What Amazon Does to Poor Cities - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/amazon-warehouses-poor-cities/552020/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> A common theme I see with these articles is how "grueling" the work is. People need some perspective on what grueling work is. I worked at a UPS hub during college, where I'd load, unload, and sort the contents of trailers. What they do seems pretty easy compared to what I did at UPS. Picking and packing orders is a lot less grueling than unloading trailers full of 60 pound paper boxes, or loading hundreds of packages an hour into outbound trailers (where if you backed up too much you could shut down the entire line), or sorting over a thousand packages an hour. None of us ever complained that the work was too hard or grueling -- at best we just wanted another person in our trailer to split the load with and BS with. I honestly miss that work; it's just too bad I can't make as much doing that as working in tech.

Compare that to an Amazon fulfillment center, where from what I've seen they walk a lot to pick packages (but even that's being automated away by Kiva robots), put the contents into boxes, and load the boxes into trailers. Amazon packages are relatively light compared to most business shipments of stuff that went through UPS (which are usually things packed in bulk). Maybe it's mind-numbing, but the horror stories about how physically grueling it is (save for maybe when they weren't properly air conditioning the facilities) seem overboard. Even then, there were days in the summer where I'd be unloading a trailer that was baking in the sun all day, and we didn't get AC in there -- we just sweated it out and drank a lot of water.

I don't really know what people expect when they work in a warehouse. It's not glamorous and it's not easy, and it doesn't require that much skill so it doesn't command that much pay. But it's better than no job at all.

<comment><USER3> The reason it doesn't command much pay is not because it doesn't require much skill. It's because either there are more people willing to do that job that doesn't require much skill, or there are fewer jobs available to those that don't have skills (in a given area).

<comment><USER4> >> there are more people willing to do that job that doesn't require much skill

There are more people _able_ to do that job that doesn't require much skill. Additionally, for any given job (especially high-skill jobs), it also much more likely for able and unwilling people to become willing than it is for willing and unable people to become able.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It frequently seems to be the case that when tech companies interact with unskilled labor, the unskilled labor gets a worse deal than they would before the tech economy. See Uber, Amazon, Blue Apron, and many others.

In me this inspires a high-level of cynicism. Now when I hear a startup wanting to "change the world" I'm always curious whose underpaid labor is going to subsidize that change. Underneath all the Silicon Valley virtue signalling about improving the state of mankind you see the same gears and levers of labor exploitation as old-school sweatshop manufacturers like Nike.

And make no mistake, the ultimate goal is to make the "knowledge workers" at these companies just as expendable.

<comment><USER6> Does Amazon offer a significantly worse deal to its warehouse staff than Walmart? My impression is that it doesn't, so I don't think this is a problem with tech companies specifically.

<comment><USER5> Probably not [1]. But shouldn't we reach for something better?

Really, I'm just upset about my own disillusionment. As a little kid I thought Silicon Valley was going to usher in a new era of technology and plenty. Something like Star Trek's utopian ideal of a society where scarcity is a thing of the past.

What I see instead is the same old corporate bullshit of maximum exploitation for maximum profit.

[1] [http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/walmart-warehouse- workers...](http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/walmart-warehouse-workers- fired_n_3787659)

<comment><USER7> It did. Sort of.

Even someone poor has a magic device in his pocket that can show almost any video ever, can talk to anyone, and give directions.

People today have never been better off. A poor person today lives better than a king of old.

Except that people always compare to each other. And that's never going to change.

<comment><USER8> >A poor person today lives better than a king of old.

That is an illusion to help people with their conscience. It does sound nice, but ...

The poor maybe eat better and maybe have better shelter, and certainly access to cleaner water, but they have significantly less control over their destiny. Also, kings didn't have to work and they were (usually) extremely wealthy, had servants, and could do whatever they wanted to. Kings had people to help them raise their children. Kings also didn't die from an easily treatable but ultimately unaffordable medical condition. Kings usually didn't get evicted for not paying rent on time. Kings didn't get arrested for trivial things and have to spend time in jail because they couldn't afford a lawyer. I could go on and on.

<comment><USER9> > Kings also didn't die from an easily treatable but ultimately unaffordable > medical condition.

Worse, they died from medical conditions which could be survived with no treatment, because treatments with negative utility based on lore with no scientific basis were applied which the common folk would not have access to.

<comment><USER8> I think George Washington was actually bled to death as a medical treatment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> These Amazon jobs are most useful to think about by comparison.

Four decades ago, analogous jobs (manual labor, no college degree) were in the car industry: at Ford and GM. Those jobs were good middle-class jobs with good salaries. On those jobs, one could raise a family with a 40 hour work week, and do very well working 50-60 hours a week.

Today, the similar jobs are in Amazon warehouses. What is different? A big one is that we have removed worker protections from our economy. By going to an unregulated free market, now Jeff Bezos is a multi-billionaire and his workers are living in near-poverty.

<comment><USER3> I think the biggest ones are cheaper transportation to and from areas of the world with lower production costs and drastic increases in automation, both which lower the demand for human labor in the USA (and other developed countries).

You can regulate all you want, but it would be better to focus on getting as much of the population ahead of the curve as possible as opposed to leaving them behind. At the end of the day, we just don't need secretaries, travel agents, much of the automobile assembly workers, etc.

<comment><USER11> It's interesting to see this reduction in labor demand is coupled with new lows in the unemployment rate.

There's a shortage of labor but employers don't seem to be willing to pay more to incentivize more people to enter the workforce (which is partially reflected in the so called "shadow" unemployment rate, which is higher). An increase in the minimum wage will cause one of two things to happen, both net good IMO: either employers to invest more in capital / automation or cause them to give all current and new employees a raise.

<comment><USER12> > employers to invest more in capital / automation or cause them to give all > current and new employees a raise

Or more cynically: fire employees and do more with the remaining employees.

<comment><USER11> They'll need to make capital investments in order to do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dj-wonk Yes, intensively competitive companies like Amazon sometimes press workers hard. Without endorsing nor assigning blame to the company (which faces pressures from globalization and shareholders), there are many potential approaches to the problems:

1\. Amazon could build a brand around treating workers better (UPS has at times had this reputation) and thus differentiate themselves and justify the cost of better pay and benefits.

2\. Government regulations could require a certain standard of job creation or insurance coverage. These could be coupled with incentive programs.

3\. Workers can organize. (i.e. into unions)

4\. Consumers can vote with their dollars.

5\. Investors can vote with their dollars.

There are many more variations on these themes.

