Defending IE6 - <AUTHOR> http://coda.co.za/blog/2009/04/01/defending-ie6 Damien du Toit makes an excellent case for continued support of IE6 and examines a methodology for doing so. <comment><USER4> The problem he's missing is simple math. We're a small startup making apps for social networks, and about 7% of our customers use IE6. (I keep meaning to check by revenue, I bet it's less then, since presumably a lot of them are using it at work where they can't just whip out their credit card.) Unfortunately, getting our great UI to work in IE6 takes up some percentage of our time. As time goes on, the percentage of users drops and the percentage of our time increases. I'm not sure if they've crossed paths yet, but if not, it's close.

Sure, if you have unlimited resources, develop for IE6, Opera, whatever else. But when you're on a budget, and you have to choose between making your app 20% better for 93% of your users, or making it work for the extra 7%, it's not a no-brainer.

<comment><USER5> He is not advocating that you get your great UI to work on IE6. He is advocating that you get a lame UI just for IE6 users.

<comment><USER6> Which takes nearly as much, if not even more effort.

<comment><USER7> It really doesn't. I'm an experienced front-end coder, and I can tell you right now that the amount of extra work I put into IE6 support is really not prohibitively high. The bugs and issues in IE6 are well-known and well- documented, so it's a simple matter of professionalism to be aware of these things, and account for them, as you code.

<comment><USER6> Depends on what your frontend looks like. The average run-off-the-mill HTML site can ofcourse be made to work in all browsers with little effort. The real pain starts when you want to do interesting stuff. Advanced AJAX and javascript magic just doesn't work in IE6 without horrible overhead - <USER2> due to the lack of sensible debugging tools.

<comment><USER7> Or... you could just use a Javascript framework that takes care of that abstraction for you. This is seriously not a hard problem.

<comment><USER6> Well, frameworks go a long way but they don't help with the pains in the CSS area. When supporting IE6 you're generally limiting yourself to the capabilities of that browser. And for any non-trivial site you _will_ run into hard problems regularly, unless you're leaving HTML behind entirely (ExtJS, Flash).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If we're talking about designer blogs or minor sites/apps that do not involve a great amount of development, then I absolutely agree with the author.

BUT if we're talking about large web applications that have serious development costs for every "supported" web browser, then his argument breaks down quickly. These costs come in the form of feature development, bug fixing and in customer support for released features. When a single web browser consumes the majority of these costs, yet the browser is continually falling lower and lower in usage, then it's time to put serious thought in dropping support for that browser.

<comment><USER9> I'm the only developer for a company that has created (and continues to support) some huge sites that require(d) a great amount of development. For the majority of these sites, IE6 is not falling in usage. It has hit - <USER3> stuck at - around 30%. Alienating 30% of a client's potential customers is just not an option.

<comment><USER6> That sounds painful - and interesting.

Do you happen to know what kind of userbase that is?

Since IE7 is pushed pretty aggressively by windows update I would think there must be a few large corporations in there who have rejected the update thus far?

At least I _want_ to think that because IE6 being stuck at 30% gives me the shivers. On our sites IE6 has been constantly dropping since about December and is now at around 18%. That's still too much but at least the tendency is right here...

<comment><USER9> I can't be too specific but one site in particular that I maintain has a big user base in education (from nurseries to universities) and I think it's very likely that this heavily influences the IE stats.

I know from experience (I've worked as tech support in schools and a college) that these establishments are normally the very last to push out upgrades to things like browsers. There's a big "if it works, don't touch it" attitude.

<comment><USER10> Which implies that if a sufficient number of web sites cease to work with IE6, such sites will "touch it"?

<comment><USER9> Not really. Your average IT admin in a school isn't going to care that the students can't get to latestweb2gadget.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are simply so many browsers and devices being used today, it is hard (impossible?) for a site, particularly a small startup, to support everything. I think its important to figure out who your target is. Do I need support on cell phone browsers? What types of interactions do I need with my users? What groups will be my "bread and butter" so to speak? If I'm selling Macintosh accessories, perhaps I don't need to support IE6.

I think you have to make some decisions about what you want to support. I really don't think complaining to your users about the browser they have chosen helps. If anything, it drives them away. I do think that no matter what you choose, you should always give your users back something. You may not be able to support all browsers, but don't return a page that simply doesn't work and leaves the user wondering why. This may be easier said than done, but I think its a good middle ground between the complexities of trying to support everything and alienating users by only supporting your "chosen path"

</comment><comment><USER12> What features of IE7 are difficult or impossible to emulate in IE6? In my experience, getting sites working with IE6 is really easy. There are _very_ few things that IE7 can do that IE6 cannot. (It is funny that this argument is usually only made to disparage IE7 but never to support IE6.) To support IE7 you've already given up border-radius, display: table, automatic PNG transparency, SVG, a lot of the DOM, and a lot of the other things that make developing for other browsers so easy. With IE6, you can get a lot of the functionality of IE7 with just a little Javascript (already written for you by others), a few conditional comments, and a little extra CSS. You might have performance issues with adding all these workarounds, but workiing with poor performance is usually better than not working at all.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm not sure exactly why there's so much controversy here.

The customers of your website should always come first, and if they use IE6, support IE6. Making them upgrade is a surefire way to alienate them or encourage them to go somewhere else. (not to mention, if you already support IE7, supporting IE6 is not that big of a stretch)

</comment><comment><USER14> If you have are a lot of IE 6 customers, it may just be impossible to try to force them to switch browsers without losing a lot of customers. Not sure we really need anyone to explain that.

However, this post seems to go beyond that and basically be quite passionately explaining ways that we can happily accept and just deal with the multitudes of browser incompatibilities and inabilities. Probably, this guy makes his living off of these problems.

This person's attitude is absolutely sickening to me. The situation with browser incompatibilities and deficiencies is out of control. Action must be taken.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if putting another browser on a CD and putting it in with a customers purchase would make any impact on the percentage of IE6 browsers visiting that site in the future. It could be a worthwhile investment if IE6 support could be dropped sooner.

For example if a business has many users that are on IE6, but the company put a firefox cd in the box of every order, would the number of users on that website using IE6 drop at substantially faster rate than if they didn't?

<comment><USER9> I used to get lots of AOL CDs back in the day. It didn't make me in any way tempted to go with AOL.

<comment><USER15> Some people must have though, or they would have stopped, and I wouldn't have collected a lifetimes supply of coasters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "you shouldn't even maintain a list of supported browsers in the first place."

Does "any reasonably standards-compliant browser" count as a list of supported browsers?</comment>


Smallest Hard Disk to Date Writes Information Atom by Atom - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencenewsline.com/news/2016071815570027.html <comment><USER2> Several submissions of this item:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116686) (nature.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116615](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116615) (gizmodo.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116127) (wsj.com)

Which will win the race for votes?

</comment><comment><USER3> But does it support atomic writes?</comment>


"I Guess That's What You Do When You're in College." - <AUTHOR> https://www.juandavidcampolargo.com/blog/college-first-principles <comment><USER2> > Doing something because other people are doing it is the path to misery and > competition.

So very very wrong.

Doing everything everyone else is doing is the road to group membership and social acceptance and great cultural fit and the best jobs and the most lucrative opportunities and loads and loads of money.

Doing things specifically because nobody else is doing them is a ticket to a pit of despair full of poverty and loneliness and isolation.

I know the difference very well because I never do popular things. I always choose unpopular projects that nobody cares about because my attitude is if a project is too popular then too many people are doing it already. I want to do things that nobody else is doing because if not me then nobody else will do them.

Doing something that nobody else is doing is very rewarding. Talking to other people about it is misery. People do not care and you are competing for their attention with other things that they actually care about. And you lose the competition.

<comment><USER3> I kind of agree. Doing things that other people aren't doing (e.g. because it's hard) even though it needs to be done would be a better heuristic and can lead to an interesting career and possibly even success.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point! I don't disagree. In the same quote, I added a footnote to explain how I was mostly referring to businesses and startups.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A map of the world's virtual museums - <AUTHOR> https://virtualmuseums.io/ <comment><USER2> Thank you for creating this.

