The Empirical Evidence That Types Affect Productivity and Correctness - <AUTHOR> http://www.danluu.com/empirical-pl/

<comment><USER3> This was just posted a few days ago -- here's the discussion for anyone interested:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8594769](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8594769)

</comment><comment><USER4> That very first study, ANSI C vs K&R C seems like exactly the kind of test that's needed.

Unfortunately, most languages are now heavily shaped by the typechecker. That is, not many languages can flip the typechecker on or off with a switch - <USER2> have parallel typechecked and not implementations.

That was one golden chance to get people familiar with the language to try both variations.

And the effect of that? Slightly in favor of typechecked (he typed smugly). But that's not really enough. It's not clear there's even a 5% bump in productivity.

I like compile time typechecking. I like static guarantees. But there's just not enough evidence to say typechecking is a must-have. And really, I'm not sure it's possible to construct an environment to test that.

<comment><USER5> We could try TypeScript vs JavaScript.

TypeScript type annotations are optional, and its semantics are by design exactly those of Javascript.

<comment><USER6> I've come to the conclusion that when you can get your code running and producing errors (javascript) in less time than it takes to compile to see the type errors (scala) the benefits of types seem a lot less persuasive.

Anything that adds an extra step to the workflow can diminish the benefit of types, so if you were to do a TypeScript vs JavaScript comparison, you'd have to decide whether you wanted the comparison to include the extra time that TypeScript adds into your iteration flow or make a fake build step for vanilla javascript that slows things down. Maybe es6 transpiled to es5 vs TypeScript would be fair.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's a good paper. The studies that involve someone writing a small program aren't too helpful, though. Typing is most useful when the type structure won't fit in the programmer's head all at once, or when there are multiple programmers and changes over time. Small scale experiments don't catch that, and are more sensitive to how well the compiler reports errors.

Looking at code on Github is promising. Several people have done that, trying to analyze changes. Of course, you only see the changes that get pushed to the server, so you're only seeing post-test results.

We seem to be converging on a consensus on typing. Within a module, automatic type inference makes life easier and programs less wordy. The newer hard- compiled languages, Go and Rust, have that. Even C++ has that now, with "auto". Program-wide type inference is hard and less helpful. Program-wide inference also means the caller's types drive the callee, which is a mismatch to the concept of libraries. So that hasn't caught on.

Expressing size remains an issue. Is size part of a type? C and C++ struggle with this and lose. Go and Rust make a distinction between arrays and slices, which seems to be working.

Type attributes are still up in the air. Read-only/immutable is common. By value or by ref is sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit. Whether something can be nil is not common, but has been tried. Rust has the "borrow" concept, which is promising but doesn't much mileage on it yet.

There's been real progress in recent years. Until recently, type systems in mainstream languages looked like either C or Pascal. Now they're getting better.

</comment><comment><USER8> Great to come across such an even-handed review; thanks!

One quick note:

> Other than cherry picking studies to confirm an long-held position, the most > common response I've heard to these sorts of studies is that the effect > isn't quantifiable by a controlled experiment. However, I've yet to hear a > specific reason that doesn't also apply to any other field that empirically > measures human behavior.

In practice, I'm not actually aware of any good studies on 'tools productivity' in any other fields. (And it's not for lack of strong opinions -- grab a professional photographer sometime and ask them about Canon vs. Nikon.) I think it really is fundamentally difficult to measure things like this: getting the most out of a tool can take years, and ecosystem factors can outweigh even a large difference in 'inherent quality'.

If we care about using nice languages, it seems like the best thing we can do is try and lower the impact of these external factors. I think the situation here is actually pretty promising -- projects like LLVM take a lot of the heavy lifting out of implementing a performant compiler, and the JVM and CLR are becoming more and more hospitable to diverse language implementations. There will always be a cost to choosing an unpopular language -- but the smaller that cost is, the easier it will be for better technologies to win out in practice.

<comment><USER9> I know the CLR was designed to support multiple languages from the very start, whereas the JVM has historically been very tied to Java. What sort of recent improvements have made the JVM 'more hospitable to diverse language implementations'?

<comment><USER8> The big one is the recent add of the 'invokedynamic' instruction, which has dramatically improved the performance of dynamically typed languages.[0] Mostly, though, it's just externalities from the slowly-and-steadily-improving Java language; for example, the improved support for anonymous functions in Java 8 also promises to make Scala faster.

[0]: [https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/vm/mu...](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/vm/multiple- language-support.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Most of the papers are available but first linked IEEE paper is paywalled: "A controlled experiment to assess the benefits of procedure argument type checking" Prechelt, L.; Tichy, W.F.

But it's available here:

[http://page.mi.fu- berlin.de/prechelt/Biblio/tcheck_tse98.pdf](http://page.mi.fu- berlin.de/prechelt/Biblio/tcheck_tse98.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER11> I remember Google made public some very interesting statistics about hard disks and their modes of failure, which was unprecedented in scale.

Google has lots of code in C++, Java, Python and Javascript, and their employees all have passed very rigorous assessments before hiring, so language comparisons should be less skewed by individual skill variance.

I would be surprised if they didn't already perform these sorts of analysis internally.

</comment><comment><USER12> One big problem is programmers tend not to write programs from scratch, rather they work in existing systems.

And even though I'm a static-typing proponent, I will concede that developer productivity is likely to correlate a lot more with the state of your existing systems.

<comment><USER13> I'm also starting to believe that the devils is very much in the details.

Personal testimonials:

Objective-C is an uncouth mishmash of strong, weak, dynamic, static, and duck typing, with different rules applying to different corners of the language. In theory this should be a train wreck. In practice I found it to be one of the most productive languages I've ever worked on - provided I was very principled in how I built my code. Whenever I let myself slip into hack mode, the result was indeed a train wreck.

F# has a mostly-fantastic type system that still manages to fall apart in a couple of key areas: First, its type inference mechanism doesn't have any clue what to do with calls to non-curried ("C#-style") methods, so any code that interacts with the .NET API ends up littered with type annotations or convenience functions whose only purpose is to wrap a .NET API call up in a curried function that the type inferencer can understand. Second, no type classes. This is particularly painful because .NET's original designers didn't have the foresight to create a base abstraction that numeric types can conform to.</comment></comment>


Stop Using Git Rebase - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@fredrikmorken/why-you-should-stop-using-git-rebase-5552bee4fed1 <comment><USER2> I've forbid rebasing on several teams - it's just too tricky to get right every single time and unwinding it when something inevitably does go wrong is a hugely frustrating and time wasting exercise.</comment>


AsciiFlow - diagram & wireframe tool - <AUTHOR> http://asciiflow.com <comment><USER2> If you want something like this without leaving VIM, I recommend DrawIt. I use it all the time: <http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=40>

It comes in handy when you need to diagram something in your code comments.

<comment><USER3> Awesome - thank you for posting that. Just what I've been after for years!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> See also the discussion 51 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2651745>

<comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't noticed the one before. It's tricky the way products and blog posts get mixed together in HN. The former should have a longer lifetime of being interesting. Also i assumed that it hadn't been posted because HN didn't kick it back. I guess it didn't notice that the www and non www versions were the same thing. It would have been nice to notice that.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I see www.domain.com vs. domain.com show up a lot over time. It'd be nice if this weren't the case, but, it's also sometimes nice to revisit things months later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool, but Emacs org-mode has really simple ASCII table creation that will auto re-size columns for you.

[http://orgmode.org/manual/Built_002din-table- editor.html#Bui...](http://orgmode.org/manual/Built_002din-table- editor.html#Built_002din-table-editor)

</comment><comment><USER6> Ah, I see. It's like emacs' artist-mode.

<comment><USER7> Yeah. but emacs' artist-mode has a lot more features, like drawing more shapes, filling, copying/pasting, spraying...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of TheDraw! :) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw>

<comment><USER9> TheDraw was one of my favorite ascii art editors! Earned several months of BBS access by doing custom menus and stuff back when I was a kid

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The combination of Emacs' artist-mode + <http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/> renders a fairly nice diagram. Useful if you want to store as ASCII but render something that "everyone else" will want to look at. org-mode can use it, too.

</comment><comment><USER11> Looks to be over quota on Google App Engine. Can we call this the HN Effect? :)

<comment><USER12> seems to be working again now

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow. I can't imagine why anyone would want to deploy using App Engine... _"This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later."_

<comment><USER14> I suppose they could just pay for more quota, like every other hosting service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just what I always wanted. Hats off to you sir. My code documentation is going to get a makeover.

</comment><comment><USER16> very well done. i think i saw this a few months ago and had problems using it. good progress. bookmarked for future use. thanks

</comment><comment><USER17> Seen this before (on here I think), but it's an incredibly useful tool.

</comment><comment><USER18> Apparently now they hit the App Engine quota. Y U NO HOST YOURSELF? i want to say.</comment>


How to RAISE $2M SEED WITH SAFE - <AUTHOR> Our first two enterprise customers of our newly launched software product are so impressed with the product,that they wish to invest in Angel round. We said that we are valued at $2m. But, despite of that these two customers/investors want to invest $2m.How do we raise this seed round without diluting more than 10% ? <comment><USER2> Yc has safe notes on the website. Get a lawyer</comment>


Show HN: Dropping pressure in Jacksonville, FL as Andrea approaches - <AUTHOR> http://pressurenet.cumulonimbus.ca/?event=true&latitude=30.317980997229714&longitude=-81.8934326171875&start_time=1370318400000&end_time=1370577600000&zoomLevel=9

<comment><USER2> The interesting part of this to me is discovering that some Android devices have barometers. (I only have iOS toys)</comment>


Tesla Model 3 is equipped with a driver-facing camera - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2017/08/01/tesla-model-3-driver-facing-camera-autopilot-tesla-network/ <comment><USER2> _> Some might be concerned about privacy. It's something that the MIT research addressed. The collected data was kept on secure servers and people could never need to actually watch the footage._

Yeah, because a system like that has _never_ before been compromised... ಠ_ಠ

<comment><USER3> That's the kind of argument they have to make to the general public. What else could they say to justify the technological need for that camera to be there? People in general don't respond to facts most of the time. It's a fear-based concern and they are saying "there there, it will be fine". And it works.

