Twitter refuses to uphold Terms of Service - <AUTHOR> http://arielwaldman.com/2008/05/22/twitter-refuses-to-uphold-terms-of-service/ <comment><USER2> Is this seriously a whole blog post with 190+ comments about what happened when someone was called a "cunt" on Twitter? Because if that's enough to launch a blog with, I'm kicking myself for actually trying to come up with real content.

<comment><USER3> I assume you have not been a victim of such attacks yourself yet?

What solution do you propose?

<comment><USER4> I've definitely been a victim of such "attacks" (though not on Twitter). The solution is to be more emotionally stable than a 5 year old and not care if someone calls you names.

<comment><USER3> I think it is one thing to receive the odd insult in internet discussions, and another thing for somebody to do some sort of campaign against you. I don't know the details of the original problem, but I can imagine that there are some sorts of online harassment that call for more severe countermeasures than stableness.

<comment><USER4> Well, I've certainly had campaigns against me. I've had people attack me in every blog post I wrote for months. Multiple times actually. I just deleted it knowing that they were spending hours doing that and I was spending seconds just clicking them away.

I more than anything just felt bad for someone whose life is so shallow and joyless that they actually care enough to put that much effort into hurting someone they don't even know because they were offended by some trivial thing he said on the internet. I have to believe that a person who would undertake that sort of campaign probably has serious depression and other mental health issues. I can hardly be upset at them given that. The emotional pain that they're trying (and failing) to inflict on me is the same they live with every day.

Short of threats of violence, who really cares? (I've had those too, which I turned over to the FBI, though nothing really came of that.)

<comment><USER3> "I more than anything just felt bad for someone whose life is so shallow and joyless"

Sure, so would I - but does it help much if some insane person tries to destroy your life? Insane to me means they are pretty much capable of anything. Glad it worked out well for you, but maybe it is different from person to person?

I can't really comment further, though, as I haven't had something like that happen to me.

<comment><USER4> Well, if trying to destroy my life means saying bad stuff about me on Twitter and Flickr, who cares? If they're capable of anything, including real world violence, then banning their Twitter account isn't going to make much difference in the real world. That's why I'd report any actual threats.

But just people calling me names? I can't find any compelling reason to even care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems... strange to me. Users are the life and blood of services like Twitter; I would do everything in my power to keep my users happy and protect them from harassment. I'd rather lose one abusive user than many good users.

The lawsuit explanation, especially, seems strange. I know threatening to sue is a common past-time for certain internet users (even though chances are they don't know what they're talking about and couldn't afford it anyway), but has anyone ever successfully sued a service for banning them?

<comment><USER6> I predict those kinds of problems will only get worse and more numerous on Twitter because going easy on assholes and not standing up against them for the benefit of your good users is a great way to send a message that you "want" more of the former and less of the latter.

Wait until the word spreads. It won't be pretty.

<comment><USER7> This is exactly what Paul was talking about with respect to Trolls in a public forum. Right or wrong, difficult or easy, it is this simple: if the incentives favour the trolls and disfavour the polite users, the trolls drive the polite users out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nobody here fucking gets it.

If Twitter moderates any legal content, they are no longer protected under the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as a communications service provider and are instead a publisher, which makes them directly liable for any user's libelous statements even if they didn't know about them.

<comment><USER7> So how does Flickr get away with moderating content and banning users?

How does Hacker News get away with moderating conetnt and banning users?

How does Reddit get away with moderating content reported as spam?

How do any of these sites get away with banning porn or spam?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I feel like he must be misunderstanding a law there. Otherwise the economic viability of much of the web goes out the window.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can't remember the last time I heard anything positive about twitter. And yet people are still addicted to it like crack.

<comment><USER10> Who is? Seems like only people who blog a lot or are part of the web2.0 social elite circle.

If I didn't read things like hacker news I would have no idea what twitter was.

<comment><USER11> It's quite popular among some hacker circles. It's generally a useful service.

I'd say the majority of people aren't devoted fanatically to it like the fame- on-a-budget blogger2.0 crowd is. People like Arrington are so frantic about Twitter because it's become of their better platforms for building a user base. When it goes down, their business actually suffers, crazy as that seems.

For me, it's just a sidechannel to organize meetings (like at a conference) or a place to find/report interesting papers/posts/manuals/libraries. I think the majority of twitter users are like me in this regard: we aren't defining a metric of success by how many Twitter followers we have. In this capacity I find it acceptable, and the downtime is only a minor nuisance that I often don't notice because I just don't tweet that often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Poor twitter. They can't get a break. I'm surprised that most commenters on the various sites seem to automatically assume that harassment did occur and the offending user should be banned. The complaint was lodged by Pownce's community manager and in no blog post were any of the offending "Tweets" reposted, so everything seemed a bit fishy to me. I assumed I could just go view her timeline to judge for myself, but when I tried to do that, twitter broke.

I hope that chronically broken sites populated by censorship proponents aren't really the future of the internet. It makes me think sites like YTMND are actually performing a noble service to humanity.

<comment><USER13> YTMND, as much of a depressing window into humanity, also has some good artistic content.

Look at <http://ytmnd.com/users/Click/sites>.

Also, YTMND is as "indy" and "legitimate" as a website can be: just some kid who got lucky making something people liked. This is much unlike the SF echo chamber.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Twitter's posted a response at [http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/twitter- enforces-tos-cares-a...](http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/twitter-enforces-tos- cares-about-users.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Another reason why users should leave Twitter and migrate to other services like Pownce. Suprisingly, the author of this post is a staff member of Pownce :)

I noticed an appropriate tweet summarizes this debate: "biz: Yesterday pizza was sent to Twitter HQ by friendly twitterers and today it's a keg of beer from @Mister_Robotics THANKS!"

The Twitter staff is apparently content eating pizza, drinking beer, and spending a freshly minted $15 million.

</comment><comment><USER16> That cunt should get a life. Jesus Christ, just go die.

Twitter is right. They shouldn't ban people for swearing.

If this guy has a real complaint he should focus on that instead of his stupid, anti-free-speech complaint.

<comment><USER17> There is no right to free speech in forums. The forum or a service like twitter are some one else's property. While you have the right to say what you want in public, I don't have to let you stand on MY front lawn if you want to spout hate speech. But if you stand in the street there is nothing I can do about it. Same thing here, Twitter is under no obligation to allow you to say what you want, they own the sand box and they set the rules. Apparently they just don't the gumption to enforce them.

<comment><USER16> Umm. It's twitter's decision. Twitter decided. This person -- who has a problem with free expression -- thinks twitter decided wrong. And then misleads about what happened -- e.g., saying twitter won't enforce ToS when actually they just don't want free speech banned on their site.

<comment><USER17> Its not free speech. Free speech is protected by law. By framing it as "free speech" you are saying anyone against this man is against free speech. He can say whatever the hell he wants, but it is not protected free speech. All the people who cry "BUT FREE SPEECH" on the internet whenever someone gets banned are idiots. The constitution protects you from the government, specifically the federal government, not from corporations acting within their own rights. If you can't understand something that basic, then I truly don't value your opinion.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Japanese drill ship fails to reach the earthquake-generating zone - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01551-6 <comment><USER2> I do not understand this article. According to wikipedia, the deepwater horizon drilled to 10,683 m in 1,259 m of water. Acccording to the nature article, the deepest ever holes drilled were successively the 2,900 and 3,200 m deep holes drilled by the Chikyu. 2,900 seems a lot less than 10,683. What is going on here?

<comment><USER3> Each drilling area has its own unique geology. Something about this specific area (e.g. heavier mud, cracks in the bed rock) led to their hole collapsing before they could reach their target depth despite trying a few different techniques.

<comment><USER2> All most likely true. And yet, the Nature article clearly states that the Chikyu set the record for deepest hole drilled. They don't qualify about unique geography or for-scientific-purposes. This is odd. I generally find that Nature tries to be accurate to a fault. Having written a "news and views" for Nature once, I find the seeming inaccuracies incomprehensible.

<comment><USER4> I pointed out above the Deepwater figure is depth from ocean surface while the Chikyu figure is depth below the ocean floor, so as long as the depth of the ocean is ~20,000 feet where the Chikyu drilled to that depth, it all checks out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are they trying to achieve any goals by reaching that depth other than "because the tech could be useful to have"? Out of curiousity.

<comment><USER6> Unleashing Godzilla?

<comment><USER7> Not here, please.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember digging holes in the back yard as a little boy, also remember building rock and dirt dams in the curb on rainy days.

I think this is why this article fascinates me. Hopefully, grown little kids around the world will reconsider this drilling problem and come up with an answer.

</comment><comment><USER9> Maybe a different approach would be to have an automated robotic drilling "rig" on the ocean floor, which a ship could restock and maybe also power via a tether. As a bonus the under-sea rig could also have a data+power telemetry cable run to the shore and operations might continue even without a ship present.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately it doesn't seem as though automation would solve any problems regarding hole collapse. Not only this, it would probably only serve to increase running costs and introduce more failure points. They have the choice of going with well tested and understood drilling methods, compared with untested automated drilling methods.</comment></comment>


Anti-intellectualism has been commoditized and sold - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/concoda/turn-off-your-t-v-before-its-too-late-5dc7dff60f4f <comment><USER2> And given away for free on medium, where the low masquerades as high.