As a museum lover (I've visited ~ 170 around the world), I struggle with getting into virtual tours. I wonder if anyone else feels that virtual museum tours are so far from ideal that it isn't worthwhile investing the time to browse? I can't seem to get into them -- not because of trivial reasons like "oh it's not like the real thing", but more like no one's been able to produce the right UI for enjoying a museum. Even Google's Art and Culture indoor maps of museums is only good for 5 minutes of amusement and not worth bothering with again. I clicked on several links in the comments and was like, eh -- doesn't really hold my interest (though if I were physically at the museum I'd be spending hours).

I wonder if these are factors:

1) Lack of good photography. Most museums tend to be dark, so you need professional photographers who know how to work with low-light photography. Also most pictures/videos tend to be low res for some reason, which takes away from the enjoyment. I wonder if most museums are loath to make high-res photography available for free because it cannibalizes their admissions.

Google Arts and Culture has some high-res artwork, but the selection is extremely limited.

2) Unwieldy ways to move in space. Google indoor maps, which has a FPS (first person shooter) interface, isn't the most natural to navigate, because it doesn't match how people actually experience a museum. I wonder if instead of an FPS perspective, an adventure-game orthographic view might make more sense? It would let you walk around the museum and click on objects to interact with them. Also let's face it -- professional museum goers will tell you that they are extremely selective and don't interact with all exhibits, so a frictionless way to preview and skip exhibits is key.

3) Limited/non-comprehensive collection. Usually only the less interesting collections are online. (not always true, but generally true). This is likely due to the cost of putting entire collections online, and there not being a lot of payoff -- unless it was possible to create a UI good enough to support monetization.

4) Lack of a cohesive story. Because only select pieces are on display online, the experience is disjointed, vs browsing a physical section of the museum which groups like objects together. The best museum story I've ever come across was the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which told a chronological story.

Does anyone know of any museum virtual tours that don't suffer from these issues?

<comment><USER3> 1) Not sure. I would say photos are usually quite ok.

2) Yes I agree: Those 360° photos are ok but the transition from one to the next is poor, even for google indoor-map as surprising as it sounds.

The only good 360° photo technology is by far matterport. [https://matterport.com](https://matterport.com)

3) I would think it is ofen marketing. To market their museum. Photos, 100 years ago did not kill the "presence" in museums.

Same for virtual visits... Nothing to worry about.

4) Yes, I also think an audio comment would add a lot. I wonder why no 360° visit does this...

Thierry [https://free-visit.net](https://free-visit.net)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for your thoughts.

1) It depends on the site. It seems many are still quite low-res, not even as good as pictures taken on Instagram.

2) I wonder if 360° is the right approach. We typically don't need to experience the transition from exhibit to exhibit. We only need 360° around the exhibit. An adventure-game sprite may be good enough to move around the space and click on objects as needed.

3) Unless the virtual visits were actually good -- then part of the ticket sales might be affected. So the solution is to sell tickets for virtual tours (but they have to be really good)

4) Audio would be nice, just like the headset you can rent at many museums. What I meant though was more the grouping and sequence of the exhibits -- for instance when you walk through a special exhibit, the sequence tells the story. In virtual tours, because the collection is incompletely digitized, the story is broken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks, I'm the creator of virtualmuseums.io

I built it after seeing a bunch of articles listing virtual museums around the world. I felt like part of the point of touring these virtual museums was to capture just a tiny bit of the fun of travelling, but that this is lost when you just scroll through articles.

I thought that it'd be more fun to put all the museums on a map, and let you track your progress as you visit them, as this helps to recreate a tiny part of what's fun about travelling.

Would love to hear your thoughts/suggestions :)

<comment><USER4> British Museum online collections:

[https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_onlin...](https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx)

BM prints and drawings virtual gallery:

[https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/galleries/prints- an...](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/galleries/prints-and-drawings- virtual-gallery)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note also that Google has an Arts and Culture site that has links to virtual museums around the world. They have lots of interesting content.

[https://artsandculture.google.com](https://artsandculture.google.com)

<comment><USER6> I wish the whole experience wasn't so laggy (on 2020 iPad Pro).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, calling all those (pretty good) visits "virtual visits" is a bit like calling a beer a strong drink.

Now I think this is more of a strong drink : [https://free- visit.net/index.php/fr/demos](https://free-visit.net/index.php/fr/demos)

</comment><comment><USER7> Just playing with it now, and I love the idea.

Have you thought about adding the zoos and aquariums that are live-streaming their animals?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Yeah I've definitely been tempted with adding more ideas like these. The one question I've struggled with, and would be super keen for your thoughts on, is whether it'd look okay to have them on the virtualmuseums.io domain, or whether you think it's worth starting again and trying to capture all the best 'virtual attractions' on a single map?

<comment><USER7> That's a really good question: where to stop.

Would it be possible to filter them by type? Put them all on the site, tag them, and let people choose to display particular tags or categories.

<comment><AUTHOR> 100% possible! There's still the question of whether you'd put them on the existing site, or make a new (more general) site to host all the links on. Definitely keen for thoughts as I'm torn between the two

<comment><USER8> There are Unix programs where a single executable answers to different names, and behaves accordingly (e.g. busybox works as ls or cat or ..., I think).

You could have a single site, with different names, where the filter is preset by the URL used.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Uber incentives for drivers is off-the-roof in India - <AUTHOR> In India, the incentive structure is like this:
INR 6,500 bonus for earning INR 1,500 in a day,
INR 6,000 for earning INR 1,100
and so on..
What is Uber expecting out of these huge incentives is out of my understanding. A driver now earns more than most of the software engineers in India (avg. salary being less than INR 2000 per day). Does Uber expect a behaviour change in the drivers that they will keep on behaving nicely to passengers even after taking away the incentives?
What effect will it have on the drivers after they take away the 6x incentive is what bothers me. How unhappy will that make them, earning INR 1,50,000 per month and then suddenly one day start earning INR 30,000 per month. I am sure they will no longer care about rating or passengers as much as they do now.
Why does it have to be this way? inevitably incentives are going to go away then why to show such dreams to drivers only to later crush them? <comment><USER2> Onboarding drivers with rosy promises first, and then cutting compensation later, has been their pattern everywhere else.</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg: The Recode interview - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2018/7/18/17575156/mark-zuckerberg-interview-facebook-recode-kara-swisher <comment><USER2> This is a hugely important podcast to listen to. Getting Zuck into a zone where he's forced to be candid and listen to (and engage with) critical conversation about Facebook's role in the world and potential abuse of power is certainly not a regular occurrence. Kudos to Swisher for getting this level of access.</comment>


Sun Microsystems slashing up to 3,000 jobs, 10 pct - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/10/20/financial/f134256D97.DTL&tsp=1 <comment><USER2> Wait until the deal with Oracle goes through...

</comment><comment><USER3> Is the "%" key missing from your keyboard? If not, why are you abbreviating "percent" to "pct"?

</comment><comment><USER4> Doomed</comment>


Did Ancient Greeks Sail to Canada? - <AUTHOR> https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/did-ancient-greeks-sail-to-canada/ <comment><USER2> This is so obviously silly. If the Greeks made such a voyage, it certainly wasn't in s trireme. Triremes are warships optimized for battle near shore.

One reason triremes didn't sail far from shore is that there is no room on board for the crew to do anything other than row. There are no bunks, there are no holds. If you want to eat or sleep, you need to get off the boat.

Another is that because of the wood used to construct them, triremes needed to be beached overnight to dry out. Leaving the ship in the water continuously would lead to the timbers becoming waterlogged, making the ship too heavy and slow to row.

At any rate, Plutarch's text doesn't say anything about triremes, only that the crew rowed to these islands. You can read an English translation here: [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0357%3Asection%3D26)

It seems to me that Plutarch doesn't necessarily believe this account, seeing as its related by an interlocutor as a myth.

