Management things I learned at Imgur - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@gerstenzang/21-management-things-i-learned-at-imgur-7abb72bdf8bf <comment><USER2> "It's terribly difficult to manage unmotivated people. Make your job easier and don't."

I want to add to this by saying, it's terribly difficult to keep yourself motivated in a team with unmotivated people. I left my last job because all the team cared about was money, job security and doing their 9-5. At my current place, we could fire half the staff and the company wouldn't miss a beat. Sadly, there is no management, leadership or clear direction. We are self managed and so it's very easy to spot the handful of proactive staff because they usually end up picking up all the tasks which eventually causes burnouts and reduced motivation etc... I've tried to motivate my team mates but how do you motivate someone who's comfortable and secure in their 9-5 and don't really care to achieve any more than mediocre? Nobody gets fired and everyone's on pretty good pay for the job they do.

So I really do agree with this point. Find people who are not satisfied with the status quo. You can't change everyone, in fact, you can't change anyone. All a manager can do is hope to keep these people accountable if they do not hold themselves responsible.

<comment><USER3> Is there really anything wrong with the fact that some people don't care to achieve anything more than what's required of them at their job? I think it's unfortunate that you're in an environment you don't enjoy, and I hope you can find other people you relate with.

I hope I don't offend you, but it feels a bit selfish to try to change them to be more motivated. For many people, a job is just something they have to get through to survive and there's nothing wrong with that. In a way you are lucky because these people will likely never enjoy their jobs as much as you do.

Don't forget that they may very well have other things besides work that inspire them, but those things might not pay the bills.

<comment><USER4> There's nothing inherently wrong with that kind of person. The problem arises when you mix the two types of people in a demanding environment where more than the status quo is expected (e.g., at a startup). If you want to coast, stick to defense.

<comment><USER5> The problem arises when managers have unrealistic expectations. If you hire someone to do 9-5 job and you expect them to do more than that, it's your fault if that fails, not theirs. Different people have different priorities in life, some will be ready to work more to finish more tasks, others will be ready to work just 8h but will be more productive in that timeframe. Or will produce better quality of code during that time or solve harder problems. Not all tasks are the same, nor all programmers produce equal quality of code, so the number of closed tickets in a unit of time is not a very good metric and definitely shouldn't be the only one that matters for an IT company.

<comment><USER6> > If you hire someone to do 9-5 job and you expect them to do more than that, > it's your fault if that fails, not theirs.

I think the biggest teller of an unmotivated person is a generally negative, problem-focussed attitude. No matter the hour of the day, "We can't do x, because..." will destroy nearby "We can do this, if...." people, eventually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When did it become a Universal Truth that good management requires regular scheduled 1-1s (weekly or biweekly at most)? Clearly managers should meet frequently and in depth with people on the team, but the "regular 1-on-1" thing is mantra, and I'm not sure there's research/evidence to support its efficacy.

People never look forward to them. You gotta remember everything you did that week so you can report on it (even when told the 1-1 isn't meant for status reports... it kinda always is). You gotta think of some issue to bring up to manager's attention. It interrupts your whole day. Your manager didn't yet help you on your problem from last week -- now they want to listen thoughtfully to problems this week?

From the manager's POV: You've been keeping up with the team members all week, helping out and checking in every day... now you're gonna lose one or two days with back-to-back 1-1s which leave your voice hoarse. They need a few more days to finish out whatever you discussed last week... should you cancel the 1-1 and sync up on the next week (and lose the 1-1 tempo), or have a "no-diff" meeting that you both know you coulda skipped?

<comment><USER8> Agreed, i dont do 1:1's with my team a) i have about 90 folks to deal with, so it would be near to impossible. b) all my folks know (and do) that they can grab 30 mins at any time with me if they have something on thier mind. I kinda keep track of who is not talking to me, and hit them up with a chat now and then. I also do something I call "walking the floor", where every few hours i get around everybody and just say hi and ask how everybody is doing, and what they are up to, ask if they have any problems. Show interest in what they are doing. I usualy time it when i know folks are takimg natural breaks etc so i know im not distracting them.

<comment><USER9> >I also do something I call "walking the floor"

Also known as drive-by management. Why not schedule some time instead?

<comment><USER10> Among "worst qualities of management I've ever experienced," drive-by is in the top 5. Even satirized in _Office Space_.

Come to think of it, "far too many direct reports" is on the same list...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If one considers the primary purpose of managers to be to improve the performance of those that report to them, then this list starts poorly.

It _is_ terribly difficult to manage unmotivated people, but most people only end up unmotivated because of poor management. And it's usually cheaper and ultimately better to motivate a proved achiever who has lower motivation than to find a replacement.

<comment><USER12> That's not always true. Sometimes people end up unmotivated because the organization shifts its mission in one direction while they shift their values in another, and so what starts out as great mission-alignment falls out of alignment. Sometimes people grow out of a role when the role doesn't grow with them. Sometimes peoples' life circumstances change and they don't have as much attention to devote to work. Sometimes people are just looking to collect a paycheck and don't care about the work at all.

A manager should always _start_ by assuming that a motivation problem is something he can address, and work with the employee to figure out what the real reason is and see if they can make the necessary changes. But sometimes, the employee and organization just aren't a good fit anymore, and it's better for both of them if they part ways and find new situations that _are_ a good fit.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely. There are many other ways people end up unmotivated, but the most common I've seen has to do with things that are within the realm of their manager - possibly with escalation to someone higher up.

I've encountered only five managers who fully exemplify this, but they had an outsize role in keeping good people who others might not have been able to keep, keeping them productive (at least enough of the time to satisfy their work commitments while they dealt with other issues), and attracting more good people (because of word of mouth from the existing good people). It seems the key here was to have the conversations when they were needed. The advice here "Make your job easier and don't." doesn't correlate with these great managers at all. At least two of them to my knowledge have given reports the advice (and assistance) to find opportunities elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Fire quickly. If you don't fire bad performers fast, you're at risk of losing your good performers. Don't underestimate the effect bad performers have on good performers. Your team will likely move faster even with fewer bodies." and "It's terribly difficult to manage unmotivated people. Make your job easier and don't." are very very important.

In the previous company I created, I had to keep an incompetent and lazy employee to appease my cofounder because he was friend with him. There's nothing worse for team motivation than having an incompetent and lazy untouchable employee... Never ever do that.

Oh and if you ever find yourself with a cofounder who wants to keep an employee because he is his friend regardless of performance, treat that as a huge red flag...

<comment><USER14> Ok, the example you gave is fine. But there is something that scares me a little.

Could a "bad performer" mean someone who just can't output as much as everyone else, even though they are trying as hard as possible? What if they exhibit strong self-motivation to learn, but have a difficult time implementing something that would otherwise be easy for someone else?...

It scares me as a (well, I consider myself, but I've been developing software for 5+ years...) junior software developer that I might be compared to seniors or "prodigy" developers. The only thing I can do is keep pushing my limits and reach those levels, and I'm lucky to be one of those self-motivated people. But the others...it sounds hopeless.

<comment><USER13> In my experience, determination and perseverance trumps raw talent. If you really push yourself to the limit and are passionate enough about what you're doing to try to improve yourself, you're going to be a better asset in the long term for a team compared to someone who understand things easily but doesn't really try to improve himself unless he has to.

Even in term of team morale, someone who tries hard and pushes himself to the limit is motivating.

So I wouldn't worry too much about it (plus you might just have imposter syndrome and discount what you really know ;-))

<comment><USER14> Yeah I get this feeling that 90% of the people I see and hear are just running a facade...And sometimes I get a glimpse of that...and it feels really good to know I'm not a fake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "It's terribly difficult to manage unmotivated people. Make your job easier and don't."

And where is the challenge if everyone is highly motivated and easy to manage? Then you can just leave the programmers alone. They don't need management in this case.

