Ask HN: If you could work a 3 day week for 60% pay, would you? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> I've been doing this for 2+ years now, and would do it again in a heartbeat with the right employer. If you are a software engineer, 60% pay is still solidly in the middle class range.

The main upside is it gives you the freedom to invest in yourself without worrying about juggling freelance clients.

Want to travel? Long weekends are the norm, and it takes less pto to get extended vacations (particularly if your boss lets you shuffle your schedule between weeks).

Want to create a small business? You now have two days a week to do exactly that. This protects the weekend, and has saved me from the burnout of 'night & weekend' projects I've done in the past. My business is not ready to support me, but it is much farther along than any previous venture I've started.

Want to do random educational activities? I've taken up bread making and taken several woodshop courses in the past year. I also read 50+ books a year. You have time.

How do I negotiate this? I get a salary and health insurance. I do not get equity. I prefer it this way, as I'd rather bet on myself than equity in a venture backed startup. Just my two cents.

Are there downsides? If you consider missed pay a downside, then yes there is. You won't be able to buy a house in the bay area. You won't be able to keep up with the jonses. You won't have a fancy car. If that matters to you, don't take the pay cut. Personally, anything above $70k a year is gravy. I'd like to maximize my free time after hitting that financial milestone to actually live my life.

Let me know if I can help with specific questions.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's awesome to hear. I'm curious how you were able to find this setup? Did you apply for full time jobs and ask for part time? Or did you start out full time and then make the change after demonstrating value?

<comment><USER4> I just got offered to work 4 days work weeks, I think potentially they would be ok with 3 days too. They are generally really flexible so I had time to prove myself in first term of the contract that I can deliver. I think my departments budget is running low so I think that helps - Contractors - <USER2> less, cost less. There are multiple things at play but most significant is demonstrating the value imo.

I've been contracting for 2 years now and lately I strongly prioritised the company culture and personal interest in the company over money. Turns out this way I found a really good cultural fit and people I can work with. They invited me to join as permie and I am strongly considering it as it seems it would allow me to do the most in my life while living comfortably.

Flexibility seems to cost you ~20% of your normal rate - at least I'm confident my daily rate could be 20% higher if I wanted elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have not done this, but I have considered it. It is certainly appealing but I'd have to be sure I'd be putting the time to good use. i.e. Not playing video games all day.

What I recently discovered is that in Germany you have a _right_ to change your employment from full-time to part-time. So long as you've worked at the employer more than 6 months and the employer employs more than 15 people. The Employer can still turn you down under some conditions but sounds like it would be hard for them to justify.

[https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/tzbfg/__8.html](https://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/tzbfg/__8.html) \- The applicable law for anyone interested.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have worked 70% (3 days in the office and half a day from home) for the last year. I am employed in a big company (in Germany), so there are rules in place which allow me to do that (and return to full time). I think you need to think about your priorities and what is important to you before you decide.

Upsides: \- Much more free time to do what you want. For me it is sports, health, pursuing my own projects and trying to get my business of the ground. Nothing seems to make me more happy than to go jogging on Thursdays after lunch while everyone else is in the office for 1.5 more days.

Downsides: \- Being at a quite traditional company where people have similar values (finance house over 30 years, get a company car, have a nice bicycle, go a little on exotic vacation from time to time, vent about the free cafeteria food), they will not understand you and why you even want part time. I looked there at the statistics and some 90+% of who do part time are women. \- I couldn't support a family alone. I am not even sure though that I could do that well if I have a full-time job though, especially not save up for retirement (this is another long discussion, I recommend reading Unscripted or Fastlane Millionaire by MJDemarco to get a more entrepreneuial view on that). \- I am not sure how good it is for my career if I switched permanently to part time, especially switching job inside (and even more outside) the company seems much harder in that case.

Next month I will switch back to full time (as my part time period was limited to a year) and see how I like that again, but if I don't like it, I can fortunately switch back to part time.

In Germany there is a law that you can switch to part time, but soon there might even be a new law that you can switch back to full time again [1]

[1][https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/gesetzentwurf-beschlossen- von...](https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/gesetzentwurf-beschlossen-von-teilzeit- auf-vollzeit-unter.1766.de.html?dram:article_id=420294)

<comment><USER7> What's the pay like? Is it 70% of your full-time wage?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> No. I have lots of hobbies and I travel a lot. But I usually go to places like Norway, or Nepal for trekking. Having 4 day weekends would mean nothing to me.

I could use more vacation time. Instead of 5 weeks I get now, I could use 8 weeks of vacation time and I would sacrifice 1/12 of my salary for that.

<comment><USER9> I like this answer. I actually feel like a shorter work week is probably way less productive than just having more vacation time. When I have momentum on a project I love spending time killing it. When I'm wrapping up a project I would love to have the freedom to ramp the hours down (maybe 3 4 day weeks in a row) then take a 2 week vacation. If I could do that once a quarter I would be very happy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've worked 28 hours and 32-35 hours. It's great.

Basic process as employee is either:

A) Switch from full-time to part-time at current job. This is easiest.

B) Apply to full time jobs, negotiate _after_ you get an offer.

Some resources if you're interested:

1\. Different ways you can do it (from negotiation on the job to consulting): [https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/07/03/35-hour- workweek/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/07/03/35-hour-workweek/)

2\. Interview with someone who has negotiated 4-day workweeks for past 15 years: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time- programmer...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time-programmer/)

</comment><comment><USER11> For about 20 years I worked four days a week for 80% pay. It worked for me, but I could never afford a family. On reflection, that was too high a price to pay.

<comment><USER12> The trick is to not to be underpaid even before you switch to reduced loads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In a heart beat.

I use to work for a company that let you buy a week of vacation a year. They just reduced your pay accordingly.

I would joke I would buy the whole year if I could - and keep the vacation, sick and holiday pay :-)

</comment><comment><USER14> I actually do that right now, it is fun. Do it if you don't need the money. On my day offs I do some coding for myself or just relax and do stuff I enjoy. But recently I didn't have a project and got board and felt unproductive sometimes. I guess it is time to start a new project ;)

</comment><comment><USER15> Well, I currently freelance and take significant amounts of time off (although I generally work 40hrs/week when I am working).

Freelancing of course comes with its own challenges and downsides, if I was offered a salaried gig that provided the level of flexibility I want, I'd probably take it.

That aside, it's fantastic, I heartily recommend trying to find a way out of the 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year lifestyle.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd rather take more leave days that I can utilise in consolidated manner.

</comment><comment><USER17> I did a 4 day week for a while, but hated the job enough that I needed that extra day just to compensate, and then getting 20% less kind of sucked.

However for a good job I would love to do a 4 day or 3 day week.

</comment><comment><USER18> I do this and everybody else in the office hates me when I wish them a nice weekend on wednesday afternoon:-)

50% (3 x 7h) would be even better, as I don't know anyone being productive 8+ hours a day.

</comment><comment><USER19> Yes, if I could continue to be paid that 60% but move to a lower cost-of- living area. Also, would have to keep health benefits, because USA.

</comment><comment><USER20> maybe during certain time of the year.

I'd prefer working 4 days per week (10 hours per day).

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd quite like a 4 day week but it's just not possible for me, I've got a family to provide for.

</comment><comment><USER22> Provided I get health insurance at a good price... yes.

Sad how much of a consideration that is in the US.

</comment><comment><USER23> No. My life is really expensive right now (kids at college), and I need the money.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have definitely daydreamed about this.</comment>


Twelve Keys of Emotional Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://zenhabits.net/2008/03/twelve-keys-of-emotional-intelligence/

<comment><USER2> all well and good concecptually, but i don't see how the blurb following each emotionally intelligent noun is supposed to add much more to (or parenthetically confuse?) the standard meaning of these words.

in some case these seem to be predominantly internally-motivated or individualistic definitions/connotations of these terms and concepts. i thought the term had more to do with people in relation to others...

1\. awareness- what about the effect of "individual emotions" on others? or "awareness" of entirely non-emotional factors in a given situation.

2\. control- "resisting impulses and urges (delaying gratification)" To me this sounds like "resisting impulses and urges (until it is no longer necessary)" which is not necessarily "control". not that i'm sure "control" is the rubric for this, but what about plain ignoring or avoiding impulses and urges because they are simply that?

... and so on

in terms of offered definition, what is the difference b/w 5&6? creativity = thinking outside the box, innovation = seeking out unconventional solutions to problems... so if (seeking out unconventional solutions to problems) == (thinking outside the box), then i guess creativity = innovation, but then why are there 12 keys and not 11?

i don't want to shred this, i respect all of the terms and concepts alluded to in the post and am glad people care, but "keys to emotional intelligence"?

if you can agree that there is such a thing as emotional intelligence, i think you'd agree that there are no 5, 10, 12... "keys" to such a thing.</comment>


What Twitter needs to add next - <AUTHOR> http://mnmlist.com/what-twitter-needs-to-add-next

<comment><USER2> I completely agree, I think Twitter should focus on monetizing and improving the web experience (because it kinda sucks right now and if more people use it -> easier to monetize).

<comment><USER3> What's wrong with the web experience? I hear this all the time, but i like it's simplicity ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At the beginning you should have focused app, that does one thing very well, 10 times better than anyone else. Then (if that sticks) you should gradually add features, but only if that makes user experience that much better. I've seen a lot of great apps do that and win big time. I think Twitter has a lot of problems with fail whale, so maybe they don't have the time (resources?) to expand their core product.

