London's Lonely Unicorn: Two Frugal Expats and Their Billion-Dollar Startup - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-13/london-s-lonely-unicorn-two-frugal-expats-and-their-billion-dollar-startup <comment><USER2> As the embedded video alludes, it's not that revolutionary an idea to pool transactions and use local resources to fulfill more cheaply if possible.

That said, the world is full of wildly successful companies that just executed well on not very revolutionary ideas, and they provide real value that was largely absent before they grew to prominence. Sometimes it's not about doing something new, it's about doing it _well_ , or doing it in a way that allows more people access.

<comment><USER3> Or, in the case of international money transfer: They see through the existing system and just openly do what most banks have been doing all the time behind the scenes, passing most of the savings to the customer.

The only problem I see with this specific business model: As soon as enough people use it, this method of transfer will be the norm and all the big banks will offer it too, thereby invalidating the justification for the existence of the new players. (Mind you, still a great win for the customer!)

<comment><USER4> >The only problem I see with this specific business model: As soon as enough people use it, this method of transfer will be the norm and all the big banks will offer it too, thereby invalidating the justification for the existence of the new players.

Yes exactly what I was thinking. But by that time Transferwise could be a reputable brand with lots of customers so they could pivot to offer other financial services.

<comment><USER5> And almost certainly better tech.

You ever check out the OS your bank is running?

<comment><USER3> Honestly, I don't care whether I am driven over by a Porsche Cayenne or a Willys MB.

And while I have not worked in the banking sector myself, lots of my friends did - and it was not cobol. They are catching up and they all _know_ that their mainframe sw is dated and act upon it.

I don't think the "quality" of the tech is of any relevance here.

EDIT: Well, I actually know some guys who bit the bullet and learned cobol when they were just turning 20. By the time they turned 30, they did not have to work anymore.

<comment><USER6> I'd have 100% more trust in a system written in COBOL than node.js.

<comment><USER7> But it is currently maintained by the new nodejs devs who figured maintaining COBOL pays greater.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been using this for the past 6 months. It works really nicely and removes a lot of friction - it's just like sending money to another local account. I've paid people in Netherlands, Australia, Germany and they recently started allowing US$ paid to Ukraine, so I've been able to pay software developers there.

<comment><USER9> Forgive my off-topicness - do you have any advice on sourcing developers in the Ukraine specifically?

<comment><USER10> Generally LinkedIn. Just say your what are you looking for, and they will find you.

I am getting at least 2-3 of them ( meaning, companies in Ukraine ) per month.

<comment><USER11> How much is the salary and what's the skill level like?

I'm very interested in Eastern European developers, they seem to get shit done and rarely complain.

<comment><USER12> This kind of commoditization attitude of developers really fucks me off. "Shut up and code and don't complain". Nah, you can fuck right off mate.

<comment><USER13> Is there anything wrong with looking for developers that don't complain?

Total aside: As an Eastern European emigrant, I don't really mind being characterized as hard-working and rarely-complaining. I like to think it's true.

<comment><USER14> Depends what you're complaining about.

If you don't complain when you see something wrong, e.g. a bad design choice - then you're basically a yes man (or yes woman), and you're only useful to companies who are either already perfect, or who don't want your help to do better. The first does not exist and the second would be a crap place to work.

<comment><USER13> Right, yeah. I definitely complain when there's something egregiously wrong. But as much as I like to hear myself speak, I try not to overdo it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Transferwise is a great service, I use it myself. They even give you a volume discount if you ask for it.

But what really surprises me is that it got to where it is at all. If you look at it, their business model is not revolutionary. Their prices are not cheaper than for example UKForex (OzForex), who provide the exact same service, and were around years before.

The business is simply a click interface for exchanging money; you send in your currency, and they send in the agreed amount to the other side. The price difference between these shops is minimal.

It could not be simpler. I've traded currencies as a professional, there's not a whole lot of other steps behind the scenes.

But I doubt most people have heard of UKForex. Transferwise however are on billboards everywhere, acting as though they invented the idea of swapping one currency for another. And acting as though you are cutting out the middle man, which you are not. You still need a bank.

Well played to them though, it seems they've used some of that startup hype attitude to get themselves a nice little business.

<comment><USER16>
      > They even give you a volume discount if you ask for it.

Just contact support? How much volume do they look for?

I'm struggling moving USD -> GBP, hitting the daily ACH limits & frustrated that the creaky US banking system doesn't have a better interbank transfer system than wiring funds for tens of dollars a pop (and presenting a physical form).

<comment><USER15> Yeah just go on the chat and tell them you've sold a house.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hello all.

I used transferwise in November to move money to Japan.

The exchange rate applied was the actual fucking exchange rate. I paid Transferwsise a couple of quid.

Worth every fucking penny. Worth swearing. Use Transferwise.

<comment><USER18> What's the foremost authority for realtime ForEx rates?

<comment><USER19> Don't know about foremost, but I always use xe.com

<comment><USER20> Yeah, I was investigating transferwise because supposedly it was cheaper than xe.com but it seems like they are pretty competitive with each other. I've already been using xe.com and see no reason to switch.

I transfer my entire salary from USD to EUR every year so I definitely want to get the best rate.

<comment><USER19> I only use xe.com as my go to website for looking up current exchange spot rates. I didn't even really know they had a transfer service.

I am a very happy Transferwise user. I used to always check the exchange rate on xe.com, then switch to Transferwise to compare before transferring. Now I don't bother, because Transferwise has always been very close to the spot rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is great, as someone who frequently transfers money from the US to Canada I wish I had known about this sooner. Hopefully they can actually make some money.

<comment><USER22> I use them every two weeks to move Canadian dollars to British pounds.

Nobody else comes close in terms of exchange rates and level of service.

<comment><USER23> WorldFirst does. There are plenty of competitors in the space that do a great job at this.

<comment><USER24> Can you elaborate on the other competitors?

Thanks

<comment><USER25> Direct competitors would be the likes of Azimo and WorldRemit.

For larger transfers (ie above £5k/$6k) you have a slew of them; Global Reach Partners, Moneycorp, World First, and Rational FX to name a few.

Disclaimer: I am a co-founder of CurrencyTransfer.com, an aggregator of some of the above larger transfer companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Interesting that they use the word expat instead of immigrant. I don't think if these two were from Asia/Africa they would have been called expats.

<comment><USER27> > _I don 't think if these two were from Asia/Africa they would have been > called expats._

And you base that on....? Why do people search for injustice?

<comment><USER28> The left has been teaching people to believe they are victims for more than a decade now. That's why they search for injustice.

<comment><USER29> If you think the victim mentality is limited to the left, you've obviously not being paying attention to the alt right or Christian conservatives.

<comment><USER28> The true alt-right is tiny. Well, since alt-right has been defined to include white supremacy, anyway.

The left is huge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> While I haven't used TranferWise yet, I think it's a brilliant idea (and yes, their exchange rates look phenomenal)!

There's also a service called PeerTransfer for foreign tuition payments that essentially aggregates outgoing payments, and buys forex in bulk.

Another cool development in the area is Visa (The Card issuer) opening up their APIs to allow direct Card-Card transfers like with Square Cash when they just started out. Barring regulatory hurdles, this method (Card-Card transaction using the Visa/MasterCard/Amex network) is probably the most efficient way of sending money across currencies.

</comment><comment><USER31> It would be nice if this could be applied to places where I don't have a bank account and just need say, $500USD converted into another country's currency. My bank here allows me to withdraw twice from foreign bank ATMs but I have a feeling they are messing with exchange rates and I'm still stuck with a bad deal. I won't even bother with real exchanges in the States or in the other country. Everything just feels like highway robbery.

</comment><comment><USER32> Is this basically electronic Hawala?

<comment><USER3> Yes, though without the negative connotations the term "hawala" carries in the West because all transactions are still fully documented and the broker gets a much lower share (for pure monetary international transfers in the hawala system, fees can go as high as 60% with 25% already being considered a "good deal"). And one does not have to pass high/drunk armed guards and is not paid from a huge pile of cash that just sits on the floor in a corner of the room.

PS: Sorry, no source for the numbers but my own experience in Northwestern Africa.

<comment><USER33> At 60% fees and drunk/armed guards, Hawala sounds like money laundering except... even worse rates.

<comment><USER34> There is no laundry or laundering there. It's like washing your clothes in a puddle of mud. It's not black exactly but it ain't white money either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Read about some challenges they are facing as many other money transfer startups. It's actually a very hot niche at the moment.

[http://uladzislau.com/online-money-transfer- startups/](http://uladzislau.com/online-money-transfer-startups/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Transferwise is by far the best international money transfer service I have ever used.

I regularly move money between Euros and Pounds Sterling, sometimes into Australian dollars too. These are typically not large monetary amounts, maybe up to a few thousand Euros, but often just a couple of hundred.

I haven't specifically counted, but I gueas I've made around 25 transfers with Transferwise. Compared to using banks directly, and even other "traditional" Forex services over the last 16 years, Transferwise is fast and very low friction.

I did have to verify my identity once my transfered totals had exceeded £15k, but that has been the only delay. They just do a very, very good job.

