Goodbye Joyent - <AUTHOR> https://zinascii.com/2020/goodbye-joyent.html <comment><USER3> Sad news. But, not unexpected given the state of Joyent in recent years.

Really happy Z got a chance to work at Joyent though, even if it was only for a few years.

For most of us ex-Basho (ie. Riak) engineers, Basho was a career highlight. We've mostly moved on to better paying, more stable jobs, but lost the magic / passion / joy that we had at Basho.

Ryan's the exception. I imagine he's loved his time at Joyent as much, if not more, than Basho.

Here's hoping lightning strikes for a third time and Ryan lands somewhere great after his winter break.

</comment><comment><USER4> > _I read a lot of code too, which wasn't always easy, but sometimes I was > lucky enough to find myself treated to one of Robert's epic block > comments[0]._

He wasn't exaggerating, that is an epic, beautiful, I would even say _humbling_ block comment to read. It's completely outside of my regular knowledge domain but that is not at all required to appreciate it.

[0] [https://github.com/joyent/illumos- joyent/blob/dff0473c792fc5...](https://github.com/joyent/illumos- joyent/blob/dff0473c792fc5c3ef7c3d862e557fe201a5d671/usr/src/uts/common/io/mac/mac_sched.c#L28-L967)

<comment><USER5> it's a horrible comment. OTOH it's world class documentation. obviously i'm not comparing myself, but i often find myself the only one at my $JOB that documents things at similar level. 99% of the time because i'm touching code i don't understand and need to understand it first. writing the doco is the way i do it.

software would be soooo much better if we lived in a world where a) engineering practice demanded devs document this well, and b) the majority of devs had the skill to write so well. market pressure however demands faster delivery times, and who cares about the tech debt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What a joy to work with Bryan et al. Probably the best paid education you could imagine.

Is Samsung doing nothing with joyent? Seems they could and should be competing heavily in the server space if not the public cloud itself more meaningfully than they seem to be today.

<comment><USER7> > What a joy to work with Bryan et al.

Presumably not for Ben Noordhuis: [https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a- pronoun](https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun)

That blog post is why I resolved never to do business with Bryan Cantrill or Joyent. I don't know if it influenced others to do likewise, but I can't imagine that it actually helped the company succeed.

<comment><USER8> But the entire point of the post you linked is that they don't work together.

<comment><USER9> It sounds to me like the parent was on Ben's side and he wanted to keep all the gendered pronouns in place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had to look up 'SmartOS' and 'OmniOS' because I had no idea what they are.

NOTE: This isn't meant as an insult; it's just that often people use terms as if they were universally known. He had hyperlinks to some of the more obscure items on the list but not the key items.

<comment><USER11> I'm surprised. They were massive names in the OS scene until recently. Their lineage can be traced back to Solaris and share many of the cool technologies that Sun developers pioneered. So much so that for the first few years of SmartOS, Linux felt like a hobbyist platform in comparison due to its lack of dtrace, containerisations, ZFS, etc.

Linux has come a long way since, which is a large part of the reason why SmartOS has become less relevant. The latter being a great shame because competition breeds innovation and we are losing a lot of interesting interesting Unixes from the public consciousness.

Edit: oh come on. I post this and it almost immediately gets negative karma despite being both factual and informative. A perfect example of the rife abuse of peer moderation on this site. I honestly don't think I'll bother wasting my time on here any more.

<comment><USER12> The downvotes might be for the slightly bombastic tone. SmartOs and IllumOS never felt "massive" to me, particularly compared to Linux. They might have had some nice tooling inherited from Solaris, but they were never particularly appealing for people who were not invested in the Solaris ecosystem - <USER2> had already been effectively wiped out by Linux by the time IllumOS and SmartOs appeared.

<comment><USER10> Or maybe the downvotes are related to the rather fanatic behaviour of some readers of this thread – I got downvoted for mentioning I hadn't heard of those OSes, only to be then voted up; and downvoted elsewhere when I told somebody to cheer up because they had been downvoted for essentially making the same comment. It's pretty frustrating, to be honest: "try to cheer somebody up, get punished for it" isn't the way things are meant to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a beautiful goodbye. I don't recognize most of the names but now I want to.

</comment><comment><USER14> Always interesting to hear the name Joyent again. The company has had quite the colorful history. Starting from a productivity suite I never understood to then moving into hosting to eventually becoming a major cloud computing provider.

I used some of their Solaris VM's and never had a problem getting eased in. Learning how to get around in one seemed to be just a bit more work than learning a different Linux distro.

The company was fun to be a customer of even if I did lose my Mixed Grill, later upgraded to the 3 Martini Lunch. I imagine even more fun to work for.

</comment><comment><USER15> It is the sign of terrible incompetence to downsize people like him. If you ever get hold of people with this much competence then find a clever project for them, or create a new subsidiary.

<comment><USER16> The company is doing poorly and it's a miracle it's not closed yet. Better not judge a dying company for laying off (all) its staff.

<comment><USER15> No way I am judging the company, meaning Joyent. But Samsung Electronics owns them, so what I expect is they realise they sit on a goldmine of talent, and if Joyent products are not doing well then they reinvest that talent in something else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I guess Oxide will be picking up some more people.

</comment><comment><USER18> The good ol RIF. Must have some fortune 500 alums working in HR or the C suite. Too bad they didn't offer VJRP or SERO.

<comment><USER5> well it is samsung... one of the largest companies in the world

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting that he throws MongoDB under the bus. I've heard a lot of negativity about them lately.

<comment><USER5> lately? MDB has always been awful. Then again i did work at the largest MDB deployment (per MDB themselves) so saw all the problems.

<comment><USER19> Technical problems or commercial?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > I feel like I was just starting to ease into my all-night rager as an > illumos kernel developer, only to have 5-0 break it up before I could jump > off the roof into the pool.

I was surprised at how appropriate and familiar this phrasing felt.

</comment><comment><USER21> Very very few developers these days get to work on such low level stack. It just sounds very technically challenging yet fun. Wish him good luck to find something related in his next venture.

</comment><comment><USER22> The mongoDB comment rings true at least from the past

Never heard of the OS mentioned

<comment><USER10> > Never heard of the OS mentioned

I hope for your sake that this admission won't cause you to be brutally downvoted too. Here's a pre-emptive +1 ;)

<comment><USER10> Downvoted because I dared to point out that I had been downvoted elsewhere.

What is wrong with the denizens here nowadays??

<comment><USER23> > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, > and it makes boring reading.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER10> "Please" being the operative term in " _please don't_ – to be perfectly frank, if I see people behaving fanatically, I'm going to mention it. Elsewhere others beyond myself were downvoted for simply mentioning that they'd never heard of the OSes mentioned before. Is that deserving of downvoting? No. Am I going to stay quiet about it? Again, no. Do I care if I will be downvoted to hell and below? For the third time, no. I consider the behaviour of others to be far more rude – and such behaviour is on the rise. If it is hidden behind a rule that has the side-effect of making it impossible to call such behaviour out, I'm going to disregard that rule – as I am doing now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> re: Design. This blog uses the Triplicate font, which is the only font I ever purchased if memory serves :-) [1]

1: [https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html](https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> It's kind of risky to have programmers who feel so passionately opinionated about the software that should power a business.

It's doubly tricky, because most companies pay lip service to passion. But like a chef that cares a bit too much about which cookware you use, it sometimes hinders the goal of serving 100 customers at noon.

I respect that they've created their entire networking stack from the ground up. Few can claim the same. But objectively, the less eyeballs on a piece of code, the more risk. What will the company do if they're hit by a bus?

I'm not sure that companies should be measured in terms of "what if a dev suddenly goes away," since creative work isn't interchangeable like gears in a machine (nor would we want it to be). But it seems at least _partly_ relevant.

