Google Map Maker will be temporarily unavailable for editing - <AUTHOR> https://productforums.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!category-topic/map-maker/news-and-announcements/crFEbGXJ-HI

<comment><USER2> If you love map editing and collaborating on better map data for the people, [http://www.openstreetmap.org/](http://www.openstreetmap.org/) is available for editing. You can choose from a multitude of editors, your edits are live within minutes and everyone can benefit from your contributions. OSM is free and open, you can download it all, you can do whatever you want with it, you are not feeding a corporation that might or might not appreciate your sacrifice.

<comment><USER3> Also, in return for your contributions, all you get from Google is a single map rendering whereas Openstreetmap offers a multitude of them, the possibility of making your own and the whole source data that Google will never let you see but that you need for any sort of analytical processing or joining with other datasets !

<comment><USER4> For me, the big win in updating Google Maps is that it uses the updates when routing directions. So now walking directions use the walking paths in our complex, and our culdesac is properly shown as a one way loop rather than just ending in a point.

<comment><USER2> Same with OSM based routers, there are several websites and apps available. OSM is fantastic for walking and biking routing.

<comment><USER5> Yes but none of them have as powerful of a navigation system, nor do they usually account for traffic data which can be incredibly handy when deciding which route to take to head home from work or school during rush hour.

<comment><USER6> Certainly. But OSM allows you (or anyone else) to use their data, make a startup or non-profit to implement such functionality.

Google Maps, in contrast is a data silo. Even if you put data in by contributing it, it's Google's data. The possibilities to implement new ideas on top of it is very limited.

As others say, the stuff that people do with OSM is terrific. E.g. you have communities of mountainbikers who enter data about small paths, level of difficulty in the uphill/downhill direction, etc. You can extract a MTB- specific map out of it (which is exactly what openmtbmap does), which renders on your GPS such that all relevant information for mountainbiking is there, routing is adjusted such that you mainly use interesting paths, etc.

There are a gazillion other interesting applications that are not possible at all with proprietary maps such as Google maps.

Also, these days, the point of interest annotations are better than nearly any other map. Heck, in my area in Germany, even picnic tables, etc. are generally in there.

<comment><USER5> It really depends on how active your area is though. My area is very bare in OSM. While I've added some stuff to it, it is really too much for one person. It has gotten better I'll admit, but is still lacking.

I like OpenStreetMaps a lot, I just don't like the options for apps that are out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not a protectionist, but Google Maps has been damaging high quality local mapping services because of its zero price-point. It is technically the best mapping service, but when the data is wrong, it is very wrong, and, the bigger the problems, the tougher it is to get them fixed, even using Map Maker.

After 2000, South African local governments were restructured. New municipalities were created by amalgamating formerly separate towns. The boundaries of those defunct towns are visible on Google Maps (as they should be, as an aid to navigation, since the new municipalities are huge).

The problem is that the boundaries of these defunct amalgamated towns are totally wrong on Google Maps, especially in the cases of the City of Johannesburg, and Ekurhuleni Municipality. Suburbs like Emmmarentia and Parkhurst in Johannesburg are supposedly in Randburg according to Google Maps, and this leads to enormous confusion when looking up addresses. Similarly, the boundaries of Bedfordview in Ekurhuleni are wrong. Trying to fix these boundary issues is futile, because one has no idea what criteria are used in moderation, and it takes a very long time to do these fixes, only to risk having them rejected.

Google needs to invest more in Maps, rather than trying to get away on the cheap with half-baked crowdsourcing, and it needs to make sure that it responds to error reports quickly and transparently.

<comment><USER8> Three of four years ago GMaps used to display as open and operating a highway linking my city (Bucharest) to another city 40 miles away. The problem was that that highway was in no way open nor operating, as it was still under construction. I completed that "this-place-is-wrong"-form describing the issue and received a message back saying that bla-bla-bla the map is correct and I am wrong. That only increased my reliance on trusted paper maps from that day on.

<comment><USER9> This reminds me of a similar problem with wikipedia. A well known celebrity (Author I think) noticed that his birth date was incorrect. He tried to get it changed, even stating that he was the actual person and knows his own birthday - only to have it rejected as not from a good enough source!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe the way Microsoft is doing it really is the better one: give resources to OpenStreetMap and let them take care of the community work. Both sides win.

<comment><USER11> Does Microsoft use OSM data for anything?

They provide a lot of server resources by allowing OSM to reference Bing satellite/aerial imagery, but I've never seen any direct use of the data (they could certainly be using it ways that are not obvious).

<comment><USER12> Famously they used the outlines of military areas, as mapped in OSM, to decide where to blur their satellite imagery...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is probably one of the worst responses Google could take - who is going to enjoy waiting weeks/months for their change to be reviewed and added to a map when the whole point of community editing was to enable near-realtime changes to map observed by people living in the area? Throwing out the baby with the bath water. One prank and the whole community suffers beyond reasonable limits.

<comment><USER14> If they allow unreviewed community edits to the map, why don't they also allow users to revert changes by others? This is how Wikipedia deals with vandalism at least.

<comment><USER15> Wikipedia's policy is radically open as far as these things go, and only works because a) they're willing to tolerate vandalism being public for short (and, sometimes, long) periods of time, and b) they have an insanely large dedicated army of volunteers maintaining it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Everyone is suggesting OSM here, but I am confused how OSM is any better at keeping out these kinds of spam based edits, especially if it is someone who has made a lot of edits? From what I have seen it would be open to the same kind of problem.

<comment><USER16> OSM probably has a much larger community of editors. Both in absolute numbers and as a share of the users.

Because OSM is a community project, editors are more likely to feel responsible for map quality. On Map Maker, users also have limited possibilities once they find problems. I once tried to undo a malicious edit, and as far as I can remember my only options were to comment on it, and to "report a problem".

<comment><USER5> Do you have a stat for this? Map maker seems much more know and to have a rather large community based on the Google product page. If anything I'd think the community is much larger for the Google project than it is for OSM.

<comment><USER16> I was guessing.

The only user number I can find for Map Maker is 25000 in 2013, but there's no reference and it's not clear how many of those are active. [http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-map-maker- vs-o...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-map-maker-vs- openstreetmap-id-editor/)

OSM currently has 1% active and 2 million registered users: [http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Stats](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Stats)

So at least in relative numbers, OSM should have more contributors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This was posted yesterday, too - previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519535](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519535)

</comment><comment><USER18> I think that [http://tasks.hotosm.org/](http://tasks.hotosm.org/) has the balance of edit, review down pat.

</comment><comment><USER19> More on the 'most recent incident': [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9432504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9432504)

</comment><comment><USER20> Major strategic blunder: the whole world was updating their proprietary map data for them, but they failed to engineer the process to be spam-proof. Now they've had to stop accepting contributions as a result. Many contributors are likely to switch to updating someone else's map data, and Google risks no longer having the most up-to-date maps of the entire planet. Larry Page needs to kick some ass.

<comment><USER4> >they failed to engineer the process to be spam-proof

That's a bit naive. They have been getting business spam constantly from the day they opened. Like businesses marking their competitors as closed, or moving their own location so it is closer to their customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> 'This is why we can't have nice things'

<comment><USER22> Why, exactly?

Is it because Google asked for a bunch of free work to support its commercial interests without providing any oversight at all? And now they won't provide the resources to fix their problem?

Doesn't it seem likely that one of Google's goals here was just to compete with and thus extinguish existing free services? Is that why we can't have nice things?

<comment><USER23> I'm curious, now that you've mentioned it.

There's clearly evidence to support us not having nice things because of childish pranks.

Where's the evidence to support Google's goal was just to extinguish free services?

Do you have any links or anything to show what you mean?

<comment><USER5> I am pretty sure that was a baseless argument just to hate on Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How awesome would it be if all the big players contributed their effort to one open source platform. Much like how WC3 works. Everyone would benefit from the work they do and they can instead compete on the features or the front end they provide to their users. If google moves their data to openstreetmap then everyone stays up to date including google.

<comment><USER25> OSM will eventually overtake Google Maps and others, so I predict GMaps will eventually use OSM.

Importing GMaps data into OSM would be a programming nightmare, and is basically never going to happen. Trying to merge those 2 databases! Yikes!

