Ask HN: Improve my programming methodology, next steps - <AUTHOR> I have been programming various scientific tools for near five years. Some of my larger programs can have up to 1000 lines of code, including defining functions.  I would like to break up my programs into more manageable chunks, ideally creating smaller programming tools I can call on to solve a particular class of problems. Ideally, I would like to be able to share my programs with my teammates.
HN, is there an ideal structure for building a "tool set" of programs? What are some books or online courses that illustrate how to set up programs?  Best practices?
Any direction is appreciated.  If it matters, I am mainly using python. <comment><USER2> 1\. Typically you'd start building up libraries with shared code, and then your command-line tools can be smaller and rely on the shared code. A good starting point is just looking at Python libraries you use and tools you use and see how they're structured.

2\. Sharing with coworkers depends on toolchain you're using. E.g. for conda you could probably do a conda source, for pip you can just `pip install [http://urltotarball.gz`](http://urltotarball.gz`) or even URL to git repository.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looking at the scipy directory, I see how they've organized their data. What I'm missing is how everything is connected. Any tips on educational material teaching how to connect all the pieces? For example, to use scipy, I know I need to import it. What I don't know is what happens behind the scenes that allows the imported module to connect to everything else.</comment></comment>


Researchers Exploit Cloud Browsers to do Anonymous, Large-Scale Computing - <AUTHOR> http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/researchers-exploit-cloud-browsers-do-anonymous-large-scale-computing-112812

<comment><USER2> Link to original paper: <http://adl.csie.ncu.edu.tw/~jhhe/doc/bmr.pdf>

They implemented map and reduce in separate js files and used bit.ly to store the intermediate results.</comment>


LA Weekly reveals its new owners - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-la-weekly-20171201-story.html <comment><USER2> Related: Gustavo Arellano, the former editor of OC Weekly, discussing the structural quandary faced by alt-weeklies: [http://reason.com/archives/2017/11/04/the-death-of-the- alt-w...](http://reason.com/archives/2017/11/04/the-death-of-the-alt-weekly- as-told-by-a)

</comment><comment><USER3> >He said the weekly will rely on stories written by full-time staffers, freelancers and unpaid contributors who are passionate about their communities.

I imagine the quality moving forward will depend on what sort of mixture of these 3 contributor types there are.

<comment><USER4> Buy out publication, fire all the writers, get high school kids or interns to write everything... profit?

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DQFBGtoUEAA- Zao.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DQFBGtoUEAA-Zao.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Meh. The LA Weekly was over about 20 years ago when they purged all their real journalists.

<comment><USER4> are archives available?

LA Weekly still had better instigative journalists than the times.

<comment><USER5> I imagine if you go to LAPL Main Branch, they'll have it on some analog medium like microfilm/microfiche.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are you skeptical about the official corona narrative? - corona-research Stanford professor John Ioannidis called the pandemic a "once in a century evidence fiasco" because there are multiple strange problems with the data presented to the general public:<p>- The total number of positive test results induces fear but is pointless.<p>- Number of positive tests without a relation to the testing volume is pointless.<p>- More testing, more false positives. There are few true positives so the effective false positive rate is relatively high. At this point, perhaps even more than 50% of positives are false positive.<p>- Everyone who had a positive test is counted as a "covid death". Irregardless of the actual cause of death.<p>- Without random sampling we cannot measure the actual severity.<p>- Multiple independent studies have shown that Covid-19 is comparable to the seasonal flu. There is no extremely deadly killer virus.<p>- Lockdowns damage the economy brutally, unemployment rates and suicides increased drastically<p>- Trillions of dollars are printed to "reduce" the damage<p>- Hospitals aren't full but rather empty.<p>What do you think? Does all that make sense to you? <comment><AUTHOR> _Hospitals aren't full but rather empty._

My wife is an ICU nurse. Her hospital on a regular day last year had 19 ICU beds, with half of them occupied at any given time. These are beds for patients who require level 2 or 3 support...basically constant monitoring by a nurse with specialized training, and support for respiratory or 2 or more failing organ systems. Not all nurses are certified for this level of care (CCRN certification), and there is a limit to the amount of equipment needed for a bed on this floor (you've heard of ventilator shortages).

Fast forward to today. Her hospital expanded from 19 beds that used to be 50% utilized to 38 beds that are 95% utilized. That leaves only 2 open beds in the ICU. So if 10 people get hospitalized for COVID-19, and 3 of them have to go to the ICU, 1 will have to be transferred to another hospital. The rest of the hospital is pretty empty. The elective surgery clinic, allergy clinic, hearing clinic, orthopedic clinic...these are all closed. The emergency department is also open. So a hospital that normally has a few hundred beds seems empty, but the ICU that normally has 10 patients has more than triple that. It is a contradiction that the hospital is both empty and over capacity at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER2> CDC estimates 35K US deaths from the flu last year. Most people got the flu in some form or another.

We're more than triple the number of deaths from Covid, and we just don't know who's gotten it and who hasn't yet.

It has a wide range of effects, most seem to not know it happened, a few are killed quickly, and in between a bunch are debilitated for a couple of weeks. I haven't noticed having it, I know people who have. Extended family has died from it.

The transmissibility and the wide range of responses confounds everyone who can only handle simple rules about what to think and do.

I agree that many of the published stats are not that useful, and the sledgehammer shutdowns needed to be careful fine-grained tracking and harm control. None of the points above relate to the narrative, though, but rather to bits and pieces of stuff. We, supposedly the richest nation on earth, cannot get our act together to test effectively or treat effectively. Lockdown damage, ineffective travel bans at the beginning (ban travel, but with tons of sentimental exceptions? No ban at all, really) is self-inflicted harm.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> _Everyone who had a positive test is counted as a "covid death". Irregardless of the actual cause of death._

This is not true. Or, more accurately, it is not more true about COVID-19 than other diseases. If someone tests positive for COVID-19 and then has a car accident, the cause of death does not add to the COVID-19 death count. As was the case before COVID-19, the physician fills out the death certificate with the immediate cause of death and the circumstances leading up to that immediate cause. There are some cases where the cause of death is not entirely clear, but this was the case long before COVID-19. Examples would include George Floyd, who had a knee pressed on his neck, exacerbated by heart disease and diabetes. The official cause of death was "cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression" despite the fact that he tested positive for coronavirus.

<comment> corona-research The WHO recommends to label everyone as a c19 death who was tested positively within the last month. They say they explicitly want to overestimate the number of deaths because they don't want to underestimate it to be on the save side.

Additionally, the relatively high false-positive rate leads to an even higher overestimate.

Also aren't there massive financial incentives for clinics to label someone as a c19 death? IIRC an ICU bed for a c19 patient costs 5-10x more per day than for other patients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Citation missing (for claims regarding numbers and "independent studies").

<comment> corona-research I was referring to Ioannidis' meta study analyzing 24 studies on c19's IFR

[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v3)

<comment><AUTHOR> From your link:

 _This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [1]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice._

[1]Readers should therefore be aware that articles on medRxiv have not been finalized by authors, might contain errors, and report information that has not yet been accepted or endorsed in any way by the scientific or medical community.

<comment> corona-research Ioannidis is one of the most cited researchers ever. In particular he's famous for debunking bogus science with accurate statistics. He's absolutely among the top epidemiologists in the world.

Bro, it's ridiculous to try to downplay his analysis without even trying to understand it. XD

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it more likely to be a vast global conspiracy involving such unlikely co- conspirators as the prime minister of new zealand and the POTUS ... or a chaotic and rapidly evolving situation?

<comment> corona-research Maybe it's just an echo chamber of misaligned incentives?</comment></comment>


Computer Games Better Than Medication in Treating Elderly Depression - <AUTHOR> http://www.livescience.com/47209-computer-games-depression-older-adults.html?cmpid=514645 <comment><USER2> 2 hours a week? I guess I'm set for a few hundred years with of mental work.

Although if I had to guess this would probably be more related to elderly people doing mental work that stimulates new connections. If a young person today who had been playing games their whole life were to try it when they were old it probably wouldn't have the same effect because they would be so used to those mental stimulation.

Just a thought from a person who knows nothing about this field.

<comment><USER3> The improvement effect might be smaller but perhaps persisting in game playing would keep those pathways from atrophying.

Plus, I imagine by the time the first video game cohort (today's late 30s?) are in their 70s that the way we interact with and play computer games may not be anywhere near the same physical experience.

If by 2050 I don't have a holodeck I'm going to be pissed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You would expect this, because SSRIs perform no better than placebo except in cases of extreme depression.

