Show HN: Spendy – a simple money tracker (iOS app) - <AUTHOR> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6084360/Spendy.html <comment><AUTHOR> So I've been working with iOS for over a year. Some employed time, freelance and I've hung around a lot in the jb-community.

Despite that I did not have one finished application of my own, lots of prototypes, but nothing in the App Store. So this is my first one, it is highly targeted to me, which you will notice if you read some of the text in the link. But I hope it is also something others will like.

Link to app in the App Store: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spendy/id872831308?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spendy/id872831308?mt=8)

Anyway, I thought I'd just post it here because why not.

<comment><USER2> Good job shipping! This was the kind of app I first worked on as well, but I never ended up putting it on the store, and kind of lost interest halfway through porting it to iOS 7 :)

The Add Transaction screen was pretty much where I lived in my app ([http://imgur.com/DobW80r](http://imgur.com/DobW80r)), so good work keeping it simple and efficient!

Some feedback:

* Might be worth making the user's current currency (you can get it from NSLocale) the default currency so that out of the box on first use they can start entering data, it's not great to have to go to settings first time you use it.

* If you must stick with hamburger menu, consider making the view tappable everywhere and not just on the hamburger icon, to dismiss it. Though I would argue it's worth using something like UITabBar to switch between log and charts if charts is something you use a lot.

* When tapping on a transaction to bring up the context buttons, consider allowing tapping anywhere on the screen to dismiss it, not just on cells.

* Consider a custom input view for the amount field, here's an example of what I did for my app ([http://imgur.com/yp27cxK](http://imgur.com/yp27cxK)), gets rid of the ugly "dialer" style ABC/DEF/GHI annotations. More maintenance though.

* Understand its for you mainly, but tag editing would be nice :)

* When you have a couple of thousand transactions in there (I had 20,000), being able to quickly whip up some adhoc queries for interesting stats becomes a lot easier if you have an SQL backed data model, and I used SQLite+transactions just because I was paranoid of some stupid bug corrupting all the data. Knowing myself, I would delete an app the first time it lost any data.

However, long term, I think the solution for this kind of app is direct integration with banks (one of the reasons I lost interest, because I started getting super tired of typing in the data on a phone)!

Best of luck, and keep on iterating! Never forget what the first version of popular slick apps looked like, a lot of them were pretty basic.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't thought about the NSLocale but that sounds like something that would suit well, especially since another guy mentioned the currency at "first launch".

Tag editing is something which is in the works.

I use, as you might read, a plain text file now. But I do miss writing queries and I am looking at SQLite.

I've mentioned this a couple of times now, but where I'm from we don't have bank APIs. But I wish we did. I kind of like manually entering things though, keeps my mind on "what am I spending money on".

Anyway thanks for the feedback.

EDIT: Saw your input view and that does look nice, especially the + - buttons, smooth. I might implement this actually. It has happened once or twice that I wanted to do some addition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been using the YNAB[1] app for expense tracking, and I'm pretty happy with it.

It has a nice feature where it records the retailer's location using the iPhone's location services, so when you enter new transactions for a retailer you've been to before it can automatically guess the payee and category. After a week or two, the app had learnt the payees I used the most, so entering transactions became super fast.

The downside with YNAB is that you must sync it with a desktop version of their app. The iOS/Android apps are free, but only support a small subset of the desktop app's functionality.

With YNAB there's also a whole financial management system that they want you to buy into. It works well for me, but might not meet everyone's mental model of how personal finance should work.

[1]: [http://www.ynab.com/](http://www.ynab.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've heard a lot of good about YNAB, but I don't need something so extensive.

I have had thoughts about the learning-thing but I hadn't thought about using location also, which sounds smart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I almost closed the tab when I saw the screenshots of the "other apps". They all look pretty terrible and because I hadn't actually read anything on the page yet when I saw them, I assumed they were screenshots of your app. I would suggest that you lead with screenshots of your app, especially since it looks a lot nicer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm, maybe I should yes. Glad you scrolled down though^^ Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I miss these Show HN project writeups. They're what drew me to HN in the first place, but these days I'm lucky to see one good one per week.

Excellent work, OP. It looks like you're a unicorn.. or could be one with a bit more design polish :)

<comment><USER6> I posted one this week with a partner (we were pleased with the results, though it was hard to stay on the front page for more than an hour).

I think a weekly Show/Ask HN roundup post could be really helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great app, I've been looking for a simple, bare bones budget tracking app.

I think you need to fix the flow for the first time users. If every first time user must add a currency, why not have first time user screen be the add currency screen? Also, the add currency screen should have suggestions. It wasn't initially clear that I needed to type 'USD' instead of 'dollar'. It also wasn't clear that the currency needed to be in capital letters. I had usd in lowercase and clicking the check mark did nothing. There should at least be feedback.

The app is great once getting past the first screen. Nice job.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will take notes, I have been thinking about the "onboarding" process and I do agree with all of your feedback. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't have an iPhone so I can't try it but I read on the website "As you can see, there is no "exchange rate" here. I decided to keep as much data separated as possible since a user may want to change their currencies around."

Not storing the exchange rate if the rate changes a lot don't you risk having a value that might not be correct?

For example if my main currency is EUR and I store a transaction of 5 US $ with an exchange rate of 1€ = 1.3$ then if one week later it becomes 1€ = 2$.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am aware of this and I am thinking of a solution for it.

I might just add a "download rate history" into a map[date>rate] and do all calculations with that.

And when exporting it would get correct values in the CSV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This app looks great, but the only negative for me is that it does offer the ability to take a camera snapshot of a real receipt. Some other apps have this receipt snapshot feature, but not the simplicity of your app. For me this snapshot feature alone would complete the perfect app in this category, and for this reason alone I am holding off on the purchase.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well the app is free with a small in-app unlock for (atm) Dropbox, unlimited tags and the different colors.

Anyway, I posted a comment about the snapshot here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7928331](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7928331)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the first things I did after installing, is turned off the notifications and badge icon in iOS settings.

It doesn't look like this can be changed within the app. It only provides the option of changing the content that's displayed. This was an initial turn off for me, but other than that I'm really happy with this!

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not sure what you mean, could you explain further?

<comment><USER10> My mistake, I actually installed the wrong app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thanks for the write up, I enjoyed the explanation of even the little details throughout the app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you liked it! If you use RSS you can add this link [0]. I enjoyed writing this so I'll probably do it again when I finish any other projects.

[0] [http://jontelang.com/blog/feed.xml](http://jontelang.com/blog/feed.xml)

<comment><USER11> Great, thanks, subscribed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is great. I built my own web app budgeting solution. I've been working on and personally using [https://budgetmyway.com/](https://budgetmyway.com/) for a while now. I love budgeting. Looking for feedback.

</comment><comment> j-rom This looks pretty cool. One question though: Is the "Tap again to confirm" button active before the animation ends? For example, what if the user accidentally double taps the delete button?

<comment><AUTHOR> I just tried it a couple of times and it appears it is not active while animating, which is good.

EDIT: It appears the method I use disables gestures by default. Semi relevant stack overflow: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7337363/how-to- recognize-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7337363/how-to-recognize- tap-gesture-while-a-view-is-animating)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Excellent overview. I love these.

One feature I may have missed is reconciliation. That is, some way to review my manually entered transactions with statements provided by my bank.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just mentioned this to someone in an email. I am not from the US, so the bank providing an API is very foreign to me.

Anyone else from Sweden here? Do we have something like this that I do not know of?

But the gist of it, unless I am misunderstanding something, is that I cannot implement it (bank integration).

<comment><USER14> Swede here. As far as reconciliation goes, from my understanding it's basically just making sure whatever's listed in the app and what's on your internetbank matches up. YNAB does this quite well, letting you edit transactions if something does not match, and marking a post as reconciled (i.e. it matches up to your bank statement). Good summation here: [http://www.youneedabudget.com/support/article/how-to- reconci...](http://www.youneedabudget.com/support/article/how-to-reconcile)

Also, we went to school together :) Good job on the app, congrats on HN first page!

<comment><AUTHOR> I see, I skimmed the article and I guess that's something to look into further, thanks for the link.

And tjenare ^^ Hope all is well man

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was looking for a similar app for android. Is there one?

<comment><USER16> I'd take a look at Financius ([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.code44.fin...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.code44.finance)). The design is fairly clean and the development is done in the open, which is nice.

I'm also working on something in a similar space. If you have specific needs I'd love to talk (see my profile).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is great and might just replace my trusty Moleskine.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice work.

I have tried heaps of apps for this, 'cost' and 'spendee' are the ones I found to be the best so far. Will give yours a try soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Those are the ones I liked the most also! But not enough to keep me away from Xcode. Let me know what you think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Downloaded. Entered my first transaction. I like the fact that it attempts to do only one thing. Simple is good.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what I was going for so that's good to hear, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Take a look at [http://coinkeeper.me/](http://coinkeeper.me/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Neat. Although it seems, after a download, that it is also a budgeting tool. It greets me with "how much do you want to spend each month" and have balances for accounts.