At any rate, the directions are inconsistent, since rowing 5 days west from Britain to 'Ogygia,' then northwest (the direction of the setting summer sun) an equal distance to these 3 islands, can't bring you south to the latitude of the Caspian Sea. The account of the short day in winter also doesn't square with that latitude.

<comment><USER3> Everyone knows Triremes can't end their turn a square away from shore!

<comment><USER4> They can, just risk being lost to the ocean

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Evidence is evidence and until it's found, we don't really know much.

That said... ancestors of Polynesians, melanesians and Micronesians were navigating to remote islands 2-3kya. They found nearly all of them, essentially surveying the entire Pacific. Their wider language group ranges from Indonesia to Easter island, Hawaii & Madagascar!

 _That_ is evidence of feats that "western civilization" did not master until the 1700s, in Darwin or Cook's days using industrial era technology.

I think it's very likely that ancient voyages contacted south America, Australia & Africa & asia at least to some degree.

Doesn't say much about the particulars, but ancient long distance ocean travel happened. Eric the red is (now almost certainly) real. This suggests (imo) the stories of the St Brendan voyage west and North American voyages to Europe are totally plausible.

Even Plato's Atlantis (10kya) is back on the table, especially considering the finds we now have from these very early periods.

<comment><USER6> It takes certain developments in shipbuilding to cross oceans reliably, particularly the need to build ships that can take storms and high waves well. Crossing the North Atlantic without a keeled ship is a good way to guarantee shipwreck.

There's no habitation of intermediate island hopping points that one might expect from transoceanic-capable cultures before European exploration: islands like the Falklands, Bermuda, Azores, Iceland. It's plausible that isolated, shipwrecked people drifted to land via oceanic currents, but that's not the kind of contact posited.

Viking precolumbian contact is confirmed. Polynesian contact is suspected, but the only evidence for this is the sweet potato, and there is a maddening lack of cultural, linguistic, or archaeological evidence to back this up. Pretty much every other hypothesis tends to be rooted in individual misunderstanding of evidence, very loose artistic correspondence ("this image from <insert culture here> totally looks like <insert other culture here>. CONTACT CONFIRMED!"), nationalistic priority claims (particularly of the discovery of Grand Banks, and Chinese claims to have gotten to the Americas before Columbus), or outright fraud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> FTA:

 _To be clear, there is no firm evidence of the ancient Greeks' purported voyages. There are no known physical remains of these historic Greek settlements in North America, nor are there first-hand descriptions of such journeys in anything but one account from antiquity._

<comment><USER8> On the plus side, this article gives us another data point supporting Betteridge's law.

<comment><USER9> Plus it's just plain fun to think about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find it hard to see how this kind of voyage could be done with a trireme however in Hellenistic times they were building much larger ships like the Tesseraconter [http://www.naval-encyclopedia.com/hellenistic- ships/](http://www.naval-encyclopedia.com/hellenistic-ships/) . Personally I don't discount the possibility that some Hellenistic ship reached North America but unless proven it is hard to accept all this. I have seen a lot of theories over the years mainly because of the Pytheas journey mentioned below but without evidence they are just theories.

PS: Who knows maybe I do have some ancient ancestry in Canada :)

</comment><comment><USER11> It is very strange to address some place in America with Volga river delta. Like "Have you been to Ohio? Yes, that Ohio which more or less lines up with Astrakhan".

<comment><USER12> That's not particularly fantastical. They certainly knew how to measure latitude pretty accurately back then, and clearly he knew the latitude of the Volga delta. Some maps of the era gave latitude measurements for notable places. It's pretty coincidental that the mouth of the St. Lawrence happens to line up so closely, but I'm sure it is just a coincidence. There's no island of Ogygia 5 days sailing west of Britain either.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps... By the way, could he mean longitude instead of latitude? I find it more logical to mention Volga river delta in this case.

<comment><USER13> Longitude measurements, for obvious physical reasons, are terribly difficult and they become decent only in modern times with high quality mechanical clocks. No chance of confusion.

<comment><USER14> For people who may not know of these obvious reasons: measuring latitude can be done by looking at the sun's elevation when it is the highest in the sky or by looking at the position of the northern star at night.

Longitude requires to compare the difference between the solar time and a reference time, kept with a clock. Good clocks that stay accurate even on a moving boat took a lot more time to be invented.

<comment><USER15> You _can_ get longitude without a clock, via lunar distances. It's just not an easy method, and didn't really become practical until the Nautical Almanac provided the requisite tables, not long before the first proper marine chronometers came into use.

But people often forget how much mathematical training was needed to navigate in the age of sail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Considering that [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas) centuries earlier sailed far enough north to encounter drift ice, it doesn't seem crazy to think they could. OTOH it's harder to believe in regular voyages without more records.

</comment><comment> aaron-lebo I think every old world civilization has attempted at one point or another to claim they were first. Outside of the natives and the Norse and maybe the Polynesians in SA, it's usually psuedohistory relying on circumstantial evidence.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans- oceanic_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans- oceanic_contact_theories)

It's weird how much we want it to be true though.

<comment><USER17> But we _know_ Columbus wasn't the first. The surprising thing is that the Atlantic is less difficult to cross than you'd think. It's somewhat common for people to ride the current to the New World in just a few metres of boat[0].

The hard, and scary, part is planning to bring enough supplies when you don't know when you'll see land.

0 [http://www.yachtingworld.com/extraordinary- boats/undaunted-t...](http://www.yachtingworld.com/extraordinary- boats/undaunted-the-42-inch-yacht-still-hoping-to-become-the-smallest-boat- ever-to-cross-the-atlantic-107559)

<comment> aaron-lebo Accidental contact probably happened a lot. Those are the stories that would be fascinating, but we'll never know about them. Planned colonization and/or trading missions are the more dubious claims.

<comment><USER18> Unfortunately not enough to condition natives to the diseases brought from the old world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Maybe a trireme could reach Newfoundland. But not along the course shown in that article: North to Svalbard, west to Greenland, south along the coast of Greenland. The stars may line up nicely but the sea west of Svalbard is anything but friendly.

<comment><USER20> Indeed, and triremes were lightly built - from Wikipedia [1]: "Triremes required a great deal of upkeep in order to stay afloat, as references to the replacement of ropes, sails, rudders, oars and masts in the middle of campaigns suggest. They also would become waterlogged if left in the sea for too long. In order to prevent this from happening, ships would have to be pulled from the water during the night. The use of lightwoods meant that the ship could be carried ashore by as few as 140 men." Then there is the issue of provisioning hundreds of oarsmen. If a Greek transatlantic crossing was made at all, I would have thought a trading ship would have been much more suitable.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's very liberating to be open to the idea they could. I'm not convinced they did, but that's a different story.

</comment><comment> maze-le There is also the story that phoenicians circumnavigated Africa [0]. As well as people that actually circumnavigated Africa with 3rd century BC shipbuilding technology[1]. Its an intereting thought, but I would treat it as speculation unless actual remains of phoenician ships are found far enough south.

[0]: [http://www.livius.org/sources/content/herodotus/herodotus- on...](http://www.livius.org/sources/content/herodotus/herodotus-on-the-first- circumnavigation-of-africa/)

[1]: [https://themediterraneantraveller.com/phoenician-ship- expedi...](https://themediterraneantraveller.com/phoenician-ship-expedition/)

</comment><comment><USER22> The Vikings who visited Minnesota in 1362 had the foresight to leave an inscribed marker [1].

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

<comment><USER23> It's fake though.

<comment><USER24> It has never been proven either way.

And we have much more accepted and well researched proof of pre-Colombian voyages specifically Viking.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows)

<comment><USER23> Yes Vikings visited North America - but the Kensington Stone is fake. Both language and the runes used shows it is written much more recent than the Viking age.

<comment><USER24> That isn't factually true it was never confirmed to be fake nor was it confirmed to be genuine the status of it is disputed.

<comment><USER6> It is not confirmed to be fake in that the hoax perpetrator never admitted to it. But there is no historian who believes it to be true.