<comment><USER26> Programming would be the lesser of the nightmares involved: merging whatever _n_ databases that Google has (licensed under _something_ , only Google knows what), with ODbL-licensed OSM data would be the real nightmare. Opening closed data is always a pain.

<comment><USER25> Licencing can be solved by the correct person in authority signing a bit of paper. Merging millions of roads in OSM with millions in GMaps?

<comment><USER26> That's the programmers' equivalent of "any matter programming can be solved by a smart person typing on a computer for a little while, there's nothing to it."

That said, I do acknowledge that merging two global datasets would be a nightmare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is not a new problem. You just cant trust an individual, even with a long history. The solution is to have individuals check up on each other. If some users are interested in drawing, other users should be interested in moderating.

<comment><USER28> And then you end up with the interminable whining regarding the moderation - see Wikipedia, StackExchange, etc.

<comment><USER25> OSM has less whining, probably because there is often less amibugity. Someone on StackExchange might wonder if a question is _really_ off-topic, but on OSM, there'll be very little disagreement about whether the thing is a lake or a postbox.

<comment><USER26> OSM is helped by the On The Ground Rule, in other words, physical world is the canonical source. There's quite enough disagreement in secondary tags (e.g. "smoothness" of a way), but having a universal canonical source (whatever is physically there) helps immensely with conflicts between data sources (sometimes from three data sources, you can get five data points, neither of which matches the physical feature ;)).

[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputes#On_the_Ground_R...](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputes#On_the_Ground_Rule)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It was practically unavailable in my area anyway. I'd already grown tired of fixing some really bad errors on the maps surrounding my neighborhood and workplace only to have the fixes reverted by someone or something else.

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder how the edits could be pre-review by an image analysis tool, that will auto detect if the submitted path is a text or a logo. Might speed up the manual process.

<comment><USER2> The Android pissing on Apple was created step by step with shapes that by itself looked totally clean. This would not work.

<comment><USER31> Sort of. Here's their list of edits: [http://www.google.com/mapmaker?gw=66&ptab=1&uid=200619129451...](http://www.google.com/mapmaker?gw=66&ptab=1&uid=200619129451972425213&start=10&sort=) (should be page 3), the Apple at the bottom would be reasonable to expect a human to catch. Not so much for a logo seeking algorithm, but it's not a clean simple shape. On page 4 the android head stands out too, again a human moderating could be expected to spot that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> For the people who didn't know the related prank like me, which led to this result: here is a quick summary about it: [http://techaeris.com/2015/04/24/google-android-mascot- shown-...](http://techaeris.com/2015/04/24/google-android-mascot-shown-on- google-maps-urinating-on-apple/)

</comment><comment><USER33> It is a welcome move if they are able to figure out a solution to retain quality. This problem exits more prominently in Google translate where people game the system and I guess that the translation is supposed to correct itself over a period of time with people fixing the mistake.</comment>


Big green Apple life: live smaller, drive less, share more - <AUTHOR> http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/big-green-apple-life-live-smaller-drive-less-share-more/

<comment><USER2> This is the first piece I edited after being criticized on HN for being too political with my small house story. I wanted this to be less political and more personal.</comment>


Magic P* words - <AUTHOR> http://rustartup.blogspot.com/2007/05/magic-p-words.html <comment><USER2> Regarding words that start with the same letter and mean the same thing in different languages, as long as you stay in the same language family, there are plenty.

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

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_Spanish_and_Portuguese></comment>


Investors Recruit Terminally Ill To Outwit Insurers on Annuities - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704479704575061392800740492.html

<comment><USER2> Though I think I get the idea from the first two paragraphs, perhaps you could provide a summary for those of us without a WSJ subscription?

<comment><AUTHOR> Try [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Investors+Recruit+T...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Investors+Recruit+Terminally+Ill+To+Outwit+Insurers+on+Annuities&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&oq=) \- and clicking on the first link... not sure if that still works

<comment><USER2> Got it, thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Bing Ballmer Says You're Fired [video] - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2009/12/19/bing-youre-fired/ <comment><USER2> The original linked to from this item: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1005926>

Personally, I really can't care.</comment>


How to view the urls of [dead] submissions - <AUTHOR> http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=478787

<comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes I want to view killed stories. You can see the URL by going to <http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=x>, where x is the item id (which you can get by looking at the URL of the story's upvote button).</comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with making coding errors at work? - <AUTHOR> Both to learn from the errors and minimize future ones, and also to not feel so terrible about making them. <comment><USER2> If you are recognising the error, you now have something that you didn't know before. Also your tooling and process should be sufficient that a single error shouldn't have a negative impact on the business, it should ideally be caught in testing or code review. Sometimes it can be productive to think about how bad code can break the product and use that to feed back into your development process.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not finding any errors would be more disconcerting, there must be some in almost every case.

The main thing is to know if your error rate and development methodology matches the risk profile, eg is it a train braking system or a playlist enhancer and did you achieve acceptable results in reasonable time.

</comment><comment><USER4> The most important part is to be honest with them and start working on a fix as soon as possible. Take it as a growing lesson.</comment>


Show HN: Gambit - betting predictions, done right - <AUTHOR> http://www.gambitboard.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN, I developed Gambit out of the necessity to speed up and improve the process of collecting the data needed to choose good soccer bets. With the collected data the algorithm performs computations and statistical matches in order to assign a risk factor to each match, and then sorts the available bets of the next two days by their risk.

This tool helped me so much in my betting activity that I decided to turn it into an actual product and beta testing (actually my users are friends and friends of friends, since I am launching today on HN and before yesterday the site was private) is giving good results and I just wanted to ask you for suggestions and feedback, plus you can earn some little money if you are into sports betting, which never harms :)

The website is still really in development mode, with no time zones, no good documentation, not rendering properly on IE and, yeah, it's pretty basic. But the algorithm is good and working, so feel safe to use it for testing your betting hypothesis if you like. I am still thinking about how to monetize it, and suggestions are welcome. Thanks a lot for your time and attention, love HN.

You can reach Gambit at <http://www.gambitboard.com>

<comment><USER2> If it works, can't you monetize it by using it and betting larger amounts?

<comment><USER3> This is not always possible. Most betting sites impose limits on your betting or events according to behaviour.

So his idea make sense :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Create affiliate links for sport betting sites as well so when users visit Gambit - you can point them in the right direction.

In fact nowhere on the 'more info' does it say where to place the bet at the odds you have given? (where the odds from?)

Also why not consider using betfair's API (or others) to place bets for users?</comment>


MIT researchers devise a secure anonymity network that's 10x faster than Tor - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/internet/231817-mit-researchers-devise-a-secure-anonymity-network-thats-10x-faster-than-tor <comment><USER2> Is anyone working on an actual implementation of this, beyond the golang reference implementation by one of the authors that can't be forked because it lacks a license?

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome. Really. But it can also be taken down with a sneeze. And these are not easily fixable details, they come from the foundation, so I doubt it will ever leave the lab. Reminds me a bit of the three little piggies tale.

</comment><comment><USER4> Recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073942)</comment>


Ask HN: What is the expected capacity for a full time developer? - <AUTHOR>

At [large company] there I work as a contractor, several projects are being planned with only a limited pool of resources. Initially plans where laid expecting everyone to deliver at 100% capacity - meaning that 8 hours of work would be done during an 8 hour workday. But if you subtract lunch, meetings, procastination, interuptions et al. - what is the expected capacity (%) of an experienced developer in a semi-agile environment? <comment><USER2> I used to use 25 hours out of 40 in burndown calculations, so 5 hours a day. This was then used against task lists that had estimates in hours of 1,4,8,16 increments. If something needed a re-estimate after work began that was taken into calculation.

That was with a fairly low amount of BS. If there a lot of meetings then lower it. If you work in an open plan work space with people not directly contributing to the same effort, lower it some more.

</comment><comment><USER3> I work at an extremely large non-tech company following a semi-agile process.

Officially, we're expected to do 6 hours of coding per day. However with meetings and lunch, we only really have 4.5 - 5 hours of time that isn't blocked off.

