Solar Beats Coal on U.S. Jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-16/solar-beats-coal-on-u-s-jobs <comment><USER2> Requiring more labor to produce less energy is not a good thing.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. More energy from less labor is desirable, all else being equal. This Bloomberg article, like most articles about solar/coal jobs, neglects to note that American coal generation is declining and solar is rapidly growing. In the solar numbers you are seeing huge numbers of temporary construction jobs. For coal all the temporary construction jobs are in the past.

Considering jobs per megawatt hour over the full life cycle of generating systems, utility scale solar PV generation is more efficient (produces fewer jobs) than legacy coal generation. Residential rooftop solar is less efficient (produces more jobs) than coal generation, per MWh. That also goes unmentioned in most reporting on "solar jobs."</comment></comment>


It's Not Just Apple vs Android - <AUTHOR> http://andycroll.com/2013/03/15/its-not-just-apple-vs-android/ <comment><USER2> While its indeed not an zero-sum game where we have a clear good guy and a clear bad guy, there are some clear good outcomes. Lets call them mini- victories.

The patent fight is one of them. Rounded corners, button less interface, menu areas outside the screen. All those are of practical purpose and should never have been allowed to be design patented. Same goes for basic iconic figures for applications, a table view interface, slide to unlock and any "natural" gestures. Then there are FRAND patents, where a clear model for deciding prices would help in making the market more predictable for new ventures.

If we look at DRM, lockdown and DMCA, we also have a mini-victory that we need to fight over. Here we have a moral argument that the device owner should be in control and not Apple, Google or Samsung. Consumers need to get a win here.

I could mention that some actors in all this are behaving worse than others, and if one had to pick one evil over the others then I know where I would lean. But that is just a secondary issue in all this. Primarily, consumers and new actors on the phone market need to win. Those are the true "good guys" in the fight.

</comment><comment><USER3> What he and the Gruber peice he references (did he seriously say Gruber isn't an Apple Cheerleader?!) fail to mention is trend.

 _The trend is your friend_ , one of the first things anyone who's suffered a trader learns. It's not a case of how high or low something is, but where it is going to be relative to it's current place.

Press and Markets get this (the former to a lesser extent true) but the fear is that Apple have had their Halcyon days. Originally Apple didn't need to worry about such issues as apps, they had the first phone device with a web browser that people really spoke about liking. Heck they didn't even have GPS dispite most feature phones in the UK having it with maps.

A lot of analyists are asking, rightly so, why is Apple able to keep making such money, now the market is cramped. Want a better camera, buy the 920, want a better screen? Buy the HTC, want a larger phone, buy the S4, want a smaller phone buy the. Hell I don't even know, but you get where I'm going with this.

The brand of the iPhone people fear to be falling. In the old days of Windows 3.1 domination, the software took months to years to write. Most of them now adays have little if anything more than weeks of platform specific code. The _alternate_ marketplace is huge, due to the size of the global market place. Hell a friend was just telling me how he thinks he'll make a profit porting to the new blackberry, despite it having very low uptake here in London.

These notions lend people to conclude that what is currently happening with Apple might not be sustainable. Gruber has been consistently wrong the last few months (in fact he is always as he predicts little but Apple growth) with regards to the decrease in share price and failure to develop new market share.

tldr; It might not be Apple vs Google. But neither are expanding their userbase rapidily, without encrouging on the other.

<comment><USER4> It is the ecosystem that Apple sells, not the hardware. People buy Apple because they know the handset will be supported for a specific period of time, that every developer wants to sell on iOS and works hard to be there, and that they can walk into an Apple store and get support any day they want.

For the hacker, most of these things are irrelevant, but for Joe-Schmo who wants to put minimal effort forward when managing their digital life, the iPhone is the pinnacle of abstraction.

Apple makes money because they sell the promise of a long, comfortable relationship and they fulfill it time and again. Even with Samsung, will I be able to update my s4 beyond Jellybean? The answer is a firm "maybe", but I know 100% that my iPhone will get updates for years.

That's why Apple makes money, because they sell peace of mind.

<comment><USER5> True, and that peace of mind can be appealing to hackers as well. We only have so many hours in the day after all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sure there is no good-guy and bad-guy here. But there is a better guy, and a worse guy, and that largely depends on what you value most.

For me, the tactics of Apple using legal methods to try to squash competition are a huge red flag, because I happen to think that the consumer is going to pay for that.

You can think that Apple defending its rights is going to benefit the consumer long-term by allowing Apple to provide innovation. But my viewpoint is that Apple can not compete anymore, and is resorting to legal tactics to fight competition. And that (if they had won) they would have a lock-in in a growing and very important market segment (high end smartphones).

Luckily the "good guys" have largely won.

It is just a matter of point of view.

<comment><USER7> > For me, the tactics of Apple using legal methods to try to squash > competition are a huge red flag, because I happen to think that the consumer > is going to pay for that.

Because nobody ever heard of a mobile phone company suing the competition to limit their ability to compete before right? I mean before Apple V Samsung it was unheard of.

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2003456/Nokia...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2003456/Nokia- finally-claims-multi-million-dollar-victory-Apple-breaching-46-patents.html)

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8460899.stm>

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/04/microsoft-m...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/04/microsoft- motorola-android-patent-lawsuit)

I do agree with you that competition benefits the consumer. A vibrant Android ecosystem is in the interests of iPhone users like me. But the Apple lawsuit was never going to stop anyone else making modern smartphones. That's not what it was about, which is why despite a (currently) $0.5Bn settlement in their favour Apple hansn't gone on to sue anyone else. Apple were very clear about the reasons why they sued Samsung and their objectives, and their behaviour has been consistent with that.

<comment><USER6> Sure, but those are not design-related patents, or natural-gesture patents, or for that matter designs based on principles being part of human society for centuries ("slide to unlock" anyone?)

"Nokia finally claims multi-million dollar victory over Apple for breaching up to 46 patents"

"Camera maker Kodak has said it will sue Apple and Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of the iPhone and Blackberry, over technology used in their handsets."

I do not condone those actions. I just think that Apple is here the "worse- guy", opening a very smelly can of worms just because of animosity towards Android ([http://9to5mac.com/2013/01/17/google-ceo-larry-page-on- steve...](http://9to5mac.com/2013/01/17/google-ceo-larry-page-on-steve-jobs- thermonuclear-war-how-well-is-that-working-for-them))

And yes, Microsoft is an even worse bad-guy (but largely irrelevant in the smartphone sector), that is why I have not (directly) spent a penny on their products in over 15 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Nokia (with Microsoft) make beautiful hardware and Windows Phone is lush, > but for some reason is not getting the market love its quality deserves.

Two points here:

First, it pains me to see MS lumped with Nokia. I'll be clinging to my N9 for a very long time yet (and probably only move on when Ubuntu or Firefox phones are compelling). I miss Maemo/MeeGo.

Second, the reason which MS doesn't get the love which its quality deserves (let's accept that it deserves a lot of love for the sake of this argument) is that Microsoft owns Skype. Telcos aren't huge fans of Skype, as a rule--it doesn't quite jive with their values. For Windows Phone, which integrates Skype by default, to really take off in the marketplace, we need to see the founding of a telco which doesn't do anything BUT data as their subscription model. With no voice fees to compete with Skype's inclusion on the phone, there will be no reason for telcos to marginalize the platform.

<comment><USER9>
      First, it pains me to see MS lumped with Nokia. I'll be clinging to my N9 for a very long time yet (and probably only move on when Ubuntu or Firefox phones are compelling). I miss Maemo/MeeGo.

