Verlan: French slang that inverses words - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan <comment><USER3> Another pecularity of French is the tendency to supercomposition.

Like the expression _au jour d 'aujourd'hui_ which means "the day of today", however, _aujourd 'hui_ itself mean "the day of today", because _hui_ is the Old French word for "today" and _aujourd '_ is obviously the concatenated form of "au jour de".

But it does not end there: the Old French word _hui_ evolved from "hoc diem", which means "this day" in Latin.

At the end, the best explanation of _au jour d 'aujourd'hui_ is

        (the-day-of
           (the-day-of
             (this (day)))

which is fascinating.

<comment><USER4> That seems similar to the way people say _PIN number_ even though PIN itself means personal identification number. I don't know if _au jour d 'aujourd'hui_ sounds horribly redundant in French, but I find that _PIN number_ is perfectly acceptable in English, along with _SSN number_ , _UPC code_ , and many others. It takes mental energy to decompose PIN into its components and realize it contains the word "number", so I welcome the redundancy.

When someone asks, "Do you remember your PIN?", I'm thinking about sewing needles or medallions for a second -- if they didn't add the word "number". On the other hand, the acronym ATM is so common that I don't feel the need to say "ATM machine" anymore; I'll say "Where's the nearest ATM?" and expect that most people will immediately understand it without having to think about what it stands for.

<comment><USER5> back to french you have the reflective verb "s'[en] foutre" (not to give a shit about [it]), which you use "je m'en fous" = i don't care, "tu t'en fous" = you don't care...

you can acronym "on s'en fout" as osef for a general "no one cares" and then rebuild osef as a verb : "je m'osef", "tu t'osef" etc...

<comment><USER6> Never heard "je m'osef" in my whole life :)

<comment><USER7> "Je m'en zef" is a more popular way of saying so (even if 'zef' is mostly used for slang on other contexts)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A bit tangential but closely related, I believe French HipHop / Rap makes such a good use of our language and all the slangs which I find lacking a bit in English HipHop.

I don't know if it's cultural or if I am really unaware of the equivalent in English, but it is such a delight to see the creativity of those folks.

A few recent examples :

[https://genius.com/15760906](https://genius.com/15760906) < Cadillac | Game over : A song about death.

"J'écoute des CDs, des sons de l'au-delà" > I listen to records (CD), sounds from the other side. Des CDs also sound like being dead (décédé).

[https://genius.com/Odezenne-tu-pu-du-cu-lyrics](https://genius.com/Odezenne- tu-pu-du-cu-lyrics) < Odezenne | Tu pu du cu

"T'es stupéfiant \ Je te roule, je te fume \ T'es stupéfait" > Word play on stupéfiant which is both a word for drugs and being surprising / stunning.

[https://genius.com/Nekfeu-egerie-lyrics](https://genius.com/Nekfeu-egerie- lyrics) < Nekfeu | Egérie

"Toujours en déplacement le soir \ Mais, c'qui compte, c'est le dépassement de soi" > The play on déplacemment (being out of town) / dépassement (overcoming) ... le soir / de soi. Brilliant

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure if this is what you meant but there's a ton of word play in American Hip-Hop, it's pretty core to the genre. Literally any rapper you pick will be doing some amount of word play.

<comment><USER8> Oh I am sure there are word plays in American / English speaking HipHop, I just haven't found the same propensity than in the French scene.

If you have notable examples in mind, please do share with me because I have been trying to find that for a while to prove my own point wrong.

<comment><USER9> Sure I think MF DOOM is a good place to start especially his Madvillainy album with the producer Madlib which is really well regarded. More recent stuff I enjoy is Mick Jenkins from Chicago, his 2014 The Waters mixtape was also really well reviewed. Aesop Rock is also generally thought of as a really good technical rapper. His album None Shall Pass from the Def Jux days is really good though I prefer Skelethon which has less word play but is also brilliant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sometimes "verlan" words come into general use, and then get reversed again. e.g the original french word "femme" (woman) is "meuf" in verlan, but as "meuf" has mecome mainstream some people has started to say "feumeu" which is close to "femme" but pronounced differently.

<comment><USER11> > e.g the original french word "femme" (woman) is "meuf" in verlan, but as > "meuf" has mecome mainstream some people has started to say "feumeu" which > is close to "femme" but pronounced differently.

This makes me very curious -- why does the original vowel of "femme" get changed in the first inversion to "meuf"? Why does the inversion of "meuf" have an extra syllable? Is "feumme" not a possible word?

<comment><USER12> There's often a final "e" in French, which is then changed to "eu" after the word gets reversed (and then often truncated). Another example is "herbe" (literally "grass" but now more often used for cannabis) which becomes "beuher" then "beuh"). As the final "e" is often mute, this process is then generalized even to words where it's not there. As a widely used example, a "flic" (slang for a "cop") becomes a "keufli" then a "keuf".

<comment><USER13> Oh gosh I've been using some of these words without even realising they were shortened verlan.

<comment><USER14> I'll add the two I had to have explained to me:

chèm <\- moche (ugly), not to be confused with chanmé <\- méchant (bad) (think bad motherfucker), whose ending can't affort to drop.

reuch <\- cher (expensive), not to be understood as an anglicism for "rush".

<comment><USER15> > chèm <\- moche (ugly)

You'd write it cheum (moche => cheu-mo => cheum')

<comment><USER14> I've only ever heard is as chèm, so that's how I'd write it.

<comment><USER15> Sorry, I meant "it's written cheum"

See [https://genius.com/Nekfeu-cheum-lyrics](https://genius.com/Nekfeu-cheum- lyrics)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We argentinians do this a lot. Guess we inherited it from the French (There were big waves of immigration in the 2nd half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th from all over Europe).

There are a lot of examples of this in tango lyrics, that are also rather complex to decipher because they are "lunfardo" (local slang) words.

A few examples:

Lleca: calle (street) Jermu: Mujer (woman) Goman: Mango ("No tengo un goman", "I have no money left". "mango" is slang for money. No idea of it's origins.

then there's "ortiba" that is a prime example of the transformation of meaning. It originates in the word "batidor" (whisk) that is a slang word for snitch. But then it transformed to indicate anybody that is not cool, or behaving in an uncool way:

"Che, ¿salimos esta noche?" (Dude, will we go out tonight?) "No puedo, tengo que estudiar" (I can't, I have to study) "Dale, ¡No seas ortiba!" (C'mon, don't be so uncool!)

<comment><USER17> Extra interesting is how sillable-reversed versions words with normal and 'slang' meanings retain the slang meaning but lose the original.

For example, _gato_ means cat. It's also an insult (the particulars of which escape me), but _toga_ is just the insult.

<comment><USER16> This particular one is very interesting. "gato" does not originate from the word refering the animal, but from gatillar (triggering) that was slang for who used to pay for company (To put it in simple words). From there it evolved to several meanings, the most important one being the person that acts as gatekeeper for somebody more important (In jails and mobs).

that is what is was very, very often used to refer to the ex president Macri.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We have something like that in Italian too, in the area where I come from we call it "riocontra" (which is "contrario", ie. "opposite", with the syllables inverted) . It's probably not as widespread as verlan, but it's still pretty common among the youth of my city.

<comment><USER19> The same in argentinean Spanish. "Pelado" (bald) becomes "dolape". What region are you from? I think I've heard something similar from Milanesi, but I'm not sure.

<comment><USER20> This, at least in rioplatense spanish is called "vesre", which is itself the vesre of "(al) revés", which in turn means " backwards".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Same thing, in Serbian:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0atrova%C4%8Dki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0atrova%C4%8Dki)

<comment><USER22> Same exists in Croatian... vozdra was very common....

The more interesting one is when you add the letter P and the syllable after the syllable For example.... Ja sam lud (I am nuts) becomes Japa sapam lupud or Ti si štupido (you are dumb/stupid ... more used in Istria instead of glup/budala) becomes tipi sipi štupuipidopo

Growing up in Holland there is no such thing really in Dutch... there is plat Amsterdams or Bargoens ... so whenever I spent time in Croatia with family I practiced my Šatrovački :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Similar things in other languages!:

Greek's _Podaná_ : [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podan%C3%A1](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podan%C3%A1)

Rioplatense Spanish's _Vesre_ : [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesre](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesre)

Serbo-Croatian's _Šatrovački_ : [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0atrova%C4%8Dki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0atrova%C4%8Dki)

(Please let me know if I missed any.)

Here for completion but not really the same if you ask me:

English's _Back Slang_ [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_slang](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_slang) and Australian " _Butchers ' Talk_" [https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/behind-that- tray...](https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/behind-that-tray-of- snags-theres-a-rehctub-talking-backwards-20020527-gdfbal.html)

 _Edits: formatting._

<comment><USER23> Bernese German has a similar thing, however they don't swap syllables, they move the initial consonant cluster to the end of the word, and add vowels, like this:

Schnure -> Ire-schnee

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

<comment><USER17> Yeah, lots of languages have things like this like Pig Latin and Jeringozo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Rioplatense Spanish (Buenos Aires and surrounding areas) also has this feature:

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

</comment><comment><USER25> Other French slang: Javanais [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javanais](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javanais)

<comment><USER26> I've been living in France for more than 5 years and I have never heard of this.

Is it specific to a region in particular?

<comment><USER27> I'm French. My grand father used this form of slang with friends when he was young so they didn't get understood by others.

I've leaved in many parts of France and never heard anyone use it, probably long dead?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> They also have special hyperabbreviated slang they use in short text messages, online chats and advertisements. Very hard to read for non-native speakers.

