Ask HN: Can/do US startups hire non-American citizens? - <AUTHOR>

I'm an international undergrad student at an American university and I'm interested in working at a startup after I graduate. I know that companies hiring non-American citizens (American citizens including green card holders etc.) need to sponsor work visas and this can get expensive. I'm wondering to what extent startups in the US hire non-US citizens, with the cost of sponsoring the visa in mind. <comment><USER2> You don't have to get an H1B visa right out of university to start working. You can use your OPT (Optional Practical Training). That will allow you to stay and work in the US for 12 months in your field of study, and it's possible to apply for a STEM extension (17 months).

<comment><USER3> The OPT is actually a very good option since you can get it on your own without the support/sponsorization of a company (which is required for an H1-B visa).

All you need is a student visa and having graduated from a US institution in a program longer than 12 months. The fee is only 340$, which is around 10 times lower than an H1-B.

Once you have it, any company can hire you as they would an American citizen or green card holder. 12 months, should be long enough to prove your value to the company/startup so they apply for a green card.

Here is more information on it: <http://www.uscis.gov/files/article/OPT_4Apr08.pdf>

On top of all that, you're exempt from paying social security and medicare taxes (be sure to notify your employer since some of them are unaware of that fact).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Even if a startup was willing to sponsor you, having your immigration status contingent on the continued existence of a company that could go bankrupt with little notice doesn't seem like a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER5> To work at a tech startup, why do you need to be physically located in the US? There is no particular complication for a startup to pay you as a contractor working from a foreign country, except that you are responsible for paying your government the taxes they want.

</comment><comment><USER6> You're basically SOL. Work visas nearly always only go to well established companies or body shops (who've learnt how to game the system). Plus, in this recession, it would be hard to prove there is a lack of Americans willing or able to do your job.

Even the startup visa being debated now, is only meant for "founders" and not for folks who just want to work in a startup.

If you really want to stay in the US without worrying about being kicked out of the country the moment you lose a job, you need to do the time to get a GC (either do a PhD and get the GC faster or get in the queue with the normal folks and wait 10-15 years)

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure your advice is correct.

First of all, small companies have no more problem applying for H-1B than larger companies. Especially in the last 2 years, where the quotas were not met on day 1 of the application process.

Second, graduate students with a MS have their own special category (not subject to the H-1B cap). And they can use the OPT training program to get a job without having to go through a visa.

Bottom line: check out usvisanews.com, not hackernews, to discuss this.

<comment><USER6> Personally, I have not heard of any startup willing to spend the time or money to sponsor a H1B. Many startup jobs are advertised with a clear restriction that they are looking only for citizens/GC holders.

<comment><USER8> A lot of YC companies do help international workers to get their H1Bs. I don't know what is the exact number.

OP: Anyway, if you are canadian, it will be easier. There is a special category for canadian who wants to work in US. H1B is tricky. And, it has a quota.

Try those startups who have secured theirs series A, it will be easier to get in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a grad student currently working for a startup in the bay area and let me say you need to be QUITE lucky to get sponsored. Most startups don't have the time or experience to drive the h1b process and, on the other hand, somebody mentioned it is a pain to have your work stability depending on a young firm that cab easily and quickly go underwater. If the company tanks, you need to get responsored immediately or leave. I love what I'm doing, but it IS quite stressing...particularly if you have a loan to repay.</comment>


Grid – A Lua Game Engine - <AUTHOR> https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/ <comment><USER2> Thank you for posting this, Bambo! I was curious why we were seeing 10s of new stars all of a sudden and trying to figure out where the GitHubbers were coming from.

Grid Engine 9 is now the largest pure-Lua game engine on GitHub. As s_y_n_t_a_x has mentioned in this thread, I built the Grid Engine on top of LÖVE.

I came from the hlcoders world, having used the Source Engine for several years, and was upset the 2D world didn't have sophisticated game engine technology like the 3D solutions in the field.

There's tons of great game software out there! But to me, a game engine isn't just a load, update, draw framework. There's a lot of hard work involved past binding libraries together.

A game engine needs an architecture, it needs to do multiplayer serialization for you, and give you a meaningful way to load maps out-of-the-box, and so much more.

Too many hobbyists are rolling this themselves, and I hope to continue to bring rich game development features OOTB to other hobbyists like myself.

If you're interested in Grid, but don't find something quite right with it, could you tell me? I've worked on this project for at least the past 6 years from what my logs tell me, but it only continues to get better thanks to people like you all reading posts like this and giving me feedback over the years.

Thanks again, Andrew

<comment><USER3> I also saw this on your repo [1], I was wondering if you are planning to move from Love to it, or what is it about? (just curious :-)

1: [https://github.com/Planimeter/lgf](https://github.com/Planimeter/lgf)

<comment><USER2> A few casual notes, though I could continue to expand on this:

lgameframework is a project I took on some time ago to provide a LuaJIT FFI alternative to LÖVE. It helped educate me on what was necessary to interact directly with the OpenGL layer, and understand what challenges the LÖVE developers will have in the distant future with OpenGL being deprecated on macOS. (Will they move to bgfx? Or Vulkan/MoltenVK? Who knows. Ask Alex, I suppose.)

As an interesting side note, it does things LÖVE doesn't, which may or may not be interesting depending on whether or not you think first-party 3D features, PBR, VR (See also LÖVR) are desirable in a pure Lua project.

It also serves as a hatch door project I hope I never have to use. Valve broke Source for modders somewhere between the 2007 and 2013 engine branches with SteamPipe, and the idea that you could spend literal years on a project and have some developer break your work in Bellevue was scary to me. They don't have the same respect for the modding community today that they did maybe 15 or so years back. I don't think that's going to change, unfortunately, but I'm digressing.

I trust the LÖVE team, and appreciate that it's FOSS software, but I need full control over the stack I present to developers using the Grid Engine, and I need to respect users by not breaking things.

In the event LÖVE breaks things, the Grid Engine needs to be patched to account for those changes, and Grid has been around long enough to see this happen a small number of times. I think the changes have been reasonable so far, but mature projects will inevitably end up with deprecation notices and backwards compat patches, and that's where we are now.

lgameframework is defensive software, but I'd rather continue to promote LÖVE. The only issue I see with this, and cannot condone however, are the libraries that have come out of the community with inappropriate names.

Edit: I apologize that all of this sounds a bit dark, that's not my intention, but a lot of people's hard work can be at stake. Implementors of such software need to defend their users. The LÖVE developers have created something wonderful, and I must reiterate this.

I plan on Grid being around for years to come, which means you have to start thinking about protecting that mote. Planimeter projects have been in the works since 2010. I work in a narrow subset of the gamedev space, and don't plan on stopping any time soon. It will be my life's work.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the extensive answer! It is very commendable that you want to provide such level of stability for your users.

On a side note, your comment made me check: hard to believe Love2d was released 12 years ago now!

<comment><USER2> Thank you for browsing my work, I greatly appreciate it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lua is a little confusing language for me because you need to throw out most of the things you know because it has its own way of doing things, it is not necessarily a bad thing but it is confusing. Luckily, it is a very small language so it wouldn't take that long to grasp it all. The most confusing thing was the fact that (almost) everything seems like a hashtable.

<comment><USER5> Ignoring metatable weirdness, I think "you need to throw out most of what you know" is quite wrong.

The main thing you need to know is that Lua's table type can be numerically iterated between index 1 and the first gap where numeric index has nil value using the ipairs iterator in addition to the non-exclusively-numeric unordered pairs iterator. A common pitfall with sparse tables is that the length shortcut # returns seemingly the wrong result if you aren't aware of that first part.

Most of the difficulty writing in Lua comes from the fact that there's no first class support for OO-style Classes, so you have to fake them, and there's no standard library so you end up reinventing a lot.

But other than that, it's a dead simple language with few features.

<comment><USER6> Lua's lack of integer support caused me some issues. Using floor() around everything wasn't really an ideal solution and I ended up changing languages for that project.

Metatables are cool, but have some weirdness to them. For OOP i ended up using metatables to make a simple prototype(rather than class) based system, but it was hacky at best.

Tables themselves are pretty awesome and powerful, but I have to admit, working with them gets a bit tiresome in ways working with dedicated arrays and hash maps don't. You have to remember exactly what kind of data is in your tables and looping through them can be a pain.

Overall though, I still love lua, it's the language that helped me 'get' programming and I wouldn't actually appreciate dedicated data structures and typed variables so much if I hadn't had the experience of starting with a more free, loose and simple language like lua. Also, its ability to easily interface with C and be easily embedded has made it appear in so many different and sometimes strange and just downright cool applications.

I've been playing with the solarus engine lately, it uses lua for its scripting, it's the first time I've written any lua in a while, but i've been enjoying it as I rediscover all the little cool things I like about it and i still think it makes a good first or second language for people.

Having the reinvent the wheel isn't necessarily a bad thing when you're learning. That hacky prototype system I made helped me understand OOP far better than just using classes in other languages had. Even if it didn't really work all that well in the end. It really made me appreciate what a built in class system actually gives you.

<comment><USER7> Integer support was added in Lua 5.3 (released in January 2015). It also added binary operators, rendering the bitop module obsolete.

One thing I never understood is the mania for OO programming---I regularly see people announce Yet Another OO Module for Lua on the mailing list, and I have to ask myself, "Why?" Is OO the only thing taught these days in school? There are other ways of organizing code than OO.

