Ask HN: How are you getting in front of decision makers? - <AUTHOR>

For your startup or product, I am curious how you get in front of decision makers the most regularly.  We all have to sell to someone so how are you getting in front of people to start that cycle?  Personal referrals? Sales calls?  Conferences?  Meetups?  Obviously this really apply's when it comes to enterprise and small business selling, which is my primary target, but also how are you getting the word to consumers about what you can offer them?
I would think this is where an incubator, Angle or VC could really help open some doors.  What if you are bootstrapped, how are you doing it or what are some of your ideas?
Interested to hear from anyone, just looking for more ideas to help make stuff happen. <comment><USER2> Persistence. Last month I finally got in contact with the owner of a very short domain name that I'm trying to acquire. Unfortunately he also happens to be hedge fund billionaire and thus very difficult to reach. After being blocked by his P.A. via email and when I flew from London to NYC, socially engineered my way past security and into his office, I finally got in contact with him, i.e. actual two-way dialogue, by brute forcing his email address. It's a ridiculous story that I'll write a blog post about but not now, I don't want to scupper my chances of getting the domain name.

As Woody Allen said, 90% of life is just showing up.

</comment><comment><USER3> Followup.cc and rapportive are your best friends...use them.

I have closed three large deals in the past month with the help of these two tools alone.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been frustrated by this problem also. For enterprise sales you really need an experienced salesman with a large Rolodex of contacts in your niche.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, and that is almost what I am thinking. I am going to need to network and find a contact that has done sales within the space. This way they have more of those personal contacts. Seems like persistence will be key here.</comment></comment>


To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-rising-inequality-consider-the-janitors-at-two-top-companies-then-and-now.html <comment><USER5> What strikes me the most when looking at many of the comments here is the blatant disregard for human suffering that extreme inequality and the resulting poverty cause. The current economical status quo is accepted as a given and all the harm it causes is dismissed with the shrug of a shoulder.

"It can't be helped, the poor sods should have made better life choices to avoid ending up as janitor" is the attitude by which the matter is dismissed - as if requiring everyone to be a member of the educated elite just to be able earn a decent living.

There is so much wealth out there. This wealth is the product of society's common strive. Why not try to change the world instead of just submitting to the way things are?

<comment><USER6> As long as we accept the need for people to be janitors, we must accept that becoming a janitor is not a "mistake", it's a useful thing that we all want to see happen for some people. We can't on the one hand say, that we need people to do this job and on the other hand say, "tough luck" to those that do it.

<comment><USER7> Doing janitorial work is not a mistake, but being a janitor for 40 years certainly is.

It's not the core job, it's the fact that there's zero growth or mobility even _possible_ that is the issue.

<comment><USER8> >It's not the core job, it's the fact that there's zero growth or mobility even possible that is the issue.

Not everyone is a 'striver.' Some folks just want to pay their bills and enjoy what time they can with their family and friends.

<comment><USER7> Even those 'non-striver' people would prefer to have growth over time, in their position, wage, and skills. Humans are not static - we like to learn and we get very frustrated when we can't improve over time.

<comment><USER9> Do you think everybody finds growth and meaning in their job? Many people find it in their family, in sport, in clubs, and work is just a wage.

<comment><USER10> And yet, the Janitor in this piece can't afford to take a holiday, so is it a stretch to assume she doesn't have much free time either?!?

<comment><USER11> Maybe the fact that she's a single mom with 4 kids is a factor too. I think a janitor with a single dependent would have a more acceptable standard of living.

<comment><USER7> Are you making a _modest proposal_ that people should go from four kids to one, post facto?

I think everyone deserves to be able to have vacation time, especially single parents.

<comment><USER11> I'm not proposing anything. Just suggesting that there are more factors than income that affect 'inequality'.

An article that focusses on inequality due to low income should perhaps pick an example with a more typical family situation.

<comment><USER12> Rewind 50 years, and it would be highly typical for a janitor to support a wife and 3 kids on HIS salary - families were larger, and mothers didn't work. The fact that a working single mom can't support her four kids today is indicative in and of itself.

<comment><USER13> Would that janitor have many vacations too? And decent college funds? Healthcare?

<comment><USER7> Yes, yes, and yes. Janitorial staff at a Ford plant in ~1965 would make enough to own their own house, vacation once a year (probably not by plane but...), and college was percentage-wise ridiculously cheaper - 30x if my calculations are correct, which they probably aren't, but hey. Healthcare would have unquestionably been provided by their employer. And all that on only a single income for a family of four, no less.

<comment><USER12> ... and with a defined-benefit pension as well, meaning no need for 401k contributions out of their salary, and no risk of losing that money due to poor investment decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We should tax wealth, not income. [1]

The majority of income the top 0.1% make is from investments and gets taxed as capital gains, only about 15% of their income is taxed as ordinary income. [2][3]

We have an economic system where it's dramatically easier to make money the more money you already have. If you have $50M, you can park it in an index fund to get 4% returns and make $2M every year just off of your investment returns (which then gets taxed at 15% instead of 35% for ordinary income). If you don't spend all of that $2M, you'll continue to make more money just by having more money.

By taxing income instead of wealth, we're also essentially penalizing labor and rewarding wealth. We shouldn't penalize something that actually contributes to the economy and instead ask people who have more (not earn more necessarily) to contribute via taxes.

1\. [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/opinion/to-reduce- inequali...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/opinion/to-reduce-inequality- tax-wealth-not-income.html?mcubz=1)

2.[http://www.businessinsider.com/the-critical-difference- betwe...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-critical-difference-between-the- top-1-and-the-top-1-capital-gains-2011-7)

3\. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2011/11/20/the- to...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2011/11/20/the-top-0-1-of- the-nation-earn-half-of-all-capital-gains/#6c7ceb647893)

<comment><USER15> I agree, but how would we enforce a wealth tax? Seems like it'd be really easy for rich people to hide their money in assets.

What about just printing money? Not ideal obviously, but there'd be no way to avoid the inflation "tax".

<comment><USER16> You can do a wealth tax by targeting the big ticket items. Rather than invade everyone's home with tax collectors to guesstimate how much every couch cushion you have is worth, you can hit probably 98% of wealth by just taxing the calculated value of owned land and buildings (which is already being appraised for property taxes in most states) and stocks, bonds, and options.

So we already invade your privacy to appraise the former, and the later _has to be be public_ because companies need to know who owns what shares and the trading platforms need to associate users to shares they own. Both can be used by government to provide ownership details.

You would also want to wealth tax companies for total global cash-on-hand assets they have as well. Those are also required to be public record already. That way private business executives cannot tax haven their own stuff under an LLC, and companies like Google / FB are punished for hoarding hundreds of billions in offshore accounts they have no intent to spend or bring back into the states.

Of course, this is all saying "government should do X" which is just for entertainment, pretty much. The US is in no condition to act in the will of the people at all right now anyway, so its all speculation - you would have to fix the broken democracy first.

<comment><USER17> > you can hit probably 98% of wealth by just taxing the calculated value of > owned land and buildings (which is already being appraised for property > taxes in most states)

Henry George proposed this in the 1800's [0]

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

<comment><USER18> And David Ricardo prior to him (George credits Ricardo lavishly, though I seldom see this mentioned).

<comment><USER19> And Milton Friedman after both of those

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As a resident of Rochester for the last 3 years post-grad, the wasted human talent here is staggering. There are engineers from Kodak that were bought out of their pensions who (anecdotally of course) get passed over for adjunct positions at RIT, because they either don't have the degree or RIT prefers younger adjuncts. Many haven't moved away because of the sense of family among former co-workers, but are whiling away their early retirement.

The two major research universities are propping up the city's advancement opportunities, but doing so with tuition increases and recruitment of full- price paying foreign students, which makes the place more vibrant, but has also alienated many.

The largest employer in town now is the University of Rochester Medical Center, which provides many of the middle income and higher income jobs but is also making a habit of buying up 'distressed' hospitals.

The collapse of Kodak and exodus of money and talent has cratered the city public school system, which has a 47.5% on-time graduation rate. The only shining spot in terms of education is an Arts school, with great links to the still world-class Eastman School of Music.

