Help wanted: Google hiring in 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/help-wanted-google-hiring-in-2011.html <comment><USER2> They called me, made me endure multiple long phone interviews and it all ended up with a 1 line rejection email 1 month after the last interview. Some of the interviewers were ugly and just trying to find a weak spot in my memory of obscure acronym names.

They contacted me again the following year and I asked never to be contacted by Google HR anymore. They are unprofessional and almost disrespectful. And for jobs paying below industry average. Don't waste your time.

<comment><USER3> The rejection without rationale is frustrating. I understand it is common procedure in the US, but it isn't in most other countries.

<comment><USER4> It's common because the legal environment around hiring is so fraught. It's not merely a cultural habit; there's significant money at stake.

<comment><USER3> I was not saying it was not required - I am sure there is a good reason (although there are big companies which do give feedback). But when you are in European or Asian market, where it is not common, it is a disadvantage for the company.

It first gives a bad impression if you are rejected, and maybe even worse, since you don't know why you are rejected, you don't know whether you should try reapply later, etc... so they loose a few good potentials I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "There's something at Google for everyone"

...except for the 99% of applicants they reject.

<comment> brown9-2 As someone who didn't make the cut, seeing blog posts like this or job postings from them pop up on my RSS reader _really_ stings.

<comment><USER6> Use the rejection as motivation. Go build something that Google will want and have them buy you out. You get to become an employee and they end up paying you way more for the privilege of hiring you.

I look at a place like Google the same way I looked at grad school. A place to go where you can hopefully meet a co-founder :)

<comment><USER7> Even better: go build something that Google will want, then reject their buyout offer and build a profitable company. Best revenge ever.

<comment><USER8> And then grow to be bigger than Google, buy Google, then fire the people who rejected you.

<comment><USER9> And then achieve enlightenment and overcome petty grievances, hire back the people who rejected you, and have a big ol' group hug with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I setup a poll to see how many of you won't ever apply to Google simply because you don't think you have a snowball's chance.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2140822>

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been chasing internships and jobs at Google on and off for the past two years or so. I'm still in college, and I met a recruiter for SREs at a conference. After talking to her on the phone, I decided it wasn't worth the stress, and called off any further interviews. I suck at interviewing (I get nervous pretty easily), so I've tried to do various things on the side where the pressure isn't so high (competitions, side projects, etc.) but companies still don't seem to care. So I think I'd be happiest working for myself, on something that I'm passionate about :)

<comment><USER12> Why not just try to get better at interviewing? Although working for yourself is great, many of the skills you use in an interview will serve you well in other areas of life.

<comment><USER11> I'd like to, but I feel like I've exhausted my options. I've interviewed all over the place, and I'm generally a nice guy and I think I'm pretty smart, but people seem to never want to hire me, I dunno why.

I forgot to add this: the most recent interview that was discouraging was with a large travel-related company. A recruiter reached out to me (so, I didn't even apply), gave me a few questions to complete that I spent hours on. I worked super hard, typeset it in LaTeX, and figured it was way beyond what they normally receive from candidates. The recruiter even told me they were very impressed. I went in to interview, chatted with some engineers (and I even taught the second guy a few things, like the rename command), and never heard back. I emailed the recruiter and asked why. The recruiter said that the team simply needed to hire a senior candidate. I felt stupid for wasting my time.

Something similar happened with Jane Street; they wanted solutions to questions in OCaml. I spent a long time on the problems, submitted them in Scheme, Python, and OCaml, all using recursion, higher order functions, etc. After submitting the code, they turned me down.

Yelp also turned me down after I spent a long time on the problem they gave me. I did what the problem asked, including writing unit tests. It was fun to write since it was in Python, and I like Python. But again, turned down after submitting the code.

Also, I figured it wasn't a problem with the code, as I had friends who were hired by Amazon and Google review it and they said it looked fine.

These are the types of things that are making me want to stop interviewing.

What I'd like to do is become more active in the HN community, and eventually start working on projects related to studying Japanese or learning about Japan. I'm working on a small project now that will show a new Chinese character per day, because kanji-a-day.com is currently the top result in Google for "kanji of the day", and it's not nice looking.

<comment><USER13> Hey Shawn, a couple pieces of admittedly unsolicited feedback in case it's helpful. a) It'd be great to check out your website rather than a linkedin page. People want a sense of who you are as a person rather than just a resume. b) Building something (anything) will give you more credibility as a doer. c) re "First place in National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, 2010" -- Congrats! That's pretty amazing.

<comment><USER11> I always welcome feedback, thank you! I didn't realize how important a personal site is. I actually recently bought the smallest Linode available, so I'd like to get shawnps.net up soon. I've been doing schoolwork and working on the Kanji website, but I'll try to get a personal site up soon.

And thanks, my team and I worked hard at the competition. I always thought it was kind of cool that had a post about us on the White House blog. The website is down now, so here's a cached copy:

<http://tinyurl.com/5uzs5yp>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What is interesting is how entrepreneurial and "start-upy" this post is. He is basically trying to appeal to all the engineering candidates who would be qualified to work for Google and not any of the other opportunities that are available to them.

Is this part of the change in leadership-think at Google with Larry taking the reins? I know that Wall Street had a huge allergic reaction to the numbers Google had been posting in r&d/hiring/talent. And I think Google backed off for a while on all that to their detriment. Now with new leadership perhaps we will see a renewed vigor to solidify talent.

Talent, by definition, is scarce. Time will tell.

</comment><comment><USER15> I applied for a summer internship with Google between 2009-2010 (remember: Australian summer!). I ended up making it through but even for an intern there were four rounds of phone interviews. To be honest I actually enjoyed those interviews though I did spend a long time preparing for them. I also enjoyed being able to poke and prod and ask questions.

The process was grueling however and I know a large number of my highly competent friends never made it through. Some of it is due to Google having a policy of "assume the worst" in order to try and reduce the number of bad hires but I think some of them was as the interviewers were too harsh. One of them had a phone interview ended almost immediately if not getting (what to me seems like a trick) question.

"Given an infinitely long linked list which you can only traverse once select a random item with O(1) storage."

Google tried to get me as an intern again the following summer but I'd decided to instead intern at a local startup[1] that are doing well. The CEO trusts me, gives me enough power to really help the company and is showing me how a real startup works, both good and bad. It's an atmosphere that Google just doesn't have anymore.

To be honest I do miss a number of things from Google, such as the stunning internal developer tools, the academic/computer sciencey atmosphere and the amazing people but I still far prefer the startup I'm in currently. I just don't think Google registers as a startup anymore.

[1] <http://www.freelancer.com/>

<comment><USER16> If a data structure can be arbitrarily long, this implies some kind of a data structure involving a linked list to avoid wasting memory. Unfortunately, it really is a bare-bones linked list, which means that we don't know the length until we traverse it.

What would we have done if we knew the length? We could pick a random number between 1 and the length, and then traverse that many items to get to our random item. Since we don't know the length, it means the question is, how will you know where to stop?

Constant growth for storage means you start with a fixed number of slots (lets call this number X) and keep them through the process. You could put items into these X slots, such as one out of every ten that you pass. That would mean you could pick items by rolling a 10-sided dice that shows a 10, and put them into one of the slots.

A problem is that you would have to remove past randomly-selected numbers to make room for new ones, and you would be biased towards items that appear later in the series. This would not be random.

And what about a string one character long (in this case, we can pretend we had been given an array, a string, a queue, or whatever) ? What if, at the start, we always select the first item to be the random choice? That would mean that an abrupt stop would give us the correct answer for a length of one. Another interesting thing is that we can store item one into a single container, instead of needing X (where X is a constant) slots.

What about two? Well, we would compare the container with item two and decide that the random choice for the container should be either what it already contains (item one) or item two, with a 50/50 split. Great! So our algorithm works for a length of one as well as two.

This is starting to feel like we've established a base case (what happens when the list has only one item?). We may be on track to show that constantly looking at the next item and comparing it to the one in the container may just work. If so, we could have a proof by induction.

So if we were at item three where the whole list is only three items long, then a random generator would have picked it with a probability of 1/3. So if we're comparing item three to whatever is in the container, then if a 3-sided dice rolls a 1, we can set container to be item three. That works. But what about the other 2/3 chance, where it could be item one or two? In that 2/3 chance, we pick the container. The container contains only one item (the first or the second, whichever one won the first coin flip previously.) For this to be a valid idea, both item one and item two should have had a fair chance to be in the container currently with a 50/50 split, correct? And we know that it was.

So when we come to item four, we replace the container with item four with a probability of 1/4, or use the value in the container with probability of 3/4 (e.g. 1-1/4 = 3/4, or the rest of the time.) The point is that at each step, the container contains the random value of the previous n-1 number of items.

<comment><USER17> Another neat way to look at it--the probability of any given element is the probability of it being swapped in times the probability it isn't swapped out in each successive item. For A[p]:

(1/p) _((p)/(p+1))_ ((p+1)/(p+2)) ... ((n-1)/n))

e.g. the fifth element's probability in an eight-element list is

1/5 * 5/6 * 6/7 *7/8

Since the numerator of each successive term cancels out the denominator of the last, the product is always 1/n.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The post mentions _Google is still the same entrepreneurial company it was when I started, encouraging Googlers to take on big ideas and high-risk, high- reward opportunities._

I do not know what the current salary/options numbers are but is it really high-reward for the top notch engineers they are seeking at this point in the game?