[http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=185157](http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=185157)

<comment><USER5> That paper just says that the effects of SSRIs scale with with the severity of depression, averaging an effect size of .2 greater than a placebo for people whose HAM-D is less than 23. That's a small effect, smaller than the placebo effect, but it's statistically significant and we're talking p < .0001 here. ALso, a HAMD of 23 can be called anything from "very severe" to "moderate" depending on who you ask.

But part of the reason you see such a small response is that according to [1] some people have significant positive responses to SSRIs but the average is brought down by people who have significant negative responses to SSRIs.

For more information about SSRIs and the controversy around them than you could possibly need, see here:

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/ssris-much-more-than- yo...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/ssris-much-more-than-you-wanted- to-know/)

[1][http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=11074...](http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1107437)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "In a study of 11 older patients"

Is that a big enough sample to draw any conclusions?

<comment><USER7> Studies are expensive, we wouldn't get anything done if we wait for all researches to be properly funded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Original article: [http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140805/ncomms5579/full/nco...](http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140805/ncomms5579/full/ncomms5579.html)

It seems like they are currently preparing a study comparing the efficacy of computer games and general computer work with regard to reducing elderly depression: [http://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT01979289](http://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT01979289)

</comment><comment><USER9> Why should a medication which is designed to lift the symptoms but has nothing to do with the causes be better than a simplest CBT, even if it is mere distraction?

<comment><USER3> Money aside, because it's the symptoms that bother people, not the cause. Most people just want relief.

<comment><USER9> Ignoring of the causes is called ignorance - the cause of suffering.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I remember doing nothing but playing computer games in my deepest depression states.

<comment><USER11> I am the complete opposite in that my depression made it impossible for me to enjoy any kind of video games (and tv shows, movies and music).

<comment><USER7> That's a more severe depression. I been there (symptoms of a chronic disease), unfortunately.

<comment><USER11> Indeed. I was diagnosed 5 years ago (age 25) with recurrent major depressive disorder (aka chronic depression) along with PTSD (due to childhood abuse I only started to deal with in my twenties) and generalised anxiety disorder. While the anxiety problems were horrible the worst was chronic insomnia. I have taken part in a number of sleep studies in NHS and private hospitals and two universities as my sleep disorders were rated as "most severe" in that I would sleep for less than an hour per day over a 14 day period which led to all kinds of horrible things such as hallucinations and false memories. For a while I was diagnosed schizophrenic but that was a misdiagnosis as it was simply (ha!) down to exhaustion. I was on 50mg of Zolpidem (Ambien) a night but even that couldn't shut my brain off.

Thankfully my depression and other issues are much better now although I still find it close to impossible to sit down and play a game, watch a movie or read a book for some reason :( It is a great shame as I used to love playing video games as a kid/teen. It is horrible not being able to enjoy something you used to love. It is almost like that part of my brain is been switch off and I can't find the on switch anymore.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for speaking up. Doctors work between their boundaries, that includes giving medication based on symptoms profiling and comparing those with previous cases or just their medical training, unfortunately that sometimes backfires against understanding some individual case and therefore its treatments and diagnostic. You have to read for yourself everything about your disorder, your symptoms, and its treatment.

I would suggest you to responsibly try two medications, one is Duloxetine, the symptoms you describe (about the sleeping part)are very similar to mine, I coulnd't sleep, I couldn't sit and watch a movie even when trying to force myself to do so, and worst yet, I couldn't enjoy music, and I used to listen music all day long. I would wake up at night sweating for no reason. It may or it may not work for you but is surely worth a try. Just start with one single 30 mg at night, if you see improvements a couple of months later you can start using 60mg; of course if you don't see improvements just stop taking it. If you are taking any anti-depressants better read first about any possible reaction between that and Duloxetine.

The other medication that helps my brain be very focused is Modafinil, lost of focus is one of the symptoms of my chronic disease (Fibromialgy) and it helps greatly on that matter, it also helps a bit with the mood, it is usually taken by people with narcolepsy, a common sleep disorder. Is also taken by healthy people who needs to stay awake for long periods, such as combat pilots and overnight workers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> SPARX is a game from New Zealand designed to teach basic CBT techniques to teens.

[http://www.beckinstituteblog.org/2012/04/a-computerized- cogn...](http://www.beckinstituteblog.org/2012/04/a-computerized-cognitive- behavioral-therapy-intervention-for-adolescents/)

There's a niche in the market.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd be interested to know what their lifestyle is, are they spending the majority of their lives watching insipid TV? (That would certainly be enough to depress me...)

</comment><comment><USER14> there's also this research about casual games seducing depression and anxiety:

[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/123495/Study_Finds_Casual...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/123495/Study_Finds_Casual_Games_Reduce_Depression_Anxiety_Symptoms.php)

The key question is why:is it only the distraction ,because its known that distraction is helpful against depression , or is also something else ? and how best is to design such games ?

</comment><comment><USER15> Oh boy.. can't wait till my 12 yrs old kid hears about this! * So much for my "stop playing games all day long" ranting..

</comment><comment><USER16> Good to know that when I'm old, I'll be spending my time gaming again :)

APM will be less I guess, but so will that of my opponents.

</comment><comment><USER17> Oncoming depression, burnout and stress. Let me play for 2 days and I'm good as new.

</comment><comment><USER18> Outstanding potential for technology! Who says all these games are just mental candy?</comment>


PaintbrushJS : Browser-based Image processing JavaScript library - <AUTHOR> http://www.jqueryrain.com/2012/10/paintbrushjs-browser-based-image-processing-javascript-library/

<comment><USER2> Reminds me of Pixastic (<http://www.pixastic.com/lib/>).

It'd be interesting to implement all those effects as WebGL shaders (massive speed boost) and to use the "pure" JavaScript implementations as fallbacks.</comment>


Show HN: Bootstrapped for 11 weeks - landing page (want feedback) - <AUTHOR>

Grooovy is a bootstrapped app in its 11th week. We came from a non-technical background and about to launch Grooovy as our first iPhone App. Would like to get all the support and feedback we can get.
What would you change about the landing page?
Thanks HN!
link:  www.grooovy.me <comment><USER2> Change the appearance of "GROOOVY FOR IPHONE" and "WE'RE LAUNCHING SOON." at the top there. It's a landing page which is supposed to advertise your service and get people excited. You have a neat logo, maybe consider putting that up instead of mimicking the Arial all-caps font you have displaying your main content.

I actually didn't realize at first you could "scroll" from step to step ... I thought the '>' arrow next to the e-mail input was supposed to mean "input your e-mail, then we'll show you the rest!". People like to know what they're signing up for before giving away personal information, right? So my suggestion is make the steps more obvious, i.e. put them all on one page or have a way to scroll through the steps with the e-mail input always visible so potential users can sign up the moment they are interested!

Hope that helped and best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> You 'buried the lead' in the html head title tag -- "Create friendships in 5 steps" isn't on any of the pages.

You might consider a condensed version that has the 5 steps on one page, with just the headings (not all the explanation text), and the call to action.

This seems more like a guided tour for someone that wants more information, when you've perhaps got their interest, it will be great for that on your launched website. Even then, you might want to change "step 1" to "step 1 of 5", etc, to let them know it isn't open-ended, and maybe emphasize your 5 step value proposition.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fantastic advice. Never thought about the step 1 of 5 at all.

I was hoping that the "Join and Create Events" paragraph would have sufficed for the condensed version with all 5 steps. I was running out of space in the design as I decided to provide support for 1024x768 browsers.

I'll make a note of the html title tag- nice catch. Thanks for your feedback!

<comment><USER3> >I was hoping ...

OK, I can see that now -- I think as highlighted points instead of a paragraph, this would be clearer.

And "Grooovy - Create Friendships in 5 Steps" is more impactful and piques more interest (my opinion) as a headline than "Grooovy Lets You Meet New Friends Comfortably at Your Own Pace."

Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Design wise, it's very clean and clear. People know what to do when they get there. I think it's ready, now comes the hard part. Marketing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Marketing is much harder than I ever imagined. Not even sure where to begin as tweeting and sharing all day hasn't really done much.

<comment><USER5> Contact relevant blogs (up to you to find which ones) and offer them a reason to post about it. A guy created an iphone app that was relevant to my website users, contacted me offering a few free downloads for my readers. I made an article about it (because I thought the app was cool) and then went around forums/reddit etc telling people the first 5 who would comment on that post would get the app for free.