While I can definitely see why people want this, I don't. I just want to track my expenses.

I will play around with it some more though, it looks like a fresh take on the app types.

Is it yours?

<comment><USER20> I'm not the owner, but I like that app. I think its possible to just track your expenses, but its impossible to take money from "nowhere" so you have to have at least one account. In this case you'll have negative balance on that account which will be set to 0 each month.

As for "How much do you want to spend each month", its not mandatory but gives a new user an idea how to use all app features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This looks great. Works well and very simple to use. What about a way to take photo of the receipt?

<comment><AUTHOR> Again I've thought about that but I am not sure how I will do it in regards to the data, which is in CSV format.

Each entry does have a unique UNIX timestamp, I might just drop all receipts in a folder and have the names of them linked to the timestamp.

How does that sound?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Seems very nice (congrats on shipping!) but for the love of god please change the app icon.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not very capable with designing icons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Great looking app. I would use this so much if there was two way Dropbox sync.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will definitely work on that as it is something I want too.

<comment><USER23> I'm mostly interested in that because I have a custom scraper script pulling data from my bank on a Raspberry Pi at home, adding two way sync would make it super useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there an API exposed? BTW, I'm loving this app! Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not even sure how or what that would be used or even done. Like "open in .." stuff? Or could you give me some example or use cases? I like the sound of an API!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: An entrepreneur's travel guide? - <AUTHOR>

I have written a technical book on DIY electronics before, which was successfully published. It's been a while and I am thinking of writing another book now.
I want to call it something like "100 Places to Disconnect", or "100 Places to Reboot". Basically, a global guide containing/highlighting the most inspirational places around the globe, with a bit of a backstory, some go-to places, possibly tech-hubs or co-working locations etc.
While working for Microsoft, as well as for other companies around the world, I have always had the benefit of traveling a lot and working in super noisy mega-cities as well as some of the most remote places on Earth, like the Gili Islands, street cafes in Kuala Lumpur, fishing docks in Seattle or on an almost empty island in Greece. And it's so inspiring to just disconnect from your daily life, exit to a different place/culture and bust out some code or come up with new ideas. Ideas that are often bigger than your day-in-day-out rhythm would allow you to come up with.
I want to revisit my most favorite places as well as those from other entrepreneurs (you guys would be a GREAT resource!).
Would you guys feel this makes sense? Is there a specific publisher that would be interested in, or does anyone have any contacts I could utilize for that?
Would this sound like an interesting book to have for you? I'm not much of a 120 page e-book type of person, I'd like to work through a real publisher for various reasons (revenue unfortunately is not one). It's harder to get the deal signed, but everything else is usually managed exceptionally well afterwards (royalties and such).
Anyways, would love to hear your thoughts. <comment><USER2> I have friends who publish periodically through publishers, and those who self-publish. As lifeguard mentions, publishers tend to require tremendous resources from authors, by way of huge marketing pushes/travel, blogging, promotion, marketing, etc. I'm not so well informed about the cost of production via publishers, nor the buy-back of unpurchased books from B&M stores.

For those who self-publish, they still do their own marketing. E-published people invest the least cost (i.e., no printing), and perhaps equal time on marketing/promotion. Paper-published people invest more up front because of printing, but perhaps reach a wider audience if they can get their books into B&M stores and because like it or not, many people still prefer paper.

This is admittedly unscientific; my sample size is about 20, though some of them blog about their experiences, and refer to their own circles of authors and their experiences, as well.

As for your proposed book topic, sounds like a wonderful idea to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the interesting insights. As said in another comment below, there are some great advantages of self-publishing.

However, buying back unsold copies from a publisher, even having to invest a single dollar in something other than researching the book is pretty unheard of for renowed publishing houses, at least from what I can gather through my limited experience and contacts.

In addition, a lot of the editing, layouting, franchise and distribution work is far more reliable, affordable and streamlined through a publisher's capabilities compared to kick-starting my own efforts on these topics.

Self-marketing your books online might have experienced a great change indeed, but I believe there's a whole lot of work between writing the book and selling it. And that's where the publisher usually stands out (still, unfortunately).

Happy you like the idea, this is reassuring. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why not do print on demand?

[http://www.lulu.com/publish/](http://www.lulu.com/publish/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for posting this, I know of lulu, but I'm sure others will be happy to learn about it. To address your question: It's a bit like with Indiegogo and Kickstarter. You will have a hard time getting funded if you don't have a good round of friends/supporters that are pushing you up in the first few days. Especially Indiegogo, where a lot of people (including me) quickly realize, it's just a mode to get funding, but it won't attract funding. Lulu is a mode to print a book, but the publishing process involves a whole lot more to reach your audience. I'm not a marketing genius, neither do I have great connections to book stores around the world. But publishing houses have, which is also why they only give you like 7% of the net price of a book and keep the rest.

It's also about reputation, which thankfully is shifting a lot now. I remember a few years back, when the first self-printed type of books showed up on Amazon and quality of content was hard to judge (especially for Kindle/ebooks). If this passes the eyes of a publisher, I know that there's likely a market for it - and most buyers (not always the case though) can somewhat rely on the quality of the book.

Just a few thoughts. If you're a known person, or know how to market really well, then Lulu would be a kick-ass option.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, two more things that a publisher will give you: \- Editor \- Layouting done professionally

<comment><USER3> The cost/benefit analyses never pencils out for these services.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Self hosted Evernote alternative - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/timdavies/trunk <comment><USER2> Not bad at all. However, I see some problems with the demo. 1\. The search doesn't seem to work. At all. 2\. The note edit box is way too small by default compared to the available space on the page. 3\. Why is there a "Notes" icon on the left? Where else can a user be on the page, as navigating to the home page while logged in also redirects me to the dashboard?

<comment><AUTHOR> First of all, thanks for your feedback - really appreciate you trying it out and taking the time to offer your thoughts. Regarding your points:

1\. I'll check the search tonight and add some tests to cover it, thanks for letting me know.

2\. Agreed regarding the design - could do with some improvements. I'll tweak it.

3\. The reason there's a notes icon is because I'm planning to have other icons there too (I'm considering a few options but perhaps bookmarks, contacts, files, etc - that kind of thing). Doesn't really need to be there now, admittedly, but it shouldn't be too long until there are other sections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> seems pretty nice!</comment>


A statically typed language I'd actually want to use - <AUTHOR> http://alexgaynor.net/2010/nov/04/staticly-typed-language-id-actually-want-use/ <comment><USER2> At this point in computing history, your language needs a stronger raison d'être than "Python isn't statically typed, and C++ has awkward syntax!"; especially considering that 99% of all new languages never get off the ground. I'm virtually certain that there's something out there that fits the bill.

If not, contribute to something that gets close. Go, Scala, Haskell; whatever works. [Obviously, I do realize that building compilers/interpreters/parsers/etc. can be fun: if that's the point, disregard this.]

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure if that's true. While newer languages like python and ruby have taken the desktop app and web app arena by storm, most system/embedded level stuff is still done in C/C++. The usual arguments for this are that

A) The language gives you more control over memory management so you can squeeze as much performance out of every cycle.

B) There's a ton of existing libraries and legacy code in these languages. (Arguably one of the only reasons C++ gained any sort of traction was because of its advertised compatibility with C)

We've put up with the "shortcomings" of C (most programmers learned or think in OOP) and C++ (abundance of so-called gotchas and quirky areas of the language, Alan Kay's famous quote about C++'s OOP) and it still leaves much to be desired in my opinion. Java was an interesting development, but its GC disqualifies it for many systems or high-performance programming until recently. I don't have much experience with obj-c but it looks like another contender in this space as well.

There does seem to be a desire for a true "heir" to C as evidenced by D, Google's Go, and Mozilla's Rust. In fact, I'd be happy if someone just took the Java language and stripped out the GC instead of trying to restrict myself to a "safe" subset of C++.

I'm rooting for all of these projects because I'd love to see some of of the benefits of modern programming language theory brought to this sector of programming. This is an area where when there's competition everybody wins.

<comment><USER4> <http://www.bitc-lang.org/> <http://www.ats-lang.org/>

Those might show promise as nice languages with speed comparable to C.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> C# is a statically typed language that gets a lot right (and not coincidentally also borrows a ton from Python). As mainstream languages go it's probably the best out there; too bad the Mono compiler is usually a version behind and the VM does not have competitive performance with either Windows CLR or Linux JVM.

<comment><USER4> Except C#'s still quite verbose. Doubly so if you heavily use generics and functional programming. You just aren't as free in the style of code that works.

For one sample point, I rewrote one of FreeSWITCH's C modules in C# and F#. The F# version had 1/20th the number of type annotations.

<comment><USER6> The c# version is pretty concise. And since 3.0 with implicitly typed local variables, its gotten less verbose.

var result = seq.Where(a=>a %3==0).Select(a=>a*a);

<comment><USER4> Yea, but try moving the predicate to a local function, and you get:

Func<int, bool> pred = a => a %3 == 0.