If these kinds of solutions don't work, workers tend to get squeezed. Due to the complexities of our economic and political systems, in practice, certain companies end up treating human resources (people) as expendable assets to exploit. Sometimes they do so for a long time. That is why other power centers (government, labor organization, consumer activism, investor activism) are necessary to achieve broader goals.

<comment><USER13> Amazon is already working to fully automate these warehouses. Actions that increase the cost of labor will simply accelerate this process.

<comment><USER14> Actions that increase the cost of labor will take _big_ chunks out of their profit margins.

Amazon will respond to this threat by telling agitated investors to _calm down_ because they have a plan to automate every human out of existence by the year 2025.

Unsophisticated investors are appeased by the tasty kool aid.

Sometimes the general public will drink it too and react with downvotes thrown at the people hinting that the emperor might not be wearing any clothes.

<comment><USER13> Anyone betting against warehouse automation should review their investment strategy. The process is well underway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I feel like journalists are just trying every way possible to create an anti- tech sentiment. Crazy how fast things can change from all hail the tech titans to oh these tech companies are creating a dystopia. Theres way too much noise in every aspect of information these days to help society focus on the problems that actually matter.

<comment><USER16> I think the tech companies themselves are doing a fine job of creating anti- tech sentiment on their own.

<comment><USER17> Public sentiment has turned at this point. Tech companies are no longer the intrepid, utopic little guy fighting the good fight -- they are the incumbents.

I would bet serious money that one of the hallmarks of the next presidential election is regulation of big tech. The backlash is building. That wave will have some mainstream politicians calling to break up big tech.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Most folks I know seem blissfully unaware or uninterested in these realities behind their next day delivery. Even supremely liberal folks in boston and new york seem to think that complaining that their prime delivery being a day late or poorly packed is reasonable to gripe about, totally ignoring the human cost behind such offerings.

<comment><USER19> Customer is paying for a service that was promised to him and it's reasonable to complain that the service was not provided.

<comment><USER20> This. This is what customer service is about -- taking care of the customer when things go badly. In the span of five weeks, Amazon had A) "lost" two packages (in reality, they were shipped to the wrong distribution center and weren't rerouted), B) were two days later on one, C) four days late on another, and D) EIGHT days late on the fifth.

For every single one, I contacted customer support and complained. As performance got worse, I actually got on the phone.

* The first time I was comped a month of prime. $8.

* The second time I was comped $20 in Amazon credit, and they reshipped the package ($55 in goods). I was told if the other one showed up, to keep both. The other one showed up the next week.

* Third time I was comped a month of prime ($8) and package was reshipped. This was $160 in electronics. I was told if the other showed up, to keep both. The second one showed up 2 weeks later.

* The fourth time I called I asked why I was paying for prime. After 10 minutes, the rep agreed. They refunded my entire year of prime ($100).

* Fifth time they didn't care. They admitted their performance was awful, and were confused how their logistics operation was doing so poorly, but if I didn't like the service I should go elsewhere.

To their credit, I was compensated $351 for five failures in five weeks, all of which were not in peak season (this was 60 days in advance of Holiday shopping season).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It would be convenient to think that the Amazon ops executives have this all figured out and that the numbers support their labor strategy, but after having been one of the people whose job it was to put data in front of those executives, I wouldn't trust their judgment with data at all. Their ideologies and their incompetence trap them to inferior analysis.

They think their pay is good because it is higher than other warehouse jobs. They don't actually compare the workload at other warehouse jobs, but needless to say nobody is worked anywhere near as hard in those other jobs. Their hiring and retention costs are insanely high, but they don't recognize their role. They view their retention as belonging in two categories: those who are fired and those who quit. Both are much higher than competing warehouses. They fire more because they have zero tolerance policies for too many things and three strikes for everything else...with no forgiveness for anything ever. Voluntary quits are high because they don't pay enough for the job that they are hiring for, but they see voluntary quits as being a problem with management. So they churn the management like crazy too. And since they churn management like crazy, they institute policies that basically take all judgment out of the hands of managers and only use them to enforce policies. Besides, retention, training, and hiring costs don't fall into the ops budget, it falls into HR, so it's not their problem anyway.

At least from one anecdotal exchange with a local ops manager, they would likely need to be paying _double_ their going rates if they wanted to bring their retention and hiring rates in line with the rest of the industry. But it's not gonna happen. They're gonna keep playing this musical chairs blame game until it breaks them.

<comment><USER22> Article stated that Amazon warehouse pay was higher than non-warehouse jobs, but lower than comparable warehouse jobs with other companies (at least in the Inland Empire of California). But all the other warehouses already have enough employees to meet their needs, and Amazon is the only one actually hiring.

I'm sure all those other warehouses love how Amazon is training up so many employees that can be poached at will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the issue may be with poor cities. If a city is poor it should have cheap housing, low utility cost, low taxes. I can't speak to San Bernardino, but one of the issues in Detroit is that they are taxing people like the city is rich

</comment><comment><USER24> About another company's warehouse:

> Wages start at $26 an hour, but many workers make a lot more than that > because Stater Brothers operates an incentive program in which people who > grab orders—doing similar tasks to workers at Amazon—are rewarded if they go > faster than the average speed.

I wonder if it would be possible for a group of workers to pay another group of workers to slow down, thus lowering the average speed so that the first group ends up in the rewards group without having to raise their speed?

</comment><comment><USER25> I couldn't help but to think about basic income while reading this article. It seems like the vast majority of people in these Amazon warehouse stories hate working there but really have no other options at the moment. Basic income would allow these individuals to perhaps work at lower paying companies that prioritize worker morale over profitability.

</comment><comment><USER26> Sure, Amazon fulfillment center jobs might not be high-paying, middle class jobs, but what's the alternative for these areas? High unemployment and stagnation?

<comment><USER27> There is a middle ground between "barely subsistence wages" and "high-paying, middle class wages" that Amazon could meet, and still be profitable.

<comment><USER6> Is there? Amazon's retail business runs on a razor-thin profit margin, and in fact Amazon was famous for _not_ being profitable until a few years ago.

<comment><USER28> ... and most of their profit comes from AWS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wish the article talked more about what Amazon and other companies can do to better invest in their communities and employees: how they can train employees for advancement, how they can proactively recognize and nurture talent instead of churning and burning through workers, how they support the community to attract better jobs and help more people, etc. it presents unionization as the only solution. I worry that unionization might increase the cost of labor and just push jobs elsewhere.

