Where does America's e-waste end up? GPS tracker tells all - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/america-e-waste-gps-tracker-tells-all-earthfix/ <comment><USER2> The article says that USA is the only developed country that didn't signed an international treaty in e-waste and points to this link:

[http://www.basel.int/Countries/StatusofRatifications/Parties...](http://www.basel.int/Countries/StatusofRatifications/PartiesSignatories/tabid/4499/Default.aspx)

But USA is listed in the page. It has a lot of footnotes: [http://www.basel.int/Countries/StatusofRatifications/Parties...](http://www.basel.int/Countries/StatusofRatifications/PartiesSignatories/tabid/4499/Default.aspx#US16)

Would anyone explain in plain English what these footnotes mean, and why the original article says USA didn't ratified the treaty?

<comment><USER3> There's a distinction between being a signatory vs having ratified the treaty.

The US is a signatory (the treaty was signed on 22 March 1990) which is why they are on the list, but it's not ratified since the US Congress has never passed legislation which would make the treaty "the law of the land"

The Basel Convention joins a distinguished list of signed but unratified treaties including the Convention on Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.

<comment><USER4> > The Basel Convention joins a distinguished list of signed but unratified > treaties including the Convention on Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), > the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, > and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.

Except that the ABM Treaty was ratified in 1972; the US, under the mechanisms in the treaty, withdrew from it (terminating its effect entirely) in 2001, but that's a different issue than not ratifying it.

<comment><USER5> But it is only a technical difference - you say you want to do X and sign an agreement, then you decide you don't really want to do X and you don't ratify the agreement or you ratify it and later withdraw. The outcome is the same.

<comment><USER4> There's a considerable difference between never ratifying a treaty (in which case, it is never in force), and ratifying it, having it in force for nearly three decades, and then _using the mechanism that the agreement itself provides_ to trigger its termination.

<comment><USER5> What is the difference with regard to the end result?

<comment><USER6> That the treaty applied for thirty years?

<comment><USER7> 30 years of doing good doesn't count for very much if you then do something bad. If a 31 year old kills someone they can't use the prior 30 years of "not committing any murders" as evidence that they're actually a decent person.

<comment><USER8> A history of good character is frequently used as a legal defence to reduce or eliminate punishment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is an abysmal situation and I'm really glad that folks are following up on the issue and trying to add transparency to the shading dealings. However ...

Stuff like this (from the article) :

 _"We're struggling for survival," he said.

Prices for many commodities found in e-waste, a major source of revenue for electronics recyclers, have plunged in the past year._

So there is a recycling fee/tax that is paid, on a per item basis, that is well above the "commodity price of raw materials". Where did that money go? Where is the agency that I can turn in serial numbers to and collect $10 for each unique serial number that hasn't been turned in before?

And while I get that burning any long chain polymer is a recipe for creating hazardous gases, the ball got dropped long before this crap landed in the New Territories of Hong Kong. The article mentions how China has cracked down on the mainland, how hard is it to ask "who's the boss?" and then to put that person in jail? Sure you're going to destroy the "employment" of everyone at the junkyard, own that. It isn't impossible to build closed cycle incinerators, so let the "rich" countries build those.

</comment><comment><USER10> I once contacted the UK's Environment Agency as I wanted to find a reputable local Waste Treatment Facility to receive my WEEE (I fix computers and occasionally sell parts/take old parts for recycling). Since I was acutely aware of how much they had charged me to hold a Waste Transfer certificate I figured the least I could do was make sure my money was put to good use.

They replied saying they do not conduct any checks of facilities, keep any record of infringements or publish any data on what facilities do with the electrical waste they received. I was surprised that this surprised me, really.

(This was some years ago so my use of nomenclature may be incorrect)

<comment><USER11> It would be interesting to repeat the experiment somewhere like the UK, and see if the laws there make any difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm actually really interested in the technical details of the tracking devices. They had to have batteries that lasted months and they had to be designed to work with the cellular networks in basically any country on Earth. (I'm assuming they weren't satellite based, maybe they were.)

Does anybody have any details on the devices themselves?

<comment><USER13> If you have a look at the first link in the text, it will take you to the full "e-Trash Transparency" report ([http://www.ban.org/trash- transparency](http://www.ban.org/trash-transparency)). When you download the 'Report', on page 105 it describes, in detail, the methodology used.

Extracts from the report: "In order to determine and procure the best equipment for the e-Trash Transparency Project, BAN tested several different subscription-based tracking systems. Based on the findings, it was determined that BAN's case scenario was better served by a customized solution, but one that made use of "off-the-shelf" GSM/GPRS tracking hardware." Source: [https://s3.amazonaws.com/ban- reports/Trash+Transparency/Disc...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/ban- reports/Trash+Transparency/Disconnect+-+Goodwill+and+Dell+Exporting+the+Publics+E-waste+to+Developing+Countries+Report+-+Web+Version.pdf)

"The combined cost of a single tracker, external battery, the SIM card, the M2M service rates package was approximately $175 (including shipping and taxes). The project, funded in large part by a grant from the Body Shop Foundation, included the purchase of over 200 trackers."

"Free and open source software called OpenGTS was used to collect and display data in a user-friendly manner...software included integration with Google Maps"

"The trackers that were used usually had at least a 9-month battery life, with some trackers still communicating after 12 months. The battery life varies depending on many factors including signal strength, temperature and sleep mode settings. Prolonged battery life is primarily attributed to the tracker possessing a sleep mode function, which allows the device to hibernate in a power-saving mode for a preset time. Typically, each tracker was set to "wake up" every 24 hours, calculate its position based on the satellite signals it received, send the data to BAN's server via local GSM networks and then reenter sleep mode function."

<comment><USER14> > Prolonged battery life is primarily attributed to the tracker possessing a > sleep mode function, which allows the device to hibernate in a power-saving > mode for a preset time.

It would be cool if the time between wakeups could increase dramatically towards the end of the life of the battery. Or only wake up when temperature conditions are favourable toward having enough power to go through a cycle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This issue is so much worse than people realize. Children in China and Bangladesh, climbing on MOUNTAINS of burning eWaste. Melting circuit boards for scraps of gold and silver. The US really needs to take the lead and ban eWaste exports. Not only would that create a need for recycling in America, but remove the potential for this stuff to pollute the world.

<comment><USER16> Some electronics are refurbished and resold, but not enough. Also, recycling materials is essential and discouraging our throwaway culture would help a lot too. I still use a phone that's 5 years old (and it works great) because I don't feel the desire to get a new one each year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> OMG, so much time spent trying to be good to Mother Earth and properly dispensing my e-waste is now in the trash can!

Is there any reputable place or organization where we can throw away our e-waste?

<comment><USER17> It depends quite a bit on where you are; here in Portland OR we have the fine option of taking it to Free Geek[1] where volunteers strip old PCs and build linux boxes which go to nonprofits (and the volunteers themselves), along with being resold (for the very best) at their thrift store, or recycled for materials (for the unusable stuff).

1: [http://freegeek.org/](http://freegeek.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's a cool story. They even visit the sites identified.

Your broken LCDs end up in giant boxes around some dude's pond in Asia. It doesn't even make sense.

<comment><USER18> In large enough amounts, everything in an LCD has value except for the bulbs, which contain mercury. To domestically and responsibly recycle them has 3 things that make it more expensive: 1) you need to disassemble the entire device to isolate the bulbs, with higher relative labor rates, 2) there is significant overhead in protective equipment, insurance, and regulatory compliance, and 3) you need to dispose of the mercury bulbs at a cost. Broken devices end up as a negative value item. The 'ponds' in HK with inexpensive labor, no PPE, and no concern for their environment can pull in several dollars a unit from the value of the circuit boards, steel, and plastic. You can fit thousands of LCDs in a 40-foot container.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is not the first time BAN have investigated one of their customers.

[http://www.resource- recycling.com/images/e-newsletterimages/...](http://www.resource- recycling.com/images/e-newsletterimages/IS_verified_complaint.PDF)

</comment><comment><USER19> Does this run afoul of any privacy laws?

Once you give your device to the e-waste program, it is no longer your property so I could imagine that this could be construed as illegal tracking somehow by the e-waste companies. There are also specific laws in many states regarding the GPS tracking of vehicles you do not own, so I'm pretty curious as to the legality of this.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm suprised that they are burning aĺl that plastic away. If they could place the electronics in a vacuum chamber and heat it up plastics and rubbers would decompose in lots of petrochemicals and natural gas that they could distilate and resell. Plus it would make the collection of materials far more safe and easy.

<comment><USER18> Plastics recycling is a VERY tough sell right now. The low price of oil makes the recovery values minimal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> At least now whenever people question why I hoard all my old electronics for as long as possible, and try to eke out as much value as humanly possible, I'll have an answer non techy people can relate with. If I don't do that, it will end up in Hong Kong giving people cancer.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is an issue that will never be solved with the current economic system.</comment>


Million User Webchat with Full Stack Flux, React, Redis and PostgreSQL - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rotenberg.io/million-user-webchat-with-full-stack-flux-react-redis-and-postgresql/ <comment><USER2> The Flux terminology is confusing to me. It looks like the Observer pattern to me.

