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Title: This weekend I waded through a couple of old projects and I thought about all the stuff I built over the years. I posted a couple of "Show HN" projects a couple of years ago and it was funny reading those posts again.<p>Basically all of the projects went on 'auto-pilot' right away, meaning that I didn't touch them since I posted them. However, my latest 'Show-HN' turned into a real business and three years later we are a three people remote team and we are growing quite fast (the project is called mailparser.io).<p>I was wondering what your 'Show HN' turned into? Any stories you want to share?
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Title: I've been looking at system programming languages. After years of web development with higher-level, dynamic, slow languages, I'd like to learn a language that is fast and suitable for system programming. Because let's face it, you aren't going to write a key-value database, web server, or the next docker in Ruby.<p>I considered C, C++, Go, Rust, D, and Swift. I liked Rust and Swift the most.<p>Rust is a bit nicer, I admit, but Swift feels more high-level. Taken in a vacuum, it's 50-50 for me.<p>However, languages don't live in a vacuum. Swift has the added benefit of opening up a whole world of possibilities in the Apple ecosystem, not to mention readily available jobs. Because of this, I'd be inclined to invest in Swift rather than Rust.<p>My question to you is, will I miss out? Are there classes of applications that are much better suited for Rust? And I mean in practical terms, not in a theoretical, both are Turing complete way.<p>Because of my impression of the languages, I mentally classify Rust as lower level than Swift, and as a result I, probably mistakenly, tend to think that maybe Swift is still too high level for system programming. But performance wise they appear to be equivalent.<p>I want to make sure I'm not overlooking something and dismissing Rust in favor of Swift too quickly.
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Title: This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12037548 by lisper about his time writing a patch for the software running on an instrument on the Galileo spacecraft makes me wonder how many other interesting stories HN members have.<p>So, What interesting software did you work on in the past?<p>I don't care if it is famous or if it made a billion $, just interesting.
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Title: Throw-away account for confidentially. I've been self employed for about 15 years, and am contemplating a return to the workforce as an employee. While the relative freedom of self employment has been a net positive, and I've had steady work through that entire time, I'm in a different place than I was 15 years ago, with a family, a home, and additional responsibilities which make self employment more challenging.<p>I'm wondering if those that have made this switch back to being an employee of a larger organization after a period of self-employment have any advice. I'm finding it difficult to even compare self employment to an employee role when it comes to basics like salary requirements considering most jobs include a benefits package that don't always have direct corollaries in a self-employment scenario.<p>What's your best advice for how to approach this transition and evaluate whether it might be the right time to change?
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Title: Hello all,<p>I have a few side projects (all web apps) that would require sizable amounts of storage space (but not much of other resources) once I bring them live, so I've been searching for cheap dedicated hosting options.<p>If huge space requirement was not a constraint, I'd say Digital Ocean (or other low-cost cloud services like Linode, Vultr etc.) would provide great bang for the buck, but I'm talking hundreds rather than tens of gigs of storage here at which levels, DO etc. would be way beyond my reach, and out of the question.<p>After some research, I have found what I believe to be the cheapest dedicated box provider and before signing up there, I thought I'd run it by HN, for other opinions, suggestions etc. What do you all think?<p>https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/servers.xml
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Title: Certain sites that are linked to here are very difficult to navigate for those of us with adblockers installed. Such a site would include forbes. I propose sites that break adblockers, or are generally horrible to use because of advertisements be banned from hackernews.
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Title: After much deliberation of pulling the trigger on the 7 $/mo private Github account, I'm leaning heavily towards Gitlab.<p>EDIT: I'm setting up a private repo for an upcoming project, and I'd like to run the issue tracking through some git service, potentially scaling to include a Kanban Board. Not sure if it's gonna be just me or other devs. This looks promising:<p>http://kanban.leanlabs.io/<p>I've set myself the challenge of being as financially prudent as humanly possible, especially with this project, as it is an extremely low budget.<p>If Gitlab can offer free private accounts, with a couple cool features thrown in on the side, why shouldn't I use it?<p>Which do you use? Why not the other?<p>PS – I'm not from Gitlab, I'm just some hacker trying to lock up his stack. :)
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Title: I use JSON Viewer [1] to view data in JSON format but it freezes on files larger than 1 MB. I want to be able to easily collapse and expand elements to understand the structure of the data.<p>[1] https://jsonviewer.codeplex.com/
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Title: Pinboard's numbers* were just realeased, and that made me curious. How many of us currently run a single-person company? By company, I mean something that generates (or is intending to generate) revenues. Side projects count.<p>Three thing I'm most curious about - growth in user base, revenues & profitability over the years.<p>If you can share numbers, that would be fantastic.<p>*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12059965
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Title: One of the things I do to deal with procrastination, and that I've had the most success with, is to develop what I consider to be productive habits. Basically, it just means me using a daily todo with tasks that I consider to be productive. I've tried out apps such as Streaks (http://streaksapp.com/) and I'm currently using Daisy (http://daisyapp.xyz/) to aid me with this.<p>Although I am successful with this, I'm always on the lookout for more efficient (and perhaps more fun) ways of doing this. So I'm curious to hear what you people do to create productive habits? Any apps or other methods you suggest for habit creation?
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253
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Title: Any stance on choosing which in your SaaS / e-commerce?
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Title: Recently I noticed I can only downvote some comments. I used to be able to downvote any comment. Looks like the difference is age of the comment?<p>Is this a new development?