Mix in more complex types (say a dictionary with a tuple in it), and it starts getting pretty verbose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Talking about static typing without investigating something like Haskell (as mentioned by others) seems limiting, particularly since Guido picked up a couple of things from Haskell like the list comprehensions presented in this post.

And then you'll discover that Haskell's type system is limited as well. Learn some Qi - <http://www.lambdassociates.org/qilisp.htm>.

</comment><comment><USER8> Those who don't know type inference are destined to reinvent it ... badly.

<comment><USER9> True, but Matz didn't know a lot of things about programming languages and luckily for me, he didn't care and reinvented them anyways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Haskell could, trivially, do the first example shorter than python.

<comment><USER11> I'm no Haskell expert, but it's a couple chars shorter AND solves the premise of the entire post.

        [x*x | x <- s, x `mod` 3 == 0]

And the function definition doesn't need all of the type clutter:

        let playWithSeq s = [x*x | x <- s, x `mod` 3 == 0]

        playWithSeq [0..10]
        -- [0,9,36,81]

<comment><USER12> Just curious: would anyone care to show me how something like that would look in Clojure?

<comment><USER11>
        (for [x s :when (== 0 (mod x 3))] (* x x))

<comment><USER13> why do you use ==? You should use =.

<comment><USER11> I use `==` when I know that I'm comparing numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> C++ is statically typed? I guess if you omit the five cast operators and don't throw exceptions and don't allocate any heap, you can sort of reason about type safety. Sort of.

<comment><USER15> It's _statically_ typed (variables have types), _manifestly_ typed (you have to declare them), but not type- _safe_ (won't treat values of one type as if they're of another).

<comment><USER16> That seems to be the worst of all words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I use C++, and I have a variety of utility functions defined. To do his task, first I already would have the following defined:

      template <class Pred, class Sequence>
      Sequence filter(Pred p, const Sequence& in)
      {
        Sequence out;
        for (typename Sequence::const_iterator i = in.begin(); i != in.end(); ++i) {
          if (p(*i)) {
            out.insert(out.end(), *i);
          }
        }
        return out;
      }

And then I would do:

      bool is_div3(const int n)
      {
        return n % 3;
      }

      // in another scope

      result = filter(is_div3, seq);

It's not how most people use C++, but my recent work has involved manipulating parse trees. I find the most natural way to do this is recursively using functional techniques, so I've built up a small set of functionaly inspired utility functions (<https://github.com/scotts/cellgen/blob/master/src/utility.h>). C++0x will let me use an anonymous function instead of having to define a function (or function object) for my predicate.

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks like scala to me:

      def playwith_seq[A] (seq : Iterable[A]) : List[A]
        for (x <- seq if x % 3 == 0) yield x * x

</comment><comment><USER19> I really wish that Fantom <http://fantom.org/> received more love.

<comment><USER20> Can you elaborate on why? What is it you like about Fantom? Why should I check it out?

<comment><USER21> Just found: <http://fantom.org/doc/docIntro/WhyFantom.html>

Nice language syntax wise, seems pretty nice. Prime unique feature is the ability to run on a JVM or the .NET runtime. It also provides a base layer of objects to replace java.io/util etc.

I'm not to clear if it maintains JVM or .NET interoperability. That would be interesting if it could call both JVM and .NET code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> OOC, assuming `x` implements `List<Int>` (sorry for syntax mistakes, don't have a compiler here). So yes - generics and type safety included:

        x = x filter(func (i:Int)->Bool {i%3==0}) map(func (i:Int)->Int {i*i})

Edit: missed the multiplication

</comment><comment><USER23> "A good example is "give me the square of all the items in this sequence who are divisible by 3""

A good example? Really? You get paid to write stuff like that? Because I don't. If you're going to promote a language as a better solution, try solving real problems.

What happens when there's a string in the sequence? The C++ example solved that, why didn't your code?

<comment><USER16> Haskell also would solve it, by outlawing the occurence of strings at compile time.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I want to create a side business, but not sure where to start? - <AUTHOR> I work for a large tech company. Most of my career experience has been in data, analytics and doing data integration and migration work. I have electronics engineering degree. I know backend/big data processing stuff pretty well,but I have no idea of doing frontend development. There are so many options that I don't know where to start.
Anyway, my intention is to create business and not the website. Even if it is selling physical products or software, I am okay with it.
Can you advise me where should I start? What type of software sells best?
As I don't know frontend development, should I spend time learning FE development or should I hire contractors for the development ?
Any advise will be helpful. <comment><USER2> The problem is not the product.

The often insurmountable problem is how to get to your potential customers. For example, selling an iOS app or a book on iBooks is a dead end for most folks. There is just no ready way to get folks attention. The usual method is some social media scheme. Establishing a content marketing scheme or some other kind of social media scheme is the hardest part. It makes getting a product seem easy.

I'm not saying don't do it. DO do it, but plan on spending a huge amount of effort developing a marketing scheme. Start thinking about that from the very beginning. In fact, an insight into a workable scheme might be the starting point for choosing a product that would fit the scheme.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Find a partner that can do the front end work. That way you can work together to get to a minimal first version quickly. The longer it takes to get from starting to an actual first version you can sell, the more likely you will run out of steam and give up. Then work together to come up with a simple idea that can be coded within just a few months of spare time.

No one can tell you what to build because if we knew of a simple but great idea then we would do it ourselves!

</comment><comment><USER4> Just use Bootstrap :)</comment>


Show HN: tascii.io – a multiplayer ASCII character grid - <AUTHOR> http://tascii.io <comment><AUTHOR> Before anyone asks, I only need registration to keep track of characters. Feel free to make up any username and password you want!

I've been working on this side project over the christmas break The original goal was to learn about real time web systems and to learn a bit more about web development.

The goal was to try and emulate what reddit did with r/place but using letters instead of pixels. It's a little basic, but I am overall happy with the result and I want to see what happens when this gets exposed to the wider internet.

I think that the "collaborative whiteboard" medium like this is interesting due to the fact that it is possible to implement other functionality through it. One example is the QuickMaths bot that I implemented, that will ask questions and listen for output on the grid. There is another more quiet bot that prevents certain words from being written also.

Would appreciate any feedback or bug reports!

</comment><comment><USER2> Seems like it's devolved into pointless political flame wars.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unsurprising in some ways, but that's freedom :/

Could make Donald trump a censored word, but not sure what that would be saying.

<comment><USER2> I think it's a more general problem. My guess is that it's not 99% of users going to the site posting that one specific issue, yet the small vocal minority of users has decided to plaster it all over the site.

One solution could be to maintain a karma for every user and update it when their text is overwritten or erased. That way a user that constantly writes the same garbage everywhere that gets erased would have a low karma and couldn't keep doing it, whereas a user that writes things that visitors want to see would have higher karmas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the insight. Yes it is presumably one user. Interesting algorithm also with overwriting. There is a risk though that someone might get passively punished simply because someone overwrote them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So, what exactly do you mean by "multiplayer" in this context?

<comment><AUTHOR> In a loose sense. You can see the other players cursors as they type and they can see yours. Idea is to see if people will interact when that happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like this. Good fun!</comment>


Scientists guilty of manslaughter for failing to predict severity of earthquake - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/9626075/LAquila-earthquake-scientists-sentenced-to-six-years-in-jail.html

<comment><USER2> This is retarded. Scientists cannot accurately predict earthquakes, they just want an escape goat.</comment>


Europe wants to use hydrogen to slow climate change – will it work? - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2248140-europe-wants-to-use-hydrogen-to-slow-climate-change-will-it-work/ <comment><USER2> The article misses an often overlook but important point: burning hydrogen in air produces NOX which can be a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. The solution to reduce the amount of generated NOX exists but the resultant engine is larger and consumes more fuel for the same power output.

Further, as stated hydrogen is typically produced by steam reforming which generates greenhouse gases. The alternative of using electrolysis requires electricity generated from carbon neutral sources.

Taking all this into account:

\- making steel requires electricity, the carbon neutral source can be used here directly;

\- land vehicles already have a proven alternative with electric engines;

\- naval vehicles do not have the luxury of easily recharging electric batteries.

As a summary I think the solution already exists for steel making and land based transport the problem is widespread adoption and politics rather than technology. Naval based transport can benefit from hydrogen as a fuel source but it comes at the engineering challenge of transport/storage and the associated safety concerns.</comment>


Show HN: GitHub Issues for {Your Workflow} - <AUTHOR> https://thinkbase.app <comment><AUTHOR> I've often felt that quality of communication depends on a company's cultural norms (e.g. being respectful of your coworkers' time), having shared context, and standardization of processes.

That thought inspired me to build this app with features that encourage focused work, efficiency and modularity.

I just opened up free registration for the public today so that I can gather some more feedback. Let me know what you think!

<comment><USER2> I like visual issue management so I signed up to see this one.

