Git partial clone lets you fetch only the large file you need - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/03/13/partial-clone-for-massive-repositories/ <comment><USER2> There is one note piece to the puzzle to make git perfect for every use case I can think of: store large files as a list of blobs broken down by some rolling hash a-la rsync/borg/bup.

That would e.g. make it reasonable to check in virtual machine images or iso images into a repository. Extra storage (and by extension, network bandwidth) would be proportional to change size.

git has delta compression for text as an optimization but it's not used on big binary files and is not even online (only on making a pack). This would provide it online for large files.

Junio posted a patch that did that ages ago, but it was pushed back until after the sha1->sha256 extension.

<comment><USER3> Do ISOs and other large blob types support only partial (block) modification? Wouldn't all subsequent blocks change too?

<comment><USER2> Sometimes they do - e.g. if you replace a file in the ISO that is the same size up to block alignment, which is common when e.g. editing a text file or recompiling an executable with a minor change. They almost always do when it's a VM image representing a disk - only some blocks change every write.

However, with self synchronizing hashes of the kind used by rsync bup and borg, it doesn't matter - you could have a 1TB file, delete a single byte at position 100 - and you only need to store or transfer one new block (with average size 8KB for rsync, configurable for borg) if you already have a copy of the version before the change.

It's somewhat comparable with diff/patch but not exactly; it's worse in that change granularity is only specified on average; It's better in that it works well on binary files, does not require a specific reference diff (can reference all previous history), and efficiently supports reordering as well small changes - if you divide a 4000 line text file to four 1000-line sections and reorder them 1,2,3,4 -> 3,1,4,2 you will find the diff/patch to be as long as a new copy, whereas a self synchronizing hash decomposition will hardly take any space for the reordered file given the original.

<comment><USER3> Oh, I used rsync many times but I thought it simply retransmits changed files. (Oh, it needs the --checksum argument to do this, okay.)

So how do these self-synchronizing hashes work? Like a Merkle Tree? (Ah, okay [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync#Determining_which_parts_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync#Determining_which_parts_of_a_file_have_changed) )

So rsync uses 8KB for chunk size, so for a file 1GB it has 125 000 chunks. (And if every chunk needs 16 bytes of hash data to send, that's about 2MB, pretty darn efficient, especially if it can spot reorders.) Though according to Wikipedia it only does this if the target file has the same size, so adding new files to ISOs might not work in case of rsync, but still, the possibility is there for diff algos and version control systems.

<comment><USER2> No, target doesn't have to be same size. As an optimization, if size and datetime are the same, rsync will assume no change and will not hash at all (though you can force it to).

But it will definitely use hashes when size differs (unless forced to copy whole files, or copying between local file systems)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has anyone used Git submodules to isolate large binary assets into their own repos? Seems like the obvious solution to me. You already get fine-grained control over which submodules you initialize. And, unlike Git LFS, it might be something you're already using for other reasons.

<comment><USER5> The problem with git submodules is they can't be used like a hyperlink to another repository. Updating the submodule requires updating the superproject as well. The new commits are invisible to the superproject until that is done.

It'd be great if they worked like Python's editable package installations.

<comment><USER6> Then the state of the superproject would depend on when the checkout occurred. That would be disastrous for consistency, you'd be unable to replicate a checkout later or elsewhere. The state of a repo after a checkout should only depend on the commit that was checked out.

<comment><USER4> It's interesting that we've never developed the equivalent for Git of what every programming-language ecosystem has: keeping two parallel listings of dependencies, one in terms of version constraints to satisfy, and the other in terms of exact refs.

I could totally see a .gitmodules.reqs file specified in terms of semver specs against tags, or just listing a branch to check out the HEAD of; resolving to the same .gitmodules file we already have. Not even a breaking change!

<comment><USER6> It would mean attaching a semantic meaning to tags, but git doesn't do that, ever, for any reference. You don't even have to have a master branch, much less tags that follow semver. Linux doesn't even use semver!

<comment><USER7> Correct, this feature should be built on top of the source control system, not as part of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Also known as workspace views in P4.

It's interesting to see the wheel reinvented. We used to run a 500gb art sync/200gb code sync with ~2tb back end repo back when I was in gamedev. P4 also has proper locking, it is really the is right tool if you've got large assets that need to be coordinated and versioned.

Only downside of course is that it isn't free.

<comment><USER9> This kind of comment isn't helpful. Of course, there have been ways to copy large files around since there were networks. What's new in this protocol enhancement is that this works within the context of a Merkle tree-based technology (upon which all DVCS's are based). To use your analogy, yes this is a wheel but it's built with rubber instead of wood and iron.

<comment><USER8> I guess I should have expanded more.

DVCS is in direct opposition of workflows that include binary files(yes I'm aware that git lfs has locking, it's also centrally orchestrated) because you can't merge almost every binary format.

We were using P4 ~15 years ago for these workflows and rather than understanding what made them work people are just rediscovering the same problems that have already been solved.

My guess is that we'll next see a solution that dynamically caches most downloaded files in a geographic friendly way, heck we may even call it "P4Proxy".

I've seen so much FUD around how git is the "one true workflow" because other solutions "don't scale" when they don't understand the constraints that certain workflows impose. Git/DVCS is great for a lot of things but sometimes you should use the right tool for the job rather than hack something together.

[Edit] These reasons are exactly why you see Unreal supporting P4/SVN out of the box[1] and no mention of git.

[1] [https://docs.unrealengine.com/en- US/Engine/UI/SourceControl/...](https://docs.unrealengine.com/en- US/Engine/UI/SourceControl/index.html)

<comment><USER10> I think this is a very p4 centric view of the world.

Locking helps with preventing collisions, but honestly the issue is still always communication. Why are people even touching files they shouldn't be touching?

Meanwhile perforce is a pain for code heavy projects and requiring a central perforce server. Git works great there.

The issue is neither is a silver bullet for the others workflow and needs, and they both suck horribly for mixed code and binary asset workflows.

That's not even considering cost.

Meanwhile film studios generally prefer keeping the considerations separate and using symlinks or URI to their data store and that works really well. But that doesn't work great for remote workflows.

So again, I think you're applying a very p4, game centric view to this. There are lots of different use cases and team structures that none of these version control systems are able to address in their entirety.

<comment><USER11> > but honestly the issue is still always communication. Why are people even > touching files they shouldn't be touching?

Because there's 300+ people working on a project, and it's not feasible to know what every other person is working on or planning on working on.

The file lock (code can be merged too, just like git, so this is only really for binary assets) is a crude communication tool saying "hey I'm using this file".

> Meanwhile perforce is a pain for code heavy projects and requiring a central > perforce server. Git works great there.

I think you're applying a git biased view here. I don't think perforce is unsuitable for code heavy projects at all (see workspace views as a prime example), and for the majority of people, having a central server isn't an issue. Most people treat github/gitlab as a centralised server anyway. I've _never_ in a decade of programming heard someone suggest adding an extra remote to git so I can share your changes, it's always been "push it as a separate branch and I'll merge it". If you have a missing internet connection, you're likely not able to share code _anyway_, and with p4 you can always reconcile offline work when you're back online.

<comment><USER10> Meanwhile film studios go on with 300+ people without hitting the issue of people hitting the same asset files without needing locking.

I think locking is a fine utility to have but I think a lot of workflows use it to workaround poor communication.

And I think you're constraining your views of git to just your workflow.

I've worked in a lot of scenarios where you need multiple remotes such as having an internal repo and an external one.

And similarly there are lots of scenarios where having a decentralized copy of the report is very useful for being able to work in offline scenarios and compare multiple branches. Things like when commuting on a plane or being in low connection areas.

I don't see how my view is git centric. I'm saying each VCS has very useful areas and equally big rough spots. The problem is that each VCS group believes there's is the only right system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is interesting and could be a savior for Machine Learning(ML) engineering teams. In a typical ML workflow, there are three main entities to be managed: 1\. Code 2\. Data 3\. Models Systems like Data Version Control(DVC) [1], are useful for versioning 2 & 3\. DVC improves on usability by residing inside the project's main git repo while maintaining versions of the data/models that reside on a remote. With Git partial clone, it seems like the gap could still be reduced between 1 & 2/3.

[1] - [https://dvc.org/](https://dvc.org/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Also --reference (or --shared) is a good parameter to speed-up cloning (for build, for example), if you have your repository cached in some other place. I was using it a long time ago when I was working on system that required to clone 20-40 repos to build. This approach decreased clone timings by an order of magnitude.

<comment><USER14> Do you actually need clones in that scenario? I worked on a build system that grabbed source from several hundred repos at the starting point, and it turned out to be way faster to just grab it all as tarballs with aria2c.

<comment><USER15> Grapping the tarbell from where? To my best knowledge, tarbell export is not a part of git, but something git hosts provide.

Git is a distributed VCS, and we should support keeping it that way.

<comment><USER14> Almost any project you work on will have an authoritative copy of the repo in some kind of web-accessible tool, most of which provide a tarball-download function.

