Britain's European allies desert it in a vote at the UN - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21724393-isolated-island-battles-hang-its-outpost-indian-ocean-britains-european-allies?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/britainseuropeanalliesdesertitinavoteattheun <comment><USER2> I had buddies who spent time in Diego Garcia, before I knew how it came to be a US base. I think it's horrible how it was aquired and we should immediately make moves towards reperations and departure, or at least agreement to payments for lease. I'm tired of my country increasingly acting like an empire of force when that goes against everything I was taught we should stand for. More than that though, is the inability to admit wrongdoing and learn from past mistakes, at least in public.

Recently the state department has been undergoing some upheaval due to the tumultous new POTUS. One was complaining to me about it and my response was they they should have gotten rid of the war-criminal Kissinger/Zbrenzski group a long time ago and they might have avoided some of this blowback. Too many DoS people essentially worship Kissinger as the inventor of American diplomacy. Hogwash I say. It's time for real leadership in the executive to take control of the state department and other agencies and reduce what I call Machiavellian realpolitik run amok.

Here is Kissingers comment on Diego Garcia. "There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?"

<comment><USER3> > I'm tired of my country increasingly acting like an empire of force when > that goes against everything I was taught we should stand for.

What surprises me everytime I interact with Americans is their naivety in their assumption that the leaders / politicians are any different or even better than those from any other country. Their belief that somehow these people who fight tremendous odds (almost certainly not ethically) to get to where they are, managed to do this while being true to any kind of moral compass.

For that sort of thing to be true would necessitate that Americans be essentially different than other humans.

IOW, I am surprised that Americans do not realise that the only difference between POTUS and Kim Jong Un or Saddam or... Is what they can reasonably get away with doing.

<comment><USER4> _> IOW, I am surprised that Americans do not realise that the only difference between POTUS and Kim Jong Un or Saddam or... Is what they can reasonably get away with doing._

Fyi, I imagine you're getting down voted because, to my knowledge, the current US government doesn't have labor camps or gas minorities.

A better soapbox might have been "histoically, the US is as guilty as anyone of exterminating indiginous peoples."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Diego Garcia is a very strategic place. If the US/UK were to leave, who would take it over? Most likely the Chinese would move in. There's no really good answer there.

The EU taking the stance that they are taking is really kind of counterproductive. They know nothing is going to come of it and they waste an opportunity for reproachment with the UK. They also just make the brexit case even stronger, confirming what many say about the euros not really having the best interests of the UK (or even themselves) in mind in many instances.

<comment><USER6> Most likely Mauritius would lease Diego Garcia to the US, just like the UK did, hopefully while negotiating a much better deal for the Chagossians.

It is not at all clear to me what lies behind Britains reluctance to concede here. They know very well they did wrong – violating their own rules – lopping off the territory in the first place. What if there really isn't any conspiracy behind the EU stance here, what if they simply vote what they believe is right?

<comment><USER7> Brits just want to swagger about and feel honourable. Look at how they dealt with the return of Hong Kong to China. Pomp, ceremony, wonderful! This grubby little problem just goes against that pride. So we just ignore it.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, Hong Kong isn't very happy about no longer being British now. (Different example than current, as there are a huge number of native civilians living there)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am Mauritian and the whole country is incredibly proud of this achievement, small David against huge Goliath.

Of course, we also know that there is still a long way to go before the conclusion.

<comment><USER9> Right on, good for you guys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I saw a documentary on how Britain deported the island's natives. It was pretty sick. They killed all their dogs, then told them, get on this boat or you're next.

After many years, what was left of the islanders won a court case against Britain who then turned around and said, good luck trying to get to your island in one piece. They continue to rent the island to the US.

<comment><USER11> So Kissinger said there was "only" 90 000 people there, and 1500 are in Britain... What happened to the other 88 500 people?

Edit: They went to Mauritius and the Seychelles, apparently [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The UN's one big jab is to prevent nuclear war by limiting border disputes. I'm not sure what the value of them weighing in on this case. What happens if/when the ICJ issues its non-binding ruling that the Islands needs to change hands? If the UK doesn't leave, does it become an illegal occupation?

I think it diminishes the UN's authority to have it issue edicts that are not going to be implemented or enforced.

<comment><USER13> > I think it diminishes the UN's authority to have it issue edicts that are > not going to be implemented or enforced.

The UN _does_ have enforcement (by the way of international military missions), unfortunately as long as either the US or the Russians/China have veto powers this enforcement will only be used against African or former- Yugoslavian countries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel really bad for Chagossians people; I didn't know about their struggle. Deporting 1,500 individuals is simply crazy, who decided that simply didn't consider Chagossians to be humans. I hope the UK/US Army will leave for good.

<comment><USER15> I live on an island in Canada an I can say people who live on islands feel close to each other. It's like a small town but at another level again since you are isolated from others.

It would be terrible to have families moved they eventually lose contact with their neighbours in a city like Crawley. The environment for the people born in a tropical island compared to cold urban Crawley would have been depressing.

<comment><USER16> > ...I can say people who live on islands feel close to each other

The Chagossians were deported by the UK, so technically some islanders deported other islanders.

<comment><USER15> Ha! I never thought of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> FYI, this is what the ".io" CCTLD stands for.

<comment><USER18> Indeed. Here's a fascinating article with (some of) the back story of the islands and the TLD: [http://citizen-ex.com/stories/io](http://citizen- ex.com/stories/io)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sounds like someone might get benefit out of the Leave voters, IMO misdirected, notion of sovereignty.

They can hardly argue (consistently) it's wrong for small island to get full self-determination when this was one of the major positives being floated for Brexit.

<comment><USER20> I have a sneaking suspicion few British voters even know the Chagos Archipelago exists.

<comment><USER21> I would think many more would know Diego Garcia exists (both among British voters and world-wide). Most of them probably would also know it's an island somewhere far away from main land masses. In that sense, they would know the Chagos Archipelago exists, even they don't know its name, or that it is an archipelago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > has become indispensable for America's armed forces, who nickname it "the > footprint of freedom"

Footprint of freedom? Come on. Why do we have to do that? As a naive little kid, maybe it would make me proud. As a rational adult, it's so cringeworthy and childish and pathetic. Especially when you learn that the island/atoll was basically stolen from the people and the people were forcibly expelled by the british just so that we can play world police.

<comment><USER23> You know when the word "freedom" is used by Americans, especially American government, it can only refer to oppression, slavery, and war. Basically, the exact opposite. I wouldn't mind all of our crimes against humanity quite as much if we were just honest with ourselves and everyone else about what they are. But it has to be like this because most adults here are dumber than the naive little kid you describe. They don't realize the irony and are actually proud of such things. The mindset you grew out of as a little child is their adult mindset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So it's an issue of the sovereignty of the islands then? The argument I'm hearing is that due to the UK leaning in favour of sovereignty, that it can no longer continue to, by default, control the islands? So allow the islands to hold a vote.

This seems like it was a vote held by other countries on whether or not they supported these islands not being allowed sovereignty even if they wanted it.

<comment><USER25> All inhabitants have been forcefully evicted. There is nobody who could vote there. It's administered from an office in London. The UK has rented the biggest island to the US army. Once a year officials from UK and the US military gather to discuss issues about the base, and they meet in London to do so.

Under these circumstances it's clear why the legal fight is fought by far away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Thanks EU! The EU is our only hope for sane antidote against a US/UK power monopoly.

<comment><USER27> There is no US/UK power monopoly. The rest of the world is resurgent and willing not to be brow-beaten into line.

I find it hard to believe that the British government have allies. As for British people, sure, friends all over the world, but the British government? I am scratching my head. Apart from the U.S. maybe it is just the Falkland Islands and maybe Gibraltar that are genuine 'allies'.

Even the relationship with the U.S. government is a bit strange - the 'special relationship' is something the likes of Tony Blair bark on about but the U.S. government don't use the term so readily, regardless of the intellect of the POTUS.

The deal with the E.U. was never on equal terms, e.g. adoption of the Euro or free movement of people, the U.K. was just one of those relatives with special needs that the E.U. had to put up with.