Then, because some meetings aren't scheduled back to back, we essentially lose the time in the middle (especially if that time is only ~30 minutes).

When all is said and done, I'm probably putting in 3-4 hours of code in per day on average. It's more than enough to get the job done.

It's soul crushing and I'm looking to quit soon.

</comment><comment><USER4> The question doesn't really have a well defined answer. It would vary tremendously by the organization and project they're working on. Also depends a lot on their level. There are senior engineers who code probably <25% of their time, but add value by helping other engineers, planning, architecting, removing obstacles, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hoped and dreamed for? 100%

What I actually use when preparing estimates?

40%-75% which depends on stuff like the developer being staffed, how short the project is (shorter = more productive), how bleeding edge the tech is (higher tech = less productive), etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> What unit is developer capacity measured in?

Lines of code, bugs per hour (clised?, created?, avoided?), revenue per month (a contractor standard), etc.

Utilization is different from productivity.

</comment><comment><USER7> See: [http://style.org/unladenswallow/](http://style.org/unladenswallow/)

</comment><comment><USER8> 80% if you have a lean development cycle. 50% if your organization loves meetings and project plans.</comment>


Ask HN: Most interesting events and conferences 2014 in the USA? - <AUTHOR>

What are the most interesting events and conferences for you that will take place in 2014? <comment><USER2> In which area?

<comment><AUTHOR> All of the US (changed the title, thanks)</comment></comment>


Tech Workers' Values - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/tech-workers-values <comment><USER2> _We believe that employees should come together and clearly define the values and policies they 'd like to see their companies uphold. A tech union isn't the perfect metaphor for this, but it's not far off._

If it's going to do anything but be window dressing then it needs to have the teeth of union - so just call it what it is.

I've argued for a while that tech workers need a union, but the chorus on HN and other places is "we're too special for a union." Which is bogus on it's face - otherwise SAG for example wouldn't exist.

If this moves the needle on a union then great, but I'm wary of the source being a pure power move (which all unions are - rightfully). I think whomever leads this needs to be above reproach in every sense as an advocate for the tiny introverted developer.

edit: I should note that the reason SAG worked is because some of the highest profile actors joined in the early days and arranged to collectively bargain for the rest of the group. It will probably work best if you get the top 50 most high profile developers (Eg. Carmack) to join and then advocate for the small guy. Sadly, in reality, a union is only as good as it's most high profile members.

<comment><USER3> My main objection to unions is that, once they're in a company, employees lose the right to negotiate their own compensation. I want to be able to skip my union dues and deal directly with the company. OR I want to be able to make a union of my own, especially for a functional or values-based subset of coworkers, and have us negotiate separately.

This is not just a tech-unions-related complaint, this is a critique of unions as a whole. But yeah.

I think that tech workers are in a special place because we have a lot of disposable income. I've gotten over my college-era "can't pay for anything" attitude, and I'm willing to pay for content that could be gotten for free. Entertainment was the first one, but now I'm also supporting some people on patreon and donating to causes. We don't need a union to drive that-- we can just remind tech workers that if we all donate a little, we can make big changes.

<comment><USER4> > employees lose the right to negotiate their own compensation.

I have never heard of that. Why would that be?

<comment><USER5> Because they would need to join the union and the union negotiates compensation for everyone, that's one of the main purposes of a union.

<comment><USER6> And that's exactly why I will never join a union. As soon as that happens at any job I have, I will hand in my resignation the next day.

I can negotiate very well on my own, as opposed to being stuck into seniority "levels", thank you very much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Who is the "we" he's speaking to here? I know that Twitter and HN, i.e. the generic internet, are the only places Sam and I typically might cross paths, so who is the community he's speaking for? Gavin de Becker and "forced teaming" comes to mind.

Is this YC trying to stay on top of the tech activism bubbling in various corners these days? He doesn't say, the entire post is expressed as self- evident, which makes me think his (et al) motivation is competitively strategic, and specifically political. Vagueness is construed against the writer, especially when it's intentional.

If he is indeed speaking to the DSA and ersatz-unionization ideas floating around, why not join forces with people who are already working on this? Fragmentation? Disruption? Narratology?

 _We'd also like to discuss how tech companies can heal the divide in our country_

Evergreen take, but you still can't solve a people problem with technology.

<comment><USER8> > _Who is the "we" he's speaking to here?_

"Sam Altman, Debra Cleaver, Matt Krisiloff". They sign the post.

> _I know that Twitter and HN, i.e. the generic internet, are the only places > Sam and I typically might cross paths, so who is the community he 's > speaking for?_

The tech community.

<comment><USER9> The tech community, or the portion of the tech community that is Silicon Valley Liberal?

(Bear in mind that even if you feel inclined to write off non-liberals, there _is_ a such thing as a non-Silicon Valley liberal.)

I can't help but feel this organization is going to have a built in equivocation fallacy where whenever it is suitable they'll claim to be a "tech worker union" but whenever it comes time to decide what the union is actually going to do it'll be the "Silicon Valley Liberals" deciding what to do.

<comment><USER8> > _The tech community, or the portion of the tech community that is Silicon > Valley Liberal?_

When they write "For good and bad, technology has become a central force in all our lives. As members of the community, ..."

they obviously mean the tech community.

And they ARE members of the tech community (regardless of if they are also members of a subset, like SV-liberal tech community or anything similar).

<comment><USER9> And if they were setting out to be a union in the conventional sense, that would be fine. But as a weird undefined vaguely amorphous "We're a union that's going to do political things", it matters whether the Silicon Valley liberals are going to be making all the decisions.

I said this on another thing that got lost on /new recently, but either form a PAC or form a union, but don't try to do both.

I very much expect this to be structurally non-viable. Once the union has to make positive decisions about what to push for even the apparent political unity in Silicon Valley will be revealed to be less strong than it seems when you're merely looking at the fact that "I don't know anyone who voted for Trump", let alone what happens if you try to extend it out of Silicon Valley. (And if this is supposed to be unionesque, you'll have to almost immediately as plenty of SV companies have major non-SV offices.) There are unions that were politically active, but they always combined it with a _very_ strong message to their members that their primary task was watching out for their members. Starting right out of the gate with "Our first priority is political activism" means that you can pretty much guarantee the leadership will end up detached from the membership in a small number of years. Something may emerge from that process, but it won't be a group of people that has anything like a quorum of the "tech community"... it'll just be a PAC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's already a solution for this - worker ownership of companies with corresponding democratic rights.

We've just emerged from an era where benevolent tech companies were supposed to stand up for us and reflect our values. Instead, they put on a polite face, said the right words to us, and then did whatever served their interests irrespective of our concerns. Repeating this scenario is foolish and only going to worsen the situation.

<comment><USER11> I like the fictional future on Mars in the Kim Stanley Robinson novels where there are no companies, but co-ops. Your time goes into the co-op and everyone owns a portion of that for life.

This is a greater dramatic shift and I'm not sure if we'll see it in our lifetimes, but it would be nice that, even that first high school job at a cinema would earn you shares in that company equal to the time you put in, for life. In some ways, that would make more sense than basic minimum income.

<comment><USER12> It will happen. The limiting factor is we need to get the friction for forking an existing co-op down close to zero. Unfortunately most people who work for a co-op still think of it as proprietary ("this is my co-op, and we don't have any openings right now. If you want yours you have to start your own").

Intellectual resistance from co-opers isn't the main bottleneck though. Management infrastructure needs to be all digital and open source, and forking needs to be technically easy. That means the accounting, staffing, and operations procedures all written out in code, rather than in QuickBooks on some computer in the stock room. On github, with one-touch deployment to Heroku, or some equivalent. Ethereum maybe.

Once we're there I think it will be fairly easy to sell the employees on the "you should spend some time training people who are forking your business" concept, since they are (mostly) already amenable to anarchist (you don't really own anything) values. At that point it will be viral and anyone who is providing ops and logistical support for that ecosystem will get very rich.

<comment><USER13> >> It will happen.

As someone who was born and raised in the Soviet Union and spent the last 20 years in the US, I hope to dear god this doesn't ever happen. I don't know where else I'd have to emigrate if it does. To Mars maybe?

