The Dawn of the Space Mining Age - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-dawn-of-the-space-mining-age/ <comment><USER2> I know that SV seems to have abandoned the idea of good unit economics, but the concept of asteroid mining seems to take that to a whole new level. The cost of developing autonomous asteroid mining equipment, finding asteroids suitable for mining, getting this equipment to the asteroid, operating it, maintaining it, and shipping the mined product back to earth must be in the billions of dollars, if not more. This article talks about moving an asteroid into lunar orbit to make this easier, but it seems to me that the amount of delta-v needed to do that would be staggering, not to mention that even if we had engines capable of generating that amount of thrust, we would still need to somehow get them out of the Earth's gravity well and to the asteroid in question. Plus, even if we could somehow do any of the above, is there any evidence that asteroids like the article's $50 billion platinum asteroid even exist? As far as I am aware, less than 10% of the asteroids in the asteroid belt are metallic in nature (most are composed of carbon and silicon), and the metallic asteroids we do know about are all iron and nickel based, not exactly high-value metals. I'm all for space exploration, both by governments and by private enterprises, but this whole thing seems completely far-fetched and impractical.

<comment><USER3> There are many asteroids in so-called near-Earth orbits, with nearly zero delta-V (beyond Earth escape) to reach them and return to Earth. The delta-V is even less than an insertion into lunar orbit.

Mostly it's just a matter of being patient and letting the orbits phase, given the right nudge.

(Also, note that delta-V is not thrust. Delta-V is a change in velocity, thrust is force.)

<comment><USER2> >Also, note that delta-V is not thrust. Delta-V is a change in velocity, thrust is force.)

Thanks for the condescending reply. Seeing as I have a degree in Physics, I am well aware of the technical difference between thrust and delta-v. However, when talking about rocketry, it's hard to have delta-v without corresponding thrust, and my usage of both terms was more for rhetoric than a desire for absolute technical correctness.

<comment><USER3> Wasn't trying to be condescending, but the reason I mention it is that in rocketry, the required thrust is _very_ different (not linearly proportional, I mean) from required delta-V, especially in deep space missions where you have lots of time to do your burns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> TL;DR: Congress signs law about space enabling people to profit, journalist excitedly retells current state of space mining.

<comment><USER5> Nation that can't launch (human-carrying) rockets launches paperwork.

Potentially illegal violation of international law paperwork, at that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ironically space mining may have been the first mining method of early humans. Before smelting was discovered, the occasional iron meterorite provided raw iron for tools and jewelry.

<comment><USER7> Pedantricly, wouldn't that rather be space-harvesting? They did fall from the sky.

<comment><USER8> Space.. foraging?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Who would have been foolish enough to squander the money, lives and resources needed to travel to and explore the New World?"

You can only argue that the exploration of the Americas was a good affair if you ignore the cost of all the pillaging and killing and deaths and slavery... If you include the inhabitants of the Americas when you judge the benefit of the "exploration of the new world", I'm not sure it ends up being a net positive for several centuries.

<comment><USER3> Maybe, but there are no intelligent natives on asteroids.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For someone interested in the future of the...err...space, what type of technical background is required to be hired today to work at a company with plans to attempt this type of mining?

<comment><USER11> Personally, if I were doing this, and I might still, I would focus on the challenges of actually mining. The reason is that rockets and probes etc are pretty well plowed areas but while Curiosity, the mars rover, can drill a small hole and using non-replacable reagents look for certain compounds, these things will need to process _tons_ of material from an asteroid to try and extract _kilograms_ of materials. That is a very unsolved problem and a very under funded one.

A lot of current extraction techniques use liquid water (not available on an asteroid), all extraction techniques depend on the raw ore being transportable by buckets or belts with gravity keeping things in place (also not available on asteroids). And many refinement techniques are very energy expensive (challenging to ship to an asteroid). So if you can figure out how to solve even one of those problems and asteroid mining company that hires you will be ahead of the game.

<comment><USER12> Do anyone know of research groups involved in this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> None of these estimates seem to take into account that dumping huge quantities of precious metals on the free market will move the price by a substantial amount. Asteroid mining might only be profitable for a short while...

<comment><USER14> That depends on the amount and time scale. The quoted $50 billion platinum asteroid would contain around 2500 tons – the equivalent of 15 years worth of terrestrial production –, and most certainly not in a pure form. Mining all that and returning it to Earth safely is likely a long-term project.

<comment><USER15> I guess what should really be considered is, why would you return the raw ore to earth? The dawn of space mining will trigger the dawn of space refining and manufacturing I think.

<comment><USER14> You'd still have to return the final products. And with something like platinum, which is used in tiny traces, stuffing half a ton in bars into a Soyuz and sending it back would probably be more profitable than, say, building whole exhaust catalysts in space and returning those.

<comment><USER15> Well, I did say 'refining' in addition to manufacturing. In some cases refined raw material makes sense to deorbit. But if you consider the costs of lifting objects to orbit, the ability to manufacture large mass components in orbit would be a huge win. Sure, the initial costs of getting to the point where you can manufacture in orbit are large. But, if space mining becomes profitable they'll need more and more gear to do this. If they have to lift all that gear off earth then it is prohibitive. Hence space manufacturing is a self-help path for mining.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Space mining concept: an in-vacuum absolutely enormous mass spectrometer as a way to naturally sort plasma-ified asteroid matter into buckets of 100% pure elements. Which can then be pushed with small ion engines onto slow orbits that will eventually deliver them to Earth.

<comment><USER17> Why sort them in space? That work can be done on Earth.

<comment><USER18> A: You've got access to a lot of solar power, on a completely predictable schedule. Especially convenient since in this particular case you don't need to convert it to electricity first. B: Anything you release as a gas flies harmlessly out into the universe, so your environmental restrictions are a great deal less. (Also, this is not "cheating regulations" or anything... this is _truly_ an environment with fewer restrictions. If you can vaporize it, it can be made to truly go away forever.) C: You've got zero G, and this sort of "massive mass spec" plan, while I question the numbers in general, is probably a great deal more practical in zero G than not zero G.

And it would all tie together; if the exhaust is in excess of escape velocity, which it probably is by an order of magnitude or two, you can just let anything you don't care to catch fly into space.

I'm not saying this is practical or necessarily a good idea, just pointing out that you _do_ have some options in space that you don't have on Earth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If one wanted to invest in this($100-$1000's - not millions), what entry points would they have?

<comment><USER20> Get your ass to work.

What other "entry point" do you truly expect for emerging worlds?

#kidstoday

<comment><USER21> > What other "entry point" do you truly expect for emerging worlds?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint- stock_company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint-stock_company)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Well, it makes complete sense: we save planet earth by moving all our industry to space.

I'm all for it. Close every factory that we can down here, as fast as we can, and put the iPod-assembly 'bots up in sk. I'd happily spend my days remotely managing a small fleet of robot miners on the Asteroid#71238, work comfortably on the beach while remotely hunting valuable commodities some 1,000,000 miles away, or at least have a harvest of asteroids parked within our reach at any part of the planet, so .. in the end, anywhere any time can just dial the # and down from the sky comes a little edible parachute with the latest iDevice.

Earth returns to paradise, kids get to play with robots in space, everyone wins. Whats not to like?

</comment><comment><USER23> Does this make anyone else nervous?</comment>


Elementary OS - <AUTHOR> http://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/10/29/2240 <comment><USER2> I am really intruigued when people say they do most of their computer usage on an iPad. I get massively frustrated anytime I try to do almost anything other than consome on an iPad. As just one example trying to copy snd paste almost anything makes me want to tear my hair out it's so frustrsting. Moving the cursor or trying to fight with the os about what I really want to select as it keeps trying to expand my selection, or the fact tbat I can't copy the text of a link, only the link itself.

That's just one of many frustrstions I run into anytime I try to use ios (or Android) for anything other than consuming and so I'd really like to know am I doing it wrong? Is there some magic to work around these issue? Do others just never need to do the things I need do regularly?

It's so bad I recently bought a headmountable camera to document the frustrations in the hopes of generating some awareness of the issues because I'd love to be able to get by with just a tablet.

<comment><USER3> You can use two fingers over the keyboard for moving the cursor on an iPad (force touch on the keyboard with iphones)

<comment><USER4> But you can not select text using that method, can you?

<comment><USER5> On the iPhone with force touch you can. You have to press again then you can freely select. That's the only time I use force touch :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am using elementary OS for the past one and a half years, and honestly speaking, I am in love with it. I am a long time Linux user, and whenever I get a chance, I tell people about all the great things about Linux and why it's better than Windows and the MacOS. But there was always one aspect of Linux that I always felt a bit uneasy about, and this was design/UI/UX/accessibility of the many popular distributions. I liked ubuntu the most in this regards, but after they moved to Unity, I had to ditch it. But then I found Elementary, and have never looked back. Elementary combines the freedom and transparency of open source with beautiful design. I have never seen an OS that scores high on so many different factors.

There's a lot of discussion here about the stock apps in elementary. However, since I am an experienced Linux user, I don't really care about stock apps. The Linux app ecosystem is extremely diverse, and over the years, I have found my best solution for each task. For example, Clementine for music, Atom for text editing etc. So these apps get installed immediately after every installation of elementary and then I never look back at the stock apps again.

<comment><USER7> > and whenever I get a chance, I tell people about all the great things about > Linux and why it's better than Windows and the MacOS.