<comment><USER16> Just because people are highly motivated doesn't mean they're intrinsically organized. You can leave the programmers alone, but you still need someone to decide what they're working on and how to best allocate resources. A manager ensures a team stays coordinated.

<comment><USER11> I've found that groups of individual contributors are actually very good on deciding what is important, what they should work on and when, and how to work together to get things done.

Managers can provide a useful role in setting the scene, reminding what the goals of the organisation, the department, and so forth are, and how this connects with what the team is doing. They are perhaps most useful in working with individuals who aren't working well as part of the team at the moment - giving them feedback, mentorship, building bridges, connecting them with people, training, and so forth.

In my opinion, managers hurt more than not if they override the self- organisation of teams, and this most hurts when you need two teams to work together - and one of the managers has (explicitly, perhaps) made it clear that doing things "off the plan" is not appreciated.

<comment><USER10> That _strongly strongly strongly_ depends on the team and contributors.

I'd agree at my startup employers. I would not agree about several teams I worked with at Apple, to pick on a corporate example. Teams built from the ashes of an acquired startup at Apple, again, I'd be more inclined to agree. You can't support a broad conclusion like that anecdotally, because I can counterexample it anecdotally, implying there's more to it.

It really depends on the ICs in question. Startups are far more selective about their ICs because one person has a very big impact. With the exception of Google and a couple others, large-cap corporate throws IC quantity at problems and distinguished, autonomous, "rockstar" (sigh) ICs are far more rare. You need the cat herders there.

<comment><USER11> It does depend on the contributors, and obviously depends on the culture of the company (ie, if everyone assumes managers are supposed to do it, nobody will do it).

You can't rely on any random grouping of people to decide well on what's important to do and how to effectively break up the work. But adding a random manager to that group doesn't help specifically. Adding a more experienced IC will generally help more than a less experienced manager.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hmm. Sam was only at Imgur for less than a year. That's a lot of management lessons for a limited period of time...

<comment> taw-snark0 He writes well, but is only 2 years out of college (Stanford '13). Learning that (and noticing how he obfuscated it on his LinkedIn) made me take this piece with an even larger grain of salt than I would normally have.

<comment><USER18> He probably obfuscated that fact so people wouldn't judge him just by his age; it would seem based on some of the comments in this thread that he was right to do so.

Some of the best lessons in life can come from those who haven't been tainted by long stints doing the very thing they're commenting on.

<comment> taw-snark0 Managing teams should be about the long term. Any understanding this guy has of the long-term effects of his management style is necessarily second-hand.

It's not about age, but experience (and honestly representing yourself in the world).

N.B. I'm not saying he shouldn't write, or that he doesn't have valuable insights to offer, just that the author's experience is fair ground for discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wanted to focus on one thing which I really liked in that list. The author stresses the need to explain the rationale for decisions (aka, why we are going to focus on x, instead of y) rather than presenting all decisions as unquestionable and infallible edicts from god.

This doesn't mean that every employee will agree with every decision taken from management - but hearing the whys, and understanding the debate that went into taking a decision helps a lot in getting buy in and getting people to go that extra mile.

</comment><comment><USER20> I thought this was a good article. I believe most people who are worth having want to be part of something bigger themselves, want to contribute to the world and are willing to sacrifice a bit to do so. These are the people to identify and reward and it is always frustrating when this doesn't happen.

Per brobdingnagian's comment... everyone has bad days on occasion. A good manager can work around this. But a workplace is about work. Not therapy.

<comment><USER3> I guess I'm just still too young, naive, and perhaps stupid, but I disagree with this idea strongly. It certainly is true that most places (in the US at least) treat work like work and not like therapy.

Maybe you're right and work is about work and not therapy, but why not? If anything it seems like it's in the company's best interest to provide therapy if it's needed. They already provide health insurance, and it's well known that people who are happier perform better on the job than people who aren't.

<comment><USER20> Remember work for you is product for someone else.

All the things we take for granted... the lights being on, the roads being paved, the bus coming on time... all this happens because people organize, take care of their personal affairs, show up and perform their duties in a proscribed manner, even when they would rather be doing something else.

My belief is to play when it's time to play and work when it's time to work and to keep my personal life separate from work and not to turn personal problems into workplace problems. Managers aren't (generally) personal counselors nor should they be. Their function in that role is to insure something happens in accordance with organizational goals. Not to be someone's mom or life coach. And again... the function of the workplace is to provide a good or a service to someone else. Not a place for working out personal issues. Take that to the appropriate venue lest the buses stop coming on time.

<comment><USER3> I'd argue that if we didn't try to pretend people were robots at work and tried to ensure everyone was happy, things would be done even better than they are now.

It's certainly the case that people show up to work even when they would rather be doing something else. If anything I suspect that's what the majority of people working are doing, working because they have to, not because they particularly want to.

On the other hand, do you really want someone who's very unhappy driving the bus or flying the plane you're on?

I don't think that work is somehow special, we should care for each other no matter whether we are at work or at a coffee shop.

Of course, everyone is different and I'm glad to have heard your opinion. I just think it's a bit sad because for those who work full time, work is where the majority of their waking life goes. That being the case, I can see a situation where people might only ever interact with other people at work, and so if they need help they have nowhere else to go. But anyway, I can of course also see your point. It's just that it seems with something like depression or suicide, people don't necessarily know what they should do or act rationally even if they do know what they should do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Many gems are in here.

\- If you can't fire friends, don't hire them.

\- Finally, firing for bad performance is easier than having to fire good people because you've run out of money, so fire the bad people before you have to fire the good people too.

\- The best way to avoid politics isn't to ignore politics, but to spend your time on it.

I'm interested in the backstory of the author too.

</comment><comment><USER22> The tone of the list seemed to draw a line between the "manager" and the "managed".

Personally I think the best way to manage a team is to draw a line between the "team" (including management) and the "objectives".

The seemingly tough part with doing things this way is to be able to draw a line between individuals and the rest of the team if someone isn't holding up their weight.

It sounds tough, but I think it doesn't have to be as tough as it sounds. If people are given enough independence and individual responsibilities, but in a collaborative setting, it will become obvious to the entire team when individuals are not carrying their weight.

Keep in mind that once a person becomes a member of your team you're in it for the long haul. Every once in a while a team needs to rally to achieve objectives, since it's almost impossible to give perfectly equal distribution of work in a project. Every once in a while individuals need to be propped up by the rest of the team if they're having difficulties with their individual responsibilities.

It should only become a problem when the same individuals, over the course of an extended period of time, fail to meet their objectives. And even then if the company is large enough they should be given an opportunity to move laterally within the company to move to another team. If individuals fail regularly within multiple teams at that point it becomes obvious they may need to be let go.

With all that said, different projects / companies have different budgets and so they may need to cut corners. That's why it's important to be careful to select people you are in it for the long haul with, and are willing to put the time and energy into that person as an investment for the betterment of the company.

Sudden turnover is one of the worst things for morale in any company. Avoid it at just about any cost, except in extraordinary circumstances.

</comment><comment><USER23> These 21 points make Imgur seem like an over-managed hell pit to work at.

<comment><USER24> I think that if _good_ management were following these rules, you wouldn't even know it was happening. It'd be more like guiding and less like controlling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Define clear merit-based systems, which reduces confusion about what your > team members need to do be recognized.

This is a great one, I wish more companies/managers did this. It's terrible when your company's advancement policy is "if your manager like you, you get promoted". It's demotivating when your bonus is based on someone's subjective feeling about how good a job you're doing, or some ridiculous self-assessment essay.

Give me clear, measurable goals, and a clear, scheduled (on the calendar) performance review.

Ship Product A or complete features B and C on time and your next raise will be X. Ship it on time and under budget and your bonus will be Y. Otherwise, Z% cost of living increase only.