Even the Commonwealth is something you never really hear about these days. I doubt the average British citizen/subject can name five members of the Commonwealth correctly. Sure the leaders of Commonwealth countries might curtsy for the Queen but there is no guaranteed backing for what Britain does from any Commonwealth country.

The NATO alliance is just a collection of vassal states corrupted and bullied by the U.S. into some 'alliance'. There is no bond between Turkey and the U.K., these 'allies' are just 'allies' because the U.S. wants to have its weapons in Turkey as well as in the U.K. Same applies for the other NATO countries, there is no special love for Blighty just because our soldiers dress up in silly uniforms and play wargames together.

Essentially the US/UK governments have lost the respect of the rest of the world, even if there are loyal stooges in place, e.g. those in-bred oiks that claim to be royal family in Saudi Arabia. This lack of respect results in a lack of fear and growing of backbone, hence decisions such as this.</comment></comment>


In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/science/16quark.html?ref=instapundit

<comment><USER2> _"This is not your father's quark-gluon plasma," said Barbara V. [...]_

Indeed.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you can break it then it wasn't really a law.

<comment><USER4> A scientific law has a slightly different meaning than the colloquial connotation. The difference is subtle, but important:

 _A law differs from a scientific theory in that it does not posit a mechanism or explanation of phenomena: it is merely a distillation of the results of repeated observation. As such, a law is limited in applicability to circumstances resembling those already observed, and is often found to be false when extrapolated._ (via Wikipedia: Scientific Law)

One example is that "Hooke's law only applies to strain below the elastic limit." As another, the laws of classical mechanics break down on the Plank scale. This doesn't mean that classical mechanics is false; it simply means that the law is not applicable under some states. Laws do not explain _why_ something happens and usually break under extreme extrapolation, such as this experiment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting - I just finished reading Gregory Benford's novel _Cosm_ , which explored an experiment much like this, at the Brookhaven RHIC (using U-238 rather than gold, and with much more dramatic results). A great read.

<comment><USER6> It is indeed a great read! I've been reading a lot of books by Peter F. Hamilton lately, if you like Greogory Benford I think it's likely you would love Hamilton!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hey, you break it, you buy it!

On a related note, where is my liquid-quark fueled warp engine? I'n not giving all that gold for you to propel to 99% c for nothing, am I?

Dumb, sophomoric "humor" aside, what practical implications does this discovery have? There is a blurb about proteins and what we can digest, which to a layman like me makes no sense, and something about a desolate universe made up of dark matter, which again fails to come home to me.

<comment><USER8> not sure why gamache deleted their reply, but it was absolutely correct as far as i could see. anyway, in my own words, and more perhaps taking a more extreme stance: this, like most modern high energy physics / astronomy has very little practical use because it only makes a difference at energies so extreme that they are difficult / expensive to reproduce.

<comment><USER9> ...so far.

The thing that occurred to me as I was reading this is how different life can be depending on how much energy is cheaply/freely available.

Think back to within the last century: I have more horsepower sitting in my driveway than the average small village of 100 years ago (and that's not counting the actual horses in my pasture :-) . Kilowatts of cheap electricity are available at every wall socket. How has that changed our lives? How much different would life be if gigawatts of power were available at that same wall outlet at the same cost?

<comment><USER10> Once electric power stops being the limiting factor for home tasks, further growth doesn't change your life much. Similarly with computing power: your PC is probably idling most of the time. The interesting question is, what's the limiting factor now?

<comment><USER11> OTOH, we now have programs routinely run in homes (e.g. games) that occasionally require computing power orders of magnitude higher than what was available ten years ago. I expect that if we have orders of magnitude more power deliverable to our homes, innovative people will find uses for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> RHIC press release: [http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/news2/news.asp?a=1073&t=pr](http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/news2/news.asp?a=1073&t=pr)

I couldn't find the actual paper -- the most recent paper on Arxiv from STAR, <http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.1641>, is about the electric charge balance function.

</comment><comment><USER13> "In this house we will obey the laws of physics!"

-Homer Simpson to Lisa when she invented a perpetual motion machine or something like that for her science project.

<comment><USER14> Actually, "In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"

<comment><USER15> It always annoys me when people misquote the Simpsons, because the popular quotes are popular enough to be googled even if you only have the gist. ("The Googles do nothing!", but the opposite.)

Someday I am going to write a "Quoting the Simpsons HOWTO", but I fear it will be too little too late.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The work discussed was actually done at the PHENIX detector, not STAR.</comment>


Need Technical Co-Founder for Green Energy Startup - <AUTHOR> Looking for technical co founder to help launch a green energy startup. Full stack developer needed.  Hyper ledger experience a plus. Must be located or willing to relocate to Austin,TX.  Send inquiries to firstname.lastname@example.com <comment><USER2> How much equity? How much salary? What happened to the previous Technical Co- Founder?

<comment><AUTHOR> All negotiable. No previous technical founder.</comment></comment>


What America can learn from the fall of the Roman republic - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/2019/1/1/18139787/rome-decline-america-edward-watts-mortal-republic <comment><USER2> Imperial Rome lasted much longer than the Republic (1000 years if you are generous with Bizantium lifespan). Maybe the lesson is that Republics help setup the context for more stable (fullfiling?) order?

</comment><comment><USER3> The die has not yet been cast: the legions have not only indicated they do not wish to cross the Rubicon, they specifically remain true to the "American People."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23412986](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23412986)

 _PSQA_?

<comment><USER4> That is they will "defend" the constitution by doing nothing about others breaking their oaths to uphold it; they will, precisely, NOT act to preserve it.

<comment><USER3> I don't think greece, spain, or portugal ever got as bad, but the latin american experience with involving the military in politics was that it leads to taking dissidents on helicopter rides.

Todd Winn, as far as I know, has yet to receive any grief on the JAG/SJA front.

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

[https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine- corps/2020...](https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine- corps/2020/06/29/i-cant-breathe-this-is-the-marine-who-protested-outside-the- utah-capitol-in-uniform-for-racial-equality/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Regardless of the exact mechanism of the downfall of the US, if you even believe that to be likely in the current environment (always at risk of being an overblown conclusion) --

Where/who would be the country to take our place?

<comment><USER6> For what this article is talking about, nobody would take our place. We just wouldn't be a representative democracy any longer. (If we really followed Rome, we would keep the facade for a while, but the reality would be otherwise.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yet another thinly veiled election timed piece being used to push one group's addenda. The next three months are going to be so damn annoying

<comment><USER6> If you think the article only attacked one side, you need to read more thoughtfully. There's plenty, on both sides, that fits what the article was talking about.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Good Health Insurance in California? - <AUTHOR> Long story short, I've done COBRA for a few months, but now I'd need to switch to a long-term health insurance. I own a consultancy company and I plan to use it to "hire" me and provide me with health insurance.
Is there any good insurance that you recommend? I searched online for a while, contacted a few, and all I could find was scammy ones.
Thanks in advance for any help! <comment><USER2> I had blueshield ca for a while as self-employee, but I wouldn't call it "good". It certainly was expensive. Family of 5, 20% copay, $5000 deductible for over $1000 a month. That was two years ago. It's probably worse now.

To be frank, I don't think such a thing as good "health insurance for the self employed" exists in CA.

Aside from the scammy ones you mention, you can get with one of the big guys and pay an arm and a leg, or roll the dice with one of these startups with new business models you see popping up.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you are healthy, Kaiser is a good choice. Since they are an HMO they are able to give you a low premium with a low deductible. Service can be spotty, but if you don't need a bunch of care it can be a good deall.

<comment><USER4> Anecdotally, many people I know in Northern California dislike Kaiser, and many in Southern California love it - but it's been years since I've really polled my acquaintances on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do you have any other employees in your consultancy company other than yourself and your spouse ? If yes, only then you can get "Group" Insurance i.e. through the company. Otherwise, you will have to buy insurance personally through the obamacare exchange etc.