Rochester itself is also a great example of 'white flight' in the post-Kodak era, though it began long before that.

<comment><USER21> I recently spent some time in the Roc recently. It was an amazing tale of two cities. Some areas are incredibly beautiful and prosperous looking, but a few hundred yards away it feels like Detroit.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Much of the wealth in Rochester never left. It just moved from city to suburb.

<comment><USER22> This is the case all over the country. When people say things like "St. Louis has lost over half its population" all it really means is that the small city center lost those people to the suburbs. What any reasonable person would call "St. Louis" didn't actually lose 50% of its people.

This applies basically everywhere. And a failure to really understand it leads to all sorts of erroneous conclusions about the rust belt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The underlying cause of this whole issue is the changes in tax policy instated in the Tax Reform Act of 1986, previously income was taxed at higher rates unless deductions were utilized which forced those earnings back into the economy creating jobs funding research, etc.. As it's become easier to retain more earnings there's little incentive not to optimize an entire corporation solely with the purpose of generating returns at the expense of all else. To resolve this USA should consider reverting back to the Internal Revenue Act of 1954. Under this rule set income over $400K/yr was taxed at 90% or it was reinvested in the economy. Do this and this inequality issue will sort itself out in the same time frame it took to do the damage.

<comment><USER24> What incentive would anyone have in making more then 400K a year if you were going to be taxed at 90%?

<comment><USER25> Why would anyone need more than 400k a year for himself in the first place though ?

<comment><USER26> To invest in 2 hippies starting a personal computer company in 1976. To invest in 2 guys in starting a search engine in 1996. To invest in a kid in Harvard making a social network in 2004....

<comment><USER27> I just _had_ to rebut some of these:

Apple got initial funding of only 250k, and that was split between equity and loan, very feasible even with a 400k yearly cap. (And I'd also note that 10% of "any money over that" still adds up given some of the salaries paid to top execs)

Secondly, Google's initial funding was only 100k in 98` dollars. The significant 25m round was from kleiner perkins and sequoia, and I certainly imagine that corporate funds for investment would not be held to the same limits as personal income tax.

Finally, facebook was bootstrapped out of their own pocket until they got a 500k invesmtent from thiel in 04 $'s. Once again the "big" investment a year later came from a firm.

In all of these cases the initial seed/bootstrapping money would come FAR under the 400k limit expressed, adjusted for inflation, and that assumes people wouldn't both save over multiple years, or that we wouldn't see more reliance on companies rather than individuals in early stage investment if the tax code shifted such that it was more advantageous.

I defend this largely because in my own readings of history I've attributed a large amount of the current economic state to events of the late 70's and 80s, the tax code changes being a major one of them, and I think your points unfairly detract from the validity of reintroducing such tax structures.

<comment><USER26> Great, now rewind and re-run that history but with the Mike Marrkula, Andres Bectolsheim, and Peter Theil being taxed and 90 percent above 400k. How motivated would they have been to risk their capital knowing that 1)They have much less of it 2)What they do make will be taxed at 90 percent 3)Bonds are a safer bet. Further, in this thought experiment, assume that Perkins and Seqouia are much smaller, less successful firms with less money to invest because most wealthy individuals have made the rational choice that risk capital is not worth it.

<comment><USER27> One would hope that we could draw the appropriate logarithmic taxation curve to constrain risky investment without eliminating it outright. I personally do not see a massive problem with curtailing some of the power/amount of money flowing around in some of these entities; but don't see it as an all or nothing as you suggest.

I'd note however that my original point was to emphasize the smallness of most of the initial investments. One does not need to be a billion dollar entity to have enough diversification in high risk investments to make it a worthwhile component of your portfolio.

(I'd also defend America's ingenuity prior to the advent of VC; we were a pioneer in the sciences and technology long before venture capital was a thing. This is an entirely separate discussion about the viability of various forms of tech. growth stimulus that I'm neither qualified nor desirous to have, but I mention it to suggest that if we've found success in other systems before, there may be reason to experiment further when we observe a clearly deleterious trend in the current state.)

<comment><USER26> Also, if you could, would you direct me to the sources of some of your readings of history so I can better understand the perspective you presented, especially regarding the 70s and 80s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Gail Evans worked as a janitor at Kodak in the 1980s. "She received more than four weeks of paid vacation per year, reimbursement of some tuition costs to go to college part time, and a bonus payment every March... A manager learned that Ms. Evans was taking computer classes while she was working as a janitor and asked her to teach some other employees how to use spreadsheet software to track inventory... Less than a decade later, Ms. Evans was chief technology officer of the whole company."

<comment><USER29> So, IOW they cherry-picked what was likely the most driven of the janitors in the past and compared it to a random one today. That seems honest.

<comment><USER30> It's not even the point of the example and they address that in the article. They point is that the janitor at Kodak _had_ opportunities to advance her career, whereas the janitor working at Apple has none because she doesn't even for the Apple.

<comment><USER31> But she's also not taking computer classes in her spare time, and work is approximately he same number of hours leaving approximately the same amount of spare time ... even if she were taking computer classes it would not be a reasonable comparison, because taking computer classes in the 1980s was a much more rare and advanced thing than taking them today. It'd have to be something more like quantum mechanics classes, or nanobiology classes, or, I don't even know.

<comment><USER32> Kodak was also paying for Evans' degree, which seemingly was a requirement for her to get her professional-track job.

How can somebody have the mind to take classes when they haven't had a holiday in years? Or when they work from 6p.m. to 2a.m.?

<comment><USER33> > Or when they work from 6p.m. to 2a.m.?

How is this different from anyone else who works full time? In fact, a random college course would be more likely to be before 6pm than after?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This story reminded me of something I've often wanted to know when people start talking about economic inequality metrics, namely, how many of those in poverty when entering the workforce will remain in poverty their whole life? To me the longitudinal information here is the most significant metric i.e. what does wealth movement look like for individuals over their lifetime. Virtually everyone in their teens and early twenties is in or near poverty, but what does that same individual look like at 30, 40, and 60?

Can any economists / sociologists in here point me to studies / research in this area?

<comment><USER35> I've heard from smarter people than me that your parents' level of economic attainment is the best predictor of your economic attainment. Everyone may be broke in their twenties, but some of those 20 somethings presumably got a leg up from being in a good (pre, elementary, secondary, post-secondary) school and can ask mom and pop for help on the down payment for a home, etc.

Suspect that's still the case, though the other trend of increasing inequality means that more and more at the bottom are slipping out of middle class, while a very select few at the top are headed toward cryoretirement in their ice palaces overlooking a scenic valley on some private jovian moon.

<comment><USER36> Score on IQ tests is a far better predictor of SES than parental SES. Someone in the 95th percentile for IQ will, on average, earn more than someone with parents in the 95th percentile of earnings.

See: [http://www.emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp- content/uploads/Intellige...](http://www.emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp- content/uploads/Intelligence-and-socioeconomic-success-A-meta-analytic-review- of-longitudinal-research.pdf)

<comment><USER37> IQ might be a better predictor, but the linked paper says it's not a far better one:

"The results demonstrate that intelligence is a powerful predictor of success but, on the whole, not an overwhelmingly better predictor than parental SES or grades."

<comment><USER38> That might just mean that intelligence is useful not only for gaining personal success, but also for raising offspring who will be successful. Is that a problem that society should try to correct?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> One of my pet peeves is when articles such as this use averages exclusively to talk about incomes. Averages are sensitive to outliers, and thus may obscure what's the typical condition. If you're going to pick one measure to talk about incomes, median may give a better picture of what's typical.

<comment><USER39> That bothers me on basically every stat on a news article. They just come up with a number and expect people to believe it. But they don't talk about how it was calculated so people can't confirm it themselves, and very often, if multiple "experts" are the ones calculating the stats, they just pick the biggest outlier to strum up more controversy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Janitors at Kodak in 1987 lived at a great time when there were jobs and the rent wasn't half of your monthly income. They likely bought their home long ago and are retired now, sitting on comfortable assets.

Janitors at Apple in 2017 can barely pay rents and they will never own their home, likely owned by the Kodak janitors from 1987.

Feel free to replace janitors with any other job title.

