Ask HN: Have you ever reference checked a potential employer? - <AUTHOR>

And if so, what did you check?
To add to the discussion; There seems to be a consensus that it's OK and normal for an employer to reference check potential employees but not the other way around. I guess this is a supply and demand thing? I understand, employers want to make sure they make a good hire but as an employee you also want to make sure you don't end up working with a bunch of a-holes (I'm sure there are plenty of stories here). So why, as a potential employee, isn't it normal to reference check an employer?
Further more, how valuable are references anyway? These days checking references seems very informal (at least where I live, Australia). A potential employer hops on the phone with someone you've nominated as a reference, usually a good friend or work colleague. It's in this context that a reference is unlikely to be negative. So what's the value? <comment><USER2> Yes, I do it all the time.

\- Check glassdoor.com for reviews, interviews and salaries.

\- Read a local version of glassdoor where employees talk about their former companies.

\- Look at the company facebook account to see photos of the workplace and current employees.

\- Search for forums and online communities where the company name is mentioned. Check the context and opinions.

\- Research the CEO/CTO and potential supervisors on LinkedIn to determine competency and chemistry.

\- Read articles and interviews about the company to gauge vision and the current state.

\- Use the government public data to check company finances. In a software company wages are the biggest expense. So if you divide the yearly expenses by the number of employees, you can estimate an average salary.

This worked great so far. Dodged a lot of bullets and managed to get massive increases in pay. The tech industry would be a lot healthier if everybody shared information. Salary, reviews, what you like about the company, what you don't like. Post them everywhere you can. I do. Knowledge is power.

</comment><comment><USER3> The value of references can vary greatly depending on the industry. In finance, this is one thing I think we get right.

When hiring, just from an employee's history I am probably 3 degrees or less away from being able to contact every one of their old bosses. Given this I can get a very clear picture of what an employee really did, as opposed to what they claim they did on their resume.

The second reason to use them is as a filter. Can't provide any references, that's a big huge giant red flag. If you can't find one person to vouch for you that's not a positive signal.

For other industries like lawyers, doctors, and engineers, as you become more senior, your value switches from being 100% dependent on your work ability to the value of your professional network.

ie an experienced doctor/engineer/lawyer brings with them a network of clients, and other professional contacts that may be worth 10x what they can do in their given profession.

As a non practicing engineer, that was one of the biggest eye openers to me. The fact that your professional network can have more value than your professional abilities.

Think of the example of say Mark Zuckerberg, imagine you were going to hire him.

What's more valuable, his ability to get pretty much any person to help move your company forward or his ability to code?

I'd say its the former, and its the former by a long shot.

Where reference checks are pretty useless is when hiring a new grad or someone who is switching fields. In those cases you aren't likely to get any positive benefit from reference checking.

<comment><USER2> Yes, more politics. We don't have enough of it in our lives.

In your broken view a good politician is a more valuable employee. And only because there is a slight chance that he will bring you some short term profit with his contacts and friends. What if he doesn't. What if he leaves to the next company. Where is the value then?

This is how companies fail and die. Hiring politicians and letting them talk instead of hiring skilled people and letting them work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't but this line of thought recently had me thinking good questions to ask an employer are:

\- How long have you been trying to hire someone for this role?

\- What's the turnover rate on your team?

\- Why did the last employee leave?

\- Why did the last candidate reject your offer (if applicable)?

\- What's the average pay rate for people on the team?

You could probably ask some of these questions without raising eyebrows, at least with rewording them to be more tactful. Reference checking past employees is brilliant and we do it anyway with review sites. Asking them for a reference at least gives the employer a chance to select someone they prefer.

I do try to ask questions of each interviewer about how they like the company, as a sort of reference check, and I think that's basically understood as being appropriate.

</comment><comment><USER5> In the USA at least, there is a much higher transaction cost for an employer than for the employee. If an employer makes a bad hire it will be costly for them to fire them, and the work they got hired to do will not get done.

For an employee there is the opportunity cost of working in a bad situation vs a good one, but getting out of the situation is far less costly. In fact, you may be marginally more valuable because you have a few new experiences on your CV.

</comment><comment><USER6> I freelance, and I figure a lot more employer checking happens there: making sure they aren't going to outright scam you, run, try to ask you to do illegal things, etc.

<comment><USER7> I agree, "qualifying" a lead or potential client is a crucial part of closing a deal. At the very least, you always want to know _why_ they're on the market for a new developer. Did their last one quit? If so, look him/her up and talk to them.</comment></comment>


RFC6637: Elliptic Curve Cryptography in OpenPGP (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6637 <comment><USER2> This is all NIST Curve ECC (P-256, P-384, etc.) and should be discouraged in favor of the curves in RFC 7748.

<comment><USER3> OpenPGP does support Curve 25519.

<comment><USER4> Do you mean GPG? My understanding is that there's no OpenPGP standard for Curve25519; and it's an optional-off-by-default build time flag for GPG. (The GPGTools binary does not support Curve25519.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> BTW, my company added support for ECC in OpenPGP.js: [https://github.com/Jaxx- io/openpgpjs-secp256k1](https://github.com/Jaxx-io/openpgpjs-secp256k1) this implementation also includes the elliptic curves for the RFC6637. More information here: [https://github.com/Jaxx-io/openpgpjs- secp256k1/blob/master/R...](https://github.com/Jaxx-io/openpgpjs- secp256k1/blob/master/README_secp256k1.md)</comment>


An 'alt+space' launcher for Windows, built with Electron - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/appetizermonster/hain <comment><USER2> This is cute as a proof of concept, but it needs severe performance improvements if it's intended to replace Launchy.

Launchy sits there with 30mb ram used and no cpu used when not in use.

This launcher sits there with 170mb ram used, and 1% of a core in _constant_ use.

<comment><USER3> Why do more people not get annoyed with the inefficiency of JS... its just burning CPU cycles and RAM!

Even 30MB is ridiculous for this type of App... back in the DOS days there were similar TSRs using a few KB of RAM.

<comment><USER4> Ahh the DOS days are long gone I'm afraid... A single 1024x1024 app icon on Mac OS X weighs in at 4MB once it's inflated to raw bitmap data from ICNS / PNG. Throw a couple of those onscreen at once in a list and you're looking at 30MB easy, and that's just in images!

Of course, you could leave out the images, but you could also just keep using DOS if RAM is a concern :-)

<comment><USER5> Are _icons_ 1024x1024 now?!

And I still think 64x64 sounds kind of big for an icon, heh. I really need to get with the times, and get a lawn I guess.

<comment><USER6> It's for making them look smooth on high-dpi displays. Those pixels aren't drawn 1:1, obviously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Shouldn't the docs mention that alt-space already does something on windows? Or is it assumed that whoever doesn't know about the default functionality won't miss it? Or maybe everyone knows?

<comment><USER8> Sometimes people just get a great idea for a cool keyboard shortcut and simply don't know that it already has a standard meaning.

This may be such a case, and Parallels is definitely one. Parallels 11 takes over the _spacebar_ (just plain spacebar) in Windows Explorer, using it to pop up an OSX Quick Look panel like it does in Finder.

They apparently didn't think to check whether spacebar already does something in Explorer. (It does, and keyboard users like me use it all the time - it's an essential shortcut for keyboard navigation.)

And from what I've seen in forums and other interactions, they can't seem to imagine that it was a bad idea to take over this key with no option to turn off the behavior.

I love Parallels, but this is so clueless!

<comment><USER7> What on earth does spacebar do? I've been using windows for decades and I have no clue! I just tried it right now and still have no clue!

<comment><USER9> My guess: it selects elements of the UI while you tab through them. Stuff like table headers, for example.

<comment><USER8> Just a note since we're long gone from the home page and you may not see this even if you look at your "threads" page...

If you're curious, here's a description of how I use the spacebar in Explorer:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11368858](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11368858)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As others have pointed out, there are stuff that should not be made with Electron and this is one type of app that just shouldn't.

If it is platform specific anyways, why not do it in like C# or something that would make it lighter and faster?

<comment><USER11> Because someone already did that.

[https://github.com/Wox-launcher/Wox](https://github.com/Wox-launcher/Wox)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Windows Key then type. No need to create a Chrome instance just to launch a program.

<comment><USER13> Exactly what I was going to reply.

<comment><USER14> You both assume that people only use applications installed via a "standard" installer, that sit in c:\program files (or whatever) and have proper menu entries.

I have 4 GB of random stuff under c:\apps of which some things have been copied over for nearly 10 years and countless windows installations. Also PortableApps, which don't sit in the start menu.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >npm

>JS

>Electron

for a thing that should be hyper-light and -fast? With all due respect - no, thanks, but - no.

</comment><comment><USER16> Native Windows-S does nearly the same thing, does it not?