* Stores contain Observables

* Components (or Views) contain Observers

* Actions are Proxies

So the article is basically saying the Observer pattern is scalable, but uses the buzz-phrase "Full Stack Flux" instead. To make it even worse it is only a theoretical application of this pattern.

</comment><comment><USER3> I suppose there is some value to this as a thought experiment but pretty much every tier in that architecture has breaking flaws. The most relevant being that anything that has an audience of 1 million users cannot run on an architecture that has single points of failure.

<comment><USER4> TLDR;'thought experiment', feh, if this was actual tested result would be much more interesting.

<comment><USER5> But if the author didn't "thought experiment" about that, how else would he bait you into clicking...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> AFAICT, Facebook engineered their client side code around Flux in order to eliminate two-way data binding in their user interface code, which leads to all sorts of issues. I don't imagine they push the pattern into the server. Their relay stuff still relies upon a smart data tier which understands a query language called GraphQL.

I _definitely_ don't think they considered implementing a dumb dispatcher and store layer on the database server using stored procedures. (This seems terrifying to me, I don't see the upside.)

It's an interesting experiment but I think this might be an example of being too aggressive in trying to generally apply a design pattern that was motivated by a specific problem.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great post, but has this design been implemented to _effectively_ handle something close to a million users ( or even 100k and show that no part is overheating) ?

As in every new and complicated design, i'm a bit skeptical of rules of thumb calculations. You never know what the wrong latency issue at the wrong place can do...

<comment><USER8> _but has this design been implemented to effectively handle something close to a million users_

Obviously not. Some of his numbers are off by an order of magnitude.

E.g. he claims "10 million messages/sec" for a single redis instance.

In reality redis tops out at well under one million messages/sec; [http://redis.io/topics/benchmarks](http://redis.io/topics/benchmarks)

The design is almost comically bad (single source of truth for a "scalable" chat app?!). This is either an attempt at parody or this guy must be suffering from a rather severe case of second system effect...

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second- system_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, you're absolutely right, 10M/s is a mistake, which I've corrected.

Few remarks though:

\- it's still way below the number of actions we're talking about here (~100k/s)

\- since redis is only used as a generic MQ and not as a store, it can be sharded at the app level without the pain usually associated with redis clustering

\- I've deployed a similar (but less performant) design for the player of a gaming website, which is in use in production for more than a year, and works like a charm (we're talking ~5-50k users per channel on a daily basis). This is definitely a "second-system" pattern, but I try to avoid the associated pitfalls :)

I'd be genuinely interested by your feedback!

<comment><USER8> Feedback?

How about just not making wild claims about byzantine fantasy designs that you never tested under any kind of load.

There has been a lot of research in messaging architectures, some of the best message brokers are free. As it happens, none of them have any resemblance to your proposed design.

RabbitMQ has been benchmarked[1] to 1 million messages/sec on 30 servers and works very well for many people.

Why not start with that?

[1] [http://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal/products/rabbitmq-hits-one- mi...](http://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal/products/rabbitmq-hits-one-million- messages-per-second-on-google-compute-engine)

<comment><AUTHOR> This benchmark is indeed very interesting.

I think I may have failed to express my point, though. I'm not building a message queue, as it is certainly a very hard problem that has been engineered for years by people way smarter than me :) I'm merely leveraging the goodness of their implementations (in my case redis, but RabbitMQ is also an option I've considered explicitly in my post).

The chat is a contrived example to show that even under high load, full-scale flux over the wire is a reasonable option. As for "any kind of serious load", well, maybe my example fails to meet the requirements, but unless I'm building Facebook, I think I've faced something serious enough to be able to think about my next step.

<comment><USER9> If you're building a large scale chat service you are implicitly _also_ building a message queue.

And as for the high load you haven't actually experienced high load until you put this into production with a million users.

To make that clearer: you can design a system for any number of users, the only relevant question is how it held up in practice and as long as you haven't had a million concurrent users you just don't know (and probably it won't).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> GameRanger has six million users, tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of whom will be active simultaneously. His chat problem involved has moderate fan-out.

Scott Kevill does it on a single machine (last time I checked) with hand- rolled C++ and close attention to the details of how the Linux networking stack works.

<comment><USER11> I am also interested to know, Do you've any links on this?

<comment><USER10> Scott gets very little press -- mostly when he picks up support for games after the publisher or matchmaking service abandons one.

I used to live in Perth and we'd sometimes hang out and mock the front page of HN.

[http://www.gameranger.com/about/](http://www.gameranger.com/about/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Do you have anything like this up on github?

</comment><comment><USER13> This could be the inspiration for a great open source project, and become something that could easily be deployed to a cloud hosting platform. Basically it's the same as firebase, but with some of the react and flux goodness like server side rendering. Or somebody could package this as a product.

<comment><USER14> Where did you see there is server side rendering? Flux and React does not imply server side rendering out of the box.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually this whole stack is designed with SSR in mind, see the related package react-nexus (which I will soon blog about, too!) :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One problem I have with using postgres listen/notify as a general purpose message queue is that it requires polling (At least that was the case when I last looked at it). Of course you can use a blocking wrapper around the polling code but it still causes unnecessary roundtrips.

<comment><USER16> Your database connection is just a socket, so you can add that file descriptor to the set of file descriptors you are waiting IO on, if you are using a classic select/poll based system. See an example in the pscyopg2 docs here: [http://initd.org/psycopg/docs/advanced.html#asynchronous- not...](http://initd.org/psycopg/docs/advanced.html#asynchronous- notifications)

Once that FD is active, you call the poll() method and your notify payload becomes available to you.

<comment><USER15> You are right. It seems that this was an issue with older versions of libpq: "In prior releases of libpq, the only way to ensure timely receipt of NOTIFY messages was to constantly submit commands" [http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/libpq- notify.html](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/libpq-notify.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As far as I understand, this design is based on similar goals as the Meteor/MongoDB project - instead of reading oplog, you listen for notifications.

I wonder how would Meteor be better than this proposal given that both are node based.

</comment><comment><USER18> OT: as someone trying to learn my way around Erlang's OTP framework, I'd be interested in a walkthrough of an OTP based system compared to this.

</comment><comment><USER19> Anybody know how to efficiently make smexy graphs like that? Did Adobe have a hand in their creation?

</comment><comment><USER20> This is so interesting - keep up the good work!</comment>


How to Be in Business Forever: A Class On Sustainability - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/08/how-to-be-in-business-forever-a-lesson-in-sustainability.html

<comment><USER2> This article is discussing a class that Fred will be holding, which stemmed from another article of his, which he wrote last year - <http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/11/sustainability.html> .

At first I considered that planning for sustainability was almost over- indulgence, but I noticed that Fred countered this in his previous article -- "It is about avoiding the temptation to overreach."</comment>


In Praise of Idleness (1932) - <AUTHOR> http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html <comment><USER2> I always like the idea Bertrand Russel raised where if a company realizes it needs half its staff that it would be best to instead reduce all staff to half-hours worked then previous.

Not sure if this is the essay or not. Sorry for the off-topic if it's not this essay.

Too bad with the current additional requirements on employers it's not that simple (health insurance, social security, etc...). Plus the fact that I'm sure some people would prefer not to have 3 places of employment to fill X-hours per week of pay and would rather have 1 employer (simplicity, less commuting, etc). Still, a nice idea in theory.

Maybe if most work was able to be done remotely, and work was done on a contract basis?

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi Implement basic income and universal healthcare, via taxes. Remove pensions for retirement and unemployment (obsoleted by basic income). With this, and taking into account that a minimum wage is not needed with basic income either, you take away all the overheads of hiring a worker. Want to hire someone to work 1 hour a day for $30? Fine, as long as they agree. You then pay taxes for your earnings, and not for hiring people.

<comment><USER3> Main problem with introducing basic income is that you are effectively punishing hard-working people for their effort (with taxes) and reward people that don't want to work with the free money. Unless you have millions of slaves or immigrants (or, futuristically thinking, robots) at your disposal this will make your country go bankrupt very quickly. Which is a common problem with socialism, but made exponentially worse.

<comment><USER4> Basic income is for everyone, workers and the unemployed, rich and poor alike. Or at least it should be. Every dollar you earn should be a bonus, on top of basic income, or else like you said, you create disincentives to work. If you're referring to the "fairness" of the distributed tax burden, that's a problem with or without basic income.

<comment><USER3> I see your point, but think about one thing: how many people are stuck in a jobs they hate just because they have to pay the bills? If you give them basic income that covers all their basic needs then first thing they will do is they will quit their jobs. Also, I can imagine that many women would leave their jobs to stay at home with their children (or to finally give birth to one). That's at least few millions of people that would immediately loose incentive to work.

Fairness of taxes is mainly theoretical exercise because this world isn't and never will be fair. So we need to deal with the fact that people don't like paying taxes and will do many things to avoid it, including quitting their jobs.

