How to Respond to Someone Quitting - <AUTHOR> http://www.alphadevx.com/a/521-How-to-respond-to-someone-quitting <comment><USER2> Coming from an emotional angle highlights the fact that teams are family style groups that spend most of their waking days together, which is nice in a way. Having said that - It feels that even after many of these conclusions in this article are made, a lot of the offboarding process is still tangled up with that emotion - Which isn't beneficial for any party.

> Never take them back

I have examples of team members returning once or even twice and adding great value each time (both permanent and contract). Some examples of people returning and spending 4+ (and counting) years in a new or the same position. "You are welcome back any time" is uttered many times to departing team members. They are welcomed back with open arms. (re)Onboarding is a breeze. If neither party burns bridges and has a graceful transition, then the relationship can be picked up again later.

> should respond to this unwelcome news

Perhaps it doesn't need to be viewed as 'unwelcome news', and instead viewed more pragmatically. It's all part of the Personnel lifecycle. Personal Life > Work Life... That employee shouldn't view your organization as their highest priority. A business owner has a responsibility to help someone transition out of the firm. If they're leaving, it's for a reason. Good luck to them. Perhaps there is something that the business can do to facilitate. That person has provided value over their tenure - And if not, then that's just data for the business to improve it's employment processes (role design, forecasting, responsibility assignment, recruitment, interviewing, contract finance).

> "Do an exit interview...If your company has a dedicated HR team, they will > have this baked into their process

I think this touches on the best takeaway - The process should be codified (not just the exit interview). An employee shouldn't have to drive this, and it shouldn't be made difficult for them. They shouldn't have to ask for pay slips, final payments, references etc. - The business should ideally have done this all proactively. This is all part of employee welfare, and even if the employee is leaving they are still owed that welfare.

When a team member triggers a transition (inter or intra organization) by handing in their notice or request for transfer, a templated job should immediately be created in the business's system with tasks for

\- handovers

\- exit interview

\- contract end procedures

\- recruitment / forecasting triggers

\- A prompt, nice, diplomatic email to the business (or business unit) that says 'J Smith is leaving' (without giving away personal information), and 'thanks for what they have done' (a genuine message of thanks).

It's not taking the heart away from the team/process by automating this, it's just ensuring that a proactive checklist is generated for due diligence in offboarding and replacing the team member. And it's about abstracting this away from emotion and ad hoc reaction, and doing right by people.

If the news catches you unaware, it may indicate that there is room for improving team communication (depending on the reason for leaving). In plenty of close-knit organizations, team members feel comfortable discussing their discontent with their line managers (whether it's salary related or otherwise). And those line managers then help the employee to resolve them (often by changing role in the team/org, or helping them adjust their employee roadmap/development path), or help them transition away (with more notice in which to recruit). On occassion, businesses have actually lined up the employee's next job for them.

<comment><USER3> > > should respond to this unwelcome news > > Perhaps it doesn't need to be > viewed as 'unwelcome news', and instead viewed more pragmatically. It's all > part of the Personnel lifecycle.

I couldn't agree more! I would be - and have been - excited to hear about her or his plans after leaving the team. People do not always leave because of issues and/or frustrations.</comment></comment>


One line of node.js turns RSS to JSON - <AUTHOR> http://h3manth.com/content/rss-json-using-nodejs <comment><USER2> And that one line calls out to a library which does all the work.

Why should this be a module? It's absurd.

</comment><comment><USER3> What's NEWs on one line of calling a library? Titling crap.</comment>


Building Better Writers with Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/espark-engineering-blog/students-in-school-today-will-be-graduating-into-a-world-in-which-written-communication-is-more-4b94a21fac61 <comment><USER2> If this were around when I was a student, I would have tuned my writing to work for machines but be as incomprehensible/stupid to human readers as possible.</comment>


Ask HN: How much do you spend per month? - <AUTHOR> I am a software developer in London (UK) and spend GBP 7,200/month for a family of 4 (my wife, two children and myself).
This seems ridiculously high to me. However, this is after looking carefully at expenses, and reducing as much as possible.
This does NOT include housing costs, as I own my flat. This includes paying GBP 2,200/ month for a nanny and GBP 800 for groceries.
We are trying to reduce our expenses as much as possible, but seem unable to do lower than that. We've bought a cheap second hand car, don't go to the restaurant any more.
I've been dreaming about Early retirement, Financial independence. However, this spending habit seems way too high.
I'd like to get an objective view on where my spending habits lie on the spectrum. So here's my question: please let me know which city/country you live in, how many people in your household, and how much money you spend per month or per year. <comment><USER2> So after housing, childcare and food, you're spending £4,200/month? Is this a troll? I'm not sure you've tried hard enough to reduce expenses. That is very high for someone who wants early retirement. It'd be much quicker if you enlightened us with what you spend it on.

And which spectrum are you referring to? People who earn your salaries?

A couple in London, both working full time, in good average jobs in London may net around £5,500 month total (£50k/year each, 10% pension contributions). Their mortgage might be £800-1700. Childcare, as you know. Council tax and utilities might be another £250-400, groceries £200-600. £200-400 on public transport. Many families are lucky if they have £1,500 left after all normal expenses.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your answer. No, this is not a troll unfortunately. We have about GBP 900/ month of miscellaneous stuff that we can't classify in any regular category. We have about GBP 500/ month of medical expenses that are not covered by the insurance.

<comment><USER2> I don't mean to pry, but I'm confused about your medical bills and why you have huge regular medical bills not covered by the NHS? I admit I'm somewhat ignorant of NHS eligibility for non-citizens.</comment></comment></comment>


Classic: about so called web apps - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20120509105723/http://teddziuba.com/2008/09/a-web-os-are-you-dense.html <comment><USER2> > The "Web Operating System" just highlights how much journalists don't know > about computers.

And how hard it is to predict the future of IT. Google was a nobody back then, and now they're a goliath that people can't get away from.</comment>


Ask HN: current vernacular for "Air Time" - <AUTHOR>

This is unusual, but I was doing a presentation today to Year 7s (age 11 to 12) and mentioned "Air Time." This got an unexpectedly raucous repsonse, so it obviously now means something. These days one must "flip" a coin and not "toss" it - so what is "Air Time" that I must avoid that?<p>Thanks. <comment><USER2> <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=air+time>

2\. air time: the time you spend sexually with women or vice versa

I'm getting old. I would have had no idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah. They may have meant the first version - being "blanked" - but clearly I need to take this into consideration.

Sadly.

Still, that's the way the world goes.</comment></comment>


Was 2015 Boston's worst winter yet? - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/bletham/www/winter2015.html <comment><USER2> The post ends with: "It actually was a once-in-a-century winter, which is good news for Boston, because it means we probably won't see another winter like this in our lifetime."

This may or may not be true, depending on how much climate change affects our environment during our lifetime.

<comment><USER3> So very true, in the next glacial period Boston will, no doubt, continuously be under snow and ice.

I find the national media's enthusiasm for making weather (not climate change, just weather) "news" rather sad.

<comment> at-fates-hands We have a local sports talk personality who likes to call them "weather terrorists" and makes fun of all the dire forecasts.

Like the Monday we were supposed to get a foot of snow overnight that would cripple the city, make your commute hell and warned to stay inside and not venture outside unless you absolutely had to. Not only did we only get an inch, the temp came up to a balmy 35, the sun came out and by 1pm, the new snow had already totally melted.

<comment><USER3> I like that, weather terrorists! It is shorter than radical extremist meteorologists (a play on radical extremist theologians)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Snowfall aside, I think most New Englanders will still relate to 1978 as a more severe winter given the number of fatalities.

<comment><USER5> The Blizzard of 78 caught people almost totally by surprise. It also had some of the same snow accumulation from multiple storms issue that this year had.

For years, just about everyone at least knew a friend of a friend who got stuck on Route 128 and had to be evacuated or got stuck at their office for multiple days. As a result, people in the Boston area were really paranoid about heading home if there was a storm coming. Some I know said to me once that they had never seen any northern city where people were so anxious to get going when it started snowing.

(I was in Cambridge in 78 but at school with no car so it was pretty much just a memorable and fun experience.)

<comment><USER6> > I was in Cambridge in 78 but at school with no car so it was pretty much > just a memorable and fun experience

All I remember were the igloos everywhere in the streets of Cambridge(port), lit by candles it was a wonderland...one of my earliest memories.

Have been away for a long time, but talking to older family about '78 they say it was a party since the city shutdown for a week, no work, just have fun ;-), whereas the current winter has been more of an ongoing slog with storm after storm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Keep in mind that the techniques used to measure snowfall have changed over time. Modern measurements are inflated as compared to older ones.

[https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/perspective/14009/snowfall-m...](https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/perspective/14009/snowfall- measurement-flaky-history)

</comment><comment><USER8> Anyone can handle the bottom 90% of snow storms that they see. I am fine with Boston having trouble this year just like I am not surprised when things close for a few days in North Carolina for 6" of snow. Even mighty Watertown NY had trouble a few times when I lived there, and those people are good at dealing with it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I guess saying "the worst in the history of the city" is less impressive for American cities, since they have not existed for very long... :)

At least we still do better than in the xkcd "Ice Sheets" comic ([http://xkcd.com/1225/](http://xkcd.com/1225/)).

<comment><USER10> If another ice age like that comes early, we'd better hope we really know how to kick anthropogenic global warming into high gear.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, an ice age would be far worse than anything predicted for AGW.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there a place I can look up the L-score for an arbitrary winter in an arbitrary city?