<comment><USER8> Serious question: How do you organize your data in a semantically meaningful way without something like an object/struct (in a strong type system preferably). I get functional programming and all, but structs just seem like a natural way to organize data.

<comment><USER7> Structs are a natural way to organize data, but that doesn't necessarily make it "OO". In Lua, a module is typically a table (associative array really) of functions. All of the standard modules that come with Lua are just collections of functions that don't have a concept of "this" (like math or os).

Now, an object in Lua _can_ have functions that assume a "this" parameter (Lua calls it "self") and thus, it _can_ be viewed as an object qua OO, for example, an open file:

        file = io.open("foo.txt","r")
        file:setvbuf('no') -- no buffering
        file:seek('set',10) -- seek to byte 10 in file
        data = file:read(8) -- read 8 bytes
        file:close()        -- close file

but Lua lacks typical OO features like inheritance, a "class" function or method, which are what the OO modules in Lua _always_ add. It's this mentality, that OO is missing if you don't have inheritance.

<comment><USER5> > _Lua can have functions that assume a "this" parameter (Lua calls it > "self")_

Even Lua's assumed "self" via the thing:funcname(...) call is just a charade and is secretly just thing.funcname(thing, ...). The split between . and : calling, IME as an informal Lua teacher, is confusing to programming newbies when they first encounter it and I kinda wish the language hadn't chosen _that_ as the thing to spend time implementing.

<comment><USER7> The same is true in C++ and Java, only the "self" argument is completely hidden in that case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks interesting but the documentation needs more information.

I dont want to "mess around" for a few days to learn what this thing is good at. I want to read the docs and be ready to make stuff.

eg)

[https://www.planimeter.org/grid- sdk/api/networkvar](https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/api/networkvar)

[https://www.planimeter.org/grid- sdk/tutorials/Getting_Starte...](https://www.planimeter.org/grid- sdk/tutorials/Getting_Started)

<comment><USER2> I will prioritize this immediately. I believe one should be able to understand all of the concepts the engine offers within short order, and clearly I need documentation to back that belief.

Everything is there to get started in just minutes, reducing any installation friction typically found with larger game engines, but I agree that documentation should be able to reduce the cognitive friction such that one can get started faster.

Thank you for pointing this out. If you're so inclined, sample game code comes with the engine for the time being to understand how it works. I realize this isn't completely ideal, but feedback like this is critical to the direction I take.

<comment><USER10> If you're looking for inspiration on how to organize your docs, I found this resource really valuable: [https://documentation.divio.com](https://documentation.divio.com)

You can see the documentation system in action in this project: [https://www.brachiograph.art](https://www.brachiograph.art)

Regarding Grid, personally I always like to look at example applications built with framework/library/engine so seeing a list of projects that utilize Grid would be nice.

<comment><USER2> Thank you, mmlkrx. I'm focusing on this today and I appreciate your help! I will keep this feedback in mind and emphasize the points you have made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would appreciate more examples on the web site - it seems like there are very, very few details on e.g. capabilities, etc.

<comment><USER2> I will prioritize this based on your feedback.

<comment><USER12> That would be awesome, going to tinker with this tomorrow!

<comment><USER2> Thank you for saying so! I will be available if you need anything at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Apparently the developers are reading this thread, so I have a request: Please reduce your website's dependence on javascript. Doesn't leave a great impression when I need to fiddle with noscript before seeing static text.

<comment><USER2> I would do more of this if I had a simpler way of pulling documentation from the GitHub Wiki repo.

I'm sorry the experience was poor, and I'll consider this feedback as I make improvements to our documentation and marketing collateral to make it nicer to use. My apologies. I work hard to win over developers, many times one at a time, and so your feedback isn't lost on me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> any examples of games made with this?

<comment><USER15> I'm making a mobile mmorpg using this engine.

We're currently in the early spriting & game mechanic planning phases but Grid has been a perfect starting point.

It's the sweet spot in-between LÖVE (Grid extends LÖVE) and a heavier engine like Defold, the multiplayer features are killer.

If you're wanting to make a tile-based multiplayer game, I highly recommend it.

<comment><USER12> Are you posting anything on GitHub publicly? I'd be interested in seeing some sample code!

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately, not. Parts of the game I may open-source, but it won't be fully open and it's nowhere near ready.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Url changed from [https://github.com/Planimeter/grid- sdk](https://github.com/Planimeter/grid-sdk), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER17> Why do people use Lua in a world where we have Python?

<comment><USER18> Does Python have any good game engines? PyGame project is a nightmare.

Lua's [https://love2d.org/](https://love2d.org/) is amazing.

<comment><USER19> I'm curious as to what you found nightmareish about Pygame... It's SDL.

<comment><USER18> Years of being extremely difficult to run on a Mac (no pip install), horrible website update (the old one was bad, but at least it was cool & functional), and on-going issues like this: [https://github.com/pygame/pygame/issues/555](https://github.com/pygame/pygame/issues/555)

There's not even a note on the website that it's entirely broken in Mojave. It's just _always_ something.

Compared to LOVE and numerous other projects which just worked right out of the box. I'm a total Python guy, but Pygame has always been frustrating.

<comment><USER19> Fair enough. Though I have similar complaints about other packages on mac (Python and Ruby MySQL packages being good examples.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For the record, Grid is also a racing game [https://www.codemasters.com/game/grid/](https://www.codemasters.com/game/grid/)</comment>


Gait Pattern Alterations During Walking, Texting and Walking - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0133281 <comment><USER2> It's hard to take an article about "gait" seriously when the authors misspell "gait" twice (as "gate") and have an overall very poor command of the English language.

Here are some examples from a single paragraph in the Discussion section:

"Specifically, those individuals under the age of 30, such as those in the Plummer study, likely started using mobile phones." What does this mean?

"While we attempted to explore an ageing component within our study generally feel that the upper age limit within our study was not sufficient to separate out more robust ageing differences." This is not a sentence.

"Though currently absent from the literature a more thorough investigation into the effects of simultaneous texting and walking, as older individuals are more susceptible to tripping." This is not a sentence.

"However, our findings are generally consistent with previous research showing that when time constraints are imposed on participants, older individuals typically take longer or exhibit more cautious gate characteristics than their younger counter parts." The word is "gait," not "gate," (this error appears twice in the paper), and "counterpart" is one word, not two.

"Others have shown that walking increases ones time spent looking away from obstacles by as much as 400% [9] leading to a phenomenon a known as 'inattentional blindness'." The correct word is "one's," not "ones."</comment>


The ethics of social games and how mass culture killed the auteur - <AUTHOR> http://virtual-economy.org/blog/the_ethics_of_social_games_and

<comment><USER2> I'm kind of torn on this, because a lot of the social gaming space is at the leading (and bleeding) edge of metrics use in our industry, and that is something that excites me (and gives me furitive visions of applying my skills in a fashion which would scale ridiculously well).

On the other hand, I'm sincerely worried that taking the craftiest engineers/marketers available and iterating directly on people's psychological levers risks creating an industry based on exploitation. I'm playing a particular Facebook game at the moment -- market research, I swear! -- and there are some game mechanics which I can only describe as darkly brilliant. I'm not going to dumb down "evil" by describing pay-for-roulette-disguised-as- treasure-chests as evil, but half of my brain is saying "That is Magic cards without the paper -- profitable, but not odious" and the other half is saying "You'd be afraid of running queries telling you who are buying those for fear of what you'd find out about 90% of sales."

<comment><USER3> Remember Diamond Mine. A compulsive-obsessive trap that put people in the hospital.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Speaking as someone who made a living from virtual goods for five years, the article presents valid points and observations but could have been more specific on the positive aspects.

Then again, I am struggling myself to come up with much positive(longer term, not in the sense of immediate satisfaction from the Skinner box) for virtual goods, as they are being sold.

"And just as with other goods and services, it is possible to use virtual goods in business that contributes positively to people's lives, as well as in business that exploits people and harms them."

I went through the PhD thesis - <http://info.tse.fi/julkaisut/vk/Ae11_2009.pdf> of the author looking for the positive examples, but could not find any.

<comment><USER5> Going to a cinema is as tangible as any virtual good. It's an experience nothing more. Things like cigarettes are detrimental to you.

People buy fancy cars/houses/clothes to one-up others all the time. Why not buy some virtual gold/farm-goods.

<comment><USER6> Why not prositution, drugs and gambling?

Gambling is an apt comparison as these games are designed to be highly addictive. We have regulation in gambling, why not also regulate this highly addictive behaviour?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I play one of these silly online games. The draw is simple: my friends play it and it only takes a few minutes a day to move forward. I'm close to ditching it though because they've changed the game to be completely unable to progress without my attention and it's not good enough to justify more investment than I've already given it.

<comment><USER3> Once I figured out it was an empty exercise, there was actually no game there at all, I STILL played it for 2 more weeks before I got unhooked.</comment></comment>


The $0.99 Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AdamSaltsman/20091206/3743/Bytes_The_099_Problem.php

<comment><USER2> You don't have to earn all your revenue just on purchases of the application.

It is also possible to sell virtual goods from within your (cheap or even free) application:

[http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/11/30/ngmocos-free- to-...](http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/11/30/ngmocos-free-to-play- iphone-games-hit-the-top-grossing-apps-list/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an interesting and definitely non-trivial economic issue. What we're presented with it the classic supply and demand pricing problem, with some fun complications.