<comment><USER5> I am sorry to say that but your view of the basic income sounds rather shallow. I would encourage you to read up on the subject.

<comment><USER3> Actually, the part about mothers working less to spend more time with their children was actually noticed [1] And that was just an experiment, where participants knew it won't last forever. In real life effect might be stronger.

What really is shallow is the understanding of how economy works by proponents of basic income. As I wrote earlier: to make it possible you need either robots or slaves, because most consumer goods don't grow on trees and even the ones that do grow on trees still need some manual labor to be done before they can be bought with your basic income money. Disincentivising work will make them less available and therefore more expensive.

The last large scale implementation of unconditional basic income was in ancient Rome, and see how that ended for them :)

[1][http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net/ssrgai.htm#Disposable](http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net/ssrgai.htm#Disposable)

<comment><USER6> If people's disposable income drops to basic income level because they quit their jobs, there will be less demand for non-essential consumer goods. The idea that people will voluntarily starve themselves to death because they're too lazy to work while fruit rots on or under trees is ludicrous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some interesting comments from the past:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015092)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1396167](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1396167)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1187681](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1187681)

</comment><comment><USER8> Although it's a pleasant read, it doesn't take into account opportunity cost. Everything I do every day requires me not to do something else. There are valuable jobs that aren't urgent that never get done until I automate my way out of my current role. Russell always did treat economics as a zero sum game, when in reality it's quite expansive.

There are also jobs that need doing today and are physically possible to do, but nobody is doing them because we haven't invented them or realized they are possible yet. The Romans could have employed scientists to photograph the surface of Pluto. Physics haven't fundamentally changed since then. Only our understanding of what is possible has changed. A thousand years from now, people will marvel at all the jobs we in the early 21st century could have been doing to advance the quality of life for people around the world (and indeed all life on Earth), had we only known those things were possible.

</comment><comment><USER9> I love this essay by Bertrand Russell. It's just a shame it remains a utopia for the typical person.

<comment><USER5> probably for a typical person (whatever that means) but definitely not for a typical HN reader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a great essay. And obviously pertinent!</comment>


Voucher_swap: Exploiting MIG reference counting in iOS 12 - <AUTHOR> https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/01/voucherswap-exploiting-mig-reference.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> Curious to hear more about the "bypass Apple's implementation of ARMv8.3 Pointer Authentication (PAC) on A12 devices like the iPhone XS."

Is this new ARMv8.3 feature already broken?

<comment><USER3> I would guess holes in the coverage, or insufficient discrimination for authenticating.

But yeah, I'm looking forward to finding out what they exploited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't used MIG much, but it's always seemed like a security nightmare. It's somewhat convenient, but the codegen part looks really sketchy and of course with separation like this it's easy to forget memory management guidelines, etc.</comment>


How One Hour of Action Can Give You 150 Hours of Satisfaction - <AUTHOR> http://thomaslarock.com/2012/06/how-one-hour-of-action-can-give-you-150-hours-of-satisfaction/ <comment><AUTHOR> The best DBA is a lazy DBA, I say. Automate. Be prepared.

</comment><comment><USER2> Before becoming more proactive, make sure your employer is not evaluating you on how many fires you put out.

<comment><USER3> If doing a better job means that you will be negatively evaluated by your employer then find a better job. Catering to mediocrity breeds mediocrity.

<comment><USER4> Would be better phrased " _try to_ find a better job."</comment></comment></comment>


The Big Winner of the Great Recession Is … - <AUTHOR> http://business.time.com/2012/01/18/the-big-winner-of-the-great-recession-is

<comment><USER2> tl;dr all good for business but labor is SOL. I wonder how long we can run like this until the natives get restless. What has me totally dumbfounded though is why all the legislative assaults on individual rights, right now. It seems to me like the worst time to do it. It seems like it's just stoking the fire. I mean 10 years ago I could have never dreamed of American edging closer to a revolution. Now it seems like it could be a few bad decisions away. I hope not, but the discontentment seems to be spreading rapidly and the assaults on rights gives people the moral justification, in their mind to take drastic measures.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the perception of an ex-Amazon engineer today? - <AUTHOR> I'm joining Amazon in a few weeks in Seattle. Since I first accepted my intern offer, I've come to see the perception that Amazon engineers are less sought-after and seen to be worse than engineers at Facebook or Google - is this perception accurate? What is the hierarchy?
I know for a fact that Amazon engineers are compensated less well compared to Facebook and Google - does having Amazon as an SDE1 on my resume imply I didn't have any better options? I turned down two startups and a bulge-bracket bank (Goldman | JP Morgan | Morgan Stanley) to accept Amazon.
I want to go to Google or Facebook someday, but I'm afraid I don't have the mental acuity to pass an interview loop. <comment><USER2> _I want to go to Google or Facebook_

Please, please, PLEASE stop thinking that way. It's absurd. I mean, I'm not saying don't go to Google or Facebook one day... but please quit thinking that working for one of those TWO companies is somehow the be-all, end-all. They're just companies. And frankly, they both suck. And I can say that having worked for neither of them. Why? Because _all_ companies suck, in their own ways. Thinking that there's this one place that's just somehow so special and that's going to make you happy, especially when you've already narrowed the pool down to two is almost guaranteed to be a mistake.

The world is a LOT bigger than AmaGoodBookSoftHooGram. I mean, really, really, really, really MUCH bigger. Almost unimaginably so. Please don't constrain yourself in such an artificial way. Just focus on developing your skills, learning as much as you can, and figuring out what you want to focus on. If you can nail that part, the name of the company you work for is almost completely incidental.

<comment><USER3> Okay, who pays as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Only the hedge funds/propshops/hft companies and some of the startups that have already exited like Cruise.

Nobody else does, that guy just has low standards and has been brainwashed into thinking the elites don't live significantly more fulfilling and secure lives than he does.

<comment><USER4> Most people reporting to me make >$200k total comp, some by quite a lot. I see no evidence that they're happier than my high school classmates. The highest earner quite certainly wasn't the happiest. Somewhere, there's an eighteen- year-old doing affiliate marketing (maybe ICOs now?) who outearns all of us, with less than zero institutional prestige.

It's a big world. Money is excellent, but it's (a) less effective in buying happiness than you think, and (b) found in more places than you think. Seriously, talk to a therapist--these thoughts are hurting both your mental health and your earning potential.

<comment><AUTHOR> >Money is excellent, but it's (a) less effective in buying happiness than you think

To me, money is how I want to live without fear. I grew up pretty upper middle class but my parents were petrified of the littlest things (putting up the thermostat at 80 instead of 85, staying at a non-terrifying $80 a night motel instead of a terrifying $65 a night one).

We're pretty secure but everyone I knew grew up more "confidently" and now makes more than me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If the greatest accomplishment on your resume is that Amazon once hired you, then you have a problem that changing "Amazon" to "Facebook" won't fix. What you accomplish and learn is more important than where.

In any case, the variation between groups in large companies is bigger than the variation between companies. Choose based on the interview experience, publications from the group (if any), feedback from friends working directly for/with the hiring manger (if at all possible), etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> It sadly absolutely is. I didn't really do much as an intern. My research contributions are pretty low impact too, I got only 1 2nd author paper in undergrad to a mid tier conference.

Nothing I've made has gotten more than 30k downloads/installs, nothing has made it to the top of HN, I haven't been a rockstar at any of the companies I've worked for...

<comment><USER4> Even if what you're saying is true--which I doubt, if only because "got hired by Amazon/Facebook/anywhere once" is an incredibly weak greatest achievement-- it's not normal to think about yourself in such negative light. Seriously, talk to a therapist.

You need to (a) make sure you're not feeling so depressed/inferior that your judgment is impaired, and (b) find the work that you're personally capable of that you personally find most impressive, and go somewhere that you can do it. To chase external affirmation that you don't think you deserve is a terrible strategy for your mental health, and probably not a great financial strategy either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any developer can get an interview at google or FB as long as you have a CS degree. It's 2018 and their goal is to interview EVERYONE. No more pick and chose. Who ever cracks their stupid and useless "technical" interviews has the "ability" to work for them. Your past experiences or real skills don't matter at all. Or I shoud say - won't help you during the interview process because it's a tough exam. Bill Gates could fail, zuckerberg could fail as well as Sergey or Larry. Which also means, anyone can succeed the interview process.

If that's what you want, my suggestion would be to memorize as many algo/solutions as possible and to spend 3 months writting complex functions on a whiteboard. Be prepared to fail the interview process at least once. Many FB/Google employees failed at least once before getting a job their.

Amazon? That's good for you.. go for it and learn as much as you can for your next gig. Don't forget to separate the interview process from the real work experience. These are 2 different things and in 2018 you better master both. One will get you a job and the other one will help you keep that job.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've studied for 4 years. I've only become marginally better. I still can't understand a lot of the hards and mediums.

<comment><USER6> Qualify what "studied for 4 years" means. No one can really study for 4 years, just like no one can really study for 8 hours :). For what it's worth, I have found good success by picking a topic on leetcode and then solving some easies, then going to a medium.