<comment><USER26> What if all your time is spent cleaning up after the cowboys? Or talking to the other team members about the problems they are stuck working on? A mission critical 2-line bugfix can take months. There aren't objective measures of performance. Any metric you come up with, employees will find a way to thwart it. Shipping a product on time? Easy. Just don't mention the bugs. Surely you don't believe it's possible to create bug-free software, do you? When all the team members have their performance tied to them, they'll all collude to game metrics. Don't even get me started on SLOC. Speaking from experience here, sorry if it's too cynical / bitter.

<comment><USER25> Picking good metrics that are not game-able is not easy, but as long as they are truly aligned with the company goals, it's kind of OK for people to optimize for them. You get the behavior that you measure.

From the point of view of an employee, anything is better than "your compensation depends on the subjective assessment of your manager". Talk about a system that can be gamed!

<comment><USER26> Well, I disagree, but it's subjective so you're entitled to your opinion. That said, the decision about whether or not to use metrics in the first place is also a subjective assessment by your manager.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This was not only a good post, but the presentation was straight to the point: no fluff, all meat. I really appreciate that, and wish more went that route.

</comment><comment><USER28> Good list, but what this hits on is managing down, and not much on how to manage up, or manage across.

In my experience, I've found managing a team fairly easy--I just think about all the things my great managers did, and try to emulate them.

Managing up, and managing other teams however, has been a real learning experience.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is kind of sad to read, and certainly not a manager Id like to work with, is this even a company that is profitable? Didnt someone buy this for a stupid amount years ago?. Back on subject, an unmotivated employee is usually a symptom a problem with the company or culture, especially if he/she is an experienced hire that has many years of real world experience, why were they motivated/productive before and not now?. Perhaps the company is blind that they have a problem? Perhaps they tick many boxes on Stackoverflow check list and many employees are HN followers so it can't be a culture problem? Just food for thought..

</comment><comment><USER30> Number 6 was the hardest for me to learn - I always wanted to give people another chance to change, but they never did. It is always hard to fire someone, but once you have reached the decision to fire do it as soon as possible.

</comment><comment><USER31> > Give feedback frequently and directly. As a manager, it's easier to wait and > then hedge critical feedback in soft wrappers, but that's selfish. I'd try > to give feedback as soon as I could grab a conference room with the person, > and not wait until the formal 1:1 days later.

I really wish if everyone could think like this. What is the point in giving feedback after 6 or 12 months during appraisal. That is also done as part of formality.

</comment><comment><USER32> Great discussions. Having had some startup experience myself I would add that people have drastically different levels of understanding and common sense, so they will interpret what they see and read differently. There is no shortage of books/blogs on management or leadership or product management, but things don't really change and the same mistakes are being made every single day in startups.

</comment><comment><USER33> Didn't Imgur have a total of 13 people last year?

<comment><USER34> Yea we've grown like crazy over the past year. We're now up to around 55 people.

<comment><USER11> My experience is that interesting things happen to organisations at size 20-30 (basically when the CEO and/or COO can no longer keep tabs on nearly everything themselves, no longer can maintain some relationship with all staff), and also when there are more than 33% of people with <6 months at the company. Hope this wasn't as painful as some of my experiences with just single dosages of these at a time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Enjoying your work and working 9 to 5 on-the-dot aren't mutually exclusive.

</comment><comment><USER36> The first point is very important. Motivate someone is quite complicated, but demotivate is extremely easy. Unfortunately, we people are weird and complex, and sometimes random stupid things can make a huge deal in terms os motivation.

When I think back on the things that had really infuriated me about works and managers, they are typically small, avoidable things; not big ones...

PD: Reading some comments on the thread, I understand this as "do not demotivate people" more than "fire unmotivated people"

</comment><comment><USER37> I definitely agree with the importance of feedback. I think companies sometimes tend to be too polite. (Don't get me wrong -- you don't want rudeness, but directness is valuable). There's nothing more frustrating than spending a lot of time on a project and having no idea if you're creating value, or walking down a rabbit hole that is not useful.

</comment><comment><USER38> > People need to feel like they've been listened to, not to make the final > call. Take the time to listen (you might be wrong), make a decision and then > explain the decision. Don't offer commentary on others' decisions until you > understand why the decisions were made.

very true

</comment><comment><USER39> "It's terribly difficult to manage unmotivated people. Make your job easier and don't.

Different people need different kinds of management. Be adaptable to figure out what drives each person's best performance."

This juxtaposition is deliberate irony, right?

</comment><comment><USER40> >> _Define success clearly and don't flip-flop on the definition without new information._

Does anyone have an example for this?

</comment><comment><USER41> That was surprisingly on topic and good.

</comment><comment><USER42> Management inversely proportional to adversity & diversity

</comment><comment><USER43> I like a lot of these very much and agree. Thanks for posting.

</comment><comment><USER44> Right off the bat you tip your hand: you are selecting against people who are depressed. Rather than try to help them, you'd rather let them wallow in misery, fail, become unemployed, schizophrenic and eventually die homeless.

<comment><USER45> Not to be heartless, but why would it be a businesses concern if someone was depressed or not?

<comment><USER44> Let's do a reductio-style thought experiment: what if everyone was depressed? That's obviously a business concern.

The standard argument for socialism follows from the same reductio: what if everyone was happy? That would be GREAT for business.

<comment><USER46> The second one is not true. Utopia of happiness would result in vast stagnation.

Agitation, annoyance, something needing fixed, imperfection, desire for more / self-improvement, etc. is a critical root of invention and creativity.

Ideally not everyone is perfectly happy all at the same time. And it should be noted that is not the same as saying that everyone should never be happy. Rather, that it's incredibly valuable to have dissatisfied people in society - they're often the ones that break with the status quo and push humanity forward.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


FreshDirect's Website Suffers Outage - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-26/freshdirect-site-down-on-outage-related-to-domain-renewal.html

<comment><AUTHOR> "FreshDirect, the online grocer that serves New York City and surrounding areas, suffered a website outage after failing to renew its domain name, showing that even a dot-com company can lose track of its Web address."

Just sad..</comment>


No, You are not Dumb. Programmers do spend a lot of time Understanding Code… - <AUTHOR> http://blog.architexa.com/2010/05/no-you-are-not-dumb-programmers-do-spend-a-lot-of-time-understanding-code/

<comment><USER2> Part of the problem is how much "infrastructure" you need to learn too. What I like about Python is that a lot of the infrastructure is common and so all Python coders know it. In C and C++ every team seems to use a different set of tools, libraries and debug macros which makes it harder to dive into a project quickly.

On another note: is there any decent open source code study tool? I only know of Source Navigator but it always felt bloated to me and the UI was always quite tedious.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that the current code study tools are hard to use and we need something more intuitive. Many tools show too much information and are hard to learn. Is this what you meant when you said that the UI was tedious and bloated?

<comment><USER2> It seemed to take too many clicks and concentration to do the common things. I'd like to be able to browse through source without the navigator getting in the way, and it felt like I was fighting the UI all the time. The use of a strange GUI toolkit (Tk?) didn't help. I don't mind learning a few keystrokes if it means that I can do the basic things like navigating the call graph without taking my eyes off the code.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, developers on Open Source projects often don't spend as much time on Design or UI Polish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Making your code open source is also a great way to make sure your code is easy to understand.

<comment><USER2> Some open source code is shockingly bad and difficult to understand. Some is rather good and a joy to work in (eg: Samba). I'm not sure the open source -ness makes a difference. Perhaps it is just that the successful open source projects that you've heard about or seen have easy to understand code, and that is the reason for their success (sampling bias)?

<comment><USER4> That's a good point. Bad code can definitely appear anywhere. I like to think that open source motivates good practices, like abhirakshit said, but I have no statistics to back up that belief.

This would be a very interesting research topic though. If I had more time, I'd attempt it. Anyone else know of such research, or want to try it? ;-)</comment></comment></comment>


How schools around the country are turning dead PCs into speedy Chromebooks - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/17/11030406/neverware-google-chromebook-chromium-os-education-microsoft <comment><USER3> It's interesting that they did this with laptops.