Intellectual thought doesn't necessarily get better with time or with our knee-jerk combination of thoughts. Creators just aren't collectively trying to achieve much outside of personal gain when they happen on a non-linear breakthrough. Between advances, the low-fidelity stuff will always be there to milk any association with the high-end for what it's worth.

</comment><comment><USER3> root cause - intellectualism has been abused, perverted and corrupted</comment>


Pygal – A python SVG Charts Creator - <AUTHOR> http://pygal.org/

<comment><USER2> I love PyGal. I went looking for a simple chart generator that looked good for a simple program I wrote a year or so ago and all the usual directions in got pointed in were far too heavy weight for what I wanted. This makes really nice looking SVG charts very simply.</comment>


A fundamentally simple programming language: Om - <AUTHOR> http://om-language.org

<comment><USER2> There is minimalism, and then there is a fetish for minimalism. That splash page displays the pathological case of the second.

Even the "documentation" is unhelpful. No hello world? Nothing explaining what this is good for? No "look at this ugly solution in Java, then compare it with this elegant solution in Om"?

Don't make me think! Tell me why I should love this!

<comment><USER3> Documentation is here btw : <http://sparist.github.com/Om/></comment></comment>


HP packs 6 cores, 32GB ECC memory, 4TB SSD into a 5lb laptop - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/04/hp-uses-new-6-core-mobile-chips-to-build-some-monster-workstations/ <comment><USER2> Impressive, but will it run Linux without being a pain in the ass? In all seriousness, I feel like the Thinkpads almost, but not completely, manage to be the standard Linux laptop.

Especially for pro laptops, I don't understand where there can be benefit in producing anything other than a platinum level supported linux machine. Assuming mostly Windows users, what does Linux compatibility really cost manufacturers?</comment>


Elderly nun sentenced to prison for nuclear break-in - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/video/2099/01/01?videoId=279964384

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7272540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7272540)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7264929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7264929)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7269272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7269272)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7261551](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7261551)</comment>


Ask HN: How competitive are prices for unlocked smartphones? - <AUTHOR> I think sites like iFixit sometimes give BOM-based estimates far below unlocked prices. They generally ignore costs of design, testing, operations (constraints on volume and delivery schedules of parts), assembly, packaging and shipping... and sufficient profit to continue improving the product line.
Instead, I want to know if we think the retail prices should be good estimates of all that, based on the apparent competitiveness of the market.
Or do carrier lock-in and monthly financing plans mean there's no incentive to offer efficient unlocked prices? <comment><AUTHOR> The phone market is really weird. Carriers aren't exactly retailers, Samsung et al aren't exactly OEMs... and it feels like somebody should be guilty of price-fixing.

It reminds me of when I was a kid. We had phones hardwired to our house, which we leased from Bell Atlantic for an obscene price. In 8th grade, I pointed out to my parents that for less than a month's lease, we could buy touch-tone phones at the local strip mall that were much better. I got a couple of RJ-11 wall plates and installed them in less than an hour. Somehow I knew the lines supported touch-tone and we didn't need to ask the phone company for permission.

</comment><comment><USER2> Bundled phones aren't a major thing in many markets, so I don't think their impact on prices is that much, especially since they seem to somewhat align internationally.</comment>


SQL Server 2019: Celebrating 25 Years of SQL Server Database Engine - <AUTHOR> https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2018/09/26/sql-server-2019-celebrating-25-years-of-sql-server-database-engine-and-the-path-forward/ <comment><USER2> I really like SQL Server. Since they shipped SQL 2000 it's been my favorite database system, but lack of linux support was always a drag - great to see that its now also running and supported on Linux!

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, time flies. I still remember installing version 6.0 like 20 years ago or so for the first time. The client tools, like Enterprise Manager, were much better then, faster, more slick.</comment>


Reactive MVC and the Virtual DOM - <AUTHOR> http://futurice.com/blog/reactive-mvc-and-the-virtual-dom <comment><USER2> > The gist is to frequently re-render a complete and lightweight > representation of the DOM, then apply a difference filter to detect the > minimum changes that need to be made to the DOM. A similar technique has > existed in game development long before React: re-render the game screen in > every game loop, but only update the minimum portion of the screen which > changed compared to the previously rendered screen.

Practically every desktop UI works that way (Windows API, X Windows, Java UI libs). It's funny to see how web programming in 2015 slowly reinvents the wheels known since 1970s.

<comment><USER3> The browser that is rendering the DOM also, ultimately, works that way, with various portions of the browser screen redrawing while others remain static.

So it's kinda funny that the modern state of web dev is adding another layer of that same approach on top of layers of that approach.

<comment><USER4> The missing part in the DOM is:

      freeze()

      doLotsOfUpdates()

      thaw()

So one would have to reinvent this. Kind of reminds of propeties in some languages, runtimes and their UI's:

      someForm.setWidth(500); // And it's updated right away on the screen, instead of being deferred, or put in some freeze()/thaw() mode. (disableUpdates() / enabledUpdates()).

<comment><USER2> Our scripts are executed in a freeze mode.

When we modify DOM it becomes "dirty", and after our script finishes, reflow/re-render happens. But also, if our script queries DOM properties, like elem.clientHeight, DOM may need to perform the calculations in order to return us correct values, reflecting all the recent property changes. For example, if we access element.clientHeight browser may need to calculate re-flow (I recently encountered very slow clientHeight calculation by FireFox).

So, if we only modify DOM properties, all the re-rendering is deferred till the end of script.

Google about "DOM reflow"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Flux attempts to be reactive by making Stores listen to Dispatcher events, > and Controller-Views listen to Store events. However, the centralized > Dispatcher is imperatively controlled by Actions, rather than taking the > responsibility to observe Actions.

This can definitely be disorienting since by default you use imperative APIs to create the actions, and then switch to working with events and subscribers from the dispatcher up until the re-render. I've not had too much difficulty with this, at least after some initial confusion.

> Flux dictates that inter-model dependency should live in the Dispatcher, but > in MVI, those dependencies are defined inside each Model.

Maybe this should be edited. Flux stores are the analog of models, and each store can define which other stores have to finish updating before it responds to a given action (in that big case statement where it registers with the dispatcher).

The arguments for RxJS, testable view functions, and avoiding internal component state are important. The dispatcher being a singleton doesn't seem to affect much in practice, since that code is never really touched. Looks like performance could be better with virtual-dom but I'd be interested to see the different optimization strategies for each architecture and how they affect performance. Some of my own notes about optimizing React/Flux are here if you're curious: [http://guscost.com/2015/05/27/react-js-and-flux-ideas-for- pr...](http://guscost.com/2015/05/27/react-js-and-flux-ideas-for-practical- applications/)

Also I think that reusable components is a really nice feature and I would encourage you to continue working on including this functionality. All in all a very nice piece, thanks for writing it up.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like the idea of moving that arrow the way he does.

Everything else was just less convincing. The real power of React is composable components that are easy to think about. I don't think the author really "got" this; if he was building "complex state machines ... and [mixing] multiple concerns in one component", he was just doing it wrong.

I also don't love the idea of stores depending on each other. In my experience, it leads to hard-to-maintain tangled interdependencies, especially on the frontend. I actually tried to use Bacon.js as a Flux replacement because of the reactive philosophy (this article was a source of inspiration), and while it was nice, the purported benefits of Rx fell flat and store interdepencies remained a problem.

Now, I use NuclearJS [0] to avoid store interdependency altogether. It's actually what I was trying to build with Reactive programming, but done better.

[0] [https://github.com/optimizely/nuclear- js](https://github.com/optimizely/nuclear-js)

<comment><USER7> Completely agree. Looking at his eventual realization of these ideas, Cycle.js, it's just a complete mess in terms of declarative, easy to understand components. The beauty of React, beyond its simple lifecycle API and virtual DOM, is that you can glance at a component and very quickly reason what it does and how it works. I can't say the same for anything that came out of this article.

There's a tendency in JavaScript development especially to overthink, over- engineer, and over-abstract. We're still in the middle of the woods with JavaScript application development. I hope we get out soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interestingly, the sliders in the MVI example seem to react way more slowly...

<comment><USER9> Same for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good write-up and similar to some of my findings. In fact I like the event emitting / messaging pattern so much I wrote a little library called msngr.js ([https://github.com/KrisSiegel/msngr.js](https://github.com/KrisSiegel/msngr.js)) to do the same type of thing.

I'm not entirely convinced of the separate "renderer" or really the act of updating a virtual dom but I do like the model-view-intent. What I've done is something pretty similar though typically I combine the model and the view in all cases but the main application itself. Basically the breakdown is like this:

Application controller - initializes application components / authorization / anything necessary for startup

Web components - Either through webcomponents.org polyfills or polymer these are the individual components that make up the user interface of the web application. Each web component is entirely responsible for its interaction with the user. It subscribes to messages when it should take in updates and it emits the data the user inputs.

Application libraries - Handles the other end of messaging; has zero interaction with anything within the DOM. Subscribes to data that gets emitted from the web components and emits data that the web components need to display to the user.

I try to keep things as basic as possible. I'm still experimenting and working on an example web application using msngr.js that I can actually release as open source but I am a fan of this type of pattern. The best part of this is I can do full unit testing on the application libraries with zero DOM and the web component side of things can be fully tested with mocked results.

</comment><comment><USER11> Looks to be the same idea as Cycle.