I'm assuming a horizontal supply curve (and marginal cost approaching zero), which implies that pricing comes down to substitutability and demand.

The pricing strategy in the article implies that to break into the top 10, your app has to be priced at $.99. To me this suggests that quality apps are perfect substitutes, and are selling at as close to marginal cost as possible. Once you fall out of the top 10, however, the competition is more monopolistic, and you can raise your price such that you sell the quantity where marginal cost equals marginal revenue.

This seems backwards to a traditional market, where the competition is more monopolistic in the higher quality products, and more perfectly comptative in the lower quality products. _Interesting_.

</comment><comment><USER4> Oh cool: this article's from the Canabalt makers.

<comment><USER5> And before that Wurdle, which is a _ridiculously_ popular puzzle title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> At the end of the article he makes the assumption that he would sell 50K no matter what the price is, but earlier in the article states that decreasing the price can raise you in rank which can be 10X the units sold...

<comment><USER5> _Can_ raise you in the rank.

<comment><USER7> I think this is the central question though - are app store customers price sensitive at those levels? His calculations assume they are not, common "wisdom" assumes they are. Now I need to ask where is the data? The one app I have (not a game) that does any sales to speak of, but so low it probably is not statistically significant, suggest they may not be - at least going from .99 to 1.99.

<comment><USER5> Huh? He comes right out and says that you need to be .99 to break the top 50. The problem is, being .99 isn't _enough_ to get you in the top 50, and at that price point, you're betting the farm to get there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't really know anything about the app store but maybe there should be some sort of listing by rating of people that have paid for it?

It seems a bit stupid that to see more copies you need to have a high volume to crack into a best selling list.

<comment><USER9> >>It seems a bit stupid that to see more copies you need to have a high volume to crack into a best selling list.

Why do you say it is stupid ? Shouldn't a "best selling list" be created based on the definition of a "best selling list" ?

Btw rankings based on the standard "best seller" definition cannot be maniuplated the way that rankings based on "ratings" can be manipulated.

imo Apple's current ranking policy - ranking by best-seller-list and also ranking by most-revenue-earned (i.e. the top grossing list) - is good.

<comment><USER10> >>rankings based on the standard "best seller" definition cannot be maniuplated

Why not?(I don't have an iPhone, so I really don't know anything about it.) It would be fairly easy to buy your own app. A $0.99 app and 30% fee to apple, you could buy your app 300 times a week for $90. If it is really that much of a hit driven market it might be worth it. Apple would love it(cash and being able to claim the next billion sold that much faster.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why does the project have to pay back its 2 months' development costs in just an initial surge of 2 months' sales?

Sure, games are hit-driven and their sales peak early... but the iPhone/Touch platform is very young and still growing. These games will still be playable and sell in small quantities years from now, when the platform's installed base is much larger.

Maybe the only "problem" here is impatience?

<comment><USER12> Read carefully, the author explains it very well. Basically, 90% of app sales are made during first 6 weeks, which happens only and only if your app hits to top 100 (which is 99.95% less probable for an average developer). After that sales slow down to virtually zero (1-2 sales a week).

PS. Developers want to eat, support their families, pay their mortgages, etc. so patience is not an option here.

<comment><USER13> _PS. Developers want to eat, support their families, pay their mortgages, etc. so patience is not an option here._

If this is their main concern, then why are they spending their time on such a low payout time consuming endeavor? "Not enough people are buying my iPhone app fast enough for long enough" isn't something a mortgage lender or a hungry kid wants to hear.</comment></comment></comment>


Dan Povey, Developer of Kaldi, Fired from JHU - <AUTHOR> http://danielpovey.com/leaving.html <comment><USER2> I have been in similar circumstances at my university where critical servers were made inaccesible during ongoing research. So I understand Dr. Povey's frustration first-hand, but breaking into the building (and the protest) was an escalation unbeholden to a professor.

The banality of some student activist causes gets to me too and often politics do not align. However educators need to show patience and decorum.

<comment><USER3> Well, it was a building Povey ordinarily had a right to be in until protestors illegally chained all external doors shut. So, calling it "breaking in" is a sorta backward way to think about it, in my opinion. His right to be in the building was curtailed by people who did not have a right to be in the building (or at least did not have a right to exclude access).

As for the university explicitly telling him not to try to enter the building, that may be the case, but keep in mind that his personal work and career were being compromised by an illegal act that had dragged on FAR beyond reasonable accommodation (the sit-in had been ongoing a month and the chaining of doors went on over a week). Just because he was curently a Hopkins employee doesn't mean that his research was owned by Hopkins. Universities aren't like regular companies. Hopkins had a duty to him to provide safe and reasonable accommodations for his work. The grant money he obtained probably had a large payment to the university for these accommodations. Hopkins failed to uphold their end of the bargain with him by pussyfooting around blatantly dangerous and illegal activity by protestors.

What he did was imprudent, maybe even fireable. But unless the students who incited this all are also expelled (I'm pretty sure they weren't), then this would be a significant injustice against the professor due to selective enforcement of policy against some but not all Hopkins members.

Also, seeing Hopkins' sleezy firing letter makes it obvious that there is no good faith on the part of the university. You can tell by how it is written in "you admitted that we had to fire you!" style, that they grossly and intentionally mischaracterized statements he made to appease university lawyers. Dr. Povey doesn't look great, but Hopkins looks like a place where no decent person should ever hope to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this post perfectly captures white privilege. Getting fired for breaking into a university building, endangering students, then writing a blog post filling in the details about how the left is anti-white. All while he's able to land another (presumably) cushy private sector job.

<comment><USER5> Breaking into a university building with a large group of other people, obstructing publicly-funded research, and creating a dangerous environment for hundreds of others _without_ winding up in jail is an example of "protestor" privilege, for only certain values of "protestor".

Mouth-breathing children have been performing these stunts with increasing regularity and chutzpah because they know they have no skin in the game, and it is for the same reason that these "protests" are embarrassingly ineffectual. They manage to take out a few exceptionally honorable hot-heads who are unwilling to genuflect towards the idiocy, and then the hot-heads transition into a cushy tech job with twice the pay and respect.

<comment><USER6> You've been posting a ton of inflammatory and flamebait comments lately. We ban accounts that keep doing that, so would you please stop doing that?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER5> I've reviewed my most recent comments and it seems you are correct. I will reflect on this and concede my spirit may be injured.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This reminded me of the classic xkcd story of the dedicated sysadmin: [https://xkcd.com/705/](https://xkcd.com/705/)

</comment><comment><USER8> What the fuck man… Quit being so whiny and find a real occupation.

</comment><comment><USER9>
        there are many things said by American progressives
        where if you replace "white patriarchy" and "women
        of color" with "Jewish capital" and "Aryan youth",
        and add a picture of a blond boy and a swastika
        or two, you'd have a very serviceable Nazi
        propaganda poster. Think about it.

[ponders it in deep silence in the Gendo Ikari pose...]

Ok, I thought about it.

So.. progressivism is basically Nazi propaganda, and white men are being persecuted like Jews by an evil cabal of all progressives, women and people of color.

No, sorry, not buying it. The author is a bigot and a manchild.

<comment><USER10> Right.. does he really believe he is experiencing a level of persecution like being a "gay Jew in the Nazi party" for his whiteness? He doesn't know what it means to be persecuted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > I'm aware that it's a huge violation of social norms for me to say publicly > that I think whites, or males, are being discriminated against.

Probably because it's blitheringly stupid to assert something that is demonstrably not true and also staggeringly insulting to people who are actually discriminated against.

<comment><USER12> > So essentially I am being fired for what might have happened, while the > students are getting off scot free for things that actually did happen.

It was demonstrated in this exact incident.

<comment><USER10> An employee and customer get in a fight. The employee is fired but the customer is not banned. What's surprising about that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have no idea who that is. But it reads like a bad parody of an alt-right list of grievances.

Seriously: someone who thinks he can make a coherent argument invoking "gay jews joining the Nazi party" doesn't belong on any unversity's faculty.

</comment><comment><USER14> Disappointing. :(</comment>


Ask HN: (Startup School 2019) Advice for cofounders about to work on MVP? - <AUTHOR> Background: I(technical) have an idea/product that I've been looking for help with. I met a person(non-technical) in the startup school directory with a similar product/vision. We have talked and will be working together during Startup School (10 weeks) on our MVP. I want to do things the right/healthy way, so we can maximize value from working together.
Is there any advice you have for us on cofounding, or working together generally?

  Topics that come to mind are:
  - <USER2>
  - Healthy relationship if we continue working together after MVP phase
  - <USER3>
  - <USER4>
  - General early stage do's and dont's
 <comment><USER5> If you're both motivated I'm sure the communication, at least which channel, will the fine.

A simple one-page agreement helps. List what each brings into the projects (other than working hours), for example one might have a logo designed or pays for web hosting. Agree who own this in the future, and who owns what one person purchases for the company during the project, again I'm using logo design and webhosting as example. Or twitter handle. When you part ways one way or another you want to avoid a situation where one person can walk away with major parts that could hurt the project. What if one person doesn't want to share the passwort for the twitter handle? With a one-pager you'd at least have some legal standing. I've also seen one person trying to sell the project on a startup website behind the other's person back.

