Noobindex.com Launches - <AUTHOR>

This is a continuation of: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227879
A) Noobindex is a social networking site for noobs.
B) Noobindex is a social networking site for gamers to organize and communicate outside of the games themselves.
I took some of your advice and am not going to worry about the press until there is something worth reporting. I decided to launch here on HN to you guys. I don't know which tag line I should use. I like A better than B. A isn't very clear, but I kind of like that it doesn't limit itself.
Thanks HN for being a great community to be a part of. I'm anxious to hear what you guys might have to say about this. <comment><USER2> Hey, I like the minimal look of your app. I'm not a gamer so my comments might be a bit off, so adjust accordingly :)

I don't like "social networking site" because it sounds too technical/formal?

C) Noobindex is a place for gamers to meet, join forces, and to (plan/interact/communicate)?

edit: Upon further review. Once landing on your homepage, I don't really know what my next step would be. I know you have the register/login links in your nav, but beyond that, I don't know why I would register.

Also for "find a group" and "find a user" you should list out the groups and users so people could browse and explore on their own. What you have currently is like a blank restaurant menu. I don't know what I'm ordering because I don't know what you serve?

<comment><USER3> Hmm, I don't like the minimal look. It's just too minimal... looks almost unfriendly.

Noobs are noobs... they need rounded corners and friendly colours, not sharp red corners :-)

</my $0.02>

<comment><USER4> hmm imo just too much red. beauty in simplicity, yes. beauty in big red expanses...hmm. a little blinding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow! Don't mistype this one. One letter over and you get a different kind of index.

I always thought 'Noob' was a mild put-down. People don't strive to be 'Noobs' or associated with 'Noobs'. So, even if they start out as 'Noobs' what happens when they go pro, or whatever the opposite of 'Noob' is? Isn't this mindset going to be difficult to overcome and market or am I just out of touch with the gaming culture?

</comment><comment><USER6> The red is a bit harsh. There's too much of it. Can't really think what to do about that. Less red though, definitely.

<comment><USER7> i want to add aside from the red color. when i get into the site first time, i don't know what to do. i don't know what it's all about. noobindex? no. sorry. i don't get it. i thought it was for noob hackers. was surprised it was for gamers.

definitely a need for improvement. 0.02

<comment><USER8> There _is_ an about page...

<comment><USER9> Wrong. Fail. You have THREE seconds to capture someone's attention before they yank the back button and go back to surfing funny cats.

The human brain is very lazy, it is constantly trying to put every situation in a box. An easy-to-understand box. An "I get it" box, so it can move on.

We talk about this over and over here, but "what's the fire burning in someone's pants that makes them want to use your site right this second?"

Now figure out how to polish that into a small snippet of text that instantly draws folks into why the site exists. Maybe: "Bored to tears waiting for someone good to kick your ass at Countertrike 2? Good, you're just come home."

Plaster that on the homepage. Then walk the person through exactly what they need to do. Step 1, step 2, step 3. Pretend we are all idiots.

And then it's game on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd rather the site was called something obvious, like "gamerdex.com". Noob isn't only a gaming term. Seeing it doesn't instantly make me think gaming.

A tag line at the very top of the first page would help too. For example, "Gamers organzing and communicating," like someone suggested above, right at the top.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone see ANY potential?

<comment><USER11> There is potential in the idea but your execution is well, bad. Sorry to say but read some of the above comments and take them into consideration.

I went to the site and the red hurt my head. I didn't know what it was about, and it just looked plain boring.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will change the design and colors. I'm working on a "tutorial video" that will have a link by the logo, which will hopefully help explain what it is about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like the layout of the site. The text is too close to the left/right sides. Adding the same spacing that's at the top to the other sides would help improve readability.

The functionality is pretty basic though. =(

I'm not sure what is gathered here that couldn't be done within an existing system like Ning, which already has a large user base. That would give you an installed userbase to help pull from without having to get people to register for yet-another-social-network.

</comment><comment><USER13> the red, it's haunting me =(

</comment><comment><USER14> Personally I like tag line B) better. It is clear and to the point. And it provides a unique niche. "Gamers organzing and communicating outside the game itself". A novel concept since the idea of networking "within a game" is now familiar, but venues for game rivals to interact with one another outside the game, but still online, is a novel idea. Besides, I haven't the faintest clue what a "noob" is! And I work in the software development world. :-)</comment>


Happiness is overrated: It's better to be right, study finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-better-to-be-right-than-happy-20131217,0,5791072.story#axzz2nvMQE7du

<comment><USER2> Already appeared on HN and commented:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6926152](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6926152)

> The original paper is clearly a joke

My prophecy there:

> I expect a lot of additional "reporting" and "blogging" that is going to be > completely serious.

</comment><comment><USER3> Misleading. Please mention in the title that it was a study done for humour.

<comment><USER4> I think we should introduce <joke></joke> tags for use on the internet for when people are joking.</comment></comment>


JustUnfollow is now Crowdfire - <AUTHOR> http://www.crowdfireapp.com/

<comment><USER2> What is the reason for rebranding?</comment>


Lost languages leave traces on the brain - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/11/lost-languages-leave-traces-on-the-brain/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+All+content%29

<comment><USER2> > _" There may also be implications for learning the lost languages: people > with forgotten exposure to languages may be able to learn that language > faster, or more completely, than people with no exposure at all."_

Coming soon: baby-upload immersion centers!

<comment><USER3> Baby-upload radios and websites more probably. Why bring baby to the sound if you can bring sound to the baby.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I enjoyed this article. It was quite different than what I expected.

By lost languages, I expected something along the lines of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) or another protolingual system, which would be so cool to have left some markers on our brains.

Here's an example of how PIE possibly sounded: How to Speak Proto-Indo- European [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jlcV7DYL3o](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jlcV7DYL3o)

Does anyone know if there are vestigial neuronal constructs, similar to vestigial organs or genes, which could help us better understand our languages' origins through brain imaging studies? See also: Murray Gell-Mann: The ancestor of language [http://www.ted.com/talks/murray_gell_mann_on_the_ancestor_of...](http://www.ted.com/talks/murray_gell_mann_on_the_ancestor_of_language?language=en)

<comment><USER5> Historical languages would not leave any traces on the brain, because languages evolve at a _much_ faster rate than biology. We believe that language is a phenomenon that is 60,000 to 100,000 years old, which is an evolutionary blink of an eye.

This is perhaps a problem with the theory of "universal grammar", which says that language itself is an evolved instinct in the brain. When was the mass extinction of humans without universal grammar? Shouldn't we be assuming that the brain processes we use for language evolved in the slow, haphazard way that everything else evolved, and asking what else we use this instinct for besides language?

Those questions I'm asking are in fact hugely controversial in linguistics, because UG has been an established theory of linguistics for decades, despite that when you take it too literally it makes no evolutionary sense, and weaker forms of it don't make enough testable predictions.

On the other hand, I believe Murray Gell-Mann is beyond controversial in linguistics, as in no linguists who take themselves seriously take Gell-Mann seriously. There's no evidence to tell us whether there was one "Proto-Human" language or many, and there certainly is no data to support Gell-Mann's conjectures about specific properties of Proto-Human.

It feels a bit wrong to conclude this with "argumentam ad cartoonist", but here's SMBC lampooning Gell-Mann: [http://www.smbc- comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2556#comic](http://www.smbc- comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2556#comic)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting, i got switched to English language at age 5 or so. With the article's emphasis on tone language as the first, "lost" language, maybe this is related to early musical training[1]:

        enhanced white matter in the corpus callosum

[1] [http://www.concordia.ca/cunews/main/releases/2013/02/12/earl...](http://www.concordia.ca/cunews/main/releases/2013/02/12/early- music-lessons-boost-brain-development.html)</comment>


Dating with Graph Search - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/499387ac3c34

<comment><USER2> I'm going to be blunt, that is fucking creepy. And I'm of the male gender, don't have a Facebook, use ghostery/adbock/encrypted linux.

Combine this with phone location (GPS/GLONOSS/aGPS) and you know where they are at all times too. Suddenly the government is very interested. Want to know exactly who was at the protest between 1211 and 1434? Want to know if a certain person is at another persons house say 1600 Pennsylvania Ave at a certain time?

Oh, and the Feds are building a gigantic data centre (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center>) staffed by what can only be assumed to be former Mormon missionaries who speak damn near every language on the planet...talk about scaling the police state global. What other reason would they have to do this?

1984 is more like 2014.

Disclaimer: I am on my second glass of Côtes du Rhône.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article was posted just a couple of weeks ago.

Link to previous discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5415691>

</comment><comment><USER4> nice illustration of a practical use for the graph search. definitely chilling though. Very much reminds me of the Sight short film: <http://vimeo.com/46304267>

</comment><comment><USER5> "Single sisters of my friends"

Let the game begin...

</comment><comment><USER6> >>The truth is that the plethora of information Facebook knows about you is unfathomable.

It literally is.

