Ask HN: Joining a Late Series Startup in SV. Please Help - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
I came across this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19624164 and after reading the horror stories I am really in a fix whether this is a step in the right direction.
I cant reveal more details but here are a few things.
1. The startup is an interesting space and ARR of $XX millions.
2. There are backed by very good SV VC`s who have a good track record of ensuring companies go public.
3. I will be in a position to declutter the tech stack/work on a couple of new exciting products and potential room for growth is good.
4. I have had a couple of meetings with the execs; I am impressed with their track record and everyone seems genuine and honest.
I am taking a pay cut to join the company and I would have to spend > $100K to exercise my options at the joining date which I am told is the best way to avoid AMT and has other tax benefits if the company were to grow exponentially in the next years.
I would have a take a decent chunk of money out of my savings to pay this amount, my question is what risk factors should I consider; Usually people only talk about the negative experiences, so please give me a reality check both good/bad;
Thanks! <comment><USER2> So yellow/red flags:

1\. ARR in the XX mil, but you are taking a pay cut?

2\. You will declutter the tech stack and work on exciting products?. Usually in a startup (or any other company) - you touched it, you own it. So once you declutter the tech stack, I am not sure that you will have time to work on the other exciting projects (or even if they will still be relevant).

3\. Why do you even need to declutter the tech stack? what happen to the original programmers? what happen to proper process? do they have unit tests? CI/CD? Can you sandbox this code in a micro service and just call it?

4\. The option thing looks like they are increasing your switching cost. I.e. once you buy the options than you will be limited in your moves both inside and outside the company.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. I should have been clear, I am not taking a pay cut in the base but the overall pay(base + rsus)

2\. I am glad they were upfront and honest about it. The manager said 50:50 split.

4\. Yeah I agree with this.

<comment><USER2> So the manager can be honest, but it is usually not even his call. The company will likely to put a lot of value on the maintenance side (which bring the money) and less on new projects (which get postponed if there are any issues in the maintenance side).

I do not think that the manager is lying to you. TODAY he see it as 50/50\. But what happen if the cluttered project is late? What happen if there is a need for new features in the cluttered project. I would accept the job only if you are ok staying in the cluttered project team for at least a year or two.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the insight you are dead right about the managements view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Don't spend any money until you are sure you'll be getting a return -- def. not on day one.

I've never actually heard of a compensation structure which has >$100k of options to even spend on day one. Most of the time they are vested on a schedule.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's 1 year cliff for vesting but apparently one can excercise at the current strike price on day one and that's pretty common among other startups with folks who want to avoid the AMT

<comment><USER4> It's "83(b) election." It's interesting a late stage startup is offering this. But do NOT do it.

Do this only for very early stage startups where your total expense might be a few thousand dollars for maybe 1% or more of the startup. At most, you lose a few thousand dollars.

Spending $100K to optimize possible future taxes is a bad idea. At this stage, you should just think that future AMT is a good problem to have. Put the $100K in safer instruments.

<comment><AUTHOR> At some point in the future, if it becomes clear that the company is on path for an ipo I could pay for it then.

I will hold off until then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cash is king - keep your savings in the account. We're really overdue for a rebalancing of the economy and you want the cash at that time. That is a gaurantee. This startup, where it could succeed will more likely not go public.

Keep your current job or get a job that pays you better, but hold on to your CASH!

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't take a pay cut.

<comment><USER6> Big companies are offering $400k+ for E5 (mid-senior) engineers. No startup in the world will be able to match that in liquid compensation.

<comment><USER7> Then they should raise enough money to afford their employees. (Or make their equity meaningful, with longer exercise windows or by loaning the money for early exercise).

<comment><AUTHOR> They have raised a significant amount but have been stingy in the stock options grant.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Newzbin (paid usenet search engine) closes due to legal action - <AUTHOR> http://www.newzbin.com <comment><USER2> Since details seem very lacking between the link and the post in the link, here's a short summary Newzbin via Wikiepdia:

"One of the main technologies produced is an XML-based file format called NZB files, which contain a list of messageIDs that are related to specific postings on Usenet. Through the use of these files, Usenet clients are able to directly download material from Usenet without having to pre-fetch the headers for the target group. Thus, the main benefit of the direct link is improving the efficiency of Usenet binaries. It is technologies such as these that are increasing the popularity of Usenet for file sharing."

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

It seems their crime is indexing binaries. This does nothing to stop file sharing through Usenet, just ever so slightly impedes access.

<comment><USER3> I don't know how they get away with this. Google links almost exclusively to copyrighted content, but they're not shut down. Why is Google allowed to exist and other indexes aren't?

<comment><USER4> Google linking to illegally distributed material is incidental - the only similarity is that TPB/etc linking to legally distributable material is also incidental.

<comment><USER5> You're comparing Usenet to The Pirate Bay? One is one of the oldest communications standards on the Internet and the other one is The Pirate Bay.

<comment><USER6> He is comparing torrent indexing sites to usenet indexing sites.

<comment><USER5> Is there evidence that there was any effort on the part of Newzbin or its users to focus the site's resources on illegal material? My impression of the service was that it indexed a large swath of Usenet impartially. Compare this to The Pirate Bay, whose users ask it to track illegal content more often than not. Unless you have evidence that Newzbin specifically targeted illegal material, he _is_ equating Usenet with pirated media.

<comment><USER4> Well there's the bit where a court found them to be guilty of doing just that.

Then there's the bit where as a messageboard it's long been superceded by forums and other forms of communication.

Then there's the bit where according to wikipedia over 5 terabytes a day of binaries get posted, and although I have no evidence somehow I don't think that's linux isos.

Then there's popular culture which constantly touts it as some kind of exclusive club 'the man' mustn't learn about because that way it'll stay 'safe' to use.

<comment><USER5> A court did not find them guilty of doing just that. A court found them guilty of knowingly profiting from copyright infringement. If I sell off my grandfather's estate, which I know to include a fake Rolex, I would also have knowingly profited from copyright infringement, but I don't think you would say that an estate sale is also equivalent to The Pirate Bay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very sad day indeed. One of the few online services I was more then happy to pay for.

<comment><USER8> nzbmatrix is excellent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> <http://newzleech.com> \- I've always used newzleech. They were also shut down for a while but they are back now.

</comment><comment><USER10> Fuck. I love usnet, I hope this isn't the start of a trend

<comment><USER11> the first rule of usenet... don't talk about usenet

<comment><USER12> the second rule of usenet... don't talk about usenet. Thats what killed the big H...

<comment><USER13> The Big Red H? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications></comment></comment></comment></comment>


ThyssenKrupp Multi – world's first rope-free elevator [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7QlAsxJP-g <comment><USER2> The elevator industry has been playing around with multi-cab systems for many years. The Otis Odyssey system (1997) [1] had cabs that could move both horizontally and vertically. The cabs were more like containers carried vertically in ordinary elevators and slid out sideways for horizontal movement. Otis built a full-sized prototype, but nobody ever ordered one.

Otis considered ropeless elevators, but in 1997 it looked like it would increase the energy consumption by 7X. Without counterweights, the motors have to do a lot more work. But maybe Multi can recover some of the energy via regeneration.

There are automated parking garages that can move cars sideways.[2] Those go back to the 1960s, and tend to be high-maintenance.

The Multi system looks really complicated mechanically. All those moving parts. Worse, they're on vertical surfaces in the shafts, where maintenance will be difficult. With regular elevators, the high-maintenance items are in the machine room. This will probably go into some prestige tower, but not be replicated much.

[1] [http://www.barkermohandas.com/images/Integrated%20Vertical%2...](http://www.barkermohandas.com/images/Integrated%20Vertical%20&%20Horizontal%20Transport.pdf)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3vtpGtyw1k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3vtpGtyw1k)

<comment><USER3> I am wondering if the solution is to use modular counterweights that can also be moved sideways and swapped around too.

<comment><USER4> I wonder how you wonder to use that.

Do you know the principle of a traditional elevator, and the role of a counterweight?

<comment><USER3> Yes I do know how a counterweights work. In principle if the elevator can be shift sideways then the counterweights can be too. Of course when the elevator goes up and down it will need to be linked to a counterweight, but as long as this linkage can be made transient then should work.

<comment><USER4> I am not convinced by your understanding.

The elevator conserves energy by having a counterweight, and the work needed for moving the elevator (disregarding the loss of the system) is 0 if the elevator is empty and the counterweight is the same weight of the elevator.

This is true for the length of the rope.

Now if you have a 99 storey building, with side moving elevators, you cannot have counterweights, as the ropes would be in each others' way when moving sideways. Either having a rope in way for 99 storeys in worst case, or with shorter ropes you increase complexity even further and negate the energy saving. if travelling further than the length of the rope.

The only advantage of this design is the lack of ropes. The downside is increased energy use.

