Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/education-50418317 <comment><USER3> One of my employers actively discouraged meetings and phone calls. They wanted everything done through Slack and email.

It felt great at first. Having a wide-open calendar and knowing that random managers can't pull you into a waste of time meeting seems like a dream come true. However, we quickly learned that removing meetings doesn't removed the need for communication.

Instead of scheduled meetings, our Slack channels turned into never ending pseudo-meetings. Instead of the well-defined start times of a meeting and the implicit expectation that meeting participants come prepared with an agenda and material to discuss, we had a spontaneous free-for-all in Slack. People could, and would, start important team discussions in Slack at random times all day long. "@here" started to feel no different than a meeting, except it was unpredictable, you couldn't prepare for it, and it would certainly disrupt your concentration.

The other unintended side effect was that people were still scheduling secret meetings. They just had to be quiet about it because technically we weren't supposed to do it. The teams with regularly scheduled meetings were more cohesive, less disrupted, and significantly less stressed than those who tried to handle everything in the asynchronous "always on, always connected" style.

So yes, excessive, unnecessary, or poorly-run meetings are bad. But I never thought I'd miss properly run meetings as much as I did when they were removed completely from our communication toolbox. Use the right tool for the right job and enforce good meeting discipline.

<comment><USER4> I've found that, with the exception of daily stand-ups, all meetings must have a bullet point agenda and notes should be sent out for each meeting with risks, action items, issues and ownership of those items. If both of those things are lacking, I doubt how useful the meeting will be or was.

<comment><USER5> Agreed but it also applies to standups. I think if you just want ambient awareness, have people post their daily "what I did/will do" to Slack. No need to derail every single day for half an hour or more.

<comment><USER6> Half an hour or more is no longer a standup.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't mean that isn't what people are calling a "standup".

More seriously, even if standup actually were 5 minutes like it should be according to theory, no interruption takes less than half an hour to recover from and resume flow.

<comment><USER7> > standup actually were 5 minutes like it should be according to theory

Jeff Sutherland who invented scrum thinks it should be 15 minutes, so according to theory they should be 15 minutes:

> The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team. > The Daily Scrum is held every day of the Sprint. At it, the Development Team > plans work for the next 24 hours. This optimizes team collaboration and > performance by inspecting the work since the last Daily Scrum and > forecasting upcoming Sprint work. The Daily Scrum is held at the same time > and place each day to reduce complexity

[https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum...](https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum- Guide-US.pdf#zoom=100)

<comment><USER8> Scrum, Agile etc. is a nonsense which should be ended. The one reason why it is so popular is that it provides managers with opportunity to organize meetings - stand ups, planning, retrospectives,... Why in the world would anyone reach out to other people to figure out what to do in the next 24 hours? The development of even a minor feature takes longer than that, and contrary to Agile principles cannot be arbitrarily split into smaller parts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's some truth to this, but holy smokes, another meeting is not the cure.

There is value in "venting" at work. A few years ago I built a software tool that pings people at the end of the week asking how their week went. Some of the quietest people in the company had the most to say when they were behind a screen. In fact, some people literally called it therapeutic. It turns out that writing things down can serve as a form of "therapy" (source: [https://positivepsychology.com/writing- therapy/](https://positivepsychology.com/writing-therapy/))

If you lead a team, I'd strongly recommend you have a feedback mechanism like this in place, but a meeting is not the right medium. It's just a place for the extroverts to complain.

If you do hold a meeting for this stuff, a 1-1 is probably the best way to surface a similar level of information.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps you are being overly dismissive of the "extroverts" needs in the situations you are describing...

Some might just "complain", but others feel safer being vocal in a group of people.

You mention understanding that some of the quietest people have the most to say behind a screen, well, I imagine there is a non-insignificant group of people who feel much safer talking it out within a group where there isn't a written record and they can judge the crowd's reaction immediately.

I wouldn't consider myself anywhere close to an extrovert and I would consider myself more candid in spoken communications at work, even when my whole team is present.

Just my 2 cents.

<comment><USER11> Most work places are heavily dominated by the extroverts. The sales and executive teams are all extroverts. So is the marketing team. IMO it's fair to consider the other side of the coin, there's virtually no way that extroverts aren't going to continue to rule the workplace.

<comment><USER12> Playing the devil's advocate, if what you say is true, that most of an organization is extroverted, why would you want to optimize your feedback process for the introverts? Is the reason that you believe the extroverts' voice is already heard?

<comment><USER11> Extroverts are over-represented because they're the loudest voices. Introverts have a lot to offer but they're pushed aside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Since this is Swedish study, I just want to point out that Swedish organizational culture is very meeting and consensus oriented.

Nordic cultures may seem very similar, but their organizational cultures are different even within the same company. Others are often frustrated about Swedes and their endless meetings. Finns in the meeting are 'OK. lets do this.' and Swedes reply 'But Jan-Erik has not shared his point of view yet.'

<comment><USER14> So true! I work across Scandinavia and there are definitely more consensus forming meetings in Sweden than elsewhere, even. Having previously worked in US & UK companies I'm still not used to it and I often feel like banging my head against the table and crying out "Will somebody please make a decision!". But of course this is Sweden, no single person will make a decision. I'm sure they think I'm terribly rude.

<comment><USER15> Heh sounds like you've maybe run across something quantified in the Hofstede leadership studies, commissioned by IBM when they first wanted to become an international globocorp.

What you're feeling is the difference between a collectivist leadership culture and an individualist leadership culture. Collectivist cultures value leaders who generate power through _maintaining relationships_, whereas individualist leaders prioritise leadership via _authority_. Think of it as accruing power in the edges vs the nodes of the social graph.

Fun fact: countries whose leader cultures are more individualist (e.g. America) are MUCH more likely to have whole populations who agree highly with "economic growth is important above all else", whereas collectivist leader nations (e.g., Taiwan, Finland) have a general populace who agree less highly with that phrase, but MORE highly with "ecological sustainability and environmental stewardship are important".

So while correlation doesn't prove causation, it may be the case that American-style individualist leadership culture is in opposition to our shared goals of non extinction :) but that's maybe a leap.

The whole study is really rad. Oh, and more bonus: collectivist leadership style correlates highly with feminine leadership style (another axes of Hofstede study)

EDIT: a-ha! Found the source: [https://www.jstor.org/stable/40836056?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...](https://www.jstor.org/stable/40836056?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)

<comment><USER16> Thanks for sharing. It's certainly food for thought. I was trying to picture this sort of leadership by consensus applied in different parts of the world where I've lived. Although it might work with some success in a few places, in most I could only foresee catastrophe. Then I was reminded that Sweden has a really good education system. Maybe there's another lesson to draw here, that in order for consensus (democracy?) to work, it's worth ensuring that the minds that will voice their perspective actually have the ability to work out the issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Yet to suppose that President Hoover was engaged only in organizing further reassurance is to do him a serious injustice. he was also conducting one of the oldest, most important --- and, unhappily, one of the least understood --- rites in American life. This is the rite of the meeting which is called not to do business but to do no business. It is a rite which is still much practiced in our time. It is worth examinging for a moment.

Men meet together for many reasons in the course of business. They need to instruct or persuade each other. They must agree on a course of action. They find thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. But there are at least as many reasons for meetings to transact no business. Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides of meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action.

\-- John Kenneth Galbraith, _The Great Crash, 1929_ , pp 138-139.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wasn't it Microsoft Japan that realized meetings were naturally crunched down to strictly useful ones when they went to a 4 day work week? Then more time was spent doing real, actual work and then workers being able to ACTUALLY relax at home or doing something truly therapeutic... like not being at fucking work. Not this bullshit "you can relax at work" crap. Oh, and their employees felt ACTUALLY better and ACTUALLY less stressed. I feel like this "study" is more a focus-group bullshit attempt to fight off the results of a 4 day work week.

The world is getting silly. Not because of studies like this. But because people actually agree with obvious bullshit like this. I feel like I'm taking damn crazy pills.

</comment><comment><USER19> Many meetings are extremely important for me as a manager.

Very few of the meetings are about "deciding things", rather they are about aligning views. As a manager I see my role as setting up meetings so that the most qualified peoples views properly influences the right stake holders. When everyone aligns on what problem to solve and how to solve it there are generally no need to take any decisions, since work gets efficiently done and few issues pops up that are not automatically solved by way of previously achieved alignment.

While using this strategy, what generally drives more meetings are: 1) Managers and other power holders that cares more about their importance and status than the work. 2) The parts of the staff that are dissatisfied and don't like their work. In many of these cases, they have been obviously neglected/abused by management before and don't feel trust in the organization.

</comment><comment><USER20> I thought Wrike had a pretty good infographic on deciding whether or not to have a meeting: [https://d3tvpxjako9ywy.cloudfront.net/blog/content/uploads/2...](https://d3tvpxjako9ywy.cloudfront.net/blog/content/uploads/2015/06/Should- we-have-this-meeting-e1434381032233.jpg?av=b36e9b420136299c52657400eb7d40a0)

Basically you should have a meeting if:

* It can't be solved by collaborating outside a meeting

* Everyone is needed to participate

* The group has authority to act

* There is a clear agenda and goals

* Someone can be the facilitator

I have found that if a meeting has all those elements than a lot can get done very quickly, rather than having ideas bounce around email or slack for weeks!