What is really scary is that, even if you as an individual decide to withhold some information in your profile, that information can still be determined, with very high accuracy, by analyzing your friends. For example, if you don't tell Facebook where you live, someone can just use the API to analyze your new friends' locations and figure out your general geographic area.

Forget ads. In the grand scheme of things, ads don't matter. What matters is that there is absolutely no way anyone can use Facebook and still remain a private individual. And the implications of this are already changing society in fundamental ways (some positive, but mostly negative).

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't find this chilling at all. What's the big deal?

<comment><USER8> At the risk of being tautological, I think it's chilling because if he told the 10 girls he "doxed" about what he had done, I'm pretty confident a sizeable number of them would have the chills.

People don't like to feel like they're being taken advantage of, which would be a pretty common reaction to finding out someone had done all of this profiling on you to get you to go out with them.

It's not outright nefarious, because, what is he really doing that's different from a dating site filtering results by your criteria; except that these aren't people who have joined a dating site.

This sounds like the kind of thing Tim Ferris would recommend doing; asymmetrical information warfare in the battle of the sexes.</comment></comment>


Occupational Gender Bias Prevalent in Online Images, Rutgers Study Finds - <AUTHOR> https://news.rutgers.edu/occupational-gender-bias-prevalent-online-images-rutgers-study-finds/20200204#.XkRJJlKTLRb <comment><USER2> They seem to take it as a given that newspapers should show pictures of a desired gender ratio (e.g., 50/50) for a profession rather than the actual ratio. Although perhaps well-intended, it seems bad to have news sources move (even further) away from factual depictions of reality.

<comment><USER3> The research question they answer is: "How different is the image‐based representation of highly gender‐segregated professions (librarian, nurse, computer programmer, civil engineer) in the physical world compared to digital spaces."

Did you read the paper? They are reporting on how far the depictions are from reality. That means right now, the newspapers you read do not have an accurate depiction of reality.

<comment><USER2> Read the abstract and glanced through the paper. Both are kind of mush, so I probably missed the main point.

Note that I am not claiming that newspapers depict reality accurately. Rather, it seemed that this paper was advocating diverging further.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> should I expect that in the near future, thinking and making decisions will be a significant risk. before doing something that could be an equity offense, I should look up the corresponding equity guidelines and follow those.

</comment><comment><USER5> It is perhaps that not all jobs appeal to men? No crap there are more female nurses or more male construction workers. Why is this a problem that causes the sky to fall in the US? Some sexes prefer one occupation over another- quit looking for systemic discrimination under every rock.

<comment><USER6> The fact that some jobs may appeal more to one gender than another doesn't discredit the existence of systemic gender discrimination so much as support its likelihood. Discrimination doesn't apply to people who conform to traditional gender roles as much as those who don't, to the men who want to be nurses and the women who want to be construction workers, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are things still biased if its also reality?</comment>


Worldwide run on Rice - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a0fU0S8MSK64&refer=home

<comment><USER2> Hey, next to ramen rice was my cheapest form of food. It's hacker news because it's bad news for a ton of people living on the edge of starvation, and something smart caring minds like ours might just be able to fix.

</comment><comment><USER3> And this is hacker news because... ?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a hard problem. It's an immediate problem. It's an important problem. It's an economic and logistics problem. Hackers like hard, important problems.

Also: ignore desperate, hungry people at your own peril. Hunger is not some sort of vague hand-wavey rich/poor gap concocted by a university professor with an agenda. It is an outright decrease in standard of living and it's something people will fight to restore.

<comment><USER4> China v Russia in the near future.

<comment><USER5> Doubtful. These guys are more in partnership than people think

<comment><USER4> I base this claim on a stat I heard from an AF general. A) A very large portion of the Chinese population will be single, middle age males in the near future. B) China is becoming resource starved. C) Russia's population is rapidly decreasing compared to China's population. D) Russia has a lot of resources.

So, just throwing that out there. Sounded intriguing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Aaron Swartz:  Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit) - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/perfectionism

<comment><USER2> "There is something to this, of course. But I have a contrary proposal: users love perfectionism."

Wrong. I would love to see more new features on reddit rather than waiting for them to re-write everything. The search function is still somewhat broken!

There is even competition of sorts: <http://redditmedia.com/> That site displays thumbnails for stories...why doesn't reddit.com have an extra section or option/setting for that? So many good things could be done if not for this perfectionism bullshit.

Another good story: 37signals took a long time fixing Backpack and finally released a new version. Too late, I had already switched to Simple GTD. I don't get why they didn't incrementally improve things...I bet they've lost many more users due to their slowness.

Perfectionism is paralyzing.

<comment><USER3> Almost,

Success is paralyzing.

<comment><USER4> _"Once a product gets past the stage where it has glaring flaws, you start to get used to it, and gradually whatever features it happens to have become its identity."_ \-- Hardest Lessons #2

Reddit certainly fell into that one big time. Digg has done a much better job at maintaining a fast development pace.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A previous company I worked for split in two, one half took on an online training site project and my half built an online website development system. The half that did the training site all hated me because I code by the seat of my pants, sometimes put out work that needed a tweak or two and I wasn't there because I was just up for 24 hours writing it. They took 6 months designing and mapping out there project, they took another 6 months to build it and by the time they were done they had 3 months of money left to make it successful and thus went out of business while my side is still going strong 6 years later. I don't exactly advocate treating users like beta testers, but if you can`t find any more errors put it out, fix anything you didn't find that gets reported by the users, then move on.

</comment><comment><USER6> Personally I used to be like this. I would never launch anything, because nothing I did was ever good enough for me. However, recently I learned my lesson. I launched hackrtrackr with only one feature, and without and going back and rethinking what I had done. The result an insanely simple website that has taken off very well. Also by launching with only one feature and minimal code it allowed me to quickly add the features I received requests for, because I didn't have to wade through a bunch of lines.

<comment><USER5> > Personally I used to be like this. I would never launch anything, because > nothing I did was ever good enough for me.

Sounds like practice coding to me, I am sure the experience you gained helped you write what you decided was worthy of releasing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> <http://beta.jottit.com/>

<comment><USER8> <http://beta.jottit.com/8dw3p/>

<http://HowDoesJottitFormattingWork.jottit.com> (same site in theory...doesn't seem to be working, though.)

Anybody know of where you can get more instructions on how to use it?

Handy for throwing together a random anonymous blog, I guess. Ad-supported, I assume?

<comment><USER7> Right, I'm sorry, I deleted your site. Why the hell could I delete your site?

edit: It's still there in history to be reverted.

<comment><USER8> Mmm, I didn't know the history button was there, and it only looks like it saves so many revisions. No biggie tho, I rebuilt it. Not sure why you can edit anybody's site. Could be fun in some ways I guess. Mental note for future, tho: Keep a copy in a .txt file...

And I just noticed...it didn't give a username for your edit. Can it be edited by literally -anyone-, member or not?

\--Nevermind. You can set that up in the setting. The defaults are somewhat curious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If aaron wants to indulge let him please go ahed. But this post is so insincere when it gives the bit about users loving perfectionism that it makes me dizzy. Its either insincere or is delusional.I don't want to have anything to do with either.

PG wants to indulge with arc, he went ahed. But I don't remember him giving some insincere explanation.

I am now a strong believer in motherfucker's theory of insincerity [http://atomicwang.org/motherfucker/Index/E06C66BF-E7D5-48FF-...](http://atomicwang.org/motherfucker/Index/E06C66BF-E7D5-48FF-9F7C-E6AD1B3F8F28.html) (sorry, but that what he calls himself)

<comment><USER10> That post about sincerity is interesting but exactly, completely wrong. He's completely reversed the entire cause effect relationship. I'll write a blog post as to why.

<comment><USER11> quick! to the INTERNET, in order to correct the misconceptions of others!

it never stops being tempting.

<comment><USER10> That's kind of a silly way to look at discourse. All discourse is basically someone trying to correct the misconceptions of others.

<comment><USER12> So is there anything besides misconception? Is there One True Conception, which defeats all others in internet debate?

<comment><USER10> Internet debate gets a bad rep, but it's intrinsically no worse than any other written debate (which in and of itself is certainly the highest form of discourse man has ever invented). Sincere internet debate is perhaps 50% of what makes the medium useful (the other 50% being, of course, videos of kittens). Insincere internet debate is unfortunately 99% of the overall market and often clouds that fact. So if anything, there's your unified theory of sincerity.

As for one true conception, I imagine it exists on many topics, though getting at it is rather tricky. I've certainly started to argue with people before only to find out, as I put it in writing, that I agreed with them, sometimes even for reasons they'd missed. So if the truth is so convoluted that you can never really know it, perhaps it functionally does not exist.

I now feel my counter argument to the sincerity thing is overhyped though. I don't have enough time to make it live up. Please don't read, you'll only be let down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Watching this get abandoned will be enormously humorous.

<comment><USER14> Why? Perfectionists do that all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I notice a lot of animosity towards PG in Aaron's writings...

<comment><USER10> A lot of people have a strong dislike of Aaron. I've certainly had unpleasant experiences.

