Old coal mines can be underground food farms - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-46221656 <comment><USER2> Coal mines are exceptionally dangerous places. They require constant ventilation against methane accumulation and pumping out water that seeps in all the time. The soil is friable and there is a careful trade-off between personel safety and resources invested into consolidation and securing the galleries against collapse.

A mine is not some kind of free underground cave, it's an industrial installation requiring constant engineering. They have 24/7 command centers that monitor and correct safety parameters before anyone is allowed to go in. When mines close, they are flooded, refilled or sealed, to prevent underground explosions and collapse that could kill people above. The closure of mines is itself a dangerous and expensive operation.

Bottom line, if it ain't worth going down there and picking unlimited quantities of coal worth $70/ton, it most certainly isn't worth it to invest and labour for months in a high risk environment, only to get limited quantities of agricultural produce worth $200-$300/ton.

<comment><USER3> In addition to the dangerous environment, it's also likely to be contaminated with a lot of toxic stuff. In the closed German coal mines the pumps have to run 24/7 to prevent both the rising water from flooding the region* and the flame retardants and other poisons from reaching the surface waters.

* some areas like the city of Essen have dropped by 16m, others up to 40m due to mining. Running the pumps to prevent flooding is considered part of the Ewigkeitskosten (eternal costs, see: [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewigkeitskosten](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewigkeitskosten) ).

edit: fixed numbers, added link

<comment><USER4> > and the flame retardants and other poisons

What did they do with the flame retardants? Spray parts of the mine with them?

<comment><USER5> A lot of things in a mine is made of wood.

<comment><USER6> Even worse, a lot of things in a coal mine are made of coal or are covered in coal dust. Flammable powders can be ugly, particularly if they're floating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If startup-ey media is anything to go by, agg-tech has some weird ideas about what the problems are with aggriculture.

The water and land required for vegetables farming isn't a problem. We don't need to move lettuce production into buildings, mines or submarine farms.

Most of the water & land is used for cereal farming.

Whatever you can grow in a mine or a skyscraper can be grown on a "small" farm near a city. Whatever water saving, pesticide minimizing, or other benefits you get have little to do with location.

There are plenty of led/hydroponic farms in normal farming places.

<comment><USER8> >We don't need to move lettuce production into buildings, mines or submarine farms.

Food crops in general absolutely, some like lettuce could actually benefit from being done indoors though as you could limit exposure to things like E. coli compared to traditionally grown lettuce.

Growing in a largely enclosed system also allows you to prevent runoff, use the least amount of water possible, control all environmental variables etc BUT unless we suddenly develop fusion today and magically start bringing hundreds of fusion plants online a year, using the sun is always going to be more efficient than grow lights.

<comment><USER9> Economically that's true, but ignoring capital costs...

LED's are up to 50% efficient. The best Solar is hitting 44% effecency. So, we can only keep ~22% of the energy from sunlight. However, plants are green because they only absorb a subset of sunlight. So, by designing LED's that only emit the light best collected by plants you can get fairly close to 1:1 and theoretically you could see a net gain. Thus, 100 years from now things might flip. Further, we can stick solar panels many places we can't effecently farm.

It's still going to stay very niche, such as producing ultra high grade produce for high end restaurants.

<comment><USER10> We could potentially supplement the LEDs with fiber optics that deliver natural sunlight underground.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 10% of the entire UK's area available in mines? That seems a tad on the high side at first glance.

No mention of flooding, collapse and the many seams that were well under 6' high. I remember claims that many mines would be inaccessible thanks to flooding and collapse within days of closure during all the mine closures of the 80s. No idea how much of that was hype to try and avoid closures of course.

So what percentage is worth opening up again for possible agriculture? Based on the photo of two chaps using an old shelter the size of a poly tunnel, very very inefficiently, barely any.

Seriously, having seen commercial poly tunnels, I'd expect to have the staging shown but wide enough that a human can only just squeeze down the centre path, _and_ another level, _and_ the entire floor area allocated to growing as well.

I'm gonna need a bit more convincing on this. :)

<comment><USER12> Here is a link to the UK Coal Authority interactive map:

[http://mapapps2.bgs.ac.uk/coalauthority/home.html](http://mapapps2.bgs.ac.uk/coalauthority/home.html)

There are a _lot_ of old mines in the UK!

[NB I found out about this when researching buying a house outside of Edinburgh - we ended up getting a house near an old limestone mine in Fife although where our house is it's volcanic rock with no mine workings under us].

Edit2: In case anyone is wondering here is a geology map viewer for the UK:

[http://mapapps.bgs.ac.uk/geologyofbritain/home.html](http://mapapps.bgs.ac.uk/geologyofbritain/home.html)

<comment><USER13> Interestingly you can see mining used to stretch under the Firth of Forth between Lothian and Fife. Supposedly, back in the day, the tunnels linked up and you could have walked from Fife to Lothian via the mine workings.

This idea in the article seems like utter nonsense, and the fact that it's in an article on a reputable website doesn't give me any confidence it isn't.

<comment> shaki-dora > Firth of Forth between Lothian and Fife

I have no idea what (who? Where?) this is, but now I want to conquer it/ask them out for dinner.

<comment><USER12> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firth_of_Forth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firth_of_Forth)

It's an area thick with history from before the Romans to more recent times. One example:

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk- scotland-46273928](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-46273928)

<comment><USER14> Is that somehow related to Genesis' Firth of Fifth?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting trade-off - much higher energy costs, but on the other hand, mine shafts are probably largely pest-free. No birds, certainly, and probably a much smaller rate of insect/fungus/mite infection as there's less opportunity for them to be blown in on the wind. The energy costs probably wouldn't be offset by the pest-prevention costs - but it might reduce the damage to the environment, and the increasing fungicide resistance, caused by widespread spraying.

<comment><USER16> How is this at all better ecologically, considering energy costs? The electrical demands to operate a mine are huge, most of which are used in pumping water out of the mine and air conditioning to make the atmosphere breathable. Air conditioning would arguably go up, since it is possible for plants to suffocate themselves with O2 in an enclosed environment.

To me, this looks like a far worse ecological disaster than conventional farming unless we develop some form of truly free energy like practical fusion power.

<comment><USER17> Fusion power is not free. The fuel is relatively cheap, but all the high tech needed to keep the plasma burning needs to be maintained and investments for building power plants need to be recovered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just about the only ex mines which are useful afterwards are salt mines, some of which are used for climate controlled storage facilities or data centers. Not coal mines.

And the occasional hard rock nickel mine, one of which was repurposed into the Sudbury neutrino observatory.

<comment><USER19> The Sanford Underground Research Facility is in the former Homestake gold mine in South Dakota. [https://www.sanfordlab.org/](https://www.sanfordlab.org/)

Work recently began to prepare the facility for the massive DUNE neutrino detectors, which will be to neutrino physics what the LHC is for high-energy physics. [http://www.dunescience.org/](http://www.dunescience.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Dwarf Fortress players have known this for over a decade

<comment><USER21> Given how badly most of those games end I'm not sure I'd look for designs there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> When I see all these high tech plans to grow food in developed countries, I always wonder how developing countries who sell food to developed countries will get reliable markets.

But then again no one owes poor countries a decent livelihood.

<comment><USER8> > I always wonder how developing countries who sell food to developed > countries will get reliable markets.

They'll stop growing specialty stuff for export and start growing a more diverse range of crops and sell them domestically which will lower food prices and should benefit their economies in the long run.

The US exports 40% of the corn it grows, uses another 20% for ethanol production but we import 40% of our fruits and 20-something percent of our vegetables. We also exports absurd amounts of other grains. If we grew most of our crops for domestic use and stopped importing tropical and out of season fruits and vegetables, we'd have much more sustainable farming practices, less waste, considerably smaller carbon emissions from all the importing and exporting, etc.

Go to your grocery, you'll see mounds and mounds of bizarre looking alien pods which are allegedly fruit and vegetables from far off lands. I can't possibly imagine they sell even 50% of what the stores receive because most people simply have no idea what it is or how to prepare it.

Hell, I have problem finding sweet peppers that are molded and/or aren't wilted leathery looking things when I go to the grocery each week. Week after week, store after store, without fail. That's waste and none of it is grown domestically (mostly Mexico although occasionally the stores near me will have stuff from South America).

<comment><USER8> *aren't molded

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For plants growing in vertical shafts, it seems to me that plants will have to get used to grow somehow horizontally or at an 90 angle (last 2 figures in the article [0]). How would that be possible? I think this may come to a misunderstanding and an oversimplification of this technique and plants would still grow vertically and upwards.

[0] [https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/76A1/production/...](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/76A1/production/_104596303_a5ede59c-809f-4485-a554-04ce0ee1e596.jpg)

<comment><USER24> Most plants are pretty good at growing towards the light. It's not a suitable way to grow a pine forest, but it should be OK for lettuce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great idea! Why would we grow plants where the sunlight is? Illogical! Preposterous! Let's bury them in caves full of toxins and industrial waste, then grow them using expensive artificial lighting!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> One can only eat so much lettuce and herbs though, I believe they're the most economically viable, but grains, and potatoes not so much.