<comment><USER24> So if I find one would that be correct? Again I'm not saying that it's genuine but there is still debate on the authenticity of it, especially some of the modern analysis which shown that some of the previous points of contention like the AVM scribbling was actually using sigla which is correct for medieval norse, fairly recent medieval runic discoveries from Norway also shown that the runic Alphabet on the stone might have been used in Medieval times or at least that there has been a larger variance in runic scribing than once was thought (something between really bad handwriting and really poor spelling)

[https://niku.no/2017/11/funn-mystisk-runeinnskrift- bispeborg...](https://niku.no/2017/11/funn-mystisk-runeinnskrift-bispeborgen- oslo/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hypothetical at best. So this theory says they made recurrent trips every 30 years. But no physical remains of these historic Greek settlements in North America exists. That pretty much settles it until an actual discovery takes place.

</comment><comment><USER26> > "Our intention is to prove, with modern science, that it was possible for > this trip to be made,"

> To be clear, there is no firm evidence of the ancient Greeks' purported > voyages. There are no known physical remains of these historic Greek > settlements in North America, nor are there first-hand descriptions of such > journeys in anything but one account from antiquity.

</comment><comment><USER27> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Phoenician_discovery...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Phoenician_discovery_of_the_Americas)

</comment><comment><USER28> Of course they did, where else could the gyros have come from.

</comment><comment><USER29> The long answer. Nope. The short answer. No. Wish they would work to find the evidence first rather than asking History Channel style of clickbait questions.

</comment><comment><USER30> Betteridge's law of headlines: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

</comment><comment><USER31> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

<comment><USER32> I posit a new law: betteridges's law will always be invoked with a link to its wiki, whenever an article is posted with a headline that ends with a question mark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Good stuff. Seems plausible to me

Another interesting question is if the vikings made it to South America?

[https://www.google.com/search?q=vikings+south+america](https://www.google.com/search?q=vikings+south+america)

<comment> aaron-lebo That second Google link appears to be a neo-nazi site, which makes me wonder how much credence to give the theory. Lots of the racial theorists in the 1880s were trying to tie together the Israelites/British/New Worlders. It's kind of a racial fantasy.

The top link reads like a conspiracy theory. You grab lots of interesting phenomena and say "we don't have an answer, therefore x" where x is Vikings, aliens, the New World Order, lizards.

It's genuinely an interesting question, the sources are scary though.</comment></comment>


A huge and ever-growing list of web applications built with Ruby on Rails - <AUTHOR> http://rails-apps.com/ <comment><USER2> I can ping the server, but get connection refused on port 80 and 443. I'm surprised to see upvotes of the article since the server isn't showing a website.

<comment><AUTHOR> it is up now, was a few minutes downtime

<comment><USER2> ok, I see it now</comment></comment></comment>


Is Google Always Listening: Live Test [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBnDWSvaQ1I&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR3KVRJMoh0npk91GyJvnhNGYhWVn17IZZexX1EZehPLzeGQ0z4LLmvY5go <comment><USER2> The fact that this dumb "Google/FB listens to you in the background and uses it to serve ads" myth is still around even on HackerNews is insane to me.

Do you all really think that if this contributed a measureable portion of ads that it wouldn't leak? There'd also have to be a large amount of hardware dedicated to speech transcription—running constant speech to text on every google chrome browser would need so much compute.

Not to mention that it'd be possible to actually show that the company was lying by modifying microphone drivers and showing that they activate in the background. I'm pretty sure you could also just do it the same way they make game hacks—get access to chrome memory and show that there's sections that match the recorded speech.

Indisputable proof that this happens would be a PR disaster for either company and cause legal action too.

I'm really in dismay at how long this myth has persisted.

<comment><USER3> Myth or not, the technology's been around for some years[1] [2], and there's a profit to be made from matching consumers and advertisers. One doesn't really need to run voice analysis, just pick a keyword[3] every now and then. You add two and two.

> _would be a PR disaster for either company and cause legal action too._

Didn't stop Sony [4], and didn't cost them all that much in money - on the order of $1MM - or reputation either.

\--

[1a] [https://hackaday.com/2017/05/04/ultrasonic-tracking- beacons/](https://hackaday.com/2017/05/04/ultrasonic-tracking-beacons/)

[1b] [https://www.wired.com/2016/11/block-ultrasonic-signals- didnt...](https://www.wired.com/2016/11/block-ultrasonic-signals-didnt-know- tracking/)

[2] [https://www.shazam.com/](https://www.shazam.com/)

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QTzVoaua4s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QTzVoaua4s)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have had this happen with my Xiaomi android phone. I've had a couple of times where I get ads served pertaining to conversations I've had with random people when my phone is laying nearby, silently listenting. No googling the topics from my side, simply random conversation.

It even seems to be able to translate conversations in my native language into displaying English ads. Creepy as hell.

I'm thinking of going back to Apple, it's just that their phones as so bloody expensive now. Sigh.

<comment><USER5> Make sure its not just cognitive reticulation, and the priming of your brain where previously you wouldn't have noticed these things.

<comment><USER4> It's not. It shows ads based on other peoples interests or what they have talked about with me. It was about things that wouldn't be in my personal sphere of interests in general. Specific ride-sharing companies, specific speakers a friend bought. A random conversation about a specific and obscure topic I had with my wife...

Lets just say that I'm pretty sure its not may brain going bonkers with pattern recognition here.

<comment><USER6> I've had the same experience.

Recently, we were visited by my sister-in-law. We ended up talking about a topic, say Topic X. Topic X _never_ comes up when I and my wife are alone; it is simply not a part of our life. We have been married for 15 years, without talking about it even once.

However, it did come up while talking with my s-i-l, and my Android phone was lying nearby. Minutes later, after my sister in law had left, I was presented a Topic X - related ad on YouTube.

It was displayed only once, I ignored it, and no Topic X - related ad was shown after that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It hapenned to me on two different occasions that I've been discussing a topic with a friend (one that I never searched for) that was later shown to me as an ad. In one particular case he told me of metal casted spinners (like the one in Ibception). About two days later I saw an ad for this. I don't believe this could be a coincidence.

<comment><USER8> Did he search for them and we're you chatting on Facebook messenger that day?

<comment><USER7> He doesn't even have facebook and he said he didn't search for them. We talked in person while hiking, only our phones were in our pockets. I also never had any facebook applications installed on my phone (except WhatsApp). Also I saw the ad about 2-3 days after we had this chat. I should also note that we were talking in Polish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Time for a company to leverage on hardware button to switch off mics, camera and gps. I know a lot of people who would buy it

<comment><USER9> I believe Apple just did this with their new MacBook & MacBook Pro. Closing the lid physically disengages the microphone.

Edit: Source[1] and also to say that I suppose Apple's solution only gets us halfway to your suggestion. There's still no way to _physically_ disengage the microphone (or Camera, for that matter) when the laptop is open. It's a step in the right direction, at least.

[1] [https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-macbook-air- and-2018-m...](https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-macbook-air- and-2018-macbook-pro-disconnect-microphone-when-lid-is-closed-2018-11)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are lots of anecdotes around about things like this, but correlation does not constitute causation. Where are e.g. the wireshark dumps showing that data was transmitted to some server while/after he was talking? Capturing the traffic should be a simple exercises.

<comment><USER11> I'm agnostic on the issue, but assuming they're just transmitting keywords, it would be pretty easy (and sensible, considering the implications!) to hide them inside otherwise innocuous packets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the first step for solving this problem on mobile is having an indicator that an app is "listening". Just like the "location" icon pops up in the top bar on Android (and going into settings for location shows you which apps recently requested location), having an identical icon/history setup for microphone access would be perfect. Same goes for front/back camera.

</comment><comment><USER13> One could shoot everything on a desktop and search for dog toys on another device on the same network/IP. I'd bet the guy is trolling.

<comment><USER14> I'm afraid not. Usually,some app like facebook is involved. You can search for news articles on the subject and see other people's report as well.

Not only do they collect voice without consent,personal experience tells me they're also sharing it with usgov(not elaborating on that).

