How Steve Ballmer Got So Much of Microsoft (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/09/30/long-ago-twist-yielded-ballmer-a-fortune-in-microsoft-stock/ <comment><USER2> Can someone rationalize this statement for me:

> Meanwhile, Microsoft's first venture capitalist, Dave Marquardt, grumbled > that it didn't make sense for Microsoft to keep operating as a private > partnership, with Gates owning 64% and Allen holding the other 36%.

How does Microsoft have a venture captialist if Bill and Paul own the entire company? I thought this might be pre investment but then the article says:

> Before long, Ballmer and Marquardt presented Microsoft's founders with a > proposed new capital structure. Gates and Allen would keep 84% of the > company. Ballmer would get about 8%, in return for canceling his profit- > sharing clause. All other employees would split the final 8%.

SO they reorg so 3 people hold 92% of the company and the rest of the employees get 8% of the company. What was the venture capitalist buying here?

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the question. The 64/36 is pre-VC-investment, and the story could have explained that better.

Marquardt's venture firm, TCI bought 5% of Microsoft in 1981. Link is here: [http://www.techntechie.com/early-investors-in-microsoft- you-...](http://www.techntechie.com/early-investors-in-microsoft-you-would- love-to-know.html)

I'm thinking that the Gates/Allen stake settles post re-org at 79% once TCI is invested. That gets the percentages to add to 100% (always wise.)

<comment><USER4> You're the author of the article?

<comment><USER3> Yes indeed

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That photograph really is sensational. Gates looks wonderfully young and innocent, almost angelic. Ballmer looks like an enthusiastic understudy for Jack Nicholson in "The Shining".

<comment><USER6> Attacking people's looks is a pretty low blow. How would you like if you started a company, published a photo, and everyone started calling you names purely on your looks? As someone who is older and perpetually 15-20lbs overweight, its really unnerving to see how young people just think its cool to lash out on the looks of others so casually without regard for the other person at all. Internet cattiness has become this mainstream thing and its inexcusable. This is HN not PerezHilton.com.

Its also hypocritical, because if someone said something about the looks of Bernie Sanders or Marc Andreesen then he would be downvoted to hell and back, but because Ballmer is a controversial figure the fat/ugly/psycho-killer comments are excused and as you can see below rationalized.

Please keep the discourse at a higher level and on-topic. Thanks.

<comment><USER7> > Please keep the discourse at a higher level and on-topic. Thanks.

How is pointing out the difference in how the article visually represents the figures not on-topic? It seems very on-topic to me. Furthermore, highlighting an unflattering, possibly biased difference _against_ Ballmer, is actually _in favor_ of him in my opinion. I read the OP comment as pointing out how the article may be biased against Ballmer.

> Internet cattiness has become this mainstream thing and its inexcusable. > This is HN not PerezHilton.com.

To me, you're the one being "catty" for no reason at all. This is definitely HN alright.

<comment><USER8> >To me, you're the one being "catty" for no reason at all.

Please, the person you responded to put in two paragraphs of their reasoning.

HN indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _Needing help in a hurry, Microsoft cofounders Bill Gates and Paul Allen agreed to pay Ballmer not just an annual base salary of about $50,000 but also 10% of all the profit growth he could generate._

But how did he get such an insanely sweet deal?

<comment><USER10> Well there's the obvious fact that he is a top-notch businessman who, after negotiating that deal, was a key player in building one of the world's most valuable companies. It was just one of his skills.

<comment><USER11> And they knew he was worth hiring since his credentials as a top notch business man were obvious the moment he negotiated a 10% deal! It's a self- fulfilling prophecy.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps I wasn't clear - his ability to negotiate that deal foreshadowed his (clear with hindsight) exceptional business skills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In this Forbes article, and in [http://www.cnet.com/news/paul-allen-gates- ballmer-tried-to-r...](http://www.cnet.com/news/paul-allen-gates-ballmer- tried-to-rip-me-off/) Allen doesn't come off very well. I'm not sure if that's accurate.

</comment><comment><USER13> The office character of Todd Packer was probably based on Ballmer.

</comment><comment><USER14> Url changed from [https://i.imgur.com/Fra8T4W.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Fra8T4W.jpg).

<comment><USER15> So Bill Gates owes Microsoft $500 mil?

<comment><USER16> > _valued at about $15.5 billion, which is $1.6 billion more than Gates' > remaining holding_

1.6 more, not 16 more.

<comment><USER15> Ah, I missed the dot. Thanks.

<comment><USER16> Quite welcome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> By being Bill Gates's Harvard buddy.

<comment><USER18> Be nice to nerds ("...One day they'll be your boss", Bill Gates), be nice to anyone. There's always someone looking. I have once been the only guy who gave a job to that silent foreigner in my classroom. That got me a surprise invitation to Brazil 10 years later. There's always something to win by being inclusive.

<comment><USER17> Yes, I suppose so, and yet the largest software company in the world fell into his feckless, fumbling hands because of _who he was_ , not what he could do; and may never regain its footing.</comment></comment></comment>


Amber: a server-side plugin to keep links working on blogs and websites - <AUTHOR> http://amberlink.org

<comment><USER2> Please, for the love of all that is scrolly, stop messing with basic browser functionality. It seems to have not one but two (!) scroll plugins, but no one bothered to test how annoying it would on a mac.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well that's an unfortunate choice of project name: [http://amber- lang.net/](http://amber-lang.net/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Will they be releasing the source anytime soon?

It's a great idea, and one that we've long needed a solution for. However, could this possibly be done as a JS snippet that uses a central server by default, to make it easier to integrate into static sites? As-is, it isn't much use for my blog, or many others who use popular blogging platforms (which allow you to embed whatever JS you want, but you sure as hell can't install a server plugin)

This is the article that first made me aware of the problem: [http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs](http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs)

</comment><comment><USER5> It would be cool if it could auto "no-follow" any url's affected by link rot.</comment>


Show HN: Contastic - Staying in Touch Made Easy - <AUTHOR> http://www.getcontastic.com/

<comment><USER2> This is my BIGGEST problem. I have 1000+ people in my professional network and I find it impossible to manage all of those relationships. Really cool how you can filter your contacts based on the last time you emailed them (<30 days, 30-90, >90) - probably the most useful feature I've found.

Are you guys planning on selling this to enterprise for use in sales, BD, etc? I wager they'd pay for this service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks and exactly - we hope this can help anyone managing a big network of customers/prospects/collegues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This really cool! Do you have any plans to link it directly to a CRM system? There are people I try to stay in touch with that aren't personal connections on LinkedIn.

<comment><AUTHOR> We were planning on connecting to SalesForce, but would love to hear if anyone out there has systems they'd like to use with Contastic.

<comment><USER4> It would be really cool to link this with ToutApp.

Have been doing research on CRM's for a long time. Happy to chat any time. firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll reach out to you - would love to chat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Organizing my contacts is a huge pain. I'm going to sign up and check this out. I'll give you feedback once I'm in.

</comment><comment><USER6> cool platform! the email i got to keep in touch was from contastic.

</comment><comment><USER7> Congrats Cy!

</comment><comment><USER8> I wasn't sure about this at first, but it's actually pretty helpful. I'd recommend it.</comment>


A computerised pathologist that can outperform its human counterparts - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/21540387

<comment><USER2> Of course it can. Glad to see this sort of thing making it into the Economist as well.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you survive as a freelance web developer? - <AUTHOR> I suppose it would help if you had a buffer/savings. At best I'd have a month or two, and my needs to survive isn't much in fact at the moment being employed I would be lucky to make 20K a year.
I freelance but I'm afraid of charging by the hour thinking that I am not good enough to be worth their money.
I also realize that freelancing is ultimately not the answer to bring financially independent. You need to build automated services or products for passive income.
I hate my job/life. In 3 weeks I'll be unemployed again. I've been trying to get a web dev position but no luck. I should add that I am not "current/up to date" with the various technologies such as Angular/Node/Gulp/Git/Laravel-Symfony, etc...
I know the scratch code and learn to develop on LAMP. I realize the time and collaborative benefits of frameworks/libraries.
I don't know I need to whip myself more and work harder, be a self-starter as they say. It's the fear. Will I make it? What if... <comment><USER3> Depends what part of the market you want to target, but if you don't have strong web development skills... i might suggest the lower end.