</comment><comment><USER36> Transferwise was great, at first. I was an early adopter of Transferwise. Some years ago, my brother (and I, sort of) started filming documentaries and I handled a lot of the money and payments to some of the people involved in his documentaries overseas. At one point without warning, Transferwise left my brother stranded in Europe without a way to get money. Transferwise held onto a few thousand dollars for a few weeks without any contact or update or anything. Every time I would email or call, I would get some customer support who would ignore my replies or transfer me around with increasing wait times between transfers until they hung up, sort of typical phone hell. When we _finally_ got a hold of someone at Transferwise, it turns out they decided that what we were doing was a cover for illicit activities (which is pretty bizarre, if you knew the people involved, and despite his published documentaries, footage, and even the receipts we kept for tax purposes).

Having family stranded overseas by this billion-dollar unicorn left a really bad taste in my mouth. The worst part was being left with absolutely zero recourse for the thousands of dollars that they were just holding on to _for weeks_ without any contact with us. If you don't want to serve us because of some bizarre, hallucinatory conspiracy, fine, but don't hold onto the money for weeks in the interim without an explanation.

</comment><comment><USER37> Throwaway for obvious reasons.

I applied for a position as a software dev there a few years ago through a friend. I hated every single moment of it.

It was like they exported the very worse from Silicon Valley's bullshit start- ups attitude. They just couldn't shut the fuck up about how they were really changing the world (yeah right), how awesome it was to work 60 hours a week for such a great Vision, how sick their (mandatory) team-holidays were, how everything and everyone was so siiiick here, mate.

I did all the rounds up to the one with the VP of Engineering who asked me to code FizzBuzz on a whiteboard (no kidding) and then spent the rest of the hour bragging about how last week he had turned down an "amazing engineer" (his words) because he wasn't "cool enough" to be one of them. You know, he was a bit of a loser, mate.

It really felt like a cult of ego-obsessed people with some narcissistic disorder; even worse, it felt like everyone was lying.

That said I'm sure there are a lot of nice people who work there, this is just my experience so take it with a grain of salt. The product is also good, I used it a few times myself.

<comment><USER38> > VP of Engineering who asked me to code FizzBuzz on a whiteboard (no kidding)

I agree that a VP in a late stage interview should not be asking this of the candidate, but I will say that I recently had to hire a new team member, and FizzBuzz helped me to immediately weed out the candidates during the initial interview. I'm talking like 50% of the candidates, and one guy even asked if he could take it home and send me the code. Another acted like I was asking him to produce something for the company for free, before even reading the three lines of requirements, and then tried to back peddle when he did read them - of course, I was already holding the interview room door open for him by that time. All told, a FizzBuzz test in the initial round saved hours of my (and their) time.

<comment><USER39> > I'm talking like 50% of the candidates, and one guy even asked if he could > take it home and send me the code.

I'm still trying to reconcile this with my own experience at work. I work for a university department, and hire student employees. Zero people have ever failed our fizzbuzz question on the interview, while it was on there.

You would think that post graduation there would be a _lower_ number of degree holders who can't code.

<comment><USER40> There are a lot of "HTML programmer" types out there who piece together snippets without ever having to think about how best to solve a problem, deal with the fundamentals of computer arithmetic, or data structures. These people can't do fizzbuzz or something simple like construct a linked list (good one for the managed code generation used to containers).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> (Tone: Genuine question I'm curious about because I don't know fintech.) How does this model end up interacting with wire transfer laws?

<comment><USER42> From (way down in) the article:

"In April, after New Hampshire's banking department cited TransferWise for operating in the state for a year without meeting money-transmitter regulations, the company agreed to pay a penalty equivalent to the fees it had earned during that time. (The startup has since begun offering its services in the U.S. through a partnership with a fully licensed bank, New York-based Community Federal Savings Bank, and has obtained its own money-transmitter licenses in many states.)"

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> USD to INR rate is less competitive than an Indian bank. Probably because not many adopters in India.

</comment><comment><USER44> Surprised to not see any mention here of legal and regulatory risk. One of the reasons moving money between countries is hard and expensive is that it is often done by people either trying to avoid tax liabilities, and/or by people involved in illegal activities and as a result governments are understandably keen to tie transfer agents up in rules regulations and liabilities. Ask HSBC...

<comment><USER45> They're compliant with British regulations.

I was given extra checks to make before my first transfer, since I was paying into an unusual type of account.

<comment><USER19> Once my total transfers had exceeded £15k, I was required to undergo further identity verification checks. Pretty standard KYC procedures I thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I wonder how much of their valuation the Brexit vote cost them. It might eradicate a good chunk of their customer base. How would one go about modeling this, how are VCs modeling this?

Imagine a company built around some service for expatriates in Britain closed their series A and their series B was happening sometime around/after Brexit. I guess that would be down round territory?

</comment><comment><USER47> I will say, their product is excellent and I've used it to transfer quite a bit of cash over the last few years. I tried a competitor of theirs (currencyfair) and the UI wasn't as nice a few years ago, which was about the only differentiator. Hope they can turn a profit soon.

</comment><comment><USER48> I am just a very satisfied customer. They managed to be cheaper than using even a dedicated FX company for international transfers (I do Canada-Austria, Austria-Canada, Canada-Hungary) and the process is pretty seamless and it doesn't take longer than a SWIFT transfer usually.

</comment><comment><USER49> Hmmm I heard these guys make less than $10million a year in revenue.

Possibly the lowest revenue to valuation ever?

<comment><USER50> Their revenue in the year ending March 2016 was 28 million pounds, transaction volume 800 million pounds per month. Last September they already did 5 million pounds a month, growing ~2x / year.

<comment><USER51> In case anybody else is wondering - these details are public. Any time you see a story about a UK company, and this one is no exception, you can get some information about it from the company registry at Companies House: [https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/](https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/)

1\. type in company name or part thereof

2\. select it from the list

3\. click the "people" tab and see if you recognise any names from the article or whatever (this can be helpful if there were several likely-looking results)

4\. click "filing history" and download the accounts and annual return (with list of shareholders)

Most of the time this isn't actually very interesting, but if you're being nosey, there's no reason not to. (The reduced accounts you have for small companies (turnover < £15m, something like that...) are usually particularly unilluminating, though some of the figures can be suggestive and the shareholders list may be interesting.)

<comment><USER52> I just tried your link & it's a very interesting option to be honest :)

In my country (Macedonia) these reports on private held companies can be given after 2 fiscal years & you have to pay for them per company searched.

I'm very curious to see what's the case in other countries on this topic :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> _" The company says it is always improving the software that automates the matching process, including complicated solutions that cover, say, a pound-to- dollar transaction with multiple dollar-to-euro and euro-to-pound swaps. If TransferWise can't find a match, it becomes a market maker, using its own money to complete the deal in the hope that another customer who wants to send at least as much money the opposite way comes along later. In doing so, it is essentially acting just like a traditional foreign exchange broker."_

And this is how it spectacularly imploded 5 years from now.

<comment><USER54> Yeah this caught my eye as well... seems like an extraordinary increase in risk for a relatively small gain, not to mention the other costs of changing your business model from a glorified escrow service to an investment bank.

I hope for their sake they have someone who knows what they're doing running that department and hedging appropriately...

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I think [https://www.instarem.com/](https://www.instarem.com/) does something similar.

</comment><comment><USER56> How does this compare to xe.com, which I have used in the past? They're a canadian company, been doing this for a long time, low cost.

</comment><comment><USER57> Value creation > 'innovation'

</comment><comment><USER58> If you're poor, you're an immigrant.

If you're rich, you're an expat.

<comment><USER59> While this sounds true and everyone likes to harp on it, there's another consideration. An immigrant is somebody who intends to stay forever, an expat is someone who plans to go back home eventually.

There are also legal considerations. My US visa for example specifically says it's a non-immigrant visitor's work visa. Legally speaking, I'm an expat.

Culturally ... I like to call myself a dirty immigrant. Riles people up a bit :P

edit for background: I come from the border between Central and Eastern Europe. Some say Slovenia is one, some say another. In the UK I would most definitely be an evil evil immigrant. In the US nobody really cares as long as I'm not brown.

<comment><USER60> " I come from the border between Central and Eastern Europe. Some say Slovenia is one, some say another."

Compulsory link, shirley? [https://youtu.be/bwDrHqNZ9lo](https://youtu.be/bwDrHqNZ9lo)

<comment><USER59> My house is actually about 50 meters to the right of that river. So I guess I'm from the Balkans.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Falling water drops power LEDs - <AUTHOR> https://physicsworld.com/a/falling-water-drops-power-leds/ <comment><USER2> Multiple submissions, none getting any love from the HN crowd:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22343512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22343512) (sciencedaily.com) : 2 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22294539](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22294539) (engadget.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22267183](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22267183) (sciencedaily.com) : 1 comment

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256968](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256968) (iflscience.com)

The writing in some of the articles isn't helping, confusing voltage with power, _etc._</comment>


Stop the FAQ - <AUTHOR> http://sixrevisions.com/user-interface/stop-the-faq-page-bandage/

<comment><USER2> I disagree. If you have no money to fix any of the problems while you're growing, you need the faq to explain the shortfalls of the product while you ramp up development after it's a proven product.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Stop following, start innovating. I think KISSinsights or Olark are perfect examples of overcoming the tired old way of doing things (like the FAQ) and making things BETTER.</comment>


How We Designed Our Interview Process - <AUTHOR> https://blog.readme.io/how-we-designed-our-interview-process/ <comment><USER2> "we want the interviewee to succeed"

This should always freaking be the case. You, the interviewer, are there to decide if you want to work with this person in the future. You're not going to learn that by making an adversary. You're not going to learn that by making it super easy either. If you're worth your salt (as an interviewer, and you should be given that you're now part of the hiring process), you should be able to go through an open ended problem (it's what I do). This open ended problem should have increasingly difficult sub-tasks and of course be related to what you intend the person your interviewing to do. One of my worst experiences interviewing was with a company that clearly didn't give a rats rear end (at one location). Interviewers were constantly late, didn't know what I'd applied for, or even at times my name. Same company, different location...totally different story. Your most valuable resource as a company is your people, treat them as such from start to finish. Needless to say, I chose where I'm at because of the people. I'm glad to see others sharing this attitude as well.