<comment><USER17> I'd go for mushrooms and yeast tanks in damp dark places. But you can also eat only so much of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Stop eating beef instead of focusing on these BS ideas.

<comment><USER27> Pasture raised cattle, and other grazing animals, can actually be very environmentally friendly. Properly managed pasture requires very little to no fertilizer, pesticides, or herbicides and acts as a net carbon sink. It can also have a large amount of biodiversity. The problem right now is feedlot style operations, where corn is grown as a mono-culture in one place and then shipped to a feedlot.

<comment><USER21> That's not the system we have though and going to a grazing based supply for cattle would require drastically cutting back the consumption of beef. Only about 10% [0] of the world's current beef is supplied through grazing pastures and that's already stressing grazing areas in suboptimal climates.

[0] [http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5304e/x5304e03.htm](http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5304e/x5304e03.htm)

<comment><USER27> Definitely true, and I didn't mean to imply that. Just think it is important to point out that we do have existing ways to sustainability eat beef, though as you point out it would require cutting back consumption to something more approaching the historical norm. I just think that grazing animals have an important role in our food system going forward as we try to make it more sustainable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Err, or you could use them as pumped hydro storage and make all that off peak renewable energy useful, like most other countries are doing.

</comment><comment><USER29> Mines are "perfect" farms? I remember hearing once that in order to grow, plants need this thing called light.

<comment><USER30> Try reading the article. For shafts close to the surface they can use fibre optics to bring in sunlight, deeper down they use LED lights.

<comment><USER31> Sunlight is ~1,000 W/m^2. Even accounting for the efficiency boost of only using photosyntheticaly useful parts of the spectrum, the quoted energy cost feels off by one or two decimal places.

There is also the point that sunlight is free, and greenhouses already solve the same problems. The Netherlands already does this to great effect: [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland- agriculture-sustainable-farming/)

<comment><USER30> Tunnels have much better and cheaper climate control, easier access to water, cheaper land costs. It's not necessarily a case of one one single variable determining the viability of the whole idea especially when this is, as I said, _covered_ _in_ _the_ _article_.

No idea if this will ever come to fruition, but these people do seem to have done some homework and have prototypes up and running now.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Desktop + Laptop, or just Laptop? - <AUTHOR>

For the past few months I've been using an interim laptop as my primary computer while I waited for the new ThinkPad lines. Last week the new lines were released. Now, I've been debating whether it's a better choice to build my own desktop, which would run around $500 and get a Dell Vostro V13 (http://bit.ly/7njiU4) which ranges from $450 - $650 for when I'm on the road.
Alternatively, I could just get one of the new ThinkPad w510 (http://bit.ly/90CrsS) which would serve both purposes. The ThinkPad option would likely run around $1000 more than the Desktop + Vostro option.
Although much of the work I do is remote, or in a VM, I still have to have a fair amount of desktop apps installed. Which would you choose? Is using a remote drive via DropBox or ExpanDrive good enough? Have you had successes or troubles keeping your machines in synch? Thank You.
Note: Links shortened for readability. <comment><USER2> I've been working with three different laptops for the last few months, and my conclusion is that it really depends on what you're doing. If you have a lot of license keys to juggle or finicky software that wants a very specific install environment, it's just plain easier to use one computer. And if you have tons of media sitting on Dropbox, it can take ages to do the initial sync after a reinstall, even if you're only using the 2GB free account. And my EEE 900's flash drive doesn't play well with Dropbox and turns the whole desktop into a nightmarish stop-start experience...so it's been relegated to being almost purely a web machine.

But apart from those things, my cross-computer experience has been pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a desktop and a notebook. I put my personal projects on Dropbox, plus some other things, use imap with Mail, rss with NetNewswire, so everything syncs and it works really well - I get the mobility when I need but use the desktop at home (I don't think I could stand using a notebook at home). I think you could have problems if you use applications you can't sync between the too, or projects with really large files that are hard to sync. My only gripe with my setup is browsing; I'm working (well, sort of, when I have time) at some utility to save snapshots of my tabs and send them between the computers, so I can close the notebook with tabs open and get the same tabs on the desktop.

</comment><comment><USER4> As has been pointed out, a single machine works best. You'll have trouble synchronizing software and data between the machines at times, and you'll occasionally forget that crucial file for a presentation or meeting on your desktop. If you really need a desktop, get a second monitor, a nice mouse/keyboard combination, and a docking station if you think that is appropriate.

PS. Stop messing around and get a Macbook. Unless you need the enterprise warranty provided by Lenovo, you really have no reason other than "it's what I am familiar with" to stick with a Windows machine.

</comment><comment><USER5> if you work for long hours on a laptop without an external monitor and keyboard, you are asking for ergonomic trouble.

But buying an external keyboard and monitor, and making sure both are an appropriate height solves that problem.

To answer your question, I personally prefer a separate desktop system. It's marginally faster to set up, and more importantly, it means that I've got a backup when my laptop is out of commission.</comment>


99% of Android phones leak secret account credentials - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/16/android_impersonation_attacks/

<comment><USER2> As the post below says, this may not actually be an important leak. But, it does highlight the issues with the "fragmentation" issue in a much more real way than we've seen before.

What happens to all these Android handsets sold that don't get updated if a major security hole is found in Android 2.2? Almost none of them have official upgrade routes to 2.3 at this point, and I find it hard to imagine that they would be able to get out a 2.3 release to fix security hole in a reasonable amount of time if they haven't been able to get it out in general for about six months now.

I obviously hope there isn't any security holes that are discovered. But it would be interesting to see how the Android vendors would react to that situation — especially if it was something Google couldn't fix easily in an Android Market-distributed patch, like the "malware" earlier this year.

(Apple is no better here, fwiw: the iPhone 2G was excluded from any fix to the remote "JailbreakMe" exploit, and the iPhone 3G never got any fix to the location "tracking" controversy.)

<comment><USER3> If there was a major security hole in 2.2, I expect there'd be a patch for 2.2 that'd get pushed out as an urgent update.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh for the love of God.

This just in, 99% of websites on the Internet leak secret account credentials. Can we please ban The Register here?

Account credentials != Auth Token. And this is a result of not using SSL to share the auth token back. Is it a mistake? Yes. Is it nearly as bad as this headline or the article implies? No.

<comment><USER5> (I work for Mozilla, but no real bone to pick here)

I dunno dude, that looks pretty bad. Isn't this kind of exposure fodder for the wall of shame at every hacker conference? If The Register is accurate[1], the token will expire in 14 days, but that's plenty of time to read lots of email.

Hopefully they can fix it on the server. Otherwise, it'll take a while to update all of those Android devices.

[1] I know, I know

<comment><USER4> It is bad and it's trivial to fix and it should have been obvious. But it's not leaking your username/password like the title implies (at least to me).

This is just like logging into ANY website without using SSL... except that it's much more likely that they're on 3G since it's a mobile device rather than a laptop.

<comment><USER5> It's trivial to fix, then?

Can this issue be fixed by changing the server? Otherwise this trivial fix will take a long time to deploy.

<comment><USER4> Well, trivial from a code perspective. I would presume that attempting to fix it from the servers would not work, unless they can 302 to an SSL server, but I don't know exactly how that would work, if ClientLogin can handle that.

Additionally, as noted elsewhere, security fixes are distributed to more devices and faster than os upgrades for Android devices.

<comment><USER6> So let's summarize:

1\. The AuthToken's are easy to sniff

2\. Hard for the end user to fix and require code changes to fix completely which may not be available for your model of phone from your carrier

3\. Valid for 14 days

4\. "the adversary can subsequently use the captured authToken to access any personal data which is made available through the service API. For instance, the adversary can gain full access to the calendar, contacts information, or private web albums of the respective Google user. This means that the adversary can view, modify or delete any contacts, calendar events, or private pictures. This is not limited to items currently being synced but affects all items of that user."

And in conclusion not a big deal and we should ban the register for spreading such vicious truths.

And we know all of this because of our love of god.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> El Reg is link-baiting again. They are hardly 'leaking account credentials'.

A patch could be pushed separately, the phones don't all have to get 2.3.4 to fix a venerability, they've done so before.</comment>


Detailed map of bumps from Bump - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bu.mp/the-world-of-bumps

<comment><USER2> We've come a long way from "warning: 800x600 pixel gif here", this image is so big however that I think that a warning is suitable, if you are not on a machine with a lot of memory you should probably not click on the large version of that image unless you'd like to listen to your hard drive for the next half hour or so.

<comment><USER3> Cutting it into tiles and creating a custom Google Maps view of it would have been nice. It looks[1] reasonably simple to do, and means your users don't need to try and render a 15kpixel wide image. Even with 4G (ok, that's not all that much these days, but I still consider it reasonable) of RAM, it took down my browser.

[1] [https://webtide.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/adding-google- maps-...](https://webtide.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/adding-google-maps-to-your- site/)

<comment><USER4> RAM usage jumped about 280MB when viewing the full size image. No problems with my system choking with 4GB RAM and plenty of programs open (2.5GB used). (Tested in Firefox and Opera, Win7x64.)