The tradeoff is that if you use unpopular software, like lisp, you can often gain more leverage in specific situations. HN's software is the most flexible codebase I've ever seen, but few have ever studied it deeply. Viaweb used those principles to dominate the competition at a time when everybody was writing websites in C. But are those days gone?

It might be an asset for a startup to use obscure software, so it's definitely worth honing the skillset. I'm just not sure it's a good idea to feel so strongly about business in particular. It has a way of burning you.

<comment><USER26> > The tradeoff is that if you use unpopular software, like lisp, you can often > gain more leverage in specific situations. HN's software is the most > flexible codebase I've ever seen, but few have ever studied it deeply. > Viaweb used those principles to dominate the competition at a time when > everybody was writing websites in C. But are those days gone?

In Paul Graham's days, Lisp was not as unpopular as it is today. It was more like choosing to use Ruby in 2020. On its way out but still in the public consciousness.

<comment><USER25> Hmm. I think Viaweb was the first web application (or at least, no one's disputed that claim) and they kept their choice to use lisp a secret until acquisition. If someone else was using lisp to make websites, it seems like they must have independently rediscovered the idea.

It was started in 1995 and acquired in 1998, so that wasn't a very long time for lisp to come into the public consciousness. It seems like at best it was considered an AI research language.

<comment><USER26> No one was making web applications with anything. The consumer-facing web was still in its infancy.

> It was started in 1995 and acquired in 1998, so that wasn't a very long time > for lisp to come into the public consciousness

Lisp was the only game in town other than C for multiple decades. Absolutely everyone learned it in university. It was the main garbage collected scripting language, like Python today.

<comment><USER27> During the 80's and 90's that place belongs to Basic dialects, not Lisp.

And when Viaweb came to be, there was also ML, Smalltalk, Perl and Tcl to choose from.

This if we focus only on the context of UNIX, because otherwise the language spectrum gets even wider.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bay Area homelessness looks the same as it did 20 years ago - <AUTHOR> http://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/overview/ <comment><USER2> Simple: change the climate of the area so that you get winter. Might chase away the haughty rich people too.</comment>


Can Drugs Help Us Focus? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/books/casey-schwartz-attention-love-story.html <comment><USER2> I can't speak to the drug aspect, but if you just need a little more focus, read up on the amino acid L-Theanine [1]. It is the same amino acid found in green tea that provides a calming and focusing effect. Some people combine it with caffeine when they want to focus on studying. This is not as powerful as the ADHD drugs, but much safer in my opinion. As always, I am not a doctor.

[1] - [https://examine.com/supplements/theanine/](https://examine.com/supplements/theanine/)</comment>


Alex King, an original Wordpress developer, has died - <AUTHOR> https://poststatus.com/alex-king/ <comment><USER2> Colon / bowel cancer has a relatively high success rate when treated (compared to other cancers), but as with all cancers, it is important to catch it early.

Not to be to graphic, but if you have blood in your stool (especially if it is dark red in colour rather than bright red), then you should take yourself immediately to the doctors and tell them. They can take a stool sample and if necessary, refer you for a colonoscopy.

You can be sedated for the colonscopy if you don't like the idea of being awake for it under a local. You normally get a dose of Propofol injected into you (like Michael Jackson) and you wake up feeling refreshed and slightly pissed off that the nurse dared to wake you up from your beautiful embracing slumber. The procedure really isn't as bad as you think it is going to be. The preparation for it is much worse (not painful, just unpleasant).

You will then know for certain whether or not you have a really nasty cancer problem, or just plain old piles. People with Ulcerative Collitis and Crohn's have a higher risk of bowel cancer, so it important that they get checked regularly (talk to your doctor).

Don't delay. It could cost you your life. Men are often the worst for procrastinating over such a decision.

Update - I don't want anyone to think that I'm am suggesting Alex delayed seeing a doctor btw. I just wanted to impart some general wisdom that might save someone else's life.

<comment><USER3> _You can be sedated for the colonscopy if you don 't like the idea of being awake for it under a local. You normally get a dose of Propofol injected into you (like Michael Jackson) and you wake up feeling refreshed and slightly pissed off that the nurse dared to wake you up from your beautiful embracing slumber. The procedure really isn't as bad as you think it is going to be. The preparation for it is much worse (not painful, just unpleasant)._

That's spot on. I've had a colonoscopy as a precaution after seeing blood in my poo (can't bring myself to use the word stool here). The preparation involves taking a very powerful laxative which cleans you out completely. You end up going to the toilet _a lot_ passing what quickly becomes a clear liquid after a couple of trips. This goes on for hours and is unpleasant. But, hey, just unpleasant, nothing more.

The actual procedure does not take long (tens of minutes) and they gave you something to make you feel drowsy. I was fairly awake and enjoyed watching the inside of my body on the screen; others can just layback and do nothing.

On the upside the doctor wrote "Excellent bowel preparation" on my report afterwards so... Achievement Unlocked!

<comment><USER2> You must be British. Only a Brit could talk about poo like this.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I am.

<comment><USER2> It takes one to know one. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you did cross paths with Alex King, please share your stories with his wife at email@example.com .

From [http://alexking.org/blog/2015/08/24/rememberances](http://alexking.org/blog/2015/08/24/rememberances)

 _One of the things my wife and I are trying to do is put together some information about my career that will hopefully give my 6 year-old daughter a better sense of who I was as an adult. She knows me as "dad", but when she gets older she'll be curious about who I was to my peers and colleagues._

 _I've spent more than a decade in the WordPress community and I'd like to request that you to share a few thoughts or remembrances about me that we can compile and share with her when the time is right._

 _If we have crossed paths or if I have managed to do something that you found helpful, I'd love it if you would take a few minutes to write it down and send it to me or my wife: email@example.com. If you're willing to have the story shared publicly, please indicate that accordingly. By default, we will keep everything confidential._

<comment><USER5> "that will hopefully give my 6 year-old daughter a better sense of who I was as an adult" ... :( heartbreaking

<comment><USER6> Yeah, reading that made me think alot about myself and my 6 month old daughter and what would happen if I died as young as my father did (he was 48, I am now 30)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> He was a great person, a great developer and a great businessmen.

And fun piece of trivia, he invented the share icon [http://alexking.org/project/share-icon](http://alexking.org/project/share- icon)

</comment><comment><USER8> In the early 2000s Alex had an opensource project written in PHP. I was then learning PHP and used his project to learn how to build a web app end to end: auth, business logic, db interactions, views, etc. I was in my late teens, and using his project as a guide I built several products that people used and were keen to even pay for, learnt lots back then.

Thanks Alex!

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks like Alex did great work and had a great family. That's a good life in my book. Too bad he didn't get more time.

</comment><comment><USER10> As someone who got into web development, and thus my career, through the WordPress community, I was definitely aware of Alex and followed his work. I recall that he once mentioned using a plugin I wrote and that just shows how interconnected everything was back in those early, indie days.

RIP Alex King, and may we carry your torch by being creative in our work, astute in our enterprise, and cherished by our communities and families.

</comment><comment><USER11> I remember often ending up on his blog when looking up various Wordpress and web development topics back in the 2000s. The about page ([http://alexking.org/about](http://alexking.org/about)) on his website reveals an exciting and accomplished career, no doubt he would have kept doing ever greater things. Rest in peace!

</comment><comment><USER12> I hadn't kept up with Alex, but I do remember interacting with him and looking up to him while I was in college and even after. He was always so impressive.

While I always admired him, I'm even more in awe now. It takes someone really special and thoughtful to create the kind of lasting impression he has left on his site for his daughter, his wife, and his family and friends. You can get a taste here: [http://alexking.org/blog/2015/08/24/rememberances](http://alexking.org/blog/2015/08/24/rememberances)

To all his friends and family, so sorry for your loss. Alex impacted so many people, many who will never know, but all of whom benefit from his far- reaching technical work and his community-building efforts.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is going to sound heartless and for that I apologise. I am curious what happens with his copyrights on his opensource code now? Not many significant projects have suffered such loses yet.

