Powerful Thoughts from Paul Graham (Notes from Hackers and Painters) - <AUTHOR> http://www.rosshudgens.com/thoughts-from-paul-graham/

<comment><USER2> Anyone else find the opening image reminiscent of Da Vinci's Last Supper?

[http://media.photobucket.com/image/last%20supper/thecathoder...](http://media.photobucket.com/image/last%20supper/thecathoderaychoob/Blog%2520Pics/last_supper_davinci.jpg)

<comment><USER3> it's ironic that a blog post like this would use an image that appears to be poking fun at the fervor with which people record and analyze paul graham's teachings

<comment><USER4> _Inc_ isn't that sort of magazine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _75\. The pointy-haired boss miraculous combines two qualities that are common by themselves, but rarely seen together: (a) he knows nothing whatsoever about technology, and (b) he has very strong opinions about it._

Not in my experience. In general, people who know the least are the most vocal.

I'm about 90% in agreement with the thoughts as a whole. There are some statements I find patently false / seen through rose-tinted glasses, like 48:

 _I think there are three reasons we treat making money as different: the misleading model of wealth we learn as children; the disreputable way in which, till recently, most fortunes were accumulated, and the worry that great variations in income are somehow bad for society. As far as I can tell, the first is mistake, the second outdated, and the third empirically false._

In what way is money accumulation today different than the past? Another quote cites that spammers spam because _their_ cost is nothing, but it incurs a cost of ~5 man-weeks per million emails on those they spam. Isn't that a perfect example of accumulating money in a "disreputable way"? And how about all the recent exposures of questionable banking practices? And pork-barrel legislation? Bribery? Monopolistic practices?

Money-making today is no cleaner than yesterday. Just because _you_ (pg / anyone believing this) may accumulate money and use it ethically _does not_ imply others do the same.

<comment><USER6> _Money-making today is no cleaner than yesterday. Just because you (pg / anyone believing this) may accumulate money and use it ethically does not imply others do the same._

Modern civilization and its achievement is certainly not the result of lazy bureaucracy accumulating money on the back of hardworking pleasant. It's certainly a result of some amount of "rules of law".

For prosperity to be widespread, you need incentive to accumulate capitals, build stuff that people actually want to buy, etc.

The world is pretty fair. Just that humans can be too unfair and short- sighted.(Like caring more about relative status instead of total wealth)

Poor nations just have more corrupt bureaucracy, unethical businessmen, and lawlessness than wealthy nations.

Yes, the bureaucracy in American and Europe aren't certainly helping matters, but relatively speaking, they're still less corrupt than what you would find in third world countries.

<comment><USER5> This rebuts my claim that there's still widespread unethical gains _how?_ You just stated that the majority of Earth's population is more corrupt than America / Europe.

<comment><USER7> He is trying to say that accumulation of money is not automatically bad just because some people attempt to do it in an unethical, nonproductive fashion. As long as the attempt to become wealthy is also accompanied by basic morals and decency, the pursuit of wealth is a noble venture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is a good _book_. Far more enjoyable and memorable to read than only these notes.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think taking his essays and making them bullet points loses quite a bit of the enjoyment. He gives examples with some prose in his essays that just drive the points further home.

Plus, lists of things suck.

EDIT: Does anyone else see the irony in the score of this comment?

<comment><USER10> Don't you really mean --

Things that suck:

        * Lists of things
        ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This might be fun, and it could generate a little more industry coverage (free advertising) for the book. Maybe there could be a small competition of some sorts within the forum to win 3 copies of the book.

It could involve something that is not coding, and that the forum members can judge (vote on). Like a best discussion topic / article submitted on Saturday the 26th between 9am and 2pm PST. All votes must be in by 7pm PST. Ten finalists could be selected, and the vote totals submitted to a separate random number generated for each one--highest 3 numbers win books. 1 entry per forum member who wants to participate.

</comment><comment><USER12> They were nice observations but in no way would I consider those thoughts powerful. Maybe I should read the book instead.

</comment><comment><USER13> Amazing photo.

</comment><comment><USER7> How much material can you pull from a book without getting into copyright issues? Is the post's author providing enough new ideas to warrant a "commentary" argument?

<comment><USER14> Copyright doesn't protect ideas so much as the expression of them. There are also fair use provisions, which include the discussing the copyrighted material. A list is given at <http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html> (there is a link to the whole law, use the Chapter 1 link). Judging by those factors, he was clearly summarizing, it was for non-profit use, he did not appear to be quoting directly, and even if he was, the quotes comprise a very small part of the whole work, and the summary does not diminish the value of the original work, I would say he is on very safe legal grounds. (IANAL, though)

<comment><USER7> Thanks. Yeah, I wasn't trying to accuse him of anything... He is obviously providing value while also indirectly encouraging people to read the book. Besides, pg had posted in this submission before I did without having a negative attitude toward the article.

I was mainly curious just how much is allowed. In a time when multimedia companies claim copyright infringement left and right, it's interesting to note the difference between print and audio/video copyrighted materials.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great advice as usual.</comment>


A kinda okay text generator - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ftql.pw/posts/random-text/ <comment><USER2> POS tagging is a nice touch, but I've long wondered if there's a way to combine Markov sentence generation with actual grammatical rules -- that if there's an opening parenthesis there has to be a closing one, dependent clauses, etc. It would need to both gramatically parse the inputs as well as produce grammar trees for the outputs that would then be filled in by Markov chains that fit the trees...

Heck, even do it at a level larger than sentences too, so questions are followed by answers, a line of dialog is followed by a response, paragraphs follow a realistic distribution of lengths...

<comment><USER3> Hmm. A Markov chain where you actually do some kind of search? You build up a chain then backtrack and retry as necessary until you get something meeting the requirements.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like getting some sort of context free grammar out of it. There is a LR grammar algorithm that is very fast, you could use a Markov chain to generate and then a CFG to verify

<comment><USER5> Or a CFG to generate at a high level and a Markov chain to fill in the details

<comment><USER4> Excellent idea. Then it would actually read like language! But uh, how to choose sentence length and which grammars you want?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Children's poetry makes for fun source texts for these projects. In this case dumping a bunch of old poems generated mostly gibberish but I found the following examples amusing.

While here on my deathbed I try to relate My many misfortunes and miseries great. Poor thoughtless young thing! If I recollect right, I began life in March, on a clear frosty night; And before I could see or was half a week old, I nearly had perished, the barn was so cold. But this chilly spring I got pretty well over, But there wasn't a tree for miles around, They were too frightened to stay on the ground, And moused in the stable, or played in the clover, Or till I was weary, which seldom occurred, Ran after my tail, which I took for a bird

The wind did blow, the cloak did fly, Like streamer long and gay, Till loop and button failing both, At last it flew away. Then might all people well discern The bottles he had slung, A bottle swinging at each side, As hath been said or sung. The dogs did bark, the children screamed, Up flew the windows all, And ev'ry soul cried out, Well done!

When Betty screaming came down stairs, The wine is left behind! Good lack! Quoth he yet bring it me, My leathern belt likewise, In which I bear my trusty sword When I do exercise. Now Mistress Gilpin, careful soul!

There as the mother sits all day, On business from their houses, And late at night returning home, To cheer their babes and spouses; While you and I have oft-times heard How men are killed and undone, By overturns from carriages, By thieves, and fires in London. We know what risks these landsmen run, From noblemen to tailors.

<comment><USER7> Lewis Carrol is actually really fun in just a pure markov chain; usually the diction is sufficient to put someone in the mood for Carrol, which means nobody really expects it to make sense anyways.

<comment><USER8> One of my favorite parts of Gödel, Escher, Bach was the description of translating Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky into various languages -- particularly troublesome since the original poem contains few English words to begin with.

<comment><USER7> I think that just highlights how hard poetry is to translate in general. Carroll picked those words with thoughts to how they sound no less than other poets that restrict themselves to English words.

Translating poetry well where both meaning and sounds are vital can be harder than writing the poem in the first place was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You're going to want to look at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kneser–Ney_smoothing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kneser–Ney_smoothing) for further improvements on an ngram based approach.

<comment><USER10> Or even just Stupid Backoff[1]: If you can't find anything of length N, try N-1 but lower the probability by a fixed ratio (0.4).

[1] Page 2, equation 5 of [https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D07-1090.pdf#page=2](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D07-1090.pdf#page=2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Markov chains are cool and text generation is fun for experiments. I would definitely recommend looking at deep learning language models, for a more fruitful investment of time to improve further. (courses on [http://www.fast.ai/](http://www.fast.ai/) are a good starting place)

</comment><comment><USER12> I too played around with War and Peace...but in the russian.

Shameless plug: My password generator that takes text inputs and generates wordish results: [https://cmroanirgo.github.io/wordish/](https://cmroanirgo.github.io/wordish/)

(It's much simpler and less correct than OP's... but that's the point anyhow)

The site is pre configured to use a few different source text excerpts:

\- The Happy Prince, Oscar Wilde

\- Matthew 5, King James Bible

\- War and Peace, Tolstoy (russian)

\- klingon, anonymous web source

\- Lorem Ipsum, lorem ipsim generator

</comment><comment><USER13> A nice experiment! I am always a bit surprised to see that CNNs & company produce much less coherent and natural sounding text than the comparably simple Markov Chain generators.