And GitHub's scheme is pretty much a de-facto standard at this point—GitLab's implementation is an exact copy of it, for example:

        https://<host>/<org/project>/archive/<ref/branch/tag>.tar.gz

Edit to add: Also, git-archive --remote is actually most of the way there, but it's not an HTTP download, of course. :(

<comment><USER16> GitHub doing something one way and GitLab copying it doesn't make a standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That seems quite useful, though Git LFS mostly does the job.

One of my biggest remaining pain points is resumable clone/fetch. I find it near impossible to clone large repos (or fetch if there were lots of new commits) over a slow, unstable link, so almost always I end up cloning a copy to a machine closer to the repo, and rsyncing it over to my machine.

<comment><USER18> What's your take on this line?

> Partial Clone is a new feature of Git that replaces Git LFS and makes > working with very large repositories better by teaching Git how to work > without downloading every file.

<comment><USER17> I believe partial clone makes the situation a little better, but it's not nearly as good as resumable cloning, because you have to partition your repo in advance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is great. We use get lfs extensively, and one of the biggest complaints we have is users have to clone 7GB of data just to get the source files. There's a work around in that you don't have to enter your username and password from the lfs repo, and let it timeout, but that's a kluge.

<comment><USER20> There's an option for that: GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=1 git clone SERVER-REPOSITORY

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> In the AAA games industry git has been a bit slower on the uptake (although that's changing quickly) as large warehouses of data are often required (eg: version history of video files, 3D audio, music, etc.). It's nice to see git have more options for this sort of thing.

<comment><USER22> Surprised this new idea doesn't support object storage. Sounds like Git LFS would still be the right way to go for repos with assets for games like meshes, sounds, etc.

However I've heard many studios use Perforce instead. However not being open source is a downside to some, but I don't really know too much about it personally.

Then if working with a lot of non code files, sounds like some solutions have locking. I guess not two people could edit the same Blender or PSD file at the same time and then merge them later on.

Kinda wouldn't surprise me if some companies actually run multiple versioning control systems. Code on one system, game assets on another.

<comment><USER21> I think in terms of game production, software licensing usually isn't the largest cost center for a project. Proprietary software isn't a concern as much, given that games traditionally are "shipped" and then completed. (Note that this changes as games that are more online service-based with live operations, rather than a specific release date and a "final" copy sent for production; the internet has changed things a lot)

You're more right than you think about multiple versioning systems, although keeping synchronized becomes an issue. Perforce is a bit of a boon for management, as they get a GUI for versioning across a multidisciplinary team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This could actually be a really good solution to the maximum supported size of a Go module. If you place a go.mod in the root of your repo, then every file in the repo becomes part of the module. There's also a hardcoded maximum size for a module: 500M. Problem is, I've got 1G+ of vendored assets in one of my repos. I had to trick Go into thinking that the vendored assets were a different Go module[0]. Go would have to add support for this, but it would be a pretty elegant solution to the problem.

[0]: [https://github.com/golang/go/issues/37724](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/37724)

<comment><USER24> That does sound like a "you're holding it wrong" issue. As one of the Go team members pointed out, defining a separate module is not a hack, but the intended way of doing it.

How would a partial checkout help?

<comment><USER23> Go modules are built around git, unlike many other languages package systems. That means you don't get to pick and choose what goes into them. Imagine if you had to put an empty package.json in every (non-node) directory of your git repo to exclude it from an NPM package, or an install.py in every (non-python) directory to exclude it from a PyPI package. Multi-language repos would get ridiculous pretty quickly.

<comment><USER25> > Go modules are built around git

Not really. Modules are specced based on zip files and metadata in text files. There's just support for extracting that data from git repos transparently.

Here's a slightly out of date write-up: [https://research.swtch.com/vgo- module](https://research.swtch.com/vgo-module)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I started a project recently and for the first time ever I've wanted to keep large files in my repo. I looked into git LFS and was disappointed to learn that it requires either third party hosting or setting up a git LFS server myself. I looked into git annex and it seems decent. This, once it is ready for prime time, will hopefully be even better

</comment><comment><USER27> Is it possible given a git repo (hosted on say GitHub) to only 'clone' (download) certain files from it? Without `.git`

<comment><USER28> I believe you're looking for the 'working tree' only. You could do the following:

git archive --remote=<your-URL> | tar -t

source: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3946538](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3946538)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm still unconvinced. Will this provide a user friendly approach to managing design assets.

<comment><USER15> My impression is that it will use the normal git experience managing design assets. Ie. with this there should be no need for additional tooling. If it works, that would be so great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > One reason projects with large binary files don't use Git is because, when a > Git repository is cloned, Git will download every version of every file in > the repository.

Wrong? There's a --depth option for the git fetch command which allows the user to specify how many commits they want to fetch from the repository

<comment><USER31> Yes, but 95% of devs, even fairly talented ones, don't really know how to use Git.

<comment><USER32> Author seems to be a manager, not necessarily a dev.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> In AWS, it's worth considering putting those large files in an S3 bucket.</comment>


Apple to investigate iPhone 7 that 'blew up' - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2017/02/23/exploding-iphone-7-plus-video/ <comment><USER2> Apple can't afford bad press like that - everyone is paranoid after the Samsung Note 7 debacle...

<comment><USER3> iPhones have "blown up" before. The problem Samsung had was several units of the device started going "up in smoke." If that starts to happen with the iPhone 7 then that'll be a different story but so far this is an isolated incident. Though as I wrote this I got to thinking if Apple does start experiencing more widespread issues then that might help pinpoint the issues Samsung was having. To my knowledge their engineers have never determined the root cause - which doesn't exactly instill confidence in consumers.</comment></comment>


Why Twilio Wasn't Affected by Today's AWS Issues - <AUTHOR> http://www.twilio.com/engineering/2011/04/22/why-twilio-wasnt-affected-by-todays-aws-issues/

<comment><USER2> 504 Gateway Time-out

nginx/0.9.2

You really want to make sure your shit works before you go boasting about how well it works. :)

EDIT: seems to be working now :P Interesting article once I got over the irony of it not working.

<comment><USER3> Ironically, this highlights one of the main issues we discuss in the post!

The Twilio Engineering blog is hosted off an external Wordpress site with a single IP that's forwarded from ngnix load balancer pool. Since the load balancers assume that the external service can fail, they won't tied resources blocking access to other parts of the site.

Hope you enjoy the post :)

-Evan Twilio.com

<comment><USER4> Why not stick an angel-mode Varnish in between? Serving stale blog is usually better than no blog!

<comment><USER3> Yup, good idea. We set up an ngnix proxy to cache the page while the blog hosting provider fixes their server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like a humblebrag to me:

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870457070457627...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704570704576275320082913808.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> We just enabled caching on the ngnix proxy to the external site hosting our Wordpress install for the engineering blog. Hopefully that should help performance.

-Evan Twilio.com

</comment><comment><USER6> This post would be better if they gave more concrete examples of their infrastructure. I read the whole post and still don't know how they survived except some knowledge about distributed system design.

<comment><USER7> They had some good general points though, like fast retries. Which brings me to one of the worst examples of a Human Factors mistakes I can think of right now...

The new rent-a-bike scheme in London has POS terminals connected to the central system via bits of string and/or cellular modems. Every now and again these links fall over or the central system becomes unresponsive.

If you are attempting to get a bike (with an active card subscription) you drop your card into the terminal and it prints you a release code that lets you take a bike.

Unless the system is down... in which case it still reads your card, and then sits there and shows you a spinner for 5 minutes.

You can't walk away during this time, because if you do and the link comes back up it'll print a release code which anyone can use to take a £300+ bike on your account.

If you do stick around and try again? That'll be another 5 minutes which you could have spent walking to the next bike dispensary.

I think that timeouts are one of those things that you can only tune really well when you use the system in a live environment and see how well things work. In this case a higher transaction failure rate would be _vastly_ better than a 5 minute time out - on other systems not so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> And of course, anyone running services not in the affected region weren't affected.

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's the article from Google's cache, in case it's unreachable for others: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Awww.twilio.com%2Fengineering%2F2011%2F04%2F22%2Fwhy- twilio-wasnt-affected-by-todays-aws-issues%2F)

</comment><comment><USER3> Several people have asked for additional details. We just posted a quick follow-on:

[UPDATE] A central theme of the recent AWS issues has been the Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service. We use EBS at Twilio but only for non-critical and non-latency sensitive tasks. We've been a slow adopter of EBS for core parts of our persistence infrastructure because it doesn't satisfy the "unit- of-failure is a single host principle." If EBS were to experience a problem, all dependent service could also experience failures. Instead, we've focuses on utilizing the ephemeral disks present on each EC2 host for persistence. If an ephemeral disk fails, that failure is scoped to that host. We are planning a follow-on post describing how we doing RAID0 stripping across ephemeral disks to improve I/O performance.

</comment><comment><USER10> Are you able to observe/log the failed instances?

What percentage of the various pools were affected by the outage?