Condolences to his family and friends if they ever read this.

<comment><USER14> I'd assume they just go to his estate unless he specifically specified otherwise.

<comment><USER13> I'd assume that his immediate descendants would respect his involvement in open source. Is there a risk (maybe in other cases) that inheritors of an estate can retrospectively change licenses on code for which they have inherited the copyright to? (Maybe I'm missing some understanding of software licenses though.)

<comment><USER15> Pretty much every free software license is irrevocable - if you make software available under that license, you can't retroactively remove those licensing terms later. This applies whether the copyright is owned by a person or corporation. It's a fundamental building block of the concept of free software - that once software becomes free, it cannot be made non-free again.

I'm not a lawyer and I'm not sure whether this has been tested in court, so I'd suggest further research on your own. There's some discussiof this on Groklaw - [http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2006062204552163](http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2006062204552163)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Damn. I never met Alex, but was subscribed to his blog for several years. This makes me genuinely sad.

fuck cancer.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a huge loss. He was a great person and developer and it was so clear how much he loved his family. My thoughts are with the Kinf family and his friends.

</comment><comment><USER18> I didn't know Alex personally, but I was a paying customer for his site FeedLounge back in the days before Google Reader came along. It was a great web-based RSS reader, and was the first web site I used that felt like a desktop app in terms of responsiveness.

I didn't really know him, just _of_ him, but as someone only a couple of years older with three kids myself, this is heartbreaking to see. RIP, Alex.

</comment><comment><USER19> How come we haven't heard he was sick!? Rest in piece, Alex!

</comment><comment><USER20> God bless his soul.

</comment><comment><USER21> [http://phkillscancer.com/](http://phkillscancer.com/)

<comment><USER22> [https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-alkaline-diets-cure- cancer...](https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-alkaline-diets-cure- cancer.t5401/) but really, this is not the time nor place.</comment></comment>


There are still game releases for the Amiga 500 - <AUTHOR> http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=66078 <comment><USER2> If I had time for a project of no consequence I would write an Amiga game in 68000 assembly, just to say I finally did it. I loved the Amiga as a teenager, but I couldn't afford all the books and development tools I needed. I had a frustrating time trying to piece together everything from magazines, coverdisks and half-baked public domain tools and consequently didn't make much progress as a programmer.

I always had a feeling of unfinished business about it, that if things had been different I could have started a game development career in the 90's rather than trying to make a name as an indie dev today.

I sometimes mess around in 68000 or in Blitz Basic on an emulator and it always strikes me how different it feels to code on an Amiga and how things have changed. When I'm coding on the Amiga, I can _focus_. Everything I need to know is in a few books that are ready to hand.

And because I can talk to the hardware directly in such an elegant language as 68000, I feel like I am engaging with the machine in a much more solid, craftsmanlike sense than when I'm coding at my day job, teetering at the top of a great tangled pile of platform layers that I must negotiate like a harassed digital bureaucrat.

It makes me think of how I thought computers would progress back then. As a teen I thought the computers of the future would be more _profound_ , rather than merely more complex, as they are today. That they'd still be comprehensible to a single person but require more from them, like an expert martial artist or meditator or something.

That's the Amiga for you. It's the dreamer's computer:)

<comment><USER3> I almost feel a tear coming to my eye =) I miss the Amiga - the community was amazing.

<comment><USER4> I had an Atari ST growing up, and there was the friendly bickering with buddies who had Amigas. Then one of them showed me Deluxe Paint in HAM mode, and I walked away in silent awe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not only on pouet: [http://aminet.net/recent](http://aminet.net/recent)

</comment><comment><USER6> My childhood love.

I wish I still had my old Amiga 600, although in truth I wouldn't have the patience to change disks while going from one scene to another. Beneath a Steel Sky had an outrageous number of disks.

<comment><USER7> You can still play BASS - it's released as freeware and ScummVM plays it. [http://www.scummvm.org/games](http://www.scummvm.org/games)

The news for other old Amiga games is probably less good. :/

<comment><AUTHOR> You can always use FS-UAE/WinUAE

[http://fs-uae.net](http://fs-uae.net) [http://www.winuae.net](http://www.winuae.net)

You have to get a kickstart rom ... somewhere.

And then you can google for the game you like + abandonware and download the ADF files.

<comment><USER8> I recommend getting your ROMs from Cloanto's Amiga Forever.

Cloanto is one of the oldest Amiga companies; for many years, Michael Battilana has been the Amiga's most energetic curator. He's met the luminaries, collected histories, and presented them in a classy, polished package.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is human intellect on the downward slide? (debunked) - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.edu.au/is-human-intellect-on-the-downward-slide-10841 <comment><USER2> I never thought the movie "Idiocracy" would be on-topic here, but for those who haven't seen it, it makes a similar argument. It starts off by saying smart people have less children than dumb people, and extrapolated for long enough, everyone is an idiot. Decent movie for those of you who haven't seen it.

<comment><USER3> Quite funny film. The premise appears to be happening around me (in London, UK) as the social housing and unemployable people have lots of children compared to non-social housing people. I'm not talking small amounts more - we're talking 6-8 children versus 1-2. In my children's school, 26 out of 32 children in the class are entirely dependent on welfare, and this is a nice bit of London apparently.

However, I feel people _are_ getting stupider. It's not because of breeding but because they contract out all but menial thought to technology. Long since gone have the days where any mental effort was to be expended on performing a task.

<comment><USER4> This is probably a local anomaly. If most people were on benefits than the government wouldn't bring in enough revenue to sustain it. I'd also point out that London is an anomaly in itself. Middle-class people also receive benefits because everything is so expensive and everything is so damn expensive because basically everyone is receiving some form of benefits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The relation between IQ tests and intelligence aside, I thought that the "downward slide" argument was at odds with the Flynn effect (a significant, upward trend in IQ scores over the past century or so):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect>

<comment><USER6> Though it would be hard to attribute that to natural selection.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but put another way, the article is making predictions which don't seem to fit the data.

<comment><USER7> But he's measuring gene expression, which is not a subjective science. Measuring IQ, on the contrary, is.

<comment><USER8> Crabtree is measuring nothing, his arguments are just based on assumptions, there is no gene expression data in these two papers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If it was true that agriculture has caused a substantial slide in intelligence, remnant hunter-gatherer populations, and populations that were hunter-gatherers until recently, should be the smartest people on earth. For example, Native Americans (at least the ones from tribes which weren't too big on agriculture) should be smarter than most other ethnic groups in America. As far as I know, that's not the case.

</comment><comment><USER10> I highly recommend the book "A Farewell to Alms" that gets a mention in the article.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd say it's true that there is now less selective pressure on the human species than there used to be, but 3,000 years is a short period of time on the evolutionary scale. Doubtful that any significant effects have resulted yet.

<comment><USER9> 3000 years is 100+ generations. That's a lot of time for evolution. Russian researchers turned wild silver foxes into tame pets in far fewer generations than that: [http://www.brighthub.com/science/genetics/articles/46555.asp...](http://www.brighthub.com/science/genetics/articles/46555.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Isn't it what counts in the wild is adaptability? And looking at intellect as a by-product of adaptability, if the world and our society changing in a direction where intellect is no longer needed - say technology is taking over our daily decisions - it is natural to trade intellect for a better technological fit?

<comment><USER7> What mechanism do you propose to account for the selection of "technologically minded" people? Restricting yourself to North-America, what are the evolutionary pressures exerted on human populations that justify such evolution?

