I'm 18 and I want to work for Facebook - without high-school. - <AUTHOR> This is my last year in school(high-school, grade 12) and I didn't register yet(schools already started 3-4 months ago).
I'm 18 and I code since 4 years, Currently I'm working remotely with at a software agency based in Dubai.
I get paid as a decent coder gets paid in my country.
My goal is to work at Facebook. Does that depend on my school graduation or getting a CS degree?
I'm asking this because everybody is telling me to finish this last year to be "free", and for companies to hire me they need at least a high-school degree.
A CS degree is not required to work at google as a software engineer, but is a high-school degree required?
> Do I need a computer science degree to be a Google software engineer?[1]
> No, a CS degree isn't required for our software engineering or product manager roles.
Here is how my work looks like:
I use mostly javascript in my work, I've worked with php and python as well, I use frameworks and new technologies
Python => Django,
Javascript(typescript) => AngularJS,
CSS => sass,
HTML => jade.
I'm currently learning ReactJS and I'm a big fan of it since 1 week.
Do you think Facebook will accept me if I applied after I get into ReactJS(and functional programming, and all it takes to start contributing to ReactJS) really well?
I want to be on that team. Its my goal.
[1] https://www.google.com/about/careers/how-we-hire/ <comment><USER2> Stay in school, kid. Finish high school and go to college, unless you are financially or otherwise prevented from doing so.

It may or may not make you more employable[1], but that isn't what a university education is for.

If you have the chance to study literature or mathematics or whatever you like for four years without going into debt, you would be stupid not to take it.

Big companies are no place to waste your youth and burn out making a buck for yourself and two for someone else. There'll be plenty of time for that later.

[1] It will.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most companies won't hire you without you finishing a school first. Hell, even most jobs like a plumper need school certificate (or whatever it is called in your country).

>A CS degree is not required to work at google as a software engineer

Maybe so. But don't be mistaken - this is an exception. Yes, you can be hired without CS or any other degree or without higher education at all, but you'll have to prove you are exceptional enough. The very fact that you started programming at the age of 12 or whatever - doesn't say anything.

> use frameworks and new technologies

This is one thing that also does not matter much. New frameworks\technologies and languages appear and die all the time. What matters is you knowledge (OOP, design, algorithms, patterns etc) and your experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply.

> you'll have to prove you are exceptional enough

what is exactly "exceptional enough", can you tell me how do _you_ see exceptional enough?

> What matters is you knowledge (OOP, design, algorithms, patterns etc) and > your experience

what's etc(just in-case there is something in etc I don't know about)?

<comment><USER3> Sorry for the late reply.

>what is exactly "exceptional enough", can you tell me how do you see exceptional enough?

This will be purely subjective. For me - one thing, for guys in Facebook\Google\whatever - something else. Maybe they'd want to see that you are exceptionaly good with algorithms, maybe you can come up with desigh ideas quicker than most of them or at least other candidates. I can't tell. The point is - you will have to prove that you are so skilled that you relly didn't need that one yera at school, certificate, degree or something else.

>what's etc

Depends on reqirements for the position. For programmers this is usually algorithms and patterns, but this will inculde something else. Maybe protocols understanding, maybe deep learning, maybe working with graphic imformation. Just look for what they have in their jobs descriptions: www.facebook.jobs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ok.

What are the reasons Facebook should hire you?

What is your plan to communicate those reasons to Facebook?

<comment><AUTHOR> > What are the reasons Facebook should hire you?

currently nothing.

> What is your plan to communicate those reasons to Facebook?

Contribute to React with the best I have, do you have a better way?

<comment><USER4> Ok.

There might be a shortcut. But the most straightforward path to getting hired by Facebook is obtaining the knowledge, skills, abilities, and experience that Facebook is likely to hire.

Keep in mind that companies like Facebook are not just looking at the knowledge, skill, and ability that someone has when they are hired. Those companies are also making an educated guess about how much better the candidate will be in a few years. A lot of that guess comes down to a track record of hard work.

What are you going to do to make the best you have be among the best in the world?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Search for "knowledge, skills, abilities, and experience that Facebook is likely to hire"

2\. Learn ALL(?) of it

3\. Do my own projects with what I learnt

4\. Start contributing

Can you help defining "knowledge, skills, abilities, and experience that Facebook is likely to hire"? please be specific

Do you think my steps are valid? If no what can I improve? Can you suggest a better path to take?

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, I don't see any shortcuts.

An alternative is to gain work experience other places. That will probably accelerate and broaden your experience more than working in isolation.

Other workplaces are often stepping stones to top companies.

Good luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> how good are you at floors cleaning?

</comment><comment><USER6> Have you made anything impressive? I know "x" doesnt really mean much

<comment><AUTHOR> Side Project? No. But in progress.

Is that a perquisite? Why?

<comment><USER7> Because you need to get to the interview stage AND seem good during it

Here is how the hiring process works from the end of the people on the committee:

1\. Get all the CVs. Let's say this is either an entry level position or a particularly good one and say we have 100 CVs

2\. We break it up into groups with each CV looked at by at least two people

3\. If there is not an applicable degree, it is almost instantly binned. The only exception is if they have a fair amount of experience (at least 1 year of contiguous work on a related project for an entry level position) or are otherwise exceptional.

4\. We continue to filter and iterate until we have it down to about 10 applicants. We have yet to really talk to anyone as part of the hiring process and are solely reading papers and looking at them based on their CV.

5\. Then we do phone interviews where it is about seeing if they sound remotely competent and would potentially be a decent fit. And if there was any question about you making it through the filters, expect it to be brought up

6\. For the last few (let's say 5) we'll do an actual in-person interview with whiteboard coding exercises and lots of discussion.

You don't have a degree. Bachelor's is bare minimum, but we prefer at least a Master's. You are in the bin. You didn't invent sliced bread, you are really in the bin.

Maybe you are the smartest person in the world, maybe you are a really earnest kid, and maybe you are someone we could never have worked with in the first place. We'll never know because you won't get past the initial filtering.

\</comment></comment></comment><comment>

In short: Finish HS and at least get a community college Bachelor's degree. And if you are truly hellbent on not getting an education (a red flag, by the way, since it suggests you'll clash with people), start making the greatest project ever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply, this made me make my mind to going back to school :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> why do you want to work for facebook so badly? its just another big company.

<comment><AUTHOR> Facebook's culture is amazing and they work on amazing stuff(or I like ReactJS).

<comment><USER9> Maybe start to contribute to React since it's open source

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Booo

<comment><AUTHOR> I find this motivating :)</comment></comment>


Fixed Case of Firefox Sudden Shutdown - <AUTHOR>

Kitty cat walked across keyboard, and then Firefox would shutdown after
just 10 seconds or so.  Used another browser to do a Google search for the cause and found that the problem seemed common but for solutions found
only things like reinstall software, update virus protection.  Since didn't have problems with other software doing shutdowns, guessed that the problem was limited to Firefox.
Just as a guess, and before the 10 seconds or so were up, deleted the Firefox history for the current day.
Problem solved. <comment><USER2> Well, it's nice you solved the problem, but it would have been more informative to know what had actually happened.

<comment><AUTHOR> Best I can guess, and I thought that guess was fairly clear, somehow the kitty cat stepped on some keys that got Firefox confused about some Web page and to shutdown. Then when Firefox started again, it kept trying to redisplay that Web page where is was confused and just got confused again.

To know just why Firefox got confused likely would have to know some details on what Firefox keeps on each Web page it remembers in its history, and I don't have any such details.

But by deleting the history for the day, Firefox was no longer able to try to return to one of the pages where it was confused and got _well_ again right away.

From my Google search, I saw a lot of discussion of Firefox doing such shutdowns, and all the suggestions for solutions were a _lot_ of work and looked unnecessary or even unpromising because I'd made no changes in my software collection or configuration. Or, Firefox was fine until my kitty cat walked across the keys.

In the interest of a short post, I omitted this explanation.

This discovery seemed nice because from my Google search the problem is fairly common and my solution was just dirt simple, much simpler than anything else I found.

Since apparently just hitting some random keys can get Firefox _sick_ about some one Web page, my solution should apply fairly frequently, maybe to a significant fraction of all instances of the problem, especially to uses with kitty cats, babies, etc.

Hope that makes things a little more clear.</comment></comment>


PowerDNS.net down for more than 11 hours - <AUTHOR>

PowerDNS (not to be confused by the DNS server of the same name) is a popular DNS hosting service based out of the Netherlands.<p>They've been down for over 11 hours now. There were no advisories or notices of any kind! What's worse? There is no way to communicate with them officially over the Internet. Why? They used their own services. <comment><USER2> There's a notice on their website homepage, something about a 3rd party's services being down, although not worded very politely. I presume lots of other people attempted to contact them about it. PS: Are you with Trilab by any chance? Look on [https://www.powerdns.com/about.html](https://www.powerdns.com/about.html) "Trilab hosts a PowerDNS based DNS hosting service called "PowerDNS.Net Hosting". This is a service of Trilab, and not of PowerDNS.COM BV."

