On Programming Languages: Why My Dad Went from Programming to Driving a Bus - albert-helmuth https://ntguardian.wordpress.com/2017/03/13/on-programming-languages-why-my-dad-went-from-programming-to-driving-a-bus/ <comment><AUTHOR> As you might imagine, this article is raising a lot of issues for me since I took a break from programming and drove a city bus in Las Vegas. Now I am back to programming (before C++:PHP3:ES3, after:PHP7:ES7:Node.js) Driving a bus is a most interesting proposition and I can say without a doubt it was the most satisfying job I ever had. I had to learn street smarts and apply them effectively. As someone without them, this was both a challenge and a thrill. I'm not driving a city bus now because of high blood pressure.

Some thoughts: OP's Dad doesn't want admit to his son he prefers driving a bus. OR OP is assuming he doesn't when he actually does. OP's Dad certainly knows he is displaying a remarkable lack of initiative when it comes to learning new languages and it sounds like he's manufactured some excuses to satisfy the family. Bus driving is an addictive Zen like experience, I-kid- you-not, so I might be right.

<comment><USER2> >> OP's Dad certainly knows he is displaying a remarkable lack of initiative when it comes to learning new languages and it sounds like he's manufactured some excuses to satisfy the family

No, OP's dad is sick and tired of working for an industry that drowns him with its stress, misery, and corporate bullshit. The reason for finding an excuse to give your family is that they are expecting you provide them with a/an (upper?) middle class lifestyle. Screw your happiness and reduced levels of stress; what matters most to them is your paycheque and what it can offer them. For some people, $20+ more per hour is not worth rotting away in a cubicle, while being treated like a replaceable nobody, always being belittled like a child at every review for "not meeting company goals", all the while being part of the very reason the company is making millions of dollars a year. All for what? A white picket fence that ultimately adds no meaning whatsoever to life?

I'm single and turning 32 this year. I'm beyond sick and tired of this industry. I'm constantly put down like a piece of disposable garbage; and yet every time I leave a company, management is freaking out and begging me not to leave because of the success I've brought them. I can't imagine being a dad, with the burden of responsibility that adds. I'd be having my first heart attack before age 40.

<comment><USER3> You might enjoy moving to Silicon Valley, I can assure you good SWEs are treated much better here than whatever location you're describing. Talented engineers are highly valued and treated as such.

<comment><USER4> Hear, hear! Don't want to deal with it? Take off! Companies need _us_ , not the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a good object lesson for the common advice of "do what you love". If you really love working with computers, then it is really hard to resist messing with them all the time. So you have a side effect of constantly improving your knowledge. But if you don't love it, but are only into programming because you can make money at it, then you won't be driven to constantly learn (even if that learning is just a side effect of "playing"). Now that doesn't necessarily mean that you will be an expert at everything, but people who have a passion for this type of sport will be in a position to pivot when needed.

I've run into people in similar situations, they used to be a systems administrator or a developer, but are completely out of it and no longer able to write any code. In some cases it is burn out, but I couldn't imagine ever going so much as a week without experimenting with something that is intellectually stimulating.

Now it may be that the protagonist in this story really did have a passion for translating business logic rules into Cobol. But was he really doing programming, or was it more following a set of procedures that ended up cranking out the needed code, without having to really invest a lot into the process? Because if there was a strong passion there, I'd think it would have extended to continuously tinkering around with other technology. (Or am I getting dangerously to the "no true Scotsman" fallacy?)

<comment><USER6> Man, I am real, real sick of the premise that I, as a professional, am somehow second rate due to the fact that I have interests outside of my work when I am not working. I build a lot of shit, I am real good at my job, and I have survived _multiple_ rounds of the predominant tech stack being totally purged, but when the whistle blows I am _not in front of a keyboard_.

You guys should really consider cultivating interests outside your work. You'll be glad you did.

And you'll also find that dedicating yourself to professional excellence _just within the context of your daily work_ will yield more than enough opportunities to develop technologically. There's a lotta shit going on out there that's directly relevant to your work, you just gotta try it out.

<comment><USER7> Speaking personally, I have a bunch of interests outside of work, many of which do not involve a keyboard. However, I also have an interest in programming projects, though I don't get as much time as I'd like to pursue them. Why would I want to do more programming at home when I do that all day at work? Simple: at work, I'm not working on _my_ project, nor do I get to do it the way _I_ want. At home, I can do whatever I want for my project, and I can do it any way I please, organizing my code however I want, using whatever OS on my computer I want, having whatever kind of workstation setup I want, and not having to use a computer that's hobbled by IT.

<comment><USER6> Fair enough, I been doing the startup thing for so long, I forget about big company problems. My typical workday is probably a lot more wild west than the average coder's. I imagine there are a lot of people out there whose creativity is somewhat stifled in their work. Many times it takes everything I have to keep the lights on around here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One thing to point out - there are hundreds of thousands of fully capable programmers out there who could easily be trained in the languages of the day in the right environment or business, but there are next to no places willing to train someone.

Whether thats a jr. frontend job or a senior backend job but Java instead of C# (or vice versa), people would rather spend months with a position unfilled than take a risk on training someone to do better. Its hilarious with all the "right to work" states that you could basically just try someone out and get rid of them if they don't work out that it always seems like too much trouble to invest in someone's learning and get a good and usually pretty loyal engineer out of it.

<comment><USER9> i think on paper everyone will agree with you. i've hired for [insert specific language] and struggled with the same contradiction.

the hard part is there is no obvious cost/reward outcome. the ideal scenario is hiring someone with the relevant knowledge immediately. so you shoot for that. a month in you're saying "we're close now, though...". when do you cut your losses?

hiring someone who doesn't know your stack comes with some extra risk, and compared to alternatives, seems like settling.

<comment><USER10> > hiring someone who doesn't know your stack comes with some extra risk, and > compared to alternatives, seems like settling.

Is that risk significant in the grand scheme of things? Especially considering how many have used a particular stack incorrectly for years. I have an MVC project around here that is very much a webforms project in MVC clothing.

<comment><USER9> depends on the project. and your hiring timeline. and a lot of other things...

i mostly agree with you. i did try to soften it by saying "some" extra risk. as in, the net risk is > 0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sounds like my predicted outcome for a lot of folks I knew back in the day. Got into the industry because dollars, didn't particularly like it, so when (for example) COBOL dies off their career dies with it.

I'm from the same era, how did I avoid it? I never knew just one language, for starters. Unlike the author's father, I never waited around for someone else to train me. I bought a book and wrote throw-away projects in Delphi, VB, or whatever. FoxPro (a primary source of my income for a period) died a slow death? Good thing I know .NET (granted, working on the MSFT VS team kind of helped with that). IOW, I didn't sit around and wait for $IT (for various values of whatever we're waiting for) to come to me or be served to me.

So why doesn't everyone else do that? Because I wasn't learning Delphi with an eye on a job, it just looked cool and I thought it might at some point come in handy. People that got into this field for the money don't do that. They see the hands on the clock go to 5:01 and don't think about computers until 8:59 the next day, at least that's my guess. Would I be a lawyer for twice what I make currently? Oh, hell, no. No amount of money can make up for half my waking hours spent doing something that doesn't look like fun. Don't go into a computer-related field just because of the money, either.

<comment><USER12> I get a lot of flag for saying this but it's the same reason most girls don't get into programming or math; it's no fun for them, at least not near the same ratio as boys; as it is observable from an early age. Just like (sadly) fighting is more fun for males so are logic puzzles; and that's fine; except now it gets framed as a discrimination issue.

<comment><USER13> > it's no fun for them

Have you considered that maybe it's "no fun" for them because the societal expectations of what girls and boys should enjoy begin from an early age?

Perhaps the forms of play that lead many to programming (eg building things with lego) aren't encouraged as much as playing with dolls. These pressures and expectations come from family and friends from the day we are born, it's the classic problem of separating nature vs nurture.

<comment><USER14> Male here, legos bored me. I do computers because I like computers. My parents, working class government employees, constantly pestered me to follow them and always asked me what anyone could possibly do with math and computers besides be an accountant, actuary, or teach those subjects in highschool. But like most males I had a driving interest in computers so I couldn't be dissuaded.

<comment><USER15> My parents, 1987: "What are you going to do with that? You can't just sit in front of the computer all day for the rest of your life."

Me, 2017: "How do you like me NOW?!"

It's easy to forget that in the 1980's in the U.S. being obsessed with computers was not a highly regarded trait. The idea then that much of our work in the future would completely revolve around them was insanity to most people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't really _get_ this blog post.

Why couldn't his father self-teach some other languages? He doesn't need professionally taught courses, just a couple of books from Amazon and he would be able to get some projects up on Github to pad his resume. I can appreciate finding the time to do this while working shifts as a bus driver would be hard but why didn't he do this _before_ it got to that situation?