Honestly, even turning around simplistic wordpress sites... without any js/css work, you should be able to bring in >$20K USD (assume you are talking in USD)..

If you really go after the lower end for worst case (but most of these you should at least double).

      - 1 site per week for $500, based on 48 weeks per year $24,000 (might be a lofty goal).
      - Add in hosting / support.. $100 USD per month (exponential growth as you add more clients)
      - minimum $50 charge to make changes outside of basic support.

This largely depends on your networking skills and contracts... but it is doable. The money in this sector of the market isn't about technical competence, but sales skills.

Be careful over-committing, and be firm with the requirements to stop it ballooning.. and be ready to add the charge as needed.

</comment><comment><USER4> very hard to make it work. need a way to automate new leads - <USER2> blog/newsletter/vlog can all help here. but must also have the heads down time to do the code. and the management skills to maintain taxes (i am still paying off a tax bill from years ago).

i recommend putting all efforts into finding a jr web dev role (try both local and remote) until you can save up enough money to freelance with peace of mind.

either way, blog blog blog. its your safety net. lots of good advice on this site: [http://robcubbon.com/habit-hamster-wheel/](http://robcubbon.com/habit- hamster-wheel/)</comment>


Ask Old-School HN: What was it like pre internet? - <AUTHOR>

I just got through perusing the IBM archive of mainframes, see here: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_intro.html
And it got me thinking it would be interesting to hear what it was like to be a hacker in the olden days before internet came along to give us unlimited documentation and source codes in a .12 sec google search :)
Was anyone in here around in the days? And if so, what was it like? Was it better or worse? What do you miss if anything? I imagine certain projects could be more rewarding because you could fully understand every aspect of your programs, unlike today where one includes massive java libs on top of frameworks and stacks of other software :) <comment><USER2> I'm not totally sure I have the credentials to chime in, since I'm relatively young -- just under 35 -- but I got started really early (in the second grade on a Commodore Vic-20), and I spent a lot of time on various dial-up BBS services and worked on some Unisys big iron in the East Bay.

So: I really miss that, honestly, and some of my energy recently has been spent on trying to figure out how to bring some of that back.

With the Commodore Vic-20 and 64, it didn't do anything at all unless you programmed it or loaded a tape into it. With that setup, programming it was the game; it was what you did for fun. And there was almost no abstraction, very little complication. You could play around with making sounds or colors or your own simple racing car game just by sitting down and typing into it. Instead of the internet, I lurked around the local library for game magazines with source code listings in the back.

The dial-up BBSs were similar, in a sense, in that you couldn't really do anything else while you were on them. I find that I can waste spectacular amounts of time today by sort of "half-working" -- I write a couple of lines of code, get bored, hit alt-tab to bring up my always-open web browser, get a fix of internet for twenty minutes, then switch back to the code and try to bang out a few more lines. That's an awful way to get anything done. With the dial-ups, you knew you were wasting time, and you didn't tend to do it for more than a couple of hours before you wanted to go back and write something again. There were still trolls and such, so I can't really say that the community was any better.

In the earlier days of the internet, websites were less real-time, and software didn't get in your way as much. The OS was simpler. Macs had MacsBug, which you could use to easily debug your own software without dealing with an IDE's buggy interpreter, or you could use to easily investigate someone else's software. To me, it felt more like I was dealing directly with the machine, instead of having to deal with someone else's software, which in turn is dealing with someone else's software, and so on until there's a machine somewhere at the end that I can no longer get to. (I worry that UEFI is only going to make this worse.) One of my first for-fun projects on my own Mac was directly accessing the ADB system to make the lights on my keyboard blink back and forth like the Knight Rider car. (I wasn't allowed to do that kind of thing on my parents' computers. :-)

I can't really say there was anything fun about the mainframe. It had the best recovery systems I've seen on any operating system so far; you could start a payroll and an accounting job (typically things that you didn't want to mess up), walk over to the wall, yank the cord out, plug it back in, and it would start back up right where it left off. That was impressive. And as geophile says, you generally rolled your own for everything. For most things, the easiest way to get software onto the mainframe was to write it from scratch. Since it was a business-purpose-only machine, it didn't get in your way too much about that, so that really wasn't that big of a deal. A major payroll job rewrite might be a couple of hundred lines of COBOL. There were deep, scary places in the machine with lots of code written by greybeards, but you never went there.

People actually seemed to share more -- little bits of code for various goodies were popular on early "internets" like eWorld. There are plenty of Javascript snippet sites now, so I'm not sure in what way it seems like people shared more, but it does seem different. Maybe it was different in that people seemed less motivated by gathering attention; they just wanted to share code because it was fun. People wanted to trade Legos so that they could build cooler things, not because they wanted to be the next Legoland and make some ad money. (I wonder what J5iverson is up to these days?)

People didn't give you shit for doing something like writing your own memory manager. They never said, "Why don't you just use _____, it's what everyone else does."

Programming seemed a lot more rewarding, though I can't honestly say whether that's just because I do it for a job now and that means often having to do it when I don't feel like it. But, programming was rewarding for programming's sake, not for the end result. Programming was a way to learn more about the machine. It was a way to make electronics do what you wanted them to. It was a way to see if you could change or improve the way that something worked, rather than just trying to create a new product or end result. (One of my prized possessions -- and one of the very few that has survived my cross- country moves and purges of stuff -- is a copy of Tricks of the Mac Game Programming Gurus, a hefty volume full of source code, with a CD full of even more stuff.)

In the early days of the web, people curated their sites. They didn't keep blogs, they had big index pages with links to stuff they thought was important. It was rarely topical. It didn't require, or even really want, your attention all the time. There was more incentive to creating centralized repositories of information on a subject. There was no such thing as advertising, you just did it because you wanted to be helpful. (And maybe because you were a bit of a hoarder.) People bragged about writing their sites in Notepad. All the cool kids used Perl. Again, these were things that mostly did what you told them to do, instead of spending time fiddling around with icky CSS and browser issues. I still didn't like it as much as the BBSs though.

Everything just seemed less opaque. Trouble with a modem? Open up a ZTerm or similar, and directly ask the modem what the hell was wrong, as long as you knew the magic incantations. Program die on a Mac and lock up the system? Hit the programmer's interrupt switch (command-power on the keyboard, or a tiny switch on the back of the machine), and type, "SM 0 A9F4" into the box that appeared on the screen, followed by, "G 0", to directly write the address of the _exitToShell trap to memory location 0 and continue execution from there. Buggy program on a Mac? Fire it up, get as close to the bug as possible, fire up MacsBug, rewrite its code in realtime until it behaved, take notes, and then open the program (or its resource file) in your favorite hex-like editor and make your changes permanent on your copy. Hard to do that with "the cloud". A home computer or a mainframe could do anything that you wanted it to, and it wasn't unreasonable to make it do anything, because it seemed to take so much less time and effort.

Well, rose-colored glasses and all. And, it's not that all the advancements we've made since then, in terms of abstraction and performance and communication and so on are bad.

It just seems less fun.

<comment><USER3> _Instead of the internet, I lurked around the local library for game magazines with source code listings in the back._

I love this. I did the exact same thing at my local library looking for books on BASIC (now I lurk on HN instead of at the library). I always had trouble getting the code listings to work because they were usually written for a slightly different version of BASIC than what I had. Without the internet there wasn't really any way for me to figure out what the problem was so there was plenty of trial and error.

One of my best memories was finally buying _Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus_ by Andre LaMothe. I remember reading almost the whole book the first day I got it and trying out all the great code examples. This was the first time I really saw how _real_ games were made. It basically runs though making a game like Wolfenstein 3D only two years after it was released. I think it would be a struggle to write a book about how to make a triple A title from 2010.

Near the end of high school I stopped coding but when I got back into it several years later, I was amazed at the resources and tools freely available on the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been programming since about 1969, but my life as a non-academic software developer started only slightly pre-internet, 1988. In those days, I was using a very early version of C++. The system I was working on was an object-oriented database system, and we were highly dependent on memory mapping and network APIs. (I mean OS APIs, not these new-fangled web APIs.) Some impressions:

\- We built nearly everything from scratch. I was working on collection classes and an OO query language, and started with very little beyond libc. We did buy a cheapo B-tree implementation (free floppy with book!) that we stuck with far too long.

