That ain't no Open Source that I see here - <AUTHOR> http://ayende.com/blog/156769/that-ainrsquo-t-no-open-source-that-i-see-here

<comment><USER2> "Here is the deal, if you aren't coding for fun, you are not suitable for a developer position in Hibernating Rhinos."

OK, fine. SO PUT THAT REQUIREMENT IN YOUR JOB DESCRIPTION! If this is a deal breaker and you fail to inform the candidate, the person wasting everyone's time is YOU.

To put some things you dismissed into perspective:

\- Sometimes a company already knows that the candidate is leaving, in which case they are being helpful by telling you it will take some time to get a release on the code they want to submit.

\- If someone passes you proprietary code without permission, bravo! You've just weeded out an untrustworthy candidate and you didn't even need to take it to the in-person interview! A huge time saver!

\- Junior programmers straight out of school rarely have a bunch of open source code. They're fresh out into the field, looking for someone to mentor and guide them as they grow. There's a mountain of things they need to learn and another mountain they need to unlearn, and they're wide open to whatever culture you find important. If you're not up to the task, don't hire them. Don't even approach them.

Getting all bent out of shape over these things is a symptom of much deeper issues within yourself.

</comment><comment><USER3> I usually find this sort of reply distasteful, but it seems appropriate in this context...

 _I don't know if I can't send you the code, I'll have to ask my employer. (Which seems really silly thing to do, considering you want to get the code to show it to some other company that you want to hire you)._

The parenthetical phrase is not a complete sentence, and should have been placed before the period following "employer". "Which" should not have been capitalized. "seems really silly thing to do" is missing an article. The final period would be rendered redundant by proper placement of the parenthetical phrase.

 _Here is the deal, if you aren't coding for fun ..._

A colon after "deal" would be better.

 _driven by whatever the crazy professor think is a valid coding standard_

"crazy professor" is a singular noun. Either use "thinks" or "crazy professors".

 _I can understand crazy coding standards, what I can't understand is why someone would submit something that would raise so many red flags so quickly as part of a job application process._

This sentence just doesn't flow well, but that aside, the comma should be replaced with a semicolon, or it should be broken into two sentences.

And I'm sure there are more errors.

But why do I care? If someone is going to write an angry rant about how a job candidate submitted code that used suboptimal coding standards, then it would be more convincing if the author would avoid writing this angry rant using suboptimal grammatical standards.

Thanks!

<comment><USER4> You might try sending this to the author (e.g. as an email) for them to fix it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you have just graduated University then it's likely that the only code samples you have will be from that and universities are known to enforce one particular style of notation which may or may not be what is used in industry.

I imagine that the number of university students who contribute anything meaningful to open source apps in addition to their studies is very small. This might be the small number of people he is interested in recruiting but being pissed off because every CV you get in isn't like that seems strange.

<comment><USER6> Contributing to open source while in University has major benefits:

1) skill development through practice and peer review 2) skill development through exposure to "real world" problems rather than the toy problems of school 3) portfolio development for job hunting 4) network building for job hunting

If you're in University, you should be working on open source projects for these reasons and others. I suspect the article author is trying to help spread this meme. Open source contributors really do have a major advantage over their peers, but many students do not realise this.

Others don't know how to start, but that's a different problem.

Besides, open source is fun, and you probably have way more time and resources during University than you will later in life.

<comment><USER5> I agree that contributing to open source is a good way to learn many development skills, however:

 _Besides, open source is fun, and you probably have way more time and resources during University than you will later in life._

Not necessarily, if you are doing CS at a top university and aiming to attain the highest possible grades this requires a huge investment of time and effort to most people.

Also it is not like a 9-5 where you can 'clock off' there is always an uncertain feeling of 'if I put another hour into this , then that might just bump me up an extra grade'

Not to mention that if you just started programming at university your code is probably going to suck pretty hard for the first 2 years at least, to the point where no serious open source project is going to want your patches.

Ultimately if Universities believed that this was important to job prospects in the industry as a whole they would make open source contributions a required part of the curriculum.

<comment><USER6> "Not necessarily, if you are doing CS at a top university and aiming to attain the highest possible grades this requires a huge investment of time and effort to most people."

I would argue that you're better off with a B and a full portfolio than an A and an empty one. It depends on where you are applying, though.

"Also it is not like a 9-5 where you can 'clock off'"

Until you have kids.

"no serious open source project is going to want your patches."

That's not necessarily true. Often either your patches are small and trivial and can be accepted or they are large and useful enough that the other developers will provide feedback. This feedback is often more useful to the student than just getting the patch accepted.

And nobody can reject your patches if it's your own project you're building.

<comment><USER5> The pressure that students will get from professors and parents will be to prioritize academic work above all other activities.

Also the majority of "good" tech jobs in the UK usually have a minimum degree requirement of a 2:1 (the majority of students achieve a 2:2) and will just bin anything that doesn't match that.

There is a fundamental choice that the industry really needs to make as a whole here. When you compare CS to a degree in (say) photography, a large component of a photography degree will be to build up a portfolio to show off whereas this is not a priority in CS.

If employers shout loudly enough that they want to see students who have produced real code for real projects then universities can adapt to that. Otherwise there is a very confused message being sent "We want people with an excellent academic record, a big git log of OSS commits, oh and they should also be well rounded with excellent interpersonal skills" , there are no doubt a few people like that but good luck to the companies all competing to hire them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really don't like the tone of this post. Getting "angry" about candidates CV's and given the impression you think less of them is a bit much.

It's absolutely okay to have a preference for the type of candidate you are looking for. Even better, how that preferred candidate should appear as early as their application.

However, don't classify the candidate as a "moron" (implied via the tone of your blog post) simply because they don't meet your preferred qualifications. Pass on them and move on.

Better yet, this is also a chance to teach if your up to it. Rather then get upset, why not ask them to elaborate AND tell them why you are having them do so. Inform them why you think it is important, helpful, and how it _may_ be important when applying at other companies.

</comment><comment><USER8> It sounds like what you're looking for is someone who won't have a life outside of work or whose life outside of work looks a lot like their life at work.

I wonder if "you must also spend your free time coding" is an attitude that discourages female participation in software engineering.

</comment><comment><USER9> Note to self: never work for this guy (or "Duke" from the comments). I do in fact have side projects, but making them mandatory shows disrespect for my time away from the job.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would not be hirable there. I have had the misfortune of only working at jobs where there has been (1) a lot to do, (2) much of it very interesting, and (3) the quicker it gets done the better. Trying to throw in any significant open source work on top of this would push me past the burnout point.

When I get off work, I sit down on the couch, put on something relaxing on the TV (Science channel, Discovery, History, Nat Geo, etc. or a sitcom or Futurama, Simpsons, or South Park), and then pull out a math textbook or a theoretical CS book or an interesting research paper, and work on expanding my theoretical knowledge. I've also added a lot of Udacity and Coursera to the mix.

(I assume it goes without saying that I also waste a vast amount of time on Reddit and HN...)</comment>


Smoking: Quitting is so hard - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21657391-everybody-now-knows-how-people-can-be-persuaded-stop-smoking-so-all-countries-should-be-doing <comment><USER2> I'd been smoking about a pack a day for 15 years when I started seeing electronic cigarettes. They were a bit expensive at first, but once the prices started to come down I couldn't resist trying one. I like electronic gadgets and the idea of trying these (and being able to smoke in even more places) was appealing. I had no intention of quitting when I bought my first one, it hadn't even occurred to me.

Gradually the convenience of the electronic cigarettes shifted my habit away from regular cigarettes, and I found myself rarely lighting up a normal one. I also would take fewer puffs, I might do one or two drags and put it down absentmindedly, not thinking about smoking for a while after. It was 100% on- demand, no urgency to finish something lit.

I tell people I 'accidentally quit' now, since I just gradually weaned myself off tobacco and nicotine. I haven't smoked or used electronic cigarettes in about eight years, and the cravings are gone. I liked smoking and I might consider going back to it if the health risks disappeared due to advances in medicine.

I wonder why the medical community hasn't done more to embrace electronic cigarettes as a 'safer' alternative or method of quitting. Addicts of other drugs are treated using the same model. I don't expect them to embrace it as a safe alternative, but I think they could help others quit or reduce their traditional cigarette smoking habits.

<comment><USER3> The medical community hasn't embraced e-cigarettes as a safer stop-smoking aid because there is only intuitive speculation and some preliminary research, but not substantial clinical research, that they are useful in that role, while other smoking cessation approaches, including those using more established alternative nicotine delivery methods, are more proven.

<comment><USER4> Anecdotal evidence from many people, myself included, suggests that they are far more effective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been able to get two people to quit smoking by giving them a superior option in every way, including the subjective effect and satisfaction that they feel: vaporizing a full spectrum extract of the tobacco plant.

Everyone has seen electronic cigarettes in convenience stores everywhere, and they are billed as smoking cessation devices. The problem with them lies in that they only contain nicotine. The tobacco plant contains other psychoactive alkaloids like anabasine that smokers are used to and enjoy.

