The Year on the Net (1996) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/public/current/summaries/hypetoc.htm <comment><USER2> For those interested in Internet history, there's a very interesting roundtable discussion hosted by Walt Mossberg with Steve Case, Marc Andreessen and Brad Silverberg at: [https://www.wsj.com/public/current/summaries/hyperoun.htm](https://www.wsj.com/public/current/summaries/hyperoun.htm).

If you scroll to the question: "Brad -- you seem much less interested than Marc or Steve in the prospect for non-PC hardware to access the Internet. Can you really make the PC simple enough and cheap enough to make it a ubiquitous access device?

Brad's response seems to foreshadow Microsoft's notorious mobile device strategy for the forthcoming decade leading up to the release of the iPhone: "...Given the choice of a Web appliance with a sub-optimal Web experience (because by definition it can't do everything a PC can) or a PC that gives the best Web experience, plays games, runs productivity applications and everything else you can do with a PC, we think the overwhelming majority of customers will continue to choose the PC. If the Web appliance is a 10x opportunity relative to the PC, Netscape's investments certainly don't match their rhetoric. Finally, everyone is in favor of the subsidy model, but no one has agreed to actually spend their own money to subsidize devices...."

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.wsj.com/public/current/summaries/hypefaq.htm](https://www.wsj.com/public/current/summaries/hypefaq.htm)

"Do I Have Privacy On-Line?

While you sign on to the Internet and blithely zap and receive electronic mail, visit Web sites and bare your soul in on-line discussion groups, you are increasingly being watched and tracked. Every move you make on the Internet can be followed, and the information gathered can be used against you."

Is this really from 1996?

EDIT: Looking at the site HTML, it looks very legit, or someone remembers way too well how '96 HTML looked like.

<comment><USER4> I wonder what the doctype is supposed to mean:

> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//Dow Jones//DTD DJ-HTML//EN">

What is supposed to be a copyright notice or something?

<comment><USER5> The DOCTYPE element technically describes the Document Type Definition (DTD). The HTML there doesn't mean it's an HTML document: it means the root element of the document is an HTML tag. The "-//Dow Jones//DTD DJ-HTML//EN" is a Formal Public Identifier, which specifies the actual DTD. The vast majority of sites don't actually guarantee their HTML is valid or even well-formed. In the grand scheme of things, this is most likely cruft left over from the early days of when the site was published and a lot of these things were more up in the air.

For a bit more detail:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_type_declaration#Synt...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_type_declaration#Syntax)

<comment><USER6> It's never really gone away either. Even now, provided you take the time to learn the format, custom DTD's are still very much a thing.

[http://leancrew.com/all-this/2014/09/sgml- nostalgia/](http://leancrew.com/all-this/2014/09/sgml-nostalgia/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The browser wars link is great. It's crazy to see how fast Microsoft moved on Netscape back in 95. Hard to imagine such a short release cycle for ANY company today, let alone Microsoft.

> Microsoft has come a long way in a short time. The first version of Explorer > was released in August 1995, for use with what was then the company's on- > line focus, the Microsoft Network -- a proprietary network that was > refocused toward the Internet in February. Explorer 2.0 was released in > December 1995 and widely derided as an also-ran by the on-line community. > But such critics were silenced by the quality of Explorer 3.0 [released in > August 96].

<comment><USER8> The initial iteration of MSIE was based on the existing Spyglass Browser (see [https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/02/business/spyglass-a- pione...](https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/02/business/spyglass-a-pioneer- learns-hard-lessons-about-microsoft.html) ). Spyglass made a deal with MS to get a % of the sales of MSIE. Unfortunately for Spyglass, MS gave IE away for free.

<comment><USER9> Wow, I never heard of this story so far. Back then, I was naive and young and believed Internet Explorer to be the better browser ;-)

<comment><USER8> When I first started running www.ibm.com in 1994 the only realistic browser options were Viola and Mosaic. IBM WebExplorer (OS/2 only at first) showed up and was fairly good but quickly lost out to the Netscape betas. While I was aware of Spyglass I can't remember ever using it.

When MSIE first came out I was explicitly prohibited from using it (typical of IBM at the time). Netscape gets slagged for becoming bloatware but the initial versions were fairly decent and cross–platform. IBM WebExplorer was genuinely not too bad, but it became a victim of IBM internal politics and died a slow death of neglect.

True tidbit which I have no public sources to cite: IBM WebExplorer was the first browser to support scripting, albeit in Rexx, IIRC a couple of months before LiveScript came to Netscape. IBM, in its wisdom, decided not to release that browser, I believe out of concern it might undercut the market for Lotus Notes.

<comment><USER10> I was first online during the summer of 1993. I remember using a browser called Cello, which was developed at Cornell Law School. I suppose it's name must somehow be inspired by the name of the Viola browser that you mention. I did not know about Viola at the time.

I also remember using a shareware winsock implementation to get online, Trumpet Winsock.

<comment><USER8> I remember Cello, I think I even tried the beta port of it to OS/2\. IIRC it died fairly quickly after Mosaic appeared.

TCP/IP on OS/2 2.x and Windows 3.x was provided through shims or DLLs. I think out-of-the-box OS/2 came with no networking at all (you could add SNA/APPC) and Windows had a couple of TCP/IP packages you could add. Neither operating system was prepared for the explosion in TCP/IP networking in 1994-1995.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Found this great Marc Andreessen keynote from the Netscape Developer Conference in 1996. Netscape wanted to be everything simultaneously. Youtube, Slack, Gmail, Amazon, AWS, Dropbox and about a dozen other businesses. Wonder if they just focused on one product. Say "groupware for Fortune 500 intranets". They would have increased chance of survivability. Even considering Win98 bundling its competing offering in their OS ;)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8wdc9qkkV4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8wdc9qkkV4)

<comment><USER12> Did Netscape really die, or am I using its (wonderful) offspring to post this comment?

<comment><USER13> The company is dead and almost all the code has been rewritten. Is it your grandfather's axe if you've replaced both the blade and the handle?

At least about:mozilla still works.

<comment><USER12> >Is it your grandfather's axe if you've replaced both the blade and the handle?

It might not be /his/ axe, but it is one that he /created/.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's 22 years later. The presentation is infinitely better. The content is infinitely worse... or at least the content that greets the average net user.

You really have to dig for good quality content today.

<comment><USER15> It's disgusting how bad its gotten. It's assuredly partially nostalgia, but I think also partially truth, but the internet of my younger years I remember as being filled with labors of love, pasionately created content most places you look. Now it's difficult to find much that isn't lowest common denominator pandering or essentially white noise.

<comment><USER16> There are still plenty of labors of love all over the place, but my own personal experience is that if you create something as a sincere act of self expression or love for [x], people don't bother with it. I think a lot of what the internet has turned into has also primed us as users to seek that sort of stuff out. I've been trying to distance myself from a lot of services and the meme-o-sphere in favor of occupying the types of sites that used to matter to me (personal web pages, no social media, a couple blogs, rss from a few news sites, SLSK). I have partly HN to thank for this, after reading everyone's disgusting unsympathetic responses to Seattle's "homeless problem," I've distanced myself from the site and don't regret it one bit.

Edit: it really did feel like we were on the verge of the future, but the rise of communications technologies has hobbled all of us, and Idiocracy may be the only future that's possible if we don't slow the ocean currents to a halt first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This timeline is wonderful: [https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/hypetime.htm](https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/hypetime.htm)

The IPO of Yahoo, the creation of MSNBC.

</comment><comment><USER18> I read through most of the content, and the quality of reporting was top- notch. The browser wars article, the reporting on the state of online privacy, the discussion of IPOs... all of it turned out to be the major important topics of the early web. Great post, OP!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love this! It's prophetic

</comment><comment><USER20> This reminds me of mirc 16bit for win 3.1</comment>


Predatory lenders have co-opted New York's court system - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-confessions-of-judgment-new-york-court-clerks/ <comment><USER2> This is part 3 in a series of articles. I've just tracked down parts one [0] and two, [1] posted recently. [0] has quite a few comments on it.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18495812](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18495812)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18542869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18542869)

</comment><comment><USER3> Everyone... I mean EVERYONE needs to master the laws of debt collection. Even if we think we are "responsible." Because all of us are a "situation" away from losing it all.

Here in the USA, there is a "statute of limitations on debt". If we fall onto bad times, the laws protect us from aggressive debt collectors. We simply stop paying all debts... and the law cleans our slate fresh after x amount of years (depending on each state). No bankruptcy needed.

<comment><USER4> It's much more complicated than that. The law doesn't wipe the slate clean. Rather, it gives the debtor an affirmative defense against a lawsuit after X years. It does not stop a debt collector from trying to collect on otherwise uncollectible debt (phone calls, letters, calls to friends, family, and employers if the debtor doesn't respond). Additionally, debts barred by the statute of limitations can sometimes still crop up as "zombie debt" years or decades later. Collectors can (and will) put a new records on a person's credit report, preventing most debtors from rebuilding their credit.

