Side Hustle: Overcome Your Objections to Starting Your Own Business - <AUTHOR> http://artofmanliness.com/2012/07/30/the-company-mans-guide-to-starting-a-side-hustle-part-i-confronting-your-objections/

<comment><USER2> Good article but I would like to ask different question. Here is my objection: if you earn money you must pay taxes and deal with bureaucracy. My ideas are simple ones, I like them, maybe they will grow big someday but while they are small going legal means I will pay more in taxes (time for bureaucracy is not free IMO) than I earn.

I wonder if people in other countries have problem like this. I'm especially interested in EU countries since as EU citizen I guess I have some flexibility here.

BTW, there is part II here: [http://artofmanliness.com/2012/08/07/the-company- mans-guide-...](http://artofmanliness.com/2012/08/07/the-company-mans-guide- to-starting-a-side-hustle-part-ii-think-big-act-small/)

<comment><USER3> I'm from Spain, where bureaucracy and taxes for new businesses are quite ridiculous. What I did is:

\- If you're making just a few hundred $ a month, don't even bother. Yes, it's technically illegal, but nobody's gonna put you in jail for not paying a few dozen $ of taxes a month. They have better things to do, and so have you.

\- Once you reach a decent income, hire an accountant to do all the paperwork. I pay 70€/mo and all I have to do is once a quarter, send a summary of expenses and income, and everything is done for me. Plus, I have someone to consult if I have more complex questions.

Hope it helps.

EDIT: Forgot to say, don't incorporate until you have quite a substantial income. Here at least it's expensive and accountants will charge you more. Just register yourself as a self employed person, which is like a one-person company here in Spain. Like freelancers, etc. I'm sure the same thing exists in other countries.

<comment><USER2> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While this was an enjoyable read, I think it fails to address the real underlying issue holding people back. The reasons given to overcome are actually symptoms of a deeper underlying fear. The fear of success and/or the fear of failure.

To be fair, the solutions provided are good short term solutions to fear. The best cure for fear is action which this article gives you some practical ways to take action...but unless you address your deeper fears, you are not very likely to follow through til the end.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think this is a good article, for people like me anyway. There are loads of people on HN wiling to throw their life at an idea for a period of time. Then there are people who are embedded in corporate but 'startup-curious' but for whatever reason are not going to quit the job and head in all guns blazing.

A side hustle is a great way to give yourself a bit of freedom, understand what your getting into with a startup and make some early steps. And with time management it is not that hard. Something else I have done I would recommend is I have set up a bank account where X% of my salary goes into a separate account. This account is for investing in my business. This way I have a clear budget to spend and don't get cold feet at the thought of digging into my family savings account.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed! I'm a huge proponent of side-hustlin'

I started my second company on the side while I was working at a large software company. On top of the full-time corporate gig I had recently gotten married and was expecting my first child. My first app launched only a couple of weeks after the birth of my daughter which was perfect because It was partly inspired by her (it was an app for kids). The app ended up doing really well on the App Store cracking the Top 50 overall list. After a few more months of hard work I was able to leave my job and haven't looked back since.

Side hustles are like tricycles...it's the first step to learning to ride on your own.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Gyro, a new cloud automation tool - <AUTHOR> https://gyro.dev/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm a member of the team that built Gyro.

Gyro, a command-line cloud automation and management tool, started as internal tool over 5 years ago. We had a vision of building one tool that would pull together several different tools (Chef, Service Discovery, Authentication, Deployments, etc) into a single interface that would greatly simplify the day to day management of our systems. This goal was very successful in transitioning to a DevOps model. Our developers are able to make configuration changes, do their own deployments, and build there own test environments without help from the operations team. And most importantly they've embraced this model because it gave them the power to make changes without waiting for an operations team and in turn it helped the operations team by reducing their work.

We decided to clean up the code and open source it. The result is Gyro (getgyro.io).

What makes this different than what exists?

\- Designed with logic (for loops, if conditions, etc) from the beginning ([https://gyro.dev/guides/language/control- structures.html](https://gyro.dev/guides/language/control-structures.html))

\- Workflows provide the ability to stage complex changes and rollback ([https://gyro.dev/guides/workflows/](https://gyro.dev/guides/workflows/))

\- Extensions allow for tight integrations with other operations tooling ([https://gyro.dev/extending/](https://gyro.dev/extending/))

For some screenshots of Gyro see ([https://getgyro.io/introducing- gyro](https://getgyro.io/introducing-gyro)), source is available one Github ([https://github.com/perfectsense/gyro](https://github.com/perfectsense/gyro))

We're really excited to open source Gyro and see how people extend it!</comment>


Google Puts Money on Robots, Using the Man Behind Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/04/technology/google-puts-money-on-robots-using-the-man-behind-android.html <comment><USER2> I wonder how long it will be before the sex industry catches on. Surely realistic and anatomically correct androids are preferable to blow-up dolls are what have you... even Star Trek mentioned the issue.

It might seem flippant, but I genuinely think that is a potentially huge market (though probably not Google's cup of tea). After all, why create a robot that is shaped like a human? The human form is remarkably versatile, but there's a reason that industrial robots don't look even remotely human. Each has a specialised function and corresponding form that makes them far more efficient than a human being.

The best reason for having a robot that emulates human form and behaviour would be for interacting with other humans. There are fewer more basic human needs than that for sex, as much as we'd all like to be prudes and deny it. Though the uncanny valley may be an issue, human nature makes it unavoidable that this will happen eventually.

<comment><USER3> This was the key theme of only the second episode of the new cop drama Almost Human. I agree with you. However, I think there is a more immediate market in industry, and one that doesn't require nearly as complex robots.

<comment><USER2> Almost Human has been on my list of things to watch, I suppose I should move it up a notch. The industrial market will undoubtedly be served first by this (and Google's probably carefully avoiding any hint of what I suggested -- heck, I already got downvoted for merely mentioning the possibility), but I'm pretty sure it will happen. The ethical implications are interesting to say the least. Complexity is interesting, too. Historically, it's always been better to have specialised programming for the domain of use. Industrial/manufacturing purposes would indeed be a nicely delineated area. Once you make androids that have to deal with humans on a human level, pretty much all limits are gone as the entire gamut of human behaviour needs to be dealt with and a portion of it simulated. I suppose a sexbot of some kind is possible without being too complicated, just don't expect it to cook you dinner afterwards. Perhaps too much complexity would actually be detrimental in this case, as no sane person has yet worried about whether their blowup- doll likes them or has a good time. Moral and ethical issues will arise. But that hasn't stopped humanity in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For me this article tells me I am growing up. Previously I would have thought "gosh Google is getting into robots, well that sews up the market everyone will buy from them."

today I think - "Wow, Google is path blazing, there is going to be so many opportunities - let's dig out ROS and find a local company with a needs"

<comment><USER5> And you'll know you're grown up when you can spot a reactionary PR fluff piece instead of anything with actual content in it!

The Amazon announcement had a concrete end goal and time commitments, and was met with cynicism, whereas this fuzzy approach allowing people to project what they want into what they're reading creates a sort of delusional optimism among many.

<comment><USER4> I used to (and still do) run the opposite direction that the crowd is going. Its just that I am choosing my tribe - and my tribe is full of people who also run the opposite direction from the crowd.

So I have to be careful to spot both the larger crowd, the crowd that is now my tribe and when people are dropping FUD scent markers over their desired territory.

In short - robots still look like a hobby that will pay off the same way writing games for the ZX 80 or Atari will pay off.

<comment><USER6> > In short - robots still look like a hobby that will pay off the same way > writing games for the ZX 80 or Atari will pay off.

You realize that that "pay off" is entirely social, right? For people who made careers out of game development, it wasn't because they made an early investment on the Atari. It was because they developed a passion.

If robots take off the way computer games did (and they probably will), the fact that you tinkered on them twenty years ago is not going to be good for anything other than stories over a beer, the same way my dad likes to talk about programming with punch cards. (Spoiler: tmk, my dad hasn't programmed anything in maybe 30 years. Kept up he has not.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel like I'm greatly missing out on new stuff like this. I'm trying to get a turtle bot together and build a sort of lab component of Prof Thrun's robot car class. But I wonder what else I could be doing. Anyone have pointers?

<comment><USER8> Some suggestions. To learn:

1) [http://societyofrobots.com/](http://societyofrobots.com/) especially the forum

2) [https://www.coursera.org/course/conrob](https://www.coursera.org/course/conrob)

3) download the old coursera course on computer vision from some torrent site

4) anything and everything on 3d mathematics you can find.

Get a job making robots. Oh and the interview question is "how do you find a path for a non-point robot with non-line obstacles". The answer is to add the point-inversion of the robot to every point in the scene, and find a path in the resulting "configuration space" (google that and program it once. In 2d. No need to torture yourself with the 3d implementation). Worst-case followup question : and how do you find paths if rotation is allowed ? Tell the interviewer that you don't know, but he doesn't know that either (and it's easy to use the previous answer to come up with a -way to slow- algorithm suggestion, doing it efficiently and correctly however ...).

If you just want to make a robot. I suggest :

(shortcut if you got money to burn and don't care about electronics : [http://www.robotis.com/xe/bioloid_en](http://www.robotis.com/xe/bioloid_en) . Lego motors are slow and crappy)

1) forward kinematics (given 3 translated and rotated robot arm sections, what movement makes the end effector ?). Oh and mobile platform kinematics (robot arm is now a robot paw. What is the effect on a mobile platform if you move the arm, given that the end effector is on the ground)

2) make a robot arm. Bonus points if you make a walker.