Regarding transient linkings: even more complexity, and possibly the cabins need to wait for the counterweight to arrive, and hand over the counterweights? Even scheduling complexity is increased. Totally useless, as to have it a bit feasable you need to sill keed the functionality of counterweightless motion.

You can understand this by drawing if still not clear.

<comment><USER3> You don't need ropes to have a counterweight. The same effect can be accomplished with track and gears.

I do agree with you that having independent counterweights would increase the complexity and the likelihood of a breakdown. Ultimately any solution would depend on the value being provided by the solution verse the increased cost or either maintenance or energy costs.

More importantly the purpose of me suggesting this solution was not to solve the elevator problem (I am sure lots of engineers have thought more deeply about this than me), but to discuss the problem.

<comment><USER4> Oh, OK. I think that an energy recuperation system and simply a "vertical railway" is simpler and more robust overall. No ropes needed just electric wiring, and elevators moving down are the counter weights. But this is basically what is demonstrated.

What I thought parent meant was using counterweights in the more traditional sense.

And yes, moving down also returns the energy, after all gravitational field is conservative. The real use of the counterweight is that the power needed to lift is less (you only need to work to lift the cargo), which means cost savings in motors, wiring, electricity, etc. Those saving by a mechanical counterweight system cannot be had with this setup without insane complexity. With today's solid state power electronics it is simpler and more reliable to use an electronic solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The big benefit is that you get more than one elevator per shaft. For skyscrapers the amount of floor space wasted by elevators grows exponentially by the number of floors.

Say you have a 5 story building that needs a one shaft elevator. 5 floors tiles 100 sqft per floor is 500 sqft of wasted shaft space. Then say you have a 10 story building that needs two shafts. Now you are wasting 10 floors times two shafts or 2,000 sqft. And so on.

An old and terrifing solution to this was to use two shafts and run a continuous loop of open door elevators.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro3Fc_yG3p0](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro3Fc_yG3p0)

<comment><USER6> Paternosters. You say terrifying, I say fun.

There's one in Leicester University (not the only one in the UK, I'm sure).

Really not that dangerous, with a cable near the top of each aperture that triggers a stop if it's touched.

<comment><USER7> The SF garage my fiancee parks in has this thing made from an industrial belt, with steps bolted onto it. I think there are quite a few of those in Stuttgart as well, though they are being fazed out. It's very efficient, but not for ze stupits!

<comment><USER8> I saw one like this as a child, in Chicago. As I remember, it was explicitly only for the employees to use to get to the cars, as it was a valet facility.

<comment><USER7> That's what the one I saw was!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The follow up video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OBHUZetYIU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OBHUZetYIU) was a bit more interesting. It shows the mockup system running through a variety of transitions.

I'd be interested in why they decided to make the 'track' as complex as they did. The transition nodes are an amazing mechanism but it seems also a likely failure point.

<comment><USER10> It's explained in another video. Those "tracks" are linear motors, with periodic electro magnetic coils.

Looks like it will be crazily expensive.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "World's first 3D people mover" might be a more appropriate --- and enticing --- title, because "rope-free" can also refer to hydraulic elevators (which have been around for over a century.)

<comment><USER12> As far as I can see, the design only allows 2D movement. If you wanted the lift to move toward or away from the camera, you would need either some kind of 2nd attachment point on a different side.

<comment><USER13> why couldn't a horizontal segment have a curve to change the Z axis by whatever angle you wanted to get to.

Also, they could have a completely circular horizontal segment to move people through an upper level of a round building - like a stadium...

<comment><USER14> Or a vertical segment could have a curve too. Imagine rotating by 45 degrees as you go up ten floors -- suddenly now you're in a completely different plane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Schedulers for Multi must be fun - I'm sure they must have employed a whole research group for solving this problem. Scheduling simple elavator systems is still a problem nowadays, this one? It's so much harder.

<comment><USER16> Sounds like it'd be a fun game

<comment><USER17> [http://play.elevatorsaga.com/](http://play.elevatorsaga.com/)

There you go. Lost so many hours playing this game though.

<comment><USER18> Thank you for sharing this. I've also now lost quite a few hours to it. Also got two of my coworkers into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My dad was is an elevator repair man, has been for the last 33 years. When I asked him what he thought about his job, he said "just like any other, it has its ups and downs"

But after seeing this, now we are going back and forth on the future of the industry!

</comment><comment><USER19> Accelerating and decelerating in line with gravity is a lot more forgiving on the occupants than lateral accelerations. Seems like this would put a big limit on horizontal movement.

<comment><USER9> Depends on whether or not the car can 'tilt' while it is moving sideways (I know they don't show it doing so). If it can then any amount of acceleration can be presented as 'up' and 'down' force to the occupants much like a plane.

<comment><USER20> Well, tilting itself involves acceleration, which will be perceived differently in different parts of the cabin... So there are still and issues.

<comment><USER9> When combined with the acceleration they are indistinguishable. I got a chance to ride in the full motion simulator at NASA Ames and it used this 'trick' to recenter itself after it had made a left or right motion. Inside you felt nothing, like the system was unmoving but outside it was moving the flight pod back to the center of motion so that it had maximum reach for the next maneuver.

I'm sure the TK folks could manage it. The trick is that the 'tilt' of the car on the linear motor would add an additional degree of freedom to deal with. And yet it would be expensive but they seem to have already crossed that bridge :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Beautifully made and well-structured video. In just 120 seconds, they effectively:

I. Set the stage by showing a trend.

II. Describe two premises and derive a logical conclusion from them.

III. Show a product that not only is the objective answer to the conclusion above but also fits perfectly into the initial narrative.

</comment><comment><USER22> Kind of reminds me of IP packets, but of people not bits. They could even travel underground from building to building and then we would have an internet of elevators transmitting packets of people (hopefully with reliable delivery and no dropped packets).

</comment><comment><USER23> So many negative comments for a Saturday. This is a marvel of engineering and deserves a celebration. Humbled by our ability to re-invent more and more. Well done to all involved.

<comment><USER24> Simplicity in design should be what we celebrate, and things that actually make it into production. All this is for now is a slick video.

<comment><USER25> It is actually in production, here's the working test version in a tower they built just for it, by Tom Scott: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI)

And it has it's first production project in the OVG East Side Tower Berlin (though not yet finished building)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The real problem I see with this, is the complexity of the components required to make anything seen in this video is orders of magnitudes more that vertical shaft versions -- thus the cost of an elevator will me massive.

What are the seismic implications - the tolerances on the XY intersections are surely tight.

How the hell would you inspect some of the complex systems.

You would need a sensor car that just roams the tracks measuring tolerance levels - make it a service car that repairmen can be in which has no walls. You'd be more cost effective putting all your large sensor objects in a car as opposed to thousands of them throughout the system

What happens when a rotating intersection piece fails and its the only route a car can take/the piece fails with a car on that portion of track - there is no door/escape/access to the passengers in that scenario.

Also - the building would require extra height to accommodate horizontal passages if the intersection between XY cant happen at ingress/egress points. If they _DO_ happen at such points - what happens when E1 wants to go right and E2 wants to go left. one car need to give way, then get back on track to go... routing conflicts could occur frequently - like the skyway connectors between towers where that Sim takes the car from tower1 to tower2 but he gets out of the middle of a row of doors....

And as mentioned, elevators are already not that cheap - I don think all but the Nakatomi Plaza and Ono Sendai HQ buildings could afford these yet...

Actually - There are buildings with primary structural elements on there external (HSBC Building in Hong Kong, for example) -- So I could see this as an external bolt-on layer to the side of a building - as opposed to a network of tunnels and shafts throughout - but then that eliminates a majority of the horizontal movement, unless it wraps onto two sides of a building...

</comment><comment><USER26> Excellent, looks like we're finally on the path to the turbolifts from _Star Trek_!

<comment> joatmon-snoo I was thinking more along the line of Willy Wonka's glass elevators :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The resulting internal transportation network enabled by this system resembles a public transit tramway system more than it resembles a traditional elevator system - and I'm willing to bet that isn't accidental. As skyscrapers become bigger and more ubiquitous, it seems natural that their internal transit systems would get correspondingly more complex, and borrowing from public transit seems like a perfectly natural way to solve the problem.

Plus, in this system all the elevators are centrally scheduled and therefore there won't be any concern about human drivers fouling up the system :)

<comment><USER28> Interesting point. Buildings that are very large on the horizontal plane (like the Pentagon) have adopted systems of personal transport like bicycles and Segways. But I guess there's no reason why the elevator model shouldn't work horizontally.

Still, elevators in general are more like ridesharing than public transit: they move according to the requests they receive in real time (with some central planning influence), rather than on a schedule set by committee months or years prior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Getting closer to Turbolifts. Canonically they form a network throughout the ship, use induction motors, can also go sideways, have multiple cabins in the shafts, switch routes etc. No inertial dampeners of course.

</comment><comment><USER30> Interesting, they are basically Trains running vertically switching tracks.