<comment><USER13> So facebook does speech recognition in realtime for every android device out there and share it in realtime with the many ad networks. Someone is really screwed up at facebook to share such an incriminating secret or business leverage (depending on how you want to see it) with competitors.

The conspiracy theory doesn't seem to hold ground.

<comment><USER14> Experience is the best evidence. Give me a better reasonable explanation then? Why do you think it's a conspiracy theory? There are lawsuits[1] and news articles on this.

Someone really screwed up at facebook? Have you read the news recently? They lie through their teeth to their owm shareholders and customers!

If I had to guess they merely transcribe audio on the device and send keywords for ad targeting and other nefarious uses. They can claim there is no "recording" since audio isn't stored anywhere. Honestly,I think this is fairly harmless if you compare it to some of the other more serious conspiracy theories.

Remember how NSA's surveillance was also a conspiracy theory?

IMO,it's a double edged sword for them,they do this sort of crooked business for law enforcent and intelligence community but they also profit by exploiting this for revenue generation.

[1] [http://digg.com/2017/facebook-phone-microphone- ads](http://digg.com/2017/facebook-phone-microphone-ads)

<comment><USER13> "Leaking" data they are supposed to have is not anywhere close to secretly recording user audio. They have plausible deniability with what you hear on news. There is no deniability when they are caught recording users. "Carelessness" does not lead an app to go rogue and start listening and transcribing audio.

Like I said, the problem I see with theory is that it doesn't hold ground even with all the assumptions one should be expected to make.

As for NSA, none of their surveillance was happening on the device. So that again is not the same as this theory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> to be fair could this not be any app on his phone that is listening?

I assume that the big ad aggregators like google etc. would be up for integrating with anyone who provided testably good data, and also it may be that the system is being gamed from the other end.. where hints are passed to the ad bidding bot (of the dog toy company) to pay more for your attention.

its a pretty crappy state of affairs we have.. its a shame that our media (and so much of everything) is owned by so few - it makes it very hard to fight against any of this :( no one has any interest in actually fixing this or making big changes as they are all using it to power their growth and so their delusional valuations.

There was nothing more depressing than working as a BA for a big company and realising that every metric was openly being gamed, objectives were stupid and impossible to meet - but it didn't matter as so long as they kept a constant suite of major structural change projects on the go (buying companies, moving profits and ownership over boarders etc.) they could meet all of their targets and just keep the lies going.

The lower level staff had to play along as their managers would fire them if they didn't play the game. the managers had to keep to the line to maintain their promoted state and keep moving up.. the most senior management could just believe the numbers and fire a middle manager if they didn't like what they got. and the shareholders didn't care as if the targets are hit the share-price just keeps rising and rising.

There was no case i could make to do anything about this, I think i proved the issue to several people but there was no way of people doing anything about it without damaging their own lot :(

Since then I have had much more understanding with the broken nature of the world, how long it will take to fix and how sometimes (often) you really do just need to let the wheels come off before there will be any action - as by that point people are less worried about being blamed and are more likely to act.

</comment><comment><USER16> The test in this video was obviously staged.

</comment><comment><USER17> Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again.</comment>


The Google+ project and exec team - <AUTHOR> https://threader.app/thread/1049523067506966529 <comment><USER2> Controversial opinion here. I know that exaggerating and complaining is a surefire way to get clicks, but it's hard to take the author's criticisms seriously when he complains about so many different things. Some as minor as the noogler orientation. Others as petty as putting down colleagues who haven't worked as designers before.

Regarding the main event in question: I like that Google allows people to party in the evenings with whoever they want to party with. I like that Google allows people to reschedule meetings if they aren't feeling well, for whatever reason. It sucks that the author's grandmother died and that he felt the need to work through the night while that happened, but it's unfair to take that out on your colleagues. Nobody would have blamed him if he asked to reschedule the meeting because of his grandmother's health. Heck, they probably wouldn't even have minded if he asked for a different day/time, just so he wouldn't have to work through the night.

I have no idea who the author is. He might be a fantastic person, and Jim/Greg might be total dicks, for all I know. But just from the volume of different complaints mentioned, and his reaction to a meeting reschedule, I get the impression that he isn't the easiest person to work with, and that there are other sides to this story.

<comment><USER3> It was a hard lesson for me to learn in the past: if you care wildly more than the people around you -- so much that you work late into the night while your grandmother is dying and your coworkers are pounding drinks with their counterparts at a competitor -- you'll just end up really hurt and frustrated and they'll all think that _you_ are the problem.

The author seems like the kind of person that I'd love to do a 3-person startup with. We'd be in an environment where working late into the night is valuable sometimes, and because all of us would be doing that he'd have no reason to be resentful. Hopefully he gets into a group like that before the corporate life trains him to preserve his sanity by not caring so much.

<comment><USER4> _and they 'll all think that you are the problem._

Agreed.

<comment><USER5> The thing is that often they are right. It's almost literally crazy to me that he wouldn't just try to reschedule the meeting and that he would work when his grandma was dying. It's not working long hours that's a problem but in my experience it often correlates with people who don't work well in a team (which this guy seems like a perfect example of).

<comment><USER6> I love working with people who "don't work well in a team". There's something beautiful about these crazies. They make amazing stuff if you just have the wits to lead them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To summarize some of his major complaints:

1) He accepted a salary (115K) lowered than what he thought was fair

2) Design occurred in silos, there was no unity or cohesion

3) His 2nd manager was "political" and "in love with bureaucracy"

4) An exec on a rival team tried to quash his idea

5) Managers often just wanted to slap their name on his work

6) He worked all night to satisfy an angry coworker the night his grandmother died, while coworker partied then rescheduled mtg

For No 1: if you don't think a salary is fair, don't accept it.

Nos 2-5: these happen at almost every medium-large sized company I've ever worked at. If you know a place that isn't political, bureaucratic, siloed and filled with rivals and petty managers, let me know so I can give you my resume.

For No. 6, if you feel a deadline or meeting time is unfair, say so. If you have a sick family member, say so.

He sent this email to his boss:

> "Greg, I had to work most of the night because of Jim, and he canceled our > meeting because he was partying with our competitors. In my book, this is > totally unacceptable. What am I supposed to do?"

It's never a good idea to send this. It's not going to help you, even if you're in the right. Canceling a meeting is not a gross injustice and if an employee parties afterhours that's his or her business.

I sympathize with the author. Sounds like a good dude. But you have to try to roll with the punches, no workplace will be perfect, I promise you.

<comment><USER8> >>Nos 2-5: these happen at almost every medium-large sized company I've ever worked at. If you know a place that isn't political, bureaucratic, siloed and filled with rivals and petty managers, let me know so I can give you my resume.

This is one of the problems with the way their hiring is marketed. They are depicted to be asking hard CS and algorithm based questions, and a culture of a workplace is being sold which is based on a merit process along the lines of _' programming abilities'_.

The reality in every people structure one will every work at, politics is how the world works. People optimize what's best for themselves. The bosses are often stupid, because bosses that exist never want smart people to grow up and become a competition to them. Money is always attached to hot projects, so bulk of the career growth, bonuses and other juice comes when you work there. Regardless of whatever the merits of that project are.

The same applies to projects too. Once a company has 2 - 3 cash cow projects, the executives won't let new set of rivaling products emerge and become a competition to their fiefdom. Most of the times the competition is killed in plain sight, but other times its back room political sabotage. Only a few days back some one mentioned how Google is a place where $100M revenue opportunities pop up and die all the time.

The same case with that 20% extra time projects. Who is going to let this happen? I'm pretty sure anybody who dares to do these projects will be marked to be a trouble maker by the very managers they report too.

In short once you have more than 2 layers of management at your company, politics is how thing will work. And its perfectly, OK. Because that's how world is.

What is problematic is if the people at the top, Larry Page and Sergey Brin don't know are too naive to understand that its happening in their company since years. Inability to deal with everyday politics can kill companies.