Whole tobacco alkaloid is a new type of juice for these devices. The two smokers I helped quit hated regular e-cigs because they are lacking. Very quickly they preferred vaping WTA juice to smoking. Smoking is dirty, smelly and socially discouraged.

Give them a better option and they will switch in droves.

I've examined all the tobacco extracts on the market, and the cleanest by far comes from a guy named Jeff at wholecig.com

He created his own process using only non-toxic solvents, it takes him 4 days to make one batch. He is an innovator and a nice guy.

In the future no one will burn raw tobacco, they will vape a full spectrum extract.

Update: I got an email saying this was the best written ad he's seen in a while, and I wanted to publicly say I have no ownership in wholecig and am not employed by them. I called Jeff about an order and got to talking to him and we swapped chemistry notes, I really like the guy and want his business to succeed because I think he's doing gods work, and saving lives through innovation.

<comment><USER6> When you say you got two people to quit, does that mean they eventually gave up the e-cigarettes, or just that they've switched from one form of smoking to another?

If you're vaporizing tobacco extract, is that any better than smoking from a health perspective?

(On a related note, since you mentioned toxicity... the lack of any sort of standards or certification for e-cig "juice" really makes me nervous about the whole field. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the brands out there could cause damage to your lungs in the long term... we just don't know yet.

I've got a friend who makes juice as a business, and it really is just something done in his kitchen, and faith that his ingredients aren't harmful when inhaled.)

Hopefully this doesn't come off as sounding too critical. Just questions I keep thinking of, especially since I've had several friends go from non- spokers straight to using e-cigs (rather than using them to quit smoking), since they're promoted as being safe.

<comment><USER5> One of them has been switching to patches with the intention of quitting.

I believe that damage to the lungs is a real possibility, especially if the voltage is too high in the coils.

I can see no possibility that vaporizing tobacco extract is more harmful than smoking raw tobacco, either from a lung health or a cancer perspective.

I think vaping wta is a prudent harm reduction technique.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't care whether you quit smoking. Just quit throwing cigarette butts on the ground. Quit smoking in and around buildings where non-smokers live and work. Quit smoking in waiting areas. Quit walking and smoking in busy urban pedestrian corridors; others are walking in the same direction. Quit smoking upwind from the picnic table where I'm having lunch. Quit smoking on park trails, at least when the risk of forest fire is high, for crying out loud.

Other than that, knock yourself out.

<comment><USER8> And stop throwing your butts out your car windows!

They (use to, don't know if they still do) make ashtrays in cars. Most people I knew who had them and smoked didn't use them. They a) couldn't be bothered to clean it out regularly and/or b) didn't want the butts to stink up their car. But b) was pointless, they and their car already stunk like cigarettes. Their noses just could detect it anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quitting is actually very easy. I quit smoking with the help of four things: 1) genuine desire, 2) vaping, 3) Alan Carr's book and 4) bubblegums. These four were the critical ingredients for me.

I think nobody can quit without having a genuine desire. I had my first kid born and not wanting him to inhale all this shit is a good genuine desire. (Even when you smoke outside on the balcony surrounding people get it, there's no escape. Everything else is a dumb excuse.)

E-cigarettes help to solve the aesthetic part of the equation - they take all the joy out. When you vape, you have the same doping effect except you realize what a pathetic f^H addict you are with all those batteries, cartridges, bottles of liquid and stuff. Bye-bye smoking with class.

The Alan Carr's book is a great help with the psychological aspect. From the perspective of hopeless addict (three packs a day) he tells you that quitting is very easy and it turns out to be indeed so. Carr also tells you to stop instantly instead of easing off. I got from smoking pack a day to vaping then chain-vaping and then I just quit right away. Carr also addressed one very important aspect for me as an IT guy: concentration. When I tried to quit smoking before I lost focus due to cravings and was afraid I could no longer work. Bullshit. Without cigarettes I am even more focused now. In the end you get more health, more focus, more stamina - more everything.

Finally, the bubble gum helped me to deal with the mechanical addiction. I wanted to smoke when I got into the car, when I got out of the car, after the lunch, and so on, so instead of smoking, I chewed spearmint bubblegum. Now I do without gum.

Good luck to everybody. It is indeed worth it.

<comment><USER10> The most important point you have made is number one. Addiction isn't a magic spell that forces you to behave in a particular matter. Complicated behaviors require thought, thought can be reigned in with logic and introspection. People simply don't want to deal with the temporary discomfort of withdraw and prefer to continue what they are doing. "I'm addicted" makes for a nice excuse to tell yourself.

Remember the emotions that you feel were generated via random permutations of your genetic code. Logic was developed by Grecian scholars and continually improved by the best of us. Don't "Trust your gut", trust your mind.

<comment><USER11> "Genuine desire" stinks of the genuine belief that is supposed to make magic and prayer work. How do you know the desire wasn't genuine? Because the smoker failed to quit; Q.E.D..

<comment><USER10> No, genuine desire is the willingness to complete something despite the discomfort. I have a desire for 6 pack abs, not a genuine desire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The most effective measure against smoking is taxation.

I hate this method of behavior control. It's always a disproportionate tax on the poor and yet another reason why if you are rich the rules don't apply to you.

<comment><USER13> * smoking is recreational, its not a necessary expense

* the rich pay the tax too

* it has a cost and is a nuisance to others

* some countries fund the health programs caused by smoking thanks to those taxes

* you got to stop finding excuses about smoking, smokers are addicts, society must be intolerant towards regular smokers. I went through passive smoking as a kid, believe me, its awful.

<comment><USER14> > you got to stop finding excuses about smoking, smokers are addicts

So are coffee drinkers. Do you give them a hard time?

<comment><USER11> I'm addicted to board games, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the whole problem with the smoking debate is that neither side (pro and anti) are willing to embrace harm reduction, even though the market has introduced many methods to use nicotine and/or tobacco that, to one degree or another, do in fact reduce the harm caused by the manufactured cigarette.

The anit-smoking side views harm reduction as a movement that is completely against their efforts. To the anti-smoking side, vaping is the same as {cigarettes, cigars, pipes, shisha, snus, ...}. The anti-smoking side's stated agenda is absolute eradication of tobacco use in any form, and they've hit all fronts just short of prohibition.

The pro-smoking side take a small-l liberal view: People should be able to use tobacco. Their problem with harm reduction is that harm reduction is also against their stated goals. While the pro-smoking side will happily embrace vaping, they view it as yet another way to enjoy tobacco.

In the meantime, people like their vices. As an exercise, re-write the Economist article, but substitute "alcohol" for "tobacco". As I recall, there was such an article posted to HN that showed how journalism colors the perception of drugs by writing about alcohol use as if alcohol was a new drug, not a very old one.

Back to my point on harm reduction, I believe that sooner or later a stasis should be reached. Harm reduction will be embraced by both sides. I believe that the only way to reduce the negative effects of any substance use to a society is to teach the risks and the safest way to use the substance. I think that the end result will be an open market where the suppliers of the substance will sell their product in any way they can and a corresponding social pressure that pushes users towards more acceptable (less harmful) practices while supporting programs that allow for self-selected cessation.

<comment><USER16> One of the problems with harm reduction is that the tobacco industry has produced and sold products under the guise of harm reduction where those products have had no harm reduction benefit.

You take a normal cigarette and test the tar and nicotine content. You then take the same cigarette and piece small holes in the filter. This new cigarette will test as lower tar and lower nicotine, but when real humans use it (blocking the holes) it's the same cigarette.

Chewing tobacco was sold as a harm reduction measure - and it caused a lot of mouth and throat and bowel cancer.

Tobacco companies are scum. It's a good thing that people are sceptical of tobacco companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recommend using Swedish snus to quit; it worked for me, and when I was using it, I had to bulk import it from Sweden rather than it being available at every 7-11.

First tried it out of curiosity when I was at a tobacco shop and saw the strange cans in a tiny refrigerator behind the counter, and before finishing the can, noticed I had been completely forgetting to smoke (20 year 1 pack a day habit.) I had accidentally quit within 2 months.

2 years later I quit snus entirely also, and I've been 3 years without a tobacco product of any sort. Snus is far easier to quit than smoking because you lose the hand thing, and the inhaling thing, and the exhaling thing, and basically everything that is fun about cigarettes, and are simply left with a pure addiction. That can't be said about electronic cigarettes, which are pretty much an drop-in replacement for cigarettes.

In that, just the switch to snus is like half-quitting in itself. Snus is also well-studied, with no known negative health effects other than an assumed link to higher rates of a few rare pancreatic cancers - based on the fact that it contains a chemical that has been linked in cigarettes to higher rates of those pancreatic cancers, but snus contains that chemical in about a tenth of the concentration.

And by well studied, I mean really well studied: [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=swedish%20snus&btnG=Sea...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=swedish%20snus&btnG=Search&as_sdt=800000000001&as_sdtp=on)

<comment><USER4> Why is it so much healthier than chewing tobacco?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A broader spectrum of legally available, socially acceptable drugs would certainly negatively impact both smoking and alcohol consumption.