I'm not really understanding how it should be used. I don't see any connection to GitHub (which already has a Project board).

The board I created doesn't have any columns and just displays cards in a flowed grid. What's the target use case?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for trying it out!

The main use case is for more focused discussions / information sharing. It started as a threaded chat app but evolved over time. I used the GitHub Issues analogy because you could use the app to make a customized generic version of a GitHub-issues-like bug tracker.

For that analogy, you can think of each board in ThinkBase as a repository of issues, while the cards are like issues.

Each board that you create in ThinkBase can have its own "card template" to focus the cards/conversations on that board, just like GitHub Issues has templates.

When it comes to tracking the status of your cards, you can create your own tags like status:open, priority:10, asignee:mike, and then perform queries on these custom tags (e.g.: segment engine status:open priority>1) to segment the cards to your liking.

The main power (I hope) of the app is that you can focus each board on whatever type of discussion or information sharing use case that you'd like depending on how you craft your templates and tags. Boards don't have to be "issues" focused but they could be.

To be honest, at this point in time I'm still refining the different possible use cases. Perhaps there is a better analogy to use. Once I'm able to hone in on one or a couple solid use cases I'd like to build out more features to better support them.

You bring up a great point about columns. I've been thinking lately of a feature that would allow you to choose which tags you want to use as your columns if you prefer a column view. So for the GitHub Issues analogy, you would create the tags - status:TODO, status:doing, status:done, and designate those as your "columns".

Appreciate the feedback.

<comment><USER2> I see, thanks for the explanatory response. When the GitHub issues reference was made, I was somehow expecting connecting to GitHub and supporting a column-based board like format.

I guess I've only worked with issues and mostly in a board with columns format, except in Asana which I took a long time to get used to then didn't like because page transitions could be so slow. I think I'm not the target market.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Psychology of C# Analysis - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/Coverity/the-psychology-of-c-analysis-24025354

<comment><USER2> I agree with your post title, but that slideshow is a bit too unprofessional to prove a point.</comment>


Pen-testers nabbed, jailed in Iowa courthouse break-in attempt - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/check-the-scope-pen-testers-nabbed-jailed-in-iowa-courthouse-break-in-attempt/ <comment><USER2> I guess the Dallas County Court passed the 'physical security of documents' part of the test.

I'm not sure why you would attempt to break into a court house without some paperwork saying what you're doing with some signatures from the proper authorities. It seems kind of dumb, frankly. Pen testing is risky if you can't prove that someone with the right to do so asked you to do it.

<comment><USER3> Getting arrested is one thing.

Getting prosecuted is different.

<comment><USER4> Isn't getting arrested enough to fail background checks for the rest of your life and never get a job or apartment again?

<comment><USER5> No, from everything I read, you can often still get a security clearance.

See:

[https://news.clearancejobs.com/2018/01/28/ever-questions- sf-...](https://news.clearancejobs.com/2018/01/28/ever-questions-sf-86/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "pen-tester" \-- this reminds me of the times "pen testers" have literally stalked people and broken into their houses.

Breaking and entry and stalking, are both illegal for very good reasons. Pentesters who do this without consent are acting unethically, breaking the law, and putting themselves and others in danger.

If a pen tester really believes physical compromise is something that should be tested, they absolutely cannot do it without consent of the involved parties. If the business reduces the value of the test by changing security rules during the process that's their own wasted money. If you want to be testing employees you need case by case consent - again, if they changing behaviour during the test, it's simply the company's money be wasted. A company cannot tell the pen testers to target employees without the both informing and getting the employee's consent.

I continue to think people calling themselves "pentesters" while doing this kind of nonsense give actual professionals a bad name.

</comment><comment><USER7> This must have been the first time this pentest company did physical pentesting.

With all the popularity pentesting has these days I'm not surprised that some companies that try to make a quick buck don't understand how serious something like this is.

Pentesters need an "out of jail for free" card, signed by all necessary stakeholders (as high up the mgmt chain from all organizations involved as needed) and carry that with them during such exercises. At least have a number of someone on hand to call for checking authorization.

The fact they didnt do some basic paperwork before shines bad on the pentest company and now really means the pentesters broke the law. It's crazy. Poor guys, but they have to know better in this profession.</comment>


Ask HN: What's one Linux command you wish you'd learned years ago? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> sed, awk or even the fact that I could've used perl from command line

        sed -i 's/old/new/g'

alone would have saved me lot of time instead of fiddling with a perl script everytime

Also, I would've liked to understand shell concepts like file redirections, command substitution, parameter expansion, difference between stdout/stderr, why sometimes I got an error for too many file arguments, or even knew that there existed sites like [https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ](https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ) and stackoverflow/unix.stackexchange and [https://www.shellcheck.net/](https://www.shellcheck.net/) and [https://explainshell.com/](https://explainshell.com/) and so on.

<comment><USER3> Just as an addition to the OP comment: "perl -pe 's/old/new/g'" is the perl pendant for sed. The obvious advantage is the support for Perl regexes. Also there's the "-r" switch for sed which extends Regexes compatibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> fzf as command history search, coupled with an unlimited history file. It is by far my "unfair advantage", I do things so much faster than my coworkers...

<comment><USER5> As someone who massively use Ctrl+r and history|grep, I don't get it. Can you elaborate, with examples if possible?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tmux and Vim for me - they are tools and not exactly commands.

</comment><comment><USER7> ^R in bash to search command history.

<comment><USER8> This comes from readline, and there are many many useful shortcuts. For example "M-." (i.e. "Escape", then ".") to insert the last argument of the previous command.

This is great when you run something like:

          ls /path/to/foo
          cd M-.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Xargs or awk

</comment><comment><USER10> watch command

</comment><comment><USER11> man

</comment><comment> e-woke :q

</comment><comment><USER12> Awk.

</comment><comment><USER13> find ... -exec ... {}\;

</comment><comment><USER14> pushd popd cd -

</comment><comment><USER15> shutdown :)

<comment><USER16> poweroff

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> tac

</comment><comment><USER18> sed, tr.

</comment><comment><USER19> tailf</comment>


No PhDs needed: how citizen science is transforming research - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07106-5 <comment><USER2> With the advent of MOOCs, I'm been taking lots of science courses to get a basic foundation in science. I would love to do research without getting my Phd and work on interesting projects.

I still have a lot to learn and read but it seems organic chemical experiments are really expensive and lots, lots of trial and error is needed. From the drug discovery course I took, robots are used to create millions of compounds to look for potential hits and then even more trial and error is needed as your progress through the subsequent steps. Also these big drug companies seem to have lots of unshared proprietary data that greatly helps them reduce the amount of experimentation that is needed to find potential drug candidates.

Unlike programming , the equipment chemicAl compounds, animal models all seem to be very expensive.

I would love to create a potential drug, patent it but it just doesn't seem feasible unless you work for a biotech company :(

<comment><USER3> I did drug discovery in grad school -- finding leads is generally not something suitable for small labs, but studying them is. A big source of compounds that actually work isn't high-throughput screening, it's isolating the active ingredient of plants and fungal matter that has the desired properties in nature, which is something that can in theory be done in a home lab (cultivating eukaryotic cells is difficult compared to bacteria but there are protocols and cell lines that aren't too expensive). This was how pretty much all science was done before molecular biology was a thing, and it gave us very useful compounds, including penicillin. (For the sake of the poor critters, please don't do animal research if you have never worked with lab animals before).

Most of figuring out which drugs are promising is biochemistry (and clinical trials) not so much organic chemistry. I wouldn't say organic chemistry is super inaccessible (given people with 0 education seem to be able to pop up kitchen counter meth labs in no time), but doing it with a purpose that isn't "follow this recipe" is difficult because a lot of stuff that looks like it should be biologically active doesn't actually make it into the cell in the first place. But I may be biased and I'm sure there are organic chemists around that have an idea of how amateurs could go around doing some small science in that area.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the reply! Sorry for the confusion : I should have stated biochemistry.

I went through this course (below)which was really interesting. However the course focused more on synthetic Chemistry and only briefly touched upon how active compounds are found and extracted from natural compounds.

I also read about biotechnology and went through some lecturers on YouTube and MIT intro to bio course. The impression I get is biotech (recombinant DNA) is cheaper than drug discovery? Drug discovery seems to have a lot more factors you need to be concerned about (clearance rate, bioavaibilty, binding to too many proteins )that make seem more expensive

[https://www.edx.org/course/medicinal-chemistry-the- molecular...](https://www.edx.org/course/medicinal-chemistry-the-molecular- basis-of-drug-discovery-0)

Would you mind recommending couple of books so I could gain some more knowledge on the subject.

