Philosophy of Education: An Essay - <AUTHOR> http://akshar100.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/philosophy-of-education-essay/

<comment><USER2> I'm not going to comment on the essay itself, apart from saying that I found it as I find a lot of "philosophy," which is to say, a comforting collection of well-crafted statements of the obvious, altogether creating nothing of real interest.

I would add, though, that there is a lesson to learn. I'm sure I'm not a typical reader (but you probably all think that of yourselves, just as most people think they are above average drivers) but I always get distracted by typographical errors like this:

      > ... while [Montessori's] method was very successful for
      > cultivating basic skills, when it comes to subjects such
      > as mathematics and greek which disciples our mind, it is
      > not helpful.

That should be "disciplines" and not "disciples."

It's not critical, it was obvious what was meant, but only after I did a double-take and went back and decoded it.

And that's my point. Errors like this do create a jar in your audience, a form of "dump-shock." For some of us it's deeply unpleasant, and worth avoiding if you can.

ADDED IN EDIT: DumpShock refers to a phenomenon, usually in Science Fiction, where you gets dropped back into the real world after being immersed in a virtual world. There's a real-world version DumpShock that you may have experienced for yourself - I certainly have:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1131266>

<comment><AUTHOR> Really thankful for your comments. The article had nothing new because it was basically meant to be a summary of set of several articles I was preparing for my exams tomorrow.

But as a blogger I really find your criticism very helpful. Thanks a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _As education becomes more and more important certainly there will be more and more interesting thoughts coming forward, and without any doubts these thoughts will determine how the future of the world is shaped._

I doubt it. A lot of interesting thoughts about education exists already and to a great extend even implemented in pedagogical principles, techniques and methods. Well implemented yes, but in widespread use, no!

I don't see much hope until teachers are at least as well versed pedagogically as they are in their subject of instruction.</comment>


Ask HN: What is your favorite blog? - <AUTHOR>

Looking to see what hackers read other than HN. <comment><USER2> Ben Krasnow, a Valve mechanical/electrical engineer. He has some amazing side projects and he documents every step of the process.

YT: [http://www.youtube.com/user/bkraz333](http://www.youtube.com/user/bkraz333) | Blog: [http://benkrasnow.blogspot.ca/](http://benkrasnow.blogspot.ca/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Seth Godin sethgodin.typepad.com But I'm not a hacker ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> I wanted to ask the same question. I've read most of Seth's blog and all of pg's essays, what do I read now?</comment>


How the Crash Will Reshape America - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200903/meltdown-geography

<comment><USER2> This article is well worth the read.

This is a perfect example of what makes history fascinating - its ability to make sense of the present and the future.

His conclusion, for those who can't get through it: housing is a dead end investment. It's a liability, not an asset in economic terms because it discourages mobility and doesn't have good (any?) returns. We should abolish policies that promote each man his own home, encourage renting, and come up with housing infrastructure solutions that are economically stimulating (in terms of mobilizing the workforce and bringing talent together).

The housing market seems ripe for technological innovation. Any ideas?

<comment><USER3> Renting _from whom_?

Unless you're proposing the government operates a People's Barracks, then housing must be able to make a return _for someone_ or there won't be any liquidity. Which will mean that renters will be just as immobile; they'll have no way to rent a new place at their destination.

<comment><USER4> Renting could decouple "home" from "house," allowing everyone to behave more rationally and giving the middle class better real estate portfolio diversification.

This doesn't require a People's Barracks. It could be done privately, merely by introducing a layer of indirection between individuals and housing stock.

I see a few problems with this idea. First, given the opportunity to behave more rationally, will most people act on it? Second, it doesn't fully decouple "home" from a physical place. It doesn't address the social environment of family and friends, or the costs of moving one's belongings. My other worry is acknowledged in the article but sort of dismissed: "homeownership has some social benefits—a higher level of civic engagement is one."

<comment><USER3> Rational behaviour is, in a way, the problem. When New Labour came to power in the UK in the late 1990s, Gordon Brown launched a raid on the pension funds to fuel his extravagant spending plans. Workers in the UK then identified a need for an alternative asset class to save for retirement, as the previously sacrosanct pensions were now seen by the government as a cash cow. Property was the preferred option, and everyone piled into that market.

But what were people supposed to do differently?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a great article.

One point (only tangentially related, at most, to the article's thrust) that always bothers me when it comes up is this:

"On one level, the crisis has demonstrated what everyone has known for a long time: Americans have been living beyond their means, using illusory housing wealth and huge slugs of foreign capital to consume far more than we've produced."

Can somebody explain this to me? I mean, the amount that Americans overconsume should be bounded above by the trade deficit, right? That's the net imbalance in flow of goods and services from other nations to us. We've demonstrated that we can actually produce everything else that we consume ourselves. So we're talking a maximum overconsumption of like seven hundred billion-ish dollars a year, which is about 5% of our GDP.

Are people really worrying about removing the 5% overconsumption, or am I missing something?

<comment><USER6> I'm no economist, but from a level-of-the-average-american perspective, this country has had an _entire culture_ based around living ridiculously outside of your means for the last few decades - at least in the middle to upper- middle classes.

That's the entire point of, for example, credit cards.

Everyone knew it, and after a generation or two, people seemed to take it for granted.

<comment><USER7> The worst thing about the culture of living outside one's means is that it encourages, and sometimes forces, others to do the same. Wages can go down, and prices can go up, financed by a credit time-bomb we all end up having to pay for, collectively, in the future.

Take the housing bubble. If you bought a house in California between 1995 and now, you paid a massive premium because you were competing against financial morons with no sense of history, much less fiscal responsibility. It's like the admonition about never arguing with idiots, for fear of becoming one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This book

[http://www.amazon.com/Nine-Nations-North- America/dp/03805788...](http://www.amazon.com/Nine-Nations-North- America/dp/0380578859)

seems to have some connection with the content of this article. The article mentions some cities that are key to their regions. The book breaks up North America into nine regions with economic and cultural connections, and names a "capital" city for each of them. For example, Miami as the "capital" of a region including the Carribean. I think the article mentions some of these same cities as being important centers for their regions.

EDIT: wiki page might be better for facilitating discussion:

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

</comment><comment><USER9> > The solution begins with the removal of homeownership from its long- > privileged place at the center of the U.S. economy. Substantial incentives > for homeownership (from tax breaks to artificially low mortgage-interest > rates) distort demand, encouraging people to buy bigger houses than they > otherwise would.

He's right, but getting rid of that those deductions is a political non- starter. There's no way it could ever pass (as he mentions, home ownership is 70% of the population, good luck with that).

If anything, politicians seem to be doubling-down on homeownership in this recovery, trying to prop up prices in order to recover.

</comment><comment><USER10> Previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479196>

</comment><comment><USER11> has been posted previously. Fantastic article on Economics of Geography.

I've spent a lot of time trying to map out the world with data and I've come to the same conclusions: Boston-Wash-NYC corridor (I would almost count in Toronto and Montreal as adjacent to it; I guess, then you could just simply call it the industrial Northeast), Pacific Northwest, Northern continental Europe (Northern France, Belgium, Netherlands, Northwest Germany). I also like the Southern Germany-Austria-Switzerland-Northern Italy cluster. The London cluster is overpriced IMHO, but still has excellent public schools. California seems overpriced and the state budget is in bad shape.

<comment><USER12> _California seems overpriced and the state budget is in bad shape_

i live in california and love it...i think in so many ways it is the best place in the world to live...but i must admit (with trepidation since i hold so many state bonds)...that the state is doomed.

the size of the fiscal crisis here is not "state size", its "nation size". but california cannot engage in printing money, deficits, or anything else a nation can do to temporarily ease through. tax revenues are dropping like a rock in every city in the state as EVERYONE lines up to get their house re- assessed to get lower taxes.

california was crushed in the housing bubble and prop 13 makes revenue collection even more inflexible. i personally intend to have my property taxes cut in HALF, which is actually accurate and fair given that houses on my street are now...half off. whatever happens i will be paying less in taxes by some amount. now repeat for tens of millions of people...

and there's no stock market windfall to offset the gloom. google and apple are just high-salary employers now. that won't save this state. suffice to say i think the state finances are in doomsday mode. thankfully my kids do not go to public schools...

<comment><USER13> > california was crushed in the housing bubble and prop 13 makes revenue > collection even more inflexible.

Actually, prop 13 is the only reason most CA cities aren't declaring bankruptcy.

Prop 13 has two relevant provisions - a cap on property tax rates and a cap on the rate of growth of the taxable basis w/o a change of ownership or new construction. (IIRC, most/all bay area cites are at the cap.) When you buy a house, you know the most that you'll pay in taxes going forward.

When housing prices boom, Prop 13 means that tax revenues don't boom. It also means that when housing prices crash, tax revenues don't crash.

Yes, the taxes paid by folks who bought near the peak will drop with housing prices. However, the taxes paid by folks who bought long before the peak are continuing to grow because their taxable basis lags the market.

Prop 13 was passed in reaction to a previous boom - property taxes were going up 10-20% a year because that's what housing prices were doing. CA govts don't cut rates and they don't cut revenues either.

If CA cities/counties had been able to grow their tax revenues in proportion to the property values, do you really think that they'd be willing to let their revenues drop with property values? Of course not - they'd increase the tax rates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Fantastic article. The history really puts things into perspective.

This is interesting: "The geographic sorting of people by ability and educational attainment, on this scale, is unprecedented."

The jab at Tom Friedman is fair. I've seen the trailing Paul Romer quote at least three times within the past week, though. There certainly is truth to it. Reinforcing "idea infrastructure" like internet connectivity seems crucial.