</comment><comment><USER13> Does this take in account global warming?

<comment><USER14> How would one do that?

<comment><USER15> "What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming"

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy- environment/wp/201...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy- environment/wp/2015/02/10/what-the-massive-snowfall-in-boston-tells-us-about- global-warming/)

"Sea surface temperatures off the coast of New England right now are at record levels, 11.5C (21F) warmer than normal in some locations," says Penn State climate researcher Michael Mann. "There is [a] direct relationship between the surface warmth of the ocean and the amount of moisture in the air. What that means is that this storm will be feeding off these very warm seas, producing very large amounts of snow as spiraling winds of the storm squeeze that moisture out of the air, cool, it, and deposit it as snow inland."

<comment><USER14> This link seems to imply that the record snowfall was caused by global warming. That wasn't the question. The question was, _how_ could the writer of TFA have changed his analysis of snowfall records to "account" in some fashion for global warming? E.g., should old, theoretically pre-warming, records be scaled down, or scaled up, or is there some other adjustment to be made?

<comment><USER16> Nobody knows. The climate is intensely non-linear, and as such can only be predicted by models that are comparable in complexity to those for turbulent flow.

This is not to say that anthropogenic climate change is not real--there is plenty of evidence for it--but that climate models in their current state, and in almost any plausible state to come, are not up to the task of addressing these sorts of relatively short-term variations.

Even saying things that are probably true, like "Climate change will result in more extreme weather events because the heat engine of the climate will have more power behind it and it is being progressively pushed out of the mid-20th- century near-equilibrium" doesn't tell us anything about specific types of climate events. Maybe it'll result in more and heavier snowfall. Maybe it'll result in more severe hurricanes. A hundred years from now we'll have the data to look at the distributions so we can tell. Today, we are largely in the dark.

Someone here quoted Michael Mann saying that high sea-surface temperatures were responsible for more moisture in the air resulting in higher snowfall. Well and good, but if New England experienced a series of unusually dry winters we'd be pointing to high sea-surface temperatures changing wind patterns resulting in drier air over the region, and so on. Almost any weather event is capable of a nice linear-sounding "explanation", but weather prediction is still terrible, which tells you how seriously those "explanations" should be taken.

<comment><USER17> One thing's for certain, we're going to live in interesting time (the bad kind). A prediction a few decades ago was that if the Gulf Stream stopped, European weather would look much more like America's.

Latitude-wise, Boston is about halfway between Rome and Florence, very slightly south of Dubrovnik (which is used as the sets for Game of Thrones' King's Landing and Qarth), Liverpool is a dead ringer for Edmonton.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The real problem was not having any melting so it just kept piling up. Two way streets become one way and must be negotiated in situ, can't see around corners etc.

<comment><USER19> You're not kidding. I (oddly) graph the temp daily, and feb had about 3 days where it broke freezing.

A fun city game: car or just snow mound?

The public transit didn't work, compounding the problem. My three mile commute turned into 1.5 hr nightmare.

Finally Massachusetts is having a conversation about public transit. Fingers crossed they'll fix it. Maybe in time for the Olympics!

<comment><USER20> I moved to the Boston area from Minneapolis... I miss the warmer, less snowy weather.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> kuni-toko-tachi Considering that records only go back a few hundred years, all a headline like this does is sell digital newsprint. It is absolutely useless and has nothing to do with the hoax of global warming. It is a data point with little meaning and only slight newsworthyness.</comment>


The BLACKHOLE Storage Engine - <AUTHOR> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/blackhole-storage-engine.html

<comment><USER2> That looks like a great way to increase performance, and it still manages to keep all the reliability and accuracy of the standard storage engines :O</comment>


Emacs visual cheat sheet - <AUTHOR> http://stevenchan.us/publications/emacs

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the great link - I'm just switching over to Emacs (from the LispWorks IDE) right now - the timing is perfect :)</comment>


One cost engineers and product managers don't consider - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/article/The-one-cost-engineers-and-product-managers-dont-consider <comment><USER3> _For years, the two things that most frustrated me to hear from product managers were "how hard would it be..." and "can't you just..." It took me quite a while to figure out why I had such a strong, visceral reaction to these phrases._

Oh, man.

When it comes to my natural reaction to this, the words 'strong and visceral' doesn't even do justice.

It took me a really long time to understand why I had such a deep-seated _loathing_ for phrases like that. Think of some absurd scenario where someone asks you to cause harm to yourself, so they can benefit in some way, and that's how I would respond. I basically translated these requests to something like, "can't you just shoot yourself in the foot, so I can sell your toes?" and reacted accordingly.

This post provides some good examples -- explained in a much more objective and rational manner than I've been able to -- of the cost, and why this bothered me so much. In general though, if engineers have to spend a lot of time mitigating "can't you just...?" then I think it may point to a more systemic problem in the organization. Namely, the business units are so disconnected from engineering they don't even realize the costs of what they're asking for, and the engineers are so disconnected that they reap zero benefit from whatever business goal is going to be accomplished by this.

I'm actually okay with shooting myself in the foot to sell my toes every once in awhile. I just don't want to do it if everyone else is going to make money from selling my toes except me, and they don't care about giving me time to rebuild my foot afterwards.

<comment><USER4> "Namely, the business units are so disconnected from engineering they don't even realize the costs of what they're asking for, and the engineers are so disconnected that they reap zero benefit from whatever business goal is going to be accomplished by this."

I don't think it's just that they're disconnected - some of the orgs I've been in - they simply _do not care_ , and never will, even if they completely understand the "costs". Why not? Because they don't have to pay it. It's not coming out of their budget, the 'costs' of higher support later on don't affect anyone who's making the decision right now, and damnit, we have to get this out _now_ or we'll lose marketshare!

This is a toxic division, and seems to be more prevalent at companies that do not see themselves as software-based companies. Yammer is all tech - <USER2> couldn't have existed 30 years ago, but plenty of more traditional companies still see software as something divorces from their main business.

<comment><USER5> It happens in tech companies too, especially enterprise companies. Project managers want to close out on their project and deliver to their customers and fuck anything else that's going on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good article, makes an important point about complexity.

Just want to add one extra thought though:

      he or she will run reports against the usage data to find
      out whether a given feature is often used. That data can
      then be run past the product managers who can help decide
      whether it's sensible to just drop the feature.

It's important to be careful here, and it's one of the traps that is very easy to fall into (see Gnome). Just because a feature is only used by 1% of your users doesn't mean it's not important. You might have 100 features only used by 1% of your users each, but if you take out all 100 features, chances are you've taken out at least one feature that every single one of your users depends on, and now your product is a lot worse instead of better.

<comment><USER7> We hit this at MSN: we removed the "print" button from all articles. Result? Engagement in Japan fell. Why? Apparently, printing out a sheaf of articles to peruse on the train is (or was) a thing. Solution? Re-enabled the "print" button in Japan; everyone else was saved from downloaded the unused-in-market "print" button, lowering PLT.

Please keep in mind I'm talking about stuff from about five years ago when you run to MSN.jp looking for print buttons.

<comment><USER8> Problem is then that you have two cases that need to be tested and taken into consideration when designing etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The title of this article doesn't make sense to me, as an engineer, working on a team of engineers.

Complexity is always something we consider - in every team I've ever worked on. DBA's always talk about the complexity of the data. Dev's always talk about the complexity of the code base. And UI Dev's and Designers always talk about the complexity of the UI.

No one understands the cost of complexity better than engineers. We understand the increase in the likelihood of bugs, or the increase in maintenance and refactoring costs. We understanding that making a UI complex means users may have difficulty learning how to complete a task and get frustrated, and we understand the costs of those frustrations.

I'm not sure why this person thinks engineers and product managers don't understand the cost of complexity. In my personal experience, it's always been business and sales people who don't understand how adding a shiny new feature could be harmful in any way.

<comment><USER10> As an engineer, my personal experience is that most feature creep actually comes from engineers. Marketing usually have the least idea, but engineers usually cause the "death by 1000 cuts".

<comment><USER9> I think the only time I've seen engineers add feature/code creep is when it's "filling the gaps" that others didn't think of. Many times ideas are presented to engineers in their unfinished format. It's often up to engineers and QA to find the areas where that idea needs to be fleshed out. Fleshing out an idea, I would argue, isn't feature creep but trying to make an added not suck.

<comment><USER11> Yup. When you've got a system that, as implemented, gets you 99% of the way to a nifty but unrequired feature? It's dreadfully tempting to go that last 1%. But somehow that 1% balloons into being something that you have to support and the UI turns out messier than you expected and yadda yadda yadda.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The first comment on that page sort of made me face palm... but then it got me thinking.

"Simplicity of usage should always win over simplicity of coding. The purpose of a product is to solve the end user's pain, no one should give a dime about the engineer's problem. IMHO that was the genius of Steve Jobs, he could take any pre-exiting product and increase its complexity by 50x while simplifying its usage by 10x."

I am relatively new to coding, and really, I want to know what do you guys think about this? Does this really scale? Does simplifying the front end often compromise the backend?

<comment><USER13> Its a false duality. It assumes complexity is zero sum, either the user has it or the programmer has it. In my experience this is not true.

<comment><USER14> But, doesn't maintaining both implementation complexity and product usage complexity low require either more development time or better developers?

<comment><USER15> Reducing either form of complexity certainly costs resources, but I think the point is that they are not necessarily antagonistic goals- they might even come as a package deal, to some degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _(5) It is always possible to agglutinate multiple separate problems into a single complex interdependent solution. In most cases this is a bad idea._

\--RFC 1925, [http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1925.html](http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1925.html)

I highly recommend reading RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths. It's a much faster and more amusing read to get the same information.