<comment><AUTHOR> Their homepage is [http://powerdns.net/](http://powerdns.net/), __not __[http://powerdns.com/;](http://powerdns.com/;) and yes they are incorporated as TriLab. Like I said, they're (PowerDNS application & TriLab) hosted on their own their own infrastructure, which is currently hosed.

So basically, PowerDNS.COM BV is doing a public service to TriLab BV by putting up a notice. And of course, one is bound to lose politesse when held responsible for stuff one hasn't done or isn't responsible for.

And, no I am not with Trilab and I have nothing to do with their service besides being a harrowed __paying __customer.

Edit: Blog post by the people at PowerDNS BV (not related to PowerDNS.NET) [http://blog.powerdns.com/2014/04/13/on-powerdns-com-and- expr...](http://blog.powerdns.com/2014/04/13/on-powerdns-com-and-express- powerdns-net-hosting-by-trilab/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> They must have been using PowerDNS.</comment>


Linus Torvalds on AVX512 - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linus-Torvalds-On-AVX-512 <comment><USER3> The AVX512 instructions can cause strange global performance downgrades.

"One challenge with AVX-512 is that it can actually _slow down_ your code. It's so power hungry that if you're using it on more than one core it almost immediately incurs significant throttling. Now, if everything you're doing is 512 bits at a time, you're still winning. But if you're interleaving scalar and vector arithmetic, the drop in clock speeds could slow down the scalar code quite substantially." - 3JPLW and [https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the- dangers-of-intels-frequen...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of- intels-frequency-scaling/)

The processor does not immediately downclock when encountering heavy AVX512 instructions: it will first execute these instructions with reduced performance (say 4x slower) and only when there are many of them will the processor change its frequency. Light 512-bit instructions will move the core to a slightly lower clock.

* Downclocking is per core and for a short time after you have used particular instructions (e.g., ~2ms).

* The downclocking of a core is based on: the current license level of that core, and also the total number of active cores on the same CPU socket (irrespective of the license level of the other cores).

As per [https://lemire.me/blog/2018/09/07/avx-512-when-and-how-to- us...](https://lemire.me/blog/2018/09/07/avx-512-when-and-how-to-use-these- new-instructions/)

<comment><USER4> > The AVX512 instructions can cause strange global performance downgrades.

Can other SIMD instructions (AVX2, say) do the same?

<comment><USER5> > Can other SIMD instructions (AVX2, say) do the same?

On Intel CPUs, yes. There's even a BIOS/UEFI setting to specify how much you want the clock frequency to drop when running AVX code called "AVX offset". AMD CPUs doesn't do that though as far as I know.

The thermal hit of using wider vectors decreases with every node shrink though, so expect the issue to become muted over time (which also explains why that doesn't apply to AMD - their only µarch with 256-bit execution units, Zen 2, is on a better node than Intel).

<comment><USER6> AVX offset is only available on motherboards that support overclocking due to how much higher intel CPUs can be pushed relatively to their advertised base and boost clocks.

Both Zen and Intel lower their clocks under load especially AVX, keep in mind that Zen 2 doesn't even reach its advertised boost clocks under any load some CPUs come close to within 100mhz or so but overall they all clock down rather fast once TMax or PMax is reached.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What are the forces in chip design that are at play here? Over the last 10-15 years, fabs have continued to fit more and more logic gates per unit area, but haven't reduced the power consumption per gate as much. As a result, if you fill your modern chip with compute gates, you cannot use them all at once because the chip will melt. Or at least you can't have them all running at max clock rates. One solution is to increase the proportion of the chip used for SRAM (it uses less power per unit area than compute gates), this is what Graphcore have done. Another is to put down multiple different compute blocks, each designed for a different purpose, and only use them a-few-at-a-time. The big-little Arm designs in smartphones are an example of that. But I feel like AVX512 might be an example too. When they add ML accelerator blocks next, they also will not be able to be used flat out at the same time as the rest of the cores' resources.

I'm sure Intel should fix the problems Linus is complaining about, but I feel like chip vendors are being forced into this "add special purpose blocks" approach, as the only way to make their new chips better than their old ones.

<comment><USER8> Jim Keller had an interesting talk recently [1] about ways of doing parallel processing to better us the billions of transistors we have - assuming the task is parallelizable. There's the scalar core (i.e the basic CPU) which is easy to program realtively. Then a scalar core with vector instructions - difficult to program efficiently. Then there are arrays of scalar cores, i.e. GPUs, so relatively easy to program again, and now a lot of startups with arrays of scalar cores each with vector engines, so expected to be most difficult to program. He didn't go into why vector instructions are hard to use efficiently, and hard for compiler writers, but I'd be interested if anyone here could explain that.

1\. [https://youtu.be/8eT1jaHmlx8](https://youtu.be/8eT1jaHmlx8)

<comment><USER9> Are GPU's really _easier_ to program than scalar w/ SIMD (or vector insns)? The programming models you have to work with for GPGPU seem quite obscure, whereas with CPU and SIMD flipping a compiler switch gets you most of the way there, and self-contained intrinsics do the rest.

<comment><USER10> GPU programming is easy enough, the complexity comes from the seperate memory system and the tedious(and not portable) API you need to use to access the GPU.

I prefer intrinsics as they give more control than shader languages and they can be written in C++ instead of fiddling with some garbage GPU API that runs async.

<comment><USER11> MSL, CUDA and SYSCL are C++ with extra topping.

Also one of the reasons CUDA won developer love is that it fully embraced polyglot programming on the GPU.

<comment><USER10> None of those are both portable and widely available on end user machines, which is needed for games

CUDA seems nice, but being Nvidia only makes it a total dead end.

<comment><USER12> Disclaimer: I work on AMD ROCm, but my opinions are my own.

There's also HIP[1], which can be used as a thin wrapper around CUDA, or with the ROCm backend on AMD platforms. It doesn't yet match CUDA in either breadth of features or maturity, but it's getting closer every day.

[1]: [https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP](https://github.com/ROCm- Developer-Tools/HIP)

<comment><USER13> As I understand it, that has to work for the CORAL 2 US "exascale", so people who've been proved fairly right so far obviously have some confidence in it. (de Supinksi of Livermore said he'd be out of a job if conventional wisdom was right, though it was pretty obvious at the time that it wasn't.) Free software too, praise be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I agree that there's too much focus on FP, but SIMD is not all about FP. Every new SIMD ISA extension has something interesting for integer.

Here's an article about JITing x86 to AVX-512 to fuzz 16 VMs per thread:

[https://gamozolabs.github.io/fuzzing/2018/10/14/vectorized_e...](https://gamozolabs.github.io/fuzzing/2018/10/14/vectorized_emulation.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> FP matters (especially with SIMD)

It matters to image/video/audio processing

It matters to simulations

It matters to 3D models/rendering

It matters to games

So it's not "just benchmarks", people actually want to do stuff with it

Sure, AVX512 might not be the greatest way of doing it, and it might be better to just make the existing instructions go faster, that might work

<comment><USER16> It's a matter of perspective.

Back in the day, CPUs didn't come with FPUs and the latter were optional co- processors.

The idea in the x86-world always was to "outsource" special requirements to dedicated hardware (FP co-processors, GPUs, sound cards, network cards, hardware codec cards, etc.), instead of putting them on the CPU package (like ARM-based SoCs).

So it's different philosophies entirely - tightly integrated SoCs vs versatile and flexible component-based hardware.

It's The One Ring ([ARM-based] SoCs) vs freedom of choice and modularity (PC). If I don't do simulations or 3d-modelling/rendering, I am free to choose a cheap display adapter without powerful 3D-acceleration and choose a better audio interface instead (e.g. for music production).

The SoC approach forces me to buy that fancy AI/ML-accelerator, various video codecs, and powerful graphics hardware with my CPU regardless of my needs, because the benevolent system provider (e.g. Apple) deems it fit for all...

Torvalds is just old-school in that he prefers freedom of choice and the "traditional" PC over highly integrated SoCs.

<comment><USER15> FP coprocessors "only" existed because the processes weren't advanced enough to have them inside the chip, but they were a natural extension (they were married to the instruction set of the chip - it wasn't a product, it was a feature)

At the old days there were minor competitors to the x87 family that died quickly. (For reference: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X87#Manufacturers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X87#Manufacturers) )

For the rest yeah, it kinda makes sense to have them customizable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I for one would be delighted by having more caches or wider backends instead of AVX512, but I don't want SIMD to be pushed into GPUs. It'd be better to do the reverse - to push forward the asymmetric core idea and move more GPU functionality into lots of simpler cores tuned for SIMD at the cost of single thread performance.

<comment><USER18> Here are some shots of the Mask Registers [https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/05/26/kreg2.html#the...](https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/05/26/kreg2.html#the- die-shot)

If seems like they just keep that area mostly empty in processors without that feature, at least for the processors related to the one pictured. Not really sure how much cache that would be effective could fit without a major overhaul, but likely a chip designer or enthusiast would. This could be why Linus focused on computational enhancement when he discussed transistor budget.

