Show HN: How's It Like – Find Jobs and Companies by Culture and Benefits - <AUTHOR> https://www.howsitlike.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> 8 yrs ago, I started my career as an Analyst followed by Software Engineer, Business Analyst, Product Owner, Project Manager and few different roles in multiple industries. And every time I commited to a new role, I felt nervous as I didn't have much insight into how the company, people, culture and work environment are like. Luckily few of the roles and companies clicked really well and some weren't matching with my expectation and interests. It was hard to quit the roles that weren't a culture fit as a lot of time and effort went into each role both for me and the hiring company.

Since then, I was always doing a lot of manual research on company's culture and work environment before applying to the roles which did take good amount of time and resources. I was interested mainly around flexibility of roles like work from home, flexible start times and offices with lots of creative space where teams can brainstorm ideas and discuss freely. I looked around for a platform that provides this kind of information in the job search process but couldn't find much to my surprise. Although there are very few sites that give this information but they are niche sites. I felt there is still a need to build something that can cover wide range of roles and companies where everyone can explore and find suitable jobs and companies based on culture, benefits and work environment.

Please check our new site and let me know your feedback!</comment>


Ask HN: After 2 years of content but low traffic, is it time to give up? - <AUTHOR> I started work on a restaurant finder website about 8 years ago (so the domain is that old), took my sweet time building it(!) and finally launched it properly with plenty of content around February 2016. The site is super-fast, follows loads of good best practices & SEO tricks and has over 500 restaurants on there now.
However, when I look at my Google Analytics, my stats are pretty poor... but improving! About 6 months ago I was getting 350ish users/month. This then grew to about 460 a couple of months ago and now I'm in the 500s/month (the site's based in Dublin, Ireland, population 1.5m). Obviously this is still tiny but does the growth point to better things to come?
One thing about the inbound traffic I am getting is that it's all for direct restaurant searches (e.g. "Johnny's Diner") rather than area searches (e.g. "Newtown restaurants"); the latter is where you see the site's true value, so everyone just bounces from the restaurant page.
I was beginning to get disheartened until this new upswing, so wondering if I should be hopeful? Also, surely a domain of that age must be worth something? Thanks
P.S. I specifically didn't give the site URL, as I didn't want to be seen promoting, but am happy to give it if there are comments requesting it. <comment><USER2> I think you picked a hard thing to do given the market competition but that doesn't mean you should toss in the towel. You have some non-zero traffic level and there is value to that if you want to continue to see what it can do.

The problem is the site is competing against the large incumbents in the space like Google etc. So you have to differentiate IMO. For example, I assume you are local to many of these restaurants, what about doing interviews, back stories, historical building facts etc. Make it nice for locals and tourists alike to learn a little about the people behind the restaurant as well as the area and history.

My son traveled recently to Ireland and that was one of the things that he and his girlfriend loved, most bars and restaurants had stories or were in some historical building etc. As an American we think old is a building still standing from the late 1800's early 1900's, Europe in general has furniture still in use that is older than some of our buildings. Google isn't going to tell you that, only a hyperlocal search can help people with those cool facts.

That type/level of content I think would help drive additional traffic not to mention differentiate your site from the big players. But you have to be honest with yourself, that takes significant work to cultivate that level of content, and you have to make sure you have a monetization strategy, but I think there is market for that type of stuff.

Just some ideas, YMMV.

<comment><AUTHOR> OMG, this is an amazing idea! Thank you so much. Something like this would get me the inbound links I need. It might involve some sort of a pivot, but definitely worth investigating.

I do have one unique feature in that the reviews are linked to proper professional critic's reviews in the natioanl newspapers, rather than anonymous commenters.

To be fair also, I have put in a signficiant amount of work, adding all that content for 500+ restaurants, their menus, reviews.

I also do have a monetization strategy but was trying to get eyeballs on the site first.

<comment><USER2> I wish you the best, the ultimate is that you succeed as that is what we all want to do. If there is anything I can do to help you I am happy to do so. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks again

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can't add much to the comments already made but I notice your blog is currently hosted on a subdomain. I would move this to the main site as in example.com/blog in order to concentrate any authority. That said, you need to be adding a lot more content to it.

I would also say, don't be disheartened at the lack of progress thus far. If it's something you believe in then keep going and keep making incremental improvements.

2 reasons I see these kind of ventures fail is the creator throws in the towel too early or he keeps going but doing the same old thing over and over. Avoid these traps and you're halfway there.

BTW, I worked in Dublin for a while (many years ago) and O'Sheas on Talbot St was a regular haunt of mine. I was disappointed not to find it on your site.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, I'd love to know the site URL. Maybe that'd help people here give you a bit more feedback about why it might not be succeeding right now.

Still, how have you promoted it? Have you done some backlink building? Work with influencers to get the word out? Partnered with some media outlets/let them know you exist? Promoted the service via ads? Built up some active social media accounts?

Because for good or bad, its generally the offsite work you do that really makes your site or service popular now. Don't get me wrong, the on site stuff like site speed and page structure is important too, but it's important in a 'won't scare off/frustrate those that find the site' kind of way.

Hope that helps a bit.

<comment><AUTHOR> TBH, I originally thought SEO would be enough to get some eyeballs, but as you point out, that's totally not the case! I tried contacting a few local food blogs, but none of them ever got back to me. Other than that, I've just told literally everyone I know and tried using Twitter, by tweeting restaurants as I add them, in the hope they would retweet to their followers. I've thought of putting it on Reddit/r/Dublin, as a sponsored ad. I never looked into backlink building, good suggestion. In short though, I guess I do need to try harder :-) Thanks.

I was curious to see if anyone thought the upswing could be promising!

The site's [https://www.menucosm.com](https://www.menucosm.com) since you asked!

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the reply. Personally I think the site looks pretty good, though I'm probably the furthest thing in the world from a web designer or anyone with any aesthetic tastes.

That said, I think the biggest issue right now may be the question of why this site is useful, given that so many other companies are doing the same thing. At a glance, it seems like it's competing with the likes of Yelp, TripAdvisor and Google Maps, all of which have significantly more data, large communities behind them and more features overall.

Unfortunately, the features it does lack here are generally some of the ones that these sites got popular for in the first place. Such as being able to create an account to upload pictures, rate restaurants and leave reviews, or (for a restaurant owner) to manage the listing and add extra information/respond to feedback.

By not having these, there's not really much of a reason to come back to the service time after time. It lacks the stickiness required for any real user retention.

I know for sure that I'd be unlikely to return after visiting, simply because the other options would have more to draw me in.

So yeah, focus on those features, get some more backlinks and try out a few paid ads and see what happens from there.

P.S. Don't worry, you're not the only person to struggle with this sort of site. It's a tough market to succeed in, and a company I previously worked for tried to do the same thing with much the same results.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, thanks so much for the encouragement.

In terms of functionality, yes, there's LOTS more I could build for sure, both from the regular user and the restaurant owner sides. I was trying to keep it quite minimal, but now that you point it out, it's obvious the site needs to be more engaging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Make the restaurant page look like the area search with that restaurant pre- selected. This way you get the same seo benefit, but your visitors will understand the value.

Also, what's holding you from adding more cities/restaurants? 500 seems a really low number these days (no offense intended, I'm just curious why you don't move faster on that side)

</comment><comment><USER6> Restaurants are an interesting space but all around hard to make money in. Restaurants just don't like to spend money where it isn't absolutely necessary. So it's hard to sell them ads or online services.

You could look at letting restaurants claim their listings and offer them a pro package of services. Maybe menus, or even try offering online ordering. Being local you have an advantage that you can easily meet with restaurants in person.

I am always drawn to developing something for restaurants as their websites are notoriously bad, same with only ordering most aren't near as easy to use as they could be.

I don't think ad revenue is going to bring in a lot of revenue. Maybe $7 to $10 per 1,000 page views. So with less than 1k views you'll probably need to look at monetizing another way if that's your goal.

If you just want a fun website you can improve and run as a fun side project, keep going.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, so freemium services to the restaurants was one of my ideas of making money. However, as you've pointed out, restaurants "just don't like to spend money where it isn't absolutely necessary", which is an interesting and valid point.

Yeah, it was bad restaurant websites, with PDF menus, that inspired me to build the site.

<comment><USER6> I still feel the same inspiration with restaurant sites, so many bad ones out there. Part of the problem is even if the restaurant doesn't have a website there are usually menu sites that at least show what they offer in the Google SERP. So they probably feel like they don't need to pay for one. Even though they could control their message, photos, update their menus, etc.

If you enjoy working on the project keep it going.

I feel like the one area restaurants might pay for or give you a revenue share is online ordering. Maybe you could become the go to online ordering app for restaurants in your area. Not trivial to build though but an area they might be willing to pay you for.

Good luck with the site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It was probably time to give up 8 years ago. Between Yelp, Google, Facebook, Tripadvisor, and Google maps it's a saturated space. If you generate OC maybe you can differentiate yourself but for user generated reviews? Too many big fish in that sea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah it was when I noticed that TripAdvisor listings for a given restaurant were featuring higher than the restaurant's ACTUAL webpage, that I thought I might be too late.

However, individual restaurant listings aren't my priority for traffic, it's the area listings. However, I now feel aiming for terms like "blackrock restaurants" was alsways going to be tough, due to it being quite generic

<comment><USER8> You know this space is already crowded by much larger players than you'll ever be. Does your site have any revenue? If so, does it make profit?

If you're in to food and labors of love, start a garden. At least that'll put food on your table.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You probably should pivot. You have some nice data likely by now. It's more a question whether someone wants it. Basically you don't have product market fit.