3) actually program forward kinematics.

4) notice that the engines get really, really hot

5) learn control algorithms. Summary : the position of a motor is a function. Find the derivative of that function, speed. Make your control loop limit that speed (meaning speed needs to remain within -x and +x. Slow down if you find your robot risks exceeding that). Find the derivative of the speed function, acceleration. Make your control loop limit it's value.

5.5) find that the limits imposed in 5 are too strict. Find a way to relax them so that over a "small" time period of, say 2-3 seconds they're always true, but allow for small periods that exceed these limits.

6) notice that if you limit the torque (the derivative of the acceleration function to relatively low values) humans will not notice the movement of the robot, even though it doesn't preclude the robot moving quite fast. Have some fun with that.

6.5) attempt to make your robot pick up an unboiled egg. Break 100 eggs. Publish the traditional "look I can pick up an egg" (in 100 attempts you'll have a single egg that survives. Don't mention the other 99)

7) find ways to get your control loops based on other values. For example, find a way to have an end effector exert constant force on an object, as opposed to having a specific position. Find a way for your end effector to track an object.

7.5) make your robot pick up an unboiled egg. Get the breakage under 10%. Publish another paper. Do mention the 10 broken eggs. 8) find a way to do 7 while making sure your robot doesn't crash into itself, that generally there is no way to trick it into attempting to intersect with itself.

After step 7, you now know more than 80% of the people working on robotics. If you're still having fun, I'd definitely suggest getting into a phd program. Note that all this is bloody hard. Before you have step 8 covered you will be one of the 100 best-informed people in your state when it comes to 3d geometry and how forces affect objects. You will get irritated everytime you see a crane or bulldozer or escalator or elevator ... Your girlfriend will hate you for pointing out ways that those things can easily or suddenly accelerate large masses and cause disasters, and how easy it would be to prevent that.

Note that we really aren't that far when it comes to robotics. That means that with basic electronics you can achieve the state of the art (exception : battery life). It is not necessary to utilize expensive motors to achieve any of this, nor do you need things like a 3d printer or the like (servos + balsa wood(and something more solid, when you inevitable make a bigger robot) + saw + drill) will get you to step 6.5, and there is plenty of information on the internet on how to replace the servo ciruits to make 7+8 possible.

<comment><USER9> I've been a robotics hobbyist for a few years and still can't answer any of those questions. I can get my turtlebot to follow me around and chase the cat though. Is there a practical programming robotics book/course out there? I've taken tons of math, controls, read robotics books, but still can't program anything harder than a PID or Kalman filter. I think part of that is me relying on ROS libraries too much.

<comment><USER8> Both of those can be really easy or really hard, depending. What exactly would you like to learn ?

Both things are related to control loops, so how about you make a slightly more complex robot that can detect it's position somehow, and get some pathfinding going ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In case the automated cars weren't enough of a wake up call, this is a pretty clear indication that the millions (billions?) of people we currently employ to do low-skill manual labor will be out of a job before too long. If we don't come up with useful for things for them to fill their time with, it's going to be a hugely destabilizing force in society.

<comment><USER11> What about a law that requires companies to train employees with a usable skill for X months before they can be replaced with a robot?

Hopefully all of these innovations will not only replace humans with robots but will also create new industries and new jobs.

Something that's more Utopian would be if there was no meaning of currency. I think it happened in Star Trek (never seen it but someone told me about the concept). If you have re-arrange the molecules of any object to create any other object, then why would everyone need to work? If you wanted MORE things then you could work, but to live day to day, would you have to pay for small items and food in the future or could you just "print" or create them from re- atomizing anything you already own?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> To put some weight behind the quote from Andrew McAfee's quote ("The opportunity is massive," said Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business. "There are still people who walk around in factories and pick things up in distribution centers and work in the back rooms of grocery stores."), just the external logistics of the Supply Chain of modern businesses accounts for around 7-9% of the GDP[1]. In developing countries, it is much higher (although I don't have a non-gated reference for other developing countries, the link in [1] shows China's cost at 18%). Interestingly, while inventory holding costs are included in that estimate, internal fulfillment costs (think Pick and Pack, Rail Shunt Yards, Crossdocking, etc) is not included as that is typically considered an operations cost. Those costs vary wildly by industry, but I can imagine it tacks on another 20-30% on top of that.

This would mean that the modern industrial supply chain costs the US around $1.5 trillion/yr.

[1] [http://www.kpmg.com.cn/en/virtual_library/Property_Infrastru...](http://www.kpmg.com.cn/en/virtual_library/Property_Infrastructure/LogisticsChina.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER13> What kind of background is Google looking for when recruiting people to work on teams like these?

<comment><USER14> Bot & Dolly is hiring: [http://www.botndolly.com/jobs](http://www.botndolly.com/jobs)

<comment><USER15> They're a good company to work for. Less nerdy than 99% of robotics companies.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure how 'less nerdy' would be a plus for a robotics company, but good to have a positive review of the place nonetheless. Do you work there?

<comment><USER17> Just guessing, but for me it's about the audience. Software in the 70s and 80s was very nerdy. With the rise of the web, it got less so, driven by the need to reach consumers and the influence of print design. In the last decade, a lot of tech is downright chic, and succeeds because of that. Look at the iPod and the iPhone, for example.

I think robotics is coming up on a similar transition. For years it was 99% research projects and industrial uses: pure nerdery. But Bot & Dolly is selling to Hollywood, and is very slickly marketed. Aesthetics are starting to really matter.

<comment><USER17> Whoa. It's worth checking out their video "Box":

[http://www.botndolly.com/box](http://www.botndolly.com/box)

Gorgeous.

<comment><USER18> We can see the two robots manipulating the rectangular screens, and infer one positioning the camera. What I'm trying to figure out, is if there are at least two additional robots positioning the projectors that light the screens, or if they just transformed the animation and the projectors are kept in basically the same place as the camera.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> they seem to have used a file photo from 2007 NYT story that has a toy robot. Hmm, bit tricky - to average person I think the photo suggests THIS is an example of the robots he's working on, no?

[http://hunterwalk.com/2013/12/03/andy-rubin-poses-with- same-...](http://hunterwalk.com/2013/12/03/andy-rubin-poses-with-same- drone-2007-2013-what-does-it-all-mean/)

<comment><USER20> More likely he just was hard to schedule for a photo shoot, so they used a file photo and this was better than a headshot of him speaking at some conference. Unless there were new robots to show from Google, it wouldn't add much to take a new photo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The long term plan of Google is "the skynet of terminator movie". Larry Page has always said it: [http://blog.beacontechnologies.com/google-ai-artificial- inte...](http://blog.beacontechnologies.com/google-ai-artificial-intelligence- is-the-future-of-google-search/) , [http://www.artificialbrains.com/google](http://www.artificialbrains.com/google) .

</comment><comment><USER22> Is it too early to reference Skynet and Terminator?

<comment><USER23> Why the down vote ? This is a pertinent question. It's a problem we will face soon or later. Internet has also it's problem. The ostrich attitude or obscurantism about them is plain stupid.

My answer to this question is that dynamite and machine have good use and bad use. There were also good reason to fear the bad use of them. But mankind manage to keep the balance largely in favor of the good use. I'll not prone obscurantism or the ostrich attitude regarding the risks of this new technologies. But we will have to manage that type of problem. It's easier when we have a little time left in front of us before things get out of control. I beleive that artificial intelligence reproducing the brain capabilities is just behind the corner. So we are in a race that I hope the good people and use will win.

<comment><USER24> _I beleive that artificial intelligence reproducing the brain capabilities is just behind the corner._

Why?

<comment><USER23> All the cogs of the brain are well known and documented since years and their interoperation as well. But we still don't know how it all work together and what function is implemented by it.(I mean publicly. Some people may already know and keep it secret)

This is like DNA. All the puzzle pieces (molecules) were known but what was missing is how these pieces fit together. It was a aha moment that made the difference between before and after.

For the explanation on how the cortical neural network works the aha moment is the only missing step. All the puzzle pieces are known (of coures in the hypothesis that only bioelectrical mechanisms are in play).

<comment><USER25> > All the cogs of the brain are well known and documented since years and > their interoperation as well. But we still don't know how it all work > together and what function is implemented by it.(I mean publicly. Some > people may already know and keep it secret)

I don't think there's a single correct thing about anything in this sentence, it's also a little bit conspiracy crazed.

<comment><USER23> What a troll! Anything more concrete to justify what you "think" or should I say _believe_ ?

I don't see what could be "conspiracy crazed" in my comment. It looks like you believe that if someone knew how it worked, the whole world would immediatly know it as well. This might be a shock for you but this world is not sesame street.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The only job robot can't do is politician.

<comment><USER27> Not so sure ... read some Isaac Asimov. (And yes, I'm generalizing from fictional evidence, but I'm only playing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not keen on letting Amazon hog the PR spotlight, Google lets Andy Rubin out of the doghouse because the X Labs are all tapped out.

<comment><USER29> Could you explain how giving a guy free run of the place and acquiring 7 companies on his say so counts as "being in the doghouse".

Maybe i'm just not used to silicon valley doghouses; I know things are expensive out here.

<comment><USER30> Exactly. This would be a dream job for a heck of a lot of HN regulars: running your own shop, with no significant money worries, and a decent chance of changing the world. If this is the "doghouse," I'd be happy to be there too.

<comment><USER31> Just to state the obvious: Andy is not (and was not) in the doghouse. He had a massively successful run as the leader of Android and is now doing something else. I look forward to seeing what his team comes up with.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Registered Domain Names Search - <AUTHOR> https://domainsdb.info <comment><USER2> That's a really nice flip of the classic domain registration search... clever! Just gotta keep those zone files up to date...