People like this bore me to death. Let's be frank - you're just biased and you're probably wrong, despite all your good intentions. What OS you prefer is a matter of taste and of choice, and there's no "better" or "worse" unless you're so narrow minded as to only measure an operating system's worth by the features that happen to put your chosen OS ahead. These days if I was a dedicated gamer I'd probably say Windows. In fact, after the Surface Studio presentation, it's tempting as a creative platform.

I used one form or another of Linux on my main desktops and laptops since 2002, until 2009. In 2009 I bought a Macbook and since then I've switched to OS X (or macOS) as my main OS of choice. I still install GNU coreutils on macOS, and still keep a separate desktop at home with Linux on it - appropriately named `lab` in my home network.

So, in 2016 my main laptop is a Macbook Air with macOS on which I do most of my work, my desktop is running various flavours of linux (arch which i keep the most updated, but also alpine, ubuntu, fedora... etc easily accessible in grub). Don't lecture us on what OS is better, we've made a decision and it doesn't have to be the same as yours.

<comment><USER8> > What OS you prefer is a matter of taste and of choice, and there's no > "better" or "worse" unless you're so narrow minded as to only measure an > operating system's worth by the features that happen to put your chosen OS > ahead.

> Don't lecture us on what OS is better, we've made a decision and it doesn't > have to be the same as yours.con

I would agree with that but you don't have to be so harsh, he may actually convince people with arguments as to why Linux is actually "better" (i.e. privacy), rather than "lecturing" them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really like elementaryOS - not for myself (need to use macOS for dev), but pretty much all of my family was migrated to it.

It has proven to be significantly more stable and simple to use than Windows and the default applications really nicely hit the simplicity and usability for a user that primarily needs web, email, photos and minor document editing. I'd even argue it's better than macOS for that user profile (especially since it's not localized to my local language, which eOS and most of major Linux apps are).

The fact that it actually looks good by default is nice as well.

Known downsides:

\- It's based on Ubuntu LTS (which is great!), but the new versions tend to lag after Ubuntu LTS releases by months at a time.

\- No upgrade path between versions.

\- Releases tend to be buggy on some hardware after release.

<comment><USER10> Not sure about the stability. I am using Ubuntu for over a year and it's way less stable than Windows was. Sometimes I encounter crashes when suspending or waking up. I also encounter lots of minor problems. For me the Windows experience was definitely more polished.

Is Elementary OS significantly different?

<comment><USER11> Likely the big reason there is that hardware manufacturers test for Windows and write drivers for Windows.

Damn it, there is at least one documented case of a motherboard giving a junk ACPI return if the OS identified itself as anything other than Windows.

<comment><USER12> While hardware manufacturers testing on windows does explain a lot, don't discount the massive amount of work MS put into making windows work on flaky hardware. They really do (or at least did) seem to have the mentality of "we will be blamed if it doesn't work, so bend over backwards to make things work"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been an elementaryOS user for years and I ended up dropping the whole thing in favour of xfwm4 + synapse + tint2.

eOS is a really nice looking thing, but it's buggy, release after release it's losing features, like [1] - this specific one was never fixed in the previous release.

The built-on music app collapses under a reasonable amount of music, same as banshee or quod libet can easily handle. Geary, the mail app looks nice, but lacks basic features and has a tendency to corrupt IMAP folders.

The window manager of eOS, Gala, is indeed impressive, but lack options to tweak. In the previous release, it was impossible to disable the ALT+TAB effect, even if all the other effects were set to none.

So overally: it's looks nice, the window manager is fast, and if you're fine with the defaults, you're probably going to be a happy user - until you find something you miss, and there is no way to fix that.

[https://bugs.launchpad.net/switchboard-plug- power/+bug/13590...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/switchboard-plug- power/+bug/1359054)

<comment><USER14> > Geary, the mail app looks nice, but lacks basic features and has a tendency > to corrupt IMAP folders.

Geary was forked after Yorba wound down, and Elementary are moving it over to the Evolution backend, incidentally.

<comment><USER15> Forgive my ignorance - what implications does this have? Would Evolution run as some kind of daemon, and Geary just add the presentation layer on top?

<comment><USER14> Yes, I think so. It means the Geary developers don't have to maintain IMAP etc support, they can concentrate on the other parts of the app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My mini Ask HN:

After over a decade of using Mac OS X, I am considering switching to Linux for my dev laptop. The tools I worry about are those that interact with audio and webcam - Go To Meeting, Google Hangout etc. My work involves me having to teleconf with others often.

Does anyone here have experience using Linux well in such scenarios. If so, what hardware are you using?

Also, does sleep-on-closing-lid work well?

<comment><USER17> This is why I still choose to go with Mac OS X, even if their most recent hardware is very, very expensive.

I don't have time to tinker with compiling kernels, configuring X11, figuring out which photo management software to use, setting up reliable backups, getting my Bluetooth headset to work, and, yes, getting the machine to suspend when I close the lid and wake up when I open it.

These are basics that will just work with OS X, very, very, reliably.

That said, if anyone can point me to a Linux distro (Debian/Ubuntu preferred) and hardware that actually work reliably together, please do.

<comment><USER18> Gosh, frankly speaking, I haven't had to do any of that stuff (except for the Bluetooth headset, I never had one of those, no idea how it works) in _7 years_.

In 2009 I installed Mandriva on a laptop--everything just worked. In 2011, I jumped ship to Mageia, the community-driven offshoot of Mandriva. Everything still just worked. Fast forward several laptops later, including mine and friends' and relations' laptops, and it all just works. Compiling a kernel? Wouldn't know how anymore. Fiddling with X11? No idea. I don't even have problems with Pulseaudio.

Compare that to dual booting this one with Windows 10. For several months, Windows 10 had a bug where it wouldn't save the touchpad settings. Every time, I'd have to disable tap-to-click. UGH. They finally fixed it, but what a pain.

(And when I had an OS X machine, received as part of payment for a job... between the beach ball and the not-infrequent crashes, where the screen dims and displays that fatal error message, it was a pain to get any work done.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really don't understand why developers use macs at all. They're not good dev machines. All production systems I work with are some flavor of linux (mostly ubuntu). There is actually a real impedance mismatch when I'm using my mac for work purposes. All those cores and RAM become meaningless when I have to do everything in a VM anyway. My personal dev machine is a project sputnik running ubuntu 16.04. I can understand why designers would use them but programmers never made any sense.

<comment><USER20> 1\. It's UNIX (more or less, but it's much more UNIX, than Windows), it's familiar bash, grep, awk, etc. It also has proper and popular package manager for command line programs (actually 2, macports and homebrew).

2\. It just works. You don't have to configure anything, every hardware part functioning properly and it's guaranteed that this will work in the future without any hassle. You don't have to think about drivers, kernel versions, sleep/wake up scripts, swap. You just install OS and start to work. That's on macs, of course, hackintoshes are more like Linux in that aspect.

3\. A lot of hardware designed for Macs. I have yet to see a device which will claim that it support Linux. Yet almost anything will work in Mac. Windows is better, of course, but Mac is good too. With Linux you better google it before you buy it, and even then something might be not perfect.

4\. They are nice machines overall. Good enough quality, good casing, good design, good internals, good service. Not best, but not much drawbacks.

5\. GUI is pretty nice and pleasant to use, there is a lot of GUI software for macs and almost every useful Linux program will have mac port (but not the other way). Linux doesn't have so polished user experience. Though it's not that important for power users, but it's nice to have IMO.

<comment><USER21> > I have yet to see a device which will claim that it support Linux.

I may have misunderstood this, but System76[0] specifically make 'designed for nix' desktops and laptops.

[0] [https://system76.com/](https://system76.com/)

<comment><USER20> I was referring to something like modem, audio card or gaming mouse.

System76 looks really interesting and if it works like Mac, it's awesome.

<comment><USER22> As others have mentioned, those System76 machines are rebranded Clevo laptops. Thinkpad's dominance among the OpenBSD developers is a strong hardware compatibility endorsement as far as I'm concerned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > the Screenshot app knows how to obfuscate text

Wow, that's a pretty great idea. Enough people do this wrong manually that it seems like something that could be better solved by the OS.

One example I've seen of doing it wrong is adding black opaque rectangles as layers and then sending out all layers including the original. Another is pixelating it in a way where it's possible to revert the pixelation since the font is known (e.g. parts of a facebook post)

</comment><comment><USER24> I bought a 2015 MBP back in January, so I'm all set for a few years at least. Whether OSX goes down the pan even more, I don't know.

Moving to Linux seems like a romantic idea, but I can forsee there being a number of problems that would make it unfeasible for me

1\. I use 1Password, no Linux client

2\. Spotify client is no longer being developed for Linux

3\. YouNeedABudget software is not Linux compatible - I have 2+ years of financial transactions in there...

4\. Google Drive, no (official) Linux client

5\. I have a number of Alfred workflows, and enjoy using Alfred in general.

Yes, there are a number of open source alternatives, but I've built up enough inertia on OSX it's going to be very difficult for me to switch.

There are things about OSX that couldn't care less about like iTunes, Apple Maps etc, but overall it's not so bad

<comment><USER25> 1\. 1Password apparently works fine with WINE, but I haven't used it myself.

2\. Spotify will still receive updates for Linux, they just don't have a dedicated Linux developer on it anymore. On my machine it still works fine.

3\. I prefer GoodBudget, which IMHO is much better than YNAB, especially when it comes to their iOS/Android apps. The desktop client just runs in the browser. Also, I've heard YNAB will be discontinuing their desktop apps?

4\. There's [https://github.com/odeke-em/drive](https://github.com/odeke- em/drive), a fork of the official drive client, and it's still being actively developed.