<comment><USER17> Yes...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Don't want to be the naysayer here, but this project is yet another 'I made smth already exisiting but with node.js and the original is still largely better'.

I think there are more interesting open source projects that should hit the HN frontpage. So let's start with this one, that computes Wikipedia Pagerank on a single node in less than 30 minutes : [https://www.nayuki.io/page/computing- wikipedias-internal-pag...](https://www.nayuki.io/page/computing-wikipedias- internal-pageranks)

<comment><USER19> There's nothing stopping you from submitting, if it's truly interesting it will appear on the front page.

Don't try to hijack someone else's post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How does this match up to Launchy?

<comment><USER21> Launchy doesn't require you to install npm first.

<comment><USER4> I don't think you're intended to build it from source - you can just get a binary: [https://github.com/appetizermonster/Hain/releases](https://github.com/appetizermonster/Hain/releases)

<comment><USER16> FOURTY FIVE MEGABYTES

/facepalm

<comment><USER22> Well, it bundles Webkit and a kitchen sink.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > The name "Hain" is named by Hyunseop Lee, it means "a Servant" in Korean.

Also means "traitor" in Turkish, cool name.

<comment><USER24> Scottish/gaelic "fein" is pronounced "hain", meaning self/yourself.

<comment><USER25> Huh, in Irish Gaelic (best gaelic) "fein" is pronounced like "feign" in English, with a leading "f" sound.

<comment><USER26> That's because it's spelled "féin" as Gaeilge, so it's more like 'fay-n'

<comment><USER25> Yeah, (born and raised in Ireland, complete with the mandatory Irish Language lessons), I'm just wondering where the poster above got the supposed "h" sound from.

<comment><USER26> I'm pretty sure it's pronounced with that 'h' sound in Ulster but most schools in Ireland are taught "Gaeilge na Mumhan" so we grew up it being an 'f' sound

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Off topic, but does anyone know what program they used as a screen recorder in the README .gif?

<comment><USER28> Don't know what this guy used exactly, but GifCam is really good - [http://blog.bahraniapps.com/gifcam/](http://blog.bahraniapps.com/gifcam/) \- it's not fancy, but it's well done on the engineering side, maintains good FPS when capturing and compresses really well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Would be awesome if it was also working on OSX. Pity I can't and don't wat to program apple platform.

<comment><USER15> Why? This was made only because OSX already has Alfred, LaunchBar and Quicksilver

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What happened to tinyapps? I propose a challenge to create app launcher that is 100KB or less.

</comment><comment><USER31> i really love these launcher apps.

this one sort of illustrates the problem with developing windows apps:

\- you either learn complicated c++ and windows api and have to write your own rendering framework for custom components

\- or use C# and xaml and get terrible performance with systems with no gpu acceleration

\- or use VB for terrible performance and CPU usage

\- or use javascript and node for huge memory usage and slower rendering than c++ (VB has the same issues)

<comment><USER22> Uh, where did you get the VB for terrible performance and CPU usage? There's nothing inherent to the language that makes it less efficient than C# or anything else running on the CLR.</comment></comment>


New version of Stripe Checkout - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout <comment><USER3> This is a beautiful user interface, but in my business, ~40% of our payments are through PayPal. To integrate Stripe Checkout, we would have to ask the customer whether they're paying with a card or using PayPal prior to displaying the Stripe UI.

While that is not the worst option, our current UX is similar to Shopify, where there is an accordion component with multiple options: PayPal, Credit Card, Apple Pay, etc..

Stripe wants to fetch a premium with this feature. As such, they should bite the bullet and allow merchants to integrate PayPal as a secondary option (similar to how Apple Pay is displayed).

I will say that this is a pretty nice improvement from the modal Stripe Checkout that has been around for several years.

<comment><USER4> I think it's just a matter of time before people switch from using PayPal.

<comment><USER5> We thought this and killed our PayPal integration (went Stripe only) and lost double digits in sales (and received constant emails asking for PayPal).

Unfortunately people want PayPal for whatever reason. Everything about PayPal from the merchant side sucks (bad API, bad recurring billing features, slow, no refund of fees for refunds from May, 6 months for someone to do a chargeback!, etc etc)

<comment><USER6> I use PayPal for random sites that I don't know because I don't like handing my credit card info to random websites. Now I would personally trust Stripe Checkout (especially on a stripe.con domain rather than in a modal) but that's because I know Stripe. The dislike of PayPal among techies is not common the population at large in my experience.

Another thing I use PayPal for is any kind of subscription, because I know I can cancel it from the PayPal side without having to worry about jumping through hoops.

<comment><USER7> As devs, we know in theory Stripe and PayPal are roughly equivalent in terms of protecting a card number. But the streamlined Stripe UI with the subtle branding doesn't drive home to the customer that Stripe is keeping your card number safe vs. random merchant storing all 16 digits in a hackable database somewhere.

The friction in the PayPal UI of making you log in to PayPal to make the payment is a pretty big trust signal IMO.

<comment><USER8> Stripe isn't as safe. PayPal collects my details only on paypal.com, Stripe collects my details on all sorts of domains, where who-knows-what JS might be present.

<comment><USER7> Are you speaking about real threats that cannot be mitigated by best practices, or theoretical threats of the future? I guess in other words, I'm under the impression using Stripe and following OWASP and script signing that my customers are safe. If I'm incorrect please pass me a clue.

<comment><USER9> As a customer, how do I verify that the merchant is following best practices and hasn't by mistake forgotten some ad script enabled on the payment page?

With PayPal as long as I only enter my password on paypal dot com I know I'm safe.

<comment><USER7> If you're very careful and copy/paste the PayPal URL into an editor and verify you didn't get sent to PayPal.com.evil.domain, then you're very likely to be safe.

<comment><USER8> I don't need to do that, browsers carefully show the actual domain in ways to avoid that problem since a few years now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For people impacted by SCA in a few months time (EU) this is really nice.

SCA: [https://stripe.com/en-US/guides/strong-customer- authenticati...](https://stripe.com/en-US/guides/strong-customer- authentication)

EU e-commerce credit card transactions currently often redirect to the bank providing your card to authenticate before accepting the payment. The UX is very poor. The beneficiary of the check is the bank, but they tell you it is done for your own security.

For some reason, financial institutions are well trusted in Europe, regardless of recent behaviour.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-moneylaundering- fa...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-moneylaundering- factbox/factbox-european-banks-hit-by-russian-money-laundering-scandal- idUSKCN1QP1P2)

<comment><USER11> Just to be sure, if your business is domiciled outside of the EU (e.g. Australia), there is nothing to be done regarding SCA, right?

In other words, there's no risk with sticking to Stripe Checkout Legacy, even for European cards?

I have read some contradicting documentation.

[1] states the business AND customer must be in EU ("if all of the following apply"), [2] says "payments to European businesses or from European customers". :\

1\. [https://stripe.com/docs/strong-customer- authentication](https://stripe.com/docs/strong-customer-authentication)

2\. [https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment- intents](https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-intents)

<comment><USER9> The article linked in the previous comment says

> _While SCA is not legally required for businesses outside of Europe, we > expect a small minority of European banks to require SCA for all payments > regardless of where a business is located_

I can believe this since the debit card associated with one of my european banks will only allow online transactions with 3DSecure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm sure they did tons of testing on the experience, but I'm not a huge fan of the Apple Pay button being up top and appearing so prominent.

My guess is that the vast majority of people won't end up using Apple Pay, so from a UX standpoint, I don't understand why it's above the credit card content as opposed to below.

My guess is that they worked out some kind of lucrative partnership with Apple.

<comment><USER13> The Apple Pay button will only show up to customers who have Apple Pay onboarded and enabled. Customers who don't care about Apple Pay won't ever see the button.

(I work on Checkout)

<comment><USER14> In the future will the "Apple Pay" in this instance also be replaced by PayPal, Google Pay, etc, depending on what the person uses?

<comment><USER15> In Elements the payment request button utilises the PaymentRequest API, so Apple Pay in Safari, a (default) purple browser button in Chrome, etc. So I imagine so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> After skimming the docs, I'm not sure why you'd want to choose Checkout over Elements in a lot of situations, other than getting some great design work for free with Checkout. The dev time to implement Elements doesn't look _that_ different from the new Checkout, and Elements doesn't require you to redirect your customers away from your site or force a multi-page checkout experience, which is generally associated with lower conversion rates. This also feels really ecommerce oriented, and less friendly to SaaS MVPs, etc.

The old version of Checkout was so dead simple to implement that it had a clear value prop over Elements, but at first blush this seems like a tossup. Braintree's js embed also came to mind after seeing this, since it's a bit less refined than the old version of Checkout, but it's simpler than this solution, and keeps users on your site.