[https://github.com/staltz/cycle](https://github.com/staltz/cycle)

<comment><USER12> He wrote Cycle</comment></comment>


Weekend Project: MasterSpore a Simple Cluster Control/Deploy tool for EC2 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/madmaze/MasterSpore

<comment><USER2> Any plans of supporting multiple clusters at once? It seems like currently there is only one or nothing

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes thats on my todo list.. but its less essential. At the moment my top-of- the list is getting it to copy back logging from each node. I want this to happen automatically after a certain interval so in case the node goes down you still get your logging data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> neat. much easier than SCPing everything over by hand haha

<comment><AUTHOR> That is exactly why I put this together, no more guessing at which nodes have been deployed an which nodes havnt</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What karma level unlocks the topic downvote button? - <AUTHOR> I've been frustrated at the quality of the FP lately and I have been desperately wanting to downvote some redundant or speculative content, but I have no idea when I get my downvote button.<p>I thought it was at 100, then 200, then 400 karma, but still no dice... Does anyone know the threshold when you get it? <comment><USER2> _I've been frustrated at the quality of the FP lately_

If you are frustrated by the quality of the front page on Hacker News, one thing you can do about that is emphasize the positive by visiting the new page

<http://news.ycombinator.com/newest>

and upvoting the stories that are good. I often see good stories on the new page that never make it to the front page. There is a lot of good stuff submitted every day on HN. Improving the signal:noise ratio here means improving both sides of the ratio, by flagging bad submissions (submissions that violate the guidelines, including submissions of on-topic content from lousy sources) and upvoting good submissions.

<comment><AUTHOR> There needs to be some sort of reward system for filtering out new. It would be great if they would reward 1/10th of a karma point up to a certain limit per day or something. It would be motivating!

<comment><USER3> The reward is knowing that you're shaping a great front page!

Voting rings have been (are?) a problem for HN, and I suspect a reward system for people who are active on [new] will be open to abuse from voting rings. But I don't know - maybe there's some interesting science / math in online voting and reputation systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> No topic downvote only comment downvote (which I think is around 500).

Closest you get is flag which happens at around 20 karma and reduces the staying power of a post.

<comment><USER5> Note that if you flag too many dumb submissions, like bitcoin spam and singularityhub garbage, then a mod will disable your flag button.

<comment><USER6> This has observably not happened to me, despite me being rather flag-happy.

(Not saying you're wrong; you're just not _universally_ right.)</comment></comment></comment>


Announcing hubot integration for Kandan - <AUTHOR> http://cloudfuji.com/blog/2012/05/11/hubot_stops_by_for_tea.html

<comment><USER2> hubot now counts as our official pet and as our new company feed provider. I'd wish for Stripe integration, so the gong plays every time we earn money. Great work with hubot on Kandan.</comment>


PAQ - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAQ

<comment><USER2> no mention of Pied Piper here. hmm...</comment>


Seagate gets hybrid SSD/HDD right - <AUTHOR> http://storagemojo.com/2010/05/24/seagate-gets-hybrid-ssdhdd-right/ <comment><USER2> These benchmarks are pretty useless. Sounds like a potentially good idea, but I'll be impressed when I see real benchmarks demonstrating worthwhile improvements.

He starts off by saying that boot times have gotten significantly _worse_. Reinstalling the OS (not something I want to do) gets startup time back to the same as with a standard HDD. So far so bad.

Secondly, application tests are completely unscientific and show a lack of understanding of how the OS works. After you open an application the OS caches it so that it opens more quickly next time. The startup improvements he's seeing can be entirely attributed to this: Consider that on my MBP with a 5400rpm HDD Pages took ~7 seconds to start the first time and ~1.5 the second time (using the same technique as the videos).

This is a better benchmark of the same drive, but I still think the conclusion is too favorable without more thorough real-world tests: [http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/seagate_momentus_xt_...](http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/seagate_momentus_xt_500gb/)

Edit: Spelling and slightly overzealous language.

<comment><USER3> When it comes to reviewing SSD's I don't think there is another source that comes close to AnandTech.

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt- revi...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review- finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd)

TL;DR: The review is still favorable, just with more meat to back it up.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, this is a much better review - thanks for pointing it out!

Don't know why I didn't think to check AnandTech. They're definitely among the best at this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Couldn't these huge speed ups be do to caching or space in inactive memory? For example, you may quit Word or Final Cut, but if nothing else is grabbing for memory aren't a lot of the needed libraries sitting there? I opened, closed, and reopened a few applications on my Macbook Pro with my 500 GB HDD, seems like they are way faster when I open them the second time... For example, iTunes went from taking about 5 seconds to opening almost instantly..

<comment><USER5> That wouldn't help the boot times or cold app starts.

<comment><USER4> FTA, those are the two things that don't seem to be improved.

"Application results were much more impressive. Because the drive learns, the first time you bring up an app it happens at disk speed. But the 2nd time!"

"Boot performance sucked compared to the old drive's ~45 second boot"

Boot performance was improved by doing a clean install, however, the best the reviewer got was close to the old HDD speeds (45 seconds) not a Macbook Air's boot times with SDD (15-20 seconds).

If you watch the videos, the speedups being boasted on the review involve opening the application, closing it, and opening it again, without running anything else.

<comment><USER5> Ah. Looks like it's a pretty clueless review then. (and Seagate need to work on their algorithm) Sorry, hadn't read the whole thing when I posted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems pointless; the flash only works as a _read cache_. I already have a 4G read cache that's much faster, it's called main memory.

SSDs are nice for lots of random reads/writes; I noticed the biggest improvements on things like "apt-get upgrade"; deleting files, reading tarballs, updating a database. This is where SSDs excel, but the SSD that's part of this disk won't help with any of that. When you download the tarball, it hits the magnetic disk. Then when you extract that, you read from the disk, and write to the disk. Then you read the package database... all from disk. You update the package database... yup, disk write. And so on; this drive will do nothing to help this use case. Anything that could be cached will be invalidated by a write. So you get no speedup on the only workload other than booting that helps a regular user.

If you're thinking of buying this, buy a regular disk instead, and save the $60 premium for a real SSD. Even Intel's "budget" 40G SSD will make your computer noticeably faster... but this thing won't.

<comment><USER7> Main memory doesn't persist across reboots; this does. Hence, potential increase in boot speed for the main OS, as well as a decrease in start-up time for an application the first time you run it after starting the OS.

And yep, no increase in that use case. Faster in the use case of opening programs (as mentioned in the article), faster in the use case of opening small files, and so forth.

Your last sentence is needless hyperbole, and is contradicted by the last sentence in your middle paragraph. Not that I disagree with your conclusion, though.

<comment><USER8> Rebooting is rare compared to regular use.

The box I'm writing this on has an uptime of 148 days, the last time it went down was to put a second graphic card in it. I really don't see how a 'faster boot' would be of any benefit, in fact any benefit in faster boot time would have to be balanced with how long it took you to install that drive, format it, install your OS and so on in the first time.

Use cases should center around that which happens frequently, optimizing boot time for anything other than a netbook or a laptop that you don't 'sleep' is a case of premature optimization.

For all the other use-cases you sketch main memory is _much_ more effective than a cache in a device at the other end serial link.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for sharing your personal computing habits with us. I happen to reboot quite often, switching between Ubuntu and Windows. I tried using a VM, but there were too many issues. With an SSD, rebooting from one OS to the other is fast enough to not be annoying, so I can have my dual-boot cake and eat it too. I have paid, and will continue to pay good money for this.

<comment><USER8> You should try a real SSD then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the admittedly not very good benchmarks provided - I don't see the appeal. I get the appeal of a potential hybrid - but I don't think this is it.

I replaced my system drive with an 80 gig Intel X25-M G2 a while ago (late-2009 macbook pro) and performed a few other tweaks (which really may or may not matter in the long run...)

My machine shuts down in less than 2 seconds and boots from power off to ready to rock on the desktop in 20 seconds... and while before I used to say "well who cares about boot time, I never reboot"..... I've now realized that I never rebooted because rebooting was something to be avoided, because it took so long. (not that it was long, but it was past that threshold where booting became an event by itself you had to endure).

Now that I can have the thing booted about as fast as I can pour a cup of coffee, and shut it down faster than it used to go into sleep mode (and sleep mode is instant, plus you don't have to wait for spindown before yanking it off the table and running to the next meeting anyway) I'll stick with my solid-state goodness for my portable machine.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is it really so hard to just put your OS and apps on an SSD drive and keep your big media files on a regular HDD? Unlike a disk, I can predict with 100% accuracy what data seek times will matter for.

<comment><USER12> I bought a $2,000 laptop from Dell a few months ago with a 128 GB SSD and 500 GB Big Dumb Drive. Guess which one had Windows installed on it when it arrived. _grumble grumble_ Scratch one day.

<comment><USER13> They kept the SSD free for you to install Linux on? Nice!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This seems a bit like electric lights and horn on my horse-drawn buggy. Nice, but making my buggy like an actual automobile is not the answer. I don't see much of a future for these, even in large corporate applications. They can simply mix HDDs with SSDs more efficiently.

<comment><USER15> Of course a pure 500GB SSD would be better, but it's at least 10 times the cost. Is it 10 times better than this drive? I really doubt it.

<comment><USER16> No, but I would guess this hybrid drive isn't 50% better than a regular old 500GB hard drive even though it's 150% the price. Value-wise, HDD > HDD-SSD > SSD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A more indepth and credible review is available at anandtech: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt- revi...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review- finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd)

</comment><comment><USER18> What do people think of Seagate's reliability, these days? I've switched to Western Digital for this reason, but the performance gains of these Seagate models are tempting.

