Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush - <AUTHOR> http://timharford.com/2018/02/microsoftofficevscandycrush/ <comment><USER5> The big barrier to outsourcing anything has always been information transfer. It's all very well handing a presentation over to a designer, but if they don't know what it should contain then they can't design it. In the end the spec document for the presentation ends up looking almost like the presentation itself.

Likewise, the office typing pool would probably be typing up a manager's hand writing. Ubiquitous typing skills now (at least in theory) should mean that the manager today spends no longer writing their document than they used to, but it comes out of that process already typed.

Ultimately something like MS Office essentially act as captured knowledge. They know how to lay out a presentation to your company standards, so you don't have to. The ideal (although nobody has quite got there yet) is that the tool is so seamless that the user can only spend their time worrying about the important bits - information transfer, in the case of a presentation.

Flight booking tools are now also so easy to use that the overhead for the person actually taking the flight is fairly minimal. That's not to say they couldn't be better, but we're almost at the point where you tell Sky Scanner that you want to travel from A to B on a certain date and it allows you to seamlessly book it. It's taken the place of the administrative assistant, who would still have had to consult you on where and when you wanted to go anyway. (Saying that, having an admin handle flight bookings is still easier than doing it yourself, so we do have some way to come here).

<comment><USER6> Case in point on the subject of information transfer: I prefer to book my own flight, directly with the airline, so I can make sure the "Blind or low vision" checkbox gets checked. Then, _maybe_ , they won't tell me to get in a wheelchair, assuming the correct information gets transferred all the way to the person helping me through the airport.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _Well-paid middle managers with no design skills take far too long to > produce ugly slides that nobody wants to look at. They also file their own > expenses, book their own travel and, for that matter, do their own shopping > in the supermarket. ...it is partly bad organisational design: sacking the > administrative assistants and telling senior staff to do their own expenses > can look, superficially, like a cost saving._

Not just superficially -- it _is_ a cost savings, and a net benefit to society. It's the realization that slides _can_ be ugly and still get the point across just as well. And doing my own expenses when everything's charged to a company card takes all of 5 minutes for a weeklong trip.

This means we can free up talented designers to improve mobile apps used by millions instead of presentations seen by ten, or administrative assistants to work where they're most needed, such as in health care.

I also don't know where the author gets his claim that average productivity growth has been _negative_ since 2007 -- a chart here [1] for the US shows it's been positive for 18 of the past 21 years, and the average is clearly positive too. And while there are certainly plenty of theories as to why productivity _growth_ might be decreasing, the idea that it comes from ugly presentations not only has zero supporting evidence, but seems almost laughable.

[1] [https://qz.com/946675/us-productivity-growth-was-negative- in...](https://qz.com/946675/us-productivity-growth-was-negative-in-2016-and- economists-arent-sure-why/)

<comment><USER8> Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft but have nothing to do with Office.

PowerPoint has a feature that suggests design ideas based on the content of your slides. This is to solve the specific problem of non-designers spending too much time trying to make slides look better:

[https://support.office.com/en-us/article/About-PowerPoint- De...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/About-PowerPoint- Designer-53c77d7b-dc40-45c2-b684-81415eac0617)

<comment><USER9> Even though you don't work on Office, I wonder if you might have some insight into why Microsoft seems to be largely ignoring two of their biggest strategic advantages: the desktop and Microsoft Office.

I've done years of VBA programming in Excel, struggling to make that horribly weak language do things it was never designed to do. I've just started working with Python, but more specifically pandas. How I got this far in life and never picked it up is beyond me, but now that I finally have, it almost makes me want to cry how powerful and filled with plain old common sense it is. So far, things are pretty much exactly how one would expect them to be in a non- insane world - if you need to do something, it is almost surely there, and likely very close to the form you'd expect it in. Just wonderful software.

With the battle now moving to the cloud, and Amazon being the biggest competitor Microsoft has seen in ages, why is Microsoft mostly just competing in the cloud, rather than competing there _and_ bringing the desktop toolset into the 21st century with seamless integration with the cloud? Why can't I do something equivalent to Jupyter notebooks in Excel, including using Python as the language?

It just seems extremely short sighted to me, but I never hear it discussed anywhere. Does the topic ever come up at Microsoft?

<comment><USER10> It's understandable why Microsoft would be slow-moving to incorporate new languages into Excel; what is popular now could change (eg if you add Python, do you also do R?), and restricting the number of languages available means people in an office can more easily work with each other.

But there has been progress!

\- Excel already has a native JavaScript API. [1]

\- They are seeking feedback on implementing Python as an Excel scripting language. [2]

\- It's a little esoteric / proprietary, but the language backing Excel's "Get & Transform" feature, M, is a noticeable jump in power. [3]

Nevertheless, it's still surprising there hasn't been more innovation in the spreadsheet space given Excel's shortcomings. So I'm working on Mesh, a spreadsheet that feels more like a 'real' programming language (because it's just JavaScript). [4]

[1] [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/profiles/script- lab/](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/profiles/script-lab/)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927132)

[3] See, eg, [https://powerpivotpro.com/2016/02/reviewlist-generate- create...](https://powerpivotpro.com/2016/02/reviewlist-generate-create- tables-thin-air-power-bi-m/)

[4] [https://github.com/chrispsn/mesh](https://github.com/chrispsn/mesh)

<comment><USER9> I wasn't aware of that much progress on your first link.....I'm curious to know if at the same time they've put any effort into improving the half-assed Excel COM API.

Totally agree on the Power Query thing, if they'd support pandas + power query + embeddable Power BI objects in Excel + seamless integration with cloud functionality (there's still no way to use Power Query in SSIS for goodness sake).

Using pandas in an Azure function and then consuming that from Excel and displaying in Power BI visualizations, all within a nie little wrapper you can email around or whatever would just be a killer app. This is one of the few advantages Microsoft has over the Amazons and Googles, I wish they'd take advantage of it.

The syntax in your example is lovely and this is something I've wanted in Excel for a very long time.

EDIT:

There is some interesting 3rd party innovation happening: [https://www.xlwings.org/](https://www.xlwings.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In 1989 I worked at a pharmaceutical firm that still had a secretarial pool. As a lab technician if I was writing a document (typically a Standard Opening Procedure or SOP) I was expected to write it by hand and leave a copy in my outbox (literally one of two trays on my desk) with the correct request form. The next day I'd receive a draft, and then I'd painstakingly provide corrections (typically every technical term and chemical name was wrong) and repeat as needed, after about a week we'd be good and it could be signed off and filed. While this felt inefficient, and probably was, part of that process also included review from my boss, so done was reviewed and done.

When someone wanted to call a meeting, that was another form, then invitations in inboxes (again physical trays on desks) replies, room assigned. Meetings were scheduled at least a week out. The flip side is that you could and did request secretarial support for meetings — someone in the room whose only purpose is to take notes, and who will go back and type up detailed minutes.

