Rdio is Now Free on the Web - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rdio.com/us/2014/01/keep-the-music-playing-rdio-is-now-free-on-the-web.html

<comment><USER2> I can't possibly recommend Rdio enough. The design is simple and intuitive. State transfers nicely between devices.

Even little things are pleasantly surprising. If I have my laptop hooked up to speakers at a party playing through Rdio, I can change the song from my phone.

The only thing it doesn't have that I'd like is Grooveshark-esque queue building. Every music player could just lift Grooveshark's queueing system wholesale and everyone would be much happier.

<comment><USER3> I'm more critical. The quality of the apps has been going down lately.

The UX of the desktop and mobile apps turned into a mess after they introduced a bunch of sliding panes, and the iOS app crashes so much I don't bother with it anymore.

I'm still a subscriber because it's one of the few streaming services available outside US, otherwise I would be looking at alternatives.

<comment><USER4> This is valid criticism, and shouldn't be getting downvoted just because people disagree.

I'm a huge Rdio fan and love almost all aspects of its design, but (especially on iOS) I regularly get confused as to where I am and how to get back. A few moment's thought (or just fumbling between panels) gets me where I'm going, but there are simply too many almost-the-same-but-actually-different panels sliding around to be intuitive. It's particularly messy when trying to juggle browsing music with a managing a currently playing playlist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Must be in response to Spotify's similar policy change: [http://news.spotify.com/uk/2014/01/15/no-more-time-limits- on...](http://news.spotify.com/uk/2014/01/15/no-more-time-limits-on-spotify- freeyourmusic/)

<comment><USER6> I doubt it's purely a response. They mentioned that they're going to be inserting advertising into the streams now for free users, which isn't something you build out in a day. I'm sure they've been planning this for a while. Maybe the Spotify announcement forced them to announce and release it sooner than they were planning, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Free "in the US" on the Web. Too bad :(

<comment><USER8> Just use MediaHint or Hola. Boom - open web again.

<comment><USER7> I assume that's probably against the ToS. If I have to break the law to access it, I don't consider it very open.

<comment><USER9> It's completely unclear if that is actually against "the" law.

I'm in Australia, where a _parliamentary report_ encourages users to use technological means to bypass geographic restrictions[1].

If I use a service it is true I must agree to their terms of service. However, if I'm not in the jurisdiction those terms apply to it is unclear if they can be legally enforced.

Additionally, it is also unclear if those ToS are broken at all by using an unblocking service. Typically the aim is to restrict serving music to any client outside the area the music license applies to, and music licensing companies understand completely that geographic restrictions can be bypassed.

It is actually in the interest of the licensing company that you do bypass the block. Then they get paid for the stream.

It _isn 't_ in the interest of the license holder in your jurisdiction that you bypass it, but in most jurisdictions they don't have grounds for a complaint: they can't actually make you use their service (especially if it doesn't exist).

[1] [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-29/geo-blocking-mps- commi...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-29/geo-blocking-mps-committee- price-report-apple-adobe-microsoft/4850484)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Should I be worried about Rdio? I am happy to pay Rdio a relative pittance for continued access to music. I'm less happy if they're in a tailspin that is going to destroy the quality of their catalog.

<comment><USER11> Unfortunately, worrying seems prudent. While I suspect this move had been planned for some time, it follows on the heels of a large layoff that decimated (triple-decimated, if the 30% number is to be believed) the company.

[http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/19/5123004/rdio-lays-off- emp...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/19/5123004/rdio-lays-off-employees-to- ensure-a-scalable-business-model)

The music streaming business seems like an extraordinarily difficult place to compete.

<comment><USER12> That may have to do with their cancellation of the Vdio service. I was a beta tester of the service but received an email last month that it was being cancelled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Rdio, _please_ release your streaming quality figures. I'll return as a customer, I promise - please just be more transparent about this sort of thing.

The reason I say this is because the quality is noticeably worse than Spotify, and I feel they won't release the numbers because they know they can't compete.

I just want some transparency. The UI and experience is beautiful, but the quality is lacking.

<comment><USER14> Last I read (which was this morning actually), it was noted that Spotify's "low/regular" quality is 192kbps, and high is 320, and Rdio is at 192.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's free on the Web… in the US.

With my UK account, I get "You're out of free music. Subscribe now for unlimited music."

<comment><USER16> How many plays/mins until you run out?

<comment><USER15> I got a trial of 7 days unlimited plays.

<comment><USER16> Where does it state that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > anywhere there's a computer

In the US.

</comment><comment><USER18> Only Free in the US. I find it super annoying when companies don't realize that the internet IS global.

<comment><USER19> Most likely, the companies that make this decision are the publishers.

<comment><USER20> This is correct. At my current place of employment, we have to deal with music licensing issues from various catalog providers. I mean this with no hyperbole, it is insanity dealing with music rights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just signed up. A couple of weird issues, I was presented with people to follow. I had no idea who these people were, and wondered what it meant to follow them. I managed to skip that step. Then I couldn't find a search box to find any artists or songs to play. It was buried down the bottom left of the page. I then typed in an artist, then clicked on an album, and got some music. Then the UI flipped, with a nice big search on top.

Took me a while to find out what a free, unsubscribed account was.

The design is really washed out. Very lightweight grey fonts that are very difficult to read. It's all a bit white and bright. Stylbot for Chrome helps a little there as there aren't any user settings to change the colour scheme.

Oh some mystery meat navigation, click on the bottom bar to bring up the current playlist. Actually you have to do quite a bit of click experimentation, to find out what the icons do. Would be nice to have some hover tips.

Oh and you can scroll the playlist, it's not at all obvious!

Gripes aside, quite nice. Will see how I get on with it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Might want to add "the U.S. web" to title...

</comment><comment><USER22> Having been a Spotify premium subscriber for over 2 years, I've just decided to switch to Rdio for one simple reason - Collections.

I've been wishing Spotify had this functionality for as long as I've been using it. Time to call it a day and go else where for my music.

Also the spotify iPhone app is shit, but I haven't used Rdio's enough yet to compare.

<comment><USER23> Spotify is about to roll out Collections. Searching for spotify:app:collection in the desktop client enables it for some people, although it didn't for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I really want to love Rdio.

I switched from Spotify 8 months ago and at first it was a breathe of fresh air but I soon started noticing issues with the desktop client. It's just a UIWebView that loads the web app. Album artwork loads slowly if you've got a large collection, UI interactions are unresponsive and will often time out.

The other major issue is having albums in your collection become unplayable due to what looks like licensing issues, only to reappear months later as the same album, except not in your collection. Spotify doesn't seem to have this issue.

<comment><USER14> I used to notice the album licensing issue, but it seems to be resolved now (perhaps it's a flag now, rather than a deletion).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So what is going to happen to the $4.99/month "Web only" tier?

<comment><USER25> I'm on the "Web only" plan. The free tier will have ads.

<comment><USER26> That's his point - what is happening to that subscription level? The RDIO post only says "we now have that service, but ad supported and if you don't want that, you can pay $10 for our unlimited service".

So what is happening to the $5/mo service that is the same as the now-ad- supported service, but without the ads? I listen to an average of less than one song per day and only need it on my desktop, laptop, ipad, etc -- so there is no way I'm paying $10/mo for what used to be $5 and if I wanted to listen to ads, I'd just turn on terrestrial radio.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Sadly, just left Rdio after two years because of the sound quality. I do miss the interface, though I actually find Spotify's a bit faster.

</comment><comment><USER28> How does the Rdio library compare to Spotify's?

<comment><USER29> Spotify, I think, has a slightly larger portfolio. But in most cases, if Spotify doesn't have it, Rdio won't either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Same

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> ...with really annoying ads played at 150% gain.

<comment><USER16> Like the TV then. Weirdly the ITV player in the UK has completely pathetic sound on the adverts that you can hardly hear, which makes them a little more bearable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Having the ability to listen to music from one source is important to many and Rdio has no "Local File" support. This is necessary for artists/albums Rdio doesn't have in it's library and it's a reason myself and many others won't ever make the jump from Spotify.

</comment><comment><USER32> I switched mostly from Rdio to Spotify. I used rdio since it started, but spotify's radio based off a playlist is great. I get more discovery songs this way. I also have non-english songs that aren't on rdio, but I can add them in Spotify. I do love rdio's new album page better.

</comment><comment><USER33> I love rdio, but what is up with the lack of gapless playback? I love continuous albums, and even for the lack of being able to play these without the annoying silences between tracks I still prefer rdio, but this is the biggest issue I have right now with the service.

</comment><comment><USER34> In terms of sound quality, Rdio streams at 192 kbps and Spotify Free at 160 kbps.

<comment><USER26> Actually, RDIO has never been forthright about what quality they stream in.

From their customer support in their knowledge-base:

\</comment></comment><comment>-- "We're not currently providing specific bitrate or codec information. We experiment with different rates and encoding formats in an effort to provide the best possible listening and user-experience, and stream CD-quality audio over the web and wifi (for mobile devices), and only stream a lower bitrate if you're on a 3G connection.