</comment><comment><USER31> Impressive video. The implementation looks complicated and might have reliability issues.

Wonder what tech they use for traction while moving vertically.

<comment><USER32> They have to have a good plan for cases when things break and electricity is not available. Firemen and maintenance crews must be able to rescue people from the elevators stuck in positions with minimum training and tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Anytime I see something about elevators I am reminded of this amazingly detailed, and highly engrossing article on the life and history of elevators.

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/up-and-then- dow...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/up-and-then-down)

</comment><comment><USER25> Here's a tour of the system in their test tower by Tom Scott: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI)

And it has it's first production project in the OVG East Side Tower Berlin (though not yet finished building)

</comment><comment><USER34> There already are rope-free elevators, for instance: \- the hydraulic elevator ([https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lFWNDQDN2hE/T3nbR7woCAI/AAAAAAAAB...](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lFWNDQDN2hE/T3nbR7woCAI/AAAAAAAABgs/7G0JKEacDJI/s1600/holed+1.JPG))

-the Paternoster ([http://www.audioguideportal.de/assets/Foto/thumbnail520x397/...](http://www.audioguideportal.de/assets/Foto/thumbnail520x397/1093_rp_mainz_kaiserstrasse5_paternoster_08_2001_mlpreiss.jpg))

The post title is just clickbait for a ThyssenKrupp commercial, plus it only shows animations of these new elevators. Yawn.

<comment><USER35> I'd rather not ride a paternoster --- seems quite likely to function as an execution machine :(

<comment><USER36> There are several Paternosters in operation where I work (HBC Europe HQ in Cologne), and they are very cleverly designed in subtle ways to work around the likelihood of an execution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Poor choice of title. It may be the first direct-drive or non-linear elevator, but rope and cable-free hydraulic elevators have been in service for decades.

</comment><comment><USER33> Aside, for those interested in the music behind the video, it's an original composition, and you can learn more and download it here: [http://www.urban- hub.com/de/people/der-videoproduzent-der-mu...](http://www.urban- hub.com/de/people/der-videoproduzent-der-multi-filmreif-in-szene-setzte/)

</comment><comment><USER38> looks expensive to build, purchase and maintain.

not sure there's anything "revolutionary" here.

<comment><USER39> If the rails are solid state using for example magnetic levitation, I can see this being much cheaper to maintain.

<comment><USER13> Ever been in an elevator during a power outage?

<comment><USER40> No problem either - do it like on freefall towers or on other park attractions, where eddy current brakes, fully passive, are employed as safety mechanism.

<comment><USER41> All elevators have multiple safety brakes working on their guide rails (this is the famous invention of Otis); so do these. Besides batteries lasting longer (two hours, they say) than the median European power outage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wow, just more over-engineered mechanical shit that will break down in spectacular ways.

</comment><comment><USER42> Looks to be about.... 10? times the cost of a normal elevator if I had to guess. I bet the maintenance costs are fun as well. As such, doubt you will see these except in niche buildings (things like the porsche tower, etc..)

<comment><USER29> The tallest skyscrapers have issues with elevators because the cables can only be so long before they snap under their own weight, so you need elevator changing floors, which take up space and lower throughput. Either you find flexible materials with a higher tensile-strength to weight ratio than steel or you forego cables entirely.

<comment><USER41> Classic elevators also need a lot of floor space to achieve good throughput. This system is basically like a paternoster on steroids; it can rise much higher, move much faster, use arbitrary circuits and has none of the safety issues. Even if this system only saves, say, 40 % floor space, it'd still be a win for many projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I posted this more than 2 weeks ago and nobody seemed interested: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14807079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14807079)

</comment><comment><USER44> Am I the only one who noticed that the first elevator shown in the video, while the narrator discussed the birth of the elevator in 1854, is gear-based and hence rope-free?!

<comment><USER2> That's Otis's original safety elevator, and it was a rope system. The innovation was that it had a mechanism to stop it if the rope broke.

<comment><USER44> Ah, thanks for the clarification...the animation made it look like it was the gear system that was controlling the movement.

<comment><USER2> The animation is a redraw of this picture.[1] It's one of the most famous demos in history.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elisha_OTIS_1854.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elisha_OTIS_1854.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My ideal elevator would accelerate at a pleasant 4 m/s^2 and have a jerk not exceeding 4 m/s^3. It would have doors that close instantly when the doorway is clear, and start right away.

That would be able to take me up a 100 yard high building in 11 seconds.

Why can't real elevators be like that? Why must the doors move slowly, and wait for 5 seconds before even starting moving? Why does the elevator reach a sluggish top speed, even with very little load? Why when arriving at the destination floor does it take a further 2 or 3 seconds for the door to open?

<comment><USER45> People with reduced mobility or reduced vision will love instant closing guilliotines.

<comment><USER46> The door closing mechanism is designed with limited power and there's an optical sensor to prevent it from even trying to close on someone. Why wouldn't that still be the case on a fast closing door?

More tellingly: fast closing doors are absolutely a thing, so clearly the safety issues are not insurmountable, but I only see them in more modern/expensive locations. I suspect it's a price grading move and if you wait another century fast-closing doors will be everywhere.

<comment><USER45> Yeah but the faster they go the more inertia the whole thing has to handle for those safety mechanism, right? And the added machinery weight impacts on the elevator loading as well.

<comment><USER46> Yes, but there are ways of dealing with inertia. Like making the door lighter and putting padding on the contact surfaces. It's not rocket science.

Also, most of the improvement would come from replacing the worst offenders (5-10 second closing times) rather than from shaving 1 second times to 1/2 a second, and there's tons of precedent for the former from the faster-closing 10% or so of existing installations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This will be how we build towers twice as tall as existing megatowers.

As beautifully explained by xkcd[0], "If your building has lots of floors, you need lots of different elevators, since there would be so many people trying to come and go the same time. If you make a building too tall, the whole thing gets taken up by elevators and there's no space for regular rooms."

But if one elevator shaft can have multiple independent cars, suddenly you've got a huge capacity multiplier without the space costs.

The horizontal motion part is cute, but I don't think it will matter nearly as much.

[0][https://what-if.xkcd.com/94/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/94/)

<comment><USER48> The car motion is not independent and it's hard to use the capacity well. Consider the morning rush in a big office tower when everyone starts on the ground floor. You can only use the bottom car to move these people.

You need a sideways dimension of movement to avoid this problem.

<comment><USER49> >You need a sideways dimension of movement to avoid this problem.

you mean like the elevator system being discussed here?

<comment><USER48> Yes. I was replying to this comment:

> But if one elevator shaft can have multiple independent cars, suddenly > you've got a huge capacity multiplier without the space costs.

> The horizontal motion part is cute, but I don't think it will matter nearly > as much.

My point is: 1\. Stacked cars are not independent. 2\. Horizontal motion matters a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I think the routing algorithms could be interesting. It's funny to think about the possibility of gridlocked elevators.

</comment><comment><USER51> One issue I haven't seen addressed is that the horizontal shafts will block foot traffic through the building.

<comment><USER52> Solutions: Have an elevator plane on the building -- shafts and corridors which are all located at one extreme side of the building, rather than the core.

And/or have horizontal transit floors. You don't need horizontal transit at _every_ floor, just sufficiently frequently to accomplish lateral transfers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> One step closer to the Wonkavader. Which always freaked me out that it could move anywhere and even fly.

</comment><comment><USER54> This is awesome! Hopefully this means the elevator can now directly open into my apartment!

<comment><USER55> This is exciting possibility, but I would expect the builders will try to minimize the volume taken by shaft. Corridors are less expensive to build and maintain than these high-tech shafts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Soo many machined pieces... wonder if that is the production design.

</comment><comment><USER57> Absolutely incredible video, and great product!

</comment><comment><USER58> Looking forward to playing SimTower Multi!

</comment><comment><USER59> Reminded me of CPU interconnects.

<comment><USER60> crossbar

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> what problem does this solve to justify the crazy expense, complexity and maintenance?

the reason elevators exist is because people cannot easily climb 100+ vertical ft, especially while carrying stuff.

on the other hand, humans are well adapted for horizontal travel - 15mi per day without breaking a sweat. and when they're not, there are movable walkways like in airports.

this whole thing is a solution looking for a problem, IMO. we don't yet live in Matrix-style human incubators with miles of horizontal travel in buildings that are _also_ miles high - it's usually either/or, and not because we've been lacking these revolutionary elevators.

<comment><USER61> If those elevators worked they would actually solve a big engineering problem: Very High Buildings can only have a limited number of elevator shafts. But it takes a significant time to use them which makes it problematic if there are a lot of people who want to go. But if elevators were able to travel horizontally that is a first step towards having multiple elevators in one shaft. There are still other problems that need to be solved in order to do this but if it works you can easily transport a lot of people in skyscrapers by having one "upwards" shaft and one "down" shaft which the elevator capsule can change between by moving horizontally.