When a debtor stops paying debts entirely, it can start a whirlwind of problems. They can be barred from finding housing, certain types of employment, their actual current jobs (certain professional licensing require financial responsibility). Additionally, most debts end up in the hands of collection attorneys (CA) who will sue en masse to obtain judgments. This effectively stops the statute of limitations and gives the CA 10 years, 20 years, or a lifetime to collect the debt. In these cases, a well-timed bankruptcy is (and should be) an option for people. In some cases of debt -- student loans for example -- the debt is presumed non-dischargeable and can create a lifetime of hardship for the debtor.

<comment><USER5> Also: Tacking on fees allows a debt collector to effectively 're-up' the debt, which resets the clock on the statute of limitations.

<comment><USER6> Once upon a time (40+ years ago?) accepting partial payment for a debt using an instrument that declared something to the effect of, "for the satisfaction of all debt", was enforceable. This became a problem when automated payment processing systems became prevalent. Savvy debtors--presumably mostly lawyers --could write a check for $10 that extinguished a $10,000 medical bill once cashed. Needless to say, the law was quickly changed before it became too prevalent--much more quickly than laws designed to protect consumers.

Unlike the loophole regarding debt acknowledgment you mention, this loophole was an artifact of mercantile law. Terms on negotiable instruments are typically strictly enforced as compared to regular contracts, to ensure maximum efficiency of payment systems. (Or at least the rules for what's enforceable are very brightline, and aren't particularly concerned with fairness. Magical phrases are still very much important.)

<comment><USER7> Interesting article I found on this subject: [https://tddlaw.com/accord-and- satisfaction-effectiveness-of-...](https://tddlaw.com/accord-and-satisfaction- effectiveness-of-writing-payment-in-full-on-a-check/)

"The takeaway from these two cases is that accord and satisfaction can only settle a disputed debt when both parties have knowledge of the outstanding issues to which the debt pertains, and the party negotiating the check has reasonable notice that by depositing the check the dispute is completely settled for the amount of the check."

I wonder if you could put a 'warning sleeve' or something around a check that is sent to someone who may process it automatically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wait ELI5: How can you presign a confession to something before you commit it? It's like signing a confession to murder before someone dies :/

How is this admissible?

I'm not American.

<comment><USER9> This is kind of the equivalent of waiving your rights. For example, you've probably heard of contracts where you sign away your right to sue someone in civil court and agree to go to arbitration instead. That's signing away your rights. Similar story here. You are agreeing in advance, to waive your right to defend yourself in court. Since these are civil cases, the judgment is always in favor of the company filing the suit because you basically agreed to let them win if they ever decided to make such a filing. In civil cases, there isn't the same burden of proof as a criminal trial. It's more of a "which side does the scale tip to with the information at hand" thing. And since the defendant agreed to not defend themselves and conceded guilt in advance, the court always sides with the accuser.

Didn't read this particular article but read a different one earlier this week on this topic so not sure if it's covered here but it's a really old law/tool and has been outlawed almost everywhere. I believe it's outlawed in the entire country for _personal_ dealings because of laws regarding due process and consumer protection. However, it is still allowed in a few states for _business_ dealings which is why these loan places use this legal process exclusively for business loans. They don't have the same level of protection that an individual has, even though a lot of these businesses are run by 2-3 people who put up their own assets against the loan.

<comment><USER10> That seems to be putting a lot of faith in the landlord not to screw you over. It's basically Russian Roulette.

But if it's a seller's market what are you going to do? Live under a bridge? Live in the sewer? Live in New Jersey?

<comment><USER9> Totally agree. You have no control once you sign that paper if the other side will be honest or honorable in any way. And since there is no incentive for them to not screw you, and actual incentive to screw you (since they get a higher return over a shorter time) that should be the expectation.

I think the real problem here is that people either don't read or don't understand what they sign. I mean you would think that a document labeled _confession_ of judgment might alarm people, but apparently not. I recently moved and during the mortgage process for our new place I raised a number of issues regarding the accuracy of the information that was filled in. Nothing fraudulent or terrible on their part - just errors. When I raised these issues (including a math error on the loan disclosure and the omission of a loan credit I was promised) so they could correct and reissue _before_ I signed them, the loan officer said, "You really read through these documents, huh?" and I was like "Well yeah. Who the hell wouldn't read through critical documents like this that put them on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars?" and she responded, "Basically everyone. They all pretty much just sign without reading. That's why we had to have that recorded phone call for documentation on our side to prove you actually understood at least the basics of what you signing." I mean I know almost no one reads EULAs, but _mortgages_?! That's just depressing.

<comment><USER11> > I think the real problem here is that people either don't read or don't > understand what they sign.

If you are looking for real problems, that's way on the back of the line. The top one I can find is, how can somebody simply sign away their right to access the Judiciary system? How can those huge contracts with incomprehensible be binding for normal people? How come people have no alternative to signing them?

<comment><USER9> We're not talking about normal people - we're talking about businesses. It's been outlawed for regular people across the board. But because they can still apply to _businesses_ in a few states, we end up with this. Businesses are supposed to be a bit more prepared and knowledgeable when it comes to legal matters so it's expected that the playing field is a bit more fair and they will understand what they are signing and be able to negotiable a contract better than a regular person who can't comprehend all the legalese.

And technically, they do have an alternative - refuse to sign them and don't do business with them. No one is saying these businesses are required to take these loans on these terms. The owners simply don't understand what they are signing. Anyone who actually is a good risk for a loan and refuses to sign these documents shouldn't really have a problem getting someone to agree to omit that as part of the paperwork.

I really think this is at least partially a matter of due diligence on the part of the business seeking the loan. If I ran a small company and found out that an officer/exec authorized to do business under the company name took out a loan and signed one of these confessions, there's a pretty decent chance they would be fired regardless of any pending legal action. If legal action was indeed filed, they would definitely be fired for a lack of due diligence on the documents that resulted in signing away company rights.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The US seriously needs to strike the work "criminal" from the 6th amendment:

"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence."

<comment><USER6> You basically have most of the same rights in civil courts, and where they vary they mostly vary for good reasons.

The real issue is that contract law permits waiving many of these long before any dispute arises. A body of law arose to limit the detrimental effects (unconscionability, etc), but Federal law (statutory and case law) have increasingly made these state law-based safeguards ineffective.[1] Federal law lacks many of these safeguards, and instead principally relies (if at all) on regulatory agencies to police abusive behavior. But that doesn't do much to remedy injustices in the context of individual disputes.

We should be hesitant to enshrine things in the Federal Constitution. Often times doing so results not only in fixing a limit on how narrow your rights, but also as a practical matter how expansive they can be, depending on the political bent of the Supreme Court.

[1] And then, of course, there's the glaring loophole of New York's confession of judgment. But that issue also involves some complex conflict of law issues. It's possible states could unilaterally shield their residents from New York's policies, but I don't know nearly enough to be able to say with any confidence what the best strategies might be. Also note that the same issues can exist across international jurisdictions. For now that's mostly a concern of the very rich and multinationals, but once upon a time these cross-state conflicts were also only the concern of the rich and large businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What I find most bizarre is that the court has jurisdiction when both the lender and borrower are foreign to it. How's that work?

<comment><USER14> Lots of contracts specify a jurisdiction to resolve any disputes over the agreement. That's probably what's happening here.

<comment><USER15> I believe the reason they gave from the previous article was the bank has a branch in new york.

<comment><USER16> Also the lenders know that the banks rarely examine all the requests they receive. The banks tend to just follow the directive so they don't have to spend money/time on looking into them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > They get around usury laws by saying they aren't making loans but advancing > cash in exchange for a share of future revenue.

Didn't stripe also resently start doing this? Does anyone know if they gearing up a business as a predatory lender as well?

</comment><comment><USER18> Companies that do business like this can only ruin so many people's lives before someone uses their last remaining money to buy a High Point and a bus ticket and makes their business practices the subject of national headlines.

Might not happen today. Might not happen this decade but eventually someone will snap. It might not come to that. The legislators might catch wind of it and change the law in a different way but the risk is always there.

<comment><USER19> It may be wrong, but it does happen, and the desperation of being underemployed and drowning in debt is powerful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> In the subject of the workings of the US judicial system, season 3 of Serial is all about courthouse stories. I really enjoyed the episodes so far.

[https://serialpodcast.org/](https://serialpodcast.org/)

</comment><comment><USER21> I am genuinely surprised no public announcement of any kind has been made by any politician of NY yet about this. Maybe some have and I just don't know?

Or could it be that all NY politicians have been paid off by these entrepreneurs?

</comment><comment><USER22> > he ruled, "[...] a criminally usurious transaction"

The only proper way to judge the actions of these crooks.</comment>


Music for a Brighter World: Brightness Judgment Bias by Musical Emotion - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0148959 <comment><USER2> Music has a severe affect on my mood.