Sorry if I come across as rude/uncaring but I have seen people working 2 jobs and still be able to self-learn web development with no programming background/education. I don't understand why his father couldn't have helped himself a bit more during his career.

<comment><USER17> I have a very similar reaction. I _can_ say that when I worked in (state) govt, I encountered this mentality that nothing could be released without "training" everyone. From this, I guess one of two conclusions are true:

* There exists a myth that people cannot learn without training that some people have bought into.

OR

* There is a collection of people that are (currently) not effective learners without a teacher

I can have some sympathy for the latter - I definitely learn faster when I can ask questions and understand best practices earlier - but I'm uncertain if anyone that just doesn't learn well without instruction are doing so because they never learned how to learn, or if it's something fundamental, like some people prefer to listen to music while working and others can't stand it.

<comment><USER18> It's much more fundamental than that. I think a lot of folks who tend to frequent sites like HN truly live in an echo chamber - a good one, but still a bubble. I think it's difficult for many here to imagine that "learning stuff" just isn't fun for most folks. When I was a kid my idea of having a fun night was staying up late reading the encyclopedia under the covers. Most people hear that and find it absolutely absurd - as if I was torturing myself since they cannot imagine doing something like that for fun.

The simple fact is _most humans_ do not enjoy learning for the sake of learning. They are in no way self-directed whatsoever, and expecting anything resembling even a large minority of the population to exhibit such traits will leave you hating humanity.

It has taken me many years to come to terms with that conclusion. Most folks are simply mentally lazy - or being charitable the modern world does not trigger whatever their interests are and motivate them.

I've struggled with how to explain to my "less successful" friends what this means, with little success. It means showing up on time for your 9-5 job and working hard at it is the absolute minimal bar for success. Most people _do not_ understand that fact, and vehemently disagree with it as a universal truth of life. But it is. The folks who are consistently successful in life are the ones hustling 24x7 - where most of their effort is in learning and furthering their career prospects - not just toil for someone else at a salaried job. They are successful largely due to the fact others simply don't put in the effort they do.

<comment><USER17> I can't say that your summary matches my life - I've been pretty lazy, but having just enough work ethic about certain things and a drive to learn and a crapton of dumb luck has seen me "successful". I have friends at various points along the financial success/security path, and I only see strong correlation between working hard and success at the very low end.

> It means showing up on time for your 9-5 job and working hard at it is the > absolute minimal bar for success

I've violated your absolute minimum - I'm not saying you can and should slack off all the time, but at the same time slavish devotion to fulfilling a 1950s viewpoint doesn't actually get you that far either.

> The simple fact is most humans do not enjoy learning for the sake of > learning.

Probably and sadly true. I _suspect_ that it's because we (society) do a terrible job of TEACHING learning, so only those with the right parents/friends/genetic happenstance learn it. But that' is an unproven suspicion. It might also be a fundamental truth of the current state of human evolution. ( I have a theory that brain usage is "expensive" calorie-wise, and we've evolved to minimize the actual exercise of our brains. My theory gets a little support when they find that starvation/crisis spurs more energy directed to the brain, but I've not seen anything that has actually studied my theory. On the gripping hand, I've not really tried to check either, because that seems like work. [joke]).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> While I feel sympathy for the father in this situation, being a software engineer (or data scientist) transcends the language which you happen to be working with. People who work in software learn quickly that the language you use is just a tool, like any other, which you should use for the right task at the right time.

Of course, not everyone will be an expert in every language. But having the ability to shift when needed to an unfamiliar language is what really makes a person a software engineer and not just a programmer.

<comment><USER20> I used to think this, but it is not entirely true. Sure learning new languages is easy. I do it all the time. However learning the environment, libraries, tools and businesses which go with these languages is a huge undertaking.

I've been a desktop C++ developer for most of my career. I switched to iOS development for the last years. It was doable because Objective-C is native language like C++ and mobile apps work in similar fashion to desktop apps.

However I found doing Android development a huge barrier. The language Java was the easy part. The hard part was a completely different ecosystem, thinking and tools. With iOS it is easy, you got clang, xCode, cocoapods, homebrew and mostly apple tools and libraries to deal with. With Android there is a myriad of Java IDEs. There are several build systems. And each build system is seemingly huge and complicated, doubling and package or library distribution tools. Then there is a all sorts of testing systems, and the fact that Java is a world to its own. You don't use all the commands and tools a regular Unix guy might be used to like otool, nm, make, gdb, lldb, ld, gcc etc.

Still it was kind of doable.

Enter Java Script and web development. It confused the hell out of me. A completely different way of thinking of software development compared to what somebody used to native GUI toolkits running on one computer is used to. You got a client and server existing on different computers which have to synchronize. You don't debug in an IDE but in the browser.

And in some ways it feels like Java Script is harder for people who actually know a bunch of languages. You know there are common sensible ways of doing things which lots of languages do whether that is C/C++, Go, Java, Swift, Objective-C, Python, Ruby or Lua. But Oh no, JavaScript has the most odd ball nonsensical way of doing things. It is hard to get, because you can't figure out why on earth anybody would make the language behave this way. If you simply stopped thinking and didn't realize how stupid it was, you'd probably be better off.

<comment><USER10> Android feels like another world even if you know java and are used to GUI development in higher level languages. Even for java android is particularly reliant on tooling, to the point where if the IDE screws up it's easier to recreate the project and copy the files in than it is to debug the tooling.

In contrast, java with something like swing (not something that I would recommend learning BTW) would feel pretty familiar to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My parents were refugees from the Vietnam War and studied computer science as new careers. Today, judging from how confused they are about things like Google and how they never talked about programming at home or particularly encouraged me to go into programming, my perception is that they were not very good programmers.

However, even though the company they worked at for 20+ years outsourced most of its coding work, they had jobs easily through retirement because while the Java work could be outsourced, the COBOL work couldn't. Unlike the OP, COBOL helped my family eke out a lower-middle-class existence, which wasn't too bad of a thing, all things considered.

<comment><USER22> I don't know about your parents, but I think many old people who used to do technical work are not that good with modern technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I hate to punt for "the man" on this one, but the story is dripping with motivation issues, and getting any kind of on-the-job training in the past 20 years (even if it's not very good) is a rare blessing.

Whenever I trained someone up, they'd snag a better job offer within months. That's why industry dumps all of it off on college/self-study/github/etc.

If they had some kind of claw-back, like police academies, things might be different, but why even bother with that when state universities are cranking- out eager young graduates by the busload, and we have a visa program that is ripe with abuse.

</comment><comment><USER24> theres a really cool dude on youtube who makes programming videos -- he will implement a raycasting engine or crack old games or do whatever. one very common comment is "why are you not a programmer when you can program so well" and his answer is really interesting. he used to to write web apps but the deadlines were so stressful that he decided to be a bus driver instead. where he lives the government will retrain you and find you a job if you decide to switch (i think he lives in scandanavia) so he did it. apparently hes way happier now.

<comment><USER25> Who?

<comment><USER26> [https://www.youtube.com/user/Bisqwit](https://www.youtube.com/user/Bisqwit)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> As a friend related the other day, "wow, all these coders, they want to be woodworkers now. What's up with that?"

Working in a fine woodworking, cabinet makers setup, vs hacking C#? Your call.

PS, you can make 3X in a week learning how to use a router, but keep it under your hat. And the girls LOVE carpenters for some wild and crazy reason.

<comment><USER28> As a bald man, a router under my hat would be extremely painful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sounds like your dad is blaming everyone except himself. He could've learned R himself instead of blaming the training service. Learning a new programming language is something every programmer does.

</comment><comment><USER30> Serious question, I honestly don't know this:

Is this expectation that you're always on the learning treadmill* an issue for other professions like doctors and lawyers? For example, do doctors _need_ to continue to stay abreast of the latest surgical techniques in order to remain employed? Or do they do they consider it an optional activity, to maybe work at a better hospital or something?

* I hate to put it that way, and while I'm a big fan of always learning, not everyone is, and the "technology treadmill" is definitely a thing.

<comment><USER31> > _Is this expectation that you 're always on the learning treadmill an issue > for other professions like doctors and lawyers?_

Of course. A certain minimum is even required by law for licensure for some professions.