Same here: I'm still clinging to my 2 year old N900, which I still consider a great phone. When I bought it I knew that the patform is in a dead end, but I got it anyway and never regretted it.

In fact I still have a brand new N9 in a box in reserve. That's in case that the current phone moves into a state beyond repair.

What is most interesting is that my pretty ancient clunker feels much more snappy then more modern smart phones after 6 month, apart from a couple scratches on the screen it looks and feels still rather fresh.

<comment><USER8> I love my N900! It's on my shelf as a backup phone. Ours aren't all that uncommon in terms of Maemo users' stories, as I understand it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Feels a little bit as if it should be filed under "yes but obvious".

When you can find large groups of people who will tell you how much they love their Android phone and other large groups of people who tell you how much they love their iPhone, it should be obvious that this isn't a one size fits all situation.

The one thing he doesn't say (possibly because it's also obvious) is that whatever side you're on, you should probably celebrate the situation as the many and varied levels of competitions that exist are driving innovation and we're all benefiting from that.

<comment><USER11> Obvious to some of us, perhaps, but fanboy wars continue to rage in tech news comments, so there are still many who aren't getting the message.

<comment><USER12> I used to be a bit like that around 15 years ago, then I learned to appreciate technology for what it is, regardless who does it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think that's necessarily the conversation telcos are having regarding Skype, Facetime, etc. Skype probably is hated because of bandwidth issues but that is not the reason for the hate.

Look, Telco love for Android is around the fact that Android handsets are virtually under their control. They can do with it as they please - bloatware, ads, etc., Android also filled the lower end market with cheaper phones retaining the same functionality while Apple only caters to certain segments.

Telcos don't love iOS. iOS is popular with customers and iOS sells. Hence, Telcos are left with no choice but to support Apple and show their love for Apple.

Microsoft on the other hand is treated like a step child essentially because they want to go with the Apple way in not letting Telcos control their handsets while not having the customer love as of now. The only single reason why MS is still in the game is because Nokia stepped in to save their butts with beautiful hardware. Yes, it's a chicken and egg issue for MS as of now but I think if they hang in there, they will eventually start getting respectable number of apps and succeed as a platform. Not to mention, Nokia releasing cheap phones as well.

</comment><comment><USER14> _Please_! Saying "Apple vs Android" is nonsense, you are comparing two things that are completly different! It's either "iOS vs Android" or "Apple vs Google".

<comment><USER15> While that's usually true, in this case it should be "Apple vs every company involved with Android (plus Nokia)". That's not as catchy, though.

<comment><USER14> I understand that. It's just that I hear so many people making the confusion and it irritates me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> While I can see the argument here (and yes, it's valid), how is it any different from them promoting either Android or Apple, where with just a few taps you can download Skype?

Same scenario really - just slightly less convenient.

<comment><USER17> What happens if a telco doesn't want Skype in the version of the Apple App Store or Google Play Store their customers see? It's simple and straightforward. They make a phone call and it's done. Maybe some grumbling if the other store doesn't have the same restriction.

Now what happens if they want to call Microsoft about Skype in the Windows Phone store? I don't know, but I do know that the conversation wouldn't be straightforward or simple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Am I the only one who would love to own an iPhone and an Android and use both? I wish that was easier to pull off.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is he calling "Nexus" a Samsung brand?

<comment><USER15> In the same way that Droid is a Motorola brand. Officially, Droid is a Verizon brand, and Nexus is a Google brand, but other companies make the phones. In the case of Nexus, half of the models were made by Samsung.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> From Gruber's article:

>By profit share, on the other hand, according to Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley, last year Apple took 69 percent of the handset industry's profits; Samsung took 34. For just the last quarter, the numbers were 72 percent for Apple, 29 for Samsung. You will note that both the annual and quarterly numbers total more than 100 percent; that is because all other handset makers, combined, are losing money

>That's a statement of fact, in a Reuters news (not opinion) story, about a company with 70 percent (and judging by last quarter, growing) of the industry's profits

I would love to see such a narrative written about Microsoft's server platform.

How much profit does Windows Server take in the server OS market? How much IIS take in the web server market? What about ASP.NET vs. Java, Ruby or whatever? Or Visual Studio vs. Eclipse and the rest in the IDE market? They're beating free(as in beer) tools and making a huge profits. Their revenue from the Server & Tools division is about 20 billion a year.

If iOS is beating Android, why can't Windows Server be considered beating Linux by the same metric?

<comment><USER21> 69+34==103%

<comment><USER22> >You will note that both the annual and quarterly numbers total more than 100 percent; that is because all other handset makers, combined, are losing money.

<http://daringfireball.net/2013/03/ceding_the_crown></comment></comment></comment>


On how to pick goats from cars: The Monty Hall Problem - <AUTHOR> http://garry.posterous.com/on-how-to-pick-goats-from-cars <comment><USER2> This never made _intuitive_ sense to me until I heard it rephrased this way:

In front of you are 1002 doors. You pick a door, and then Monty Hall opens 1000 doors to reveal goats. You have the option to pick the remaining door or stick with your original choice. Which should you do?

<comment><USER3> I've always thought the combining doors way of explaining this made the most sense - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem#Combining_do...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem#Combining_doors)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> After a _lot_ of brain twisting it sinks in.. and I do probability for living!

For doubters: Before the door is opened by the host, you are less likely to have chosen the right one(with prob 1/3). Once he opens the door, he eliminates one "bad door". Now, given that you were less likely to have chosen the right one in the first place and one wrong one has been removed, it is highly likely that the residual door is the right one.

<comment><USER5> Right, so the first choice is door 1, and the host reveals that door 3 is a goat.

The decision to switch or not is really a decision between door 1 and door 2. At this point isn't your first guess completely irrelevant?

I've heard this problem and the reasoning before, and for some reason I can't get myself to believe that switching is better.

<comment><USER6> There are two possibilities when you pick door 1: either you've picked a door with the prize behind it (33%) or you've picked a door with a goat behind it (67%).

Assume you stick. In that case, you have a 33% chance you've picked the right door, as before. Opening another door doesn't change whether you've picked the right door or not originally.

Assume you switch. In the case you've picked a door with a goat originally (67%), you will necessarily switch to the door with the prize. In the case you've picked a door with the car originally (33%), you will necessarily switch to a door with a goat. Therefore switching gives you a 67% chance of picking the door with the prize.

Another interesting strategy to consider is "randomize" - what if you picked randomly between the two remaining doors? Then you'd have a 50% of getting the prize, since you're selecting randomly between two doors, one of which you know contains the prize.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Imagine a similar but slightly different scenario: We now have two contestants: Mr A and Mr B. Mr A is the contestant in the original story. He gets to pick a door. The host then opens a door with a goat (and removes it from the stage). Then Mr A gets to choose whether to keep his door or open the third.

Now the second contestant, Mr B, joins the show. He has not seen anything prior and has no knowledge of Mr A or the other door previously removed from stage. All he sees is two doors. He has the option of opening one of the two.

Mr A has 2/3 chance of switching door and coming out with a car. Whereas Mr B has 1/2 chance (from his perspective) of picking either door and coming out with a car.

I think the main problem why so many people have a hard time grasping the solution is that they're looking at the probability as Mr B and ignoring the extra information they do have as Mr A.

<comment><USER8> Seriously, I had one of my friends ask me this question and I was stymied too !! Neway, the 1002 thing is really intuitive and I definitely agree that we think from the perspective of Mr.B and the point of the matter is that the host removes all the "bad" doors !

