at a smaller scale or slower pace. Startups are hard.

<comment><USER4> > Given that the article is titled "Later Stage Advice" and it says things > such as switch from not caring at all about marketing to caring about it a > little bit once the product is working I think Sam's advice is properly > qualified.

There are probably less than 20 YC companies that have reached the point where this advice is valid. Zenefits, Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe etc.

The others never needed this advice. The nightmare scenario for employees is getting stuck at a company without true product/market fit that just sort of has it, then watching the founders justify following this advice because they have raised enough money to get to 30 employees without ever having true product/market fit.

> The cases where a company is so compelling and viral that there is a clear > path to scaling are the exception.

IMO, this advice should only apply to the exceptional companies.

> For every Instagram there are probably 1000 companies that are still > considered successful by their founders but at a smaller scale or slower > pace. Startups are hard.

Those companies should stay small with no formal management structure and most should not follow the advice in the post, even if they have scaled.

I think the OP's point is that product/market fit is overlooked so often by founders and teams. No matter what, it should always be the true focus of the business. The number of companies that need the advice in this post is so small that YC should just write it as a personal email to founders.

<comment><USER5> > The number of companies that need the advice in this post is so small that > YC should just write it as a personal email to founders.

I think that a large portion of The Macro's purpose is content-marketing for YCombinator. It's a taste of the advice that you will get, personalized, if you take funding from them. The point isn't necessarily to help later-stage companies (although this is a beneficial by-product), it's to convince later- stage companies or early companies that hope to get to the later stage to apply to YC so that they can get the personal emails to founders with more tailored advice.

<comment><USER4> My comment is more about backing up this point from the OP:

> IMO, sama is wrong to suggest founders take their eye off the product ball > at all (even just a little) until they are 1000% sure they've built a > machine that will scale, and now all they have to do is scale it.

Founders are adults and part of being a founder is knowing what advice to take. That said, I think someone at YC may agree that this advice is generally bad for a lot of early founders to follow. The reason I was backing up the OP is that he/she was stating that you should be 1000% sure you have product/market fit before following any of the advice in the post. Simply having the right number of employees or making some revenue are not enough.

My point is kind of nuanced. In general, I think YC puts out the best information for founders of all early stage companies/startups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> sama, if you're reading this, I'd love to hear more about

> Senior People: In the early days, hiring senior people is usually a mistake.

I know a lot of folks (including myself) are of the opposite opinion - it's a mistake to hire non-seniors to build the first round. Senior folks can often see pitfalls ahead of time and dodge them, saving valuable time while the company is pre-product/market fit. I can think of plenty of definitions of "Senior" that I _wouldn't_ hire (overspecialized, 'senior' in years only) though. Our disagreement may only be one of definitions [0].

I have seen startups die due to lack of talent early on (I worked at a startup that died due to technical debt, but that's another story). What scenarios have you seen that were caused by senior folks that causes you to see hiring them as a mistake?

[0] More on my opinions on what 'senior' should mean: [https://rkoutnik.com/2016/04/21/implementers-solvers-and- fin...](https://rkoutnik.com/2016/04/21/implementers-solvers-and-finders.html)

<comment><USER7> There are multiple ways to be a "senior" employee.

The first is to be a very experienced individual contributor. Amazing programmer with deep experience, world class designer, sales person who can get to the right person in any org. These people are gold. Hire the best and most experienced you can.

The second way to be senior is to be great at hiring and building organization. These people are very valuable later, and will save you a lot of heart ache. Hiring them early is a mistake in general, because their instinct for solving problems is to hire great people and develop great process rather than to simply solve the problem themselves. For an early stage startup there are too many unknowns and this amounts to premature optimization. Later on this is the a critical skill set.

Inexperienced managers are nearly universally terrible. Inexperienced individual contributors can often make up for it with raw talent, and you gain experience fast at a startup. Therefore early on experience is not at a premium, you should hire primarily for talent above everything else. Later on experience becomes increasingly valuable.

Short version: Hire the best makers you can early even if they're junior, hire the best managers you can later which means more senior folks.