Try not to sign long contracts, e.g. if you can rent a service (or SaaS) monthly that's better than a year-long lock-in, even if you pay extra in the short-term. One beauty of startups compared to bigger companies is they can scale down their costs if needed.</comment>


Competitive programmers handbook - <AUTHOR> http://codeforces.com/blog/entry/50728 <comment><USER2> Thanks for this - it is very appreciated!

<comment><AUTHOR> This book does a great job by explaining step by step through code.</comment></comment>


OpenBSD: from distribution to project - <AUTHOR> http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/from-distribution-to-project

<comment><USER2> The paragraph on NetBSD gave me a good chuckle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is that a common piece of snark in the community? I know that Theo was one of the NetBSD founders, but so were the people who forced him out.

<comment><USER3> It's pretty common for both sides to occasionally slag the other, though it seems less now than say a decade ago. The bad blood goes deep.</comment></comment></comment>


Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people - <AUTHOR> https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/new-blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd7w2t2mtvfg81uhx <comment><USER2> No, the NASA officials are the ones that killed seven people. Is there audio from the presentation? If you are meeting with some group about something that is life or death, you sit your butt down and ask questions until you get the actual situation. They didn't do it for Challenger and they failed to do it for Columbia. You are in charge, the decision is yours and you are responsible.

On a side note, the whole first paragraph is just plain insulting to anyone who is making a life or death decision. If that is the attitude of anyone in the meeting, then they shouldn't have that job.

<comment><USER3> There's definitely audio from all those meetings. You can hear the mission manager plow right through the issues with bureaucratic ease. They've seen something similar before and even though it was unexplained, because they've seen it, they think it's a known issue.

You want to blame her for it and shake her out of it as you hear her say it, but it wasn't malicious. I believe the mission manager even had a spouse who was an astronaut, so it's obviously not like they don't care. I've always found it fascinating how organizational structure and pressure can take really brilliant and motivated people and beat them into making such poor decisions.

It's really important to remember that these people are not idiots. It's literally a room of rocket scientists and space shuttle mission managers. It's so easy for us all to say here that it was so easy to see it happening and that anyone who didn't ask the right question was a moron, but these structures take on a life of their own. If I had it to start all over again, studying that would make a fascinating and potentially rewarding career.

<comment><USER4> For the past two years I have worked in the local emergency room as a technician working on getting some clinical experience. Let me tell you, in the constant face of life and death, you really just develop a kind of "danger fatigue" and even the most critical moments become somewhat prosaic.

You begin to develop a false sense of security after nobody really does from a gunshot wound. Then, someone septic comes in, and "seems" fine, and they're dead in a few hours.

I'm not sure what this kind of logical fallacy is, but I suspect it's similar in a government environment, where you're constantly at RED ALERT. The risk of danger just seems overstated, even when it isn't.

<comment><USER5> A very similar phenomenon happens in aviation—we call it complacency. Thousands of successful takeoffs in a row make it hard sometimes to remember that each one is a completely independent event.

The way I fight it is by explicitly reminding myself that just because something worked yesterday, that doesn't mean I can skip a step today or let my guard down at any point.

It really does take deliberate thought though. Funny how the brain works.

(The upside is that every successful takeoff becomes a delightful surprise!)

<comment><USER6> Same thing for rock climbing, and complacency born from routine is exactly the problem: you tie knots that your life will depend on every day, thousands of times, and then stuff like this happens to some of the most skilled and experienced people:

\- get distracted while tying the rope to your harness and leave the knot unfinished, fall 20 meters from the top of the climb (Lynn Hill, by sheer luck only broke her foot and elbow)

\- use a slightly unusual rope setup and when preparing to be lowered, tie in on the wrong side of the anchor, fall 14 meters onto rock (Rannveig Aamodt, broke her spine, pelvis and ankles)

\- have your partner point out damage on your harness, shrug it off because there's plenty of safety margin, continue climbing for 3 days in a manner that puts repetitive abrasion on exactly that part of the harness, have it snap while rapelling and fall 150 meters to your death (Tood Skinner)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The slide in the article has the same text, but is a recreation of the original (The Calibri typeface used wasn't part of PowerPoint until 2007).

The original slide can be seen in the full report linked in the article:

[https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=...](https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=0001yB)

<comment><USER8> Why would someone recreate that slide instead of just using the original? Gah, that's sloppy reporting. Makes me suspect the entire story told, now that you pointed that out.

<comment><USER9> There's other sloppiness here as well, like treating the orbiter velocity as the determining factor (nine times the speed of a bullet...) when the delta-V between the foam and the orbiter is the more pertinent information.

The author comes across like they have an axe to grind (maybe rightly so) but should make better efforts at getting technical details right in an article about the perils of miscommunicating technical details

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> As much as I appreciate the sentiment and I never like to miss a chance to pile on PowerPoint, this is really, really missing the point.

As the CAIB report makes clear, the PowerPoint slide was a small symptom of the actual problem of a complex organization gradually accepting more and more risk as "in family" simply because unexplained phenomena hadn't caused serious issues before (while remaining unexplained). The CAIB report really is a masterpiece (as is Feynman's appendix to the Challenger report) of understanding how the understanding of risk can be subjugated to organizational pressures over time.

<comment><USER10> > The CAIB report really is a masterpiece (as is Feynman's appendix to the > Challenger report) of understanding how the understanding of risk can be > subjugated to organizational pressures over time.

Agreed. It is a useful document to read for anyone who plans meetings and heavily relies on consensus to see where the problems lay. You need outsiders and first principles thinkers (physicists are good options, as Feynman always demonstrates) to disrupt bureaucratic agreement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> During that final Columbia flight, I remember reading a short news story on the internet on the foam falling off. It even had a short video of the foam falling off. (Somewhat of a novelty way back in 2003.) I watched that video several times.

I remember being concerned, but confident that NASA would figure it out.

Then when I saw the headline that Columbia didn't land, I remember immediately thinking, "On no! The foam!". I also remember being puzzled that none of the news stories after the crash mentioned the foam for a long time.

I've tried to go back and find that news story, but I have never been able to find it.

<comment><USER12> This sort of thing seems to be standard in journalism. For some reason, the articles never seem to ask the obvious questions or make the obvious connections. I've always been so puzzled by this but I guess it's because there's no incentive to speculate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a rehash of the claim Edward Tufte.made about the Challenger crash, and it is doing the same thing: take something that was, at most, one of the many contributing factors (but the one of most interest to the person making the claim) and exaggerate its significance out of all proportion. It is not a helpful way to present data if the goal is to understand what went wrong in the hope of avoiding making the same mistake in future.

</comment><comment><USER14> We weren't at the briefing. Surely the briefer could have emphasized these points, rather than just relying on the slide itself to convey the seriousness of the situation. Or, the judgement of the audience to pick up that they hadn't tested for this situation.

I like Tufte as much as anyone else, but he's in the business of selling courses.

</comment><comment><USER15> The speed listed in the introduction is wildly wrong. The foam could not possibly have hit at 28968 km/h - that is the approximate orbital speed of the shuttle. At 82 seconds into flight, the speed is about 700m/s (2500 km/h).

Even using _that_ figure would assume that the foam came to a dead stop instantaneously after detaching from the tank. I wouldn't be surprised if the relative speed was only 1/10th of that, putting the speed of the collision around 250km/h, less than 1% of the figure stated in the article.

<comment><USER16> > The speed listed in the introduction is wildly wrong. The foam could not > possibly have hit at 28968 km/h

The article said "[a]s the crew rose at 28,968 kilometres per hour the piece of foam collided with one of the tiles". It did not say that it collided with the tiles at 28k km/hr, just that it collided with it during it's acceleration to that speed. So technically it's correct, but I definitely agree that it it's a false implication, likely added for dramatic effect.

<comment><USER15> In the next sentence the author also says the damage was caused by foam "hitting the wing nine times faster than a fired bullet." A bullet goes about 900m/s, and the "nine times" figure often symbolizes orbital velocity. It's clear that the reference is to the speed of the collision.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Actual slide deck. Personally I think the author of this blog is an a-hole to highlight a single slide.

[https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/2203main_COL_debris_boeing_030123.p...](https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/2203main_COL_debris_boeing_030123.pdf)

Particularly interesting is the slide titled "Damage Results From "Crater" Equations Show Significant Tile Damage"

</comment><comment><USER18> > They rejected the other options

I didn't think there were any options. Indeed the managers didn't think so.

From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster)

> Throughout the risk assessment process, senior NASA managers were influenced > by their belief that nothing could be done even if damage were detected.

However the CAIB determined Atlantis could have been used as a rescue vehicle had NASA acted quickly enough. It also put forth a high risk repair procedure:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster#Possible_emergency_procedures)

<comment><USER19> There were a number of things they could have tried. No one of the alternatives (except launching a rescue shuttle) could possibly have turned out worse than the course they chose. Instead of an Apollo-13 style "Failure is not an option" effort, Jon Harpold, then the director of Mission Operations, is reported to have said

"You know, there is nothing we can do about damage to the thermal protection system. If it has been damaged it's probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know. Don't you think it would be better for them to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done, until the air ran out?"