</comment><comment><USER41> I think one of the most important issues raised by this article is toward the end:

> Ms. Ramos, the Apple janitor, lives down the road in San Jose. She pays > $2,300 monthly for a two-bedroom apartment where she and her four children > live. Before overtime and taxes, her $16.60 an hour works out to $34,520 a > year. Her rent alone is $27,600 a year, leaving less than $600 a month once > the rent is paid.

$2300 a month for a two-bedroom apartment. Service workers like janitors can barely afford to live here at all.

<comment><USER22> They _should move_. There are janitorial jobs all over the country, most of them in areas where you could rent a nice two-bedroom for 1/3 that cost. There is just absolutely no reason to stay in the SFBA with prospects like that. I wish more people realized this. They'd be _much happier_ somewhere else.

<comment><USER42> There are many reasons why someone can't simply move. Maybe they're caring for parents who live in the area. Perhaps they want their kids to attend well- funded Bay Area schools, so the kids can have a shot at earning more money. It could be they can't save up enough money to make the jump.

The list could go on and on... my point is, moving is hard, especially so for those with little disposable income.

<comment><USER22> Yes, of course! Been there! But a lot of stuff _will be_ easier once/if they pull it off.

Pop culture insists on a very silly perception of the non-coastal parts of the country. There's still a lot of opportunity elsewhere -- at _drastically_ lower costs of living.

Moving isn't easy, but everything else in their lives will be easier once they do. One impediment to this, as I see it, is that the culture is telling them the opposite of this. And that's actively _harmful_ to their long-term prospects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> It sounds like the real reason for inequality is that the pay for "janitorial work" has simply decreased. The article makes a point to say that the pay is the same, accounting for inflation, but it's disingenuous not to highlight total comp, which Ramos had significantly less of than Evans.

<comment><USER44> The reason for inequality is that people are not equal. The work they do produce is not equal in value. More people can do a janitor's job, and/or do without a janitor, so the value of a janitor's work is less. More supply, elastic demand, means lower price point.

Through technology, some people are able to produce much more than others, so inequality is inevitable unless there is a balancing force (aka taxation).

<comment><USER45> Indeed, the value of keeping toilets sanitary is far greater than that of creating the next web app.

"This work is essential to the health of the population, but because of something to do with marginal economics and supply and demand and weak labor laws and class power and reserve supply of labor, I don't have to pay a proper wage, or even treat them like human beings!"

<comment><USER46> Value can be defined as how much people are willing to pay for it. Based on that, some webapps are worth more.

<comment><USER38> I think it's useful to remember that the work of one webapp developer can positively affect the lives of millions of people. Tech yields a counterintuitive amount of leverage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Government was similar to this. Many of my mid to high level colleagues in IT about 5-10 years ago came up through the ranks from clerical jobs. My longtime director/mentor started as a tabulating machine operator in the 70s.

All of those types of people are pretty much gone into retirement now. We don't have that type of advancement because most of those entry tasks in both IT and business are farmed out to a permanent underclass -- a contract bodyshops with mostly South Asians on work visas.

</comment><comment><USER47> And then Kodak died. How many high paid janitors do they have in their upstate NY headquarters now?

<comment><USER45> Indeed. If only they hadn't given their janitors paid vacation, they'd be in Apple's position right now!

<comment><USER30> You're quite righty but imagine if they didn't have janitors at all - <USER2> they could have been AppleGooglebook!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> "If you're educated, you're in command."

I'm not college educated, I've made a comfortable living as a coder. It took over ten years of self-teaching in my 20's while working a FT job but I knew this is what I wanted to do. So I agree with the statement but there's more than one way to become educated. Academia is just one way and possibly not the best way.

<comment><USER49> But the simple knowledge of this fact is so scarce that it makes almost no difference. And since most schools don't care about coding (or, where I'm from for example, about anything not related to get the most students to pass the equivalent of SATs), this is not going to change soon.

I was so surprised when my father told me that back in the 80s, in a small city in the interior of Brazil, in a public school, he was taught BASIC as part of the school curriculum.

Over twenty years later, in a prestigious private high school in the capital city, coding was only mentioned once by a school director when shaming students for only using computers for "foolish tasks", while completely ignoring the fact his school didn't give a single coding class, not even as extra curriculum.

Programming should have the same importance status as maths in school, if not more.

<comment><USER24> I went to a small town public school in the late 80s and early 90s and we had an AppleSoft Basic course. I'm amazed that schools don't have that now.

<comment><USER50> Not many people are qualified to teach programming in any way and also willing to work for abysmal school teacher salaries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> This also helps explain the "skills shortage". Traditional means of building a skilled workforce are no longer available. The loyalty disconnect can cut both ways. If I invest in training someone, they are likely to up and leave for a better offer. If you employ me, I can be made redundant whenever convenient.

</comment><comment><USER52> This sounds negative from an America-centric view. Seen globally, poverty has plummeted and countries have become more equal. If you care about people suffering, the cleaner at Apple is probably much better off than the farmer in China who could easily be dead from famine by now if it wasn't for the global economy - driven by companies like Apple.

It may also be misleading to compare a contractor cleaner today to an employee cleaner 30 years ago. I don't know the industry but perhaps the modern job is easier to get and seen as lower status than it was in the past? Maybe someone who's a cleaner today would have been unemployed in the 1980s? In that case, the article is comparing lower socioeconomic status (SES) people to higher SES people and complaining that the lower one is worse off, which is a tautology.

<comment><USER53> > I don't know the industry but perhaps the modern job is easier to get and > seen as lower status than it was in the past?

I'd say there's more technical skill (certifications and iso standards) to adhere to in cleaning today, than 30 years ago - and each worker clean larger areas (and probably works harder than 30 years ago, suffering under tight micromanaged schedules). That's my impression (though mostly in Norway). Note that cleaners might be better, more efficient and doing a more demanding job, and _still_ have lower status...

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> It isnt just the cleaning staff. IT, especially startups, have a culture of pigeon-holing people even when they are on staff. It's a symptom over- specialization imho. People are hired according to extensive and exacting criteria. Once hired, managers find it difficult to think of the person as anything else.

Honestly, that is a large part of why i broke free and enlisted. I'm now in an organization that sees increasing skills and promotion as essential. If i fail at my job (pilot) i wont be fired but given a different role. Call it a throwback to the 60s if you want, but im less stressed now than i ever was as a consultant. (And forget everything you think you know about the military. The rcaf isnt anything like american movies.)

</comment><comment><USER55> That's globalization for you.

Apple's software is based on open source BSD. They sub-contract the building of their phones to China, and they are made mostly with Korean chips and displays.

Apple can import cheap indentured workers from overseas on H1B visas.

They avoid US tax by pushing their profits through Ireland.

Kodak was a far more progressive company that invested in their employees. Apple is now the world's biggest company, Kodak is dead.

<comment><USER56> " _Kodak was a far more progressive company that invested in their employees. Apple is now the world 's biggest company, Kodak is dead."_

Kodak have missed digital revolution and stayed on analog for too long, that's why it's dead. Treating its employees better had nothing to do with that (except maybe hasten downfall a little).

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> This post hits close to home. I went through this when I worked full time at tech helpdesk / call center.

I was a contractor of a contractor of a contractor of the Navy.

Me <\- Contractor (payroll company) <\- Contractor <\- Contractor <\- Navy

Each step took a bit off the top, I made $17/hr no vacation, no health insurance, no sick time.

At one point my contractor (they signed my checks, a faceless shell) who I never met or communicated with called me at work and tried to reduce my pay. I felt so angry and upset. I ended up arguing that I would quit if they touched my pay.

I learned when I quit that:

Me ($17/hr) <\- Contractor ($35/hr) <\- Contractor ($55/hr) <\- Contractor (???)

Its all about liability, health insurance is a liability, sick time is a liability, vacation is a liability, and the possibility of paying for layoffs is a liability.

Trickle down.

Also related,I was also working part time in retail where I learned that over 80% of the staff was part time to avoid paying health or vacation or sick time...

This is common practice in retail. These companies have huge workforces of part time people, they avoid giving people enough hours to be full time... Its terrible and needs to be fixed.

