Apple Moves Mac Pro Production to China - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-moves-mac-pro-production-to-china-11561728769?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> Back in the day, my international economics professor told me corporations will set up, and base their business out of the countries that they see as the most stable. Because of this, it scares me when I see headlines like this, even though it is only production. If anyone has a counterpoint to what he said, I am very interested in hearing it

<comment><USER3> Why do you say China is unstable?

The US is talking about starting a war, had government shutdown issues recently, and has a president that is abrasive on foreign affairs. UK is dealing with brexit.

China may have the issue with HK recently, but to an outsider, they look more stable. Of course, something like Japan or Australia seems better, but China isn't a terrible choice.

<comment><USER4> > _Why do you say China is unstable?_

It's now a dictatorship, with a single man ruling for life. The history of dictatorships shows, for fundamental reasons, stability in the short term and chaos in the medium.

(The fundamental reasons include not being able to back away from bad decisions, eliminating competent rivals, and as a result bumbling into crises that seem to escalate themselves.)

<comment><USER5> >It's now a dictatorship, with a single man ruling for life.

This is a cartoon take on China. Yes, China is led by a fairly Leninist party structure in nominal terms, but in terms of management China is relatively decentralised. Politically but in particular fiscally regional and local authorities manage day-to-day operations with significant leeway depending on the region, anything else would be unfeasible in a country with 1.4 billion people.

The bureaucratic nature of the Chinese state (which is really thousands of years old) makes comparisons to Western strongman dictatorships impossible. There's a reason the communist state has survived Mao, market reforms under Deng and now Xi, and it's not because it's run by some big brother figure who gets assassinated and then everything collapses.

<comment><USER4> > _China is led by a fairly Leninist party structure in nominal terms_

China's party structure was fine and decidedly non-dictatorial. Deng was not a dictator and neither was Hu Jintao. They did not, like Xi has, ensconce themselves as leaders for life [1].

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/26/xi-jinping- chi...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/26/xi-jinping-china- presidential-limit-scrap-dictator-for-life)

<comment><USER5> Nothing much about the party structure has changed. Xi doesn't get any more power than he has right now simply because of a term limit removal. Given how opaque and complex the power distribution inside the communist party is, Xi could have feasibly governed with a marionette in place without changing the term limits at all, just like Putin in Russia while Medvedev was in office.

China was certainly much more dictatorial than any Western country before this change, and it isn't much more dictatorial now. Xi's extension of time in office isn't really related to governance as much as it is related to the problem of succession. With significant amounts of the old guard finally reaching retirement age, there is a fear of political instability in the party.

<comment><USER6> Xi doesn't have more power because of the term limits removal. But the fact that he was able to get the term limits removed was a public display of the power he has accumulated.

And the way he has done that is by imprisoning and killing competitors to his power. The fact that he could even contemplate bringing the term limit up indicated that he was certain at that point that there was no one to compete with him within the party, who would protest the term limits removal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For years I've been very happy, productive, and at times stubbornly loyal on my Linux / Lenovo setup, but it seems that so many of my colleagues have embraced Mac that it's gotten harder and harder to not be on the bandwagon. I recently hit the point of deciding maybe I should just have a Mac, but I seem to have done so after Macbook Pros have passed their peak. I don't follow consumer hardware trends much, so what does HN think - is it now too late to be getting on the Macbook Pro Kool-Aid? Will other platforms make a comeback soon?

edit: I'm aware this article is about the desktops, but it seems to be part of a trend that Apple isn't that focused on the workstation-use-case anymore, and is pushing ever more into mobile.

<comment><USER8> > Macbook Pros have passed their peak

As someone who has used a number of Mac(book)s for years, I agree with this general (or a vocal minority's) consensus.

It's a beautiful machine: great OS, hardware integration is (mostly) top notch, and a lot of pro-grade hard/software for multimedia production are only available on the Mac.

And yet, the 2013 Macbook Pro (maxed out beyond recommended specs) is the last Apple-built computer I will buy. I recently built myself a PC that dual-boots macOS and Linux, and am looking at Thinkpads for my next laptop.

I don't know if "the tide" is moving to Linux, but at least I am, and being the most computer-savvy person in my social circle, I'm recommending everyone I know to _not_ buy a Mac/book. It's probably the best computer in the market for that form factor, but the company has given the users too many reasons to move away.

<comment><USER7> Totally tangential rant here, but when I've had family or close friends (the kind who would come to me for free tech support and who I would generally indulge) ask me for recommendations, I've told them that I don't know Mac products well enough to recommend / recommend against them, but that if they get iOS or Macs, I simply won't be in a position to help them. Almost invariably they get the Apple device, need help, can't get it from Apple, and come back to me. Can't stand it. And if I ever have a glitch they'll say, "but Apple stuff just works..."

<comment><USER9> The only difference when they do choose the products you recommend (in my case it is Apple), they come to you first before even trying the manufacturer's support.

<comment><USER7> I don't mind that - I can almost always fix an Android or PC glitch myself. It's the look of disbelief when I tell them I have no idea if their iPad is supposed to do that or not, followed by, "but you're a techy person".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I honestly think the China IP rip off is overblown, and this is coming from someone who works there often. Also, if open source software has demonstrated, sequestering IP behind patents is a hindrance to society.

And your critique about civil rights abuses could equally be leveled against the US itself. After all, we put several immigrant children in concentration camps on the daily because they just want to move to the US.

It could be argued that we've already given up so much manufacturing to foreign entities that trying to get it back is just too costly for most businesses to handle.

<comment><USER11> > I honestly think the China IP rip off is overblown, and this is coming from > someone who works there often.

You wouldn't be the first person with _real_ experience working in China making that point. From everything I've read the IP issue is way overblown. There are some high-profile cases but in general it seems to be used as a convenient cudgel for other purposes.

AFAICT the real issue working in China is that it's a communist country, heavily bureaucratic with byzantine and entirely unfamiliar legal systems and business networks that almost everybody else, including to a lesser degree other East Asian countries, find very challenging to navigate. Even corruption works differently there. Because it's a communist country power and influence flow in unexpected ways even when everything is above board.

The upshot is that even when criticisms about China are reasonable, they're kinda beside the point because they're not the _principle_ reason companies find it difficult to operate there. Even when the Chinese government wholly cooperates with a reform measure--passes and earnestly applies a law--things invariably go sideways for outsiders.

<comment><USER12> The weakness Of rule of law is a common criticism raised against China, which is a huge reason foreign companies (and foreigners) have difficulties being in China.

<comment><USER11> And yet reading sites like China Law Blog, [https://www.chinalawblog.com/](https://www.chinalawblog.com/), I don't get the impression that the rule of law is especially problematic, per se.

For example, AFAICT few people say that China doesn't take enforcement of trademark protections seriously. The procedures for redress and enforcement exist and applied fairly. But navigating the administrative state can be confusing and cause people to trip over the technicalities. Some of the stories I've read from the blog above detail situations where Chinese partners or workers used the legal system against foreigners in very surprising but arguably fair manners. Much like the U.S., if you want to protect your rights you really need to make sure to employ vigilant lawyers who can foresee potential problems.

The U.S. is large enough that there's been little pressure to address issues of regulatory and procedural uniformity relative to the rest of the world (e.g. civil law countries). China is similar in that regard. What's different is that China's systems are almost wholly unique and far more complex, whereas the legal systems for almost all Westernized nations, including Japan, have a pedigree that can be traced back to Western Europe, if not ancient Rome. China has been adopting American-style legal rules and norms for commercial law, including common law rules about case precedent. That helps further the rule of law and, more importantly, provides processes more familiar to foreigners, but it also adds yet another dimension of complexity.

To use communism as an example, again, consider that American tripartite system of government--legislative, administrative, judicial--can create substantial complexity relative to a small, autocratic state.[1] In China the Communist Party is another pillar of governance in addition to those other three, multiplying complexity. And China has a federal system much like that in America. So just because things are confusing and _seemingly_ haphazard doesn't mean that they actually are. I mean, China has had a robust and effective administrative state for millennia. IMO much of the perception of China as chaotic and full of cheaters is self-serving. And to the extent it's correct, I think it says at least as much about the limitations the central government faces than about their lack of desire or will to do anything about it. If we don't appreciate that than we're simply going to frustrate ourselves with demands and expectations that are misinformed and unreasonable.