Pandora was the first algorithm that got a lot of elements right for me. I'd find one or two songs that created a mood I needed, and then Pandora took over and found lots of others for me.

Does anyone have recommendations on other algorithms that work?

<comment><USER3> Google Play Music seems to work really well for me. I can now press instant mix and get a random playlist that works well for me and hit it again if i want a different style.</comment></comment>


How to improve your website load time - <AUTHOR> http://blog.boxedice.com/2009/08/08/2-steps-to-improve-your-website-load-time-by-50/

<comment><USER2> Actually, there are a few more ways to speed things up:

1\. Let's make the web faster (by Google): <http://code.google.com/speed/articles/>

2\. Implement the recommendations at WebPageTest – <http://www.webpagetest.org/test>

<comment><USER3> Also, install yslow for firefox: <http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/>

<comment><USER2> WebPageTest is essentially a hosted/online version of YSlow and Firebug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh come on, these things come up all the time and should be common knowledge already. And even worse, this linkbait article is not mentioning deflating/gzipping text-files (html, css, js, etc).

<comment><USER4> And now I was curious and played with their site.

Optipng cut 20% off the iphone.png (originally 37 Kilobytes). But by simply using JPEG you get a file of just about 10 Kilobytes.

If you want to go even further you could combine the images per row (eg [http://www.serverdensity.com/img/screenshots/viewserver- smal...](http://www.serverdensity.com/img/screenshots/viewserver-small.png) and [http://www.serverdensity.com/img/screenshots/serversnapshot-...](http://www.serverdensity.com/img/screenshots/serversnapshot- small.png)) and use an image map for the links.

PS: You are scaling those images in the browser. That looks incredibly bad, don't do that! Very noticable on the terminal shot. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are not gzipping, this will give the most benefit for you efforts. Pretty bogus title. Could have easily been 100% if you had it running on your local machine. The things your mentioned are yslow recommendations.</comment>


Cloud providers instance types, prices, etc under one API and UI - <AUTHOR> https://banzaicloud.com/productinfo <comment><AUTHOR> For more information of how details are retrieved/automated and the open source code you can read this post - [https://banzaicloud.com/blog/cloud- provider-productinfo/](https://banzaicloud.com/blog/cloud-provider- productinfo/)</comment>


Hydrogen fuel cells give drones 'several hours' of flight time - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2015/12/15/intelligent-energy-hydrogen-fuel-cell-drone-range-extender/ <comment><USER2> This is probably BS, you need a strong enough tank to have liquid hydrogen, so on a customer drone, I don't believe it can be feasible. I don't think hydrogen fuel are very efficient too.</comment>


How to Report a Bug to Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://www.schveiguy.com/blog/2017/05/how-to-report-a-bug-to-microsoft/ <comment><USER2> Hi schveiguy,

I am just a completely random MS employee, acting on my own behalf, who is browsing HN on my day off from work. I work in Xbox and don't work anywhere related to Excel or tech support. I just repro'd your issue in under 30 seconds in Excel 2016, and also submitted an issue internally on this. I hope it helps :)

[http://i.imgur.com/N6X2Lj4.png](http://i.imgur.com/N6X2Lj4.png)

Also, I'd highly recommend using the builtin feedback menu, e.g. "send a frown" highlighting the issue. As well as making a post on [https://excel.uservoice.com/](https://excel.uservoice.com/). I know on my current and former teams, both of these(feedback & uservoice) get looked at quite often, even if there is only a few number of votes on them.

edit: +1 to [https://answers.microsoft.com](https://answers.microsoft.com) as mentioned by mherdeg

<comment><USER3> So you are saying it actually worked. Awesome! And thank you very much!

I honestly didn't know about the "frown" thing. I frankly have a hard time finding stuff in the menu on the 2016 products. I spent about 5 minutes looking at another person's PC (who was having the issue originally) to figure out what version of office they had before finally just clicking on the start menu and seeing "Excel 2016". Help->About just used to be so simple...

<comment><USER4> Not to excuse Microsoft here, but it's in a giant button marked "Feedback". Come on.

<comment><USER5> Well, the L1-Support could have said that:

"To report a bug please open the FILE menu, and click on "Send feedback". Ta- dah.

Support is still shit if they can't do that. In a software-company everyone should know the rough path to actually report a bug, or what looks like one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> First, I think it's good that Microsoft and others separate _tech support_ from _bug reporting_. Obviously some support requests will be due to bugs - but I'd never _ever_ try to enter a bug via tech support (and this article shows why).

That said, the Microsoft way of bug reporting is utterly infuriating. If a bug like this is reported you want a human response from a developer familiar with the code in question, within at most a few days. This isn't _support_ \- I'm not buying a service from Microsoft I'm _providing_ a service. For free.

Uservoice isn't working. It's a site where you vote on silly feature requests, not a proper bug reporting system where you can actually follow the issue being resolved. The bug report menu item in some products seem to take me to different places each time and differnt products do it differently. (and don't get me started on the people that respond on answers.ms... what is their correctness rate? 5%?)

I'm very happy to see that for a lot of the dev related projects you can now usually get a response on a github issue very quickly.

<comment><USER7> How do you propose filtering tech support from bug reports at scale?

<comment><USER8> Letting customer support people push a button that says "This person appears to have an actual bug" that reports it to a specialized customer support team with some technical knowledge to be able to report it.

These customer support people talk to people like this all day. They can know when an issue is an actual bug.

<comment><USER9> Hmmm.

Getting the bug report to the right dev and eliciting the ever-important "huh, that's weird" is a really tricky routing problem due to Microsoft (and similar companies') scale.

So... maybe... a team could be created, whose sole purpose is to distill potential issues into tiny testcases that take the fewest number of seconds for someone with domain knowledge to look at and go "okay I doubt this is invalid". Not to actually repro the issue (which might require significant setup), but rather to get an initial go/no-go.

Then teams around the company could be routed batches of testcases to look at every couple of days.

I know I'm describing issue tracking here - the specific point I'm getting at is that the first team I mentioned would handle all the back-and-forth with the customer until the testcase was as small as possible.

The caveat emptor with this idea is that it's inspired by a single datapoint (OP's bug report) and may not scale to more nuanced problems. Hardware failure, for example, would fall right through this approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ouch, sounds like this author used a long phone tree and talked to about ten front-line phone support technicians, none of whom were able to file a bug report. Bummer.

Also sounds like one or more of those people advised him to report his issue in the web support forums at [https://answers.microsoft.com/en- us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_...](https://answers.microsoft.com/en- us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_excel) , which in my experience often get really good feedback from employees and expert community contributors ("MVPs"). It sounds like the phone technicians did a bad job of explaining this resource which this author might have mistaken for static help documents (it's not).

Things may have changed in the past few years, but back when I worked in the PM organization that owned updates to this Web Query feature in Office 15 (the prior version), I remember that MVPs and PMs would absolutely trawl those forums looking for user-reported bugs and trying to help get them workarounds & fix the root-cause bug. YMMV of course, but many members of the team spent time every week looking for primary-source user feedback.

I definitely can't blame the author for taking the angle "OK, I tried CS, I'm going to give up and write a blog post" \-- certainly very popular these days and works great for getting in touch with a tech company -- but it's too bad that the author didn't manage to get in touch with the community at answers.microsoft.com. The MVPs, employees, and other contributors there are often phenomenally helpful in doing bug triage and devising workarounds or real fixes. Seems like a case where first-line support might have been able to say "we can't fix this, but we know who can" quicker.

<comment><USER11> > I remember that MVPs and PMs would absolutely trawl those forums looking for > user-reported bugs and trying to help get them workarounds & fix the root- > cause bug. YMMV of course, but many members of the team spent time every > week looking for primary-source user feedback.

Oh bullshit. Anyone who's landed on answers.microsoft.com before and seen what passes for "dialogue" with customers on there knows what you're saying isn't true. I don't have any links handy (I abandoned any hope years ago on Microsoft caring about fixing bugs in products), but there are numerous extremely well documented bugs in SQL Server (just as one example) that have been open in some cases for over 7 years!

<comment><USER12> Agreed. Easily ⅔ of the time I land on answers.microsoft.com, the MSFT response marked as answer is "run sfc /scannow" or "Try a clean boot".

<comment><USER13> Don't forget how sorry they are to hear it and that they will most happy to assist with your problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As someone that use to work in Enterprise and prior in SMB for o365, you are caught in a trap because Home users aren't treated the same way.

If you want this to be escalated quickly and get the devs involved, create an o365 trial account, make sure it has a null.onmicrosoft.com domain - that's commercial.

For commercial, you're connected to a tech, which is outsource through the typical firms, e.g. Teleperformance, Experis, Unisys, etc -- they don't care but they have an SLA to follow and if you give them negative feedback, the case will be escalated as the team lead will question why they got negative.

For example, a typical agent would have 100-120 cases a month. CSAT can not fall under 92%. Yes, 92%.