<comment><USER3> I've been on both sides in worse situations. The resumé is printed out and handed to the interviewers at the last minute or someone is asked to interview a candidate who has showed up and the resumé is handed at that moment. It makes up for a poor experience where the first question is "describe your experience and what you've worked on", most of which is usually present in the detailed (and long) resumé.

<comment><USER2> Me to, in which case I explain the situation...I apologize to the candidate, and we move on. Last minute scheduling accidents happen, it's how you recover from them that counts. Openness seems to improve the impression of the company. Trying to hide the truth from the candidate signals an issue, if you're a candidate...run away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think about hiring a lot and I see a lot of companies doing things that I think are completely opposed to their own goals. Specifically around technical talent where, given the current market, the goal is almost always to out- compete other companies by finding good candidates that others would have turned away because of cargo-cult awful interview processes and standards.

This looks great from what's printed on the page.

The question that jumps out at me from reading the interview prep screenshot is: How often does a candidate fail the "work on your own project" part simply because the people watching them have no interest in the problem space or worse, no idea what's going on? I just don't see how that type of interview could be scored equitably across a range of candidates.

Is that considered a failure on culture grounds? I'm highly suspect of basically all culture related hiring standards.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's really good to hear that some tech companies are being mature about the process.

I've been in almost all positions of a hiring team: phone screen, white boarding, Q&A, etc.; and in the end I want to hear what this person can bring to the company and see if they're a good fit or vice versa.

I feel like so many places put emphasis on abstract knowledge and technical ability and leave out so many other traits that are good. Also, in Techlandia, I feel there is too much of a male machismo that permeates through and there are many people that treat the interview as a chance to demonstrate ability to the interviewee and/or trick them - to the point of intimidation.

<comment><USER6> > I feel like so many places put emphasis on abstract knowledge and technical > ability and leave out so many other traits that are good.

I don't disagree, but personally I would rather work with a competent (or brilliant) asshole than an incompetent nice person.

<comment><USER7> Sample-of-size-1 statistics time (from which nothing can be learned, just for fun)?

I (freelancer) once had a software-making client that employed me for a month do contribute a special component to their big project. When I arrived the big boss himself received me and showed me around - and when it came to showing me where and with whom I actually worked he apologized profusely before he even started.

Apparently I had to work with the one (and only) guy who sat alone in his office. But he was the guy who had written the specs that I had to write the code for, and he had room since all offices were designed for at least 2 people. The apologies were because that was the most difficult person in the entire company to work with, by a margin, but he was too good so they just kept him in his cell...

Well, I wasn't daunted at all actually. Turned out that yes, he was difficult socially. For example, there was a woman who came in to ask him something (it was rare anyone talked to him while I was there), and in an audibly annoyed tone he pointed out that he had already sent her that exact information 5 days earlier in document XYZ on page N, headline "3.2 foobar" (yes, to that detail, without looking anything up).

He also was really, rally good. The specs he had written, several hundred pages in three documents, were near perfect. I didn't have to ask a single question at any time, he had thought of _every detail_.

I myself also had no trouble talking to him, I had fun with the other people that I visited in their offices (who repeatedly told me pitied me for having to share an office with that guy), but also with my room mate. Because of the surrounding highly unusual circumstances this still is one of my most memorable (and completely positive) freelancer jobs.

<comment><USER8> Loved the story.

It sounds like that guy had a high IQ and low EQ, which is highly efficient for work scenarios, but it usually sucks for any kind of social interaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I kinda like this one. The "what to expect" is really well done.

I also like the do-a-real-thing step. We do something similar at Pivotal. Once you pass the basic tech screen, we invite you to work with us for a day.

We pair program, so this is easy to do: take the candidate, drop them (usually) into a real project with a real engineer working on a real problem. Then they work together on the real problem. That's it.

Assuming nothing goes drastically wrong: One project in the morning, then lunch, then a different project in the afternoon.

If we agree that you know what you're doing and that we want to work with you, you're hired. Every engineer at Pivotal has passed the test of "do you want to work with this person?"

In the quest to work out "can this person do the job?", I personally continue to be amazed at the gymnastics companies will engage in to avoid just ... trying folk on the job.

<comment><USER10> I hope I was the only person to have had a bad experience with Pivotal ever. Their recruiter straight up lied to me (told me on the phone that they'd schedule a phone screen, went on radio silence, and claimed they had emailed me about moving on). From my personal experience, I don't think Pivotal belongs in a thread discussing great hiring practices.

<comment><USER9> I'm sorry.

We had a period where we had many candidates and not enough recruiters (hiring good recruiters is actually really hard). Some of the recruiters would get stressed out and quit. Some would, as you say, simply drop candidates on the floor without telling them. We also had a _lot_ of trouble with our previous candidate management software. We switched to Greenhouse 2 months ago, it seems (touch wood) to be doing much better.

If you like, you can contact me by email and I'll follow up for you. This offer extends to anyone else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Love the idea of giving the person an idea as to what to expect though this is a pretty general outline; I've gotten the same (although I'll admit far less pretty) when I've interviewed at Amazon, Apple, etc.

The idea of letting someone actually work on a problem is far better than generic algorithm or data structure questions. Two things though...

> As soon as we schedule the interview, applicants receive a link taking them > to this welcome page.

Love the page but the content is all static. This should be in an email. If it's in an email, especially in invite form, I have access to the content at all times on my phone and can even accept an invite. Putting it in the browser means I have to find the email and open the browser (alternatively bookmark or keep the site open). But the content is static so it should be in an email.

In my opinion anyway.

> After that is the main part of the technical interview: we ask interviewees > to work on their own project, using whatever resources they deem necessary > (and yes, that includes Google). We want resourceful developers who can > problem solve, not people with an encyclopedic memory. We use this as an > opportunity to learn what our candidates are passionate about. This helps us > understand whether ReadMe is a place where they can pursue their long-term > goals.

Hmm. So many projects I want to work on, especially for an hour or two session, may not necessarily reflect my long term goals but be more oriented towards completing something that either myself or I perceive my interviewers being interested in. Yeah I get the whole "work on what you want" thing but in such a short timeframe to show off what I can do is absolutely _not_ indicative of my long term goals.

<comment><USER12> On the last bit, perhaps these people are just better developers than me or perhaps it's an artifact of the sort of things they work on vs what I work on but I can't think of a single thing I could complete in a couple of hours which I'd be proud enough of to show as an accomplishment.

I see a lot of these interview discussions talking about having candidates bang out real features in a couple of hours and I just don't understand how that's possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That strikes me as being highly optimized for people who are one or two years out of college.

<comment><USER14> In what way?

<comment><USER15> I don't have a GitHub (bitbucket, etc.) account, can't remember the last time I contributed to any open source project, and have very few hobby programs I work on outside of my job.

Yet somehow I'm consistently rated very highly by my peers, to the point where I have significant influence on the technical direction of projects I work on.

The reason I don't have hobby projects or dev social media accounts is this: by the time I get home, I have a spouse and two children who I have a life with outside of programming. I frankly don't have time to work on hobby programming outside of work to the level of sophistication that rises to the sort I'd feel comfortable showing in an interview. And picking some random toy project that does would quickly reveal how little I care about it.

Edit for clarity: that said, I think this level of transparency is fantastic. I have nothing negative to say about it.

<comment><USER16> On the other hand, it is not necessary for a company to hire every good developer that walks through their door. What they need to do is to hire enough people and try to optimise their good to not-so-good ratio. Even if their process would not select you (a good developer), it does not mean that it is not a good process.

The original question asked whether this was slanted towards younger developers. Although I don't interview people this way, I would expect that good senior developers could pull an interesting kata out of their back pocket as long as they had enough warning to set up their development environment ahead of time. Hell, I'm quite sure I could fill up a couple of hours with FizzBuzz variations and still come away giving a good impression.

Basically, when interviewing for junior developers, I want to see if they can code and if they can take direction. So it's cool to write any stupid code and then help them explore it. I'm trying to find out if they can listen to criticism and if they can utilise that criticism to improve their code.

For senior developers I want a lot more. I want some evidence that they have spent their time thinking about software. I want to see their opinions, but more than that, I want them to be able to show why their opinions are worth listening to. When a senior dev comes on my team, they are not there just to write code. They are there to inspire others to greater heights.

If you quickly revealed to me how little you care about some random toy project, I would try to help you see the point. It's not about the toy project. That project is only a medium for communication. If you still couldn't see the point, then I would probably conclude that you were not right for our team. That might be my loss, but as long as my filter selects enough good people it's not really a big problem for me.