</comment><comment><USER5> I might as well ask here: am I too stupid to use twitter? Whenever I visit it, I see somebody responding to somebody else ("@otherguy yeah I totally agree") - but I can't see the original post, which annoys me. Is this normal or am I too stupid to use twitter?

<comment><USER6> haha, I used to wonder exactly the same thing. I asked my friend who actually uses Twitter, and he basically said, "You're doing it wrong." He said that Twitter is all about the stream, and using it for historical conversations like that is awkward and difficult. Which makes me question the point, but there you go.

<comment><USER7> I use the Seesmic web and Android client, mainly because they do a great job of showing conversations (click 'in reply to' in the meta message).

<comment><USER8> That does require that the comments are public (or that the author has granted you access to view the comments if private).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just because a service has a feature, doesn't mean a user _has_ to use it. At its core, Twitter remains a 140-character-update service. (And no Leo Babauta, Twitter will never go beyond 140 characters because of the SMS-length limit.)

And I fail to see what decentralising Twitter has to do with keeping it simple.

<comment><USER10> It's already possible to send tweets which would overflow an SMS. Twitter limits tweets to 140 characters UTF-8 characters, which can be multibyte. SMS is 140 8-bit chars.

<comment><USER9> Not if you're using SMS to send tweets, like some of us still do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't think removing the 140 character limit would be bad necessarily, as long as only 140 characters are displayed by until a "view full tweet" option is invoked. The problem is that people will complete a thought over multiple tweets, so the stream becomes polluted.

</comment><comment><USER12> I disagree. Sure, Twitter needs to improve stability and speed. But I think the location and annotations are exciting and it makes sense for them to learn what works and adds value to the core experience.

<comment><USER13> No, they have value. The value is in the simplicity. They would be adding "noise" if they keep this up.

Twitter just needs to leave their sh.. alone.

I think...personally... if they want to improve the experience, they should do it through optional add-ons using their own API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would like to see this design-tweak, if not on Twitter, then on a 3rd-party client: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1445955>

</comment><comment><USER15> After I saw the headline I was all prepared to come here and say, "No what they need to do is make what they have stable and scalable." It turns out that's mostly what this little article says, too, despite the misleading linkbait-ish headline. Sigh.

<comment><USER16> The linkbaitish headline is how the article makes its point. Between seeing the link, clicking on it, and viewing the article, I guessed what the feature was going to be, and guessed wrong. Without that mechanism, the article wouldn't have affected me in the way it did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Built in syncing of read tweets between all clients.

</comment><comment><USER18> Who uses twitter anymore? Nearly everyone I know prefers Facebook status updates because you can comment on them and everyone's already running FB 24/7 anyway.

<comment><USER19> Well, I guess that really depends on who you know and how you use social media.

Most of my Facebook "friends" really are personal friends or at least acquaintances that I know for non-professional reasons. They are nice and often interesting people and I enjoy staying in touch. But I won't do business through FB and would consider it an incredible waste of time to follow status updates 24/7.

On Twitter, I follow several loosely connected circles of people. Some I consider friends, others I don't know and have never met. Shared professional or cultural interests is common. Keeping an eye on my stream through a good client gives me a narrow, personal and often useful heads-up about things that interest me.</comment></comment>


How we prepared our systems for our £20 million crowdfunding round - <AUTHOR> https://monzo.com/blog/2019/01/16/crowdfunding-technology-systems/ <comment><USER2> Thanks so much for posting this! This was one of the most technically interesting projects I have worked on and was a great opportunity to learn a huge amount about scaling systems.

In order to make running the crowdfunding easier for ourselves we added new tools for load shedding, optimised our apps to reduce the number of API calls and prepared crowdfunding specific runbooks. These steps made a huge difference on the day. Hopefully you all manage to learn something from our experience.

For context Monzo is a bank in the UK and last month we crowdfunded £20 million from 36,000 users through our own platform. We run the bank on our own software stack using Kubernetes & AWS, which we used for crowdfunding too.

If you have any questions please do let me know and I will do my best to answer them!</comment>


Webkit + Macruby = Manipulating the DOM right from Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/defunkt/lyndon/tree/master <comment><USER2> I used to noodle with Ruby GTK+ bindings - ruby was a nice language to lay out screens, write controllers and utilities etc... so it would also be nice alternative for DOM work (and perhaps building up composable widgets). Interesting...

I think the startup Appcelerator has a product called "Titanium" which kind of does this as a desktop/ria client platform (but not just ruby).</comment>


US Navy pays Microsoft $9M for continued Windows XP support - <AUTHOR> http://bgr.com/2015/06/24/windows-xp-support-us-navy-millions/

<comment><USER2> My condolences go out to my friends who work at Microsoft who have to support this.

</comment><comment> fooman-chu Absolute incompetence...</comment>


Blackbeard's Pirate Ship Yields Medical Supplies - <AUTHOR> http://news.discovery.com/history/blackbeards-pirate-ship-yields-medical-supplies-150128.htm

<comment><USER2> 'Ship's surgeon' in some cases meant they went through a training course, which taught them how to amputate and extract teeth. Most often not a doctor in the modern sense.</comment>


Canadapt - <AUTHOR> http://canadapt.ca <comment><AUTHOR> How to immigrate to Canada when your CRS score is below than required level to get an invitation?</comment>


TWA L1011 TV ad: "We've made part of first class a dining room" (1972) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1_qBeD6oUg&t=28 <comment><AUTHOR> Did anyone reading this ever fly on a TWA plane with a dining room in first class?

What was the economics of this? Did they expect that passengers would order enough food and drinks to make up for lost fares from the missing seats in first class?</comment>


Wolfram's Beta - <AUTHOR> http://www.wolframsbeta.com/ <comment><USER2> I was expecting something like Gizoogle when I first saw the word "computizzled"

I hate to say this, but this was even more disappointing than the real Wolfram|Alpha</comment>


Fletcher Henderson: Sugarfoot Stomp - <AUTHOR> https://popmusicgumbo.blogspot.com/2019/03/fletcher-henderson-sugarfoot-stomp.html <comment><USER2> I know music isn't a typical HN topic & am happy to find another source. Thanks for posting this.</comment>


No-cost desktop software development is dead on Windows 8 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/no-cost-desktop-software-development-is-dead-on-windows-8/

<comment><USER2> An interesting and, I fear, misguided decision. I suspect that one of the most underrated factors in the growing popularity of non-Windows platforms is the availability of high-quality free development tools.

The cost of a Visual Studio Standard license is a daunting, but not too bad to someone who's already in an established career. But to a young programmer who's still in school or in the early stages of their career, it's simply unaffordable. And that means that they're going to go with someone else instead.

Folks are generally going to want to stick with the platform they know best, so that's going to lead to a reduced supply of Windows app developers in the short run. Worse yet, in the longer run it will undercut the core of Microsoft's ecosystem by reducing the supply (and driving up the cost) of enterprise developers who are skilled in their platform.

</comment><comment><USER3> Filicide against the .net ecosystem. Glad I turned to js about a year ago.</comment>


Taiwan's 'White Shirt Army,' spurred by Facebook, takes on political parties - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/taiwans-white-shirt-army-spurred-by-facebook-takes-on-political-parties/2013/11/10/4a1fde52-46e4-11e3-bf0c-cebf37c6f484_story.html

<comment><USER2>
        Taiwan's 'White Shirt Army,' spurred by Facebook, takes on political parties (washingtonpost.com)
        3 points by ilamont 27 minutes ago

Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6709216](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6709216)

<comment><USER3> In fairness to the submitter here, who apparently submitted the canonical URL, the previous submitter should have trimmed off the referrer code from the URL before submitting.</comment></comment>


453 free HD images for your web and design projects - <AUTHOR> http://www.resplashed.com

<comment><USER2> Doesn't work

</comment><comment><USER3> 404?</comment>


Show HN: Discover similar pages - <AUTHOR> http://mindx.ai/ <comment><AUTHOR> A chrome extension for discovering webpages similar or related to the page you're currently browsing</comment>


Qualcomm Demos 48-Core Centriq 2400 Server SoC in Action, Begins Sampling - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/10918/qualcomm-demos-48core-centriq-2400-server-soc-in-action-begins-sampling <comment><USER2> I remember from my work in an ad startup revjet.

On one meeting we had a typical discussion with ops guys:

\- "why wouldn't we optimise our hardware utilisation by doing things a, b, and c."

\- "hardware is crap cheap these days. If you need more capacity, just throw more servers at that"

\- "is $24k a month in new servers crap cheap by your measure?"

\- "comparatively to the amount of how much money these servers will make the same month, it is crap cheap. It is just a little less than an annual cost of mid-tier software dev in Russian office. We account only 12% increase in our revenue due to algorithmic improvements and almost 80 to more traffic we handle. A new server pays back the same month, and you and other devs pay off only in 2 years"

This pretty much summarises the viewpoint of a typical "big dot com ops manager" on hardware these days

<comment><USER3> This is somewhat true. However, raising gross margin by cutting depreciation is a good thing. And throw in "green" for karma points. Using hardware that takes less space and power with more performance will get most good 'big dot com ops managers' happier.

<comment><USER4> Except a new architecture brings with it non-trivial software compat and operational overhead. If you are 100% in control of your software the former is manageable, but how many of us really are?