That said, I markov-generated some text with Nietzsche's "Also sprach Zarathustra" as a source some time ago and it made more sense and was more coherent than the original.

<comment><USER14> I don't think this is necessarily true. CNNs can produce incredible results, see for example [0]. A snippet from the paper (their code is also available):

""" Prompt: The Mage, the Warrior, and the Priest

Story: A light breeze swept the ground, and carried with it still the distant scents of dust and time-worn stone. The Warrior led the way, heaving her mass of armour and muscle over the uneven terrain. She soon crested the last of the low embankments, which still bore the unmistakable fingerprints of haste and fear. She lifted herself up onto the top the rise, and looked out at the scene before her. [...] """

RNN/LSTM type models can also produce really coherent results on the scales shown in the blog.

Markov chains can be quite useful when you can manually create conditioning, but some of the key power of neural methods is learning to process conditioning and blend in ways that may not be obvious (or require significant domain expertise to grok) when handcrafting. YeGoblynQueenne below discusses a lot of the core issues for Markov chain based approaches.

In particular, plagiaristic sequences are incredibly common in Markovian generation, and though there are some papers on how to deal with this [1] it is not straightforward to decide what plagiarism really means in many contexts. This problem also arises in neural models, but isn't nearly as extreme due to the nature of both learning and the sampling process.

One _huge_ bonus of Markov chains is that controlling exactly what you want or using _hard_ rules is pretty easy, which is definitely NOT the case with neural generation...

This blog post is a really nice run through of how to get decent results from Markov chains, but don't discount neural methods either - they are getting better all the time, if you are willing to deal with the headaches.

[0] Hierarchical Neural Story Generation, [https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04833](https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04833)

[1] Max Order [http://www.flow-machines.com/maxorder/](http://www.flow- machines.com/maxorder/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> One problem I see in the article above is that the result is evaluated only by eyballing- which _is_ actually a perfectly legitimate evaluation method; humans' language faculty, is, after all, the only process we know of that can correctly recognise and generate natural language expressions (and other, automatic, methods like BLEU scores, often simply automate the eyballing process).

However, if you're working with statistical language modelling, you should probably try to check the statistical properties of the resulting model! For example- measure perplexity, or mutual entropy, etc. This will give you a more concrete, and faster, way to evaluate your model than just generating some text and looking at it, trying to figure out where it came from. I'd suggest the author give that a try- they seem to have dipped a toe into statistical language modelling but be unwilling to go all the way with more advanced approaches (e.g. the cited paper, by Kassarnig, uses "n-grams, Justeson & Katz POS tag filter, recurrent neural networks, and latent Dirichlet allocation" \- but the article author doesn't seem to have tried any of that on its own, let alone a combination, other than n-grams). The more advanced material can be daunting, but it's not actually such a huge leap from Markov chains. And the results can _sometimes_ be worth the effort.

. . .

Btw- it sounds to me like the approach taken in the "N-Grams, take 2" section basically boils down to a PCFG (a Probabilistic CFG). It sounds like the probability of the next token is calculated conditional upon the probabilities of all preceding _strings_ of tokens in a sentence, which is what a PCFG does (which is to say, PCFGs are not Markov). With an N high enough, that will, indeed, copy your text verbatim :)

. . .

The author should keep in mind that no matter what you do, Markov chains are always going to either look completely incoherent, or produce exact copies of their training text.

In fact, that's a bit of a problem with most statistical language modellng techniques. Even state of the art systems, that can produce very grammatical text, fail badly when it comes to producing _coherent_ text (e.g. a perfectly reasonably structured recipe, where the listed ingredients are not used in the preparation instructions, etc). And that's something that no statistical measure of fit can capture, unfortunately. So you're left again with eyballing the end results and hoping for the best.

Edit: sorry, I'm babbling a bit. The way to use statistical evaluation metrics, like perplexity, is to first automatically evaluate your generated text, then eyball it to see how the metric matches your own "sense" of the text's grammaticality. So then, if you figure out that a low perplexity score produces more grammatical results, you favour models that produce low perplexity etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> > they seem to have dipped a toe into statistical language modelling but be > unwilling to go all the way with more advanced approaches

That's fair.

Thanks for your suggestions. I clearly have some studying to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I feel for fooling a quick skim, getting interpunction/capitalization correct/believable was the biggest improvement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha.. yeah, I left that bit out. It was several dead ends and I finally ended up with something that was stupid simple. It seemed like more trouble to explain than it was worth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What does "cweep" mean?

<comment><AUTHOR> If it helps, here's the full paragraph:

      "We'll send the infantwy down by the swamps," Denísov continued.
      "They'll cweep up to the garden; you'll wide up fwom there with the
      Cossacks"—he pointed to a spot in the forest beyond the village—"and I
      with my hussars fwom here. And at the signal shot..."

<comment><USER7> What are "sramps"?

<comment><USER17> [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/swamp#Noun](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/swamp#Noun)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Your prose is too prolix.

</comment><comment><USER19> Was fun to read. Thankd

</comment><comment><USER4> Very impressed and delighted with your example results

</comment><comment><USER20> This is going to be used for building better link farms in 3, 2, 1...</comment>


The Big Picture: France on strike - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/10/france_on_strike.html?camp=localsearch:on:twit:rtbutton

<comment><USER2> I'm curious - how does such violence actually help anything? There are much more effective ways of telling the government that their actions are not favorable.

Specifically, I point out the high school students overturning a car. What does that actually accomplish? There's a difference between protesting for change and burning cars.

<comment><USER3> This sort of 'student' (or hooligan of the day) action has worked quite well historically - the government has always caved, and basically printed money. Such efforts are one reason that the highest end French restaurants are better found in Spain today - it's too damn hard to remain profitable in France - read Au Revoir to All That for some insight. Also, read a funny book called 'A Year in Merde' for some examples of the French 'way' of doing things.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Lightweight Employee Training Software - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for a service (or a piece of software) that will allow me to train our clients' employees on how to use our product. Basically, I just want the employees to view a slide show with audio (or a screencast) and then take a quiz at the end. The results of the quiz should be saved and emailed to an administrator.
That's all I need.  Does anybody know of anything like this that isn't too pricey?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> We use Moodle. It's open source, and works pretty well. As with a lot of products like this, it takes some tweaking, and some time, but for the money...

We also use YouTube to host the video (embedded on Moodle). We did have to offer a downloadable version for clients that block YouTube.

Finally use CamStudio to record the web casts/demos, with a little help from VirtualDub for audio touchups and normalizing. They are both free as well.</comment>


Show HN: Transcrypt – Fast, small Python 3.5 to JavaScript transpiler - <AUTHOR> http://www.transcrypt.org <comment><USER2> Nice concept, great work!

As a side note: I found your extra whitespace before function arguments to be very strange. I haven't seen this type of spacing before. Is there a reason why you do this?

I personally use and encourage the use of the "pep8" python tool (link below) to validate my codestyle as I find it makes working with other developers easier (this extra whitespace is pointed out as an error).

pep8 tool: [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pep8](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pep8)

<comment><AUTHOR> My coding style took shape long before PEP8 or even Python emerged. I tried following PEP8 for a few months, but since I mosty use C++ and Python in combination, pure PEP8 didn't work on the C++ side of things. So I stick with a kind of geometric mean of my Fortran, Basic, Cobol, Algol, Ada, Pascal, Modula2, C, C++, Python, JavaScript, asssembler and PLC AWL coding styles. But that's just the way Transcrypt itself is coded. Feel free to follow PEP8 completely in your code using Transcrypt. It's parsed by the CPython parser, so no problem there. However, if you use JS libs they won't follow PEP 8 either. And that's probably something to accept, as, however big the Python world, one cannot ignore the JS world when programming for the browser. By the way of all those languages I like Python best. But since I write technical (signal processing) apps, C++ interoperation is an inevitable fact for me. To be more exact about the braces: I started out numerical programming in Fortran66, and wanted a formula to look like this: (a + b) * (c + d), so with blanks surrounding the braces, rather than (a+b)*(c+d) which I found harder to decipher at that time. I stuck with that ever since, for any braces, unless adjacent to each other.

<comment><USER3> FWIW I prefer the same kind of spacing. So there's at least two of us.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice to know!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone have insight on how does this compare to Rapydscript ([http://www.rapydscript.com/](http://www.rapydscript.com/))?

<comment><AUTHOR> Rapydscript came closest to what I was looking for. But I wanted multiple inheritance, assignment of bound functions, properties and recursive tuple assigment.

<comment><USER5> So you rewrote the whole thing.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. There are currently is also brython.

Stop reinventing the wheel everytime something you want is missing from a lib. Try to contribute to said lib first.

Otherwise, this adds noise, wastes ressources and splits point of focus in the FOSS community.

I understand the appeal of writting your own baby, I understand the ego part too.

But remember this is a projet you then have to maintain and document. People will ask about their problems with it on stackoverflow, they will type "X vs Y vs Z" on Google.