I'm more curious about the hourly rate.

If you have a pool of 30 instances and only 3 are accessible, are you still being charged for all 30 plus the additional 27 you need to bring up?

</comment><comment><USER11> LOL...."504 Gateway Time-out".....nginx must not be one of Twilio's "small stateless services" (F)(A)(I)(L) ;)

<comment><USER12> A cursory inspection indicates that their ngix box at least is running on EC2 NoVA. It takes a particular kind of person to want to tempt fate to such a degree by posting something like that while running on top of what can be best described as "a fluid situation"

<comment><USER13> Like saying "My spelling is perfect, my grammer to!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I want to see an article about making use of not-perfectly-up-to-date backups databases in a different region. Why can't reddit dump a copy of their new articles and comments to the west coast every night, then if the east coast dies, fire that up? Sure it's missing a chunk of the latest day's data, but that has to beat either completely being down or jumping through the technical hoops required to keep separate regions in sync across the internet. Then collect new articles and comments on the backup for a while, and when east coast is fixed merge the new data back over to east coast and go back about business?

Ditto for any web 2.0 we-are-a-fancy-shared-commenting-blog service, or anything that is fundamentally time based aggregation of information. Do database replication systems just not handle the concept of working with temporary gaps in the data?

<comment><USER15> A lot of AWS stuff can't be transferred between regions. There's no way to move an EBS snapshot from east to west coast except to copy the thing across the public internet. Once it's over there on the west coast, to "fire that up" they have to launch app servers, database servers, cache servers, etc. whose configurations they had to keep mirrored from their normal region. They need to get all those backups onto EBS disks without using the same snapshot features they probably automated in their main region, attach them to the right instances... For a team with a single sysadmin, it's not as simple as you make it sound.

<comment><USER10> Amazon needs to buy some railroad right-of-ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Website not loading... Not sure if article is serious...

<comment><USER17> loads just fine for me...

<comment><USER16> Try #7 worked (serious).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Awesome post! "504 Gateway Time-out" was the best article I've read in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm sure Twilio is hoping this sounds impressive but it sounds pathetic to me. Services are supposed to stay up after all.</comment>


It Probably Works: Probabilistic algorithms are all around us - <AUTHOR> https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2855183 <comment><USER2> Everybody using md5sums (or equivalent) and assuming they don't clash is using probabilistic algorithms.

There is nothing wrong with this if the probability of failing is smaller than the chance of an asteroid landing on your head.

<comment><USER3> ... And if the impact of failure is less than an asteroid landing on your head.

<comment><USER4> Landing, however unlikely, is probably ok.

Impacting (more, but still unlikely), is probably not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fantastic article. Probabilistic algorithm design is fascinating to me because it's all about making sure that the system behaves as expected, rather than every individual operation being perfect. Implementing most random algorithms in practise strongly reminds me of studies of populations & behaviours of organic life (which is much better than the rube goldberg/spaghetti factories which sometimes arise as "solutions" to complex problems).

Another interesting related field is Dave Ackley's Robustness-First Computing model[1], which operates with every atomic computational cell having some elements of randomness built in.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=helScS3coAE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=helScS3coAE)

</comment><comment><USER6> For those who are interested, Berkeley has publicly available lecture notes for their Randomness & Computation course. They go over some randomized algorithms as well as the mathematical tools necessary to analyze them. Just a heads up, the content is fairly theoretical.

[http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~sinclair/cs271/f11.html](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~sinclair/cs271/f11.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Good example of a probabilistic algorithm/data structure: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_list)

</comment><comment><USER8> Could someone explain or point me to a resource as to why using multiple buckets in the HyperLogLog algorithm makes it more accurate than a single bucket?

<comment><USER9> I don't have an article but my intuition is that it reduces variance. It smears the probability of getting "unlucky" with the hashes across all of the buckets.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Decentralized Operations - Hierarchical trust based darknet - <AUTHOR> http://swax.github.io/DeOps

<comment><AUTHOR> Jumping on the darknet post train. I wrote this a number of years ago. Never really found a niche. It's a YC08 reject, though to be fair I was totally unprepared for the interview.</comment>


IBM's Hardware Transactional Memory - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2011/08/ibms-new-transactional-memory-make-or-break-time-for-multithreaded-revolution.ars

<comment><USER2> This should be interesting. My maxim is "Shared-state multithreading using locks for mutual exclusion is the most performant way to write a buggy program"

I typically use message-passing to avoid this (it also scales a lot better) but it will be interesting to see how transactional memory works for smaller scale parallelism (or the lowest level of a multi-tiered parallel architecture).</comment>


Procedural Altar Generation - <AUTHOR> http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2015/03/14/procedural-altar-generation/

<comment><USER2> Makes me wonder if the author has seen Dwarf Fortress. It generates nations, cultures, and simulates wars and such between them(and much more).

<comment><USER3> I would think someone this into roguelikes would know it. OP seems to be more focused on the actual graphical representation besides the syntactical/semantic representation though; something DF is very much not known for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The correct term for "spirits" religions is animist.

<comment><USER5> I believe he refers to a wider concept, since he writes, "spirits":

> have a range of animistic of (ED: I think he means "or") shamanistic > beliefs, totemism, ancestor worship, etc

so even if e.g. fetishism or cults of the ancestors might generally coexist with animism they are not exactly the same, hence the made up "spirits religions".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How many iterations until it generates islam</comment>


Stack Overflow to require attribution for code samples - <AUTHOR> http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272956/a-new-code-license-the-mit-this-time-with-attribution-required?cb=1 <comment><USER2> Why doesn't this get any attention? Has it been on HN before?

<comment><USER3> Beats me, it was the first time I'd seen it and I found it pretty surprising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905009](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905009)</comment>


The Tale of Studio Ghibli - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/12/japanese-animation?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/thetaleofstudioghibli <comment><USER2> If you haven't seen any Studio Ghibli/Miyazaki films, I highly recommend them. The animation is unique and gorgeous. The stories involve conflict with nature or mistaken antagonists, not evil caricatures. While many of the films contain violence, it rarely resolves things. Also, most Studio Ghibli films have strong female leads. I think _Grave of the Fireflies_ and _The Wind Rises_ are the only ones with male protagonists.

In all, Studio Ghibli's works are a refreshing contrast to the romance- obsessed princesses and 3D talking animals so often put-out by Disney and Dreamworks. Even if you're an adult, they're enjoyable to watch.

<comment><USER3> I enjoy Miyazaki films, a lot. My favourite is Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind[1] but all of them are beatiful pieces of art. I also encourage people who do not know Miyazaki to see some of his works. Princess Mononoke is a good one to start with.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nausica%C3%A4_of_the_Valley_of_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nausica%C3%A4_of_the_Valley_of_the_Wind_%28film%29)

<comment><USER4> Definitely agreed, if you've got kids Totoro and Spirited Away are good excuses to become introduced to Miyazaki's work.

If you like the anime film of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, it's worth checking out the manga drawn by Miyazaki between 1981 to 1994, over a thousand beautiful B&W pages [1]

It is a very sophisticated work that stands on its own and really deserves more attention. He is a very talented illustrator and painter.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Nausicaä-Valley-Wind-Box- Set/dp/142155...](http://www.amazon.com/Nausicaä-Valley-Wind-Box- Set/dp/1421550644/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Totoro is the only movie I can just as easily watch with my five year old niece as my 71 year old mother. Wonderful film.

<comment><USER5> The scene in Totoro of the children growing seeds into trees during the night is one of my favorite moments of that film. Really captures a kind of childhood wonder.

The comment about how accessible the film is reminds me of watching Ponyo together with my grandmother a few weeks before her passing. It was something she really appreciated, and one of the few positive things she talked about in the following days.

Although not my favorite Ghibli film, and not such a fan of that particular dub there is something delightful and honest about all the studio's films that I find special.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article also mentions somebody's reaction to Princess Kaguya as looking "unfinished" \- I saw the the same comment elsewhere (on HN maybe?)

I am really taken aback by this - the watercolor/ink style may be a little bit unusual these days, but it's not as though animation has never been done in this style before, nor that artwork of this style is completely alien. There is a ton of this stuff.

Nor is this film extremely minimalist, and minimalism been done before too.

I'm starting to feel that the overly-detailed, extremely complicated CG animation and action scenes in most movies are having an adverse affect on our expectations, so we are becoming less able to appreciate something simple.

I could tie this back to software - so much of what we deal with evolves over time to be rather complicated, with a million features, and we beg for more.

Geez, things can be simple. It's not "unfinished" to be simple.

<comment><USER7> Couldn't agree more. I recently saw Princess Kaguya after being essentially dragged to the movie theatre by a friend. I've never really developed a taste for Japanese animation, and went in with no expectations.

Frankly, it's the most emotionally engaging movie I've seen in half a decade. It blew me away. At no point either did the animation ever look unfinished. That's just a weird characterization, and I'm kind of annoyed at the implication that the audience expects a certain baseline of eye candy on the screen at a given time.