" _For dedicated professional engineers, earning a PE license is just the beginning. Many state licensing boards require that PEs maintain and improve their skills through continuing education courses and other opportunities for professional development._ "

[https://www.nspe.org/resources/licensure/maintaining- license](https://www.nspe.org/resources/licensure/maintaining-license)

" _Continuing legal education (CLE), also known as mandatory or minimum continuing legal education (MCLE) or, in some jurisdictions outside the United States, as continuing professional development, consists of professional education for attorneys that takes place after their initial admission to the bar. Within the United States, U.S. attorneys in many states and territories must complete certain required CLE in order to maintain their U.S. licenses to practice law._ "

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

" _Almost all states require some amount of continuing professional development education and training be completed by teachers to maintain their licenses. Specific requirements for license renewal vary greatly from state to state, and are often quite complex._ "

[http://www.teachtomorrow.org/continuing-education-for- teache...](http://www.teachtomorrow.org/continuing-education-for- teachers/#four)

" _More than 40 jurisdictions require that architects complete continuing education to update their professional skills to renew their license while additional states are considering such requirements._ "

[http://www.ncarb.org/Continuing-Education/Continuing- Educati...](http://www.ncarb.org/Continuing-Education/Continuing-Education- Requirements-by-State.aspx)

<comment><USER32> PE continuing education requirements are a joke compared to what this industry expects. Texas, where I used to work and considered getting my PE requires 15 hours _per year_. What person here in their right mind is going to claim a software engineer can keep current with that little independent study?

<comment><USER31> 15 hours is just the minimum that Texas chose to require for continued licensure. I'd be rather surprised if successful PEs didn't spend as much time in independent study as successful software developers.

<comment><USER32> First off, I wouldn't be. I used to work with them.

Second off, your post, and the others in this chain, are putting forward CE requirements in other professions as evidence that the at-times insane self- learning required by this industry is not unusual. It is. CE requirements are a joke and hold no weight in this discussion. If you want to argue other professions have similar impositions to ours, you need to do it without referring to these requirements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > He's kept looking for computer programming work, and bought a book on Java, > but the life of the poor is hard, and erratic bus driving schedules coupled > with living paycheck-to-paycheck makes learning programming hard, especially > without a decent computer.

I hate to be unsympathetic because I won the birth lottery by far. But these days it seems like you could learn python or java on a $50 used tablet or raspberry pi. Is it really so hard to learn to program for the poor? (serious question, not being critical)

<comment><USER34> The problem we have when thinking about poor people is that we think they're people just like us, but with no money.

That's not the way to think about it.

You would be astonished at their ignorance and, as an effect of that ingnorance, laziness. They literally have no idea what is possible. No idea what effort could achieve.

It's typically not their fault either. Someone with influence in their life has to set an example and show them the way otherwise they'll never understand how to unlock their potential.

<comment><USER35> You might want to consider this, too: [https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your- br...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-brain-on- poverty-why-poor-people-seem-to-make-bad-decisions/281780/) \- be mindful of your privilege when judging other people. Since you're posting on HN, you're probably already in a few multi-sigma-from-mean categories.

<comment><USER34> I am mindful. I'm speaking from the experience of being that ignorant person and being lucky enough to have a few people in my life that showed me the way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's not so much the programming languages now, it's the build tools and middleware.

Classically, UNIX used the same build tools (make, shell, SCCS/RCS) across languages. Libraries across languages tended to be similar. For a while, you could use Eclipse as an IDE on many different languages. Now, each language has its own quite different tooling and libraries. This makes language switching a pain.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm still quite young, but I notice it is harder for me to learn new concepts or programming languages than it was when I was a teenager. I can imagine many programming jobs have little room for learning. I'm still a PhD student so learning is part of my daily "work". I don't have a family to take care of either. I can imagine that in 10-20 years I will hardly have any time to learn new things and will have to rely on what I already know.

Also I frequently hear people say "programming is easy" or "you don't want to be programming all of your life, right?", so maybe people think they don't need to study new languages, because they think they will actually need to do less programming in the future as they get more senior jobs. I'm not sure if they are right or wrong.

I really hope I can spend a large part of my life learning about new things, and I hope those things I learn will help keep me employed. At the same time, it's hard to predict whether the things we study today will still be relevant by the time we are in a position to apply what we learned.

</comment><comment><USER37> > Perhaps this article can serve as a warning to those who don't love > programming what they should expect in order to stay relevant in their > career. And if what it takes is a turn-off, maybe they should pursue a > different line of work.

This is such a reasonable summary. Many times here I see people comment on HN "Not everybody loves coding side projects in their spare time, and that should be ok. I have more important things to do..." This attitude is fine, but just know you're setting yourself up for a letdown when your job doesn't prepare you for the next "fad language" that ends up making or breaking employment decisions.

</comment><comment><USER38> If software development is your vocation as well as your job, and you want a career, then you better not be dependent on any particular language.

My first job, in high school, was programming a CDC 160-A in assembly language to render characters on a Calcomp plotter, fast.

I've done FORTRAN (II, IV), some PL/I, APL, RATFOR, Bliss, C, PERL, PHP, Java yadda yadda yadda who cares?

The point is: you want a career in a fast moving engineering field? Plan on reading at least one technical book a month for the rest of your life. Yes, for the rest of your life. 120 books a decade.

(Tim O'Reilly's Safari Books Online service is a good way to do this without having to hire two moving vans when you move.)

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't think this is language specific as much as it is about keeping up to date in your field of employment.

</comment><comment><USER40> Many of us spend time on various entertainment sites with active content discussions, HN is one of them. And the state of these communities is highly dependent on owner's and moderators' power and vision on their evolution. Moderation is a thing that projects an experience on newcomers, who always do the same wrong things, because they are at the beginning of their way to be mature participants.

Otoh, there are few mostly uncontrolled communities that go through newbie hell via some sort of elitism/indifference to them. When you spend few years in these places, you start to see all the patterns — from newbies to almost speechless "old" guys with hardened mental armor. You easily estimate the amount of time your opponent was here (or in similar place) and you see where your discussion goes in terms of "meta". You _feel_ the rotation in that group, because names change, but thoughts remain. You do not need the moderator's help to be able to stay. That's great in a sense, but in fact the community voice consists mostly of immature boys who throw fucks at each other and argue about things that have no real matter.

This resembles the state of the entire programming industry for me. Each year we see new "developers" of various grades ready to fight and produce more complex shit that has no real meaning. Countless new abstractions, conceptions, frameworks, etc that were already invented before their birth, but had no chance to jump in their minds because there is no news with cool design on whatever.io. Really seasoned and experienced guys have no voice in there, because the management consists of the same unprofessional people who delegate everything down. You're using 20-year old technology? Ha-ha, the MODERN way is foobar.js with server-side bazlets, you old loser! You know nothing! Maybe, but your tech is 2 years old, so you can't be experienced in it by definition.

I really wish they all just stop and look around. Technology is already there for decades, you just have to not reinvent it and accept rough edges, because they are there for a reason. Forced moderation of hyped "modern" junk at institution level is also welcome, so mainstream doesn't fall into this madness. Our area is so big that a regular professional starts to understand everything just around the time his career is over. There is nothing smart in it, this is pure insanity. /rant

Edit: word order, typo

<comment><USER25> _Technology is already there for decades, you just have to not reinvent it and accept rough edges, because they are there for a reason._

There isn't just one technology, or one company, or one team, who can sit down and agree to stop. "People like the Amiga, so we're not going to make a competing computer, we're just going to fire everyone and go home" \- every other computer company.

"People like the iPod, but I can play .au files from my Sun workstation command line, so why doesn't everyone just accept the rough edges?"

"rsync works, who needs DropBox anyway?"

New technology is invented at least partly because rough edges are horrible, and at least partly because if we (collectively) don't invent stuff, what can we sell? How can we compete with other businesses?

Why does anyone write? Shakespeare existed so writing should be over.

<comment><USER40> All new shiny things involve learning and making mistakes curve. That should be compared to different brand new languages and sentence construction methods, not different authors. Why doesn't anyone invent new languages? Is english really _that_ good and easy? No, it is horrible in so many ways. But it is known to ~anyone so anyone can learn it and tell whatever they need to whoever they need. No need to complement that with chinese or russian, unless you are both native speakers and have no foreign sides in your business plan.

We have at least math and chemistry notations as special cases, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Driving a bus??? I frequently wish I was doing something else for a living due to many complaints I have about the state of this industry these days, but driving a bus sounds far worse to me. Having to deal with the general public every day would be a nightmare for me.

<comment><USER41> Oh, the stories you hear...

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I've known lots of people who got CS degrees when I went to school who now are no longer employed or doing other things because they assumed nothing would change. For 35 years I have stayed viable by constantly learning (but also avoiding just chasing every new thing).

<comment><USER43> This affects people 5-10 years into their career and new grads alike. People I graduated it that thought they could coast on their degree alone without internships or projects have been unemployed for a year.

The "study CS -> get a job!" myth is no longer true, if it ever was. While the market is great, you still have to work for a good job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I used Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL over 16 years and while changed 5 jobs. I am still learning new programming languages(swift) or some programming languages I have not learnt yet like embedded C. that is true if you can master one programming language then you can easier to pickup difference programming languages.

Thanks for C language and Pascal that basic concept i learnt from high school.