</comment><comment><USER43> Devil's advocate: there is an upside here. Come economic downturns, companies can mitigate layoffs by choosing not to renew contracts. It means that those who planned for stability (full time employees) are more likely to get it, e.g., start a family, take out a mortgage, etc. Those expecting turbulence can avoid long-term commitments.

<comment><USER58> So the solution to lack of stability is to not allow some people to ever have it?

<comment><USER43> I don't see how having a contract job means never being able to move into a stable position.

<comment><USER43> I'm getting some downvotes but nobody explaining why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> FLUX-YOU >Focus on core competence and outsource the rest. The approach has made companies more nimble and more productive, and delivered huge profits for shareholders. It has also fueled inequality and helps explain why many working-class Americans are struggling even in an ostensibly healthy economy.

That is the outsourced companies causing inequality. They are the ones paying people terribly, not the company contracting with the outsourcing companies.

This article wants to blame major companies for inequality while conveniently ignoring the existence of the outsourcing companies which are the ones setting the pay for these employees. Stop doing that, raise the minimum wage and benefits that outsourcing companies must pay their employees/contractors, and fix the bloody problem at its source.

<comment><USER59> I disagree. Large wealthy companies are working hard to directly employ as few people as possible. Part of what they gain from this is the ability to pretend that the companies they hire to perform this "non-core" work are entirely separate black boxes. It would be embarassing to Apple to be treating their employees this way so they hire an outsourcing firm to do it for them.

As large companies, like Apple, race to shuffle employees to these companies in order to save money, everyone gets hurt but Apple. The money gets locked away from the middle class and Apple pretends that they don't have any full time positions that lack advancement opportunities and decent pay.

<comment> FLUX-YOU But if the outsourcing companies were providing opportunities on their own, their employees could afford classes, living expenses and work on skills to eventually work at Apple.

Apple gets quality janitors and security guards while paying the outsourcing company more.

The outsourcing companies are the actual ones running the race to the bottom. Stop that, and Apple will have to reconsider (at which point, we get to argue all over again if their new solution is morally acceptable)

<comment><USER60> >Apple gets quality janitors and security guards while paying the outsourcing company more.

I suspect Apple will then go and find another contracting company.

<comment> FLUX-YOU All of them would have to obey minimum pay regulation. If Apple knowingly hires a company violating that law, then absolutely go after them. If loopholes come from that regulation, then that has to be fixed too.

<comment><USER61> For someone who works on site at Apple in Cupertino, the minimum wage is not a liveable wage, even with four or eight to an apartment. We could try a per zip code minimum wage, that would even raise teachers' salaries, then we'd need a per zip code tax for public employees. Or some other solution. [http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/04/22/in-costly-bay-area- eve...](http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/04/22/in-costly-bay-area-even-six- figure-salaries-are-considered-low-income/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> The article fails to mention Amazon, which does still have plenty of non- outsourced blue collar jobs. I doubt there is a lot of the kind of upward mobility at amazon for them that there was for the Kodak janitor in the 80s, though.

<comment><USER63> Keep in mind, though, that Amazon is doing everything it can to automate most of those blue collar jobs (warehouse robots, delivery drones, etc.). That workforce has a very limited shelf life.

<comment><USER44> As they should be, if they want to continue to exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Fantastic article, we've truly been seeing a bifurcation of the workforce, and the development of a plutonomy. The interests of capital and labor are inherently opposed because the incentive of the employer is to reduce costs, and capital has been winning out.

I think there's a false tendency to blame Apple for this predicament. It's not Apple's responsibility to provide for the welfare of our country's citizens, it's our responsibility - and it's only through our government that we can really change things. No vacation, benefits, and 80% of one's paycheck going to rent is our government's responsibility to fix, not Apple's.

The most obvious policy here would be some sort of universal basic income. This would naturally prop up wages for the low-paying jobs like janitor that nobody wants to do.

Having to work under those precarious conditions for such lousy pay (relative to cost of living) and no prospects for advancement must be a downright miserable experience, the literal definition of wage slavery. 6pm-2am shift means she probably never even sees her kids during the week. All for a meager $600/month in disposable income after rent is paid (which when you're a contractor without vacation and benefits isn't much). And she'd never be allowed to complain about it because she'd be told that she should be grateful to have a job, there are people in Africa starving, she should've studied harder in school, and she shouldn't have had kids. What a world we live in.

Many oppose universal basic income on ideological grounds, but enough with this ideologically-driven bullshit that ignores the unnecessary suffering of the wage slaves at the bottom. Nobody in a first world country should have to live a lowly life like that janitor.

<comment><USER17> Do you know the history of Speenhamland? The empirical results of that experiment in a basic income was that it acted as a subsidy to employers, enabling them to pay below subsistence wages that were made up for by the government-funded UBI. There's a parallel to how food stamps and other support enable large corporations today to pay less in wages, as the difference will be made up through taxpayer funding. I don't want to ignore suffering, but I suspect something like a jobs guarantee would achieve the same ends in a more equitable fashion.

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

<comment><USER64> So if I understand correctly, the Speenhamland System was a wage supplement system, not a UBI system. That is, if people stopped working, they stopped getting the extra money. This means that employers are free to slash wages and let the supplement make up the difference.

With UBI, people get the money regardless, so employers have to compete with what people can get without working. If you only offer them a meagre income boost for a gruelling work week, you're going to struggle to attract people.

<comment><USER17> With UBI, the employer now can pay (wage-UBI) for every employee, shifting the wage burden off the employer and onto the state by a factor of UBI x population. With a jobs guarantee, an 'employer of last resort', the government sets the floor on wages through hiring, giving everyone who wants a job but can't find one in the open market at whatever base wage parallels UBI. The government only has to pay for base wage x unemployed rather than UBI x population. This also yields labor for the government for 'New Deal' type projects, and employers now have to do better than the base wage/job conditions to hire, raising the velocity of money. More importantly, everyone has the dignity of a job if they want it as well as the money needed for basic needs.

Are there guarantees that UBI will always be comparable to a living wage?

<comment><USER15> This is counteracted by the fact that employees now have the option of walking away from their jobs, and thus employers would have to raise wages to draw them in. Wages might rise in the type of jobs that nobody actually wants to do (eg. janitor), though wages may very well decrease in the jobs that everybody wants.

UBI and government job programs aren't mutually exclusive. I do think the government should create more jobs for the public good, especially in scientific research and development. But either way, I think a UBI is necessary so that people have the option of working for themselves rather than being forced to answer to someone else. UBI is like the libertarian approach, while government jobs are the more authoritarian approach. I think both should coexist.

I guess there's no guarantee that UBI would be a living wage. Regardless, I think we need a UBI. Money is one's claim on society's resources, and since we're all shareholders in this economy, we should receive a citizen's dividend, even if that amount isn't that much (eg. Alaska's Permanent Fund)

<comment><USER17> > This is counteracted by the fact that employees now have the option of > walking away from their jobs

I don't see how either a UBI or a job guarantee limits employees from walking away from their jobs. The presence of a job, or an income, hasn't stopped many people from starting their own thing.

> But either way, I think a UBI is necessary so that people have the option of > working for themselves rather than being forced to answer to someone else.

The option to work for yourself isn't taken away by a jobs guarantee. I can see how the presence of a UBI would permit people to do things no one would pay for otherwise. As idyllic as I really do think that sounds, I suspect that examples of people doing things no one would pay for would be used over time by UBI opponents to drive down the value of the UBI to below a living wage.

<comment><USER15> UBI doesn't limit employees from walking away from their jobs, it enables them to.

> The option to work for yourself isn't taken away by a jobs guarantee.

Obviously. Job guarantee programs however still don't allow you to truly walk away from your job unless you're able to financially support yourself, whereas a UBI does.

<comment><USER17> Yep, I misread your point, and mis-responded.

A UBI that's actually enough to replace a job has the benefits you describe, at the cost of UBI times the population. A UBI that's not enough to replace a job doesn't have the benefits you describe, has the negatives I describe, and costs almost as much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Six figures in the bay area is less than 79k in Rochester when it's cost of living adjusted. This article is just wrong in many ways.