Anyhow, the movie's the bomb. Sad to hear that this studio is going on an extended hiatus. I hope someone else fills the void, because I would definitely be in the market to throw money at my screen for _anything_ of this caliber.

<comment><USER8> > I've never really developed a taste for Japanese animation, and went in with > no expectations.

To be fair, the vast majority of it is crap. (In much the same way the majority of American entertainment content is also crap)

But there's also fantastic stuff out there, like Miyazaki films.

Makoto Shinkai has some excellent films.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makoto_Shinkai](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makoto_Shinkai)

Garden of Words, 5 Centimeters Per Second, Children Who Chase Lost Voices, The Place Promised in our Early Days, and Voices of a Distant Star are all excellent.

Mamoru Hosoda's recent works have all been quite good as well.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamoru_Hosoda](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamoru_Hosoda)

I'm not really a fan of his earlier works, but everything he's done since The Girl Who Leapt Through Time has been very high caliber.

I wouldn't say either is quite at the level of Miyazaki and Ghibli, but they're both quite good, and some of the better examples of the medium at it's best.

<comment><USER9> Wolf Children is another great non-Miyazaki film done in a similar style: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Children](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Children)

<comment><USER8> Yep! That's one of Hosada's works

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As an 80's anime kid, I remember when I first saw Castles in the Sky and My Neighbor Toro Toro. It left lasting impressions on my world views of flying robots and bus-shaped giant cats.

But Princess Mononoke straight out floored me. The surprising heaviness and violence felt like they backdoored a complex film for adults. In Japan it was the highest grossing film of ALL TIME until Titanic came along.

My growing years have been enriched beyond measure by the Ghibli/Miyazaki films. May my curiosity and joy of trekking hidden paths be the legacy of Studio Ghibli.

<comment><USER11> The Studio Ghibli film Spirited Away (2001) overtook Titanic and is still the highest grossing film in Japan.[1] Another Ghibli film, Howl's Moving Castle, also passed Mononoke on that list.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest- grossing_films_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest- grossing_films_in_Japan)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I still remember my first watching of Grave of the Fireflies. It was gut wrenching, brutal, and to be honest, depressing and demoralizing to the point of wanting to slash your own wrists at the pain and suffering that people went through after the war (especially the orphans).

It's a great film, but getting myself to watch it is seriously tough each time.

I wish there was another animator out there who would/could do something remotely close to what he did for his studio.

<comment><USER13> A friend once described Grave of the Fireflies very aptly: _" It's like watching Schindler's List while chewing broken glass, but without the refreshing salty taste."_

And it is truly a great film.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> They complain near the end that Disney dubs all the Ghibli films. This is an odd complaint since all the DVDs have the choice of sub/dub, and Disney does a good job with the dubs. Kiki's Delivery Service, for example, is one of the best dubs I've ever seen.

<comment><USER15> I have to take issue with this particular choice. The quality of the acting may have been good, but the editorial changes Disney made to the movie are downright offensive.

Adding music to quiet scenes was annoying, but changing the ending was unforgivable.

<comment><USER16> How did they change the ending in the dub? I have only seen the subtitled version.

<comment><USER17> Phil Hartman, who voiced Jiji (the cat), ad libbed a line at the end. This might not seem like much but in the Japanese version Jiji, having stopped talking about half way through the film, doesn't talk again; possibly this represents another way in which Kiki matures. It's a small point but seemed to go over the head(s) of the director(s) of the English dub. Either that or they didn't think it mattered.

Anyway, there is much in Miyazaki's and Takahata's films that is misinterpreted or misunderstood by audiences and critics outside Japan. For a long interpretation of some of the themes in Spirited Away, by a friend of mine, see this post i made to the Miyazaki Mailing List over a decade ago: [http://www.imasy.or.jp/~fukumoto/n/nshow.cgi?50927](http://www.imasy.or.jp/~fukumoto/n/nshow.cgi?50927)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Miyazaki/Ghibli stand apart from the rest of the anime industry. Their sensibilities are both out of sync with the film and TV output of other companies[1], different from mainstream manga; yet when they put something out, the world watches. I think it stems from Miyazaki's unique outlook, which seems far less influenced by pop culture but instead hews to the dreams, whimsy, and imagination of children. It's less "modern", more "storybook", and that makes his films unique and widely appealing.

That's not to say there aren't other anime film directors who have put out impressive work:

\- Satoshi Kon (a visionary sadly deceased, a true loss to the world)

\- Makoto Shinkai (purveyor of the most beautiful animated scenes to exist[2])

\- Mamoru Hosoda (works naturalistic yet fantastical, grounded in family and the real world)

All three have been labelled "the new Miyazaki" or compared to him.

Finally, since people are posting recommendations of Miyazaki's work:

 _On Your Mark_ , a 6-minute animated music video, is the sort of thing that you watch once and remember years down the road as a strange memory, a sci-fi short story from your teenage years. [http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1yx4sf_hayao-miyazaki-s- on...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1yx4sf_hayao-miyazaki-s-on-your- mark_music)

</comment><comment>===

[1] In fact, Miyazaki has criticized the anime industry for being too full of people who don't observe other people, resulting in works that don't resonate with a wider audience; it's anime by anime geeks for anime geeks, full of stereotypes and a culture unto itself. That's why directors like Satoshi Kon and Shinichiro Watanabe are so needed, who paint rounded, real characters who're accessible to a wider audience. Discussion: [http://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1wltx5/miyazaki_the_p...](http://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1wltx5/miyazaki_the_problem_with_the_anime_industry_is/cf36y3m)

[2] Shinkai's most recent work is _The Garden of Words_ , a lush feast for the eyes which might as well have been titled _The Garden of Wallpapers_ : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTTRweJ7jVs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTTRweJ7jVs)

</comment><comment><USER19> The article mentions the treatment these films receive in the West, but I would like to add that there is also a general aversion to anime. In Catalonia, where I live, only the young generations are (more than) open to anime, while the rest will miss beautiful artistic experiences like the Sutdio Ghibli films because of their prejudices against anime. In the US I've seen similar reactions but mostly I have found people who will classify all anime (including films such as these) as "cartoons" for children.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been a Miyazaki/Ghibli fan for a long time. At this point I have so many Ghibli-themed shirts my wife jokes that I am nearing the Miyazaki-event- horizon and will collapse into the form of Totoro.

If you have not watched any of their films, I highly recommend you do so. Sheer joy of life is what they impart and it will stay with you for years.

</comment><comment><USER21> Possibly of interest to fans of Miyazaki Hayao's work is the series he did for Nippon Animation in '78: Future boy Conan[1]. Despite the cheesy name, in my opinion it is his greatest work. I have watched the complete 26 episodes of this series multiple times with my kids, and they've watched it on their own many times. Anyone I turn onto this series is absolutely slackjawed with how good it is. Most of the character archetypes, themes and famous sequences from his subsequent movies are to be found in this series.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Boy_Conan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Boy_Conan)

</comment><comment><USER22> Whether you like watching animation or not, Studio Ghibli ones will open your eyes. From the iconic Totoro, to the classic Spirited Away, each one with different themes, told via simple, animated scenes that aren't as fancy or pretty as the Pixar or Disney ones, but are works of art. They also provide good insight into Japanese culture.

<comment><USER23> I disagree that Ghibli films are not as pretty as Pixar or Disney. In my (arguably subjective) eyes Ghibli animation seems much more aesthetically pleasing and "warmer-feeling" than CGI. And on a second notice, although I have huge respect for the artists that are involved in the production of Pixar films, it deeply saddens me to see that traditional animation seems like a second-class citizen in modern-day Hollywood. It's been years since I've last watched a high-profile traditionally animated film from western studios. And it's not just the style, I think that thematically and character-wise Pixar et al. films feel so generic when compared to eg. Nausicaa or Spirited Away or even Whisper of the Heart. And it's not only studio Ghibli, it always seemed to me that Japanese animators try to innovate a bit more thematically than their western counterparts. See for example the movies of Sathoshi Kon (like Paprika, or Millenium Actress). They have such a unique adult-oriented perspective on animated storytelling that is unlike anything Pixar has put out.

<comment><USER24> > a high-profile traditionally animated film from western studios

traditionally animated (read: hand drawn) movies costs way more to produce, requires skill sets that are difficult to get now-a-days, and also some (undeserved) social stigma regarding "cartoon" movies, all of which contribute to the decision that it's not a wise investment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The first Miyazaki film I watched was Spirited away. The moment I saw it I became a life long fan of his work.

I've been to the museum in Mitaka twice, seen all his movies and despite pushing 35, I'm just as amazed and gleeful watching his work today with my three year old.

I can't think of any artist that had a greater influence on me. Much love.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is just a review, and as such it glosses over what has been reported elsewhere as the real reason Ghibli might not survive Miyazaki: the big man himself hoped to hand the reins to his own son, but the "young scion" failed short. Rather than look for alternatives, Miyazaki just gave up; which was a very Japanese thing to do.

