Live-Blogging With Adobe CEO - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/29/live-blogging-the-journals-interview-with-adobe-ceo/

<comment><USER2> [Speaking about Mr. Jobs's assertion that Adobe is the No. 1 cause of Mac crashes, Mr. Narayan says if Adobe crashes Apple, that actually has something "to do with the Apple operating system."]

Wow. Any support I had for Mr. Narayan and Flash went right out the window with this one snarky remark. He might as well just blame the users for choosing a Mac in the first place...

<comment><USER3> Agree that Mr. Narayan comment was not a great one but he has a point. Userland applications should not crash the operating system. If Mr. Jobs meant: "No. 1 cause of Safari crashes" then I would agree with Mr. Jobs because Flash does crashes Safari a lot. This means that both Safari and Flash have pending bugs to be fixed (I wonder which one has more bugs per line of code?)

<comment><USER4> I'm just curious what sites people visit that flash is constantly crashing for them? I visit a fair amount of flash video content sites on a daily basis and I get a flash crash maybe once every two months? Firefox on Vista, latest versions.

<comment><USER5> Flash crashes for me at least once a day, on Youtube. I'm using a Mac here though, using chrome. I'm guessing the flash implementation for windows is significantly more stable than on mac/linux.

<comment><USER2> ClickToFlash is an amazing piece of software. The web is a much friendlier place!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Non-technical responses, lots of dodging and hand-waving, saying things are a smokescreen without rebutting direct points. Very, very bad move for Adobe. Why would they want to get into a pissing contest with Apple and let Jobs control the conversation?

<comment><USER4> I don't think you understand what 'control the conversation' means...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Mr. Murray likens the Apple-Adobe fight to that between reality TV stars Jon > and Kate Gosselin

... at that point I stopped and wondered why I am reading this crap.

</comment><comment><USER8> A terrible title. This will drift right past the front page. I was going to use "Adobe CEO disagrees with Steve Jobs".

<comment><USER9> Agreed. Can someone (admin / moderator) modify this to avoid double submission?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here is my question on the open spec part of flash: "Which non-Adobe flash client can be used to play videos on Hulu?". I think the answer is none because of threats made by Adobe.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ben Horowitz had a post yesterday about founding CEOs vs professional CEOs(<http://bhorowitz.com/2010/04/28/why-we-prefer-founding-ceos/>). This seems to be almost a perfect example of his point. The founding CEO makes a technical argument about why change is needed and the professional CEO defends his companies current position.

</comment><comment><USER12> It completely lags any credibility when a hired gun debate with an innovator and founder. Wish he would have waited till he actually had something to say.

</comment><comment><USER13> This maybe a little of topic but I was reading TUAW and and some one commented that today Apple stock gained and Adobe stock fell. I googled it to check myself and I find it really amusing.

</comment><comment><USER10> I really wonder about the personal relationship and history between Jobs and Adobe's current exec. I also wonder if anything that happened during the NeXT years affected his thinking (e.g. Display Postscript).

<comment><USER14> There's no relationship there at all.

The current Adobe execs are pretty much just business folks brought in to make money, once the founder/CEO/CTOs (Geschke and Warnock) left.</comment></comment>


SQRL (Secure Quick Reliable Login) - <AUTHOR> https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm <comment><USER2> ice idea, but if you need to mitigate some issue by making the code also a clickable link, why would anyone ever scan it? Since opening some scanning utility will take more effort than simply tapping or clicking the link?

<comment><USER3> I think the idea is to use the clickable browser option on a trusted machine, e.g., at home. If you're using some other system you can log in by scanning the QR code with your phone without having to use a keyboard, avoiding keyboard logging, cookie fishing, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was posted a few years ago, it got torn up then by the HN community.

<comment><USER5> A year ago, and jury was undecided

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14459537](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14459537)</comment></comment>


The management myth (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-management-myth/304883/?single_page=true <comment><USER3> For the last 4 years I have worked for the first time in my career as employee of a big corporation. The "managing class" of MBAs reminds me of the way a communist state like East Germany was run. Centralized decision making, information withholding, the desire to plan out everything for years, saying one thing while meaning the opposite, hanging up motivational posters "we are innovative" while squashing innovation, ignoring of inconvenient facts and so on. All that comes with the appearance of "management science" and its own insider language.

<comment><USER4> Well, yes. This is because both are examples of command economies and both evolve additional non-hierarchical mechanisms to achieve actual outcomes.

In any large enterprise there is always a Nomenklatura who actually "make things happen".

When explaining to people that trying, for the billionth time, to create The Perfect Reward Scheme won't work, I put it this way: GOSPLAN had decades, and access to unlimited men with guns and dogs, to make its plans work. And it failed.

<comment><USER5> > GOSPLAN had decades, and access to unlimited men with guns and dogs, to make > its plans work. And it failed.

I am no fan of oppressive regimes, centralised planning or Stalinism, but it always grinds my gears when people point to the collapse of the Soviet Union as the One, Absolute proof that centralised planning is always doomed to failure.

While I'm sure that the hierarchy and command structure of the government and economy had their parts to play in the collapse, their importance is often overplayed by gargantuan proportions.

At the time of the October Revolution, Russia was a largely agrarian society, which henceforth industrialised and developed remarkably quickly under Stalinist Five-Year-Plans, in the midst of the Great Depression. However, it was still poor and barely industrialised when it was decimated by WWII. Despite this, it recovered to become a major world power that challenged the US during its peak.

US GDP has consistently been 3-5 times USSR GDP during the the latter's entire period of existence. Despite this, the pressures of the Cold War forced USSR military spending to match US spending, reaching more than 25% of GDP.

Any country in a similar position would be doomed to crack under the economic strain, regardless of the structure of government or economy.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, it's funny how many people look at a country that went from agrarian society to first spacefaring society & 2nd most powerful nation in ~40 years and go "obviously their economic system was an abject failure".

The level of growth experienced by the SU was unsurpassed. In the 50s the US media was fretting over it being "too successful".

<comment><AUTHOR> > Yeah, it's funny how many people look at a country that went from agrarian > society to first spacefaring society & 2nd most powerful nation in ~40 years > and go "obviously their economic system was an abject failure".

The U.S. went from agrarian society to the first spacefaring society to make it to the Moon, and became the most powerful nation on earth, in ~40 years.

The issue is not that the Soviets didn't develop: it's that they didn't develop as quickly as they could have, had their central planning not retarded their growth rate. Not to mention their utterly murderous regime.

<comment><USER5> > The issue is not that the Soviets didn't develop: it's that they didn't > develop as quickly as they could have, had their central planning not > retarded their growth rate

Even if centralised planning is doomed to retard growth rates(a hypothesis I consider quite plausible), you cannot reasonably confirm that hypothesis, or the extent of the retardation, using the example of Soviet Russia. There were too many factors involved for you to lay so much of the blame on centralised planning.

There were multiple geopolitical and economic factors involved, including the fact that USSR was trying to match the military and diplomatic might of an economy triple its size, fought wasteful wars(Wars are a centralized decision in almost all modern countries) and suffered from variations in the rates of global commodities. These factors alone would most likely decimate a country no matter what its economic system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "In my experience, for what it's worth, consultants monitored the progress of former clients about as diligently as they checked up on ex-spouses (of which there were many). "

Former consultant here. That is 100% true - the metric of success is whether clients buy more work, not how successful your recommendations were (and there can be many reasons to buy consulting services beyond they produced successful strategies)

<comment><USER8> What are other reasons?

<comment><USER9> Access to skills, networks or resources you don't have. For any significant decision it can be valuable to get a different perspective. It can also be a way of protecting confidentiality.

Lets say that you are deciding whether to sell a business unit, or to ramp up investment to try and break through.

\- Skills benefit: creating the financial models is something many companies don't do all the time. Using an external consultant may also benefit as they may know current industry valuations.

\- Network benefit: They might know other people in the segment who would be interested in your business unit. (for product development this is a better benefit). Counter-argument, it's part of managements job to know about the industry so your own network should be enough.

\- Resource benefit: The whole team is busy so bringing in external resource to consider the problem lets internal resource keep focusing on existing business. The counter-argument is that if this is the _most_ important thing to do then existing resource should be focusing on it.