<comment><USER2> poor little netbook with 1G on this end, it didn't stand a chance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cute. But so much more could be learned from maps like this, if you could overlay a map of, well, pretty much anything else on top, and look for correlations. Population density, political boundaries, G3 support, economy, whatever.

</comment><comment><USER6> Greenland? Wow... Really? It almost seems too much to believe to see dots in some of the random places they have them.

</comment><comment><USER7> Back in the day when Meebo was a web IM client, they had a similar heat map updated every few minutes.

I wrote a script that grabbed it and stitched the grabs together into a visualization of their traffic over a month or two. Never got around to publishing it anywhere though.

I can probably find it if there's interest.

</comment><comment><USER8> Cute map, but pretty huge and hard to zoom in.

I have substantial OpenLayers and GeoServer/WMS experience.

OP: if you're interested in an interactive navigable map to show this information (perhaps updated dynamically), let me know.

</comment><comment><USER9> ha! you can see the main routes from santiago (chile) to the coast (valparaiso and vina del mar). when were the data taken? those roads would have been very busy this last weekend (independence day here).

<comment><AUTHOR> nice! this is an aggregate view from the full month of august, so we wouldn't have picked up el dia de independencia, sadly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> a few brave people in north korea <https://www.dropbox.com/s/86ymyaa7itm86mi/nk.png>

<comment> guard-of-terra Brave? Ones in the south are probably some tourists; One in Pyongyang must be kids of some very important parents, ones who travel and study abroad. Neither demographic counts as very brave.

<comment><USER10> Ohh, I didn't realized you'd interviewed them. My apologies

<comment> guard-of-terra I don't see how using a certain program for a phone makes oneself brave.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why would anyone go for ASP.NET ? - <AUTHOR> "ASP.NET is a web application framework developed and marketed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, web applications and web services."
While other alternatives like PHP, PHP based frameworks (CI,Symfony,Zend), then Rails etc... really make the job easier when compared to asp.net.
While in PHP you would be writing 5 to the point lines to do something, in asp.net the same would need you to have things that are irrelevant to the goal, in the code...
have a look -
<%@ Page Language="C#" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<script runat="server">

    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        Label1.Text = DateTime.Now.ToLongDateString();
    }

 </script>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head runat="server">
    <title>Sample page</title> </head> <body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <div>
        The current time is: <asp:Label runat="server" id="Label1" />
    </div>
    </form>
</body> </html>
Now how much of PHP would the same code require ?! So, Why would anyone go for asp.net?
I understand that number of lines doesn't matter after reading some great comments, but don't you thing it slows down quick learning in some way... because you've to go through big chunks of code that do simple tasks... while on this front, other languages make learning really easy and fun with short straightforward codes. <comment><USER2> Your comparison is overly simplistic and doesn't really prove anything. I'm a unix guy, so my exposure to ASP.NET, while existed, was limited. ASP.NET tries to make writing large apps be a manageable process, tries to use the existing .NET library and plugs well with other Microsoft technologies. I can't really argue on much deeper levels, but comparing how many lines of code some mundane task takes isn't really saying anything.

I can create my own DSL whose sole purpose in life is to send dates to a browser, and all it takes is a file with the character "x" in it; that doesn't make my language any better than Rails, ASP.NET, php or anything else. Different languages and platforms exist to solve different problems and cater to different markets.

<comment><AUTHOR> I feel enlightened and awakened... Thanks :), seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Microsoft has done a lot of things wrong in terms of its various software offerings. Visual Studio is one of the things that they have done a pretty good job on though.

Asp.net is also very attractive to the legions of .Net developers who may not have much exposure to the web way. It mostly abstracts web interactions away, so that it's not a huge leap to go from client/server applications to web apps.

Sure, there is a lot of code in the final result, but the IDE helps automate a lot of that, and in combination with ReSharper, it's not a bad environment to work in.

<comment><USER4> When you abstract away the web as .Net does you also miss out on the subtleties - e.g. "Postback" - the .Net function that stores server state in an encoded string which it embeds in a form on the web page and restores state. It makes the web seem friendly to ex-Windows programmers but ignores the HTTP RFCs and ends up as big non-REST-ful mess. .Net is full of features that make it easy for Windows programmers to avoid learning how to use the web properly.

<comment><USER5> ".Net is full of features that make it easy for Windows programmers to avoid learning how to use the web properly." Upvoted for quote.

<comment><USER6> This is an important point to consider in frameworks.

Does $abstraction make things easier because you don't have to learn about $technology, or does it make things easier because it eliminates the repetitive parts of $technology?

Keep in mind, the former reason is entirely fine/admirable -- so long as the abstraction is not unnecessarily leaky. Why learn something you don't have to?

I hav skepticism over Cappuccino because, as someone who does a lot of web _and_ Obj-C/Cocoa development, I see a lot of my Mac dev friends attracted to it not for its merits as a solution for making web apps, but because they don't want to learn anything about web technology. Still, I have a lot higher opinion of Cappucino than ASP.NET :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > So, Why would anyone go for asp.net?

Because they have an existing investment in C# and/or the microsoft stack, and a team of developers who know C#/visual studio. In that situation it's pretty hard to sell PHP.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've spent some time digging through the .NET internals (through books and code) and have/had a good familiarity with IIS and the HTTP pipeline Microsoft has set up.

ASP.NET is an oddball. It's roots, as many have pointed out, were to make web programming look like windows programming. That's the crappy part.

The good part is that there is a heckuva lot of power under the hood if you take the time to learn the mechanics of things. I can move from a drag-n-drop GUI programming of the web into all kinds of other things depending on my whims. I can go XAML, or Silverlight. I can go straight functional with F# or some of the other functional languages for .NET.

And it all runs inside the same IDE with IntelliSense and debugging and machine-level inspection if I want it. And all the applications, no matter what their language, can easily interoperate with each other. And if I stick to ASP.NET 1.1, I can run on *nix boxes all day long.

The list goes on.

Please don't misunderstand me. I don't have the religion, so I'm not trying to pump it up more than it is. It has real problems as an architecture because the winform idea doesn't fit into web programming. Having said that, however, a good programmer can crank out ASP.NET applications as fast as anybody else in any other platform. For exploratory web application programming it's on par with any other platform. The new team stuff looks pretty cool.

I find that most people who dis ASP.NET failed at learning it or are just blowing off steam. To say the same thing a different way, by the time you've wasted years figuring out where all the alligators are, you don't see what the big deal is any more.

Biggest plus? I can almost go to Seven-Eleven and pick up good ASP.NET programmers. The market has a lot of them (cheap). Biggest minus? Just because a bunch of stuff is hidden doesn't mean it goes away! Great ASP.NET programmers can crank out Javascript, CGI, and StoredProc code with the best of them. By "helping", Microsoft makes it a real pain to get under the hood and take total control (but it's very possible to do once you get the hang of it)

BTW, your example? You drag a label onto the form, double-click on it and type one line of code in. I'd argue that it only takes one line of code (and about 5 seconds) to accomplish. The rest is framework fluff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Daniel, I realized I was blowing off some steam, actually I'm just beginning with ASP.NET over a surveillance project we're doing. Coming from php background and watching Ruby people talk so much about, less code this that, I was really taking to views that were based over just a look at code. I really love that comments you wrote, and that sets me a new way to think over things and be more positive, more importantly your comment encourages me to DO things FIRST and then comment, rather than being an observatory commentor. Thanks :)

<comment><AUTHOR> and, yeah I just tried out Mono on my ubuntu, I loved the way the code remained same on windows as well as *nix... It will be a great help in my project :)

<comment><USER8> Cool.

If you really want to torture yourself, pick up a couple of good ASP.NET internals books and make yourself read them. After that, the other problems turn out to be fairly easy.

Glad to help if you need any. Just drop me an email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > So, Why would anyone go for asp.net?

The .NET development environment.

Visual Studio is dead simple to install and use. Add-ins have been easy to install, too. (I'm looking at you, Eclipse!) The .NET Framework has great breadth and depth. It integrates well with MS SQL Server. There are plenty of quality 3rd party tools/libraries that work with the stack. API documentation is easy to get to. Building install packages is a snap. Visual designers can make building/understanding components or the database schema easier. Code generation from the designers can fill in boiler-plate stuff yet still leave it visible if you need to dig around in there by hand.

As for ASP.NET WebForms (which is the sample you've given), it was meant to make it easier for Windows Forms developers to do web page design. WebForms imitates the WinForms structure and calling conventions, so you can make a working web page act more like a desktop app in terms of the programming model. Obviously, you run into limitations rather quickly because the WebForms abstraction is very leaky.

ASP.NET MVC would be a good pick for new projects if you are already an experienced web developer. You get all the benefits of the .NET stack without the limitations of WebForms. You get control over the markup that gets generated and it does a good job with separation of concerns. I recommend.

<comment><USER10> I wouldn't say WebForms was meant to make it easier for Windows Forms developers to build web apps.

I think it was intended to make it easy for Visual Basic developers (which is a huge market btw) to develop web apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> ASP.NET isn't the worst technology to use for a startup. There's lots of useful prebuilt components for it (commercial usually, but the value is still there).

Microsoft is also offering some pretty good hosting platforms for startups, and usually you can pick up licenses for low cost. EC2 now is also offering Windows instances for easy cloud hosting.