<comment><USER38> you can have dedicated up and down shafts where the cars move horizontally only at the top and bottom, like a ferris wheel. without having them move horizontally at any floor. you just need a way to disconnect the rope (like ski lifts). or you can have towing cars that have only 50 ft of rope and operate on rails (like ships that get towed through Panama locks)

<comment><USER62> That means that all cars must traverse the entire distance and that all cars must wait each time a car reaches a floor.

<comment><USER38> > That means that all cars must traverse the entire distance

with a lot of cars in uni-directional shafts, is this really an issue?

> all cars must wait each time a car reaches a floor

maybe solved by a 2-lane shaft with a passing lane. very doable with rails or towing cars.

<comment><USER63> How can you have multiple cars in a single shaft, using the rope system? To what would the second car from the ceiling be hanging on?

<comment><USER38> > very doable with rails or towing cars.

<comment><USER63> Ah, right. But then, isn't that what they've done here?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I hate to be so cynical, but for how often the TK elevator in our building is out of service (these things have been around for 100 years and still break down more than a Fiat), I don't have the confidence necessary to step foot in this thing.

<comment><USER65> Came to post a similar comment. Of course it's anecdotal, but in our old building we had a +20 years old Schindler's lift (yes that sounds very close to Schindler's List, the joke is never far away) and in the 5 years I was there I never saw them failing. In a new building no single month passes by without one of the TK elevators needing servicing, at worst multiple times a week. And if they're in service there are still always chances they forget the floor entered or one of the special programs for limited access areas stops working. Definitely software problems but might also be hardware related sometimes. Like the doors sliding open a couple of mm then closing again, until the technician shows up once again. I know that doesn't mean all their products are like that and maybe human error is at fault here, but it ceryainly does not leave the same good impression as the Schindler's ones.

<comment><USER63> My previous workplace had a couple of Schindlers, which failed multiple times per year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Off-topic, who is the narrator? I think I've heard him on another German "corporate presentation" video, and I can hear a slight German accent...

And back on-topic, googling to find the details instead of just a flashy video, here's Tom Scott on MULTI: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI)

<comment><USER41> He sounds somewhat similar to the kurzgesagt voice-over artist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> This might read a bit odd and tangential but I cringe every time I get into a ThyssenKrupp elevator. Thyssen and Krupp were huge fans of Hitler and the Nazis. The two families donated large sums of money to their cause. They both benefited from Hitler's support and promoted the use of forced labor. ThyssenKrupp is largely seen as a Hitler firm in many circles.

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

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krupp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krupp)

[2] [http://spartacus-educational.com/GERthyssen.htm](http://spartacus- educational.com/GERthyssen.htm)

<comment><USER68> Many of the progenitors of modern Japanese companies were heavily involved in assisting the Imperial Japanese government during WW2 as well. Although US did dismantle a lot of the zaibatsu's after the war.</comment></comment>


Sanctioned DPRK vessels resume sailing with AIS switched off to avoid detection - <AUTHOR> http://www.voakorea.com/a/3329348.html <comment><USER2> In Korean...

DPRK = the Democratic People's Republic of Korea = North Korea</comment>


Ze Frank's Kickstarter post-mortem - <AUTHOR> http://zefrank.tumblr.com/post/20122841731/kickstarter-post-mortem <comment><USER2> Other than being an awesome exposition of a Kickstarter project, this is an example of incredibly valuable feedback. Now thinking what I can do to stimulate even a fraction of this level of customer feedback in my startup...

<comment><USER3> >Now thinking what I can do to stimulate even a fraction of this level of customer feedback in my startup...

giving your customers $150k is probably a good starting point.

kickstarter is another of those online businesses that challenges the traditional definition of customer and supplier. Ze Frank isn't really their customer in this instance, he's more like a supplier, providing a service worth a large amount of money to kickstarter's customers (the donors). that much feedback from standard customers isn't really something you can expect, but if your startup has any transactions of that scale it's not unreasonable to ask for a meeting to get very detailed feedback as part of your contract.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can I just say, I'm incredibly excited for the (new) show!

</comment><comment><USER5> > The $133,000 will be taxable income for this year in addition to any > personal income I have.

I'm not sure about US tax, but wouldn't it make sense to incorporate a company to handle the money?

<comment><USER6> He must have already filed at least as a sole proprietorship. The first benefits to becoming an LLC or an S-corp is the liability limitation: it lets you distinguish between your assets and the business's assets in a legal sense, so you don't (for example) lose your house because your company gets sued. The next benefit is business-related tax deductions. This goes hand-in- hand with business-related tax complications, so if he isn't planning on taking deductions and can't see a legal need for separating his business assets, it might be amounting to a more complex (and therefore expensive) tax situation for no tangible benefit. Of course, other things he may decide to do (such as hiring employees or issuing stock) could force him to incorporate.

I'd be surprised if it didn't make more sense to become at least an LLC, but tax law is complex. If I were him I'd do whatever my accountant told me to do.

<comment><USER7> LLCs act as pass-throughs, distributing profits (and thus taxes) in proportion to ownership stakes. As a presumably sole owner of an LLC, he'd have to file a Schedule K-1 with the company tax return, which essentially moves the profits of the LLC onto his personal tax return (which is then taxed accordingly).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The referrer log about 1/3 of the way down is really interesting. He needed to create most of the demand himself, it didn't happen organically through Kickstarter.

This is a great overview of what it takes to do a successful Kickstarter. Nice catch.

<comment><USER5> Kickstarter is very much "just" a system for people to use. From my own experience with backing projects I back projects from people with pedigree and some sort of proven value. Anyone can promise something but when I'm backing a project I want someone I know can deliver, especially when Kickstarter provides no assurances or guarantees a project will be made, you're relying entirely on the project creator to be honest and stick to what they say they will do. If I found a project via browsing the Kickstarter website and there _wasn't_ some sort of outside influence driving the funding of the project (be it the project creators twitter followers, a group of people that are interested in the same field and have worked with the project creator, a previous product the creator has produced) I would shy away because if this is a persons first project they are inevitably going to be issues.

Here's an example of a guy who walked away with $90k and didn't deliver anything but broken promises for over a year and only recently gone back and worked on the project: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/schuyler/lockpicks-by- op...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/schuyler/lockpicks-by-open- locksport)

<comment><USER9> I don't think that's a fair characterization. No one forced the hands of those backers. I hadn't heard of the project until you linked to it, but having read through the updates it's evident that Schuyler was totally forthcoming about his lack of experience in this area. Any backer slightly less skeptical than yourself who said "I'll give this guy a shot" was completely entitled to withdraw their pledge if they felt he was getting in over his head as the total amount pledged ballooned to over 15x his specified threshold. He's posted nearly 70 updates since launching the project, and it would appear that despite the delays it is coming to fruition. It's not as if he fleeced his backers for $90k and skipped town.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting to read a thoughtful write-up from him, since so much of his public persona is "I'm doing wacky things... invest in my Kickstarter and I will give you a prize of a plastic shark!"

<comment><USER11> The man has a degree in Neuroscience from Brown University, he is not unfamiliar with critical thinking, analysis or statistics.</comment></comment>


Magic Leap Headset Test Drive: Off Your Phone and into Your World - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/magic-leap-headset-test-drive-off-your-phone-and-into-your-world-1533730080 <comment><USER2> [https://outline.com/www.wsj.com/articles/magic-leap- headset-...](https://outline.com/www.wsj.com/articles/magic-leap-headset-test- drive-off-your-phone-and-into-your-world-1533730080)</comment>


Ask HN: What's the worst thing that happened to you job-wise? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Got let go after showing up late to mandatory retraining (I found out the day of, and we didn't have smartphones then), which resulted in moving to another company across town for a contract where conversion was a "sure thing" just to have the contract run out 3 months later and not get renewed. No official reason given for either, but I can read between the lines.

As I was still reacting to the news about the contract, the IRS seized my assets based on a clerical error on their part, resulting in an already tight financial situation turn into a nightmare. After being unable to find paying work for months, my vehicle was repossessed and I was evicted, broke with no support network.

Over the years since then, I've hustled to get back on track, but that one year's repercussions are still being felt today.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a sad story, and I'm happy that you were able to get things fixed eventually. I always have a little safety net for situations like yours, even if I of course hope they will never happen to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Depends on precisely what you mean by worst.

There is a deep, objective sense in which spending more than a year on a site that never got launched was bad. A permanent loss of meaning for that time. But it doesn't hit quite so hard as, for instance, being woken up every night for two weeks due to a bug I wasn't allowed to fix in an integration with our monitoring system, or when the amped-on-amphetimines founder threw a chair at the guy I was sharing an office with (and later explained how this was a better way to handle their disagreement than firing him, because he was really quite talented, wouldn't firing him have been bad for the company?) -- this made it impossible to work, the anxiety was just....