Perhaps I'm naive, but how hard would it be for Amazon to really commit to investing in its workforce and community rather than just strategizing to avoid unionisation? The article states they invest in schools in whatnot, but are they just doing this for political points or actually dedicated to investing in the workforce / community and helping its workers grow?

</comment><comment><USER30> > "It's a step back from where we were," said Pat Morris, the former mayor, > about the jobs that Amazon offers. "But it's a lot better than where we > would otherwise be," he said.

That makes complete sense. /s It sounds like where you were was a city without jobs.

> San Bernardino is just one of the many communities across the country > grappling with the same question: Is any new job a good job?

Yes, if you don't have a job then any job is a good job. Sentiments like this article is why people are "too good to work for McDonalds."

> The share of people living in poverty in San Bernardino was at 28.1 percent > in 2016, the most recent year for which census data is available, compared > to 23.4 in 2011, the year before Amazon arrived.

Something that can't be attributed to rising inflation? These are meaningless stats.

I didn't read the rest.

<comment><USER31> > Something that can't be attributed to rising inflation?

Sure, but probably a very particular type of inflation: housing cost. Wages for unskilled labor haven't increased at a rate to account for rising housing costs, exacerbated further by insufficient housing supply, and demand for housing has gone up due the increased number of jobs.

Median household income in San Bernardino is 39k/yr (pretax) [1]. Median rent is 16k/yr [2]. So the median household spends nearly 42% of their pretax income on housing. The other necessary expenses of life (especially if you are far below median income and have dependents) will quickly eat through the rest.

There is a dynamic at play in which several factors, including the increase in lower paid jobs and population, is increasing poverty rates.

[1] [http://www.bestplaces.net/economy/city/california/san_bernar...](http://www.bestplaces.net/economy/city/california/san_bernardino)

[2] [https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market- trends/us/ca/sa...](https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market- trends/us/ca/san-bernardino-county/san-bernardino/)

EDIT: found a more conservative median rent citation and updated the figures based on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Amazon (and other companies) should just leave these ungrateful areas. I mean, San Bernardino should be thanking Amazon but instead they are complaining. Once the big companies threaten to leave and ignite a race to the bottom, these cities will come back crawling on their knees begging for jobs, any jobs.

It's not like worker are going to politically unite and retaliate. All (both) the political parties are controlled by 1%. Any popular movement is either squashed (Bernie) or appropriated (Trump) by this moneyed elite. Unions too are successfully stigmatized and restricted legislatively ("right to work").

</s>

</comment><comment><USER33> Amazon Fulfillment centers are cold calling cell phones with employment advertising. That's a $1,500 fine _per call_ under the TCPA. These poor people shouldn't apply to work for pay, they should contact a lawyer and get paid. Amazon is flagrantly breaking the law. Easy money.

</comment><comment><USER34> You can do one line summaries without reading the article - without reading it the answer will be along the lines of "fucks them".

</comment><comment><USER35> I think its time that instead of reporting "what percentage of a made up number of people have jobs", and instead report "salary percentiles". 5% unemployment isn't that great if 50% of the people have a $24k/year job, and if that number is 5% of only 40% of the population because everyone else gave up.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think the best people for jobs like this are those that just want supplemental income. Teenagers, College Kids, Part-time or temp workers.

<comment><USER13> I think it is pretty clear that we should automate box packing as soon as possible. It is a waste of human talent to have people doing this.

<comment><USER36> The problem is, those people need to have jobs.

<comment><USER13> Even moving them to quality control or edge case handling is a win. No one is going to miss box packing.

<comment><USER36> It's only a win if they don't get laid off or have their paychecks cut.

And I'm pretty sure that the people who do it for their job, if they aren't able to find another one, would miss it.

Automation can be good, but we can't forget that these are actual people, with rent payments, food bills, and possibly families, that are currently doing these jobs. Blindly following the "Automation is great" mantra, while forgetting about them, is going to be disastrous.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Death Star was an Agile Project - <AUTHOR> http://greatandsmallblog.com/2011/03/07/the-death-star-was-an-agile-project/

<comment><USER2> I think its a perfect example of an Agile manager - anybody that isn't on board, throw under a bus.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Death Star was a trap[1]. It wasn't semi-complete. It was fully operational[2] and designed to lure in the Rebel fleet to a single location. Destroying the rebels in detail had proved to be too time consuming.

[1] Ackbar, Return of the Jedi "It's a trap!"

[2] The Emperor, Return of the Jedi "As you can see, my young apprentice, your friends have failed. Now witness the firepower of this fully ARMED and OPERATIONAL battle station!"

<comment><USER4> Well... We all know what happed to admirals Ozzel and Mottie when they said "no repro" and "woops, missed that" in the daily scrum with Darth Vader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure I'd hold up a project that left a fatal vulnerability exposed to the world as a "good" example of a methodology.

<comment><USER6> Article is talking about the second Death Star. They removed the 'small thermal exhaust port' of that one. Rather it got blown up cause it was under construction leaving a path to the core open (and the moon based shield generator got blown up).

<comment><USER7> I'm amazed they didn't build at least _some_ redundancy into their shielding plans. I mean, come on. They fixed the fatal flaw from the first design, but you'd think they would have learned a more valuable lesson: it's not the exhaust port; it's the fact that you keep leaving one critical dependency in the plan each time.

<comment><USER8> No, no.. the construction was always perfect. There just wasn't an acceptance test for that. If PM had wanted Death Star of the poking-it-there-won't-make- it-explode variety, then they should have written a User Story for that. _Duh_.

<comment><USER9> Bug: Thermal exhaust port is vulnerable to external attack that can lead to total system failure

Opened By: qa-ds1-15215

Severity: 1

Fix By: DS2

Comments:

qa-ds1-15215: I was checking out the design and noticed that thermal exhaust port AH-51 is open to the world. Someone could drop an explosive in here and bring down the system. This needs to be fixed ASAP.

pm-ds1-32542: Well, duh. Who in their right mind is going to be dropping explosives into their own system? Resolution: By Design

qa-ds1-15215: Status: Activated. Are you serious? Do you not understand the implications of this design problem?

pm-ds1-32542: Assigned To: dev-ds1-29412.

dev-ds1-29412: Jesus H. Christ, 15215. We talked about this in the hallway yesterday. There's no way we can change the design _now_ , we've got people coming in to kick the tires on this thing. Resolution: Won't Fix

qa-ds1-15215: You too???!!! You guys seriously don't understand what's at stake here. Can we at least look at this in the next version? Status: Activated.

dev-ds1-29412: Fine. Resolution: Postponed.

lukes: Lol

<comment><USER10> Actually according to the book "Death Star" by Michael Reaves, the project manager actually caught the exhaust port vulnerability during construction and made a verbal agreement with the foreman to fix the problem.