Here's to affordable housing in talent-rich and diverse Manhattan and San Francisco...

</comment><comment><USER15> Fantastic article... I think everyone who reads HN can relate to the theories and thoughts the author outlined. Interesting to read when you consider where to start your next business.

</comment><comment><USER16> In your geo-economic estimation, is the Bay area a separate geo-economic region from So-Cal, or are they the same?

<comment><USER7> Crossroads between Pacific Northwest (liberal mindset, educated people) and California (entertainment, ambition). This is why it has been so successful.

As the tech Midwest (Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto) heats up, I'd imagine that Pittsburgh has similar potential, being also at a crossroad between that region and the Northeast.

<comment><USER8> Interestingly, he mentions Pittsburgh twice as a rare success story among U.S. post-industrial cities. (And by "interesting," I mean in the sense of "I happen to live here, and thus have more than a passing interest in the topic.")

<comment><USER7> I grew up in Harrisburg. Unlike Pittsburgh, there aren't any four-year colleges there, so most of the ambitious people left and, and after college, ended up in New York, Philly, DC, Toronto, etc.

Western and central PA have a reputation nationwide for producing a disproportionate number of hard-working, successful people... who don't move back. There's definitely somewhat of a "Pennsylvania diaspora" (as well as one for Minnesotans) community in New York.

I think Pittsburgh has a lot of potential to reverse that trend, seeing as it has two major universities and has come a long way in terms of being a good place to live.

<comment><USER8> 'There's definitely somewhat of a "Pennsylvania diaspora"'

Around here we call it "Steeler Nation." :)

As for "good place to live," I was just talking to someone about the number of cultural institutions that Pittsburgh has. Being the home of robber barons like Carnegie, Mellon, and Frick, there were a lot of institutions and endowments left behind to assuage their consciences for treating so many steel workers so brutally to build their fortunes. Having kids, I'm especially aware of the excellent Carnegie libraries, Children's Museum, Science Center, and Phipps Conservatory. Not to mention the fore-mentioned universities, and all of the hospitals (UPMC is the region's single largest employer). One of the ironies for the city is that having non-profits as the largest employers means that a large portion of the city's economic activity is off-limits for local taxes.

<comment><USER13> > One of the ironies for the city is that having non-profits as the largest > employers means that a large portion of the city's economic activity is off- > limits for local taxes.

"Non-profit" only affects income taxes. You can still tax their property, purchases, activities, and employees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "What will this geography look like? It will likely be sparser in the Midwest and also, ultimately, in those parts of the Southeast that are dependent on manufacturing." Sounds like something the Republican party will fight against tooth-and-nail.</comment>


Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons - <AUTHOR> http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/1565.html

<comment><USER2> Great article that taught me a lot about narcissism. Many writers consider narcissists evil and imply that nothing good can come from narcissism. Although I would not want my parent or my spouse to be narcissistic, this article made me understand that narcissists do a lot of good in the world.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the reference to Don Quixote. I can see it now - "Leadership Secrets of the Man Of La Mancha" ;-)</comment>


Will the proliferation of affordable AI decimate the middle class? - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/04/will-the-proliferation-of-affordable-ai-decimate-the-middle-class.html <comment><USER3> The problem with this rosy picture as all other rosy pictures about automation is that depending on the speed of technological change any automation will potentially destroy the livelihood of a lot of people before they are able to re-adjust to a new economic reality. People can't typically change their skill-set as fast as technology can be introduced.

This doesn't have to be a problem if a country has welfare system mechanism to cope with redundant workers, giving them a line to hold onto until they can re-adjust to the new reality.

The problem is when you combine rapid technological progress with small government dogma. That creates a toxic combination where the only winners are the rich.

This is unfortunate because when you setup a society this way it causes large fractions of the population to fight technological advancement, free trade and immigration.

I think the %1 have to to realize that if people are going to buy into their desired free trade and technological upgrades, then you got to offer something in return. Taxes stuffed away in Panama isn't an acceptable answer to most people ;-)

<comment><USER4> I think the current "1%" should be the one afraid of AI. Introducing new technology usually seems to shift wealth to a different set of people.

<comment><USER5> Not in this case. The owners of the _commercial_ AI and robotics benefit. We're already seeing the effects of this: look at the increasing stratification of wealth in the context of increased productivity and automation in recent years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a whole massive underlying assumption here: that we will soon have affordable, deployable, non-finnicky machine learning models for enough problems to decimate the middle class.

In my experience, ML models, even the best deep convnets and such, are still _extremely_ "finicky" by human standards, in the sense that small or human- insignificant changes to the input vector can cause large-scale changes in the output classification/regression. Cool demos with video-games need to be run past some industrial automation experts before we go around proclaiming them to be the harbingers of industrial AI!

</comment><comment><USER7> The biggest hit will be truck drivers and call centers, I think we're far away for most other jobs being economically replaceable.

<comment><USER8> I'm amazed we even still have call centres. Most of the human workforce is just puppetry driven by workflow scripts. Working in one was the single most dehumanising experience of my life, and I was the one implementing the workflows. I agree that they are absolutely a huge target for automation - <USER2> can't think of a single step in the entire workflow between campaign conception through to deployment and associated follow up (document fulfilment, etc) that couldn't be made more efficient and frankly more humane with massive automation. And that's without any kind of ML/AI in the picture. Once you start throwing AI around I reckon you can skip up a whole skill tier from there. In this case, I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> >AI isn't like an oil field owned by a handful of people

Sure, it's free to access open-source AI tools.

However, only huge corporations have enough capital to first build these ground-breaking technologies.

Being the first, it becomes almost impossible to compete at a later stage ("Thiel's aim for a monopoly").

<comment><USER10> The companies that have dominated each new wave of computing have not always been the incumbents. Is building an AI more capital-intensive than Operating Systems or PC hardware? It's feasible that if a powerful AI is created that it will be done on a cloud server by a small team of people.

<comment><USER11> Your observation is true, your conclusion isn't necessarily. AI is different from other areas of computing in that _data_ matters far more than code does. Current legal practice is that the data is owned by the organization that collected it, which means that to collect data on millions of users to train behavioral models, you need to have millions of users. If you have millions of users, you're probably a pretty big company.

<comment><USER12> That depends to a large extent on what skill you want your AI to be able to learn.

Many applications from recommender systems, to market analysis to drug discovery probably require large datasets of the sort that can only be collected by a large business.

But if you want to learn control polices for robotic agents that navigate the physical world, driving cars, stocking shelves, etc. then I think the physical world is presenting everyone with approximately the same data set regardless of company size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Middle class is already well down the road to ruin. AI isn't going to make a difference either way.

</comment><comment><USER14> Let's wait for someone to invent it first.

<comment><USER15> haha. double points for funny and true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "decimate" != "devastate"

To "decimate" is to reduce by only 10%.

<comment><USER17> Not in modern usage.

<comment><USER18> The modern usage is wrong, and the correct usage is useful.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light!

<comment><USER19> "To reduce by 10%" is, in English, the novel usage. It was apparently invented by essayist Richard Grant White in 1870. The original meaning of the word, "to destroy", is attested to 1663:

[https://arnoldzwicky.org/2009/06/03/the- decimators/](https://arnoldzwicky.org/2009/06/03/the-decimators/)

<comment><USER16> Caesar was 1900 years ahead of his time when he threatened to decimate the 9th Legion, then.

The meaning may be obscure and obsolete, but the word does mean something specific.

<comment><USER19> Unless Caesar spoke English, he didn't threaten "to decimate" anybody. Because "to decimate" is an English verb.

Rather, I'm sure Caesar used the appropriate conjugation of the Latin verb "decimō".

Two separate, but related, words. With two separate, but related, meanings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> >In the case of low-skill labor the rise of China has hurt some US low-skill workers (although US workers as a whole are almost certainly better off due to lower prices).

That (along with immigration) explains the rise in income inequality in the US. If you have marketable skills you benefit from access to larger consumer markets. If you don't, though, you suffer from access to large pools of unskilled labor.

</comment><comment><USER21> The death of the middle class will be austerity, union busting, stronger intellectual property rights, tax evasion by the ultra-wealthy, TTIP and the TPP.

The ruling classes sure would _prefer_ it if those things were swept under the carpet and sci fi super robots took the blame instead though.

</comment><comment><USER22> Yes.</comment>


Humans are still evolving despite modern medicine. - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/news175185659.html

<comment><USER2> Ok I am going to get slammed for this, but it has to be said:

Women are evolving to be shorter AND heavier!!!?? WTH. This is a disaster. I blame myself. I am not having sex with as many tall thin women as I should be. This is definately a wake-up call.</comment>


Please Stop Calling Suicide Victims Selfish or Weak - <AUTHOR> https://johnpavlovitz.com/2017/07/21/please-stop-calling-suicide-selfish/ <comment><USER2> > suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem

Sometimes it's a permanent problem, like getting diagnosed with Alzheimer's or going blind. Unfortunately there are still a lot of untreatable conditions which can obliterate one's life.

</comment><comment><USER3> Selfish or weak? I always saw people who committed suicide as the ones who are taking matters in their hands.

I am absolutely sure that I will commit suicide as soon as I may be a weight for my family.

I was actually wondering yesterday when there will be a "switch" available, which has poison inside and requires to confirm every month or so that you want to stay alive. This solves the problem of an accident where I would be severely disabled or a neuro degenerative illness such as alzheimer.

I think about this from time to time not because of depression but becaise this should be something people plan, like heritage or retirement.

</comment><comment><USER4> Beautiful and perfect.