I just purchase "organic chemistry or drug design and drug action"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there a comprehensive list of citizen science initiatives anywhere?</comment>


Cron Checker – Cron to plain English - <AUTHOR> http://www.cronchecker.net

<comment><USER2> Has anything changed since this was discussed at length just over three weeks ago?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8122129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8122129)

It still doesn't understand the "n/start-end" notation:

        6/2-59 * * * * cd

            The command cd will execute the
            6/2th through 59th minutes of every
            hour every day.</comment>


Happy Birthday, Dennis Ritchie (from Penn Jillette) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWOHvRzvf08&feature=youtube_gdata_player

<comment><AUTHOR> Another post from the family -- this is Penn Jillette's 70th birthday message to Dennis. (Penn, hope you're okay with me posting this. Dennis loved it.)</comment>


"Most of Facebook's 2B users should assume data has been compromised" - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/facebook/2018/04/05/zuckerberg-facebooks-2-billion-users-assume-data-compromised/ <comment><AUTHOR> _"The source of this vulnerability is Facebook's search function. […] Users have to opt into it, via an option that lets their names come up in searches. The security settings have this option on by default."_

That is _opt-out_!

Seriously, why is _The Next Web_ routinely reporting in favour of Facebook?</comment>


Achieving Top Mental Performance for Software Developers - <AUTHOR> http://softwarecreation.org/2012/achieving-top-mental-performance-for-software-developers/ <comment><USER2> Is it just me, or do these read more like a list of objectives to accomplish than a set of methods for achieving objectives? Let's look at a few random ones:

 _Plan and prioritize first to establish clear path for achieving your goals. Beware – planning uses a lot of energy and meet serious resistance from the brain._

Okay. Great. Planning and prioritization meets serious resistance from the brain. Got it. Any tips on how to overcome that resistance?

 _Do one conscious active task at a time. Brain has very limited working memory and processing capacity (about 4 items). Multitasking seriously reduce your IQ and performance as brain can work only in the serial mode._

Sure. That's easy to write in a blog post (so easy that I've literally seen hundreds of blog posts saying this very thing). But how do you reduce multitasking? How do you cut down on the urge to "just check email/IMs/Facebook/whatever for just 10 seconds"?

 _Start your sprint on the full power and eagerly run until the end of your committed time. Put yourself in the champion mindset to achieve your goals. Forget about everything else and run, run, run…_

And what is this "champion mindset", exactly, and how do I go about achieving this Zen state?

I don't mean to be harsh, even though I've probably come off as being extremely harsh above. It's just that I've seen posts like this go by again and again in my HN feed. They all seem to say the same (or at least, very similar, things) and none of them seem to notice the inherent irony of posting productivity tips on a site that is so notorious for sucking productivity, it has inbuilt mechanisms to limit the time you spend on it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think that motivation and interest is a much better predictor of mental performance than anything mentioned in this article.

<comment><USER4> After tutoring for a few years I have to agree with you.

I worked at a Kumon center, which was an "enrichment" program for both poorly- performing kids needing help with math and reading but also very smart kids trying to get (sometimes far) ahead[1] in their math and reading skills.

I learned two things: First, you can explain anything to almost all kids, but there are a lot of different ways about thinking about numbers and the way their teacher taught them may not be a good way for any particular kid.

I had some kids who would just seem "blocked" when faced with a math problem like 48x12 (usually larger than that), putting the numbers one above the other and trying to do multiplication the way the teacher taught them. I'd play around with the numbers in front of them, show them that every number is really a bunch of other numbers just expressed in a different way. I could show them that 48x12 was really just 48x10 plus 48x2, which are 480 plus 96, which just makes 576 just-like-that.

Some kids would be blown away that numbers were not these final static things but really figures that could be represented so many different ways. For a lot of them just kind of "exploring" what it means to be a number helped a lot more than making them crunch problems the way their teachers told them to, and once they got that numbers were these very liquid things they seemed to do a lot better.

The second thing I learned is that nothing fucking matters except motivation. If the kid's not motivated it's nigh impossible, and if he is the job is a dream and tutoring becomes practically as pleasing as a musical song and dance.

There's only one thing I was able to figure out about motivation: You can't teach someone to be motivated by lecturing them on the importance of being good at math or reading or threatening them (as parents sometimes did in front of me) or calling them lazy. The _only thing_ that mattered was that I was visibly motivated and excited about the material, always happy and buzzing around them. The only way I could impart motivation was by realizing that it was contagious. There's a quote I sometimes parrot on here that more or less relates to the phenomenon:

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." -Antoine De Saint-Exupery

And it looks like I've gone on and on and forgot what I really meant to say here (other than I agree). Ah well.

[1] Rather, their parents were trying to get them ahead.

<comment><USER5> "I could show them that 48x12 was really just 48x10 plus 48x2, which are 480 plus 96, which just makes 576 just-like-that."

I learned this lesson on my own, and was chastised for it while young. "That's not how you learn multiplication!" And so forth.

It was only (much) later until I saw Feynman's infamous videos where he denounced how the subject of Algebra was taught, and it made me feel a lot better about how I went about learning - and how I will teach my son. Or rather, lack of teaching.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Getting enough sleep might be the most important thing.</comment>


ChartMogul Launched: Analytics for Stripe, Briantree, Recurly and Charify - <AUTHOR> https://chartmogul.com/blog/2014/12/launched/

<comment><USER2> Thank you for having a $1 plan, I always wanted to try out Baremetrics to have a better understanding of my [few] subscriptions but I couldn't afford their price - I know, $29 is not much, but bootstrapping the company and paying various other services I need it sums up.

You surely got me as a customer, and I'm looking forward to have more than 100 customers and upgrade to the bigger plan!

<comment><AUTHOR> YEAH!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks great, this is an area I have always thought surprisingly lacking by the payment providers themselves. I'll definitely be giving it a try when I get a chance.

It might be worth providing a bit more of a breakdown of your product (especially screenshots) as I found your sell sheet a little brief, just a little constructive feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

Yes good feedback, we didn't finish our product page yet. But didn't want to wait for it to launch.

You can see some screenshots in this blog post: [https://chartmogul.com/blog/2014/12/first-look-the-future- of...](https://chartmogul.com/blog/2014/12/first-look-the-future-of- subscription-analytics/)

You can create a free trial with no credit card and try out the product for 2 weeks with no commitment also.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congrats on launching! Will definitely be checking this out for Stripe analytics. I would love to see one of these analytics tools keep track of trial conversion rates. Does ChartMogul do something along these lines?

Minor nitpick: on the company page a team member is listed as a 'Frontent Engineer'. Typo?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for spotting the typo - fixed! :)

We don't track trials just yet, but we'll be adding this functionality in the near future.</comment></comment>


Global temperatures likely to hit at least 1C warming for next five years - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/09/global-temperatures-likely-to-hit-at-least-1c-warming-for-next-five-years <comment><USER2> In germany we have a drought right now. I never assumed that we in germany get water issues.

Now farmers said things like 'i have never seen so little water at this time of year in the 30 years im a farmer'.

I don't have the feeling we are recognizing the elephant in the room.

My personal take on this is to buy a farm, buy water reserve tanks, have a little garden and trying to become independend. Which is not a bad plan in general as it helps to cut costs down anyway if you do it smart enough. Its not that i get money when i put it in the bank and corona showed how volatile shares can be.

<comment><USER3> 30 years is not a good enough sample. In fact it's pretty bad.

<comment><USER2> I do combine this with other data i read of course.

We do have more data available than just what one farmer experiences.

Nonetheless, what is a good response to it?

I don't have the feeling that just ignoring it or not doing anything is a good approach.

<comment><USER4> It makes me incredibly nervous about what happens when water and food gets scarce and you have cities full of people with no ability to acquire these basic needs from the land. You can desal water on coastal communities with cheap renewables, but you can't grow food in concrete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We seem to be trending right along with the worst case emissions scenario: [https://sites.uci.edu/energyobserver/files/2018/11/4BDC35FE-...](https://sites.uci.edu/energyobserver/files/2018/11/4BDC35FE-0E3C-42F0-93C8-79A4E117C088.png)

Edit: There is also credible evidence we've been underestimating climate sensitivity for years: [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01484-5](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01484-5)

<comment><AUTHOR> Given that IPCC and other world bodies suggest we need to be reducing emissions by 7.6% every year for the next decade (starting this year). We're doing the almost exact opposite.

The US and China are increasing hostilities and are locked in a downward spiral of increased military spending (and associated emissions).

Most of the economic elite, while paying lip service is in utter denial about the direness of the situation.

With a few exceptions (New Zealand), every developed and developing society is prioritizing the economy and economic development over the preservation of a viable human future.

We're bordering on insanity.

<comment><USER6> If you want to compare which problems are worse, plenty are much worse than slow effects of climate change, like wars, contagious diseases, exploitation of poor people, poverty and inequality in general, political systems controlled by the rich that want to keep it that way, etc. Those problem cause massive suffering and even death. And what's the worse that could happen to humans due to climate change? Some foods might disappear, some people might need to modify their houses for new weather, some might need to relocate. It's not insane to simply ignore the problem altogether, it's very rational. Now how to solve all those actual problems is a big question.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure where you're getting your information. We've consistently underestimated how fast things are happening, and how much sooner they're happening.