5\. Haven't used Alfred, but you can get some of it's features using other tools, e.g. indexed search using Tracker, clipboard history using Diodon, and perhaps some other things. However you are right that you can't get the kind of polished automation Alfred seems to provide. Rather, you'll have to write shell scripts and use the commandline tools to get what you want. Absolutely everything is possible, but it'll feel a bit like using lots of duct tape at first.

Note: I'm not saying you should switch right away (1). But I used Linux (Ubuntu) full-time for work and at home for the last 5 years and I was able to do everything with very few exceptions (2). Most peripherals that I bought just worked out of the box. Going Linux full-time is 100% doable.

Also, with so many apps running in the browser (or on Electron) the choice of OS matters less every year.

(1) in fact, I'll probably get a Mac myself this year for developing iOS apps.

(2) Only exception: Windows VM for Microsoft Word/Excel/Powerpoint & iTunes for iPhone syncing. All other software ran in WINE or had a reasonable Linux alternatives.

<comment><USER26> > 1Password apparently works fine with WINE, but I haven't used it myself.

I run 1Password in Wine in Docker on my (secondary) linux ThinkPad with Dropbox sync. It works, but it's clunky. Part of that is that I don't like the Windows 1Password application compared to the macOS one, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not interested in Elementary OS at all, but I do keep an eye on Solus [https://solus-project.com](https://solus-project.com)

(Well, there's also [http://papyros.io](http://papyros.io), but I'm not confident that it will amount to anything)

BTW, that practice of making keywords (which often repeat throughout the text) into links (often to your own damn blog) is abhorrent.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not a blog, it's a Wiki ([https://github.com/rcarmo/sushy](https://github.com/rcarmo/sushy)), and the blog just hangs off it. I see no damning in that - you can always either not visit or not click :)

<comment><USER28> Then you gotta warn us in the title that you link everything :). Just kidding, but on a more serious note I also found it very distracting. Sure, link the first occurrence of the word, but I see no reason macOS needs to be linked every time it's mentioned. Even the big daddy of wikis, Wikipedia, recommends against linking things that have already been linked and very common terms [0]:

> An overlinked article contains an excessive number of links, making it > difficult to identify links likely to aid the reader's understanding > significantly. A 2015 study of log data found that "in the English > Wikipedia, of all the 800,000 links added ... in February 2015, the majority > (66%) were not clicked even a single time in March 2015, and among the rest, > most links were clicked only very rarely", and that "simply adding more > links does not increase the overall number of clicks taken from a page. > Instead, links compete with each other for user attention."

When I, an internet user see a link, it's visual distinctiveness cues to me that it might lead me to more information that emphasizes something. It's fine for websites to link to their own tags, but there's also overdoing it.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Link...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Linking#What_generally_should_not_be_linked)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm testing out a little JS to hide all but the first link of each kind (it makes sense for the anchors to stick around to do internal reference counting). Will be up soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The Mac UI ripoff issue may not matter to you, but it does to me. It's gross and slavish, like using a KIRF Chinese knockoff phone with stolen icons.

<comment><USER30> I agree. Every time Elementary OS comes up, people are like, "Finally a nice looking Linux desktop!", and I'm over here thinking, "meh...regular old Gnome 3, as shipped with recent Fedora versions, looks nicer and more cohesive, to me."

<comment><USER31> Regular old Gnome3 is horrible to use with multiple screens.

Good luck running a program in full screen on your main monitor, while also doing stuff on a secondary monitor, where you have to switch windows, open new ones, etc.

Gnome3 is only useful on non-touch laptops, not on any other usecase.

<comment><USER30> Huh...I don't think I know what you're talking about. What specific problems have you had with multiple screens? I don't currently have my system setup for multiple displays (I live in an RV and don't have room for that kind of setup), but did use Gnome 3 with a second display for quite a long time. I don't remember any problems with switching windows and such. It seemed to work pretty much the same as Windows or macOS.

The only multi-monitor complaint I had about Gnome 3 was that opening the Activities bar or changing apps led to both displays dimming. This makes Gnome 3 _horrible_ for presentations, screening films, or pretty much anything you'd want to use a projector for. I'm hopeful that problem has been fixed, as I've rarely felt so annoyed at a piece of software. Notifications were also problematic, in that they would pop up over full screen applications (which is, IMHO, never the right behavior...full screen apps should really be treated as sacred, by default). But, at least notifications can be disabled. The misfeature of screen dimming and shrinking app windows across displays could not be disabled last time I messed with it (admittedly, a year or two ago).

 _" Gnome3 is only useful on non-touch laptops"_

Which touch features do you think are missing? Mine seems to work fine, though I so rarely use the touchscreen that I may be missing something important. I find touchscreens hard to use for anything more than basic scrolling, so it's not a feature I even wanted, but it came with my laptop, and I was surprised to see it worked fine out-of-the-box with Linux. I didn't even tweak it.

<comment><USER31> > This makes Gnome 3 horrible for presentations, screening films, or pretty > much anything you'd want to use a projector for. I'm hopeful that problem > has been fixed, as I've rarely felt so annoyed at a piece of software.

That's exactly what my issue with multiple screens is.

Still not fixed.

> Which touch features do you think are missing?

It's not that I think touch features are missing, it's that I think non-laptop features are missing.

On a screen with 1440p or 2304p height, and 27" diagonal, I can afford to have a lot of things directly in view – I don't need to have them hidden behind things like the dimmed activity menu.

Which, btw, isn't very ideal for touch users either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> A desktop linux could really grab an audience right now with the current state of windows and the agnosticism that is common in today's applications. The problem with desktop linux has always been that polish isn't quite there.

Things like handling gracefully video card/dual monitor, audio switching, and sleep mode recovery end up being headaches that use up a lot of time googling around and generally learning about stuff you shouldn't have to know.

It would be nice to see a company that specializes in a linux flavor sell a machine that is specifically built for that OS and with high build quality. Chromebooks are the closest thing to that but pushing a web-only interface is a major drawback.

Are there any serious projects in this direction?

<comment><USER33> Dell comes closest with their Developer Edition, but even they aren't trying too hard and just tell people to suck it up when e.g. the touchpad firmware is broken.

<comment><USER34> Dell is really not trying. Most laptops ship with touchpads that work fine on Linux. Dell ships buggy, painful firmware with a premium laptop, and people give them the benefit of the doubt because it's a "Linux problem," not their mistake.

<comment><USER35> Have you seen the buggy behaviour you mention with the Developer Edition laptops?

Their Developer Edition laptops get special treatment with regards to Linux compatibility. At one point, the made the the company they sourced some new touchpads from develop drivers for Linux and got it upstreamed.

<comment><USER34> My company issued me one when I started a few months ago. I tried really hard to make it work, but the thing was too buggy in too many different ways. I finally gave up and grabbed a random old Lenovo out of storage, put an SSD, 16GB of RAM, and a new battery in it and it works great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Interesting reading.

Since 2012, I've tried Elementary several times but I always come back to whatever other (Debian based) distro with LXDE because there's one thing, really JUST ONE THING, on Elementary I can't stand: the Application Switcher (alt+tab) animation. It's slow and distracting and, even switching any and every UI animation off, I couldn't speed it up.

I still like the project and I really want to use it as my main OS some day (at least for 1 year or so. I'm always switching OSes)... I'll give it a try again next month to see how things are going.

<comment><USER13> This, besides the no detailed window tiling, was one of my main issues as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've used elementary OS for a few months now as my primary development environment. It's great to have set up in VirtualBox on 2/3 monitors, and the fact that it's based on Ubuntu makes finding support online pretty easy for someone not as experienced with Linux.

My biggest complaint is actually that the OS file selection interface (like what I get opening things in Sublime Text) is not same as the fancy finder application, but the default Ubuntu one that doesn't look consistent.

</comment><comment><USER38> Funny how everyone here in comments and author is saying "I really like Elementary OS" but nobody really wants/is ready to use it.

<comment><USER14> I've been using it for the last 2/3 years. Started using it because my computer was old, and it was a lot faster than Ubuntu, and much more polished (in my opinion) than XFCE or LFCE, and have used it ever since. Has worked really well. Definitely has one or two persistent bugs, though. There was a really annoying cursor one for a long time, and then one with window focus which Ubuntu also suffered from. It's also annoying not to be able to do updates in place. To be fair, I think they are often upstream issues, Ubuntu also was waiting for that upstream focus fix for a long time. But it does mean they're not yet fulfilling the promise of a completely seamless, polished, Linux distribution.

For the moment, for my use case it's the best distribution, but it's not quite at the stage where I'd want to put it on a relative's computer, and I think given their stated aims that's the litmus test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> As a slight aside. Can anyone point me to any recent work being done to get working Linux drivers for the various Mac hardware bits that have been problematic in the past? I'm only finding old howtos for Linux on Mac which usually end up with some hardware or other not working. I'm specifically interested in Linux on MacBook Air. Thanks.

<comment><USER28> Maybe this: [https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookAir](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookAir)?

<comment><USER39> Thank you. A great start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I've been using elementaryOS for a few years now and just upgraded to Loki. On the whole it has been great, but there are just a few buggy elements that occasionally make me want to wipe the thing and start fresh with Ubuntu, which at least I can trust to not break. Hoping that eOS continues to become more polished.