</comment><comment><USER17> In my experience, practically everyone agrees that software should be simple, but not everyone agrees on what simple is.

<comment><USER18> Unfortunately, that hasn't been my experience. Everyone wants software to be _easy_ , but most people (by which I mean clients, management, and anyone else who's ever asked me to build software) have no opinion one way or the other about simplicity: They want it to do exactly what they want, the way they want, regardless of how technically feasible or user-friendly that ends up being.

Simplicity is an ideal I see a lot more among tech people (myself included), and while I think it's nice to aspire to, it's definitely not something I've seen as a request, requirement, or even preference among the kind of people who are willing to pay others to build things. They want what they want, not a simple implementation of what they need.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps the reason I haven't shared your experience is because I primarily deal only with tech people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow, that one really resonated with me. I hadn't really thought about how to put simplicity into perspective quite like that. One of the things that frustrated me about Windows was that there was always about 7 different ways to do the same thing (or get to the same place) and that lead to amazing time wasting discussions in attempting to support customers remotely.

Google has (had? I suspect they still do this) company wide 'fixit' days where people would fix bugs for prizes and what not. I suspect a 'delete-it' (or 'simplify-it') might be a useful exercise as well.

<comment><USER20> We still have fixits and we also have delete-it's as well. The team I'm currently on has Delete Tuesdays where everyone competes to delete unused code or config options. It's very satisfying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Whammed in the face with:

"Subscribe to receive future articles right to your inbox"

Tab closed. To hell with them.

<comment><USER22> something in one of chrome, ghostery, disconnect or adblock removes that, fwiw (and maybe it's just because it's timely, but it's actually one of the better posts i've read in this kind of thing).

<comment><USER21> I have adblock and ghostery. It still appeared for me.

Perhaps I should use noscript as well :)

<comment><USER23> I rarely see this stuff in w3m ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've been pushing this idea for the past couple of years with clients, and when I give talks at conferences. The fact of the matter is that unless an organization knows what the carrying cost is for their features, and the effect in terms of complexity, they are flying blind.

In essence, it is Joel's Law of Leaky Abstractions at work. You can't manage a software project just in terms of a set of features you agree upon with business. The codebase is a key constraint that underlies all of those discussions and unless the effects of feature choice are on the table, you end up incurring radically different costs.

This isn't just about paying attention to technical debt. It's about having the discussion about whether it is worth targeting some features or not, taking the code into account - using it as a factor in business decisions.

[http://www.confreaks.com/videos/717-rockymtnruby2011-opening...](http://www.confreaks.com/videos/717-rockymtnruby2011-opening- keynote-code-blindness)

[http://michaelfeathers.typepad.com/michael_feathers_blog/201...](http://michaelfeathers.typepad.com/michael_feathers_blog/2011/05/the- carrying-cost-of-code-taking-lean-seriously.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> Totally agree. The last company I worked for would agree to add basically any feature someone requested, even if it was of no use to anyone else. Most of the time spent implementing these odd features was making sure they'd work with all the other possible combinations of odd features, just in case they were ever used in tandem. They never were. The project I worked on was in its 4th total overhaul when I left, and they still hadn't actually _sold_ a single copy.

</comment><comment><USER26> An oddly lengthy article considering its topic (simplicity).

Useful nonetheless. It puts into words the visceral reactions we have all had at some point to "How hard would it be to...?"

</comment><comment><USER27> Would anybody speculate that the popularity of MVC and agile development has exacerbated this issue?

I'm working for the first time on somebody elses code and with a group of develpers, and it seems like the answer to most problems is 'just add another model'. I stay away from that as much as I can, and try to make existing models fit new features and functions.

Maybe it's just my current workplace, but is this a more modern problem?

<comment><USER28> I'd rather have two simple things than one complex thing.

In the codebases I've worked on, a lot of the complexity I see arose from people changing the meaning of existing code so they could 'reuse' it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Writing software is all about managing complexity.

</comment><comment><USER30> HN had another article a couple weeks ago asserting you shouldn't add business processes to your company unless they had an expected value of increasing foo by at least 10%. The author argued this was a good way of avoiding creeping bureaucracy. It's striking how similar that is to this article's thesis re code complexity.

</comment><comment><USER31> _Complexity is also introduced by well-meaning people on the implementation side as well. Software developers like challenges, and the challenge of building a complex system that serves up a simple interface is especially alluring. Consider DSLs, abstractions and the attraction to being the one to build a framework that gets leveraged for years. This drives us to introduce huge complexity debt we defend with statements like "it makes it so easy once you understand" and "it will save us so much coding." Writing the lines of code is rarely the big cost in engineering: it's the understanding, the communication and the maintenance._

Ok, but did it save so much coding, or not? I do try to restrain myself from being clever when I realize it's really not worth it, but being clever sometimes does pay off. Extra coding is complexity too.

<comment><USER31> That said, making a _simple_ system that provides a simple interface to a complicated (or at least, a sophisticated) issue, is much better. And, you don't have to control your ego either. You can learn to take pride in the expressiveness and simplicity of your code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've frequently heard designers, developers and VPs of Engineering -- which I'll collectively call "builders" \-- argue that a product should have fewer features and thus should be "simple."

But I honestly can't remember reading once when a _user_ has said they want fewer features. Users want it to _easy_ , yes, but they also want the features that make their lives, well, easier; see how that works?

Whenever I hear builders argue for simplicity I get deja-vu as if I'm hearing union members argue against those who might cross the picket line, or lobbyists trying to convince congress to give their clients tax breaks, or record companies complaining about downloaded musics, or, or, or,... well you get the picture.

<comment><USER33> I think fewer features isn't something a user would request. Fewer features is just something they would notice the absense of. Users don't always know what they want.

For example, there may be a ten-item menu where the user only uses the two features at the bottom. The user is slightly annoyed every time they have to move the mouse all the way down there to select that feature. But it probably wouldn't occur to them to ask that the other menu items be removed – they are just trying to ignore those items.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is it poor submission titles?

Is it websites that pop up a subscription box with no obvious close button?

<comment><USER35> Title should be: The one "feature" that will cause users to practically insta- close your website and not read the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A lot of this is heading off complexity at the beginning. Every new feature should come with "Do we really understand why we're doing this?" It's ok to experiment, but prune prune prune....

</comment><comment><USER37> As an engineering manager I have struggled many times trying to convey the real cost of these 'cant you just do this...' type of things. This article makes a clear case in a structured way.

I haven't run into many product manager that would understand the cost management exposed here. Most product development company I have been at avoid discussion/debates around the real cost of some of the development.

I'm not sure whether it's the lack of understanding, or simply the lack of interest for long term impacts sometime outlived by exit strategies.

</comment><comment><USER38> Brilliant article.

I have made similar observations in the past as well:

[http://williamtpayne.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/complexity-it- ha...](http://williamtpayne.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/complexity-it-had-better- be-worth-it_03.html)

As well the mistakes we tend to make when we try to deal with it:

[http://williamtpayne.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/pushing- complexi...](http://williamtpayne.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/pushing- complexity.html)

</comment><comment><USER39> How do you know when you're making it too complex? On one hand you have Hello world! And on the other the vilain project manager requests.

But say you design a distributed system and its protocol, how do you know what is to keep and what is to delete ? We know the problem of over quality or complexity, but how do you know you're just right?

My feeling is that beeing too minimalist might refrain progress and discovery of new loved features.

</comment><comment><USER40> like a commenter suggests on the original post, end users don't care how something is built, but how well it solves a problem of theirs. It's like drucker saying costs have nothing to do with price. So, you can build things with bloat but it'll put you out of business. You also have to do right by your users. Not doing stuff because it's hard isn't a good excuse (a lot of the time).

</comment><comment><USER41> In short: KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid)

That's one of my favorite principles of software development (and engineering in general).

</comment><comment><USER42> Maintenance is 200% of the cost of writing software.

The first 100% of the cost is 20% writing, testing and certifying it, and 80% maintaining the result.

The additional 100% is the cost of rewriting it because you didn't actually write it to be maintainable.

</comment><comment><USER43> Features are what sells products, the cost is that they make the product more complex (and add to the cost).

Simple products are often easy to use, and document, which is one of the reasons Apple does so well.

<comment><USER44> Solving problems sells software - features are just one way of getting there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> To be clear, the author is talking about simplicity which comes out of years of dealing with complexities. The better I get at engineering the simpler are my solutions.

</comment><comment><USER46> I loved the article, and I like how the author implores us to extend the drive to reduce complexity to how we speak about products.

</comment><comment><USER47> Could not agree more. Very good paper!

</comment><comment><USER48> really good read

</comment><comment><USER49> _Users don 't want complexity, either._

This is not true. Users want a manageable and _appropriate_ amount of complexity. Sane defaults, reasonable options.

In the sitcom 'Allo 'Allo, a woman is trying to set up a date with a character who's a stickler: "What if I am late?" > "Don't be late" > "What if I am early?" > "Don't be early. Be _punctual_."

I'm reminded of this whenever I see something on the minimalist vs flexibility wars. The answer is in neither camp, it's in the 'be appropriate' camp.

<comment><USER32> > Users want a manageable and appropriate amount of complexity. Sane defaults, > reasonable options.

+1

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> without reading the article, I guess it's communication.