What you're describing is essentially "collective enterprise" or "kolkhoz", where nominally you own a share in a venture, but in practice you don't own shit, and as a result you don't consider it "your own", and as a direct consequence of not actually owning property, you just can't bring yourself to care. This gives rise to a lot of unsavory and damaging behaviors: from not actually working all that hard, to outright stealing. They had a saying in the USSR: "Everything belongs to the kolkhoz, so everything belongs to me." So who's to judge you if you e.g. steal a couple of tons of kerosene to heat your hothouse in winter?

Communists had to _shoot people_ who had even a modicum of entrepreneurial skill ("kulaks"), and take away their property in order to get the rest to join after the October Revolution of 1917. I suspect that's how things looked to the revolutionaries back in late 19th century. They've never experienced their proposed ideology on their own hide and therefore did not see its rough edges and downsides. All of this collectivism in the US can exist only as a part of a broader staunchly capitalist economy, and then only during the "good times" when people's needs are more or less met and they can spare some energy on pursuing ideological purity.

All of this discussion about communist ideals from people who have never experienced anything anywhere close to what it's like is like a bad nightmare to any Eastern European who actually has a first hand experience living under a communist regime. Truly, those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

I, for one, will sacrifice everything I've got to prevent any even remotely communist development of events here in the US. Yes, that does include not considering Bernie "Money grows on trees" Sanders seriously. Communism does not work. It never did work. It never will work. I'm 100% certain of it.

Cue people explaining to me that the "USSR never actually had communism" and "you're holding it wrong". You're missing the point.

<comment><USER14> I model you a bit like my father, who grew up in a Soviet satelite state, if he had ended up in the US instead of a country with strong socialist history: he will argue for free education, basic income, national healthcare, nationalization of infrastructure and resources (all of which are pretty socialist ideas), but will immediately revert to referring to kolkhoz and aparatschiks if any politician or activist openly endorses socialist views.

The main point where I will agree with you is that USSR and FORCED anything is wrong. But what would be so wrong in expanding and evolving the cooperative model and letting workers owning their companies become the norm? To me it is all about making that the more efficient way to run a company, so people do it voluntarily. This could be accomplished by changing some of the laws regarding liability, taxation etc to reflect their intended purpose (or by going full way to corporate personhood and making something like a transnational impossible, i.e. if you want to do business in that country, you need to get a "corporate passport"). The current US system is broken. USSR was broken. Let's try to mix and match and add new things. Marx was probably right in his diagnosis of the fatal tendency of capital to consolidate and turn free market capitalism into crony capitalism. The efficient solution to this seems to be the german, scandinavian, canadian mixture of the two. Heck, even china on the more dystopian side "works" because they combine the two

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Tech workers are as disparate and varied as non-tech workers...

There is a hierarchy and I think it is unlikely we will see common ground emerge. Survival of the fittest and the best will still win the day. Just like the labor unions of the industrial era, efforts like this are doomed to be spikes of ideology rife with the same contradictions of those it proposes to keep in check.

Some tech workers run multimillion dollar businesses and some push bits around for them in the wee hours of the morning for much less.

Some have PhDs in category theory and write Haskell on a multiple 6 figure salary in finance and some maintain dated ruby on rails systems they didn't write for much less.

Some roll around on scooters in data centers putting out real fires in environments that need high availability. Others spend their days upgrading old versions of windows in small town school districts.

The same divides that existed before the internet will follow us. Nothing new here. Work hard, strive to get to the top, and hang on. Unions are not the answer. Darwin always wins the day.

<comment><USER16> Exactly. This post is founded on so many bad assumptions..

 _We 'd also like to discuss how tech companies can heal the divide in our country._

Why _shouldn't_ there be divides in our country? Which divide is being referred to? Religious? Political? Net worth? Productivity? Persuasion?

Why assume differences need "healed?" Why this constant, desperate push for homogeneity?

Why can't people simply be different, and have conflicting opinions and worldviews? Why can't these disagreements, alongside of passionate debate, be lauded and encouraged instead of shamed?

Why can't people simply not like one another sometimes, without needing "healed"?

<comment><USER17> A lot of the push for healing is really about a belief that the other side would agree with you if they just _had all the facts._ That what's holding back agreement is _educational_ in nature.

I don't think this is true, to state it mildly, but a lot of modern politics (and nearly every smart-aleck tweet ever written) makes a lot more sense when viewed through this lens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Tech workers have something so much better than that. Freedom. If you do not like the values of the current company find a new one or start one.

Mob rule knows no fairness. When your ideas are vague, people fill them up with their version of fairness. Employees who are just starting out do not know anything about making sacrifices to build something bigger than themselves. If they collectively form a gang and override the will of the founders and investors who made more sacrifices, it drains the spirit of the individual to risk their time and savings to start something new.

People are free to organize their efforts but it takes founders and their sacrifices to make things happen. This collective power should embrace ideas of fairness and voluntarism instead of laws and force to get their way.

<comment><USER19> You could make the same argument about most engineering disciplines. Yet other engineers have unions, because historically they've had unions and they've worked out well. The only reason that software engineering unions aren't common is because we didn't adopt them at the beginning.

Quick reminder that unions are the reason that many of the benefits you have in the workplace today are standardised across the workforce -- a union that has teeth can actually make a difference to your employer's actions.

<comment><USER18> That probably explains why "other engineering disciplines" do not have as many startups as software. If you do not like the current place and its values why do you hold others and its owners hostage to your ideals? Why not start a new one and attract better talent with your better values.

Tech companies are trying to do something better than what previous generations could do.

<comment><USER20> And maybe tech unions- call them guilds or free associations or hacker collectives if you can't stomach the term- can do labor relations better than what previous unions could do, as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is a pretty bizarre and direct ripoff of pinboard's Tech Solidarity, except run by The Man and they'll "select" who's allowed to attend. Classless and tone-deaf would be charitable interpretation.

<comment><USER22> As someone who knows little about Tech Solidarity, other than what's shown on their site, it seems like they're a bit different. Sam's group is a little more pointed in the direction of promoting the broader tech community's values into a company, and Tech Solidarity seems to be more about connecting developers to their community and supporting that interaction.

Perhaps you can expound?

<comment><USER23> I've been talking about organizing labor in tech companies around an ethical agenda since December. For example: [https://sfbay.techsolidarity.org/2017/01/05/meeting_notes.ht...](https://sfbay.techsolidarity.org/2017/01/05/meeting_notes.htm)

That said, I'm happy to hear YC preaching from the same Bible. I would encourage Sam to coordinate with the many groups already working to what is apparently a shared goal.

<comment><USER22> I didn't mean to understate or downplay what Tech Solidarity was (I am just learning about it now), so I hope you don't take offence to my my questioning.

I am sympathetic to your cause.

<comment><USER23> No offense taken at all! Tech Solidarity is about in-person meetings, so I get that it's not easy to get a sense of the agenda from the outside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I can't articulate why exactly... but I have a very bad feeling about this.

> We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to > reduce the polarization we've helped create.

I'm pretty sure this kind of thing is just going to make the polarization worse.

<comment><USER25> > We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to > reduce the polarization we've helped create.

I guarantee this is code for "we think Trump wouldn't have been elected if he couldn't use Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. Let's figure out how to make that possible."

<comment><USER26> I don't think you have the authority to offer such a guarantee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Give us creative freedom and ownership of our IP.

When you claim all of our thoughts on and off the clock, you encourage us to avoid creatively-fulfilling ventures, burn out, and leave for greener pastures.

<comment><USER28> > _Give us creative freedom and ownership of our IP._

you can't be serious. why would a company even exist if all the work it paid for would be owned by someone else?

i mean sure, you can live in that world, it's just nobody would pay for anything to happen.

<comment><USER29> You pay for your business to continue operating, not for a lucrative exit strategy.

<comment><USER28> yeah sure. the open source services business model has some legs but they aren't that long.

in other words, yes it works, but not that great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's good that Altman recognizes that something needs to be done here. Something does need to happen.

However: Altman is a business owner and an executive. I don't think he can coordinate the solution. The kernel of the issue here is the disengagement rank-and-file employees have from the public policy implications of their work. Employees don't need permission from owners and managers to be accountable for those implications. The widespread, implicit belief among the rank-and-file that they do need permission is the first obstacle that we need to address.