Creting a new project has consequences.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't mind supporting, maintaining and documenting it. I've taken a good look at Brython and it just isn't what I can use for my projects. Also the fact that there are cows and horses I don't consider a waste of Nature's effort. Building big banking offices is, in my view. But making something is just fun. The whole life is a waste of effort, afterall what's the purpose, unless you enjoy it... ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> About the intended use: Transcrypt's niche are non-trivial web applications where, apart from looks, things like structure, overview, simplicity, explicitness and regularity start to count. This is where Python shines and Transcrypt with it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hackers/Tinkers should understand the difference between syntax and semantics, most of the devs love python because of its clean syntax (95%).

Having a lightweight syntax around the semantics of managed platforms will be a win here for any _syntax_ language targeting JS, LuaJIT, BEAM, JVM, CLR, LLVM.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well done JdeH. Being able to keep a python hat on when writing client side and server side code could be very useful.

I also like how you've kept the output as close to the original Python code as possible. The generated scaffolding code looks neat and easy to read too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. It had to be debuggable in the browser, so I paid a lot of attention to that. But I wanted the multiple inheritance in. The combination of lean, readable JS and multiple inheritance, is why I started the project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I checked your example with solar system. Since it's calling directly document.getElementById, it would not be some valid Python code that I could run independently. Isn't that defeating the purpose of coding in Python first?

<comment><AUTHOR> Purpose of Transcrypt is to be able to use Python in the JavaScript world. The call document.getElementById doesn't have meaning outside a browser. For non- gui debugging purposes module org.transcrypt.stubs.browser is present supporting the bare minimum. Of course someone could write a library supporting all kinds of DOM functions. But I don't think it would be very useful. The idea is to be able to do the whole web "chain" in Python. So CPython + a framework on the server, Transcrypt in the Browser (or, generally, JS client).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel like all these python to javascript transpilers will be used as a crutch for those who know python but not javascript. The problem with that is javascript has spent well over a decade developing tool-chains, conventions, and best practices, to assist in web development. When people start trying to apply python to web development, they throw all that away.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is to embrace the JS world to the max and not reinvent any wheels. So Transcrypt will cooperate with any existing JS lib. Only personal I code far more efficiently in Python, especially for bigger apps. But (as is elaborated in the docs) that's personal. I've coded quite complicated technical web apps in JS, but somehow it didn't fit me like Python does. For different people that will be different, I guess.

<comment><USER12> I agree with you as to the language (I just like Python a whole lot better than JS), but I always feel dirty writing in a non-native language, not to mention the pretty big commitment one makes when choosing a transpiler.

In Transcrypt's case, the commitment probably isn't that big, since the JS source is pretty readable (and so I can just migrate to that relatively easily if I want to), but it's still a bit of a hack.

That said, it looks like a great project, and I'll definitely give it a try and hopefully use it more widely.

<comment><AUTHOR> Commitment will require continuity, so in the long run I want it to be independent of me, except for technical input. I plan transfer it to a foundation in a few years. At the same time I'd like to keep a firm hand on the wheel to keep it lean and focused. As for the 'hack' part: I am rather old... And I remember very lively people thought Kernighan and Ritchie C was a hack to avoid programming directly for a processor using a macro assembler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why not use a python->x86 compiler followed by a x86->asm.js compiler?

<comment><USER14> I don't know much about the project but I have a lot of experience with asm.js. Using asm.js has many drawbacks and should only be used if the tradeoffs are acceptable. Some of the large issues:

\- A bad debugging experience (no segfaults on null, local variables are numbers instead of strings or objects, function pointer calls are super confusing)

\- Much more difficult to interoperate with external JavaScript libraries

\- Massive code bloat (you have to reinvent everything like arrays, strings, maps, regexes, memory management, etc. instead of just using the browser's built-in implementations)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does it support yield from/async/await?

<comment><AUTHOR> No. As soon as JS supports this, I'll work on that. If you work in an environment with multitasking primitives, you can use it via the appropriate JS API, though. In other words, anything you can do in JS, you can do in Transcrypt. But a standard Pythonic API to multitasking is on my wish list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why on earth are you using frames for that website?

<comment><USER16> Please rewrite it. Maybe hide the menu under some icon I don't understand is the menu. Override the scroll so it jars. Probably a good idea to show a blank page, until I click through to allow about 4-5 external scripts before I can see any text, another 2 scripts to show images, and whilst we are at it, make sure I cannot click any links without allowing another script.

At the moment, the site is too easy to navigate, the text too easy to read. Maybe use more images, big images, a 2mb+ background gif would be good. Oh, I forgot external scripts, throw some of those in, my laptop fan isn't whirring so it is underused.

yes, what a terrible website, please "improve" it

:-\

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, in fact, the only thing it had to be right now, is functional, which indeed I believe it is. There's no css, just hand coded html. And it was ready in a snap. But if I ever change it it will remain functional in the first place. It won't feature any floating menu buttons that try to escape your mouse button, or screenwide pictures of managerial looking types at a conference desk. Frames seem to be a bit difficult for search engines. But for now they'll have to do.

<comment><USER17> user_0001 agrees with you, and was being facetious :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I know. It's kind of funny how these frames trigger comments everywhere, though. Maybe I ought to keep them in as a gadget...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


EA finally "exploring the possibility" of offline mode for SimCity - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/10/ea-finally-exploring-the-possibility-of-offline-mode-for-simcity/

<comment><USER2> EA lost me as a customer because they treated us as a hostile agent that was somehow infecting their project goals.

The condescending attitude toward what we all knew was one thing. Refusing refunds was another. But when EA started to threaten banning customers from their Origin accounts (an EA only app store in which customers may have made multiple purchases) that was it for me.

EA took what was once a source of immense enjoyment and nostalgic memories and twisted it into one of the few battles I went nuts over.

It will be a long, LONG time before I consider purchasing another EA game (despite my addiction to sports games on the consoles).

<comment><USER3> EA does not hold a monopoly on sports titles, although they have the license to use NFL teams.

But 2K Sports also has a license for NBA teams, in NBA 2k14 for instance. And I actually do like the Nintendo-based sports games a lot. :-p

<comment><USER2> I'm crossing my fingers that 2K gets back into the thick of things in the nextgen with the NHL series, which is where I used to spend the majority of my down time :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The ability to play offline is far down the list of improvements they could make to this game. For a start, the inability to create any meaningful regions means players just end up building a few specialised 'neighbourhoods' separated by a couple of miles of grass or forest. The highways and railways only seem to link up 4 neighbourhoods at a time so your 'Metropolis' ends up being more like 4 seperate, non-connected towns, each consisting of 4 little neighbourhoods.

EA massively missed the goal posts on SC5. Players enjoyed crafting a whole world of their own, micromanaging it down to the nth degree. I didn't spend hours and hours playing SC1,2000,3 & 4 thinking "if only my city could be smaller and it was compulsory to play with strangers who don't share my design ideas".

The only thing they got right, in my opinion, was the graphic refresh and bendy-roads.

I did buy the game when it came out, even had to buy the Windows 8 upgrade pack to play it! I don't know what I was more disappointed with, SC5 or Windows 8. I can't remember to be honest because, after 1 week of playing the game, I booted back into Linux and haven't restarted since.

<comment><USER5> What Windows 8 has to do with SimCity?

<comment><USER2> In a way, everything.

Both are prime examples of corporate desires to push something new on the customer, despite the harbingers of doom that preceded their launch.

Coincidentally, both seem to also be scaling back some of these "mandatory" decisions because the market has rejected them on a massive scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The way handled this game is really quite sad. I was excited for it, the previews looked promising ... but the fact that the server performance was newsworthy, and the small-city problem, meant that I never bothered buying it. I imagine I'm not alone.

Not having actually bought the game I can't say for sure, but I wonder if the much-touted online features haven't been as popular as they hoped ... which means that this now 7-month old game is probably quite expensive for them to keep running into perpetuity. Ripping the online features out, and allowing offline only, could allow them to save on running costs?

<comment><USER7> I have absolutely nothing to back this up, but I feel that the vast majority of gamers that would be interested in this game probably didn't have the slightest clue about any issues the game has had. I read tech sites regularly and as such I, like you, chose not to buy it, but it wouldn't surprise me if sales were to still be fairly good. The problems were newsworthy, but in the UK I only noticed a few articles stating the issues, and compared to other games the news seemed fairly tame when you look at the severity of the issues. It wouldn't surprise me if this news was largely ignored by those that found out through mainstream news sites.

The thought of being happy about a games failure feels quite bad, considering those that worked on it are real people who would probably like some successful projects under their belt, but in a way I'd be quite happy to see that EA had suffered because of this release.

<comment><USER6> I'm in the UK too, and I believe it was frontpage BBC news for a fair while. Also, don't underestimate the network effect of twitter & facebook for the non-tech crowd ... if people see their friends moaning about their woes I would suggest it is likely to make them think twice. How many people were making positive comments about sim city during it's launch period?

<comment><USER8> As both non-owners, you both dont know that features were disabled in SS for literally months for some users. The entire launch and release was a fiasco.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They're "exploring the possibility" and I'm sitting here at my PC, playing SimCity in offline mode thanks to the cracker that made it possible.

<comment><USER10> It's not very PC to call them that.

<comment><USER11> Cracker, as in someone that "cracked" the DRM (which was done a while ago I believe).

<comment><USER3> Cracker usually entails "black hat". It would be proper to call him a "cracker" if he broke the DRM and distributed it on Bittorrent.