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Title: Can anyone share an experience from selling a self-founded, single-person company?<p>Topic is created because of a comment in this[1] thread<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12065355
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Title: I am eager to quit but I feel like I might need to be on good relations with him, otherwise, he won't leave a good word in for me for anyone who contacts him as a reference. I don't have many references because, I'm in graduate school. Let's just say quitting in anyway would not be good for our relationship given his personality.<p>I could suck it up for three more years (granted I graduate in three, he's not the best at science or getting us funding, he's mostly a politician) and it's too late to switch groups without wasting an additional 3 years. Sticking with it seems like my best option right now, unless I am wrong and I do have other options.
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Title: Today we'd like to introduce five new features and one moderator.<p>1. You can collapse comments in threads. If you're logged in, collapses persist across page refreshes and devices for a week.<p>2. You can tell which way you voted and undo a vote if you want. An 'unvote' or 'undown' link appears after a post's timestamp when you vote.<p>3. Save and share the best stories and comments. Click on a post's timestamp to go to its page, then click 'favorite' at the top. Your favorites are linked from your profile, and you can browse other users' from theirs.<p>4. On the front page and /newest, click 'hide' if you no longer want to see a story. The next story in the list will slide up at the bottom. If you change your mind, visit /hidden and click 'unhide'. If you're logged in, hidden stories persist for a week.<p>5. Find out which stories were the most popular on HN on a given day by visiting /front?day=yyyy-mm-dd. You'll see all the front page stories for that day, sorted by how much time they spent there. For example, Alan Kay's AMA had the most front page time on June 20: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2016-06-20.<p>Finally, I'm pleased to introduce sctb, a.k.a. Scott Bell, as a Hacker News moderator. Scott has been moderating HN incognito for a long time, but starting today he and I will be sharing the public part of the job. Since Scott is familiar with all aspects of HN moderation, you shouldn't notice any changes in practice; this is just an internal refactoring to enable such innovations as vacations and a day off. Scott is my cofounder from Skysheet (YC W09), an excellent programmer with a meticulous eye for detail, and a thoroughly decent human being. Please welcome him and be nice!
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Title: I have had two interviews with big companies Google and Amazon. After going to on campus interviews with both companies but only to here the word you are not qualified. I feel like a complete loser.
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Title: I'm "only" 6 years into my career but already worked with a dozen languages. While there are some obvious distinctions (like elixir being a better fit for concurrent systems or some being statically typed while some are not), most of them are very similar.<p>For corporate projects I usually comply to whatever language the system is already written in and adapt to that, but if I were to start a new project now, I wouldn't be sure which language is the right choice.<p>Here are some of the languages I used for projects in the past:<p>- Go<p>- Clojure<p>- Elixir<p>- Ruby<p>- Python<p>- Java<p>- NodeJS<p>- PHP / Hack<p>How are you deciding which language to pick when starting from scratch?<p>(On a similar note, the same thing could be asked for client side code: JS, TypeScript, ClojureScript, PureScript, ES6 / Babel, Coffee, etc)
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Title: I'm fairly familiar with the popular tools such as afl and Codenomicon Defensics. But I find the academic literature very opaque and don't really know where to start.<p>If I want to understand the cutting edge of fuzzing techniques, and what will be the emerging state of the art in the next few years - where should I look? Any good papers or books (with at least some for novices to understand), or research projects that are leading towards a new excellence?
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Title: My startup has been kicking around the idea of developing a Chrome extension to help save you money.<p>I've been wondering - what are some of everyone's favorite apps or extensions for saving money? I've heard of Ebates, Honey, and Ibotta. Is there a need that's currently going unmet?<p>Would love to get potential user feedback. Thanks!!
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Title: I read within a job description, "...open floor plans inspire a constant exchange of ideas, advice, and banter.". Is it just me, or do all of those things make you cringe when you're thinking about actually getting work done?
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Title: More in the lines of small daily training of IDE, tools, data-structures, design, frameworks. Ranging from fingers warm-up to a drawing relevant architecture/frameworks/pattern-designs. It can vary from project to project and what stage of projects.
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Title: I'm looking for interesting books about new ideas and concepts. Share your favorite books here.<p>One of my favorites is How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenbreg (https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Be-Wrong-Mathematical/dp/0143127535)
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Title: Peter Thiel became a part time YCombinator partner in march 2015. [1] Thiel will serve as a delegate for Donald Trump and speak at his nominating convention. Among other things, Donald Trump has proposed banning muslim immigration and building a database of muslim americans.<p>Paul Graham has said that "We just cannot let Donald Trump become president. It would destroy this country." [2]<p>Sam Altman has said that "To anyone familiar with the history of Germany in the 1930s, it's chilling to watch Trump in action". [3]<p>[1] https://blog.ycombinator.com/welcome-peter
[2] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/727902623597105153
[3] http://blog.samaltman.com/trump<p>Obviously people with differing political beliefs can put them aside and work together, but these are some unusually strong statements from Graham and Altman. Thiel's participation in YCombinator also raises some troubling issues for potential founders. Are there any Latino or Muslim ycombinator founders? Are they expected to interact with Thiel?
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Title: I've long thought that the command line is just a bit rubbish, even if it is powerful.<p>If you were redesigning it today (2016), how would you lay it out and what it do?<p>E.g. collapse output. Keep more metadata on history. Built in error hints (e.g. google the error, harvest possibilities).<p>How should the CLI work across microservices and cloud services?<p>What should the graphical design be?<p>This is deliberately open. Looking for pet hates and ideas.