<comment><USER29> Isn't this similar to what is done in English?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Another one that can seems weird to english speaker:

"Comasse", which is a verlan of the last word of "Comme ça".

"Ça" is pronounced "ssa" which sounds "ass" once reverted. English peoples would understand it as "Come ass".

<comment><USER31> I've always imagined the inverted words written with the original spelling: « Comme aç » for « Comme ça », which adds more poetry to the word to my opinion.

They don't talk about words inherited from SMS mistakes, but I would add « aps » (for « pas », as in « je sais aps » = « I don't kown »).

<comment><USER32> I'm not sure 'aps' is coming from SMS/texting as it was used (if memory serves) in the early 90s when cellphones were very rarely used.

It's most probably the same phenomenon as other verlan words: a mix of phonetic inversion and some influence from the writing form.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Ah yes, tromé (verlan for métro), ouais, and putain: the three French words I sprinkle in with my broken French the most to make it seem like I speak the language better than I actually do

<comment><USER34> > ouais, and putain: the three French words I sprinkle in with my broken > French the most to make it seem like I speak the language better than I > actually do

Mandatory: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KunHko803g4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KunHko803g4)

<comment><USER35> Voilà donc de quoi s'inspirait The Wire: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lElf7D-An8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lElf7D-An8)

<comment><USER34> Oh, I think it's more than inspiration. The Wire producers are obviously guilty of plagiarism [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ4pldh_pOA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ4pldh_pOA) (nsfw).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Similar thing with Australian butchers: [https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/behind-that- tray...](https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/behind-that-tray-of- snags-theres-a-rehctub-talking-backwards-20020527-gdfbal.html)

<comment><USER37> The French butchers also have something a bit different : [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louch%C3%A9bem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louch%C3%A9bem)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Funny that "Verlan" is itself the verlan slang for "à l'envers", which means reversed.

</comment><comment><USER39> Interesting that this is an actual phenomenon. I recall my French friend explaining to me that "McDonald's" was shortened to "MacDo" which then (if you were in the know) was reversed to "DoMac".

<comment><USER31> It is pretty old, it was already popular in the 90ies when Les Inconnus used it. Everyone who wants to appear « in » (in touch with the young) uses it, I'm not even sure it looks that cool to actual teenagers ;)

<comment><USER40> Teenagers may learn some of these words without realizing it's verlan. For example a strange/weird object can be "chelou", it means bizarre or surprising now, it has lost the semantics of the original "louche", meaning suspicious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This has been around at least as long as the 1980s: back then I was a teenager and had an exchange visit with this kid from Paris, I remember him describing how they flipped words around to make their own slang. One that stuck in my head was "chébran", a reversal of "branché", which literally means "plugged in" or "connected" but in the era of Minitel and other early networks was used to indicate someone who was hip to current trends.

</comment><comment><USER42> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0atrova%C4%8Dki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0atrova%C4%8Dki)

</comment><comment><USER43> Verlan is usually used by french people with North African origins (where Arabic is the official language)

I have always thought that these people were just reading French from right to left like you would read Arabic, giving birth to Verlan.

There are no vowels in arabic, so "bi" "ba" "bo" are just instances of the letter "b", which I thought explained why verlan reversed the words but kept the order for each "consonant+vowel" unit

<comment><USER44> Verlan has gone into common use by all strata of the general population, not just immigrants. It's been the case for 50+ years. It's much decried by the usual suspects like the Académie and whatnot but the truth is that everyone uses it.

The phenomenon is also accelerating, even the most trivial and shortest words are getting commonly reversed: là (there) -> al, pas (not) -> ap, moi/toi (me/you) -> ouam/ouat, ça (that) -> ass, bien (well) -> ienb, pied (foot) -> iep, etc. Lots of fun to be had when explaining all this stuff to other non- French speakers.

<comment><USER40> Another short one "ouf", as in "C'est ouf !" Used by everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Nepali people use a similar method for gossiping. The syllables are reversed, making it hard for people around to understand what they're saying. Only the two conversing know what they're talking about and they've done it for long enough that they can easily parse through it.

It's a hard skill to master, which is why it's easy to assume those around don't understand what's being talked about.

</comment><comment><USER46> The people on the board of the Académie française must be upset. They're the purists, making sure there's no perversions entering the French language. But language is fluid. You can't stop the tide of change

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise)

<comment><USER47> I kind of like it when absurd things like prescriptivism are as formal and organized as this. It makes them much easier to mock, deride, and rebel against.

The US by contrast has a similar level of prescriptivism around the English language, largely comprised of biases against regionalisms, speech patterns of the working class, and dialects like AAVE. But it's enforced informally through snobbery and various other forms of social and institutional exclusion, which can be much harder to schematize and challenge.

<comment><USER48> >and rebel against

i.e. intentionally use definitions you know are confusing and then - <USER2> language is famously a single person endeavour - blaming the listener when they misunderstand. This arrangement works particularly well as a shibboleth to prevent people knowing what you're saying if they have the poor foresight to choose another language as their native tongue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Maybe a naive question from someone with only passing familiarity, but does gender stay the same? Maybe not the best example, but does le metro stay le trome?

</comment><comment><USER50> Verlan lervan

</comment><comment><USER51> So, like pig Latin, but for French?

This is a new thing?

</comment><comment><USER52> Itd be fun if they'd apply this principle of reversal to their abbreviations/acronyms as well, then the French ones will mirror the rest of Europe again. Right now:

MRI is IRM (imagerie par résonance magnétique)

LPG is GPL (Gaz liquide propane)

Etcetera...

<comment><USER53> Uhm, Italian uses mostly the same order as French (GPL Gas di Petrolio Liquefatto, for example), unless by "the rest of Europe" you mean to exclude the ones that speak romance languages.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can you work as a developer while taking medication for mental illness? - <AUTHOR> I'm a developer, and I've just realized that I probably have bipolar disorder, and maybe ADHD. (But I should go to a psychologist instead of self-diagnosing.) I go through periods of hypomania where I am extremely productive. I also have periods of depression where I'm not able to concentrate or get anything done.
It has been very difficult for me to hold down a job, or even finishing a big contract project. At my first startup job, I was really struggling to concentrate on my work. I think I ended up getting burned out and lost all motivation, so I had to quit (or I was probably going to get fired.)
I think I've been able to work around my mood swings by doing some freelance projects. I can usually hold it together and finish some work, and then I have a break. It has also been helpful to work 5-10 hours per week, or go full-time for a month or two.
However, I'm currently interviewing for a full-time job with a startup, so I will need to be reasonably productive for extended periods of time. I'll have a manager assigning me tickets to work on, and I'll probably have to work on a lot of really boring things, because that's just how it is when you're an employee. But it's a really awesome opportunity with a high salary, significant equity, and the whole team works remotely. I've also been really struggling to hold it together with contract work and side projects, so I need some stability for a while to build up my savings (and the startup "lottery ticket" would be nice.)
I was listening to a podcast recently where Stephen Fry talked about taking lithium. He said it worked well for him, so I think I would like to try that as well. But I've also heard that some medication can make everything fuzzy, or that it's harder to concentrate and get into the state of "flow".
Are there any developers here who have successfully managed their bipolar disorder with medication, and can still work as a developer? <comment><USER2> I have OCD and Schizoaffective Disorder. I have been on anti-psychotics for awhile as well as other medications to manage the obsessive thoughts. It has been pretty brutal to be honest. I have been prescribed Adderall to counteract the sedation from the anti-psychotics. I typically yo-yo (go on the meds when needed then stop when I feel like I can) on many of my meds because the side effects are terrible. It can get hard to be productive sometimes but I just deal with it knowing that eventually I will be productive again.

That being said, if you know you are having issues or are even a bit concerned about it I would recommend you stay away from the stress of a startup. Try getting a job at a larger company that moves at a lot slower pace. Also, if you are in the US, I would recommend disclosing any mental illnesses you may be diagnosed with to HR as it can help protect you with the American with Disabilities Act. If you don't disclose and end up having issues with performance due to the mental illnesses there isn't much you could do to protect yourself in that situation.

</comment><comment><USER3> I take lamotrigine for epilepsy, but people also take it for bipolar disorder. Some days I feel fuzzy but typically have no issues. On days that I have trouble concentrating I just up my caffeine intake or try to focus on something that is more rote than analytical.

</comment><comment><USER4> Take the job, hopefully it comes with insurance. Talk to a doctor. Get a brain scan. Finding the right medication and dosage for your exact condition(s) will take time. Flow-state is not magic, it can be learned, or re-learned if necessary. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> Same here, lost my job cause of burnout, didn't get a job for the past 1.5yrs. Lost.

</comment><comment><USER6> i have never really had problems with my meds particularly, i cant speak for bipolar but ive had a plethora of various meds for ADD, depression and neuropathic pain and they never seemed to have any negative effect on my productivity

the only one i can place which did in a way was tramadol which seemed to rob me of the ability to get angry, you might think thats a good thing but sometimes getting a bit worked up about a problem actually helps me solve it

</comment><comment><USER7> Talk to your doctor first. If you'll enjoy it you can try but never let it stress you.</comment>


Learning Node, Express, Jade, MongoDB from scratch - <AUTHOR> http://www.pranavpiyush.com/web-app-with-node-express-jade-mongoose-and-mongodb/

<comment><USER2> This is the same stack that Drywall is built with. When you're ready to get past a simple hello world app, please take some time to checkout the project.

[http://jedireza.github.io/drywall/](http://jedireza.github.io/drywall/)

<comment><USER3> Care to give elevator pitch for drywall? I checked it out and looks interesting, but wanted to see where you were going with it.