<comment><USER27> Prior to that a previous protege also died young [1]. Miyazaki himself also carried the productions he worked on to a frightening degree. The man was/is a complete workaholic and expecting anyone to fill that role is essentially unreasonable.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshifumi_Kond%C5%8D](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshifumi_Kond%C5%8D)

<comment><USER5> For anyone curious about the behind the scenes of the studio during production, especially surrounding the tireless work of Miyazaki, the Making of Princess Mononoke documentary [1] is a superb watch. The film was translated by a Youtuber, and missing a few parts but very much gave me a great appreciation for what goes into creating one of their films.

[1] [http://ghiblicon.blogspot.com/2008/11/making-of-princess- mon...](http://ghiblicon.blogspot.com/2008/11/making-of-princess-mononoke- series-1.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am a huge fan of Studio Ghibli's work. I read a really great book on Miyazaki and Takahata this year that discusses their early competition and the birth of Studio Ghibli. It also does a pretty in depth analysis of most of the Studio's films that came out before The Wind Also Rises.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005E7AN1A/ref=oh_aui_searc...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005E7AN1A/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1)

</comment><comment><USER15> I hope the article is wrong about "When Marnie was There." I saw it in Japan just as it was about to leave the theaters, and it was amazing. The releases do tend to lag about a year behind, though, so I wouldn't be surprised if it just hasn't been announced yet.

</comment><comment><USER29> Myself and my children aged 4 and 6 have seen most of the Ghibli movies... they are amazing. Obviously, Totoro is well liked... but Ponyo and Kiki are the favorites here (we have re-watched them many, many times) and that was a surprise for me.

</comment><comment><USER30> For an Economist article I was expecting more covering the Studios economic troubles, periodic retirement of Miyazaki, and more contentious films [1].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Rises#Controversy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Rises#Controversy)

<comment><USER30> To elaborate on the economic troubles I think part of the problem is possibly the lack of a successor to Miyazaki. His son's work is often considered quite poor [2] and there's no clear successor to Miyazaki who often announces his retirement, then comes back for one last film.

In addition to this, they've have a series of big budget flops. While The Tale of the Princess Kaguya has received critical acclaim for it's artistic quality, it cost 50MUSD to make (compared to 6MUSD for Kiki's delivery service), while bring in 25MUSD at the box office. And while it's received critical acclaim, informally I've been told it's not well liked in Japan (looks good, but content is poor).

So, I was curious to hear more about their financial troubles, and how much they have been effected by these large budget flops and what the future might be (there's a rumor that Nico Nico Douga might buy them, or that they might shut down completely). It's unfortunate that this wasn't covered in the article.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Rises#Controversy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Rises#Controversy)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gor%C5%8D_Miyazaki](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gor%C5%8D_Miyazaki)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The studio just can't survive after Hayao's retirement.

I was especially disappointed when Ursula Le Guin trusted her Earthsea series to him, and he gave it to his idiot son.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0495596/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0495596/)

<comment><USER8> >Ursula Le Guin trusted her Earthsea series to him, and he gave it to his idiot son.

That's not really fair.

For one, Gorō was basically forced into the industry. He didn't want it, and was pressured into it.

Second, it was not Hayao's choice for his son to direct Earthsea. Suzuki Toshi, president of the studio, was the producer, and Gorō was originally attached just as a consultant. He drew the storyboards, and Suzuki decided upon seeing them to entrust Gorō with the role of director.

Hayao actually was very against it, and outright said his son did not have enough experience yet to be a director, and then refused to speak to him until after the movie had aired.

From Up on Poppy Hill was significantly better than Earthsea, and I think there is still a chance yet of Gorō becoming a worthy successor to his father.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This films looks to be the death knell of Studio Ghibli. Not a single ounce of the originality, character or detail that makes Studio Ghibli films unique.

<comment><USER33> I imagine you haven't seen the film? It is a wonderful movie (just watched it yesterday), with terrific characterization and attention to detail (grounded, even more so than Miyazaki's own movies, if I would dare say so). I wouldn't have expected any less from the director of _My Neighbors the Yamada_ , which is, _in my opinion_ , Ghibli's best film.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> [http://www.canistream.it/search/movie/grave%20of%20the%20fir...](http://www.canistream.it/search/movie/grave%20of%20the%20fireflies)

I realize that copyright is eternal and the producers have the right to set any terms they want, but it is the best set of options (for producers or comsumers) really pay $19 for a 26 year old movie or torrent it for $0 with no options for rentals, streaming, etc...?</comment>


Young Coder With Worried Parents. Advice Needed - <AUTHOR>

Hello,<p>I am a 15 year old programmer who has taken up programming in the past few years and has come to love it. I do not own any gaming consoles nor do I play video games excluding the occasional flash game. I am not the typical media programmer and none of my friends know that I am interested in it. Infact I am somewhat popular at my highschool and I hang out with different friends almost every weekend. Usually I spend about 1 hour mon-fri and 1-2 hours sat-sun on the computer. What I dont think my parents understand is that I am not your typical kid glued to the screen playing minecraft. I literally want to change the world. I am in the process of creating an education site that could seriously impact teachers all over the united states and the world. The problem is that my parents think I am spending too much time on the computer. Honestly 2-3 hours a week is the usual but sometimes I have spent more sometimes almost none. I need help showing them that I am doing this to help myself improve! They always tell me that learning is more important than grades and while I do have great grades I love learning programming in my spare time. With no programming classes offered this year programming at home is my only option. I want to explain to them how this is no different than playing guitar. In fact they would be happy if I practiced 3 hours a week but apparently it is totally different with a computer. Could any of you give me some advice on what to do? I'm hoping to talk to my parents about it and compare this to playing an instrument. If any of you have any advice or resources you could recommend please tell me. I know it is cliche but I really do want to change the world and in today's world computer programming is the way to get there. I do not want to be stifled by a misunderstanding. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance! <comment><USER2> I'm a successful startup founder (we're 100 people plus and making money) and I was lucky enough to have supportive parents as a kid. Although I didn't really start coding seriously until after college.

It sounds like you are smart / articulate, so you'll do fine no matter what, especially if you work on things you are interested in.

I think your instrument analogy is perfect. You might not turn out to be a rock star, but getting good at code is probably the most valuable skill you can get (aside from reading challenging books).

So I'd tell my parents the truth. They are probably somewhat scared because people tend to be scared of what they don't understand.

As long as you are asking for advice, here are 2 unsolicited points:

* You don't have to study computers in college to be a world class programmer. Study art or biology or something and (assuming you keep getting good at coding on the side) you'll be able to create things that matter. Others who went to school may turn out to be better coders, but you'll write code that people care about.

* Open source. Learn to love github. Share everything you can on there, even if it sucks. If you think something is just an experiment / hack, say so in the readme, but don't let that stop you from posting it. And don't be scared to send pull requests to projects you end up using / fixing bugs on. You'll run into some bad apples but a few people will be super happy to help you get your code quality to the point where they can merge your fix. Being good at open source collaboration is in a lot of ways a more important skill than actually writing algorithms or other coding skills.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree with dilithiumhe3's idea of getting a teacher or akin to help evangelize your talent, and can be great platforms for personal growth...yea, don't worry about your parents; if they don't 'get it' then you'll just be waisting energy trying to convince them the world isn't flat. Get yourself an adult mentor, preferably one with dot-com scars and/or tattoos, but anyone willing to mentor and stimulate your brain will do. A charismatic mentor is also a powerful weapon upon the wil of your parents, tho only as strong as your grades and attitude so try not to be a punk too much and get any new privileges revoked (that was my mistake). I also wouldn't worry about the computer too much. computers are stupid tools that just piss you off the more time you spend on it. Pickup the Guitar, they're fun to play and the chicks will love you...and you'll also learn a whole lot about structure, composition, analysis - fundamentals of any programing language. Finally, stop sneaking weed and playboys with your friends; go someplace quiet, spark up, and and ponder gravity, or probability, or psychology. whatever stimulates your neurons. The blackhole of adulthood quickly approaches, best set your trajectory early & often.

P.S. _ignore_ the haters! They're NOT trying to change the world, that's why they got time to hate.

godpseed dude.

</comment><comment><USER4> Since you love programming, and by extension problem solving, think of the whole situation as a problem to solve. You are having a hard time trying to convince your parents that what you're doing is worthwhile -- to you, it's even more important than the other things you do because you're more passionate about it. There are a few things you could do here (some of them you just have to accept because you have no control).

1\. You could work hard on your project, do everything in the power available to you to make it successful and prove them wrong. Possible, but just takes a lot more work and determination than you may think.

2\. Fake it and please them. Let them always see you playing guitar or doing something they'd like to see you do. Still keep working hard at school, but in three years you could start doing the things you love. Also, you're still very young so there's a lot of time. And you'll definitely learn a lot in three years.

3\. This is actually not as bad as you may think but you can just do what they say and you'll still be out in three years. You could always work on the stuff you want then. Don't automatically discount this idea.

These are just off the top of my head. I'm sure if you think about it pragmatically you'll come up with some good ideas to take the weight off your head. Take it easy.