</comment><comment><USER3> I was looking for exactly this a while back. Awesome little tool!

</comment><comment><USER4> Great idea and perfect tool!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, we are going to release REST API next week.</comment></comment>


Professional Software Development - <AUTHOR> https://mixmastamyk.bitbucket.io/pro_soft_dev/index.html <comment><USER2> > 2010s:

> Continuous Integration & Delivery

> Workplace domination by "lumber-sexuals"

This is the best the author could come up with for major developments this decade?

Are you kidding?

<comment><USER3> For those, like me, who had no idea what a "lumbersexual" was: [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Lumbersexual](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Lumbersexual)

<comment><USER4> Everybody now: "Heees a lumberjack and he's ok, he sleeps all night and he works all day..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What he writes about version control and svn.

> its fully centralized design is largely considered obsolete

> ...it is still widely used, maintained, and appropriate for a few use cases, > such as for folks who require centralization and/or increased security > controls for one reason or another.

Statements like this sour the whole book for me and makes me feel it's written by one whose experience is lacking.

<comment><USER6> Those statements are mostly true. One of those few use cases where centralized version control still has a lot traction is game dev. Because of large files and a need to manage them efficiently on relatively limited local disks.

<comment><USER7> You also have to ask the question if the "distributed" functionality is really necessary. Even if companies use git or mercurial or whatever, most have a central repository anyway. They basically offer no extra value over Subversion on that specific (but most prominent) feature in practice.

<comment><USER8> A lot of the young guys I work with don't even really know about the distributed characteristics. For them git is Bitbucket or Github. that's all they know.

<comment><USER9> They'll learn. Things like cheap branching didn't become useful to me until I had a bunch of stuff going on at once, which didn't happen until I graduated to more senior roles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find it strange/sad that the chapter "Construction" has zero code samples. Most of the software development books I've seen come out recently are focusing on programming related subjects - methodologies, processes, architecture, ... - not programming itself. The only book on actual code construction I am aware of is "Code complete". But the latest edition is from 2004. Does anybody know more recent works on the subject?

<comment><USER11> Philosophy Of Software Design is a recent work on the subject

Amazon: [https://amzn.to/2Rpu6zX](https://amzn.to/2Rpu6zX)

Book review I wrote a while back: [https://benmccormick.org/2018/12/31/book- review-philosophy-o...](https://benmccormick.org/2018/12/31/book-review- philosophy-of-software-design/)

<comment><USER12> Hands down my favourite programming book of the last decade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >2010s: Workplace domination by "lumber-sexuals"

What

<comment><USER14> __A not-so-manly man dressing like a lumberjack (although a lot more refined) and sporting a beard that has the volume of a lumberjacks beard and the groom of a hipster, cashing in on the "rugged, outdoor stereotype" Most of these guys aren't very good with their hands and only want to seem so because God forbid you would get those soft lotion treated hands dirty. Lumberjacks are typically known for their strength and being able to work with their hands. Most lumbersexuals would be stumped changing a tire. __[1]

apparently

[1][https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Lumbersexual](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Lumbersexual)

<comment><USER15> regarding lumberjacks: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=89LfQUlcNFk](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=89LfQUlcNFk)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a great read, not only Software Developers, but also Product Managers, and Owners, who would like a better understanding of the development cycle they're working within.

</comment><comment><USER6> Would love to see this in PDF. Is there a way to get it?

<comment><USER17> See chapter 0, section 0.5 - "Purchasing This Book."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very enjoyable writing style and content that is resonating with me as a developer who has made the transition from university to professional life recently.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm real curious how he got the rights to the image on the cover.

<comment><USER20> Its also the cover of a Joy Division lp. There might not have been a copyright.

See: [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/pop- culture-p...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/pop-culture- pulsar-origin-story-of-joy-division-s-unknown-pleasures-album-cover-video/)

<comment><USER19> I saw a copyright on every version of that image I could find.

<comment><USER21> See also: [https://adamcap.com/2011/05/19/the-history- of/](https://adamcap.com/2011/05/19/the-history-of/) (mentioned in the Scientific American piece).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> +1 for including the Zen of Python in the design section

</comment><comment><USER23> Thank you very much, very interesting book</comment>


Announcing Handmade Quake - <AUTHOR> http://philipbuuck.com/announcing-handmade-quake <comment><AUTHOR> There are already several episodes uploaded. The playlist is here: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBKDuv- qJpTbCsXHsxcoS...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBKDuv- qJpTbCsXHsxcoSSsMarnfyNhHF)

<comment><USER2> Thank you. I would love to see him use twitch for higher value & experience to subscribers.

<comment><USER3> Confused by this. Can you expand on what "higher value" and "experience" the audience would gain from this being on Twitch?

<comment><USER2> compared to youtube, twitch is a streaming experience with subscribers can comment on chat instantly.

I think, allowing subscribers to ask or comment instantly in what the caster does atm is an amazing opportunity. And not suggesting the streaming twitch over youtube because of same time follow up (as told in another reply), agreed that it would be really hard to simultaneously replicate him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel compelled to link to Michael Abrash's amazing and inspiring series of articles written when Quake was developed (don't know if there is a better link):

Ramblings in Realtime: [http://www.bluesnews.com/abrash/](http://www.bluesnews.com/abrash/)

I read this while I was in high-school and worked on my own 3D engine in parallel (inspired by Abrash's articles).

As this was written while quake was under development, you get the reel feeling of the challenges they went through during development. Through "beam trees", z-buffer, to finally end at the PVS and sorted edge rasterization and mip-mapping technique that made the whole thing wrong smooth enough in the end.

There is a similarly lengthy description of the considerations they had regarding shadow maps vs. e.g. gouraud shading.

Carmack and Abrash's experience is very much trial-and-error and that's inspiring, because you realize that they went down many dead ends in order to find the right way to solve the problems. It's not some sort of divine stroke of genius, but far more their determination that solves the problems in the end.

Of course Abrash also mentions some of the uglier hacks.

<comment><USER5> Another very interesting exploration of the Quake source is Fabien Sanglard'[1]. He has done reviews of several of the Id games that have been released.

[1] [http://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/index.php](http://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/index.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks to be similar to the Handmade Hero project ([https://handmadehero.org/](https://handmadehero.org/)) which I love, but rather than building a modern RPG in the case of HH, Handmade Quake seems to be focused on rebuilding that familiar classic shoot-em-up, step-by-step, one line of code (and presumably one concept) at a time. I'm sure the folks at id would be pleased, as they routinely opensource their games to share knowledge with others.

These two projects are as close to a game development masterclass as one can get.

<comment><USER7> If your goal is to learn about game development, I would avoid Handmade Hero. Over 200+ days into the project, and he still has a rats nest of a 90's era style Windows code base. It's clear he didn't put any pedagogical thought into the project. Masterclass is the wrong word to describe HH.

<comment><USER8> I've learned a lot of useful stuff watching the Handmade Hero feed on Youtube - but I stopped trying to follow along directly after the second week or so. Casey seems to harbor grudges against C++ and object oriented programming (both of which he will expound upon at length) that lead him to pile obfuscations and abstractions into his code that make it difficult to approach as a student, and difficult to separate what should be best practice from "stuff Casey does because anything other than raw C is a big dumb stupid."

And now that the series is 200~ days in, I know it would be futile to start again from the beginning (assuming I only do one "day" per day) because by the end of the year I still wouldn't know how to make a basic game. So I've gotten into the habit of just watching the particular parts i'm interested in (such as tiling, or fonts) and implementing them with SDL so maybe I can finish something decent within my lifetime (although I should probably just use Unity.)

That said, it is still a very good series, as long as you accept that Casey Muratori and his methods are very _opinionated._

<comment><USER9> Yeah... if you disagree with his objections to object-oriented programming and design-by-abstraction you're going to have a hard time getting through the series.

If design patterns are comfortable and understandable for you then check out Game Programming Patterns[0]. It's a decent book.

However I agree with Casey's philosophy and the wider data-oriented design approach to programming. C++ is not a great language. Zero-cost abstractions are a myth. We should be thinking about the data and not about how to write clever, abstract code.

[0] [http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/](http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What I find a bit disappointing is that this won't be a remake in the sense of writing the code in modern C99/C11, but rather a copy/paste with comments of the original code according to [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3xy110/announc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3xy110/announcing_handmade_quake/cy90vnl) .

</comment><comment><USER11> These two sentences seem to be in tension:

> It is named Handmade Quake thanks to the inspiration of the Handmade Dev > community, and following the spirit of their manifesto, we will be starting > with a blank Visual Studio project, nothing pre-written at all, and file by > file, will turn it into the source code that id Software released to the > world in late 1999.

> The main goal for this project is to show you how full video games are > actually built.

Modern AAA games always seem to be written around a pre-written engine. Yes, the engine had to be written at some point, but it was likely a modified form of a pre-existing engine, and so on, iteratively, until you end up with a blank project you're writing in Turbo C or something similar which existed for MS-DOS in the later 1980s, pre-dating Quake.

My point is, modern AAA game development isn't clean slate. It's modification of existing code, which is a topic that seems rather under-emphasized in the introductory programming literature. It would be interesting to see some series of videos which were all about making a non-trivial change to some large codebase which has evolved for a few decades.

<comment><USER12> If you're trying to argue "pre-built" on the basis that they started with some existing code, that defines almost all software, so does not seems like a useful definition.