The SF Bay Area has OTX West[1], which takes broken desktop computers and swaps parts to make a smaller number of working computers, which they then distribute to schools. Their new, modernized, mobile-friendly no-useful- information site doesn't tell you much, but last year's site has a useful FAQ.[2] As of 2015, they provided Windows 7 desktops with LibreOffice. They have a deal with Microsoft which allows them to do OEM installs of Windows on old Windows computers.

If you have old computers to unload, send them to OTX West in Oakland.

[1] [http://www.otxwest.org](http://www.otxwest.org) [2] [https://web.archive.org/web/20150226174001/http://www.otxwes...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150226174001/http://www.otxwest.org/faq.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> I actually mentor at one of the schools mentioned in the article (Academy for Software Engineering in Manhattan). Really cool to see it featured here since they incorporate CS into their curriculum throughout all four years of high- school. If you're in the NYC area I would encourage you to check out iMentor and get involved with the school... They're always looking for more mentors!

</comment><comment><USER5> I have an old netbook that came with Windows but runs Lubuntu now. Why the excitement about Chrome OS compared to other resource-light Linux distros? I can run Chromium on Lubuntu, so doesn't that give me access to all the Chrome OS software plus a bunch of other Linux software too?

I don't understand why Chrome OS is considered to be something revolutionary.

<comment><USER6> > I can run Chromium on Lubuntu, so doesn't that give me access to all the > Chrome OS software

No, Chrome on Linux does not include all features of Chrome OS. (At least, IIRC, based on Google Chrome release blog posts with Chrome-OS-only features identified.)

<comment><USER7> Aside from proprietary codecs and DRM, what exactly does ChromeOS implement that Chrome does not?

<comment><USER8> Ease of use from an administration perspective. Google provides great tools for admins to be able to manage fleets of chromebooks.

From your average user's perspective, it also generally looks nicer than lxde and other lightweight DEs (though that's entirely subjective).

For technical users, there's probably not a good reason not to just use a lightweight linux distro, but technical users aren't really their target audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wish they would have used ubuntu desktop instead of chrome os, but glad to hear people are doing this.

<comment><USER10> A friend of mine works in IT for district doing this. They have under a dozen IT staff serving five k-12 schools. In the past he worked in a much larger distinct with a Dell based laptop program.

One of the reasons they love the Chrome system rather than a more traditional install (be it Linux or Windows), is when some clueless student comes in saying: "it broken," the staff can wipe the device clean in a second. The student can log back into the Google services to bring their account back, and they minimize undue downtime to repair software problems created by the students.

Could you get something similar going under an alternative distribution, sure, but with this they're is no labor/cost overhead associated with maintaining the server systems and software.

<comment><USER11> > no labor/cost overhead associated with maintaining the server systems and > software.

There sure is! It's just serviced by Google instead of you, and funded by your students' data instead of money.

<comment><USER12> So sick of the knee-jerk 'paying by data' argument for EVERY.DAMN.THING.

Google does not do whatever analysis you're claiming on education accounts, btw. Sure, they may be leveraging education accounts to get other 'paid' contracts, but they. are. not. monetizing. student. data. While I am myself a little bit of a cynic, sometimes it pays to tone down on the cynicism and see things in a slightly more positive light.

<comment><USER13> Is there some agreement from Google not to analyse student computers or are you assuming Google wouldn't stoop so low? Is it a general position for all educational users?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is Google's page on it:

[https://www.google.com/edu/trust](https://www.google.com/edu/trust)

<comment><USER14> And it states:

>>No. Google doesn't assume ownership of any customer data in Google Apps for Education core services, and it says so in our contracts (under "Intellectual Property").<<

<comment><USER13> Claiming ownership of customer data would be way beyond any moral line it's kinda crazy that the company that used to say "don't be evil" needs to say it.

The policy keeps saying things like:

>"Google Apps for Education services don't collect or use student data for advertising purposes or to create ads profiles."

Just make me wonder, well if they're only promising not to use it for advertising purposes then what use are they making of it; why isn't it just "will not use student data for any purposes without express and explicit permission"?

<comment><USER15> There are a lot of uses that are benign or beneficial, such as indexing emails for easier searching, etc but having to have an explicit permission prompt for every one of those uses would severly hinder UX

<comment><USER11> It doesn't need to be a UX thing, just provide an itemized list of the ways in which the data will be used on a page like the one linked.

They choose not to do this, arguably because they know what sort of reactions that list would evoke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So are they basically just replacing windows with linux on a bunch of these laptops?

It seems like that is where the biggest success came from: a linux install with a lightweight DE.

<comment><USER17> Being right up front: this article smells like an advertising piece. But, taken at face value this desktop environment sounds like a good match because it's both user-friendly and easy for their IT staff to manage, which is not a trivial thing for Linux.

I've had good luck with lightweight Linux DEs too. I have a crappy Compaq CQ56-115DX that I got from the NVIDIA chip settlement a couple years ago. It's got 2GB of RAM and what amounts to a single-core Athlon 64 3200+. Win7 obviously ran like garbage, but a SSD and Lubuntu made it very usable for basic productivity stuff. It was never fast, but it went from painful to usable.

The problem is that Ye Olde Linux Desktop isn't something you could hand to a random student and have them manage by themselves. Having a centralized management system is a very relevant feature there.

<comment><USER18> why not? my mom was using it. only reason i had to put her back on windows is because of shitty silverlight drm, doesn't even work in a vm.

oh, and she's non technical and over 60. people commonly mistake the concept of familiarity with usability. just like android isn't more unusable than ios. it's completely different and it has 3 buttons.

<comment><USER19> _shitty silverlight drm, doesn 't even work in a vm._

I've had good success with pipelight[0], including DRM'd sites (Netflix, etc). The biggest issue being user-agent sniffing (so I just set it as IE9 and leave it).

[0] - [http://pipelight.net/cms/installation.html](http://pipelight.net/cms/installation.html)

<comment><USER16> I setup something like that for my laptop a while back. I ended up switching to chrome, not chromium, as netflix supports HTML5 video streaming through it instead of silverlight.

<comment><USER19> That's good for Netflix + html5, but doesn't help with every site (ex: fox/cw/etc). So it probably isn't a good solution for 'Grandma' since she probably wouldn't have the knowledge to understand why it breaks on non-html5 video sites. Whereas pipelight + user-agent works (currently) for a larger number of sites.

<comment><USER20> What's the resolution like with Pipelight vs Chrome HTML5? It was my previous understanding that the bitrates and resolutions were limited running on any PC platform. [http://www.technorms.com/42752/5-netflix-tips-hacks-you- shou...](http://www.technorms.com/42752/5-netflix-tips-hacks-you-should-know) has info on how to select bitrates via the "hidden" menu.

<comment><USER19> I get full HD bitrates through pipelight (looking at the hidden menu in pipelight shows it at the highest bitrate). I'm not at my house right now, but I think it's generally in the 3500kbps range (or some number in the 3k range in whatever that menu shows). I don't know what the bitrate for Chrome HTML5 is since I don't use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> They could do this for free by running Puppy Linux. I use it daily on my 10-year old laptop. It's Ubuntu-based and runs completely from RAM. My hard drive inside this laptop is dead but it takes about 18 seconds to boot from a USB2 flash drive.

<comment><USER22> I had the same thought on this, Puppy linux is great

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Inspiring story...

This is an excellent example of a startup finding a niche, with the added bonus of providing a much-needed benefit to society...

Win/Win...kudos to Neverware!

Think I'll pull a couple of old Dell laptops out of my closet and rig them up to give away to a couple of kids I know...