<comment><USER17> From a quick glance at the proportions and considering not only the register files are halved, but also the vector EUs, I'd expect a 25% increase in L3 or a 50% in L2. That and some lessened thermal constraints.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> AVX-512's richness to x86 is like what C++'s is to C. Linus makes a summary assessment for how he can leverage these technologies to his advantage and if the cost of learning the technology and all its intricacies outweighs the perceived advantage: that technology is garbage. This reaction from Linus appears to fit his conservative pattern. I think where Linus gets things wrong stems from his facts rather than his philosophy.

AVX-512's fantastic breadth is born out of an actual need to free compilers from constraints imposed by programs in virtually every mainstream language. All of these describe programs for an academic-machine rooted in a scalar instruction model. Without any further performance from increasing cycles over time the target has to become instructions-per-cycle and even operations-per- instruction. The limitations on ILP and the expense of powering circuitry to achieve it has been well studied for the past two decades. The failure to realize it is evident in the failure of Netburst. Linus believes that the frontend of CPU's have a lot more to give; perhaps best exhibited with his refutation of CMOV ([https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/cmov.html](https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/cmov.html)).

Today's programming languages haven't evolved to make things easier on programmers to describe non-scalar code. On the other hand, power constraints, and now security constraints haven't made things easier for hardware to efficiently execute scalar code. Perhaps AVX-512 is as naive a bet as Itanium, if not it might be just the missing piece compilers need that they didn't have twenty years ago.

</comment><comment><USER20> Are Intel just delaying the inevitable? Is it safe to say (even today) that a slow GPU will crunch big matrices faster than a fast CPU? And that's before we get to price/performance. So all that's left is the bottleneck around PCIe which, in theory, leaves the CPU with an advantage only for small datasets - which we don't really care about anyway (because they happen quickly).

Maybe the tradeoff is somewhere interesting from a latency perspective - <USER2> or similar. I dunno, am I barking up the wrong tree?

<comment><USER21> In the article they quote Linus speculating that the increased core count of CPUs will achieve the same thing as AVX512 without the problems. I have read comments on HN that if cores keep increasing on CPUs they might be able to replace GPUs for some of the tasks as GPUs (or CUDA in particular) have quirks that CPUs don't have.

AVX512 in particular has issues. Using it slows down the CPU so actual wall clock benefits depends heavily on how it is used.

<comment><USER22> For general purpose computing maybe. For gaming the GPUs contain special operations for texture lookup and what not that would be very expensive in a CPU.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> AVX512 is both integer and floating point, not just FP, so this rant about FP comes across as ill informed.

Despite that I'd agree most people probably see no benefit from these units today. But that could change. For workloads with parallelism, wide SIMD is very efficient - more so than multiple threads anyway. The only way to get people to write vector code is to have vector processing available. Once it's ubiquitously available people might code for it and the benefits may become more apparent.

</comment><comment><USER24> The very wide AVX stuff with integer ops, like these from wiki:

\- AVX-512 Byte and Word Instructions (BW) – extends AVX-512 to cover 8-bit and 16-bit integer operations[3]

\- AVX-512 Integer Fused Multiply Add (IFMA) - fused multiply add of integers using 52-bit precision.

could be very useful. I could have done with those recently. They also don't (AFAIK) cause cpu scaling (polite term for downclocking). He may well be right with FP though.

<comment><USER25> 52 bit precision? typo?

<comment><USER26> 52 bits is the size of the mantissa in an IEEE 754 double precision floating point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> _" I've said this before, and I'll say it again: in the heyday of x86, when Intel was laughing all the way to the bank and killing all their competition, absolutely everybody else did better than Intel on FP loads. Intel's FP performance sucked (relatively speaking), and it matter not one iota.

Because absolutely nobody cares outside of benchmarks."_

That was back in the stone age when a lot of applications for FP math weren't mainstream. Most of AVX-512 doesn't even concern FP, there's lots of integer and bit twiddling stuff there.

Furthermore, people really _do_ care about these benchmarks. It influences their purchasing, which is really the thing that matters most to Intel. A lot of people don't actually care about hypothetical security issues or the fact that the CPU is 14nm when it still outperforms 7nm in single-threaded code.

Also, it's not like you can just trade off IPC or extra cores for wider SIMD. It's not like "just add more cores" is just as good for throughput, otherwise GPUs wouldn't exist. Wider SIMD is cheap in terms of die area, for the throughput it gives you.

Lastly, these are just _instructions_ , nothing says that an AVX-512 instruction needs to go through a physical 512-bit wide unit, it just says that you can take advantage of those semantics, if possible.

</comment><comment><USER28> A related discussion is here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23822203](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23822203), also with interesting comments.

Since this thread is of the second freshness, we won't merge.

</comment><comment><USER29> Down with simd, up with spmd/compute

</comment><comment><USER30> There are 1001 AVX512 variations, but few equivalent operations to the RISV bit manipulation instructions.

</comment><comment><USER31> _Intel 's FP performance sucked (relatively speaking), and it matter not one iota. Because absolutely nobody cares outside of benchmarks._

Today I learned that even Linus Torvalds has a bozo bit. [1] When's the last time he actually _did_ anything with a computer?

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

<comment><USER32> He has the history correct. Most of the CPUs that x86 beat in the market had superior FP performance; SPARCs, Alphas, PA-RISC, Itanium, etc.

> When's the last time he actually did anything with a computer?

According to Linus he completes about 30 pull requests a day. Some multiple of that in kernel builds. His $1900 32 core Threadripper speeds that process a great deal and FP contributes little to nothing.

Today people stream video+audio, encrypt+decrypt and render graphics. All of these have specialized silicon. If their AVX-512 vanished in the night almost no one would notice the next day.

Maybe we should all be astronomers and thermodynamicists writing bespoke finite element simulations and have a deep appreciation for the wonders of floating point ISAs, but that's just not the real world.

<comment><USER33> Speaking as someone who does scientific computing all day long, in part with FEM simulations, even for me AVX512 isn't usually worth it in terms of wall- clock time.

<comment><USER34> Speaking as someone else who does scientific computing all day, taking away vectorized operations would kill my performance completely.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Your Open Source Startup - <AUTHOR> http://opensourcebridge.org/sessions/737

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm giving this talk at Open Source Bridge next Tuesday.

<comment><USER2> Good luck! I really liked post from you from last year: <http://ope.nu/p/40></comment></comment>


Climate Change Poses Major Risks to Financial Markets, Regulator Warns - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/climate/climate-financial-market-risk.html <comment><USER2> Financial markets are discounting mechanisms. If climate change causes losses from weather events to increase, insurance and insurance companies will be repriced accordingly. Commodity futures prices reflect the weather hour by hour. If climate change reduces GDP by 10% over a century, that reduces growth by 0.1% a year. A moratorium on fossil fuels would cost much more than that.</comment>


Steam on Windows 10 will get progressively worse in 5 years - <AUTHOR> http://gadgets.ndtv.com/games/news/steam-on-windows-10-will-get-progressively-worse-gears-of-war-developer-865457 <comment><USER2> Win32 isn't going anywhere, anytime soon, and Microsoft isn't likely to sabotage Win32 just to kick people off Steam. Outside of games, there are millions and millions of Win32 apps in the wild and Enterprise customers that rely on them.

Microsoft has already addressed some of these concerns (modern apps can be sideloaded by default since last November; Steam already has the power to sell modern apps) and is working to further increase the openness in the modern platform (better mod tooling support, for instance). It does seem like Microsoft is working hard to balance openness of the platform and security/reliability.

I suppose it doesn't hurt to keep reminding Microsoft that we all love for the platform to trend towards openness (and I know a lot of the people at Microsoft want that too, because many of them started out doing interesting things with that openness themselves). It just doesn't seem likely that Microsoft is that bent upon "killing Steam" to go to the lengths and efforts Mr. Sweeney suggests here. They've got plenty of other reasons why people use PCs and Windows beyond gaming.</comment>


Mt Gox CEO Karpeles says bitcoin exchange is at turning point - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/25/bitcoin-mtgox-ceo-idUSL1N0LU12G20140225

<comment><USER2> Well, at least he's not completely disappeared, I suppose. Otherwise there doesn't appear to be much to actually discuss here. Maybe the fact that he would tell the press that a statement "should" be ready "soon-ish", which seems like total brazen disinterest in taking control of the narrative here, at a time when his company needs it the most.</comment>


Protobuffs in Riak 1.2 - <AUTHOR> http://basho.com/blog/technical/2012/07/18/Protobuffs-in-Riak-1-2/

<comment><USER2> The question is, why didn't Basho do this from the beginning? I like Riak a lot, but I don't see why they didn't choose a carefully designed binary interface from the start. I understand the motivation behind choosing a REST http interface, but now they have to maintain two essentially feature complete interface that don't really have much in common.</comment>


Ask HN: Why are billionaires not giving more money away? - <AUTHOR> With some people having so much wealth, why are we not seing them put more money into society? Helping out where their money really can make big difference. <comment><USER2> I wrote about this a while back [1]. Thinking that more charitable donations will create more upliftment is a false premise. Don't get me wrong, charities do serve a function. But most of the human suffering emanates from greedy politics, corruption, and dumb policies. Most of the world problems can't be solved with capital alone.