Really, both nicotine and caffeine are _terrible_ stimulants, despite the fact that most people, especially city people and young people, seem to _love_ stimulants. For example, chewing coca leaves or consuming coca-leaf derived teas is probably better for you than smoking (and certainly better for you than snorting cocaine). Coca Cola famously used to include coca leaves: why not re-legalize? Ephedrine is also a great natural stimulant, still consumed traditionally in China, Central and South Asia.

Alcohol is awesome socially at a certain range of intoxication, beyond that it gets progressively more terrible. However, many people who have tried low doses of empathogens such as MDMA believe they are better socially than alcohol. Many highly ranked medical professionals also believe that occasional use of these substances is less dangerous than alcohol.

But intelligent drug policy is unlikely to happen on a wide scale any time soon: like many major facets of our current international capitalist dystopia, there's far too many cashed up, cross-border, back-scratching mutual support networks with an interest in the status quo to easily facilitate change: for example existing cartels with near-monopolies on supply (and everyone they pay off), big pharma, the prison industry, and conservative politics.

PS. To quit smoking, have a child... you get free backup from hormone changes, and naturally wind up spending more time around non-smoking young parent types.

<comment><USER18> I am not sure.

I have an electronic cig at the moment, as it's when I am drunk that I crave cigarettes the most.

wanting to give up smoking is a terrible reason to have a child, though I am sure that's not quite the way you intended that last part to come out.)

<comment><USER19> _...that last part..._

Deliberately inverting motivations or reversing cause and effect is a common form of humor. Another example: "If you want to wear your seatbelt, get into a car crash."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > The most effective measure against smoking is taxation.

That is certainly one of the levers used in Australia. It has also promoted a thriving black market for cigarettes. There's a balancing act there.[4]

Other measures such as plain packaging, graphic warnings on packaging and banning in many public places are also in use here.

A while ago I listened to a Freakonomics podcast[1] about how to make people quit smoking. There were two related points that stuck with me.

1\. Nicotine can have a lot of positive benefits. As one of their experts stated, "Good drug, bad delivery system." [2]

2\. One of those benefits is a possible anti-depressant effect. So smoking may inadvertently be treating a person's undiagnosed mental health issue[3], an additional difficulty when trying to quit smoking.

This second point has made me a little more compassionate towards smokers, and to the difficulty of quitting. (As least in theory, still get annoyed when I can smell cigarette smoke on myself after a trip down to the shops because of some smoker on the sidewalk.)

[1] [http://freakonomics.com/2014/04/03/how-to-make-people- quit-s...](http://freakonomics.com/2014/04/03/how-to-make-people-quit-smoking- a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/)

[2] I don't think smoking, and trying to quit smoking, it just about the nicotine. That's just one aspect of the issue.

[3] NOT advocating this as an excuse to continue smoking. There are better treatments.

[4] "The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to get the most feathers with the least hissing." — Jean Baptiste Colbert

</comment><comment><USER21> From memory, I think the points made about (teen smoking) smoking in "Tipping Point" were pretty good without thinking it through deeply (on my part). Cliffnotes I remember is that teens keep smoking because "cool people" smoke not because "smoking is cool" etc. I don't know how to attack the demand side but I guess some sort of reverse "Don't Mess with Texas" campaign could be a start.

Then again one of the appeals of smoking is the fact that it's rebellion of sorts so not sure any campaigns work.

Keep on hammering the supply side is the best bet I'd guess. The demand side seems really tricky.

<comment><USER22> Smoking is a rebellion, but getting around that is easy. You just make smoking lame, something only a loser would do. Then you introduce another behaviour that the can substitute as a (safe) way to signal tribal belonging (which is what a rebel really wants).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I stopped smoking by getting a prescription drug called Champix (apparently Chantix in the us).

The instructions tell you to pick a day to stop like 5 days after starting the drug, I think on day 7 I just didn't feel like smoking anymore. After the prescription ran out I started to crave cigarettes again but no where nearly as badly as going cold turkey so I just didn't smoke any more.

</comment><comment><USER24> For anyone who would like to quit smoking, "The Easy Way to Quit Smoking" read in one sitting is what did it for me. I went from a pack every three days or so for a few years to nothing in four hours. No patches. No smokes. No vaporizing.

Sounds like magic but it's just a damn good book.

</comment><comment> d-equivalence Allen Carr's Easy Way to Quit Smoking. Be careful cause it works like magic only the first time.

</comment><comment><USER22> No it is easy. All you gotta do is want it.

Most addicts don't want to, probably because they enjoy it.

So try to convince them to start vaping instead - much the same hit, much less cancer.

</comment><comment><USER25> In my experience, being broke forced me to quit smoking. It narrows your choices down to one possible outcome. You simply can't afford $15 for 20 cigarettes.</comment>


6 predictions for the future of deep learning - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/3172554/analytics/6-predictions-for-the-future-of-deep-learning.html <comment><USER2> Strange article. The analytics ecosystem is not the main object of preoccupation of DL researchers. Most other predictions relate to frameworks and standards, also not big issues for the DL community.

What is important in DL now is:

\- reinforcement learning and games

\- generative adversarial networks and unsupervised learning

\- advanced NLP, especially dialogue, QA

\- better architectures - residual, inception, attention, memory

\- better tools - parallelization, running on weak hardware, knowledge transfer

In short, we're advancing from simple recognition to complex generation or synthesis.</comment>


Ask HN: Doctor turned self-taught developer. To do a master's in CS or not? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN,
I come to you guys in search of solid and honest advice.
I'm 30 years old doctor turned self-taught developer. For the past 12 months or so I've been teaching myself programming through use of Freecodecamp and Udemy courses.
My main skill set right now is web dev, but my main interest is in health tech and ideally I'd like to be working as a software engineering in the healthcare space working with patient data, medical imaging and other more complex stuff.
I must say that my programming career path has not been straightforward. Unbeknownst to me, I didn't realise that coding != programming and if I want to become a software engineer I would need to get a solid understanding of computer science. It is for this reason that I've recently started to focus more on the fundamentals of CS like DS&A.
It is also for this reason that I've applied to go back to university to do a Master's in CS.
However, during this time I've also been applying for jobs and recently was offered a job at a health tech startup where they want me to work on an AI symptom checker chat bot.
So now I'm a bit torn. I really want to get a solid understanding of CS so that I can become a knowledgeable software engineer and work in the healthcare space in the future.
But at the same time, I feel like I can also learn whilst on the job and actually, this style suits me more as I consider myself more of a practical learner than a book learner.
So HN, all other factors put aside (like money), what would you do in my shoes: to go back to university or not? <comment><USER2> The only advice I can give is from my perspective as an employer at a large SaaS company recently. As CTO I was responsible for building a large team covering various skills, including a large number of software engineers. My experience led me to a position where I would actually favor candidates who had significant experience over those with academic qualifications. I have often found, not always but often, that highly qualified engineers need to be "retrained", as software development in the commercial world is (IMHO) a very different discipline to that taught in academia.

I should stress, that my experience is in very specific fields, visual effects, games, retail intelligence, VR, and this may colour my advice. It is entirely possible, in fact likely, that academic qualifications are more valuable than experience in other sectors. I would advise researching the nature of the sector you want to work in, if possible speak to various companies and agencies who specialise in that area, and see what the general expectation is. You may find that a lack of formal qualification might hinder you even getting to interview.

Summary, I personally don't feel that academic qualifications hold any particular value over experience, and strongly believe that someone who is motivated to learn themselves brings value in a different way to a business. But that might not be the opinion of every business or sector, so be careful.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would recommend going to university and doing that Masters in CS. Mind you, it could be a pretty steep learning curve not having done any undergraduate work.

My rationale is simply that as a self-taught coder, you are unlikely to have a solid grasp of the fundamentals. It is the fundamentals that will support your work in the long term. As you hare discovered coding is only a small part of the total knowledge required to be a competent software engineer (and I use that term deliberately).

The complex stuff that you would like to work on will, sooner or later, require more than programming knowledge. In the long term your additional education will make you far better prepared to handle the intricacies of your intended work.

In closing, it is rather like the distinction between a pharmacist and a general practitioner. They both know the names hundreds of pharmaceutical products. But only the GP is qualified to correctly diagnose the patient's condition and thus optimal prescription(s). In simple cases the pharmacist could probably make a diagnosis and supply the correct drug, but it might not be based on the same thorough examination and diagnosis that the GP would make. In complex cases the latter approach could have adverse effects. Fortunately in medicine there is a protocol that avoids such problems. In programming there are no such protections.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I am thinking along the same lines too. Thanks for your answer!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [random internet remarks]

Is your goal to work as a programmer or go to school? Neither is right or wrong. It might be both depending on the short versus medium term. It might be neither (i.e. the goal might be getting out of medical practice instead -- again nothing wrong with that). Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> My goal is to work as a software engineer in the healthcare space and improve the state of patient data (because I think it's currently abysmal). I'm interested in making medical data less fragmented, more accessible and more secure. I believe blockchain could be a viable solution so naturally I am also interested in blockchain.

Obviously I want to work as a programmer, but I'm wondering if my goals, which require specialised knowledge in topics like security, encryption, cryptopgraphy, medical imaging, databases, would be better learned in university than from a job.