It's a large numbers game... from my blog maybe 1,000 people read the article and of those maybe 20 bought the app.. but the ones who bought it probably recommended it to their friends etc..

contact 50 blogs, it's time better spent than twitting IMHO

<comment><AUTHOR> Point well made. I'll see if I'm able to contact blogs and see if they would be interested in writing an article about it when the beta's out. I'll offer early testing of the beta so if they do decide to talk about it, they can. I'll start gathering a list. Thank you for the great feedback- very helpful! What's your blog about? Any links?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a landing page, the only thought you should give it is what is the fastest path to deleting it and launching.

<comment><AUTHOR> It might only be a landing page- but I still find it important to generate as leads as possible. We're the type of app that requires a decent number of registrants in order to be fully utilized.

Launchingwise, we're already working hard on that. This landing page will also convert to become the product page after the app launches so feedback would still be appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Get a new domain name.

<comment><USER8> Agreed, I went to groovy.me, and didn't notice the third o until I saw the groovy.me site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the honest input! I'm not too worried about the extra o' in the domain name at this point. We're bootstrapped so we need to make sure that we're dedicating our resources towards the more critical areas for now. But i'll definitely look into it soon.

Does the domain dribbble.com also make you want to enter dribble.com at first glance?

<comment><USER3> This was pretty good on naming, the resources:

[http://thenextweb.com/2008/10/13/the-15-dumbest-names-for- we...](http://thenextweb.com/2008/10/13/the-15-dumbest-names-for- web-20-startups/0/)

I agree with the comment above on the name, I think many will simply not see the third letter mid-word in both cases. It's probably something with visual perception where you see what you expect, not what is there (... maybe related to how folks miss their own typos ).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which job to take? - <AUTHOR>

I'm graduating with a CS degree, and have a couple job offers.  The choices basically boil down to working for IBM doing windows/java stuff, or working for a small web development company doing linux/python stuff.  Is it just crazy to turn down IBM for less money and (potentially) less career advancement opportunity?  Or could expanding my linux and python skills be a good choice in the long run?  I'm real conflicted about it and would like to hear from some people that have been there, done that. <comment><USER2> couple more things: did you like the people who interviewed at either position? did you get to meet the team? in the end it's the people you work with that you learn from the most. there are office-space like environments in big companies and there are highly dynamic environments in big companies; there are start-ups run by clueless wantaprenuer (sp?) business-types (where you'll just be expected to crank out low quality PHP code 80 hours a week) and there are truly innovative start-ups.

ignore the name of the company and the title, focus on the content of your work and the people you will be working with.

my first job out of college was doing operations at yahoo: i ended up learning a tremendous amount on the job and was almost _hunted_ by a start-up who came across me. my first real job (prior to college, junior year of high school) was doing similar work at start-up: the pay wasn't great and i ended up losing the job after the dot-com crash (which gave me a chance to go to college) but i got to work on real and interesting projects on the job which i could put on my resume and talk about at my yahoo! interview. the reason i mention my experiences is that big companies offer unique challenges (at yahoo it was a truly massive scale growing at an immense rate) and name recognition; smaller companies, on the other hand, are more able to take risks and put you on high responsibility projects that will also teach you a great deal.

lastly don't over think your decision and don't worry too much about making the wrong one. once you've made one stick with it and don't think too much of "what if i chose the other way". i am quite guilty of not following this advice (over thinking and going back and forth on decisions, regretting previous decisions, worrying too much about the future) and that has cost me a great deal of sleep, productivity and happiness. you're fresh out of college, this is the perfect time to make mistakes (whether it's joining a start-up that may end up tanking or going nowhere, or joining a company that you may end up leaving in a year due to lack of challenge).

<comment><AUTHOR> First of all, I don't know anything about python, my first experience with it was doing the django tutorial last week. The small firm said they use python specifically because they found PHP programmers to be so different in level of skill, and that python programmers were consistently pretty high. I can't vouch for any of that, but to me, it does say that they're concerned about hiring good people and not just anybody. The owner/founder has an active development role so I'm thinking he's not too much of a "clueless wantaprenuer". Hopefully :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You're foolish to turn down a job only if it's a job you really want. No position is so awesome it's perfect for everybody.

Most any job _can_ have interesting problems. That's a function of the problem space, and the freedom you have to explore solutions in it, not the platform/architecture they use.

I've worked at a (very) big company, a (very) small company, and in academia. If you're not sure what you prefer, maybe you should try several (in any order).

There's a lot of "how to write software" that you didn't learn in your CS degree, but you'll pick that up quick enough on any real-world project. I learned most of what I know on a solo project (and reading the c2.com wiki); most people I worked with at the big company still haven't figured it out.

Recent startup people I've talked to have been very interested in my small- company experience (even in a different field), and almost not at all in my big-company experience. Who do you want to impress? If you're thinking of doing a startup, tenure at IBM may not impress potential cofounders; if you want to work on device drivers at Microsoft, a web startup may not be the most relevant.

You will almost certainly have many, many jobs over your lifetime. Even if the one you pick today ends up being terrible for you, it's simply not possible to choose a job so bad from which you can't recover. Not even "Swiss Patent Clerk".

<comment><AUTHOR> "Even if the one you pick today ends up being terrible for you, it's simply not possible to choose a job so bad from which you can't recover. Not even "Swiss Patent Clerk"."

Excellent point. I hadn't really looked at it like that. Just getting started it feels like this job will determine the entire trajectory of my life but like you said, I can always change direction (relatively) easy later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd go for the IBM position, regardless of which pays more. For one thing, the advantage of working at a large established company is they'll teach you how to write software. There are a truly vast number of things about writing software professionally that a CS degree doesn't prepare you for.

You could do a lot worse than spending a couple of years at IBM. If your alternative is a web development company, you'll almost certainly be doing more interesting work there.

<comment><AUTHOR> I take it you mean more interesting work at IBM. That's what I was wondering. If I get to go to work and solve interesting problems every day I would be happy. I just know so little about it that I fear working at an Office Space type environment. If anybody reading this does or has worked at IBM I'd love to hear what you thought about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You will find that the greatest accomplishments in the world are often built upon solid foundations.

It's perfectly possible to go from college into a startup (or to skip the college part), but in general you will do better (and contribute more) in a startup when you have some experience in a large company. You may not want to retire from IBM, but it's good to see the good and bad bits about how a large organization is run.

The IBM job may or may not be there in another 5 years. There will always be some startup opportunity available.

<comment><USER6> I would actually argue the opposite: the IBM job (or some equivalent big- company job) will always be there. The startup opportunity at [name your startup here] is only available now.

Big company jobs tend to be alike in many ways (due to their size), whereas startups vary so significantly that it's deceptive to think of all startups as interchangeable.

So yes, there will always be _some_ startup opportunity available, but if you know that there are good people working at this one, or if they're working on interesting things, then I think it's a better option.

<comment><USER5> Companies like IBM tend to be most interested in finding high-ranking college grads to bring in. Additionally many startups appreciate and value someone who has solid experience at a large organization, coupled with a drive to do more.

Doing it the other way around (try a startup, then go to BigCo) is less optimal.

<comment><USER6> As one data point against your statement, from PG's "Hiring is Obsolete":

 _I asked managers at Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Cisco and Microsoft how they'd feel about two candidates, both 24, with equal ability, one who'd tried to start a startup that tanked, and another who'd spent the two years since college working as a developer at a big company. Every one responded that they'd prefer the guy who'd tried to start his own company._

<http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html>

<comment><USER5> Don't believe the OP was starting a company, he's coming in as an employee. Big difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I haven't faced this problem myself, but I have a few friends who've been in somewhat similar situations before. Most were more interested in the smaller company, but due to various reasons (rationalizations?), ended up picking the bigger company job (ibm/microsoft/amazon/google). Despite their stated intentions to only work for a few years to learn how things work in the "real world" and, of course, make some money, they seem to have no real intention of leaving now.

At the same time, with the exception of one of the Google people, none of them are particularly interested in the work they're doing. So it seems that earning the big money and having relatively stable, secure, and only slightly challenging jobs becomes a local maximum that is hard to escape from.

So while it's true that you'll probably have many jobs over your career and in the end what you choose may not matter as much as you might think, it does seem tougher to go from big company -> small startup than the other way.

Another data point (anecdote) about IBM specifically: I know 4 people who work (or have worked) at IBM, on the software-side of things. None of them says that it's very hard. One actually quit because he said it was ridiculous that everyone just constantly slacked off and nothing got done. On the other hand, the one person I know on the hardware side of things at IBM says that the work is interesting, challenging, and fairly busy.

</comment><comment><USER7> Do you know who you'll be working for at either job, and who you'll be working with? Are they personable? Are they knowledgeable? Will they be able to look at your work and tell you, in the simplest terms possible, how you fucked up?