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts- dont-...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change- our-minds)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And, that camera will be the first thing covered after a purchase, just like cameras on a laptop.

[https://smile.amazon.com/Webcam-Cover-Laptops-Pad- Devices/dp...](https://smile.amazon.com/Webcam-Cover-Laptops-Pad- Devices/dp/B004Z0XSY6)

<comment><USER5> Until the car doesn't start or "auto pilot" features don't work because the car's ai does not detect an "alert human" at the wheel?

<comment><USER6> Here, a good idea of a product to sell on Amazon.com : a device that, applied to the camera, makes it think it's looking at the driver, while instead it's looking at some fake footage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My Mercedes E550 has it too, and it is used for drowsiness detection. The car suggests you should take a break if you look tired or like you will fall asleep. I have had warning to stop and take a break come on only once and I was indeed incredibly tired.

<comment><USER8> Wow, I rented a MB once and it did that, which was absolutely the right call. The thing was that I initially ignored it and thought MB used a timer or something but 15 minutes later, I became aware of it and it was quite acute by the time I was aware of it.

I've always wondered how it knew that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems like a great solution to the problem of driver distraction, except that most face-detection algorithms are biased (they work best on "white" people, and poorly on just about any other race/skin type).

We definitely should fix that before restricting access to a feature based on where your face is looking.

<comment><USER10> At least Google photos seems to work done with Indian faces. No recognition problems and even classifies photos by people. It even recognised my photo in which I was 3 years old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> When I sleep I slump over almost into a fetal position. It's never comfortable for me to sleep in a car. My Mrs on the other hand appears to be awake and sitting up, the only subtle clue is a slight bobbing of the head if her sunglasses are on. I wonder how engagement detection would work in her case? There have been many times I have been having a grand old chat with her as I am driving and in my periphery and she is sound asleep. I predict that she could easily fool the system unto thinking she is awake.

<comment><USER3> Drowsiness detection with OpenCV

[http://www.pyimagesearch.com/2017/05/08/drowsiness- detection...](http://www.pyimagesearch.com/2017/05/08/drowsiness-detection- opencv/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You wont own a Model 3, Tesla only lets you drive it around.

</comment><comment><USER13> Here you go:

[https://www.amazon.com/EL7566-AW-Synthetic-Rubber- Electrical...](https://www.amazon.com/EL7566-AW-Synthetic-Rubber-Electrical- Black/dp/B000TPEHMS/)

<comment><USER14> Plain old scotch tape works stupidly well too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I see more value in being able to see who's riding in the car and if they're doing any damage while my car is in use as a taxi.

<comment><USER16> For that a normal non-Musk camera will do just as well, not a hidden camera that will come on on its own after an unspecified update Tesla does remotely and then steam video to their servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Theoretically it could be a good anti-theft device where certain facial profiles would only be allowed to access the vehicle.

</comment><comment><USER18> Seems like this might be a good hedge against potential regulation. I could easily see some states or even a federal regulation or law requiring that level III autonomous cars have some sort of driver attention monitoring system.

</comment><comment><USER19> Well, you have to have surveillance coverage when people aren't looking at their phone and are away from their Samsung TV and Microsoft XBox 360.

 _" If you see something, say something."_

<comment><USER20> "If you see something, say nothing and drink to forget."

[https://topatoco.com/collections/wtnv/products/cpb-wtnv- sees...](https://topatoco.com/collections/wtnv/products/cpb-wtnv-seesomething- flask)

(No affiliation, just a fan of the podcast)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is this really that surprising? The article mentions what I would expect: it's likely to be used for tracking how engaged the driver is in the future.

I'm a little surprised that's not in there today.

Alternate theory: do we know what it's actually looking at? Could it be used to put a few of the back seat on the touchscreen so the driver can check on the kids easily? A number of cars these days have small mirrors up by the sunglass holder to allow drivers to do this.

<comment><USER22> The backseat cam is a valid potential use case, but I'm surprised they wouldn't have put that on the larger S or X, if so. ;)

<comment><USER21> Perhaps it wasn't ready and will be going into future revisions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I cancelled my model 3 reservation over this. I found it very sleazy this wasn't mentioned in the official reveal.

</comment><comment> alex- Could the model 3 be a very expensive video conferencing platform?

<comment><USER4> We are all being phished to purchase an extremely expensive camera.

<comment> alex- The future of meetings: starting them in SF and ending them in Tahoe. Maybe it's a cheap video conferencing platform :)

<comment><USER4> Drats, another new platform. Now I need to worry about the adapter problem, again...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TechEmpower's Web Framework Benchmarks Round 10 - <AUTHOR> https://www.techempower.com/blog/2015/04/21/framework-benchmarks-round-10/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for keeping your great benchmark site up-to-date.

Btw. your _https_ /SSL doesn't work with IE11. It's the first site ever where IE11 asks me to "check the advanced settings for TLS 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and try it again". It works fine in Firefox.

The HHVM tests "didn't complete", probably due a config error ([https://github.com/TechEmpower/TFB- Round-10/blob/master/peak...](https://github.com/TechEmpower/TFB- Round-10/blob/master/peak/linux/results-2015-03-24-peak- final/latest/logs/hhvm/out.txt)) - HHVM was in the top results in Round 8/9.

<comment><USER3> They appear to have badly misconfigured Apache so nothing IE related works and all the cipher suites are weak. [https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=techempower.c...](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=techempower.com&hideResults=on)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the pointer - I have reconfigured our Apache to support the ailing browsers affected by a stricter cipher suite selection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lots of web frameworks come with their own HTTP servers. Seems like a waste. OTOH, configuring Nginx can be a pain. It's easier to cook something up in the language of your choice in which you're building your website.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was one blazingly fast HTTP server with API such that other web frameworks could just build on top of it?

<comment><USER6> I think that's what mongrel2's aim is. [http://mongrel2.org/](http://mongrel2.org/)</comment></comment>


Telescope Sees Star Dance Around Supermassive Black Hole, Proves Einstein Right - <AUTHOR> https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2006/ <comment><USER2> _Once again fails to falsify Einstein 's prediction_ This notion that anything is ever fully proven needs to stop being spread around. Maybe pedantic, but the anti-science crowd latches on to things like this - e.g. 'Science is claiming to have all the right answers just as much as religion!' No it doesn't, it has a long, long list of wrong answers, and a short list of answers that haven't yet been proven wrong, which makes up our current best approximation of 'the truth'. Einstein's theory just withstood another attack, so it gets to keep its crown for now.

<comment><USER3> No, you're mistaken. A _prediction_ was made and matches experiment, therefore the _prediction_ was proven correct.

I believe you're repeating the idea that "_theories_ aren't proven correct, you can only ever fail to falsify them", which is true. But you're applying the idea to predictions, which makes it false because predictions absolutely can be proven correct. In my opinion you come across as confused about these ideas.

<comment><USER2> You are correct, my comment should have read 'theory' rather than prediction. Alas it is too late for me to edit it, so it will be forever wrong.

<comment><USER4> Fortunately, HN has a list of your other comments, many of which have yet to be proven wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This video of stars orbiting Sagittarius A* taken over 20 years never ceases to blow my mind. [https://youtu.be/DRCD-zx5QFA](https://youtu.be/DRCD-zx5QFA)

</comment><comment><USER6> Actually, the effect described here (if I am not mistaken), was already observed in the orbit of Mercury before the theory of Einstein explained it. See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Pe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Perihelion_precession_of_Mercury)

<comment><USER7> Good point. Orbit is an orbit. "Don't just draw a full cycle of orbits to highlight it is some amazing finding"

<comment><USER8> Because the gravity is stronger in these cases it's possible that effects not captured by Einstein's theory could be seen, just as Mercury probed stronger fields, falsifying Newton's theory. But Einstein's theory survived this scrutiny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In case anyone hasn't seen it here is the time lapse of stars orbiting Sagittarius A:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF8THY5spmo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF8THY5spmo)

</comment><comment><USER10> From the article:

> One hundred years later we have now detected the same effect in the motion > of a star orbiting the compact radio source Sagittarius A* at the centre of > the Milky Way. This observational breakthrough strengthens the evidence that > Sagittarius A* must be a supermassive black hole of 4 million times the mass > of the Sun

I love that scientists are so careful about stating that something is absolute fact when they can't be 100% sure. The public's idea of things is definitely that Sagittarius A* is a supermassive black hole, but that compact radio source _could_ be something else, so they're careful to note that.

</comment><comment><USER11> Such an amazing experiment, it's incredible that we can measure such things at these distances with this level of accuracy. A shame we're more interested in our own opinions than the science.

</comment><comment><USER12> Anybody know what the precession period is for Mercury and this star? How long does it take for the orbit to return to some starting orientation?

<comment><USER12> 3 million years for Mercury, by my calculations and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsidal_precession#Calculation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsidal_precession#Calculation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How does one with good math/physics background gain a deeper understanding of black holes? I'm fascinated by them and want to systematically learn the theory behind it.

