Apple's outdated legal practices from a developer's point of view - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/bambuu/a-story-of-apples-excruciating-outdated-legal-practices-e5c144f0aeeb <comment><USER2> > _Nevertheless, I was conversing with Apple Support to fix this mess, but > this is where the first problems started to appear. You see, apparently I > had to attach "some kind of government issued photo ID" to verify my real > name. A bit strange to me, since it's perfectly fine to change your name on > the regular Apple ID account, but "I'm no legal wizard" I thought, "there's > probably something I don't understand"._

Well, the "regular Apple ID account" is not selling applications to consumers.

(While Apple could have made changing the developer account name a much better experience, it's obvious why they require identification to change it)

> _Yeah, I'm totally gonna send a picture of my passport, without concealing > any information, to a random person on the internet. That's not dangerous at > all._

Or, you know, you can stop selling apps. If you've opened any kind of business, and have dealt with any kind of bank, you'd be giving all those kinds of documents and more, and have to be there physically too.

> _however it requires that you "provide business or court documentation that > reflects the change". No other service provider required this documentation, > but who knows, maybe Apple's legal team is just better than the rest._

Do those other "service providers" concern selling stuff as a business? Plus, if it didn't require anything and some random hacker hijacked your account and could change the details to theirs easily, you'll be screaming bloody murder.

> _And then it magically happened. 1 month and 21 days after the first form > submission, the name of the bambuu Apple developer account was officially > updated. And all it required was 80 $, countless hours, and my will to live. > All worth it._

Try opening a conventional store. Or any kind of money handling web service...

<comment><USER3> > and have to be there physically too.

Not in Denmark, you can do all that online.

> No other service provider required this documentation

Well, Google play?

> Try opening a conventional store. Or any kind of money handling web > service...

In Denmark this is done before lunch (trust me, I've done it on several occasions).

<comment><USER2> Handled users money as a random web person?

If you mean you did the bureaucratic stuff online, I assume you still needed to give proof of who you are -- perhaps with some state provider digital signature or whatever.

If not, then it might be easier for the one opening the shop, but it's much more dangerous for the consumers giving them their money.

<comment><USER4> > perhaps with some state provider digital signature or whatever.

Yes he did. In Denmark it is called "NemID" [1], and is a state issued 2 factor identification system for online interaction with banks and official services.

Obviously Apple can't rely on this system for all their users, but in theory they could make it work for Danish users.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NemID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NemID)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, that would be nice, but as it's not a standard, they probably Apple couldn't even make it work for Danish users -- they wouldn't go build 2 systems and go out of their way to verify data with the Danish government just for a few million people (or, actually, just for a few thousands of developers).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the article brings up some good points about the issues of verifying identity over the internet, something that yet does not have a universal standard. In Sweden we have a system called "BankID" which basically let's you use your phone as a 2FA device in order to verify your identity to companies, the tax agencies, police etc and it works very well, although limited to Sweden. This is not an SMS based system and is not tied to your SIM card, instead tied to the application on your phone together with a personal password. Hopefully a system like this can catch on in the future as a way of verifying identity.

With this said i will excuse myself for going out of topic here but i am getting very tired of the recent trend of putting reaction GIF's in pieces like this. Reading it on desktop is just hard for me when getting into a nice reading flow, only to be broken up by a reaction GIF 1/3 the size of my monitor height. Authors adding a GIF to the end does not disturb me, but for me this article breaks the reading flow by adding so many.

Here is how large one of these reaction GIF's render for me: [https://imgur.com/a/dYihu](https://imgur.com/a/dYihu)

<comment><USER6> I'm guessing BankID in Sweden is very similar to the version in Norway, which is a pretty horrible service.

In order to use BankID, you have to bind it first to one bank account and use that bank's code brick to log in. Or you use BankID on your phone which is tied to your SIM card and some providers will charge you for using it!

It also relies on your phone having service (not just WiFi access), so the amount you're charged for using it can be much higher overseas.

BankID would be just as secure if they used the authentication scheme behind Google Authenticator, and it would allow people to use it without additional costs.

<comment><USER5> No, luckily our version is not tied to the SIM card at all and works on just wifi devices. It's also free for the consumer to use. For being a service primarily integrating with banks, i will say it works very well in Sweden and now most providers has started to support it. Sure, there can always be improvements and i wish there were a standard not owned by a company, but i'm also glad when my 80+ year old grandmother has something simple enough to authenticate that provides a reasonable layer of security.

If you are interested there's some details here [https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-legitimation](https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-legitimation) that lists the differences.

<comment><USER6> That's good to know. I wish Norway would get on board with better practices!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I also changed the name of my company within Apple's developer program. It was not easy and the most confusing part was that they always send you documents that look like spam. Their emails look like spam, their letters look like spam.

Also it took several weeks because apparently they don't have a process in place to change account names and have to do it by hand and asking the boss and the bosses boss for stuff like that. I wonder how the whole thing can be that complicated, I would guess they have to deal with hundreds of startups per day that want to change their name because the first one was made up while being drunk or something.

</comment><comment><USER8> We pivoted our organisation to non-profit. What we did: we just abandoned the old account and crated a new one. But even there we hid a snag. Dun & Bradstreet seemed to have never encountered an association. It took some time till we got a new DUNS number.

We had luck that our country, Switzerland, has a registry for all entities who employ people¹: the UID registry, [https://www.uid.admin.ch](https://www.uid.admin.ch), and our non-profit was listed in that registry. Phew!

¹: not exactly but it will be tedious to explain the Swiss UID registry here.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why is this so "outdated"?

-If you wanted to send Apple a fax, use one of the half dozen apps to take a picture and send it as a fax.

-In the U.S. and probably other countries, Apple has to send you and the government documentation of the money you made on the App Store

-I feel much more comfortable downloading random stuff on iOS knowing that the security model on iOS and to a lesser extent proof of authorship and app review keeps malware and viruses off my phone.

<comment><USER10> > If you wanted to send Apple a fax, use one of the half dozen apps to take a > picture and send it as a fax.

Wtf? It's the 21st century, why do I need to use fax to communicate with a leading tech company?

> In the U.S. and probably other countries, Apple has to send you and the > government documentation of the money you made on the App Store

My government expressly warns citizens not to send anyone unredacted copies of your national identification documents, and it is illegal for companies to ask for this unless they have a very good reason to do so (very good reasons include being your employer or bank).

<comment><USER11> If you are selling an app in the App Store, then Apple is your employer. That lines up with the GP's point that Apple is required to send both you and your government documentation of your income via the App Store.

<comment><USER10> Then Apple is your distributor, not your employer.

<comment><USER9> The IRS requires Apple to send them and you a form 1099K -

 _What does my Form 1099-K report to me?

A Form 1099-K includes the gross amount of all reportable payment transactions. You will receive a Form 1099-K from each payment settlement entity from which you received payments in settlement of reportable payment transactions. A reportable payment transaction is defined as a payment card transaction or a third party network transaction._

[https://www.irs.gov/businesses/understanding- your-1099-k](https://www.irs.gov/businesses/understanding-your-1099-k)

I'm sure other countries require something similar.

Either way, they need either Your SSN or your TIN to report it.

<comment><USER10> Yes, because you still need to pay income tax over money you earn, whether an employer paid you or you are independently doing business transactions (i.e. you are self-employed).

The page you linked even says "It is important that your business books and records reflect your business income, including any amounts that may be reported on Form 1099-K."

Another way to think about it: If Apple were your employer, you'd have to fill out a timesheet and they'd have to pay you at least minimum wage. That's not the case; if your app sells 0 copies, Apple will pay you exactly nothing, regardless of how many hours you spent making the app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm actually glad Apple has some formidable barriers to thwart identity thieves trying to steal my app revenue.

<comment><USER10> I'm not glad that those barriers include doing something my government expressly warns against (sending someone an unredacted copy of a national identification document).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This seems a bit extreme but on the other hand Googles approach is completely worthless.

I would say, start the process while logged in to the account and then have the legal documents verified at an Apple Store.

<comment><USER14> That's what notaries are for: "Identifying the person appearing before the notary by reference to significant proofs of evidence including passport, driving license, birth certificate, diplomatic documents etc." [1] Notaries are licensed by their governments to perform this service, and can do so by inspecting the person's documentation and certifying that fact to a third party like Apple, without needing to share a facsimile of the actual documentation with the third party directly.

There aren't that many Apple Stores in the entire world. It would be a considerable burden to expect people to travel to one. Apple Stores are present in only 17 countries, and there aren't any at all in Africa, India, or South America. This Business Insider article has a map:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-stores-how-many- around-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-stores-how-many-around-world- chart-2017-2)

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


Omega2: $5 Linux Computer with Wi-Fi - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/omega2-5-linux-computer-with-wi-fi-made-for-iot#/ <comment><USER2> I was just reading about this little guy yesterday, in Linux User & Developer mag. I was planning on building an Arduino sunset/sunrise outside lights controller for my house (using lat/long and a bit of maths), but I think this fits the bill better.