I suggest you do a business model canvas. Jot down your value proposition - what problem you're solving.

Are you targeting people looking for locations? Or hungry people looking for a place to eat? Adventurous people looking for somewhere new? Someone just looking for a place to bring a date?

Pick a specific problem. Focus your site around that. Make sure your copywriting emphasizes solving it.

If it doesn't work, move on to other similar problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this. The main use case is "Hungry people looking for a place to eat" when they know where they want to go, or near their current location if on mobile. I guess the market's too saturated for something so generic now. As you say, I should really "pick a specific problem", specific being the key word.

<comment><USER9> Or you can tackle the problem better. One of the world's biggest problems is deciding what to have for dinner, especially for groups that eat different things.

One thing I wanted to try is Akinator for restaurants.

Do you want pasta? No. Pizza? No. Something classy? No. Spicy? No. Fast food? Maybe. Burgers? No. Tacos? Okay.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice suggestion, thanks. Means I could pivot but still using my existing dataset

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > One thing about the inbound traffic I am getting is that it's all for direct > restaurant searches (e.g. "Johnny's Diner") rather than area searches (e.g. > "Newtown restaurants"); the latter is where you see the site's true value, > so everyone just bounces from the restaurant page.

What page are you expecting to rank for "Newton restaurants"? And if people are ending up on the Johnny's Diner page, why doesn't that page include the site's true value?

<comment><AUTHOR> For something like "newtown restaurants" I hwas hoping the search results page for that would rank, something like menucosm.com /restaurants/newtown-123 . On that page I have good canonical URL, pagination, rich text, SEO text, links to similar pages, all the standard stuff.

The reason I said the Johnny's Diner page doesn't show the value is because t;s the area search that's most useful. I have added links to the area search from the Johnny's Diner page, and that might be why I'm slowly seeing this upturn in traffic from 350 to 500 (the dates tie in with when I released the code)

<comment><USER10> [https://www.menucosm.com/restaurants/newtown-123](https://www.menucosm.com/restaurants/newtown-123)

How the heck are you expecting this to rank for anything?

> On that page I have good canonical URL, pagination, rich text, SEO text, > links to similar pages, all the standard stuff.

Here's what I see when I load that URL:

[https://imgur.com/a/cEffh4U](https://imgur.com/a/cEffh4U)

I see absolutely nothing like what you describe on that page.

Meta description: Find great restaurants in Sallybrook on menucosm.com Meta title: Restaurants in Sallybrook

Really?

And if the area search is so valuable on the Johnny's Diner page why are you linking to it and not making it a primary focus of the page?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for getting back to me and taking a look.

Newtown and Johnny's Diner were just sample names I came up with. If you go to the homepage, you'll see links to area searches and the 3 most recent;y added restaurants. I didn't want to put anything specific, I guess I probably should have!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The definition of insanity is doing something over and over again expecting the same result. Maybe it's time to think of a new growth strategy to get exposure to your content.

</comment><comment><USER12> Kudos to you for sticking to something for (at least) 8 years - it's very very easy to become discouraged, so it's inspiring to someone continue to press forward after so many years.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :-) I've learned loads developing the site, so it hasn't been a total waste.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> this seems like it would be very useful for tourists. In touristy areas you could put up flyers with QR codes (or URL routes) that bring up restaurants in that neighborhood (where the flyer is placed).

</comment><comment><USER14> Probably.

I work with a site just like yours, and can obviously say only so much. But consider these things:

The reason you're getting good hits on restaurant pages is that most restaurant websites suck. Many might have only a facebook page, etc. Presently you're being "told" by Google that it's only going to send you individual restaurant traffic, but you feel the value is in the aggregator.

Which brings us to the uncomfortable truth.

Google is at war on aggregators and is doing everything it can to hide them. In the last 8 years it has pushed them further and further down the rankings, while having it's own aggregator services appear at the top of the rankings. Google don't want you to exist because being the middleman is where they make their money. A while ago there were some cases trundling through the courts, but no idea what happened with them.

Also, most of your competitors like tripadvisor/bookatable/opentable/timeout/resdiary/etc. sell bookings directly to the restaurants. They'll charge per cover (per head). If not, they'll be upselling something else (tripadvisor has recently been pushing a lot of "experiences" where it'll be making a big commission). Some of them actually make most of their money by also selling restaurant management software, etc. You haven't given your site, or said how you make money, but can you make that kind of money, and can you do direct sales to restaurants? They are hard to sell anything to as most of them are constantly on the breadline. If you're hoping to slap a bookatable widget on each of your listings and make money, prepare to be disappointed, it might cover your hosting and a few beers.

Finally, I hope you don't find this too rude, but are you _really_ following good, modern SEO practice? As if I search "Newtown restaurants Ireland" then tripadvisor, your main competitor, is sitting pretty at the top. But your site is nowhere to be seen (I see no independent aggregators). Perhaps you've given a bad example as Google is insistent on trying to show me restaurants from Newtown, Wales. I also tried a few restaurant names in Newton and still couldn't figure out what your site is.

EDIT: Just saw you actually posted your site, so if I search "Rathmines Restaurants" you're 16 in google results. It's not bad, but you can see what the others are doing instead ("the top 10 restaurants in Rathmines"). You also see that if you go to any of the top results, a bunch of listings have "reserve" buttons, and use something like the opentable widget.

Plus points for having full text menus, your site is clean and fast, it's a good achievement. I just do wonder how you're going to make money on it. I would definitely try putting opentable widgets in asap so you can get a much better idea of what sort of revenue you could generate and just how much you'd have to grow it to make it worth the investment. In my experience though those widgets are pretty lacklustre unless you can figure out a way to make money directly from the restaurants.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks alot for this very detailed response. That's interesting about Google's war with aggregators but makes total sense now that you say it.

I do plan on integrating opentable, that'll be the next feature I add, if I stick with it. It's pretty much a labour of love at this stage, HN has convinced me I'm fighting a VERY uphill battle.

Restaurant management, along with freemium services on the site, was where I was hoping to make money eventually. Sadly, as you and others have pointed out, restaurants live on the breadline, so I think I picked a bad market!

In terms of SEO, think I posted the easy wins I did on another comment. "newtown" was just an example of a made up place for illustration purposes in the original post. That's cool that I'm in position 16 for Rathmines, I was down in the 50s last time I checked (Rathmines is a cool area with plenty of restaurants).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The numbers that matter are the ones I don't see. Revenue? Expenses? Time commitment you put in. Opportunity cost of that time.

Maybe you aren't Zagat's or whatever, but if it cash flows out, pays you for your time, or you just enjoy it... Why not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Initially I was targeting users, eyeballs on the site. If I could get a few 1000 a month, my plan then was to approach investors, saying "I've got this many people using the site, this is how I plan to make money". So, I have 0 revenue and only 500 monthly visitors, they're the only figures I have right now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A few things...

As someone else mentioned, the top listings on Google all seem to reference "the best restaurants" or "the top 10 restaurants". Also, they typically mention the current year. Both of these encourage clicks, and if people are clicking your result, it'll help improve your ranking. So, change your titles to "The 10 Best Restaurants in Smithfield, Dublin - 2019" for area pages.

You also have no H1 tags on these pages. This is SEO 101. Add an H1 heading that says "Newtown Restaurants, Dublin" at the top of the area pages.

Your URL structure is...

[https://www.menucosm.com/restaurants/smithfield-274](https://www.menucosm.com/restaurants/smithfield-274)

You're using 274 as an ID, but you would be better of making shorter URLs for both users and SEO, and using the name in the URL as the identifier. I'm assuming you can find a way to not have two areas in Dublin with the same name. The new URLs would just be...

[https://www.menucosm.com/restaurants/smithfield](https://www.menucosm.com/restaurants/smithfield)

Think about adding a short description at the top of area pages. A tiny paragraph where you can talk about the area, what it's known for, the type of restaurants there, etc. You want to keep it minimal, because you don't want to distract from the list of restaurants, but it's a chance to plug some keywords, the area name, Dublin, etc.

You have very, very few restaurant ratings. This means I can't search for highly rated restaurants in my area, and you can't recommend restaurants when users are viewing one. Take the scores from Google, TripAdvisor, and Yelp, and generate scores for each of your restaurants. For example, if a restaurant is 4 stars on TripAdvisor with 10 ratings and 5 stars on Google with 1 rating, then you might say it's rated 4.1 on your site, or 82%. And just like that, your site becomes much more valuable, and the doors open for more features and filters. If you get enough traffic one day, you can start to include your own user reviews.

One of the first things I see on your restaurant pages is the link to the restaurant's official website. I imagine a lot of users bounce there, without ever realizing you have menus on your site. You might want to reverse that, and better highlight your menu pages.

On area pages, the filters are all hidden by default. That's a valuable part of the site users are likely overlooking. You might want to have them always visible, and organize them a bit better to remove some of the unnecessary white space (which is a bigger deal if they're always visible).

You have cuisine categories, but when I'm browsing the list of restaurants, I don't see them anywhere. When I see a restaurant like "Beo Kitchen" in the area list, it's meaningless. Is this a burger place? Fine dining? Sushi? Vegetarian? You have the category data, so display it beside the restaurant so users don't have to click each one and read the description to see if it's relevant to them.