My greatest fear is being horribly, painfully and helplessly broken. Too broken to even kill myself. I have an advance directive, of course. But stuff happens.</comment>


Why Some U.S. Ex-Spies Don't Buy the Russia Story - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-10/why-some-u-s-ex-spies-don-t-buy-the-russia-story <comment><USER2> This is stupid. No intruder is going to copy files straight to their home computer. They'll use a compromised server somewhere, and there is plenty of server to server bandwidth.

It's fine to be skeptical of course, and to be _very_ skeptical of direct "hacking the election" (whatever that means) claims.

But there is plenty of public evidence that Russia was involved in the DNC hack. This evidence was available before the election, which makes it more credible against claims of political interference.

I've posted this before, but I think it's important people understand what public evidence is available:

2014 report into ATP-28: [https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat- research/2014/10/apt28-a...](https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat- research/2014/10/apt28-a-window-into-russias-cyber-espionage-operations.html), presenting pretty compelling (if circumstantial) evidence that group is Russian state backed.

(July) 2016 report into the DNC hacking, showing it was first breached by ATP-29 (The other Russian state backed hacking group), but the leaks almost certainly came from a second breach by ATP-28 later: [https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion- democ...](https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic- national-committee/)

<comment><USER3> My question would be, has Julian lied about sources before, and would he deviate from that if he didn't?

His claim is that the source is not Russia --people who were happy to see Julian leak things (and believe his leaks) while Bush was president are now calling him a puppet of Putin. I have no idea if Putin has goods on him. Or whether Julian is just a medium. It is, however, interesting to see people shift along political axes though.

If there was a Russian angle, I think their aim was to cause uncertainty regardless of winner. Be it Trump or Hillary, whoever the winner was, the voters of the opposition would question the results --despite there being no actual election hacking (altering the vote count).

One interesting thing though is that since the media writ large expected Hillary to win, had she won, this same evidence would have been "page 6" news and would have been rather quickly forgotten but for a few "sore losers".

<comment><USER2> This is speculation and personal opinion, unlike the stuff I wrote above.

I suspect what happened is that the hacking groups gave Wikileaks the dump via a cut-out. It's entirely possible that cut-out isn't aware how the data was obtained.

I don't think Assange is a Russian agent (even though he receives money from RT etc). I think he has his own motives. At the time this was more anti- Clinton that pro-Trump specifically.

More recently his Tweets have become more supportive of Trump personally (although interestingly not really his agendas necessarily). My uncharitable suspicion is that he's hoping for a presidential pardon.

 _this same evidence would have been "page 6" news and would have been rather quickly forgotten but for a few "sore losers"._

Of course. There's plenty of similar evidence that the Russians also supported the Green party and Sanders campaigns in various forms. No one talks about them because they ended up not mattering.

<comment><USER4> Isn't it most plausible Russia is in every party and branch as much as possible, so whoever wins they win? We need Russia out of our government all together and not make it a partisan issue.

<comment><USER3> If you want Russia to pull back, you have to pull back too (ala Bill Clinton detente) Pull back on the sanctions, pull back on hovering over and picking up pieces in their former sphere of influence (former central Asia soviet reps).

We might be able to influence N Korea with these tactics, but Russia has a lot of natural resources, people and materiel. It's a diff game.

You have had (some) people on the left defending Kim Jun-un's actions as predictable (he's being bullied, etc). Putin's are predictable too, given what he has to work with.

I think we'd be better off reluctantly working with him (in the ME, for ex.) than blocking them every corner. It sets them back into a cold-war mentality. We (the world) need the biggest powers, US, CN, RU, to get along, if not be friends. We don't see eye to eye in many things (human rights wise, ex, pollution, ex) but we can work toward a more stable planet.

<comment><USER5> Why do you believe that the Russian reaction to pulling back would be to pull back as well? If anything, all experience shows that they'll use that to do a power grab in the neighbouring countries instead. Treating "sphere of influence" as a valid concept is immoral, it essentially means allowing Russia to do whatever they want to others against their will; there's a good reason why their neighbours are allying with the west - it's because they want protection from being "sphereofinfluenced".

If anything, we can say that the current sanctions and other have been somewhat effective in deescalating violence, and if the west would have pulled back, then we'd have Ukraine dismembered by now through increased direct Russian military involvement.

Nothing "sets back" Russia to cold war mentality; they have never left it, won't will without a regime change, they won't stop treating the west as their enemy and they will aggressively (re)take the now independent states we let them to.

<comment><USER6> Do you think the West has no sphere of influence?

And, was it Russia that expanded to the NATO borders, or were the NATO borders that expanded to eventually reach Russia?

<comment><USER5> I'm saying that the whole concept of spheres of influence is outdated, immoral and invalid. Instead, you should think in terms of alliances or some other concept that gives agency to the people _there_ , not "the West" or Russia.

The sovereign countries themselves must get a choice - if they want to join NATO, that is their right, and Russia shouldn't get a veto (nor even a vote) in that. Countries should be free to join/leave the "spheres" at will, not be placed there or given or taken.

And, actually, the whole reason why NATO is at their borders is the Russian insistence of their sphere of influence. If Russia agreed in practice that their borders stop where they are and that they won't ever poke beyond them, then their neigbours wouldn't need to even consider NATO.

<comment><USER7> > And, actually, the whole reason why NATO is at their borders is the Russian > insistence of their sphere of influence.

Uhh, no.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_NATO#German_reu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_NATO#German_reunification)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Even the language used in this article is misleading: "hacked the election". The actual allegations are that Russia was behind the hacks of the DNC servers. That is not election hacking! Hacking the election sounds like the Russians found some vulnerability with voting machines. There is no evidence of this.

In either case, Trump won the election because he won more electoral votes than Hillary. And he did this by winning more popular votes in key states. It's that simple. The Democrats had an unappealing candidate who ran a weak campaign in key states. And lost.

What the DNC leaks do show, however, is that the Democrats ran a fraudulent primary election where they colluded with the Clinton campaign and suppressed any opposition from the left. This resulted in an unpopular candidate in the general election, and a public even more untrusting of the Clintons and the process. The Democrats needs to look in the mirror instead of playing to fears of Russian boogeyman.

<comment><USER9> Trump won because in MI, PA, and WI, Jill Stein received more votes than the difference between Trump and Hillary.

3rd party candidates in FL in 2000 and MI, PA, and WI in 2016 were the spoilers for the whole nation. Don't be an idealistic, naive American voter, be a pragmatic voter!

Yes I know the electoral college is racist, and we need to abolish it.

<comment><USER10> Why do you assume that all the third party voters would have voted for Hillary if there were no third party candidate? They could have abstained, or even voted for Trump. Many libertarian party supporters find the Republicans more tolerable than the Democrats.

In any case, shaming people because they voted for a candidate who they felt best represented their views goes against the very idea of representative democracy.

<comment><USER9> I'm not shaming the fact that they voted, I'm shaming who they voted for. You aren't a responsible voter if you're not up to accepting responsibility for your vote. If you voted for Trump, hope he's making you happy. If you voted for Jill Stein or Ralph Nader in 2016 or 2000 in WI, MI, PA, or FL, you are very much responsible for Bush and Trump respectively in the electoral and government system we have since your candidate was a spoiler.

These 3rd party voters could have abstained or voted for another 3rd party or went Republican, but they didn't. They could have traded their vote to someone in a safe state ([https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/opinion/anti-trump- republ...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/opinion/anti-trump-republicans- dont-waste-your-vote-trade-it.html)), if Hillary was their 2nd preference. If not, go ahead, vote for 3rd party candidate who could be a spoiler and has no chance of winning.

<comment><USER11> You aren't a responsible voter if you pretend that voting for a "lesser of two evils" over a candidate who actually represents your beliefs is ever anything better than a wasted vote.

<comment><USER9> This is the very definition of idealism and being naive about how much your vote matters, when you should give a thought to your 2nd preference and be pragmatic if you are in a non-safe state for your 2nd preference. Do vote trading with someone in a safe state, and your candidate will still get the same percentage of nationwide votes, and your 2nd preference will win.

Again, I am not saying that don't vote for 3rd party candidates anywhere.

There is no equivalence between Trump and Hillary, and if Voting for Hillary in a non-safe or safe state would have been a wasted vote, pity the 65 million who voted for her.

<comment><USER11> "This is the very definition of idealism and being naive about how much your vote matters,"

I was a California resident at the time. My vote was about as close to irrelevant as one can get; California's electoral votes haven't turned red since Reagan.

Even if I had moved to Nevada by then (that is: a few months before I actually did), I would have had zero regrets voting for Johnson. Neither Trump nor Clinton deserved my vote, simple as that.

"There is no equivalence between Trump and Hillary"

There is plenty of equivalence between two corrupt and most-likely-actually- criminal sociopaths. There's also plenty of equivalence between two presidential campaigns that went out of the way to present a "if you're not with me, then you're against me" mentality and alienate every supporter of the other candidate.

Importantly, and more specifically, both candidates' campaigns utterly alienated me as a voter simply because I did not precisely align with their "one true policy" or whatever. Neither candidate gave me any reason to vote for them, and every reason to _not_ vote for them.

"2nd preference"

I had no second preference. If I _did_ have a second preference, it might as well have been Mickey Mouse.

"vote trading"

Oh yeah, and make my vote even more worthless than it already is.

(Of course, vote trading as a California resident would've been an upgrade no matter what, but now that I live in Nevada, it'd be entirely irrational to want to _dilute_ the power of my individual vote any further than it already is).

<comment><USER9> I am not sure how to help with your perceptions of campaigns and candidates, but their likely policies and cabinet appointments were there for anyone to see. Trump institutionalizing xenophobia is a degree of difference that is hard for me to see past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The author of this opinion piece: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Bershidsky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Bershidsky)

<comment><USER13> Suddenly we are quick to point out opinion pieces in a media landscape where that has become otherwise irrelevant.