<comment><USER14> Agreed about the few buggy elements. The last version had a bug with the cursor for about 6 months. Freya's still got the window focus bug that Ubuntu has had for years (haven't tried Loki yet). They're waiting for upstream fixes, but it does undermine the fundamental usability message of the distribution. If they do manage to grow to a major distribution, they really need to set aside a significant amount of money to sponsor upstream developers to fix these problems in weeks rather than months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Tried elementary awhile back, but I've recently gotten tired of ubuntu's kernel, and just some errors/quirks with my hardware. So when I upgraded my hdd to sdd/hybrid I said screw it and went with Antergos (arch linux) distro. The gnome build is pretty beautiful, lightdm is styled very lovely, better than ubuntu/xubuntu/lxde/kubuntu by far. My hardware performs way better with less crashes, though I think I've narrowed that down to a bad memory chip that I need to replace soon.

I did pull out gnome and swap it for i3wm. I recommend if you haven't tried i3wm give it a try, there's less graphical flair, and panels -- but you gain in performance, speed, and productivity, everything is just a shortcut away, and the i3 config file makes adding more shortcuts even easier. Definitely worth the time to learn.

</comment><comment><USER42> This may sound silly, but I'm mostly concerned about losing the three-finger side-swipe to the other desktops. Is this possible with elementary OS?

<comment><USER43> It's certainly on the to-do list, but some features related to swipe were implemented in the GTK version after than the one Ubuntu 16.04 LTS currently ships, so it'll take a bit more time.

I personally want that feature too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Last time I tried Elementary OS it _looked_ very nice but basic stuff like adding an HTML signature in the email client was missing.

Did they improve on this front?

<comment><USER45> Why would you want an HTML signature?

<comment><USER46> Some companies will require you to use a signature with an image and particular formatting. Also, tackiness is in the eye of the beholder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The AppCenter is the hottest development area, so there are new features and fixes landing every day. But in the not very distant future you're going to see the result of a lot of work: [https://houston.elementary.io/](https://houston.elementary.io/)

There is a problem with Epiphany, namely that the webkit version that ships with Ubuntu is long outdated, hopefully that's going to get fixed: [https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2016/02/01/on-webkit- secu...](https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2016/02/01/on-webkit-security- updates/)

</comment><comment><USER45> Loading this page with JS disabled, all the images are blurred. Loading it with JS, there's a fancy fade-in animation on the images. What is the point of this? Why would you intentionally distort the images for people who browse with JS disabled?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a simple approach to lazy loading, so that you only download the images you actually want to view on a phone as you scroll to them.

(I also pick the right kind of image depending on your display DPI, and resize them on the back-end, but that's beside the point here)

I get a _lot_ of mobile visitors, and mobile bandwidth is expensive, so I'm considerate to them - folk with JavaScript disabled know how to re-enable it to view the images, and are a very minute percentage of my page views.

Sorry! :)

<comment><USER47> FYI I also get the blurry images in Firefox's reader mode. (I had to go back to the original to see if that was intentional when I saw the first screenshot ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, well, that's actually JavaScript that (go figure) strips away all the event handlers :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Now I need a decent terminal (iTerm2-like quality) and a sane set of shortcuts (like a shortcut for "Copy" that doesn't stop processes in terminal) and I'd be all set...

<comment><USER49> This is probably the #1 reason why I still want to use mac OS every day. Emacs-style editing shortcuts and not having to press Ctrl-Shift-C to copy when I'm in my terminal window (alternatively, not having to remember to press Ctrl-Shift-C _to_ copy but only when I'm in my terminal window).

<comment><USER50> Yep, I really like this about Mac OS X. The fact that I can c-w to kill a word anywhere or c-u to kill a line is pretty nice. And OS-level copy/paste has the same shortcut everywhere, like you say. I think it was a mistake for Windows and linux to use control as the default meta-character for gui operations. I always switch it to super if I can.

<comment><USER51> It is unfortunate that the 'desktop Linux' groups all came from Windows backgrounds and ignored all the previous Unix windowing systems, _most_ of which knew better than to screw up terminal emulation.

Qt has a flag to use the GUI key for shortcuts, but it's hard-wired to the platform. I keep hoping there will be enough OS X refugees to make it a user- configurable setting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> > but neither would I use a plain Gnome, KDE or Unity desktop, because I find > them tasteless and cluttered

I've been preparing a "plan B" for my iOS developer career, and I've installed elementary and a Fedora 25 alpha to see what's going on in Linux land. To me, Fedora's GNOME 3 seems just as pretty and minimal as elementaryOS. It's way less cluttered than GNOME 2. I actually had to figure out how to clutter it up again (I want files on my desktop!).

</comment><comment><USER53> I use linux on my laptop at work. It is running Red Hat. I have many issues and as always with Linux one of them is bad graphics drivers.

Basically every time I've tried desktop Linux (which is many times) I have always, always struggled with graphics drivers. Even if I get it to work fine, they always suck compared with a Windows installation. Last year I ran desktop Linux and first I had Linux installed and ran CS:Go, I had some issues with frame rate and when I installed Windows on the machine I got about 10-20 more fps which made a huge difference under heavy load.

I love the idea of desktop Linux but I've come to terms last year after about 8 years of trying that it will never be as polished, as good as Windows. At least for me as a gamer. I think a big part of the problem is that there is just too much choices and software out there. Either it's Gnome, Unity or KDE or 20 other window managers. Writing GUIs for Linux is hard compared to Windows/MacOS. Small issues in many appliations, errors that show up when you really try to replace programs with open source ones etc.

I love open source and of course I understand why things are the way they are, it's incredible hard for a smaller open source project to compete with a company that has lots of resources to throw at the issues.

<comment><USER54> Just curious, what graphics hardware were you using? Intel? Nvidia? ATI? I've used Intel and Nvidia extensively and had very few, if any, issues. Intel's drivers are open source, integrated with Linux, and fantastic. Nvidia performance is indeed worse than on Windows, but not enough for me to care. ATI is a mess and has been for more than a decade. Don't use ATI if you want to use Linux.

<comment><USER53> Mainly nvidia, I have used their linux drivers but they just aren't as good in my opinion. Last time I tried was with a couple of years old graphics card.

It works with nvidia, but as soon as you have multiple monitors or do heavy gaming the faults are there and it's obvious that they don't put in the same effort as in their windows drivers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> What about power management? I've heard that elementary is not as good as MacOSX at that.

<comment><USER9> That depends on hardware (and amount of proprietary firmwares) really. On newer Macs where a lot of things are non-standard and controlled via EFI, it's going to be tough - same as BootCamp where Apple doesn't provide drivers for powersaving.

On things like ThinkPads, XPS Developer Editions, etc. the battery is rather comparable to their Windows counterparts for most cases.

<comment><USER55> Surprised to hear that Apple does not provide power management for other operating systems. Are there any recent benchmarks for macOS versus Windows in terms of power saving?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I'm seeing a whooole lot of posts about laptop hardware poorly supporting Linux distributions in this thread. I've been considering moving to a Linux- based laptop for basic computing once my old MBP inevitably dies a horrible death, but these reports about poor hardware interfacing, broken features, missing drivers, etc. is making me less interested in doing so. Is this really such a widespread problem?

<comment><USER57> If you go for an obscure distro it is. Ubuntu has good hardware support.

<comment><USER56> I'll likely go for Ubuntu just because it's the most accessible choice right now, and the distro I'm most used to. In my case, is there a reason why I should go to other distros? I'm mostly used to distros like Arch, CoreOS, etc. being used for production servers and other specialized hardware over personal computing.

<comment><USER57> IMHO Qubes ([https://www.qubes-os.org/](https://www.qubes-os.org/)) is the only desktop distro with worthwhile differentiation. Most of the other distros' gimmicks fall under "who cares" if you just want to browse the web and program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I installed it in vmware and was surprised to see that both the installer and the OS seamlessly grabbed and released the mouse at the window border. The window also autosized when I changed the guest resolution. I don't recall those features working in Ubuntu or any other VM without manually installing vmware tools. Is that a vmware update or OS package convenience? Either, it's smooth.

</comment><comment><USER59> I am computer science student who have been using elementary as the primary os for almost three years now. It's beautiful and you would never think of switching to another linux desktop environment once you start using it. The only major problem you would be facing would be release upgrades. You have to do a fresh install for upgrading to a newer elementary version.

</comment><comment><USER60> The quality of MacOS releases have been dropping since Snow Leopard. With Sierra, they dropped the accessibility setting for disabling scroll inertia. This is serious for someone who's getting RSI.

I use Elementary OS as a secondary OS, and I have to say I'm loving it more and more while the quality of MacOS continues to drop.

<comment><USER61> That setting is still there.

System Preferences > Accessibility > Mouse & Trackpad > Trackpad Options > Scrolling > Without Inertia

System Preferences > Accessibility > Mouse & Trackpad > Mouse Options > Scrolling > Without Inertia

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> For me, only showstopper to migrate from Mac to Linux is alternative for iMovie and Lightroom. Any progress on this alternatives for Linux in last year or two? What programs do I need to check?

Elementary is nice, it is also my backup OS, and I also donated some money to them 1 year ago.

<comment><USER63> Plenty of options there.

iMovie: Pitivi, OpenShot, KDEnlive and even Lightworks for something more advanced.

Lightroom: Darktable, Rawtherapee and Corel Aftershot Pro.

<comment><USER64> The truth is though - there is no replacement for Lightroom. Digikam has the file management capabilities but the editor experience is clunky (pop out editor, edit modules require opening, no apparent easy sync of settings across images, poor noise control) and it's not the fastest app I've used. Digikam 5 is a big improvement is some ways but the editor is still very clunky to use.

ASP is just buggy. I tried it on Debian Jessie and Ubuntu 16.04 and on both it lasted a few days before simply refusing to open, even after install. It's also slow, even though they claim it's faster. And it does annoying stuff like paint its own window borders to look like a Windows app.