</comment><comment><USER23> This is all great in theory but real-world application is so painful and does not scale if it is anything more than a literal set it and forget it deployment. I currently work in K12 and have looked into CloudReady for the last 3-4 months. We abandoned it mainly because deployment was unbearable if imaging or running around with a dozen USB sticks. If you choose to go the managed device route you pay twice, once for the Neverware license which can be transferred to another laptop if the original dies and once for a Google console license which is non-transferable (for the type of license we typically purchase). We are currently working on rolling our own district specific Chromium deployment full with managed updates.

If you take away the money factor the sheer frustration of having to keep polishing turds and putting 6-8 year old hardware out there can be overwhelming whether it's as light as Chromium or still a bloated Windows image that takes 3 hours to deploy with all the hacky crap that has to happen to run outdated software. Keys come off, laptops get dropped, motherboards get fried from being on & closed in a laptop cart for 5 years and first-gen mSata SSD's fail. And then to do this with a staff of 6-10 people with varying skills for thousands and thousands of devices in some cases.

Better off biting the bullet and buying proper Chromebooks for ~$300 and be done with it. Windows is done in education as a standard. Lab environment, sure. Office 365 will fill the role for learning the "essential" Office suite. The kids are ready to move on. It's the adults making the curriculum and trying to teach it that can't get beyond what they already know.

</comment><comment><USER24> It seems weird to me that Google isn't distributing ChromeOS as an installable OS. Isn't their goal to get everyone using Chrome, not to sell ChromeOS hardware?

</comment><comment><USER25> From Linux you unpack the .bin file and dd it to a USB stick.

[https://neverware.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/213346247-Cr...](https://neverware.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/213346247-Create-an-Installer-USB-on-Linux)

Might have a play on the old Thinkpad X60. Wish them well with the pricing model!

<comment><USER25> Well, that was easy.

Installed the 'home user' version on an X61s from March 2008 so an 8 year old laptop. Listening to an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum mp3 from local storage using the built in mp3 player (all sound buttons recognised). The X61s has an Atheros wifi card and Intel graphics so not too exotic in terms of drivers. 1.5Gb RAM and a 64Gb SSD and quite responsive except on 'noisy' Web sites where scrolling down the page will stutter now and again. I might be evil and switch one of the cores off in the BIOS and pull a RAM stick out and see how it goes.

You boot off the USB, you select language/keyboard and connect to wifi. Then the Adobe Flash installer appears. After that you can log in with your Google account and use the system as a live usb or choose to install to hard drive.

The latter option again asks for the language/keyboard stuff and then asks about single or dual boot. I went for single boot so erase whole drive, then you click next and you get a summary screen.Click 'next' and it is away - <USER2> existing data gone and a happy bar in the form of three 'bubbles'. It powers down when the install is finished. Rebooting you get the language/keyboard thing again and then sign into the Google account.

Claiming just under 4 hours on the old 6 cell battery. Fan calm. Top shows cpus bumbling along at around 5% or so playing this track with fairly 'calm' Web sites loaded. Font rendition is nice as might be expected.

I might set up another Google account for specifically testing this thing out on normal workloads. Might also try it on a Samsung NC10 netbook which has trickier kernel driver requirements (Samsung extensions).

I think that the company would benefit from mentioning the ability to run a live session off the USB stick without installing more prominently. They might get more eyeballs that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I installed Chromium OS on my mom's old notebook. It's actually nice, works very smoothly, practically everything out of the box and there are no bloated settings, applications etc. to confuse her, she doesn't need more than Gmail, Google and Google Hangouts anyway.

</comment><comment><USER27> Interesting to see how Neverware has changed over the years. If I remember correctly their V2 product was about replacing old computers/laptops with virtual machines running in the cloud. They have a new solution but they're still solving the same problem.

</comment><comment><USER28> then/than

The Verge needs English classes.</comment>


Legal marijuana is taking a bite out of drug cartels' profits - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/03/legal-marijuana-is-finally-doing-what-the-drug-war-couldnt/ <comment><USER2> > The latest data from the U.S. Border Patrol shows that last year, marijuana > seizures along the southwest border tumbled to their lowest level in at > least a decade.

That does _not_ mean there are less drugs being imported, just that less are being seized. I worked with the Border Patrol years ago and it was astounding how they tracked success:

\- When arrests increased, they celebrated that enforcement was working.

\- When arrests decreased, they celebrated that deterrence was working.

Heads I win, tails you lose.

While I'm in favor of legalization, you should take these numbers and the process that created them with a grain of salt..

<comment><USER3> Speaking of the US Border, it is way more porous than many people think. Here is a photo of the 2 strands of barbed wire that make up the border fence near Locheil Arizona.

If you ride your dirt bike along the border there (I did), then you will find a few dirt roads that cross the border that look heavily used. I spent 8 hours down there and was not approached by any Border Patrol (Saw some from 100 feet away, but no contact)

There is so much stuff crossing the border, in so many places.

[https://email@example.com,-110.626566,3a,75y/da...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-110.626566,3a,75y/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1s92944321!2e1!3e10!6s%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fproxy%2FwfYrxITpg9k7jdJyFNVk5R-VJ9jooe9tCPegs22ar3VBqeMoOf5uKEVhzSJ4-bmFb5P96lXvrt0Q9u9dInybQl5gCOoZKg%3Dw203-h152!7i3264!8i2448)

<comment><USER4> I think most people (at least from the Southwest) know about this; otherwise Donald Trump's desire to "build a wall" would be incoherent.

<comment><USER5> Donald Trump's desire to "build a wall" is incoherent.

<comment><USER6> It may be unrealistic, but it seems _coherent_ enough to me. What's so crazy about border control?

<comment><USER7> Making Mexico pay for it for one and the other crazy ideas he wraps up in it. That, indeed, does make his plan incoherent.

<comment><USER8> If he means it's going to come out of their pockets directly, he's deluded.

On the other hand, given the trade deficit he could say, we're pulling out of Nafta, unless you kerb your unauthorized border crossings.

Alternatively he could fine the unauthorized border crossers they catch and partially fund it that way. Or he could institute temporary permits (seasonal whatever) and impose a fee for those. Also fine employers who hire undocumented workers and fund it partially that way.

It really depends on what he means by "Mexico" and "pay". But if he's flexible, and he appears to be, it could be possible.

<comment><USER9> In fact Trump has mentioned ideas such as a special tax on any money sent to Mexico, which is certainly plausible.

Trump doesn't help his case by simply headlining "and Mexico will pay for it" over and over, but he does mention practical suggestions (even if you remain opposed to the fundamental concept) from time to time on most of his policies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Another reason not mentioned in the article is quality. Domestically produced hydroponically grown marijuana is so much better than the Mexican weed. I live 60 miles from Mexico in Tucson Arizona, we see a lot of it around here. The quality difference is huge - compare your favorite craft brew with Bud Light that has been left in the sun too long.

I had a friend give me an ounce of Mexican weed last year. That is a fair bit of weed. I tried a sample one night, and then gave it back. It wasn't worth keeping around, even for free. I knew I would just never use it, it was typical Mexican ditch weed and my tastes had gone to better things.

So which beer did you want? Sam Adams, or this Miller with a cigarette in it? The Mexican weed is just disgusting now. Only people on a tight budget will use it, not people with a choice; maybe 10% of the users I know. Everyone else gets the good stuff. Light, fluffy with 20 strains to choose from, tested and graded, and you can pick out the individual bud that speaks to you; or compressed brick that smells a little like coffee or grease and has an unknown THC level, unknown origin, unknown anything.

The only positive attribute to the Mexican weed is price.

<comment><USER10> Since when is the sun worse than indoor lighting?

<comment><USER11> It's more about a controlled growing environment. Outdoors there's a 100% higher chance of pollination, which means seeds and spindly buds. Indoors it's much easier to separate male and female plants, and also much more likely to have consistent watering etc which leads to more lush growth

<comment><USER12> I personally find that [high quality] outdoor is akin to a beer after work. It helps you wind down after a stressful day. An hour or two later and there are no lingering effects, it's great for a touch of relaxation. I find that I can carry on being productive even while high.