Not so easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thanks for submitting this. This is a much-needed response to a story that had IMMENSE uptake from news sources all over the world. I'll recycle some electrons here from a rather quiet recent thread discussing another response to Gerald Crabtree's claims

[http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-11/are-people- get...](http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-11/are-people-getting- dumber-one-geneticist-thinks-so)

that wasn't part of the first wave of gee-whiz stories based on Crabtree's press release, but which actually interviewed other knowledgeable experts to provide perspective on the claims. Reading the Popular Science article "Are People Getting Dumber? One Geneticist Thinks So" linked above, originally submitted to Hacker News by user omnisci

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4811697>

and reading the article kindly submitted here by vectorbunny helps to clear up some of the misconceptions sparked by the many articles based on Crabtree's press release.

What I've noticed about this widely covered story is that Crabtree has certainly mastered the Science News Cycle

<http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174>

by making a press release that has had uptake from dozens of news outlets. But none of those news outlets seem to have reporters on staff who are competent to judge the genetics issues involved, or who even know sources in the Behavior Genetics Association. (The article kindly submitted here has better sourcing and analysis than most of the previous articles based on the same press release that I have seen, as author Rob Brooks has actual expertise in the subject, and took care to think through Crabtree's arguments before rushing to print.)

I had earlier shared links to some of the first stories on this issue with friends in the Behavior Genetics Association (I'm part of the Facebook group for the association). Gerald Crabtree has some interesting institutional affiliations and previous accomplishments,

<http://www.hhmi.org/research/investigators/crabtree_bio.html>

but he is not leading researcher on the genetics of human intelligence. One of the Behavior Genetics Association scientists commented, "I don't know why Crabtree is wasting his time writing about this when he can do such great scientific work."

I have met most of the researchers who are currently active in research on the genetics of human intelligence at a meeting of the International Society of Intelligence Research and at events sponsored by researchers in the Minnesota Twin Families Study in my town. They don't take Crabtree's approach to these sensitive issues.

Another comment already posted here mentions the writings of James R. Flynn. Readers interested in more detail about historical trends in human intelligence are well advised to read James R. Flynn's new book Are We Getting Smarter? Flynn's book deals with much more recent times (just the last century) but has the advantage of being based on actual IQ tests.

<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1107609178>

[http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item6835805/Are%2...](http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item6835805/Are%20We%20Getting%20Smarter/?site_locale=en_US&?site_locale=en_US)

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044403240457800...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444032404578006612858486012.html)

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/28/are-we- getting-s...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/28/are-we-getting- smarter-review)

Flynn is very well respected among behavior geneticists as a "truth-seeker" for his careful research work.

</comment><comment><USER14> Considering how recent the study of epigenetics is, I doubt we can make a meaningful analysis of this. Nutrition quality has gone up incredibly in the last century and its impact remains to be seen.

</comment><comment><USER15> It was debunked via Reddit citations before the original article was posted on HN.</comment>


In response to This*: Stop letting engineers get away with social ineptitude - <AUTHOR> http://www.charleshooper.net/blog/stop-letting-tech-people-be-socially-inept/ <comment><USER4> I can't agree. My professional experience involves enough interaction with extraordinarily talented engineers who have extremely abrasive personalities. Often, that abrasiveness is a side effect of their talent: the same ability which allows these talented men and women to see through the complexity and grasp the conceptually simple steps necessary to solve the problem also helps them see through the seemingly-meaningless boilerplate and social grease that we call people skills.

You can argue that if the culture shifted such that these individuals were marginalized and forced out then they would change out of necessity. I could see this argument--idealistic to the point of fallacy though it is--presented at other venues. However, those who frequent Hacker News should know that these people will find talented others who are capable of dealing with their social immaturity and will end up co-founding their own company and, unencumbered by the enforced social niceties of this fictional society, may very well end up becoming a dominant player and returning to the status quo.

<comment><USER5>
      > My professional experience involves enough interaction
      > with extraordinarily talented engineers who have
      > extremely abrasive personalities.

There's a difference between "that guy's kind of a jerk, but I don't think he knows it" and deleting paid accounts and backups over some words on Twitter.

I agree, very talented engineers tend to be abrasive. I know a handful myself. But each and every one of them is capable, at the very least, of not being an intentional jerk and being basically polite and respectful in their dealings.

<comment><USER6> _There's a difference between "that guy's kind of a jerk, but I don't think he knows it" and deleting paid accounts and backups over some words on Twitter._

Yeah, there's a not-so-subtle line there.

I would be concerned if an employee of mine exhibited that behavior, because I've seen it before. We had a technically brilliant, but socially ... scary ... individual working as a sysadmin. He blew up about a decision to abandon all of our 1-off mail platforms and switch purely to Exchange (rather than GroupWise, which he preferred and most in our location used).

He was the technical lead for our GroupWise deployment, so to voice his dissatisfaction with the decision that _idiots in upper management made_ , he did us the courtesy of wiping out a swath of our employee's mailboxes contained on one of the servers. And, much like this guy but on a grander scale, began erasing the current set of tapes that had backed up most of our servers our location.

We didn't end up losing much, and I can't remember why (we had tapes stored off-site off-line, but they were only moved weekly). The thing that was most shocking was all of the profanity and yelling originating from his cube while he was packing up his things under direct supervision of a member of corporate security. He seemed genuinely surprised he was told his services were no longer necessary (they even laid him off rather than firing him for cause, allowing him severance pay and unemployment during a hiring boom). At no point did he _seem_ like a stable guy. His boss liked him because he was very smart and the result of his _cleverness_ was enough of an improvement to services and reduction in costs that his instabilities could be argued away ("He launched this project that's bringing in X revenue, he's just a little strange, that's all.").

Sad thing: he continued to find employment and continued to get laid off (5 places, I believe), then died at 37 of a heart attack. The guy who noticed the obit forwarded it out to our team like it was some sort of vindication " _See, he DIED because he was such a jerk!_ ". Even normally decent people have a mean streak about them, I guess.

<comment><USER7> Let me be _very clear_. Anger management problems do NOT correlate with sociopathic behavior. Sociopaths can be charming just as likely as they can be assholes. Equally, someone who is charming is just as likely to be a sociopath as a frustrated technical person with no social skills.

So thanks for your single data point of an angry person who was also a sociopath.

Your post is equivalent to writing: "We had a technical guy. Very polite. But he was black. When we asked him to do something he deleted all our work. Turns out he did this at the next five jobs. Be careful hiring black people".

Being black, or white, or martian, or having anger management issues, are not relevant. Being a sociopath is relevant.

<comment><USER8> Sociopath is a tough word because it means a lot of things and it really isn't used in clinical diagnosis. Based on the historical patterns though a sociopath was typically someone lacking any type of empathy, so they would do things hurt other people just to amuse themselves by watching the results. There is no where near enough information to diagnose sociopathy presented.

If you look at the Anti-Social Personality disorders, this may fall closer to a Cluster B - Histrionic. Which is what many people consider someone with "anger management" issues.

I agree with what I think is the intent of your post, that people with a personality disorder are suffering from something they may not have control of. However, I do think anger management issues are a disorder and are not of a kind with being "black" as there is no inherent disorder associated with being black.

I think that employers have a very real, and legitimate interest in not employing people with severe personality disorders, particularly if they are not under control or in treatment for the disorder. Even then, it doesn't make sense to put some people in a position where they can cripple your company if they are very upset over something.

<comment><USER9> >Sociopath is a tough word because it means a lot of things and it really isn't used in clinical diagnosis

When understood as a synonym for an acute case of antisocial personality disorder (this is how virtually all people educated in clinical psychology understand it), it's actually one of the primary commonalities of criminals and is an incredibly meaningful way to understand some people.

> Based on the historical patterns though a sociopath was typically someone > lacking any type of empathy, so they would do things hurt other people just > to amuse themselves by watching the results.