We realize that is not be as much detail as you'd like, and we apologize for this — if you have feedback about Rdio's sound quality as you're listening, please do let us know." \</comment><comment>--

<comment><USER34> Looking at network flows from rdio servers reveals that the mp3 chunks are actually 192 kbps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I can only listen to 30 seconds of the songs. I have not logged in to Rdio for over a year, so it couldn't be the monthly limit still being in effect.

Anybody else experience this?

<comment><USER16> If you read the homepage, it suggests free accounts get access for 6 months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Sadly I had to drop Rdio for Google Music as the PiMusicBox couldnt support their flash only API. They dont provide a stream via API.

</comment><comment><USER37> Went there in a rush, only to find out that "starting today Rdio is free IN THE US on the web" (emphasis mine). Bummer.

</comment><comment><USER38> I love being able to click on an actual Record Label name and seeing what they have released lately. That is huge for me.

</comment><comment><USER39> I love Rdio. Bought my finacée, my brother, my mother, and my father subscriptions.

</comment><comment><USER40> What's the difference between this and Spotify?

<comment><USER16> Spotify desktop app Linux uses about 11% of my CPU, Rdio / Chrome uses a shade over 30%.

(Having said that the Spotify app's windowing is a bit ugly and glitchy for me. I think it's a Qt app and I mainly have GTK apps.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> US only. Great :(

</comment><comment><USER42> can I play and control audio in sync across all my devices with rdio? Is that a feature they offer yet?

<comment><USER43> Play no, control yes. It's still pretty cool at a party to hook up my laptop to my speakers, and be able to walk around and queue up songs from my phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Just subscribed!

</comment><comment><USER45> I might buy their mid-tier plan and cancel my Spotify subscription. I was planning on downgrading my Spotify subscription, but it seems that their mid- tier plan (the one that cost half that of premium) is gone now.

<comment><USER46> I think it's still available, just not advertised on the main page. When editing my subscription, the $4.99/month option was still there.</comment></comment>


Entrepreneurs Get Creative to Get Funding - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703790404574471433151548294.html

<comment><USER2> A $90k for 25% stake seems to devaluate the initial $500k investments. Are initial investors usually ok with this type of devaluation, or are they just happy to see more funding since they don't want to put more money into it?

<comment><USER3> I'm guessing it's a mistake in the article. End of Summer was not too long ago, so a company with about $500K in the bank should be worth more than $270K premoney.

I just thought of another explanation: Maybe the TV show only airs if a deal gets done, so the founder reasoned the publicity was worth a bad valuation?

<comment><USER4> I doubt the part of accepting the money for publicity. I think they get plenty for just being on a nationally syndicated show. (Kudos to them on WSJ and Shark Tank) They might have even gotten better publicity for standing firm on their original offer.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOSfMzwA5C0>

They accepted an offer with a 6 month buy out clause so it is possible they never intended on keeping the money.

I just have major doubts about their numbers. The way the founders present them is very suave but thinking deeper in is really questionable.

Other highlights from the show are in: They had 40% of University of Arizona (about 14k users) in 8th months.

30k revenue in 1 year.

Not exactly a smashing success, but a start. Just a few doubts when examining them deeper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The article seems to contradict itself; Shark Tank gave them a $270K pre after they "walked away with $500K in investments" at the end of the Summer? Maybe they meant all investor owned equity is now 25%?

      Notehall.com, one of 10 ventures chosen to participate in
      the three-month summer program, walked away with about
      $500,000 in investments.
      ...
      Through the show, which aired Notehall.com's episode last
      week, Mr. Conway landed the company an additional $90,000
      after agreeing to give up a 25% equity stake

<comment><USER5> No the Sharks usually only invest if they are getting a sizable percent of ownership so I think that's correct. They must have needed the money pretty badly.

<comment><USER6> I wonder why on earth someone would burn through $500k in less than a year to develop a class notes sharing site, given the developer abstractions available today.

Maybe he tried to launch a blitzkrieg marketing plan in many different universities at once, with little testing or compartmentalizing?

Maybe just too much staff?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I get the feeling from the article that there's something very wrong with this particular startup, or at least the founder in question.

"No turning back" sounds like a poor excuse to keep dragging a startup along, trading 25% and a boatload of your time through some investment TV show for just 90k sounds like you've given up on actually working your ass of to develop the product/business, or for that matter, actually being sort of in charge of it if it somehow does manage to survive.

The low valuation is not the problem, but twenty-five percent at that valuation? Better do some consulting to scrape that cash together. It might make sense in some situations, just sounds like a bad deal to me if you also have to be on some TV show to actually have a chance at getting it.

The article is rather light on details and – as others have already pointed out – on math that makes sense, so I might be getting the sitation completely wrong, but this just strikes me as a really poor way to run a startup.

<comment><USER8> That line jumped out at me too:

"I had invested my life savings and I knew there was no turning back," says Mr. Conway, a 2007 graduate.

Life savings? 18 months out of college?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have it on good authority that most of the deals on Shark Tank don't actually close- it's just good TV. In which case Notehall was "stupid like a fox" and doing it just for publicity. They were the top Google trending term the next day.. better bump than most blogs will get you.</comment>


Weakness in Intel chips lets researchers steal encrypted SSH keystrokes - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/weakness-in-intel-chips-lets-researchers-steal-encrypted-ssh-keystrokes/ <comment><USER2> > People should also be aware that disabling DDIO comes at a significant > performance cost. So far as the researchers know, chips from AMD and other > manufacturers aren't vulnerable because they don't store networking data on > shared CPU caches.

Again, performance gains leak sensitive data and the solution is to disable some features (and loose performance as well). Seems that Intel chose between performance x security, and security lost.

> Intel DDIO is enabled by default on all Intel Xeon processor E5 family and > Intel Xeon processor E7 v2 family platforms. (from > [https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/io/data-direct-i- > o-t...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/io/data-direct-i-o- > technology.html))

Seems that it was used in 2012-2014 processors, so it's an attack on 5-years- old processors. Perhaps the impact isn't that great nowadays, but I couldn't find it the same attack can be made in more recent CPUs.

<comment><USER3> The web site of the researchers says:

> Yes, DDIO is enabled transparently by default in all Intel server-grade > processors since 2012 (Intel Xeon E5, E7 and SP families).

[https://www.vusec.net/projects/netcat/](https://www.vusec.net/projects/netcat/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Intel claimed that DDIO would boost performance up to 2.3x. that's a pretty big performance hit.

[https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Intel-Xeon-E5-2690-Sandy- Brid...](https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Intel-Xeon-E5-2690-Sandy-Bridge-EP- enterprise,news-37417.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> So, if I get this correct, the researchers side-channeled the LLC to reveal data stored there by the NIC (DDIO).

</comment><comment><USER6> This flaw in ssh has been known about for ages, and has nothing to do with Intel, and putting data in cache is neither Intel-specific nor a "weakness".

<comment><USER7> Explain please. This is about direct device io exposing memory remotely through timing attacks. Ssh info is just one example of what can be leaked.

<comment><USER6> Memory isn't being exposed, just the fact that something is touching memory in a certain place. That ssh login keystrokes leak via side channels is a long standing flaw in ssh. Memory access patterns can already be inferred from network response latency on any processor, nothing about that is new or surprising.

<comment><USER7> This doesn't give more timing precision than previous techniques?

<comment><USER8> It is a super accurate way of timing packet receipt. For keystrokes sent across a WAN that wouldn't normally help you. But this really isn't about ssh, which is just used as a cute demo of the power of traffic analysis and side channels; this is about remote access to local side channels in the memory system.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apex Logs structured logging public beta access - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/apex-logs-public-beta-48c683464054 <comment><USER2> I'm interested on what makes it different than a simple ELK stack deployment in my Google Cloud. Seems like it shares many arhcitectural similarities to Elasticsearch and Kibana.

<comment><AUTHOR> Compared to Elastic's Cloud offering Apex Logs would be roughly half the cost. I forgot to mention in the post that it's 100% serverless, so there's nothing to maintain and no need to resize clusters as you grow.

Kibana definitely has the edge right now when it comes to charting, but I would say if you're just looking for a simple and clean logging solution Apex Logs would be a nicer experience. If you try it out definitely let me know if you have any feedback!</comment></comment>


Firefox turns 10 years old today (Phoenix v0.1) - <AUTHOR> http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/0.1.html#new Phoenix 0.1 was released September 23, 2002 <comment><USER2> History of Mozilla UI:

[http://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.andrewturnbull.net/moz...](http://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.andrewturnbull.net/mozilla/history.html)

[http://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.andrewturnbull.net/moz...](http://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.andrewturnbull.net/mozilla/history2.html)

[http://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.andrewturnbull.net/moz...](http://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.andrewturnbull.net/mozilla/history3.html)

[http://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.andrewturnbull.net/moz...](http://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.andrewturnbull.net/mozilla/historyfx.html)

History of Mozilla mascot:

<http://www.davetitus.com/mozilla/>

Archive of old browsers and original Mcom.com site:

[http://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web- brows...](http://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-browsers- day/)

<http://home.mcom.com/archives/>

<http://home.mcom.com>

<comment><USER3> From that overview:

"This newer strategy...with fewer releases but more features and changes manifesting in each one...has held through to subsequent Firefox releases to date."

History sure changes fast.