<comment><AUTHOR> About 210 questions on leetcode, 45% med, 45% easy, 10% hard.

I repeated doing a bunch of them because I'd forget tricks and the like. I think I just don't have the IQ for it.

To compare, most of the people that I know who cracked FB, Google, trading companies etc did less than 80 or just read CTCI. I read CTCI and didn't find it helpful at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do not live a life of regret. Have experiences. Maybe, having an Amazon experience is a good thing? How about (for instance) if it turned out the big data science being done inside Amazon took you to JPL or Antarctica or into your own startup?

I tell a joke about failing to get hired by Microsoft in the 1980s. Sure, I'd be fully vested, but I've worked continuously since graduating.

In a million years we're all fossils. Life is too short to waste in coulda- shoulda-woulda

</comment><comment><USER8> Take your experience and look for jobs doing what makes _you_ happy. School is over, you don't have to do stuff to please other people anymore. Don't take a job to impress your friends, belong to a "club" or make your parents happy.

Want to work on technology X? Look for jobs doing that. If you get a job at Google, do you know what you'll be working on? I've heard they assign you to whatever _google_ wants you to work on. Sure, you can move to another group someday but as I once told an interviewer: "Why should I pay my dues working on something uninteresting in hopes that I can someday move to another dept doing what I want to do, when I can just work for someplace else, working on something I want to do _right now_?

</comment><comment><USER9> Whatever you believe is right. Amazon is what you make of it just like everything else. With such low spirits ahead of your start date I suggest you defer it further, we expect enthusiasm at Amazon,you will be rewarded handsomely in a couple years. But that first impression has got to be one of a winner , a go getter. YOU cleared the hiring bar , why do you look back? Who cares if it is lower than Facebook or Google , are you trying to tell me that is the ceiling of an Amazonians potential. We want everyone to feel great working at Amazon , and you are no exception . Nobody will tell you to buck up at Amazon , you will just stop being relevant and quit one day if you don't have the fire in you from day one.

<comment><AUTHOR> It absolutely is what I make of it. I got the team that I wanted in the city I've wanted to live in since I was a kid. I want to make the most of it personally but I have doubts I'll get much out of it even with that. I'm really afraid of getting PIPed within the first review cycle. My stock isn't going to appreciate much either and my TC is very low compared to my peers.

<comment><USER10> Why, oh why, are you starting out so defeated?!

I'm not sure the origin of the quote... "If you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right."

You're shooting yourself in the foot before you even start!!! STOP it!

Just go in and apply what you know, learn where you don't, and work hard. It's going to be hard, but it'll be worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would also agree with the tone of the rest of the comments. You could work in the best company doing the shittiest work and working in the shittiest company doing the best work. At the end of the day - Take a chance. Make mistake. Learn. Keep repeating.

</comment><comment><USER12> I know two people that worked at Amazon as software engineers. They worked in very different groups, one very business integration focused, the other one worked in the core Amazon site. Both are extremely professional, intelligent, and capable and I would be happy to work with either again. I think you have a better chance at Amazon of developing strong professional skills that are better suited to a larger number of employers, than you would at Google or FB (but I could be wrong.) Keep in mind technical groups within a large organization can be very different from each other so you should use every opportunity to meet/network across groups.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for an actual response. That's heartening, but I'm still not sure if Amazon and Google are held in equal footing :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Comparing yourself to others is going to make you nuts. Stop it. Seriously.

Why not be _THANKFUL_ you've got a job?

If you start with what you've got now, work to learn as much as you can while you're there, it will go a long way for you going forward.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am thankful. But everyone gets a job out of undergrad with a CS degree. I think I'm one of the ~10 people in my 300 person CS program that got a job at a big tech company making more than $100k a year. That's not good enough. I'm not competing with them, I'm competing with people that went to HYPSM.

<comment><USER10> You don't sound thankful. You sound entitled.

Have you considered that even though you may consider FB or Google a better place to work, for status/pay... that you're already starting out INSANELY better with even Amazon, than the rest of the world gets?

You can make this experience as good or as poor as you like. It's completely up to you. I say to make the best of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are you from (i.e. born/raised) the Bay Area by chance?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope. Born in the South.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to work your way down the career ladder? - <AUTHOR>

I've been working in IT for about 20 years now, initially as a programmer and more recently as a Project Manager and Development Manager.
While I'm a competent manager, increasingly I find myself longing for the days when I was coding as things seemed more straight forward and more interesting back then.
So my questions are:
1) How would people recommend I start working my way back down the career ladder?  I'm still OK with databases but my last hands on coding experience was c. 2000 and even back then I was a generalist rather than a specialist so just picking up what I was doing then technology wise wouldn't give me too much of a head start.
2) What am I forgetting about?  I know that the grass isn't greener on the other side but right now the issues of management are far clearer to me than the issues of being a developer.  What are the crappy bits I've forgotten but will hate?
3) How would people suggest I pitch the career move to companies and recruiters?  Done wrongly it has the whiff of failure but the reality is that it's about what I think will make me happy. <comment><USER2> Important missing info: are you working currently full-time for someone as a DevMgr?

1) In the MSFT world, certifications are still an interesting "get your foot in the door" approach. If that's an interesting option for you, you could pick your path and work your way through the cert. Personally I enjoy the process of learning and testing myself but I understand it isn't for everyone. Other options would be teaching yourself via books, open source projects, videos, classes, etc. If you are employed, see about getting your company to send you to training events and conferences.

2) You're forgetting how great it is to write unit tests all day, every day for two weeks! Yay! :D Well, here's what you're forgetting: important decisions will be made without you and, whether you agree or not, your input will likely often be ignored or you will be expected to just shut up and code it. "Sorry - the decision's already been made. Yes, I agree that it isn't the best but it's out of my hands. Can you have that class finished by Friday? Thanks for being a team player."

3) I don't think this is a real issue unless you want the "cream of the crop" developer positions. Small companies would kill to have someone with your experience take a dev job with them.

<comment><USER3> When thinking about ScottWhigham's last point, it occurred to me that telling many of the people at small software companies that "I tried my hand at management and while I'm not bad at it (or whatever) I've realized I prefer development." (And probably add some of the reasons.)

Of course one danger is that you will end up doing some management, if for no other reason than there being no one better suited. That said, that sort of reluctant manager is not likely to have some of the worse pathologies we see in all too many managers.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be honest I wouldn't mind a bit of management, something like team leading - the 60/40 technical / management split. It's the 0 / 100 split that's getting me down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1) Can you go part-time? Then you could get some open source or consulting experience. Would your company be willing to demote you, or let you work on some of the code in the projects you are developing?

2) Coding is boring drudgery and you have less of a view of where you are going than the managers (we hope :-) You'll be stuck with bad colleagues bringing you down instead of being able to get rid of the dead weight. You'll be out of practice and not experienced in a lot of new things, but it sounds like you already put ten years in coding so you will be able to catch up.

3) What you said here made sense. You could also sell yourself as a "fixer", who has both the programming skill and the management nouse to get stuck projects going again. Another alternative is to go into consulting, but I'm guessing neither of these options appeal if you just want to go back to coding. You could try cutting your hours and work on open source the rest of the time in order to improve your CV. Hell, your company might let you work one day a week on open source a la Google if you pitch it right (like, I'm good and I'm quitting if you don't give me this.)</comment>


Lessons I've Learned from Three Million App Downloads - <AUTHOR> http://jordansmith.io/lessons-ive-learned-from-three-million-downloads/ <comment><USER3> Love this bit: "Sometimes you're stuck on a problem, and there just don't seem to be any great solutions: maybe it's related to a piece of code you're writing, or decisions around how you're going to market your app. Then, you start thinking about the problem from a wider perspective. You realize that you won't need to even write the tricky piece of code if you architect it the right way, and that the marketing decision is one your friend (who has a knack for that sort of problem) would know how to tackle. You could sum it up as 'taking a step back' from the problem."

Taking a literal step away tends to help. I've often realized new approaches or epiphanies when mulling a problem while walking or in the subway.

<comment><USER4> On solo projects I've been experimenting with a technique that sounds a bit silly but seems to help a bit. I try and take off my programmer hat, or even my analyst hat, and try and become a stakeholder.

What do I want this program to do? What will make me want to use it, and what will be a deal breaker?

Once I finish thinking this through, I 'become' a programmer again and get to work. Often I find that things that seem a big deal at a coding level either don't matter, or are the wrong things to worry about.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't work for many people. They know the theory but can't apply it.

I can, but I've met plenty of bright people who simply haven't learned that ability yet.

It does work wonders for myself though. I am well-balanced between wanting technical excellence, ease-of-use and usefulness. It helps my job relations a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "What I've learned (aside from sucking it up, and sending a kind, helpful response) is: design your product as if it was going to be used by people that are a software literacy step below the target user."

Completely with you on the 'sucking up and sending a kind helpful response'. Snark does not pay. It makes no sense to snap at a user.