</comment><comment><USER21> This sounds accurate to my now recently-ex company. The number of meetings have soared, to the point where they probably spend 2-3 days per two week "sprint" (it's really more of a hobbled walk) in project meetings. Not just the absurd number of project managers (currently 1 PM to every 2 programmers, I believe), but the whole team. And what's weird is that when you're in the office, it doesn't feel out of place, but if you're actually trying to be productive it's a horror-show. I had a 3 hour meeting a few weeks back, and then another meeting directly after it which was a summary of the previous meeting.

Add to that the fact that 90% of the company are incapable of being on time to those meetings, and you can probably guess as to one of the reasons I'm moving on to another company. The meetings are usually also at short notice and the person who requests it will universally be late to their own meeting.

I see excessive meetings and calls as a failure of written communication skills. The people I see organising the most meetings are also those who are least adept at understanding writing, and the worst at communicating via it themselves. There's definitely an art to being a good written communicator, and maybe there should be more emphasis placed on it when recruiting in tech roles.

<comment><USER22> I must work at the same place

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> True story:

A project I was on earlier in the year was full on Agile, with _constant_ meetings - daily standups, weekly retrospectives, weekly scrum-of-scrums, weekly reviews/demos, bi-weekly product backlog refinements, weekly story refinements, weekly product backlog planning, weekly sprint planning, frequent meetings about git branching strategies and near daily "way of working" meetings. And of course there were some relatively meaningful small meetings closely related to actual development work.

Everyone was losing the will to live, including myself - there simply wasn't enough time to actually _work_!

I had a word with the project manager, and with a totally casual manner he said: "OK, let's have a meeting with the whole team to discuss it".

<comment><USER24> It's easy to poke fun but this seems like a 100% reasonable response when the alternative is changing the entire schedule of the entire team based on the feedback of a single person. And it doesn't seem like any one person should be attending all of these meetings (agreed it's definitely too many though).

<comment><USER23> > It's easy to poke fun but this seems like a 100% reasonable response when > the alternative is changing the entire schedule of the entire team based on > the feedback of a single person

So, it's meant to be an amusing anecdote on HN; I haven't told the entire story of the project :) The PM had heard this from several other team members alread, several times. The difference is I was tech lead, so he listened a bit more to me, and I was also quite adamant this time (I'd tried to tell him more politely numerous times).

> And it doesn't seem like any one person should be attending all of these > meetings

Bingo, this was the biggest problem - the project manager in particular was bad for telling irrelevant people to join meetings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is probably controversial, but I generally disagree with the popular HN sentiment that great progress is accomplished by groups of people working together in teams. My view is that the greatest work is done in isolation by individuals, with the occasional conference to stay up-to-date on new ideas. This isn't to say that individuals accomplish great feats entirely on their own (which undoubtedly is almost never the case), but merely that almost all productive work is done independently.

If I ran my own company, I would ban almost all meetings and limit the most crucial ones to 15 minutes tops. And while my company might fail due to a misplaced sense of schadenfreude, it's a risk I'm willing to take to get experimental verification of whether meetings are actually as valuable as everyone claims they are.

<comment><USER26> I work with people like that. They're extremely siloed and they make decisions in a vacuum. It always ends up creating problems for everyone else. Then when we actually do have meetings, they don't want to collaborate or discuss, they just want everything immediately, end of discussion. It doesn't work.

If you don't want to work with other people, move out into the woods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I call BS. Meetings make me lose the will to live & drove me to quitting my job multiple times. If you want to make sure I don''t do anything during the day, put in a meeting in the middle of it.

Perhaps it helps people who have pointless jobs that create no value?

<comment><USER28> I call your BS call :)

There is nothing better than a day with nicely spaced meetings

My current Project on every second wednesday:

10:00-10:30 Daily Standup

11:00-12:00 Architect Jour Fix

12:00-12:30 Lunchbreak

13:00-14:00 Sprint Retro

15:00-16:00 Sprint Planning

Most of the gaps have a reason (conflicting meetings, etc) We use those gaps to "transfer knowledge". That basically means we sit in the cafeteria chatting about work or non-work relatet stuff, planning our weekends, etc.

<comment><USER29> Wait, you're actually putting that forward as a good day? That boggles my mind...if you come in at 9, get settled, you have maybe 45 minutes to work. Then, until 14-15, you have NO one hour stretch, then you have just one more stretch from 16-17...when do you actually code?? Don't you need a couple hours of focused time?

<comment><USER30> As an Architect, I'd rather have six hours of meetings, and one hour of documentation, than eight hours straight of being at a computer. In some jobs - meetings are the work. Meetings are influencing, are negotiating, are discussing, are communicating. And all of that is best done face to face.

<comment><USER31> That's orthogonal to the fragmentation. Probably two thirds of my job is meetings, but I'm ruthless about compacting them so that the remaining third isn't a scattered forty five minutes at a time

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've had times when a pointless meeting with too many participants was a welcome break. Of course, just reducing the work week and having more free time would be a lot better. But I'll take what I can get.

</comment><comment><USER33> This articles reminds me of Parkinson's Law: "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law)

Without efficient ways of doing things managers want more people doing things like them. Like the traffic problem doesn't get better with more lanes.

<comment><USER17> Exactly and the point I was going to make, and pointed at in the article (toward the end).

Uncosted inputs will be used to the limits of tolerance of costed inputs.

Time is a near-universal uncosted input, at least in internal allocation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> One of the things you realize quickly as you manage is that there is a more bimodal distribution of preferences for socializing among engineers. I don't want to fall into stereotypes, but there are some people that don't like meetings (aggressively) and are pretty outspoken about it.

There are a number of people that kind of enjoy it as a form of socializing. That obviously doesn't apply to overly long, poorly structured meetings that waste time. But a sizeable (mostly) silent group of people appreciate reasonably scheduled and structured meetings in the way described in this article. To each their own.

<comment><USER35> I don't like meetings because they are not "productive time", but I do like them because they do, as you wrote, fulfill my socialization needs. Onsite meetings work way better for me in that regard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> As unpopular as it might be - I kinda like open offices for this reason. (work type dependent).

Having the 4x mission critical managers sitting in a cluster & overhearing each other's conversations did wonders for keeping everyone on the same wavelength - without meetings.

[offtopic]

Was a bit of an eye opener how powerful that can be. 40 man team, insane yearly sprint-like pressure for 2.5 months solid. Everything continuously on fire basically...but it's fine as long as the center holds. Also had an interesting effect on team morale - they're a lot happier to charge into battle if they're confident leadership is unified.

</comment><comment><USER37> WTF? Venting might be arguably beneficial in some cases, but in many companies employees don't get to vent in a meeting.

Rather, they have to endure demands, complaints and display of status from management - which is the opposite of therapy.

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

One of the reasons of pointless meeting is to keep busy and appear busy - <USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs)

<comment><USER38> The article is, in part, suggesting that it's exactly those kind of status- conscious people who benefit from 'meeting therapy':

"Academics from the University of Malmo in Sweden say meetings provide an outlet for people at work to show off their status or to express frustration."

But yep, that might not be ideal for a participant who would prefer to be making progress on something else. I've seen a bunch of tech companies start to suggest to employees that they can and should leave meetings if they don't feel like their presence is important.

<comment><USER37> "outlet for people at work" hints that benefits everybody, or the majority.

"outlet for management" sounds quite different.

<comment><USER38> Yep; I'd imagine that's an intentional distinction by the author. Some people might act this way regardless of whether they move between a management or individual contributor role.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> There's an interesting hatred of meetings by software engineers, and I think it's to far on the hatred spectrum. There's definitely a lot to hate about meetings and they are very poorly run in general. But the argument of "when do you do actual work!" is not a good one. If you run an organization of 200 people, it's a lot more effective for 25 people to spend all of their time making the efficiency of the team, and impact of the team on the business as high as possible, than it is to increase the team size to 225. If those 25 people can, through messy meetings, debates, and emotional outbursts, somehow make 200 ppl twice as effective, that's great!

I think a better framing for meetings is not by looking at the battle, but the war. Individually, yeah it can suck. But the goal is to ensure a large amount of individuals march in the same direction, toward the same goal, and are progressing the business forward. Some amount of work is needed for that.

Let's optimize for maximizing that impact, not how "good" the process feels.

<comment><USER40> Coding takes an enormous amount of concentration and headspace. Meetings are context switches that make retaining focus much harder. That's why coders hate them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> They aren't therapy for me. It takes me a while to get into the zone if I'm doing anything that I would consider "creative" as far as coding. Incessant meetings break up my day into chunks that aren't useful. I don't mind status meetings but a recent job turned into 3 or 4 meetings a day for half and hour at a time and that destroys my day and creates a lot of stress. I think sending a status to the team once a day is fine. If you want my attention email me and we'll set something up. This public flogging that managers like to pull at meetings really is stress inducing.

</comment><comment><USER42> I feel fairly alarmed and skeptical at the idea of managers being therapists, not because I think it's a bad idea — in fact I think it ought to be a good one — but because in my experience, most of the folks asking for your vulnerability in the business world aren't willing to off any in turn.