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/01/columbia- space...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/01/columbia-space- shuttle-anniversary-nasa)

<comment><USER20> In my life up until now, I'd always believed the best of people and doubly so of NASA. Seeing that, and knowing it's true, makes me believe that there is evil in this world. And that man is part of it. Whoever and whatever forces allowed him to get where he was with opinions like that, needlessly sacrificing the lives of seven people and being satisfied that he'd made the right decision needs to be brought to account, publicly and with no means of secrecy.

<comment><USER21> > "After showing the astronauts in orbit a video of the foam strike and > discussing with them what they thought they knew, mission managers concluded > that it was a non-issue and posed no threat to the crew's safe return.

> ...

> "Although the circumstances of the tragedy have been well documented, and > Hale insists there was "never any debate about what to tell the crew", his > revelation brings new insight to the mindset of some Nasa employees at the > time."

The crew knew.

<comment><USER19> Here is what NASA emailed to the crew about the foam strike:

\--- begin quote ---

You guys are doing a fantastic job staying on the timeline and accomplishing great science. Keep up the good work and let us know if there is anything that we can do better from an MCC/POCC standpoint.

There is one item that I would like to make you aware of for the upcoming PAO event on Blue FD 10 and for future PAO events later in the mission. This item is not even worth mentioning other than wanting to make sure that you are not surprised by it in a question from a reporter.

During ascent at approximately 80 seconds, photo analysis shows that some debris from the area of the -Y ET Bipod Attach Point came loose and subsequently impacted the orbiter left wing, in the area of transition from Chine to Main Wing, creating a shower of smaller particles. The impact appears to be totally on the lower surface and no particles are seen to traverse over the upper surface of the wing. Experts have reviewed the high speed photography and there is no concern for RCC or tile damage. We have seen this same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry.

That is all for now. It's a pleasure working with you every day.

\--- end quote ---

Now does it sound to you like the crew was fully informed, or like NASA was minimizing the issue?

[https://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/030630emails/](https://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/030630emails/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >...nine times faster than a fired bullet... I don't think so.

A NASA publication [1] gives the SOFI piece impact velocity as about 800 feet/sec. Rifle bullets reach 2.5K - 3K fps muzzle velocity routinely.

[1] [https://history.nasa.gov/columbia/Troxell/Columbia%20Web%20S...](https://history.nasa.gov/columbia/Troxell/Columbia%20Web%20Site/CAIB/CAIB%20Website/news/FOAMIM~1.PDF)

<comment><USER9> I assume the author mistakenly took the orbital velocity instead of the delta-V at impact

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Death by PowerPoint is a real thing. Sometimes literally."

So tacky. Treating human deaths as a punchline to a joke.

</comment><comment><USER24> The authors of the slide either lacked the ability to analyze problems, or lacked the ability to communicate their opinions, or were intentionally obscuring their opinions.

Which of these is the more likely explanation?

I've seen experienced engineers incapable of expressing their thoughts clearly. But I've also seen well-established organizations that encourage hiding your opinions behind a wall of bullshit.

<comment><USER17> Have you considered the possibility that in some cases it is basically forbidden from expressing opinions. These guys were tasked to conduct and summarize their studies not opine on the decision to be made, that violates separation of duties and an expressed opinion leads to questions of diligence.

<comment><USER24> Yes, that's what I meant under "intentionally obscuring their opinions" (for example because of the organizational culture, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Powerpoint was one of the problems.

A much worse problem was NASA's management stepping in to block multiple requests for imaging the orbiter.

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

</comment><comment><USER26> I heard one possible reason for underestimating the damage was due to the move of a NASA (or the contractor?) lab/facility that dealt with this kind of issues, from California to a cheaper place such as Alabama/Florida(?).

The move was done as a cost saving measure. Quite a few of the engineers chose not to relocate with the office. When the space shuttle launched and the image was being reviewed, many of the experienced engineers (who could possibly have predicted it correctly) were no long with the team.

I remember reading above bit years ago while reading about the incident.

</comment><comment><USER27> Kinda weird to even hint that the tool used to communicate would be the cause of the disaster. The same words could have been written in LaTeX and presented with a PostScript viewer running in Linux.

<comment><USER28> They very much could. In terms of language, the whole slide deck in question is essentially a scientific paper in PPT form, and scientific papers tend to be typically written in LaTeX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> "there is a huge amount of text, more than 100 words"

"PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers"

Would technical papers have fewer than 100 words?

If people can't be bothered to read 13 slides, what would they do with a technical paper?

If people can't be bothered to make their message clear in slides, how would they create a readable technical paper?

I don't like presentations that consist of "monotonously reading [bullets] as we read along" either. But what does PowerPoint have to do with this? I've seen such presentations done with trendy web tools instead; they don't change anything. I've also read full technical papers written in LaTeX that didn't manage to get their point through the unclear writing (and vaguely misused technical jargon buzzwords).

<comment><USER16> > If people can't be bothered to make their message clear in slides, how would > they create a readable technical paper?

Slides are not the same as or replacements for technical papers. Even by comparing them, you're making the same mistake as these engineers did. Compared to a paper, the downsides of a presentation are that they are typically constrained to just 30-60 minutes, in front of a group of people who may be checking their phones and only be half-engaged. Also, by its very nature, the presenter is speaking, so it's difficult to simultaneously read the slides while listen to the presenter.

The upside of a presentation however, is that you can give it to many people at once, and solicit feedback in real-time.

Accordingly, presentations like this need to be far tighter than technical papers. There needs to be much more work invested in prioritizing the issues that you discuss, they should take advantage of the advantages of the form (e.g., utilizing the skills of the audience), and minimize the disadvantages (short time-frame, and no monopoly on attention).

As a starter, you should never put a single word on a slide that you do not say out-loud. There's nothing worse than putting a block of text on a screen and talking about it. The astute audience members will listen to you while reading the text, and in the process not internalizing either. Most audience members will just have their eyes glaze over and then check their phones.

Sadly, engineers are often taught how to write technical papers, but not how to give effective technical presentations.

<comment><USER29> > you're making the same mistake

I assume you mean the "generic you", as it was the article quoting the NASA report that suggested the comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am not sure if the author and commenters here are specifically condemning Microsoft Powerpoint, or just computerized slide presentations, of which Powerpoint is by far the most common type. Because even if everyone used Apple's "Slides" tool, they could still make a lot of the same mistakes. Even if they drew things out on clear plastic sheets, they could still make the same mistakes.

So is it really Powerpoint specifically? Maybe. I'm open to that possibility. But I'm more sympathetic to the idea that Powerpoint has enabled many more people incapable of creating quality presentations to deliver them anyway.

<comment><USER31> No, this article is not a criticism of PowerPoint specifically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Tufte makes a good point that the critical information could have been conveyed so much more effectively.

If only the managers had been given a better summary! But I think this is a vast over-simplification.

Even with a crystal-clear summary of the issues, it doesn't always add up to a clear disaster on your hands. Only in hindsight. The shuttle was an incredibly complex system and there were always issues to examine, to fix, to prioritize, to defer. There is just a lot to regularly weigh.

</comment><comment><USER33> I seem to remember it differently, what killed seven people was senior management choosing to ignore warnings about ice debris strikes on the wing during launches. On this one, they know ice had struck the wing, they choose not to have ground placed telescopes survey the shuttle, choose to not have the crew do an EVA and choose not have have a rescue shuttle sent up. The title has a nice ring to it all the same.

</comment><comment> what-the-grump Not the person that made the powerpoint? Not the team that reviewed it? Was this done by an 10 man team in some tiny start up? I mean seriously.

<comment><USER34> Exactly. This article is like one of those BusinessInsider click-baits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Ironic, the woman responsible for the catastrophe: "...rather than spending the day just listening to keynotes..." [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2Pruxom9-8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2Pruxom9-8)

</comment><comment><USER36> > _" It was impossible to tell how much damage this foam had caused hitting > the wing nine times faster than a fired bullet."_

This figure is GROSSLY inaccurate.

From: [https://history.nasa.gov/columbia/Troxell/Columbia%20Web%20S...](https://history.nasa.gov/columbia/Troxell/Columbia%20Web%20Site/CAIB/CAIB%20Website/news/FOAMIM~1.PDF)

> _Eighty-two seconds into STS 107, a sizeable piece of debris struck the left > wing of the Columbia. Visual evidence and other sensor data established that > the debris came from the bipod ramp area and impacted the wing on the wing > leading edge. At this time Columbia was traveling at a speed of about 2300 > feet /second (fps) through an altitude of about 65,900 feet. Based on a > combination of image analysis and advanced computational methods, the Board > determined that a foam projectile with a total weight of 1.67 lb and impact > velocity of 775 fps would best represent the debris strike._

So somewhere between 775fps and 2300 fps. For reference, slow and heavy 45 ACP bullets start at around 800fps and up. 7.62x39mm (AK-47) bullets are in the neighborhood of 2300fps. The shuttle was moving as fast as a moderately fast rifle bullet, and the foam likely hit at much less than that; something probably a bit under a subsonic pistol bullet.

The author is incorrectly assuming that the foam hit the shuttle at orbital velocity, which obviously couldn't be the case because the shuttle was _nowhere even close_ to orbital velocity at the time.

</comment><comment><USER37> So do they still use PowerPoint like this?

</comment><comment><USER38> I thought this was going to be a more direct kill, as in maybe a slide that flashed bright colors very quickly and killed people who got seizures from it.

</comment><comment><USER39> TLDR; Engineers had found that there was risk of foam detachment, NASA managers thought that risk was not flagged significant to halt the mission.