<comment><USER2> Hey Jason, thanks for taking a look. Right now it's just an open source project of mine, not a business or anything. If something isn't clear after reading the GitHub page, please open an issue or send me an email. I've started breaking out wiki pages from questions I've received. My main focus right now is getting more eyes on the project and gathering feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been learning Node, Express, Redis and SocketIO this week-end on CodeSchool. That was really great (fun, quick, interesting)

For those you want to try it, here is a 2 day pass : [http://go.codeschool.com/jxYVXA](http://go.codeschool.com/jxYVXA)

(No affiliation)

<comment><USER5> The course:

[https://www.codeschool.com/courses/real-time-web-with- nodejs](https://www.codeschool.com/courses/real-time-web-with-nodejs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Site is down.

<comment><AUTHOR> guess I need to change my hosting provider... didn't expect so much traffic...

<comment><USER7> Godaddy.com :)

I understand why your site is down :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah... it was actually Westhost - don't know why I'm still using them. Called them and seems like I hit the limit on simultaneous clients allowed.. :/

Now begins the search for better blog hosting... any ideas?

<comment><USER8> github pages + jekyll should work nicely for you

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks - didn't know that was possible. upgrading now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> welcome to HN effect :)

<comment><AUTHOR> lesson learnt for sure...</comment></comment>


Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on Amazon's Web Services, Startups and Innovation - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2010/02/01/amazon-cto-werner-vogels-on-amazon's-web-services-startups-and-innovation/

<comment><USER2> Always interested in what Vogels is saying, but this was pretty thin and the content of what he did say was generic marketing speak.

Meat: <http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/></comment>


Show HN: Redesigned Super Trunking Scanner site - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN.  270 days ago, I shared a link to my online scanner site which runs from a software defined radio (SDR) backend.
It worked but it was never really beautiful.  This weekend, my project was to rework it to make it easier on the eyes.  I think I've succeeded and would like to share it.  It shows how even a non-UI-centric person like me can succeed given the right tools (Bootstrap, in this case) and input from a friend who "gets" this stuff.
My improved site: http://scanner.rachelbythebay.com/
Previous HN post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3021756 <comment><USER2> This one is much better. Some kind of folks would like to see an interface that resembled a radio, though :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Skeuomorphic interfaces, right? I thought about that before embarking on this work earlier this weekend, but haven't been able to really try it.

One school of thought would be to have it work like a "real" scanner, in which you enable and disable banks. Any activity on an "enabled" bank would then pop up. I could just use talkgroups to replace banks. It would still be smart about playing back calls serially so you don't miss anything. It would just switch the "list" for a "now" scheme.

I suspect the hardest part of this would be reproducing that ghostly backlit glow. Graphical stuff is always tricky for me.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll see if I can make this happen.

<comment><USER2> But that its a lot a work. If you wanted to sell this then it would be a good idea :)</comment></comment></comment>


The Doctor Who Championed Hand-Washing and Briefly Saved Lives - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/01/12/375663920/the-doctor-who-championed-hand-washing-and-saved-women-s-lives

<comment><USER3> His work was ignored, ironically, through a lack of scientific reasoning - <USER2> which the critics meant there was no theoretical basis for his evidence. It was taken seriously when Pasteur provided the theory, however, the failure to recognise the idea advanced evidence-based medicine - which is where we are today. So, ignoring him actually advanced science ;-)

Contemporary reaction to Ignaz Semmelweis

Semmelweis's critics claimed his findings lacked scientific reasoning. The failure of the nineteenth-century scientific community to recognize Semmelweis's findings, and the nature of the flawed critiques outlined below, helped advance a positivist epistemology, leading to the emergence of evidence-based medicine. [1]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_reaction_to_Ignaz_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_reaction_to_Ignaz_Semmelweis)

<comment><USER4> The perversion of science that believes an observation must be accompanied by a theory (preferably acceptable to the current mainstream) is still alive and well, even in medicine, positivist epistemology or no. Once you start looking for it you'll see it at least once a month even in popular press articles.

But a perversion it still is. It is eminently scientific to simply document and even _publish_ an inexplicable observation, and only later hope that somebody can incorporate it into a testable theory.

To watch a putative scientist discard evidence because it has no theory with it boggles my mind, but even here on HN I've seen articles about papers getting rejected for this reason in the last year, so it's a real problem even today.

<comment><USER5> A modern-day analogue to this would be the "back is best" campaign for putting infants to sleep on their backs as a way to reduce SIDS. The evidence is overwhelming that putting infants to sleep on their backs (vs stomachs or sides) reduces the rate of SIDS significantly. We have no idea _why_ , but that doesn't really matter.

It's hard to understand how a scientist could be arrogant enough to dismiss legitimate evidence simply because the underlying mechanism isn't understood.

<comment><USER6> The key is testing the behavior and theory.

There are often lots of confounding factors - in the SIDS case, much of the decrease in SIDS rate can be attributed to changes in factors (continuing the decrease from before the "back to sleep" campaign, generally safer sleep areas, changes in cause-of-death coding, etc.) [https://naturaltothecore.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/revisiting...](https://naturaltothecore.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/revisiting- sids-and-back-sleeping-part-1/)

When you don't have the correct theory or mechanism, it's easy to do the wrong thing - like when the British navy thought acidity prevented scurvy and shifted from using lemon juice to more-acidic lime juice processed with copper tubing that destroyed the vitamin C... [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy)

Rather than just following a statistical anomaly, you need to devise and perform tests that will invalidate your theory, as was done with the other theories (e.g., the priest bell in the article). This is perilous when people's lives or global economies are at stake, and so anomaly hunting and cargo cult science can persist in high-stakes, difficult to test environments.

<comment><USER4> I would observe that A: nothing I said precludes any of that; certainly "science's" job is not done with the mere observation of facts and B: nothing about any of that is helped by including spurious theories in the observation of a brute, unexplainable fact.

Also, I'd happily set the bar higher on correlations to be reported in this manner... then again, I consider 0.05 to be a mistake anyhow that should simply be rectified as that has been concretely demonstrated to not be enough, IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >He publicly berated people who disagreed with him and made some influential enemies.

This piqued my curiosity. Managed to dig up this quote attributed to him by "Forgotten Ideas, Neglected Pioneers"

>In this massacre you, Herr Professor, have participated. The homicide must cease, and with the object of bringing this homicide to an end, I shall keep watch, and every man who dares to spread dangerious errors regarding puerperal fever will find me an active opponent. For me there is no other means for checking the murder than to unsparingly unmask my opponents.

I can kind of see why people didn't like him.

<comment><USER8> His statements and arguments were correct - that _ought_ to be all that mattered.

<comment><USER9> You know _now_ that they are correct. The other doctors didn't know for sure then. I think is undeniable that, even with the doubt of that being correct, they (the other doctors) should have behaved more scientifically about it. But when you are not sure if the statements are correct, it doesn't help if the proponent attracts antipathy.

In the end, I believe the veredict is, with justice, that the medical society at the time failed as a whole. But we might have had a different outcome if Dr. Semmelweis had more political skills. I don't want to acuse the man of anything in here, and of course this a personal, subjective, unfounded opinion; but it might be that his proud about being correct was more important to him than his wish to save more lives. Even unjusticed heroes have flaws, especially vanity related ones.

I am sounding like devil's advocate here, but I really don't want to blame Dr. Semmelweis of nothing here, nor discredit his accomplishments. I just want to give some perspective here, a human perspective. Science is a lot about humanity. Both in the human beings learning about a major scientific breakthrough and the human beings responsible for the breakthrough. If you want to change the world, you have to make sacrificies. Sometimes in your pride.

<comment><USER8> Several points:

(1) "doctors didn't know for sure" \- that is a usual state for a doctor - e.g. 'the symptoms of this patient strongly suggest x, but it could also be y or z. Given the data, the best course of action is ...'. Do you imagine that a doctor even today, examining a patient with e.g. persistent headaches, or chest pains, or ..., knows 'for sure'?

(2) I am not a medic. But a few times I have helped people in critical condition (accidents etc) - in all cases, I did my absolute best to save the persons' lives. If paramedic's had shown up saying 'you xxxxing idiot, you ought to be doing xyz' I would have been happy to accept their advice, no matter how they 'presented' it. I hope you would also.

(3) In farming work in the past, I have often made mistakes (either ignorance or error) when caring for animals, sometimes those animals died due to my mistakes. Being told 'you xxxx xxxx why didn't you do xyz' afterwards, meant that I did better next time. I sure as hell didn't think 'oh, I don't like the way that is being presented, I think I'll just ignore it'.

To be clear, I am condemning the doctors of the time.

I am not necessarily disagreeing with you about whether or not Semmelweis could have been more tactful - I don't know enough to really comment (e.g. it might be that he was tactful initially, but as time went on and he was ignored, he 'turned up the volume').

<comment><USER10> Your example is different because you're a layman and you're going to pay attention to someone who knows what they are talking about.

If you were the subject matter expert, and some guy appears and tells you that you're doing it all wrong, ego tends to play a bigger role!

<comment><USER8> >Your example is different because you're a layman and you're going to pay attention to someone who knows what they are talking about.

For (2), yes. The 'it must be presented to me in a way that does not make me lose face' part still applies.

For (3), not really. My 'patient' has just died - I cannot hide from the fact that there is probably something better that I could have done - and the other (lay) person has more experience of this situation than me. I would not say 'hey, I've known farming for 10 years, I'm not going to listen to you'.

<comment><USER9> This is not a conscious boycott due to ego protection. This is not simple hollywood villains, these doctors are humans. Much more complex than that.