<comment><USER43> No, its not the managers who are therapists. Everyone forced to go to their meetings are providing free therapy for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I have found that our daily standup calls are fairly therapeutic for those involved. Occasionally, a call will start with a very salty conversation regarding some topic from the prior day or concerns around schedules, but every single time it eventually evolves into a productive call. Sometimes this takes 20 seconds, sometimes this takes 20 minutes. I have a bad habit of trying to pre-empt or quench a salty exchange in progress, which usually escalates the situation further. I've found the best thing someone on the sidelines of a heated or otherwise pointless exchange can do is to come up with a completely different topic, or propose some sort of compromise. But, at the end of the day it can really help some people when you just let them yell it out for a few minutes on the phone. Doing this all the time is obviously not healthy for team dynamics, but there is always some happy medium between extremes.

One other thing that can help a lot is to have structured calls and ways for people to flag things for mandatory discussion. If I am on a call that starts going sideways, having some established process where I can say something like "Hey guys, can we take a look at <some bucket of flagged items>?" can very quickly right the ship. What this does is effectively remind everyone that we are here to do a job with certain degree of professionalism and diligence. Everyone also has a vested interest in getting to the bucket of review items, because these are usually the topics creating the most stress day-to-day, and talking through them with the team is an excellent means to relieve much of that stress.

</comment><comment><USER45> It's therapy for the worst kinds of people. For productive people, meetings are horrible; akin to sitting there and watching a bunch of monkeys howling and banging on their chests to maximize the amount of bananas that they're going to get at the end of the month.

</comment><comment><USER46> > Academics from the University of Malmo in Sweden say meetings provide an > outlet for people at work to show off their status or to express > frustration.

Yup, see this all the time, and it's one of the reasons I try to avoid most of them. Nothing gets done, half the people aren't really prepared, and the usual outcome is the guys with the biggest egos sound off and make themselves feel important and everyone else just has a good old moan.

It may be therapy for them, but I'd rather not be there, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER43> "Many managers don't know what to do," he says, and when they are "unsure of their role", they respond by generating more meetings.

Another reason that we should have less managers and instead elevate engineers into dual engineer/executive positions.

</comment><comment><USER47> I once talked to a manager about how meeting seemed like a waste of time, he said he loved meetings because it meant people were working together and getting things done.

That made me think, that meetings were about making people feel that their work was meaningful when it wasn't. Basically, if you do meaningful work, you don't need meetings, but if its the other way around, meetings make total sense.

<comment><USER48> The problem with that is it is very easy for someone to get a lot of work done in something useless. It is very easy to keep adding more and more features to product X not realizing the the product will never sell enough to make the investment in releasing it worth it: you would be just as useful to the company by taking a nap. Meetings are how you get everybody on the same page on these things. Of course if it is obvious the product won't pay off you send a memo to everyone. However more likely it is a combination of the marketing person doing some productions of sales, engineering projecting how much effort is left, and then someone senior deciding if we need to invest anyway because the loss leader is still worth it for other reasons...

None of this is to say you are wrong though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> The problem I experience with meetings is that often times the information presented is only tangentially related to you.

I hate it when I'm in a meeting and it ends up a conversation between two people. It's stressful if you have an expectation to get something done but also an expectation to sit in a meeting you realize really doesn't pertain to you.

<comment><USER50> Once upon a time, this was the point of circulating 'minutes' or a summary after meetings.

Outside of some special cases (e.g. the Federal Reserve), they're specifically meant to reflect _conclusions_ , not the full course of discussion. Back-and- forth that reaches an answer isn't needed, and a debate that ends unresolved would just read as a summary of the positions. That way, you can invite the people who need to speak in a meeting, while anyone who just needs to be informed about the result can catch up from a shorter, async source.

It seems like easy video recording and calling have been one reason for the decline - minutes were handy if someone couldn't make the meeting, but now they can dial in or watch it afterwards. That's great for not having to create a summary, but I think it loses much of the value of a concise, written record of what happened.

<comment><USER48> Depends on the minutes. I've seen some where the entire minutes where things like "Heard the report from the director of X on the state of Y". I would like to know if the department in question is a useful use of my tax dollars, so I really want to know what the state of Y is, but I'll probably need to do a FOIA request to get it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> We have a 1hr weekly with just the SWE's that is definitely therapeutic. We basically just poke fun at whatever stupid things happened during the week, while still keeping our teammates abreast of our progress on tasks. It's 1 hr once per week and I definitely want to take it to my next workplace

</comment><comment><USER52> "People often feel marginalised. They feel that they have no influence or position. In these cases, the perception is that meetings do not improve anything, but actually cause even more frustration."

Literally the last paragraph hits the nail on the head for, I'd wager, the vast majority of people.

<comment><USER53> I agree with you, but I want to add some precision to this. In some meetings I feel powerless, and I find them absolutely horrible. In other meetings I have a voice anytime I want to use it, and I feel powerful, and I wouldn't miss them for anything less than a diarrhea poisoning incident.

Edit: In most meetings I feel neutral and disaffected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> The text kind of reads to me like those meetings are therapeutic mostly for the people that cannot really justify having a job there to begin with... This really reminds me of David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" and the solution to that would be a restructuring of society that doesn't require being in an employer/employee situation to be a valuable part of society.

</comment><comment><USER55> Important context quote: "Instead he says there has been a rise of managerial roles, which are often not very well defined, and where "the hierarchy is not that clear"."

So this article doesn't apply to tech-focused organizations. For sure, meetings are still relevant there, but should trend to fewer not more

</comment><comment><USER56> > _Prof Hall says as a result, meetings can become "maligned somewhat > unnecessarily". But he argues that negativity towards meetings can be > because their real purposes are misunderstood... the real purpose of such > meetings might be to assert the authority of an organisation, so that > employees are reminded that they are part of it. Such meetings are not > really about making any decisions, he says._

We're supposed to feel less negativity towards meetings once we realize that its a way for the organization to assert its power over us? Reading this article only made me feel more negativity toward meetings, not less. What kind of an egotistical blowhard would prefer wasting his team's time and productivity, just to assert his own power and feel better about himself

<comment><USER57> I would argue that the purpose is not tyranny, but to make you feel like you are part of a team, and that people's progress is being checked on.

If tou start feeling "whether I do honest work or slack, it makes no difference" you might start losing motivation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Can anyone find the original paper? The press release is here: [https://mau.se/en/news/work-meetings-have-an-unwarranted- bad...](https://mau.se/en/news/work-meetings-have-an-unwarranted-bad- reputation/)

<comment><USER59> The Swedish version of the press release ([https://mau.se/nyheter/arbetslivets-moten-har-ofortjant- dali...](https://mau.se/nyheter/arbetslivets-moten-har-ofortjant-daligt- rykte/)) has a reference; it seems to be a book:

 _Mötesboken : Tolkningar av arbetslivets sammanträden och rosévinsmingel_ , by Malin Åkerström, Vesa Leppänen & Patrik Hall. (ISBN 978-91-984203-6-4)

[https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/publication/06a08c62-a8f3-43cc-...](https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/publication/06a08c62-a8f3-43cc- acbb-91a16f042c07)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> In other words, more and more people are being employed in pointless jobs.

There isn't enough actual work to go around, but everyone needs to be "employed". And since they subconsciously know that their jobs are pointless, they need to justify their existence through posturing and status and "visibility" and report production (which nobody reads) and endless meetings. Lots of activity, but little actual achievement. Middle management only ever grows @1, because everyone in the middle is in the same boat, and having more people under you makes you more important and less likely to lose your job or have your department cut.

@1: With the exception of the massive job purges the mega-corporations do once a decade or so.

</comment><comment><USER61> Oh I have no doubt that they're therapy... for certain people who need therapy. I even referred to a certain recurring meeting recently that always tends to be mostly a particular guy talking, as his therapy session. So I feel vindicated now!

</comment><comment><USER62> We are a manufacturing facility and the amount of meetings to discuss how to best implement LEAN, 6S, and kaizen has become comical. Many of these meetings indeed turn into complaint fests between managers from different groups.

</comment><comment><USER63> Makes me think of Ray Dalio on transparency and 'meaningful work'. I agree that people want to vent and be heard but as others have noted meetings turn into a way for management to reinscribe control and turn complaints back on the complainant (Learned helplessness,etc)

If we need meetings to define our job then that is pretty unclear management. If you dont see how your role pertains to the overall goals of the org and need meetings to figure this out then there is a general disfunction.

Meaningful work and the ability to give and receive feedback. Less meetings.

</comment><comment> kube-system I'm not sure meetings in most organizations are the result of people 'asserting authority' or people 'unsure of their role'. Almost no managers are calling meetings to fulfill some hidden agenda or personal gratification. Most are called by people who are legitimately trying to solve a problem.

They're just a product of a lazy/ineffective management style.

The problem is, proper task delegation requires a lot of work:

1\. understanding the problem (probably the hardest problem)

2\. understanding the organization and resources

3\. breaking down the problem

4\. assigning tasks appropriately

5\. managing time, both of the process, and the delegates of the tasks.

When a manager does this properly, it's not a very 'visible' process, so nobody really knows they've done all this work.

Alternatively, lazy managers can just call everyone into a room and let them figure out everything. It doesn't require any upfront planning or understanding of the problem. And it comes with the bonus of high-visibility.