Of course, I'm a bit gun-shy about being an early adopter of a new product line.

BTW, Amazon shows them available for pre-order. 500 GB is listed for US$138.

[http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3Dap...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3Daps&field-keywords=seagate+momentus+xt&x=0&y=0)

<comment><USER19> I've setup about 3000 seagate drives in 2008 and 2009 (90% are 1TB Barracuda ES2). In the second half of 2009, the quality dropped sharply. The number of disk failures went through the ceiling (from about 1 to 3% per year to 5 to 8% per year) and we switched to Hitachi.

I still don't have enough data to evaluate Hitachi drives reliability. Come back next year :)

<comment><USER18> Interesting. It is the "click of death" that is one of the more recent incidents to cause me general concern with the brand.

[http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1050374/seagate- bar...](http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1050374/seagate- barracudas-7200-11-failing)

[http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/352816/seagate-hard-disks- suffer...](http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/352816/seagate-hard-disks-suffer-from- click-of-death)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> old-gregg _"Microsoft Word startup went from about 12 seconds to less than 3."_

What is it about OSX that makes applications to launch so slowly? Microsoft Word _always_ starts in under 5 seconds on Windows, almost regardless of the hardware, and has been for as long as I can remember. Sluggish application launch was #1 impression after getting an MBP - nothing on it starts like Notepad/Wordpad/Mspaint on Pentium III winbox circa 99.

My gut feeling is that it's dynamic linking. How wrong am I?

<comment><USER20> Doesn't MS Office offload some of that load time to startup by running a helper app on login that preloads some stuff? So your tradeoff is boot time vs app launch time.

<comment><USER21> I usually kill Office Start and all the other "fast startup" applications that various bits and pieces install, but Word is damn fast to start. I've had occasion to use Word 97 on modern machines - it starts about as fast as Notepad.

<comment><USER22> What about Word 2007? Is that as fast as Notepad?

<comment><USER21> I don't own Word 2007. I actually use OpenOffice for all office-like tasks; they're somewhat slower, relatively glitchy, but they get the minimum amount of work I need there done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So does the SSD portion effectively become a cache for the traditional platter HDD portion? Seems similar to an L1 cache for a HDD. Of course, as the article states, the caching algorithm will be application-specific. At 4GB however, it wouldn't be hard at all to keep a significant portion of the OS and any oft- used apps like browsers directly in the SSD portion.

<comment><USER5> That's the idea, but 4GB for a 500GB disk seems extremely small, especially considering the price. The other problem I see with this is that the 4GB are probably only one flash chip. Fast SSDs manage to sustain high transfer rates by effectively arranging flash chips in a RAID-0; the 80/160GB Intel X25-M SSDs use 10 chips in parallel if I remember correctly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "By blurring the performance difference between disk and SSD, these drives will ensure that hard drives dominate for at least another decade" - I would say 18 months at the most. A decade is a long time in solid-state hardware!

</comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone know where I can buy a nice desktop computer with an SSD drive? I feel like I looked on Dell recently and didn't see any. (But then again I'm an online shopping moran)

<comment><USER10> Buy the nice desktop computer and then install your own SSD and re-install the system on it - then use the mechanical drive for bulk storage, compiling, video streaming, etc.....

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is this similar to ReadyBoost in Windows? I haven't seen any benchmarks that demonstrate significant performance. Why would it work better if the flash is built into the hard drive?

</comment><comment><USER27> Would be nice to know when these will be available...

</comment><comment><USER28> 7200 rpm: It seems they forgot about the noise.</comment>


I Was Assaulted For Wearing Google Glass In The Wrong Part Of San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/i-was-assaulted-for-wearing-google-glass-2014-4

<comment><USER2> I had a MacBook Pro snatched around the same area. Amusingly enough, the trend of grabbing expensive mobile products from rich people is called "Apple picking," regardless of if they take Google stuff or Apple. :) Honestly, it just isn't very surprising that you were in an area of town with a lot of poor and crime, walking around with a very expensive gadget, and got mugged. If you walk down the right street over there you can see a drug deal going down on every corner. You shouldn't read so much into it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think he was assaulted for being a public symbol of everything that is hated in an area.

I'd also get the same thing happen to me if i marched through East London with an EDL t-shirt on.

Basically he was doing something stupid and not socially acceptable in public and got owned. Shit happens. Sorry.

There is a thing called the "grey man principle" which is to move unnoticed and unseen by not drawing attention to yourself. Dress down, blend in, show nothing. This gets you a long way to an easy life in a city.

As for glass, if someone poked it in my face I'd probably use my sharpie to colour the lens in. The same is true if someone stuffed a DSLR in my face or a smartphone. There's being a tech fan and there's being a dick and the line can be crossed pretty quickly.

As for the whole SF situation, welcome to the class divide. If you earn a lot, you're no ones friend id you flash it around.</comment>


Year-round daylight time will cause 'permanent jet lag,' sleep experts warn - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/daylight-time-bc-sleep-experts-1.5342620 <comment><USER2> In Europe, Budapest, Berlin, Paris and Madrid have been in the same time zone for over 80 years. The day in Paris is currently shifted by almost an hour compared to Berlin. If the time shift has serious implications, then it ought to be possible to demonstrate them by comparing Paris and Berlin.

Of course, it is perfectly fine to _prefer_ one time or another. But I do not find the claims of health and safety impacts very convincing, given that many places are already shifted today.

<comment><USER3> Spain has long been suspected to suffer from their timezone choice. I do remember reading about that problem before, and a fast Google search finds several articles discussing the issue. (For example [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/22/spania...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/22/spaniards- sleep-time-zone-spain))

Up to a certain point, countries adapt. For example, Germany and France are in the same timezone, but their schedule is shifted. This can be easily seen when looking at the TV schedules. In Germany, evening TV starts at 20:15 (the start of movies, ...). In France it's more like 21:00. When I lived there it was 20:50, but TF1 now seems to start at 21:05.

German TV: [https://www.zdf.de/live-tv](https://www.zdf.de/live-tv)

French TV: [https://www.programme-tv.net/programme/chaine/programme- tf1-...](https://www.programme-tv.net/programme/chaine/programme-tf1-19.html)

Similarly, schools and kindergardens are usually not at the same time.

This local shifting works more or less, but can't be stretched too far. Especially multinational companies have expectations that workers come in at certain times. This is the problem that Spain faces. (I couldn't easily check by how much Spanish are shifted as Spanish TV schedules don't seem to coordinated like in France or Germany).

<comment><USER4> Spain is, however, thought to be 2hrs 30mins ahead of "sun" time, not a mere one hour we're talking about here.

<comment><USER5> > thought to be 2hrs 30mins ahead of "sun" time

Spain is certainly ahead by a lot, but the 2:30 is for Galicia which is the westernmost tip of Spain (which is on the same longitude as Portugal, which is in a different time Zone).

For most of Spain it's less, tough still a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi "Exposure to morning sunlight"? When? While commuting to a closed workplace with artificial lighting, like the majority of the population does now?

I'd rather have exposure to sunlight after work, when I can actually, you know, be outside and receive it, rather than be in closed spaces during practically all the sunlit hours.

As for the kids, there is strong evidence than being actually outside receiving sunlight is good for, e.g. preventing myopia. So it's also better for them to have sunlight after school so they can play in the park under the sun, than have it while they're at a closed space. Apart from the fact that they prefer it that way.

PS: I'm not from Canada, but there is a similar debate in my country, and I strongly prefer permanent DST. Actually, according to polls, a considerable majority of the population does, but they still want to set permanent non-DST time. Fortunately I have a flexible work schedule so I guess I'll just wake up at 6 instead of 7 but still, the change will have an impact on my family.

<comment><USER6> I'm in Norway and really appreciate every extra minute of sunlight in the autumn. When commuting, dropping off the kid to school, walking through a frosty parking lot to the office building, and taking the first cup of coffee with glimpse of sun in the window.

It makes the workday morning a lot more tolerable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nowhere do they indicate a 'permanent jet lag', it feels like their open letter has been misconstrued, I assume this is to get a catchy headline? It's a short, easy to read open letter and I was able to understand what they're saying.

They are calling on switching to Standard Time instead of Daylight Saving Time. There can be adverse long term effects of switching to DST as opposed to ST. And finally the reference to jetlag is in the context of _social jetlag_

<comment><USER8> I don't know what "social jetlag" is, but the 'lag' in jet lag is the latency between a newly imposed sleep schedule and the body's circadian rhythms. You can't have a permanent "lag" \- any "lag" effects will be gone within at most a week or two. Whatever the pros and cons of DST, "jet lag" is not the right way to describe them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hang on... Right now the sun comes up at 8 am and goes down at 4:30 pm in the dead of winter at the 49th parallel. So it's dark when you get up and dark before you get home from work. And it will still be dark after the change. So what's the problem?

<comment><USER10> You're absolutely right. It's going to be dark in winter anyway. The problem is that "sleep experts" have personal opinions and preferences, too, and use their expert status to push their personal agendas.

<comment><USER11> This does not explain why the opinions of sleep researchers are not in line with the general population.

<comment><USER12> It certainly does. Sleep experts and anyone whose opinions are in like with gen pop don't get quoted in clickbait news articles.