The trick here is to make the new platform attractive enough it survives the stupid test, i.e. I'd be stupid not to try this out! That implies either very cheap or very fast or.. both. I presented on this at Linaro Connect USA in 2014: [https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/linaroorg/leg- keynotekiko-...](https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/linaroorg/leg-keynotekiko- lcu2014mythology-v2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if people will actually get documentation for these, unlike many of their other devices. I'd hate to see server kerenels end up as much a wreck as phone kernels.

<comment><USER6> I can't really go into details because of NDAs (oh the irony) but these machines will boot fully open source and upstream kernels out of the box. We are very much trying to avoid the problems encountered with phone-grade ARM chips.

<comment><USER7> Will there be datasheets and other programming documentation available? ARM core documentation is, but everything else on the SoC is also important. Just because there is open-source code for it doesn't mean it's been documented, because the code only shows "how" and not "why".

Qualcomm is notoriously closed with docs, about the same as Broadcom. Intel is starting to close up, but is still more open because of the x86/PC legacy.

<comment><USER6> I don't know (and if I did know, I couldn't say at present).

However the points raised in this subthread are absolutely correct. Having upstream kernel support is vital so that any distro boots on any h/w and so that security fixes can be applied. Having good quality drivers is important, and documentation very helpful too.

Red Hat is taking the high road here and working with server manufacturers to make sure that upstream kernels work painlessly on ARM server hardware. We don't think that ARM in the datacenter can be a success otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In my opinion, the way for ARM to succeed in the server space is:

1) One quarter the price for equivalent performance for server task (e.g. 500 USD for 48-core Qualcomm vs 2000 USD for 16-core (32-thread) Intel). E.g. the problem of 48-core Cavium ARM chip was poor performance, that could be fixed by Qualcomm, with better IPC (big enough L3 cache, and 3 or 4 OooE).

2) One quarter the power usage

3) Reliable and affordable motherboards

4) Devices at similar price vs Intel ecosystem (high performance Ethernet, Infiniband, PCI-E SDD, etc.)

<comment><USER9> "One quarter the price" ... "One quarter the power usage" ...

The first is very unrealistic because this is a market and ARM chip makers aren't Santa Clause, the second seems very, very unrealistic, because Intel already has the most efficient "big iron"-ish CPUs (just compare SAP benchmarks vs. power usage of Intel-based vs. POWER-based systems, for instance), and have been under continuous pressure for more than a decade to make things more efficient (because energy use and costs following from it are a major cost factor for all of Intel's biggest server customers). That alone doesn't mean that it's not possible to be better, of course, but it's a strong hint that if no one else managed to get close to Intel there that it maybe is a hard thing to pull off. In any case I think a four-fold efficiency increase is expecting way too much.

10 % better power efficiency at the same performance level per unit would already signal a huge win for ARM.

<comment><USER4> No, actually he is exactly right. 10% better would made no difference to the typical buyer, and to complicate any TCO guesstimate would need to take into account managing a new arch in a deployment, which comes with its own hard to measure overheads.

<comment><USER9> Define "typical buyer". 10-15% instant energy savings would be one heck of a reason for FB/Google/Amazon/Microsoft to veer towards ARM for their clouds, especially if the vendor can plausibly show that they have more potential there.

These are servers, not hypedisruptionmarkets. Not once where there 400 % efficiency increases in a single generation of anything.

<comment><USER10> > 10-15% instant energy savings would be one heck of a reason for > FB/Google/Amazon/Microsoft to veer towards ARM for their clouds

I'm not sure the upfront effort/cost would be worth it for that savings alone, especially when Intel will just come along and say they'll have that savings in an x86 chip in 9 months without any software dev required.

What this _could_ do for the big DC companies though, is provide them a lever to keep Intel on that path. That lever alone might be worth all the dev effort required to support 2 architectures in a DC for some customers - and even if it's not worth it empirically, it may make them feel like it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Except the core counts, no other specs like frequency, power or cache. Are there any qualcomm docs.

<comment><USER12> No specs, no benchmarks, no looking inside the case..

<comment><USER6> When they're available to buy, which is not long away, you'll be able to find out all that. The cases aren't going to be welded shut :-)

It's not surprising that Qualcomm don't publish this because they themselves probably don't know the yields from each bin in the final process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What modifications are required to be made to the linux kernel/tcp stack to take advantage of 48+ cores, in order to achieve a more linear scalability?

Are there any real-life experiences? Would a different TCP stack such as mTCP[1] suffice?

1\. [http://shader.kaist.edu/mtcp/](http://shader.kaist.edu/mtcp/)

<comment><USER9> > What modifications are required to be made to the linux kernel/tcp stack to > take advantage of 48+ cores, in order to achieve a more linear scalability?

[https://xkcd.com/619/](https://xkcd.com/619/) isn't a joke.

Linux is the default operating system of _huge_ NUMA systems with hundreds of CPUs / thousands of cores.

<comment><USER14> They have put quite a bit of work into scaling, but that doesn't mean it's perfect yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you like 48+ core ARM servers, Cavium's ThunderX offering has been available for some time.

<comment><USER15> Cavium is about on par with an old e5-2670 that is about $90 on ebay. So while at some future point arm server chips will likely be a good value Cavium's ThunderX is def. not it.

<comment><USER14> Do you believe Qualcomm's will be any better value?

<comment><USER15> No clue I guess we need to wait for benchmarks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I read somewhere that ARM was growing fast because it hadn't been as thoroughly developed as x86 in the past. So right now ARM manufacturers were catching the lowest hanging fruit, so to speak.

Is ARM going to hit a limit soon like x86 has?

Also in the comments of the article someone says that the x86 architecture is outdated vs SOC architecture.

Is this true? Does this mean we'll see SOC on desktop in the near future?

<comment><USER17> Yes, the specs of Centriq and Vulcan are probably similar enough to Skylake that there's no catching up left for them to do. At best they could advance at a similar pace to Intel/IBM.

When it comes to the desktop, Intel is driven more by business concerns than technology. Putting the southbridge on the processor doesn't have that much advantage, but AFAIK Zen can run by itself with no external southbridge to some extent.

<comment><USER4> Well, Vulcan is now kaput, Seattle seems disowned and X-Gene is up for grabs, so only Qualcomm and Cavium remain as contenders in the server SoC space. I predict they still have a solid shot but it will require a lot of uncomfortable adjustments along the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if the number of cores and threaded will now follow a similar law to Mores Law. 18 months seems too quick, maybe doubling every 8 years...

<comment><USER19> Moore's law states transistor count doubles approx every two years. So if that keeps up either you'll see more shrinking of computer size, utilization of the new transistors per square inch, or both.</comment></comment>


The High-Res Society - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/highres.html

<comment> old-gregg I think Paul is over-generalizing. Young, fast-developing industries tend to produce rich ecosystems of startups due to low cost of entry. But over time, as industries mature, companies are naturally starting to consolidate into larger and larger entities in order to survive. Paul thinks that just because we're seeing this early growth in web software, it applies to all economic activities of mankind.

Using Pauls's main arguments (historical perspective) it's not hard to "prove" the opposite: world is constantly moving towards consolidation.

Look: Desktop software development world looked very much like web scene today: one person could invent (and implement) an electronic table or an editor or a basic interpreter or an interesting game and do very well financially (has been done thousands of times). Yet in the early-mid 90s most software got prohibitively expensive to build for a small firm.

Also you can go back to early automotive boom in the US: there were myriads of automotive startups in mid-west (and in Europe too) and look what happened to all of them later. Same can be said regarding telecom, oil and railroad industries.

Developing industry = more startups Mature industry = very few startups

Has always been like that.

<comment><USER4> I would expect an essay talking about smaller is better to discuss two things I didn't see there (although I'm pretty tired from having driven through the Alps, again):

* Coase and lower transaction costs. I think this generally favors pg's argument.

* Capital requirements for new companies. With internet startups, these are _extremely_ low. Is this an anomaly that will disappear soon? Is it a new trend that will spread to other fields? Is anything else that has 'gone before' comparable to this field's low capital requirements?

<comment><USER5> > Capital requirements for new companies.

Capital requirements for software companies might have gone down due to better tools and cheap hardware. However, it's gotten more expensive, and borderline impossible given the regulatory environment, to start any sort of operation that builds, grows, mines, or transports things. I'd bet it's more expensive to start a medical practice or an accountancy now than in the past, too.

<comment><USER6> I don't think enough people highlight how many startups depend on open source software to keep their costs low. Everyone knows it's the case, but it doesn't seem as highlighted when people talk about near-zero startup costs. Without Apache, PHP/Python/Ruby, MySQL, etc. etc. we'd all have to be buying webserver software, databases, frameworks, etc. or wasting a lot of time (and thus capital) rolling our own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I believe that as a general trend, we are in a period of time where the large organization is collapsing, across wide areas of human activity.

Without writing a thesis on it, I offer the following disconnected observations:

* The US Military, one of the largest human organizations, was successfully attacked at it's headquarters for a total expenditure of less than $400,000 and a few lives, and has not and may never catch the attacker

* The Roman Catholic Church's sex scandals

* To be fair to all religious factions, punch in "baptist financial scandal" into google, or any other large religous denomination

* The disappearence of any sort of financial security in corporate employment or retirement

* The fact that there is no "corporate ladder" that PG refers to, and it has likely existed only in people's hopes and fantasies for two decades or so. The way to advance in most corporations is to have the corporation grow beneath you, or to leave for another corporation and come back to a higher position. Promotions and raises inside one corporation do not meet inflation when averaged over all employees. Loyalty is punished, almost as if in some sense the organization knows it is a bad thing and is trying to kill itself.