\- Different perspective: Someone coming from the outside who's not part of your group think. You can _sometimes_ get access to real expects - <USER2> argument is that they're often not real specialists, you have to test.

\- Protecting confidentiality: You may not want it known that you're considering selling the unit. Consultants can act as a natural firewall. Tends to be more useful if you're looking at an external purchase - since in my example they'd have to crawl through the numbers of the unit and that makes it obvious.

The benefit no-one talks about:

\- CYA: it's a tough decision and may turn out to be wrong. Helps to have "blah blah international consultancy says that X market will do Y and recommended as follows ...". Counter-argument: get some integrity. In fairness it can help to bolster an argument to have external 'calls to authority'.

<comment><USER10> Don't forget the bypassing of anti-trust laws. Coordinating prices with your competitors directly: illegal. Asking the same consultancy as all your competitors about what prices you should charge: perfectly legal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article confirms my own suspicions and experience: management is the art of selling bullshit, and being a deterrent rather than help (which it is supposed to be, and bills itself as).

The most disturbing (and correct in my observation) thought in the article is that there is now a new ruling class. And when I think about it, the management ruling class is like an octopus, like mafia, with connections and tendrils everywhere: it does not matter whether one is competent or benevolent, as long as one is well connected, the rest of the management mafiosos will always find "a slot" for one of their buddies and shove them somewhere to be a parasite in a company, parasite to the workers and society at large. And while they might be the ruling class at the moment, like a metastized cancer of society, now that we are aware of their presence, I say: nothing lasts forever. Bullshit cannot defeat logic, because problems are real, and bullshit cannot solve problems, only logic and knowledge can.

<comment><USER12> There must always be bullshit for logic to prevail over. There must always be...bureaucracy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> 10 years later, this article still holds up. It's not necessarily the MBA that's at fault, but it is a degree handed out by too many institutions to students with too little experience to benefit from it. The MBA has become a career changer degree, rather than a supplement to people with solid leadership credentials - and the reason is obvious, once you have a track record, you don't need the degree, so schools have found a way to collect the tuition somewhere else. And the curricula don't vary as greatly across schools as the marketing materials would lead you to believe.

I am biased. I did some time in a large consultancy. I also chose a JD over an MBA precisely because it was different than the subject matter and way of thinking that I was exposed to on a daily basis at my employer and clients. So to a large degree, I agree with Stewart's position. Every Fortune 500 is pushing for "different perspectives" and "out of the box thinking" \- and they pursue it through diversity. However, they hire the same consultants as the rest of their peers and advance individuals with the same degree from the same schools as everyone else. The hired diversity and diverse perspectives wash out somewhere in the middle management ranks. I'm now a director at a fortune 500 and I don't fit the profile at all. There are zero people in my peer group with backgrounds like mine, which is fine. But there are zero people in my peer group with backgrounds similar to mine (meaning non-traditional degrees and work experience) and that probably isn't fine. Naturally, the corporate initiatives are the same as what every other large corporation has done over the last decade - and it's funny because we tend to go last, and still don't learn from the mistakes of other companies. I suppose we don't even hire the good MBAs.

</comment><comment><USER14> It is interesting that the most successful founders of companies are almost always domain experts in their field, or, at least, have spent time in the trenches of their domain. Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Ellison, Page, and Brin all studied CS. Jobs had Woz, and is the exception that proves the rule (Jobs was maniacally product obsessed). Jack Welch was an Engineer. The list goes on and on.

Of all the topics that pop up on Hacker News the fact that MBAs are not useful to founding companies or creating new products seems to be a sentiment we share very little controversy over.

Yet why have MBA types come to dominate the ranks of the startup scene? I used to think that this trend wan't a big deal, but now I'm becoming convinced that MBA types cannot, generally speaking, found successful companies.

<comment><USER15> > Yet why have MBA types come to dominate the ranks of the startup scene?

Have they? I wasn't aware that MBAs were infiltrating the startup scene? Would be interested to hear about some examples.

Edit: I totally agree that MBAs shouldn't be let anywhere near a startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article looked familiar, and it turns out that I had read the author's book on the same subject published several years later. It goes into a lot more detail about the author's personal experiences in the management consulting business, plus much more history WRT MBA programs and where the whole concept of management as a standalone discipline came from.

It's not my field so I don't know how fair the criticisms were. Still, it was a really interesting window into an area that overlaps quite a bit with the tech industry.

Anyhoo, the book that emerged from this article is "The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy":

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002PQ7B72/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002PQ7B72/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

</comment><comment><USER17> Companies hire M.B.A.'s and consulting firms because management is so hard. Alas, I think the fundamental reason for this is that the human psyche was designed by evolution to operate in small foraging bands, not large, hierarchical organizations, and it is really hard to get anything so unnatural to work very well.

<comment><USER18> My belief is that, after working in a couple of dysfunctional companies, organization design with proper work and communication processes, and effective management, is the "secret" to company success. Almost no one seems to understand what management is and that it is a job in itself, just like being a designer or engineer is.

That being said, I've studied management and agree that as it's being taught it is indeed inane. Currently, I'm learning how to _not_ manage a company by working as a grunt and being managed. I think this experience will be very valuable in the future as I intent to start a company.

<comment><USER19> Can you walk us through your idea of the daily work of a manager, since you say it's "a job in itself"? I understand that if you give a person a title and tell them to sit around for 40 hours a week and collect a paycheck, they'll invent ways to stretch that out, but in real terms, what are the daily objectives that a manager must address? How many people can one manage before they need to commit their attention 100% to management? 10 subordinates? 5? 1? Is someone not a "real manager" as long as they have time to do code work on the side? Is a manager who does code automatically less qualified than one that would ensure his managerial duties exclude any time for other pursuits? Is someone only a legitimate "manager" if they went to school for it? Can it be self-taught?

I've had management positions before so I have my own answers to these questions, but I'm curious about yours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A point-of-view from the essay is the author dislikes employees who can't think critically.

The big issue I have with the piece is that poor critical thinking skills isn't an issue with _only_ MBAs. Every field and every degree has a spectrum of people with poor critical thinking skills to good critical thinking skills.

So yes, dumbly putting up a client-facing diagram of a 5 forces analysis might be pretty stupid, but knowing to think about the role government might play in the firm's ability to capture profits is good practice.

Similarly in hardware, blindly following a manufacturer's board layout is dumb too if you don't understand the specific needs of your application and how the schematic and board might change.

<comment><USER18> Inability to think critically or be creative often come as a result of management. Positions are too narrowly defined, so operators lack context for their work. Without information, you literally can't think at all.

<comment><USER21> >Inability to think critically or be creative often come as a result of management.

Unfortunately, in my experience management does not want you to think critically. They want you to do what you are told.

From the article: >... the science of handling pig iron is so great and amounts to so much that it is impossible for the man who is best suited to this type of work to understand the principles of this science, or even to work in accordance with these principles, without the aid of a man better educated than he is.

This is so accurate a description of management in my experience. Unfortunately, I have not always worked for the best companies, but I don't know if it's the same at the best places.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Check out this recent article from The Economist:

Nothing special: MBAs are no longer prized by employers

[http://www.economist.com/whichmba/nothing-special-mbas- are-n...](http://www.economist.com/whichmba/nothing-special-mbas-are-no- longer-prized-employers)

I think this is just the beginning of a much longer trend in management reform.

<comment><USER23> That article doesn't look at if or how a MBA brings value. It mainly points out that a MBA is not a differentiating factor in easily finding a high-paying job, unless it was acquired from a highly regarded MBA program anymore. The reason being that, since MBA programs are money makers for their teaching institutions, they expanded like any rabbit population would do without predation, and with rabbits also getting into the Matrix, since you can earn a MBA from the cozy cushion of your pillow in your bedroom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Good article. Presumably because I did something bad in a previous life I apparently have a PhD in information systems management (fortunately these days I make my living by bending computers to do my will instead). The whole field is infested with ideology. One reason I'm a failed academic is because of the whole prioritisation of convention over a logical evaluation of the actual problem space. Because I prioritised the latter over the former (and my subfield was especially ideological) I worked more slowly than those making convention-based shortcuts. On the other hand my thesis was accepted with spelling mistake corrections required only :P.