That's a pretty gross over-simplification, there are many comorbid behaviors with sociopathy and they form a whole constellation with which a clinician can diagnose/identify it.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder>

Here's a good start, you may want to educate yourself before you pontificate on the subject. Sociopathy is a very misunderstood disorder by most of the public, although there was a recent book that covered it semi-okay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think the issue is one of social incapability, but one of failing to match a hire with his responsibilities. If you're going to have your technical guy interacting with customers, then being technically brilliant but lacking customer service skills is not a good fit.

I work for MegaCorp. We have developers here that are incredibly difficult to get along with and a few that are great. There seems to be this sense that the more capable and intelligent a person is the more frequently they're jerks to deal with. I haven't found this to be true. There are plenty of good devs that aren't "holier than thou" (and one of the best devs I worked with was clearly on the extroverted side, though most of them land on the introverted side of things).

I will say, though, that more people have ended up being let go for attitude, rather than work quality where I am employed. To put it plainly, in a large corporation where you have to work amongst imaginary and real bureaucracy, it doesn't matter how skilled you are, if you can't work with people you won't get anything done. Your fantastic project/work will not be looked at because nobody will care to see it and your manager (often non-technical) won't want to show it off because you keep aggravating him or putting him in the awkward position of defending your behavior to his superiors.

<comment><USER10> "I work for MegaCorp. We have developers here that are incredibly difficult to get along with and a few that are great. There seems to be this sense that the more capable and intelligent a person is the more frequently they're jerks to deal with. I haven't found this to be true. There are plenty of good devs that aren't "holier than thou" (and one of the best devs I worked with was clearly on the extroverted side, though most of them land on the introverted side of things)."

I agree with you here. I also find that the jerks, may seemingly be intelligent, but don't learn much from other people (which usually happens if you are smart+socially aware) because they think are right all the time

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the 2 "skills" in question here are "tact and maturity".

No one is asking engineers to be salesmen or glad-handing PR people. But as so many others have pointed out, any mature adult, no matter their vocation, should have the basic social understanding of "this is ok to do/say" and "this is not ok to do/say" for most given situations.

i.e. tact..

And to all of you who hide behind the "that's not learnable for me, I'm awkward/nerdy/shy/neckbearded" excuses, I call bullshit. Grow up.

I was the epitome of awkward, shy and socially inept (since childhood) as a developer, and in my mid-20s I made the conscious choice to overcome these things. To become more professional and to learn how to communicate and interact properly with my co-workers, superiors, reports and YES even customers.

And I did it by just throwing myself in the fire. It was hard at first, but I figured it out. And it has opened so many doors and opportunities for me.

The combination of my technical competency as a developer and my professional communication skills has been a huge asset for me when looking for work and new opportunities.

Plus, on the lighter side, it eventually helped me with my inter-personal communication and social skills as an added bonus! (i.e. it got me laid more) :-)

</comment><comment><USER12> > yet employers often find that people filling these roles with poor people > skills are still employable. This needs to stop. I'm of the opinion that > every position is customer-facing.

Well fuck me, then. I'm sorry, it's already hard enough for me to find jobs as it is.

Frankly I'm glad we live in a society that has a place for us social retards. I really do believe that social "skills" can't be learned, at least not well. I'm glad there's a place for us, just like I'm glad there's a place for people who are short, black, or ugly. Yeah, there are fewer employment opportunities, and our salaries are handicapped consequentially (tech skills + people skills = high payed manager!) but telling us we should be out on our asses for something we can't help is cruel.

Obviously the guy should have been fired though.

<comment><USER13> As adults I think it's pretty immature to recognize a fault and then not even attempt to change one's behavior in a positive manner.

<comment><USER12> Not if it's a fault that can't be changed, or at least not easily.

I'm short, too, and I've learned to accept that, just as I've learned to accept the fact that some of my friends have more people posting "happy birthday" on their wall than I do.

<comment><USER14> Can't be changed? Are you sure you aren't making up excuses for yourself? If you didn't believe people skills were innate and unlearnable, would you have to face the fact that you may be simply lazy in that regard, or that you're clinging to an unfriendly personality because you feel it makes you more of a techy hacker archetype?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wrong problem. This whole issue was just typical assholery, it's not a failure of introverts or antisocial behavior. By all means, stop hiring assholes, but don't blame it on people who just hate smalltalk and never bothered to learn.

</comment><comment><USER16> This guy is mistaking "poor people skills" with "being an asshole". I'm not sure whether the two are so clearly related : there are a few different manifestations of lack of social skills, and there are jerks who don't have much social skills issues.

"All it takes for someone to be good at customer service is: [...]".

This sounds so simple. And it misses quite the point. Lacking "social skills", is precisely this : not knowing how to behave completely "normally" (whatever that means) with other people. Like, not grasping the effect of your words, or not being able to think them through fast enough before saying them. Of course, I want to be helpful, and to answer the person in front of me (or on the phone). That doesn't mean that it is what the person will see or hear.

</comment><comment><USER17> There seems to be a convention amongst the techie crowd that social rules are a silly bit of nonsense that dumber people engage in. This is not at all the case.

When I handle a project from beginning to end, it goes smoother. I find any mistakes I've made myself; I know what assumptions I made at every step; I don't have to get my head around the job over and over again; it's all-round easier.

When a team does projects, it requires rules, with some rigidity. Each person has to act somewhat like an object-oriented sub-routine, with guaranteed input, guaranteed output. This does add some overhead, but it allows each person to function with relative freedom in his own space.

Social rules and conventions are the rules for the team comprised of a culture doing the project of living. They allow us to get through the day using hundreds of social shortcuts; assumptions about each other's behavior, needs, wants, expectations.

<comment><USER18> Assuming that people show up on time, do what they have agreed to, etc obviously isn't stupid social rules. They have practical utility.

Sugar-coating peoples screw-ups, pretending they aren't wrong when they are or have a point when they don't, playing politics or favorites, etc however tends to make smart people look with distain on all social rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> wait, what? There is a difference between being socially inept and destroying data because you think someone is a jerk. This difference is similar, I think, to the difference between honking or flipping someone off in traffic and, say, ramming them.

I mean, one of those things is just being rude. The other is going out of your way to damage someone else.

Personally, I would put up with a lot of the first. Rude people, of course, shouldn't be in customer service, but on the back end, eh, if they are good enough, I think they are worth keeping around. Especially if they are the extremely direct, blunt and honest kind of rude, I think they can actually be better back end people, sometimes, than people who try to twist things to look better than they are.

But people who destroy things when they are angry or insulted? yeah, those people should not be let anywhere near a root prompt.

</comment><comment><USER20> I believe that what many are quick to refer to as _social ineptitude_ is a keener sense of bullshit detection, combined with the inability to take it with a smile.

Imo, most _socially-inept_ tech people are simply individuals that are more sensitive to the hypocrisy and nonsense one is exposed to when dealing with the public.

I don't know if being a tech person is a cause or an effect of that bullshit sensitivity, but as a programmer who used to be a bouncer in a bar a few years ago, I can tell you that some of my non-tech colleagues were by far very quick at losing their temper than I was.

Now, there's a difference between being bullshit intolerant and being malicious. I am of the firm opinion that the actions of that Tech support guy (deleting data out of pure spite) are certainly not characteristic of the tech-guy stereotype as we know it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Good engineers' poor personal skill is often a manifestation of traits that allow them to be good engineers in the first place (though not a necessary condition). The same way Steve Jobs and James Cameron are horrible bosses to work for, the same way CEOs often suffer from ADD and bi-polar disorder, and the same way so many amazing Nobel Laureate have autism problems. If you appear ordinary in your personalities and traits, then chances are that you aren't the outstanding leader of your field.

<comment><USER22> I would disagree with your characterization of Steve Jobs and James Cameron as horrible bosses to work for, but I certainly see why you say it.

Many, many people I'm certain have asked themselves "why, oh why can't Steve (or Jim) be nicer" (and still be the same in every other way). People just don't work like that.