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Title: Most are familiar with the fact that Kodak developed the first digital camera in the 70s, and then never followed up on it, eventually becoming bankrupt as film became obsolete.<p>I'm interested in an 'insider' account of what was going on at Kodak during the rise of digital. My naive assumption is a bunch of 60+ executives with a 1950's mindset of "We're Kodak", and some junior execs proposed projects that are either ignored or ridiculed.<p>But I wonder, what really happened? Is there a source or interviews or the like? What were they saying in the meetings while digital products were hitting the market?
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Title: I bought a MBP Retina 16gb with AMD M370X a few months ago. When I bought it, it was fast and snappy. Now during the summer the fans won't stop, crappy OSX kernel_task throttles the cpu with no way of turning it off and after a few hours regular programming use it needs a reboot because everything runs at a crawl despite only about 4gb mem used.<p>I don't know if it's the laptop, or El Capitain, but I'm done. Reinstalled osx from scratch, reset the both rams, even tried the 3 different methods of killing acpi but it made no difference. This laptop was a complete waste of money.<p>I want a lapop of similar spec - the monitor in particular was fantastic, I've heard good things about the Thinkpad t450 and the Lenovo carbon, are there others, what are your experiences with them?
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Title: I've been approached by 2 different publishers to author a programming book, based on the strength of a few technical articles I've written. They are both established publishers - think O'Reilly, Packt, Manning, Wrox, etc - and it's darn flattering to be asked. I think it'd be a fun experience, and a feather in my cap. Though I'm under no misconception about the monstrous amount of work it entails.<p>To those who have been down this road: Before I get into bed with a publisher, what else should I be thinking about? What questions should I be asking? What is a fair, market-rate deal for a first-time technical author writing about a popular subject? What are the areas to negotiate? Thanks HN!
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Title: As an engineer in the US what is a typical work day? Mine is 9 hours including an hour unpaid lunch. Is that normal or are there people that really get to work at 9 and leave at 5?
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Title: Between Brexit, the Snooper's Charter and the fact that we are 2 EU migrants we are thinking of moving our company out of the UK.<p>I've seen a few places that look interesting and would fit our requirements (basically being able to do everything in english and not having to live there):<p>- Ireland<p>- Estonia (saw http://howtostayin.eu/ this morning)<p>- Singapore (https://blog.ghost.org/moving-to-singapore/ for an example)<p>Any other place in the EU with a good track record on surveillance laws would be good as well.<p>Is anyone in the same situation or has done this kind of move?
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Title: If some of yours are controversial, please don't sit tight - make a throwaway account
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Title: http://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services<p>https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=ec2&src=typd
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Title: Dear HN,<p>I'm starting to look around for a new job, and need to update my resume.
In my current resume I have a section called "Skills & Competencies" which includes a mixture of languages (C#, python, Go, JS etc.), products (various DB systems, BPM suites, etc.), areas (front-end, back-end, "cloud"/aws, db) but also practices/skills (project mgmt, TDD, agile development methods, CI, etc)<p>To me this feels like a mishmash of things and it does not give a clear picture.
I'm not sure how to "design" this piece of my resume.<p>I guess the main point I want to bring across is that I'm an all-round developer who cares about getting things done and uses whatever means are best for the job. I'm able to learn/understand tech quickly but this is just a means to an end. I like to focus on the team and there interaction / openness.<p>How would you solve this?
As interviewers, what would be helpful to bring this point across?
What would trigger you to invite me for either a cup of coffee or a job interview?<p>Thanks a lot!
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Title: Recall the NYT article describing Google's team culture case study. (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html?_r=0).<p>I am being recruited by a manager & two technical leads for a leadership slot. They want to replace the existing manager for vague, but apparently real, "communication" problems - details forthcoming. 3 teams on 3 continents, perhaps 30 people total.<p>I know & trust the two technical leads, but want to have solid due diligence in place before accepting any offer. What questions can I use to learn whether the dev teams play well together?
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Title: What should an American (or other English-speaking) software engineer expect if they wished to work in China?<p>Is there xenophobia? Are Americans looked down upon or treated differently?<p>How difficult is it to find a job? How about a visa?<p>Culturally, what are some things to avoid, things to expect, etc?
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Title: A young version of yourself is about to start their career and you can give them three books, but only three books, what would they be?
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Title: We have had no email delivered through SendGrid in over 16 hours. Their status says everything is normal but there are reports on Twitter of people having problems.<p>Is anyone else here having problems today?
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Title: Hello,<p>I'd just like to give my two cents where I know no one gives a shit ever. I'm 29 years old. I finished with my Business Administration degree(major) and now I just feel completely LOST! Has anyone ever felt that way? You have the drive and motivation to get to your destination but once you are there -- you're left wondering -- "what else could I have done? What else is there to life? Because if this is all there is then I'm not happy." And, truth be told, I am not happy. I'd like to be something -- more than just an office person. More than just someone who works that 8-5 shift. I feel like a complete wreck. Has anyone ever felt this way?<p>I feel like I should go back to school but do I really want to rack up all that loan? I am already struggling right now. I just wish I knew where to start as a push and motivation.<p>What would you guys do if ya were in my shoes?
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Title: I'm writing a feature story tentatively titled, "Why the Company You Want to Work For Won’t Hire Telecommuters." I'd like your input.<p>Plenty of businesses are interested in hiring only onsite staff. I want to explain the viewpoints behind such policies – and then, ideally, address what it would take for those organizations to hire telecommuters or remote workers.<p>So I’d like to hear from two types of respondents:<p>* Someone who has been in a hiring role at an organization where the job requisitions typically say, “Local candidates only, please.” (Whether or not you’re in agreement with the policy.)<p>* Someone who’s applied to a job that says, “on site only” and gotten a remote job despite that requirement.<p>If you applied to an “on-site only” job ad and got the gig anyway, there’s just one question: How’d you make that happen?<p>My questions are primarily for the people on the hiring side:<p>* Why does the person who does this job need to be on-site?