With all that being said, this is not likely to be a success because it's such a competitive area and you're not improving on the existing competition that everyone is aware of. So, I wouldn't get carried away spending a ton of additional time on the project. The good news is that you have a site, it works, the design is simple and easy to use, there's data there, it's cheap to host, and it's ranking on Google for certain keywords and phrases. There's no reason not to make a few of the simple changes I mentioned, like the title tags and H1 tags. That could be a few minutes of work, and make a noticeable difference in a couple of months. I would not recommend advertising on Reddit or paying anywhere to promote it. I'm quite certain you'll be throwing money away. I suggest working on the SEO and a few minor improvements, and letting the site simmer for a year as you focus on other projects. You can see if the analytics rise in that time, and if you start seeing a few thousand users a month. For some perspective though, you probably need a 20x increase in traffic to earn a dollar a day from advertising.

</comment><comment><USER17> What's the site?</comment>


Ask HN: Why Are There `Remote: Only US` or `Remote: Only Europe` Jobs? - <AUTHOR> I am under an impression that there are limited software engineers in US and EU, which is why they have to hire from everywhere else. And with anti-immigration regimes companies are now turning towards remote work. But seeing job listing with `Remote: Only US` or `Remote: Only EU` makes me wonder if I am wrong in thinking that?<p>Can someone here who is responsible for creating such vacancies or anyone who knows clarify about why they have this condition? <comment><USER2> Mostly because of 2 reasons:

1\. They dont want to deal with complex legal, immigration and employment laws. If you are a US company, you can just deal with IRS and state laws.

2\. They want you to be able to easily travel to headquarters if needed. Much easier if you are in the country.

The reality is that remote hiring is awesome but there are legal and HR related risks that most companies dont want to deal with.

<comment><USER3> 3: It's easier to work when everyone's working hours overlap

<comment><USER4> Many countries share a time zone with the US

<comment><USER5> None of them are in Europe though...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In my experience it is usually for legal reasons. In those places the employer knows the lay of the land as far as employment law and an a independant and predictable legal system that is also understood / preditible.

I worked for a company that had some major banks and financal institutions. Anyone working on their systems had to be a US citizen, living in the US (even the european banks required that at times).

I was actually involved with one customer who I happened across some strange monitoring setups and it turned out it was the remnants of a company they used that was based outside the US / Europe when the company was expanding quickly. This outsourced company could not explain why they did what they did and after an internal investigation / consultation from legal they realized how little leverage they had with this outsourcing company (pretty much none). It could have been incompetence, but from what I saw the setup was far from something you'd do 'accidentally' or something you would do to accomplish another goal. After that they reviewed a lot of their outside companies and laid down a lot of new US (and sometimes some local exceptions) only rules. Fortunately for my employer they had already established those rules for similar reasons / other customers had demanded it.

</comment><comment><USER7> For me, it's down to timezones. On a remote job advert I said I'd consider developers in Europe due to timezone overlap and an American developer e-mailed in saying, "but what if you just naturally get up really early". I hired him, it works just fine.

<comment><USER8> I think this is one of the main reasons. I work in the US and big part of the team is located in India. It's very complicated to find time for meetings or if you need to reach out to someone from that team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's easier to sue someone / take them to court. (both criminal court and civil court)

Also much, (like a LOT), cheaper to get local lawyers to handle non- international things.

Easier to ruin their life - shaming someone in the US could be devastating to their entire future work and possibly family life. Knowing how / where to do such in other countries is not normal domain knowledge.

You also don't need a passport to travel to their place and punch them in the face.

When actually doing the work: It's easier to figure time zones, weather issues, and holidays as well.

Language / accent barriers cost time and are extra work too.

Given the above situations, work done cheaper over-the-border has to be re- checked by someone local for security issues / backdoors are more of an issue.

In my very small data points / experiences, ymmv.

</comment><comment><USER10> When I've seen a U.S. company "hire" an engineer outside of the country, they tend to end up having to do it as a contractor instead of as a FT Employee. When I see "Remote: Only US," there's a high chance they're not looking to hire on a contractor.

Reason being taxes and labor relations laws (PTO requirements, health insurance isn't going to extend to your country -- or really any of the benefits package).

I've been with remote employers who will go a step further and also restrict individual states (e.g. no California) or only hire in states where they have existing employees to reduce the load on HR.

They'll need to register in each State they've got employees. If they're taking on employees internationally, they might need to set up some kind of legal entity in that country. Which if it's a country like China, oh boy, that's a lot of paperwork.

</comment><comment><USER11> Two reasons that come to my mind: 1\. legal burden of hiring globally 2\. while allowing remote work, the company might not be set up for asynchronous communication

</comment><comment><USER12> Adding to the main reasons already mentioned by others; it's also about culture. Most companies have the perception that people who live close-by are more likely to fit into the existing culture. With that in mind, it does make sense to prioritize people in the same country/continent even for remote work.

Also, the demand-suply for remote working engineers is way different, so it can be an alternative to relocting from abroad.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think you got an answer to your question. Legal reasons would be the number one reason, most likely.

What I wonder is, how does Gitlab do it? They hire pretty much anywhere in the world, and somehow, it seems unlikely they have a legal representing entity in all the countries.

<comment><AUTHOR> They have legal entities in quite a few countries, but most of them are in countries that have labour-friendly rules. [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/finance/payroll/#legal- ent...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/finance/payroll/#legal-entity- payroll-providers)

Everywhere else it must be similar to freelancing. You give them receipts and they pay. But you still have a contract with the company. But if you both are in different countries I am not sure how much practical value does that contract have.

<comment><USER13> Freelancing is what I thought, but then, their benefits wouldn't be enforcible. As in, if they tell you they'll give you 20 days off a year, but then, you've been unable to take more than 5 due to crunch, nobody's gonna be there for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some products destined for government require a certain percentage being made in the country. Voters like that sort of thing. As if you spend 50K on a national hire, you might be able to spend 20K on imported hardware.

</comment><comment><USER15> I know some government contracts require that "the data doesn't leave the US" my understanding is that this is to discourage subcontracting to non-US companies</comment>


Ask HN: Alt. paths for a CS guy who has always been tilted away, towards arts? - <AUTHOR> I'm ~30. Been an Android dev for ~8 years. I am pretty good at coding but I have never been passionate. It just pays the bill. I recently received a promotion that makes me question my current career status quo even more.
I am kind of at my wit's end. I struggle with the idea of resigning and just going travelling for few months but my job is my only source of income. No, I am financially very sorted, just that I don't have a huge savings corpus.
When I look back I have always been interested in literature, cinema, history, and arts in general. But I am also under no impression that I am an artist. Architecture fascinated me. I was opting for it at college but family didn't let me. Peers and seniors all advised against it. At leat in my country (India) only those opted for the field who couldn't get into mainstream engineering streams.
I was listening to a podcast episode once; in that a British woman was the guest and she used to make old stuff for films. Old newspapers, postcards, stained old crumpled pieces of paper. I found that really exciting.
I am a hobbyist beginner level carpenter. I like the idea of making/designing/conceptualising/imagining things that one can touch, look at, admire. I have always been writing in my own capacity. I write in my diary regularly (not just the daily entries but a lot more than that) and sometimes publish among literarily inclined friends and acquaintances in my native language Hindi.
I am trying to find cross disciplinary masters and PhDs and whether I can shift to something else at Masters level than CS that allows me to move into another field. But so far I have really not found anything. Or maybe I am not finding the right way.
I just thought I will post it here hoping someone might have gone down this road. I know no one can give me a readymade route but I hope to get some hints at reading the road signs. <comment><USER3> Do it. Do it. Build on the side. Go home and do it. Code is also art - <USER2> PhDs, masters or whatever - art isn't in imaginary paper degrees, it's in you. Just make more stuff. Make your art, put it out there and show it to the world. If you're an artist, then nothing anyone advises or says will stop you from creating. Otherwise, you're just wishfully thinking. The first ingredient to being an artist is having the boldness to start creating something.

<comment><USER4> Yes. This. If you have a computer and internet, there are thousands of hours of quality tutorials. I'm a CS guy who's very interested in rendering and animation and I'm improving my skills substantially just by posting on the internet for feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Same boat here - I have a degree in Art, but fell into tech work and have been paying the bills with it for 25 years.

My answer is that I do side projects that build tools to help artists. I also do some basic woodworking and try to remember to unplug at the end of each day and make something.

At the end of the day, I find that I enjoy making my money working for someone else, and then letting my creative side be a hobby. So while I wish you the best in finding a new path, sometimes the answer can be as simple as accepting your day job for what it is, then living the rest of your life doing what you love.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hey, you might want to look at NYU ITP. It's courses are at the intersection of Art and Technology and might be in line with what you are looking for. I am currently studying there and would be happy to chat about it. (Also, I am from India and started school here in my 30s)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I'd love to talk to you about it. How could I contact you?

<comment><USER6> You could mail me at my gmail id: chakravarty(dot)arnab

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not easy I have an MFA I. Art if I didn't know how to code I'd be homeless. Teaching art you get adjunct faculty after a PhD you'll make less money than fast food. Technology has been great at putting the nail in the coffin of the arts. This is intentional as society us shifted to a facistic totalitarian model every profession has to be absolutely geared toward the benefit of a tiny wealthy minority. The society that had a major arts Renaissance in the 1960-70s no longer exists. Art is dangerous to facism that's why the web us designed to strangulate it.

<comment><USER8> > acistic totalitarian model every profession has to be absolutely geared > toward the benefit of a tiny wealthy minority

There's plenty of self-employed people and small businesses which absolutely do not benefit the "tiny wealthy minority". Event artists count in this area (self-employed ones), it's just that not that many people or companies are willing to pay for art.