Your first job is going to be, in the best case scenario, extremely humbling. Even if you can make major contributions to the project, you'll find a lot of your assumptions coming in will be silly and ill-founded. A lot of the things you'll learn will be independent of the language you're using, or the platform you're developing on.

Choose wherever you'll learn the most. Responsibilities matter more than titles and salary (modulo whatever you need to live comfortably), but these things aren't mutually exclusive.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm pretty sure I'm gonna learn an awful lot no matter which one I choose. The people I've met so far at both places were very smart and nice. I'm fortunate that judging on those criteria neither job is far ahead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Where are these positions located? Why do you care about "potentially less career advancement opportunity?" Do you want to do a startup, or do you want a career at a big company? We can't assume much from your post. Thanks! Also, what choice are you leaning towards, and why?

<comment><AUTHOR> What I want is to work on free software. The smaller python job offers that. What I'm not sure about is if it would be foolish to turn down IBM. I'm hoping other HN readers have been faced with this choice, or similar, and could tell me what decision they made and how it worked out for them. I don't have anything against working for a big company, but it was made pretty clear to me that at IBM I would be working on enterprise applications using java, among other technologies, on windows. I'm not really excited about working on proprietary software but this is my first job and I don't know what to expect. Is working on enterprise software challenging and exciting or am I going to spend all my time doing paperwork?

<comment><USER2> enterprise software has it's own challenges: you're dealing with software that has to be shipped to a customer, who may or may not want to upgrade/keep up to date the software (e.g. he may want to keep using an ancient version and yet want backwards compatibility). you have to follow a different development cycle: you can't just release too early and then fix it in production when bugs surface.

there's going to (usually, but not always) be more "process" overhead involved in enterprise software, although the goal of various agile methodologies is to lessen it and let you spend more time coding.

in short it's a different life cycle: someone else has clear requirements for the software (which you likely aren't going to be using yourself) that you have to deliver in a fixed time frame.

with consumer web applications the challenges are different: you don't have a specification document from your customers, you don't ship a copy to them. iterations are much quicker and you can always fix code once it's in production as it's running on your own servers. however, this is pretty much a 24/7 environment: you may not be carrying a pager, but you will be expected to be ready to fix the software at any hour of the night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> what do you mean "windows/java"? are they doing java in a windows vs. unix environment?

would there be chance for you to transition into doing linux/python stuff over at ibm (they certainly do a great deal of linux/python work)? ask them that up front.

also what matters a lot more than the tools/languages/systems you will be working on is -- if you want to do core software developlment -- whether you will be working on company's bread and butter or something which is only tangential and "nice to have"? are you going to be doing new development or merely fixing bugs (or doing operations)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well the IBM position sounds like it would be kind of an easy transition, that I would not be thrown into anything too tough right away. NOt that there aren't challenges there, but I would be able to ease into it a bit. Bug fix here, documentation there, slowly and steadily work up to more difficult problems. Which is fine by me. But ultimately it sounded like their main stack was windows and java. I'm sure they've got *nix boxes and python doing things, but the main stuff would be in java on windows.

Now this may be stupid, but to me, right now, I would rather learn more about linux and python than java and windows. In 3 - 5 years I would like to be a python wizard, not a java wizard. Is that short-sighted?

<comment><USER4> To some extent, yes, this is short sighted. Languages are all much of a muchness. A decade ago, Perl was the flavour of the month. All the hot new sites used it. Today the same niche is filled by Ruby, and Perl is something of a pariah amongst scripting languages (though still my first choice for anything that needs prototyping.) Whatever flavour of the month you happen to like today will inevitably describe the same arc. That's just the nature of the business.

The good news is that all these skills are transferable. Becoming a better Java programmer automatically makes you a better Python programmer, and vice versa.

What isn't transferable is domain knowledge. If you want to make something of yourself in this industry, you need to specialise in something. Learn everything there is to know about something, be it networking, writing compilers/virtual machines, security or operating system design, etc. If you don't, you're essentially doomed to a career of moving bytes from a to b, applying some trivial transform to them on the way. Which, incidentally, describes neatly the vast majority of web development.

<comment><USER2> that's a very good point (about domain knowledge), but it doesn't seem to be that IBM will give him the sort of domain knowledge he's looking for either. and perhaps the original poster doesn't know what domain knowledge to look for - as he hasn't been exposed to it yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why do you ask this? You already should know that, at IBM, you will be another brick in the wall. Do you need permission to do what you love?</comment>


Fluid interfaces and little objects - <AUTHOR> http://www.patmaddox.com/blog/fluid-interfaces-and-little-objects

<comment><USER2> The comparison of Ruby's Hash and Array classes to Java's collections API is not very relevant - first of all, the graph is from 1999 (there are more classes now), and secondly, Java's collections API does cover quite specific use cases which Ruby's Hash and Array classes don't (e.g. concurrent access.)

In Java, you could also always use List or HashMap without thinking about Sets, Trees, or weak references, but that's not the point; the Java collections API isn't an alternative to 'should I use Hash or Array', the use cases for the two APIs are completely different.</comment>


Getting started with UX design - <AUTHOR> http://rupachaturvedi.com/2012/02/05/getting-started-with-user-experience-design/ A simple "how-to" post to help start-ups get going with UX design. <comment><USER2> This has nothing to do with either getting started with ux or ux in general.

This is about a small subset of methodology excisting within the meta term ux.</comment>


Microsoft launches Surface Book 3 with new Nvidia GPU options - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/6/21247907/microsoft-surface-book-3-specs-price-release-date <comment><USER2> > It's disappointing to not see any design tweaks

Why ? So that manufacturers feel they have to change something, anything, to satisfy spec-only reviewers ? And then we end up with an apple keyboard fiasco ?

<comment><USER3> design tweaks like more than 1 usb-c port

<comment><USER2> While it's a good point I wouldn't call it a design tweak but an hardware improvement ^^.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For this price and the target market why are they not including TB3 and more ports? They are committed to keeping their users on their poorly designed dock connector when they are is a much better industry standard connector out there.

<comment><USER5> I love my SB1 although it's far from perfect. The dock connector does grow on you. Unlike USB-C, when someone trips over your cable the dock connector pulls free. The design of the SB1 means you can charge the tablet or keyboard independently with the same connector. And the $300 dock, while expensive, is better than any USB-C dock I've seen at providing a clutter-free desk with single attachment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Run Linux on Windows"

Really fascinating seeing this in an official Microsoft ad.

<comment><USER7> Anybody got any day-to-day practical stories of how this Linux layer generally is? I have the top tier Pixelbook bought on the promise of integrated Linux on secure hardware.

In reality it's crap, no FUSE, some GUI programs simply don't run, upgrades can trash your install, sporadic development attention from Google, and my 2015 MBP is an order of magnitude faster (wish I'd sprung for the 16Gb version though).

The new MBP without a touchbar would be a great replacement but the Book 3 has caught my attention. Love to hear stories from Mac->Windows refugees.

<comment><USER8> Hm, depends on what you need. WSL1 translates syscalls to NT, it's not a real Linux kernel, so probably no FUSE. Performance is good in general, but it's still NTFS underneath. I use it for SSH and FileZilla, with Debian. No breakage so far, even going from Debian 9 to 10.

WSL2 is basically a Linux VM on Hyper-V with some glue involved. It should be possible to make FUSE work there. I haven't really tried WSL2 yet.

You'll have to bring your own X server. I use VcXsrv.

<comment><USER9> So WSL1 was like a reverse Wine?

<comment><USER8> Yes, I think that's a valid way to put it. "is", though. Because WSL2 is so different, WSL1 will stay, for the time being. You can use both side-by-side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The most striking issue is that Thunderbolt 3 isn't available for this refresh. Even stranger is that the 15' doesn't have Wifi6 either (because it uses a AMD CPU)?

<comment><USER11> Both the 13" and 15" have WiFi6:

 _Wi-Fi 6: 802.11ax compatible

Bluetooth Wireless 5.0 technology

Xbox Wireless built-in (15" only)4_

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface- book-3/8xbw9g3z71f...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface- book-3/8xbw9g3z71f1)

Where do you see otherwise? You're talking about the Surface Book 3 right? Which is also Intel only currently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I always look at the Surface Book and want it to be my next laptop, but I feel like it is a jack of all trades that doesn't really excel in any one area - and therefore, I have a hard time justifying it over other machines.

Most powerful Surface ever? Sure, but the Macbook Pro 16" can give me double the cores at a similar pricepoint.

Gaming-class GPU? Yeah, but if I wanted a gaming laptop I'd probably want something with an RTX card in it. And if I didn't care about form factor, I'd build a desktop.