</comment><comment><USER3> wth! That page tells us nothing useful. The hardware headline has a picture of it, a pinout diagram and nothing more. What kind of hardware is it built with? What architecture is it? What's the wi-fi chip? Does it have good support? What libraries are you using? What distros are supported?

All I can see it that it's running busybox and a two year old kernel.</comment>


How "../sms" could bypass Authy everywhere - <AUTHOR> http://sakurity.com/blog/2015/03/15/authy_bypass.html?2

<comment><USER2> Yet another problem that could be solved with good typing :)

Seriously though, it's very worrying to me that so many low-level ruby libraries have so many issues. I realise bugs happen, but at least in the python world there seems to be less "oh whoops the most popular OAuth provider lib is susceptible to CSRF"-type bugs.

<comment><USER3> But there was no user story in which the user typed "../sms"! You seem to be encouraging thinking about scenarios like this in advance, a.k.a. BDUF.</comment></comment>


Many ways of malware persistence - <AUTHOR> http://jumpespjump.blogspot.com/2015/05/many-ways-of-malware-persistence-that.html

<comment><USER2> For more information on this topic check out Hexacorn's "Beyond good ol' Run key" series. [http://www.hexacorn.com/blog/category/autostart- persistence/](http://www.hexacorn.com/blog/category/autostart-persistence/)

</comment><comment><USER3> My kids have been able to infect our computers with some really nasty adware and spamware by trying to install Minecraft mods.

One computer is a Windows7 PC with UAC disabled (unfortunately), so I had to do some deep dives into the registry to clean it. The other was a Mac with Yosemite, and that was so messed up we had to take it to the Apple Store for a wipe and reinstall.

I've tried to coach my kids on downloading and installing things, but when friends come over to play Minecraft it's like they forget everything.

<comment><USER4> Game mods are a minefield of adware, malware, and outright rootkits that compromise PCs. The Minecraft developers messed up a long time ago by doing two things. Not making mods easy to use and not having an official mod repository that offers safe downloads. Even the decent sites offering mod downloads have issues with ads laden with malware.

<comment><USER5> Further to this: mods are so hard that some people use a mod launcher. This replaces the official Mojang Minecraft launcher. But part of the role of the launcher is to log on the player. These alternative launchers just ask the player for their Minecraft username and password! And this is just what the community accepts.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/30orgd/is_there_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/30orgd/is_there_a_legitimate_reason_for_a_mod_to_ask_for/)

<comment><USER6> Are Minecraft mods actually securely implemented?

Could a nefarious mod that _didn 't_ include a launcher still read the user/pass out of RAM?

<comment><USER7> Mod is just a JAR file that's loaded into Minecraft process. So yeah, no protection whatsoever.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are late applications to S14 no longer being accepted online? - <AUTHOR>

I was writing a late application for S14, but when I tried to edit it last night the link was dead (ycombinator.com/apply displays as blank page).<p>Is this a temporary glitch or are late applications for S14 no longer being accepted online? <comment><USER2> Late applications are still being accepted, and I just made one with a test account.

Since I can't figure out what's wrong on my own, please get in touch me me at firstname.lastname@example.com so I can see where we messed up. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Nick, I just emailed you with more details.

It appears to be working now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pretty sure all the teams have been accepted/rejected at this point.

<comment><AUTHOR> All teams who applied by the application deadline have been, but YC's homepage states they'll review late applications that are submitted on a rolling basis until June, before S14 actually starts.</comment></comment>


YC startup Homejoy embarks on global mission to free people from housework - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/15/yc-startup-homejoy-embarks-on-global-mission-to-free-people-from-housework/

<comment><USER2> So it is a competitor of Exec, Taskrabbit, and Lyft, but what does it do differently or better besides just being another cleaning service?</comment>


Stop the presses: Facebook CTO says news next in social revolution - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12406171

<comment><USER2> Gotta love sensationalist headlines...

Should read: Facebook CTO says purchasing servers for a separate startup prior to Facebook _might_ have been unnecessary

The idea that Facebook wouldn't need its own data centers is pretty ridiculous, and that's what the title implies

EDIT: looks like "while at FriendFeed" was added for clarity ... Further edit: The title is changed now, but the original said "Facebook CTO says purchasing servers was his biggest mistake" or something of the like

<comment><USER3> yeah true.. title is completely mis leading. When I read this thought facebook did mistake on purchasing it's own server and setting up it's datacenter.

But Bret (CTO of facebook, co-founder of Friendfeed) talks about Friendfeed here. Considering friendfeed growing and struggling stage to make it's presence. There is lot of other thing to worry than maintaining own data center.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> friendfeed was built in 08, before amazon had released EBS as a feature. there is no way in hell the instance-store disk i/o would have kept up with friendfeeds mysql demands (you may remember the post Bret himself wrote on their nifty approach to mysql: <http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed- uses-mysql> ) Frankly, even EBS probably wouldn't have. Plus, back in 08 the larger ec2 instances were still pretty low on ram compared to what you could cheaply cram in a colo'd server, putting even more pressure on the disk i/o.

I think Bret's really wishing what almost everyone is, that these problems would just go away and you could pay a reasonable premium for that, but we're not there yet and certainly weren't in 2008. I don't think he really checked his numbers on this one.

edit: however there is a happy medium. managed service providers will gladly charge you ec2 prices (250/month for a low end server, 500/month for a beefy one) while handling all midnight colo trips for you.

<comment><USER5> Don't worry, people are on it - <http://www.dotcloud.com> :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> When someone says "My biggest mistake is doing X and not Y. X turned out to be really hard." I wonder if they know how difficult Y would be as well.

</comment><comment><USER7> In other news, Amazon's CTO says his worst decision was to buy servers as they could have just rolled EC2's API out on Dreamhost's Private Servers offering..

Less facetiously, this "regret" surprises me. I'd have though that of anyone, Facebook would want to have full control and security over their own servers. Agreeing to a contract where Amazon can pull the plug over "objectionable" content or even adverse effects on their network poses a significant risk for any large business to accept.

<comment><USER8> He is not talking about servers for Facebook but his old startup, Friendfeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Until some very smart people get together and restart tandem, buying hardware will be a poor decision. Designing for a fail-by-design architecture will be the right thing to do. and if you have fail by design, why not just ship the executable to whoever's the cheapest virtual hosting at the moment.

PS: To very smart people: Please get together and start Tandem: the sequel. Pretty, pretty please. With sugar on top.

</comment><comment><USER10> The _only_ two paragraphs that actually match the headline:

 _If we had to guess, it's probably going to be orientated around media or news, because they are so social. When you watch a television show with your friend, it's such an engaging social activity.

We think that there's a next generation of startups that are developing social versions of these applications, where what Zynga is to gaming, they will be to media and news, and we're really excited about that._

</comment><comment><USER11> In addition to the misleading title, you gotta love the "Yell" typo for "Yelp" in the article...

<comment><USER12> Yell is the company that publishes the UK Yellow Pages. I'm sure Bret Taylor meant Yelp. However: <http://www.yell.com/reviews/> "The places to go, by the locals in the know". Or so they say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's funny the differences in headlines between one tailored for HN and BBC audiences respectively.

</comment><comment><USER14> something about the t-shirt under the shirt look that detracts from the article.</comment>


What system do you use for bug tracking? - <AUTHOR> I am interested in seeing how you track bugs during development and acceptance testing.<p>We use bugzilla, but it leaves a little to be desired. <comment><USER2> Trac ( <http://trac.edgewall.org/> ) is awesome. It also has very good integration with subversion, if you want that (but you can ignore that aspect if you just want a bug-tracker).

<comment><USER3> There is a local company Assembla.com that has a basecamp like online project management service. it has Trac as one of the features. I am using it for our project, which includes a couple of developers in the Boston area and a couple in India.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Trac is very nice, as other have stated. It's kinda like SourceForge done right, in the sense that it has source browsing, a wiki for web pages, and a bug tracker with good notification capabilities. Last time I used it it was absolutely retarded about user accounts and saving settings (you had to carry around an MD5 "key", rather than being able to log in).

We're using FlySpray, because it drops into our CMS (Joomla) with relative ease, and we wanted customers to be able to file bugs. We also use it for support. It works pretty well, has all of the features we needed, and is a really nice clean and simple codebase, so customizations are relatively easy. It's also a low-dependency PHP project, so it'll drop onto any ol' hosting account with a database, and runs plenty fast.

</comment><comment><USER5> Comments at the top of the file.

<comment><USER2> On personal projects I use comments like

        (defun foo (x y z)
          ;; FIXME: foo should not barf if x is nil

and then periodically grep all my sources for "FIXME".

<comment><USER6> This is so common that many of the syntax files for Vim even have TODO FIXME XXX NOTE and others included, so they're highlighted and easy to spot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Check out Roundup - <http://roundup.sourceforge.net/> .