Unfortunately the project manager got distracted by other matters soon after and the foreman fell sick and the replacement foreman didn't know about the changes to the plans so he went ahead and built the port to spec.

When the project manager found out, it was too late and the construction was still behind schedule so she just left it.

This all happened AFTER the plans for the death star were leaked, too. So if the vulnerability had been fixed, the rebels would have gone ahead with their plan as normal and even Luke wouldn't have been able to hit that womprat.

<comment><USER7> Well, we knew there was high turnover with the staff on that thing. Vader's people-management methods were pretty extreme and capricious, to say the least. It's abundantly clear that ruling through terror didn't exactly bring out the best in his workforce.

<comment><USER11> Don't forget that the majority of the people who worked on the Death Star were contractors.

<comment><USER7> Most likely without decent health insurance, because who in their right mind would insure those guys? Talk about occupational hazards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Talk about a hostile working environment, though.

</comment><comment><USER13> The Sith must also have practiced pair programming, because "Always two there are..."

</comment><comment><USER14> I guessed they lacked the V in MVP.</comment>


Business idea: recommendation system for physical stores - <AUTHOR> http://blog.celsopinto.com/post/5728926942/business-idea-recommendation-system-for-physical

<comment><USER2> excellent Thought. Could I be the devils advocate for a second.

1) Most of the retail chains (I mean the Big/Medium one which are primary target for this kind of system), already has a price check system installed in their store. This can be issues in following way \- Why should the store waste some space for new harware \- What is stopping these price checking sytem vendors to simply upgrade their system with this feature as addional one. They already have a installed base and customer confiedence, they can kill the market if they see any traction.

So ideally you may want to create a single system which will replace this price checking system with addional features. or the reverse.

2) Most of the Small shop owners any way wont have space for a price checker/scanner. So this market is pretty limited.

3) There are few key advantages for online profile like amazon does. \- people can browse at their liesure and no effort/little effort is required from their side to do passive browsing. while nobody will visit a shop juzz to do passive shopping of grocessories/pharmacy. \- Passive browsing helps to build one part of the user profile. This is not possible in case of physical profiling. Also there is some effort required from user to scan any item. \- For online browsing, you can use IP address/user login details to track a user and hence his profile which can help u display related products. But when u do this physical, unless there is some way user enter his details (either scanning his member card or entering some number), u cannot use his history during shopping time. This will limit ur data to current shopping iteration only.

4) Already most of the groceorry shops provides coupons/deal details currently during your billing time based on the items u have purchased. So this is not new.

5) Now if these business are ready to share the details (which i dont think they will do)and u are keeping the profile of each consumer/customer in a centralized form, u will have more details during the checkout time. (due to same reason that u wont know the user untill he provides his member card). And that can be more usefull to provide more deals based on \- other shopping he has done recently. e,g he bought a tv from best buy and he is in sears, offer him deals on tv stand. \- See if u can utilize some social cues. either use facebook or have ur own social features. so that u can tap his friends profile to suggest something.

I am not saying these are big issues, but something u need to think before u pursue these idea

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback.

1) Indeed, price checking is already in place so perhaps in those cases the recommendation system can send data into them?

2) not the target market, not enough data. Remember, a small market that has huge value is still a valuable market worth pursuing.

3) Of course no one browses the stores :-) But when you make a buy there, you're already in a spending mindset so stores can take advantage of that to promote things that may interest you more. With the receipt recommendations, you should be able to track data across shopping sessions. Like a cookie ;-)

5) I don't think any of the possible clients will allow you to store the details elsewhere than at their own DC.

Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Lost me at "without having to go through the frustrating experience of asking the store assistant for recommendations and getting none."

Is this seriously such a big problem that people will pay money or change their behaviour to use your solution?

<comment><AUTHOR> Daniel, this is not a product for consumers it's for big retail, eg. Fnac (Europe), etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have yet to find any recommendation system that stands on its own (vs. YouTube related videos for example) that I would regularly use other than HN. Any ... recommendations?

</comment><comment><USER5> Hello! In-store recommendation system in-store already exists. It is develped by Myrio company and is implemented at Diesel store in Europe. More news on the way from the founder of Myrio...

</comment><comment><USER6> Are you a software company or a systems integration company?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have my own software company (<http://leftfield.pt>). This would be best pulled off by people with lots of experience in software integration (CRM, POS) both engineering as well as sales.

<comment><USER6> Well congrats on getting your post up on the first page of HN!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are a couple of start-ups looking to do this. The first that comes to mind is ShopTap. They are looking to hire quality engineers right now, so you might want to contact them if you're looking to build something like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Like I said, I don't have any intention of pursuing this one any more :-) That said, I'd be more than glad to share opinions with anyone that wants to do this.</comment></comment>


Microsoft mulls cutting UK datacentre investment amid Brexit concerns - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/01/brexit-tariff-fears-could-see-microsoft-cut-uk-datacenter-investment/ <comment><USER2> I think the articles assertion that with the reduction in eu migration there will magically be more visas for USA India and China that is not what the hard core brexiters are about.

<comment><USER3> "More visas for USA, India and China" is obviously not what what the hard core brexiters are about, but it is what those countries are going to ask for when it comes to a 1 on 1 trade deal with the UK. There's nothing magical about it, it's just a question of who has leverage in negotiations.

<comment><USER4> The Australians have already said that they are looking to make immigration to the UK easier as part of their trade deal negotiations:

[https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/21/australia-t...](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/21/australia- to-seek-uk-migration-deal-in-brexit-trade-talks)

NB I _really_ hope these things don't happen as although I am a Remainer I don't want the Brexit voters pushed further to the right and I think that would be an understandable reaction if they found that Brexit resulted in _more_ immigration.

<comment><USER5> Anti-immigration voters aren't driven by actual immigration. How could it be so, when you can't readily know people's immigration status? No, they're driven by _news coverage_ of immigration, plus the loss of jobs and general neglect in provincial parts of the UK (which the news encourages them to blame on immigrants).

They probably _are_ going to go further to the right, but not for any reasons relating to actual policy.

<comment><USER6> Disclaimer: I voted remain.

You can _easily_ tell people's immigration status. I walked into my local Lidl about 7 years ago and didn't hear an english voice for the entire 30 min shop. That was the first time I realised how out of control immigration to the UK had become.