<comment><USER51> it's system complexity and how that makes it hard to maintain, change or validate.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Kobble – Notes app that saves directly to GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://kobble.io <comment><USER2> I think I'm able to view all other gists.

If I open the Gist on [https://gist.github.com/](https://gist.github.com/) then go to the original gist at 'kobble-git/channel-groups.json' I can navigate to all the forks and see data for other users.

<comment><USER3> Oh wow. Look at that.

[https://gist.github.com/kobble- git/87ea625d421177f9e9307c6ce...](https://gist.github.com/kobble- git/87ea625d421177f9e9307c6cee259e63/forks)

And each fork is a link to a secret gist.

<comment><USER4> This isn't directly obvious, so I'll clarify. Anyone who has used this app - all of your notes are publicly available by following the link above.

Everyone - revoke access to the app and manually delete all the gists it created in your account.

To view anyone's notes, all you have to do is visit [https://gist.github.com/kobble- git/87ea625d421177f9e9307c6ce...](https://gist.github.com/kobble- git/87ea625d421177f9e9307c6cee259e63/forks), click anyone's "View fork", then follow the trail of gist links in the JSON.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please read the comments above about the various uses of Kobble. Gists are for public use and sharing. Private repos are coming very soon for other use cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Kobble is the only app available where you own all of your data.

What? I find that highly unlikely. In what way do I not "own" the texts I write in–for example–Apple's Notes.app?

And what is even meant by "own"? Even for something like Facebook, I'm pretty sure that I still own the copyright for texts I write in their app.

<comment><AUTHOR> By 'own', we mean that no data is stored on our servers. The goal is privacy and to protect your data.

<comment><USER6> We don't own Githubs servers any more than we own Apples. This statement is a falsehood.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting tool, I like that it works with GitHub and the repo support will be cool to see.

The design is neat (I generally like dark themes) although the fading animations got a bit annoying after a few minutes using it. Some of the dialogs could do with supporting common shortcuts (e.g. enter to create a new track, escape to close the dialogs). Sometimes I managed to click outside of the presentation view without realising, and then left/right arrow keys stopped working. Sometimes I wasn't sure where to find certain functions (e.g. I looked for "Edit" on a presentation item on the context menu, but then realised I had to click it and then click the pencil icon). I couldn't get the Share functionality to work, and wasn't sure why it was in its own context menu with no other items.

I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the tracks/channels distinction. I can understand creating a project to store presentations (items) in, but why is there another level in Kobble?

<comment><AUTHOR> Public and private repos are available now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What does this have over Standard Notes?

[https://standardnotes.org/](https://standardnotes.org/)

<comment><USER9> Oh my god, thank you. This is something I've been looking for as a replacement to Quiver.

I love Quiver, but it no longer cuts it since I've migrated to Linux.

<comment><USER10> I've using Standard Notes for almost three months already. It's neat, but "standard editor" is kind of weak (like not supporting tab to indent), I have to try using the extended editor. Everything syncs nicely BUT on two occassions a tag got duplicated with some of the notes. I have no idea how - but at that time I had it open on two desktops. Not sure how nicely the encryption is done. You can create your own server for notes too!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 30 second impression:

The landing page has side arrows? Is this meant to be a Powerpoint slides deck type app?

Why isn't it just a 1 page vertical scroll to showcase the 'notes app'? Or do all the pages in notes have to be a click page arrow?

edit: I looked around a little more (never logged in) but all I ever saw was the slides. I am still not sure if that's the only mode, or is there another preview showing other modes/styles of notes? As boring as it may be, I'd love to see some generic notes examples: grocery list, todo, programmer's notes, school notes, lorem ipsums, or anything more representative of a real world notes and less of just listed features.

<comment><AUTHOR> You create content using Markdown with Kobble. The content can be rendered as simple markdown or as slide decks. Our landing page was created with Kobble as a markdown slide deck.

If you log in (with GitHub), you'll see the rest of the UI.

<comment><USER11> It does look neat and definitely beautiful. Thanks I'll login and check it out some more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Devs, pro tip: if you call a file "minified", please minify it. Your main.min.js is a whopping 4.7mb of un-minified JS.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but it's less 1M compressed. Including the other static files, it's still less than 1M for the entire app.

<comment><USER13> Compression isn't minification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Curious as to what makes this "beautiful".

<comment><USER15> same. they also forgot to add "made with <3 in san francisco" at the bottom

<comment><AUTHOR> Made in New Zealand!

<comment><USER15> Still no ascii heart or emoji. This will never succeed :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Kobble is the only app available where you own all of your data.

If it's hosted on Github's servers, you don't really "own" it. Or at least you don't have sole proprietorship of your data.

</comment><comment><USER17> Shameless plug time again...

* My summer project (2016):

[http://public.docs.xstatic.site](http://public.docs.xstatic.site)

* The pitch goes something like this:

<xstatic>| Docs is a simple, fast and easy to use, web based document editor.

It generates static (but editable) HTML files that can than be easily shared and printed. Like Google Docs inside an AWS S3 bucket.

* More info in this document:

[http://docs.xstatic.site/markdown_db86ac26-f232-4400-a544-d5...](http://docs.xstatic.site/markdown_db86ac26-f232-4400-a544-d59e9dc06b0d.html)

<comment><USER18> I think a Show HN is the one time it's bad form to shamelessly plug your own product.

<comment><USER17> But your username says otherwise ;)

More seriously - Why so?

I think that:

1\. It's on topic.

2\. It's a project not a product. I ain't sellin anything.

3\. There is no thunder to steal. Usually, more comments, more votes, more rain for the show.

4\. Shameless has to be shameless.

5\. It adds to the discussion. See, it just did...

<comment><USER19> It's like going to the inauguration of some new shop giving out flyers for your own competing shop. It's just bad taste.

<comment><USER17> I think it is like coming to a jam session and blowing your trumpet with a whimsical tune.

There is no competition.

P.S - I've reread this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) just to make sure I wasn't in the wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Having read your explanation of channels/tracks - I get it, you have to serialize your storage into something and it's neat that it's representable through url. I was a little confused at first. I agree with others that the organization seems a little bit too forceful or opinionated for the primary use case of a "notes app" which is jotting down a quick note.

Maybe you could have an "unsorted" channel by default, and then split out the context dropdown into little icons? Simplify the work flow to be: 1. Click "new markdown" button, 2. Write some markdown. 3. Save.

If you defer asking the user to name a file up front, you can auto generate a filename based on the contents of the document (like parse 1st line for # My Title -> my-title.md). The only sacrifice you pay is making them click "save" the first time; but IMO that is a lot less friction than having to name documents before I even start writing. Plus even if your parsing fails - you're no worse off than where you started by asking the user for a filename.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are all great suggestions. You'll see shortcuts drop next week. Maybe even better than you expect :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This feels excessively complicated to me. what's a track? what's a channel? why do I need filenames for everything? why does it take 3 minutes for a new user to write a single line of 'note' ?

a beautiful notes app (to me) would be one where you start with writing a note

<comment><AUTHOR> Everything in Kobble can be shared. Channels are there to organize tracks - your tracks and tracks from other users.

Kobble can be used for much more than just note taking. It's meant to share meaningful content with other users. A track is like a project, and channels make it easy to share them.

<comment><USER22> Why did you choose obscure names instead of something everyone could understand right away? To me, it seems "channels" are just "groups"/"categories"/"folders" and "tracks" are just "notes"?

The fact that you need to explain it is a good indicator that it's unnecessarily complex.

<comment><AUTHOR> The model is very similar to other popular apps, like YouTube or Spotify. Instead of organizing songs or videos into channels, you organize tracks.

<comment><USER23> People don't seem to like your names, and perhaps the names do need more work, but I wanted to commend you for _trying_. Whenever I see something named "Group" I cringe a little, because it is so abstract and meaning-free. It is barely better than names like "Thing" and "Entity". So I appreciate your attempt to be more concrete and creative!

<comment><USER24> This is such an important point. I'm living with a generic "group" feature in a SaaS app and it's a nightmare. It's been used by numerous clients for totally different things. These are the weeds that will choke your garden.

<comment><USER25> ...or they will be the very thing that frees up your users to use them in creative ways without feeling hemmed in to a particular mindset.

We have the concept of 'tags' in our app, which are used by our users to delineate anything from company departments, social groups, locations, age bands etc. - basically anything they see fit. It saves us creating a mess of drop downs to try and cater for all edge cases, and they feel the freedom to think of them however they like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> All this is is a presentation with a boatload of text and absolutely NO indication of what the app looks like or how you go about using it.

Even before i saw the note about the security issues i wouldn't click on try because why should i invest my time in trying it. I have no clue what it does beyond saving markdown files to github. I've got plenty of markdown apps that I like quite a bit, and uploading my notes to github is not something i've been going "damn i wish i had an app that would do that" because anyone who knows about github already knows how to commit their files and push them up...

doing it in gists is even worse (ignoring security aspects) because at least with my manually managed notes their organized in folders, browsable, greppable, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm one of the devs for Kobble. Since Kobble is such a versatile tool, it can be quite difficult to tune a marketing message clearly. We are working on it!

One of Kobble's primary uses is as an open content sharing platform. GitHub gists were chosen for this purpose intentionally, because the discovery mechanisms are built into GitHub. On top of that, we have built a flexible data model (similar to YouTube) for organizing and sharing the content.

Private repos (which are coming shortly) address the other use case where you want to keep data private. We have clarified this in the intros.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I like the idea of saving directly to Github. I'm using Github API for dictionary changes in my Chinese text translator that I'll release soon.