* The collapse of joint financial organizations that were once emmensely powerful and efficient: * We used to all put premiums into large insurance corporations, and those insurance corporation used their economy of scale to invest those premiums, such that they paid out something like 109% of premiums as claims and still profited. Today most big insurance corporations pay out less in claims than what they take in via premiums. * We used to all put money into banks, which then made loans and paid interest to the depositors. Now we don't save, and as of a few months ago, banks don't lend.

* The US Federal Government, arguably the largest human corporation, is bankrupt and disfunctional -- it was never a model of efficiency, but in times past it got some things done, built dams and won the wars it fought and etc. Now it does nothing productive at all.

* IBM, Microsoft, GE, GM, Exxon, etc -- the readers here don't need to be told of their failures, but I would additionally point out the trend that they don't want new additions to their organization, and attempt to hire mainly contract, outsourced, non-employee employees these days.

* The United Nations

One thing to note, is that I think if the trend is away from big organizations, the trend of integrating Europe into one big EU is a bad one. The trend of increasing Federalization in the United States is probably also generally the wrong direction.

<comment><USER8> You need to separate the stability of individual large organizations over time to the relative importance of all large organizations. The Mormon faith is growing and other religions are dieing, but on average about the same number of people are part of some religion. Google grows as GM dies, but the average number of people working at large 5,000+ person companies seems fairly constant. Individual government organizations grow and die but overall the government workforce seems fairly constant. Companies with less than 5 people are a wold apart from company's with 50 but after 5,000 it's all about the same mess.

PS: The Pentagon is just an office building NORAD is far more important.

<comment><USER7> There is only one Google, but there are many crumbling behemoths. A few years ago I read a statistic about the percentage of the workforce employed by large traditional corporations, and it had continually dropped; but like a lot of statistics, it was not clear how it accounted for the trend in hiring temp or contract workers through third party front firms.

While the stability of large organizations over time, and the relative importance of all large organizations, are separate concepts, both are dropping. While Mormonism or other religions may grow and shift, in general the trend is toward the less centrally organized sects, and the big centrally organized, heirarchical ones are becoming less so, and becoming more run by the lower levels of the organizational pyramid.

Of course the Pentagon is not just an office building. Any reasonable person would believe that one of the hijacked airplanes could have been piloted into a NORAD installation if that had suited Al Qeada's purposes, but NORAD is only useful against other dying behemoths of giant organizations, such as the soviets, and thus isn't nearly as important as it used to be, and would never be bothered with by Al Qeada.

I think the reasons that we did not catch or kill Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora are exemplary of the ways that giant organizations fail. We believed we were strong enough to pursue other goals at the same time (Iraq, various shifts in policy under the cover of the Patriot Act, etc) and thus tolerated various internal groups siphoning off resources to persue those goals, and when things did not go as expected, we could not move fast enough to get back on track, and the internal groups had grown too powerful to stop. If we ever catch Osama it will probably be because we pay someone else to do it for us; I think that is loosely analogous to how IBM had to pay Bill Gates to write DOS for them, because their own internal politics and bureaucracy made it impossible for them to themselves.

One bullet point I left out of my list above, is higher educational institutions. I remember in the early days of slashdot, the education career questions were all of the type "should I go for a Phd. or settle for a Masters" or "the place I want to attend had Computer Engineering instead of Computer Science, does that matter" and stuff like that. Look at the educational career dicision questions on slashdot or here these days -- it is all variations on "should I drop out" "how hard is it to get a job with no degree" and so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Most of creative work at 'big companies' involves designing business processes. Which is in fact programming, only using people and resources. Another task involves optimizing the processes and minimizing the associated cost.

The whole raison d'être of a large organizational pyramid is cost of processing and transmitting information and handling the associated noise. Middle layers of management filtering and processing information for the upper decision-makers. Keeping the noise down by designing company 'policies', 'strategies' and 'missions' that can be easily communicated to every employee.

A manager who designs the most efficient and scalable organization structure wins over the competition or conquers a new market.

Here comes the internet with zero cost of communication. Here come high level languages that make it cheap to describe the most efficient processes.

Any large organization can in principle be substituted by a code because the organization itself IS a code written in job description language.

<comment><USER10> I think this is a great point, but I have to disagree with two parts.

 _Here comes the internet with zero cost of communication_ \- information still costs time (opportunity cost) to produce and consume. It can be designed to be easier to produce/consume, but that costs design resources. The Internet gives zero cost to _transmit_ information.

 _Here come high level languages that make it cheap to describe the most efficient processes._ \- this won't happen because people are not interchangeable like Silicon is. You can hire two people that fit the same job description but will fit differently into the organization. They will work differently, interact differently with management and coworkers, produce different results (even if equivalent).

I think the closest we can come to high level business languages are

1) something like design patterns that can't be plugged in directly but can guide implementation of a business process with known trade-offs OR

2) design processes that can be completely specified and automated so human judgement isn't involved

Interestingly, #1 favors talent cultivation (a la Google) and the second leads to outsourcing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's amazing how quickly things change. Paul mentioned the 70s as a heyday for big organizations, but I remember this going well into the 80s. You can see it in the culture. Remember how many movies were made that glorified climbing the corporate ladder? "Working Girl" with Meg Ryan, "The Secret of My Success" with Michael J Fox, "Big" with Tom Hanks. Those are just a few. There was an entire hollywood genre of climbing the ladder - movies that made it seem that making presentations with little arrows going up and down on a chart was the apex of human achievement.

I was in my teens during the latter half of this decade - I'd guess that at least half of the people who read hacker news are too young to have seen them when they came out. If you do watch them now, they'll probably seem as quaint as "Hair".

Don't ask.

<comment><USER12> Ever notice any 80s movie characters who were computer programmers? I can remember one - it's the weirdest thing to watch. He's socially awkward, which is reasonable, but he also has no money! All the cool kids in the movie make more than him. You could not have such a character today - <USER2> implausible.

<comment><USER13> David Lightman. He was smart, nerdy, witty and got the girl.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Part of the reason—possibly the main reason—that startups have not spread as broadly as the Industrial Revolution did is their social disruptiveness._

I think a more abstracted version of the problem would be that, at least in western civilization, products spread much faster than best practices. If Nintendo releases a new videogame system they'll sell millions the first day, and yet 2/3 of American children still don't get their daily RDI of calcium.

The problem is that processes are much more important than products in terms of quality of life, health care, child development, business, education, etc. And while technological progress is increasing exponentially, the rate of best-practice adoption remains flat.

It seems like the American dream is being able to purchase the solution to any one of life's problems in a big f __*ing box at Wal-Mart for less than 200 bucks. Consumers are already really well trained at this, and we need to figure out a way to leverage this behavior to get them to adopt new processes. The problem as I see it is threefold:

1) People don't know about best practices

2) They know about a best practice but they aren't sold on it

3) They're sold on it but it's too hard

So far as I can see it, the only way for America to remain competitive with the rest of the world is to make the adoption of best practices an order of magnitude easier. We might be temporarily ahead of everyone else in terms of getting the smartest kids to go out and join or start their own businesses, but in terms of nearly every other best practice we're falling drastically behind.

The reality is that we live in a society where doctors don't wash their hands before surgery, where shoddy farm practices cause excessive soil erosion, where pregnant women eat fish high in mercury and PCBs, etc. America is certainly getting more high-res in response to change, but is the catalyzing change really technological? Corporations are great at buying stuff, it's the best practices they are really slow at adopting. The fact that corporations are breaking down into smaller units seems to be a synechdoche of society at large falling apart due to the same set of failures.

</comment><comment><USER15> Behind the success of most corporate giants is usually the not-so-invisble- hand of government connections. The 1960's organization man economy was a result of the tremendous growth of government during the New Deal and the World War. IBM was a small company until it received a giant government contract to run the Social Security accounting system. GE grew enormously from government spending on space, nuclear energy, and advanced AT&T's dominance was a result of nationalizing the telephone industry in 1918. The economies of scale for Wall St. companies are solely the result of the Federal Reserve's "too big to fail" policy ( and also regulatory costs).

I think that the early 1900's were a more economical natural time. There were some big corporations, but the economy was largely dominated by small businesses and startups. The 1960's were the anomaly, a direct result of the creation of the American mega-state.

Today the government and large government connected corporations have calcified. Look at NASA. It's not sexy to work there anymore because everyone knows that it hasn't done a single interesting thing since it put a man on the moon. But because it is a government program, it cannot fail and be replaced with something more dynamic. It's a zombie organization, not really alive, but unable to die.

 _But till recently this was an anomalous route that tended to be followed only by outsiders. It was no coincidence that the great industrialists of the nineteenth century had so little formal education. As huge as their companies eventually became, they were all essentially mechanics and shopkeepers at first._

In 1900, getting an education was anomalous. Most smart people were mechanics and shopkeepers, and if they were ambitious and talented, they created successful startups. The hacker in 1900 viewed a college degree like a hacker today views an MBA - as an expensive way to rot your brain. And finally, for those who got engineering degrees, I doubt starting a company was that uncommon. Off the top of my head, the very first student at Stanford ( Herbert Hoover) did indeed start his own company. So the tradition has been there for a long time.