[1] For example, in the U.S. using a judicial judgment to induce a government agency to do or abstain from something can be challenging and expensive. We maintain especially rigid separation between the judiciary and executive for good reasons--reasons directly related to our conception and experience of rule of law--but that does not necessarily translate into efficiency or even consistency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am not sure if this is a good move on Apple's part in the long term, both parties, Republicans & Democrats, have shown a lot of ire for China. I don't think this will go unpunished. But perhaps they believe that the Chinese market is vastly more valuable than the US and are willing to eat any cost the US may levy against it in the future.

If I were them I'd have just moved it to Vietnam or India.

<comment><USER14> The main reason to manufacture in China isn't cost. It's far from the cheapest. It's supply chains. There's nowhere else that can compete.

<comment><USER15> Could you please link to any good self-contained material that covers the info on this advantage, for a layman like me? This sounds like a massive opportunity space.

<comment> d-sc To picture the manufacturing capabilities of the US: Image trying to bake a cake, except all the ingredients come with a 8 week lead time and the people with the mixer, measuring cups and ovens are all 200 miles minimum away from each other. Then imagine 2 days before the cake is supposed to be done, the chef asks to change one ingredient.

In China everything is one or two days away.

<comment><USER14> If you're in Shenzhen, you can have your parts in hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well I was not going to buy one, the price jump from the previous Pro was not something I or many expected or appreciated.

I will get on my soap box again.

Apple needs to be out of China, not moving more manufacturing to that country. What will it take to get Apple to stand up for the rights of the oppressed in China or are they that wrapped up in dollars they no longer see the people component? For a country which struts around in Western countries about their rights and privacy position their continued and increasing production in China shows how much that stand of theirs is meaningless.

They stand for rights and privacy only when it does not interfere with their revenue stream

<comment><USER17> It probably explains the at least $4,000 markup between the cost of the hardware and the final price. They've gotta pay those tariffs and pass the losses onto consumers who don't care about spending $6,000 for an 8-core CPU, 32gb of ECC ram, an R580X and 256 SSD.

You'd have to be drinking a lot of fucking Kool Aid as any sort of creative professional to think MacOS is worth that premium above alternative tools in either Linux or Windows 10.

Apple deciding to move production to an economically hostile country and shutter more American jobs only adds injury to insult.

<comment><USER18> In professional environments the price of a computer is so minimal it doesn't really matter. If someone is being paid even $100K a year then the extra $4,000 for a computer they'll have for probably 4 years is a rounding error.

<comment><USER19> Have that attitude about your purchases for 10 years, wasting at least $4000 a year, and you've wasted $40000. That's significant even if you do make $100k.

<comment><USER20> Who buys a new computer every year? That's just silly and a waste of money.

<comment><USER19> You don't buy a new computer every year but if you carry that attitude around with you then you're probably wasting comparable money elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In the specific case of the new Mac Pro, I don't really think there's much IP to "rip off": it's a fairly ordinary PC in an unusual case running a pro portray OS that has been made to run on non-proprietary hardware for more than a decadeS. There's not much that can be 'ripped off' that couldn't be inferred from the year down of a single unit, and not much of value, honestly. They're almost all off-the-shelf components and those that aren't are already incorporated in other SKUs already produced on the mainland (such as the iMac Pro).

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder how significant the cost differences are for Apple with this move, especially since they mention previously manufacturing in the US and that many components are sourced in the US. How high will the margins be on these devices??

<comment><USER23> Apple previously (years ago) spoke about the importance of the supply chain, not price as the reason to mfg in China. Steve Jobs gave an example that if you needed to change the design to use a different type of screw then you'd have several manufacturers nearby that you could source from. That's just not possible in the US.

<comment><USER24> > That's just not possible in the US.

This is a chicken and egg argument. Supply and demand fixes these things.

<comment><USER25> > Supply and demand fixes these things.

Not necessarily. A _lot_ of know-how in many Western nations has died out over the last decades of off-shoring, and factories have long ago closed shop. You'd have to do a start from absolute zero and that needs more money, way way more money, than the US can afford.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As I said the other day:

There are even more compelling reasons to adopt a hard line with the CCP:

"Report on forced organ harvesting in China"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20249489](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20249489)

We're in a situation where we are confronted by our own fundamental values and what they mean to us and what we're willing to do about it.

</comment><comment><USER27> IIRC, did they not move Mac Pro production TO America in the not too distant past?

<comment><USER28> Yes, the article mentions that the old Mac Pro was produced at a plant in Texas

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder how predicted sales of the cheese grater are going?

EDIT: I didn't even know it wasn't for sale yet, whoops, a lot of hype though...

<comment><USER30> I would imagine the sales should be pretty successful. $6k is still in the realm of 1 to 3 months earnings for many folks. Even I'm tempted.

<comment><USER31> Success is obviously a relative thing.

I would suggest that any professional scenario that uses macOS for client- driven computationally intensive tasks (rendering video being the obvious example), the new Pro will be a no-brainer. Huge step up in maximum CPU/GPU throughput.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Apple is desperate to keep profits flowing while the iPhone and iPad stagnate in sales performance. Services is on the rise; but not fast enough.

So they are being absolutely militant to squeeze any and all profit out of the supply chain they can regardless of what that means.

We know countless US and EU based suppliers who have been replaced by cheaper equivalents in this pursuit of profit. In some cases Apple has even been complicit by helping lower cost vendors improve to displace higher cost US based ones.

Without government trade restrictions this is a logical thing to do when under profit pressures.

The Mac Pro decision was clearly similar. Save a couple % on a 6K machines production costs is all that matters.

</comment><comment><USER33> Where was it made before?

<comment><USER34> The cylindrical model was assembled in USA, the only which was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Apple and Samsung already exploit slave labor indirectly throughout the entire supply chain from sulphur mining, rare earth elements mining in the ocean and final assembly. Depending on China might be a stupid move if it suddenly decides to enact sanctions to harm the US economically... it would be a huge hit domestically but it might be necessary for a pretext to war (if foreign relations policies change).

</comment><comment><USER36> I am sorry that US lost some jobs. And some are making a few thousands less than before. But the world is developing, and things are cheaper. Not only life in developed world is getting better, developing world is seeing more jobs. I am sorry that developed world is not winning all because of foul play by players lagging behind and trying to catch up.

</comment><comment> c-smile Ok, forget about Macs …

Is there any factory left in US or Canada that produces plain blankets for example? These are actually strategic goods ...

<comment><USER37> Faribault Mill makes nice (but expensive) wool and cotton blankets. I think part of the reason they are still around is that they have (or certainly had) a fairly large military contract.

[https://www.faribaultmill.com](https://www.faribaultmill.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Will that make the Mac Pro cheaper than a car?

<comment><USER39> Yes, but you forgot to specify which car.

<comment><USER40> And forgot to specify cheaper for whom. If it's cheaper the difference gets gobbled up by Apple

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Interesting that 80% of the American production line workers were paid minimum wage and had no benefits.

Do the workers in China make more and get benefits?

How does this align with the common claim that American manufacturing is a no- go because labor and benefit costs are simply too high.

<comment><USER42> > Do the workers in China make more and get benefits?

No. Minimum wage in cities like Shanghai is 20 yuan ($2.91). They get poor benefits. But the worst part is the lack of safety regulations that reduces cost at the expense of worker safety.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Anyone have a good resource of backdoor / spy / sketchy China computer manufacturing things?

I always see info about the Huawei scandal for example, and I would love to read a great write up of more specific technical details of things going on

<comment><USER44> I suspect any modified hardware would be targeted, not every single computer. You probably shouldn't order a computer online if this is your threat model, and instead pay for one off the shelf.

<comment><USER45> > And instead pay for one off the shelf

If a state actor is sufficiently motivated, even in a physical purchase, your computer will just get switched out for a bugged one at the cashier.

Common OPSEC practice re: buying hardware (or anything you don't want your name associated with, really), is to pay an unaffiliated proxy to buy it for you.

<comment><USER46> >your computer will just get switched out for a bugged one at the cashier.

I doubt it. How would they swap it in time if you drove to a random Best buy, picked out a laptop (I think they still keep them in locked cages on the show floor), and kept eyes on it until checkout? Nevermind that they'll need surveillance on you 24/7 and have the exact model ready to go (or be able to plant the bug within minutes) to pull this off. It's much more feasible to only bug delivered/ordered equipment.

