Most Initial Conversations Go Better Than People Think - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/most-initial-conversations-go-better-than-people-think/ <comment><USER2> I played a game with a random PUBG streamer (less than 5 viewers) recently that I felt went fairly well, except for a few moments when he drove off without me and came back a minute later apologizing. He communicated very poorly and in the end, I had 4 kills and he had 2, i went down and he died trying to save me. Then he rage quit and muttered something or other as he disconnected.

I thought I must have said something to set him off. We seemed to get along fine, we had decent team chemistry but I figured I pushed the guy's buttons. It really bothered me so I sought out his videos and luckily he had recorded it.

I expected to find I wasn't nearly as pleasant as I thought I was. Nope, he was just an asshole. He was talking to someone behind him for several minutes and was on mute for about a quarter of the game, which explained a few moments of tension where he wouldn't respond or communicate at all in crucial parts. I watched a few other games of his with random people, and he'd do the same thing: be pleasant at first, die, rage quit, repeat.

Sometimes it really is the other people.

<comment><USER3> It's interesting that the default for most people, past adolescence, is to not realize _it really is_ other people. It took me a long time to realize that other people's bad moods, scowls, glares, etc. were 99 out of 100 times a reflection of them and not me. Kind of freeing, but also kind of scary when people that are clearly in terrible moods are your coworkers :/

<comment><USER4> In my experience it's most often no ones fault. It's just miscommunication.

<comment> saiya-jin Its true that communication issues are the source of most of the conflicts generally.

But there is something else - as a grown up, it took me some time to realize and accept just how many other grown ups have various issues, are imbalanced, carry scars from messed up childhood and so on. If you spend some time with them, over time these will start to surface in various, often nasty ways.

Its a mistake to try to be friend with everybody. Life is too short, rather invest time and energy into those relationships who are worth it, ie give back, help when you need it etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is something that I've come to discover over the past couple of years. People tend to think that other people like them less than they actually do. People will often think "oh wow, that person is great, I really want to spend more time with them", but then won't push the relationship (platonic or not) further because they're uncertain if the feelings are mutual. I've missed out and let a lot of relationships and friendships fade because of these feelings.

In general, we tend to have a lower opinion of ourselves than what other people do. As the study says, we're a lot more aware of our fears and insecurities than the people we interact with, as people aren't mind readers.

> Finally, simply ending an initial conversation with "I really enjoyed > speaking with you" can help take the ambiguity out of the exchange

Reaching out like this and making positive statements can mean a lot to the person you're talking to. I've found it really strengthens a relationship to make these kinds of positive comments. You feel awkward the first few times you say it, because we're so unused to making meaningful compliments about people's personalities, but it's a really good thing to do. Saying something like "I really value our friendship" can absolutely make someone's day.

</comment><comment><USER6> During my time at University I was involved in some research studies, one was particularly aligned to this study.

Essentially I myself (Male) had to stand up in a small room, in front of 6 young women and talk about myself for I think 2 minutes whilst being filmed. At the end of the chat I had to rate how I felt I did, then I watched the video of my conversation, then I had to rate myself again. I had to do this around 2-3 times from memory.

During this time the "audience" could not smile, or reciprocate any emotion or discussion, they had to sit there blankly during my speech.

The result of the experiment was that I had rated myself more confidently after seeing the video of myself speaking. Adding to the fact that we generally underestimate ourselves when speaking to others.

<comment><USER7> I think that this one is a bit different, because part of experiment is that audience will intentionally skip non-verbal clues that you would otherwise use to judge how they react to your talk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> >While initial meetings and relationships at the beginning stages are most vulnerable to these biases, long-term acquaintances are no less susceptible.

Isn't this a straight up contradiction?

<comment><USER9> The two claims are logically compatible iff vulnerability is exactly equal at all points during the relationship.

<comment><USER8> But in that case, relationships at the beginning stages would not be the 'most' vulnerable.

<comment><USER9> They wouldn't be uniquely the most vulnerable, but they would be the most vulnerable in that no other stage would be more vulnerable.

<comment><USER8> The 'the' implies unuiqueness. If John, Bill and Mary are equally skilful, then it's not the case that John is the most skilful of the three.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Link to the study: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30183512?dopt=Abstract](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30183512?dopt=Abstract)

TL;DR: our perception of our performance in a meeting is lower than the actual performance.</comment>


Ask HN: Contract says my vested shares are forfeited if I quit within 24 months - <AUTHOR> Is this standard/fair?
I'm joining a 2 person startup as a co-founder and this is the language in their contract:
Notwithstanding anything to the contrary herein, if Recipient's employment is terminated by Recipient prior to twenty four months having elapsed since the Effective Time (such twenty four month anniversary being the "Resignation Date") then all of the Vested Units and Unvested Units (whether held by Recipient or one or more of Recipient's transferees) shall automatically be forfeited and cancelled without any payment with respect thereto as of the Termination Date, in each case, without any action on the part of Recipient or the Company and after the Termination Date shall not be outstanding for any purpose. <comment><USER2> Does it apply to the other co-founders as well? If not, then you're not on equal footing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am not a lawyer [and recommend hiring your own to review the contract and recommend a course of action]. This appears to mean that if you quit within 24 months of whatever the "effective time" is, vested shares are clawed back.

On the one hand, if it seems like a problem now, that doesn't may indicate a questionable relationship. On the other hand, that it seems like enough of a problem now to load it into the contract seems shortsighted by the company: if there's a problem 14 months from the "effective time" [whatever that is], the best thing for everyone might be for you to resign rather than stick around another ten months [an early-stage startup eternity] to maintain your equity while the other founders devote energy toward getting you to quit instead of growing the company.

To me, it looks like it may indicate the use of documents more typical of a small closely held business than a startup in the form of a Delaware C-corp. Then again, a lot of companies are called "a startup" that are not really designed for sustained rapid growth and organized to accept outside equity to fuel it...e.g. people refer to restaurants and similar new local businesses as startups.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, that's helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That goes one step beyond the standard cliff period for vesting. Honestly it doesn't seem like the incentives are aligned: if you make it past a one year cliff, your shares / options are vested and they are yours to keep / exercise. You earned them!

As other commentars noted, in this scenario you may want to quit but choose to stay until the 24 month mark (bad). The founders may want you to leave but instead of firing you they'll make you miserable so you quit and this portion of the contract goes into effect (bad).

My rec: If everything else is solid and there's a cliff period setup in another portion of the contract, get this removed. If there isn't a cliff, convert this to a standard 1, 1.5, or 2 year clif using the normal language (no shares vested until the cliff, then they're yours after that).

<comment><USER5> > If there isn't a cliff, convert this to a standard 1, 1.5, or 2 year clif > using the normal language (no shares vested until the cliff, then they're > yours after that).

Consequently, I'd also ask for a higher salary or more options if the cliff gets bumped up beyond 1 year. Risk management and all that jazz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fair/standard is more about the total compensation of the contract. Based on the fact that you're asking leads me to think that you find this section to not be fair as it relates to the total compensation.

Contracts are a negotiation process, line out or modify the sections you don't like and submit it back for their approval. If they're not willing to negotiate then they likely aren't a place you'll want to work for.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough. Isn't this essentially just a 2 year cliff period? Do you have any insight as to what the norm amongst startups for this condition is?

<comment><USER6> I don't have enough direct experience to comment on what's normal for for joining in a small setup as a cofounder.