I think most commenters here would generally associate "pre-built" with the licensing of an existing engine available on the open market. Such as Unity, UE4, etc.

The very top AAA game studio actually use their own proprietary engines. For example, EA uses the Frostbite Engine in many titles:

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

Even if I were to accept the strict definition you proposed, many of the upcoming titles on PlayStation 4, such as Dreams and Tomorrow's Children are essentially completely new game engines.

They're breaking new ground in rendering and gameplay technology and are as reasonably close to "from scratch" as you're going to get at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "The series will likely be starting right around the beginning of 2016"

I really hope you do this. I also suspect you have underestimated the incredible workload this will be, and this shouldn't receive any hype until you start delivering. It will likely take 1-2 days to edit and produce 1 hour of video, and making a full game along with making full, good quality videos, will take, well...good luck!

</comment><comment><USER14> So this is another Handmade series that you need to extrapolate knowledge if you want to follow on Linux, right? Nothing against it, of course, but, since I'm new to game programming, trying to learn SDL as I learned this stuff back in Handmade Hero was a huge pain, I couldn't get past the 14th episode or so.

<comment><USER9> The port to Linux will happen later. I forget the exact episode Casey justifies this but basically the problem for game developers is that every other platform other than Window is not a good target platform if you want to stay in business. So he's showing people how to target Windows first and will show us how to port later.

Just go look at the Steam hardware survey to find out why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would encourage Philip Buuck to call the series _Artisanal Quake_.

</comment><comment><USER16> seems that at some point source will be here [https://github.com/philipbuuck/HandmadeQuake](https://github.com/philipbuuck/HandmadeQuake)

</comment><comment><USER17> I predict that this won't be for the feign of heart.

</comment><comment><USER18> _applause_</comment>


Experiment, Measure, Repeat - <AUTHOR> https://blog.buildo.io/experiment-measure-repeat-5e2c389e63ff <comment><USER2> "avoid maintaining useless things"

If your company is small, heed this warning. If you're spending a lot of time on maintenance of non-essential things, and struggling with supporting legacy things while creating new things, you are missing a huge opportunity. Right now, "trimming the fat" is as easy as it will ever be. As your company grows, it will only become more difficult. Be ruthless now with maintaining focus on things that "move the needle", and with killing things that don't.

Analogy:

It's like you're gearing up for a long hike. There is a natural tendency to take things along "just in case", even if you know you probably won't need it. At the trailhead, you could easily leave some of that non-essential stuff in car. You try on your pack, and it doesn't feel that heavy. You think "what's the harm". Of course, you are still fresh and full of energy at the trailhead. A few days into your hike, you start to really feel the weight of that extra stuff. The pack digs into your shoulders and hips. Your entire lower body is sore. You regret bringing the extra stuff, but now that you are in the wilderness, you cannot just dump it. You have to carry it back with you, and you wish you had exercised restraint when you had the chance.

<comment><USER3> I am working more and more on this. We have a ton of legacy code we drag along because nobody understands it so it's too scary to touch. I have started to push the idea that it's simply not acceptable to have code we don't understand. We have now refactored several parts that were painfully complex and convoluted by analyzing what they really do and then rewriting or changing. Most of the time it is not that difficult once you commit to the task.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They measured long enough in this specific example that they avoided the problem but something I see people repeated forget is to establish a baseline before making a change. If you don't know how variable something is before you make your change you might naively think you made something better or worse when it's within normal variability.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, and measuring things as they are before experimenting can also serve as a valid motivation to start an experiment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This sounds an awful lot like the lean/six sigma (lss) tool set that every company of a certain size and age has experience with. But that's not to invalidate the ideas here, as lss can unfortunately be prone to a cultish zealotry that mutates the original principles.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is it just me, or is this example not an experiment? There was just pre and post change measures, with no comparison group. The measure of success was "use more threads" which was the same as the treatment, instead of the actual goal, making an improved perception that a Slack channel was faster and easier to read (and potentially improving productivity: faster ship, more tests passing 1st time, etc.).

A better method might have been something like: Pick two channels with equal traffic and relevance to business, require one channel to emphasize threads and respect quiet, let the other go on as they are, compare groups at the end on the actual metric of concern (of users in each group, quick check/survey of perceived utility, ease, value of the channel). Could even have done same measure in the beginning as well to show change over time comparison. Still not random selection, but better.

"But that's a lot more work", some might say. But without this extra work, there is no actual experiment. The test just says that threads are good and when we ask folks to use them, they do. But look at the data; Slack message count decreased from Q4 17 to Q1 18; any change in actual utility could be due to seasonality, shipping vs. bug bashing, other changes that resulted in fewer messages so threading wasn't needed; maybe threading caused fewer messages, maybe threading caused people to choose not to comment when they would have otherwise... but we can't tell from this design.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with iterating. But call it that: "Iterate and change, measure, repeat if change correlated with goodness". A formal Experiment is designed to show that the change you made _caused_ a change in something else, something important to you or your business. Without a formal experiment, you just have correlation, hope, tribal knowledge, instinct, experience... all great things, none of which support causation.

And not everything needs this level of rigor, and that's totally fine; maybe that's the case in top post example. But if a change is expensive in terms of workflow, effort, or actual expense, perhaps it's worth doing a more structured test before committing.

If you've never had an experimental design experience, try reading anything at [http://exp-platform.com/](http://exp-platform.com/) (Kohavi's work at Microsoft) or search for DOE design of experiments at your favorite search engine; also articles on "A/B Testing" often give suggestions on how to best structure a controlled experiment. And recognize that most older work focuses on traditional ANOVA and t-tests, but there are all sorts of other modern ways to assess impact.

(edit: corrected typos)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice!

You're right: scientifically/formally speaking this cannot be considered an experiment but, in my opinion, for small and easy-to-change processes, there is no need to be formal. The goal sometimes is just to solve small pain points and make people happier at work, and in such cases the fact that people perceive that things are better after the experiment could be enough :) Obviously, this was just a simple case study and every perceived improvement could be due to confounding factors, as you say, or just to the fact that the experiment created awareness about a problem. Obviously, if an experiment touches something more relevant than slack messages, being more formal is a good thing and A/B testing is for sure a better approach.

The point of the post was just to make people aware of the fact that changes in a team can happen without too much pain and that continuous improvement and experimentation are processes that can be implemented easily.

<comment><USER7> Did you measure, though, that the staff was happier or more productive? Did any meaningful change occur as a result of the requests to use Slack differently?

Looking at your graph, it's not really clear that anything has changed significantly: when did the change get implemented? Is a couple weeks' change in activity a result of a couple of loud employees going on leave? There's such variability there that it's hard to say that anything has really changed.

I agree that a formal analysis isn't always necessary, but you don't appear to done _any_ here and are then couching a suggestion to try something on Slack as having measured something. That's just bad science! :D

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not science :)

However, you're right: in the article, it's not clear how we decided to consider the experiment as successful: we called a meeting with all the team and asked everyone something like: "Do you think that the situation on Slack is better now?", and the majority of people said "yes".

I added a note at the end of the article to address some of the comments ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Information Underload - <AUTHOR> http://hello-robot.com/blog/?p=9

<comment><USER2> I got a chumby (chumby.com) as a gift for this new years and it does a great job at keeping me up to date with the weather, news, stock quotes, facebook and other random data while I'm barely getting out of bed.

I save a lot of time now that I am not tempted to turn on my computer in the morning.</comment>


Tapping into Distributed Erlang from Rails - <AUTHOR> http://nabewise.posterous.com/tapping-into-distributed-erlang-from-rails

<comment><USER2> What are you using in Erlang to talk to Redis?

I'm a big fan of <http://github.com/mattsta/er> (probably because it's mine).

<comment><USER3> We're using <http://github.com/cstar/erldis> . It's a very thin wrapper over the raw commands and does what I want well (well after we hunted down a weird bug in response handling under load, but that's a separate story)

<comment><USER2> I started out there too, but it felt like there was always just _one more_ bug to fix and then everything would be okay. After half a dozen "one more" bugs, I scraped it and started over.

I've been using my redis client in production for a few months with no problems. If you find yourself getting stuck with erldis, give it a try.

<comment><USER3> yeah, it was a bit choppy at first, but it has been smooth sailing for the last several months. Overall, it's pretty solid in production</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A curated list of Sentiment Analysis methods, implementations and misc - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/xiamx/awesome-sentiment-analysis <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, repository author here.

I was interested in sentiment analysis, so I read a lot surveys, papers; and researched what implementations are available. I thought it would be beneficial for the community to have a list of useful resources, serving as a good starting point.

The goal of this repository is to provide adequate links for scholars who want to research in this domain; and at the same time, be sufficiently accessible for developers who want to integrate sentiment analysis into their applications.

Experts in sentiment analysis and opnion mining, please don't hesitate to criticize this work :)</comment>


Ask HN: Do you think bots are the next big thing? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Bots (in a very general sense..) will be big one day. Next...who knows. With smartphones,we saw these in various guises for decades before the iPhone took the world by storm. Before that they were interesting and we all knew they had potential but didn't offer practical value yet. Some many things had to come together with software, hardware, a vision and other factors to complement the technology like the Internets evolution. Bots and AI IMO will have the same lag then impact one day when we 'crack it'. Maybe we have other factors we need to advance to make them interesting such as robotics or something we haven't conceived yet. While some people dismiss the potential as they've been about for so long without impact, I feel this is evolution happening. Just dont expect it tomorrow. It took 700 years form the first rocket to going to space. 30 years from the first computer to being a common item. 20 years from first smartphone to a mass consumer one. The rate we're advancing tech these days is pretty incredible really.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bots were the next big thing... 25 years ago, on IRC.

