Not being an asshole will make you more money - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlassquats.com/post/not-being-an-asshole-will-make-you-more-money <comment><USER2> I have an example. In a previous role was in a position where we were negotiating a large-ish (>1M USD) multi-year contract when our client asked us to also do a proof of concept about some topic. It was just 1 week or 2 weeks so I said it would be free but because of various regulatory stuff we needed a contract in place.

I was dealing with the same purchasing lawyer on both contracts. The process was super-standard: someone sends a first draft, the other side redlines (proposes changes and makes comments), then the first team redline, etc, at some point you all compromise a bit and someone makes a clean copy of the document containing all the agreed changes for everyone to sign. So we got to the point we had all agreed and the purchasing lawyer on the other side produced the "clean copy" but he obviously thought we were a bunch of rubes so he produced a clean copy for us to sign by backing out all of our changes and only putting in his changes. This is a ridiculously low-integrity bush-league stunt and he did it on the zero-cost POC contract while we were still negotiating the >1m big contract.

Some people just want to win so bad it doesn't even matter to them that they are being total assholes, the prize is zero and it's outright harmful to their own interests. I bet he cheats when playing his own kids at boardgames.

<comment><USER3> > by backing out all of our changes and only putting in his changes

That so feels like a mistake because that's the sort of tactic that would completely and utterly remove their capability of ever working as a corporate lawyer ever again for any company.

If that genuinely happened, that lawyer needs to be disbarred, but that's a pretty damn egregious accusation.

<comment><USER4> > That so feels like a mistake...

Easy to test.

1\. Send back the document he sent with a copy of your most recent edits and ask him to confirm if his document is correct.

2\. But, make note of at ONE error, and see if he fixes all of them.

3\. If he only fixes only the one, then he's either really lazy or trying to keep up the deceit.

4\. Repeat steps 1 to 3, be sure to CC everyone involved. If he's lazy he will be ashamed and be more careful. If he's a sneaky bastard he will most likely get angry.

Not foolproof, but will sure make everyone aware of what is going on. (regardless of the motives)

<comment><USER5> You must have had your share of weasels during contract negotiations.

<comment><USER4> I have dealt with some horrible people over the years. It's incredible what they will do to get away with stuff.

Standing your ground while maintaining a logical and rational approach is the only way to deal with them.

Most of them like a fight, so you simply can't pick one with them.

<comment><USER6> Assuming there is an external person arbitrating (which is usually the case when dealing with internal politics at least -- one or two levels up from you), it's _so_ important in these cases to stay reasonable. Virtually every single time, the person that likes to fight will cross the line in the hopes of goading you into a fight. But it's exactly at that time that you win. You send a very reasonable email to the arbitrating person saying, "I'm really trying my best to get this working, but I'm having trouble. Could you please give me a hand." Since the arbitrating person really would rather do nothing, they will look at the situation and say, "A is completely reasonable. B is not. B, you need to change."

I remember one time where I was discussing a problem with a manager in another team. Every single email he sent, he CC'd the management 2 levels up. Every single email I sent, I sent directly to him only. My colleague was panicking. He felt that I _needed_ to show my side of the story to upper management or else I would be in trouble.

Eventually the management 2 levels up got frustrated: "Why am I getting all of these emails? Why can't you people sort out this problem yourself?" To which I reasonably replied, "I'm very sorry that you've been bothered, and I'm not sure why this person is being so difficult. Now that you are here, would you mind giving us a hand?" Problem solved.

<comment><USER4> You have a good point about CC'ing too many people. And that care should be taken when including others in a discussion that could affect their reputation.

Thanks for pointing this out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A few years ago I started a company, then raised money through convertible notes. By the time the notes were due (2 years), we weren't ready to raise a round yet, so all investors extended their notes. All except one.

The investor that didn't want to extend the note was also the CEO of the company that was our largest client, so not only did he call his note, he also ended his company's contract, making a huge hole in our revenue.

After doing that, and knowing that the company would be struggling financially, he sued, forcing the company into bankruptcy.

From the beginning we tried negotiating a payment plan or some other form of compensation, to no avail. Although at some point he did "offer" to completely take over the company and fire the founders (which we of course refused).

During bankruptcy, he took over the assets of the company while also giving us and the trustee a hard time.

Now, after having ruined the jobs of everyone that worked at our company plus the potential upside of all the other investors and shareholders, he is suing me and my cofounder personally.

The company closed 2 years ago and it looks like this new lawsuit will take another 2 years. Also no one knows if this guy is going to stop at that.

Be very careful about doing business with assholes, especially if they have a lot of money and you will be taking any type of potential liability (e.g. debt) in their favor, even if it's not personal liability, they might still try to go after you and make your life miserable.

<comment><USER8> Is it possible for you to name said investor such that people know to stay away from said investor?

<comment><USER7> As user volkk said, unfortunately it would be legally risky for me to disclose the identity of the investor. Which is pretty frustrating, because then you realize that when someone does something bad to you (legally/morally), there are very few (legal) ways to remedy it, especially if they have a lot more money than you.

I can say that he's not based in the Bay Area, so if you are raising money there it is very unlikely you will run into him.

I can also say that our best investors were RightSide Capital, based out of SF. They supported us throughout the whole ordeal with the company and even offered to buy out the other guy. They also said that, out of 600+ investments they had done at the time, they had never seen another investor act the way ours did.

<comment><USER9> > even offered to buy out the other guy

Why didn't this happen? That seems like an obvious outcome of the situation, unless losing the big client is enough to effectively destroy the company.

<comment><USER10> From the tone of OP's story, it seems like the other guy probably wouldn't've agreed to the buyout; seems like he had an axe to grind.

<comment><USER9> But does that matter? The other guy didn't have shares, he was owed money. If the investor provides money, there's enough money to pay the other guy off...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The most common difference between us peasants and the people of means is that those other people ASK more often. Ask for more money, ask for a bonus, ask for lower rent. And then it adds up.

The one thing that holds most of us back is shame. But shame is a good thing in general. It's the glue that keeps societies together, preventing them from spiraling down to the lowest common denominator.

Questionable if this still works nowadays. But, anyway, the trick is to uncork some of that shame is small doses and be a little bit selfish every once in a while.

<comment><USER12> I often ask people who are complaining about their salary whether have asked for a raise. Most of the time the answer is "no" followed by reasons like "I am afraid to get fired" or "they will make my life miserable" or "they should just do the right thing".

<comment><USER11> Exactly. 9 out of 10 managers will give you more money. They are not going to _offer_ it to you, normally, because they are not a charity. They want to give you the least amount of money that you will except.

Secondly, who ever gets fired for asking for a raise? I mean, that is not normal. And if that does happen to you, it's most likely of some other underlying factors, where asking for a raise is just the last drop.

<comment><USER13> > Exactly. 9 out of 10 managers will give you more money.

I don't know - man. I've worked at a lot of places and this doesn't seem to be a common thing. It could be I've just worked at a lot of bad places but still. Asking for more isn't enough. It has to be the threat of leaving in order to get them to give more. At which point - the advice now for managers is, if they're threatening to leave unless you pay more then just let them leave.

<comment><USER14> I've always thought a "threat" of leaving is a meaningless concept. It's either a bluff or it isn't. Most straightforward way to handle it is to find another offer that you will legitimately take if you don't get a sufficient salary bump, and communicate that there aren't any hard feelings, you just need what the new employer will pay you. If your manager refuses, you move, and if he bumps your salary or counteroffers, you can reassess. This is really the only way to handle it if you want to keep things simple. Or, you can bluff.

<comment><USER15> (Citation needed) I read recently that shopping for an offer, leveraging it for a raise, and then staying was actually the wrong move. It essentially started a countdown to them letting you go.*

* _If you're indispensable, the rules may not apply to you_

<comment><USER14> Yeah, as a rule of thumb. Ultimately it's all about leverage over time. If you're temporarily indispensable and now more expensive, but still replaceable for cheaper in the medium term, that's not a great situation for you to be in. On the other hand, if you really do have that other offer, you have a signal that that might be what you're worth in the open market. And if everyone starts getting more expensive, then employers simply have to adjust over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Kinda off topic but other side of the coin, befriending the asshole:

At my first job there was this grizzly old engineer who was known for being pretty surly, but knew the code base almost as if by memory, and the behavior of the code. He was bothered by anything and everything and really just wanted to run out the clock and go home and work in his wood shop.

I was in support and nobody wanted to go to him for help, but man you had to sometimes. I read something about guys like that being really particular about things so I just made a long list of what he was annoyed that people didn't bring him (information wise) and how they brought it to him when people or I did go to him.

Most importantly I'd make a point that he would see that I brought him information (about customer problems) based on his past feedback.

Eventually over the course of months he warmed to me and I could get his help bringing him virtually nothing and he wouldn't complain. Dude was still annoyed for not getting a mountain of information from other techs, but not so much me. People there for 10 years would get a "Have Mark look at it first." talk from him... I had been there for 9 months.

For him it was about getting to know people and trust that they would bother to get him what he needed, once you proved that, he didn't so much care.

<comment><USER17> Not a native speaker but shouldn't grizzly above be grizzled? :)

<comment><USER18> If you go by the dictionary, "grizzled" and "grizzly" both have the same meaning; having grey hair.