<comment><USER8> I Second that. Extremely easy to set up and comes with quite reasonable default configuration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I have a choice (not very often when working with a company) I use FogBugz. It's a bit pricey compared to FREE, but now that they have a hosted version, it's great if you need to track bugs with a team.

The simplicity and approach of FogBugz is fantastic. Really worth a look if you have the cash to afford it. That being said - they do have provide it for free if you only need 2 accounts. See: <http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.482288>

<comment><USER10> Joel, we know it's you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I use a heavily modified version of Case Tracker, a group of addon modules for the Drupal CMS. It's similar to other helpdesks (it's actually a fork of the project and project release modules that are used at drupal.org) and it's being extended by a student during this year's Google Summer of Code.

Since Case Tracker runs in Drupal it's just one feature of an entire suite. I have all the features I need, from web-to-email, email-to-web (posting by email or phone), XML-RPC, a full range of access controls, wiki functionality, RSS feeds, etc.

</comment><comment><USER12> Mantis is good, and it's fairly similar to Bugzilla (though better), so the transition should be pretty smooth. It was also a breeze to set up.

</comment><comment><USER13> TRAC's my current favorite.

Too all the people using comments in the code and the like, that's very good when you're a 1-2 person team, but when you (hopefully) have more coders, possibly QA people and (god forbid) customers who complain about stuff that doesn't work well, you'd better switch to something that's more manageable.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've used trac and mantis. Trac is kinda a pain to set up. Mantis is easy to set up, but very ugly.

</comment><comment><USER15> I use //TODO: in my Visual Studio stuff. VS will find them for you automatically, I don't even have to grep for them.

I also try to write code so small and simple that it approaches the complexity of "Hello World." That way, it's easy to find the bugs.

</comment><comment><USER16> I like keeping things simple while we're still small, so right now we just use 37signals' basecamp's (<http://www.basecamphq.com/>) to do list. this will probably change in the future

</comment><comment><USER17> If I'm just working alone: ToDoList by AbstractSpoon Software <http://www.abstractspoon.com/>

For small projects it's enough to manage all my tasks, including bugs.

</comment><comment><USER18> Personal projects: a 'TODO' text file, 1 line per issue, open in the editor (emacs or Eclipse) for the project.

Group/open-source projects: JIRA, which was a nice step up from Sourceforge's built-in tracking.

</comment><comment><USER19> <http://16bugs.com/>

</comment><comment><USER20> I fix bugs before I need to track them.

</comment><comment><USER21> Mantis. Not great, but good enough - for now. May replace it if our needs get more complex.

</comment><comment><USER22> <http://acunote.com> Naturally :-)

</comment><comment><USER23> checklists stored in emails, & the backs of credit-card-bill envelopes

</comment><comment><USER6> A simple shared spreadsheet in Google Docs for small projects. Trac for some others.

</comment><comment><USER24> Mantis. But I tend to think the pages are too long.

</comment><comment><USER25> index cards

</comment><comment><USER26> Notepad

<comment><USER27> Ick. I would never rely on so crude a tool as Notepad for my bug tracking. I use emacs (text-mode).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> A whiteboard.

</comment><comment><USER29> Unfuddle!</comment>


Ask HN: Dictionary based password generator source code – useful or useless? - <AUTHOR>

I've written a Chrome App that generates 'random' phrases based on a hard-coded dictionary of several thousand words.
For example, it creates '312Hesitent-Boxes', '646Nifty.Brains!'.
These passwords are sufficient for many websites requirements, but more-over, they are easyier to spell and type.
The issue is, since a Chrome App is basically just a zipped up JavaScript/HTML folder, it's trivial to get the list of words and then generate every possible combination of numbers+punctuation+words - that's still a lot of words, but nothing that couldn't be generated into a table with that much effort.
Question is, does the ability to predict every password easily make such a tool useless?  Or are we more common sense based and know that we could use these passwords on sites that lock/restrict accounts when they hit incorrect passwords, have two-factor, IP locks, non-predictable usernames etc... <comment><USER2> I would suggest allowing users to supply their own wordlists, supply them with custom transliterated languages or help them create words from texts, logs, pdfs etc.

Transliterating words to latin characters from a user's foreign language is a great way to add words not usually found in dictionaries. (eg If you speak Greek, French or Japanese, take a couple of books and transliterate them, remove 10% most and less common words, remove any words between 1-3 and 8+ chars and you should be gold.) You can create or find dictionaries like this for different languages and provide them for users to choose/download from.

Open sourcing your app would be a great way to get help and ideas from others.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yours is essentially a variation of the correct horse battery stable/diceware method. It is quite secure way to generate/encode passwords, but I'd recommend using more words, at least three but preferably four. The punctuation, numbers and capitalization might help to get through some onerous password requirements of some sites, but they do not contribute as much as the words to the security of the password.

edit: Just a reminder: check your randomness source for security!

<comment><USER4> [https://github.com/jvdl/CorrectHorseBatteryStaple/pull/2/fil...](https://github.com/jvdl/CorrectHorseBatteryStaple/pull/2/files)

Agreed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd say you're good. Some quick maths:-

Even if you only use a relatively small dictionary (of 32,000 words). Just picking two words at random is a billion combinations. Throw in some different punctuation symbols, plus a 3 digit number and that's over a trillion password combinations.

Any password throttling only helps, but you cannot rely on every website using it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Useless? No. Diceware's not useless, and it's just a wordlist.</comment>


Ask HN: Startup Ideas You'd Like to Fund in 2019-2020 - <AUTHOR> I has been a while not heard any new ideas.  Here are the ones previously listed:
Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund (2008) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16431037
Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250704 <comment><USER2> I think that page moved to "Requests for Startups" [https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/) last updated 2018</comment>


Apple will reportedly limit third-party tracking in kids apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/31/apple-kids-privacy-third-party-app-tracking/ <comment><USER2> OK. Now, quite seriously, how can I lie to every app I own and make it think I'm 12?</comment>


Why Mark Suster is wrong about not hiring job hoppers - <AUTHOR> http://www.pauldix.net/2010/04/why-mark-suster-is-wrong-about-not-hiring-job-hoppers.html <comment><USER2> This reminds me of an article I came across, praising execs working with an 'assignment mentality' rather than lifetime-employment seekers: <http://hbr.org/2001/07/the-right-way-to-be-fired/ar/1>

What's interesting in this debate is that Mark's own experience isn't where he puts his mouth. He spent the first 8 years of his career at Accenture (which screams failed attempt at making partner -- sorry to be harsh), but drastically changed occupations every two years inside the firm (switching from IT to strategy, changing countries etc.).

I really like reading Mark, so I'm afraid of overbearing my point. But his inital blog post sounded like shamelessly getting his cake and eating it too.

He felt that such frequent career changes were the best way to prepare himself to lead a startup someday -- why would the same trait magically become a liability in others? Optimizing against this very behavior in job selection signals a quite detrimental two-tiered mindset -- himself at the helm, and employees who are there to take orders.

This is to some extent the reality of capitalism, but it isn't admirable leadership, nor a good way to generate innovation, and certainly not the best way to inspire people to stick on a sinking ship while the rats drown away. As the OP said - money can't buy you love... :)

Contrast this with Yelp, Aardvark and the second-generation breed of entrepreneurs coming out of the PayPal and Google mafias.

<comment><USER3> The distinction between tenured and assignment mentalities made in the HBR article is vital: before offering or accepting a position, make sure you understand the other's understanding of the relationship sought and the nature of the work. Distinguish between project-oriented and task-oriented work and act accordingly. Project-oriented positions have natural life-cycles with obvious times to conclude the relationship and move on (e.g., product delivery).

Finding people with an earnest, project-oriented mentality is hard. A lot of people believe or want to believe they are project-oriented, but are really case-workers, and vice-versa. A good portion of people aren't project- or task- oriented, they're people-oriented and will conform to a project- or case-oriented environment to the extent that it fosters good inter-personal relations.

A small fraction of people are entirely self-oriented: they'll do whatever is necessary to build their self-esteem and satisfy their will to power. They're cancers. One is enough to destroy the team. Filtering-out these bad seeds is the hardest and most important skill a hiring manager (or potential recruit) can develop. Mr. Suster's post isn't particularly helpful in identifying these most toxic individuals: they bind tightly to their hosts and stick through the disease they create, gaining greater responsibilities and better titles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Salary is priced by the market, and that requires regular testing. Saying you don't want to hire regular job-changers is saying you don't want a functioning market. That, of course, is just what one would expect from companies who don't want to pay people what they are worth. Talk of 'loyalty' is effectively propaganda.

<comment><USER5> I've been asked for loyalty from companies many more times than I've ever been shown any. It's pretty rare that a company really sticks by their employees.

For the younger generations, after watching their parents work 20+ years at the same organization and receive a cheap watch, they have no illusions about who will be providing the loyalty and who will be receiving it.

<comment><USER6> "Loyalty" is staying together and providing work or benefits even when it is financially a bad move. I've never in my life seen a company that is loyal to its employees.