<comment><USER4> Some random remarks:

1\. Working as a software engineer in healthcare and improving the state of patient data are two different goals. One is technical and vocational and the other is largely a matter of policy and economics and outside the scope of working as a software engineer in healthcare.

2\. Engineering is usually a matter of combining existing systems. Detailed academic knowledge of databases is very interesting and mostly irrelevant to engineering an information system that contains databases because there are lots of good databases and because what makes one or the other better is nature of the problem to which they are applied.

3\. The same is true for encryption and security. It's a matter of picking tools and/or hiring experts. It's not robustly implementing one's own elliptic curves.

4\. There's nothing wrong with pursuing a CS degree for the sake of learning. Just realize that successful engineering is a matter of collaboration and "knowing which table to look at."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You do need to have a foundation which you can learn in a university but also outside a university. My bet is that you can learn it faster and cheaper outside university.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you suggesting I go through the self-taught route and learn from MOOCs and books instead?</comment></comment>


Why Minecraft Matters - <AUTHOR> http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/01/15/a-brief-explanation-of-why-minecraft-matters/ <comment><USER2> Minecraft's story is even more impressive than the article makes it seem. The game was not developed by a few people, it was developed by _one_ guy ("Notch"). He hired six people only recently and they started working together around Winter 2010/2011.

He now gets help with the business and support side of running a company but only one of the developers he hired is working on the game with him together. The other developer is getting their next game up and running.

What's also interesting is that Notch does not want to run the business, at least not at the scale at which it is now. He hired people to do that for him.

<comment><USER3> If you think Minecraft is an impressive one-man project, have you ever played Cave Story? (Doukutsu Monogatari)

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Doukutsu Monogatari is, rivaled only by Braid, the most beautiful, fun, and moving video game I have ever played. It is astonishingly creative and innovative. The gameplay is challenging, but fun. And there's not even a hint of repetition.

It is a masterpiece. I wish that I could play it again for the first time.

<comment><USER5> Thank you both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _The reason you should care is because a team of four or five people using free libraries and cross-platform tools have just made a mockery of the last five years of franchise-oriented, $50 million budget, yearly-release, AAA game development._

Eh, I would not say that. Minecraft is not seriously competing with AAA big- budget titles like God of War. They have completely different audiences. Yes, GoW is extraordinarily expensive to create, but it offers a gameplay experience that Minecraft doesn't and never will. Or at least, by the time minecraft can procedurally generate an experience like GoW, the big-budget AAA franchises will have moved on to something flashier.

And certain franchise titles are attractive because of the licensing, eg the NFL. That is unfortunate but not something the gaming industry can do much about immediately.

<comment><AUTHOR> But the idea is that it doesn't matter if the game genres are completely different. What matters is that indie developers like _notch_ have shown that they can make games that will become immensely successful in new genres, such as sandbox games. Perhaps the audiences are different, although I'm sure there is still quite an overlap. However, even if the audiences are different, this just goes to show that indie developers are beating top notch companies (no pun intended) to taking advantage of these audiences.

<comment><USER6> The audiences are different, it's possible for people to like Minecraft and God of War, but for different reasons. That's what I mean by different audiences. I like classical Opera and NFL Football, but they have different audiences.

I picked GoW to contast with Minecraft because its a big-budget title with exactly the strengths that Minecraft lacks. It's narrowly focused on the theme of a god-slayer who engages in brutal close-combat. It's loaded with detailed, hand-crafted content that all fits together coherently, supporting that theme. The story, the art, the scenario/level design, the cinematic design, which is seamlessly integrated into the actual gameplay and superb performance on its target hardware (at least, for the length of time I've played it) all make a difference.

A cow in Minecraft looks like a Gateway computer box: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD6qUTQDvU4>

A cow in God of War is a 35-foot tall minotaur whose armor spews some sort of steam as Kratos rends it asunder: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_xbbD7RgCg>

I'm not taking anything away from Minecraft here. It is a fantastic game-- the point of Minecraft is entirely different from the point of GoW. Anyone playing Minecraft cares more about what the cow represents than what it looks like. But people playing GoW care a great deal what that Minotaur looks like. They care how he looks, how he moves, how the camera tracks him during the encounter, whether there is a brief fps hit when the garbage collector kicks in, etc. Currently, to get a game full of scenes like the one linked in that GoW youtube video, you need a team of designers, artists, and developers working with excellent directors and leaders.

<comment><USER7> But here's the thing: Who is pushing the idea that people want the God of War cow? Are players really asking for that, or is it a fantasy on the part of publishers?

Publishers definitely like the idea of pumping up their games with unnecessarily large budgets, even though it works against them on a risk/reward basis, because, at least in theory, throwing money into a game will lead to a work of higher quality than the competition. And internally, everyone in charge of such projects can fall back on the prestige and instant attention assumed from having such an obviously detailed, polished work.

And yet Nintendo has never felt much need to compete on that level. They give their games plenty of marketing, for sure, but product development stays pretty tight. As far as the public knows, they never let a product explode into a monumental 4-year effort. But their games are still good and still attract a sizable audience, and they've had the most success of the big publishers in substantially expanding the game market.

Comparing the two approaches, I take the opinion that most of the console publishers are overextending themselves with an outdated strategy. It was more compelling to try to push the budget upwards in past eras, where the technology was just barely making new things possible each time, and the market was full of early-adopter types who wanted to see the shiniest thing around. But the differences between the best-looking games of 2011 and the best-looking games of 2006 are pretty subtle to the uninitiated viewer, nothing like the gap between any previous five-year comparison. And the overall trend of gaming has been towards more accessibility and less (overt) complexity. So our notions of quality have to change with it, and that greatly upsets the balance of power in game development.

<comment><USER8> >Who is pushing the idea that people want the God of War cow?

The people buying games? God of War 3 moved 1.1 million units in a single month[1] at ~$60 retail. Minecraft just topped 1 million units _total_ last week, at $13-20 a piece.

This isn't taking away from Minecraft's success at all -- and what was essentially a one-man show making $15M+ off a single title is absolutely phenomenal success -- but I think it's silly trying to directly compare the two given the differences in scale. Neither is a replacement for the other.

[1] [http://www.next-gen.biz/news/npd-god-of-war-iii-tops- march-s...](http://www.next-gen.biz/news/npd-god-of-war-iii-tops-march-sales- chart)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> To me, the more interesting part about minecraft's success is that it gets a lot of people doing things that look like work to me for fun. Also, it does this with a high learning curve and without using any kind of reward schedule mechanics that are in vogue now. As far as I can tell (and I've only watched others play), the appeal is based on the joy of creation and sharing your creations, and the difficulty of it actually enhances the experience. It just seems so fresh compared to what everyone else is doing.

<comment><USER10> Its worth noting that the audience/gamer who plays this game is pretty unique as well.

I heard of the game from the dwarf fortress forums, penny-arcade, and then later on Techcrunch and other blogs. The people talking about the games, who made the most out of it, tended to be the type with gaming experience, willingness to turn a blind eye to its current graphic set, and an imagination large enough to see the potential of the game world.

Basically, outside of the core audience of the game, there will be a sudden drop in the number of people who would be willing to give it a shot.

<comment><USER11> Except that many who get into it, gets their friends into it and their families into it (since it's such a great family game). I think you underestimate the appeal of a sandbox game like this. It's got all the casual gaming characteristics and enough depth for hard-core gamers. It's really quite impressive that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Notch seems to be adopting Google's 10% time (to some extent), but rather with 50% time.

       "Because I want to avoid us just focusing on reaching release,
       I suggested that we should dedicate 50% of the development time
       in Minecraft towards adding fun new stuff. Basically, any developer
       working on the game (two people at the moment) can just come up with
       something they'd want to add on a day-to-day basis, as long as the
       rest of the team thinks it's a decent idea. If it ends up being fun,
       it gets added." [1]

Sure, that 50% time will still be spent working on Minecraft. But it won't be the same as the other 50% time when the developers are trying to reach deadlines and so forth. I think that Notch is now taking control of how the company functions, which is a good thing. Before, it was just him and there was nothing but meeting deadlines. Now that he has more people to help him, he can focus on fun things like this.

[1] - [http://notch.tumblr.com/post/2687176736/information-dump- inc...](http://notch.tumblr.com/post/2687176736/information-dump-incoming)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt:

       "Braid and Minecraft are both examples of how a few good
       ideas, executed in an accessible and affordable way, will
       outsell franchises by orders of magnitude."

This just about sums it up. Many indie developers are harnessing potential new game genres. They're finding low-budget ways to create addictive games with a high chance of becoming viral. They're finding classic ideas to expand on and platforms to build off of. Big game publishers are failing to do this. They'll spend tons of money, yet lack the innovation to break through in these new areas of the market.

<comment><USER12> Except that quote's not accurate at all. Minecraft has sold 1 million copies lifetime. CoD Black Ops sold 7 times that amount in 24 hours. The franchise outsold Minecraft by an order of magnitude.