In retrospect, it's easy to blame decision makers but here's the thing: If I told you that risk of you dying is 1 in 103 if you drive the car today, would you still drive? Relatively risk of fatal accident in Space Shuttle program was 1 in 62.

</comment><comment><USER40> What a surprise that it was from Boeing. I don't like them at all.</comment>


My Android development income report - <AUTHOR> http://www.kreci.net/reports/android-developer-income-report/ <comment><USER2> I think you are the person who has achieved the most here on hacker news. You lack the ego of a lot of the people who are constantly writing advice articles on how to run a startup (where they don't even have a startup). And you started with small doable things, and worked your way up to a pretty high income (for where you live).

The courage to go through this, and the lack of ego in selecting the products is quite inspiring for me. I think people like you should be our real heros, not the people who constantly write comments for upvotes and write fluffy articles about startups.

Like I always say: making money on the internet is not hard! If you want to make money on the net, there are many many ways to do so. But most people are out there trying to do stuff that will impress hacker news users. Just keep your mouth shut, make money and forget about all the critics here.

There are many, many people who really just care about being lauded by their peers. These are people that are trying to insert themselves into a startupy group of people. They are more interested in the social than in the money. The ones interested in the money are not writing idle comments about various unimportant stuff.

Kreci is doing it right. He has found ways to make money, he keeps finding new ways and every month his income keeps growing. Is that not what this game is all about?

<comment><USER3> Kreci is doing something right, but I don't think 'cracked screens', 'fake x-ray scanners', 'beauty tips' or 'nuclear buttons' are pushing the envelope on android development in ways that matter. All of them are clear rip-offs (or should I say re-implementations) of similar (useless) apps for the iphone.

I'd put the bar a bit higher and say, ok, you've found the way, now make something really impressive instead of a series of knock-offs of 0 utility apps.

The virtual drums and the wp stats apps are more like it.

<comment><USER4> Some HN users motivation for side projects is to impress other HN users, "make something really impressive". Others are trying to make money and this is how Kreci succeeded (a la Notch).

<comment><USER3> Let me reword that to 'useful' instead of impressive.

<comment><USER2> Who defines what is 'useful'? I have a cousin, he sits at home all day, watching TV. When he buys apps, he does not want or care for things like 'currency bot'. Why would he care about that, he never needs to convert currency. But if he sees something like the x-ray stuff, he'd be quite entertained by it.

For him, it's much more useful than a VIM clone for android. Your definition of useful is not the same as most of the worlds definition.

<comment><USER5> _use·ful

1\. being of use or service; serving some purpose; advantageous, helpful, or of good effect: a useful member of society.

2\. of practical use, as for doing work; producing material results; supplying common needs: the useful arts; useful work._

Seems to me that his definition is spot on.

<comment><USER6> The point maxklein was making is that these apps are useful to someone, otherwise, kreci wouldn't be making money from them.

Just because we don't deem them useful here doesn't mean there aren't people who do find them useful.

<comment><USER7> > _... these apps are useful to someone, otherwise, kreci wouldn't be making > money from them._

this logic only works out if you approach things myopically.

do you think drug dealers provide a useful commodity? they're certainly making a lot of money.

the apps described take advantage of some neurological disposition to gimmicks / novelty - it's not a given that the world is a better place because of them.

<comment><USER6> I guess you're calling capitalism myopic. I don't necessarily disagree with you, but that's the framework we've set up.

(And yes, I do think drug dealers provide value. It's a service, people want it. In any other context, we'd be writing articles about how a perceptive entrepreneur rose up from a simple upbringing to rolling in cash, it's just that we look down upon the product.)

There's a pretty decent sibling of mine who's dead. You may want to turn showdead on temporarily.

<comment><USER7> yes, capitalism is myopic and you can justify many myopic conclusions by limiting yourself to its framework.

> _... it's just that we look down upon the product._

that's an amusing misdirection. it's actually more about the lives ruined and suffering experienced by way of the product.

> _What is your definition of wealth? Paul Graham says, and I tend to agree > with him, that wealth is "things people want". If people want these apps (or > drugs), then the apps (and drugs) create wealth._

wealth is control over other people. having lots of money in a capitalist system is a proxy for being able to control lots of other people in this system.

taking advantage of neurological hooks (chemical in the case of drugs, or sensual in the case of advertising / apps / etc) is certainly one way to gain controller over others (by the proxy of money).

i suppose if your concerns are entirely contained within the bounds of playing that game (very much the case for many entrepreneurial types) there's no motivation to challenge its definition of "value".

<comment><USER6> > it's actually more about the lives ruined and suffering experienced by way > of the product.

This is an 'amusing misdirection,' to use your own words, about you forcing your own morality on others. There are plenty of people that use drugs without ruining their lives, no need to get high and mighty about it.

> wealth is control over other people.

Hey man, I'm an anarchist. I understand exactly what you're saying. But regardless of my own personal thoughts on the subject, that's not the way that this country is set up.

As I said over here[1], it's just that we're talking about two different things. Within capitalism, kreci is creating value. If you'd like to discuss a different system, then you need to tell everyone that you're talking about something else. When on a forum about startups, I assume people are discussing the current system by default.

1: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1882865>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These are great numbers!

I'm not going to get into blowing smoke up your ass or tell you that you should be saving the world. Remember, there are three types of apps: useful, popular, and money-making. Unless you are independently wealthy, #3 is a must- have: the others are optional.

Now -- take what you've learned with these apps and figure out where the next level is.

On a side note, I've found that the best projects to launch are projects that turn other programmers off -- much less likely to have competition there and much more likely to find a need to fill. "Programmers don't like it" is quickly moving up my list of tags for a successful startup. It's probably around #4 or so now.

Totally awesome. Very well done.

<comment><USER9> That's an interesting tip about what turns programmers off. I've been operating under a similar motto, if it's hard to do, keep doing it.

My best apps in the Market do some stuff that takes a lot of work and talent to complete, and those are the things that have the least amount of competition and make the most money.

There are developers looking to make a business of the Android Market, and there are some that just want a quick buck. Do something hard to avoid the quick-buckers in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems like kreci just discovered a new way of making money: 1\. find some easy to implement iPhone app 2\. rewrite it to Android 3\. profit!

<comment><USER11> Many of these apps were ported _to_ the iPhone on the basis of previous success on dumbphones. I don't know what it's like in the US, but these were a big business in Europe. Jamba/Jamster was a big name and their adverts on music television have been bugging me for years:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The most interesting part of the post for me was that how these totally non- useful apps had a lot of downloads and how the only meaningul one had a fraction of the others. (OK, one can say that the virtual drum is also a meaningful one.) I mean no offense at all, as (unlike with the post from a few days ago with the 4-hour work-week iphone guys) these apps are free and of course anyone is free to sell or buy anything.

However it tells a lot about this market. I mean the newly found smart phone market. People run to buy and download totally meaningless apps most of which could have been done (and probably has been done) on other smart phone platforms (or plain j2me) at least 5 years ago. But this is just a small market disturbance, now as iphone opened the eyes of a lot of people that these gadgets are not merely (or mainly...) phones they download every stupid app. But this will go away soon.

</comment><comment><USER13> How did you get users? Did you do any promotion or marketing? Or did you just upload to the android market with a 'build it and they will come' attitude?

<comment><AUTHOR> If app is good (funny or useful) people will come. As I have been experimenting most of online promotion is not worth efforts/time or money that it may cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's interesting that WP Stats is the least popular app. Even simple Big Red Button ("Don't push this button" app) beats it!

Actually it's a bit sad to see that market is more favorable to some "cool" simple apps rather to useful, but more complex.

</comment><comment><USER15> Kreci, you used to do monthly income reports. It looks like you're not doing those anymore? I'm probably not alone in being curious how your photography and other streams are doing lately. Thanks for the interesting Android report!

<comment><AUTHOR> I will make a total income report next month - stay tuned ;)

<comment><USER16> Wait, so this was Android-only money? I thought this was total income.

<comment><AUTHOR> As the title say it was my Android Income report ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just as a point of reference from the iOS world. My free apps have < 80K downloads total but last month I generated 4K from ads. You really can't beat the eCPMs from iAds. Android is a great platform, but the app market really is miles behind iOS. Rampant piracy, poor app market organization, and difficulty for most users to purchase paid apps means that if you want to actually make a living developing apps, iOS should still be far and away the #1 choice imo.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Comments welcome and very desired =)

</comment><comment><USER13> What do you use to sell ads?

<comment><USER18> I'm curious on this too. I wasn't even aware it was possible to implement ads into an Android app. How would views be tracked? Is it a pay-per-click system? Passing just over $1k for October is impressive in such a small (but rapidly growing) mobile market.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Ads are paid per click. I just implement a library provided by a paying company and it loads banners from their servers.

<comment><USER19> That ad network could have used all this publicity to get more customers, if you would just share that information.

But I understand it is totally your call.

<comment><USER20> Just downloaded Virtual Drums, and he uses AdMob, according to the ads themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nicely done. I recently released my first app in the app store, EasySal Calculator. As I live in America, I uploaded both a paid (adfree) version and a free (with ads) version. I noticed that my free version makes more money as well.