Even not firing people in recession times, providing four monitors or free massages and lunches are not loyalty if they make workers more productive or attract better talent. It would be loyalty only when these actions cost the company much more than they benefit it, as a gift to the employees out of sheer good will.

<comment><USER7> Part of a comment I left on the HN thread discussing Suster's post was "It was most often used when a builder had materials or a little cash available to avoid laying off good workers when there wasn't a contract job available." About builders building houses on-spec to keep together their core workers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cogent: _"If you're a job hopper that will translate to how you view entrepreneurship." This is so off the mark it hurts my brain. Let me explain why._

 _As an entrepreneur there is one benefit that ranks above all others. Stability and a big paycheck definitely aren't it. It's a sense of ownership. It's a sense of owning your own destiny. I've talked to a bunch of other entrepreneurs and they share that feeling._

 _If you ask job hoppers why they left some of their jobs the story will be the opposite. They left because they weren't given enough ownership. They weren't included in vital decision making processes. When you have the ability to improve your workplace, you have no reason to hop jobs._

 _Most jobs don't actually give their employees this chance. They're filled with bureaucracy and ridiculous power struggles. That's exactly the opposite of the startup and entrepreneurship experience._

This really resonated with me. The most frustrating jobs for me, the ones that ended in me leaping for my life or being defenestrated, were the ones where I was under extreme pressure to deliver, but the schedule and spec were subject to capricious, unpredictable shifts out of my control. The ones where I had little say in the composition of my team or the methods we used to deliver results.

Ultimately, accountability for the outcome without the authority to manage the effort is about as frustrating as life can get.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. I gave two week's notice earlier this week. This is the first time I haven't lasted two years at a company, so I am feeling a bit like a job hopper. But the reasons I'm leaving are very much about accountability without authority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> While I empathize with employers that loose good people quickly (< 2 years) I have the following thought: I own my own life. I don't have to stay in Toronto if I don't want to. I don't have to continue to take bullshit for a cheque. I can go off and become a resort hand in Tiji if I wanted to, this is Canada for goodness sake. I am FREE.

Unless I took a signing bonus, both the employer and myself put a lot of effort into bringing me on board. I don't remember getting a cheque for all the interviews I've gone to.

Suster can go ahead and self select for stayers, this is capitalism after all, but he is going to lose out at the margin. Someone can actually get a ton of work done in two years and really and the 10 year employees I've met are rarely rockstars in their field.

<comment><USER11> > I don't remember getting a cheque for all the interviews I've gone to.

I'm wondering if anyone ("rockstars", presumably) demanded that job interviews be treated as temp consulting gigs that need to be paid for.

<comment><USER12> As an employer without a lot of credibility, I have been known to pay for interviews. (Now, usually these were interviews where I asked for work to get done, but those are the best kind of interviews, no?)

I don't understand why more places don't pay for interviews; it seems to make a lot of sense all around; I mean, this idea that a recruit will sacrifice the better part of a day to each potential employer speaks to a larger power imbalance between the two than I think exists, at least at the higher end.

<comment><USER13> I totaly agree with this. Instead of wasting time building generalizing filters take the ones you feel good about on as contractors first. Get a feel for their competency and whether they fit your environment before you buy the cow!

Anything else just seems so ineficient and risky at least when it comes to programmers. Think long term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Paul, I think you make a compelling counter-argument. Thank you for moving the debate forward. I have written my own follow on posting here: <http://bothsid.es/62o> that referenced your blog posting

<comment><USER15> Hi Mark,

Your follow piece is very helpful.

> " If I'm looking at a stack of resumes and have to quickly whittle them down > I usually eliminate resumes where people switched too many times and didn't > have a single place that they stayed for 3+ years "

Is a lot more reasonable than the original title (when I see it with people), especially when applied to those ten or fifteen years into their current career (edit: originally I said "30+", but then I realized age is an illegal question and that there may be people who switched careers at a later age e.g., by going back to college for a CS degree at 25).

> Again, this is totally fine. I recommend to people that you put on your > resume the reason that you changed jobs.

It would make sense to do this for 6 month stints, but not for 18-36 month ones. One reason is that this question is already asked on most employment applications. It can be confirmed through a reference check (I am still surprised when companies don't do this prior to making an offer). Having reasons stated all over the resume can be perceived as excuses and as bad mouthing (in public, given that the resume is read by many and may be publicly posted) former employers (e.g., if one put down "insufficient challenge" or "inadequate compensation").

When hiring engineers, resume screening should be done by engineers (or at worst, engineering PMs). I know they will hate it, but remind them that they will hate working with bozos a lot more.

I can find a lot better heuristics: do they just list keywords, are there obviously technically inaccurate things, are descriptions full of "wank words" vs. concrete, measurable, achievements. Asking candidates to submit an answer to a _simple_ randomly chosen question along with the resume (e.g., "in C what's wrong with this code: int* foo (void) { int n = 3; return &n; }", posting puzzles (like Facebook does) or doing a "fizz buzz" test over Etherpad are much simpler filters.

If there are red flags on the resume (and I agree that lack of 3+ year stays ten years after the person has graduated college is a red flag), the place to address them is either right before an in-person interview (after a phone screen) or right after (before making an offer). It's the role of the hiring manager, team technical lead and company HR to do this.

As an engineer conducting an interview or a phone screen, I already have a tough issue on my hand: give a binary answer after only forty five minutes with the person; time spent asking about their life's story (other than asking them about specific projects) is better spent finding information that will help me tell me whether they're technical and cultural (in terms of their ability to communicate, passion for software engineering/computer science, etc...) fit for the position or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> When I was a more naive manager (and employer), I would have agreed with Suster's arguments.

But the startup world is simply not a "stable" place, for either party. There's always a tradeoff; my most stable/non-hopping friends work for the government doing fairly mind-numbing things. Those aren't the employees your startup is looking for.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a commercial transaction with all that entails.

If you as an employer are any good - you will have the best people wanting to join you and if you are not , then well , it is going to be a revolving door.

The best people will always have more offers on the table.

<comment><USER18> I don't think that's necessarily true. Some of the best programmers are _abysmal_ interviewees. So I would suggest that there are a ton of briliant programmers out there with jobs that are well below their level.

<comment><USER17> True , but then let the code talk , in this day and age of github and other social coding sites - show them what you got and if the employer has any sense he will hire you.

<comment><USER18> Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Having good code on github will get you an interview, but it won't make up for a bad one.

<comment><USER17> If an employer overlooks good code and instead places more emphasis on an amorphous process like an interview which has plenty of false-negatives and positives , then i would argue against working for such an employer.

They have a broken recruitment process.

<comment><USER19> I know a few people whom I consider amazing programmers, but that I'd never hire and feel very dubious to have as colleagues due to their personality and how they act. There are very few jobs (if any) where all that counts is the quality of what you put up on github.

<comment><USER17> Fair enough, but i never said hire programmers based "only" on their code in github. The assumption here is that certain programmers do not do "technical" interviews well and they can therefore point to their code as proof of their technical competency. If their personality is broken well - that's a completely different problem and i don't know the solution to it. Either way, i think this particular strain of discussion is in someways orthogonal to the main point of the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hmm. I changed jobs 6 times (5 companies) in 3 1/2 years, which averages to a job change every 6 months. Longest stint I had was about a year. As far as I can tell, I have not been noticeably penalised for it in my professional life.

It's definitely the fastest way to increase one's income, and you can't blame people for doing that. My first job was doing technical support (first full, then part-time) at $8.50/hr, and the subsequent 5 job changes were simply progressions to a very modest mid-level IT salary in the $50-$70k range. I don't think that's ridiculous.

<comment><USER21> Your case is justified because you seem to be qualified for something better than what your starting job was. So job hopping made sense for you.

As a hiring manager, I would not hire someone who has been job hopping _for the same position_. Think of it as a twist on the Peter Principle.

<comment><USER20> Fair enough, but, it seems to me that it is rarely the case that two positions at two different companies in our field are truly _the same_ , even if the title is the same and/or they draw on similar skill sets.

My jobs were all in different subspecialisations of technology, but there is a certain identifiable sameness that unites all of them, and especially unites the first three (ISP and SMB-oriented IT consulting work) with the last three (VoIP & TDM telecommunications).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Excellent deconstruction of Mark's post. I'd add one point:

I thought that Mark's post was valuable in understanding the perspective of some hiring managers or investors since inevitably a few of those people will be looking at my resume. But I was not convinced that Mark's hiring filter was the correct approach to hiring. As an entrepreneur you're the underdog and need to find ways to do more with less. If all the big name companies are afraid of job hoppers, then you should be looking even harder at job hoppers. Your best chance at finding that diamond-in-the-rough employee is to take a closer look at the applicants that were never really evaluated at other companies because they were "caught by the filter."

</comment><comment><USER23> According to the definition outlined in the article, I would be considered a "hopper". I've been gone between full-time freelancing and being a senior employee in 3 start-ups over the last 5 years.

Looking just at my employment history at face-value, you could determine (taking the article's definition of dedication and commitment) that I was not truly dedicated to the long-term success of the companies I've been involved in.