In common use, though, "grizzled" is generally used to imply "old" or even "unkempt", and "grizzly" is generally used to imply "bad-tempered" (probably alluding to the behaviour of the "grizzly bear")

..in this case, according to the story, either word would apply!

<comment><USER17> Got it, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There are basically two ways to make money:

1\. Add value so there is more pie to go around and get your cut of it.

2\. Extract value from what already exists. You get yours, but other people tend to get screwed over.

If you aren't doing the first, you are probably doing the second. This is not really a good long term strategy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate this concise framing. I do think it gets more complicated than this though.

Defining the pie gets really complicated. Sometimes you make one pie bigger and another smaller. Companies like Lyft certainly decreased the taxi pie but then made a new one altogether.

I believe there are fair ways to extract value from what already exists by creating a better version in a competitive market. Ultimately I think the value should be defined at the customer and societal levels. The tangents and levels in between make things messy.

<comment><USER19> _I believe there are fair ways to extract value from what already exists by creating a better version in a competitive market._

Adding efficiency is a means to add more pie.

Obviously, my comment is a simplification. It kind of goes without saying that simplifications leave out a lot of nuance and gray zone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I didn't mean to add unnecessary complexity. I agree with your original statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've met plenty of assholes. They're rich and getting richer.

Being an asshole is like emitting a poison: at certain doses other people are fine. As it increases they become more transactional* until they shut down or let the relationship die. But this doesn't stop a lot from getting rich.

Assholes do get "handled" however. Often it is used against them. But does this matter to them? Probably not to the extent you would expect. A lot of assholes hide their ways until they pounce.

Being an asshole pays well. Does that make it ok? No. Does it matter to them? Likely not: they're assholes.

The real lesson is to learn not to include assholes in your inner circle. And make it hard for them to join or get too close. There are benefits to not being an asshole.

All that said, there are benefits to _having_ an asshole. Shit needs to go through somewhere. _And particular people are well suited to it. Let them._ Some deals go better when done between assholes.

* Or they're like a hot oven. We will tolerate the heat because we like cookies. But won't leave our hands in there too long or unprotected. We will turn the oven off completely when we don't need cookies. Transaction complete, cut ties. We might come up with ways to reduce exposure down to minimal levels. We'll wear gloves. Less time spent. Or we'll find a better oven with a better door and insulated handles.

</comment><comment><USER21> The major flaw in this article is that it does not defined what constitutes "asshole" behavior.

There is a difference, for example, between being vindictive towards others, and simply pushing people out of their comfort zone.

The term "asshole" is so vague that it borders on useless.

<comment><USER22> Even if you could come up with a good definition, it would still be a silly assertion. He's wrong: not being an asshole won't make you more money. Being an asshole will also not make you more money. How nice or not nice you are to other people is almost entirely unrelated to how much money you make.

<comment><USER23> It's not a silly assertion, it's just that you've taken silly things away from this article. He's asserting that if you're too self interested / lack empathy you will hurt yourself in the long run.

<comment><USER24> It's ludicrous, not just silly. People are talking here like this is a study that can be verified.

It is a random person ranting and completely subjective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I had a clients contract that had this in it:

"Recover any and all actual, incidental and consequential damages to XYZ, _including but not limited to actual or estimated loss of profits_ and sales and costs to cover, attorney's fees and costs.."

I wrote back: "Nice try but yeah, no. ;-) "

(My lawyer fixed all these overreaches and they were a great client.)

As an aside my lawyer told me that when you a drafting a contract with someone you want to work with, its best to be fair. If you don't, you're starting the relationship where the counter-party doesn't trust you. After all, you tried to screw them the very first chance you had.

<comment><USER26> If you are replying to clients like that then I am glad you have a lawyer.

<comment><USER25> Lawyers are good tool in our business. If someone gives me a one page "mutual NDA" I can handle it myself.

If I get 9 pages of "our standard contract" and I read it through, ask if I can make changes and if they say yes, I give it to my lawyer.

For that contract I actually wrote back this:

 _Who signs these "standard contracts"?_

<comment><USER26> I was thinking of the legal ambiguity of reply with "but yeah, no". Perhaps you were paraphrasing.

<comment><USER25> When you have they whole email, there isn't any ambiguity. :-)

This is the whole email:

"Hi Guys,

Who signs these "standard contracts"?

4.2. In the event the Provider is in breach of any of the representations or warranties set forth in Section 4.1 above, in addition to any other remedies IPG may have under this Agreement, IPG, at its sole option and without incurring any liability, may: (d) _Recover any and all actual, incidental and consequential damages to IPG, including but not limited to actual or estimated loss of profits and sales_ and costs to cover, attorney's fees and costs;

Nice try but yeah, no. ;-)

If I can strike out the unreasonable parts we can probably come to some agreement.

-Chris"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't see any evidence to support the assertion unfortunately :)

Also, the huge difference between emotional/perceptive aggression, and actual aggression.

There are loud, crude people who like to push for a fair deal, or who are not aggressive terms.

There are 'nice', cunning manipulative people who seek excessive terms.

There are actually truly nice people, who push for assertive terms, not realising how far they are going.

And of course, there's mostly tons of misinterpretations: people who have totally different needs, perspective, expectations with respect to how to go about a situation. A founder seeing aggression might actually be an investor taking a perfectly normative demand.

But yes, I've seen utter stupidity in deal making.

Relationships do matter, and you need a working agreement with whoever you're working with, investors included.

<comment><USER28> I think you're missing the point.

Make "rising tide lifts all boats" deals. Here, you're entering in a deal to create additional value to the world.

Don't make deals with a zero-sum outlook. Here, you're entering into a deal for, at best, a transfer of existing value within the world.

<comment><USER29> That is the point of the article, yes. But it doesn't offer _evidence_ that that is a _financially_ better strategy.

It is self-evidently morally better, of course. And it may be financially better too. But the article just flatly claims it in a number of single- sentence paragraphs without communicating any real data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Don't respond to emails from random people trying to buy your business. They're all scammy.

If you respond to these, or offers to re-fi your house, or help someone move their royal fortune out of Nigeria, you're indeed going to be dealing with assholes.

If you want to sell your business, take charge and run a competitive bidding process. But ignore unsolicited offers.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's tough when someone in your industry with a big name reaches out but in general, you're right. Very rarely do people come to you with good intentions. You generally have to seek out good people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The term asshole is very subjective; some people will perceive being candid and telling it how it is as being mean while others love the straightforwardness. Bosses have to put emotions aside to think more logically and that comes off as unsympathetic when talking to employees or partners. Steve Jobs was known to not have been the nicest guy yet he's praised all the time.

<comment><USER32> You're talking about being nice, not being an asshole. Assholes are people who come in and shit all over everything instead of trying to play fair. People who are not nice can be fair. Take as an analogy the difference between social class and economic class, and how people can have a social class that's different from their economic class.

<comment><USER31> Being apathetic and selfish are some attributes that both assholes and top billionaires exhibit. I'd say it's not so black and white and people will perceive what being nice means to them differently depending on their social economic status since people of lower economic status tend to be more susceptible to emotions than a business person.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, I was trying to use social and economic class as a metaphor for asshole versus not-nice. Because it's easy to conflate the two in both cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't own a business, but I have encountered these behaviours at a smaller scale.

Now I think about this situation as a variation of the prisoners dilemma. If both parties play nice, each one gets a smaller payoff. If one is an asshole and the other is nice, the asshole gets a bigger payoff (by shafting the nice party). This article proposes that being nice is beneficial for all parties in the long term. That holds true also in the prisoners dilemma, if the game repeats over time.

Now, why do people still act that way? One option, as this article presumes, is that people are simply not aware that is the best option in the long term.

The second, most insidious option, is that they are aware, and do it in purpose. Maybe the world is still big enough that you can play a first game with different people until your fame catches up. Maybe the payoff for being an asshole is so high that a single win is enough to retire.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes I feel like humans do not understand that we're the prisoners and nature is the police.

Nature does not care about killing us. The universe will feel no remorse if an asteroid kills us all or we do it ourselves with nukes. Corona doesn't feel shame.

We're prisoners in so many ways. When are we going to start cooperating to try to escape our death sentence? Or are we content to fight each other over scraps while we await our fate?

<comment><USER34> > Sometimes I feel like humans do not understand that we're the prisoners and > nature is the police.

Understanding that cooperation provides higher benefit to players compared to competition requires prior education among the players. It is literally part of any Introduction to Economics course.

The problem is a) under-education b) irrational players.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Most of the billionaires are assholes and/or criminals with a couple of noteworthy exceptions. So maybe not being an asshole will get you ahead in the middle but it won't get you all the way to the top of the foodchain.

So this is solid advice, but unfortunately the role models are exactly those people that didn't follow this sort of advice. Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Apple, Google and Facebook all would not have been as large and would not generate as much money for their founders if the founders had been nice guys. Fortunately we also have Woz and a couple of others like him to balance things out a bit.

<comment><USER36> Wait.. are you saying bill gates is an asshole?

<comment><USER37> I wouldn't classify him as an asshole, but he definitely wasn't always the nicest guy:

[https://www.gq.com/story/young-bill-gates-was-an-angry- offic...](https://www.gq.com/story/young-bill-gates-was-an-angry-office-bully)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Encouraging human interactions to operate along chimp-like hierarchies instead of bonobo-like co-ops is why we see this behaviour everywhere.