I think that's the odd part. A lot of the answers here have the distance of time, and know what's important. At the time, stuff like that, like having the management team demean and laugh at you for being concerned about honesty with business partners -- it has such a salient emotional impact it's hard to remember it's not even in the right category for 'worst thing'.

</comment><comment><USER4> The worst thing to happen to me was also the best. Back in 2006 I put in my 2 week notice after 5 exemplary years at the company. With 3 days to go I was fired for a frivolous reason (my boss was a vindictive type of guy). I was supposed to continue working part time for the company but getting fired put an end to that, that's why he did it. That motivated me to take a year off and prepare for a career change. The new career was software engineering, and now I make four times what I did back then, and I work fewer hours and have less stress. Funny how life works out sometimes.

<comment><USER5> What was your previous occupation?

<comment><USER4> I was a center manager at Kaplan test prep. I was also a teacher for SAT, GRE, GMAT, and LSAT classes. The plan was to continue to teach part time after I left my management position.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to work for a small company and was their only IT person. This was an internet business with a dozen employees and I was responsible for taking care of the office computers and network, as as well as taking care of web properties they had and maintaining an e-commerce platform from the late 90's. The whole period was terribly stressful. I worried a lot about everything I couldn't fix quickly, and lost every bit of work life separation possible.

</comment><comment><USER7> A Startup was using a really bad way to communicate between their software components. Their main architect was a moron. I was a contractor at the time. I told the CEO that there is better way to do this if he let me. I was asked to leave the next day. 6 months later the startup went belly up.

</comment><comment><USER8> I was expelled from the California Institute of Technology for sleeping on a couch after the Master of Student Housing told me not to.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For me, when a previous employer hired a lawyer to send me a letter to clarify certain things (it was related to non-competition and non-solicitation).

What's yours?

<comment><USER9> I've been threatened when announcing my resignation at two jobs. I work in a niche market, but the level of paranoia is unjustified.

The first time was a very uncomfortable five days where they tried to convince me to say where I was going. I was heading to a competitor and they figured that much. I finally had a heart to heart with my manager and explained that if they trusted my integrity then they would know that I was not going to take any "trade secrets" with me. They backed off at that point and the rest of my stay was more pleasant.

The second time was at the next job. They asked me to stay and I said no. Then they said, "what if your offer were to disappear?", implying that they were going to somehow going to make enough trouble to have my offer withdrawn. I made it very clear I wouldn't respond to their threats and they denied making threats and didn't make them again.</comment></comment>


PEP 465 – Dedicated infix operators for matrix multiplication and matrix power - <AUTHOR> http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0465/ <comment><USER2> Huh? Isn't it a question of whether you are doing matrix or array ops, so the type system is the issue? I have rarely needed to do elementwide multiply on matrices, and if I do, in Eigenproblem I can just call mat.array() to get an ArrayView.

Really, the problem is that NumPy is a crappily designed library primarily intended for array ops, and is just not well suited for linear algebra.

<comment><USER3> > NumPy is a crappily designed library

I don't think you know what you're talking about.

<comment><USER2> Try Eigen, you'll agree that NumPy is an array library that had linear algebra support thrown in as an afterthought.

<comment><USER3> Of course it's an array library. The fact that it's not designed for your problem doesn't mean it's designed _crappily_.

Suppose you ported Eigen to Python. You'd still need an array library, so you could represent the inputs and outputs in a way that's usable in Python. You'd probably use NumPy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Guido has indicated that he is ready to accept the PEP after a few details are worked out: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/python- ideas/aHVlL6BAD...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/python- ideas/aHVlL6BADLY/GBCTSbY40QQJ)

So it appears that we will indeed have @ for matrix multiplication in Python 3.5! This is a feature the numeric python computing has been hoping for for a long, long time.

</comment><comment><USER5> It kind of seems to me that it's actually vectored multiplication that's the odd one out that should maybe have a special syntax, maybe even one that applies to many operations and not just multiplication.

A matrix is a _Thing_ that happens to also be a collection. A vector you want to multiply is just a collection. Really vector multiplication is just a map operation, so make some syntactic sugar to generate an operator comprehension:

        a = [1,2,3]
        b = [4,5,6]
        c = a [*] b # or something
        # becomes
        c = [x * y for (x,y) in zip(a,b)]
        # or
        c = a.__vecmul__(b)

This would make more sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great! Minor quibble: the underlying method names should not mention `mat` (e.g. `__matmul__`); instead mentioning the shape of the operator (e.g. `__atmul__`).

<comment><USER7> that might be a good idea, or a little strange.

many existing python infix boolean operators resolve to method names based on the meaning, rather than the symbol. e.g. `a + b` resolves to `a.__add__(b)` rather than `a.__plus__(b)`, `x * * y` resolves to `x.__pow__(y)` rather than `x.__asteriskasterisk__(y)`, say. so arguably it would be consistent to name @ after the common meaning also.

[http://docs.python.org/2/reference/datamodel.html#emulating-...](http://docs.python.org/2/reference/datamodel.html#emulating- numeric-types)

on the other hand, "consistency is not necessarily a virtue: one can be consistently obnoxious" \- C.A.B. Smith

that said, i like the idea that @ should be more general than just for matrices. an arbitrary infix boolean operation, neither necessarily commutative nor invertible.

even when talking about matrix multiplication, generalising slightly from arrays to abstract elements of vector spaces, and from matrices to linear transformations between vector spaces leaves you writing the same kinds of expressions that compose linear transformations without anything necessarily being represented as a matrix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's funny. If there is one thing that Python users do more after than diss R - it's steal from R.

<comment><USER9> Matlab is a horror but one thing they do do well is .* and * for the two multiplies.

<comment><USER10> Julia also adopted this syntax, and I'm not sure if I like it. In numpy at least, I find myself doing element-wise multiplication much more frequently than matrix multiplication, so '.*' always feels clumsy. I'd rather have special syntax for the matrix multiply (and I was a long time matlab user before moving to numpy).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seems to me that Haskell's ability to infix named functions is a much nicer solution over-all

<comment><USER12> I agree. I wish python had the capability to infix functions. Maybe the topic for a new PEP ?

<comment><USER13> This is this[1] workaround.

I wonder if a whole set of infix matrix operations could be added to reduce the need to load numpy for simple tasks.

        A @* B
        A @. B
        A @+ B

[1] [http://code.activestate.com/recipes/384122/](http://code.activestate.com/recipes/384122/)

<comment><USER12> Yes, but making it part of the language would bring clear error messages in case of misuse, and would allow the use of a different token, e.g. ":", as in smalltalk

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The bloody associativity issue is unresolved...? Of course it should be right associative.

Otherwise A _B_ x means (A _B)_ x which is idiotic for numerical work. One would have to write A _(B_ x) to get reasonable performance which isn't far enough away from A.dot(B.dot(x)) to justify the implementation overhead.

Lastly, as awful as it sounds, it is nice when awfully expensive things like 10K by 10K matmats have some visual weight. It makes people think about how they're written down.

</comment><comment><USER15> If you're really determined, you can use `.` as an operator via __getattr__ and inspect :p

<comment><USER7> ugh.

very loosely related, this reminds me of calling R functions from python that take keyword arguments with dots in their names.

        >>> f(hello.world=123)
          File "<stdin>", line 1
        SyntaxError: keyword can't be an expression

so instead:

        >>> f(**{'hello.world':123})

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm kind of baffled by this. Python has operator overloading, so what's wrong with using * for matrix multiplication? I know there's a bit in the PEP that claims to answer this, but I can't understand their argument. Can someone explain?

<comment><USER17> It looks like it says there are enough cases where libraries crave two multiplication operators, elementwise multiplication and matrix multiplication, that it makes sense to add an operator to the language.

<comment><USER18> Would matrix multiplicqtion be useful for anything other than matrices ? I can understand to provide an operator in the language when it's usable by many types, but i don't understand what sense would it have to create an operator just for one type... Even more so when that type isn't part of the language.

Or does it mean that @ would be used just for arrays, and that it would be useful for cases when arrays aren't matrices of numbers ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Who else uses @ this way? It seems really ad hoc and ugly as a core feature of Python syntax

</comment><comment><USER20> This looks bad:

S = (H.dot(beta) - r).T.dot(inv(H.dot(V).dot(H.T))).dot(H.dot(beta) - r)

but this:

S = (( (H) _.dot_ (beta) - (r) ).T) _.dot_ ( _inv_ ( (H) _.dot_ (V) _.dot_ ((H).T) )) _.dot_ ( (H) _.dot_ (beta) - (r) )

is close enough to:

S = (H @ beta - r).T @ inv(H @ V @ H.T) @ (H @ beta - r)

although bit less readable due to being bit longer.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd really like to see user-defined infix operators such as those in Haskell. There are some baked into the standard library (*+-/ etc), but you can also roll your own, so people could make do until this gets accepted.