Left = 'unverified facts', Right = 'opinion piece'

<comment><USER14> If you check the article, this really is an opinion piece, not an article based on solid verifiable facts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This points to using a cheap Linux box at host VPS.

AWS micro instances run Linux basically by default and have about 150-250 megabit connections.

I assume they loaded the documents onto a hacked AWS box running WordPress or similar and downloaded them later from there. Hackers almost always tunnel through at least one compromised machine because they don't trust a VPN alone for anonymity.

In no way does this imply anyone was or was not responsible. This is a common thing to do for any hacking group

</comment><comment><USER16> It's odd that the bloomberg piece has a whole bunch of links but doesn't link the VIPS letter. It's here: [https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets- challenge-r...](https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge- russia-hack-evidence/)

Also it goes out it's way to mention William Binney, and The Nation article linked from it mentions other ex-government employees associated with VIPS, but neither mentions the mysterious Skip Folden that VIPS relied on as thier technical expert.

This is what the VIPS letter says about him:

 _Independent analyst Skip Folden, who retired after 25 years as the IBM Program Manager for Information Technology_

but if he spent 25 years as a high or even medium level employee at IBM I would expect some kind of internet trail and I couldn't find one.

<comment><USER17> The name is "Norman (Skip) Folden", and people on Reddit have been trying to ID him.[1] There's someone 85 years old with that name, but that seems an unlikely match. "Program Manager for Information Technology" is usually a job title at a customer site, says Payscale.[2] An "IBM Program Manager for Information Technology" may just designate someone who ran an IBM mainframe shop.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/6q49di/july_5_2...](https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/6q49di/july_5_2016_in_the_early_evening_someone_working/) [2] [http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Program_Manager%2C_I...](http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Program_Manager%2C_IT/Salary)

<comment><USER18> _may just designate someone who ran an IBM mainframe shop_

It's quite possible that he worked for IBM running mainframes on site for the NSA or CIA or any of a myriad of relatively secretive US government agencies.

If so, together with IBM's historic penchant for secrecy, and given that Folden is perhaps closer in age to The Greatest Generation than to The Millenials, he just might not be very visible on Google.

I'd bet that searching "real" databases, e.g. DMV records, Social Security records, IBM employee payroll lists, property tax records, etc, would be far more productive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I find it interesting that no one is discussing the fact that the DNC's leaks were damaging only because they were not operating impartially. Regardless if the leaks came from Russia or a whistleblower in the DNC, isn't the fallout somewhat self inflicted?

<comment><USER20> Yes, and the only reason I was interested in the leaked information was because of the transparency it provided into the DNC and Clinton Foundation.

In a democracy, transparency is a good thing.

There are still a variety of things that were in the emails pertaining to campaign finance violations and DOJ improprieties that have essentially been ignored. Regardless of how the American people came to know about these things, they should be the focus of the investigation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't get either of their arguments. Yes, 180mbps is pretty fast for residential internet, but it's certainly not hard to get nor is there any reason to believe he was using residential broadband. The MS Word thing I didn't follow at all.

<comment><USER22> According to the website of "Adam Carter" (linked in the article: [http://g-2.space/](http://g-2.space/)) the 180MBPS is only unusual if you assume the hacker was Russian - it's very fast for a VPN connection and, according to Carter's website, is consistent with USB 2 download speeds.

For more about the MS Word stuff, here's the page on that: [http://g-2.space/intent/](http://g-2.space/intent/)

<comment><USER23> Was this based on file timestamps in some archive?

I'll grant that it could also be related to some way the files were prepared in the interim, but it is at least worthy of considering where that metadata might have come from or been replaced through normal activity or intentional operations.

<comment><USER24> It was. And in fact afaict the archive was never public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Obviously wrong bit: "Downloading such files this quickly [at 22.6 megabytes per second] over the internet, especially over a VPN (most hackers would use one), would have been all but impossible because the network infrastructure through which the traffic would have to pass would further slow the traffic."

</comment><comment><USER26> This is an interesting analysis, but determining download speeds (and the resulting conclusions about how the data was moved about) from zip file metadata is still basically guesswork. You have to make a number of assumptions for this to work out, and yes, they are reasonable assumptions, I guess, but they are still assumptions.

I would also point out that this article is mostly revolving around whether _some_ portion of the DNC emails were purposefully leaked, but it doesn't say much at all about the remaining incidents and data. It certainly doesn't disprove the "russia story."

<comment><USER27> Additionally the claims they make about timezones are also only based on the difference of timestamps. Eg they see that the difference between 7z (Unix timestamps thus UTC) and RAR3 (MS-DOS localtime) is three hours. The way they then conclude it's Eastern time is very flimsy.

In fact that that alle files, even those in rar-files were all modified on the same time, convinces me more that the timestamps have nothing to do with the transmission. But that someone altered them after the hack, or that but more unlikely is that all the timestamps are still untouched and exactly on how they were on the DNC server

<comment><USER28> Eastern time is 4 hours (and at the time, probably 5) from UTC. 3 hours is somewhere in the ocean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> So, maybe I'm missing something here, but since when does the Russian _hacking_ stand for "the Russian _story_ " as a whole? Manaford's no-knock warrant, Jared's Russian embassy back channel, or Donnie Junior's e-mails seem like much more important items in said story so far. Within that context the DNC hacking seems to me to be only a small piece of the puzzle. Its validity (or not) does not call the other elements's veracity into question.

</comment><comment><USER30> > _VIPS instead surmises that, after WikiLeaks ' Julian Assange announced on > June 12, 2016 his intention to publish Hillary Clinton-related emails, the > DNC rushed to fabricate evidence that it had been hacked by Russia to defuse > any potential WikiLeaks disclosures._

This is laughably stupid. Why would attributing the hack to Russia instead of Wikileaks or whatever make any difference to the _contents_ of the hacks?

<comment><USER31> Because the media and the mass conciousness is that easily manipulated? It worked, didn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > CrowdStrike, the firm whose conclusions informed much of the intelligence > community's assessment

I don't think this is true at all. I do recall CS releasing their own report in early summer, but my understanding is the January IC assessment was a completely separate document which did not cite the CS report in any way.

(If I am missing something here, happy to be corrected, this aspect just stuck out to me)

<comment><USER32> The IC assessment was just regurgitating CS's report. The IC just took CS at their word since they would have contracted out to someone like CS to begin with. The FBI, for instance, wasn't allowed to look at any of the evidence directly. AFAIK, no government entities have looked at the raw data.

Edit: [http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2017/jul/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2017/jul/11/donald-trump/did-john-podesta-deny-cia-and-fbi- access-dnc-serve/)

> In his testimony in January on the cyber attacks, then-director of the FBI > James Comey said the agency never got access to the machines themselves, but > obtained access to the forensics from a review of the system performed by > CrowdStrike, a third-party cybersecurity firm.

<comment><USER14> To clarify, this is the report I am referring to, and it does not appear to mention CrowdStrike at all:

[https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf](https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf)

<comment><USER32> Sure, they didn't cite CrowdStrike, but there's no extra information in that report other than what came from CrowdStrike's report.

<comment><USER14> There definitely appears to be additional information in the IC assessment though.

<comment><USER32> Like what?

<comment><USER14> They're different reports. I don't quite understand what you are saying.

> The IC assessment was just regurgitating CS's report. The IC just took CS at > their word since they would have contracted out to someone like CS to begin > with.

The IC assessment appears to be very different. It describes information sourcing without any reference to an analysis of DNC servers (let alone CrowdStrike). There does not appear to be any indication that information from CrowdStrike's analysis or any information from DNC servers at all was used to generate the IC assessment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> More technical details can be found here: [http://g-2.space/sixmonths/](http://g-2.space/sixmonths/)

</comment><comment><USER9> So, as a motive, one possibility could be the DNC orchestrated the DNC leaks to blunt the effect of trickling podesta/wikileaks emails if it was somehow an insider. Why become the news during a campaign where every moment Trump spoke his poll numbers went down? And show their own favoritism? It doesn't seem plausible. This could all be more Russian disinformation. As far as the podesta/wikileaks emails go:

1) Russia's history when it comes to election meddling and spreading dis- information speaks for itself, yes the US does it too, but the Russia is on another level (Every eastern European country has been a public target from the same groups).

2) Russia had a lot more to fear from Hillary than Trump. The sanctions and military ratcheting would likely be more in force than it is now under Trump and a dysfunctional congress. Hillary was a known hawk on Russia, compared with Manafort/Flynn on Russia.

3) Putin himself said "some patriotic Russians might have done stuff" like sending phishing emails.

When Russia faced the lemon of a Hillary administration, they made lemonade. Arguably, it wasn't that hard and paid for itself. We as the voting public knew most of this before the election, including partly about Trump's intent of collusion and possibly collusion, and voted the way we did anyway.

Assange is kind of irrelevant, he has always had his own motives, and it's pretty clearly being anti-US. Offering Damore a job with wikileaks, really?

</comment><comment><USER34> There's something I don't get about the "Trump-Russia scandal":

It seems to me the chances are Russia tries to hack most US politician's emails every day, and probably twice on Sundays. Even the nice ol' US was caught in 2009 spying on the UN Secretary General and the Security Council delegations of its _allies_ ; do we really for one moment think that famously- spy-heavy bad-guy Russia and its ex-spy-master President wouldn't be constantly trying to get its hands on the emails of its Cold War enemy?

In which case, hunting whether Trump encouraged Russia seems like hunting for who asked the clouds to rain this morning.