Poor African countries, for instance, have received trillion dollars in aid, and yet because of the incompetence of their leaders, poverty is still wide- spread. I don't think if billionaires doubled their donations, it'll create a change the situation significantly.

[1]: [https://shubhamjain.co/2016/10/02/fallacy-of-hating-the- rich...](https://shubhamjain.co/2016/10/02/fallacy-of-hating-the-rich/)

<comment><USER3> Often the aid does more harm than good and actually keeps the very people in position of power that are corrupt.

The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics[0] examines the very phenomenon.

[0] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11612989-the- dictator-s-...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11612989-the-dictator-s- handbook)

<comment><USER4> Awesome book. I find the lessons apply at all levels of leadership and influence, i.e., from running a country to running a high school clique. I worked in Africa under PEPFAR/CDC and can confirm, like 5% on average of that aid actually reaches the intended targets and has the intended impacts. The rest is siphoned off and diverted to the dictators and their coalitions (as defined by the book, the people actually keeping the dictator in power, not the populace).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Helping out where their money really can make big difference._

First do no harm. We don't necessarily know what works. We have rich folks who are pro UBI and that ticks me off. I don't think it is a good solution. I think it just helps salve their guilt at helping to destroy jobs. I don't want their guilt salved. I want them to focus on redistributing work. We should view the trend towards automation as the Second Industrial Revolution, not the start of making most people charity cases dependent on a handful of "generous" rich people or some nonsense.

I was homeless for nearly 6 years. Most programs to help the homeless are completely sucky. I am against growing more homeless services. I am trying to come up with answers that shrink the problem of homelessness.

But a lot of people are not interested in shrinking the problem. Many are fine with growing it, because it serves some sick emotional need of theirs.

I recently talked to someone who wanted to 'share their vision' of taking over an entire downtown block with homeless services. I cut them off with "I have an appointment. I gotta go."

This person said they had "a heart for the homeless." Sounds more like some sick hard on for the homeless. That isn't actually caring about the welfare of other people. That's some twisted desire to make them feel good about themselves. If you care about other people, help them get off the fucking street. Come up with solutions that shrink homelessness, don't build more soup kitchens. Geez.

But solutions that shrink the problem of homelessness are hard to create. It is a hard problem to solve. In contrast, programs to "help the homeless" (like soup kitchens) are easy to dream up, but often help entrench the problem rather than resolve it.

No matter who you are, trying to find something that actually works is challenging.

Bill Gates said that automation of an efficient system magnifies the efficiency. Automation of an inefficient system magnifies the inefficiency.

I think that same paradigm applies to throwing money at problems. I would hate to guilt rich folks into throwing more money at programs that actually make the problems worse and entrench them. They can just keep stuffing it under their mattress or whatever until we have some concepts for how to actually improve things. Then someone can go try to convince rich folks to invest money in real solutions.

<comment><USER6> > First do no harm. We don't necessarily know what works. We have rich folks > who are pro UBI and that ticks me off. I don't think it is a good solution. > I think it just helps salve their guilt at helping to destroy jobs.

Rich people don't destroy jobs, efficiency / innovation / increases in productivity destroy jobs. Society doesn't need jobs that are no longer required, and it makes no sense to pay people for things that can easily be done by a machine.

Now, that said, the problem you describe is real and it is an issue. But I don't know what a viable solution aside from a properly implemented UBI would be.

<comment><USER5> The first industrial revolution shortened work weeks, in part to redistribute work. People worked really long hours. That was the norm. With automation, unemployment levels rose while those with jobs continued to work inhumanely long hours. Then people pushed for the 40 hour work week.

I think we can again work to lighten the burden of work for the average worker without disenfranchising large numbers of people.

I used to write about that on my old blog, but I probably won't continue to write about it. Here is at least a partial list of those writings:

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/ir2.html](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/ir2.html)

<comment><USER5> My latest related thing, brand new. Still fleshing it out.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15781531](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15781531)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> False premise - you cannot know the full aggregate of those who actively give to charity regularly.

A great number of people including some very wealthy ones prefer to give anonymously and often stipulate that as condition of their giving.

Furthermore, even with public donations, there is no mechanism to track _all_ of it for various reasons (e.g. many agencies may release totals but not donor/donation details), so you can't know the totals, much less judge the rate changes of that.

<comment><USER8> Nor is giving away money necessarily an unalloyed good; it can create dependency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Most billionaires have their value tied up in stock which they don't want to be selling. As long as you own your stock, you own your baby. Once you sell it you are losing control. There are of course exceptions.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm going to guess that what the question is referring to is not random charitable donations, but large projects in the old Rockefeller/Carnegie mold. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have done this, but not too many others. Eli Broad has dedicated major funding for medical research. Peter Thiel seems to be determined to destroy society. I guess it depends on how much the feel themselves to be a part of society, and want to keep it going.

</comment><comment><USER11> I would argue that allocating the capital wisely and creating jobs is more valuable than giving it away to charity. Being a billionaire opens up the floodgates to get people to listen to you and to have a meaningful impact on the world. I'd lose respect if Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates decided to stop investing their money in game changing ideas and just donated it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Which societal problems do you think are caused by a lack of capital?

</comment><comment><USER13> It's important to realize that even if they're not giving enough, they do give more in times of great inequality. Unfortunately, that's not, and will never, be able to do the job that politics and real redistribution is designed to do:

"In developing this position Walker sits squarely within the traditions of American liberalism, with its belief that promoting equality of opportunity within the current economic and political system is the best response to its failings. Everyone should have the same chance to be privileged, you might say, so that they can use their privilege to attack privilege more efficiently.

There's some logic to this line of reasoning, but it rests on two questionable assumptions.

The first is that generating more philanthropy is effective as a route to reducing inequality. If it isn't, then the intellectual scaffolding supporting Walker's arguments collapses, because the problems of capitalism can never be addressed regardless of how many new philanthropists it creates. At the macro level however, societies that are most dependent on philanthropy like the USA are also the most unequal and vice versa—it's the social democracies of Scandinavia that have the highest levels of equality and wellbeing, where the foundation sector is very small.

Tax-funded, redistributive government; people-funded, independent civil society action; and dynamic but well-regulated businesses are far more important. It was the same story in America under the New Deal and the Great Society, which kept economic inequality at much lower levels before the new gilded age began around the turn of the Millennium. In fact in the US, philanthropy has increased in line with inequality over the last 50 years, so the more you have of one, the more you have of the other. Statistically speaking, philanthropy is a symptom of inequality and not a cure."

The Privilege of being Privileged: [https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/michael- edwards...](https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/michael- edwards/privilege-of-being-privileged)

</comment><comment><USER14> Because "charity" is not necessarily the best place for them to put it. Lots of money goes into charity, but a lot of it is lost from inefficient spending.

And few of them believe their businesses are not doing a lot of good for society. Jeff Bezos is the only one who can create an Amazon. Rockefeller improved transportation. Warren Buffet invests in businesses people are too greedy or impatient to invest in.

They all believe that they're adding a lot of value to society by doing what they do. Elon Musk is good at articulating what he does, but Jeff Bezos probably believes that he's doing a lot more good for poverty in the USA by reinvesting his money into Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER15> Most wealthy people have an odd psychology. They want to believe that they have earned everything they have, that it is some sort of just reward for their own fiscal righteousness or cleverness or intelligence. Many don't even consider themselves rich and use terms like "we're doing ok" or "middle class" or "normal". But at the same time might feel ashamed to buy the expensive bread because it may make the maid fell uncomfortable. To them all it took was hard work, so why doesn't everyone else do the same, why should their money be taken in taxes or why should they sacrifice for someone else as it is their own fault to be in such a situation.

Most don't factor in how privileged they were to be born into some wealth or with parents who were educated. On the smallest level, it trickles down to the expectation that they would go to college (my poorest friends were never expected, encouraged or helped to do so if anything it was discouraged by their family as a waste of time and money). Going even deeper, if your parents were good with money and had resources to help you, suddenly taking that unpaid internship during a summer isn't a big deal, because dad pays for your living expenses while you do it, to the poor kid it's an impossible notion to work for free in a big city on your own dime. Going into debt for college, forget it dad paid for that too, so now the next ten years of your life aren't sapped by student loans, for some these are crippling. But I think more than anything having the fiscal wisdom of parents who know how to wisely invest is the biggest advantage of all.

All of that said, they get a few things right, blaming others for your problems isn't constructive and their education and hard work is a factor. The only problem is the disconnect between recognizing how lucky you were so that you forget to be kind to those who weren't as lucky (and I don't mean financially kind, I mean just not being a dick).