Regarding the other point about first-time users. I have a slightly related theory.

When you design something, design it for someone who has the attention span of a two-year-old. Not because your app is going to be used by a two-year-old. But because that is how much mental bandwidth a user is going to give you. Your user is probably busy or just likes to multi-task.

Working that much harder on the UI pays off, or at least prevents a disaster.

<comment><USER7> >When you design something, design it for someone who has the attention span of a two-year-old. Not because your app is going to be used by a two-year-old. But because that is how much mental bandwidth a user is going to give you. Your user is probably busy or just likes to multi-task.

I think this is a common problem, and the problem is with the people creating/selling/supporting the product, not the customer. We get so invested that we are willing to overlook little pain points or special knowledge required, which are precisely the things that drive customers away. We develop our own obscure workflow, and just by being an expert in the topic we become incapable of providing the feedback to make it friendly to new users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "So, don't be stingy: a product with no paying users is (usually) better than a paid product with no users. It's much easier to upsell to an existing customer than it is to find an entirely new paying customer."

This is generally true, but it seems a bit like applying an Enterprise view of sales to a market of minnow sized budgets. It reinforces app consumers' view that apps should only charge for marginal value, not core value or the biggest value. This sort of "freemium" model leads to basically a market of pure crap with extremely rare gems.

Edit: I'm not dumping on the author, here. Were I to "do mobile" I'd probably take a similar approach because it clearly works.

<comment><USER9> I must be in the minority, but I refuse to use freemium applications (those relying on in-app purchases to complete their functionality). My attitude is if you don't think your app is worth anything - I agree. Look, I'll walk into a Starbucks and spend $3 on something I'm going to consume in 30 minutes without even batting an eye. If you think your software is worth less than that then it probably doesn't warrant my time to check it out. I'm willing to concede I'm in the minority - but I'll also point out this goes a long way toward explaining why the quality of indy mobile apps is so abysmal.

<comment><USER10> Did you ever buy shareware back in the day like Doom?

What's the difference?

<comment><USER11> This is a great question. Shareware locked into this idea that if I could only get my game or application into people's hands, then they will love it and pay for the other features.

This definitely is a similar model to a free app with in-app upgrades. The challenge is coming up with a model where the user will decide they want to upgrade. Is it more features? Is it a restricted timeframe? More game levels?

I bet different app types do better with different options. I'd be curious if anyone has captured data on the best option for the different categories.

<comment><USER12> A long time ago I made a DOS shareware app and posted it on various BBS/ftp servers. 6 months went by, and to my great surprise I got a check for $10 in the mail with an appreciative note asking for the full version with the extra features. By this time I completely forgot about the app, and of course I'd never made the full version. I think there might be a moral in there somewhere kind of like how backups don't work unless tested regularly.

<comment><USER13> A long time ago I made a Windows (3.1/95) app that invisibly used a file share to send 'Post it' notes to peoples screens. It served a purpose for myself and my colleagues at the time as we were in an organisation that barely used email, and also had no IM facilities whatsoever.

I threw it online, by uploading it to several of those shareware app hosting sites that used to exist and hosted it on my own site as well. The app was fundamentally free, but if you wanted to use it legally in an organisation you had to by per-user licences.

To my utter surprise, cheques started arriving in the mail, some for 100's of user licences. Several were FTSE100 companies. It turned out that my app had a killer feature - when you sent a 'note' to someone else, it appeared on their screen almost immediately _on top_ of what ever they were doing. Apparently traders loved this, so my apps was being used in several banks on their trading floors.

The whole thing was short lived, and the money I made was a short bubble. Less than a year later it all dried up, and NetNote[1] was consigned to history.

Back to point though, and why I'm replying - one of the large banks asked me to come in for meeting to discuss upgrades to the app - as they'd paid for 1000+ user licences I felt duty bound to attend the meeting. However, what they basically wanted was a complete overhaul of it and had a request list as long as my arm. As an indie developer I couldn't commit to that, so I didn't make any promises, and then completely failed to deliver on their requests.

Of course I regret that now.

\--

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20030323215705/http://www.jaruze...](https://web.archive.org/web/20030323215705/http://www.jaruzel.com:80/netnote.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Regarding just trying again and again... "Winners never quit,quitters never win but those who never win and never quit are idiots".

I'm reality most of us don't really have more than a few shots except in those rare cases of the most trivial apps.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's particularly encouraging to read the many hours of work and back-stepping he's done, to get the quality really, really high. Startups are often associated with speed, but less so on flexibility, even if lean philosophy purports it. Ship fast. Get the bare-bones MVP done. Aim for viral growth. This is probably why we have millions of apps, but only a few dozens last and actually taken up by the mass. Different types of products mean different processes after all, give or take amount of resources.

In this app's case, it's about re-imagining an existing function - timetables. The designer knows that user experience is everything, and because of this he's willing to scrap everything if need to. And even when this happens, it isn't exactly waste as you understand the problem deeper and come to the design of an even better solution.

Sure you can argue that an MVP can bring about those design iterations. Keeps your focus on the users too. But arguably the market for this type of product is _very active_ \- though not necessarily competitive. So rather than get buried with the hundred others, it needs to shine right from the beginning.

<comment><USER16> You're exactly right. I think the thing you said that people can't get their head around too is that you sometimes have to decide you are wrong and start something over. Learning from failure is the hardest thing to get right. The missing piece is usually having enough data to _know_ if you have failed. With that, going deeper and better feels like an improvement not a reset.

<comment><USER15> Admitting that you're wrong may sound like a bruise to your ego, but only if you feel personally tied to the project. Pixar has a good approach; they vehemently emphasise that the project is always separate and thus criticism towards it are never personal. If you try and do it for your own project, you can get a more objective view and explore much more design possibilities.

The downside to this is a longer process, and actually you become more prone to "analysis-paralysis". But still I would argue that it's part of developing yourself to become more objective, at least that's the experience with my project anyway. It's funny that we're taking about this because two weeks ago I had to tear down an entire product architecture, built over 3 years, to start all over again. I had made one flawed assumption at the beginning, and it got buried so deep that I didn't realise for a long time. It manifested itself into a set of problems that I kept hitting into, until I had to concede that there's something rotten at its core.

It sounds like a waste, but no: the new product was actually designed at a much shorter time, and _far better_ than its predecessor (well you'll just have to take my word for now ;)) And yes I do feel a bit silly for being in denial before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's sad is because of App Store economics. He can never depend on his paying customers to ever pay for an upgrade. He will always have to chase new customers.

<comment><USER17> Another sad thing is that a consumer can't tell their iDevice "hey, stop downloading updates to this app; I like it just the way it is" \- the closest we can get is turning off automatic updates for all apps, and then hoping we never accidentally tap on the "Update" button for that specific app.

Currently, both of the problems can be solved in one kludge: release a big upgrade as a new app. For example, I bought the app Things when it was at version 2. I liked it so much that when Things 3 came out as a separate app, I bought it too. And if I really loved the UI of Things 2 and hated the new UI in Things 3, I wouldn't have to do anything. I could keep auto-upgrade on, and never have to worry about my Things 2 app being upgraded to something I don't like.

<comment><USER18> You can still download older versions of apps, it's a workaround but it can be done.

<comment><USER19> Can to do that on Google Play?

I'd love to be able to undo app updates.

<comment><USER18> No idea, I meant App Store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very impressive Jordan. Pls do consider releasing TimeTable in India - <USER2> Android version if possible. Millions of parents of primary kids (more than the students) will be happy.

</comment><comment><USER21> TLDR: App design is equally important as coding. Design everything around first time user and simplicity.

<comment><USER22> Yep, for most apps design is typically the more important factor than the technical implementation.

<comment><USER23> For most _software_ , design is typically the most important factor. An app that does the right thing and has the right interface but is poorly coded and inefficient is still useful. An app that does the wrong thing, or has an awful interface, is not useful no matter how slick the code behind it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A lot of apps are like this. I know dev who were like "They made that all that money off Angry Birds." Didn't Rovio have a bunch of terrible ideas that failed and Angry Birds was one of their last ditch projects?

<comment><USER25> Yes, they spent years making games with relatively little success and bleeding money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "Instead, my 'moderate success' story is closer to one of hard work, and slow, steady progress"

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd be intrigued to know what caused those spikes in your download volumes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, those follow the start of school/college semesters across various countries. It's actually quite nice, it means some periods of the year (like now) have relatively low usage so I can spend time on other projects. Approaching those spikes, I usually invest more time into updates etc.

<comment><USER28> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Some profound product management wisdom there, Jordan. Wish enterprises understood it as well as you've laid out. Thanks for the post and here's to your continued mojo.

</comment><comment><USER30> really great article. It's a breath of fresh air in the sea of churnalism suffering from Mediumitis - "I did this in 3 hours and now I have self-worth".

</comment><comment><USER31> It's sad that people aren't willing to pay $1 for an app but are willing to purchase in app features. I feel mobile software is moving in this direction and that it will only get worse with time. The sad part is it makes software more complex and hence more expensive overall, and you probably end up spending more over the lifetime of the product...