Rather than staging meetings and attempting to help shape the outcome, Altman and other executives should encourage their employees to work amongst themselves. Getting directly involved, however, is problematic, and I think owners and executives should probably avoid doing that.

<comment><USER30> I'd suggest that, if your net worth exceeds a million dollars _and_ your entire income/value is derived from the current startup trends embodied by YC, _you are uniquely unqualified to start talking about helping workers_.

 _sama_ is a leader in the class of the exploiters, and crowdwashing like this won't change anything.

EDIT: The "general you", not "you, tptacek". :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> From the earlier sama post, What I Heard From Trump Supporters:

> Almost everyone I asked was willing to talk to me, but almost none of them > wanted me to use their names—even people from very red states were worried > about getting "targeted by those people in Silicon Valley if they knew I > voted for him". One person in Silicon Valley even asked me to sign a > confidentiality agreement before she would talk to me, as she worried she'd > lose her job if people at her company knew she was a strong Trump supporter.

..

> We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to > reduce the polarization we've helped create.

Are tech employees the correct population to attempt to bridge a political divide? I'm not convinced that's the case.

<comment><USER32> Silicon Valley (especially SF) is all for diversity...as long as you think exactly like they do.

<comment><USER33> Wrong. There's little tolerance for bigotry. There's nothing wrong with that. Having the opinion that a class of people do not deserve the same rights as others is not "diversity" or "having a different opinion". It's bigotry, plain and simple.

What you want is for no one to call you out for espousing terrible views. You want freedom from consequences of speech, not freedom of speech.

<comment><USER34> And you're attacking someone simply for stating that they think "Silicon Valley (especially SF) is all for diversity...as long as you think exactly like they do." From left field, you're bringing up and arguing against "having the opinion that a class of people do not deserve the same rights as others". And declaring that you know what EduardoBautista "wants": "no one to call you out for espousing terrible views. You want freedom from consequences of speech, not freedom from speech." How you come to these conclusions based on that one statement, and then bring up your contrived ideas in a seemingly vitriolic attack against another person, I don't know.

Perhaps people wouldn't call what you're exhibiting "bigotry", but I would: based on a single statement, you jump to conclusions and attack someone based on those conclusions. I think such behavior is one of the biggest problems in (a part of) American culture, and I would wager I'm not alone in thinking this.

<comment><USER35> > How you come to these conclusions based on that one statement

Because that one statement is from Stormfront.

<comment><USER34> Simply for the sake of meaningful discourse, I'd like to believe there's more to this thought. But you offer little.

1\. Is there proof you have of this? Or is your statement just one of "This is something I think /they/ would say."?

2\. More importantly: If a statement comes from the mouth of someone you feel is unsavory, does that make the statement invalid? Is everyone who then utters that statement unsavory, and so on? Do you think you can come to that conclusion? Particularly with EduardoBautista's thought: do you think you could come to that conclusion?

Attempting to associate EduardoBautista with Stormfront (with a comment like yours) would be considered a damning accusation to many, though such tactics have become painfully commonplace. That is not what you intend, is it?

<comment><USER35> I'm saying that the sentiment expressed (vacuous complaints about "wrongthink" when the "wrongthink" in question is complaints about people choosing not to associate with fascists) originates from Stormfront and their ideological brothers-in-arms. Whether he's an actual white supremacist or someone who got suckered into repeating their propaganda is immaterial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "Tech companies are very receptive to their employees' influence. We believe that employees should come together and clearly define the values and policies they'd like to see their companies uphold."

Maybe he should replace "employee" with "investor" and start working on that? In the end it's the investors that force companies to make money at any cost.

<comment><USER37> Engineers like money too. And demand it from their employers.

If you are not doing that, you should.

<comment><USER32> Yes. I don't understand the people who say "I'd rather work in a company with a good working environment" as if you have to work for peanuts to have a good job. If you are convinced to work for a low salary in the name of "culture" your employer is laughing all the way to the bank.

<comment><USER38> I don't know... most of those places that pay a low salary in the name of 'culture' are startups, and most of those don't ever make any money... so there isn't really anyone laughing all the way to the bank.

<comment><USER39> Replace "culture" with some other buzzword or phrase, e.g. "work on hard problems," "intellectually challenging/stimulating," "positive work/life balance," "work on important problems," "be disruptive," etc.

This sort of "anything but financial compensation" compensation is ubiquitous in this industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> _> We believe that tech companies can create a better economic future for all Americans by spreading high-paying technology jobs around the country ..._

From what I can tell, this doesn't really line up with the location and remote-friendliness of YC companies. Most seem to be in the Bay Area and few that I can tell allow remote engineers, managers, or execs.

Sorry, but being an Instacart delivery person in Dallas isn't a high-paying technology job.

Prove me wrong with real numbers please.

</comment><comment><USER41> I have no clue what he's talking about, and what it sounds like he's saying makes me a little angry.

\- Unions are a force to protect the 99% from the corruption of the 1%. They are not a force to drive a liberal agenda, though by protecting the little guy they may indirectly align.

\- Increasing competition by getting more people into coding (be them from outside the country or from outside of cities) is the exact opposite of what a union would do. It would drive down wages for the skilled workers that investors are getting rich off of.

\- Technology making peoples lives worse is the fault of a combination of capitalism and the fact that CEOs and investors are more motivated by adding 0s to their bank account than anything as nebulous as "good." Why should tech workers risk their jobs to force the hand of the companies they work at?

\- Is he talking about automation taking jobs? Because the profit from the concentration of wealth again is at the hands of the 1% and .1%. Unless he's saying tech workers need to pass the buffet rule, or tech workers need to refuse to work at companies that don't give enough equity then I don't see how the average tech worker is the solution to the wealth being drawn away from the average citizen (who can't afford $500 in an emergency) into an investor's portfolio....

</comment><comment><USER42> The same forces that have killed unions in the US will kill this. As long as labor can be shipped to areas of the world with a lower quality of life, they will do so. Lower level tech positions like tech support have already been shipped overseas, and once countries like India and China develop the infrastructure to take higher level tech jobs, they will go there too.

If we want to protect our workers, our labor laws, and our standard of living, we have to stop globalization.

<comment><USER43> 1\. "Overseas" is a curious definition. Linux was written in Finland, after all. Would blocking US workers from aiding Finnish technology have been productive?

2\. Can it be stopped? If US companies refuse to work with Indian or Chinese employees, what is preventing India or China from out-competing the US company in the international market? If the US places tariffs on technology products and services from other countries, what is preventing those other countries from outpacing our standard of living?

<comment><USER42> 1\. It depends on where the work is shipped. Global trade between countries with similar minimum wages and labor laws is a net positive because it takes advantage of the varying resources of other countries without exploiting labor. Yet when a country has a vastly different economy, it can be not fair at all. For example, minimum wage in Mexico is $0.48/hr, and their quality of life is very low. How is it fair to the world when a richer country facilitates the poorer country's poor labor laws by shipping all its work to the poor country, all while gutting the richer country's middle class? It just leads to a race to the bottom to see which country can offer the cheapest labor.

2\. It can be stopped. The US was an economic powerhouse before globalization, and had an incredibly powerful middle class with a high quality of life. What China has done is use the money from outsourcing into creating its own internal industries, which is why their economy is rising all across the board, while in the US we've been outsourcing our industries to the point where only the capital owners who exploit globalization are seeing an increase in quality of life. If we stop that, the globalists will suffer but our middle class will rise. As far as competition goes, what does it matter if we have the "strongest market" or whatever if the majority of people don't benefit from it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Reminder: TechSolidarity, a very similar initiative is open to everyone and is meeting next Wednesday in SF [https://techsolidarity.org/events/sf_april_5.html](https://techsolidarity.org/events/sf_april_5.html)

<comment><USER45> In what way is it similar? I thought TechSolidarity was explicitly an anti- Trump thing. Didn't exactly get that vibe from this post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> See also [https://techsolidarity.org/](https://techsolidarity.org/)

</comment><comment><USER47> This:

      As members of the community, we're interested in ways in which tech companies can use their collective power to protect privacy, rule of law, freedom of expression, and other fundamental American rights

And this:

      We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the polarization we've helped create.

are not really compatible. People from Red America already aren't welcome in tech (I am from Red America). This makes polarization worse by creating yet another filter bubble. Making tech companies into even more explicit vehicles for progressive activism might be a good thing on balance, but it won't help with polarization. Pick one.