[https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Science/Study-compares- peac...](https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Science/Study-compares-peaceful- bonobos-to-aggressive-chimps)

</comment><comment><USER39> Reputation information doesn't always flow freely.

After agreeing the purchase of the site for the house I'm now sitting in, the sellers changed their asking price, tried to pull out of the sale after we got planning permission, accused us of swindling them, and the night before we fenced the property moved the boundary markers.

When it was all done and dusted one of our neighbours said "it's great to see someone getting the better of $FAMILY_X". Seems like we weren't entitled to access to their reputations until we'd started to build the house, and became true locals

</comment><comment><USER40> Some examples of the term sheets would have been nice. But it's so true that people are often wasting your time trying to secure a win for themselves only. It makes me think about good recruiters and bad recruiters. The good ones want to find a great fit for the position and have a reputation for getting good salaries for the people they place. The bad ones want to undercut the other recruiters and try to convince the candidate to accept a lousy offer. I'm sure the candidates are perfectly able to do that themselves.

</comment><comment><USER41> I totally agree. A business school professor of mine, Stuart Diamond, wrote a book called Getting More about using these ideas in negotiation. His theory is that you should always be leaving money on the table. If you're not, you're playing the short game.

[https://www.amazon.com/Getting-More-Negotiate-Succeed- Work/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Getting-More-Negotiate-Succeed- Work/dp/0307716902)

<comment><USER42> When both parties leave a representative but not show-stopping amount of money on the table intentionally, this can potentiate exponential growth like nothing else.

Effectively each group gets to focus on efforts & shape the outcome in pursuit of mutual growth, with a non-lopsided good-faith buffer to start with, compared to predatory terms.

The reduction in risk and increase in functional leverage is phenomenal.

Alternatively, with a ruthless arrangement, there will be opportunity-sucking or destructive imbalances for operations across a financial spectrum, whether prosperous or underperforming at the time. Greedy ars'les thrive making surplus look & act like shortage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Unfortunately, you'll find people often respect assholes. Look no further than how people are outright worshipful of successful criminals.

Some people also seem to learn how to capitalize on their poor reputations. If you're well known in an industry, even for something bad, you can often get people to talk to you.

</comment><comment><USER44> > Smart successful people do not want to work with people they cannot trust. > It's not worth it. The world's too big. You'll only ever whittle away your > reputation until you're surrounded by mirrors of yourself. It's not worth > it.

This can also be said for the hiring of talent. But these hiring people aren't only aholes, plenty of them are simply plain ol' dumbasses.

Of course you're not getting the best people, you're sending up red flags like fireworks on 4th of July.

</comment><comment><USER45> I want to see stats for this. There's an evolutionary reason why ass holes exist and they exist because the ass hole strategy is viable. Good people exist too, also because there is viability in the good strategy as well.

</comment><comment><USER46> Of course it won't. Otherwise the advertising industry wouldn't exist.

More than that. In general, the market rewards being asshole and borderline fraudster. Reputation is a thing within smaller groups, but what matters is primarily reputation related to your behavior _towards your peers in that group_. And if your peer group is composed of assholes, then being an asshole is a positive trait as long as you're not an asshole towards members of that group.

Another thing: when you're a no-name upstart, reputation matters little because nobody knows you. When you're a large, successful business, any bad reputation can be compensated by proportionate spending on PR and advertising.

Yet another thing: in B2C, consumers often don't have a meaningful choice. An individual is juggling _a lot_ of different priorities in their lives, not least of which is "saving money" and "buying stuff one likes". So e.g. Coca- Cola does a pretty lot of evil stuff, but people have strong taste preferences in the product category Coca-Cola sells, so nobody really boycotts them. Or, pretty much every major brand of smartphones is doing evil things, and every major telco provider is filled with assholes - yet as a citizen of the western world, I really _do_ need to have a smartphone. So I have to choose _someone_. Or, a grocery store next to the place I used to live would wash stale meat with detergent and sell as fresh. This lands straight into asshole category, but I still went there, because a) it was the closest store, and b) I have no guarantee other stores don't do the same (and plenty of reasons to suspect they do).

And yet another thing: taking VC investments; when investors come knocking for their returns, plenty of startups are forced to become assholes.

\--

TL;DR: The market rewards assholes. If you're not an asshole, your competitors will force you to either become one, or get marginalized. There's an excellent essay that goes into details about the mechanics of that: [https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on- moloch/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/).

<comment><USER47> Was Food Lion the meat bleacher?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> As long as the fed is printing fake money, money is essentially free to those with good credit, and it makes sense to do all the things described by the OP. Someone will bite, and you may as well make the money.

One day, I hope for a society where money is a real measure of productivity and all the things the OP said will be 100% valid. This is not that day.

</comment><comment><USER49> I think this is being naive. You can wreck your career this way. You can be very talented but get screwed over if you are not aware of the people around you. In sense you need to have an "asshole" radar on at all times and be ready to respond in kind. Personally, this is exhausting.

<comment><USER50> You can't change an asshole but you need to be more asshole to an asshole in order to inspire respect among peers and people around you. In my career before i get promoted i was already a go to guy among my peers because people knew i don't expect sympathy from an asshole and push their ideas if i see merit in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> But, but ... nice guys (and girls) finish last - or so the saying goes. It's been my experience that the belligerent and those that take charge and those that are just the loudest garner more attention and cash. That's not me though.

</comment><comment><USER52> Not being one will earn you more in the long run, if you can fend off all the axxholes who fare better at short-term gains.

Unfortunately, our economy is now based on high short-term gains, there's plenty of axxholes everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER53> Telling people what you want and telling others when they screw up is commonly seen as mean behavior in the world today.

But it's hard to be successful if you don't do those things.

</comment><comment><USER54> It worked for Denis Leary, and not just stealing Bill Hick's act. More of a musical thing.

</comment><comment><USER55> Now you stop being an asshole to get more money, which is exactly what an asshole will do.

</comment><comment><USER56> It seems like the bigger asshole tends to make more money, unfortunately for myself.

</comment><comment><USER57> Becoming a billionaire requires you to be an asshole by definition because the only way to accumulate and retain that (frankly incomprehensible) amount of money is through the exploitation of your employees and the surplus value of their labor at a tremendous scale.

</comment><comment><USER58> This is true..

Until you have a lot of money, and then you become an asshole.

</comment><comment><USER59> "But it won't make it more fun" - Assholes, probably.

</comment><comment><USER60> This is a decent article. I generally agree with the sentiments presented, but I disagree with the font-choice, which I found difficult to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the feedback. Any recommendations for something legible?

<comment><USER60> The font is really thin, even when I zoom it's difficult to read. A thicker sans font would be easier to read. The one you're using looks nice visually, it's just hard to see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> also, you won't be an asshole. that's good, in and of itself, isn't it?

</comment><comment><USER62> you cannot AB test that.

</comment><comment><USER63> Goldman Sachs disagree

</comment><comment><USER64> > I really don't understand why.

> So many people are straight assholes in business. Especially the more you > climb the ladder. As my bootstrapped business reached $3M ARR, a wave of no- > name investors approached us. Some of the term sheets more than insulted me. > They sought to take control of the company without any payout for the co- > founders or employees. They just wanted to capitalize a company they'd now > own.

> I don't understand why.

(Warning: Probably unpopular opinion for capitalistic mind sets following)

Well, big surprise, because they got corrupted (ethically) by their money and greed, or that is the way they got a hold of it in the first place. They got some, so they want more. Money buys almost anything in capitalistic society after all. They see a chance to take advantage of a fellow human being, a chance to profit! They do not care about the human in your business. They care about ways they could profit from it. You are only a means of increasing their capital. The higher the amount of money investors have, the more likely, that they got it through ethically questionable means, because that is, where the big money is made.

There might be ethical investors out there too. Haven't knowingly met any such yet, might have unknowingly met some. It is probably also quite difficult to keep a clean sheet through all the complexity of today's financial world.

(perspective change from having a company which others want to invest in, to investments being done by people)

There is a difference between working for a wage and using money to "magically" create more money, fueling turbo capitalism. In many cases that difference is an ethical one: What investments does one make? Can one be sure, that those investments are not actually investments, which flow directly or indirectly into production of weapons, climate destroying big companies, pesticide producing giants, who are responsible for decimating bee populations and starvation in third world countries? Anyone "investing" should really think hard about it and be on the lookout for superficially nice investments, which are actually indirectly quite unethical.

Now I will admit, that there are probably still many ways to make ethical investments. Of course there are. It's just that those are not yielding the highest returns. You could invest in social projects, in green energy/technology, in research for many good things. You can even donate to a good cause (like protection of rain forest) and thereby make an investment into all our future.

Most people, who "invest" in something however, are almost completely after the returns those things yield and do not give a damn about the ethical aspect of that investment. They do not give a thought about indirectly investing in some huge company, which takes part in producing weapons or building the next big coal mine (thinking of a recent example).