</comment><comment><USER45> My dad was programmer, then he opened a hardware shop (plumbing and sanitary hardware). And never looked back and made good money

</comment><comment><USER46> True Programmers Never Stop Learning. He can give a changce to Javascript. It is the most popular programming language now: [https://jobsquery.it/stats/language/group](https://jobsquery.it/stats/language/group)

</comment><comment><USER47> I've met a couple of people like that.

I met an Assembly and C++ programmer on my first job. He was asked to maintain a Visual Basic project and months later got fired for underperforming.

Then, I met an APL programmer that at some point even owned a consultant firm. Nowadays he works as a cab driver, barely covering his cab expenses.

<comment><USER7> >I met an Assembly and C++ programmer on my first job. He was asked to maintain a Visual Basic project and months later got fired for underperforming.

I can imagine why. After coming from an asm/C++ background, he was probably completely demoralized in having to work in the comparative hell that is Visual BASIC.

<comment><USER47> Unfortunately back in my country there wasn't a lot of opportunities for low level programmers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> From my experiences R is easy for statistician to learn and Python is easier for cs people to learn.

Post ignore the fact that R usually have bleeding edge statistic package out there most of the time compare to Python.

I'm going to learn Python but because I believe their Neural Network libraries are better. And it makes me better rounded but I'm not going to pretend as if Python is some how faster than R. It doesn't matter. These two languages are for modeling stage. Once your model hit production people are using something else C++, Java, etc..

Also seems like his father isn't well rounded enough to pick up another language.

Which leads to learn and play with as many different language out there especially paradigm, it'll make you a better programmer in general and you'll pick up language faster. Because of similar paradigm and because syntax evolve over time or adapted from other languages.

</comment><comment><USER49> I thought that COBOL programmers were in great demand, for maintenance of old systems, and increasingly so as old programmers retire.

<comment><USER16> A friend's father is a COBOL programmer. He works for a bank (shocker!) and has said that while there are jobs they are not available all over the country but mostly limited to certain areas. So while a Java or PHP programmer will be able to find work pretty much anywhere a COBOL programmer might only find a dozen companies with openings and mostly in places like London, New York, etc. Places with big financial institutions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> > He did eventually realize this and sought employers who would train him

I can't understand that. Modern programming is not like engineering nuclear reactors or driving mars rovers. All you need to learn is a cheap laptop, mediocre internet connection and passion to learn it.

Just apt-get python/R/whatever and start writing simple things, then more and more complicated, then your own projects (make your own home automated, after all), and after a year you'll be able to find an entry-level dev job.

> bought a book on Java but the life of the poor is hard, and erratic bus > driving schedules coupled with living paycheck-to-paycheck makes learning > programming hard, especially without a decent computer.

Oh cmon. It's the same bs as "girls don't become programmers, because of males/stigma/gender-language". If you have interest in programming, you'll learn it, and won't stop at some "it's enough for resume" level. I, personally, learned C++, being in army, with night shifts, drills, living for $150 a month, just because I loved it and used every hour of my spare time to explore it.

<comment><USER51> To your last paragraph: if the girl think programming is male occupation girls are not naturaly interested in, she won't consider it nor try it. If she won't try it, there is no way for her to find out she like it or love it.

I was told multiple times girls are just not good nor interested by people who knew I plan to study computer science. Had I not met teacher in school who showed me interesting parts and treated me realy equally, I would have no idea it can be potentially something for me.

If you would be a guy who work in kindergaden and knit for hobby, your theories about gender not matering would hold something. You have systematically picked occupations that have no risk in feminizing you nor has "but women do it naturally better" element of.

<comment><USER50> "Not consider nor try it" means that she doesn't have interest in programming. You don't need anyone's opinion to start programming or knitting, or learning Mandarin. If you like it, you do it for yourself, and then someone starts paying money for things that you know and love.

P.S.: it's funny but I knitted. My aunt taught me and I knitted a scarf. It rolled up and became a tube, and I lost interest after that fail. :-)

<comment><USER7> That's funny, I knitted too when I was a kid. It didn't last very long either. I think I was about 8 years old.

I have to agree: if you like something, you just do it. But I guess a lot of people just can't bear to do anything without getting approval from their social circle first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Now that your dad can't drive a bus anymore, for god's sake, give him that SICP book to read.

</comment><comment><USER53> Today is one of those days when driving a bus actually doesn't sound so bad.

<comment><USER54> Or maybe driving for FedEx/UPS... I think I'd like the varied routes, and learning new neighborhoods/streets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I feel for the author's father, but I think the author knows the score. His father made a bad decision to assume he could ride out the rest of his career on his COBOL skills.

<comment><USER56> So a programming career is so fragile that one mistake kills all past experience gained? I don't think mistakes should be so costly, and in the article the father tried to remedy mistakes and was met with misfortune.

<comment><USER55> _> So a programming career is so fragile that one mistake kills all past experience gained? I don't think mistakes should be so costly, and in the article the father tried to remedy mistakes and was met with misfortune._

I don't think he made one just one mistake. COBOL was already in decline when he made the initial career switch in 1995. So every year that he complacently did nothing while his marketability as a programmer declined along with it was a mistake.

All in all, I think he's fortunate he was able to make a decent living as long as he did during that particular time period, knowing only COBOL.</comment></comment></comment>


Exploiting a No-Name FreeBSD Kernel Vulnerability - <AUTHOR> https://www.synacktiv.com/posts/exploit/exploiting-a-no-name-freebsd-kernel-vulnerability.html <comment><USER2> You should not rely on No-Name vulnerabilities. Their reliability is unknown. Only rely on recognized, well-known, properly branded vulnerabilities like Spectre, Meltdown, Shellshock and Heartbleed.

<comment><USER3> Is this sarcasm or something else? It's not clear.

<comment><USER2> I upvoted you, there is nothing wrong in asking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://lobste.rs/s/h4v02e/exploiting_no_name_freebsd_kernel](https://lobste.rs/s/h4v02e/exploiting_no_name_freebsd_kernel)</comment>


Saudi Arabia bestows citizenship on a robot named Sophia - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/saudi-arabia-robot-citizen-sophia/ <comment><USER2> Not that big of a step, knowing the limited rights of real women in the region...</comment>


Getting Physical Extreme Abuse of Intel Based Paging Systems [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/n3k/CansecWest2016_Getting_Physical_Extreme_Abuse_of_Intel_Based_Paging_Systems/raw/master/Presentation/CanSec2016_Presentation.pdf <comment><USER2> Web viewable: [https://github.com/n3k/CansecWest2016_Getting_Physical_Extre...](https://github.com/n3k/CansecWest2016_Getting_Physical_Extreme_Abuse_of_Intel_Based_Paging_Systems/blob/master/Presentation/CanSec2016_Presentation.pdf)</comment>


Dark Sky Joins Apple - <AUTHOR> https://blog.darksky.net/ <comment><USER2> This is a real shame, wish they would continue to support their Android App, it's my go to for weather.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bastards.</comment>


Show HN: Cron jobs online - <AUTHOR> http://www.cronmonkey.com/?ref=hn

<comment><USER2> From clicking the link, I don't actually understand what it does? There's a box with Google.com in it, and the getting started button wants me to sign up...

Maybe a bit more information to actually explain would be helpful.

Also, why 10080 for paid, not 10000? I don't know why, but it makes me feel uneasy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for the feedback :) I see the confusion about what this actually is. I will improve the UI above the fold and show more details about the service. The 10080 is basically 7*1440(1440 count is a job which runs every minute) so pro account will allow you to run 7 tasks which run every minute. I can see why it can be confusing... Thanks once again for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just finished building this service. Its a simple way to create/run cron jobs online.

Any feedback/feature requests are appreciated. Particularly from people who run cron jobs currently.

Thanks

<comment><USER3> "I just finished building this service. Its a simple way to create/run cron jobs online."

cron jobs to do what though. Will you be accessing my server to pull statistics? Scraping google for data? Setting a Nest thermostat? Ordering my more vitamins from Amazon?

Above the fold, front and center. "This is a simple service to run cron jobs online. A cron job can do x, y and Z."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for the feedback :) I do understand the lack of details above the fold... I will add more details and maybe have a few examples of what is possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've used this before, [http://http.sh/](http://http.sh/)</comment>


Front End Engineers - We need you to make Grubwithus (YC W11) beautiful - <AUTHOR> https://www.grubwithus.com/make-us-beautiful

<comment><USER2> This job offer is hilarious. I haven't seen a more appropriate use of marquee and animated gifs in ages!

<comment><AUTHOR> We also have blink tags in there! (Chrome won't display blink tags, but Firefox will)

<comment><USER3> I can tell the site really need the UI help, because the marquees only go in one direction. With my years of Geocities development experience, I can help you create marquees that go right-to-left _and_ left-to-right.

<comment><USER4> That will also help i18n efforts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Front-end engineers make things beautiful? I thought that's what designers do.