<comment> 1ae8-4846-8e9c People have gotten promoted off their 20% projects.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows, but to say you understand the internal dynamics of Google and the decisions that Larry and Sergey make is certainly some kind of delusional.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> pi-squared The Googleyness is weak with this one. Inferiority complex. Work-life balance problems (work over xmas break, late night after work). Not being able to stand for oneself (salary, reschedule meeting). Wanting everyone to like him (literally said it). Seems to dismiss other people's jobs and even names as being less important than his.

Nobody's perfect, we all have some bad things in our personalities. But it's impossible to read this and extract the value that he tries to convey that Google as a company didn't accommodate him (dismissing the design of buildings or noogler's orientation) rather than he tried too hard to be liked and perceived as valuable member.

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately in big companies no one is valuable. If someone is, the company has a problem.

<comment><USER10> In 2014 Google paid a guy named Neal Mohan $100 to refuse the head of product job at Twitter.[0]

[0][https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/neal- mo...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/neal-mohan- googles-100-million-man-2013-4)

<comment><USER11> $100m not $100

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is one of the most unprofessional things I've ever read. Giving callouts to people who passed you up for a hire is just... unacceptable.

<comment><USER13> Yes, very odd. I suppose it's an attempt to suggest the employer made a mistake passing on them, but the act of calling out itself demonstrates they might have made a good call.

<comment><USER14> So true! The whole post is just completely offputting and strange. What strikes me as the most odd is that the author thinks this makes him look good. imo it just discloses that he's a nightmare coworker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The big tech companies are really really good at making you feel like you're exceptional and special and destined for greatness because you're good enough to work for them. But then there's the risk that they just say that then dump you in with thousands of others to churn out product.

I'm increasingly convinced that there's a ton of life experience and wisdom to be gained by working for big tech in your early 20s when you have a lot of flexibility. But when you've figured out what kind of life you want to lead, they're probably not the right fit for you.

I think it boils down to: money is easily quantifiable, happiness and freedom aren't. So people make bad life decisions based on an incomplete assessment of what will really suit them best.

<comment><USER16> Yeah that's the biggest take from this. Lots of nice smart people mostly doing routine boring things made a little more palatable because it comes with a big name company and decent perks.

And we may have some inkling as to why Vic left (if the anecdotes are representative of behavior).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's just a side note, but this mention of his brief tenure at a "failing startup" rubs me the wrong way:

 _"In a couple of months I knocked out more work than they could have built in a year with their eng team."_

No startup deserves a designer with this kind of attitude. Your job isn't to produce pie-in-the-sky concepts for your portfolio but to work on the product _together_ with the engineers.

</comment><comment><USER18> Some have written about the problems of the piece. I agree with most of the criticisms, but what is useful for the rest of us is not the problems, but figuring out what useful things we can get out of the piece.

The author's biggest work-related mistake was to sit tight when given a managed he had a bad relationship with. In most large organizations (500+ employees), your success and your failure will have a lot to do with a good relationship with your manager. It's not just performance reviews, but your technical influence that will be influenced by this. This matters with sibling teams too, as a political manager (and most bad managers are very political) will not want a report they don't like to have more influence than they do. I have seen people go from being seen as extremely productive to being called very low performers, and vice versa, in 2 months and a manager change. This kind of match, and caring about making teams cohesive, is something that most large valley companies do not really care about, and hurts them greatly, as a lot of talent is underused or downright shoved out the door.

We can learn the some things as managers too: A report we really dislike could really help the company a whole lot if they were in an environment that matches them better, and ultimately that's what we should be caring about, not making people we don't like leave, and helping people we like get promoted. Whether it is by knowing them better, or helping them move somewhere else, is far more work than just undermining them, but its ultimately the right thing to do. What we should foster instead is teamwork, and the minimization of political behavior among reports. The sly report that is always telling me what I like to hear, but playing politics all day is the bad manager of tomorrow. Companies work better when people are aligned with building the best product the company can, not maximizing the credit they get. The more energy is spent on political fights, the worse the product gets.

</comment><comment><USER19> This isn't a story about Google+, it's a story about a disgruntled employees failing at a job as told through his own glasses filled with illusions of grandjour and sense of superiority.

That said it's still an incredibly interesting story, and I have the feeling that many managers could gain some insight into what's going on in some of those "I am gods gift to development"-type individuals who can be both a huge benefit to a project yet at the same time be toxic to work with.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wow, on one hand - pretty interesting read in a sense that tabloids are interesting, but boy, you should never do that. It's not just burning the bridges, it is not a very good signal to your potential employers, partners, acquirers, employees... Imagine public outcry if it went the other way: if managers hung out dirty laundry on employees who were not up to snuff.

Also, about contractors in pivotal roles. The author was relatively new to for-profit industry and it happens way more often than one may think. People who go the contractor route are usually senior and experienced enough to be confident in getting and keeping the gigs, as the barrier to getting rid of a contractor is very low.

</comment><comment><USER21> Never write in anger. writing in sadness is ok, but writing in anger generally clouds the message. Some of this stuff is about how you work, and how others work. Its not about google, you could "feel" this way in almost any enterprise with more than 1 tier of management.

<comment><USER22> The writer seems unbalanced and I can't tell if he or the workplace is the problem, or both.

The thing that cought my eye is that he was telling his boss his coworker was home hung over, becouse he worked while his grandma died instead of visiting her. Like, who is being inconsiderate here really?

<comment><USER23> >The writer seems unbalanced

That doesn't mean anything, and if you're trying to give it meaning, you're probably not qualified to diagnose someone over a twitter thread.

Everything, all-caps profanities and all, would be part of a normal conversation where a friend is ranting to you.

<comment><USER24> Ranting makes people seem unbalanced. Especially ranting on Twitter.

<comment><USER25> For me it looks that he is a human being with genuine emotions, that he's passionate about his work and not yet a complete corporate drone.

<comment><USER26> Twitter has become our society's Rorschach test of character. This rant will earn him both detractors and admirers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm sure Google+ is a dumpster fire, but reading this my only takeaway was... fuck, I hope I _never_ work with anyone this toxic.

The hate, the vitorial, the attacks, the arrogance, the lack of accountability, paranoid, passive aggressive, complaining intensely about event trivial things...

This is the type of person I would leave a project over, no matter how exciting the work.

<comment><USER14> Yes. Probably why they forced him out of Google... because he was horrible to work with and the entire team was complaining about his lack of social awareness and poor interpersonal skills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> _If your team, say on Gmail or Android, was to integrate Google+'s features then your team would be awarded a 1.5-3x multiplier on top of your yearly bonus. Your bonus was already something like 15% of your salary._

Suddenly it makes sense why we can't use + to force a word in google searches anymore.

<comment><USER29> Is that why they got rid of it? I liked using + more than putting the word in quotes, which is what you have to do now.

<comment><USER30> > _Is that why they got rid of it?_

Yes.

"Plus" is a dumb and lame product name.

When Jean-Marie Messier was trying to make Vivendi an important Internet company, he decided he wanted to make some kind of portal (copying Yahoo) that would be named "Vivendi Plus". He announced it at a press conference before having even secured the vivendiplus.com domain. That was in Sept. '99\. It failed miserably (didn't even launch).

Ten years later when Google wanted to copy Facebook they came up with the exact same name. It failed.

I think just naming a product myBigCompany--Plus is a symptom you don't know what you're doing or where you're going. It's bad form and then it's bad luck.

<comment><USER31> It also implies that regular Google is Google-, some kind of inferior good. Never a good thing to do to your principle revenue stream.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> People are being too hard on this guy here. It's true that big companies are full of politicians and jerks, and that this can be frustrating if you just want to get good work done.

There are some things you can say about the style of writing but... There is stuff here that resonates and accurately describes downsides of SV life. Just because "it's like that everywhere" doesn't mean we shouldn't aspire to better. Just because we don't like some aspect of this guy's communication style doesn't mean we should dismiss him.

If you're reading, Morgan, don't despair at all the people displaying needless aggression in this thread.