Darktable is the best RAW editor I've used, but it's got essentially zero file management. Batch output requires a new mental abstraction with the 'queue'. For volume work (hundreds of images at a time) it seems ill equipped as you have to create a style or copy the history stack (which doesn't seem to have an easy keyboard shortcut). I'm still working on this one as it has so much power and control it could be fantastic, but more work needs to be done on the _process_ of the edit or you can get stuck in the editors rabbit hole of fine detail.

RAWtherapee - that's the next one to test for me. My initial feature check showed it suffers some of the complaints of Darktable like no file management (as far as I can see) and an involved edit process.

If you pair any of the above applications with gThumb you can get some of the file management back in the most LR style I have found, but (infuriatingly) gThumb doesn't seem to display images in subfolders for whatever reason.

My conclusions so far (as a former pro photographer) is that there is potential in the linux world to equal and even do better that LR but it's definitely not there yet and definitely not in one programme.

And let's not start talking about Photoshop/GIMP - which of course ISN'T photoshop, as they keep telling us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Could you post the steps to get Elementary OS working on a Chromebook? Interesting post, thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Erm. I just installed from an SD card, because I had already removed ChromeOS previously (in case you haven't read that bit). Unlocking your Chromebook is highly dependent on the specific hardware, so I suggest you Google around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Does Elementary handle mutli-resolution displays better than stock GNOME? That was a major reason for me leaving Linux. I love gnome, but I couldn't deal with not being able to use (in a stable way) a 1080p external monitor with a 4K laptop screen.

</comment><comment><USER67> > the terminal emits a desktop notification whenever it detects that a long- > running process has finished.

Does anyone know how this is implemented?

Edit: pretty simple: [http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~elementary-apps/pantheon- termin...](http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~elementary-apps/pantheon- terminal/trunk/view/head:/src/PantheonTerminal.vala#L106) [http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~elementary-apps/pantheon- termin...](http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~elementary-apps/pantheon- terminal/trunk/view/head:/src/TerminalWidget.vala#L259)

<comment><USER35> That can be achieved in any terminal emulator that visually shows the occurrence of an ASCII bell.

For instance, all I had to do was include `\a` in my `$PS1` and now whenever a command finishes running and bash is ready for a new command, my terminal emulator gets a bell.

Konsole (and any Konsole based terminal emulators, like Yakuake) shows a notification if a bell happens in a non-foreground session.

Konsole also has explicit tab-specific settings for "Monitor for Silence" and "Monitor for Activity".

<comment><USER67> Wouldn't that beep every time you run a command? And/or interfere with any programs that use the beep for their own purposes?

<comment><USER35> > Wouldn't that beep every time you run a command?

It's up to the terminal emulator to do what it wants with the beep character. Technically, it's up to whoever has to display the character; if you're running bash at a tty — an actual terminal — then the kernel gets to decide what to do, so it beeps, since there is little else it could choose to do.

Terminal _emulators_ , on the other hand, know they aren't actually in a limited environment and can do a lot more than playing a sound. That's why there's such a thing as "visual bell" among terminal emulators. Some highlight the tab title upon visual bell, Konsole merely sends a notification if a bell occurs.

\----

> And/or interfere with any programs that use the beep for their own purposes?

I don't quite understand what you mean here. There isn't any way for arbitrary programs to listen for / wait for / register callbacks for the beep.

If you're thinking about the `\a` in `$PS1` ... well, PS1 is shown only when bash runs as an interactive process.

Also, the beep control in ALSA is muted by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I actually did the same after the Macbook pro presentation. Got Elementary OS on my desktop to try it. Works fine so far, better UI/UX than Ubuntu for sure.

But I have some problems with the Nvidia support. [https://elementaryos.stackexchange.com/questions/8952/artifa...](https://elementaryos.stackexchange.com/questions/8952/artifacts- in-background) Also v-sync doesn't really work, I get lots of tearing.

The terminal is nice and the window manager is good as well. ( elementarty- tweaks should be in there by default )

</comment><comment><USER69> For me a downside of Elementary OS is that, like all Ubuntu-based distros, I've found installing it on my apple hardware to be such a pain. Fedora-based distros on the other hand have worked wonderfully out of the box. If I were to advise a friend on which distro to install on their MacBook, I'd recommend the beautiful Fedora-based Korora over Elementary OS any day. [https://kororaproject.org/](https://kororaproject.org/)

<comment><USER8> Arch (Antergos if you want nice out of the box setup[1]) works very well on my 2015 work MBP, perhaps give it a try.

[1] [https://antergos.com](https://antergos.com)

<comment><USER69> Huh, never heard of Antergos but it looks great. Will consider it next time I swap distros...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Just gave it a shot, great UX experience! But: for some reason it formats /boot to ext2 which is a bad idea as it has no journaling and you're likely to end up with a corrupt boot partition that won't boot. It's also a shame to see it's based on ubuntu and not Debian or Fedora which both test their packages a lot better than the ubuntu team has proven over the years.

</comment><comment><USER71> Well, many decisions behind macOS UX are certainly based on usability testing and research, which is costly. By incorporating these features Elementary OS is profiting for all that, so it seems to be crossing a line.

GNOME in a sense also takes a lot of inspiration on macOS but it is different. I personally use GNOME.

Elementary OS seems great, though, don't get me wrong. I hope it helps bringing more people into Linux.

</comment><comment><USER72> _" in what I can only call a tremendously good example of how not to copy Apple's mistakes, the built-in Music app looks a lot like iTunes, but without any of the bloat._"

Not a bad writeup. For me music is via XTools->mplayer

</comment><comment><USER73> How do I install this thing? Will it work well on relatively old computers?

<comment><USER14> It works really well on old computers in my experience. I first ran it because Ubuntu was so slow to be unusuable on an old Core2Duo, and on that hardware Elementary was very fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> All of the stuff he praises about Elementary is just vanilla GNOME. I mean, he can't even recognize that Rhythmbox has looked the same for over 3 years now.

</comment><comment><USER75> there is a linux OS built specifically for chromebooks called gallium OS

[https://galliumos.org/](https://galliumos.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. It does not add anything that I wanted, and I had already ditched XFCE in favor of LXDE in the past. The point of the post was not to get Elementary running on a Chromebook, it was to see if I, coming from a Mac, could use it on a future desktop without issues and the usual ugly UIs Linux DEs have.

<comment><USER76> Go to Reddit.com/r/unixporn, with some minor tweaking it's very easy to make Linux look nice.

<comment><USER77> Minor tweaking?

/r/unixporn crowd is always interested in posts that customize their Linux setups to the max: use Window Managers almost exclusively, have a unified color scheme all over the system etc. That's not minor tweaking.

<comment><USER76> I did one that took me probably 30 minutes and it looked nice in Manjaro. Those are just nice Environments, don't have to go all the way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> No intel wireless 8000 series support = show stopper for me, why they wouldn't include that in the kernel config I have no idea

</comment><comment><USER78> I thought it was a good OS but it does not play well with the newer HP laptops. Sadly had to revert back to Windows 10 :(

</comment><comment><USER79> Can this be run on the mac just like windows parallels? Would love to try it out for some design experiments I am doing.

</comment><comment><USER80> I really wanted to use Elementary, but couldn't get my Lenovo laptop to connect to WiFi... Someday maybe

<comment><USER81> Lenovo and Dell sometimes have broadcom wifi which are utter crap. If you do go down that route just order an intel wifi and replace it, normally a 5 minutes job and save hours worth of headaches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> I've used elementary before, never encountered any major issues and quite enjoyed the UX clone factor ;)

</comment><comment><USER70> It is indeed quite pretty and build with UX in mind, does it have SELinux enforcing by default now?

</comment><comment><USER83> Has anyone found an alternative to OSX that can still compete to it's battery life?

<comment><USER84> No, not for me. Running Windows 10 on the exact same macbook (just a reboot to bootcamp) and I get an hour less battery. Probably something to do with Apple's aggressive app nap?

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> For a second I thought this was a new OS, then I realised it was Yet Another Ubuntu Derivative and I tuned out.

Also, that fact they're trying rather hard to get you to pay for it seems a little...icky. Yeah, I know, just click custom amount and enter 0 but still...

</comment><comment><USER86> Are there any differences between this and Debian + Pantheon?

<comment><USER87> A couple:

\- eOS is built on top of Ubuntu rather than Debian

\- The team doesn't officially support Pantheon outside of eOS, so you've probably got it from an unofficial PPA that could break with the next version.

\- I don't think the Pantheon DE would get you eOS's included apps like Geary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Is there any difference between this and Debian+Pantheon?

</comment><comment><USER88> > It has polish and care that the stereotypical raging neckbeards who espouse > the mantra of Linux on the desktop are unable to appreciate (or, apparently, > build), and it has to exist, even if merely as a counterpoint to all the > ugliness.

Please be nice :(. Some of those so-called "neckbeards" probably helped build the stack upon which things like elementaryOS rest.

<comment><USER89> Having an interest in design, I often feel a vibe of aggression towards the whole endeavor coming from some elements of OSS scene that I can see being equally infuriating or hurtful as "neckbeards". Among them are:

\- dismissal of design as a sort of thin veneer, somewhat fake, lipstick-on- good-bacon

\- design as a kludge aimed at amateurs, to the point of preferring the worse UI (all else being equal) so as to prove something

\- design = prettiness, and, by extensions, design being entirely a matter of taste and therefore impossible to criticize

\- the complete rejection of any argument or evidence that cannot be derived from any of the laws of thermodynamics, Shannon, or at least an RFC

That being said, having browsed the elementary OS website, I'm not sure if isn't the victim of some of these errors itself. It sure seems to be a ripoff of macOS ca. 5 years ago applied as thin veneer to Linux. Their "brand" page may also be the first implementation of cargo-cult design.