All of those problems you identified are accelerating global warming and will be made worse by it. Unless we reduce emissions drastically immediately (and stop the biosphere collapse), we're likely en route to at a bare minimum a +3C world, with a ~20% chance of a +4C world within our lifetimes.

Estimates of what survive at a +4C world range from a few hundred million to a maybe 1-3B people. That's what, somewhere between 50-90% of humanity dying off. Look to your left, look to your right, unless we do something today, those people are going to die.

The World Bank in 2012 came out with a report as to Why We Need to Avoid a 4C world. At that time, they suggested that +4C is a low probability as early as 2050's-60's. Their assumptions then were that we'd stop curbing emissions in 2015 (they've gone up), and they also drastically underestimated how much higher CO2e concentrations would be increasing in the atmosphere (they assumed CO2e concentrations would go up by 1.5 ppm / year, but instead, they've gone up 2.6 ppm / year)

The issue with climate is compounded by something called "thermal inertia", which in practice means that the action we take today won't bear fruit for another 30 years.

So yea, unless we drastically reduce emission and stop the biosphere collapse, this generation, meaning YOU, meaning the elites who ignore this, and yes me, will likely be responsible for the largest die off of life since ... well the last mass extinction event.

So yea, pay attention to the science. Pay attention to the scientists and the literature.

The picture is bleak.

<comment><USER6> There is no science today that can make any kind of confident predictions on the effects of climate change on human population in 30 years from now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Um... There's actually quite a bit. What is the basis of your claim?

The most famous is the limits to growth model (developed by the Club of Rome in the 1970's, which we're unfortunately tracking quite closely). You can read about that model here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth) , though there are many academic articles about. That is a quantifiable, falsifiable model that has had about 50 years of predictive power. The next 30 years according to that model are horrific.

Another scientific effort is what is being calculated by the global footprint network - [https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/climate- change/](https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/climate-change/). We've been in a deficit also since about the 1970's, and that overconsumption is directly connected to the current scientifically documented biosphere collapse which suggests that we're in the middle of the 6th mass extinction event on earth.

Lastly, a number of independent modellers have attempted to show what the world looks like. Here's a brief article with a map. [https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/what-the-world-will- look-l...](https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/what-the-world-will-look- like-4degc-warmer). From the article:

> Micronesia is gone – sunk beneath the waves. Pakistan and South India have > been abandoned. And Europe is slowly turning into a desert. This is the > world, 4°C warmer than it is now.

90% of where humans currently inhabit would be inhospitable to human life. That's about 6-7B people that will have to move across 1000's of km on the order of less than a decade. Likely into the Arctic and Antarctic ... where .. topsoil formation typically takes 100's of years.

Moreover, if you think xenophobic Europeans or Americans are going to allow Africans, Asians and Central Americans in, when they're putting existing climate refugees into concentration camps RIGHT NOW, you should perhaps rethink your worldview.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure what you are getting at. A model is essentially an unproven hypothesis, it can never be proven and confidence in the model depends on the evidence. With models on the effects of climate change (aka impact models) the confidence is pretty much non existent, there were literal studies done to show that, it's actually a huge and complex ongoing research area. So the predictions of doom is nothing more, but propaganda, that conveniently forgets to say that such predictions are very likely to be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I truly thought we were about to exceed the speed of light before I realized C != c.

<comment><USER8> For some incomprehensible reason, the Guardian's style guide specifically says _not_ to use the degree symbol.

Perhaps it's an attempt to maintain their reputation for sloppy editing.

[https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style- guide-c](https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-c) (under "Celsius")

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Solar minimal will reduce temp. Not increase. This is not the issue.

</comment><comment><USER10> Doesn't sound dramatic to me, especially considering the process for calculating these "global" temperatures (stations near growing urban heat islands etc.).

I'd be more interested in long-time temperature increases in specific remote areas. One of the oldest continuous temperature records on a mountain in Germany shows less than 0.7C since 1800: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohenpeißenberg_Meteorological...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohenpeißenberg_Meteorological_Observatory#/media/File:Temperaturreihe_Hoher_Peißenberg.PNG)

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

<comment><USER11> It seems very unlikely that this report would fall into the well-known problem of not accounting for urban heat islands:

[https://www.skepticalscience.com/urban-heat-island- effect.ht...](https://www.skepticalscience.com/urban-heat-island-effect.htm)

Are you specifically clamining that the authors ignored this ?

<comment><USER10> You can only avoid this effect by not using urban stations, claiming the effect is small doesn't solve the problem.

I am specifically claiming that there is no known global temperature dataset that is frequently used in such alarming studies and contains no stations affected by the UHI effect. Since the linked article contains no references or links to sources, I cannot be more specific.</comment></comment></comment>


All late projects are the same (2011) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.systemsguild.com/pdfs/DeMarcoNov2011.pdf <comment><USER3> They're all late because customers are fools and salespeople are liars.

Customer: "how long will it take (and therefore cost)?"

Three vendors: "less than [the other 2 vendors]."

 _...iterate until "cheapest" solution is reached ... meanwhile the technical staff at the vendors are losing their minds at the sales team, telling them that what they're specifying is impossible..._

Customer, to vendor [cheapest]: "Here's a contract. We look forward to this project being delivered on time and on budget!"

<comment><USER4> Salesperson to raging customer (aftermath): "We were only able to complete the bathroom in the estimated time. You are welcome to live in it for a reduced monthly fee while we build the rest of the house around you"

<comment><USER5> In my experience new build houses and apartments are never on time either.

<comment><USER6> there was just a recently completed apartment building here which was months ahead of schedule. They tried more agile methods when doing it: daily meetings instead of weekly ones and working more in parallel. It was done by a less dinosaury company called Fira.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While much of this is true, I think it also leaves out a very common cause of software being late, perhaps the most common. The time it will take is unknown, in some cases unknowable, and no one is willing to say so. "How long will it take?" (equivalently, "Can you do this feature set by this date?") The only honest answer is: "I don't know." Nonetheless, a date gets put on it.

<comment><USER8>
      and no one is willing to say so.

Except most engineers are perfectly willing to say so in my experience but management decides to ignore them or force them to say a made up number promising falsely not to hold them to it. Even worse what happens very often is an engineer would give an estimate and then a manager would "bully" it down to a lower number.

On the reverse of course it makes sense to have estimates otherwise how should managers or product people decide what should be done next?

A big part of the issue is we don't have good knowledge how to estimate work. It's not a skill that is heavily invested in and is wrongly assumed as an inherent ability.

<comment><USER9> As a manager over a new project with a ridiculous release date, I'm subject to the same political bullshit as everyone else. At this point, I'm of the opinion that anything with a realistic ship date simply won't get funded. So all I do these days is commit to things that I am certain aren't achievable in the time frame on the table, just so that we can get the project off the ground in the first place. From that point, I immediately start to play the game of politics and showmanship to put together a narrative with the usual culprits for why a project is late. Shifting requirements, other teams that didn't deliver what we depended on, etc.

Then I make more promises and estimates, playing the emotional card of "sunk cost" to convince upper management to continue funding the team rather than torpedo the project. Then we ship, and I quickly get everyone on my team promoted "because we shipped" before it becomes clear to upper management that we shipped something essentially worthless to the company. Because we're in a huge profitable company, everyone can jump ship to the next shiny thing, and whoever is left holding the potato on its way to deprecation just gets re- org'd when it gets canned.

I know it's a bullshit game. But I play it well, and all the software developers on my team get paid and promoted because I am so good at it.

<comment><USER10> You're subject to the "same political bullshit" because you choose to be. You don't have to partake in it, but you do. You can choose not to, you can choose to try to bring the company around you to greener pastures - but you don't.

You sound wise and such in general, but perhaps your time would be better spent making a difference in how people believe work should be done at a place that actually allows brewing better practices instead of lauding bad ones.

<comment><USER11> This would just result in them not managing any projects anymore, and "Yes we can do it in 2 weeks" Joe will get them instead

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is why "agile" methodologies caught on. Ignoring how they're used as internal political cudgels now, the most general goal of agile is to constantly adjust scope and estimates.

This way, we can accept that we're all terrible at estimates but we do our best not to paint ourselves into corners because of our terrible terrible estimates.

<comment><USER13> He doesn't think estimation is the problem. He says that the projects are started late and that developers are handed a deadline by the business and then accused of being late when they can't meet that deadline.

<comment><USER12> That's still an estimation problem by management. In agile, all sides are supposed to understand that scope and timeline are constantly adjusted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The most successful software manager I've worked with, in terms of timeliness, was the one who deconstructed the work the most before starting. What exactly was going to be done, how confident were they in their estimate? Not confident? Break it down more. More detailed requirements, more detailed GUI mock up, More pre-design. Then, when confidence was high enough, by his judgement: who was going to do the work, and how did that work fit into the organization's schedule, including the testing, bug fix cycle needs, test equipment availability, and release.