If yes, then find an insurance broker who can help you with a Group insurance. One such online broker is ehealthinsurance [0] but it is better to find a local broker whom you can talk to in person. To find those, you have to go to healthcare.gov [1] and click on local help. You can then get a list of brokers in your area.

Overall, this is a very exhausting process especially as a small business because most insurance companies are not interested in group insurance unless you have at least 3 or more employees (in my experience). Not worth their time otherwise. And your spouse doesn't count as an employee when it comes to health insurance even if they are employed by the busines

[0] [https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/small-business-health- insur...](https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/small-business-health-insurance)

[1] [https://localhelp.healthcare.gov/](https://localhelp.healthcare.gov/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot! Unfortunately I'm the only one, I tried signing up with Justworks but encountered the problem you mentioned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I recommend sticking with COBRA if it makes sense, I was in a similar situation and did COBRA for 18 months and it was about 20% less with 25% more coverage than what my family and I are on now. After that we did a blue cross blue shield and it is like all of them, a giant pile of suck with high deductable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I honestly wanted to get a cheaper insurance. COBRA is incredibly expensive.

<comment><USER7> how much is it?

<comment><AUTHOR> ~$1,300 a month for a married couple. Mafia and cartel can't even begin to describe the situation here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You need to insurance hustle ...

Your wife needs to get a job with family benefits for you.

Or you need to enroll in a class somewhere with benefits.

Or you just need to stay real healthy and not have kids.

And welcome to the USA!

</comment><comment><USER9> Do you have a primary care doctor you like? Not all doctors accept all insurance plans, so sometimes it's helpful to work backwards from that. You can call their office and ask for a list of accepted plans.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I don't have a primary care doctor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://www.coveredca.com/](https://www.coveredca.com/)

You might qualify for Special Enrollment due to a life event.

</comment><comment><USER11> I spent a while looking at reviews some time ago. Kaiser consistently has the best reviews in California.</comment>


Music lovers pursue technologies to return to high fidelity - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-02-04/nashville-sound-quality/52963362/1?csp=34news

<comment><USER2> How did they not have even a single mention of SACD, DSD or PDM?</comment>


SONY Releases "Neural Network Console" - <AUTHOR> https://blog.dl.sony.com/443/ <comment><USER2> would be nice to have it cross platform and cross library (for tensorflow, pytorch ... :)</comment>


KonMari method in under 1000 words - <AUTHOR> https://www.bestlifecoach.me/the-life-changing-magic-of-tidying/ <comment><USER2> "Does it spark joy" is very useful heuristic. But what about things that have an emotional attachment? Or were really expensive?

I'm working my way through "it's all too much" ( [https://www.amazon.com/Its- All-Too-Much-Living/dp/0743292650](https://www.amazon.com/Its-All-Too-Much- Living/dp/0743292650)) and it has some great tips. If something is emotionally valuable you better be displaying it or treating it like it's valuable. If you're not it's probably dead weight. If something was costly but you're not using it, you're paying MORE for it by storing it indefinitely. And so on. Tips on how to talk about clutter with the family etc. Very useful book.

<comment><USER3> Photography helped me get rid of old clothes I "loved" 3-4 years ago.

I took all my sentimental clothing items (first concert tee, that gross hoodie I really loved) that I hadn't worn in years and laid them all out on the floor. I snapped a photo of each and after that I felt completely comfortable with throwing them away.

3-4 years later I haven't looked at the photos or missed the clothing, but I get a warm feeling anticipating the moments I'll relive when I do bump into them in Photos.

<comment><USER4> I do the same thing, and it's amazing how much it helps. It's like you don't want to lose the feeling you remember when seeing the item, but the item itself is completely irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This comes off as a rather long-winded summary, and it neglects to mention one of the core principles of the method, which is that you must physically touch the object you are deciding whether to keep or discard, not just look at it. Make piles on the floor and hold each item. I would put that in a 50-word summary. :D

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there something like this for digital clutter?

<comment><USER7> recycle bin for clutter, folders for current things, zip archives for indefinite things :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker - <AUTHOR> https://coneapp.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, HN!

Really excited to share my little project here. Being a colorblind designer, it was often hard for me to figure the color names and decide which colors to use. Hence, I decided to make this app.

Cone lets you pick colors in real time using the phone's camera. It lets you build color palettes while on the run, capturing and recording color for later comment/discussion, sending the colors to someone else quickly and efficiently, and of course translating a physical objects color to a usable set of information without having to get expensive colorimetric equipment.

Really excited to hear feedback from you all :)

<comment><USER2> I like how you kept the site and dependencies simple. 34.7KB of js (~21 is mostly color definitions), and 4.2KB of css.

Just FYI:

1\. You could save ~15.75kb by minifying your JS/CSS (a bit nit-picky since your resources are a fraction of what most sites have)

2\. The 1MB background image comes out to 570.6 KB through tinypng.com (47% off!). If lossless is more your thing, you could save about 5% by running it through something like imageoptim.

<comment><USER3> If you're willing to go lossy, also look at PNGQuant - [https://pngquant.org/](https://pngquant.org/) I've started using it on all of my web images. I've yet to see the loss on a couple dozen images, but the size drops by up to 66%, even after being run through imageoptim.

<comment><USER4> tinypng is actually based on pngquant + more optimizations not in pngquant

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really liked the landing page, especially the outline of the iPhone with an example of the app running inside of it.

<comment><USER6> The landing page was really cool. A minor suggestion I have: could the animation be slowed down a bit? I was scanning the page and the cursor moving around was a bit annoying.

I think that the way the application works will still be clear if the animation plays at half of its current speed.

<comment><USER7> I thought it was just the right speed.

<comment><USER6> Another option: maybe stop the loop after 1 cycle? Or add a pause between cycles? :)

<comment><USER8> Definitely not stop it after 1 cycle. I watched it over and over many times. Please no pause either. I really really like it the way it is now. One of the best demos I've seen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not sure how many people this affects but clicking on the download button from the website on Chrome (iOS) takes you to an iTunes page that doesn't contain the app. Clicking on it via Safari (iOS) sends you to the app store to the app proper.

Video of the issue in Chrome (iOS) - [http://imgur.com/ntTmynl](http://imgur.com/ntTmynl)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for reporting that. I just copied the link from my iTunes connect account which only has one additional parameter "?ls=1" that seems to work in Chrome.

Does anyone know what that parameter means?

<comment><USER9> This article is a couple of years old but it appears LS is Load Store: [http://blog.geni.us/2013/12/06/parameter-cheat-sheet-for- itu...](http://blog.geni.us/2013/12/06/parameter-cheat-sheet-for-itunes-and- app-store-links/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You're underselling this hugely! $0.99 is far too cheap

<comment><USER9> It was this price point that got me to buy it to try it out. If it were $1.99+ I probably wouldn't have. Psychological stuff...

<comment><USER11> Yep. It's a sad state we're in. It's just too risky to pay more for an app from a publisher who is not well-known. All too often, installing an app for $3-5+ is disappointing when you discover the app is not what you were expecting. I rarely pay for apps, simply because I'd have paid thousands of dollars over the lifetime of a single phone, only to uninstall 95% of apps after discovering it was not for me.

Is an in-app purchase _required_ to offer something tangible? Instead of using ads and offering an in-app purchase to remove ads, I'd love to see cheap apps (ie: free or $0.99, without ads) with options for in-app purchases - maybe $3, $5, $10, $20 - that are nothing more than a voluntary donation to pay more for an app I find worthwhile.

If I could volunteer to pay more for apps _after using them for an extended period of time_ (fully unlocked, no trial gimmicks), I'd likely have spent a lot more money than I have thus far. I won't pay thousands for a bunch of crappy used-once apps, but I'd pay a few hundred for the bundle of apps I've kept.

<comment><USER12> If I could get a refund if an app sucked I'd be infinitely more willing to try out random paid apps.

Use the steam method if necessary, only auto-refund it if you've used it less than x hours

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cool indeed! I had a similar need and created [https://github.com/Zalastax/colornamer](https://github.com/Zalastax/colornamer). Finding a good source of names was the hardest part so you might want to complement your list of colors with those in my list.