<comment><USER8> This is a strategy that has been proven to work, but history would state that it's not the only way. There are plenty of examples where senior people have started nice large growing software companies. In fact I'd dare to say that many more senior people have created more economic value from their startups then those who haven't...you just never read about them in TechCrunch. The valley specifically is littered with former Oracle/HP/Apple/etc execs (aka "senior people") that go on to create very big companies (Dave Duffield, Marc Benioff, etc).

<comment><USER7> (1) I totally agree that there are people who violate this rule and do great. Hiring really senior early can totally work, especially if you get the product right the first time. In fact, it can be a huge accelerant.

(2) There's a difference between the founder of a startup and early employees. The founder has to be a manager from day 1. I wish I had been more experienced starting Twitch. I generally think more experience for founders is a positive, especially when it comes to management.

<comment><USER8> > Hiring really senior early can totally work, especially if you get the > product right the first time.

Spot on. I do find in practice that "senior people" get the product right the first time, but are less risky to try to steer the company in directions that may appear "disruptive".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >"Announce Offers: Up to a few hundred employees, try announcing every potential job offer on an internal mailing list. If you do it, very often someone in the company will know something good or bad about the prospective employee."

Does this actually happen?

<comment><USER10> It probably depends on how incestuous your chosen industry is.

I'm going to guess that Sam went to a "top 10 school" and has only worked in Silicon valley. In this case I'm guessing that this advice seems self evident to him as you tend to run into the same people over and over again.

The financial industry behaves very similarly where all other things being equal, its considered almost a negative if you can't find someone who actually knows a potential hire. This makes it easy to move around but tougher to break in.

I'm not sure if this is good advice or bad advice but it is something that does happen so its best to follow the old advice and make friends/network. It doesn't have to be slimy, it can be as simple as emailing someone on hacker news who made a comment you learned something from to thank them for making it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> When I read this,I was verifying each point against the last startup I worked with and they don't follow many of the points discussed when I was there.But they have a very good seed funding.The thing going against them may be is growth.They are from 4 (including me) to 25+ (excluding me)employees in less than 6 months with no senior person in the team.One main Founder was trying to do micro management and delegating tasks poorly with poor communications.They have fired many people than I can imagine.And I am still hopeful that they succeed as my friend is still with them. I still think they may succeed as they are growing. I was ok with everything except the firing part!.This is an operational heavy business and not technical.

<comment><USER12> > But they have a very good seed funding

This implies that they aren't at the stage that this article is aimed at.

<comment><USER11> Yes probably. Article is largely aimed at 12-24 Months but at the same time 20-40 member team. But if you team is big, you need lot of things in control no matter how old you are as detailed in the article. Otherwise they are inviting chaos

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some great points in there! "Communication" should be right up the top in bold. Bad communication has ties to many disasters like founder breakups, team disconnect, ownership & performance issues, company direction et al.

However one that stands out as unnecessary: "Senior People: In the early days, hiring senior people is usually a mistake."

The best people I hired in the past were senior. Ton more experienced and older than I. Of course they didn't come from corporate backgrounds but from fast paced tech cultures/environments. With all the equality talk in the valley around gender and ethnicity I'm surprised age discrimination is still so loosely thrown around. The key here should be "hire experienced people fit for the stage of growth". Burning time teaching / hand holding inexperienced people is a drag on the company's speed to execute and culture.

Any views on holacracy?

<comment><USER14> The traditional argument against hiring senior people in a young company is usually a mistake because cash is precious and senior people are usually too expensive to fully utilize since at a startup everyone ends up having to do bitch work anyways, so it might as well be cheaper hands doing it.

Senior people aren't always old.. this has nothing to do with age discrimination

<comment><USER13> "Senior people" is an age reference. "Senior role" is a reference to the actual position. Maybe semantics.

If I have to pay say 2x junior rate for 1 senior role that can move/execute faster than 2+ juniors, then I will. Apart from having someone that hits the ground running I'm also sending a strong business message to the market and investors that I can bring in top hires to execute faster than the shop down the road that's still learning business fundamentals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >> Good HR means three things: a clear management structure, a way for people to talk about workplace issues and concerns, and pathways for people to evolve in their careers.