Which makes the US reaction not smell right. It smells somehow like a game of pretexts.

So having "not got that" about the scandal -- something seems fishy here -- it looks to my amateur, non-US, non-politician, probably-too-cynical eyes, like there's five parties having a political fight for control (and yes I am being deliberately simplistic and caricaturing):

\- The Trump team, who seem like they're recruited like the Dirty Dozen (you're so unsuitable for any normal administration, and possibly borderline insane, that you've got nothing to lose with this crazy mission...)

\- The powers that be / senior civil servants. Trump spent his entire campaign calling Washington "the swamp" and declaring he'd drain it. Did you think they wouldn't fight back, the FBI wouldn't leak, they wouldn't try to undermine this braggart who's just come marching in telling them he's going to rip them apart?

\- The Republican establishment (McCain, etc). Did you really think parts of the Republican party that spent so long wanting anyone but Trump would grow to like him?

\- The left-of-centre echo chamber (us techie types, journalists, other professionals), whose typical MO is to use the levers of embarrassment, twitterstorms, and rhetoric to try to shovel any government we are unfortunate enough to have over us into following our agenda

\- Modern industry, which seems to have cottoned onto the idea that if publicly you say enough "left" things (equality, diversity) and sound passionate about social progress, you can pursue a "right" agenda (not paying tax, disempowering employees, building private monopolies with moats around them) without anybody making much fuss.

And though that may be a gross caricature, in that model somehow the behaviour seems to make sense. For example, the Trump-Russia scandal as a way of tying Trump's hands and forcing him down foreign policy lines he doesn't want. The administration's seeming dysfunction, because anyone who joins them knows it is the only administration they will ever serve, so you can only get amateurs who don't know the game of White House politics or think they can change how it is played. The constant storms over his latest tweet, despite his tweets having been incoherent for years, because raising the level of outrage creates social roadblocks -- making avenues hopefully too sensitive and already too explosive for him to travel further down them.

Which makes Russia seem like an irrelevant bystander -- doing what it does every day (which happens to be trying to hack American servers for everything it can get, while trying to nibble at gaining more control and influence in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean).

<comment><USER35> > hunting whether Trump encouraged Russia seems like hunting for who asked the > clouds to rain this morning.

The Trump-Russia scandal isn't about whether Trump "encouraged" Russia, which seems to be the basic error in your entire argument.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Could HN be a dating bureau for entrepreneurs?  - <AUTHOR>

Could I find my co-founder here on hn? So what if I wanted to advocate my interest in finding a co-founder, could that be a sub-part of hn? <comment><USER2> Sure, why not ? Just write up a nice description of what you are looking for in a co-founder and post it, I'm sure you'll either get some real respondents or you'll learn about what's wrong in the way you approach it.

have a look here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052950>

and do a google search for

site:news.ycombinator.com co-founder wanted

and

site:news.ycombinator.com looking for a co-founder

best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> I have to say I was thinking more along the lines of 'match me against criteria x and y'. Needless to say, the trust part is the most difficult part I suspect..

<comment><USER3> I don't think there are enough connections among individuals in the community to make that work. HN doesn't place a high priority on identity. No avatars, no karma display, no username differentiation. I'd bet the average HN member can only recall around ten HN usernames they have a good idea of the personality & project of.

[http://socialstrategist.com/2008/04/16/your-users-are- boring...](http://socialstrategist.com/2008/04/16/your-users-are-boring-help- them-stand-out)

HN did start a cofounder wishlist GoogleDoc a while back.

You can find it in a more searchable format on <http://StartupLinkup.com></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Getting a grip on economics - <AUTHOR>

I find my economics knowledge is typically deficient. Likewise I find every little bit of economics I learn is helpful.<p>Can you recommend sources that can help build a basic mental model of economics for someone with more of a coding background? <comment><USER2> _Economics in One Easy Lesson_ by Henry Hazlitt. A set of short "lessons", starting with the Broken Window Fallacy. No special background required so it should work for someone with "a coding background". [http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-50th- Anniversary/...](http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-50th- Anniversary/dp/0930073193/).

There's an old 1948/52? edition available as a scanned PDF which can give you an idea if you want to buy the updated version: <http://www.fee.org/pdf/books/Economics_in_one_lesson.pdf>.

At a higher level, _The Road to Serfdom_ by Friedrich von Hayek is also short but unlike the above quite dense. Most useful (to me) for applying information theory to command economies. Rather apropos to the situation in the US today, it was published in 1944 and dedicated to "The socialists of all parties". It was intended as a warning to the British socialists of the day who were about to take over and remake their country, warning them of a variety of things, some of which they found out the hard way, plus the demonstrable even back then danger of concentrating so much power at the top (too easy for idiot thugs to take over, e.g. Stalin, "Those who are good at acquiring and exercising discretionary powers in government are usually the most ruthless and corrupt individuals." (Wikipedia)). [http://www.amazon.com/Road-Serfdom- Fiftieth-Anniversary/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Road-Serfdom-Fiftieth- Anniversary/dp/0226320618/)

Check out [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom#External_li...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom#External_links) for the _Reader's Digest_ condensed version (Hayek was amazed at how good it was) and there's even a cartoon version that I reviewed and found to be quite good.

After the above two you'll be oriented for a variety of much larger tomes, from the classic _The Wealth of Nations_ to e.g. von Mesis' _Human Action_.

</comment><comment><USER3> * Economics in One Lesson by Hazlitt

* Man, Economy, and State by Rothbard

* Road to Serfdom by Hayek

* Capitalism and Freedom by Freedman

* Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Nozick (politics/philosophy, but a great book)

* What has the government done to our money by Rothbard (<http://mises.org/money.asp>)

</comment><comment><USER4> "Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell is the easiest to read, accurate introduction I have read.

"Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life" by David Friedman requires a little more work.

Several previous commentors have recommended Hayek's "Road to Freedom", but I think his last book, "The Fatal Conceit" covers more or less the same ground and is easier to read.

"Software As Capital" by Howard Baetjer, Jr is interesting, but I wish he had discussed open source in it, since his analysis contradicts most open source theories and practice.

A good Engineering Economics text may be useful.

And I second the other commentors who suggested Jane Jacobs's "Economics of Cities" and "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" and O'Rourke's "Eat the Rich", his "On the Wealth of Nations", an analysis of Adam Smith's classic is also worth reading.

</comment><comment><USER5> Greg Mankiw wrote years ago on his blog a good list of introductory high level econ books:

 _A student emails me asking for a summer reading list. Here are ten very different books I like that are fun enough that you would not be embarrassed (well, not too embarrassed) reading them at the beach:

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom

Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers

Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity

Steven Landsburg, The Armchair Economist

P.J. O'Rourke, Eat the Rich

Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street

Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics

John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar

William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, Lives of the Laureates_

I'd also recommend a good textbook, if you're a little more serious.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I should mention that so far i've found The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith) and this blog (<http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com>) have built up an idea of classic economics and hinted at Austrian economics.

I'm still having trouble understanding some of the macro stuff like foreign currency reserves, printing money, inflation + employment etc.

<comment><USER2> Heh, "having trouble understanding some of the macro stuff like foreign currency reserves, printing money, inflation + employment etc." shows that you've learned enough to be as confused as any honest person is about these fields, e.g.:

The Phillips Curve postulated there was an inverse relationship between inflation and employment (e.g. one aspect was that as labor got tight, it cost more to hire people and that lead to inflation). It was utterly destroyed by the stagflation of the '70s where we got both high inflation and unemployement, but it's still the law of the land in the US ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey- Hawkins_Full_Employmen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey- Hawkins_Full_Employment_Act)).

I prefer the explanation that you get inflation by "printing money", but as we and e.g. the Japanease in the last two "lost decades" show, it's not that simple: this is confounded by the velocity of money as the high level concept and at the low level is expressed as the futility of "pushing on a string" (e.g. "dropping money from helicopters" as the current Chairman of the Fed puts it does little good if people are afraid to borrow or lend).

Macroeconomics is a wild blood sport where no one is _really_ sure of their view of The Truth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A few books I've found extremely helpful for thinking about these things.

Jane Jacobs on cities as the economic entities that _really_ matter: _The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Economy of Cities_ , and _Cities and the Wealth of Nations._

Peter Drucker: _Entrepreneurship and Innovation_.

and _the_ classic textbook:

Paul Samuelson: _Economics_</comment>


Mac OS X Lion: Should You Upgrade or Wait? - <AUTHOR> http://www.applecasts.com/lion-upgrade-or-wait/

<comment><USER2> As of two days ago, GPGMail plugin doesn't work with Lion.

100% dealbreaker for me.

(And when it does, I'll gladly upgrade!).

</comment><comment><USER3> Wait. Don't make my mistake. It really needs 3 or 4 patch releases to fix stability and performance issues.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wait. Performance decreases are not worth the useless Mission Control.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, I'm holding off on installing Lion.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm having problems with USB devices and didn't have any with snow leopard. Hopefully after the first patch things will be much better ;)</comment>


The Branding Checklist - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/weareevermore/the-branding-checklist-15652f015502 <comment><USER2> I think its concise and to the point, a great starting guide for newbies</comment>


Show HN: Ctrl+f – NLP API to find and replace named entities - <AUTHOR> https://ctrlf.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> When I was working on Fitmeal, back in 2016, I implemented a large NLP module to find food entities in text messages.

This week, I refactored that code and made it accessible through an API.