<comment><USER12> That sounds glorious.

I've had plenty of meetings where 15 min in I have to ask "What's the purpose of this meeting?" Or at the end of the meeting, "Ok who was taking notes? No one?"

<comment><USER13> Having good secretarial staff is under appreciated. Yeah, I can do my own time (I bill by the hour), book my flights, find open meeting times, etc. But if an administrative assistant can support 3 professionals saving them just 5 hours a month, they can pay for themselves.

<comment><USER14> I really don't get it. Every single place I've been at that had a secretary was running like cream cheese. But no-one has them anymore. The only things I can figure is that the healthcare, retirement, and sexual harassment issues really do add up to remove the utility of a secretary.

<comment><USER15> What does the phrase "running like cream cheese" mean? It sounds slow, but from context here it sounds...fast? Efficient?

<comment><USER16> Running smoothly. Smooth as the cream cheese on your bagel.

<comment><USER14> I guess that's not a phrase everyone is familiar with. It is well illustrated via Coach Finstock in _Teen Wolf_ here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0m5wJRGHEQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0m5wJRGHEQ)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What drives me the most crazy is that after _decades_ these tools can't get the basics right, like text editing. That has to be the single biggest waste of time.

I _always_ prepare my material in a real text editor, until I'm completely satisfied with the content, before I risk dumping it into PowerPoint or another terrible editing environment. I mean, 99.9% of presentations contain bullet points and it's _still_ a mystery what will happen the next time I type a key: will there even _be_ a bullet in front of the next line of text, will it just invent a new line spacing different from the previous bullet, etc.?

Then, as if to punish me for having the audacity to save time composing text outside of Office, its Paste mechanism utterly destroys text in ways that almost seem malicious.

I end up having to find and disable _so many settings_ just to restore a reasonable set of behaviors for stuff like Paste (bad defaults).

<comment><USER18> Try using beamer ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_(LaTeX)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_\(LaTeX\))) as an alternative to PowerPoint.

<comment><USER19> Having made multiple presentations in beamer, it's definitely not better at everything than WYSWYG presentation editors; some things like non-standard slide layouts are more laborious than they need to be.

I think the take-away is that it would be useful if a presentation WYSWYG editor (or any other power-user-oriented program) produced unique and invertible human-editable source code that corresponds to the document. Then the editor would just be a visual programming environment that complements the text programming environment. And it would be up to the user to decide what is more convenient to do in each environment. For example I would like to typeset equations in the text environment, but draw diagrams or play with the layout in the visual environment.

<comment><USER20> Having a visual frontend for a textual format sounds nice but is always dangerous, in my experience. Before you know, you have some subtle features in the textual format that the GUI can't represent, and as a result, any modifications in the GUI will break your usage of the feature.

<comment><USER19> Very interesting point. Any chance you can recall a specific example? I'm not doubting you; simply curious since the above seems like a good idea to me and I want to understand the pitfalls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You don't need the mentioned smartphone to be exposed to Candy Crush. Last time I clean-installed Windows 10, there it was in the Start Menu by default. And, even after using the Settings app to uninstall it, it would go on to reappear multiple times.

The message I took from that is that the PC is no longer something of an intellectual space, and Microsoft want to forcibly assimilate you into mainstream garbage.

<comment><USER22> Yeah Windows 10 Start Menu is awful in part because of that. It's like after the Windows 8 debacle Microsoft is telling us: "oh you like this Menu that much? Ok, here is your menu..." and give us one so bad no one dare to use it anymore as a revenge. And it works. I almost never use it because it cannot find what I want. And that's when is shows anything at all, because on my VM it's broken 1/4 of the time (no problem with 7 & 8.1 in the same configuration).

<comment><USER23> the start menu on Windows 8/10 (and Windows Phone) was originally designed under the expectation that most users would create their own personalized tile layouts as a means of self-expression. Start menu team always wanted and lobbied for some or all of the tile area to be initially blank with a "drag apps here to personalize your tile grid" message, so that users would understand how they're "supposed" to use it, but they kept getting overruled by other teams wanting to use it as a way to promote their stuff. :(

<comment><USER22> I found tiles a great ideas on Phone (I owned some WP and developed apps for it) but always hated it on desktop. The ever moving parts were making difficult to find information by catching the user attention. Also the 2D layout also posed a problem to scan entries, especially as most were cut after a few characters. That was a pain to found the good Visual Studio command prompt for example.

And now some of the Win8 area remains such as wierd black squared background behind software icon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The biggest point is more administrative staff would help productivity. I'm flummoxed by the lack of admins at the large, successful company I work for.

Many senior managers and staff could be x2-3 more effective. One marketing manager spent all week doing ppt layout for a 10 minute slide deck for the president. Another BU lead spends hours resolving a shipping and receiving fiasco for _one_ package.

When these people do what they're paid for they are really good. But when they get absorbed into administrative tasks they're terribly inefficient.

<comment><USER25> Totally agree. I have spent months last year parsing corporate documentation rules. if we had more tech writers whose job is to make sure the docs are in the right form we could free up years of engineering time. Same for booking travel. We have to do it ourselves but still follow a ton of rules you always forget if you do it only once or twice a year. If we had one person that could book travel and get visas a lot of time could be saved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Seems like he lacks the self-control, willpower and confidence to set boundaries for himself and others. These are definitely skills which are needed in a modern office environment and they especially apply to "senior staff".

I get what he's trying to say, but it's really a matter identifying the critical skills needed for your line of work, then building productive habits and killing inproductive ones - nobody said you HAVE to have funny memes in your presentation and in turn waste 20 minutes searching for them. So don't do it and voilà, one distraction less.

This is the information age and being able to filter out superfluous information is a valuable (and neccesary) skill - don't blame external factors, they won't go away. If anything, this is "survival of the fittest" in the modern world.

<comment><USER27> I understand your point, but the goal of technology should be to help us be more productive, not to try to separate the ones that have strong willpower from the rest. The clear trend here is that technology companies want people to become slaves to whatever process they setup, instead of working to improve our lives.

<comment><USER28> I agree with you in abstract, but examples in this article are quite odd. Leaving aside typing, which is faster if you do it by yourself once you learned it, they just don't take that much time. Neither travel booking nor filling expenses nor work related supermarket shopping. Even normal power point presentations are done very fast with company template. Preparing speech and content when presentation mattered a lot seemed to take way more time then layout.

Even candy crush is an odd example, middle management is not main audience and I doubt they play it all that much in work.

And then again in larger corporations, middle management (the ones that are not part of teams that produce) are what used to be administration. They have zero decision power, know nothing about projects they are assigned to and they are there to produce reports so that programmers don't have to.