<comment><USER16> Such as?

<comment><USER13> I expect Matt will have more personal bad experiences, but the most well- publicized one goes approximately as follows:

\- Aaron applies to YC, starts Infogami with a co-founder who drops out (presumably because of Aaron's special interpersonal sparkles).

\- Aaron launches Infogami, with a promise of a new feature every day.

\- Aaron complains for a long time about how he doesn't have a co-founder, and then merges with Reddit.

\- Aaron abandons Infogami (pissing off all its users, including me), and then proceeds not to do anything at Reddit, to the chagrin of the Reddits, who just effectively gave him a bunch of their stock. Aaron nevertheless has time for nauseatingly many melodramatic blog entries. \- Reddit gets bought, and Aaron gets an equal share of the spoils.

\- Aaron cries in the bathroom (literally), and then quits Wired, the acquiring company, by just not showing up to work. (And posts a suicidal blog entry, and proceeds to delete it.)

\- Aaron does an interview in which he claims to have been part of Reddit from the beginning, pissing absolutely everyone off.

<comment><USER10> Mine wasn't that bad, but it did involve me being told I had an apartment in Cambridge locked up, only to find less than two weeks before Y C began that I didn't.

<comment><USER17> Sorry, but how does that involve me?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Funny, since Aaron had exactly the opposite strategy when he launched Infogami, blogging about launching a new feature everyday and taking a very incremental approach. I don't think that lasted very long though. Everyone is free to change their mind, of course...

<comment><USER3> It is good that he chose an extreme though. Publicity tends to like extremes, regardless of which extreme it is.

<comment><USER19> Certain personalities tend to like extremes in that way as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The problem w/ perfectionism is that it's only perfect in the eyes of one person...

<comment><USER21> this statement is so true

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> That open library project didn't last too long...

<comment><USER11> didn't you see that other post? he finished it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yes, I'm coining a new term - "pefectionism." Don't know what it means, I'll let the audience decide.

</comment><comment><USER23> I disagree... users love seeing new features. If they don't work so well, they don't care. Most likely they'll enjoy them and feel privileged they are getting to use them before they are really ready. They'll see the potential. They'll start imagining what it'll be like once it's finished. If it's a cool, innovative feature they haven't seen before, they'll see it as proof you're a cool place to be. Even if half of it doesn't work.

Get features out often. Of course make sure they don't break anything else, or reduce the users experience, but users love to see a site evolving and changing with them on board.

</comment><comment><USER24> Like Artix, Chain would have failed in its current form no matter how smooth it was polished. It was very important that we failed fast so that we could focus on morphing it into something that works. You lose that with perfectionism.

So you'd better be a Steve Jobs.

<comment><USER5> > So you'd better be a Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs is a huge perfectionist. However he will make you work 70+ hours a week to achieve his perfection and he will ride you every step of the way to get the best out of you. <http://www.folklore.org>

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What's the difference between "adding a feature" and "improving the site"?

I always took them to be the same thing. In that sense, you're either adding a feature or you're stagnating. (Or, I suppose, going backwards.)

<comment><USER26> "Getting Real" has the answer to that: <https://gettingreal.37signals.com/>

In short, having fewer features is often the best feature.

<comment><USER3> ..unless it isn't.

(points to all the billion dollar networking sites on the news)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wow this discussion has invoked a lot of participation, unfortunately this is useless discussion. Don't you guys have to hack?

<comment><USER28> What ... and miss the two minute hate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> people seem to confuse adding features to additions in the interface. Most of the times users are either subconsciously frustrated by a problem or that there isn't a solution for it yet (i.e. why someone else hasn't solved it yet).

perfection??? I think most software sucks so much that it doesn't do anything useful. It would be better to try and get your product to do just one thing that is useful for one person.

Aiming for perfection is just an excuse for not building something useful.

</comment><comment><USER30> I played around a little bit on beta.jottit.com. In editing mode, I like the live rendering alongside the marked up text. I haven't seen that before.

</comment><comment><USER31> <http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/windows/2007/02/07/jottit> ?

<comment><USER32> No, that's Jott.com. Not sure why the author refers to it as "JottIt".

<comment><USER31> Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> hmm... how about a compromise: release early, release often, keep things as simple as possible, but get those details perfect.

</comment><comment><USER8> What's Jottit going to be, then?

<comment><USER23> Apart from a failed startup?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> looks like so 1999. come on this is 2007. and the name is like a hit train got over it ...g(j)ot it?

</comment><comment><USER35> I have reservations about that name.

<comment><USER36> No, it's fine. The site's going to let you list famous people who you want to sign various body parts. It'll make for an interesting tag cloud.</comment></comment>


Reality Check: Google Plus Is No Facebook Or Twitter Killer - <AUTHOR> http://www.allfacebook.com/dont-believe-the-hype-2011-07

<comment><USER2> Not to take away from the article content, but it is posted on "The Unofficial Facebook Resource".

I mean, just compare the time spent on what Google got right, verse what they didn't. And yet the conclusion implies that it doesn't even matter, because people won't bother with three social networks at once.

<comment><USER3> Yep. The whole 'business model' of his website is based off of Facebook's success. He definitely has a vested interest here.

I also think it is simply too early to define what Google+ is or what niche it serves best. A lot of these criticisms could be said about Facebook when it was in its early stages too (no brand profiles, lack of returning users, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "I follow Danny on Google Plus, and filed him away in the appropriate circle."

He's doing it wrong. You don't file people by their interests, you file people based on how interested you are in them. I have family, close friends, acquaintances, and people that i'm following who I don't know. The main problem with Facebook is the large number of people who I'm connected to (and want to be connected to), but I don't care about their status updates.

Most people end up going into acquaintances and 'following', but that is how it is in real life too.

My close family and friends group has plenty of action, because I have stuff to talk with them about.

Tagging posts or users based on what it is about is ultimately an intractable management problem for the end user.

<comment><USER5> Saying that someone is 'doing it wrong' on a social network is doing it wrong. The average user isn't going to think deeply about this stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It raises some interesting points, like that it feels like ghost town. For me it does if I look at circles like "Family" or "Friends" while "Early adopters" is very active. Similar is on the Facebook. On the other hand I think that circles are usable and a natural way to sort people in groups/circles. Only time will tell who will prevail and it will be interesting to watch this fight.</comment>


Srinivasa Ramanujan - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan <comment><USER2> > During his short life, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3,900 results > (mostly identities and equations). Many were completely novel; his original > and highly unconventional results, such as the Ramanujan prime, the > Ramanujan theta function, partition formulae and mock theta functions, have > opened entire new areas of work and inspired a vast amount of further > research. Nearly all his claims have now been proven correct. > ... > As > late as 2011 and again in 2012, researchers continued to discover that mere > comments in his writings about "simple properties" and "similar outputs" for > certain findings were themselves profound and subtle number theory results > that remained unsuspected until nearly a century after his death. > ... > Of > his original letters, Hardy stated that a single look was enough to show > they could only have been written by a mathematician of the highest calibre, > comparing Ramanujan to mathematical geniuses such as Euler and Jacobi.

Pretty incredible work. Hats off to Mr Ramanujan.</comment>


Tracking Snowden - <AUTHOR> http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/tracking-snowden

<comment> grey-area The coverage over at the Guardian is better at present:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2013/jun/23/edward- snowden-...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2013/jun/23/edward-snowden- leaves-hong-kong-moscow-live)</comment>


Scientists Are Rethinking Animal Cognition - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/ <comment><USER2> It surprises me that people could claim that the inverse would ever be true. As in, why would the default be to assume that animals are not conscious? Claiming that consciousness is unique to humans seems like quite a high-horse proposition for us to make about our species.

The question as to how far down consciousness goes is still a matter of debate. The idea that consciousness goes _all the way down_ , i.e. to rocks et al. is called panpsychism in philosophy. I don't think that's likely, since our best bet is that consciousness is maybe/probably an emergent property of information processing in the brain. How complex that information processing has to be to result in consciousness is an interesting proposition, and could be hard to determine given the subjective nature consciousness to begin with.

Still though, I can't imagine experiencing consciousness, responding to stimuli the way I respond to stimuli, and thinking that animals/bugs that also respond to stimuli in the same manner as we do are not conscious. The fact that this assumption has permeated culture throughout history seems like a very obnoxious oversight and has probably led morally sane people to enact morally insane abuses towards animals and I think that is a shame.

<comment><USER3> > It surprises me that people could claim that the inverse would ever be true. > As in, why would the default be to assume that animals are not conscious?

It's known as motivated reasoning. Specimens of our species are not known for disinterested rationality. We have deep interests in doing things to animals that animal cognition could make more unpleasant or expensive. An ancestor without this talent would have been less likely to become an ancestor. Think of how much tougher it would be to put a spear into a boar if you thought it was as sentient as your mother. You'd still do it if you were hungry enough but would pay a greater price.

<comment><USER4> I think the closer you are to the actual killing of animals, the more you tend to revere them, if anything.

From my viewpoint, our current views on the killing of animals are as much a reflection of our cultural fear of death as anything.