The real story, of course, is that there's a lot more beneath the surface. Instead of blowing me off, ask me about the extent of my dedication to each company. I'm absolutely convinced that I've sacrificed, failed, and subsequently learned more in 5 years of "hopping" than the majority of "dedicated" employees who spend the same amount of time in a single job.

</comment><comment><USER24> When GE has a policy of firing 10% of the employee every year, why do you think employee should stay loyal?

</comment><comment><USER25> I think the point of both sides of the argument is this: Don't look for a job, go start your own damn company.

<comment><USER26> and unless you plan on working alone, you'll have to hire people. You can't hire people the same way you talk yourself into entrepreneurship. They're not going to be co-founders, they won't have a great upside, they're going to be paid a salary to do a job for you. Figuring out how to hire the right people is probably harder than anything else I've done.

<comment><USER27> >They're not going to be co-founders, they won't have a great upside, they're going to be paid a salary to do a job for you.

This is a point that I think most (especially first time) founders would do well to keep in mind when thinking about loyalty or even overall commitment of employees.

As an employee with 1% or less of the company in options and a normal if not below market salary, I simply don't have the upside incentive to go "above and beyond." Combined with the situation of responsibility (handling outages and other emergencies) without authority (advice on major infrastructure changes ignored or delayed), my loyalty or commitment haven't been earned.

<comment><USER12> I think it is something I think all employers would do well to keep in mind. But especially startups, because as you said, you are almost always getting paid below market rates. And, on top of that, it's a rather unstable job; I mean, if the company goes under, you get fired, right?

The thing is, when you are a startup, you /don't need/ people who want to stick around for 5 years. In 5 years, you will be much bigger, or dead. Either way, the employees you need 5 years from now will be /completely different/ from the employees you need now.

As a startup, you want ambitious people; the sort who hop from job to job to increase their salary and to get more interesting projects. You want someone who is relatively bright but inexperienced who really wants to gain experience. There are people who require constant change, and those people do really, really well at startups, and not so well at large corporations. Often, those people are willing to work for less money in exchange for letting them work in things they are not qualified to work on, and nearly always those people are willing to trade away stability, which is important, because as a startup, you can't offer stability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Mark is probably right - its hard to manage the entrepreneur types.

There is an interesting treatise called "Exit, Voce and Loyalty" by A.Hirschman that talks about the reasons for withdrawal from a relationship, be it employer-employee, or state-citizen interaction. I think Paul's reasons for 'job hopping' fit into the Exit camp, withdrawing due to either inability to change things or unwillingness to confront the system in a free market with plenty of exit options.

highly recommended: [http://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses- Organizat...](http://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses- Organizations/dp/0674276604)

</comment><comment><USER29> has anyone looked at this through the eyes of the engineer? they are clearly not sold into your vision if they're job hopping--how is this the engineer's fault? your startup can only keep top-notch people as long as it's committed to changing the world. the smartest people i know want to work on hard problems that impact a lot of people. if you can't fulfill that in an engineer, what incentive do they have to stay?

</comment><comment><USER30> Relax guys. I wouldn't hire Mark Suster either, but it's nice that he's helping startups in LA.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nice counterpoint article.

The thing not mentioned in either posting - what about guys like me that take/prefer contract work? When you are an indie developer trying to go your own way you inevetible take a lot of of short-term contract work to keep yourself floating.

<comment><USER32> You're scary and dangerous to bigger companies. They know you know how to leave and survive at any time, and expect you to get tired of the crazy schedules, overtime, and all that at any time. (At least I've known managers who thought that about your type).

<comment><USER31> Yep - exactly.

Probably why I'm so startup oriented. Of my fulltime jobs most are startups. Just prefer if i'm going to commit then I'd rather comit to a company I can have the greatest impact at and where the risks/rewards are highest. I'm 'built' for startups, just how my psyche works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> After a little over a decade working in the software industry, I would put the bozo rate for employers at about 9/10. Though I don't have much direct experience hiring developers, I get the impression that they have roughly the same spread. This industry is like the music industry or Hollywood: a few gems in a sea of nobodies, all looking for a piece of the action. If you're a gem but not in the loop, it could take while to be discovered.

A developer who has changed jobs every year could be a bozo themselves, or they could be a star talent who hasn't been lucky enough to find an equally valuable employer. If it's loyalty you want, find one of the latter and give them a good working experience. They will be very _very_ grateful.

</comment><comment><USER34> Alex talked about something similar a while ago on TheDailyWTF. I haven't seen anyone post this link in these various discussions yet, so I'll drop it here:

[http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT- Tur...](http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover- Crisis.aspx)

He writes about how IT turnover is a good thing, and suggests that job hoppers are likely to be more talented. Interesting stuff.

(Also, I tried posting this on the linked article instead of here, but it kept rejecting my post, even when I took out the link. No idea what's going on there.)

</comment><comment><USER35> As much as I understand the developers point of view on this, it is different as an entrepreneur. For a startup it is vital to not have half of your companys knowledge walk out the door. This article just says that there are valid reasons why job hoppers can be good employees. Mark Suster doesn't say that you should never change your job, nor does he deny young people to have some more tries for orienatation.

<comment><USER36> In a knowledge worker economy the workers own the means of production. In effect, the factory walks out the door when they do. The only way to prevent it is to make sure the knowledge is shared very well among all workers, no one person is a gatekeeper, code is well maintained and high quality, and firing anyone who purposefully tries to "own" the knowledge before they can own it. That's the only way I've found to make sure the factory stays at your company.

It also means that you have to now treat programmers as the "talent" and not the "workers". Think movie star not factory worker and you'll do a lot better. It may seem retarded, but if you want smart creative people to work for you then treat them like smart creative people. Not like a rivet puncher at a factory.

<comment><USER33> This can't be emphasized enough. It's not enough that you have some technical wizard who is making everything happen at your startup. You have to make sure that the magic becomes a permanent asset, or you are going to get knocked back to the starting line when mr wizard leaves or when it's time to grow the team.

How to do this depends on the particular kind of work being done, but generally speaking you want maintainable code with lots of tests, and records of the valuable knowledge gained in the process.

It's not easy to get this out of most developers, particularly if you are not a developer yourself. If you ignore it, chances are very good it's not being done at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I look like a job hopper on my CV, so I have to explain that startups go bust.

</comment><comment><USER38> It seems like Paul is only looking at one side of the table: the one to be hired. Certainty, we're all able to switch to better opportunities, but the long term signaling effect says you're not going to be their in tough times. Persistence is key in startups, so I can see why he'd be anxious - as would I.

<comment><USER39> I think loyalty is something earned. I think we should model jobs more like relationships, value has to be given on each side of the equation. If your not treating the girl well, she leaves. You don't go in saying, baby if you date me you have to be here for the next 2 years even if I start beating you.

 _disclaimer_ I'm a Job hopper ;)

<comment><USER35> But a girl who has been changing boyfriends like her clothes in the past is more likely to do so in the future. Maybe that's because she doesn't fullfill her side of the equation in general.

<comment><USER40> Wouldn't it still be worth it to be with a great girl for only a few months?

<comment><USER6> I've heard similar advice about hiring people who are obviously over-qualified and will probably leave in 6 months. You have to use them not as workers, but as trainers and inspiration beacons for the rest of the team.

<comment><USER41> The beacon that leaves after a few months? I don't know what kind of inspiration that would provide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> i laughed at this line:

>As the old saying goes: money can't buy you love, but it can buy you prostitutes

<comment><USER43> I also liked "if you want loyalty without earning it, hire a dog."

Working at a job right now that has several in-house dogs wandering around the office all day, it makes me wonder if they have 401k packages and non- disclosure agreements or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The reason Mark is an asshole is that he's trying to create / exploit cultural norms to prevent employees acting in their own self interest. Of course it would be optimal (for the employer) to have employees that never leave, but the vast majority of employers treat their employees fairly poorly. Any social bonds such as employers keeping employees around through tight times have long since been shattered since employers have made it abundantly clear they look out only for themselves. Expecting employees to do differently makes you a dick.

Even the basics -- employers expect two weeks after you resign to help transition your responsibilities -- are asymmetric: how many employers would give you an extra two weeks of wages if they fired you to help tide you over until the next job?

<comment><USER22> Asshole? Dick? What's the point of that language. Mark's free to hire (or invest) however he wants and you're free to not work with him. Even though I have my disagreements, I found it very useful to hear Mark's perspective on hiring. There are a lot of people who share his philosophy and you're better off understanding it.

On the asymmetry of loyalty, it's just basic economic incentives. An individual has to be much more concerned about what their former employer says about them than a company does about what a single former employee says. It may not be perfectly 'fair,' but that's just the way the world works.

<comment><USER40> Agreed. I would rather have him come out and say it rather than him keep quiet about it and just doing it his way anyways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I definitely wouldn't hire a job hopper who is dumb enough to not somehow cover that up on his resmue...

