The end for Mandriva - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/645862/rss <comment><USER2> Wow, such memories here. Back in my teens, Mandrake was the _first_ distro that actually worked for me and helped me start to understand Linux.

I was working at an ISP back then, variations of Unix everywhere, and had to get into Perl coding for a task. Having Linux on my machine seemed like a great place to start, and Mandrake was the one that installed best on my hardware.

I still go back and forth as to whether it was ultimately _worth_ it for me to get into Linux (time-wise) -- I probably would have been better off focusing on entrepreneurial efforts than not-so-necessary techie stuff -- but at the end of the day, learning Linux has saved me tens of thousands of dollars in managed hosting fees and contractor rates alone.

Knowledge of Linux also been a _clear_ difference-maker in nearly any technical job interview I've ever had, so I suppose it was worth it at the time for sure.

RIP Mandrake, and thanks to anyone who helped make that project possible.

<comment><USER3> Counterpoint: Mandrake was the first distro I installed as a child -- but it was very broken. I picked an 'RC' (IIRC, RC1) because the version number was bigger and I didn't know what RC stood for.

<comment><USER4> Oh, well, don't feel bad... the non-RC versions were also plenty broken back in the day. Play word association with me and hand me "buggy Linux distro" and you'll get back "Mandrake".

And I've played with a _lot_ of Linux distros since then....

(This is _way_ back, like, less than a major version after it forked from Red Hat. The first thing they did was put all the latest newest pretty shiny in to the distro. This had the expected effect on stability, unfortunately. And Linux has come a long way, as has everything else despite our occasional complaints... "expected effects on stability" == "hard hangs". Back then, "hard hangs" tended to encompass disk corruption pretty frequently too, even if you didn't go with the latest & greatest filesystem, which was actually "slightly faster but much buggier than ext2", which itself was not necessarily great. My goodness, we really have come far....)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Title Misleading: Mandriva was last released by Madriva SA was 2012 and was moved to OpenMandriva with a independent community. [https://www.openmandriva.org/](https://www.openmandriva.org/)

Mandriva SA closing has zero impact on OpenMadriva [https://forums.openmandriva.org/en/discussion/987/mandriva-i...](https://forums.openmandriva.org/en/discussion/987/mandriva- is-going-out-and-openmandriva)

<comment><USER6> And the title (which I wrote) said nothing about OpenMandriva — which, as far as I can tell, isn't moving along at any great pace anyway.

<comment><USER5> To be fair to you I didn't know the last 3 or 4 years of Mandriva history and what had happened.

In May 2012 Mandriva the company abandoned development of Mandriva and transfered leadership, resources and the forums to OpenManadriva. [http://blog.mandriva.com/en/2012/05/17/mandriva-linux- will-r...](http://blog.mandriva.com/en/2012/05/17/mandriva-linux-will-return- to-the-community/) (The link is broken since it was hosted by Mandriva)

<comment><USER7> the spinning up of OpenMandriva has to be a textbook example of how to do it wrong. The relevance had petered off pretty dramatically by that time. Seems the owners and possibly even the courts running the various administrations didn't recognize that part of the value. Should OpenMandriva have been started like in 2002 or so, the landscape could look different now.

<comment><USER5> Mageia forked successfully than the OpenMandriva happened when all the energy left the camp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> RIP Mandrake/Mandriva. This distro was the first to give the Linux world automatic hardware detection and module loading.

This distro was also the first to provide RPM a viable alternative to `apt- get` with `urpmi`.

What we take for granted today were once engineering marvels for Linux newbies everywhere.

<comment><USER9> On the subject of apt-get/urpmi I'm really disappointed how it seems RH adopted the _worse_ of all options: yum.

Today it is not so bad, but it was awful, in the beginnings of Fedora.

<comment><USER10> Yum is actually being replaced by dnf, which is a heavily modified fork of yum and it's supposedly much better.

<comment><USER11> What's even better is that dnf uses ZYpp's solver.

IIRC, it was created as a compromise between people who wanted Fedora to move entirely to ZYpp and people who wanted to maintain compatibility with yum's APIs.