I've seen a number of startups who think the only part of HR where they need to invest resources is recruiting, right up to the point where the wheels start coming off. Once you're feeling the pain points - disgruntled employees, people leaving, communication problems, etc... - it takes a lot more time to get things working again.

It's hard because these issues aren't the things recruiters are good at solving, so they need more specialized knowledge, but at 20-50 people don't have the capacity to bring on the right expertise.

</comment><comment><USER16> Any advice on setting the top three goals for your startup? Do founders actually create "SMART" goals or are they more general like "growth"?

</comment><comment><USER17> I guess I don't understand why there is "later stage startup advice" on the internet.

Ostensibly if you are later stage you have a bevy of advisers, investors, mentors, peers etc... that would be in a much better position to give you advice about your specific - end even general - issues. Who is this advice really for?

<comment><USER18> There's also lots of people on the internet giving advice to the President. Maybe giving unsolicited advice is a thing people do on the internet.

<comment><USER17> I think that nails my point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wouldn't it be simpler so identify which size worked well for you without thinking about management much (probably up to 20ish) and then splitting the company into teams of max. that size? Sure for some types of businesses that won't work but it'll work for a lot of them.

As an aside: my gut feeling is that many startups tend to over hire as it's sort of a status symbol to have more employees. I mean look at how many people were needed to build and scale WhatsApp. Is your startup really doing something that is technically more complicated or harder to scale?

</comment><comment><USER20> The 12-24 month timeframe seems off. The % of startups who after 12-24 months should have 25 employees and do all the other things that sama mentioned has got to be very small to the point of making this blog post seem out of touch with reality.

Tell me a startup that went anywhere within one year? Now count the startups that went nowhere. That ratio has to 1/1000 or greater. I actually question how many YC startups this really applies to. 10 or less? How many really have market fit?

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm at a startup that has product-market fit, and are currently at the early end of what it seems like the target company is. Interesting to see how much of it has already been implemented or is in the process of being implemented (onboarding is a somewhat iterative process right now, but it's steadily improved), as well as what we haven't yet gotten to.

</comment><comment><USER21> Very good advice, I love every since part of it and added it to our leadership documentation [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/)

</comment><comment><USER22> > Do Offsites: Take your best people outside the normal workspace for a > weekend where everyone has time to just talk and think through the bigger > picture.

That sounds horrid. My weekends are _mine_ , they're not to be used to improve the company's performance. If you're doing this, do it during the work week.

<comment><USER23> That's great. You should never take a senior position at a startup. Or, for that matter, probably a senior position at most any company. Which is fine. Different strokes for different folks. But some people prioritize career advancement over free time on the weekends.

<comment><USER24> Typically offsites (for me, as a senior level engineer) happen during the work week, not during a weekend. I feel that people are more productive and creative at offsites during regular work hours because they're not thinking about what they could be doing instead (like going on a camping trip with friends, for example).

I agree that my weekends are mine, and there needs to be a work/life balance no matter what position you are in.

<comment><USER22> Yes, all of my offsites have happened during the work week, as they should. The idea that senior engineers should ever be expected to work 12 days straight (5+2+5) is absurd. Yes, it's still a work day if it's an "offsite".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> about compensation bands - how does one correlate this with experience ? Because in an early stage startup, this may fluctuate drastically based on what the startup really needs.

For example for a fintech startup, a 5 year devops guy may be making market salary... but a 2 year, talented data science guy may be offered market++ salary. So how do you really structure bands ? And does bands really solve the problem of not pissing people off in this case ?</comment>


Persistent Whiteboard with node.js and websocket - <AUTHOR> http://draw.2x.io <comment><USER2> It's interesting opening two tabs and only drawing on one, and using the second tab to see what other people are probably seeing.

Some strokes have huge lag during spikes, others that I made on my screen are never displayed on the other tab.