<comment><USER22> You can get cute about it:

[http://code.activestate.com/recipes/384122-infix- operators/](http://code.activestate.com/recipes/384122-infix-operators/)

The code there overrides | to construct arbitrary operators that are used by wrapping an object in |, like:

        a |x| b

where x defines the custom behavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why not overload the already-defined * * ? Matrix multiplication is used much more than matrix exponentation (which can be delegated to methods), and * * is already right associative.

<comment><USER4> Because __already means element-wise power. The reason we need a new operator (@) for matrix multiplication is precisely so we can all the same operators for arrays that we already use for scalars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Coincidentally I just implemented this the other day for a quick Matrix class in Groovy. Was about 4 lines of code.</comment>


Be careful how you average – a retail example - <AUTHOR> http://blog.custora.com/2012/08/be-careful-how-you-average-a-retail-example/

<comment><USER2> Stanford's Sam Savage has written an excellent book on the topic of disaggregating average data and mistakes made from using averages. Here's a summary of the book on his website: <http://www.stanford.edu/~savage/flaw/>

and here's a link to his book, titled The Flaw of Averages: [http://www.amazon.com/Flaw-Averages-Underestimate-Risk- Uncer...](http://www.amazon.com/Flaw-Averages-Underestimate-Risk- Uncertainty/dp/0471381977)

<comment><USER3> Cool book, but sad that the public on average seems hopeless at understanding that variance exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was never a math kingpin, but my last startup was stock market/trading related so I got to brush shoulders with some brilliant analysts.

Their advice to me is "anytime you think you want to do a simple average, you'd be better served by displaying a histogram of averages".

I think this completely applies here too since it would help you quickly see if (a) the bulk of your customers are have a low repeat price and the average is buoyed up by a few large purchases or (b) one customer orders a whole bunch of tiny items at a low price dragging the averages down.

</comment><comment><USER5> I see this type of thing come up all the time when monitoring complex production systems.

Say you have 10 servers in each of 3 datacenters and you are looking at request latency. Averaging all 30 servers is very different from averaging to the datacenter and then averaging/alerting on a dc by dc basis.

</comment><comment><USER6> TL;DR - use weighted averages. And there's a reason why people use median and mode. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, personalized analysis beats treating the population as uniform.</comment>


Ask HN: How to make an impact on climate change? - <AUTHOR> Over time, I've become increasingly convinced that the biggest and most important problem we have a shot at solving during my lifetime is climate change. However my skills are in software and ML which I do think are some of the most powerful tools available to us. Does anyone on HN feel their work makes a big impact towards solving this problem? Alternatively, does anyone have any ideas about how to make progress on this problem given the type of technical background I and many others on the site have? <comment><USER2> I was thinking about this a lot lately.

Since I started my business I was trying to reach out to nonprofits to offer my skills, however not one of those that I contacted was interested (although my main skill is robotics).

I think the best way to help us to financially support environmental NGOs (I'm currently looking at joining 1% for the planet).

I'd be very interested to hear about other ideas people have!

</comment><comment><USER3> For inspiration of around helping build tools, check out the Air Miners index of 80+ startups working on removing carbon dioxide from the air: [http://airminers.org](http://airminers.org)

I helped build it, happy for any questions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also, does anyone have a chart of the mentions of "climate change" on HN? I'm curious if it's rising in interest, I have alerts set so I see a lot of it but would be interesting for someone to pull actual data.

</comment><comment><USER4> You said you are skilled with Machine Learning.

Turns out you probably can help by predicting the impact of independent variables on climate and see by yourself.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've reduced meat consumption by a lot.</comment>


Jack Welch Inflicted Great Damage on Corporate America - <AUTHOR> http://archive.is/gZSME <comment><USER2> Please post the original source. This is in the guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

It's fine to add links to workaround URLs in the thread.

</comment><comment><USER3> The singular focus on shareholder value, to the exclusion of all else, has greatly damaged society.

There needs be a conscientious realignment to maximizing stakeholder value.

The corporation is best way to organize labour and capital in productive ways that we've ever come up with and it can be a tool for immense good, but not if it disregards the society, the environment, or the community it operates in.

<comment><USER4> Totally agreed.

If I was CEO this wouldn't be rocket science, you fire a bunch of people prior to reporting numbers. Expenses go way down, stock goes up, repeat this. Throw in some M&A's and you are good to go.

Not that I would do this, but that's how you maximize "shareholder value". Of course, it's not good for the actual business in the long term.

<comment><USER5> Partly, the emphasis on extreme short term gains, in turn accentuated by short term trading (options) and HFTs disincentivizes any management actions that try to optimize for the long term.

The CEO will be under tremendous pressure if he/she tries to optimize for a 1 year timeframe (for example) as opposed to quarter-by-quarter. I wish boards can come up with a compensation structure for execs which optimizes for long term.

<comment><USER6> Absolutely. In recent decades CEO tenure has fallen by ~half, while CEO compensation is circa 10x bigger. I think that's behind a lot of current business and economic problems. Giving someone only a short time to extract a lot of money is an absolutely terrible setup for creating sustained value delivery.

<comment><USER7> Spot on. Any doubters can go check out GE stock. After several rounds of mining, there is nothing left in the poor rock.

PS You know things are really bad when the stock chart starts to go to log price scale because it has gone down so much!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Under Welch, GE's mission changed. Its new goal was to become "the world's > most valuable company." Which is to say, he turned the focus of the company > to its stock price. Everything became secondary to that. ...

The irony is that GE's stock price is now at the same place it was in 1997. In between, sound and fury signifying nothing. Over twenty years of zilch.

[https://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?...](https://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=ge&insttype=&freq=2&show=&time=20)

<comment><USER9> FWIW GE has split its stock twice in that interval: there was a 2:1 split in December 1997 and a 3:1 split in mid 2000. Meaning despite stock price being back to its 1997 level, total valuation has increased 6x (and an investor who had one GE share in early 1997 now has 6 of them).

<comment><USER10> When a stock splits, the market cap still stays relatively the same.

Market cap for GE is still lower today (93 B) than it was in 1997 (208 B). Unless there were major spin offs, that means the company is worth less.

<comment><USER11> GE has been selling off assets as part of a turnaround strategy in the past ~2yrs or so

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/ge-chief-says-assets-sales- will...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/ge-chief-says-assets-sales-will- reap-38-billion-11568315157)

<comment><USER10> That shouldn't affect market cap since they're capturing the cash equivalent in value through the sale. It's trading physical assets (probably with poor returns) for cash assets.

Spinning off less-profitable divisions would affect market cap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is worth noting that when Jack Welch arrived at GE he was dealing with a bloated company heading towards bankruptcy because it had way too much overhead. Firing the bottom 10% each year was harsh medicine, but it was what GE needed at the time.

The fault is not in the medicine supplied. It is that his imitators supplied the same medicine to other companies in other circumstances.

What is the fallout? Jack Welch was a big part of the breaking of the social contract that used to be part of American business. It took decades, but now American workers have accepted that a job is not "until death do us part" and have also given up on their side of the same contract. And the result is a very different relationship between corporate America and their workers.

<comment><USER13> The imitators did what Jack Welch advocated for. He did not advocated for firing 10% of people once when company is clearly bloated. He advocated to do it again and again and again.

When I give you advice and you follow my advice, it is rightful to blame me for that advice.

But also, these articles primary blame him for massive short-termism, corporate raiding and likely creative accounting to get numbers he wanted at the expense of company health.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Unfortunately that mindset is bleeding into our governing system. Make the short-term numbers look good at the expense of long term prosperity.

<comment><USER15> > Unfortunately that mindset is bleeding into our governing system. Make the > short-term numbers look good at the expense of long term prosperity.

What does that even mean?

<comment><USER14> Maybe I'm just looking at the past with rose-colored glasses, but postwar US built the most advanced highway infrastructure, hoover dam, landed on the moon. Now we rely on rate cuts and tax cuts to inflate our paper wealth. California couldn't build a high speed rail with all its wealth. Our astronauts had to hitch a ride with the Russians to get to ISS.

<comment><USER15> > but postwar US built the most advanced highway infrastructure, hoover dam, > landed on the moon.

The interstate system could be seen as a boondoggle to make automakers rich at the expense of the US having a modern rail network.

Without question the moon landing and the Hoover Dam were historic engineering feats but they were both products of their eras. The Hoover Dam was a _prewar_ Great Depression jobs effort and the moon landing would never have been possible but for the Cold War.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The most harmful idea he introduced is stack ranking, the consequences of which we're still dealing with in the tech industry. In particular ranking people on a team level on the team and firing those on the bottom has taken a severe toll on many teams and companies/

<comment><USER17> The utter destruction of any sense of team work when people realize that someone has to be the bottom is awful.

He had to be a smart guy. How did he not realize anything that actually needs a team is going to suffer? Is this some lone eagle crap like EDS had?[1] Can you imagine the original Macintosh team running under stack ranking? I guess you shouldn't appoint people CEO who don't understand teams are required to build great products.