<comment><USER12> > What's even better is that dnf uses ZYpp's solver.

What is sad though, is that it does not output CUDF, which would allow using other solvers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The Screen Savers on TechTV talked me into installing Mandrake when I was 16/17\. I paid around $60 for the 7 CD installation disks at Best Buy.

I really had no idea what I was doing and just used it to play Mahjong.

RIP

<comment><USER14> I fondly remember TechTV.

Then G4 took it over and absolutely destroyed it. A tragedy (at least to me).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mandrake was the first Linux distro I attempted to install way back in the day.

My first "Main Distro" was PC Linux which was Mandriva with a apt-get package manager for RPM fork.

Sad day for all the old time Linux users.

<comment><USER15> Very nostalgic! I remember downloading the two-CD Mandrake set using a "fast" internet connection at my dad's workplace. Took most of two days. Then I had to learn how to burn a CD. Then I had to learn what this "BIOS" thing is, and what it means to boot from CD. Then I clicked a bunch of buttons that I didn't understand. Then a bunch of weird text scrolled by on the screen, and then I was running Linux![1]

Thanks for all the fun, Mandrake!

[1] It wasn't till later that I discovered that clicking random buttons has a tendency to wipe out other operating systems on the hard drive. Like my parents' Win98 installation. Whoops...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Mandrake was my first distro as well, haven't used it in ~14 years I guess.

I remember downloading it over a 56k modem that kept disconnecting at night and when I was at work, it took about a week! Sadly, I knew no Linux users in person.

But it was totally worth it. I can still remember the sense of adventure first installing and running Linux. And then I installed some dev tools, and it was like this OS was calling me to write code. I started to code and haven't stopped since...

<comment><USER17> I actually bought Mandrake at the store, Office Max I believe.

First linux I could get to work with my video card--after a couple of weeks trying with redhat. Sound was another story--I don't think I got it working.

~15 years ago, I think.

<comment><USER16> I actually switched to RedHat a few weeks or months later, I can't recall exactly why, and I do have some memories of playing music with XMMS on those first distros.

<comment><USER17> I ended up in Debian not too long after, and spent ~5 years there. Wouldn't have made it that far without Mandrake, I don't think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If I understand it, Mandriva "lives on" in Mageia: [http://www.mageia.org/en/](http://www.mageia.org/en/)

<comment><USER5> Also lives on as Openmadriva [https://forums.openmandriva.org/en/discussion/987/mandriva-i...](https://forums.openmandriva.org/en/discussion/987/mandriva- is-going-out-and-openmandriva)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thanks for participating in the distro war. Without any participation to the war, we wouldn't have the battle proven distros we have today.

</comment><comment><USER20> I was the first (or second depend of the point of view) employee of Mandriva back in 1999, quite a journey since then. Sad to see them gone

<comment><USER21> I used to work at Conectiva in 1999 and I remember to look at Mandrake/Mandriva spec files, I did remember your contributions (also from Pablo). Good old days. Later both companies get merged. Respect.

<comment><USER22> Good times. Conectiva 6.1 was my first contact with Linux, after a workshop in UFMG. I was a kid back then and got completely hooked by that "grown up thing".

Then I spent too many sleepless nights trying to patch the Kernel to work in my cheap PC and its PC Chips motherboard with an integrated WinModem.

And that headache got me every single job I ever had after that =D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I somehow ended up with a manual for Mandriva long before I had a machine of my own or that someone would let me install Linux on - I read it thoroughly hoping to learn everything I could about *nix. I never did end up using Mandriva, but it still feels like my first distribution... Sad, in a way, to see it end.

</comment><comment><USER11> Like many others, I got into Linux through Mandrake in 2003. I've long since moved on (I'm an Arch user now, after a very long stint using Gentoo), and the MDK community lives on in Mageia, but it's still kinda sad to see the company go.