I voted remain, but if you think we can't tell who's english, or you think it's a lie that huge areas have been ghettozied in virtually every major city, you're either blind or unobservant or simply don't have a diverse contact with many areas of our society.

<comment><USER5> You can go into shops in Wales where nobody speaks English either.

Yes, there are ghettoes, but (as in European countries which have experienced terrorism problems) that doesn't mean the occupants are immigrants. People can be born here and not have English as a first language.

(Also, non-immigrants have very little idea how large the barriers to immigration are these days..)

<comment><USER7> > _People can be born here and not have English as a first language._

Only this is less common than the other.

Besides, for those anti-immigrant, whether "born here" or "newly arrived" doesn't matter much. If they are not of English, Scottish, etc ancestry, they are immigrants.

So saying that the e.g. the terrorists in Germany were German because they were born in the country is a little beside the point when they are clearly from middle-eastern origin for example.

<comment><USER5> > for those anti-immigrant, whether "born here" or "newly arrived" doesn't > matter much. If they are not of English, Scottish, etc ancestry, they are > immigrants.

Well, now here we have a problem, because immigration policy can only apply to people who are legally considered immigrants. The word for expelling large numbers of people who were born in the country but not of the dominant ethnicity is "ethnic cleansing".

<comment><USER7> > _The word for expelling large numbers of people who were born in the country > but not of the dominant ethnicity is "ethnic cleansing"._

They might not want them expelled, but simply counted along with new immigrants in estimations of the cumulative amount of people of foreign ethnicities that resulted by immigration (and thus in decisions whether immigration has been "too much" or not).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just so everyone knows this was Fake News

[https://news.microsoft.com/en-gb/2017/01/24/microsoft-re- aff...](https://news.microsoft.com/en-gb/2017/01/24/microsoft-re-affirms- commitment-uk/#sm.0001io4wowz9xf20t1k2lcovafo37%23dxhs81Zvke1CKjQ3.97)

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't imagine a datacentre has much economic impact.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why? It is Brexit not Internexit. The servers will be reachable, even after the Brexit. So, where is the problem? Maybe they will not be able to exploit the tax loops?

<comment><USER11> The "why" is extensively covered in the article.

<comment><USER12> Facts and information don't matter for some people

<comment><USER13> The problem is that most people stopped conscious reading nowadays.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Building recommender systems with Azure ML service: best practices on deployment - <AUTHOR> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/building-recommender-systems-with-azure-machine-learning-service/ <comment><USER3> This blog includes 11 different algorithms that you can choose from - <USER2> let us know if you have any questions or we can help!

Disclosure: I work at Azure on machine learning.</comment>


Ask HN: Joomla vs Drupal (vs Magento)? - <AUTHOR>

I am looking for opinions on which CMS is 'most appropriate' for creating reasonably sophisticated websites, sometimes with e-commerce functionality. The team creating the site is a combination of designers and developers, but the end-user could be anyone.
From what I hear, Joomla is quick and easy to set up but doesn't seem as 'industrial' or extensible as the Drupal. I read that Drupal has a steeper learning curve, but does that just mean non-techies will struggle with it? We're developers, so not bothered about coding, and from my initial investigations in to Drupal it doesn't look too tricky. Also, the plugins look to deal with a lot of common website requirements. Including Ubercart for e-commerce. Magento is a (relatively) new e-commerce specific CMS, but I worry that it isn't as widely used (read: tested) as Drupal and that it won't have the same pool of plugins available.
I've read a fair bit about each but guess this is quite a common dilemma - it's a considerable investment to learn, implement, integrate and maintain a new CMS - so am posting it here. As ever, the right solution ultimately is dependant on the specific project, but it would be interesting to hear some thoughts on each. <comment><USER2> Personally I like Silverstripe for its sane CMS backend, where the copyeditors will look at. Their ecommerce module needs some handholding though.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would take drupal over joomla any day (for theming and custom development reasons). I don't have experience with Magento though.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the general vibe I'm getting from the tech crowd, of which I would consider myself a member of. Anyone got experience with Magneto?</comment></comment>


VimWiki – A personal wiki for Vim - <AUTHOR> http://vimwiki.github.io/ <comment><USER2> It's GREAT to see vimwiki at the top of Hacker News.

I've been using this for years, and keep all my notes in a wiki[0], written in GitHub flavour mark down, with syntax highlighting etc. in the editor. I guess it's not orgmode (which sounds amazing), but it seems really really good to me.

I created the vimwiki_markdown[1] gem which allows you to convert GH style markdown to HTML using the wiki. Now I might just call out to pandoc, but I didn't know about it at the time, and my gem works fine*

I love that you can have project specific wikis etc. It's just so great. I'll also link to the relevant section in my .vimrc[2] if you are going to go down the markdown route.

[0] [http://wiki.psdavey.com](http://wiki.psdavey.com)

[1] [https://github.com/patrickdavey/vimwiki_markdown](https://github.com/patrickdavey/vimwiki_markdown)

[2] [https://github.com/patrickdavey/dotfiles/blob/682e72e4b7a70e...](https://github.com/patrickdavey/dotfiles/blob/682e72e4b7a70e50858d1a3b7f0713ce6b470fb6/vim/.vimrc#L243-L281)

<comment><USER3> This definitely appeals to me for its simplicity, but the major downside to this approach (for me) is that you can't (easily) draw pictures.

So often when I am taking notes, the notes involve diagrams. Markdown is great at text, but has nothing for diagrams.

After a lot of thinking about this problem, I've decided to start using an iPad with an Apple Pencil and Microsoft OneNote. Here is an example of some notes I took when thinking about an AudioUnit plugin that would dilate time:

[https://1drv.ms/o/s!AtbMnk02vU5DgQBbmSeyPx9zd1Dn](https://1drv.ms/o/s!AtbMnk02vU5DgQBbmSeyPx9zd1Dn)

VimWiki is definitely very cool. Just sharing this in case anyone out there has the same concern as me about drawing diagrams.

<comment><USER4> how good is the handwriting recognition for searches etc?

<comment><USER3> The engine is very good; it's recognized all my writing. The downside is that it is offline -- it happens in the cloud. This means it's a little delayed and sometimes it seems mysteriously unavailable completely.

<comment><USER5> I find it interesting that you use the term "offline" to mean "in the cloud". I generally use it in the _opposite_ way.