Although if you crack the DRM, and then distribute it as a patch-file that modifies an already installed version of Sim City, that would be a "Hacker".

Methinks he's using the term correctly. I'm just musing because it seems like a lot of people here are not accustomed to underground lingo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There already is a half working offline mode server emulator (made by one person). And EA has a "Team" working on exploring the idea of possibility of having an offline mode.

<comment><USER12> Give them credit. Marketing teams don't generally know how to code. They're probably still learning...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Explore away, EA. Right while I explore the possibility of buying something other than your game.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm sure they'll look into it after they fox all the glaring simulation issues graphical glitches and severe city size limitations. The bigger problem, and I realized this after just a couple days of playing is that the game just isn't fun like the previous ones were.

Being sick in a tiny city, yet completely overwhelming every public transport option with teens of thousands of people hanging out at single bus stops, with no ability to build a subway is a huge simulation failure.

So many game regressions replaced with dumber alternatives. I ended up uninstalling it after a couple weeks and loading up sc4k instead.

<comment><USER4> I completely agree (see my comment along similar lines).

The online/offline debate has diverted far too much attention away from other, more important aspects of the game (at least to players) that badly missed the mark. I'm certain SC5 would have been slated as "the disappointment of the decade" even if 'online-only-gate' had not happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How long are people even going to care about them bungling things like this? Admittedly, I'm not a super hardcore gamer, but as indie games and iOS games achieve ever higher levels of polish and depth, I find it hard to lament any one company's flops - there's too much good stuff out there to enjoy in just about every genre.

<comment><USER15> Just a second. EA is one of the big publishers when it comes to the Windows platform. Meaning they have quite a few franchises that have followers. However they have been vilipending their paying customers as potential thieves for a very long time with quite a few blow back and under delivering compared to the customer's expectation. So, sure you can enjoy 'indie' games on other platform, but as publisher go, I would advise to look and think twice before you buy any games from EA.

On the technical side, I am far from surprised at the BS official answer from EA regarding the feasibility of offline mode, and bigger playground.

<comment><USER14> I can see my phrasing was a bit imprecise - when I said "How long will people even care?", I meant how long will people bother protesting when they can just buy good, fully functioning games from other publishers? For me, EA just seems to be among the most boring, mediocre and un-user-friendly forces in gaming. With the wealth of great games out there, I wonder if they'll see a Zynga/Nintendo style reversal of fortunes in the near term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Didn't they say that it was a technical impossibility for SimCity to be able to be run offline?

</comment><comment><USER17> Is it possible that EA is finally (belatedly) learning to listen to their customers? Could this be the point that they turn around as a company and become player centric?

Or am I naive and reading way too much into this?

<comment><USER18> They probably want to fire 80% of staff working on the servers.

<comment><USER19> Right. EA has determined

1\. No way to milk this year-by-year (John Madden's SimCity 2014...)

2\. So, might as well see if there's a long tail.

My wife bought this game, and was really mad at how EA bungled it. It's probably the last SimCity game she'll buy. So from this single data point, yeah, EA might as well give up :-/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What online mode? SimCity, SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000, and SimCity 4 all still work offline.

Oh, they mean SimCity Online! Why would they want to remove online mode from SimCity Online? Surely they didn't bill it as a single player game that needed an online component!/s

<comment><USER21> When they announced a new SimCity game there was no mention of it being SimCity online - that was only announced later.

Sure, you can say that people shouldn't get excited about a game until they have something more solid than initial announcements and rumours but if companies want to benefit from the pre-release anticipation, they need to make sure they don't mismanage that expectation.

<comment><USER22> Exactly. If they had named it "SimCity Online" then a great deal of the negativity attached to it likely wouldn't have happened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> EA on not allowing larger cities: "The system performance challenges we encountered would mean that the vast majority of our players wouldn't be able to load, much less play with bigger cities."

Seriously? If they had allowed offline play in the first place, the city size would only be limited by the player's own hardware.

</comment><comment><USER24> Isn't all this moot if the RCI is just faked? The glassbox is not an engine at all. Nothing you do in game actually effects the economy or labor force directly.

How is offline mode going to change the fact that the game is not a simulator but a really pretty linear RPG.

<comment><USER25> >> Isn't all this moot if the RCI is just faked? What!? Is this true? I've avoided this sequel (to one of my favorite games of all time) because of all the other user-hostile moves made, but I'd not heard anything about this. If that's true, there's nothing left of the spirit of the game. Why would anyone play this game, ever?

<comment><USER22> First off, I don't own the game. Having an interest in the series I did a good deal of research to decide over whether to buy it or not. I avoided it big time from the beginning based on the comments from people playing it pre- launch and post-launch.

I don't know the current state of things but all indications were that the simulation was severely broken. I'm not sure about being "faked", as in intentional, but things just worked in ways that made no sense.

For example, one experiment involved a city that was all residential with no services whatsoever. Low taxes kept population in positive for happiness so people kept moving in to replace the people that left because conditions were so miserable.

The theory is that you could succeed at building a decent size city no matter how badly you managed it.

<comment><USER13> It's true. After just a couple plays I figured out the simulation and could basically do whatever I wanted and make loads is cash and everybody was happy. It was like playing a crappy sc clone on good mode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Too little too late?

</comment><comment><USER27> Then perhaps I'll "explore the possibility" of buying it. But probably not, they have left a nasty aftertaste with their shenanigans.

</comment><comment><USER28> The pirates beat them to it.

</comment><comment><USER29> unfortunately it's not the possibility they are exploring, it's the users...

</comment><comment><USER30> What, you mean the same offline mode that people hacked into it shortly after it was launched? To say it would take significant engineering work, when people have already done it fairly quickly, just makes you look like an incompetent liar.

<comment><USER21> To be fair to them they have to support the thing - a crack may be good enough to get someone up and playing but from their perspective they need to make sure it's rock solid else they'll face a repeat of the backlash they had when the online version was flaky.

<comment><USER31> No matter how well they want to make it, it wouldn't take six months of development with full access to the source code though.</comment></comment></comment>


Map: Where the Developer Jobs Are - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3061135/map-where-the-developer-jobs-are <comment><USER2> Wow I feel like the data in those maps may be REALLY suspect. It's entirely possible that it's just my area but the data for Southern Maine seems like it's impossible to be correct based on my knowledge and experience as a hiring manager in Southern Maine. For example if I'm reading the map data correctly it lists 144 developers in Southern Maine, I personally know more that that.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the minimum I should do to legally-protect my side project? - <AUTHOR> What are the minimum (i.e. cheapest) legal actions that I should really do if my side-project is already up and running and people are using it ?<p>* I'm not charging any money from users but I've got ads on the site. * I don't want to incorporate - this is a side project and I hope it can be sustained that way.<p>Thanks ! <comment><USER2> I would say LLC for all or most of your side projects .

You can trademark your graphic assets. Shouldnt be too much trouble , most of this can be done online by yourself .

If you don't want a legal entity you better have a business moat I.e. real users , real usecase, or put your name , face on the site and brand it such that your side project=you</comment>


In China's Orbit - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704104104575622531909154228.html?mod=WSJASIA_hpp_LEFTTopStories

<comment><AUTHOR> This article really struck a note with me. The atmosphere here in Beijing really has changed a lot over the past few years. The relative wealth of the 2 countries is directly evident in the different attitudes of Western expats and native Chinese towards money. The expats here are becoming noticeably poorer. I see it because I am a retailer of luxury goods.

There was a time when being on an expat package in Beijing meant living the good life - you could splurge however you wanted because the cost of living was so cheap. Today, my products are really pushing the affordability of the expats here but are considered a great value by the new middle class here. Several times a week I get complaints from expats that our prices are too high. I've never heard that from a Chinese. Indeed, the opposite is true, several times a week Chinese people tell me what a good deal I'm offering.

It's actually getting a bit problematic for me. Inflation's pushing my costs up and my competitors are raising their prices as well. I've been raising prices alongside everyone else, but I'm really about to price myself out of the expat market. Expats who receive their paychecks in dollars are seeing their purchasing power diminish and I think it's having a big psychological effect on them. They're really important to me, but I would be crazy to not be trying to reduce the percentage of sales that they constitute.

This is directly impacting my spending decisions. A few years ago, it would have made sense for me to drop money to advertise in expat magazines. These days, that extra money's all going to marketing towards the Chinese.

<comment><USER2> In all this, I'm never clear about where the average Chinese citizen is making all this money...is it all from investments?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are wealthy entrepreneurs, there are children of wealthy entrepreneurs, there are wealthy landlords.

A lot of my customers, who are white-collar, have made good money in the stock market over the past decade and also in the real estate market.

But to be honest a lot of it is a matter of confidence. My Chinese customers definitely don't make as much as their American counterparts on average, but there is a sense that life is getting better and better, they're making more and more money, they have savings in the bank, so it's OK to splurge from time to time. I would say 40-50% of my Chinese social circle owns an iPad, even though they probably only pull in 20-30k USD a year.

<comment><USER3> This strikes me, especially the last line. It seems as if your Chinese customers are spending like Americans do during bubble times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My frustration is many in the West don't recognize the genius and moral standing of the Chinese core leadership. Westerners focus on the censorship, the lack of democracy, the human rights violations, the communism, or the capitalism. The image continues to be one of a crazy communist dictatorship with no direction and no morals that just happened to get lucky with some twisted capitalism.