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> classic teaser. If you extend the problem to n doors and you're shown all but one, I think it helps the intuition.

Years ago I recall a lunch conversation with a group of mathematicians, some with PhDs in statistics, that was quite lively.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is also explained well by Kevin Spacey in the movie 21.

<comment><USER11> Not really. That was just enough to get me to read the Wikipedia article to figure out what the heck they were talking about in that movie. It made the student sound super smart, but most people I know didn't have a clue what they were saying (including myself).

<comment><USER12> Yeah. And what was that whole business about the Newton-Rhapson method?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> you pick door 1. the host does his thing. now the situation is:

if it was behind door 1, you win by not switching.

if it was behind door 2 or 3, switching would win.

seems intuitive to me.</comment>


Ask HN: Active incubators in Southern California? - <AUTHOR>

I've found several incubators' sites in SoCal (LA and Orange County), but have heard conflicting things about how active they are. Some have told me they're sort of defunct, or not accepting new applicants, etc.<p>I'm curious about which incubators HNers might recommend down South. Not going to list what I've already found since I'd like to see what else people suggest. If anyone's enrolled in one, I'd love to hear a testimonial. <comment><USER2> I remember reading a couple months ago in some blog post that there are 27 or so startup incubators here in southern california. That made me cringe as I scrolled through the list of people behind most of them & wondered who the hell they were and why many of the links on their sites didn't work (that was the case with probably 5 of them not to mention not a single allumni of their programs ever made it past that initial investment). :(

That being said there are a few ones that I see all the time & based on the track record of their applicants as well as the mentors/investors involved they'd be worth a shot:

\- Amplify.la \- launchpad.la \- muchercapital.com

and not in the order.

</comment><comment><USER3> We interviewed with StartEngine, but weren't impressed. There is no actual structured program (e.g. office hours, dinners), their graduates have a poor track record of raising money, and they have had no successful exits.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is a good resource to compare programs:

[http://www.seed-db.com/accelerators](http://www.seed-db.com/accelerators)</comment>


Apple Watch Sales Sink - <AUTHOR> http://www.technewsworld.com/story/82250.html

<comment><USER2> This is contradicted by what Tim Cook said in his talk with analysts about Apple's third-quarter results for 2015 on the 21st July.

      our June sales were higher than April or May. I realize
      that's very different than some of what's being written,
      but June sales were the highest.

[http://www.imore.com/this-is-tim- transcript-q3-2015](http://www.imore.com/this-is-tim-transcript-q3-2015)

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is from July 8 (48 days ago). Anyone have any more recent information?

<comment><USER4> This article in Fortune suggests Apple Watch is selling strongly in Best Buy stores: [http://fortune.com/2015/08/25/best-buy- apple/](http://fortune.com/2015/08/25/best-buy-apple/)</comment></comment>


Analyzing the NPM Dependency Network - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/graph-commons/analyzing-the-npm-dependency-network-e2cf318c1d0d#.60p3k87rp <comment><USER2> Also, it don't mention ability of mirroring the dependencies infrastructure, it's openness and the integrated tests workflow that could exist.

</comment><comment><USER3> Part of me hopes this is bad press for Kik.

</comment><comment><USER4> Lol why didn't he just use PageRank...

<comment><USER5> would be interesting to see how it looks like with page rank actually

<comment><USER4> It wouldn't just be interesting - it would literally tell you the mathematically most important nodes in the network. No need for long-form think pieces that circumnavigate known solutions. Just run PR, give us the results, and move on.</comment></comment></comment>


You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html <comment><USER3> But I think this is the weakest part of the article :

      "And since human nature limits the size of group that can work together, the only
      way I can imagine for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no
      structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way
      components of a market economy do."

There's a reason for that . Ronald Coase in his Theory of the firm explained that the reason we don't have an arrangement like pg describes above is that

      "According to Ronald Coase, people begin to organise their production in firms
      when the transaction cost of coordinating production through the market exchange,
      given imperfect information, is greater than within the firm .."

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

Sometimes , I think that the zeitgeist has swung too far in favour towards being an entrepreneur instead of working for someone and making something awesome.

<comment><USER4> Case study: At Sears, Eddie Lampert's Warring Divisions Model Adds to the Troubles

      Eddie Lampert's big idea is that markets and competition rool, so
      he's forcing the different parts of Sears to compete for resources
      just as if they were independent firms, with individual division
      profitability the only criterion for success.

      ...

      If the different divisions of Sears have no common interests,
      if the best model is competition red in tooth and claw, why should
      Sears exist at all? Why not just break it up into units that have
      no reason not to compete?

      For that matter, why should any large firm exist? Why not just have
      small firms, or maybe just individuals, who make deals for whatever
      they need?

      ...

      There are some things you don't want to leave up to the market — the
      market itself is telling us that, by creating islands of
      planning and hierarchy.

More here: [http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/john-galt-and- th...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/john-galt-and-the-theory- of-the-firm/)

And here: [http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears- edd...](http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-eddie- lamperts-warring-divisions-model-adds-to-the-troubles)

<comment><USER3> My own company works this way. It's absolutely ridiculous. Each division hoards good programmers , projects and expertise, and people sometimes get stuck in other divisions without much work , while a few efficiently managed divisions land all the good work , leading to all the good people in the poor divisons leaving because they aren't growing , it's almost like working in a different company if you're in a different division.

<comment><USER5> I am a bit mystified as to where people get the idea that competition is fundamentally better than cooperation. The only time competition has ever done any good is when it leads to greater cooperation.

<comment><USER3> That's not always true. Competition always produces better performance , atleast in individual activities.

<comment><USER6> Individual activities are precisely not what we're talking about, and at any rate you're wrong even at the level of an individual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree with the diagnosis, but there's something important that's omitted here: the point of a startup is to create the type of large business that PG is advising against joining. The entire point of a startup is exponential growth. A company that stays small is generally derided as a "lifestyle business" and Silicon Valley investors seemingly have absolutely no interest in funding that sort venture, even if it's more sustainable for most people.

</comment><comment><USER8> "We've now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from working for a big company."

Can't say this has been true based on my experience so far at startups - <USER2> are a lot of bad managers/executives out there who have no business managing a business and the damage is probably a lot worse at a startup than at a big company. Based on a lot of anecdotal stories from developers, this seems to be an all too common pattern at startups.

Also, startups tend to have a bad problem unless bootstrapped - they're beholden to their funders, who can sometimes recommend courses of actions counter to what a good long term business should be doing, causing executives to make bad decisions with regards to treating their employees properly.

<comment><USER9> >they're beholden to their funders

This. Once you accept funding, you're _working for the money people._

Forget those narratives of heroic freedom. Your situation isn't really all that different to any other corporate environment.

If the money doesn't like you as a founder, you can lose your job (at best) or be back-stabbed out (at worst.)

And if the project isn't viable, it dies anyway. So you're still out of a job.

There's a cultural difference, in that you have more agency at the start. But the script you follow is already written by the surrounding financial culture.

You have _no freedom at all_ to deviate from it - unless you bootstrap.

<comment><USER10> And if you bootstrap, you lose freedom in other ways. What kinds of businesses can be bootstrapped constrains your options. The market becomes your boss, and no amount of soft-skills or convincing arguments can change its mind.