<comment><USER19> I used to work there, started post-IPO, left in December 2010. IMO the answer is absolutely. But that's all I feel I should say.

<comment><USER20> Maybe you can't comment/it isn't appropriate to comment slewis but my experience is that Googlers who leave with just their regular option grant don't really walk away with anything spectacular in terms of wealth from the stock. Also factor in that salary tends to market-rate and rarely more.

However, it is known for engineers working on successful teams and products to obtain additional grants that can lead to them leaving Google with several $million worth of stock.

I'm not sure if slewis's 'absolutely' answer is based on something like the latter - in which case you have to make sure you are working on high-value projects that are going somewhere.

<comment><USER19> Sorry, didn't see this earlier. In addition to project awards (which are significant as you say) there are individual bonuses and stock refreshers for top contributors that can also be 'significant'. Sorry for the vague terms. Further, getting promoted to the upper levels can be rewarding as well.

But you are competing against 'top-notch' (to quote op of this thread) engineers for those types of awards. You'll also sometimes hear complaints about politics in the promotion process. It seemed mostly fair to me based on the promotions of engineers whose work I was familiar with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I just got back from my university's career fair (Caltech). It was a bit interesting to see that while Google had poorly-advertised information sessions, it was Facebook who had people on the floor recruiting. It seemed like Google was content to stay in their high castle, while Facebook was actually willing to try and recruit possible talent. If this continues, I doubt Google is going to compete with Facebook getting the influx of talent they say they want in this post

<comment><USER22> Google never even bothered to show up while I was at Tech... I'm at Facebook now - come join us!

<comment><USER21> Physics major.

<comment><USER23> I hear they make the best programmers...

<comment><USER9> I'm a computational physicist, and let me tell you: physicists make _lousy_ programmers. (I refer less to myself and more to the folks who wrote the indecipherable code I have to work on...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Speaking as someone who has been through the process now twice [1], once unsuccessfully and once successfully, I can certainly sympathize with the frustrations, particularly the lack of feedback.

The unfortunate thing is that Google wants to avoid their system being gamed.

There can be some luck of the draw both when it comes to recruiters (mine was excellent) and interviewers. Effort is made to normalize for that sort of thing but no system is perfect.

My experience has been that the top tier companies are all selective and keen to avoid false positives. Google is really no different in this regard.

I can say that being a Googler of only a few months now it is an amazing place to work and well worth the effort, frustrations notwithstanding.

[1]: <http://www.cforcoding.com/2010/07/my-google-interview.html>

<comment><USER2>
      > My experience has been that the top tier companies are all selective
      > and keen to avoid false positives. Google is really no different
      > in this regard.

That's not what I've seen. One of the dodgiest tech managers I've ever encountered went to work on a very, very senior tech development position in Google. This guy regularly spied on other manager's email inboxes every night (disrupting regular email backups) among other things. He had no qualifications other than being political and a bit lucky. Zero. The team he left behind improved a lot afterwards (and he quit suddenly, being very irresponsible.) The delusion of googlers is ridiculous. A big part of getting to Google seems to be plain luck with moment/position and interviewers/HR involved. Outside Mountain View and a few teams here and there (like V8/Chrome), Google is just another big software/advertisement company.

<comment><USER3> So your argument against false positive is one special case ? This happens everywhere, you cannot avoid it at scale. The only meaningful number in that aspect is the ratio of false positive compared to the number of hired people (they should also control false negative, ideally, but that's much harder to do I think).

<comment><USER2> A very obvious false positive for somebody so unqualified for such a senior position. My point is Google's hiring system is not as good as what (lucky) googlers who got through believe. From my limited exposure it looks there's selection bias at play.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Any chance of Google opening more offices across Europe? Not everyone wants to emigrate for a job, no matter how sweet it is.

<comment><USER26> Anyone work at Google in GermanY? What do you work on? What is it like?

<comment><USER27> You can see a description of what Google does in Munich here: <http://www.google.de/intl/en/jobs/germanylocations/munich/>. Have a look at the Software Engineer openings.

The Munich office is also growing, so if you'd like to work for Google in Germany, now is the time to apply :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Seems like they have a pretty serious perception problem to address. They've set themselves up so high people, obviously some worthy and some not, simply won't apply. I wonder how sustainable it is..are there enough CS PHDs (essentially what people think is the only thing Google will even interview) interested in working at Google to keep their staffing where they want? I hope not.

</comment><comment><USER29> Words not found on this page: "Design", "UI", "UX".

Compare to: "Engineer" (3), "Develop" (1+) and technology name-dropping.

I expect 2011 to bring more of the same from Google.

<comment><USER30> I'm pretty tired of this sentiment. Yes, Google might value engineering above UI, but that doesn't mean they don't value UI at all. Look at the piece on Chrome Tab behaviour that was on HN earlier today [1].

Chrome has by far the best UI of any web browser I've used. Google Search has the best UI of any search engine I've ever used. Google Calendar has the best UI of any electronic calendar I've used. And so on.

Do they have as good UI as a specialist graphic design company? Maybe not. Against any tech company however, they stack up pretty damn well, despite what Gruber might claim.

[1] <http://theinvisibl.com/2009/12/08/chrometabs/>

<comment><USER31> I am the engineer that added much of the behavior described in this post, and also the manager of the Chrome frontend team. We are always looking for engineers excited by design challenges and who have an intuition for user experience. Within the Chromium project we design all our UI ourselves and rely on our engineers having good taste and judgment. Any engineers who love UI like this and are comfortable (or can become comfortable) with C++ or Objective C should please drop me a line (beng at google). I'd love to talk to you.

<comment><USER32> Is your team responsible for the recent changes to the Web Inspector?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> So if Google and Facebook are the sexy places to work, and can offer programmers less because programmers would rather work with cool people on cool project than on something boring, what are the unsexy companies that pay more?

Oracle? Something else?

<comment><USER34> Large scale ecommerce is pretty boring and usually pays a lot. Try Amazon. Likewise, any sort of big ERP package consulting pays a lot and is boring.

The other direction is a combination of hard and unsexy. VMWare had the highest base pay in the Bay Area when I left. I'm in Australia now and it seems like the highest pay for a software developer is to work with a mining company. Of course, if you are in NYC, there's always some financial thing.

Then again, I'm on the market and have been poking around and thought the proposed compensation at places like Apple and Google was pretty good. If your career goal is a stable job that pays $250K a year, software isn't the right field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> A while back as I was pondering whether to change my job or start my startup, I got a call from a Google recruiter looking for QA folks.

I had just spent 2 years working for a very large software company as a research engineer after the startup I worked for got acquired. I wanted to return to a role where I would be closer to customers so I could see my work benefit the end user first hand. I reasoned this meant joining a small product team as a developer or a larger team as a product manager. So I told the Google recruiter I may be interested in a product manager role, and may be a developer role if it was a smaller team.

I was flabbergasted when he told me "Frankly, you have no chance of getting those roles at Google in the near future." I have a Masters in C.S. from a top engineering school and classmates / ex-colleagues at Google in those exact roles, so I suppose this guy just wanted to hire me for the role he had been assigned, but what a shitty way of trying to do it!

May be this was an isolated incident. My friends who have worked at Google have uniformly had a good experience actually working there. So I hope Google finds a way to hire or train their recruiters better to avoid incidents like this.

</comment><comment><USER36> Does anyone know what a senior dev @ google w/a Masters degree in CS could expect to earn a year?

<comment><USER37> 100K$ base + stock options (Annualized) / bonuses 15~10k $ = 115k $ per year pre tax. if you are really experienced add another 10~15k to your base and same to your stock + bonuses = 135 ~ 145 k$ per year.

if you are a star dev, you can always try your luck on wall street firm, D. E. Shaw., Knight Capital and such.

<comment><USER38> That's quite low for a senior dev with a masters. Pre-raise, you might have gotten $100-115k in base and bonus + stock of $30-50k. Post-raise, add 10% to that base, and some of the bonus compensation has shifted into base.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It is really a telling point of Google's internals about how much better the site (<http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/index.html>) works in Chrome vs. Firefox/IE.

</comment><comment><USER40> One day I hope to see a company like this advertise for a technology ethicist. :-)

edit: okay, perhaps I should explain: not because I'm looking for a job (I'm happily employed!) but because it would suggest a desire to actually be proactive about social and ethical issues, which, sadly, so many companies are not (or deliberately avoid).

<comment><USER41> I think an ethicist has to be recruited from the existing engineering ranks to have the internal prestige needed to be effective.

<comment><USER40> Effective from whose point of view? There's a lot to be said from a fresh perspective on things, especially when it comes to identifying potential problems. I've done a lot of interviews with engineers and worked in industry myself and when you're within the box you don't tend to be able to carry out the necessary reflection very well, if you even think about doing it at all :)

Of course it does help to understand what's going on in a company to be internally effective, and it might take a while before an external person is accepted (as always), but in order to identify potentially negative social and ethical impact it can really help to have someone who is open minded and not tied to the particular traditions of the group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Since Google has always been hiring at least some people even through the recession, does a blog post like this mean we're back to the torrid expansion of 2005-2007?

<comment><USER43> To me it indicates that competition is quite fierce. Not just from other attractive companies, but competition from startups and from people deciding to go indy. The opportunity available for someone doing their own thing is better right now than it ever has been before.