</comment><comment><USER24> Mandrake was my first successful Unix-like experience as well - I had spend a few days trying to get Red Hat to work at one point, but it never did (video card drivers were the issue IIRC). Mandrake actually worked and let me play around with it. I dual booted it for awhile but it didn't really catch on with me; nonetheless it was an important first experience. (Later a friend convinced me to install FreeBSD and I took to that much better. I avoided Linux for years after that in favor of BSD, though eventually I moved to Debian for most cases. Keep being tempted to go back to FreeBSD though...)

</comment><comment><USER25> Like many already mentioned, Mandrake was the first distro to offer proper hardware detection to my computers.

Also being compiled for i586 architecture was a big plus to me back then, as I wanted to take advantage of my Pentium processors.

</comment><comment><USER26> Mandrake was my second linux distro after a thankfully brief tangle with Caldera Linux (yeah, I know). Although I have very few good memories of Mandrake (made me discover why the term RPM-hell existed), it's still sad to see one of the big distros disappearing.

I've moved after that to Debian-based distros, and eventually to Slackware, and now I'm trying to get myself back into the linux game with CentOS/Red Hat, but I'll always remember Mandrake as my first not completely sucky distro.

<comment><USER27> Almost my same story. I still remember trying to learn as much as possible from the magazines, downloading a full distro with my connection was unthinkable back then. It was back when I lived in Mexico. I find it very interesting how technology enabled people growing in different backgrounds to share the same experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I moved over to Mandrake after Yggdrasil bit the dust (with a short Debian stint in between) and ran it as my main OS for years .. but tried Ubuntu one fateful day and haven't used anything but Ubuntu since.

So its a sad day to see Mandriva leave the scene .. they were doing really good and necessary things for us Linux devotees in the early days, and they deserve their place in the Linux Distro War history books. Pouring one out for you today, fella's ..

<comment><USER29> ah Yggdrasil! I used to get the full updates as a data CD (with fun cover art) stuck between the tech books of my local University's bookstore; because the download over dialup would've been prohibitive. ok... next nostalgic old fart can top that with leased Darpa 10Base2 lines.

<comment><USER28> Heh .. I remember the first time I booted Ygdrassil .. it came with a floppy, and a CD. Man that was a great adventure, waiting 20 minutes on my 386-16megs for X to load. My, how far we've come .. good times, eh?

<comment><USER30> Having to fear borking your monitor by setting the wrong hz is not something I miss. The fantastic feeling when stuff actually worked is something else though. I feel I have gotten spoiled.

Just now I had to spend 10 minutes fixing the system tray icon of pidgin under kde5. No satisfaction when it worked, just annoyance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Sad to see it all go. Still have the old Mandrake boxes knocking around somewhere. I recall it being installed, under the radar, in one London financial company, as a desktop for a trader to build out some modelling and pricing tools. This was their first linux box - all other nix boxes back then were either sun or hp-ux. Happy times.

</comment><comment><USER32> I used Mandriva for my work laptop for a long, long time, until they first ran into problems (2010 was it?). When the Mandriva community reformed around the Mageia distro ([http://mageia.org](http://mageia.org)), I switched to that, and I've been a totally satisfied Mageia user ever since.

Mageia is the linux I recommend, because these days I only recommend linux to non-technical users, and it's the only one that works so reliably.

I joke about how I've basically forgotten how to tweak Linux on the command line, since with Mageia you don't need to, but it's not really a joke. Everything "just works."

</comment><comment><USER33> Mandrake was the first distro that allowed me to reliably connect my audio modem, my video card, _and_ my sound card. It was my go-to OS for a long time after that.

It's easy to forget just how challenging hardware support for Linux used to be.

</comment><comment><USER34> Mandrake was my first exposure to Linux.

My hats off to Mandriva for keeping it going for so long.

</comment><comment><USER35> Mandrake/Mandriva was my favorite distro for over 10 years.

My introduction to Linux came with Red Hat 4.2, it was very cool but my limited knowledge at the time made certain things difficult for me.

Next, I used Red Hat 5.0 and I liked that a lot but what really changed things for me was Mandrake 6.0. That distribution got me excited about digging into Linux and GNU to find out how things worked and how to customize things to my liking.