He was nearly always on time, and never acceded to the customer's desired delivery date unless he could meet it.

I'm not saying this works in all environments, but for his case, it did.

<comment><USER15> This can surely work depending on organization. The problem is when the sales people need an estimate in two days or they don't get the contract. Then it is just a wild ass guess and the normal problems ensue.

The reason that software is so hard to do in most cases is that you are making something that (by definition) has never been done before. Of course stuff is going to go bad. This is largely a corporate culture problem. In these cases, I want to have the sales people come to a weekly meeting and have them estimate when they will have 100K sales for the month from new business. I don't think they would like that very much and you'd get a lot of dithering.

<comment><USER16> The question is whether you're working for a sales company or a tech company.

Sales companies will prioritise the requirements of sales people, and tech would prefer to ignore the sales guys.

Frankly, as an engineer - I would never prefer the company where the sales people can decide how much overtime I would be doing in the end. Also - <USER2> would be getting all of the bonuses, since it's them making the decisions in the first place.

The good thing I find is that working for the engineering companies usually implies having clients with a head on their shoulders (hence them knowing what they want and what they're getting; and how much time it usually takes).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > [I]nstead of obsessing over "What's the matter with those software folks who > didn't deliver on the schedule we gave them?" we need to ask instead "Why > did we ever kick off a project with such marginal expected value?

</comment><comment><USER18> We work, live and operate in a complex environment and I think if we start viewing the organisation its projects and the environment in which it operates more from a systems perspective we may realise that in fact, it is truly difficult to make accurate predictions given the non-linear behaviour the system exhibits that results from all the information flows (or lack thereof), interaction of parts and other dynamics such as markets, human energy levels/mood, etc.

I really learned a lot from the book called Thinking in Systems and nowadays I can't help to look at projects, from within the context in which it operates. Definitely recommend the book for somebody wanting a bit of an introduction to that mental model.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think it also has todo with scope creeps. When a product / Service is developed, new possibilities are appear and customers are always trying to put these in the scope without adjusting the time / money necessary

</comment><comment><USER20> Well the projects small marginal value isn't really related to the late delivery of the software people. I always say that delivering software successfully has a lot to do with courage. That includes courage to say (communicate) that a spec is too sketchy or outright unrealistic to deliver on time . That someone is dysfunctional within the project. That the timeline is too aggressive and needs to be split up into phases according to worse case scenarios.

If you can't do that, then you are the one to blame for tge project. If you did, though, then youre free to crash and burn happily ever after.

</comment><comment><USER21> While I 99% agree with the thesis of this post, I feel like another part to why I was late with a ton of projects earlier in my career was due to me getting prolonged depressive episodes, where I didn't want to leave my bed, let alone work on some software I really don't care about. For me, I was later diagnosed with Bipolar II, but it makes me wonder how many people just try and "walk it off" with these things, and as a result their work suffers.

</comment><comment><USER22> The projects are late because no single project have finished before start.

</comment><comment><USER23> From 2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11098466](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11098466)

</comment><comment><USER24> One perspective is that negotiation of schedule and resources is often nothing resembling estimation but is a political game. Ed Yourdon's book "Death March" has a chapter about Negotiation .

[http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/013143635X/samplechapt...](http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/013143635X/samplechapter/013143635X_ch03.pdf)

There's a list of "negotiation games" that, sadly, you'll probably recognise. And a bit of more practical advice:

      >> The problem I have with "estimate" is that I understand
      >> the word to mean, "best assessment knowing what is known
      >> at this moment and what can reasonably be predicted about
      >> the future." From experience, what I have seen happen is
      >> that once an estimate is published,it becomes a rock
      >> solid commitment representing the maximum amount of
      >> resources needed to accomplish the project phase or the
      >> entire project.

      > Unfortunately, there's an uglier aspect of the political
      > negotiation when you introduce the plus-or-minus
      > qualifier into your estimate: You'll be accused of
      > uncertainty, wishy-washiness, weakness, or even
      > incompetence. [...] What senior management really wants
      > is a firm commitment — a promise that the project will
      > be finished on a certain deadline, with a budget of a
      > certain number of dollars, and a staff of a certain size.
      > This gives them the enormous luxury of (a) no longer
      > having to worry about the problem for the duration of the
      > project and (b) having a convenient scapegoat to blame if
      > the promise is broken.

      > Jim McCarthy, in his excellent book, Dynamics of Software
      > Development, suggests that the project manager needs to
      > confront this head-on and persuade the customers and/or
      > senior management that they need to share some of the
      > burden of uncertainty [around schedule, cost, resourcing]
      > that the entire project team will be living with on a
      > day-to-day basis. Thus, the project manager effectively
      > says to the customer or the senior management group,
      > "Look, I don't know precisely when this project will
      > finish — but since I'm the project manager, I'm far more
      > likely than anyone else in the organization to figure it
      > out as soon as it can be figured out. I promise you that
      > once I know, I'll tell you right away."

      > Only a manager with a lot of self-confidence, and the
      > ability to walk away from the assignment, has the
      > chutzpah to say something like this in the politically
      > charged atmosphere of a death march project. The time to
      > say it is at the beginning of the project; after all, if
      > the customer and senior management do not respect your
      > ability as a project manager, and if they don't realize
      > that you do have a better chance of knowing when the
      > project will finish than anyone else, then why are they
      > putting you in charge of the project in the first place?
      > Are you being set up as a scapegoat? Are you going to
      > be a "puppet manager," with all the decisions being
      > made by other political manipulators in the
      > organization? If so, now is the time to get out!

      > Similarly, if you're a lowly programmer on the project
      > team and you see political games like this, it may be a
      > strong indication that your project manager (a) doesn't
      > have the confidence to believe in any estimate that he
      > puts forth, (b) doesn't have the backbone to stand up
      > for himself and for the project team, and/or (c) has
      > gotten himself into a political situation where all the
      > key decisions will be made by people who are not
      > directly involved in the project. Again, this is a
      > strong indication that the project is doomed; and
      > before you get too deeply involved, it might be a
      > better idea to seek greener pastures.

Refusing to be pressured into emitting on-the-spot "estimates" that will be regarded as commitments is a useful life skill. Teach your new hires: [http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=2267](http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=2267)

<comment><USER25> Bah, your estimate is meaningless anyway, since someone five levels above you in the org chart has already promised the customer that feature X would be available in 3 weeks. And that promise was made last Tuesday, so by the time it gets to you, there are only two weeks remaining until the deadline.

You'll know this is the case when you say "at least a month", and the PM looks at you like you just shot his dog.

"The answer I need is two weeks."

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> (2011)</comment>


Infamous Chinese pirates launch Ubuntu that looks just like Windows XP - <AUTHOR> http://184.108.40.206/search?q=cache:KhgOKKuUs30J:www.downloadsquad.com/2009/12/26/chinese-copy-cat-pirates-launch-ubuntu-that-looks-just-like-windows-xp/+chinese+copy+cat+pirates&cd=5&hl=en

<comment><USER2> Microsoft could use this in their next FUD campaign - "Linux is a cheap/pirate knock-off of our product".

There have been repeated attempts to make Linux look like Windows over the last few years, and usually it's done in the name of helping Windows users transition to a new OS, but actually I'm not sure that's what it really achieves. Instead it further entrenches Microsoft's brand and UI into the minds of users, such that to the naive person "Windows" and "a computer" are the same entity.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As terse as downloadsquad.com articles are, it seemed unfair to include this domain in your submission filter (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499044>). Unless of course they were doing the spamming, which it appears they were not, but given how interesting the article's outbound links are and the fact that this article could server as an interesting entry-point for discussion, I submitted a cached copy.

</comment><comment><USER3> The picture that says "that's actually ubuntu" doesn't look anything like the screenshots from the actual distro's website.

</comment><comment><USER4> And 2010 will be the year of Linux on the desktop! Thank you, infamous Chinese pirates. The official, government sponsored Linux distribution already copies the Windows XP interface. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux>

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know how many signs Microsoft needs in order to understand that the success of their operating-system is not correlated to how many features it has or secure it is; in fact, it is almost the opposite. . .if Microsoft spent less time building Cathedrals and more time sharing their source code (a portion at a time given the problem and the community) then maybe they could finally start iterating in the right direction, rather than attempting to integrate their next-gen 'space station' of an OS on planet made up of pueblos.</comment></comment>


The Politics of Power in Cyberspace - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/the_politics_of.html <comment> daniel-cussen I forgot the word for this...blogscraping I think? This should link to the original blog post:

[http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/12/whenever_i_write_abo...](http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/12/whenever_i_write_about_the.php)

</comment><comment><USER2> _Cyberspace_ is such a 90's word.</comment>


Arrears of pay – one of the worst things for your company - <AUTHOR> http://blog.karolzielinski.com/arrears-of-pay-one-of-the-worst-things-for-your-company

<comment><USER2> Yeah, arrears of pay is unacceptable as a rule.