Death used to be an ever-present part of life. Killing an animal was viewed as taking the life of something else to prolong your own. And all to often, people would die in horrific ways anyway.

Now, death is a thing we try to hide away and not talk about. So we also hide away the killing of animals for meat. Death is a taboo in our society in some ways.

<comment><USER5> > I think the closer you are to the actual killing of animals, the more you > tend to revere them, if anything.

This is clearly not the case, else nobody would be willing to work for a factory farm.

The opposite appears to be true. People become desensitized - at least the ones who can handle the initial shock. Also, in some regions of the world (and in developed countries), generations have grown up with a company mentality and seem incapable of considering things from any other perspective.

<comment><USER6> Its different when you are slaughtering animals endlessly as a job versus hunting for food. The former will make you a morbid psychopath. The latter will give you reverence for the animal and the hunt and your position in it.

<comment><USER5> I don't disagree. However, I would argue that there are vastly fewer food hunters than factory farm workers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The entire trend of research in animal consciousness over the last 300 years has always been "animals turn out to be more conscious than we think".

If you look at how the London Zoo treated animals in the mid 1800's, you'll see how even the most scientifically advanced group (at the time) that was working with animals could have been so cruel without realizing it.

Sometimes it unnerves me that we'll realize 100 years from now that animals were more conscious than even we me imagined possible and our treatment now of them (specifically livestock) is was really really bad.

<comment><USER8> Same argument can be made for how humans have and still do treat other humans who they decided to label sub-human and thereby less worthy of living a suffering-free existence. The trend is when humans have too much power over literally anything, they almost always tend to abuse it.

<comment><USER9> As recently as the 1980s, doctors did not provide anesthesia to infants undergoing surgery. They thought infants' pain response was just a "reflex", not a conscious experience of pain.

[https://www.livescience.com/28848-babies-have- consciousness....](https://www.livescience.com/28848-babies-have- consciousness.html)

<comment> david-gpu My understanding is that that was in part due to the difficulty of providing the right dosage that would provide pain relief without causing harm. Source: dad was an anesthesiologist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I recently slaughtered and butchered two young pigs as an exercise in getting closer to my food sources and an experiment in economy. The situation was six pigs in a trailer, and our task was to shoot two of our choosing.

When the first pig was shot, he fell and lurched for a bit while blood spewed. The rest of the pigs were alarmed by the noise and the human in the small trailer. One pig came to investigate the dying pig. Quickly it went back to eating with the others.

I mentioned this to the farmer and he said the pigs seem to understand _fear of death_ but not death itself.

Each year I get closer and closer to the idea that humans are shockingly not that different from other animals, but this set my idea back a bit. Of course, elephants are a counter-example to this behavior with their apparent mourning of the dead, so that has to be considered too.

<comment> rv-de Next step is going to India and yelling at children to stitch faster? Then you can justify wearing cheap clothes :D

Possibly the pigs are just traumatized. Read Frankl's "Search for Meaning" to get a perspective on how even educated and highly civilized human beings can become insensitive towards death and dead bodies.

<comment><USER11> This remembered me a story someone told in Reddit months ago, which may or may not be true:

Said guy had a wild hog family persistently ruining his crops, until he decided to camp and shoot them. When the family finally arrived, he aimed and shot the first in the head. The other hogs became curious, but continued eating while their relative lay bleeding right there. He shot another with the same effect, but missed a third shot, which hit a metal container and scared the bejesus of the remaining hogs, which fled. He was curious about why they were more scared from a loud noise that their brothers' heads mysteriously exploding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> God I hate articles that start with five pages of fluff. I don't care what the weather was like. I don't care what you did with your shoes. I don't care what the expression on your contacts face was when he greeted you.

<comment><USER13> To each their own, but I appreciated the cultural knowledge of the Jains, a group I wasn't familiar with before this, and it dovetails with the topic quite well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's funny how animal cognition and animal welfare tend to be conflated. We are projecting our own empathy in a very irrational way. E.g. eating dogs is being frowned upon in large parts of the world because our empathy gets in the way. Even though it is a perfectly good source of protein. However, We eat pork and beef without much guilt even even though especially pigs are apparently quite smart compared to e.g. a purse sized dog with a brain the size of a pea. It's completely irrational. Cuddly-ness rather than cognition seems to be what drives our empathy.

If you think about it, everything that lives (cognitive or not) also dies. Mostly this happens of natural causes and a lot of that involves being eaten by something else or if you lucky enough to avoid that by dying some long and painful death because of some disease, parasites, or accident. Natural death is mostly not very pleasant and typically really nasty even.

So considering that, I feel quite OK about eating animals. The alternative of not eating them means that they would not have lived at all or that they would have died a nasty "natural" death. So, I'm not saving them from some terrible fate by not eating them.

Arguably, it's the opposite (or it can be). If we stop eating meat, there are entire species of farm animals that will likely go extinct because they only exist because we breed them. So, we stop the cruelty of killing them that hurts our feelings but we instead wipe out their existence. Not that I'm advertising animal cruelty but I'd say modern responsible farming produces good quality lives for the animals and good quality meat when we end them in a way that is comparatively quick and painless to what nature has to offer. I enjoy eating meat but am aware that eating a bit less is probably good for me.

<comment><USER15> I agree, this topic needs to be decomposed much further for people to have a productive discussion on it.

Some extra decompositions:

> _So considering that, I feel quite OK about eating animals. The alternative > of not eating them means that they would not have lived at all or that they > would have died a nasty "natural" death. So, I'm not saving them from some > terrible fate by not eating them._

That works out for small-scale farming, but most of our meat is factory- farmed. While the death itself may be quick, their lives are _living hell_. Nature doesn't get _that_ cruel, on that scale. So we need to separate out death from life and suffering here.

> _If we stop eating meat, there are entire species of farm animals that will > likely go extinct because they only exist because we breed them._

The question is, why do we care about that? Evolutionary speaking, individuals rarely care about species; it's hard enough to get _humans_ to recognize the concept of their species, and I sincerely doubt a cow or a pig is aware or interested in the fate of their own kind in general. Survival of animal species is something _we_ value, for reasons ranging from emotional (nature is prettier with more stuff in it) to practical (genetic diversity). But I can't imagine a chicken being _grateful_ for living in a cage on farm, because it lets chickens exist at all.

Not judging any positions here; I just wish this topic was debated in a more structured way, with all the important aspects stated in isolation, and then related to each other.

<comment><USER14> Agreed, not a big fan of industrial meat production. And not just because the quality is less.

I don't have a strong opinion on whether it is good or bad for farm animal species to exist at all but I do find the contradiction interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Are all the things being called "consciousness" in this article really even the same?

Whatever problems of Julian Jaynes' theory, we know that there are schizophrenics who often hear voices and be commanded by voices. Are they "not self-conscious" by the various other measures involved - ie, the mirror test and such.

A lot of this article revolves around how much self-awareness is required by moral impulses to keep someone from eating an animal. The thing is, if basic self-awareness exists in nearly all creatures, then it means predators have eating these animals anyway and human evolved omnivore, I don't see the problem hear. Tell me this one is so special I shouldn't eat it and I might agree, tell all animals and I'll say you're calling for humans to outside the order that all other animals are in.

<comment><USER17> If you are looking for a moral/ethical imperative to stop eating animals, then the IPCC report covers enough of the carbon and ecological costs of animal agriculture that it is something that you should quit.

If you are looking for an expansion of "The Subject" of ethics, if you will, then that's something you have to do for yourself. To consider non-human animals for consumption regardless of the ecological externalities is an ethical choice, not an ethical demand. I have expanded my personal considerations ethically to include other life on this planet, as their success is required for my continued survival.

<comment><USER16> _If you are looking for a moral /ethical imperative to stop eating animals, then the IPCC report covers enough of the carbon and ecological costs of animal agriculture that it is something that you should quit._

I wasn't looking but thanks. I mean, I'd say global warming can only be overcome by society-wide political action, not by individual choices. Collective action forcing different consumption patterns are the only way sorts of problems like this have ever been solved in the past.

<comment><USER17> And that's going to require a cultural change - a cultural change that will be far easier without tons of people supporting the current state of the agricultural industries.

Society-wide political action is definitely what is needed, and being generally supportive of vegetarianism/veganism, and pressuring politicians to do the same, is an important part of that process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think the underlying point remains _how do we feel about this_. What I like, is the evidence-based models which point to higher cognition aren't now observational by anthropomorphism, but are founded on an experiment: _I construct a situation which demands a higher order thinking function, and I put an animal into a test, and I observe sequences of actions, which demand indirect cognition, operating on future state, or about the self, and image of self, or cognition of the projection of "what it would look like if I could see it, from the other side" type models_

So the ethics has been there forever, but what is newer (I do not say new, because people did experiment before. They are just really well formed experiments now), is a constructed model based on better than belief: its based on experiment.

The other side of the coin, is that some purely observational behaviour in higher primates now has to got back into the ethical pot: If we know chimps can do higher abstract reasoning, and we also observe chimps kill and eat the young from 'other' tribes, what do we now think about that killing and eating?