EDIT: After looking closer at the docs, it does indeed look like you'd want to use Elements for SaaS or similar digital products. Unless I'm misunderstanding something, after the user completes their payment on Checkout, Stripe sends you the payment via a webhook, or you have to poll for the transaction. That's a big step back from the old version of Checkout, where you would send a token through to your server from the checkout form, and find out immediately if the payment went through or not so that you could proceed accordingly. This looks nice for ecommerce sites where delayed fulfillment is expected, but not for user subscriptions or account upgrades.

</comment><comment><USER17> Glad to see "Support for iDEAL, SEPA Debit, and other European payment methods" is on the roadmap - the world is bigger than the US, and many European's don't have cards. Hopefully they don't continue requiring you to obtain your own SEPA creditor identifier, as that simply isn't available to many non-EU companies wanting to trade in the EU. We are integrating Braintree currently just to support SEPA for European customers...

<comment><USER18> We are in Europe (France) and are using Stripe with SEPA Direct Debit.

<comment><USER19> how much more steps does a final user need to make in order to complete a one shot payment (vs CCard) ?

With instant (bank) payment coming in september, SEPA might be the option of choice in EU (also Paris here )

<comment><USER20> At least here in Finland SEPA direct debit is usually disabled by default for extra security* as domestic shops do not use it (we have redirect-based bank buttons instead) and with foreign ones one usually uses card instead.

So not really an option of choice in entire EU unless something changes - <USER2> don't want to tell your customers to enable something on their bank account first before purchase.

But VISA/MC debit cards are extremely common here, so I guess card+SEPADD might cover most people in EU. Though I think many people here are vary of entering their card details online as they are not used to that (then again, I guess the advent of Netflix and others must've made more people familiar with that).

* IIRC you just need the user's IBAN and consent, and IBANs are not really private as people use them to make payments to each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wasn't the advantage of the original checkout the customer didn't have to leave your site?

<comment><USER13> We found that legacy version of Checkout did not allow us to build a number of features that users have been asking about for years—including instantly turning on Apple Pay without needing you to register with Apple directly, supporting a unified API that can work with redirect-based payment methods such as iDEAL (coming soon), and a bunch more features that we're working on. If you're looking for something embedded in your page, we have Elements: [https://stripe.com/docs/stripe- js/elements/quickstart](https://stripe.com/docs/stripe-js/elements/quickstart)

<comment><USER22> Plenty Stripe users don't care a jot about Apple Pay, especially those in the B2B space - I consider it a real loss to have customers be redirected vs just showing a modal. As another commenter mentioned, it also means another step for the end user.

I understand the desire for a converged Checkout API and UI, but I still kind of wish there were _2_ options - modal or redirect.

<comment><USER23> I so unbelievably strongly agree. There should also be a pop-up version of checkout instead of a redirect.

The only two features I care about are (i) a simple popup to accept cc details (ii) an aesthetically pleasing interface

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Any support for EU VAT handling coming to this? A lot of work seems to have gone into European support here - odd that VAT handling not part of that.

<comment><USER25> The EU is not a priority for Stripe, which I think is very unfortunate. They only support a subset of countries. I would have switched from Braintree a long time ago if only Stripe were available in Poland.

Braintree works, but is a source of ongoing cost, as it is impossible to do automatic reconciliation. There is no way to connect the (batched) payouts that you get with transactions/invoices. A major problem in the EU.

Also, Braintree has a terrible risk-review approach, where if you trigger a risk review (for example, by growing), they will freeze your accounts for an indefinite amount of time (from weeks to months) and demand various documents from you.

<comment><USER26> (I work at Stripe.)

We are actively working on Poland. I would love to learn more about your business and potentially get you early access. Please contact me directly. My email is felix at stripe com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Please, DO NOT force users to update to this new version. I like the old, and I want to keep using the old.

</comment><comment><USER28> Funny that just as 3D Secure and other payment UIs are moving towards being embedded, vs redirect, they decide to go in the opposite direction.

<comment><USER29> They have the embedded option as well: [https://stripe.com/docs/stripe- js#stripejs-and-elements](https://stripe.com/docs/stripe-js#stripejs-and- elements)

This change seems to solidify the distinction between Stripe-hosted vs self- hosted

<comment><USER30> Anyone got any thoughts on when to use Elements vs the new Checkout?

<comment><USER31> Unless you're a Big Stodgy Corporation that must have exactly your own custom flow, always prefer the Stripe Checkout flow (either new or old) over Elements. Checkout is easier to implement, provides a polished UX, and users are more likely to trust it over your custom flow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> 3 days after I launched a new site with Stripe-payment. I love that they removed the "open in new tab for payment" on mobile phones. Maybe I have to do some rewriting before the weekend..

</comment><comment><USER33> I have a form that users fill out for one of my side projects with normal credit card info. A few users over the years have requested paypal, but not so many that I felt compelled to dive into their API mess.

But now I probably need to make a change. Stripe Checkout integration looks pretty similar to Paypal Checkout (though with better docs and a more up to date NPM package), but I wonder if I shouldn't just bite the bullet if there are so man y more customers that would use paypal...

</comment><comment><USER34> Whenever I see these kinds of changes I wonder if the company has any idea of why people use their product.

Given the comments here, either Stripe has no idea that people use Checkout for the single page experience, or they do know it and are just happy to nuke 50% of their customer base for reasons.

It's just a different product. But it's being released as a new version of an old one.

</comment><comment><USER35> The embeddable snippets don't work in an iframe, pops out and exposes the stripe domain which totally sucks.

<comment><USER36> I bet the frame busting is deliberate. As a consumer I prefer seeing the Stripe padlock on the current page...a reason this commenter gives for preferring paypal: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19741689](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19741689)

<comment><USER35> Yep, you're right they have it locked down tight.

I tried some anti-frame-busting javascript and nginx return 204 trickery which prevents the top redirect but it still returns a Stripe error within the iframe complaining about not being able to redirect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Looking good, Stripe. I love how you are on to things like SCA well in advance, making life easier for us merchants.

Now if you'd just finally add some VAT handling to Stripe Checkout, and to Stripe overall...then us merchants in the EU will be able to use these nice Checkout pages you create.

</comment><comment><USER38> I've been looking a fair bit into these embedded checkout things recently and I gotta say that braintree is far-far inferior to Stripe in terms of offerings, usability, API, etc.

There's things one would consider no-brainers for this type of service like discount codes with an expiry date and maximum number of uses that Braintree doesn't offer but their saving grace is PayPal support that, for better or for worse, is a must for most businesses.

The end result is that a dev needs to create a custom checkout UI integrating both services and having their customers split among the two ecosystems which is just gross :).

</comment><comment><USER39> I made a video about it whilst in preview: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zFcxszKHHw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zFcxszKHHw)

They now allow email to be prefilled. Very slick when using an Apple device.

Wish they did a slightly better job comparing the old and new on [https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout](https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout)

</comment><comment><USER40> If people are looking for a hosted cart, why not go with a more generic provider instead, like 2Checkout or Fastspring? See: [https://www.2checkout.com/digital- commerce/](https://www.2checkout.com/digital-commerce/)

Benefits: 40+ payment methods (including PayPal), full tax management (including filings), more customization options, etc.

Seems like Stripe is behind the 8 ball with this one. Or what am I missing?

</comment><comment><USER41> One of the pain points of the last Checkout page was that it required server- side code. This new version can be used with fully static websites out of the box!

</comment><comment><USER42> My question, does it support Stripe Billing out of the box? Would be great to have plans, billing etc. as a part of this sleek experience.

<comment><USER43> It does! We support plans and trials, with some limitations that we're working on removing soon.

<comment><USER44> Does it support tiers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I switched today to the new Checkout and it worked flawless (took me ~1.5 hours).

Let's see how people react to the new checkout. However PayPal is still more common for us (1. classic bankwire, 2. PayPal, 3. Credit card, 4. Sofort/Klarna). Target audience for the ranking is a high order value manifacturing German B2B shop.

</comment><comment><USER46> the old version seems better for my use case of just accepting credit cards...

</comment><comment><USER47> Interested to see what the PSD2/SCA implementation looks like. Stripe will go out of their way to avoid adding friction, but the requirements are not trivial.

<comment><USER13> You're right, they are definitely not trivial :) We've done a lot of work to make Checkout automatically support PSD2/SCA compliance out of the box — we'll trigger 3DS only when it's required. More here: [https://stripe.com/en- US/payments/strong-customer-authentica...](https://stripe.com/en- US/payments/strong-customer-authentication)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Does anyone know how easy this is to integrate into React? I'm not seeing React support for this new version in their docs.

<comment><USER49> Stripe hosts the whole checkout page with this. So, you generate a link in the js client library and then redirect to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I wonder if/when they will launch a consumer product like paypal/venmo.

</comment><comment><USER51> I could see Apple buying Stripe.

</comment><comment><USER52> Have they figured out how to support Apple Pay and subscriptions?