My plan is to start with General Relativity and Einstein's equations, maybe some journal articles about black holes. Do you have any suggestions?

<comment><USER14> Watch some course lectures on Youtube. Work your way through some books such as by Schutz or Sean Carroll, or if you are brave by Misner, Thorn and Wheeler.

<comment><USER15> I walked past a guy standing outside the Palo Alto Creamery, and he was reading from a copy of Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler -- it's a very distinctive looking book. Turns out he was a guy with a non-math background who had taught himself enough to follow the book. I was impressed!

<comment><USER16> That book is big enough to visibly distort space-time on its own.

I'm impressed that the reader learned the math on his own. And, uh, what's my excuse?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Probably easier to list number of times Einstein was wrong (it's not even a half dozen).

I hope I live long enough to see then use the moon for lensing or put radio/telescopes on the far side.

<comment> GuB-42 Ironically, one of these times is when he doubted the existence of black holes. Yes, it means the article could have been subtitled "proves Einstein wrong".

To be clear, while general relativity predicted the existence of black holes, Einstein initially thought that they wouldn't be able to form in reality. [1]

[1] [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1968902](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1968902)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How did you find your current job? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
Job hunting is isn't easy for most of us. There are several tools available which can be used for the purpose, but some might be more effective than others. It's worth finding out what has worked for others before investing your time in any of them. So here's my question to the community:
How did you find your current job?
- Personal reference
- HackerNews (Who is hiring thread)
- Stackoverflow
- LinkedIn
- Other (please mention) <comment><USER2> Recruiter. Was just casually exploring the market to decide whether to begin a job search in earnest, and they happened to send me something that was a good match for the next stage of my career development.

</comment><comment><USER3> All but one job I've ever held has had at least some form of reference to get me in the door.

Many have been from direct personal recruitment on the part of a former colleague who wanted to work with me again.

<comment><USER3> _technically_ I "found" my current job via LinkedIn - a former colleague shared an opening with his company, I contacted him, and the rest, as they say, is history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Recruiter and completely took me by surprise. I was looking as I was in a horrid 'survival' job but hadn't turned to this one resource. It was an excellent call out of the blue.

</comment><comment><USER5> Recruiters and a plethora of job posting sites like Monster, Dice, and jobs. Weeding through the junk is the tough part.</comment>


The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/scott-mautz/train-your-brain-to-remember-anything-you-learn-with-this-simple-20-minute-habit.html <comment><USER2> Dr. Wozniak began creating the algorithms for our forgetting curve in the 1980's. His 1986 version of the algorithm, which is not copyrighted, has been in use by popular free software, like Anki.

He continues to refine the algorithms, but they are proprietary to his software (SuperMemo).

I believe spaced-repetition learning is by far the most efficient way to retain and recall information.

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR "If you repeat information, you'll remember it better."

I think it's worth noting that Ebbinghaus' original experiment had people learn nonsensical isolated syllables and measuring the rate of forgetting.

See on page 30: [https://archive.org/details/berdasgedchtnis00ebbigoog/page/n...](https://archive.org/details/berdasgedchtnis00ebbigoog/page/n6) (It's German, though)

But real world information always comes within a context and it has inherent value. For example language learning:

If you learn the English word 'table' (as a foreigner), you don't just try to remember the writing and pronunciation. You already have a full semantic concept of what a table is, which helps you tremendously to remember the word 'table' in turn.

<comment><USER4> Although most, if not all, masters of memory use methods involving vivid nonsense images, the more nonsensical and crazy the better! Like if was learning "mesa" ("table" in spanish) I might picture a giant mesa in the desert, with lots of tables on the top of it, with members of Mensa sitting at it talking about tables.. You would think that meant having to remember a lot of extra irrelevant stuff. It's rather surprising that it works at all.

<comment><USER5> Actually, memory masters ascribe a sequence (a la a song) to store multiple things. I think time/sequence i.e. auto-association is arguably the most important element in human memory. Some have described it as a memory house with various rooms and objects and navigating it.

The more "nonsensical" as you put it, the more distinctive & discriminant the memory is.

Edit: formatting & more details.</comment></comment></comment>


X12 - <AUTHOR> https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12/ <comment><AUTHOR> Just saw on reddit that X11 turned 30 today! Someone made a comment about how they were surprised they hadn't made it up to X12 yet, and I remembered this wiki entry.

I'm a huge fan of these kinds of articles. Unless you really suffer through something and learn it really well, it's unlikely you'll gain the full breadth of wisdom that's acquired through years of experience.

I posit that genuinely trying to learn from history is actually incredibly difficult. For starters, sometimes it might be difficult to even get access to the knowledge. But even when you manage to acquire access to large amounts of information, you have to consume and process it. You might have the knowledge of hindsight to help guide you, but at the same time you might lack contextual knowledge that might help provide answers as to why certain things ended up the way they did. Did $FOO technology die because it sucked or because of unfavorable external forces like reality?

I've made this exact comment before, but a lot of tech knowledge isn't easily discoverable. You really just need to have the correct historical background sometimes. My favorite example of this is filesystem layout in the different unix-y systems. On my system I have the following folders: /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin. How many developers know why? Here's an explanation. [0]

All my work experience has been focused largely around web app development. As we start creating more sophisticated applications on the browser, I'm sure there's probably tons of lessons the web community will have to learn the hard way, despite native desktop application developers having lived through their own flavor of it. To give a recent example, when Redux began to blow up in popularity, I remember seeing plenty of comments saying how it was just re- implementing the same ideas from some old OS 20 years ago. That's great! I probably wouldn't have even known about that. So what lessons did they learn? Why aren't any of these great old wizards helping power level the younger generation?

[0] [http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074...](http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html)</comment>


Ask HN: 44-year old software developer – what now? - <AUTHOR> I'm a 44-year old developer who first programmed on a TRS-80 in 1982, graduated with a degree in Maths and Comp. Sci in 1994, and I've been working ever since as a 'software guy' in various industries (school administration, medical, construction, logistics, real estate finance, hospitality). I'm unsure what to do next.
Data points: 1) current job is for a logistics company where over 5 years, along with a non-developer co-worker as advisor, I've created a custom Winforms / SQL server application that now runs the company.
2) have Australian and EU citizenship, currently in the EU
3) technically am 'ok', sometimes slightly better than that; my strengths lie is talking to non-technical people and creating cleanly-developed and maintainable software that meets their requirements
4) have a joint venture agreement in place with an Australian-based long-running client (since 2005); I rewrote his Delphi-based finance application in C# so it now works cross-platform on Windows and Mac (using Xamarin), with a shared PCL (portable class library) that contains the core calculations. There is an 'ok' mostly-passive (aside from bug fixes) income from the sale of this product.
5) my work, with the exception of some C# Mac work in recent years, has been entirely Windows-based, and 90% of this has been Winforms. Early on I worked on and helped develop a C++/Paradox (!!) application, then Delphi apps, and now C#/.NET/Winforms is basically everything.
6) via HN I have a reasonable understanding of current technologies, but zero practical experience, although I do have some 'as required' experience with HTML / CSS / JS
7) I've got Crohn's disease, and can't practically make it into an office job 5 days a week, or reliably
8) currently am learning Python and Django
I still love developing, and although I'm an introvert like solving people's business or general problems with software, and interacting with them to achieve this.
Any brainstorming ideas would be appreciated. <comment><USER2> It sounds like you have a lot of options.

What kind of work do you really want to do?

What would be an ideal mix of workplace elements relating to your health and working with colleagues and where you would live?

How much do you want to stretch? Python and Django are in a way similar to C# and webforms in terms of the type of work and concepts while F#, Scala, Haskell, Erlang, or Clojure would probably be less familiar?

Do you want to work in a setting with a few other developers? Or a lot of other developers?

Do you want to work with *nix boxes in addition to Windows? Work with Systems on a Chip? Distributed computing?

My random advice from the internet is to spend some time examining the wide range of possibilities. It's not that you're likely to get them all, it's just that you might have a better feel of what you're getting and not getting.

Good luck.

</comment><comment> UK-AL Your c# skills allow you do pretty much any developer job web/desktop/mobile/games. So what do you want to do?

</comment><comment><USER3> The job market right now is pretty brutal. If you can keep your current job, do it and if you have time try to contribute to an open source web project like django. If you can become a django contributor even for small bugs that will set you apart in a very crowded job market. Personally I was forced to take a brutal 75% income cut just to not go on unemployment in California and become homeless, here there is really no safety net. I've managed to stay in the game for 25 years but its not at all easy.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I'd characterize the job market right now as "brutal"—are you referring to the market specifically for late-career technologists? From what I can gather the job market seems about as healthy as it normally is in tech at least. Rougher perhaps if you're older or really junior (like fresh out of a code school junior) but if you're reasonably current it seems to me that there's at least some opportunites available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > I'm unsure what to do next.

I'm sorry if I've missed something, but isn't the status quo a reasonable option?

Other than that, see what other problems your current customers are having that you could help with. Basically you do not want to leap into a completely new arena and start from zero again (some people can pull this off, most don't). Your Delphi to C# thing appears to be a good example of the sort of transitions you can make.

Alternatively, do personal projects on things related to your hobbies or stuff like that. It's a great of motivating yourself and learning new stuff. Often enough, you will find that there is actually a market for what you built.

Also, find dev meetups in your area (assuming you live close to or in a reasonably-sized city) and go there. You tend to get free pizza and there are always people with interesting / intriguing ideas. Sometimes the people themselves are interesting / intriguing.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like to dig in deeper about how computers and software works. It is fun, I learn a lot and it have given me many jobs even without an exam. You could learn more about Linux, UNIX, cloud services, http etc. I don't know how the job market for Windows based desktop applications will be in the future.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does #3 mean that you also have the _superpower_ to translate business/non- technical stuff to technical people ?