<comment><USER4> ChanServ, my old pal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No. My guess is they'll end up being another fad due to poor execution and bad user experience choices.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think you have to differentiate between "stupid" bots and "smart" bots, the former sort is working with structured input and the latter is processing your natural language and provides a more human-to-human experience. I think smart bots will become ubiquitous and they might become the next big thing.

</comment><comment><USER7> It depends. I think you have to qualify the question some how. Mainly, how do you interact with the bot?

</comment><comment><USER8> If you're talking about text-chat-bots then no.

I would pick a 3-clicks UI over a 3 messages UI every time.

</comment><comment><USER9> Define bot please.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nope.

</comment><comment><USER11> Bots are new Terminals, more powerfull.

They force users to do only one thing at a time, so converts more. I think bots are next hot thing.</comment>


Radio Shack to start stocking Arduino, Other Goodies - <AUTHOR> http://blog.radioshack.com/2011/07/21/top-ten-diy-suggestions-from-you/

<comment><USER5> I remember watching my local Radio Shack turn into just another commodity electronics shop, and not a very good one, at that. By the end, it was just a place I would go if I wanted to be harassed about buying a cell phone (i.e. never).

If Radio Shack has gotten rid of the high pressure cell phone sales people, started hiring nerds again, and started stocking the kind of things I need when I want to finish a project but don't want to schlep out to Fry's or wait for an order from Amazon for, I might return. But, it's been a long time since I've been to a Radio Shack, and I rarely think of them as the place I should go for anything, since they trained me out of that habit.

I have to admit that carrying Arduino and other assorted tinkerers toys does make me think maybe the company at least has some of its old spirit. I guess we'll have to see what comes of it. Next time I pass one, I'll probably take a stroll around...I'll know whether they've gotten good again by whether I walk out empty handed or not.

<comment><USER6> The best Radio Shack satirical slogan I've heard which sums up their decline:

      "Radio Shack: You've got questions, we've got more!"

<comment><USER7> "Radio Shack: You've got questions, we've got batteries."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is exactly what RS needs to do. Go back to their roots. I was bitterly disappointed a few months ago when I needed a breadboard and a few basic components and RS didn't have half of them. I ended up going to a store in Denver that strips old electronics and sells the components.

There are tons of electronics geeks still around from Arduino builders to car audiophiles building custom circuits to the RC crowd - and no one serves them. Right now half RS's inventory is available at Best Buy, Walmart and every other store with an electronics department. There's a very profitable niche waiting for them if they're willing to do what they do best.

Employing a few guys who know what they're doing would help too. The local ham radio club and computer and electronics engineering faculties would be a good place to start recruiting.

<comment><USER9> What is the store in Denver? I would love to know another place I could go locally for parts. (other than RS obviously)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> They're really looking to make stronger ties with the "maker" community, and are ramping up their DIY cred by hiring Meredith Scheff <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpZ7FyjGkGk> (of NorthSkirt fame <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UktOOIK_6nU>) at Noisebridge, and Ed Lewis at Instructables <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxRqGOSHbUg> to do ads.

<comment><USER11> At first I was like "whoah," and then I got to the last part of the sentence " _to do ads._ " That's still cool I guess.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I had a really hard time trying to fit all that into one sentence :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I had heard something like this a few weeks back--that Radio Shack is going to start stocking more components again. Discussing it with my co-workers, we decided they probably can't make as much on the old business model any more. Every time I've been, they try to sell me a cell phone, but there are cell phone stores in every town already. Everything they sell is available at Best Buy for comparable prices (with better selection), or on Amazon for far cheaper.

I look forward to a day when perhaps Radio Shack will sell kits and electronic components... even if it's more expensive than Digikey. There aren't really any nationwide brick-and-mortar electronics stores, but there are plenty of consumer electronics + cell phone stores... I'd love to see Radio Shack making money with a new business model.

<comment><USER13> >Everything they sell is available at Best Buy

Well, I've found radioshack sells cables _far_ cheaper than the equivalent at best buy.

<comment><USER14> really? aren't they the single most expensive place to buy cables or has the internet spoiled me?

<comment><USER15> If you have to buy local, Radio Shack does have some cheaper cables. I notice Best Buy is the worst, but Apple has ok priced cables. This is mainly in locales without Fry's or other non-mainstream box stores. Heck, Apple has been cheaper than Wal-Mart in cables.

Obviously, online is cheaper than any retail.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, no Frys where I live. :(

We recently got an apple store though, I would never have thought to look there for cables. For some reason assumed they'd be overpriced... :)

<comment><USER16> Likely because Apple has other stuff they can make money on, while Best Buy, having won the race to the bottom, really doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's great that Radio Shack is reaching out to the community and trying to stock more DIY items, however I'm not sure if it's going to work out for them.

DIY is a small subset of the population and a smart one. They're going to buy this stuff online, whether Radio Shack stocks it or not.

I read a AMA from a McD exec who said people are always complaining about them needing more healthy choices. Well, whenever they add them, no one buys them. The people who want that stuff aren't going to eat at McDonalds anyway, so why waste inventory space.

So, sure, i'd love to be able to be able to get in my car and get an arduino board and some servos, but I'm not sure if that one one trip a year or two from me is worth it.

<comment><USER18> I don't know if it were cheap enough. I could see using them as a rush order place, a little more markup over mail order but much faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Good first step for them. Next:

\- Price cables and connectors at only a slight markup from monoprice levels (cover the overhead costs, but basically sell without any profit margin)

\- Stock every single high traffic component possible at just slightly higher markup than digitech

\- Sell components for custom PC builds (a la Fry's, CPUs, RAM etc.), charge slightly less than Fry's, slightly more than newegg, etc., but only stock components that are highly recommended by Tom's Hardware and other respected build guides. Have employees build machines with these parts and know what will go wrong, advise customers accordingly.

So where do the big profits come from?

Service contracts.

Give free support to walk-ins, one time only, charge on subsequent support requests. Become a non-ripoff/know-nothing version of geek squad.

<comment><USER20> > _basically sell without any profit margin_

Free one-time support is not going to make this strategy profitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The only knowledge I have of Radio Shack is when I went in and found the tinest of commodities - things like single LEDs and audio connectors and flashlights - to be priced so high it was almost unreal.

Is this still true of the place? Or did I go during a bad period in their history?

<comment><USER22> are they even still called "Radio Shack"? or is it "The Shack" now? They use to be the most amazing place ever, and would supply components and things to keep you busy beyond your wildest imagination. and at cheap prices too! Some kids went to the mall for the arcade. Radio Shack was my arcade. But that was decades ago..

<comment><USER23> No, they're still called Radio Shack. Not that they bear much resemblance nowadays. I saw (and programmed) my first TRS-80 there. Ah, halcyon days - <USER2> they're a phone store and the bookstore in the same mall - the bookstore where I bought _Gödel, Escher, Bach_ and _I Will Fear No Evil_ on the same day - <USER3> dead.

We need new cool stuff. The old stuff's all sad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Totally serious question: how is Radio Shack still in business?

I would love to see them go back to basics, with drawers upon drawers of components and wires and stuff. Seems like nobody likes doing that stuff on their own nowadays.

<comment><USER25> When I worked at RadioShack (several years ago) there was a near-constant stream of people coming in to purchase cellphones. As an employee I got a fairly good cash bonus every time I sold one, so I imagine RadioShack made a LOT of money off cellphones and accessories. For example: The cellphone sale itself was $X cash to me but accessories were $2X, $3X, or $4X as more were purchased. A brand new featurephone with 3 accessories and a warranty netted me roughly $75-100 cash for the sale. The warranty was actually good, too. We sent lots of different kinds of phones back in a re-usable plastic box to a repair facility somewhere. People seemed to trust Radio Shack more for cellphone purchases than the brand stores across the road.

However, that was back when Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T stores weren't as easy to find as they are now. I imagine they're not able to attract nearly as much cellphone traffic as they did before.

<comment><USER26> The last time I was in an RS it was for a capacitor. I found the bin (in the back of the store), dug out what I needed, and went to pay for it.

The salesman just sneered at me and didn't even trouble to ring it up; he just gave it to me and waved me out the door.

I haven't been back.

I'll stop by one this morning, I'm curious if they've changed at all.

<comment><USER27> Since when is free stuff an insult?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I hope this works for them, I've been getting into Arduino and other electronics lately and would be nice to have a local place to pick stuff at the last minute. I went into our local shack a few months ago to pick up a piezo transducer to use as a pickup in a cigar box guitar I was making with the kids. It was dead when we got there, so all of the salesmen descended on me asking if I needed help. So I said I needed a piezo transducer, and they all looked at me like I had 3 heads. "Do you mean a transistor?" :) I asked them to just show me where the transistors were and I'd take a look around. Sure enough down in one of the bottom drawers of components was a label "Piezo Transducer" - bingo! As I checked out a few minutes later the manager was in awe that he had such a thing in his store. Surprisingly the same store actually had a decent (though small) selection of other supplies (hookup wire, breadboards, blank circuit boards, etc).

</comment><comment><USER29> I arrived in the US in 1998. Prior to that, I remember reading good things about Radio Shack. When I finally found a branch, I browsed inside to see what the big deal was. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I remember leaving very disappointed. It seemed to be all custom gadgets (PDAs, RCs, etc), cellphones, and expensive batteries. Reading comments here of what Radio Shack _used to be_ at least clarifies why it got good buzz in the past.