Please be specific. Give me examples of things that can only be done if she were in the office.<p>* Have you been in a position where you personally would be okay with an employee being a telecommuter, but a decision-maker deemed otherwise? How did you handle it?<p>* How has the policy affected your company’s ability to attract candidates?<p>* Have you hired someone for an in-the-office job, and later given permission for the individual to work from home? What happened to make the change okay?<p>* What would it take for the company to change the no-telecommuters policy, even if only for one specific position?
For example, “If a rock star in my field applied for the job, we’d do anything to get him to say Yes – including letting him work remotely.” But there can be many other answers, and I’d very much like to hear yours.
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Title: Let's do this again. It can be a SaaS app, a mobile app, or any side project that is netting you recurring revenue.
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109
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Title: At my company I'm considering switching us from Nagios to another monitoring system and starting to do some research. What's the best monitoring solution out there today? I'm pretty impressed by Prometheus, but just like to get some more opinions.
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Title: For programmers working at AI companies, what is your skill set for the job?<p>* OpenCV<p>* Neural networks<p>* R<p>* Machine learning<p>* CUDA<p>* something else?
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Title: I recently joined a big tech company. The work is interesting and the team seems skilled and well run. But the larger company has done some really sketchy things where they mislead users in the name of growth. They also have policies that help entrench it beyond what is fair. They are in an industry where the leader has a big natural advantage, and they are in that lead by a large margin. They'd seem like they'd rather win a dirty fight than lose a fair one. Most days I feel a combination of frustration and shame working for them because of this. It seems that the policies follow from the leadership and company culture, and they have been doing similar things for awhile.<p>I am not sure what I should do.
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Title: I find it strange that a group of FOSS-freaks and hacker-types would all congregate around one closed, proprietary platform. I'd like to know why this is.<p>I suppose the better question is "why aren't we all using weird home-made static blogs?"
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Title: Hi HNers,<p>A friend of mine's daughter is interested in tech, 12 years old, a little shy (if that matters), good grades, and a good circle of friends. Her mom wants to foster growth and confidence and all that good stuff. She has been to two two-week camps, one a co-ed disaster, one a girl only success. Anybody got any advice?<p>Thanks!
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Title: How do you guys handle payment for your SaaS?<p>There are quite a few options, from plain Stripe/Braintree to layers on top of them like Chargebee/Quaderno or full solutions like paddle/fastspring.<p>Granted that the needs might be different if you are in Europe like us with all the special VAT handling.
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Title: Hello<p>Maybe this question doesn't properly apply to USA programmers since labor laws are a little different there, but let me try.<p>Rationale: we always discuss how programming makes us tired and stressed, how often we spend hours and hours per day just procrastinating or being completely unproductive while still trying to be. Also, we often discuss how programmers get paid nice salaries in comparison with most other professions. This leads me to the conclusion: I'd probably be very happy to take a 25% (or more) salary cut if I had to work 25% (or more) less. I mean, 8 hours per day is a lot and it's very rare for me to have a fully productive day. If I moved to 6 hours per day, I'm not even sure if I'd become less productive, I'd probably just spend less time chatting at the coffee room, and have a smaller chance to get burnout. Maybe a little less productive, but the company would be saving some money with me, and if they did this to other 3 people they would be able to hire another 6h/day programmer to balance things, maybe making the result even positive for them.<p>But, considering that no company does this, it looks like this isn't a good idea for employers. Why? Why do companies try to squeeze all the possible juice from employees instead of the alternative where they pay a little less, require a little less, and the employee becomes much more happy?<p>And the question to the workers: wouldn't you accept a proportional salary reduction for a proportional time-spent-inside-the-office-doing-whatever reduction?
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Title: Recently Dennis Cooper had his blog and associated account deleted by Google without much recourse or reason provided:<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757<p>Coincidently, I just received two emails from Google telling me my entire account is suspended and about to be deleted as well. I can appeal but without knowing the reason, it's pretty hard to argue anything except, I didn't do anything wrong!<p>I've uploaded a picture album of the suspension/appeal emails here:<p>http://imgur.com/a/ARrLP<p>I wonder if other HNers are also getting suspension/deletion out of the blue, if so definitely let us know. I use my account mainly for email, I have absolutely no porn in my email, and pretty much just email family and get tech related subscriptions, social related notifications. It's all super tame, so I'm at a loss. I really hate to say it, but Dennis Cooper might have been right, I feel like the rug has been pulled from under me. "Only when they come for you, do you realize haste was a virtue."<p>Is Google on a (possibly automated) account deletion spree?
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Title: They removed the article, but there is still a post on their front page: https://techcrunch.com/<p>This the version googled has cached:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JP0ef1CueKYJ:https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/26/ourmine-team-important-message/+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk
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Title: I know that people say that "interviewing is hard" and I've read lots of articles that say that people generally don't like doing long winded technical screens but it is the only way to judge whether or not a person is competent, etc.<p>What I want to know is why have other related areas of study such as Statistics, Economics, Actuarial Science and Operations Research been able to organize professional bodies that can determine competence. There are other professional bodies where they don't give credentials but they organize a central location for candidates and organizations to come together and they provide a standardized format to determine competence.<p>I find this especially baffling now that "data science" has become a buzzword. Lots of "data science" techniques such as:<p>- Generalized Linear Modeling<p>- Gradient Boosted Machines<p>- Support Vector Machines<p>- Random Forrests<p>- The Simplex Algorithm<p>- Anything with the word Bayes or Markov in the title<p>were developed by Statisticians/Mathematicians. Even though hospitals and insurance companies and the Fed and logistics companies are able to find statisticians/operations researchers/ predictive modelers/ etc. with out problems why do tech companies such as AirBnB(https://www.quora.com/How-does-Airbnb-hire-data-scientists) say they HAVE to give these multi-day long technical screens with multiple homework assignments?<p>What is it about applying the same techniques to tech that makes them special and some how harder to measure?