It doesn't seem abnormal for the employment contract to have various clauses that are there to ensure a minimum commitment to the venture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are you receiving a salary as well or not? In my book, a cofounder without salary should not have a cliff.

Even if you are receiving a salary, a two-year cliff is very unusual.

</comment><comment><USER8> So many parts to a contract, assuming the salary and other aspects are what you'd consider good then to me this seems fair.

If the other parts are low and this is seen as part of the main package rather than a longer term bonus, then it wouldn't be so far...

I doubt a co founder is going to leave within two years unless something is seriously going wrong...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this helps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a really weird clause. - what's to stop you from just not showing up to work? You either get fired and get your shares, or stay on payroll and get your shares.

<comment> finance-geek I am not a lawyer, but _not showing up_ is not a good idea, you could then be fired _for cause_ and lose your stock. Being fired is different from being laid off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Do both of you have the same clause? I would get a lawyer</comment>


The Autonomous Selfie Drone Is Here. Is Society Ready for It? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/13/technology/skydio-autonomous-drones.html <comment> King-Aaron Change the Skydio logo to a McDonnel Douglas / Lockheed Martin logo and the product seems a lot more sinister.</comment>


Sound Open Firmware – open-source audio DSP firmware and development tools - <AUTHOR> https://www.sofproject.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> My understanding (thus far): This + DSP + D/A Converter + Amplifier Circuit + PCIe Hardware Interface Chip(s) + FPGA (maybe) + Software Driver (On the computer whose PCIe bus it is) = Open Source Sound Card...

I could be wrong about one or more of those component parts however(!)... Comments welcome!</comment>


Ask HN: Resources on how Google/Facebook etc. approach software design? - <AUTHOR> A friend once told me Google starts software design by designing data structures.  I'm looking for information on how FAANG companies approach software design, are there any resources out there? <comment><USER2> The design process at Facebook is, to put it charitably, a bit minimal. "Move fast" is taken to mean start writing code immediately, then iterate on that to approach the desired outcome. Developers are rewarded for landing code in production each review period, even if that code provides little benefit, will need to be rewritten, and might even be buggy. In the rush, careful design and testing (which might delay landing in production and result in a bad review) get pretty short shrift. Some might say that there's risk or waste either way, and that velocity rules all. I'm not going to say they're wrong, but it makes "software design at Facebook" a bit of an oxymoron.

<comment><USER3> In my experience working at Facebook, not a single thing you said was true.

People plan and think before they code.

People are rewarded for impact, not for landing useless code.

Code is carefully designed and tested, or it doesn't land.

Impact rules all, not velocity.

<comment><USER4> If these principles are followed throughout the engineering org, can you explain how the recent reports of password and other information being stored in plaintext happened? That is Security 101.

Genuinely curious.

<comment><USER5> I don't work at Facebook but my understanding is passwords were not stored in a database in plaintext, but there was verbose logging of web requests that were not sanitized. Sanitizing logs is definitely common sense and a basic security practice, but it can be difficult to be sure you are doing it adequately without good tooling to monitor it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are a number of blog posts by people such as Tim Bray, Steve Yegge, and others - as well as internal engineering blogs (at least there is one at Facebook and several at Google). I read these on a regular basis (Yegge's hasn't been updated in a while), but only to take away ideas and learn about new technologies.

Their approach is almost certainly not the right approach for you, because you are not Google ( [https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/you-are-not- google-84912cf44afb](https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/you-are-not- google-84912cf44afb) ). That said, if you are looking for a position at these places, then the blogs might help you, in a number of ways. If you want to work there though, focus on the sound engineering techniques applicable anywhere (maps, hashing, trees, graphs, algorithms) and build a reputation through Open Source contributions to the projects the companies are involved with.

* Tim Bray / Amazon / [https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/](https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/)

* Steve Yegge / Ex-Googler / [https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/](https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/) and [https://email@example.com](https://firstname.lastname@example.com)

* Facebook Engineering Blog / [https://code.fb.com/](https://code.fb.com/)

* Google Developers Blog / [https://developers.googleblog.com/](https://developers.googleblog.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> A group of early ex-Facebook engineers/directors have recently collaborated with Software Engineering Daily to produce a podcast series about the engineering philosophy behind the core product. I think these talks are a little more raw and direct than you would find from official corporate talking points. [https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/category/all- episodes/](https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/category/all-episodes/)

<comment><USER8> I've recently moved all my podcast subcriptions to google podcast and now I am sad that I can't find this one there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ex Amazon here. Amazon has some solid principles that often go against popular belief.

\- No waterfall-ish process where design is handed down from architects to senior engineers to juniors. The same people do design, implementation, ops and so on.

\- Measure everything and always. People are encouraged to define metrics and goals and create dashboards before writing code

\- Simplify: decreasing complexity is taken more seriously than in other companies. Do not use a database when you can use a file, or a message passing library when you can use a socket, or 200 lines of code when you can for out to "grep | sort". This can be surprising to new hires.

<comment><USER10> > message passing library when you can use a socket

kindly explain that logic

<comment><USER11> I'm also curious about this. Reinventing your own serialization and retransmission every time, instead of using proven technology does not sound like "decreasing" complexity. Same goes for using files and grep instead of databases in many cases.

<comment><USER12> It probably means that if you only need to ping a process from another one (no payload needed or only a handful of case expeceted) you don't have to deploy your last gRPC knowledge. cf. how daemons are managed on Linux

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> John Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" is a good book on the subject. He has worked with Google.

<comment><USER14> It's a very well written book! Short and sweet. Not that novel as expected, but a still very good read for a weekend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are you looking for wisdom to apply to your day to day work? In that case, keep in mind that Facebook/Google practices are tailored for Facebook/Google problems, so their practices might not fit your situation.

</comment><comment><USER16> Really good overview: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.01715](https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.01715)

</comment><comment><USER17> I used to be at Google, years ago. I don't know if any of this is still relevant.

The design process at Google started with a design document. There was a template that I think was available online a long time ago but (ironically) I can no longer find it. The template was relatively lightweight and had some headings like so: Introduction, Goals, Non-goals, Overview, Detailed design, Security, Privacy, Testing. Compared to other design doc templates I've seen it wasn't heavy on software engineering theory. Of course the bulk of the writing would be in the "detailed design" section and subsections.

Good design docs were very detailed. One I wrote ended up being, I think, about 40 pages by the end when printed out, and that was not an especially large or unusual document. Design docs for critical systems could be larger still, or more frequently, split into many other docs. The quality of writing was generally high and they were maintained in version control. There was a mailing list where design docs were posted for company-wide review, though by the time I was there, this process had degraded quite a bit and a lot of stuff was done in team-specific design docs in Google Docs, with relatively minimal or no peer review. I felt that it was common for the less "serious" teams to do this, e.g. teams working on the latest chat product or on Google Apps itself. Those docs tended to be shorter, only partly filled out, or non- existent. The closer to the metal, older-school stuff was all hand-written HTML.

Good design docs would be kept up to date as the design evolved, although I'd say that was the minority. Most designs were the work of a small number of people or just one person. There were not many design review meetings that I recall, though probably that varied a lot by team.

Diagrams were minimal, possibly because there weren't any good diagramming tools available internally (well, there was graphviz and TeX).

Data structures would often be designed up front as long as they were either protocol buffers (i.e. inter-server comms or long term data storage), or fundamental to what the system did as with BigTable, indexing, index serving, ad serving etc. Systems where the data structures weren't fundamental to the design didn't necessarily plan out every structure in advance of course, by no means. For many products the user interface or network protocols were more important, so that's where the design docs would dwell.