<comment><USER46> If that is how you evaluate, you will end up with an organization of snakes.</comment></comment>


Goldman Sachs relaxes dress code for techs in fight for talent - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-goldman-sachs-technology-idUSKBN19Y17J <comment><USER2> I worked on the American trading floor of a Swiss bank. After the crisis, Zürich decided to reign in us free-wheelers. So they came out with a new dress code [1]:

"Among the 'dos' and 'don'ts' for women: 'Make sure to touch up hair regrowth regularly if you color your hair.' Men are commanded to, 'Schedule barber appointments every four weeks to maintain your haircut shape.'

Neither sex is allowed to 'allow their underwear to appear,' wear short- sleeved shirts or, strangely, cuff links."

We all bought ridiculously-coloured suits (the bankers, being bankers, went along); the rules were pared back. Goldman Sachs has always had an antiquated dress code for people who will never come within fifty feet of a client.

[1] [http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/797245](http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/797245)

<comment><USER3> _Goldman Sachs has always had a ridiculously antiquated dress code for people who will never come within fifty feet of a client._

When I was much younger I didn't understand the concept of people who never had to deal with clients having a dress code but now I sorta do: the company is trying to create or promote the concept that everyone in the company is a member of the same team and have more in common with each other than they do with outsiders. Whether or not this actually works I don't know, but that's the only thing that makes sense. Same reason I guess the military puts _everyone_ in camo these days, even people well behind the front lines.

<comment><USER4> If Cialdini's _Influence_ is to be believed, everyone _says_ they don't treat people wearing (or driving) nice stuff better, but subjecting this to scientific scrutiny reveals that they overwhelmingly and significantly _do_.

If that's true then dressing well is pretty damn rational in general, and especially if money's on the line.

<comment><USER5> As an Indian immigrant to Minnesota in the 1970s, my dad adopted a habit of ALWAYS wearing a suit. This gave him the benefit of the doubt in a lot of interactions where he wouldn't have otherwise had it. He kept up that habit for a long time and wore a suit to parent teacher conferences, my 4th grade violin "concert," etc. It most certainly got him a deference from others and did its job admirably.

He never got OK with my habit of wearing jeans and T-shirts even as an adult because he couldn't grasp how different my experience was from his.

<comment><USER6> That's something I got from my dad as well - dress for the job you want,not the one you have. I also found that dressing well fixes at least some of the age discrimination you face as a young person, you get treated much better while wearing a suit and a tie than when just wearing a t-shirt or a plain shirt.

<comment><USER7> So if you want a job at google but work at a bank, wear Hawaiian shirts and shorts?

Also, over dressing can be as much of a problem as underdressing. If you came to a def interview at say Facebook in a suit, it could get awkward.

<comment><USER6> Well, obviously that was an advice given by a working man trying to punch above his weight and be treated seriously in situations where most people from his background weren't. It worked for him, and it worked for me when I was looking for jobs, houses, had to do official business and run a company. I suppose a situation like you described has never crossed my dad's mind because it's just such a unique problem to have. As with any advice - use common sense?

<comment><USER7> Ideologies defy common sense; if someone believes a suit is always appropriate, they might not accept that there are contexts where it isn't. Likewise the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember working in a bullpen among other young, enthusiastic, hard-working, poorly groomed males coding in the horror show that C++, CORBA, and Oracle could put on for a production environment during that first 90s dot.com build up.

Meanwhile the president/CEO guy came wandering through the production gallows with our manager speaking about how next-round VCs were going to show up tomorrow for a looksee.

I asked my manager if we should dress up for that. The CEO threw his hands out and said, "No, no, no! Wear that penguin shirt and flip flops and shit. We are a start-up."

</comment><comment><USER9> If you view human beings as perfectly rational machines then dress codes make no sense, but that's not what we are. Dressing formally puts you in a different frame of mind. It reminds you that your work is serious and that different standards apply to how you act and talk than in your casual personal life. If you dress to work the way you'd show up to a dive bar, then you're that much closer to behaving like you do at a dive bar.

Economist Tyler Cowen makes another good argument for formal dress: it is a vehicle for social mobility.[1] In a society that values formal dress, you can signal your intent to move up the social hierarchy by how you dress yourself. If you want to become an elite, then dress like one and people will take you seriously. But when the elites adopt casual dress in their professional lives, what is left are much more subtle and hard-to-adopt class signifiers: manners of speaking, interests, childhood experiences, travel, etc.

Yet another problem is that dressing "smart casual" is actually more difficult and expensive than wearing a suit. A suit is a great equalizer. A $2000 suit is not all that different than a $300 suit. And you can very easily get away with having only two or three suits. But smart casual is much more difficult, subtle, and expensive to pull off.[2]

[1][http://www.businessinsider.com/wearing-casual-clothes-at- wor...](http://www.businessinsider.com/wearing-casual-clothes-at-work-to-show- wealth-2017-2)

[2][http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/inf...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/informal- dress-social-mobility-sicilian-perspective.html)

<comment><USER3> _But when the elites adopt casual dress in their professional lives, what is left are much more subtle and hard-to-adopt class signifiers: manners of speaking, interests, childhood experiences, travel, etc_

The NYT had an article on this recently: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opinion/how-we-are- ruinin...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opinion/how-we-are-ruining- america.html?_r=0)

 _I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named "Padrino" and "Pomodoro" and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class._

<comment><USER10> That op-ed was mocked mercilessly.

<comment><USER9> That's sometimes a sign that you're onto something. Donald Trump was mocked mercilessly. Looks like he got the last laugh.

The sandwich shop example is a little weak, but I agree with Brook's point. There is a cultural segmenting of American society into the top 20% and the rest, and it's a strong barrier to social mobility. At the college I attended, there was a clear social barrier between the kids from upper middle class urban families, and those from lower middle class suburbia. The differences in interests and life experiences were profound and hard to overcome. Ironically, the much derided fraternity system was one of the few effective measures for bridging that gap, by creating common experiences and a new shared identity.

<comment><USER11> >Donald Trump was mocked mercilessly. Looks like he got the last laugh.

_Is_ mocked mercilessly, and I don't think he's got the last of anything yet.

<comment><USER12> ... he's president of the united states?

<comment><USER11> And half his family / cabinet is implicated in relaxing sanctions against the Russian kleptocracy in exchange for information damaging to his political rivals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know some people prefer money over morality and integrity, but personally, I am satisfied that these guys have to struggle to get people to work for them. In my ideal world, people would grow spines and would not work for these shady big companies.

<comment><USER14> Goldman and its ilk may be responsible for the financial crisis, but the financial crisis was painful for ordinary people because Wall Street _stopped_ performing its function in the economy. Business ground to a halt and companies laid off workers in large part because credit dried up.

If these big shady companies are immoral because of that time their operations slowed, imagine what would happen if you got your wish.

<comment><USER15> Google "Goldman Sacks starvation" sometime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> GS relaxing its tech dress code is the first sign of the of the end of the business cycle. The second is a management committee member taking up DJing.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/business/dealbook/goldman...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/business/dealbook/goldman- sachs-david-solomon-dj-d-sol.html?smid=tw-dealbook&smtyp=cur)

Sell equities, buy treasuries.

<comment><USER17> no QE has caused a massive bull market in Bonds Guilts Etc buying gold or commodities as a hedge might be better

<comment><USER16> Honestly, you're probably better off buying BTC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Serge Aleynikov, you're awesome and everyone here loves you. Thanks for all your hard work and open source contributions.

[https://github.com/saleyn](https://github.com/saleyn)

<comment><USER19> man, provide some context so poor people like me don't flag your comment then feel stupid and unflag them.

context: see other comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14777935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14777935)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Goldman Sachs might get more traction with tech talent if they drop their proprietary in-house language and database; Slang and SecDB. See 'Confessions of a Slang coder at Goldman Sachs' [1], and 'The hidden weakness inside Goldman Sachs?' [2]. Of course, it is considered by some to be the secure sauce behind their secret source but I expect its a factor, especially if they are trying to hire from the Silicon Valley crowd.

[1] [http://news.efinancialcareers.com/au-en/282097/slang- goldman...](http://news.efinancialcareers.com/au-en/282097/slang-goldman- sachs/)

[2] [http://news.efinancialcareers.com/au-en/274853/secdb- goldman...](http://news.efinancialcareers.com/au-en/274853/secdb-goldman- sachs-slang/)

</comment><comment><USER21> If you want my attention, the thing to offer is an actual office with an actual door that closes. (Private, semiprivate, whatever—just not a thousand of my closest friends and a jet engine or two.)

</comment><comment><USER22> Odd, I worked at Goldman Sachs in London in approx. 1999-2001 and visited the New York office a few times and remember it being the usual "smart/casual" (veering to very casual). When did it smarten up?

<comment><USER23> I visited their NYC offices in 2008. we were talking to them about some openstack/cloud stuff at the time. I went in jeans and a polo. My contact there emailed after saying the meeting went well, but to please wear a dress shirt and no jeans next time. And I wasn't even an employee! ;)

<comment><USER24> Definitely ahead of their time, Openstack wasn't formed until 2010

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Having spent some time at one of the other big financial sector names recently (bigger than goldman)...