Conversely, indoor tends to be more like sharing a bottle of wine with someone - you're going to get far a stronger kick out of it and it's going to last longer. It also tastes much nicer.

I'm not disputing what you're saying, growing outdoor is cheap (virtually free) and therefore attractive. Typically there is little pride involved and the quality suffers. However, _well-grown_ outdoor fills a niche just like well-grown indoor does. It merely has a bad reputation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _The cartels, of course, are adapting to the new reality. Seizure data appears to indicate that with marijuana profits tumbling, they 're switching over to heroin and meth._

This is a really interesting development. There's always been this "gateway drug" argument around pot: once people start with marijuana, they'll move onto the harder stuff. I can imagine that there might be a correlation, but I expect that the causality is the other way around: once you break the law a bit for pot, and discover that it's really not a big deal, you assume that the other illegal drugs are probably fine too.

As marijuana becomes more and more legal in the US, it'll be interesting to see which way the causal link goes.

<comment><USER14> Here's to hoping people realize and deal with the _real_ gateway drug: Prescription opiates

<comment><USER15> Here's to hoping people realize and deal with the _real_ gateway drug: Alcohol, that great destroyer of worlds, marriages, cultures, physical health and particularly the brain, time (hangovers, boredom), coping strategies (emotional pain), real pain (coping strategies), poor decision making (you know it), and so on. Start here, and come into it with a few entrenched problems, and sure enough you'll find yourself elsewhere should time and circumstance align.

To all the magical, healing drugs that are currenly illegal: may you one day be free. [http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_caus...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_cause_most_harm)

<comment><USER16> What would happen to those rankings of meth and heroin were sold at every grocery store?

Alcohol takes a lot of blame because it is the most accessible and cheapest drug.

<comment><USER17> Methamphetamine is sold at grocery stores (Safeway, Target, several others), at least according to a quick search:

[http://www.goodrx.com/desoxyn?drug- name=desoxyn](http://www.goodrx.com/desoxyn?drug-name=desoxyn)

<comment><USER18> This is misleading; it's sold at grocery store pharmacies, but only with a prescription. As a Schedule II drug the controls are much tighter than normal drugs, including strict regulations on who can prescribe such drugs and secondary verification for new prescriptions. In NY (and soon more states), they can only be prescribed electronically using approved security measures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is one of the main reasons I support legalization and/or decriminalization of all drugs. Demand is demand, and a black market economy is worse than a transparent & regulated economy.

I think it's still necessary to focus on reducing demand (through education and self-help, not punishment).

<comment><USER20> I'm of the opinion people should be able to do what they want. And certainly drugs being illegal causes more problems than it solves. That being said, here is a case to think about.

When I was in my early 20's (20 years ago) I got a job in Phoenix AZ working on a concrete crew. We were building poured in place buildings (something like big box store size). First we would pour the floor. Then the walls on top of the floor and pull them up into place with a crane. It was extremely demanding work and the company beat the crap out of everyone. Very often we would get to work at 3 AM so we could pour before the sun to prevent the mud drying so fast. Lunch time was around 10 minutes and there weren't breaks. If you didn't run at all times... going to get a shovel...run, go for a drink of water, run you got yelled at. If you still didn't run a second time you were fired just like that.

My first day there were 7 or 8 new people. At the end of the day they had fired all the new people except me and one other guy. This went on for a couple of weeks until they had the crew they wanted. I needed the job and it paid pretty well (at the time) so I ran and busted ass like you wouldn't believe. After a couple of months I got let go as well and was very OK with it. It was completely nuts and I'm sure illegal as hell but no one appeared to complain and I'm not sure the state at the time and place would have listened anyway.

The point being... almost everyone on the job site was doing meth. Except me and maybe a couple of other people. I've never been a fan of meth and find it completely disgusting even though I'm not "anti-drug" and I damn sure wasn't about to do it out there. It was expected. The pace was set by meth. When you finally burnt out, you were thrown away and left with mental/health problems. But the building was up and the company owner made money.

That is my fear about legal drugs. Expectations. End results. Even social expectations like booze is now in many places. I want to do what I want to do... not be expected to do anything.

It's a complex problem. I don't know the answer. Maybe part of the answer is to invent better/less harmful drugs that are less easy to abuse and legalize those.

<comment><USER21> Here's how I look at it: it's a trade-off like any other. There are people with unsustainable work practices in every job. It could be long hours, little sleep, performance enhancing drugs, etc. If it makes them deliver better work, they'll get rewarded for it in their career, but they're most certainly suffering consequences elsewhere. Family strain, health problems, emotional drain, loneliness.

The temptation is strong to ban other people from making different trade-offs than us, because it keeps them from besting us in competition and challenging our value systems. But what right do we have to dictate what other people should value and what trade-offs they're allowed to make with their own lives? My sweat, blood, and tears are mine and mine alone to give and withhold.

<comment><USER16> Because rational people know that people aren't always rational.

Are you also opposed to those medians and guardrails on highways that impinge on your freedom to drive off the road when you so choose?

<comment><USER21> I think that's a spurious analogy. The public has no duty to build roads such as to enable your preferred suicide technique. The public has no right to tell you how many hours you can work or not. A job is a free exchange between two parties.

<comment><USER22> > A job is a free exchange between two parties.

That's a statement born out of extreme privilege. For substantial proportions of people, there is very little freedom involved: You take what is on offer, or you lose your house or don't eat. One side has an extreme amount of extra leverage, and some of them takes according advantage.

People died fighting for the 8 hour working day because without regulation employers simply did not give a shit if they were working people into an early grave. We have May Day labour demonstrations in large part of the world in part as a result of what is now the AFL-CIO wanting to commemorate the Chicago Haymarket massacre, and restart what was already then, in 1880's, a multiple decades long fight for human working hours.

In other instances, people burned to death because of employers that thought it ok to lock the factory doors to prevent workers from taking unauthorised breaks.

Is that an indication of a free exchange?

For a free exchange, both sides need to have reasonably equal power.

<comment><USER21> You make a good point. My response to a someone with a similar perspective on a different fork of this thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11237231](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11237231)

I would love to hear your thoughts. I'm hopeful that both classical and progressive liberals can find common ground in a basic income. Combined, we are an unstoppable force for human freedom and prosperity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wow what a Black Swan event.

Take something illegal and taxing it heavily has a negative impact on the black market's profit and a positive impact on the economy. Truly disrupting the space.

<comment><USER10> I'm sure the black market profit doesn't even notice. However, many operations are still considered at least gray market as the feds take down plantations.

<comment><USER24> The black market is noticing; the article ends with this:

> "The cartels, of course, are adapting to the new reality. Seizure data > appears to indicate that with marijuana profits tumbling, they're switching > over to heroin and meth."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's pathetic that we've learned nothing at all from Prohibition.

</comment><comment><USER26> While the seizure rate has gone down, I believe this to be a two part or multiple part reason. Border agents have also gone way down along the border. It's a number that has also been rapidly decreasing over the past four years from the current administration. Ex: I am a past employee of Customs and Border.

<comment><USER27> I don't see that in the federal data. Can you cite something to back up the claims? Border & Customs is still employing most of those people to work _somewhere_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why was marijuana in the "illegal" list in the place ? Any scientific studies that it is more harmful then alcohol or smoking ? Here in India it is legal and part of the religious traditions since thousands of years. It's known as "bhang" in hindi.

Essentially legalizing is just getting thing right which was wrong earlier.

<comment><USER29> "Here in India it is legal "

That's a rather spectacular claim to make, and indeed, the very first sentence of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_India](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_India) says " All forms of cannabis are currently illegal in India, with some limited allowances made for some traditional preparations." So either you are wrong or the Wikipedia article is, along with all its references, history etc. I'm not a betting man but if I were, I know where I'd put my money...