<comment><USER90> Firstly, I see a lot of people complaining about the design, but the matter of fact is a lot more programmers are willing to work for free and make their contributions open source than designers are. This was more true a decade ago than it is now, so there is a lot of "if it works, do not break it" attitude.

Secondly, "good design" is subjective as opposed to a program that achieves its goals. No matter what you do, you will have a substantial amount of people hate your designs. So when people come in and tell them that the design sucks, there are a lot of people also telling them that it is good and it works.

What needs to happen is people come up with objective shortfalls in existing designs and let them know how that can be fixed.

<comment><USER91> It doesn't happen that projects like GNOME and KDE get bashed by trying to improve the whole stack experience, by developers which only care to scatter xterms across their screens.

This is why many of us that enjoy UI design ended up going to platforms where it is praised.

<comment><USER92> GNOME development has been mostly design driven since maybe 2008, the whole 3 era had professional designers on board since the beginning.

<comment><USER91> I know, and how much FOSS bashing have they received for their ideas?

<comment><USER92> Definitely too much, mostly by a vocal minority of the userbase. I guess design is not enough, you need good charismatic leaders to be able to sell it to the community, and you need to be strong enough to not care about the criticism.

That said, not all design is made equal, sometimes a little dose of reality check from the community can be helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> I moved from windows 10 to ElementryOS 3 weeks ago and I haven't had the urge to go back at all.

</comment><comment><USER94> I love how it's called Elementary OS but it's just a Ubuntu Linux with some sugars. I already got excited about another operating system but it's same old, same old.

</comment><comment><USER91> Kind of interesting overview, but it doesn't support XCode nor the Objective-C and Swift frameworks I care about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course not. I never meant to suggest this would be a macOS replacement - and as a former dabbler in GNUStep, let me tell you that that way wouldn't work either.

<comment><USER91> I am ok with the Mac as it is, I don't see an issue with it, and actually am looking forward to eventually being able to play with the magic toolbar from Swift in a future acquisition.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I've been waiting for a suitable desktop Mac for the latter part of six years. I'm certainly not OK with the disrepair their product line is in, nor with the value for money of the "Pro" (or, as I prefer to call them, the "Air SE") range.

<comment><USER91> I don't use desktops since 2006, only laptops with docking stations.

Many of our customers follow similar patterns, I hardly see new desktops being deployed, so I have some sympathy for Apple thinking that it might not be worthwhile to keep doing them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> I've been looking for a replacement OS to try over macOS for a while, so I just tried this on for size.

2-year old MBP. Created a boot disk with the Elementary ISO and started up. Fairly snappy, connected over a USB 3 connection to a 500GB SSD.

First thing I tried to install was Google Chrome. DEBian package. Fail. Google search for others who have tried. Found recent article, followed step-by-step. Failed. :-(

<comment><AUTHOR> I just downloaded the official Chrome .deb and did a sudo dpkg -i foo.deb.

Can't understand how that would fail, really. One thing you might try is doing an apt-get install -f, since there might be implicit dependencies depending on the build, and this forces apt to figure them out.

<comment><USER9> He tried to install an app on a live system running off of a read-only medium. :)</comment></comment></comment>


Apple, Microsoft summoned in Australian pricing probe - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57568633-92/apple-microsoft-summoned-in-australian-pricing-probe/

<comment><USER2> There is no excuse why downloadable content should cost more -- economies of scale, shipping costs, and differences in taxes and exchange rates are all irrelevant. Even in the case of physical goods, the disparity is often drastically more than can be accounted for by the above reasons. This comment sums it up quite well: [http://news.cnet.com/8618-1001_3-57568633.html?assetTypeId=1...](http://news.cnet.com/8618-1001_3-57568633.html?assetTypeId=12&messageId=13633335)</comment>


Ask HN: Access to the Corpus - What Would You Do? - <AUTHOR>

What if you had programmatic access to the entirety of the dataset of Google, Bing or Yahoo; every page they have crawled (including all meta data), all the searches performed and ads for display.  If you had programmatic access to that dataset, what business would you create?
One of my friends posed this question to me on Friday and my brain seized up.  Creating another search engine made no sense, but the massive size of the data set and potential possibilities actually made my brain shut down.
What would HN folks do? <comment><USER2> So .. Google _have_ these data. Their hacking chops are not unremarkable. What have they done with it? Well, basically, you can ask for a word and they'll find other pages that feature that word ...

And that's it.

They have access to "the world's combined knowledge" and a zillion PhDs, and that's _all_ they can do?! It's shocking. But it's not, really, because the data are basically useless without annotations.

So let's go to Disneyland and pretend we have a genius NLP engine or an annotated web. Then,

1) 360 on a company/product. In particular: who are _all_ the stakeholders, and how do they feel? I'd sell this to e.g. analysts. Same thing on people's online identities.

2) Memetracing. I'd sell this to advertisers. (So, we follow historical product releases and see exactly what memes spread about them and how, and through who. Related to (3) on ismarc's post)

3) Rumors (this would require your feed to be real-time). I'd also probably sell this to stock traders (the idea here is to monitor e.g. forums frequented by GE employees to guess scoop)

OK, so those are basic. More interesting:

4) Organization-tracing. If you can label social graph edges with influence levels / information intakes, you can start playing with predicting organizational decision-making (behavioral economics / game theory ..There's a TED talk about this).

5) Games: procedural content generation that looks really real, i.e. worlds full of people whose identities are plausible, whose interactions with others are plausible, etc.

Those all require some analytical / NLP firepower on a scale which I don't think is really doable at the moment. The problem is that bags of words are meaningless without a social context - the data are pretty worthless unless your computer can figure out who it's important for and why.

<comment><USER3> If you really think that's all they're doing then you have very little understanding in just how subtly awesome some of the stuff they're doing is.

Peter Norvig does a better job explaining some of it than I ever could. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8DcBF-qo4>

<comment><USER2> Peter Norvig says exactly what I said in that video.

He says it when he says "... but the computer doesn't understand physics." Why not? The internet knows a hell of a lot more physics than I do.

The statistical stuff is cool, but all you can do with it is fancy accounting. You can never really pull out _meaning_ .. and doing real analogical / inductive reasoning on statistical data sets is _hard._

You'll notice that suggestion (4) can only be considered doable because the internet has easily accessible APIs to determine who is real and what organizations they belong to.

While suggestion (5) is not feasible at all at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You have to consider that all that data isn't just a list of web pages. That includes information provided by the web page and the contents of the page itself (as well as associated metadata).

1) Create a map of the web (what links where and how), enabling an enhanced "browsing" experience (no more perusing a site for links to other interesting places)

2) The contents of those pages contain a large volume of technical documentation as well as a large number of opinions of the technologies that rose from the documentation. With both, and a large enough history of the creation of pages, the release of the documentation and the opinions presented, a model can be built to predict the success rate of any particular technology.

3) Given sufficient time, there is a large enough set of text that can be rendered to audio through speech synthesis (higher quality the better) in order to train a speech recognition system to a previously unseen level of accuracy.

4) Given a proper algorithm, sites with security vulnerabilities can be discovered just from what is crawlable and most likely should not be accessed. From that list, and given the total number of unique websites contained in the database, you can calculate the ratio of harmful to potentially non-harmful websites and provide a risk threshold of any given link on any given page.

5) Provide a search engine that uses regular expressions on different sets of the data (metadata, tags, text, text in a specific tag, etc.) to present a search engine with a previously unseen level of accuracy (accuracy of the results is dependent on the individual doing the searching, not the systems ability to guess that by std::list, I didn't mean "Sexually Transmitted Diseases STD List" (seriously, [http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=std::list) has that as the second result).

Edit: I failed at formatting

<comment><AUTHOR> (5) is an interesting idea. I'm stuck on what else in the meta stream you would want to search, but certainly giving the flexibility to search the tags as well could open up some interesting experiences.

<comment><USER4> Search based on content type, content language, with/without keywords, author. Honestly, if Google just put out #5 and charged for it, it'd be worth $10 a month to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> SEO? With something like that you could programattically find semantic locations with lower coverage and then sell the knowledge that you could possibly attack that keyword. For instance, I'd love to see a chart which plotted frequency of use in an English corpus against some hypothetical Google-coverage variable. Anything that's a strong outlier from something like an exponential curve could be a good target.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not sure I understand in depth enough about SEO to fully understand this idea, but it sounds good in concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd like to see which search results were clicked on for a given search, and then associate those sites. And then do an amazon style: people who landed at this site also went to _____. As well as other relations based on user browsing, not based on site links.

<comment><USER7> I really like this idea, though probably the other sites would be the same shown in the search results. Usually when people are looking for something, they just orderly open the search results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would use it to fight crime/corruption. It isn't too hard to identify people from a few google searches. Examples:

Food places near X will give you a good indication where they live and their income Find what they are searching during normal work hours. Often this will give you where they work. Searches of themselves.

Then just use this information to hunt them down or expose them.

<comment><USER7> How would you know who's a criminal?

<comment><USER9> From their searches of course!

It comes up in criminal cases all the time -- when you're googling "age of consent laws" or "how to dispose of a dead body" it's pretty easy to establish premeditation, though that doesn't help with 'pre-crime'.