<comment><USER14> I've made almost the same thing :) [https://colorna.me/](https://colorna.me/)

<comment><USER13> Super nice! Had I just known about it earlier... We made some different choices, but the end result is quite close. It's a shame that the native html color picker is so bad, I wish I could have used it, but FlexiColorPicker is a delight to work with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You made something very simple and beautiful. I bought it right away, and had fun building a palette of the Kansas sunset while my dogs ran through the woods. I know I could do the same thing just by taking a photo and extracting a palette later, but I really liked the experience of doing it in the moment.

Just one request: I'd love a way to export a bunch of colors at once. Is there a way in the current interface? If not, please consider it for a future update.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am really happy you liked using the app.

Exporting multiple colors at once is a great idea! I've added it to my roadmap and will be implementing it very soon. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Question here, how do you put a name on the hex? Do you have a database that map each hex code to "limelight", "grey asparagus", etc ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am using a database with Resene color names (and some names from the Wikipedia colors list) mapped to specific hex codes. I find the closest hex code from the database to the one in your camera and show the name associated with it.

Hope that answers your question!

<comment><USER17> You could also use the layperson-supplied colour names from the XKCD survey:

[https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey- results/](https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/)

[http://xkcd.com/color/rgb/](http://xkcd.com/color/rgb/)

It took colourblindness into account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's a PWA that does mostly the same, apart for the naming: [https://use- the-platform.com/rainbow-explorer/](https://use-the-platform.com/rainbow- explorer/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Is there anything to covert hex codes to paint colors? Live, real word paint on the wall. That would be neat.

I haven't looked at a paint can in a while, maybe it's as simple as rgb?

<comment><USER20> There are multiple standards for this.

\- RAL – [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAL_colour_standard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAL_colour_standard)

\- Pantone – [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone)

\- some others, often with military roots (FS595, British Standard, …)

Pantone has different charts for paper/textile prints etc. RAL is mostly used for paint. It's common to have RAL codes on spray cans or wall paint buckets here in Europe.

There are tools to approximately convert RGB (and HSL and others) to these colors, eg. [http://rgb.to/](http://rgb.to/). But since the color models and intended use are different, there are some colors with no equivalent.

Pantone even provides RGB/CMYK mappings for applicable colors in their sample books: [https://www.pantone.com/images/pages/19890/Pantone- Extended-...](https://www.pantone.com/images/pages/19890/Pantone-Extended- Gamut-Guide-Proces-Colors.jpg)

There are also palletes for graphics software like Adobe Illustrator. But some colors look weird on the RGB display obviously.

(Source: i worked as a backpack designer for years, we did a lot of pantone prints)

<comment><USER21> iirc pantone charge you an arm and a leg to use their colours...

<comment><USER20> Yeah, that's true. Even these cute color books are ridiculously overpriced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is very well done and looks beautiful. What an iPhone app is made to look like.

For everyone who is wondering how he got the hex, and names, etc. there are links in the bottom of the coneapp.io page. Here are the links:

> The Resene RGB Values List is copyrighted to Resene Paints Ltd, 2001. Name > That Color by Chirag Mehta

Resene RGB Values List: [http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/Color/resenecolours.txt](http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/Color/resenecolours.txt) Resene Paints Ltd: [http://www.resene.co.nz/](http://www.resene.co.nz/) Name That Color: [http://chir.ag/projects/ntc/](http://chir.ag/projects/ntc/)

</comment><comment><USER23> What a great idea. I am renovating my house right now and I have to buy some paint for partially painting a facade. I could use such an app to be able to choose the paint color, in the store, as close as possible to the original one.

Do you know of any such app for Android?

<comment><USER24> Beware the effects of incident lighting on colour perception. As a human, you do a lot of processing you're not even aware of to normalise the colours you perceive. Cameras cannot do this (without calibration), so if the incandescent/flourescent/daylight/sunlight mix and intensity is different in the store to your house, you could end up with a very different shade.

<comment><USER25> It's really interesting. My wife and I have done lots of painting at our house over the past year and we never get exactly what we expected. Most recently, we spent a long time selecting a light gray, which looked very much gray with a group of other grays. Then we painted the first portion of wall, stepped back and both said, "well, that is blue".

<comment><USER24> I'm guessing you looked at the paint in the shop under artificial lighting (which is more orange - making blues look more grey), then painted it in your house where there is more bluer daylight!

Always buy the extortionately priced test samples. It's worth it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is something I didn't know I needed for a long time, how has this not existed until now? It's so simple and truly is a delight to use. Thank you kind sir!

<comment><USER27> Adobe Color CC (now Adobe Capture CC) was released 4 years ago, in May 2013 [https://itunes.apple.com/US/app/id1040200189](https://itunes.apple.com/US/app/id1040200189)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The landing page is awesome! I wish the app was available for Android so, you know, 80% of smartphone owners could check it out.

<comment><USER29> You mean the 80% of smartphone users who are much less likely to purchase apps? [1] Could be a chicken-and-egg problem, but still.

[1] [https://www.appannie.com/en/insights/app-annie-index- market-...](https://www.appannie.com/en/insights/app-annie-index- market-q1-2016/)

<comment><USER28> Oh, so Cone app is NOT free?

<comment><USER8> Did anyone say it was free?

<comment><USER28> I thought that everything that is posted to Show HN should be available for free so that everyone could play with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice idea! I just can't figure out why is the size of app almost 30MB?

<comment><USER31> It said 14MB or so for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Nice job! When I started iOS development, I made a similar app for my portfolio. I still use it occasionally, since I'm also colorblind.

It's been a while since I updated it, but it still works aside from the occasional Core Data crash because I didn't know any better back then: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/colormyworld-color-picker- an...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/colormyworld-color-picker-and- eyedropper-for-your-camera/id692361549?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER33> i must say the name, the website, the app's UI all look pretty neat. you seem more of a designer than a developer, may I ask you, what's your expertise?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I am an interaction designer but I picked up development (frontend on web) early on and have been doing both since.

<comment><USER34> I see that you're based out of Pune. Are you looking for a job? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> [https://coneapp.io/?color=#156077](https://coneapp.io/?color=#156077) "Blue Stone, aka Green"?

<comment><USER36> Do all 16 million color combinations have names? That would be crazy!

<comment><USER37> Looks like it chooses from one of 1383 names.

From [0] linked in the footer.

0: [http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/Color/resenecolours.txt](http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/Color/resenecolours.txt)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Great name. Cones are the color receptors in our eyes concentrated in the fovea. Love it when names hve scientific meaning but remain simple ;)

</comment><comment><USER39> Is there a story behind the name? It's a cool name, but it doesn't seem obvious at first glance.

(Edit: cone cells! of course! cheers :) )

<comment><AUTHOR> There is actually a story behind the name. I am a colorblind designer and colorblindness is caused when you're missing some cone cells in your eyes.

Since this app helps me see all the colors, I decided to name it Cone!

<comment><USER40> Does the app say out loud the colour name? If not - it would be a good feature for partially sighted users also.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Great idea ! I wish I had this idea after working on a website that tries to map RGB colors to paint names. An example of result with the Limeade color - [http://en.tacolor.com/hex/6fb400/](http://en.tacolor.com/hex/6fb400/)

This does the distance check in the CIELAB color space.

</comment><comment><USER42> Would you be interested in supporting color space conversions for Apple developers? Like how does UIColor(displayP3Red:0.7 green:0.8 blue:0.4) map to extended sRGB? Standard sRGB? If you give you an sRGB color, what's the saturated version of that color in P3? What's the 50% desaturated version of a given color? Etc.

</comment><comment><USER43> Very nicely done. I would recommend either a simple tooltip popover for each button on _first_ startup, or a simple help button somewhere. It took me a while to realize/notice that the snowflake button was to freeze the frame.

I wouldn't want to clutter the elegant simplicity of this app, but it was confusing to me initially.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's certainly worth its price but I wonder how many people would pay for it. Nice work! I like the design.

</comment><comment><USER45> Thanks, now I'm that guy in public holding up my phone to stuff. Kidding, this is really great :)

</comment><comment><USER46> So this app is using the device's camera? How does it account for the fact that camera's perception of color is often no where as similar as our eye?