<comment><USER6> Frontend engineers execute beautiful designs. It's a team effort.

Edit: Also, Grubwithus is looking for frontend engineers w/ strong design sense. We're a small team and wear many hats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is awesome. I literally laughed out loud at my desk, turning heads. I really really hope you get a awesome designer/front end engineer, who also has a good sense of humor :)

</comment><comment><USER8> It's already beautiful. My God. It's glorious.

<comment><USER9> The dancing baby is an especially nice touch..

<comment><USER10> I've been waiting for the day that dancing baby came back in vogue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't articulate how much I love that they set it in centered Comic Sans.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do I get the job? WARNING: MUSIC

[http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=1...](http://wonder- tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=1&music=2&url=www.grubwithus.com)

</comment><comment><USER12> I ran it through geocitiesizer; I think it looks a little better.

[http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2...](http://wonder- tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2&music=6&url=www.grubwithus.com/make- us-beautiful)

<comment><USER13> How? I can't make out any difference...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> You need a designer. One that can code, but that's still called a designer. I'm not sure if you can find that designer by advertising for a "frontend engineer with strong design sense".

Also, any good designer will balk at your request to "make it pretty". Design is not lipstick you can put on after the fact.

My suggestion: tell people that you're looking for a designer, and instead of "make it pretty", tell them you want to improve the user experience. Have them be involved early on. Making things pretty might be part of this job, but is not the only thing.

<comment><USER15> I'm not surprised to hear this reaction. Telling a designer to "make this pretty" is much like telling a programmer to "code this up". It's not really how good software is written.

Funny, this came up during a discussion of "UX" design a while back, where a lot of programmers (myself included) expressed concern about an emerging field that sees itself as the "user representative", standing between the domain and the programmers.

But I appreciate the concern on the other side... "pretty this up" doesn't involve a designer at the stage they can make the biggest difference.

I thought the 37Signals approach in "getting real" was a good one - use the "Three Musketeers". You want one good programmer, one good designer, and one good go-between who can do both - though cross training where _all_ team members are at least somewhat capable of contributing to each role.

In the messy world of startups, though, I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of "pretty this up" work. Programmers working with essentially no funding will start coding, and eventually they'll get to the point where they know their creation looks ugly. At this point, they'll come to you needing it to look better.

Try to see this as a challenge. Plenty of programmers have joined organizations as they guy who will "code this up" and managed to bring the team over to a better understanding of what they can do. This may be a crucial skill for designers as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I for one eagerly await the release of "Grubwithus bootstrap" - which will help front end developers relive the dazzling veneer of the 1990s geocities era.

</comment><comment><USER13> Earlier today I found a website that said "Recommended Browser: Netscape Navigator 4.04 or newer", now this... Afraid to view the source, feels like I'm disturbing an archeological excavation site.

"It belongs in a museum!"

</comment><comment><USER17> <http://kyrobeshay.com/>

</comment><comment><USER18> I actually hope that you don't find an engineer/designer. This website is awesome, brought back many memories :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Front end engineers are not exactly designers. Speaking as a front end engineer, I do not do design.

</comment><comment><USER20> This made me chuckle.

Brilliant!

</comment><comment><USER21> Brilliant. Just brilliant. Felt like I just found a webpage I searched for in Magellan.

</comment><comment><USER22> Will the lucky hiree still have to design around the name 'GrubWithUs'?

</comment><comment><USER23> Let me recall some Professor's personal website in College.

</comment><comment><USER24> this is perfect. reminds me of my first website

</comment><comment><USER25> Brilliant! Takes me back to the good ole days.

</comment><comment><USER26> As a designer I must say that I would NEVER apply for this position. Your ad doesn't illicit the sentiments of a company that truly cares for or understands design.

<comment><USER27> Elaborate.

Sounds to me like you're just being pretentious. Not that designers _ever_ do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This… is BEAUTIFUL! How did you guys do it?

</comment><comment><USER29> what is wrong with the page it looks fine as it is to me

</comment><comment><USER30> There are not nearly enough social buttons on this page

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't think that means what you think it means. You want a designer.

<comment><USER6> Mentioned this in another comment:

Frontend engineers execute beautiful designs. It's a team effort.

Also, Grubwithus is looking for frontend engineers w/ strong design sense. We're a small team and wear many hats.</comment></comment>


T-Mobile explains why its network went down, hard, on Monday - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/17/21293950/t-mobile-outage-june-explainer <comment><USER2> It was definitely more than volte that was down. I had full signal and couldn't talk, sms, mms, or connect to the internet for about 12 hours. I work in the field and I don't have an office phone. It was a peaceful day.</comment>


UN to call on world governments to decriminalise all drugs, says Richard Branson - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/un-to-call-on-governments-around-the-world-to-decriminalise-all-drugs-says-richard-branson-a6699851.html <comment><USER2> In the USA the prisons are filled with drug users. They are forced into poverty after getting out because they have a criminal record and have a hard time finding a job. Many are homeless as a result.

People will use drugs even if they are illegal, and making them legal would reduce the prison overcrowding and would be a tax income for the states to pay for fixing roads and other stuff.</comment>


What it takes: my thoughts on how to become a great programmer - <AUTHOR> http://blog.howtoprogram.tv/post/3164118691/what-it-takes-to-become-a-great-programmer

<comment><USER2> I have always said this: "You show me a kid who knows how to create with Lego and I will show you a kid I can turn into a great programmer"

Lego is the best coder test I know. You have to be able to envision the final goal, you have to know how to assemble that vision using the limited component pieces available, you have to know how to work around the tool's limitations, and above all you have love to create.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think those qualities are just a few of the things in talented hackers that also make them naturally strong entrepreneurs too.

Tenacity, creativity, and a love for solving problems and building things...

</comment><comment><USER4> I haven't found anything much better than this: [http://www.indiangeek.net/wp- content/uploads/Programmer%20co...](http://www.indiangeek.net/wp- content/uploads/Programmer%20competency%20matrix.htm)

I expected to see something great coming from the Software Craftsmanship movement, but their idea of being a great programmer is basically using XP, and satisfying customer requirements, with no surprises. To me that is just being an average professional programmer.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ouch, I think all of these miss the mark. They just lead to solving problems and writing great code. But those aren't the mark of a great programmer, just a good programmer as they don't imply that they build things of worth.

Great programmers build things that mean something, and they build them well.

The bottom line is great programmers care. They care for their mission, their users, and their craft.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would like to see something about testing capabilities of a great programmer.</comment>


Robotic milling and classic masonry: Sean Collier Memorial - <AUTHOR> http://architecture.mit.edu/project/sean-collier-memorial

<comment><USER2> That's beautiful. The only thing I could have done without would have been the constellation lights set into the pavers. Those seem like a gimmick, and don't really relate to the rest in a natural way.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's something in my eye. It's making it hard to code ;-). What an exquisite tribute!</comment>


Apple's next iPhone: 4-inch display; 12.5% more productivity - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apples-next-iphone-4-inch-display-125-more-productivity/77810

<comment><AUTHOR> Does this start to lead to fragmentation? Enough that developers will have to start thinking about different models when building their UI?

I personally still run IOS 4 on my original iPad as well. A number of developers / apps require IOS 5 (ex. iHeartRadio) that I can't use.

It isn't as fragmented as Android but is the IOS ecosystem reaching critical mass where developers will have to build multi-display optimization code and once you've done it how much incremental work is it go from supporting 2 resolutions to supporting N resolutions?</comment>


Ask HN: What Is the Best/Worst Purchase You Have Made During the Quarantine? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I bought a fishing rod and lures/hooks/bait and a fishing license. Going fishing once a week has been a pretty nice break from working at home and the activity itself enforces 6ft distancing pretty well so I can have a friend meet me at a fishing spot. The other fishers at each spot are really friendly too and happy to share what is working for them.

I used to fish when I was really young, but I dropped it at high school to focus on grades. Now that I'm a working adult with a fun income and my own car, I'm having a blast exploring my own city and the outskirts looking for fishing spots, and finding new fish.

So far I've caught a few largemouth bass and a crappie!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I bought a new chair as my old one was starting to kill my back. I have a beautiful wooden table and chair set that works well as a writing desk for short periods of time, but was not conducive to sitting for a couple of hours. It remains to be seen if the chair is truly "comfy" but I have found my posture to have been improved a ton which is the important thing to me.

On an impulse I bought the DJI Mavic Mini and I love that thing so much. It's brought me so much joy.

As for worst purchase, I bought a new fridge out of an abundance of precaution thinking that I could store a lot of food but it sits 90% empty unless I fill it up with a ton of water bottles in my garage. Probably was an unnecessary purchase and I should've gone for a deep freezer if I was serious about trying to store food for long periods of time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Best - A freezer we bought a few years ago and didn't really use much until recently. It lets us limit trips to the grocery store to about once a month.