<comment><USER29> You can't compare the costs now since Rochester is a shell of its former self.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Good point - in the race to offer superb benefits to its best employees, companies made it harder for themselves to directly hire low skill and low pay employees. After all you can't afford to offer free massages and laundry to the guys delivering groceries for you making $15/hr or the receptionist making $20/hr.

</comment><comment><USER67> > her $16.60 an hour works out to $34,520 a year.

Interesting... I'm developer at a comparably tiny company, I get paid slightly less than her per hour but a larger salary overall, and my rent is less than half of hers (and it's not considered cheap around here).

I know i'm not paid top notch but all I read here is it's hard to be a janitor in expensive places.

[EDIT]

Maybe this is not a fair comparison, I'm not paid hourly, and all I have revealed here is that I work rather a lot of hours. She does 44ish hour weeks, and to be fair as a cleaner you are unlikely to physically be able to work more (consistently).

The ratio of pay to rent is ridiculous though, (that is a fair comparison) my rent is way under half hers. If housing is that expensive in that area then janitors should be paid more...

</comment><comment><USER68> >> Ms. Ramos, the Apple janitor, lives down the road in San Jose. She

>> pays $2,300 monthly for a two-bedroom apartment where she and her

>> four children live. Before overtime and taxes, her $16.60 an hour

>> works out to $34,520 a year. Her rent alone is $27,600 a year,

>> leaving less than $600 a month once the rent is paid.

Assuming she's only losing 20% to taxes and other deductions, she can't even cover rent. How is she paying her rent? Is there another person or public assistance?

<comment><USER69> With dependents and her income level, she is paying a much lower rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> This.

"I look at the big tech companies, and they practice a 21st-century form of welfare capitalism, with foosball tables and free sushi and all that," Rick Wartzman, senior adviser at the Drucker Institute and author of "The End of Loyalty," said. "But it's for a relatively few folks. It's great if you're a software engineer."

</comment><comment><USER71> "Less than a decade later, Ms. Evans was chief technology officer of the whole company"

From a Janitor to CTO in under 10 years - I wish I could dream that. I started playing with code around 6yo and now 33..

Could it be that it was really rare period of time where such thing was possible?

</comment><comment><USER72> The way I see it those janitors, security people and other such workers whose jobs are today almost universally outsourced, are also contributing in their own small way to the company's bottom line and to its success. Why should they be treated any different?

</comment><comment><USER73> The flip side here is if the large company goes belly up - like Kodak did - the "outsourced janitor" might still keep their position at the company they are working for - they will end up working at another customer location.

<comment><USER74> That would assume that the other customer location is currently underserved or not served at all.

Outsourcing is about reducing costs. It's not good or evil. But it depersonalizes decisions on which service to choose and narrows the decision making criteria down to cost. Costs for service jobs are driven by people. So, when a company is choosing their janitorial service and they choose the lowest cost service, that means the service that pays the lowest wages or that cuts the most corners will typically win the contact.

Depersonalizing the buying decision and commoditizing human labor aren't good or evil by themselves. But, turning people's welfare into a math problem certainly leaves us open to making decisions we wouldn't have made if we saw the consequences through a human lense instead of only an economic lense. At best, it causes suboptimal outcomes for an individual while maximizing the aggregate benefit.

We can fight against it all we want, but everytime we buy a t-shirt, an apple, or an iPhone, there's a supply chain behind it built on the lowest cost provider. We are all part of that process. I hope I'm not evil for buying a cheap t-shirt. But I know I enabled some shady behavior that made it $1 cheaper.

<comment><USER73> >> That would assume that the other customer location is currently underserved or not served at all.

sure. but it's a potential option as opposed to being let go flat out.

If Kodak went belly up before that "rags to riches" story of a janitor becoming an exec proceeded beyond the janitor stage - she'd be looking for another job elsewhere, whereas in contractor's case there's a chance of getting reassigned to another "project".

It's not as much about "depersonalizing" as it is about convenience of not having to deal with the domain that has nothing to do with core business. The cost factor is also not linear - in terms of straight up cash figures sometimes it costs the same or more to outsource maintenance, security etc vs hiring your own.

Works both ways - car dealership for example isn't going to hire a web designer for their site full time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> This article seems very anecdotal to me, and thus tells me nothing. Jobs come and go. Jobs once held in high regard are now common jobs. Also people nowadays have (good paying) jobs that didn't exist decades ago.

</comment><comment><USER76> Love when threads like these dissolve into "How can we further overcomplicate tax law to benefit to ultimately benefit the government"

<comment><USER77> TIL taxes only benefit the government and never go to anything useful like the food stamps my family sustained itself on while my baby brother went through chemotherapy, or the Post 9/11 GI Bill that allowed me to get degrees in CS and ECE which led me to a job at one of the world's largest tech companies, or the unemployment that allowed me to properly transition from the military into the civilian workforce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> What gets me is the sheer _romanticization_ of the rich and powerful. Culturally we turn people into gods who by there very virtue can do no wrong.

And because of it we'll never be able to rework income inequality - <USER3> we've all wanted to be on top of it since childhood.

</comment><comment><USER16> The roots of modern wealth inequality on deep, vast, and way more complicated than companies just outsourcing unskilled labor because they are optimizing for profit over being charitable.

* Automation advances in every industry. It is like AI - there is no sudden on switch when everything is automatic and post-scarcity is suddenly achieved. It is a slow march of small improvements and optimizations over time. Productivity per human labor hour has increased a hundredfold in the last century on the backs of this automation and innovation.

* A combination of social organization, peer pressure, the variable range in the quality of a persons parents, the variability in wealth of a family, the trends towards and away from high median wealth, the prevalence of anti-intellectualism, the laws at the time, the laws in the past, the general availability of materials, the competitive market internationally, and ones own biology contribute to the prevalence or absence of an educated populace. No society has figured out how to take _every_ human born and turn them into a scholar, however. We _all_ have the disenfranchised who are not educated (in fields the market deems valuable) but still need avenues to survive. This creates our unskilled labor market.

* The laws of your country influence how wealth moves throughout it. The laws of other countries also influence the behavior of private actors in your economy when interacting with foreign ones. The market is global - business decisions are not made based on arbitrary lines on a map, they are made based on the planetary market forces and trends of all seven billion+ people. Thus, you cannot set local policy (that influences wealth inequality) in a vacuum.

* Aside fiscal policy, you also have, relatively independent of other variables, how open your society is to innovation and entrepreneurship. This is another cultural marker, but if your country supports and incentivizes startups you can offset the problem of a waxing classical labor market. It also has the converse effect of generating jobs through its successes.

* Finally, and least significantly, is fiscal policy. In some countries the lack of a trustable market or rule of law can make this much more meaningful, but if your company has a functioning internationally connected economy nowadays all your fiscal policy is doing is pushing the boat rather than building it. Policies like favoring investment over salary _favor_ increasing inequality, but are not the cause of it - they just accelerate it.

The TLDR is automation, education, globalization, entrepreneurism / innovation, and fiscal Policy, but there are more, and these alone are just as abstract trends as wealth inequality is above them, just as much as how the future of humanity itself is just a abstraction above that.

Together all these effects, and more, influence the total market and control how prosperous or despondent people are. When citing historical wage averages as having stagnated in the US in the seventies it is not one aspect in isolation - from what this article talks about in regards to corporations only hiring immediately for its core competency and outsourcing other labor - <USER4> the combination of all of them. Rising automation reduces the need for labor. Rising populations increase the supply of labor. Fiscal policy favors wealth centralization. Globalization favors economies of scale. Giant companies throwing around more money means more influence - which means more regulatory capture. Regulatory capture means exploitation. Exploitation is always parasitic - it suffocates growth and prosperity to fill few pockets. Exploitation and rent seeking go hand in hand. Regulatory policy and capture come back again, creating rentiers markets to pillage and exploit more. Globalization reduces the sovereignty of individual nations, making it near impossible to fight back with just one government run by its people.