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Its nice to have some data to confirm what many predicted. That said, the DEA is acutely aware that it is _much_ easier to move drugs around once they are already in the country and so their mission my require installing border crossing checkpoints on states that have legalized those drugs.

I saw a sign on the Kansas side of a highway leaving Colorado that said "If you bought pot, leave it behind." Clearly someone had seen an uptick in drugs coming in that way.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is anyone surprised by this?

It's the same thing that happened when alcohol prohibition was lifted.

</comment><comment><USER32> The actual headline would be better expressed as "legal marijuana undoing what the drug war caused"

</comment><comment><USER33> Pot is still illegal in Australia because, you know, it's bad.

<comment><USER34> But alcohol is, you know, grrrreeeat!

/s

<comment><USER35> The fact that we have one terrible substance that is legal isn't a justification to legalize another.

<comment><USER36> Pot isn't a terrible substance. Especially not when compared to alcohol.

<comment><USER10> That's always a question of proportion. _It 's all in the mix._ It's sure carcinogenic and surely beats the lung up in a lot of ways. It also does statistically, by my own observation, lead to a significant lack of all kinds of activities.

For example, it frequently leads to a lack of believe in - or even just consideration for - how terrible substance consumption is, over all if not for the sake of nutrition.

<comment><USER37> Also if you are prone to developing a psychotic disorder (prevalence of psychotic disorders is ~3%), pot consumption before the age of 20 increases the chances of it happening.

<comment><USER10> Which is probably just a consequence of other complications.

<comment><USER37> This is a fairly neutral review of the literature:

[http://cannabisandpsychosis.ca/more-information/what-do- we-k...](http://cannabisandpsychosis.ca/more-information/what-do-we-know/what- is-the-evidence-saying/)

<comment><USER10> there is not a single source given, just wiki links

<comment><USER37> There are plenty of sources and the original papers are easily found, but there isn't a proper bibliography with links which I agree is frustrating. For example the first one says the last name of the author and the year: Andreasson and 1987. So I googled "Andreasson 1987 cannabis" and found the article:

[http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...](http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2887%2992620-1/abstract)

Hope this helps.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


HackerBuddy - <AUTHOR> http://hackerbuddy.com/ <comment><USER2> (Copy & pasted from a feedback email to Dave because I thought others might like to elaborate and discuss):

Great job on starting HackerBuddy. I was impressed with how quickly it matched me up with someone!

Ideas as they came to me:

1\. Cool icons and good tooltips for areas of expertise!

2\. I like my profile but you should allow vanity URLs like hackerbuddy.com/artvankilmer

3\. Are you pulling pics from Gravatar? Nice bit of personalization.

4\. Twitter and HN icons would be a natural addition :)

5\. My Twitter and HN usernames are probably my HackerBuddy username. Could suggest that automatically instead of making me type it in.

6\. Browse Users isn't prominent enough!

7\. How I can give feedback isn't prominent enough!

8\. Browse Users can't just be a dump of profile names. I need to be able to slice & dice by expertise, general availability (don't suggest folks that have already been paired with a bunch of other users), etc.

9\. Some kind of reputation / recommendation / feedback system would really help. Why not pull in a user's HN karma or StackOverflow score to help seed things a bit? Even feedback on a user's profile of how helpful they were would help.

10\. "CSS" is painfully missing, esp. since you have "Design", "HTML", and "JavaScript". CSS != Design (e.g. I think Photoshop, Illustrator, wireframes)

11\. Logged out home page is a good start but you need more to hook folks. Try imagery of hackers helping hackers, appealing to folks obsessed with HN karma / SO scores / Twitter followers, and just nailing your value prop. "Free karma for helpful hackers" doesn't do it for me.

Keep up the good work!

<comment><USER3> A github link as well as twitter/hn would be good as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi guys - I'm Dave, the guy that built HackerBuddy. Thanks for all your feedback - it's really useful. I'm planning on improving the site over time, and I'll be going through the comments and adding in any skills that seem to be in demand, I realise some of the options are pretty limited right now.

At the moment it doesn't email people when a match has been made - my thinking behind that was the person who requests the help would most likely already email their new match to ask for help - if you guys think it would make more sense for the app to email to introduce, then I could look at including that too. Thanks again for all your comments! :D

<comment><USER5> I don't know that auto emailing is necessary. I tend to agree with you in the fact that the person who actually needs the help should initiate the email to the person. Something you may want to provide the option to provide contact information other then email (IM mostly). I would prefer to get an IM then an email most of the time.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, I like that idea - I'll add it to my list of things to do :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just signed up.

But, my main areas of expertise (statistics, e.g. data analysis or mining, modeling or forecasting, designing and analyzing experiments, ...) don't mesh well with your categories. Have you thought about allowing users to search profiles, or some means of adding categories (sugestion box?)?

<comment><USER7> This would be nice as my skill set didn't match your categories that well either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a very interesting idea that I haven't seen done before. From what I see you would have the potential of having several people helping you with your startup. If this is the way it seems something like a "project dashboard" to organizing help would be awesome. While it would be possible to keep track of all of this in your email it could get difficult with 5+ people helping you with different aspects of the startup.

All an all I love the idea, very simple design, easy to use. I will use it over the next few days and let you know again what I think.

</comment><comment><USER8> I love this site - as a recent coding n00b (see <http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001>) having mentors around is invaluable. Whether it's just offering advice or actually helping you write some jquery having someone to bounce ideas off is essential. I really hope this gains critical mass so that everyone uses it and it becomes a hub for finding casual mentors.

<comment><USER9> Tom - I saw you speak at the London HN meetup last week and your work was very inspirational. I've always been a business guy in the tech industry but never actually coded anything (i've reversed engineered some php in joomla, but nothing crazy). I'm in the process of putting together an app for my squash group so people can add their matches and view standings. I did the Python tutorials from Google as well and have spent some time learning django.

Also, StackOverflow has also been extremely helpful, especially given that I'm such a noob at this. For example, one of my questions was so basic about the ORM that after I found out the solution I felt like such an idiot. [1]

That being said...if you want a business and/or hacker buddy to bounce ideas off let me know. My contact info is in my user listing.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4907479/how-do-i-do- multi...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4907479/how-do-i-do-multiple- joins-and-aggregation-with-django-orm)

<comment><USER8> Awesome! Let's get in touch, I love playing squash too :)

<comment><USER9> Cool! e-mail sent!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Kudos for the color palette, I absolutely love it!

I noticed you need some help with the typography though, so let this be my first hackerbuddy contribution: <http://f.cl.ly/items/0A3o083L2v1O402t1z1x/hacker-buddy-2.png>

Sorry for png instead of CSS, I hacked it quickly in inspector, but should be easy to reproduce.

<comment><USER11> Full justification doesn't work well on the web, especially for short lines, because the spacing between the words is not consistent and the gaps are too large. Flush left, ragged right looks better. (Also, minus sign isn't a replacement for en dash).

<comment><USER10> As said, just a quick hack with no claims to perfection, but imho an improvement over the original.

Left-align vs justify might be worth retrying, justify won in my 5-second comparison. You're right about en dash; I left the copy entirely untouched because I didn't want to spend more than a few minutes on the whole thing.

While you're at it, the signup-button could use some love, too...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Fantastic idea. "Casual mentoring" like this brings a lot of the benefits of incubators to those not participating in them. I'll echo others in saying that we need more specificity in our expertise and a better browsing system. Perhaps allow people to specify their own "tags" and list their experience on different sites as line items, and then display all that in the browse screen.

</comment><comment><USER13> Great idea!

It would be great if you could expand the areas of expertise though. For example, I have significant expertise with cloud computing, EC2 deployment, scaling, MongoDB, but there's nowhere to mention this. I also have expertise deploying Rails in production, the different possible setups, etc. Just checking off "Rails" is a bit broad.