> The society that had a major arts Renaissance in the 1960-70s

Can you expand on that? People were buying more paintings back then?</comment></comment>


Sliding Window Technique and 4 Questions (Algorithms Series) - <AUTHOR> http://quanticdev.com/algorithms/dynamic-programming/sliding-window <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

Sliding Window Technique is a method for finding subarrays in an array that satisfy given conditions. We do this via maintaining a subset of items as our window, and resize and move that window within the larger list until we find a solution. Sliding Window Technique is a subset of Dynamic Programming, and it frequently appears in algorithm interviews. In this video, you will learn how Sliding Window Technique works (with animations), tips and tricks of using it, along with its applications on some sample questions.

Video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM2dhDPYMQM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM2dhDPYMQM)

Article: (same as title link) [http://quanticdev.com/algorithms/dynamic- programming/sliding...](http://quanticdev.com/algorithms/dynamic- programming/sliding-window)

In the video, you will find the solutions to the following questions, as well as their time and space complexities:

      • Easy: Statically Sized Sliding Window: Given an array of integers, find maximum/minimum sum subarray of the required size.
      • Medium: Dynamically Sized Sliding Window: Given an array of positive integers, find the subarrays that add up to a given number.
        o Variation (Medium): Same question but for an array with all integers (positive, 0, negative). The optimal solution is Kadane's Algorithm, but Sliding Window can still be applied with modifications (not recommended though).
      • Medium: Flipping/Swapping: Given an array of 0's and 1's, find the maximum sequence of continuous 1's that can be formed by flipping at-most k 0's to 1's.
      • Hard: Strings: Given a string and n characters, find the shortest substring that contains all the desired characters.</comment>


Is This Higher Education's Golden Age? - barry-cotter https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/golden-age?cid=wsinglestory_41_1 <comment> barry-cotter Univetsities work to ensure that their qualifications are necessary at every level to get a job, when we have decades, sometimes centuries of experience to tell us that practically they are not. It might be worthwhile if the quintupling, dectupling of costs were accompanied by more teaching and research faculty but instead their numbers have held steady while useless administrators and exploited adjuncts grow and grow.

> Professional master's-degree subjects like accounting, business, education, > engineering, and public administration have seen phenomenal growth. The > number of master's degrees conferred in all fields went up by 60 percent > from 2000 to 2014. Universities developed these programs not only in > response to student and employer demand, but also because they could price > them at rates that made them self-supporting. Rapidly growing master's > fields include biology, computer science, homeland security, and health > science.

> Students pursue master's degrees to delay entry into the labor market, to > gain new knowledge or make new contacts, to raise their salaries, to qualify > for doctoral programs, or just to try out a field that they think aligns > with their interests. Universities, sensitized to market opportunities, > deploy battalions of planners to establish footholds in up-and-coming > master's fields before competitors are able to do so. Some of these efforts > are simply avaricious, but most speak to the agility and responsiveness of > universities under the influence of market logic.

</comment><comment> barry-cotter > The humanities have also made important advances: for instance, in our > understanding of the culture and history of areas outside Europe and North > America. They have made breakthroughs in text analysis, such as > demonstrating that the Old Testament was composed in multiple layers, and > they have given us an entirely new way of looking at the world as > constructed by "epistemic regimes."

We've known the Old Testament was composed in multiple layers since well before anyone currently alive was born. Philology as born out of biblical criticism so that understated the case if anything.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's definitely the Golden Age for university administrators, whose viewpoint the Chronicle represents.

Is it a golden age for teachers or students? That's another question.</comment>


Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company? - crack-the-code I'm curious to know what kind of tools, scripts, automation, libraries, etc. you all have built to help boost the productivity of your team(s). <comment><AUTHOR> At a company of 10,000, it's important to know the 100 people you'll be working closest to. I built a "memory" game as a webapp which matched the faces of 4 people on your team to a single name and a list of self-assigned skills. You click on a photo to match a name to a face, and once you guess right a new set loads. You can randomly click through your whole team and learn a lot about them in just 15 minutes or so.

The whole thing was built with read-only SQL scripts, Flask, and some JQuery.

<comment><USER2> This sounds very interesting and useful. I was thinking about making something similar but with my personal contacts & people I meet socially.

Is your code opensource or only for internal use?

<comment><USER3> I agree, I think thats a great idea. I would like to put it on at my place. Mostly for me, as I can never remember people and its not that big of a company but there are so many people I do not know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> At my current job, I saw a lab technician work manually with Excel sheets entering sample IDs and then using a website where he'd copy/paste the sample ID into to get a bar code, and then print it out to stick on the box.

I wrote a Python script that uses openpyxl module to read His Excel docs, and report lab module to generate bar codes in a PDF document with appropriate spacers so that he can simply print it out, and stick them in boxes.

He is happy and so am I that I could save his time. It only took me 20 mins to write this script.

<comment><USER5> There genuinely needs to be more of this sort of thing.

The overall 'productionisation' of our industry has led us into a cookie cutter style of work and away from genuine problem solving like that. Ironically that sort of productivity boosting work has been wrapped up in a nonsense 'process automation consultant' role that is inflated beyond sense and often dismissed by the receiving company as an unnecessary expense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wrote a shim layer for all our packer/vagrant OS workflows to operate against an unreliable vsphere ecosystem. It exposes a suite of posix sh functions for sysadmins/developers to easily operate against this very unreliable environment. It adds automatic logging, retrying, and adjustable verbosity because of the numerous ways this environment randomly fails.

People can just . source the file in from a shared location and often find that their scripts just start to work better. It's not perfect, nothing's perfect. It's not even that clever. But when builds and deploys start to work twice as good, even with the remaining failures, well, that's something. None of the 65000 employees using it will ever know, but it feels good to know we were dropping 2/3 orders and now we're dropping 1/3.

</comment><comment><USER7> Back at my old job, people would have trouble knowing what to do when on-call.

I built a slack app that would keep track of my team's pages and what people did to respond to them. As new pages were triggered, the bot would show the on-call person what previous people had done to resolve the page.

<comment><USER8> Nifty. This should integrate with a service runbook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In my previous organization, we dealt with a legacy enterprise software product which had accumulated a massive bug history over multiple years and sub-products. All being tracked by an in-house bug tracking product.

Lots of issues we used to see being reported were either already fixed or had been config issues. In order to (somewhat) quickly find existing fixes/comments for issues that we get reported, I built a search tool (webapp) which scraped the bugs and comments in those bugs in order to find any relevant information around your query and listed them in order of matching probability.

Was a pretty cool learning experience to build that out. I had deployed it on a personal remote VM that devs were granted, have no idea if people are still using it.

</comment><comment><USER10> I built a hacked up experimentation framework for clientside flags, that boosted my teams speed and confidence quite a bit. Hacked up because it didnt use existing serverside mechanism for a bunch of reasons.

Used the same experimentation framework for automated javascript binary releases, so at some point i could release 5 times a week, with no issues. Now i left the team, people took that on and continuing like tic toc.

Showed them how to use powerdrill (data drilling, analysis tool), and taught them metrics. It is surpising how little people care what their work is really about eventually, and bringing them data driven mindset gave even more productivity boost.

</comment><comment><USER11> At my last job we had to do builds constantly and put it on hardware, which was annoying because builds took 15 minutes and putting it on the hardware took another 10. Couldn't solve the latter because it wasn't in our domain, but the first half I managed to "multithread" a build using a really hacky batch script compliation method, with a make file calling the compiler in a new command window for each file that needed to be compiled, with some checks for "needs to be compiled" or "wasn't changed". An extra script at the end of the process made sure that all the compiler instances finished before continuing with the next step. All of that work got it down to 2 minutes, or in small change cases, about 30 seconds. And another part of that was integrating some configuration data with existing files, which was simple as writing up a bunch of excel macros to do the copy/pasting and file output. It was hooked up to a shared folder on the network so the other team could just do their part, and then my part was entirely automated. In fact, the team testing things could do everything by themselves without any input from me at that point and only needed me to answer certain questions.

Yes, it's really hacky and the whole thing is entirely silly and could have been solved by using more proper tools (i.e. not a defunct make software without wildcard support for input files or Excel for configuration), but I was VERY pleased when I got it working.

</comment><comment><USER12> I was working on a project where we'd be printing several hundred thousand badges for several schools. We had all the data and just needed photos. The client sent us a DVD with several hundred thousand photos, upon inspection we realized that the photos where really bad:

\- No single aspec ratio

\- Some photos had no one in it (picture of a chair, etc)

\- Some photos had multiple people in the photo (!?)

\- Some photos were of such poor quality that you couldn't make out the person.

It seemed some locations let the students provide their own photo. This is the first time we'd ever encountered data in this shape.

My company had two options: Print the data as-is (which would result in thousands of reprints) or hire some temp staff to sort through the photos.

I asked them to let me try and sort them over the weekend with a library I just learned about (OpenCV). I was able to write a custom OpenCV python script a little over a hundred lines long and ran it over the weekend to crop and sort the photos into several categories (based on face detection) leaving only a few thousand that had to be manually reviewed! That had a real dollar impact and felt really good.

</comment><comment><USER13> In the past week I've written a broken-link checker, in perl, to sanity-check the output of a static-site-generator.

I've also written a trivial PHP parser which was designed to match up class- definitions with comments above them:

[https://blog.steve.fi/parsing_php_for_fun_and_profit.html](https://blog.steve.fi/parsing_php_for_fun_and_profit.html)

Both of these tools were designed to be invoked by CI/CD systems, to flag potential problems before they became live.