For example, in 2000-2005 I had all kinds of ideas for things I wanted to do, but ultimately got discouraged by the fact that, even though I had excellent software development skills and great ideas, I lacked the capital and knowledge to, for example, set up a rack of servers or a bank of fax machines in a closet somewhere. Today, in stark contrast to even 2005, those kinds of hurdles are totally gone. It's very easy to get servers set up in the cloud to do whatever you need.

Also it's far easier to succeed independently than it was a few years ago. In the computer games space, where I make my money, self-publishing is a seriously viable alternative now (I'm living proof!), where a few years ago you mostly needed to work for a game studio to actually make a living.

Google is still a god-like entity that many of us would love to work for, but there's a comparatively new form of competition that's probably hitting Google harder than ever before: the fact that it's 10x more viable to do your own thing today than it was in 2005 or 2007.

<comment><USER44> Very well said, unoti.

In my words, the power of the capital over labor has diminished, as labor increasingly can do without (external) capital. To that the capital responds by upping salaries and instigating the bidding wars over the talent that is still up for sale, at least for now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> i'm currently waiting for the results of a couple of phone interviews, for a position here in Europe. It's the 2nd time i've applied. The 1st time i didn't make the 1st phone call, i was very nervous and almost didn't manage to answer the most basic of questions. This time, i came across a tweet from a googler who attended a GTUG event, announcing available positions in Europe, i ping'ed him and he booted my profile on their recruitment system. A few days after, i got an e-mail and a call from a recruiter and we had a nice talk, the guy was great and most helpful even after the 1st screening. I was setup 2 phone interviews with engineering googlers from Mountain View and i did my best to comply, although being interviewed by professionals that have been eating complex algorithms for lunch leaves a feeling that you'll hardly impress whatever you do or say. My overall experience with the recruiting process has been OK and if i don't make it would basically by not being match with their goals i guess. Also, i'd guess the number of applicants is immense.

</comment><comment><USER46> I've seen a few trial tests for HN "Help Wanted" pages - I believe a Google doc spreadsheet was one of the more active. Anyone have any idea what is currently the most active service for querying the HN community with projects in search of contractors, etc.?

</comment><comment><USER47> The way I look at it, is if you didn't go to an Ivy League school, don't even bother thinking about getting a job at Google.

<comment><USER48> I didn't go to an Ivy League school and I got an offer (about 5 years ago). I know of plenty of Google employees who aren't Ivy League.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I've been the target of Google recruitment attempts a few times and it generally gave me a "body shop" sort of vibe. Very impersonal with very rigid process, and, at least initially, focused on the wrong sorts of things looking to try to find "easy outs" to filter folks. They weren't looking for why I'd be great for them, only for how I might be imperfect. That said, I gave them the same treatment in return. In return, from my perspecitve, I think, "Twenty thousand employees and what that entails. Arrogant attitude. Big emphasis on code performance optimization rather than innovation or entrepreneurship. High share price, post-IPO, lots of FUIFV folks already. Low job title. Uninspiring pay rate. Don't care about their cafeteria. Don't _want_ to live a Google- oriented life." Therefore... no. Those were my own easy outs. And there are tons of other companies to work for, and other folks coming after me. I can even have big colored balls and toys to play with, if I so choose. My own private office, etc.

<comment><USER38> I expected something like that and was pleasantly surprised that my recruiter was fairly personable and pretty willing to bend the rules for me. Perhaps it was because I was hired in the trough of 2009, when there were 4 recruiters doing the work of 1 and everyone was fearing for their jobs.

Basically...YMMV. I suspect that a lot of any individual candidate's experience will come down to which recruiter and interviewers they happen to draw.</comment></comment>


Moving AWS Glue jobs to ECS on AWS Fargate led to 60% net savings - <AUTHOR> https://www.taloflow.ai/blog/aws-glue-to-ecs <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, we had this question pop up about how we moved our AWS glue jobs from Fargate to ECS on our last post, so wanted to follow up to answer that question.

This might be helpful for anyone thinking about a similar migration. If you have any questions / comments let us know.</comment>


Airtame – Chromecast killer? - <AUTHOR> http://airtame.com

<comment><USER2> It would be difficult to kill a shipping $35 device with a not-yet-shipping $120 device. I get that 'Airtame' is, in theory, more flexible, but is it 4x more flexible? even 2x? I'd consider something like it for $50 in order to be able to stream what ever I want to the monitor but that is coming with Wifi- HDMI so I may get that for 'free' in future monitors/TVs. All in all, a challenging place to start from.</comment>


Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40 - <AUTHOR> https://insights.dice.com/2019/06/24/ageism-tech-professional-earnings/ <comment><USER2> The article's way of using "ageism" in the lede, and their title, both seem odd, and seem to confuse the real issue of what I think what most people mean by "ageism".

There seems to be a substantial tech industry aversion to hiring developers in 40s (sometimes 30s) or older.

But if you suggest that developers in their 40s expect salary to keep growing without limit, that fuels hairtrigger resentment arguments about how those people are just greedy and unrealistic, and that that's the cause of any "ageism" they perceive.

That would be a diversion from legitimate issues of people getting their resumes illegally screened for age, interview tests targeted at people with CS101 fresh in mind, rejecting candidates for "culture fit" (not just over-20s, but women, certain ethnicities/racial backgrounds, unapproved sex/gender identification), etc.

<comment><USER3> >"resumes illegally screened for age"

I'm happy this is a thing in the US and wish Europe would copy this since in some Western European countries like Austria, having your birthday and photograph on your resume is mandatory making discrimination a piece of cake.

<comment><USER2> Photos are another one in the US, with our wealth of diversity, yet ongoing history of biases and marginalizing.

I used to hear in the US that some companies' HR had policies of discarding all resumes with photos or certain other details, to reduce risk of the company appearing to discriminate on basis of ethnicity or family status, for example. Perhaps apocryphal, but I always heard not to include a photo.

And we heard of studies in which resumes with nothing changed but the name, to a "black" one or a female one, were treated differently.

But then the most popular US resume Web sites introduced photos, to appear alongside your resume and your messages.

<comment><USER4> Note that a name can only indicate culture, not physical traits. This is a very different sort of discrimination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> No this is not ageism. After a certain point, if you are an individual contributor, your value is not worth more than someone with less experience.

A developer with 10 years of varied experience can usually do just as well as someone with 20 years of experience. I also believe that the idea of the 10x _developer_ while not a myth, is so rare it's not worth trying to find for most companies.

I speak as someone in my mid 40s who has been at this professionally for 20+ years [1].

I'm debating whether I want to take the next step of consulting or just stay in development. I see my salary hitting a ceiling in the next two or three years and I think I am okay with that.

[1] well for all intents and purposes maybe 12 years. I stagnated for a few years and became an "expert beginner".

<comment><USER6> "I also believe that the idea of the 10x developer while not a myth, is so rare it's not worth trying to find for most companies"

The problem with the 10x myth is that it assumes a single dimension of productivity, and that no-one is ever negative so there's some sort of sensible, positive "minimum" to talk about.

Senior developer leads a team of three other medium-experience developer, and completes the project in six months. Junior developer leads a team of 5 other even more junior developers, after six months they've got nearly nothing, so we pull in another 4 semi-skilled developers and 2 contractors who are drowned under the mess and don't know what to do, and six months later, the project is cancelled entirely.

How many times better is the senior developer?

There's nothing even _remotely_ skewed about those numbers, either. Both are totally realistic. And yes, senior engineer can fail, and junior engineer could succeed. (Although the range of projects where a junior can succeed and a senior can fail assuming adequate initial knowledgebase for both is fairly narrow; generally if you find one, you've probably got a strawmanned "senior" engineer who isn't actually senior but just a collection of stereotypes in your head.)

If you're still offended:

A generally senior software engineer who knows nothing about the domain and his team of three develop furiously for a year and eventually deliver the first iteration of what was asked for, with another year to go on the project to finish it. A generally software junior engineer who is deeply familiar with the problem domain listens to the customer's problem and after a day's thought realizes what they _really_ need is a very different, but also much simpler, solution, which they deliver in two weeks by themselves. How many more times valuable is the latter?

(I've actually advised someone like that in the construction industry. They were switching into a programming career in their 40s. I said, look, there's no realistic chance you're going to outprogram me in a really academic, isolated sense of the term. But you've got contacts, the ability to pass the shit test with other people in your industry which I and/or generic software engineer have no chance of, and a deep understanding of the problem domain. Don't worry about trying to outprogram a 20-years-experienced software engineer, take advantage of the facts that you know what your customers really need, and... you're there! and I (standing in for generic software engineers) am not! Life's about playing what you're dealt, but people are generally dealt more cards than they realize, I think. Not necessarily _better_ cards, but they have _more_ cards than they think.)

I tend to agree there isn't a such thing as an engineer who is 10x more productive than another, in the sense that they will do the same thing as that other engineer, just 10 times faster. The key comes from doing things _differently_ , most of the time.

There's other differences as well, such as being aware of the pitfalls. I recently got myself put in charge of a billing system, and as a senior engineer, I at least have the good sense to be suitably terrified, for instance. "Move fast and break things" has its place, but "careful, paranoid engineering" does too. Almost by definition, your really junior employees don't really know how to do the latter. (They'll often be able to cargo cult it, which can be a start, but they won't really understand it.)

