Low Pay, Long Commutes: The Plight of the Adjunct Professor - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/12/17/459707022/low-pay-long-commutes-the-plight-of-the-adjunct-professor <comment><USER3> My question is why are people so insistent on following the academic route with all the sacrifices it sometimes entails. I know everyone has ideals of what they want to do in life some sometimes you have to adjust to the reality. Why not work in the non academic field in the same speciality if there are more opportunities and better pay? Maybe this will even help correct the supply/demand curve for professors in the long run.

<comment><USER4> > if there are more opportunities and better pay?

Frequently there aren't. The subject of this article is an artist, so cue your STEM lord "do you want fries with that" jokes now.

However, this can occur even in fields like math and computer science. You graduate with a PhD in math and a specialization in topology. Who will hire you to do that? No-one. Plenty of people will hire you to do something you can do, but what if you really want to continue research in your specialty?

I'm working on a PhD in CS with a specialization in programming languages. Google came to do a PhD recruitment day and essentially asked "so what kind of PhD are you getting, machine learning or systems?" and we said "programming languages" and the reply was "wow what is that?"

So if you want to work in your own specialty, you might need to work in academia.

<comment><USER5> What are you doing with programming languages exactly??

<comment><USER6> Presumably working on their syntax and semantics. PL is a pretty broad field that encompasses proof theory, formal logic, language design, compiler design, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm an adjunct, and I wrote about a somewhat similar article here: [http://jakeseliger.com/2015/04/03/why-do-people-including- ot...](http://jakeseliger.com/2015/04/03/why-do-people-including-other- humanists-love-to-hate-the-humanities/).

WRT this one, I'm distressed to not see the words "supply" or "demand" appear. The more people are willing to be adjuncts, the worse the pay / conditions will be for adjuncts. I'm part of the problem!

But my primary income also comes from being a consultant; I just like students and teaching.

<comment><USER8> There's a lot to untangle here, and in your article. The supply/demand question reminds me of a seeming paradox about gentrification -- that a young professional (or artist) who moves to that up-and-coming neighborhood appears to be the one at fault, making the place more expensive, creating more churn, becoming another patron for the lifestyle shops. Similarly, it's tempting to blame the adjunct, as you suggest -- that by accepting the adjunct jobs they allow the system to survive. Your article also suggests blaming the careerist tenured academic for moral compromise: "The cost to the individual who manages to get tenure is low but the cost to the field as a whole is high."

While I share your moral outrage, I see these phenomena -- whether the dilution of academia or the dilution of vital neighborhoods -- as a series of top-down structural choices. That gentrification is the result of opportunistic investment and regulatory capture of local governance. That starving adjuncts and uninspired professors are the result of a devaluing of a liberal arts education in the name of a bottom-line STEM/entrepreneur-centric view of what is valuable to society. That a get-your-act-together chiding of those screwed won't correct a system willfully rigged to take advantage of the idealist.

All this to suggest that we shouldn't blame the victim, whether that is the adjunct or the badly taught and overcharged student, for having hope in teaching, learning, and an uneconomically rewarding practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why am I suppose to feel bad for these adjunct professors? They seem to fall into two categories - either they are full time professionals who take on a teaching job just as supplemental income, or they chose field and/or degree for which there weren't a lot of job opportunities.

I would never support my child getting a degree in Ancient Chinese Art History, I don't care if it is their "passion". As Scott Adams said "Passion Is Bullshit."

<comment><USER10> I was an adjunct for a few years and I fit into neither of your "categories".

When I taught my first class, I did it as a personal favor to the department chair, whom I had a good relationship with (I'd often come in to different classes and speak to the students about our field and such). A few days before classes began, the instructor for this particular course "fell through" and she asked me if I would be willing to teach the course. After some thought, I gave in and agreed. I ended up teaching several different courses of a few years and I didn't do it for either of the reasons you mentioned.

While teaching the first course, I found that I genuinely enjoyed it. At the end of that term, I received my (anonymous) evaluations from my students and they were outstanding. I was compared to (and rated much better) than their previous instructors, many of whom I considered friends. I agreed to keep teaching.

I certainly didn't do it for money. I was only paid for the hours I spent in the classroom -- no pay for "prep time", the hours I spent grading papers, etc. All things considered, I earned less than $10 per hour. I could have made more working at a fast-food restaurant -- and probably been less stressed out.

I taught because I truly enjoyed it and became, to use your word, quite "passionate" about it. To this day, I remain friends with a lot of my former students -- many of whom now work in my field. I've even had the pleasure of working with a few of them professionally. It feels good to see them "grow up" and to have them thank me, years later, for making a difference in their education.

Sometimes I actually miss it but, then again, I never did it "just as supplemental income".

<comment><USER9> So it was for the enjoyment -- there is nothing wrong with that. I also did a part time "job" that paid almost nothing compared to my real job, but was for "passion". But I wasn't crazy enough to make a career out of it like the subject of the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a former adjunct in math, this is a depressing but common phenomenon in lower tier schools. I remember my first pay check, walking up to the Dean and asking why there was a "0" missing. Turned out the "pay period" wasn't bi- weekly but bi-semester. I learned a lot that day. My career in software has been much more fulfilling

</comment><comment><USER12> This is super crazy, I didn't realize people tried to survive off adjunct teaching positions. In my grad school experience most adjunct/visiting faculty (e.g. Bjarne Stroustrup) were fairly senior industry figures who enjoyed teaching on the side.

<comment><USER13> Indeed, the title "adjunct professor" used to be a fairly prestigious honour given to an expert in a field in exchange for some teaching. However, in lieu of paying teaching faculty properly, universities started handing out the title to anyone, and it has reduced its meaning greatly.

<comment><USER14> Ssshh! Don't let my mom hear that. She framed the first appointment letter that I received as an adjunct and gained great book club credibility by being able to refer to "my son, the Ivy League professor." Don't tell the deans, but I would happily teach for free as long as I can keep making her that happy.

<comment><USER15> I think I downvoted you by accident. I was trying to up vote you but those little arrows are tiny and close together on mobile. So sorry.

<comment><USER14> Haha! No worries. Mom does not frame any of my Hacker News karma points, so it is all good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> No offense, but if you are in a saturated field then unionizing and making some of your fellows even more expensive will simply open up opportunities for others or even lock many out.

I do not understand why people expect to be rewarded for making their career choice knowing full well the field is saturated. The ultimate goal is to get tenured which they should consider that the time invested is the payoff just as with any other career. You don't start in the upper half or top, you pay your dues.

<comment><USER17> If I look at medicine as a comparison, when I graduated undergrad (early 90s), medicine was a field with seemingly very strong prospects. Fast forward 20 years, and the prospects in medicine don't look nearly as good, and certainly not when weighed against the investment (in time and money) and risk (malpractice, regulatory _insanity_ , etc)

I wonder if the same thing happened in academia. If you look at the fundamentals a decade ago and continuing even now (consumption rate growing faster than the consumption of medical services, tuition rates rising MUCH faster than inflation), it's reasonable to think that the industry is growing quickly.

Whether or not it ought to be, and whether or not that's sustainable, I can understand a counter argument that even if the field is saturated now, if the industry growth continues as implied by the fundamentals, it could still be a good choice.

Now, if my teenage offspring ask for advice, I'd tell them to pick something that's meaningful and interesting to them and then double-check that they can survive on the value they create. If so, don't go chasing further monetary value.

<comment><USER18> Medicine is great if you have the money to invest in a medical related business. The degree grants you access to those opportunities. More than half of all doctors are self employed. They own the malpractice insurance companies. They hire people to take care of the red tape.

Academics can start businesses, but they don't have unique access to business opportunities.

<comment><USER19> In the US the number of self employed physicians is rapidly declining. The overhead of dealing with billing, practice management, and EHRs means that medical offices need economies of scale to survive. More and more physicians are becoming regular W-2 employees of hospitals, payers, and large integrated provider groups. Fortunately the unemployment rate for licensed physicians is effectively 0.

<comment><USER18> Maybe that's good news. I have suspected that the rats nest of doctor owned business entities is a significant driver of health care costs, because it's impossible to figure out where the money is actually going.

The doctors will still have "insider" investment opportunities -- in my locale, they own the provider groups as shareholders.

I will admit that I favor a government provided health care system, where medical training is free (maybe even for nurses, dental assistants, etc.) and everybody works for the government on a decent professional salary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> the better question is how college costs continue to sky rocket in an environment with an oversupply of labor?

<comment><USER21> Because goods and services cost what people are willing to pay, not what they cost to produce. The value of your college degree is based on the institution's accept/reject ratio, not on the quality of instruction (which is nearly impossible to quantify).

It means starting a new prestigious college is nearly impossible. Without excess applicants to reject, a new college doesn't rank well, which in turn means less interest by students and parents. The upper tier colleges can charge pretty much whatever they want without fear of competition.

That also means colleges put a lot more effort into attracting students than actually educating them. As long as there is an excess of people wanting adjunct positions, institutions can get away with a high-low strategey - <USER2> handful of well known full professors and an army of starving adjuncts.

<comment><USER22> It's easy to quantify quality of instruction. Just longitudinal analysis. Messy? Probably. But in serious industries, it would be done. But higher education administrators would rather listen to instructors than students and instructors _really_ don't like the idea.