<comment><USER11> So you think a majority of sleep researchers think we should have DST all year?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If anyone wants to go over the literature, this article has a good review:

* [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944/full)

TL; DR:

> _In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching > between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST > permanently. The latter would exaggerate all the effects described above > beyond the simple extension of DST from approximately 8 months /year to 12 > months/year (depending on country) since body clocks are generally even > later during winter than during the long photoperiods of summer (with DST) > (Kantermann et al., 2007; Hadlow et al., 2014, 2018; Hashizaki et al., > 2018). Perennial DST increases SJL prevalence even more, as described > above._

> _A solution to the problem is shown in Figure 2C, which contains a > combination of obliterating DST (in favor of permanent Standard Time) and > reassigning countries and regions to their actual sun-clock based time > zones._

The official position of the scientists who study this sort of thing:

> _As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying > circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on > Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position > Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). > The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large > populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time > zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or > permanently._

* [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0748730419854197)

The field in question:

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

</comment><comment><USER14> Summary: if the sun rises later in winter then it will be dark when most people wake up, which confuses your body and could lead to sleep deprivation.

<comment><USER15> Blaming the clock system is easy. True blame is on work practices. It is the year-round same-hour alarm that awakes people at awkward times, not the time itself.

The real health solve is for workplaces to set an adaptive clock-in time, so everyone wakes up with the sun.

International companies already have a country-dependent clock-in time; this is not much of a stretch.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. We're clearly at a point where worker and individual rights are at a minimum and corporate and business rights a near totalitarian max.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If the issue is that children will have to wake up too early, make school start later.

<comment><USER18> Then parents will have to go to work later, so the whole day will be shifted for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The European CET timezone is so wide, that several countries should actually be in other timezones. Meaning: they already are part of this effect... and yet somehow the medical experts didn't notice significant issues.

<comment><USER3> They did.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Spain#Criticism_of_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Spain#Criticism_of_the_use_of_Central_European_Time)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find it hard to believe that this could have any significant effect, given all the other negative influences on sleep we already have that seem to be way more drastic.

In any case, our whole style of life has shifted from the mornings into the evenings, so summertime makes much more sense than having no daylight savings time at all. Summertime for the whole year is definitely my personal preference. To be fair, I live in Portugal, where wintertime for the whole year would be overall bad for the way we live and for tourism, because it means that it will be dark at 8 PM instead of 9 PM. People here mostly live in the evenings and start work at 9 AM and even later.

Or, keep adjusting for one hour twice a year. I've never had any problems or complaint about shifting time either. It is nothing, not even a nuisance. IMHO, there is no need to change something that works fine.

</comment><comment><USER19> So by following that, everyone that does DST is on permanent jet lag 6 months of the year? I don't think so.

<comment><USER20> No, because the sun rises earlier in Summer.

<comment><USER21> No surprise there. The whole _point_ of DST is for the clock to loosely follow sunrise, as opposed to the solar noon - so that daylight doesn't get "wasted" in the longest summer days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Brisbane, Australia is one place that should really be on permanent "daylight savings time" relative to Melbourne and Sydney, or to put it a different way, be UTC+11 rather than UTC+10.

Sunrise tomorrow morning will be 4:57am and by the solstice - 4:45am. Sydney on DST will be a much more civilised 5:57am. That's sun shining in your window being on the East coast, it's actually getting light much earlier!

If Brisbane was permanently UTC+11 it would be on the same time as Sydney through summer (DST is 6 months of the year) and then an hour ahead for winter. The latest sunrise time in winter would then be 7:38am which is the same as Melbourne's and 1/2 hour later than Sydney. But given it's the dry season and rarely overcast, daylight will begin more like 7:00am.

</comment><comment><USER23> In the Netherlands, this is currently a hot discussion. At the moment, the Netherlands belongs to the same timezone as Berlin. Historically, the dutch time was GMT+0020 (that's right, 20 minutes more than GMT). This would be the most natural timezone for the Netherlands. During the German occupation in the 1940s, the Dutch time was set to the same timezone as Germany. After the war was over, this was kept as timezone.

Thus, we already have a timezone shifted in the wrong way, with less daylight during the morning and more in the evenings. Moving to permanent DST, would move our time even further away from the biological clocks of everyone.

</comment><comment><USER24> I am in favour of abolishing daylight time and simply using time that assumes sun is close to peak at noon. "Regular time", that is. I think it is backwards to change time to fit human habits. Change the habits instead.

<comment><USER25> Doesn't work with countries far from the equator, where the sun never reaches the zenith during winter time.

<comment><USER26> Local noon is measured by meridian passage (a line) and not just the zenith (a point, directly overhead). I assume that is what OP meant...have clock noon be close to local noon. It's a complicated issue, particularly long term, for example, where it then bumps into the move to get rid of leap seconds.

<comment><USER24> Exactly. The usual timezones are set up with the general intent that 12:00 is close to the time when sun is at its highest point in the sky. That is how our time historically was calibrated and I don't see why that needs to change if daylight time is abolished. It is a good reference. What else would be a better reference?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Imagine living somewhere far north like Ellesmere Island or Tromsø Norway where the sunlight hours in some parts of the year are practically non existent.

<comment><USER28> I grew up in Northern Norway. It's pretty neat, to be honest -- it's true that the sun never rises in the winter, but it's sort of circling right underneath the horizon, so it doesn't get properly _dark_ either!

(If you just look at the calendar, the period of absolute night is fairly short. But this is Norway, so even if the sun is technically above the horizon, it's probably hidden behind a mountain.)

Mediterranean latitudes have far darker nights. This is especially true with snow on the ground; at that point you can easily navigate by moonlight.

That being said, it is pretty dark. Norway has a particular type of seasonal affective disorder which doesn't strike anywhere further south, and which manifests as... well, difficulty sleeping, loss of energy, depression, lots of bad things.

It never seems to affect anyone who grew up there, but it can be an issue even for Norwegians who move northwards. As for refugees who end up placed there ... often they decide whatever they were running from was the lesser of two evils.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> So um, what if we just changed the time we go into work to something more sensible, instead of changing the actual time.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is an unconvincing argument.

Singapore is effectively on year-round daylight time. Singapore is just barely north of the equator, but it's on the same timezone as Indonesia, which puts it a full hour ahead of the timezone it "should" be on, according to its solar noon. As a result, sunrise is around 7am and sunset is around 7pm every day of the year.

Somehow, this hasn't caused the country to fall into collapse, the way these quoted sleep experts make it sound.

<comment><USER31> The article is about Canada, far from the equator, where sunrise times are substantially later in the winter months. Singapore is not a relevant case for the experts' concern.

<comment><USER13> Yes, but "Canada" is big, and most of the people live on the southern portion of it.

The southern Ontario wine region is at the same latitude as France's wine region. Scotland is at the same latitude as northern Quebec.

Compare locations on a globe.

<comment><USER31> France, Scotland. Neither of those are Singapore last time I checked.

By all means make comparisons to France and Scotland, I don't have any issues with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is an argument for people to wake up later, not for clocks to be set back an hour.

</comment><comment><USER33> I say keep standard time and maybe add some more time zones.

</comment><comment><USER34> Well that's just about the stupidest thing I've heard.

</comment><comment><USER35> Solution: year-round standard time

<comment><USER25> That's exactly what TFA prescribes

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I hope this gains some traction. I lived in Arizona for a while, which is on permanent standard time, and it was great. Now I'm on the east coast and the sun comes up at 8 am. Thankfully the clocks change tonight, but if they didn't, which is what's being considered here too, that would only get later and later.

</comment><comment><USER37> These discussions around setting clocks to full hours from GMT get us nowhere, they miss the point: our problem is that our lives are organised around arbitrarily set, typically "rounded" times of day, for no real reason other than that we've always done it that way. We now have the means to change that and e.g. set school timetables _relative to sunrise_ and can expect everyone to have the means to follow them (e.g. a school app that shows you the exact times for every day, or a general converter from "Sunrise +6 hours" to clock time). Workplaces, buses could also adapt similarly. So we could finally get rid of living by fixed timetables and switch to healthy schedules according to sunlight.

TL;DR switch from "GMT+X" to "Sunrise+X" assisted by IT for most things to solve all problems.

<comment><USER38> It's kinda funny, discussions about time zones usually devolve into the idiotic "UTC everywhere" suggestion, but your suggestion is the complete opposite, and will result in time being different for everyone, from city to city.

So you'll have a gradual half-hour difference between San Diego and Seattle in the summer. When it's sunrise in San Diego, it's Half Past Sunrise in Seattle. You're in Seattle, you have a phone meeting with someone in San Diego at two hours past sunrise. Uh, when is that again? Oh, and you bring in a third party from someone in SF, he's 15 minutes off to both of you.

<comment><USER37> > _Uh, when is that again?_

Uhm, it will be 18:26 or so for everyone. What's the problem?

<comment><USER38> Ah, ok, you don't want to move time, you want to move opening hours relative to sunrise. Gotcha.

That's not insane, but it's a very, very, very hard sell. I think the closest you can get is having schools and workplaces move their starting hours by half-hour increments across the year.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Neither Fortify nor Network World understand Open Source - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/07/21/neither-fortify-nor-network-world-understand-open-source

<comment><USER2> Interesting analysis -- Fortify's rankings of open source software included centralized email address and contact information for reporting security vulnerabilities. This naturally favors the corporate-run open source projects (such as JBoss) as opposed to distributed community efforts.</comment>


Writing Quality Third-Party JS - Part 2: Loading Your Code - <AUTHOR> http://blog.errorception.com/2012/01/writing-quality-third-party-js-part-2.html

<comment><USER2> It is indeed strange why so many such services insist on putting their script tags in HEAD</comment>


NixOS 20.03 is released - <AUTHOR> https://nixos.org/nixos/manual/release-notes.html#sec-release-20.03 <comment><USER2> It's worth noting the "My experiences with NixOS" discussion from a few days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22877355](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22877355)

As someone just getting into Nix and NixOS myself, I found one particular comment there offers an excellent summary after talking with a few others in person as well: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22891648](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22891648)

Essentially, after an initial investment of time for learning curve, the huge payoff comes when migrating to another machine because of system-wide configuration being reproduced with precision.