Or is the intent for the user to see the world through the app and find colors that look appealing on the screen?

</comment><comment><USER47> Great looking app. I'm an iOS dev, and I need to implement a similar color picker for picking a color within an image in my app. Any tips or example code you can point me to for how to performantly target a screen pixel and get the hex?.

</comment><comment><USER48> Congratulation for your new app. Adobe has a similar free app called Adobe Color. However, your app is better as it clearly define the color name and code. You may like to check their app and add a color scheme feature. Very good work!

</comment><comment><USER49> Looks great! Really love the landing page! How long did the app take you to build?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! It took me about a month to build this from scratch. I am familiar with JavaScript so that helped me in picking up Swift quickly.

<comment><USER49> Being familiar with JavaScript did you consider something like React Native over Swift?

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually started with React Native but soon realized the limitations and switched to Swift. Learning Swift and shipping the app was definitely faster than trying to figure out how to do X in react native and make it work properly.

I think React Native is good if you're building database apps but when you want to leverage the device capabilities like camera, Bluetooth etc, going native is the best option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Very cool! A feature suggestion for the future: add a Watch app! That shouldn't be hard to implement at all, and would be a killer feature, I believe. A quick color browse from a pic in the gallery.

</comment><comment><USER51> This is wonderful, thank you! I appreciate that there is a subgrouping color such as "blue" under the hex codes, it really helps for colors with names that are not related to the base color.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've actually been looking for something like this. I only rarely ever need to figure out what a color is, but its always been difficult. This app makes it much easier. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER52> Bravo, a wonderful app indeed. I just see so many uses for it. And it is priced just right for it to pick up quickly.

The app design is just wonderful - minimal and quite intuitive. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER53> I have zero reason to use this but i love it - thanks!

</comment><comment><USER54> Great app! Very small critique: at a quick glance to my home screen, the icon looks like an app in the download/install process.

</comment><comment><USER55> Great work and good luck with sales! Did you write it in Swift or Objective-C? BTW: just bought it! :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the purchase, I hope you have fun with it! I made it in Swift 3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> This is one of those apps you look at and think, "Oh yeah, this should exist"

Seems obvious in hindsight.

</comment><comment><USER57> It's so simple and pretty that it makes me sort of angry.

Thanks for the inspiration (and app) Kushagra!

</comment><comment><USER29> This is nicely designed. Love the simplicity and the navigation is a neat twist.

</comment><comment><USER58> Shameless plug of my app which is very similar: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/qolor-fast-color- grabber/id9...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/qolor-fast-color- grabber/id973492333?mt=8)

<comment><USER12> Ouch that review

<comment><USER58> yeah I guess some people are pretty stupid ^^

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Am I just too stupid to see the grander idea of this app or why does it get so much attention and top position on HN? It's just a color picker on camera images or what did I miss? It's very well done I agree but still seems remarkably trivial. Why all the fuzz?

<comment><USER60> Compared online equivalents 'Snap It' that help color identification which require taking a picture and uploading to their site. This is really helpful in identifying colors on the go. The simplicity of this app is where it sings.

It's easily monetized by connecting app to paint suppliers like Sherwin Williams, Home Depot, or Lowes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> well done. this is a cool app.

good luck charging for it though... if there is not a free one, some free-app loving developer might waste a couple of hours of his afternoon doing the same and shipping it for free.

</comment><comment><USER61> Love it fantastic app. +1 purchase from down under.

</comment><comment><USER62> I can't find it in the Canadian App Store.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's strange! Here's a direct link: [https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/cone- live-color-picker/id122...](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/cone-live-color- picker/id1221305627?mt=8)

I'll look into the issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> This is so cool - just bought! Great work.

</comment><comment><USER64> Congratulations, looks very useful.

</comment><comment><USER65> Looks cool. I wanted to build something similar some time ago, but never got to it. My idea was that it would serve colorblind people so that they can check what color some things are.

Interesting color names data can be downloaded here: [https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey- results/](https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/)

</comment><comment><USER66> Great work !

</comment><comment><USER67> Loved the same.</comment>


Windows for Raspberry pi - <AUTHOR> https://www.raspberrypi.org/windows-10-for-iot/

<comment><USER2> Steve Teixeira at Microsoft says: We're embracing...

\- Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.

\- Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the 'simple' standard.

\- Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.</comment>


It's 2010 and Canadians pay the highest cell phone bills in the world - <AUTHOR> http://wirelessnorth.ca/2010/08/27/its-2010-and-canadians-pay-the-highest-cell-phone-bills-in-the-world/ <comment><USER2> Having lived in the US for many years and then returning to Canada recently, it is absolutely stunning how few people here have cell phones. The primary reason is in the US, nation-wide plans are standard, whereas in Canada they simply do not exist. So you pay long distance for calling from one small city to another small city which drives the price of cell phones through the roof. Even if someone does own a cell phone, there is stigma attached to using it -- "can I call you back on a landline..." sounds ridiculously archaic in 2010.

The top iPhone plan ($100/mo) includes 500 local minutes: [http://mobilebusiness.bell.ca/rate-plans/combo-plans-for- iph...](http://mobilebusiness.bell.ca/rate-plans/combo-plans-for-iphone)

Here's the competition ($80 for 400 min.): [http://www.rogers.com/web/Rogers.portal?_nfpb=true&_page...](http://www.rogers.com/web/Rogers.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=WLRS_Plans)

The Canadian telecommunication industry is a cartel by any definition.

</comment><comment><USER3> On a similar tangent, I'm actually travelling to the states for PAX coming up next week, and I tried to get something set up for roaming data with my carrier, Virgin:

[http://www.danhulton.com/blog/2010/08/26/mitigating- exhorbit...](http://www.danhulton.com/blog/2010/08/26/mitigating-exhorbitant- us-data-roaming-rates-on-virgin-mobile-canada/)

The short of it is, I have to pay $6 per MEGABYTE of roaming data I accrue, even if it's on Viring US's network. And I'm _LUCKY_. If I didn't have a smartphone, I could be paying $15 for the first megabyte, and $0.05 per _KILOBYTE_ thereafter.</comment>


Ask HN: Keras on PyPy? - <AUTHOR> Wondering if non-standard interpreters like pypy and cpython can be used to speed up training. <comment><USER2> It seems like there's some progress, including a merged PR to tensorflow that should end up making this work, but I'm confused as to the exact status:[https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/252](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/252)

</comment><comment><USER3> I got stuck on this problem a while ago. I was doing reinforcement learning and the environment needed to run in pypy to make it fast enough. I ended up using Pyro4 to bridge pypy (environment) and CPython (keras).

</comment><comment><USER4> Asked about this before. I was told no one cared since the real work is done in C and would not benefit from pypy. So the python level optimizations would not affect much.

<comment><USER5> Not entirely true. For good utilization you need both GPU/TPU ops to be fast (written in C), but that won't get you far if your input pipeline (possibly written in python) is slow. I could imagine if all the TF calls work in PyPy, that it would help with throughout by speeding up the input pipeline and keeping the GPU/TPU saturated more effectively. One solution is to write everything to TFRecords, but for experimentation that's kinda annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > non-standard interpreters like pypy and cpython

Isn't CPython the default and most standard interpreter?</comment>


The Very Serious Lessons of Juicero - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/juicero-lessons/523896/?utm_source=atlfb&single_page=true <comment><USER2> I don't see this taking off. Smart people don't buy single use appliances. Except for waffle makers. ;)

Only the well to do people would consider this (only because it's expensive, so it has to be bought), but even then, they'll probably stop buying the packets after a short time because they'd rather go down to the corner juice shop and let someone else squeeze them some expensive juice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Juicero need to sell only the juice packs, that's where their business model is. The machine is probably a loss leader so they can sell the packs. Now we know it's useless, so they should move to selling the packs only.</comment>


Takers and Makers - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/10/takers-and-makers.html <comment><USER2> "Makers build things. They create value for society, their employees, their shareholders, and themselves. Be a maker and stay far away from takers."