That said, I've done ASP.NET professionally for about 5 years, and 2 years ago switched to Ruby / Rails / Merb and have found the transition to be a huge improvement. The open source world has a better atmosphere, and I believe better talent overall.

The worst thing about ASP.NET is the corporate culture, where unskilled VB coders adopt it, and use it to build really badly developed websites.

Also, ASP.NET pretty much requires Windows. Trying to develop it on Mono, or on a Mac (with Vmware) is an effort in futility. If you go ASP.NET, make sure you're comfortable with Windows. This was one issue that I had a major problem with. Command line scripting and build tools in Windows are generally aweful. This will limit any good developer's productivity.

</comment><comment><USER12> Because sometimes you don't have a choice. Either by policy or by inheritance, you might be stuck with that environment.

In my day job, i use ASP.Net MVC framework because we're an all Microsoft shop. And although i recognize the danger of proprietary systems in the medical field, I am unable to change anything at this time.

Also i find that Microsoft products work best with other Microsoft products so SQL Server with Windows Server 2003 and ASP.Net along with Active Directory and so on...

But, echo'ing the other comments, using a limited metric such as number of lines to implement a feature is a bad idea. Try it out on some application and then you'd be better equipped to dismiss or recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Because C# is a _very_ good language.

How many security holes have been found in the asp.net stack vs the php stack? I recall seeing a php security issue on reddit or news.y about once a month (anecdotal of course). But you don't have those problems with asp.net.

Yes php provides simplicity in the language but complexity in the configuration. You have to be pretty handy with *nix to get it all working right. Remember facebook showing all it's code to the world?

Asp.net windows configuration can be easier especially if you have a windows background.

In the end though, if you know php use that. If you know python use that.

</comment><comment><USER14> \- Huge library of high quality components

\- One of the best available development environments (Visual Studio)

\- C# is much better for structuring your code base for large teams and long lived projects

\- If you're really using a database, SQL Server is way, way better than mysql.

I prefer Rails myself, but I manage a team who prefers .Net, and I can see the advantages.

I agree with other posters, Webforms are horrible and wrong, but MVC could make .Net one of the best Web dev platforms.

</comment><comment><USER15> In my experience (and I'll preface this by saying that I'm not quite an expert yet) ASP.NET is fairly easy to bring people with no web experience up to speed. Our development company switched from LAMP to ASP.NET, C#, and MS SQL Server. While I wasn't involved in the decision-making process, I did ask them why they switched as I came from a LAMP background. They said that their company gets all of their employees from their internship program, and it was easier to train interns with all of the standardized tools that Microsoft puts out. Plus there is a pretty good community of .Net developers that makes the training process easy. It took me far longer to learn PHP than it did to learn C#, but maybe that's because my coding experience is better now than it was then. :)

</comment><comment><USER16> As far as I remember it took me considerable amount of time to get along with C# alone, but after that playing around with ASP was much more easier. If you're planning to start asp.net or other microsoft stuff like .net, make sure your OOP fundas are thorough.

</comment><comment><USER17> ASP.NET annoys me so much with leaky abstractions BUT ASP.NET MVC is the best thing since PHP.

<comment><USER18> Agreed. I'm a long time Perl user but I think C# (and Visual Studio) is well done and keeps getting better. That said, the Web Forms model has always been a bane for me. It violates so much that is web--from hijacking the HTML ID attribute for its own purposes (thereby forcing all your client side script to use hideous framework-generated IDs), to making non-standard form handling a torturous experience. ASP.NET MVC looks like it could be the start of something much, much better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not a big ASP.NET fan, but the number of lines of code to do something is less of a concern to me than the underlying hardware requirements and licensing costs to produce a running application.

</comment><comment><USER20> I support many internal ASP.NET apps at Intel because our internal employee services applications started as classic asp/com on oracle db over 13 years ago. ASP.NET is really great if designed/written properly. Like others have said, once you are a .NET shop it's easy to find .NET talent. I'm currently working on our LMS which is Java/JBoss and I've learned to respect .NET, Java, LAMP, Rails and Python. I have web.py and django on my todo list for building some fun personal apps. Hope this helps give you perspective.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> You know guys! Thanks a lot, I love HN for it helps me broaden my scope of thinking :)

Its logical to build upon framework already tested and tried, so coming up with something new would've been a waste of time n resources, whereas the current .net scenario provides nice integration as i notice..

another point that comes to my mind is that -- Things couldn't be kept more simpler than that, as you can't sell simplicity at high price.</comment>


Level Playing Field - <AUTHOR> https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/level-playing-field/ <comment><USER2> Level playing field?

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/04/firefox-install-google- chro...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/04/firefox-install-google-chrome-home- page/)

> Without Chrome, we'd be at the mercy of Internet Explorer or other web > browsers when users want to get to Google.

How so? Is Matt (or Google) afraid that other web browsers would block Google properties?

I never saw Chrome as the way for Google to ascertain that the general public can have unfettered access to Google properties, I saw - and see - Chrome as a way to extend the Google eco-system onto the end users device, and to gain access to URLs that otherwise would remain hidden from Google to reduce the 'dark web' as seen through Google as well as a way to track users on pages that don't have Google Analytics installed. When technically speaking it really shouldn't matter what browser the users uses, as long as it is standards compliant it should simply work.

Killing off reader didn't do much to level the playingfield either, RSS is so much more open than everything that tries to replace it.

On the whole, Matt is on the ball that Google would be a better company ('less evil') if they were willing and able to play on a level playingfield but I don't see Google as a company willing to do either. They could if they really wanted to, but they are definitely not doing that.

Between the corporate newspeak about how every change that violates consumer privacy even more that gets hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread and Googles abuse of their muscle when it comes to such things as copyright violation on an unprecedented scale Google, if anything, seems to be totally allergic to level playing fields.

Anyway, props to Matt for making public his call on Google to be nicer (especially during his leave), let's see what will happen because of this.

<comment> vertex-four > Is Matt (or Google) afraid that other web browsers would block Google > properties?

No, they're afraid that other web browsers will fail to implement features that Google needs unless Google has a significant say in the standardisation process by means of having a web browser. They'd be at the mercy of other web browsers for those features otherwise.

<comment><USER2> What about all those other companies not being Google, Apple and Microsoft?

Do they not get a 'significant say in the standardization process' because they _don 't_ have a web browser? And if not why should those who have a web browser get a say? Much less a significant one? The only way this matters is if you extend the capabilities of your browser _outside_ the standards process. So if everybody would follow the standard then that wouldn't be a problem.

No more Microsoft sites that only work with IE (remember Active-X/COM objects?) no more Google using features that are only present in Chrome to cripple Google docs on Firefox.

<comment> vertex-four The implementers, sad as it is, get the final say on what they implement. Standards organisations can standardise whatever they want, but if the implementers don't want to implement stuff they won't. Hence we don't have XForms and all the rest of XHTML 2.0, nobody's implemented Persona despite that being a standard, etc etc.

Google can pressure others to agree to follow a standard by being an implementer, and they do. (There is practically nothing accessible from a general web page on Chrome that isn't defined in a standards document or draft standards document.)

We, unfortunately, don't live in a perfect world where web developers can unilaterally force browser implementers to implement standards - Google is a large company that heavily depends on the web, and needs to be able to do that. For the most part, other companies can contribute to Firefox to get that, but Google likely decided the politics and potential bad PR of that ("Google are taking over Firefox") were not worth it for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> As Google has come to dominate the browser market, they've slowly made Chrome more and more integrated and reliant their own propriety services. They've done away with the concept of a homepage and exclusively control what the new tab page looks like. There's no way for users to set a competitor's site as the new tab page.

[https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2918032?hl=en](https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2918032?hl=en)

> _" If your default search provider isn't Google you may see a different > layout on the New Tab page."_

They advertise their own products on search results, pushing organic results down even further.

They pulled a bait and switch with Android, turning it into GoogleOS.

Google throws its weight around just as much as Microsoft ever did, they just smile while they do it.

<comment><USER4> Each have their own definitions and ethic (or maybe aesthetic is a better description). Google have a strong advantage in discovery. They have more influence on "discovery" of everything from podcasts, books, applications, journalists, and everything else than any other company. They certainly use that weight. They can get users to any of their products. But, it is true that these products are not usually very lock-in. Search is very easy to switch from. Gmail is pretty easy. Network effect products like Wave, talk, circles, hangouts are actually the products Google has had trouble getting traction with. They got users, but not the lead in their markets.

MS have "weight" with OEMs and decision makers at companies from one man shows to fortune 500. They use that, which creates a nasty distance between liking the software you personally use and the decision to keep using it. Even Berkshire Hathaway's website is made with frontpage.

Apple have an interesting version of this. It may be their achilles heel, but it's also made them bold and creative. Apple products sell to the public, not to businesses and not through businesses. They don't rely on deals with OEMs, retailers, distributors, corporate buyers or telcoms to make sales. They don't even rely on discounts and competitive pricing. They definitely don't chase price/feature niches. More than any other company they rely on sheer consumer demand for their products. That means they would find it very hard to survive a "Windows Vista" period of ambivalence about their products. The trait is probably a long term liability. But, it is a version of level paying field, win by winning approach that produces bold product decisions.