<comment><USER5> My statement was referring specifically to an "individual contributor" and I said as much in the original post. If you are a team lead, by definition you aren't just an "individual contributor" and you're also not the "10x developer". Your increased effectiveness is because you have a team under you and you are a "force multiplier".

 _but "careful, paranoid engineering" does too. Almost by definition, your really junior employees don't really know how to do the latter. (They'll often be able to cargo cult it, which can be a start, but they won't really understand it.)_

I also specifically said the difference between someone with 10 years of experience and someone with 20 years experience. If you have 10 years of experience -- you hopefully aren't a "really junior employee".

<comment><USER7> I've worked with a 10x developer. He wasn't a team lead because he wasn't interested in being a team lead and also probably wouldn't have been nearly as good at it as the person who was.

But man, was he ever transformative. Not only in terms of handling the most technically challenging tasks and solving the black-magic challenges that nobody else wanted to touch, knowing the C standard like the back of his hand, and getting things done quickly to a high standard of quality. He also was a force multiplier, because he would help others debug their problems when they got stuck and get them back on their feet and productive again, give advice for how to best handle various edge cases, and designed and maintained our tooling. He was a mentor to junior members of the team, and the team lead would ask his input and advice for how long things might take, what risks he could see causing delays, etc.

You can't plan around having someone like that but they make a world of difference if you're lucky enough to work alongside one.

<comment><USER8> Likewise. To have someone with immaculate technical judgment means you potentially have a custodian that keeps an entire multi-team codebase on track.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Honest question: is this actually ageism or is it business cost-benefit analysis in action? You could argue that the benefit to the company of experience for a tech worker is only worth a maximum of X dollars. After that point, the company is better off hiring younger, _cheaper_ employees with lower expectations than it is continuing to give raises, benefits, etc. to older workers.

I would expect a salary plateau to be a natural result of the above + supply and demand in the market. Maybe that's what the term ageism has come to mean (not its original definition)?

<comment><USER10> I would believe it if that would apply to other positions. Why is it the case for us but not regular businessmen, lawyers, etc?

<comment><USER11> In almost all industries you start out doing low level technical stuff and then over time transition to working with people. An analyst at a management consultancy, a bank or a hedge fund spends his time looking at balance sheets or excel, whereas partners go to meetings and dinners with clients.

In a word, you make more money by transitioning from hard skills to soft, and since most developers are unwilling or unable to do this their salaries will plateau.

But compared to the financial industry, and probably law, developers can count themselves lucky. Those industries work on an "up or out" principle, sticking around for 20 years as an analyst simply isn't an option, no matter how good you are.

<comment><USER9> Think you nailed it here. For example, in the consulting world you can pretty easily calculate the dollar value of employees at different levels based on the rates you can charge for them, the hours they bill, the new revenue they bring, and their compensation. That calculation tends to put a pretty hard limit on salaries for people not willing/able to make the transition to highly billable SME or partner-type business development/practice management.

In more traditional corporate roles, the compensation path is tied pretty heavily to growth in managerial skills and subject matter expertise in ways that don't always have parallels with software development. Even there, though, I've started seeing similar "ageism" as the article points out come into effect. Clients I've worked at have started coming to the realization that younger and more tech-savvy workers can often get to, say, 75% of the value of a 20-year employee for half the price in compensation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The bigger issue for us Olds is that we have serious financial and family responsibilities that make us highly undesirable employees in today's modern "I've got mine! Fuck you!" society.

Imagine that you have a close family member with Stage 4 cancer. Who wants to have you on their team? Nobody, that's who. And you better be living in a jurisdiction with solid legal protections, or they will fire you in a hot second.

That is a far greater concern than salary stagnation.

<comment><USER13> Companies in general love people with obligations (kids, high mortgage etc.) because they're much more afraid of being fired, and thus are more obedient.

<comment><USER14> That hasn't been my experience, in particular when interviewing with managers and team leads younger than myself.

The last one slipped, and as much as admitted that he was concerned that I wouldn't be able to work as hard: he had presumed that I had children to take care of.

It used to piss me off, but now it's just discouraging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Based on the findings I think it is premature to say this is ageism.

There are multiple other factors going on here:

1) As senior developers become more skilled there is a diminishing return in terms of compensation. This happens regardless of age. A developer with 40 years of experience is not really worth that much more than a developer with 30 years of experience.

2) As developers get nearer towards retirement there is less incentive for them to stay at the top of their field.

3) As developers get older they tend to want to find a place they enjoy working at rather than playing the salary game every 2 years.

<comment><USER16> True, but it should be easy to control for this right? Check the progression in other skilled fields and cross reference into tech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> 1\. There are diminishing returns to experience within software development, as you get more experience there are fewer and fewer companies that have any use for those extra years of experience.

2\. The _perceived_ value of that extra experience is even lower. How many recruiters or even engineering managers can honestly claim to be able to leverage the last 5 years of experience from someone with 20+ years?

3\. In most industries your salary stagnates much earlier than that unless you transition to a management role, and I think it is safe to say that developers are much less keen on taking that step than say bankers.

<comment><USER17> And even if they are, transition into management is much harder. In my experience in the UK, in London at small to medium companies, I've never seen a promotion to management and only once seen promotion to senior developer. Developers are not seen as management material - and breaking out of the that perception is incredibly difficult.

<comment><USER18> > Developers are not seen as management material - and breaking out of the > that perception is incredibly difficult.

The pointy haired bosses all think we have severe autism and can't deal with people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I work with a lot of folks over 40, the two things I've seen that make me doubt ageism studies -- especially in tech, is that older engineers on average seem less likely to consider new technologies, and older engineers are more concerned about day to day stability and are less risk averse to consider another job which may pay higher because they have kids in school, mortgage, etc.

<comment><USER20> I have to disagree with this assertion. While my information is anecdotal I can attest to its veracity (I am 45 years old).

Over the last two months I have been arguing in a professional manner for my company to move towards .Net Core and React (away from older Framework code and Angular 1.x) Arguably neither of these technologies is super new, but they seem to be new enough that I've been getting push back over various concerns (often over learning something new). I have to say, on the whole most of the push back is from younger developers, many of whom are in their mid-thirties.

My point being that I don't believe that age is necessarily the deciding factor. In my experience most developers tend to lose some of their interest in the field at some point in their career and other do not. Everyone seems to hit that point at a different age, some of them quite young and others quite old.

I'm definitely risk averse but not averse to new technologies. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> A similar discussion on ageism can be found at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252097](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252097)

</comment><comment><USER22> Ageism is the consequence of high birth rates. If many young people are available at low prices, why would you pay more for an older worker ? You can't have everything, have three children and then asking for a high salary. There are choices to be made in life.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think generally current startup hiring discriminates in hiring for post vs pre internet age programmers and that could possibly account for the statistical differences in salary for developers that didn't spend their entire careers under the current paradigm.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is why you should always try and save at least 30% from every paycheck. Assuming you start working at 21, you should then have enough invested to live off the passive income by the time you reach 49.

</comment><comment><USER25> > _In Hired's findings, tech pros were never offered more than $149,000 > annually._

I don't know where they are getting their data but that's a lot lower than good developers of all ages make. You can see on [https://levels.fyi](https://levels.fyi) that large tech companies will pay senior developers 200-400k routinely.

I don't necessarily doubt the analysis but the data is very incomplete if they didn't see a single offer over $150k.

<comment><USER26> Are you seeing over $150k anywhere other than SF?

<comment><USER27> Seattle area also. And I've seen increasing numbers of remote offers that are close ($170k base was the most recent I saw), you could live in a cornfield for all they care.

It's not a difference of FANG vs. non-FANG, and not even necessarily of location, it's a difference of tech company (or trying-to-act-like a tech company, "tech-like") and not. A lot of words could be spent trying to define exactly what I mean by "tech company" and certainly some non-tech-companies might have tech sub-departments that are given enough autonomy to be sufficiently "tech-like". But mostly it's just a mindset. Tech companies are full of people who understand it's the tech workers who are responsible for the lion's share of the company's success, and so they're often run by technical people too. They understand it so well that some of them had to be sued in order for salaries to rise proportional to contribution again (even if still too low) since the socially low rung of individual contributors even at tech companies often fail to see it well enough to complain, which puts the sibling comment about 2009's "reasonable salary" in another light. (See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation))

<comment><USER26> I can tell you that a lot of older companies in Seattle have not yet caught up with that change of conditions. Plenty of places are still 20% below that, and they aren't looking for junior people.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stack Overflow open sources their ASP.net MVC mini profiler - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/mvc-mini-profiler/

<comment><USER2> Note to go with this I've now updated the nuget package (<http://nuget.org/List/Packages/MiniProfiler>) so it is easy to deploy. Enjoy. (also: [http://marcgravell.blogspot.com/2011/06/profiling-with- knobs...](http://marcgravell.blogspot.com/2011/06/profiling-with-knobs- on.html))

</comment><comment><USER3> Woah nice! Is there something equivalent for Java?

<comment><USER4> Not as far as I know. The concepts are all open, I hope this is ported to other platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Out of interest why did you go with google code rather than github? Google code doesn't have any good mechanism for submitting patches and contributing to the code like github does.