Most of my work involves scripting, or tooling, around existing systems and solutions. For example another developer-automation hack was to automatically add the `approved` label to pull-requests which had received successful reviews from all selected reviewers - on a self-hosted Github Enterprise installation.

</comment><comment><USER14> I built a code generator package in Kotlin which generates codes for Kotlin, Swift, Web (JS), and React-Native (TypeScript). Basically, you provide your class definition in a DSL style (Similar to TOML) and it will generate the implementation and interfaces of the bridge for different technologies.

<comment><USER15> This is great! We're working on code generation from class definitions right now.

Any good resources worth looking at?

<comment><USER14> I started by checking how you can write HTML using Kotlin DSL. Here is the source code [https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.html](https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.html)

Now, I have to generate different languages once the DSL is finalized. To achieve this I use Flask framework architecture. There we have routes with HTML templates. Here each generator has its own templates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> When our company was doing more active Go development, a colleague and I built Charlatan.

[https://github.com/percolate/charlatan](https://github.com/percolate/charlatan)

Ended up saving us a lot of time writing mocks for tests.

</comment><comment><USER17> Python 3+:

Blue - A dead simple event based workflow execution framework.

I always find it easier to model systems from an event driven perspective. Especially when you have to move fast and evolve unpredictably. I wanted a framework anyone could learn to use within 5-10 minutes. At the same time it should be able to solve all kinds of use cases that require event based coordination between tasks in a distributed environment.

Works well for us for simple use cases (eg. data processing workflows) and complex ones (eg. our entire retail order fulfilment system).

<comment><USER18> Is this similar to Prefect? I'm interested on using those kind of system, I think it would be really easy to mock up business processes on these kind of tools quickly before building a more robust solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wrote a shipping container tracking system for ~7 shipping lines.

Each shipping line offers a tracking service through one of these methods -- email, RSS or website form. Our container numbers are collected into a Google Spreadsheet via our freight forwarders. Our employees use an antiquated ERP with no API.

The script collects relevant container numbers from the Google spreadsheet, scrapes the update and the scrapes the ERP system to enter the update.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wrote a custom documentation tool that we use on all of our projects. It's a few input fields for heading/paragraph/images and a few buttons. You can add as many "sections" as you want. It exports HTML/CSS that you can stick in any <div> and it scales well, handles popups for images, and such. It's made our life much simpler when adding documentation to our sites.

</comment><comment><USER21> Automated discovery of late shipments eligible for a refund, which the carriers otherwise make very difficult to track. There are some services that can do this, but they take a big chunk of the refunds. We save thousands each year.

Many other specialized calculators and templates, which tend to be more foolproof than Excel.

<comment><USER22> I did the same in Australia. When I ran the script to request refunds for missed Express Post SLAs, we were 90% of Auspost's inquiries for the day and got back thousands.

<comment><USER21> The interesting thing with both FedEx and UPS is that they also guarantee delivery times for regular "ground" shipments, which are fairly prone to delays. The exceptions are circumstances out of their control, such as weather or recipient issues. And they suspend during a couple holiday windows. But most shippers either don't realize there are guarantees or don't have the means to efficiently track them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Mine was hardware and software related.

I built a WebUSB Postal Scale and WebUSB Label Printer so our e-commerce company could print carrier shipping labels with just one click.

It took the process of fulfilling an order down to ~10 seconds per order.

</comment><comment><USER23> Wrote a simple fizzbuzz server which brought down the time we spent interviewing freshers for internships/jobs. Since we're a small team, this had a big impact.

</comment><comment><USER24> My last job was at a company that develops one of the most popular mobile MMO action games in the world (with hundreds of millions of installs). It stores data in large Cassandra clusters (depending on the platform, DCs contain up to hundred nodes).

What I did was designing and developing a command line utility/daemon for performing one-off and regular backups of production data. The solution is able to:

\- work with a 24/7 live Cassandra cluster, containing tens of nodes

\- exert tolerable and tuneable performance/latency footprint on the nodes

\- backup and restore from hundreds of GBs to multiple TBs of data as fast as possible, given the constraints of the legacy data model and concurrent load from online players; observed throughput is 5-25 MB/s, depending on the environment

\- provides highly flexible declarative configuration of the subset of data to backup and restore (full table exports; raw CQL queries; programmatic extractors) with first-class support for foreign-key dependencies between extractors, compiled into a highly parallelizable execution graph

There was an "a-ha!" moment, when I realized, that this utility can be used not only for backups of production data, but for the whole range of day-to-day maintenance tasks, e.g.:

1) Restore a subset of production data onto development and test machines. This solves the issue of developers and QA engineers having to fiddle with the database, when they need to test something, whether it be a new feature or a bugfix for production. They can just restore a small subset of real, meaningful and consistent data onto their environment with just a bit of configuration and a simple command. Developers may do this manually when needed, and QA environment can be restored to a clean state automatically by CI server at night.

2) Perform arbitrary updates of graphs of database entities. It's a common approach to traverse Cassandra tables, possibly with a column filter, in order to process/update some of the attributes (e.g. iterate through all users and send a push notification to each of them). The more users there are, the longer it takes, and negatively affects the cluster's performance and latency for other concurrent operations. Having a tool like I described, one may clone user data onto a separate machine beforehand (e.g. at night), and then just run the maintenance operation somewhere during the day, on data that it is still reasonably up-to-date.

All in all, it was a fun experience of devops, which I'm quite fond of. With just a little creativity and out-of-the-box thinking, there are lots of ways to improve the typical workflow of working with data.</comment>


Show HN: Bookmarks manager – Fastbmk.com - <AUTHOR> http://fastbmk.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello all! We built Fastbmk.com as a fast, lightweight and reliable bookmarking service. You can create bookmarks with tags and notes. List bookmarks by tag. Search bookmarks. Import and export bookmarks.

Browser addon is available for Firefox and Chrome. Using addon, you can create bookmark and check if the current page is already bookmarked.

We intentionally used a minimal set of web technologies to create a tool for everyday use, which doesn't waste resources of client's computer.

Minimalistic design Low CPU/Memory usage Quick server responses

We already use the service on a daily basis and it works just fine. So we invite you to try it too :) Currently the service is more like a minimum viable product. A lot of features are planned to be implemented in the future.

So your opinion, questions, suggestions and ideas are greatly appreciated :)</comment>


Wikipedia contributions from IP address 127.0.0.1 - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/127.0.0.1 <comment><USER2> Probably a misconfiguration involving X-Forwarded-For. The frontend sticks the IP in there, you set your backend to trust X-Forwarded-For headers from, say, 10.0.0.0/8, but somehow your frontend and backend end up on the machine and the connection comes from 127.0.0.1 and fails the check for a connection from 10.0.0.0/8\. So you distrust X-Forwarded-For and just log the IP address that the TCP connection came from, which was 127.0.0.1.

I have never been able to make sense of all the rules around X-Forwarded-For and neither have the various library implementers. I recently wrote an authentication plugin for Envoy that just extracts what Envoy thinks the remote address is, and puts it in the authentication header that goes to the backend. Then the backends can't get it wrong; if the signature on the message is right, you're getting the IP address that the frontend Envoy got. If something is misconfigured, the header probably won't have a valid signature, and so the request will be rejected outright. Less failsafe than what Wikipedia did... but easier to detect.

<comment><USER3> > I have never been able to make sense of all the rules around X-Forwarded-For > and neither have the various library implementers

There are no rules. I only trust it for internal (LB->service) requests, and never have more than one address.

<comment><USER4> > and never have more than one address

That's important if you don't control all the systems. Back to there being no rules some systems prepend addresses at each layer and some append them. And if you don't know or don't control the behavior at each layer it's useless IP soup. I've not dealt with that in a long while but your comment brought back memories.

<comment><USER5> To solve the append/prepend dilemma there's also X-Real-IP too. (At least the Nginx module does this.) So basically just log the x-f-f and use the other one as the real client IP.

Of course, if you don't control the layers, then probably you should consider those headers invalid for an incoming request.

(Though for email there's ARC to sign the added headers, maybe if someone really wants to provide at least marginally accountable HTTP proxies, they can use something like that.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Explanation: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:127.0.0.1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:127.0.0.1)

<comment><USER7> There's no explanation there.

<comment><USER8> It seems it's not present on mobile, at least, but on desktop there's a yellow box with an explanation.

a server misconfiguration in 2013 and another one in 2015

2013: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(techni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_\(technical\)/Archive_119#Edits_from_127.0.0.1)

Wikipedia appears to have a two-layer varnish cache system, and if the frontend and backend cache is the same host, the edit was attributed to localhost.

2015: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(techni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_\(technical\)/Archive_142#User:127.0.0.1)

A change broke Wikimedia's parsing of X-Forwarded-For and defaulted to localhost.

<comment><USER9> Navigation templates (seen at the bottom of many articles) are also missing from the mobile view.

<comment><USER10> They have been for years. The issue is that they're tables, and often nested tables (there's nothing to prevent how nested afaik) which don't render that well on the mobile UI. Rather than figure out how to render them or come up with an alternative layout, they opted to hide them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you want to get the real scoop, sometimes local knowledge is the best.

<comment><USER12> Just be glad you didn't have to explain an in joke about ftp sites, the local loopback address, and a troll, in a deposition, under oath, to Scientology lawyers, like Keith Henson did.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson#Scientology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson#Scientology)

[http://smokyhole.org/kh/kh.htm](http://smokyhole.org/kh/kh.htm)

[http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=6289](http://www.cryonet.org/cgi- bin/dsp.cgi?msg=6289)

Readers of alt.religion.scientology were astonished to notice a large collection of alleged secret, copyrighted and trade secret protected documents of the church of scientology posted anonymously over the weekend of May 5. An expert source known to __Biased Journalism __verified the documents as authentic.