<comment><USER47> It seems really implausible to pull off without making a scene with a bunch of retail workers thinking you're trying to pull off some kind of scam/fraud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Didn't the "ripping off" gave us the value brands such as OnePlus, Xiaomi, and even Huawei at the beginning of their phone business? So I'd say it's a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER49> That didn't take very long.

</comment><comment><USER50> _" More than 80% of the workers working across three assembly lines were contract employees paid minimum wage for eight-hour workday...when their shift ended, many walked off the job, he said—even if the lines were still running."_

Of course they did, that's what anyone in that situation would do surely? Are they supposed to work for _below_ minimum wage because the company can't organise shift changeover properly?

<comment><USER51> No -- well, it depends, and that's a false dichotomy.

I work until the job is done (or I'm cut) and the workplace is safe. It's the employer's responsibility to pay me at least the legal minimum wage for hours worked. If that means I'm going into OT because they can't organize shift changes properly, that's their problem.

There are usually also legal or contractual requirements for breaks, so I'd be prepared to say "I'm walking away this minute -- unless you want to pay meal penalty?" (I've said that once or twice, and the response has always been "Go, take an hour!") Texas doesn't seem to have any laws requiring worker breaks (wow), and the article doesn't mention if they have a union, but Texas law does apparently require at least a 1.5x pay rate for any hours beyond 40/wk.

Depending on their contract, either they should walk away as they do, or they should keep working until relieved and get paid for OT. Nobody is suggesting they should do extra _unpaid_ work.

<comment><USER52> >I work until the job is done (or I'm cut) and the workplace is safe. It's the employer's responsibility to pay me at least the legal minimum wage for hours worked. If that means I'm going into OT because they can't organize shift changes properly, that's their problem.

My experience working in factories as a young man was that employers hawked over time cards obsessively and threatened to fire you for a first or second time offense if you went into OT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is not good.

<comment><USER54> The article reveals that the people working the Mac Pro assembly line in Texas where paid the minimum wage which in Texas is currently $7.25 an hour. When the plant closes, those guys can apply to any fast food place in Austin, and make the same money.

<comment><USER55> So if they have 5000 people working there, 5000 people will be looking for those "McJobs".

Many of them won't find another job, or at least not quick enough to provide food on the table.

<comment><USER54> According to the article, demand for the Mac Pro tapered off years ago, and they were down to "a skeleton crew". The original plant opening had some kind of tax deal for "up to 500 jobs", so even at peak it was not making a huge difference. Texas supposedly has a 3.8% unemployment rate right now, so there is apparently a lot of work available. I like Apple, but assembling the Mac Pro in Texas was overrated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Back when I worked at NeXT we created a lights-out factory in Fremont, CA and then closed it. Steve said that we were moving it offshore to be closer to where the parts were manufactured. At the same time, I was told by some employees who worked on creating the automated factory that the real reason for moving it was completely different. They told me that the goal was to sell it to a group of Executives who could then charge the company for manufacturing the machines and avoid US taxes by sending the money offshore as a business expense. It was sold to a group of Executives so that they could avoid any one Executive being technically in "control" of the offshore. I was also told that the group of Executives included theoretical "competitors", and they traded "favors" for shared ownership.

I can't confirm any of this - but it is consistent with other things done to avoid taxes. (Steve was once successfully prosecuted for avoiding taxes using an offshore. After that, he got better accountants to make sure his tax dodges could withstand legal scrutiny.)

<comment><USER57> You've posted so many of these stories over the years that we had to ask you to stop unless you could somehow substantiate them:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15317343](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15317343)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15075098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15075098)

That request is still in effect. I don't have any reason to doubt you, but the stories are so grandiose and inflammatory (and similar) that we need to apply at least a little burden of proof.

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20305230](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20305230) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> In the short term, moving to China is always the right move, the labor is cheaper, the regulation is lighter, the market is gigantic and the middle class is growing every day.

In the long term, I believe we are mortgaging our future. Not only is China ripping off IP but companies like Apple who try to be "woke" have no buisness advocating for equality at home while doing buisness with a nation that has imprisoned thousands of religious minorities in re-education camps.

America's approach to China is that of an overconfident fiancee who thinks once they're married they will change their partners ways. It rarely works out.

<comment><USER59> > Not only is China ripping off IP but companies like Apple who try to be > "woke" have no buisness advocating for equality at home while doing buisness > with a nation that has imprisoned thousands of religious minorities in re- > education camps.

First of all: You are not wrong.

But similar things can be said about USA. USA steals a lot of stuff too. But of course the American press won't tell you about that. Or if they mention it, they will put phrase it like "America liberated the population of Irak (insert any country here) from the dictarship".

But the press on other countries could say different things about the USA:

"Not only is USA has a long history of creating coup-d'etat in foreign countries (e.g: South America), and installing governments that favor their policy and killing thousands of innocent people to achieve that. But also is known to create false evidence to invade countries to steal their oil and killing thousands of innocent people, again. And recently it has been proved that the USA spied on their allies to..."

I don't want to put in a way that the USA is "bad" or China "good", or vice- versa.

But the important thing here is: critical thinking. Don't buy what the press tells you.

Is China "bad" ? Who is telling you that China is "bad" ? Does the person that is telling you that China is "bad" gain something from it? Is that person any better than China?

Companies are driven to make money. Otherwise they would be an NGO, and not a company.

<comment><USER60> "USA steals a lot of stuff too. But of course the American press won't tell you about that. Or if they mention it, they will put phrase it like "America liberated the population of Irak "

This is complete rubbish.

The US is not in the business of industrial espionage for commercial purposes - either on a corporate or governmental level, where China is.

Second - geopolitical issues have nothing to do with theft of IP, and usually not even resources (at least not in Central America).

'Central American countries' or 'Iraq' definitely have nothing to offer the US or anyone else in terms of the kind of IP theft one might be concerned about in China.

America did not 'steal' anything from Iraq - their Oil is their own, they receive 100% of the revenue, not only that, they are free to partner with any company they use, in fact, they ended up going with entities like Total (France), Statoil (Russia) etc. _instead_ of US companies. (I guess as a 'thanks' for the fact they are now free to do as they please, and the Oil belongs to the people of Iraq instead of Saddam Co.)

"China is bad" because they steal IP, there is no rule of law, there is widespread corruption, pollution, there is total control of the people by the state and people dissapear of the street for no reason.

Literally, as we speak, China is incarcerating 100's of thousands, possibly millions of people due to their ethnicity or religion, and harvesting their organs as they are killed on trumped up charges. [1]

When we use the term 'Nazi' or 'concentration camps', usually it's hyperbole - but it's not: we now have a major power rounding up people by the millions due to ethnicity and culling their organs. This is actualy Nazi level stuff.

The level of moral relativism implied here is repulsive.

[1] [https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/23/asia/china-organ- harvesting/i...](https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/23/asia/china-organ- harvesting/index.html)

<comment><USER61> > The US is not in the business of industrial espionage for commercial > purposes - either on a corporate or governmental level, where China is.

Seriously? You are kidding right? You must be kidding.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial_espionage)

The most poplular examples are probably German Enercon and Dutch Airbus, but our own Belgian Lernout & Hauspie was also targeted by something you are in complete denial of.

It's Europe here, we're supposed to be allies, no? So why is your government literally stealing business using industrial espionage? That's like sleeping with your best friends wife.

So yeah, get your facts straight please.

"No I didn't sleep with your wife, I would never do such a thing! But THAT guy, THAT guy does it!"

<comment><USER62> I have no clue what level of industrial espionage takes place in the US or China but the fact that it _has_ occurred in both places does not speak to the frequency and severity that these types of actions are taken. All your examples could be true and still the Chinese govt. could be orders of magnitude worse.

To me all of this is nearly irrelevant to OP's original point which was taking an American company's manufacturing to China is a risk. I don't think OP was implicitly making the claim that moving a Chinese company's manufacturing to the US is less of a risk. That seems to be the tangent that the comment thread has taken but it was not part of the original comment. I think there is more of a risk that the Chinese government will steal the IP from Apple in China than the US government will steal the IP from Apple in the US.

<comment><USER61> I was reacting to this statement: "The US is not in the business of industrial espionage for commercial purposes - either on a corporate or governmental level", which is obviously false. I wanted to rectify that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Trump doesn't use computers; he probably won't tweet about this.</comment>


An Intuitive Explanation of Convolutional Neural Networks (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://ujjwalkarn.me/2016/08/11/intuitive-explanation-convnets/ <comment><USER2> How do CNNs work when the output is multiple categories? For instance, in the same image is a cat and a dog and a car. What's the architecture look like - multiple CNNs, each that can predict one category? Or does one CNN have multiple outputs and if the score > threshold, add that category to the list shown to the user?