If parents had to pay directly for college, I suspect longitudinal tracking of students to assess influence of prior instructors would start in a hurry.

As a med student, I presented a poster at a medical education conference. The most common comment was "Woah! Data!" A brief tour of the faculty presentations indicated this field of study is a protectionist racket. Nothing good will come of it.</comment></comment></comment>


Pierre Menard, Inventor of Lisp - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@old_sound/pierre-menard-inventor-of-lisp-5ddc12c1363e <comment><USER2> I can't see any evidence in this post that Menard's work preceeded McCarthy's. What am I missing?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's fiction not essay. I heard on twitter that Jorge Luis Borges may be involved.</comment></comment>


Why is 1 greater than 0? Using Math to Prove the Obvious - <AUTHOR> https://blog.nathanhleung.com/one-greater-than-zero/?ref=hn <comment><USER2> If you're studying math, that's what you usually do in the first year: constructing and proving the obvious via axioms. It's an exhausting and tedious exercise, spread across different topics like analysis, linear algebra, probability theory, and separates the wheat from the chaff. After that, you are prepared for the interesting and non-obvious math topics.</comment>


London is the most Googled city in the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-33770969

<comment><USER2> The article's title is "London arts and theatre scene most googled in the world"

"The research was carried out by London & Partners, the London mayor's official promotional company." Hardly independent and I wouldn't be surprised if they just kept looking until the data confirmed their assumption.

<comment><AUTHOR> Was surprised to see this come from the BBC. Maybe I should not be...</comment></comment>


Commander Keen Level Maps - <AUTHOR> http://www.commander-keen.com/level-maps.php <comment><USER2> I spent so many hours playing the first game as a kid, decoding the alphabet (which I would later discover it tells you how to read in episode 2 or 3 anyway), trying to get every last item, etc.

My favourite bit was the dark, fiery secret tunnel underneath one of the larger levels ([http://www.commander- keen.com/levelmaps/1/013.gif](http://www.commander- keen.com/levelmaps/1/013.gif)), which teleports you to the city on the right- hand side of the world map at the bottom of the level maps page, not really visible from the map screen when going between the main cities... but I no longer remember which of these maps is that city, alas

(or maybe not alas: I hope I've put some more currently useful information in that part of my brain instead. Thanks for the nostalgia!)

<comment><USER3> Yep, I remember that level. My sister and I called it the Pepsi Maze, because of its maze-like layout and the fact there were Pepsis everywhere.

I _believe_ this is the secret level: [https://www.commander-keen.com/level- maps-1.php](https://www.commander-keen.com/level-maps-1.php)

We called it the Teddy Bear Maze, for its higher occurrence of teddy bears than other levels. Though looking at the layout now, I don't think it quite deserves the 'maze' designation as much as the Pepsi Maze does. But all those teddy bears...you could rack up a few extra lives if you managed to snag them all.

Looking at the levels, this one raises my curiosity: [https://www.commander- keen.com/levelmaps/1/015.gif](https://www.commander- keen.com/levelmaps/1/015.gif) Note that there is a yellow keycard, but not a yellow door. I'm thinking either the level was never quite completed, or whoever took the screenshots to make these images took one after opening the yellow door. Reflecting on it now, I think perhaps the latter was the case, though I don't remember where the yellow door was. Either by one of the robots, or right before the drop out of the colored area.

<comment><USER2> Yes, [http://www.shikadi.net/keenwiki/Keen_1_Levels](http://www.shikadi.net/keenwiki/Keen_1_Levels) says the "teddy bear maze" is the secret level and that the yellow door never existed.

Not sure if a mistake or red herring; probably the former but in a more tortuous level layout it would be kind of funny/cruel to make people work to get the green key to get the yellow key to get nowhere extra at all...

Thanks to khedoros1 for linking to the wiki, which has lots of good stuff on (and also lets you look at the level maps while the originally linked site is down): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656926)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google cache:

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.commander- keen.com/level-maps.php)

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.commander- keen.com/level-maps-1.php)

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.commander- keen.com/level-maps-2.php)

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.commander- keen.com/level-maps-3.php)

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.commander- keen.com/level-maps-4.php)

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.commander- keen.com/level-maps-5.php)

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.commander- keen.com/level-maps-6.php)

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.commander- keen.com/level-maps-7.php)

</comment><comment><USER5> The entire top half of Keen 3 map 8 is inaccessible because of incorrectly placed blocks:

[http://www.commander-keen.com/levelmaps/3/008.gif](http://www.commander- keen.com/levelmaps/3/008.gif)

It's not necessary to complete the level, and it's harder to notice when your screen doesn't have the resolution to see the whole thing at once, but it's interesting that it was released like this.

<comment><USER6> Some of those inaccessible parts of older game maps drove me up a wall as a kid. I'd see a hint of them, and then... how?!?!?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A few years ago Tom Hall almost accomplished to release the source code of 4-6 online, i still can't believe we lost it on the final step. So close yet so far :(

I've created a twitter account just to ask Tom about the progress.

I still have hopes of seeing commander keen released as software libre.

Here's the discussion on twitter [https://twitter.com/0samueloph/status/668911938844401664](https://twitter.com/0samueloph/status/668911938844401664)

</comment><comment><USER8> I remember having Commander Keen on my 486 and it was the first game where I realized the levels were stored in plain ascii. Changing the ascii values would directly change the level... I lost so many hours of my life to that!

<comment><USER9> They are?! I would've had so much fun with that as a kid. Is this true of all Keens? 4 was my first and favorite.

<comment><USER10> Doesn't seem like it: [http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/Commander_Keen_1-3_Level_...](http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/Commander_Keen_1-3_Level_format)

[http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/RLEW_compression](http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/RLEW_compression)

Looking at a hexdump of the Keen1 file matches those specs. Keen 4 uses another, more complicated kind of compression, too: [http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/Carmack_compression](http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/Carmack_compression)

They might be thinking of earlier Id software games. Some of those weren't compressed, and you could at least edit them with a hex editor pretty easily.

<comment><USER2> That wiki is brilliant, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Man oh man. I was born in '91; Keen has a special place in my heart.

I remember when my father — a field-service engineer for then Digital (more server hardware than anything software) — brought home an early release of Windows 95 from a MSFT buddy. It was around this time of year, 1995.

I managed to install it on whatever hardware we had laying around the house. Cool beans.

Then I installed Keen. But the sound didn't work.

I asked father dearest. He fuddled around and couldn't figure it out. I tried a different pair of Soundblaster Speakers (looked like these [https://iak.olx.ph/images_olxph/834942014_1_1000x700.jpg?buc...](https://iak.olx.ph/images_olxph/834942014_1_1000x700.jpg?bucket=05)), but no dice.

Then I realized that it wasn't the speakers but the game, because the sound worked otherwise! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miZHa7ZC6Z0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miZHa7ZC6Z0)

I took my father's pager and scrolled through, looking for the MSFT guy. I called him at 9am the next day. "Hi msft guy my name is joshmn I am guy-from- digital's son; I have a question about the operating system I have on this disk. Do you have a moment?"

I remember my mom standing in the kitchen saying "what are you doing joshmn?" "Mom please one moment I am talking to the msft guy"

She almost died laughing.

I explained my issue with Keen and sound. I can only imagine he was amused.

Luckily for me, his son had the same issue! It required a simple change in a text file somewhere, I can't remember where, but after an hour I finally figured it out.

Same guy traded a SEGA Genesis for a whopping 23" CRT a few years later.

My mom says I was a smart kid. Sure, maybe, but little does she know about how I couldn't find the second DOOM floppy for the installer. To replace it, I took a Windows 95 floppy, put a different sticker over it, and tried my hardest to write (physically, on the label) the same exact design/letters/words of the other DOOM floppy, changing the 1/x for 2/x.

</comment><comment><USER12> I remember playing Commander Keen 4 demo a lot (I finished all the demo levels) then searching for a free version full download in google. (I used to do that a lot when I was younger.) somehow they never yielded any free versions or downloads.

The game was a blast. Then I played and completed Keen 1 when it was released as freeware. They felt like completely different games (Keen 4 is a lot bigger game than Keen 1 which is like Duke 1 compared to Nukem 2).

I still have all 6 of them (Older me now knows how to get full versions without the stupid google search terms) but I no longer play them though they still as good as they used to be.

<comment><USER10> I played most of the way through the 1st one recently, and some of the 4th. In the mid-90s, my friend gave me a pirated copy of one of them. Maybe Keen 5? Or Keen Dreams? It had one of the piracy-protection things where you have to name the enemy to get past, and I only knew the names of 2 enemies. I'd keep exiting and re-starting the game until I found one that I knew.

Captain Comic and Commander Keen were my Super Marios until about 1995, because we had a PC but no game consoles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For those who don't know, it's made by id Software : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Software#Commander_Keen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Software#Commander_Keen)

<comment><USER14> I got it for free, along with Jill of the Jungle, and Wolfenstein 3D, with a Gravis PC Gamepad back in the day. They all came on two floppies, I was amazed that so much content could go on two discs that I could carry with me.

Revelation: Today, it's amazing to me to have a 128GB ssd on my keychain.

<comment><USER15> Commander Keen 4 and Duke Nukem 2 with a Gravis joystick of some description.