Worst - $100 on Valorant skins. I knew I'd play this game a lot so I got some currency because they had a promo where you'd get 20% extra after the beta. Figured I would be a good amount of skins for it. Unfortunately time has reveled that Riot is one of the most selfish companies in the world and their pricing model is targeted directly at whales. Great game, but I'll never give them another cent until they bring their skins down to sane prices.

<comment><USER4> What is your opinion of Valrant's anticheat which requires kernel access?

<comment><USER3> I'm a security analyst specializing in incident response forensics, but not a great reverse engineer (although I'm trying to learn) or a software engineer, so I have some insight that might be valuable but I might sound ignorant in other ways when I step outside the bounds of my expertise. So forgive me in advance.

I haven't researched Valorant extensively. I have a Windows desktop at home that I use pretty much for gaming, browsing, and social media. I don't do anything on it that would result in a financial disaster if I were compromised.

There are lots of anti-cheats that do various things at the kernel level. I haven't compared their actual functionality to Valorant's. An initial search makes it seem like Valve's VAC is an exception. However I know back when I used to play counter-strike global elite players used to claim like 40% of their games at that level had at least 1 cheater. That doesn't mean it was the result of them not having kernel access if they don't, but I suppose its a possibility.

Some poorly implemented anti-cheats supposedly used to ban people just for having any reverse engineering tools like debuggers and more obviously RE oriented stuff running on a system whether you were attempting to interact with a game related process or not.

AVs, Endpoint Security Agents, and other security related software generally gets more access and do things that would seem highly suspect if they weren't trusted applications. However, sometimes the access was necessary in order to detect increasingly sophisticated malicious activity.

I think in a way we're seeing the same thing with anti-cheat software. If people want to play a serious competitive game without hackers, that might eventually be the price of entry.

Most security decisions are a compromise between usability and safety. I used to work for the government in places where in the name of security they locked down their computers to the point where brand new high end hardware was too slow and broken to accomplish a meaningful amount of work.

So I'm not sure what specific things the Valorant anti-cheat is doing with its kernel level activities. I would need to know in order to compare it to other anti-cheats. I just know that in general there are frequently good excuses for that level of access in anti-cheat programs.

One thought that has occurred to me (which may be a thought born out of ignorance of software development) is that perhaps rolling your own anti-cheat is kind of like rolling your own crypto algorithm, that its a fool's errand for every game company to try making their own when there's something that still works on the market already. Each anti-cheat is bound to have growing pains (Valve got some backlash for things VAC did with DNS queries a long time ago).

I haven't really studied the state of the anti-cheat industry though, perhaps they are all bad.

Basically there are two major concerns from having kernel access. A lot of people focus on the potential of the company to do something nefarious with that access. I actually think that's the smaller risk. Sure it can happen. Sure that knowing what I know about the Chinese government as an Incident Response analyst makes China's partial ownership slightly concerning. However, the most likely scenario that people should be worried about is a 3rd party finding a vulnerability in Riot's anti-cheat solution.

Neither of these concerns is enough to make me stop playing videogames until there's some kind of outrageous discovery about Riot or a working exploit for their software. However, if your whole job or life is stored on the same computer you use for gaming, each person has to decide what level of risk is OK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Two good purchases:

I bought a chest freezer. I was running out of space in my small freezer. It is extremely efficient, and I can store more food.

I bought more sun shirts to protect my skin from UV rays while I am out in the garden.

</comment><comment><USER6> Worst - small power generator - world didn't fall apart..

Best - bag of real flour from small local mill. My Mom mastered baking real bread without yeast. Cheap, tasty, healthy, simple. Will never touch what they are selling as bread.

<comment><USER7> Would you mind telling how does she do it?

<comment><USER6> Try watching videos below (they are in Polish but 3rd video has CC translated). This type of bread is Polish Lithuanian tradition. You just mix flour with water and keep it warm for a few days, let it ferment to make 'zakwas' \- sourdough.

You use rye flour, possibly crude. I have purchased type 720 rye flour (pytlowa - Google translates that as bolted?).

My Mom then experimented and fine-tuned these recipes.

[https://youtu.be/6BeDDl8-VD0](https://youtu.be/6BeDDl8-VD0)

[https://youtu.be/PzWD89vITNQ](https://youtu.be/PzWD89vITNQ)

[https://youtu.be/qhq32b7zMwE](https://youtu.be/qhq32b7zMwE)

This is a link for this particular flour on Polish auction site, they are shipping to Europe.

[https://allegro.pl/oferta/maka-zytnia-typ-720-10kg- chlebowa-...](https://allegro.pl/oferta/maka-zytnia-typ-720-10kg-chlebowa- pytlowa-z-mlyna-9103680153)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Got a hp x360 laptop right before the pandemic that was an excellent buy and build quality was the best of all the laptops I've ever owned.

Got my kid a cruzee balance bike and transitioned her to a woom bike. Both excellent products.

</comment><comment><USER9> Some big bags of flour while experimenting with sourdough recipes for bread, pizza, pancakes etc. I've learned a lot about working with yeast and won't feel dependent to find it in shops anymore.

</comment><comment><USER10> I purchased a combination standing desk and exercise bike. In my first two weeks I've run the odometer to 360 miles.

</comment><comment><USER11> Found a great deal on a herman miller aeron. No more back pain, it's great!

</comment><comment><USER12> Employees, trademark, and the Hololens 2</comment>


DUNS - the fraudulent secret startup cost of iOS development - <AUTHOR> http://www.stefankendall.com/2013/01/duns-secret-startup-cost-of-ios.html <comment><USER2> Based on my experience, if you apply using Apple's form at <https://developer.apple.com/ios/enroll/dunsLookupForm.action>, you can get your DUNS number within 5 days for free.

I explained my full process at <http://blog.metamorphium.com/2012/12/03/apple- duns/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Try getting the number from here: <http://fedgov.dnb.com/webform/displayHomePage.do>

You basically tell DnB that you are applying for a US government contract. They are then required to give give you the number within 1 day.

They will tell you that they will revoke your number if you don't enter yourself in some government database within 90 days. You can then enter yourself there (or as happened for us the first time we needed the number, we were just too busy to do that and figured that we would let it expire and deal with the consequences if anyone really needed to use the number).

<comment><USER4> That seems dishonest. I don't think that's a good idea.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, sorry, I have little tolerance for government created monopolies that are overly bureaucratic. We actually did have an SBIR for which we needed it.

D&B seems to be a good company, but the DUNS system seems broken and requires payment just to signup for no value being provided.

<comment><USER5> What makes you think D&B is a good company? As far as I can tell all their revenue streams sit right on the border of extortion. If they couldn't convince major players like apple or the US Gov to require the usage of a DUNs number, they wouldn't even have those revenue streams.

Additionally they are at this point the number 1 source of voicemail spam for me. And asking them to not call is non-functional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There was another article recently about the awful DUNS # process for the App Store. You can find some good tips in the comments, including applying via the federal site and applying via Apple's form. Readers suggest both of these methods are faster.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4977889>

I also posted my own experience getting the free DUNS #:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4978516>

</comment><comment><USER7> Worth noting that if you're a "single person business", you don't need to bother with a DUNS number: <https://developer.apple.com/support/ios/D-U- N-S.html>

(ie: If you were planning on hacking something together and charging for it on the App Store, go for it. This won't affect you.)

<comment><USER8> Ah... I was wondering how I'd gotten around this when I signed up as a dev.

<comment><USER9> I think this is a recent-ish thing. I didn't have to go through it when creating a company account > 18 months ago.

I'm not sure what problem Apple were trying to fix.

<comment><USER10> It's probably just a hoop they make you jump through to make sure you're "serious" so that they can cut down on app approval times without hiring a bunch more reviewers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My little non-profit apparently got a DUNS number automatically when we filed our first 990EZ "online postcard" with the IRS. I had no idea that it existed until a merchant card processor wanted it along with our EIN because D&B had never called or mailed us anything. When I did the lookup on D&B's web site and found the number already assigned, I gave it to the people who wanted it and thought nothing more. Two days later, the phone calls and letters started. "Your Dun & Bradstreet registration is incomplete and may not be accepted!" They haven't shut up for over a year. Fortunately they don't appear to have a working telephone number for me.

</comment><comment><USER12> Marco Arment spoke about the hoops he went through when going through DUNS on Build and Analyze (#93, 24:48 in[1]). While his discussion isn't as accusatory, it might be worth a listen for his experience in dealing with them.

[1] - <http://5by5.tv/buildanalyze/93>

</comment><comment><USER13> A reassuring note for UK readers - I got my number in 3 days, and nobody tried to upsell me on anything. (It's possible there's less paperwork for them in the UK, what with UK company details being centralized.)