<comment><USER17> > On the other hand, it is not necessary for a company to hire every good > developer that walks through their door. What they need to do is to hire > enough people and try to optimise their good to not-so-good ratio. Even if > their process would not select you (a good developer), it does not mean that > it is not a good process.

I am led to believe, by the people on this site and others, that unless you are AmaGoogBookSoft or a Valley darling good developers are so hard to come by that they can't afford to miss good ones.

<comment><USER16> Sampling bias? ;-) I've worked in famous companies. I've worked in obscure companies. I've met amazing programmers in both. I've met horrible programmers in both. Most are somewhere in between.

There are good programmers everywhere. Grabbing a couple (ideally including a senior dev) of really excellent people will go a long way improving your team. But you need to do more than advertise and interview to get these people. You need to go out into your community, participate, and create a reputation. You need to work on your internal processes and be interesting enough for an excellent dev to be interested in you. My advice for a small up and coming team is to spend the cash to hire a well known senior consultant with a good track record. From there you can get your culture set up and you can make contacts with other good devs that the consultant knows. After that it is really just hard work to hone everything that you do so that good people think that it will be a worthwhile career move to spend time with you.

If your management strategy is to throw money at talent and hope that it gels, I think you will have a lot of trouble. Once you have talent, it's important that they are set up to succeed. This is more than just turning them loose on a project. IMHO, good teams have many dimensions to them. You don't necessarily need (or want) to have a superstar in every position. It can be good, but it requires a corresponding level of proficiency from management to get them all working together well.

If you are worried about the one that got away in your interview process, then I think it is a sign that you have very much bigger problems that you need to deal with. If you tell me that this is common in the Valley, it will not be something that surprises me ;-)

<comment><USER17> That's not really what I am talking about. I'm talking about the oft-parroted "talent shortage" wherein companies claim they can't find enough good developers. If true, companies cannot afford to let good ones get away. I personally think "we have a talent shortage" is code for "we don't know how to hire".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sounds interesting but what if the candidate doesn't have a personal project or one they're willing to show you the code for as they're working on it? Also, seems like you could game this by rehearsing what you'd be developing before the interview (same way you can game questions about binary trees etc).

I think someone having a personal project is a strong indicator that they're passionate about the trade though which is a great thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> That hasn't been a problem so far. A lot of candidates start new projects, and that's fine too. If you can't think of _anything_ you would want to work on, that's a pretty bad sign for us.

<comment><USER18> What happened in the worst case scenarios? Did anyone turn up with no project or fumbled at adding a feature to their project?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The candidate has to bring their own laptop to work on during the interview, at their place of business?

I know lots of people have a laptop already, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who doesn't (I just can't work on one; I get frustrated). Or is that part of the selection process; they don't want the kind of person who doesn't own a laptop, or doesn't bring it with them to interviews.

<comment><USER20> Or maybe you're more comfortable on your laptop compared to a random pc ?

<comment><USER19> On a personal note, I'm far more comfortable with a proper keyboard and a big monitor (or two), and frankly, so long as the OS has a couple of standard editors and the standard build tools, surely everyone can start working pretty much instantly? How long does it take to find the terminal and start typing? If a candidate's laptop is some kind of security blanket, or they can't do anything without exactly their particular micro-choice of environment, that's not a good thing.

Provide a desktop for the candidate to use. Make sure it's got vim, emacs, gedit, and whatever the cool kids use now (sublime?). Make sure it's got a recent set of tools for the technology at hand. GCC and build tools or the equivalent standard. Job done.

<comment><USER12> It's a little more complicated than that. Maybe they're a Windows user and your machine is OSX, or vice versa. Maybe your keybindings are different than what they use. In my normal workday you're right, that wouldn't be a big deal. But in the high pressure situation of a timed interview environment it can freak people out.

We tell candidates that we'll provide a laptop for them if they don't have one but also tell them to feel free to bring in their own.

Also to turn your statement around a bit, perhaps one could claim that your need to have a big monitor (or two) is your own security blanket, and that you should be able to work without one. In my office some people have oodles of monitors. Some people just use their laptops. Some are a bit of both. Everyone has their preferences.

<comment><USER19> _Also to turn your statement around a bit, perhaps one could claim that your need to have a big monitor (or two) is your own security blanket, and that you should be able to work without one._

The day a job interviewer tells me to bring in my desktop and monitor selection with me, I'll be the first to complain.

It was "just a personal note". My point is that telling people to bring their own laptop in for a job interview is odd enough to object to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great post and it's awesome to see many companies try to make interview process better but my happiness didn't last long.

They require[1]: 'Your GitHub is full of everything from embarrassing hacks to impressive Open Source contributions'

I understand some reasons behind seeing Github profile of candidate but requiring it is too much. But this is still better then company i saw the other day which was requiring Github project with X000 stargazers.

I think we have to choose between bad and worse.

[1] [https://readme.io/careers/#job-full-stack-nodejs- developer](https://readme.io/careers/#job-full-stack-nodejs-developer)

<comment><USER22> Plus, what about contributions to projects that aren't on GitHub? I have commits in Firefox but you wouldn't know it from my GH profile.

<comment><USER23> Well you can tell them this, right? The essential part is having some code out there in the open. I imagine if you host your projects on bit bucket it's OK too.

Though I agree that a lot of skilled people don't have the will/feel the need to build a public profile of their work.

<comment><USER24> even more, some companies might claim the rights on their work, depending on the country and company. In my experience (UK) there are a few like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The presence of an itinerary for the interviewee should be a requirement. Sadly it's not. I've taken two interviews in the past week where I was in the dark as to what my visit would look like.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't own a laptop, so I guess that's the defining part of the article for me. Does not meet minimum requirements. ^_^

<comment><AUTHOR> That page is dynamic, so everyone sees something different. By the time a candidate gets that page, they've already talked to 1-2 members of the team. Of course there's no "own a laptop" requirement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Great attitude. readme.io might consider getting into the tech hiring business. Spread these ideas around & make some money too.

</comment><comment><USER28> > First impressions are everything.

They're not.

<comment><USER29> Yes, they absolutely are. The one thing I look for the most in a potential new role is cultural fit; pretty much if I think the team will gel with me. Much of this becomes apparent through the interview process: the type of questions asked, the level of exhaustion shown, and how interested the interviewers seem in their own jobs. These things are as important to me as the type of company and the offer they extend since this is the place where I will spend a great deal of my time and effort. I'd rather not spend a significant part of my day with people that I don't like in a place that I can't stand.

<comment><USER30> Very true. And, of course, it is important to remember that interviews are in many ways two-way streets: the candidate interviews the company just as the company interviews the candidate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> How are different engineering disciplines interviewed? For instance, take a mechanical engineer, are they going to sit down with a stack of tooth picks and be asked to design a bridge with a Pratt truss? Are they asked to show their designs on Github?

I seriously think there's an underlying pissing contest that has permeated the software development culture. If other engineering disciplines can be hired by talking intelligently and answering questions related to their field, why can't software engineers?

<comment><USER32> > If other engineering disciplines can be hired by talking intelligently and > answering questions related to their field, why can't software engineers?

Other engineers have professional registration and thus some form of regulation. In some countries you're not allowed to cal yourself an engineer unless you have some particular qualification and the registration.

<comment><USER31> Then maybe we need to push for that. I'm just tired of the way we do things currently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> have you gotten any feedback from new hires on this process?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a self-selecting group, of course... but we're all happy with it! We've also gotten a lot of good feedback from people we've interviewed, since it's not often interviews feel encouraging rather than adversarial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Lots of people here are describing interviews (from the perspective of the interviewee) as being an adversarial process, where people have bad experiences because the interviewer is more interested in being intimidating or showing up the interviewee, but I wonder how much of that is just the process itself being intimidating.

For me, job interviews were always incredibly nerve wracking. It feels like you're being judged, but of course you are being judged- the whole point of the interview is to judge your suitability for a position. It's also nerve wracking because I was always interviewing for something I wanted really badly, that was a step up from whatever I was doing at the time. So, I was always interviewing from a position of weakness, and it made me feel even more self-conscious.

At this point in my career I've probably been the interviewer >= 20x as often as I've been the interviewee. Some were phone screens, the rest were in person, and about half the time I was one of two interviewers (some companies do one-on-one interviews, some do two-on-one, and supposedly some do many-on- one interviews but I've never experienced that (but it sounds terrible)).

In all of that, I don't think I've ever been malicious or tried to show off or make someone feel bad, and I don't think I've ever witnessed or even heard of a colleague doing it either. Maybe I'm just lucky, and got all my jobs at companies that had a less horrible interview process, but I wonder.

Job interviews at companies I really want to work for have been intimidating because it _is_ intimidating. I wanted to move up in the world, take the next step, and so it always felt like the people interviewing me were implicitly people I wanted to emulate. That's so awkward- it feels like approaching pseudorandom strangers and asking, "I want to be like you, am I cool enough for you to give me a job here so I can be like you?" You're being measured against a yardstick, and it feels like the yardstick is the person interviewing you, because they've already got a job at the company you want to work at.

So I would have to fight against being intimidated by the people who were interviewing me, but what I didn't realize was that although I felt intimidated, they (probably) weren't being intimidating. I was just projecting what I was feeling onto them, they were just being their normal selves and sucking at interviewing because everybody sucks at interviewing.