The user interface is, indeed, beautiful. But that's not enough to make me use it.

Notes on my iPhone can't be stored in a hierarchy of subfolders. In order to do that, I made my own notes app in PHP, but it's pretty awful. I plan to port it to JS+Github, but I have other priorities right now.

Is it possible to only commit changes to a file using git, instead of re- uploading the whole file? I wish there was an easy way to append to a file without a download-append-upload process. Please teach me if you know how to do this in git!

</comment><comment><USER28> Anyone looking for a nice interface to manage your Gists should take a look at [http://www.gistboxapp.com](http://www.gistboxapp.com)

<comment><USER29> If I'm not much of a coder, is this app okay for regular documentation/notes?

<comment><USER28> The main use case for Gists and thus Gistbox is storing code snippets. However you can save any kind of text you want. Gistbox lets you organize your Gists under labels so they're easy to find back. Moreover it offers you the option to save private Gists. Using a tool like nativefier you can even turn it into a desktop app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So I have (and bought!) not one but two plaintext editors for iOS that save directly to Dropbox or iCloud: iWrite Pro and 1Write.

I have both apps because iWrite is my reach-for text box while 1Write opens to a Dropbox folder that has a semi-organized idea box (a "personal wiki" of sorts, but informally so).

Why do I want this instead? Versioning? I've thought of moving my ersatz "personal wiki" to Github for that, but I don't wish to make it visible to the world.

</comment><comment><USER31> I registered localnotes.io or something a couple of years ago to make a notes app (just a side list of note files and then a markdown editor) that would persist to local storage and could be synced to private gists and images would store as base64 encoded files under that gist.

I got a proof of concept working but was too lazy to integrate with GitHub and canned it.

Working on something more fun now and learning vue.js.

<comment><USER32> Note that you can store images and other binary files in gists; no need to base64-encode them. Gist are git repos too and can be cloned and commit/pushed to.

<comment><USER31> Didn't know that. Awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Unfortunately I cannot access this because it can read my private gist. I understand why it needs the access though :(

<comment><AUTHOR> GitHub Integrations are coming!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think adding encryption at the client side would make more practical, like what laverna does. [https://github.com/Laverna/laverna](https://github.com/Laverna/laverna)

</comment><comment><USER35> Small, non-technical pet peeve: they repeatedly spell GitHub as Github.

<comment><AUTHOR> Duly noted and fixed. Most of the data in Kobble is built with Kobble, so changes are trivial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> One problem with using gists is that each modification adds another entry in the response's history array; over time the responses get larger and larger.

</comment><comment><USER37> I use Zim Wiki. Also, it has version control plugin, so you can store your notes on the GitHub or BitBucket or GitLab if you want. I prefer plain old backups.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm into the idea (I currently use Ia writer saving to a folder in Dropbox). Is there a desktop client or only the web version?

</comment><comment><USER39> i would love something like this for free bitbucket private repos, is there any planned support? realtime updates would also be great

</comment><comment><USER40> Why do you need access to my email address?

</comment><comment><USER41> Can I use Kobble offline?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not the web version. Other versions are in the works. Stay tuned.

<comment><USER41> Thanks!

What versions are you working on?

What do I generally need to use this?

A web browser? Git? Github? A Markdown Linux editor?

I would love some further explanation!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Would be nice, if there is a mobile friendly version.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mobile is coming soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> How do I use this? Is there a bookmarklet?

</comment><comment><USER44> mobile?</comment>


A Year Later, Cybercrime Groups Still Rampant on Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/a-year-later-cybercrime-groups-still-rampant-on-facebook/ <comment><USER2> It's good to see Krebs ending his piece with a conversation starter on the costs/benefits of using Facebook, and whether people are changing their usage or deleting their accounts. I wonder when this discussion will expand from tech sites to the general press?

Years ago Krebs did something similar whenever there was a new hole in the Java interpreter. He regularly advocated that people remove Java support from their web browsers, and that they consider removing it entirely from their computers if they don't use any Java apps.

In a related comment found below the original article, "MrB" writes how Facebook still tracks people without accounts. This is why I block Facebook's BGP prefixes in my router, their domains in my DNS resolver, and key hostnames in /etc/hosts. With this combination, Facebook is unlikely to be able to track me even when I'm in between setups. For example it should work in cases where I temporarily fail to re-populate /etc/hosts while doing testing, or set up a new computer (still using the same router), etc. And since their IP blocks and domains are relatively stable, it doesn't take much babysitting on my part.

<comment><USER3> What're the hostnames that you put into /etc/hosts?

<comment><USER4> You can find blocklists on github, here is an example:

[https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...](https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporations/facebook/all)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious. Its so hard to be anonymous online. How do they do it?

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if these are "real" cybercrime groups or just people from poor countries trying to make a living by scamming each other.

I would expect these FB groups to be more like scam sites Alboraaq or Cardmafia than "real" crime forums like Verified.</comment>


Ask HN: Urgent Need an email provider that would never black-hole incoming email - <AUTHOR> Hi guys!  All email providers I know of throw some of the emails I receive in the black-hole (doesn't bounce so the sender doesn't know I didn't receive them). I need an email provider that would never never never do such thing. Throwing 0.01% of my emails in the black-hole is too much for me: what I need is 0%. I don't care if it's Viagra spam, let me sort that myself.<p>Please let me know if you have any suggestions (free is great, but paid is also OK)! <comment><USER2> I think you would have to run your own email server for that (but you will likely not have the same uptime as a cloud provider, resulting in lost messages anyway). All of the cloud providers have to filter spam as a selling point to their users, and at scale they have to blackhole them for efficiency (pipe to /dev/null instead of storing the same viagra email for millions of users). Also for security if they detect a known virus they may want to delete it rather than let users risk spreading it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Set up a Postfix or OpenSMTPD and make sure you have a TLS certificate. Other than that you should be fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I want to keep a copy of the emails on my server, then forward a copy on my Gmail, what would be the way to go? Postfix or OpenSMTPD?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the solution to internet connectivity problems in Windows 10? - <AUTHOR> Windows 10 has a habit of dropping WiFi connections after some time and also sometimes the ethernet connection is not visible or does not work. Does anyone know why this is so and what solutions exist? <comment><USER2> I've found that installing Linux or downgrading to Windows 7 seems to clear these issues right up</comment>


Cost of SF-LA train rising 20% to $77B, delayed 4 years to 2033 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/about/business_plans/Draft_2018_Business_Plan.pdf <comment><USER2> I feel like Musk might be gearing up to undercut this project...

<comment><AUTHOR> He estimated the cost of a hyperloop connection between LA and SF at $6b. In other words, less than newest rise in projected cost of this government train. Can it be built in less than 15 years...</comment></comment>


Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce Unix Bootstrap - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lucperkins/unix-bootstrap

<comment><USER2> I actually like the idea, but I think you ended up with something more 1998 internet than UNIX. I think you could take the idea and run with it and make something very cool though, an easy way to represent a combination of console commands, output, and comments on each, in a uniform way. Maybe adopt some of the popular techniques from technical books where they separate the code/output, the content, and the tips/notes, plus anything else that's useful.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> How is this not blowing up HN right now?</comment>


New speakers announced for Exceptionally Hard & Soft Meeting - Berlin  - <AUTHOR> http://ehsm.net/

<comment><USER2> Out of the names I recognise, I notice Mitch Altman and Nick Farr, both of whom would usually be attending the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. The Chaos Communication Congress is this year in Hamburg. I'd be really surprised to not see either of them at the CCC, so I'm going to guess: that's some hardcore train-hopping.

I'm happy there is something planned in Berlin for this time... it'd feel weird if there wasn't some hacker happening in Berlin between Christmas and Sylvester (NYE).

</comment><comment><USER3> Keynote Speech: "I built myself a nuclear fusion reactor when I was 16"</comment>


Marketing is to programming what economics is to physics - <AUTHOR> http://lplatebigcheese.com/post/14403866427/marketing-is-to-programming-what-economics-is-to <comment><USER2> Marketing is to programming as plasmodia are to mosquitoes.</comment>


Ticketmaster Quietly Changes Its Refund Policy, Screwing over the Fans - <AUTHOR> https://www.ghostcultmag.com/ticketmaster-quietly-changes-its-refund-policy-screwing-over-the-fans/ <comment><USER2> This is the perfect ground for a chargeback. The merchant is not delivering the service they promised and isn't abiding by the terms stated at the time of purchase (the original refund policy).</comment>


Quill.org Receives a $1M Donation from the Pineapple Fund - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/writing-with-quill/quill-org-receives-a-1-million-donation-from-the-pineapple-fund-to-teach-critical-thinking-to-10-cbf1bab10fee <comment><AUTHOR> Their repos are here: [https://github.com/empirical- org](https://github.com/empirical-org)</comment>


Don't Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2012/03/18/#/dont-follow-your-passion-follow-your-effort

<comment><USER2> " _1\. When you work hard at something you become good at it._ "

Yup

" _2\. When you become good at doing something, you will enjoy it more._ "

Hmm.. what now?

I'm good at a lot of things I hate. I've spent time doing them either because I had to or because I enjoyed it at the time. For me, it often works the opposite of what he says; when I get better at something, I often find it boring.

<comment><USER3> Regarding 2 I think it's sometimes true - for example people don't like math, when they don't understand it. But when somehow they notice they're good at some branch of math - most starts to love it, cause they can beat challange. At least it worked that way for me for math and programming. Similiar story for team sports - I love basketball cause I was higher than most people in middle school so I was good at it.