<comment><USER4> I will probably end up doing the same I did for dapper and maintain both

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> See also my blog: [http://samsaffron.com/archive/2011/06/09/+Profiling+your+web...](http://samsaffron.com/archive/2011/06/09/+Profiling+your+website+like+a+true+Ninja) for more details

<comment><USER6> Great post. Thanks for the praise of New Relic as well.

I'd love to get your feedback on what use cases you had where we were not sufficient. Given that we've been around for 3 years and this is the first release of your profiler, it's not fair to compare features, but I'd still love to know what metrics tipped the scale toward building this.

Three huge features we offer that it seems like you're currently missing out on are automatic profiling of slow requests (vs. manual profiling), automatic real user monitoring to provide insight into the end-user experience, and automatic instrumentation (vs. stitching profiling code into your app).

We totally agree that it would be nice to see web frameworks embrace the concept of performance metrics and provide hooks that tools can use. Rails is way ahead of the curve here. Starting with version 3, Rails ships with plenty of hooks across various aspects of the models, views and controllers.

<comment><USER4> re "where we were not sufficient"

The big advantage we have is "production ubiquity". As a "trusted user" navigates through the site - in production - she can see the time it took to render the page ... on the page ... this constantly updates with all the ajax calls, which is an innovation. At any point the user can click on the time and break it down into little bits, without navigating away. You can see it in- action at <http://data.stackexchange.com> just log on.

Monitoring end user experience is a VERY cool feature. It ties in to what I like to call "birds-eye" profiling. This is not at all the problem we are trying to solve with our profiler. In our context we get that same information from the chrome dev tools and firebug. When it comes to "birds-eye" profiling, you guys are innovating and leading. I can not think of any competing products that have a more complete feature set.

Automatic profiling in almost any platform is real tricky business in production. It gets even trickier in statically compiled apps. In an ideal world I would write code like the following:

def bla; fast_method; fast_method; slow_method; fast_method; end

My "ideal" production profiler would automatically "know" to instrument "slow_method" and forget about the fast ones, this would all work automatically in production. Technically this can be achieved in a .Net app, but is very tricky. You would have to spin up a new appdomain instrument say 3% random calls using ICorProfiler and route a portion of the traffic to it, then you would have to cycle and do another 3% and so on. At the end of the process you could use something like mono cecil to dynamically recompile the app with all the "interesting" spots profiled and re-route all the traffic to it. The trouble is, the set up is way too elaborate. In a Ruby app this would be way simpler to do and in fact somebody could build something that does something similar ... today.

The trouble with ICorProfiler on a site the scale of StackOverflow, is that it introduces stability issues which are unacceptable, particularly when CPU is way high. We can not afford to use is for the constant "production" profiling.

Now, there is a bunch of profiling you can stitch up more simply like, time in controller, time in view and time in db. But, the .Net framework is way behind on providing the hooks there, sadly.

All of this said, I must admit I have not tried NewRelic in the last 6 months, and would be happy to give it another shot and send you through some of my ideas, you are doing real important work that is making the internet a better place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> var profiler = MiniProfiler.Current; // it's ok if this is null

using (profiler.Step("Set page title"))

huh?

<comment><USER2> "Step" is a static-call to an extension method. This way allows your code to keep working fine (unchanged) for users that aren't profiling (i.e. 99.99% of the users).

<comment><USER7> I meant more the "it's ok if this is null" part. Does that comment not mean what I'm thinking it means? Because invoking a method on a null object will throw an exception.

<comment><USER8> Extension methods can be invoked on null objects (the object gets passed to the static method and you can check for null in the extension itself).

Strange, but does enable some interesting syntactic sugar checking for empty values etc.

<comment><USER7> Nice. I've used extension methods from time to time but not in this way. Could prevent you from writing if foo != null a lot if you have an extension method by doing: public static bool Exists(this Foo foo) { return foo != null; }

So then you can say if(foo.Exists()) { foo.bar(); }

Or make Exists return an instance of Foo (foo if not null, a new Foo if not) and go with foo.Exists().bar();</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why I switched back to Google Chrome over Mozilla's new CEO - mkr-hn http://mkronline.com/2014/04/01/i-switched-back-to-google-chrome-over-mozillas-new-ceo/ <comment><AUTHOR> I find the revival of interest in his political donation since his rise to become CEO a little ridiculous.

When I first found out, I was shocked and maybe even a little upset. But I don't see him using Mozilla to advocate his own political beliefs, and I find his argument of "checking political and religious opinions at the door" when going into Mozilla good enough.

I don't see why we have to make such a big deal out of his personal opinion, as long as we don't have any indication that he'll be using his position at Mozilla to further his political agenda.

If we start hearing about gay men being refused to work at Mozilla under suspicious circumstances, or other such abuses, then I'll be outraged.

<comment><USER2> Anything related to gay marriage has become totally "good vs evil". There's no middle ground, no nuanced arguments.

If you're against gay marriage, then you're obviously a homophobic religious gay bashing evil hitler.

I'm glad he stood up for what he believes in and put his money where his mouth was. If only more people (on all sides of arguments) did the same.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's become that and I don't believe he's "a homophobic religious gay bashing evil hitler". I do believe it's a mistake promoting a contentious[1] person to CEO since that's pretty much guaranteed to cause a PR shitstorm like this.

[1] Allegedly three board members quit because they wanted an outside hire instead of Eich (unrelated to the Prop 8 issue).

<comment><USER4> SJWs will find a problem with absolutely anyone and anything. You can never please SJWs. The only winning move is not to negotiate with them at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is not a good reason to use a less secure browser.

Let's face it, Mozilla Firefox is more open and provides a higher level of control over Javascript (a very common thing used for launching browser exploits) than Chrome.

So essentially this author is compromising with their security due to the personal opinions of a CEO. This to me is not a good reason to switch browser.

</comment><comment><USER6> I never understood how a Libertarian can be against gays. Maximum freedom and small government but not in someone's bedroom?

<comment><USER7> What makes you think he's "against gays"? How do you know he's not gay himself?

<comment><USER6> The bill states "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

<comment><USER4> Right. It doesn't state "death to all gays".

<comment><USER6> It didn't say 'death to all colored people' either back in the day. Just the color of their skin made them different. Now, just who someone chooses to love. Why do I feel the need to defend myself? But okay, in case you're wondering, I'm married and have been for 14 years after beeing with the same girl for 7 years during college. Yeah, thats long... In my country same-sex marrige has been possible for years. I teach my kids they can decide for themself who they wish to love.

<comment><USER4> None of this is relevant. You made a baseless allegation. There is no grounds for claiming that Eich is against gays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Enjoy your botnet.

<comment> mkr-hn What botnet?

<comment><USER8> Google Chrome. Sends your every keypress straight to Google.

<comment> mkr-hn Do you mind sharing where you heard this?

<comment><USER8> How do you think it offers autocompletions? Magic?

<comment> mkr-hn That's not

> _every keypress straight to Google_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So he boycotts Mozilla and instead goes to Chrome, Which Google is behind. Google, one of the major (the biggest?) contributors of Mozilla.

> You're probably wondering: "Why now?" The donation came to light in 2012. > It's simple: He was a low level functionary back then. He had no more power > than the cashier who ranted at me about the "War on Christmas."

Wasn't Eich the CTO of Mozilla back then? That position must be very impotent at Mozilla, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER4> Oh, enough with this shit already.

Stop spamming Hacker News with your insane activism, which is nothing more than bigotry under the guise of anti-bigotry.

Take this shit back to the SJW ghettoes of tumblr, where it belongs.

<comment> mkr-hn What makes you think I'm a SJW? I'm an active member of /r/TumblrInAction.

<comment><USER4> Trying to oust Brendan Eich out of his professional position because you don't like his personal opinions is SJW-style bigotry and harassment. It's an example of everything that is wrong with the SJW scene. You don't try to convince people through civil debate (and just give up if you can't), you insult/bully/harass/mob/threaten/disenfranchise people into accepting your position. This is beyond the pale.

<comment> mkr-hn > _Trying to oust Brendan Eich out of his professional position because you > don 't like his personal opinions is SJW-style bigotry and harassment._

You've confused me with someone else. I haven't called for him to step down or for Mozilla to fire him.

<comment><USER4> That's the endgame for this entire witch hunt against him.

<comment> mkr-hn Who's talking about a witch hunt? My article is about my personal decision to choose another browser, and the conditions for reconsidering Firefox. None of those conditions involve him losing his job. I don't think you actually read it.

<comment><USER4> Don't play dumb. All of this so-called "activism" is meant to put pressure on Mozilla to fire Eich. It is a witch hunt. And you are complicit.

<comment> mkr-hn > _Don 't play dumb. All of this so-called "activism" is meant to put pressure > on Mozilla to fire Eich. It is a witch hunt. And you are complicit._

This from the person who doesn't think we should interpret and judge a man's public anti-equality political contributions? Why do you give the benefit of the doubt to him and no one else?

<comment><USER4> I am calling you out as complicit in the witch hunt against Eich, whih you are. It is as simple as that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Programming Is Hard, Let's Go Shopping - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/10/programming-is-hard-lets-go-shopping.html <comment><USER2> This isn't even about libraries, this is about approaching the right problem: if you, for example, allow only strict XML-compliant HTML, you can build an XML parser that ignores namespaces (which is sufficient for simplified HTML; once you accept namespaces and other parts of XML life gets much harder), from scratch if it makes you feel more manly, in a day... you then have _solved_ the problem.