<comment><USER16> This one maybe?

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

<comment><USER17> We got Keen 4 bundled with this Gravis joystick: [http://mocagh.org/forsale/gravis-back.jpg](http://mocagh.org/forsale/gravis- back.jpg)

I played Keen exclusively with a joystick for years and was pretty good at it. If you sat me down with the exact same joystick I could probably still play pretty well, but the much looser feel of a modern joystick would screw me up. When my brother and I would play Keen, we'd make the plastic on the joystick case creak from the frantic maneuvering!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Jason Scott has archived Commander Keen, playable in Browser via DosBox

[https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_1_-_Maroone...](https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_1_-_Marooned_on_Mars_1990)

[https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_2_-_The_Ear...](https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_2_-_The_Earth_Explodes_1990)

[https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_4_-_Secret_...](https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_4_-_Secret_of_the_Oracle_1991)

[https://archive.org/details/msdos__K6DEMO__shareware](https://archive.org/details/msdos__K6DEMO__shareware)

[https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_- _Keen_Drea...](https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_- _Keen_Dreams_1993)

Commander Keen created iD software.

Also noteworthy for the use of John Carmack's adaptive tile refresh to smooth scroll on early 90s PCs.

</comment><comment><USER19> I very much enjoyed the speedruns of this game done by CapnClever on twitch. He has records on most official games and also has run some of the unofficial games.

It great to see someone running through levels I sweated blood and tears on as a kid.

[https://m.twitch.tv/capnclever/profile](https://m.twitch.tv/capnclever/profile)

</comment><comment><USER20> Commander Keen and Captain Comic, i do not think i spend more time on anything else at that age.

<comment><USER21> Captain Comic 2 seems to be almost impossible to find a working copy of. It seems it had some sort of copy protection that when the files were copied it locked you out of a majority of the game.

It seems this would be trivial to get around, but there doesn't seem to be enough interest in the game to find any information on it.

<comment><USER10> Any info on how it locks you out (text it shows? behavior of the lock?), how soon into the game, etc?

The binary itself seems either packed, compressed, or obfuscated, and that's probably part of why you haven't found a fixed version.

<comment><USER21> It has been a while since I tried. These are the only two sites I could find that mention it:

[http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/captain-comic-ii- fractured...](http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/captain-comic-ii-fractured- reality)

[https://raisedonvideogames.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/captain-...](https://raisedonvideogames.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/captain- comic-ii-copy-protection/)

<comment><USER10> Interesting, thanks. By this point, I'll bet there's a page somewhere with the codes...in fact, the copy that I downloaded has a file "PROTCODE.TXT" with the codes to look up.

They look like they're just 16-bit values. It tells you to look up things like "A, 5". In the table, there are 16 letters (columns) and 128 numbers (rows). I'll bet it's just checked against some algorithm in the game code.

It's tough to see where some of the code comes from, though. The game copies chunks of the binary around within itself, and constructs function calls "by hand" (pushing a memory address byte-by-byte, then "returning" to it). It's not horrendous to trace, but more than a half-hour job for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> aand we broke it.

Web archive to the rescue: [https://web.archive.org/web/20170628072214/www.commander- kee...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170628072214/www.commander- keen.com/level-maps.php)

</comment><comment><USER23> Related: Video from WeAreDevelopers Conference 2017, "The Early Days of Id Software - John Romero" [1]. Great nostalgia.

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

</comment><comment><USER24> Ah, such fond memories looking at these levels… This is where I learned my first command prompt skills – cd-ing through directories, dir /p-ing and running the various keen.exe programs :)

</comment><comment><USER25> Some of those would make great posters.

I wish I could see the same for Jazz Jackrabbit.

</comment><comment><USER26> related link, Commander Keen 4 play in your browser

[https://classicreload.com/commander-keen-4-secret-of-the- ora...](https://classicreload.com/commander-keen-4-secret-of-the-oracle.html)

though personally I prefer Crystal caves, have fond memories of playing it on computer in father's work [https://classicreload.com/crystal- caves.html](https://classicreload.com/crystal-caves.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> Very fond memories indeed of playing this DOS game on old Celeron and Pentium II.

The game is honestly much better than the Marios and Sonics that it was trying to mimic (at least part 5 and 6 were IMO)

<comment><USER28> If those CPUs are old, what does that make the 286s the game was made for.

<comment><USER29> I originally ran Commander Keen 4 on a 286 using a 5.25" floppy I got from some kiosk that was selling shareware disks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> OMG I didnt know about Keen 1, 3, 5 and 6! Will have something to do in the weekend. I first played Keen 4 on floppy disks installed on Win 98.

<comment><USER10> I played Keen 1 first, and Keen 4 a couple of years later. We might've had at least the first one before we even had Windows 3.1. I remember the clamshell package that shareware kinds of games used to be sold in, because after installing Keen4, that package sat on the hutch above the computer desk for a long time, and I touched it every time I reached up to turn on the speakers.

I knew about Keen Dreams at some point in my childhood. 2, 3, 5, and 6 were unknown to me for a _long_ time (might've been in college in the early 2000s before I knew of them?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I discovered Commander Keen through a "software of the month club" 3.5" floppy disk delivered by mail

</comment><comment><USER32> See also: [http://nesmaps.com/](http://nesmaps.com/)

<comment><USER33> Might as well go to the mother lode: [http://vgmaps.com/](http://vgmaps.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What's up with the swastika in Keen 5 Level 4 (lower right corner)?

<comment><USER35> As thekaleb mentioned the creator seems to reference this symbol a lot in his games. Here is more of a back story (after some google-fu of course as I'm not very familiar with the games)

Seems like Keen 5 has it as an easter egg to reference Wolfenstein [1].

And Wolfenstein uses it since the game has a "Nazi Party" within it (if you fight them or fight with them I'm not aware of) [2].

Interesting quote from [2] "The inclusion of the swastika led to the banning of the conventional game in Germany, as cultural stigma against the swastika is high there."

[1] [http://www.shikadi.net/keenwiki/Keen_5_Easter_eggs#Swastika](http://www.shikadi.net/keenwiki/Keen_5_Easter_eggs#Swastika)

[2] [http://wolfenstein.wikia.com/wiki/Swastika](http://wolfenstein.wikia.com/wiki/Swastika)

<comment><USER36> While probably a mistake on John Romero's part, Keen uses 卍 in its easter egg while the nazis used 卐 instead.

<comment><USER37> True but regardless of which one is technically correct, both pretty much share the same negative connotations now. I used to always hear people talking about how the swastika is really a sign of peace, but regardless of what it originally meant, it doesn't mean that anymore.

<comment><USER38> It doesn't have anything to do with Nazis to at least a billion people in India. I'd even bet that the majority of people around the world associate swastikas with non-Nazi stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is the tool available that made these maps?

<comment><USER40> I dunno about for these Keen maps, but I wrote a level dumper for the classic NES game M.C. Kids if you want to see what that looks like:

[https://gitlab.com/mcmapper/mcmapper/blob/master/main.c](https://gitlab.com/mcmapper/mcmapper/blob/master/main.c)

Output:

[https://tcrf.net/Proto:M.C._Kids](https://tcrf.net/Proto:M.C._Kids)

I'm contemplating turning it into a full level editor for the ROM hacking community, but I don't know how much use it would actually get.</comment></comment>


Why I didn't like Java 5 years ago, and why I don't like it now - <AUTHOR> http://chrismoos.com/2009/12/07/why-i-didnt-like-java-5-years-ago-and-why-i-dont-like-it-now/

<comment><USER2> _The next thing I tried in Java was creating a web application. I bought a book on J2EE and as I began learning the ins and outs, I began to hate it with a passion. The amount of configuration and boiler plate code to get something simple up and running, was a huge turn off to me. I was disgusted with the concept of EJBs and all the various patterns in J2EE_

Who said you need to use EJB's to do Java web development? At least spend some time learning Java before you start bashing it. Anyone else getting tired of the constant bashing of Java?

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't say you needed EJB's. I just said that it was a J2EE pattern which I attempted to follow.

Servlets/JSP/SpringMVC aren't too bad...

And I'm sorry if I'm part of the constant bashing, it wasn't intentional, just using Java recently made me dislike it again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Chris: never use automatic memory management?

The only time I have, after the fact, thought it worthwhile using C/C++ was some Nintendo game development. Well worth the effort to lower memory footprint and get good runtime performance.

Everything else I have done, in hindsight, would have been better done in a language with automatic GC. Fortunately for me, SAIC bought me a Lisp machine in 1982 and since then I have been able to do a lot of my work in Lisp, Prolog, Ruby, and Java :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I really never do manual memory management anymore, unless I'm doing a performance sensitive project in which I feel like I want to be really close to the metal.

I'm usually programming in Python/Ruby/Erlang...GC!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, he doesn't like Java for some valid, well discussed reasons and one very wrong reason (memory management is for novices). Waste of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Manual memory management, in most circumstances, is a waste of time. I really don't enjoy it, but it did teach me that a resource like memory, is finite.