<comment><USER3> Ha, I see your point. I used "offline" because it is happening in a way that is disconnected with my interactive usage. It doesn't analyze the handwriting as I write, it processes it in batch later, and this might even happen during a moment when I'm not connected to the internet. But I can see why this usage could be ambiguous or confusing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While I never got on terms with orgmode, I cannot praise vimwiki high enough. It's intuitive and simple enough to not have very steep learning curve.

I use it with taskwiki [1] extension, which stores all the tasks in the awesome Taskwarrior [2] CLI task manager. With this, I have my tasks in my text files, searchable just a command away on the CLI or my mobile phone via the Android app.

[1] [https://taskwarrior.org/](https://taskwarrior.org/) [2] [https://github.com/tbabej/taskwiki](https://github.com/tbabej/taskwiki)

<comment><USER7> I've setup vimwiki, taskwarrior (ubuntu),taskwarrior for Android and setup sync with a server. How do you get the items you add in the Android App to show up in Vimwiki?

<comment><USER7> Read the response down on this thread. The key is using tags and viewports

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Only looking at this page, I have no clue what this does.

It says...

        organize notes and ideas
        manage todo-lists
        write documentation
        write a diary

I can already do these in vim, with text files or markdown files. What is this actually doing, then?

Projects like this really deserve some high-level explanation like "Do you want to do X, but don't like having to do Y? This addresses that."

<comment><USER9> Creating links: when your cursor is over a word, hit enter. To follow, hit enter. To go back, hit backspace.

Todo Lists: Hitting C-Space marks the item as done or not done. It also creates a progress indicator on parent TODO items.

        - [.] Do something
            - [X] Something 1
            - [ ] Something 2
            - [ ] Something 3

Diary - Hit leader-w leader-w, you automatically get a new page created with today's date to write in. leader-w i will get you to a diary index page. leader-w leader-i will auto-populate that index page.

Tables are auto-formatted to match the text you put into them.

All of this is entirely possible with plain text files, vimwiki just makes it easier to do. It's even compatible with markdown formatted files.

<comment><USER10> So it's basically a suite of tools for writing a wiki?

Does it have its own build/rendering engine, or can I use one I already know (Pandoc)?

<comment><USER9> It has a few built-in syntaxes (including Markdown), and can render those out to HTML (including some generic templating for having static CSS/JavaScript).

And frankly, I simply consider it to _be_ a wiki. I rarely if ever find the need to export it out. Makes for a great personal wiki if you're already in Vim.

<comment><USER11> I have successfully used the export feature to hand off project documentation I was keeping in vimwiki. This way they got a set of HTML files that anyone could view. Some of them did not use vim at all so while this meant the documentation would not be as easy to edit at least it was accessible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The one vimwiki line I have in my vimrc is to set the path to my Dropbox.

      let g:vimwiki_list = [{'path': '~/Dropbox/Public/briefcase/vimwiki'}]

All of the default commands are pretty nice. Here's a nice cheatsheet:

[http://thedarnedestthing.com/vimwiki%20cheatsheet](http://thedarnedestthing.com/vimwiki%20cheatsheet)

</comment><comment><USER13> Vimwiki maintainer here. Feel free to ask questions.

<comment><USER14> Is there a recommended way to sync this with a remote server or service? My interest is to share the info between devices. I suppose I could just use a git repo, but wondering if there's a less manual way.

<comment><USER13> There is no standard way. It's just a bunch of plain text files, so there are many ways to sync. AFAIK, many users use Dropbox.

<comment><USER9> Dropbox works well, as does (oddly enough) iCloud. Syncthing also works well enough too. I simply simlink whichever choice I make back to my home directory, and it works as expected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've used VimWiki for a couple years now. I use the most basic features (Enter, Backspace). The ability to instantly jump to the wiki is the most useful (Leader W W). My wiki is just a folder in my Dropbox so I can get to it on almost any computer.

When I started, VimWiki syntax was better supported than markdown. I've seen lots of markdown related pull requests come through, so maybe that's changed.

I use VimWiki for:

      * Life goals (stretch and short term). I use it almost as a centering tool.
      * Poetry
      * Passages from books
      * Book summaries (that I write)
      * Lecture/Speech notes
      * Notes on misc. items I want to explore
      * Ideas for future science fiction short stories

Last summer I wrote a simple Awk script to extract VimWiki style definitions (Term::Definition) into TSV's for importing into Anki. I was frustrated that I couldn't fully automate this process without modifying Anki. Maybe someone else has figured this out?

<comment><USER6> Regarding the Anki import, this Vim plugin might be of interest:

[https://github.com/tbabej/knowledge](https://github.com/tbabej/knowledge)

Beware, highly experimental, and the documentation is lacking (reading the tests would be the best idea to get a feeling how the syntax works).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This looks like Org mode for Vim, very exciting! I like the ability to export to an HTML page. It might be useful to export as doku/mediawiki, markdown, or other types of formatting.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is also instant Markdown extension: [https://github.com/suan/vim- instant-markdown](https://github.com/suan/vim-instant-markdown)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So its basically like Orgmode (a simplistic version, that is) but for Vim?

<comment><USER18> For people, not familiar with org mode, the markup portion is a very very small subset of org mode. Org mode is a very powerful tool that is used for many more applications. People complaining about "usability" of org mode do not know where to begin "learning" org mode. The thing is that no one needs to "learn the whole org mode"; you take it in piece by piece, based on the features you need. I started off learning just the (1) org markup syntax, and exporting. You write once, and then export the same to HTML, PDF, markdown, plain ASCII text, etc. Then I learned (2) Org capture.. taking notes at whim of a moment, dumping all notes in a single file (you don't have to do it in a single file) categorized by tags. Then I wanted to take notes with "living code".. notes that contain the code as well as the code output. So that was learning (3) Org babel. Then I wanted the notes to generate files containing the code in those notes. Enter (4) Org tangle. One day I felt like why not experiment with (5) Org table that is plain text spreadsheet that can contain formulas too. It truly is a beautiful piece of software. At some point, I started tinkering with elisp, and started appreciating the org mode design even more. I felt a need to have some thing like the default ASCII exporter, but few of my own tweaks. (6) And I learnt how to design my own custom org exporter.

And I believe that all of that is probably less than 50% of the whole of org mode. I will learn more as and when I feel the need. If you feel lost, read the org mode manual or ask the org mode mailing list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> (Serious)

I really want to learn either Vim or Emacs but I've never been able to decide which one to learn. Every time I've tried to search about this topic I end up in petty wars. Help?