</comment><comment><USER19> Some things like that certain animals like dogs don't learn/plan by imagination never made sense to me.

When I want to teach a dog something, I treat him like a problem-solving agent. I pose the task as a solveable problem to him, like "touch stick to get food", and he will "compute" the necessary actions to touch the stick.

Also they always said dogs/animals don't do impulse control, while dogs clearly display a range of that trait.

</comment><comment><USER20> I heard something retold recently in this space that was very interesting about a distinctive feature for humans. And that is the ability to make a vow. That would be a pretty interesting topic to see how animals can communicate understanding of the far future and what not.

<comment><USER21> Sounds like a good thing for someone who wants you to take a vow to say.

<comment><USER20> Maybe, but the interesting thing is that I think it identifies not just a difference of degree but of kind. For instance animals can use tools and build things and communicate and recognize self and so forth, where in each case humans dominate in the vast separation of degree we have taken each. I can't think of any analogue where a vow would be a difference in degree to something. Maybe it's along the ideas of abstract thought. I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Jainisms logo makes it a barrier to entry for many in the West. I'm surprised they don't rebrand. For me consciousness means more about actually making a choice. You can be aware but unconscious. I guess this is where 'woke' comes from. Choice is a byproduct of your moral framework and if this is dictated to you then maybe you are not conscious? There are stages of awareness. You can pluck a string at it will vibrate. Arrange several in accordance with each other and you have an instrument. We ourselves are like instruments in that respect. You press our keys (senses) and things start to vibrate and reverberate. (yup i'm ripping Diderot). But I do feel strongly that all thought is just a diff between world states. I don't find anything particular profound about it. Western religions deprive animals of consciousness to feel better about eating them.

<comment><USER23> > Jainisms logo makes it a barrier to entry for many in the West.

Are people confused about this statement? See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika) -

"The swastika is a geometrical figure and an ancient religious icon in the cultures of Eurasia, used as a symbol of divinity and spirituality in Indian religions. In the Western world, it was a symbol of auspiciousness and good luck until the 1930s, when it became a feature of Nazi symbolism as an emblem of Aryan race identity and, as a result, was stigmatized by association with ideas of racism and antisemitism."

<comment><USER24> 2020 Neo-nazi Goals: Turn Google logo(or anything they don't like) into a symbol of hate speech and everyone just goes with it since they can't think further than "bad man do x, x bad"</comment></comment></comment>


Etleap (YC W13) launches with a cloud service for easy data cleaning - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/09/y-combinator-backed-etleap-launches-with-a-cloud-service-for-easy-data-cleaning/ <comment><USER2> Congrats to Christian and the Etleap team! Smart team, good product.

<comment><USER3> Agreed and seconded!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are you actually able to correlate/consolidate data from multiple sources? And what level of no code is no code? Basic sql or drag/drop or some form of DSL?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question. We find that most effective approach (whether you're a coder or not) is to interact with samples of the data directly to specify your transformations, so our approach is similar to Stanford's data wrangler ([http://vis.stanford.edu/wrangler/](http://vis.stanford.edu/wrangler/)). Once the transformations are specified, Etleap compiles them into code an continuously applies them to the data at scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> ETL into Redshift remains a pain. I'm really rooking forward to testing your service!</comment>


The Fall and Rise of SVG - <AUTHOR> http://blog.siliconpublishing.com/2015/12/the-fall-and-rise-of-svg/ <comment><USER2> "Rather than embracing SVG as an alternative, Microsoft pursued a blatant copy of Flash in their too-late-to-the-table Silverlight effort."

The author seems to have missed, apart from an initial mention, VML out completely. VML was Microsoft's SVG alternative in IE 5 through 8, not Sliverlight. Sliverlight was a Flash alternative.

VML, although badly documented, can/could do much of what SVG can do, in a few cases it does it better. It was also pretty complete with IE 6 in 2001. SVG had the first very basic version in Firefox 1.5 at the end of 2005, and needed Firefox 3.0 in 2008 before you could say it was reasonably complete. MS thought they had a head-start and could win the vector battle.

The key thing, as well, with VML is that it was built into IE natively. Getting Adobe SVG or Sliverlight added onto IE into large corporate environments was near on impossible. We, fortunately, decided we didn't trust Adobe prior to them killing the IE SVG plugin and were running fully on VML at that point.

The last 10 years of my working life have been based around SVG and VML, my co-founder and I would tell you a similar story. Especially, regarding word- wrap in SVG, it's our top pain point as well. It forced us to use HTML as foreign objects in SVG to get word wrap. Of course, IE never supported FOs, Edge has only just added it.

<comment><USER3> Interestingly, "VML is Microsoft's contribution to the creation of the SVG standard." I'd never heard of it either.

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/bb250524%28v=vs.85%...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/bb250524%28v=vs.85%29.aspx)

Silverlight was probably the last major Microsoft attempt at platform lock-in, but it was too late; arguably it was killed by Apple's platform lock-in barrier on iOS just as much as Flash was.

<comment><USER4> He mentions VML almost right out of the gate, here didn't he? "I have followed the standards for XML-based vector graphics closely. PGML (mainly from Adobe) and VML (mainly from Microsoft),"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Yeah I didn't really see VML as relevant after its very inception. True it was sitting there in IE for an extra decade or two but it never had some sort of resurgence or potential that I saw. Silverlight on the other hand had serious people saying "this is the future!" When VML first came out, it had to be taken seriously. Next to PGML, not so much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An article about rise of SVG with numerous images of SVG drawings, and not a single one of them is an actual SVG :)

<comment><USER6> Maybe because the publishing platform he uses doesn't support uploading/pasting it (e.g escapes xml).

<comment><USER7> I have a few projects where allowing users to upload SVG files like other image types would be useful, but SVGs can contain javascript, so allowing straight SVGs is an XSS vulnerability. I don't know what the correct way is to strip javascript out of SVG files. There must be some library which can parse an SVG, keep only whitelisted non-Javascript-containing properties, and write out the file again, but I can't find it. (What does Wikipedia use?)

<comment><USER5> [https://github.com/cure53/DOMPurify](https://github.com/cure53/DOMPurify)

<comment><USER8> Yeah because sanitizing client side is a great idea.

<comment><USER9> Serious question: whats wrong with that?

<comment><USER10> I think his concern is- since the security program would need to run on the attacker's computer, the attacker may simply opt not to use it, circumvent it. That being said, I don't see why it can't be used to sanitize requests to the server.

<comment><USER11> Well, if you are worried about xss, that is a case of an attacker's code running on a victim's machine. If they process svgs through the lib before adding them to the dom, that would be one way to prevent the xss attack. This seems to be what DOMPurify are suggesting based on their documentation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think a lot of credit for SVG's resurrection goes to Mike Bostock for making it the core of his visualization technology. Obviously D3 is the big SVG thing now, but his 2009 work on Protovis also relied on SVG, as did Polymaps in 2010.

I argued with Mike back then that SVG was a bad choice because it didn't work in MSIE and it was sort of a forgotten technology everywhere else. Fortunately he didn't pay any attention to me. SVG is particularly handy because it lets Javascript create and alter graphics using a DOM representation. That's something you really can't do in Canvas or WebGL without reinventing parts of what DOM does.

</comment><comment><USER13> I suggest that SVG missed it's true calling - as a modern vector animation platform. D3 is a good example of that kind of use, but I think it had a lot more potential. The ability to debug your graphics as elements can be very useful, and you get a lot of functionality built-in (e.g. DOM events).

As an example, see this unfinished asteroids SVG I wrote in '09 (before <canvas> was generally available):

[http://public.codenazi.fastmail.fm/asteroids_dynamic.svg](http://public.codenazi.fastmail.fm/asteroids_dynamic.svg)

(seriously, it's not actually a finished game - damage is disabled, there's no levels/etc, but you can move with the arrows, shoot with space, (useless) shield on x)

The problem was the (slow) reflow every time you changed the DOM. I tried a few ideas to batch changes or pre-allocating elements, but browsers just couldn't run it consistently smooth enough at the time. It's somewhat better now - maybe I should actually finish it...

<comment><USER14> Agreed. I would love to see web apps start moving to SVG. I am not a web developer myself so I could be wrong, but having played with SVG a bit, it seems SO much more suitable for making web apps than the HTML5/CSS morass we are stuck in now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For SVG to truly rise, it needs better font/text support. It should be easy to programmatically determine the width of a string of text in a given font. Unfortunately, it is not. You can go look how libraries like D3.js do it. But ultimately, pixel-perfect text with SVG is difficult/impossible. I'd really like to know if I'm wrong about that.

On the positive side, ReactJS plays great with SVG. I'm working on some basic line charts that I want ReactJS-managed so I can render them server-side too. My line chart isn't done but I tried the server-side rendering and it's working great.

<comment> jarek-foksa textElement.getBBox().width and textElement.getBoundingClientRect().width should give you the text width in user and client space.