Also, how do CNNs draw a box around the target in the image?

<comment><USER3> First question: The network is trained to recognize a fixed set of outputs. That's what makes it a classifier -- it classifies an input into a single output. It does this by giving each output possibility a score, and the highest score is its guess for what the original image is. So if I have a network that I train to recognize cats, dogs, and cars, and I get an output like {cat: .13, dog: .85, car: .02} Then the input was most likely a dog. The network calculates all of those values simultaneously.

You can, of course, tell the network to output whatever you want: all of the guesses, best guess, top five guesses, all guesses over a threshold, etc.

Note, this is a gross oversimplification, but it gets the general concept across.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Parameters like number of filters, filter sizes, architecture of the network > etc. have all been fixed before Step 1 and do not change during training > process – only the values of the filter matrix and connection weights get > updated.

Is this just the article's over-simplification or are these values really just randomly selected?

<comment><USER3> These are called hyper parameters (filters, filter sizes, stride length, pooling function, activation function, and a whole host of others not mentioned in this article). They are chosen "randomly" in the sense that it isn't an exact science, ie there is no "right" answer. However, intuition and experience are used as a guide to select reasonable values.

The values in the filter matrices and the weights and biases of the fully connected layers are truly random though. They are often initialized with Gaussian random values. Sometimes they are just initialized as all 1's, or 0's. Again, there's no "right" answer (there is probably research out there that recommends one initialization approach over another). These are the values that are trained using gradient descent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I actually don't think this is a good explanation at all. I'm not saying it's badly written, just that it's not a good explanation for the stated purpose (serving as an intuitive explanation).

To this point, the article is certainly NOT intuitive if you don't already understand image convolution. The explanation is also very long and rambling. While I understand the author has made an effort, I don't think the article really presents the subject matter in a new way: I can learn all of this elsewhere. This is a common problem when people write about complex subject matter without fully understanding the knowledge gap between teacher and audience.

If I were the author, I might try to read up on technical communication and spend some time figuring out how to correctly simply something. As it stands, this article using the typical strategy of information hiding to simplify the subject matter. The problem is that information hiding doesn't doesn't work very well unless it is expertly done. I do like the animation, but again, it only serves to show how image convolution works, and doesn't actually teach us anything about a CNN.

I would suggest the author break the document into three separate sections, the first being very simple (maybe start with the part that says 'images are just matrices') and then add more details in each section. The final section would have a lot of detail. That way you counteract the information blindness that occurs from simplification by providing the information later.

Otherwise, this article is really more of a data dump than an intuitive explanation, and since it doesn't really teach us anything we can't learn elsewhere, I don't see what it contributes.

A cleaner explanation, expertly prepared, could really elevate the effort that went into this.

<comment><USER6> Jesus, chill. I am reading it, (and I know nothing about CNN's), and learning about what do I need to read first about them. The author makes it clear on few things that you need to read before hand.

I think it is a good article/blog post, (thanks dude, whoever you are that wrote it).

You on the other hand didn't give any better alternatives on your "rant".

<comment><USER5> The comments are for discussing HN submissions. As written, the article is yet another data dump on CNNs. There are a lot of these on the web already, and I don't think this explanation is better than what already exists.

I stand by my comments.

> You on the other hand didn't give any better alternatives on your "rant".

I don't have to provide better alternatives. Note that my response did provide suggestions on how to improve the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article is all right but for newbies reading it; be a little careful. The author is sloppy with terminology in a way that can trip up someone who is just learning. An example being that a Kernel and a Filter are not the same thing.

<comment><USER8> Can you explain the difference between the two? I'm new to CNNs and have been wondering this myself - this SO answer says that they're the same thing:

[https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/154798/difference-...](https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/154798/difference- between-kernel-and-filter-in-cnn)

<comment><USER7> Sorry, edited a bit for clarity after thinking some more about it.

The kernel of a filter would be it's impulse response, which is what you convolve by to get the filter response. That's where the sloppy terminology comes from. A kernel though does not need to be a filter.

A kernel is a function whose product maps a point in one domain onto another domain. For example, the Fourier transform has a kernel of e^jwt. The integral (or sum if discrete) of these products over the function is the transform because it maps the entire function into it's new space. A filter is a function typically defined as having product behavior in the frequency(transformed) domain, which is equivalent to convolution in the time(original) domain. A window is a function that has product behavior in the time(original) domain, and thus convolution behavior in the frequency(transformed) domain.

Particularly in linear algebra (matrix math), if something is a kernel function, there are certain mathematical implications.

Another confusing bit here is that the convolution they are performing to project the original function (the larger image matrix) onto the smaller one isn't a proper convolution, it has a hidden window function in the way the operation is being performed to restrict the output to only the fully overlapped area of an otherwise linear 2D convolution. This is typically called a cropped convolution in image processing.

<comment><USER9> Personally I think you're being a bit pedantic and fuzzy yourself on the terminology. For the purposes of CNN, it's perfectly fine to think of them as the same thing and the kernel in this case is simply not the same as the "kernel" in linear algebra you alluded to. In fact, it's so different, I don't even know why you'd bother to mention it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> anyone happen to be familiar with any uses of CNNs on 1D "images"? (like you'd get from linear image sensors [https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/ap- en/product/sensor/lin...](https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/ap- en/product/sensor/linear-sensor.html) )

i hit up google scholar occasionally looking for references, but literally everything seems to be applying them to 2D images.

<comment><USER11> Well, what happens if you build a 1D-input CNN in TensorFlow and train it the usual way? Does it work? Seems like it should.

What's even the difference between 1D inputs and 2D inputs? It's all a bunch of numbers anyway. I don't think it really matters if the pixels are arranged (as you see them) in a neat rectangle vs in a straight line. You could take a 2D matrix and enumerate it as a linear string of numbers and it would still be the same matrix, just represented differently. I don't think the CNN cares either way.

I would go as far as saying that the 1D-ness of the input is just "in your head".

<comment><USER12> I would argue that in a signal (1D) you can expect some sort of relationship between consecutive elements. In an image (in essence a 2D signal), you can expect a relationship between consecutive elements not just on the horizontal, but also on the vertical axis.

If you arbitrarily represent a signal as a 2D matrix, then abrupt changes in the gradient on the vertical axis are meaningless. But the same is not true in an image, which is naturally represented as a 2D matrix. Here, a sudden change on the vertical axis usually corresponds to an edge in the image.

If you represent an image as a 1D array, you throw away spatial information. So I'm not sure about the 1D-ness just being in ones head.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article was very helpful. The animations did wonders to show how the networks iterate.

<comment><USER14> The computerphile cnn video is quite good.

Of course, andrej karpathys Stanford lecture on the subject is as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Breezes right over back-propagation, arguably the most crucial part :/</comment>


Comparing the Politics of Trump and His Silicon Valley Surrogate Peter Thiel - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/17/trump-silicon-valley-surrogate-thiel/ <comment><USER2> Here come the torches!

[https://vimeo.com/28437700](https://vimeo.com/28437700) (complete with scientific innovation)</comment>


ACM and the Professional Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2639990

<comment><USER2> The paywall has to go.

As researchers, the very purpose behind publishing is to make our work available to as many people as possible. The ACM and other publishers _used_ to facilitate this. Now, the role they play has the exact opposite effect - that of _restricting_ access to information. Furthermore, requiring authors to hand over copyright, as opposed to licensing their work to ACM under suitable terms (e.g. creative commons) no longer make sense. I note the recent introduction of author-pays publishing, and this is a step in the right direction, but the prices seem way out of line given distribution costs.

I made the decision several years ago that I will not allow my scholarly work to be restricted from those who wish to view it but aren't members. As such, I refuse to publish in any venue that does not allow open access. I see the ACM primarily as a racket, acting like a self-interested, for-profit corporation - not an one that represents the true ethos of the scientific community, which involves openly sharing the results of research.

I encourage anyone who still has any faith in the paywall publishing ecosystem to watch the recent Aaron Swartz documentary, "The Internet's own Boy". This will make you angry and realise how corrupt the system of ACM, IEEE, Elsevier and similar organisations truly is. If ACM wishes to have any relevance going forward, it needs fundamental change, lead from the top.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, you can put your paper on your own site with minimal modifications (an extended version with an extra sentence). Most people who care about their papers do this, but it is very annoying that the Digital Library is not a very effective resource, and that the ACM is stuck mostly in the past.