Put that way, with investors you can say "At least my bosses are human"

(Note, I'm not saying one is better than the other in all cases, just that "bootstrapping gives you ultimate freedom" isn't true)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While I see some value in his practical insights the logic is deeply flawed. I would much rather he just share his observations on optimal work environments than try to explain what we are "meant" to do in some kind of incomprehensible pseudo-science.

By precisely the same reasoning we are meant to rape women to impregnate them and murder members of competing tribes, and are not meant to have birth control, surgery, or a level of technological complexity in the world that is beyond the power of any one human to fully comprehend.

<comment><USER12> Woah. It's not like he's saying "this newfangled thing is bad because it's new", he's citing specific health and well-being effects that he has observed. I doubt you could make the same case for rape.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _And since human nature limits the size of group that can work together, the only way I can imagine for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way components of a market economy do._

 _That might be worth exploring. I suspect there are already some highly partitionable businesses that lean this way. But I don 't know any technology companies that have done it._

Isn't Valve such a company?

[http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...](http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf)

<comment><USER14> github too

[http://www.fastcompany.com/3020181/open-company/inside- githu...](http://www.fastcompany.com/3020181/open-company/inside-githubs- super-lean-management-strategy-and-how-it-drives-innovation)

<comment><USER15> And Morning Star, Zappos, Stripe, Medium, Semco, W L Gore, Whole Foods, and others... [http://danieltenner.com/open- cultures](http://danieltenner.com/open-cultures)

<comment><USER16> Also, the guy who founded VISA has spent his later years putting forward ideas on how build large organizations that still maintain the anarchic qualities which allow independance from too much central control.

[https://books.google.ca/books/about/Birth_of_the_chaordic_ag...](https://books.google.ca/books/about/Birth_of_the_chaordic_age.html?id=osgYgo_lHp4C&hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically.

It's not technology, it's society. The notion of "working from 9 to 5 until 65" is a relatively recent construct brought on by the industrial revolution. There's a great section on this in the book Your Money or Your Life. If you read some of the literature of the times, there was a period in which some authors and thinkers started saying that people would have more leisure time, and thus be more creative. Industrialists didn't like this since it limited productivity and the potential for growth. Moralists didn't like this, since they believed idle hands lead to trouble. A massive campaign was waged to get society to buy into the concepts that growth (not sustainability) is needed, and that productivity is important. This also coincided with the growth of consumerism, as people started thinking they needed more stuff.

<comment><USER18> >> It's not technology, it's society. The notion of "working from 9 to 5 until 65" is a relatively recent construct brought on by the industrial revolution.

I'll buy this if by "brought on by the industrial revolution" you mean "demanded by organized workers in response to the excesses of the industrial revolution." If it weren't for unions I don't think the 40 hour work week would be anything like the norm.

<comment><USER19> If not for unions it would be 'work from 7 to 7 until dead.'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sure, because no hunter/gatherer tribes had a chief, medicine woman or other revered person who both gave direction to their tribe, and to whom the tribe was responsible.

A pretty weak argument against bosses. Humans naturally tend to form hierarchies - the boss is simply one node in that hierarchy.

That some people thrive in such positions doesn't mean it's our natural state.

<comment><USER21> Humans don't naturally form hierarchies. At least I don't always look to an authority figure to tell me what to do. I usually want independence and creative space, along with the advice and aid of knowledgeable colleagues. I chafe under the yoke of arbitrary authority.

But maybe I'm not human.

<comment><USER10> You're human, but you're not _all_ humans. I think people have a continuum of attitudes on what they're willing to trade autonomy for. I've met a lot of people who are happy to have someone tell them what to do, because it means they don't need to figure it out for themselves. That's not bad, it's sort of a necessary ingredient of working together that some people need to be more willing to follow than to lead.

<comment><USER21> I think people confuse division of labor with hierarchy. The former means other people make decisions I don't care to. The latter means others tell me what to do and are acknowledged as my superiors.

<comment><USER10> Yes, this is true. There's definitely a difference between "this guy is making strategic decisions and interfacing with the rest of the company on my behalf" and "this guy is my superior and should be paid more than me". Unfortunately, the bosses make the salary decisions, so it just sort of falls out of that

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There was a lot of this going on: [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature)

</comment><comment><USER23> _" (...) a large organization could only avoid slowing down if they avoided tree structure (...) I suspect there are already some highly partitionable businesses that lean this way. But I don't know any technology companies that have done it."_

Isn't this what Valve has done?

</comment><comment><USER24> _we are clearly not meant to work in groups of several hundred. And yet—for reasons having more to do with technology than human nature—a great many people work for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees._

The size of the company has little relation with the size of the groups you work in. I've worked for a couple of companies with around 8-10k employees and a couple more with around 1000 employees, and all those cases I've always worked in groups of 2-20.

Also, having a (good) boss is great. They handle all the shit work (like sales and customer relations) and run interference so that you can do you real job.

</comment><comment><USER25> > Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each > species thrives in groups of a certain size.

This is another reason why we should really limit companies to a maximum size. Other reasons are that companies should not become too big to fail, and that smaller companies lead to a more modular economy, where one company uses the outputs of several other companies, instead of having a few MegaCorps with an opaque, internal economy.

<comment><USER26> _smaller companies lead to a more modular economy_

This is a very interesting point, which I would extend to saying that it might lead to a more _resilient_ economy.

The trouble is, scale is such a powerful thing. When you look at industries like the automobile industry, or even inside technology the chip industry, you appreciate that. It's hard to imagine modern fabs being run by groups of less than 100 people, for example. (Interestingly, this is something that might change in the extremely long run as production technology matures.)

<comment><USER27> There's an argument to be made for larger companies in terms of resilience: they will usually be able to absorb more risk. Modularity of small companies is good for if they fail, but I suspect they are more likely to fail. I don't have an opinion one way or another, just musing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> You always have a "boss", either the regular one you report to in a company or if you are the founder/owner/CEO of a company it will be your clients, your board or stockholders. Also having a good boss that shields your from the BS may be better than no boss at all.

</comment><comment><USER29> Animal analogy is interesting. Any animals that cultivate crops? Are there any Human hunter/gatherer societies that scaled?

Here's a snippet of dialog from one of my favorite movies:

Jeremiah Johnson: You wouldn't happen to know what month of the year it is?

Bear Claw: Why no, I truly wouldn't. I'm sorry, pilgrim. Winter's a long time going?

Jeremiah Johnson: [exhausted] Ah.

Bear Claw: Stays long this high.

Jeremiah Johnson: March. Maybe, April.

Bear Claw: March maybe. I don't believe April. [rising to depart] March is a green muddy month down below, some folks like it, FARMERS mostly.

\---

Recently, a company that I worked at was acquired. Felt like like farming. So, I bailed; hunting for something new.

<comment><USER30> > Are there any Human hunter/gatherer societies that scaled?

I'm not aware of any, and I think that it would be impossible. You can't really achieve a lot of density with hunting and gathering because before long you've hunted and gathered everything around you at a rate beyond which those natural resources can regenerate. Thence cometh agriculture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> We aren't meant to have bosses, but we are social animals who are meant to work in groups. Groups often _do_ need leaders who are able to synthesize a path that is mutually beneficial and help people to work in concert.

The problem is that we have developed economic structures that make it hard for individuals to reject bosses who are not leaders.

</comment><comment><USER32> pg said: "We've now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from working for a big company."

I assume he's funding companies in the States? One of the bigger advantages of working for a large(r) company is health insurance. Or do all of Y Combinator's startups have good health insurance?