Escalations on a negative feedback ticket removes that ticket from that techs queue, so by rating it negative and not letting it be closed will get you the quickest service in terms of escalation because the agent and that agents Team Lead will escalate it to the NEXT team that has meetings with QA and the Dev's in India w/ Wipro and is the quickest way to get it resolved.

Or, just prove that there's a way it can be a security vulnerability and get a 10k check. I would but, I think I'm disqualified.

</comment><comment><USER15> Still waiting for Microsoft to fix this huge bug in Edge for over a year:

[https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft- edge/platfor...](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft- edge/platform/issues/7134034/)

I wouldn't hold my breath. Microsoft is koolaid city.

<comment><USER16> Wow--props for your persistence. I thought the original blog post was bad.

Hopefully this gets more visibility so it's escalated correctly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I had a similar experience recently. My kid was trying to play Minecraft on her iPhone with her friends and it required her to login with her Xbox Account (which is another name for her Microsoft Account) but she didn't have permissions to play online because her account was a child member of a family and I hadn't granted her permission to play with friends.

The Bug was that she wasn't showing up as my child on the Xbox website, only on the Microsoft Account website. So I had no way of granting her permissions.

Unfortunately I tried the Chat support feature first. I was bounced around between Microsoft Support, Microsoft Account Support, Xbox Account Support, and Xbox Support numerous times. Eventually I was told to go fill out a form with a provided support number and that someone would email me.

When I finally received an email it contained links to the knowledge base article I'd found myself and had walked through with support numerous times already. I was even told a different points that I needed to Contact Apple and Mojang about the issue.

After an evening of this I decided to call. I was on the phone for about 2 hours with a guy while we went through all the same gyrations I had done before with Chat support. Thankfully he didn't try to pawn me off on anyone or transfer me to another department.

After eventually conceding that it wasn't user error and in fact a bug, he said he would submit it as a bug and sent me a link to a page where I could view the status of my support case.

The linked page is mostly useless as it is just a log of the emails I exchanged with Microsoft Support however it does have an obscure Status field. I never followed back up on the issue until a week ago when my kid asked about Minecraft again. I checked the Xbox Account website and miraculously I could change her permissions!

For shits and giggles I just opened up the support link I was emailed and the Status is now showing as "New -> TroubleShoot -> Closed". So yay!

I still haven't gotten a response from Microsoft Support about who I should contact at Apple about my issue though...

* I almost forgot! At one point the Xbox team wanted me to log into an Xbox One to try and adjust the privacy settings there. Only problem was that I don't own an Xbox One so they suggested that I some how come upon one on my own because they were confident it would solve my issue.

<comment><USER18> I'm trying to think of where I could even drum up an Xbox One, but I think I'd be up a creek without a paddle myself. None of my friends own one (though they own 360's and PS4's) and none of the MS employees I know own a Xbox One.

I think I'd just try to hijack one at a Microsoft Store, if they have those available to "demo". Though they may have ripped that out for the Vive areas iirc...

<comment><USER17> I was half hoping they'd offer to send me one. I've wanted to play with a Kinect and SLAM but the upfront cost is too high for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >My bug that I found has to do with Excel 2016. At my company, we have many spreadsheets that use a feature in Excel called "Web Queries". These allow one to download a web page, or a table that is on the web page, into cells in your excel document.

Ok, sounds janky, but go on...

>In my particular case, I am using this feature to connect our internal job tracking system that I developed to spreadsheets that are used for calculating pricing and energy savings (our company makes energy savings updates to refrigeration systems), and upload that result back to the tracking system.

Oh god why?? Why!?? What is this Frankenstein system you have created??

<comment><USER3> It's... complicated :) Mostly because utility companies insist on Excel for exchange of energy calculations. And even more importantly, because it was WAY WAY better than the previous iteration. Don't make me talk about it.

<comment><USER20> You can use actual programming languages to beat up excel: [http://www.python- excel.org/](http://www.python-excel.org/) (I'm sure other languages can beat up excel too)

I'm not saying it's a fix for this particular use case, but I couldn't imagine having to manually update a bunch of excel sheets regularly.. talk about a nightmare. ack.

<comment><USER21> Or indeed [https://github.com/kaleidicassociates/excel-d](https://github.com/kaleidicassociates/excel-d) which schweiguy may find more appealing :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My 2 cents having gotten about 10 bugs in Microsoft products (mostly Windows and Office, some server, some client, some kernel mode, some user mode):

You basically have to pay for Premier Support or find a way to get in touch with a developer out-of-band to get anything fixed. Even going through Premier is a brutal process, as a consumer, try to find a human at Microsoft or just give up. Even if you do pay the ransom for fancy support, you're still way better off trying to find an alternate way to contact someone on the team. Write a blog post, tweet at someone, post on HN or Reddit, whatever.

If you do go through Premier, hope that your bug repros every time with a procedure that takes no more than 5 numbered steps. Anything beyond that, give up. Never ask for advice or assume common sense or anything with any room for interpretation.

Hope that your bug is in something that is about 1 year old. Any newer and support has never touched it and is surprised anyone in the real world uses it. Much older and they won't risk a change.

This has gotten better recently, but be prepared to fill out a lot of questionnaires about why some data corruption bug or memory leak is a problem for your business. These will be insane in context. At one point I had to write 8 pages about why Task Scheduler (their cron, more or less) should run tasks on the defined schedule, as opposed to not running them.

Hope that your issue is in a core-ish server product. The support teams for AD, Exchange and SQL are significantly better than anything client side. Just as long as it's one of these older established products and not something new, if it's new, support won't know what it is.

There are incredibly competent and helpful people in Microsoft's support org. Like fix your bug in a 15 minute phone call after a hundred hour case, cut you a private build and ask you to confirm the fix - competent. I'd estimate there are about 4 of these people in that entire support org, and you don't get to talk to them until you've invested a month or two in escalations and repros.

Oh and answers.microsoft.com is an anti-service. It's like experts exchange in the dark times, only worse. There is no useful information there and it serves only to add noise to your search results.

</comment><comment><USER23> Ah! Many many moons ago when MS refused to even answer the phone I ended up in frustration telexing (yep!) a guy in MS HQ who turned out to be called Bill Gates, and dramatic things happened quite quickly. That's what we used to do before blog posts...

(It also resulted in my first start-up getting funded.)

<comment><USER24> Is this story available in more detail somewhere?

<comment><USER23> Only generally after a few pints... B^>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There are also Microsoft teams that don't put you through such nightmare scenarios though. Last night I submitted a TypeScript bug report, and within 15 minutes it was labeled, added to the next-release milestone, and had someone assigned to it.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, but who are the users of Typescript? Developers that, by and large, can usually tell the different between a genuine bug and analogous cases of not understanding where the FILE button is. The signal:noise ratio for reported typescript problems is certainly such that its much easier to filter through the issue tracker and find the genuine bugs.

People use github issues as tech support quite often, but the users of excel are nothing like users of Typescript.

<comment><USER27> So probably the right way to get a bug in Excel fixed is to report it to the typescript team...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I get the same nonsense and runaround as a Premier customer.

10 years ago they were wonky about engineer assignment but excellent. 20 years ago a guy would be on an airplane for a crit sit.

Now, forget it. It seems like the KPI they care about isn't resolution, but getting issues dumped to the next queue.

<comment><USER29> Inbox zero meets bug tracking

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I would agree with Namrog84 (yes, I'm an MS employee). Also, the Excel UserVoice should allow you to report bugs and I would say should be your first stop for any issues that you encounter ([https://excel.uservoice.com/](https://excel.uservoice.com/)).

Also, I worked as a Product Manager (Marketing) in the Office division for about 3 years, and honestly if you find folks who you know in Marketing, we're all about community and are willing to help get you the right resources and to the right people, regardless if it's our product that you're having trouble with.

Finally, I know for a fact that the marketing and engineering teams are actively engaged on StackOverflow, so if you were able to post something there, they will find it and respond.

<comment><USER3> Thank you. I should probably have tried those too. It would be a good idea to instruct your support people to refer to those places for bug reporting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have reported a bizarre Outlook bug 18 months ago and I am still getting updates from desperate people slamming their heads into the same wall. Microsoft could not physically give less fuck (Plank-fuck?).

[https://answers.microsoft.com/en- us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_...](https://answers.microsoft.com/en- us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_outlook-mso_mac/outlook-for-mac-error-message- rules-could-not-be/920e81ae-aa68-40d9-88a9-ae380a950919)

> Secondly, what an ignorant unhelpful error message is this? What is the > error? In which rule it is? How do I fix it? The message could have equally > read "F... YOU!", it would be equally unhelpful and rude!

</comment><comment><USER32> The real trick is to know somebody who works on the product. Seems to be the only way I've ever seen any bug get reported and fixed.

<comment><USER33> I remember submitting an early preview F# bug directly to dev email which I got together with compiler crash message related to some obscure attribute handling situation. I remember being very surprised that I could do it, and more so when I got a response! That was the first time I realized there are people like me behind this faceless Microsoft machine.