Also I was unaware of Taylor's fudging of his data. Nobody ever draws attention to that, and presumably when I was reading the originals I skimmed that part due to looking for specific information which never made it into later write-ups as I couldn't make it relevant enough to my narrative (thus I never re-read the originals).

<comment><USER25> _I apparently have a PhD in information systems management_

I honestly didn't know that was possible.

<comment><USER24> yep, baffles me as well. Also the fact that it got through with spelling mistake corrections only :o

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well, I did study BA 1.5 years (for free in DK) and I have mixed feelings. From one end, it's just what the author says as there is a lot of fluff floating around. From another end, though, we did a lot of field studies, which included inferencial statistics, that focused on teaching how to properly test theories. Look, the business world is full of complex issues that need research, humans are difficult. The problem with MBAs is that they don't take BA research very seriously - they pretend to teach academic papers just by reading the abstracts and the easy material. Core competency is actually a great line of research, unfortunately by the time it reaches those doing an MBA it has been stripped of all the useful parts and it has become a mere slogan.

</comment><comment><USER27> The basic thing about the MBA is that it boils down the inner workings of a widget factory to generic parts.

This is all well and good when your inputs are chips or bolts, but when they are humans things break down fast.

</comment><comment><USER28> I am a bit perplexed. I think there is a mechanism to prevent duplicate postings on HN?!

Wonder what happened to the filter? I posted this same article earlier: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11928990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11928990)

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm somewhat unclear why management consultants are hired.

1\. Is it to help management solve problems they can't themselves solve? 2. Is it to show and teach how to manage? 3. Is it to help improve the management process and organizational structure?

<comment><USER30> You missed the most important reason! To have an "objective outsider" look at a business issue in an "unbiased" way.

Please note my quotation marks.

When I was a consultant, the purpose of hiring us ranged from a temporary extra pair of hands to the above. Most projects were somewhere in between.

In terms of the "unbiased view", every single company knew what they should do. These were smart people. However, internal politics prevented them from getting the ok from leadership. So, you hire an outside consulting firm and when someone says "that's a bad idea" you hold up the McKinsey deck and say "these smart guys think it's the right decision".

Works nearly every time.

<comment><USER31> It works the other way around too: consultants make very convenient scapegoats, which allow managers and executives to push for change (via the consultants they hire) without risking their own neck.

<comment><USER21> This thread of thoughts is the reality I have seen first hand.

Management consultants are simply there for often political reasons. Sometimes as an extra pair of hands, but often not.

In addition to the reasons given, it was also sometimes as simple as inept ivory tower management having lost faith in group and deciding they needed to hire real pros to come in and fix things. Another one: Management never wants to point the finger at themselves. They hire some real pros to come in and lay down what went wrong. I hated that job--swimming in bullshit all day every day.

I have so many ridiculous stories I've experienced in my short time doing that kind of work that I don't think the average person would believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Really, what can i say other than a good piece of writing that essentially matches my own conclusions and experience (and of course, I'm biased because I have the philosophy degree like the author and, now having worked for government and a big private corp, though I've not had the "pleasure" for working for a consulting firm, I have had the "pleasure" of working with them when hired by senior executives). I feel I need to comment just so this article generates some discussion/anecdotes.

All I can really conclude is that it seems to me to be common practice to look to consultancy either when you:

-don't know what you're doing and from a merit point of view probably shouldn't be in the job you're in

-you just need temporary labor without the problems/responsibilities of permanent employees

-you need to hide/cover-up/massage something

-you have a friend at the consultancy and you just continually hire/swap jobs while managing other people's money/resources and funnel it to each other

-or...possibly combined with all of the above, you need to hide your work/non-work behind a veneer of social prestige and acceptability: if profits increase, you take credit, if it fails (and if you actually measure whether it fails you'll be in the minority), well, you can't be blamed, I mean you hired the best consultancy...i mean...they have letters next to their names and everything (well, more commonly everything except experience in the business they're consulting about).

But in this sense, the management class and consultancy are beginning to blend together: its just all about image, project confidence, never introspect or question or measure anything properly, don't hold them to account, and remember...and the end of the day its about networks, how much you get paid in fees and bonuses, and your next job. No one's going to investigate your claims of past success anyway since its all behind NDA's and corporate veils.

Unfortunately, I don't know what kind of legal position I will be in if I actually talk about some of the...err..."interesting" experiences I've had, and the people in these industries obviously have to protect their reputations (since that's about all they have) so I'll just take a quick quote from the article:

"As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don't know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much."

</comment><comment><USER33> The first myth of management is that it exists.

[http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy- technology.html](http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-technology.html)

<comment><USER23> That list is funny.

My preferred line is the first one: "Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence". It applies to so many behaviors in various fields.

Then there is one I am not sure I agree with, it really depends on what "level of management" means: "The degree of technical competence is inversely proportional to the level of management". In my experience, technically- challenged engineers, but who somehow end up with management/supervision roles, also s.ck at that too, big time, so much that you'd wish there was a universal law against it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Set a philosopher to catch a bullshitter. Nice.

</comment><comment><USER35> People interested in the topic of the great farce that is modern business management should read in Jeffrey Pfeffer's Leadership Bullshit that also criticizes the management industry as well as modern corporations' incentive structures for leaders that make the optimum choice for leaders to lie and deceive.

</comment><comment><USER36> From Ben Rich's biography, about Harvard Business School: 2/3 HBS == BS.

</comment><comment><USER37> Brilliant article. I only wish I'd read it 10 years ago...

</comment><comment><USER38> I agree up to a point, but I doubt any successful business was run by managers who communicated in the style of Heidegger.

</comment><comment><USER21> >… the science of handling pig iron is so great and amounts to so much that it is impossible for the man who is best suited to this type of work to understand the principles of this science, or even to work in accordance with these principles, without the aid of a man better educated than he is.

That is the most accurate description of MBAs and anyone involved in selling management consulting and advice.

It boils down to is "it's complicated, you need an expert." Don't ask why, you'll learn your lesson quick enough: "we're smarter than you, and we're really good at expressing it." In fact, that seems to be the primary skill required in this field: expressing that 'we're smarter than you.' I don't believe for a second the selection process at the most prestigious consulting firms is biased towards undergrad institution prestige for any other reason. Plenty of firms looking for great engineers/developers will hire a great candidate with a degree from a less-than-prestigious undergrad. I've never even heard of that in consulting and finance (I'm sure there's some exceptions, but I bet they're few and far between, and probably due to personal connections).

</comment><comment><USER39> You don't take an MBA to learn how to manage people.

An MBA teaches you about the fundamentals of business and organizations: Finance, economics, microeconomics, marketing, accounting, management accounting, and a lot of stuff in between.

MBA's are 'business wonks' \- they may or may not make good leaders or managers.

The tool of the software developer is code, the tool of the MBA is a spreadsheet or an analysis framework.

It's not remotely about people skills.

</comment><comment><USER40> Management is sort of like dating, in that there are so many complexities and hidden variables that you have to go by instinct and experience. I don't see how it can be taught well in school. Try to use empathy and don't make enemies, I guess. Be careful about what you say to both your manager and underlings.

</comment><comment><USER41> No love for the typical MBA consultant here, but one thing they seem to have over the philosophy crowd? Brevity. Good lord this post needs an editor.

<comment><USER25> His review of the literature is old too, with his primary sources being nearly a century old. If he had done a more comprehensive review, he would have found much of value.

For example, there is no doubt that management philosophies from Japan (like ZQC or the Toyota way) have had an influence on American production. Is that all imaginary? Because US auto quality seems to have improved significantly as a result.

<comment><USER42> Stewart _did_ read the modern literature. He found it lacking. Addressed in the article's 4th paragraph:

 _After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature. Partly, I wanted to "process" my own experience and find out what I had missed in skipping business school. Partly, I had a lot of time on my hands. As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I'd think, like, I'd rather be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist?_

Moreover: he's hammering home the point that management science isn't much evolved from its early pig-iron days.

Something which I, having studied economics in school, am finding applies rather well to economics as well. A discipline which is curiously ignorant of its own history.