In my case, moving back and forth between laptop and desktop/workstation was a pain point with Xubuntu. A delta of less than one hour between `apt-get dist- upgrade` on two devices was enough to translate into divergence of versions in some packages.

We've come a long way since days of tsx-11, but I digress.

<comment><USER3> I love the idea of Nix, but it is pragmatically unusable in practice. I installed it on my work laptop running OS X, and doing anything with it would often lead to searching through obscure gitlab or forum posts. The core commands are unintuitive. Try to get 'cargo install' to work for common Rust tools dragged on for weeks of on and off incidental work on the side. When something pulled in the Network Foundation SDK, I couldn't figure out how to specify it with nix-shell. After multiple attempts asking in chat, nor, did it seem, anyone else knew either. Eventually I found the package I was trying to compile in nix and just gave up on getting packages with HTTPS dependencies to work with 'cargo install'.

When it got to the point of reinstalling docker, I just gave up and used brew.

My personal box runs Arch Linux, which uses pacman. It's fast, and the commands are based on combining a common set of letters.

To me, nix is the epitome of the problem with OSS. A brilliant idea crippled by abysmal UX because enough emphasis isn't put on what's necessary for people to use it if it isn't the center of their life. If I were working on nix daily and focusing on it constantly, I'm sure I'd feel the commands are obvious because I'd incidentally memorize them all. But when using it as just one of many critical tools, it simply demands too much attention for someone to be productive.

That isn't to say it's worthless. It's still an impressive achievement and I'm glad someone did it. What will hopefully happen is that someone will write a new 'nix' frontend tool to make it simple and intuitive.

<comment><USER4> There are tools that require a big time investment to learn, and Nix is one of them. It much more "pragmatically usable" than other OSes once you learn all the bits and pieces. It's kind of like Vim. But yes, it's quite frustrating at start that you can't do seemingly simple stuff with ease.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great! Over the past 2 years I've found it worth migrating more and more of my infra to NixOS. Now my laptop, media server, router, and VPSs all run NixOS.

From Debian+cfgmgmt to NixOS I've gone from a feeling of dread that my machine wouldn't be rebuildable, to confidence they can.

A build tool to construct a Linux machine conceptually makes more sense to me than taking a distro and repeatedly mutating it.

NixOS's model is similar to React's: build the system/value you want, and NixOS will perform the diff/apply to your actual machine.

The downsides are:

* It doesn't look like an ordinary Linux machine. No FHS.

* CLI tooling is a bit awkward.

* Short support for stable releases. I see NixOS being suitable for rolling release, even in a production environment. NixOS's repo and your own repo can easily add multi-machine integration tests so NixOS machines can use familiar techniques like CI/CD/push-on-green.</comment>


On Building Entity Recommender Systems Using User Click Log & Freebase Knowledge - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/109936836907132434202/posts/EP4NY6yAeei

<comment><USER2> This is a cool paper, I love recommeender ideas. I've always set up a multi algorithm bake off for live systems. And every time, showing a block of popular links, either globally, or in the category gathers more clicks than any smarter algorithm. YMMV, but I always found this depressing!

Popular is popular is clicks.</comment>


Fantasy console on a console - <AUTHOR> https://jborza.github.io/emulation/2019/10/20/fantasy-console-on-a-console.html <comment><USER2> I would like to take this chance to mention the excellent [https://github.com/rust-console/gba](https://github.com/rust-console/gba) crate, which is a very useful zero-cost Rust abstraction layer you can use instead of the C compiler in the devkitPro GBA toolchain (and would be especially good for programming systems things like emulators, for the GBA.)

If you have some low-level C knowledge, but have never seen bare-metal programming done in Rust, it's really quite a difference in approach; despite your statements compiling down to banging physical memory pointers and MMIO registers together, it feels quite safe—with a proper library helping you out, it becomes quite hard to put the system into a wedged state, for no runtime cost. You can't even put bitflag registers into invalid states!

</comment><comment><USER3> 6502asm is a neat little project. I'm not sure it's early enough to be the first "fantasy console", though. :)

While the term was popularized by PICO-8[0], I think you could make a case for the CHIP-8[1] virtual machine circa 1977. I've built some tools[2] and games for CHIP-8, so I'm admittedly a bit biased. My user community is even running a CHIP-8 themed game jam this month- I can plug the details if anyone is interested.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico-8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico-8)

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8)

[2][http://octo-ide.com](http://octo-ide.com)

<comment><USER4> Firstly with regards to the article, this is a neat environment and simple project, but lacks niceties even basic hardware such as the Atari VCS featured, including sprite handling and collisions thereof. When I start developing 6502 games, I expect to start with the Atari VCS or NES/Famicom platform, neither of which I believe have a true framebuffer. One noteworthy and fundamental difference between these sets of environments that's particularly interesting is that this 6502asm is capable of modifying its own code, whereas the other two environments mentioned use ROM and so lack this. As for its age, it seems younger than twenty years and so certainly wouldn't qualify as a first.

Secondly, with regards to RodgerTheGreat, it's interesting to see one of your messages here. I'm not certain I'd mark CHIP-8 as the first, but that's due primarily to my not being aware of any older virtual machines used for games, discounting any games on, say, the DEUCE. I've participated in this game jam, as well as the last, so I expect my submission has been properly submitted; here's to at least one other game I submit.</comment></comment>


While Drafting SOPA, the U.S. House Harbors BitTorrent - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/while-drafting-sopa-us-house-harbors-bittorrent-pirates-111226/ <comment><USER2> I love how the article ends, 'Although the above is interesting, as the House is the place where lawmakers are currently trying to push though SOPA, this revelation might actually help their cause. If even people at the House are "stealing" content, we really need SOPA to counter it, they may say

The question is though, whether SOPA will be able to break the habits of millions of Americans, as there will always be alternatives available. And even if it manages to put a dent in the current piracy rates, is that really worth it considering the potential damage SOPA can do to the open Internet and legal businesses?'

Their article is link bait with one arguably substantive paragraph at the end.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but interesting anyway.

The title of the article should be "What the US House bittorrents the most"

<comment><USER2> Which is actually even more misleading. How about, "Staffers pirate content in US House."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To borrow a phrase, "When the Congress does it, that means that it is not illegal."

Nixon/David Frost interview, 1977: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejvyDn1TPr8>

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm ignorant of how YouHaveDownloaded.com works. Does it have any way to weed out dummy IP addresses inserted by trackers? Claiming to have peers in the House seems like exactly the sort of cheeky thing the TPB trackers would do.

<comment><USER6> Yes, it has. YouHaveDownloaded performs random check of obtained IPs - to make sure they actually up/download.

<comment><USER7> Not really, there were martian addresses in there last time I looked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They don't practice what they preach, because they're not the kind of person they're preaching to.</comment>


Ask HN: Contemporary 2014 resources on SEO - <AUTHOR>

Hello all,
I'm asking what resources are you using for creating SEO-friendly website.
The story about this question is that last such thread was 6 years ago [1] and I guess things have changed by now.
Anyway everything I'm reading consists a lot of words like "may be", "usually", "somewhat" and other non concluding statements that make me feel the whole SEO-business is actually somehow a SCAM.
I'm particularly interested in:
1. Infinite scroll navigation ( Should I include noscript tag and put pages links or what is the technique in general to make the pages indexed )
2. How to replace javascript UI elements with crawlable links ( for example a price slider )
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=277259 <comment><USER2> I personally prefer the use of fuzzy words and don't see them as scammy, but rather as an indication of someone being honest with me. Remember: Only a sith deals in absolutes ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgpytjlW5wU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgpytjlW5wU)) - SCNR :-)

OK. Back to topic: The language is fuzzy, because no one knows the Google algorithm. The best SEOs can do is make predictions and tell you the general steps to make your site rank: Nail your on-site SEO and build links. There are two good resources for this: [http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to- seo](http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo) [http://moz.com/beginners-guide- to-link-building](http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building)

As narrowrail said Moz holds a lot of information for SEO marketers with an interest in playing nice with Google. Then there is the whole topic of "blackhat" SEO - i.e. people who use techniques that Google does not endorse (e.g. private blog/link networks). They know a way to make it to #1 on Goolge right NOW, but are running the risk of being caught by Google and loosing all their rankings. IMHO the best resource for "short-term SEO" is www.viperchill.com.

SEO is an easy-to-learn marketing channel. It is relatively low-cost, but slow on the uptake. If you make your way to #1 for a keyword, you usually stay there for some time. That gives SEO a fantastic ROI - at least in my experience and that of a few other founders.

Regarding your specific questions, this might be helpful: [http://www.brombone.com/](http://www.brombone.com/) Additionally, you should sign up for the Moz community (IIRC that is free) and ask your questions there. A lot of good SEOs hang out there and are willing to help. Also try [http://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo](http://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo) \- pretty helpful crowd there, too.