Lets take a look at for example DAX (German stock index). Anyone investing in any "financial product" that invests into the top n DAX companies. There we have BASF and Bayer, responsible for producing, selling and lobbying for pesticide usage and killing natural diversity and species, starvation of people in India and forcing farmers to use genetically modified seeds, in the name of profit. We have BMW and Daimler, where at least to my knowledge Daimler is part of the diesel scandal, making people believe their cars were cleaner than they really are, indirectly guilty of dealing huge damage to our environment and health. We have Deutsche Bank and Telekom there as well. Telekom just sucks for being a monopoly (at least was) and keeping technology way behind in Germany. Deutsche bank does not have a good name, when we talk about ethics, although I do not personally know exactly what they did. Probably investments in weapons and stuff like that. And wasn't Adidas connected to child labour in third world countries?

So basically anyone investing in DAX as such invests in these at least partly evil players, knowingly or unknowingly. But people are being scared by people working in banks and other places, who tell them that, if they do not invest into something with more risk, they will not be able to take advantage of those precious percentages at the stock market and then those scared people stop thinking and become investors. Notice also how usually the people, who are consulting you at banks and insurances try to steer you into the direction of stock market backed investments. Usually they will make other options simply look worth, simply based on percentages. That is often, because when you invest into such products of theirs, their company gets more flexibility of investment itself and can do more unethical investments, yielding higher returns for them.

In my opinion anyone investing into anything has a responsibility. That responsibility is not to increase their own riches, but to look out (not only superficially) for any ethically questionable consequences of their investment and even the responsibility to try to make the world a better place with their investment.

<comment><USER42> Looks like Deutsche Bank enabled Donald Trump after his dealing had proven to be less-than-honest and he was too "toxic" for regular US institutions to touch any more.

[https://forensicnews.net/2020/01/03/trump-deutsche-bank- loan...](https://forensicnews.net/2020/01/03/trump-deutsche-bank-loans- underwritten-by-russian-state-owned-bank-whistleblower-told-fbi/)

[https://www.barrons.com/articles/how-deutsche-bank-helped- fi...](https://www.barrons.com/articles/how-deutsche-bank-helped-finance- donald-trump-political-rise-51582050221)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Just like Madoff or Trump or Weinstein

<comment><AUTHOR> Being in jail doesn't sound profitable. Robbing a bank makes rich for a second too.

As for Trump, he probably should've put his daddy's money in the S&P.

<comment><USER66> I think we can agree that billionaires main trait is not being nice

Putin is worth 200 billions...

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm almost certain that Putin makes tons of money for those immediately around him and as soon as he stops, he'll be replaced. That's generally how dictatorships work.

<comment><USER66> The money doesn't disappear though and I'm sure the Bush family is still doing well

<comment><AUTHOR> I've heard that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. That doesn't mean you should be irrational though. Or if you do, understand that it's a short play. Rationality generally wins.

<comment><USER66> An assholes can be completely rational, become incredibly rich and still be an asshole.

It doesn't mean being an asshole it's the best strategy to become rich, it isn't enough to become one and generally I think being good decent human beings is much better for society and for themselves, but the numbers shows that very rich people are usually not among the best people in this world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Ok no i

</comment><comment><USER68> "Not being an asshole will make you more money"

Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Paul Graham, Jack Dorsey, all of AirBNB and Uber's executive staff, Mark Benioff, Larry Ellison and Donald Trump would all beg to differ.</comment>


Disclosure of H/W prefetcher control on some Intel processors - <AUTHOR> https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/disclosure-of-hw-prefetcher-control-on-some-intel-processors

<comment><USER2> Was the fact that you can enable or disable these not publicly known before this article?

<comment><USER3> Presumably disable. They are enabled by default, and the suggested use is to disable for more reliable benchmarking.

<comment><USER4> Unless you plan to run with these disabled, how would disabling them during benchmarking possibly improve the relevance of the benchmarks? And if the benchmarks aren't relevant, why benchmark?

<comment><USER3> If, e.g., you're trying to benchmark the memory itself, and not the processor's prefetch algorithm.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The City States of Europe - <AUTHOR> http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/the-city-states-of-europe <comment><USER4> I don't think the Megacity is a good model and here in Germany we certainly don't "lack it". It's nothing we desire. Germany is currently happy NOT to have cities like London, Paris, Tokyo, New York or similar.

What's the future for those Chinese Megacities? I'm not sure we see a linear/whatever development of them over the next decades. Already huge cities like Beijing or Delhi (India) are having huge problems (waste, energy, water, air quality, and all kinds of pollution, transport, ...) which easily could lead to very nasty scenarios.

The medium sized large cities (1-3 million people) usually offer better quality of life, especially if there is enough space around them.

If we look at Germany, there are competing concepts like the "Metropolitan Region" (the region with a big city or a city landscape as its center) and the "Region" (sometimes the Bundesland/State, sometimes a bit smaller). The region is defined by cultural/political/economic aspects - it could lack a big city, but have a cultural identity, which provides the bonding. The large cities were growing, not because of foreign migrants, but because they provided the better infrastructure and cultural life + the young east germans were looking for work after the fall of the 'Wall'.

At the same time in western Germany quite a bit of the economy has been driven by medium sized companies sometimes in remote/rural areas in small towns. Some of them are no longer medium sized, but kept the spirit of one. They show that it is possible to deliver high-tech to a global customer-base from small cities. Just take 'Herzogenaurach' in southern Germany, a small town with just over 20k people. It hosts three large companies: Adidas (> 10bn Euro revenue), Puma (3bn Euro revenue) and Schaeffler (>10bn Euro revenue).

<comment><USER5>
        huge cities like Beijing [...] are having huge problems

I don't think these problems are city problems. The problem is a consequence of the numbers of people. For example the waste n people produce is more or less constant (relative to a given level of development) regardless of whether these n people live in a dense city space, or are spread out.

Indeed, densely populated cities are probably better placed to deal with transport energy and so on, because economies of scale work in favour of dense cities. A particularly good example of this is public transport. Only dense cities can be walkable, and only dense cities can support efficient, well utilised public transport networks.

<comment><USER6> Density alone is not an argument for mega-cities, though. While it's possible that the economies of scale keep increasing with size -- ie. maybe the electrical network of a dense city of 5 million people is more efficient than that of a dense city of 100k people -- there is probably a point somewhere between those two points where the gains are only marginal.

A dense city of a 100k can support an excellent bus network, a dense city of 250k can additionaly support an excellent networks of trams or subways. 500k gets you direct access to high speed rail and beyond that I'm not sure what additional millions get you in terms of public transport -- an airport, I guess.

And a dense city of 100k people is more walkable than a dense city of millions: In the former case, you can pretty much reach the whole city area by walking (if you are a healthy adult). In the latter, you can only walk in your general neighbourhood -- which probably ends up being much like a city of 100k itself, meaning you rarely have to venture outside for everyday needs (shopping, services, culture, even your job if you're lucky).

<comment><USER5>
        there is probably a point somewhere between
        those two points where the gains are only
        marginal.

I think we have not reached it in any city currently on earth. I think the whole earth's population could live in a space the size e.g. of Texas, if that space was as densely populated as London (which is not that dense). In such a scenario it would be near trivial to provide everybody with top-notch public transport, waste disposal and so on.

       In the latter, you can only walk in your general
       neighbourhood

That's true, but why is this a problem? For a sustainable, walkable city it's only relevant that all key infrastructure (e.g. schools, shopping, leisure, parks ...) is within walking distance and this infrastructure gets replicated in bigger cities.

<comment><USER6> Of course there exist many places where we have not reached the point of marginal gains (and hence massive room for improvement), but you don't make an argument why you think we haven't reached that point anywhere on Earth.

I think you underestimate the practical difficulties of providing 7 billion people with top-notch public transport and other public services, and there is no precedent of what a region the size of Texas with an average density of 10k/km2 would even look like (though there are artists' renditions, most of them dystopian). But anyway, if that could be done, it could just as well be done if you split everyone into groups of 200k to 2m and settled them in smaller regions of similar density. And that's not a hypothetical, that's what we call a city now, and they work fine.

 _That 's true, but why is this a problem? For a sustainable, walkable city it's only relevant that all key infrastructure (e.g. schools, shopping, leisure, parks ...) is within walking distance and this infrastructure gets replicated in bigger cities._

I agree. I'm not saying that cities larger than 10m are a problem, per se, I'm just saying that smaller, dense cities get you most of the advantages from a quality of living and services aspect. I think it's a matter of taste whether you prefer to live in a city of 50k, 100k, 500k or 2m, and all of these are broadly similar in terms of sustainability.

<comment><USER5>
       underestimate the practical difficulties

My point is not that this is easy/hard, but rather: it's easier to provide top notch infra structure for the worlds population if it is concentrated in a few dense urban centres, rather than spread out. I find this hard to contest. Just think about distance, bearing in mind that the cost of sewage systems, rail (over- and underground), fibre-optic cables and so on basically tracks distance.

       if you split everyone into groups of 200k to 2m

This is an interesting point. B b b but ...

I cannot think of an _existing_ city with 200k inhabitants and great infrastructure. I can't even think of a city with 2m inhabitants whose infrastructure can compete with world leaders such as Tokio, Manhattan, Hong Kong and the like. And even in these places the best infrastructure is found in the densest parts of the city, not in the outskirts.

Note that the cities you have in mind, say European cities of 200k - 1m size, are rather spread out, and low density. I have lived in enough of those.