Great post!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> 500 - Internal Server Error

Stop letting writers get away with technical ineptitude!

<comment><USER24> Hey, cut the guy some slack, that's a proper error page instead of a debugging message. :)

Edit: added a smiley

<comment><USER23> I just couldn't pass up the obvious joke. He had it back up a few minutes after I posted that, which makes him a winner compared to some. I posted a real comment as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> That's not social ineptitude. That's malicious behavior and destruction of property. There is a difference. Please don't conflate the two.

</comment><comment><USER26> What's so hard about kindness that engineers can't figure out? I really don't buy that excuse.

<comment><USER27> "Kindness" is a pretty vague term. I think "empathy" might better suit your question.

It's rather difficult for some types of people to learn, especially if they're not exactly wired for that or their cultural or familial background didn't put much emphasis on it.

In the programming profession, it's not particularly useful when you primarily deal with computers (computers just don't care).

<comment><USER28> No programmer in any company of any reasonable size deals primarily with computers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Based on some digging around I have a very strong suspicion that Jules is the founder and only employee of This*. I think the "new employee" will likely just be a new email account with a different name.

</comment><comment><USER30> "The understanding that they represent their employer and that people are relying on them" - Most developers have huge, inflated egos.

"A compassionate, helpful, and courteous attitude" - See above.

"The knowledge of whatever their supporting" - An understanding of the technical side of a product is vastly different from the functional side as its easy for a developer to say "This is sample. You hit X, then Y then select Z and find Q" which does not translate in any way to a client understanding a product and the frustration of dealing with "simpletons" shines through - <USER2> leading to outbursts like we've seen.

This is of course the standard. I would imagine entrepreneurs and such do not follow this guideline, but for a generic programmer these traits are not something that are a typical side-effect of the craft unless you start moving up in rank.

The fact that the author would be offended by the statements mentioned really reiterates the point that most developers take things entirely too personally. I know I did for the better part of 10 years.

<comment><USER31> > Most developers have huge, inflated egos.

I think that stereotype is about as likely to be true as the "typical" developer's stereotype of _designers and managers_ being the ones with inflated egos. The "typical" programming company seems to be quite the ego contest, if you listen to what everyone secretly thinks about everyone else!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I know a few universities that are pushing programs to "fix" this problem in engineers by encouraging them to do more presentations and group projects.

It seems like there will always parts of "geek culture" that just don't care. Perhaps they're even proud of social ineptitude? But those aren't engineers I would want to work with.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, although the ones that are less capable in group dynamics usually just bail, making the others do the work.

Where I saw the most exercising of social skills, involved cheating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Offence: Engineer is offended by customer and flushes the customers livelihood (website)

Cure: Management should be offended by engineers and flush THEIR livelihood (job)

Seems symmetrical, but perhaps over-simplifying the problem? Of course I realize that the article above doesn't directly advocate firing the engineer, but many high-functioning technical people just cannot realistically be trained to be social animals too. Those abrasive nerds are really productive outside of a customer service role, so wouldn't a better solution be to fix the mis-allocation of tech staffing resources to customer facing roles?

edit: and yeah, maybe the problem is that this particular engineer was just a dick, and we shouldn't use him as an example in the discussion of technical vs social roles in our companies.

</comment><comment><USER35> Yeah, I don't believe for a second that this is a trait that belongs exclusively to engineers.

Here's a thought: anyone in a position of "power" is susceptible to this dynamic; if "social" relationships were described as an equation, then power (P) would be inversely proportional to the effort or energy (E) you need to expend to maintain any given social relationship (R),

P = R/E

The more power/authority you wield, the more of a jerk you _can_ be (not should be or are), because the value of the relationship is lopsided - <USER3> don't _need_ to spend as much energy on it.

The power an engineer holds is that they are often quite valuable within an organization, and tend to have an easily transferable skill set.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd put the blame on whoever hired the guy and put him out front as the customer support guy, without monitoring him. Some of it's attributable to the support guy, but most of the blame should fall on his bosses.

</comment><comment><USER36> I think the author needs to display a little bit of that compassion he's talking about and realize that learning social skills is not as easy for everyone as it might have been for him. The world is full of different kinds of people, and it takes all kinds to run a company. If Jules is truly great at the technical side of his job, I see no problem with freeing him to get on with it.

<comment><USER5> This is not about social skills. The ability to function in a crowd of strangers doesn't matter here.

Not being an asshole to paying customers is what matters here. That's not a social skill, that's a matter of maturity and respect.

<comment><USER37> It is about social skills. What do you think "maturity and respect" means in the context of interacting with other humans? These are cultural norms, and different people conform to culture in different ways. Place "respectful, mature" American employees in a Japanese zaibatsu, and I think you'll discover respect is more a convention than a universal standard. ;-)

Pedantry aside, that engineer still comes off as a dick in this context.

<comment><USER5>
      > What do you think "maturity and respect" means in the
      > context of interacting with other humans?

We're not talking cross-cultural divides here, we're talking about engineers not being allowed to hide behind the excuse that they're "not good with people" to allow them to be jerks.

<comment><USER37> One could argue a certain kind of engineering personality tends to comprise its own distinct culture. As an INTJ, a cross-cultural divide is _precisely_ how I look at it.

I'm speaking more in general, though. To reiterate, this guy acted as a jerk, and I agree with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I don't believe this is something special to engineers. Hey, back home, in "less civilized" part of the world, you can be beaten up by waiters if you are complaining (being asshole) about meals at a restaurant.

In order words, "tact" is something you need to learn. Especially in internet world where doing something stupid is just a click away.

</comment><comment><USER23> The last line of the article really just sums it up for me. If you don't have basic every day people skills, you'd better be _damn_ good at what you do, otherwise, it's probably not worth it as you alienate your coworkers and make life difficult for those around you.

And that's _before_ you get a customer-facing role.

</comment><comment><USER39> The vast majority of web hosting shops are not "companies" with "employees" and "management." They are one or a few guys with some dedicated servers and most tier-1 support outsourced to huge web hosting support shops.

This seems like a whole lot of attention over what seems like one guy who is an asshole.

</comment><comment><USER40> Web hosting tech-support people are NOT "Engineers". Or for that matter tech.

</comment><comment><USER41> I kinda wish there were ways to add URLs to an extant thread rather than starting new threads with URLs. Because, for fuck's sake, this is like the fourth link on this boring topic.

</comment><comment><USER42> 500 - Internal Server Error.

Can anyone post up a copy? Seems like a sensational title - would love to see the argument.

</comment><comment><USER43> _500 - Internal Server Error_

Someone needs a socially inept engineer to fix their website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there, you must have caught me right before I increased the level of caching in place on my very-undersized Linode. You should be able to access the site now. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I think one problem here is that they non-chalantly made "poor people skills" equal to "abusive behavior towards costumers" and used the "awesome tech with poor people skills" image as a euphemism in their PR to comb over a VERY ugly situation where they were getting a shit storm of bad PR - it was probably the only way out of that situation short of publishing "welp, sorry, he was a total jerk-off asshole and we fired him".

I do think the (stereo-)typical techs can be said to prefer focusing on interesting problems and on their computers rather than having to deal with people all day long - possibly angry or even downright abusive customers demanding support. I don't see the (stereo-)typical techs as slimy and very skilled at playing the political game and manipulating people and advancing the career ladder through it. (which is something I would see as very specific but definitely STRONG people skills, no matter how repulsive.)

But that doesn't mean all techs don't have any manners or empathy.

</comment><comment><USER7> "As a technical person who has worked many customer-facing support roles"

Stopped reading right there.

"I am a technical person who also has ability Y, therefore all technical people should have ability Y."

This is the thinking that would sit Magic Johnson down and say "Your ball game is pretty good, but your golf game is awful. Stop working on your basketball skills and start golf training."