URPMI addresses so many of the issues with RPM that I was hooked. No more RPM dependency hell.

I finally switched from Mandriva to something else in 2009.

It was great, in its day.

</comment><comment><USER36> I started my Linux journey with Mandriva. At that time, compared to Redhat Linux, Mandriva had better user interface and could play mp3. Now I use Debian. Sad to see the end of the road for Mandriva

</comment><comment><USER37> Looks like Mandrake was the first Linux distro for a lot of people. Back in the late 90s early 00s I spent all my days in front of a bunch of SGI workstations, and wanted something at home with a desktop UI that worked but still gave me all the wonderful *nix features I was used to. Mandrake was the first distro that kind of did that. It was relatively easy to install and the windowing environment was mostly familiar. It had a lot of warts but they felt worthwhile at the time.

RIP!

</comment><comment><USER38> Interesting. I hadn't followed them but it seems like they had quite a few enterprisy things that looked decent at first glance back in ~2006 when I last checked them out. Seems like that's what they were pushing for then, guess it didn't pay off. Pretty sad to see them go. One of the original five distributions I tried when I had 0 clue (SUSE, Debian, Slackware, Red Hat, Mandrake roughly in that order).

</comment><comment><USER39> Mandrake 7 was the Linux distro that made me switch away from Windows. I used Windows 98 at the time and did not like XP much. Although there was lot to be desired, it worked much better than Win98, so I made the switch and never looked back since.

As I learned more about Linux I switched later to Slackware which I'm still using to this day (with Ubuntu on second and MacOSX on third computer I'm using daily).

</comment><comment><USER40> I remember buying the official edition of Mandrake 10.0, while my previous experience was only with Slackware. It was so easy to install that I completely stopped using Windows, ever since.

Truth is though, that for me it died right about when it became Mandriva and Ubuntu was the new shinny distro, that wasn't only easy to install but it'd sent the disks right to your home.

Rip Mandrake and thanks.

</comment><comment><USER41> Like so many others, Mandrake was one of my first distros back in 1998, 1999. When I worked at the Electronics Boutique, it was one of the three Linux distros you could buy in a box at our store (the other was Red Hat and the third was Corel Linux I think). Memories.

Shame the company is over but I'm glad the OSS part moved on a few years ago.

</comment><comment><USER42> Linux-Mandrake 7.2 was the first distribution I successfully installed and used as a primary OS. All of the memories :(

(I may have abandoned the RPM world for Debian, but it was Mandrake that got me using KDE back in the 2.0 days - it's now 2015 and I'm still a KDE user!)

</comment><comment><USER43> RIP Mandrake, used Mandrake 7.x to 10, fond memories of users spending a lot of time playing clanbomber. Loved urpmi, lots of installable games (compared to Redhat that time) and Multi Network Firewall (MNF) edition.

</comment><comment><USER44> Wow, my Mandrake 7.1 user manual just became a collectible.

Easy to forget little things, but a lot of people my age would not become computer scientists without Mandrake, RedHat and Knoppix.

</comment><comment><USER45> Even though I didn't use it for long, Mandrake was one of my first distros as well. Lossless resizing of FAT32 partitions seemed like magic at the time.

</comment><comment><USER46> Mandrake was one of my first linux distros as well. It was a pretty exciting step up from slackware for me back then. A shame that its the end.

</comment><comment><USER47> Mandrake was one of the first distros that I ever got to work on a laptop correctly. I'm shedding some nostalgic tears here!</comment>


You Are Not Working from Home - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/opinion/work-from-home.html <comment><USER2> Essentially the writer lays out the drawbacks as:

1\. Your salary may go down if you live in city where living costs are less because companies often offer salaries based on the living costs of the city -- Well that's justified. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

2\. You might not get free food and snacks that you get at your office -- yeah, that is very concerning (not).

3\. Your company will monitor your work activity on your machine more than usual by keeping track of the hours and so on -- Don't companies already do that when you wfh? If you are against such a company, you shouldn't be at theat company in the first place.