<comment><USER27> It depends on how much you do. If you need to book travel once a year, then it is clearly easy to do it yourself. I used to work in a place that had a secretary available for these tasks. I would just give her a pile of receipts and get a check a few days later. The secretary would make reservations and schedule important meetings. This can save a huge amount of time over the years. Nowadays all these little tasks combined consume a lot of time we should spend doing real work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> He presents a silly argument ("computers encourage generalists but Adam Smith said specialisation was the way forwards") and I'm pretty sure he's aware its silly, its more of a hook to build the rest of the musings around.

</comment><comment><USER30> In consulting it's typical that consultants draw the layout of their sides on paper and send it to a center specialized on PowerPoint to produce it. Or they dummy it in PowerPoint and the specialists take it from there. For Word, at least my firm blocks most of the layouting stuff so that you can only use the official styles. Works for me

<comment><USER31> We probably work for the same firm.

I think it works well for basic formatting, but information transfer already becomes time intensive when you're looking to create something high-end (eg where Message and conceptual design are closely linked)

That said, yes, I see many clients spend significant chunks of their time on creating the ppt compared to how long they need to write down their ideas on paper. (And off topic: the other major corporate timesink i see is time spent in meetings, often because it's unclear who has the mandate to make decisions, and as a result everyone gets invited)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The author confuses short term efficiency with true desirability, I think - economically, too, not just in the "extreme efficiency is hell for us as people," sense.

What happens to your super-efficient workforce of people doing exactly one thing over and over when the industry shifts? It's very similar to code, here: highly optimized processes are hard to refactor.

The world is full of not-sufficiently-explored market spaces, hence the ability of small companies to disrupt large ones, and the growing desire to be agile and use MVPs even at large companies. Specializing to extremes is the opposite, and it will get you eaten in many, many businesses.

</comment><comment><USER33> Companies want generalists so they can easily replace employees. Employees with specialized skills can command higher wages and can be difficult to source and replace. You need to understand the business, be an admin, handle shipping, book your own travel (at the lowest price), manage your work hours, train yourself, and do your day job. Would be great skills as an independent consultant, but this is happening as a full time employee at a fortune 500 company.

</comment><comment><USER34>
      In a modern office there are no specialist typists; we all need to be able to pick our way around a keyboard. PowerPoint has made amateur slide designers of everyone. Once a slide would be produced by a professional, because no one else had the necessary equipment or training. Now anyone can have a go — and they do.

I'm struggling to follow. Putting your thoughts down on a piece of paper is something we all need to be able to do. Do people waste time doing it? Sure, some people will waste some time. A myriad of reasons to it. Boredom, clumsiness, a strong need to let out your creative sides, just to name a few.

Perhaps this entire piece comes down to being more aware of the things that distract you. The side quests that often start small, but end up consuming large portions of your time.

      In a modern office there are no specialist typists

Sure, in a modern office you won't come across many such people (amongst other esoteric examples). But there's a counter argument here - <USER3> introducing additional bureaucracy by proxies is just as hurtful, if not more.

<comment><USER35> "Sure, in a modern office you won't come across many such people (amongst other esoteric examples). But there's a counter argument here - <USER3> introducing additional bureaucracy by proxies is just as hurtful, if not more."

Who said anything about bureaucracy? It all could be lean and agile - but with tasks such that people could concentrate on the value adding tasks. It _seems_ more efficient to hire less people to do n amount of tasks but what happens when the productivity of those people plunge?

As an extreme example, we in finland use the public health services a lot. Every time I go there, the doctor fiddles about on his computer doing this adminsterial task and that. It would be much more efficient if the doctor had some secretary who could manage the bureaucratic fiddly bits and let the doctor focus on medicine.

<comment><USER34> The doctor example is great, but where do we draw the line exactly? Offloading some aspects of your work by utilising other people and their expertise is surely the way to go, but there's a balance to be kept. Sticking to your example, good secretaries (much like good engineers) are expensive, and are hard to come by - isn't that enough to explain why public health services skimp on those?

You could argue that in an ideal world/society, everyone would just do those few specific things they're really good at/love, and nothing else.

<comment><USER35> Calling out for _highly trained_ secretaries to do the doctors typing is really a strawman.

As a patient I don't really care of the quality of the bureaucratic output if the case is one-shot - which most are. So in that instance they could have a drunk monkey punching the computer. What I do care about, is that the doctor could see more of these one-shot patients and just _forget_ the damn computer.

The value the records add, is providing a long term storage for my current diagnostic case. Once the issue passes, the value of those records plunges to zero.

Calling whatever it is, 80/20 principle, tipping point management - <USER4> _everything_ needs to have 0.999999 level of certainty. In the one-shot bureaucratic typist thingie 0.9 would suffice. Once the medical issue becomes more prolonged and difficult, added care in the papers section will start to add value (as patient information is logged and tracked, and so on).

On the other hand, since this is a _medical_ setting and we insist training on the secretary, the secretary could add immense value, by just going through the checklists the doctor really does not remember to do. The constantly recurring problem when getting medication is the doctors checking for incompatibilities with the patients physical condition and other medication. From my experience, if there is any underlying condition they screw it up half the time. As an example is a relative of mine with nut allergy and some ongoing medication - the stuff this persons gets described half the time has bad outcomes when combined with either of them. So in this instance the only valuable outcome would have been applicable medicine, and since that was screwed up, the value of output is zero, and the amount of resources used is... non-trivial at least.

Hospitals have solved this by having nurses following in the doctors footsteps with procedure specific checklists - and this _saves lives_. [http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/7/08-010708/en/](http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/7/08-010708/en/)

<comment><USER28> The secretary you just described is going to ask way more money and has a lot more employment options. Why would she/he take a job with zero autonomy, little social status, non-flexible hours and not expect money in exchange?

And once you pay her those money, is it overall saving money?

<comment><USER35> Note, I gave two versions of the secretary :) - the non-professional and the professional one.

The professional secretary I described is a nurse. Also, the non-professional would effectively be a nurse. They just have different duties where the latter would also check-list through the doctors remedies. Note that this potion is not that of non-autonomous robot. They have the right and duty to double check on the doctors performance.

First, costs. Where I'm from nurses are fairly well trained professionals, but have a really low salary. They seem to keep at it. I could imagine a worse gig than GP:s assistant.

In single payer healthcare one should look at the total cost/benefit for the entire economy, not just how to minimize the cost for the single health center.

The cost of bad diagnosis or faulty recipe can be that the time of the doctor visit was completely wasted. Hence, the time used for the visit by the patient was completely wasted. If they need the medicine they need to reschedule - thus the cost doubles not only for the doctor, but also to the patient. And the direct cost is not the only cost. As we are effectively doubling our resource use, now we are clogging the system, and delaying other patients.

And. I don't get it why this needs to cost more. They have plenty of nurses at the health centers, for one accident or the other. They could just change the routines that the secretary-duty nurse gets a call if she's needed at some other place.