<comment><USER15> Have you tried them though? Now check it out with kerning and/or italics. Do you see overhanging when you draw the rectangular box found via the API? Good example is strings that end with a character like f.

Works in theory. In practice, it does not. That is what I found but again, I'd be happy to be wrong.

<comment> jarek-foksa That's interesting, the computed bbox seems to be slightly off on Chrome when I apply "italic" font style.

<comment><USER15> When working on it a year ago at another employer, we had a list of edge cases. I don't recall them all but some were off by quite a bit. Enough so that the work around was to do everything in SVG except text and use plain DOM position on top for text. That was a bit better. It would be wonderful to do everything in SVG.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The only thing holding back SVG is laptops. Most phones have enough pixel density that SVGs look great and are the right choice for most non-text, non- photo assets. But pixel density is low enough on most laptops that they look fuzzy. Low-end tablets have the same issue but no one really cares about hi-if experiences on those devices.

I think it often comes down to what's the easiest asset workflow that gets us a good result. From that perspective, 1x raster + 2x raster is less work than 1x raster + SVG

<comment><USER17> Why does an SVG look fuzzier than a bitmap at low resolutions? Is it because of the lack of anti-aliasing?

<comment><USER18> Because bitmaps target a specific resolution they can be tweaked so that features are aligned to pixel boundaries resulting in less anti-aliasing.

Truetype fonts are an example of a vector format that can still look sharp at arbitrary resolutions because they can include hinting programs that align the control points to pixel boundaries. This is why fonts tend to look sharper on Windows and Linux than MacOS X. Linux and Windows default to strong hinting, and MacOS X uses only slight hinting, preferring accurate shapes to sharpness.

<comment><USER19> > Linux and Windows default to strong hinting, and MacOS X uses only slight > hinting, preferring accurate shapes to sharpness.

I know you already know these things, but for the sake of discussion (or other people).

Linux allows you configure hinting. It's true that by default (depending on how you define default) you get no hinting, but no reasonable distribution that I know of has shipped with that default for the past 7 years. Quite the opposite in my experience. Linux fonts (thankfully) look more like OS X fonts than Windows fonts.

Unfortunately, this configuration usually happens in some Gnome/Unity/XFCE/KDE configuration format, so if you want to use a better window manager with no DE, you sometimes have to recreate this from scratch, although, as someone who obsesses over font rendering and doesn't like the DEs, this is easier now than in 2000.

And then you have Google Chrome who just ships with its own font rendering. Gah.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I see a big security problem with SVG: browsers allow executing scripts in SVG files in site security context, so you have to check for a lot of script execution vectors in SVG before you allow uploading user files.

[https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/4aa9e1/includes/...](https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/4aa9e1/includes/upload/UploadBase.php#L1128)

[https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/4aa9e1/includes/...](https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/4aa9e1/includes/upload/UploadBase.php#L1293)

<comment><USER21> my understanding is that svg in <img> is safe but prevents script execution

svg in iframe + srcdoc + sandbox gives you sortof-inline svg with separate security contexts.

only plain inlined svg should be a security risk.

<comment><USER20> If you host SVG file on the same domain as the main site, I can give a direct link to the SVG file and your browser will execute arbitrary JavaScript in that context.

<comment><USER21> I think in that case setting the CSP sandbox header to "allow-scripts" would have the same effect as the iframe sandbox attribute and allow script execution in the SVG but prevent same-origin access and various other things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Where is native support for iOS and Android? Why do we bother generating the same assets for different screen densities? Am I the only one who wants SVGs on mobile?

<comment><USER23> Everything supports SVG 1.1 these days (the end of the article talks about this).

[http://caniuse.com/#feat=svg](http://caniuse.com/#feat=svg)

<comment><USER24> I think the OP means in the native SDKs for those platforms.

<comment><USER22> Correct!

<comment><USER25> [https://github.com/jmenter/JAMSVGImage](https://github.com/jmenter/JAMSVGImage)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> No mention of retina screens? In my experience it has pushed to use font and svg on the web.

<comment><USER27> This and the android device fragmentation (yes, also for resolutions and pixel density) is what pushed me to start replacing raster images for SVGs in all my web and hybrid mobile apps. I guess being quite good at Illustrator helped me to make the jump.

I don't bother using jpg's, png's of gifs anymore. Whenever I can, I use vector designs exported to SVGs (backgrounds, custom iconfonts, logos, shapes, animations, etc...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Corel had a serious SVG effort during this early period around 2002-2004. They created a SVG Viewer and tooling around an initiative known as Smart Graphics.

Here's a Press Release about it: [http://www.corel.com/uk/pdfs/press/79.pdf](http://www.corel.com/uk/pdfs/press/79.pdf)

</comment><comment> jarek-foksa I'm currently working on an SVG authoring tool written in JavaScript. You can check the project on [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/boxy- svg/gaoogdonm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/boxy- svg/gaoogdonmngmdlbinmiclicjpbjhgomg)

</comment><comment><USER25> 1\. ForeignObject support still sucks.

2\. WebGL and even Canvas are significantly more performant. I realize that's comparing apples and oranges... Still, if I had a choice for any data visualization project today I'd use WebGL rendering, or ThreeJS etc.

<comment><USER29> _WebGL and even Canvas are significantly more performant._

It did seem rather unfair of the article to bash Microsoft/IE so much over SVG support, when actually today the performance and sometimes rendering quality in IE is dramatically better than the likes of Chrome and Firefox.

But in any case, you're right, performance is a significant real world concern if you're using SVG for anything beyond very simple diagrams or line art.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> We use SVG all over the place, but then we have the great privilege of being able to tell our clients to only use modern browsers. It's pretty nice to be able to specify one graphic for use at all pixel densities that never gets blurry.

<comment><USER31> Oh yeah. I work for a web agency and, if I could, I would just stop using images and use only SVG. Sadly, we still need to push some visuals as large.jpg + mobile.jpg and use media query...

<comment><USER32> Why not build your sites using SVG and render your bitmap images from those SVG files?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> One of the early successes of svg, iirc, was its adoption by Linux window managing software.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think another factor in the rise of SVG was it being used in illustration programs most notably Inkscape and its predecessor Sodipodi.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have worked with SVG extensively, mostly through Raphael but also with Snap and D3.

It might not be a perfect standard, but it's a glorious feature set the web needs.

</comment><comment><USER35> Should this be called the rise and fall and rise of SVG?

</comment><comment><USER36> Or also read W3C's version of the SVG Origin Story:

[http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/WG/wiki/Secret_Origin_of_SVG](http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/WG/wiki/Secret_Origin_of_SVG)

<comment><AUTHOR> Or Alex Danilo's awesome history: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV3GSxbW_-A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV3GSxbW_-A)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Google renders their homepage with SVG now, don't they?

Right click on google.com and do a view source.

<comment><USER17> The logo is a png. The page is a giant wad of incomprehensible, minified javascript. There are two references in there to SVGsomething, so who knows.</comment></comment>


When C# Dresses Up Like Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wekeroad.com/2010/08/09/csharps-new-clothes

<comment><USER2> I've never once used the dynamic keyword in a C# program, but I do ponder on it a lot. The new dynamic features in C# being able to provide a "method_missing" along with the emphasis on "what it does" over "what it is" is really intriguing to me. Can this be leveraged in any meaningful way in C#? Has anyone given it a real try yet? If so, should we even bother? Why not just stick with a language like Ruby then? It feels awkward to say the least to start doing this in a language like C#. Although most C# apps dive into reflection quite a bit to pull off similar functionality.

I am currently working on a Silverlight app using RIA Services. Here on the server side you have to have each CRUD method for each type you are surfacing. You can't do

            public IQueryable<T> Get<T>() { }

It has to be

            public IQueryable<Foo> GetFoos() { }
            public IQueryable<Bar> GetBars() { }

Same with all update, insert and delete methods. It drives me insane that I literally have several thousand lines of CRUD methods. Can some kind of dynamic solution jump in here and help? I doubt it, but I can dream. (Generics don't work here because RIA services can't support sending generic arguments across the wire).

<comment><USER3> That depends on what the GetFoos are doing. Why couldn't you do IQueryable<ISerializable>?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I really like about the dynamic features of C# is that dynamic objects are not just simply expando objects; you can write your own dynamic object implementations and specify their behaviour. You can create dynamic types that behave like types in various other languages which is very useful when you're trying to interface code from those languages.

</comment><comment><USER5> F#'s dynamic support is more interesting than C#. Instead of giving you yet more special-case compiler rules, F# provides dynamic lookup and assignment operators, but you provide the implementation. That way you can implement what you'd like to happen in the scenarios where you want dynamic access with convenient syntax.

I've found MS's less-typed APIs like MVC to be more annoying to use. Taking "object" everywhere? Just means the tools (IntelliSense/compiler) can't provide the info I need, and I'm forced to go read documentation for small things.

Especially silly is the whole "use an anonymous type as a dictionary" idea. (E.g, SomeFunction(new { width=100, height=200, style="bla"}). The only reason I can see a need for this is because the language doesn't have handy list/sequence and tuple syntax.