And as others have written, things involving "stuff" tend to need to scale. This might not be a problem in that pg might be confining his remarks to software startups, not things like engineering or science companies?

The odd thing, is that many bloggers have written that while it's great to do a startup, it's crap to work for one. So if it's crap to work for a startup AND for a larger company, I guess everything will be done in groups of 2-4 people?!

</comment><comment><USER33> _Financing a startup with debt is usually a stupid move._

Why? Isn't that better than giving away equity, assuming that you actually believe your company will reach multi-billions in valuation in the future?

<comment><USER34> Debt is a bond, and your creditors have priority for payment. Creditors generally adopt a "FU, pay me". So you end up burning hard cash to make your payments + interest.

An equity investor theoretically has an interest in the enterprise actually succeeding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29)

</comment><comment><USER36> oh my.

let's look at animals again, shall we. ants? bees? any form of colony or swarm? penguins? birds all over?

cherry pick examples to fit a narrative, nicely worded but utterly wrong.

for some things small and nimble is best. for other things, like flying to the moon or producing hardware scale is needed.

you don't like big corp environments? fine. but just like being a vegan it is a choice, not an absolute truth.</comment>


Machine Learning Video Library - Learning From Data (Abu-Mostafa) - <AUTHOR> http://work.caltech.edu/library/ <comment><USER2> I am doing the <https://www.coursera.org/course/ml> from Stanford by Andrew Ng & I definitely recommend it.

I'm really excited by all of this free university level material flooding the web as I never even started college due to financial concerns (aka I didn't want to get any loans).

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know whether Prof. Ng has updated the material since the first run of the class?

We are still in the honeymoon phase of free, online university courses, so I think there's been relatively little criticism of what's available now, but I'll go for it: I was disappointed by the Coursera/Stanford ML class. It was obviously watered down, the homeworks were very (very) easy, and I retained little or nothing of significance.

In contrast, the Caltech class was clearly _not_ watered down, and, as the material was much more focused (with a strong theme of generalization, an idea almost entirely absent from the Stanford class, as I recall) I feel I learned far more.

Another big difference: the Caltech class had traditional hour-long lectures, a simple web form for submitting answers to the multiple-choice* homeworks, and a plain vBulletin forum. The lectures were live on ustream, but otherwise, no fancy infrastructure.

So I think that some interesting questions will come up. Do we need complex (new) platforms to deliver good classes? For me, the answer right now is no -- what clearly matters is the quality and thoughtfulness of the material and how well it is delivered. Can a topic like machine learning be taught effectively to someone who doesn't have a lot of time, or who doesn't have the appropriate background (in CS, math)? Can/should it be faked? I don't think so, but I think there are certainly nuances here.

* Despite being multiple-choice, the homeworks were not easy -- they typically required a lot of thought, and many required writing a lot of code from scratch.

<comment><USER3> One of the conscious aims of the undergraduate coursera classes has been to lower the bar (in terms of assumed prerequisites, pace, and scope) in order to increase participation.

Daphne Koller's Probabilistic Graphical Models was their first graduate class and it was definitely tougher than other Coursera offerings have been.

<comment><USER4> This. The Coursera PGM class is the only free online class that I've enrolled in that felt like a similar difficult to a slightly harder than average undergrad course at Caltech (where I go to school).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I took this course last term after reading an introductory book on machine learning and skimming through Andrew Ng's CS 229 lecture notes. I thought this class was particularly excellent at emphasizing the theoretical aspects of machine learning, as well as emphasizing some underlying themes (like avoiding overfitting with regularization and cross validation). The class didn't cover as many models and algorithms as many of the other ML classes, but I've found those relatively easy to learn with the intuition this course gave me.

</comment><comment><USER5> I began the mlclass from coursera but I'd like a more advanced approach.

I found some courses(I don't know if there are more):

Andrew Ng Stanford CS229: <http://cs229.stanford.edu/info.html>

Caltech(the one from the OP link): <http://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html>

Tom Mitchell Carnegie Mellon: <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/10701_sp11/>

I'm considering following the Tom Mitchell course as it seems to go deeper into the details, also because it uses a pretty cool bibliography.

What do you think, am I making the right choice?

</comment><comment><USER6> I really liked the Google talk <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M> and there are a bunch of advances in machine learning mixing technologies, like inductive learning & genetic programming. The Google video also shows some combinations of techniques to make it learn much faster.

Fortunately I can find videos and whitepapers on all those subjects, but seems the libraries are all very much in 'the past'. Maybe I don't know about some, but is there a library/toolbox like Weka which implement all modern & old algorithms and allow you to play on datasets mixing and matching them? Maybe I just couldn't find that, but Weka seems to be too primitive for that?

Disclaimer: I majored in AI a long time ago and I understand most of these concepts, but I have never touched it after I finished, so I'm not up to date/aware of everything, so sorry if I missed a famous tool or something.

<comment><USER7> If you enjoyed Geoff Hinton's talk you will probably find the theano 'deep learning' library to be of use. Still undergoing quite a lot of iteration but powerful and you get to run your stuff on the GPU for added fun. <http://deeplearning.net/software/theano>. Incidentally Hinton gave another google tech talk in 2010 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdIURAu1-aU>.

<comment><USER6> Thank you for that deeplearning link; I guess that's my missing link! I did Google for that many times and it's the first hit, so I have no clue how I missed that. Anyway, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Being a newbie in ML, I found intro video quite helpful, having difficulty to grasp the idea of training, why is it needed etc, I found Mostafa's explanations quite helpful. I have taken ML's by Ng as well and due to heavy use of stats I could not grasp it.

Now I am learning Stats by Prof.Thrun at Udacity I assume I will be able to grasp it in much better way.

p.s: anyone is trying to learn ML basics and wish to learn? Why not learn together and solve the interesting problems together? contact me via email given in profile

</comment><comment><USER9> I am not sure if this helps but posted yesterday on HN - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4200931> (Good for newbies like myself)

</comment><comment><USER10> No genetic algorithms :( I love genetic algorithms.

<comment><USER11> Although certainly a related field (to the point that the UCL ML MSc offers an Evolutionary Computation course), genetic algorithms are not ML per se.

<comment><USER12> I strongly disagree, though it depends on your definition of what machine learning really is.

If you define machine learning algorithms as those that learn from data, then okay. In that case, EAs are reinforcement learning algorithms and other methods like Q-learning are also not ML algorithms.

However, I use the canonical definition by Mitchell: A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P, if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E.[1] In this case, it's clear that in fact EAs are very much so an ML method. One could even go so far as to say they are more appropriately ML than things like SVMs as they are truly learning from experience rather than just data being handed to them.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning#Definition>

<comment><USER11> I don't necessarily disagree with you. However, I find that most contemporary real-world ML applications (from face recognition to collaborative filtering to computer vision) do use algorithms that "learn from data", using some kind of learning technique, i.e. supervised, unsupervised or a combination of those.

The process of creating that kind of algorithm is also very different: it is based heavily on mathematical/statistical/probabilistic methods and hence the resulting algorithm can be proven that it works with some kind of certainty. On contrary, creating an EA is mostly some kind of "art" (as one UCL professor put it).

All in all, I can't help but feel that even though they are both approaches to the same problem ("how can a computer program learn?"), data-driven methods and EA algorithms don't share much more. And since the results produced by the former are what most people expect of an ML algorithm to accomplish, I tend to think of those when using the phrase "machine learning".

But it's all about semantics in the end.