If you want to let users get a little sloppier, that is itself easy to handle. You can even build a crappy HTML5 parser and then generate your own reasonable (HTML4 strict, for example) output: that will probable take a few days, but is mostly just implementing the spec that Hixie spent forever writing. Even if you get the parser wrong (as it is a long and complicated specification), it doesn't matter, as you are regenerating the output entirely clean. Again: you have _solved_ the problem.

In neither of these scenarios were there lessons to learn or scars to gain: you don't spend years learning how you made mistakes and getting a feel for this deep problem... you simply _solve_ it, as you defined the problem correctly. It is amazing what problems you can solve when you first choose the right problem and then take a direct path to the solution.

Given this, the complaint about the approach Jeff took then discussed libraries (which is what Jeff focused on, possibly due to the title of the other article), but honestly the horrifying part was that it also discussed the solution direction that was taken: finding tons of special cases and attempting to filter the input with regular expressions.

Those are simply not the right tool for the problem. Even simplified XML is not a regular language. The definition of an individual tag might be, but you are up against the horror that is an HTML parser: the same ones Hixie spent years reversing the behaviors of to build the aforementioned parser specification.

So, yeah: you can learn a lot from writing your own code, and you may even want to develop things that are core to your business yourself rather than using libraries, but of you are spending a ton of time, accumulating scars in the process, writing code to solve _the wrong problem_... just, don't, okay? ;P</comment>


Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://stallman.org/archives/2011-jul-oct.html#06_October_2011_(Steve_Jobs) <comment><USER2> For those that are kneejerkingly chastising Stallman, understand his point of view.

OS X and iOS are not free, and Apple led by Jobs changed the way that people thought about installing Applications on desktop operating systems as something that requires manufacturer approval (App Store), which led the way for others like Intel to make AppUp, etc. This restricts what the user has access to install is more of a setback for the free software movement than anything Microsoft ever did.

Jobs also changed the licensing program for Macintosh clones, making it too costly for the manufacturers to continue making machines. If there were Mac clones, then eventually perhaps freedom would have flourished.

Basically, Jobs was the ultimate technology monarchist and Stallman the ultimate technology anarchist. (I almost said capitalist and communist, but Stallman is all about free, not about centralized distribution and control.)

I'm not saying I agree with the man, but this is what he means by jail.

<comment><USER3> Look, all respect to Stallman for writing Emacs and the GNU toolchain. Among technologists he's clearly one of the few figures on par with Jobs. Indeed, he's also personally a difficult figure and a bit of a totalitarian about his craft, much like Jobs himself. [Though I don't think Jobs would ever publicly emit something like Stallman's "eulogy".]

Where Stallman falls short is in supposing that open, hackable systems are an unmitigated good. "Just works" and "highly configurable" are often antonyms, rather than synonyms.

Should open, hackable systems always exist or be developed as a check on Tivoization? Yes. Are they ever going to get a dominant market share, in the sense that the masses making voluntary decisions will choose Free software/hardware? No.

      more of a setback for the free software movement than
      anything Microsoft ever did.

No.

iOS exists because it can make tons of money to pay back its development costs. Android exists for the same reason.

And at some point, a true mobile/touch Linux (perhaps a fork of Android) will also exist, and the free knockoff will owe a great deal to the hundreds of billions in dollars in capital plant installed worldwide by the for-profit, closed originals.

Indeed, Linux itself exists because of the fact that AT&T could make a profit off Unix, and that IBM could make money off selling computers.

So: iOS is not a setback for the free software movement. In the long term it's a massive boost in the arm.

<comment><USER4>
        more of a setback for the free software movement than
        anything Microsoft ever did.

Of course RMS would say something like this. Microsoft's business practices gave RMS followers; Steve Jobs took them away. As any RMS-style self- proclaimed bearded prophet/politician/priest/father-figure knows, it's never been about making things but about gaining followers. The beard is not ironic.

<comment><USER5> Stallman has never left any room for doubt that his motives are genuine. It's not about followers. There's no shortage of people telling him how to moderate his message to attract more, yet he won't do it. I think this is another thing people are going to grudgingly acknowledge he was right about, after a decade or two—but that might have happened more quickly if not for the harsh delivery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Stallman is consistent and vastly intelligent and whilst his comments can be seen as insensitive he is quite correct that Steve Jobs did suppress software freedom.

We don't go to Stallman for sensitivity (you're a dolt if you do), we go to him for the truth, no matter how painful. We can all do with that sometimes - [http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-succumbs- to...](http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-succumbs-to- alternative-medicine/)

<comment><USER7> Equating the iPhone to a "jail" is goofy political hyperbole. Normal people don't even view software in that context. It's just a piece of hardware and software they choose to use or not use.

Stallman represents the strain of computer nerds who want to view their hobby as the bold movement of a freedom fighter. They are out-of-touch and don't understand what normal people think and feel. They want their nerd playground to remain in place because it's a world they have control in.

To paraphrase you, it's sad but true.

<comment><USER8> It's hard for me to say how representative my non-techie friends are, but nearly all have some understanding that the App Store is tightly controlled by Apple, and not always in ways they agree with (apps being banned or not approved makes mainstream news semi-regularly). They accept it because they still like the iPhone more than the alternatives, but I wouldn't say that they are 100% happy with the way the App Store is run. Some join random "tell apple to unban [thing]" groups on Facebook periodically.

<comment><USER9> I would say that the very fact that they join "tell apple to unban..." groups makes them non-representative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh come on, grow a spine people. Quit whining about 'insensitive'. Just because you die doesn't give you a free pass from criticism for more than about 24 hours, and most people don't even get that much.

Stallman is right. Computer-as-a-jail is Jobs' legacy and I too hope it dies with him.

vvv Edit vvv

Look at it this way: Jobs and Apple did truly amazing things in the usability department. For that they should be rightly praised.

But none of that requires jailed computing. Most of that happened before the lockdown got underway in earnest with the iPhone.

It would be a total tragedy if all the good and the bad concepts got conflated here.

<comment><USER11> His claim is that the negatives outweigh the positives and that its a good thing that Steve Jobs no longer actively influences computing. I can't disagree with this sentiment more. Making technology that people can actually use is far better than making unusable technology that is open.

<comment><USER10> But it's a false dichotomy. There's nothing inherent about usability that requires jailed computing.

I submit two examples:

1\. The Apple Mac was unquestioningly a pioneer in computer usability. Yet it didn't need a kernel that refused to run apps that weren't "approved" with a cryptographic signature from some central authority. (Yes the original Mac case was closed but there was a high voltage monitor in there and it had no upgrade plan anyway. Most later models were expandable.)

2\. I have Google Nexus S running Android that's every bit as usable, even for nontechnical folks, as an iPhone. It's not carrier locked and the OS is predominantly open-source, much of it even GPL. It doesn't need rooting or jailbreaking because there's no jail to break. And guess what: there are _way_ more people "actually using" Android phones than the jailed ones from Apple. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Smartphone_share_current.p...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Smartphone_share_current.png)

Jobs was good at many things: leading Apple, leading product development, advancing quality and usability, making products people want to buy, making great profit margins. He was an incredible guy.

But just because the same person and company _also_ embraced jailed computing doesn't mean that it's somehow a necessary condition for usability, any more than the dictator is a necessary condition for the trains to run on time.

In fact, I think the evidence points to the contrary and it would be a shame for this confusion to send computing on a step backwards in one direction or another.

<comment> T-hawk > There's nothing inherent about usability that requires jailed computing.

Not a requirement, but there is a correlation. Programming for an unjailed ecosystem takes more effort to support the vastly wider environments on the devices. Classic example (in an industry largely orthogonal to Apple, to factor Apple out of the discussion): game programming for a PC versus a console. The PC game company has to support a million different combinations of video and sound and input hardware and operating system, which takes mountains of effort (or cost) that the console company can put into the actual game experience instead (or save the costs.)

This happens at smaller scales too. An iPhone developer has to support exactly one form factor, exactly one screen size, exactly one input method. An Android developer needs to contend with a wide range of screen sizes and resolutions and keyboards and touch responsitivity. Sure, it's possible for the Android developer to accommodate all those devices. But we live in the reality of the capitalist market, where the resources to make that investment of time and effort may not be available.

Taking choice away from the user, imposing a jailed environment, can indeed lead to a better experience overall, in that the content producers can focus more tightly.

<comment><USER10> Yes, this was always the argument given in support of the monopoly Microsoft Windows used to have on commodity computer operating systems. Some proposed that having only one platform choice was more economically efficient for the industry as a whole. I don't think Apple was really on board with this idea back then.

I do not think that requiring all computers have only one display resolution for the convenience of software developers ends up being a winning strategy in the long run. It may be a winning strategy for Apple's business of course, at least until Apple decides to do an iPad or a "retina display" or for whatever other reason decides that a different form factor is in their own interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Did anyone expect him to say something different?

It's the first time I've seen his political blog. I'm always disheartened when I find out guys who used to do cool stuff now just spend their days tweeting or blogging about politics. It's like visiting your grandpa who used to do woodworking and finding out he now just watches Fox News all day.

<comment><USER13> > Did anyone expect him to say something different?

He could have said nothing at all.