1) had a buddy who worked for EDS tell me that they wouldn't hire anyone who came as a group at a job fair because "eagles fly alone". That would actually explain some interactions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> His achievement was leverage and acquisition to make the top line number look really big.

The legacy is stack ranking has destroyed culture at innumerable companies (I continue to witness it in most companies that I know).

Also the CEOs from the GE CEO factory went to on to destroy not only GE value, but also Boeing [1] and many others.

[1] [https://www.economist.com/business/2020/01/11/the-last-ge- ma...](https://www.economist.com/business/2020/01/11/the-last-ge-man)

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not unsympathetic to his point but pointing out that GE doubled the return on the S&P and then trying to make the case that he was merely in the right place at the right time for a global bull market seems odd.

<comment><USER19> I think the argument is that he cut out the interior walls and burned em for extra heat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> For his sake I hope the afterlife doesn't do stack ranking though the irony appeals to me.

</comment><comment><USER21> Pretty ironic that he later came to call maximizing shareholder value "the dumbest idea in the world."

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximiz...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizing- shareholder-value-the-dumbest-idea-in-the-world)

</comment><comment><USER22> I worked at GE during his tenure.

We used to call him "Neutron Jack," because after he was done, the buildings were still there, but all the people were gone.

He used to visit corporate sites in a $20-million-dollar helicopter. Quite a sight...

</comment><comment><USER23> What a truly horrible human being to do that to his fellow men.

</comment><comment><USER24> I am skeptical of this article.

Paragraph 5: GE beat the market by 2x over Welch's career.

Paragraph 6: The market is the reason Welch's track record looks so good.

<comment><USER25> I think to be able to understand the article's point one has to take for granted that the opinion of the stock market is not gospel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Cloudflare DNS resolution error...

<comment><USER27> The actual link is [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-02/ge- s-j...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-02/ge-s-jack-welch- inflicted-great-damage-on-corporate-america) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> He's like a human paperclip maximizer..

</comment><comment><USER29> Blocked by Cisco Umbrella.

<comment><USER30> Same here, what's the deal with that

<comment><USER31> archive.{is,today,fo,li,vn,md,ph} allows arbitrary content, which means that most corporate firewalls will block it as a matter of principle, assuming you're using the MITM part of Umbrella.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm a pretty big fan of "don't hate the player hate the game" \- it's too easy to look from outside and say X person failed society. With business, we love to hate on those who have extracted so much wealth for a few, yet modern capitalism is built on these tenants. If we went to prevent inexperienced, philosophically devoid people from running amuck, we need to focus on re- building the system, not vilifying those that utilize it. Many of these issues started with Dodge vs Ford [1] - yet I rarely hear folks talk about it.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co).

<comment><USER33> The article is about how he changed the game.

<comment> blaser-waffle There was plenty of ruthless capitalism before he showed up. He just pushed it to be more ruthless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> De mortuis nil nisi bene.

<comment><USER35> Yeah, no. That's way too easy of an out.

He did bad things. His reputation continues to influence commerce to this day. He doesn't get a free pass on the harm he caused simply because he's checked out.

<comment><USER36> Yeah, but was he an evil person or a product of a flawed system?

It seems to me there would always be a Jack Welch, albeit one of a different name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm not an economist or anything, but isn't this article really just a complaint against pure capitalism? Jack played the game and played it well. I wouldn't vilify someone because of that. Blame the system and then propose something better.

<comment><USER38> There was something better, mid century regulated corporate business stewardship. But Walsh and his acolytes pillaged it like a barbarian horde falling on a dignified gallery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> For all his faults, and he had many - from infidelity, focus on manager/corporate rankings instead of absolute performance, allowing accounting shenanigans that still haunt GE etc, wasn't Jack Welch was a product of the period in which he ran GE?

His ability to manage a behemoth of GE's size during the globalization push that resulted in the death of so many industrial companies during that same period is undeniable.

<comment><USER40> A product of the period? It was the leaders of the time that produced the period.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I don't think he is to be blamed on that. What happened for GE/IBM/Boeing is just the symptom.

After all the deindustrialization process had been going on for decades, and naturally the only way to keep the company afloat is to cut cost or "financializate" everything.

The real questions are:

1 - Why there weren't enough people who were interested in STEM?

2 - Why didn't the government (and the voters) do anything useful about this situation?

<comment><USER42> 1\. When the culture celebrates rapacious capitalism, rugged individualism, and financialization of the economy as right and just, people are drawn along by the current. No one lives in a vacuum despite what the prevailing voices would have you believe. It is no wonder that many talented scientists went (and still go) to investment banks, when this behavior is congratulated and voices of admonishment are minimized.

2\. Vietnam, Nixon, Reagan, Bush...the list continues. When Jimmy Carter warned the country people lost faith in him because his statements didn't make them "feel good". This was also the era in which corporate money began to flow almost unrestrictedly into government in the form of lobbying and campaign contributions. As Upton Sinclair rightly put it: "It is hard to get a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it."

<comment><USER41> Yeah that's exactly what I have in my mind.</comment></comment></comment>


The Globe of Economic Complexity [WebGL] - <AUTHOR> http://globe.cid.harvard.edu/?mode=gridSphere&id=CN

<comment><USER2> well, that's the coolest thing I'm going to see all week.</comment>


The FBI could end up with 5% of all bitcoins - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/132327/the-fbi-could-end-up-with-5-of-all-bitcoins-and-it-plans-to-sell-them/ <comment><USER2> So.... $1.2 B or $78 M?</comment>


The Spandrels of San Marco Revisited: An Interview with Richard C. Lewontin - <AUTHOR> https://evolution-institute.org/article/the-spandrels-of-san-marco-revisited-an-interview-with-richard-c-lewontin/

<comment><USER2> Key point:

 _I think the right way is to start with the sentence: "We do not have any hard evidence of the forces leading to the following evolutionary change." There has to be a prelude to the discussion of evolutionary change to make it clear that although the theory of natural selection is very important and happens lots, there are other forces, or other mechanisms, that lead to change and we are not obliged by being Darwinians and being evolutionists to invent adaptive explanations for all changes. I think that's where you have to start. Then, as either a philosopher or biologist, ask in a particular case what is the direct evidence, besides the desire that we want to find something, that a particular story is true or not true. Most of the time we're going to have to say that this happened in the Eocene or the Paleocene and we haven't the foggiest notion of why it happened. I think the admission of necessary ignorance of historically remote things is the first rule of intellectual honesty in evolution._

This was an interesting interview. The take-away, I think, is that speculating on origins and "just so stories" is a fine way to think about things, but it isn't science and should be prefaced by a frank admission that there is no evidence to support those speculations. When chin-stroking "what if..." theories, however interesting, become conflated in public discussion (and in scholarly circles) with evidence-based theories, science suffers.</comment>


Mob Software: The Erotic Life of Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.dreamsongs.com/MobSoftware.html

<comment><USER2> >.< TL:DR please.</comment>


Show HN: Namer.ai, AI (RNN) powered domain name generator - <AUTHOR> http://namer.ai <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

namer.ai is an AI powered domain name generator we built as a side project.

My wife was trying to name her blog and I threw out an offhand comment over dinner about how we could totally build an AI to do that. She asked why we never actually build any of these things we talk about and it turned into a challenge. By late that night we had a dataset of a million domain names and were generating text that looked enough like domain names to encourage us to keep going.

The names aren't all perfect but there are some really good ones in there! There are also some hilarious ones in there. For some reason the internet seems to be biased towards chickens and Seattle.

www.hackerseek.com is available for example, as is www.stonestartup.com

We're using a character-level RNN to generate domain names which we match against the user's query with word vector similarity.

There are a lot of domain name generators out there but none seem to generate results anything like ours. For example the model learned that some domains are named with overlapping letters such as fashionistash.com for fashionista and stash.

Would love to get advice on where to go from here. Are the results enough better than what's out there? How would you go about promoting something in such a crowded space?

</comment><comment><USER2> check price thingie not working. maybe you could use it for affiate domain sales

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, thanks for letting us know! What did you put in the box and which registrar did you try?

Affiliate links are our best idea so far. We've got a few set up. All the links to registrars are affiliate links.