But it would be really interesting to have cities that have 200k - <USER3> inhabitants and are extremely dense like central Hong Kong. Such small cities may be big and dense enough to have the economies of scale of their larger rivals. But, as pointed out by "vidarh", they would not remotely match megacities in terms of interesting cultural life.

       not a hypothetical,

I don't think it works that well. European cities of 200k - 2m are car-centric in my experience. I supect China would run into major problems if its population live in low-density European style cities with 200k inhabitants each.

<comment><USER7> > But it would be really interesting to have cities with that have 200k - <USER3> > inhabitants and are extremely dense like central Hong Kong. They may be big > and dense enough to have the economies of scale of their larger rivals. But, > as pointed out by "vidarh", they would not remotely match megacities in > terms of interesting cultural life.

I think with that kind of density, if you go to 1m-2m size, you have a sufficient base for very regular high capacity public transport to other similar sized high density cities very near.

E.g. Macau fascinates me (though I've never visited). It's a fairly small city - roughly 643,100 people (2015 estimate) - , yet it's spread out over a positively tiny area - about 30km^2. Overall density of 18,568/km2. If you condensed London into smaller cities with that density, you could have e.g. split London into four cities of about 120km^2 each, and still free up more than 1000km^2 for green belts or low density zones around them, and yet they'd still be near enough to each other for it be pretty much as easy to travel between the areas as today, and the increased density in each city might even cut down total travel times in many cases.

The biggest challenge with something like that would be disciplined planning, beause obviously if you put big, dense cities like that near each other, the land in between would become immensely desirable.

<comment><USER5> I agree, this would be a fascinating experiment. 2m city on around 50 km2 is almost completely walkable, and certainly bicycleable. It would be just about big enough to have an interesting cultural life. I wonder why historically such a city has not evolved.

<comment><USER8> I suspect that a lot of it has to do with the fact that density is expensive in terms of building and infrastructure and also that many people don't especially want density as a matter of choice. As a result, most cities that have highly dense areas largely created those after they had already built out into surrounding areas. (The somewhat exceptions are geographically constrained areas. Even pre-skyscrapers there were very dense areas on Manhattan like the Lower East Side although presumably a return to tenement living conditions isn't a desirable future for cities.)

<comment><USER5> I don't think density is expensive, on the contrary, density is cheap due to economies of scale.

I think one reason might be food production and transport. Before the invention of refrigeration, fertiliser, mass transport, humans had to live rather close to food production, which stands in the way of density.

Another reason might have been that really dense living required the ability to build high-rise houses, with concomitant requirements for being able to pump water high up, have elevators and so on.

Reliable sewage systems and provision of fresh water was another problem.

Some of the above became widely available only at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century. At that time, the automobile encouraged sub- urbanisation.

It may be only know that small, yet very dense cities are possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article started off so promising. Just when I reached the part where I expected the author to begin making their point, it was over and all I saw were comments.

<comment><USER10> Not just that: towards the end he started talking about "winners", like population growth was always a positive. Clearly he's never been to Mexico City or one of those Chinese megacities he seems to envy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> From the article:

"Since 2000, this "urban draining" has been reversed, largely as a result of migration from beyond national borders."

Is this correct?

For Copenhagen the urban draining ended in the 1980es.

As far as I know most European capitals had a similar development and were growing comfortly in 1990es.

The change coincided with the end of the cold war and the wave of growth, increased global trade and migration that it enabled.

<comment><USER12> I think the urban draining referred to the inner core of each city, not the entire metro area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I boggled at a map of big cities which included Bradford but not Edinburgh; I think they're counting [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Yorkshire_Urban_Area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Yorkshire_Urban_Area) as "Bradford". Of course a built-up area doesn't have a unitary urban government, which can result in planning anomalies.

<comment><USER14> Yeah - I was confused by that. Bradford has a population of 293,277, whereas Leeds (15 miles down the road, border to border and included in the larger West Yorkshire stats) has a population of 751,500.

It seems a bit of a push to categorise several small cities and larger towns separated by miles of rolling hills and countryside as a "Megacity"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I came away less than convinced after reading that.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm not a history expert, but wasn't it basically the industrial revolution that made the city important? Before then, most people were farmers, and the cities didn't matter that much, no? Ok, so how do the latest technological developments, such as computers and Internet affect things? It makes online shopping and remote work possible, so you no longer need a city for those things. The only thing that I can see that you still really need a big city for is an interesting social life, and admittedly, that is important.

<comment><USER8> >but wasn't it basically the industrial revolution that made the city important

Not really. Cities were important since basically the transition from hunter- gatherers to agriculture going back to Babylon and Nineveh.

>The only thing that I can see that you still really need a big city for is an interesting social life, and admittedly, that is important.

Which isn't to everyone's tastes but there does appear to be real and perceived value in concentrating specific industries. As others have remarked many times, it's ironic that the industry that should be among the most amenable to being distributed has instead so concentrated in specific places like the Bay area. (With the result that so many people have convinced themselves their life is over if they can't work there that they'll put most of their income into a crappy apartment.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Istanbul is as European as Shanghai is American. Turkey is not part of Europe. Whereas other metropolitan areas that are _very_ European are simply left out: Moscow, St Petersburg & Belgrade.

<comment><USER18> Ah, the tired knee jerk comment whenever Turkey and Europe mentioned. What exactly makes Istanbul a non European city?

<comment><USER19> How do you _define_ European, anyway? Is Moscow a European city? How about Tbilisi? Tel Aviv _feels_ pretty European to me as well.

I realize it's not PC to talk about these thing in the open, but Europeans do share some form of common cultural heritage that unites them - they're all part of the West and Western Civilization and all that implies.

Historically, Istanbul was always part of "The Orient" \- it's where Europe ended.

I'm from Eastern Europe originally, which has a complex relationship with Turkey - Ottoman Empire and all that. Most people I know do _not_ think Turkey is part of Europe, nor that it should be ever let in. And that position is considered "soft" compared to how the Greeks feel about it - whoooooo boy.

<comment><USER10> _> Historically, Istanbul was always part of "The Orient" \- it's where Europe ended._

That is factually wrong in so many ways.

To start with, the archipelagos and coasts between today-Greece and today- Turkey shared a common history right about the time "western civilization" is commonly supposed to be born.

Then the Roman Empire happened and Constantinople became central to the whole enterprise, in many ways more Roman than Rome, to the point of surviving almost unscathed the fall of its Western counterpart in a myriad of tribal wars. In the meantime, one guy born in today-Turkey went on to become St. Paul and basically rewrite the Christian gospel as he saw fit.

Istanbul "left Europe" only when the Ottoman conquest happened; and the Ottomans themselves quickly rebranded Constantinople as their capital, openly stating that they were the true heirs of the fallen Roman Empire. Even at this time, with the follow-up of crusading and so on, Venetian ships were busy building cultural and economic bridges between today-Turkey and today-Italy. Despite the friction of Islam and Christianity, Mediterranean traders went along better than either side ever did with their barbarous Northern counterparts.

The fracture that Islamization brought never quite healed, and you can argue about Turkey being "different" from mainland Europe ever since the Ottomans; but you simply cannot say that it's "always" been like that, there is just no factual basis for that statement.

Regarding the views of this or that population about Turkey, they are not unique. Someone was busy this morning on HN arguing that the French don't think the UK belongs in Europe. I know plenty of Swedish people who don't think Finland is Europe, let alone Russia. Personally, the low level of civility demonstrated at various points by several politicians in Hungary, Poland and so on, could very well mean they are not Europeans either. That is not the point. You build the future by looking ahead, not by looking back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is in line with the philosophy of Jane Jacobs. Check-out some of her ideas regarding the City as the true measure of macroeconomic analysis: [http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html](http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html) [previously discussed: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10834435](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10834435)]

</comment><comment><USER21> I would love to see a map of the US arranged like this. New York is often undersized in statistics because so much of the metropolitan area really exists in New Jersey or West Chester. The fact that the eastern parts of Brookly & Queens count towards NYC while Jersey City & Hudson County doesn't feels like an accident of geography and not an actual distinction that matters.

<comment><USER22> This is exactly why I think many state borders in the US need to be redrawn, for better administrative efficiency and less political problems. New Jersey as a state should not exist, at all. The northern half should be part of a new city-state called "New York City", which includes not only present-day NYC boroughs, but Jersey City, Newark, and the rest of northern NJ in the west, White Plains and all that area to the north, and Stamford and the eastern half of Connecticut to the east, as well as all of Long Island.

The southern half of NJ should be part of a new city-state called "Philadelphia", which also includes Philly, the surrounding area in PA, and maybe Newark Delaware.

This pattern should be repeated across the nation, with state lines redrawn so that no large metro area crosses a state border. If a metro area crosses a state border, we're doing it wrong: there should be a clear hierarchy with towns/cities being lower-level than states, being lower-level than the federal government, and having cities spanning states breaks that and creates confusion and generally a big mess, as is seen with the screwed-up transit systems between NYC and NJ.

While they're at it, they should re-organize the states so they're roughly the same population. So tiny-population states like Rhode Island and Vermont and Wyoming need to be merged with neighbors somehow, and huge-population states like California and Texas need to be broken up. This would lead to better representation in the Senate.

There's a web page here about someone's idea along these lines: [http://www.tjc.com/38states/](http://www.tjc.com/38states/) This was a class project in the 70s, but the idea is sound and makes even more sense now with greater urbanization since then. They also reduce the total number of states, which would save taxpayer money overall by reducing administrative overhead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> When the megacorps like Alphabet and Apple start building their own cities, the nation state will really be in trouble.