<comment><USER4> Living authors can put their paper online, yes. But what about all the older articles from authors that are already dead, to which the copyright is now owned by some corporation? That's one of the worst things in the current copyright system.

<comment><USER3> Yes, this gets me also: the DL is often the only place where an old paper can be found.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I Read the title I thought of the Google and Apple wage fixing case, and I thought... the ACM really isn't representing the professional programmer much. Not in the same way that the AMA, Bar association or many other professional associations do.

Some might say, well that's not what the ACM is for. Why not? Continuing education is great, although frankly being a journal publisher isnt 'education' to me. But if the ACM wants to really expand, they need to think about what the working programmer really needs.

If the answer to all this is 'keep publishing stuff' then maybe the ACM is just an academic bridge, and these articles about being for the 'professional programmer' should just stop.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. There were some serious issues in the late '80s and on, like removing the tax safe harbor for consultant programmers, and the ACM was nowhere to be found on these issues, which is one of the things that prompted me to drop my membership. Maybe if I was an academic I would have viewed it differently, but....

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am a 38yo professional programmer. I used to be an ACM member largely because I could benefit from the CACM subscription. But at some point, the stack of CACM paper editions filled my cellar, and around the same time Moshe Vardi published one of his controversial editorials on public access, so I cancelled my ACM membership, because:

* I could not get a digital-only subscription

* CACM's position on public access made feel uneasy about supporting this ancient organisation with my money.

</comment><comment><USER8> I was a member for a few years. I left when my role moved away from software development for few years.

I'm thinking of rejoining, there are some interesting articles [Edit this is incorect: and if you pay for the digital library you get Safari Online access too I think]. ACM seems much more interesting than the BCS which (from an outside prejudice perspective) feels even less relevant.

Edit: Looking at the site again I'm wrong and Safari Online access is extra. Not sure if I'm misremembering or it has changed. Given this I'm unlikely to rejoin.

<comment><USER9> Agree on the edit. For clarity: about 700 Safari online books, videos from O'Reilly and other publishers are available to ACM Professional Members without a subscription to the Digital Library necessary. In addition 500 Books24x7 titles and more than 150 Morgan Kaufmann and Syngress books are available to ACM Professional and Student members, again without Digital Library subscription required.

Professional membership to ACM is about $100, and subscription to the ACM Digital Library is an additional $100. Student memberships fees are reduced to 20-30% of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder what percentage of employees at Google are ACM members. That in itself might inform Vint of how useless the ACM is.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hmm, I'm getting a 500 error. What's up?</comment>


Ask HN: Should I go back to university? - <AUTHOR>

 Abstract:   recently laid off in a city with a huge wave of highly qualified people looking. Losing self confidence. Thinking about going back to school. Spouse still in university, but spouse's parents pay for tuitions. No debts whatsoever, no cars, only expense is rent and food. We will be 25 this year.
Education: software development certification from technical school. GPA 80%. It was a really intensive program, doing 78 credits in 8 months, class from 9-5 M-F, with 1 month practicum at the end.
Work Exp: total 3.5 years
(0) month-long contract project at a really big Business Intelligence project. They liked the project.
(1) 2 years at a small company about 50 employees, small IT dept of 4, did everything from ASP.NET web apps to VB.NET/VB6 backend apps to SQL db admin to site cross browser compatibility stuff. Left after months of ridiculous unpaid overtime. Gave them 2 months notice to find, and train the guy.
(2) 1.5 years at a smaller company, about 30, as the sole programmer, writing C# in-house use apps and stuff to go with our SQL database (that I installed and configured). Developed business ideas for them, made custom software to those goals. Laid off along with 7 other people based on seniority. Nothing shameful there.
Obvious weakness: my technical school taught us how to work, how to think like a programmer and how to debug problems. But it's still technical school. I will not be able to answer technical questions if I have not used that particular bit of knowledge before. I know nothing about lower level architectural stuff.
Redeeming Qualities: I work hard. I can look up stuff I don't know how to do quickly. I come up with good business ideas, I can think from my manager's POV and our clients' to reach a fair comprimise. End users really like me because I not only fix problems they find, I will actively find out what I can do for them. I'm fiercely loyal to whatever company I work for, even when they're cheap and abusive.
Bottom line: I know I can be really good at my job once I'm on the job. I just think my lack of proper education and low level knowledge about computer science will prevent me from being seen as such at interviews or resume screening. Going back to school can fix that.
However: my spouse is still in school. I went to university straight out of high school with 87% GPA, but dropped out after the first year because of academic immaturity (ie: I thought university was a load of crap--no one gives a shit about you and you're just a chequeing account number. The textbooks are meant for the profs to profit rather than for you to learn, and the profs clearly have other things to do way more important than teaching you. I was going to all the classes but never handed in any assignments. Teenage angst. I was taking arts and foreign languages. This was before I even touched any programming.). I don't know if I have the discipline to do it still. I may go back to get all angry about the bullshit institution again and shut down again like I did. But I managed to get through the technical school well, because I love programming, I love it to death.
....advice? <comment><USER3> One thing to try might be to put together a portfolio of some kind. This way you can show people that, yes, I can do X, Y and Z and here's the proof. Good recommendations certainly don't hurt either.

I'm going to take a guess that just straight resume submitting isn't going to go so well. You'll likely get filtered out on the lack of college degree. This means you'll have to actively and creatively pursue getting in touch with a real life person to at least start the conversation on why you should be considered.

I kind of waffle on the more education part of the question. It really depends on where you would go to school. If you can get into a really good program, then it's well worth it as you'll learn a lot from the profs but even more from your fellow students. If you end up in a mediocre program, you'll probably end up frustrated like you did before. I wish I could give you some magical advice on how to determine a good vs. bad program, but I have no idea. (For myself, Ohio State was OK, I didn't put in enough work to get the most out of it. Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering was fantastic. I felt like the dumbest person in the room many times and that's great for learning.)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're completely spot on. I talked to a couple people in difference industries, and they're all receiving tonnes of resumes from big name companies with degrees. Everyone's getting laid off here....

The portfolio idea sounds good. I do have a small set of hobby programming projects that aren't marketable, but at least I will have something to show in lieu of a degree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems like you still want to work in the same field, and are mainly considering school because of the credential it offers. While that addresses one reason employers might be throwing away your resume, it isn't on its own enough to make you stand out.

The most effective way to stand out is through a personal connection.

So instead of going to school, maybe you should try to meet a lot of interesting, smart people who are working on cool stuff. Work with them on side projects and stay in touch with people at companies that are expanding. This isn't hard for programmers to do: just go to programming language user groups, try things out at home, and get involved in some mailing lists. Hang out at local coworking spaces and BarCamps.

It will probably take a few months of this before you get a good job offer. It will feel much scarier than school because there is not a well-defined end goal. But if you have an active geek social circle you will hear about job opportunities well before they get to the point of screening resumes for education credentials.

</comment><comment><USER5> Going back to school is kind of a reset button, and generally something you can only do once or twice. It sounds like your situation might make it worth it, but only if you actually want a reset. If you just want to weather the economic storm, 1.5-2 years might not be long enough. But if you want to change your direction a bit, either out of programming (sounds unlikely) or to get a more theoretical background (which you may have; some of your spelling and terminology is [are?] foreign so I may be misunderstanding what you mean by "technical school"), then go for it. Especially while you have no kids and no real expenses.

It also sounds like you aren't going to be happy if you're at a school where you're just an account number, as you put it, so maybe you should visit some schools and talk to professors and students. Then you can save yourself the time/effort/money of applying to, or even attending, a school that you won't like. Though this might not be practical for you if you have strict geographic constraints (e.g. you don't want to move).

Disclaimer: This is from the perspective of someone who went from high school to a four year university (studied CS) and then went straight to a CS master's program, which is where I am now. So I thought about some of these issues, and talked to a lot of people about them, but I don't have actual experience to justify some of the above. Also, I'm biased towards grad school, which is hard work but a hell of a time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, sorry. School options here are 4-year degree programs at a university. College has a bad connotation up here in canada. The other option is a 1 year, or 2 years programmes at a "provincial/state institute of technology" generally thought of as career prep type programme, or where University grads go to actually be useful on the job.