</comment><comment><USER5> I had the same problem growing up. I would suggest explaining your case to your parents, showing them your plans or your work would definitely bolster your chances of them being on your side and understand. It is probable that they simply don't know what you do and always assume that you aren't doing something productive, maybe going through the route of getting a teacher on your side and helping you out may be really helpful too.

<comment><USER6> >I had the same problem growing up.

What was your parents' worry or objection? It would be interesting to know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a couple of ideas: first, have your parents buy you a programming tutor. This will validate your time and actually might benefit you a lot (if you find the right one).

Second, read some biographies of famous programmers and entrepreneurs. You'll probably enjoy that and you might be able to show your parents that you're doing something that other successful people do.

Next, find some way to compete or have your skills verified. Enter hackathons, for instance.

And like many commenters have said, make something and show them. Are you a toddler playing with dry pasta all day? That's not good. Are you making macaroni necklaces for mom? She'd like that.

Also, as a software engineer I don't even think about "hours spent on the computer". If you are serious about computers, eliminate that thought from your brain. It's a tool as indispensable to me as a pen would have been to a writer. I work on it as much as I need to. Some weeks that's 0 hours, some weeks that's 100.

Also, remember this struggle and write about it for your college essay. Good stuff.

</comment><comment><USER8> Talking to your parents and showing that what you are doing is likely to be beneficial. Probably you can shows the codes posted at github and then show where the coder is working--running their own show or running the show at some big company etc. If they see that what you are doing is what guys much older to you are doing and is likely to help you, probably your problem may get solved.

</comment><comment><USER9> Take some online classes on programming! There are plenty of free classes you can take online now through Coursera, edX, or Udacity. The classes are offered for the benefit of the students more than anything else, but they do offer certificates (the vast majority of them at least) of completion as well as paced assignments which are graded. This may be more along the lines of traditional proof that you are being productive that your parents are looking for. Additionally, if they are worried about you going to college, most colleges have a process by which you can take an exam for credit for courses which you purport to already be knowledgeable in. It's _possible_ that if you learn the material from an online course, you could end up translating that knowledge to credit wherever you go to school. If you make this argument to your parents, you may be able to continue learning what you're interested, furthering your education, and appeasing them all at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have kids and don't mind if they use the computer for long periods of time just as long as they are creating and not just consuming. Creating a website and learning to code is good. Playing games all day, not so good. Some games like Minecraft can be creative and you can learn a lot from them, but your still just playing a game and not impacting the world.

So try to tell your parents this is your creative outlet. And you are not just consuming crap, but creating things that will impact people's lives. Also if you continue down this path your probably going to make some serious cash either with your own idea or helping to build something amazing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Show them something. Build something with your knowledge and show them to prove that you're not spending time. Build some educational website or something like this, then you're parents will be able to see that you're actually doing something when you 'spend' time with computer.

Grades are the way for your parents to see that you're good at school, if you build something with computer that would be the way for them to see that you're not spending time.

</comment><comment><USER12> Have you tried to just show them what your working on and explain it? Show them your doing something productive, and learning in the process and not just screwing around.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why not to make a simple, useful CRUD app for your parents to show then that what actually you do ??

</comment><comment><USER14> It looks Luke you are hiding your work. If you can't show it to your parents how can you show it to the world. If you are passionate about what you do, don't be afraid to share it. They either like it or they don't no other options

</comment><comment><USER15> A lot of parents see many of the habits of younger generations as antisocial.

Try to get them to understand how you're connecting with the world and people, not avoiding the 'real world' (whatever that means) and people.

</comment><comment><USER16> Try to talk to them. Explain what are your goals, show them that you're not a lazy kid who uses the computer only for recreational activities. Show them examples of other "kids" who started young and did great things.

</comment><comment><USER6> Getting so absorbed in the computer that you are late for dinner would be a bad move. But you seem like a very sharp 15-year-old, so you probably already know that.

</comment><comment><USER17> You could go to a job boards to show the technologies your learning are marketable for getting a job.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think what you wrote is a terrific start, if you can share it with them in what you think is a safe manner. For example, while _we_ know what Hacker News is, would seeing that name at the top of this page scare them before they took the time to learn the context (or even read what you wrote)?

I'd be quite happy if I had a 15 year old son with such an interest and who could express it so well. And who also apparently has a healthy social life and life beyond just programming.

I wish some of the "big names" on here would make a comment. Your parents might "get it" a bit more if they saw pg, "the creator" of Gmail, and the like speaking up with an encouraging word.

Wishing you luck, in any event. And, difficult as it may be, convincing your parents may well be good practice for making effective arguments, on many and varied topics, in the future.

As an alternative, get a few appropriate sound tracks and them you're really into creating electronic music? ;-)

\--

P.S. What about buying a printed copy of pg's book, "Hackers and Painters", and seeing whether you can get your parents to read it?

The essays its based on are available individually, here. (The book is, as I understand it, a subset of these.)

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

</comment><comment><USER19> Learning to play an instrument is fine.

Learning to play an instrument in order to "change the world" and become the #1 rock star is worrying.

There are other factors involved, lots of people want to be rock stars, so there is a lot of competition, and many of them are very mean people who don't fight fair.

There are lots of people who wanted to become rock stars but didn't make it or aren't smart enough, and they will be jealous and try and stop you. They don't care how hard you are trying. They will even try to steal it if you succeed.

You CAN do it, but it will probably take ten or twenty years or more and be much, much, much harder than you think.

You will eventually have to become very obsessed with programming and spend 12 hours every day doing it, just like a rock star or basketball star spends all day practicing. You won't have any friends or girlfriend or normal life.

If you don't succeed, you will become mean too, and have no choice but to work for somebody else like a slave, even though you worked so hard.

That's probably what your parents worry about.

It's up to you. Are you the smartest? Are you willing to work the hardest, harder than anybody, for 20 years? Are you willing to give up your entire future?

That's what it will take to "change the world," and in reality, the world won't change very much no matter what you do. Even Steve Jobs only really gave people new cellphones, and he spent his whole life trying that hard, and died very young because of it.

<comment><USER20> I disagree. OP is fifteen. I was staggeringly ambitious when I was fifteen, and although I didn't achieve everything I was aiming for, I'm super-glad I was.

It is easy to "change the world". Next time you're walking on the sidewalk, and see a piece of trash, stoop and pick it up. _Presto_ : you've made the world a better place.

The question is how much, but certainly saying that OP "won't have any friends or girlfriend or normal life" _IS COMPLETELY WRONG_. Most very successful people I know have satisfying personal lives.

I dissent from the parent. I would suggest you not ask yourself "Are you willing to work harder than anybody, for 20 years?", or indeed to compare yourself to others at all. The question I would invite you to ask yourself, which it sounds like you are doing already, is "What is something interesting and helpful I could learn?"

Good luck to you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Please don't tell my parents I'm a programmer.

They think I'm a piano player at a brothel.

<comment><USER22> Reference to an old russian joke?</comment></comment>


Adobe Flash Is Doomed, Says Firefox VP - <AUTHOR> http://www.minyanville.com/dailyfeed/adobe-flash-is-doomed-says/

<comment><USER2> That has been the consensus of a lot of developers for about a year now. No Apple support hurts. However, the real reason is that the modern browsers lessen the need for Flash. Chrome, IE9, and Firefox all competing are going to cause rapid improvements in the traditional experience. All have great releases this month, for example. I'm sure Flash will be around for a few more years. How quickly it goes depends on the mobile market, IMHO. If Android phones and tablets run Flash well, it will survive a bit longer.</comment>


Neutrinos from CERN to Gran Sasso Respect Cosmic Speed Limit - <AUTHOR> http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR19.11E.html

<comment><USER2> I hope someday they can explain why 186282 miles per second is the limit in the first place.

<comment><USER3> c is 299,792,458 m/s only because the meter is so defined; it makes just as much or more sense to say that the speed of light is 1, and this is where we get the Planck units.

From this perspective, it becomes obvious that the question, "Why is the speed of light one unit length per unit time?" is an absurd one. There is no other alternative.

<comment><USER4> The question isn't absurd from a lay persons point of view and the explanation falls short.

What Cushman means is a number like Pi is always 3.14159265, to us or to hypothetical aliens. Whereas the speed of light can be just effectively represented as 299,792,458 or 1 depending on the units you use.

What you are effectively asking about ck2 is calculation of dimensionless physical constants which are of ratios of like-dimensioned physical constants, for example the fine structure constant. These could in theory be calculated one day without using experimentally derived values . . . maybe.

The wikipedia page on the physical constants has a good run down on this: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_constant#Dimensional_a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_constant#Dimensional_and_dimensionless_physical_constants)

As does: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_physical_constant>

<comment><USER5> > _like Pi is always 3.14159265, to us or to hypothetical aliens._

Unless you're counting in base Pi, then Pi is 10.

Pi is only 3.14... in base 10. Just like the c is ~2.99 * 10^ 6 m/s because we define a meter that way.