I'd like to hear your thoughts.</comment>


Ask HN: What sites like GrooveHQ offers discounted SaaS Products for Startups - <AUTHOR>

Sites like groovehq.com list software who are offering 90 days trial or xx% discount specially for startups and small businesses, can someone tell me list of similar sites ? it will be helpful to others too<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> I know of Crazy Egg and their 90 day free trial.</comment>


Visualizing the Federal Shutdown - <AUTHOR> http://labs.enigma.io/shutdown2013/

<comment><USER2> Hi HN! This is a project I've been working on for the past few days to collect and visualize data about _who_ exactly has been affected by the Federal shutdown, and how. The source and underlying data (which I collected by hand from OMB contingency plans) can be found in my Github:

[https://github.com/dandelany/shutdown2013](https://github.com/dandelany/shutdown2013)

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool. What's the difference between the shades of blue?

<comment><USER2> I'll add a label for this - different shades of blue represent different reasons workers are furlough-exempt. Namely they are either necessary to protect life and property, or their funding comes from somewhere else rather than the appropriations bill.</comment></comment>


Another Reason Why DRM Is Bad -- For Publishers - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120412/07212918466/another-reason-why-drm-is-bad-publishers.shtml

<comment><USER2> Read [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2012/04/understa...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2012/04/understanding-amazons-strategy.html) (discussion at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3841463>) instead.</comment>


Agent Discovered Dead in Paris Possessed Encryption Key and Classified Docs - <AUTHOR> https://www.newsweek.com/secret-agent-discovered-dead-paris-pool-vomit-found-possess-encryption-key-1418977 <comment><AUTHOR> I thought it was weird that they found this material in the hotel room safe - seems like a bad place to hide keys.</comment>


HN is like CB radio - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mathgladiator.com/2011/01/hn-is-like-cb-radio.html

<comment><USER2> Even better, Ham Radio. A hobby actually has an active community of people using their stations to communicate long distance with other in a (semi-)digital format. (E.G. PSK-31[1]).

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSK-31>

</comment><comment><USER3> funny you mention CB radio. im currently working on a project regarding CB. ill be showing my MVP here soon. as soon as this DNS propagates. >_></comment>


Livestream of SpaceX's attempt to land on a barge - <AUTHOR> http://youtube.com/watch?v=ivdKRJzl6y0 <comment><AUTHOR> There is also a second stream of just the telemetry without the hosted conversation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkz_lclGXNg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkz_lclGXNg)</comment>


Housing.com CEO gives his entire stake to employees - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Housing-com-CEO-Rahul-Yadav-gives-away-his-entire-stake-worth-Rs-200-crore-to-employees/articleshow/47272859.cms?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=TOI <comment><USER3> > _Yadav had reportedly written a resignation letter on April 30 to the board > and investors and questioning their "intellectual capability" and giving > them a one-week deadline to "help in the transition". However, on May 5, he > withdrew the resignation and apologised for his outbursts._

I call unstable. This CEO isn't maverick, world-changing bastard. He is simply unstable.

Moreover, there are huge questions about quality of hiring at Housing. Their website, app have had same bugs for 6 months, and they still remain. Over 2000 people can't make a decent bug-free website to see property listings?

The whole point of Housing was Airbnb style property listings - <USER2> verification, owners -only, professional photos and VR. And somehow their UX is one of their weakest points.

<comment><USER4> I actually think their UX is the best UI I have seen from an Indian website/app. When it first came out, the UI was way way ahead of anything from CommonFloor, MagicBricks, 99 Acres etc. That in turn put pressure on other real estate sites to improve the UX. You can see the transition by going through past archives of these sites.

Interestingly - thier UX when it first launched allowed you to specify a radius on a Map by drawing over it. They then reverted to a more common real estate UX of a search box. As a side note- Map based real estate listings look cool & then probably after A/B testing, they tend to revert to a list based view with a map based view to supplement it (42 Floors also went from Map based view to list based view).

About bugs & 2000 employees- my understanding is that most of these people are in the sales/operations side & note on the tech side. Just like a vast majority of Google's 53,000 employees are not engineers. Regardless, I am not sure of the co-relation between number of employees & bugs. In some cases, more engineering employees could introduce more bugs.

About customer satisfaction, its a hard problem, Rahul Yadav realizes it. Here is him on that topic in an interview.

 _End users are not satisfied when it comes to finding a house through the portal. People are asking why Housing is spending so much on ads when it can't help people find real houses? "The industry is such! We'll get there. Our current customer satisfaction rate is 25% and in theory, we can only reach to about 70%. We are pretty happy with the 25% rate considering when we started," he says. Rahul stresses on the challenges of the industry and believes that becoming a marketing leader first is very important and then the growth can be along with the market._

[http://yourstory.com/2015/05/rahul-yadav- housing/](http://yourstory.com/2015/05/rahul-yadav-housing/)

<comment><USER3> Their UI is good, not their UX. Bugs simply destroy the experience.

I'm also fond of their branding somehow, and their aggressive campaigning, their staying away from TV, and them not forcing me to download their apps.

But that all falls short when the website fails 11 times just while I'm trying to put up a listing.

<comment><USER5> Have put up my apartment for rent on Housing and all the other major realty sites.

In my experience, Housing has: a) The best UI and UX b) The best customer service in terms of tele-service, the agent coming over and taking photos, etc. c) The best response - on the other sites, even when I clicked and uploaded my apartment photos, the response rate on Housing was the best. d) Interesting add-on features such as 'lease agreement' maker and so on (which I only used to draft my own agreement with my tenant)

As regards 'aggressive campaigning', so many other companies are burning more expensive television moolah (e.g. Car Trade, Car Dekho, YepMe, Practo and more). And yet, this company interestingly attracts more than its fair share of criticism of aggressive campaigning - possibly thanks to some of media houses that also run property portals :)

<comment><USER3> Didn't go down that way for me. Their sign up form kept giving 503, and each time it did that, the form reset saving nothing I entered. That is a UX fail.

The form is not clear on expectations, when you don't follow them, it fails, resetting itself. That is a UX fail.

The service is only available in Metros, but they never say that during onboarding. Even their sign up form has all Indian cities. You put up your listing and if Housing is not in your city, you simply never get contacted. Fail without notice. That is a UX fail.

I managed to have 3 accounts with same e-mail. That is a massive, massive incompetent engineering. That is a UX fail.

UX and UI are not the same thing. Beauty is seen. Experience is felt. Housing's interaction design is absolute junk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To anyone monitoring the housing.com story, this just seems like the latest in a series of increasingly erratic events by housing.com CEO Rahul Yadav.

[http://www.livemint.com/Companies/DQevn4TkemzICqPeSNe8vI/Its...](http://www.livemint.com/Companies/DQevn4TkemzICqPeSNe8vI/Its- business-as-usual-for-Housing-CEO.html)

[http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-05-05/news...](http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-05-05/news/61833210_1_nexus- venture-partners-softbank-housing-board)

[http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/housin...](http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/housing- com-ceo-rahul-yadavs-victory-sign/articleshow/47235790.cms)

</comment><comment><USER7> Housing.com is dot-com-bubble era extravagant startup with no good forseeable business model. In their initial rounds, they spend $1M ( 40% of funding ) to get the fancy domain and phone number. Its almost as if they are doing exactly opposite of Sam Altman's every advice - low burn rate, focus on product, hire slowly, build and iterate. One of my friend who works there told me that they are working simultaneously on 16 projects.

I don't believe a company like this would find itself existing in the next few years unless, they get a new CEO who knows how to get shit on track which would mean firing of lots of people and cutting down on their stupid campaigns. I don't know weather this move was because of his sheer goodwill or to save his face or to get back on news again but considering his moves in past few months, he is an arrogant cocky teenager-like mentality person who doesn't think twice before making a move

<comment><USER3> Sam Altman's advice is for early stage startups working on small seed rounds, not for companies getting 2.5MM, then 18MM, then 90MM USD in funding. I don't know if you have ever raised, but you have to justify to investors how you will spend money. They most definitely told their investors that they will use their money for fancy domain and given the Indian market, they were probably okay with it. No investor would give you tens of millions and expect you to sit on it eating ramen increasing your runway to 4 decades. The idea is to use the damn cash to grow faster.

16 projects does not sound very high given over 2000 employees.

Property listing startup with no business model? Are you kidding me?

<comment><USER7> > No investor would give you tens of millions and expect you to sit on it > eating ramen increasing your runway to 4 decades. The idea is to use the > damn cash to grow faster.

So its just about getting a stake? Currently, Housing.com won't survive a day if VCs pulled the plug. If the stake becomes worthless, what is the point of investing?

>16 projects does not sound very high given over 2000 employees.

Most of their employees are photographers and not engineers. The problem is not on working on so many things but working at them all at once, with no focus at all which seem pointless since they don't really have a gold-laying hen working for them, yet. Making a loss ~50 Cr is not cool [1].

> Property listing startup with no business model? Are you kidding me?

The business model on which sites like Sulekha and CommonFloor operate is to urge the user to give out his contact details which they can sell to their clients. Essentially, spamming and even that is incredible low-margin model. Would Housing.com go that way?

[1]: [http://www.livemint.com/r/LiveMint/Period1/2015/04/06/Photos...](http://www.livemint.com/r/LiveMint/Period1/2015/04/06/Photos/g_housing_web.jpg)

<comment><USER5> On your earlier point about the domain name, if you had the money and had an option to buy your brandname.com (especially "housing" for the business they are in), $1 million is a good investment.

There are a whole lot of things they can start monetizing. Sure, I am not going to buy an apartment based on slice view, but based on my experience with Housing as regards getting tenants and prospective buyers, I would gladly pay them for the service :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://housing.com/in](https://housing.com/in)

Unfortunately 'Our Brand Story' video on their homepage, made 0 sense to me. Its probably me though.