Also, take a look at AWS Lambda/{Azure,Google}CloudFunctions and Zappa. I guess this "serverless"/lambda/cloud function frameworks are here to stay and it's not easy to figure out how make it work properly.

</comment><comment><USER8> You need to market yourself. Get a website, cards, handout, anything, then go to meetups. Talk to your local sbdc rep. Craigslist ads work well. Contact me and i'd be happy to tell you all the stuff i do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - I'd already made a list of stuff like that to expand my 'profile'. One thing I should have noted more clearly is that I'm not in the USA. However, the bulk of what you say still applies independent of location.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Beat advice is to prep for being a 45 year old developer.

</comment><comment><USER10> Find a job where you can work remotely (from home).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I've actually been working mostly from home for about 8 years now. I agree this would solve a lot of the 'problems'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is in your hearts desire? Would be a good place to start.</comment>


The Actor Who Played Robocop Is Now an Art Historian, Returning to Detroit - <AUTHOR> https://news.artnet.com/art-world/robocop-actor-now-art-historian-1332608 <comment> T-A Not to mention Buckaroo Banzai:

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086856/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086856/)

<comment><USER2> And Leviathan (basically Alien in the ocean; from 1989 when everybody seemed to be making ocean movies to compete with Cameron's The Abyss) [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097737/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097737/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting because Dallas has quite an art scene, and RoboCop was largely shot in Dallas.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wasn't he also in Star Trek Beyond?

<comment><USER5> Close, he was in the movie before it (Star Trek Into Darkness) with Benedict Cumberbatch playing Khan</comment></comment>


Overstock.com accepts blame for ERP problems - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/?p=1108

<comment><USER2> That's one of the goofiest articles I've ever read. So good corp-speak quotes, though.</comment>


CD Players Are Back from the Dead and Now Work with Airpods - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/cd-players-are-back-from-the-dead-and-now-work-with-air-1845091060 <comment><USER2> Can airpods work with record players? bc I would use them instead of cd's for that old timey vibe</comment>


Be Specific (especially during PG's office hours) - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/r/lesswrong/lw/bc3/sotw_be_specific/ <comment><USER2> It's easier to ask someone else to be specific, though, than it is to be specific oneself. Sometimes people have something real, but it's instinctive and they haven't yet sharpened or polished it. Under such conditions it's good to evoke it out of them rather than challenging them on lack of specificity.

That may not apply as much to an investor-founder conversation, because a founder should perhaps be expected to say what they mean unambiguously. But in normal conversation, I think it applies a lot.

Even in the founder situation, there are genuinely talented people who lack full articulacy as of yet. Distinguishing those from the clueless requires discernment, and maybe even kindness. I bet the earlier stage you go, the more of an issue this is.

<comment><USER3> It's a matter of preference. I'd rather be challenged, even in everyday conversation, because I just enjoy debating and getting to the heart of an issue. The most helpful thing anyone's done for my ideas has been to say "Shut up. Stop _telling_ me I should care and just _show me why_ I should care".

It's like a good elevator pitch: tell what you're doing, show why it matters. Good and bad ideas get corresponding reactions—"your idea is bad and you should feel bad" versus "shut up and take my money", if you will. But if your idea is "frighteningly ambitious", then they'll probably just say "yeah, right" or "how‽"

For example, I'm writing the legendary "sufficiently smart compiler"; with it, your program will run on many cores and computers as if they were one fast one.

Yeah. Right.

So yes, it's a shame when talent goes unrecognised, but founders and funders need to meet each other halfway—somewhere around "fɔunders", I guess. And there's no reason you can't be kind and firm at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This stood out to me: "I whispered audibly enough for a few nearby people to hear, 'Be specific! Be specific!'" because it also applies to writing. I'm a grad student in English lit and teach undergrads. Their writing is filled with generalities about the work and/or author; very few have the training or discipline to talk specifically about the work and to examine particular sentences. So I spend a lot of time doing that in class.

Actually, most people are like this with books or movies or other things in their lives; they'll be able to say if they liked a book, or could "relate" to it (whatever that means), but beyond that they won't have much concrete (another synonym for "specific). Which is okay, since they're not trying to be professional writers or critics. But if you are trying to a be professional _x_ (writer, critic, startup), you'd better be willing to look at details, since details are everything.

The older I get, the more I believe details are everything. Well, maybe not _quite_ everything, but certainly 95% of the thing.

<comment><USER5> I watched that onstage office hours session on Youtube and the same thing struck me "They need to be more clear and more specific" My startup is based in an industry that I have been working in for six years so specifics are not the issue, it's condensing all the details down into just a few minutes.

<comment><USER6> I always liked Spolsky's approach to this, described in his "painless functional specs" piece, of using little stories or scenarios to illustrate typical use cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A submission by Eliezer Yudkowsky name-dropping PG and referencing YC right in the thick of YC application season--has any submission ever been so perfectly crafted for HN before?

</comment><comment><USER8> _> > for your brain to stop thinking about an unfinished task, you must (1) know and trust that an external system will remind you to perform that task when it is time to perform it, and (2) have chosen the next action taken at a sufficiently concrete level that your brain is no longer trying to plan it out in the background._

Wow, I do this instinctively all the time, but to be frank I feared it was just a stupid obsession of mine and suspected it could be detrimental, that it made me less efficient. I'm relieved to know this is an advised method of managing your mind, even if there isn't of course much science behind it. Anecdotally, this does help with my concentration.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a very valuable post for people who are applying to YC. In particular, I think business people who haven't done as much implementation work are particularly susceptible to this specificity problem. I certainly was (and sometimes still am).

One concept helped me catch myself making this mistake... I read somewhere that a good explanation gives a peer the understanding required to reconstruct / implement the idea themselves.

However, some people have success describing ideas broadly in certain instances. For example, I have some friends who have had success selling "vision" to investors, even though after they pitched me I wasn't able to explain how their product worked at all.

<comment><USER10> I think the general thumb is to be very specific with seed and angel investors, and much more broad and conceptual with VCs.

<comment><USER11> why is this?

<comment><USER10> Because usually angels care more about the product and VCs care more about the market. At the angel stage the most important thing is whether you can create a product people want. But by the time you get to the VC stage it's assumed that you've already done this and have traction, so what's important is the market opportunity.

There are of course exceptions, e.g. Fred Wilson is extremely product focused, but if you're going in blind I think that's a decent heuristic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys>

</comment><comment><USER13> The analytics platform discussed in the article is <http://keen.io>

They've since been working hard to nail their product down with more specificity. :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Isn't this similar to what The Foundation For Critical Thinking talks about in their Thinker's Guide series?

[http://www.criticalthinking.org/store/products/set-of- twenty...](http://www.criticalthinking.org/store/products/set-of-twenty-one- thinkers-guides/155)

If a person is a critical thinker then they are almost always going to be predisposed toward rationality, and if they're not a critical thinker then no amount of rationality training will ever sink in. I suppose I vaguely support the goal of trying to teach people to be more rational, but I'm not sure that starting out by trying to teach people rationality tricks is the correct approach.

<comment><USER14> Can you be specific about what it means to be a critical thinker?

<comment><USER10> Being a critical thinker means that you have the ability to judge the quality of thought, both in yourself and others. It also means that you're able to generate not just opinions but reasoned thinking.

This is much different than rationality training, which focuses on teaching people to avoid a handful of specific non-rational thought patterns that frequently occur in certain situations. But it's not about figuring out what hidden assumptions you have, learning to judge the quality of information, etc.

<comment><USER15> I've attended rationality sessions organized by the people behind the Center for Modern Rationality, and they do teach about how to find hidden assumptions, and judging quality of information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The issues that the article covered around 'being specific' not only applies to presenting start-up idea of course. I've seen the same issue appear in resumes, during interviews and conducting performance reviews - all situations where people start talking in abstract/generic terms and fail to specifically mention their skills/achievements.

In my experience, learning how to be specific has the biggest effect on improving your resume, interviews and performance reviews.

<comment><USER17> It seems this is best summed up by the old "show don't tell" bit. As in provide concrete information, not explanation. Don't tell me you're creative, show me what you have created. Etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> One of the only valuable takeaways I got from my encounters with Objectivism is the emphasis on concreteness when communicating ideas. Not sure how it fits into the philosophy, but I learned the technique from an Objectivist.

</comment><comment><USER19> I find it ironic that an article titled 'Be Specific' is made up of 1802 words.

<comment><USER20> 'Be Specific' is not the same as 'Be Concise'

<comment><USER3> Concision can also hurt specificity. You can express a concept very concisely when you elevate it to very abstract, general terms. Specific, concrete examples often take quite a bit longer to express. This came up a lot when I was tutoring CS: it was easy to give a precise but abstract textbook definition of something, but that's not useful at all to a beginner—much better to say "you can use pointers to make a linked list and here's how" than "pointers are referential types used to implement non-contiguous data structures and to reduce copying".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here's a tip: when on stage, don't have all four people lean forward onto their knees and huddle into themselves like frightened armadillos.

</comment><comment><USER22> "Now explain that to me like i'm five"</comment>


Oculus Rift acquired by Facebook for $2 Billion  - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/games/a-headson-look-at-sonys-virtual-reality-goggles-20140324-35cvw.html

<comment><USER2> This link doesn't seem to go to the right page?</comment>


Dot-com revival spawns startups to serve startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/20/BUG31J4IJM.DTL <comment><USER3> I like this. It's similar to selling shovels during the goldrush (not that this is a goldrush, but you get the metaphor).