 _Now I would guess that practically every Stanford or Berkeley undergrad who knows how to program has at least considered the idea of starting a startup. East Coast universities are not far behind, and British universities only a little behind them._

In the 2000's your average ambitious Ivy league graduate wanted to work for Wall St. The rest would go into consulting, academia, or get a profession degree. Very few people think of doing startups. If the Wall St. bubble never comes back, and graduates are forced to make an honest living, perhaps there will be a trend towards doing more startups.

 _Fifty years later, startups are ubiquitous in Silicon Valley and common in a handful of other US cities, but they're still an anomaly in most of the world._

Startups are an anomaly in Europe, Japan, and Korea because of government regulations. China is filled with startups because it has the freest market in the world. Startups are common in Sillicon valley because it is the home of the tech industry, which is the most unregulated industry in the United States.

</comment><comment><USER16> _How often does it happen that a rule works for thousands of years, then switches polarity?_

I'm not a historian, but as far as I know from reading various books by Drucker, large corporations didn't exist for much of the last thousand years. In fact, I remember he made the point that looking at the turn of the last century, even the largest business of that day would be considered small to medium by today's standards (and goes on to ascribe that to a lack of management knowledge - it's impossible to manage a huge corporation without management).

If "larger is better" has only been with us for a hundred years, it may well slink back into the shadows sooner than we think.

I think the order in which this will unfold will be highly dependent on what kind of business you're in. Car manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to get small any time soon, at least not until we have perfect simulated models of the human body to get rid of all the human trials, and until we have instant, near-free manufacturing processes available to all. By the time those happen, it seems unlikely that "corporations" will look like they do now....

<comment><USER17> I don't think 'corporation' is a required title for the concept to apply. Large command-oriented economic drivers have existed for a long time. The Roman army was one, it's economic function the looting of conquered territory. Notice that when it could no longer accomplish that function, things began to turn south for Rome.

We are observing the decentralization of economic authority, common throughout history, but usually a side-effect of economic decline and/or societal collapse; maybe more correctly a side-effect of the movement from specialized occupations back to subsistence farming.

This decentralization seems to be different, and appears to be driven by the unprecedented communication, access to information, and wide audience granted by the Internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Now it turns out the rule 'large and disciplined organizations win' needs to have a qualification appended: 'at games that change slowly.'"

The pattern I see throughout history is that large organizations endure until some disruptive technology takes them down. (Greek hoplite armies vs. light infantry and archers, armored knights vs. longbows, cavalry corps vs. tanks.)

The modern age has simply accelerated the whole process. Technological change occurs increasingly quickly now, and so these "overturnings" happen more and more often. Because large organizations take time to form, the balance of power has shifted to small entrepreneurial organizations.

<comment><USER19> true, you might want to look at empires that lasts for centuries after rapid expansion

alexander the great, napoleon, the japanese (1940ish) don't count because they cannot sustain the expansion

ironically, mongol empire (and its vast expansion) lasted for 3.5 centuries. there must be some other reasons that neither cruelty nor barbarism can explain (in fact, empires based on cruelty/barbarism don't last long)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Perhaps it's an east coast thing but I was just back for Thanksgiving and of the many Ivy League superstars I grew up with, almost all are working on Wall St, in management consulting shops, or they have become lawyers. I'm not saying that Ivy League == best and brightest, but it is probably a good indicator of ambition.

These three industries all have one thing in common, they pay well and they only require a Liberal Arts degree. My sister graduated from Harvard a few years back and I'd say that every single one of her friends I've met works in one of these three industries. Their conversations of others I haven't met indicate that these three professions are the norm for all their classmates.

Perhaps Stanford is different and perhaps CS majors are as well. But the major trend I see is that the most ambitious people from the most prestigious Universities are going to the places that pay them the most.

<comment><USER19> the trend i see is that the most ambitious people do startup and degree(s) matter less as time goes

maybe a quantitative measure like Z = asset_from_work_now / cost_before_work_then where cost_before_work_then include tuition, rent, etc ... work can be defined as wall street, lawyer, plumber, startup, etc

Z for googlers can be in the thousands to millions, while Z for wall streets might be in the tens or hundreds ... big difference

or course Z can be negative (bankrupt+debt) ... but the huge discrepancy of Z value only reinforces my point, only the brave and ambitious dare to walk the uncertain path; the rest only follow thru the proven, safe path

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think a major reason for the high-res society as Pg so eloquently calls it, can be found in Ronald Coase's classic _The theory of the firm_ from 1937.

In it he tries to describe firms and why they exist. His main finding is that the reason that firms exist as large entities instead of just individuals trading labour and services with each other is transaction costs. In an industrial society the transaction costs of many individuals coming together to create and sell a product would be prohibitive. By creating firms the transaction costs are lowered - it is cheaper to create and maintain the structure needed to uphold the firm than it is to locate and purchase services in the marketplace when you need them .

The transaction costs are coming down with the advent of the global information flow - it is much easier for me to locate and purchase the services of an individual coder than it would be to locate and purchase the services of a welder 20 years ago. The transaction costs are especially low in industries that sell immaterial services and goods that can easily be moved around the globe, such as web businesses.

This makes firms increasingly less competitive with individuals, it also explains why some sectors such as the auto and aero industries are dominated by big companies and probably will be in the future. The transaction costs of individuals building a Boeing 747 are just too prohibitive.

Link: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm>

</comment><comment><USER22> I like this a lot, but I'm not sure I understand the title.

<comment><USER23> Future economies will be made out of more, smaller pixels.

<comment><USER8> Successful companies tend to grow. Could Google make just about as much money with 5000 people as they currently make with 20,000? Perhaps, but while adding people has a positive ROI they are going to keep doing that. There high value for large organisations to buy small ones and IP law tends to create cash cows which buy up all the interesting companies around them.

PS: When companies that can kill Google, IBM, and Toyota while staying small show up I might agree with you until then I expect things to stay like they are.

<comment><USER23> "This doesn't mean big companies will disappear. To say that startups will succeed implies that big companies will exist, because startups that succeed either become big companies or are acquired by them. But large organizations will probably never again play the leading role they did up till the last quarter of the twentieth century."

(<http://www.paulgraham.com/highres.html>)

<comment><USER24> That is actually _the_ point I thought needed more exploration. For one thing it seems to accept that 'startups' are a product of an environment dominated by large companies. There are some interesting questions that arise:

* A theme running through many of pg's essay is that startups are a far more productive use of resources. Pg sometimes uses acquisitions as an example taking the same resources & applying them to a large organisation. The result is reduced productivity. Doesn't that imply that acquisitions shouldn't take place in the first place? A transaction is supposed to take place when it produces some sort of a net surplus.

* Can a startup complex survive without acquisitions?

* If size is a disadvantage, isn't this a disincentive to grow? Wouldn't that put a company in danger of being out competed by smaller players?

* If growth is capped by anti - economy of scale effects, is there still enough incentive for startups?

* Today's startups often float around winner take most areas. Isn't this at odds with small organisations being dominant? The solution to this one seems alarming: Small organisations with huge revenues. If this scales we get a large number of Googles being run entirely by a few hundred employees & responsible for a level of wealth creation grossly disproportionate to their number of employees.

My ideas are pretty uncooked. But what I'm saying is that this prediction might be more robust if it explored a separation startup & big business. IE what does a startup look like in an economy dominated by startups. Foxes can never outnumber rabbits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So there's at least one problem with this, I think (though in principle, I suppose I agree). This line bothers me:

 _Even if Internet-related applications only become a tenth of the world's economy_

A tenth? Internet applications? A tenth of the world's economy could be Internet applications? I'm a bit flabbergasted by the thought. I mean, I guess...if entertainment spending comes to be merged into the Internet applications category, and media, and toys and games, and travel, and education, etc. I guess the argument can be made that a tenth of the investment an average business makes (regardless of what the business actually does) in the future will be on Internet-related technology.

But, I think we're still a long way from that, aren't we? And it doesn't alter the basic realities of the economy, and where people spend most of their money.

How much do grocery stores and food producers spend on Internet applications? Certainly not 10%. Real estate and other big ticket item sellers like cars and boats? Is it 10%? Seems very unlikely, though maybe with advertising becoming more Internet focused one could say that their advertising budget will eventually be going to the Internet. Food and houses and other necessities are where 1/3 to 2/3 of the average person spends their money, worldwide. So, what else is there? Energy. I suspect energy companies spend maybe a tenth of one percent of their annual budget on Internet-related expenses, if that much (though they spend a lot on technology, in general).

Unless we imagine that the percentage of money people spend on these things will drop significantly in the near future relative to entertainment, toys, sports, and knowledge-related activities (and all of those things become dramatically more Internet focused--which is the believable aspect of this scenario), a 10% Internet application economy future is hard for me to visualize.

Of course pg is theorizing that the wealth being created is independent of existing systems of wealth generation. Being a libertarian, I'm sympathetic to that notion. But, there needs to be a productivity boost created by new technologies for it to literally create wealth. It needs to save people time or make some sort of production or transit more efficient. Entertainment doesn't produce wealth, IMHO, it merely redirects it...and some percentage of modern Internet applications are entertainment. I'm not saying that's a bad thing...just that I believe when the wealth being "created" isn't actually in response to production or increased efficiency, I suspect it's squeezing a balloon rather than blowing more air into it.