The situation is more about someone coming to you, a person who take care of your animals for 20 years now, saying that a particular fruit that just grow in mountains can save your animals when they eat before noon. And to support this he ponts out that his animals have much better survival rates.

Imagine that the reality is that just eating that fruit, grown wherever, any time of day, already improve your animals health.

Sure, the right thing to do is keep testing the different hypothesis until you understand why his animals have better health. But if the guy comes yelling at you, very arrogant and calling you ignorant and stupid; it might be just too natural to realize that fruits growing on mountains are the same that grows everywhere; so everything the guy says must be bullshit. F __* that guy, who he think he is?

<comment><USER11> The guy was arrogant, yes. But he had the numbers to support him. Furthermore, the death rate of mothers at the hospital where they did all the autopsies was so horrible and so well known that soon-to-give-birth mothers would fake illness near the other hospital in town just so they wouldn't need to give birth over there. (Don't have the reference handy, I've read it in several places).

But the general response was not "well, that's a theory worth testing". It was "This guy is crazy. Gentlemen do not pass disease". I have read no record of an alternative theory of the high mortality rate that anyone else had advanced - one might have existed, and was lost in the myst of time. But I find it just as likely that there were, in fact, no competing theories.

I have unfortunately witnessed a modern day case applying to a much smaller population. Not much has changed. I know a doctor who has literally (and provably) saved at least ten lives based on his understanding of a disease, which he cannot support with statistics yet - his statistics keep improving with every case, but still not at the publishable 0.05 threshold. And this is an extremely rare disease (in the order of 1/1,000,000), so it might take 10 more years until he has a rigorous proof. (Alas, giving more details would basically be naming him and myself, which I do not wish to do)

His theory is a lot easier to accept than the prevailing theory about said disease, except that accepting it proves incompetence of many in the field, including editors of medical journals -- which, indeed, is the case, but those cases are dismissed as occasional random misses rather than the systemic incompetence that it is.

It is possible this doctor will retire before they have enough evidence to publish their results. And despite the amazing results so far, when I went for a second opinion after talking to this doctor, 4 others told me that he is making a mouse out of a molehill, and that it's almost impossible that he is right. Luckilly, imaging results proved he was right, and another life was saved. And you know what? Of those 4, only two realized they need some introspection, and the other two dismissed this as a "lucky guess".

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

P.S: Said doctor is extremely humble, and communicates very clearly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are old Hungarian movies about him[1]. He is described as the "savior of mothers" here in Hungary.

[1]I have seen this one, but I'm sure it's impossible to find English subtitles for it: [http://hungarian.imdb.com/title/tt0033035/](http://hungarian.imdb.com/title/tt0033035/) There is an other one, I didn't see it and they say that the older was better: [http://hungarian.imdb.com/title/tt0045136/?ref_=fn_al_tt_6](http://hungarian.imdb.com/title/tt0045136/?ref_=fn_al_tt_6)

Also I found by accident this link: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1440757/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1440757/) I don't have IMDBpro so I can't see any relevant info on this one, I hope this will be good.

</comment><comment><USER13> and check -> The Semmelweis reflex or "Semmelweis effect"

 _" The Semmelweis reflex or "Semmelweis effect" is a metaphor for the reflex- like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs or paradigms. .. "_

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

<comment><USER13> Aaron Swartz himself wrote about this kind of situation: [http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/semmelweis](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/semmelweis)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not that Dr. Who.

<comment><USER15> Indeed. It took me a couple of tries to parse this headline, thanks to that mistake on my part.

<comment><USER16> I wouldn't call that a mistake on your part; it's over-use of capitalization in the headline.

<comment><USER17> The problem is that it's still normal:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Headings_and_public...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Headings_and_publication_titles)

 _> As regards publication titles it is, however, a common typographic practice among both British and U.S. publishers to capitalise significant words (and in the United States, this is often applied to headings, too). This family of typographic conventions is usually called title case. For example, R. M. Ritter's Oxford Manual of Style (2002) suggests capitalising "the first word and all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, but generally not articles, conjunctions and short prepositions"_

<comment><USER18> It is normal in the US. In the UK title case has been obsolete for decades. Apparently USA Today and Washington Post already switched[1]. It makes US newspapers look very old fashioned to me, well along with the rest of their retro styling.

[1] [http://gawker.com/reader-poll-big-letters-in-headlines-or- li...](http://gawker.com/reader-poll-big-letters-in-headlines-or-little- letters-900331797)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This story was discussed on HN a few years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4438828#up_4439503](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4438828#up_4439503)

</comment><comment><USER20> Yes but _which_ Doctor Who championed hand-washing and briefly saved lives?

<comment><USER21> Doctor? Doctor Who?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's funny I live two minutes from this place [1]. It's now no longer a hospital but a campus for the University of Vienna, and houses many nice restaurants.

1: [http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2015/01/08/aakh-1784_enl-453...](http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2015/01/08/aakh-1784_enl-4530a6c3ec67d4263450f41dced729c8192f889b-s1200.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER23> When I was helping launch Peter Thiel's MetaMed.com, I came across all sorts of stats like this.. It's amazing how many _hundreds of thousands of lives_ might be saved if doctors did simple things like wash their hands.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Even today, convincing health care providers to take hand-washing seriously > is a challenge.

Really? Such an interesting article, and then this gets dropped in.

<comment><USER8> This article gives the general idea:

[https://news.yahoo.com/clean-hands--vanderbilt-s-hand- washin...](https://news.yahoo.com/clean-hands--vanderbilt-s-hand-washing- initiative-172312795.html)

<comment><USER8> This article is very good - it covers doctors' hand-washing plus other things.

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the- checklist?p...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the- checklist?printable=true)

(I read it a few years back and just re-found it now)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is all I saw.

[http://cl.ly/image/2a0z2Q1T2S2C](http://cl.ly/image/2a0z2Q1T2S2C)

[http://images2.fanpop.com/image/photos/10300000/Doctor- Who-T...](http://images2.fanpop.com/image/photos/10300000/Doctor-Who-The- Classic-Series-classic-doctor-who-10355782-500-375.jpg)</comment>


Why Facebook isn't the best home for your public events - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/06/facebook-events-syndication.html

<comment><USER2> (I'm involved with several student groups on campus.)

Facebook is an amazing tool for getting people out to your events. It doesn't matter if the event is really "public" because the only people who could make it (or that will come) will already be on campus and be invited to the event. (They will see it in news feeds)

So, is it bad that the event data is locked in Facebook? Yes. But, does it matter? No.

<comment><USER3> Are you implying that all people who are invited to the event have a Facebook account? Do you find it reasonable to require them to have one? Maybe you do, but not everyone does.

<comment><USER2> I'm not trying to imply that. Yes, I do think it's reasonable to require a Facebook account for college students. We also publicize the events in local papers, flyers, word of mouth, and even our blog. Facebook is the best way to get >85-90% of students who come to come.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You make some good points.. I created a poll "Best site to use to run a public event" to expand upon this topic.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2637986>

</comment><comment><USER5> That's odd. Usually Facebook has public pages for stuff. Maybe they think public events is a bit of an oxymoron, since non-Facebook users can't be marked as attending.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use meetup.com for just that.

<comment><USER5> Too bad meetup is pretty pricey for the organizer. The lowest rate is $12/month if you prepay for 6 months.

[http://www.meetup.com/help/How-much-are-the-Organizer- Dues-t...](http://www.meetup.com/help/How-much-are-the-Organizer-Dues-to-run- a-Meetup-Group)</comment></comment>


Comcast 2 Gigabit fiber for residential - <AUTHOR> http://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/imagine-where-2-gigabit-speeds-will-take-you#.VR1VgnY_mqY.twitter

<comment><USER2> Your average ATL data scientist here. Google and comcast duke it out, we win!</comment>


Going underground: who's behind Berlin's secret subway bedrooms? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2016/mar/20/underground-berlin-secret-subway-bedrooms-airbnb <comment><USER2> _At first, the underground workers who stumbled upon this scene in a disused U-Bahn tunnel in Berlin's Reinickendorf district in mid-January assumed they had encountered an abandoned film set. But checks showed that no film recordings had been applied for in the area._

Because no one would build a film set in a disused subway and then abandon it without filing the proper papers!

<comment><USER3> Truly hilarious that they assume people actually follow laws down to a T like that.

There is much beauty in the world from people not doing so.

<comment><USER4> You've never been to Germany it seems.

<comment><USER5> And you've never been to Berlin I guess?

<comment><USER6> And you've never experienced Berlin's bureaucracy I guess?

<comment><USER5> I did. I live there...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's actually an organization that specializes in tours of Berlin's underground architecture and offers some interesting guided tours (although they probably wouldn't include the subway bedrooms): [http://berliner- unterwelten.de/home.1.1.html](http://berliner-unterwelten.de/home.1.1.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> When I first saw that, I was like... I wonder if that was a porn studio that they setup to avoid laws/taxes.

</comment><comment><USER9> The front garden tableau (in a publicly accessible area): [https://www.facebook.com/BerlinWriters/posts/978227365587788](https://www.facebook.com/BerlinWriters/posts/978227365587788)

The headline sounds like there are many of them, but these are the only two.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone have any sense if squatters ever hide elaborate rooms/false walls in public spaces? I've always been fascinated by this...