// I noticed that you are an ML PhD student. So you know exactly what I'm talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> this links summarizes it all! other links are needed in order to strengthen your knowledge!</comment>


The DNC Looks Increasingly Incompetent When It Comes to Cybersecurity - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/technology/2018/08/the-dncs-false-alarm-report-of-a-hacking-attempt-suggests-its-incompetent.html <comment><USER2> It starts at the top. Having your own personal email server as Secretary of State, and using it illegally to conduct government business? Shows a real disdain for security.</comment>


HTML+CSS=POOP - <AUTHOR> http://www.zideck.com/blog/article.php?id=2

<comment><USER2> Bollocks!

Not only the author has not had a good look at both the historical context of HTML and CSS but has also failed to understand the technologies behind the success of the web.

HTML is a mark-up language for documents. Its simplicity has enabled the spread of the web. In addition it provided a means for some semantic marking of documents through tagging. It was not meant to be a graphical language (see SVG for that!) When it came out there were actually no browsers and most computers were still displaying graphics with herculer cards.

Once microcomputer technology caught up a bit, fancier documents and graphics started appearing and HTML still coped. It still copes even with fancy web applications. In the meantime computer languages appeared and disappeared, desktop software morphed from DOS to Windows 7.

CSS was the answer to presentational issues. It got limitations yes and it gives people difficulties, but so Haskell for me but I never tried to blame my own deficiencies to a 'badly designed' language. Yes CSS does not provide for rounded corners, but it does allow you to display the same content for print, handheld devices, auditory devices as well as feel the text in braille!

Most important this separation enables easier indexing of web pages which is next to impossible to index with graphical based systems.

<comment> PHP-TROLL Bollocks to your bollocks. You're reading comprehension must be very low.

"HTML is a mark-up language for documents. Its simplicity has enabled the spread of the web. In addition it provided a means for some semantic marking BLAH BLAH BLAH."

You are repeating what he says in his blog. Maybe you read the wrong blog?

"CSS was the answer to presentational issues."

Yes, but it's not a good answer. It is possible to criticize something not as reflection of a person's own deficiencies, but because it is works poorly.

"Most important this separation enables easier indexing of web pages which is next to impossible to index with graphical based systems."

He never said the separation of content and layout is bad. He said they way that it is implemented is "POOP" Any sane person is for the seperation of content and layout.

<comment><USER2> If you think that it works poorly you are welcome to improve it:) The testimony of the web provides the answer to the fact that HTML and CSS works.

You can read Håkon Wium Lie's PhD thesis as to the reasoning behind CSS. <http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/phd/> and make your own mind if it is POOP or not.

IMHO it has a very good basis and also provides an architecture for improvements. Pretty much similar to Knuth's TeX.

I personally find no difficulty in using CSS! I think it is the smallest of the head-aches that a web developer faces. really a non-issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I just hate when people criticize things they know little about. Article is full of incorrect statements: There are at least 3 browsers to pass acid3 test: Chrome 3, Safari 4, Opera 10.

There ir a way to have equal height divs: check out display: table-* properties. Supportend in IE8 too.

There is a way to have rounded corners in CSS, supported in Safari, Firefox, Chrome.

There is a way to have box shadow, and gradients in CSS. Even animation, transformation and transitions.

</comment><comment><USER4> While that may be true, I don't think anyone knew enough about web design when these technologies were created that they could've done any better.

<comment><USER5> I suppose they could have looked at existing visual design online and offline, and come to the conclusion that grid layouts were quite popular, and perhaps they should support it nicely?

But what they really didn't anticipate was web _applications_ , which is a whole other story, and something for which HTML + CSS is really badly suited.

I feel the author's pain.

<comment><USER4> That's assuming anyone even anticipated comparability with print media. I think the original vision of hypertext documents was closer to the of text files than that of magazine pages. Grid layouts are clearly not popular in text files. I think if HTML was modeled after what was seen around it, it would look more like Markdown, with correspondingly fewer features.

Not to mention, modeling software interfaces after real-world objects is often a very bad idea.

<comment><USER6> "modeling software interfaces after real-world objects is often a very bad idea." really?

What do you think of the desktop of your computer, compared to your physical desk?

or the fact that the windows of your programs can be stack on top of each other like paper pages?

Or text processing programs, that show you the output the way it is going to be displayed (WYSIWG).

Or that whole Object Oriented Programming thingy.

On the contrary modeling software interfaces after real-world objects is a very good idea.

<comment><USER4> The desktop of my computer bears no resemblance to my physical desk. I have no icons on my physical desk. My physical desk can hold absolutely anything no matter shape or size and I can stack things and put them in piles and clear them off with one swoop of my hand. Also, my computer desktop has nothing on it, which is quite different from my physical desk.

The fact that "windows" can "stack... like paper" shows that the real world isn't being modeled. Last time I checked, windows could not be stacked like paper and windows on my computer have very little resemblance to paper in any other way. I'm quite certain paper wasn't the inspiration for stacking windows.

I think WYSIWYG editors _are_ a bad idea, precisely because they try to model the real world too closely.

Object oriented programming is about much more than modeling real-world objects in code. Sometimes (often in fact) that is exactly the wrong way to create objects.

Trying to model software off real-world objects is how you get stupid things like clicking and dragging to flip pages on a document you're reading, all while animating the turning of the pages.

The examples you give (where they are accurate at all) are about using physical objects to provide a metaphor for understanding software. The perfect example is the trash / recycle bin. It provides a metaphor that makes it easier for people to learn what it does, but it isn't modeled after a real trash can or recycling bin. You don't have to empty it. You can, but it's not required. You don't have to change bags. It isn't picked up twice a week. It doesn't start to smell after a while. It's of essentially unlimited size. If it was modeled after a real trash can, some of these things would have been implemented in some way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "you know cars? they really should have had airbags when they were invented... oh, and they should have had CD-Disc players as well. Boy those car manufacturers were sure stupid."

Why is this article interesting? He doesn't like HTML & CSS. Fine. I've got a different developer who enjoys his work. Perhaps I'll hire him instead.

<comment><USER8> It's more like if cars were invented without steering wheels, and when people pointed out that wagons had steering wheels, all the car advocates told them that they just weren't leaning to the side hard enough when they tried to turn.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should Qt be considered in the place of electron? - <AUTHOR> When a cross platform app is required, Electron is often mentioned first: Should Qt be considered  to fill that gap (As in the new QML-y Qt) <comment><USER2> I hear this a lot, as a contrast to Electron, but I haven't seen any examples of good cross-platform Qt apps.

The only Qt app I've used recently is VirtualBox, which is terrible on the Mac. The controls don't look or work right at all. On Windows, it's less bad, but still noticeably non-native.

I searched the web and found that Google Earth Pro also uses Qt, so I downloaded that. It looks awful, too. The scrollbars, split panes, buttons, and toolbars look wrong. Checkboxes are drawn mangled, animation is absent, and the outline view doesn't size its rows correctly so the bottom half of text is cut off. Despite language being "System default" in the Earth prefs, and English being the top language in my System Prefs, part of the UI is in Japanese (my #2). The view right after launch: [https://i.imgur.com/eDvSoUm.png](https://i.imgur.com/eDvSoUm.png)

I think a good first step would be looking at existing Qt apps. Are you OK with the quality of apps like VirtualBox and Earth? Alternatively, do you think you can do a better job at this than Google and Oracle?

I think if you're planning to write a typical Qt app, in order to make 'native app' fans happy, you're going to be in for a surprise.