<comment><USER25> _Stewart did read the modern literature._

He might have. He didn't quote any of it.

<comment><USER42> He does, in fact, quote and cite multiple sources. Michael Porter. Marvin Bower. James C. Worthy. Tom Burns and G. M. Stalker. Tom Peters. Gifford Pinchot. Karl Popper.

Perhaps not modern enough for you, though works through the 1990s are mentioned. None are "century old". Not at the time Stewart wrote, not now.

How about you assert what specific sources are missing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Horrible idea of course, but I wonder if there are companies who pick CEOs randomly from new MBA graduates and pay them an extremely high salary with no stock options or other incentives.

<comment><USER23> I think you may have the beginning of experimental setup to test the hypothesis that the value brought by a MBA is not different than zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> to say philosophy majors are better managers than mbas already shows that the person doesnt know what an mba is.

mbas can go any number of directions, and while one clearly does not need an mba to be a good manager, most (actually all) mbas I know that did go into management are much better at it than the philosophy majors I know.

Edit: I also wanted to say that the management classes I did take were super interesting. Management 101 is more like a psychology class than I would have expected. Also, I'm pretty sure the author got an MBA between 2008 and 2010

<comment><USER45> After taking management courses at a local community college, I was underwhelmed by the management courses at my state university's Top 15 Management College.

The community college had courses on interpersonal management techniques, and the purpose of a manager in a company. (Hint: It's to find and remove a worker's blockers, not to brow-beat lazy workers.) Though designed for front- line supervisors and other low-middle management, it was some of the best management education I've ever received. I was stunned not to find any similar courses at the higher level.

<comment><USER46> I am a consultant, usually not in management, and management is about actually participating and propping up, rationalizing, and preventing the firm from dying confronted with management dictats such as:

> Our firm wasn't about bureaucratic control and robotic efficiency in the > pursuit of profit. It was about love.

As opposed to bursting out in laughter.

I'll admit: I failed on this one.

<comment><USER46> What I found works best is that you assume that successful managers are just lucky. Treat them like an addicted gambler and you will be successful. More of what they think made them successful, never pointing out the odds and the fact that you'd expect people to succeed on occasion with pure randomness.

Treat them like they know best and never pin them down demanding a response from them, because they don't have an answer, just "work" to create an answer. Yes technical people who bubble up are an exception to this for the first few years of being manager but it doesn't last.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: RingMail, free VoIP calling and messaging network - <AUTHOR> http://ringmail.com/dl

<comment><USER2> Really cool! Which VoIP SDK library did you use in the app?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's based on Linphone for iOS.</comment></comment>


Greed and the Wright Brothers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/19/opinion/nocera-greed-and-the-wright-brothers.html <comment><USER2> I think the real answer is compulsory licensing of patents.

Congress thought the ownership of something as trivial as a song was so important they wrote laws to compel songwriters to license the performance of a song to any and all comers. Have you ever wondered how bands can "cover" other bands songs? They can because whoever wrote the song is forced by law to give them a license to perform it.

Patents need to work the same way. Under current law the liabilities for infringing a patent are completely unbounded. If a potential user of a patent knew beforehand what the cost of using a patent was, they could make some real business decisions.

<comment><USER3> The first step is to stop using the word "compulsory licensing". Compulsory licensing sounds like some kind of crazily authoritarian evil government regulation; if I didn't know what it actually is, and there were no triggers that convinced me the idea is worth taking an hour of my time to research, I would imagine I would instinctively oppose it. The language implicitly accepts that patents are a natural right, and that what it is proposing is an infringement on that right. In reality, of course, it's a limitation on a government-granted monopoly. Nobody is being "forced to give a license"; it's actually the derivative creator who is no longer forced to face unbounded cost when using something which was patented.

<comment><USER4> Maybe it could be called something like "licensing by right" or "right-to- use", so casting it as a defence of something positive, rather than the imposition of something negative.

<comment><USER2> "Right-to-use" sounds like something people could get behind.

Congress needs to pass "Right-to-use" patent reform to prevent Saudi oil companies from buying up patents that increase gas mileage and preventing US companies from developing them into products.

I don't think this has ever actually happened, but current patent law would allow it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's so sad, because the Wright Brothers really were innovative. Not just the control system of planes, but the system of discovering that: they realized that building and testing a whole aircraft was too time consuming (not to mention risky), so they made a wind tunnel, and ran years of tests on models.

The first successful man-powered aircraft ([http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossamer_Condor](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossamer_Condor)) also found ways to iterate more quickly.

But, as a creator, I can really empathise with Wilbur Wright's feeling, tragic and short-sighted though it is: _they_ thought of it; they put all their blood, sweat and tears into it, for years and years; they were the first to climb this mountain; therefore, it's _their 's_.

Though it seems more artistic ego than "greed" to me.

</comment><comment><USER6> See also [http://idlewords.com/2003/12/100_years_of_turbulence.htm](http://idlewords.com/2003/12/100_years_of_turbulence.htm), by HN-banned author and entrepreneur Maciej Cegłowski.

<comment><USER7> HN-banned? Why? How? By whom? When?

<comment><USER8> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108008)

The whole affair is really sad. Especially due to high quality of Maciej's blog.

<comment><USER9> Interesting. So that's the story of the origin of lobste.rs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > "That is, of course, the irony of the patent system. Without patent > protection, a competitor can simply replicate an invention and undercut the > inventor's price — which necessarily includes all the time and expense of > research and development — so the incentive to experiment and create is > severely inhibited. But if innovators such as Glenn Curtiss cannot build on > the progress of others without paying exorbitantly for the privilege, the > incentive to continue to experiment and create is similarly inhibited."

That's not really irony. The patent system exists (or _did_ exist) not to benefit the inventor, but to provide a mechanism by which he may share it with other people who want to build on it. The alternative was keeping trade secrets.

<comment><USER11> This is an oft-repeated lie. The point of patents, as stated in the US constitution, is to incentivize inventors by giving them a monopoly for a limited time. It says nothing about disclosure.

Promoting disclosure doesn't make sense anyway since once an invention is commercialized it can usually be reverse-engineered.

I don't understand where this idea comes from or why people always bring it up.

<comment><USER12> > Promoting disclosure doesn't make sense anyway since once an invention is > commercialized it can usually be reverse-engineered.

The idea is to encourage inventor to disclose details of his invention before it is successfully commercialized so others can take it into account in their own ideas and actions. To develop complementary or improved inventions. Basically not to invent exact same thing twice.

<comment><USER13> Have you ever looked at patents to inform your ideas? As slavik81 says that's legally dangerous, but it's also typically useless.

<comment><USER12> I didn't say ideas behind patent system worked by any stretch of the imagination.

<comment><USER13> Fair enough!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting write up about Writght brothers and Santos Dumont.

[http://www.cnet.com/news/were-the-wright-brothers-really- fir...](http://www.cnet.com/news/were-the-wright-brothers-really-first-not-in- brazil/)

Disclaimer: I am Brazilian and I learned that Santos Dumont was the first one when I was little in school.

I just find it interesting and wanted to share, No sides or flame wars.

He was Brazil's Leonardo Da Vinci I guess.

<comment><USER15> Likewise, Richard Pearse of New Zealand is sometimes considered the first. He was able to get airborne in early 1903, but not really able to maneuver.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse)

It's also worth reading about Sir George Cayley, Samuel Pierpont Langley, and Gustave Whitehead -- all aviation pioneers with some degree of success in the pre-Wright era.

One of the main accomplishments of the Wright Brothers was that they continued to improve on those flights over the next several years, putting flight in the public eye -- their flights in 1908 and 1909 catapulted flight from "something a few people have claimed, but there's still a lot of skepticism" to "something everyone realized was really possible".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you should ever visit Nova Scotia's North island do not miss the Alexander Graham Bell museum in Baddeck.

Bell employed Glenn Curtiss to work on an airplane which is up in the rafters of the museum. For whatever reason Bell lost interest in aviation leaving Glenn Curtiss to launch his own company. The guides spend quite a bit of time talking about what Curtiss accomplished while he was at Baddeck.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell_National_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell_National_Historic_Site)

<comment><USER17> The Curtiss Museum in the finger lakes area of central New York state is also very neat. Curtiss was born in Hammondsport on Keuka Lake and spent most of his life there.