<comment><USER4> Well, Chrome cooked their goose with a totally different methodology. A little agility is never a bad thing when you're being out-competed by the same company who pays most of your bills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 10 years ago the browser market was very different. ie dominant and many sites (banking in particular) "ie only". Mac had a version of ie and linux as a web surfing platform was wanting.

Firefox has been a good thing.

for those using firefox, the browser has more information.

go to the address about:mozilla

Maybe "information" is a stretch, but its fun.

<comment><USER6> A little bit more than 10 years ago there was IE on Unix.

(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX>)

<comment><USER7> I actually have a copy of that still.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >You said this is a lean, lightweight browser, but it's 8MB! I laugh at your silly lies!

>Take it easy, sport. Phoenix has many files that override those in Mozilla, but it also has a new set of files. These files render a ton of files in Mozilla unnecessary, but we haven't yet stopped packaging the old files. It also still contains the modern theme and all the composer UI. In short, we haven't done any work yet to minimize the size, but we expect to be able to hit 6MB with a little work.

Things have changed quite a bit.

<comment><USER9> Firefox is currently 17MB. It's pretty amazing that that size includes (off tge top of my head): JavaScript interpreter/compiler, HTML4 & 5 parser, XML parser, CSS parser, graphics engine, layout engine, WebGL, lots of typographical features, plugin API, extension API, DOM, BOM, developer tools.

<comment><USER10> It's much less impressive when you consider that Opera offers basically all of that, plus a built-in email client, and built-in BitTorrent support, and a built-in IRC client, and built-in ad blocking, among other features. And the largest Windows installer of the current 12.02 version is merely about 10.5 MB, too.

<comment><USER11> How is bloatware impressive?

The vast majority of the world will never need to use any of that.

Built-in ad blocking is about the only useful thing you listed, and Ad-Block and ABP are widely used.

<comment><USER10> I think you missed the point. What is impressive is that Opera offers much more functionality than Firefox, yet its installer is nearly half as large. Whether or not the additional functionality offered by Opera is useful is irrelevant to this discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Congratulations! A toast to one of the most prominent (and, alas, one of the last, with Wikipedia) non-consumerist-centered tools of the web.

<comment><USER13> what about most webserver, middlewares, web programming languages, databases, etc?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Happy birthday. Thank you for serving me with my best interests at heart for so long.

</comment><comment><USER15> I started using Phoenix at v0.3 and remember just how "new" it felt. At the time I was still running Windows (maybe even 98?) and was experimenting with Linux, but hated the netscape/mozilla options. Phoenix was fast, had tabs, a popup blocker, and no ads (unlike Opera). I was a proud user then, and I think they've done remarkably well given the massive competition from three commercial software giants - I'm still a happy user today. Well done Mozilla.

</comment><comment><USER16> The Firefox Wikipedia page states:

"Initial release November 9, 2004; 7 years ago" [1]

Maybe they're referring to the 1.0 release? I do remember using Firefox way earlier than that, it must have been 2000 or 2001. I guess those were 0.x releases. Wikipedia doesn't seem to say anything about that.

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

<comment><USER17> Yes, I'm pretty sure I was using Firefox 0.7 in 2003 or early 2004, so that November date must be about 1.0 release.

EDIT: It was called Firebird back then, too

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here is my guide to run it under ubuntu karmik [http://mapopa.blogspot.ro/2009/11/firefox-01-aka-phoenix- on-...](http://mapopa.blogspot.ro/2009/11/firefox-01-aka-phoenix-on-ubuntu- karmik.html)

My guess the same instructions should work on ubuntu 12.04 lts

</comment><comment><USER19> It's interesting that 0.3 had the ability to right click on an image to block the server it comes from... I'm assuming this is a preference or an extension nowadays!

<http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/0.3.html#new>

<comment><USER14> right click on image -> view image info -> [tick] block images from domainname.tld

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> After making the jump from Netscape 4.5/4.72 to Mozilla 1.2, I stayed on Mozilla until Firefox 1.0 came out. I've been using Firefox ever since. I've got Chrome installed, mostly to check that websites work properly in it, but it never pulled me away from Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER21> I really miss Phoenix. The tiny size, almost non-existent feature set, incredible snappy speed, and still wide compatibility with most (if not all) websites of the day.

Then there's Firefox. It's taken years to get to a point where you aren't swapping from three page loads. It has hardware graphics rendering and built- in video codecs. An entire development environment. And "helpful" features that try to guess what you're thinking and end up using more bandwidth, i/o and cpu than is necessary.

I know, i'm a luddite, i'm old-fashioned, i'm hindering progress. But get off my lawn! I just want a single tool that does something well. What's wrong with just releasing plugins for the features that aren't strictly text and image web content?

</comment><comment><USER22> Already?! HB Firefox. And thanks for showing us that there was a better way than IE6.

</comment><comment><USER23> I remember installing it for the first time and it felt just right. The other browsers at the time (Mozilla Suite, Netscape 6.x, IE) just felt so bulky.

You could tell right away that this software was going to go places.

</comment><comment><USER24> I never thought I'd get to a time where web browser milestones began to make me feel old.

</comment><comment><USER25> Early Firefox felt really responsive and it was more functional and safe than IE.

What happened? I still use it, but I definitely don't feel the same about it.

<comment><USER26> I was a big fan of Phoenix. What bothers me about modern Firefox is forced updates combined with surprise browser resets that break plug-ins and delete settings data. A few more of these and I'll finally have to switch 100% to Chromium (except for site testing.)

<comment><USER27> Forced updates? Firefox has the usual set of update options, from automated and invisible to completely manual: <http://i.imgur.com/eh84n.png>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Second line down "earch" should be "Search", in case anyone at Mozilla is reading this.

</comment><comment><USER29> What, no gimmick? PR fail.

(Not that it seems to have done much for Opera, but Mozilla is in a better position to capitalise.)</comment>


Statistical analysis shows Romney's new Twitter followers are fake - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/statistical-probability-that-mitt-romneys-new-twitter-followers-are-just-normal-users-0/260539/

<comment><USER2> "We did not find a similar pattern in Barack Obama's recent followers. "

Why would you expect the patterns to be remotely similar? Obama has been the President for over 3 years. Romney has been a presidential candidate for a few months.

"Our test is based on the underlying assumption that the followers of Twitter accounts tend to display a some kind of general indegree distribution."

Unwarranted assumption. It could be that many new people are joining Twitter JUST to follow the Romney campaign.

"Selected the twenty accounts closest in size to both Romney and Obama,"

I'm not sure why anyone would consider this a valid sampling technique.

"The median number of followers for Romney's new followers was 5, whereas the median for the comparison group was 27. This represents a stark, and statistically significant difference. If you are a statistics nerd, like us, you might want to know that the p-value on this was 0.0000. "

Not if the "comparison group" is completely bogus.

<comment><USER2> A better comparison group would be people who have gone from (relative) obscurity to extreme prominence over a short period of time. Sheer number of followers doesn't seem to be important (particularly since I would expect most of the accounts with that many followers to belong to people who have a) been prominent for quite some time and b) have been on Twitter for quite some time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The graphs comparing the "indegree" distribution of each candidate's new followers to that of comparable accounts would be much more informative if they showed the _distribution_ of distributions.

In other words, show the range of indegree distributions from the 20 comparison accounts (not just their average).

<comment><USER4> Why not just name the comparison accounts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is awesome. _The Atlantic_ just made up for its reddit spamming (sort of).</comment>


A is for Ajax and C is for Comet - <AUTHOR> http://leahculver.com/2009/07/24/a-is-for-ajax-and-c-is-for-comet/

<comment><USER2> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming)>

I don't think I've ever seen so many warnings on a single Wikipedia article.

To be honest, the ridiculous ways in which you have to implement trivial network applications on the Web sometimes makes me think whether the Web may have severely slowed down technological progress. People are still building IRC, usenet, FTP and e-mail, but this time in the stupid way.

<comment><USER3> This is not an interesting post. The OP on Leah Culver's site is one of the most ridiculously obvious things ever written on the web; a "definition" of AJAX? Really? She offers no insightful commentary (linking to Wikipedia).

Every post on her blog is a cleverly (but not _that_ cleverly) disguised self- promotional stunt. I've never seen somebody on the web so obsessed with herself. Who, exactly, does she think her audience is? A bunch of Diggers?

If somebody wanted to post about the "Comet" PL to YCN, they could have just posted the link to the Wikipedia article and started a discussion about that.

<comment><USER4> _Who, exactly, does she think her audience is? A bunch of Diggers?_

Bingo. I prefer a more pejorative nomenclature: Digg users are _Duggalos_

</comment></comment></comment><comment> old-gregg Wow.

I was always fascinated how a single function - XMLHttpRequest() has grown to be promoted into a TECHNOLOGY but it just outdone itself by becoming two (!) TECHNOLOGIES by taking a little longer to return to the caller.

scanf() must be screaming with envy. Poor old scanf()... future holds nothing for it.

</comment><comment><USER5> For things besides chat, Comet sounds simpler than XMPP.