<comment><USER53> Yes.

>...the new version of Checkout is a smart payment page hosted by Stripe that creates payments or subscriptions. It supports Apple Pay...

Learn more at:

[https://stripe.com/docs/apple-pay](https://stripe.com/docs/apple-pay)

[https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout/migration#client-s...](https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout/migration#client- subscriptions)

[https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout/migration#api- subs...](https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout/migration#api- subscriptions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Disclaimer: Slightly off-topic rant about why I as a consumer will always avoid Stripe:

Will they now not lie about wire transfer being US-Only and accept the debit card they say they accept?

My one interaction with Stripe was absolutely horrible, lost my vendor which is otherwise great a (subscription) sale and will take a lot of effort to right.

Edit: Right, it wasn't just errors, but it just didn't work with any message. One time the credit card number field just became red and shook.

Yes, I'm outside of the US. But was using a card from a provider that was listed as supported. I found no qualifying statements anywhere (in fact I found about no statements meant for end users digging through the Stripe website) and help texts on the page were non existent or utterly useless.

Days of pain trying to pay a damn invoice. The folks at Notion were nice enough to void it, but I ended up switching to dynalist.io for my notes anyway because my trust was sustainably broken.

This experience gives me the impression that Stripe are utterly incompetent in their core business, accepting money.

<comment><USER55> Weird…sorry about that. I'd like to look into why it was declined. Could you email me the date you tried, card last 4, card brand, and expiration date? If you can dig up that interaction and forward it to me as well, that would be helpful. email@example.com</comment></comment>


Study finds hunter-gatherers' energy expenditure same as modern Westerners' - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/debunking-the-hunter-gatherer-workout.html?src=recg <comment><USER2> Modern food can be so fantastically calorically dense that it's depressing to sit down (ha!) and compare food taken in versus the amount of exercise one can reasonably perform. Anybody who has ever done so will have immediately realised how much pedalling a slice of pizza or a donut can be equal.

You may have heard that "abs are made in the kitchen", or "you can't outrun the fork". And this just shows that it's true even for very physically active people.

I train in Olympic-style Weightlifting, probably one of the more demanding physical activities. Elite international-level athletes in Weightlifting can be visually categorised into two groups: superheavyweights and everybody else.

Why? Because superheavies don't need to make a weight class, there is no incentive to strip down fat. So they eat heavily to support maximal hypertrophy and training intensity.

Whereas weightlifters trying to squeeze in at the top of a weight division will often have very low bodyfat. How is this achieved? Through a tightly controlled diet.

We are talking about athletes who in all other respects _train the same way_. A Chinese superheavy trains the same way as a Chinese welterweight. A Bulgarian superheavy, same as a Bulgarian heavy. And so on. Literally every day, racking from hundreds to thousands of calories of exercise. But they eat differently.

And the results speak for themselves.

<comment><USER3> >>>>"Of course, if we push our bodies hard enough, we can increase our energy expenditure, at least in the short term. But our bodies are complex, dynamic machines, shaped over millions of years of evolution in environments where resources were usually limited; our bodies adapt to our daily routines and find ways to keep overall energy expenditure in check."

And yet how do we get from a modern man spending most of time sitting down spending the same energy as a Hadza walking ~100 miles a week to a modern Olympian swimmer supposedly spending 12,000 a day and maintaining 8-10% body fat while swimming 50 miles a week? Does 10+ years qualifiy as 'short term'?

<http://www.michaelphelps.net/michael-phelps-diet/>

<comment><USER2> I think that the NYT article was poorly written.

It's hard to tell what was meant by controlling for differences.

For example, fat people have a higher BMR, simply because they are larger.

Tall people have a higher BMR, because they are larger.

And so on.

The "Phelps diet" is a bit of a media beatup, apparently. Not that it matters, Phelps could still get fat if he wanted to. Elvis is estimated to have been eating more calories than that in the year before his death.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I personally hung out with the Hadza for a few days a little over ten years ago.

This article rings completely true -- most of them really only spent a couple hours a day "working", which is typical of hunter-gatherer tribes -- it's remarkably leisurely. People didn't break their backs working until the agricultural revolution, which demanded it.

The Hadza spend a ton of time "gambling" amongst each other, which doesn't involve a lot of energy. And even while the article says:

> _Each day the women comb miles of hilly terrain, foraging for tubers, > berries and other wild plant foods_

It's really not a big deal. It's like walking around Central Park a bit. And the East African savannah is a really flat place, the hills are not big. It's just leisurely strolling around, nobody's in a hurry. The annoying part is digging for roots with sticks.

Fun fact: in Africa, the hunter-gatherer tribes are the only tribes with no history of famine.

</comment><comment><USER5> Anec-data: with no other changes to the amount I work out (a lot), how much alcohol I drink (I don't), or really the amount of food I eat (6 small meals a day), weight just started falling off when I stopped eating sugar in the form of cakes, candy, and donuts. Also my skin cleared up, and my eyes stopped being shot.

My (far from proven) theory is that refined sugar in enough quantity to give you a slight buzz is the almost sole factor in weight gain in many individuals.

<comment><USER6> If you consumed the same amount of food, how did you substitute the sugar you took away? Sugar has a lot of calories per weight, if you simply reduced the calories intake then losing weight isn't unexpected.

<comment><USER5> I ate until I was no longer hungry, just not sugar. Did I eat fewer calories? Almost certainly. Did I go hungry, or feel like I was eating less? Not at all...

<comment><USER7> I think it's pretty safe to say then that the weight just started falling off because you were taking in less calories. That'll happen. I don't think there's any reason to assume that the same thing wouldn't have happened if you had cut out fats or protein instead.

<comment><USER5> There is a massive difference in the ability to satiate of fat and protein vs sugar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Dr. Lindeberg and co. found the same thing (albeit using less sophisticated methods) in the study of the Kitava islanders more than 20 years ago.

<http://www.staffanlindeberg.com/TheKitavaStudy.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> >> We think that the Hadzas' bodies have adjusted to the higher activity levels required for hunting and gathering by spending less energy elsewhere.

When I commute by bike, my brain is less flexible at work, than if I tube it in and eat chocolate. I will happily agree that my body shifts from using the brain at 100% CPU to 50% CPU and 50% body.

That big lump of grey matter does not run 100% all the time.

<comment><USER5> Also: glucose helps self discipline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I lost about 70 pounds without working out. Just moderating my diet.

<comment><USER11> I lost 44 pounds by drastically cutting out sugar ... no more junk food, sweats, beer, sodas or sugar in my coffee. The only sugar I get these days is from fruits and milk.

<comment><USER12> Ditto. I lost about 40 lbs cutting out snacks at all, and sticking to highly regulated meals (high in protein - not carb-less, general caloric restriction, avoidance of processed high-fat foods like most sauces, dips, etc).

And then I gained 30 lbs of that back by moving to a new city and letting myself go. Physical activity did not really change.

What goes in has way more to do with your weight than what goes out.

<comment><USER5> I used to really tightly regulate everything I ate, and stuck to that as a bit of a crutch, and like you would gain it all back when I stopped. Since I've stopped allowing myself any candy (or candy-like things), I've been able to be pretty chilled out about what else I eat... Also: I weigh myself every day, and plot it, which helps me get back on track if I'm starting to creep up, and need to eat just a little less

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article says hadza walk many miles per day but burn the same calories as sedentary westerners. How is this possible? Well you go look at the table in the study and the hadza are all 30kg lighter than westerners. The men are all apparently 5'4 and 115lb, if you look at the BMI. That's probably 115lb at sub 5% bodyfat, too.

The study claims to control for body size. I didn't read it. But I still suspect we're looking at an apples to oranges situation here. A little dude of pure muscle who has been walking 10 miles a day his whole life is essentially incomparable to a fat sedentary Westerner.

I don't think the data presented predicts that if you had 6' fat sedentary people walk three miles a day they wouldn't lose weight, but that's almost claimed in the article.

<comment><USER14> Obviously, if you had a 6' fat sedentary person suddenly start walking 3 miles a day, they would lose weight. That's actually -not- the claim of the paper. The paper claim is that total energy expenditure is largely uncoupled with physical activity levels. For example, within the Hadza they found no real difference in energy use compared to different amounts activity. They also found no relation between body fat percentage and total energy use.

What this points to is that if you give the human body time to adapt to any set of conditions, you'll likely end up burning roughly the same amount of calories.

Here's the actual paper by the way: [http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi/10.1371/journal.po...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi/10.1371/journal.pone.0040503)</comment></comment>


W3C declares HTML5 standard complete - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/28/w3c-declares-html5-standard-done/

<comment><USER2> [http://www.cnet.com/au/news/html5-is-done-but-two-groups- sti...](http://www.cnet.com/au/news/html5-is-done-but-two-groups-still- wrestle-over-webs-future/)

""The real problem is of course that the W3C is still copying our work even after we asked them to stop doing that," [Anne] van Kesteren said. It's legal, but "oftentimes it comes pretty close [to] or is actual plagiarism."