<comment><USER11> [http://laughingsquid.com/artists-build-a-secret-apartment- in...](http://laughingsquid.com/artists-build-a-secret-apartment-inside- providence-mall/)</comment></comment>


Tell HN: Find hackers to hack with - <AUTHOR>

Let's make this a thing. If you're currently employed and looking to hack on a side project with someone else, fill out this Google Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1IRIVvyUDfkihu3ilrFOg0hIBwsZlKieSv6uWOvj7VgQ/viewform<p>Tomorrow morning I'll send out everyone's info in an e-mail. You can reach out to anyone on that list if you want to hack on something with them. Replies are optional. <comment><AUTHOR> Link: [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1IRIVvyUDfkihu3ilrFOg0hIBwsZ...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1IRIVvyUDfkihu3ilrFOg0hIBwsZlKieSv6uWOvj7VgQ/viewform)

</comment><comment><USER2> You ask for full name, workplace, job title, hometown, email and you want to send this information to "everyone"? I don't know :-)</comment>


From project to profession: going indie on NewsBlur - <AUTHOR> http://blog.newsblur.com/post/18561597889/going-full-time <comment><USER2> Congrats! Charge more. It has all manner of upsides, such as decreasing emails written by people who think $12 is a lot of money, and also means you won't have 20% COGS for a software service.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not only is Samuel an amazing developer, but he is also the perfect person to build the news reader of the future. Check out his Github repo for some of the cleanest Python / JS code you'll ever come across. <https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur>

I worked on a personalized news reader in 2009 ([http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2009/11/parsely-a-feed- rea...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2009/11/parsely-a-feed-reader-that- ada.php)). We decided ultimately to abandon the project to pursue Parse.ly Dash, a media analytics tool. When we were winding down Parse.ly Reader, I discovered Newsblur. I can say confidently that NewsBlur gets everything "right" that we got "wrong" in our original design. I now use NewsBlur as my primary reader and I am a paying customer. I have also evangelized it to my friends. I am really excited that Samuel is going to go full-time on this project and make it one of the best pieces of software on the web for news junkies like me.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am very excited to see how you grow NewsBlur. It's a really great looking take on RSS feeds.

As someone who had a large social group sharing items on Reader before their last round of changes, I would love to hear what your plans/timeline on adding social features are.

(fyi, Samuel mentioned adding social features in his 2011 year-in-review blog post, [http://blog.newsblur.com/post/15993667293/2011-year-in- revie...](http://blog.newsblur.com/post/15993667293/2011-year-in-review), and there is a social branch on github, <https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/tree/social>)

</comment><comment><USER5> First, let me thank you for providing a welcome alternative to those of us who were turned off by the "improvements" to Google reader. You made migrating dead-simple and that was a big factor in my choosing NewsBlur over other RSS sites.

My question, though, is that RSS usage seems to have plateaued, and may even be declining. Twitter, especially, has taken a fairly hard line in treating RSS as a second class citizen. Do you think there's a risk that other sites will move away from RSS in favor of social media, and, if so, do you have any plans to deal with that eventuality?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't see NewsBlur as competing with other RSS feed readers, many of which are seeing declining use and are either folding or are in the process of folding. NewsBlur, on the other hand, is doing very well because I'm charging people and can afford the popular opinion of "declining popularity" so long as it means revenue keeps increasing.

You have to remember that NewsBlur is unlike any other reader. It shows the original site, it filters and highlights stories, and it's being actively developed. There is a huge swatch of sites for which using Twitter is no substitute. You just want to read every post from those Tumblrs. You don't want to miss what Gruber is saying on Daring Fireball. And Salt & Fat podcasts are only once a week. You sure you want to rely on catching that single tweet a week that gives the link?

As long as the technology is good, I think there's an enormous market, full of people struggling to keep up with a dozen blogs by having to manually visit them all every day.

I'm not going for the expert RSS readers who use RSS in a way I never did. I followed 40-some sites when I started building NewsBlur. I now follow around 110. I never used Google Reader, and I think there's a lot more people like me than the ones who were already hooked on RSS.

<comment><USER6> My concern is that my ability to get feeds for news I want to follow is being reduced as people move to social networks. As you say, I can't count on catching one tweet or facebook post in the flood of messages. But sometimes people are only posting updates on social media.

I'm a premium subscriber on NewsBlur and love it. I was never satisfied with a reader until NewsBlur came around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Love the product; sadly, I am so stuck on Reeder (backed by Google) that I can't bring myself to change. Now, a Reeder backed by Newsblur …

<comment><USER8> I know Reeder is adding Fever as a login in the next iPhone version - maybe we could get NewsBlur on that list somewhere

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Samuel, I just wanted to let you know that you are a huge inspiration to me even though you don't know me. I remember your first post when you said you did the first version of your site while commuting on the NYC subway every day.

That small piece of info is my driving force every week as I recall how productive other entrepreneurs can be. So thank you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Originally this blog post was going to be a "and so can you" type post. I thought it was kind of important to set the tone to say that I'm a schlub who just pushed hard enough on the persistence/patience/perseverance/perspiration mix. It ended up being all about me instead, but I'm still working on the post in my head.

I'm not especially productive. I just work relentlessly on NewsBlur, every single day. Check the graph on <http://github.com/samuelclay>. There's another year before that of the same persistent pushing. And oftentimes I think that I take more than twice the time others do to get something like a distributed feed fetcher built. But push through it and one day you're shipping.

My first year was all internal motivation. But after I launched, that very quickly switched to external motivation. I added NewsBlur's Get Satisfaction forum to the dashboard of every NewsBlur user. That way I get a lot more feedback about the product. I had to build that little table by hand, even writing a cronjob to grab the latest feedback so it would show up instantly for users just logging in, but that was so clearly the basis for my external motivation.

Getting paid, on the other hand, was never a motivation. It just didn't occur to me that I could live off NewsBlur. Even today, that's not the case. But I'm taking a gamble by going full-time, spending the next few months cranking out my big social branch, and seeing if there's something bigger in NewsBlur. Luckily, at this rate, simply monetizing the current site might be enough to keep me off the streets.

<comment><USER10> I had a similar experience to you 2004-2007 with an RSS-to-everything service called Feed Digest. It started as a way to get my Delicious links onto my blog and eventually turned into my full time job with 25k users. I sold it in 2007 after a number of mistakes on my part: [http://peterc.org/blog/2010/257-three- years-ago-i-sold-my-st...](http://peterc.org/blog/2010/257-three-years-ago-i- sold-my-startup.html)

Anyway, the only reason I'm piping up is because I think NewsBlur is cool and I hope you manage to avoid the single bigger killer for my own project.. not charging enough! :-) I earned enough for it to be an OK living but not enough to hire people, get much help, etc, and it turned into a real burnout situation. There wasn't anything like Hacker News to learn from at the time either.

So if you're going full time with this, I wish you the very best of luck but I pray (and I'm not a religious man!) you find a scalable and realistic business model that makes this project _comfortable_ to run, rather than just enough to keep you off the streets, as it were.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Only now I realized that Newsblur loads the original page for each feed unlike Google Reader - very nice.

</comment><comment><USER12> What do you think of pinboard's one-time payment formula?

 _The fee is based on the formula (number of users times $0.001), so the earlier you join, the less you pay._

Currently it is just shy of $10.

<comment><AUTHOR> Love the idea, but it wouldn't work for NewsBlur. While Pinboard charges once for being able to store bookmarks and all of the associated meta-data, he actually charges $25/year for the archival subscription, which is where a whole lot more work happens.

NewsBlur has to fetch millions of sites regularly, whether you're on the site or not. Eventually I step down the fetching of sites that have few active users, but it's still expensive to do a whole lot of feed fetching and parsing. It's not much, but then again, neither is $1/month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Congratulations Samuel, I see you have read my email (I'm the Dude from FeedsAPI), that's the way to go. Good Luck and if I can ever help make Newsblur more awesome, it'll be a pleasure.

</comment><comment><USER14> Congratulations! I didn't know Newsblur was open source, that's awesome.

Good luck, Samuel. Don't forget to change the company name on your Github profile ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I noticed that my Stack Overflow profile was outdated, as well as GitHub and others. In fact, my personal blog still says I'm working on DocumentCloud.

This is a problem needing solving. Or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It looks beautiful and I am a sucker for beautiful things. Immediately signed up for premium membership. I wish you good luck in your adventure.

</comment><comment><USER16> I met Samuel at the last startup school, he seemed like an outstanding guy and a very good developer. Congrats and good luck!

</comment><comment><USER17> Great news! NewsBlur and Pinboard are the only web services I pay for. Very excited to see that you are growing.

</comment><comment><USER18> Congratulations Samuel, and good luck!

</comment><comment><USER19> Congrats! I wish you a continuous chain of awesome events for you and your project.

In another note; is nice that you are trying to be unobtrusive with your visitors but I think your design is conversion-flawed; the register form and (after that) the premium benefits should really stand out!

Rough sketches of what i mean: <http://i.imgur.com/Gy569.jpg> <http://i.imgur.com/sKwZF.jpg>

<comment><USER13> Any chance to see you add your email in your pofile? I'm traing to get in touch with you, my email is in my profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> on the homepage the most unimpressive news are, hacknews everything else looks better maybe newsblur can grab the first page of wherever hacknews is pointing to?</comment>


The Moderately Enthusiastic Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://devblog.avdi.org/2014/01/31/the-moderately-enthusiastic-programmer/ <comment><USER2> > And if I were looking for a job right now, I'd feel pressured to fake it. > Either I'd feel like an impostor, or I'd feel resentment for trying to boost > my emotional commitment to a coding project to an unrealistic fever-pitch.

Software recruiting seems designed to produce one of two goals:

1\. Repeatedly break your heart, or

2\. Turn you into a psychopath you can fake the passion and interest and dedication that companies demand at the very first step of the interview, when they know they flush out 90% of the people at that stage.