And, the natural fallout of that is that if the brightest young lads and lasses are going into Internet applications, instead of taking part in the physical world, we might end up slowing the growth of wealth generation in the world rather than accelerating it. Particularly if they're mostly doing pure entertainment applications.

Luckily, as long as we have a free market, it will correct for those kinds of mistakes, even if it takes a while for us to recognize the corrections (and even if the mistakes get subsidized across several years because investors are slow to react to shifts in the landscape).

<comment><USER26> there is no direct relation between a product's market value , and true value.

look at wikipedia , skype , and linux. another example:worldwide yearly vaccine market is $11 billion , worldwide daily oil market is $6.5 billion.

the problem with those going to internet apps is not that they chose internet apps , because internet and software apps hold enormous potential value. the problem is the things they chose to implement , are not really valuable. but that's maybe a basic issue related to the consumer culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Isn't there some danger that you are over-generalizing from an industry where there are exceptionally low barriers to entry to a global trend? What if you want to make a new automobile, or even worse, a new airliner?

However, I think there is another trend that reinforces what you say here. Previously there was a strong incentive for risk-averse people to work in large corporations. I'm a risk-averse person and I once worked at a large corporation. With the change in organizational behavior so that layoffs have become a first resort action, instead of an action only appropriate in desperate circumstances, there is little risk-aversion benefit to large organizations. So other than health insurance, large corporations have become a generally inferior class of employers. This is true even if you are not entrepreneurial.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think the trend here was missed. The fast change is not a new event but rather a continuous trend that moved laterally into business.

It's decentralization, and it's been occuring throughout history. For example, equality is a form of decentralization that has taken quite a while to manifest. You've also got decentralization in information, labor (specialization), and housing.

The next one that we desperately need is energy decentralization: we need to have smaller, agile, and more incremental methods of generating energy. The tech is coming along so we'll be able to do this, and some of the tech will only work well if it's not scalable.

My $.02

</comment><comment><USER29> I had two responses:

\- The Internet is different from other fields because of low barriers to entry and the ease of collaboration between groups (low transaction costs). This means that even if our field grows very large (and I think it will), the principles underlying its success might not successfully spread to other industries.

\- Another thing that might happen is that large organizations gain enough power that they can control the Internet. If they're able to do so and prevent the rise of alternative, more free networks, then hegemony could come to dominate this industry too, as it did all the others.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think the limiting factor to growth of the startup culture is the fact that big organizations are good at providing commodity goods and services _and_ the freedom and unconventional nature of startups doesn't seem to scale up to big organizations. At some point I'm sure even companies like Google and Genentech, which tried to maintain the startup feeling, start to feel pretty corporate.

So I would agree insofar as to say that startups will become the _de facto_ standard method of commercializing new technology, but I don't think they will ever represent a significant portion of the economy as far as the number of people employed. Having such a small percentage of the population involved in startups doesn't afford them much opportunity to affect social norms on a large scale.

Short of complete automation, big organizations will always be best at doing commodity things like picking up your trash and making your shirts. Even once those particular tasks are automated, big organizations will grow (often from startups) elsewhere to tackle new commodity goods and services. Once something is no longer cutting edge, it'll be provided by a big organization.

Startups will always disrupt the way big organizations currently do things, but by being successful they will just become big organizations themselves.

</comment><comment><USER31> In many industries, there is a non-stoppable trend towards larger and larger companies.

In retailing, Wal-Mart is crushing their competitors, who are also extremely large but they do not have the economies of scale that Wal-Mart. (In addition, Wal-Mart has better management.)

In some cases, large companies succeed because consumers want the perceived value of purchasing from a large company. Dell and HP basically own the server and desktop computer market, and there is no reason to assume this will change in the next ten years. People feel that Dell will not go out of business.

One of the industries hurting most right now is the automobile industry. GM and Chrysler say they will run out of money unless the U.S. government provides several billions of dollars in aid soon. Ford says it does not need government financing but it has pledged all of its assets in a collateral- based loan. Yet almost no one is willing to buy a car from a small automobile company, they are viewed as risker than GM or Chrysler.

In choosing software companies, one factor sophisticated purchasers look at is, "How likely is this company to be in business 5 and 10 years from now?" When you commit to a software package, you are making a huge investment in time and energy, far beyond the purchase price of the software. You want to know that in the future, the software company will continue to enhance the product and will be around to provide technical support. This is why companies, for example, purchase software from Oracle, even though Oracle is ridiculously. People expect Oracle to be in business ten years from now. Yes, open source to some extent mitigates this risk, but putting aside very successful open source projects (Linux, Apache, MySQL, how do I know that they will be around ten years from now. Do I really want to writing the code myself?)

Law firms have consolidated tremendously in the past decade. Large clients want one firm that can provide experise in dozen of areas of the law and can handle complex transactions that span the globe. In Boston, ten years a 100 lawyer firm was considered to be a large sophisticated firm. Now such firms (at least on the corporate side) have merged with other firms to create 500 attorney firms.

In public accounting, the Big Eight has consolidated into the Big Four. Clients want the brand name that only a Big Four firm can provide.

There is no clear trend here. In some industries, consolidation is taking place and will never stop. In other industries, it is the opposite effect.

James Mitchell www.bostonconvivium.com email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER32> "If Internet startups offer the best opportunity for ambitious people, then a lot of ambitious people will start them, and this bit of the economy will balloon in the usual fractal way."

With the advent of open hardware and 3D printers, I think you can take out the word Internet and have the statement still be true.

</comment><comment><USER33> The conclusion overreached a little bit. And there was something disturbingly California centric about it.

In my opinion there is not such a huge cultural gap that's responsible for the different startup rates.

Few (if any) cultures are so deeply authoritative as to be anti-success.

The valley's lead is much more the result of rather simpler causes. People - <USER3> whole lot of smart ones, two recession proof large smart people producers (the universities), and funding lots and lots of funding.

That's where the lead comes from and it will be difficult to close it. Culture doesn't have anything to do with it.

<comment><USER34> "Few (if any) cultures are so deeply authoritative as to be anti-success."

I would argue that most cultures, even in California, are too authoritarian and inflexible to really cultivate productive, disruptive change. For all the talk about innovation, it is genuinely difficult to argue against the status quo. It is very, very hard to change one's frame of mind, and people tend elsewhere to defer to expertise and experience over ideas with are promising, make sense, but are not so fleshed out. In the Bay Area you will at least find an audience, if not easily convince them. Being anti-authority is obviously insufficient for startup success, though.

A good quote to keep in mind:

"...I would design my own, fresh, without knowing how other people do it. That was another thing that made me very good. All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life." -- Steve Wozniak

We are currently encountering much existing knowledge in engine design. Some of it is undoubtedly wise, but a lot of it is probably out of date. We have the chance to experiment. But it would be genuinely impossible to do such a thing in most auto companies today.

<comment><USER35> Also - Feynman's "What I cannot create, I do not understand."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> There's a famous economics essay about the size of the firm by Ronald Coase (winners of the Nobel prize for economics), in which he discusses why firms (companies, organizations) exist at all (instead of individual contractors), and the factors influencing their size.

summary: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm>

actual essay: <http://web.cenet.org.cn/upfile/30998.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER37> I dont quite understand if the article was to convince me about something or was it to predict the future?

"An ambitious kid graduating from college now doesn't want to work for a big company. They want to work for the hot startup that's rapidly growing into one."

Thats a generalization and I believe its untrue and biased towards talented, ambitious young people Paul meets. Sorry if I'm wrong, but if that was to convince me, I'd need a proof. From my point of view, the rest of the world is still at sort of peak of belief in the "corporate world" (but I dont have any research doc to reference as well :)).

"Fifty years later, startups are ubiquitous in Silicon Valley and common in a handful of other US cities, but they're still an anomaly in most of the world."

Well thats what I dont understand the most. If the whole article talks about the huge positive impact that startups are going to have on economy, let me ask Paul: what has changed since then ("fifty years [ago]") that makes you believe that NOW is the moment startups are going to change the whole world so much? What was the reason you wrote (published) the article NOW?

</comment><comment><USER38> Large organisations are modelled on the military. So were schools. And many more countries had compulsory national service. Now schools are evolving and university with all its freedoms is more likely experience than military service for most new entrants to the workforce, it's not surprising that a huge, rigid, hierarchical structure is no longer relevant or even tolerable to many people.

Another point to bear in mind: more small companies means more outsourcing, particularly for legal, HR, IT support, and so on. We should also see masses more companies using shared business premises, with shared receptions and so on.

Small companies should also mean more teleworking, since (1) people in small companies are generally more open to the idea of it, and (2) it's easier to keep track of what everyone in a smaller company is doing, even if they are working remotely, and (3) it means small companies can have international representation which may be one guy in a specific Asian country working from a bedroom-office.

</comment><comment><USER39> PG, your use of the term "economies of scale" seems to be slightly misleading:

My understanding is that to benefit from "economies of scale", you don't necessarily have to be big in size. You can be a two people startup serving a huge user base with a small margin. It's possible to make huge profits in this scenario because of economies of scale in terms of the size of the market served.

Your use of the terms seems to indicate that you can use economies of scale to your advantage only if you are big in size:

 _Those who bet on economies of scale generally won, which meant the largest organizations were the most successful ones._

 _But in the late twentieth century something changed. It turned out that economies of scale were not the only force at work. Particularly in technology, the increase in speed one could get from smaller groups started to trump the advantages of size._

<comment><USER29> I think you're confusing "economies of scale" with what Taleb calls "professions that scale".