<comment><USER48> At least the words are compatible, though the intent is probably not. Red America is perfectly happy to "protect privacy, rule of law, freedom of expression, and other fundamental American rights", and would love to "reduce the polarization".

Let's start with the easy one, polarization: that gets reduced if the tech industry accepts Red America values. Well? It works. It is a solution to polarization. Problem solved.

Red America is fond of privacy. FYI, the recent ISP thing isn't going over well with non-politicians. When gun registrations were published in a newspaper, that didn't go over too well. Opposition to stuff like home/family/schooling inspections (kid-related government agencies) is intense in Red America.

Red America loves the rule of law. You can tell that Trump has disappointed them on this when they chant "LOCK HER UP" and he evades the issue. Red America prefers that the constitution be interpreted very literally, using the actual text, with the meanings of words as they were in the English language at the time they were written.

Red America accepts freedom of expression even when they don't like it very much. It wasn't Red America that violently shut down Milo's speech. That was all blue.

Red America is obviously fond of other fundamental American rights. When the ACLU counts to ten, they do this: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (skipping the amendment they don't like)

<comment><USER35> Your idea of "compromise" is to demand capitulation. There is no reason for anyone to comply with your demands because you bring nothing to the table.

In the end, it was conservatives who shot Milo down by exposing his advocacy of Catholic priest molestation. His remaining supporters are fascist and reactionary pedophiles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> One value I'd like to see enforced is better separation of employees' work and private life. Examples would include:

Not having to support politics I disagree with during or outside of work hours.

Not having my photo and about me on the company webpage. No one wants to know the truth that my hobbies are not rock climbing and playing the guitar.

Not being forced to go to conferences, hackathons, and other company sponsored events.

It would be nice if these values included lobbying for tech workers to not be exempt from overtime pay and reforms of the h1b visa program.

</comment><comment><USER50> These recent interviews with Alan Kay [1][2] cover this topic from a perspective I find valuable. In addition, there are many other relevant presentations he has made and in which he presents his own perspectives and points to the ideas of others like Douglas Englebart, Neil Postman, Seymor Papert, Marshall McLuhan, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Paine [3]

[1] Alan Kay - Inventing the Future Part 1: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVUGkuUj28o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVUGkuUj28o)

[2] Alan Kay - Inventing the Future Part 2: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6ZHxUwqPVw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6ZHxUwqPVw)

[3] Alan Kay's Reading List [http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp](http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp)

</comment><comment><USER51> Lots of focus in the comments here, on the Unions aspect of this post, but Sam leads with how it's "tech companies" who have the power and responsibility to change things. And then follows up saying that unions might be a good way to make companies beholden to popular belief.

This is mostly bullshit. Instead of putting the honus on the executives and VC's who define the growth-first business models, it's somehow the responsibility of their employees to wield the power of a tech company responsibly? To shape the direction of a company?

Maybe in a round-about way, Sam is saying that unions are the only way to responsibly limit the power of tech companies' leadership. But make no mistake, the responsibility for the power of technology falls directly in the laps of a company's leaders.

</comment><comment><USER52> > We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to > reduce the polarization we've helped create.

Liquidate Twitter?

</comment><comment><USER53> "We'd also like to discuss how tech companies can heal the divide in our country. We believe that tech companies can create a better economic future for all Americans by spreading high-paying technology jobs around the country and other measures."

Isn't the elephant in the room extreme capitalism? Tech is just accelerating it.

Perhaps the alternative is workers managing their own workplaces:

[https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure- Capitalism/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure- Capitalism/dp/1608462471)

</comment><comment><USER20> Every time the idea of a tech workers' union is brought up, the same tired criticisms of organized labor are brought up again and again.

Do people forget that this industry is built upon the ideal of innovation? Why can't we build a new type of union that fixes the bugs that prior unions suffered? Why can't we experiment and find new solutions? Why can't we disrupt the relationship between capital and labor?

The notion that unions are somehow inherently unworkable flies in the face of everything that the tech industry stands for.

</comment><comment><USER54> It'd be appreciated if YC would record and or livestream the meeting mentioned near the end of the blog post for those who can't be in the Bay Area.

<comment><USER55> This, please.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> A Tech Union is a great idea, starting with Bay Area employees banding together for higher equity at startups. If VC-funded startups suddenly couldn't hire their first employees for 1% equity (against the founders' 50-70%) then we'd see fairer payouts for successful startups.

</comment><comment><USER57> _We believe that tech companies can create a better economic future for all Americans by spreading high-paying technology jobs around the country and other measures_

I believe this is key. Technology does not have to be binded to one or a few locations. If tech could once again try to be spread across other cities and states that will be good for everyone. It will be good for remote work, cost of living, people will support tech growth more nationwide, there will be new ideas that might not emerge in a tech hotspot and not everyone will have to move to one place which is really a single point of failure.

</comment><comment><USER58> > We believe that tech companies can create a better economic future for all > Americans by spreading high-paying technology jobs around the country and > other measure

While an obvious positive, this completely ignores the fact that these higher salaries are precisely because we write software that increases efficiency over what a handful of humans can do. So while there is an increase in high paying jobs, there is inevitably a decrease in many more low paying jobs (short-term at least, likely long-term unless we learn how to re-train people better)

</comment><comment><USER59> A few weeks back, I wrote a piece about assessing and setting your values as an engineer:

[https://www.nemil.com/musings/software-engineers-and- ethics....](https://www.nemil.com/musings/software-engineers-and-ethics.html)

I was surprised we didn't discuss this more and I wanted to help someone early in their career think through it.

(I also got some good feedback from YC's Paul Buchheit who helped coin "Don't be evil" in the early days of Google)

</comment><comment><USER60> I both like the idea of unions on the one hand (have greater group self- determination) but on the other hand it can lead to ossification and ultimately our own demise (through complacency, irrelevancy, protectionism, etc.)

I do like the idea of spreading the wealth to other parts of the country, especially those that are hit hardest by the changing characteristics of the economy --people we often forget, hollowed out industrial cities, forgotten rural areas, etc.

</comment><comment><USER61> I would love participate in this event and I believe this effort may be an important step in moving us towards ethical software. Unfortunately, despite having a fairly unique and well-suited pedigree to contribute, I live a good thousand miles away.

Would there be an opportunity for individuals not located in the Bay Area to attend, provide commentary on meeting notes, or somehow participate without being present locally?

</comment><comment><USER62> What are your guys thoughts on moving or starting a new tech community in a remote city that are not too expensive, such as Alaska even?

<comment><USER63> There used to be tech in interior California which is an inexpensive area. Sierra Online/Sierra Entertainment was a notable example. The Grass Valley Group was another.

Paul Graham's "How To a Silicon Valley" [0] has the best recommendations I've seen.

[0] [http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html)

<comment><USER55> @pg's guide is good, but misses a few points.

There's the role of the defense industry and Silicon Valley. See Steve Blank's "Secret History of Silicon Valley":

[https://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon- va...](https://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-valley/)

That said, there's a bunch of strength to @pg's points and conclusions. Portland and Boulder as potential tech hubs sounds about right. It might be possible to build out elsewhere -- Rochester and Buffalo in New York _were_ technology centers, once, and though it's small, Burlington, VT, has much of the right vibe (though possibly too harsh winters) for tech.

I _don 't_ see the sweat-and-mildew belt -- the midwest -- really doing much. There's too much about getting outside and actually clearing your head, which the vast expanses of overhumidified prarie (or frozen tundra) don't offer. Though the land is cheap, and a few college towns (University of Illinois, University of Iowa, Notre Dame) _might_ manage to create some centres around.

I'm also not entirely sure Chicago ought be written off, though I suspect it would take a tremendous amount to turn it around. On the one hand, it's lower- cost land, nearer East Coast centres, with good natural transport (air, rail, ship, truck) for various industry. On the other hand, the weather's little different from Ithaca or Pittsburgh, and the politics are interminable.