The most senior engineers were very familiar with the performance costs of things, e.g. the cost of an L2 cache miss vs a disk seek, and that deeply informed the design of many systems.

That's about it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Data structures are the basis of what you start off with for any program. The key is to understand the domain you want to model. It's hardly unique to FAANG.

<comment><USER19> Fred "Mythical Man-month" Brooks wrote:

"Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables [i.e. data structures], and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts; they'll be obvious."

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My theory is that they have more people who understand and respect software design in higher management levels compared to other companies. So it's easier to do good work without constant pressure from the "business" people to take shortcuts.

<comment><USER4> This is probably true for Google, but not Facebook, given how many times they have broken things, especially security related.

<comment><USER17> Facebook's culture is basically a younger brother of Google's, or at least used to be. There's a reason their tech stacks are so similar - FB went through a phase where it poached a lot of Googlers.

A tech firm is most easily defined as a company founded and run by a software or hardware engineer. The only exception I can think of is Apple, but Jobs was immersed in engineering culture from the time he was a teenager - he was sort of a sphinx in that regard. Even so, it's fair to say Apple under Jobs is maybe more of a high-end design house than a traditional tech firm: their in- house talent struggled with online services and anything involving complex computer science R&D, e.g. their AI / mapping efforts were weak sauce compared to Google.

<comment><USER21> "their tech stacks are so similar" in what ways? not similar at all

<comment><USER17> Thrift RPC is basically a clone of Stubby. Lots of sharded MySQL (not so much at Google anymore but the whole time I was there, the ads db was a giant sharded MySQL DB). Small number of large monorepos. Etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was thinking about this the other day, because I'm kicking off a new project. How do big companies start their code base. Do they have 1 person write a platform and everyone builds on top..and then iterate. Or several people contribute to the platform. The example in java being, someone needs to layout some skeleton package structure (a hello world controller, DAO)...?

My previous projects were me coming onto an existing project, or were small enough that I had 50% of the code done before the next person helped out :)

<comment><USER4> All big companies start out as small companies, which means 1 or 2 or a few people writing code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Take any information (blog posts, articles) that comes from the company itself with a grain of salt because it is essentially marketing and so will downplay the downsides of their approach and paint a rosier picture of the process than what really happens there.

</comment><comment><USER24> I am not sure how facebook and google or any of the big companies measure the design practices to be better what we do at pickmysolar is we try out few design patterns for poc and check it flexibilty then decide on the framework or the design

</comment><comment><USER25> I didn't know that they spent much time on good design :/

<comment><USER26> And certainly not _user-centric_ design ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> wow there are places like that for real?

i'd say it comes down the maturity of individual engineer or group how they'd approach a problem. some problems are worth spending time most aren't and every problem is not at global scale trust me.</comment>


The Gender Gap Is Smaller Than Realized - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-gender-pay-gap-is-overblown-2013-5

<comment><USER2> _There's hardly a gender gap at all, actually; it's just that women choose jobs that pay less._

Bad wording at its best with a sprinkle of blame the victim - just imagine how a woman wakes up, looks at the mirror and says - today i choose to work as hard as any man, but I also choose to not move as high the career ladder as possible.

<comment><USER3> > today i choose to work as hard as any man, but I also choose to not move as > high the career ladder as possible.

Or the alternative explanation: 'today I choose a different balance in my life.'</comment></comment>


Buffon's needle or how ants estimate nest size - <AUTHOR> https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=9977c7ea88099bc6d6e607e4477f3920eb4440ca781953b5bdc2c6f92e19f739 <comment><USER2> A beautiful related result is the Crofton Formula [0], which says that you can measure the length of any curve by appropriately counting the number of straight lines that intersect it.

(My co-authors and I discovered a generalization of the formula that also holds in curved space [1].)

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

[1] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.05515.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.05515.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Interesting as the paper is, please link to the arxiv abstract rather than the pdf as that's more web friendly. Reader can always click on he pdf link there.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.05515](https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.05515)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> An interesting related problem is Bertrand's paradox[0]. You have an equilateral triangle inscribed in a circle. You pick a random chord from the circle (a line that goes from one edge of the circle to another). What's the probability the chord is longer than an edge of the triangle?

As it turns out, there isn't a well-defined solution. That's the paradox. The issue comes from "picking a random chord". There are different ways that you can pick a random chord which lead to different solutions. One approach to picking a random chord is to pick two random points on the circle and draw the chord between them. This gives you a probability of 1/3\. Another approach is to pick a random direction and radius, then draw a chord at the end of the radius perpendicular to the radius. This approach gives you a probability of 1/2.

One interesting aspect is the second approach is the only approach where if you were to draw a circle within the larger circle, the distribution of the chords in the inner circle will match the distribution of chords in the outer circle.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_paradox_(probability)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_paradox_\(probability\))

<comment><USER5> I am not sure what makes this a paradox? Normally I think of a paradox as leading to a state where you have two or more contradictory statements being true at like Russell's Paradox in set theory. This just seems like a problem where you don't have enough information to solve it but once you get the info you need (how to pick random chords) you get a logically consistent solution.

<comment><USER4> A paradox is any statement that appears to contradict itself. That includes both actual contradictions such as Russel's paradox and statements that appear to be invalid, but have non-obvious valid conclusions like the Monty Hall problem.

This problems falls into the second category. We are given what appears to be a well-defined problem, but when we solve it in different ways, we get different answers. The resolution to the paradox is the problem isn't well defined because your technique for generating randomness will produce different answers.

<comment><USER6> Because of the Principle of Explosion, a contradiction implies any statement. So for people who don't think that everything is meaningless there can't be any true contradictions. This means that in fact _every_ paradox falls into the second class. Paradoxes merely differ in how difficult it is to see the logical flaw that leads to the apparent contradiction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought this was total magic in high school until my college's intro to probability class discussed this before the midterm. I guess maths progression in college can be fast.

<comment><USER8> I think high school is constrained by having to normalize the curriculum over the entire population, but college (I take that to mean university) has more leeway to teach you what they like, and make it harder. Plus you are only studying 1-2 subjects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This was a practice problem I remember from when I was studying for Exam 1/P, one of the qualifying exams for actuaries.

[https://www.soa.org/education/exam-req/edu-exam-p- detail.asp...](https://www.soa.org/education/exam-req/edu-exam-p-detail.aspx)

[https://www.casact.org/admissions/syllabus/index.cfm?fa=1syl...](https://www.casact.org/admissions/syllabus/index.cfm?fa=1syllabi)

</comment><comment><USER10> There's a nice chapter on Buffon's needle problem in "Proofs from THE BOOK", an Erdős-inspired attempt to collect the most beautiful proofs. You can find a PDF of the entire book easily enough on Google, it's a good read although I would dispute the beauty of some of the proofs in it.

<comment><USER11> >although I would dispute the beauty of some of the proofs in it

Agree. In my opinion, the proofs in that book are not so much about beauty, rather how one can prove seemingly complex stuff with surprisingly elementary tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I first saw this little gem in a stats test in my second year at university. I must say it was a lot more fun deriving it without the time pressure

</comment><comment><USER13> Kakeya is another nice needle problem:

[https://youtu.be/IM-n9c-ARHU](https://youtu.be/IM-n9c-ARHU)

</comment><comment><USER14> Unreadable on Chrome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which platform? Mobile? Which version?