[http://www.glennhcurtissmuseum.org/](http://www.glennhcurtissmuseum.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> On a bicycle the left hand pedal screws in one way and the right hand pedal screws in the other way. To anyone that has noticed it the reason is obvious - you don't want the pedals to fall out or work free over time, therefore it is common sense that the threads are different on each side.

However, there was a time before 1900 when you did not have a left-hand thread on one of the two pedals on a bicycle. You probably didn't have bearings in the pedal either and the pedals really could fall out on the one side.

It took the Wright Brothers to see this problem and come up with the solution of using the left-hand thread. Back then there were two patent offices in the U.S., one for bicycles and one for everything else. The Wright Brothers were awarded the patent even though the left hand thread was far from a new innovation, it was the application of that innovation that was what they could patent. This really was a must have feature for bicycles but history has this 'invention' as an interesting footnote to the Wright Brothers story, there are no generally known details as to how they were able to profit from it, which presumably they were able to do to some extent.

There is also another Wright Bros. patent that comes before that. This is for some self-oiling hub. Nowadays bicycle hubs are packed with grease and the last thing you want to do is to oil them. However, once upon a time, oil was what you used to lubricate bearings, and still was the case with 3-speed 'Sturmey Archer' hub gears up until the 1970's. The Wright Brothers innovation was to use some bits of felt as seals, this prevented the oil running out when the bicycle was parked on its side. At that time there were literally hundreds and hundreds of variations on the humble bicycle hub, plus what we know today as a ball bearing had actually only been invented thirty years before hand. No thread sizes were standard so this small bit of engineering was more like home computers before the IBM PC - nothing compatible and all very new.

Much like how the million and one different home computer variants that existed during the 1980's died a death as soon as the IBM PC (and clones) took over, a similar thing happened with bicycles back in the early 1900's. Parts became standardised, bicycles became mass produced and 'craft' manufacturers such as the Wright Bros. could not compete on price. It all happened very quickly, within a short space of time everything ended up being a variant of the Rover Safety Bicycle with Dunlop tyres.

By the time of the 'Patent Wars' the Wright Brothers were quite experienced at applying and getting patents. I suspect that there is a lot more to the Wright Brothers history that needs to be understood, far beyond the potted back-story I mention here. It is also difficult for us to appreciate their inventions, because they are laid out before us. For instance the left-hand thread, the physics going on there are beyond 'well it could work free if the bearings seized', there is this concept of precession that needed some deep knowledge to understand. Similarly with the patent for controlling the plane, the Wright Brothers understood flight at a deeper level and I think they thought there patents should reflect that knowledge and disregard 'workarounds' such as what Curtiss came up with.

<comment><USER19> TL;DR: the wright brothers had a history of patenting special additions to bicycles, so when the market for craft bicycles dried up due to standardization of parts, they "pivoted into creating the airplane". :)

fair summary?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It is fascinating how those who begin as "doers" and innovator can end up having their entire activity controlled by something as inactive and uninnovative as the legal system?

I wonder if it is the situation of having achieved a palpably fundamental innovation leaves someone open to thinking that the world owes them success.

<comment><USER21> The world is in no way short of people who think the world owes them a living. Didn't a recent survey show that over half of all programmers think they're going to be millionaires? Ah yes, invent a better mousetrap and blah blah blah.

In what way is the legal system not innovative? Sure, it relies on precedent, but look at the innovative ways precedent is used. The problem isn't lack of innovation so much as the purposes to which it is put.

<comment><USER22> _> Didn't a recent survey show that over half of all programmers think they're going to be millionaires?_

Seems pretty reasonable. Rule of thumb is to save 10% of your income. Median income of programmers is reported to be $90,000, which is roughly $67,000 after tax in my location. That annual addition compounded at 5% works out to $900K over the course of a typical career.

And that is just in cash savings. Another rule of thumb is spend 30% of your income on a home. If you use that to buy, that adds another, say, $400,000 to your net worth and we should be safely able to assume another $300,000 once the home is paid for if you redirect those payments into savings.

Add in an earning partner and the numbers get even larger. And while prices can fluctuate, those numbers have historically gone up, which means decades from now you will probably be making more than $90K, and your home will probably be worth more than $400K.

I'm more interested in why half of the programmers surveyed don't think they will be millionaires. You don't even have to make the median income I proposed earlier to get there. Quite a bit less will do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> No, the Wright brothers' patents did not hold up the US aviation industry:

[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2355673](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2355673)

Although the introduction reads something like a conspiracy theory, this paper does a decent job of providing historical industrial data and references as evidence that despite the various patents at play, the aviation industry in the years leading up to and during WW1 was actually doing well.

</comment><comment><USER24> James Watt also spent much of his time and energy fighting patent battles in a hope to prevent others from entering the market. Who knows what further innovations he could have pursued if he hadn't been derailed by that greed. It looks like this is a recurring problem.

<comment><USER25> It was largely Matthew Boulton who fought Watt's patent battles. Edward Bull worked for Watt and then attempted to rip off Watt's steam engine designs. Watt's key insight was a separate condenser, which made the steam engine much more efficient. Watt and Boulton's license fee was 1/3 of the coal saved from using the Newcomen Engine.

Watt was not commercially successful until he met Boulton, and it is interesting to note that Watt also faced a patent problem. James Pickard had a patent for a crank to convert reciprocating motion to rotational power. Pickard wanted to simply cross license their respective patents, however with Watt's being significantly more valuable, Watt simply designed an alternate solution, sun and planet gear.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watt](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> For more examples see: [http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h...](http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm)

And join a Pirate Party of your location!

</comment><comment><USER27> I just got an insight upon reading this. Patents stand to incentivize the research and development, the failures that precede innovations. On the other hand, they hinder research and development that builds on existing technology.

A good middle-ground would be patents being applicable only on rights to create _products_ based on a technology. Rights for any products based on a derivative patent belong solely to that patent, with nothing going towards the 'parent' patent.

This encourages the incremental innovation, as well as pushing the original inventor to continue to improve on their own patent.

For example, let's imagine someone patented a glass bottle as a container for ketchup. Any glass ketchup bottle makers pay that person. A person examines that glass bottle, observes that breakage of glass is a problem, and patents a plastic ketchup bottle. All plastic bottle makers buy their rights from this person. Glass bottle makers (if any) continue to pay the original patent owner for their rights. The glass bottle person, improves upon the plastic bottle, and gets a patent for a squeezable plastic ketchup bottle...You get the idea.

Discuss.

</comment><comment><USER28> Ailerons aren't really conceptually different from wing warping, it just uses a hinge rather than bending.

</comment><comment><USER29> _"That is, of course, the irony of the patent system. Without patent protection, a competitor can simply replicate an invention and undercut the inventor's price — which necessarily includes all the time and expense of research and development — so the incentive to experiment and create is severely inhibited. But if innovators such as Glenn Curtiss cannot build on the progress of others without paying exorbitantly for the privilege, the incentive to continue to experiment and create is similarly inhibited."_

I read this and wondered if the patent system could be reformed to have a standardised rate for all licensees, similar to what is attempted with FRAND patents, but enforced with teeth across all of them.

</comment><comment><USER5> Their pop-over "you've read 5 of your 10 free articles this month" made me want to read the article more thoroughly, to make sure I didn't waste the resource/gift, thus increasing my engagement. It's _valuable_.

Seems like an effective enhancement to freemium. The most sincere best advertising: the thing itself. And if it's not free, how will people know it's great? How will they develop a taste for it if they've never tasted it?

<comment><USER30> It's just a bullshit limit that gets in the way of my reading. More times than not I have _not_ read an article just because it's not worth the extra effort. I know the NYT doesn't care about losing my eyeball in that instance just as I don't care enough about the article to go the extra mile. It works for both of us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This was clearly a not-too veiled slam at Apple. Joe Nocera really needs to get over it. Yes, Steve Jobs lied to him about his health. Yes, he was made to look like and idiot for repeating those lies. Yes, that was a shitty thing for Steve to do (Steve Jobs acting like an asshole to someone - woah, shocker).