<comment><USER14> He had the opportunity to remain silent for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Copy pasted from the page for convenience:

 _Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died._

 _As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing._

 _Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective._

<comment><USER4> Wow, reads like something a psychopath would write. Reminds me of Cat's diary entry: [http://www.goodeatsfanpage.com/humor/otherhumor/dog_cat_diar...](http://www.goodeatsfanpage.com/humor/otherhumor/dog_cat_diary.htm)

<comment><USER15> Wow. How really? He was writing his opinion. Is that considered psychopath?

<comment><USER16> Lack of empathy is the definition of psychopathy. A psychopath will look at someone ran over on the street and think "too bad it ruined that nice jacket" or something similarly disjointed form the fact that a human being is dead. Stallman's comment is similarly unempathetic.

<comment><USER17> A psychopath might also feel kinship with someone they've never met and defend them like family.

 __*

Or we could stop calling each other psychopaths.

<comment><USER4> > A psychopath might also feel kinship with someone they've never met and > defend them like family

No, psychopaths don't feel kinship with anything but themselves.

<comment><USER17> I lost a point for suggesting that we not bandy about a medical term as a pejorative. I apologize for offending anyone.

<comment><USER4> No hard feelings; nice little site you have. I would drop reference to bitter humor from "hire me" page though; not many bosses I know like bitter people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's interesting - I question why Stallman felt the need to say anything. Have some respect in death - and even if he chooses to ignorantly portray himself as an arse by continuing to poor criticism on someone 1 day after their death - I put this to you.

If Stallmans "dream" of "everythings free" truly prevailed. Most of the technology that we use would never have been invented anyway. The capitalist nature of society demands returns for injections of investment, and indeed, this is how investment generates advancement and so on. Stallman continually criticises closed environments - and while I do applaud what he is trying to advocate in terms of "open source" computing - I do strongly disagree with "we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing."

Really ? That "malign influence" across 4 decades is what has shaped computing. Indeed, the typefaces representing the letters in your poorly timed comment, Mr. Stallman, wouldn't even align. Malign indeed.

<comment><USER19> There is nothing about death that demands respect. Anyone can do it, and eventually we all _will_ do it.

<comment><USER20> This brutal rationality about death guff misses all sorts of points. People dying makes other people feel sad, it's just how the world is. Everyone dies and yet it's _still_ a big deal.

It's really hard to explain to someone who doesn't get it why death is a big issue but if you don't take into account that death is a sad thing for some people you just end up looking like a dick at the funeral.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The last straw ... Good-bye Mr. Stallman - we may not agree but I won't spit on your grave. And I'll continue making money from closed source software _and_ contributing to open source communities whether or not you approve.

<comment><USER22> I agree, what an asshole. Saying that the world will be a better place after someone dies should be reserved for mass murderers and lobbyists - it's a harsh and inappropriate statement about a leading industry figure, whether you agree with that figure or not.

For example, I violently disagree with RMS on a lot of things, but I still believe he is a visionary, and Open Source is a valuable concept that will always be an important part of my life. And I won't be "glad he's gone" when his time comes. Too bad he can't do exactly that for Steve Jobs and give the man some respect. What he displays here is nothing but irrational hate, a mean and low move on RMSs part.

<comment><USER23> >Saying that the world will be a better place after someone dies should be reserved for mass murderers and lobbyists

Yep. Certainly not for people that hire lobbyists though. Nothing wrong with paying people to do something despicable, its not like you're actually doing it yourself.

<comment><USER22> Look, I don't advocate that Jobs was a saint, far from it actually. But I don't think the world will be a better place without him either. So yeah, I believe people like RMS are despicable for being jubilant about another person's demise and that won't change - no matter how hostile or snarky you lot are about it.

Edit: obviously, I should not have used hyperbole to imply that whenever a lobbyist dies, the world is a better place. That was rather stupid of me. I _do_ believe the world would gain something if lobbyism didn't exist though. So if Steve Jobs had done _nothing else_ in his life but paying lobbyists...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective."

Or perhaps the hope should be to make more "effective" free software instead of having ill wishes towards your competitors. I mean, Stallman can really preach about free software all he wants, but most people in the consumer world probably wont turn down a superior closed source product based on that merit alone. The biggest factor in deciding winners or losers here is the quality of the products being created by the two methodologies, and I am yet to be convinced that the free software approach consistently creates the better product.

<comment><USER17> Fun with circles:

Nobody cares about free software. Free software then becomes the domain of technical folks paid by big companies and amateurs. Because of this, nobody cares about free software, so it remains the domain of:

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's worth remembering that even Stallman himself admits he is mildly autistic. Autism is often characterized by black and white thinking and lack of empathy towards others - both of which are displayed to excess in his comment.

<comment><USER9> This is fascinating and very relevant -- do you have a source?

<comment><USER25> <http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch03.html>

From end-note 2. "Stallman considers himself afflicted, to some degree, by autism: a condition that, he says, makes it difficult for him to interact with people."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Since when has Stallman ever been subtle? At least he is consistent. I saw nothing wrong with his statement.

</comment><comment><USER27> Stallman is as clueless about communication as ever. That's no way to convince people.

<comment><USER28> I don't think Stallman cares about convincing -- his role is to be an uncompromising extremist, which he does quite well.

In any movement, you need people to set the goalpost so far away that others can seem reasonable by comparison. They serve a purpose to the movement, but they themselves risk being ostracized and marginalized.

On the facts, I think he's wrong about Jobs -- Apple has done a lot to make it possible for free alternatives of some important software to exist. What they are doing to make the web (HTML5) a reasonable alternative to Flash is almost enough. In fact, closing iOS to Flash is the main reason that it's happening.

<comment><USER27> No, I don't think Stallman furthers his goals in any way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> You know, I have some feeling surrounding Jobs' passing (while I never met him, I've known a number of people who did -- mostly from 20+ years ago), and I've appreciated the tributes. But there is also the desire and need to discuss it in context. Some respect may well be warranted, and there may not be the need to rush headlong into critical analysis, but Jobs' passing does promote a lot of attention and focus that will not continue indefinitely.

Richard's statement may seem in some ways including timing somewhat harsh, but it's entirely consistent with his position and it is a valuable counterpoint to the notion, and sentimentality, of Jobs as a savior of the technical -- and broader, in various definitions (U.S. industry, design, personal achievement, etc., etc.) -- world.

I felt that HN's front page organically filling with Jobs posts was a fitting, and moving, tribute. But this is also HN, where we analyze and discuss things critically. And I would expect the stories and comments to move to a full and varied spectrum of views.

The resurrection of the Mac, and of Apple, was built in good part upon BSD. Safari was born of Webkit. There is not just an either or in this story, there is a co-opting and commercial progression that is quite worthy of consideration and discussion.

There is also the fact that UNIX/Linux systems remained and remain expensive in the commercial sphere and difficult for the typical end user to manage in the free sphere. More and more people have been appreciating Apple products because, for they most part, they can plug them in, turn them on, and they "just work". It's a relief to have someone else managing "that security stuff" (whatever latent and perhaps nascent weakenesses may as yet remain largely unknown to the general public). And to have someone else deciding, we won't cheapen the design and manufacturing further, to the point where things break in six months or are uncomfortable to use.

Most of us never knew Steve, personally. It's a mark of his influence how we nonetheless feel the effect of his passing on our lives -- at a personal level.

But there needs to be room for a larger conversation. In part precisely because and as a reflection of this influence, there are important matter to discuss. Not all aspects will be flattering of Mr. Jobs. But that is the nature of the position he inhabited and the decisions he made.

So, lets make some room for that discourse.

For my part, "free" vs "walled garden" is a critical distinction playing out right now in the computational and communcations space. What Apple has done and offers really does need close consideration. Monitors and controls are general tools, readily turned to the purpose of the hand that wields them. So, what really will work for us, on this spectrum from "anarchy" to "jail"? Is it really a spectrum, or is it a slippery slope leading inevitably to one extreme or the other?

Steve Jobs made some important decisions and executed them superbly. Were they -- will they be -- the right ones?

<comment><USER30> Well said.

I generally don't agree with Stallman's viewpoint, but his voice is important. I would neither like to see an all encompassing Jobs-world nor a Stallman- world. As long as the one exists with the other we all have more opportunity. The Jobs approach enables mass consumption of technology. The Stallman approach enables fully detailed exploration of technology. Either, on their own, severely restricts access to technology. In the case of the former, through disseminating technology by fiat. In the case of the latter, through disseminating technology only to the dedicated and skillful.

I don't see how either one can disappear and leave the other as the complete dominating implementation of technology. It doesn't appear to be a possibility. Even with market domination of the walled-garden approach, the hacker will always have the opportunity and capability to start from scratch. There's nothing stopping anyone from building a better mobile OS.

<comment><USER9> Ironically, Jobs would be perfectly acceptable in Stallman's world -- he (Jobs) took free software and did what he wanted with it, exercising his right to tinker (and profit).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ideology should never compromise basic decency. I should hope. It seems people in this comment chain are assuming they are mutually exclusive: they are not.

</comment><comment><USER32> RMS: standing on principle at any cost until the bitter end. What a trite, insensitive comment to make.

</comment><comment><USER33> I agree with rms on a lot of things, but this was truly tasteless and disrespectful.

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady I always thought he was a bit of an a-hole but this is very disrespectful.