\- There were many varieties of UNIX, and we had to support all of them. We spent a huge amount of time porting our application, and building up our portability "layer". As time went on, we also had to deal with object layout differences across compilers. Porting to all these platforms and compilers consumed unimaginably huge amounts of development and testing resources. We also ported to OS/2 (remember that?), and even Windows 3.1. Different industries and customers had different OSes, and we had no choice but to support all of them. It took a very long time before we decommissioned our first OS.

\- The OSes and compilers were buggy. At one point, the brokenness of mmap (on SunOS 3.something, I think), was a real problem for us.

\- CPUs were buggy. One of our engineers found a CPU bug in a 68040 because one of our features was failing in an odd way, and he kept diving lower and lower until he reached the CPU.

\- I'm pretty sure we wrote Makefiles by hand.

\- Source control was a nightmare. I don't really remember what we were using early on, but it was a tolerable pain. After a year-long project we switched to an early version of Clearcase which I found mind-bending and non-intuitive. It did amazing things, but it was torture to use. Oh, and it sprayed random bits all over our source repository, (due to a bad interaction with an early RAID driver, if I remember correctly), and we had Clearcase engineers in house for maybe a month trying to rescue what they could.

\- Everything cost money: OSes, libraries, development tools, source control. My company was a startup, and several of the startups we were friendly with or potential customers were doing development tools.

\- Anyone know what Reed Hastings, founder of CEO of Netflix, used to do? Anyone? Bueller? He wrote the Purify/Quantify tools. These were the absolute best memory corruption and profiling tools of the day. (I'm pretty sure that he actually wrote Purify himself.) Expensive, wonderful tools.

\- Research involved going to a library or talking to people. No google.

Good times, good times.

</comment><comment><USER5> To be a hacker? I can thoroughly recommend Steven Levy's book on the topic. Generally in the 'way back' times a computer is something you visited at work or a large university, once the notion of having some computation of your very own broke (mid to late 70's) those machines limited what you could do by the resources available. Once the PC sea change hit and machines with MMUs became practical for people to own it got a lot more interesting the things you could do at 'home'. The decade between 1985 and 1995 was one of 'oh wow, look at what I can do' and always buying a new machine every year because it was so much better than last years. When the world wide web became 'the thing' in 1995 it really was a sort of magical.

Better - you could know all there was to know about your machine / OS / App.

Worse - you knew all there was to know about your machine / OS / App.

Basically once you hit the information wall you had to stop, now it just keeps on going and going and going what you can learn.

EDIT: (added because its the way I think of these things)

The 'ages' of computers:

pre-1975 - Out of reach for everyone except people with a job or research project that could justify access.

1975 - 1985 - The 'microcomputer' era, like amateur radio, people getting wildly excited about building computers with fewer resources than a Atmel ATMega328P for under $1,000. But they could be programmed, and they could "do stuff"

1985 - 1995 - The 'PC' era, where the coolness shifted to software, and advances in hardware lead to more resources for more complicated code. Anyone could write a compiler or an OS or new data base.

1995 - 2005 - The 'Internet' era, and one of the first mass extinction events :-)

2005 - present - the 'Appliance' era, where the emergence of folks who don't care one whit about programming or technology have to have a computer to do daily tasks.

</comment><comment><USER6> For me I got into computers in the around 1980 in high school...

So starting out pirated programs, and type-in stuff from magazines. Many programs were in BASIC so a lot of peeking and poking about in the code and memory to see what you could do with the computer and programs. Lot of reading and hand-written/mind work between times with hands-on access to school computers.

Once I got my own computer VIC-20, i got lots of mags and books (especially the programmers reference guide) more time to experiment and try out hand- converted assembly routines in my programs.

Commodore 64, man the pirated disks were everywhere... also was the beginning of copy protected disks - and then to push back the protected software copier and cracked programs... lots more books and magazines to learn (the magazines were getting more technical then like the Transactor magazine, a true Commodore programming mag... ahhh), as well as copied text files from BBSs becoming more prevalent (see textfiles.com for a sample of independent information people exchanged)

Once I got my modem I called around a lot, got some files but the discussion forums were also an attraction, though the audience was limited to usually folks within the general area of the BBS. Soon I became a sysop and worked on my board as well as called others. Lots of hacking on the boards to personalize them, add modifications, do new functions like inter-BBS message networks, etc.

BBSs came in different varieties, besides operating system/computer (mine were on the Commodore 64) there were boards with lots of on-bbs games, some with pirated software, others did message boards (mine was more a message board), some tried to do porn and stuff for profit, never got into that so don't know much of that aspect. Hackers at that era besides cracking started doing demos and intros for cracked games, its surprising how much of a show you can put on with a few K of ram on a 1 mghz computer.

Internet creeped into neighborhoods and BBS callership dried up - except for the more dedicated sysops and their boards (mine lasted till around 2004, mainly due to Hard disk failure without a backup. :-/

I think it was better in a way for development as absence or less accessibility makes the heart grow fonder and gave us time to plan things out between whatever computer opportunity you were deprived of. Also a lot of the technologies we use now were in their infancy in the day, so some of us old geezer grock why computers/software do this or that because we saw it when it originally came on the scene.

Today you have such more higher level languages, and supercomputers compared to the old times, the complex is pretty much a cakewalk to the general programming public now. So much accessibility and inter-connetedness too.

Back then it was mainly a nerds only club, your mom wouldn't even get into the same room with the computer. Now the general public is here, which means you got lots of noobs and wannabes all over the place.

Now also has a lot more distractions, not just games and facebook, but also the avalanche of hardware/ programming/ etc. technologies that are being pushed out at us every day. I guess the big challenge for folks today is where to get started and what paths to choose.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was coding for my old Amstrad CPC 464 in my tween years. I distinctly remember not having access to a firmware manual, or the funds to purchase one.

So when I wanted to know how something worked (say, the cassette data interface) I'd write to Amstrad, asking for the relevant documentation. They'd then photocopy the wrong pages from the firmware manual, and return them to me in the enclosed S.A.E. I'd then write to them again, explaining what I wanted, and they'd send a different but still wrong set. We'd repeat this several times, with a lag of weeks between each iteration.

I also learned a lot from listings in magazines. Each monthly edition of Computing with the Amstrad would have program listings (games, utilities, lessons) in BASIC and Z80 Assembler. One could figure out a lot about how the machine worked by careful inspection of those listings.

Funnily enough, I remember spending entire evenings at the tender age of 9 and 10, coding away without any distractions like email, web, music etc. I might have been more productive then than I am now :-(

</comment><comment><USER8> Pre-Internet we were information-bound, now we are attention-bound.

From that observation you can deduce a number of consequences.

Information (software, encyclopaedias) was expensive. Your intellectual life depended much more than now on where you grew up (as opposed to, say, your character), see for example Lisp in US vs Prolog in Europe. It was harder to be distracted but also easier to find yourself reinventing the wheel.

Instead of reading blog posts about time management and the seven most important traits of whatever, you had mildly interesting newsletters, documentation to photocopy, and complaints about the choice of books in the local library. Back then you were more concerned about gathering resources, now you are more preoccupied by where to put your attention and efforts. So, in that sense, we have all followed the same trajectory as Bill Gates.

<comment><USER9> Well, it depends a bit on what pre-internet era you're talking about. When I think back to the 1960s and 1970s in the US, the first difference that strikes me is that we were resource-bound.

* Hardware was expensive, so back in the age of minicoputers _you_ went to the computer. And perhaps first to the card punch room to make changes to your deck. (Painful memories.)

* Connectivity was both expensive and slow. Anyone remember acoustic couplers? Don Lancaster's revolutionary TV typewriter? Their financial heart attack when the first BBS phone bill came in?