The flexability of pretty much doing what you wanted in California in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s is hard to beat, and that's continued to pay off. Though I'd argue those benefits are now largely gone.

The role of a cheap housing stock and/or the ability to pick up and create a long-term plan with a large set of land, say, in Chicago or Detroit, seems interesting though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> "Rule of law" as a tech worker's value? Uber... Air BnB... ... illegal immigration.... does not compute.

<comment><USER55> The irony given YC's involvement in those is ... interesting, to say the least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Should this have some sort of warning attached? I'm not sure every company will like having their (unauthorized) employees defining their policies and values. A common controversy with unions, especially when they're forming, is employer discrimination against participants.

<comment><USER65> The employees already instantiate a company's actual values. They just don't get to decide what the company says its values are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> It's pretty much the nature of tech hiring to select the most elite candidates from around the world. Distributing the offices through Rust Belt exurbs does _not_ mean tech jobs for laid-off steelworkers in Rust Belt exurbs.

<comment><USER67> While it may not mean jobs for laid off rust belt workers if there were a number of tech workers living in the rust belt they would spend most of their salary in the rust belt which could very well lead to jobs in other sectors in the region.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> One way to start "spreading high-paying technology jobs around the country" would be to advocate for distributing H1-B jobs via auction, rather than lottery. Perhaps the union could work on this!

<comment><USER55> That creates several modes of imbalance / abuse, potentially.

E.g., a large and cash-rich firm could bid on more visas than it needs, starving other firms.

It also fails to address the leverage that the visa sponsor has over the visa holder -- lose your job, and you lose your right to remain in-country.

<comment><USER68> Perhaps there could be penalties for non-use. But in general, the total market is so much larger than any given firm and its competitors that it shouldn't be an issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Out of the whole agenda, privacy is the only item for which it matters at all that we're in tech. Everything else seems to be things he hopes wealthy people in any booming industry care about.

</comment><comment><USER70> The great thing about "values" is that everyone can have their own (play on same phrase with "standards")

To have "rights", they must be encoded in the legal code.

</comment><comment><USER71> This is an interesting initiative, I look forward to seeing where it goes. Kudos to Sam, Debra & Matt for taking a lead on this.

</comment><comment><USER55> "What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour.

"It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.

"We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen; who sometimes too, without any provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of their labour. Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of provisions; sometimes the great profit which their masters make by their work. But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. The masters upon these occasions are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen, accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which, partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate, partly from the necessity superior steadiness of the masters, partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of submitting for the sake of present subsistence, generally end in nothing, but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders."

\-- Adam Smith, _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_ , 1776. Book I, Chapter VIII, "On the Wages of Labour".

[https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...](https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_8)

</comment><comment><USER72> Sorry for digressing from the main intent of the post, but I find it a little odd when in 2017, someone uses the term "worker" to describe me. I try to be definitely more than just that to my team and my organization. Maybe I'm oversensitive, but it just feels weird.</comment>


MacBook Air 2018 Teardown - <AUTHOR> https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Air+13-Inch+Retina+2018+Teardown/115201 <comment><USER2> Wait, does the Air actually have more ports than the MacBook? What's going on? I thought the MacBook replaced the air, an the MacBook pro is a merger of the MacBook and MacBook pro?

Have the MacBook and MacBook air "switched"?

<comment><USER3> Yup. The Macbook Air is _heavier_ (and has more ports) than the Macbook.

I suspect this is because Apple gives so little attention to Mac now and updates products two or three times a decade. So when one product is updated, the rest of the lineup seems incongruous.

<comment><USER4> Anyone know if one of those lines will be discontinued? Seems odd to maintain both the macbook and macbook air

<comment><USER5> No one outside Apple (and maybe inside too) knows for certain. They don't share information like that in advance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _Soldered, non-serviceable, non-upgradeable storage and RAM is a serious > bummer on a $1,200+ laptop._

I don't mind the RAM. There's only two options upfront: 8GB and 16GB and I know what I need. The non-serviceable storage however, even with the Thunderbolt 3 ports for external storage (because who wants external storage on a laptop), is a bummer.

I just recently upgraded an 11" Air from 128 GB SSD to 1 TB SSD. It seems that storage demands only go up over time; that's much less so the case with RAM or CPU these days.

<comment><USER7> The soldered RAM is really bad, making adding RAM impossible. I get it. They want you to buy a new Mac every couple years. It's really annoying.

I've considered adding SDXC 512GB card to the SDXC slot to expand storage, less thing to lug around than an external Thunderbolt drive.

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty ambivalent about the RAM thing. The CPUs they're using don't support more than 16GB of RAM, anyway, and I'd guess that nobody who both cares and has the tech knowledge to be likely to upgrade RAM is going to be buying the 8GB model in the first place. For me, the deeper problem there is, why should I be feeling anguish about being able to upgrade them memory in a (non desktop replacement) latpop in the first place?

20 years ago, when we were collectively trying to squeeze more and more out of personal computers at a fairly decent clip, it made some sense. At this point, though, things have tapered off outside of a few special cases like large- scale data crunching and serious gaming, neither of which was ever really a primary use case for Macs in the first place.

What's left for reasons why you might need ever more RAM are things that feel kind of silly. On my personal computer, the big RAM suckers in recent memory have been ad-heavy news websites and (bafflingly) the Slack desktop app. In both cases, I'm pretty sure the reason why they get away with sucking more and more RAM is that we're rolling over and buying more RAM instead of putting some more pressure on software developers about being wasteful.

I rather wish Grace Hopper were still around to give a memory consumption version of her "nanoseconds" lecture.

<comment><USER9> Well Slack is an electronjs app.

I think developers are still chasing the 'write once run anywhere' Holy Grail. This time it's JavaScript.

<comment><USER8> Running in Electron accounts for a few tens of megabytes, tops. I'm not convinced it's really all that much worse than the runtime environments for popular interpreted and managed languages.

The other 2-3GB (I'm not even kidding) seemed to be a result of keeping a copy every single attachment and Giphy image that anyone posts in memory, indefinitely. Like with any good memory leak, the solution was to bounce the application.

I use vscode quite a bit, and it doesn't eat RAM in a way that seems reminiscent of what people like to blame on Electron apps. Perhaps what we like to lay at the feet of Electron is more appropriately blamed on there being a lot of JavaScript developers who haven't been sufficiently educated in how to manage memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The fact that we are still seeing 128GB non-upgradeable SSD's on a base-level Mac is insanity.

For any poor soul who has had to do mobile development work on one of these, the 'you are low on risk space' notification is like a spectre that haunts dreams.

The environmental impact alone of non-upgradeable units is a serious issue in my eyes. Previous Macs have lasted me up to 8 years or so with nice and consistent upgrades over the years.

The small amount of thinness or whatever it is has been the trade off is not worth it.

We've lost the exterior battery button, we've lost MagSafe, the butterfly keyboards have had scathing reviews at best, and, in what seems like the most open statement of 'we're not even the same company any more', they've even removed lost the trademark glowing Apple on the back.

It has moved beyond the point where I need to draw the line and will be building the most compatible hackintosh I can as my next laptop.

<comment><USER11> It's not exactly a development machine, with a 7W processor. But if you want to do dev on one, you can buy one with a 256GB (or more?) SDD.

<comment><USER10> I think you're missing my point that as time goes by, the need for storage space has a tendency to increase, and thusly, without the ability to upgrade, and with asinine prices from Apple for their SSD's instead of about half that for a very nice quality SSD of the same capacity, I'd prefer to buy a baseline 8GB/128GB unit and upgrade it myself for 1/3rd of the price like I have for every other single Mac I've bought in my 15+ years of purchasing them.

Furthermore, a MacBook Pro, which one could certainly call a development machine, still starts with a baseline, non-upgradeable 128GB unit.

Virtually no 'pro' task, Image Editing, Software Develoment, Video Editing, Audio Editing, that Macs have typically and historically been used for, are suited to these 128GB drives and create machines that need to be thrown out and add to e-waste instead of having any meaningful longevity.