Of course, this is me looking at the situation through the lense of the single payer social healthcare scheme. The logic of the situation is probably different elsewhere.

<comment><USER28> Nurses in low paid systems are aging and complain. It happens that young women don't want that job all that much. That job does not happen to have perk that would offer low salary - hours are inflexible. But also, those who won't be nurses because of caring or some similar general idea, are even more likely to leave if you turn the job into secretary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Top down management. People who have no understanding of the process dictating how many people are supposed to do it. And adding useless tasks that secretaries could handle to the professionals task list, because "computers can now do it". Which, what anyone who has worked with computers, can tell that is horseshit. A menial task is a menial task and will cause interruption of flow no matter what. And, since the expert is not so good at the typist thing, it will actually take _a lot more time for him_ to do the typing.

So, we have, the time the expert uses t_e, the time of the secretary t_s, and the multiple of time that the expert will spend on the secretaries task. At high enough multiple of cost it would always be cheaper to have a secretary to do the typing. And, it's not only the wage difference. There is also the cost to the organization for not implementing all of the workload that they could implement, if all of the experts were firing on all cylinders. Especially in public health care these negative externalities can be considerable (I imagine).

</comment><comment><USER36> The spreading of capabilities often fails because of this, you don't have the experience. And since you're not in it deep, you don't build real skills. Spreading one self thin.

The argument often came in the last decade. Everybody could be <foo>. And technically yes, the average smartphone of today has the potential to be EMI + Warner Bros + ... Yet it doesn't scale with the number of users. People did as much if not better with old sequencers or vintage paint programs.

It's rarely the tool that matters.

I regularly think that the world would lose by being flat. You need peak and valleys so you can master and enjoy the complexity of a domain. Having access to everything is akin to the paradox of choice. It's seducive but only on a short term basis.

</comment><comment><USER37> The chart he linked to shows a very weak correlation between smartphones/productivity, even as a single data point...

[https://bankunderground.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/chart.pn...](https://bankunderground.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/chart.png)

There was an even larger drop in the late 1970s (what caused that?) and the dip started around the time of the recession in 2008 as well which must have had a large impact.

There were very likely many causes to productivity and I'd be curious to see what the major historical drivers predating the modern smartphone/financial crisis era dip.

<comment><USER38> > There was an even larger drop in the late 1970s

Women began entering the labor force en masse. Way more employees available = less productivity unless you can invent a bunch of new needs immediately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Office is a productivity drain because they successfully pivoted away from the "productivity" market to the "job protection" market.

The former was a product Microsoft sold to employees on behalf of the company.

The latter is a product Microsoft sells to employees _on behalf of the employee_ (although on the company dime) and which the employees use to protect their job title, against the interests of the company.

These kinds of pivots are inevitable as these core software markets become commoditized. You can only make money off a software product for a decade or so before lower cost competitors will come in and eat your lunch.

</comment><comment><USER40> FWIW Tim Harford's "More of Less" programme is one of my favourite radio programmes - it's based on statistics relevant to popular media and news stories.

<comment><USER40> Doh, should be "More or Less".

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> So on the one end, you have the manager who wrestles with Powerpoint, Project, Word, Kayak.com etc.and spends only 20% of her time working as a systems designer, her real area of expertise. On the other, you have the manager who dictates his email to be typed up by a secretary, and who reads only printouts of incoming email.

Where is the sweet spot, DIY where it makes sense, and delegating to others where that makes sense?

<comment><USER42> Only reading print outs and dictating emails sounds like a sweet mechanism for managing your time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> > Well-paid middle managers with no design skills take far too long to produce > ugly slides that nobody wants to look at.

So true. Nowadays, whenever I can, I slap something together using impress.js and call it day. I'm faster and the result is much nicer.

</comment><comment><USER44> Contrary to what the title may imply, he doesnt shit on Office and say its a bad product.

</comment><comment><USER45> Should one understand this as a productivity tool that contributes more as a distraction than something actually designed to distract? Or maybe, that the productivity tool no longer is employed as a productivity tool?

</comment><comment><USER46> I've definitely seen and done what is described here. I always justified it to myself as doing the things that keep me sane long enough to do the things I actually have to do.

</comment><comment><USER47> I would have thought removing clippy would raise those numbers ;)

(Who among us didn't spend an embarrassing amount of time interacting with that little rascal?)

<comment><USER48> Honestly, I think Clippy might be due for a comeback. Of course I don't think actual Clippy will come back but I think that some actual intelligent AI could help with office tasks if it worked (which is a big if). In the same way that Word knows I want an outline if I type "I." I think it might be useful if Word could know I want to type a letter if I start with an address or something.

<comment><USER49> > I think Clippy might be due for a comeback.

I suspect so. Just a few days ago I found an ASCII version of that troll in a frigging code editor ([http://kakoune.org/img/screenshots/screenshot-i3.gif](http://kakoune.org/img/screenshots/screenshot-i3.gif))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> when i see what people try to swat with excel, i pretty much agree.</comment>


Typeplate: a typographic starter kit encouraging great type on the web - <AUTHOR> http://typeplate.com/ <comment><USER3> 3.5kb minified. Not too bad.

Although there are a few bits in there i'd strip right out, as they're rather unnecessary.

They claim they're not making any opinionated aesthetic design choices. Yet, the section about paragraph indenting is totally aesthetic, and personally their example is harder to read with margin-top disabled and indenting enabled.

Again with drop capitals. I never see websites using drop caps. They look ridiculous in the digital world and a waste of precious bytes.

Maybe it's just me being a moody developer, but i wish instead of cramming all these features into ambiguously named files like 'helpers', 'styles', 'functions', they'd just break each bit into its own named file.

\- settings/colours

\- generic/normalise

\- objects/paragraph

\- objects/list

\- objects/figure

Etc. Etc.

At least then i get exclude the shit i don't want, or import the rules i do want into my own project without having to include the entire framework.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't help but think that web fonts are more page weight than they are worth. Is any significant number of your users going to be able to tell the difference between your 2MB webfont and Arial/Helvetica or Times?

<comment><USER5> On HN I've seen posts from people that have locally installed to their machine all or the majority of Google Fonts. It's kind of a "best of both worlds" approach in that you get a speedier web and all the nice typefaces and I've been debating doing it myself.

It almost seems like a useful browser service to possibly cache common font CDN fonts all the way into the system font store and maybe for the OSes to consider adding a lot more of the free as in speech/beer fonts into OS images.

<comment><USER4> Personally, I set Firefox to use the Croscore fonts and disallow use of any other fonts. It causes some weirdness with pages that use icon fonts (but for some reason, not all of them). Overall I like it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is great.

\- Brings your content forward? Check.

\- Clear documentation? Check.

\- Explains design decisions? Check.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think styling should be done with semantics as far as possible (avoiding classes).