It's one of many instances of copying, Hickson said. "For reasons that defy my understanding, the W3C staff refuse to treat the WHATWG as a peer organization" that relies on WHATWG's work, he said. Instead, it creates its own copies of some standards. "They'll eventually say they have a 'final' version, and then they'll stop fixing bugs. It's very sad."

<comment><USER3> It's amusing to me to watch the WHATWG people complain about the W3C having the temerity to put out revisions to their own specification, and then complaining about how the W3C is copying their work. Would they rather W3C put out an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT HTML specification from theirs? Would that be better for anyone at all?

<comment><USER4> Yes, actually. We'd encourage the HTML working group to do original work. Many W3C working groups do that, e.g. the webapps working group worked on web components and various other specs, and it helps the web platform.

<comment><USER5> So they should reinvent the wheel when there are good solutions out there?

Isn't the whole point of standards to stop that sort of thing happening?

I get that you may feel that someone is just appropriating your work rather than doing their own but if your aim is to build a standard then reusing things is probably going to be part of doing that.

<comment><USER3> What makes this really funny for me is that WHATWG fully appropriated the spec that W3C wrote for HTML and the DOM, as well as _the names HTML and DOM_.

<comment><USER6> The specs were written from scratch, because the W3C holds the copyright on them (the old specs are also of relatively little use). The spec now called HTML5 was officially called Web Applications 1.0 till after the W3C HTML WG was (re-)chartered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The other huge accomplishment of HTML5 is completely standardizing many fundamental parts of the web that previously were a mess of browser incompatibilities. 6 years ago, if you wanted to parse HTML, you might reach for BeautifulSoup, or libxml, or Hpricot, or Nokogiri...and they would all be subtly different in the parse tree they produced. And they couldn't do any better, because if you viewed the page in IE, or Firefox, or Chrome, or Safari, you might get a different parse tree.

Now, IE9+, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are all basically guaranteed to look at the same page in the same way, and the "toolsmith" parsers like Gumbo or html5lib are all rapidly converging on the standard. So it's finally possible to see a page the way a browser sees it.

<comment><USER8> > Now, IE9+, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are all basically guaranteed to look > at the same page in the same way, and the "toolsmith" parsers like Gumbo or > html5lib are all rapidly converging on the standard. So it's finally > possible to see a page the way a browser sees it.

The web projects I have to take part on, are a distant reality from that description.

<comment><USER9> Are you talking about inconsistent HTML parsing or inconsistent CSS rendering? The latter is much more of a pita than the former.

<comment><USER7> If you stick to the basics of CSS that have been around for a decade or so, both of them are basically solved problems. Browsers are remarkably uniform in how they handle the stuff that was a PITA in 2008.

The problem is that expectations adjust too, and now we want all these new HTML5 features that were just pioneered in a single browser a couple years ago. _Those_ have a lot of cross-browser issues.

<comment><USER10> In many environments, expectations don't have to adjust. With corporate clients, expectations were never reasonable in the first place, and many common requirements that have been around for decades _still_ aren't reasonable.

Clients often demand idiocy like "pixel perfection," specific fonts, custom scaling behavior for size (including application-controlled zooming), and other things that simply aren't part of the paradigm for accessing websites through web browsers.

Between that and the fact that going "beyond the basics of CSS" is a pretty common thing, browser interfailure is still a real problem. It's not as bad as it used to be, but the problem is still there, and many of us are still dealing with it regularly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The term "WHATWG" seems to be conspicuously absent from this article. I wonder where they factor into this announcement.

<comment><USER12> I think they already moved to living standard.

<comment><USER13> Indeed, the W3C's work on HTML5 is irrelevant. It exists only for the purpose of giving the W3C-qua-organization the appearance of being involved in the further development of HTML.

<comment><USER6> I think that's disingenuous — even as someone who has been around the WHATWG for longer than the W3C has been working on HTML5. One clear reason that publication as a REC is important because it implies a royalty-free patent grant between all members of the WG.

<comment><USER14> It's interesting that WHATWG is trying to get the patent commitments by being a W3C Community Group:

[https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#What.27s_the_patent_story_f...](https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#What.27s_the_patent_story_for_WHATWG_standards.3F)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This announcement makes me miss Mark Pilgrim. I wish he was still publishing his blog.

</comment><comment><USER3> This CNet article seems to have a lot more detail than the Techcrunch one:

[http://www.cnet.com/news/html5-is-done-but-two-groups- still-...](http://www.cnet.com/news/html5-is-done-but-two-groups-still- wrestle-over-webs-future/#ftag=CAD590a51e)

</comment><comment><USER16> Cool, but It doesn't really matter what W3C says. In the end it is all about what the Oligarchy of popular browser implementers decide to implement.

<comment><USER17> > the Oligarchy of popular browser implementers

In the past, only Mozilla cared about what the W3C said, and they built Firefox on the idea that interoperability by following the standards is the way to go. Not that long after Apple initiated Safari, and led Google to their own browser initiative.

All this because Mozilla, the insignificant actor of the all IE time, decided to follow W3C.

You're not totally wrong telling that W3C doesn't mater that much, but browsers are what they are today because of W3C for a good part, and it still have a very important place in the browser game.

<comment><USER4> This is pretty much the opposite of how things went down.

If browsers followed the W3C, we'd be living in XML utopia (XHTML2, XForms, XLink, XEvents, etc.). In 2004 a group of implementers (specifically Mozilla, Opera, and Apple) proposed to the W3C to focus on web applications by evolving HTML and the DOM, but were flat-out turned down, and had to go off and form their own standards organization---the WHATWG. Today, that is where much of the foundational work of the web platform is still done: [https://spec.whatwg.org/](https://spec.whatwg.org/)

<comment><USER8> And we could have goten something similar to XAML, instead of the HTML, CSS magic and JavaScript workarounds to replicate desktop behavious and UIs.

<comment><USER18> Do the names XHTML2, XForms, XLink, XEvents invoke an image of something like XAML to you?

We would have ended in some huge JAVA EE circa 2004 mess, with XML to spare and perhaps RDF and a couple ad-hoc languages thrown in for good measure.

<comment><USER8> Yes, because in the XHTML world, tags could loose any semantic meaning.

In HTML 5, one is abandoned to the CSS tricks and JavaScript hacks to make visual UI components of HTML tags.

Every time I get a consultant gig outside the web world, I rejoice.

Yet I've spend a big part of my career involved in web development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Final standards document

[http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/](http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC- html5-20141028/)

</comment><comment><USER20> The most important thing about HTML5 is <video>? What a weird statement.

<comment><USER21> Making Flash obsolete is pretty important

<comment><USER22> Video doesn't kill the flash star.

<comment><USER23> I'm hoping Chrome will drop their built-in flash runtime, only thing it's used for is ads.

<comment><USER8> I imagine you don't play browser games.

<comment><USER18> I imagine not that many people would care if they turned into HTML5 Canvas games.

Nothing kills a laptop battery or spins the fans like BS flash browser games.

<comment><USER24> > I imagine not that many people would care if they turned into HTML5 Canvas > games.

Presumably, the developers still making Flash games would, since HTML5 Canvas has wider reach than Flash, yet they still use Flash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm hoping for a scene graph standard for HTML6 and a spec that allows multiple documents per window (which themselves could be nodes on a scene graph) instead of the one document per window.

<comment><USER26> HTML5 is a living standard, no? There isn't going to be an "HTML6".

<comment><USER27> The spec published by WHATWG is a living standard, and is just called "HTML". The expectation is that every so often the W3C will pick a revision of the WHATWG's HTML spec and stamp it with a version number.

<comment><USER24> > The expectation is that every so often the W3C will pick a revision of the > WHATWG's HTML spec and stamp it with a version number.

W3C HTML5 is not just a snapshot of a particular revision of the WHATWG Living Standard. In a reasonable world, W3C HTML5 (etc.) would be a subset of the WHATWG Living Standard on the date the former was published, but I'm not sure that even that is strictly the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone know how is Doctype versioning going to work with W3Cs snapshoting of the living standard? Or are browsers just going to ignore W3C and stick to implementing WHATWGs spec?

<comment><USER29> No browser ever paid any attention to the version of the HTML specified. The only use for DOCTYPE—and the reason it remains in HTML5—is "doctype switching", i.e. different rendering modes are triggered in the browsers. You can use "html", "html5", "html6.2" or "foobarbaz" as your doctype, the effect will be the same—they will all trigger standards compliant mode.