I'm planning a project management project with a whiteboard, this article is going to save me the time I was going to spend trying to make a chat server act like things it's not.

edit: For anyone else who reads this article and starts digging around, check out [http://www.ape- project.org/wiki/index.php/How_to_write_an_ap...](http://www.ape- project.org/wiki/index.php/How_to_write_an_application_with_APE)

<comment><USER6> AFAIK Comet's not really an XMPP alternative, rather XMPP works (usually) on top of a Comet implementation.

BTW I posted a little Chat over Comet intro with some code, perhaps it might interest some: [http://niryariv.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/the-long-poll- imple...](http://niryariv.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/the-long-poll-implementing- ajax-chat-with-comet/)

<comment><USER5> You could be right; wiki describes XMPP (BOSH) as an alternative ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming)#Alternative...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_\(programming\)#Alternatives)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "What's the future of Comet?" None.

It will be killed as soon as WebSockets get implemented.

WebSockets will bring the real-time web alive. It will be the greatest advance in internet since its early days.

Google Wave will ride on WebSockets. Web alerts will be the next gold mine. iPhone like push messages for email, feeds, etc., web chat without hacks, instant collaboration and much more.

We really don't understand right now the impact of the real-time web, but it will be pervasive.

<comment><USER8> When will that be, and when will all Browsers support it?

<comment><USER7> I'd adventure to say by the end of the year all major browsers will implement WebSockets: Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera are working on it as we speak.

<comment><USER9> You're missing one VERY big browser in that list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've had enough of this real-time web silliness. Threading and networking on the client side is exactly what it seems. "Real time" is something entirely different than a client-server metaphor, which is all this browser thing has ever been.

The difference? Real time applications run discrete logic on bare metal and have sub-millisecond response time. Web applications that use multiple data sources with short update periodicity is what it says on the tin.

As many HN links hint, REST = CRUD, AJAX = TCP/IP and what was old is new again.

However, while the future may look like a cheaper IBM-style mainframe-to-the- world thing, it just looks like web services via vendor lock-in to me. Like a low-rent version of SUN's old slogan.</comment>


Darkside, Russia's dark web drug lord - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-12/05/darkweb-russia-drug-lord

<comment><USER2> '"Politics always attract extra attention," Darkside writes. "We do not want that."'

But interview with Wired will not attract any attention? Something fishy is going on.

<comment><USER3> I thinks he was talking about authorities' attention. Look around the Russian side of Internet -- it's full of illegal stuff and local authorities there turn the blind eye on most online crimes, but crack down heavily on any activity that opposes official Kremlin's politics. Just a few examples:

1\. [http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/7/5690410/putin-signs-law- for...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/7/5690410/putin-signs-law-forcing- bloggers-to-register-with-russian-media-office) 2\. [http://www.rferl.org/content/journalists-in-trouble- jailed-r...](http://www.rferl.org/content/journalists-in-trouble-jailed- russian-blogger-on-bolotnaya/26572291.html) 3\. [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/opinion/the-kremlins- socia...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/opinion/the-kremlins-social-media- takeover.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish they'd posted longer transcripts of the interview - this seems like an excerpt, or a teaser.

</comment><comment><USER5> he says. "You can't rape the whole world and remain safe."</comment>


Lessons from Stripe - <AUTHOR> https://markmcgranaghan.com/lessons-from-stripe <comment><USER2> The point about optimism is very interesting and I completely agree re: ambition - hard problems are more feasible than easy ones. However, I don't agree with the point about ad clicks.

> "Ambitious problems for Stripe look like enabling more internet businesses > and supporting entrepreneurs in more countries, not getting more ad clicks."

I used to have a similar mindset until I actually ended up working on Ads at Google. There are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of small business merchants, mom and pop stores, etc that rely on ads (be that Google, Facebook, Instagram, whatever) to run their businesses. In fact, these are the vast majority of ad buyers! The huge multi-billion dollar corporations are far and few between.

That's what drove many of the engineers (including myself). A small increase in conversion ratio (be that through better ranking, filtering, query interpretation, etc) meant a huge deal to these merchants and in some cases, could be the difference between life and death for some of these small companies. And at the scale Google operates at, very small incremental changes = huge impact. The engineers and projects, at least in my team, were driven by exactly the same goals mentioned here - to "enable more businesses" and "support entrepreneurs" all across the world.

It's easy to get sucked into the hype and blanket statements of "ads are bad" (I was guilty of that too). I've since left Google, but that experience really internalized for me that things like this are never so black and white.

<comment><USER3> Three small businesses can easily end up bidding against each other on Google Ads for the same keywords, higher and higher, until they drive each other to the point of having precisely zero profit left to them, and all of the profit going to Google.

Making money is all well and good, but this is not empowering anyone.

<comment><USER4> Much of small business is about geographic monopoly where simply putting yourself in front of customers that didn't know about you before is wealth creating.

<comment><USER3> That's a good point, though I have to wonder how often is there an actual micro-monopoly?

I imagine that two dry-cleaning places a mile away from each other would end up in competition eventually, and Google will drain all the profits from both.

Something is fundamentally unbalanced about this.

<comment><USER4> Coffee shops can be make or break depending on the corner of the intersection they are on so it can be a little bit ridiculous in terms of how small the geography is. I agree re: Google capturing the spread. Always want to control the means of distribution for your own business, ultimately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recently had my onsite for Engineering Manager role at Stripe. Stripe interview process is lengthy, I met 14-15 people. There's a mini onsite (3 45 minute interviews) if you cleaer that one there will be a full day onsite which consists

1:1 Management Roleplay, Technical Roleplay, Technical Discussion, 3 behavioral interviews

there is a lot of overlap between mini onsite and full day onsite.

After meeting so many folks and spending so much time, the feedback you get is minimal. In my case the recruiter informed that everything was great but the team did not feel the spark.

<comment><USER6> Maybe I'm wrong about this but it seems odd for a company to hire externally for engineering manager except in extremely rare cases? From experience in a few companies I can't think of people who were hired directly to that role (e.g. a people manager of engineers). I basically only see external ICs and senior engineering leader hires and internal promotion of engineers to engineering managers.

<comment><USER7> Hiring externally for any role at any company is very normal (e.g., FANG companies hire external EMs all the time).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know, this super optimism as a value might lead to situations where something is going clearly in the wrong direction, but people get afraid of pointing it out due to fear of going against the company values, and getting natural overly optimistic personalities out of their delusional high and back into reality.

<comment><USER9> From the engineering friends I know at Stripe, you'd be correct: there's a strong cultural push to not question the status quo / prevailing wisdom.

On the tech side, they continue to build on top of a broken foundation (MongoDB), resulting in millions of man hours wasted dealing with the complete lack of transactions. Mongo now has transactions, but last I heard Stripe was still running a very outdated version and spending absurd amounts of time dealing with issues that transactions would have entirely avoided. If you suggested that maybe it'd be worth changing course to something like Postgres because of the insane amount of work being wasted, you'd be shut down for not being optimistic enough.

<comment><USER10> The fact that Stripe _ever_ used MongoDB is dubious enough, but that they've endured on it well past the fad's expiry is reason enough for me to avoid doing business with them in the future.

Handling money is serious business and if one insists on using the unproven flavor-of-the-week to do so, they'd better make sure it has at least the fundamental requirements to accomplish its task, e.g., transactions/MVCC. Stripe apparently failed to do so, and has chosen to propagate that failure for many years.

One can make excuses for the spunky startup with a handful of employees needing to save time by using what they know or whatever, but Stripe is well past that point, and serious people should've taken over by now. I'd expect "replace Mongo with a real database" to be near the top of the todo list for any serious people.

<comment><USER11> FWIW, having worked with the Stripe API for ~5 years and put all our sales through them for the lifetime of the business, I wouldn't have guessed they used MongoDB. The API is mostly excellent, and it has always presented a consistent view of the world to our side.

The same cannot he said for a number of other services we use, including those from some companies with supposedly very good tech credentials. We've had to back out of integrations due to the clear evidence that they are non transactional and/or eventually consistent.

<comment><USER12> You couldn't tell what backend they use just from their API unless there's some errant exceptions leaking information. Their test API might give us some clues. It can only purge your data one record at a time, at about 1.5 records a second, and locks your API credentials for however long it takes to crash or finish iterating through each object. I don't know what storage engine would have that constraint but they've stuck with it for years and simulate a fast test API with a whole other piece of software instead of just having a fast test API.

What storage options don't have the ability to delete all your records at once quickly? If it was MongoDB there would surely be an index attaching the data to your account. Same with PostgreSQL.

<comment><USER13> You can make all those mistakes with a traditional RDBMS. Iterating over objects to delete them one at a time with database round trips is also a common mistake people make with ORMs(along with many other things that could have been done in one statement).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How do you teach optimism in the way Stripe is looking for though?

As someone with a hefty amount of anxiety and depression weighing down on me most of the time, I often feel like I'm the only person in the room who can't get excited about things, but I don't want to be the weight bringing everyone else down. Is there not a danger of this value becoming a proxy for "people with depression and similar mental health problems aren't welcome at Stripe"?

<comment><USER15> I have a similar problem. I'm always pessimistic, stressful and anxious. After my job interview for a machine learning job, HR gave me a personaly test. It turns out that they were literally horrified by the results and told me that every response I made was the exact opposite they were looking for. I got the job nevertheless but mental issues do become a barrier in one's career. I knowingly try to be alone in the office, don't take any breaks and don't talk to anyone unless it's necessary. Haven't heard a complaint yet. But I would suggest to the opposite, communication is important.