TL;DR: meetings are the result of lazy management.

</comment><comment><USER64> The article lacks one important detail: number of companies studied. Because frankly, it sounds a lot like n=1, and generalizing from one (or possibly a few) dysfunctional examples is a fallacy.

And even if there were an overall trend: not addressing other scenarios seems like a substantial omission regardless.

The article makes it sound like the whole world needs status validation and/or a place to vent. I know enough places where stuff like that gets shut down, hard.

</comment><comment><USER40> If you're a meeting maker, one thing to consider is that a one hour meeting for eight people is equivalent (maybe at a minimum) to 12 hours work. Ask yourself, if I could achieve what that meeting will achieve by spending 12 hours working alone in a room, would I see that as a good use of my time? Because that's what you're doing. Meetings had better be damn important and genuinely require active participation from all attendees.

</comment><comment><USER65> There's also the class of pointless meeting where nontechnical managers don't understand what they're responsible for so use them to as a way to "manage by feel". They call them to see what people's reactions are to fishing questions to judge the situation, and to use them as training sessions. These I find to be the most counterproductive meetings.

</comment><comment><USER66> People should decline pointless meetings.

<comment><USER29> An interesting idea...supposedly at Tesla and SpaceX, Elon recommended that anyone who found a meeting to be pointless should get up and leave immediately. I don't know if that's still the practice, maybe someone from those companies can chime in.

<comment><USER67> That has presumably worked _for Elon_...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> The ideas are not knew here, and I am largely sympathetic, but it's really funny to hear what is usually normally presented in David Graeber "you should relate to this and be mad" form here presented presented in dry "studies show..." form.

</comment><comment><USER69> I don't disagree with the article. Without articulating it, I always thought so--precisely that makes many meetings so infuriating for me personally. I don't have the job title of therapist or actor/background extra.

</comment><comment><USER59> Original source, in Swedish:

[https://mau.se/nyheter/arbetslivets-moten-har-ofortjant- dali...](https://mau.se/nyheter/arbetslivets-moten-har-ofortjant-daligt- rykte/)

</comment><comment><USER29> Isn't this title a contradiction? They aren't pointless meetings if they are therapeutic for the attendees. Now, what about pointless AND non-therapeutic, is that possible?

</comment><comment><USER70> Sounds like a local maximum at the organisational scale.

</comment><comment><USER71> This reminds me of open-plan offices. What a nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER72> If your meetings are non productive blame yourself and start proposing topics thay result in actionable innovations.

</comment><comment><USER73> Pointless work meetings always fatigue me quickly...

</comment><comment><USER74> yxIjdy;6;d

</comment><comment><USER75> It makes sense, since most therapy is about as useful as pointless work meetings.</comment>


Ask HN: Emergency preparedness kit subscription service - <AUTHOR> Building and maintaining a proper emergency preparedness kit is difficult. First, you need to know what items, food, and water to purchase based on your household. Second, everything expires at different times requiring you to continually replace certain items and food. Third, if you look to purchase everything at once, up front,  you'll face sticker shock.
How about an emergency preparedness subscription service that allows you to pick a level of preparedness, input your household composition, and then allows you to build and maintain an emergency kit over time?
I'd appreciate any feedback on this idea. Thank you! <comment><USER2> I'd pay for it, if it was reasonably priced. I built a pair of these, one for myself, and one for my wife, and it was really a bit of a pain. I still don't really feel happy about the kits (do i have exaclty waht I want? Are the first aid kits good enough? etc)

One thing that would be nice is to have a whole suite of code around it. Some ideas:

\- email me when 6 mos, 3 mos etc before my food/meds expire

\- make products, etc customizable. For example, allow me to pick if I want a filter straw, or a water boiling kit, etc.

\- group needs and resources by different types of situations. So I know that I am covered in a hurricane, but maybe not in an earthquake. I dunno.

Oh, and you can do a preparedness blog as marketing

<comment><USER3> Absolutely agreed on this. I'm not much into subscription boxes, but this one sounds legitimately useful - particularly because keeping emergency kits up to date is one of their biggest pain points.

I would suggest it should just include refills of semi-perishables that are nearing their expiration date (with a reminder to consume the old ones) rather than an email reminder.

> \- group needs and resources by different types of situations. So I know > that I am covered in a hurricane, but maybe not in an earthquake. I dunno.

This is a good point. For instance, I'm very unlikely to experience flooding or lose power due to even the worst storm, but a significant earthquake where I live - rare but possible - would be absolutely devastating. As in, lucky to be alive at all after the first big tremor.

Additionally, what one has room to store and the challenges one would face in the case of a generic disaster probably differ somewhat between Manhattan vs the suburbs of Dallas.</comment></comment>


A Snowball's Chance In Hell : IronRuby - <AUTHOR> http://openmymind.net/2010/8/7/A-Snowballs-Chance-In-Hell-IronRuby

<comment><USER3> I agree with some points in this article, but there are dangerous points here as well.

Its dubious to say that in the face of Windows and Office, Ruby is not worth investing in - in the face of windows and Office, NOTHING is worth investing in.

This is a common business trap - why spend money on insignificant businesses when you already have giant product lines - that many companies fall into. Microsoft has already done it with Windows Mobile and IE, and is trying to avoid the same fate with its ZuneOS and Cloud Computing offerings.

<comment><USER4> Microsoft's situation is indeed a common business trap but it's more than a conceptual trap. It's a strategic trap. MS has reached a local maximum in it's profit potential. Any change in course would impact it's "golden reputation for solid profits".

A company caught in a local maximum might really be unable to escape the situation, in that the purse holders are simply unwilling to open the purse for investments on a scale necessary to get into a different position. And they have a point.

"You want to take these golden goose eggs and invest in diamond mining? No, we keep the goose eggs, that's what they are there for!"

IE, companies don't exist a priori to grow and grow. A company exists to grow, become profitable and return the profits to the owners hot little hands.

"in the face of windows and Office, NOTHING is worth investing in." - <USER2> might indeed be true. And it might the case that the only thing MS really is throw enough money at different project to keep from _seeming_ like the abusive rent-extractor that its market position makes it.

<comment><USER5> Your description of those monopoly strategies reminds me of the resource curse:

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _Ruby almost exclusively runs on Linux (for the server) and Mac (for the > desktop)_

<http://rubyinstaller.org/> would care to disagree. It's just that it's included by default on many Unixes/BSDs (/GNUs/what-have-yous). Windows includes utterly _squat_ for development of any kind on a fresh install; the exact same statement could have been made for _any_ language.

Literally. You can't compile C out of the box either, nor any .Net code. Does that mean nobody programs in C or .Net on Windows?

<comment><USER7> Ruby itself might run fine on Windows, but the fact is that the majority of Ruby developers use Mac or Linux and cares exactly _zero_ about Windows, which means that _a lot_ of libraries etc. doesn't work on Windows. So, while possible, using Ruby on Windows is an uphill battle.

<comment><USER8> It's not exhaustive, but two years ago I asked "the community" what they thought on Microsoft and Ruby and.. [http://www.rubyinside.com/is-windows-a- first-class-platform-...](http://www.rubyinside.com/is-windows-a-first-class- platform-for-ruby-823.html)

At Euruko 2008, I chaired the evening panel and brought it up too. A room of 400 people went to silence when I asked if Windows support was considered important to Rubyists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this article is reading way too much into the issue. I'm guessing Microsoft canned IronRuby because there weren't enough people using it to justify the continued development required to keep up with the canonical version.

<comment><USER10> Completely agree. I also completely disagree with the author that it's in Microsoft's best interests to handcuff its developers to its platform. That strategy might have made sense when Microsoft was still the 800lb gorilla lording over the entire market. Now that they have some real competition they're going to have to compete like everybody else: by making the best products they can that people use by choice.

If anything they've clung to their old monopolies so long that they've seriously jeopardized their future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Such nonsense. Bill Gates' Microsoft would've put hundreds of developers on IronRuby and ensured it was the fastest and the most feature rich implementation there is. Just like they did with C++, Java and JavaScript.

BTW Windows is completely useless for any serious Ruby development/hosting. There are a ton of bugs in networking, threading, GC.

<comment><USER12> It took Microsoft a long time to get a C++ compiler out that was worthy of the name. Templates were so unusable that they were the laughingstock of comp.lang.c++ for much of the 90s. J++ was merely a trap for the unwary, lacking several important interoperability features (JNI and RMI come to mind) and promptly abandoned when a judge prevented them from poisoning the Java ecosystem. Think twice before you rely on them to faithfully implement a standard.

<comment><USER13> I seem to remember Visual Studio having a better C++ compiler than gcc for quite a while -- at least through the whole egcs fork. Some of the templating stuff didn't work in VS6, but I think that was pretty universally true for all compilers through 2003 or so. Or am I misremembering?

<comment><USER12> The way I remember it, Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 in 1998 was their first compiler that handled just about everything I could do with Borland C++ 3.0 back in 1991. Each of these was disappointing, but Microsoft's earlier releases were just about useless. I didn't do much with GCC until later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Regardless of the importance of IronRuby for Microsoft (next to zero), the author is right in assuming Microsoft wants to make it easy to port your stuff to Windows, but devilishly hard to port anything Windows to anything else.