[snip--to transcript from a deposition of Keith Henson by the "Church" of Scientology. Lieberman is their lawyer.]

Lieberman: do you know who Patrick J. Volk is?

Henson: to the best of my knowledge I've never heard of this person.

Lieberman explains that Volk is apparently communicating from some educational institution in Pittsburgh. Henson still doesn't recognize the name. Lieberman hands Henson a document.

        From: email@example.com (H Keith Henson)
        Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
        Subject: Re: OT Materials...
        Date: 6 Apr 1995 19:35:38 GMT

        Parick J Volk (firstname.lastname@example.com) wrote:
        :    Screw the courts....
        :    I have an ftp site for all the OT materials...
        :    ftp:127.0.0.1  /pub/texts/news/alt/religion/scientology
        :    I don't know how long I'll have it up.
        :    P J Volk
        :    (alt.2600 lives! All hail the clams and trolls!)

        Great stuff!  But don't you expect the 'ho to blow a gasket?

Henson: (cracks up) this is a great troll.

Lieberman: (acidly) you find this amusing?

Henson: yes. It's an in joke.

Lieberman quotes from the Volk post: "screw the courts" and also says that he has an ftp site for all the OT materials. "Mr. Henson is laughing hysterically about this posting for reasons that I suppose he understands--" Henson offers to explain.

Lieberman: What's an ftp site?

Henson explains that ftp means file transfer protocol. You can use almost any machine on the Internet to access a file on almost any other machine, that has been placed in an ftp directory, he says with relish. [He goes on at length about how this is done.]

Lieberman: Okay. "So when he said 'I have an ftp site for all the OT materials,' he is saying he has all the OT materials on a site which people can access." Was Henson aware of Patrick Volk's ftp site? Does this refresh your recollection? he demands.

Henson: well, you see right after the colon, it says ftp:127.0.0.1?

Lieberman: yes.

Henson: that's a loopback address.

Lieberman wants to pursue the question of the site with the OT materials. Was Henson aware of Patrick Volk's ftp site?

Henson: (patiently) It's at 127.0.0.1. This is a loop back address. This is a troll.

Lieberman: what's a troll?

Henson: it comes from the fishing where you troll a bait along in the water and a fish will jump and bite the thing, and the idea of it is that the internet is a very humorous place and it's especially good to troll people who don't have any sense of humor at all, and this is a troll because an ftp site of 127.0.0.1 doesn't go anywhere. It loops right back around into your own machine.

Lieberman [not getting it]: So the idea here was to make the church think that this person had an ftp site and to take action against him and, in fact, he didn't have it; is that your point?

Henson: Oh, it's really humorous, and I picked up on it and instantly added something to extend the troll. Extending the trolls like this is an art form of the highest order.

Lieberman (acidly): I see. So this is part of your art form where you say, "don't you expect the 'ho to blow a gasket?"

Henson: yes.

Lieberman (starting to lose his temper): so you do remember this posting apparently?

Henson (helpfully): I can't remember for certain that I did this one, and certainly I could not swear to any of the material on here being letter perfect on it (but he goes on to say that it is such a good one that he would be happy to take credit for it).

Lieberman: You find this whole thing kind of amusing, don't you?

Henson: Oh, this is screamingly funny.

Lieberman (no more Mr. Nice Guy): You find it amusing to make Helena Kobrin and the church go after you or other people for this sort of thing, whether you have the materials or not; is that right?

Henson: It's a great game.

Lieberman: It is a great game. You really find it amusing, don't you?

Henson: It's an extremely amusing thing.

Lieberman: All right. You find it amusing when you receive these letters from Ms. Kobrin, the cease and desist letters? It's part of the game; isn't it? [This goes on for awhile as Lieberman hammers at the point. Henson reiterates that he is amused, and wants to talk about the SP levels.]

Lieberman: You find it an amusing part of the game when you receive these cease and desist letters, right?

Henson: No, no. It's not amusing, it's a major increment in status.

Lieberman: I see. You feel this increases your status, right? On the internet, on a.r.s.

Henson: Yes, absolutely.

Lieberman: All right. And it's all part of this game, right?

Henson: Absolutely.

Lieberman: It's all part of the troll, right?

Henson (waving exhibit): This is a great troll. I mean, anybody in the computer business instantly would have spotted this, ftp:127. In fact, it even says trolls in here (indicating). In fact, this was cross-posted from --

Lieberman has heard more than enough about trolls: "There is no question pending. You can hold your comments."

Lieberman (with an air of getting into the bizarre nature of the situation): why did you think this would cause Ms. Kobrin to blow a gasket?

Henson: this wasn't addressed to Helena. He goes on to explain that the message is a loop back. If it worked at all it would be a loopback to your own machine. If you tried it you'd discover it's a troll. The 127 is the loopback address! It's a joke, but the lawyer isn't getting it.

[The observer notices that the RTC lawyer has connected "the 'ho" with Ms. Kobrin. Evidently the nickname has made transit to the solid world. Ms. Kobrin is stuck with it for life.]

<comment><USER13> Please tell me there are videos of this cross examination somewhere

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 127.0.0.1 I get (server misconfiguration, etc...)

How do we explain the 2 edits by 18.104.22.168: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/8.8.8....](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/184.108.40.206)

Perhaps before that IP was owned by Google? But 220.127.116.11 the service was launched in 2009, but the two Wikipedia edits are from 2013 and 2014

Edit: Mobile friendly link

<comment><USER15> If I was to hazard a guess I'd suggest 22.214.171.124 could've been serving outbound Google traffic at the time? Could've been a mistaken config.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So once we filter out the ones that are due to the 2013 and 2015 server misconfigurations, we get:

1\. Creating a talk page for "Gun politics" in 2001;

2\. Adding links to the Russian versions of pages on Japanese eras/periods in 2004;

3\. Creating a mysterious internal page I can't make much sense of in 2004; and

4\. Responding to various comments on database reports and testing some things there in 2012 (under 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 rather than 127.0.0.1).

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems like some of them are spam, e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Toyotomi_Hideyosh...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Toyotomi_Hideyoshi&diff=prev&oldid=579674072) Does this mean Wikipedia's network was hacked by an unauthorized outsider?

EDIT: Ah, sort of. A network misconfiguration caused this. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(techni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_\(technical\)/Archive_119#Edits_from_127.0.0.1)

<comment><USER18> It's not "sort of" hacked by an unauthorized outsider! The explanation is pretty clear cut and perfectly believable, no hackers or malice involved at all..

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The diff is coming from... _inside the house_!

</comment><comment><USER20> [https://xkcd.com/742/](https://xkcd.com/742/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Some black magic there (Haha). Yes, some kind of misconfiguration.

</comment><comment> mickael-kerjean Someone on wikipedia has "127.0.0.1" for username?

<comment><USER22> No. As a special case, if you're not logged in, you appear to contribute with a username matching your IP address. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_users](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_users)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Arengu, the brain behind your sign-up forms - <AUTHOR> https://www.arengu.com/?source=hackernews-launch-2020 <comment><AUTHOR> Hello!

This Jacobo, cofounder of Arengu, today we are launching Arengu in Product Hunt and I've also decided to write a blog post telling you about our journey building Arengu from scratch, the idea behind it and our vision. I hope this could inspire and help other founders!

As a quick context, Arengu is a SaaS that helps you to build all your sign-up logic without coding and streamline user onboarding by using your existing APIs or authentication systems.

A few highlights:

\- Drag & drop editor: Build flows and forms in no time & with no code.

\- Use cases templates: Registration flows, adaptive sign-up flows, passwordless flows, OTP email/SMS flows, social login, etc.

\- Low-code: Reduce development time, maintenance & costs.

\- Stack agnostic: Integrate it with any stack.

Read my blog post talking about how we've built Arengu from scratch, our story and vision: [https://blog.arengu.com/arengu-the-brain-behind-signup- forms...](https://blog.arengu.com/arengu-the-brain-behind-signup-forms-our- story-and-vision/)

Also if you are a Product Hunt user, do not miss our launch at: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/arengu](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/arengu)

I would love to receive any kind of feedback from you!</comment>


Show HN: DeepCamera – Turn Camera into AI-Powered with Embedded/Android/Pi etc. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SharpAI/DeepCamera <comment><AUTHOR> Three years ago, we decided to develop production on the hottest area: machine learning/deep learning. We tried several cloud option, but can't make real production due to cost and other limitation.

So, we start to develop this production: DeepCamera.

Specify to one hardware(camera), go deep inside for porting would cost half of year based on our strong embedded linux(router) experiment. So, this is the best way we figured out: software on set-up-box or Android(tablet/mobile).

Also, we strongly believe AutoML is the only way for AI production to success. Users should be able to teach/train AI(Model) simply just like chatting. So we developed the application as wechat/whatsapp. People start to talk to machine to make them clever. When they recognized people wrong, just rename it, machine will train its brain to remember it.

After deployment in one of the largest industry leading data center to protect their security, we finally getting to our final target: open source.

This is the way a platform likes Android could born on AI. This is our dream, Android on AI, that's SharpAI. With your help, we will success.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is super confusing. Questions:

1\. What is your unique strength here?

2\. Does user need to call in web API to use this? Can this whole thing work offline? If not, is web API part open sourced?

3\. What are the techniques you are using to bring down power usage?