Anyone read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn?</comment>


The Stack Overflow Developer Story: A New Technical Resume - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2016/10/bye-bye-bullets-the-stack-overflow-developer-story-is-the-new-technical-resume/ <comment><USER3> As someone who reads and writes thousands of developer resumes a year, the major problem I see is that people have a difficult time separating what is important from what isn't, and separating day-to-day responsibilities (which are typically understood from a job title) from unique and novel achievements. I don't know if this kind of tool solves that problem.

Much of my work with resume clients is extracting what they do from them and then putting it into efficient words. Many people struggle with just explaining what they do.

The other problem is that you have to understand that your reader often isn't someone with a highly technical background (or even a recruiting background), so you have to define yourself quickly in order to prevent the reader from misinterpreting who you are. If a reader is looking for a "Python Developer", it's best to refer to yourself that way on the resume.

For senior level people length is often the issue - it's a highlight reel - not a biography. Anyone can get to 1-2 pages max.

<comment><USER4> As I've gotten older my resumes have gotten shorter. The shortest resume is just your last name "Zuckerberg" or "Snowden". If you've achieved something impressive (sold a company, started a well known web framework, fixed some large horrible government or organizational process) it speaks for itself and the rest of it is just making sure you aren't a conartist, which an interview can easily handle.

<comment><USER3> >As I've gotten older my resumes have gotten shorter.

That's refreshing to hear. I hear too many people claiming "I have so much experience and accomplishments that I simply can't fit them all in under four pages". The problem there is just an inability to assess what is the most impressive or relevant experience.

Many people do get emotionally attached to the work they've done. I've worked with people transitioning into tech from other fields, and it is hard for them to swallow the thought of distilling their 10 years as a litigator and law school into maybe 2 lines on a resume. If you can detach yourself from the work, are efficient with words, and you know what employers are looking for, it's not difficult to create a one or two page resume even with lots of experience.

<comment><USER5> > I hear too many people claiming "I have so much experience and > accomplishments that I simply can't fit them all in under four pages". The > problem there is just an inability to assess what is the most impressive or > relevant experience.

As someone who recently did some job hunting I will tell you that while I agree on an idealism level with your comment it's just simply not true in practice.

I had _many, many_ companies outright reject my truncated resume even though it provided an outline of years of experience and some top accomplishments simply because it didn't include enough of the buzzwords they were looking for. Resubmitting with my longer, 5 page resume (which I absolutely hate doing)? Accepted. Every time.

I will say, however, that if you can apply directly to a person via email (the "Who's Hiring" HN posts are perfect for this, typically) then the shorter resume will work just fine.

<comment><USER6> For CVs for monster/linked in I have a buzzword bullet list where not everything even gets it's own bullet so it doesn't take up much space.

So as a dev one ends up with bullets like (exaggerated here for effect):

* C# / .Net (ASP.Net webforms, MVC, WCF, Entity framework)

* SQL ( T-SQL, stored procedures, sql-server management)

* Python (Django, Flask, south, numpy, scipy)

* Javascript (jQuery, ES5, ES2016, webpack, bower, npm)

* Front-end frameworks (angular, react, knockout)

* Unit testing (mocha, jasmine, chai, nunit, xunit, junit)

* sourcesafe, bamboo, trello, docker

Yes, there's a danger it can look a bit redundant but it's mostly just there for the box ticking buzzword finding recruiters and prospective employers should understand that too and really be reading the other parts to try to get a better picture of your depth of those and the relevance at your more recent roles.

<comment><USER7> > box ticking buzzword finding recruiters

Sums it up well

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was skeptical of this when they first launched the earlier versions, but I actually quite like the way they've done it in the final version.

My favorite resume of all time is Matt Hall's stratigraphic column resume: [https://static.squarespace.com/static/549dcda5e4b0a47d0ae1db...](https://static.squarespace.com/static/549dcda5e4b0a47d0ae1db1e/54a06d6ee4b0d158ed95f696/54a06d6fe4b0d158ed95fff5/1292595536033/Strat_column_2011.pdf) (His blog post about it is here: [http://www.agilegeoscience.com/blog/2010/12/17/resume-20.htm...](http://www.agilegeoscience.com/blog/2010/12/17/resume-20.html))

I'm a geologist, so I'm rather fond of the puns, etc that he's made here, but the point is that a straigraphic column is a great way to lay out a resume. It gives a vertical visual depiction of what the person has been doing from most recent to longest ago.

That's exactly what the developer story is. I really like that they've used that visual layout. It's a very effective way to convey activities and employment history.

</comment><comment><USER9> My recent job search lead me to the idea that the traditional resume is broken. Temporal view only gives recruiters and hiring managers the bullet points to qualify you in whatever bucket that they need.

Instead of a traditional CV/Resume, I went with a single page narrative approach with a link to the temporal view on my LinkedIn profile. Initially there was some pushback as the recruiters were bellyaching over the fact that they needed to actually read my essay, but as time progressed I discovered that this format became a tool.

By forcing the hiring manager/recruiter to actually read and understand your background, inbound leads were much higher quality and the initial phone screen was extremely easy. Out of 100+ job applications, i got 20 or so responses, and of those 20 responses, 10 offers.

Out of the 20 responses, 19 were good fits and had good hiring managers with a company that had a decent culture.

I am definitely using the narrative approach again for my next job hunt.

<comment><USER10> I haven't sent a resume in a while. Usually I just give a "cover letter" of sorts that says a) why I'm interested in the job b) what I can offer/why they "need" me, c) why I think so (usually just talk about experience).

I have a website that lists my workplaces and my main projects and of course my GitHub, both of which I link. I guess that's my "resume".

<comment><USER11> Didn't send a cover letter in a while. I am surprised this practise still exists.

<comment><USER10> Mine's not a cover letter in the usual sense but that's the closest analogy I can think of... I just write an email saying those three things and links to my stuff.

<comment><USER11> Right. The separate full blown cover letter is dead. We just put a short text in the initial email to go along the resume.

That's also what I do and recommend.

<comment><USER12> > The separate full blown cover letter is dead.

Out of curiosity, in which country are you? AFAIK, here in Australia, not having a cover letter would pretty much prevent you from getting a job.

<comment><USER11> UK at the moment.

We always have to fill a message when posting a resume. Write a short paragraph and that replaces the cover letter.

I wouldnt call that having 'no cover letter at all'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Weren't GitHub profiles the new technical resume? How well did that work in practice, and how would this Stack Overflow approach be different?

I was under the impression (from reading HN/Reddit) that while engineers do read GitHub profiles if explicitly linked in a resume, nontechnical recruiters do not. And they are the gatekeeper to said engineers.

<comment><USER14> Not every programmer likes to share his side-project code on public places like GitHub - for many reasons. Or pullrequest to some opensource mess. Code you write and problems you solve at work usually can't be shown on GitHub either.

So, this "show me your GitHub" thing for me is no different from "show me your Facebook, wait what, no FB account??" experience with non-technical HRs ;)

Conventional resume is totally OK for a first step in recruitment, I don't understand the need for extra fanfare.

<comment><USER15> Resumes are extremely easy to exaggerate or fabricate. I haven't seen fake github profiles yet (and I suspect they would be more trouble than they are worth).

I am often brought in on the hiring process to vet peoples technical skills. I used to just try to ask questions in the hour or two I got with the person, this seemed no better than flipping a coin. Even if the person was honest and we were both talking about the same skill, but how do I know that their experience with that skill is applicable? Now I insist on seeing a portfolio of some kind for coders. A Github, Bitbucket, Sourceforge or any other publicly viewable body of source will do.

15 minutes with someones code is a much better predictor of skill than even several hours of discussion. It costs a lot less too.

<comment><USER16> Very recently, a close friend was looking for a job (as a junior dev - <USER2> on web). After applying and getting rejected, we decided to try a different approach - he basically gave up and decided to the following:

1) added buzz keywords in his resume

2) hosted an instance of gitlab and took various open source projects (stuff that was not popular, but had enough polish), modified them and uploaded them.