Having languages that can be used on both sides of the fence breeds a generation of developers that can jump the fence anytime. This is death for them. They will never encourage it.

<comment><USER15> But they can't be used on both sides - you port your ruby program to windows and then you start using .NET libraries (and there are a ton of them, many of which are good). Initially it might just be a couple to make a simple GUI, then you add more and more and in the end you have to rewrite the program if you want to get away from Microsoft.

So I don't get their problem.

<comment><USER14> Their reasoning must be either that they find the native and cross-platform Ruby libraries to bee "good enough" or that rubyists that port their work to Windows do it in a way they keep the core cross-platform and the GUI thin and easily portable.

It would be interesting to have a WinGlade/WPFGlade GUI library that used the GUI descriptors Glade generates to build native Windows interfaces on-the-fly. That would make life very easy for porters. It's so interesting I find it unlikely I am the first to have this idea. Got to google it.

Would be even funnier to have a plugin for Visual Studio to "Save As Glade"...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Any argument that builds on protecting the cash cows for Microsoft is not helpful, either to Microsoft or to the community.

For big companies to survive long term, the main thing is to have the flexibility to do that. The most relevant example here is IBM, which almost didn't survive the 80s until they emphasized more system integration.

As humanity progresses, demands will change. Microsoft has enough power, both in terms of number of employees and in cash, to pursue more than one option. Hence, many of the innovation coming from Microsoft Research can be very useful in the future. Moreover, one of the main advantages for Microsoft in the 80s and 90s was that they are friendly to developers. Of course there will eventually be a tie-in. You start using IronRuby, then you find ready .Net solutions to your programming, then you commit to using their database, and maybe visualisation via Excel, and you find yourself and your customers tied to the Windows/Office platform. Just like many companies are tied to IE6 despite what Microsoft wants and despite common sense.

Give developers no incentives at all, and they wander around. At some point, the clear division in tools makes people either commit to Microsoft or to everything else, and when Windows come short (and it will, nothing is forever) people will move in droves. But give them a semblance of cross compatibility, and they will stick to Windows/Office while convincing themselves that there is always a way out. In reality, they will be locked by the economics of rewriting all the use of .Net technologies.

Bad for the community, because splitting the community into Microsoft and others camps will lessen competition in both sides. Cross pollination will C# and Ruby will not exist when there is no shared community. And no improvements will be needed in either camp because of new features in the other.

</comment><comment><USER17> Where is this "Microsoft killed IronRuby" thing coming from? Sure, the lead developer quit, but that doesn't mean it's officially been shut down, all support removed, etc... not to mention that it's an open source project. Did I just miss something?

<comment><USER8> It didn't kill it. It did something worse. It withdrew enough resources and manpower from the project to effectively kill it without saying as much.

Now it's obvious why IronRuby was relicensed under the Apache License just a few weeks back.. no-one would have bothered picking up the reins if they hadn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Weren't you recently complaining about the MVP selection process? If non ms platforms are so superior, why do you spend so much time flaming MSFT? Seems like it's time to move on

<comment><AUTHOR> Not exactly recently; and for the record, that post made the MVP program more transparent than its ever been (thanks to some detailed in-the-know commenters).

The world you would live in is full of sycophants. The only people you'd have talk about XYZ would be people who love XYZ. You would dismiss anyone who thinks better alternatives exist.

Q: "Hey, isn't this antenna problem awesome?" A: "It ROCKS!!!! Its like a super cool game!"

Q: "Dude, don't you love how this page doesn't render well in IE?" A: "Oh Man, we get to play with HTML and CSS for the next hour!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wasn't this the same argument made when Apple acted like a douche and banned certain tools for iphone app development? It didn't make sense then and it doesn't make sense now. How is providing better tools for development on any platform dilute that platform? This is honestly a stupid argument and people should stop putting it forward.</comment>


Something I made: Context free art in javascript+canvas - <AUTHOR> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6600185/cfa/cfademo.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I've reached a point where I needed to lift my head up from bootstrapping and see what else was on the horizon.

So, I spent a bit of time programming just for fun, and here's the result.

It turned out that someone else (Aza Raskin) had already done this, but thankfully I didn't discover it until I was finished: [http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/contextfreejs-algorithm- ink-...](http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/contextfreejs-algorithm-ink-making- art-with-javascript/)

Enjoy!</comment>


Show HN: Quick animations – Put words in characters mouths - 100-xyz https://toonclip.com/quickie <comment> 100-xyz Enter the sentence you want the character to say.

Choose a character Choose export format (gif/mp4/webm) Click GO

The resulting animation can be shared on Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Wechat...</comment>


Fast computation of scalar products, and some lessons in optimization - <AUTHOR> http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2011/08/11/fast-computation-of-scalar-products-and-some-lessons-in-optimization/comment-page-1/#comment-54631 <comment><USER2> Was about to submit this, and the search revealed this comment that's very relevant: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2857938>

This kind of optimization is often very important. Unfortunately what works changes often and it's hard to guess what will work -- which is why it's good to do these micro-benchmarks.</comment>


Google Ad Planner - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/adplanner/

<comment><USER2> I can't even see what it is without agreeing to terms of service. No thanks.

<comment><USER3> About w/o legal: [http://www.google.com/support/adplanner/bin/topic.py?topic=1...](http://www.google.com/support/adplanner/bin/topic.py?topic=14714)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Keyword affinity for news.ycombinator.com:

hacker news: 1700.0x, whois: 25.0x, google analytics: 19.0x, google voice: 14.0x, tiger woods: 7.4x, avatar: 7.4x, brittany murphy: 4.6x, amazon: 1.9x

So Google thinks Hacker News readers 4.6x more likely than the average internet user to search for "brittany murphy"?

I wonder how accurate this stuff is. It'd interesting if pg (or anyone else with a site large enough to show up) could confirm/deny the accuracy of the results...

<comment><USER5> I don't know about keyword affinity, but traffic stats are very accurate based on ~15 sites I tested (ranging from small to large).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The strange thing is that I can't for the life of me find a way to take the list of placements generated by this tool and hook it up to a campaign in AdWords. That's sort of the point, right?

No buttons on either Adwords or AdPlanner referring to the other. No "Link Accounts" button. This would be gold, if only we could use it to do real work.

<comment><USER6> Workaround:

      - export to .csv
      - open in excel
      - copy 1st column
      - paste into placement tool

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ha. Using the tool for google.com doesnt work.

Facebook is getting 320 Billion page views a month worldwide...

</comment><comment><USER8> And this is news how?</comment>


Ask HN: What's your experience like working with Kubernetes operators? - <AUTHOR> https://brown.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_2snI8123lx2MPg9 <comment><USER2> Pretty bad experience to be honest. Still very technical and hard to use</comment>


Public Enemy: quotes from the Martin Shkreli jury selection process - <AUTHOR> https://harpers.org/archive/2017/09/public-enemy/ <comment><USER2> So does the fact that so many people know about and despise Shkreli mean that the jury selection process will select for people who are less informed or don't reflect the values of the general population (Or just people who are willing to lie about their ability to be impartial)? Is there a term for this, or how is this accounted for in the process?

<comment><USER3> Actually the people who hate Shkreli are almost universally under-informed.

Listen to the man speak for 5 minutes, instead of listening to the media's portrayal of him, and you'll learn he's an intelligent guy doing no harm.

Nobody was priced out of being able to get Daraprim. Only 2000 people take it. 70% of it was given away FREE to people who said they couldn't afford it. Insurance companies paid the increased price. Drug prices are a very small percentage of the costs insurance companies pay (most of it going towards doctors' fees IIRC). The extra profit was put into researching improvements on Daraprim, which was a 70 (?) year old drug. The only reason Shkreli's company even acquired the rights to Daraprim is because other companies couldn't make enough money on it to want to keep making it.

<comment><USER4> Martin Shkreli has a pretty active YouTube channel with pretty solid stuff about Finance, Investing and Organic Chemistry. Of course, his live sessions are a bit tedious but can be insightful. Based on the videos, I found him intelligent and fairly geeky. The media portrayal did not do him justice, I guess that is the case with pretty much every one.

<comment><USER5> Martin purposely feeds into the image the media created for him as this greedy capitalist big-pharma monster.

You can see him do it sarcastically on Twitter and see how effective it works.

It's a common tactic these days to exploit the tendency for the news to breathlessly cover insignificant/minor actions of fringe people and blow them up into these exaggerated caricatures of powerful people that need to be stopped/fired/shut down/etc.

When it reality the entire 'power' of these 'monsters' is due to their subsequent notoriety in the media. This is how they gained their following and how they grow it.

If they were ignored they would go back to being nobodies.

The same thing is happening to many people the media calls 'alt-right' and (actual) white supremacists. They're useful idiots for lazy journalists and motivated political groups looking for exaggerated adversaries from which they can rescue the world from.

The media hands them power, which makes them _seem_ powerful and influential. Then a small group of people willing to ignore the 'bad' stuff being said about them, or they actually research it and see it was all blown out of proportion, then joins their cause - people who would otherwise have never heard of them.

The wonderful side effect of outrage culture is that it fuels the things they are outraged about and in many ways becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's far deeper implications to insisting the media takes a balanced and reasoned approach to their coverage than simply having class.

<comment><USER6> What can be done to make sure the incentives don't align?