Bottom line: customer support requires ability, certain personality traits, and training. Do not let _anyone_ (technical, non-technical, CFO, anyone) handle customer support if they are not qualified. It will end badly.

<comment><USER45> Social skills are not comparable to golf, they're comparable to being able to move around physically without tripping or falling into everybody within a 5 meter radius of you. It's not a sport, it is a _critical_ skill that everyone who expects to participate in modern society needs to have.

<comment><USER18> Bullshit. Steven Hawking can't even move his arms yet he produce more value than most people.

What we need is the social equivalent of a wheelchair and then get back to more important matters.

<comment><USER45> Social skills have nothing to do with paralysis. Steven Hawking is permitted to lack mobility all he wants so long as he has some social skills.

It's not that we can't put up with people with no social skills, it's that we _shouldn't have to_. If I can avoid dealing with your lack of social skills by simply not hiring you, you can be damned sure that's what I'm going to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> As soon as people stop letting non-engineers get away with total, utter technical incompetence and stupidity.

</comment><comment><USER47> I suppose some of it is attributable to Asperger's -- some of it. In many cases, though, I can't help but suspect laziness and a holier-than-thou attitude.

<comment><USER48> Laziness? He went and deleted the customer's backups.

<comment><USER47> True, he did. I was talking about something slightly different -- laziness in terms of learning to interact well with other humans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I think he's reading too much into it. I have seen waitresses get moody and piss off customers, MBAs that have had violent disagreements and stomped out or quit on the spot. A Tmobile once hung up on me when I complained loudly about not getting cell service and being stuck in the office unable to call a cab.

There are tons of geeks who are really personable.

Taking one example of an engineer who may have had a bad day because of people being rude/confrontational and extrapolating them to social ineptitude of engineers is missing the forest for the trees.

<comment><USER50> Or the infamous flight attendant grabbing a beer and pulling the escape chute...

I'm an engineer with "people skills" who has worked large and small organizations including a hosting company and many freelance jobs. No one should be really surprised when a hosting company employee goes off, because it is one of the shittiest customer service jobs you can have in terms of the entitlement factor and low margins. That's not to say the guy should be excused, but just pointing out that it doesn't necessarily means he lacks people skills, it may just have been the straw that broke the camel's back.

As far as engineers talking to customers goes, I think that depends heavily on the company. Obviously engineers can provide better customer support than someone with little technical knowledge, but if there are many customers then there's most likely more bang for the buck solving technical problems that affect many people. Personally I've often felt visceral frustration with taking the time to provide quality support when I know full well that I'm sacrificing potential productivity to help one person when there are issues affecting hundreds or thousands that are still unresolved. I justify it by chalking it up to the (perhaps) intangible benefit of providing truly exceptional customer service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I clicked on the link and got a "500 Server Error". I cal that pretty damned rude and socially inept.</comment>


Colour e-reader with video in development - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/8610962.stm

<comment><USER2> I am very interested in deveopments in eInk technologies. I wish I could buy an eInk monitor with a DVI input so that I can use it for programming outside. I like to sit on a terrace or on the beach, but laptops/LCD screens are unreadable in bright sunlight; and these glossy screens they all seem to have nowadays don't help).

I also noted the presenter rotates the prototype from landscape to portrait and back, but the video doesn't rotate with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> By the way, the cartoon video shown in the first video is Big Buck Bunny (<http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/>), an award-winning short created using open source software, primarily Blender.

</comment><comment><USER4> I hear it'll be called "iPad."

<comment><AUTHOR> An iPad doesn't need a backlight any more? Good Lord! When did that happen?</comment></comment>


What's in my garden? Lockdown list from Chegutu, Zimbabwe - <AUTHOR> https://lockdownlist.wordpress.com/blog-2/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN. I've been documenting the life in our garden and surrounds during Zimbabwe's Covid lockdown. Work in progress, and I still have a lot to do on the insects :) Still, sharing this in the hope that it inspires similar efforts - this is a lot of fun. Feel free to contact me with questions or of you need high-res or additional photographs of anything :)</comment>


Police Violence and the Rush to Judgment - <AUTHOR> https://quillette.com/2020/09/08/police-violence-and-the-rush-to-judgment/ <comment><USER2> I largely disagree with this article, but it is informative and decently reasoned. I think the author is haphazard and inconsistent with where they apply their imagination: fantastically generously when it comes to the police who killed George Floyd, and not at all when it comes to appreciating how much of a difference there may be between how police treat those they value vs. those they don't.

<comment><USER3> "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in- groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." \--Frank Wilhoit</comment></comment>


No more addresses: Asia-Pacific region IPv4 well runs dry - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/no-more-addresses-asia-pacific-region-ipv4-well-runs-dry.ars <comment><USER2> This is really the best part of the article: "In the meantime, the clock is ticking for the RIPE NCC, which handles Europe, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union. RIPE still has some 65 million addresses left—almost exactly the number it gave out last year. RIPE has a similar final /8 policy to APNIC, so Europe may be looking at a Christmas stocking with no IPv4 addresses in it by the end of 2011. Of course if ISPs rush to submit their last, big requests, it could happen sooner.

LACNIC in Latin America and the Caribbean and AfriNIC in Africa dish out relatively few IPv4 addresses every year, so they are good for several more years. ARIN, which handles North America, does give out a lot more addresses, but somehow managed to get the long end of the stick: not only does it have 61 million regular addresses left, but it also "administers" 75 million unused legacy addresses (given out before the RIPE NCC, APNIC and ARIN were formed). So North America should be good, IPv4-wise, for a couple more years. Maybe even longer. "

I haven't seen this type of analysis in any of the other IPv6 articles and is really the most important variable. Growth is important too, but I think it takes a back seat to availability and run rate. It's good to hear ARIN has some super secret addresses.

If we keep going at our current rate we'll probably see some of the RIRs run out of addresses. However, I think between ISPs buying back addresses, B2B IP address sales, and other IP market dynamics will extend the life. If the Microsoft deal is a signal, IP addresses are currently around $11, if bought in bulk. If I could put stock in IP address price, I'd be long right now.

<comment><USER3> The managers of the RIRs themselves are more pessimistic, and I'd expect them to have run a bit more analysis on this than the writers of this article. For example, RIPE predicts they'll exhaust in September [1], and ARIN is also expected to exhaust within a year [2].

[1] <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12306573> [2] [http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/news/article.php/3...](http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/news/article.php/3923031/Last- of-the-IPv4-Addresses-Allocated.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In Singapore it's been the norm for consumers to be NAT'd behind a shared IP for a while now. Sometimes when it's really busy you need to enter captchas on just about every site to prove you're not a bot.

</comment><comment><USER5> Actually they thought they would hold out a bit longer but APNIC surprisingly assigned a whole bunch of IPs for 'experimentation' altho in reality they are probably 'dirty' and will be cleaned up for re-assignment later on.

Anyways, as of now, the only IPs that APNIC has is reserved for IPv4 to IPv6 transition. What that means is anyone in their region cannot request an IPv4 IP, unless it's for the express purpose to do conversion to IPv6.

This will happen to all regions of the world within the next year.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it's first time this year I heard about the end of IPs. Such news tend to come out every few months. Quite often for a thing that won't have such a big impact on "normal" people...

<comment><USER7> Previous reports were the pending exhaustion of available IP addresses based on projections of current use vs. the remaining number.

This is the first report of actually running out. No more speculation. Out. No more. Reserved.

<comment><USER8> To be fair it actually means they've cracked open their last /8 and they're _almost_ out.

It won't take them that long to exhaust this last space, but there _are_ for the moment, still addresses available from APNIC for the Asian Pacific region. These new addresses have gone into the last phase of contingency rules though, and are available under a different procedure than has allowed people to request IPs from APNIC in the past.