But capitalism is only a part of their success. Everyone knows you should do some free trade and open up the economy. The really hard part of running a country is managing the powerful internal special interest groups and getting all the systemic incentives aligned correctly so that people work together to produce better government and a better economy. Russia and many others have tried capitalism and failed because their political systems sucked.

The triumph of the Chinese leadership is how they have adapted the Singapore model, managed their powerful internal special interest groups and an insanely diverse geography and ethnic populations that don't speak the same language, keeping the country together, while getting a growing number of people to work on improving government and the economy and moving towards creating a fair, unified, and stable environment for business and wealth and improving peoples lives.

edit: I suppose I really know nothing about the moral standing of the Chinese core leadership. I don't know what they are thinking. But I see how many they have lifted out of poverty and their dedication to improving government and the lives of those people.

</comment><comment><USER5> > _This optimal system of social and political order emerged in the English- > speaking world, based on property rights and the representation of property > owners in elected legislatures._

I'm not sure this is a fair statement. To me, referring to a system as optimal implies a sense of finality, as though we have a rigorous, tested proof that this socioeconomic system we've developed in the West is optimal and complete. Again, to me, this is an absurd notion.

</comment><comment><USER6> Crazy, I just wrote about this recently. With all the economic debate that's going on right now, I guess it's the topic du jour. The guy's summary is amazing, wish I could write as well as him.

[http://www.pakg1.net/2010/10/changing-chinese-mindset- toward...](http://www.pakg1.net/2010/10/changing-chinese-mindset-towards.html)

<comment><USER7> Ahem: that's professor _Niall Ferguson_ you're talking about!

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

(One may argue with aspects of his outlook and analysis, and even his scholarship -- as have the likes of Paul Krugman -- but even so, he's one of the most famous historians of the current period, and an excellent prose stylist besides.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone know what the as yet untranslated paper is? I found this:

<http://www.ccer.edu.cn/download/8359-1.pdf>

But it's from 2007, wondered if there's anything more recent.

</comment><comment><USER9> There's one thing I can't wrap my head around. I post here hoping that one of the bright minds will offer some explanation. What will happen when the rest of the world gets fed up with the one way relationship China has set up with the them?

It's all fine and dandy now - china makes cheap goods and exports them to the rest of the world. In addition, they are slowly taking on more sophisticated tasks as evidenced by their latest super computer, I'm sure soon we will see contributions in technology to the world economy.

But what will happen when the rest of the world gives them the proverbial finger? When they finally say - screw you, either open your market to us, compete with the rest of the world's rules - or fuck off we won't buy your goods.

Is this possible? Would the world even be able to afford such a stance? Or will this happen and what will china do? How much would the projected GDP of the US be if it included china's 1bn population and the potential market it within it?

<comment><USER10> how's your chinese?

<comment><USER9> why do you ask?

<comment><USER10> Imagine the chinese market is made open to you. What has changed from today's reality?

What makes access to the chinese market difficult for westerners, apart from the luxury/status items? The language and cultural barriers are still significant.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


5 Things We Learned from Analysing the Location of 950+ Blockchain Startups - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/outlier-ventures-io/5-things-we-learned-from-analysing-the-location-of-950-blockchain-startups-96daa788560c#.md0ut6yun <comment><USER2> Blockchain is a meaningless technology without Proof of work. These startups are merely fleecing clueless VC's with their bad message passing systems. I've met a number of fundraisers at this point that will admit in confidence that they have no idea what blockchain is, but that if they say they're into it, they get an opportunity to demo and meet.

<comment><USER3> I don't think that's accurate. If I have a ledger in which every record is signed (along with the previous signature) it's fair to call that a block chain, isn't it?

Systems based on signatures without proof of work aren't used for digital currency because of the double-spending problem. But I'm not sure if everybody talking about block chains is also talking about digital currencies, are they?

<comment><USER2> If its fair to call that a blockchain, then git is a blockchain. Pgp signed emails are blockchains. The technology becomes completely uninteresting 80's era innovation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are there any startups (excluding exchanges and consumer payment services like Coinbase) who are out of the R&D phase and actually have a product?

I've seen a lot who are "exploring how banks can use the blockchain for digital contracts" or something along those lines, but that's all.

<comment><USER2> bitcoin. Maybe ethereum.

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't consider Bitcoin a startup, though.

<comment><USER2> that's a fair point. I don't disagree

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Listicle title</comment>


To Sell Weapons, Defense Contractors Make War Seem Fun - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2016/10/06/to-sell-weapons-defense-contractors-make-war-seem-fun/ <comment><USER2> I'd love to see how George Carlin decodes this 'war is fun' language.</comment>


The average Greek is working a full 40% longer than the average German - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17155304 <comment><USER3> Facts that reconcile this article with what we already know:

1\. _The Greek labour market is inefficien_ t. That is why so many people work in small (inefficient) shops. Closed shop regulation for many professions lock people out of high wage occupations. Next to Portugal's 28% high school graduation rate [1] Greece's recent progress (<50% of 25-64 year olds completing high school in 1997 versus 61% today [2]) is valiant but the leaves an uneducated, unproductive generation untouched. It also doesn't account for Greeks' shorter working years.

2\. _Doing business is tough_. Here is an anecdote from a financial commentator in Athens:

"My friend explained that the owner of the bookstore/café couldn't get a license to provide coffee. She had tried to just buy a coffee machine and give the coffee away for free, thinking that lingering patrons would boost book sales. However, giving away coffee was illegal as well. Instead, the owner had to strike a deal with a bar across the street, whereby they make the coffee and the waitress spends all day shuttling between the bar and the bookstore/café. My friend also explained to me that books could not be purchased at the bookstore, as it was after 18h and it is illegal to sell books in Greece beyond that hour. I was in a bookstore/café that could neither sell books nor make coffee." [3]

3\. _The government used cheap loans not for infrastructure or reform, but to pay public servants and build a military_.

4\. _The government lied about its finances and is depravedly corrupt_.

[1] <http://m.upi.com/m/story/UPI-16361301069117/>

[2] <http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/44/21/48657344.pdf>

[3] <http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/36085/>

<comment><USER4> _"books could not be purchased at the bookstore, as it was after 18h and it is illegal to sell books in Greece beyond that hour. I was in a bookstore/café that could neither sell books nor make coffee."_

Unreal.

Note that it wasn't that the store was somehow incompetent, it's that doing something as simple & normal as selling a book after 6PM is _illegal_. Giving away brewed-in-house coffee is _illegal_. I'm having trouble articulating how profoundly outrageous this is, how self-destructive a country is which not only enacts such regulations but, it seems, _tolerates_ it.

If mere sale of a book is prohibited during any hours (much less perfectly reasonable & normal hours), outsiders will find it hard to extend sympathy and aid to a country so keen on destroying its own economy via absurd legislation and citizens so willing to comply. I'm glad to help the needy, but that stops quick when the recipient won't quit obviously self-destructive behavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That number is (more than) a bit misleading. I don't know where OECD pulls those numbers but it certainly doesn't feel as if Greeks work more than the average european. Shops dont work on sundays, public services are open for only a few hours a day, banks close at 2 etc. Underproductivity is a major issue, most of the work of public services is unnecessary red tape that could be easily automated if the government was willing.

Work hours is not our major problem, it's work ethics that are lacking. Hard work is not compensated, it is in fact frowned upon in the public sector, and this situation has even infiltrated much of the private sector. Absurd regulation and governmental dependencies has stifled competition in all but a few sectors (where it works it works reasonably well, such as telecommunications or banking). Couple that with a hostile investing environment and you have the perfect recipe for disaster.

That said, Greeks in general are industrious and entrepreneurial, but we tend to channel our inventiveness on finding ways to avoid paying taxes. Personally i believed from the start that Greece should have exited the euro in order to revitalize its dormant economy.

<comment><USER6> Are you sure? Because I find shops open from early morning till late night: from general goods to restaurants and so on.

<comment><USER5> What about everything else? Are gas stations open on sundays? Pharmacies in the afternoon? Are government offices open after 13:00?

<comment><USER7> The government closes down after 13:00 for the whole afternoon? Or only for a siesta?

<comment><USER5> most administrative services close at 13:00 for the public. Still, the greater issue is not the hours worked, it's the fact that it's unacceptably slow. For example, most accounting offices employ people whose job is to wait in queues outside government offices all day (such as tax and social security offices).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know about Greece, but I grew up in Portugal, and I suspect there are some similarities. People in Portugal "work" long hours. But they also work in a very infective way: long useless meetings, everything requires lengthy social interactions, bizantine bureaucracy, too many managers for too few real workers and so on. There are complex cultural problems that cannot be expressed by such simplistic metrics (and that, unfortunately, cannot be solved with quick fixes).

<comment><USER9> I'm also from Portugal but I have been working in London for some time now. Curiously, I don't see much of a difference besides now working only from 9 to 6 instead of working from 9 to 10. Same useless meetings, a very long line for coffee all day long, everyone is a manager, etc.

My opinion is a simple one: some countries sell stuff others want, some don't. We were just unlucky and not smart enough to value our geographical position in the world.