Detachable tablet? Interesting idea, but this feels highly impractical with the 15" version, which is the model I would get for maximum performance.

I think if I was a college student, this would be a fantastic device. A little bit of everything and the ability to type notes in OneNote or handwrite them when necessary. But as my daily driver for productivity, I think there are better options at a similar price point.

<comment><USER13> I used the original Surface Book (13in) as a college student for a year, and I think you are spot-on.

For me, as a student, it was a beautiful device. For that academic year, my notes were more impeccable and organized than I could have ever imagined my notes to be. OneNote is a pleasure to work with. Writing on Surface Book feels great. Downloading lecture pdfs/powerpoints and highlighting/annotating stuff on top of them was very useful. The machine ran fast enough for me to actually write code and use it as a normal machine too, with no limitations. As a daily driver, it was great.

But all the cons you listed were true as well. My current daily driver is a newer MBP, but I still eye Surface line all the time, hoping that one day it will get to the point where I would want to pick it up again as my daily driver.

<comment><USER12> I think it will take a hardware redesign at this point, which I hope comes with USB4 that allows them to break dock compatibility as well.

The 15 inch version doesn't need to detach. Just let it flip around like a ThinkPad X1 Yoga, therefore allowing you to put all of the compute stuff in the base as well. Go for 8 cores and give me the best mobile video card on the market and I'll buy one so fast.

<comment><USER13> Great point about flipping around vs. detaching.

During my year with a surface book, at no point I just detached the tablet and used it on its own. When I wanted a "tablet" mode, I would usually disconnect the tablet, turn it around, attach it, and then close. Which essentially flips it around and puts in the same position as X1 Yoga.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The Quatro RTX 3000 Max-Q should make these a nice and slim VR-capable laptop option! Nice change from the heavy bricks we've had to carry around until now.

<comment><USER15> Are the Quatro cards suitable for gaming? I've always been under the impression they tuned or modified more for use in CAD and similar applications

<comment><USER16> My understanding, at least in the past, is that it's the same hardware with different drivers. The drivers "guarantee" accurate rendering at cost of a bit of performance (maybe). At one point there were even hacks that allowed you to install the Quadro (it's quadro btw) drivers on gaming cards.

The extra cost is mainly from getting the cards/drivers certified by every CAD/CAE software vendor as compatible, and possibly just extracting extra value from a market perceived as less cost-sensitive (ie, they are probably paying 10k/year at least just in CAE software licenses).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The lack of thunderbolt 3 on the SB3 makes Dell XPS 13 a better thin&light option

<comment><USER18> The Surface 3 comes with a real NVidia GPU like the GeForce GTX 1650 or 1660 Ti. That's what got my attention (being able to run SolidWorks on a thin and lightweight machine has some appeal for traveling).

Unless I'm mistaken, Dell's XPS 13 just has CPU integrated graphics (Intel Iris). So I wouldn't consider it better, unless I limited myself to a desk, tethered to an external GPU.

I do wish the Surface had other, beefier components available (eg. larger SSD).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> _Sigh_ is a traditional laptop smaller than an A4 sheet too much to wish for?

I just want a Surface Go with a decently-sized SSD that _I can hold by the keyboard_ , and there just doesn't seem to be a machine like that.

(Or a Surface Book that is just a bit smaller)

</comment><comment><USER20> No Ryzen 4 is a major letdown.

<comment><USER9> Probably contracts with Intel that haven't expired.

<comment><USER20> Then how did they manage to stick a Ryzen 3 in the Surface Laptop?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> FWIW, I own both the SB1 and SB2, and it's been, hands down, the best hardware I've ever used (and I've been through a lot, including multiple generations of macs).

Typing this on my SB2, which weighs next to nothing, is capable of good gaming, has acceptable battery life, and allows me to detach the monitor and use the pen while in client meetings and marking up docs.

Best all-around machine ever.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think the Surface Book design is getting a bit long in the tooth. I don't think it was ever a winner for style, and the hinge and gap are not only strange, but also make it feel like a thick machine for such a premium laptop.

I normally love Microsoft hardware design, but the Surface Book is the one device that stands out as needing a change.

</comment><comment><USER23> Isn't the 15W CPU strongly limiting compared to the 28/W45W CPU in Apple's lineup?

</comment><comment><USER24> Finally a laptop with a good (1080p) front-facing camera.

</comment><comment><USER25> will it run linux (directly and not inside windows) ?

(microsoft <3 linux right ?)

<comment><USER26> I've used Manjaro and Ubuntu on my Surface Book 1. [https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/](https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The bezels on this (and macbooks) are still SO HUGE.

Guess I'm gonna keep recommending that my friends buy XPS's until they figure out that big bezels are ugly.</comment>


Play: A P2P Distributed Torrent Site That's Impossible to Shut Down - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/play-p2p-impossible-shutdown-160301/ <comment><USER2> Is that the same technologie like Popcorntime? Or does it use something more leightweight?</comment>


New Data Shows Income of Top 1% Has Grown 100x Faster Than Bottom 50% Since 1970 - <AUTHOR> https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/12/09/staggering-new-data-shows-income-top-1-has-grown-100-times-faster-bottom-50-1970 <comment><USER2> Without meaning to quibble with the numbers in the article, they point out that the bottom 50% of income has gone up $8,000, while the top 1% has gone up $800,000, which is indeed a 100x difference in absolute numbers. But on a relative basis, the bottom 50% of earners' incomes have gone up 42%, and the top 1% have gone up ~250%. Still a large difference, but not nearly as extreme as 100x.

Is there merit to analyzing these numbers on an absolute vs. relative scale, and/or is that beside the point? Does it miss the point if analysis like this doesn't also look at the cost/standard of living in those time periods too? E.g. if a particular standard of living that cost $19k in 1970 (manageable in the bottom 50%) now costs $21k, that's a great boon, but if it now costs $30k, that's probably a bad sign.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not to sound defeatist, but we've now an endless amount of charts pointing to the significant changes that came as a result of political and economic decisions made in the 70s, including their effect on income and wealth inequality, and what has come from it?

We've had revelation after revelation in not only this regard, but also the exposure of the gaming of tax/visa/migration/residency/etc. laws to shelter the gains from those changes in an untouchable manner, and what has come from those?

What do we, as a society, want to do about this? What can we do about it? What are the side effects possible from any actions taken on it? Therefore, what will we do about it?

The answer is likely not much. We might elect someone Sanders-esque, but the result will be the middle earner taking a further pummeling. Eat the rich? Revolt? They're untouchable. There's a reason many have been building or acquiring elaborate "fall out" shelters in remote areas of New Zealand and elsewhere. It'd also probably be met with economic and societal collapse, and all that hidden money would come back to scoop up the deals in the remains.

I'm not saying something _shouldn 't_ be done, but good luck designing something that will continue our mutual relative safety, security and prosperity. Not to mention the high likelihood that if actions were taken and the shit did hit the fan, the likely candidates to have the finger pointed at them will be those of us in tech and those in finance, and when you can't access the CEO for a battering then the cronies who built their systems will probably do.

<comment><USER4> Some of these problems feel larger than life because they are.

I think our generation (I'm early 30s) is spoiled because we receive the benefits of great problem solving all the time in the form of continually progressive improvement in all aspects of society. We've come to expect that things should always improve, because so many things improve tremendously year over year.

But what we don't see is how they improve. For instance, the amount and quality of work that goes into making our phone better and better amounts to thousands of years of research and expertise every year, and we (by and large) take it for granted.

You can use the market to approximate the amount of investment. 2.2 billion iphones sold in it's history, at around 1000$ each = 2 trillion in revenue. Assume about 5-10% goes into research, and your iphone has about 10-20 billion dollars of investment into it. That's 7000 years of a 300k salary amount of effort. This is back of napkin and can be off by an order of magnitude, but I'm trying to put into perspective how much effort is needed to create really meaningful, great solutions / products. Not just lifetimes, generations of generations of lifetimes.

> What do we, as a society, want to do about this? What can we do about it? > What are the side effects possible from any actions taken on it? Therefore, > what will we do about it?

The honest truth is that if you don't have talent or money, you can't do anything but play your role. Welcome to the 21st century. You're not the R&D engineer in the iPhone ecosystem; you're the consumer. You're one of 2.2 billion.

Now, consumers do have power in the market - they can refuse to buy goods and services. They can leave the ecosystem. They can complain. They can boycott. But in the consumer model, this only serves to provide awareness of the problems so that the real engineers can fix them.

Similarly, the economic changes that the US is going through is not something that normal people can make positive change. We need talent and hard work applied to the problem to create, test, and deploy real solutions.