* Information was obvious scarcer, but it could be found if you networked in meatspace. Lots of interesting conversations to be had at the local electronics shop or campus computer center.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been using computers since the '70s, so there's a lot of highlights that will be left out, but here's a few choice memories: Building a Apple II+ clone with pirated EPROMs so we could play Ultima 2 and Wayout. Using a TRS-80 4p and 1200 baud modem to connect to the university mainframe since remote users had a higher job priority. Helping my father teach Autocad 2 on DOS. Seeing the Xerox GUI and networking before the Mac was ever created. The joy of VMS clustering and other big iron features, which everyone is slowly reinventing. Build Ciarcia's designs from Byte. The first Mac, Amiga, Next and BeBox machines. Wirewrapping, soldering and assembly. Ham radio RTTY and packet systems. Printed documentation in walls of colored binders. User goup meetings. Swap meets. Hours spent in libraries and bookstores. Building some of the first web sites. (Pre Netscape)

Things I love now are the powerful affordable systems, free quality software and virtualization. Like many older folks I hate the users that can't read the basic documentation or even try to expand their computer skills. (But I end up helping them... :) )

</comment><comment><USER11> When the BBS came along it was awesome, then it was too addictive and the phone bill was insane. Then we discovered blue boxes and PBX hacking and it was really on. It seemed amazing at the time being able to pick up the phone, make a few tones and be talking to someone on the other side of the world, or downloading "warez" from a BBS in Europe.

For some reason I particularly remember walking to the store one day pre- internet thinking about this whole "virtual" electronic BBS world out there that only 1 out 1000 people actually had a clue existed and how awesome it was. When the internet came along it was a obvious to me that was it going to change everything, but I was too young and naive to think about the business aspect of it.

Other stuff, hmm. When you finished work for the day you were actually finished, but more likely to be in the office late because you couldn't work from home. The phone rang a lot more often before email. Installing software on another branches system meant driving there - uphill both ways, barefoot, in the snow.

</comment><comment><USER12> It was worse. I started in the late 1960s. Information was not easy to obtain as it is now. The computers were not particularly limited (or so it seemed at the time), but there really wasn't any decent internet until the late 1980s. Things were quite slow in comparison to the way they are now, particularly at the human-machine interface. Frightening amounts of paper were used for punched cards and printouts. While the old days were fun, I don't at all miss any of it.

Now, I can cheaply obtain any computing capability I might want for pennies an hour. I can obtain just about any information I need with a few keystrokes. I can easily benefit from the massive, readily accessible work of others.

I can no longer function effectively without using contemporary amenities, nor would I so want.

</comment><comment><USER13> I was there. And it wasn't that long ago. Before the Internet, and before wifi and broadband, we had dial-up bulletin board services that used a modem. They were text-based and when you started a download, you had to wait for it to finish before you could do anything else. Some bulletin boards were connected by dedicated phone lines between them, so you could access multiple BBS's without having to hang up and dial multiple phone numbers. Also, the good BBS's were frequently busy. So you had to leave your modem program to keep re- dialing until you could finally get through.

<comment><USER14> Ah Wi-Fi, I had a blast working on WiMax and what became 4G over at Nortel (before they went bankrupt).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Before the current version of what we know as the internet there were alternative silos of information you could mine. Some of these, like bitnet/netnorth, usenet, BBSes, FTP sites (like Simtel-20) were eventually absorbed by the internet. If you worked for a big enough company they usually had internal repositories you could access that were full of "hackers" showing off their stuff. Software/Developer focused magazines like Dr. Dobbs, BYTE, CUJ, etc. were a LOT more useful and relevant before the internet stole their thunder.

</comment><comment><USER16> There was a show on the radio about BASIC programming, with programming samples. You'd have to record the show on a cassette tape, because the code was transmitted as audio output. You could do the excersise, and then check your code by playing the tape on your Commodore 64. I still think that was a pretty ingenious thing, sending code over the radio!

Ah, and the BBS'es of the early'90's... So much time wasted there!

</comment><comment><USER17> I started my computing journey back in the days of BBS dial up porn, DOS & Windows 3.1.

Network protocols were wildly divergent. (anyone remember NetWare?)

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was the best!

Plug & play was unheard of. DMA & IRQ conflicts whenever new devices were added to a system was the norm.

Castle Wolfenstein3D was the coolest game ever.

<comment><USER18> > anyone remember NetWare?

I was a CNE (which means I was a badass at at NetWars)... Btw, I still think syscon was amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was coding back on Windows 95 before it was common in the UK to have internet access. My machine was a Pentium 75Mhz with 8MB RAM and an 850MB hard drive.

I got my warez from local computer fairs (fayres?) and bought books on Visual Basic from PC World.

I miss the buzz of Windows 95 and the Pentium from back then...

</comment><comment><USER14> As for programming, I'd write in x86 and Delphi (which came on 10 floppy disks) with a lot of GoTO 0 statements. My parents used punch cards [PDF: <http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/fisk.pdf>], so I guess I had it easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the link, its fascinating. That does give a whole new meaning to linking and compiling :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is one of the most fascinating HN posts I've read in a while.. nothing practical, just fascinating.

PG says somewhere that there is a direct correlation between the length of a comment to its quality.

This is the perfect example.

</comment><comment><USER21> Let me just remark that the original O'Reilly _Whole Internet User's Guide_ had no mention of the web--plenty on Gopher and FTP and Usenet, as I recall, but it must have been in press about the time CERN was announcing WWW.

</comment><comment><USER14> We had a lot of Encyclopedias growing up, and the study/library in our house where I spent most of my time. These days, it's HN. Same deal, just a faster way of aggregating information.

</comment><comment><USER22> We used floppy disks to exchange files. Software was purchased and received by post mail as bunch of floppy disks. Was it better or worse? It was fun. Much more exclusive than now.

<comment><USER23> yes, the UPS truck stopping in front of the house to deliver a package full of floppies full of freeware. That was a 'download'. But more importantly I recall the wonderful years of 92-94 when the internet was really blooming and become a reality for the masses - there was feeling that something profound and very special was occurring and I was watching it come alive. Now if only I would have snapped out of my glassy eyed haze and snapped up some domains, that would be a cherry on top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I comes from china, you guys are so interesting, I love U!

</comment><comment><USER18> Better _and_ worse.

One thing I sorely miss is printed documentation -- _especially_ the (unix) permuted index. Even today, I'm convinced that I understand and remember information better when I can hold an actual book in my hand as I read.

Long before internet access was available for what the NSF used to call "commercial traffic", we were already connected to each other through store and forward networks like uucpnet, FidoNet (fight-o-net), and WWIVnet.

Instead of an ISP, you'd connect by modem to a BBS (TAG BBS ftw!). And for most BBSs, only one person could connect at a time. If you were a user that meant you'd have your terminal program (Telix was my favorite) set to keep redialing across several BBSs till you connected to one. Sometimes you'd be redialing for most of the early evening before your modem squawked and squealed which meant you'd finally gotten in.

The BBS itself, was just some hobbyists computer. And the Sysop (system operator/owner) may or may not have participated in one of the aforementioned store and forward networks. If not, there would be local discussion boards, file download areas, and usually a few doors (games). Popular games I ran on my BBS were Tradewars and Geopolitics -- and like everything else, it was multiuser but only one person at any given time.

Being a Sysop had three main benefits: [1] it was fun; [2] US Robotics gave you a sweet deal on a high-speed modem; [3] whenever you were sitting there connecting to other BBSs (thus tying up the line) people just assumed the busy signal meant your board was more popular than it was.

For those of us who were writing software, there were usenet newsgroups like comp.lang.c and FidoNet echos like 'the c echo' where we could discuss and trade code with people around the world.

But honestly, I spent far more time reading talk.bizarre than doing useful C-related stuff.

That little edge though -- having easy access to other people from all over the world, made me seem far smarter at work than I really was. That, and being able to read a man page...

Can't believe that makes me an old-timer :-(</comment>


Monkey research suggests a biological explanation for toy preferences (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.livescience.com/22677-girls-dolls-boys-toy-trucks.html <comment><USER2> I'm calling bullshit on the title (which, in the hopefully likely event it gets changed, is currently "Hormones Explain Why Girls Like Dolls and Boys Like Trucks"). One study showing a correlation might suggest something worth looking into further but it hardly "explains" anything.

The results with the monkeys are interesting, if both the research and the reporting of it are accurate. However, animal models, while certainly useful indicators, are still just animal models and can't say anything definitive about _human_ biology and psychology.