<comment><USER3> > The only Qt app I've used recently is VirtualBox, which is terrible on the > Mac. The controls don't look or work right at all. On Windows, it's less > bad, but still noticeably non-native.

On Windows and Linux (primarily Ubuntu), KeePassXC, VirtualBox and VLC have been pretty good in my experience and they're Qt as far as I know. Dropbox uses Qt as well, however, it's interface is minimal. Electron doesn't even try to look or behave natively for what it's worth.

<comment><USER2> Curious. VLC on MacOS doesn't exhibit any of the weird UI glitches that other Qt apps have, and an inspection of the package shows it doesn't contain any Qt frameworks.

VLC's Wiki [1] says: "Qt / Qt4 is the default, plain, graphical, interface to VLC, made using the Qt library (Linux users may need to have this installed). It is used as the default interface on the Windows and Linux versions of VLC media player from version 0.9.0 and above."

[1]: [https://wiki.videolan.org/Qt_Interface/](https://wiki.videolan.org/Qt_Interface/)

I googled for "dropbox mac qt" and only found this page [2] from 2014 which says they were experimenting with rewriting the Dropbox UI in Qt for Linux and Windows. The linked post [3] says the Qt rewrite is for Windows and Linux only.

[2]: [http://www.webupd8.org/2014/07/dropbox-ui-rewritten-in-qt- fo...](http://www.webupd8.org/2014/07/dropbox-ui-rewritten-in-qt-for- latest.html) [3]: [https://web.archive.org/web/20141015093406/https://forums.dr...](https://web.archive.org/web/20141015093406/https://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=118006)

I consider Qt (along with Gtk+) to be native on Linux -- there's no more- native toolkit that it's wrapping or emulating.

So I find it interesting that these cross-platform applications (Wikipedia lists _9_ platforms for VLC!) both use Qt for only 2 platforms, and 1 of those is where it's native, anyway. These are mature applications which have clearly put a lot of effort into both user experience and cross platform support, and they have already gone to the trouble of implementing their UI in Qt, but for most platforms they choose not to use it.

What I get from this is: Qt is useful as a cross-platform GUI toolkit only for targeting Windows. Is that overly cynical?

<comment><USER3> It's interesting that it seems Qt is not used to target Macs. Perhaps Qt really is only good for cross-platform development on Windows and Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Heck yes. I still don't get how so many creators of apps justify choosing Electron to themselves, what with all the downsides (resource usage, power consumption, accessibility, security, and so on).

Another GUI-framework I've enjoyed using is wxWidgets, which provides a thin abstraction to a platform's native widgets. Has a bunch of language bindings, and a pretty liberal license as well.

<comment><USER5> What exactly is the security concern by using Electron?

Accessibility is only achieved by the creator's intention.

<comment><USER4> Well, it brings the usual web security issues to the desktop, dragging with it much of the browsers' attack surface. Also, there's been a bunch of CVE – there's one [0] in particular that springs to mind.

        Accessibility is only achieved by the creator's intention.

That's a problem. Native widgets come with accessibility built in (to the extent accessibility is supported on the platform in question).

[0]: [https://www.trustwave.com/en- us/resources/blogs/spiderlabs-b...](https://www.trustwave.com/en- us/resources/blogs/spiderlabs-blog/cve-2018-1000136-electron-nodeintegration- bypass/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As much as I enjoy working with Qt, I wouldn't bet on it for the future. QML support still seems a bit iffy and being told QWidgets are being phased out is disheartening. The framework is in a sort of limbo stage where newcomers don't really know how to proceed. The lack of popularity (outside of some niches) doesn't help either.

I hate working with web frameworks but the network effect is real and not in favor of Qt. Perhaps there was a time when Qt was thriving and innovating, but right now it seems like it's just a bunch of fortune 500 companies paying 1-2 Qt developers to maintain legacy software.

Sometimes I wonder if there is an alternate universe where Qt won "the battle" and made the world a better place. Sadly for us, that didn't happen here.

<comment><USER7> QWidgets are being phased out? What???

<comment><USER8> No, they are just mostly finished and aren't seeing a lot of new feature work being done ,if any. Qml is a way better way so that's what they are working on. It gets better every release, and that guy doesn't have a clue. Sorry. Just for the record, QML is awesome.

<comment><USER6> > they are just mostly finished

Yeah, I don't know how much experience you have with Qt but widgets are far from being "finished". There's plenty of things that could be improved if their focus wasn't on Qt Quick.

The use of Qt Widgets is declining (albeit slowly), as stated in [http://blog.qt.io/blog/2019/01/14/qt-customer- survey-2018/](http://blog.qt.io/blog/2019/01/14/qt-customer-survey-2018/). You're telling me that they're going to support two different technologies that do the same thing without giving preference to the newer, technically superior one?

Qt Quick is intended to replace Qt Widgets, but it isn't currently at a stage where that's feasible -- hence my apprehension.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, that's not true. They have said that Qt4 widgets are feature finished, and not being deprecated. Obviously eventually there will be little use of the older way, but they have repeatedly said they are not deprecating them. Believe what you want.

<comment><USER6> I'm aware that they aren't being deprecated, but that doesn't mean they aren't being phased out. When I say it is being "phased-out" I'm referring to how it will no longer be advertised as the optimal solution to a problem. Perhaps we're just arguing semantics at this point?

<comment><USER7> Phasing out is the same as sunsetting, i.e., terminating: [https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/sunsetting](https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/sunsetting)

From the first post, I assumed the commenter meant something like, "in Qt 6 QWidgets will stop working", which is insane.

<comment><USER6> I guess it was poor wording on my part then, sorry. I only meant that it was not going to be the focus of the product anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Actually, this is funny because that's literally what I have been doing for the last 2 startups I co-founded.

The first one was in 2013, so Electron was not an option at the time, I needed a runtime to run my webapp (in the healthcare industry, for many legal reasons and budget, I could not and would not have it hosted on the internet, so I needed it to be a desktop app). At the time it was webkit, and it already was a great experience. The app was part C++, part Angular1, all the data was stored locally in a sqlite db. The company is still running, and the app is on the verge of being rewritten (basically because the new CTO is not much into C++) with Electron.

Second project, started in 2016, originally a React Native app (IOS and android), but many customers wanted a desktop/web version. Web was a lot of work because the app depends on storing data locally (sqlite again), so to make it fast, I did a first prototype with Electron, spent a week on but I had many issues with building native nodejs modules, so I dropped it and back again on Qt, but today it's all chromium-based instead of webkit. So I wrote the native part I needed in C++ (was fast and easy because the Qt library covers a lot), bridged it to the application, and the port of the ReactNative app was completed in less than 2 months.

I like Electron very much, but if you know C++, Qt is great competitor as a webengine runtime. Of course, I had my share of issues with Qt, but I don't feel like it would have been really better with Electron, whatever the framework, there are always issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> Qt with or without QML should definitely be considered. Granted, I can't say I've ever made more than a toy application in Qt (via Python and PySide).

A third option if you're too afraid of C++ or one of the Qt bindings, and you really _need_ something web-like, is JavaFX.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm developing something on Electron, but casting occasional glances at Qt wondering if it'd be better.

It's hard to beat the edit-test-debug cycle of Electron, where I can tweak a line of code, hit Cmd-R, and see the results in less than a second.

<comment><USER11> QML is just as fast. If you don't make any changes to the C++ side of things then there's no recompiling needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone have experience with Proton Native? [https://proton- native.js.org/#/](https://proton-native.js.org/#/)

Never used it myself but I wonder if it is a more performant alternative to Electron

</comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone else find Qt difficult to setup/compile and find the qtmoc hoops that are necessary really frustrating when it comes to compiling projects in a non standard way?