</comment><comment><USER33> I tried reading this, but it is just stream of consciousness writing and littered with unnecessary details. It comes across as petty and the author doesn't seem to be good at communicating what he wants. For instance, he's whining about a 9am meeting with a coworker. If it's such a big deal, why didn't you ask for a later meeting?

<comment><USER34> The "coworker" seemed more like a superior. I'd also be wary of cancelling meetings with a hostile superior.

<comment><USER35> To me, it sounded like they all reported to Greg.

<comment><USER36> At places like Google, where peer reviews determine your bonuses and your career advancement, senior people on your team have to be handled politically. For a person coming in at a level 2, this means nearly everyone.

<comment><USER33> I've worked at a large software company with a similar review system in place and I think this attitude makes it sound like everyone is walking on egg shells and can't state what they really think for fear of offending someone in power. That's hardly the case.

If someone "below" me had a problem with my scheduling or some things I was doing, I'd like them to tell me and not just act angry later on.

People work together and generally try to be accommodating in large companies. But it does require people _communicating_ their needs to each other and being fair. The poster sounded like he was holding a grudge against people and trying to power through things instead of having a frank discussion with other people. It sounds like they have talent, but they need work in working with others.

I get that sometimes you know your ideas are much better than other people's, but at the end of the day you need to work with others and give and take a bit.

<comment><USER36> > I think this attitude makes it sound like everyone is walking on egg shells > and can't state what they really think for fear of offending someone in > power. That's hardly the case.

The company has to explicitly foster an egoless culture to make fair peer reviews work, but egoless employees aren't going to present themselves well enough to get promotions. The system incentivizes politics. If you didn't see it in your team, your teammates hadn't learned to play the game yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> There's a special kind of rottenness in big orgs when the only thing they can produce is "like X but by us".

I understand why it happens, I've been on a few projects like that. The problem is that it's hard to come up with a genuine new idea that a stack of middle managers will agree on and execute.

But if you say: "Let's make Twitter/facebook/App Store", then the middle managers can't really disagree with you since there's already a successful example of that thing on the market.

There's also no room for miscommunication, everyone already knows what Facebook looks like, we just have to copy it.

The problem is that this work is dull, uninspired, and likely to be unsuccessful. What's the point? Why not just kill this shit before spending millions of dollars on it?

<comment><USER37> Like VisiCalc but by us. Hmmmm, sometimes it works out okay.

</comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 _He's a timid and generally kind person (running theme). But also not sure of himself. Not confident in his work. Also understandable considering it wasn't the best. Often times he seemed anxiety stricken._

This is the point at which you begin to realize the author is a bit of a jerk.

<comment><USER38> Really? My turning point was when he called out companies for not hiring him and then said he did more work than the engineering team in 3 months

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Interesting insight, but I can't help but wonder if this guy is going to regret some of the shots he took in this article.

I also stumbled upon his Twitter at the end of the article and it does more to show really how much this experience has affected him ([https://twitter.com/morganknutson](https://twitter.com/morganknutson)). Very sad.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm s bit sad at the end of the article. Sounds to me like a great designer, with good ideas and some genuine leadership skills. But the article itself is so full of anger and resentment that I really wonder what it would be like to work with the author. Looks like nobody has taken the time or given him the opportunity to learn how to navigate trough BS and handle it.

Saying NO, being political, negotiating. . . Not very surprising if he indeed had such bad managers.

Still, feels like wasted time and resources for everybody. I hope he is doing OK now.

</comment><comment><USER41> Megacorps don't work to make products. They work to keep their top-dog status perpetual. One way to do this is to hire smart people and keep them locked away wasting time.

Two benefits: them not working productively at a competitor's place is one, and them losing the skills and drive to make real-world useful things after a few years is another.

<comment><USER42> Ive read other post basically making the same claim, Google is happy to create, fund, and hire for projects just to capture/retain talent and remove it from the hiring pool. Is that HN folks reading too much between lines or is it a thing?

<comment><USER41> It's not a Google thing. Every single large, successful company does this.

It is a no-brainer decision from a game theoretic point of view: these companies already have a top-of-the-line, best in the world product. Working on more products requires lots of inspiration, time and luck, and even in the _best_ case all you get is just another amazing product. (I.e., just more of the stuff you already got.)

Using your money and fame to neutralize talent that could be used against you requires no effort or thinking at all, only money. These companies don't know what to do with their profits anyways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Your story is exactly why I see many capable people leaving the Valley putting all that BS behind. FAANG, those are where you find a bunch of incompetent managers, who never got to learn leadership, stealing your ideas to look good in front of their boss, draining your energy with stupid decisions a donkey wouldn't take, and unable to understand how to work with smart people.

Move on and get a new life. And before you get your next gig, go spend 10 days in a vipasanna center.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's one thing to not be happy at Google+, which is the center of this rant. But to put targets on all of the companies you interviewed at along the way with their founders Twitter names? Incredibly bitter and salty. It's no way to strengthen your argument or to live.

</comment><comment><USER45> Publicly criticizing people & companies you've worked with because you haven't seen eye to eye with them...

Is this the sort of person you'd want to work with or hire to work for you? If it were a company that didn't pay you or were doing something unethical etc then fair enough - blow that whistle... but as far as I can see this is just someone with a chip on their shoulder and a bruised ego who can't move on.

<comment><USER46> I would never, ever hire someone who went on a giant public character assassination of his colleagues and dumped all the day-to-day insider baseball to the world. Call-outs to people who didn't hire him. Jesus, wtf?

I don't care how dysfunctional his experience was, I don't care how much of a star he might be, I don't need that kind of worry in my life, and it's hard to imagine someone who would. Be interested to know how his career goes after this.

<comment><USER47> The run-down of companies that didn't hire him and name-checking the people involved put me off the whole damn thing before I even got to the stuff at Google. Who does that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> > ... I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team > was.

No, this is never true. Airing dirty laundry almost never produces a real change in the world. It just burns bridges and often makes you look petty.

<comment><USER49> Possibly, but sometimes things do need to be said and he changed the names of the actual people he did not like so much, so maybe consider this "dry cleaned"? It definitely is useful to other people in similar circumstances and pretty much raises a point about all the pettiness that occurs in all industries. This is a human condition that needs to be addressed or this world will continue to be built by people who shouldn't be in charge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> The one thing he did, which is admirable, is that he didn't call out most people by their real names, but some of the remarks do seem a little petty. But this hopefully was a learning experience for him to not sacrifice what he wants in order to make people like him (it's a struggle I fight with).

This does sound like a failure of leadership WRT the product and internal management, but, I think we should all try to read past the memory coloring, because I'm sure other members might have a different experience. But I think the main point still holds. Google+ was created as a reaction to FB, and while there were a couple of half decent features, but I can't remember anything they created that was enough to overcome FB's network advantage and draw people away.

Either way, this article is fascinating to hear internals and understand the dynamics behind the scenes.

</comment><comment> 1ae8-4846-8e9c Engineer here. I wasn't around for G+, but it seems to be an open secret internally that G+ was one of the most poorly managed projects _ever_. This isn't the first time I've heard about the poorly designed incentive structures or terrible senior management described here.

I'm not going to say anything about all the other obvious caveats here, I think the other comments cover that pretty well. But because this one actually pisses me off: who cares about "partying with our competitors"? Does working at Google mean I shouldn't have friends at other companies? And above all, why the shit is your manager supposed to care about that?

For what it's worth, I've also seen people transfer in less than 3-6 months on the team they were hired into. But if you don't do anything to make it happen, it's not going to happen.

</comment><comment><USER51> Just wanted to highlight this bit of the article about Vic Gundotra: "I remember him frequently flirting with the women on the team."

Don't be that guy.

<comment><USER52> The shot he took on Twitter is even harsher. [https://twitter.com/morganknutson/status/1050609480033951744](https://twitter.com/morganknutson/status/1050609480033951744)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Reading this I got the immediate impresssion that his temperament isn't very Googley and was a cultural mismatch from the beginning. His ego is really big and doesn't seem be able to deal with being a small fish in a big sea.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is really ungrateful. The author is not happy because he got to work on Google+ not chrome?