<comment><USER13> To get some useful figures to compare:

How much profit has CoD made after all costs are accounted for? (including advertising, which minecraft skipped by going viral)

How much money did CoD make per developer?

<comment><USER14> This isn't a good comparison; Minecraft is an extreme statistical outlier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a great article on techcrunch on why the gaming industry needs to wake up and try new things and not keep on going for IP that has already been done before again and again. Sometimes gamers actually want new and fresh games not the next FPS.

<comment><USER16> "not the next FPS" is funny. I have 3D sickness and can't play FPS anymore. And I got sick watching the YouTube videos about Minecraft.

<comment><USER17> Are you sure your sickness isn't being caused by an unnaturally small or high Field of View (FOV)? This is a common cause of motion sickness-like symptoms in gamers. Usually adjusting to a FOV of 90-100 degrees fixes this (depending on your screen's aspect ratio).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Notch is a really refreshing person. Instead of all the wannabe-entrepreneurs that want to build apps/games for money (mostly), he just seems to really enjoy what hes doing. I also think all the money doesnt mean too much to him, other than he now has the freedom to only do "fun stuff". The fact that he doesnt want to run the business and just keep coding underlines that even more.

</comment><comment><USER19> I like that Minecraft is proof you can write something cool in Java, a language considered by many to be corporate and boring.

All Java haters should watch the video of Notch coding away in Eclipse.

<comment><USER20> I'm one of those haters who thinks Java IS kind of corporate and boring. On the other hand, it's just a programming language, and it's what you do with it that counts. You could write enterprise CRUD apps in Lisp if you wanted to.

I think it's more interesting that Minecraft is a Java APPLET. (at least the free version I played was)

<comment><USER21> Once you click that "allow permissions" button, an applet is pretty much exactly like any other Java application. It has all the permissions it wants, up to and including running native code.

The paid version gives you the option to run it either as an applet or a downloadable auto-updating jar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Jeez, someone cut APB some slack. It may have been a flop but it was hardly your run-of-the-mill linear action game.

<comment><USER23> I do think its massive budget was its undoing. I thought APB sounded pretty fun, but the pricing structure just sounded usurious and I wound up not even trying it out. I don't recall the specifics, but as somebody who has paid for lots of subscription services and games in the past, APB just sounded singularly like they were nickel and diming you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think it's ridiculous to use one game like Minecraft to announce a new era for videogame developers. Who's to say Minecraft wasn't an anomaly, a result of a ridiculously talented person like Notch and a perfect storm of hype and word-of-mouth PR?

> Why it matters

>

> Sounds interesting, you say, but why should I care that a few guys have put > together a cool little indie game? The reason you should care is because a > team of four or five people using free libraries and cross-platform tools > have just made a mockery of the last five years of franchise-oriented, $50 > million budget, yearly-release, AAA game development. And it's not just a > fluke. The Humble Indie Bundle, World of Goo, Braid, and a number of other > extremely low-budget titles have electrified the gaming community, while > games with millions in marketing budget like APB and Kane & Lynch fall flat > on their face critically and commercially. Gamer discontent with these > barren blockbusters is palpable, and Minecraft is the new poster boy for it.

Oh, they've "electrified the gaming community", have they? But how well are they doing financially?

Apple's App Store has enough successful apps to give developers hope, but the PC videogame scene needs more data points, before I'll start considering going "indie", as the kids call it.

How well does Minecraft do in terms of protection against piracy? I haven't heard a lot about it, and considering games like the aforementioned World of Goo's problems with it[1].

This is like saying that the success of Audiosurf on Steam ushered in a new era that developers would now be able to repeat. Steam has definitely made a big different, but everyone, calm down and take a deep breath for a second.

Notch is a friggin' wizard, and as much as people will try to reverse engineer its success, don't try to create a trend graph with one data point. I think it'd be devastating to give aspiring developers the impression that the road to success has been paved. Notch has found a way, but he hasn't paved it for the rest of us.

[1]: [http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/11/14/world-of-goo- vs-p...](http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/11/14/world-of-goo-vs-piracy/)

</comment><comment><USER25> This fits right into the pattern we've seen in the game development scene for the last two years. It's getting cheaper and easier for indie gamers to go from zero to hero every day. If you look at tools like Unity3D then its easy to imagine that the dream of so many people to be able to get a sustainable income from gamedevelopment AND gamedesign(people working as a coding monkey at EA aren't really living the dream, are they?) is closer than ever.

In a while i'll show HN my project relating to this. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> _But it also doesn't have ..._ a scruffy 30-ish white protagonist _, ... or any of the other hundred things that plague gamers in practically every major release._

I find myself thinking only of Half Life and Portal. Half Life, in which people were crazy about Gordon Freeman (and he fit the part) and Portal, which did not do this in the slightest.

Has it become conspicuously common? I've fallen a bit out of touch with modern games.

<comment><USER26> <http://www.eatliver.com/i.php?n=5925>

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've long thought that new tools (especially procedurally generated content) will pave the way for a new era of game design that allows much, much smaller teams to create top tier games. It's a lot more difficult to express an artistic vision through a large and complex bureaucratically controlled organization than it is to express it through a small group or an individual (compare the artistic quality of books written by a single author vs. by committees, etc.)

Moreover, the incredibly high cost of production of many modern games limits the sorts of games that get made. Minecraft level sales are barely enough to cover the costs of making a game at a company like EA or Activision.

Hopefully Notch's success will lead to the development of Minecraft as a highly modable platform for roughly similar games and also to the development of new low-cost game systems that produce no less enthralling experiences.

</comment><comment><USER28> Something interesting to note is that this would've been extremely much harder to do in 2000. Small companies and one-man teams would have a hard time publishing games and gain enough ground to stand a chance against the giants at that time.

And when we look at the quality from that time period - A little over a decade ago - games like Diablo, Starcraft, Quake (2) and Unreal were the ones with the best quality. With a bit of effort, indie developers and startups these days can easily beat the quality they had.

If this continues, what will we see in 2020? As the quality a game can achieve converges towards some limit (At least I'm assuming so), will indie games be more and more common and actually manage to make games that _will_ challenge big-budget franchises?

</comment><comment><USER29> A point that seems to be missed is that Minecraft is a niche game. That niche is geeks. Now, that may be quite a profitable niche to exploit, but a game which is essentially about building things out of blocks will never have the mainstream appeal of a God Of War or an Angry Birds.

</comment><comment><USER30> FPS + Farmville = Profit?

<comment><AUTHOR> Minecraft is not an FPS, neither does it have elements to it that are similar to Farmville's. Go try out Minecraft and come back when you're more informed on the subject.

<comment><USER30> FPS = First Person Shooter, there's melee and range weapons. What is your definition of a FPS?

For Farmville part. Isn't there not much to do after the 'survival mode' at night?

<comment><AUTHOR> While Minecraft may be in first person and let the user use an bow-and-arrow as a weapon, calling it an FPS is distorting what the game really is. Shooting is a feature of it, but it is not what the game is known for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> An interesting note here for those of who who like Minecraft: There has been another sandbox game called Dwarf Fortress out for a while now, which Notch said he used as a big inspiration for Minecraft. Dwarf Fortress lets you build out your world in millions of unique ways, liquid flow mechanics are accurate, gravity, civilization actions, pretty much everything.

However, one huge warning: The learning curve is 100 times harder than Minecrafts, and the base art for he game is asci!(although you can upgrade it with user made graphic packs) It will also take all of your processing power.

<comment><USER32> I recently tried to get into DF. I downloaded the lazynewb pack and tried for hours to get it to run at a proper resolution. The window would never size to what I had set it in the config editor as included with the pack or with manual editing.

I really wish I could have played that game.

<comment><USER20> I had a similar experience the first time I tried it. It was unplayably slow, but now I can get a solid framerate. Check back in a few months, the DF guys seem to be making some progress in performance, etc and the next build might fix your issue.

<comment><USER32> I don't think it's my computer performance (I have an i7), but something with the package.

I'll try again with vanilla DF when I have the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Minecraft is awesome. But nothing about it's business or distribution model is new. I was playing computer games I got from "The Net" (well, back then, it was BBS's-over-modems) that were (a) made by a single guy and/or small team, and (b) sold directly (or mostly so) and/or pirated. Now, this thing is awesome and he did a hell of a job at overall game design and coding. But this meme I've seen going around how the fact that it's the work of basically one guy is some new new thing: it's not.</comment>


How statistics can help cure cancer - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25054938

<comment><USER2> Never work for Childhood Cancer: It is to "rare." With 12,000 a year on average for all childhood cancers it is statistically to small of a number.

How about this: Spend money on childhood cancer research! It truly feels that no one cares about a cure.

US Federal Cancer Funding 4% goes to childhood cancer research.

American Cancer Society is worse 1% goes to childhood cancer research.

There has not been a new chemotherapy medicine introduced for almost 25 years!

<comment><USER3> _There has not been a new chemotherapy medicine introduced for almost 25 years!_

SJG-136 has finished phase II, it is looking good. The developer of SJG-136 has told me (in a personal conversation) the side effects are very very very mild.