The GP may have been focused on finding known fugitives on the run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Create new tools similar to how Google, Yahoo and MS already do when leveraging this asset. I know this is somewhat a BS answer, but really what other answer is there? This is like asking the question "What new features should Google, Yahoo or MS build on top of their search?"

<comment><AUTHOR> My initial thought was that maybe you could create an information business along the lines of ComScore. That seemed a bit pedestrian.

Overnight, I began to wonder if you could build a tool much like Farecaster, where you could help ad buyers understand the movement of pricing for keywords, and make predictions about when they will move up and down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Download all of the porn on the internet. I'm only half joking.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would keep the meta data and reverse engineer the algo!

<comment><AUTHOR> Good luck with that. :) Solving the user acquisition problem may prove somewhat challenging, no?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sell it to someone, who'd know what to do with it?

<comment><USER14> You know that bit in Office Space where they're asking each other what they'd do if they had a million dollars and one of the guys replies that he'd invest half in mutual funds and take the other half to his friend who works in securities?

You're that guy now :-)

<comment><USER13> Yeah, you got me, ok. But somebody would say this eventually, I saved this somebody's ass, didn't I?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wouldn't create a business. I'd write a program that could learn (text- based) language. Then I'd write it up and submit it to Computational Linguistics. Then I'd die in obscurity as someone took my idea and figured out how to monetize it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Start the world's most underhanded (and successful) SEO firm.

</comment><comment><USER17> Better machine translation.

</comment><comment><USER18> This scenario is reminiscent of what happened a few years back when AOL released their whole corpus of search queries with associated user-ID hashes. Most of what was done with that data set amounted to amateur CSI work and general meanness. I don't recall any profound revelations or can't-miss business opportunities coming out of it. The value of raw data is overrated.

<comment><AUTHOR> AOL released the list of searches created by users, purportedly anonymized. You didn't have access to the index of their crawler. Also, their subset was really small. I'm talking about a continuously updated stream.

I have started learning about complex event processing (CEP) and am wondering if you could do anything with that as a model tied to suggesting related links/sites.</comment></comment>


Larry Lessig: the Law is Strangling Creativity (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps even more relevant (I'm looking at you, SOPA) 4 years ago.</comment>


Earbits (YC W11) on Robert Scoble's Building43 - <AUTHOR> http://www.building43.com/videos/2011/06/16/earbits-online-radio-focused-on-the-music/

<comment><USER2> Why doesn't Pandora make any money and how will Earbits model be different?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pandora relies on compulsory licenses provided by the government with royalty rates that are set by the copyright royalty board. Those rates, unlike royalties for publishing (which are a manageable percentage of revenue), are on a per stream basis and they are set too high. So, every single song you hear on Pandora costs them a fraction of a cent. It's one of the reasons why they limit your usage and have restrictions against skipping too often, etc.

Combined with other royalties, overhead and the low value of display ads on a radio site, it's next to impossible to turn a profit. And, the royalties are set to go up several times over the next few years.

Earbits is different because we license music directly from the copyright owners under our own agreement. Because we provide more value in the way of merchandising real estate, upcoming live performance information and other things that help the band (and label) build a sustainable "business" through their radio exposure, they give us certain royalty waivers and let us use the music in exciting ways to help drive awareness to the band. Our costs are lower and our service is more flexible as a result.

We have no ads, no commercials and no skipping restrictions. That being said, you'll only hear the music we have licenses for, but that hasn't stopped us from adding half a dozen Grammy winners and numerous headlining artists to our roster of 1700+ artists through 140 labels so far.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the insight. I appreciate the reply.</comment></comment></comment>


Reimagining the Code Generator - <AUTHOR> https://useoptic.com/docs/#/another-code-generator <comment><AUTHOR> Hey All, I started working on an open source programming assistant around a year ago. Our goal is to automate tedious parts of programming so developers can focus their efforts on the most important and novel parts of their project.

The major technical barriers we needed to overcome was figuring out how to go beyond a one-shot generator to build something that was useful throughout the lifecycle of a project. I'd love to hear HN's feedback on the approach we're taking.</comment>


Ask HN: Should my new application hand out complex passwords, forbid user PW's? - <AUTHOR>

It seems from password analysis of recent hacks that many many users have extremely poor passwords.<p>Should my new application disallow user created passwords, instead generating complex passwords for users? <comment><USER2> As well as killing conversion, this will pretty near force your users to write the password down. That's another attack vector (that you can't do anything at all about).

The middle ground is a policy that enforces harder to bruteforce passwords (eg. at least one of each: upper case, lower case, numeral. Minimum length and no combinations of dictionary word + easily guessed number). Of course, the more complicated you make it, the more likely the user will write it down, forget it, not bother with your service, and/or curse your name.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends if you want anyone to use it; complex pwds are one of the biggest barriers to user registration. If your users are comfortable online they should be aware of the risks, and allowed to set simple pwds (a pwd strength indicator is useful). If not, and you're concerned about security, look into things like visual pwds (picking a picture from a much larger 'alphabet' of images), and / or two-factor authentication.

What kind of app is it (game, banking, ...)?

<comment><USER4> Anyone have any insight on where to get that many generic images?

<comment><USER5> Check public domain images: <http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Graphics.shtml>

<comment><USER4> Very cool, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You will decrease your conversion considerably. My personal take on this is: tell the users they are creating terrible passwords, educate them, but do not forbid.

<comment><USER7> I agree with this idea.

I also see it used a lot lately. Just let them know their password strength as they are typing it.</comment></comment>


Vanguard conditioning users for phone phishing atttempts - <AUTHOR> http://benplesser.com/2013/03/15/vanguard-conditioning-users-for-phone-phishing-atttempts/

<comment><USER2> Hackers and technical folks and just the kind of people who hang out here on HN tend to be very inflexible and on the side of being "technically correct" over being "right".

From a security perspective, this should never happen. The author is absolutely, positively, without a doubt correct in his stance on this. Being called in such a way and having very little and/or weak security protocols as described is not only a security breach waiting to happen but it really is, as the author points out, training people to get phished.

But there's a bigger picture here. And that's the picture of Vanguard as a company having years of experience in talking to, working with, dealing with, and learning about their customers. Just like the manager says in the post, they need to balance security with service (no they're not mutually exclusive but they're not one and the same either).

In the end I think this okay. It's not technically correct but it seems like its the right thing to do. Now the reason for this call is never described (which gives some credence to the theories here that this actually never happened along with a lack of other details) but assuming here for the sake of argument that the call was just to talk about something that isn't of super high significance (let's say it was a sales call to upsell something) then a couple of security questions should suffice. If it's to talk about a 10 million dollar bank transfer to some off-shore account then maybe we should be in an uproar here.

Another point to consider is who is responsible for security? Obviously the company that hold your data should be reponsible for the safety of that data and should have measures in place to prevent fraudulent access to it. But then there's also the responsibility of the customer who needs to take care of their account credentials and make sure that if someone accesses one of their private accounts somewhere that there isn't a domino effect. I don't think it's Vanguard's responsibility to make sure that all of their customers use different, long, and random passwords on their Gmail and Facebook and what have you so that one day someone can access one of those and get into their Vanguard account. I mean, that's certainly a nice-to-have but customers have a responsibility to secure their data just the same as companies do. We want to be educating regular folks about security all the time but the moment it comes time for them to apply what we're teaching them we turn around and act like they're off the hook for being ignorant of security best practices. It's a double standard if you ask me.

I know we all like some good old fashioned manufactured outrage but before we get the pitchforks out let's look at the big picture, and not _just_ one aspect of the issue here.

<comment><AUTHOR> The purpose of the original call was to get a change of address (for sending forms). I probably should have clarified that but it seems like a pretty generic request.

No need to believe me about the "truthfulness of the claims". Just call Vanguard yourself and ask if they handle cases this way. They will confirm.

You ask about security responsibility. I absolutely agree with you that customers have to take on a lot of it (Vanguard is not responsible for creating a 20 char password on your behalf).

I do think, though, that you have to draw the line before training your users to accept phishing attempts. That is what is happening here.

My biggest reason for pitchforking Vanguard here is that, for many people, they hold more assets than commercial Banks. Their security protocols should have HIGHER standards.

<comment><USER3> I'm with you on this one and it has bothered me tremendously for years, but this is hardly limited to Vanguard, I know for a fact that many, many other institutions do this and will immediately ask for your secret password, or divulge too much information if I wasn't actually the intended recipient.

Thanks for bringing more attention to this. Personally, I think it is a fairly big deal and a responsibility that Vanguard should shoulder more of. They aren't providing free checking, or free email, or anything of that nature. They are taking money (pretty good money) for a financial service. Their web presence has improved by leaps and bounds and I'm surprised that this hasn't changed.

<comment><USER4> I agree with both of you that Vanguard has a responsibility to keep their customer's money secure. Vanguard holds a large chunk of my money (much more than any single bank), and I'd like to know that it's secure.

bpatrianakos is also right. Security has to be balanced with service. I think Vanguard's call would be okay _if_ the security questions they ask are compartmentalized. What I mean by that is that they have separate security questions that they ask in a low-security environment (like an outgoing phone call) that they will _never_ trust for high-security actions, such as withdrawals or password resets. Those actions should require a further level of authentication and should never be done via outgoing correspondence.