And as for those studies on young children, it's a mistake to think that just because a child is only a few months old they haven't been exposed to enough cultural influence to skew what they prefer to look at. If just a few of those parents have put a football mobile above their baby boy's cot or decorated their little girl's room with Disney princess wallpaper, that familiarity could easily explain the results.

Do biological differences exist between genders? Absolutely. Are some of those differences driven by ancient evolutionary pressure rather than modern culture? It's a reasonable hypothesis, worth investigating. Have those differences now been explained by a single factor and a few small studies, half of which were on monkeys, and do they just happen to line up with traditional gender stereotypes? You'll have to do a lot better than a Live Science blog that cites nothing but other Live Science blogs to convince me of that.

EDIT: Well, at least the title was changed to better fit the article, even if it still doesn't line up with the actual science.

<comment><USER3> Your information is badly out of date. Studies have been consistently showing biology beating culture for the last 20 years.

<comment><USER4> What are these studies? The metadata studies I've heard about say otherwise. That is, some studies say one thing, other studies say the opposite, and so it's impossible to really conclude anything by choosing a subset of the literature.

For a recent lay presentation on this topic, see [http://freethoughtblogs.com/lousycanuck/2014/02/03/ftbcon2-e...](http://freethoughtblogs.com/lousycanuck/2014/02/03/ftbcon2-evidence- based-feminism-w-full-transcript/) . At the top is a link to a Google document ( [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1slJbQpPTlg_m6cKgsarzGLqY...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1slJbQpPTlg_m6cKgsarzGLqYNfEpuvmqv4QTV303Fro/edit?pli=1) ) with full citations.

<comment><USER5> Here are some I think are interesting. [http://www.isna.org/node/564](http://www.isna.org/node/564) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer)

They talk about male babies who were sexually reassigned at birth and given female hormones. However many of them decided to reidentify as males later on life, showing that even with female hormones and a female upbringing, it was not enough to make them adopt a female gender identity.

I wouldn't say this is conclusive evidence. But I think it's enough to show that people should keep an open mind about this subject.

<comment><USER6> > > [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer)

I'm learning about this now. _Shocking_. This could pass as some story about medical experiments during nazy germany.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting watching the conversation over sex differences take shape. On the one hand, we have a group of people that say even though males and females are biologically different there are NO differences in the way we think or perform. At the other extreme you have the "girls are nurturing, males are war-like" argument. What it really is is a combination of both nature and nurture. The effects of testosterone and estrogen are well known. Brain plasticity is a marvelous thing. Add to that 'developmental windows' where certain behaviors and predilections become our (as in each individual person's) baseline behavior and you have a fantastic spectrum of humanity. Average people will tend more toward stereotypical behavior, because the stereotypes define average. Those at either end of the spectrum may be a hyper stereotype or a stereotype defying unique one-of-a-kind individual. Don't hate it, embrace it.

I found the below links a week ago, just browsing for 'sex differences':

[http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex- diff...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex- differences/201101/how-can-there-still-be-sex-difference-even-when-there-is)

[http://sugarandslugs.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/sex- difference...](http://sugarandslugs.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/sex-differences/)

[http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/sexdifferences.aspx](http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/sexdifferences.aspx)

<comment><USER8> It's always sad to witness this need to flatten things on a space of two extrema. Often it's a complex combination that can't be pinned down neither in space nor time.

<comment><USER9> I really, really like the Genderbread Person for this reason.

<comment><USER8> Never heard of it. Pretty nice. I'd just change the 'and' in sexual orientations since people desire and feeling can target different types.

rapid picture link ps: [http://i.imgur.com/t7Lfh4p.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/t7Lfh4p.jpg)

<comment><USER9> It actually oversimplifies all four dimensions, if you can even claim with any surety that there _are_ exactly four dimensions. There are things like "third gender" [1] and there are demisexuals [2] and there are asexuals and so on.

What I like about it is that it's just slightly too big as a concept presentation (though it _feels_ like it isn't) and mostly evokes the recognition that There Are Things You Didn't Know About.

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

[2] [http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=Demisexual](http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=Demisexual)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Honest question, why are people so afraid of there being inherent differences between boys and girls?

<comment><USER11> Imagine a scientific study that just said "Scientific justification for social oppression found." In a nutshell, I believe that's why.

It's not even that it's bad for there to be differences between the sexes; what's bad is that some people will inevitable take these studies as justification for their sexist views and attitudes.

<comment><USER9> You don't have to imagine it:

[http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2766200?uid=3739696&ui...](http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2766200?uid=3739696&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103484766073)

"The Negro: Is he a biological inferior?" (1927)

That was from one crappy Google search. I can probably go home and break open books to get indirect references for a lot more studies.

<comment><USER12> But that article concludes that "the Negro" is NOT inferior:

> I have tried to review briefly the important fields in which evidence of > Negro inferiority is most likely to be found, if found at all. In no case is > the proof conspicuous by its volume---rather the opposite appears true.

<comment><USER9> I actually wondered how such an article got published as late as 1927. That would explain it. I can go find a better one tonight. More broadly, though, here's a Wikipedia page on the subject:

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

Glancing through the citations, #33 is "Tiedemann, Friedrich (1836). "On the Brain of the Negro, Compared with that of the European and the Orang-outang" (PDF). Phylosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 126."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My favorite part about baby psych studies is how the researcher gets to pick whether "prolonged staring at an object" means "natural affinity for the object" or "surprise at the unexpected object"

</comment><comment><USER14> Aren't these the totally debunked monkey research studies that are being referenced?

<comment><USER15> Yup: [http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/08/05/3816216.ht...](http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/08/05/3816216.htm)

<comment><USER16> That article is about MRI studies, not monkeys. Do you have any links about the monkey studies?

<comment><USER15> Sure: [http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/03/entertainment/la- ca-...](http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/03/entertainment/la-ca-rebecca- jordan-young-20101003)

Search for "monkey".

The basic premise is that drawing cultural associations cross species is pretty much a no-go; a preference for a "pot" doesn't validate traditional gender roles any more than a preference for a particular color would -- it's more a reflection on our own cultural biases than it is a proof of hard-wired gender roles.

<comment><USER17> That references one study with monkeys. Was it the same one?

<comment><USER18> One but not the other.

What that linked article was about:

[http://academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/imagingthebody/Hand...](http://academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/imagingthebody/Handouts/alexander_2002.pdf)

What this post also discusses:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> And I bet male monkeys prefer to code, while female monkeys prefer to work in marketing.

<comment><USER20> I always through female monkeys preferred Elementary Education and males Business Mangemanent with a concentration in IT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm just going to leave this here for further discussion.

[http://www.newsweek.com/why-parents-may-cause-gender- differe...](http://www.newsweek.com/why-parents-may-cause-gender-differences- kids-79501)

In one, scientists dressed newborns in gender-neutral clothes and misled adults about their sex. The adults described the "boys" (actually girls) as angry or distressed more often than did adults who thought they were observing girls, and described the "girls" (actually boys) as happy and socially engaged more than adults who knew the babies were boys. Dozens of such disguised- gender experiments have shown that adults perceive baby boys and girls differently, seeing identical behavior through a gender-tinted lens. In another study, mothers estimated how steep a slope their 11-month-olds could crawl down. Moms of boys got it right to within one degree; moms of girls underestimated what their daughters could do by nine degrees, even though there are no differences in the motor skills of infant boys and girls. But that prejudice may cause parents to unconsciously limit their daughter's physical activity. How we perceive children—sociable or remote, physically bold or reticent—shapes how we treat them and therefore what experiences we give them. Since life leaves footprints on the very structure and function of the brain, these various experiences produce sex differences in adult behavior and brains—the result not of innate and inborn nature but of nurture.

For her new book, Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It, Eliot immersed herself in hundreds of scientific papers (her bibliography runs 46 pages). Marching through the claims like Sherman through Georgia, she explains that assertions of innate sex differences in the brain are either "blatantly false," "cherry- picked from single studies," or "extrapolated from rodent research" without being confirmed in people. For instance, the idea that the band of fibers connecting the right and left brain is larger in women, supposedly supporting their more "holistic" thinking, is based on a single 1982 study of only 14 brains. Fifty other studies, taken together, found no such sex difference—not in adults, not in newborns. Other baseless claims: that women are hard-wired to read faces and tone of voice, to defuse conflict, and to form deep friendships; and that "girls' brains are wired for communication and boys' for aggression." Eliot's inescapable conclusion: there is "little solid evidence of sex differences in children's brains."