There are good places for using dynamic typing. Unfortunately, it seems MS is mainly doing it for interop and as a patch for other annoyances.

<comment><USER6> What are you talking about?

In C# you can make your objects implement IDynamicObject with this signature ...

         public interface IDynamicObject {
              MetaObject GetMetaObject(Expression parameter);
         }

That returned MetaObject is responsible for defining the runtime dispatching, and you can do it however you want. The "binders" defined in MetaObject are returning Expressions, which means that the DLR library also has a chance to do inline caching.

F# uses the same API.

> _Just means the tools (IntelliSense/compiler) can't provide the info I need, > and I'm forced to go read documentation for small things._

Yeah, reading documentation in this day and age. The horror!

<comment><USER5> Interesting, thank for the info on that interface. F# doesn't use that though; it simply has syntax support for a user-defined dynamic operator. That is, I can do foo?bar and I'll get bar as a string and do what I please. The types you mention don't even appear in the F# compiler source.

As far as reading documentation, I shouldn't be forced to lookup tiny things here and there because an API decides to use object type for each parameter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is definitely neat that you can take a language like C# and make it dynamic... but it would seem to be a lot more sane to just use the IronPython or IronRuby, or even the plain Python or Ruby runtimes themselves. Use a language for what it's good at?

<comment><USER8> Part of the reason dynamic exists is to integrate with dynamic languages like Iron* in a saner way. This allows you to use C# for what it is good for, Ruby for what it is good for, and cleanly integrate the two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's the rationale for adding dynamic typing to C#?

Is it only to support interop with dynamic languages (Iron*)?

I'm not against the idea but it seems like a minor use-case to add a major language feature for. Unless there's something else I'm missing.

In the past, C# added new language features in order to support some specific goal.

Extension methods, lambdas and expression trees were added mainly to support LINQ. They're good features on their own, for sure, but the reason they were added is because the language team wanted to do LINQ.

What's the larger goal here?

<comment><USER10> I've tried to come up with which use-cases make sense for C#'s dynamic as well.. Where I mostly could figure that it would really help is with COM interop. Working with something like MS Office is fairly painful in C#3, since you have to pass the "Missing" argument to each of the 20-30 arguments that every method can take, and cast the result of every method.. The named arguments feature would also be useful there.

I've been fortunate enough to avoid having to interop with COM that directly recently, so haven't had to find out whether or not it makes a difference.</comment></comment>


Taking TODOs from code to tickets/stories - <AUTHOR> http://oceansaremadefromstreams.posterous.com/a-system-to-parse-a-code-basess-todos-and-cre This is mainly aimed at people who have lots of TODOs in their code.
Not primarily those that don't.
You'll probably be wanting to use a ticketing system like Redmine or Trac too.
All feedback welcome, though pref not too many flames for NOT putting TODOs in code, though I try to address that in the blog post. Thanks. <comment><AUTHOR> This is mainly aimed at people who have lots of TODOs in their code.

Not primarily those that don't.

You'll probably be wanting to use a ticketing system like Redmine or Trac too.

All feedback welcome, though pref not too many flames for NOT putting TODOs in code, though I try to address that in the blog post. Thanks.</comment>


Why Top Talent Leaves - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2012/01/18/why-top-talent-leaves-top-10-reasons-boiled-down-to-1/ <comment><USER3> "Poor people management" isn't specific enough, and it doesn't explain why top contributors are more likely to leave than mediocre contributors. It's a very specific form of poor management: treating technical people as interchangeable, and therefore assuming that all technical people are mediocre, and therefore assuming that maturity and judgment only exist in management. When people really, _really_ swallow the Kool-Aid of management as the ultimate masters of the universe, as they must in certain large corporations, they start to think of management as the final step in human development: infant, child, adolescent, worker, manager. Some people linger on one step of maturation or another (literally "retarded") and that's fine, as long as they accept the natural order of things, right?

Apparently that approach works for some corporations. Getting rid of top contributors at least makes management's belief structure valid and gives their world a kind of simplicity and intellectual coherence that's hard to achieve on a large scale. (If you can't help believing something that isn't true, you had better make sure it _is_ true in the part of the world you care about.)

Good managers know the people they manage and know their diverse capabilities. That's hard work, though, so it isn't for everyone.

<comment><USER4> >> _treating technical people as interchangeable, and therefore assuming that all technical people are mediocre, and therefore assuming that maturity and judgment only exist in management....the ultimate masters of the universe, as they must in certain large corporations, they start to think of management as the final step in human development: infant, child, adolescent, worker, manager._

Back here in India, this mentality is so common and prevalent that it assumed if you don't become a manager within 5 years of you joining the industry you are fit for nothing. Also managerial posts are supposed to be mean't for the best as you mention _masters of the universe_.

Many people even express shock, when someone above 27-28 codes or is involved in some tech work. Its considered as a sign of incompetence and under performance, like as though the person isn't really ready for the 'actual' stuff yet.

This has already let to huge problems in getting work done in large Indian IT firms. There just aren't good people anymore.

<comment><USER5> "Many people even express shock, when someone above 27-28 codes or is involved in some tech work. Its considered as a sign of incompetence and under performance, like as though the person isn't really ready for the 'actual' stuff yet."

Such odd thinking. So... you do coding for a few years - <USER2> stupid/wrong/mistake-filled code - to work your way up to "manager", then oversee people who are also doing stuff wrong. And if you actually learn during those first few years, and, say, get to 30 and are _good_ at developing and actually can _develop_ well, you're an outcast/outsider?

What other industries does India have this same mindset in?

<comment><USER6> I don't think this is specific to India. Promoting good developers to more managerial roles seems to be a common HR mistake.

Sometimes these developers are good managers as well, but arguably more often they aren't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Keep in mind that there will always be a delay between when you've unalterably lost someone good and when that person actually leaves the company. Financial, social, mental, and professional inertia is a real thing. And a job is in many ways a relationship like a romantic relationship, like a marriage.

When is a marriage irretrievably broken? If you take the moment that the divorce actually happened and you rewind say, 1 day, it seems unlikely that you could get the couple to reconcile then if they were irreconcilable just the day after. And in all likelihood you'd have to go back years to get to a point where reconciliation would be possible, where one or the other of them had not made the decision in their heart, perhaps without even consciously being aware of it, that the relationship was over and on a denouement to eventual permanent separation.

The same dynamics apply to employment. If you rewind the clock one day or one year from the point of separation you probably cannot fundamentally change the glide slope that results in an exit from the company. And like marriage and divorce the "reasons" are probably not so simple, not down to one solitary action or cause. More likely it's due to an incompatibility of life goals, lack of mutual respect, failure to communicate openly with one another, and problems with basic chemistry.

I have seen employees (good, high-caliber talent) who are immensely passionate about their job and they keep throwing themselves into the maw of rejection that their local corporate culture exudes. They keep banging away trying to make things better. Nine times out of ten they get rejected outright, and the 10th time they get dragged over broken glass getting one little change made. That sort of thing wears on a person just as surely as fighting with a spouse drags on a person. And one day things just start to click a little differently and they see a future where they are no longer working at that company, and they don't hate the idea.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you in principle. But an employment isn't the same as a relationship with a Person.

Life in most large corporates starts with heightened expectation in the first few weeks/days and from there on its a constant decline and a complete mismatch in what the person expected and what the actual reality is.

My experiences have been horrible, I've seen a never ending timeline of nepotism, biased behaviors and partiality in large companies. Endless bureaucracy, politics and socialist style of 'one works, everyone else leeches on him' style of working very common.

Its this bitter fact is what causes the maximum attrition of good people from the company and not the inevitable boredom that happens with historical baggage.

<comment><USER8> That explains IMHO the average cycle of 5 years per employer. Year one: Your happy that everything is new, you learn a lot and are releaved to have quit your old job. Year two: You start to see the cracks, but you are still motivated and full of energy, right? You try to fix it and still happy. Year three:You can't fix everything and you start to hit walls. You realize things aren't actually that different from before but still different. you hang on. Year four: After a possible internal change you finally realize that it's just more of the same in a different colour, you start to think about another change. Year five:the same shit as before, without a perspective, at least non you like, you find something else. The cycle starts again.

Good people management as discribed in the article and the linked articles can mitigate this. Really good companies may add a cpuple of years, perfect ones may retain you forever if they exist at all. But sooner or later you will get something different, not necessarily better. Sad thing is that alo tof companies, and I don't mean your direct boss here but companies in general, do near to nothing about it. The end result being that the whole system is nearing the absolute average, the talents either being bosses (if they adapt, pgs essay on popularity comes to my mind), burned out and disillusioned (pretty likely) or start-up founders (where possible and hopefully successfull).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've come to a pragmatic conclusion about this problem:

When an organization becomes very large, serious individual compromises for the sake of organizational effeciency become necessary. These compromises happen for the sake of allowing teams interact with hundreds or thousands of other developers to produce a large product (often at the oversight of a nontechnical executive). This is a serious turnoff to star workers who are self confident and prefer to do things their own way. Said star workers know their own worth and would prefer to work on their own terms again sans constant individual compromise, so they leave.