All three are "cheats" by some standards, including (probably) the standards of the other two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I run my own XMPP server (prosody), yet use google apps for my domain; due to an annoying chain of dependencies, this means I can't use Google Photos.

To allow _other_ google users reach you at your non-google server, Talk+Hangouts have to be disabled in the google apps admin console -> Google+ doesn't work without Hangouts enabled -> Google Photos doesn't work without Google+ enabled.

The fact this happens seems to mean that google does _not_ want to play on a level field; but wants to build a walled garden.

<comment><USER6> Google Apps have always been a tack-on for many of Google's smaller services. Google+ was completely unavailable for Apps at first. Now Inbox is unavailable.

It's a fairly conservative product targeted primarily at organizations who value stability over new features. "A personal account with vanity address," while popular with geeks, is not really the intended use.

<comment><USER5> Do you have any suggested alternatives for free email hosting with BYO domain? I don't entirely trust myself to run an email server. Even if I do, are there trustworthy secondary MXs?

I also really like google voice; and am sad I can no longer call from inside gmail. I don't know of any other reliable services for completely free calls to USA.

<comment><USER7> >sad I can no longer call from inside gmail

How are you trying to do it? If I hit the search icon on the chat pane, I can type in a number and call from Google Voice. It opens a new Hangouts window, but that's what it's been doing for as long as I remember, and certainly the last year at least.

<comment><USER5> > How are you trying to do it? If I hit the search icon on the chat pane, I > can type in a number and call from Google Voice. It opens a new Hangouts > window, but that's what it's been doing for as long as I remember, and > certainly the last year at least.

If you run your own XMPP server, you have to disable google Talk, which disables the calling from gmail (in addition to much more)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _> [A specific company I won't call out explicitly] sucked contacts out of Gmail but refused to export contacts back out._

I'm guessing everybody read [A specific company] as "Facebook", but I know for sure of at least one other company, and possibly two, that it could refer to :-) In fact, now that I think about it, I can think of several candidates.

But let's talk about reciprocity. Who owns your contacts? You, or _Google_? If you want to export contacts out of Google's services, why should Google stop you just because the other service does not reciprocate? Sure, Google makes it easier than most, but isn't that also what their users wanted? If the user truly wants the other service to also export contacts as easily, that's between the user and that other service.

Now consider that Gmail is in the top 3 biggest email providers next to Yahoo and Hotmail/Live/Outlook/Whatever-it's-called now. Very likely it is now the biggest, and so they have _the_ biggest set of contacts data in the world. If any 3rd party service wants access to those contacts, Google wields a disproportionate amount of power over them, and as this post shows, is willing to apply it by "requiring reciprocity".

"Level Playing Field" indeed.

<comment><USER9> Interestingly, I see here a very similar spirit to the one of GPL - you only get to use our stuff if you share yours on the same terms. Many people avoid GPL exactly because of that. There are arguments though that this feature of GPL is what safeguards freedom, and I think one could try and make similar arguments in case of reciprocity here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The desire for a level playing field also partly explains why Chrome and > Android are so important. Without Chrome, we'd be at the mercy of Internet > Explorer or other web browsers when users want to get to Google

Except that Chrome download notices appear at the bottom of Google's homepage for non chrome users, or at least have in the past.

I see where Matt is coming from here but when you are dealing with Google as a competitor, rivals are going to try everything to get back market share. If Google is going to use its competitive advantage in search to push its other products why shouldn't anyone else?

</comment><comment><USER11> I liked it better when mega-corp didn't come with a side of self- righteousness.

<comment><USER12> amen. take my data, take my liberty, but you'll never take my healthy self doubt of your true motives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Google's attitude towards Windows Phone shows nicely how much they strive for leveling the playing field. Or we could look at Google Maps on mobile IE -- in WP 8, it is horrible, in GDR1 it works very well, all that's changed is the user agent.

<comment><USER14> What you say is very different from the release announcement of GDR1 which is "includes hundreds of enhancements for the mobile web".

When it comes to mobile IE performing poorly, I don't think you need to look further than the software itself.

<comment><USER13> The biggest 'improvement' they did to IE in GDR1 is faking user agents so mobile sites think it's an Android browser so the site appears correctly. At the moment, IE on WP does 100/100 in ACID3. It does not support HTML5 as well as Chrome on Android though - but I really doubt that that's the main reason why Google stuff does not work well on it (as the previous example shows it as well).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > _We've expressed the principle of "Don't be evil" from the early days of > Google._

The glory days of ancient past. How can anyone seriously defer to this moto in the context of modern day Google is beyond me.

</comment><comment><USER14> Well put, Matt. I take it it fell on deaf ears, given that Google users stopped communicating with me over XMPP before that and it has never worked again?

</comment><comment><USER16> Can anyone tell me how many things in this list are about a "level playing field" or "do no evil". If Apple or MS did even half of the things in this list, people would be screaming about it from rooftops a couple of decades later, but as Assange noted, Google seems to get a free pass.

Most of the Google search page area is now occupied by ads, or ads disguised as content

[http://searchengineland.com/google-results-too-ad- heavy-1662...](http://searchengineland.com/google-results-too-ad-heavy-166226)

Profiting off adware ads for downloads

[http://regmedia.co.uk/2014/08/15/firefox_dodgy_download.jpg](http://regmedia.co.uk/2014/08/15/firefox_dodgy_download.jpg)

Decreasing contrast in the background of ads, this especially hurts older people as ability to see contrast decreases with age, and the FTC found that almost half the people fail to notice that there are ads on the page, thus forcing products that are first in the organic results to pay Google for ads.

[http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-itor-maybe- not/](http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-itor-maybe-not/)

[http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google- intentional...](http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google- intentionally-trying-to-minimize-the-fact-that-these-are-ads/)

[http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/ftc-googles-ad- practice-i...](http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/ftc-googles-ad-practice-is- deceptive.html/?a=viewall)

Tracking the emails in the free Google Apps for Education and even paid Google Apps for Business to build ad profiles, making misleading statements to the public that they're not doing so, and then when it finally came to having to make statements to federal court, having to tell the truth about it and then claiming the consumer Gmail policy applied to Apps for Education data.

[http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht...](http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.html)

Paid inclusion for shopping search results

[http://marketingland.com/once-deemed-evil-google-now- embrace...](http://marketingland.com/once-deemed-evil-google-now-embraces- paid-inclusion-13138)

Ranking Google+ reviews over Yelp results even if the user explicitly searches for Yelp

[http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-complains- outranked-...](http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-complains-outranked- google-local-listings/111539/)

Conspiring to kill SkyHook(and succeeding) with its 500lb outsized influence like Microsoft used to, in order to gather wifi & user location data.

[http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook- la...](http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-lawsuit- motorola-Samsung)

Getting fined by FTC for violating Gmail users privacy by exposing their friends lists in Google Buzz in order to compete with Twitter

[http://www.netcompetition.org/antitrust/why- ftcs-22-5m-googl...](http://www.netcompetition.org/antitrust/why- ftcs-22-5m-google-privacy-fine-is-faux-accountability)

Tracking the physical location of Android phones for ad purposes without properly informing users and disabling things like Google Now if you disable the tracking.

[http://digiday.com/platforms/google- tracking/](http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/)

[http://www.datadrivenbusiness.com/google-quietly-testing- off...](http://www.datadrivenbusiness.com/google-quietly-testing-offline- store-visits-tracking)

Google employee accesses personal information of others. Google says it has fixed the issue, but how do we even know? Is there any legal safeguard against someone at Google reading your email?

[http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked- tee...](http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied- on-chats)

Tying Android App store to having Google search engine as default on Android, ensuring that alternative search engines cannot be shipped as default.

[http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/02/12/documents-shed- light-...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/02/12/documents-shed-light-on- google-rules-for-android/)

Stopping Acer from shipping Aliyun OS by threatening to pull the Play Store and Android beta access. Bonus points for enforcing this by the duplicitous moniker 'Open Handset Alliance' doublespeak

[http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/report-google- threate...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/report-google-threatened- acer-forced-it-to-dump-rival-os/)

Making people literally cry with the forced Google+ integration into Youtube and making confusing UX to make people share more than they want to, in order to compete with Facebook.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs) (warning, NSFW language)

Extracting petty revenge on CNET for googling(!) information on its CEO

[http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/](http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/)

Convicted in the courts for colluding with other tech firms in illegal non- poaching agreements

[http://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles- wage-...](http://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-fixing- cartel-involved-dozens-more-companies-over-one-million-employees/)

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the list, was it researched today or is this an ongoing passion of yours?

<comment><USER2> Given the 6 hours between the article's appearance and the list here I figure the best bet is on the research being done today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So if others are evil , it's okay to be evil because that's a level playing field? Maybe change it "Don't be Evil*" ?

Hangouts/XMPP , RSS, the big brother aspect of GA - No matter how you justify them they're never going to be good.

</comment><comment><USER19> It is important to read this in the context of republishing an internal memory.

It it interesting to see how to disagree with the company's direction and drive home a point.

Publishing openly is subtly communicating to the top brass at Google.