Yet there are differences in adults' brains, and here Eliot is at her most original and persuasive: explaining how they arise from tiny sex differences in infancy. For instance, baby boys are more irritable than girls. That makes parents likely to interact less with their "nonsocial" sons, which could cause the sexes' developmental pathways to diverge. By 4 months of age, boys and girls differ in how much eye contact they make, and differences in sociability, emotional expressivity, and verbal ability—all of which depend on interactions with parents—grow throughout childhood. The message that sons are wired to be nonverbal and emotionally distant thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The sexes "start out a little bit different" in fussiness, says Eliot, and parents "react differently to them," producing the differences seen in adults.

Those differences also arise from gender conformity. You often see the claim that toy preferences—trucks or dolls—appear so early, they must be innate. But as Eliot points out, 6- and 12-month-olds of both sexes prefer dolls to trucks, according to a host of studies. Children settle into sex-based play preferences only around age 1, which is when they grasp which sex they are, identify strongly with it, and conform to how they see other, usually older, boys or girls behaving. "Preschoolers are already aware of what's acceptable to their peers and what's not," writes Eliot. Those play preferences then snowball, producing brains with different talents.

<comment><USER20> At some point you need to ask yourself, why the hell do I care? This is so much low-level posturing and image-crafting on the part of anyone who participates. It bespeaks of a self-righteous society with no ability to organize or plan other than whine about the color of the bike shed and other narcissisms of small differences.

<comment><USER22> What are you even saying? You could use this as a response to like 60% of the comments on HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Title relatively misleading.

The researcher's website is here: [http://www.geriannealexander.com/](http://www.geriannealexander.com/)

I leave it to more expert people to analyze the publications, which appear to be available for the price of name & email.

</comment><comment><USER24> Bullshit

Read the main paper cited in the article by Alexander at Texas A&M in 2002. It says: female MONKEYS prefer COOKING POTS.

Then if you aren't debilitated by laughing read the methods, it's a total piece of shit yet is quoted again and again because it agrees with people's prejudices.

<comment><USER25> Do you have a direct link? I couldn't found it.

But there is a strange linked press note about the male-typical digit ratios: [http://www.livescience.com/18484-finger-length-masculine- fac...](http://www.livescience.com/18484-finger-length-masculine-faces.html)

> _The researchers studied a group of 17 boys ages 4 to 11 and measured their > finger lengths, and took images of their faces. They digitized these images > by marking 70 measurement points to compare the face shapes. Analyzing the > data on the computer, the researchers were able to see what parts of the > face could be linked to digit ratio, and how strongly they were correlated._

It's a small sample number, too many fuzzy criteria and it looks like an easy set of measurements to cherrypick or find spurious correlations and "explanations".

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My son likes dolls, and my son likes trucks. Is he a secret hermaphrodite?

<comment><USER6> Many boys like to play with dolls. What are action figures after all?

I think toys are a bad measure for any study related to gender.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Anyone interested in gender studies and the current understanding of gender ought to read "Delusions of Gender" by Cordelia Fine. It is a fantastically interesting book.

[http://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society- Neurosexism-D...](http://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism- Difference/dp/0393340244)

</comment><comment><USER27> Do boys actually prefer trucks and balls or do they just not prefer dolls and pick a toy acording to some other quality (complexity of movement?) not taking into account how much the shape resembles human?

Maybe girls would also pick trucks and balls if human shped figures were not available?

</comment><comment><USER28> Taboos are alive and well among the scientifically literate. If you don't believe me, just check out the cognitive dissonance in this thread.

</comment><comment><USER29> Who's to say monkeys are not also socialized by gender?

</comment><comment><USER30> It also finally explains that boys like girls!

<comment><USER31> Red card.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why or how?

</comment><comment><USER33> So, despite what everyone has been saying, girls are different from boys?!

</comment><comment><USER34> and they all like stuffed animals</comment>


Show HN: Quaint – a statically typed language with seamless resumable functions - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bbu/quaint-lang <comment><USER3> Honestly, "elif" is terrible! If you dare to use the "long" keywords such as "sizeof" and "alignof", please, use "elseif" at least! Or, in this case, what's wrong with "else if"? The single word makes sense for languages like Python.

Outside of ^^^, the language is beautiful. Thank you!

<comment><AUTHOR> The rational part of me screams that "else if" should be a single token, so I'm left with: elif, elsif or elseif.

"else if" is really an old C hack that enables the parser to not have a special production for else-ifs, and it would generate a deep parse tree, rather than a flat one. I feel like that is wrong. A chain of if-elif-else should be conceptually linear, not nested.

Moreover, in a language that doesn't require parens around the conditions, it would look rather "disorientating":

        } else if a == b && b == c {

<comment><USER3> Only primitive parsers would be bothered by multiple tokens in a row - <USER2> don't have to be one word, you don't even need a special separator - it's only needed in languages like Python. That's why Java, C#, JavaScript, and others don't need an "elif" equivalent - it's all a matter of code formatting and not nesting redundantly.</comment></comment></comment>


Owls discover and get rid of a hidden camera which tracks their movements - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/MacyThornhill/status/1159829410091896833 <comment><USER2> Makes me think of Rupert Sheldrake and his book "The Sense of Being Stared At".</comment>


Show HN: Checkup – Monitor health checks your menu bar - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dino-dna/checkup <comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr, I got tired of manually curl'ing all of my essential services, and didn't want a webpage dashboard, script, or window-ed app as the primary query-UX. Now, one quiet little icon lets me know if all of my digital concerns in the world are well with a binary PASS/FAIL-like icon.</comment>


Microsoft seeks to recruit autistic workers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32204999 <comment><USER2> I think what Microsoft is trying to say, and what the article is doing a poor job of communicating, is that the company believes that there are some autistic people who have much to contribute to Microsoft, but they are currently disadvantaged by current hiring processes which rely so heavily upon interviews. The idea of trying to find alternative ways to assess candidates that don't rely so completely on interviews/high pressure social situations seems laudable to me, even if in this article it was poorly expressed.

<comment><USER3> "don't rely so completely on interviews/high pressure social situations seems laudable to me"

There is an obvious competitive advantage to any company that removes arbitrary and unnecessary barriers, aside from whats being discussed. If almost no jobs actually require that arbitrary barrier, the pool of applicants on the other side of the barrier will inherently have individuals better at the job than the pool who made it over the artificial meaningless barrier. Given a big pond, a small random sample of pond water will always have a smaller "biggest fish" than a larger random sample from the same pond, and if the sample size expands to the size of the whole pond, that fisherman will get the biggest possible fish.

The fact that this doesn't happen historically or currently despite the obvious financial advantage, shows that hiring and general office culture is obviously more influenced by primate dominance rituals than economic reasons. When you throw in some additional dominance rituals to compensate or rationalize away the reduced hazing rituals and membership rituals to "even things up", its going to be a hellish working environment for the folks who do get in.

Mix the above paragraph with the observation of corporate communication always indicates the opposite of what it explicitly claims. So a company that feels the need to say quality is job one actually prioritizes quality dead last after production goals and profit and pretty much everything else. Or a company that issues elaborate press releases about its diversity program invariably actually closes management ranks to all but old white men. You can handle an issue by "doing things" or you can dispose of it by "issue human interest press releases" so press releases mean it was decided nothing will actually be done. So you can assume a corporate communication of opening hiring to autistic people actually means it was completely and utterly closed to them and it'll remain that way but we'll talk nicely about it and issue press releases for the human interest spin on the news. We won't hire them but we'll talk really nicely about them instead.

So its kind of a "one step forward two steps back" story. Its actually signalling that autistic people would be better off working anywhere else. Which is a useful observation. And fitting in with the first paragraph, it means MS competitors have an inherent advantage over MS in having superior hiring policies instead of the MS strategy of instead talking about superior hiring policies.