<comment><USER4> You are confusing units and numeral systems. Pi is always Pi no matter how you count whereas c is dependent on how you measure time and space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The original generated lots of discussion 8 months ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3029922>

</comment><comment><USER7> _"Although this result isn't as exciting as some would have liked," said Bertolucci, "it is what we all expected deep down. The story captured the public imagination, and has given people the opportunity to see the scientific method in action – an unexpected result was put up for scrutiny, thoroughly investigated and resolved in part thanks to collaboration between normally competing experiments. That's how science moves forward."_

Couldn't agree more. Whilst there has been a lot of criticism from the science community it was wonderful to experience a bit of drama and excitement.

God knows everyone is looking for something/anything hopeful to distract from the endless bad news.

<comment><USER8> Really? Has there been that much criticism from the science community? I though everyone with respectable opinions thought it was handled exactly like proper scientists should have handled it.

OPERA had unexpected results contradicting the status quo of our understanding of fundamental physics. They did everything they could to determine and correct and calibrate possible errors. They published the results and methodology in hopes that their peers could either help them understand what went wrong, or confirm it. An they did (the former).

I saw it as the science community at its finest. Sure, there was a lot of skepticism and disbelief in the accuracy/correctness, but that is part of the game. You don't take things at face value, and you don't ignore unexpected results.

\-----

So, I don't have any objection to what you wrote, but, is my impression wrong?

<comment><USER9> There has been enough criticism from scientific community at large and more importantly from within the OPERA collaboration that their spokespeople resigned from their position.

Not much of that criticism coming from respectable scientists made it to mainstream media, though. I presume that is because they did not want to show a "holier than thou" attitude openly. But internally a lot of people thought "they must have done something wrong" and after they found the error "what were they thinking?".

I think your impression is wrong, but very understandable unless you interacted with people offering criticism directly or semi-directly through one or two persons.

<comment><USER10> While I don't disagree with your characterization of the criticism, it was more complex than just "people within the scientific community were critical and people outside thought they did the right thing in opening up the data and methodology to criticism when they could not identify a problem in the initial troubleshooting."

A large part of the community took a "wait and see" approach that was (obviously) skeptical of the results.

Because of the hype associated with the event, it's not surprising that people would end up resigning whether or not they really did anything wrong. I can't say that I have enough of a background to know if they should have resigned or not, but I certainly wouldn't use the fact that they resigned as conclusive proof that whatever was done wrong was handled incorrectly as opposed to a reasonable error.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Startup School 2018 – Curriculum - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-2018-curriculum/ <comment><USER2> Really great news that this program is getting more effort poured into it. Startup School could be orders of magnitude bigger and more important than YC itself. It could be the first meritocratic platform for startup opportunity.

Instead of trying to predict success based on the seeds of an idea and a brief interview, any startup could enter the program and those that prove themselves could move up a ladder that provides more and more opportunity.

The application still asks about educational background, which effectively just a way of asking about familial wealth, but it still seems like a major improvement over existing avenues.

I predict that in the future YC will be viewed as the "do things that don't scale" early effort and Startup School will become the massively world- changing product that results.

</comment><comment><USER3> For those that took part in previous years, would this be suitable for those of us running (or thinking of starting..) bootstrapped startups, as solo- entrepreneurs?

I ask because the curriculum looks great, but wondered if the mentoring might be a little more focused towards the more traditional startups looking to progress to VC funding, rather than those of us that are taking things a little slower on our own.

<comment><USER4> We're bootstrapped, and we did it last year. I wrote about our experience: [https://canny.io/blog/what-youll-get-out-of-y-combinators- st...](https://canny.io/blog/what-youll-get-out-of-y-combinators-startup- school/)

I would guess that this is YC's version of freemium. They're giving away a slimmed down version of their product for free, to drive brand awareness / resonance, and attract more qualified leads to their paid (7%) program.

You might not be interested in YC proper, but there's still plenty of great advice, that will probably translate into you having a more successful startup.

<comment><USER5> It is amazing how successful YC has been. Is there another well known accelerator that has close to YC's total valuation of startups?

Also it baffles me that YC has close to 1000 startups that have gone through them but only one "Dropbox" has IPO'd.

I get the feeling that YC's best days are ahead when things they invested in a decade ago will pay off huge returns.

<comment><USER6> > I get the feeling that YC's best days are ahead when things they invested in > a decade ago will pay off huge returns.

Yes. It takes a good 10 years to build / IPO a company. Also they've funded a bunch of companies outside the US / Europe region where IPO markets are not as friendly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When you're in YC they tell you that a huge part of being a successful founder is "managing your psychology." I wish they would elevate that to a first-class concept in their startup education.

<comment><USER8> We did! The session taught by Daniel Gross: "Life as a Founder" will largely be focused on this.

<comment><USER9> Do cofounders often have a chaotic relationship secretly, or is it mostly positive?

It's always positive outwardly, of course, but I'm asking about the side that people rarely see. It's hard to know what's normal and what's not. And that's a problem when you're trying to evaluate whether someone is a good fit as a cofounder.

Consider Jamie and Adam from mythbusters. They can't stand each other. But when they work together, things get done. Are most cofounders like that, or is that the exception rather than the rule?

<comment><USER10> There's no clean cut answer here. It's all over the spectrum. Some founders get along great and some don't get along well. Obviously the better you and your cofounders get along, the higher your probability of success. I've seen plenty of bad cofounder dynamics kill companies, irrespective of the business fundamentals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Startup School Help! I submitted the application with no content by mistake a few weeks ago. I sent an e-mail to email@example.com requesting that it be reset but have not received any reply. When I try to apply again I receive the following message: "Thank you for applying to Startup School! We will let you know whether you're accepted by August 20th, 2018." with no chance to edit the application form.

<comment><USER12> Hey, check the settings link in the menu. The application is still editable. In addition, the entry fields seem to have increased in length recently, so perhaps a good idea to review your submission even if it was submitted properly last time.

<comment><USER13> > In addition, the entry fields seem to have increased in length recently,

What are the new limits? I still seem to be limited to the length when I signed up on the first day.

201 characters for "What is your company going to make?" and 252 characters for "Why did you pick this to work on?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> On the podcast they encouraged people to take the classes remotely and not go out of their way to attend in person. More YC companies are increasingly remote and so is YC itself.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's awesome that the curriculum is newly created for this term AND that the old curriculum is logged in the library page.

<comment><USER16> I'm pretty excited, I hope there is a way to 'meet people'. I hate to say, but random people from reddit I added on instagram/facebook are some of my most interesting and beneficial social connections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Notably, Paul Graham is listed on the curriculum! Is this going to be pg's first appearance in years?

<comment><USER18> What has @pg been up to recently? I remember the good old days when he was semi-invisible moding on hn. My participation has gone down due to other priorities but it seems that his spirit is well continued here and the new mods are excellent at keeping drama out and making hn stay true to its core.

<comment><USER17> My impression was that he had semi-retired to spend time with his family (and good for him! he certainly deserves it after founding YC)

That being said, I've certainly missed pg essays as of late...

<comment><USER19> Though I can't be sure, I think a big reason for his retirement had to do with the Two Minutes Hate he was subjected to at the hands of the Internet Outrage Machine. PG has always had a knack for being misunderstood, and I think disappearing from the spotlight was his way of making sure that problem didn't hurt YC.

Unfortunately for you and me, that means no more great essays. It's kind of funny because, in retrospect, "What You Can't Say" almost prophesied how this all went down; his only mistake was not seeing the storm coming.

<comment><USER9> I remain hopeful that the outrage machine will fizzle itself out. The key is to make sure resources are distributed as widely as possible, but without eliminating the concept of private ownership. When people want for nothing, there's not much to be mad about.

... If only. Even as I write the words, they ring hollow. Hate may be with us forever. But one cure is time: it's easier to look back and see how ridiculous it was in the moment. It always is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm really curious how YC will choose which companies get $10k. They don't mention this anywhere.

I'd guess it's probably a combination of which teams are most promising and need the money the most.

<comment><USER20> They touch on this in the latest podcast. The $10k grants are an experiment to try and increase the completion rate of the program. They assign you with advisors who track your progress.

[https://blog.ycombinator.com/geoff-ralston-and-adora- cheung-...](https://blog.ycombinator.com/geoff-ralston-and-adora-cheung- discuss-startup-school)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There is also podcast about discussion of startupschool at [https://blog.ycombinator.com/geoff-ralston-and-adora- cheung-...](https://blog.ycombinator.com/geoff-ralston-and-adora-cheung- discuss-startup-school/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Hey. So I understand correctly that this isn't for someone like me, right? Someone who just wants some knowledge from the startup world, but doesn't want to create his/her own startup. Right? Or can I just come and listen?

<comment><USER23> You can audit the course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Are graduates of Startup school 2017 encouraged to apply again?

<comment><USER25> Yep!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I signed up for startup school, but I can't seem to find any description of the commitment it is... What does it mean to "complete" it?