But seriously, at this point you can't read anything that Joe Nocera writes without wondering what axe he is going to grind against Apple this time. He even wrote a glowing review of the universally panned "Haunted Empire", he's become so blinded by his dislike of Apple. He really needs to find a new schtick or at least present some more sophisticated nuance.

Also note, Apple isn't suing Samsung over all Tablets/SmartPhones, or all general methods of building tablets/smartPhones, but very specific elements that Samsung just ripped off, rather than inventing their own approach.

Microsoft has certainly been able to develop their own Tablets and Phone OS elements without having to blindly copy the iPhone/iPad - so it's certainly possible.

<comment><USER32> It's sufficiently well-veiled that I don't see the link to Apple at all. I don't know the detailed history you're referring to but if you're determined to see things through this lens then _everything_ this author writes can be taken as a snipe at Apple (no matter how stretched). In other words, he'll never be able to redeem himself in your eyes. Is that reasonable?

<comment><USER31> "But if innovators such as Glenn Curtiss cannot build on the progress of others without paying exorbitantly for the privilege, the incentive to continue to experiment and create is similarly inhibited."

Thus, in the story of the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss, is a lesson for our age as well."

That's the link to Apple.

And certainly, partisans can either be blinded by their dislike, or they can introduce nuance. A good example would be comparing a couple Apple Partisans, Jim Dalrymple and John Gruber. Dalrymple is like a broken record - He brings almost zero insight into assessing companies like Blackberry, Android, etc... Just rants against them.

Gruber has had phases like this, but in the last couple years he's done some worthwhile reviews of the Windows Phone product line, and has had good things to say about the Lumina. He's even been more open minded about Microsoft's web services, and went so far as to appear in a promotional video for Windows/Microsoft Azure. Gruber is regaining my trust.

Perhaps the critiquing with insight is someone like Siracusa - There is a writer who can rant against Apple's every conceivable product, decision, and technology - yet he does so with an overriding rationality that you can appreciate.

I don't see that rationality any more in Joe Nocera's writing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If you invented it, you should be allowed to patent it. Especially, if it as ground breaking as flight would've been. I see no greed there. By that logic, the writer should head to North Korea and lead the life of a Comrade since the same could be said about capitalism too.

<comment><USER34> Yeah but the Wrights invented a method to solve the lateral instability problem. They shouldn't be able to patent all solutions to a problem, just the solution they invented, surely?

<comment><USER35> But how do they benefit from the fact that they realized lateral instability is a problem that needs solving to achieve stable flight ?

<comment><USER36> My non-informed opinion is that this is a basic science vs invention problem.

The Wright brothers were both inventors designing an invention (an airplane) and private-sector researchers investigating the basic science of flight. Their discovery of the problem of lateral instability and its consequences for flight was a matter of basic science; for it they deserved recognition from their peers and scientific acclaim. Their invention of a method for stabilizing flight deserved a patent.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Scanning TV listings to show if there is something good to watch on TV? - <AUTHOR> There are plenty of channels on TV and it's impossible to know if there is a good movie on some channel, or if it will be next hour.<p>You'd need such a thing? <comment><USER2> At a time when TV watching is shifting to on-demand, I don't see a big market now or in the future for this. Writing non-essential software for laggards probably isn't a good business model.

Here's what I'd like, perhaps it exists already... One website to track all the streaming media available to me. I could tell it that I subscribe to Hulu Plus, Netflix, and have Amazon Prime. It would show me a merged list of what all my services offer, and most importantly have a UI that lets me REMOVE stuff I don't want to see and queue stuff I do want to see.

The problem is every time I go to Amazon, I'm offered the same tired movie/show lineup. So, to find something new to watch, I have to find it in lists of all the crap I have no interest in, same with Hulu. An aggregate UI would allow me to keep track of everything in one place.

<comment><USER3> I like this idea, and I'd like to get notification when new movies become available if they fit what I like. I'd also like to mark movies I want to see which are not available yet (just came out to theaters), and have the system notify me when those movies arrive.

And finally I'd like to have groups of movies, so that I can have a group of my favorite movies, and a group of my kids' favorite movies, and not have everything mixed as amazon seems to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds interesting. I'll work about it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ten years ago, maybe a bit less, there were a number of sites promulgated upon aggregating TV listings. Five years ago or so, they -- or the ones I was still aware of -- started disappearing behind page obfuscation and/or altogether. You might ask yourself and look into why.

In short, if it's a personal project, then go ahead and have fun. If it's a business idea, you'd better do some domain and market research before committing any significant resources -- pre-existing ventures appear to have exhausted themselves. Although with my avoidance of unnecessary Javascript and low use of mobile, perhaps I've just missed out on what they've become.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes, it could be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER6> nope, completely waste of time, instead you should encourage people to watch less TV...

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean just movies and tv shows. No talk show or others tv programs. The same movies/tv shows that are on Netflix, but on tv broadcasting</comment></comment>


Appleseed renderer release 1.5.0-beta - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed/releases/tag/1.5.0-beta <comment><USER2> In addition to the source code they also provide a complete compiled binary distribution of the renderer and tools for anyone who just wants to make some computer graphics.</comment>


Wetherspoons just deleted its entire customer email database – on purpose - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/wetherspoons-email-database-gdpr <comment><USER2> I saw some discussion from UK ecommerce folks at the time about this. Lots of jokes about it being one easy way to remain compliant with data privacy laws.

But there was another thought - maybe there just wasn't any ROI. Wetherspoons is a pub, and maybe email isn't the most effective marketing channel for pubs. Or possibly they couldn't track the ROI accurately enough, since it's an online to offline conversion.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe because it was extremely low quality. You could put anything in the email field to get on the wifi - it can't be verified because you'd need to give the customer internet for them to access their email...

The associated 'password' is a joke too. It can be reset without any sort of sign-in or verification!

<comment><AUTHOR> The 'free' wifi networks I've been using recently give you a free 5 minute window to verify your email before shutting off again.

<comment><USER3> That's interesting, I've never encountered that before.

Wetherspoons did not use this system, however.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wetherspoons has about 4 apps to send you news anyway and most people who would sign up to the newsletter probably end up in a spoons frequently anyway.

At least you can order food to your table without having to move which is lazy but pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some good news.

Of course a monthly newsletter may not be an issue, but when you start receiving tens of them (from tens of sites/firms you maybe dealt with once in your lifetime), it does become one.</comment>


I solved the problem by dropping the table and restoring it from backup - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/a/4797328/604069 <comment><USER2> Did Rasmus Lerdorf post that?

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf)</comment>


Why You Won't See Hard AR Anytime Soon - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/uncategorized/why-you-wont-see-hard-ar-anytime-soon/ <comment><USER3> This seems to me a bit like saying we could never have a flat tablet computer because its impossible to have a perfectly flat crt that's thin enough what with the magnetic yoke, the electron beam, shadow mask etc.

"Breakthrough" is used much too often these days. Breakthroughs are breakthroughs because you don't see them coming. It will be laugh-out-loud unexpected when it comes, seem obvious in hindsight, and be one of the few things _ever invented_ that might deserve a patent monopoly to be granted for a small handful of years.

<comment><USER4> I agree, and I think the author would too - the key phrase in the headline being "Anytime Soon". I think he expects a breakthrough to happen - <USER2> remember that there's generally quite a bit of time between the initial breakthrough and its feasability for large-scale consumer applications. The first LCD display was created in 1972, and the first patent of the underlying technology was issued in 1936 to the Marconi Wireless Telegraph company. I don't remember seeing them in Wal-Marts until the late 90's at least.

<comment><USER3> As we approach "the singularity" or whatever you want to call it, the idea->prototype->product dimension contracts quickly.

<comment><USER5> Do you have any evidence for this statement?

<comment><USER6> The time stays the same since as ambition grows, the difficulty in prototyping and producing a product increases. Any gains made in rapid prototyping are offset by higher goals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My TLDR of this article is: Due to the additive blending, the "augmented reality" of the immediate future then is restricted more towards 2D HUD-like overlays and ghost-like 3D overlays.