I like to hear stories like these. I have been gaining a strong interest in Android Development and these stories make me think that maybe I can be semi- successful at it as well. I don't expect to make loads of cash, not even close to what you're making, but even a little bit makes me feel good.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is it a good model that all the money is actually coming from ads?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not able to sell via Android Market as I am not allowed to do it by Google (developers from Poland still can not sell their apps...).

<comment><USER23> Would it be possible to form a US corporation, of which you are the sole employee/contractor in order to sell in the app store?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it would be possible but this is not my current business model anyway. Apps I make may do much more as free with ads in it (I do not consider changing it until google add my country to the list...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This just goes to show how worthless mobile ads are. Eventually advertisers are not going to want to pay for the presumably pitiful conversion rate.

<comment><USER25> How does it show that?

<comment><USER24> They paid $1000 to put their ad on a cracked screen?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What do you mean by updating apps? Do you have to make minor changes every few days to make sure it's at the top of a list somewhere?

<comment><USER27> Apps in the Market will naturally get more attention after they've been updated and appear in the "Just in" lists. So yes, it's a crude way of bumping the app a bit.

<comment><USER28> This used to happen on the Apple app store as well, but they stopped it to prevent spurious updates. It was getting out of control. Expect to see this happen in the google marketplace as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Good article, it is good to show that there are lots of indie devs that earn money with Android.

We started last year with Android, and we are making around $2000/month (1M downloads in total) with really simple applications. The majority of the revenue comes from ads, but more and more paid apps revenue is higher!

</comment><comment><USER30> I'd be interested in the difference in CPM for something like this in comparison to similar download stats for the iphone. My hunch based on figures we have seen on here from time to time that similar numbers would monetize better on the iphone.

<comment><USER31> What makes the biggest difference on the iPhone is the sheer number of downloads. There are more iOS users, and each user uses a lot more apps.

So an app that gets 200,000 downloads on Android, might get 2,000,000 downloads on iPhone. (These numbers are roughly based on actual figures for my apps, like Brain Tuner [a simple game I created], which are available on both iOS and Android.)

Even if the CPM stays the same, revenue would be 10x because there are about 10x the impressions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It would be interesting to see how your profits may differ if you were able to sell the apps on the Android Marketplace (without ads). I've been leery about trying ad-based monetization, but it looks like it is working fairly well for you.

</comment><comment><USER33> You wrote the "Cracked Screen App". I installed it and love it... it is so realistic. Haven't really had to install it and I didn't notice any ads in it - oh wait... that's probably because I have an adblocker installed on my phone.

</comment><comment><USER34> i wish he will earn more money doing this way. there is a news here about Quoc Bui and Mike Moon from thefreeapps.com who did earn 80k/month by ads from their iphone apps. i hope android apps will yield the same.

Thanks Kreci, you inspire me

</comment><comment><USER35> Nice to see some numbers, but those seem to be more "fluffy" apps (I mean, really it doesn't enable you to see xray does it?).

Apps that have some greater utility might be more popular.

<comment><AUTHOR> This apps are made to entertainment and what I have discovered from my experience this kind of apps is most popular.

<comment><USER35> Okay, then that makes sense.

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Did you evaluate different ad networks and which performed best?

<comment><AUTHOR> I stay with one ad network that I am 100% sure about making their payment in time and without cheating on clicks and payments...

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> how do you serve ads on "cracked screen"?

also, i'd love to see an ad implementation that would ask "Did you clicked the ad on purpose? YES NO" before opening the browser. ha!

</comment><comment><USER38> This is good news. Even with simple apps that aren't games he's making a decent amount of money off ads alone.

Too bad he didn't mention what ad network he's using. I'm getting ready to launch my game/app (<http://developingthedream.blogspot.com/>) in the next few months and I'm going into it with no expectations.

Good to hear i may gain a bit of extra cash from this project. I'm using mobclix and it was really easy to integrate into my app. However, I don't like that the view doesn't auto resize or fill the parent.

<comment><USER39> I've downloaded the crack screen app and he's using adMob on that one.</comment></comment>


PyPy v7.0.0: triple release of 2.7, 3.5 and 3.6-alpha - <AUTHOR> https://morepypy.blogspot.com/2019/02/pypy-v700-triple-release-of-27-35-and.html <comment><USER3> Great news, will have to give it a spin. A few of the Python 3.6 features were holding us back from deploying PyPy.

<comment><USER4> How's pypy with numpy these days? It's been a while since I had a look and last time it was the big limiting factor for me

<comment><USER5> numpy works on pypy these days. You have to install it via pip and it does not have wheels, so it takes a few minutes to install, otherwise works. The numpy- heavy workloads will not be sped up by pypy, but depending on what you are exactly doing your python program might be faster in other parts.

We are actively trying to secure funding and goals to make numpy fast, now that it works and we are working together with numpy community to make sure it stays working.

<comment><USER6> Do you have a donate link ? Would love to contribute.

Usually your donate links are mentioned on your blogspot and more than one person has told me that they are not sure this blogspot is authentic.

Do look into having a single static website with a blog - using something like Pelican ([http://www.pelicanthemes.com](http://www.pelicanthemes.com))

<comment><USER7> Why does it matter if this blogspot is authentic? The "Donation page" link is to [http://pypy.org/py3donate.html](http://pypy.org/py3donate.html) which is hosted under pypy.org.

The blog could be written by Trafalmadorian trolls, and it wouldn't matter - so long as you trusted that "pypy.org" was part of the PyPy project and that its connection to PayPal was valid.

I don't think your last comment is relevant. What I think you are saying is that the blog should be hosted under pypy.org and not blogspot. It could be WordPress or any other system.

It couldn't easily be Pelican because the blog supports comments, which means integrating with some other commenting system - plus authentication and spam detection. Why not get rid of the hassle of manually adding files and rebuilding the server and just use blogspot?

Lastly, are you really saying that people aren't donating to PyPy because some supportive blog site somewhere else, run by who knows who, isn't hosted on pypy.org?

<comment><USER6> yeah - because people dont go to the homepage. what gets tweeted out is this blogspot page (including here on HN). So people check out the nice blog post and see a donate link on the left of [https://morepypy.blogspot.com/](https://morepypy.blogspot.com/) and then go ...hmm, looks shady.

Not many read the blog post, then go to Google, search for pypy and then click the link and then donate.

Fundraising is not an easy process - there is an aspect of sales here. Blogspot may be easy.. but its not good branding. And that was my point - <USER2> I want them to succeed.

<comment><USER7> Please explain how it looks shady, because I don't understand it.

If I start a blog - completely independent of PyPy - which promotes PyPy and describes the development efforts, and I want to encourage people to support the PyPy project, then I might link to the PyPy donation page, yes?

Yet, because I'm not affiliated with the project, I can't put the blog under pypy.org.

Would my blog also be shady? If so, doesn't that mean that no one should promote donating to a project unless that promotion is done under the project's domain?

You write "Not many read the blog post, then go to Google, search for pypy and then click the link and then donate."

That would be true even if the blog post were hosted under pypy.org. That is, why would _anyone_ donate after reading one blog post?

I would think that more people would donate after they download PyPy, try it out, and see that it's worthwhile enough to fund.

In that case, they've already found out how to get PyPy, so there's no need to "Google, search for pypy" because they've already done that.

Nor is PyPy unusual in this respect. It's hard to find projects which have both a blog and a donate page. Of the 50 so projects I looked at, the following are "shady" according to your definition:

\- the PSF blog (hosted on blogspot) links to the python.org page for donations, eg, [https://pyfound.blogspot.com/search?q=donate](https://pyfound.blogspot.com/search?q=donate) .

\- The Thunderbird blog has a posting like [https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2018/08/whats-new-in- th...](https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2018/08/whats-new-in- thunderbird-60/) linking to [https://donate.mozilla.org/thunderbird/](https://donate.mozilla.org/thunderbird/) while the main Thunderbird page is at [https://www.thunderbird.net/en- US/](https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/)

while:

\- Orange, with a blog at [https://blog.biolab.si/](https://blog.biolab.si/) is a sibling subdomain to the main project site at [https://orange.biolab.si/](https://orange.biolab.si/) , making it ... semi- shady? I mean, how are we to know that "biolab.si" is not some sort of large ISP where any of their customers can make a subdomain?

I did find a two places where the "donate" and "blog" pages were hosted on the same domain: [http://rssbandit.org/](http://rssbandit.org/) (which links to a SourceForce page which redirects to PayPal) and [http://sagerss.com/](http://sagerss.com/) .

To summarize, I don't see why it's shady, your view seems to mean that no one should promote donating to a project except for the project itself, static site generation tools don't seem to be a good fit for blog support, and it doesn't seem like the effort to change to a single domain would have a worthwhile effect on improving the donation rate.

<comment><USER6> your examples are weird - and ill try to explain if i wasnt able to. I'm not saying that the blog is bad and you are explaining why the blog is good.

I'm saying it is hosted on blogspot and there is another main site which is a pypy.org . People dont think the way you do. Try it out - ask 10 people if they would open this blogspot page and ever click on the donate link. Pypy's blog is not shady - blogspot as a free hosting service is shady.

your examples of mozilla, etc blogs are super orthogonal - they are hosted on an authoritative domain. Again, I'm repeating - it has nothing to do with pypy. Its about blogspot.

You are again attacking my suggestion of static site - the reason i suggested that was because it was a python based site generator with a CMS. you can try to do a wix site or whatever. As long as its an authoritative domain.