</comment><comment><USER14> Has anyone tried react-native-desktop that uses QT? What are your experiences?

[https://github.com/status-im/react-native-desktop](https://github.com/status- im/react-native-desktop)

</comment><comment><USER15> Of course. If it's only for desktops, you should go with Qt Widgets.

</comment><comment><USER16> Well, if I can ditch chromium, I'm all for it. Will look into it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Another option is SWT and the Eclipse RCP.

</comment><comment><USER18> Also consider Adobe AIR.

</comment><comment><USER19> Can Qt run in a browser?

There's your answer.

<comment><USER20> Yes, it does: [http://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/05/22/qt-for- webassembly/](http://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/05/22/qt-for-webassembly/)

<comment><USER21> Looking at the widget gallery ([http://example.qt.io/qt- webassembly/quickcontrols2/gallery/g...](http://example.qt.io/qt- webassembly/quickcontrols2/gallery/gallery.html)) I want to complain about what a waste the 5.6MB download is, but that's probably smaller than a lot of new sites and most android apps.

I now fear this might become viable and websites will become a black box where things like ad blockers don't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Qt is brought up in almost every thread where electron is mentioned.

<comment><USER23> Because it is awesome</comment></comment>


MDMA - <AUTHOR> https://www.profgalloway.com/mdma <comment><USER2> Why does a simple blog post require JavaScript to render?

I only bothered trying to read this because I thought it was going to be actually about MDMA, but nope -- just using it as some kind of "gangster metaphor".

Here's the first paragraph of this rather rambling and low-information article for those in the no-JS camp:

>The unicorn barn is on fire. Ablaze. A feckless FTC and DOJ, no longer countervailing forces to private power but co-conspirators, have enabled invasive species (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google) to devastate the ecosystem. What to do? No worries, just double up on the MDMA of our economy — charismatic CEOs cut with cheap capital — and the illusion of prosperity party rocks on into the morning. Not that I've done a lot of drugs in my life, but they make for gangster metaphors, no?</comment>


Landing on the Moon without a Rocket - <AUTHOR> http://underamp.com/?p=181

<comment><USER2> There's a problem with this idea -- as you decelerate out of orbit, in order to reduce the craft's velocity so the inflated-bag method will work, the craft's angle with respect to the surface naturally changes and becomes nearly vertical. This is unavoidable.

Remember the early Mars missions that used the inflated-bag method? They had to expend a lot of fuel to slow down enough to safely approach the surface, at which point the air-bag method was used (and worked). But this only reduced the amount of fuel required to get to the surface, it didn't significantly change that cost and burden.

Just do some numerical orbital simulations -- see what happens when you slowly reduce the velocity and altitude of a craft orbiting the moon so it is able to graze the surface. See what happens when you impact the surface at shallow angles. Hint: the craft's velocity is still extremely high and the air bags have to absorb too much energy -- they will self-destruct.

In a hypothetical approach to a perfectly smooth plains area (the moon has plenty of those), in which there are no altitude irregularities and the craft can approach at nearly orbital speed and impact the surface at a very shallow angle, the craft would begin to roll along the surface at such a high velocity that the centripetal forces would tear the craft apart.

Speaking as a former NASA Space Shuttle engineer.

<comment><USER3> They do specifically say that they're intending to come in at 0.02 degrees or so, which seems to indicate they've considered this. Personally, and not speaking as a former NASA Space Shuttle engineer, it seems unlikely that they'll find ground flat enough for this to work. They mention mountains, but even just craters will provide far, far more variation than 0.02 degrees, so they look like they'll skim the surface nicely, then slam into a wall.

But they're not stupid - I wonder what they're not telling us.

<comment><USER2> > They do specifically say that they're intending to come in at 0.02 degrees > or so, which seems to indicate they've considered this.

That won't prevent the craft from contacting the surface at very high speed and beginning to roll. As soon as the roll starts (as soon as linear velocity becomes rotational velocity), the velocity will decline further, which will change the angle of attack and increase the conversion of orbital kinetic energy into centripetal force. Believe me, the craft will disintegrate if it touches the surface at near-orbital speeds, which is implied by the proposed angle of attack.

> Personally, and not speaking as a former NASA Space Shuttle engineer, it > seems unlikely that they'll find ground flat enough for this to work.

Yes, but my reason for stating it like that was to focus on one factor and eliminate others for the moment.

> But they're not stupid - I wonder what they're not telling us.

I think the author is someone who thinks about these problems, but not with the benefit of experience in orbital analysis or intuition about the kinds of problems that come up.</comment></comment></comment>


The $7M Startup with Zero Managers - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/the-7-million-startup-with-zero-managers.html

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of people on HN and Twitter asked us how we're setup at Buffer, here's an in-depth interview that I hope answers some questions, I'm also keen to answer any more from the community here.</comment>


Show HN: Metatask – a simple business process management app - <AUTHOR> Hi All!
We (team of two) are building this app for almost a year now. I'm running a small web/apps development agency and initially this app was started out of frustration with Asana we used to manage all our admin tasks (hiring new devs, starting new projects, onboarding new clients, scheduling trips, getting visas, sending invoices, purchasing equipment and software... for almost any admin task you can imagine.
Tech stack - it's build on Scala / Akka + Angular. We had some serious fun while coding this ;)
Landing page: http://metatask.io (I did it myself overnight, I realise it is not very polished).
Just start using app: http://join.metatask.io
I'd be happy to hear some feedback, especially on landing and app's UI/UX. <comment><USER2> Clickable: [http://join.metatask.io](http://join.metatask.io)

Seems relatively simple to use...but a few very simple instructions would probably help orient new users. I had to bang away to figure out that there was a title field on the "Create process" page...it sort of felt like I was entering the same sort of information multiple times.

Anyway, looks like a nice piece of work

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for feedback! It's actually my fault not to mention in a post that this is in "beta" or "MVP" stage (it's stable and not many bugs but features are limited to the essence). We working on new user onboarding experience right now, so would appreciate any advice or feedback on this. For the moment, based on first user's experience it seems the biggest issue is everyone discover big green "start process from scratch" button first and it's not clear that it is here to start a one-time process without using template. We changing navigation a bit now to make it easier for new users to discover and understand how to use templates first following by forms and concept of making tasks available instead of directly assigning them. Turns out it's hard to explain :)

<comment><USER2> Maybe a "hello world" tutorial where the goal isn't to explain anything just to touch a few key places quickly. Along the lines of five or seven steps each one 5 to 7 word sentence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like the landing page. I wish I could do something like it myself.</comment>


AMD and Valve Partner for Driver Updates via Steam - <AUTHOR> http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/65584

<comment><USER2> Steam is becoming a package manager for windows?

</comment><comment><USER3> Only for laptops, though, I assume.

On Windows laptops, upgrading your graphics ATI drivers has always been a royal pain in the ass.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, unfortunately it doesn't seem to work on my Toshiba netbook with a Radeon 4300.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hope these won't be forced, I can't be the only person who has had to use older drivers due to bugs/etc.

<comment><USER6> Its not forced, I went through it today, and then promptly rolled back to 10.3, the last (somewhat) working driver from ATI/AMD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm happy they are working on this; it's been a long time coming IMHO.

There are plenty of pitfalls for sure, but I think it's a great idea.

(Although I do hope they keep working on the client. It's a little buggy...)</comment>