<comment><USER14> Weird. It is fixed now. It got stuck loading something I think and didn't expand beyond the first paragraph. Now it does. My bad.</comment></comment></comment>


Create and view interactive cheatsheets on the command-line - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cheat/cheat <comment><USER6> I finally learned the basic tar command from this menemonic:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1x0qwh/hav...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1x0qwh/having_trouble_remembering_tar_syntax/)

<comment><USER7> `tar -xfj foo.tar.bz2` would extract the file `foo.tar.bz2` from inside the archive `j`. IOW, it's providing `j` as the argument to the option `-f` that's used to specify the archive file. It should rather be `-xjf`. Also, case matters, `-J` is for .xz files, not .bz2.

`tar` has a pretty simple calling syntax, probably simpler than most utilities. I encourage people to use the manpages instead of cute but wrong or misleading mnemonics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been using this tool for a while. It's great for when you're familiar with a command but would prefer a list of common examples instead of a detailed man page for whatever reason.

Resizing an image with imagemagick's convert utility is extremely common, but invoking the binary with -? or bringing up the man page will get you way more information than you're actually looking for, whereas the cheatsheet[1] has exactly what you need right there.

[1]: [https://github.com/cheat/cheatsheets/blob/master/convert](https://github.com/cheat/cheatsheets/blob/master/convert)

<comment><USER9> > would prefer a list of common examples instead of a detailed man page

This. I have always complained to myself that man pages should have had this option.

<comment><USER10> I want to echo what you are saying a little bit. I have never learned something from a man page. Maybe it is because they provide full documentation but that is very rarely actually useful when using commands.

That is what excited me about this. Maybe cli apps will see this example and try to document how to use it in this way. Infinitely more usable in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Isn't it a perfect case for aliases?

If you don't remember the particular command, why not to look it up for the first time and then assign personalized alias, which is easy to remember?

Like with `tar` example and `zsh` you can even define suffix alias (`alias -s`), so you can just type `./your-file.tgz` and `zsh` will invoke `tar -xzf ./your-file.tgz` or whatever you prefer.

<comment><USER12> Funny, i actually created my own alias which points to [http://cheat.sh/](http://cheat.sh/)

...that of course assumes I have an internet connection. Otherwise, fall back to man pages as well as my own directory of text files with reference info on commonly used commands - employing my own examples.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is what I've been looking for. I might have come across it before and ignored it, but I really need this.

They're far apart but those moments when you want to cut a video, or set id3 tags, and you rely 100% on Google to find out the CLI args for you.

Much better to store them locally, or in a git repo shared by your devices, and look them up on the CLI.

Even better, I'd like them to be already stored in bash's ctrl+r "history" and be displayed with comments. That would be amazing, to just hit ctrl+r and start typing ffmpeg, regardless of how long since you ran that command.

</comment><comment><USER12> This seems a nifty utility...but I've slowly migrated to depending on manpages, my own directory of text files, and with an alias to [http://cheat.sh/](http://cheat.sh/) (while online, that is). Looking at this tool, mnemonic, navi, etc., i almost prefer navi and mnemonic over cheatsheets, but obviously that is only personal taste, and with no offense to the makers of any of these utilities.

Specific to man pages, it actually took me a while to learn how to read them in order to gain maximum benefit from them. Surely, the quality of manpages is not the same across all or even most applications...but i guess i've gotten used to manpages enough that between them, and my own text files, with a rare dive into something like [http://cheat.sh/](http://cheat.sh/) or good ol' DDG search, seems to have me covered.

<comment> trey-jones I learned more about how to use man pages in the 3 (4?) hours of LFCS exam than I did in nearly 10 years of using unix/linux every day. It's amazing what being forced to work without a web browser to hand can do.

<comment><USER12> Very interesting; thanks for sharing!!

I've not been interested in pursing that cert. (my day job has been lots more pointy-haired boss type of work rather than sysadmin, dev, or devops, etc.). However, i do have a colleague who is pursuing this cert., plus your note about learning manpages (as one benefit), and other anecdotes that i've heard similar to yours...makes me think that maybe i should pursue this cert even if only for my own personal improvement. Thanks again for that interesting tidbit!

<comment> trey-jones Since you may be interested I would add that it didn't take much preparation after having worked as a sysadmin/dev/linux user for nearly 10 years, and my employer paid for it so there wasn't really investment from me. There are some targeted questions (there was a Docker question for example) that might throw you if you don't typically use the tech, but also a lot of general linux usage (grep, find, stdin/out/err manipulation, etc) so that even if you have to skip something (I didn't finish completely) you still stand a good chance of passing.

I did find it to be a good exercise in some things that I don't do often (and things like using man pages), and I also would say that I feel a bit more confident and validated walking around with the cert than I did before.

I also got a T-Shirt!

<comment><USER12> Very helpful; thanks again!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've written a similar tool — with the additional feature of syntax highlighting of the output. (And a shorter command name, which might actually matter for a tool like this!)

[https://github.com/codesections/mnemonic](https://github.com/codesections/mnemonic)

</comment><comment><USER15> Is this the same as [https://tldr.sh/](https://tldr.sh/) ?

<comment><USER16> doesn't look like it. tldr.sh seems to pull from the web, while this cheat project looks to be more of a similar too to collect knowledge you build yourself over time.

</comment></comment><comment> trey-jones It's funny that when I saw this headline I thought, "That would be great for tar!" Admittedly I do have the ability to disable the bomb and can both create and execute archives (gzipped or not!) without a cheat sheet. But for pretty much anything else, I never have the confidence to do it without looking at the manpage, or my own cheat sheet.

</comment><comment><USER17> I remember it like this:

x - <USER2>

c - <USER3>

z - zip (like, compress)

v - <USER4>

f - <USER5>

when I write the command I just say in my head what I want to do: Say I want tar xzvf:

tar extract zip verbose file

makes sense to me

</comment><comment><USER18> So, we now have tldr, and navi, and mnemonic, and cheat, and maybe some more similar tools. But why don't we add these examples to the respective man pages? There's clearly a need for them.

I guess if you wanted you could make a new command that only prints the EXAMPLES section of a man page. It could turn out to be an improvement even since you get all the nice things that man provides like colours and consistent formatting for free.

</comment><comment><USER19> I needed the tool to install the tool. It ships as a `.gz` file. The standard `tar zxvf cheat-linux-amd64.gz` doesn't work. Tried `7z x cheat-linux- amd64.gz` which works.

<comment><USER20> gunzip is probably what you were looking for

<comment><USER19> Ah yes, that's the one. By the time I need to do the same again I'll have definitely forgotten again!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Similar tool: [https://github.com/denisidoro/navi](https://github.com/denisidoro/navi)

</comment><comment><USER9> The real test would be: can you do this?

      $cheat cheat

</comment><comment><USER22> Oh no, here it comes, the next generation of superduper admins. Fast, efficient, no experience nor education. "Erm.. Boss, we have leaked our database into the wild, because .. erm .. yeah .. I mouse-pasted first search result and it worked :thumbsup: .. it wasn't me .. just an unfortunate accident .. blame the software!"

<comment><USER23> I heard some of those new admins even use man pages or personal notes. Curse those amateurs, back in my day we kept all of POSIX in our heads and we liked it!</comment></comment>


Get started with testing from top to bottom - <AUTHOR> http://blog.codeship.io/2013/03/15/Testing-top-to-bottom.html

<comment><USER2> Badass</comment>


Why does sexism persist in the video games industry? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27824701 <comment><USER2> I am still trying to find how they defined "gamer". Does a mom obsessed with candy crush count? Statistics without background can be worse than useless.