And, remember, this is what it's like when the market is _good_ for employees.

<comment><USER3> I agree with this. Yet it doesn't explain why recruiters are running wild and everyone including your neighbour weeps about "shortage of developers" in the market. Is that because they absolutely feel obliged to waste time of 99 candidates with their IKM Java 6 tests so they could get their dream guy to work for a "X market leader" on their "ground breaking" project?

<comment><USER4> My hypothesis:

* Companies don't have a good idea what they want or need

* Which leads to awful, tone-deaf, nonpredictive interviews

* And every startup founded is a net loss in filled jobs, which means hiring intensifies while people who the founders want to hire—people like them—get spread out ever thinner and would rather take investment to start companies than get back on the market. When eventually they need to hire too, their contribution to the problem grows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A friend recently started a job programming for Enterprise Rent A Car. Did you know they even regularly hired programmers? I didn't, but he seems to like it. The company I'm at once interviewed a programmer who was working for Home Depot.

The reality is there are actually plenty of programming positions that are perfectly suited for a career programmer who doesn't particularly love it and just wants a steady paycheck and a decent home life. But these positions aren't at Google or Facebook or the hottest Silicon Valley startup, and they're not going to ever pay $150k+ or even $100k+ (they might start at half that). You don't need to know what a suffix tree is. You don't need to have ever heard of bloom filters. These positions probably aren't at many of the companies posting in the 37signals job board, because that board is naturally going to attract job seekers who are more enthusiastic about programming as both a craft and a means to a paycheck.

I think a lot of posters here seem to be wanting too much in exchange for too little. In every industry, it's always been the case that the top companies have tried to hire the most "passionate" employees--and yes, that means employees who might work overtime while smiling about it. I don't think this is so evil when there are plenty of other choices.

I do think it's a bit disingenuous, though, to want to be part of the next explosively successful company while still putting in the minimum effort to get a steady paycheck. This forum is disproportionately full of people wanting to get at least somewhat wealthy off of software development, people who want the same compensation as big firm attorneys and doctors. Those lawyers probably work more than the average over-worked programmer at a top company, and the doctors almost certainly do. The attorneys and doctors also all necessarily went to graduate school and probably took on a lot of debt that the average programmer doesn't have. The fact is that, across _all industries_ , jobs with this level of compensation are rarely 30-40 hour a week lifestyle jobs.

<comment><USER6> There are quite a few startup jobs doing interesting things that don't require fake "passion" or crazy hours, especially outside the Valley bubble.

In real life there isn't a dichotomy between getting a so-called career job at some stodgy company and frat-house crazy-hours fake-"passion" startups in the Valley.

Perpetuating that dichotomy is dishonest and helps keep startup employee diversity, treatment, and compensation down.

The people I work with aren't "career programmers who don't particularly love it." They're not putting in a "minimum effort." They certainly know about suffix trees and bloom filters. They're years-of-experience, extremely talented people who put in unbelievable effort to achieve our goals at work, but they also go home to families and other passions.

<comment><USER5> I find your post interesting because I never said anything about "frat-house crazy-hours." I only suggested that certain jobs might want more of this amorphous "passion" and that many jobs don't require it at all, and you're the one who concluded this must mean "crazy-hours."

To me, it means exactly what you described: people who put in unbelievable effort at work, who probably love what they do, and who are extremely talented and take pride in that talent. None of that necessarily translates to extra hours. None of that translates into loving work more than family. None of that translates into not going home home to a family and the rest of life after work. But, to me, it does translate to passion.

<comment><USER6> I wrote my comment with your last paragraph in mind, which directly attaches hours to compensation and "lifestyle jobs."

<comment><USER5> That's fair enough, but my last paragraph was directed at a very specific demographic. There are a lot of posters on HN who expect to make $200k+, _at least_ , as a programmer. The typical job paying in that range tends to be fairly demanding. Do you disagree with that? I'm not saying there aren't exceptions, but the vast majority of developers I know with incomes above and beyond the $200k mark have put in a huge amount of effort to get to that position. They're clearly passionate about something--either programming or, well, just money.

Also, for what it's worth, "lifestyle businesses" _are_ often tied directly to having lower hours.

<comment><USER7> Programming is unusual that some people may have incredible mathematical talent which will allow some to be a LOT better than other without much effort (in specific areas).

I am not in that category. Above average, keen to learn and a decent bit of background. Not earning anywhere near 200k+, but I am living inn Barcelona which is pretty cool. Don't do more than 40hours per week usually either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What they mean is that they want you to _appear_ passionate. They don't really give two poops about your internal state. What they want is the promise that you will work unto exhaustion and then a bit beyond, with a smile on your face. They want the promise that you are willing to _fake passion_. Fakeness is very important in today's fast-paced work environment. Then you die.

<comment><USER9> So many of these replies seem so deeply cynical.

As someone who has put _passion(ate)_ in job listings, I _absolutely_ wanted people who were passionate about this field. I was less interested in the people who did comp. sci because their guidance counselor told them it was going to be a hot field, instead targeting those who were probably programming as a child.

People who have an internal drive that you simply can't fake. Who build great stuff, and keep up on trends and technologies, because they feed on it. There is no faking it, and many simply don't fit this mold at all.

But it isn't all upside. Those same people will seldom write documentation. They'll gloss over things they think aren't important. If you have to build something that you know is wrong, or that will go unused, they will have so much inner turmoil they'll almost certainly sabotage the project. They'll probably pull your projects in directions you don't want, and might use techniques and technologies that are interesting and fun but aren't necessary if even appropriate for the current need.

You need to balance it all. But anyone saying that there is no such thing as passion in this field, or that there is set that has it and another that doesn't, is living with delusion. It is very, very real.

<comment><USER10> It's kind of hard not to be cynical when 95%+ of job adverts in all industries have the same 5 buzzwords in them. I mean, if the guy/girl in Subway is supposed to be 'passionate about great customer service', when it's manifestly implausible that _anyone_ is (EDIT: put too strongly, I do know people who just love pulling pints in a pub, but whatever), how am I supposed to take seriously any ad that uses a word that's been reduced to complete banality? It's the (ab)use of passionate in job ads that's truly cynical, and of course it leaves job-hunters no option except to view the matter cynically.

I agree with whoever it was who said that it's not so much about _actually_ getting passionate people, but more a test of how ready you are to eat shit and be compliant. So when you say:

> As someone who has put passion(ate) in job listings, I absolutely wanted > people who were passionate about this field.

I have to ask: well, did you actually get more of that kind of person when you put 'passionate' in the job ad than you would otherwise? I'm genuinely curious, because - having spent some time in the dole queue in recent years - I can't imagine _anyone_ responding sincerely to a clause like that in a job ad.

<comment><USER9> We aren't talking about sandwich shop ads. We're talking about software development ads: a generally high compensation, very flexible, and huge variability of skills career. And the truth is that the majority of ads do _not_ have it in them.

Most ads list educational requirements, a list of required technologies, and give you a contact number.

But those ads that do...boy do they burn the asses of people who feel excluded. Those people are the ones who'll declare bombastically that those employers will never get candidates, it's a warning sign, etc.

It's just self-comforting blather.

Can I say whether I got "more" of those types of people by putting it in an ad? No, I can't, as I didn't do controls so I have no basis of comparison. But essentially it was an attempt to save everyone some time -- include the unsuitable candidates -- and to exclude those people who, when asked how they keep on top of emerging trends and techniques, have no answer ( _shockingly_ common, and an immediate no hire). The same is true of various other seemingly decorative words that so offend so many: If an ad says that you need to be a JavaScript "ninja", and you know just enough to kind of decorate up an ASP.NET page, you know maybe save everyone some time and don't apply? Yet some people still do, and then they write the "Your JavaScript tests are bullshit!" blog post that sees a million seal claps on social media.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm similarly suspicious of all job ads that mention "fast-paced"; I read it as "we value your ability to throw things at the wall and see what sticks over careful analysis."

Another thing I notice: the more I mature as a person and a developer, the fewer job ads actually interest me. I suppose that's inevitable, however, as I continue to hone in on what domain I want to work in.

<comment><USER12> Similar here, except the domain is less interesting to me than the 'how' and 'who' of the work. How will I/we work, and who do I work with? Do I have to work under people who change direction every 3 weeks, never write anything down, are in constant "emergency" mode and believe that's "agile"? No thanks, regardless of industry/domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > But sometimes I worry that it's code for "we want to exploit your lack of > boundaries."

That seems quite true for the video game industry.

[https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/11/video-game- industry/](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/11/video-game-industry/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Is this unique to programming? I'm fairly certain this holds true in a number of other industries. Journalism, fashion, design come to mind.

Employers are _strongly_ incentivized to actively seek out the most exploitable of potential hires. It's deeply unfortunate.

<comment><USER15> > _It 's deeply unfortunate._

No, it just means the system is broken.

And when things are broken, we fix them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> People are saying this is pedantry, but there's a good point being made here. Coding passion is a deep cold analytic burn that is nothing like what people assume it to be. It typically is a reflection of the interest you have in the project not the product. Most developers can hate what they work on and do incredible work if they love what they are doing minute to minute.

No I won't be a passionate evangelist about spreadsheets, but I could get happily lost in the codebase for Google Docs. People code for 48 hours when lost in the happy delirium of discovering some new problem, that's passion. However it might have nothing to do with their personal investment for the finished product. In fact they likely really enjoy the challenge of fixing something broken more than seeing it run once fixed.

Putting passion on a job spec is really quite unreasonable, but it seems easier than saying single minded to a fault and willing to sacrifice personal health to do a bit more hacking.