I know this because I do these types of tasks all the time, and was forced into a 2017 13" MBP with a 128GB SSD and paltry 8GB of RAM earlier this year due to having it given to me as a work machine. Using it was an unpleasant experience unlike any computer I'd used, much less a Mac.

And why? For aesthetic purposes? For greed/profit? What's the use of their 'all-aluminum' eco-friendly goals, if they create machines that intentionally have a 3-4 year shelf life baked into them? It's mind-boggling.

We pay a premium for Apple devices, and more and more, especially as the prices seem to constantly be creeping upwards at this point, the conscessions we need to make to use them have become far greater than the benefits.

RIP Apple computers. Hello, Apple, Inc.

<comment><USER12> >I think you're missing my point that as time goes by, the need for storage space has a tendency to increase

Hahaha, my Acer laptop from 2008 had 160GB storage space, and it was not much by the standards of the time.

So no, we're still not back to 2008-level storage space needs on a laptop.

<comment><USER10> But that Acer laptop from 2008 would no doubt let you upgrade the RAM and HDD, which is my overall point.

Apple has turned their products from some of the most high-class computers and devices on the planet, to, it seems, greed and drivel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's amazing. Everyone I spoke to, everyone who reviews Macs for a living and everyone who comments on it seems to agree: Apple makes a long, confusing list of Macbooks that all seem to compromise on the features that made them popular in the past. There's not a single Macbook that's universally loved by its target audience and that's quite a feat.

<comment><USER14> This just shows just how much has changed in the last few years.

Their push to increase revenues on a per-unit basis as opposed to reaching more customers will leave them incredibly exposed when someone else finally comes along and builds a laptop that developers are happy with at a fraction of the cost of whatever the next gen-MBPs are priced at. It might not be next year, but they're not gonna be beloved forever if they keep this up.

<comment><USER15> Until a team with resources comparable to the OS X team puts in the effort to polish some Ubuntu derivative and make it work flawlessly with one or a few particular hardware configurations, Apple will still have an advantage that many are willing to pay a premium for.

<comment><USER16> I have a T470P (the i7-7700HQ with 2560x1440@14" came in about half of a Macbook Pro in my country), I've genuinely had to do nothing to make Fedora 26 (then 27) work on it perfectly since I got it.

It of course came with Windows 10 and that's the rub, it's a crap shoot since I knew I'd be able to get Linux to work fine I just didn't know how much work (if any) would be required.

I was pleasantly surprised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> ...and here I am with my 2010 13' core2duo. 16gigs of ram, an SSD a variety of ports and flying along nicely. Still on the original battery and getting about 5-6 hours on a full charge.

<comment><USER18> Surely that speaks to the build quality of the devices?

<comment><USER17> Yes, but also the upgradability!

If I was stuck with the original 120gb HDD and the stock 4gb of RAM it would be in no way 'usable' as it is now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Macbook aside, I always wondered how many laptops it takes IFIXIT to determine how to take the laptop apart. Is there always a sacrifice laptop where they dissemble regardless of breaking stuff? Then they take what they learned on the "real" laptop?

<comment><USER20> Exactly none. I think you're overestimating the difficulty of taking things apart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Welp. There goes the last laptop Apple makes without a garbage keyboard.

<comment><USER22> I actually like the new keyboard... :( My fingers feel a lot less fatigued over time vs using a traditional mechanical keyboard. And even compared to the 2015 MBP, the newer keyboards feel more comfortable to relax my fingers on. While I never bothered doing a speed comparison between the two, I feel like I type slightly faster, albeit with slightly more mistakes. For example, reaching for the y key will occasionally cause my pinky to accidentally press the semi-colon key.

<comment><USER23> The keyboards seem to be very divisive. I know a lot of people who like them or don't mind them. I flat out cannot use them, and not for lack of trying.

<comment><USER24> I like the clickiness, and initial feel is very positive, but after a few minutes I find it really frustrating to type on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> thats a 3/10? That seems like a low score given the rest of the article

<comment><USER26> Think a 10/10 would be a computer with every part (including RAM, SSD, CPU) user-replaceable with no specialized equipment.

<comment><USER27> No need to guess. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg97ovaD-b4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg97ovaD-b4) What Does it Take to get a 10 out of 10 iFixit Repairability Score?

They've even issued a few. This one is for a phone. [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/11/ifixit-gives- modular...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/11/ifixit-gives-modular- fairphone-2-a-rare-10-out-of-10-for-repairability/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Easily repairable Thunderbolt ports is great news. My 2013 MacBook Air's is busted now and that means no external display output, and a knock to resale value or hope of donating this machine to a friend when done with it (I wouldn't want to give them a computer broken in this way).

</comment><comment><USER29> I recently had to swap out the screen in my mother's much abused 2015 12" MacBook. That machine was a nightmare to work on with many components attached to the bottom cover and flimsy ribbons connecting top to bottom making basic access challenging.

It's nice to see this machine have a more sane design.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's good to see that the battery isn't glued to the top case. I'm not sure if the airs have ever had it glued, but the pros sure did.

It was always a bummer to tell people that a bad battery meant replacing the entire upper case.

<comment><USER31> They used epoxy?

Usually when companies glue parts together inside electronics they use rubber cement, which can usually be peeled off without damaging the component or the housing. It's an inconvenience, not a roadblock to repair.

<comment><USER32> When my retina-display macbook pro battery swelled, they replaced the entire top case. It appears to be policy that the top case and battery are one piece.

<comment><USER31> Probably the difference between having Apple replace it and doing it yourself with a $20 battery you bought off of the Internet. Well, that and a few hundred bucks.

I can see why they wouldn't want the techs doing that in the store, one of the failure modes if you screw it up is a lithium fire. Also, if the battery had started to swell up it may have bent the case. Apple doesn't leave much room for expansion with their batteries anymore.

<comment><USER33> I think it's the default policy. My rMBP from 2012 started to have battery issues and I got a $300 quote for replacement that included a new top car.

Got the $80 battery from ifixit and replaced the battery relatively easily. It did have me pour generous amounts for aceton (nail polish remover) into my MacBook to unglue the battery though, was happy that everything still worked after.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Interesting that the keys now have a little skirt to apparently stop particles.

Though I had to use my 2013 Air recently while my 2017 MBP was in the shop (keyboard aka whole front panel + battery replacement) and wished they'd just kept the high-action keyboard that could weather the grime between cleanings.

<comment><USER35> This has been the case with all the new 2018 MacBook Pro. Its called 3rd Generation Butterfly Keyboard.

It is new so we are still waiting to see if there are reports of Key malfunctioning after some longer period of use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> So the air have tons of ports, function keys, escape key, touch ID, a fan not connected to anything thermal! and is heavier.

while the "PRO" macbook have a single usbC on 12", no fans, no f-keys, no escape key.

Apple is now a true Mainstream Consumer PC manufacturer! The models means nothing! Now you have to dive in model numbers and specific production runs to get what you want, just like buying Asus et al.

<comment><USER37> You're mixing up the "MacBook" with the MBP. Pro is 13", has four USB-C ports and fan cooling. Function keys optional on the (quite crappy) base models.

<comment><USER38> The 13" MBP has two USB-C's, not four. The 15" has four.

<comment><USER39> You and parent are mixing up the 2 lines of 13" MBP.

Non-touch bar has two ports. Touch bar has four.

[https://support.apple.com/kb/SP775?locale=en_US](https://support.apple.com/kb/SP775?locale=en_US)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Patent holder attempts to put x-plane out of business - <AUTHOR> http://www.x-plane.com/x-world/lawsuit/

<comment><USER2> This title isn't quite right. Uniloc does not want to put x-plane out of business. They want to reap some of the profits from the app without doing any work.

They're rent seekers, not enemy combatants.

His "fight to the death" spirit is admirable, but he is turning a simple robbery into mortal combat. I so very much hope he wins big.

<comment><USER3> They aren't rent seekers. They are protection racket money extortionists.

<comment><USER2> No, they're classic rent seekers.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking>

 _...rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur..._

 _Many current studies of rent-seeking focus on efforts to capture various monopoly privileges stemming from government regulation of free competition._

In practice, the difference comes to this: Its the government's clubs that finally smash your business, not the troll's.</comment></comment></comment>