It is clear Matt finish a not excited about the direction Google is going re: standards. Thankfully, Microsoft is going the other direction.

<comment><USER2> > Publishing openly is subtly communicating to the top brass at Google.

It's not all that subtle. This is a pretty strong signal coming from someone as careful with words as Matt.

<comment><USER19> Do you know if he's back from his sabbatical?

<comment><USER2> It's been extended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I suspect publishing this post now is aimed as much at an internal Google audience as at external players.

Bearing that in mind, I think "a level playing field" is an excellent goal for Google to aspire to.

To say what Matt can't: if Google plays on a level playing field it makes them a much more attractive partner and supplier.

<comment><USER2> Why can't Matt say that? Effectively he is saying that. And saying it from his now-extended-to-2015 leave. It's a pretty powerful statement. And it makes me wonder if he's going to return to Google or move on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If they want to level the playing field they should properly support oauth and openid. That means letting me log into Google services with an external provider.

</comment><comment><USER22> >"Without Android, phone makers could shut Google out of mobile phones completely. Chrome and Android help ensure that users can get to Google without interference; they protect our users from other companies' potentially unlevel playing fields."

Isn't this just saying that Google won't block its own services on Android? There's no guarantee that Google won't block some other search engine. FWIW, I think the App Store / Google Play stores are the biggest obstacles to openness. They are literally determining what users can and cannot be run on their respective platforms.

<comment><USER23> >"Without Android, phone makers could shut Google out of mobile phones completely. Chrome and Android help ensure that users can get to Google without interference; they protect our users from other companies' potentially unlevel playing fields."

This quote just rings so incredibly hollow.

I challenge anyone to name _one_ mobile-OS (or OS in general) who has blocked Google servies ever. And no, not being the default is not blocking. First one to do so would be facing widespread consumer outrage, so I doubt anyone is even considering this.

Now turn it around, and ask if Google has ever blocked anything for its competitors (XMPP, apps on WP, non-Chrome browser access to Google-services, blocking non-Chrome browsers with Google-only DRM, non-Google advertising on Android, etc etc).

I think it's pretty obvious which one is need of having its playing field leveled, and it's not Google. Not by a mile.

<comment><USER24> > I challenge anyone to name one mobile-OS (or OS in general) who has blocked > Google servies ever.

Google Chrome on iOS uses a different engine because Apple controls what engine can be used by browsers. That's a restriction placed on Google - although the fact that Google happily uses a different engine on that platform is a pretty big hint that when they want the user data they'll compromise on stuff like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What about a level playing field for Hangouts and GTalk?

</comment><comment><USER26> To me, the biggest problem I have in my interactions with Google (and it's growing over time) is that I never feel like their customer. I don't pay them anything (now that they've sold Motorola, they don't make phones, and they don't seem to charge for the OS on the phone), they don't have products I can buy. They just... put stuff out for me to use, and make money off ads. So there's this rather disquieting mismatch between what I as a user want from them and what they do, because their money doesn't come from me, it comes from people who buy ads. And they need to put SOME effort into user satisfaction, because they need users to have someone to look at the ads that they sell, but there's still a mismatch between user wants and Google offerings. Google Reader is probably the canonical example -- yeah, it wasn't a widely used service, but the users it did have were devoted, and might even have paid to keep using it. But it didn't matter, as Google Reader didn't line up with how Google wanted to sell ads now. So it got the axe. And it's in those moments of powerlessness -- where you have no say over what Google does, because you're not its customer, you're just its user -- that Google loses its appeal. It's not evil, it may even be a level playing field. But that sort of user powerlessness makes me uncomfortable using Google stuff going forward.

</comment><comment><USER27> Google used to care about an open and interoperable web. Not any more. Most of their web apps suck in browsers that aren't Chrome and with no good reason considering most other browsers are completely capable. Google continues to advertise Chrome on www.google.com while not opening that same lucrative advertisent spot to anyone else. Level playing field my ass.

When he actually does something to level the field, I'll tune in. Until then it seems like Matt is ittle more than a PR drone these days.

<comment><USER2> > When he actually does something to level the field, I'll tune in. Until then > it seems like Matt is ittle more than a PR drone these days.

I think you are completely missing the point here. Matt is setting this thing out for the world to see, that is the employee equivalent of displaying your dis-satisfaction with how the company and its management reacted to your previous pleas. It's a pretty brave thing to do and it definitely is _not_ good PR for Google to have this thing out there.

What it does is make me respect Matt a bit more, rather than less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I would imaging reciprosity and level playing field would require Google's robots.txt to be an open free-for-all. I mean, since we're talking about embracing the open web. I Googled "is Google crawlable" and similar and that doesn't seem to be a thing. I checked the robots.txt and that seems to disallow a lot of stuff. Search, news, groups, images, etc. [1]

Google does a great job of taking the open web, repackaging it, slapping it up behind a (crawling) wall, extracting maximum cash from the result. It will always be able to suck in your content "think of the users!" but that'll generally be a 1-way street. Yes there are API's, but that's still a different relationship to "we crawl whatever we want, we put any content we want in our search results, because users".

Unrelated: Chrome (which I use and love) also had the added benefit of reducing the amount of money they'd be paying to Firefox for the search deal. Not a terrible outcome. It might even have paid for itself right there, but that's utter speculation.

[1] [http://www.google.com/robots.txt](http://www.google.com/robots.txt) \- seems to be far more disallow than allow

</comment><comment><USER29> So why doesn't XMPP federation work then?

<comment><USER30> Because voices other than Matt's prevailed, presumably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The comments (amazingly) have some insights - including someone who used his chat history to analyse his changing vocabulary and more - quite a fascinating idea for those who will live digital lives for decades.

But what seems to be missing is simpler - googles core function is search and until that is a level playing field we are all at the mercy of Google. I am not a reactionary "nationalise everything" but the biggest uses of global data surely surely must be public goods and treated as such?

</comment><comment><USER32> Everyone willingly liberates the non core parts of it's business. Google should apply these principles to search, support and ad-sense rev share data

</comment><comment><USER33> >If another search engine crawls the open web and returns better search results, people will switch to that new search engine immediately

I don't think people would ditch Google so easily or quickly.

</comment><comment><USER34> While i like the approach described by that post, many things are hardly something that is applied by them or others in RL, money is what drives decisions.

</comment><comment><USER35> OT, but on the European Google antitrust investigation on search results, I am thinking of a tutorial as a settlement.

</comment><comment><USER36> After all is said and done, Google is still the fairest company and the Google ecosystem is the most open. Seriously, can you imagine a world with out Google? Can you imagine a world were we're at the mercy of Apple & Microsoft? I just can't stomach that with Apple & Microsoft you have to pay to program your own device! You can dislike and criticize Google all you want this doesn't change the facts.

<comment><USER26> Microsoft and Apple have a much, much longer track record of playing well with others than Google's, which is practically nonexistent.</comment></comment>


The Political Ad Wars Come to Snapchat - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/live/republican-debate-election-2016-cleveland/the-political-ad-wars-come-to-snapchat/ <comment><AUTHOR> "A new political ad unit has arrived ahead of the Republican candidates' debate: the Snapchat filter."</comment>


Ask HN: Does your team use an internal wiki? - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN,
I was wondering if any of you had experience with setting up and running an internal wiki as a team knowledge repository.
My team right now uses OneNote to store all of our tribal knowledge in, It's however recently become quite inconvenient, as many of us are moving to either Linux or Macs. Bonus points if it uses a popular syntax such as Markdown. Even more extra points if you can edit the content through a good text editor like vim.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> We use Redmine[1], which has a wiki plus a whole lot more. We use the "issues" feature heavily as well as the wiki feature.

The non-technical staff use the repository browsing a lot - the engineers use SVN/git direct access... the non-technical staff only needs browsing access so Redmine covers that.

In the past, I've used Trac[2] as well. Redmine is heavily influenced by Trac, but at the time I made the choice for our company, Redmine supported multiple project a _whole_ lot better.

In the more distant past, we used Twiki[3], which is wiki-only. It has a lot of functionality and is a nice wiki (I still like its markup best).

Twiki is very nice in that it keeps its pages as text in a repository (RCS when I used it, probably still). One thing that bothers me about Redmine/Trac/MediaWiki is that the pages are in a database so, if you have a problem with your Wiki, you have a _very_ hard time getting your notes out of the wiki to see how you fixed it last time. :-/

A different engineering group at a former employer used MediaWiki[4] which obviously is a very competent wiki as well.

[1] <http://www.redmine.org/>

[2] <http://trac.edgewall.org/>

[3] <http://twiki.org/>

[4] <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki>

</comment><comment><USER3> We use gitit [1]. It supports a number of syntax formats, including Markdown. It supports a number of revision control systems to use as the file store, such as git. I very rarely use the web interface, as I prefer to use the wiki from the command line, using vim for editing. Use of git also allows team members to easily clone the repository and use it even without access to the server.