Other thing is - when you need to do sth you love for living - it sometimes become a chore instead of passion. External vs internal motivation etc.

<comment><USER2> I think you're right, but I can't remember this ever happening to _me_. Maybe I just have to think harder.. Or maybe I enjoy learning so much that I don't care that I'm new at something. Or maybe I just avoid things I don't like..

<comment><USER4> I don't advocate any philosophical comments or endorse one. People, often in a blog, write stuff from their experience (or experiences of people around him) which might or might not apply to all or even a single individual author but worked well for the author (or around him). It's hard to generalize and hence, shouting that you don't fit into the 'general' or the 'natural' defined by somebody's premise is as baseless as generalizing it in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All this articles proves is that people are misusing the word "passion" to mean some sort of hobby. If you haven't poured almost all your free time into something, you aren't passionate about it.

<comment><USER6> Isn't the point of the passion advice that people would wish to put more time into their passion (and find what their passion is to begin with)? So your comment boils down to "it isn't your passion unless it is your passion", which is not very useful.

<comment><USER7> No, I think there's a valid point. The difference between a mild interest and a passion is precisely how much attention and effort you devote to it.

When I was young, computers at home were quite rare. But once I was exposed to them I was hooked. I rode my bicycle to the Radio Shack and stood at the display model writing programs. I saved and bought a Sinclair ZX-80. Almost all of my free time went into programming.

Then there are all the people I've known that say they want to learn to code. People who grew up with a computer, and went to school were there were programming classes, and work alongside programmers. They _think_ they'd like to learn programming, but really they're not interested enough to bother.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but you didn't need any advice to find your passion for computing. Presumably people looking for self help advice are less "self aware" than you are/were.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8>
      1. When you work hard at something you become good at it.
      2. When you become good at doing something, you will enjoy it more.

Actually, it's quite possible to become good at something you don't enjoy, speaking from personal experience. One does not follow the other, and I'm surprised that the author states this as a fact.

<comment><USER9> You're right, of course. But the point he's making seems to be based on the idea that to experience mastery of a domain can be truly fulfilling even if that domain is boring. That is, the feeling of power and self actualization that comes from competence can happen even if you are doing something that is not innately enjoyable.

I draw an intuitive connection in my mind to the study [1] suggesting that people are happier with having a higher status compared to their close associates than with a higher absolute status but lagging behind the peers to whom they aspirationally compare themselves.

Would you rather be a mediocre newbie working in a dazzling, sexy field, or the _best damn X_ in the Y field who knows all the tools and has confidence about relative competence?

[1] <http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/4/471.short>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This seems so close to an article that appeared in the NYT a couple of weeks ago that it almost feels like plagiarism: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/jobs/follow-a-career- passi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/jobs/follow-a-career-passion-let- it-follow-you.html)

<comment><USER9> Look at the date of Mark Cuban's post (March 18, 2012).

Cal Newport and Mark Cuban are both well known bloggers who have been making this same case for some time. No plagiarism involved.

<comment><USER10> I posted in the middle of the night, and didn't do enough fact checking, so I apologize for the use of that word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Its not a very well written article, was a little annoying to find that in the end he was just making a painfully semantic argument

<comment><USER12> When most people tell you to pursue your passion or follow what you love, don't you think they're really saying, "think real hard about what you like, and go do that" rather than "notice you've already put a ton of effort into X, realize that's what you are passionate about, and go do more X."? It's a semantic argument if you interpret "Follow your dreams!" the latter way, but I don't think most people do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Please update the title, the url is blogmaverick.com, which I think most people on HN know is Mark Cuban's blog.

I feel like Cuban wrote this post just because he needed to write a post. In the end he says "Don't follow your passions, follow your effort. It will lead you to your passions...", and the roundabout way he goes to get there doesn't add any value. He himself says if you're passionate about something, you're going to learn about it, and become better, etc. etc. Ignoring that that isn't completely true, I've wasted too much time just writing this comment.

<comment><USER14> I was just about to say the title is extremely sensationalist and inappropriate for HN, but the mods beat me to editing it -- like a second after I typed this up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe he is a very "clear" person. Lot's of normal people are confused and not so well organized. Follow your passion is a guideline for getting started with organizing your life.

I can only assume that the author was always organized enough to put his effort where his passion is, but he doesn't seem to realize that.

A normal person will just put the effort where he/she is told to put it by authorities: first parents, then school/high school, then the first random shitty job they happen to land. Sure, it works, they'll probably eventually be able to pay off their mortgage. But some people expect more from life.

</comment><comment><USER15> Ken Robinson did a great talk about passion, that somewhat negates this blog post...it takes a lot more than just being greatly skilled at something to be passionate about it.

<https://vimeo.com/21195297>

</comment><comment><USER16> Is it just me or does this logic not make sense? You put a lot of effort in -> you get good at it -> you become passionate about it. How do you choose what to put effort into? Answer: what you're passionate about.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think he's right. Too many people pick things that seem dreamy without considering whether it's actually something worth doing.

I'd honestly rather be an excellent plumber than a fifth-rate rockstar.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think perhaps "Passion" needs to be replaced with "Obsession".

<comment><USER19> Can you be Obsessionate about something?

<comment><USER20> You can be obsessive about it.</comment></comment></comment>


PagerDuty Hacks: Alert by Foam Dart Bombardment - <AUTHOR> https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/pagerduty-hacks-alert-foam-dart-bombardment/ <comment><USER2> this is an interesting solution for the times that the phone is on the "do not disturb" mode.</comment>


Graphing every idea in history - <AUTHOR> http://flowingdata.com/2012/07/16/graphing-every-idea-in-history/

<comment><AUTHOR> Article the Flowing Data post came from: [http://griffsgraphs.com/2012/07/03/graphing-every-idea-in- hi...](http://griffsgraphs.com/2012/07/03/graphing-every-idea-in-history/)</comment>


Top Teams for Seedcamp Week 2009 Announced - <AUTHOR> http://blog.seedcamp.com/2009/09/top-teams-for-seedcamp-week-2009.html

<comment><USER2> Congratulations, David! (The submitter's company, Boxed Ice, is one of the finalists; they make Server Density, a very cool server monitoring software company.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Glad to see Loc8 on the list. They are the guys behind the official iPhone app for the Edinburgh Festival, the largest festival in the world. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Festival>

</comment><comment><USER4> Congrats to the Boxed Ice guys! I'm sure we'll be meeting during the week.</comment>


Startups offering free products or services in response to Coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.vccafe.com/2020/03/18/100-startups-offering-free-products-and-services-in-response-to-coronavirus/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this! If anyone knows of other resources and directories for this kind of info, please comment. My company has a "coronavirus edition" product coming out next week and we're looking for ways to connect with users who can benefit. There will be thousands like us, as there bloody well should be.</comment>


Goldman Sachs 20 Best Stocks - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/goldmans-top-20-upside-stocks-2012-4

<comment><USER2> Heh, this is why no one trusts Goldman Sachs. When America will probably be oil/coal/natgas free by 2040, why would you ever invest in a dying industry?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Odd it's all around the Oil and Natural Resource Industries, you think they would look at more Tech.</comment>


Two Scoops of Django: Best Practices for Django 1.11 – Two Scoops Press - <AUTHOR> https://www.twoscoopspress.com/products/two-scoops-of-django-1-11 <comment><USER2> I've been meaning to buy one of these books for a while now, are they a pretty good source?

<comment><USER3> It's an excellent reference for best (and common) practices, but I wouldn't recommend it so much as a learning tool. The 1.11 version weighs in at 549 pages and covers everything from installation and dev environments to security and continuous integrations. It's quite thorough and obvious the authors are well-versed in Django development. Highly recommeded.</comment></comment>


Latvia becomes 18th state to join the eurozone - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25567096 <comment><USER2> As I Greek, having the experience of the Euro both theoretically and practically, I can say that the currency per se, it's not _a problem_ but given the way the ECB acts the last 3 years, I don't understand why would anyone give-away the control of the countries currency to a board of people who act in very controversial ways..

<comment><USER3> Do today's Greeks blame the bulk of their economic problems on outside forces, rather than things they've done to themselves?

edit: I don't really have an agenda with this question - I'm not a European and I'm not invested in any way, really - and I'm a little surprised at how quickly it got voted up. Please just treat it as a sincere question.

<comment><USER4> In economics, everyone is always looking to blame everyone else. But the fact remains that, once the initial recessionary shock is over, whether or not an economy recovers depends almost entirely on whether the central bank follows mainstream economic principles, or the pseudo-principles that are popular among politicians and pundits. Israel and Australia are known for executing the former. The Fed split the difference. The ECB has taken overwhelmingly the latter course, and Europe is paying for its love of convenient, self- flattering economic narratives.

The policies and the policy effects of central banks are measurable in elementary ways. This is not an opinion. It's very important to realize the role of the ECB and the Euro in this recession, because the current popular alternative--mindless national hatred--has not turned out very well for Europe, historically speaking.

<comment><USER5> I largely agree with what you write, but I'm somewhat skeptical about blaming the ECB. The thing is, it seems that monetary policy is actually pretty powerless when your goal is to _increase_ economic activity (rather than slowing it down).

Point in fact, what could the ECB have done better? They could have reduced interest rates faster and more aggressively, but would that really have changed so much? What else could they have done?

I think the blame lies squarely on fiscal policy, namely the European obsession with austerity. Mainstream (that is, non-pundit) macro-economics correctly predicted that austerity would hurt, yet European politicians _still_ follow that prescription.