There's no reason for anyone to be a jerk to an interviewee, the interviewers want to have successful interviews just as much as the candidate. Nobody wants to drive away a potentially good hire just to act superior for a few minutes in front of a job seeker that they will never see again for the rest of their life.

So I would like to think that all of the horror stories about terrible interviewers come from interviewees projecting their (totally natural) stress onto other people, but who knows. People can be irrational jerks too unfortunately. :( I'm also curious if the bad interviewer behavior was exclusively in one-on-one interviews. Those seem more likely to go off the rails, since there's no other interviewer to counteract someone who is an especially bad interviewer to begin with.

<comment><USER35> > I'm also curious if the bad interviewer behavior was exclusively in one-on- > one interviews.

I can hardly speak to this in general, but Google always schedules one of your interviews with two interviewers, one of which is supposed to be training the other to do a good interview.

I felt that those interviews were much nastier than the one-on-ones (2 out of 2 times).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> JavaScript exercises, might as well give them an exam? It's not different than puzzles at other companies.

</comment><comment><USER37> Owlbert? "It twit looks to like whoo you're twit writing a to letter whoo..."

</comment><comment><USER38> I am quiet impressed that there is even a niche market for people who want to host docs. It really just takes 15 minutes to setup a gulp/grunt script to build and push to cloudfront. After all, we need those scripts for local development anyways.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a huge market for good developer experiences :) More and more people are becoming "developers" every day: computer-literate people who want to build something.

It's easy to push __something __. It 's a lot harder to build something good. Our goal is to get away from static docs, and show each developer exactly what they need.

<comment><USER39> Documentation is great and all but I think the real huge market here is in merchandising that mascot of yours.

<comment><AUTHOR> Email me (email@example.com), and I can send you some Owlbert swag :)

<comment><USER40> Bro, send me some too. :D Email is in my profile.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


My Top 10 Worst Business Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/09/04/my-top-10-worst-ideas-to-make-money/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I agree that #9 (BabyCalc / automated baby progress emails) would have been a flop in and of itself; it just sounds like he had a personal reason to fold the business.

BabyCenter.com right now is hugely popular among soon-to-be parents. What's one of the key things that gets parents to sign up in the first place -- almost immediately after they find out they're going to have a baby? Weekly emails detailing the pregnancy's latest progress.

</comment><comment><USER3> His pic with that 6 figure check from Google Adsense is kinda huge with webmasters. shoemoney is kinda legend among webmasters.

<comment><USER4> In the circles I run in, he's not well-respected.

<comment><USER3> why is that, the webmasters i know say he is smart and knows how to make money. I personally don't know much about him.

<comment><USER4> It depends which webmasters you talk to. If you run around on digitalPoint, people think he's an internet god. If you go to wickedfire, you see a completely different opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really like the article about the Facebook ads; that website has a lot of good articles!

</comment><comment><USER6> These were great!

I think we all have a notebook full of these.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. What was sad/amusing is that I had a similar idea to his #1. Like his #1, it was very original, very funny, and so outrageous that it just might work...It didn't though...As soon as I have a big success I promise to make my own top 10 list of worst ideas...Actually, I'll probably make it a top 20 as narrowing it down to 10 would be hard.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, some of those gave me deja vu. I hadn't thought about the girls in the Ferrari though, I might pursue that one.

<comment><AUTHOR> A friend of mine actually was working on something similar for a year(may still be working on it, gotta check in with him).

It's funny, I thought it might work because of its originality. My opinion has changed now.

<comment><USER7> Does it really take one year to get two topless chicks into a Ferrari? Then again, others work their whole life for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Most of these aren't business ideas. They're features.</comment>


Big Startups vs Little Startups - <AUTHOR> http://ezliu.com/1-startup-2-startups-big-startups-little-startup/

<comment><USER2> I feel like people use the small is safer logic with lots of life decisions but never offer any proof. What if you are wrong about the risk and you make nothing? You ended up in the same spot with much less experience.

Some niche markets may be great, but you didn't find one. It is dominated by fairly large players with cost advantages.

What happens if you do this for a while and add a product? Maybe that becomes a big business? I just have never ever seen evidence that going small anywhere in life works out better than always going big.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there, thanks for the feedback. I don't claim I'm right, this is just how I view opportunities. i DO think of every opportunity as a distribution of payouts with varying probabilities. Before going into the venture (and even after it... only once measurement), you can't actually _know_ what that probability distribution looks like.

That said, I don't really believe small is _safer_ -- I'm just saying small costs less and generally has smaller upsides and smaller return variance.

If you read to the end, you'll notice that I don't actually make a value judgement on which path is "safer" or "better" in any way. I think it's just a question of personal preference, influenced by your individual station in life.

I think this has more to do with outcome utility. I personally will probably never spend more than 1mm a year, so building a startup that has a significant tail above 1mm/year in recurring revenue would be great -- but the utility of that tail is very low to me, so its not worth sacrificing success probability.

And yep, just totally guessing what that return distribution looks like.

For me it's not that small is safer, its that there are a lot more resources to fall back on for small. I personally don't have the chops to build twitter scalability. But if I wanted to open a restaurant, there are tons of resources and many people have blazed that path for me, and I can look to them for advice. It's not "easier" it's just that the path to "success" is more well documented, and I consider that a valuable tool that increases the odds of "success".

<comment><USER2> I definitely agree that entering an established market with a product that is just going to take a bite out of it is easier due to the prescribed path.

And like i said, maybe it makes you some cash and allows you to build more stuff on top.

I'm coming from some experience in that I've built some small businesses that just didn't make enough and didn't have enough potential to be worth the stress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I landlord 3 properties and I REALLY need your little startup. Spread the word! The pain landlords feel, and the crap we sometimes put tenants through because of crappy tools/laws should be solved.

<comment><USER4> Can you expand on that? I've been interested in that market but don't know where to get involved. I'd love to hear your thoughts - even if in an email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> On the whole, I agree with you. However -

1) Unless you're Instagram - a big startup will cost you much more than 2 years of life. The monetary price probably doesn't matter much as you will have acquired funding.

2) I also think the expected value of any given random point on the "startup dartboard" is smaller than the values you threw out there.

That all said...my interests align with yours. Hitting singles is more attractive than swinging for the fences. Goals change though...Rocket Lease may be a safe bet on your part. If traction picks up and it becomes an undeniable juggernaut...I don't think you or anybody else wouldn't take the "big startup" ride.

</comment><comment><USER6> Given the headline, I was expecting a comparison of large teams versus smaller nimble (Instagram, Path) ones. There's a whole lot to be written about group dynamics in terms of headcount.

But in terms of this discussion. I have to take issue with choice of market opportunity based on personal financial situation.

" _Where are you now? There's no right answer to this. If you're 30 and broke and wondering how you're going to pay the rent in 6 months, its harder to swing for the fences. If you sold your last startup so you'll never have to worry about food and rent again, big startup board._ "

Not only does this lead to rather arbitrary founder-market fit, is the success rate curve of the smaller startup really that more evenly distributed than the larger ones? I doubt it.

That said, it sounds like you may have been a landlord yourself, saw the pain point in vetting tenants, and went for it. Niche, but already a service that 1) is arguably underserved and 2) your customers are used to paying for.

Best of luck and it sounds like you might have some takers here on HN already.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think startups are too plastic to be characterized this way. Well, software startups anyway—hardware, durable goods, science, or other capital intensive startups are a different story.

I suppose there are small markets to go after and big markets, but there are also unknown markets, and to go truly huge and be the VC darling of the decade you might need to create your own market. But the kicker is that the market you are targeting is not fixed. Software is sufficiently abstract, and it's reasonable to run lean enough that you can literally change your target market overnight. And in the case of the really huge startups, they all get there through a series of pivots to scale progressively. None of them start with the vision of what they ultimately become. The people who think Facebook/Google/Apple scale at the beginning are probably more dreamers than doers. The trick is to grow your ambitions as you grow your business. So I don't disagree with the advice, other than to caution against letting your bootstrapping thought process color your future ambition.

</comment><comment><USER8> I used to be a trader, too.

What is interesting to me is that the ethics I encountered in finance (n.b. I was in statistical arbitrage, and I'm pretty sure I'd have a different perspective if I'd worked on mortgage-backed securities) were a lot better than what I've seen in these VC-funded (or VC-hungry) startups. We tend to have this reflexive attitude in technology that people in finance are scummy, when the reality is that they're just more honest about their greed than VC- istan types.

The engineers in these companies are great. Really ambitious, really talented, and often fully believing in whatever marketing-copy "vision" the VC darling comes up with so people will be glad to work for 0.01%, vested over four years, of a company that will probably be flipped for 100-500M. I've never disliked the engineers anywhere. At least 85% of the VPs and above are fucking slime, though.

I think the "little startups" point you make has sense, but I think the ideal is a small, stable startup that also has a chance of becoming larger. I think the objective should be to build a stable and small business doing work of very high quality, and later growing-- a "get rich slowly" strategy of solving interesting and hard problems on the small scale first and eventually developing the tools and expertise to solve major ones. Maybe I'm naive, but this is what I'd like to see in my next company. A "change the world in 20 years" approach, rather than an all-out effort to bank it in 48 months that (a) leaves everyone burned out from working too hard, and (b) almost always involves ethical compromise.