So to sum up, why don't they donate more or give more money away? They think the world is as it should be, people who earn things have things, people who don't have things didn't earn them. This is an oversimplification, but that's the gist of it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Probably because the people who devote their lives to charity, and the people who devote their lives to earning billions of dollars don't have a lot of overlap?

The exceptions tend to people who start businesses with a charity focus, or who retire and need something to do.

</comment><comment><USER17> Because all their wealth are already put into society. Where do you think all the factories comes from? Who do you think employs all the people? Who creates products and services that people want and which improves people's lives? Billionaires do not sleep on the bag of cash - their wealth is already tied up to the things they are already doing. And as for non profit activities probably all of them do it for the causes they believe in. Universities, libraries, research, art, charities etc. I never understood this demonstration of the rich people, like they are some kind of evil aliens who want to hurt "us good people". This communistic nonsense should just go.

<comment><USER18> I downvoted you for;

1) "This communistic nonsense should just go." This is taking the question to an extreme POV you want, not where the discussion was.

2) "Who do you think employs all the people?" Its worth recognising small businesses employs about 50% of the population and is contributing more new jobs than corporates these days.

<comment><USER17> It's OK I don't mind. 1\. This was a bit of rant but questions like this are very related to communist's/socialist's "it's always someone else's fault". This is not productive nor is helpful. It's better to educate yourself on how economics work in the real world. Then you will have a chance to make the world a better place yourself instead of "let's use force to take from productive people and give it to unproductive people" which is not that good of an idea in the first place from economics perspective (proven empirically in many countries many times).

2\. Nit-picking on my my "all". I didn't mean that literally. Billionaires' wealth is tied up and even if they would sell everything (and give everything to charity) someone else (who takes over) would be even richer which most likely would result in less competition, less innovation, higher prices and lower quality to everyone. Lack of understanding in how economy works results in questions like this.

<comment><USER18> I concur 2) was nitpicky :)

Regarding your statement "let's use force to take from productive people and give it to unproductive people" which is not that good of an idea in the first place from economics perspective (proven empirically in many countries many times)."

Firstly, one can easily argue force to take wealth is already in place. Most people would pay less tax if it was voluntary. Try not paying your tax and see what happens. So pretending this taking by force system doesn't already exist is ignorant or misleading for rhetoric. The discussion really should be about levels of taxation, not should there be taxation (ie forceful taking of money).

Secondly, I'd be interested in where your empirical evidence comes from regarding how taking money 'from productive people" is a bad thing. And clarify 1) productive and wealthy are not the same and should be recognised and clarified what is being debated. I assume we are staying with the core discussion of taking money from billionaires in general, and not focusing on billionaires that rent seek vs value add. And for your empirical evidence, I assume your looking at the usual quoted countries at the more extreme edges like Communist Russia or Venezuela. But please point me somewhere if I'm wrong.

I would suggest you look at history more openly. You should find empirical evidence suggests some level of redistribution is hugely beneficial. No economy in the world has transitioned to first world status without significantly balancing wealth distribution during this time. This could be coincidental but I doubt it. Look at western Europe, Japan, US, Canada, Australia etc through the 19th century. These became first world as they built the service and mass consumer economy. How you ask I am sure? We'll it was many things and redistribution of wealth and assets was a paradigm shift during this transition for all nations, much like what china is attempting now. People make the mistake of thinking first world countries are 'capitalist' in a much more pure sense than reality. All these countries have significant redistribution policy already, most more so during boom times. Think about education, health, unemployment systems, fire departments, roads, libraries, vehicle authories etc

So my general point is that outside the fanatical fringe, people shouldn't debate whether wealth redistribution good or not, but what level of redistribution, or on what financial terms is it beneficial. I dont claim to know whats right, but I feel places like Venezuela massively overcooked policy left, whilst many western nations are swinging a bit too right these days.

<comment><USER17> "Firstly, one can easily argue force to take wealth is already in place." That's exactly what I had in mind just maybe was not clear enough. Welfare economics/socialism has a lot of support on emotional level and it is understandable that people who might be struggling are asking questions like in this thread. But if we are discussing economic policies we want to implement then a simple analysis and understanding on the very basics on how things work quickly reveals that it's not as simple as "lets take it from the rich and give it to the poor and everyone will be happy". Taxes are necessary but I would argue that welfare is not what it should be used for at all.

About empirical evidence of socialism failures - countless examples where underdeveloped countries tried it - Russia & co (some not voluntary like my country Lithuania), Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua (and actually majority of south/central America so no need to list all of them), Somali, Libya (and actually mostly all worst African states where USSR were heavily involved no need to list it), good latest example from Africa is Zimbabwe, from Asia largest one is India, Bangladesh, Yemen, Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma, Laos etc. Basically any poor country you can think of - it will have a history of some form of socialism. Nice example is China. You can compare it to Taiwan and Hong Kong. Also you can compare China 50 years ago and now (despite being communist on paper now it's one of the most capitalist countries in the world in reality and it's very good for them). North vs South Korea. Just too many examples. Redistribution simply does not create any wealth. Some very rich countries can get away with it but even current day Sweden on the very top on ease to do business lists. And Sweden is already very rich so they have something to redistribute ([https://mises.org/library/sweden- myth](https://mises.org/library/sweden-myth))

I guess we look at 19th century extremely differently. For me it was as laissez-faire as probably possible. Current levels of redistribution and inefficiency of it would have been unimaginable back then. We should be very thankful for our ancestors who were working so so so hard. We are currently standing on the shoulders of those giants that started this exponential growth of technology that improved our lifes so much in the last couple hundred of years. Especially USA which to this day is world's economical, industrial, technological and innovation locomotive. Even logical arguments why redistribution though taxes are working for me seems like mental gymnastics and doesn't really much sense. Why would would someone should be efficient with someone else's money even if he has good intentions? Why would redistribution create larger pie to everyone? 19 century is a great example to me how human potential can be unleashed with freedom (from a lot of things at that time - religion, taxes, regulation etc).

I don't disagree with your conclusion. I would avoid left vs right labels though. There is some unavoidable reality on how the world works and labels clouds our judgment and we make emotional decision based on what is "morally" right or wrong and not adapting and working with what we actually have in reality. Every country is actually capitalistic (including USSR and North Korea). The only difference is who control that capital. It's ironic that in capitalist countries it's usually controlled by people (people of merit who often are creators and innovators) and in "communist" countries it is controlled by "government" \- usually people with no merit and very often very evil ones. The ones who are good at getting at the top in the power pyramid. Where do you think computer would be invented and would reach all the regular folks?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Money won't be helpful. It will just go to corruption. The premise that if poor countries will just imitate the west, not be corrupt and be smart, then poverty will go away is ignorant thinking. And if this happens Europe and America will never have illegal immigrants again I hear that a lot sad to say. While I'm not poor but I grew up in a poor neighborhood. I could say that if these billionaires adopt more of my destitute childhood he gets a good education not only from academic but also from the parents it could be a life changing charity. Rather than throwing money on to corrupt organizations.

</comment><comment><USER20> You don't become a billionaire by giving anything away. These people are all psychopath tier manipulators. You can be sure anything they're giving away (eg Gates/Buffett tax dodge) they're getting more than equal value in return.

</comment><comment><USER21> Maybe because everyone that would give it away, did.

</comment><comment><USER22> To maintain the status quo.

"Making the world a better place" is the biggest lie ever said.

</comment><comment><USER23> Why should they? Why can't the poor help themselves? Most of us won't be poor if we only spent on the essentials. Stop buying material crap. Foster good relationship with family, neighbors and community. Community service at large and help each other. The wealthy get rich because we keep buying more of the crap they make that we don't need.

<comment><USER24> Because the most marginalized in our society are so screwed. They're dealt the worst cards. It's easy to shout Randian quotes from your high tower, but when you come from impoverished backgrounds barely making ends meet, something like an unexpected parking ticket or an injury can mean going homeless.

<comment><USER23> You have no idea where I come from.</comment></comment></comment>


My Reasons for Leaving .NET - <AUTHOR> http://hkarthik.me/blog/2011/11/11/my-reasons-for-leaving-net/ <comment> clark-kent Welcome to the Ruby and open source community. Don't look back. I did the same thing a few years ago. I left Java for Ruby.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! I've found the Ruby community to be very open and welcoming. It took some ego busting to pull the trigger and make the switch, but I'm very glad I did it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great read, thanks. Very similar to how I've been feeling lately.</comment>


Ask HN: Ever Use Front End Framework Mithril.js? - <AUTHOR> I am looking for a front end b frame work to pick up and looking at Mithril. Just from reading some of the docs it looks good on the surface but I haven't actually used it in anything so there could be pitfalls I am unaware of.  I am curious if anybody has experience with it and what your thoughts are.<p>I know React is the hot thing right now for components, but Mithril looks better and really attractive to me. I just don't want to waste my time if there's fundamental problems with it. <comment><USER2> I've used it before. Not for anything "production worthy", but the tool I built is seeing at least monthly use at my company, seems relatively stable (hasn't broken yet), and was way easier (for me at least) to write than the same app when I originally wrote it in Angular.