<comment><AUTHOR> The server had a hard time dealing with the load. I suspect running node.js on Cygwin contributes negatively in that regard. Furthermore, my custom serverside canvas could probably benefit from being asynchronous, and the server really should batch up updates within a certain time frame, to not hammer other clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Neat! Though, on Ubuntu with Chrome 9.0.597.98 I never got loaded after 2 minutes. This could just be due to traffic load though. However, I was able to see other people scribbling, which was still fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> The server is being hammered pretty hard at the moment. It's taken on 30-40 simultaneous users before, and worked without a glitch. Now it's around 50, and a few seem to be going beyond the normal update rate.

At some point I will have to enforce a harder rate limit, and/or build better spam protection. The app has been pretty much unused for the last 5 months though, so there hasn't been any real reason to focus on that part :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have FF4.0b11/MacOS ("Firefox is up to date") and it gives me the "requires... FireFox 4+ (available from the beta site)" message.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. FF has websocket support disabled for now, and I've been slow to move to socket.io. That, and plenty other updates, are in the works. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks to whoever wrote "skillz" next to my portrait of pg :)

And nice app, it would benefit from a little chat box though.

<comment><USER6> Haha that was me, np ;-) Shame some low-life scribbled over it.

A chat box would be nice, yeah!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is fun, but you should remove the eraser. I think you'd find more creative graffiti without it.

<comment><USER8> An ever expanding space would be neat too. No need for an eraser, just find some blank space to write on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does this maintain a canvas on the server?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Custom implementation I never updated beyond the very basics. There has since been released a better node.js canvas by LearnBoost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Love it.</comment>


Robert Scoble's Galaxy S II vs iPhone 4S camera test - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/photos/111091089527727420853/albums/5663472490008529457

<comment><USER2> This a dreadful comparison. There is nothing to show depth of field; there's no comparison between performance in low-light and harsh-light conditions; no comparison between flashes. All-in-all, pretty useless.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, that is typical of Robert Scoble. You should have been warned before you clicked on that link.

<comment><USER4> mostlylisa on Twitter, of the taptaptap people I think, put out the following link:

<http://campl.us/f349>

Not a comparison, but it really does show that the iPhone4S camera is pretty damn good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why does the iPhone 4 photo look the sharpest? Probably just shaky hands?

<comment><USER6> Probably shaky hands indeed.

While not indicative of real-world use, comparison shots like this, IMHO, should be done with a stand... unless the only variable being tested is "likelihood of shakiness due to camera(phone) form factor."

<comment><USER7> I generally agree with you, except in this case one of the specs they touted in the iPhone announcement event was capture speed. It captures much faster than the iPhone 4, and would be a good explanation as to why the 4s appears less shaky.

<comment><USER5> I don't think capture speed has any effect on the sharpness of the image, sharpness is more down to the lens/shutter speed, I'm assuming the "speed" touted by Apple refers to the startup time of the camera app as well as the responsiveness of the UI and the ability to take consecutive shots faster.

Looking at the shots again, it does seem that the sharpest image, that of the original iPhone 4, is also the noisiest, iPhone4 autoexposure set it to high- iso/fast shutter I suppose?

<comment><USER8> Yes, that's definitely the cause here. The iPhone 4 Picture is much darker, meaning it was made with a higher shutter speed and therefore is much shaper when holding it by hand. If you have a good camera lying around you can try it out by playing with iso/aperture/shutter-speed: Make two pictures in a dark(ish) place, one with low speed and low iso, the other with high speed and high iso (but same aperture). Depending on how dark it actually is and how steady your hands are, you'll see a big difference in sharpness.

The other thing are the colors, which seem much better in Samsung's picture. This, too, has nothing per se to do with the quality of the camera but it's settings. This time it's the white balance that's different. This is one of the things, where camera automatics are still often wrong. A small change of the subject can cause big differences. Moving a few centimeters more to the left is enough...

Again, you can try that with a "real" camera. A DSLR will let you choose the color temperature, but even cheap digital cameras have sometimes different modi for "sunlight"/"cloudy"/"artificial light". I won't go into details here (see [1]), sufficient to say that this can greatly affect a picture.