I think in today's world, most people that learn programming in college, don't really get in depth with C, and in most cases start with Java (and end with Java). That is why I think the concept of memory management can easily be pushed aside (although, not always).</comment></comment>


C programming language showing signs of weakening in 2016 - happy-go-lucky http://betanews.com/2016/11/30/c-programming-language-showing-signs-of-weakening-in-2016/ <comment><AUTHOR> This article is a charmingly strange look at the popularity of programming languages written - or perhaps heavily edited - by someone who is clearly an outsider to the field.

</comment><comment><USER2> Well:

> Another noteworthy cause of C's weakening > is its lack of a corporate > sponsor

A big plus for me, how are the java API law suits going ?

> Over the years, C developers have shepherded C on > a path to improved > performance but neglected to > add new features

what new features, you mean you want to replace some function calls with single built in statements ?

</comment><comment><USER3> Upvote just for this masterpiece:

> With the advent of the Internet of Things and chatbot technology, C is > slowly becoming more obsolete.

<comment><USER4> On the contrary, _" C is so common today that most programs have C compilers to run C-coded files"_</comment></comment>


Wufoo's Secret to Customer Happiness? Googly Eyes - <AUTHOR> http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/wufoos-customer-service

<comment><USER2> Wufoo makes such ridiculous gobs of money. People barely pay attention because they're located in Tampa and don't brag about it all the time - like other subscription based revenue companies we often hear from.

What's worth noting is if a big company (99% of them anyway) tried to copy off of WuFoo they'd seem so disingenuous and fake they'd fail. Unless your AMEX, of course.

<comment><USER3> Can you say how much money?

When they were just starting, I remember thinking, "How narrow and trivial. Do they honestly expect to make money?". I'm looking to make this lesson even more potent.

<comment><USER4> Seconded. We hear all kinds of things about how much companies _exit_ for, but rarely about what they earn. Even an order-of-magnitude or a per-employee order-of-magnitude would be interesting.

<comment><USER5> This isn't meant to be an accurate analysis, but it gets halfway there. Have your grain of salt ready.

Wufoo has pretty standard conversion rates of 7% signup, 15% free -> paid. Each paid user nets about $13/mo. (<http://particletree.com/features/web-app- autopsy/>)

Compete (500k/mo | <http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wufoo.com/>) and Quantcast(250k/mo | <http://www.quantcast.com/wufoo.com>) have vastly different total traffic numbers, but Quantcast suggests that only 15% of their traffic are regular users.

MY GUESS: Their monthly active users are probably between 30k-75k. 30% of their active users are paid users. I'd say they make about 250k/mo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is an example of the difference between "Good" and "Great".

</comment><comment><USER7> I have officially been brainwashed... was totally expecting a Google pun here.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wufoo in general is a good simple success story. Its a story of polish. Polish in concept, site design, feature set, attention to detail, hand written thank you for using our service notes and more. They are a good envious benchmark for you want to be.

</comment><comment><USER9> <Idea> why don't more companies have sit down and write a customer day </idea>

</comment><comment><USER10> On a seemingly unrelated note, "Happiness is only real if shared." - Christopher McCandless

</comment><comment><USER11> My first thought: "Hmm, I could outsource note-writing to India, or automate it with Mechanical Turk."

I suppose that defeats the point though. :)

<comment><USER12> How about timesvr?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting. The real issue question may lurk here:

Did the developer do it because its in his job description or because he felt strongly that he wanted to communicate with the client in that way?

And how does that change things?

<comment><USER14> You bring up a good point. Right now, we're still small so everyone has a support day and talks to users almost daily. At this size, we all appreciate the close communication with the people using our product and we write those cards out of free will (not just a job description). Chris wrote more about it here:

<http://particletree.com/notebook/the-4-12-day-workweek/>

Now, as the company grows, this may have to be adjusted. The cards did not start as some marketing stunt, and we never want that message to be sent to our users. When cards from developer X don't feel personal enough, we'll have to brainstorm some more creative ways to thank our users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Fans of Googly Eyes may also enjoy this:

<http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/googly_eyed_bill>

Or maybe not, it's pretty silly. You can get the source code and make your own googly eyed people (PG, anyone?).

</comment><comment><USER16>
      the handwriting suggests that the author spends much
      more time with a keyboard than a pen.

Really? It looks rather neat to me. If that handwriting looks bad, the writer should visit my doctor sometime!

</comment><comment><USER17> usually you need substance before form, but with Wufoo 'form' is substance; great business model.

</comment><comment><USER18> Ok, Even tough Me was touched. Go Wufoo.</comment>


Walkthrough of a MongoDB Map/Reduce Job - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fiesta.cc/post/10980328832/walkthrough-a-mongodb-map-reduce-job

<comment><USER2> Hey Mike, do you think you could talk about how you test those js functions? Do you actually hardcode them as strings in python, or do you load them from a separate js file that you can develop / test separately. I've always been a little sketched out by the requirement that those MR jobs be written in js, would be curious to hear how you do it.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great question, and to be honest it's a bit of a pain point so I probably should've talked about it in the post.

When developing a new M/R job from scratch I start by mirroring (at least part of) the data to a local database. Then I can iterate locally on the M/R using print() and printjson() to debug the map() and reduce() functions - those will print directly to the database log.

I tend to just embed the map() & reduce() functions as Python strings like you see in the post. I'm confident that there are better ways to handle this, though. One approach that can be interesting is to do development from the shell, that way you can write and debug the map() & reduce() in an actual JS environment. Once you're happy with them you can just drop them in as strings with the rest of your application code. Would love to hear how other people are approaching this stuff, too.

All of that said, I expect that the tooling here will improve over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> That's strange; this site is blocked at my office (we use Brightcloud.com) but it doesn't seem to have any history of problems.

<comment><USER4> We're using tumblr for our blog if that offers any insight. Otherwise I'm not sure what could be causing this.</comment></comment>


Restructuring a giant, ancient codebase to make LibreOffice work well everywhere - <AUTHOR> https://fosdem.org/2018/interviews/michael-meeks/ <comment><USER2> Thank you for sharing this article. Speaking personally, it comes at a great time. I've been toying with the idea of getting involved in open source, and was particularly interested in pushing forward open source office suites.

Something that I'm particularly interested in with LibreOffice is helping the core being decoupled from the UI, to both help with portability and to speed up the rate of UI innovation. I had thought that I may have to start by myself, but based on this article it seems that the current LibreOffice developers are thinking along similar lines.

If any LibreOffice developers are reading this, are there any sub teams setup that may be a good fit? To give some idea of my background, I would describe myself as a tester that knows how to code (not in C++ alas, but I'm familiar enough with debugging at a low level).

<comment><AUTHOR> Regarding the UI, there are certainly some... curiosities. To give you a random anecdote from the trenches: [https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107087#c...](https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107087#c16)

"It's challenging to fix as one needs to tunnel certain data through 20 layers of abstraction, but hey, that's improved UX for you!"

If you want to get into triaging bugs, I welcome you with open arms. I am desperate to get us more helping hands as after nearly 10000 analysed reports I am anxious to diversify.

Here is the index of our QA tech articles: [https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA)

Basic debugging info for triagers: [https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/BugReport/Debug_Infor...](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/BugReport/Debug_Information)

Debugging for devs: [https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/How_to_debug](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/How_to_debug)

Binary bisecting: [https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Bibisect](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Bibisect)

If you were thinking of working on the UI, please get in touch with the design team, which includes some devs (but could really use 10 more!): [https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design)

You will find me in the QA IRC channel (and most others): [https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/IRC](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/IRC)

I'm heading to sleep now, though, but I hope to see you around!

<comment><USER3> Do you think someone (with a programming background) can help in say, 2 to 4 hours by just jumping in, or am I going to cause more harm than good?

<comment><USER4> This articulates almost every experience I've had with trying to contribute my time to any open source project that has any size. I really think I've figured something out that'll help. I spend many hours getting X codebase to compile / work on my machine. I fix said issue and feel great about it! It never even gets looked at and/or it gets smashed to shreds with criticism by the same person that submitted the feature req / bug / whatnot.

<comment><USER5> I feel you, especially as someone with a bit of social anxiety any time I think I'm doing something helpful or useful (like writing this comment), because that concern is always in the back of my head. I don't have any particularly good advice that you likely haven't read or heard before, but sometimes it's useful to read/hear it from others who've been in the same boat.

In my experience, and this goes doubly so for small FOSS projects, you _have_ to remember that it's someone else's baby. Maybe they were the person who started it, maybe they've been there since the early days, or maybe they have an unusually strong attachment or sense of ownership over whatever it is you're changing. At any rate, the moment you submit a patch, there's always the risk that it may be met with harsh criticism (sometimes deserved; sometimes not), and at least part of that may be the nature of the human psyche. So, the best defense is to do things by the book, if there's an established process, or failing that, persistence. Sometimes, just the existence of a patch in the wild--even if it isn't accepted by the developer-- can be enough to motivate them toward a fix. I've seen plenty of relatively minor fixes get rejected only to be fixed hours later by a maintainer because the patch got them _thinking_.

Let's be honest, even if it bruises the ego a little: As a user, I don't care how it gets fixed. I'm not in it for the glory. I just want it to _work_.