Also, adding female assassins would not be as simple as "create a model". Each added character requires dozens of animations (climbing, falling, running, using each weapon), full voice acting for each of those situations (every time "he" is used would need to be re-recorded with "she"), each cutscene would need to be reviewed for timing issues, and the bug testers would need to do everything twice to check for graphical bugs. While they probably could have done it, something else would need to be cut.

<comment><USER3> "Does a mom obsessed with candy crush count"

Why wouldn't she count? Cause she's a mom? Cause the game has candy? Or what?

As for female assassins, truth is somewhere in the middle. You don't need to make everything from scratch. Procedural adjustments can be made to the male animations and you can use the same animations for females.

I mean come on, women have a slightly different figure, but they have two legs, two arms, one head and so on. They're humans. It's not like the complaint is that birds and dogs were left out of the game.

That said, I'm fine with women being left out being a business decision. They'll now see what the effects of that business decision is on sales, and have the chance to learn for the next version.

<comment><USER4> Maybe she shouldn't count if you're writing an article about why there are so many female gamers isn't there a female character in Assassin's Creed. My mom is in her mid-fifties and just got an Android tablet to read ebooks and is now addicted to Candy Crush. By that ESA study's standards she's now one of the ~50% female gamer demographic. She is not going to transition into a "hardcore gamer" even if more "hardcore" games have female characters. The statistic is just not useful in the context of the article because "female" contains a lot of disparate demographics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think comparing across genres would be more informative...for example, the percentage of female characters in an FPS (say, CoD, Bioshock, or whatever) as opposed to an MMORPG (WoW, Eve, etc.)

There's also a certain danger in adding females into games, right? Behavior which may be acceptable against only male characters can get pretty bad when applied to females--consider the case of Postal 2, GTA, or any number of sandboxy games. Fallout, for what it's worth, at least was equal opportunity and let you shoot both women and children in the face.

If you allow females in a game with violence as a major component, you open yourself up to all of the issues of some insecure jackass perpetuating violence against women and posting about it--or just getting yelled at straight-out for supporting that functionality at all.

EDIT:

It's kind of funny, actually, that we were arguably more progressive in FPSs in the 90s than we are today. Stronger female characters ( _System Shock_ , _Jurassic Park: Trespasser_ ), more options for character customization ( _Half-Life_ , _Quake 2_ ), and better socialization ( _Ultima Online_ , _Asheron 's Call_, _Everquest_ ). For shame.

</comment><comment><USER6> A better question is why has there been so much obsession over female characters in the past 2 years? Not having a female character in your game is not sexist. Its dumb to claim otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Average gamer is 31 years old

> 48% of gamers are female

> 71% of gamers are 18 or older

> 53% of gamers play games on their smartphones

> While the percentage of female gamers has increased, that has been primarily > due to the rise of mobile games, which often do not have characters.

Combining "mobile" gamers with PC/Console gamers is like combining chess players with professional wrestlers.

Just because a lot of women play Candy Crush, doesn't mean that you need all PC and console games to have female protagonists 50% of the time.

I think the real problem here is that there are a few female gamers that go online and just get offended by the same thing male gamers say to each other all the time. Maybe online games should have a 'politically correct' section where easily offended people could go and play.

</comment><comment><USER8> As a game developer (mathbreakers.com) we recognized this was something we could pay attention to, and from the start we tailored the game to appeal to girls including female characters. Truthfully it was also a good business move, as the question often comes up with important contacts.

We still see the widely-held belief in potential customers (parents) that "girls (kids) might not like our game" because it has explosions and logic in it, but from our perspective there is little difference.

Like racism or homophobia, sexism will take a long time to percolate out, but gradually it is happening.

Another example is Mass Effect 3: You can play a gay, non-white female

</comment><comment><USER9> Begs the question. Before you can ask _why_ sexism persists in the video game industry you have to ascertain that it really _does_ persist. Personally, I don't see much evidence.

</comment><comment><USER10> Please don't editorialize titles. The HN guidelines ask you not to. (The submitted title was "48% of gamers are female".)

<comment><USER3> And yet, I wouldn't have opened yet another article on gamer sexism (I get it, gamer sexism is bad mkay?), but I _did_ find the data point of half the gamers being female very compelling (and useful to mention during meetings).

Sometimes, the guidelines should be broken.</comment></comment>


Gmail service disruption - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1379995199000&sid=1&iid=043f082bc7cd18e15458318035d9bc7a

<comment><USER2> Google services have lately seemed like something Ralph Nader warned you about.

Lately I've found that many Google services (like Google Groups) don't work entirely right with IE or Firefox and they only work right with chrome.

Today I logged into my Google Analytics for the first time, and Google wanted to verify my phone by sending me an SMS. Well, my house is outside the GSM service footprint except when there's a strong temperature inversion, so I get in my car and drive 2 miles, park at the school, don't get the message, I reboot my phone, the message finally comes, then I drive home, and by that time I guess my session timed out because after I typed in my verification code into my computer, it asked me for my password and wanted me to verify again.

I canceled and then Google Analytics in years came up (after about three minutes loading) and locked my browser (Google Chrome) up, until I discovered there was some dialog box that wound up off my main screen that was locking it up.

And then they came out with the new gmail which seems to be yet another scheme to shove Google+ down my throat.

Try doing a search for a programming related query and instead of getting the relevant documentation you get something in broken English that tells you what a loser you are because you are trying to do what you're trying to do and gives you ten incoherent reasons why you shouldn't do what you're doing.

Meanwhile, Matt Butts is making Youtube videos about how you'd better make sure that anybody who links to your site had better make it a nofollow link because if anybody makes you a link that's not a nofollow link you must surely be a spammer. Therefore, you should check all your links in Google Webmaster Tools and write a polite letter to anybody who links to your web site that they'd better remove the links or if they can't do that, make the links nofollow.

Speaking of Youtube, if you're in the 80% of the land area of the USA where all you can get is bad DSL and bad satellite service, it's just unwatchable. Amazon Prime, Vudu, Netflix and everybody else seem to be able to cope, but I don't find anything entertaining at all on Youtube when I have to wait 15 minutes to see a 3 minute video,.

Oh yeah, but if you get 50,000 people to plus you, maybe your site rankings will move from the third page to the second page, or maybe not.

The only organizations who can get away with being linked to today are Wikipedia and spam factories that used to be search engines, like about.com, because if Google bans them (as they should) the DoJ will be on them with an anti-trust lawsuit.

What's worst about it is that if some small competitor comes up with something better, Google buys them up, shuts them down, and then you're left with Google's offerings which just get worse every week.

I remember when I was proud to be a Google AdSense publisher because it didn't have the "one rule to a flat tummy" ads and you know what, they bought the sleazy ad networks and now AdSense is as sleazy as anything. Oh, but if you have one erotic painting from 1649 on your site out of 1,000,000 images they'll kick you out of AdSense without warning the day you are flying back from a conference in San Francisco after one of their agents watches you give a talk at a conference about your web site.

I will say I'm impressed with android, both as an end user and a developer -- it's amazing. But my understanding is that their "scalable" platform for distributed applications is getting long in the tooth and that everything takes four times longer for Googlers to do it than anybody else. Their recruiters never stop calling, never get the hint that you don't want to go work at their beehive where whatever they pay you won't go very far because unless you commute to Fresno you'll spend it all on a mortgage for a house that will be worthless in 25 years and, of all places, you know you'll be just a number to them, if you don't fit their mathematical model of what a coder or a product manager or whatever it is, you just suck.