One thing that you should look out for is that many users run on low brightness and has a lot of glare. So (while the lower contrast is better on high-end screens) you want as much contrast as possible!

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice.

I had serious trouble with the demo, though. In order to figure out the switches at the top I had to dig in the code. Apparently when it displays _off_ , it is actually _on_. A little color would help here.

</comment><comment><USER9> Raising consciousness for typography is a good thing and urgently overdue.

Every frigging wiki software I know uses Arial, of all things, for body text. Can you believe that? A wiki as the kind of software where text plays the most central role of all, whose primary purpose is to have users read it over and over, and the programmer's best idea is to make the worst parody of a shit font nightmare ubiquitous.

Yeah, we're in dire need of more font awareness.

</comment><comment><USER10> Am I the only one that was slightly taken aback by the casual use of the word "bitch" in a document that is mostly formal and well articulated?

</comment><comment><USER11> I actually rather wish they HAD included more aesthetic design choices - <USER2> options, at least.

I'm not a typographer. I know I'm not a typographer. If there was a single kit I could just include in my sites to make it professional-grade readable, I'd just use it.

Sure, there might be 5% improvements to be made if I spent weeks researching. But I can use that time more effectively elsewhere.</comment>


ATCOM: GPU-Accelerated Real-Time Enhancement of Long-Range Imagery - <AUTHOR> http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/atcom-real-time-enhancement-long-range-imagery/

<comment><USER2> ATCOM is the holding company for that line of products the actual people behind the research are EM Photonics [http://www.emphotonics.com/](http://www.emphotonics.com/).

These guys have done some really great stuff in the GPGPU arena, they are very CUDA centric but they release allot of very useful research and the best free CUDA based linear algebra library (CULA) out there....</comment>


Email Hell Is Over, Pain-Free HTML Emails Are the Future - <AUTHOR> http://zurb.com/article/1431/email-hell-is-over-pain-free-html-emails- <comment><AUTHOR> Clickbait title but Zurb Foundation for Emails 2 have a DSL that eliminates table...</comment>


Before 1948, LA's Power Grid Ran at 50hz - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/before-1948-las-power-grid-was-incompatible-with-the-r-1683629042 <comment><USER2> Until the 1990s, Grand Central Station in New York had almost everything - 60Hz commercial power, 40Hz LIRR power (Pennsylvania Railroad standard) 25Hz NYC Subway power, 700VDC Metro North power, 600VDC subway third rail power, and some old Edison 100VDC power. There was a huge basement area full of rotary converters to interconvert all this. Various ancient machinery and lighting ran on different power sources.

In the 1990s, Grand Central was rewired, and everything except railroad traction power was converted to 60Hz. All conversion equipment was replaced with solid state gear. It took quite a while just to find everything that was powered off one of the nonstandard systems.

It wasn't until 2005 that the last 25Hz rotary converter was retired from the NYC subway system. (Third rail power is 600VDC, but subway power distribution was 13KV 25Hz 3-phase.)

<comment><USER3> >"Until the 1990s, Grand Central Station in New York had almost everything - 60Hz commercial power,..."

Do you mean 50Hz there?

<comment><USER3> I really don't understand the downvotes, this was a sincere question. Please note, the OP states:

>"Until the 1990s, Grand Central Station in New York had almost everything - 60Hz commercial power, 40Hz LIRR power (Pennsylvania Railroad standard) 25Hz NYC Subway power, 700VDC Metro North power, 600VDC subway third rail power, and some old Edison 100VDC power."

and then subsequently states:

."In the 1990s, Grand Central was rewired, and everything except railroad traction power was converted to 60Hz."

I am asking because I am trying to make sense of the entire comment. They also mention 4 or 5 other electrical frequencies and voltages, so there's a lot packed into that comment. I am genuinely interested in the comment and trying to learn something.

<comment><USER4> I don't think 50Hz was ever used in the US. What are you curious about?

They probably had some old 60Hz three phase supply, maybe something weird like a "wild leg" configuration, but when everything was modernized they likely switched to 480V three phase for the big stuff like the ventilation motors, and 240V single phase with neutral for supplying smaller motors and 120V systems.

<comment><USER5> > _I don 't think 50Hz was ever used in the US_

I think Before 1948, LA's Power Grid Ran at 50hz :)

<comment><USER4> Haha, geez... That's what I get for picking my phone up to the comments hours later. Embarrassing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Incidentally, Japan faces this very issue to this day; part of the country run on 50Hz, the rest on 60Hz.

This made matters trickier after Fukushima, as the nation is effectively two smaller electricity grids, not one large one - so making up for the shortfall became harder than it could have been. (However, there's a massive frequency converter interface between the two grids.)

Edit: Aw, shucks - now that I revisit the article, I see the exact same points being made in that article's comment section. My bad.

<comment><USER7> Yes, a lot of older appliances actually had a little toggle switch to change between these.

The problem still exists but many of newer machines have its own inverters so it's less of the issues...

<comment><USER6> -It is not much of an issue on a micro scale - biggest issue today is probably direct-drive electrical motors, which will run too fast (if 50Hz on a 60Hz grid) or too slow (vice versa).

Also, running a 60Hz motor on a 50Hz grid will cause it to run hotter (larger current than nominally on 60Hz; also, less efficient cooling as it turns slower). If the designer designed to a price point rather than to a standard, this may be an issue.

On the macro scale, however, you've got a problem if, say, you suddenly lose a power plant in the 50Hz region of your country. You cannot then simply make up for the shortfall by distributing the load between all plants in the country (or, unless you're an island nation like Japan - from your neighbours, too) - only the ones in the 50Hz part of it.

This is just a long-winded way of saying that the larger your power grid, the more robust it is when a power plant goes offline.

The Japanese are in the unenviable position of having two small national grids rather than one large one - and, for an encore, they're on a bunch of islands and likely unable to import significant power from neighbours, too!

Hence any plant downtime is felt much harder than it would any other place. Tough luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For some other fun with California's 60hz legacy...

The timezone database (maintained by the people who are very particular about making sure that a time specified is a well known time) have a note in the northamerica data file:

[https://github.com/tzinfo/tzinfo- data/blob/master/data/north...](https://github.com/tzinfo/tzinfo- data/blob/master/data/northamerica#L449)

# From Paul Eggert (2016-08-20):

# In early February 1948, in response to California's electricity shortage,

# PG&E changed power frequency from 60 to 59.5 Hz during daylight hours,

# causing electric clocks to lose six minutes per day. (This did not change

# legal time, and is not part of the data here.) See:

# Ross SA. An energy crisis from the past: Northern California in 1948.

# Working Paper No. 8, Institute of Governmental Studiåes, UC Berkeley,

# 1973-11. [http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8x22k30c](http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8x22k30c)

<comment><USER9> Just when you think there might be a finite number of time/calendar pitfalls...