4\. You keep mentioning AutoML but AutoML is only useful for training and generating model, not inference. For embedded software, the bottleneck is not training but inference. Also, you need to clearly mention what exact AutoML techniques are you referring to.

5\. On one table you mention NVidia and CPU hardware having same GFLOPS. Very confusing.

Overall, I'd recommend more rigore and being crystal clear when you are using technical terminology.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. No production implemented the feature we open sourced. This is unique. 2\. Whole thing(AI Inference/Classifier training) are offline. 3\. ARM did it. 4\. We have classifier training on the embedded system. 5\. I calc the theory/real, arm is better than Nvidia GPU.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> All your base are belong to us!</comment>


Steve Jobs: Playboy Interview (1985) - <AUTHOR> http://www.playboy.com/articles/playboy-interview-steven-jobs/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> JOBS: The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone.

PLAYBOY: Specifically, what kind of breakthrough are you talking about?

JOBS: I can only begin to speculate. We see that a lot in our industry: You don't know exactly what's going to result, but you know it's something very big and very good.</comment>


How to clear database in Spring Boot tests? - <AUTHOR> https://brightinventions.pl/blog/clear-database-in-spring-boot-tests/ <comment><AUTHOR> Nowadays using a production like database in unit1 tests is a common practice. Calling a real database can increase our confidence that a tested code actually works. Having said that a database, by its very nature, brings external state into a test that will affect its behavior, hence we need to pay special attention to prepare the test execution. There are couple of ways to handle the database state in tests and I'm going to describe an approach I like most.</comment>


The backbone of IoT is here - <AUTHOR> https://iota.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> As the Internet-of-Things keep expanding, the need for interoperability and sharing of resources become a necessity. IOTA enables companies to explore new business-2-business models by making every technological resource a potential service to be traded on an open market in real time, with no fees.</comment>


What I say to people who are looking for a job - <AUTHOR> https://www.gregkamradt.com/gregkamradt/2018/3/18/0xov5ak1hjunr4twj83k940z9q6fza <comment><USER2> One piece of advice I like to give nowadays, is that if you don't know how to get to a goal, then do this:

        1) Divide up that goal into pieces.
        2) Take those initial pieces and divide that up.
        3) Take one of the bits from 2, and create a lame, incomplete version of it
        4) Keep polishing that bit until it's great

The key steps are 3 and 4! It's hard to build even a small production ready component of something, even a very small subpart. However, pretty much anyone can build a lame, insecure, wonky version of that subpart.

An example is the movement syncing system in my MMO. First I went through an "Asteroids in HTML5" tutorial. Then I got hold of a "Chat in Websockets" tutorial. Then I hooked them up in the lamest way imaginable, then kept on iterating.

The very hardest part is 4, of course. In order to do that part, you have to know what it is you don't know. A good Comp Sci education gets you a good ways there. (Warning: If your profs and TAs keep telling you "you don't need to know [X]" because libraries/etc take care of that for you, you need to figure out if they're only saying that because they don't know themselves. If on the other hand, they give you some background information about when you _do_ need to know [X] then that's valuable information.)

<comment><USER3> Reformatted list for mobile:

1) Divide up that goal into pieces.

2) Take those initial pieces and divide that up.

3) Take one of the bits from 2, and create a lame, incomplete version of it

4) Keep polishing that bit until it's great

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Based on the title, I was expecting the article to suck, but I think it's actually pretty solid.

My takeaway is 2 things:

\- if you wanna do something for living, sound like you know it well, and hopefully actually well

\- if you are not financially independent, keeping shaking the money tree until you have another money tree to shake

And calling myself out, here's a couple notes to self:

\- don't judge a book by it's cover (or an HN link by it's title)

\- don't assume things are gonna suck just because you're in a suboptimal mood in that moment

<comment> rc-1140 > Based on the title, I was expecting the article to suck, but I think it's > actually pretty solid.

I disagree, honestly. After reading it, I saw another stellar example of empty yet well-meaning advice. It's just enough to stand on its own, has good intentions, but doesn't actually focus on a tangible problem or set of problems that people have. Rather, it addresses a few high-level topics in extreme brevity and is just an outlet for the author to demonstrate some kind of power they feel that they hold[0]. The article looks more like a wrapper for a previous HN comment, which is in a thread about an article detailing a very specific and actually useful piece of advice, and a Data Science book.

[0] [https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6...](https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6779&context=lkcsb_research)

<comment><USER5> a lot of the advice struck me as something that not everyone looking for a job can _afford_. 10 weeks of trying a new thing for a week? I found the best advice in the article to be the one about taking time off to travel - that it will be hard getting back (know someone who is in that state now)

Honestly: If you're looking for a job - find a friend who is hiring. Be sure that friend is not just a friend, but a friend who is going to _go to bat_ for you.

<comment><USER6> It's a tricky situation. I was in a position to look for hires, but I was surprised to realize how many of my friends weren't necessarily qualified for that position. It wasn't a high position or anything either.

If you can vouch for a friend to that degree, they probably don't need your help.

<comment><USER5> > If you can vouch for a friend to that degree, they probably don't need your > help.

A friend of mine finished a coding camp. He'd been looking for a job for 9 months. I interviewed him and totally understood why - he just had no chill at all. Super anxious, very nervous, seemed way too eager to please, borderline desperation? Sat him down, we did a very tough coding problem, and he did just fine for a junior position, so I made an offer happen.

A lot of times people have a 'singular flaw' that nobody will tell them what it is, and it takes someone willing to come up with an excuse to get them hired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What I say: the worst thing that can happen is you take a job and realize a few weeks latter you hate the job.

You can do anything (within limits). Some miserable jobs must be done by somebody, they often pay well. Doing a "miserable" job for 40 hours a week and going home might be better than a job you love for 100 hours a week, since those off hours can be filled with other things you love. It depends on you though. One person's mild dislike is another person's hate. One person works with fun people and doesn't care about the nature of the work, another hates his co-workers and wants out of an otherwise great job.

<comment><USER8> > a few weeks later you hate the job

yes. and, to make matters a bit more confusing, _any_ job can be made vile by extreme hours, rude/uncaring/mean co-workers, multiple bosses, unnecessary chaos and stress caused by an overprivileged unqualified manager, etc. so one needs to somehow see past all of that in order to figure out if one hates the job or _this job_

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Google, "[this activity I like] for dummies" and learn for a week.

I used to think this, but after guiding some folks into coding I find this flippant and discouraging.

First, tech is lucky in that you can learn essentially for free, with the not- to-be-forgotten requirements of a computer and an internet connection. Other professions - say, carpentry - have costlier barriers to entry, even for that week.

Second, what are the baseline requirements to get there? Tech is in the opposite position here: depending on what you turn up in that hypothetical Google search, you might find things for different OSes, for different kinds of work. Ops is not Database is not Data Science is not backend service code is not front end web coding is not desktop application development (and mobile is in a place of it's own). It's VERY VERY easy for someone to get a very wrong impression. Someone "not good at math" but with a logical thought process can kick ass in coding in the right area, but they can get the wrong tutorials for what they want with no clue that's happening. Most tutorials (for good reason) don't try to overload you so they make a lot of assumptions...but those assumptions are wrong for a lot of people.

Third, the assumption of "a week" is very hard for most people. They have family considerations, whatever job(s) they currently hold (and the energy it sucks out of them, which for people wanting a career change is often higher than otherwise). Do you expect an hour a day for that week? 3? 8? Make this clear before telling people that if they can't handle the week they shouldn't try this.

I applaud what the author is TRYING to do, but this approach is most likely to end up discouraging rather than inspiring most people in my experience.

In the past when I told people they could just learn the basics of programming online, I was basing it off of me trying to do so with all of my knowledge and experience that I already have (which, not coincidentally, also includes a lot of info on how to find good ways to learn online). Expecting others to do so without accidentally steering themselves into frustration is optimistic at best.

This doesn't mean they CAN'T - it just means a little guidance helps a LOT. While I only really know coding and tabletopRPGs, I assume the same points apply to other professions: A guide - not asking them to teach you, but to help you define what you're asking and avoid pitfalls ("Don't pay $200 for a udemy course, wait for their very regular $10 sales") can help you make the most of any go-get-um attitude and dedication.

<comment><USER10> I also take issue with the idea that you should try something for a week, and if you don't like it, it's not for you. There are certain ctivities where your first week will be a poor representation of how much you enjoy an activity. I found the first couple of weeks of learning how to play a guitar miserable. That does not mean it was wrong for me to persevere, it meant that certain activities only become enjoyable once you reach a particular skill threshold. I can think of a lot of activities that work like that.

<comment><USER11> Consider the case of someone who is terribly out of shape and tries something that is a bit physically demanding for a week. They will feel miserable. That doesn't mean the task is "not for them," it might mean they can enjoy it if they get into better shape.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The problem with this sort of advice is that how useful it is completely depends on where you are in life. Basically, it's targeted advice, but there's no disclaimer stating that.

Arbitrary examples:

\- Someone fresh out of a Chemistry undergrad

\- A 40 year old laid off from their Walmart job with no savings

\- A 30 year old who's just had a successful startup exit

\- A young (say ~20) adult in a dead-end town

... etc

The advice given to all of them will be completely different. For most people, this stuff is completely useless, but for a specific group, it might be very useful.

It's also very much dependent on goals. Do you want to work 9-5 for a lifetime? Hard at first, easy later? Do you want to take high-risk shots to attain financial independence? etc.

<comment><USER13> I don't think this is the problem. I think you assuming a short blog post like this is supposed to be a universal, generalized solution to job searching is the problem.