Also note that the picture from the Galayx II and the one from the iPhone 4S have roughly the same brightness and sharpness. Judging from the noise and resolution, the two cameras seem quite similiar (and are maybe even produced by the same factory).

 _TL;DR_ This comparison is not meaningful at all. For a professional result you would need to control the cameras completely manual and take a lot more pictures in different settings (light, reference colors, tripod, ...).

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_balance>

EDIT: He actually made more than these three: <https://secure.flickr.com/photos/scobleizer>

<comment><USER9> > _For a professional result you would need to control the cameras completely > manual and take a lot more pictures in different settings (light, reference > colors, tripod, ...)._

Well, it's also worthwhile testing how well the automatic settings work -- that's how most folk will use the phone.

(All I really want in a camera phone is non-shitty low-light photos.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The really bad quality of iPhone 4S shot may be due to his hands shaking, we really wouldnt know untill somebody uses a tripod to do comparative shots. Nice thing about Galaxy S2 software though is that you can specify ISO, focusing type as well as use a timer to deal with "shakiness" of the shot. In less than ideal light situations, Galaxy suffers from shutter lag, i havent tested the iphone picture taking that much though.

</comment><comment><USER11> The iphone4S seems more yellowish but it's more detailed when you look the book words. You can't barely read any on the Galaxy unlike on iphone4S.

<comment><USER12> They are focused on different points. The Galaxy is focused closer than the 4S; the details on the Belkin card reader (in particular, the edge contacts in the slots) are clearer on the Galaxy, and the difference is even more marked on the keyboard letters. The Galaxy also has a higher exposure. On the book paper, the lack of focus combined with overexposure has causing some bleed into the type; but it shows better detail in shadow areas.

Much of a muchness, IMO. The two are very close, and aside from things like color temperature (which I personally would discount and tweak later if desired - though I wonder if the white balance is configurable on either phone), they are all but equal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Full size photos on flickr: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/scobleizer>

His stream, which has some other test photos with commentary: <https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts>

<comment><USER12> The full-size photos are available through the "download photo" link under the actions menu in Google+.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Who exactly is robert scoble, and what is his claim to fame? His name seems to come up somewhat frequently

<comment><USER15> I believe this is called the "Robert Scoble"-effect. One could liken it to social media spam: I don't want to know Robert Scoble, don't find him notable, yet his name appears everywhere.

Such people know how to insert themselves in the daily conversations and can count on the support of their followers to carry their views far and beyond. Most of the time those views are not much more than a catchy social hook. You Googling his name and reading this reply will likely cement Robert Scoble in your brain for a while longer.

I find it an interesting, albeit at times annoying, phenomenon. Like the Quora drama (in which Scoble was able to permeate into a lot of topics):

[http://scobleizer.com/2011/01/30/why-i-was-wrong-about- quora...](http://scobleizer.com/2011/01/30/why-i-was-wrong-about-quora-as-a- blogging-service/)

[http://www.quora.com/Dan-Kaplan/Sorry-Scoble-Quora-is-not- yo...](http://www.quora.com/Dan-Kaplan/Sorry-Scoble-Quora-is-not-your- playground)

<comment><USER16> >I believe this is called the "Robert Scoble"-effect.

Heh, I love that. I'm going to use it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> iPhone 4S produces more accurate colors. Overall, I'm delighted how great the image quality if for all cell phones; astonishing how far we've come in just a few years.

<comment><USER18> How do you tell that iPhone 4S has more accurate colors without actually seeing the real objects?

<comment><USER19> Maybe he has the same keyboard and has seen a can of Diet Pepsi before. It's not hard to imagine that being true.

I think that the 4S shot is too red/yellow compared to the Galaxy II. This sort of comparison is pretty subjective though.

(aside for evanwalsh: for the record I hate my Nexus One and have a 4S on the way)

<comment><USER20> Does he also have the same light/lamp/bulb?

Without making sure parameters & the software used were the same, such a casual comparison doesn't seems too useful to me.</comment></comment></comment></comment>