Its not about me - its how people thing. You should go and check.

<comment><USER7> Now you, "ask 10 people if they would open [the pypy.org] page and ever click on the donate link".

I think the answer is "very unlikely", which is why I don't think your example is a useful diagnostic.

I also don't think "authoritative domain" is meaningful. What does it mean to be "authoritative" and how do people tell if a domain is authoritative?

I gave the examples of blog.biolab.si and orange.biolab.si - is "biolab.si" authoritative enough to know that both subdomains are part of the same project, if pointed to blog.biolab.si ?

Let's stay in the same top-level domain. Is github.com authoritative? What about gitlab.com? If so, what does that mean? That we can trust paths under that domain to be part of the project?

I note that [https://github.com/donate](https://github.com/donate) and [https://gitlab.com/donate](https://gitlab.com/donate) both exist, but neither are ways to donate to the respective projects. So the answer is clearly "no".

Indeed, it looks like someone could set up [https://gitlab.com/gitlab_blog](https://gitlab.com/gitlab_blog) as a place to describe GitLab development, and set up [https://gitlab.com/donate](https://gitlab.com/donate) as a way to donate, and yet have nothing to do with GitLab.

So if someone read a blog post under gitlab.com/gitlab_blog/, then they _still_ can't trust the donate link but must instead, as you wrote earlier "go to Google, search for [gitlab] and then click the link and then donate" .. though neither takes donations on their home page.

How is the PyPy situation any worse by not hosting the blog on a non- authoritative URL?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> PyPy is fantastic. I'm my option, if they achieve to be faster than CPython in all scenarios( I'm thinking in Numpy/Scikit/Pandas CPython C API abuse), and get full Windows support (they do not support multiprocess in Windows), they WILL be the preferred Python Runtime.

Congratulations PyPy team for the great release!

<comment><USER9> I doubt they'll ever get even as fast as CPython for CPython API usage. What allows PyPy to run Python code fast is the same thing that makes the CPython API slow: The two implementations look nothing alike on the inside. The API is too leaky an abstraction to implement efficiently on anything but CPython.

<comment><USER5> While I agree with you, pypy already runs cffi fast and we are thinking how to run cython fast. That would cover a large subset of using C API I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> fake-name Awesome. And they're _finally_ pushing pypy3 in their Ubuntu PPA too ([https://launchpad.net/~pypy/+archive/ubuntu/ppa](https://launchpad.net/~pypy/+archive/ubuntu/ppa))!

I use pypy3 pretty heavily in some personal projects, and the install process has always been extremely annoying. This is great!

\</comment><comment>

I wish they'd set up a CI-build PPA (or _any_ install process that's not just "wget binary").

I actually looked at setting up my own ppa at one point, but it's apparently involved enough that I didn't have time.

</comment><comment><USER10> If I was PyPy, I'd have dropped all 2.x effort and focused on Python 3.8 compatibility.

<comment><USER11> Actually, there's been quite some speculation that PyPy could inherit the 2.x crown when CPython expires its support for 2.x (1 Jan 2020). PyPy is probably the best non-CPython Python 2.7 implementation, so it's a natural fit to some degree. I suppose it's all dependent on where the PyPy team wants to spend its time and whether or not someone might fund them for this effort (Canonical, RH, etc).

I don't know that they have the will to bug-for-bug reproduce CPython but the C API emulation layer added within the last few years probably means that it will be really high fidelity.

<comment><USER10> Well, this whole Python 2 & 3 is a huge fiasco. Supporting 2.x keeps the circus forever on.

<comment><USER12> Reinventing the wheel keeps the circus going forever. As long as python 2 is supported I don't have to touch any of the scripts I have to "maintain". The moment I am forced to migrate everything to Python 4 (they broke everything already, why not again) I will have to deal with a huge amount of pointless busywork just trying to restore functionality.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, this is how to world moves forward - otherwise, we'd all be still watching VHS movies. Plus, there's this lovely tool called 2to3.

<comment><USER12> Funnily I can still watch VHS movies on a relatively new TV. Just had to plug in the VHS recorder and play, meanwhile the description of 2to3 makes it look like a plug and pray.

I mean really? A script that might mention some cases it can't fix as warnings. "optional" fixes that replace missing classes with incompatible replacements, giving you the "choice" of fixing the mess by hand. Also an apparently unstable API for your own fixes, doubling down on breaking your code while you try to fix your broken code has to be dedication.

> Note The lib2to3 API should be considered unstable and may change > drastically in the future.

<comment><USER10> Well, 2to3 works surprisingly well and I've converted tons of projects with it. Most major Python projects support both 2 and 3, so, private codebases, which "just work", should stay on the "just working" old versions of the interpreter instead of insisting maintainers to waste time entertaining their laziness, because things that "just work" don't require ANY updates, right?

<comment><USER12> I am happy as long as I can plug-in old versions of the interpreter in a system 10 years from now as easily as I could plug-in my VHS recorder into the TV. Might be able to do that if I install a windows version of python on Wine, there is a good chance (~100%) that the dependencies of python on Linux will not remain compatible that long.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, but dependencies are another story. So, my point is, if something "just works" and you don't want to have to upgrade, you need to freeze the entire system with all dependencies, which includes hardware, OS, etc. Everything else is just an illusion.

I sill have people using my Win16-based software written using Borland Pascal with Objects I wrote 30 years ago. They keep changing power supplies, etc. of an old system, but recently they had some major hardware problem and asked me to help them. I couldn't and wouldn't.

They ended up somebody creating a VM from their hard drive, and they are happy now and can back up that image and keep the circus going on forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What's the word on 3.7 support?

<comment><USER5> 3.7 (or maybe even 3.8) support will start as soon as we can have a "final" 3.6 - which might be couple months from now. I think 3.7 won't be done in 2019, unless some magic source of funding pops up.

<comment><USER14> how isn't Google or Dropbox or Instagram not completely funding you

<comment><USER5> The main way big corpos are sponsoring os is hiring the developers typically. That comes with a whole lot of things that some people don't want to deal with, like changing your place of residence

<comment><USER15> Zurich or Munich shouldn't be too bad, isn't it?

<comment><USER16> Why not Cape Town?

<comment><USER15> I doubt that they allow you to work on a VM there. I saw only marketing and content jobs there. In Munich or Zurich they do have VM teams. Maciej is from Warsaw, he could do surfing in Munich. Armin Rigo is in Switzerland.

<comment><USER5> I live in Cape Town where I can do surfing a bit better than in Munich ;-)

<comment><USER15> Sure, also much cheaper. But Munich has no sharks, and the wave is much easier to catch, and it's easier to train 360's :) The Zurich wave is not that good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anyone know if puppy works with deep learning libraries like pytorch/tensorflow, or if there are plans to do so? Not looking for numerical speed ups, but for speed ups in preprocessing code

</comment><comment> man-and-laptop I don't have a suitable workload with me right now. Has anyone tested the performance of PyPy3 vs PyPy2? Last time I tested it on a problem, PyPy2 was significantly faster (at least x3). That was maybe one or two years ago, when it was in beta.

<comment><USER18> As usual it depends. But pypy3.5-6.0.0 is fast enough for me that I now prefer it over pypy2.7-6.0.0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anyone using pypy in production? If so, what are your experiences like?

<comment><USER9> The place where I work uses it for back-end report generation. In my experience, PyPy's claimed speed benefits are very realistic. For most of our code, we get about a 3x speedup. For some areas of code, we get up to a 7x speedup. The only compatibility issues we've run into stemmed from mistakes on our part (e.g. all dicts are effectively OrderedDicts in PyPy, but your code will break in CPython if you rely on that implementation detail).

As a side note, for some reason, it's terrible for pytest — your tests will take literally 100x as long. If you trust PyPy's compatibility, I'd recommend running your tests with CPython even if you run PyPy in production.

<comment><USER20> > all dicts are effectively OrderedDicts in PyPy, but your code will break in > CPython if you rely on that implementation detail

Actually since CPython 3.6 (or maybe it's 3.5?) the same is true in CPython too, though I'd personally still advocate specifying OrderedDict if you particularly require that property anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wish PySide (and/or PySide2) would work with PyPy. It looks like (after a cursory search) some version of Gtk can be used but I prefer Qt over Gtk.

<comment><USER22> For gtk, gstreamer etc. PyGObject should just work. It has PyPy as part of its CI pipeline. Also in combination with matplotlib (GTK3Cairo backend) and numpy.

Not sure about PySide2..

<comment><USER21> Thanks, but I mentioned I don't want to use Gtk. I've not had a particularly joyous time with Gtk in the past and therefore chose Qt as my GUI platform of choice over Gtk.

Therefore until and unless PyPy has usable Qt bindings (e.g. PySide or PyQt), then unfortunately I need to stick with CPython :/

<comment><USER22> Yeah, sorry. It shows at least that it's possible with the current PyPy C API layer to have GUI bindings working.

Here is the only PyPy related issue I found for PySide2: [https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/PYSIDE-535](https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/PYSIDE-535)

PyQt doesn't have a bug tracker ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Cool. Does anybody have an idea How Django or Flask web app can be benefited from overall performance perspective ?

</comment><comment><USER24> I personally think that Rust port of CPython has the bigger potential than PyPy.

<comment><USER25> Why? Isn't the clever bit the JIT, rather than the implementation language?</comment></comment>