Yeah dress codes for tech folk went out some time ago. Among the coders I spent time with, jeans and metal t-shirts were de-rigeur

</comment><comment><USER26> Just pay more than your competitors! I'll dress in a fucking clown suit if you pay me the right price.

</comment><comment><USER27> Allowing work remotely would work better, imo.

<comment><USER16> They allow it. Just make sure your MD is behind you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I never got the point of dress codes. When everyone dress (boringly) alike I tend to view them as mindless drones and my respect for them drops to near zero. Show up in some unusual or creative outfit however and I'm so much more willing to believe you are an intelligent and interresting human being.

<comment><USER29> Totally agree. I mean, look at all these dull, uncreative, mindless drones [http://www.uh.edu/engines/Solvay-1927.jpg](http://www.uh.edu/engines/Solvay-1927.jpg).

<comment><USER30> I feel like a black and white picture doesn't really contribute to the conversation. I assume it's meant as a joke but either way, I try to downvote when something doesn't contribute (as opposed to when I don't agree).

<comment><USER31> Hello? It's not just a black and white picture, it's the 1927 Solvay Conference on Quantum Mechanics, the joke being that most of the "mindless drones in suits" in it won Nobel prizes.

<comment><USER30> I figured they must be prominent people, but in that picture I don't see much. It won't be pink and purple but I can imagine tints of green and other colors that shake things up a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Slowly getting there, but they still have to wear pants...

</comment><comment><USER33> I have different opinion on this one. I will be very happy to wear suit if you pay me executive level salary and I don't mind even if I work as an individual contributor and write code. But if you tell me that it is an organizational policy and you have to be dressed smart because you might bump the CEO of the company or any future client in the elevator but we will still pay you a salary of 60-100k and sit a cube all day head down and keep working your ass then sorry to say that "Goldman sacs, go f __yourself "

</comment><comment><USER34> I once saw a press release about Goldman or one of these other big money firms and how they were going to build software "like a startup". In the photo that accompanied it were a group of guys wearing hoodies that had some lame slogan on it, trying to woo Silicon Valley talent to come to finance by showing how they were cool now.

Under the hoodies were expensive shirts and ties.

The picture had exactly the opposite effect of what it intended- it showed how fake and false the 'culture' they were portraying was.

<comment><USER35> This was Goldman, particularly Marty Chavez who is otherwise a very smart character originating from from outside banking (Stanford Phd).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Are salaries in IB tech on that level today? I doubt even a senior quant hedge fund / HFT firm developer makes anywhere near the quoted $400k.

<comment><USER37> I think 400 is likely attainable for the hedge funds, no idea about other fields. The HFT guys pay about 250 (total comp, e.g, salary and bonuses) for a newly minted PhD.

<comment><USER36> No way. £250K for a new Ph.D. with zero experience in industry? Even a low latency whiz kid with deep Linux kernel optimisation will just about maybe make £250K in a very good year.

<comment><USER37> $250k, not pounds. $125k base, 100% bonus. I know two fellow Phds who had this first year. This is a top-10 program, but not more.

<comment><USER36> Agreed, that sounds about right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm still traumatized from working in banking tech. When I see a line of Java code I start to break out into cold sweats.

<comment><USER39> What do you work on now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> So, if you want us "techs" to work on antiquated languages like Slang, then cut us some slack in our slacks.

Tech is IB land is billions of dollars, yet, the actual end delivery, the systems, the codebases, the platforms are of a far lower quality than most outside could ever suspect.

Bonus-driven development is partially to blame there though.

</comment><comment><USER41> Oh cool... If only this happened six months ago when I had my interview. Then again, attire was the smallest problem of the interview.

I remember reading Glassdoor to see what working for the company as a dev was like and most of them complained about how low the pay was compared to tech.

Maybe they should pay more for a wider talent pool?

</comment><comment><USER42> BlackRock did the same.

</comment><comment><USER43> [http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/569010e4dd08956a188...](http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/569010e4dd08956a188b463f-596-447/mr- robot-tk-body-image-1441135756.png)

</comment><comment><USER44> The important question, however, is do suits make a corporate comeback?

</comment><comment><USER45> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14768697](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14768697)

</comment><comment><USER46> "Oh and remember, next Friday is Hawaiian shirt day! So, y'know, if you want to, go ahead and uh, wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans."

</comment><comment><USER47> compensation for engineers is still lower at Goldman than at tech firms, nice try Goldman.

<comment><USER48> Maybe a minority view but, pay me a suit salary because I actually want to wear a suit. I'm a professional, not your friend's tech-savvy kid.

<comment><USER49> I think this is a minority view, I used to have to wear suits for work and its a pain making considerations for them.

<comment><USER50> I've only ever done tshirt and jeans stuff. I couldn't imagine wearing a suit every day, but it might be fun to have a "dress up Fridays".

Ideally, anyone could wear whatever they want whenever they want. In practice, it doesn't seem to work out this way, even at the tshirts and jeans companies.

<comment><USER51> Bunch of the teams I've worked with over the years have had "formal fridays". I can confirm it was a fun tradition.

<comment><USER52> I thought I was the only one!

What kind of company did you work for where this happened?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I sometimes wonder if I dressed better if I would be further along in my career, but honestly I think it's just made it really easy for me to identify people who understand and value my work.

There's this one guy high up in my company who I'm almost entirely convinced got his job because he wears nice suits and has an English accent. We have junior employees who know more about his area of speciality than he does.

</comment><comment><USER54> They could also try a policy of not arresting developers who contribute fixes back to GPL projects too.

<comment><USER55> How so?

Do you have any links for this? it sounds pretty bad, but I guess there are certain nuances to it?

<comment><USER56> The GP is likely referring to this story:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov)

[http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis- goldman...](http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman- sachs-programmer)

I am just now realising that this case is still ongoing. That's crazy. A DA literally made it his mission to get the verdict reinstated:

'On April 4th, 2016, almost nine months after Aleynikov was acquitted by the NY Supreme Court, the Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance's office filed an appeal seeking to reinstate the guilty verdict'

Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I would not be surprised if Goldman kept applying pressure behind the scenes to ruin him.

Donation link to help fund appeal (his website): [http://www.aleynikov.org](http://www.aleynikov.org)

<comment><USER57> >'On April 4th, 2016, almost nine months after Aleynikov was acquitted by the NY Supreme Court, the Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance's office filed an appeal seeking to reinstate the guilty verdict'

how's this not double jeopardy?

<comment><USER56> Because it's still the same case going through the motions.

What I find more interesting is the following on the Manhattan DA's wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Vance_Jr.#2009_Manhattan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Vance_Jr.#2009_Manhattan_District_Attorney_election)

'After Vance very publicly staged an accusation and spending 5 years and reportedly $10 million on prosecuting the Abacus Federal Savings Bank for larceny, the bank and its employees were found not guilty on all 80 charges. Despite its small size, the Chinese-American family-run bank was the only New York bank so charged during the Great Recession, despite Vance admitting that Citibank, among others, had behaved badly. The story is well told in Steve James' feature-length documentary, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, September 11, 2016.'

n=2 is not much but there is at least initial indication of a pattern where this DA is very specifically seeking cases where he is in a much better position (more manpower, resources) than the prosecuted party to win. Going after the little guy. Nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I like wearing a suit because i like looking good.

<comment><USER59> I like wearing a dress shirt and wool pants because I like looking good. I'm not allowed to wear a tie (heavens forbid a coat) because I'll scare the other engineers and developers. At my last job, I wore a dress shirt (with a collar) and jeans one day, and my coworkers made me go home and change into a t-shirt and jeans. Seattle/Redmond area btw, it's incredibly relaxed here.

<comment><USER58> Dude. The answer to that request is to laugh and say "if you think I'm going to rely on my personality to get laid, you're kidding yourself.". And then, just always dress well.

There's never anything wrong with looking the best you can. There are far worse things to be known for.

<comment><USER59> It wasn't a request. It was teammates constantly asking where I was interviewing across the day. One team member made that same "joke" four times in a row, in the span of a few minutes.

<comment><USER58> That seriously sucks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> "Must be an East Coast thing"

I can't recall being in any work situation since the 80's where dressing up was even a good idea. I mean, wearing suit, tie etc would identify you as being non-technical and hence not worth listening to.

Fascinating to hear that there are still workplaces with dress rules in 2017.

<comment><USER61> I don't think you understand who is thought to be "not worth listening to." This industry is filled with the software development equivalent of CAD technicians thinking they're engaged in deeply analytical work and are generally well respected simply because they can regurgitate some trite CS trivia.

The reality is that the effects of the industry's arrogance have simply shifted form over the years. You think being able to dress in shorts and thongs at work is a measure of being respected ("recognition that the quality of our work isn't measured by how we dress") but that's simply not true.