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Title: Anonymous person (under a nickname) sent screenshot as a proof that they managed to gain SSH access to our production server. The screenshot is legit, information displayed in it could not be faked without actual access.<p>Just a proof, not some ransom request or anything equal.<p>What would be a smart next step? Other than checking if there are any security updates for all the software in our stack.<p>We are a small company and don't have any security experts, etc.<p>Thanks!
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450
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Title: I've been a developer working for large corporations for the past 4 who are more concerned with "fast" delivery than "correct" delivery. As a result of that, the concept of Unit Testing is somewhat foreign in the environment (I think we have somewhere around 40% test coverage, our unit test suite takes ~40 minutes to run on a dev machine, and new unit tests rarely get written). Unit tests aren't "valuable" to the customer, so they are pushed out in favor of "value" code (features) and the reliance on manual QA testers to catch defects (which doesn't happen).<p>Imagine you were hired as a consultant to come in here and fix our process. How would you sell TDD to the bosses/managers who only see it as extra work for the same value? I'll admit I'm a little fuzzy on the benefits as well. I'm slightly ashamed to admit that even on my side projects I'm like "I'm totally gonna do TDD you guys!" but that rapidly falls by the wayside.
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Title: I've already read and understood K&R. At work I write rails code and deal with challenges like large databases and scaling large codebases. I was thinking about doing Project Euler problems or cryptopals.com in C. Any other ideas?<p>My objective is to better understand how computers work, how ruby works, and generally to be a better software engineer.
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Title: I've been on a bit of a Smalltalk / Squeak / message-passing OOP deep-dive as of late and was looking for pointers to good Smalltalk codebases to study that are considered particularly elegant and compact.<p>I'm especially struck at the moment by what seems to me to be a bit of a contradiction. In this talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QboI_1WJUlM) from COFES, there's a clear push for a kind of simplicity and elegance that seems very opposite to the common criticisms I've seen of OOP, that it too easily results in overly-complex software (one Reddit comment I stumbled across from someone that seemed to have experience working on commercial Smalltalk applications said Smalltalk encourages an explosion of complexity). I'm keen to look at some good counter-examples.<p>So, Smalltalkers on HN, what's your favorite Smalltalk-family code and why?
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47
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Title: I read a similar thread on reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4v3ts4/what_was_your_why_didnt_i_start_doing_this_sooner/) and thought that it would be interesting to know such moments from the HN community!
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630
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Title: A year ago, I asked HN what can I do get an entry job. HN told me to keep on grinding. That I will get lucky. Some HN people offered to look at my resume. I talked to them through email, and they offered advice. I followed their advice.<p>A year later, I still haven't been able to get any job. Two weeks ago I had an on-site for a position near Philly. Expected salary would be $40K - $50k. I passed the final interview and was told I was one of the best candidates. I was supposed to get an answer today, but it appears I've been ghosted. I've also been ghosted by another company after doing a phone tech interview with the VP.<p>I'm currently at the 14 month mark unemployed after graduation with a BS degree in CS. I went to a public state school centered between Philly and NYC. I live by Hoboken, Jersey City, and NYC.<p>Since I've either been ghosted or rejected by everyone so far, I have only one choice left. I managed to pass LaunchCode, then skipped a few steps (since I already have various personal projects and a CS degree), directly into interviewing with a local company. The thing is this will be a $10 - $15/hr internship. While I'm grateful for anything, it scares me to be at this point in time of my career looking forward to a low wage internship.<p>Everyone says there are jobs everywhere for CS graduates, but it's been so hard for me personally to get anything. I am not as smart as most HN people here. I did not go to an amazing school. But I am passionate and competitive by heart. Computers have been my life. So, what happens to people who graduate and can't find an entry job?<p>Apology if this thread does not belong here.<p>Here are a few other things I've done:<p>1) 2 unpaid websites for a business<p>2) volunteer programming for nonprofit<p>3) attend NJ Tech Meetup every month and some others.<p>4) volunteered PropellerFest in Hoboken<p>5) worked on two unpaid programs for companies during the interview process (spent a minimum of 2 weeks on each)
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42
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Title: I'm interested to hear what you think is good/important enough to warrant following, admittedly with the aim of expanding my list. I'd also be interested to hear what reader you use.<p>Here's my list (most of these are easily searchable so I won't link them):<p>Comics:
Cube Drone, Dilbert daily, Garfield daily, Invisible Bread, lolnein, Poorly Drawn Lines, The Oatmeal, xkcd<p>Misc:
xkcd what if?, John A De Goes' blog [1], Still Drinking [2], Krebs on Security<p>I use a Telegram bot [3] as a 'reader' of sorts (no affiliation).<p>[1] http://degoes.net/<p>[2] https://www.stilldrinking.org/<p>[3] https://telegram.me/TheFeedReaderBot
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148
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Title: Hackers tend to have great taste in board games, especially ones involving complex strategy. So, what games do you like to play?
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48
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Title: As die-hard FreeBSD user and admin I'm interested to know why FreeBSD hasn't been used more often (yeah I know about Netflix and Yahoo but still)?