It feels inevitable. That as we advance in our ability to make so much from so little, that the real beneficiaries of it have to be those who were first movers on it, that were sociopathic enough to discard anyone else in the pursuit of power. To condemn billions to suffering and to suffocate markets and drain pocketbooks to make fractions of a cent more, to centralize resources just slightly faster into your control and domain of influence. Like global warming, like space colonization, like scientific innovation, none of these are the purview of one slice of Earth's surface area. None are limited in scope to a few people. They matter to everyone, but we have no functional system of making everyone matter in regards to them. These market forces are operating beyond the bounds of one country - beyond the walls of Kodak and Apple. They are operating on the entirety of humanity and all their macroeconomic behaviors are dictated by the entirety of the accessible market capital can reach. But what is supposed to keep them in line, constrain capitalism to be to the benefit of both workers and capitalists and not just the later, is still isolated to thin strips of land subdivided by thousand year old traditions.

Focusing on the individual pieces of the puzzle remains valuable, but something as pervasive as rising inequality - of understanding the movements of markets, of a global economy that is beyond the complete knowledge of any one person anymore (it is simply moving too fast) - is the product of a billion causal relationships, not just whether companies want to invest in their employees now to prosper their local economies in the medium term.

</comment><comment><USER79> While I agree with a lot of the comments and the article, can we just point out that they say Kodak's former janitor became CTO?

That would be commendable had the company done well, but perhaps having a janitor CTO contributed to their downfall...?

</comment><comment><USER80> A number of the ideas in this thread are a little crazy. I wonder what is the economic potential of a tax that is vested over the people who propose it and their families. For example, it would be like "if you propose taxing wealth at 80%, the government goes into your house and your family's houses to take 80% of your wealth as a 5 year experiment."

"Oh you live in a 300k dollar house? Confiscated! We are moving you to a tiny house valued at 60k with all others who think like you"

I wonder if that would help folks come up with more sensical solutions. We could vote on the ideas, and the winners get the ideas implemented on themselves first!

</comment><comment><USER81> Entirely irrelevant to the content of the article, but is there a solution to the problematic interaction between sticky headers and full-page scrolling?

At least in Firefox, if you press Space or PageDown (to scroll down a "page"), on the linked article, you'll lose several lines of the text, as they're obscured by the header. Illustrating:

<\</comment><comment> page 1 </comment><comment>--->

<\</comment><comment> page 1 </comment><comment>--->

<\</comment><comment> page 1 </comment><comment>--->

<\</comment><comment> page 1 </comment><comment>--->

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<\</comment><comment> page 1 </comment><comment>--->

<\----- lost line </comment><comment>->

<\----- lost line </comment><comment>->

<\</comment><comment> page 2 </comment><comment>--->

<\</comment><comment> page 2 </comment><comment>--->

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<\</comment><comment> page 2 </comment><comment>--->

Chrome isn't afflicted by this (on the linked article), due to the fact that its page scroll is slightly shorter than Firefox's (on a webpage without any sticky headers, Firefox gives you about 1.5 lines of context from the previous "page"/screen, when you page-scroll; Chrome gives you about 5). However, if the height of the sticky header were greater (as often is the case), Chrome would also be affected.

This is obviously in addition to the annoyance of the sticky header wasting vertical screen space, but the latter is just an aesthetic preference, while the former is broken functionality.

Yes, I know that on Firefox I can just use reader mode, but it seems sad that after almost 30 years of the development of the web, going back to a design that could easily have existed in the 90s, is an improvement.

<comment><USER82> There's a bookmarklet around Google that removes fixes headers.</comment></comment>


Trump to sign border bill, declare emergency: McConnell - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-shutdown/trump-to-sign-border-bill-declare-emergency-mcconnell-idUSKCN1Q30KU <comment><USER2> Trump is going to win reelection in 2020 isn't he?

<comment><USER3> Depends on if the Democrats can find someone less horrible than Hillary to run against him. He's not (I trust) going to win by declaring an emergency _and using that to rig or abolish the election_. He _might_ win by declaring the emergency in order to do what he wants to with the border, _if_ enough people agree with what he does with the border.

<comment><USER4> There already will be ongoing state of emergency, too dangerous for open elections etc.

<comment><USER5> > There already will be ongoing state of emergency,

There have been several overlapping states of emergency for the last several elections; in fact, the US has been in a State of Emergency with regard to Iran since 1979; there are, I believe, in the neighborhood of 30 active states of emergency.

<comment><USER6> Thank you. I didn't know this and looked it up on wikipedia, which lists them here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_in_the_United_States)

Apparently trump has already issued three such State of Emergencies. Is this just sloppy journalism that describe this as a unique event, or is this new one different in some legal sense?

<comment><USER5> It is, I believe, unprecedented to use a state of emergency to achieve a policy end which Congress has been asked to support and declined to do so.

It may likewise be unprecedented to use a state of emergency to address a long-ongoing condition for which there is no relevant emergent change triggering the declaration.

So, yes, a declaration here would be new and different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's the best alternative way to minimize the number of people in the country illegally?

It's fine enough to say this option sucks, but you have to bring a better one.

<comment><USER3> Or you have to deny that people in this country illegally is a problem. (I don't agree with that position, but it is a logically valid one.)

<comment><USER7> It's a valid position I guess. But having illegal status opens you up to all kinds of exploitation, violence, etc. It'd be hard to argue that this is a good alternative.

<comment><USER3> So I meant that people could deny that there was any need to control the number of people who entered the country. That is, that there was no need to control the border. But as you point out, that position would _probably_ require you to abolish "illegal" as a status. That is, if you're here, you're just like a citizen.

<comment><USER8> Or at least "just like a legal permanent resident."

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that's better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is he going to use eminent domain to acquire several hundred miles of bordering properties? [1]

[1] - [https://www.revealnews.org/article/this-land-is-our-land- man...](https://www.revealnews.org/article/this-land-is-our-land-many- property-owners-wont-sell-for-trumps-wall/)

</comment><comment><USER3> On one hand, this is progress. I'd rather they (both sides) nothold the entire government hostage for this one issue.

On the other hand, this is kind of scary. I don't like the President accumulating more and more power at the expense of Congress (though Congress has earned it, by becoming progressively more worthless for the past 2 or 3 decades). I therefore don't like the President governing by executive orders; I like even less him governing by declaring emergencies.

<comment><USER10> Expansion of executive power has been going on for decades now. The Democrats had plenty of opportunities to roll this back under Obama, after seeing what sort of powers Bush had used it for. Instead, they decided to allow executive order to become even more powerful without considering what may happen next.</comment></comment>


Show HN: mobilethread.com -- anonymous mobile messaging (web app) - <AUTHOR> http://moth.ws

<comment><AUTHOR> Going to be on <http://moth.ws/dev/> for a while</comment>


R Passes SAS in Scholarly Use - <AUTHOR> http://r4stats.com/2016/06/08/r-passes-sas-in-scholarly-use-finally/ <comment><USER2> I think Python is the biggest hidden gem in statistics. It's had a tremendous impact on machine learning and algorithm development, yet traditional statisticians still rely on SAS/R/Stata/MATLAB.

All of these languages have libraries that produce the same results, the difficulty is mangling the data into the correct input format. Python's list comprehensions are much, much easier to use than MATLAB matrices, R's data frames, Java's ArrayLists, etc. I'd advise any new graduate student to learn how to plug data into traditional programs, but save yourself a headache and perform your data manipulation in Python. Eventually you can take the leap and do the analysis in Python as well.

<comment><USER3> I'm glad I read this comment. After checking some of the docs I think I will have a go at Python for data wrangling. List comprehensions look... friendly.

R still rules for plotting and running canned statistical procedures but sometimes I feel like if I stop programming R for a week I forget how to use it effectively... E.g. Forgetting to add stringsAsFactor=FALSE to everything, forgetting rbind() can overwrite column names, forgetting I have to define my own string concatenation operator in every script.

If Python can save me some of the frustration involved in manipulating data frames that will be nice.

<comment><USER4> I'd recommend reading [http://r4ds.had.co.nz](http://r4ds.had.co.nz) for an R workflow that eliminates a lot of those pain points.

(Except for infix string concatenation - I've never really understood why people prefer that to paste(). Maybe if you're not thinking in vectors?)

<comment><USER3> A reply from the man himself! Thanks for the link. I'll have a go.

I do like the look of the dplyr library a lot. Combining functions like select and group_by with the pipe operators creates code that is reminiscent of SQL- very nice for readability.