<comment><USER15> IMO I agree with him.

<comment> k-mcgrady I don't have any problems with his beliefs, he can believe what he wants. But publishing that 1 day after Jobs death is disrespectful. Better to just not say anything.

<comment><USER15> Ah. Your right anyways. I'm just agreeing with him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I would've never say that he is crazy, but this crosses the line.

</comment><comment><USER35> Steve Jobs created products that people love and are more than willing to pay for, even wait in long lines in the rain for. Even during the slowest economy the Apple store at my local mall is filled with life. Stallman loves his "freedom" - well Steve Jobs was free to create a profitable company and do it his own way, apparently Stallman would like to do away with such freedoms.

</comment><comment><USER36> I wonder why some people still hear a guy who uses email to access the internet.

<comment><USER19> Because he still makes good points.

Judge the value of statements on their merit, not on how their writer surfs the web.

I can't believe I actually need to say that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I am just wordless. Probably 'jerk' is the best I can say.

</comment><comment><USER38> link seems down and google's cache seems old, any mirror ?

</comment><comment><USER39> Constant Jackass.

</comment><comment><USER40> Interesting, the first guy not gushing over Jobs and hastily putting together a tribute is Stallman.

</comment><comment><USER41> I like it. :)

</comment><comment><USER42> Unfortunate comments by a deluded man.

</comment><comment><USER36> Is stallman nuts? -> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3083536>

</comment><comment><USER43> I wonder if this guy thinks there is ANY software that is worthy of being purchased or is it all tainted in some way? Has he ever purchased a can of soda, a movie ticket, a laptop computer, etc.? How does he even subsist in our corporate consumerist society without compromising his highly developed sense of right and wrong? I don't know but gathering from his hateful disposition it must not be easy.

<comment><USER44> What Stallman's for is free as in 'free speech'. Free as in 'free beer' is something completely different.</comment></comment>


Where Is Mark Zuckerberg? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/where-is-mark-zuckerberg/556049/?single_page=true <comment><AUTHOR> Crisis management is difficult, but the first part is easy.

Stand in front of a camera and read this script.

\---

 _" Facebook created a massive problem, and I'm sorry.

I was slow to react so I don't have any answers yet.

I take personal responsibility for this, and it now has my full attention.

I promise to give a public update every week until we fix the problem."_

\---

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> FTFA:

 _Where is Mark Zuckerberg? Where is Sheryl Sandberg? And more importantly: Where have they been since 2016?

Nothing that has come to light in the recent days is news to Facebook. They've known about all these things for months and, in some cases, years.

They built the system that allowed data to flow out of Facebook with only very mild oversight. They built the system that allowed dark political advertising.

And, most importantly, they built the service that created these massive stores of data and the tools for using them to reach billions of people.

This is what they've built. These are the governance problems that come with this kind of market dominance.

Mark Zuckerberg created a service and a corporate structure that centralized power in himself. And that means we need transparency from him because there is no other way to get it._</comment>


Harry Porter's Relay Computer - <AUTHOR> http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay <comment><USER2> This might sound a little odd, but am I the only one who originally read that as Harry "Potter"?

Also, the video is quite nice!

<comment><USER3> No. But I was wondering how an electromechanical computer would fit into that particular fictional universe.

<comment><USER4> I dimly recall trying to figure out how to make modern(ish) conveniences, like flashlights or televisions, under D&D rules. An imaginative person (i.e., not me) could probably use the "building technology on top of a magic-based world" theme as the basis for some good stories.

Of course, there's probably some corollary of Rule 34 for fictional world- building, meaning there's already thousands of books out there with this theme. If anybody knows of some well-written ones, I'd be interested in having some new (good) fiction to read.

<comment><USER5> The one that springs most immediately to mind is "Wizard's Bane" by Rick Cook, which involves somebody making a programming language out of small spells which could be used to make more complex ones, but the book wasn't actually that good.

Much better written (and very popular) is "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", which you can find here:

[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality)

...Or in a variety of ebook formats from the author page.

Diane Duane's "Young Wizards" series never reveals much about the workings of its magic system, but it's made pretty clear that using magic effectively is mostly a matter of describing precisely what you want to happen, and closely akin to engineering. They're good books, and I like the idea of non-mysterious magic that you may have to debug before it works right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tech specs:

5Hz clock cycle.

8 general purpose registers.

32kb of memory.

19 instruction non pipelined architecture.

"not fast, but lights blink and it makes noise."

Respect :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's another one (smaller, but more messy!): <http://www.kilian- leonhardt.de/relaiscomputer/pics/pic4.htm>

I also bought a neat little 4-bit relais computer from this person (Kilian Leonhardt). It's got just enough program memory to do a multiplication algorithm in.

</comment><comment><USER8> Having seen it in action in person, I found the sound quite astonishing. It has noticeable patterns.

<comment><USER9> Rhythmically, it sounds _exactly_ like a hippie drum circle.

EDIT: To whomever downvoted me, I _like_ hippie drum circles.

<comment><USER10> All together now:

         Load a word, to A, load a woord!
         Increment PC, incremeeent!
         Load the next opcooode, load it iiin!
         Oh, Loooord, now decooode!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you like this, check out Jon Stanley's similar but smaller Relay Computer Two[1]. The page gives a highly detailed explanation of how it all works including complete circuit and logic diagrams.

[1]: [http://www.electronixandmore.com/project/relaycomputertwo/in...](http://www.electronixandmore.com/project/relaycomputertwo/index.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The only part where he cheated as far as I can see is the memory, that's a static RAM chip. All the rest of it is relays, it runs at 6(!) Hz.

The video is quite amazing.

</comment><comment><USER12> damn i saw it and the potter fan inside me woke up, i clicked it and.. bummer. but the vid was nice :)

</comment><comment><USER13> The video is way cool-- makes me think of Intel's video for their 3D transistor where they shrank (who?) down to transistor size to demo it.

Just imagine somebody shrunk to fit inside a CPU, giving _exactly the same tour_.</comment>


Paypal Officially Blocks Purchasing Goods From Indian Paypal Account - <AUTHOR> http://www.pluggd.in/paypal-india-blocks-purchasing-goods-297/

<comment><USER2> I am seriously at loss trying to understand RBIs objective in forcing this. Better tracking of money for business and individuals, sure yes, there are simpler consumer friendly ways to do that.

-Make it mandatory to enter PAN information. Treat it like any other bank where with PAN you know exactly what money came in and where it went out/was spent.

Why restrict the amount to $500, why force me transfer it to my bank account, why not allow me to shop online using money that is mine and also due to the PAN card regulation, has been informed to the RBI.

I can still ask for transactions in multiples of $500 to start off with. It seems RBI is simply making their own job easier by imposing regulations which leaves no more work for them to track this money.

<comment><USER3> I heard a different story. RBI asked PayPal to become a bank-like entity. PayPal refused to do so. So, RBI has the right to enforce its rules.

More here... [http://techie-buzz.com/tech-news/paypal-rbi-guidelines- flout...](http://techie-buzz.com/tech-news/paypal-rbi-guidelines- flouting.html/comment-page-2)</comment></comment>


Astronaut Scott Kelly: How Tom Wolfe Changed My Life - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/opinion/scott-kelly-tom-wolfe-.html <comment><USER2> > Oh," he said. "I use a pencil."

But in the Paris Review Interview he mentions writing on a typewriter. He must have changed his habit.

[https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2226/tom-wolfe- the...](https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2226/tom-wolfe-the-art-of- fiction-no-123-tom-wolfe)

</comment><comment><USER3> There are currently 5 NYT articles on the front page of Hacker News. As you can easily guess, I am not a subscriber and I don't intend to become one.

It would be really neat if someone could either post a quick TL;DR of these articles, or - if permitted - to repost the text of the article in its entirety, so that at least I can read it here on Hacker News before commenting.

<comment><USER4> It's not permitted to post the full text here. And worse if it's done systematically on all articles from NYT.

I find that usually a google search on keywords provides free articles on exactly the same subject:

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vanityfair.com/style/2017/0...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vanityfair.com/style/2017/08/astronaut- scott-kelly-tom-wolfe-the-right-stuff/amp)

[https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/5280444/scot...](https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/5280444/scott- kelly-remembering-tom-wolfe)

Otherwise, NYT is not a bad newspaper.</comment></comment>


Researchers Pinpoint Array of Obesity Genes - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/healthday/644136.html <comment><AUTHOR> Would anyone be able to help me view the journal article? I'm so incredibly fascinated to understand how we can figure out stuff like this, but I feel kind of stuck, not being able to dig deeper than this article.

<comment><USER2> This might be in the neighborhood. From January; at a very brief glance, appears to be about the same or a similar metasurvey.

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=Ruth+Loos&...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=Ruth+Loos&as_sdt=400000&as_ylo=2010&as_vis=0)

gives

<http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/91/1/184>

and

[http://asn-cdn-remembers.s3.amazonaws.com/121dbcd531f7fd4484...](http://asn- cdn-remembers.s3.amazonaws.com/121dbcd531f7fd44842c004cefde97e9.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. That looks like a great start!</comment></comment></comment>


Implementing Bret Victor's Learnable Programming Has Never Been Easier - <AUTHOR> http://amasad.me/2014/01/10/implementing-bret-victors-learnable-programming-has-never-been-easier/

<comment><USER2> and it's down</comment>