Disclaimer: I am the maker of www.linksspy.com, so I am slightly biased towards SEO

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for the time spent on your answer and for the useful links.

I'm giving you my feedback

1) Regarding Brombone is actually a service that indexes your pages with probably a headless browser ( similar to PhantomJS ) and then proxy the urls to their servers. What I'm actually doing is even better. I'm having a single page app built with backbone and nodejs that gracefully extends to single-page application with backbonejs and other goodies. In other words this service is not for me, I've already built this from scratch.

2) About Reddit - I will try to ask also there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've always found the SEO/SEM industry rather shady. It is full of consultants with relatively low technical knowledge, usually just following the herd. I'm pretty sure Google itself offers plenty of resources (analytics, webmaster tools, etc.).

Most of the advice I've read over the years seems pretty common sense, as long as you're offering a fair product for a fair price. If I were in your shoes, I would probably use what Google offers for free for a few months. After that, I'd sign up for moz.com's free 30 day trial ($99/mo afterward), and learn as much as possible from what their service offers. If I felt comfortable on my own after that, I'd cancel.

This is not my area of expertise, but I hope it helps.

</comment><comment><USER4> Check this out regarding point 1 [http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google- offers-seo-recomme...](http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-offers-seo- recommendations-pages-infinite-scroll/90533/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I think you may have a more informed discussion on this question on Inbound.org simply because SEO is a huge focus of that community (vs HN) .

Not being facetious - and I'm not an SEO guy - but opinions on SEO by people who do not have expertise in it are not as relevant and may simply feed your confirmation bias, rather than get you (closer) to the true answer/conclusion (whatever that may be)</comment>


The complete history of Reddit - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2014/12/03/history-of-reddit/ <comment><USER2> Note: (2014)

There have been quite a few things which have happened since.

<comment><USER3> No wonder there was no mention of the Ellen Pao debacle.</comment></comment>


Teacher's resignation letter: 'My profession … no longer exists'  - <AUTHOR> http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/06/teachers-resignation-letter-my-profession-no-longer-exists/

<comment><USER2> This is just another hack propaganda piece from the same Washington Post column that regularly publishes hack propaganda pieces like this.

I am a teacher in private practice. Teaching is going along just fine as an occupation if you are responsible for actually meeting your clients needs and the clients are all free to shop for the services of another provider. My wife has been a teacher in private practice for her entire working life, and it is from her that I learned actual entrepreneurship and a dedication to deeply understanding a subject in order to pass that understanding along to client learners. The huge claim on everybody's taxes that government-operated schools have (and the claim on young learner's hours that compulsory schools have) make it difficult for a teacher to thrive in private practice, but not impossible. If you have a fire in the belly to teach, roll up your sleeves and teach. If you would like to break the oligopoly of the current government- operated schools, fine, do that too, but recognize that plenty of people like the current system just fine because it protects their jobs from competition at equal out-of-pocket cost to potential clients.

<comment><USER3> Hack propaganda piece? He has almost 30 years experience in the public school sector. Isn't that relevant and valuable? You use the words client instead of student, which is actually the first time I've seen that in writing.

" the clients are all free to shop for the services of another provider". I don't even know how to respond to this one. What percentage of people can afford private school? Did you even read this? He resigned due to the increasing amount of government regulations and his lack of control over his own classroom. How many "private practice" teachers even exist? 10%? 5%?

"recognize that plenty of people like the current system just fine". That wasn't the point of this article by far. It was one teacher's experience, not an editorial on how everyone hates the system. But if you bring up the point, please cite your sources. Show me what government employed teachers like the current system just fine.

I really can't believe you referred to a student as a client. It just feels to me completely against the spirit of education.

<comment><USER4> > I really can't believe you referred to a student as a client. It just feels > to me completely against the spirit of education.

Actually, I can completely understand why the OP would say something like this, and I can see the value in it.

Calling a student a "client" can be a good reminder that, as a teacher, your main responsibility is delivering something of value -- knowledge and understanding -- to that student. I think that's more congruent with the "spirit of education" than thinking a teacher's primary responsibility is to whatever organization they're part of. (Note: I'm not at all implying you were saying that! Only that some poorer teachers seem to act that way.)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where can I find technical co-founders? - <AUTHOR> Can anyone help me out with some advice on this?
I need to find technical co-founders as I am a sales and marketing focused business owner £2M t/o.
Technical co-founders in the UK (near Bristol) would be ideal as that is where I am based, but I might consider people in the Valley as we may end up there anyway.
My business idea is focused on a concept that would eventually render my own business model redundant.
I don't need work done for free - I am happy to employ someone to de-risk their time investment and I already have 2 investors who will fund us.  However, I will self fund for as long as possible.
Any advice is gratefully received.
Thanks.
Nick <comment><USER2> Flat out hire a technical advisor. Don't bother dangling equity, just pay their rate like you would an attorney - retainer + hourly. Ask them to create a technical roadmap and architecture. With that in hand you can then find a first employee to implement it.

In this way, you can leverage the expensive expertise of a very senior level person where it's most needed and then hire a less experienced and less expensive individual to perform the daily work.

It's like building a house, hire an architect first, but then a general contractor to make it happen.

<comment><USER3> I would recommend this as well. but i see no reason why this person cannot be your cofounder. If you are building a software based company it would help to have a technical cofounder with a vested interest.

You don't sound like a traditional start-up, so most of the advice form startup school may not apply to you. You probably don't need someone who actually writes code day to day. I would get someone with high level expertise in building and running technical teams who can start from one developer and scale up. That person will lay out your technical infrastructure while you focus on the business side of things. This is definitely not an easy find, and is harder than finding some smart student who wants to play with latest technology x that does not fit well with your business plan.

I'm @shaded2 on twitter if you want to chat more

<comment><USER2> Co-founder usually means "compensated with more equity than cash". And there's also the implicit massive time commitment.

Part of the point is that an advisor is typically someone so experienced you can't afford all of their time. But they can turn enough of the problem into routine bits and pieces that it becomes easier for a person with less experience to implement correctly.

I believe all too many startups suffer from inexperienced developers throwing up the first thing that comes to mind. A little guidance goes a long way to taming youthful exuberance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi Nick,

SWFounders meetup in Bristol is a good place to start [http://www.meetup.com/sw-founders/](http://www.meetup.com/sw-founders/). It seems to attract a couple senior devs looking for an opportunity when I've been there.

Secondly, feel free to drop me an email (freebananas at gmail). I run [http://www.meetup.com/Bristol-and-area-CTO- meetup/](http://www.meetup.com/Bristol-and-area-CTO-meetup/). If you can give me some more details I occasionally find out if someone is looking for something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Robin, I'll sign up and pop in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should check out ycombinator's startup class. (It's free) [http://startupclass.samaltman.com](http://startupclass.samaltman.com) According to them, your better off with no cofounder than some random person you meet online. Ideally though, you should have someone you've known for many years.

<comment><USER6> As a follow up, here are the highlights of the lessons taught in that class and what to look for: [https://medium.com/how-to-start-a-startup/65-quotes- from-sam...](https://medium.com/how-to-start-a-startup/65-quotes-from-sam- altman-on-startup-teams-co-founding-and-hiring-5cfadf4dc69e)

<comment><AUTHOR> I am all over that - I have not seen it because I have been working the past week but now I have got a day off I am going to smash through all of the lectures: expecting great things!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hire somebody as a senior engineer at market rate, and if you're happy with their leadership, you can convert them to a senior position and/or upgrade them to a cofounder. But you'll want to see if they can architect your tech stack and build and lead a team first before you marry them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree - finding the right people is one of the hardest parts of running a team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bristol has a pretty good startup scene (I've recently moved here). Have you checked out some of the local networking and support groups? There is some stuff concentrated around Engine Shed [http://www.engine- shed.co.uk/](http://www.engine-shed.co.uk/)

If you have finances you could always employ someone in a CTO type role rather than take on a co-founder.

If I were in your position I think I would define what I actually need of this additional senior person. Consider what skills they should have, what input you want of them. Then start chatting to people - if you find someone who seems ideal then you can can find out what kind of terms they would be willing to come on board under.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! - I will check out engine shed. I plan to sit down and write out a spec sometime this week

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interview lots of people and make it clear that they'll actually get paid. Takes work to get to know folks.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hi Nick,

I would recommend taking your time to select your co-founder. I believe it is not only about finding someone that loves your idea, and that has matching technical skills.

Sharing equity with someone, even if you can provide the security of an income, is like entering a marriage. Any confusion, lack of communication, conflicts (and there will be no matter what) will impact your team (this comes from a start-up team member that witnessed poor decision-making due to a lack of cooperation between founders).

Make sure you both have a similar vision of entrepreneurship and take your time to work with the person so you can both experiment difficulties together and see if you trust your co-founder.

You can find contractors to get you started (with an open-source framework like web2py so that your CTO will easily be able to pick up the work).

I have applied this to my project, selected potential tech co-founders because I enjoyed working with them on various occasions (work, school, start-up week- ends ...) and asked for small, paid tasks that a mentor verified for me. It is supposed to be the hardest part in entrepreneurship so I wish you the best going forward on this search for your co-founder.

I know Europe has less Tech/Start-up events to attend (I live in France) but if you can I would recommend networking, meeting as many programmers as you can. There are a lot of events registered on Meetup.com in London. [http://www.meetup.com/cities/gb/17/london/tech/](http://www.meetup.com/cities/gb/17/london/tech/)

Good luck !