<comment><USER5> You're going to love Spark if you haven't tried it yet.

<comment><USER3> Another powerful tool I will keep in mind!

I think this thread illustrates a kind of tension between those coming from an IT/big-data/web oriented background and the more traditional statistics/science/engineering side.

The IT side bring a lot of very powerful and scalable tools to the table. However there are aspects of traditional work which I suspect are lost on some big-data people.

For example, in my line of work (physical asset mgmt) we deal with a lot of very small datasets, very poor quality datasets (e.g. some guy's favourite spreadsheet) and also cultural issues (some engineers are inherently averse to changing systems, and spending decisions are inherently political). In this situation, there is a limit to the benefit of more powerful/scalable tools, and it is advantageous to use tools which are considered high quality and vetted by the community.

R is in a good position here as it has the pedigree of being accepted by the academic stats community, as well as actually being a great tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some reasons I love / use R:

Plenty of _free_ high quality documentation and learning materials around R (just read anything by Hadley)

Package manager. Super easy to find, install, and start using packages.

Open source / Free

Large community of users

Extensive usage by the stats community. (If a new algorithm comes out, chances R there will be an R implementation)

Easy to build and share your own packages via Github.

Easy to link C++ code to your packages.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

I love R, but something about how the language feels syntactically, it's not as pleasurable programming wise compared to something like the Python data stack. But with all of the above advantages, I don't see myself switching to anything else in the future for my data science work, unless I have a really pressing need to. The other thing is that the language is so damn popular that the useR conference was sold out in pre-reg. rounds.. Seriously guys, stop using and learning about R so I can get in the conference....

<comment><USER7> A big problem with R is that it's _just_ stats. The other day I wanted to do a simple loan amortization (simple PMT/IPMT in Excel). People say 'use R over Excel!'. Right. There are some clunky barely-working packages in R that do half of what you need and some stack overflow posts that mostly show how to do the other half, but that's no basis to build on.

And don't get me started on string handling in R, or that there's no way to get the path of the currently running script, or a dozen other things that are trivial in a general purpose language but are a major pain in R. R is not 'general purpose' enough, and it doesn't have to be useful to write both kernel drivers and database REST frontends, but being able to do things that are math-related and not purely stats - that's not too much to ask for I'd say. Especially because it's not reasonable to ask people whose main job is not writing software to learn multiple languages/tools.

(Other recent example I remember: how unintuitive I found it to plot a sine wave and its first and second derivative. My Mathematica-oriented colleague did it in 2 minutes.)

<comment><USER3> There are many things wrong with R but basic plotting functions are one of its strengths.

Is this the way you did it? It seems pretty intuitive...

a=pi/180

x=1:360

plot(x,sin(a * x))

plot(x,a * cos(a * x))

plot(x,-a^2 * sin(a * x))

<comment><USER7> But that just draws 3 separate plots.

My main problem was the derivative, not so much the plotting (or maybe it was 'plotting an arbitrary function'); but I looked it up and it seems I slightly misremembered what it was I wanted to do. I wanted to draw a cubic _spl_ ine, not a _s_ ine. What I ended up doing was

        spline_x <- 1:6
        spline_y <- c(0, 0.5, 2, 2, 0.5, 0)
        spl_fun <- splinefun(spline_x, spline_y)
        p <- ggplot(data.frame(x=spline_x, y=spline_y), aes(x, y))
        p <- p + stat_function(fun = spl_fun)
        p <- p + stat_function(fun = spl_fun, arg = list(deriv = 2))

I still don't quite understand how that derivative works - ?list doesn't mention anything about 'deriv', and there's a function called 'deriv' but I'm not sure how that's being interpreted in the code above.

Also it seems recent versions of ggplot2 have geom_xspline() which does what I need (I'm told) but that wasn't in the release version when I was doing it.

<comment><USER4> It took me 5 minutes to figure out how that actually did work! That is rather esoteric code!

(FWIW the reason that there's no native support in ggplot2 for this sort of smoothing is that I think it's a really bad idea as it tends to distort the underlying data)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> EDIT: I am corrected in regards to the SAS routines statement; see the reply.

A few comments. I worked in pharma and the FDA specifically requires a number of SAS routines- specific function calls- to be used when doing drug studies/clinical trials. R can't replace SAS in those cases without massive effort because the FDA is slow and conservative and people like to have validated results.

I think the writing was on the wall for SAS when this article came out: [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business- comput...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business- computing/07program.html?pagewanted=all)

The SAS spokesperson said: """Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, "We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.""""

to which a senior employee of Boeing pointed out that every jet they build uses R as an integral part of the design process. I think that had to be an "oh shit" moment for SAS, where they realized their strong position in stats was going to start to erode.

<comment><USER4> That is not true. The FDA uses R internally, and there is no requirement that you must use any specific software tool. See [https://www.r-project.org/doc/R-FDA.pdf](https://www.r-project.org/doc/R-FDA.pdf) for more details

<comment><USER8> OK, so my employers were wrong! [http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2012/06/fda-r- ok.html](http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2012/06/fda-r-ok.html)

"""Despite some mistaken conceptions in the pharmaceutical industry, SAS is not required to be used for clinical trials. This origin of this fallacy is probably related to the fact that data must be submitted in the XPT "transport format" (which was originally created by SAS). This data format is now an open standard: XPT files can be read into R with the standard read.xport function, and exported from R with the write.xport function in the SASxport package. (And if you have legacy data in other SAS formats, there's a handy SAS macro to export XPT files.)"""

Thanks for clearning that up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not totally sure whether this analysis captures the true extent which R vs SAS vs SPSS is used.

If I use R for a plot, or a simple bit of regression, or anova, or even cross- validation. I don't reference it in a paper. I only cite it if there is a package designed for a particular type of data (e.g. a Bioconductor package) or something a bit more esoteric (e.g. apcluster). About 95% of the work is data munging and - sorry Hadley - I don't cite dplyr, purrr, magrittr etc...

However I have notice that in clinical trial or small social science papers simple analyses of this type are often cited as being done in SPSS or SAS. I think this just reflects the fact that non specialist data analysts are more likely to cite SAS or SPSS for simple procedures such as graphs or anova as an appeal to authority.

So I reckon the data may reflect a trend but tells us little about the true levels.

<comment><USER10> Why don't you cite the packages you use?

<comment><USER11> Nobody cites every package they use, it's not feasible. I use a lot of packages, and some journals have a limit on the number of citations you can have. I only cite packages when it provides specialized statistical functionality.

For example, I do a lot of work with data from complex surveys, and I always cite Lumley's survey package because without it I wouldn't be able to do the work. On the flip side, I use Hadley's readr package extensively because I think his I/O functions are more sane than the defaults. I'm not going to cite readr in every paper I write just because I'm too lazy to type stringsAsFactors = FALSE when I read a csv file.

<comment><USER4> To me, citing readr feels like citing the company that made your pipettes. It's just useful infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The success of R in Statistics (in respect to Python, etc) was that it was thought from the beginning with Statisticians and their specific needs and approaches in mind. As much as I appreciate Python, it is a general purpose programming language adapted to Statisticians needs, not the other way around.

R has many issues, but if you speak to Statisticians you will hear that its the closest thing they have to their own way of doing things.

<comment><USER13> This is absolutely true, and actually learning R is an excellent way of learning statistics.

<comment><USER14> and a very inadvisable way to learn programming. (But I agree with what you said.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> R is really LISP with syntactic sugar and bindings to well respected high- performance FORTRAN matrix and math optimization codes.

[http://librestats.com/2011/08/27/how-much-of-r-is-written- in...](http://librestats.com/2011/08/27/how-much-of-r-is-written-in-r/)

It's great for bleeding edge scientific research. The results of many languages don't always match for advanced algorithms, but the open source nature of R, makes it easier to identify the problem areas.

The R-core interpreter does have a number of deficiencies. (R is based on S-language specification that left wiggle room from the 70s.) General purpose programming and data wrangling/engineering is best handled in other programming idioms.

<comment><USER4> I would love to know what you mean by data wrangling because I think R has a lot of good tools for it.