<comment><USER24> Why build it ? It's far easier to lobby the current nation states to get what they need. They just have to keep enough of the public funded government policies and infrastructures they need to continue to strive.

<comment><USER25> > Why build it ? It's far easier to lobby the current nation states to get > what they need.

You are truly an optimist. Google can't even get Mountain View to allow them to put up a few skyscrapers.

"Google's plans to build housing on its Mountain View campus in Silicon Valley are being resisted on the ground that residents might keep pets, which could harm the local owl population." ([http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21647614-poor-land- use...](http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21647614-poor-land-use-worlds- greatest-cities-carries-huge-cost-space-and-city))

<comment><USER26> Seems like google could just move anywhere they wanted or threaten to and the city would have to comply.

<comment><USER25> Google already has moved: they have offices around the globe, Sydney, Singapore, New York, London, etc. They still rely on Mountain View as their main campus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I would like to see that map with metro areas but with GDP figures (and/or GDP per capita) in stead. I find GDP per capita figures hard to find for cities.

<comment><USER28> You can find it here, with the original sized maps and the original article:

[http://www.catataxis.com/index.php/tag/city- states/](http://www.catataxis.com/index.php/tag/city-states/)

<comment><USER27> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Honest PVS-Studio Review by an Ordinary Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0435/ <comment><USER2> Good review, I wish they supported clang and gcc on Linux as coverty does. Any plans? I be the first to try!

<comment><USER3> Yes. PVS-Studio confesses its love for Linux: [http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0415/](http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0415/)</comment></comment>


Simple questions to help reduce AI hype - <AUTHOR> http://smerity.com/articles/2016/ml_not_magic.html <comment><USER4> Stephen makes a lot of good points. And the list of questions he says people should ask is also useful. I have a few to add:

* What algorithm(s) are you using? Nobody should be able to brag publicly about their AI without simply naming the algorithms.

* What is your objective function? That is, what are you trying to optimize; what value you are you trying to maximize or minimize? Is it classification error? Is it measuring similarities on unstructured and unlabeled data through reconstruction?

* Do you already have the data that you can train on to minimize that error? If not, do you have a realistic plan to gather it? Have you thought about how you'll store it and make it accessible to your algorithms?

We have a series of questions we suggest that people ask themselves when approaching a machine- or deep learning problem:

[http://deeplearning4j.org/questions.html](http://deeplearning4j.org/questions.html)

I talk to a lot of startups making claims about their "AI", and I can't stop them from jumping on the bandwagon, but not all have the ability to build a machine-learning system and gather the data it needs.

Every good thing gets hyped, but that doesn't make it less good. It just means readers have more work to do.... Like Francois Chollet, I happen to believe that AI is even bigger than the hype, but in ways that the hype can't imagine yet.

[https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/751483046436548608](https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/751483046436548608)

<comment><USER5> Great additions. I can't believe I missed "what algorithm(s) are you using" \- it didn't even occur to me people could skip those yet still be taken seriously though that was (obviously) the case with the company I referred to in the article given they pitched AI when they had none.

I agree with you and Francois about the future potential enabled by AI. I do think we're at the early days of the internet where we can see it enables many things but we're not really accurate about predicting more than a year or two in the future.

Hype is just noise distracting us from the important contributions and issues we should be concerned over. I'm more worried about the immediate future of ML algorithms being misused, resulting in modern day redlining[1] and so on, than I am about any SkyNet prophecy.

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

<comment><USER4> I agree with you about redlining. I hadn't really thought about that... A recent scandal involving a predictive analytics firm called Northpointe shows how stupidly people use algorithms, and how much they are abused when there is no transparency: [https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk- assessm...](https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments- in-criminal-sentencing)

<comment><USER6> The scandal is that propublica wrote a story which directly contradicts their own statistical analysis. Their analysis was unable to show statistically significant bias (and had other flaws that might be genuine mistakes - <USER2> multiple comparison correction, possible misinterpretation of the model).

[https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying....](https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying.html)

In fact, their r-script suggests that the secret algorithm is probably reducing racism relative to whatever secret algorithm human judges would use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is a simple antidote for hype. It doesn't require questions, and it will mute it completely. Just ignore the hyped word and see if there is anything there. The author does this throughout the article, but the business plan argument is the best example:

> asking if the business plan would work with free human labor replacing the > automated component

Just ignore the word AI, and measure the value of the business or the research or the software for what it is. That's it.

But the author still resorts to the word AI as a common reference. This is what feeds hype, because we introduce it with every mention.

Hype isn't about substance. It's about the energy and excitement infused into these words that tends to build up. That's why we call them buzz words. People who know nothing technical about the subject begin to react to them, but they will not react to a different word.

Salesmen will always proceed to monetize this attention and excitement with things people can click or buy or say yes to. The market is driven by hype. Whether something actually happens in the field will have nothing to do with hype, but most money in a capitalist market is still driven by it. So although hype may be distracting for those doing real science or real entrepreneurship or real work, it's your best shot for promoting whatever it is you're selling, be it to consumers, to investors, or for funding.

</comment><comment><USER8> > The real world is not a dataset.

I've seen this cut both ways. Particularly in neural nets for video, which I'm working on, datasets such as HMDB51 are extremely difficult to the point where they may not represent the difficulty of the real world application. Many vision tasks in the real world can actually be constrained by camera angles, assumptions based on experience about what kinds of objects are in the frame, lighting considerations, or other things that make the real world task actually _easier_ than the dataset.

> AI won't save a broken business plan.

Best point in the article and the thing I worry most about day to day. Even if your AI is crazy good, if you don't have a market and people willing to pay for your product then it doesn't matter.

<comment><USER9>
        > Many vision tasks in the real world can actually be constrained by camera angles

Great example - because it can be extended to show that even human brains have great difficulty with that. Just turn the scene upside down and see how the brain has to go into overdrive and still miss a lot of stuff. There are quite a few optical illusions photos based on that, for example the face that seems to smile - until you flip it.

<comment><USER10> >There are quite a few optical illusions photos based on that, for example the face that seems to smile - until you flip it.

Ah, the Thatcher effect! [0][1] Although IMO this is a bad example because (er, AFAIK) we don't have the same sort of hardcoded facial-feature-recognizer systems in computer-vision neural nets as we do in boring old hew-mons. The Thatcher effect works on people with prosopagnosia [2] ('face blindness', people who have to work out who you are by your clothing, gait, voice and body language). These, taken together, proved that the known full-face-detector in humans, the fusiform gyrus, is aided by other systems that recognize features of a face (eyes, mouth) independently of that face's vertical orientation.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatcher_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatcher_effect)

[1] [http://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs- public/styles/story_med...](http://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs- public/styles/story_medium/public/thumbnails/image/2016/02/15/17/thatcher_illusion.png) < here's the trope-namer, straight outta the 80s. The effect is much more pronounced in this image than in the wiki one; it's way more obvious that the mouth/eyes are 'properly oriented' despite being upside down

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One question that's not explicitly asked on this list: How much preparation does the training data need?

Knowledge representation is still one of the main bottlenecks on AI/ML in general, a deep learning network is not going to prepare its food by itself.

</comment><comment><USER12> I haven't experienced a hype more warranted.

Yes, the underlying "magic" is decades old algorithms, often relatively simple concepts like LMS or nearest neighbors. The ML isn't the exciting part, it's the application. The pieces are finally in place: simple acquisition of training/test data (big data), powerful computing for the masses, larger crossover of ML into the computing/robotics fields. There is much hype but also much on the cusp of changing huge parts of human life.

<comment><USER13> We'll see whether this is true when ML has actually changed huge parts of human life. So far it hasn't changed much, to be honest.

<comment><USER14> The recent advances in speech and image recognition alone have had tremendous impact. Many areas of day to day life have been impacted.

<comment><USER15> This is generally overblown. What has mainly happened so far is that already- existing products have been incrementally improved by deep learning - <USER3> recognition, spam detection, search ranking, etc. all worked reasonably well before deep learning came along; deep learning just improved them.

There aren't actually that many actually massively-impactful image recognition products out there yet (there are certainly products with the _potential_ to be impactful, e.g. medical diagnostics, but it is too early to call).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Achieving human-level performance on any real-world task is an exceedingly > difficult endeavor when moving away from a few simple and well-defined > tasks.

It's an exceedingly difficult endeavor to try to get all humans to produce "human-level performance" while doing simple and well-defined tasks. Evidence = Mechanical Turk.

<comment><USER17> An interesting thing to note there is that research shows that untrained individuals have significant variance in task performance which decreases as they get better at the task. Mechanical Turk might be an extreme case, since all tasks are done by untrained individuals.

Whilst I agree with the quote that AI has difficulties when moving away from well-defined tasks, so do we. Most expert performance is constricted to narrow task domains, does not transfer well to other domains, and takes a long time to acquire. In a sense, that's not too dissimilar to AI.

I do disagree with the "simple". Games such as Chess are the stereotypical example for things AI performs well in. Their rulesets are well defined, but the games are incredibly complex. It is amazing that AI outperforms even grandmasters in this area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > "How much does the accuracy fall as the input story gets longer?"