<comment><USER20> Even though I'm more of an Emacs user, I'd say if you're going to learn one, learn vi. Not vim, mind you: nvi, the original one (you can emulate it in vim with "set compatible"). Use it for a few months until you get muscle memory for it. Just about any UNIX-like system you'll work on, anywhere, has at least the old vi, and it's very useful to just have that muscle memory tucked away.

<comment><USER21> What's more, if you prefer the Emacs environment, you can run a vi-like editor in it (Evil). Emacs keybindings, on the other hand, are the default keybindings for GNU readline, which is used in a lot of shells and related programs. Additionally, I know that OS X allows you to use Emacs keybindings in any text field. (I am not a mac user, can't comment on this.)

(Disclaimer: I am a happy Spacemacs user, and it would take a lot to pry it away from me.)

I'd recommend learning vi, so you can learn how awesome modal editing is. Then, learn Emacs' basic commands for line editing (so as to make readline apps easier to work with). Once you've done that, evaluate whether a (Neo)vim with plugins or Spacemacs setup is better for you, then choose one of those.

<comment><USER22> As an avid vim user who has tried Evil mode, emacs, and even spacemacs, I fully agree with all of the reasons you listed. To add to it:

\- *-mode (specific syntax highlighting, commands, etc. based on project or task)

\- edit/save remote files via built-in TRAMP [0]

\- built-in plugin manager (interactive, or via emacs init config)

\- MELPA [1]

\- Non-blocking (e.g., run tests in one buffer while editing source in another)

\- client-server approach (neovim adopted this, but emacs has had far more time to work out the kinks)

The main reasons I stay with vim are:

\- already committed to vi-like muscle memory (and evil-mode, while admirable, doesn't cut it)

\- no translation of VimL configs and plugins to Emacs Lisp

\- many plugins for languages, frameworks, etc. which I use daily are severely out of date in emacs (and I'm too lazy to maintain them myself)

[0]: [http://askubuntu.com/questions/79100/how-to-open-a-remote- fi...](http://askubuntu.com/questions/79100/how-to-open-a-remote-file-ssh- with-my-local-emacs)

[1]: [http://melpa.org/](http://melpa.org/)

<comment><USER21> I prefer the Emacs environment: I love TRAMP, org-mode, and the simplicity of getting a fully-featured IDE just by adding a list to my spacemacs configuration.

Do you use neovim?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Advantage over vim-notes? [https://github.com/xolox/vim- notes](https://github.com/xolox/vim-notes)

<comment><USER22> It seems vim-notes is much more developed for taking general, self- encompassing notes, similar in style to Evernote. I don't see a way to inter- link the notes like vim's help, but it does have far more rich and powerful note-taking features.

I'd still use vim-wiki because it's intended to be a lightweight knowledge database similar to a mind-map, but more robust. It allows for quick, easy organization of ideas whereas vim-notes appears to be more for a formal writing process.

<comment><USER23> vim-notes does have inter-linking, so I guess this project is pretty similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In all the orgmode threads, a viable replacement never comes up in any other editor, even for the basic features of note taking. Now here we have several commenters who have tried both and really like VimWiki. As an Emacs user who might like a modern feeling editor but stays mostly because of orgmode, seeing the enthusiasm here gives me hope that similar may be reachable in Visual Studio Code one day.

</comment><comment><USER25> I keep personal notes in Dropbox. I formerly used plain text files, then I used my own syntax highlight format in GEdit. Then I started using Markdown in Sublime Text (with the "Sunburst" colour theme for making everything stand- out).

I tried vimwiki with the files stored in Dropbox but it didn't go anywhere. I liked the simplicity of just bunging stuff in a semi-structured .md file.

I worked with Markdown files in Dropbox for several years. However in the last year or two, I sometimes have occaison to read/write notes from my phone or tablet and Sublime Text is not available for those systems. I tried various Android editors like Markdawn and DroidEdit but nothing I was satisfied with.

These days I am slowly gravitating to Google Keep. It's simple but OK for my needs and I can use it cross-device - on desktop these is even a Chrome app which works like a desktop app.

<comment><USER26> Sunburst is such a good color scheme. I really like that the background is black.

I've made some changes like make the left gutter grey have grey background (so I know where it starts and ends) and some other changes for the way I like to see html, php, js and css. I might have broken the syntax for other languages.

[https://github.com/inod/contraste/blob/master/Contraste.tmTh...](https://github.com/inod/contraste/blob/master/Contraste.tmTheme)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Been using org-mode. Trying out vimwiki after seeing this and I like the simplicity of it better. It has enough features for me to remove the overhead of an emacs + evil install just for org-mode.

<comment><USER28> Why do you find org-mode complex? I think it's simple, but perhaps not easy.

<comment><USER27> I don't necessarily find it more complex to get started on, but some of the vimwiki defaults with navigation and creating new pages are nice to me. Plus, it makes my workflow simpler, because org-mode was the only reason I was jumping into emacs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Love the idea, but why use a custom syntax instead of markdown?

<comment><USER30> Markdown is supported, from the Features list...

 _three markup syntaxes supported: Vimwiki 's own syntax, Markdown, MediaWiki_

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is really cool! I wrote a small go app awhile back to solve my personal wiki problem ([https://github.com/esell/bookie](https://github.com/esell/bookie)) but since I am in vim most of the day, this seems like an even better solution. You could even just take the output and toss it up on Github pages or whatever if you wanted to share it.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm using LiveComment [https://www.npmjs.com/package/livecomment](https://www.npmjs.com/package/livecomment)

LiveComment is Editor/IDE-independent, cross-language, realtime & easy with client or server JavaScript plugins.

For example, my HN notes pool [http://acpul.org/pool](http://acpul.org/pool)

</comment><comment><USER33> I like org-mode but I'm a vim user and I don't want to be switching around constantly. I'll definitely will try this

<comment><USER34> Just so you know there is a Vim OrgMode extension. [https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode](https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm a huge fan of VimWiki and have years worth of data in my main wiki.

What are people using for their wiki on iOS? Right now I'm syncing with iA Writer. It works pretty well, but doesn't support links. It looks like Bear is promising -- it uses the same style links, but it doesn't sync with a folder of text files. Any others out there?

<comment><USER36> for ios wiki [http://www.trunknotes.com/](http://www.trunknotes.com/) but no interop with vimwiki so i stopped

I use [https://daedalusapp.com/](https://daedalusapp.com/) which i can webdav remotely and rsync locally with vimwiki

<comment><USER35> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have tried using this or orgmode at various points, but I haven't been able to find a good workflow for linking images/screen shots with notes (which I do quite often in Evernote). I use vim as my primary IDE, so I would love to find a solution for image links to let me use VimWiki as well.