I tried the former, and did not finsih. I completed the latter, liked it. Sorry about the confusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm in a bit of an opposite situation, I've been doing web development since high school (i'm 27 now), and am just now going to college for the first time. For a degree in religion of all things.

That said, I would never have gone to school for anything related to computers. I'm still not sure if I plan to continue doing development or go into something else completely, but I'm fairly certain that I could pick up more useful knowledge outside of school. Experience is huge, and at 3.5 years you are about at that level where it doesn't matter if you have a degree or not to many employers. I've worked with many coders with formal degrees, did well in college, but simply fell flat when confronted with a professional development environment. The best programmer I know personally has also never stepped foot in a college class room.

So my advice would be to stay away from formal education and keep coding. Do side projects when you can, You would be shocked how a weekend of toying with a new programming language will change the way you think of things and help your 9-5 programming.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the encouragement. I will spend more time on my hobby projects.

I have a lot of useful knowledge that I gained from my time in the technical trades school, as well as on the job. But sometimes I feel like I've hit a brick wall as well. For example the MSDN will tell me that it's more efficient to use class A rather than class B. Why? I don't know, I can't even begin to device tests for myself to find out if, where and when this is true. I just have to take whatever I find on the Internet as true. Sometimes it's frustrating. But then I still get the job done, so maybe it doesn't matter...?

Also, congrats your going back for religious studies. I did a 1 year theology certificate program between dropping out and programming. Really taught me lots I'll be thankful for all my life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm doing that right now! Got a small thecnical degree, worked for 3.5 years..

But my job sucked! So I decided to go to university!

Why? It's a transition! At university yes you get shit to do (in computer science the classes are horrible and disconnected from realty!!)

But, there is no place like university to build a startup and make connections! So that's the main reason I stick to university :) Plus where I got in Québec they credit me one year + the interm because of my work experience.

So...

You will hate going to university because the classes are boring it's not practical, but you get a good degree.

But what can help you put up with the BS and really stand out is building a startup, joining toastmasters, building connection with people and making contacts, etc.

And when you know that most universities are like 60,000 people "little cities" that are all connected to the same community, it feel good :)

So... while it may not be your answer, I love what I do! And in university there are some companies that are actually taking students for a job! I see "We need 25 programmers" ads in the bathrooms :P hahahaha

</comment><comment><USER8> When you thought the university was a load of crap, that no one gave a shit about you, that textbooks were meant for professors to profit, and that professors don't care about teaching you, you were right.

It was not "youth angst" or "academic immaturity". It was just a correct assessment of the situation.

Most people who think you should go back to school do not actually dispute that, they just think that putting up with bullshit like that is somehow character building, that "paying your dues" pays off, and that it is worthwhile to prove to large commercial corporations that you can be manipulated by the large academic corporations.

They might be right, but if you love programming, you should program. You have to pay the bills too, of course, so you have to figure out how you can do both. Maybe work on a small project you can try to sell while searching for a job, or start doing contract / consulting jobs on the side ? It depends on the details of your situation.

</comment><comment><USER9> I knew a brilliant hacker who also dropped out of college for the same reasons.

It's a bit of youthful arrogance, immaturity, but also the kind of spirit youth would not be youth without.

Anyway, a recession is probably the best time to be in school.

But there are two very important things to keep in mind:

1\. Do NOT go into life crushing debt! A small amount of debt is OK, state schools are cool.

2\. Do NOT take school too seriously, OBVIOUSLY it's a for profit operation. Do not let their BS stop you from getting an education while having a good time. You'll do most of your learning on your own and from like minded classmates, learn, have fun, get a degree.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did your hacker friend eventually go back to school? I guess it also feels like I'm admitting defeat to the "system" if I go back. I had hoped to say "Forget you! I can hack it on my own just fine". So, I guess a bit of that arrogance still remains...

It feels awful. "Everyone" in my family and their social circle think it's the norm, that you do high school and then you get a degree and get a job. That it's just life, you just play the game that everybody's playing. That the school obviously doesn't care, but also obviously none of the students care either -- they're just paying customers. It feels so awful and dirty to have to go back to that and prove everyone right.

But, that's the firey youth talking again. If I do go back, this time the professors will be a resource to chat up outside of class hours. This time the fellow students will be potential business partners. This time, when presented with esoteric course material, I can think about how it relates to my code, oh so many tiers down later. This time, I know that the academic bureaucracy isn't there to help me, they're just there to make a buck and keep the system going, like my pension plan and unemployment insurance.

Hurray for cynicism!

<comment><USER9> My hacker friend is doing the whole living out of the back of a van thing... in a good way... by choice.

As to admitting defeat to the system, sure you could look at it what way, but you could also argue that the defeat came when you quit! But that's mind games and you can play those on your own, you don't need me for that.

Suffice it to say, if you proving everyone else right or wrong is a major concern for you, that's a problem, school is not.

I think your last paragraph is an excellent plan, hell it sounds a lot like what I did in college.

Except that my attitude to esoteric material was: C- is all I need to pass. The professors then look at you with those puppy dog eyes: But you can do better! I know, that's why I'm not bothering with this shit.

Cynicism is the appropriate response to less then honest systems like college often is. Another word for cynicism is realism.

And your plan talk to professors outside of class and view fellow classmates as future partners, isn't cynical at all, in fact it's very positive.

The view that academic bureaucracy isn't there to help you, could be described as cynical, but then again it could also be described as factual.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you go back, get a degree in an industry. Technical aptitude and skills are great and transportable to almost any field. A "proper education" makes you more valuable if you understand the problems to be solved in an industry like biotech, or greentech, etc. (probably not so much financial services these days)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's kind of hard to pick an industry based on "what I think will be awesome 4 years later." Also I have no confidence in being able to do school for a subject I don't care about.

Hence CS is probably the only degree I'll be going back for. I would really like to learn assembly and proper C and C++. as well as algorithms and data structures....

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> After reading your last paragraph, I'd stick with the professional world and try to craft a job you love, one where you control your own destiny.

I would bet that school will still strike you as mostly bullshit from the sounds of your past experience (tech school/self taught)

<comment><AUTHOR> ...yes, I don't think the state of our higher eduction has improved in the (counts) 7 years I've been gone. I'd have to play the system like everyone else there is doing, and my honest opinion is that degrees are an over- produced commodity in the developed world today.

On the plus side, many have pointed out that the true value of a degree program isn't the courses, the books, and the shiny paper at the end, but the contacts you make there and what you can learn from talking to the professors one on one.

Looking at my U-grad friends, I've come to realizes university does not educate people or give them any sort of knowledge. University is a place where you can education yourself and obtain whatever knowledge you seek for yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Speaking as a former enterpreneur, I don't think having a BS represents anything at all.

Speaking as an employee, one thing I came to notice was that the BEST people I worked with did not even attend an IT course (they had graduations on other areas, like math or physics - one in english literature!). Of course there were some IT bachelors in the bunch - what I'm trying to say is that, as far as I've noticed, it didn't make anyone better than the ones without a degree on the field.

I'd get to know new technologies, get to meet new people (both online and offline), take part on things (like JUGs or other technology groups - <USER2> give a try at setting up my own, maybe), get involved on open source, write.

Investing in a bit of hype also helps - like jumping on RoR one year ago, when it was 1.0, for instance, would automatically turn you into a 'Rails Hacker', which is a 'niche'.

Bottomline: I don't really think getting back to work or learning 'low level stuff' would really help in anyone's career (except if you plan on becoming an academic).

</comment><comment><USER13> Yes.

We can argue all day about how credentials shouldn't matter. But they do. Put up with a little BS for a few years and it will pay off.

</comment><comment><USER14> Did you say WHY you want to go back to school? It is a very personal decision to make. Many make it to the top just fine (maybe not easy) without the paper in their hands. I have to agree with you on the BS that schools deal out. ASU made it clear during my time there, that they were a business in it for the money. But regardless, just worry about what it is you're looking to get out of the experience.</comment>


Show HN: See what other NPM packages everyone else is using - <AUTHOR> http://www.npmdiscover.com/ <comment><USER2> This is fantastic all around. The visual design is perfect, it's fast, and within a minute of using it I discovered some new libraries which might be useful for my projects. It reminds me a bit of using Google search when it first launched and was less cluttered.