<comment><USER2> I might stay up late coding for something like a CTF, but I'm fully aware that what I'm pushing out is something that just barely qualifies in one metric ("it runs!"), and it will be totally unmaintainable even by me the next day.

But I limit my professional work hours because it demands a long-term quality. Some other poor guy might come by and need to figure out what I did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Indeed, the word "passionate" with reference to programming is going the same way as "free" has gone for marketing; over-used and misrepresented to the point of being meaningless.

On the plus side, it means that the class of employers who advertise their vacancies in this fashion become easier to identify and avoid. Or exploit.

<comment><USER18> wizard -> guru -> ninja -> rockstar -> passionate programmer. Just be thankful that it doesn't take too long for these kind of labels to get watered down, overused, and then dumped for the next buzzword.

<comment><USER17> [https://twitter.com/KiwiCoder/status/314501152760815616](https://twitter.com/KiwiCoder/status/314501152760815616)

<comment><USER19> Not sure if you're being serious, but you just said the opposite of what mrspeaker did. Those are -> and not >

He's implying the whole thing is meaningless buzzwords while you seem to imply they actually have a ranking or something (and no they do not).

<comment><USER20> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I, too, am starting to hate the way "passionate" is casually tossed around in our industry. When I see phrases like "passionate about multi-level marketing", I kinda throw up in my mouth a little.

<comment><USER22> >> When I see phrases like "multi-level marketing", I kinda throw up in my mouth a little.

Fixed that for you

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've always read "passionate" in job posts as "excited about learning better methods, technologies, and tools" and "not satisfied with the status quo, and continually making things better." Neither of these require an insane commitment outside work, or necessarily makes you easier to take advantage of.

People who have "paid their dues" by going to school and learning one language, and then _never_ update their skills unless forced to do exist, and working with them sucks. You're always fighting a "but such and such already works!" attitude. Programming by flipping switches on computers made using vacuum tubes worked. Thankfully someone wasn't satisfied and wanted something better.

</comment><comment><USER24> I almost entirely agree with this post.

Every place I have worked, I have consistently been among the most performant. I am relied upon to solve many of the hardest problems, despite my age, because I have a track record of learning enough to solve them very, very quickly. I will find myself thinking about the current problems my team faces, as well as odds and ends and interesting behavior in the languages, frameworks, etc, that we use, even outside of work hours. I love learning and teaching new technologies, and am frequently the one to introduce new tech into projects at work (along with giving talks to teammates about how it works).

However, I have never worked more than 40 hours a week.

If there was a dire emergency due to things failing in production, and I had hit my 40 hour limit, I'd not -mind- spending time investigating/fixing it, but I would not tolerate a workplace that expected it outside of that kind of issue.

When I play with code outside of work, it's usually to learn something, not write something useful. I have almost nothing on Github because most of what I've done outside of it has been things that already have solutions out there; I just want to learn more about the problem, rather than seeing some deficiency in the existing solution.

I don't consider myself 'passionate', as such. Coding is something I try to keep compartmentalized; I may allow it to come up in conversation when it's contextually relevant, but I actively try and avoid talking about it, and I don't feel any need to spend inordinate amounts of time on it outside of working hours.

And yet there's this demand for passionate programmers. Which, yes, seems to come from companies that expect you to put the code above all else. You see it in their perks; food and gyms and doctors and sleeping pods, why do you even need to go home, you can stay here! No, I want work/life balance, and to have that balance I need separation.

This definitely feels like a bind; I have to cross companies out like Google and such, because I don't want to work at a place that seems to have the expectation I should stay at work beyond 8 hours. And I likely wouldn't be hired even if I pretended to ignore that feeling, as I don't feel any inclination to fake interviews any more. "How would you solve (algorithm question typical of interviews, but which I don't remember offhand how to solve)?" "I would Google it, as that sounds like the kind of thing others have solved, and there's no way I'll be able to come up with as good a solution in 20 minutes, on a whiteboard, as I'd find online in 5" "But what if you didn't have the internet available to you?" "I would work on constructing the internet, then, nevermind your problem, because I've apparently time traveled to before it existed and there's money to be made". "Fine, but just, how would you solve -this- problem, if it wasn't already solved?" "Probably go sit by myself to mull it over a while." "But I want you to solve it right now." "Why? It's research material; no one else has ever solved it, apparently, I can't just write out how to do it in such a case." "Well, we really think you ought to be able to." "Yeah? I guess we're done here."

<comment><USER25> Granted, I was only an intern there, but I never got the impression from Google that they really wanted people to stay all day. By 7 at night, my floor was a ghost town (suitable for intern Nerf wars).

<comment><USER24> Yeah, it may not be; I just find amenities on site, rather than pay and benefits that transfer off site, makes me uneasy. Some of my perks require remaining at work = incentive to remain at work = harder to maintain work/life balance.

I mentioned Google only because it's famous for the amenities provided at the Mountain View facility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Like so many things, I have mixed feelings about this.

I don't have a problem with the word "passionate" and I could understand an employer who genuinely desires that.

Problem is, I don't think most people actually want anything of the sort. More likely, I think they're just following the fad of grandiose overblown adjectives and mimicking the motions of "only the best" interviewing of companies whose trajectories they'd love to emulate.

The typical 201X boilerplate sums it up nicely:

 _"Are you passionate about technology? Do you write beautiful code? Come help us change the world."_

I'd wager most organizations shouldn't want much less need someone with passion in more than a handful of positions - more like competent, hard workers who will execute the vision put before them.

In my experience, unless the stars have aligned, passionate people are a horrible choice for most roles. Their passion is not some simple resource that can be redirected efficiently into whatever management cares about, it's an intense, consuming, emotional drive with all the massive potential negatives those words suggest.

Good luck getting even average performance out that passionate someone on a project they don't believe in and duck for cover when they deem the CTO / founder is a fool driving the organization in the wrong direction.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think passionate and enthusiastic is overused word without meaning. For me it even has negative tone.

Too often it is used for greenhorn with no skills, while veterans with deep knowledge are branded in negative way. Someone who is 'passionate' is usually badly treated and works for peanuts.

</comment><comment><USER28> Sometimes words just seem to get overused by everyone at the same time. In the UK at the moment, every single cookery and bakery program insists their recipe will give you the PERFECT X, where X is cake, meal, dinner party. We can't just make great food, it has to be perfect.

<comment><USER29> I think cookery programmes feed the voyeur in their viewers and nobody really tries to make their own cooking 'perfect'.

Maybe this is just a UK thing - where perfection is appreciated for a nanosecond and then everyone's back to looking for risqué jokes in everything (hence, the 'soggy bottom' meme in that baking show - which btw is hosted by a a well known satirical comedienne whose apparently mild comments have an undercurrent of loathing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's because for recruiting, passionate means: we want people able to be overworked and still keep a good mood.

</comment><comment><USER31> When I write "passionate" in a job ad, I mean for the person to be enthusiastic about code /programming.

We have different teams in my company. Some require people who chose to become a programmer for the pay, who may not care so much if they write the same code day in and day out, who uses the computer only at work and cares more for Facebook than hackernews.

Some teams require passionate programmers - the kind who finds _good_ solutions, that makes sure that the code is better when they commit, not worse and who prefers to read about technology rather than gossip in their spare time.

It's not about putting 80 hours a week into the job, it's about being an expert in programming. It's not about being passionate for the product neither, because the job they will do is often product agnostic.

</comment><comment><USER32> Avdi's overanalyzing it. Everybody's simply using the word to mean `enthusiastic` these days. And I don't think it's the primary things companies want -- they definitely want to appear enthusiastic/passionate about their products to their customers (cuz enthusiasm sells if customers can't truly assess the quality of what they're getting), but as long as their employees are doing a great job on the inside of the company, who cares if they're super passionate/enthusiastic. It's the job of the sales people to put the passion gloss on the final product. Enthusiasm on the inside doesn't even necessarily mean `better work results`. Enthusiasm pushes you farther but it won't magically make up for lack of skills.

<comment><USER33> >Avdi's overanalyzing it. Everybody's simply using the word to mean `enthusiastic` these days.

He may indeed be "overanalyzing" it. But a _lot_ of developers to that. How many people have to agree with you on a subjective matter before "overanalyzing" becomes "seeing the obvious?"

Developers and their hysterics, I tell you! Why, the simple creatures are simply unfit for the business world at large! Hush dear, you've been overanalyzing again.

The problem with "passionate" is that it's a leap of faith for the developer to make, that the company hasn't earned. What if they come in, "passionately" develop the product with no thought of personal health or career risk, and then see the company shed it when it becomes advantageous to do so? Passion, it seems, only flows one way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I am so glad someone posted this.

I am personally NOT passionate about programming.

I am passionate about creating things!

It seems counter to evolution and human nature to be passionate about staring at a computer monitor all day long in sensory deprivation.

The problem with tech is that it encourages unbalanced people and unhealthy lifestyles due to the unreasonable expectations of knowledge acquisition placed on your average programmer.

And you get bizzare mole people in China who just program all day and google cultures where you live at the office and code.

I don't know what the solution is. We seem to be good at making other peoples lives more efficient but we can't make our own lives more efficient.

</comment><comment><USER35> I agree that the overuse of "passion" in programming job ads is kind of silly. The only thing about job ads that's bothers me more is when recruiters say "work on hard/challenging/exciting/fun/important problems". Simply because 99% of the time their "hard problems" are neither hard nor real problems. These are problems that our community of developers has created for ourselves though. Since a lot of developers choose to change jobs every year or two the recruiters have to use phrases that spark an interest in candidates.