I had a bit of trouble convincing it to redraw when I though it should, and ended up throwing in way more m.redraw()'s than I probably should have, but it works, it's responsive, it's _fast_ (if you couldn't tell that already from it's benchmarks), and it's _fun_ (for me at least).

*Note: I haven't bothered looking into React yet, so I have no real comparison between the two. But Mithril suits my style of development, and that's good enough for me.

P.S. The templates look really nice in CoffeeScript too, for what it's worth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing your experience. When I was reading up on it I found out there's been a few updates that fix problems such as not having to redraw as much. You can also write your components in html using the new m.trust('<html>')

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Learn both. I have and here's what you'll learn:

React is clean but heavy. It can solve every problem for you well except one. That one is mobile web-apps. (It's really heavy for low-bandwidth applications.) React won't make you much of a better developer itself, but all the things that it comes with are really good to learn like:

\- Redux \- ES6/7 with Babel \- Webpack (which I prefer) or Browserify for packaging \- Using ESLint to get in the habit of writing readable and consistent code.

Mithril is nimble and light but more difficult to use well. Learning Mithril will make you a better developer because of how it encourages smart use of Javascript. This is easier to see for yourself (read the blog entries) than quantify in a list like I've done with React.

<comment><AUTHOR> You share the same thoughts as I hado which is nice to have that confirmation.

I also just found out that Mithril has a growing material design library. Check out polythene.js.org

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am not an expert in either Mithril.js or React, but have used both.

React is a safer bet in that it's far more widely used and battle tested by large sites and just about any problem you'd want to solve using React has been solved by others before. Finding solutions to any React problem you want to solve is just a Google search away whereas fewer people have really pushed Mithril's limits and solved every conceivable problem.

Mithril seems faster, more logically designed, and is more fun to use. The killer thing about Mithril is that the documentation and guides are so amazingly good and focused with lots of examples and simple explanations.

As with thuddle's comment, I also had to explicitly call redraw a few more times than what felt necessary to get things working on occasion, but I think that might be more due to my own inexperience with Mithril rather than a bug in the framework.

For personal projects, I'd definitely lean towards Mithril just to enjoy life more. If it was anything where my job was at stake and I had to minimize the risk of not successfully completing the project, React would still probably be the safest bet even if the solution wouldn't be as fun to create or as fast.</comment>


Ask HN: Can someone please review my code? - <AUTHOR> I recently did a work sample in Rails for a company which I will not name. I felt pretty good about it when submitting it, but I was ultimately rejected. They did not provide any feedback because they wanted to keep the hiring process under wraps, and I respect that. The problem still remains that I have no idea what I did wrong or what I need to do to improve.
So I want to ask you to review the code and let me know what you think. I will not post this work on a public site, because I want to respect the wishes of the company.
So my idea is to post it on bitbucket in a private repo and if you wish to review it, I will add you to the repo. I understand this is a lot to ask for when asking for feedback on the internet, and if there is a more straight forward way I have overlooked, please let me know.
My goal here is to understand what I did wrong and improve while still respecting the wish for secrecy by the original company.
Thanks a lot in advance
[edit]
I posted this request here and on reddit and I got same feedback - post the code on github. So I have done so. It can be found here https://github.com/saq7/rails-work-sample/ <comment><USER2> The changes probably solved the feature request(s) and it looks Rails-like and a lot of engineers would've coded in the same style.

Reading the instructions ( _), especially

"Your presentation should be something you're proud of. The user-experience and aesthetic aspects should be well considered."

I'd say they were looking for candidates who simply spend more time on the project. More CSS changes, more refactoring, maybe giving them a list of things you wish you had time to solve.

Entirely possible it's not code related at all. Them waiting for another candidate, somebody impressed them more for non-technical/coding reasons, hiring freeze the manager doesn't want to admit or internal discussions about the job role.

All you can do is send a nice email asking for feedback. If they don't provide that, move on.

_) Took just 2 clicks to see the deleted files. It's possible to delete files from repositories including history.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the feedback. I know that files can be deleted and from history as well. I figured if I left those files in, a reviewer could find them and keep it away from someone who didn't care enough to look. Thinking back to it, not the best idea, I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.reddit.com/r/codereview/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codereview/)

</comment><comment><USER4> You seem to care a lot about the "feelz" of a company that rejected you without providing any feedback to help you improve. Just post the thing on github (or public bitbucket) and paste a link here. Unless you signed a NDA regarding their hiring process, you don't owe them anything at this point.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, the folks over at reddit said the same thing. I have uploaded it to github and posted a link in the submission text

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Did you use any of this crap? if not your code probably wasn't hip enough.

[http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/ruby-on-rails-study- guide...](http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/ruby-on-rails-study-guide-blocks- procs-and-lambdas--net-29811)

<comment><AUTHOR> Though I know about Procs, Lambdas, and Blocks, I did not use any of them, because there was no real need to. My goal when completing the work sample was write concise and readable code.

Though there might have been places where these constructs might have been useful

<comment><USER5> And I got down voted for being spot on. Also don't forget automated unit tests no automated unit tests no job.</comment></comment></comment>


SEC loosens crowdfunding regulations for small businesses financing in pandemic - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/04/sec-loosens-crowdfunding-regs-so-small-businesses-can-raise-alternative-financing-in-pandemic/ <comment><USER2> I work in private equity so I've been keeping an eye on the crowdfunding space and the quality of the equity on offer is -- to put it lightly -- unbelievably low. I saw one company offering a SAFE note that only paid out if they went public... for a single location brewpub (not even a chain concept!). I'm not sure if that's legally the same as theft, but I'm quite certain it is statistically the same as theft.

I'd advise everyone to steer clear of the space until we have a government interested in minimizing the level of fraud and abuse. This current development is likely to make things worse, not better.

<comment><USER3> It's a logical conclusion that many people pointed out. Why would you sell equity to random people instead of VCs? Because you're doing something that VCs won't touch. We should expect all Reg Crowdfunding/A+ deals to be either scams, low quality, or small opportunities.

<comment><USER4> The question is why won't they touch it. Unrealistic expectations of high returns kill deals too.

I'd be more than happy to start funding deals with high probabilities of low- to-medium returns. And I know for a fact that those deals exist at the small scale.

<comment><USER5> People say this a lot but it's worth questioning, because the "unrealistic expectations" also make the portfolio math work, and if the math doesn't work, not liking the expectations doesn't turn a broken investment into a viable one. You can do a really superficial analysis in 5 minutes of Google Sheets to work this out for yourself, and at least crystallize your implicit expectations about the number of companies in your portfolio you expect to be profitable in N years as opposed to dead and gone.

<comment><USER6> I vaguely remember in the Startup podcast that Gimlet Media went to non-VCs before VCs would get in on their thing. And they did eventually do a $200k crowdfunding campaign. So clearly the argument "No VC = Scam" doesn't work. I do buy that the scam rate may be higher. But I think allowing yourself to be scammed some amount is probably okay.

<comment><USER7> Didn't they have a poor outcome? I feel like the only reason VCs got involved eventually was FOMO, not a solid thesis.

<comment><USER6> SPOILERS! Just kidding, I haven't reached the end (stopped when they started doing other startups) so I don't know how they ended up. Looking it up, looks like they sold to Spotify. I wonder if the deal was good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Now that Facebook CPMs are dropping (because major brand advertisers are pausing spend), the snake oil salesman are back.

There's a hilarious Facebook ad where you can invest in a COVID-19 telemedicine startup. The doctor in her office is tending to a sick patient. Through a laptop. And they both are wearing heavy masks for the laptop session.

<comment><USER9> Haven't you ever heard of computer viruses?

<comment><USER10> Achoo, tag you're it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've noticed multiple advertisements to invest in golf or food production robotics on Instagram, of all places, in the past week. I always wonder what kind of sucker invests into an Instagram advertisement.

<comment><USER12> Often fraudulent offers include a large number of typos or red flags specifically to drive away high information buyers; sealing the deal usually requires some labor, and they want to exclude anyone who might figure it and not buy in the end. Better to exclude a few marks in order to guarantee that everyone who clicks is credulous enough to sell to without significant effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if this is merely because they don't have the resources to properly investigate small-scale fraud.

</comment><comment><USER14> Would investors be purchasing equity?

</comment><comment><USER15> Crowdfunding should be loosened. Sure some people will get scammed but it is the same people who the government allows to sink their weekly paycheck into scratchers. These regulations are only in place to give PE a monopoly on certain investments.

<comment><USER16> The critical difference being that government makes a lot of money off gambling taxes; it may be a negative-sum game, but it's their negative-sum game.

<comment><USER15> Fair point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Deep down, I want to believe that someone, somewhere in the government apparatus is working feverishly to help the other apparatchiks to understand the Golden Goose's carotid arteries have been severed, and if something isn't done immediately the entire income stream of all governments is going to fade away into nothing.