The clear layout makes it easy enough to mentally filter out common packages which appear in every search result, like gulp and grunt, but it might be a nice bonus to highlight packages that are "most uniquely" associated with the search term and not used by everyone else, or to cluster tools which are alternatives to each other together (e.g. putting gulp and grunt side by side on the same line).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah I noticed it would be useful to cluster related packages together, that was the thinking behind introducing the filters to the right-hand side e.g. framework, test etc. When you click them it will toggle the view.

I was hoping I could rely on the keywords associated with the package to cluster them, though as it turns there's not a lot of love for the keywords section, meaning clustering them would take manual effort. Doing it myself isn't feasible and I though about creating the means for users to contribute the info, just wanted to wait for demand for it first :).

Thanks!

<comment><USER3> It would be great if the URL reflected the search results. I used your suggested "express" search but after getting the results the URL remains [http://www.npmdiscover.com](http://www.npmdiscover.com) That makes sharing results with someone else or bookmarking fairly awkward.

That being said, kudos for providing a resource that helps wade through all the npm packages out there!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah this is definitely the next thing to be done, a number of people have been asking for it so hopefully it'll live in the next few days.

Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also: When searching for packages, I recommend [http://npmsearch.com](http://npmsearch.com). It scores search results by popularity, which usually correlates with quality and maturity.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a nice concept. When I start using a new library or framework I very often want to know what the best practices are. Seeing what else I "should" use is a step towards that.

</comment><comment><USER6> You should filter out devDependencies. Everywhere I look I just see browserify, webpack, babel.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, at the moment I treat both dependencies and devDependencies the same, it made sense just to get an idea of what people were using, though a nice feature would be to differentiate between them. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe make it say "of xyz projects on github, foo% use " then a colon or an ellipse. Just a little suggestion rather than putting the first item in the dependency list and "etc".

</comment><comment><USER8> You should have a list of top packages so we can easily test out the site.

On a related note. It would be nice if there was a [https://www.ruby- toolbox.com/](https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/) for AngularJS and NPM.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I did think about this, however after looking at [https://www.npmjs.com/](https://www.npmjs.com/) I felt their 'packages people npm install a lot' kind of satisfied that criteria.

I could put something along the lines of 'Top 10 most discovered packages' based on data from the site :)

<comment><USER2> I must say that I really like the uncluttered homepage the way it is!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> what npm packages compete with each other would be nice.

It would be interesting(not saying useful, just interesting) to have something that was similar to TF-IDF for code.

That would argue that everyone uses Express actually makes express not that meaningful.

Of course that would assume that the concept of meaningfulness in text could transfer easily to meaningfulness in a software project, even though that is an area where I have never heard the concept broached.

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting. Given how much the Js scene changes from month to month it would be useful to track this over time.

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe I'm doing this wrong but I don't think react-native is a dependency of moment

<comment><USER12> Where does it say that?

<comment><USER11> I searched react-native and moment came up as one of the results: [http://i.imgur.com/Ceq04hr.png](http://i.imgur.com/Ceq04hr.png)

<comment><USER12> That just means that from all the projects on GitHub that use react-native, 10% of them _also use_ moment.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Love Is Like Cocaine (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/love-is-like-cocaine <comment><USER2> great article. due to various mental health issues i dont really have the full range of emotion that others do so "love" is something thats out of my sphere of experience however i have experimented with drugs and this actually helped me understand why people get so hung up on relationships</comment>


Snopes is in danger of closing its doors due to a business dispute - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/snopes-in-danger-of-closing-its-doors-due-to-business-dispute/ <comment><USER2> Snopes does seem to be struggling with impartiality recently, so I don't feel as bad about this as I otherwise would.

<comment><USER3> Are you sure, or are you just seeing more articles that disagree with your preconceptions?

I don't see it, but it could be that I am in a bit of a bubble, so I ask in the hope of checking that.

<comment><USER4> It's a little bit of both, honestly. They have definitely taken a strong political position as of late, which has resulted in instances where they've ignored legitimate sources that agreed with the rumor they are trying to dispel, and allowed sources suffering from "citogenesis"-like qualities because it agreed with their views. I look forward to a future snopes-like site which is completely impartial, but unfortunately impartiality is very difficult to exhibit when the subject matter is frequently very subjective.

<comment><USER5> Citation please.

<comment><USER6> [http://www.snopes.com/donald-trump-iraq-war/](http://www.snopes.com/donald- trump-iraq-war/)

vs

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThwaDSaoGU8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThwaDSaoGU8)

<comment><USER7> The question Snopes was answering: "Donald Trump expressed strong opposition to the war in Iraq before it began in 2003". Snopes says this is false.

The video you linked is an excerpt from a Trump interview where he mostly waffles on whether we should attack Iraq. The closest he comes to opposing the war is saying that perhaps we shouldn't do it yet and perhaps should wait for the UN.

In what universe is that "strong" opposition?

Strong is perhaps a fuzzy term, but the context is Trump making claims like this one during one of the GOP debates: "I'm the only one on this stage that said, 'Do not go into Iraq, do not attack Iraq.' Nobody else on this stage said that. And I said it loud and strong".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> OMFG. Can a smart person please archive the site in case these dummies can't come to an agreement?

This is spectacularly bad timing considering how many of our institutions that trade in truth are being attacked.

<comment><USER9> Let's get Archive Team on it. I'll suggest it on IRC now, I suggest you do the same.

[http://archiveteam.org](http://archiveteam.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am happy to see them die. How can you claim to be an independent fact checker when you are this dishonest. Politifact equally biased and sometimes outright lying.

</comment><comment><USER11> who knew zdnet was still a website

</comment><comment><USER12> I smell a divorce brewing between the Mikkelson couple.

<comment><USER13> The article says there was a divorce and Wikipedia indicates that they've been divorced for nearly three years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Holy Freakin' Snopes.

</comment><comment><USER15> TIL you can hide domain registration and of two companies which aid in this. To be honest this concerns me more than the fate of the website.

<comment><USER16> It's more than just two companies. Many, if not most, registrars offer this as an option when you purchase a domain.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Blog on blog.domain.com or domain.com/blog - <AUTHOR>

I know this has been asked before, but I can't find it. Which is better for SEO: blog.domain.com or domain.com/blog? Also, is it ok to host my blog on wordpress.com and not loose out on the SEO? <comment><USER2> Short answer: it depends. /blog is better if you just want more pagerank for your main domain, subdomain is better if you want to build your blog into something important on its own.

A subdomain blog with good pagerank also gives you the ability to add heavyweight links to content on your main domain when you'd like to drive traffic to specific areas.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd use a subdomain, because I like flexibility and because I don't give a shit about the SEO tricks du jour.

<comment><USER4> I second this choice. Although it obviously hangs on how often you want to post and how related to your www's concept/product your posts are, the benefit of Google treating it as a 2nd site is tremendous. The site: handler becomes more useful, you have the potential of the subdomain showing up as a second result cluster in search results.

Also, no disrespect to any other posters, but a new company/site blog likely has 9 months before it starts to earn enough link-juice to need to worry about spilling some...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's better to use domain.com/blog for SEO reasons. You should also have a look at other hosted blog services. There are plenty of options around with TypePad, Blogger or even Tumblr. Squarespace is a good solution too because they let you import your data from Wordpress, Typepad etc.

Check out <http://iwantmy.name/a> for an overview of blog services that offer a custom domain option.

</comment><comment><USER6> The only reason to use blog.subdomain is if you plan to host it seperately, e.g. on another platform (PHP or windows or whatever), another server (Wordpress has security issues some might worry about) etc.

Otherwise, subfolder is either better (SEO) or a no score draw (everything else).

</comment><comment><USER7> This is easily the single most important question a nascent organization faces. Get it wrong and every bad thing ever mentioned in a chain letter will happen to you and each of your collaborators, many times over.

(Honestly, I doubt it matters much, but blog. is my [slight] preference. In any event, it isn't difficult to make one redirect to the other, and it's wise to do so, whether the Google juice the other answerers mention is important to you or not.)

</comment><comment><USER8> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=503079>

My searchyc.com query was '.com/blog'

<comment><USER9> I would have expected that query to return bucketloads of submitted stories as opposed to the meta discussion about /blog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Whichever is easiest for you. My site is just a collection of interlinking subdomains anyway, so blog.domain.com is best for me. Then I use a simple one click wordpress install on hostgator.