As a beginner of text classification, I find the contrary, if the sentence is very short, the result is more likely suboptimal. E.g. classification of short tweets vs a detailed NYT article.

<comment><USER5> I intended these questions as broad examples though some are specific to a given AI system or architecture. You're quite right in that it depends on the task and the model.

I was thinking specifically about neural machine translation (NMT) with the encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder-decoder architectures converts a sentence in language X into a fixed size vector representation then aims to "expand" that vector into the equivalent sentence in language Y. As the vector size is fixed, short sentences can be adequately represented but longer sentences end up being lossily compressed. This realization illustrated a fundamental limitation in the encoder-decoder architecture and motivated the use of attention mechanisms.

There's a great figure (Figure 1) in Nvidia's Introduction to Neural Machine Translation[1] that shows the dramatic drop in accuracy with respect to the sentence's length.

[1]: [https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/introduction- neur...](https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/introduction-neural- machine-translation-gpus-part-3/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> quoted from the blog post*

      Achieving human level performance on any real world task is an exceedingly difficult endeavour when moving away from a few simple and well defined tasks.

May be related or off topic

I have developed a small messaging application which categorise the incoming messages by HUMANs (instead of AI) to achieve less false positives.

HTTPS://www.formalapp.com

I admit this app's solution is not technically complex.

And I understand building AI based solution is complex and needs more expertise.

But in this use case relying on human intelligence works or am I missing something ?

<comment><USER19> link: [https://www.formalapp.com](https://www.formalapp.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> AI is 60 years old and gone through hype cycles before. Nural networks are nearly as old as AI but work better these days.

</comment><comment><USER21> Short reaction: No!

In a little more detail, the author is talking about cases of "an amazing system" but, really, has in mind a quite narrow view of such systems and how they work and can be, and have been, built. Really, the author is looking at less than, say, 5% of the great examples of how to build "an amazing system".

In more detail:

The article has its definition of _AI_ :

> In this article, I won't quibble over definitions, simply taking the > broadest term as used in the media: artificial intelligence is whenever a > system appears more intelligent than we expect it to be.

Okay, from my usual understanding of AI, say, the peer-reviewed papers I published in AI, this is a relatively broad definition, but while considering this article, I'll accept that definition.

But, oops, right away in the sentence before we have

> If there's any promise I can make about the field of AI,

So, the author is saying that AI is a _field_. From the author's definition of AI, that is a very broad field indeed! Maybe the most broad of all?

Still I will try to consider the article:

So, my next concern is

> Ask what cases the system will fail on

> "Revealing the failure cases of your models is a way of avoiding over-hype"

> Kevin Murphy at ICML 2015

Now what is _AI_ is starting to look quite narrow, narrow enough to have a "model" and "failure cases".

So, oops: Consider a simple computer program that plays the little matchstick game Nim: There are two players. The game starts with three piles of matchsticks. For a _move_ a player picks a pile and removes from it as many matchsticks as they want but at least one. The players alternate moves. The player who picks up the last matchstick loses.

Okay, there is a simple algorithms for perfect play. Then if both players play perfect games, who wins depends just on who moves first. If only one player, A, is playing a perfect game but on that instance of the game with perfect play by the other player, B, should lose, the player A will still win as soon as player B makes a mistake.

How to play a perfect game is in

Courant and Robbins, _What is Mathematics_.

So back to the last quote, there are no real "failure cases" and, really, no "model". Instead, there's some applied math.

But, I'll keep reading:

> No AI system yet developed will magically fit every use case.

Well, the little algorithm for playing Nim fits "every use case".

> If a researcher tells you that a model got state of the art results out of > the box, they're either exceedingly lucky or giving you a fairy tale version > of reality.

No. As in a program to play perfect Nim, there is another explanation: They have a perfect solution for the problem.

Again, by this far into the article, the author seems to have in mind a limited view of what _AI_ is.

> Even if their model is arbitrarily flexible, there are still fundamental > limits placed on us by information theory.

Not for a program written using the Courant and Robbins algorithm. Information theory has essentially nothing to do with it.

Continuing:

> "How much training data is required?"

For the Nim program, none.

> "Can this work unsupervised (= without labeling the examples)?"

Well, since there are no examples, apparently so.

> "Can the system predict out of vocabulary names?"

WHAT? I doubt I understand the question. But with the Nim program, maybe so.

The author seems to be assuming that the program is about natural language understanding. Not all computer programs are.

> "How stable is the model's performance over time?"

With the Nim program, perfectly stable.

> Very few datasets are entirely representative of what the task looks like in > the real world.

"Dataset"? The Nim program doesn't have one.

Again, it appears that the author is thinking of a narrow view of _AI_ , much more narrow than the definition the author gave.

> Any claim of advanced research without publication is suspect at best

> "If you do research in isolation, the quality goes down. Which is why > military research sucks."

> Yann LeCun at ICML 2015

Uh, sorry, but I've done all my original research "in isolation" \-- in a small, quiet room, sometimes on my back looking at the ceiling. For my Ph.D. dissertation in applied math, the first of the research was on an airplane ride from NY to TN. The rest of the research was independently in my first summer in graduate school.

> The rate of change in the field of AI is such that anyone on the sidelines > is at best keeping up.

No, not really: I call my research applied mathematics, but it meets the author's definition of _AI_. But I pay essentially no serious attention to the _field_ of _AI_ (e.g., the work of people who claim to be in AI) at all. And the number of researchers in the field of AI, computer science, and information technology entrepreneurship that have the mathematical prerequisites to read my research is tiny. So, I'm not paying attention to the field of AI, and AI researchers are paying no attention to my work, some of which is published and, in one case, for one important problem, really, a significantly large set of important problems, totally knocks the socks off anything in AI. That case? Sure, some applied math, right, complete with theorems and proofs. In more detail, the work is some new results in mathematical statistics.

> It is certainly not impossible for an entity to come out of nowhere with an > amazing system but not it is far less likely.

Naw! Essentially the opposite is true: If want "an amazing system", usually stay far away from AI -- just totally ignore the field. Instead, pursue applied math. E.g., molecular spectroscopy for identifying chemical molecules is terrific stuff, but is has essentially no "training data". Instead, the work is based on some quantum mechanics and group theory.

Again, the author is thinking in a way quite narrow compared with the author's definition of AI and compared with what is done to build "an amazing system".

> It also means they haven't been put through the standard evaluations that > academia would have placed on them.

Well, as I've seen in some of my peer-reviewed publications, my work in applied mathematics is more advanced and with standards commonly higher, e.g., theorems and proofs, than the academic review process is able to follow.

Besides, any work I publish means I've given away the intellectual property, and now mostly I don't want to do that.

> AI won't save a broken business plan. An easy upper bound is asking if the > business plan would work with free human labor replacing the automated > component.

Going back decades, for many cases of "an amazing system", the idea that human labor could do the work at all is essentially absurd. Here the author is being narrow again.

> Achieving human level performance on any real world task is an exceedingly > difficult endeavor when moving away from a few simple and well defined > tasks.

No: Totally knocking the socks off human level performance is very common in applications of applied mathematics to complicated real problems, e.g., critical mass calculations for nuclear weapons, target detection via phased array passive sonar, also with Wiener filtering, to track the target, maybe with Kalman filtering, differential game theory for saying how a missile should catch a fighter plane, deterministic optimal control theory for, say, least time control to get an airplane to a given altitude, matching anti- ballistic missiles to incoming warheads, a huge range of applications of deterministic optimization, e.g., linear programming and integer linear programming, going way back to, say, even vacuum tube computers.

> All of this is to say that if the business plan doesn't work with free > humans, AI won't save it.

Well, for my startup, there's no way humans could do the crucial, core applied mathematics, but my software based in my original applied math works just fine!

Again the author is thinking about cases of "an amazing system" much more narrow than the author's definition of AI and much, much more narrow than good work in applied math going back at least 50 years.

<comment><USER17> I have not read the entire thing, but skimming I found references to math and an "amazing system", so, are you Stephen Wolfram?

<comment><USER21> No.</comment></comment></comment>


Disillusionment of an Entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/29/disillusionment-of-an-entrepreneur/

<comment><USER2> When I first started my blog I had a simple goal: I would write 10 posts and if I didn't have 10 thousand visitors after the tenth one I would quit. I also intentionally decided that having the date of an article be public would just stop me from writing the next one since I would feel bad that I hadn't written in X number of weeks.

I got over 10k by the second post and subsequently forgot about my goal until a couple posts later. But by that time I was coming up to 100k.

It's weird, when I started out I had just moved into tech (again) from engineering and I didn't really think it was feasible to shoot for 10k visitors after a handful of posts, let alone 100k, but once you get there it's still kinda dull and doesn't really give you the satisfaction that you thought it would.

The most satisfaction it has ever gotten me was when someone recognized me at a tech event, it seemed way more human and there was some real enthusiasm that arbitrary numbers don't give.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure whether this is passion or greed. Leaning towards the latter.

<comment><USER4> I quickly checked their company and the acquirer and it doesn't seem like there is enough money to 'retire in a house with an ocean view', not until it's in Nicaragua, of course.