</comment><comment><USER4> Let's not cheer this nonsense. This could be a tabloid article about "Showbizz revival spawns businesses to services stars".

I mean StackExchange as a startup to serve startups? Can't be serious.

</comment><comment><USER5> "The most since 2008". Not a really convincing figure in my opinion. The most since the market tanked only means a recovery is underway.

</comment><comment><USER6> The part I like the most is that first paragraph, none of whats listed is what the companies do. New Relic - app monitoring. Stack exchange - <USER2> communities. Dot cloud - app deployment.

</comment><comment><USER7> Cool. PG has been suggesting a startup for startups for a while now.

See <http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html> , point number 30.

</comment><comment><USER8> What I don't understand from the article, why would a startup would want to hire Java-programmers. ;-)</comment>


Letterspace – Swipe. Edit. Note - <AUTHOR> https://programmerbird.com/letterspace/ <comment><USER2> Looks very nice. I've always hated the select text marker on mobile devices (I don't think anybody has done a very good job of it).</comment>


Small eruption near Bardarbunga - <AUTHOR> http://www.ruv.is/frett/small-eruption-near-bardarbunga

<comment> k-mcgrady Does anyone know how likely it is that this eruption will cause disruption (to air travel) as severe as the one a few years ago?

<comment><USER2> It is less likely if only because the flight regulations aren't as strict--it used to be _any_ measurable ash closed an air space, but this has now been revised to close airspace only if the ash levels are 4mg per cubic meter of air or greater.

[http://www.iata.org/pressroom/facts_figures/fact_sheets/page...](http://www.iata.org/pressroom/facts_figures/fact_sheets/pages/volcanic- ash.aspx)

[http://www.icao.int/publications/documents/9974_en.pdf](http://www.icao.int/publications/documents/9974_en.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here is a page that seems to be collating a good amount of information: [http://volcanocafe.wordpress.com/info-on- bardarbunga/](http://volcanocafe.wordpress.com/info-on-bardarbunga/)

YouTube LiveStream combining a few of the webcam sources, a twitter feed and a map of the earthquakes: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoISDUAPNgc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoISDUAPNgc)

Kind of neat to see how much information we have access to.

</comment><comment><USER4> 3D Animation I made of the earthquakes locations and magnitude [http://blitzkopf.github.io/](http://blitzkopf.github.io/) . But anyways there is no real eruption yet.

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://baering.github.io/](http://baering.github.io/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there a map for the area that's grounded yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> The Icelandic safety institution: [http://www.almannavarnir.is/displayer.asp?cat_id=8&module_id...](http://www.almannavarnir.is/displayer.asp?cat_id=8&module_id=220&element_id=3158)

Also mapped by ruv.is here: [http://www.ruv.is/files/imagecache/frmynd- stor-624x351/myndi...](http://www.ruv.is/files/imagecache/frmynd- stor-624x351/myndir/lokanir_vefur_0.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh dammit, please don't full-on erupt. My first European trip in my 31 years on this planet better not be canceled by a frigging act of God.

<comment><USER8> WELL YOU PISSED ME OFF!</comment></comment>


Prevent others sending emails using your domain name - <AUTHOR> https://www.usertrack.net/blog/stop-others-use-your-domain-emails <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

Two days ago I had an issue with someone randomly contacting me on Twitter saying that someome from my company sent her a ransom email asking for bitcoins. Initially I didn't pay too much attention and actually blocked her, thinking it was just a scam attempt, but upon further inspection I realized my email DMARC settings were not correct.

I spent a few hours looking into it and improving my email authentication, so today I wrote a quick summary of what I learned while doing so. It's just a technical overview of what I had to do to fix my DMARC policy.

I posted this for those who didn't know this was an issue, never considered setting up DMARC for their business domains or just want a very short summary of what setting it up means.

I am by no means an expert in the domain, but it took longer than it should finding examples of DMARC/DKIM/SPF TXT records and understanding how to set the correct values.</comment>


Has insect detective Timothy Paine uncovered a case of biological sabotage? - <AUTHOR> http://failuremag.com/index.php/feature/article/californias_bioterror_mystery

<comment><USER2> I appreciate that the headline on HN has been toned-down from the original. The word "bioterrorism" definitely doesn't apply to what may be going on here.

<comment><USER3> This may now apply now though. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Even the toned-down link text given here is somewhat unfair to the article, which is really about how we deal with an introduced plant (in this case the eucalyptus tree in California) that has both good and bad effects on the local biota. There is no clear The Right Thing to do here, and it's a fascinating issue to consider.

<comment><USER5> It's how we deal with a non-native plant, but the interesting bit is the strange introduction frequency and odd spatial pattern of insects that kill and injure that particular plant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Site seems to be down. Readibility via google cache: <http://www.readability.com/articles/vap3uudt>

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not ashamed to admit that I could use a tl;dr version.

<comment><USER8> In the 150 years that eucalyptus have been in California, only quite recently have their native pests made it over from Australia. It's possible somebody is intentionally bringing eucalyptus harming pests over and there's some decent evidence pointing towards that.

Further, there's some debate whether eucalyptus in California is beneficial or an invasive weed and whether attempts to introduce the pests' predators are a good idea or not.

<comment><USER9> I was curious as to what the evidence for deliberate pest introduction was, so I skimmed the pertinent section of the article, and came away with this:

\-- the infestation "jumped" from one part of CA to another

\-- rumors of an individual bragging about having moved the borer

\-- borers initially detected in S. CA (ports/airports would make N. CA more likely)

\-- introductions of borers occurred in bunches with multi-year lulls

\-- native ranges of borer species all include the same east coast AU state

\-- the 2 invasive eucalyptus species are particularly suceptible to these borers

\-- pests have appeared in CA first before spreading; 7 are found only in AU and CA

\-- nursery trade does not import eucalyptus

\-- 14/17 of AU pests introduced in CA since 1980 are eucalyptus-specific

\-- only 2/16 eucalyptus pests arrived with their predators

\-- no South America / Asia pests have invaded CA, only AU pests

Arguments against this theory:

\-- borer is the only pest so far found that is fatal to the eucalyptus

\-- pests could survive the 14-15 hour direct flight in a plane's cargo hold</comment></comment></comment>


Tweetmart | Sell Stuff on Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://tweetmart.com/ Have stuff you want to sell? List it on tweetmart and let all your friends on Twitter know about it! <comment><USER2> Thanks so much for submitting this. I would definitely like to hear peoples thoughts and or suggestions.</comment>


Square Raises $150M at a $6B Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/square-raises-150-million-at-a-6-billion-valuation/ <comment><USER2> > "Square, a six-year-old start-up, spent much of its early years bringing > small, square-shaped credit card readers to small and medium-sized > businesses."

6 years old, just raised $150mn...yeah, that's not a startup anymore. It seems some people consider tech companies and startups to be equivalent, but startup is a term for business stage not business type.

<comment><USER3> I've come to understand a startup as a company that doesn't want to pay overtime.

<comment><USER4> Nah, that's pretty much the entire industry, even the ones that don't call themselves startups anymore.

<comment><USER5> That couldnt be more incorrect, from my own experience at least where i live.

<comment><USER6> Every salaries job I've ever worked has put me in as an "exempt" employee, paid for the job I do and not the hours I work, so not eligible for overtime. This includes non-tech companies who have been in business for over 100 years, across three states.

It's pretty standard when you're a salaried employee.

<comment><USER7> Counter anecdote, I was an exempt salaried engineer at General Dynamics, and got paid time and a half for every hour over 40, if I worked more than 45 hours per week.

It boosted my annual salary noticeably, because we worked 45-50 hours nearly every week. I hear that the OT policy still exists, but few people still get OT because of the DoD sequester. But in 2010-2012, it was very nice.

<comment><USER6> That's completely up to the discretion of your employer. The reason for classifying an employee as an exempt employee is to exempt them from the Fair Labor Standards Act, usually with the goal of excluding them from demanding overtime pay. I'm not sure what the benefits are for classifying someone as exempt but then still giving them overtime pay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't really understand the payment-company wars. Living in Europe, I can instantly wire money to anyone in the EU for free, so I'm wondering if companies like Square are solving a problem that uniquely exists in the US, or whether I've got the wrong end of the stick.

Does this have to do with the predominance of credit cards in the US otherwise (a relatively uncommon mode of payment where I live)?

Seems to me like a high value for a problem that I can't relate to.

<comment><USER9> > Does this have to do with the predominance of credit cards in the US > otherwise (a relatively uncommon mode of payment where I live)?

Likely, and the same problem exists in European countries with significant CC[0] penetration (e.g. France, or Iceland where cash marks you as a tourist and I've seen people buy a single packet of gum on card): you have to request a quote from a payment processor, the first link I get (EMS) tells me to "request an offer or contact the sales team".

[0] leaving it for posterity, but I actually meant "cards-based payment" rather than "credit card": the payment processor issue applies to both. It is true (in my experience) that euro countries tend to use debit cards rather than credit cards.

<comment><USER8> Is it really that common to payment with credit card in France? I'm assuming that's only the case in Paris? I regularly buy stuff on card, but always debit if I can help it, and I would assume that that's also the case in the France.

I grew up in The Netherlands and I'm living in Italy now, and credit cards are generally viewed with suspicion. I didn't get a credit card until a few years ago when I needed one to live in the US.

A lot of people that I know are uncomfortable with credit cards. I'm guessing that's because they're associated with fraud; banks here don't make it easy to file reports in general. My card was used fraudulently for the first time a few months ago and it took A LOT of paperwork for my bank to accept that I hadn't made the purchases.