<comment><USER39> May be I'm; but you are not helping with your one liner :( [for "professions that scale" google is pointing to this page]

Btw, Wikipedia seems to be more or less in agreement with my stand here: [<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale>] "Economies of scale are the cost advantages that a firm obtains due to expansion. Diseconomies of scale are the opposite. Economies of scale may be utilized by any size firm expanding its scale of operation."

OK! It seems I missed the cost advantage part; i.e., the term "economies of scale" is used only if there is a cost advantage to be gained from expansion. Is that right?

<comment><USER29> Sorry, I assumed that that was where you were coming from.

Economies of scale usually refers to how the cost of producing a unit decreases as you are producing more units at a time.

Taleb calls an endeavor scalable if your reward can increase practically unboundedly with little no extra effort. Examples include pop stars and websites.

<comment><USER39> That helps :) Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It's interesting to read this with Taleb's " _The Black Swan_ " in mind (which I just reread this weekend), specifically because it made me think of Taleb's "barbell strategy":

" _... your strategy is to be as hyperconservative and hyperaggressive as you can be instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative. Instead of putting your money in 'medium risk' investments, you need to put a portion, say 85 to 90 percent, in extremely safe instruments, like Treasury bills—as safe a class of instruments as you can manage to find on this planet. The remaining 10 to 15 percent you put in extremely speculative bets, as leveraged as possible (like options), preferably venture capital-style portfolios._ "

It seems that going to work for a startup is the exact opposite of this.

I.e., it would be better to be an investor in many startups rather than working solely on/for one startup.

</comment><comment><USER41> The "corporate ladder" analogy is broken, because the ladder is tree shaped. It's statistically impossible to climb tree shaped ladders, because they get exponentially smaller at the top, and there are too many levels. "Climb the corporate n-ary tree" would be a better analogy, for large values of n, and large tree height. It should be obvious to computer scientists, via pigeonhole arguments, why this isn't statistically feasible.

In any case, it's probably easier to find loopholes, like startups, or being an early arrival to an industry, or starting at a smaller company that inflates later, or tunneling your way between points in the corporate topology, by switching from one company to another, if you're ambitious. But betting against statistics never pays.

</comment><comment><USER42> "To say that startups will succeed implies that big companies will exist, because startups that succeed either become big companies or are acquired by them."

A startup can have a goal besides becoming a big company or being acquired by one. If the company meets that goal, it is successful.

</comment><comment><USER19> "There's no evidence that famously successful organizations like the Roman army or the British East India Company were any less afflicted by protocol and politics than organizations of the same size today. But they were competing against opponents who couldn't change the rules on the fly by discovering new technology."

the mongol empire was the game changer [adopting siege machine, biological weapon (throwing infected corpse thru enemy's wall -- the seed of black death), religion (islam, christian, budhism), trade (silk route, 'pony' express), and the rise of creative class]

it conquered the world with bow and arrow, lasted 3.5 centuries (longer than the nuclear powered usa)

barbar/dictator/despotic empire can't/won't last that long -- there's truly something about mongol

</comment><comment><USER43> Paul mentions the decreasing costs of technology, but he doesn't mention the fundamental property of technology that allows this to happen.

This economic trend is directly related to technology and software. One of the problems for big corporations is that more and more is done by machines, i.e., software. However, the singular phenomenon of software is that, the more people working on it, the harder it is to maintain and evolve.

Small groups are much better prepared for success in our present world because they can leverage software. As a single organization grows, so grows the complexity of its internal systems.

</comment><comment><USER44> _[3] It's possible that companies will one day be able to grow big in revenues without growing big in people, but we are not very far along that trend yet._

PG: Can you expand your thoughts on this? Why do you think this trend is not very far along? What would help in accelerating such a trend?

After startups, this trend could have a significant impact -- meaning folks that start companies/early employees would like to stay longer at such companies, and still be nimble, maybe not to the extent of a startup but not a BigCo. either.

</comment><comment><USER45> _"..there were already a handful of countries past that stage when the Industrial Revolution happened. There do not seem to be that many ready this time."_

Speculation: This factor may be the difference between life and death for the trend towards high-res. There's today a good chance the US will weaken economically, energy will get catastrophically more expensive, a city somewhere will experience a suitcase nuke.

'should', not 'will'.

</comment><comment><USER46> 本文中文版请参考:<http://www.yeeyan.com/articles/view/pestwave/19240>

A Chinese version of this article is available at:<http://www.yeeyan.com/articles/view/pestwave/19240>

</comment><comment><USER47> This trend was examined in Zuboff's 2004 book "the Support Economy". I've commented it on my (fledgling) blog. www.efficientfactory.com [http://efficientfactory.com/2009/01/17/the-support- economy-b...](http://efficientfactory.com/2009/01/17/the-support-economy-book- review/)

</comment><comment> cool-RR "But large organizations will probably never again play the leading role they did up till the last quarter of the twentieth century."

I suggest retracting this statement. What idea do you have of how the world will look 50 years from now? This may be remembered as your "640kb will always be enough" quote.

<comment><USER48> pg isn't prescient, but based on his argument this isn't much of a stretch. It may not turn out to be true, but it would be an even worse idea to cripple the conclusion to your thought because you're worried about embarrassment.

.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." \- Alan Kay

YC is definitely working to prove pg right.

<comment> cool-RR "this isn't much of a stretch"?! from a sample period of a few decades to "never again"?

<comment><USER49> No. Read the rest of the essay - the factors that made large organization work are dissolving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Startups don't go against the traditional grain of society. They are part of the fauna that resulted from an economy of extremely large scale. Things like anti-trust laws, and investment banking - the food for startups - only happen in instances of super-scale.

</comment><comment><USER51> Quick question: Is the RSS for PG's essays not working? I never got the update.

</comment><comment><USER52> I hear echos of William H. Davidow's "The Virtual Corporation", isbn 0887306578, in this post. I thought those ideas were innovative back then - 1993 - and still waiting for then to arrive in mass. mxt

</comment><comment><USER53> "Which means the ambitious can now do arbitrage on them. It will be very valuable to understand precisely which ideas to keep and which can now be discarded."

Do you mean "arbitrage" or do you mean "triage"?

</comment><comment><USER54> A corollary to the move toward smallness, if I might:

<http://h3h.net/2008/12/economy-of-software-maintenance/>

</comment><comment><USER55> There's a lot of start-ups per capita in Israel. The big sharks buy them so fast, Israelis are constantly busy opening the new ones. What a whirlpool.

</comment><comment><USER56> Pedantically, Uncle Sid, not uncle Sid? Sid is my uncle, but to me, he's Uncle Sid. Or is that a Britishism?

</comment><comment><USER57> PG should also read The Third Wave by Alvin Toeffler. This sounds very much like his thinking.

</comment><comment><USER58> People join big company if they are opportunistic and join a start-up if they are ambitious.

</comment><comment><USER59> n-th restatement of the same idea. jeez, what a bore already</comment>


UIKit for the Mac - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/unifiedh/Chameleon-Swift <comment><USER2> I'm still hoping for API convergence between the Mac and iOS, opening the road to universal Mac/iOS apps.

People keep bringing up how iOS is designed for touch and the Mac for mouse and keyboard, and how screen sizes are different and all that, but those differences can all be accounted for. Microsoft have shown it possible.

Why? Extend the Mac software ecosystem and allow for multi-paradigm devices, like the iPad Pro should have been.

<comment><USER3> Possible? Maybe. Desirable? No, not all. Don't get me wrong, AppKit is very much in need of a modernization, and it definitely is not as actively improved upon as UIKit is, but the two have very little in common from a design UI/UX standpoint. What has Microsoft shown with their multi-paradigm direction? That lowest common denominator is bad. And same would be for a possible "UXKit".

<comment><USER4> AppKit is dead. Apple is using WebKit for all their UI needs, these days. Goodbye AppKit, you were never that great, but you served your purpose, and had a relatively long and fulfilling life. RIP.

<comment><USER5> I don't think that this is true...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> a-priori If you want something that works now, there is Chameleon, the project this is based on:

[http://chameleonproject.org/](http://chameleonproject.org/)

Unfortunately, it seems the project's maintainers have mostly lost interest in the project (last push to Github in May 2014), but there's a few forks that have kept on. I maintained this one for a few years for our own uses:

[https://github.com/toushay/Chameleon](https://github.com/toushay/Chameleon)

Unfortunately, the company behind that fork, Toushay, went out of business last year so there won't be any further work done on that fork. There may be others out there that are still maintained.

<comment><USER3> Or, instead of debugging and maintaining over-ambitious lowest common denominator projects, which will limit you any way you look at them, just re- write the UI portion of your software with proper Mac design in mind, in AppKit.

<comment> a-priori Using something like Chameleon can get you up and running in a very short time. Literally, it took one afternoon for me to get our app running on Chameleon. True story. I actually did it without management approval on the day they said "we should have an OS X app" and demoed it to them at the end of the day. It wasn't perfect, and took another week or two to iron out a few bugs in Chameleon we ran into. That was the start of our fork, actually.

But it worked, and it would have taken two to three months to get to that point from scratch. I should know, because I did from-scratch ports to other platforms and that's how long it took each time.