<comment><USER30> >'You can use "html", "html5", "html6.2" or "foobarbaz" as your doctype, the effect will be the same—they will all trigger standards compliant mode.' //

You're wrong if your asserting that any doctype produces the same results globally but it probably doesn't matter unless you're targeting legacy UA.

See e.g. "Appendix: Handling of Some Doctypes in text/html" at [https://hsivonen.fi/doctype/](https://hsivonen.fi/doctype/) or Eric Meyer's [http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/network/2000/04/14/doctype/...](http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/network/2000/04/14/doctype/index.html) (for MacIE5 ... like I said it probably won't matter!).

<comment><USER6> Speaking of IE/Mac, that's the reason why the HTML DOCTYPE now is `<!doctype html>`. If it hadn't been for IE/Mac, it'd be `<!doctype>`.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> i guess it's finally time to upgrade that .vimrc to include syntax highlighting for the new tags... canvas, video, audio, nav, section, etc..

<comment><USER32> i know it was just a joke, but for vim users working with html i recommend the html5 plugin[0].

[0] [https://github.com/othree/html5.vim](https://github.com/othree/html5.vim)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I was hoping they would add file api support for downloading to non sand boxed environment with mandatory user interaction prompts. The api would prompt for the file download location (via file dialog) but after that, how the file is filled up is up to the web client (and happens in the background). This would allow for parallel download workers via the existing get range option.

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://html5doctor.com/the-ride-to-5/](http://html5doctor.com/the-ride-to-5/) is an interesting overview of perspectives of various people who've been around HTML5 for years about its publication as a REC.

</comment><comment><USER34> Kind of ironic that the embedded Vimeo video in the article is Flash.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wonder when the IE standard support documents listing all the "deviations" from HTML5 will happen.

<comment><USER35> latest versions of IE are pretty good regarding standards.

<comment><USER36> I wonder when they will get as good as the rest of the browsers that are out. I still find more bugs in IE11 than any other current browser.

<comment><USER37> I see more Safari bugs/issues - it's surprising how poor Safari is in some areas.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


An analysis of Vox Day and his supporters - <AUTHOR> http://www.philipsandifer.com/2015/04/guided-by-beauty-of-their-weapons.html

<comment><USER2> Friendly reminder for all that HN favorite Eric Raymond was on the Rabid Puppies ballot: [http://voxday.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/rabid- puppies-2015.html](http://voxday.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/rabid- puppies-2015.html)</comment>


Ask HN: How can I find a full time job? - <AUTHOR> I am a recent Computer Science graduate of Northwestern University, and am struggling to find a full time job. Landing interviews seems to be the most challenging thing ever, and I'm at my wits end about what to do. I'm getting extremely stressed about how to move forward, and will greatly appreciate any advice or opportunities that can come my way. Thank you! <comment><USER2> My ex graduation from OSU in computer science and had a hard time getting a job. She went to a community college and took a class in .net and then applied for jobs at the state. When I graduated I got a job at a consulting company.

you might look into this? Land your dream job, launch your career!

All Nanodegree students receive career support. Nanodegree Plus students receive a job guarantee. [https://www.udacity.com](https://www.udacity.com)</comment>


Ask HN: Reading Recommendation for Hackers? - <AUTHOR> I am looking for resources which focus on the core idea of hacking: virtual machines / emulators, demoscene, compilers etc.<p>I have read the blue book of smalltalk so far, which describes the smalltalk internals. <comment><USER2> Reversing, Secrets of Reverse Engineering - by Eldad Eilam is a nice read. If you know how to reverse engineer something, you can really learn from anything.</comment>


Ask HN: Which sites do you visit everyday? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> If you don't count IRC and Usenet servers, every day I visit:

Hacker News [0], El Reg [1], PacketStorm Security [2], CNN Lite Version [3], Weather dot Gov [4], Github [5], CentOS [6], Ars Technica [7], Sometimes Serverfault though burnt out answering questions [8]

[0] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest)

[1] - [https://www.theregister.co.uk/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/)

[2] - [https://packetstormsecurity.com/](https://packetstormsecurity.com/)

[3] - [https://lite.cnn.io/en](https://lite.cnn.io/en)

[4] - [https://www.weather.gov/](https://www.weather.gov/)

[5] - [https://github.com/](https://github.com/)

[6] - [https://centos.org/](https://centos.org/)

[7] - [https://arstechnica.com/](https://arstechnica.com/)

[8] - [https://serverfault.com/](https://serverfault.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> 50+ answers in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14075942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14075942)</comment>


What do YC Founders think about working at Big Companies? - <AUTHOR> http://rahfeedback.posterous.com/what-do-yc-founders-think-about-working-at-bi <comment><USER2> It's fascinating that the biggest problem is bureaucracy. I don't think the big companies are aware that it's such a big problem. When organizations institute bureaucratic rules, it's always to avoid problems-- e.g. duplication of effort. They never seem to consider the cost of the rules, only the cost of not having them. But this shows how high the cost is. If you're too bureaucratic, it doesn't just make people demoralized or unproductive. It makes them not want to work for you at all. Which means you're not even measuring the cost of such rules accurately; you're only measuring the effect on the people they don't cause to opt out of your sample.

<comment><USER2> BTW, if you have a range of answers, map it onto range of colors. Don't use blue for no, red for weak yes, and purple for strong yes, because chromatically purple is between blue and red.

<comment><AUTHOR> Duly noted - the next set that go out will contrast more.

<comment><USER3> Maybe I misunderstand you, but I think the point was it would be easier to understand if there was _less_ contrast between adjacent answer groups. Strong Yes should be distinct but similar to Yes, which should be distinct but similar to Neutral, and so on. A stepped gradation between two colors works, or even just tints and tones of the same color.

Also, just another minor quibble, could the bars be sorted by some weighted score? So the statements they most agree with pile up on one side. Or, perhaps score by strength of feeling in either direction, so the "important" factors line up on one side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone who went through the acquisition of a software startup, the year in golden chains, and who is now working 12+ hours a day at a software startup again my biggest problem with working at the "big" (in mentality and geography if not employees or success) company was that it atrophied my skills. This is of course ultimately my fault for not working harder to improve myself during that time, but I certainly at the time got dragged under the water by all the wrong incentives.

Standing out enough to get recognition, compensation and other perks required a minimum of legitimate technical innovation and rewarded all the wrong kinds of effort, mostly political maneuvering and the cultivation of a swaggering, executive demeanor that I really hated about myself. Now that I'm back to being judged by my (esteemed) peers on the basis of my direct work product, I'm learning at a crazy pace and enjoying life more even though I'm tired from the long hours.

Startups may not be for everyone, but they are for me, and that would likely be the case even without the possibility of an exit payday.

<comment><USER5> Interesting. A couple of follow-ups, if you don't mind:

Where did the acquisition lie on the talent-/product-acquisition spectrum?

Also, how did those perverse incentives seep into the former start-up's culture? Was it a result of working closely with people already at the acquiring company who bought into the system? Were the executives at the acquiring company directly to blame? Or something else?

<comment><USER4> The acquisition was done for a number of reasons, but most paled in comparison to obtaining a particular piece of software (web browser and JS VM for tiny feature phones) and the team who wrote it (and went on to maintain and extend it). In addition a couple of the founders of the startup went on to be important members of the management team at the new company, so I guess both.

The folks who came from the startup got scattered into every corner of the new company both organizationally and in some cases even geographically and as a result the values of the startup just sort of diffused into the larger company and when we wanted advancement we quickly learned to play by the new rules. At least I did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not a YC founder, but I was the first employee at a startup that was acquired by MSFT in late 2001.

The founders and I were college friends and we were all quite green, having graduated in 1999. As a result, I had a ton to learn. For the first three years, Microsoft was a fantastic engineering training ground. I worked with, and learned from, truly brilliant engineers and architects.

The _next_ three years at Microsoft taught me how not to design management hierarchies, how not to determine customer needs, and how not to structure incentives for individuals and teams in large organizations.

I'm no longer with Microsoft, and I'm quite excited about my current work, though leaving was a difficult decision given how great my co-workers were.

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems the really sad fact is that a ton of middle managers make a handful of mistakes. We're really hoping to be able to level that field through education as well as giving clearly smart employees, such as yourself, the ability to drive change from within.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting to me that so many people in the startup community hate the bureaucracy and overall attitudes in big companies, yet for quite a lot of people, the high-paying exit is the ideal fate for their startups. Exits normally involve one of these big, bureaucratic companies swallowing your company whole.

<comment><USER8> The exit allows you to eventually start a new startup and go through it all again, an IPO/ continuing private business means that your doing the same thing for a long time and may eventually become big company you were trying to escape from initially.

I guess that would be an interesting question to pose, if your startup continued to grow would you wlecome the challenge of expanding it to more of a big company or would you prefer to jump off and do something small again?