<comment><USER16> That's interesting, what was the point of the personality test? I mean it's crappy if you can 'fail' it, so in that sense I'm glad it's not an actual hurdle, but then why give a candidate the test in the first place? If it's to know how best to work with you, then they should save it for after you've been hired.

<comment><USER15> They said they wanted to see if I was a good fit for the organization's culture. Technical interview went really well, so they did not cared that much about the test results. But they requested me to take the test again hoping I would get better results. What a joke :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's interesting to hear an internal perspective of how "great" Stripe's recruiting processes is.

As an external applicant, I would say it was better than most, but still an internal recruiter shit-show. Week-long windows between email responses, dropped balls, and even no-shows for scheduled calls. Seeing this contrast makes me wonder if Stripe employees are just high on their own supply?

Recruiting is hard. I can only imagine it gets harder at scale. I'd bet that Stripe's best recruiting is done through employee referrals... and that is probably building a mono-culture.

<comment><USER18> I previously worked at Stripe. Mark's post mirrors my experience internally as a hiring manager, and as a candidate. But as you said, at scale things get harder; I'm sure the experience does vary and some percentage of people come out with experiences that don't match the ideal.

My own experience was that Stripe was able to take me from a prospect to a hire in less than 30 days. My interviews and calls were all on Friday, and I would hear back on Monday with results and schedule the next round for that very same week.

<comment><USER11> 30 days seems exceptionally long, unless that was driven by your timeline?

<comment><USER18> Given I had a job while interviewing, I was driving it as fast as I was comfortable. But the part that was important to me as a candidate is that I was getting feedback within 1 business day, and getting the next step scheduled for later that same week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > When considering ideas, we think "how might it work?" is more interesting > than "why will it fail?"

Engineering involves critical thinking. You should have a firm belief that what you wish to create _can be created_. However, that is simply a foundation upon which to throw as many "why will it fail?" permutations as you can generate. This isn't pessimism, it's the culling of error, like a sculpture from a block of marble.

<comment><USER20> Some clarification on the "why will it fail?" question. It's different and less constructive than "how will it fail?" which asks for failure modes and mitigations. It's a superior discussion to "why will it fail?" That said, "why will it fail?" is also inferior to the pre-mortem discussion starter: "why did it fail?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> One criticism I've heard from former Stripe employees is that many of the people in high positions are Stripe are young with no management training, especially in the non-engineering parts of the company. So it sets up for a lot of problems, and cultural problems because they don't know how to manage people or large organizations well.

<comment><USER22> Sounds like basically every successful startup in Silicon Valley.

Certainly I heard the same from friends at FB and Google back in the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm impressed that Stripe has been able to maintain it's culture over the years, as it grows in headcount and size. I recall reading this blog from 2012 (although I read it in 2014): [https://blog.alexmaccaw.com/stripes- culture](https://blog.alexmaccaw.com/stripes-culture)

And the consistency between then and now is fairly impressive. Ambition and Optimism seem like codified values that have emerged over time. But the one thread that is consistent is their thoughtfulness on hiring.

It should be no surprise to anyone here though, given that their interviewing doesn't consist of the standard 4-5 leetcode questions, but rather much more thoughtful rounds like a bug squash, architecture, and lots of hands on coding - algorithm rounds exist, but kept to a minimum.

Not to say that this is good and should be the new standard - just that it is extremely thoughtful and was going against the grain. Wish more companies would think about their hiring practices from first principles and didn't just copy Google

<comment><USER6> Unless you actually work there, how are you so confident that Stripe's actual culture has been "maintained" outside of reading company sanctioned blog posts/think pieces...? Or that the actual culture has ever even closely mirrored the one that has been outwardly portrayed?

Glassdoor is not perfect, but I think I get more insight into the reality on the ground looking through recent reviews than a blog post, and at least from what I can see recent reviews over the last few months are extremely mixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Stripe's Glassdoor profile consistently perplexes me. For a company that large that has been around as long as it has to only have 81 reviews is _very_ strange. There is no easy way with Glassdoor to get a true measure of # reviews per total active FTEs per year but it feels much lower than other companies that are both younger and smaller.

<comment><USER24> With a staff level under a few hundred, it isn't that strange. People only tend to complain more about negative experiences vs. positive and the internet lurker rule (%99 lurk, %1 write content) explains the rest of the numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How does one build a strong startup culture like Stripe? I'm looking to strike out on my own, and while I know there are other fundamental concerns I should be worried about, this is something that I continue to dwell on. A strong team can make or break a company.

I'd appreciate any advice or reading material.

<comment><USER26> I don't know if this is right, but from the outside, it looks like a company where the tech team has the most seats at the table.

Versus sales, or some separate product management team running the show. That model seems to work well with what Stripe does. It probably doesn't work well in many other niches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Optimism I believe does have a very positive effect on both productivity of the people and how much they love working in a place. But in my experience overdoing it might make your employees start developing this "This does not make sense at all, why are these people living in dreams?" mindset. From chats I had, I could feel some of my colleagues also had a hesitation towards the goals etc. It was interesting to see people become frustrated especially if they have been used to being slightly pessimistic and cautious due to their background(title(Finance background), nationality(mostly non-US and UK people) etc.)

Overall very nice article though, I do believe moving fast in hiring is the most yield/effort you can do to hire great people. Best companies I worked for(above one included) moved extremely fast in hiring, worst take 2-3 weeks just to reply to an email let alone scheduling an onsite. Wish decision makers in recruiting knew this.

p.s. love the Stripe Docs and Technical blog posts, this one specifically was very informative: [https://stripe.com/en-de/blog/api- versioning](https://stripe.com/en-de/blog/api-versioning)

</comment><comment><USER28> I have seen a lot more problems come from an excess of optimism, than an dearth of it. You should not be so optimistic that you don't think about how to roll back changes if they turn out to be a bad idea, for example. Backups and rollback plans and code reviews and etc. are all fundamentally pessimistic. An excess of optimism can lead to no plan B. Every startup pivot relied upon NOT having so much optimism that you will not believe a pivot is required.

Not to say that optimism is all bad, but it's not all good either, and in the U.S. corporate world I see a lot more problems from an excess of optimism than from the reverse.

</comment><comment><USER29> I had the pleasure of working with Mark for ~3.5 years at Heroku just prior to him joining Stripe. Since leaving Stripe, he's been working on research projects at Ink & Switch, one of which they recently chose to focus on as a stand-alone business: [https://museapp.com/](https://museapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Most values and keeping the team healthy, reflects the vision of founders I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER31> ... and why have you left stripe ??? :/

<comment><USER32> You can feel good about a workplace and still leave (need a change, better opportunities elsewhere etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Not directed at author but I looked at his bio after reading the article. He spent his time mostly as an engineering manager and yet in his bio has:

"I led engineering teams at Stripe"

Do managers in software companies actually think they lead teams? I've seen or heard "led engineering" or variants so much from mid level management that I wonder if my perspective is skewed.

Seems crazy to me.

<comment><USER34> Two reasons it shouldn't sound crazy:

1\. Just grammatically, managers need some verb to use. If he said "I managed Engineering," it would be really difficult to argue that isn't what an engineering manager does. But good managers lead, so they prefer the word lead over manage, even though the meaning in context is quite similar.

2\. You seem to be implying that managers suck and don't know anything about engineering, so how could they claim leadership?

Speaking from my career path, most eng managers come out of engineering and are pretty technical. At Atlassian (where I'm a front-line Engineering Manager), you have to earn your way to Senior Engineer before you can join the management track, and the managers for several steps up the ladder are accountable for technical outcomes.

It's very common in our office for the front line managers (aka Team Leads) to lead whiteboarding and pair a lot during the early phases of a project to make sure it's built on a sound design, and to be similarly involved throughout projects to ensure they're tracking to completion on schedule and hitting our quality bar.

My understanding is Stripe works very similarly. So, yeah, I buy that he "led" engineering teams there.

<comment><USER35> > But good managers lead, so they prefer the word lead over manage, even > though the meaning in context is quite similar.

I would actually argue that good managers _support_ their teams, they don't lead them.

A tech lead or architect should be leading the engineering team, and the manager should be supporting the team's efforts and clearing the path for them.</comment></comment></comment>


The Unemployment Rate in Every Region of Europe - <AUTHOR> http://thesoundingline.com/map-of-the-day-the-unemployment-rate-in-every-region-of-europe/ <comment><USER2> Meh blog post. Here's the interactive chart at Eurostat: [http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/RCI/#?vis=nuts2.labourmar...](http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/RCI/#?vis=nuts2.labourmarket&lang=en)

<comment><USER3> The definition of "unemployment" is important here. it

An unemployed person is defined by Eurostat, according to the guidelines of the International Labour Organization, as:

> someone aged 15 to 74 (in Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Iceland, Norway: > 16 to 74 years); > without work during the reference week; > available to > start work within the next two weeks (or has already found a job to start > within the next three months); > actively having sought employment at some > time during the last four weeks. > The unemployment rate is the number of > people unemployed as a percentage of the labour force. > [http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics- > explained/index.php/...](http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics- > explained/index.php/Glossary:Unemployment)

This means that any person which is currently not earning their keep, but not actively searching a job (because they are on the dole) will not be unemployed in these statistics. It also means that any person which is not earning their keep, but unable to take a job in the next two weeks because the are in a government job market program, will not be listed as unemployed in these statistics.