I've always wondered if it's a coincide that Paypal, Square, Google Wallet, Apple Pay etc. are all US-based, or whether it's because they don't address a significant pain point this side of the Atlantic.

<comment><USER9> > Is it really that common to payment with credit card in France? I'm assuming > that's only the case in Paris? I regularly buy stuff on card, but always > debit if I can help it, and I would assume that that's also the case in the > France.

France doesn't really make a difference between "credit card" and "debit card": it's essentially an implementation detail of your card's contract, the former is called "deferred debit" and the latter is called "immediate debit" (or "direct debit").

I believe the latter is indeed much more common than the former (and the default), but even it can have credit-ish characteristics in the form of overdraft (with variable depth and interests, and banks may waive part of the overdraft fees under a certain amount, mine did when I was there).

My point was more about card-based payments in general (as opposed to cash, bank transfer or cheques) than specifically credit-card and cards are definitely extremely common in france (though not absolutely ubiquitous).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Apple Pay is certainly a threat to Square, but I'm sure Apple doesn't care about POS terminals and that's a pretty huge market on its own.

On top of that, Square Cash is right now the absolute easiest way to send somebody money. Just a moment ago I sent a friend $45 in less than 60 seconds with a single email. Instantly I'm emailed back with a confirmation that the cash will be in his account in 1 or 2 days. In my experience he'll have the cash tomorrow.

<comment><USER11> Not entirely sure how different it is in the US but I (UK) can send money from my bank account to a friend's one and he/she gets the money in less than 20 seconds.

<comment><USER12> But wouldn't you and your friend have to exchange bank account numbers?

An advantage of Square Cash is it uses email as a proxy, and you probably already know your friend's email.

<comment><USER11> You need to know the sort code / account number you're sending money to which is written on the cards the first time, after that it's already saved in my bank portal and I can just select them

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I get the feeling that what Square is doing now is just a glimpse of their greater plan. They have a proven ability to execute and release polished products that are enjoyable to use.

Nearly everyone I every need to pay is on Square Cash (and those who aren't soon are, the barrier to signup is very low) and the app is just a pleasure to use compared to the competition. It's second nature at this point.

<comment><USER14> Cold water:

Square Wallet was a big dud, as was the Starbucks partnership. That was their "greater plan" at one point.

Square Cash is easy to use.. but operates at a structural loss of over 20 cents per transaction.

There's plenty of issues when you look past the surface, particularly with the business model. They have not yet delivered a polished product that's enjoyable to use _and makes lots of money_.

<comment><USER15> > They have not yet delivered a polished product that's enjoyable to use and > makes lots of money.

The small business I work for recently switched to Square Register via an iPad and the Square Stand for all POS and it's pretty brilliant. It's a big step up from using a phone plus the regular little reader, and setup and use are quite simple even for our tech-illiterate employees. Judging by the popularity of the related receipt printer and cash drawers on Amazon, we're far from the only ones to make this jump recently.

I don't know how much money they're making per $100 stand, but they've made the barrier to a modern flexible POS system so low that I'd be surprised if their share of the payment processing pie isn't growing quickly.

<comment><USER14> It's not the stand they make money on, it's the 2.75% payment processing rate. That is higher than what competitors charge (closer to 2%), and as business grows that can add up to a significant premium. That is what drives them off of Square. So there's a kind of glass ceiling there.. to keep those customers Square would need to renegotiate a lower rate that trims down their gross margin.

Square does have a really good niche in the mom-and-pop shops where 2.75% is an ok price given the easy of signup and free POS system. But at the same time there may be significant customer acquisition and support and fraud costs in that niche.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks like they blew past their valuation projections from 2011:

[http://www.pitchenvy.com/gallery/square-pitch- deck/](http://www.pitchenvy.com/gallery/square-pitch-deck/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how this kind of money raising impact employees? (compared to going IPO)

<comment><USER18> For those that own stock or options earned and vested, it's a weighty validation about the value of that asset. Assuming the there is a core of early programmers that collectively own 5-15% of the stock but are not involved in the financing side of the business, I am sure they feel differently following this investment/valuation. A 0.1% stake is a big deal now.

IPOs of this decade in tech seem to be a different beast. Much bigger. Companies seem to be successfully raising large (+100m+) sums without going to pubic markets.

Understanding the implications of this is beyond my pay grade, but I imagine there are some complex relationships with early employee and investors. IPOs allow stockholders to cash out and the company itself to raise capital. Companies have an alternative way of raising capital which many now prefer. I imagine that all demand for their stock from later stage investors can be channeled into to company's coffers this way without dilution by stockholders.

Either way for employees that have some tenure at Square, being now valued at $6bn is much better than being valued at $600m or $60m.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> When Square will open their platform for Indian Users ? Any Idea ?

</comment><comment><USER20> Totally unrelated: $6B is Bitcoin's market cap times 15.

<comment><USER20> Edit: "... times 1.5."</comment></comment>


Here Are the Most Popular Web Frameworks with Seed and Early-Stage Startups - <AUTHOR> https://news.crunchbase.com/news/popular-web-frameworks-seed-early-stage-startups/ <comment><USER2> At best this is a lagging indicator in a fast moving world. If you assume that those raising an A round in 2017 started their company two years earlier it makes a lot of sense.

I think pg said it best is his essay beating the averages:

"When you choose technology, you have to ignore what other people are doing, and consider only what will work the best"

</comment><comment><USER3> Is Spring really in the same category as React and Angular?</comment>


Python by the C side - <AUTHOR> https://www.paypal-engineering.com/2016/09/22/python-by-the-c-side/ <comment><USER2> oscrypto, in attempt to support both CPython and PyPy well, uses cffi or ctypes to interface with the crypto libraries. That said, when cffi is present, only the ABI (dlopen) mode is used. No shared libraries are compiled.

My experience using both for the project has lead me to characterize ctypes as something for Python developers wanting to interact with C, and cffi as something for C developers wanting to use their code from Python. ctypes plays nicer with the Python GC. cffi is oriented towards C terminology/semantics, and (even knowing from the beginning that weak refs must be held) was far easier to crash by accidental use-after-free.

<comment><USER3> That's really useful to hear, especially from you, (presuming you're the same wbond who wrote oscrypto)! Have you written or considered writing a longer- form expansion on these experiences?

And yeah, in spite/because of all its simplisticness, ctypes really does seem to win out among those who share Python's aesthetics.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I am the author of oscrypto. Unfortunately one of my unfulfilled interests is longer-form technical writing. Trying to balance open source and family means that for now, that isn't in the cards.

I think one of the biggest benefits of ctypes is that it is part of the stdlib. Not requiring a compiler means it opens up a whole swath of users who aren't Python developers, but have Python installed. Part of the reason I'm interested in this is being heavily involved in the Sublime Text community, where every user has Python and ctypes, but requiring a C compiler and Python headers eliminates probably 99% of users.

Trying to distribute pre-compiled shared libraries was a path I went down, but gave up on. Having to compile 10 versions of the cryptography package every time a new release came around was a disaster. If you chance upon the cryptography-dev IRC channel, you'll see it is a part time job to get the package compiled reliably, and they have dedicated hardware provided by Rackspace to help them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cython is really fantastic. It makes you realize that there is often not a huge reason to leave Python if that's what you are comfortable with. The community has simply produced so much.

</comment><comment><USER5> cffi is awesome! You can even use it to wrap Python code in a dynamic library to use in existing C apps (to create plugins, for example). I gave a talk about how to use cffi and using it for embedding a few months ago. You can see it here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5dtiplkCIc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5dtiplkCIc)

<comment><USER6> Very cool! If you're familiar with CFFI already just skip the first half of the video or check out the blog post: [http://codelle.com/blog/2016/5/embedding-pypy-in-a-c- applica...](http://codelle.com/blog/2016/5/embedding-pypy-in-a-c-application/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There also Nuitka for compiling python into a native module.

[http://nuitka.net/pages/overview.html](http://nuitka.net/pages/overview.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> I had a great experience interfacing C++ code with Python using both SWIG and SIP. While latter seems to be a bit more powerful for binding C++ code (as it handles many of the intricacies of operator overloading, polymorphism, virtual functions and class inheritance with ease), SWIG does support other languages besides Python (also I think SIP is modeled after SWIG).

For calling C functions cffi or ctypes is usually easier and incurs less overhead, but for rich C++ interfaces there is just no alternative to using a binding generator, as the required code becomes large very fast.

</comment><comment><USER9> I love Cython, its extremely fast... Has someone experience about the stuff the guys at magic.io are building. They seem to have developed a really fast implementation of asyncio event loop on top of libuv...

</comment><comment><USER10> I swore off SWIG years ago after being forced to use it for a very large set of C++ bindings. Recently, though, I needed to wrap a smaller C library of about 50 functions and a few structs. I tried cffi but its workflow for wrapping the complete contents of a few header files still seemed more complicated than SWIG. I ended up using SWIG again. The initial results were very easy but SWIG doesn't handle arrays very gracefully. May need to go back and put some more effort into cffi.</comment>


Can we stop the annual salary posts? - <AUTHOR>

<rant> With ever increasing frequency, there seems to be more and more of these "What's your annual salary?" posts.
Hacker News used to be the place for startup news / startup info sharing/ tips & tricks, etc. If you are joining a startup, you should expect to lose the salary game every time.  You shouldn't be in it for the salary but the thrill of exploring the unknown, paving your own path, building something amazing, etc.
These salary posts emphasize the Silicon Valley mindset that salary largely defines your identity in this community. Facebook, Google, and Twitter continue to push engineer salaries to astronomic levels and that is fine - however those aren't startups.
I'm a Founder / CEO of a venture backed startup, https://www.tindie.com, and I have the lowest salary on our team of 5 engineers. My salary is probably a joke to most of you - and thats how it should be.
We're in it for the long run. We want to build somethings great. Shake things up. No where in that equation does annual salary have a bit of importance to me.
So can we all agree these salary posts are just blowing smoke and get back to work? </rant> <comment><USER2> I don't like the salary survey posts because I doubt their validity, and haven't voted them up.