<comment><USER9> Rule one of branding. Don't call it branding. Don't say the word "brand" in your brand advertising. I guess those were two rules. But hey, miscounting is my brand now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> And HackerNews calls the man unstable, deranged, insane. Nothing is valued here but greed to some folks.

 _Edit:_ The downvotes don't really prove me wrong, guys.

<comment><USER11> Or it could be that HN values stability, rationality, and sanity. If you read beyond the headline you will find plenty of crazy.

Or more likely, if someone is trying to convince you of their pure altruism - especially the CEO of a huge corporation - they're trying to scam you in some way. This guy is playing with large quantities of other people's money. If I were an investor I would be terrified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most comments here are so sad. Looks like most people are simple jealous of Yadav's success. People calling him a bastard and mentally unstable. Shame on you guys. Make me wonder what these commenters have achieved. Especially @arihant. Calling another a bastard and unstable is more telling of @arihant himself rather than yadav.

<comment><USER3> I said he _isn 't_ a "world-changing bastard".

And if you're running a 1500 crore company and spend time fighting on Twitter, crashing cars, impulsively resigning, abusing your own investors, giving away your shares impulsively, you would be hard pressed to find people who will call you stable.

Is there any guarantee that Rahul won't retract this decision by next week? There isn't, and that is unstable behavior.

<comment><USER13> >> fighting on Twitter, crashing cars...

Wouldn't that put Elon Musk in the bad books as per your rather prejudicial yardstick of measuring the worthiness of a person at the helm of a company?

Also, it was Advitiya (the other co-founder) at Housing who crashed his car.

<comment><USER3> Correlation is not causation. Just because Elon Musk did so does not mean that rate of success among car crashing CEOs is not lower than the rest of them.

You've got to look at a nominal case, the median, not the outlying example to justify your mistakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As generous as that may be, is it a wise move for a CEO to essentially divest all of their shares in the company?

<comment><USER15> Probably not, considering his weird behaviour and statements about being too young to care about money I doubt it will spur investor confidence in the direction of the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why, just why would anyone do that? I understand wanting to give 50%.. 70-80% even, but all of it? Does that seem crazy only to me or is there a hidden motive to it somewhere?!

<comment><USER17> Presumably he is still an employee, so will have some ownership. Why _shouldn 't_ the people who _are_ the company have real ownership as well? Why should the CEO retain the most ownership?

<comment><USER18> > Why should the CEO retain the most ownership?

That depends on where the company is since its inception.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> 1\. His stake might be all options or at best illiquid stock so unsure if it's comparable to "cash" 2\. He's not on the best terms with his VCs and owns <5% of company: might be on the verge of getting kicked out. 3\. Yadav already made his $$ with each round; he just bought a Porsche.

</comment><comment><USER20> That's incredibly awesome.

Many CEO's get paid so ridiculously much that the stock just pushes it into absurdity.

It's great to see folks realize the work input of all employees at a company is about the same and to share the wealth more equally.

The Gravity payments CEO was another great example - clearly he already pulled in a lot and had a lot of stock, but this is setting things right - [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/business/owner-of- gravity-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/business/owner-of-gravity- payments-a-credit-card-processor-is-setting-a-new-minimum- wage-70000-a-year.html?_r=0) (I'd also argue his original salary was massively more than needed).

</comment><comment><USER21> Eccentric. To draw a parallel, Rahul reminds me of Evan S of SnapChat, but only that Evan managed to correct his act and that's down to the mentors he had.

Either way, there much to learn from Yadav and his amazing team at Housing. They managed to create a great business in a short amount of time, sustained growth and managed to iterate rapidly. Now, I don't know for sure if all that growth happened inspite of Yadav, or because of him; but its hard to find fault with him, and he's achieved a lot in his short career already, and has to be credited for a lot of wealthy individuals he's now created in the process.

So much money has been poured into Housing at absolutely sky-high evaluations ($900m in a round led by Japan's SoftBank a few months back), Housing.com's competitor CommonFloor.com has its founding team intact (and one that's much mature in terms of experience). So there is some cause of worry.

Indian start-up scene is going through an unprecedented amount of growth propelled by all the talent that isn't leaving the country any more (most unicorns are founded by IITians that otherwise would have left the country for Silicon Valley) as VCs and Angles continue to pour a lot of money into the ecosystem.

IMO, Housing is a success story (as much as Ola Cabs, Zomato, Snapdeal are).

Orig comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9491156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9491156)

</comment><comment><USER22> > Rahul Yadav has decided to allot all his personal shares[...]

So I'm not very well versed in options but does this _literally_ mean all of his shares or is there a difference between personal shares and some sort of other shares? Did he really give away _every share he owned / is entitled to_?

Edit: erm, thought questions were okay. Why the downvotes? I just wanted to know if there is some sort of legal distinction with "personal" shares or if it simply means all of his shares.

<comment><USER18> This is all his shares.

<comment><USER22> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A founder CEO puts(should put) in more than anyone while getting paid industry standard salary or less in best cases. The only upside/motivation for them is the equity which can make him/her a millionaire. With that out one would look for the nearest exit because it's a thankless job and people don't care how you feel or how many sleeping nights have you had.

</comment><comment><USER24> Their pitch is a work of beauty, but it doesn't tell me much about what they actually do. It's definitely the most memorable ad I've ever seen.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyYyKRiJR4M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyYyKRiJR4M)

They learned well from Simon Sinek's _Start with Why_ , but I'm afraid they jumped the shark: it comes off as _trying too hard_ to inspire.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think this guy has an OCD, constantly trying to achieve publicity by using the "Yadav" image for marketing Housing.com. I just feel like this is another similar move, to re-establish his image after all those hatred going around him to the point that he was called the Rahul Gandhi in IT.

He could be X times more successful than me, I'm not going to waste time fighting that argument otherwise I eagerly want to hear out his argument for this move.

</comment><comment><USER26> it's easy to forget that he _raised_ $90mm to begin with. So somebody came away impressed enough to drop the money into the company:

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/15/softbank-housing-dot-com- in...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/15/softbank-housing-dot-com-india/)

With the money they didn't stand still, they started hustling and built an outstanding buy/rent site that kills the ugly competition (magicbricks, commonfloor, indiaproperty).

Have to admit that the "Look Up" campaign has been nothing short of silly.

</comment><comment><USER27> Quite a maverick move.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't know much about Mr. Yadav, but quite likely my own mental illness would put his completely to shame.

At the same time, whenever I have four dollars, I use it to buy a slice of hot pizza for a homeless person. Many of my professional colleagues - who earn quite a lot more money than I could ever hope to - regard that as irresponsible of me, to feed the poor.

What you describe here in the comments - I haven't read the India Times story yet - sounds like Bipolar Mania.

But even so, some people really do practice sincere generosity. The simple fact that Mr. Yadav gave away all his stock doesn't mean there is something wrong with him.

</comment><comment><USER29> How does a startup hire 2,251 employees in 3 years?? Insane.

</comment><comment><USER30> Rahul Yadav is good man and good thinking beacuse he should not give money to people who are money minded but give to charity or open something poor people.</comment>


Inclusive Design Toolkit - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/design/practice <comment><USER2> This is a document to increase awareness about accessibility and provide guidelines, yet the landing page fails to convey the intention of the document.

Accessibility is about lowering barriers to people and making things actually easier, not about making a message difficult to understand with marketing gibberish.

Why can't a landing page, especially one about accessibility, be concise and straight to the point?

<comment><USER3> Wow, right. When I first saw the link I thought, "Excellent, MS are contributing some good to the world via accessibility tools". By the time I had scanned the page, I had come to the conclusion that it was just marketing blather for their equivalent of material design.

Maybe they're testing AI-generated content?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The amount of doublespeak in this document is absolutely off the charts.

Disability equals Mismatched Human Interactions - really?

[http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/0/D/B0D4BF87-09CE-4...](http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/0/D/B0D4BF87-09CE-4417-8F28-D60703D672ED/INCLUSIVE_TOOLKIT_MANUAL_FINAL.pdf)

Why not just accept that some people have disabilities and it's everybody's responsibility to help these people out to the best of our abilities? It's the moral thing to do.

Why bend and squish words into different definitions?

<comment><USER5> > "Why bend and squish words into different definitions?"

It's not bending definitions, the World Health Organisation's definition of disability is a generic description of what a disability is.

To be clear, the definition given was...

"a mismatch in interaction between the features of a person's body and the features of the environment in which they live."

In what way does that not line up with what a disability is?

<comment><USER6> This definition matches every discomfort.

<comment><USER5> Such as?

Perhaps it helps to think of disability this way to shake the idea that it has to be a permanent state. If I break my leg, but it eventually heals, was I not temporarily disabled?

<comment><USER6> Such as not enough leg room on a plane, a chair with not enough padding or ventilation -- every possible discomfort, including most trivial ones, even to a fully-abled, mint-condition, picture-of-health human is some mismatch between them and their environment.

(If I wanted to be snide, I'd include "using Windows".)

<comment><USER5> Using your leg room example, if it's inhibiting your potential range of motion whilst sitting then you are disabled.

To look at it a different way, isn't a person with healthy eyes as equally disabled as a blind person when they're in a completely dark room? The source of the disability is not as important as the outcome.

<comment><USER7> No. Because you (and WHO) are consistently leaving out the obvious -- all of this is in comparison to "typical" human abilities. According to that definition, everyone living in a northern climate becomes disabled each winter, since none of us can survive outside without special clothing. And if humans could see magnetic lines, we'd all certainly be better matched to our earth environment, so does that mean all humans disabled?