True. Although, if you think about it, that's still pretty cool "sci-fi" tech, and opens up a lot of exciting futuristic possibilities. For example, you can still have a 2D HUD giving all the context-sensitive information you need, and you can still have ghost-like 3D images overlaying the real world to help you out.

In fact, I have no problem waiting for nonadditive AR glasses for everything except video-games, because in real-world use I want to be able to discern reality from augmented data.

</comment><comment><USER8> 11 ways to solve what you're trying to do.

1\. Direct optic nerve connection. 2\. Optogenetics (hack the ganglion for blue/yellow on/off control) 3\. Holographic displays for close focusable screens 4\. Eye drops that can be stimulated to block or darken light 5\. An AR that doesn't obsess over sight but uses soundscapes. 6\. Invert/distort the image so the brain relearns what light v dark means. 7\. High res lcd's that use hemispherical lenses over groups of pixels to produce defocused light. 8\. Simplify the problem by making AR windows not goggles. 9\. Embrace the imperfections, delays, tears, for artistic license. 10\. Constrain the environment so hard AR arcades precede portable devices. 11\. Sponsor an x prize

Ultimately feasibility and time-frame to market are questions of money, not a lack of ideas or technology. Given a billion dollars Abrash could have out a hard AR system in under 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone else feel that widespread use of "hard AR" isn't actually desirable?

I'm all for soft AR, and anything else that increases the convenience and bandwidth of human/computer interaction.

But hard AR - seamless with the real world - makes it possible for people to quite literally lie to themselves (or, more sinister, be lied to) about what's real around them. I have nothing against solipsism, but with that kind of technology, it seems like it'd make more sense to go full-on virtual reality, if you want that, rather than viewing the real world through rose-tinted glasses.

<comment><USER10> People already lie to themselves and are lied to. Millions of years of evolution have given us a brain with a remarkable ability to heal over any damage to its worldview. (See _Phantoms in the Brain._)

AR is not the gating factor here.

<comment><USER11> "People already lie to themselves"

The most compelling illustration I've seen of this is the McGurk Affect[1].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=G-lN8vWm3m0#t=78s)

<comment><USER12> That's not quite the same as a brain "healing over damage to its worldview" though. That's a side effect of the brain incorporating multiple input sources to overcome unreliable and noisy data. It's not the brain "lying to itself", but the brain recognizing (and I'm stretching the word "recognize" here because this is not a conscious effect at all) that auditory input is less reliable than visual input for differentiating certain consonants, and letting the visual interpretation dominate.

This is really a very different concept from self-deception, because it has evolved specifically because in practice it tends to provide a _more_ accurate view of the world.

On the other hand, self-deception measures, by definition, function to _decrease_ the accuracy of our worldview in order to help us in some other way. For example, realizing that the waterfall at the top of the mountain is not inhabited by a fertility spirit will make your worldview more accurate, but it may also get you executed by the rest of your village, and since lying convincingly is harder than professing a legitimately false belief, we have evolved to cultivate false beliefs when it is politically expedient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> On drawing black: Maybe biologists will discover a way to use carefully timed pulses of light to cause rods and cones to emit a diminished signal, or maybe all incoming light will be polarized, with an inverse polarized all-wavelength laser that cancels out the incoming light. Or maybe simcop2387's holographic mask idea (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4273811>) on a contact lens would work.

</comment><comment><USER14> Maybe we won't be using biological eyes any more. Maybe we'll be interfacing at the retina or neural level. If it's not any time soon, it may not be using any simple solution we can think of right now.

<comment><USER6> When speculating on this sort of thing, it's unnecessary to think in terms of biology and the whole _two eyes_ thing.

A cybernetic implant or augment could produce the effect of having another set of eyes that was seeing something else entirely.

Even cybernetic eyes that had a uniformly high-density perception area, instead of what's actually concentrated in a relatively small zone in biological eyes, might have the advantage of situating things "off to the side" but not requiring you to actually look at them to make sense of what's being conveyed.

<comment><USER15> Scott Westerfeld's novels The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds mention something like what you mention - several characters have implants that allow them to have multiple "levels" of sight and hearing to interface with technology.

<comment><USER6> Recommendation duly noted. I'm a big Vinge fan, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> On drawing black:

LCD glasses that "darkened" at specific points do have the problem that those spots would be blurry, yes.

But if the spots are big enough, then they will create solid block spots at their middle. And the display can then "fill in" the darkened blurry spot proportionally with the "same" pixels from the camera, altering the ones it wants.

It would look bizarre for people looking _at_ the person wearing the glasses, with strange black dots flitting across their glasses... And the syncing would have to be perfect (very difficult).

But it's an engineering issue, not a fundamentally physical one.

<comment><USER17> The time cost of signalling and unit computation is fundamentally physical. Drift and error in inertial and position sensing is fundamentally physical.

You can make very good goggles if the money and time per unit isn't an issue. Registration to the point that there are no detectable flaws is very hard. You have a hard timing constraint from the human visual system on the order of 5 to 50 milliseconds. In that time, you need to sense the visual environment, determine position and its derivative vectors, figure out how your simulation needs to be updated, render the new data, and display it to the user.

Not something you can necessarily solve by throwing money and engineering hours at it until it works. In fact, there may be a few Nobel prizes in physics between here and there, or possibly biological integration well beyond our current horizon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So, I have one issue with this: "hard AR" already has to solve all the mentioned problems of video passthrough if it wants to make virtual objects seem lifelike: dynamic range, field of view, lag, all of it. _If_ you somehow solve of them, which of course seems impossibly hard at present, then there's no point in worrying about see-through AR; just use video passthrough.

<comment><USER19> He mentions some of the even harder problems to solve that are specific to video pass through mainly, the problem of having to focus exclusively on a screen closed to your eyes all the time which gets tiring fast.

<comment><USER20> Virtual retinal displays will be able to fix that; they display an image directly on the retina, using lasers, and will eventually be able to have a range of focal depths in a single scene.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It shows how fast computer technology moves these days that he spends the whole article talking about how hard and far-off this tech is, then casually mentions that it might be available in as little as 5 years.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I see soft AR being somewhat common in 5 years, especially if Google glasses and its competitors take off. It'll be another 5-10 years after that until it is as ubiquitous as smart phones are today, IMO.

Hard AR might be an expensive toy at that point, though I'm not sure if the author is speaking about "it's possible and has been done" or "everybody is doing it."

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Couldn't you just use something like Circular polarization <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_polarization>. Each point on the glasses is a TFT and polarizes the light coming in to the opposite direction thus creating a good black surface.

His second argument about the processing time is good if the processing is done on the phone but with cellular networks becoming better organized you could easily have a computing cluster do most of the work. Using that and some basic statistical inferences (to fudge some of the processing) you can get pretty impressive response times.

</comment><comment><USER24> _"you can just put an LCD screen with the same resolution on the outside of the glasses, and use it to block real-world pixels however you like." That's a clever idea, but it doesn't work. [..] a pixel at that distance would show up as a translucent blob several degrees across_

The LCD solution was the first one that came to my mind too, and I'm surely missing something here but why wouldn't the regular translucent pixels suffer from the same problem as that above?

<comment><USER25> Probably, which is why I think a better idea is to watch the person's eyes and try to guess their focus. That combined with a higher resolution screen (maybe 3x?) would let you try to mask a diffraction mask to match where light should be coming from for that part of the person's eye.

At least I think this should work, combined with being able to control the translucency of the pixels would allow it to be fairly accurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Great piece. As an entrepreneur in the CV/AR industry, it's interesting to see how a larger company examines the problems faced by technology that is about to converge. As a smaller company, we have to come up with a product that will stick in a related industry that will hopefully position us well when the time comes for true AR (hard or soft).

"skate where the puck's going, not where it's been"

<comment><USER27> <http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/36/cdu.html>

"You'd have to be a real idiot to skate to where the puck used to be"

<comment><USER28> _<http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/36/cdu.html*>

That has to be one of the most useless articles I've ever read. So, yeah, if you take a metaphor for a generalization about anticipation, you can "debunk" it by ignoring that it's a metaphor and quibbling over minor issues of pedantry. But that article does nothing to share any actual useful information, so far as I can tell.