<comment><USER10> It's a finite number, but it's always at least one bigger than you think it is.

<comment><USER11> That's pretty much how you prove the infinitude of primes :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My mind always boggles at humanity's general inability to standardize on one thing without great pain and fighting. Whether it's Metric vs. Imperial, Beta vs. VHS, Blu-ray vs. HDDVD, OpenGL vs. DirectX, USB speeds, power connectors, instant messaging protocols. Nobody can just sit together and cooperate--we always have to go through that painful period with multiple incompatible standards that fight it out until (hopefully) one of them wins.

<comment><USER13> I'm actually rather impressed with humanity's ability to standardize. It's perfectly natural (and in many cases desirable) for multiple parties to go through that "painful period" with different solutions that will compete to become "standard". It just takes a little time for everything to align and settle, that's perfectly natural.

As for the U.S. refusing to adopt the planet-wide metric system? You've got me there. That's just… Weird.

<comment><USER14> It should be obvious why the US stays on the imperial system. There is an opportunity cost to switch that is greater than the current ongoing cost of translation. Thus, someone has to bite the bullet and assume losses to push metric. Throughout the world, the organization that put the foot down and ate the bill has almost always been the government - but the US government operates on short term results. The politician that inconveniences the public today with a metric conversion doesn't have his seat tomorrow, and his replacement immediately halts proceedings.

Language isn't close to a solved problem. Hopefully the next hundred years can finally see the reconstruction of the Tower of Babel for a generation of the world soon to come. But there also needs to be a legitimate reason for us to want to unify language. If we operate independently of one another and let businesses control any interactions by proxy of money, we will stay separate.

<comment><USER15> Imperial units are better, and I expect the world will convert to them in the next century. They're sane and easily divisible into eighths and more with a single significant digit of the next smaller unit, while going from 1 kilo to 125 grams is a awkward increase in digits. They're human scale: a pound is generally about a big handful, while a gram is hardly an easily estimated quantity for humans and a kilogram is awkwardly big to hold in one's hand. A cup and a pint are useful amounts of water to drink, while a liter is a bit more than a useful quantity to measure such things by. An inch is a knuckle on my finger, and a foot is the length of my forearm, while a meter is difficult to measure without a reference and a centimeter is a useful unit but I don't have an inbuilt measuring unit that long. I could go on, but I think this is a sufficient set of examples: metric is difficult to use for casual estimation (which is, after all, what one does most of the time, imperial is designed to be on a human scale and is better for everyday use and estimation.

Edit: Not sarcasm. I work with imperial daily farming, and worked with metric doing chemistry in college.

<comment><USER16> > a foot is the length of my forearm

Or the length of one's foot, even.

You're right about meters not being as good a "human scale" measurement as feet. The idea of average height being 1.8 m is pretty awkward on its face. Turns out, though, the metric world has settled on starting with centimeters, though. But it's not clear that this is better, because now you end up throwing around high magnitude numbers like "183 cm" rather than "6 ft".

Given that we're clearly comfortable going with a diminutive unit (viz. cm vs m), I've always thought it would be better for the world to settle on the decimeter as the reference unit instead. It's larger than a centimeter but smaller than a meter, which is what we're after, and it's about the width of one's hand, which is arguably a more natural choice for something "human scale" than the foot. The snag is that "foot" still rolls of the tongue a lot more easily that "decimeter". So we go ahead and say 1 dm = "1 hand". It's a great unit, because if we want, we can scale up or down to meters and centimeters with (base 10-derived) constant factors, which is so easy that anybody can do it in their head.

The only snag left is that "hand" is already in use as a unit. This turns out to be less problematic than it sounds, because the legacy hand is an obscure unit really only used in horse breeding. And we're in luck, because as its name suggests, the imperial "hand" is named after the span of one's hand (with fingers extended), so they're roughly the same—it's not as if you end up with one name for two wildly differing sizes. This is the same kind of "conversational equivalence" we get with a ton and a metric tonne. That is, in conversation you're basically never reduced to needing the speaker to clarify which it is that he or she means, because you just don't need that kind of precision—a ton and a tone are both two very large masses that are in the same ballpark as one another.

Perhaps most importantly, the transition from feet to hands is fairly straightforward in conversational use, because end up saying that "1 ft" equals "about 3 hands".

People make a big deal about pi versus tau, but getting widespread adoption of the "hand" as a unit seems to me to be a much more worthwhile cause, because it would have a much bigger practical impact on everyday life than tau ever would.

<comment><USER6> >> a foot is the length of my forearm

>Or the length of one's foot, even.

-If you're using size 14 (US; male), 15,5 (US; female), 48 (Europe), 12,5 (Mexico)...

The good thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from.

<comment><USER17> or, if you're in the US, size 14, 15.5, 48, or 12.5.

thus underscoring your point: we can't even agree on how to represent numbers, let alone measurements!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It took a long time to standardize and integrate the US power grid (which even today is basically 3 loosely-connected systems). Some parts held out longer than others.

My brother recently visited a hydro dam in northern Minnesota that had one turbine operating at 25hz even as recently as the 90s, serving at least one industrial customer still running equipment that predated the interconnected 60hz grid.

<comment><USER19> You prompted me to look up how power stations are synchronised. This rabbit hole leads to The War of Currents. It's worth a read.

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

<comment><USER20> It's amazing how much opposition there apparently was against AC current – a technology that noone is afraid of today.

<comment><USER21> The open question for me is why did Edison even bother with DC at all? A DC generator requires a commutator. If there is anything that screams dodgy, that would be it.

Sliding friction. high current contacts. 60 times a second? Seriously?

<comment><USER22> Do incandescent bulbs last longer with DC, since they're not switching on and off 60 times a second?

<comment><USER23> There used to exist these "buttons" (for lack of a better term) that you could place at the bottom of a lamp socket to make your bulbs last longer. They were actually a diode shaped like a disc (more or less), that ultimately halved the amount of voltage going to the lamp (while also acting as a half-wave rectifier to form a noisy DC current). So in such an application - yeah, running a lamp at half its rated voltage would lengthen the life of the lamp (while reducing its brightness of course).

There was once the argument that DC would cause the lamp filament to vibrate like AC would (in the presence of the Earth's magnetic field?) - and thus if you ran your lamp on DC it would last longer due to not being mechanically stressed (I think this was one of the pitches behind those buttons, too).

I think it was later found that the argument had little validity, and was more a marketing pitch. That said, a lamp does experience a moment where, when the current (AC or DC) is switched on, the filament does "flex" \- partially from magnetism, partially from thermal loading as it heats up. This flex, over time, does produce a mechanical stress on the filament. It's a major reason why incandescent lamps typically burn out when you turn them on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Fascinating -- I'd always heard that 24 fps developed as a US film standard compared to 25 fps in Europe because of the difference in AC power frequency (24 and 60 being a pretty straightforward integer ratio). And yet, during this time, LA became firmly entrenched as the center of the American film industry while producing 24 fps films. I wonder how that squares -- was this something people had to deal with, or does this article possibly overstate how widespread 50 Hz power was?