Funny, wildly different times, I don't think github was even popular (existed?) back then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It bears repeating: this is how Microsoft saw the open source movement back in the day:

[http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/](http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/)

I don't think they've changed their fundamental attitude to their customers in the following years.

</comment><comment><USER35> I didn't follow the part where you couldn't give them a Microsoft id for a commercial office 365 license. Presumably you were giving them your personal Microsoft id used with office 365 home at home for your own personal non commercial use? Why did you not just give them the id for the commercial office license your company must have to use office for commercial purposes?

It's understandable that one of the differences with the greatly discounted non commercial use office home license is lesser support than the more expensive commercial license is entitled to. Support is expensive.

</comment><comment><USER36> That was fantastic!!! And to think, all they have to do is have a "report bug" item in the help menu.

<comment><USER37> We did this with Opera Mini. I think it could have worked, sorta, if we had staffed this properly (meaning 50/50 on tech support/development. we weren't in a position to do that). But only early on. The early users were kinda techie (beta users were great! smart people who could speak english!), so it worked decently well until we reached like 1M MAUs. At 250M MAUs it was just random noise to a human. And the volume was insane.

It didn't help that were all Swedes and the vast majority of the users were Russian/Indonesian/Nigerian/Indian. Language-specific ML could definitely have helped nowadays, but this was 2005.

Another aspect:

The content was so "inappropriate" that we felt that we coulnd't really recruit young/cheap people with the proper language skills to watch these feedback channels. It just felt.. well, wrong.

Here's a lesson: if you build a browser and target it to people who have not been exposed to the Internet before, most users will use it to access porn. Not wikipedia.org, un.org etc. Very, very hard-core porn.

(We did notice that they actually started looking for things besides porn after a couple of years, though! I guess it's something people have to go through...)

<comment><USER37> > It didn't help that were all Swedes

In the beginning, I mean. Quite soon we also had norwegian team members, and a few years later some polish team members, and so on. Language mis-match still was most certainly an issue though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> For an example on how it should work look at Bash On Windows. They are really doing a great job there.

[https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues](https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues)

<comment><USER39> That reminds me of the Halloween Memos and Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Commandline". The MS writer dabbles a little in this new 'open source' thing and reports back that he's astonished he can just open a bug! And even submit a patch! Even as a professional Windows user he admits being a little seduced by it. And Stephenson notes the contrast between the Debian bugtracking system and MS Windows's opacity.

<comment><USER34> I spent ten years or so as a Windows developer. I've experienced the difference between the MS bug reporting process, and the ability to raise an issue on an open source tool then fix it with a pull request. There's no way I'd ever go back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> That's one great thing I like about RedHat. You don't even need to be their customer to report a bug. And you'll usually get some sort of a response in days.

<comment><USER41> And it applies not just to RedHat, but also Debian, SUSE, Ubuntu, and so on. Not to mention that every project that your distribution will inevitably work with to fix a problem also works in the open.

I cannot imagine working on a platform that doesn't give you the ability to report bugs directly to the people working on something. Actually, I can't imagine not being able to read the bloody code and figuring out why something is broken in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I report bugs sometimes. I develop and test software for a living, and so my paying clients come first. This includes both software they are using and relevant tools that I am using in order to help the clients.

After or alongside those come the support and development teams of free (speech) software that I use. After that, certain developers of non-free software. As an exercise for the student, guess where Microsoft comes in that list.

</comment><comment><USER43> In contrast, Steve Jobs was known for randomly answering customer support calls to better understand the customer.

[http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/22/tech/innovation/jobs- excerpt-c...](http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/22/tech/innovation/jobs-excerpt- customer-service/)

<comment><USER44> It still works :)

A couple of months ago I sent an email about a bug in the iBooks iPhone App directly to Tim Cook. A couple of days later, an Apple PM responsible for the iBooks App sent me a mail telling me to describe the problem a bit more precise. I offered to take a video and sent it to him. It went back and forth a bit (but always the same person!) and in the next iOS patch the bug was fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> At level 7 you lost. They got you off the phone. I usually allocate a half a day to these types of efforts. Hopefully I am not overly critical, but it appears you have spent much more time complaining about the MS support process than just biting the bullet and spending the whole day on the phone.

</comment><comment><USER46> Its due to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_interdependence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_interdependence)

</comment><comment><USER47> I've had the same experience, with Comcast... What these companies don't understand is that good CS can make a customer for life, or the opposite.

</comment><comment><USER48> What about this? [https://office365.uservoice.com/](https://office365.uservoice.com/)

<comment><USER49> Even better: [https://excel.uservoice.com/](https://excel.uservoice.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> One of the best shaggy dog stories I've read in a long time. As a work of creative writing, well done.

</comment><comment><USER51> I feel like the entire world is ignoring me.

</comment><comment><USER52> Ok, so this was just a silly rant.

<comment><USER5> Well, considering he got an internal dev to report this issue... Not so silly :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run".

\- Microsoft

The reason you are all using MS Excel today.

<comment><USER53> Nah; Lotus got very defocused on new C++ and cross-platform spreadsheets. Maybe Microsoft misled them on the relative importance of OS/2 vs Windows, but to my eyes it was a classic case of too much money leading to a focus on abstract high-level issues leading to bad software.

Still, it took years for 123 to really fade away, at which point Lotus was all about Notes.

Source: I worked on the X (Open Look and Motif) versions of 123 around 1990-1992.

<comment><USER43> What are your thoughts on Quattro Pro?

<comment><USER53> I don't believe I've ever set eyes on it running.

Kudos to the team that got it to work, though: at the time it was probably the biggest C++ PC program ever.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Kanban for Multidisciplinary Projects? - <AUTHOR> I've always worked with some kind of a Kanban-Scrum-Agile-ish system for as long as I can remember.  Most of these evolved out of necessity and without official affiliation to any of the above.
I'd be curious to know what HN'ers have found useful for deep/wide multidisciplinary projects.
These are projects where you have hardware, software (embedded, workstation, web), mechanical, electrical, FPGA's, manufacturing, CNC, 3D printing, injection molding, sourcing, sub-contractors, etc.
In other words, we are not talking about an iOS or web-app project but rather a complex multidisciplinary project.  Designing and building a car, plane, rocket, desktop computer, industrial machine, etc. <comment><USER2> Try codecks.io which I found because one of the devs posted here. It's like Trello on steroids (imports Trello boards, too). We switched our complex product development to Codecks almost immediately and are lovin' it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Their focus seems to be gaming dev. Does it really play well with the kinds of multi-disciplinary projects I mentioned?

<comment><USER2> Yes. It's content-agnostic and has nothing to do with games.

<comment><AUTHOR> They should rethink their branding. I wonder how many people they lose due to how they portray themselves?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Pythonrc, now with ability to load virtualenv specific customizations - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lonetwin/pythonrc/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've submitted this before a couple of times over the last couple of years but re-submitting now because I've added a few interesting (at least I think so) enhancements. The '\l' command to list the code for objects and now the '\e' command will also let you ^edit^ objects (ie: open the source file for objects in the editor). Also the ability to load and _pre-populate_ your sessions when working in virtualenvs.

Would love to hear feedback or ideas. Hope at least some people find it as useful as I do.

<comment><USER2> Hi. Does this work on windows?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure to be honest. I've developed, tested and used this only on linux (various flavors). That said, I can't think of reasons why it shouldn't except for maybe the terminal color sequences. Not sure how compatible those are.

I'd love to hear whether it does. If it doesn't it would be good to get bug reports or pull requests.

<comment><USER3> It shouldn't be hard to add windows support with colorama[1].

[1]: [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/colorama](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/colorama)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. One of the (personal) goals for this was to keep it simple all in one file (that's why the code is 540 lines with comments and help and license text) and be dependent only on the stdlib.

This lets me just copy it over (using the bash function I have shown in the demo) everywhere I ssh without having to pip install anything. Additionally it just works out of the box for any virtualenv ...even something created with mktmpenv.

Of course, if someone doesn't feel the same, they are encouraged to make this their own ! I've put in effort to ensure the code is easy to read and modify.

<comment><USER3> you can always hide colorama's import and initialization behind try: except ImportError block, which will allow it to work when it's available, and skip when it's not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You could shorten the demonstration in the README a bit by avoiding the explanations. Most of it is quite obvious.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I guess it _is_ a bit long. I'll redo the demo soon. Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can you make it do presentations for you like dave beazely? ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure what you mean. Do you have an example ? If you are speaking about creating screencasts, I've been thinking about creating a script that'll load a text file, replay it on an prompt and generate the asciinema json based off that. Something like a mix of except, typescript and asciinema.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, kind of a joke. Dave Beazley is well-known to give talks with a _heavily_ modded interpreter. See [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyDLAutA88s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyDLAutA88s) for an example.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah! Didn't watch the entire video yet but I get it.