<comment><USER2> I tried speedy icecream and got some interesting names. I just chose that at random. Most of it was bad but there were some good ones.</comment></comment></comment>


Fastly acquires CDN Sumo, releases EngineYard add-on and fastly-rails gem - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastly.com/blog/ruby-rails-fastly#.U1BOaOZdXKg

<comment><USER2> I don't know how they're doing it, but Fastly is growing like crazy. They're still just a little out of the price range for my personal blog but I do want to use them on a larger app soon. Their benchmarks are great.</comment>


Show HN: Emissary, a RESTful, scriptable content extraction service - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/LukeB42/Emissary

<comment><USER2> Not sure what this does, is it able to automatically extract data from a page? Those are notoriously unreliable, in my own experience, but maybe I'm not getting the full picture here, I read the docs but not sure what this is

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah it's an RSS reader that stores plain text. There's an included client that will pipe the text into less but with it being a REST API you could retrieve the data from other stuff. For instance, a +news IRC channel mode: [http://i.cubeupload.com/9ApdXQ.png](http://i.cubeupload.com/9ApdXQ.png)

<comment><USER2> oh okay so it requires RSS feed, it can't automatically detect content on a given web page?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Might be interesting if connected with Huginn.</comment>


One Weird Trick to Protect Your Company Email - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/ink-different/one-weird-trick-to-protect-your-company-email-934c6608b698#.dp930eg71 <comment><USER2> Weird Trick == Buy Product Advertised</comment>


Buffett's bet: Hedge funds can't beat the market - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/04/news/newsmakers/buffett_bet.fortune/index.htm

<comment><USER2> Interesting that Warrren Buffet should make this bet. He, of all people, should know that extraordinary managers are able to produce extraordinary returns (1.5x to 2x the average?) over time. I think this is reflected in the fact that he only figures he has a 60% chance of winning. It seems he is hanging the bet on the extraordinary _fees_ that hedge funds claim, and hence saying that they _would_ do better over time - just not after the fees.

This is a worthwhile addition to the debate of index funds vs. the best of actively managed funds - most participants in this debate are awfully black- and-white. I have seen several critics practically say that there is no such thing as a better-than-average investor - just a normalized distribution of investor luck.

Hasn't anybody done a survey on this? It shouldn't be too hard to determine with statistics whether the world's top investors are better than or on par with the expected variance in luck. I strongly favor the position that a good investor _can_ beat the market over time..with the caveat that it takes 10 or 20 years to determine who these investors are.

<comment><USER3> The assessment of fund management suffers from the usual problem - there are bound to be some people who really are just that lucky.

For simplicity if you look at just the last two years and four fund managers, statistically one of them will have won in both years. He will rationalise this away (his 'system') and claim to be a good manager of money.

There are enough funds that quite a few of them are _certain_ to have won in 9 of the last 10 years, further reinforced by the fact that losing funds tend to close.

Because of this effect I would say that past performance is a horrible predictor of future performance. Certainly I am happy to put my money where my mouth is - with the exception of sensible diversification (cash and bonds) my savings are all in low fee index funds.

<comment><USER4> I see you have read The Black Swan. I learned a lot too when I read it. And it is an especially must-read for those getting into trading and fund management.

<comment><USER3> Nope, just took too many stastics classes I guess :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> take a list of 1 million people. tell half that a particular stock will go up and half that a particular stock will go down. discard the 500,000 that you were wrong to and do it again, tell 250,000 that a particular stock will go up and the other half that it will go down. Repeat a few times until you have only a few thousand people left whom think you have been right 7 or 8 times in a row. Tell them you are a stock guru and will teach them your system for $10,000. Profit.

</comment><comment><USER6> One of the alleged selling points of a hedge fund is that their short-selling makes them outperform during market downturns. So it's a little odd that Buffett stipulated just returns, rather than returns adjusted for some measure of risk (if I had something that returned .5% less than the market on days when market was doing better than average, and .5% more than the market when it did worse than average, this would be a better thing to own than just a market index, even though it gets exactly the same average return -- because it's giving me extra money right when I'd want to buy other things, in exchange for giving me less money at times when I'd prefer to sell).

</comment><comment><USER7> while its true that index funds will usually beat out managed funds, its tough to put in such a hard constraint, in this case, of 10 years. it really depends on the business cycles and depths/peaks of the recessions and booms.

i kind of feel like this contest is more of a coin flip and will _mostly_ only benefit the hedge fund people.

</comment><comment><USER8> My bet: Buffet and hedge fund managers make lots of money.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Buffett" is a brand name for financial media. This is a meaningless ploy to sell more Buffet-branded media, and it doesn't merit any rigorous scrutiny.

</comment><comment><USER10> I used to like Warren. That was until he got so chummy with Bill Gates. Now I won't even watch Fox News anymore.</comment>


The FBI has no trouble spying on encrypted communications - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2015/09/29/the-fbi-has-no-trouble-spying.html <comment><USER2> Requesting the article be changed to [https://theintercept.com/2015/09/28/hacking/](https://theintercept.com/2015/09/28/hacking/) which seems to be this articles source.</comment>


Beautiful Weather App with Smart Animations for android phones - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sixthsolution.weatherwiz <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Guys,

we just launched our beautiful weather application for android phones and would be happy to have your comments.

you can get it here:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sixthsolut...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sixthsolution.weatherwiz)

Regards,</comment>


Ask HN: What would be the ideal "Software Engineering" curriculum? - <AUTHOR> I have several friends who are at the point in their life where they are trying to decide what to do. Most of them love computer and can build simple stuff (html/css a little JS), but want to become engineers more fully.
They're kind of torn between the boot camps who preach "CS doesn't teach you applicable stuff, it's all theory," and CS people who say, "Well, yeah, it's not great, but it's a hell of a lot better than just learning to churn out code at a boot camp.
I think there's likely some truth to both of those statements - CS may teach a lot of stuff that isn't completely necessary (or perhaps a bit of a waste of time), yet bootcamps don't go into near enough depth.
So my question, for those of you who have done one or both of those (I have done neither), is what do you think the ideal curriculum would look like? <comment><USER2> The ACM and IEEE assembled a joint recommendation on the CS curriculum in 2013. The long pdf: [https://www.acm.org/education/CS2013-final- report.pdf](https://www.acm.org/education/CS2013-final-report.pdf)

University Computer Science teaches a substantial background for a career of 30 plus years, not the fads of today. For example: volume one of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming first appeared in 1968 (first draft 1962) is still in print in the third edition and still recommended. The other volumes are also important. The programming languages of the day were: FORTRAN IV, COBOL, ALGOL-60 variations, PL/I, and APL. The operating systems were owned by IBM, Burroughs, CDC, and DEC. Everything was on punched cards, accurate key punching was a very important programmer skill.

So theory of algorithms, compilers, operating systems, networks, distributed systems, AI, NLP, robotics, security, databases, software engineering will assist for a long career, but not every day. Implementations and fads will change, hopefully for the better.</comment>


Feedback wanted on new IoT platform - <AUTHOR> Hi there,
Check out this project we are working on:  www.seashell.sh
It is a platform to setup and manage cloud infrastructure, devices, and applications for IoT/edge projects from a single dashboard.
Think of it as a control plane for the whole lifecycle of a connected product. As of now, the platform supports the whole Raspberry Pi family, but support for new hardware will be added in the near future.
We are still at an early stage, and would love to get any feedback so that we can shape the platform according to the needs of developers out there.
Any comment/idea/criticism is much appreciated :-)
Cheers! <comment><USER2> Maybe better integrate with existing solutions like Cumulocity (sitting right next to u on Speditionsstraße 13) then rolling a complete new one. Cumulocity already started 2010 an is now owned by software ag.

Regards Jan

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Jan,

Interesting thought.

We have already spoken to some people from Cumulocity which are responsible for strategic topics, such as integration. The conclusion was that even thought both companies provide "iot platforms" we have different products with different goals.

From my point-of-view Cumulocity focuses on delivering an IoT platform with the end goal of enabling customers to leverage data from IoT devices and thus make the most its business potential. Seashell, on the other hand, aims to allow people to leverage cloud tools, technologies, and practices seamlessly also on edge devices, thus bridging the gap between these two domains from a development and operations perspective.

Diving a little deeper, we provide users with a platform for cloud infrastructure automation, network configuration, workload orchestration, and more out-of-the-box, so that they can focus building their applications rather than spending resources on lower level details required for deploying software to their fleets.

That said, it would be great to hear a bit more about your thoughts of integration with Cumulocity :-)

Regards Matheus</comment></comment>


Distributed Continuous Integration - Keep the Mainline Clean - <AUTHOR> http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/96937/Distributed-Continuous-Integration-Keep-the-Mainline-Clean.aspx

<comment><USER2> What this approach doesn't solve, as far as I can tell, is the problem of eventually merging together two or more long-lived feature/dev branches. Sure, you know you have no conflicts with mainline because you continuously integrate that back into your work. But what about everyone else's branch?

The point, I thought, of Jez Humble's definition of CI is that you are continuously integrating /everyone/ and /everything/ specifically to prevent the above problem.

<comment><USER3> If you have one long running branch, no issues since you do a mergeback often. All other production-ready code is integrated immediately, so all code is integrated in the long-running branch.

If you have 2 or more long-running branches, then you put them behind a centralized point and merge them up to this development branch which has a mergeback from production-ready code - so all code is integrated.

Either way, you can still integrate all code, its just not in the line of the flow towards production.</comment></comment>


LimeWire to shut down completely on Dec. 31 - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101203/ap_on_bi_ge/us_limewire_shuts_down

<comment><USER2> So is LimeWire's future that of Napster's?</comment>