<comment><USER10> I have seen many greetideas come from Portugal, the challange is getting the ideas out of the door.You can read here about the start up scene in Lisbon <http://squaxor.posterous.com/lisbon-the-startup-spirit>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well BBC ran a show last night. And it did show the some reasons why Greece is such trouble today.

It turns out people spent like crazy, far beyond their means. Things like electricians driving Porsche's and High End Mercedes cars. All of it imported from Germany. When a nation full of people with government included involves in such spending it is but other wise natural that they price for it later on.

The anchor did explain that it wasn't just weak institutions and bad government policies. It was reckless lifestyle spending on part of Greeks. It seems many Greeks now want to sell of their costly cars, which are now believed to sell for less than half the price they bought it. So what happens? If they are unable to pay the loans and Bank take the cars. Banks still get only ~50% of what they lent. Its step by step collapse of a whole system.

In many ways, the institutions, like Banks are responsible too, for lending out money like that- unchecked. But the whole system is to be blamed. People, Government and everybody else involved.

On the other hand they also showed, Germany and how they manage their economy.

Now lets look at it, Greeks might work harder than Germans. That is no indication of why Greece is such crisis today. Apart from working and earning you also need to manage your money well. Why spend more than what you can earn?

Also scenes in Greece were heart warming, difficult to believe its 21st century Europe. Its almost like a third world country. People begging on streets, sleeping on footpaths, Eating from what is distributed. Couples relying on free clinics for minimal healthcare. As I said, only the Infrastructure looked grand. Otherwise it looked like a third world country.

<comment><USER12> I don't think that's why these stats are interesting. There seems to be a stereotype of lazy Greeks being bailed out by hard-working Germans. These OECD stats (which I originally checked out after an episode of Radio Open Source featuring economist Mark Blyth) show that this is just another example of an ugly, incorrect stereotype.

<comment><USER11> Although I agree that its wrong to say All Greeks are lazy, Its also true that they didn't manage their money well.

Now I'm not too much of an economist. But I would be annoyed if my money is used to bail out somebody for mistakes they made.

<comment><USER12> German banks have substantial exposure in Greece and other troubled Eurozone countries, through bonds/loans. Those bailouts (and we're getting a little vague here) are often used to service these debts, allowing said banks to report a profit and pretend their investments were sound in the first place.

Interesting that we rarely look at who lent Greece such vast quantities in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Greece could be the most productive country in the EU and their government would still be in dire straits. Tax evasion is endemic. It doesn't matter how much people are making if almost nobody is paying their taxes. The Greek government has started cracking down, but Greek disrespect for taxation has been building for generations and won't die easily.

<comment><USER5> It was (and mostly still is) so easy to avoid taxes in Greece that it's fair to say the burden is on the government more than the people. I believe it's difficult to make people tax-conscious when they see that it's so easy for everyone around them to steal. The tax authorities here are corrupt, underqualified, and have a very low rate of tax collection. It's so bad that it had better be replaced altogether.

<comment><USER14> Greece is a democracy. The government is representative of its people.

<comment><USER15> Is the US a democracy by the same standards?

Saying you have a democracy does not make it so, the actions of a government acting out the will of its people makes it so.

<comment><USER14> The perfect democracy achieving the will of all voters is not achievable, as different groups may promote conflicting policies. There are however parts that are consistent with all populace, and as the cabinets change you definitely can see what they do have in common.

Greek politicians are Greek people too, with same cultural background and overall attitudes prevailing in the society. Ditto for Greek government employees (a huge sector of their economy), who are there to enforce the regulations.

If there is a culture of tax evasion, you can't expect the government to fix it just because there is a tax code in the writing. People's attitude have to change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Unfortunately, as long as Greek companies don't pay taxes, Greeks can work as hard as they can the situation will continue to deteriorate.

<comment><USER17> Not sure why you were downvoted, widespread tax evasion in Greece is certainly a contributing factor for the trouble they're in. You can build an apartment building, have an 'uncompleted' top floor, and therefore pay no tax on the building.

[http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/10/greeks-b...](http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/10/greeks- bearing-bonds-201010)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Time spent in work is not time spent working. All my greek buddies have a easy gong day. They are in work a number of hours, but how productive those hours are who knows.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm biased, I'm German.

But last year I think there was an article linked that explained how Germans have more productivity output per year than US Americans, although Germans have more holidays.

Said that, it's obviously a generalization. I'd think it's very company specific, and depends on many factors, especially the number of "meetings" one has to attend, those that are not work because they have no agenda, no action items, no decisions made etc.

</comment><comment><USER20> The hours worked figure is misleading. in The Netherlands, Germany etc workforce participation rate of women are much higher. But because women tent to work mostly part-time, especially if they have kids, average the number is really low. Also a lot of young family's split this time as both parent's work part time to spend time with the kids. A normal work week is about 40 hours so if you take out 6 weeks for vacation days, sick days etc your left with 1840 hours. I think a more interesting number would be average work time per household I suspect that the list would look differently.

</comment><comment><USER21> As I understand it, Greece's problem is the wealthy completely dodge taxes, putting the burden on everyone else (or collapsing the government). It's an idealized version of America's wealthy dream-state.

</comment><comment><USER22> It does not matter how long you work. What matters is what you get done in a week.

<comment><USER23> This. The far more important column is the second one about Productivity. And Germany leads the way there with no mention for Greece.

Working more hours to produce the same thing is bad, not good.

<comment><USER24> Leads the way? Belgium and the Netherlands are higher. In that table (where did they get those numbers) I would say Norway + Netherlands 'win'; least hours, most productive. For me as a programmer that's exactly how it should be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why is there no mention of taxes here? Isn't the single biggest factor that the Greek tax system is corrupt from the ground up?

</comment><comment><USER26> Greece's problems are predominantly due to state debt, caused by:

1) State Fraud and Corruption: "In early 2010, it was revealed that successive Greek governments had been found to have consistently and deliberately misreported the country's official economic statistics to keep within the monetary union guidelines."

2) Public Tax Evasion: "Greece suffers from very high levels of tax evasion. In the last quarter of 2005, tax evasion reached 49%,[142] while in January 2006 it fell to 41.6%.[142] The Tax Justice Network has said that there are over €20 billion in Swiss bank accounts held by Greeks."

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

My personal opinion is that I really don't see why the rest of Europe should bail the Greeks out. They should be booted out of the Euro.

> "The average Greek is working a full 40% longer than the average German" > Amount of time worked != productivity.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is not a very relevant statistic. Note for instance the semi-slave factory workers of Asia who on average would work much harder and longer hours than either of these two groups, but end up with much less money and a worse lifestyle. Now why is that? (and how can I fit it within my pre-existing ideological bias?)

</comment><comment><USER28> As well as the issues other posters have mentioned, the HN title (though not the article) is misleading as the Greek retirement age was 55 until recently.

Working 40% longer hours each week, but cutting a decade off your career, does not mean you work 40% longer.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's very easy to blame simple people for the mess that capitalism created. "They spent a lot". Really? Who's to say? Did you ever wonder how much is spend on high tech weapons by your government? Do you KNOW what YOUR country's public debt is? Are YOU responsible for it (because you're gonna be held accountable for it either way).

As easy as it is to buy mainstream media "analysis" it's also just that - mainstream, meaning that it is designed to keep the powers that be from safe from criticism.

What happens in Greece is that we're taking loans upon loans to save defaulted banks that are based mainly in Greece, Germany and France. Tax evasion, porsches' and the rest are dirty propaganda designed to hide the crime that's being perpetuated. Saving failed capitalists (mainly banks up to now) by robbing the laymen.

As for the tax evasion bit, it's mostly true if we are to speak for a small fraction of the Greek population - namelly the rich and superrich Greeks. All the rest are paying our due for nothing - meaning that our taxes (for me it's about 50% of my gross income) are used to refinance loans and not a single dime goes to roads,health or education.

Bear also in mind that for two decades every banks were all over people to persuade them to get loans (sth like the mortgage situation in USA) which were used to buy shit from Germany and France (that's why many say that these countries surplasses are European south deficits). This was evident at a state level too with huge amounts going to buy arms from these two countries. Arms that were of no use.

Anyway, this issue is far from simple and what's more you, no matter where you're from, are far from just spectators. What happens in Greece (namely the ripoff of any hind of welfare state + the death of the middle class) is just an experiment to be continued in virtually every western country. It's the way that western capitalism wants to proceed - and bear in mind that what really counts is workers wages (that have been slashed in Greece since the begining of all this crisis) - many big heads waiving their finger have told us Greeks, that the only way to get back to economic development again is to be OK with chinese salaries. We're trying to take that fingers and put them back where they belong and maybe you should try thinking your line of defense against those failed bussinessmen and politicians.

A Greek.

<comment><USER30> _It's very easy to blame simple people for the mess that capitalism created._

Greece has a problem with _government_ debt. How do you blame capitalism for this?

 _What happens in Greece is that we're taking loans upon loans to save defaulted banks that are based mainly in Greece, Germany and France._

If that is the only problem, why not simply default and let the banks fail?

<comment><USER31> They really need to, and a large portion of the populace seems to be fighting for it.

Also, I'm not sure that we can blame Greek public debt for the rise in interest rates that's actually killing the country, seeing as Spain is going through a similar thing and they were running surpluses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Well obviously they should work less then. Most people I know who spend less time working tend to enjoy life more, look better, have more money and live longer.