<comment><USER18> Hopefully they win their debates against lobbyists for entities circling to cheaply acquire/privatize municipal and other gov assets that can no longer be sustained due to budget shortfalls.</comment></comment>


Lemonade launches in Germany with the shortest insurance policy in the world - <AUTHOR> https://www.lemonade.com/de <comment><USER2> Why don't they offer auto in the US? Or health? It's like they are saying, "those two areas are so broken, not even our innovative plan can make them work."

<comment><AUTHOR> Who said we won't? ;) Stay Tuned!</comment></comment>


Why You Can't Trust Google - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2009/09/24/why-you-cant-trust-google/

<comment><USER2> Yet another misleading headline - it should be something like "Why google apps is not reliable" or such.

This headline reads like Google violated some privacy stuff...</comment>


Condé Nast finally throws Reddit a bone, new hires coming - <AUTHOR> http://blog.reddit.com/2011/02/reddit-undergoes-dramatic-expansion.html

<comment><USER2> It doesn't sound like CN has really changed their attitude much. The news in this blog post is fantastic! But it sounds like the money is coming from Gold subscribers, not CN. Reddit is either already bigger than Wired - or probably will be soon...they have > 1 billion pageviews / month. It's totally crazy that they run the site with about 5 people.

I've been there for almost five years, and I have to say I've loved every minute of it. Back then it was smaller and nerdier, and now it's all big and popular but you can still find the same cozy space in the smaller communities (/r/coding, /r/compsci, for example).

<comment><USER3> pageviews aren't what matter anymore, UV/month is.

comscore's january numbers just came out this morning. Wired droped 38% from 9.4 to 5.9 million. In one month. Hopefully for their sake thats a javascript screw up.

reddit rose 11% from 1.0 to 1.1 million. Again, in one month.

so if you were to over-extrapolate here you could say that reddit will overtake wired maybe late this year, but as it stands now wired is >6x bigger a media property.

<comment><USER4> > _reddit rose 11% from 1.0 to 1.1 million_

The numbers that they show (the same place the one-billion pageviews stat comes from) indicate that they're now closer to 14 million monthly uniques:

<http://www.reddit.com/tb/fdyyf>

<comment><USER3> comscore's numbers are notoriously lower than quantcast/google-analytics, but usually about half not 1/14th... so somethings clearly wrong there too.

<comment><USER5> I do not trust comscore's numbers at all. They rely on opt-in sampling of user data. There is obvious selection bias there. Large companies will never allow such tracking software, so anybody browsing from work will never be counted. There are many other large demographics that they just plain miss. They have a history of goofing badly, for example being directionally wrong about Google's ad revenue [1].

1\. [http://seekingalpha.com/article/72911-why-was-everyone- wrong...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/72911-why-was-everyone-wrong-on- google)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hmm, I wonder if this announcement comes on the heels of momentum where users are not renewing the gold subscriptions. I'm not sure of that and I'm purely speculating, but I think the average initial subscription amount was about $10 and those would expiring around now. Just guessing.

This sort of action would be a good way for CN to rope back in any doubters that their $$ will benefit the site.

edit: I know they indeed beefed up investments in hardware and I was referring to hiring more devs.

<comment><USER7> That or maybe the users _are_ renewing, giving reddit some confidence to make a long term commitment by hiring, rather than spending the subscription money on hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish there was a way for these guys to disengage from the Death Star and go independent. It doesn't seem like living inside CN has a ton of advantages anyway.

Maybe the ultimate Reddit community project would be to raise a large amount of capital to buy the site from CN.

<comment><USER9> Ben Huh has offered to negotiate with Conde Nast for Reddit. He also has $30 million in new investor cash that he's sitting on.

Also, this: [http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/134411/animated-take- cheezbur...](http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/134411/animated-take-cheezburger- networks-30m-vc-round)

<comment><USER10> Yeah, but being owned by Ben Huh wouldn't be any better than being owned by Conde Nast. It would probably be far worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> ...and Reddit is currently down (well, in emergency read-only mode). :(

<comment><USER12> Where do you go when Reddit is down?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> i am trying to be generally optimistic, but it seems pretty likely that Conde Nast is going to eventually want to monetize the reddit community in ways that no one will like. without some sort of payoff at the end of the road, i can't imagine why they'd agree to additional hires.

<comment><USER7> CN could start by helping reddit sell their banner ad inventory... it's got to be less than 1% of the time that I see a real ad, rather than reddit self- promotions or something for another CN property running in that slot.

<comment><USER14> "Something for another CN property" could well be the payoff.

<comment><USER7> True although the number of those seems to be, if anything, decreasing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The engineering team at Reddit manages 250M pageviews per engineer. That has to be some kind of record. Has any other site ever hit the Alexa 100 with only 4 engineers?

Kudos.

<comment><USER16> Perhaps Craigslist?

30 employees and 20 billion pageviews/month. Not clear how many of those people are engineers.

<http://www.craigslist.org/about/factsheet>

pg makes reference to it in this essay <http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is indeed great news, but I can't believe what CN has done to this company. Well, I actually can because I worked at CN for 4 years and saw extremely little investment in long-term digital strategy. There were a lot of tricks being thought of to try to get an edge, but they still have too many print dinosaurs who are terrified of losing their jobs calling the shots. And I'm not saying these print dinosaurs couldn't very easily evolve and learn what they need to learn and be what the publisher needs to stay afloat. I'm saying there's this cloud of fear looming over everyone's heads there that's suffocating any potential for innovation.

</comment><comment><USER18> Reddit has been down for two days maybe that was the kick in the pants they needed.

<comment> mkr-hn Reddit is down half the time because people flocked to it when Digg went south. Any team would struggle to keep up with that kind of growth.

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+reddit.com/>

A sudden influx of 100k people overnight is not easy to manage.

The number on the visits graph is even more substantial.

<comment><USER19> Well, some of us were knocked on to hacker news as a result. It's like a cashflow waterfall. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization>

<comment><USER20> Oh, that explains much.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


HTML preview for doc, docx, pdf & rtf - <AUTHOR> http://recruiterbox.com/blog/11/html-preview-for-doc-docx-pdf-rtf

<comment><USER2> Prompted by downloading a .doc file from Qwest only to find out that inside was a monospaced text file, I set up a small, nearly UI-free site for doing document conversions. [http://doc.mar.cx/<url>](http://doc.mar.cx/<url>); gives an HTML or other sensible rendering of an url (e.g. [http://doc.mar.cx/http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/02/02...](http://doc.mar.cx/http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/02/02/T02020000010001MSWE.doc) ) and [http://doc.mar.cx/<extension>/<url>](http://doc.mar.cx/<extension>/<url>); attempts to convert the url into the format with the given extension (e.g. [http://doc.mar.cx/txt/http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/0...](http://doc.mar.cx/txt/http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/02/02/T02020000010001MSWE.doc) ).

I use wvHtml for doc->html, wvPDF for doc->pdf, but antiword for doc->txt. To convert .docx, .xls, .xlsx, and WordPerfect files to HTML, I use OpenOffice, by way of jodconverter. For ODF files, I use OdfConverter. Conversion of Excel files to .csv files uses xls2csv. For PowerPoint files, I use ppthtml to convert to html, and catppt to convert to text. For Lotus 1-2-3 files (I added this after downloading some historical telecom data from the FCC!), I use ssconvert.

Any conversion that results in an HTML file (e.g. doc or pdf to html) I bundle all the images into a single file using the data: url scheme. To do this, I wrote a utility called pagecan: <http://afiler.com/pagecan/>

</comment><comment><USER3> UX Suggestion: Please hyperlink the Blog text besides the Recruiterbox logo. It's underlined so users expect it to be a link.

<comment><USER4> Also, a <title> tag would be useful :-).

But apart from this, I now I'll face this very problem soon (well, for a relatively fluctuant value of "soon"), so thank you very much for sharing this _raghu!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should also consider 'pandoc', written in Haskell, for converting between markup formats: <http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/>

I am curious for more details about why Tika wasn't good enough. Please explain.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tika is very good at converting documents to plain text. Very reliable too. The problem for us was that, most resumes have a lot of formatting in them. For example candidates use tables to structure data. When such a resume is converted to plain text using tika, it looks jumbled.

Will take a look at pandoc. Thanks for suggesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Based on the title I expected some html5 magic for converting binary files into html in the browser.

</comment><comment><USER7> How would you compare abiword for doc/docx conversion versus antiword (<http://www.winfield.demon.nl/>)?

Also, what are the limitations of abiword for doc/docx files?

<comment><AUTHOR> Haven't tried antiword. As of now I find abiword pretty stable for both doc and docx. I need more data but I found a few cases where it just hanged while converting. There is no specific pattern to when the program hangs. For now I am logging such cases and timing out the conversion in 3 seconds.

<comment><USER7> Thanks.

Where do you get your doc files?

Are they the just ones submitted to your site, or is there a pastebin or similar repo of doc files?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How about trying out calibre <http://calibre-ebook.com> It can do all kinds of conversions from a number of formats, it is quite reliable, and it can be run headless.