Right now the fringe groups get what they want through "any publicity = good publicity" and low effort journos get what they want through stirring up fake outrage and getting more views by writing exaggerated clickbait about these fringe groups.

Thus they both keep doing what they're doing, which poisons the public debate (by making fringe groups seem more significant than they are, sometimes to the point of drowning out the more reasonable voices)

<comment><USER5> The only hope is that the people on the both sides see the flaws in both of their failed strategies.

In the current form that means that

a) the left realizes their obsession with outrage culture have taken fringe, nobody, groups like the 'alt-right' and made them powerful, when they otherwise wouldn't have been. While also making Trump look like an oppressed underdog speaking the 'truth' against a barage of largely overblown exageration and fear mongering. As well as having empowered a number of unhelpful leftist groups in their own ranks who only further alienate their cause amongst the centrists whom they desperately need.

b) the right realizes they will need to see beyond emotional gratification of having fringe groups like Trump and 'alt-right' gain new found power at the left's expense and look for the actual ROI these groups bring. People who gain power through controversy are only good at controversy, smart rational people are needed if you want good productive output.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this is so important and less reflective of either Shkreli or the legal system, rather it shines a bright light on how many people are struggling to afford both adequate healthcare/drug coverage and simple can't afford their own prescriptions and as a result do not/can not take them.

It is a damn shame. It is also a damn shame people in this country have to be in court/under oath (potential jury members are during the selection process) to admit to these financial shortcomings, because such admissions of financial difficulty are social stigmas that almost anyone would try to avoid admitting (it's the same with millions who were in foreclosure during the Great Recession who would never admit it).

</comment><comment><USER8> I understand that Martin may not be popular to many people, but everyone deserves a fair trial, even those who are repugnant. I am glad that these people recognized that they were biased and spoke up, rather than taint the jury.

<comment><USER9> True honesty should always be commended, but I have to wonder: how many of those folks just wanted out of jury duty?

<comment><USER10> definitely this one:

      juror no. 52: When I walked in here today I looked at him, and in my head, that's a snake — not knowing who he was. I just walked in and looked right at him and that's a snake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How many of these people just wanted to get out of jury duty. I did jury duty a couple years ago and it was entertaining how hard some people tried to appear impartial so they would be excused.

Lawyer - "Do you think people have the right to self-defense?"

Potential juror - "No. If someone shoots at you, it's murder if you shoot back."

<comment><USER12> Except there are places (like Canada) where if you shoot back, this is prima facie evidence that you were violating the safe storage laws.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure you can legally defend yourself in Canada in the event of a life threatening situation. If someone breaks into your house and is trying to kill you, you have the right to defend yourself but don't have the right to cause them death or grievous bodily harm.

Canadian Bill C26 Self-defence against unprovoked assault 34\. (1) Every one who is unlawfully assaulted without having provoked the assault is justified in repelling force by force if the force he uses is not intended to cause death or grievous bodily harm and is no more than is necessary to enable him to defend himself.

I read a story about some man swatting at a Raccoon with a broom that almost got 2 years in prison. That's more time than what a rapist or child molester might spend behind bars. There was another story about a Chinese corner store owner who apprehended a thief who had been stealing from him regularly and almost went to prison for it. It's scary proposition when it comes to defending yourself. If you cause any harm to the assailant you will be prosecuted. The law in Canada typically favors the criminal.

<comment><USER14> If Canada actually favoured the criminal you would be saying "went to prison" instead of "almost went to prison".

<comment><USER13> What I meant is the system favors the criminal but the public uproar most likely saved the Chinese store owner and the Raccoon man escaped with probation and fines and public shaming. He begged for his life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >>> juror no. 59: And he disrespected the Wu-Tang Clan.

clearly the best reason to be biased

<comment><USER16> Disclaimer: I'm a huge fan of Shkreli. Great guy, excellent financial instincts, pharma wizard etc.

I'm surprised he didn't get assassinated for some of that stuff with Wu-Tang, especially in NY. I know I've been waiting a new full-featured Wu-tang album for a LOOOONG time, and I know a lot of new yorkers were too. Multiply that anger by several million people and media deception, it shocks me that he's still around.

The lesson I've learned about all this is the value in nobody knowing your name. Shkreli was fucked over HARD by the media, he's really just a cool guy playing the game, and they spin him as this terrible evil mastermind.

He used to stream all the time, you couldn't watch him for more than five minutes before falling in love with him. He's a man of the people in the truest sense. More than anyone I've ever met.

I hope he finds a way through all this.

<comment><USER17> I don't follow Shkreli closely but him sexually harassing journalist Lauren Duca (he still continues to do this: "when I'm acquitted, I'm going to fuck Lauren Duca") makes him very much not a "man of the people in the truest sense".

<comment><USER16> What's not manly about that? I'd fuck Lauren too. Granted, I might not tweet it out quite like that, but yeah.

You don't get to determine morality based off someone's speech, only off their actions.

Until they actually fuck, it's that big of a deal. People that complain about mean things online were recently attacking people with dangerous weapons the other day. I have become suspicious of most people who want to gatekeep other people, it's usually a signal that they have no respect for the concept of personal property and human rights.

<comment><USER17> Speech is an action, I'm not sure why that isn't obvious.

Your denial of it, and the weird generalizations you're making, make me think you're not actually open to rethinking any of this. Oh well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anyone surprised by this has never sat _voir dire_. No one on earth is as biased and judgmental as the yokels trying to get out of jury duty claim to be. Both times I've gone through this I was hoping the judge would start handing out contempt of court citations.

<comment><USER19> In Washington, DC, nobody but the judge and the lawyers gets to hear what the potential juror says. I suppose it would diminish the boredom of the voir dire, but when juror _x_ gets sent back to the waiting room early or shuffled out of the box during the final cull, none of the other jurors have a clue what it is about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Many comments seem to be unaware that the trial is now over. He was convicted on 3 of 8 charges[1]. I guess one could argue that an extremely biased jury would just have convicted him on everything.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/business/dealbook/martin-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/business/dealbook/martin- shkreli-guilty.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> One should note that people come up with tons of crazy excuses for why they can't serve on a jury when they don't want to be there.

Source: I was in jury selection for a simple possession trial that lasted two fulls days, and watched peoples excuses become more and more elaborate as the process wore on.

<comment><USER22> Right. And I assume that this [EDIT: was expected to be] a long, high profile trial that most people would really prefer to not be empaneled for.

A while back I was called in for jury selection for a Grand Jury which would have involved something like 4 days a week for multiple months, i.e. completely awful from my perspective. The thing that surprised me in that case was that a fair number of people basically volunteered to be chosen--though many obviously did not. (The DA let them go through voir dire first before picking from people who were less inclined to do it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is this a story about what happens when potential jurors have access to Google prior to the interview?

Shkreli is internet-meme famous and not exactly a national celebrity. I'd be surprised if so many people would recognise him by name without having an omniscient device in their pocket, let alone sneak in an obscure reference to his Wu-Tang Clan album. I guess people don't know what the case is when they're invited to selection, but nowadays they find out some minutes or hours before the actual interview?

</comment><comment><USER3> It's sad that a bunch of idiots acting like this get to decide who is guilty and who is innocent.

In this case maybe he got lucky because they'd already heard of him and made their stupidity apparent straight away. But what if they hadn't? What if they only learnt about his drug pricing during the trial and then convicted him based on that?

<comment><USER18> That would have been an instant mistrial, since the charges had nothing to do with drug pricing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hilarious, but if those people really wanted to see Shkreli convicted they would pretend to be impartial.

<comment><USER18> Of course, what they _really_ want to do is not serve on a jury.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> As an outsider, why are juries not "blindfolded"? As in, given a fake name, only the transcribed testimonies, and relevant evidence. It's just strange that the accuseds identity and (potential) reputation could influence the trial (positively or negatively).

<comment><USER26> I think your answer is that just reading the transcripts would not be as good as hearing and observing the testimony.

The first thing that potential jurors are asked is if they know anyone in the courtroom, and this is in the presence of the judge, bailiffs, attorneys for both sides, defendant, and a few other people. If you answer that you do know someone, they ask if your knowledge of the person would prevent you from rendering an impartial verdict in the trial to come. The question of whether a potential juror knows a particular person comes up repeatedly.

In the trial I served on, the attorneys also informed us of the sexual orientation of the defendant and asked if that would be a problem.

The jury is allowed to form an opinion of the credibility of the statements of any of the players and use that to weigh anything said against anything else. But it will be from an opinion formed in the courtroom, not from a preexisting opinion, nor from internet research.

BTW I never had to serve the USA in the military, so I weigh the inconvenience of six or seven days of jury service spread over three or four weeks against the fact that my life was not in danger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Interesting transcript, but I would be actually more curious to see the transcript of the questions (and answers given by them) asked to the jurors that were actually selected.

</comment><comment><USER28> Ah, is this nonfiction?

</comment><comment><USER29> When will the US get rid of these juries? How can they seriously trust judicial decisions on random people?

<comment><USER30> It's like democracy: the worst system there is, except for all the others.

<comment><USER29> We don't have this system in Germany and it's clearly better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > I have several friends who have H.I.V. or AIDS who, again, can't afford the > prescription drugs that they were able to afford.