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80
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Title: If you're a location-independent entrepreneur, please share where you choose to live and why.
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122
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Title: A socio-technical history of the Internet that will definitely appeal to many HN readers: Ben Peters, author of "How Not to Network a Nation", discusses the history of Soviet cybernetics and computer networks on Sean's Russia Blog podcast episode "The Stillbirth of the Soviet Internet".<p>In the interview, Peters states the reason the Internet appeared in Silicon Valley and not near Soviet Kiev was that "the capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists". This challenges conventional notions about the relationship between society and technology and contradicts the often-stated belief about laissez faire economic freedoms and capitalism being necessary for the high-tech booms.<p>Peters also ponders what we might learn about current Internet state surveillance trends, such as the now-known NSA programs, by looking at the 1960's Soviet project called OGAS ("obshche-gosudarstvennaia avtomatizirovannaia sistema"). Its full title in English unashamedly gives away its intentions: "All-State Automated System for the Gathering and Processing of Information for the Accounting, Planning, and Governance of the National Economy, USSR".
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42
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Title: Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER,
your location, and whether remote work is a possibility.
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68
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Title: Please lead with the location of the position and include the keywords
REMOTE, INTERNS and/or VISA when the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome.
When remote work is not an option, please include ONSITE. A one-sentence summary of
your interview process would also be helpful.<p>Submitters: please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no
recruiting firms or job boards.<p>Readers: please only email submitters if you personally are interested in the
job—no recruiters or sales calls.<p>You can also use kristopolous' console script to search the thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519.
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534
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Title: Time and again, users on the Internet are shown to be uniquely identifiable through new and old data leakage from their browser.<p>And I'm wondering: just like browsers already display "do you want to share your location" when websites try to access this info, why don't they have this kind of security mechanism for every information that could make the user uniquely identifiable such as "This site wants to know [the list of installed [fonts|plugins] | the battery status of your device | ...] ?"<p>Are there some technicalities that make this a particularly hard problem?
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40
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Title: I'm trying to tell if I should invest time into VR development.<p>HTC vive and oculus owners, are you still actively playing VR after few months, or you put it on the shelf?
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105
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Title: Public or private market — what's the best investment you've made? How sure were you when you made it that it would pan out as it has? How long did it take to pan out? And have your investments (number of investment, amount per investment) increased or decreased over the last ten years?
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47
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Title: I'm asking this for several founders on our team who are getting deeper into our thirties and starting to think about moving to a larger more stable company. We have been working together for 4 years under the same company name during which time we have done 4 major projects that we were hoping would take off. We've been profitable the entire time and we all make decent salaries, and 3 of the projects still generate modest revenues.<p>The problem we are facing is that our resumes and Linkedins do not look impressive (to our eyes) because you don't see a progression through multiple companies with inflating job titles (example good profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/saadkhan02).<p>So, how does one communicate that they are hirable after running a semi-successful startup for years? Or, perhaps, is this undesirable?
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245
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Title: I've noticed this trend now where you are first asked for your username or email first, then the page reloads with the password box separately. This is really annoying if you use a password manager as you sometimes have to open it twice. Where has this come from? Is it safer?
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54
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Title: I'm a business oriented Computer Science college student who's been trying to come up with an idea for a profitable side business for some time now. How do you find the right idea to build a business off of?
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46
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Title: Your boss comes to you with some highly improbably task and you say YES.<p>Your Project Manager comes to you asking if something could be done and you say YES. And then you have a unbelievable deadline looming over you for the next few days.<p>Your peers ask you for some help on a task that they had been struggling with - for days. You say YES and then you end up having to feel the burn for their complete workload.<p>Your subordinates ask you for help every five minutes and you always say YES and end up helping them and sometimes end up doing all the task yourself - veiled under 'mentoring'.<p>How do you say NO? How did you learn to say NO?
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60
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Title: I've been playing around with computers on and off for 30+ years, but now at the age of 45 I have discovered a love of assembly language (x86) and reverse engineering.
So my question is how can I get a job taking my learning further, money is not a big deal for me,so willing to undertake very Junior level work,but I feel my age will be a big blocker.
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74
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Title: I'm not going to finish my C.S. degree in 4 years, it's going to take me a couple of years more. I'm not able to assist to all lectures and attend all exams because I've been going through a lot of stuff lately, so I haven't been (& am not) able to pass an academic year in a year. My gpa is still good.<p>I'm worried about being rejected for most applications in the future due to how long it took me to finish and I don't want to come off as whiny or anything in interviews, etc when interviewers ask me (if they do) why it took me so long.<p>So:
Do employers care how long it took you to finish a degree?
How important is to employers and interviewers?
Is there anything I can do to counteract it?<p>Thanks.
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61
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Title: Hiring managers - what constitutes too much job hopping for you to pass on a resume?<p>Everyone else - do you have a lower or an upper limit on how long you tend to stay with companies?<p>As the former, my personal rule of thumb is to look for at least one recent tenure of 2+ years for someone with 5+ years of experience. More allowance is made for candidates with less experience, but again - 4 one-year tenures is a red flag.<p>I do see a trend for shorter tenures in the last couple of years, presumably due to the competitive market, so am curious where you stand as either a hiring manager or a potential job seeker.