What's behind the VC/build-to-flip mentality is competitive paranoia and the attempt to exploit social trends to get a first-entrant effect. Many of these social networks _are_ winner-take-all, sure. But there are a lot of creative and technological ventures that don't have to be like that. If you're a game studio, for example, of course there is competition... but if you make a great game and another studio does so in the same year, the result is that you both win and it's a great year for games. I wish people focused more on that, and less on "destroying" other companies. Every time I interact with a company that says their business model is to "destroy <tech company X>" I always find them to be really unethical.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure I can agree that small vs big is so black and white.

Why is the small board dotted with different values and the big board a vast wasteland with only a few potential outcomes? Is it VC pressure? That could definitely eliminate some options - however, if you intelligently take on capital and have the ability to hire better and brighter people - you should have more positive outcome possibilities.

I think the general idea is pretty sound, but definitely not so black and white. I believe most "big" startups were small startups initially.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's definitely not black and white.

I think of every opportunity as being a different dartboard with different values. These were just examples of _A_ small startup and _A_ big startup.

It's our responsibility as an entrepreneurs to pick the board that best fits our risk profiles for the best cost.

Not all boards have a positive EV.

The "use dad's connections to buy my product" startup board is just 1 big fat positive number (imagine some nearly "risk free" opportunity)

The "punch people in the nuts for a dollar" startup looks like a board of all zeros (as far as I know, most guys aren't interested in this service)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As someone who is currently struggling with finding an apartment to live in, I hope to God your startup becomes popular. Awful, incompetent real estate agents, terrible PDF forms that don't work properly on a computer, and an overall terrible process has stressed me out these past few weeks.

</comment><comment><USER11> 'Rocket Lease is me saying that 40k a year would be life changing for me'

I really don't get this line of thinking. I'm assuming the author isn't a programmer as otherwise I don't see how 40k a year would be an acceptable or life changing amount of money, and, if he isn't, then why not learn to code? Or maybe I'm just missing something and the intent is this is only a part-time project that doesn't take up much time so any money it makes is just extra (and 40k extra per year would be welcome by most people I'm sure).. honestly I'm curious, as while I have an interest in entrepreneurship, the potential payoff would have to be fairly high as being able to simply work as a programmer for others already provides a fairly decent quality of life.

<comment><USER12> I am guessing he means that $40k would enable him to work on his own stuff for a year instead of having to get a job.

I've been self employed for a bit over a year, and I'm paying the bills but make maybe 1/3-1/2 of what I used to when I was working as a programmer for someone else - working on my own things in my own time is a premium that's worth the lower "salary" for me.

Additionally, going into business yourself gives you a chance for a much higher payback in the long run (you're probably not going to make more than $200k/year inflation-adjusted as a programmer, but you could still make millions in a few years as a small business owner).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like this - and just because you start small doesn't mean you can't think big in the long term. Small but steady growth goes a long way towards building a lasting business too.

<comment><USER8> Thank you.

The danger scenario of a grow-slowly business is that you usually rely on clients, and sometimes they can become so demanding that you never escape the mediocrity of ad-hoc client demands. You want to avoid providing "custom" services that usually end up with you doing their grunt work without being able to automate it. You also need to constantly be looking out for better clients. Good clients aren't always the ones who pay the best. They're the ones who will let you do things right and who give you the freedom to actually grow, rather than living in a maintenance slog.

There's always a boss. The appeal of a VC startup is that your boss _wants_ your company to grow at 100+ percent per year. He wants you to play the anti- martingale strategy.

I think the problem, both for a person and a company, is that it's hard to find a "boss" who is looking for serious but not ridiculous growth. A corporate boss won't let you rise faster than him, and large companies get sluggish and stupid. So the typical job results in a boss who won't let you grow (personally) more than 3 or 4 percent per year. A VC wants you to triple your valuation every year. It's best to work for people who are on board with "get rich slowly": a 15 to 20 percent increase in the value of your knowledge base and skill set (and 15-40% growth in the business imprint) year after year.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Really, I guess this is my really old response to the "ambitious startups" threads from a while back...</comment>


Depression is not a malfunction - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=depressions-evolutionary <comment><USER2> Anecdotal, but this seems to back up what I've experienced in life...

I've dealt with _bad_ depression for most of my life..and it really, really sucks. When I "come out" of it, I'll look back at some of the things I did and said while I was depressed and just be like "WTF!?". It will usually result in my apologizing to people around me for acting bizarre, and alienating myself from whatever friends I had previously made.

Suck-zore.

The _GOOD_ thing about it is that depression has almost always been a major brain-catalyst for me. When I was young, the first thing that got catalyzed was dirt-bikes. For a summer I did almost literally _nothing_ other than read about, and ride dirtbikes. I emerged from that knowing more than anybody I know of about all the racers and bikes and parts and tracks etc. etc.

Then I discovered computers...

I know it's stupid and childish to reference the Hacker's Manifesto...but that pretty much nailed it for me. Here is something that doesn't get mad at me for being depressed, or scream at me to stop talking back, or think I'm weird, or anything like that....

Hands down, my best code has been written while I'm depressed.

For somebody that can't imagine what being depressed is like...imagine taking a photo that is out of focus, nothing really makes any sense at all. You can make out shapes, but they're blurry and not that meaningful. That is depression (well, that is actually a better descriptor for mania, not depression...depression would be more like really low light)...

Sitting down at a computer and getting buried under a bunch of code is...in focus, if that makes sense. When you're manic, or depressed, code is something solid that you can grab on to.

Sorry if this doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER3> In my case, being depressed means much deeper understanding and much more sharper mind. I even have an impression that the hard period I had few years ago, when I was _only_ working and reading books, formed me intellectually.

On the other hand, I quickly realize that _consequences_ of my thoughts are rather pointless. Not that my thoughts are pointless; far from it. The catch is that, actually, I couldn't care less about consequences of my thoughts, as they have little impact on the world.

Most of the time, I even don't care about sharing my thoughts with the world. I speak a lot with my girlfriend and a couple of friends but, for example, writing articles is pointless because I will have to deal with not understanding people.

The paradoxical consequence of thinking too much is mistrusting yourself. If you have an opinion which is very solid logically but is against 99% of the population, it is easy to wonder whom is wrong: the whole society or you.

That's why coding helps me a lot. The logical framework of code points me out that my thoughts are not pointless and my mind is not disorted anyhow. Coding helps me to get peace of mind. I'm much more relaxed when I write code.

I believe this is one of the reasons why a lot of people went to mathematics as well. If you mistrust yourself, you have to have a framework that keeps you in touch with the real world. Logic ensures that you are not crazy, yet.

Also, that's why coding is so addictive. It takes a week without coding to get me anxious. Without coding, I feel that my brain lacks some chemistry.

Personally I believe that depression, or any other unusual state of mind, is just a filter that disorts the output of your mind. It gives you a very different perspective, but if you're blind, it won't help you anyhow.

This is partially the reason why it is hard to decide whether depression is a problem, or not. Smart people might gain a lot from different states of mind; regular folks, well, not much.

To be honest, I'm not sure whether depression is actually a cause or a result, in case of some people. If you start thinking too much and realize how the world actually looks, it is easy to get depressed a bit.

PS. I've created a separate account for purpose of this comment; I feel this is too personal. Sorry that this is a bit chaotic but I don't have enough time to write the shorter comment so I wrote the longer one.

<comment><USER4> This concept sounds similar to the point you make: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article seems to be mostly speculation and is frankly weird in its assertions.

The very definition of depression is _un_ productive behaviors, and patterns of thought that go in circles.

There is a productive emotion that causes both reflectiveness and social isolation; it's called "sadness". People often describe a period of mourning as a necessary downtime, a reconfiguration, to get ready for the rest of one's life. I have never heard anyone describe depression as anything other than a waste of time.

<comment><USER6> Yup. It's amateurish speculation.

Some problems with the speculation, known to anyone who has read about or dealt with depression:

* Difficulty concentrating is one of the symptoms of depression. You can't think.

* Depression typically begins for no apparent reason in the person's life circumstances. It's often seasonal, triggered by things like changes in the length of the day.

* Depression doesn't lift when you've solved a problem. It lifts for no apparent reason, too.

* Depression is often fatal.

A better speculation: depression is a disorder of the circadian rhythms.

<comment><USER7> Your speculation has been extensively explored, and isn't actually better than the theory advanced in the article:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&cmd=D...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&cmd=DetailsSearch&term=depression+circadian+rhythm&log$=activity)

Reading over a few of the abstracts, the consensus appears to be that depression _can_ be caused by defects in circadian rhythm, but that the relationship isn't necessary, and may not be sufficient. If I were you, I'd ease off on using _"amateurish speculation"_ as an epithet in this situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Depression is very much a malfunction. When I was depressed, I wasn't functioning, and now that I take drugs every day to control it (over-the- counter drugs, btw), I function quite well.

What _is_ true is that being just shy of depression is probably adaptive and beneficial, which is why there are many examples of brilliant people who spent part of their lives depressed. It also explains why genes "for depression" haven't been selected out of the gene pool - it is likely that they are beneficial for the majority of carriers (makes you work harder, you're less satisfied with what you have, etc...) but if you have too many of these genes, then you just hate life and want to kill yourself, at least sometimes.

BTW the Wikipedia article on depression is very good and has links to some relatively accessible journal articles on current thinking about depression.

<comment><USER9> What OTC drugs are there for depression?

<comment><USER10> Beer.