Tony Wright is a good example, leaving rescuetime to jump back into something new now that rescuetime has become a more stable, growing company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If I had to guess, I'd guess and hope most YC founders desperately want to work at big companies, but only if it's their own company ;)

(It's not that they don't want to work for other big companies, just not quite as desperately.)

</comment><comment><USER10> The most striking point was obviously bureaucracy. I wonder what the reaction this would get if it was company specific and included only people who had left the company.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm having a great time at Facebook.</comment>


Show HN: phpconsole - a new tool for web developers - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, I want to share with you phpconsole - my dev tool that I started developing quite a while ago, got to the point where it was usable and started testing and implementing it in my daily workflow. In the last 10 months me and some of my coworkers used it over 17k times in total, which gives me an indication that it may be useful for many more people.
Phpconsole is aimed at PHP/JS devs, but I believe that porting the client code to other languages would be fairly easy.
All feedback is welcome and if you're interested, leave your email on the page - you'll get an invitation to a beta version.
Check it out here: http://phpconsole.com Product tour: http://phpconsole.com/tour <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable links:

<http://phpconsole.com>

<http://phpconsole.com/tour>

</comment><comment><USER2> This is something that will ultimately be dependent on your servers, right? Seems handy, but I'd worry about sending internal application state to a third party server.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is amazing. Going to start using this in all my website/web app development from now on. Thanks you.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope you'll like it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems great. I would definitely use it. (And I like it is made in Scotland :D )

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Greetings from Aberdeen :)</comment></comment>


I built a browser extension that disables Twitter's infinite scrolling feed - <AUTHOR> I created a browser extension that replaces the infinite scrolling feed on Twitter with a short feed where you have to click a "show more" button in order to keep scrolling.
It creates a mental checkpoint where you can decide whether you want to keep reading or that you've had enough and maybe want to go do something else!
It has been really useful for me so I thought it could help you guys too. I don't really like how the attention economy puts so much power on private entities to control our time and attention - but I don't entirely blame them.
I recorded a video of the whole process and then tweeted it out, you can check that here: https://twitter.com/voxelbased/status/1174719303544967168
You can get the extension on Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-infinite-scroll-d/jmeadkldfpocoldelepenlicgdlinfeo
And on Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitter-infinite-disabler/
Thank you! And please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions! <comment><USER2> This is neat. Although in recent years I have trimmed down my extensions to just uBlock Origin and HTTPS everywhere. I went through a huge phase of installing novelty addons like this but got concerned about the privacy of the addons and what kind of code they were running. Sure - I could vet the addon by inspecting the code, but that's now outside my scope. I don't have the time or energy to do it anymore.</comment>


Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/cloud-centers-bring-high-tech-flash-but-not-many-jobs-to-beaten-down-towns/2011/11/08/gIQAccTQtN_print.html

<comment><USER2> I've just written an article (waiting for publication) lamenting the same thing from almost the exact opposite angle: Lots of jobs, no money.

Here in Scotland, the government has just given £10.6m in 'support' to Amazon to encourage them to open a distribution centre (actually they already had two, but anyway...) The Scottish government is trumpeting this as a recognition of Scotland's "highly skilled workforce". Actually it's 750 jobs (gov't estimate) mostly on 1% above the legal minimum wage, with no real prospects.

And to cap it all, Amazon don't even pay tax in the UK. All their sales go through a Luxembourg company. So it seems ridiculous that the taxpayer is subsidising the operations of a highly profitable, tax-avoiding company. Effectively we're buying jobs.

Meanwhile, Borders is bankrupt (loss of 1,200 jobs), and other booksellers (Waterstones paid £2m in corporation tax last year) are struggling.

Relating it back to this post - highly skilled work requires less people. Low skilled work requires less people AND pays less money. But it's progress, and I fear it's simply an economic reality. I don't know what the solution is.

Note: I don't want to litter this post with climbdowns, moderations etc. I'm not disparaging Amazon jobs, and 750 people working instead of unemployed is good. But we can't win in a race to the lowest paid unskilled labour. And Amazon's labour can't even be offshored anyway, so who are we bidding against?

</comment><comment><USER3> "not many jobs"? in a town of 3400 people, the new datacenter is expected to create 50 direct jobs and 150 contracting/maintenance positions. if we say the workforce comprises half the population, that means 10% of the jobs in town will be datacenter related. that sounds pretty good to me.

apple isn't going to magically turn your town from podunk, nowhere into some big metropolis.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but it's very likely the 50 direct jobs will be handled by people mostly brought in by Apple and some won't even live in the town.

<comment><USER5> They contracted someone to build the thing in the first place. Whoever is there for the data centre will be renting or buying a place to live, or at least staying at hotels, shopping for food and going to restaurants.

It may not solve all of the town's problems but it probably does not do any harm either.

<comment><USER2> You're right. But the problem is bigger than this. It's that the data centre eliminates a far greater number of jobs than it creates. Somewhere else in the US, there's a CD pressing factory which has just closed its doors with 150 jobs lost. And 10 retailers who sold those CDs. And the company that printed Road Atlases. It's an inevitability, but one that is overlooked by saying, "Well it's progress, we're creating skilled jobs in the businesses that are doing the displacing. Let's retool our workforce."

<comment><USER6> If a data center produces only 50 jobs, then I find it hard to believe that a CD pressing shop produced 150 jobs.

<comment><USER7> The Sony CD plant in Terre Haute, IN employs ~ 1,400 [1]. I know they have other plants, but I think that is it for the Eastern US. And, it's pretty much the only company in the country that produces physical media, so other CD pressing plants are pretty rare.

[1] [http://www.indianaeconomicdigest.net/main.asp?SectionID=31&#...
Edit: According to http://www.sonydadc.com/en/locations/, the only production facility in the US is in Terre Haute...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is very much in agreement with my observations about technological unemployment in the US.

[http://sluggish.homelinux.net/wiki/Employment_and_Productivi...](http://sluggish.homelinux.net/wiki/Employment_and_Productivity_Trends_in_the_US_Economy)

Jobs in software related industries have been stagnant or in decline in the US for the last decade, and traditional narratives about the ability of workers from older industries to upgrade their skills and become "knowledge workers" seem to no longer be true.

<comment><USER9> According to the bureau of labor statistics jobs in software industries are set to massively increase, so who's right

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure I'd trust the BLS projections very far. According to this article, [http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/robot_invasion/2011...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/robot_invasion/2011/09/will_robots_steal_your_job_2.html) the BLS projects a sizable increase in pharmacy work, but automation may end up flipping that on its head.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Technology is about making things easier. Computers, in particular, are about automation. We're finally starting to figure out this automation thing in operations. Cool.

If you're not figuring out how to make you redundant the guy beside you, then the guy beside you is trying to figure out how to make you redundant.

</comment><comment><USER12> It is incredibly short sighted to say that the sum of the jobs created by a data center is the people reporting to work in the building. This data center likely created hundreds, if not thousands of jobs. It's just that most of them aren't in hicksville, NC.

There are hardware engineers designing the facility, software engineers maintaining the software infrastructure, product managers scheming of ways to use Apple's cloud facilities, etc.

<comment><USER13> > This data center likely created hundreds, if not thousands of jobs. It's > just that most of them aren't in hicksville, NC.

Well, yes. But it's worth taking note of the point that Governments subsidizing the creation of data centers in places like hicksville, NC with the idea that the jobs they create will become a huge boon to the local hicksville economy is fundamentally mistaken.

Aside from a skeleton staff to main the facility, most of the work is, as you say, create for people who will never need to set foot in North Carolina. The local jobs aren't bad for Hicksville, but they don't justify the huge subsidies, and they aren't going to ever save hicksville from economic irrelevancy.

<comment><USER14> According to the article, the government didn't subsidize Apple.

 _Town Manager William "Todd" Herms said Apple's presence boosts the town's tax base and helps it lower overall taxes..._

Apple benefits from reduced taxes, and the town gets 50% of something rather than 100% of nothing.

<comment><USER15> That quote seems more like political-speak than actual hard numbers. The article also said that the state government gave Apple $46 million in tax breaks, while local government cut their property taxes by 50 percent and personal taxes by 85 percent. I'm hard-pressed to see how the taxpayers aren't subsidizing this datacenter.

<comment><USER16> They gave Apple those breaks to get them to build the facility there. No breaks 0 revenue, breaks some other > 0 revenue.

<comment><USER13> Money is fungible; tax breaks are no different in function than charging the full tax rate but handing Apple a pile of cash equivalent to what they'd have saved with the tax break.

It's a subsidy. The argument that they made more with the subsidy than they would have without it is separate from the idea that tax breaks don't amount to a subsidy (which was yummyfajitas assertion).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I keep seeing new articles in this type of tone. Like they know what's wrong but are afraid to say what they want for fear it won't be published. What this article is describing is capitalism working effectively, maybe too effictively to be sustainable. Capitalsim is all about using technology to produce profits more efficiently. By building a data center in a small town Apple is efficiently using its techology to produce profits. This isn't something to be complaining to Apple for doing.