Skreli's defense for this is that the costs are primarily borne by insurance providers. I have no idea about US healthcare which seems a bit of a quagmire, is this true?

</comment><comment><USER32> Smart enough to land himself in prison .. is an oxymoron?

</comment><comment><USER33> Regardless of Martin's guilt or innocence (prior to conviction) this is virtue signalling at it's finest.

<comment><USER34> "It has become popular to describe certain behaviour as 'virtue signalling'. [...] As popular as it is, it's a stupid term that misuses the concepts it invokes, it encourages lazy thinking, and it's hypocritical.

The term signalling does not mean the same thing as 'saying' or 'showing off' when it is used by economists or biologists. Signalling means _credibly_ giving information that is difficult to prove just by saying it. For example, banks used to have very grand buildings. Any bank could claim to be safe, but only a bank that had lots of money could afford a grand office."

[https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/stop-saying-virtue- signalling](https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/stop-saying-virtue-signalling)

<comment><USER33> "Guano (from Quechua "wani" via Spanish) is the accumulated excrement of seabirds, seals, or cave-dwelling bats.[1] As a manure, guano is a highly effective fertilizer due to its exceptionally high content of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium: nutrients essential for plant growth."

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

In other words -- why do I give a shit what Adam Smith's opinion is?</comment></comment></comment>


Multi-Stage Docker Builds for Creating Tiny Go Images - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/travis-on-docker/multi-stage-docker-builds-for-creating-tiny-go-images-e0e1867efe5a <comment> awinter-py Holy crap, hadn't heard of this. Sounds like it's merged to master and coming down the pipe for 17.05. [https://docs.docker.com/engine/userguide/eng- image/multistag...](https://docs.docker.com/engine/userguide/eng- image/multistage-build/)

This solves a major pain point for many people working w/ dockerfiles.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep! Building smaller images is just one part of the story. There are other pains this helps with, the biggest for me delivering images with no unnecessary artifacts (uncompiled code, ssh keys when `go get`ing private repos, ...)

<comment> awinter-py yup. thanks for posting.

PS your safe sharing tool makes a lot of sense. email is nonsense for sharing sensitive docs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> For Go (as it is statically linked) you can use FROM SCRATCH. It's faster, smaller, easier. [https://blog.docker.com/2016/09/docker- golang/](https://blog.docker.com/2016/09/docker-golang/)</comment>


Tell HN: My usability pet peeve – am/pm times with a leading zero - <AUTHOR> I don't know why I've started noticing this a lot more recently on websites, but it seems to be getting more common to see times-of-day stated in the am/pm format but still using a leading zero on the hour. E.g. "03:00 pm" instead of "15:00" or "3:00 pm". My brain has got so used to parsing the 24-hour clock such that I see a leading zero and assume it's a morning time, then there is the moment of cognitive dissonance when I spot the "pm" and have to recalculate in my mind (especially if the time in question is in a foreign time zone). Does anyone else anecdotally get this? Has anyone measured whether it is a problem on a larger scale? <comment><USER2> This is potatoes. Want to rage? Read this: [https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en- US/d77...](https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en- US/d77ee438-9789-4d04-ab93-5df001bf539d/set-language-british-causes-date- format-to-change-to-yyyyddmm?forum=sqlsetupandupgrade)

Who in their right mind thought YYYY-DD-MM is a good idea. (It's "smart", recognizes the YYYY part and moves it to the end and interprets as DD-MM-YYYY)

The ISO standard specifically used "-" as the delimiter for the standard date format because no one was using it. And MS had to ruin it.

<comment><USER3> > Who in their right mind

Probably the same people who thought MM/DD/YYYY was sensible?

<comment><USER4> At least that's far back enough that they aren't around for us to be angry at.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My pet peeve is am/pm time; I have no clue why people use it vs 24 hour clocks. Even worse when people leave off the am/pm; 'the meeting is today at 2!'.

<comment><USER6> I use am/pm because that's how I was taught to tell time growing up, and in my corner of the world (northeast US) nearly everyone uses it. "2 pm" is immediately meaningful to me, but to parse "14:00" I have to subtract 12 in my head. Even when the am/pm is left off, it's usually clear from context.

I'm not arguing for the inherent superiority of am/pm notation, but I do get frustrated with people who use 24-hour time because "it's more logical", without seeming to realize that it's more difficult for the majority of people to understand.

<comment><USER7> You don't subtract it though. Once you are used to it your brain just correlates 14 with 2 and 17 with 5 and 23 with 11 without thinking. In Norway, and I think in most of the 24-hour world, we still use the 12hr clock in speech. I don't go around saying that "the clock is quarter past fifteen", I say "quarter past three" and the context usually makes it clear when I'm talking about.

<comment><USER8> Indeed. It is written 15:15, but pronounced three-fifteen (or quarter past three etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I always quip that if I were to achieve world domination, my first decree would be about harmonizing all these bullshit idiosyncrasies that we developers have to deal with. 24-hour format everywhere. Metric system everywhere. Celsius everywhere. And so on.

<comment><USER10> Not sure if you're old enough to remember this one: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time)

<comment><USER9> I do! But no. Just no.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The biggest temporal fail of the web is date. For some topics, it's impossible to tell whether the author was working in 2012 or 2019.

<comment><USER12> Especially on blogs where the design only gives the month and day, and it's impossible to find out which year, because that's the only date to be seen on the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Lately I've tended to use military time even in very informal circumstances, although only in written form. E.g. I'd text my GF "dinner w/friends Saturday 2000?".

</comment><comment><USER14> A similar issue, but perhaps not as bad, is the incorrect use of currency identifiers, like "SEK 100" ("$10"), or incorrect decimal symbols.

Another interesting case I've seen sometimes is when people are helpful and convert from imperial to metric units, but don't change the underlying value. Stuff like comparisons, "price per 28.3 grams" ("price per oz").

Units and locales are hard.

<comment><USER4> What, you don't measure things in multiples of 28.3 grams?

<comment><USER15> We have standardized 13.37 gram units here

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't see a problem with "03:00 pm" because I spot the : immediately. I see 2 digits and then 2 digits, so it's consistent.

</comment><comment><USER17> decimal time

</comment><comment><USER4> 15:00 am

<comment><USER9> [https://xkcd.com/1179/](https://xkcd.com/1179/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Even worse: Apple's "time-zone support" in their iOS calendar, which changes the times of your appointments behind your back.

If you buy plane tickets and then enter the dates and times in Calendar... Apple will change them without telling you if you travel through time zones. AS IF ANYONE ENTERS TIMES LIKE THAT.

If I have a meeting in London next week at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, I'm not going to sit here in the U.S. and do the math so I can enter the meeting time at some crazy hour to "fool" Calendar.

DEAR APPLE: WE WANT THE ALARM TO GO OFF WHEN THE CLOCK ON THE PHONE SAYS THE TIME FOR WHICH I SET THE ALARM.

This is NOT an option on iPhones currently. Unfuckingbelievable: [https://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2016/03/apples-idiotic- time-...](https://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2016/03/apples-idiotic-time-zone- support-sets.html)

<comment><USER19> Google Calendar is also guilty of this nonsense, I missed a flight exactly for this reason.

<comment><USER20> At least for Google Calendar, it's pretty easy to avoid the mental math by using the built-in time zones. You can select the time zone when creating the event[0].

[0] [https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37064](https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37064)

<comment><USER21> iOS does this, too. There's and entry for "time zone" immediately beneath the time setting spinny thing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Node.js Foundation Announces New Members - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2015/06/nodejs-foundation-advances-community-collaboration-announces-new

<comment><USER2> StrongLoop is excited to be part of today's launch of the Node.js Foundation! Here's the backstory on how the foundation came to be: [https://strongloop.com/strongblog/announcing-the-node-js- fou...](https://strongloop.com/strongblog/announcing-the-node-js-fou..).</comment>


Why Founders Can't Afford to Have Any Weak Links - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/09/30/why-founders-cant-afford-to-have-any-weak-links/ <comment><USER2> I think this sort of thing is entirely possible in small teams. Sharing important passwords via a Google Spreadsheet and having a known-password to the admin account for Google Apps is a great step that can mitigate most emergencies.</comment>


Synthetic Meat May Be On The Market Sooner Than We Thought - <AUTHOR> http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/answering-how-a-sausage-gets-made-will-be-more-complicated-in-2020 <comment><USER2> Kibo's "Animal 57" is really here! I want some.

[http://www.kibo.com/exegesis/animal_57.shtml](http://www.kibo.com/exegesis/animal_57.shtml)</comment>


High glucose levels may explain why some flu patients have more severe symptoms - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-04-high-glucose-flu-patients-severe.html <comment><AUTHOR> Most of us are staying at home, doing less exercise, and eating more. That's probably bad news for glucose levels.</comment>


NVIDIA Announces Tesla Personal Supercomputer - <AUTHOR> http://www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/NVIDIA_Announces_Tesla_Personal_Supercomputer.html <comment><USER2> I took a look at the Tesla after viewing an Nvidia demo with the Mythbusters Adam & Jamie doing a simple demo of CPU v's GPU which you can see here ~ <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKK933KK6Gg>

Firstly you can run the thing as either a card (cheaper, slower) or standalone machine (expensive, nobody lists the price). The CUDA toolkit which is C based is Win/Lin 32/64 bit compatible and available for most mainstream disto's ~ <http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_learn.html>

_"... The Tesla architecture is built around a scalable array of multithreaded Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) ..."_

If you think this is a similar to mainstream development think again. Programming with this machine is right down to the metal and reminds me of programming the PS2 and other specialised consoles. You need to spend some time reading the Hardware manuals, understand the architecture to use the machine to it's capability.