<comment><USER32> I feel this way and it's mostly due to apple's return policy. Because it is near impossible to return an app I generally look towards free apps with an IAP to unlock everything/remove ads. If apple had a refund policy similar to steam with a 2h return window I'd be much more willing to pay upfront.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> >Sure, three million downloads is a lot, but that's happened over more than six years.

It still remains "a lot", US$ 500,000 per year, not exactly peanuts IMHO.

EDIT: Ah, no wait, I misread the article, he got a handful of downlads when the app was US$1, the 3 million downloads are since it was made free/freeware.

</comment><comment><USER34> Does somebody know which blog engine and theme was used here?

<comment><USER35> [http://jekyllthemes.org/themes/kiko- plus/](http://jekyllthemes.org/themes/kiko-plus/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Personal essay strikes again in business context - I like it very much and glad to see it here. Looks like a useful read and educational.

</comment><comment><USER37> Would love to see revenue data!

<comment><AUTHOR> Not enough to make this my day job, while paying off a mortgage unfortunately. For short durations it has been, although my living expenses are much higher now than they once were.

It's also very seasonal - it closely follows the download graph on the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Thanks for sharing Jordan!

</comment><comment><USER39> agreed

unless -- based on personal experience -- if it's treated as suspicious by the local police/neighbors, even if its a skinny, geeky-looking, white male who goes out walking alone late at night.

if I had a nickel for every time I've been harassed by police or local do- gooders, I'd have a lot of those nickels. and I'm not even of the demographic that PC-ness says should be oppressed. (ostensibly: black+male, or male+gay, or non-white, or female, or mean-faced, or weapon-carrying, etc. in reality: straight white male, innocent, no weapons, not in a gang, no drugs, etc.) "why are you walking alone at this time? why are you looking at things? implied: are _you_ a terrorist? a pedophile? explain immediately!"

We do not (always) live in an intellectual-friendly culture. At least not in the USA, 2017. We (might, often) live in a small-minded, hyper-stereotyped, very ignorant local culture. Obviously it depends on precisely where you live. SF on Friday at 8pm? very different than Kansas, small town, Wednesday, etc.

not even joking. (And I submit this knowing it's not a HN-hivemind/PC-aligned viewpoint, and thus will be downvoted. I do not care anymore.)

<comment><USER40> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14542573](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14542573) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER39> I wanted to give you some feedback that I find this behavior to be passive aggressive and toxic. I shared an opinion and a perspective, based on actual life experience, which was related to the topic at hand, the comment I was replying to. I wrote it in good faith. And then, from my perspective, you parachute in and sabotage it.

I appreciate that you acted in a way that you think is trying to improve matters.

But any normal person, in RL, would consider your action to be an attack, and passive aggressive. It's chilling and toxic.</comment></comment></comment>


SpaceX: Musk's 'Mars ship' prototype aces 150m test flight - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53659702 <comment><USER3> I really love the out-in-the-open development process. It doesn't cost SpaceX anything, yet they attract lots of internet media where people set up streams, discuss progress etc.

The next year should be pretty exciting as they develop things further. Starship has a number of big innovations, which are:

\- the raptor engine. This was developed behind closed doors and is sort of finished. We won't see much of it, but it is the most advanced rocket engine ever made and I'm not aware of any upcoming engine that can compete with it.

\- Stainless steel construction. What we're seeing with SN5 is the basic tank structure of the second stage. The hopper that flew last year was a neat demo, but SN5 was pressurized and the design is way closer to what the actual starship will end up having. The first stage tanks will also be a stretched version of these tanks, so that's why you see them focus on this so much right now.

\- belly-flop landing. To land, starship will be coming downhorizontal until a few hundred meters above ground when it'll make itself vertical to land. SN5 won't have the fins and cone to perform this, but SN6 will. It might be possible to see this before the end of the year - SN6 (with 3 engines) goes up 20km, goes horizontal to burn off speed, then lands vertically.

\- belly-first re-entry. Instead of a heatshielf that withstands a high temperature, Starship will burn off speed with its belly, but do it over a longer time period of time so that while the total heat is the same, the max temperature doesn't rise too much. The stainless steel can't take the temperatures ablative heatshields on capsules can. Don't know if Starhip will be able to perform this meaningfully without a booster.

\- in-orbit refueling. Starship is big and heavy and basically can't get anywhere unless it's re-fueled in orbit. I don't think this has been done before, definitely gonna need 2+ starhips and boosters to show this.

\- superheavy booster. This might be the simplest part of the whole system - <USER2> first stage with 31 raptor engines.

Lots of stuff coming in the next few years.

<comment><USER4> > belly-flop landing ...

Seems less likely that SN6 will be used for 20km flight + belly flop due to the change from 301 to 304L. If I had to guess, I'd say it's likely SN6 will be used w/ nose-cone and LOX header tank for additional short duration hops.

<comment><USER5> I believe Elon said they were targeting SN8 for a high altitude flight with 3 raptor engines, hopefully later this year. Various parts are already under construction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yesterday's discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24055823](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24055823)

</comment><comment><USER7> Amazing! Next 50 years is going to be crazy in space innovation!

<comment><USER8> *5 years (not to say the next 50 won't be awesome too)

<comment><USER7> In 50 years I expect us to have a Mars Colony and looking towards Titan or other habitable areas of our galaxy and have discovered an insanely fast way of travel previously thought impossible. Human lifespans will be extended and what it means to be human will be a very different definition and so deep space travel will be within human grasp by the end of century.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That cover photo though, it looks so much like a flying hot water heater :-)</comment>


Effective Editing in Emacs: Moving. - <AUTHOR> http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2011/01/14/effective-editing-movement/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great introduction on how to navigate inside of a buffer in emacs, but I also have learn a couple of more advance tricks like c-subword-mode, or C-s C-w

I also find useful put my moving keys in the home row.

        ;;; Arrow keys.
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-k")    'next-line)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-i")    'previous-line)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-j")    'backward-char)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-l")    'forward-char)

        ;;; Fast Arrow keys.
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-K")    'forward-paragraph)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-I")    'backward-paragraph)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-J")    'backward-word)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-L")    'forward-word)

        ;;; kill text
        (global-set-key (kbd "M-j")  'delete-backward-char)
        (global-set-key (kbd "M-J")  'backward-kill-word)   ;;;    Doesnt work on paraedit.
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-w")  'kill-word)

        (global-set-key (kbd "s-1")    'shrink-window)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-2")    'enlarge-window)

</comment><comment><USER2> Another great tool for movement is next-error, bound to C-x ` by default, though I bind it to M-` for convenience. Despite its name, it's not just useful for jumping to error locations in source code. It also jumps to matches from M-x occur and M-x rgrep, making it very easy to hop around from one regex match to another. A negative prefix argument can be used to navigate in the reverse direction, in case you go too far.</comment>


Show HN: forage - Deals from local restaurants & bars - <AUTHOR>

I just finished the MVP for my first personally owned startup. It's been a long (longer than it should have been.. built too much) journey and I'm glad to finally see that chapter come to a close. I hit the streets tomorrow to get restaurants/bars signed up.
Filtering is currently turned off and please be aware that while the restaurants are not, the deals are all fake.
demo: http://demo.forage.at
angel list: angel.co/forage <comment><USER2> It's not an MVP, I'd call it a non-functional prototype. But it's a good idea. Here's some thoughts:

\- Cut the amount of copy, the site is WAY too wordy. Read some blog posts about copywriting

\- it doesn't need more features yet. Make the features you are showing work, and then clean up the design on them

\- Start a blog and a podcast, interviewing exciting restauranteurs. Use content to build the Forage brand

\- new logo

keep rockin

<comment><AUTHOR> First off, thanks for taking the time to give me feedback. Responses below.

>>It's not an MVP, it's just a mockup really.

How so? It's fully functional. I added a setting to disable all filtering (location, timing, tags) because I didn't want to have to schedule a ton of deals to match unforeseeable criteria.

>> Cut the amount of copy, the site is WAY too wordy. Read some blog posts about copywriting

Heh, I'm certainly not a writer. Thank you for the feedback on it, I'll try and trim it back.

>> \- it doesn't need more features yet. Make the features you are showing work

What's not working? Did you run into something specific? If you're talking about filtering, I covered that above.

>> and then clean up the design on them

A large part of the design challenge is lack of content. As features are added, the content will fill out, allowing me to fill out the design. I also couldn't spend a horrible amount of time on the design itself. I'd love to hear feedback on what you didn't like specifically though if you have time.

>> Start a blog and a podcast, interviewing exciting restauranteurs. Use content to build the Forage brand

Agreed to an extent. At this stage I'm going to devote my days to door-to-door pitches to get restaurants on board while my nights will be spent developing features based on feedback from restaurateurs. I'm not funded so I have to cram as much as I can in. I realize the value of a blog though, well to an extent.