After a week, he was able to land multiple interviews. While he did get called out once, almost all engineers/non-tech hr didn't bother calling his bluff.

I am not suggesting that you should lie on your resume or steal open source projects, just that depending on one factor (like github, or resume, or white boards) is futile and that tech hiring in general is broken.

<comment><USER11> > While he did get called out once, almost all engineers/non-tech hr didn't > bother calling his bluff.

I see plenty of GitHub profiles that are filled with forked/starred projects from other people, and nothing of substance.

I don't bring it to the candidate because it is worthless and there are more interesting things to talk about. But that doesn't mean I didn't see it ;)

Actually I have never once in my life see a good github profile.

<comment><USER17> I don't like this notion of having a "good" GitHub profile. GitHub started off as an easy place for me to dump code, no matter how crappy. Dumb ideas, samples from learning, incomplete experiments, whatevs.

Then I noticed that I had started censoring my code krapola. I was sepf conscious about the code I was making visible, as I didn't want to be judged. Then I decided that lame. Now I shamelessly put garbage on GitHub, too.

Coding poorly & having fun trumps curating a collection fancy schmancy artisinal repos. And I've also learned that my good code often lives at work, and never makes it to GitHub.

<comment><USER18> I'm the same way. I removed a lot of old stuff from my early days because I was afraid I was going to be judged on it. Now I don't care. GitHub is my dumping ground for everything. I start a new project almost every time I want to learn a specific thing so I have lots of incomplete projects on there simply because I move on once I learned the goal task.

Unfortunately like most people all the clean and polished code lives in private work repos. All those things I learned from the unfinished repos is being used in work code. Oh well.

<comment><USER19> I wonder if it's worth maintaining two accounts. A professional-oriented curated one could be valuable in some job hunts.

<comment><USER20> I have a self-hosted Gogs instance for all the stuff that I want private (either because it's shit or because it's really personal information that I don't want to put on anyone else's computer, including GitHub's).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Surprisingly, not many people know just how to write a good developer resume. The Developer Story is a good approach but even that is missing the key element that makes a resume work _when you are looking for a job_.

Imagine this scenario:

        - Farmer looking for horse to plough my fields and inspect my farm
        - Horse 1: "I am a stallion! My coat shines in the sun, my mane is dark and glossy, and the very earth trembles as I run. I have come from the stables of Arabia, have been in the armies of Alexander, the greeks, and the mighty Theseus! I have ploughed the fields of Asphodel, and won 'prettiest horse' in the Reading village fair"
        - Farmer: "Wow! You're...impressive"
        - Horse 2: "I enjoy ploughing fields and I'm pretty strong"
        - Farmer: "Great! I can offer you two apples, four sugar cubes, a nice warm barn..."

To be effective, Resume's shouldn't be all about how great we are (unless we are _really_ someone standout). Rather they should be tailored to the job we want.

The resume needs to get through the "hiring funnel". This means they must contain the keywords that the ATS and Recruiter need in addition to our technical accomplishments that the Hiring Manager and Interviewing Panel will want. This really is pretty simple but we get caught up looking inward and not paying attention to the actual audience of the resume. So most resume's end up hit or miss.

For anyone interested, I've written a book on how to do this. The book's description on Amazon contains the entire process so you don't need to buy it unless you want to. [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KVVY9OA](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KVVY9OA)

<comment><USER19> >The book's description on Amazon contains the entire process so you don't need to buy it unless you want to.

Would you say this level of openness has an impact (positive or negative) on sales of your book? It's pretty refreshing but the cynic in me wonders if it hurts sales.

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure - maybe it does but the idea itself is pretty simple so I want to get it out there. I see a lot of people spending time making their resume's "look good" instead of being more result-oriented. I figured if I could explain how to write a resume well it would help.

The book itself has more detail and a step by step (chapter by chapter) process to get a great resume written out. So it's mostly helpful for the lazy ones! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So I got the notice this morning that my info had been changed to this new developer story on SO. I go check, it's literally > 10 screens before a single useful piece of info appears. 70 or so open source projects I contributed to or run followed by my job experience

> "your Developer Story is the best way to share whatever it is that you take > pride in. It's your story; tell it your way."

Um, no, that's not my way. My way would be to list my professional accomplishments first and then list my open source projects just to show how much of a geek I am.

<comment><USER23> FWIW, there's a tab to switch to the old view which is probably what most recruiters will know to do. I hope they track what recruiters actually click on when checking your resume.

I honestly don't know which they'd prefer. As someone who occasionally interviews people, I do tend to find the cookie cutter descriptions of jobs to be moderately unhelpful. I would be interested in seeing more "what you take pride in," in many cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> At some point years ago I must have asked SO not to show me any questions with "soap" tag.

Unfortunately my shiny new developer story now has "I dislike soap".

</comment><comment><USER25> It's an interesting idea, but I prefer to take my experience and tell a story that specifically targets the role for which I am applying. From that perspective, having a single "story" out there for all potential employers isn't optimal for me.

<comment><USER26> They should let you tag items on the timeline for different roles, so that you can quickly filter it for employers and send out.

<comment><USER23> That's an awesome idea! You should suggest it on meta.stackoverflow.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A lot of negativity here, but I really liked my profile on stackoverflow careers, and I really like this. I felt like it was pretty different from linkedin, here are some things I like/liked: \- easy to list my favorite technologies and books. \- easy to link to github to show projects, easy to link to stackexchange. \- UI gave good guidance on how to write a better description

As someone who's hired hundreds of software engineers over the past 15 years, it did the best job generating the kind of resumes I like to see.

</comment><comment><USER28> I like where this is going (i've built something similar, if private [1]).

Resumes in their current form don't work well as a source of truth about anyone's career. The main issue being that we put summarized/editorialized information in instead of details. It's like discarding the data you used to generate a chart and then updating the chart directly going forward.

[1] [https://jobrudder.com](https://jobrudder.com)

</comment><comment><USER29> I've had success with the "T style" where I list the stated requirements verbatim from the job posting on one side and how specifically I meet those requirements on the other side. Combined with some narrative about relevant experience, it's way better than just a chronology.

</comment><comment><USER30> Wait so hiring managers who didn't have more then 60 seconds to parse my resume now have the time to go through years of my stackoverflow activity? Sweet!

<comment><USER31> The SO story will allow them to scan the highlights quicker IMHO.

<comment><USER32> It will become even more important to include visuals such as popular company logos or hip cool images.

This is the only reason I created a logo for my open source project, so that it sticks out whenever someone posts about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is it really now? That sucks as I don't really engage with SO that often; Hardly ever really. Sure, if I Google for something SO results come up, but normally I search YouTube for a talk/tutorial or search Github for snippets of code.

I guess I'm screwed...

<comment><USER34> That is why this is a good move on stack overflow's part. They wand developers to feel like they have to use SO.

<comment><USER13> In terms of vertical integration, this technical resume aligns more with SO's robust job platform than with the Q/A platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is authored by a Jay Hanlon, "VP of Community Growth". Apparently, the role includes publishing clickbait.

He squeezes in a humblebrag: "...if you're like me, and still just a little proud that you got off the waitlist and eked your way into a school above your intellectual weight class..."

And he uses scarcity to scare devs into creating a profile: "It only takes a few minutes, and you do NOT want some other joker snapping up the good URLs."

<comment><USER36> Yeah I also felt the scarcity quip was in bad taste.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I don't see anything on here that I couldn't do with my LinkedIn profile, TBH.

I do kinda wish I knew the secrets of how to get 2-3 recruiting emails a day though. Unless it's "have 5 more years of experience," I think my profile could use some help.

<comment><USER31> dice.com

<comment><USER37> Lol, I guess I should have specified emails written in good English that weren't asking me to move across the country for some shitty 3 month contract.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've been a contributor and top 10-20% user on SO for the last 5 years or so, and I've never once received a single job offer, solicitation or point of contact. I'm doubtful this will change any of that.