Oh and they are more austere.

</comment><comment><USER33> We're led to believe the solution to this economic crisis is either getting deeper in debt or more austerity measures (higher taxes, less subsidies) We're led to believe it's either A or B. It's neither A or B for most countries. The truth of the matter is that it's a political problem. We have to reduce the size of the government.

<comment><USER34> ... and jail the corrupt people that hold public office yet act against the citizens in any way. Until that moment in time, nothing good will come out of this and the status quo will just keep on rolling and smashing everyone in its way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Germans are known for their efficiency, not hard work. Besides, a rested worker is more productive than an overworked one. Germany has got it right.

Also, starting a business in Germany is much easier than in Greece - it's on par with the US and UK, while Greece is more restrictive for some reason...

<comment><USER19> But only recently. It was a nightmare founding a limited 10 years ago (GmbH) when I founded a startup, it's quite easy today when my wife founded a startup (UG).

Many Germans founded Ltds in Britain on paper, that made the government see the need to change some laws.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> As a Greek I have to admit that this number tells half the truth. The other half is that in terms of productivity Greece is very low. So while we may work a lot more than the average German the quality of the products/services we provide is significantly worse.

</comment><comment><USER37> Fun thing that this article doesn't mention: in Germany it is very, very common to work extra hours that are not paid and not in the books. This is particularly true for high profile jobs.

<comment><USER38> > _in Germany it is very, very common to work extra hours that are not paid > and not in the books_

I am working in Germany and what are you talking about? More specifically which industry? The employment laws here are so ridiculously pro-employee that I basically need to "excuse" and justify myself if I was to work more than X hours a week. And typically, at least in IT, a certain amount of overtime (or a "flat charge") is in your contract and you get more salary for that - <USER2> than the so called "collective agreement" requires your employer to pay you. So for most people in regular jobs, I doubt this holds true. Maybe small IT startups try to squeeze the youngens by circumventing all laws and regulations? At least where I am working, typical German bigger but not huge company, you can set your clock by how punctual they show up to and especially leave work; shortly after 5pm they can start cleaning here because that's when practically the whole building is empty except for some poor souls like me.

"High profile", executive level jobs are different, that is true but this is to be expected at that level and pay rate and I doubt you will find any other country where this doesn't hold true.

<comment><USER39> I think it's more common with larger companies and the corresponding 9-to-5 attitude.

I work for as architect for a small consultancy/software-development company and I'm paid the same salary no matter how many hours I actually work. Contract says 40 h/week, but there are weeks when I reach the 40 on wednesday. MIght be able to work less than 40 hours when times are not as stressful (haha), but the average has to be clearly above 40 h/week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I heard some of them even hold two full time jobs at the same time, receiving double salary. And that is in government employment, one of the most stressful jobs available in Greece.

</comment><comment><USER41> As the 4 columns show, productivity & hours worked go diametrically opposite (negatively correlated). All the countries in the most working list are also in the least productive list. So, it still doesn't change the German assertion that Greeks are not doing enough.

Second, the article itself accepts - " because the two labour markets are structured differently, it is actually hard to compare like with like."

That means the headline is pointless as it is contradicted by the sentence above.

</comment><comment><USER42> Very interesting to see that Norway is the 2nd most productive, but ranks 3rd in fewest hours worked! Makes me feel good about leaving work at four. ;)

<comment><USER43> But what is that number anyway? It's probably just GNP / people. ? Norway will look good in that respect due to the oil.

<comment><USER42> Doesn't say, unfortunately.

"They are collected by individual national statistics authorities who each have their own methods of collecting and collating information."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I am not surprised that the most hard working populations are the most unproductive. The mythical man-hour doesn't just apply to software.

</comment><comment><USER45> I don't know about Greece but the statistics in the page are quite disturbing to read. You do long work hours to be more productive, but in the end (probably it has more factors than that but I am simplifying it) it doesn't do you any good so you do overtime, which damages your productivity even more...

This is the most damned vicious cycle I've ever seen I think...

</comment><comment><USER46> We keep hearing about the lazy Greeks being bailed out, but isn't it really the banks who lent too much money to Greece who are being bailed out? If the Greeks are so lazy and corrupt, then it was foolish to lend them so much. Why should laziness be punished while foolishness is rewarded? Which poses the greater systemic threat?

</comment><comment><USER47> This article would be much more beneficial if it went beyond pointing out inaccuracies in common beliefs, and explained where they came from. As given it simply regurgitates self reported government statistics and provides no insight.

</comment><comment><USER48> There is a difference between "working" and working.. "working" in a highly inefficient system is very different than working fewer hours in a more efficient system

</comment><comment><USER49> (If you were confused why the "Most X" column is not the same as "Least X" but in reverse order, it's because the list is not exhaustive.)

</comment><comment><USER50> When we talk about the shortcomings of Greece we should not forget that Greece was under military dictatorship up until the middle of the 70's (as were Spain and Portugal). And there were several terrorist bombings afterwards ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Organization_17_N...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Organization_17_November) just to name one of many groups).

As a German I'm getting tired of painting the Greeks as lazy. It's rather their country that's in a mess.

</comment><comment><USER51> Flagged for politics.

</comment><comment><USER38> One thing that I always find very unsettling when reading things like that: how Germany is somehow always an epitome of efficiency and productiveness. I am working here and I absolutely do NOT perceive it like that and friends who are also working here confirmed that impression. We are constantly swapping horror-stories of stupid bureaucracy, lengthy extremely bloated processes, having to do things five times, lazy people, stupid people, people who have no idea about their job and no education, tons of stupid "office wars/games" going on, lengthy discussions about very petty things and just for the sake of "but I was actually right" and so on and so forth...

The only conclusion is then, it is much much MUCH worse elsewhere? Really?? (Or is this just some sort of "halo effect"?)

</comment><comment><USER52> working longer hours != working more or harder.

much of the financial problems in .gr (and .it) have occurred because many citizens do not declare the bulk of their income, then, lo and behold, there is insufficient tax revenue to pay for the myriad government services. there are more porsche cayennes in .gr than there are people who declared over EUR 50K income in 2010.

based on the fact that .gr has essentially committed long-term fraud with their financials i put absolutely zero stock in any claim that "they're working harder than germany".

sure, there are some greeks who work really hard and are productive, but if you've spent any decent amount of time in other countries that border the mediterranean sea you'll notice that their definition of "work" is very different from most people from a less pleasant climate.

<comment><USER53> _there are more porsche cayennes in .gr than there are people who declared over EUR 50K income in 2010_

That 'fact' is not only completely untrue, but utterly ridiculous and off by several orders of magnitude. There where over 300000 people declaring of EUR 50k in income in 2010, while Porsche has sold 1500 Cayennes in Greece since launch.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Team communication solution that keeps employees happy and productive - <AUTHOR> https://www.happierco.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN.

We would really love to get your feedback on this.

We started months ago as an employee engagement solution. We got customers coming from some of our competitors, trying to implement OKRs, CPM, pulse surveys and other systems du jour. They were not only having issues with the complexity of existing tools, but also the employee engagement activities were not actually "engaging" to employees. Employees felt like they had to use these systems to please the company leadership. So, that wasn't helping at all in terms of employee happiness.

Let's be honest, OKRs and other performance management systems can be hard to do, and are usually badly implemented in companies, which is hurtful for culture and morale.

So we made this new version of Happierco. A team communication solution that keeps employees happy and productive.

Happierco gives each employee and team a profile where they share their current goals and progress, receive feedback and recognition from colleagues and managers. Team members can reach out to each other to create personal connections. They can also answer surveys about their workplace or organize around specific topics impacting their work.

Data about employees' work and performance is usually scattered across multiple tools. Happierco makes it easy to integrate with other productivity software to pull the data into teams and users profiles.

We want to make it part of day to day work, and useful to everyone, instead of building a tool that is only useful for People Operations, HR and company leadership.

Please take a look and let us know what you think. Any feedback, even the harshest critics, are welcome!

<comment><USER2> +1 for spotting a problem. One comment I would have is that for our sales team it is particularly useful if it is mobile or at least mobile friendly.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a mobile app on our roadmap.

26% of our daily users are on mobile, but we're not yet happy about how it works on mobile browsers. We should have an update next week that focuses on making it more mobile friendly.</comment></comment></comment>


Prowl: Growl client for the iPhone - Any notification over push - <AUTHOR> https://prowl.weks.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> You can push anything, server notification, facebook notification, twitter replies or push mail.. as it is based on Growl. Pretty clever!

I wonder how it works out for the dev if users use it heavily for years paying only a one-time 3$...

</comment><comment><USER2> Still on the fence as to how useful this will be, given that you either need:

a) A Growl-enabled computer running and connected to the Internet; or b) Your own server somewhere making API calls to create the push notifications.

It might work for iTunes Store developers to get cheap pushes to their customers, but other than server notifications (i.e "Server A is down, please ring so and so"), I'm not sure how useful this would be to the general public.