<comment><USER25> The power frequency isn't that relevant for film, since it just powers motors on the cameras and projectors (or often just hand cranked). In fact, prior to the introduction of sound in films, the exact playback speed wasn't as important, and cinemas often varied.

Where it becomes relevant is for television, and in both cases the refresh rate matches the mains frequency. PAL is 50Hz interlaced, and NTSC is 60Hz interlaced.

<comment><USER26> I had to read further to understand why Cathode Ray Tube televisions were tied to mains frequency - it's due to an effort to reduce artefacting

[https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/164252](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/164252)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This 99% invisible episode also talks about this (third segment): [http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/you-should-do-a- story/](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/you-should-do-a-story/)

<comment><USER28> Yeah the timing seems not coincidental.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The story of why parts of the US used 25 Hertz power instead of the standard 60 Hertz is interesting. Hydroelectric power was developed at Niagara Falls starting in 1886. To transmit power to Buffalo, Edison advocated DC, while Westinghouse pushed for polyphase AC. The plan in 1891 was to use DC for local distribution and (incredibly) compressed air to transmit power 20 miles to Buffalo, NY. By 1893, the power company decided to use AC, but used 25 Hertz due to the mechanical design of the turbines and various compromises.

In 1919, more than two thirds of power generation in New York was 25 Hertz and it wasn't until as late as 1952 that Buffalo used more 60 Hertz power than 25 Hertz power. The last 25 Hertz generator at Niagara Falls was shut down in 2006.

Details: [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=4412948](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=4412948)

</comment><comment><USER30> I had a Waring Blendor [sic], cat. no. 700A, with the widest range I've ever seen: "115 Volts, 6 Amps, 25 to 60 cycle A. C. - D. C." I haven't been able to pin down an exact date on this model, but it seems to date from the 1940s or so, when the U. S. power grid still hadn't completely settled on a standard. I've read that portions of Boston still had 110 volts DC in residential areas up through the 1960s, though I've been unable to find much detail about this.

<comment><USER31> That's because it's quite common for simple appliances to use a universal motor.

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

It basically doesn't make a difference what polarity you feed it, if it's positive going into the rotor then it's positive going into the stator as well. When the rotor changes polarity, so does the stator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Growing up in Southern California, I remember always finding old clocks with conversion stickers on them - I've been looking for a good source on the technical details to find out what they needed to do to accomplish the changeover. I'm not willing to pay 35 bucks to read the IEEE article however.

<comment><USER33> IEEE articles can be 'obtained' on Sci-Hub.

<comment><USER32> Thank You!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > _customers could bring their old 50hz appliances for free adjustments and > exchanges, [including] 380,000 lighting fixtures_

Surely ordinary light bulbs don't care about the frequency. Do they mean the electronics for fluorescent lamps? Were those common in the 1940s?

<comment><USER35> The most recent episode of the podcast 99% invisible talked about this. Basically anything with a motor needed to be replaced or somehow changed so the motor would run at the right speed.

If you didn't, your electric clocks would run 12 minutes fast every hour (for example).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> There are other, smaller countries that have mixed frequencies.

PG&E (California' primary gas and electric utility) still has DC tariffs, thought I believe they provision it by installing a converter at the pint of use. I believe this is just for elevators.

Parts of Back Bay in Boston were still wired for 100V DC mains voltage into the 1960s

</comment><comment><USER37> Similarly the history of voltage levels: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity#History_of_v...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity#History_of_voltage_and_frequency)

<comment><USER38> The vibrating reed frequency meter which is the lead image in your link is super cool - never thought about a meter using tuned resonators to measure frequency instead of a discrete time-based counter.

<comment><USER39> higher freq reeds were also used to switch on/off street lights and household low-tariff water heating here in NZ - hearing the switching tones coming through the stereo was part of my childhood.

A local ham friend build a high power tone generator back in the 70's ... sent slow morse across town in the early hours one night by turning on/off all the streetlights in his neighbourhood

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> don't this become a moot point in retrospect?

with the global trade electronics are simply made to work anywhere 100~240V 50/60Hz so the manufactures don't have to make several different models. (They obviously still ship with different plugs but the actual converters work with almost any input)

</comment><comment><USER41> whats the difference between 50Hz and 60Hz besides the timer shift mentioned in the article?</comment>


Ask YC: Thoughts on our Startup Weekend Idea? - <AUTHOR>

We started work on CorkShare, a visual representation of a corkboard on the web.  You can read about it at http://corkshare.com/.<p>I was wondering what you guys think of the idea, and does the homepage clearly explain everything that we hope to accomplish?  Thanks! <comment><USER2> No mention of how it is different from other services just like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're trying to differentiate in terms of being community-based. Each 'CorkBoard' will be a small private discussion between friends on each item posted. Hopefully our SWC presentation comes online soon, because I think the presentation explains it much better than our intro page can for the time being.</comment></comment>


Git tricks: stash - <AUTHOR> http://bytbox.net/blog/2012/07/git-stash.html

<comment><USER2> I definitely agree that stash is useful, but I'm more of a fan of committing early and often, then squashing using git rebase -i.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to use stash before discovering Kenneth Reitz's legit ( <http://www.git-legit.org/> ). With legit, git switch <branchname> automatically stashes and restores uncommitted changes before and after switching branches. One less command to type and sightly higher level.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Sometimes, something needs fixing ASAP, and you have 260 build-breaking > lines an hour away from being commit-worthy

If you have 260 lines of code you should have committed it already. I disagree with the article. stash is the wrong solution for a substantial set of changes tied to a particular branch -- instead you should use a temporary branch, and relax about using git reset to rework it later.

> clone a new copy of the repository

The thought shouldn't even be entering your mind.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you want to make a quick fix it in an unrelated function or the same file would be easier to do git add -p <file>. It allows to decide which change to stage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup. It's often hard to test that change if the rest of the working copy is borked, though.