<comment><USER8> > According to that definition, everyone living in a northern climate becomes > disabled each winter

This seems valid to me.

The prefix "dis-" is a negation prefix[1], and "abled" means to have a range of abilities[2], so it is equivalent to not-abled. Not having a range of abilities.

There's nothing in this most basic description that suggests being disabled is an abnormal or permanent state.

In the context of getting to the grocery store in the winter, I am quite literally disabled by the cold temperatures, unless I have some natural occurrence or form of technology that en-ables me–el nino, clothing, vehicles, underground tunnels.

I am disabled from reading this screen if I don't have my glasses on. This is a permanent disability, but I can correct it by either putting on my glasses, or by making the text bigger.

Our set of abilities is not immutable, and technology is just meant to add to this set. Microsoft's document is just about making designers aware that not everyone always has the same set of abilities as the designers themselves. Recognizing this allows us to design technology that helps more people in more situations.

WHO did not change _the_ definition of "disabled", they _corrected their own_ definition to recognize that whether or not a person is disabled is a contextually dependent question.

[1] [http://www.dictionary.com/browse/dis-](http://www.dictionary.com/browse/dis-) [2] [http://www.dictionary.com/browse/abled](http://www.dictionary.com/browse/abled)

<comment><USER7> I think my comment rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, and for that I apologize. Actually, I agree with almost everything the replies argue. My point -- which I did didn't make well -- was that I think using the word "disabled" in the WHO sense is either disingenuous or silly. Silly, because if everyone is disabled at all times, then the word becomes meaningless. Disingenuous in the sense that "not having a range of ability" implicitly really means having an unusually or unexpectedly limited or different (but not strictly larger) range of abilities as compared to some poorly-defined range for a "typical" human, without actually admitting that we are comparing against some standard.

Yes, the standard is vague and poorly defined. And I agree that disability doesn't need to be permanent or easily visible or significant, that it is context dependent, and it obviously isn't binary. I have no qualms with the idea that everyone or nearly everyone is, at some point and in some ways, disabled. And perhaps most importantly, we should disentangle the concept of disability with moral/value judgments.

Still, I think all of the examples I've seen on this thread are implicitly comparing against a standard but explicitly pretending they are not. You mention that you are disabled from reading your screen. Because many humans would have that ability. You didn't say you were disabled because you don't have the x-ray vision needed to see through walls. Just like nobody would say a person is disabled because their body doesn't produce enough fur or whale blubber to survive a new england winter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Inclusive Design Toolkit ([https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/design/practice#toolkit](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/design/practice#toolkit)) consists of a downloadable manual and activities. The manual is an overview of the inclusive design problem. The activities are more like a guideline to researching possible design solutions.

I didn't find there any ready to use design recipes.

</comment><comment><USER10> Title is not clear but this is Microsoft saying they are committed to designing for accessibility in mind. I believe they added a new section called the Inclusive Design Toolkit.

Linking to the PDFs or something would be a lot more straightforward than linking to their general design page.

The PDFs make some good points about how designing for accessibility has secondary, wider reaching impact.

It's nice to see at the very least that Microsoft cares enough to make this.

</comment><comment><USER11> When I eventually got to Microsoft's actual PDF that explains this I noticed two things:

1\. The URL is [http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/2/C/F2C19EC6-03E2-4...](http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/2/C/F2C19EC6-03E2-4D8C-B417-0265B808CD06/Microsoft- Design-Language-1603.pdf)

Why the heck does everything at Microsoft have to involve URLs with GUIDs in it?

2\. That PDF is one of the worst documents purportedly on design frameworks I've ever seen. It's not functional, or direct, the text is in a tiny font, there are pages that do nothing with no content.

Ironically in page 20 they specify a minimum size of 12 EP, yet the label on the side is like half this size! Wut?

</comment><comment><USER12> Microsoft says they're changed but still designs everything for office slavery. Even graphical style emphasises it. Looking at this page first thoughts are: suits, ringing phones, cold calls. They're designing hamster wheels. They sell their software to business executives, not users who will use it.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Human beings have been at the center of design practices for a long time."

What does this sentence even mean? Who else would be at the center? Cats?

<comment><USER8> They may be referencing IDEO's Human-Centered Design [1].

I think the danger is that if you don't intentionally use human-centered design processes, you could end up "just getting it done", or "reducing cost", or nothing at all in the center.

Surely you've heard some horror story of engineers spending millions of dollars designing software, but they neglect to include the end users in the design process. What happens in this story? It finally makes it to the users and they deem it unusable.

There was a fun little incident in Canada recently where this was probably part of the issue [2].

[1] [http://www.designkit.org/human-centered- design](http://www.designkit.org/human-centered-design)

[2] [http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/psac- pro...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/psac-protest- phoenix-pay-system-st-johns-1.3726011)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So... what is this?

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure, I skimmed the entire thing and still don't know.

<comment><USER16> I read the entire thing forwards and backwards and either way does not make any more sense than the other.

I guess marketing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here I am again to complain about bad focus support. The biggest travesty is people pushing the diversity narrative without... being inclusive.

The page has javascript, so I know they can put in javascript that targets the keyboard and helps users know where the hell they are focused. The focus outlines on those damn buttons is way too non-obvious.

</comment><comment><USER18> Despite using Windows regularly and doing my development on it, I have serious problem with Microsoft approach. They literally tried to ignore many people who uses low dpi _right now_. I know people are going to adopt better monitor in somewhere along the line. But whole world is not just silicone valley and as far as I can see in third world countries (which is where Microsoft rules) 99% uses very low DPI monitors for desktop and laptop. That's because for a long time manufacturers produced and sold low dpi monitor.

Changing your underlying technology ( as far as I know they adopted DirectWrite as replacements for ClearText) with out caring about your users experience (and ironically making it worse that what it was) does not mean anything other than ignoring and don't caring about your user base.

Font rendering in Windows 10 is ridiculous. It is in worst possible shape. (In UWP and modern app). At the other hand, Ubuntu, Fedora (with freetype tweak) font rendering is fabulous.

I hated that guy, Steve Ballmer. He didn't know basic rule of management. You as manager cannot force people to use something you want. You should provide them better experience overall.

I know there are some technical issues there about ClearText (which was not that good -far from freetype-, but much better than DirectWrite). We are talking about biggest and most successful software company in history of mankind. There is got to be better way than ignoring your userbase. I am sure they _can_ provide better font rendering for UWP in low DPI monitors.

Let be honest nobody cared about windows modern apps before integrating them into Windows core itself. Right now every time i open settings app my eyes hurt.

P.S. I do realize most people in HN have high DPI monitor, but if you can just try to use UWP app in 14 inch monitor with 1366x768 resolution (which is more than common in third world countries), and compare it to ClearText.

P.S 2. this is not only for third world countries. As far as I know gamers tend to buy large screen but with 1080p resolution. I tested on it, font rendering on anything less than 200 DPI is fucking nightmare. And doesn't matter how much smoother UWPs animation's are. Or how much their design are cool. When text is ridiculously awful, it doesn't worth using.

www.sven.de/dpi

P.S 3 This is one of the saddest experience I had as SE. Microsoft knew they had desktop users locked in, and because of that they didn't care. Imagine a world which Microsoft had serious competitor in desktop/laptop OS space. I am sure they wouldn't dare to mess with user experience in such way. I am really happy with recent increase in Apple's iMac's and MacBook's.

<comment><USER19> lol I have all sorts of issues on the new high dpi computers at work. One of them being the fonts too small (which they actually have a way to fix via zoom now). One of them being random applications can't handle it. like any transition I think it's a mess. I do like being able to zoom the hell out of and shrink the hell out of text though depending on the time of day. As I get older I definitely mess with the font sizes throughout the day a lot.

<comment><USER18> I do understand what you saying. But I think there is subtle but important difference here. Microsoft deliberately ruined font rendering experience for users who already was using their platform, and didn't care because they knew they had them locked in.

But small fonts and etc problems in high DPI monitors raised in kind of adoption old apps (Win32 API) in new technologies (high DPI monitors). This is quite ordinary. Every manufacturer or company will experience something similar eventually.

<comment><USER19> They ruined an entire OS series just to get their tablet version of the UI out. I think this one is tame compared to that, vista, or ME.... Or BOB

<comment><USER18> Lol. Haven't thought that way about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Judging from the fact that Windows 10 still uses icons from 1995, I am surprised to learn that Microsoft even has a design department.

</comment><comment><USER21> When did Microsoft became eligible to speak about design?

<comment> chestnut-tree Microsoft has a long history of providing accessibility options in their products (long before Apple or Google started taking accessibility seriously).

Microsoft have never been very good with visual and interaction design in their desktop operating system. However, Windows Phone is the exception. It's visually attractive, and has nice, well thought-out interactions. I think it's superior to Android and iOS in many ways. It's obvious that both Apple and Google took some cues from Windows Phone in the updates to their own mobile operating systems. (Undoubtedly, all these companies look at each others products when designing new features).

<comment><USER22> Same windows phone that forgot to put a notification bar until Windows Phone 8.1 update?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Microsoft laying the foundation for Hololens apps?

</comment><comment><USER24> so now accessibility is called "inclusiveness" ? Can we please stop with the marketing bullshit ?

</comment><comment><USER19> inclusive design page captures the back event via a redirect page.

</comment><comment><USER25> That's quite a lot of reading to do in a landing page. Needs a tldr; section!

<comment><USER11> It's amazing there is so much text surrounded by negative space yet they have managed to say nothing at all. That's quite an accomplishment really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Oh no, the social justice warriors have invaded Microsoft!!!

(Double speak, meaningless sentences abound - that if you were to strip them from the article no meaning would be lost.)</comment>