In part, the _structure_ of the Eurozone is at fault. If the automatic stabilizers like unemployment insurance and other social programs had been a part of a supranational budget, the crisis would never have become as deep.

<comment><USER6> The problem is their messaging. If they stood up and said to politicians "You must spend money to pull your economies out of the slump", it would have been much better.

Also, even if it wouldn't have been that effective, more aggressive interest rate moves _would_ have done _something_ , and that _something_ on the margin means less suffering in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> National security will always be the number 1 priority with the kind of neighbour Latvia has.

<comment><USER8> Which neighbor?

<comment><USER9> First Latvia was occupied by the Soviet Empire, and all that entails, the purges, the gulags and so on. Then it was occupied by the Nazis, and all that entails, death camps and so on. They were especially keen on punishing anyone they thought might have found a way to co-exist with the previous invaders. Then after that, the Soviets again, keen to punish Latvia for "surrendering" to the unstoppable Nazi war machine. The Soviets were keen on _lebensraum_ too, and set about deporting Latvians on an industrial scale, and colonizing the country with Russians.

They are still finding pockets of exiled Latvians deep inside the Russian interior, and asking them if they want to come home.

<comment><USER2> The Eurozone (Germany mostly) is getting closer and closer to Russia. I don't think Latvia will gain any advantage from this.

Take a look at what happened to Cyprus. They (the EU) would never do that to Italy, no matter how crisis-striken would ever be. Meaning: Say tomorrow Russia invades Latvia, the EU will do a couple statements and that's about it.

<comment><USER10> How an attack on a EU member state will be reacted to will set precedent. The EU cannot afford not to react to such an attack with full military force no matter which member state is attacked.

Apart from that the majority of states in the NATO are also EU member states, meaning that the EU has effectively control over the NATO. Also something that might be worth considering in such a scenario.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What does this entail? Open borders to EU residents? Just the Euro? Or also free trade within the EU?

<comment><USER12> In addtion to the things that other commenters have mentioned, there is one more difference between having your currency pegged to the Euro and being a Euro country: when goods are traded between two Euro countries, these goods aren't really paid for. Instead, the sale is transacted through the so-called TARGET2 system. Wikipedia describes it like this:

 _A Dutch importer, for example, might place an order with a Spanish company. Payments to and from the accounts of the buyer and seller are channeled via central banks, so the Spanish exporter 's bank gets a credit with the Banco de España, which in turn has a claim on the ECB. The Dutch importer's bank owes its local central bank, leaving De Nederlandsche Bank with a debit at the ECB._

The idea behind this was that the liabilities within the TARGET2 system would cancel each other out. To everybody's utmost surprise, however, this has not happened. For example, Germany is currently being owed over 650 billion Euros. Needless to say, the countries who owe this money don't have it anymore.

<comment><USER5> > _when goods are traded between two Euro countries, these goods aren 't > really paid for_

This is a very politically biased and misleading perspective on reality.

Consider an alternative world in which the central banks of the Eurozone would have been consolidated entirely. That is, no more Bundesbank, no more De Nederlandsche Bank, only the ECB. All commercial banks would have central bank accounts directly there.

In this world, _everything_ in the real economy would look _exactly the same_ as it does in our world.

However, this alternative world would not have Target balances in its central bank system, and therefore nobody (including you) would ever even think to write that "goods aren't really paid for".

But how can it be that goods are paid for in this alternative world while they aren't paid for in our world? The answer is that that just doesn't make sense.

Goods are paid for even in our, non-hypothetical world. Yes, there are flow imbalances, but guess what: That happens in every region ever that has a unified currency.

If you don't like that, then please just be honest and come right out and say so. Don't try to cloud your opinion in misleading rhetoric.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hope that Poland will follow the same way.

</comment><comment><USER14> They are fu __ed.. I feel sorry for them as a European. Our politicians will rip their economy away. This pact they signed essentially sold their country including their people. It 's always the same, the strong countries look for weak countries to join their forces by promising money. When the small countries need the money the most, they will get promises and packages coming with many hooks. Hooks that will cripple and kill the economy of the country, such that at the end the strong countries can suck up all that is there. Their money, their land, their resources, their best engineers and workforces. And what's left at the end is not a country, but a lost fight. A fight that was never fought and silently won. Both governments win and assure their own security in trades and assets, but the people loose.

</comment><comment><USER15> Latvia planned to join the Eurozone in 2008, but, well, y'know what happened.

</comment><comment><USER16> "Latvia becomes 18th state to throw away control of their economy."

<comment><USER17> economy != control over monetary policy ; but sensationalist media has done a great job at making citizens believe otherwise

<comment><USER18> Not only monetary policy, but to a large extent their banking system, and their fiscal policy as well.

<comment><USER19> Knowing Latvian politicians and bankers, that can only be a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> R.I.P Latvia.

</comment><comment><USER21> Yay, another third world country to join EMU.

Yes; Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece & etc are third world countries. These days I even want to add France to it...

<comment><USER18> Their per-capita GDP is ~20k in PPP terms, which is hardly third world.

<comment><USER21> Yes, yes it is. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(PPP\)_per_capita)

It's right there with Italy, Greece and etc. All third world countries.

<comment><USER22> If you think that Italy and Greece is third world you don't know what you're talking about.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's with the pitchforking on crypto? Be honest - <AUTHOR> Is it envy or lack of understanding related to financial engineering? Or, is it a threat to traditional models, aka disrupting the status quo? <comment><USER2> It's skepticism of what looks awfully like a bubble/ponzi scheme. Your question is predicted on the premise that crypto is necessarily a good investment, but some are skeptical that the underlying work has any value beyond authentication, whereas government-backed fiat currencies are notionally and practically backed by promises of actual resources.</comment>


DAG Rosenstein's "Responsible Encryption" Demand Is Bad - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/deputy-attorney-general-rosensteins-responsible-encryption-demand-bad-and-he <comment><USER2> This is a well-written piece that takes a step toward clearly discussing tech security issues in laymen's terms. Which is an important step.

The failure to adequately describe the security landscape to those outside the technology sector is the greatest failure of technologists in the last 5-10 years. The NSA revelations were lost on america as a whole. They were muddied by confusing technologies and what many considered to be treasonous means.

In this regard, snowden was the whistleblower technologists needed, not the one america needed. The person or company to bear that standard has yet to be identified.

I would say our job as technologists is two-fold: first, we must continue to press our organizations for privacy and the security of our users. The e2e encryption focus is a great example of this.

Just as important is our ability to communicate security problems in a manner accessible to the common voter. Without their understanding, and passionate support, privacy in the tech sector will be relegated to the "anarchists" and criminals. Tor suffers this treatment and e2e encryption is already being painted in a similar light. It is essential that pieces like this continue to be written.

Collectively, we need to learn to distill this complex issue into language everyone empathizes with as much as technologists do.

<comment><USER3> The reality is much simpler: security issues in computing don't affect the layman's life enough so that people feel concerned about it.

A few people are conned, or have their identity stolen. But the vast majority just had a slow windows XP and a few toolbars attached to their web browser.

They couldn't care less.

As for bigger issues, like gov spying, it's exactly the same. They can't see any link between it and their personal life, and have no interest in projecting what could happen in the future as they have no will to participate in building the system they live in. Caring for society is a niche feeling.

The only thing that would make people react would be a massive and violent catastrophy, with strong symbolic value. And remember that equifax didn't cut it: the outrage barely trickled to outside the geek circles. So it needs to be bigger, and simpler to understand.

</comment></comment><comment> dane-pgp > Examples include the central management of security keys and operating > system updates; the scanning of content, like your e-mails, for advertising > purposes;

Now that Google, an advertising company, has given up scanning the contents of emails for advertising purposes: [https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite- gains-traction-in...](https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains- traction-in-the-enterprise-g-suites-gmail-and-consumer-gmail-to-more-closely- align/) the necessity/reasonableness of this practice is highly questionable, but I suppose "for spam-filtering purposes" would be a clever alternative argument there. (Even with encrypted emails, though, there might be enough unencrypted metadata for accurate spam detection).

Perhaps the real lesson for us here is the danger of centrally managed operating system updates. The fact that Rosenstein is already aware of this attack vector, and thinks so highly of it, suggests it could be a priority to address this. One technology that would be helpful here is Binary Transparency: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Binary_Transparency](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Binary_Transparency) so a user can at least be sure that they are being given the same updates as everyone else; and if researchers can audit the updates they can hopefully find "if userId = 123456" payloads. You'd have to trust the OS to not support "secret updates" which happen without your consent, but ideally this too would be addressed by an initial audit, or a TOFU policy.

</comment><comment><USER4> This worked for "responsible disclosure", attempting and mostly succeeding to frame the completey responsible practice of "full disclosure" as implicitly irresponsible.

Here's hoping it doesn't work for the DoJ.

<comment><USER5> What exactly do you mean by "full disclosure" here? If you mean disclosure of zero days with no warning, then yes, generally responsible disclosure is more desirable. I'm not aware of any security professional who disagrees with this stance.

<comment><USER4> I am a security professional who thinks full and immediate disclosure is always responsible and professional and desirable.

<comment><USER4> Example: Today, I found out that on the close order of a thousand people at Yubikey, Infineon, Microsoft, Google, Lenovo, and Fujitsu knew that my Yubikey's RSA keys were weak—IN FEBRUARY.

I found out today.