<comment><USER11> While a popular home remedy, beer often makes the condition worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> submitted four days ago with the original article title:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=788259>

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

</comment><comment><USER13> Very interesting topic. A few checks on current comments:

The metaphor of the brain as a carefully portioned soup of chemicals should be retired. The brain is a modularized information processor. While you can pour in more "happy" molecules (try morphine), this still causes a cascade of other effects. Prozac doesn't start working for two weeks -- figure that one out!

Drawing a line between clinical depression and healthy sadness is easier said than done. Almost no one gets depressed without triggering life events. The difference is in depth and recovery. In any case, we still don't have a good idea what is "healthy" about sadness.

It is really hard to judge the long-term benefits of depression. Evolution plays out over generations. Modern society is not what we are adapted for anyway. Maybe we should study siblings of suicides to see if they are somehow more biologically successful on average.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't trust the human body when it comes to pain. It tends to go on way longer than I need it to get the point.

I also find it hard to think of something that strips away your motivation, even your desire to experience things that have always delighted you, as a positive. It's a very vulnerable state, not something to be sought.

That said, it's part of life for many people, moreso in creative people, and learning to recognize it and take steps to unravel it is essential to one's future health.

</comment><comment><USER15> After reading the article it is clear to me that perhaps the best treatment for depression would be a start up. The symptoms fall right in line with a startup lifestyle: ability and need to continuously work on problems dividing them smaller and smaller, eating disorders and weight loss or gain, isolation and not spending time with friends and loved ones, etc. I'm not depressed but my startup lifestyle sure has me living with the symptoms.

</comment><comment><USER16> Ignoring chemical imbalances, most depression stems from a loss of control in ones life. If depression is really just a side effect of having a self image and a sense of control over that future self image then the benefit is the ability to adapt. The problem may not even have a solution, it may just be a need to reconfigure the self image in accordance with reality.

<comment><USER17> It's bad that the word depression is used for two dramatically different conditions.

Clinical/chemical depression. (which btw _causes_ loss of control of ones life)

Emotional depression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Depression is the symptom you get when your soul is left without sufficient daily nutrition, happening for a longer period.

Now, what does the soul "eat"? Love! In any form, and there are so many.

Depression is actually exploding in our current times, all over the world. How will future generations judge the health state of our current situation? Hmm..

<comment><USER19> That's cute and all, but your mood is influenced by chemicals (influenced by, or _is_ is beyond the scope of this conversation) and an imbalance in those chemicals will lead to a disorder that you can fix by improving that balance. I'm also not saying loving someone won't do that.

No one says you can solve a malfunctioning liver with love.

edit: Also, depression doesn't just mean being down and the cure for it is 'cheering' up. Depression is an overloaded word.</comment></comment>


Where To Go For Inspiration? - <AUTHOR> http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/06/where-to-go-for.html <comment><USER2> There _are_ more important things to do than blog every day.

:)</comment>


Meteorological winter aligns with December-January-February - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/dont-believe-the-hype-winter-does-not-begin-tonight <comment><USER2> I can't believe that I was an adult when I first learned that seasons are not universal, and I don't mean that July is winter in Australia but summer in Europe. I mean like how in Mali, there are three seasons: the wet (rainy) season from June to mid-December, the dry season from mid-December to March, and a hot season from March to June. The epiphany I experienced was kind of like the one I had during a software engineering class, an exercise in internationalization where students had to write a program that took people's names as an input (which turns out to be quite complicated). It always amazes me how many unexamined assumptions our minds make about how the world works, and it always surprises me when I run into one.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm 38 but only noticed a few years ago that calendars say "Winter begins". I feel like as a kid it was "Winter solstice." I always assumed the solstice was the _midpoint_ of winter, not the beginning. Doesn't that make more sense? Anyway, my sense of the seasons is more like children's books: autumn is when the leaves change, winter is when it snows, spring is when the flowers bud, summer is hot. Sounds like meteorological winter still doesn't put the solstice at the middle of winter, but it would be closer.

<comment><USER4> Yea, I've been thinking about that too. A few weeks ago my 3 year old saw it snowing out and said, "Mom and Dad, it's winter!" A visitor we had over said something to the effect of, "well, actually it's not winter YET, that's not till later in the month." The 3 year old was very confused, as he could clearly see it was winter by the snow outside. I much prefer the 3 year old's simple method for knowing when winter was here.

<comment><USER5> It always saddens me when I hear of adults closing off conversations with children (and in this case in such a dismissive manner). Adults really should realise that they are constantly teaching children, or rather, children are constantly learning from them. What did this exchange teach?

A better approach is to keep things open - for example, respond with something along the lines of "how do you know?" (or even just "why?"). The you get to talk about seasons and how they relate to temperature and weather, leaves on the trees, snowmen...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So? I remember watching weather reporters as a kid, and even teachers telling us about seasons in primary school, they always had a clear differentiation between "meteorological seasons" and "calendar seasons". Meteorological winter started on December 1st, and ended with the first blooming flowers in early March. November is a bit more confusing, because you traditionally start wearing a winter coat on November 1st, but only in the morning as days are still warm-ish.

I assume different countries will have different meteorological seasons. Just like most countries within a timezone don't exactly sync up with the idea that the sun is at the highest point at noon.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting that the Met Office in the UK says that winter for weather starts on December 31st [http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/learn-about-the- weather...](http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/learn-about-the-weather/how- weather-works/seasons/winter/when-does-winter-start)

</comment><comment><USER8> Previous discussion from earlier today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10777310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10777310)

</comment><comment><USER9> Instead of this somewhat pointless magazine article, the phenomenon of astronomical winter and meteorological winter being out of phase can be used to teach numerous important concepts to children (and, apparently, to magazine contributors). Seasons can teach periodicity, phase relationship, the relationship between an input (solar flux) and a system that integrates that input (atmospheric temperature), leading to the calculus of trigonometric functions, or leading to principles of accounting. Really this one simple natural cycle can be the basis of an entire semester of high school science or math. Whining about the calendar is pretty superficial.

</comment><comment><USER10> Let's just move the 1st of January to the day the 'real' winter begins. Time... what an invention!

</comment><comment><USER11> It's ironic this article was written in record-breakingly warm December (in the Eastern United States).

</comment><comment><USER12> In Minnesota, Winter is November to May.

<comment><USER13> Best argument possible in favor of not living that far north!

<comment><USER14> There's not a 100% correlation with low temps and being far north. The Seattle area is as far north as most of Minnesota, and our winters are nothing like theirs (record low here is 0F - Seatac 1950) and it's typically overcast and 45F.

<comment><USER12> Yes, absolutely! We're mid-continent, and the Laurentian Divide pulls Arctic air downward over our state making it the coldest in the lower 48. Still I'll take our far greater cold sunny days to Seattle's warmer overcast days every single time, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> tl;dr - "i don't like that words have meanings, i'm more interested in feelings"</comment>


Beautiful software - <AUTHOR> http://humanize.it/2008/02/23/beautiful-software/

<comment><USER2> I don´t see why software can be art and solve a problem at the _same_ time.

I hate when people sees software only as a tool. Yes, of course it is a tool. But, what is not it? Of course, you can see software as a tool to sell cars. But for me a car is only a tool to go from one place to another! Please, stop being obvious! _Everything is a tool_ , but some tools are _beautiful_ while other not. Antoni Gaudi´s Casa Batlló was built for people to live in, like a lot of buildings. But the Casa Batlló is beatiful, it has an ethereal artistic background that most buildings lack. A report is nothing more than a bunch of text, just like a novel or a poem. But it lacks something that makes a novel or a poem art.

Most pieces of software are ugly and not artistic at all, of course. But it does not mean that a certain piece of software could not be art, and beautiful, and clever.

And what about demos? They are not tools, but they are beautiful. Usually beatiful in two dimensions: the code and the images and music produced. They are not art?

<comment><USER3> +1 for mentioning one of the most visually stimulating apartment buildings in the world. I saw it on a trip to Barcelona and it makes you realize how boring all buildings are designed to be.

Have you read "How Buildings Learn" by S. Brand? I think you would like it - premise is the manner in how buildings are constructed influences their growth and ability to change.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where to buy Twitter followers (as a gag gift)? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to buy an outrageous number of twitter followers for a friend's account on his birthday. Zero expectation that it'll have any real impact on his profile - it's strictly an absurd joke of a gift. The trouble is sorting out where to buy followers (bots or real, preferably a mix) from a 'reputable' company that won't just run off with the money. Considered emailing someone on the Romney 2012 campaign but short of that I thought someone here might have the answer. <comment><USER2> <http://fiverr.com/gigs/search?query=followers>

Haven't tried it myself, but it seems promising.

<comment><AUTHOR> good call, didn't even think to check out fiverr.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've done that to a friend before. Created a Facebook fan page in his name and got 1000 "Likes" from fiverr.com. Was a pretty funny gag.

</comment><comment><USER4> Feebay has all sorts of auctions from followers to sponsored Tweets.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've actually done a similar thing using fiverr.com

<comment><AUTHOR> How did it go? Would you refer the provider you used?</comment></comment>


Harvard Medical School: Protein Folding Revolution - <AUTHOR> https://hms.harvard.edu/news/folding-revolution <comment><AUTHOR> TLDR ML is getting closer to solving protein folding. New method predicts structures 1 million times faster than previous methods.