Shameless plug: I'm also looking to work towards bringing a new chemotherapy into the market. ([http://indysci.org/projectmarilyn](http://indysci.org/projectmarilyn))

<comment><USER2> Won't be for pediatric cancer till after this has gone through what 5-10 years of a trial stages and then used on adults for several years.

Serious hope this project works BUT very sceptically it can make it to market. Seriously be a game changer if something goes directly to generic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So these general ideas (plus machine learning, which is really advanced statistical calculation) was what Anil Potti tried to do. I believe that he had good intentions going into it. But it's a really really difficult problem, and he maybe oversold the idea. The end result was not pretty.</comment>


Ask HN: why do you get up in the morning - <AUTHOR> Mine was reason was to try to make the world a better place so that I could feel fulfilled when I died.<p>Now I'm looking for better alternatives. <comment><USER2> Because the Mrs kicks me out the bed and gives me a list of jobs to do!

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds pretty good but how does she decide whats on her list?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why did you abandon your previous reason? You no longer care about making the world a better place? You don't find fulfillment from doing so? The fulfillment isn't enough? Or you no longer think you're going to die?

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ9A3GCL7jU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ9A3GCL7jU)

</comment><comment><USER5> Because I would get bored after 10 minutes in bed without sleeping. Instead if I am awake I can do things I enjoy.

</comment><comment><USER6> My back begins to hurt if I lay around too much.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been asking myself that question for the past months with alarming regularity. At the moment, my answer would be: 'because it's a habit, because I need to pee, and because... why not?'.

Which obviously doesn't really feel good, and is cause for worry.

If a friend were to give me such an answer, I'd think he was depressed and suggest he see a psychologist. I will likely do just that sometime soon.

That said, the problem is that this feels different from what I know as 'depression'. I've had many periods of unhappiness ranging from general ennui, to multi-week depressions where I could barely do anything.

In all of those cases, there was some awareness that my depressed state of mind warped my view of the world. As I grew older, I learned to deal with that. Sometimes I'd just 'sweat it out' and basically get sick of being depressed. Sometimes I'd actively try to remove the source of unhappiness, or force myself to just keep moving. And once I regained a more 'healthy' perspective, I got better.

In this case, however, I feel that my perspective is not off, or at least not much, but rather that I truly have no legitimate reason, or at least not one that motivates me, to get up. Here's why:

I'm in my late twenties and many of the problems or challenges I faced in my teens or twenties have either been resolved, or have became unimportant.

On a personal level, I do not have any internal problems, anxieties, or conflicts going on that I feel need to be addressed (other than the getting up part!). In part, this has been the result of many years of diligent self- improvement and pushing myself out of my comfort zone, of which I'm proud. But I've also been lucky: I have wonderful parents and siblings, a decent social life, and an above-average amount of close friends. And perhaps because of my personality, I am very happy alone and rarely, if every, feel lonely. I wouldn't mind having a partner, but it is a 'light desire' more than a need.

Professionally, I no longer have acute deadlines to fulfil, a degree to aspire to, or a job to find. I make more money than most of my social circles as a web developer, and I actually _like_ my job (much as it's not a passion necessarily). And I can probably just do this for at least five years, and probably longer.

And finally, as far as world view goes, there is no 'higher goal' that I aspire to, at least not as a conviction. I do not strongly believe that certain things are intrinsically better or worse, just that I'm inclined, either as a human or as a particular individual, to think certain things are, and that following those inclinations is likely to affect my happiness. But that is not enough of a motivator for me.

The result is that perhaps for the first time in my life, or at least since my teens, there is nothing that feels important enough to get out of bed for. And while I do actually feel sort of okay most of the time, because really, how awesome is it that I don't have many of the worries or problems that keep others up at night, I find it a horrible state of mind.

And the most likely way out of this state, perhaps with some help from a psychologist, would be to find something that gets me going. To fool myself into caring, day-to-day, for something, enough to _want_ to get up (or, alternatively, to actually become a true believer in something, but I tried that already).

I don't like this solution.

I know it's likely to happen, I know it's quite possible I will meet the love of my life and live for my kids and stave off this 'existential depression', or have some humanitarian cause tickle my fancy, but it feels rather... brittle and unsatisfying.

Sorry for being a downer and giving such a long answer, but I guess I'm hoping some of you can help me to find a way out of this that is... satisfying.

(And yes, there is of course the option that all of this is a warped perspective that can be fixed with professional help. That would be ideal. I just don't think that's quite it, in this particular case)

</comment><comment><USER8> To have fun during the day. Drink a nice coffee.</comment>


Roc: Modern web development system - <AUTHOR> http://www.getroc.org/ <comment><USER2> Looks like it's a generator/updater for the boilerplate of your webstack, similar to [https://github.com/TrueCar/gluestick/tree/cybrass/hostname-c...](https://github.com/TrueCar/gluestick/tree/cybrass/hostname- changes)

Given how complex a React+Redux stack can be (lots of indepdent modules and projects) I've found Gluestick to be useful so that I can ignore the boilerplate setup.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is it? Yeoman (a project template system)? NPM2: NPM Harder? It claims to reduce boilerplate and provide the best developer system out of the box...... with no indication of what that even means. It's self-parody of Javascript that this makes it to the HN front page.

<comment><USER4> The main difference to boilerplate generators like Yeoman is that Roc collects an entire set of dependencies into a single npm package, versions it and provides a generic way to start using them within a project (CLI + configuration).

It does not introduce an extra api-layer, you use things like React like you normally would.

In short terms the boilerplate is shifted into a versioned module that has a CLI and simple configuration system. The main goal of this is to keep complexity of things like Webpack, universal rendering and the like outside your actual project.

When you generate an app with Yeoman you get all the code dumped into your project. With Roc you get a thin skeleton that depends on the larger module that can be updated through npm.

Think of it like npm module composition.

<comment><USER3> Put that on the homepage. Compare A (your app on Yeoman) to B (your app on Roc). Show me why I should use this!

<comment><USER4> Good suggestion. We have written a bit more about it here. How a typical workflow would look as a developer/user.

[https://medium.com/@DZV/roc-one-solution-to-javascript- fatig...](https://medium.com/@DZV/roc-one-solution-to-javascript- fatigue-b14ea07b9763#.3igzifp2h)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like how among js people modern means newr than the yesterday's.

</comment><comment><USER6> Github repo: [https://github.com/rocjs/roc](https://github.com/rocjs/roc)

</comment><comment><USER7> Error 503 Backend fetch failed Backend fetch failed

Unstable is modern. :D</comment>


Organize and share parts of your spreadsheet - <AUTHOR> http://www.collatebox.com/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Who says data has to be all about business? Manage any growing list of data and organize online.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Register today to subscribe to our invite only beta access</comment>


Editor quits journal over pay-for-expedited peer-review offer - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2015/03/editor-quits-journal-over-pay-expedited-peer-review-offer

<comment><USER3> I'm guessing he wasn't an economist by profession then ;-) Seriously, this seems like a great solution to the problem highlighted in the article - <USER2> review is a slow process when left to non market forces. Seems analogous to hiring a consultant to review your code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry but no. You can't say that. This "solution" might solve something that has been highlighted in the article, but who said it was a problem?

I'd rather have a very slow but _rigorous_ and _scientific_ review process than what is offered here.

Good science should not care for a few month of review instead of a few weeks. If the presented results seem important to the point of needing to be urgently out there, you can always upload a preprint to arXiv or a similar repository before or during the review process.

Paid for fast peer-reviewing is _WRONG_. It prioritizes the science done in rich laboratories of the rich countries. That's not how science is supposed to work. It's stupid to think that introducing this "market forces" into the reviewing process won't have an effect on its output (and I'm not talking about speed here).

<comment><USER3> > I'd rather have a very slow but rigorous and scientific review process than > what is offered here.

Yes, but clearly, others disagree. They'd rather have rapid review and are happy to pay for it.

Also, consider medical research. Quite literally, lives will be saved by faster review.</comment></comment></comment>


Glass Enterprise Edition 2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.blog.google/products/hardware/glass-enterprise-edition-2/ <comment><USER2> I was an original Glass Explorer, owner of ~15 units, we spent 9mo full-time with our startup (DocHuddle, Inc.) working as CTO+Developer on glass use cases, and I can say this:

Real progress wont be made until there are great developer tools. Google, feeling that simulators ruined the true experience, didn't make simulators for the Glass SDK, which made development impossible. It meant you had to debug with the thing plugged in or on your face (or via Android Mirror).

Thankfully, the overheating problems have been fixed, but real progress also wont be made until you can work on it 18hrs a day (not just until the unit heats up.)

It was surprising to me how much money was spent on the Glass program yet how little was spent on the folks who would actually be coming up with the app ecosystem.

All that said, I still believe in the concept and think the Enterprise use cases are enormous. I just hope the opportunity isnt bungled again.

<comment><USER3> >It was surprising to me how much money was spent on the Glass program yet how little was spent on the folks who would actually be coming up with the app ecosystem.

You can say that about pretty much every google product. Stevey's Platform Rant[0] is still as relevant as it was years ago.