<comment><USER13> Not sure what you mean by workflow, but you can include images like this:

        {{file:../../images/image.png}}
        {{http://example.com/image.png}}

Vim is of course not able to display images, but they appear when you convert the wiki page to HTML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I use this so much it became my to-go place to create step by step plan (a.plan) for any project I do. I would also bind :w with converting the wiki to html and have a cronjob to sync the html with the server so anyone can easily check the project I m working on and its progress

</comment><comment><USER39> I've been using vimwiki for years - it's been an absolute life-saver - but had no idea it now supported markdown. Any one know of a tool to convert vimwiki syntax to markdown or can i just use markdown in new files and keep vimwiki in the old files?

</comment><comment><USER40> Very cool, I was just searching this kind of thing.

I'd like to see if it would be easy to support ReST beside markdown. I'd like to reuse my current files instead of trying to convert them haphazardly...

<comment><USER41> Coincidentally, I was just finishing up a simple reST wiki. It's literally just a makefile and a couple conventions to follow.

[https://github.com/a3n/riki](https://github.com/a3n/riki)

As morantron says in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13158062](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13158062)

you can navigate from within your existing markupdown* files in Vim by putting the cursor on the filename in your .md/.rst file, type gf, and Vim opens the target file.

I wanted to be able to use the links that I was going to write anyway in my .rst files, but they end in .html and when in vim you probably want to go to a .rst source file.

So you write them ending in .rst, and the makefile fixes that up before giving the file to rst2html. Proper nav within Vim and on the generated .html page.

Would work equally well with any capable programmer's editor that allows you to "go to the file under the cursor."

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is this substantially different than:

      a) writing a syntax highlighting script for your notes files,
      b) using tags to jump to documents and
      c) using netrw for browsing your files?

Because if it is not, and even if it is just making it easier to do those things yourself, I would personally not even consider using it, having had some really nasty surprises with Vim plugins in the past. Yes, I do mean you, Powerline.

</comment><comment><USER43> I suppose it was taken, but "Viki" would have been so much better a name.

<comment><USER44> Viki/Deplate : A personal wiki for Vim [http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=861](http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=861)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Funny, I just setup my vimwiki + syncthing yesterday night!

</comment><comment><USER46> Is there something similar for Sublime Text?

<comment><USER47> Actually there is. There is very neat solution whose name escapes me. It might not have all the featured of VimWiki, but it had others that were as cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> ...But it still can't match org.

Maybe in 10 years?

<comment><USER49> > ...But it still can't match org.

But you have to start somewhere.

> Maybe in 10 years?

Org mode has a 5 year advantage over vimwiki (2003 vs 2008) and significantly more contributors. Vimwiki only seems to have had meaningful contributions from others since Q3 2014 So maybe. Who knows.

<comment><USER21> With vim's relatively high popularity over Emacs, I wouldn't be surprised if vimwiki is able to match org within a few years.

<comment><USER50> Ah, but that assumes popularity is all that matters. I think that emacs's programming model and programming language are both superior to vim's, so it wouldn't surprise me to see that it takes longer to implement the same functionality with the same extensibility in vim than it would in emacs.

It also assumes that the average vim developer has roughly the same skill as the average emacs developer. Is that true, though? Obviously I'm biased, but it seems to me that emacs is far friendlier to the sort of user who demands the ability to extend his environment as he wishes.

Which leads me to the question of whether as many vim users are also vim developers, as emacs users are also emacs developers? I think that the former is fairly uncommon, whilst the latter is fairly common. Sure, there _are_ emacs users who don't extend it, but my perception is that they are far rarer than vim users who just use their editor.

<comment><USER21> I'm an Emacs user, and I love it a lot. However, I do believe that the Vim community has traditionally been more active with producing plugins.

<comment><USER50> How so? Emacs has been extensible since it was written; vi wasn't until vim came around, and writing extensions in vimscript is pretty brutal compared to using elisp.

Does vim have an equivalent to gnus, magit, eww, erc, emms, slack-mode, info &c.? Probably a few of those, but of the ones it has are they as mature?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I'm taking a break with macOS, I'm dating Linux - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@singuerinc/im-taking-a-break-with-macos-i-m-dating-linux-edf406f2cd6d <comment><USER2> I don't get these articles. As a person who uses Linux personally and MacOS at work I haven't seen a huge change or innovation in years in either OS and honestly I'm not unhappy about it. I don't get what people want out of OS's these days. They are suppose to be platforms to write applications on right? Why do we treat them like they should come bundled with a bunch of bells and whistles. We used to call these bell and whistles bloatware till apple started making them. I think both OS's are great in their own right for what it's worth. I'm just more on the side of give me a base and I'll decide what I want. So these new releases mean very little to me.

</comment><comment><USER3> The whole wife/girlfriend part was too forced in my opinion. Post would have been better without it.</comment>


Trump Presidency – Indian students unsure about pursuing US higher education - <AUTHOR> http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/donald-trumps-rhetoric-leaves-indian-students-unsure-about-pursuing-higher-education-in-us/articleshow/55484871.cms <comment><USER2> Perhaps silly since Trump's position is "Intel yes, Infosys no", i.e. no change in H-1B policies for students who graduate from US institutions of higher education, and given how big a fight there will be just to zap the Infosys bodyshop sector of H-1Bs, it's highly questionable it'll go further.

On the other hand, if the only reason you're going to spend 4 years at school in the US is to get an H-1B visa, the risks for the opportunity cost you're taking has definitely gotten higher. On the third hand, do we really want such people getting work over here, as in, if you're here to get a real education _and_ then work over here, that's quite different than just the latter.

<comment><USER3> that's also part of reason why people voted/supported Trump

<comment><USER2> Indeed, Disney laying off workers and only giving them severance if they trained their HCL and Cognizant bodyshop replacements, with the added sting of non-disclosure, well, that didn't play well with the sorts of people who "voted/supported Trump".

I'll add especially since it's strictly illegal to directly replace American workers with H-1Bs, but that's never been enforced to my knowledge. This whole "legal/illegal" thing has taken _such_ a hit ... AG nominee Sessions has quite a task ahead of him. Another reason we voted for Trump.

Note also that that was a _supremely_ boneheaded move for _Disney_ , which is not just another corporate giant ... except perhaps it is, now....</comment></comment></comment>