<comment><USER6> "git stash --keep-index" to stash everything except for what is in the index, or "git stash -p" to choose what changes to stash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find stash to be most useful when you want to pull in changes but have a dirty directory.</comment>


Ask HN: What is your favorite implementation of Unix Man pages? - <AUTHOR> What are your favourite, best-designed implementations of the Unix man pages across CLI, IDE and web? <comment><USER2> A/UX's commando ('inherited' from MPW, see [http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/too...](http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/tools/mpw- tools/commandref/commando.html))

</comment><comment><USER3> man man</comment>


Ask HN: How many non-developers (business) ppl teaching themselves how to code? - <AUTHOR>

How many non-developers are tired of not being able to find a technical co-founder and are determined to stitch something together with their own hands?<p>As a follow up to the real reason why I'm asking: I'm a developer bootstrapping a startup out of Hacker Dojo, and I was thinking of teaching a free class, which would basically be a "programming 101" for non-developers. Hacker Dojo has many free classes for all sorts of people, e.g. "design 101" for developers (who are usually not savvy about good design). <comment><USER2> As an accountant who eventually became a developer, the hard part isn't learning to code, it's all the related lore that causes problems. Version control, shells and pipes, "scripting languages", (free) Unix, editors instead of push button ide's, etc. If someone has had experience with a rigorous field, writing code won't be hard to grasp, butthey won't even know the questions to ask about the ancillary tools that are needed to be successful. Have a 10 things to revisit as you learn about programming page, or something.

Most people could figure out that, say, a miner would need to know about digging and shoring up dirt. That they might need to know about pumping water isn't obvious until you've done it a few times.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am a non-dev teaching myself to program and something like what you describe would be great. Something for people who want to learn about the tech side but aren't going hardcore with the self-teaching would probably be good as well-- meaning a class that teaches you enough to _understand_ what exactly your tech co-founder does, will do, can do.

</comment><comment><USER4> Over the past year I've been slowly teaching myself python (mostly for stuff related to my current job) and django (partly just for fun, partly in preparation for the day when I'm not at said job, I suppose). Since I don't have a strong, immediate and personal reason to hit it hard, I haven't been, but I do try to write a little bit of code every day and learn something meatier on a weekly basis.

While I'm sure that a beginner class would still have plenty of value for me, I find that most beginner resources spend a lot of time on stuff that I'm already comfortable with, and it's a pain to dig through to the part where they start covering the topics I'm trying to learn atm. I don't suppose this is a helpful suggestion for your current idea, but what would be most valuable to me is some kind of mentor who could help me figure out what topics/ideas/practices to learn next, where to find the right intermediate- level resources, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes, this is a great idea. But it should be an online course. I quit my banking job of 5 years and have spent the past 9 months taking courses in discrete math, algorithms and data structures, and computer organization. I have also been teaching myself python/django and have built a prototype with real alpha testers and a list of over 150 people interested in paying for my product when it's completed. I have a good grasp on programming and CS fundamentals, but could really use a course that teaches the basics of software engineering principles, scaling issues, payments processing, and version control with git. Basically a crash course in everything a junior software developer will encounter when climbing the learning curve at his first job at a startup.

</comment><comment><USER6> Marketing guy here with good skills in design.

Got tired of looking for developers to help me with my ideas so I started teaching myself Python. I already know a lot of stuff about php/html/css/etc. Even though I had already a quite good understanding of the developers job it opened up my mind even more.

All in all, it's a great experience and I can now hack something together to have a "working prototype" of my ideas :)

Tl;dr Python FTW

</comment><comment><USER7> Great idea - I'd be interested. Also, to consider, (maybe echoing some of the themes from other comments): setting up core deployment environment that 'works'. Often tiptoeing in, I get tripped up on some detail of config that is obvious to the experienced. Also best way to connect for mentor help on-demand for problems or design best practices.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am teaching myself python/django. Started around January this year, released www.sgelections2011.com about 2 weeks ago. Bring it on :)

P.S I'm actually looking for a Django Jedi Master to take my under his wing for a bit. Think I got the basics down but lack a experienced eye to see that obvious mistakes I'm making. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm currently trying to combine learning to code with travelling the world. I don't like making it easy for myself...

</comment><comment><USER10> Non-dev here going through the ropes with PHP and Javascript

</comment><comment><USER11> Me. RoR.

</comment><comment><USER12> My partner re-taught himself to code for a hobby site called moodalytics.com. (He used to develop back in the 90s but moved into management and user experience, so he didn't keep those dev skills sharp.)

He taught himself to code not because he wants to be a developer. (He knows how much work and talent that requires!) Rather, he built that site purely as a way to attract developers to help him on a larger-scale product he's now working on; he wanted to prove to developers that he wasn't going to sit idly by making 'business decisions' while the developer slaved away at all the seriously critical stuff.</comment>


Show HN: Tiny Web Crawler - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/indrajithi/tiny-web-crawler <comment><USER2> It's not entirely correct to remove query parameters from the URL. Query parameters are part of the URL and can make a website show entirely different content.

The Googlebot for example considers these two URL's different pages:

        /mypage?name=name1
        /mypage?name=name2</comment>


Australia could become the next California - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/18744197

<comment><USER2> I appreciate that The Economist takes a hard line on the reality of Australia's position, as clearly a comparison to California is wild. Last I checked California's population was roughly double the entire country of Australia, not to mention the vast differences in GDP and economy.

Australia has a lot going for it, but many problems that will hold it back. Firstly, the Australian economy will live and die by mining. The Australian dollar has been so low for so many years, that China (and others) have become dependant on their neighbour to the south for a big chunk of their mineral resources. This clearly swings the labor market in favor of low-education physical labor. I regularly hear stories of miners in the backcountry of Queensland or Western Australia earning insane salaries. If you grew up outside the core of Australia's 5 major cities, there a good chance you have a miner in the family and have been panhandling in the local rivers. In the cities, you have been raised to work in mining supporting industries such as finance, banking or insurance.

Australia does have a deeper connection with the major developing nations of the world. Whether the conservatives like it or not, there are many chinese, japanese, indian, brazilian, south african, thai, sri lankan, and many other nationalities here. Many companies have done business in the countries of South East Asia and Africa. Many even border on being philanthropic. Furthermore, Australians are some of the most internationally travelled people I have met. Nearly all of whom have taken extended multi-month trips several times in their lives, and aspire to continue doing so.

Education has been a problem and will continue to be for some time. If the mining boom ever tapers off, Australia will have a hard time recovering. In a country of 23 million, the top schools of Australia don't have the same talent pool to draw from as the US, UK or Canada. Thus, the resulting education level is not the same. I know countless tech leaders that would list the ability to recruit talent as the biggest problem they face. Many of the top tech companies in Australia hire significant numbers of non-Australian passport holders.

Furthermore, much of the top tech talent in Australia is moving to California. I know countless friends who have chosen SF, simply after visiting once. I don't blame them. If you want to be in the technology space, go to ground zero for the technology world. If you want to be in mining, Australia might just be best place in the world.

</comment><comment><USER3> Australia does have an SWF, the Future Fund - it is one of the top dozen in the world by size:

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

Although the current government would like to impose a new resources tax (and a carbon tax) and spend it all as part of budget rather than banking it in the fund (which was mostly financed by the privatization of national telecom)</comment>


Google Capital - <AUTHOR> http://googlecapital.com <comment><USER2> It`s a new website? Am I missing something in this link?</comment>