For sure, that doesn't seem like a hard thing to do. Maybe I will make a tool like that to do live presentations! Looks like fun.

/Me going back to watch that video</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Whom Do You Use for New Hire Background Checks? - <AUTHOR>

My last Q about this hire is can he stay out of serious trouble and manage his own finances. I've Googled 'background check' and the vendors all look sleazy to me.
So HN - Whom do you use for background checks?
EDIT: I have signed permission from the prospect to do the check.] <comment><USER2> Background checks sound pretty sleazy in any case - what business is it of yours if someone once had financial problems (such a record will never tell you the why only the what).

Call the last employer but one for an honest assessment of the reasons your prospective employee left and how easy they are to get one with - you already know they have the knowledge required for the job - you tested for that before and during the interviews - right?

If you still feel a little uneasy then it's a "No Hire" - end of story.

<comment><AUTHOR> As SysAdmin he will control all the servers in my company, have access to all the data, all the passwords, all the personnel files. He will control $100Ks of investment.

I think this is basic due diligence. I have also had confirming advice this is a good idea from previous company owners (and stories about times when they did not).

Its like checking if your accountant has money troubles.

There is also lots of research that shows people are really really poor at detecting lies (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXm6YbXxSYk>). We all have made mistakes in judging people, I am pretty trusting actually and have been burnt. There is too much on the line this time.

<comment><USER2> well at least that way you are going to hire someone who has not been "caught".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is it even legal to do checks on "can he manage his own finances"?

Even in India (where you can have checks of criminality and so on at the point of hiring, especially in large companies, thanks to the focus on Outsourcing) people don't disclose their financial information to employers. Banks and financial institutions will turn any inquiries down unless you are a law enforcement officer with the proper paperwork.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it is legal (but IANAL). The online services _certainly_ offer credit reports having this level of detail.

But I'll edit the question to make sure people know that the prospect has given signed permission for the inquiry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Over the years, I had several requests for my approval to check if I have a criminal record, but I don't remember any about my credit report.

Plus a potential employer could use the information from the credit report in salary negotiation. I don't really like this idea. Credit report are easy to obtain if you have consent, just check the major agencies, the ones I have dealt with in the past (not when hiring people) are TransUnion and Equifax.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please see my comment <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=854928>

You are putting a lot on the line when you hire a SysAdmin, Accountant, and certainly anyone with check-writing authority.

The employer that uses financial distress to bargain someone down is getting what they pay for. The employee will jump as soon as they can. I am not that kind of employer.

<comment><USER4> That is really when you are small enough that you can't afford controls and verification to ensure real security.

The point is not about the employer exploiting financial distress but that the employer can know what your current revenues are and therefore gain an edge.

<comment><AUTHOR> As I said I am not that kind of employer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have had employers in the finance sector pull my credit report to check me out. I'm pretty sure they use one of the big 3 US credit agencies. You might be best off to check with one of them to see how you can do this legally. If they don't do it directly, they can probably show you a third party that would.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think there are companies that bundle this stuff and do it cheaper than the big 3. But like I said in the OP they all look a bit "oily" so I'm looking for referrals from HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wasn't this question asked just a few days ago? I've searched with SeachYC, but I haven't found it, so maybe I'm imagining things, but I could've sworn I've seen it here recently.

<comment><AUTHOR> I searched too - no I don't think so.</comment></comment>


Judicious Use of Shitty Code - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jaredsinclair.com/post/123277602945/judicious-use-of-shitty-code

<comment><USER2> Here's another dirty little secret: the main reason writing "clean" code takes significantly more time than writing "shitty" code is because you have to unlearn all the crappy practices you've picked up. And please don't conflate clean code with overengineering.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a good example of why many people don't consider "software engineering" a real discipline.

<comment><USER4> to be fair, he's actually a trained nurse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems like a lot of justification for being sloppy

<comment><USER6> Yea I agree. It's not that much more effort to clean things up and it will save you time later.

Not sure why the author thinks writing clean code is some form of premature optimization.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you promote your website? - <AUTHOR> What are some techniques that the HN community uses to drive traffic and otherwise promote their website?
Each website is different and I know there is no one shot way to promote all websites. Building a website or online service that people want to use is step one. Assuming that condition is met, what combination of things work well? Paid clicks, organic search engine traffic, phone calls, face to face time, crazy marketing trick X?
In my case, I have a online service based website that I'm trying to promote. I'm making calls to those who sign-up and leave a valid phone number to get feedback (not very often), as well using Google AdSense, following the best search engine practices, signing up for local conferences, and telling everyone I meet about my site and will listen. What else makes sense? <comment><USER2> A list of probably obvious things to try:

HackerNews Delicious Links StumbleUpon Niche blogs - There are people who don't get a lot of freebies who will actually do a full write-up in exchange for a free trial etc. Without knowing what your product is, it's hard to reccomend anything to specific in this category. Twitter - Tweet about new features, promotions, related news at least once a day. This is also a nice informal way for your users to speak directly to you in a public forum. Company blog - Get a Tumblr or something and have this feed to your tweets as well. Facebook page

Out of curiosity, what's the audience?

<comment><AUTHOR> My startup offers online surveys, which are mainly used for research, company and employee evaluation, and feedback.

I don't consider the service so glamorous, but I think its useful and I'd like to spread the word as much as possible. I come from a programming side, so I can make all the website magic happens, promoting my website does not come so naturally to me.

<comment><USER3> i assume this is your web site? <http://new.surveyshare.com>

who do you consider your main competitors? survey monkey?

anyway, you might want to think about running an adwords campaign and using the names of your competitors as the keywords and target them directly... like we under cut their prices... or something of that nature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know you're asking about advertising but I think you might benefit from stepping a little back and thinking about marketing before you think about advertising.

Think about who your target customers are (i.e. the individuals within these firms who will pay for your product), are if they using existing products or are they completely new to the product type. What's your value proposition to these users.

Once you understand that it should be much easier to promote your product to those users. If your target market is HR staff in SMEs then use linkedin to target that group, get featured on HR blogs, magazines, etc. and make sure your value proposition clearly comes across whenever you advertise.

</comment><comment><USER3> here are some ideas you might could change to your site. <http://duckduckgo.com/spread.html>

<comment><USER5> i did something like that <http://www.adobocode.com/spread></comment></comment>


A Lesson in Internet Anatomy: The World's Densest Meet-Me Room - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/multimedia/2008/03/gallery_one_wilshire

<comment><AUTHOR> Higher resolution photos on the photographer's website: <http://eecue.com/a/1547/One-Wilshire-Tour.html></comment>


Eric Schmidt to head new Pentagon innovation board - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-military-innovation-idUSKCN0W421V <comment><USER2> Guy who colluded with other high level corporate officers (see techtopus) to artificially limit the salaries of tens of thousands of highly skilled workers, now asked to advise the government on how to do innovation. For purely moral reasons I'd disqualify him from the position. I suspect he'll find some way to leverage this to benefit himself and/or his friends and won't consider any harm to the public. I don't want this guy in this position.

<comment><USER3> I was under the impression this agreement, at least initially, was to prevent anticompetitive poaching.

Suppose Apple wants to dominate search. One way to do so is to poach every Google search engineer by offering to triple their salaries. These companies agreed not to do that.

Yeah, it's illegal, but what options did these executive have? California effectively bans noncompete clauses. And there's enough money in the system and teams are typically small enough that dismantling a competitor is feasible.

Google Engineer Sarah shouldn't be paid triple Google Engineer Jessie just because she works on a product that's valuable to Competitor X.

Edit: original post not clear enough. Reproducing a reply below:

>The problem was with using money to prevent your competitors from doing business. Doing so subverts the free market.

Suppose every time a competitor rented office space, you bought the building and evicted them.

Suppose Walmart opens a store in SoMa that sells groceries at a tenth of what surrounding stores sell, then jacks prices when those stores fold.

To ELI5: you run a lemonade stand. Your neighbor Susie also has a lemonade stand. Susie's mom doesn't like your parents and wants you to fail, so she pays the store $500 to not sell you lemonades. Yeah, the market price of exclusive lemonade rights is now $500, but unreasonable sums are being spent to prevent competition. Something's wrong.

There are laws against most anticompetitive practices, but not all.

Part of the motivation behind the poaching agreement was filling a gap. You could dismantle a competitor by paying everyone and anyone in their product's critical path to simply not work there anymore.

The solution, an antipoaching agreement, was illegal.

<comment><USER4> > Google Engineer Sarah shouldn't be paid triple Google Engineer Jessie just > because she works on a product that's valuable to Competitor X.

If they want to keep the employee, they absolutely need to match what others are willing to pay. That you suggest otherwise is nonsense in the american job market.

Cheating to get a better price is as you acknowledged, illegal, and most of the time you will find the market begins to even out those weird bumps by creating incentives for others to learn/work on that skillset (because of the higher rewards.)