Two legs good. Four legs bad. Post that shit to the mailing list. There are far more good people than bad people. Stop covering for the fact that huge corporations are risk-averse and slow to make changes; that's baking bias into the process.

<comment><USER5> I don't think anyone would (or should!) argue that 9 months delay is responsible disclosure. If they do then they are wrong.

But dumping zero days isn't any better.

This 2003 paper from SANS[1] talks about the BugTrac policy of full disclosure after 14 days, but says most recommend 30 days. I think that is a reasonable expectation.

[1] [https://www.sans.org/reading- room/whitepapers/threats/define...](https://www.sans.org/reading- room/whitepapers/threats/define-responsible-disclosure-932)

<comment><USER4> All those companies argued that for the last 9 months they sat on the Yubikey vuln key issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I should mention that I suspect that the more likely that FBI investigations are successful, the more government debt they receive. Which is why the debt- based economy is flawed.</comment>


Show HN: Stuff I Need to Remember - <AUTHOR> http://stuffineedtoremember.com <comment><USER2> Does this send emails based on what I need to remember?

<comment><AUTHOR> I built this thing for all of us who read too many books and collect too many ideas ("build things that people will miss when they're gone, take more cold showers, measure twice, cut once"). I keep reading great books or posts with great ideas and I keep forgetting to put them into action because they don't really belong on a task list.

So, the idea is you list a handful of thoughts / ideas / snippets that you should be considering and it pings you with an email randomly through the week and keeps the thought or idea in the front of your mind as you work.</comment></comment>


Economists Adding Up at Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.investors.com/news/technology/amazon-microsoft-among-techs-that-say-employing-economists-adds-up/ <comment><USER2> Was talking with an Econ PhD student recently, and it sounds like there's still a gap between economic training and modern statistical methods (for most students). I wonder if a large portion of econ PhD's opting for tech rather than academia will change that (quicker).

<comment><USER3> Can you elaborate on that? If you mean that ML stuff isn't taught much in coursework, that's probably true --- but getting that stuff to work for economic questions isn't exactly trivial (e.g. we only have observational data but want to estimate the effects of hypothetical policy interventions).

If you mean something else by "modern statistical methods" I'd be curious to know what you mean.

<comment><USER2> Well, we talked about using cross-validation and the bootstrap/bagging methods. I was surprised that he hadn't heard of these ideas, much less using.

Deep learning variants are definitely farther out; I think the current lack of interpretability makes for a real strenous case wrt economic applications.

I don't really want to draw conclusions from n=1 convos but a couple other links had piqued my curiosity towards this relationship: [https://www.quora.com/How-will-Machine-Learning-affect- econo...](https://www.quora.com/How-will-Machine-Learning-affect-economics), [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11460412](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11460412)

<comment><USER4> These methods are not usually taught in economics courses. Why? Not enough data. In most cases economists are dealing with survey data, time series data and panel data. The benefits of cross validation and bootstrap/bagging grow with data size. When you're dealing with minimal amounts of messy/misbehaving data these methods lose their power.

Other methods become more important ie: Instrumental Variable estimation, Probit and Tobit models, Vector Autoregressions, Vector Error Correction models. Im sure your econ PhD student friend would know what these are.

A different tool-kit to solve different problems.

<comment><USER3> "Not enough time" and "harder to do inference" are bigger reasons. It's hard to see why cross validation would do worse than the AIC or BIC for lag length selection in VARs, the bootstrap is widely used for inference for all of the models you mentioned, IV isn't known for its exceptional small sample properties, etc. People are working on this stuff, but it takes a little while to get it to work well for Econ research, and it takes some clear new empirical findings before it becomes mainstream enough to teach it in classes. Everyone recognizes that there's a lot of promise, though.

<comment><USER4> grayclhn, you might find Rob Hyndman's article on cross validation helpful. [http://robjhyndman.com/hyndsight/crossvalidation/](http://robjhyndman.com/hyndsight/crossvalidation/)

" Asymptotically, minimizing the AIC is equivalent to minimizing the CV value. This is true for any model (Stone 1977), not just linear models. It is this property that makes the AIC so useful in model selection when the purpose is prediction."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The kinds of economists hired by these places are basically just applied statisticians with more practical training in causal inference. Microsoft/Google/Amazon aren't hiring macroeconomists to forecast interest rates or whatever; they're (mostly) hiring microeconomists who can estimate causal effects and design experiments.

Also, any applied economist at a top tech firm knows undergrad level applied ML.

<comment><USER6> I think its a bit more than that. Susan Athey did a Quora session in January that addressed this issue. [https://www.quora.com/session/Susan- Athey/1](https://www.quora.com/session/Susan-Athey/1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How many economists are there at Google, compared to other non-engineering professions at Google, say chefs, cleaners, doctors, physiotherapists, accountants, secretaries, barbers, lifeguards etc.?

"Athey says Microsoft is another company with "at least a dozen" economists on staff. She knows of nearly 100 economists employed by tech firms, the big majority joining after 2010."

A few dozen economists for a company the size of Microsoft or Google, and 100 across all the major firms seems few when you consider the myriad and quantity of other non-economic non-engineering staff these technology companies hire.

<comment><USER8> I think the point is not the absolute size of the number (would you expect PhD economists to be comparable in number to most other professions you mentioned?), but the recent hiring trend. I think it's interesting for a few reasons. One is that tech companies have a bit of a historical tendency to make economics decisions without much input from economists. Another is the notable big exceptions such as Varian at Google and the generalized second price ad auction. A final one is the interaction between econ and CS in terms of methods, viewpoints, priorities, decisions. (Disclaimer: I've collaborated with economists and computer scientists at both companies you mention.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The most amazing example of such cooperation is Yanis Varoufakis, who was working for Valve on virtual currencies and economy of Steam Market before becoming Minister of Finance in Greece. In his own words: [http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began- with-a...](http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began-with-a- strange-email/)

<comment><USER10> I saw Gabe make a presentation at the University of Texas a few years ago, and Yanis was sitting in the front row. Not being an economist myself, I had no good questions for them. And I gather that Gabe was a little annoyed at all the questions around upcoming releases and not the topic of his speech.

In hindsight, I would have asked Yanis if he was overwhelmed by the detail of the data that Valve collects on their market - both the Steam store and the in-game markets. Conventional public economic data would seem to have to be used with caution, as there are people at all levels looking to sway the numbers in different directions (ahh .. politics!), but the Valve data would have been base numbers without any "processing". And there's a lot of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> They hired all the Math, CS, and Physics PhDs, so now they are hiring the tier 2 quants :-)

</comment><comment><USER12> I had always presumed the vast majority of economists working in tech were simply doing transfer pricing... shuffling profits overseas to minimize taxes.

<comment><USER13> Some, yes. However, a lot of economist work goes into real-time ad auction platforms, marketing, fraud detection, and many other places where human interaction and incentives meet automated systems.

As an economist in the technology/data science space, I've found that the training and methodology brings a lot to table, such as the feature engineering side of ML or investigating business processes for incentive misalignment.

<comment><USER14> I studied econ undergrad but don't see much reason to get a PhD outside of academia or leveraging a public sector job such as a Fed job into a private sector finance role. I can see some of the technical skills such as survey construction/analysis, bayesian analysis/higher level statistics being somewhat useful, but a lot of that is also very role specific and can be learned on the job, no? Thinking with a game-theory/incentive-centered mindset is something that does not require too much formal econ knowledge.

<comment><USER3> Econ's undergrad degree is remarkably unrepresentative of Econ grad school. But every phd program in any subject is training you to do research first and foremost, so don't do it for technical training.

<comment><USER14> Can you speak to why the gap is so large between undergrad and grad econ programs?

<comment><USER3> The level of math. An Econ/math double major is about the right background for an Econ phd program. (I was a math major in undergrad and didn't feel like a lack of much exposure to Econ hurt me much in grad school, but it would have given me better perspective on the field.) Many Econ undergrads want a "businessey" degree and don't want to take math beyond calculus, so trying to teach "real" macro (which would require coursework equivalent to differential equations) or "real" micro (similar to but less fussy than real analysis) or even empirical research (statistical tools that build on regression) would be rough going. So we teach "intuition" and watered down versions of the results and punt on justification. Plus the "core" undergrad courses have a large service component --- we need good business students to be able to take intermediate micro, for example, so unilaterally ramping up the required smath wouldn't be feasible even if some of the students wanted it.

tl;dr phd programs can spend a lot of time teaching students how to use and extend mathematical tools and can cherry pick students with the right backgrounds. Undergraduate programs have a big service component, have to assume a range of mathematical preparation, and have to actually teach "economics" in their core courses -- game theory needs to teach game theory, not how to be a game theorist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> i used to work at an institutional investment firm. a huge one. (say it like trump) huuuuuge. we had lots of economists. i chilled with them. i partied with them. and when we partied, when the booze flowed and we all shared sordid stories about how our jobs really went down, they basically said the work they did was, meh, adding very little, and at times no, marginal value and that most of the time the traders did their own thing regardless.

also, lets not forget what happened to south america when the chicago school of economics prescribed its bitter medicine. they're still recovering/reeling both economically and culturally.

so, i shudder when i read that some of the most influential and active corporations, those determining the way of our society/culture and economy, are adding all these PhDs from a discipline whose track record is absolutely crap from both a social/cultural and an economic angle. (full disclosure i have a b.s. in economics, so, yes, i understand some of what an economist does)

the suits are taking over.

<comment><USER16> Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina are not reeling from an overdose of Chicago school economics.

Pay a bit more attention, or be a bit more honest.</comment></comment>