<comment><USER36> We need a rating system for recruiters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have the utmost respect for Avdi, but I think he's being way too pedantic here. It's just a word.

Literally no one ever who has written "passion" in a programming job description has demanded an uncontrollable, foaming-at-the-mouth desire to to work on their project lest ye be fired at once.

</comment><comment><USER38> Hyperbole. Words like "awesome" and "incredible" have also lost their original meaning and power. Things can't just be "good" or "moderately enthusiastic" anymore - it sounds too weak, and doesn't cut through the noise these days.

</comment><comment><USER39> Ugh. "I'm going to fixate on this one word, get completely pedantic about the semantics of the word and use it as the basis of my argument."

If I were this guy and I was looking for a job, I'd be less worried about not having enough passion. I'd be sweating the fact that I can't parse the meaning of a word based on the context it's used in. That's a pretty valuable skill to have as a programmer. I'd be worried about being overly pedantic about things - most people don't want to work with a pedant who can't see beyond strict definitions.

<comment><USER40> _shrug_ , as i've grown older i've learned that language matters. And i've seen enough of these so called naive "passionate programmers" who get exploited by management into working much longer and harder than they are getting paid for(and not taking vacation time), to think that he has a point.

The language we use is part of establishing a culture that can have a meaningful effect. Drilling into employees that a good programmer is passionate about his job breaks down work/non-work boundaries over time.

Another similar example of this is startup founders using the pressure they are under and fear of company failure to "inspire" the salaried+options employees to work harder. When in reality most salaried employees at startups have much less at stake than the founders and can usually find another job if things go south.

<comment><USER2> I get the desire to not want clock-punchers. But I've seen all variety of teams bust their collective ass to get a product working as good as it could. (And then grind to a stop in 5 minutes when management sends an email saying they have to work overtime.) This was without trying to only hire people willing to dump in massive overtime.

I don't think getting developers to bust their ass is something you can recruit. I think it's something you can cultivate by making it clear that the developers' product is valued.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is a strong selectivity bias regarding the source of job descriptions being quoted from: Look at the average software development job listing on Monster and similes and you'll find the standard banal, career-programmer targeting lists of technologies and middle-of-the-road expectations.

I also don't think "passion" means either that you're Jesus Christ (where the term "the Passion" means "to suffer", not that he was really into it), or that you must love the code more than your child. But many of us have written or encountered code that feels so elegant and perfect that we get giddy with enthusiasm about it. We've used tools and technologies that seem so game changing that we evangelize them enthusiastically.

That is passion, and it is absolutely real. Some people have it, and many people don't.

None of that says anything about whether it's a good hire trait or not, and it's possible if not probable that many positions do not need, and may even suffer from, a passionate developer.

<comment><USER41> > But many of us have written or encountered code that feels so elegant and > perfect that we get giddy with enthusiasm about it.

For all the companies out there who _say_ they want a passionate programmer, I doubt many of them are really prepared to actually _manage_ one. People with this kind of passion are not motivated by anything you can give them and it takes a lot of coaxing to get their activities to line up with your business requirements.

They could knock out your entire application in a week, and spend the next six months doing absolutely nothing of importance. And there's nothing you can do about it.

<comment><USER42> This is a very insightful comment.

I'm a passionate programmer but I've felt kind of like a fish out of water for most of my career.

I feel as though I could run at least 100% more effectively if I found the right organisation that harnessed this passion. The work wouldn't even need to be mega exciting - just the right combination of process, tools, culture etc.

I think I do OK for my clients, but the high notes I hit are on my own projects and freelancing work.

<comment><USER41> I don't have any clear answers for you. I personally like the situation where I'm the only programmer in my domain at the entire organization. It gives me stability in the form of a salary, latitude because I'm the only one who knows how to translate the requirements into working code.

The stakes are small, but I get a lot of free time because prior poor business decisions are forcing them to keep a full-time guy for a workload that really could be handled by a part-time contractor. I can spend lots of time being cautious and focusing on implementation details. Also screwing around and browsing HN.

I don't get paid what a full time Rails dev should be getting paid in this job market, but the intangibles I've managed to wring out of the arrangement make it worth it.

Eventually I'd like to find/train a sales guy to line up deals and another code guy like you to help me implement them. But for now I like where I am.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Seemingly innocuous virus can trigger celiac disease - <AUTHOR> https://news.uchicago.edu/article/2017/04/06/seemingly-innocuous-virus-can-trigger-celiac-disease <comment><USER2> It doesn't surprise me that much.

Polio looks like an ordinary "stomach flu" virus but occasionally you get an autoimmune response to it that damages your nervous system.</comment>


Robert Darnton defended the digital, while still savoring the printed - <AUTHOR> http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/05/robert-darnton-closes-the-book/ N.B., although this article is mainly about Darnton's more recent work as Harvard's University Librarian and as an advocate for open access, among historians he's probably most celebrated for his 1984 book The Great Cat Massacre. Also, the title makes it seems like this is an obituary; in fact he's just retiring.<p>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Cat_Massacre <comment><AUTHOR> N.B., although this article is mainly about Darnton's more recent work as Harvard's University Librarian and as an advocate for open access, among historians he's probably most celebrated for his 1984 book The Great Cat Massacre. Also, the title makes it seems like this is an obituary; in fact he's just retiring.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Cat_Massacre](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Cat_Massacre)</comment>


GitHub down - <AUTHOR> https://status.github.com/graphs/past_day <comment><USER2> My favourite part of this is the "All systems operational" in green at the top. Yet, all systems are clearly not operational.

<comment><USER3> Didn't Github comment on their blog recently [1] on how they were improving and reducing failure detection times? Doesn't speak well for them if it's first on Hacker News and not their own Status page.

tl;dr; > One of the biggest customer-facing effects of this delay was that status.github.com wasn't set to status red until 00:32am UTC, eight minutes after the site became inaccessible. We consider this to be an unacceptably long delay, and will ensure faster communication to our users in the future.

EDIT: "We're investigating some issues with our databases".

[1] [https://github.com/blog/2106-january-28th-incident- report](https://github.com/blog/2106-january-28th-incident-report)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have the feeling that this is happening more and more these days. And it's a mayor problem when a large part of your infrastructure is depending on services like Github (composer, etc.)

<comment><USER5> It's kind of ironic when one realizes that one of the major design goals of git was to be distributed, to reduce dependency on a single point of failure.

<comment><USER6> GitHub isn't really a single point of failure. You could easily keep working on your branches and/or forks and re-sync once the server is back up.

<comment><USER5> That's definitely true, but PRs, comments and bug reports are not distributed, nor are many bridges between Github and external tools (issue trackers like JIRA/Trello, build-servers). This might seem pedantic, but it creates an asymmetry: commits and branches distributed, as opposed to PRs and comments.

<comment><USER7> Fossil[1] is a distributed scm with a distributed bug tracker, and distributed wiki.

[1] [https://www.fossil-scm.org](https://www.fossil-scm.org)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do we really need a new thread every time GH is down for 5 minutes?

Also, please use GitLab.

<comment><USER9> Any Git hosting provider as large as GH is also likely to go down once in a while. The bigger your scale is the more difficult it is to get nines.

<comment><USER10> I dunno, I'd see it as the opposite. The bigger the scale the more cost effective it is to have more redundancy. I can't remember the last time Google search wasn't working or saw news about it being down.

The fact that github keeps going down while being a huge business shows they still need to work on having more redundancy, something that's expected of big services like theirs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's clearly a case of misrepresenting the status as on [https://status.github.com/messages](https://status.github.com/messages)

The graph on [https://status.github.com/](https://status.github.com/) specifies the app server availability as 95.5017% for the _day_.

      24*60*(100-95.5071)/100 = 64.69776 minutes

</comment><comment><USER12> Github daily status chart, 2016

[https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/25f38b08](https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/25f38b08)

Source [https://status.github.com/api.json](https://status.github.com/api.json) -> Daily Summary

</comment><comment><USER13> 01:56 Mountain Daylight Time "We're investigating some issues with our databases"

</comment><comment><USER14> my favorite single point of failure /s

</comment><comment><USER15> A shame... And the github status webpage says everything is fine.

</comment><comment><USER16> I guess it's up now.

</comment><comment><USER17> Ir works for me

<comment><USER18> Up for me too, all systems seem to be operational. Located in Europe if that matters, not sure how GitHub is geographically distributed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, this is a good excuse to not do any work</comment>


Intel patches remote hijacking vulnerability that lurked in chips for 7 years - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/05/intel-patches-remote-code-execution-bug-that-lurked-in-cpus-for-10-years/ <comment><USER2> 7 years ?????? WTF intel !</comment>


Ask HN: Saw a really cool portfolio yesterday on HN... - <AUTHOR>

Can HN help me find it? It was a Show HN web design portfolio...like, "This is how you showcase your portfolio in web design." Particularly, you were able to navigate with your up+down+left+right keys. I wanted to bookmark and look at it again. Thanks. <comment><USER2> Might have been this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7234182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7234182)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that is it! THANKS! I just couldn't find it in my history, wishing I bookmarked it.</comment></comment>


Live: Edward Snowden at 33C3 via Video Link - <AUTHOR> http://streaming.media.ccc.de/33c3/hall1 <comment><AUTHOR> It just ended.</comment>


Kemal: Fast, Simple Web Framework for Crystal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kemalcr/kemal <comment><USER2> What's the difference between Kemal and [https://github.com/manastech/frank](https://github.com/manastech/frank) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Kemal started as a fork of Frank later turned into an organization of its own. The differences of Kemal are being maintained and more complete (not just for PoC).

P.S: It's still under heavy development.</comment></comment>