There's of course the usual advice [1]: Keep your pull requests/patches short and targeted. Don't try to do too much, because larger, more widely reaching patches are likely to be ignored or turned down. Document what you can, why you did what you did, and what you intended to fix; but don't be too verbose (guilty, as you can see here!). Asking follow-up questions is instrumental if it's rejected, because there's probably something that was missed or overlooked. Of course, this doesn't obviate issues with projects that have a distinct lack of communication skills or toxic personalities. Ironically, I've had some luck with non-committal/non-responsive maintainers by forking small projects, applying my changes and moving on, only to find some weeks later that they want to pull my changes. In those cases, I never expected a fix--I just needed it to work _yesterday_ \--and I needed somewhere to publicly source the fixed copy from. That upstream wants the resolution as well is merely an added bonus.

But the key is (polite) persistence. It's also the hardest to do if you don't want to seem rude or pushy. I also think that rejection and criticism play on our fear of failure (whether or not we admit it), which may kill participation. Just don't give up: Think of the other users who don't have your skill set to fix the underlying problem and consider that you're advocating for _them_!

[1] [https://www.atlassian.com/blog/git/written-unwritten- guide-p...](https://www.atlassian.com/blog/git/written-unwritten-guide-pull- requests)

<comment><USER6> Well, skip the anxiety, because this is good advice :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> He has a slide deck [1] that he links to in the interview, where he tries to highlight some challenges with grokking large codebases, and techniques one can use to compartmentalize understanding and build from there. I found it both a bit too colloquial yet also too opaque, but there's some useful nuggets in there.

It also speaks to a significant problem: large codebases are inherently difficult to understand, which forms a barrier to entry. This is despite the fact that most software makes use of various abstractions to break problems into smaller parts.

In the general sense, I believe it's worth thinking about how the particular abstraction mechanisms used in software impact a new contributor's productivity, vs. the productivity of someone more familiar with the codebase, especially for projects that are developed in the open, or with high developer turnover.

[1] [https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/2016-04-29-solving- pr...](https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/2016-04-29-solving-problems.pdf)

<comment><USER8> I've always found abstraction to be a double edged sword when trying to understand codebases. Sometimes it helps define the intent, but other times I'm going "WTF is this thing for real?" and tracking the abstractions through several files.

My favorite is tracking down a member function and being completely confused until I realize that I missed one of the layers and it was overridden in that instantiation.

<comment><USER9> IMO the most important thing when introducing a layer of abstraction is the name of the new component. I sometimes spend 2 or more minutes making up a name that best describes what this layer is about.

ProTip: _Manager or_ Controller is not a good name. To me a good name is eg "PostDetailSerializerResolver" - it's a component that will resolve serializers for post detail objects. And according to concept of single responsibility, it should only do that. If you need it to do more, you must change the name.

<comment><USER10> > I sometimes spend 2 or more minutes making up a name that best describes > what this layer is about.

Some of the best refactoring I ever did for long-term code-maintenance was nothing more than untangling a web of abstraction layers and renaming them to fit the actual context, changing nothing to the functionality of the code.

Sometimes you start out with an idea for what the architecture will be, but then things change and the naming isn't updated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's so amazing that the dinosaur LibreOffice/OpenOffice is still maintained. From the codebase, it is probably similarly old-fashioned like Thunderbird. Some folks may say it is hopeless to modernize. For me it does not even matter whether that's true or not -- it is a well-done and partially timeless and universal tool in my everyday work flow. While there are fancy and modern alternatives like the (closed source) Google Docs, LibreOffice always stays as a fall-back solution if nothing more works. Thank you for this work, developers!

<comment><USER12> I recently discovered that Microsoft literally will not sell you Office for a computer not connected to the internet. You cannot buy this product, I tried very hard, lots of escalation, etc.

Needless to say, LibreOffice works very nicely in an offline environment, and it's very rare that I find a file it does not handle well. (The only example I have — a Word document with Track Changes enabled, heavily revised by multiple people, multiple times over many days. L.O. seemed to lose track of the changes and showed a wrong document. I imagine for most people this is pretty rare.)

And you don't have to worry about malware (for those tempted to pirate Microsoft Office).

<comment><USER13> I'm a bit confused by this. Microsoft normally has excellent offline activation capabilities for all the three letter agencies that buy their software and run it on internal networks.

<comment><USER14> Enterprise editions exist with 100% offline installation, but unfortunately, home and business licenses have an "offline install" that requires online activation...[0]

This has been a huge PITA for me since I often need Word and Excel on a computer that's restricted from accessing the internet.

[0]: [https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-the- Office-2016...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-the- Office-2016-offline-installer-f0a85fe7-118f-41cb-a791-d59cef96ad1c)

<comment><USER13> This is a bit kafka-esque:

> You need to be connected to the internet to download this installer file, > but once that's done, you can then install Office offline on a PC at your > convenience.

> ...

> After your Office installation is complete, you need to activate Office. Be > sure you're connected to the Internet and then open any Office application, > such as Word or Excel.

I mean the lede is "problems with slow speed or unreliable connections" but at the same time ... offline is offline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm quite surprised that the markup incompatibility with Microsoft Office is still an issue. Are they actively sabotaging the Open Document Foundation, or is it just really difficult to achieve?

<comment><USER16> Have Microsoft completely solved compatibility between different/same versions of MS Office now?

<comment><USER17> Nope, I ran into word documents that word could not render just last month. And I hardly use word; I edit about 1-5 docs per month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm trying to document the internals:

[https://chrissherlock1.gitbooks.io/inside- libreoffice/conten...](https://chrissherlock1.gitbooks.io/inside- libreoffice/content/)

I've also been, on the quiet, go through the commits and summarise it better. Before 2009, there was this insane way of grouping commits and it makes it hard to know who did what to the code!

</comment><comment><USER19> Would be nice to restructure the article next to make it readable on mobile.

<comment><USER20> Reader Mode in Safari works well on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I recall seeing a Google tech talk over ten years ago where they talked about cleaning up OpenOffice (or was it StarOffice?) it was memorable because they mentioned it did #define private public. I'm impressed they kept at it and it sounds like it's going well. Still glad it's not my project, though :)

<comment> the-tml Sounded unfamiliar, so I checked. The Apache OpenOffice sources indeed have three such lines left (all in obscure fairly irrelevant parts of the code; two inside odd #ifdefs that are never true, one inside their OS/2 (yes!) backend). LibreOffice naturally hasn't any such crap any longer.

<comment><USER22> Do you know why both Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice still exists?

<comment><USER18> History. Check the Wikipedia article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Michael Meeks is a wonderful guy, love his "Up early..."

</comment><comment><USER24> Personally wish people would stop tinkering with the UI - polish but do not tinker/change needlessly. Case in point being that Linux likely remains fringe as a desktop platform simply because of it's continual tendency to morph on the UI side of things.

Then again, Win10 is going down the same route so maybe it will all even out (...).

<comment><USER25> You mix UI and UX polish, and the UX on OpenOffice is honestly not very good ... I only had to use it the other day and struggled with finding half a dozen things that are just obvious with Word.

<comment><USER26> * obvious to Word users

For complete novices, yes the UI is not very intuitive. But Word isn't much better either.

I recently had to start using Word again at work and even though the ribbons _seem_ intuitive and user-friendly, actually finding the feature I needed has not always been easy. I've had to Google quite a bit (the help is excellent though).

At least in LibreOffice everything is always in the menus and does not suddenly disappear if your window is not wide enough.

<comment><USER27> Office now has a command search box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Generally I find their suite pretty full features and functional. There are occasional conversion snafus with MS formats, but honestly that is less on them and more on MS.

In all honesty, my biggest issue is that Calc can slow to a crawl when a sheet gets even moderately large, especially if using filter/sorting.

<comment><USER18> I've upvoted you - this sort of feedback is invaluable! Do you have an example spreadsheet? If you could log a bug and upload it, that would be helpful.

<comment><USER28> Open a LibreOffice Calc doc. Put a 1 in A1. Drag down to a thousand or so. Then drag to the right replicating that series out to say LL. On my decently beefy laptop (i7 quad core, 16 GB RAM, 8 Gb RAM free) it slows to an absolute crawl. On my server (16 dual threaded cores, 64G RAM), it can handle quite a bit more before slowing to a crawl.

<comment><USER28> laptop windows. Server Ubuntu

<comment><USER18> Try the bugzilla - [http://bugs.documentfoundation.org/](http://bugs.documentfoundation.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I love these sorts of projects and solving these sorts of problems. However, I don't have time to work on an Open Source project, and can't due to employer restrictions anyway. So I get out my inner refactoring by going to the Code Review Stack Exchange [0]. Check it out if you want to do some analysis of a small self-contained piece of code.

[0] [https://codereview.stackexchange.com](https://codereview.stackexchange.com)

</comment><comment><USER30> This reminds me of a presentation[0] from Microsoft at CPPCon about using the same giant ancient Office codebase on iOS and Android as on Windows.

0\. [https://cppcon.org/bonus-talk-cxx-in-ms- office-2014/](https://cppcon.org/bonus-talk-cxx-in-ms-office-2014/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Error:Execution failed for task ':createStrippedConfigMain'. > A problem occurred starting process 'command 'D:/android/mobile-config.py''

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you trying to build the Android Viewer on Windows? I believe no one has ever done that, so I recommend you to stick with Linux: [https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/BuildingForA...](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/BuildingForAndroid)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Try doing that with your dynamically typed language.