If you think this is not true, imagine replacing the head of R&D at Apple for the next generation iPhone with an average American (or just yourself).

A lot of people feel helpless because they see a problem but are unable to solve it. But actually, if you just play your role, things will likely be solved. The consumer market actually works pretty well - it just takes time and some systems are more competent than others. Just playing your role as a consumer that can complain, can speak out, and can demand solutions, is usually good enough.

The other option is not something most Americans want to hear. Work on yourself to become a lot better than you are. Think a lot harder than you currently do. Become a better manager of resources, become a better strategic thinker, become addicted to solving harder and harder problems. Eventually (give or take 10-20 years), you'll become someone who is talented and capable enough to be given the harder problems of the world to solve.

<comment><USER5> How do you feel about individuals that have money, but arguably lack talent themselves. That is, people who have acquired resources through inheritance / luck, then grown them through investment strategy executed by those with talent and the simple nature of exponential growth?

I feel like this type of wealth in particular is commonly used for personal empire building and doesn't benefit society much at all as it ends up being hoarded for future generations of the same family (or passed back and forth between wealthy families) and not circulated amongst the general population. I see no reason to think that these empires will not be increasingly strengthened by time without outside intervention.

If you happen to work in a growth area then you may catch some relatively minor benefits of cash infusion, but the overwhelming trend seems to be using money to buy more money to insulate and protect oneself rather than using money to improve the quality of all human existence. Money currently flows to where the biggest ROI is and not necessarily where the biggest impact in standards of living can be made. To me, this seems tantamount to running up the score at the expense of everyone else when you've already won.

I think this is just normal human behavior that won't change without incorruptible regulation.

<comment><USER4> The underlying issue that a unit of capital is intrinsically more valuable than a unit of labor in the current shape of our economy. From the perspective of what's broken, it's not who has the capital that is broken. It's that between capital and labor, capital is too powerful and over time most ROI will end up being earned from capital.

In my view, people who have money should not be separated between those who have talent and those who don't because for the vast majority, money is stronger than talent at ROI, and therefore carries more weight (in our current economy). Talent, sadly, is both the outlier and the rounding error.

Also, when talking about the economy, it's not really about improvement of standard of living - that's the side effect. The key issue is actually distribution.

If you look at Amazon, it's lowering the cost of goods and making it faster / more convenient to get them - arguably, that's a higher quality of life for its consumers. The only issue with Amazon is that it's doing the job so well that many of the very same consumers lose their job and can't consume anymore.

Rich people who create personal empires have their money stored somewhere. They probably bought some companies stock that are making improvements to people's lives, so indirectly their money is being used to improve standard of living globally. The issue is not improvements, it's who gets the money.

The plain fact is that in our current economy there's just not enough value that labor can provide to get enough share of our global monetary supply. Capital is eating it up, no matter if it comes from inheritance, from financial institutions, or rich tech conglomerates.

You can try to solve by either reducing the return on capital as a whole to match labor, or increasing labor's ability to get returns equal to capital. The first can be done by a tax on wealth that can't be loop-holed out of - unsurprisingly, quite hard to do. The second can be done by improving labor's value through making people work harder, take less wages, or become more skilled - also very hard to do.

But even if you manage to equalize capital and labor return temporarily, capital is always getting more efficient over time, while labor will be largely stagnant (unless we modify our genes on a societal level to increase our ability to work). So while we can level the playing field temporarily, eventually we need to explore how labor can exit the economy altogether.

2 reasons - first, the only winning strategy of labor right now is to become capital. That doesn't sound sustainable. Second, it just doesn't make sense for (certain parts of) labor to be in the economy anymore.

For instance, we have the technology and systems to fully automate our cashiers in restaurants. Why keep someone there? I understand the need for fulfillment, social life, and something to do, but can't we as a society come up with something better than working an assembly line at a McDonald's?

We grow up with the assumption that we should work for our existence and our value is based on the work that we do. If we don't work, we don't eat. If we don't work hard, then we deserve everything bad that comes to us. Conversely, if we work hard, then we deserve the money that comes.

But the reality is that rich people don't have to work hard. If you inherit a couple million, you can just throw it in an index fund and not have to do anything for the rest of your life, and "earn" substantially more than the 99% of the population.

Capital > Labor is not just an economic crisis, it's a values crisis. It calls into question almost everything we believe about our self worth. In many ways, it's our belief in the value of our hard work, not the system of capitalism, that is preventing us from making good solutions.

From a pure systems point of view, economics does not need to be fair to work. The economy is just how resources get distributed, so we could yearly collect and throw the world's money into a pot and roll a dice to see who gets what, and that's an economic system. It's not fair but it is a distribution. We have strong opinions of what is fair because much of our self worth is tied up in what we do.

Currently, the capitalist economy says the people who can generate the highest ROI deserves most of the resources. This… is not wholly bad, it generally means that people who know what they're doing get to manage most of the resources of the world. But with the emergence of tech and winner-take-most companies, it creates a larger and larger group of people who, based on the distribution rules of the current economy, don't get anything, and this is bad because it creates a situation where slavery or starvation is the typical livelihood of the 21st century.

One solution is universal basic income. UBI is basically the admittance that labor will never become competitive in our economy again, and that we should look for other ways to distribute resources to them because market forces ain't going to give anything to them.

I actually think UBI is one of the only solutions. But it only scratches the surface of the issue. Beyond income, there's structure, affirmation, goals, promotion, social status, social interaction, belonging on a team, and more built into the social fabric of work. Even if we give income to people who are forced out of the workforce, there's still a lot missing.

But I don't think capitalism should be completely thrown out. The very same tools that you use to build a successful ROI generator can also be used to solve hard problems that don't give ROI. One positive example I think about is the goal to reduce cases of malaria to zero. This is tough! But it's an activity that can potentially create a lot of value - just that you don't capture it directly yourself. And you don't fund it based on your profits, you fund it based on people who align to the cause, want to invest in the cause, and believe you capable to use the money well to actually tackle the problem instead of wasting it.

At the highest level, the truly scarce resource is never the lack of money; it's the lack of ability (talent). So, even though from an ROI perspective, talent isn't as good as money, if we expand our values beyond ROI, talent becomes paramount.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for taking the time to write that. It's clearly stated and helped me recognize some more of the nuance of our current situation.

While I haven't thought it through entirely, nor am I qualified to assert that I can; I wonder what a universal max income and / or placing a maximum on the value of an individual's asset holdings (in addition to a UBI) would do to combat the disparity between the strength of capital and labor. I wonder if such a system could support itself without a traditional tax structure and instead impose a 0% tax rate on income below the max and a 100% rate on income in excess of the max.

<comment><USER4> The short answer is it won't help much and it might hurt a lot.

90% of working Americans make less than 100k / yr. The tax structure is already skewed so that the richer you are, the more you pay, and you can make it more extreme... but it does nothing to help the 90% of people who make less than 100k / yr.

When thinking about distribution, it's not about reduction, it's about transfer. So you need to think in terms of transfers, not in terms of earnings amounts.

But, putting a max income ceiling is an interesting systemic exercise. What do you want to happen and what will actually happen?

It seems sensible, maybe we can put a cap of say $5m a year on income. But the problem is that we have no clue how people who make more than $5m a year feel about it and how they will respond.

One way to get insight it is to put it in income levels that you can understand. Lets say you put the max at 30k / year. This would vastly disincentive people who are working really tough jobs that pay well because there is an equivalent easier job that pays just as well, so it would devastate certain industries. If collecting garbage paid the same as petting kittens, the garbage collection industry would face a huge worker shortage and they would not have the levers (raising salary) to attract people.

At what point does the max salary cap stop hamstringing certain industries? I'm not sure. But the NBA / NFL max salary is like $50m a year I think? So at least at that level.

Bleeding down asset holdings over time to a certain level is also interesting but also not likely to help - the economy holds the stability of our assets as the basis for trust. If assets slowly shrink over time to a fixed number OR just disappear overnight (via taxes or other things) there would be a massive scramble to find the asset that is the safest to hold - basically, people will scramble to find that one investment / place in the economy where your assets are secure. Most optimistically, it would create a giant "hunt for the tax loophole" system, but it's likely to destabilize the entire economy.

The hard part of the solution to inequality is that we have to think about how to get poor people more money BUT no one wants to just give them money because they have to "earn it". This is where many people get stuck in the old way of thinking. 90% of American people can't do much of anything to earn more money for themselves.

There's this naive thought that rich people are siphoning it away from poor people, if we just hamstring the rich then the poor people will get more of it. The sad truth is that poor people are not worth much in today's market economy, not valued by the market, so no matter what you do to rich people, it won't help.