You can pretty much tell if this article is meant for you in about 1 minute.

<comment><USER14> No, the problem is it's mis-titled. It should probably say something like "What I say to people who are looking for a job in tech" or something.

<comment><USER13> Yes why don't we all account for every edge case in every single thing we say. Perhaps it should have been, "What I sometimes say to some people who are looking for a job in specific industries in certain age groups in given regions of the world, provided they have the resources, intelligence, financial security, and time to do so."

It's a casual blog post not a piece of code.

<comment><USER14> You're not even giving my post a good-faith reading. I suggested adding two words to the title to make the post far better and more specific, not adding a 32-word mini post in the title. Do you really believe that's what I was suggesting, or are you just trolling and looking for an excuse to downvote?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In my opinion, the single most point in job seeking is to get feedback as much as possible, as early as possible.

Consider these bad examples:

sending many resumes and didn't get any response. This is huge blow to morale and there no hint on what should be improved, which went wrong.

\- to fix it: get someone in field to review the resume and give suggestions. This is simple but many people didn't do it. And it's totally possible to find somebody you never know before to review your resume.

decide to jump on a wagon (data science, machine learning) and plan years for it, like online degree, many courses, a master or even a Ph.D!

\- problem: it took too much time to get some feedback, and the commitment is too big, often not executable in reality. It's possible somebody spent a lot of effort to get in a program, only to find out he/she doesn't like/fit it later.

\- and the wagon may be outdated when you finished the program.

\- to fix: tiptoe as early as possible, like a side project, some short courses. This of course require some existing experience and skills.

In general,

\- meetup is a great way to meet with people, learn about the field.

\- doing side project is very useful.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Google, "[this activity I like] for dummies" and learn for a week.

Call me shallow, but everything I like to do is something I've researched exhaustively. This is also related to the reason why it'd be _very_ difficult for me to come up with "30 specific activities [I'm] interested in".

Somewhat OT: _We are in a dawn of the second career (or third, fourth, fifth)_. As we live longer and longer and are required to support ourselves with our own pensions, we'll see more and more people giving up what they know in order to pursue enlightenment in some other unrelated field. Lack of employer sponsored pensions, continuing education, and vesting schedules is a key identifier [and has been for a while] to this.

</comment><comment><USER17> This guy seems hilariously full of himself: [http://www.ischiaproject.com/purpose/](http://www.ischiaproject.com/purpose/) (linked from the OP)

> The purpose of the Ischia Project to to provide a visual, personal, and > informational perspective of the Island of Ischia in its present state. This > project does not serve to be a travel guide for the island, however, it does > promote itself as a chance to visit the island through the lens and words of > a fellow traveler. Through photos and interviews the reader can start to > understand what it means to physically observe Ischia today. It is important > to note that the stance in which this project is present is that of an > outsider looking in rather than a native to the island.

Shorter: "I was a tourist in Ischia and this is my travel instagram/blog."

<comment><USER18> Serious question- did you look into the project any further than reading the purpose? I've never seen a "travel instagram/blog" that included 9 unique interviews that focus on the interviewee/local culture. There is actually minimal ego involved in the entire thing- the primary focus seems to be on shedding light on a lesser known locale with very few (3, to be exact) personal articles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you need a job asap, your best chance everywhere is to ask relatives, friends and friends of friends for a stop gap position, then build from that.

</comment><comment><USER20> > "Building things" isn't an activity. "Building furniture" or "Building a web > app" is an activity.

This is a strange way of thinking, to me. What I'm building (or even if I'm "building" at all) is _way_ down my list of priorities. You'd do better to ask me what color I want the walls painted at my job.

Building software can be fun and I've spent many years of my life doing that, but in that field I've also had some of the worst managers I could have imagined. I much prefer loading boxes in a warehouse for a great boss, than writing software for a lousy one.

Why would I start a job search with the low-order bit? That practically guarantees an inefficient search, which may not even converge on a local maximum.

</comment><comment><USER21> I have one major problem with this advice. This advice is only actionable for people who either already have financial security and can afford to take time off, or who don't have day to day responsibilities that demand your spare time, like childcare.

If you have all of that spare time, then by all means try to follow that advice. But if you're short on time for life or financial reasons, it's much trickier, and you have to find ways to make many small adjustments to get to a career change.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow, this is the most ridiculous "advice" ever. I mean, just absolutely absurd. So terrible and outlandish I'm convinced it must be satire. Either its satire or its written by someone incredibly far removed from reality.

There's a ton more to deciding on a career than "I pick the thing that I find most interesting." I mean, c'mon...

Other factors (not inclusive):

What's the pay? How important is pay vs enjoyment of the work? Are you willing to sacrifice pay to do something you love? Are you willing to do a "meh" job that pays well for a few years to save up so you are in good financial shape to follow your passion?

Are other people relying on your income? How does your job choices affect them?

Hours? Will you be on call? Shift work? Mandatory unpaid overtime? Will this effect your marriage? Social life?

Is travel required and can you travel?

What's the realistic job outlook? I might find baseball the most interesting thing in the world, but making that into a career isn't feasible for everyone but the best of the best of the best. If I did pursue baseball, then I'd have to be willing to endure a poverty wage in the minor leagues for years with a 99% probability of never being called up to the majors. Even if I wanted to work a non-player role, what's the competition? Do I stand a chance?

Is it a job that requires luck and/or knowing the right people to get hired?

What's your fallback if this doesn't work out?

Do you have to relocate? Are you ok with that?

Do you have to go [back] to school? Crunch the numbers, does it make financial sense to go [back] to school?

Is your spouse ok with all these choices? When you're married you are a team and negotiation must happen.

Are you ok with turning something you love into something you hate? That's the biggest issue with making a "passion" into a job, it can become a chore and you can grow to hate it. Just because you love doing it in your free time doesn't mean you will love doing it when you have to.

Just because you really enjoy something doesn't mean you're good enough for someone to pay you to do it. Be realistic here, most people aren't going to get paid to do a hobby.

Just because you really enjoy doing something for yourself doesn't mean you'd really enjoy doing something for someone else. If you love building websites for yourself using your own technology stack at your own pace doesn't mean you'd love building websites for someone else, to their exact specifications, with a technology stack you didn't choose, and half of it is maintaining someone else's legacy code.

Do you have an entrepreneurial spirit or are you happier with being a cog in the machine?

Consider health concerns.

Work life balance?

If you're interested in learning something, what's the barrier to entry? Do you have to buy a lot of expensive equipment to get started? If you do, do you have both the money and the physical space for this equipment? Is teaching yourself this activity dangerous?

If you pick a job based on "things I'm interested in," you miss out on the jobs you don't even know exist yet.

Most jobs you can't have as a "side project" first. You can't be an lawyer on the side to see if you'd like to make it a career. Nor can you be an optometrist, medical biller, security guard, nuclear engineer, HVAC technician, veterinarian, offshore oil rigger, flight attendant, police officer, solider, mortician, plus an a million other things.

Finally, in the real world most jobs aren't particularity interesting nor do they usually give you "energy"! Learn to deal with it, this is real life, not some fantasy land. If you get to turn something you enjoy into something you are paid handsomely for, you're incredibly lucky. 99% of jobs out there are simply a means to an end.

</comment><comment><USER16> Career and career transitioning advice from someone who started their (first) career in 2012.

Classic.

</comment><comment><USER22> It seems like most of the comments are negative yet the article has over 130 votes. Weird how that works sometimes.

<comment><USER23> Last time I checked, I couldn't _downvote_ articles here.

So instead of downvoting drivel like this into oblivion, people come and explain why they think this is nonsense.

<comment><USER24> You can flag posts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is really a lot more subjective than the write up makes it out to be. There's no generic algorithm for determining whether or not someone needs a new job.

</comment><comment><USER26> what if I don't have money?

<comment><USER27> Then check your options in how you can do things that you that give you enough money and time to proceed in the direction you really want. Not having money is both a really though problem to solve and a very easy excuse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> More from Greg here; helpful ideas on his job search approach and pitch > [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6nFJzW- SDg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6nFJzW-SDg)

</comment><comment><USER29> Offtopic, but you now do "analytics on user behavior" at Salesforce. Do your analytics let you know that logging out my brower tabs overnight to show me some marketing bullshit is really f*king annoying?

</comment><comment><USER30> Does any of this actually matter if you've got decent connections? Does any of it matter if you don't have any connections?

I mean just looking at your linkedin, you've changed jobs every 8 months to one year, relocated multiple times, done a bootcamp, etc. That's what you should say to people who are looking for a job. None of this seems that useful to those really struggling. Look at this thread from earlier: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18401578](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18401578)

What can he take from this post? Doesn't seem to me that he can take anything at all. This fluffy blogspam constantly pollutes the page, but maybe I'm just a cynical asshole, what is it that people actually take away from this kind of thing?

</comment><comment><USER31> Rule #1 for career advice: Never, ever leave a good job unless your financially ready to retire.

<comment><USER32> What constitutes a "good job" here? The pay or the work you like to do? I did a kinda stupid thing when I left my last half decent paying, but a miserable one for nothing. I just couldn't take it anymore. So I stepped off the ledge, figuratively speaking. I was lucky enough that I had money for 6 to 8 odd months, so I just packed my bags and took off backpacking. Only now just slowly trying to get back into full time work again.

<comment><USER31> So, it sounds like that wasn't a "good job".

The tricky part is defining what a "good job" is. which will be different for different people. i define it as: good work life balance, decent salary, good location, good stability.</comment></comment></comment>