Thanks!

<comment><USER14> Yep, mcrittenden recommended a tag system (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2176517>) in the first thread. I'll just quote him:

 _I'd like the hardcoded areas of expertise removed in favor of an autocomplete freeform box, much like Stack Overflow's tags box. For example, I'd like to put that I'm a Drupal expert and I'd like to look for node.js help, but neither of those are options._

<comment><USER13> Oh boy. I totally missed that. Thanks.

I'm not sure a tagging system is the best option though. It's very flexible indeed but it's at the expense of the simplicity of checkboxes. Especially when many tags mean the same thing. eg: rails and rubyonrails.

Since "hacker" expertise is a limited scope, perhaps expanding from there is a better idea?

<comment><USER15> Maybe you could use the best of both approaches by presenting the most popular/important/broad tags (e.g. PHP, usability, CPC) as a _suggested_ list while allowing users to add their own, more specific or less popular tags (e.g. drupal, memcached, adsense, appengine).

<comment><USER16> Or (as long as it's performant), an auto-complete as you type so that both "java" and "javascript" show up in the auto-complete's suggestion list when you type "java" in. In the above example, a person would type in 'rails' and see the 'rubyonrails' auto-complete, and (hopefully) choose that instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hi! I just signed up, and I thought I'd go see who was about to help a potential me - and it signed me up as needing help without any sort of confirmation! Now I'm in an embarrassing situation where I need to explain to my poor buddy that I don't actually want his help, I was just poking around :( Perhaps you should add some sort of confirmation to the "need help" thing :)

ETA: some sort of "undo" button (i.e. no longer needing help) would be nice :)

<comment><USER18> Ditto. I clicked 'Help a fellow hacker' thinking it would lead to a page about that process, or with a list of people needing my skill set, but now it sounds like I might be contacted by someone who took the time to write me a personalized request that I'm not (yet) ready for.

I just signed up to get a feel for the site for now.

I also recommend skill set options in product management, project management and community relations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just signed up -- great idea!

Small problem: I clicked the "Get Startup Help" button, selected an area of expertise, and was then paired with someone. The random selection (instead of being able to browse available profiles) is not necessarily a problem, but now I can't cancel my request for help...

Also, it would be great if you sent out emails when you were paired with someone else -- a sort of automatic introduction. Do you send out an email to the person that was paired? Hopefully -- as I won't necessarily come back to the site to check if I have requests waiting for me.

Finally, perhaps the global list of users could be augmented by a bit of geographic info -- just to see if someone's close to you (might be nice to meet fellow hacker buddies)?

</comment><comment><USER20> I haven't read through all the comments yet... I like the idea, the site's design is pretty awesome, but I'd suggest making the "Help a Hacker" and "Get Startup Help" buttons more prominent and easy to find. It actually took me a bit of hunting to finally find them on my profile page.

Might work well to have them on the index page _if_ you're signed in. Otherwise you get the copy on what the site is and how it works.

Just an idea :) Well done though!

</comment><comment><USER21> The options for programming languages are absurdly limited. I want to help people with Clojure, Haskell and Lua. I don't care that they're not as popular as the options you did offer; hackers generally don't pick tech based on popularity to the degree that other people do.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is it really that fantastic? I think better place to find help are Q&A sites (like SO) or even Ask HN "feature". In such places your problem is seen by more than one "fellow hacker", so the chance to solve it is much greater...

<comment><USER23> At the very least, it will serve as a case study on the merit of mentoring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A detail: I miss titles below the icons representing various skills. I really hate to have to mouseover just to check what a cup of coffee means. I know it looks cooler without text, but usability suffers.

</comment><comment><USER24> I like the idea, though your categories are pretty thin - neither C# nor WP7 show up as checkboxes (nor does F#, Scala, or Clojure).

Maybe a "suggest a category" feature would help here?

<comment><USER25> Yeah needs C# or VB as options, ASP is there, but is it ASP.NET, or just classic ASP?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There are a lot of important items that are not "development" that are missing: product management, business development, sales, etc., that can all be helpful to the aspiring hacker.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am using a Gmail address that is registered with a "+" filter, i.e. `email@example.com`, and I think it breaks Gravatar. I'm getting a broken image.

<comment> a-priori Yes, that will break Gravatar since its algorithm uses the hash of the entire address to find your image.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I know its a little late on this thread, but how about adding some more manager related tasks to the thread: Hiring, Managing Employees, etc

I understand its not a completely "hacker" category, but there for a hacker that needs to complete a lot of those tasks for my startup -- I'd prefer to speak to a hacker than get advice from more business orientated people.

</comment><comment><USER28> One small suggestion: stop using text-align: center on everything. It's generally poor design practice and makes for unfocused layouts.

</comment><comment><USER18> The help page says email adresses are swapped. It would be nice to see some kind of blind, double confirmation process, where both sides get to briefly interact first before that is done.

Sometimes, you just want to get to know someone else first before you give out an email address.

</comment><comment><USER29> Good to know I'm not the only one making this website.

<http://www.makethatthing.com/>

(shameless self promotion, I know, but I wish Dave the best of luck with his site)

</comment><comment><USER30> Nice idea, have signed up to try it out.

Really would like a faceted search function to filter and search users with specific skills, the "browse users" list is fairly useless as-is.

Also needs a "close account" function.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the comments - I agree, the browse user list is pretty dreadful at the moment. I'll be looking at adding a search function as a better way of finding people in the next update. (And the close account function too)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Very nice job. The design is incredibly clean and functional.

</comment><comment><USER32> I did something similar with EveryMentor.com. There have been quite a few fruitful matches so far (one was 2 wedding planners! how that happened I've no clue).

</comment><comment><USER33> This is free right? Is it also free/open source?

<comment><USER4> It's free, yep - I'm planning on open sourcing it once I've improved the code a bit, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> People love numeric karma. If you can find a nice way to do without making human interaction "cheapened" please do.

</comment><comment><USER35> Great! Could you add Design with different subcategories like information architecture, visual design etc?

</comment><comment><USER36> Signed up and hopefully I can get some help with the parts or ruby I don't fully grasp yet.

</comment><comment><USER37> Signed up and volunteered. Love the idea and looking forward to seeing how it goes.

</comment><comment><USER38> How come Drupal gets no love in the 'how I can help' area?

</comment><comment> Deal-Tracker Great idea! Seems like the site has a decent user base.

</comment><comment><USER39> Could you add a favicon? Thank you for the great work!

</comment><comment><USER40> Signed up. Looks like a solid idea if it works :)

</comment><comment><USER41> Nice site. How about Lisp? Search?

</comment><comment><USER42> what is the hackerbuddy site built with - php, ruby ?

<comment><USER43> It's directly on the about page:

What is HackerBuddy? HackerBuddy is a weekend project built using Ruby on Rails. It was built as a way to learn Rails, there is a very large chance that this site will collapse under the weight of it's own awkward code. If it does - sorry - I plan to improve it as I get better at coding in Ruby, please bear with me.</comment></comment>


Will Mountain Lion be Free?  - <AUTHOR> http://johnnye.net/articles/will-os-x-become-free.html

<comment><USER2> It just means that you will have to keep your app up to date with their dev cycle. As for free, I really doubt it. Apple will milk you, one way or the other.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah for sure Apple make their margin, but I don't believe that they look for margin on every single item they ship. I'm convinced it's a more holistic approach to profit.

iOS updates being free is an example, OS X being sold for a 10th of the price of competing operating systems is another. They are willing to lose money on a single item if it makes more money in the longterm.</comment></comment>


How the NSA can break trillions of encrypted Web and VPN connections - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2015/10/how-the-nsa-can-break-trillions-of-encrypted-web-and-vpn-connections/ <comment><AUTHOR> Original: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10394993](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10394993)</comment>