You can mix and match Chameleon (UIKit) and AppKit in the same application, so you can incrementally replace Chameleon with a "proper" solution. If you find that's important to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unless Apple are activly working on UXKit a better bet would be an implementation of UIKit with SpriteKit, with sane 'defaults' for Mac OS. I've missed something like CollectionView on Mac OS with same API as UIKit.

By sane default I mean something like: Tab Bar on IOS, Slidable Side Menu on iPad and regular side-panelMac OS.

UXKit has some issues, e.g you can't swipe back with the touchpad. So I take it has some work left before being a complete replacement of AppKit.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hopefully this will take off!

Could use something like this as using OSX's frameworks is so painful (creating list views with items of various heights is overly complicated)

</comment><comment><USER8> Twitter tried once upon a time:

[https://github.com/twitter/twui](https://github.com/twitter/twui)

</comment><comment><USER9> I thought that the Chameleon project is dead. I studied the source code a few years ago.

</comment><comment><USER10> Seems risky to go for this when it's very likely something Apple is working on.

<comment><USER3> Is it really? UXKit has not moved at all. It has remained relatively static in the Photos app. It's a serviceable patch-work that Apple has done for their specific purpose, but I don't think it's actively being pushed forward for a possible AppKit replacement.

<comment><USER11> > UXKit has not moved at all.

This is speculation, unless you have inside information, UXKit could well be under active development - we don't know.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Recruit a Frontend Hero - <AUTHOR> http://codemonkeyism.com/recruit-frontend-hero/

<comment><USER2> I don't think so. First of all, a Frontend Hero needs to have design sense, ability to learn quickly, empathy with users, trustworthiness to "fill in the blanks", and the balls to say no to designs or features that are unnecessary, impractical, and time-consuming. What Sebastian Deutsch described is a CSS / Javascript quirks specialist.

Additionally, the article never really touched on how to recruit these people - it just lists screening questions to ask during an interview. To recruit a Frontend Hero, you need to hire great designers and create a culture that treats front end engineers as first class citizens.

Incidentally, we're doing that at Airbnb right now. <http://www.airbnb.com/jobs/show/8>

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. Frontend is far more about design and usability than it is about whether or not you can remember vendor-specific hacks for CSS columns.

I figure if I ever need to hire a "frontend hero" my checklist will be very short. Do you have a sizable portfolio, and does your stuff look like the stuff I want? If so, you're in the running.

<comment><USER4> Please notice a frontend coder is not a user experience designer. So having good design skills is not necessary to work as a frontend coder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      Q: What methods do you know to realize columns?
      A: cleardiv
      clearfix (better one)

WTF? I'd expect floats, faux columns, display: table-* , *-column-count being the answer but get some cleardiv/clearfix instead. I never liked those, especially cleardiv. Often you can do simply reusing next element (#footer {clear:both}), but sometimes that's not enough, alas.

In my opinion any competent frontend developer should know these, not enough for the hero. On the other hand, to be able to interview hero you should be at least on that level yourself, which is not the case there, imho.

</comment><comment><USER6> To me this looks like an endless series of 'gotcha' questions that for the most part are either in the totally obvious or terribly obscure category.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. I'm not even sure what this means:

 _Q: What methods do you know to realize columns?_

<comment><USER8> It means "If the design calls for having text flow across side-by-side columns (like in newspapers or magazines), what ways are there to code it?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That looks like a very poor checklist unless you're purely looking for someone that rapidly turns templates into markup.

Otherwise, a grasp of how the users will interact with your app and what constraints that imposes on the front end is far more important than their ability to regurgitate CSS clearfix syntax and knowledge of server side javascript frameworks they might not have to learn.

</comment><comment><USER10> ... wow, I haven't been paying close attention to the web development community. CSS frameworks are really considered an essential building block now?

<comment><USER11> I literally equate css frameworks with code bloat. I'm glad to see that other people feel the same.

<comment><USER12> Bloated as because CSS frameworks are, essentially, based on CSS and works at mercy of the browser; true "frameworks" like Compass are pre-compiled and comes without presentational classes, therefore less bloat. On the other hand, front-end work is dirty by nature, and I'd argue that a beautiful page with bloated code is better than a not-working page with very clean code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Someone who understands normal flow and positioning, how elements interact with each other, and minimizes the amount of code for each part of the design will be much more effective than someone who knows all the short cut css hacks.

Also, a bunch of these questions were far more relevant during the IE6 era which is now finally at a decline. I would care that someone knows how to code for IE6, but that requires one question since all IE6 bugs are very well documented, just make sure the person is aware.

</comment><comment><USER13> I actually that's a pretty nice list of quirks that only an experienced developer would know. I learned quite a few things from that list.

I would add: When all else fails, use a table. Ha!

</comment><comment><USER14> this list is wrong.

hacks, css grids, obscure references, nonstandard way of clearing divs, instead of the much more used and standard overflow:hidden , vendor specific css declarations? printed media references?

here's a few questions that a REAL front end dev would likely answer:

do you know standards? do you do inline css/js? do you use hacks? do you use grids? if yes, this guy is a neofite and needs to learn how to unbloat his css do you reset your css? do your sites validate? do you like flash in your websites? do you code by hand? do you use autohotkey/zen coding/texter/autoit/etc for coding? do you despise expression web/dreamweaver/kompozer? do you use firebug? how do you test for xbrowser testing? do you know what "semantics" mean in a web context?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For a user experience designer I would have a different interview.

What's important for me is to see if some understand what is happening behind the scenes. There are so many people who apply a clearfix but do not understand the principles of block contexts.

</comment><comment><USER15> I do not see how any of these questions reflect the ability to be good at the front-end. If I didn't know one of those answers in a real world scenario, I could easily just Google it. Design sense and a good concept of usability are much more important IMO.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> @euroclydon oh yes minifying, I gonna add that to the list good point.</comment>


The FTC Confuses Newspapers With Journalism - <AUTHOR> http://blog.heritage.org/2010/06/07/the-ftc-confuses-newspapers-with-journalism-as-it-seeks-new-media-tax/

<comment><USER2> The core problem is the "Eat Your Broccoli" Problem. In-depth and globe- spanning reporting is essential for a running democracy, but everyone would rather spend their money on American Idol than American Morning and would rather read about celebrity domestic scandals than domestic policy. The cross- subsidy system worked well in the 20th century to avert this, but that's out the window. We need to either create a new cross-subsidy system or we need to find a way to charge people for news directly.

And let's not forget Craigslist if we're casting blame on why the Internet killed newspapers. The classifieds section got decimated by it.

"Here, they confuse journalism with newspapers, and an informed public with newspaper jobs. In fact, Americans have never been better informed or more engaged."

This is not new or unique to newspapers. It's a fallacy common to pretty much every sinking industry.

"but the FTC is an 'independent' agency run by people appointed by the Obama Administration, which has been antagonistic to an Internet it cannot control"

When has the Obama Administration been antagonistic towards the Internet? Aside from ISP-promoted wackaloon conspiracy theories about how Net Neutrality is actually censorship, where is the argument (much less evidence) for this? I mean, I realize this is The Heritage Foundation, but come on. Way to trash a great article with a nonsensical partisan jab.

<comment><USER3> Well, the same author has a recent column in National Review Online about this:

[http://article.nationalreview.com/434022/obama-vs-the- ipad/m...](http://article.nationalreview.com/434022/obama-vs-the-ipad/mike- gonzalez)

The article includes two quotes from President Obama. The first from a commencement address:

 _You're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and iPads, and Xboxes and PlayStations . . . information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation._

The second is from an interview with CBS News:

 _There's one last point I gotta make, Bob, and that is that I do think part of what's different today is the 24-hour news cycle and cable TV and blogs and all this. They focus on the most extreme elements in both sides. They can't get enough of conflict. It's catnip to the media right now. And so the easiest way to get 15 minutes of fame is to be rude to somebody. In that environment, I think it makes it more difficult to solve the problems the American people sent us here to solve._

Constructing an 'antagonistic to the Internet' argument on the basis of those two quotes seems somewhat, well, challenging - but those seem to be the primary sources.

<comment><USER4> I'm no fan of the Obama administration but if you watch any of the "analysis" shows on cable news channels it is clear that "stirring the hornet's nest" is a big part of how they operate. And I don't think it's a bad message to say "just because it's on the internet doesn't mean it's true" but I would say the same goes for any other media these days, including White House press releases.

<comment><USER3> Right, which is why I said constructing an argument based on such sources would be challenging.

A commenter asked what the writer's justification was for calling the Obama administration antagonistic to the internet, and I found it for him. Doesn't mean that the writer's justification has merit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The FTC "has not endorsed the idea of making any policy recommendation or recommended any of the proposals in the discussion draft"

[http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal- eye/2010/06/is_the_...](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal- eye/2010/06/is_the_government_pushing_a_dr.html)

<comment><USER6> The document in question is merely a set of discussion topics. "We anticipate that different participants in the roundtables at which this document will be discussed will criticize some or all proposals, improve others, and add ideas of their own. The purpose of this document is precisely to encourage such additional analyses and brainstorming."

It's for an upcoming roundtable at the National Press Club. The actual document is here: [http://www.ftc.gov/opp/workshops/news/jun15/docs/new- staff-d...](http://www.ftc.gov/opp/workshops/news/jun15/docs/new-staff- discussion.pdf)

The public can also contribute ideas here: <http://public.commentworks.com/ftc/newsmediaworkshop/></comment></comment>