 _Lies, damn lies and statistics._

<comment><USER4> That's the standard definition for unemployment. An unemployed person is generally considered to be someone who would want to be employed, but is not. It is meant to be a measurement of the number of people who want jobs, but are unable to get them.

There are other measurements for labour force participation, which are usually fairly easy to find, and are a proportion of people who are legally able to work, against the number of actual workers.

<comment><USER5> It is as good a time as any to wish a pox on all jargon and reflect that a person with no employment is unlikely to be unemployed.

If anyone else is interested, a very light search into the history of when they picked that measure as the standard suggests it has been with us since ~1930. Apparently the nature of complaints hasn't changed much over the years.

[1] davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/origins-of-unemployment.pdf

<comment><USER6> The jargon exists because the category is useful in answering the question "how is the economy doing".

If we included people who are retired then we would see unemployment go up and down in correlation with generation sizes: when the baby boomers retire the number of "unemployed" people would go up dramatically. But that confuses the picture of whether businesses are hiring.

<comment><USER7> Hence why the question should be and is limited to ages 25-54 year olds. A "retired" 25 year old should be included in the definition of unemployment.

However, the 25-54 unemployment rate (the opposite of the "employment rate") is not calculated by state or locality in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Two days ago I was watching a German TV show in which the panelists discussed the low-wage-job boom: apparently unemployment is very low (5.6%) _but_ an unhealthy portion of the jobs people are working are low-wage and/or exploitative of labor, and thus not really contributing to long-term social stability.

If too many people are working minimum wage and the minimum wage isn't realistic then sooner or later you have a big problem paying for social services.

(In Germany it's 8.84 EUR per hour but has only existed for a few years and I gather there's a lot of noncompliance.)

So, interesting map, but only telling part of the story.

<comment><USER9> I'm more of an UBI guy. The whole minimum-wage stuff didn't seem like a good idea to me.

But since its conception I only read good things about it.

<comment><USER10> To me minimum wage is great - but why (in UK) does a 24 year old need less than a 25 year old, or indeed deserve less?

Why do "apprentices" deserve less than is considered the minimum living wage.

Even minimum wage has been corrupted.

UBI, or something equally revolutionary, I think will be needed without a major population collapse.

<comment><USER11> One of the main risks of a minimum wage is suppressing the employment rate of less-skilled, less-experienced workers. If the minimum wage is too high, it's uneconomic to take on staff who don't deliver enough value for the business. The reduced rates for young people and apprentices exist to reduce this stifling effect - without them, you'd make it uneconomic for businesses to take a chance on new employees who might need a lot of training or support.

This does of course create a secondary risk of businesses laying off older staff in favour of young people and "apprentices", but I haven't seen any clear evidence that this is a widespread problem.

<comment><USER12> If you've never seen any evidence of that, you've not looked very hard: This is what every supermarket does for their filler jobs, and to a lesser extent for their till and other store facing jobs as well. If you're over 18, you have to be very lucky to keep your job (or more realistically, to keep being given work) in such a situation.

Outside of supermarkets this sort of practice is also pretty entrenched in a lot of small-medium IT businesses: They have a sizeable portion of their workforce as trainees or whatever (they may be underpaid legally, so they almost always are) and don't hire them after their time is up (ever, as a rule). New trainees are then cycled into the slots that are now vacant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are groups of people that, through no fault of their own, are less productive. Maybe they are young and inexperienced just out of school, maybe they are older and have lower stamina, maybe they are rooted in a region where it is costlier and more difficult for businesses to operate, maybe they are a visible minority and are made less efficient by other people's discriminatory treatment, maybe they have a difficult family situation affecting them at work, maybe they only have experience in industries where margins are thin because of foreign competition or maybe they are innately just not good at the type of activities that are profitable in today's world.

Central banks affect job creating investment through interest rates. It may seem like small interest rate changes wouldn't make a big difference for anyone once the effect propagates and is diluted across the whole economy. However, looking at it through the lens of cost of capital where businesses decide to do projects or not based on the expected profitability relative to borrowing costs, it is easy to see that the effect is highly unequal. This type of calculation implies a threshold, a cutoff where activities under a certain level of profitability are completely stopped. The fact that interest rates act as a threshold with regards to investment entails shutting down all lower margin activities, those that tend to be manned by people that are naturally disadvantaged.

This means that when central banks tighten too much, some workers may be afflicted moderately by a more difficult labor market but whole segments of the less productive and more vulnerable, may be completely cutoff from having a job.

The investment in equipment and buildings necessary to perform their work disappears. Major projects get cancelled in isolated and disadvantaged rural areas. Entry level positions that would be manned by the less experienced disappear. Jobs that require less education also go away.

People who, in good times are already paid less and have little capacity to bear a fall in revenue, don't just bear a proportionate drop but a complete fall to zero with often only meager government welfare to fall back on. On top of the hit to dignity, it atrophies their skills and makes them further disadvantaged and vulnerable. In the next cycle, they're likely to again be the first to be cutoff.

It's difficult to overstate the utter cruelty of monetary mismanagement.

<comment><USER11> >This means that when central banks tighten too much, some workers may be afflicted moderately by a more difficult labor market but whole segments of the less productive and more vulnerable, may be completely cutoff from having a job.

Europe has been running rock-bottom interest rates since the 2008 crash. The ECB are charging 0% on MRO lending and offering -0.4% on deposits. The BoE have just increased rates from 0.25% to 0.5% in late 2017 due to rising inflation. Both banks have spent most of the last decade flooding the markets with money through QE.

It's hard to see what more they could do.

<comment><USER13> Zero is not rock bottom. A lot of stores of value have negative returns. Zero is high in a lot of contexts.

Historically, negative real returns on stores of value were the norm. Before financial systems existed, almost all investments had negative returns if you didn't put work and energy into them. To store value, you had to accumulate stuff, buildings or land. Most options either had high maintenance costs, were subject to risk of damage from natural causes and theft, were very volatile or required hard labor to get production out of.

Even in societies with financial systems, getting low risk, hassle free, liquid, positive real returns has been difficult for most of history. This just reflects the natural laws of thermodynamics that tell us that everything tends to decay without a constant supply of work and energy. In general, most things require maintenance to keep their worth.

The 20th century was probably the most notable exception. Because of unprecedented demographic and technological growth, positive risk free real returns were easy to find. The recency effect probably explains some of the confusion people have about this. It is possible that under favorable conditions, wealth can have positive returns and even compound into very good long run returns but it is not a guarantee and there is nothing natural about it. It may not continue forever, particularly amidst an aging and retiring population in a world no longer as rich in easy to exploit natural resources.

While people are used to get negative returns on very short term purchases, you buy fresh vegetables at the supermarket, even if they degrade over time, many can't seem to accept the normalcy of negative returns on longer term assets. In nature, squirrels' nut caches have a certain percentage of losses from theft and spoilage. Real returns tending towards the negative is natural even if they can seem unusual for people just out of the 20th century.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really dislike this kind of visualization since it makes regions with total different population densities appear on the same level. besides, the definition of who is actually unemployed varies greatly throughout Europe since governments have been hacking such statuses to make figures look better than they are.

<comment><USER15> > it makes regions with total different population densities appear on the > same level

It shows unemployment RATES, so population density does not matter.

<comment><USER16> It does matter. Consider of a hypothetical country consisting of two equally large regions.

One region is desert, only 10,000 people live there and unemployment rate is 20%.

In the other region there are 1M people and the employment rate is 3%.

Now if you look at the map, it seems that the country is doing pretty poorly. Half of the country has a bad employment rate. Whereas in reality it only affect a small portion of the population.

<comment><USER17> > One region is desert, only 10,000 people live there

> In the other region there are 1M people

This has already been normalized: these are European NUTS-2 regions, which are drawn to contain roughly equal populations. Each NUTS-2 region is supposed to be 800k to 3 million people per region. It's not perfect, but it's not just geographical borders with wildly different populations.

For example, London is split into 5 regions, most big cities are their own region, and small countries are just one region. Going into even smaller regions would be nice (and are defined in the standards as well), but it seems that nobody has put in the effort to collect data at that granularity.

<comment><USER18> > Each NUTS-2 region is supposed to be 800k to 3 million people per region. > It's not perfect

It's far from perfect in some countries. The Community of Madrid with 6.5 million people is its own region (or Catalonia with 7.5 million); that's more than Scotland, which is cut up into five NUTS-2 regions. The Paris region (Île-de-France) has 12 million inhabitants, which is more than, say, Austria or Hungary or the Czech Republic, each cut up according to more or less traditional geographic divisions.

You have a point according to how NUTS _should_ work, the grandparent does have a bit of a point according to what it's like _in practice_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd like to add that actual figures for Italy are hard to estimate correctly.

Many, many people work under the table, very often pretending that they're still out of work to keep getting the unemployment check.

<comment><USER20> Is that anecdotal or fact? How many is many, many people?