But I can't say I'm a fan of your reasoning here. Software developers are probably poorly served by the idea that they should be accepting lower income in the service of building up the ideas of their employers.

Annual salary is not "blowing smoke"; it's a tremendously important consideration.

</comment><comment><USER3> This felt like an advertisement. The extra link @ the bottom (after you've already posted said link in the story) only cements this feeling.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My company - <https://www.tindie.com></comment>


Ask HN: How would you improve Hacker News? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Mandatory flair when people submit posts so later everyone can search by topic.

"machine learning" "health tech" "web dev" "biotech" "systems" ... etc.

There's just too much new content to constantly keep up and always spot articles about one topic if you are interested. The search doesn't really work for this either.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most of my "suggestions" have to do with the UX and some of them are probably coming eventually, and a lot have been suggested by other people as well. Let the metaposting begin ...

\- collapsible comments.

\- auto merging of identical stories into subtrees on the new/news pages so no one story can overwhelm it

\- collapse comments on identical stories into subtrees on the new comments page so no one story can overwhelm it

\- don't show comments from stories on the new comments page which are more than two levels deep, because they're not likely to be directly relevant to the OP (and it discourages fueling possible flamewars.)

\- don't show comments on the new comments page which have been voted down, to discourage drive-by downvotes.

\- don't allow voting from the new comments page - if someone wants to vote they should have to actually read the thread.

\- links to comments on the new comments page should lead to the parent of that comment, where it exists, to include part of the context.

\- the ability to sort a thread chronologically.

\- a way to save threads and comments other than upvoting them.

\- a way to unsave threads and comments.

\- reversible voting.

\- remove the greying out of text posts.

\- remove the greying out of downvotes.

\- remove visible karma counts.

\- don't allow posts to be deleted after they've been replied to, _or_ auto- kill or auto-prune replies to a deleted post.

\- an option to change your username.

\- display green usernames as a randomly generated hash. This would hopefully discourage trolls adopting personas with ironic and insulting usernames, which seems to happen a lot.

\- boards, hashtags, _some_ extra bit of abstraction to sort stories by.

\- replace shadowbanning with actual banning _or_ show a message to a banned user when they're logged in informing them of their status and that their comments will need community approval for the time being. Basically, no longer expect it to work by fooling people.

</comment><comment><USER4> better purging of identical topics. I see the same article or topic appear several times over a few days.

<comment><USER5> Currently, this relies on moderators and users flagging duplicate articles, which is very labor intensive. The automated software can kill duplicates with identical URLs, but it would take some pretty sophisticated AI to reliably figure out that two articles with entirely different titles are talking about the same topic (and which of the articles is the primary or higher-quality reference).

<comment><USER6> A key aid would be a disincentive to posting duplicates, e.g. _lose_ rather than gain karma points by doing so.

Many sites are trolling for extra hits by deliberately munging their URLs, either appending random crap to the URL itself (e.g. gamedevdaily.io) or appending fake fragment identifiers (medium, signalvnoise) to evade automatic dupe detection using simple URL duplication.

In the meantime, dupes are "winners" for both the poster (intercepting activity and, thereby, points) and the site (gaining more visibility, since your site appears 2X-4X more in HN than it would otherwise).</comment></comment></comment>


Adioso (YC W09): how they're taking a different approach to travel search - <AUTHOR> http://www.tnooz.com/2010/09/06/tlabs/tlans-showcase-adioso/

<comment><USER2> Semirelated question: are there any good interest groups, mailing lists, or forums for tech people working in the travel vertical? I've been doing travel- related stuff since 2004 and I still don't have any good industry contacts.

<comment><USER3> Would also be interested in this as well. tlack, what do you do specifically?

<comment><USER2> My first taste of the industry was working for WorldMedia.net, which is an advertising/media buying/creative services agency which focuses on the travel sector. While there we built Aloha Airlines' booking engine and a bunch of other cool stuff, mostly really dynamic marketing tools driven by data from different sources and stuff like that.

I now work for FederatedTravel.com, where we have a large network of semi- independent hotel booking sites.

Your turn!

<comment><USER3> Well, aside from being an avid traveler, I'm currently working on a side project that helps people find the cheapest method of travel (air, bus, car) to a given location. Getting more information on how consumers travel and their interaction with online travel sites are what I'm most interested in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Booked a trip to SE Asia with you guys a few days ago. For what it's worth my first user reaction was:

* Looking good!

* Of course I jumped in without reading any help and didn't realize the full power of the natural language search, in particular "direct" would have been handy to know. I'm sure you recognize this as a potential problem.. That said, my perception is it's not that big a deal from your perspective - it didn't stop me using the site and having done 1 booking now and liked the experience I've bothered to investigate further (including reading the very easy to find help), and now feel much more qualified to drive.

* The flights cost more than indicated because they didn't include luggage. Be nice to see an all inclusive number, especially as I can't help speculating the price quoting is probably not uniform across airlines... some prices being more inclusive than others. Also, I guess it made the real price of the multi-segment route I selected closer to what a direct flight would have been, making me more likely to have wanted a direct flight.

* Would have liked to exclude a specific airline, can I do that? Consider that a lower priority feature though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many thanks for the comments, great to see you're liking it so far.

We certainly hope to be able to offer apples-with-apples comparisons on luggage and other charges - it's a growing problem in the industry, particularly with low-cost airlines.

One thing that's _really_ hard to do with our current architecture is exclude an airine; we'll be able to allow you to limit to a specific airline, and we'll implement that soon, but all-except-one is for much later :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How has the dynamic between you guys and Hipmunk been? You guys may be targeting different types of travelers but there is that shared goal of making travel better. Has there been a collaboration, or do you guys have more of a friendly rivalry going?

P.S. Really dig the logo.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's early days but so far it's been great. We know them quite well and have chatted about our ideas and helped each other out a bit. Time will tell how we each progress but hopefully we'll carry on focusing on different markets and use-cases but supporting and helping each other out where appropriate. The online travel search space is most certainly big enough for different companies solving different problems.

P.S., Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I tried it for a few minutes and I love it. The oh-so-refreshing interface makes it such a joy to use.

One thing: I was confused as to whether or not my searches were round trip or not. I finally realized that they were not based on (1) the low prices returned and (2) the FAQ. But I guess I should have known by the "Once you've selected one you'll be able to find a return trip..." text.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

We haven't quite mastered the behaviour around round trips but we'll keep working at it. Part of it is educating people and adapting to cultural differences. Australians, Europeans and Asians are more accustomed to unbundled one-way low-cost segments than US travellers, I think.</comment></comment>


Show HN: MVP, target market= YOU, the entrepreneurs on HN. Please give feedback - <AUTHOR>

Here's the idea behind our MVP:
Web company landing pages almost all follow the same format - single page, a series of panels, each panel with a couple of key selling points, a price list table, contact form.  Each panel has either an image as a background or a different color.
So our idea is to create a service focused purely on building landing pages that follow this format. Quick and easy.
So that's our MVP, please check it out at www.landinggear.me
Are you willing to give us some  feedback?
We'd like to know if you think this is something you would use.
thanks <comment><USER2> [http://landerapp.com/](http://landerapp.com/) [http://launchrock.co/](http://launchrock.co/) In my opinion, there are no chances for success.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply Jacke,

As far as I am aware, they are not the same product at the moment.

landinggear.me makes landing page templates, so it is more like getting a themeforest template or bootswatch template

<comment><USER2> basically it's all depends on the usability of your product. Honestly, I don't use Landing Page services because of limitations, that they gave [css, js,html soo limited].

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your thoughts. Sounds like you need full control over your css,js and html</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Slack workspace for businesses with funds to buy/sell - <AUTHOR> Created a new Slack workspace for businesses to connect with businesses that have the funds to buy/sell today! Many startups will close due to covid19. Let's support each other - state what you can buy and sell today. http://cross-connect1.slack.com<p>Slack has upgraded the workspace for free so we can get the most out of it as well. <comment><USER2> Buy/sell what? This sounds like spam to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Buy products that your company takes, and sell products that you make. Most B2B startups will struggle now because we dont know whats going to happen to customer funds. This group aims to make it clear - so people can state this is what i can buy, this is what i can sell today - hopefully cutting the long sales process short.</comment></comment>


NHS worker quit when she was stopped from wearing face mask - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/04/nhs-worker-quit-when-she-was-stopped-from-wearing-face-mask <comment><USER2> This must be a gutwrenching choice for persons who have dedicated their professional lives to helping others be well.

Lately I've seen numerous stories about health workers being demied PPE usage by administrators, or U.S. residents being told by government officials that masks weren't helpful to the general public.

Those stories seemed to be one sided; the only justifications from the other side seemed to be in the form of quotes from press releases, not interviews discussing their reasons.

Anyone know of articles that offer some balance?