<comment><USER27> From the "About" page[1]:

> _You must submit at least 9 out of your 10 weekly updates and attend 9 out > of 10 group office hour sessions._

1: [https://www.startupschool.org/about](https://www.startupschool.org/about)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anyone have an opinion if this curriculum would be useful for people currently working at a startup or wanting to do intrapreneurship?

<comment><USER29> I'm of the opinion that all knowledge is helpful. If you work at a startup, understanding the bigger picture of how it operates, where it fits in the market, and what all the roles and responsibilities for success may be can only help you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What is in it for YC to give away a million dollars for nothing in return?

<comment><USER31> Being _the_ place for startups is potentially worth billions. This branding is important to get mindshare and to attract talented teams and startups. A million is nothing compared to this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Thanks! This is amazing!

</comment><comment><USER33> Thanks YC!

</comment><comment><USER34> Thanks YC for doing this.

>100 companies who complete the course will also receive $10K.

Depending on your location and what position you are in your career , Funding can be a big issue.

This small grant can be a big help to start a business , but 100 companies is quiet limited to be honest.

<comment><USER35> They're giving a million dollars to companies and asking for no equity in return and you're giving them crap for it? Unbelievable.

<comment><USER34> > you're giving them crap for it

Wait , what ? My comment started by "Thanks" that's a weird interpretation really...

If you have 1000 companies following the course that's like 10% chance of getting funding, regardless of whether or not there is an equity that's the point.

<comment><USER36> they are giving away 1,000,000 dollars.. just giving it away. plus tons of content. did you read the article?

<comment><USER37> Doubtful that it is randomly given in a lottery sense - they likely are granting this to keep promising teams going...

<comment><USER38> In return for... 0% equity!

<comment><USER37> Yeah, which is why it is only 10K -- and not the 100K like was stated earlier by someone - if it were the 100K then it would be very similar to a typical YC round of funding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> And nothing about discussing the mental, emotional and psychological pressures and stresses placed on entrepreneurs.. like that fact that the majority of entrepreneurs are likely going to lose their partners and possibly irreparably damage their friendships...

YCombinator isn't what it used to be. Shame

<comment><USER40> As per other comment, this one seems to be about it: _" Daniel Gross (YC) – Life as a Founder"_

<comment><USER39> One "kind-of-on-subject" talk, tacked on right at the end of the whole curriculum, I can really feel the deep understanding and empathy. I feel so sorry for whoever believes this curriculum is about anything other than alumni YCombi-Fanbois...

<comment><USER40> I believe.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Automattic develops software for over 75M websites - <AUTHOR> https://www.software-engineering-unlocked.com/episode-4-leif-singer/ <comment><USER2> Some more information on how Automattic hires:

\- [https://automattic.com/work-with-us/how-we-hire- developers/](https://automattic.com/work-with-us/how-we-hire-developers/)

\- [https://www.andyserong.com/2019/07/25/switching-jobs-and- app...](https://www.andyserong.com/2019/07/25/switching-jobs-and-applying-for- automattic/)

\- [https://danq.me/2019/08/30/automattic-00/](https://danq.me/2019/08/30/automattic-00/)

<comment><USER3> That was extremely interesting, thanks for the pointers.

There are really so many ways to conduct "hiring", the process of onboarding someone new into a group; and this serves as impeccable illustration that if you are willing to innovate in that regard, we can do so much more and so much better today than just 10-20 years ago (and ever before).

The process of Automattic makes you want to work with them if only because they seem to have a fantastic culture, really play the game at a higher level on the 'human' part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > If that works out well, then, you are invited to do a trial, where you work > alongside an Automatic team for a period of 1-3 months for ~10 hours per > week. This trial is paid with 25 Dollars per hour.

$25/hour for a professional software developer is kind of insulting. Particularly so if Automattic is looking the same tier of talent as the top tech companies.

<comment><USER5> Keep in mind that Automattic is a remote company.

Maybe $25 per hour won't attract local talent from silicon valley, but there's a huge global market of talented engineers that would happily apply to work remote at a company like Automattic.

<comment><USER6> I don't know any developer who is excited to work for less than $40k/yr on the absolute lowest, closer to $60k/yr.

Let me do the math..

Oh wow, I didn't realize that $60k/yr is $28/hr. I guess this does make sense after all...

<comment><USER7> >I don't know any developer who is excited to work for less than $40k/yr on the absolute lowest

In my country, $40k/year is a super high salary, even the average senior developer wouldn't make that much.

<comment><USER8> This can be a problem with remote working. It's fine if you live where accommodation is cheap but if you're earning the same money living in a metropolis it doesn't add up.

<comment><USER9> But the companies in the metropolis either have to pay good wages relative to the metropolis or hire remote. This won't really be a problem until/unless we hit a tipping point in the number of companies hiring remote and I predict that will take decades (unless something drastic happens).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This podcast is very hard to listen to. The way that both people talk, the naiveness of the host....it sounds like Im listening to an infomercial for tech jobs.

I realize that English isn't the native language of either speaker.

</comment><comment><USER11> > If that works out well, then, you are invited to do a trial, where you work > alongside an Automatic team for a period of 1-3 months for ~10 hours per > week. This trial is paid with 25 Dollars per hou

How are you supposed to live/support a family on $1,100 a month for 1-3 months? Would be a hard pass for me if I was looking.

<comment><USER12> What a joke. Work overtime on top of my job for $25/hr and no benefits?

Fact is the companies that are the most open on HN about compensation pay the least (like Gitlab and Buffer).

My theory is that instead of paying more they simply cast a wide net via hiring. If the net's large enough you'll find enough people willing to be paid low rates.

You know who doesn't talk about salary? Companies that pay well and hire devs who know what they're worth.

<comment><USER13> I don't want folks to get too hung up on the 25/hr number, it's not meant to be a negotiation or imply a salary — in fact it's identical for every role at the company, whether you're doing a trial project in support, engineering, or to be our new CFO. At the time when we introduced it other companies were having candidates invest a lot of time to get hired with zero compensation, which didn't seem fair and we wanted to shift that. You can also compare 10-20 hours of a remote trial to the time spent flying to and from a city, being there for a day, and doing lots of on-site work and interviews.

<comment><USER14> I like it, especially that you have that as the trial salary for all positions (seems like a good shared experience).

If someone is optimizing to maximize a few weeks of trial pay, probably not the best fit.

Also, keep in mind that $25/hour is almost double the median wage of the USA. The software world is a bubble right now. By all means, I advocate to take advantage of that and save up, but don't get angry when a company's wages aren't 10x that of a non-software role. Sure, you can make a lot more money going to a company that earns a lot of money (generally via exploitation of unfair intellectual monopoly laws) while creating little surplus value for the world, or you can join a company like Wordpress that creates far more value for the world than they capture.

<comment><USER15> I've been a software developer since 1999. (before then I was a half developer/half operator for 3 years while going to graduate school). I have never made less than $25 hour.

So if there is a "bubble" it's been going for two decades for me - and this is in Atlanta.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the data point. I also have been a programmer since 2008 or so and don't think I've ever made that either. But I also have done a lot of unpaid programming interviews and/or take home assignments. And also generally have worked at places with strict Intellectual Monopoly assignment agreements. So that's why I think this particular offer isn't so bad.

<comment><USER15> $45K was the average going salary in 1999 for 2-3 years of experience in Atlanta as your bog standard corporate developer. The average salary for a college graduate now is $50K ([https://www.thebalance.com/college-graduate- salaries-expecta...](https://www.thebalance.com/college-graduate-salaries- expectations-vs-reality-4142305))

<comment><USER16> 50k seems really low for new grads today even in Atlanta.

<comment><USER15> I conflated two numbers. Everyone was mentioning that $25 is twice the average wage in America (which is a little off). If you use what I feel is a more accurate baseline - the average wage of a college grad in any area across the country. $50K is a better number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Side point but...

"In this episode, I talk to Leif Singer, an engineer at the fully remote company

Why some of the big tech is still not very remote friendly like FB, Google, Apple etc.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's php right?

<comment><USER19> WordPress is written in PHP, but Automattic (the company that develops WordPress) has other products that are written in other languages.

<comment><USER20> The new editing interface (Gutenberg) has been written in react and there are rumours about more of the backend being rewritten in it too.

edit: I meant more of the admin area, sorry.

<comment><USER21> The backend being rewritten in React? Maybe I'm missing something but I don't think that's at all correct...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why do I feel like this is the most extreme form of clickbait? Imagine vi or vim was marketed by how many workstations used it for modifications.

<comment><USER23> Isn't "clickbait" sensationalistic? In this case, the title and content strike me as boringly factual.

<comment><USER24> Software that works with 75M users? Oh wow I gotta click on this!

<comment><USER25> That scale is not even on the extreme end of articles we are privy to these days.

Do you want titles like "How Automattic develops software for websites"? Boring.

<comment><USER26> How Automattic develops Wordpress would have been ok :-)

<comment><USER27> Maybe, but not everyone knows that Automattic is the core team behind Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>