They did assure me that this stupid number would be useful for all manner of stuff, which, so far, it hasn't been. But since they didn't charge me for this misinformation, I'm willing to let them off.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, we had a similar experience in the UK, we had our DUNS number the next day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've dealt with these jokers with going after federal grants... very, very shady and I totally empathize. Getting a DUNS number is actually free and you can get it in 24 hours, but you have to call their super secret number for federal contractors. Just tell them you're only using it to suckle on the government udder. It is the same number regardless.

</comment><comment><USER16> We just went through this at OpenWatch. Ugh, what a nightmare, and could set our launch back by a few weeks. Horrible company.

</comment><comment><USER17> My experience: after about a month, they finally called and took my information over the phone. I then waited the 2 weeks for the information to "propagate" to Apple, tried to sign up, but it said something was off. It turns out they forgot to put in our website address. So I tried to sign up for their iUpdate account (which allows modification of your data), and apparently I missed one of the questions, so now I can't update it online, and the only choice is to mail in this paper form along with like 3 paper forms of identification, then wait for a few weeks for them to give me credentials to iUpdate, then make the single-field change, then wait another 2 weeks for it to propagate to Apple. I called to ask "since you were able to take all my other information over the phone, can you please just make this minor modification?" The answer was always "no." D&B is indubitably the worst "service" I have EVER worked with!

</comment><comment><USER18> Just being curious - checking for Germany:

"If you would like to obtain a D&B D-U-N-S Number for your business, please complete and submit the form below. Companies based in Germany will receive their D&B D-U-N-S® Number within five working days. Companies based outside of Germany will receive their D&B D-U-N-S® Number within 30 working days."

</comment><comment><USER19> Yes, D-U-N-S numbers are a scam. The 30 day delay is to scare you into paying -- I got a number free in a couple days. D&B will cold call you later to sell you their many other bogus services. They'll also sell your information to anyone who pays.

</comment><comment><USER20> I also had to register for a DUNS number. I was somehow able to do it online and get the number emailed to me immediately, without any phone calls or other human interaction. Of course the email contained promotions for services like "DNBi SelfMonitor" for $39/month. So much for accreditation.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm pretty sure a meth lab trying to go legit could get by DnB. There's no real screening here; it's pure extortion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have found a hack to get a DUNS number instantly that I have used for 5-10 different companies of mine, it works every time and as far as I can tell there is no backlash. feel free to email me if you're reading this and want to save $230 lol

<comment><USER22> Is this a joke? Why wouldn't you just post it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Annoying that the Apple DUNS lookup is not working currently:

        "We're sorry, this service is currently unavailable.
        Please try again later."

<comment><USER24> Same thing here. I gave up and decided to go through D&B's website and filled out their forms last night. Got a call this morning. For $295 they can expedite the process and get you your number in 3 days or wait 30 - 45 days. This is completely ridiculous. If I get my number in 6 weeks and wait 2 weeks for Apple to update their database I'm looking at a 2 month delay in releasing my app. Nice job Apple.

</comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady It is not a cost. The number is free to get. It's also only necessary if you setup a company developer account - it is not needed for an individual one.

</comment><comment><USER25> Slightly off-topic - the submitter's app (Big Lifts Pro) is very useful for people doing Wendler 5/3/1 or Starting Strength.

</comment><comment><USER26> Could someone with some knowledge please cover _why_ apple has this requirement?

<comment><USER2> I believe the requirement of a DUNS number began sometime around June 2012. Before that, they required a company to upload their incorporation documents. My guess is manually validating those documents became too much of a burden, and it was easier to just rely on the same international database that the government uses to identify companies. Basically, it allows Apple to offload the manual labor of verifying companies to a third party at no cost.

<comment><USER27> Just FYI, having a DUNS code is also part of the requirements for publishing on the Windows Store. Symantec is the third-party doing the verifications for Microsoft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is a serious scam, wonder my Apple is going with them. Not only do they scam you to signup for an account, they call you every month and scare you into buying a report. They say that multiple companies are requesting your credit reports and its not complete, you need to pay a certain amount to get it in shape.

Any update can take up to 14 days and they call you at odd hours to confirm those details as well.

Serious scam and a huge pain in the ass every company has to deal with while signing up for a developer account.

I started my signup process in August and got the developer account setup for our company in November. F#$%ing BS!</comment>


() Achieves Market Cap of $0.00 - <AUTHOR> https://stocknewstimes.com/2018/05/05/cbd-crystals-trading-33-4-lower-this-week-cbd.html <comment><USER2> I don't understand the post. Is it some kind of autogenerated criptocurrency post gone wrong?</comment>


Show HN: Nibble – Food Recommendation Engine - <AUTHOR> https://nibble.at <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Hackers,

Nibble is a food recommendation engine whose purpose is to find you your next meal!

No longer do you have to waste time trying to answer the age-old question of "Where should I eat"?

Nibble features:

Invite your friends out to eat - Share your restaurant discoveries with your friends. Be the answer to when your friends ask "Where should we go to eat"?

Localized recommendations - No more scrolling through pages and pages of options to find where to eat. We provide users with a personalized recommendation of where they should go.

Restaurant Menus - See what there is to eat before you go! We provide access to online menus at restaurants you plan to go to in order for you to see if you'll like it before you try it.

Call to order - We provide quick and easy access for you to call restaurants so you can pick up your food by ordering ahead of time. Some restaurants even provide delivery over the phone!

Track places you like  - We automatically group all restaurants you previously have liked so you can revisit them without trying to remember where that one special place was.

For more information please visit www.nibble.at

Team:

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

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ajp20](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ajp20)</comment>


VPC Endpoints for Your Own Applications and Services - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-privatelink-update-vpc-endpoints-for-your-own-applications-services/ <comment><USER2> When you are a large company, you outgrow the limits of a single AWS account per environment pretty quickly, and you start splitting out functional areas or services into their own accounts.

These endpoints solve the last piece of the puzzle, for having components communicate. Until now, we've had to do public ELB's with restricted security groups, or VPN tunnels.

<comment><USER3> Is IAM not sufficient for separating things within an organization?

<comment><USER2> You run into all kinds of hard and soft limits when you have thousands of instances.

The other thing to think about is scaling for people. Do you really want 100+ teams in one account?

What about cost tracking ? Etc etc.

Lots of reasons to have an account per team, or ideally, an account per service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting seems like it will be very useful for providing SaaS offerings to servers that you want to keep extra secure by fully restricting internet access (Private VPC without NAT).

Not 100% clear if it is possible to enable bi-directional access for things like vulnerability scanning, but still seems very handy for a certain target audience.

<comment><USER5> PrivateLink is used to provision Endpoints, which can accept TCP connections, but not originate them. It's designed for services such as webservices, web sites, databases, e-mail, and so on.

VPC peering does allow you to do full bi-directional communication between two VPCs, though the IP ranges have to be unique and de-conflicted across the two networks, unlike with PrivateLink.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the post:

"For example, one customer told us that they plan to create hundreds of VPCs, each hosting and providing a single microservice"

At first glance, that sounds pretty neat, but looking at VPC pricing shows that PrivateLink pricing is 1 cent per hour and 1 cent per GB.

It'd be nice to discuss pricing _before_ suggesting we partition microservices into separate VPCs. Or after. Somewhere :-)

That pricing can add up if you're making "hundreds of VPCs"!

</comment><comment><USER7> Does this work across regions? Endpoint in a vpc in one region connected to service running in another region...

</comment><comment><USER8> I am new to this VPC thing. Is there an overview that explains why I want it and how it works?

<comment><USER5> There's lots on [https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/](https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/), and talks on youtube ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=3qln2u1Vr2E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=3qln2u1Vr2E) is a fav). But the TLDR is this: VPC stands for "Virtual Private Cloud" and it gives you your own virtual data center on AWS. You get a private network that uses whatever IP range you'd like, and you can connect to it privately via VPN or Direct Connect (physical links). You can also connect it to the internet with Elastic IP Addresses.

VPCs are free and you can create and edit them programmatically (add subnets, change routes, manage ACLs and security groups) - so they're a useful way to manage an environment of things like EC2 instances, containers, Elastic Load Balancers, RDS databases, Lambda functions, and more, without needing to worry as much about them being exposed to things you don't control.

With this latest PrivateLink feature, it's now possible to offer services between VPCs. So you can build a service in its own VPC, and map into other ones, securely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Jeff - two questions:

1: it's not clear... can I now access S3, SES SQS RDS from my VPC Lambda functions without a NAT gateway?

2: how do you make those screenshots with the torn off effect?

<comment><USER10> With the exception of S3, the services you listed require an IGW or a NAT gateway (with RDS it depends if you are talking about the control plane, or the database itself). The list of AWS services that work with PrivateLink is here [1] and we are working on adding more.