<comment><USER3> "your download has just finished" popping up in your iphone when you're on the go (or at the pool), or the latest tweets from friends (using Adium), or even getting notified when your friends log on to Xbox live are examples of some quite interesting general public things that can be done...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Gaining Experience as a Full-Stack Developer - <AUTHOR> TL;DR, How do you keep your knowledge/experience sharp as a full-stack developer and still not feeling burned out?<p>I work as a full-stack developer, I enjoy it, but I find the amount of things to learn and keep up to date with are very overwhelming. I'm new to the software industry, it's less than 5 years since I graduated college, and I'm still not even near the "good enough" stage, and the reason I guess is that I'm still trying to catch up with too many things, starting from server configuration/setup, up to following the latest changes/trends in the front-end world. I do side projects/freelancing outside my full-time job, and some of these projects are pure UI design, some others are pure backend and API development, in these projects, I feel more relaxed and enjoying the work I do, compared to when I jump from layer to another as a full-stack developer. So I guess my question is for those who do the same thing, how do you keep your knowledge/experience sharp in each stack? <comment><USER2> You _don 't_ stay sharp across the entire discipline, that's the trade off. Inherently a generalist will always be behind a specialist. As someone in a similar spot. I've found that two practices keep me effective.

1\. Stay on the '80' side of the 80/20 rule. Find breakpoints where you are getting diminishing returns. Stop yourself when you are getting into specialist territory, by asking 'how often am I going to need this?'

2\. Have a network of specialists who you can call when you need abilities in that last 20%. This is the hardest part because you will have made a lot of progress and want to just keep going on your own. It's important to take a step back and think "I could call <specialist> and they would knock this down in a day".

As a generalist think of yourself as consumer rather than a producer.</comment>


Using load shedding to survive a success disaster - CRE life lessons - <AUTHOR> https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/12/using-load-shedding-to-survive-a-success-disaster-CRE-life-lessons.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> I have a set of rules for load shedding that I urge you to consider. First, and foremost, whenever you read (or are about to say) "load shedding" just mentally substitute the correct terminology, which is "intentionally serving errors." This will put you in the right frame of mind to properly ponder the outcomes.

Secondly, the error path on your backend must be strictly cheaper than the success path, or the whole scheme doesn't work. Particularly bad actions on error are for example logging an error at such a high severity that the log files need to be flushed and synced, which is likely to be tremendously expensive. Another example is taking a mutex and incrementing some error counter that normally wouldn't be incremented on the serving path. If this tends to synchronize all your serving threads, your server will collapse.

Third, load shedding can only be implemented correctly if you control the client and the server, end-to-end. Perhaps you want to avoid hot spots by serving a soft error from an overloaded shard. If your client is guaranteed to try another shard (or just give up) this is a good approach. If the client might retry on the same shard, then it's not helpful. You just "shed load" in such a way that you had to serve the same request twice.

<comment><USER3> Your second point is critically important and often not well considered. I once worked on a system where the base where the base exception class logged to the filesystem upon instantiation, which meant a catastrophic response to a full disk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some additional things that can be done:

* soft-shedding, where instead of dropping a request (which might just incur a retry storm), sometimes it is appropriate to send back a cheap response so that the clients sees a successful response instead of an error

* route critical requests and non-critical requests to separate clusters that can be scaled and configured independently. The blog post mention doing that using DNS, but that also works for mid-tier services.

* build back-pressure into the client. Instead of a timeout or error, a well-conforming client can enter "polite" mode when it receives a signal that the backend is overwhelmed.

<comment><USER5> Is soft-shedding a good idea? You're still paying CPU time to come up with a response that is a 200, but probably won't fool the client or the user anyway. Without a signal that the server is having problems with load, the retries can be more aggressive.

<comment><USER6> Imagine a Netflix type service which needed to calculate a bunch of different categories to show the user. If some of them are more expensive to compute than others, those categories could be dropped, while still returning an acceptable response to the user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We did this very successfully at Blekko (search engine) to keep the system from getting over loaded. The frontend engineer Bryn designed a really useful way of monitoring nginx connections to the backend and to shed load when they exceeded a threshold, and Greg designed a 'geoknob' that would let us turn off traffic to regions of the world that were unlikely to be our primary customer base.

Also anomalous load shedding is a great indication of a traffic anomaly. Big scrapers sometimes appeared that way first even when their attack was coming from a wide number of IPs.

</comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone comment on when at what level of scale this kind of issue might arise? It seems like it would be fairly costly to implement and test, is it safe to assume that when you attempt this it is either infeasible or too costly to continue to scale to be able to service the peak load? If you were running on bare-metal and simply could not add more instances/databases/caches/etc fast enough I can understand that you might be able to deploy a software solution like this faster than increasing capacity. I could also understand being capped by the cost of continuing to scale but I can't imagine putting the development effort into this kind of solution unless there were no other options?

Would these kind of techniques ever be a worthwhile exercise to a (early) startup or a small company that is hosting in the cloud or is it a last resort after you have already gotten quite large?

<comment><USER2> I think your question is really excellent. If you don't feel pressure to eek out the very last drop of marginal utilization, load shedding might not be for you. It may be quite a bit easier to just add 5% more CPU or sandbag your open-loop capacity plan.

<comment><USER8> Thanks, its an interesting topic but as I read it I started to think about someone coming along with a startup or a side project actually thinking this is something they would want to put effort into prematurely rather than putting more effort into more (cost and time) productive optimizations or the product itself.

I'm definitely going to store the techniques away in my mental toolbox for later though and hope I get an opportunity to say "Procrustean load shedding" in a standup sometime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For anyone who's interested, the following paper on load shedding is also a good read: [https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2010/readings/mogul96usenix...](https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2010/readings/mogul96usenix.pdf)

The paper basically identifies the problem as a "livelock". You have a system that receives so many requests that instead of making any real progress, it tries to move those requests through different queues (Section 6).

If you're building a distributed system (say SOA), I find that load shedding also has the nice property that it gives the system's clients immediate feedback -- rather than having the client wait for a long time and make guesses.

</comment><comment><USER10> This reads like an ideal use case for an object store service. My guess is with the traffic patterns of mobile clients, this was a necessity. Good read.</comment>


JetBlue Shakes Up Pilot Hiring by Training Them from Scratch - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-25/jetblue-to-shake-up-hiring-on-start-from-scratch-pilot-training <comment><USER2> At least from what little is mentioned (and what very little I know on the subject), this sounds like a terrible way to become a commercial pilot. If you can't go a more traditional route like military or Embry-Riddle, it seems like an airline in the developing world would by far be the most fun. I think Susi Air was hiring/training foreign pilots with little to no prior experience, though due to new legislation I believe there is now a 250hr requirement.

Edit: I double-checked and there is now a 750hr requirement for foreign pilots. What a bummer as there used to be opportunities for 0hr's in Indo.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are already too many commercial pilots in the world, and almost all of them are captive to the need to maintain their flight books by .. flying often. This has been a common problem for decades now - too many pilots, not enough planes for them to fly.

So what has happened is those who own and operate the planes have a glut on their hands. They can choose the cheapest pilots available, and keep them flying for cheap, simply because there are 10 more pilots out there willing to fly just to maintain their certs.

The same is happening in software development. There are too many cheap developers out there, willing to write software for beans, and thus producing crappy software is the norm. Nobody wants to pay to do software 'properly' these days - they want it down 'now'. Knowing that there are 100 developers out there willing to work for peanuts, for every developer who expects to get paid properly for doing the really hard work first, means that customers of software development have a glut on their hands too. Its a buyers market, simple.

<comment><USER4> >> The same is happening in software development.

Nonsense. There is a huge shortage of devs and it's only going to get worse, software is taking over the world.

<comment><USER3> There truly are parts of the world where there are too many programmers.

<comment><USER4> Which are these parts?

I'm guessing ... Mars? Because most places on Earth programmers can work remotely.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, right. Mars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a really bad article:

* did not say who's paying for the training

* number of hours required for ATP is less than 1,500 for certain structured training programs

* there definitely is and will be a shortage of ATPs who are willing to be paid at regional rates of $18k-$25k under the new knee-jerk regulations

* other airlines are already offering school loan "forgiveness" for new hires

<comment><USER6> Last sentence, third to last paragraph: _Prospective pilots would pay for their own training._

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I suppose the pilot union's objection is that this will somehow lead to a lower tier pay for incoming pilots.

Would experienced developers have similar objections, if their companies proposed essentially running their own code academies?

<comment><USER8> I understand the concern, but I'm not sure if that's a fair comparison. It would be like tech companies going from "We're only going to hire people who have master's degrees in computer science" to "We'll experiment with training programs for people who just have bachelor's degrees in related fields"

It might indeed lower pay for the people who have the most experience, but probably not by much. It's hard to believe that it will be a net negative for the company or its customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's terrifying.</comment>


Ink. An(other?) impressive Twitter Bootstrap. Is it? - <AUTHOR> http://ink.sapo.pt/

<comment><USER2> Is there any way to stop the code view appearing in its intermediate textarea form, and go straight to the full line-numbered/highlighted view? I had the same issue here: [http://www.fabfabbers.com/openscad/](http://www.fabfabbers.com/openscad/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I tried the code and its very simple and elegant. Will try out in my next new project.</comment>


Show HN: Famous quotes in your terminal (golang cli app) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jamiecollinson/quote <comment><USER2> Nice, you've reinvented and "extended" fortune!</comment>