</comment><comment><USER11> If you are looking for a co-founder and not a contractor for-hire, then it is important to source one from within your closest contacts. Ideally, choose a good friend.

Not only does the co-founder need to share your vision, they need to tolerate/accept/embrace you personally, and you them. You will go through tough times together.

If you prefer to call the shots and carry the burden of founding, then don't get a co-founder: just retain and pay a contractor, as many others have said here. It's good advice.

The illusion of a co-founder is debilitating for startups. Every founder must be putting in devoted work. It's a gunny-sack race they're in, not a baton- race, not a solo-marathon/sprint.

So find someone close to you who appreciates you personally, otherwise, hire an expert.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right - I founded my current business with two friends and now only one of them is left! So I know about the grind and the importance of strong relationships.

My instinct is that if I don't have that relationship with a technical co- founder before we start then I would be in a better position to hire in and mitigate the risk of getting in bed with someone prematurely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Prepare a compelling explanation for what your proposed market is, and what you bring to the table (connections, sales experience, management experience, capital, etc)

Go to a place where technical folk and startups hang out, such as a coworking space or regular meetups. Talk to people, see if you can help anyone with an introduction or an insight. Be sure to mention what kind of person you're looking for.

Network with the people who know everyone (e.g. Manager of the coworking space, local startup bloggers, service providers). Be sure to mention be sure to mention whom you are looking for. If you do something for them, they will remember you better.

Eventually one of those people will meet someone you need, and they will remember to intoruce you.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you already have a semi-established business, you are looking for an employee and not a co-founder. "Looking for a technical co-founder" implies you are starting a brand new business, not looking to bring someone in to an established business.

<comment><AUTHOR> My intention when I posted was to leave my existing business to run itself and to apply to YC W15 to found a new business.

Having reflected on the advice and the fact I don't have a technical co- founder I know and trust implicitly I am going to go down the route of hiring a competent technical advisor to PM this for me with sub-contracted work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My advice. 1. Try to get your MVP out asap with a young tech graduate/internship/ from Bristol University CS department. It will give you time & opportunity to find what you are looking for. Forget meeting technical co-founders like you would date people online. You have more chance of winning in the casino that meeting your tech partner online. Best you start solo than chasing first your tech co-founder.

2\. Use your network as I am sure you must be linked to some great folks/friends.

You have to think as your co-founder (tech or not) as your most important relationship before hire, customers and also definitely investors. All the best.

</comment><comment><USER15> Nick, I have a small IT business in Southampton with a branch in Poland (for cost efficiency). I've got good references, 10+ year of experience and more. Mail me if you want to talk - email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER16> I recently started Cofound Hound, a mailing list service for finding co- founders based purely on mutual matches.

You sign up & get a list of people that might be a good fit. They get a similar list weekly (with you & others on it). If there's shared interest, we intro you two. That's it. Meet them, work on something with them, whatever.

With FounderDating and CofoundersLab, your profile goes stale or you get spammed. No more.

[http://www.cofoundhound.com](http://www.cofoundhound.com)

</comment><comment><USER17> Hi,

Not sure I'm looking to start a new project BUT I am technical, in Bristol and would be happy to meet and say hello - email in profile

</comment><comment><USER18> Hey nick_bristol, read your bio, I love the market you're in (security in oil & gas and maritime markets), would you be open to working with someone from Canada?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks mate, I need to work with someone face to face on this one. Canada is a little cold for me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > I don't need work done for free - I am happy to employ someone ...

Then you want a contractor not a cofounder. One trades time for cash, the other for equity. To hire a contractor, google "hire a coder" then describe your requirements and cash reward on the sites that appear in the search results. If you really want a technical founder, become one: [http://blog.samaltman.com/non-technical-founder-learn-to- hac...](http://blog.samaltman.com/non-technical-founder-learn-to-hack)

</comment><comment><USER20> Hi Nick. I am looking for a business partner and I am technology focused. My email is email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER21> Reach out to me. I'm a contract CTO/Co-founder and I can probably help you email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER22> hi ... i am not from bristol but that means nothing. i am technical founder. please send me an email if you want to discuss more.

i am looking to start a new project as my last one was completed

</comment><comment><USER23> What is the t/o stand for after the 2M?

<comment><USER24> Turnover presumably.

In the UK it means the same as revenue in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> That is a tough question, as startup advice out there is "look between your friends". This is the same as saying "sorry if you didn't go to a top CS college to have smart developers friends. There is nothing you can do". Sam Altman in his last startup class went as far as to say that non-tech people have no business founding a tech business, quoting "software people should found software companies, media eople should found media company". I found that a little bit sad to hear.

Anyway, my advice. Start with "freelance-as-a-test-to-CTO contract". But the secret is to find a developer who is not a freelancer. Freelancers already made their mind, they don't want to be a CTO, they will treat your contract as any other job, probably not even prioritize yours.

You must find a non-freelancer developer with an interest to start a start-up. Maybe a guy with a dayjob who needs the paycheck and can't afford to quit it, or some other who already failed in one or two of his own ideas. Or a young smart developer who is still lookong for his idea of a startup.

Finding the right profile, you must deal with the agreement the right way. You must convince the developer that your idea has the potencial to be big. You must value his time and pay a reasonable fee. I think the right one won't charge the top market he would if he was a freelancer. He _must_ gain other thngs than money with the job. Learning mostly. Learning about a code, as he will build a software from scratch, probably learnng new tech. Also learning how a business is built. If it fails he must be better prepared to startup his own thing, for example. That is the hard thing to get with freelancers. They will accept your proposal only for the money. You will never know if they are really interested in being part of your business for real. This is become a 100% certainty if you are outsourcing to a software factory or remote freelance, so don't even consider about it. I would start with an hourly fee, i think it is better for a test than a fulltime hire. Sometimes might be even irresponsible to hire a developer to such an only-idea startup. Too risky.

Hire the guy to make the MVP with an hourly fee. This way you will know if the guy is good, if you work well together, if you cmmunicate well. He will also know if it is something he wants to dive in. So this would be the freelancer as a test to CTO.

Now, actualy answering the qustion to where find it. I don't believe in startup events or regular networking for this. You hire the more outspken and available developer, not the right one. A good tip that worked for me is to keep an eye for this guys that show up at HN front page with a technical post or a Show HN. Rule out the very experient and famous developers who are regulars to HN front page. Search for the new, unknown guy who did something bright (HN upvotes are a great filter from tech guys for this). At the Show HN rule out the full formed startups, look, again, for the new, unknown guy who built something great as a side project.

If you have experience in the field, a good idea and money to fund (and a willingness to go to SV), i think you are in good position to attract the top talent that appear here.

Also, look for someone in "Who is hiring" Hn thread ( _definitely not_ at "Needs a freelancer?" thread).

<comment><USER26> [Sam Altman in his last startup class went as far as to say that non-tech people have no business founding a tech business, quoting "software people should found software companies, media eople should found media company". I found that a little bit sad to hear.]

If that were the case, we wouldn't have the largest IPO in history because Jack Ma would have been unqualified to start Alibaba.

<comment><USER27> There will always be exceptions to the rule. But I believe sam was speaking with respect to high level observations from YC. Statistically speaking he is probably right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> DM me at @kpatel79 on twitter and I will be able to point you in right direction.

</comment><comment><USER29> TLDR; Show you are willing to put in _effort_ and _labor_ aside from generating ideas/spending/raising capital

Hi Nick -

I can speak for myself. I am a primarily technical, sole founder of a 3+ years profitable company who had to develop the business know-how along the way.

With the ability to see both sides, what I've found is the business-side components are _equally_ as important as the technical components; that is, neither can live without the other. But here's the rub: The technical side is a thousand times more laborious to become proficient at, and there's not even a comparison.

If you're able to take that with more than a grain of salt, it implies while your contributions are equally as important as a technical co-founders to the overall business' success - the technical co-founder is not likely to see it that way because they won't be looking at things in terms of value (which is what matters most from the business man's point of view) but in terms of value + effort.

The way you can make developers feel good about working with you is to emphasize something aside from money (risk) to contribute which shows you will be putting in a substantial amount of effort which then has tangible, measurable results. For example, if you are a good writer and willing to write lots of content for SEO.

You say you are a sales and marketing focused person, so really stress what it is you will be doing work-wise that will compel the technical co-founder to want to work with you. Will you be cold-calling 100 people with a 5 percent conversion rate every day? Will you be spending 4 hours a day using X, Y, and Z tool to come up with keyword permutations for AdWords campaigns? Will you be reaching out to a minimum of 3 potential affiliate / rev-share partners a day to maximize those types of relationships? Show what makes you good at what you do and the effort you will be putting forth to achieve your results.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your advice. I can see the rub for a technical person being asked for the moon and then left to deliver it whilst non-tech waits around for something to happen. I am trending towards employing a technical advisor to structure what needs to be done and then to bring people in to do the work. Your comment really underlines how the technical side are going to feel about the non-tech; and that is something I hadn't appreciated.

<comment><USER29> Sure thing. It won't be as much of a problem so long as it's an employment agreement. My comments really only apply under a co-founder arrangement.</comment></comment></comment>


The New and Improved Visual Studio 2017 RC: A Review - <AUTHOR> https://dzone.com/articles/visual-studio-2017-rc-review-a-look-at-whats-new-a?oid=hn <comment><USER2> Ummm...where's the vision for Mac?</comment>