>> keep rockin

Thanks again :)

<comment><USER2> Fyi I tweaked my comments some. Here's responses:

"It's fully functional"

You said the deals aren't real. I guess I was confused, I thought this was automatically aggregating all the deals from other services. If you are having to go talk to restaurants and secure deals themselves, this idea won't scale. Just being up front.

"A large part of the design challenge is lack of content"

No, the design is obviously done by a non-designer. That's okay to start off with. Then slowly improve on it by asking feedback from people with design background, and eventually hiring a contractor to add some polish.

"At this stage I'm going to devote my days to door-to-door pitches to get restaurants on board while my nights will be spent developing features based on feedback from restaurateurs"

Marketing 1 feature > Adding more features

I highly recommend the book "Start Small Stay Small" by Rob Walling, it is a great business book for micropreneurs. Also Rob has a great podcast "Startups for the Rest of Us" that I think you would like.

<http://startupbook.net>

best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> >> You said the deals aren't real. I guess I was confused, I thought this was automatically aggregating all the deals from other services.

Ah, I see. I just meant the deals are fake, as in please don't show up at the restaurants and ask for a $5 burrito because "you saw it on forage"

>> If you are having to go talk to restaurants and secure deals themselves, this idea won't scale. Just being up front.

Neither. Restaurants & bars manage their own promotions.

>> No, the design is obviously done by a non-designer. That's okay to start off with.

Ouch. Outside of the logo and the specific pages (deal, restaurant) I actually thought the design was decent. I'm horrible at branding so I hired a designer but he came up with something horrible. I'm just using the current logo as a placeholder.

>> Marketing 1 feature > Adding more features

It really depends on the features, product, and audience. Social networking integration would go leaps and bounds above blogging.

>>I highly recommend the book "Start Small Stay Small" by Rob Walling, it is a great business book for micropreneurs. Also Rob has a great podcast "Startups for the Rest of Us" that I think you would like.

Cool, I'll check it out. Thanks again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://demo.forage.at></comment>


Microsoft's default font is at the center of a government corruption case - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/world/2017/07/11/microsofts-default-font-is-at-the-center-of-a-government-corruption-case/ <comment><USER2> Whoops! Truly silly. Documents supposed to be produced in 2006 written in a font that wasn't available until 2007.

<comment><USER3> Was hoping it was some sort of 3 letter agency. Instead just the Pakistani prime minister trying to hide profiteering and tax evasion.

You'd think that hiring a professional forgerist would be a cost of doing business.</comment></comment>


MHI Successfully Completes Demonstration Testing of Wireless Power Transmission - Digit-Al https://www.mhi-global.com/news/story/1503121879.html

<comment> Digit-Al More info here: [http://news.discovery.com/tech/alternative-power- sources/wir...](http://news.discovery.com/tech/alternative-power- sources/wireless-energy-sent-170-feet-through-the-air-150313.htm)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Efficiency?</comment>


Towed microphone array visualizes formation of fish schools - <AUTHOR> http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sciencenow;2009/326/4

<comment><AUTHOR> (As seen on Slashdot; posted better link here.)</comment>


Would an in-house coffee waiter improve your team productivity?  - <AUTHOR>

Imagine someone whose job it is to keep peoples coffee cups full, thereby removing the productivity destroying trips to the kitchen.  Would this improve your team productivity? <comment><USER2> I don't have my copy of "PeopleWare" to hand, but I think that is where I read this story ...

A company brought in an external consultant to look at how to improve productivity in the software and engineering sections of the company. After two weeks they reported back and recommended the hiring of a "coffee lady" - someone to bring around biscuits, fruit, sandwiches, and hot beverages. This would save the programmers and engineers from making "productivity-sapping visits to the kitchen, water cooler, etc."

The recommendation was implemented, and over the next few months productivity fell. At a loss, a further study was commissioned.

It was found that although time was taken to visit the kitchen and stand by the water cooler, and some of the time "wasted" was spent in talking about football, dates, and other non-work related topics, some of the time was spent explaining a problem, and having a colleague say "I had that problem last week/month/year, and here's how I solved it ..."

The benefits of sharing information far, _far_ outweighed the apparent losses in efficiency. The best thing you can do is increase the interaction, without causing more loss of time at desk. Encourage people to visit the facilities at the same time, provide whiteboards and pens, provide a shared workstation, have doughnuts and sandwiches delivered at predictable times.

Increase the communication within and across teams.

Don't force them to stay at their desks.

</comment><comment><USER3> With coffee cups never empty, there will be a significant amount of diuretic liquid poured into your team's collective digestive systems.

This can lead to only one result - more productivity-destroying trips away from the desk!

Will you try to solve this in the same manner?

</comment><comment><USER4> I use coffee trips as an excuse to get up and move around, as opposed to sitting at my computer 10 hours straight. I would probably drink more coffee with a waiter, but I would still invent excuses to get out of my chair every now and then, if only to stretch.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd ask them to please not service me and would continue my irregular trips to the kitchen to get a cup of tea. The reasons for this are:

\- I do my tea trips during natural pauses in my work (between tasks, stuck on a problem, waiting for the computer, feeling tired) while the coffee refills would interrupt whatever I'm doing and cause me to lose focus

\- Breaks are good for your creativity - when stuck on a problem I regularly get great solutions when I stop "actively" focusing on it and get a cup of tea (or do other small AFK tasks).

\- In the office kitchen I bump into users (I develop in-house software) and get immediate feedback, which is often the most valuable kind.

\- Getting up from your chair is good for your posture, blood circulation, etc.

All of these make me more productive, not less.

</comment><comment><USER6> Like others have stated, I use going to the kitchen as a stretch for my muscles. I find that getting up away from the desk and walking around helps break up the working day. Without these breaks I know that my productivity would drop, especially in the afternoons.

The same goes for working through lunch. I often find myself doing this in order to complete all the work I have on my plate. What I am trying to force myself to do is actually get out of the office and at the very least go for a walk outside. More often than not I am a lot more productive in the afternoons when I take a decent break for lunch. Working straight through lunch is a bad habit to get into.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hmm...I think it would have some benefits. The biggest issue I could see is that people need to walk around. I know when I walk down the block to get a coffee it's less about the coffee and more about getting the chance to walk outside and stretch my legs a little bit.

You also might have to introduce a system to give everyone a catheter since the more coffee you drink the more trips to the restroom you'll be taking.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've often thought that a school bell that rings every 40 minutes would also be a good idea in a working environment. Especially if there was enforced playtime too.

I'm not joking about this, I really think structured work/play is a valid idea. if I ever get enough staff I'll try it out on all of them. We'll see where it goes...

</comment><comment><USER9> How about instead a caffeine drip put into everyone's arm when they get into the office in the morning? Seriously though - people need to move around... I don't think there is a need to optimize coffee breaks. If people don't have breaks you'll see a drop in productivity rather than a gain.

</comment><comment><USER10> I go to the kitchen because I need to stretch my legs, not because I actually need the coffee. If the coffee came to my desk, I'd have to find another excuse to take a two minute break and walk around. Take up smoking, perhaps.</comment>


Vendor Prefixes Are Hurting the Web - <AUTHOR> http://hsivonen.iki.fi/vendor-prefixes/

<comment><USER2> Holy hell, vendor prefixes aren't hurting the web, the 6.5MB of fonts that that page downloads to display a single blog post are. That's not a flash of unstyled content, it's a financial quarter of unstyled content. At first I thought that the blog post was some clever demonstration of how things are broken because of vendor prefixes, when really it was just the browser blocking for 20 seconds while it downloaded the fonts so that it could display 25kb of text.

Now, on to the post.

It sounds an awful lot like the author is sad that people are using -webkit browser prefixes rather than -moz browser prefixes, because most mobile browsers run webkit. The author seems to work for Mozilla, and this reads an awful lot like bemoaning that people like webkit prefixes over Mozilla prefixes. He seems to be asserting that a developer must use one and only one vendor prefix, and completely ignores the possibility that you can actually have each browser render its own version of the same CSS effect by specifying multiple rules with multiple vendor prefixes.

> Engine-specific content is bad for users. If a site uses CSS with the > -webkit- prefix, users of Firefox, Opera or IE get a worse experience even > if they implemented the same feature with their own prefix or without a > prefix.

CSS is not content. CSS is presentation. Say it until it makes sense. If you're serving different _content_ to the user based on CSS vendor prefixes, you have bigger problems.

Even then, pixel-perfect presentation across all major browsers shouldn't be the goal. Very few people will care that things render the exact same everywhere. What you should care about is a consistent experience _per browser_. When you're looking at a site in IE, the site should be consistent in IE. When in Webkit, the experience should be consistent with itself, etc. If you insist on demanding pixel-perfection, then I invite you to look at your site in, say, Webkit on a Windows machine, an OS X machine, and a Linux machine. It's going to be different; the use different font rendering engines, which dramatically affects the look-and-feel of the website. You aren't going to achieve Grand Unified Omniplatform Pixel Perfection. Get over that expectation and start designing experiences that are self-consistent per platform.</comment>


Foveated 3D Graphics [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/176610/foveated_final15.pdf

<comment><USER2> Gaze-tracking is also going to change depth-of-field and HDR effects. Right now both of them generally suck, because the computer doesn't really know where you're glancing on the screen.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah; I'm mostly interested in this for HD VR applications where the screen necessarily needs to be at a much higher resolution to cover a wide field of view, and being able to dynamically adjust depth-of-field effects and such would also be pretty interesting. I wonder how much it would impact the perceived reality of the situation</comment></comment>


Palm: this is your survival guide - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/19/palm-this-is-your-survival-guide/

<comment><USER2> I think they should have offered at least one phone with decent hardware. Probably too late for that now.