<comment><USER4> "corporate communication always indicates the opposite of what it explicitly claims"

Do you have evidence for this? If Apple announces that their new iWatch with features XYZ will go on sale, I expect the watch to go on sale and to have features XYZ. Similarly, if a business mentions quality, then since qualities are the "characteristics or features that someone or something has", I expect them to focus on adding features to their product and incorporating more jargon into their business processes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think MS is making a good move in our current society. Popular culture isn't mature enough that we all feel we should treat people well by default - we are happy to abuse autistic spectrum people because they're not clearly labelled as being a member of a disadvantaged group. We know we shouldn't abuse people for being black, handicapped, gay, female, etc. But we can still abuse people who don't "understand the unwritten rules of the workplace". So at least this may benefit people who can be labelled as autistic to get protection from that abuse and discrimination. That's going to happen at a job interview, where an otherwise qualified candidate can be discriminated against because they wouldn't be a "good fit for our team". Members of many other disadvantaged groups already get some protection from this - you can't refuse to hire someone because they're a woman and thus wouldn't be a good fit for your all- male team, but you can refuse someone for being unable to understand complex social interactions even when they aren't essential for performing the job.

It's not ideal however. Ideally we wouldn't ostracize someone for misunderstanding jokes, trying unsuccessfully to mimic the likable behavior of neurotypicals or failing to make eye contact at the right moments. But our society is still at that level of intolerance where we need some kind of labeling of disadvantaged people to help everyone else stop and think "Oh, I'm not supposed to be mean to him for that, he can't help it".

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm autistic and I feel disgusted by such announcement. I have worked hard, gained a PhD and that's why I'd be recruited into one of these companies.

If Microsoft could do anything, it should just understand an autistic perspective in the workplace and its often eccentric behavior.

<comment><USER7> I'm disgusted by your disgust. I wanted a PhD more than anything, but I didn't understand my disorder at the time, and I didn't have the care nor coping skills I needed to get through life on top of achieving what I wanted to in the PhD program. That was three years ago and I still cry almost every other night or so over it, but I am living a much healthier and more understood life, instead of every day being almost constant confusion and stress (on top of difficult school work, being a teaching assistant and a research assistant).

It helps when the work environment understands explicitly. I experience heightened stress and chaotic thought patterns in overtly social situations that ripple across months when the situations only last days or hours, and I need to learn to engage in them very slowly at my own pace and be comfortable.

If my former school understood this instead of having my professors call me 'aspie', maybe I would have a PhD by now. The one thing I learned from this is that I should not be forced into any situation that makes me experience distress, and I do not care if you think it's ridiculous. I have spent far too much of my life in difficult mental places, and I do not want to live like that anymore, and I won't. I don't force people around me to do graduate level math simply so they can talk to me in a language I understand.

We are not always clever and eccentric, 100% of the time. It would help if people stopped looking at us like computers and started remembering we are human too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _"...understand the 'unwritten rules' of the workplace..."_

I guess everyone would benefit from writing them down.

<comment><USER9> The thing about unwritten rules that govern social behaviour is– even if you write down a set of rules, a new set of unwritten rules will emerge.

<comment><USER8> More importantly writing down all the unwritten rules would make the corporation actionable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are already a couple of companies hiring purely autistic people as they seem to be amazingly accomplished QA people.

<comment><USER11> Some doubtless are, but you can't really generalise. Attention to detail and patience for, indeed enjoyment of, repetitive tasks may be traits widely found in people with autism, but they're not universal: surprisingly little is.

<comment><USER10> Generalizations aren't universal claims.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Someone obviously didn't read: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_Dark](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_Dark)

</comment><comment><USER13> The autism advantage (from 2012): [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/magazine/the-autism- advant...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/magazine/the-autism- advantage.html?_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER14> What about those of us with asspergers? We need jobs too...

<comment><USER15> Aspergers is an outdated diagnosis that nowadays falls under Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

<comment><USER16> I really liked Parenthood though. I think it did a lot for ASD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> [http://specialisterne.com/](http://specialisterne.com/)

<comment><USER18> Or a Dutch company: [http://specialisterren.nl/](http://specialisterren.nl/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What they said:

> "Each individual is different, some have an amazing ability to retain > information, think at a level of detail and depth or excel in math or code."

What they mean:

> Each autist we're interested in is exactly the same, they have an amazing > ability to be really fucking nerdy and make computers do magic shit. But > they're hard to deal with, so we also need to make this a PR move.

Seriously. I'm very uncomfortable with this article. There are probably people on the autism spectrum already working at all the big tech places. Why single them out like this?

Newsflash: Not all people with autism are genius programmers. Not all genius programmers are people with autism. Treat everyone with respect. Treat everyone as an equal human being. This article doesn't seem to get that.

> "just 15% of adults with autism in the UK are in full-time employment."

No shit. That's because for every 100 individuals with autism, ~55 are considered mentally disabled (IQ<70) and only ~3 of them turn out to be geniuses (IQ>130). [1] Coupled with social challenges, this means very few individuals with autism are able to be independent into adulthood. [2]

This article irritates me.

[1]: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21272389](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21272389)

[2]: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14982237](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14982237)

<comment><USER20> I'm diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum, with an IQ of > 140, and early in my career I worked at Microsoft.

This is a PR stunt, but I'm comfortable with it if it helps align people's optics to the idea that autistic traits can indeed be harnessed into a super valuable role in society. You'd be surprised how many people don't think that's the case.

<comment><USER21> Maybe this is too much to ask but it would be nice if the choices weren't "simpleton unable to function" or "Rainman."

<comment><USER22> I know what you mean. I have a friend who is autistic and he is probably about average in intelligence.

That is a bad place to be for someone with autism as the behavioral issues means he has trouble finding work, but he can't get any government support because he isn't disabled enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What a repulsive idea.

Just hire people based on how well they can do a job. You don't have to pigeonhole people into one of your shitty mental categories and _then_ hire them.

<comment><USER5> I used to hold the same opinion about positive discrimination for women and ethnic minorities, but now I realize that it's necessary to overcome people's instinctive prejudice. Most companies don't hire on how well you can do the job, they hire on how well they like you, and that encompasses all their prejudices. People can't just switch off their prejudice but if they're conscious of what it is, they can at least try to look past it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So, honest question: how is this not discrimination?

Not that I feel discriminated against personally, but it seems like they'd be opening themselves up to a HUGE legal liability. You can't hire someone based on their gender identity or the color of their skin, but you can hire based on a physical difference in the brain?

<comment><USER21> "People who do not have a disability" are not a protected class, while people with disabilities are. This seems intuitive enough to me...

<comment><USER24> The problem with this statement is that you need to define "a disability." You will immediately have to deal with the problem of classifying clinical depression, for example.

<comment><USER25> You know this has already been done, and clinical depression is indeed considered a disabling condition, right? Check out the ADA and SSDI.

<comment><USER24> Yes, I'm aware of it. I was making sure that the respondant was, as it's the classic example of why you can't simply say "has a disability" as a way of classifying individuals. Plenty of people have disabilities that you cannot easily identify, let alone require them to disclose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've got only one issue with this article. It should be published in 2016 and state something like "After 1-year pilot program, MS announced that their recruitment process has been redesigned to prevent discrimination against autism and resulted in hiring 1000 new employees which could be otherwise rejected. It all started in 2015 with a small 10 person trial ..."

In case of a company with 128k employees, a pilot program for 10 people just isn't news-worthy.</comment>


Apple and Other Tech Companies Tangle with U.S. Over Data Access - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/us/politics/apple-and-other-tech-companies-tangle-with-us-over-access-to-data.html <comment><USER2> _> Microsoft said federal officials would have to get an order from an Irish court, because the emails were stored on servers in Dublin._

The feds are being hoisted on their own petard somewhat here, having long argued that a foreign person's data held on a US server is subject to US jurisdiction. The logical corrollary to that argument is that data held on an Irish server is subject to Irish jurisdiction.

It is standard practise for companies in Europe (e.g. the bank I'm consulting for right now) to ensure that, when they subscribe to cloud services, their data is held stored and processed in datacentres within the EU, so that it is subject to EU legislation and, hence, the EU's data protection laws.