</comment><comment><USER39> I thought the "new resume" was Stack Overflow Careers, which I spent USD$29 for back in the day. To SO's credit at the time, they offered a full refund if one was ever not satisfied. I never took them up on it, though I should have considering that it was a waste of $29 for all the value I got out of it. I spent a fair bit of time sprucing up that profile, got very few hits, and the quality of the leads was no better or worse than what I'd get off LinkedIn. IOW, random recruiters spamming.

So when the recent email hit my inbox, it was with a healthy dose of skepticism that I just immediately deleted it.

</comment><comment><USER40> This would probably not be the most proud feature shipped to date (if I worked at SO). \- It looks just average and does make use of the white space \- It has this section where you "DISLIKE" technology? wtf really? \- Who cares what you recommend as a book to read? This is a resume right, not your blog. \- I somehow feel this is too leaderboard-y and not something i would use for a resume - but sure, it IS a cool thing to have if you're into StackOverflow (like a LOT), just not a resume..

</comment><comment><USER28> It's not the new resume by a long shot. But it does point to some large flaws resumes have.

Resumes in their current form don't work well as a source of truth about anyone's career. The main issue being that we put summarized/editorialized information in instead of details. It's like discarding the data you used to generate a chart and then updating the chart directly going forward.

You also can't manage the things you put on a resume. You can't easily search, tag, sort, view by company, position etc. You're doing all that in your head and then putting the result on paper.

There should be tools to help with this stuff (I built one [1]) and those tools should put the resume in it's proper place, as an output of some other more comprehensive source of truth.

[1] [https://jobrudder.com](https://jobrudder.com)

</comment><comment><USER41> __ is the new resume_

Oh please - not again.

<comment><USER42> My first thought too.

"What fresh hell is this?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> StackOverflow as a company may have grown a little too quickly; I wonder how much $$ they make from this and whether they should just focus on their core which is community and maintaining a decent community rather than these marketing-led stunts.

<comment><USER43> These aren't mutually exclusive goals. We have people dedicated to growing and maintaining the community (on Stack Overflow, as well as the other sites in the Stack Exchange network), people who work on large feature areas (e.g. Documentation), yet more people who are focused on the Jobs and hiring/recruiting experience for developers, etc.

<comment><USER32> I'm more curious to know how these affect the profits of StackOverflow and what gets more bang for the buck or if random ideas are being tried out seeing which one sticks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I see some other comments about preferring other ways to tailor your application or have specific approaches when you apply for particular jobs and I definitely agree with both:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12687415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12687415)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12686741](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12686741)

But I don't think this is really aimed at supplanting that. It's really just trying to put a better face on the "passive" approach to things and I like it for that.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm trying to get hired as a junior front end developer. Suck at writing resumes.

This is my worst one so far. Also I've been applying but no responses, I have a defeatist mentality and also I think I do accept that I don't meet the requirements.

[http://m.imgur.com/a/oCdvU](http://m.imgur.com/a/oCdvU)

I have changed the format some as the bullets as titles doesn't make sense. Still I have to condense and overall my "achievements" are pretty basic. Probably will have to find another menial job. Oh well

<comment><USER46> That is a terrible resume :-(

Why would you start with negative sentences about your projects? "not complete". "at best what I have...". "decided to abandon".

The second page is much more promising. Instead of story-telling and editorializing "This was a basic job, and quick", focus on what techniques you used:

\- started from a broken Bootstrap prototype \- rewrote email sending using package xyz

etc. Show me that you know how to use a variety of technologies, packages and tools. Then I can judge whether I have a job for you.

<comment><USER45> Right unfortunately I haven't used many tools. This one site was built with bootstrap and since I don't use/know bootstrap I wrote it from scratch the scrolling, menu, animations, etc...

Yeah it is a work in progress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> _" your Developer Story is the best way to share whatever it is that you take pride in. It's your story; tell it your way."_

Are people still relying on third party companies marketing to both sides of the market, to attract employees? You don't really need them. The Internet and contributions to open source [0] is your developer story, use it. [1]

reference:

[0] I realise not everyone can/will want do this.

[1] offer from google engineering (SRE) on basis of newsgroup questions and code.

</comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone have a security@ contact address for stackoverflow that they know is monitored?

Unfortunately there is no way to opt out of this service right now. (edit: I don't want to email security to ask for an opt-out, it would just be nice to opt out until they fix the actual security issue.)

Edit: Found a web form they use on security.stackexchange.

<comment><USER43> Not sure what issue you're referring to, but you can reach us through the contact form linked at the bottom of every page on our Q&A sites (like the one you found) or by email to team@. Mentioning something like "security vulnerability" in the subject or the body will help get it looked at faster.

Edit: checked internally, and this specific issue is being fixed as we speak.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, I've done that now, hopefully you can find my submission I did put 'security vulnerability' as the top line in the body. If that doesn't narrow it down search for 1635976 also in the body.

It's an either an information disclosure issue or an authorization issue (depending on your point of view), I won't say more on here.

<comment><USER48> I'm curious what you found - once they get it fixed, would you mind sharing in some form?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I have seen numerous versions of the "New Resume" in the last ten years or so. It's really hard to replace something universal that everyone understands, even if it's antiquated. I doubt this will fair much better.

<comment><USER50> The difference is that this is aimed at one market, whereas other "New Resumes" try to be a catch-all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Why does everything need to be a stream? Is my resume a twitter feed now?

<comment><USER52> The length of a tweet would be a fantastic constraint on most resumes.

<comment><USER51> I agree. Sounds like a fun new product to disrupt the resume industry: Tweesume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> The traditional resume works because it's easy to scan visually quickly. It's easy to print out and share. This is not.

<comment><USER54> There is a 'print to pdf' option that saves it as the traditional view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I like the use of 2 columns.

</comment><comment><USER55> That lady's resume is very impressive. Is she looking?

</comment><comment><USER11> Obviously this is marketing fake from stack overflow.

There is nothing more unreadable than a Stack Overflow resume. Well... except a project on github that doesn't have a readme.

</comment><comment><USER56> Ugh.</comment>


Tunnelbear launches Remembear password manager - <AUTHOR> https://www.remembear.com/download/ <comment><AUTHOR> Very slick branding and onboarding [https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/24/vpn- company-tunnelbear-ex...](https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/24/vpn-company- tunnelbear-expands-into-password-management-with-remembear-app/) has more info</comment>


Ebola-Infected Health Worker Took Flight from Cleveland to Dallas 2 Days Ago - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/us/ebola-infected-dallas-health-worker-was-on-flight.html

<comment><USER2> Ebola isn't spread in a respiratory manner. Unless he took some bodily fluids and rubbed them into a mucus membrane/cut of another person, no need for more fear-mongering.

<comment><USER3> Not quite as simple as that.

The infected patient coughs and a spray of droplets lands on a handle or arm- rest. The next passenger puts his hand on the arm-rest and then eats a packet of peanuts, thus transferring one person bodily fluids into a second person's bodily fluids.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To be clear, this was Cleveland, TX, NOT Cleveland, OH.

<comment><USER4> Correction, it WAS Cleveland, OH.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What encryption do you use to send files to unsophisticated parties? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> Adding a bit more detail to the question:

I'm keen to understand people's solutions for sending sensitive data (e.g. CSVs, PDF docs) to third party organisations that can only be assumed to have standard (MS Windows / MS Office) tools at their disposal for decryption.

I'm keen for encryption to be of a modern, robust standard, and preferably available via mac / unix tools.

Thanks HN!

<comment><USER2> Standard passworded ZIP files? Sounds like Windows Compressed Folder handling copes just fine with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would use something like 7zip.

However my unsophisticated parties are really too unsophisticated or too lazy so I send it in clear.

This is why you will not find a comment from me throwing stones at Equifax or other orgs that had breach.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks yeah 7zip looks useful although the standard macOS unzipping utility can't decrypt it when it's encrypted using AES256 (not sure if windows can natively). Hence I'm concerned that the third party will also need a copy of 7zip...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why not a link to an https url?</comment>


Google Crisis Response: 2011 Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html

<comment><USER2> I didn't know Google had this service. I found it brilliant.

Interesting how the banner is black and white instead of the usual colorful logo.</comment>