This is very equivalent to "Well why should we pay engineer X more when they are working the same number of hours as marketing person Y?"

Its a comparison that doesn't make sense unless you want to pretend that the employer does not benefit as a result of the value the employee produces.

If the engineer is 3x more valuable to the other company and not to your bottom line, its an obvious time for that engineer to move, not be made a slave by anti-competitive agreements between employers.

Hopefully you will be able to find someone to work on your product at a price point that your business can derive some value from, but if not, its probable that your business sucks.

<comment><USER3> I agree it's wrong. I was just elaborating on the reasons it happened, as I haven't seen it explained in press and I know people who were affected in 2005 when this started.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Assange's "When Google met Wikileaks" comes to mind... [https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it- seems/](https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/)

<comment><USER6> (strong downvotes here) But Google uses HTTPS... Joking aside, Google is seriously helping to advance computer security as a whole (just take a look at their security blog). Obviously, it is not a good idea to have your private life in the cloud.

Joking aside #2: could a private company like Google be acquired by US as a key security asset? It seems possible, I found this [https://www.quora.com/Can-the-US-government-acquire- private-...](https://www.quora.com/Can-the-US-government-acquire-private- companies) helpful.

<comment><USER7> I'm a bit mystified by the downvotes. During previous wars, the US did in fact compel industry to retool for wartime needs. And not in arm's-length transactions, but by fiat and in many cases at enforced price levels. e.g., during WWII domestic civilian auto and airplane construction was completely diverted to military needs. In a global war, I think it is actually quite likely that the same thing would happen with each combatant's civilian tech industry.

<comment><USER8> In a new world war, assuming no nuclear wipe-out scenario, Google would indeed be drafted. Their effectiveness as a global entity would collapse rapidly however, as the global internet would be destroyed as a first stage target. Google would lose the vast benefits it has on global information, tracking, etc. Mostly what Google would be drafted for then, would be the sheer engineering talent - basically the government would want their skill, not Google itself per se. In the case of WW2, the government wanted the steel output and labor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This comes on the heels of Schmidt's most recent email innovation, as published by Time [1]:

> If you get something you think you may want to recall later, forward it to > yourself along with a few keywords that describe its content.

> This isn't just handy for emails, but important documents too. Jonathan > scans his family's passports, licenses, and health insurance cards and > emails them to himself along with descriptive keywords.

This is so horrible and wrong - and now he holes himself up in a make-believe position at the Pentagon? Figures...

[1] [http://time.com/3425368/google-email- rules/?xid=time_socialf...](http://time.com/3425368/google-email- rules/?xid=time_socialflow_twitter)

<comment><USER10> Translation:

"If you have private data, please put it on our servers so we can add it to our internal profile we have on you."

This is surreal.

<comment><USER11> Do people really believe this?

<comment><USER12> Some believe it's intentional.

I believe it's unintentional, but that the result is eventually very similar, if not the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

<comment><USER14> I remember when that happened. I will never defend that silly argument, but I do think this was taken out of context. Wasn't he specifically trying to say: if you're going to commit a crime, don't tell Google about it, because then Google will be compelled to help the authorities? So from his perspective, he's frustrated that people expect Google to ignore it when you're doing illegal things and also telling Google about it.

Eric Schmidt has a way with words in that he always says the wrong thing - sometimes you can see what he was trying to say, and there might be something good there - but whenever he talks he just fumbles and ruins everything.

<comment><USER15> The problem is Google cannot have it both ways. They like to act like the data you generate on Google is private only to you, and that Google employees can't see it, and that you're not "telling" anyone, as far as they're concerned.

But you are, because they can and do access that data. And pass it on to the relevant authorities.

<comment><USER16> In the large, for most people, those assertions are true. It turns out that there's a wide gulf between "Can" and "do" that a fair risk assessment will, for many people, indicate is a useful place to be.

Entire companies are built and thrive in the gap between "can" and "do" on the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> All of his actions lead me to think he's considering a run for the presidency one of these days. Maybe 2024 after Hillary. They're quite aligned and he'd be a natural Democrat successor.

<comment><USER18> How many corporate Democratic presidents can the US population withstand?

<comment><USER19> all of them apparently

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've said long ago that Google at one point became a new R&D branch of the US military.

<comment><USER21> Google _does_ own Boston Dynamics....

<comment><USER22> Which isn't focusing on military contracts any longer as part of their buy- out. Does no one actually read anything before they make comments like this?

Best link I could find on short notice: [http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/185570-google-finally- pro...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/185570-google-finally-proves-it- wont-pursue-military-contacts-pulls-leading-robot-from-darpa-competition)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've always been fascinated with how the smartest people end up doing the stupidest things.

Only after opening the next pandora's box do they realize how stupid it was to try to open it in the first place, but it is too late by then.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixb7MdeR8yU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixb7MdeR8yU)

But we never learn, do we...

What good can potentially come out of a high tech, nuclear, AI-driven military force, ran like a software company is beyond me..

<comment><USER24> The only thing we learn from history, Hegel once said, is that we learn nothing from history.

<comment><USER25> well, that's something ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Julian Assange met with Schmidt and his entourage at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and afterwards put his thoughts into an article:

[http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it- seems-279...](http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447)

He basically claimed that Google is an arm of the US State Department.

<comment><USER27> That Google has relationships with In-Q-Tel - the CIA's venture capital arm - is fairly well known e.g. [http://www.wired.com/2010/07/exclusive-google- cia/](http://www.wired.com/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia/)

That doesn't need to mean there's anything murky going on or that Google is an arm of the US state department. Government invests in technology; that's how the Internet started

<comment><USER26> Did you even read the article? In-Q-Tel and their investment isn't even mentioned. He cites dozens of other reasons.

But since you brought it up, why do you think the CIA would invest in a tech company?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> That to me sounds like the worst job, from the start he's an outsider trying introduce massive change, but in an advisory role.

<comment><USER29> Schmidt seems a bit like Bloomberg in that his main interest, now that he has amassed wealth and power, is to use it to hang out with powerful people, more than accomplish anything in particular with them.

(For Bloomberg, it was an obsession with becoming British aristocracy)

<comment><USER30> Bloomberg was probably the most effective mayor in modern NYC history, and spearheaded the creation of Silicon Alley as well as modern LIC, Williamsburg, and Dumbo.

He's a lot more than the "soda ban guy" here.

<comment><USER31> i would credit private industry for those private endeavours. hes "stop and frisk" guy to me. pure authoritarian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> DoD needs the help. I wish him the best of luck.

Having said that, I'd much rather read something like "Google's Schmidt to head up program X for DoD"

Yes, I understand that his unique talents are needed at the top, but frankly you can't top-down optimize something that isn't working in the first place. My preference is to get multiple large programs that serve as an example (and no, the ACA site does not qualify as a large program, at least it shouldn't) and then work on optimizing the system. The way things are, I'm kinda left wondering exactly what he expects to accomplish and exactly how he's going to know that he's accomplished it. "Advisory boards" are the kiss of death in D.C.

Could be a prelude for more political activity. In that case, it'd make sense. He'd be a very interesting SecDef.

</comment><comment><USER33> It was his fault that Google killed XMPP efforts and didn't open Hangouts. It had a direct impact on cutting off the majority of my contact list. That's not the kind of "innovation" that we needed. So I don't trust him to make good choices.

</comment><comment><USER34> As Schmidt has vested interests and personal relationships with the Pentagon, will the public trust him with their security in regard to government intrusion? Should they? Contrast this with Apple's current public relationship with government.

These public activities may not be representative of what really is happening, but trust is all the public can rely on. Very few can understand the techical issues, and very few of those people have access to the information and the time to analyzse it.

However, I'm glad the Pentagon is getting the best help available; the U.S. falling behind in military technology could be an historic catastrophe. Let's not take democracy, liberty, and all their benefits for granted.

<comment><USER10> You seem to take for granted that technology will never be used against citizens.

<comment><USER34> I worry about that, but I don't see an alternative other than to mitigate that risk, via law and policy, as much as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's an appropriate job. Schmidt has always had a more "traditional" relationship to and attitude about government programs in general, long before government surveillance became a hot topic. Sun was a big supplier to the DoD. Schmidt is, despite his occasional odd outbursts of context-free candor, one of the smartest people in the tech industry, and will certainly be one of the people most in tune with what's technically possible and what's reasonable to implement to serve on that board.

</comment><comment><USER36> Whether you think he's not right for the job or not, there has to be some interaction between the private sector and military to debate the best routes for security and innovation. There's not many people who have the experience and know-how as Schimdt, with the other option is the military be completed segregated from the public and completely fall behind. This board will probably be a gold mine for the public sector, because they need some serious help.

</comment><comment><USER37> Why not call him "Chairman" rather than "Former CEO"...?

<comment><USER38> More people probably know what CEO means.