<comment><USER3> Yep. They are trying to increase margins by skimping on cases and the feel. If the Pre wasn't a cheap feeling piece of plastic crap, it may have done better.</comment></comment>


Culture, mathematical models, and Neandertal extinction - <AUTHOR> http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/demography/ecocultural-model-gilpin-2016.html <comment><USER3> Interesting. Teasing apart the many factors that play a role in the extinction of the Neanderthals is exceedingly difficult. Decades ago, it was assumed that the Neanderthals were intellectually and technologically inferior to modern humans, and simply could not compete. However, recent discoveries demonstrated that the Neanderthals had art, tools, and shelters. They probably had language. Their brains were larger than that of modern humans. They were much stronger.

Some scientists speculate that the Neanderthals could not adapt to the changing climate as the ice age receded, whereas modern humans from Africa were are better adapted to warmer climates.

I doubt that. The Neanderthals spent 200,000 years in Northern Europe, Southern Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia; surely they were quite adaptable, to have survived that long.

I suspect that the reason the Neanderthals died out is that modern humans were more aggressive, more murderous, more apt to kill the other. Modern humans developed in the brutal savannas and jungles of Africa, and when they came north, they brought their brutal ways with them. When they encountered Neanderthals, they probably killed the men and enslaved some of the women. Eventually, the Neanderthal population dropped so low that it was no longer sustainable as a separate species.

<comment><USER4> More murderous humans? Killing and enslavement? Speculation. It _is_ known that Neanderthals would slaughter and eat their own kind during a hard winter. And that when Neanderthal encountered the more elegant and graceful arrow and spear point flakes of the modern human, they attempted to imitate them - <USER2> chipping an entire nodule down to make one point. Not the correct method which is flaking dozens of good points off of one nodule. Not so good with technology, Neanderthals.

And there were never many Neanderthal at all, at any time. Not a successful species really. It takes no fiction of murder and enslavement to explain them away. Intermarrying would do it handily, with the overwhelming population of Homo Sapiens spreading through their territory.

<comment><USER3> Of course I'm speculating. It's also speculation to assume the Neanderthals imitated, badly, the technology of modern humans. Indeed the article asserts that the humans who first ventured into Neanderthal territory did not have superior technology. So who developed better spear points? No way of knowing, really. Some genius from either group, perhaps.

As for arrows... bows were not known to exist until tens of thousands of years after the time period we're discussing. Atl-atl are thought to have existed since Upper Paleolithic (30KYA) but it's now believed that modern humans were in Europe and Asia much earlier, perhaps 70K or 80K years ago. It was between 40K-30K that the Neanderthal disappeared.

Cannibalism is assumed, based on tooth marks on bone. There's no evidence that it was universally practiced, however. Maybe just a few extreme cases. Or perhaps it was universal among hominids -- meat is meat.

<comment><USER4> We can make up stories to suit a particular narrative. Or look at the evidence dispassionately. Maybe its not in this article, but well documented that Neanderthals were cannibals. Not tooth marks - butcher marks on the bone, a dozen individuals at one site that were related, all during a hard winter. Clearly an entire troupe of neighbors slaughtered for meat.

Then there are sites inhabited over decades by Human and Neanderthal in turn. That's where its clear that at least some Neanderthal failed to adopt the better technology.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: best photosharing service? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all, I am currently looking a for, as the title suggests, a photosharing service to store some photos.
I've had a look at the wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photo_sharing_websites), but decided HN would be a better source for advice.
I know there are currently popular services, such as Instagram, Flickr, but I'm looking for something that's less social. Any advice?
Cheers.
(Also, does anybody use imgur for other than a quick image/link generator?) <comment><USER2> Cluster might suit your needs. It's not photo storage, but it's photo/video sharing that's only to private groups of people. In fact, people can't even know what other clusters you belong to, other than the ones they share with you. Works on the web at [https://cluster.co](https://cluster.co) and it's on iOS and Android.

Disclaimer: I'm the iOS developer on Cluster.

As always, feedback appreciated if you do check it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, this is pretty good app! Definitely give this a try...Thank you very much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think we need more information to make a suggestion. What do you mean by less social?

For me, I either post to Facebook if the photo is one that I wouldn't mind being completely public and I think is generally interesting to my friends.

I use messaging services for 1:1 or group sharing for "boring to most" photos or ones I would like to be less public. I print out books to share sometimes.

The people I want to share with are not tech savvy.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd also be interested in a private self-hosted option. I want to share my family photos with my wider family and friends, but I don't want them to have to sign up to any third party service, and I don't want to upload my photos to companies like Google or Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use self hosted WordPress blog. I like having more control, but give up some conveniences like not worrying about bugs and patches.

</comment><comment><USER6> Less social?

Subscribe to Flickr, set your upload default to private.</comment>


Lissajous – A tool for programmatic audio performance in the browser - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kylestetz/lissajous

<comment><USER2> This is very interesting but a more detailed tutorial and documentation would be really handy. For example I haven't figured out yet if there's any other (than destroying) way to stop the track.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great name.</comment>


Google Glass will be manufactured in the USA (Santa Clara, California) - <AUTHOR> http://glass-apps.org/google-glass-manufactured-in-usa-santa-clara <comment><AUTHOR> What do you think how long will they keep the production in the USA before offshoring it for mass production? It seems to me that they only want to keep the production in the US as long as it takes to get this gadget out of beta - but at google this might be a long time :)</comment>


The world is on lockdown. So where are all the carbon emissions coming from? - <AUTHOR> https://grist.org/climate/the-world-is-on-lockdown-so-where-are-all-the-carbon-emissions-coming-from/ <comment><USER2> _So where are all those emissions coming from? For one thing, utilities are still generating roughly the same amount of electricity — even if more of it's going to houses instead of workplaces._

I see that as a positive, we already know how to shift electricity production to low carbon technologies and many parts of the world are already doing so. Transport is much harder to deal with.

<comment><USER3> Exactly that. We don't need to replace every car or plane out there. If we're able to build a renewable electricity grid and shift heating to using that clean electricity instead of gas or oil, we can save much more than by using electric transportation. But for that we'd need more clean electricity supply which isn't intermittent or can work as storage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The bleak reality is that living standards need to fall in developing economies to reduce global carbon emissions, at least with current technologies. Otherwise, increased living standards in developing economies will replace the developed economies reduced emissions due to sheer population size and growth.

<comment><USER5> People in all countries will be so desperate for work that they won't give a damn about carbon emissions.

<comment><USER4> I think this describes developing economies generally. Basic housing and food is what people need work for.</comment></comment></comment>


Dear "Landlord" [ironic] - <AUTHOR> http://raganwald.posterous.com/dear-landlord#and-one-year-later-ellipses <comment><USER2> > I have a more serious problem with your offices. A lot of folks just like > you build these great offices, lure people like me in, and then wind up > getting jobs as architects working for someone else.

And the even more serious problem here, by implication, is that this is actually considered a valid business model: I start a small company, we build a decent product, end up with a few loyal customers and _bam_ acquihired. It's a common enough thing to be a valid goal. You may call your startup a success, for example, if you happen to fortunate enough to have this happen to you and your business.

What a peculiar notion of success we've been developing!

<comment><AUTHOR> Imagine you are interviewing a salesperson. He doesn't have much experience, but he explains how he went door to door showing people his minivan. "You can drive it for free, I may make my money putting ads on the side, I may make my money charging referral fees to storage landlords, I'll figure it out later."

A bunch of families sign up for a free membership in his "Minivan Club" and choose not to buy or lease a family vehicle. He's proven that he can sell, he says, so he'll come work for you and exercise the same magic.

But what about those families? How are they going to go shopping or take their kids to school?

He shrugs. "Money back if not satisfied," he quips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well, yes. This is why you don't use free hosting services. This has been obvious since Geocities at least. Why is this still news in 2013? How is this lesson not getting passed along? Why do people still fall for this trick?</comment>


How to Multiply Numbers that are Close to base 100 in just one line - <AUTHOR> http://mathema-tricks.blogspot.com/2012/03/multiplying-numbers-that-are-closer-to.html http://mathema-tricks.blogspot.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> <http://mathema-tricks.blogspot.com/>

<comment><USER2> Why the extra link? I'm sure the vast majority of HN users are able to delete everything bar the domain name in their browser's address bar.

<comment><USER3> He did that on his other posts as well. I won't post any links to them though. ⚑</comment></comment></comment>