Note that you can also edit text in Firefox textboxes with the editor of your choice using the "It's All Text!" add-on [2]. I have my browser configured to use gvim, so I can use vim to edit everything from emails and wiki content to this HN comment. :)

[1] <http://gitit.net/> [2] <https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh gosh, I've always wanted something like "It's all text", but I never bothered looking if anything of the sort existed. This certainly removes the need for having to store the files on disk in such a way that they're accessible to gvim, awesome!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've used Gollum (<https://github.com/github/gollum>) which is a pretty straight-forward little wiki and works well in a small company.

<comment><AUTHOR> I discovered that apparently Gollum isn't very well supported on Windows (might be more specific to actually), but at least you can view the end- product in GitHub, if you can't run the server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It can be very hard to get started with a wiki - content either isn't added, or isn't up to date, so people lose trust in the info in there. This has a negative feedback effect on people writing entries too. In addition, writing articles is hard as people feel expected (perhaps from wikipedia) to having to write detailed, canonical articles.

I have had success numerous times introducing an internal blog as a team knowledge repository, blogging anything interesting to it. With a search function, and making anyone an editor, it has many of the same features with a number of benefits:

\- people can comment and ask questions

\- signing up the development mailing list as an email subscriber ensures everyone sees new info as it is posted

\- people blog about code issues, and tips and trick, not just 'how complicated feature X works'

Honestly, it works a treat. Blogging is the mechanism by which we share programming knowledge on the internet, why shouldn't it be the method we use inside our workplaces?

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting approach, thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My team has an XWiki. It works well enough, and there are a number of plugins and things to get XWiki pages to update in vim or emacs through a Perl RPC library. I don't like it as much as Confluence (paid), but it's at least syntactically the same. The Perl library you use for scripting is actually the Confluence library.

Mediawiki is OK, but the granularity of access control isn't there for what you could need in the software world.

The corporate overlords use Sharepoint, and also some Confluence. If you host all your OneNotes online, you can have OneNote sync them. That might be your quickest way to share your tribal knowledge. This is an obviously short term fix because otherwise every new employee will have to add N synchronized OneNotes. I haven't found a way to import a OneNote into XWiki short of printing to PDF and importing again.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yep, we have a GitHub repo and use its Wiki quite a bit. (Along with shared Google Docs)

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually just realized that you can clone the wiki hosted for each repo in Git onto your disk and just edit it from there rather than having to do everything through the web interface. I think running the gollum server will also host that wiki locally if for some reason you want to read it locally through the browser. That's pretty neat!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My last two jobs both used Mediawiki in different capacities. The current company is moving from Mediawiki to Mindtouch. It is similar to Mediawiki but more geared towards corporate environments. The editor is completely wysiwyg as well.. no more markup which is great for the non-geeks in the company.

</comment><comment><USER9> Our team uses dokuwiki, which is much more lightweight than mediawiki and serves our purposes quite well.

<http://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki>

</comment><comment><USER10> We use a wiki and it's very useful. We have even moved the project documentation to it from SVN.

</comment><comment><USER11> We've used moinmoin, which is nice.

Can't use vim.

Maybe Dropbox for teams?</comment>


Free printable origami face mask to protect yourself and others from Coronavirus - <AUTHOR> http://www.printablefacemask.com <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22750018](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22750018)</comment>


Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ <comment><USER2> Did you mean this?

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

You linked to the main page!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's odd! It was a perfectly good link when I submitted it. Thank you for the correction.</comment></comment>


GLab: A Gitlab CLI Tool - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/profclems/glab <comment><AUTHOR> Glab is a simple and elegant GitLab CLI tool written in Go (golang) for creating and managing issues, merge requests, and a lot more... Do give it a try. Your feedback is much appreciated.

[https://github.com/profclems/glab](https://github.com/profclems/glab)

[https://gitlab.com/profclems/glab](https://gitlab.com/profclems/glab)</comment>


Donations and Women in Tech Panels Are Not a Diversity Strategy - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/donations-and-women-in-tech-panels-are-not-a-diversity-strategy-do-better-c3c51022a916 <comment><USER4> I don't understand why anyone would need a "diversity strategy". Just hire whoever seems like they would do the best job, and then spend the remainder of the apparently monumental effort that you would have spent executing your "diversity strategy" on improving your bottom line. It's ridiculous that we focus on the racial and gender makeup of applicants instead of just judging them on their accomplishments.

<comment><USER5> Do you believe there are any disparities in demographics between the general population and a given field (such as tech)? What demographic do you belong to? How do you think these disparities might affect society as a whole? If there are disparities, what, if anything, do you think should be done to lessen the disparity in demographics?

Edit to add: If you choose to reply, please include attempts at answering all of the questions. Note there's nothing in this comment that assumes that hiring is the appropriate (or only) place something (if anything) should be done. It's easy to dismiss this as only "yes, there are disparities, but it shouldn't be fixed here", or "equal opportunity". That's not the end of the conversation. What does a better solution look like?

<comment><USER6> > _If there are disparities, what, if anything, do you think should be done to > lessen the disparity in demographics?_

Target inequality of _opportunity_ , and do not assume that differences in _outcome_ are prima facie evidence of differences in opportunity.

In other words, the pipeline is the place to solve this.

<comment><USER5> What does that look like in implementation? How do you ensure and measure its effectiveness? What rates of improvement should be acceptable?

<comment><USER7> I'd suggest that a starting point could be to make sure that those hired roughly reflect the diversity of the talent pool being hired from.

If they 'match' \- then it's a roughly good indicator that the hiring process 'is fair'.

As far as I know - this is generally true: the ratio of female engs. in the valley is roughly commensurate with the ratio of females graduating from Comp Sci. Which is actually positive news.

Now - that's nowhere near the whole story, but at least it's a crude basic metric.

<comment><USER5> I tend to agree with you on the starting point and that it's a rough indicator.

 _that 's nowhere near the whole story_

I'm glad you acknowledge this. It's a story that tends to get abandoned after looking at the types of metrics you describe. I don't think that's what you're doing here, by the way. Just the fact you bring it up makes it clear you don't.

<comment><USER7> Thanks. But I often feel that that core metric is way too often overlooked by those lamenting injustice.

The fact that 'the first rough metric' is pretty decent, I think speaks to the general fairness and goodwill in the tech industry.

I've worked in tech my whole life - and without a doubt the people are pretty good. It can be a little guy-ish sometimes, and there are some bad- actors/companies, but I reject the idea that Tech is bad for women. Google and Facebook are probably 95% Obama voters, and progressive on almost every issue. To scream bigotry among this group is just too rich.

So yes - the story does not end there, and there are clearly more obvious problems as you move up in management - but I also don't see an entire industry that's in some kind of trauma.

Interesting tidbit: a survey of tech workers shows that men point primarily to the 'funnel problem' whereas women point to the 'lack of role models'. Which I thought was telling, and hints at an opportunity for improvement.

<comment><USER5> I'm a bit taken aback by your comment here. I was encouraged by the lack of partisanship that began our exchange, as that so often does nothing but further polarize discussions. There are indications that you're looking for a more nuanced discussion, but phrases like "those lamenting injustice" and "to scream bigotry among this group is just too rich" makes it harder, rather than easier, for those that don't already agree with you to be willing to enter a discussion: it takes extra effort and good faith to attempt to engage in substantive discussion on contentious issues (rather than fall into the echo chamber everyone decries).

 _a survey of tech workers shows that men point primarily to the 'funnel problem' whereas women point to the 'lack of role models'._

Interesting. Do you have a reference to this survey at hand?

 _Which I thought was telling, and hints at an opportunity for improvement._

I'm not sure if I'm particularly dense (though I don't dispute this might be the case), but I think people generally assume that their intent in statements like this are much clearer than what is actually the case. I have a hard time knowing how to interpret what you mean, or what opportunity you see. Is it that you think there should be more role models for women? That the lack of role models for women indicates that there just aren't that many women in tech and that's because women aren't generally interested in tech so there really isn't a problem? That there's a mismatch between how men and women perceive the problem that needs to be addressed? If that's the case, do you think one perception is more accurate than the other? My comment to which you initially responded asked for specifics on implementation and measurement on addressing disparities in tech. I'm still interested in hearing for details rather than generalities.

<comment><USER7> "I was encouraged by the lack of partisanship that began our exchange"

 _There is no 'partisanship' in my comments_. I'm just making a comment. That's all.

"I have a hard time knowing how to interpret what you mean"

 _I mean exactly what I say_. There's nothing to interpret.

There is a lot of noise in the press about 'injustice' in terms of gender and race in the Silicon Valley - when, as a baseline - the Valley employs almost exactly the people that are fed into it. When you read articles about such issues - they generally do not refer to the fact that the % make up of the Valley is almost identical to the % makeup of those with relevant qualifications.

So - as a 'starting point' for any concern, it should be noted that by the easiest and most obvious measure - the Valley seems to be doing a pretty good job. Maybe even a great job.

I think this is unfair: a lot of voices 'screaming bigotry' in the press lack this perspective, and instantly distort the scenario by taking the assumptive position that 'there is inherent unfairness in the valley because only x% of their Engineers are of minority group ABC' \- when in fact, it's actually pretty fair, given the talent pool they draw from.

I can't say that I've ever read an article critiquing the Valley on gender representation - that ever made mention of this fact.

So even though there is an issue to be addressed - it's also being misrepresented.