Nolan Bushnell of Atari fame said that you aren't a real entrepreneur until you've made a payroll from your credit cards.

I myself have experienced this once, and the company did _everything_ right. It was Lisp Machines, Inc. (LMI, the competitor of Symbolics) and we had been kept apprised of the status of our effort to get an investment from TI.

At one point we were told that our paychecks had been cut and then locked in a safe. If we got the investment, we'd get them ASAP, and in the meantime we were free to do as we saw fit. (It being a crusade to being LISP to the masses, we all stayed and worked. :-)

This went on for two semi-monthly pay periods, and then we got the investment. And celebrated with a make-you-own sushi party; my suggestion, enthusiastically endorsed by the president, who was even more of a sushi fan than me. It's good, messy and cheap fun, as long as you know how to make the rice and have a good source of fish, which we did from a Japanese grocery store in Cambridge.

But outside of special cases like this---we were far from shipping product and we knew we needed another round of financing---it's a clear signal to pull the eject lever.

At the very least, it tells you something very solid about the margins on which your company is running and the other resources it has on tap, as well as likely the character of the top dog.</comment>


Apple is killing the Mac - <AUTHOR> http://www.wmaus.net/?p=1633 <comment><USER2> It will be interesting to see how people build for ios post mac, right now xcode is the only way to build for ios. Or will the mac be an expensive tool for ios developers?</comment>


RIAA: Innovation is the Best Way to Kill Piracy - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/riaa-innovation-is-the-best-way-to-kill-piracy-120412/ <comment><USER2> Yeah, well, too bad the RIAA is the best way to kill innovation.

</comment><comment><USER3> As long as the RIAA still supports draconian copyright, a little nod toward innovation doesn't mean much.

</comment><comment><USER4> well, look who's talking about innovations, rofl</comment>


Building a web application from the ground up - <AUTHOR>

What should be considered when building a website from the ground up? What process could be followed? What resources should be considered? <comment><USER2> It starts with what you know. How much programming experience do you have? What front and back end technologies do you know? What operating systems? Have you built a dedicated server? Have you worked with cloud services? Is this just for you as a side project are is it your work?

<comment><AUTHOR> In terms of knowledge and experience I have that. I work doing a lot of php, js, css/html and a little java.

Its more for my knowledge, and of course could turn into a side project. I am just looking for tips and i guess frameworks and architectures that could help me learn how a website is developed from the ground up</comment></comment>


Don't Cheat on Interviews. It's Obvious When You Do - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Hackbyrd/dont-cheat-on-interviews-it-s-obvious-when-you-do-fce92825d879 <comment><USER2> The interviewer is incentivizing this behavior by playing gotcha with computer science knowledge. The only reason I know about radix sort is from college and I have never used it. If they are hiring a college professor, then I understand but otherwise this is ineffectual and biased towards young college grads.

If your interview is breaking when someone googles information, then your interview is flawed.

<comment><USER3> I had a similar thought reading this. The interviewee gave what the interviewer admitted were normal and valid answers, though 'not what I was looking for' (uh ok—job seekers aren't mind readers) but effectively badgered the individual into "cheating" after they repeated multiple times not knowing the fuller answer.

To me, were I the interviewer at that point we'd have already moved on to the next problem set or next question in the interview.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I want to point out the insanity of filtering on an interview question that has a low success rate.

Presumably your candidate has a bachelor's degree. By this point in their life they've answered thousands and thousands of questions. They taken countless exams, and there is solid aggregate data which summarizes their performance (GPA, standardized tests, certificates, etc).

By filtering on a few challenging questions, the interviewer is throwing these statistics in the trash and rolling the dice to disambiguate the best and worst candidates. What do you think the variance is on a five question exam? Not great.

Rather than try to assess decades of expertise with five questions, I think you are better served by asking questions which pull in orthogonal information.

Do the candidates career goals align with the companies? Do they seem pleasant to be around (also high variance, but orthogonal). Are they enthusiastic about the position?

</comment><comment><USER5> Hiring someone based on whether or not they know a particular algorithm that may or may not have any business relevance to their work, speaks to the process. Obviously the candidate was in the wrong here, but I question what this sort of teaser question actually buys you.

Experience and depth are varied. If you happen to ask a niche question where someone has a lot of depth, then you've identified perhaps deep knowledge on that narrow topic, but what about general problem solving and programming skills?

<comment><USER6> I think you are correct in the issue here is the author is bad at interviewing and taking feedback. At the point where the interviewee didn't know the algorithm, he should have then moved on to another question and or ended the interview shortly after if that one answer was somehow the deal-breaker. The interviewer asked a question and the interviewee said he was not familiar. Interviewer proceeded to attempt to push him further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Funny that the Author says counting sort is O(n) when it's really O(n+r). It's almost like making interviews around the knowledge of some case specific sorting algorithm is a bad idea...

<comment><USER8> Given that in the problem the value of r was fixed to 1000, the specific algorithm that would solve the problem instance would have been O(n) in terms of the input size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > At this point, it was very obvious to me that he googled the solution. I was > amazed that he had the guts to do so in an interview. Just WOW.

Frankly, I'm amazed at the guts to say you shouldn't just search for the answer. It's what you want an employee to do. Not just sit around and "think about it" for an hour, only to write something terrible. Search it and find someone who's already done it and use their working solution.

I've also had the "guts" to search for things on google in interviews. I've done it doing remote interviews where I share my screen with them. Best time was when I was asked "how do you iterate through a json dict in javascript?" Not being a javascript developer, I'm not sure why they were asking me. But I searched it, and found that one of results to stackoverflow was purple. I told the interviewer "this must be good, since all the other ones are blue." We all laughed (it was a group kind of interview) and I was told "Your Google-Fu is strong."

I very quickly received an offer.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a low quality cheat. There's a website where people share how they got through interviews and it includes stuff like "Wait for the interviewer to look at the code you've written for this specific problem and spot the bug on Line k. They will then ask you if you can think of any edge cases. Try the following edge cases that appear to pass until you hit this edge case that detects the bug. Fix it. Wait for a hint on making it more efficient, then depending on the hints follow this action". Oddly enough k the person is probably well trained on the problem by that time. Don't know why they memorize the tree.

For the people who talk about work experience in the past, there are also extensive guides for this sort of thing. They assume a simulation of what they did. Pretty cool. And incredibly exasperating on the other side.

<comment><USER11> Which website is this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I feel like the moral of this is to be better at cheating.

I mean, if the interviewee hadn't cheated, he still would have gotten the esoteric sorting question wrong, and probably failed the interview because another person had happened to remember the esoteric sorting question.

So it was really a situation where there was (aside from ethical considerations) no incentive to not cheat.

If it were a situation where we were evaluating the candidate based on actual work related skills, this wouldn't be an issue. Interviewer could develop a conversation with the candidate and have an interesting discussion about the problem that will give insight into how smart they are and if they can hack it.

That could have been done in this case as well, but instead of giving useful guidance, ("what if you thought about them as strings") interviewer gave a meaningless clue. That is really just restating the problem parameters and has little to do with the implementation.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is selection bias. Of course the cheaters who get caught are obvious. The question is whether the cheaters you don't catch are obvious. Academics say the same thing about students who cheat in university, apparently unaware of the vacuousness of the argument.

</comment><comment><USER14> Man... I do about 2-3 screening interviews a week. Always fun when you hear them furiously typing on a mechanical keyboard when they are trying to answer how they did something on their last project. I've had people cheat by printing off common answers on the wall behind the camera. Last week had someone try having someone else respond to the questions while they were on video. Good times. Interviewing is a skill (for both sides) For something as important as hiring, I'll include my new dev leads/potential s as part of the hiring process to see how you suss out if a person might be a solid inclusion to your team. Tell me your greatest weakness or O notation gotcha isn't it...

</comment><comment><USER15> > not exactly what I was looking for

Here lies the problem, as long as the interviews are about what you want and/or what I don't know - I don't care.

</comment><comment><USER16> Anyone ask an algorithm question, I am just going to suggest using quantum bogo sort for everything.. Let the damn program run till the heat death of the universe. Then interrupt them during the next question, and try to find out how bad there backend really is..

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand why an interviewer would create a sterile exam situation which is nothing like the real world or the job of interest. I'm supposed to be appalled by the interviewee but I'm more appalled by the interviewer.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is very common in my phone screens

<comment><USER18> Yes, unfortunately its hard to avoid :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anyone else think this was a half-ass attempt at cheating ?

<comment><USER20> It says more about the honesty of the interviewee than their actual programming skill.

Arguably it's a more meaningful result than someone who simply does or does not know the counting sort algorithm.</comment></comment>


Swapping a company's logo with their direct competitor  - <AUTHOR> http://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2011/07/26/companies-swapped-logos/

<comment><USER2> Maybe i didnt pick it up from the article, and not to be facetious but i dont understand the point of such an exercise?

<comment><USER3> I think the mental confusion that arises shows how powerful branding can be.</comment></comment>