<comment><USER33> It's really not going to be easy either way.</comment></comment>


What career path for engineers who don't want to go to management? - <AUTHOR> http://frrl.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/quandary-career-advancement-of-technical-engineers-part-ii/

<comment><USER2> In reading this article I was struck by the value judgements implied by the choices of terms within the context of contemporary American culture : Engineers == self-centered == bad Managers == other-centered == good

Another perspective might be that engineers are more interested in the value of the work they do whereas corporations are only concerned with the economic benefit they can obtain from that value. I'm not an economist but I'm convinced that value and price/cost/profit are two very different things. The first measures the actual benefit to a person or society of a given good while the later is determined by market dynamics/economic context. For example a laptop may only cost a few hundred dollars due to abundant supply but if I use that laptop to solve a problem worth millions then isn't the value of that laptop really much higher ?

</comment><comment><USER3> Managers care about money only, hence they get the money.

Engineers care about money and glory, hence they get none.

For glory is about money in corporations and almost everywhere in this world.

As an engineer, I focus on glory only, that's hard enough, and I am pretty sure some big money would come out of it if, I ever manage to achieve anything.

This is not something you can do when you're young, you need some money to survive, but as soon as you get that, you can.

Work for glory, not money.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This article is just a conversation starter. What career path does your company offer to engineers? If you're an engineer/developer/programmer, what career path should a dream company offer?

Are the technical skills wasted if the engineers go to management?</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to promote your new fancy web application? - <AUTHOR> I was wondering, as a soon to be startup founder, what opinions do all the hackers out there ;) have on the best ways to promote a brand new web application. Thank you all. <comment><USER2> [http://andrewchenblog.com/2007/11/22/why-bloggers-and- press-...](http://andrewchenblog.com/2007/11/22/why-bloggers-and-press-dont- matter-for-user-acquisition/)

Interesting contrarian viewpoint. I don't agree with it entirely (the truth always lies somewhere in the middle) but the important takeaway is that active promotion is expensive as hell (either time or money).

I'd say the most important thing is to BE WORTH TALKING ABOUT. If you're yet another project management app or bugtracker, this is challenging. Have a twist, have a story.

Next, try to find a viral loop (read more Andrew Chen if you think your app has potential here... Most don't).

Be an SEO genius. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

Learn about direct response marketing (best way is going to marketingexperiments.com and playing the adwords / landing page game). This only works if you have a product to sell, of course... Unless you want to play arbitrage games, which have gotten harder.

The trick is (after a very brief push for your spike of attention and accompanying SEO-juicing backlinks) to find a systemic way for business to come to YOU.

</comment><comment><USER3> You could write a book on this. Heck, I probably should - I've done it a few times :)

A short list (but by no means anywhere near complete!):

\- Find as many blogs in your niche as possible. Pitch them _properly_ (a lot could be written on that point alone) DON'T JUST GO FOR THE BIG ONES! The smaller blogs are more likely to link to you if you're friendly to them and develop rapport.. I run blogs with over 10,000 subscribers and I love helping people who are FRIENDLY and GENUINE.

\- Use your social network.. you've been building one up, right? Make sure all your Twitter and Facebook followers know about what you're doing. Lean on your Linked In contacts.

\- Stumbleupon advertising (if appropriate, 5 cents a visitor). Adwords advertising (if appropriate).

\- Find places where users of competing applications gather (forums, Google Groups, etc) and work your way into their attention zone.

\- See if there's a sub-Reddit that's specifically for your niche. Find people to charm there, post ancillary links regarding your app, etc. Don't over-do it.

\- Post it on HR (as someone said above)

\- Find your way in to interviews, podcasts, etc. A lot of content providers are dying for more content - you might make a great interviewee. The media is less opaque than it seems.

\- Go to events! Make sure you have an elevator pitch. Get excited. Wear schwag featuring your logo, etc, if you want to. Don't just focus on the big- wigs - get anyone who might find your service useful excited.

\- Does your design rock? Get on to the "CSS design", and "Web design" show case type sites. There are hundreds of them around. Not amazing exposure, but the more links the better and any one of your visitors might turn in to a serious contact.

\- Start your own blog for your company / startup. Make it really interesting. Be candid. Show off new features. Show off stuff you're working on. Show off your team or your technology. Build up your own tribe of followers. They will make all the difference when it comes to saving you on del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, and so forth.

\- Make sure you stay on top of your e-mail. Customers might test you with e-mails - responding quickly and completely can make the difference between sales and no sales - or life and death with a startup.

\- Find ancillary reasons to get your service mentioned in blog posts and tutorials. For example, if your startup is an RSS mashup generator of some sort, you need to have tutorials out there that recommend your service. Get those tutorials and posts on to Reddit, Hacker News, Digg, etc.

\- If people write about your site, write tutorials that mention you, etc, PROMOTE THAT CONTENT EVEN IF IT'S NOT YOURS! Get people reading stuff that's about you - not by you!

\- Remember that bigger sites like TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb (if applicable to your sector) love exclusives. Don't bother mass pitching those - focus on one, whichever you can get best rapport with, and offer an exclusive. Your product needs to be AWESOME for this to work though.

\- Follow a search.twitter.com search on terms related to your service (and even the name of your service) .. get in touch with people who might be interested, respond to all comments about your service.

\- Write a bog standard press release and submit through the standard channels. This will not help much but at least your company name/service name will end up with a ton of results in Google - this can help you look bigger than you are. You /may/ even get some offline coverage if the press release is actually kinda good (but not too crazy). It's cheap to do this.

\- Build ancillary "fun" services that tie into your main web app. Something fun, free, perhaps something that you can relate to sites people find interesting, such as Twitter. Let's say your main service is an online graphics editor. Perhaps you could create a separate site where people can create avatars for Twitter / Facebook from a small set of templates.. separate project but promoting the first.

\- Hustle, hustle, hustle! Make sure you know as soon as someone blogs about your service. Follow Google Blog Searches, etc. Keep Googling. Get commenting on blogs (not in a spammy way - just get your name and service out there). If someone needs to do something your service offers, you need to be there!

I believe Jason Calacanis wrote an interesting piece on doing PR for a startup recently. Find that article and read it - I recall it was very good.

..

BTW, if anyone thinks I might be able to turn this into a good book, resource site, or similar, vote this up and I might give it a try! :)

<comment><USER4> Sorry, what's HR?

<comment><USER3> My bad. I meant HN - as in here. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Promoting a website is the same as promoting any other product:

1) Identify your target market 2) Find a distribution channel 3) Pursue your target market

Many startups go the TechCrunch route, but unless your target market is Silicon Valley technologists it's probably not a smart move. Put another way, not all customers are created equal.

When I was first launching Appaholic (now Adonomics) I posted aggressively in the Facebook developer forums. Beyond that I pursued SEO.

Most startup people I know think a bit about (1), very little about (2), and jump right into (3). Be methodical and data-oriented, instead.

<comment><USER6> Steve Jobs emphasized the same 1-2-3 in that NeXT pitch that floated around HN and VentureHacks recently: <http://venturehacks.com/articles/steve-jobs-pitch>

At Stormpulse we created an embeddable version of our Stormpulse map and got it on The Palm Beach Post and a bunch of other news outlets that no one in Silicon Valley cares about before we ever made it to TC.

But those 'unknown to the world at large' news channels are where people go to find our content, so they were the right places to distribute. Target customers first, buzz second. In our experience, if your product is solid, eventually you'll get noticed by someone that really needs to write a tech story (that's what happened for us); and once you're in to the stream, other, larger press (TC, etc.) will tend to follow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Amazon's Mechanical Turk can get you beta testers and first users for $.01-.05 a piece. It's generally cheaper than using ad sense.

<comment><USER8> People beta test websites for 5 cents?

<comment><USER9> I haven't used mTurk personally, but I know people who have, and I've looked a lot into their model.

Here's the deal: For a small amount of money (1 to 5 cents, or more if you like), you can pay people to take a specific action on your site, like posting a review, voting on 10 items, commenting to a post, etc.

I took a look at the mTurk site (<https://www.mturk.com/mturk/findhits?match=false>), and here are some things that you can earn money on:

\- Look at 25 photos and click on the parts that are sidewalk ($0.02)

\- Enter the title, name, and residence of a US Patent ($0.08)

\- Write a 30-word comment to a blog post ($0.03)

\- Find the longitude and latitude of a business, given its street address ($0.10)

\- Write a one-paragraph abstract of an information technology article ($0.05)

I find it amazing that so many people are willing to do such drudgery-laden, time-intensive tasks, but evidently, when you toss a bunch of nickels into the air, lots of people jump.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Make it so good that everyone talks about it.

</comment><comment><USER11> I just gave a presentation on this at Barcamp Atlanta. The slides are up on my blog if you're interested:

[http://blog.aisleten.com/2008/10/18/generating-buzz- without-...](http://blog.aisleten.com/2008/10/18/generating-buzz-without- being-a-scumbag-spammer/)

</comment><comment><USER12> First post it on HN, if you can take the though review it shows how thick you skin is. If you pass the review, you're ready to go show off to the rest of the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, yeah, I guess posting to as many places as possible is one way to go, but apart from HN, do you suggest any other extremely cool, heavily hyped, news sites, mailing lists, and the such? :)

<comment><USER12> HN review will give you a good sense of how useful your "fancy" application is, this is paramount to whatever promotion you may want to take your product into. Good review on HN gives you a strong launch pad, I speak from experience. You may get meaningful coverage over the internet, better than what mass mailing, spam posting and any other free platform will do.