It's not that poor people are worthless to society though. People are people, poor or rich, and together we create a dynamic, diverse, robust and enriching society in many ways other than wealth. But the economy doesn't care about that - it just cares about one number going up.

You need to have a clear sense of the available options you have (levers) and what they do in order to understand how to affect change in a good way.

Especially when fixing inequality, you'll have to think about levers outside of the economic system because all the economic levers affect things within the constraints of market forces, but its the market forces themselves that you need to offset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If we graph out how companies has scaled out (Measured in different ways) I don't think it'd be as suprising.</comment>


From Zero to a Million: There Are Two Usual Paths for Startups; I Took the Third - <AUTHOR> https://blog.markgrowth.com/from-zero-to-a-million-there-are-two-usual-paths-for-startups-and-i-took-the-third-one-e82ecf96591e <comment><USER2> Sounds a lot like my first startup out of college:

* Focus split between two products * No real revenue * A blog to catalogue our path to wild success (I think it lived at diariesofastartup.com)

Long story short, it didn't pan out for me (too many cooks, differing levels of commitment, cluelessness) but I've had some good successes since then.

Best of luck - the path does become clearer as you learn the lessons of growing a business.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can someone explain? What are the usual paths? What's the third path? Am I missing something, or is this just a clickbait headline?

<comment><USER4> A critical reading of the blog post has me thinking that he hasn't invented a new way to do startups, he's just making the common mistake of building product before verifying demand. The obstacles he's running into are the exact obstacles one would expect to run into if you do this.

If you are starting a startup and have no money to burn through validating a business model, your only real way forward is to start with sales. You can sell your idea to potential customers (bootstrapping), or you can sell it to investors.

There's no third way to do this, because those are the only two groups of people that can give you money.

This guy is choosing to bootstrap. A fine path, but it requires you to schlep. You have to talk to a _lot_ of people to validate a business idea. People who are _so_ enthusiastic about the idea suddenly develop cold feet when it comes to buying your product and integrating it into their business / life.

If you are a coder, the natural tendency is to avoid talking to people and instead do what you know: build product. But unless you talk to people you aren't going to know what to build. His entire blog post is just exploring these failure modes, except with added self-importance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would say ignore the nay-sayers and the guys slamming you for your "ego" or just giving you attitude - but do extract the actionable feedback, but only apply that which resonates with YOU. (But now at least you have the other bits that don't agree with you somewhere on your periphery of awareness, in case you turn out to just be stubborn and wrong - but there is no one proven way despite protestations in the comments, and even well validated startup mrthods like focusing on "customer interviews")

I can certainly related to your experience, also solving very hard problems, but I would laugh about 11 weeks as painful as "large amounts of sunk time" is.... We are thinking in terms of years not weeks.

Bootstrapping is almost always the best way to start.

Unless you are lucky, most VC only happens after your success is pretty obvious.

Our solution has been to do dev work for money on the side, one of which resulted in a maintenance retainer. It's a pain in the ass, but has allowed us to work on our startup for almost two years, buying us time to pivot aspects of our bring-to-market strategy or what market to apply our idea to.... In other words, do several BIG pivots.

I would also suggest you decide how to weigh your attention between your products or put them in a sequential strategy that makes sense to you... I don't think you can build three services at the same time at the same level of priority.

If you take the long view, keep pivoting, and keep searching for as much real world customer interaction, your chances of converging on something cool is much improved.

We also got nice growth metrics with very little long term activation/use, which drove us back to do more customer development in the real world (and over skype!)

Keep trying things, keep sharing the journey, we all make many mistakes along the way, hopefully they don't sink a business that "could have" worked.

My view is, you should only fail with flawed ideas, not fail winning ideas due to mistaken models of execution.

Keep learning.

</comment><comment><USER6> You list "Migrated the email list from MailChimp to SendinBlue" as a "major accomplishment". This is a minor, even trivial, administrative or technical task. Trumpeting it as if it is one of the biggest things you've managed to achieve makes you sound bush-league.

<comment><USER7> Without knowing the level of automation and unique data associated with the records stored within the first ESP it is not fair to cast blanket judgement.

Having migrated ESPs and selected/on boarded new ones, vendor lock in can be a major concern and headache. This is due to all of the automations you add, performance data, audience segmentation data, etc. Often, particularly for business users, this can be in a proprietary format locked inside the platform.

If for example, your entire welcome onboarding flow is locked away like this, you need to be very careful not to disrupt a major touch point in your funnel or you risk losing very real dollars.

Email platform transition/setup and management at scale with any complexity is one form of hell i hope most people never get subjected to.

<comment><USER6> I'm not saying it wasn't a pain in the ass, just that intermingling what amount to administrative tasks with major business objectives under the header "major accomplishments" isn't great for your image.

It's like a major public company mentioning the fact that IT finally got everybody in the company on the same build of Windows 7 in a quarterly report to investors. Yes, it was probably a lot of work, and yet nobody cares, and mentioning it as being a big deal raises doubts about whether you can manage things that are much more difficult, like for example your actual line of business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> With no investment and little revenue how is the team getting paid?

<comment><USER9> They are paid in play money er stock options?</comment></comment>


ASxxxx Cross Assemblers - <AUTHOR> http://shop-pdp.net/ashtml/asxxxx.htm

<comment><USER2> I like the plain HTML in early-90s styling - very simple and functional. That is a lot of different architectures... but x86 is not included.

Also noticed that the complete package is 24MB+ because it contains not only the source but the binaries for all the assemblers compiled with all the compilers they used: cygwin, djgpp, linux, symantec, turboc30, vc6, vs05, vs10, vs13, watcom. I'm not sure what the point of doing this is (since the platforms are DOS, Linux, and Windows), besides as a comparison: cygwin appears to make the smallest executables, while vs13's is over 2x bigger.

<comment><USER3> _cygwin using the options they used_

 _while vs13 's, using the optio s they used_

FTFY. Not saying I know options for VS to produce small bins, nor that there isn't a trend. Just a friendly reminder that there's more to a _benchmark_ than this keen observation had allowed

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've recently been working on an assembler that has ASxxxx syntax compatability, but doesn't keep any of the other choices ASxxxx has made. It has definitely not aged well.</comment>


"Used To Be Free" is not a good business model - <AUTHOR> http://www.andyjenkinsblog.com/2010/01/29/used-to-be-free-is-not-a-good-business-model/

<comment><USER2> Good point, bad example. The entire NYT pay issue is a lot deeper than he lets on. I for one will pay for the NYT. In the past I could have said the same for the WSJ, though these days not so much. Other than those two I can't think of any other news source I would pay for. To say CNN.com and NYT.com have the same content on them is just untrue, especially if you live in the New York area.

As for the comment "It's reported that the NYT site network has 40 MILLION unique users, yet they can't seem to make enough money to support themselves without charging?

I literally CHOKE thinking of what kind of marketing and sales I could generate with that kind of audience. I know people who regularly generate millions of dollars in sales with a mere fraction of that traffic."

Having been in the NYT office a few times, I know that you need to make billions with a B to pay for that place. They have one of the biggest buildings in Manhattan, with literally dozens of floors of employees. I can't even estimate how many people there are, but it is in the thousands.

The problem is not that they suck at selling ads, the problem is that the ad- supported model just systemically won't work for a paper their size. They either need to shrink expenses massively or find a new revenue model. So their calculation is that they can make more money off a few million paying subscribers than tens of millions of advertising viewers. We shall see. If they gutted their payroll they would be just another weak news agency so lets hope they can make the pay model work.

<comment><USER3> _They either need to shrink expenses massively_

They have a large expense in the form of putting news, in ink, onto pieces of paper and distributing those pieces of paper all over the world. And I know that's the first thing I'd look at cutting if I were them...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I spent most of that article wondering about the formatting - its one thing to be quirky and idiosyncratic but when it gets in the way of the message it might be time to tone it down a little.

</comment><comment><USER5> "I literally CHOKE thinking"

Literally? Really?</comment>


The Dangerous Safety of College - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/opinion/sunday/the-dangerous-safety-of-college.html <comment><USER3> Having been physically present at ground zero of this thing, and having spent quite a bit of time trying to understand it, let me offer one piece of missing information.

This group is well aware of the prevailing doctrine that truth comes from dispassionate investigation and rigorous argument.

They just reject it. They reject that it's conducted in good faith, and they reject that the sacred constructs of the ideology are subject to any microscope. That intellectual ideal is seen as something by and for the powerful old white men who control power structures, including and especially academia. It's seen as just as much a tool of oppression as phrenology, eugenics, and other racist pseudoscience, and they're hoping to push it towards the same fate.