> Reporting online in Cell Systems on April 17, systems biologist Mohammed > AlQuraishi details a new approach for computationally determining protein > structure—achieving accuracy comparable to current state-of-the-art methods > but at speeds upward of a million times faster.

<comment><USER2> I would suggest you add the word "protein" to the title (before "folding) to make it clearer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Done. Much obliged.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Am I Technical enough to be the Technical Co-founder? - <AUTHOR> I am looking for on advice on how technical does a technical co-founder have to be.
Is my background enough?
My experience:
- MEng Engineering Maths (learnt MATLAB, Java, C, Prolog and Haskell as well as Linux)
- Software engineer >2years (Java, SQL, Linux)
- Quantitative analyst ~2.5 years (VBA and Excel)
- Investment professional ~4 years (Excel)
In my spare time I've been learning React.js, node/javascript and GraphQL. I've been building an MVP with Graph.cool as the backend. I'm also okay in python.
So am I Technical enough to be a Technical Co-founder? I have a potential non-technical co-founder lined up to start the business with. <comment><USER2> Kinda depends on what you're building...for a todo list app, definitely, for an autonomous robot that performs brain surgery, maybe not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point - it would be a data intensive investor portal which also serves up PDFs. My goal further down the line is to have advanced analytics but the initial services would be fairly rudimentary and I feel like I could build it..... it just might take longer

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are you technical enough to build the MVP then I don't see the problem?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I think I could build an okay MVP. It wont be shiny but it'll work

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any constructive advice would be more than welcome</comment>


Flying Solo with Android Development - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@anitas3791/flying-solo-with-android-development-c52d911b62bf#.j4ajhpix9 <comment><USER2> Great post! I absolutely love the tip about reviewing your own PRs. I never would have thought to do that and it seems like a great practice to look at your own code from a different angle.

</comment><comment><USER3> Had a blast building the Winnie Android app while going solo for the first time! Happy to answer any questions about my experience.</comment>


Ask HN: What would a note taking app for visual learners look like? - <AUTHOR> I've recently been thinking about the way we note take in general, reflecting on my experiences with Notion, OneNote and many more. Even though these products are fantastic at what they do, as a highly visual learner it seems to be missing features such as mindmaps, intra-diagram highlighting and annotating, and many other potential features.<p>Anyone else has had this thought before? Comment down below what you think a the perfect note taking app for visual learners should look like! <comment><USER2> Good stuff. I've been developing a concept called the Capture Map, which is like a meta-model in which things like mind maps can live. It's very visual, but also organizational and modular. You can start such a map with a journaling node, then add separate lists. Connections are a separate topic and run in types, as opposed to having specific mandatory visual qualities like shape gradations.

So far, in my experience, the top two app-types that work well are 1) vector drawing apps like Inkscape and 2) spreadsheet apps like Calc. The latter because even though "it's a spreadsheet (which is a pretty big deal)," "it's also a drawing app supporting layers, etc."

Living document of reference, very alpha: [https://www.friendlyskies.net/intj/the-capture-map-a-new- con...](https://www.friendlyskies.net/intj/the-capture-map-a-new-concept-in- self-expression-and-idea-capture)

</comment><comment><USER3> Something like Miro. I'm a user myself and it has good or great implementations of all of these things. Here's a few examples: [https://miro.com/innovation-software/](https://miro.com/innovation- software/), [https://miro.com/mind-map-software/](https://miro.com/mind-map- software/), [https://miro.com/workshops/](https://miro.com/workshops/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep I absolutely love Miro. It has a lot of neat visual features, but however is aimed more at team collaboration rather than organising note taking for individual use. Regardless I think there's a lot Miro has to offer!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ugh, I'm not sure. I feel like Drawing programs like Libreoffice kinda work. But at the end drawing and be able to erase with a real pencil and paper is the best for me until you have a good idea ahead of time of what you want to draw.

<comment><USER2> One of the concepts I've found really works well for dreamers/creators/organizers is the blank slate. I call this Rebasing-- creating psychological distance from the previous, less-desired mental state in order to bring about a new, desired mental state. A LOT of people tell me that they need to move from digital to paper as part of this process. (I have some weird theories as to why this is)

What I learned from there is that it's also important in many cases to move from paper back to digital, capturing what you developed on paper and integrating it, where possible, back into the "previous" thing, ideally making the previous thing into something else. Something better, maybe lighter, etc. Otherwise what can happen is that lessons go unlearned, thoughts that really should have been remembered or communicated don't get remembered, etc.</comment></comment>


Ask HNs: How many people use your product? - <AUTHOR> Whether it be solo, team etc. how many people use what you make? <comment><USER2> Not sure if this counts. But I use a static site generator [1] that I wrote in Python3, to create my blog. Every time I watch a foreign language movie, I use a tool that I wrote in haskell [2] to search, download and find the perfect subtitle for that movie.

Right now I am rewriting it in Rust, with the added capability of syncing the subs in case I am not able to find the perfect subtitle. It is almost done. Now I am trying to put it online.

[1] [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Feni/0.9](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Feni/0.9)

[2] [https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hastily](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hastily)

</comment><comment><USER3> I launched a niche website a few years back on my own as a side project that averaged less than 100 unique users a day. Now the site does over 1,000 unique users a day. No paid marketing, just SEO.

</comment><comment><USER4> I made an app over a year ago that has ~3 DAU.

Another pings back every 3 days (if they reboot) and each day I get ~500-700 pings on the newest version. 1000 if I include the old one.

</comment><comment><USER5> We have 20,000 users! :) If you're a booklover, you should check it out: www.beek.io

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Since no one has shared let me start. I have roughly 12K user for an android app. ~50k Downloads.

</comment><comment><USER6> Very little people. Some executives, that's all.

</comment><comment><USER7> iOS app: 550K DAU with ~2.5M downloads, 3 years in the making.

<comment><USER8> What's the app?</comment></comment>


The Truth About Tinder and Women Is Even Worse Than You Think - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-02/tinders-forgotten-woman-whitney-wolfe-sexism-and-startup-creation-myths#p1

<comment><USER2> In summary: is a cofounder. Tinder brings in a new CMO (after company was founded), name him a cofounder, rewrite history so she is no longer a cofounder, ignore her complaints about harassment, proceed to fire her. Then when this story breaks talk about suspending the "cofounder" that was doing the harassing - acting as though it is new information.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's pretty shocking that founders of a company the size and success of Tinder could be as cavalier with their social media streams and professional attitude. Regardless of the facts of the case, these will dramatically impact their public perception, as they should. There is no instance in which these behaviors are acceptable.

</comment><comment><USER4> As a sidenote, I'm surprised pitching Tinder to chapters of her sorority around the country worked. The way it was written gave me a very "Amway" make- your-friends-buy-stuff vibe.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't see why the author included details about the defendant writing "muslim pig" in a text message and saying that another executive looked like a penis. These details have nothing to do with the case. The only purpose they serve is to defame the defendant.

It's unethical to write such an opinionated piece covering a case like this, in which the facts are just starting to emerge. Let's keep it objective until the evidence is clear. Otherwise we risk perpetuating a witch hunt (of both the defendant and the plaintiff).

<comment><USER6> Not sure why you're being downvoted - I was just about to write the same thing. People write stupid things on social media. I expect tabloids to call them out on it. But I expect Bloomberg BusinessWeek's reporting to understand the distinction between psychological context to an accusation, and unrelated character assassination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7979847](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7979847).

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's another version of events:

[http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-true-story-of-the-tinder- war-o...](http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-true-story-of-the-tinder-war-on-women- crisis/)

As awkward as it is to say, stories like this make me averse to hiring or working with unknown women in the tech world and I suspect the same is true of other male developers. If I'm ever in a position to do so, if I were to hire a woman I would have to know for a fact that she is very cool and wouldn't cause a shit-storm over some trumped up sexual harassment allegations.

I don't have any a priori objections to working with women, but the potential ability of a 'sexism' lawsuit to sap a startup of its two most valuable assets (time and money) lowers their desirability as prospective employees.

I'm also baffled as to how this brogrammer meme came about. Developers/males in the tech world are some of the nerdiest and nicest people I know. They're the diametric opposite of 'bros' who wear backwards baseball caps and act obnoxious in public.

<comment><USER9> Your link says:

 _" 8\. In late November 2013, plaintiff "gave the relationship a second chance." [i.e., when she found that she had been demoted for breaking up with him, she decided to try to make up]"_

You say:

 _" If I'm ever in a position to do so, if I were to hire a woman I would have to know for a fact that she is very cool and wouldn't cause a shit-storm over some trumped up sexual harassment allegations."_

If she was really demoted for breaking up with her boss, that's a pretty strong case for sexual harassment, not a "trumped up" allegation.

In most companies, women and men work with each other every day, and sexual harassment cases are rare.</comment></comment>


Steve Jobs and The End of The Personal Computer - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904199404576538311480072084.html

<comment><USER2> Article is behind a paywall.</comment>


Raspberry Pi sales are rocketing in the middle of the coronavirus outbreak - <AUTHOR> https://www.techrepublic.com/article/raspberry-pi-why-sales-have-rocketed-in-the-middle-of-the-coronavirus-outbreak/ <comment><USER2> Made in the UK (Yes It can be done outside china) Open Source, cheap-as, solid documentation and friendly community. Whats not to like</comment>