Other alternatives are places like techcrunch ; there you must be one in the circle or getting a funding scoop. Or at best they will write in an effort to bury you instead. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, I love your optimism ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Petercooper shared a great list here are some of my thoughts...

We failed to promote our last start up very well (Seekler.com), and our new start doesn't rely on eyeballs so we aren't really promoting it. That being said we did learn a few things. Some of these are probably specific to our type of site which was silly / interesting lists, other tips might be more generalizable.

* Focus more niche, whenever we specifically targeted and marketed based around a niche we were far more successful (batman comics vs. comics <http://seekler.com/lists/Best+Batman+Graphic+Novels+>(Comics) )

* Engage highly motivated users, we wanted to make a great horror movie list and we found a couple horror movie blogs, forums, and fans and got them involved in the process from the beginning and after they all thought it was good we promoted it.

* Time you promotion, some days are better than others to announce a link / site / news. Figure out what days are best for your kind of content. Then try to focus all of the announcements across various sites into one day. Single day focus always did much better for us than slowly stringing along a few links here and there. (likely because of the larger social news and voting effects)

* Get a good relationship with a couple bloggers that write about your topics. We had a few that we could email at any time and they were happy to add a link pointing out our new announcement or release.

* Blog and Twitter we have had a few blog articles drive as much traffic to the site as any marketing attempt. I have also been amazed at how many people will sign up to follow site announcements via twitter if you don't abuse it by posting all the time.

* One in awhile go for something edgy, some of our mainstream lists did well, but some of our weirder ones were easier to get links for.

* Share the wealth if you get some good traffic from other sites link back to people, you will find them more likely to mention something you do if you have been showing them some love.

* Spend a little time making sure you site is OK at SEO, just good enough that you aren't hurting yourself when you do get linked up for various topics.

Anyways just a couple tips off the top of my head, our attempts where never hugely successful but we had a handful of good traffic hear and there. Hope some of my thoughts help.

</comment><comment><USER14> \- Get bloggers/writers to discover your svc serendipitously or through a friend or social media contact

\- Definitely small time bloggers need to focused on. You never know who reads what!

\- Submit your company to conference/contests like TechCrunch40/50. Go even if not selected or semi-finalist!

\- Once at these conferences make yourself standout in a sea of nobodies. Be different and get people talking

</comment><comment><USER15> Apparently dropping your company name in this thread is a good way :)

\- <http://mattcrampton.com/flickr/></comment>


Why an 'iPod killer' will never kill the iPod - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1397-why-an-ipod-killer-will-never-kill-the-ipod <comment><USER2> They have a good point, but seriously beating iTunes isn't exactly hard. QuickTime has been the most pain in the ass media player on the PC for a long time, it was even worse than Real for a long time. I mean Real is full of crap that slows down your computer, but QuickTime used to be outright slow.

Apple has certainly improved, but I don't see iTunes as much more than a well written library program with an MP3 player tacked on.

If I had the money I could easily build and design a better, sleeker MP3 player than Apple. It's just the fact that all the companies who are coming to compete in the MP3 player market don't have a history in it. I used to own a Sony MP3 player, and fuck did it butcher the iPod Shuffle in usability and play time, I mean it had 50 hours of playback! It was, and still is, the only MP3 player on the market that can actually play all the music on it before its battery dies. If I ever needed a small MP3 player again I'd either dig up the old Sony one or buy the newer model.

The iPod Classic sits in the multimedia market, not in the solely MP3 market. This is where the problem comes in. iPod's competition doesn't know how to make something that looks worthy of the money. Zune was a piece of plastic crap, plastic was flashy when the original Walkman came out, but if anyone from Microsoft cared to look out of their window on a highway they might see that plastic is trash.

I have a cheap motorola phone, no bells or whistles. My girlfriend has a more expensive phone with a camera and mp3 player and what not. It's the same phone, it even takes the identical battery, yet hers has a metal back plate and everything else and weighs 3 times as much. This, in peoples minds, equals value.

I could easily use the iPod's example and build a better MP3 player. It's quite simple; use a slightly wider LCD screen and display in widescreen, which should all blend together in a deep black so that you can't see the difference between the LCD and plain black when it's off (the mp3 player I had from Sony did this and people liked and commented on how cool it looked, because it was cool). The front plate should be a single piece of unbroken electrically conductive glass so that you can operate the controls (similar to how the iPod works) but without it ever, ever being able to get dirt stuck between the cracks. The back plate should obviously be scratch resistant aluminum.

All of the above design is off the shelf or, in the case of the LCD, easily designable. However, the cost of such an MP3 player would be too high that you can't guarantee people will buy it, which is exactly why Microsoft or Sony hasn't made something like this. Apple has a keen following, it's risks aren't going to bankrupt it or a division, so it's free to experiment; other companies can't experiment in the market, that's reserved for the lab only because if they fuck up slightly then no one will pay the money.

<comment><USER3> Quicktime is worse than slow--its not even standards compliant, and most ordinary H.264 video will not play back on it properly (and that subset seems to change on every release).

From an actually-working standpoint, its even worse. I had to install Quicktime a while back on Windows to convert some weird-format Quicktime YUV files to something usable--it instacrashed upon trying to convert it. After reinstalling a few times it worked, but it took over 2 hours to _start the conversion_. This was a conversion from raw YUV to raw BMP. Oh, and then it took about 2 days to do the conversion for a single film. Seriously, folks.

I've constantly heard its much better under OS X; but at least my experience on Windows says its not merely bad, but the single worst media player I have ever used (yes, worse than Real.)

<comment><USER2> My brother switched to Mac a while ago, and pretty much the first thing he commented on as the major difference was that he could actually use quicktime.

<comment><USER4> I'm on a Mac right now, and this is absolutely correct. QuickTime handles nearly everything once you have Perian installed. It means that suddenly you have a capable mini-player for watching nearly anything. And it's very smooth, too: it has a bunch of nifty little features that I'm sure the Windows version doesn't have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >If you're going to be an iPod killer — and not just a great new music player — you have to first out-Apple Apple at all the things that makes the iPod special. That means superior industrial design, an iTMS-beating catalogue of content, and a better desktop experience than iTunes.

My understanding is Apple makes $100 dollars' margin on every Ipod. You could gain some market share in the mp3-player space by undercutting Apple.

Just make the design work (this might mean hiring a renowned UI designer from outside, or hell, poach Jon Ive for 30M), make it cost half as much as an iPod, but avoid _making it out of plastic._ Make a case out of exotic metals or hardwoods or marble, or acquire 1000 songs for Microsoft's catalogue to add to every ipod so it is useful from the get-go.[1]

[1] I have no idea how feasible this stuff would be, but I think it is appealing.

<comment><USER4> But if you try to undercut Apple, and they're making a ridiculous margin, then if you've actually got a good player worth buying they can just drop prices. Look at the iPhone situation. They killed nearly all their competition with the price drop. Nobody can touch it right now.

<comment><USER5> I'd like to split a hair: if you make them drop their prices, you'll hurt their margins and possibly their revenue, depending on the elasticity of the product. I'm not sure you'd win out in the end, but strictly speaking, you would be undercutting Apple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Weird .. people actually LIKE using iTunes? I mean its pretty decent .. but nothing special.

<comment><USER4> I love it, mainly because it has the two things I really like.

First off, I can quickly make playlists that work well together, thanks to Genius.

Second, I can use a keyboard shortcut to get to the search bar, to quickly find music.

iTunes has the fastest search of any music player I've ever used. I love it for that alone. And what else should a music player do? I've used Amarok. It has too _many_ features. It's a beast. iTunes is a background application, absolutely, but it's easy to use. And if you really need it, they've got the best visualizer I've ever seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems to me that the company most well-positioned to create a successor to the iPod (other than Apple), is Amazon. A mini-Kindle with audio and video - and downloads everywhere 3G reaches could be a smash hit.

<comment><USER4> You know, you've got a good point! The Kindle is an excellent product: Amazon's proven that they have a good design team. The only problem is that its screen can't support video, ever. (It already has an MP3 player built in.)

It would be lower on the market, but Amazon is actually in a prime position to be making hardware. Don't know how much they'd make by entering competitive territory, though. I don't know if it would be worth it for them.

<comment><USER7> Actually, e-ink is now up to at least some video. See: [http://earthfirst.com/a-look-at-the-paperless-newspapers- of-...](http://earthfirst.com/a-look-at-the-paperless-newspapers-of-the- future/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd love an equally usable audio player with better sound quality. I encode everything at 224, which should yield pretty good sound, but today I threw in a CD (left the iPod in my car) and there is a very noticeable difference in sound quality. I'm only going to play my CDs when I'm home now.

</comment><comment><USER9> The article headline is correct, but the explanation given in the article is incorrect. Our frame of reference for the successor to the iPod won't be the iPod itself because, like the Walkman, it will be completely different from its predecessor.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. And I think that's what the article is saying: nobody IS making anything new.