[0] [https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611](https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611)

<comment><USER4> Tangentially, I regularly wonder what Steve Yegge would have to say about that rant nowadays.

<comment><USER5> He just wrote a blog post that refers to it briefly, tongue in cheek.

[https://email@example.com/google-to-grab-one-year- late...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com/google-to-grab-one-year- later-3e1e4df321f3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Much as it's maligned, the original did attempt to solve some genuine problems and narrowing the audience / focus seems sensible.

Given a lot of the negative points were around the reaction of others to having a camera pointed at them, I never got why they didn't make it easy to flip up the camera part as a way to physically indicate it wasn't in use. Perhaps a little less of a concern in a professional use environment, but it still helps if you have an easy way not to wind people up, eg if you nip away from the place you actively use it in but don't want to take them off completely; would be a Glass equivalent of not going to talk to a shop assistant with your headphones blaring away or whilst on the phone neither of which are particularly polite!

<comment><USER7> >Given a lot of the negative points were around the reaction of others to having a camera pointed at them, I never got why they didn't make it easy to flip up the camera part as a way to physically indicate it wasn't in use.

That actually doesn't really solve the problem. People sometimes use cameras in the most inappropriate of places. If a friend of mine has a motorbike accident and breaks an arm and someone from the side of the street goes "coooool" and pulls out his phone and starts streaming, I can storm over there and slap the phone out of his hand.

You may or may not like the idea that I might do that, but I think it's appropriate and if that person disagrees then fuck 'em, they can argue it in front of a judge in small claims court.

The problem with glass, even with a flip down camera, is that /I have to hit you in the face/ to do the same thing. There's no way to make a glasshole stop filming except to stick my mittens near their eyes, and I'd totally agree with any judge that said my going for someones face to make them stop filming is a far more aggressive action than slapping a phone out of their hand.

But therein lies the problem. If you don't have the social awareness to know that you shouldn't be filming someone, if you're using glass I can't force you to stop filming without severely escalating the situation.

It's a socially inappropriate design.

<comment><USER8> Aren't sidewalks and streets public spaces? Unless you're on private property (that you own), you can't legally slap someone, nor can you slap their phone out of their hand.

<comment><USER7> Would you still feel the same way if someone was filming your child?

<comment><USER9> "Won't someone please think of the children!"

There are legitimate privacy and rights concerns to the legality of filming in public spaces (especially in this era of "big data"). None of them are exclusive to children.

Also note that parent was discussing the legality of filming, which is independent of the... interesting social moires you espouse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's possible to install GNU/Linux on Explorer units thanks to Google following the GPL and releasing kernel sources[0]. It's also possible to get AOSP running on an Explorer unit, and it works well enough on Android Lollipop at least[1].

Some people at PostMarketOS have even gotten recent Linux kernels to work on Glass[2], although the last time I tried (last year), I wasn't able to get anything to draw to the framebuffer after about 6 hours of effort.

Finally, the original GlassOS was Android based. The stock kernel and applications have been extracted and are floating around[3].

[0]: [https://developers.google.com/glass/tools- downloads/system](https://developers.google.com/glass/tools-downloads/system)

[1]: [https://forum.xda-developers.com/google- glass/development/ro...](https://forum.xda-developers.com/google- glass/development/rom-aosp-google-glass-t3356234)

[2]: [https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Google_Glass_(Explorer_Ed...](https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Google_Glass_\(Explorer_Edition\))

[3]: [https://github.com/GlassHack](https://github.com/GlassHack)

</comment><comment><USER11> What Glass was supposed to be in the first place. I just hope it finds its way to regular people too at some point - would be cool to have such a tool in hobbyist space, not just in structured professional employment.

Side note: throughout the video my inner critic tried to scream, "they're definitely overstating the impact", but it was drowned in excitement generated by the music. It's one of the few times in my life when I felt the music is purposefully manipulating me. Now I wish for a switch that could cut off background music from a video and leave just the speech.

<comment><USER12> Focals is trying the consumer market. [https://www.bynorth.com/](https://www.bynorth.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know of cases in "logistics, to manufacturing, to field services" where this is being used? I'm not being skeptical, I just hadn't heard of this and it seems interesting

<comment><USER14> My doctor wore Glass when I had an appointment with her. It was part of some experiment or trial being run at the medical center where I'm a patient. She asked for my permission first. This was at least a year or two ago.

<comment><USER15> I'd turn right around, even when asked for permission. Too creepy to describe, a doctor has absolutely no business pointing a camera at people unless there is a very specific reason for it.

<comment><USER16> Why is everyone so ridiculously focused on the camera? I've never cared about the camera. I want a cheap HUD, even if the controls are hand-operated instead of creepy-computer-vision-operated. Most of the Glass projects I saw were HUDs, not vision-aware HUDs.

<comment><USER15> > Why is everyone so ridiculously focused on the camera?

Because possibly recording someone you are facing in ordinary circumstances is more than just a little bit rude.

<comment><USER16> So don't record people? And/or cover your Glass camera with tape like everyone does with their webcams. In the context of the comment chain, I am perplexed about why everyone seems to saying that the primary utility is from the camera, when that seems clearly secondary in utility to the HUD

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The usage examples in the promotion video embedded below the headline look pretty neat. Live streaming, hands free manuals, personalized information.

<comment><USER18> > Live streaming, hands free manuals, personalized information

I was very skeptical about all of these:

\- live-streaming : why $3k glasses and not a much better $50 camera on a headmount?

\- manuals : an unreadable, hard to navigate postage stamp? Meh.

\- information : is hard to navigate tiny info obscuring your vision really better than an ipad?

<comment><USER9> According to Wikipedia, the display has the same relative size as a 25in screen 8ft away. Still small (and lowish res), but larger than it originally sounds for reading info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have always said that Google were wrong to launch this to consumers first. There are so many business uses for this technology, this is what Google should have focused on first. Since this originally launched, there is a lot more competition in the VR and MR spaces, especially with Microsoft targeting corporates with its HoloLens. But Google's Glass is such a smaller, lighter, more practical product than the competition. It just needs great developer tools and support now.

<comment><USER20> I think they opened the platform to everyone, not just a select group or 'consumers'. The thinking behind this was commendable, however, the press made people think about the product wrongly.

The product was also ahead of its time, nowadays people would not care if a delivery driver dropped off a parcel wearing the things and did all the scanning and whatnot with a 'head mounted camera' instead of what looks like a ruggedised PDA.

They forgot the lessons learned from gMail where the word of mouth, invite only approach worked well for getting early adopters. Google Glass should have been a bit more like that, plus they could have entered different markets on a app basis, e.g. in galleries and museums the product would work well with mapping. Or sports events where the product told you who the competitors were and provided commentary.

I wish that we would identify the press as the culprit on these cock ups of marketing, they take a novel product and get the masses to imagine a use case for it that is unrealistic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone have a link to some more detailed specs?

I do carbon fiber related design & fabrication, from molds to final parts. I could find a version of these immediately useful in my work in several ways, including logging work progress by camera/video/hyperlapse, logging notes with voice-text, quick lookup of material specs.

With some development, I could see display of correct sequence and orientation of layers, and really cool would be recognition of key points and dynamic display of exact placement of next layer of pre-cut material.

Good to see continued development.

</comment><comment><USER22> For those of you who have worked with Google Glass, is the "corner of the eye" design better than if the display were projected in some way onto the lens of the glasses?

<comment><USER23> Not tried the projected on to glasses way; but the corner of the eye works great - not super distracting but also easy to view.

<comment><USER24> Yeah I agree, it's kind hard to explain - you can sort of ignore the display unless you look at it, but when you do look at it, it's big enough to see what you want to see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Going after consumers first was and still is wrong approach in AR and VR. Technological leap is too big for that. Technology is not mature enough to produce high quality with consumer range price.

Remember how mobile phones took over? Their original market was business use. Those bricks were very expensive and heavy, but they sold well to business customers on the move. Then they became a status symbol for high income consumers and from there they gradually overtook the world.

Augmented reality and Virtual Reality should follow the same path. High end science, medicine, architects, CAD, military uses should come first. After the technology matures and prices drop, consumer products can emerge. Top notch commercial VR product like Varjo VR-1 costs $6000 and it's peanuts if you need VR for professional use. It's cumbersome to use long periods of time but the image quality beats Rift or PSVR easily.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think it would be a good consumer product if it didn't have a camera.

The display and voice control would be enough.

<comment><USER27> Interestingly, I used the original for a week. The hands free camera was the only thing that I found useful about it, by the end.

This of course, might be partially attributable to the limited processing power of it.

However, if all people need is a screen in the periphery, smart watches and similar wearable tech is probably cheaper and easier.

<comment> the-rc I loaned one for a few weeks and camera was the most useful feature for me as well.