</comment><comment><USER9> Million Dollar Question:

How could you additionally parse the information to extract structured data? For example; names of candidates, addresses, previous employers, job titles held.

<comment><USER10> That's been done across online job boards since 1996 when we launched hotjobs. Resumes, although varying aesthetically contain a pretty ridged structure that presents itself well to localized extraction. This allows easy term extraction for searching across a very large data set quickly.

A simple 30 line flex/yacc combo will work effectively at a high ninety percentile

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Please add a candidate delete function. I sent an email with candidate with multiple attachments and Recruiterbox created multiple candidates by mistake.

</comment><comment><USER12> There's really not much here.

Could we see some code or a demo?</comment>


BlackBerry Future Visions - Leaked Video - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEYS4UAKxgs

<comment><USER2> In their defense, I guess they remembered who their actual customers are. Otherwise, this is kinda the "1984 brought to you by RIM" video.</comment>


Poverty Shrinks Brains from Birth - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/poverty-shrinks-brains-from-birth1/

<comment><USER2> Is it not possible that its not actually poverty that "shrinks the brain" but genetics.

<comment><USER3> FTA:

      epigenetics—modifications to DNA caused by environmental factors such as stress—could also be playing an important role, and can be passed down through generations.</comment></comment>


Spokesman-Review must provide info on anonymous commenter - <AUTHOR> http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/jul/10/s-r-must-provide-info-anonymous-commenter/

<comment><USER2> "In a hearing last month, Jacobson's attorney argued that his client's reputation was hurt"

Now, is it possible to prove this claim? I don't believe so. I know the comparison is not the best one, but we have cases where a perfectly healthy child is given a vaccine shoot and goes into full comma, and yet parents lose in court because judge decides that there is no proof that this vaccine was a cause and parents cannot prove it did because they do not owe a Time Machine to go back in time, deny vaccinating and monitor their child being perfectly fine months later.</comment>


Before the Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8399209](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8399209)

<comment><AUTHOR> My mistake. I thought if it's already been posted then HN would redirect me to that discussion when I try to submit... That didn't happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> btw, after so many startups already funded and sold it could be a nice idea to create by interviewing and maintain a list of what these startups are wishing to have but have no time/resources to work on it. This could be a list of ideas to accept as long as more than one or two startups are wishing for [not necessarily exactly] the same thing.)

My bet is that YC has a list like this, the question is why not to make it public (and dynamic) on this site.

Things like "less buggy PHP" or "less bloated Java" or "Java without aliasing bugs" could be filtered out automatically.</comment>


Why Doesn't America Read Anymore? - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt-america-read-anymore <comment><USER2> The only thing worse than April Fools Day is the submission of April Fools jokes five days after the fact. This was a rather lame one too.

</comment><comment> V-2 Okay, and where's the original article?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the original article.

Check this out:

[http://gawker.com/npr-pulled-a-brilliant-april-fools- prank-o...](http://gawker.com/npr-pulled-a-brilliant-april-fools-prank-on- people-who-1557745710)

[http://www.uproxx.com/filmdrunk/2014/04/npr-april-fools- day-...](http://www.uproxx.com/filmdrunk/2014/04/npr-april-fools-day-prank- facebook/)

[http://kotaku.com/a-reminder-that-not-everyone-reads- before-...](http://kotaku.com/a-reminder-that-not-everyone-reads-before- commenting-1557812641)

Thanks Ran: [http://ranprieur.com/](http://ranprieur.com/)

<comment> V-2 Oh, I see. But all comments seem to be in on the joke, so I assumed the original one was somewhere else. I don't use FB

<comment><AUTHOR> The facebook link where the jokes are is here: [https://www.facebook.com/NPR/posts/10202059501509428?stream_...](https://www.facebook.com/NPR/posts/10202059501509428?stream_ref=10)

<comment> V-2 Thanks. Maybe that's the one that should get submitted!

Succesful troll is successful :)

<comment><AUTHOR> You caught me, you red beyond the headline.

And BTW this also happens to break Betteridge's law of headlines: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wat. This seems a bit belated in it's submission to HN.

<comment><USER4> ...it is because nobody read the original article.</comment></comment>


Deus Ex (2000) Forced Players to Reframe Their Entire Experience - <AUTHOR> https://mikesgamingtrove.ca/2019/08/17/deus-ex-2000.html <comment><USER2> I remember being so absorbed by Dues Ex that after a long play session that, IRL, I walked up an ATM and for a few moments tried to find the "hack" button.

It is also the first game I remember that forced me to make consequential more choices through regular play. I was very proud to make it to the end without killing a soul,</comment>


Seattle to permanently close 20 miles of streets so residents can walk and bike - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/seattle-streets-closed-stay-healthy-trnd/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> I can only applaud this. We have seen this happen in many cities in Europe, and the effect has been overwhelmingly positive.

Pollution, noise, danger and the sheer amount of _space_ that cars take for themselves are negatives that, at least in cities, are not outweighed by the benefits cars bring.</comment>


Ask HN: Why are e-books sold for the same price as printed books - <AUTHOR> Why are e-books usually so freaking expensive? <comment><USER2> Value based pricing. The value of an e-book is close to the value of a p-book to the user. The details make it a wash depending on who you are.

Some people might want to sell the p-book when they are done, but you may be able to make copies of the e-book.

Some people like having the p-book, other people have too many books and clutter already and like to read technical stuff on a tablet while spinning at the gym...

There is plenty of other pathology in book pricing.

Allegedly hardcovers are worth more than softcovers but most of the time a used hardcover is cheaper than the softcover because: (i) softcovers are often nicer objects to live with, and (ii) libraries and their patrons mark up and otherwise abuse hardcovers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because that's apparently the price where the sellers maximize their profits. If people stop buying e-books at that price, the sellers may drop their prices. However, the price would still have to cover royalties, design costs, profits, etc.

Here's an article that breaks down the various costs in print books vs. e-books:

[http://www.davidderrico.com/cost-breakdowns-e-books-vs- print...](http://www.davidderrico.com/cost-breakdowns-e-books-vs-printed- books)

</comment><comment><USER4> Greed</comment>


Site which posts huge amount of (non-hacking)problems to solve - <AUTHOR>

I once found a site where people in general(I think) posts all kind of interesting problems to solve, ie not just hacking problems but physics, environment, chem, economy, etc. Real world problems, not school quizzes. Anyone know what I'm talking about? <comment><USER2> Assuming you're not referring to yahoo Questions, there's a nice list here, maybe your site was included? Brainrack and InnoCentive seem to match your description: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crowdsourcing_projects>

</comment><comment><USER3> project euler? <http://projecteuler.net/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, nothing like that, more like what was posted below. Euler is great for programming exercises though.</comment></comment>


Podcast search engine with 15-30 second accuracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.castdex.com/ <comment><USER2> Website seems pretty broken? "Learn more" link is dead, massive loading times mean I don't really want to spend time trying to find more.

Basic search function seems to work though. I think something like this would be most useful to me if I could have it track my personal selection of podcasts.</comment>


Your Excuse (to not vote) Sucks - <AUTHOR> http://yourexcusesucks.com/

<comment><USER2> One too add: My vote for a third party would be wasted. Why it sucks: Every vote for a third party looks to the two big parties like an act of absolute pants-shitting desperation. If a significant number of votes go to ANY third party candidates, even if spread across a bunch of candidates, they will get VERY scared. NOTHING is more important to them than maintaining an absolute lock on the artificial environment they have constructed to make it look like there is a choice on significant matters when this is not the case. A threat to that is a threat they are willing to work to avoid. It will count.

</comment><comment><USER3> Encouraging people to vote is mathematically equivalent to watering down my own vote with the inclusion of a vote of someone who demonstratably does not care. I do care, and I want my vote to count. I do not want my vote mixed in with people who are guilted into it, haven't actually researched the politicians, or don't care about government. I don't get why people think encouraging everybody to vote helps our situation.</comment>


Vetusware.com – the biggest free abandonware collection in the universe - <AUTHOR> https://www.vetusware.com/ <comment><USER2> The nostalgia of slinging Visual FoxPro in Norton Editor.</comment>


Show HN: Fetchpost – Save HN post and comments as mails in maildir format - <AUTHOR> https://asciinema.org/a/593u87rrsa3mevktyekepm4ke

<comment><USER2> Clickable repo: [https://github.com/holygeek/fetchpost](https://github.com/holygeek/fetchpost)

It doesn't look like you're using the HN API. Perhaps you should? Here's a library from a quick google: [https://github.com/cryptix/gohn](https://github.com/cryptix/gohn)

<comment><AUTHOR> > It doesn't look like you're using the HN API.

Sorry I don't get what you mean. The comments are fetched by making REST requests to [https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/](https://hacker- news.firebaseio.com/v0/), so it is using the HN API isn't it?

<comment><USER2> Ah, I missed that, sorry. D'uh, you actually have a global right up top called HN_API_URL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is useful, should be more upvoted.</comment>