When I say 'there's more to the story' \- I'm not offering a consolation or token to 'the other side' of the debate. I don't view these things as having sides. I'm simply stating that I think there's more to it. That's all.

I'm not debating anyone or taking any sides.

As for the 'male/female' perspective - I wish I had that reference for you - <USER2> read it relatively recently, and the data point really popped out at me, which is why I remembered it.

I'm a guy - so 'lack of role models' is something I would never consider as a possibility for 'why I wouldn't want to work in tech'. So, knowing that so many girls feel that way, make me think about the issue differently.

How can this be helpful? Well, for one, obviously by making sure that the 'stories' of female engineers are told, that there is visibility etc. - <USER3> is kind of a no-brainer, one that really should not be contentious.

But there are other issues. The Canadian Navy did a study (long ago) where they found that when ships deployed with very few women on board, that it was stressful for them. But when there was a 'critical mass' of them (I think like 8%), then they seemed to get along a lot better. So, this 'critical mass' concept might be useful in planning: if a 'guy founded' startup grows, they may consider reaching that 'critical mass' as an absolute minimum for female participation. Most companies don't think about gender issues until headcount gets larger, so maybe once they start growing, they can try hard to get 'a good group' of girls in, beyond that threshold, so that they don't feel isolated. The same could very well apply to minority groups - i.e. maybe there is a 'critical mass' below which many feel isolated. Black and Latino Engineers are pretty rare. This could be an issue there.

The 'role model' issue may be also strongly related to the lower participation of females in upper management. But that's a whole other can of worms, and I've already written too much so ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there a refutation to the argument that all these "diversity for diversity's sake" programs, this sort of frantic insistence upstream to achieve diversity at all costs, produces some less than qualified candidates?

In every institution I've ever been at, people talked about how to recruit more women, but in practice this meant grabbing the first woman who applied and using them as a prop to show how diverse they were. Professors have blatantly admitted to my female friends that they were being used for that purpose.

<comment><USER4> Yes, hiring people based on their race/gender creates a perverse framework of incentives. A good example of some of the problems that arise from valuing "diversity" over actual merits is Susan Fowler. Her bosses treated her very badly because she was a woman, by refusing her requests to transfer and giving her bad marks on her performance exams, and the reason they did it was because of their incentive to appear "diverse". I don't mean to excuse their behavior, it was horrible, but maybe things would have been somewhat better if the system didn't reward her bosses for having a woman on their team (and subsequent disincentive for them leaving).

<comment><USER9> > the reason they did it was because of their incentive to appear "diverse"

This seems to radically mischaracterize the issues in that case.

<comment><USER10> It seems to match her original blog post.

"It turned out that keeping me on the team made my manager look good, and I overheard him boasting to the rest of the team that even though the rest of the teams were losing their women engineers left and right, he still had some on his team."

(from [https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on- on...](https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very- strange-year-at-uber))

That's not the worst thing she reported, but it's there, and it's definitely very bad. Would you elaborate on what mischaracterization you see?

<comment><USER9> A characterization that the origin of the problem was Uber paying too much attention to diversity statistics.

<comment><USER4> I think it's very reasonable to say that the reason it made her bosses look good to have a woman on their team was directly because of the push for diversity and inclusion in the tech world. Why else would they value such a thing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you want to convince people it is in their own best interest to invest significantly in diversity, it's not likely the intro to this article will cut it for most.

The first paper mentions that they only found a correlation, however contradicts themselves in attempting to turn this into causation, despite mentioning that correlation != causation: "While correlation does not equal causation (greater gender and ethnic diversity in corporate leadership doesn't automatically translate into more profit), the correlation does indicate that when companies commit themselves to diverse leadership, they are more successful."

It doesn't seem like this was checked for backwards-causation (companies may be more likely to start prioritizing diversity when they are succeeding, but not when they are failing), among many other potential confounding variables, and it seems that they were very intent on trying to prove their outcome regardless of what kind of data they had, where the article starts out with "We know intuitively that diversity matters. It's also increasingly clear that it makes sense in purely business terms." I didn't check everything from the second link, but this appears to be a very common pattern.

The third link attempts to appeal to the same sense, however goes much further, stating: "it was not "diversity" (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team's intelligence, but simply having more women." This would seem to prove far too much, and is obviously not a generalizable result unless you sincerely believe that replacing all men with women will make your company perform better. I'm unable to view the full text or data from this paper due to the paywall.

If you're concerned about the proportion of groups such as women in tech, the right time to get them interested is when they are very young. Not during or after college. With a baseline of significantly more men in tech, you cannot reasonably expect to achieve figures such as a 1:1 ratio of female to male employees. With that said, the author seems to be focusing more on problems after people enter the workplace. There may be a lot of issues here, but I think solutions need to focus on deeper underlying problems such as culture, rather than single bottleneck processes such as promotions (and that which leads up to them).

</comment><comment><USER12> The first paragraph is her premise. On first read, I uncharitably dismissed it - "yeah, tech companies should be tripping over themselves to achieve diversity so they can take advantage of this.... uh, correlation with.... a hot 35% bonus....in the mission-critical field of "probability of "performing well""" (all quotes intentional).

Then I charitably followed the links in the paragraph. The scientific studies are underwhelming (in terms of convincing a tech company to do something). The mckinsey article cheapens itself towards the end ("The unequal performance of companies in the same industry and the same country implies that diversity is a competitive differentiator shifting market share toward more diverse companies." That implication is terrible)

It's not hard to understand how diversity in the workplace might challenge our minds more, keep us more professional (in company culture and hiring practice), improve fitness in whatever other ways. But it's all conceptual, and until there's more scientific evidence, the literature has to settle for being obnoxious - light on information, heavy on telling the reader what to think before and after said information (tabloid style).

</comment><comment><USER13> Reading the existing comments on this thread, if it represents an accurate sample size of the type of culture in tech: this is why as a woman I want to drop out.

<comment><USER4> Ironically, I've known women who've wanted to drop out of tech culture because of the massive push for "inclusion" and "diversity". Nobody wants to be a diversity hire, and nobody likes seeing people propped up beyond their ability because of their gender or race. A lot of these people just want to be treated normally, and you don't get that by giving people special treatment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The action points in the article:

      1. Treat the women and people of color already working at your
         company well, including paying them equitably and preparing them
         for promotions.
      2. Overhaul your interview process.  Hire programmers that have
         the skills the company needs.
      3. Institute onboarding.  Make sure that everyone has the
         information they need to succeed at their jobs.

None of my employers have ever prepared _anyone_ for promotions, regardless of sex or color. Companies would have to do this at all before questioning whether they do it equitably.

Most of the prospective employers I have approached regarding job openings have had a horrible interview process. And I would suggest hiring for _aptitude_ rather than existing _skills_. Almost everyone focuses on "what have you already done?" rather than "what could you do if we hired you?" It's maddening. Companies can barely test for skill, and I have only seen _one_ that even tried to assess aptitude.

That would be great if companies maintained persistent records of internal collaboration. Unfortunately, I have anecdotally observed a trend of decreasing job-specific training, and less robust internal technical documentation. Some companies don't even have a stepwise guide for doing a manual build of their main software product after getting the latest source.

In short, those are good suggestions, but they don't need to be specifically targeted by sexes and colors. Everyone would benefit if companies did this. So why don't they? It seems like a sane and decent company would become diverse without needing to make any specific effort to do so, whereas a dysfunctional company would see its problems manifest in many different symptoms, with monoculture being just one of them.

</comment><comment><USER15> Women should not get preference because they are women.

<comment><USER16> That is an obnoxious way to reply to someone who expressed a personal concern. If you can't be respectful of others, please don't comment here.

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13716297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13716297) and marked it off-topic.

Edit: it looks like you've been using HN exclusively to comment on politics. That's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't use HN this way.</comment></comment>


Airbnb.Work - <AUTHOR> http://aaaaaaa.co/

<comment><USER2> Looks like a parody. Tho I bet it'd be pretty interesting to learn how leather has been made for thousands of years. Scary how short industrial history is compared to village history. Makes you wonder which will survive.

<comment><AUTHOR> It service to pay for job experience or get small salary. Intersting to do something by hand

<comment><USER2> Why would you use the word "fucking" in your title if it's for real?

<comment><AUTHOR> No. I am in russia. Please vote up

<comment><USER2> i did. though looks like people flagged your post. most likely jealous. but i'd also try to explain your vision more since it definitely is challenging people to think differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Um, what is this?

<comment><USER4> Looks like a rent-a-freelancer thing, very much in progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Airbnb for fucking All<"

Nice.

Why is this on page one?

I advise flagging, this is obviously spam.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is 100% phishing as it uses crowdt site to reap your FB details.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not need your fb details at all. Fb use only for contact and for reliable posting. It godaddy hosting [Next time go to heroku]

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Please take this down from page 1 of HN.

</comment><comment><USER8> And how did it get to #5?

<comment><USER2> Did you read it? Its kind of funny. It's so rediculous maybe people get loopy at night and vote odd stuff up.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> AAAAAAAA re-imagines the possibilities of building work experience through digital marketplace. Also it aim to be airbnb for all</comment>