<comment><USER3> The rationale I've heard from the hospital side seems self-contradictory: they are worried about liability from using an unapproved medical device (mask). But the liability from exposing a healthy patient to an unmasked sick worker, or exposing a unmasked healthy worker to sick patients, seems like it ought to be greater than that..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I do wonder whether the western refusal to wear masks is more cultural & political rather than rational. Cultural because we don't have a culture of wearing masks and so changing our culture so you aren't judged is difficult, political in that it's politically difficult for public officials to say both "Masks do help stop the spread of this disease" and "We don't have enough masks, and we need them all for high risk workers & sick peeople so please don't try and get masks"

</comment><comment><USER5> Couldn't she just have kept wearing the mask and if she got fired sue for wrongful termination?

<comment><USER6> I'm guessing she felt like the the course she took would get it raised in the media sooner. Probably benefiting others, sooner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One dumb supervisor. Sad and oh so common. But not really newsworthy?

<comment><USER6> Seems like a good use of the media to me. That one dumb supervisor could cost someone's life. Raising that to someone in the NHS that can fix it is worthwhile.

The official responses are bland and non-committal, so the public shaming seems needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In the middle of February Heathrow staff was ordering travelers disembarking planes from China to __remove face masks __because they could scare the population.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone got an idea why this story was scrubbed from the front page so fast?

Seconds story I've seen wiped without reason just today and I haven't even been on here much.</comment>


Ask HN: Boring businesses which make non-boring money? - <AUTHOR> OK HN crowd, I need some help brainstorming.  I would love to hear from you about businesses you have experiences with that are extremely profitable but are totally boring and non-sexy.  Say, for example, scaffolding rental.  Let's focus on businesses with some scale, things that you've seen get to $10-30M+ in revenue and $3-5M in profit.  Recurring revenue a plus. <comment><USER2> Happened into a random chat with a small commercial fisherman (think Jaws boat) recently. He was lit and fed me a lot of details. Sounds like he makes a lot more than I do as an experienced computer guy. He certainly has a lot more houses.

</comment><comment><USER3> My friends own a "vape juice" company - one of the larger ones I think. They're currently doing around $10-15M in revenue after starting just a few years ago.

<comment><USER4> Any sense of the profit margin they're seeing?

<comment><USER3> Very large, haha. I know they've decreased over time as competition has moved in, but 2-3 years ago they were selling items that cost ~$1.50 to make for $25. They also run pretty lean from a personnel standpoint.</comment></comment></comment>


TokBox Fires 50% Of Engineering Team, All Founders Gone - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/09/tokbox-fires-50-of-engineering-team-all-founders-gone/ <comment><USER2> Man, look at the "team" page: <http://www.tokbox.com/view/team>

Why the hell do they need a "VP of Human Resources"? A "Community Evangelist"? I count 20 people on that team, I would have expected a third of that.

Good lessons here for startup hopefuls. First, don't take $14m for your fairly simple flash video app. Second, if you do, don't waste that money on feeding your ego with a large headcount. Third, if you do, don't be surprised when you're kicked out and someone else is in control of your baby.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sometimes when you have too many employees some will show up, start their computer, sip on some coffee and pretend to work for the entire day. Then one magical day someone with a decision power realizes that this guys are just trading "showing up for 8 hours" for fat checks. On that day the collector gets fired.

This does not necessarily mean that the company is having trouble. It just means they can hire people who can actually do some work or be more productive than the ones who were fired.

Do your job. Do it damn well or at least show everyone that you are trying hard enough and if they bear with you a little bit more you will succeed at it. Otherwise enjoy the checks and know that sooner or later your circus will end.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ouch. And not fired by crappy VCs, but by Sequoia and Mitt Romney. That's gotta be bad for their self-esteem.

<comment><USER5> Seems like it would be better for their self-esteem if they could rationalize the firing as being by crappy VCs who don't know what they're doing. This way, it's much harder to blame it on the VCs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good to know that not dropping out of school to work for them 2 years ago was the right choice.

<comment><USER7> Who knows, you might have been their new CEO and you might have kicked some serious butt in that position...

Alternative universes have one small drawback, we don't get to experience them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems like a case of raising too much money too soon and getting kicked out by the VCs. But I could be wrong and I am curious to know the founders side of the story.

<comment><USER9> the founders took money off the table (the ones who left right after the funding round at least) so they're fine

<comment><USER8> It's not about the money or may be it's just me I want see my products succeed not just work. If the founders left right after the funding round that just doesn't seem right to me, it isn't fair to the VC's either. I guess we'll never know what exactly transpired unless one of the founders speak up.</comment></comment></comment>


Intel Shows Moblin 2.1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220100965

<comment><USER2> This looks really nice (I'm at the IDF).

Actually there's a new Ubuntu netbook remix being announced as well which looks really slick.

<http://www.ubuntu.com/GetUbuntu/download-netbook></comment>


Real-time tracking of human eyes using a webcam - <AUTHOR> http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cpp/TrackEye.aspx <comment><USER2> There is a Swedish company called Tobii that does something similar yet a lot more advanced, including lasers and what not to track eye-movements.

One of their ideas is that people with physical handicaps could use their eyes instead of mouse/trackpad to point and click at stuff, but if this could be done with a webcam that's even more better. If you could click on you IPhone only using your eyes, wouldn't that be cool?

<comment><USER3> However, it's quite improbable you'll get an interesting resolution for your movements with a webcam, compared with lasers or other methods. Image-based eye tracking needs to be real-time (so probably inherently low resolution these days), tracks objects that are an important part of the captured image (so you get like a much lower resolution mouse, because of the size of your eyes or pupils compared to the webcam resolution), and needs to compensate for errors so it needs a lot of redundancy in data to generate output (so decreasing the resolution even more).

Anyone working in computer vision can tell me if I'm right or wrong? I've been working in the area in some small projects, but they were extremely related to this eye-tracking stuff.

<comment><USER4> I know from using the tobii that eye-tracking has one big problem: Your eyes never stay still. Whenever you're focusing on something, you are making mini- movements (called micro saccades IIRC) around the focus point. When you move to the next point, you're eyes 'jump' there and do the mini-movement again. When you read a line of text, it feels as a fluid movement, but it actually is a series of jumps over a couple of words at a time.

Interpreting eye tracking is mostly defining what is the cut-off point between movement during focus and actual movement. It seems that with a web-cam, this choice is already made for you, due to it's low resulution :). It's been a year or two since I had to deal with it though, so my memory is a bit hazy. I can post links to some good articles on eye tracking if anyone is interested (just leave a reply).

Finally, I'd like to remark that many people put their mouse where their focus is. Mouse tracking is a quite effective (and cheap, and hardware-less) means of focus logging. As is simply recording clicks.

<comment> a-priori You're dead on. The purpose for the micro-saccades is to keep the image on the retina changing. Photoreceptors on the retina do not respond to the intensity of light, but rather the rate of change of intensity. A combination of micro- saccades and blinking lets your visual system gather as much information as it can, and visual memory fills in the gaps.

The illusion of a complete image is really one of the most remarkable things about the visual system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A webcam, eh? I always keep track of my human eyes using egg crates. They're just the right size, and you can label the outside with sharpie...

</comment><comment><USER6> Somebody needs to commercialize this, stat. I would love to get visual heat map of my web site - which portions of the text user looks at?

<comment><USER7> Few things I can think of..

1\. Usability tests (including heat maps and replays for manual observations)

2\. Measuring effectiveness of display ads (web, TV etc) more concretely.

3\. Accurate Strabismus (Squint) recognition and measurement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't seem to get this thing to figure out where I'm actually looking. Isn't that the point of "eye-tracking"? It is pretty good at figuring out where my eyes are located on my face, but that isn't very valuable information.

Has anyone else had any success?

</comment><comment><USER9> Is not it too much stressful to use eyes as an input device? I don't think there general uses for people that can use a mouse. I think that the next revolution in input devices can be a keyboard that is actually like the iphone a display + touchscreen so that the keyboard will drastically change in order to be application-specific.</comment>


Windows 95 is now an app you can download and install on macOS Windows and Linux - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/23/17773180/microsoft-windows-95-app-download-features <comment><USER2> >The app _its_ [sic] only 129MB in size and you can download it over at Github for both macOS and Windows. Once it's running it surprisingly only takes up around 200MB of RAM, even when running all of the old Windows 95 system utilities, apps, and games.

Only to give some perspective, the original requirements for Windows 95 were:

1) 4MB of memory (8MB recommended)

2) 50-70 MB space on hard disk

so IMHO the "surprisingly only takes" comment is _surprising_.

Previous "Show HN" from the Author:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17827797](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17827797)

<comment><AUTHOR> I ran Windows 95 under 8MB and let me tell you, that was far from sufficient! There was a RAM shortage back in those days so getting the second 8MB SIMM was a fairly expensive proposition for a teenager. Also on a 85Mb hard drive too don't get me started ...

<comment><USER2> Sure, you take the "recommended" (which is usually double the minimum) and at least double it to have a minimally running system and quadruple it too have it running decently, this is "standard Microsoft".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This Electron app is based on [https://github.com/copy/v86/](https://github.com/copy/v86/) ("x86 virtualization in JavaScript, running in your browser and NodeJS")

<comment><USER4> And yes, it's as slow as it sounds

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Don't I need any Win95 license to run it?

<comment><USER6> Officially (perhaps even morally) yes. Practically no.</comment></comment>


DoublyLinked - A New Programming Forum/Community - <AUTHOR> http://thedevshed.net/forum/

<comment><USER2> programmingforums.org, [http://www.programmersheaven.com/mb/](http://www.programmersheaven.com/mb/), [http://forums.devshed.com/beginner- programming-16/](http://forums.devshed.com/beginner-programming-16/), and probably hundreds more...

What is it about this site that stands out from anything else like it?</comment>