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68
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Title: i'm an enterprise developer, specialized in .NET stack, i've been ranging from eCommerce, Media, Healthcare ad now Public Administration areas, it may sounds good, someone may says that i've been "lucky" to face with multiple biz domains, but is not all gold what's shines, in my country (Italy) there is no importance (or almost) to quality of projects (especially Technically), you have to face with ridiculous deadlines, poor team mate (in order of thech knowledge) and tremendous customers.<p>When i started to work i thought, "nice, i'm paid for doing what i would have done i my free time !", but now looking at the current situation i'm not of the same thought anymore, i would move on to different fields but i can't focus on one in particoular, i constantly feel interested in IT Security, then low level programming (C/C++) than again "new" languages like GOLang, RUST etc.. i can't focus on nothing, i think it's due to my work frustrations, does anyone ever been in a situation like mine ? and more... some advice on how to follow the right path ?
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100
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Title: What book have you found so amazing that you have given it as a gift? This could be a tech book, biz, self help or other book.
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360
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Title: There is a long standing bug in Windows, where the hover state on taskbar items - highlight and a window preview - gets stuck after having the computer run for a while, as if the taskbar never notices the cursor leaving it.<p>I've had this bug on every single Windows version since Windows 7, on every single installation and every single Windows PC I've used actively.<p>Along the years I've seen people suggest all kinds of workarounds for this, but I've seen none that do more than temporarily fix the issue.<p>This bug has intrigued me ever since I noticed it being consistent across versions, and most recently I checked if it still applies to Windows 10 Anniversary Update, which it does. Why is it so persistent? Why did it survive the "should-not-call-it-metro" changes to the explorer shell?<p>Since there's often interesting discussion and insight on obscure bugs in Hacker News, does anyone have any insight on this? Has anyone ever debugged it?
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50
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Title: Hey HN!<p>There have been a couple HN posts that others have posted about our Kickstarter for the Superbook, our shell that turns any Android phone into a laptop for $99. We didn't see them until fairly late, so wanted to do an AMA, answering questions about the technology, its applications, our production schedule, manufacturing costs (how we can price it so low), or just anything else in general.<p>Also wanted to put out an open offer to stop by our offices on 5th and Mission and play with the current working prototype (bring your Android phone too!). Just email me at [email protected].<p>Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook-turn-your-smartphone-into-a-laptop-f
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146
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Title: Hi HN! I want to reduce my footprint on FB, i.e. delete all posts and photos, unlike all likes, etc. I'd like to keep the account active, so simply deactivating isn't the way to go (yet?)<p>I did some digging and there seems to be some Chrome extensions that - according to reviews - can give mixed results.<p>Most of what I could find - including past posts to HN - were 4 or 5 years old. So my question: is there a recent, go-to tool that you know of which can help me achieve the above? Or should I try my luck with the random years-old tutorials you can find online?<p>Thanks!
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110
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Title: I have a Bsc in Software development which was extremely practical and light to non existant on real math or algorithms. Since then I have done very well as a contractor programming mainly in java building webapps for your typical enterprise shops, banks, big energy providers etc.<p>Now at age 33 I'm considering taking 3-4 months after this contract to take the following 3 courses:<p>- http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-042j-mathematics-for-computer-science-fall-2010/Syllabus/<p>- http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-006-introduction-to-algorithms-fall-- 2011/Syllabus/<p>- http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-046j-design-and-analysis-of-algorithms-spring-2015/calendar/<p>I want to stop contracting and apply to a company solving real problems after this process, google, facebook, zalando, amazon, etc..<p>I have always felt terrified of the google interview process, or any test on a whiteboard for that matter.<p>In the 3 months, I plan to work 6-7 hours a day and get a tutor 3-4 times a week on chegg.com. If I have time left I would also like to work through cracking the coding interview.<p>Would love any feedback on this idea, i.e. if I'm missing the mark, or picking bad courses it's best to know now.
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218
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Title: What chatbot would you like to have?
This could be a chatbot for Messenger, Telegram or Slack. Tiny and specific bots are okay.
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45
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Title: I know lots of people who are interested in learning to code, but many lose interest very quickly after starting. If you can relate to this: why did you stop?
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40
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Title: What are the cool life hacks for Developer, you are applying in day to day life?
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71
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Title: I know this is a niche question, but have you reached a point where you have enough passive income to not to have to work for a living?
If so how did you accomplish it?
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187
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Title: Apparently, WebAssembly will revolutionize the client-side development. The web apps will be very much like desktop ones: high performing, can be written in any language. At the same time they are cross platform, can be easily distributed, and do not require installation.<p>Meanwhile, every "builder of web3.0" who's trying to "fix the Internet", or "make the web faster, safer, and more open" is doing it in such a way that back-end development is not required. I.e. they are working on decentralized (either p2p or federated) universal back-ends that they assume should be used by everyone.<p>Do you believe that in future the back-end development as we know it today will be obsolete as everybody will use some p2p BaaS platform and the web-development will be all about implementing client-side apps?
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177
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Title: We all know that exercise is good for us, yet many of us fail to either start or continue. Why?<p>Like many of you, I sit in front of a computer far too much during my days. I blame my inactivity on everything: not enough time, family obligations, an I'll do it tomorrow attitude, it won't work for me because of my genetics, I don't know what I should do so better not do anything and get injured etc.<p>Do you do the same? What keeps you from exercising or what made you start exercising in the first place? How do you keep it up?
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123
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Title: I'm not sure if this is allowed here as it's technically "not legal", but while I love my MacBook, nothing beats having a comfy desktop computer at home with a ton of storage. I know I'm in the minority, but I miss it.<p>Unfortunately I am very much used to OS X and highly productive in it and Apple's desktop offerings are pretty poor right now (correct me if I'm wrong), so unless I decide to go for Linux, I'll try a Hackintosh.<p>What I'm looking for are experiences with them for someone who just wants a computer to code, torrent, and watch movies from and doesn't care about iMessage working. I probably won't update my OS X much either.<p>I keep hearing widely different things about Hackintoshes so I thought I'd try HN.<p>Thanks!