Congratulations, anyway :)</comment></comment>


Equifax says cybersecurity incident could potentially affect 143M US consumers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/07/credit-reporting-firm-equifax-says-cybersecurity-incident-could-potentially-affect-143-million-us-consumers.html <comment><USER2> This should be a business-ending lawsuit.</comment>


A virus that kills cancer: the cure that's waiting in the cold - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9508895/A-virus-that-kills-cancer-the-cure-thats-waiting-in-the-coldc.html

<comment><USER2> Two previous submissions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4463519>

(no comments)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4466528>

(comments that the news story goes beyond the facts)</comment>


The sniff test of self-recognition confirmed: Dogs have self-awareness (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170905111355.htm <comment><USER2> Interesting idea, that the mirror test for dogs is unfair because their vision sucks compared to their nose, but this reasoning seems to take quite a leap. From the article:

"This study confirmed the previous evidence proposed with the STSR by Dr. Cazzolla Gatti showing that "dogs distinguish between the olfactory 'image' of themselves when modified: investigating their own odour for longer when it had an additional odour accompanying it than when it did not. Such behaviour implies a recognition of the odour as being of or from 'themselves'.""

Maybe the dogs just recognize their own modified scent as very familliar? Not as a representation of themseles, but just a smelll they smell often. I love dogs, and don't doubt for a moment they have some level of self-awareness similar to our own, but to me, this test stinks.

<comment><USER3> The mirror test works like this: you stealthily put a mark on the face or head of the being and then present the mirror. If the being then tries to reach the mark it is a strong clue of self-recognition.

In the excerpt the exact way of the sniff test is not described. I didn't read the paper, hoping for a summary here on HN. I thought maybey they controlled for confounding effects, for example by presenting other familiar smells, including the smell of self. The modified smell showing a higher level of interest compared to other smells would be a clue of self-recognition.

Anyway the approach shows clearly a bias of the mirror test. You could say the mirror test was discriminating the dogs.

This might be a leap, but I felt reminded of the hearing bias Deaf people experience every day. The majority of people assume that hearing and communicating via the audio channel is the way to go, and so I experience hurdles like needing to phone for identification for services.

I sympathise with the dogs.

<comment><USER4> Is this like the experiment where they put a dot on a bird and then showed the bird itself in a mirror, and then the bird tried to clean the dot off itself?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure this is just a problem with dog's poor visual processing. Sample size N=1 and what not, but I had a dog that would see it's reflection in the mirror, and start growling, hackles would start raising, and as the reflected "dog" started doing the same thing would start a loop that further enraged my dog. Shouldn't a dog be able to also recognize their own sound and emotions?

<comment><USER6> Counter-anecdote. My dog finds his reflection curious for a minute or so until he sniffs at it. Without any scent, he loses interest in the reflection, appearing to shrug it off as make-believe like the dogs he sees on television. Seems kind of self-aware-ish to me, in only that he can distinguish between sight and scent of himself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is kind of fascinating. My first impression was I'm not sure this works as a substitute for the mirror test because I don't know how you distinguish a dog recognizing a smell as self from a dog recognizing an unfamiliar smell jumbled with a familiar smell (without associating the self-smell with actual self, just with "I smell this all the time").

But that got me thinking about the mirror test itself. If it were somehow possible to---in such a way that the person was unaware of the change---wire someone up to co-opt their vision to remote cameras, then give them control of a robot body that looked like them and mimicked their movements faithfully, then numbed their sense of touch... Could you fool a person into "failing" the mirror test by identifying the robot as themself when it is not actually their own body?

Too far down this road, of course, you run into some weird philosophy questions on "what is 'my body' anyway?" But I don't know of an experiment of this style that's been tried on people. Could be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER8> I always thought my border collie sometimes seemed stressed and panted after she investigated the clumps of hair that would sometimes fall out when being pet or groomed. I remember it happening after saying to her "it's you!" Haha :-(. Poor dog thought she was falling apart. I remember telling her "it's okay" and she licked the air in my direction. Some part of me thought I was nuts for thinking she understood or anthropomorphizing her. But as the years went on we realized she knew what was up more often than we could imagine, so many instances of her reacting to spoken words or the world in ways we never thought her capable of.

</comment><comment><USER9> Lets apply this to cattle

<comment><USER10> Don't forget pigs as well.

<comment><USER11> AFIAK, Pigs already "pass" the mirror test -- but yes, the "sniff" test would be interesting too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Except when they chase its own tail running in circles around a tree trunk.

<comment><USER13> That's not because they don't know it's their tail, it's because they're incredibly bored. Dogs only do that if you don't take them for enough walks

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow! Kind of re-adjusts the weight thrown behind the mirror test. [0]

Recognizing self-recognition and sentience is truly a quagmire of problems, but I suppose it makes sense that it becomes tied to the most salient sensory input for the entity.

This concept will deeply complicate the uncanny valley of machine sentience, and the boundary between live organic life, and contrived artifacts that simulate comparable systems.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test)</comment>


Dune: Trailer - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/TwitterMovies/status/1303729244221169664 <comment><USER2> I was seriously excited when I heard they were rebooting Dune. It is one of my favorite books and movies. Modern graphics, sound, music, actors would have been wonderful. Then I found it was may have fallen victim to being "woke". All of my favorite franchises are being wrecked. Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who and now Dune. In this case, Liet Kynes has changed gender and ethnicity. It doesn't even make any sense. The original Dune already had plenty of diversity and arguably some of the most powerful female characters in all of SciFi. I wish I knew how to fix this.

<comment><USER3> > I wish I knew how to fix this.

You are not alone in these feelings. I've been searching out new peers and forums where we can converse without fear, the mind killer, the little death that brings total obliteration.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you hire your first programmer? - <AUTHOR> TLDR: How does a company with no technical people hire their first programmer? What should we be thinking about? How do we get the right person?
Context: We're in Europe in a medium sized town outside of any big startup/tech city. The company that I work for is slowly pivoting to becoming a tech company. It started out doing workshops and organizing events. About a year ago we had a software company develop a piece of (customer facing) software that would aid us in our offline ventures. Now that we've worked with that software for a while, and even expanded on it a little, it's becoming more and more clear: we need to become a tech company to reach our goals. Where most of the people in the company currently still largely work in the offline part of the company we've realized that a digital-only product is our future.
Since this is becoming way bigger than originally anticipated, we're hesitant to continue doing this with an outside contractor. So we're looking into hiring developer(s).
There's currently no technical people working at our company and there's no real knowledge about this either.
Question: We wouldn't even really know where to start. How does one hire the first developer to a company? What should we be thinking about? What do we put in a job posting? How do I even go about the interviewing process? How do we get the right person with the right skills to apply? How do we create an environment for a developer to fit in? <comment><USER2> Telling programmers what to do as a non-programmer can be like herding cats. Your first step should be to hire in a technical manager who can build the rest of the team for you. If you believe this is the future of the company, you should consider hiring someone at the director level who speaks your language and also the language of developers.

This person doesn't even necessarily need to be a programmer or a good one but they do need to know how to run a software development team. You will have to use your experience and intuition to tell if they are a good fit.

You can find this individual at networking events perhaps but if you have the money to spend then you might consider hiring an executive recruitment agency. You also might consider employing a management consultancy company to interview this person to check their technical knowledge and management style but I have no way of knowing what that costs.

This person can then answer all the other questions you have with full knowledge of the context of your company and your local area.

<comment><USER3> This is important to do early, or not at all. I was in a technically-driven startup. Couple of years in, the management team changed and development got a less-technical manager who could talk manager-ese to the President. But he quit paying the slightest attention to Engineering, made silly decisions and bogged the product down in a quagmire it never recovered from.

So, the right hire here from the start is critical.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Has Anyone Immigrated to USA from UK as a Software Engineer? - <AUTHOR> I'm a software engineer with over 15 years experience currently based in London, UK and am planning a move to either west coast USA or east coast Australia. I would be taking a wife and two small children with me.
1. Which location would you recommend and why?
2. How quickly can immigration to these locations take?
3. Which has the best quality of life, both now and over time?
4. Is the work ethic similar to that of London, more intense, unknown?
5. Any tid-bits of advise? <comment><USER2> UK, US, and Australia have similar work ethics. The Aussies, based on my anecdotal experiences, seem better at relaxing and do so less pretentiously than folks here in the US.

Immigrating to the US is easy if you have an employer lined up, however getting a green card or full citizenship can take awhile (5 years?)

In the US you will absolutely need employment for health insurance. Don't get sick while unemployed, or you will have to move to Australia anyway to avoid the bill collectors :-)

If you plan to stay in a city, London, San Francisco/LA, Sydney, etc. all have high costs of living.

I am from the US, I wouldn't want to live anywhere else permanently.

But if I were an immigrant, particularly from UK/Europe, I would have to have a very specific reason to move to the US.

If I wanted to start a business, live in a suburb, own a gun, lower taxation, etc. the US is great. Though you will only find lower taxation outside of NYC/Boston/Chicago/San Franscisco/LA/Seattle, etc. Diverse climate and people.

Quality of life is very subjective. If you plan to live here through retirement to death, the US is a terrible place to retire with low social security payouts. You would need to move to low cost area, unless you can afford a nice condo in Florida. If you plan to stay in a city unto death, make sure you find a rent controlled place...

Australia is probably a better fit if you don't care about any of the above, but we would welcome you here regardless.

If you are more interested in exploring the East, then Australia is the obvious choice. If you want to be able to explore Central/South America, and get back to London relatively quickly then the US might be better.</comment>