<comment><USER19> Well, by "under the table" I mean that those workers are unknown to the government, so I don't think there is a way to know for sure. The government's estimates are at ~15%. From my experience, most workers in agriculture and food & beverages work under the table.

It's a very complicated subject--which I can talk about if you're interested-- but I don't know if you can really blame them. Taxes in Italy are almost 50%. For years I've paid 45% in taxes and 1200/yr. for my accountant. In Poland, I only pay 19% for taxes and 40/mo. for my accountant, and services to citizens and public safety are about 1000 times better than Italy. It just feels wrong to pay taxes in Italy: you don't have any money left, and whenever you need something from the government it's a nightmare and done so badly that you feel you're in a third-world country.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> With the exception of Bavaria, this almost looks like a map of historically Protestant vs Catholic regions.

Also, what is so different about Macedonia compared to the surrounding regions that it has such lower unemployment rates?

</comment><comment><USER7> For all interested, here is the "harmonized" OECD unemployment rate. It uses a standard definition to compare the OECD countries.

[https://www.oecd.org/employment/harmonised-unemployment- rate...](https://www.oecd.org/employment/harmonised-unemployment-rates-oecd- updated-april-2018.htm)

[https://data.oecd.org/unemp/harmonised-unemployment-rate- hur...](https://data.oecd.org/unemp/harmonised-unemployment-rate-hur.htm)

</comment><comment><USER20> In case anyone is wondering what unemployed means in this context:

> An unemployed person is defined by Eurostat, according to the guidelines of > the International Labour Organization, as someone aged 15 to 74 without work > during the reference week who is available to start work within the next two > weeks and who has actively sought employment at some time during the last > four weeks. The unemployment rate is the number of people unemployed as a > percentage of the labour force.

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder how many plausible alternative captions we can come up with for this map? A few takes: * Corruption level (blue is less) * Income per capita (blue is more) * Education level (blue is better) * Price of a beer (blue is more) * etc

<comment><USER23> Just overlay a map of median temperatures and you'll have some interesting insight.

<comment><USER24> The map of Protestants and Catholics is the one that leaps out at me as aligning quite closely:

Religion: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Catholicism,_...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Catholicism,_Protestantism,_Orthodoxy_and_Islam_in_Europe.jpg)

Unemployment: [http://thesoundingline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/EU- and...](http://thesoundingline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/EU-and-Turkey- unemployment-rates.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Big part of Europe is missing (Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Kavkaz...). But for some reason it includes asian part of Turkey, islands, part of south america... ;-)

<comment><USER26> The South America / islands and included because they are territories belonging to a EU country (France, Spain, Portugal). Turkey is in there because it's a candidate country.

<comment><USER27> Is it still? It's a human rights nightmare and I don't think the EU should have anything to do with Turkey while Erdogan is still in power.

<comment><USER28> It's still a candidate. It's moving backwards rather than forwards on its acceptance criteria, and realistically won't be joining anytime soon, but it's still a candidate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The unemployment rate in Republic of Macedonia is like that for almost three decades. More than 25%.

</comment><comment><USER30> Strange choice of color scheme

<comment><USER31> What is strange about it?

<comment><USER32> Low numbers go towards red, high numbers towards blue. Often, red implies something bad so that's a bit confusion. I guess it's the standard scheme for low/high numbers at eurostat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Explains why I keep getting job offers from Norway and Southern Germany..

</comment><comment><USER34> That's

\- one picture

\- a whole lot of non-sequitur.

</comment><comment><USER35> > _where the unemployment rate is below 5.8%, a level generally considered to > indicate a healthy labor market_

5.8% is a the cut-off for a healthy labour market, apparently.

Meanwhile [https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-s- unemployment...](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-s-unemployment- rate-drops-to-a-record-low-of-58-a3250981.html) describes London's unemployment rate reaching 5.8% as a record low!

<comment><USER36> The two things aren't mutually exclusive, and in any case you're probably not comparing figures that are calculated in the same way.

<comment><USER35> I know; but the chart's source data almost certainly doesn't use figures that are calculated in the same way either. At best, they'll have been manually corrected for estimated biases. (Will they have correctly accounted for how many people get shifted off into disability payments and other health-related benefits that are used to massage unemployment figures? I have my doubts.)

My point was more that a suspiciously precise number of 5.8% was chosen as a magical barometer of goodness, justifying a switch in hue, not just brightness or saturation. The magic number of 5.8% doesn't seem to have support elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Not included in the chart: Israeli unemployment at 3.6%

[http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-unemployment-in-israel- fa...](http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-unemployment-in-israel-falls-to-new- low-1001233871)

<comment><USER28> Israel isn't an EU, EEA or EFTA member, or candidate for EU membership.

<comment><USER37> Can people really still point at Turkey and call it a serious candidate for EU membership?

There is a serious case for including Israeli figures in this kind of pan- regional not-exclusively-EU analysis. Israel is far closer, culturally, to Europe than geographically closer neighbors (e.g. Morocco, Tunisia) and is increasingly part of European academic, sporting, and artistic interests (most recently thinking of Eurocrypt 2018, which was in Tel Aviv this week, and this year's Giro D'Italia, which is starting in Israel this weekend).

There are strong historical reasons why Israel will never apply to be a member of the EU or to adopt the Euro - but a perspective is to think of Israel as strongly Eurosceptic. Can anyone really look at Eurosceptic parties on the Continent and say that, what, the EU defines what it means to be European? That Hungary is no longer culturally European or that it dropped off the Continent because Viktor Orbán got elected Prime Minister?

<comment><USER28> As things stand, currently, Turkey's candidacy isn't going to be going forward anytime soon. But that's not the point. It is an official candidate, so Eurostat keeps an eye on it. If Israel became a candidate, Eurostat would do ditto (though for practical reasons Israel also won't be a candidate anytime soon).

Incidentally, Turkey is also in a customs union with the EU, the only non- EU/EEA/EFTA country of any significant size to be in one. This gives Eurostat added incentive to keep an eye on it.

Israel is a member of or involved in various non-EU pan-European things (EBU, Council of Europe etc), but Eurostat is an EU thing, not a European thing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is anyone using Clojure for Web App? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Technically I don't build web applications like RoR or Django. Rather I build out my front-end with HTML/CSS/JS and call REST services. That being said I have started using Clojure to build those rest services and as my processing layer for by back end system. I like it, for this use, it is very compact and succinct, what used to require reams of boilerplate in Java takes me a few lines of code in Clojure. MY personal opinion is that writing web apps in this fashion is more elegant due to it's simplification of the technology stack. I also like it because it allowed me to transition from Java to Clojure for services because my web UI was not tied up in implementation specific technologies such as JSP or JSF. I could have easily transitioned from Java to Python or Ruby if I wanted to go that way, having the UI completely decoupled from the back end technology stack affords developers a lot of flexibility.

<comment><USER3> I agree your approach does seem more elegant and more flexible, but what about in terms of productivity? How does productivity compare with Clojure as backend and using javascript alone to render the HTML compared to Django or RoR where there is a HTML rendering DSL available?</comment></comment>


Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.0340 <comment><USER2> I came across this paper a few months back and really enjoyed it. It was one of the things that inspired me to begin working on a new project I have going [0]. It really does a great job at explaining how Monoidal Categories can be used to tie together concepts from these various fields of study.

I was not in 100% agreement with the conclusions in the Computation section of the paper (if I remember correctly -- I need to review the paper in its entirety again) but it was still very enlightening! :)

[0] [https://github.com/JKhawaja/BraidOS](https://github.com/JKhawaja/BraidOS)

<comment><USER3> I'd love to hear your critiques of the computation section. I read this paper basically yearly.

<comment><USER2> I think it was the lack of a stronger Type-theoretic approach to classifying the 'world' of computation. This categorical 'program morphism' is ill-defined when taken back to the world of computation (is it supposed to represent sequential execution?). It is also clear that every object within the closed category will have an equivalent morphism and vice-versa (and thanks to the nature of Type Theory, it will also be infinite and still allow for crazy paradoxes like the entire Category being an object of itself). I guess it's the categorical approach to Type Theory?

Some other things as well. But this is what I collected after a quick review. :)

EDIT: Oh yeah I also find this statement abhorrent: >While a Turing machine can be seen as an idealized, simplified model of computer hardware, the lambda calculus is more like a simple model of software.

It should be removed :/

<comment><USER3> W.r.t. to the comparison of Turing Machines and Lambda Calculus, I don't find that a terrible first approximation of the difference of feeling between the two. I'd like to know why you consider it abhorrent—I'd merely call it gestural at best.

As far as the first concern I think Baez and Stay were pretty explicit that they're only talking about typed lambda theories and typed linear lambda theories. You can give computation semantics by picking canonical forms of equivalence classes of lambda terms.

I'm not sure what the concern is with every object having a morphism—that's true axiomatically of categories due to the id arrows. Is that what you mean?

I don't think there's any category which is its own object, but you could see an embedding of linear lambda calculus inside itself since one of those morphisms will be an interpreter.

I tend to find this paper really illuminating and instructive, though I'd freely admit that the computation section is not a robust theory of practical computation but instead an exploration of lambda theories.