The much maligned camera had a more useful outcome still: it's the first (kind of) public device using Google's computational photography, paving the way for Pixel phones. Glass took better pictures than what the weak sensor and CPU were capable of on paper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As a cyclist and a motorcyclist, I love the idea of Glass. Being able to have a HUD that shows your speed and basic directions is a brilliant tool. You don't have many options for mounting your phone on the handlebar, and doing so requires you to look down, something car driver don't have to suffer from

<comment><USER29> Garmin make a device called Varia Vision that does this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does this work for people with aging eyesight? I can't focus on things that are closer than 10 inches

<comment><USER31> I believe the display is focused at a distance of about 8 feet so you shouldn't have an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I work with EE1 and EE2. Does anyone have specific questions? I think I can answer now that it's public. My experience with EE2 is limited as I've been very busy with other tasks.

<comment><USER32> Some Basics the screen is 640x360 resolution the EE1 runs custom Android 4.4 (Kitkat) The EE2 is running Marshmallow (I think) with stock UI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Are there any other providers in either the Enterprise or the consumer space with a better/better-priced offering than Google Glass or is this all we have for now?

</comment><comment><USER34> Is the old prohibition on having facial recognition still in effect?

<comment><USER35> they keep the facial recognition results server-side

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> With Google killing off so many of their products, which company is still willing to bet on this being around in a couple of years? Seems really risky to me!

</comment><comment><USER37> Wondering if Scoble will get one to try out in the shower and kill this one too :-)

</comment><comment><USER38> Prescription lenses?

</comment><comment><USER39> Glass is literally meme tech and time spent on it is wasted.

</comment><comment><USER40> i would not feel comfortable with my doctor wearing one of these contraptions during consultation.

</comment><comment><USER41> How long until they cancel the product?

</comment><comment><USER42> So basically still quite far away from useful. I reckon MS will get there first on AR

<comment><USER43> > So basically still quite far away from useful.

Except for the plethora of ways both the blog and the video describe how it has been very useful?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Hey! Could you pass me my Glass Enterprise Edition 2, please?

I'm a big fan of the technology so I'm happy to see that it has survived the various speedbumps.

<comment><USER45> People say "hand me my laptop" instead of "hand me my Dell XPS 1023a(c) v2" already. It'll be "hand me my glass/glasses".

<comment><USER46> I'm just glad the name is clear about what version it is!

Hated the "New iPad Air" and "New 3DS". Like, how am I supposed to communicate that to people? People don't know what is "new" and what isn't unless they've been following the releases. Plus, in 5 years we can't say "new" because there were future releases! God it makes me so angry!

Edit: At the very least put a number in there, and increment it with every major revision. Then even your grandma can tell the difference between "Widget Gen 1" and "Widget Gen 2". Unless you pull a USB... Those people aren't right in the head.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Used Google glass for a project three years ago. The biggest question for going to Enterprise is demonstrating the value the solution provides, rather than showing some cool gadgets. I still don't see a killer use case of Google glass.

</comment><comment><USER48> Am I misunderstanding their glass "partners", or am I not able to build my own software for this without using one of their cronies?

</comment><comment><USER49> Rare treat to spot a typo on a Google page:

> It provides hands-on workers and professionals with glaceable, voice- > activated assistance...

[https://www.google.com/glass/tech-specs/](https://www.google.com/glass/tech- specs/)

Perhaps V3 will come with a built-in spelling and grammar checker. They could call them SPAGgles.

<comment><USER50> Typos abound these days. My personal guess is, since people communicate in written form constantly now, they don't see it is as "special" anymore, and they just don't think it's very important to proofread.

But if you're looking for minor errors, there are three in this blog post alone:

1\. In the first sentence, there is a stray non-breaking space before "manufacturing". Along with the regular space character next to it, the effect is to put extra whitespace between the words words.

2\. "We've also added USB-C port" should have an "a" before "USB-C".

3a. The first sentence of the last paragraph ends with "work better, smarter and faster". So they've elected _not_ to use an Oxford comma, which would be an OK choice except for the fact that in the first sentence of the paragraph before that they _do_ have an Oxford comma. (They have "... Sutter Health, and H.B. Fuller.") So it's not consistent.

3b. Oh, they're also inconsistent with Oxford commas within a single sentence! The last sentence of the first paragraph is this: "Workers can use Glass to access checklists, view instructions or send inspection photos or videos, and our enterprise customers have reported faster production times, improved quality, and reduced costs after using Glass." No Oxford comma before "or send inspection" but there is one before "and reduced costs".

<comment><USER50> And of course I wrote "words words" above, providing yet more evidence in support of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law) .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Cool technology. But...

Once being a taxi driver was a skilled job. You really needed to know your streets well.

But than came GPS. An augmented reality for drivers.

And now everybody can be an UBER driver. Anywhere. No knowledge is needed.

So now taxi drivers are easily replaceable. And the pay is shit.

And soon, we'll have augmented reality for Every profession.

And we'll see a similar shift happening: Good professions that once combined hands-on skills with knowledge, won't need that anymore.

You won't need to think. You don't need to know much. Just follow instructions well, and fast.

So now you'll be easily replaceable. And the pay will be shit.

And this will be everywhere.

<comment><USER52> This argument has been made since at least the industrial revolution. Replace "taxi driver" with any job that has previously been partially or fully automated away.

<comment><USER53> This argument was made by the ancient Greeks when they started writing their epics down and didn't need to memorize them any more.

[1][https://books.google.com/books?id=XzYX0T-ZqTcC&pg=PA34&lpg=P...](https://books.google.com/books?id=XzYX0T-ZqTcC&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=greek+epics+ancient+written+memorization+plato+phaedrus&source=bl&ots=wOZIz0c2Fn&sig=ACfU3U3yu_dIX1R_YzFhle3h-cYTT2arqw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjbi8nI9ariAhVS0KwKHYgqALoQ6AEwEXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=greek%20epics%20ancient%20written%20memorization%20plato%20phaedrus&f=false)

[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue)#Rhetoric,_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_\(dialogue\)#Rhetoric,_philosophy,_and_art)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Enterprise Edition! What is this Microsoft from the mid nineties?

Also, is there a cancellation deathpool yet?

<comment><USER55> Clearly it's signaling that this isn't a general purpose consumer product like the original Glass was positioned. Sounds like people are going to snipe no matter what they call it, or who they sell it to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The only notable improvement is switching to Android. (Which I kind of assumed they were built on originally.)

I can't fault Google for trying to salvage something from the epic fail of v1, but that product video still has the faint whiff of cluelessness about human factors that brought us glassholes in the first place.

Case in point: I'm not sure I buy the video clip of the doctor speaking to the "Actor portraying patient" with glass on displaying medical history. I don't know if the medical benefits of having my doctor seeing 3 lines of medical history ("tremors, arthritis, hearing aid") outweigh the weirdness factor of having to speak to a guy about sensitive medical issues with a freaky-looking wifi-enabled video recording device strapped to his face.

Also noted that the only black person in the video is an actor playing the role of a patient, as opposed to a professional playing him or herself like everyone else. I'm sure Google's intentions for more diversity are positive, but this particular implementation feels a bit hasty. It couldn't have been that hard to find a black professional in order to complete the diversity checkbox.

[edit: removed sarcasm about diversity, added context]

</comment><comment><USER57> Still just as ridiculous-looking _and as useless_ as the first, and thus a non-starter outside of a very small group of Silicon Valley techies.

It's like Google saw all of the criticism about the device, and decided that the best way to address it was by just beefing up the components instead of the actual flaws with Glass V1. For starters, the display is too small and too low resolution to actually provide enough useful data to affect the workflow of front-line employees. This is a marginally useful tool for managers to check a line-item or two--something they can do with their phones. For anyone actually requiring the use of their hands, Google Glasses still just gets in the way by distorting part of the visual field.

I give the entire Glass project about a year before it dies (again, permanently) when the executive in charge of it either gets the promotion he was aiming for or moves on.

<comment><USER58> I'm not sure you understand their intended usecase for the product - didn't seem to be much of a fashion accessory.

<comment><USER59> OP said the resolution was too small, the field of vision too narrow, and the equipment itself too cumbersome to be used by people engaged in manual labour.

Those are all technical critiques. What am I missing? Where was it said _Enterprise_ product failed as a fashion accessory?

I mean certainly they might be wrong and all the above critiques false, or dealt with via progress to version 2.... but no one mentioned fashion.

<comment><USER58> OP edited their comment after I replied - fair points.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The B-17 'miracle': Defying Hitler with sabotage - <AUTHOR> https://hushkit.net/2020/04/17/the-b-17-miracle-defying-hitler-with-sabotage/ <comment><USER2> On the other hand, Swiss fighter planes deliberately shot down US B-17 bombers that overflew their territory, using German Me-109s.

The reason was to "preserve their neutrality", but the US should have incinerated them.

America's 'War' Against Switzerland

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

I've talked to Europeans in person, and they have the strange idea that tweaking the US military has no repercussions.

<comment><USER3> Swiss fighter planes also shot down German planes that overflew their territory.

I'm not sure what this has to do with the linked story, though.

Regarding the 20mm shells, German fighters had a 20mm cannon that fired through the propeller hub. These were not big bullets, but were packed with explosives [1].

The linked story seems a little bit "too good to be true". A tall tale.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mine_shell_(projectile)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mine_shell_\(projectile\))</comment></comment>