I wonder, though: what else is there to do? After you can fit your entire music library onto an iPod, and navigate it incredibly easy, what's left to add on? Beyond new features, like the iPhone's doing, and - eventually, once there's enough space - lossless audio formats.</comment></comment>


Homes actually need to be practical now - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/03/finding-privacy-during-pandemic/608944/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's very hard for me to understand the motivations behind American home and apartment design. It is the exact, diametrical opposite of the design that anyone who works from home, takes work home, or is engaged in any kind of intellectual or creative labour at home would want. And, of course, quite topically: it is especially impossible, in view of such a design, to do any of the aforementioned with small children at home. That may be impossible anyway, but the typical single-family detached house layout assures it. From a European perspective, it's all rather perverse.

Lots of nooks, crannies, partitions, and doors that close are an essential principle of most apartments found in Central and Eastern Europe, at least. Back in Moscow, which I left as a pre-school aged child, we had a small foyer that opened into a long hallway with numerous rooms and doors. The kitchen in itself had a door, which meant one could use the kitchen table to work or study when not cooking or eating.

Meanwhile, in Atlanta, I had a 2 BR ~1200 sq ft apartment with wasted space for a needlessly large walk-in closet in the master, and a second bathroom nobody needed. That space could have easily been carved out for a third room!

The rooms themselves around here seem to be designed to facilitate 'private life' only and do not have functional attributes in mind.

Two other perverse tendencies we commonly lament:

1\. To combine the front door, kitchen and living room in some way; why would you want someone to walk straight into and through your living room, or your kitchen?!

2\. The seeming aspiration in the layout of ordinary apartments to mimic the layout of houses, when they are in fact not houses for many reasons, and serve a very different set of priorities.

</comment><comment><USER2> My wife and I often talk about the under valued nature of walls and doors in houses. I feel it'sa trend that will reverse over time. Closing a door to hide toys is an awesome thing.

The interesting part of this article was they said open concept was preferred for demolition filming. I've often heard people say open concept is preferred for home improvement shows due to the difficulty of shooting smaller rooms(tilt shift lens anyone).

<comment><USER3> Most of the "open concept" I've seen is just the kitchen/living area. I can see pros/cons for separating the kitchen (to keep a messy kitchen behind doors) or opening it up (more space, can talk to guests while preparing). I can also see why historically they were separate because a lot of aspects (drive ways, hall ways) are inherited from the rich, which often had servants doing meal prep. I do agree HGTV has influenced things and larger rooms are easier to film.

I feel like the downside I've noticed from contemporary design is lack of cupboard/storage and awkward layouts for couch/tv placement (many "staged houses" are impractical for living in--I hate decorative pillows). That might be exacerbated by larger, cheap TVs (but I remember this predating them). Maybe the lack of cupboard space is expected because people eat out more? Part of it is obviously knocking down walls gives fewer walls for cupboards, but I guess pantries are blown out to give more sqft to the main rooms?

My experience before the open floor plan trend was that there was a lot of bespoke rooms that weren't often used such as a dining room. I lived in places that had a separate living room and family room--but mostly the family gathered in one because the TV was there. Bedrooms have always been closed off. Things like a home office or gym were just extra bedrooms repurposed.

The personal space issue they're talking about seems like it would only apply to studio apartments or kids sharing rooms. I shared a room with my siblings and definitely remember feeling like I couldn't escape, but that didn't have anything to do with floor plans.</comment></comment>


MySpace's Tom Gets $500k Per Year to Stop Coming to Work - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2009/06/23/myspace-tom-deal/

<comment><USER2> This looks like a slow severance to me.

In exchange for his salary reduction, he agrees to not close his profile and remain an "ambassador" to the service? If you ask me, it just sounds like they're trying to keep some decent PR going in the face of some serious adversity.

<comment><AUTHOR> This seems like bad PR considering all the people they have fired.

<comment><USER2> I would venture to guess the average MySpace user has no idea about the people they have fired. They'd certainly notice if something happened to Tom though.

<comment><USER3> You seem to be correct, they can't replace Tom as the default friend. They'll have to do something really clever for that to happen ...

The other day I was talking to my friend and she was telling me that facebook suck's because it does not support layout changes and allows auto music play as soon as you load the page. So, in the process I told her about the layoffs and Facebook has crossed over Myspace in terms of monthly visits... she was totally surprised.

<comment><USER4> >they can't replace Tom as the default friend.

They could make it Rupert Murdoch!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _...what became the world's top social network, only to see it lose its edge > under News Corp._

I think it's fair to blame acquirers in many cases, but based on MySpace's history they may have done better under News Corp than they would have done independently.

<comment><USER6> I don't think the founders would be to concerned, they made there millions.

It wouldn't have done much better solo unless they had seriously changed there engineering and removed all the backwards compatability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Talk about out-of-this-world salaries...

<comment><USER7> Just curious, why did I get downvoted for that?

Yes, it was snarky but how are these salaries ($7.5mio and $500k) not out of this world? I'm not after myspace in particular here.

<comment><USER7> So, as my question also gets downvoted I can only guess I touched a sore point anyhow. Too bad none of the downvoters feels obliged to explain how such salaries are justified. Especially in a company that is currently writing off in the billions.

<comment><USER8> I didn't downvote you, but given that Tom is a name and profile recognized by millions of people, the fact that he's paid such a small amount to stick around is surprising. Other than that, NWS is a private company. If you think they're overpaying people, short the stock, bank your profits, and use that as proof that you know more than Rupert Murdoch about how to run a media company.

<comment><USER7> Well, thanks for at least providing some insight into that mindset.

The "small amount" part (wrt 500k annual) is what I just don't get into my head. I doubt that millions of people care about Tom. I doubt that myspace would lose upwards of 500k per year if he went away. But you are ofcourse right, I am not Rupert Murdoch and my observation that myspace is tanking is merely from the frog perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, after the Casual Friday incident it makes sense...</comment>


Foc.us TDCS headsets and controller - <AUTHOR> http://foc.us/

<comment><USER2> I just spent 5 minutes navigating around the site.

It looks like some kind of thing. I imagine based on the word headset that it's a soundthing? But given the total lack of explanatory information, I've got no real idea why it's a good soundthing or why I'd want to replace my current soundthings with this new one. I'm further confused that I'd apparently need to buy some soundpadthings and a controllerthing?</comment>


Crooks Spy on Casino Card Games With Hacked Security Cameras, Win $33M - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/03/hackers-game-casino/ <comment><AUTHOR> Was this poker? How was the casino able to see the hole cards? What other game could this have been? And who would play at these stakes? Was it the casino's money that was lost or other players? There is no mention of victims, so perhaps it wasn't poker?</comment>


Wash.io decimated local businesses, then crashed anyway - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/AndrayDomise/status/770861655123165184 <comment><USER3> I started wondering how wash.io had seemingly driven out so much local business, and thought: perhaps they were undercutting the opposition - cleaning at cost or less - in order to build market share?

Their website is still showing prices:

\- $2.15/lb Wash+Fold (min 15lb, so $32.25 minimum) \- $2.75 shirt \- $6.69 t-shirt \- $7.79 sweater

Plus a $5.99 delivery charge.

I'm not all that familiar with laundromat prices in the USA, but the few truck-stop laundromats I used were _much_ cheaper than this (admittedly I'd have to fold my own clothes).

On the face of it, they weren't competing with local laundromat services - <USER2> on price, at any rate. If they were competing for business, it was with the cash-rich, time-poor market segment. I'm skeptical that wash.io really drove that many local laundromats out of business, and if a significant number of laundromats happened to go out of business at the same time, it's worth exploring whether there were other market forces (such as increased business rents) at play.

<comment><USER4> One of the tweets links an article that suggests it's more a sign of the general gentrification/housing crisis - with wash.io more like the cherry on top than the real cause:

 _So why are San Francisco laundromats actually closing down? Two reasons: real estate and the tech boom. There is a shortage of housing in San Francisco, which is a problem exacerbated by the boom in startups and the influx of highly paid employees. The rich want homes, and they 're willing to buy the poor out of them._

[https://mic.com/articles/123311/](https://mic.com/articles/123311/)

<comment><USER5> If that's the case (and if GP's analysis is correct) then the post title seems misleading to me.

Further, it sounds like wash.io was doing the natural thing in an environment of rising real estate prices -- move the big bulky machines somewhere else (where the real estate is cheaper) and pickup/deliver.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Startups that genuinely care about common good and bettering their communities need to reclaim the word "disrupt" from the parasites and looters that use it.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is really unfortunate. Technology should be used to empower local business, not destroy it...</comment>


Report: In-Game Purchases To Blow Mobile Games Revenues Past $11 Billion By 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/30/report-in-game-purchases-to-blow-mobile-games-revenues-past-11-billion-by-2015/

<comment><USER2> No shit sherlock, Nexon has like a $600 million revenue from in-game purchases and has none of the notoriety of a company like EA.

I wouldn't doubt a company like EA could get past the $11 billion in in-game purchases alone if it deployed its systems like Zynga does. However, unless they developed like Nexon where the games are still great games, I doubt EA would be survivable.</comment>


Finite State Machines lecture - <AUTHOR> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5837841629284334824#

<comment><USER2> The rest of the lectures are also mirrored on google videos: <http://mgccl.com/2008/04/06/aduni-videos-now-on-google-video>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I was looking for the rest of the stuff.</comment></comment>