<comment><USER30> I think Radio Shack gets the benefit of a lot of at least somewhat rose-tinted memories. Yes, they were a source for various electronics components at a time when there weren't a lot of sources for such things. And you had a decent shot at finding a knowledgable employee. However, for as long as I remember Radio Shack--which takes us back to the mid-1970s--their shelves were also filled with all manner of mostly overpriced and poor quality audio gear and the like. So they've been something of a mixed bag for a very long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I am a ham and as a kid I used to visit the local Radio Shack weekly. For a while they even stocked ham radios. I haven't been in one for over ten years.

I just attended an all day Arduino workshop a few weeks back and it was a blast. Talking afterwards it seemed everyones number one request was to get a local vendor to stock some of the more common Arduino parts. I sure hope Radio Shack is listening.

</comment><comment><USER32> That's awesome! I remember 20 years ago radio shack was amazing for me as a child hobbyist. Now I only go there for obscure sized batteries (so once every 2 years). Let's hope they can revive the original spirit.

<comment><USER33> As a kid in Canada, I had this radio shack battery club card, where I could get a free battery every month. I always got the 9V size, which was perfect for little projects, handheld games or just sticking on your tongue. Sad to see what the shack became, but that little promo bought them a ton of goodwill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if Radio Shack is going to implement a DIY education system or something. I don't know how to build stuff with Arduino but if they had a little kiosk that showed how you could set up and program a hello world (led blinking) in Arduino I'm sure it could interest some people who had no idea what Arduino is.

<comment><USER35> Back in the day, I learned a lot about basic electronics and computer design from their old "Engineer's Notebooks" (e.g. [http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=108524...](http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=10852491&clickid=prod_cs)) and some books they sold about TI's line of microprocessors. If they wrote new books for Arduino, that would be a great start. I might even play around with hardware again (haven't touched it since I got my EE degree).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just to quibble: Radio Shack have only acted on two of those points, and not the top Arduino point. They say _we're actively working on every single one of these_ , but that might not actually mean they will stock Arduinos in their regular stores.

</comment><comment><USER36> While great news for those who can go to RadioShack, I'm somewhat disappointed that where I live, Vancouver, Canada, Radio Shack's have been replaced by "The Source". NOt that I was really a fan of what Radio Shack had become, but I've got good memories of Radio Shack from it being the only electronics store as I grew up in a smaller town. If Radio Shack is really trying to offer hobbyists more, than it's too bad that their retails stores are no longer open up here. [Checked Wikipedia, CircuitCity owned RadioShack, changed the name to "The Source", then sold off the Canadian operations as part of bankruptcy proceedings.]

</comment><comment><USER37> Oh man... it would make Radio Shack awesome again. I might actually visit one of those stores on the way home. The parts might be more expensive, but if it saves me a trip to China, I'd do it.

</comment><comment><USER38> Does this mean that Radio Shack will stock the Android Open Accessory Kit? Because I've been looking all around the net and I can't find a site I trust that carries all the boards.

</comment><comment><USER39> They don't seem to have the store space for all these things unless other things are going to go. Is this just in the catalog?

<comment><USER40> Resistors and capacitors don't need to take up that much space. Heck, I remember when they used to hang them on the walls in blister packs. Drawers seem a lot more sensible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Now, they could bring back the TRS-80 name with a line of non-PC-compatible computers ;-)

<comment><USER40> Heck yeah. I bet an Arduino would be fast enough to emulate them. They should make a miniature 3" high TRS-80 Model I kit with all the old software library included.

<comment><USER41> That would be cool, but I guess there would be cheaper ways to do it - <USER4> TRS-80 CoCo is more or less as complex as a C64 and that requires just an FPGA. You could build the whole TRS-80 line inside one chip.

<comment><USER40> The point is not to do it the cheapest possible way, the point is to do it in a way that appeals to hackers, makers, and other tinkerers.

Still, an FPGA could be even cooler than an Arduino if it were reprogrammable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Will they continue trying to sell me batteries and cell phones with simple overpriced electronics components?

</comment><comment><USER43> Finally, a reason to go to Radio Shack

</comment><comment><USER44> I wonder if there exists a chance they will notice their current downward trend, look back at their heyday, and do an about-face?

<comment><USER45> That's what I'm wondering, but they are still heavily promoting cell phones like the recent HTC Evo for Evo 3D trade-in. I don't think they can be a relevant DIY shop and standard electronic store at the same time. All of the stores I've been don't have the room, not to mention the staff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I go to Radio Shack several times per year. I would be absolutely thrilled if they would just pay attention to what's in their parts bins and actually keep them stocked.

</comment><comment><USER47> The last time I bought something at Radio Shack (probably a battery), they asked me for my phone number, then made an issue out of it when I would not give it.

I haven't been back.

</comment><comment><USER48> Here's my anecdote about the decline of Radio Shack:

I went there to get a USB cable the other day. The only normal male-male USB cable they were stocking had gold-plated ends (for reasons unknown), a big non-standard bulge in the connector at one end, and a ludicrously grandiose package, festooned with details about how this was a USB "transfer" cable, specially designed to transfer data between Windows computers.

For this reason, apparently, it was necessary to price it at $40. That's forty dollars. For a USB cable.

I laughed in the clerk's face while he was explaining to me about the "transfer cable" nonsense, told him he just lost a customer forever, and left.

<comment><USER49> Could it be that you picked up one of these?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy_Transfer_Cable>

Maybe overpriced but it was likely not just a USB cable if it was called a "transfer" cable.

<comment><USER48> To me, that's no excuse. I have a better idea: sell a regular USB cable for $2, which is what they should cost, and design your OS so computers can talk to each other without having to build gold-plated $40 SuperWindowsTransfer versions of commodity cables. It's outrageous to me that such a product even exists, outrageous that it was $40, and outrageous that Radio Shack, of all places, could not carry a reasonably-priced USB cable. I would have even been ok with a certain price premium; I don't expect a retailer to match Monoprice. But $40 for the only USB cable in the shop? Please.

<comment><USER46> Uh. That weird USB cable makes possible things which aren't designed into the USB hardware spec. It's the USB equivalent of a null-modem cable on RS232, something which cost quite a lot when purchased over the counter.

<comment><USER40> It may be not even be correct to call it a cable. Doesn't it need a CPU in it?

<comment><USER16> Correct. It makes for an interesting product-design case study -- the manufacturer probably thought they were being clever by making an intelligent peripheral look and behave like a 'cable', but the work went unappreciated ("This is just a stupid USB cable. Why are they charging $40 for it?")</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Help me give away a site that's made $70k - <AUTHOR> I own https://applaunch.us, a website that has made almost $70k since it was launched back in 2012. See https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/26079/30819099-85e0b22a-a1d2-11e7-9157-c5f18cb3c3a7.png for a revenue screenshot from the stripe dashboard.
I've not touched the site for over 2 years, with most of my time going into https://ipinfo.io, and as a result the site is now just about breaking even with hosting costs. I've thought about shutting the site down, but recently had the idea of giving it away to someone with the time and passion to put some energy into improving and promoting the site. If nothing else, it could be a great learning experience for someone to get to work on an established site.
I'm looking for advice on how to best give it away. Where can I find people that might want to take it on, how should I decide who to give it to if there's a lot of interest? How should I best structure it? I'm thinking of handing everything over, and offering to pay the hosting costs for the first year, the new owner keeps all revenue etc. Is there anything else I should consider? <comment><USER2> That's a great idea. I'd start by open sourcing everything and putting the offer to hand over access to domain and data in the project README.

BTW, I've just launched my first little SaaS. Seems like you have some more experience doing this. Maybe you have some feedback? [https://latency.at/](https://latency.at/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm yeah opensourcing it could be a good idea, I'd not considered that.

Latency.at looks great. Saw you on the HN homepage today, congrats!

<comment><USER2> Yes open sourcing it would be great. If only as example / inspiration. There are tons and tons of open source tooling and articles on building sites and services but rarely full sites with all the 'glue' around the core service that is necessary to actually operate it.

Re/ latency.at: This was probably /newest not the front page. My blog articles didn't work well on HN. But at least when launched I got on the front page. Still really hard to acquire users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why not list it on flippa and sell it. Doubt it makes a lot of money for you but, by the time you deal with giving it away you'll at least get a little out of the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd rather give it away to somebody with the energy to put into it, but perhaps not the money to buy it. Passing it forward :)</comment></comment>


An open letter to Edward Tufte - <AUTHOR> http://www.whit537.org/et/

<comment><USER2> Interesting but the main point seems to be that tufte shouldn't be making so much money off of his work anymore. Ok, but why not? What am I missing?

He did the research, wrote the books, and on the first one took a big financial risk self publishing. Seems to me that he's provided a lot of value and has rightly reaped the benefits. No?

<comment><USER3> His overt message is: science is better than pitching, public interest is better than private interest. Is his art career consistent with that?

<comment><USER3> The main meme I want to spread is that Tufte should invest his money in a non- profit Foundation for Beautiful Evidence.

<comment><USER3> And I've tacked this onto the top of the page: <http://www.whit537.org/et/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "I have _followed_ your work for a decade." "I have followed _your_ work for a decade." "I have followed your _work_ for a decade."

But...

Here are some suggestions for what to do with your money.

<comment><USER3> The suggestions are Tufte's own. He spent six hours telling me to do science instead of pitching, and to work in the public interest instead of a commercial interest.