Technology's effictiveness is outstripping captialisms mechanism for job creation. The unemployment problem probably cannot be fixed without drastic socio-economic reform.

<comment><USER18> This.

Every time I see articles like this -- pointing out how large full-time admin and operations teams are now replaced with smaller teams and easy-to-manage infrastructure -- I wonder if something similar will happen to software engineering.

In fact, I am sure that something like this _must_ eventually happen to engineering. The cost involved in designing and developing new services will be reduced to only that which is essential. I just dont know what form it will take.

Will newer, easy-to-use libraries reduce the work of five engineers to one? Will basic application development knowledge become so ubiquitous that engineers are only needed for the harder, more obscure challenges? Will all of engineering be reduced to only the most creative work, with all the logic and plumbing provided automagically by intelligent programming environments?

Probably all of the above. What's a dev to do?

<comment><USER12> Yes, we all yearn for the days when cloud computing data centers were run by thousands and thousands of operations engineers. Sadly, those times are no longer here - mostly because they're a figment of your imagination.

But don't let that stop you from assuming for no good reason that the software industry is about to die. People have been making that assumption for 10 years or so now, so you have plenty of good company.

<comment><USER18> <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man>

I didn't say that a single data center employed thousands of engineers, or that the software industry is dying. But don't let that stop you from having an imaginary argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Around here in Oregon, I've seen a fair amount of similar stuff over a few decades. A big company moves into the area. Everyone is thrilled to be building the new facilities. Then, a few locals are hired, a few skilled employees are brought in from their other areas, and everyone else is left scratching their heads.

After a few years, the municipal tax break comes to an end. The big company needs new technology anyway, so it's cheaper just to build a new facility in a new town with new tax breaks, than it is to upgrade the existing one.

</comment><comment><USER20> Instead of subsidising jobs, subsidise education.

</comment><comment><USER20> Create your own job, instead of relying on someone else. Isn't that the idea of a startup?

<comment><USER9> What if your startup doesn't make any money

<comment><USER20> Not sure. My startup does not have that problem.</comment></comment></comment>


Demo: Flying with Mesosphere Marathon, MySQL, and Flocker - <AUTHOR> https://clusterhq.com/2015/08/28/flying-with-marathon/

<comment><AUTHOR> Note that while the example uses the use-case of migrating from a local- storage spinning disk to a local-storage SSD by using actual data copy, flocker can also be used to manage attachments of volumes on EBS for HA/failover of stateful containers.</comment>


Somebody, please put Google News out of its misery - <AUTHOR> http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2018/05/26/somebody-please-put-google-news-out-of-its-misery/ <comment><USER2> Just this weekend I was searching for some older news, and was spending quite a bit of time poking around Google News, and eventually came to the conclusion "this has gone totally to shit".

Near as I can tell, nearly every change Google have made to News has made it a worse product. It's enough to make me want to start building a news aggregator. Of course I have time to do something like that... _sigh_

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A good alternative to Google news is [http://newsnow.co.uk](http://newsnow.co.uk)

It has high information density. It is headlines only which makes it easy to scan lot of information in one go. The categories are also very wide covering everything one can imagine a news aggregator to cover. Only problem is that it doesn't filter or categorise by events or topics so there tends to have duplicate coverage from different sources.

[http://radio3.io/rivers/](http://radio3.io/rivers/) by Dave Winer is also good. You can make your own aggregator with his River5 (node.js) program. Do anyone of you have any other suggestions?</comment>


Oakland's Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Tax: Impacts on Consumption - <AUTHOR> https://www.nber.org/papers/w26233 <comment><USER2> "nber.org" is "National Bureau of Economic Research".

Despite the name, it's not a US federal government agency - it's "an American private nonprofit research organization".

It might be well worth our time to consider NBER's sources of funding when trying to discern truth or falsehood in it's conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER3> So basically a complete waste of time except for transferring money from mostly poor people to the government, so I guess yay if you're a progressive.</comment>


Google Drive blocks personal copy of Plandemic at request of Washington Post - <AUTHOR> https://reclaimthenet.org/google-drive-takes-down-user-file-plandemic/ <comment><USER2> There is a difference between preventing a document from being publicly shared and a document being deleted from a users account. The article provides no evidence that files have been deleted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing that out. I've updated the title to reflect that it was blocked but not deleted.</comment></comment>


T.J. Miller Really Hates 'Pretentious Rich A**holes' in the Real Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/news/a44308/tj-miller-silicon-valley-interview/ <comment><USER2> I mean, there are so many:

"This is awesome. There's nothing wrong with us. We're cool."</comment>


Subscription e-commerce goes crazy, now in the bedroom - <AUTHOR>

Hah check out the newest player in the subscription e-commerce space: www.naughtypotato.com. This space is getting crazy.  I wonder if this it's here to stay or just a passing fad.  Either way, this takes the whole concept to awesome/ridiculous heights.<p>Thoughts on birchbox/shoedazzle/foodzie/blissmobox/babbabox/manpacks/guyhaus/naughtypotato? <comment><USER2> there is a lot of overlap. Manpacks and guyhaus sort of already offer this. Can there really be so many niche verticals?

<comment><USER3> I think NaughtyPotato has brought a needed simplicity to this space. The user can haz a little play or a lot. That very well might appeal to a large part of this extremely small demographic.</comment></comment>


Is a top tier MBA considered positive from Silicon Valley investors ? - <AUTHOR> Is a top tier MBA considered positive from Silicon Valley investors ? <comment><USER2> Not sure. I looked up what Paul Graham had to say on the subject:

> If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of > each person with an MBA, you'll learn something important about business > school. After Warren Buffett, you don't hit another MBA till number 22, Phil > Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only 5 MBAs in the top 50. What you > notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. > Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon > Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, > not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help > you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you'd do better to learn how > to hack than get an MBA. [3]

>[3] Learning to hack is a lot cheaper than business school, because you can do it mostly on your own. For the price of a Linux box, a copy of K&R, and a few hours of advice from your neighbor's fifteen year old son, you'll be well on your way.

from: [http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html)

<comment><USER3> Yeah and if you look at those guys biographies and the critical decisions they made time and again ... a non technical person would make a fatal mistake a high % of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> (I'm not a 'silicon valley investor')

If you were to tell me you managed to get a top tier MBA in much less time than normal (e.g. a year instead of two) and for free (instead of $XXk), I'd be super-impressed at your resourcefulness and determination.

If you tell me you spent 2 years and a whole bunch of money to get some letters after your name, instead of devoting those resources to the business you're asking me to fund, then it might be a negative signal.

Would you rather invest in a company that spends time and effort to enter and win startup competitions, or one that is fully focused on getting product- market fit?

</comment><comment><USER5> I would guess that having one person on your team with a top-tier MBA would be a positive. If you're mostly/all MBAs, that would be a negative.

The benefits of having one top-tier MBA are: (1) networking for hiring/selling/partnerships, (2) someone who can give pitches better than the stereotypically average engineer, (3) background in marketing/operations/sales that most engineers don't have. Basically, it can round out a team and provide a network that helps with certain important functions.

</comment><comment><USER6> To think that a bootstrapped company that is breakeven and has a lot of potential to grow is a very positive signal for investors...

Makes me think that if you are doing a MBA and you want to become an entrepreneur OF SUCCESS(not those that get dad/angel/whatever money and fail)...

You should be building a business, like... now. This second. Everything else is a waste of time.

Now, if you aren't and have no idea what to do, you are no different than me, then a MBA won't do anything for you. I believe people who are getting investment they are doing stuff, building teams and shit. For nothing of that, a MBA counts to be honest.

They want to invest in a business and they expect you to have one. If they wanted to employ somebody, they could hire some graduates

</comment><comment> d--b I'm surprised to see most answers are very negative. I am not sure that paying for an MBA is worth the money, but if you take out the money aspect, I'd say there is no reason why having a MBA should be anything but positive...

I think:

1\. there is a tough selection process to get in, so chances that if you get an MBA from Harvard, you're a pretty smart person

2\. MBA classes should give you valuable lessons, that you won't get from Startup School or YC.

<comment><USER7> But they´re the wrong lessons if you want to do a startup... an MBA is very focused on an existing firm.

That´s why Paul Graham et al advise against it. There´s some very useful knowledge, especially financial and accounting and knowing organizational dynamics if you want to go B2B (not to mention connections).

I personally sometimes regret spending the money and effort on my master´s (a Tech MBA). It definitely didn´t give me the career advancement I was hoping for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know exactly what you would bring to the table. What would you be able to do that others could not? I'm interested to know.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's so context dependent that asking a question suggests you may be thinking the wrong way.</comment>