That won't stop the recruiters from calling though, because the whole point isn't that they want your labor but they just want to kneecap their competitors by taking anybody who can pass an IQ test and wants to live around San Jose away.

Google used to be about a culture of excellence, but today Google is the new Microsoft. Because they never release versions, the press never catches on to the fact that Google's services are like Windows 8.

<comment><USER3> This comment has nothing to do with the article except for "I hate Google" sentiment, and does a pretty lousy job of it. It seems reasonable to assume you don't need to drive 2 miles to answer your phone, and "Matt Butts" is just juvenile.

And yet it's currently the top comment.

<comment><USER2> I do need to drive 2 miles to answer my phone, really. Don't get me started on AT&T and Verizon or the Nigeria-class broadband service in the US. Cell service sort works in mid-tier cities like Rochester, NY, but go to Greenwich Village or Beverly Hills and try getting a signal.

When I talk to people in China or India or Australia or Germany, I get a good connection, but when I talk to people in Encino or Boston I have to repeat half of what I say because their connections keep dropping out.

Calling him Matt Butts gives me once chance in ten that his team of flying monkeys won't see a reference to his name and ban all my web sites and every web site that links to my web sites (except for Wikipedia)

And it's not just "I hate Google", I used to love Google. I've just watched how Google's ecosystem has wrecked the web. So many topics are dominated by old crappy web sites (talked about in Hacker News today) and these sites have an incentive NOT to improve because if you make any radical change in your web site, there's a high risk that your rankings will tank.

In the meantime, if you want make a good site, there's a high risk you'll build it and nobody will come.

If the comment above has gotten a lot of votes it's because a lot of people feel the same way. I think tomorrow I am calling my broker and selling GOOG short.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps you do need to drive 2 miles to answer your phone, but I think the point was that the vast, vast majority of Google's users do not need to do that. (sidenote: isn't that because you have 2-step-auth turned on? how would you like it to work, given your circumstances?)

<comment><USER2> I don't have two step auth on, but it wanted to check my number anyway, which was fine with me. If they'd set a longer timeout it would have been find with me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really frustrating for me.

I argued up and DOWN with people about us switching to google apps for our email.

Up until recently, we were hosting our own mail on a server in our switch room.

"It's more reliable!" I would insist.

Well...it _hasn 't_ been more reliable. There has been more than one longish- term downtime that I can remember since we switched over.

When I was hosting it myself, I could give people status updates, an estimate for when it would be fixed, some kind of explanation.

Now, all I can give them is "it's broken. I don't know why, and google isn't telling anybody why."

Very frustrating, especially considering how much we pay every month for it.

<comment><USER6> You've just described one of my biggest problems w/ outsourcing mail, etc.

Really, downtime isn't a big deal (to an extent, of course) because most people realize that "shit happens" and there will be the occasional downtime regardless of who's handling mail.

The problem is that you are, in effect, helpless in these situations. Like you mentioned, you can at least keep your customers updated when it's a problem with your own machines. When you've outsourced it to someone else, you're at their mercy, so to speak.

 _" What's wrong with the mail system?" "I dunno." "When do you think it will be fixed?" "I dunno." "Today? Tomorrow? Next week?" "I dunno."_

<comment><USER4> It's true that it can be awkward in such situations, but there are two things that still make it "better":

1\. Google will bring it back up in a timeframe that is very comparable (if not better) than your average in-house IT team would.

2\. Given (1), if you ask people how much per year they are willing to pay for transparency in such circumstances, most businesses will not be willing to dedicate very much of their budget towards it unless it increases reliability. The "helpless" feeling is just because you can't see Google's engineers working to fix it. Surely no one doubts that they are doing their utmost to bring it back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "The email delays are affecting less than 50% of Gmail users."

That is a HUGE change from 0.024% this has been changed from a "Service disruption" to a "Service outage".

Also, not sure if it is dependent on your Google login, but mine are all in EST.

<comment><USER8> PST is broken too - all my clients are PST and most are effected. About half are paid, others are grandfathered free accounts and I see no appreciable difference.

<comment><USER9> I'm in Nicaragua and having issues with free accounts and apps accounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've had issues getting steadily worse all day across domain since ~9 am est or so. I just received this from Google as part of an auto reply to support ticket.

"Thanks for your patience.

Please read below for updates on the status of your issue:

Updates since last message:

This issue has been partially resolved for some users. We expect it to be fully resolved within the next hour. The issue caused severe delays sending emails, especially emails with large attachments. It also caused delays in loading Drive files with large images.

The delays were caused because of a problem with an undersea cable. All parties involved are actively working to: 1) Redirect traffic and add additional capacity to resolve the immediate issue. 2) Fix the problem with the faulty undersea cable. "

<comment><USER11> What kind of mechanism for USA-based email service causes email delays for 50% of Gmail users due to an undersea cable?

Not disputing, just curious about cause and effect here, and Gmail architecture.

<comment><USER12> [http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/ind...](http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We've been reporting delayed inbound emails to Gmail (Google Apps) since Friday 13th.

Glad to see they're now acknowledging it, though the percentage affected listed here seems remarkably low, considering an informal survey of employees and clients suggests from 1 in 50 increasing to 1 in 20 affected over the past week, with delays up to 24 hours.

</comment><comment><USER13> Did anyone else just realize that there is NO WAY for us to be notified when an issue is affecting your specfic account?

/appstatus isn't good enough...

</comment><comment><USER14> Worse than an outage, I got this dreaded email from Google a few hours ago. I hope there isn't some sort of attack going on:

Someone recently tried to use an application to sign in to your Google Account - email@example.com.

We prevented the sign-in attempt in case this was a hijacker trying to access your account.

<comment><USER15> I had this today as well. Where was your attempt coming from? Mine was in HK.

(To be fair, I think it was my own machine attempting to connect via VPN)

<comment><USER16> Got one yesterday from Anhui China. I'm definitely not using any VPN services there

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> TIMEZONE!

I wish they (and others) would include timezone information. I always have to second-guess if its PST, EST, GMT or something else.

<comment><USER18> Bottom of the page: "All times are shown in your local timezone unless otherwise noted."

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So does this mean we've lost some emails forever or does this mean we'll get the emails eventually just delayed?

EDIT: I have an email currently lost in limbo. 3 hours delayed and counting. Not sure if it will ever get delivered.

<comment><USER5> I think this is a bit more complicated than normal.

You can read the RFCs if you want to, but normally what happens if an email cannot be delivered is that it will sit in the queue on the SMTP server trying to relay it with status: deferred.

What's different this time around is that gmail is actually reporting that emails ARE being delivered, even though they may not be.

Earlier this morning, I did a manual SMTP transaction[1] with aspmx.l.google.com and got an OK status when I sent the email.

This means that a server relaying mail to gmail would NOT leave a message in its own queue (to retry delivery later), because the server would "think" that it had been delivered.

The problem here is that my "delivered" message did not show up in my inbox until quite a bit later.

SO! Instead of the SMTP system being able to take care of its own outages, the responsibility is upon google to have properly queued messages for delivery internally, and then to deliver them when the system goes back to normal.

It sounds like what is happening is that google is accepting the messages, but then they aren't getting delivered to a mailbox. They're being queued somewhere along the way (at google).