Some of the more extreme protestors will tell you that advocating for traditional academic inquiry is fundamentally white supremacist, in that a mode of understanding the world favored by the ruling class is seen as more legitimate than others. There is no objectivity, the reasoning goes, so we ought to put the traditionally opppressed in control of the narrative for a while.

The article is spot on that the right way to think about it is as a religion. There are articles of faith: the world works in terms of identity-based groups; certain groups hold and actively maintain power over others; it's time to depose those groups and let others have a turn at authority, particularly over what constitutes truth. There is testimony: the "lived experiences" \- anecdotes - of members of oppresssd groups are gospel. Obedience is paramount - the first and last step of being an Ally is to accept, believe unquestioningly, and evangelize what you are told.

These people aren't coddled and they aren't weak. Appeals to psychological safety are attempts to weaponize empathy, not genuine fragility. They are fierce warriors for what they believe to be justice.

<comment><USER4> Your characterization made me grin, as someone who is on the _other side_ to you.

>That intellectual ideal is seen as something by and for the powerful old white men who control power structures, including and especially academia.

Lets be real here - academia until only very recently in world history - <USER2> virulently exclusionary to people of color and women. Before we dismissed eugenics as pseudoscience, it was perceived as just science. It is easy in hindsight to say it was flawed and a tool of oppression - but at the time it was very much an active area of academic inquiry. Given that in the past pseudoscience was seen as science, what evidence do we have to believe that we haven't made some of the same mistakes in classifying pseudoscience in the present? Given that academia in the past was corrupted by bias against women, what makes us now think it's truly objectively academic, now?

It takes a lot of faith to believe that this is the one period in history when bias hasn't tainted "objectivity"/"science"/"academic inquiry".

<comment><USER3> > what evidence do we have to believe that we haven't made some of the same > mistakes in classifying pseudoscience in the present?

None. I just think that when we suspect something might be pseudoscientific, we ought to read and study it really carefully, explore the arguments, and discredit it by formulating and publicizing well-reasoned counterarguments. And since the demographics that traditionally practice this sort of thing have some gaping blindspots, we ought to be actively recruiting a broader set of perspectives into this pursuit, so that we can generate more good ideas and discredit more of the bad ones.

We don't need to throw out science to deal with bad ideas put forth by scientists. Science itself has the mechanisms for this. We just need to do it better.

Not scream at the author's speaking engagements until he leaves the room.

To be clear, the side I'm on is the liberal/academic/technocratic orthodoxy, where smart people engage seriously with ideas, arguments, and data (including devil's-advocating positions they don't agree with) to discover the truth, and formulate policy prescriptions based on the truth, i.e. what's romanticized on The West Wing. I do believe in reality's well-known liberal bias and on most policy questions I am pretty much indistinguishable from an "SJW." As far as getting to those policy positions, though, it was clear I would not have been welcome in my campus's left-leaning political scene.

<comment><USER4> It is clear to me from reading your previous comment that you've made an effort to understand the arguments made. That's a breath of fresh air.

>Not scream at the author's speaking engagements until he leaves the room.

Student politics just suck. But, I don't think they're representative of some of the underlying ideas they are based on. I've met some incredibly intelligent and well-read anarchists - but I wouldn't think anarchy was a system with that thought behind it if all I'd met was the _loudest_ proponents of anarchy.

I think one of the problems currently we have in discourse-at-large is its really easy to find the egregious and ridiculous arguments people make, and paint the rest of the whole ideology with it. Perhaps the only partisan movement in politics today? :)

>I just think that when we suspect something might be pseudoscientific, we ought to read and study it really carefully, explore the arguments, and discredit it by formulating and publicizing well-reasoned counterarguments.

>We don't need to throw out science to deal with bad ideas put forth by scientists. Science itself has the mechanisms for this. We just need to do it better.

I think the problem has been that in the past (and still today) women and PoC were hampered by their inability to even _get stuff published_. If people begin in a position where suspicion is immediate, its harder for them to get a foot in the door, even if the gatekeepers hypothetically would allow in a person they are suspicious of.

As a result, some people still feel like one of the few levers they can successfully pull is the protest lever. Some protests suck.

>And since the demographics that traditionally practice this sort of thing have some gaping blindspots, we ought to be actively recruiting a broader set of perspectives into this pursuit, so that we can generate more good ideas and discredit more of the bad ones.

I think we agree on this - and I think we agree that there's the possibility of bias in science as it stands.

Where I'm going next with this: The idea then is that science internally sucks at making choices to correct this bias. Therefore establishment science needs to be externally influenced. That's not a dismissal of the scientific method, that's a claim that the scientific method never existed in an unbiased form in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It has been decades since the political left in the US has relied to any degree on reason and logic to bring people around to their way of thinking. It's basically been name-calling (that's RACIST!), public shaming via internet rage mobs, mockery, and now, physical violence to oppress people with whom they disagree.

And I think this has made them intellectually soft. Many of the younger ones don't know how to argue for their views intellectually because they've never had to.

A now-deceased friend who was an avowed socialist, who came of age in the late fifties/early sixties, absolutely loved to argue politics and ethics with avowed free-market capitalists like myself, and I enjoyed arguing with him. But I've found it impossible to have any discussions with any element of intellectual rigor with any of the 20- or 30-something Bernie Sanders supporters I'm acquainted with. Within minutes, they fall back on character attacks -- "that's racist!", "you're greedy and selfish!", etc.

And it looks like it will get a lot worse before it gets any better.

<comment><USER6> I find the opposite effect - liberals have thought much more deeply about their views, and conservatives often just parrot shallow talking points.

For example, a group of my progressive acquaintances has been debating in depth on the New Yorker's reporting over past few months, including especially the long piece on Hillary the week before the election. They have framed that discussion around progressive views on fairness of opportunity and fairness of wealth distribution.

The leading political progressives have the same depth of argument - listen to Obama's speeches, the speeches at the DNC, Bernie and Robert Reich, Kander on voting, Stiglitz.

In contrast the right is intellectually bankrupt. Michael Anton's articles motivated the right for the past few months and the articles are poorly argued flimflam. Heritage's chief economist is disingenuous and misguided. The chief GOP wonk in Congress, Paul Ryan, is a mediocrity who barely understands healthcare never mind economics. This is what happens when a party goes to war on expertise[1] (because expertise of course threatens their donors' ability to make huge amounts of money[2]).

1\. [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-death-of- experti...](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-death-of- expertise-9780190469412?cc=us&lang=en&)

2\. [http://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2017/3/10/14871696/sco...](http://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2017/3/10/14871696/scott-pruitt-climate-denial)

<comment><USER7> The gop is soft, but arguing with the alt right is scary. They are extremely good debaters, very antifragile.

<comment><USER8> They've certainly taken rhetoric classes. They just have the slight problem that they have near-zero facts on their side. Of course, they're decent enough rhetoricians to shift fully into meta-level philosophical sophistry when that gets brought up, but that's... not helpful against those of us who recognize sophistry as such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's odd, I'd define "dangerous safety" as being unlikely to experience racism, sexism or other prejudice, and thus becoming incapable of realising how those things affect others.

"Dangerous safety" is the kind of environment in which a man like Charles Murray sees no problem with burning a cross next to a police station.[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_(political_scie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_\(political_scientist\)#cite_note-9)

</comment><comment><USER10> It's the US Dept of Education's fault. They won't stop lending money to institutions who trample on student speech the administration disagrees with. U.S. Dept of Education is a blank check.</comment>


Ask HN: Viable Career in Web Dev? - <AUTHOR> After almost 8 years, I am trying to switch career from customer service to web dev. I am learning Python in weekends.<p>What should I learn for viable career in web dev? <comment><USER2> Javascript/React/Webpack for one thing.</comment>


Show HN: Online destination for Product Enthusiasts - <AUTHOR> https://cohortplus.com <comment><USER2> Promotional votes and comments (by friends or sockpuppet accounts) aren't allowed here, so please don't do that.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> CohortPlus is built with the vision of re-imagining how professional communities work on mobile. Our aim is to carve out highly engaging professional groups on mobile by focusing on enriching the end-user experience. The CohortPlus app is already live with over 20,000 downloads. In fact, our Product Management community is the largest community with over 8000 professionals on our platform.

Rich and spam free professional discussions, knowledge exchange, questions, and answers as well as job-related content get debated and discussed daily on the platform. It has helped a lot of professionals to interact with like- minded folks and further their careers.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is great. I've been searching for one place for all my Product Management needs, and this seems to fit. Great job guys!

</comment><comment><USER5> The website needs a bit of work in terms of design, but the content is great. Good job on building such an active community.</comment>