<comment><USER2> >I'd like to know why you consider it abhorrent

1\. I am a Turing fan-boy. 2. I am also a big advocate of the fact that Software IS hardware. And in reality, all computation is software ('hardware' is merely the materials engineering that implements the computational 'logic' e.g. Electrical Engineering for modern-day computers). Classifying a Turing Machine as a 'hardware' abstraction is just so not true. It's an Abstract Computational Machine -- it abstracts the concept of computation (not the fact that it uses a Tape, etc.) and as I said earlier: computation IS software.

>I'm not sure what the concern is with every object having a morphism

Every program is a function type, and every type is an object. Thus, (type- theoretically at least) every object within the category is also a morphism and vice-versa. Considering Turing Completeness, we can create any program and thus any type from other types (it itself being a type). Thus, the Category can be achieved as a whole as a 'program-type (function type)' since everything within the category is a type itself. This creates strange paradoxes, where the category (and all sub-categories and functors between them) are inside the category itself. (Side-thought: I wonder though if you could address decision problems with this craziness.)

>typed linear lambda theories

Symmetric Monoidal Categories give rise to Linear Type Theories. However, Braided Monoidal Categories (and especially Monoidal Categories) allow for more. The Rosetta Stone diagram in the conclusion section doesn't restrict the category class (if I remember correctly).

>I tend to find this paper really illuminating and instructive

Me too. :)

>but instead an exploration of lambda theories.

hehe, I'm not a fan of Lambda Theories (but please excuse my bias).

EDIT: An explanation for the downvote would be appreciated. Thanks. :)

<comment><USER3> Regardless of your belief about the relationship between software and hardware, I think it's reasonable to _compare_ TM and LC by considering TM as "concrete" with its notion of the tape and the algorithm and LC as "abstract" with its notion of reduction and equivalences.

Every program (for a suitable definition of program) is a morphism in a category with objects as types. The types themselves are not (programmatic) objects at all—they're merely the "objects" of the category. The arrows from 1 to a type are the values of that type, though. As stated, Completeness would allow you to embed an interpreter which means some of those arrows ought to look a bit like `(a -> b) -> (a -> b)`, the simplest of which being the `id` arrow on `(a -> b)`. That said, not all theories of typed lambda calculus are Complete.

There's nothing that says a Category has to be well-founded, either, for that matter. If you use set comprehension to deal with the components of your category then you might end up with a Russel's paradox. For mathematics involving "large" categories you use a Universe formalism which lets you dodge those issues for a while.

> However, Braided Monoidal Categories (and especially Monoidal Categories) > allow for more. The Rosetta Stone diagram in the conclusion section doesn't > restrict the category class (if I remember correctly).

Yep. And there are many kinds of LC. A lot of interesting work comes out of studying them all and comparing them all.

Edit: Note, I wasn't the downvoter.

<comment><USER2> >compare TM and LC

You can, but Turing already did such in 1937 and showed equivalence of expressiveness. :p

>The types themselves are not (programmatic) objects at all—they're merely the "objects" of the category.

Do you mean 'programmatic' in the computational sense or categorical sense?

Because, I was referring to the fact that every program (morphism) also has an equivalent function type (internal hom). Function types are objects within the Category as well. :)

>If you use set comprehension to deal with the components of your category then you might end up with a Russel's paradox.

It seems that this paper is using a set-theoretic comprehension for the concepts. Although, you could consider 'more powerful' constructions like Universes.

I know a lot has been put into the study of LCs and I have nothing against studying them. I just have a personal preference to use other 'methods' to study computational theory. :p

<comment><USER3> I think we're just talking around one another. I don't understand how your criticisms are anything besides style, I suppose. If you dislike LC and distrust the mechanics of CT then of course a paper which uses CT to unify LC with math and physics won't float your boat—but it's still perfectly cromulent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like that paper. Looks like it has been updated to V3 since I read it last.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you go from being an average developer to a great one? - <AUTHOR>

An average developer is probably one who can write code, solve issues by looking at stack overflow, intermediate with a programming language. But how do you become someone with great skills who is respected in the industry. One who works at places like google, twitter or facebook and can crack interviews without preparing for weeks. Solves algorithms and other CS questions with complete confidence.
I believe the biggest answer here is probably practice and I agree, but is there someone who has gone this route?
Please share your thought,resources,advice. Thanks !! <comment><USER2> As you noted, the biggest thing is practice. But here are a few specific tips that I believe significantly improved my programming ability:

1) Try to get the implementation 100% correct on the first try. I don't mean that you should implement the whole system in one go, but the part you implement should do exactly what you want it to do (i.e. no typos, mixed up variable names, etc.). At first I thought this was a bit harsh, but it was amazing how much debugging you can avoid with a little more focus in the beginning. Also, it forces you to adopt good coding practices and make sure your algorithms are fully specified.

2) Don't tolerate tedious work. If there's any part of your workflow that's tedious, spend a lot of effort trying to minimize it. Some examples of things you might do: write a script, refactor your code, use a better editor, use a different programming language. You won't learn much from changing 100 variable names to camel-case, other than how painful it is. You will learn something from writing a tool to help you do that.

3) Think about how various libraries and frameworks you use are implemented, especially if they have features that seem like "magic". Try to reverse- engineer their design, or take a look at their source code (if available). This is a natural way to gain exposure to new ideas.

Regarding more "theoretical" subjects like algorithms and data structures that you might need to know for interviews, you could practice on programming contest websites (e.g. www.codeforces.com) or read some textbooks. However, in my opinion, those are not nearly as important for a software developer as the three things mentioned above.

<comment><USER3> 1) is great advice. It's roughly equivalent to what most music teachers recommend for learning to play an instrument. If you just play all day long you wont improve, or at least not improve as quickly, as if you just play one hour per day in which you try hard to play as perfectly as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Apply Richard Hamming's golden advice from "You & Your Research" to your career.

1) What are the most important problems in your field?

2) Are you working on ONE of them?

3) Why Not?

<comment><USER5> One of the best pieces I've ever read.

[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)

Suggestion: use readability

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Practice make the master. If we change 'programming' to other discipline, it becomes evident: How do you go from being an average pianist to a great one?

Practice, mentors, books, new challenges, rewriting code, etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> A lot of reading blogs, articles, etc. online, and a lot of time spent in your spare time working on projects. Also working on things that are new and challenging to you. Also if you come across something you don't understand while reading and article or working on a project don't just skip over it, spend the time to really understand the concept.

</comment><comment><USER8> Start calling yourself one. Then work on a prominent enough project that people start believing you. If this doesn't work, write / speak / comment / manage your way to credibility and higher visibility. If a great programmer programs by himself in the forest and no one notices, then no one cares.

</comment><comment><USER9> I got this piece of advice from a mentor. "The best developers are not the smartest ones, but the ones who ship most often." That being said, following a test driven development path will put you ahead of everyone who doesn't test.

</comment><comment><USER10> Reading a lot seems to help - keeps you up to date on what's _possible_ , so when you hit a problem you have something in the back of your mind to resolve it. (more practical than algorithms-y).

</comment><comment><USER11> pg has you covered: [http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> Work with people smarter than you

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree but to even get to that, One probably needs to be good enough or higher than the average bar to get in their company.

<comment><USER13> Make a point to work with the best programmer in the company (or best that you can get to work with), rather than working with the portion that is inferior to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> By making a lot of mistakes.</comment>


Show HN: 6nomads – matching tool for remote devs and tech companies - <AUTHOR> https://6nomads.com <comment><USER2> I once got a couple of interviews through the [https://weworkremotely.com/](https://weworkremotely.com/) site. Seemed like a good selection there, and it was open, which was nice. Seems like this one is aspiring to be like that. That's cool, it's a growing space. Any others?

Personally I ended up taking a local job as I find it more enjoyable to work alongside a team, but maybe in the future would take another look.

<comment><USER3> RemoteML for data scinetists? Never tried, but I saw some offers here and there: [https://remoteml.com/](https://remoteml.com/)</comment></comment>


Did GeekList spam GitHub users? - <AUTHOR>

https://plus.google.com/100367677260739454957/posts/KeBWpbRF3Na<p>GeekList claims it was a failed mail merge: https://twitter.com/gklst/status/281360156359536641 <comment><USER2> Just checking my email now. I got spammed as well. They certainly scraped emails from GitHub.</comment>


Make our emails public? Open For Business - <AUTHOR> http://startupitis.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/open-for-business-part-1.html

<comment><USER2> Sounds like a very interesting idea, I look forward to reading the rest of the series. I would imagine that it would be a good way of getting new customers if you were running the business properly, since people can make their own judgment on how well they trust the business owners.

One very interesting effect of allowing anyone to become business contributors is how it could change staff recruitment - you'd have a way of finding candidates who had not only a proven track record of good work, but also have extensive domain knowledge.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's a TL;DR I prepared ;) Open models for value creation work. Look at open source projects, Wikipedia, Kickstarter projects and many others. Lean Startups and Customer Development approaches are pretty open too and we are increasingly seeing open data and open, transparent support ... but how far can we go? Can we open up everything in a startup from idea generation to planning, discussions, financial and testing data? What would an "open source" business look like?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What do people think? Could a totally transparent, open startup work where everything (except legally private things) are public and open to comment?</comment>