<comment><USER3> > It is standard practise for companies in Europe (e.g. the bank I'm > consulting for right now) to ensure that, when they subscribe to cloud > services, their data is held stored and processed in datacentres within the > EU, so that it is subject to EU legislation and, hence, the EU's data > protection laws.

Absolutely. EU Data Protection Laws are so enshrined, I would argue that they are part of the culture. In the UK it's part of the educational syllabus to learn about the Data Protection Act.

If American companies cannot adhere to the act, companies will walk away from those services. I see a lucrative market opening up for "private clouds" whereby the requirement is, is the data "safe" is it vulnerable to American jurisdiction?

Is there a business opportunity here to brag about 100% none American? I don't see that being conducive to a free, open, global economy. Least of all between two of the largest economies.

There is rule-of-law in the EU and warrants do get issued and executed. The rabid pursuit of this by the US can only be counter productive in my mind. For everyone.

<comment><USER4> Health services moving to digital working pay money to have software and services that respect privacy and that don't send data everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any time I read this type of article, I keep recalling what irritated the hell out of me with the Snowden leaks and responses of US citizens. To paraphrase: "It's terrible they're spying on US citizens (but everyone else is fair game, geez, whack a splicer in that fibre channel asap)".

The US has reinvented the concept of borderlines on the Internet with what the NSA/TLAs have been up to. I'd say that's a distinct step backwards.

<comment><USER6> The response of most US citizens has been, "Snowden?"

But then there are plenty of people on HN who should know better who are outraged, OUTRAGED to discover the US is spying on people, but seem to have no issues with their own and other governments spying on them. So it's ignorance and hypocrisy all-round.

<comment><USER5> Well, all of the Five Eyes are complicit, no argument there. Certainly a top- heavy weighting from the US though, with basically control of the net, and a stellar budget. The peons just follow the marching orders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _"Only Congress has the institutional competence and constitutional authority to balance law enforcement needs against our nation's sovereignty, the privacy of its citizens and the competitiveness of its industry."_

What competence?

</comment><comment><USER8> How do these things work in the case of physical goods and documents?

For instance, suppose you and I are both US residents, residing in the US. You loan me some item. I fail to return it and you sue me. The court orders me to return the item to you.

If I had that item in a storage locker in Los Angeles, there is no question that the court would have the authority to order me to retrieve that item and turn it over to you or to the court.

Suppose, however, I have taken the item to Mexico and have it in a storage locker there? Can I now get away with telling the court that since the item is in Mexico, the court does not authority to order me to retrieve it (or to order me to instruct the storage facility to retrieve it and ship it to me)?

Similar question for physical documents. For instance, if GM set up a documents storage facility a few miles away from its headquarters, across the border in Canada, and kept all documents not actively in use at the Canadian facility, would they then be able to fend off document subpoenas from US safety investigators this way?

<comment><USER9> There are two entities in question: you and the object.

You are within the jurisdiction of the U.S. And can be held in contempt, charged (even in absentia), etc.

The object is now within the jurisdiction of Mexico so it gets complicated. A Mexican court can be petitioned to require the entity that (unwittingly or not) possesses it to turn it over, etc.

The difference with data Ina server is that a company has the power to turn it over regardless of where it's stored and the U.S. Government is having their hat on that.

By physically locating servers in other jurisdictions you have to comply with their laws too and that gets complicated. You can end up Ina situation where one government doesn't recognize the authority of the other and you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Personally I find the constant overreach of the U.S. Government to be appalling and entirely short term I it's thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In practical terms how much will this set back the U.S. Govt? Won't they get rapid support from European countries and just make the process streamlined?</comment>


MVP is not alpha - <AUTHOR>

I keep seeing people label their sites as "MVP". MVP is a minimal viable product.
This means feature set not quality.
Stop using MVP as an excuse for your poor quality software. If you didn't have time to polish the features maybe it wasn't minimal enough! <comment><USER2> It's too easy to get caught up in the fad where you see blog posts bragging about launching in 3 hours with a crappy website and bagging their first customer.

.

(Note: This is all based on my meandering experience. Take it with a grain of salt.)

For me, a MVP tackles a single sub-problem of your targeted userbase and execute the heck out of it. This should be a gem of a small solution you create that is beautiful, usable, and magnificent.

Your goal is to get those initial users to feel that heady emotion (Wonderful word: "frisson"), that sends chills down their backs when they realize what you have created.

.

Not taking advantage of graphic design is stupid. Remember, when users see that MVP, they don't consciously think, "ok, this site does X, but it has a graphic design quality of Y, but I don't care". They take in the MVP as a whole and they put it through their binary evaluator.

You need to take advantage of everything at your disposal to make sure that evaluator lands on the right side. To do anything less would be doing yourself a disservice.

You don't want to be sitting a few days after sending out the MVP and wondering if people aren't converting because it looks crappy or because its useless.

(A big caveat is if you don't have a designer on your team. At this stage, it is time consuming (and expensive) to hire freelancer designers to render the vision you have in your head. I would try to make do. I come from the school of thought that having a designer cofounder is essential, and better yet, you have a designeer on your founding team.)

.

Remember, all I am talking about is just one small aspect of the bigger problem you are trying to solve. The bet here is that with your identified subproblem, the costs for producing it will be relatively low (at least compared to the overarching problem you are solving).

.

It is easier for people to see a tiny, tiny bit of something absolutely wonderful and imagine a lot more of it than it is to see something crappy and imagine something beautiful.

.

What ends up happening is:

1\. Potential users try out the MVP and appreciate its straight up utility.

2\. Potential users see the quality and craftsmanship of the tool (even though its tiny) and you start gaining a fanbase. These users expect more wonder from you.

3\. It becomes very natural for you to grow out your userbase along with your feature set.

4\. You tackle more subproblems with the same amount of polish and voracity and in the end you get a wonderful product with a huge fanbase.

.

jiggity's personal mvp pathway to new products

Research -> Identification of one pressing subproblem -> Build the heck out of a solution to that subproblem -> Polish, make it beautiful, put in emotive triggers -> MVP release -> Userbase reacts with astonishment -> Identify pressing subproblem #2 -> Built solution for that subproblem -> Polish -> Release -> Use fanbase from earlier iteration to grow much faster -> Repeat

</comment><comment><USER3> Great point. This same discussion was made by Ben Yoskovitz on <http://www.instigatorblog.com/no-shitty-in-mv/2012/01/05/>

</comment><comment><USER4> I disagree.

If the purpose of the application is met, but the app is otherwise ugly, hard to use or what have you, then you have an MVP.

The point of an MVP, generally, is to determine whether or not there's a market for your application, and whether it actually fills a need.

If you can put out an ugly, half-working application that saves me real, tangible money, then I'm probably going to use it. If there's better-looking or more highly regarded software in the same space, you're out of luck, and shouldn't be launching an MVP... the market's been proven by the competitor. But if it's a new space, in an unproven market, that solves a real problem, then yes, I will accept an app that hasn't "had time to polish the features", so long as the one core feature that I'm using it for works.

<comment><USER5> > The point of an MVP, generally, is to determine whether or not there's a > market for your application, and whether it actually fills a need.

I've seen people use MVPs as a fund-raising tool too, while making their pitch to potential investors.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it viable to charge for access to a closed beta of your product? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> It certainly works for games.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I thought that was the case for games. The product in question however is a big data/intelligence tool. A 'founding customer' deal was what we were considering, a heavily discounted price for a years subscription and to join a closed beta. Just wondered whether charging for closed beta was a generally accepted thing or whether we would be laughed out of the park.</comment></comment>


DoJ Subpoena Proves Twitter's Value — and Its Weakness - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2011/01/08/twitter-doj-wikileaks/

<comment><USER2> It does no such thing and proves neither. A ridiculous headline and a worthless article.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems to me that it proves Twitter's weakness, in the sense that Twitter ultimately must comply with the law, however unconscionable that law may be, but also Twitter's strength --- Twitter did fight the subpoena and may have done so successfully.

It doesn't seem that it proves Twitter's value, except in the sense that WikiLeaks is a savvy enough organization that it wouldn't be using Twitter unless it thought it was valuable enough to be worth the risk.</comment>