Mediocre programmers, lacking the confidence to leave, have a much larger threshold for such individual compromises for the sake of the organization. So they stay.

<comment><USER10> There comes a point where having a few exceptional programmers is no longer enough to deliver a project, so more and more process starts getting wrapped around the software life-cycle to manage the larger team.

Striking a balance between enough process to keep everything on track and allow PMS to make predictions about the project timeline while not stifling your best programmers with a system they end up working against is not an easy task.

<comment><USER11> If I'm a homebuilder and in my crew I have 5 average-ability builders and one exceptional tile guy, I can't be expected to let the tile guy run the show. I might treat him differently -- give him plans and let him run with them, let him be responsible for meeting his own deadlines and so forth, but in no circumstance can I let that tile guy have total free reign over a home project... and in all honesty, he probably doesn't want it.

I'm not sure the analogy works, but this was my struggle moving from startups to enterprise environments. Personal contribution matters, but there can be no heroes, because the totality of the business is immense. This thinking requires a bit of abstraction on the business side and coming to terms with the fact that you're a member of a team (and there are many other teams all with different relative importance). A cog in the machine? Perhaps, but a startup is just a tiny machine, and when you scale, as is the nature of a successful startup, you do so by adding cogs and thus increasing the size of your machine.

I firmly believe that process doesn't really keep things "on track" as much as it forces the business the choose between competing priorities, and it forces communication. It doesn't matter if it's Agile, XP, whatever -- you need three things for process to work: 1) defined owners with the authority to set priorities, 2) defined intervals when those priorities can't be changed, and 3) agreement between the involved parties that they'll stick to the process.

<comment><USER12> that's the point - the analogy does not work. A difference in performance between an average worker and an exceptional one is not very large. The difference between an average programmer and a good one can be between having or not having stuff working.

Precisely because of worker analogy, people leave.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Eight of the most important words I learned in management, leadership, and choosing jobs, from a professor of mine:

"People join good projects and leave bad management"

<comment><USER14> lovely quote. Is there a source for that?

<comment><USER13> Thanks.

I posted a few words on it a while ago -- <http://joshuaspodek.com/people- join-good-projects-leave> \-- that says the professor I heard it from, Michael Feiner, plus links to more about him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Woefully incomplete. The article doesn't seem to recognize that talented folks can leave because their own goals have changed. Perhaps an engineer is ready to try new challenges that simply aren't applicable at the organization, or perhaps a manager has had a lifestyle change that drives her to resign.

Anytime somebody tells me "there's only one reason this happens," I get suspicious. Life is far more complicated than that.

<comment><USER16> Agree. I am leaving, not because of management but because I want to begin a startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Top talent leave an organization when they're badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring."

Am I the only one who thought that this was extremely unspecific? Many factors go into managing an organization- I'm curious as to which factors I should focus on to help motivate & reinforce top talent. The only details provided by the author are accountability and reward systems.

<comment><USER18> The company I work for now is a big, fast growing and very profitable corporation. It also has a problem retaining top talent.

While big and growing and profitable it is noticeably disturbed that the best people keep leaving. It is trying to fix that and failing miserably.

Here is what is making me leave.

1\. Severe lack of control over how I work. A new, crappy source control tool is being shoved down our throats over our objections.

2\. Because it is not a tech company, but a company which happens to have software development department, IT has washed their hands of us, and is in fact in open warfare with us. Fun!

3\. _Software is always seen as the problem. Just don't take it personally._ This was told to me by a very senior manager who has been here for many, many years.

4\. Official corporate policy STRONGLY discourages contact between software and the rest of the company. Contact I might use to try and fix that "software is always the problem" perception. But nope, not allowed to try.

5\. The director of engineering tends to undercut us at random instances. For example, while I was the tech lead on a project he decided certain documents must not leave the company because they ware too sensitive. I was not consulted. It made my job 10x more difficult. Other documents which contained the exact same information + more, were sent out like free hot cakes.

6\. A couple of hyper confrontational, screaming, perfectionist control freaks which are cronies of the director of engineering and I happen to report to one of them. Not actually the worst boss possible. Within that loud control freak perfectionist there is a mostly rational engineer. Who is also very technically competent. He just sucks big time as a manager and dealing with him is incredibly emotionally exhausting.

At one point he become so frustrated with another member of our team he literally gave up on him and dumped managing him in my lap. My management of him consisted of talking to him calmly. This resulted in him over-delivering on all his assigned tasks.

7\. Corporate red tape bullshit bureaucracy.

8\. My team has a few open positions (go figure!) one of them happens to be damn near identical to mine, the position is advertised for 20K more than I am getting paid. This is after I have asked for a raise. After I took a huge project that was supposed to be a train wreck, saved it, shipped it on time, and made a ton of money for the company.

I have an interview with another smaller company at the end of this week.

<comment><USER11> Wow, do you work at the company where I worked last? It's disheartening to see how common the situation is.

> the position is advertised for 20K more than I am getting paid

In fairness, it's pretty much accepted that you have to switch companies to get a sizable (say, 10%+) raise in IT. Not that it should be this way... but I think it's that way pretty much everywhere.

<comment><USER19> >In fairness, it's pretty much accepted that you have to switch companies to get a sizable (say, 10%+) raise in IT

More people need to understand this. Slaving away hoping to "stand out" doesn't work in IT because of caps on compensation increases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I prefer Marc Andreessen's reason: Companies that have a retention problem usually have a winning problem. Or rather, a "not winning" problem.

Source: [http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to- big-...](http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-big- companies-part-2-reta) (original seems to be deleted from blog.pmarca.com)

<comment><USER18> The company I work for now is very profitable and growing fast. I can not wait to leave. If I cared mostly about money, I would want to stay.

<comment><USER21> I agree; I think the claim that "winning" is what retains people is vaguely on the right track, but the focus on company growth and profits is off-base. A sense that the company is doing _interesting things_ and is _where the action is_ is fairly important, and may or may not be correlated with those things. To take a classic (if admittedly overused) example, nobody at Bell Labs got wealthy from working there; they all made a decent living, but it was emphatically a middle-class living, with no stock-options or six-figure salaries (even when inflation-adjusted). What kept people there was a feeling that this was the best place in the world to work, and at the center of interesting-stuff-happening.

<comment><USER22> Yes, but Bell Labs is not a role model. (Many managers were a hassle there too ) There can't be more the than 5% of the industry doing what Bell Labs did or MSR does. So the interesting question for the 95% is, what makes the best of the rest, doing boring but profitable work, better than the rest of the rest? Even at Google, a very desirable corporate job, many engineers aren't really inventing the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You can gauge someone's ranking in an organization explicitly and implicitly.

Sometimes implicit beats explicit.

The explicit is performance reviews, which can be cherry-picked. The implicit is the list of projects someone was entrusted to work with. People will more freely give the gamut of projects they've worked on than the gamut of performance reviews they've gotten, and most clever people realize this, so after a few dud projects they look elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER24> "what do you aspire to bring to the world?"

Yes. Yes. Yes. One thousand times, yes. If you're asking me to dedicate my waking hours to something, be clear about what that something is. Hint: It's not your corporation.

I've interviewed at several companies, and the only ones I rejected out of hand are the ones that are just "doing business" and have ceased to chase some vision.

Some companies do really cool stuff, but have no vision (e.g. most of Lockheed Martin) whereas there are companies who do something seemingly less exciting (e.g. Yelp) that have a vision for how they're going to change the world.

In Yelp's case, they're helping great businesses thrive and be found and holding bad companies accountable. As an Aero guy, I'd be predisposed to Lockheed, but frankly, when I talked to Yelp, that kind of thinking made all the difference.

</comment><comment><USER25> "Top talent leave an organization when they're badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring." Can't get closer to the truth.

</comment><comment><USER26> Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. Manage those correctly for your employees and you'll have a happy organization.

</comment><comment><USER27> top talent is like an $800 coffee machine. If you ain't gonna use it or appreciate the fine coffee it makes, there are others who will. and the coffee machine insists of being appreciated every moment .

<comment><USER28> That analogy is awful. You can buy a $800 coffee machine, and put it on the factory floor unused for 10 years, and it will not make a difference.

<comment><USER29> Actually that seems like a good analogy. If you have a $800 coffee machine but are serving it to people who won't appreciate it, it's going to waste. I've heard HR people asking about how to attract top talent when all the company does is build simple CRUD apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> In a word: Asshattery. More often but not always, brought on by shrinking resources -- whether real, or perceived/projected/created by management as part of a agenda regardless of financial state.

</comment><comment><USER31> Because top talent isn't enough. You also need up-to-date skills, connections, past recognition and opportunity. Most talented people I know live in fear of never getting these things and becoming failures. So people tend to take a fail-fast approach to career changes and move as soon as they aren't getting these things.

<comment><USER32> The problem with this is that past recognition and connections take time.</comment></comment>