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-privatelink- endpoin...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-privatelink-endpoints- kinesis-ec2-systems-manager-and-elb-apis-in-your-vpc)</comment></comment>


Google's Knol - A Wikipedia Killer or a Blog Killer? - <AUTHOR> http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/07/24/googles-knol-a-wikipedia-killer-or-a-blog-killer/

<comment><USER2> ProBlogger - possibly the worst blog on the Internet.

It's a blog about blogs that writes nothing but pointless, stupid articles, and poorly at that. Grammar and punctuation mistakes run rampant. But not to nitpick, looking at the actual article itself:

First, it asks a question that it doesn't actually address in the article. Its first point is a question based on a nonspecific concept of "media," then ignores the point and starts talking about small publishers versus Wikipedia. Then it brings up spammers, for seemingly no reason. Then it brings up Squidoo and points out, unnecessarily, that there's a similarity between the two sites, only there aren't, because the two are designed differently and have different methods of achieving the goal, only some people can't look past the user name's being in the article because fuck it, few bloggers actually care about thought anymore. The Squidoo reference, of course, is another diversion from the original question, which is never addressed.

Can people please stop posting links to sites like this and TechCrunch? In a world that has a shitheap of bland and generic trash, HN ought to PROMOTE the good stuff, not just mix it in with all the crud.</comment>


I've made Dayta free - <AUTHOR> http://daytaapp.com/go/

<comment><USER2> Neat! I was looking for something very much like this!!

Two feature requests:

1) Discrete values: I want to track things say on a scale of 1 to 5, or 1 to 10. It shouldn't be too hard to implement this without cluttering the UI; you can have a check box that says

[x] on a scale of ___

and use the icon of the log as a rating slider.

2) I would like push notifications / alerts prompting me to enter things. E.g. Insulin every 3 hours, or mood every 5 hours.

I would totally pay 5$ for an app that does these 2 things reliably.

[edit: wow dude, this app is buggy :) 2 minutes and I already found one bug: +/- doesnt show up unless you first switch to keyboard and then back to +/-!! Hire a programmer / tester to fix these things and concentrate on the product, it's a better use of your time!]

</comment><comment><USER3> Worth noting is the competing application and web platform <http://www.daytum.com/>. This one was built by the same guy who has been doing the annual Felton Reports for the last 4 years (<http://feltron.com/>).

</comment><comment><USER4> Why? Don't get me wrong -- thanks for making it free! I'd really be interested in hearing the about the process that made you decide to go free. Would you be willing to share this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure!

It's the New Year, and Dayta is great for tracking specific goals = New Year resolutions.

I also want to get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

Hence, free!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Neat app. Two suggestions.

1) Allow me to .csv import. I have a ton of data collected already and don't want to spend hours tripping through your UI to put it in there.

2\. Allow me to default a day to '0' if I do not enter data for that day. For example, I track how many miles I am running per day. If I run 11 on 12/1, don't run at all until I run another 11 on 12/10, don't make me enter a '0' for all the days in between. Currently, Dayta will just show me a graph suggesting I've been running 11 miles / day for that entire time.

All in all - I think you're off to a good start. So, kudos to you.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sweet, thanks for making this free! I actually have a bug report for you, though! ;)

To recreate:

\- Add new folder

\- In the new folder, add a new idea

\- Select the idea to bring up the the data input view

\- Make the text field become first responder

\- Select the Recent History button to view Data Points

\- Hit close

\- App crashes

Tested on my iPhone 4/iOS 4.2.1

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Dayta is a great app for tracking New Year resolutions, and I'm still on a quest to get it in front of every iPhone user's eyeballs.

I think making it free (for a week) to coincide with this event would help. As always, feedback me up!

<comment><USER7> Looks like a very useful and nice app. Being a picky interface person though, I do have two very minor complaints: your wood texture for the nav bar is overly saturated. If you could tone down the saturation and maybe implement some custom nav buttons, you'd have yourself a much better looking interface (not that it doesn't look good already, though). The second is that the wood does not match that seen in the icon.

Solid app otherwise, though. Thanks for making it free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Would be neat for users to opt in and to be able to share certain data sets to a public API for developers to be able to play with.

</comment><comment><USER9> <http://daytaapp.com/>

Link to the apps site itself instead of the iTunes Store site.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for making it free. I'm trying it out right now. For me, it lacks one critical feature that another competig app seems to provide: a timer. I'm using both discrete counters and timers to time tasks and completion time. Not a big issue, but something to keep in mind. Thanks for making it free and all the best!

</comment><comment><USER11> Thumbs up for the inclusion of export to email/CSV; I wouldn't use this kind of thing if I couldn't make a backup.

</comment><comment><USER12> I remember hearing about this app ages ago and spent a few hours searching for it last month. I couldn't remember the name and wound up buying some knockoff. I would have paid $5 if it had shown up in my searches. Thanks for making it free, but thanks even more for reminding me of the name!

</comment><comment><USER13> Thank you.

It slightly reminds me of mercuryapp.com. That one asks you how you feel about stuff.

I didn't use it much, instead I wrote a diary where I rated my efforts every day and I added a little note.

</comment><comment><USER14> For those who don't remember, Sahil built the first iteration of Dayta in one week. He logged his progress here: <http://oneweekapp.com/>

</comment><comment><USER15> Put the initial description en englais.

<comment><USER16> anglais. (What's the point of using "classy" French if you mess up the orthograph? Maybe better to abstain.)

<comment><USER15> Touché.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seen it before, was very interested, but have no iDevice to use it on or I'd be tracking _everything_. _Free_? Extremely impressive for a free app.

<comment><USER18> Out of curiosity, anything specific you would be using it for?

<comment><USER17> I've been leaning more and more towards setting up a track-everything tool myself. Mood, food, pains, sleep, weather, productivity measures, literally anything I can come up with. Combine that with a prevalent keylogger which also tracks applications, and I could build up some huge statistics on myself, and maybe find causes of problems (and I'd just be interested).

Of course, part of the fun of making it myself would be experimenting with ways of representing and extracting meaningful information. I haven't brainstormed on it much; so far I'm at "dump it in SQL" because I can build a query for just about anything really quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This sounds like a great app, but is it really appropriate to link to an iPhone app on Hacker News? Personally, I think it's good that you linked to the direct source, but I did not see any news noteworthy content other than what you told us in the title. Perhaps you should link to a blog article you wrote about making the app free.

<comment><USER20> I think the direct link to the page on the Apple Store (which includes a good description of the app) is far more valuable than a link to a blog post that says "Hey guys, I made this app free" which may or may not include a link to where you can download it.

I don't have an iPhone anymore, but this app looks quite useful and I've forwarded this thread to a few friends. Thanks!

<comment><USER21> True, but what would be valuable is a blog post describing the thought process that led to this decision and what the perceived advantages and disadvantages are. If this is an experiment, it would be good to know the hypothesis.

It would be great to see a post in a couple of months time following up on the decision as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'd love to see an iPad version. I will definitely use this as so far all the dedicated weight tracking apps are crap.

</comment><comment><USER23> Thanks for making it free.

I played around with it a bit and it's a pretty decent app. Some minor nitpicks like the +/- thing someone else mentioned.

I'd say good effort and a good gesture but I think I'm going to be loyal and stick with Daytum ..

</comment><comment><USER24> Installed, I'll use it to track my journey on slow-carb diet.

</comment><comment><USER25> Can anyone recommend a Android alternative? It has to be free and must not require my data to be available to the provider (ie store it locally).

</comment><comment><USER26> Thanks for making this free. The timing is perfect.

</comment><comment><USER27> What drove you to the decision Sahil?

BTW, we need to catch-up sometime!

</comment><comment><USER28> Androd port?</comment>


Show HN: Collection of popular CSS layouts and patterns - <AUTHOR> https://csslayout.io <comment><USER2> Other then my disdain for anything ProductHunt, quite a nice presentation.</comment>


I made a CPU load average tracking app - <AUTHOR> http://loadaverages.elliottkember.com/

<comment><USER2> You may want to think about having it store the data locally and 'phoning them in' in batches at some random interval. Otherwise it seems you're going to have some crazy concurrent requests every 5 seconds. Cool idea, though. Very whimsical.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true. As usual, there are about a thousand ways I could've done this app better. Still, it works okay for an afternoon project :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This will rapidly turn into some bizarre form of performance art. You're going to run out of colors pretty quickly.

The instructions get obscured by the user list, at least on my Linux version of Chrome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - I've made the user list scroll. I do need some more colours, but as soon as I add more, they become pretty indistinguishable or too light. Still looking for a good set of hex values :)

<comment><USER3> More colors won't help anyway - people can only distinguish so many colors before the distinctions become meaningless.

This is a great opportunity to try to visualize the info in a different way that takes advantage of the noise rather than being smothered by it. What that way is, I have no idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nicely done, z -

<http://i37.tinypic.com/21llon6.jpg>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Whoops, forgot the "Show HN:" - my bad!</comment>