We should at least confirm that the security questions aren't compartmentalized before we break out the pitchforks. However, given that Vanguard limits passwords to 10 characters with limited support for punctuation, I don't have much faith that they have any sort of compartmentalized security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I ran into that with a credit card company recently. They called and left a message about suspicious activity on an account and a callback number. I couldn't find that number anywhere on their website or the web in general. I ended up calling the main # and connecting to the security department. It was a legitimate message they left. I mentioned the phone number thing and they agreed that was an issue but who knows if they acted on it.

<comment><USER6> The number isn't published because it's outsourced, your bank is not the one handling the call. The agents will speak as if they're from your card issuer, but you will notice all the automated systems will say "cardmember services" or other ambiguous name.

<comment><USER7> "Cardmember services" is also a notorious phone scam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I also noticed (and complained) that their passwords were limited to so absurdly short sequence. Not sure if it's still true. Hope not.

<comment><USER9> I just checked. Vanguard passwords can be up to 10 characters long

<comment><USER10> For perspective, this is an absurdly short sequence.

<comment><USER9> You could argue that there should be no limit or maybe the limit should be higher, but I'd have a hard time arguing that a 10 character password composed of upper, lower, specials and digits is absurd

<comment><USER11> They don't accept lower case - if you have capslock on you'll still be logged in. I don't think they accept all special characters either.

<comment><USER4> Ouch. I didn't know their passwords were case insensitive.

I thought they didn't accept all special characters either, but I just successfully changed my password with special characters that I don't remember them accepting last time I changed my password. I was successfully able to log in using a version of my new password with the case changed for some letters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Color me skeptical here or perhaps this is just an aberration. I've been with Vanguard financial services for more than 30 years and I've never received any phone calls. All recent communication has been via email with a non-clickable link telling me to log into my account and check my messages.

<comment><AUTHOR> I an OP. I can assure you that this happened. You can call them and ask if these calls are standard. They will confirm.

<comment><USER2> Why did they call? You focus much of the post on security best practices which is indeed very important but I think it would also be very helpful to know the reason they called to begin with. There's a huge difference between someone calling in the way you described to say "it looks like based on your account activity you might want to buy our XYZ service" and someone calling to say "this to confirm that $10MM bank transfer to that offshore account, now what's your account number again?".

<comment><USER12> Of course, they're not going to tell you the specific details until you've correctly answered the security questions anyways. A phisher would use this to their advantage:

      "Hi, I'm calling about some suspicious transactions on
       your account which I'm fairly sure aren't authorized, but
       I need to confirm with you just to make sure."

      "Can you tell me what those are?"

      "Sorry, I can't reveal specifics unless I can confirm I'm
       talking to the authorized account holder. [Ask security
       questions.] Thank you. Did you make a transfer of $500 to
       Pharma Laboratories in Albania?"

      "No."

      "That's what I thought, we'll go ahead and cancel the
       transfer. Your account will remain unaffected. Thank you
       for your time."

The only defense against this (other than initiating the call yourself) is to casually give obviously wrong answers, and see if the rep accepts them blindly. If your first pet's name was Buddy and you say Ninja, a real rep shouldn't accept that. That should work until a really sophisticated operation tries to do a live man-in-the-middle attack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most corporations don't behave particularly responsibly in terms of your data security, and the financial industry is one of the worst when it isn't an issue that they are statutorily liable for. So you end up with odd extremes where credit card fraud is treated with extreme care (statutorily liable > $50) and business banking is usually secured quite poorly (no liability, typically). It's up to you to provide or ask for any extra security measures you find appropriate, like asking to call them back.

Anyone using common security questions is already balancing a risky behavior with ease of use.

They might also know that risk is low - if they don't allow any difficult to reverse transactions like outbound fedwire there may not be a lot they can't easily undo.

</comment><comment><USER14> Apparently it's common practice. Lloyds TSB (UK bank) and 3 (UK mobile network) do something similar.

<comment><USER15> Yep. I've had Lloyds phone me and _tell me my own goddamned password over the phone_. Which means, apart from anything else, that they store them plaintext.

Phishing for this kind of info is stupidly easy though, and while call-centres quite definitely do condition people to be phished, there's not much that can be done when people are so willing to be fast and loose with their personal information.

Go tweet/facebook the following, and prepare to be astounded by how naïve most are:

"Want to know your porn star name? Just take your first pet's name, your first school's name, and your mother's maiden name! Mine's Muffy Grove Schlitz!"

<comment><USER14> It's more a failure of services/companies that require silly things like pet, school or maiden names as shared secrets. By now, everyone should get a PGP key at birth.

<comment><USER4> I agree. I never answer the security questions with a truthful answer, because things like "first company you worked for" are too easy to look up. I treat security questions almost the same as passwords. I generate random answers per question and store them in 1Password, just like my passwords.

A side-benefit of this is that if someone calls me and asks me to answer a security question, I won't know it. I'll be forced to call them back after I've opened 1Password and pulled up the record with the security questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> At the very least, they should call you and direct you to vanguard.com where there would be a link at the bottom that says "call us back" at which point if you call back you'd be promptly put back in touch with your rep. another factor that helps broker trust in a conversation.

I follow this protocol with American Express and it's always effective. I'm also a high dollar monthly spend (corporate account) and so I get answered within a couple rings and they can pull up my account and notes immediately.

-David

</comment><comment><USER17> I received an email from Vanguard regarding $20 for taking a survey. It seemed phishy as the domain that it was sent from wasn't @vanguard.com (or similar) and the enticement of a monetary award.

I contacted Vanguard regarding this and forwarded them the email. The representative thought it was a phishing attempt as well. I was later contacted by Vanguard and they told me it was legitimate. I was even able to contact the person that wrote the email through a Vanguard number.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here is Vanguard's email contact form:

[https://personal.vanguard.com/us/ContactUsSecureEmail?isCont...](https://personal.vanguard.com/us/ContactUsSecureEmail?isContact=p)

</comment><comment><USER19> Any idea which Vanguard this is talking about? Financial services? The university? The furniture company...?

<comment><AUTHOR> Vanguard the financial services. I'm less concerned about the furniture company's security...</comment></comment>


The dark underbelly of Silicon Valley recruiting (and there is a silver lining) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kabaim.com/2012/08/dark-underbelly-of-Silicon-Valley-recruiting.html

<comment><USER2> As someone who is two years out of college with CS degree I very strongly related with this post.

The reality of what the press says and what tech companies say about recruiting is belied 100% by my experience looking for a job.

First of all, for job seekers, your ability to discover good-fit/good-match employers blows. Supposedly everybody needs 'engineers.' Yet 80%+ of job listings seem to be from recruiters who will vaguely describe their job, don't have a good understanding of the skill required, and can't tell you who they're hiring for. Okay, maybe a third of those recruiters have decent job descriptions. But still.

Likewise, most of the jobs listed from non-recruiters either list unreasonable/stupid/silly experience requirements (5yrs+ plus experience with agile development? You can 'learn' agile in a week), or are obviously legacy companies that nobody in their right mind will want to work for (coldfusion? really?).

And invariably when you do find something from an interesting company that's not through a recruiter, what they want is 5 years experience with their exact technology stack.

I know quite a few skilled programmers and they do not have loads of people hunting them down throwing money at them (though somebody should be).

What I believe has happened is that only programmers in a narrow community with a narrow set of experiences are being considered for reasons that are not sensible.

I would encourage any company that's trying to find good people to make good people aware that they're looking. I won't go through wishy-washy recruiters. Anybody else who cares where they work isn't going to be doing so either.

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity, what markers do you consider qualify the label "skilled programmer"?

<comment><USER2> Offhand and very quickly and perhaps with a bit too much gloss:

* Ability to quickly learn new languages

* Ability to quickly understand and use appropriate design patterns where sensible (even if they are unaware of the whole idea of design patterns and just do it by doing what's sensible to them from experience).

* Ability to use or adopt new stack technologies (IE maybe they're an expert in PostgreSQL or Cassandra, but if for some reason they have to use MySql or Hadoop it's not a big ordeal). Same thing for coming to grips with stuff like 3rd party APIs.

* Balance documentation and clear design approach with ability to accomplish things quickly.

* Are able to avoid poor design and extreme inefficiencies, while also being able to recognize that not everything needs to have groundbreaking performance or architecture.

* Are accustomed to creating good baseline unit tests.

* Ability to code clearly and quickly.

* Able to work well with a team and effectively communicate.

* Some ability to express design and implementation opinions graphically.

* Ability to learn and adapt and use documentation/google and knows when to ask and when to look something up.

Of course this isn't to say that there's no such thing as valid job requirements. But odds are if you're looking for a PHP dev, for example, you don't really need a 'PHP Dev,' though they might be a bit cheaper than other kinds.

Rehash of what I don't think is usually super important:

* Ability to program natively in a language on a whiteboard (though ability to use psuedocode on a whiteboard is good).

* Familiarity with specific development methodologies (the way a team works can usually be picked up quickly).

* (Most of the time) Tons of experience with a specific language. In general, the more general purpose the language, the less experience matters (I think), though there are some other factors that go into play. It does depend on what/where the programmer will be working on. But in general, I'd say a brilliant programmer who hasn't used your language or stack a lot might be more valuable than someone who does -- the heretic's nectar can be sweet indeed.

* Implementation knowledge of the head of some obscure algorithm or data structure. Maybe you should know of the algorithm. But there's no reason a good programmer necessarily knows every algorithm and its implementation details off their head. Likewise, odds are, that for the average programming job, the programmer will not be implementing a high-performance version of any algorithm because they'll be using core functionality in the language, its libraries, or their tech stack :( . And the exceptions to the rule will require some R+D time anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. This has been going on for decades in the Valley - the only thing that has changed is the names of the players.</comment>