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132
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Title: Numerous online application systems have you first upload a resume in .docx, .pdf, .txt, from which an attempt is then made to pre-fill out much of the online application. This doesn't work very well and basically requires one to complete the entire app. Anyone out there have experience creating these programs? How do they work and what's the best way to format a resume so that they work properly?
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50
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Title: I've been working as an independent consultant for about 12 years. However, now age 40 with two young kids in tow, I'm looking for something more stable.<p>The crux is, while I'd want to get paid like a 18-year veteran of the industry, who would want to hire me for that? While I can write CRUD apps in about a hundred languages, do embedded, some FPGA, some image processing, some web UI, some tablet, some desktop, some data analysis, some magento, wordpress, AWS, Heroku, Haskell, etc., nobody is hiring with a need for "a little each of a bajillion skillsets". At best 3-4 are used in any one job. Also having worked primarily independently I don't have a ton of the management experience that is asked for in senior level positions either.<p>So while I feel like I've put in the time and I have the intelligence, have I completely painted myself into a corner? Even for consulting gigs, I feel like what I have to offer is not far beyond what a 2-year veteran with that specific skillset could offer, so how can I compete?<p>Granted I'm applying for jobs now and so it'll be a matter of supply and demand, but has anybody else been down this road? If you have and it sucks, can we make a general warning for other youngsters considering this path?
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40
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Title: Or maybe you launched something that is just languishing, not even paying for it's hosting? In retrospect, were there any warning signs the business would fail? Could you have done anything different to help the site succeed?
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50
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Title: Recently I decided that I wanted to run my own MTA. Downloaded qmail, applied a couple of patches and it was done. The problem is making sure my mail is not marked as spam by the major MTAs out there, gmail and hotmail both mark my mails as spam. So far I've:<p>- made sure I'm not running an open relay (obviously)<p>- made sure a reverse lookup to my IP matches my host<p>- made sure my IP wasn't already in any spam IP blacklist<p>- added SPF<p>- added DKIM<p>- run a lot of tests at glockapps.com<p>It's still not enough. I don't know what else to do, is it possible to run your own MTA, for personal use in 2016? Who, here, is doing it successfully?
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648
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Title: I've been working as software engineer for over 15 years. I feel burned out and have no interest left in this field where learning new things just keeps you at the same place in life. And no respect for experience, unless you demonstrate on a whiteboard with your implementation of a sorted bubble tree list.<p>My question is, how to successfully get out of tech and still make decent living ($100k+).
Has anyone tried small business that worked out for you?
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158
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Title: Yesterday I found this talk [1] on the origin of silicon valley in the defense industry, linked in a comment here [2], and couldn't help but sit through the entire thing in one go. So I wonder, what other great, freely available talks or lectures does HN know about?<p>Rules: Can be on any topic. Can be of any length. Ideally, should be a standalone talk.<p>[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo<p>[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12281207
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47
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Title: Last time around this was fairly popular. Lets have a 2016 version.
If you have any side projects that you've built and that you no longer have time for, list them here and let's see if others want to buy it from you.
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63
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Title: I recently started reading again and I was looking for some good tech blogs to read. I tried Mashable/Gizmodo/zdnet but their junk to good read ratio is really high. I'm looking for something more like the old new thing [1], but I've come to really enjoy.<p>[1]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
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79
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Title: How should I prepare for a front-end dev interview? What type of questions do you usually ask / or have been asked in an interview?
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209
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Title: Google seems to be more and more of a one-stop shop for me (and many others). There are privacy concerns, as well as concerns about data being available/under your control for the long haul.<p>What have you done to mitigate this risk? If you've left Google's services, what services have you replace, and how?<p>I rely heavily on Gmail, Search, Drive & Photos. The main issue I have is making my data highly available and resilient at low/no cost.
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66
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Title: It has been more than a year since last, amazing and filled with information topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440208<p>Lets see what are best landing pages as of 2016.
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44
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Title: I'm looking into becoming a developer-for-hire through them. Is the company legitimate, ethical, etc? Are there any hidden issues or things that one should be aware of? Any other general bits of information? Are there better places for this kind of thing (I'm basically looking into consulting, freelancing, telecommuting, remote working, etc), and if so, then where specifically?
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50
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Title: As we move to further process nodes, I presume we have more surface area to put cores in. About a decade ago, people used to say we'd get CPUs that have the same clockspeeds but have a lot more cores. When I look at Skylake and Kabylake (rumors), I don't see the number of cores increasing (we seem to be at 2 for laptops and 4 for desktops). I know there are some SKUs like the 6850 with more, and of course, there arr Xeon chips. But .. why are desktop processors not getting beefier over the last 5-10 years?
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40
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Title: I know many high profile developers participate on HN, and I often see people mention projects they've worked on which I've heard of or used before. While it can be nice to read a comment completely oblivious to who the author is, often extra context can add insight. A lot of the time the HN handle is non-obvious and even different from their GitHub username (if they have one). Is there something like a public list that shows some of the more seasoned voices and what their HN username is?
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46
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Title: I'd consider myself a pretty experienced developer with diverse skills. I want to create some passive income streams using my abilities.<p>What are the recommended methods for a solo developer? Which method of the following would you recommend?<p><pre><code> ebook in a niche technical topic
SaaS product that solves a niche issue
mobile or web based game</code></pre>
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427
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