There are very few successful companies where more than a very small handful of technical people are listened to or respected.</comment></comment>


Black Screen: A modern terminal emulator based on Electron - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shockone/black-screen <comment><USER2> Hello. I'm the author of Black Screen, and I'm upset this post has appeared on Hacker News. The terminal is at a very early stage; I don't even use it by myself. Although, it's nice to see that people show some interest.

<comment><USER3> Can you use another npm namespace?

. npm install black-screen

is far better t'han "install-all" for many reasons: better npm search, no namespace pollution, more semantic than such a generic name.

Please consider to change it.

<comment><USER2> I'm afraid you misunderstood the command. The package is named correctly - black-screen. Install-all is a local npm script, that's why you run it with `npm run`.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of these seems to pop up every few months, which is great, terminals are old crusty awful things, but it seems like they always die out in development before they can run existing things like Vim which makes them fun POC's and not much else :/

<comment><USER5> I would really love it if one of these web-based terminals managed to stick around. Just being able to view images in a terminal would be amazing. The trouble with building on web technologies seems to be that the overhead is just too high (eg. Atom) considering how many terminals the average developer has open at a time.

I guess at least since it's based on Electron, it might have more longevity than something built from a cobbled together base. Here's hoping!

<comment><USER6> _Just being able to view images in a terminal would be amazing_

What are the advantages of that over using a dedicated image viewer program?

<comment><USER7> cat tmp.png

"Yep that looks like it's right"

git add tmp.png

<comment><USER8> Whoopee, you saved one keystroke (`eom tmp.png` "Yep, looks good. _Presses Escape_ ") and if you become interested in any data from previous commands' output you'll have to scroll up more / live with a larger window than otherwise because now you've got an image sucking up n rows in your terminal.

<comment><USER9> Look at IPython and DrRacket to see why inline images can be useful in REPLs. With DrRacket you can not only view, but also create and combine images one step at the time, always seeing the latest form of it. And then you naturally end up with a script for doing the transformations needed to get your desired result.

In short: the time savings introduced by shortening the feedback loop tend to add up. There is a reason why Web developers now use auto-reloading solutions, despite the fact that it saves "just one keystroke" (F5 in this case).

<comment><USER8> Oh, I'm all for interactive development, one of the reasons I prefer dynamic languages is precisely that, I just don't think the utility of having a static (or animated, or auto-reloading ((!) changing output in a non-ncurses shell?!) image in the shell is that useful compared to the engineering effort and what feels to me the loss of the shell's essential character. ncurses is about the limit of having enough control to make a game vs. having something that isn't a shell interface anymore. The shell isn't a monolithic IDE which you only run one instance of, the closest analogy I use is "vim+Linux are my IDE" and terminal windows are just windows to interface with my "IDE" that I can run any time. eom theoretically supports auto image reloading, though other viewers definitely do. When I edit LaTeX files, I do so in vim, and have the PDF open in evince/atril to the side which auto-refreshes when I save the file (if I set up vim to run latexmk on save, otherwise it's just an extra command I do). This is just the same when doing ClojureScript development -- your IDE doesn't necessarily reload and try to support all the features of a browser, the programmer just uses an actual browser to the side and you use whatever IDE or text editor you like and a file monitor manages the auto-reloading stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Screenshot looks awesome!

I get this error on mac os Yosemite, I made a github issue here: [https://github.com/shockone/black- screen/issues/21](https://github.com/shockone/black-screen/issues/21)

        black-screen$ gulp
        [17:35:09] Using gulpfile ~/black-screen/gulpfile.js
        [17:35:09] Starting 'default'...
        [17:35:09] Starting 'watch'...
        [17:35:09] Starting 'clean'...
        [17:35:09] Finished 'default' after 359 ms
        [17:35:09] Finished 'clean' after 58 ms
        [17:35:09] Starting 'typescript'...
        [17:35:09] Starting 'sass'...
        [17:35:10] Starting 'react'...
        [17:35:11] gulp-notify: [Black Screen Watcher] React has been compiled.
        [17:35:11] Finished 'react' after 1.83 s
        ~/black-screen/node_modules/typescript/lib/typescript.js:35171
                    if (host.fileExists(fileName)) {
                             ^
        TypeError: undefined is not a function
            ...

<comment><USER11> Appears to be gulp-typescript problem. Upgrading gulp-typescript to "^2.8.1" solves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Bringing up a whole web browser engine for the terminal is a deal breaker for me. I want it to start instantly. 1 second is too long.

<comment><USER2> That's understandable. It's like with editors. There is vim and there is Intellij IDEA (sorry, JetBrains, for calling your child an editor). I want it to be smart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I see it is buzzword-compliant, but what is it good for?

<comment><USER2> Ha-ha, I get that a lot after telling about React and Electron. Initially I was thinking about Swift + Cocoa, but I figured CSS would give me more flexibility in designing the UI, and it would allow more people to write plugins. Everybody knows JavaScript, right?

So, I use a terminal emulators pretty extensively, and I'm tired of their dumbness. Compare any operating system from 1980 and 2015 - there is a huge difference. The same with web-sites, text editors, and pretty much any other category of software. Except terminals. The biggest achievement they made is 256 colours support. Good job!

It doesn't take a genius to understand that the limitations are caused by the text user interface. Of course, text is a great and universal tool. It's easily parsable (or not so easily, but still parsable). It can be piped, after all.

But who said we can't take the good old text and present it beautifully? Imagine you fired an sql client, wrote a select statement and received an ASCII table as an output. Wouldn't it be useful if the terminal understood that it looks like a table and converted it into an HTML table, with sorting by any column, resizing, filtering, and everything else. The same with XML, JSON and every other format: why should I type `jq` after a command that outputs JSON? Is that so hard to just detect and parse it for me?

Output formatters was the idea that made me start the development. I also plan to let users write custom formatting plugins.

But even besides that point there is a lot of room for improvement in current terminal emulators. For example, I have a git branch displayed in RPROMPT of my ZSH. It works well, but if I checkout another branch from a different place, my shell will still show the old branch, which can have certain consequences, if you rely on it.

The current feature I work on is autocompletion. I plan to parse man files and provide only what can be displayed in that place. By the way, folks from the Fish team do the same.

Unfortunately, right now Black Screen can not be used as a replacement for your favourite terminal, it has a long path to the first release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I kind of don't want to have my terminal emulator run a complete webbrowser because that's how all the cool kids now pull off the Delphi window skinning look of 2000.

<comment><USER15> I think that what these JS-based UI toolkits are doing is really great, but I really dislike the idea of bundling basically a browser with the application.

<comment><USER2> There is a positive side: a built-in HTML and CSS engine allows to write very customizable interfaces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> reminds me a lot of TermKit

[http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/](http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/)

looking cool!

</comment><comment><USER17> When I saw this post I thought it was going to be an xterm with an oldschool CRT look. I got someone to build me one of those for playing rougelikes a few years ago - see here if anyone is interested: [http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1884955](http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1884955)

</comment><comment><USER18> Something like this, but with performant native controls?

I will love to build a interactive REPL "terminal" for some data tool I'm building, but with a modern native GUI.

</comment><comment><USER19> iPython Notebook makes for a nice terminal emulator: [http://jeroenjanssens.com/2015/02/19/ibash- notebook.html](http://jeroenjanssens.com/2015/02/19/ibash-notebook.html) (inline images!).

It lacks readline support, though, and does not implement all VT100 control characters.

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice, another application that eats away tons of RAM because it comes with it's own WebKit engine.

<comment><USER10> I don't disagree, but as someone who has written a bunch of personal tools (including a Tinder assistant lol) with electron and nwjs, think about why people are using these runtimes before you rip on it. Since so many people are doing it, there must be some good reasons.

<comment><USER20> Yes, they are using it because they are familiar with the web platform and want to go a step further. But that doesn't mean that all other ways to build programs for desktop use suck and we can only use a webkit engine. With stuff like electron, the result is bloated as hell and looks totally foreign.

EDIT: Just think of the major performance problems these electron based editors had and still have. Our compurters have become faster, so we just write more bloated and slower software?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Related: [http://xiki.org/](http://xiki.org/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Bummer. Doesn't compile with iojs.

<comment><USER23> It looks like it uses "child_pty" to spawn pty's. child_pty hasn't been updated to support the latest nan/v8 api (in fact, it looks like it's been unmaintained since March). It also improperly uses fs streams to read and write to the pty fd which will exhaust the thread pool very quickly. So, even if you can compile it, it will still break.

It also looks like it doesn't handle sigchld with a waitpid anywhere, so be prepared to have a zombie apocalypse on your machine.

I'd recommend the author switch to pty.js[1] which now compiles on io.js >=3.0.0 and reads pty fd's properly, but I'm biased.

[1] [https://github.com/chjj/pty.js](https://github.com/chjj/pty.js)

<comment><USER2> Thank you for the advice. Pty.js was my initial choice, but it didn't support return codes at the moment. I'll take a look at it again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This looks really awesome - can't wait to try it out!</comment>