_"You'd have to be a real idiot to skate to where the puck used to be"*

ROFL... yeah, that quote is hilarious, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Notes to AR adaptation: I believe that AR will be introduced not through everyday life experience but via event context. (Similar to the 3D dorky glasses that we use in the cinema today). In those scenarios, the environment is much more controlled and even process lagging can be forgivable. For example: take any stadium close sport field, like Soccer Euro championship. How amazing would it be to go to a empty soccer stadium and just see using AR the game in your hometown. Not saying there are no tech challenges but it is definitely easier where the env is controlled and even been 3-5 minutes behind is still ok, for a new kind of experience.

</comment><comment><USER30> If I had to bet, I would say that AR glasses of the future will replace your vision entirely with a camera feed (called video-passthrough in the article). Today's glasses have a low field of view and lag, but these are only quantitative problems. They can be solved with gradual improvements. They're not physical limitations. The camera is right next to the display, so there are no fundamental speed-of-light issues. It's easy to imagine that, over the years, the lag will be reduced enough to be imperceptible.

The problem of drawing black with see-through glasses looks like a much harder problem in comparison.

</comment><comment><USER31> Aside from how obviously cool Hard AR would be (for us SF nerds particularly), and some interesting gaming/entertainment(/adult) applications, is there any real _need_ for Hard AR? It seems like it would be used primarily to turn reality into fantasy, which I suppose has its merits, but is that enough of an impetus for the countless man-years of experimentation and development to get us there?

<comment><USER32> I can see two game changing practical use cases directly:

Releasing computer people (and most others) from slavery to a desk when working -- including meetings. For personal interaction, you would need to stay inside ca 50-100 milli seconds distance.

Giving information to people when they need it while repairing/building/driving/etc a physical object.

<comment><USER31> I think definitely your second example, possibly your first, could be accomplished with "Soft" AR. Remote personal interaction would still be reliant on the latency of the network/medium, and without _touch_ , I'm not sure how much more use superimposing someone believably into my field of vision would be as opposed to having a display or a holographic avatar of some sort that doesn't require full Hard AR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone know the author of the article, I can't find their name anywhere?

<comment><USER34> I think it's Abrash.

<http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/uncategorized/>

<comment><USER33> Awesome, thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> >how do you draw black?

emit antiphotons, duh.

<comment><USER36> Lol, using antimatter to destroy incoming photons, to have the color black, would be a seriously comical but cool over engineering.

<comment><USER37> Must-control-physicist-inside.

<comment><USER36> No, please don't. Unless you're just going to object to me using the word matter to talk about a photon. It was a joke, I don't think it requires that kind of precision. I think it loosely appropriate to refer to all anti- particles collectively as anti-matter.

<comment><USER37> That was the reason (and the fact that an antiphoton IS its own photon, and, well, complicated stuff), don't worry. ;)

<comment><USER36> Are you an actual physicist?

<comment><USER37> Yes.

<comment><USER36> Question, have you had points where something you just learned deeply and suddenly changed your understanding/intuition of reality, I only ask so as not to presume, and what were they, or the biggest one or two?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Needs better definition of 'anytime soon': 3 years? 9 years? 20 years?

Also, arguing that something _isn't_ possible seems risky for a practitioner in the field. It invests identity in the negative proposition, potentially biasing perception against new possibilities. (When a 'Hard AR' breakthrough does occur, it will come from a researcher who thinks it's possible and imminent.)

<comment><USER39> At the end of the article:

> I'd be surprised if it was sooner than five years, and it could easily be > more than ten before it makes it into consumer products.

<comment><USER38> Thanks, I'd missed that. 'Hard AR' - with opaque and dark solid-seeming objects - within the next 10-20 years would feel very 'soon' to me! So from my perspective the author's concluding paragraph shifts 180' from the tone of his headline and list-of-unsolved-problems.

<comment><USER40> agreed, i thought he was being wildly optimistic with his estimates at the end there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Sensor person here. These a problems are all solvable with enough sensors and compute power. What good is it? I am sure that there are specialist applications that make sense, like for doctors and mechanics that want to see schematics overlaid. I haven't seen a single consumer level use-case that makes sense. Games? Sure. Anything else?

<comment><USER42> Here is a use case.

Suppose that you have face recognition + AR. Then you can have an application that keeps track of notes and tags them to people and objects.

So you make a shopping list, walk into a store that it knows, and there are arrows pointing to everything you have to remember to get. Or you are in a meeting, make a note to ask John a follow-up question, then when you meet John again you have a glowing reminder to ask him.

<comment><USER43> It is easier to just use Amazon and have a 3d hologram of the items (or just the fake theater 3d). Less intrusive too.

<comment><USER42> Amazon sells me milk? Amazon knows what I need to ask my co-worker?

Hey, I didn't say it was the most compelling use case. Just that it was a use case.

<comment><USER43> <http://fresh.amazon.com/> <https://www.skype.com/>

:P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> > I'm sure that one day we'll all be walking around with AR glasses on (or AR > contacts)

All light sources generate heat. Is it not a good idea to have a possibly intense heat source so close to your optic nerves?

<comment><USER45> Light sources generate heat primarily as a waste product from elements that radiate in the infra-red spectrum - there is no rule that visible light must carry enough energy to significantly warm the surface it hits. The more efficient the source, the less heat is generated, so it's just a matter of using an efficient light source for AR technology. In addition, the human body is very good at eliminating waste heat, so even something running at slightly above body temperature shouldn't pose a problem - we are able to dissipate the heat of the sun and metabolic heat very well already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> And yet soft AR, e.g. Aurasma, may revolutionize many areas:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frrZbq2LpwI>

That is, do we actually need hard AR right now?

</comment><comment><USER47> For transitional period, it might be even desireable that AR experience isn't lifelike. Easier adoption, avoiding PR disasters, tunning customer in etc.

</comment><comment><USER48> You don't need AR, contact lenses etc. You just need a way to remove the screen and keyboard, i.e. a better way to interact with a computer.

</comment><comment><USER49> Wouldn't a combination of multiplicative blending and additive blending give you the possibillity to create images with adjustable opacity?

</comment><comment><USER50> TFA mentions focusing issues with LCD glasses (for blocking light). Would LCD contact lenses have same issues?

</comment><comment><USER51> Am I the only one who finds AR not that desirable or even scary?

<comment><USER52> No. Soft AR, maybe useful. Hard AR, very scary.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Officehours - <AUTHOR> http://officehours.io/advisors <comment><USER2> This looks like a neat idea. I like it and look forward to trying it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks—let me know if you run into any problems with it. (I know there are plenty for us to address, but sometimes things sneak past us.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great service, great idea just signed up hoping to get some action :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome—thanks for joining!

We're still early in our development, so you might run into a few bugs. If you do, you can let me know directly (email@example.com), or by using the Intercom link in the bottom left corner.

We have a long list of issues to address, and things to improve. That said, we've already fixed a lot in the first couple of months of testing.

Another note: traffic is still pretty low on the site, as we're so new. I'm working on fixing this, by starting to promote the service a little. That said, in the interim, it's good to promote your sessions actively, as that's where you'll likely receive the most interest.

I wrote more about this, here: [http://blog.officehours.io/how-to-promote- your-officehours/](http://blog.officehours.io/how-to-promote-your- officehours/)

<comment><USER4> First and foremost: Good luck at your new (ad)venture! I wish you wholeheartedly success and prosperity!

Out of pure cat-level curiosity, is there a business model behind this idea?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We're sure excited about this one.

There are only two of us, and we're bootstrapped, so we don't need a whole lot of money. This is good, as it allows us some freedom to just build the service and concentrate on making it good.

That said, we think there are a few ways to make monkey from it.

The very first is to start selling job postings. These can be segmented by category. Plus, the same recruiters can use Officehours to do preliminary interviews, or talk about the opportunity, with prospective candidates.

After that, we'll start to build out a batch of other added features that will be sold as premium services.

But, for now, I think we just need to concentrate on making sure that sessions are as successful as possible.

<comment><USER4> Good, sounds like a solid plan! Good luck and stay strong! :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks—we have a long way to go!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>