\--

Your emails will _probably_ be fine, but unfortunately you probably can't call your mail administrator and ask what is up (unless you work at google). Normally, you'd be able to look in your smtp logs and see a message status (delivered, deferred, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can confirm our service is having issues right now with delayed inbound emails. We are Google Apps for Business users, non edu/gov. Not all users are effected just specific domains within the account.

<comment><USER20> Us too. Seems that when you attach a file, it's even less likely to go through.

<comment><USER7> Not sure about you, but I find these status updates a little insulting: [http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1379995199...](http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1379995199000&sid=1&iid=043f082bc7cd18e15458318035d9bc7a)

At least with my cloud servers if there is an issue I at least get an idea of what is going on or an expectation of resolution. Google... what is really going on that an issue remains unresolved for 3-4hrs impacting paying users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I know this is nitpicking but this datum is at least confusing:

"The average (median) delay was just 2.6 seconds, but some mail was more severely delayed. However, this issue did not affect users' access to the Gmail page or other functionality."

What does "some" mean in Google's order of magnitude?

A median time without the maximum and minimum is not quite useful, as a mean time without more data.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is really killing my productivity today. I don't like being so reliant on email, but I work remotely, so it's a necessary evil. Having worked in operations for prominent companies, I sympathize with the gmail team right now, but my patience is wearing thin with the problem approaching the 5 hour mark.

</comment><comment><USER23> So, at the 2012 I/O conference Google announced there were 425million gmail users. I'll tack an extra 75million to make things an even 500mil for growth over the last year. That's 12million affected users.

<comment><USER24> 500 million * 0.00024 = 120,000

<comment><USER25> It's been updated to say "less than 50% of Gmail users" now. We're seeing it across most/all of our accounts.

<comment><USER8> Based on my experience this morning, I'd say that 15% of our 300 or so Gmail users over about 25 domains were effected. In my opinion, their initial estimate was way too low and seemed dismissive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I was wondering why my emails on my phone weren't going through of a server I took pictures of this morning, and then I was getting 'rejected by server' emails after that.

Here I was blaming iOS 7.

</comment><comment><USER27> 9/23/13 4:00 PM Gmail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users within the next 1 hours. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.

</comment><comment><USER28> That announcement at least tells me something is going on, but i am not seeing a disruption. I have a total outage. I cannot even get to the login page.</comment>


The Economics of Privacy (2005) - <AUTHOR> https://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/economics-privacy.htm <comment><USER2> It's interesting how so many stores now have rewards systems. You can get $X off your purchase today _if you sign up for this program so we can track you_.

This is basically a system that makes people an offer to sell their privacy. I think it would be fascinating to look at statistics for how many people opt- out of these programs, and how much the annual cost of non-participation is for an ordinary lifestyle.

<comment><USER3> What is more interesting and much less monetized is buy-outs, I would pay a premium monthly for an opt-out of Twitters tracking of my account for instance. I know many people who say the same thing about Facebook, if these places switched to a simple Netflix model and allowed us to pay our way out of their tracking services I would pay the same amount advertisers pay for my info to keep it out of their hands.

I think the reason why they don't offer this is because it would probably come off as sounding 'randsom-y' or something.

<comment><USER4> Isn't this model already relatively heavily used? There are loads of apps that have a free ad supported version, but if you pay for it, all ads are removed.

They could spin it in a similar way:

Ad supported version is free. As part of this free service, you are tracked extensively to build a valuable profile for sale to ad companies.

By paying for the service, all ads and the associated tracking required to make your profile valuable to advertisers is disabled.

In this way, the tracking is spun as a necessary evil for the ad supported model to work.

This would probably require them to be pretty open about what sort of tracking is going on.</comment></comment></comment>


Modern workers are at the mercy of ratings - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/06/how-modern-workers-are-at-the-mercy-of-ratings <comment><USER2> I seem to be the first to raise the Deming point of view again, but I'm glad to, so here goes:

One of the big problems with trying to rate workers is that most workers have approximately the same rating. In other words, the differences in ratings are not statistically significant; they are just as well explained by pure chance.

Building a system where you incentivise and promote on a random draw of cards is bad in and of itself, but doing it and then labeling it as being based on merit is actively hostile to anything you're trying to accomplish. You are building a culture of people stabbing each other in the back in desperation to win your lottery, and not a healthy environment of cooperation and focus on productivity.

Yes, sometimes you have a worker who performs off the charts in either direction. That's a great opportunity! If they perform much better than someone else, put them in a position where they can coach and train others in how to do things that well. If they are much worse, try training them or otherwise find them a different job they can do better.

Other than that special case, the only way to improve the performance of the system is to give the workers better tools, better information, better understanding, more cooperation, better ability to do their job. The manager is the only one standing in the way of the workers doing a better job.

But then how do you assign bonuses and raises when everyone performs approximately the same? Split them across everyone. That simple. Think in terms of incentivising the team, not the individual.

And things like promotions that can't be shared among many people? Ask the workers themselves who they think are a good fit for the position. Chances are they know that hell of a lot better than a manager will. And it is abundantly clear how to get a promotion: make a good impression on your team. Cooperate, teach, help out, be nice, do good work. And these are -- by a weird coincidence -- just the things you want to accomplish.

<comment><USER3> This entire premise, that people are usually more or less equally capable at a given task, doesn't correspond to my experience at all, across several industries.

It seems ideological, or philosophical or based on limited industries.

It can also be dehumanizing to imply people can't get any result from trying hard, or that everyone has equal abilities.

I'm just not exactly sure why you are saying this, what it is based on, and what the goal is here.

<comment><USER2> There's an important distinction to make which I'm not sure I've successfully communicated: when I'm saying there generally is no "statistically significant" difference, I'm not saying everyone performs at the same level.

There can be huge variations in performance between people. But this variation tends to be internally consistent. You don't have one or two workers that perform multiple standard deviations away from the mass.

Think of it as drawing people from a distribution with large variance. When assigning bonuses to individuals, you're looking for statistical anomalies, i.e. you want to find that one person that appears to be drawn from a completely different distribution. That is what is very rare.

Large variation in performance but without any statistical anomalies still means everyone is performing "within the systems natural boundaries." There's no reason to suspect someone comes at it from a completely different angle.

That said, _of course_ you want to minimise the variation of your system. If nothing else because it makes it easier for you to find the true outliers.

But you don't reduce variance by giving raises to the top performers -- that will, _at the very best_ , make them perform better, thus increasing variance further.

Better try to reduce variance by bringing the other people up, which requires much more involved management than just giving more money to the ones with the high numbers.

<comment><USER4> > Better try to reduce variance by bringing the other people up, which > requires much more involved management than just giving more money to the > ones with the high numbers.

yes, bringing people up that are not doing as well, has in my (anecdotal of course) experience, resulted in huge overall gains for all-round team performance (people share info with each other, help each other, are more motivated etc)

i would add, that unfortunately, the trend seems to be in the opposite direction...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One good thing to come out of certain rating systems, like Uber and Airbnb, is that the users get rated too. If someone is a terrible customer, then they can probably make things a lot worse for the driver or host than vice versa, and without these scores, drivers might not be able to warn other drivers about them. I would hope that with other modern customer service jobs, that reverse- ratings are always employed. It is a measurable way to improve the jobs of customer service workers.

<comment><USER6> Actually, what I've found on Airbnb is that everyone just rates everyone high to either avoid rating retaliation or to avoiding seeming like a dick / hard customer. I suspect it's the latter -- there really is no upside to being an honest critic.

You'll rent a place that ends up being on the noisy highway and the worst rating you'll find is "great for early risers!"