<comment><USER4> That was completely unclear from the text. It might be clear if I were Edward Tufte, and in that sense it works as an open letter. But for a broader audience (I've read two of his books, if that matters) the supposed contradictions or hypocrisy aren't apparent. His 'sins' are presented, but the covenant being violated can only be guessed at. Even if it comes down to your own personal dashed expectations, elaborating on exactly what those were would make it easier to connect the dots in the way you intend.

As it is, it comes across as though there is something inherently wrong with him having what you think is a lot of money. Why should it matter? If you believe that a "Foundation for Beautiful Evidence" _should_ exist, there must be reasons. But just going by the text that's there, it sounds like the main reason is that you think Tufte can afford to endow one. That may be a useful practical detail, if true, but it's not really a _reason_ for him to do it. Remember: you're also asking him to do something with his time and attention, which he has no more of than you do. Why would he? Why would anybody? It might be understandable to someone who attended the course, but it could be elucidated to someone who hadn't by being direct about what you think such an enterprise could accomplish.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I can see that. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr--Tufte, you're brilliant. You worked hard to build a powerful brand, and now you're very intentionally using that brand to make a crap-ton of money on the contemporary art market. Well played, sir.

But didn't you say that people working in the public interest are inherently more credible than salesmen? Weren't you saying that science is inherently better than advertising?</comment>


SOA: Sample Apps and Their Development and Deployment Flow - <AUTHOR> https://techblog.livingsocial.com/blog/2014/06/03/soa-sample-apps-and-their-development-and-deployment-flow/

<comment><USER2> 90% white males — what an outrage! :p</comment>


QQCoin – Scrypt Jane Hybrid cryptocurrency with quick transactions. - <AUTHOR> http://qqco.in/

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is bitcointalk thread: [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=389238.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=389238.0)

And qqcoin sources: [https://github.com/qqcoin/qqcoin](https://github.com/qqcoin/qqcoin)

Wiki: [http://wiki.cryptsy.com/qqc](http://wiki.cryptsy.com/qqc)

Would be interesting to hear HN community opinion.</comment>


The History of Digital Spam - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.06173 <comment><USER2> Seems to have totally missed Usenet spam, where the term "spam" originated. Usenet seems to have been totally overwhelmed by spam, to the point of uselessness, and I suppose the reasons are complex. Also seems to have missed out on fax spamming, which at one point threatened to render faxing useless. Noted sociopath Sanford Wallace was key to both fax and Usenet spam overwhelming the medium, which is something.

I think that without those two cases, this article is not very complete. Apparently legislation helped the fax spam problem some, but has been useless in helping the email spam problem, and wasn't even attempted for Usenet spam, so there are experiments that worked and failed for different media.

Since email spam has almost rendered that mode of communication worthless, there's probably some merit in considering a "lifecycle" of parasitic advertising communications.

The article also doesn't seem to consider the fact that almost all spam is advertising. The perverting effects of ads on the medium in question should be considered.</comment>


More Teachers Can't Afford to Live Where They Teach - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/03/24/470710747/more-teachers-cant-afford-to-live-where-they-teach <comment><USER2> This saddens me. Teachers and the doctors should be the most valued professions in the society. Yet we put on pedestal lawyers and programmers.

World does not need that many avg programmers not everybody is and can be Ulrich Drepper or Richard Stallman.</comment>


Show HN: Play Tetris in Your CLI - ha-shine https://github.com/ha-shine/tetrust <comment><AUTHOR> Is "command line" a proper word for this? Terminal - OK, but that's not CLI.

</comment><comment><USER2> Tetris is also bundled with emacs. See: [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TetrisMode](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TetrisMode)

Not that I'm an emacs proponent...

<comment><USER3> Bash tetris also comes with Gforth (GNU Forth)!</comment></comment>


Coin App - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id893741371?ls=1&mt=8

<comment><USER2> I tried to claim but for some reason it says it will be shippe d in Spring 2015</comment>


Humans as Superorganisms - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/10/adventures-in-the-science-of-the-superorganism.html <comment><USER2> Terrifying, and we're all running around blasting ourselves with chemicals, medicines and god knows what. Kind of like physics, we get down to one layer and we're still nowhere.</comment>


A Common Gotcha with Asynchronous GPU Computing with Clojure - <AUTHOR> https://dragan.rocks/articles/19/Common-Gotcha-Asynchronous-GPU-CUDA-Computing-Clojure?src=hn <comment><AUTHOR> Uses [https://uncomplicate.org/clojurecuda](https://uncomplicate.org/clojurecuda) but the text relates to CUDA in general whether used from C++ or from a Python, Java, Clojure wrapper...</comment>


Ask HN: Headless broswers – use cases? - <AUTHOR>

what might be interesting use cases for headless browsers like Ghost or PhantonJS, except for running tests? <comment><USER3> Crawling pages is probably one of the most common use cases, I would imagine.

I use PhantomJS and SlimerJS to host CLI tools written in TypeScript/JavaScript. I also run these tools in the browser because I find it a better debugging experience than remote debugging.

There's a lot of functionality available through NPM and writing tools and scripts in TS can be very productive and easy to cobble things together - <USER2> advanced things.

</comment><comment><USER4> I used it for logging into my bank's crappy web interface and dumping my financial data as csv. It required javascript and has no api available.

This was so I could convert the data from multiple accounts to [http://www.ledger-cli.org/](http://www.ledger-cli.org/) format automatically.

</comment><comment><USER5> Crawling webpages. I needed to find out if a product price is actually visible to users. PhantomJS executes JS and CSS and I can execute a Javascript query to check.</comment>


New MacBook Pro not compatible with all Thunderbolt 3 devices - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/03/new-macbook-pros-thunderbolt-3-compatibility/ <comment><USER2>
      The version of OS X on the new MacBook Pros (late 2016)
      will not work with existing Certified Thunderbolt 3 docks
      and adapters (released prior to November 2016).

This is ridiculous.

<comment><USER3> Seriously. I would be interested in learning what, exactly, the problem is. Is there a genuine, reasonable shortcoming in the older chips that would be too difficult to work around? What's the point of something being "Certified" if you can't trust it to work in the future in situations where it absolutely should work?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps Apple will launch a thunderbolt-to-thunderbolt adapter to make it work.

<comment><USER5> But it only works if you have a thunderbolt-to-'thunderbolt-to-thunderbolt' dongle on either end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apple's "It just works" soundbite doesn't seem to ring anymore. Even recording over USB means no Wi-Fi

<comment><USER7> Do what now? Can you expand on this? Having trouble finding an article about it.

<comment><USER6> New Macbook Pro can't walk & chew gum at same time(watch wifi + USB = fail) [1]

It was on HN last night

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYVjIjBMx6o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYVjIjBMx6o)

<comment><USER7> Is there an article to accompany this? Apologies, I don't have the time to watch the video.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And they removed digital audio from the headphone jack. It's quite a budget device they've been trying to make in all but appearance.

<comment><USER9> Wait, what?!! That actually pisses me off, I used that jack to watch movies on the TV with DD all the time.

I hate screwing with streaming this, AirPlay that, or trying to play it with another box connecting to the TV because inevitably there's some glitch or problem with the codec.

I don't mind using a dongle to get HDMI, but I always relied on the optical output to go to my older receiver which doesn't have HDMI ports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hopefully they release an update within a year with a 32gb ram option. I was for sure buying a new MacBook Pro until I went to the order page and couldn't find the ram option. My late 2013 will just have to last another cycle.

<comment><USER11> Why do people need 32gb of ram? I can have 15 tabs in chrome, a music player, 3 windows of my IDE, and a word processor on my current 8gb laptop just fine.

<comment><USER12> VMs.

Spin up a few vagrant instances to test that stack you're coding and you can quickly wish you had more memory.

<comment><USER13> I think it's better to use cloud servers/containers once you have to run that many VMs concurrently but obviously that starts to cost more money.

<comment><USER14> It's not only about the money. Connectivity is still not everywhere, and even if it is, bandwidth/latency issues arise. I really like having local data, local VMs and local everything. Sync when connected, but ready to go at any time.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I would gladly convert to using hosted VMs but I'll loose sync'd folders which I really need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Incredible. Have any HN Apple insiders provided any info on internal opinion regarding the Macbook Pro furore? Apparently a popular nickname is Dockbook Pro

</comment><comment><USER2> You're just plug it in wrong.

 _scnr_</comment>


Collective Intelligence machine learning source code (Python) - <AUTHOR> http://examples.oreilly.com/9780596529321/

<comment><USER2> This, I think, is the source code which accompanies this book: <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321>

</comment><comment><USER3> The book [1], was excellent.

It introduces several different techniques for extrapolating from large datasets (machine learning). The book uses python, but obviously you can port the code to the language of your choice.

Some topics it doesn't go incredibly deep into, which is totally understandable. Thankfully, there are tons of resources online to fill in the gaps. I'd recommended it if you haven't dabbled around with "collective intelligence" yet.

[1] <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321>

</comment><comment><USER4> Is this a post just to get karma? Or is it really a link that someone who owns/knows the book might not know. Let me guess...

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, I posted it to share some totally neat code with like-minded people. I don't own the book. I found out about the code from this comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2087919></comment></comment>


What do you think? "Prepare For The Hyperinflationary Great Depression" - <AUTHOR> http://www.zerohedge.com/article/shadowstats-john-williams-prepare-hyperinflationary-great-depression <comment><USER2> Not much. Hyperinflation is the nerdocalypse for those who don't believe in Keynesian economics, but comparisons with Zimbabwe or the Weimar Republic are absurd and overblown.