</comment><comment><USER11> You can always proxy the /blog on your primary domain, so that BOTH URLs point to the same place. So you end up with both /blog and blog. With the same content.</comment>


Ask HN: what do you guys think of JavaFX? - <AUTHOR>

In the RIA world, with the release of proprietary frameworks+runtime such as Flex, Silverlight and opensource HTML+JS based frameworks such as cappacino and sproutcore, how does JavaFX stack up? Anyone has played with it yet? is it simply Java applets of the late 90s again or is it something worth learning and looking into for building rich-media applications? <comment><USER2> The problem with JavaFX as with Silverlight is that they are missing something very important in their understanding.

RIA is not really about the developer support but about the designers. If you don't have your support from there its going to be hard to compete.

The RIA world is a very different world from the enterprise development world that most developers are used to.

So no I don't personally believe you should look into it. Concentrate on Flex/Air, HTML 5.0, PHP, Ruby and the usual Java, C++, C, C# and what have you.</comment>


The Zipcar Prize proposal: enabling one-way car sharing trips - <AUTHOR> http://troy.yort.com/zipcar-prize-user-sourced-car-sharing-assignm

<comment><USER2> Rather misleading title, since it's not actually about a prize, it's about a prize that some guy thinks should exist.

The problem of allowing one-way rentals is not one that I think Zipcar is particularly interested in solving. No matter how you slice it, it winds up leading to a less efficient allocation of parking spots than the current one spot per car model, it increases the probability of a pissed-off customer who finds that the car from his local spot has semi-permanently vanished to four hundred miles away and nobody is currently planning on one-waying another one in, and it wouldn't necessarily lead to enough increased revenue to make these two downsides worthwhile. In fact it might well lead to less revenue, since someone making (say) an overnight round trip could just book two one-ways instead of a return and wind up saving money.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think the title is misleading, and it definitely isn't intentionally. Half of the post is an email to Zipcar proposing it, and the title needs to be short.

I think the other issues you identified are real, are solvable, and are addressed in the post.

The post explicitly says not to allow a one-way trip to empty out a lot/neighborhood (permanently vanished car). An "I miss this car" button on the Web site would make it easier for Zipcar to know when to reward someone for parking a specific car type in a given lot.

In many cities, Zipcar has dozens of cars in the urban core. The use here is going from Seattle to Bellevue or Mountain View to San Jose, not BFE 1 to BFE 2.

I agree that Zipcar hasn't been not particularly interested in solving this problem. I think that may change now that they have competition in most markets.

As far as less revenue, most of the trips this enables aren't happening today because so few people spend $60-$80 (day rate) to drive 30 minutes then park for 8 hours.

If someone could book two one-ways cheaper than a round-trip, it would be because it's helping Zipcar. If my driving balances out two one-way trips booked earlier, I'm helping reduce Zipcar's costs by slightly altering my behavior (driving different cars).

<comment><USER3> No, I think it's pretty definitively misleading without context. And there's a simple, short solution: "The Zipcar Prize proposal: ..."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Title changed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the bigger problem with zipcar is having a car sit around for hours while you're visiting a friend or sight-seeing.

As a zipcar user, I often want to drive somewhere that's 30 minutes away and stay there for 5-8 hours. That means I'd have to pay for the 5-8 hours that the car just sits around. (Which means I just skip it and hunt for a cab.)

On the reverse side, on sunny weekends, I often can't find a car to rent. Since I live near a part of the city that's a big draw on the weekends, I bet there are Zipcar customers who visit my neighborhood and leave their Zipcars in parking lots all day. I would pay extra to use their cars for a few hours.

<comment><USER5> Zipcar's hourly pricing is so low because the rental for these extra 'waiting' hours is built in. If you are driving at 60 miles per hour and the car gives 20 miles per gallon, the cost of driving for one hour is over $10 at current gas prices. Zipcar's hourly rentals don't cost much more than $10.

Your idea of using cars others have parked locally is a good one, although I wonder how many people rent zipcars for 7-10 hours and park it for 5-8. It would be almost certainly cheaper to rent by the day from Enterprise et al if you did that.

<comment><USER4> It often is cheaper to rent by the day from companies like Budget, but zipcar is incredibly convenient. In DC, I have 5 locations within 4 blocks. The major car rental companies are all 1 cab ride away.

<comment><USER5> I really like your idea but if Zipcar let you rent someone else's parked car, and you were late, they would almost certainly lose the stranded customer.

I know how much people hate waiting for a ride because my startup RideCell worked on real-time carpooling for some time before we pivoted to fleet automation. Even now, one of the main problems our product solves is reducing wait time for transport/service vehicles by auto-dispatching tasks to the nearest one, routing them intelligently, and making the wait more bearable by letting people track their transport/service vehicles (Think Uber for everything).

Of course, the fact that this is a hard problem makes it even more interesting :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The point of the Netflix prize was to improve something Netflix already understood well and was getting diminishing returns for its research dollar. The Netflix Prize was able to attract serious interest from legitimate academics and engineers because the problem was refined to the point where it was legitimately very hard.

ZipCar doesn't even offer one-way car trips. I'm sure it could do them with adjustments to inventory, management, and pricing. Traditional car rentals are evidence there is a model that works. But ZipCar needs start one-way car trips, much less get to the point where it has reached diminishing returns on its research investment, before it can expect worthwhile contributions from crowd sourcing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Isn't this already done by (for example) U-Haul? They would quickly go out of business if you couldn't rent a truck one-way, or if they couldn't manage their inventory.

U-Haul's business model is not precisely the same as Zipcar's, but it's pretty close.

</comment><comment><USER8> Car2Go (a Daimler company) is tackling this problem with the concept of an operating area. You can pick up and drop of your car from a car2go designated spot or any legal parking spot within this area. Here is an example of their operating area in Austin

[http://www.car2go.com/portal/austin/page/mybookings/mapEnlar...](http://www.car2go.com/portal/austin/page/mybookings/mapEnlarged.faces)

They are also innovative on other fronts such as charging by the minute and a feature-rich touchscreen in each car.

</comment><comment><USER9> The ultimate car service would allow me to find a car a short walk from where I am and then do a one way trip, without a booking. I've always felt that the only barrier to providing this service was a critical mass of drivers and zipcars. Most cars are currently idle for the majority of their lifetime, taking up a lot of parking space. Imagine if the streets were lined with shared cars instead of privately owned cars. Once you get to a certain density you should be able guarantee availability in all but the most remote locations. There are large scale migrations like commuting that take place over the day/week but the availability of cars should match this. Given a rising population density it seems inevitable that such a service will have to exist as we will run out of storage space for idle cars.

</comment><comment><USER10> Do any zipcar-like rental companies allow you to return the car to somewhere other than where you picked it up? Doing so obviously dramatically changes the complexity of reservations. It is a feature that more traditional rental operations can offer only because they have very large centralized inventories. Even so, they still have to orchestrate moving cars from popular destinations back to popular origins.

The proposed solution is definitely interesting, and I think it might be possible to make it workable, but I think it is a different order of complexity from the Netflix prize.

<comment><USER11> Just signed up for Car2Go.com in Vancouver, which launched here this month and offers one-way rentals.

Their model is per-minute pricing with an hourly cap.

You "return" it by parking it anywhere within a huge area (several square miles) that effectively makes up anywhere you'd be car-sharing anyways (living outside this area means you'd be pretty likely to own a car).

You find a car to rent with their android or iphone app, website, or by calling their 24/7 phone number. All cars are tracked using GPS.

Pretty sweet model that is a good substitute for taxis, assuming the car supply keeps up with consumer demand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is it just me or does this smell like a great social media job by Car2Go.com?

</comment><comment><USER13> I think the solution would be variable pricing, much like buying or selling a financial asset. If the rates for things could be adjusted to encourage activity around some number (say, to keep the number of available cars in a region at 1 for every 10 zipcar members), using some real data, they could just let people drive cars one-way. If it turns out that everyone wants to borrow a car from A and return to B, that just means it's too cheap to do so, or it's too expensive to borrow from B and return to A.

It would certainly be an interesting model to try.

</comment><comment><USER14> I worked on developing a model like this while at the Media Lab. We were trying to model dynamic pricing for one way rentals (with and without restrictions as described on this thread) but ultimately found it very difficult to simulate due to the lack of data.

We tried using proxy data by scraping popular bike sharing websites but it didn't seem analogous enough. Any ideas where to get zipcars reservation data with zipcar offering such a prize?</comment>