The rating system does not work. Airbnb doesn't care about rating inflation because it just makes everything look like 5-star experience.

Uber is frustrating for other reasons. I've never made an Uber driver wait for me, I'll greet the driver, and I can't imagine how someone can be a better customer. I have a 4.1 rating and can't get VIP because of my rating. My girlfriend doesn't even believe in getting up to leave the house until the app tells her the Uber is there. She constantly calls uber for large loud drunk groups, redirects her rides, and yammers on her phone the whole ride. She has a 4.8+.

Aside, my girlfriend also rates all Uber drivers 3/5 because that's an average rating. They get a 4/5 if they go above and beyond. I actually though 5-star systems had merits until I met her. Now I'm firmly against them.

<comment><USER7> Part of the problem of rating inflation comes with the removal of problematic listings.

My girlfriend & I discovered large patches of mushrooms growing out of the master bedroom carpet in an otherwise very unhealthy AirBnB. I wanted to write feedback on the house, but I couldn't warn others since AirBnB's policy in such cases is to remove the listing. I spotted the listing not long after with a clean slate. I'm sure they cleaned the place, but I'm also sure they didn't tear out the floors and fix the root problem. Too bad no one will know since the ratings won't be a source of info in such cases.

<comment><USER8> The way to solve this would be to have an overlay everywhere, such as the one that tha browser extensions afford where you can see a layer of reviews that are truly independent.

Maybe AR will open a new door there... I know it would be an extremely hard problem to solve - it might involve cutting-edge techniques in AR, AI, computer vision and so on - but I think there might be a billion dollar market there.

The pain certainly exists as reviews _could_ be useful, but they're trash almost everywhere (Uber, AirBnB, Google, Amazon, Deliveroo, etc.) due to platform-owner incentives.

<comment><USER9> Interesting. I wouldn't try to do this with "true" AR (magic leap / hololens) - not enough benefit - but just a location aware layer would do it.

Seems like you'd want to pair it with a browser extension (want to avoid making that booking in the first place), and the back-end engineering is very similar to what (IMO/AFAIK) you'd need to support similar reality overlays in "true" AR.

<comment><USER8> I mention AR because browser extensions would work well on the web, but you'd only be able to do the same on mobile with a system that cooperates, and there's a slim chance that Apple and Google - esp. the latter - would allow something of the sort to materialize. Plus of course with AR you could take it to the streets!

As for the business model of this independent platform, one could still make _a ton_ of money out of it as long as its revenue-generating incentives were disaligned from the review scores, and I really think that's not such a hard problem to solve.

<comment><USER9> Ohhh. Phone as browser in physical space, AR as extendible medium.... I like.

For the AR-ish part... Oh, widgets! Right? Like clock, or weather, or the news thing. Constantly (modulo performance) update what you're showing on the widget based on location. Or dynamic notifications; "this is how many reviewed locations we know of at this location".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I get that its immeasurably frustrating for a person to be distilled into performance metrics, but how else can we measure one's impact? Using a trust based method where a supervisor leans on their personal biases to determine an employee's value is fraught with issues as well. A large enough corporation is a machine and we can't base decisions off of how we "feel" the machine's parts are working. Hard numbers will win over time.

<comment><USER11> Yes, you've described why large corporations are hated. It's quite obvious that a handful of numbers are incapable of measuring a person's true impact, yet by god, they insist on trying.

<comment><USER12> All businesses want good employees, but what they want most are employees that can be replaced if necessary. They hire people to accomplish tasks and add value. I have felt underappreciated in corporate roles before, but then I realized that I was attaching too much of my identity to my job and in something where I had no real equity. Since then, I am much better at separating work from personal life, and I am happier putting my personal interests above the company's.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I was a lot less upset about some of the crappy experiences I'd had working for evil giant companies after I read "The E-Myth Revisited".

My elite 10 person team was doing a great job on Device A, while Device B had a team of 200 semi-skilled foreign contractors just barely keeping things on track. Then, somehow, the company decided to reorg my super-skilled team and promoted the leader of the contractor team.

From 3-4 levels up in the company, the Device A team and the Device B team were IDENTICAL. They were both delivering things on time and under budget, even though team A was costing the company 1/5th as much, they were both fine. These products were generating hundreds of millions of dollars or maybe even billions in revenue per year, so the difference $5 million/year and $25 million was irrelevant.

If I'd realized this sooner, I wouldn't have put so much effort into doing a great job at the expense of my own interests, and it would've been just fine

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd rather be at the mercy of _relatively_ objective metrics than at the mercy of whoever my boss happens to be. (I happen to like my current management chain, but people come and go...)

<comment><USER15> Meh.. you're still at the mercy of whoever your boss happens to be. They just need to put a little effort into framing the metrics the right way or to make sure you're getting work that doesn't touch on the right metrics. The idea that performance metrics are fair is just corporate propaganda designed to make you have the incentive to improve them, thus being easier to control and replace.

<comment><USER16> >or to make sure you're getting work that doesn't touch on the right metrics.

What? The metrics should be distilled from the overall company/org/team goals and mission and if you're working on things that don't align with those of course you're not going to have a good performance review.

<comment><USER17> Think more subtly - if you need to meet a metric/goal of 50% of your time on phone calls and 50% on tickets, a manager who wants to tank your metrics will game the system to feed you less than needed to make your metric on one or the other. Just because a metric exists does not mean it's applied fairly or evenly to all employees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> They need to do controlled trials whereby they try their best to truly and objectively measure a sample and then compare those to real ratings.

I suggest that for most things, customer ratings are completely irrelevant.

They might want to ask specific, relevant questions, such as: "Was the car/flat generally clean and tidy" "Were there any problems entering the facility" on the customer side "Did the customer generate problems with the authorities" "Did the customer disrupt your ability to drive" "Did the customer make repeated requests for out-of-bounds services even when they were informed such requests could not be fulfilled" "Did the customer party include more individuals than indicated on the reservation"

etc. etc.

Then they can glean specific bits of information and provide guidance.

Otherwise, general reviews are pointless because they're muddy, set to different standards, emotional, unspecific etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> We've always been at the mercy of ratings. Now instead of being rated by a single person, we are rated by hundreds.

</comment><comment><USER20> Hacker News should revel in this kind of headline; ratings are made by algorithms that can be gamed and exploited.

</comment><comment><USER21> We should start a rating boycott where we rate highest for all ratings.

<comment><USER22> > We should start a rating boycott where we rate highest for all ratings.

This company I've worked at for about a year now is the first place I've been exposed to worker ratings in my career, and this has been my strategy. I refuse to play the game, and give everyone a perfect score no matter what. It absolutely does not benefit us workers in any way to give someone less than perfect marks across the board. It is literally nothing but a tool used by management to provide justification when it comes time to downsize. Furthermore I've noticed that it tends to breed a culture of distrust and backstabbing among colleagues, who may use the opportunity as retribution for personal slights. It's an awful policy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There's nothing new about this. My first job back in 1979 came with ratings used to determine raises.

Corporations are rated, as well, on all sorts of numerical metrics.

</comment><comment><USER24> Sadly, this article is paywalled for me.

<comment><USER25> [https://outline.com/JhCCJd](https://outline.com/JhCCJd)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Les Measurables

</comment><comment><USER27> A) Paywall.

B) Get a different job.

</comment><comment><USER28> ...does the "0.6 of a worker" bit remind anyone else of the "Three-Fifths compromise" from American History class?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three- Fifths_Compromise](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise)

Not sure if an intentional dog whistle</comment>