What does he think the US Dollar is going to be debased in comparison to? The Euro? Europe has pretty severe structural problems of its own, and Britain is both tiny and worse off again. Russia and Japan are stable but rather moribund, and while Brazil is a bright star int he world economy these days it's tin in comparison to the US economy. Which leaves the Yuan, and China is going to leave its currency pegged to the dollar for as long as they feel like it, both because it keeps the trade balance stable and because they have no intention of letting us inflate away our debt.

Oh yeah. Gold. Riiiiiight. Look, we still have tremendous amounts of wealth in the US, though you might not feel that way if you're in Detroit or some other towns. If the Chinese ever grow anxious about having too many dollars on the books, they're not going to start demanding they be paid in gold ingots, they're going to do what the Japanese did and just come over here and start buying blocks of Manhattan or Downtown LA or whatever prime real estate they can pick up for a song (which will be most of it, in the next year or two - commercial RE is in a slump of its own).

Hyperinflation makes no sense for the US because there is no harder currency that can easily displace the dollar, and there are vast numbers of valuable assets which are most easily purchased in dollars here in the US as far as our external creditors are concerned. Internally our debt-to-GDP ratio is rising but not that bad in context, and the administration has already expressed interest in deficit reduction so it's not like they're oblivious to the issue (unlike the previous administration with their proclamations that 'deficits don't matter').

</comment><comment><USER3> Long term, our government can either default on its debt (I doubt this will happen) or use massive inflation to reduce the effects of debt (this is what I think will happen).

I think that it is impossible to predict when this will occur and whether it will be rapid (hope not!) or gradual (my hope).

Both W. Bush and Obama spent way too much money on credit. If you as an individual are going to to buy a car for $20K and pay for it over a 5 year period, you should not say "this car cost me $20K," rather, it is really more accurate to say "this car is costing me about $28K with interest." It would be nice, but unexpected, if instead of the government saying "we are going to spend $500 billion on defense this year" they would be more honest and say "defense spending this year, including interest on the money spent, is estimated to be between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion."

Doesn't that sound a bit more honest?

</comment><comment><USER4> Eventually China will stop buying our treasuries, they are already discussing it, <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,487245,00.html>, then the government will have to drastically cut spending or inflate the monetary supply. No one seriously believes they will cut spending.

</comment><comment><USER5> Correct. The dollar is finished - the USA will undergo at LEAST 100 % price increases realsoonnow.

The country might break apart. The sign is, when the Mexicans seize California, as they have been saying they will do for a while, America is through.

And when I say Mexicans, I don't mean the ones in Mexico - I mean the ones in the USA illegally right now.

The price of oil will go through the ceiling - in terms of USD - and America will stop.

Then - there's gonna be a war.

Not one of the TV wars like Vietnam, but one of those everyone-is-invited wars like WWII. After that, who knows whats gonna happen.

History will record three 'Inexplicable American Madnesses' that caused all this.

1 - The USA removed it's trade barriers to China thereby destroying it's own industrial base even though they knew it would happen.

2 - America bankrupted itself fighting Israel's enemies for it just when it needed everything it had to fend off the results of the first mistake.

3 - America permitted 20 million illegal immigrants into it's territory, even though they said they'd seize California - and they did.

We are living in interesting times.

<comment><USER6> Do you have any evidence for these bold claims? the world might be interested in hearing what you have to say, provided you have proof, and not just polemic.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Stuck in support role - <AUTHOR>

Is there any way out of a support role? Long story short, I started working at a company part-time in college supporting a CMS (slicing, integrating cms, troubleshooting, etc). I did it for over 3 years. Recently I transitioned into full time, but it seems like I've terribly outgrown the job. Even though there are other positions for UI/UX, programming, the company pretty much only wants me doing support. The company hires totally new people for these positions all the time, and it really hurts. This is the case for pretty much everyone at this company that started on support, there seems to be no way out. I worked really hard for this company in college since I thought I was working for something more (long hours, less pay for more responsibility, harder or equal work as full timers).<p>Should I be grateful to even have a job? Am I asking for too much? I figured I should have been given some semblance of a chance by now to do anything else. High tail it out of this company, or what? I didn't go to a well known college, and only have one significant project I can point to outside of work, so I'm finding it difficult building a solid resume. I feel really gimped, but a lot of the blame must obviously fall on me. <comment><USER2> I started my professional career in QA, then "downgraded" to a support role in a different company because (a) it was a mile from my house instead of a 2hr commute each way every day and (b) it actually paid more! Now for the interesting part: In support, you have an opportunity to SHOW and CREATE tremendous value! Value drives recognition. Value drives increases in salary. Value drives opportunity - within or outside your current employer.

Let me back up my assertions:

I worked for a large software company that had acquired a smaller niche company. Niche company had some bugs that caused some problems for its customers.

I helped said customers resolve those issues. Those customers wrote really nice letters and sent them to my employer. Regularly. It was actually a little embarrassing after a while. It's almost as though I was asking for them, and I wasn't. It just wasn't "normal" -- enter "Wonder Boy" nickname. That's all good - I got raises and recognition.

Next, I developed a utility to help correct this problem. I didn't actually understand much about programming, and it was a fairly complicated issue for me to solve. Had to do with bitwise operators and all that good stuff. I sought out answers to an equation I wasn't smart enough to solve, but for a problem I knew existed. Once I had the bits (funny, huh?) of info I needed, I wrote a very simple program/utility to save companies from experiencing this problem. Guess what happened then? Development manager tried to recruit me (lucky for him, I didn't accept).

Then...I started working closer and closer with partners. I was becoming somewhat of a subject matter expert. I then get invited to present in partner training. So I go do this. What do you know? Sales Consulting people see me and say - Wow - this guy is confident, knows his stuff, and can communicate to an audience. Now, I get recruited to sales consulting. Sweet - that works! Not smart enough to figure out complicated bit shifts, but smart enough to solve real world problems and communicate those solutions to high level business people and lower level techies. That works.

Create value! Have passion. Seek solutions to problems to problems that only you have visibility to! You are in a unique position - you are the front-line! You are seeing things that escape everyone else. Use it as an opportunity to make people happy. You make them happy and you solve your own situation. You will have customers trying to recruit you when you solve major problems. You'll have internal people fighting for you. You'll have your HR department spinning their heads not knowing what to do when your boss is trying to give you a raise out of cycle, and two or more people from other departments in the same company are asking them for salary advice when trying to negotiate your role in their department.

Hope this helps! (no time to proof and hope it makes sense - forgive any typos or strange sentences/fragments - hopefully you get the concepts)

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you tried talking to them? Bring up your concerns and make it apparent you are interested in one of the other positions, and see what they say. I wouldn't assume unless you've already brought it up and they were unwilling to do anything about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have, and for the most part, he wants me to wait it out. I've waited quite a while already really, and I'm not really interested in being led on once more.

<comment><USER4> I've been in a similar situation. It could be that your boss feels the company has invested time and money into your "training" (even if you didn't receive any formal instruction), so they don't want to replace you and incur that cost again. Whether this sort of thinking is justified or not -- I think it's not, considering you've been there for 3 years and your training must have paid out long ago -- in practice it's clear your boss' interests aren't aligned with yours.

Given that, and given that you've already expressed your wishes to your boss, you _should_ start looking for another job. Unless you live an area with a shortage of programming jobs and you are unable to move to a better area (very unlikely if you live in the US), I'm sure you'll find something.

Don't even mention leaving your job if you don't have a job offer from another company. In fact, if you get a good job offer you should probably accept it; using it as leverage to move within your company might work, but you should think really hard if you want to stay at your current company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tell your boss that the work isn't fulfilling enough and if he doesn't do anything about it start looking elsewhere. You're in an industry where demand for your labor is much higher than you probably realize.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm finding that to be not so true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apply for a more interesting job at a competitor.</comment>


Stephen Hawking to Unveil Today New Space Exploration Project Called "Starshot" - <AUTHOR> http://www.space.com/32537-stephen-hawking-starshot-space-exploration.html <comment><AUTHOR> Here's the live event starting in an hour: [http://livestream.com/breakthroughprize/starshot](http://livestream.com/breakthroughprize/starshot)</comment>


Police Are the Problem, Not the Solution - <AUTHOR> https://indypendent.org/2017/10/police-are-the-problem-not-the-solution/ <comment><USER2> People are regularly unnecessarily traumatized by their interactions with the police. I wrote about one such person in _Ordinary Rendition: The Public Servants ' Quagmire_ [0], which touched on some of the same issues as are discussed in this piece.

Thanks for the link.

[0] [http://www.taxiwars.org/2017/10/ordinary-rendition-public- se...](http://www.taxiwars.org/2017/10/ordinary-rendition-public- servants.html)</comment>


Introducing a complete and modern UI widget for cloud based image uploading - <AUTHOR> http://cloudinary.com/blog/introducing_a_complete_and_modern_ui_widget_for_cloud_based_image_uploading

<comment><AUTHOR> A new JavaScript upload widget that can be added to any website. The widget allows users to interactively upload images and any other files to the cloud directly from their web browsers. The widget supports multiple file selection, drag & drop, webcam capturing, progress bar, thumbnail previews and more. Uploaded images can be manipulated, optimized and delivered by Cloudinary. Sample JavaScript code is included.</comment>


A Culture of QA - <AUTHOR> http://jrdnsndrgrhm.tumblr.com/post/64185563860/a-culture-of-quality-assurance

<comment><USER2> I think you're dead on with on with your intuitions. I find QA a problem because on a traditional production line QA is a very defined process.

However in software what is QA the UI, interaction, API, backend code ?

More to the point do I really need QA ? As a Startup is QA not a part of our core design and iteration process as we try to achieve "product market fit" ?</comment>