<comment><USER15> For example, reshaping JSON to the format an intricate R function expects. Appreciate the great work with (d)plyr and similar packages, but it's still work and overhead. Combined with some inefficiencies/quirks in base r functions (does ifelse() still evaluate twice?) it's easier to go with a widely used and respected package in a general purpose language; Nokogiri for example. For data engineering, consider there is not a maintaned R package for a web-client, and asynchronous programming is weak.

<comment><USER4> JSON is often a pain because it's so hierarchical and un-dataframe like. I have a few notes on working with it here: [http://r4ds.had.co.nz/hierarchy.html](http://r4ds.had.co.nz/hierarchy.html).

`ifelse()` is a nightmare of a function but I don't think double-evaluation is ever a problem.

There are two maintained web-clients: curl (low-level) and httr (high-level). And I think rvest does everything that nokogiri does.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the link on JSON and your packages, great work as always. I should clarify when I said we-client, I meant websockets client to consume feed. The last time I tried, the only R package (r-websockets) just crashed my Linux box and not maintained for several years. httr doesn't do websockets, as I understand. Seems likely a fundamental way to engineer/wrangle data into R.

<comment><USER4> You can do it with httpuv, but it might a bit clunky. I think better websockets support, and better async generally, is on the roadmap for the next year.

<comment><USER15> For httpuv, author Joe Cheng advised cannot do a websocket-client. [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28120307/how-to- interact...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28120307/how-to-interact- with-websocket-from-within-r)

Looking forward to the improvements. Appreciate all your work in the field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good.

* Rant mode: On

Maybe in 30 years they will also learn a true programming language and stop producing undocumented, unusable, unportable, underdeveloped libraries for research level tools and technologies.

Outside the world of Neural Network it is a complete disaster, and the NN landscape is at an acceptable level only because of big companies, surely not thanks to the researchers. And the reason, of course, is that most researchers refuse to think of themselves as "software developer" and use these arcane languages which might be good for prototyping but lack power when it comes to shipping a real product (which might also be a tool for other researchers to use).

At least they're not using Matlab where everything breaks as soon as you change machine.

* Rant mode: Off

<comment><USER11> I mean, I won't argue against having better code and documentation, but it's not really our job to ship a real product. Shipping well documented, easily usable, ultra portable, well developed libraries takes a fuckload of time, resources, and expertise that we don't have. Our primary job is to ship ideas.

It would be awesome if every project I did ended up with a nice, polished piece of software, but that's not what I get paid to do. I would be fired if I tried to do that.

<comment><USER16> Fair enough. But, speaking as a researcher, I often find myself reading through hundreds of lines of code and rebuilding routines from scratch in order to reproduce and expand on what others did in their works.

However, I was very harsh, and of course I wouldn't find viable to expect production ready code, but something moderately portable could come handy. Of course, as you said, a researcher doesn't have the time to build a well developed library. As a solution, my University is considering the idea of hiring a dedicated developer whose job would be to maintain libraries. I really hope this to happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Am I right to believe that there is no way that proprietary scientific software can keep up with open source?

<comment><USER18> No. Some have the benefit of proprietary modules (FPGA toolchains), some have large libraries of pre-entered and organized data (Mathematica), and some have early access to hardware (LabView, CUDA).

Programming languages, perhaps, are less vulnerable to these issues. And perhaps open source could beat these applications eventually, given perfect competition. But we're not in that world, unfortunately.

<comment><USER19> I think that open source _programming languages_ will always win in the long run, since the target customer base knows how to program and extend the tools.

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure that logically follows. What %age of Python users actually know the underlying C well enough to make changes to the language? Even the number who know how to write bindings is tiny overall.

<comment><USER19> I'm fairly sure that most of them would be able to wing it if they had to. C isn't exactly that special.

In all events, the percentage of users skilled in software development must be higher than among users of tools not related to software development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One thing that interests me is language power, vs experience. Let's say you had 1 year experience in language X. Language Y comes along that is better in some way. In another year, would you be happier and more productive with 2 years experience of X, or one year of Y?

I sometimes think with the churn of languages, no-one really gets deeply enough into one to really leverage it.

</comment><comment><USER21> The way I use Python in machine learning is quite different from how many others in competitive ML use Python. I use Python purely for Python 2.7 with Pypy and try not to touch or use numpy,scipy,pandas,etc. R's data.table is possibly faster than Python's numpy/scipy/pandas. I think anyone claiming Python because of numpy/scipy/pandas is really being mislead. You should be using Python in spite of the need to rely upon numpy/scipy/pandas. If you really need numpy/scipy/pandas just use R and data.table which is amazingly fast. I think Python is really great because of Pypy and the strength of the standard Python library.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is great news! It excites me to see the continued support of open-source and well-maintained programming languages in academics.

(Someone may have said this already, but there is no way I'm reading through all the "Python vs R" BS to find out)

</comment><comment><USER23> Mathematica isn't being used at all? That's surprising. Mathematica is wonderful. I wonder what's holding it back?

It doesn't seem to have a package manager. Could it be that simple?

<comment><USER24> The interfaces are terrible. The price is high.

If you need to call one of the built-in pieces of Magic (TM) then Mathematica is OK, but if you want to build something new that needs to interface with literally anything outside of Mathematica, then Mathematica is a PITA.

<comment><USER8> Actually, the whole Mathematica kernal is exposed via a C API. I wrote a Python-Mathematica bridge based on this and it was wonderful. You could sit in Python, and send Python expressions with variables, etc, to Mathematica for evaluation, and get the results back as Python objects.

The interface was trivial.

<comment><USER24> I've worked with these types of bridges before. They are terrible if you want to keep the program running and intermittently call Mathematica throughout the course of a multi-hour session.

If you have a small script that makes a single one-off call to Mathematica, _and the interface already exists for your language, which it probably doesn 't, even if you're using an extremely popular language, and even though you're paying hundreds of dollars a year just for PERSONAL use_, then things can be ok. But if you want to make a bunch of calls and keep the program running reliably then you're SOL.

Oh, and don't even _think about_ deploying. It will cost you so much that it's more cost-effective to just rewrite the thing or do the work of switching out with a different library/tool.

<comment><USER8> I don't understand why you consider a problem to intermittently call mathematica's kernel in a multi-hour session. There's nothing that would make this not work. The mathematica C interface launches a copy of the kernel and communicates with it over a straightforward protocol.

In this case, I _wrote_ that interface and open sourced it. [http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/MathSource/585/](http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/MathSource/585/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just noticed that this was posted by my old (half) boss!

Finally! This is very encouraging, that such an excellent free software package is in such high demand. From what I've used it for, it worked very well. It's great for quickly creating nice-looking graphs and plots.

</comment><comment><USER26> 1\. This is a good place for use of log or semi-log plots.

2\. How do the authors unambiguously search for 'R'? Monocharacter language names are difficult search keys. (C, B, S, R)

<comment><USER27> To 2: When I look for just "R" even in an anonymous window (so it should not use my history) I get as the first suggestion a link to [https://www.r-project.org/](https://www.r-project.org/) \- the home of R. What else is there for that letter - that is equally popular? "R" is "hip" and trending. Microsoft not too long ago started a big push into the R space and now regularly generates headlines around the system, accelerating the trend even more.

<comment><USER28> Even weirder, a Google search for "xlispstat" seems to bring up more R hits that don't even mention xlispstat than actual xlispstat ones. Some weird algorithm is associating R and xlispstat as relating to statistics and because R is much more popular these days, prioritizing R over xlispstat.

<comment><USER29> it's not the search engine's fault, it's the contents. R is associated to xlispstat as the credible alternative. E.g. Jan de Leeuw JStat's paper. Also the author of xlispstat is one main contributor to R.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> >Note that the decline in the number of articles that used SPSS or SAS is not balanced by the increase in the other software shown in this particular graph.

Is Machine Learning cooling down?

</comment><comment><USER31> no mention of Incanter . . . is it really that niche?

<comment><USER28> Is it still alive? I remember being excited about it when it came out initially but then things seemed to slow and then stop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> R? Everyone doing most anything interesting has been using Python for a while.

<comment><USER33> I suppose there is no interesting science outside of computers?</comment></comment>