Google+ for all it's short comings were business failures not tech or ux or design failure. I worked on far stupider projects at big companies and I am utterly grateful for the opportunities given to me.

Absurd blog and no matter how muchi hate Google posts like these makes me realize how ungrateful some people can be.

<comment><USER54> If you read through the end, you see he is not happy because his Manager backstabed him and fired him (slow release as they say) because he felt threatened by him.

<comment><USER55> Frankly, if you are running around the office, making everyone feel like useless piece of crap because you are the obvious rock star, no wonder that folks get defensive.

My bet is that he wasn't fired/let go because the manager was afraid for his job (that's what the author claims and it is a pretty cheap shot to make) but because the guy's behavior was being toxic for the team. Unfortunately he couldn't see that over his ego ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I feel like I understand the author's experience, and his bitterness, I had a very similar situation myself when I was a new engineer, creating an amazing project that was really useful for everyone that got completely shot down for political reasons. For a while after, the more I stuck out with better work the more I was punished.

I learned a lot from this. It was very demotivating, painful, even humiliating, and it took me a long time to get over it (mostly). What I _didn 't_ learn is that all the people who were to blame for this were the bad guys. Here's what I did learn:

      - People are people and will do the things that people do, despite your high expectations.
      - You can often not change other people. But you can change yourself. Think of what *you* can do to improve relationships.
      - You'll rarely change someone's thinking by using logic. This, sadly, is not human nature in a political environment.
      - Work is a political environment. Even engineering.
      - You must learn what motivates, frustrates, encourages, shames and honors the people you work with.
      - Protect the people you work with, do not cause them to raise their defenses.
      - If you want something to move forward in a team you must win people over.
      - You don't win people over by making them feel threatened that you will take power from them or make them look bad.
      - If you truly care about something, having another person claim that idea as their own isn't bad, it's a great victory.

If you don't really care what gets done in your organization and are just interested in being the most well respected and successful person, and want to get there in the quickest and not deal with everyone's crap, then do what a lot of others do and just flatter and lie and job-hop around before things catch up to you and you'll be C-level in no time. You can also get there (but not for sure) through long difficult years of doing everything right. Make your choices.

</comment><comment><USER57> Yeah..... I'm not buying into this 100%...... it sounds like typical corporate BS that he is complaining about, and it was his choice to work instead of being with his family during a serious time of ill health.

Like others have mentioned, I get the impression there are many sides to this this story, just like any other story. And yes, it does come across as extremely whiny. And also somewhat naive.

Yaaaawwwwwwn.... I'm not exactly sitting on the edge of my seat for part II.

</comment><comment><USER54> That's what people say when they say the team and product you're on matters most. In big tech companies, your experiences can vary greatly from one team to another.

This is where the companies could do a better job with HR of making sure each employee fits well in their team and enjoys themselves, and if not, to relocate them to another team.

This is also a great lesson to learn for yourself: Don't stay on a shitty team, don't work for a failing product. Get out as soon as you can, transfer to another team, or even quit and leave the company if that's not possible.

</comment><comment><USER58> This sounds so much like how things are done at Yandex. I guess we really copy Google at everything. I also disagree with people attacking the author, these sorts of things need to be aired out, in fact names should be named as well. Public callouts is the only way we can defeat toxic workplace culture.

</comment><comment><USER59> It's a real shame, because I can definitely see a way for Google to do social networking in a way that would pull me away from Facebook. Basically I could connect with people and put their feeds into channels sort of like Slack (one for family, one for work, one for recruiters so I could get rid of Linkedin). But I'd have control over each channel and (this is important) people could message me in a way that worked like Gmail, but I wouldn't have to fork over my Gmail address.

For me that was the critical omission, the idea that we can be "friends" on Google+ but you have no way to message me. It never made any sense. And I'm not even that smart.

</comment><comment><USER60> His criticisms come off as seriously naive and green if he was expecting to upend the design practice of a behemoth tech company with many competing business units and products, each with their own leaders, legacy code dependencies, and teams of designers who would poke holes in his design decisions from a UX perspective (e.g. didn't test designs with users, just made it up) and see him as a 'graphic designer' who is a glorified pixel pusher and lacks a fundamental understanding of the field of HCI and user centered design.

This is clearly evident from when he mentioned his outrage that he:

 _" Never would've imagined that I was joining a team of 50+ designers where a bunch of them had never designed before.

And I was "evaluated" at about their level? These weren't interns, these were designers in their very first roles ever...at Google."_

From any UX design professional's perspective, he comes into their world, lacking any background in UX or basic understanding of user centered design methods, and just does the visual design portion of the work, not the actual hard work that goes into understanding human behavior, being curious and testing hypotheses and validating designs with quantitative and qualitative data via UX research methods.

Dude needs to check his ego in my opinion, design is a team sport and anyone can mock up random _dribbble_ worthy interfaces in an afternoon and think they deserve the title of designer then diss others who have a 4 year degree in fields related to understanding human behavior, not just art or graphic design (although art degrees are good if you solely focus on visual design due to color theory, typography, understanding design aesthetics, design critiquing etc.)

tl;dr

UI designer ≠ UX designer

</comment><comment><USER61> The best bit was his take on the famed Google "adult daycare" workplace theme - essentially saying it's a clutter problem. But this guy is a dumpster fire.

</comment><comment><USER62> I have never read a corporate butthurt story with this kind of flow--not on Medium anyway.

@morganknutson, your writing style is on point.

</comment><comment><USER49> "They just wanted THEIR work to be used, or to be able to take credit for it. I hate that weak ass shit." My favorite part, it sucks he lost someone in the whole process...

</comment><comment><USER63> auto-bio: a very serious person doing very serious and important things

that's all you need to know. can stop reading right there

</comment><comment><USER64> For anyone interested, "Emerald Sea" was the project code name for G+.

</comment><comment><USER65> Hmmm this is interesting, but too much anger. I'm taking it with a grain of salt. This is definitely no rachelbythebay.

</comment><comment><USER66> It's a sad story. His tweets provide the background for why he decided to write all this.

</comment><comment> the-dude Unhinged guy does not like Google, his boss or his collegues. Why is this at the top?

</comment><comment><USER63> i especially like how he has nothing but disdain for jack dorsey but is perfectly happy to tweet the day away

</comment><comment><USER67> I was complaining about some of the problems in a few HN posts back then.</comment>


Discord's new Privacy Policy takes effect on May 25th, 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://discordapp.com/privacy <comment><AUTHOR> Here is raw text of mail from support team that I got on May 15, 2018:

      Discord <email@example.com>
      15.05.2018, 11:58
      ----
      We're updating our Privacy Policy
      ----
      Hey <username>,

      By now, you've probably read dozens of emails exactly like this one, so we'll keep it brief like shorts. Or briefs :thinking:

      We're updating our privacy policy in preparation for the EU's General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) later this month. Although these changes are spurred by European law, we think privacy is super important and so these changes will apply to everyone, no matter where you're located.

      Here's a quick summary:

      - We aren't asking to collect more data or use your personal data differently — instead, we're being more specific on how we use the information we collect, how long we keep that data, and the rights you have regarding it.

      - As part of that, we're also adding information about how you can control the usage of your personal data and download the data that you've provided to us.

      - Finally, we're providing more clarity around the legal bases we use to process your information, including providing the service to you, complying with the law, improving our improving our services, fighting abuse on the system, and developing new features for you.

      For the full scoop, you can review our _updated privacy policy here: https://discordapp.com/privacy_. It takes effect **May 25th, 2018**. By using Discord on or after that date, you'll be agreeing to the changes. If you have questions about these changes, feel free to reach out to us at firstname.lastname@example.com: mailto:email@example.com.

      Appreciate ya,

      The Discord Team</comment>


Can working near other developers be counterproductive? - <AUTHOR> https://jaxenter.com/can-working-near-other-developers-be-counterproductive-119958.html

<comment><USER2> No for a given development team collocated teams will perform better as a group.</comment>