Also it should be noted once again that this just effects the asia/pacific region. ARIN, RIPE, LACNIC and AfriNIC are still allocating addresses. Though most of them have applied some form of exhaustion rules. In these regions, IPs are not projected to run out for months yet and in the case of AfriNIC, years.

<comment><USER3> No, as stated in this article, this last /8 is special and they'll only hand out 1024 addresses ONCE for every APNIC member. Effectively they've run out, these addresses can only be used for transitioning purposes, 1024 addresses are useless to hand over to end customers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Apple Needs to Do Now  - <AUTHOR> http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/what-apple-needs-to-do-now/

<comment><USER2> _Dig, however, the page-curl animation (beautifully rendered, but stick-in- the-craw wrong) in iBooks._

I have to agree. It's superfluous eye candy. I much prefer the Kindle iPad app. It's very functional and stays out of your way. BN app? What's the deal with the startup time when you call the mothership? Why does it take BN app several times longer than the Kindle? Why make me wait til it's over? Show me the darn book! The Kindle app gets all of this right.

<comment><USER3> If they include, they should at least do it _well_ ; my iPhone 3G makes it a terrible feature to have. I don't think there's a disable option, but I would love to have it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think that these affordances are more important for non-tech people than what techies in particular give them credit for. In order for people who prefer using the analogue equivalents, this is a great way to inspire confidence enough to rely on the computerized tools, and to see some of the advantages of having the stuff in a computer.

I think it's a phase in many ways, but an important phase nonetheless. Scaling UX to handle total newbies and hardcore experts is not a simple one, and so far examples of doing that in any way that could be considered successful are few and far between.

<comment><USER3> Just make sure you're not in the same room as John Gruber when you praise the floppy save icon in Office.</comment></comment>


Experience vs. Function — a Beautiful UI is Not Always the Best UI - <AUTHOR> http://www.usabilitypost.com/2008/10/13/experience-vs-function-beautiful-ui-not-always-best-ui/

<comment><USER2> Crappy post. The cream of any UI crop is able to combine both pretty and usable. The line "The interface is too beautiful, there's too much of it - it's distracting because you cannot easily focus on the news stories" is bullshit and I know so every time I use my iPhone.

If there's a problem with the newspond interface then its not usable enough - not too good looking.

<comment><USER3> That's the point of the post: the newspond interface sacrifices usability for beauty.

<comment><USER4> No. The newspond interface is an ugly interface because "beauty" in design is about understanding the content. Newspond's creator shows no understanding of information design.

<comment><USER3> That may be your understanding of "beauty," but it's not the author's.

It's not worth arguing semantics, substitute "prettiness" if it makes you feel better.

<comment><USER4> It's not "pretty" either. Perhaps "gaudy" or "пошлость" (Russian for "pretentious banality") is the word you're looking for? (Edward Tufte has a graphic: <http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0002uN-5267.jpg> )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I agree with what the general gist of the article entails, don't let the UI get in the way, I don't particularly agree with all of the specifics.

My main problem with this article is the fact that the author pits "experience" against "function," and thereby separates the two into different camps. He doesn't have any in-between, wherein there would be a balance of experience _and_ function; instead, he focuses only on the two extremes.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there is anything wrong with a very functional website. I'm a fan of minimal (functional) design, but at the same time, if you're able to make a site beautiful as well as functional, there is no reason not to do so. I thought his use of newspond was a particularly poor example: it is a perfectly functional website, but happens to be very well designed. As a designer, I obsess over the design, but as a user, I have no trouble getting content out of the site.

I would say that experience, from a user's perspective, is about 40% of what is expected. A good experience, a smooth interface. On the other 60% is the functionality, which is a given.

There is no reason you can't have both, you just need to know _how much_ of each is necessary in your particular application.

(This article reads a little like cannon fodder, as well, but at least it brings up a valid--albeit age-old--discussion.)

<comment><USER6> On the two extremes - this is quite interesting. One of the key value-adds that we have on Portfolio Executive is simplifying complicated processes. On one our forms we've got the number of required data fields down from 16 to 4, with a few more being presented as required.

To make the form responsive and interactive we're obviously using ajax and js, and we add in some sexy transitions and graphics. i think there are many sites that do similar things where necessary.

in examples like this i think the user interface/experience actually becomes the functionality and so the distinction is difficult.

for me i always do the 'Apple test': can i make it simpler? faster? more obvious?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just experienced this first hand on my own site, and changed <http://www.stitcho.com> from a pretty, graphic-laden layout to a sparse, mostly text-based layout. (The old site is shown in the video tours, if you're curious.)

It was hard to delete what I had spent much time on. But when I analyzed the logs and saw that users weren't following a clear path, it was the best decision to make.

In the future, I hope to find a professional to make it pretty AND clear.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think it is not the beautifulness of the UI that could be distracting. Its the navigation and easily understandable UI. If the user has to click more than 3 clicks to do anything on any UI, user's not gonna stay longer. Example of Google was pretty good. Even now when Google has so many products like Books, Gmail. News etc, users don't get confused as to how to use anything new on Google and that's because of Google's attitude of lesser clicks I suppose. So some website with less clicks, great functionality and a beautiful UI is gonna sell like anything.....

</comment><comment><USER9> Craigslist is another perfect example. Ugly, and amazingly useful and useable.</comment>


Pnpm: An alternative to npm and yarn - <AUTHOR> https://www.kochan.io/nodejs/why-should-we-use-pnpm.html <comment><USER2> Well we had brocoli, brunch, gulp, grunt, browserify and webpack. So in the js mindset npm, yeoman, bower and yarn were not enough. Because we already have settling too long on robuts standard and it's time to move on !

<comment><USER3> yeoman is not a package manager.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > global store

How does pnpm implement "garbage collection"?</comment>


Doctor falsely accused, career destroyed by Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/06/health/ricardo-quarrie-doctor-falsely-accused/index.html <comment><USER2> Anyone here with any legal background? What responsibility does Google have for spreading what are now known to be lies? Isn't this essentially libel? IANAL so this is an honest question.

</comment><comment><USER3> This why EU has a "right to be forgotten" law. The US needs a similar law.</comment>


A MIPS R3000 Microprocessor on an FPGA (2002) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://brej.org/papers/report.pdf

<comment><USER2> There have been a ton of advancements in FPGA's and MIPS cores since 2002, and there are quite a few R3000 (MIPS I) cores available:

[http://opencores.org/project,ion](http://opencores.org/project,ion)

[http://opencores.org/project,plasma](http://opencores.org/project,plasma)

And there's more info on the Red Star R3000 CPU (the linked PDF) here:

[http://brej.org/red_star/](http://brej.org/red_star/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Added.</comment></comment>


Seizing Control of Yahoo Mail Cross-Origin Again - <AUTHOR> http://blog.saynotolinux.com/blog/2014/12/09/seizing-control-of-yahoo-mail-cross-origin-again/

<comment><USER2> I'm willing to give Yahoo! the benefit of the doubt that they're working on that general class of issues, but it needs to be a priority to fix the underlying cause of this exploit. That it took 8 months for this guys report to get taken seriously is silly.</comment>


Net Neutrality is now the law throughout California - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/Scott_Wiener/status/1046550687780225024 <comment><USER2> The provisions aren't in effect yet, so "now" is bogus.</comment>


List of Machine Learning and Data Science Resources - Part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://conductrics.com/data-science-resources-2

<comment><USER2> I want to share my own list of blogs on data science (228 feeds). They are presented in this short article: <http://blog.databigbang.com/data-science- resources/></comment>


S/qmail Is a Mail Transfer Agent Based on Qmail - <AUTHOR> http://www.fehcom.de/sqmail/sqmail.html <comment><USER2> Oh no, not another instance of the Qmail abomination.

And I don't know where they got the information about Postfix supporting Qmail's QMTP. Postfix' own documentation doesn't ever mention it.</comment>