<comment><USER3> I had some friends who tried to port the Linpack benchmark to a small cluster of computers each with 8 NVIDIA GPUs using CUDA, and they found that the biggest bottleneck was the bandwidth to and from the GPUs. It's just hard to keep the GPUs fed with enough data. They confirmed that they are both hard to program and incredibly powerful.

<comment><USER4> I tried CUDA programming as well and found that the threading model and such is an utter nightmare. For certain tasks its quite easy, such as upscaling or filtering an image. However, such a task is _exactly the kind of task where you'll end up bandwidth-limited anyways_. The kind of complex tasks where you actually fully use the GPU processors are often the exact kind of situations where the API will work against you every step of the way.

The "960 cores" moniker is also very misleading, as last I recall there were really only (960/8) cores, with each core being able to run 8 instructions at the same if all the instructions were exactly the same.

<comment><USER5> What are some of these complex tasks you had in mind? I think that almost any computation-bound task, however complex, could benefit from GPU acceleration. But I would like to hear about exceptions.

<comment><USER4> A motion search, for video compression, is what I was trying.

It has some huge disadvantages:

1\. The threading model is completely unsuited to a search that takes a different number of iterations per block (since it wants all the threads doing the same thing).

2\. CPUs already have the PSADBW instruction, which allows an absurd effective throughput: its literally an instruction dedicated to this kind of task. Its also a purely 8-bit integer problem, so it doesn't benefit from the high- performance floating point units on the GPU.

Due to 1), you're pretty much restricted to either crippling your performance, using a very simplified search, or using an exhaustive search. And if you're using an exhaustive search, it turns out that there's a mathematically equivalent and vastly faster way to do it called "sequential elimination"... which is completely impractical to implement on a GPU as well due to its linear nature, and which allows a Core 2 to vastly outperform a GPU and possibly even be competitive with a dedicated FPGA doing a normal exhaustive search.

<comment><USER5> Hmmm.. OK. You mind posting a link to the pseudo-code of the algorithm? The problem of different number of iterations per thread is quite common, but can often be fixed.

If all threads in a block have the same number if iterations, you're fine; different blocks can take different number of iterations. As long as the number of blocks is much higher than the number of SMs, the machine will dynamically schedule the blocks to available SMs.

If each thread takes a different number of iterations, it's more difficult, but you can still do dynamic allocation yourself, by running as many blocks as you have SMs, and having each thread pick up work as it needs. You can also randomize the assignment of work to threads, so the expected amount of work is roughly the same. This all depends on the particular problem and data, though...

As for the 8-bit nature of the problem - this is true, you're not utilizing the floating point units that are the biggest advantage of the GPU. How large are the vectors you need to do PSADBW over?

<comment><USER6> _If all threads in a block have the same number if iterations, you're fine; different blocks can take different number of iterations. As long as the number of blocks is much higher than the number of SMs, the machine will dynamically schedule the blocks to available SMs._

At this point the programmer's head has already exploded. MIMD systems (like OpenMP on Larrabee) don't have any of this BS.

<comment><USER5> No, Larrabee will have exactly the same issues. Except threads will be called fibers, and blocks will be called threads. Read the Larrabee paper from Siggraph 08.

The way to get maximum performance out of a given chip area is to use SIMD, and that's here to stay, with all the associated issues.

<comment><USER6> _Except threads will be called fibers, and blocks will be called threads._

That's how their rasterizer works, but I'm talking about using it as a regular x86.

 _The way to get maximum performance out of a given chip area is to use SIMD, and that's here to stay_

There's a big difference between MIMD+narrow SIMD and super wide SIMD.

<comment><USER5> The Larrabee SIMD width will be 16 and NVIDIA's is currently 32, so that's almost the same.

Not just the rasterizer, but any application that wants to take full advantage of Larabee will have to use the SIMD vector units to the max.

Larrabee might turn out to have great performance (which I hope), but if it does, the reason will not be black magic or breaking laws of physics. The reason will be SIMD.

<comment><USER6> For some reason it's easier for me to wrap my head around one thread driving a 16-wide SIMD unit than 32 threads that execute in lockstep. I know it ends up being equivalent but it feels different.

Also, on Larrabee you can execute a different kernel on each core, while on GPUs you can't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like Tesla. He was under-appreciated in his time, brilliant, and did things just for the joy of the science.

I just wish they'd stop with the naming of products, rock bands, and breakfast cereals, etc. after him. Its starting to wear thin.

</comment><comment><USER8> This sounds cool, but the page linked to is only a standard press release and the link to the interesting stuff is buried in the marketing-speak. The fun stuff is here: <http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_computing.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> It'll be interesting to see how much these will cost. 4 Teraflops of single precision calculation is very impressive, however if you need double precision, the speed is not quite as impressive at 400 Gflops - although still very good compared to my laptop with 20 Gflops :)

The main drawback with these is that you have to use CUDA, which certainly takes a while before you wrap your mind across. I played CUDA for a while but considered it is too much effort for something which is very specialised and might not become mainstream. Still there seems to be many people using CUDA and with lots of research roles - see the CUDA forums.

<comment><USER10> It says "Available from VARs worldwide for under $10,000" in here <http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_computing.html>

Now I know how it felt like in the '80s when people were looking at the mainframes/desktops of the time and wondering... can I afford this $10K machine? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I guess I am a little skeptical about the market. First, I have to believe it is rare that an __individual __would need a super computer. Besides, any individual that actually needs one is probably going to build his/her own. Businesses might want these on a large scale, but then why market it as a personal computer?

<comment><USER6> Lots of scientists, engineers, and finance people could use these. It's personal in the sense that it's used by one person, not that people would buy it for personal use.

Also, it doesn't really matter whether you build or buy; either way all the cost is in the Tesla card and NVidia gets their money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reading the title, I initially thought it was something related to the electric car ...

Anyway, I guess the problem is that most programmers have no clue of how to program GPU. Programming multi-core CPU is already very hard, and now comes the GPU stuff ...

</comment><comment><USER13> 960 cores. Wow. I thought that I was in over my head trying to program 2 at a time!

<comment><USER14> What was it Joel Spolsky said about programmers counting "It must work for 1. Oh, there's more than 1? Then it must work for _any number_ ".

;)</comment></comment>


Show HN: 2018 ACM SIGMOD Programming Contest – $10K Prizes Donated by Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://sigmod18contest.db.in.tum.de/index.shtml <comment><AUTHOR> For this year's contest, the task is to evaluate batches of database join queries on a set of pre-defined relations. The challenge is to execute the queries as fast as possible without (much) prior indexing. So the time has finally come to unleash your fastest hash table implementations!

The top-5 best-ranking undergrad or grad student teams are invited to the 2018 ACM SIGMOD conference in Houston, TX. The winning team will be awarded a prize of USD $7,000, and there will be an additional prize of USD $3,000 for the runner-up.

</comment><comment><USER2> Awesome contest. Was great fun last year!

Was great to improve one's C++ skills.

I will definitely participate again this year. Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting topic! Looking forward to trying out some fance join algorithms</comment>


Ask HN: How did C# become one of the most cross platform languages of all time? - <AUTHOR>

This always intrigued me.  I'd like to know the history of this.  Seems unlikely that a language from Microsoft would be great at building Mac/iOS apps, games(Unity), and Android.  Is this just due to the work from the Mono team?  I think C# is pretty cool but would have been great to see Ruby or Python get the same love. <comment><USER2> C# was an open standard from the start. And it was well-designed.

And yes, a big reason for C#'s cross-platformness is the work of De Icaza and the Mono technology.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is true (from memory)

Unity was already C# before phones and paid Mono to port it to the iPhone. That kicked off Mono realizing that these new platforms could be a source of revenue, and charged for support. Their approach has been: Mono is free for free OS's and for pay for proprietary ones.

Another driving force is that C#/VB.NET is very popular in the enterprise for Desktop apps. This pool of developers need something for phones/tablets and there's Mono just ready for them.

Ruby/Python are not as good for desktop apps (more on servers) and phones, Macs, and tablets are not likely servers.

</comment><comment><USER4> It is also a very well thought out language, that took from Java's history many of the mistakes it made, learned from them, and avoided them.

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Infrastructure](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Infrastructure)</comment>


Google is testing promoted video ads in search results - <AUTHOR> http://digiday.com/platforms/gusher-money-google-testing-promoted-video-ads-search-results/ <comment><USER2> Advertisers really are clueless when it comes to UX and wonder why ad blocking is on the rise. Next stop, auto-play video ads in search and after that, the complete death of online adverts, because by then, most people will be using ad blockers.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be interesting to see the A/B results for video. If it's not obvious that video appeals to our senses more abruptly, then they could be late to this one.

The web's becoming more TV-like as time goes on, and it pains me that text is being forced to become a second class citizen of the web.</comment></comment>