<comment><USER39> Perhaps, but the fact that he's still currently part of Google leadership is far more relevant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> There are so many places where effeciency could be improved in governments (healthcare, democracy, transportation, monetary system, law, taxation), and I'm sure Eric Schmidt can do the job by bringing in high-tech culture....still, military is the last place where I would like improvements to be seen.

</comment><comment><USER41> This puts the acquisition of BostonDynamics in a new light. They weren't the peaceful people snatching them for civilian use. They were a shill for the military; hiding them inside of something less violent seeming to keep the heat away.

</comment><comment><USER42> > Pentagon advisory board aimed at bringing Silicon Valley innovation and best > practices to the U.S. military

snark: The US military already know how to move fast and break things.

DARPA and the Pentagon have done a tremendous amount to move technology forward, over the decades. But, I personally would feel more comfortable if it were a non-military organization that were in the lead role. Technology should be a means to improve humanity and decrease human suffering. What the Pentagon wants out of technology, at least in a proximate sense, is something completely different.

</comment><comment><USER43> Defense Innovation Advisory Board AND The Groundwork (Hillary campaign)? We really have to have one person heading both of those, and have him CEO in charge of determining what people get to look at?

</comment><comment><USER44> I feel a great disturbance in the force..

</comment><comment><USER45> I believe big corporations like Google or Apple serve a balance role with the Government; under that assumption serving a position on both sides would represent a conflict of interests.

</comment><comment><USER46> Easy on the innovation there Eric. Just help them figure out how to keep a government server from being hacked every 2 hours.

</comment><comment><USER47> do no evil. muah ha ha ha ha ha!

<comment><USER10> They have replaced that motto. Which, I suppose, means that they can feel better about themselves now. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil))

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Revolving door?

<comment> ju-st PR stunt

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> "Members will draw on their experience in Silicon Valley to advise on rapid prototyping, iterative product development, complex data analysis, the use of mobile and cloud applications and organizational information sharing."

So, what the Pentagon's R&D processes can learn from SV.

</comment><comment><USER25> being evil, it's more of a calling than a job.

</comment><comment><USER50> People may not want to hear it, but by definition we _are_ devolving into fascism as corporate and government interests become increasingly incestuous.

<comment><USER51> Even if this was corporatism (which it might be, but corporatism is more complex than that), not all corporatism is fascism -- Mussolini has a quote equating them, but that was trying to piggy-back fascism on corporatism, which had been supported in many non-fascist forms by many institutions (notably, the Catholic Church) long before fascism exist.

Fascism combines corporatism with militaristic nationalism and other features.

Mere business-government entanglement, even when it becomes corporatism, is not sufficient for fascism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> To head the Skynet development team.

</comment><comment><USER15> Yet another Googler infiltrating our government. Obama's administration has repeatedly positioned Googlers in every open position with any technology relation whatsoever. It's a staggering example of government corruption at work, especially coupled with their continual immunity from legal repercussions for their actions in this country.

<comment><USER53> ...what?

After working many years in the DoD contracting space bringing in almost anyone from silicon valley who actually knows how technology works should be an improvement from the terrible state it's in now.

Why is it corruption when the government tries to get top quality employees to work within their ranks?

<comment><USER15> Eric Schmidt's wealth is heavily tied to Google's stock, and he's effectively Google's evangelist who they send to government (ours and others) to convince them to do what Google wants them to. (Usually to pass laws helping Google do business, or to avoid punishment for Google's privacy or tax violations.)

It's impossible for him to put the interests of the citizens of our country above his allegiance to Google. This is much like when a government position at the FCC is filled by a Comcast or Time Warner employee or something. The conflict of interest here is amazing.

<comment><USER53> That's a bit different than your previous post. You simply said Googler's in general which there is nothing wrong with that. Now if they currently have a stake in the company AND are working for the government? Yeah I agree with you.

Though I'm not going to lie it still may be better than the current situation. I can't tell you how many times you hear "yeah setup a shell corporation and do this and that and get rich on government contracts". Maybe it's just replacing one corruption for another...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> And just like that, _out of nowhere_ , a year later the Pentagon starts buying Google's Atlas robots.

<comment><USER54> Boston Dynamics was a defense contractor before Google bought them. Despite what was said at the time of the purchase, the continuation that business relationship should be the expectation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Well that's a pretty dumb move for Google PR and their shareholders.

Hard for foreign business to take you seriously on having their back when the US government comes knocking when the CEO is running projects at the Pentagon.

<comment><USER56> Sundar Pichai is CEO, not Schmidt. Although he is still Chairman.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: 13" laptop for gaming under $1k? - <AUTHOR>

this question was asked earlier on engadget (http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/27/ask-engadget-best-ultraportable-laptop-for-gaming/) and i felt like no one really answered the question.  the conversation was drowned out by apple vs non-apple folks.  so i thought maybe i should ask the question here since the community is more hacked-minded.  thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> It really depends on what level of gaming you expect to do. Most of the laptops I've seen that are under 13" (Apple included) either have integrated graphics or a low-end discrete GPU (like an nVidia GeForce 8400M or 9300M).

If the laptop has a discrete GPU as an option, it usually adds $50-$100 to the price, which may push it over the top of your budget.

If you just want to occasionally play some games, but you're not trying to play Crysis on maximum settings, go with something like the Dell XPS M1330. It's an older model, but you should be able to find one with good specs (including a discrete GPU, the 8400M) for under $1k.

If you can spend a bit more, take a look at the Asus range. They've got some 14" laptops that are a little over $1k, but you can get a GeForce 130M, which should be somewhat better than the 8-9 series GeForce chips.

</comment><comment><USER3> dell xps studio 13

especially if you find a sale or good coupon that will allow you to toss on some extra stuff but stay under $1k.

</comment><comment><USER4> i'm sure we'll see decent 13" gaming laptops under 1k when nvidia releases ION 2 at the end of this fiscal year.

</comment><comment><USER5> Depends on how much gaming[spore vs crysis]. Is a 9400 good enough? Then the $999 white macbook would work. Or a dell for a bit less.</comment>


Tesla, Inc. Repositories - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/teslamotors <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, the majority of these projects are just forks of well- established ones without any contributions.

<comment><USER3> They really should license their onboard computers. Companies like John Deere would happily scrap Intel Windriver.

<comment><USER4> I think John Deere is perfectly fine using something that is proven to work. I can't imagine anyone wanting to tie themselves to Tesla's software at this stage of the game.

<comment><USER3> Contract provision that survives bankruptcy, Tesla needs the cash or there may not be a Tesla in two years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Happy to see Tesla /finally/ make some traction on GPL compliance.

Some additional context [1]:

      I'm reaching out you since you are someone who has expressed interest
      or requested open source code from Tesla in the past.

      We would like to let you know that we now have two repositories on
      GitHub that might be of interest.

      You can find them here:

      https://github.com/teslamotors/buildroot
      https://github.com/teslamotors/linux

      Today they contain the buildroot material that is used to build the
      system image on our Autopilot platform, and the kernel sources
      for those boards as well as the Nvidia Tegra-based infotainment
      system in Model S/X. It is expected to be amended with material for
      other systems in the car in the near future.

      Currently the material that is there is representative of the 2018.12
      release, but it will be updated with new versions corresponding to new
      releases over time.

      It does not contain the proprietary applications Tesla has built on top of
      this system image such as the actual Autopilot software stack,
      Nvidia proprietary binaries, etc.

      Work is underway on preparing sources in other areas as well, together with a
      more coordinated information page. We wanted to let you know about this
      material as it is available now while work continues on the other parts.

      For further questions, please contact email@example.com.

[1] [https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/tesla-releases- some-...](https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/tesla-releases-some-gpl- opensource-bits.115545/)

<comment><USER6> Looks like they have some more work to do:

[https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2018/may/18/tesla- incomplete-...](https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2018/may/18/tesla-incomplete- ccs/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It looks like everything is a fork except for two repos:

buildroot - a Github commit of the buildroot.org project

linux - a manual clone of the linux git repo

There are probably some Tesla made commits somewhere in here, but they really should just opened pulls against the original projects.

<comment><USER8> It looks like the purpose is to link to for being GPL compliant, not like an attempt to contribute to open source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lots of Ruby and Go, my languages of choice. Makes me love Tesla even more.

<comment><USER10> They're hiring Go programmers...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> While they don't include their higher-complexity systems or seem to improve the existing projects much, I still find it interesting to see what tools they use.

</comment><comment><USER12> shiiiisss [https://github.com/teslamotors/linux/commit/6f13a69f3d72ac08...](https://github.com/teslamotors/linux/commit/6f13a69f3d72ac08f0913da2b1d8c87a733929c2)

</comment><comment><USER13> How can we be sure this is really Tesla sponsoring this? It looks like the sole person is a Tesla employee but maybe they're working unilaterally? It is probably them but just wanted to add some healthy skepticism...

</comment><comment><USER14> Finally, after being non compliant with GPL for years.

</comment><comment><USER15> Pile load of propaganda, again.</comment>