4\. Your work-life balance will be in disarray when you work from home. -- Sure WHF is not for everybody and companies are not forcing their employees to do it forever, as I understand they offer you the choice to do it if you think it suits you better. If its not for you, then go to work!</comment>


ADHD guidelines add Ritalin as option for 4-year-olds - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2011/10/17/adhd-preschool.html?cmp=rss

<comment><USER2> Nice. A reason for parents to have an excuse to tranquilize their kids.

Let the kids go outside and play, spend time with them. They don't need these drugs.

We will soon have generations of zombies if this craziness is allowed to continue.</comment>


The real reason that capitalism is so crash-prone. - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/05/091005fa_fact_cassidy <comment><USER2> Great read. My two favorite quotes:

The Prisoner's Dilemma is the obverse of Adam Smith's theory of the invisible hand, in which the free market coördinates the behavior of self-seeking individuals to the benefit of all. Each businessman "intends only his own gain," Smith wrote in "The Wealth of Nations," "and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." But in a market environment the individual pursuit of self- interest, however rational, can give way to collective disaster. The invisible hand becomes a fist.

and

Limiting the development of [complex] securities would stifle innovation, the financial industry contends. But that's precisely the point. "The goal is not to have the most advanced financial system, but a financial system that is reasonably advanced but robust," Viral V. Acharya and Matthew Richardson, two economists at N.Y.U.'s Stern School of Business, wrote in a recent paper. "That's no different from what we seek in other areas of human activity. We don't use the most advanced aircraft to move millions of people around the world. We use reasonably advanced aircrafts whose designs have proved to be reliable."

The second seems quite applicable to software engineering as well.

<comment><USER3> It's unfortunate that the article uses the Prisoner's Dilemma as its example, because the Prisoner's Dilemma is actually not the best game model to set up as the opposite of the Invisible Hand. A more appropriate model would be the Tragedy of the Commons, which was proposed by a fellow named Garrett Hardin in an article in a 1968 edition of _Science_ magazine.

If you are interested in formal modeling of coordination problems, an interesting overview can be found in Elinor Ostrom's book _Governing the Commons_. In chapter one she gives an overview of the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Tragedy of the Commons, and the Logic of Collective Action (Mancur Olson's theory). After reviewing these abstract formal models, she looks at other possible institutional solutions for coordination problems.

Here are some links:

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER4> Any quick one-liners or easy-to-understand wisdom that you've gained from the material? The entire subject area looks immensely fascinating, yet very dense at times.

<comment><USER3> Yes, game theory can get inscrutably complex, even through the initial models are pretty simply to set up and understand.

The basic components of any coordination/cooperation problem are the same: you have actors with preferences, you have a situation with rules that they can't change, and you have outcomes with payoffs/penalties depending on whether the actors choose to cooperate or not.

Most of the problems revolve around how to get people to cooperate, when defection is attractive for some reason. Most of the solutions involve making sure situations are not one-off interactions, that all actors have information about what each other is doing, and that in the case of multiple actors using common resources, you need to have some form of monitoring and enforcement.

If actions are one-off, the temptation to act selfishly is higher than if actors know they are in a long-term situation in which they must choose to cooperate or defect time and time again. In this way information such as reputation can then function as a signaling device to other actors.

Games such as the Prisoner's Dilemma work only when presented as a one-off situation in which both actors have no information about what they other is going to do. So the solution is 1) make sure you're not setting up one-off interactions, and 2) make such actors are in an information rich environment wherein they can make appropriate signals about their intentions and past behavior.

Most of the other games, such as Tragedy of the Commons or Battle of the Sexes, have stable solutions if you repeat them and increase the information available to the actors. The equilibrium solutions are called Nash Equilibriums, after John Nash, the paranoid schizophrenic mathematician featured in the movie _A Beautiful Mind_.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr>.

A bit more than a one-liner, but hopefully this helps a bit.

<comment><USER5> Beware of simplistic conclusions of very basic game theory, especially if it's coming from RAND.

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

This documentary enlightens a bit on the subject and is quite accessible. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_%28television_document...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_%28television_documentary_series%29#1._.22Fuck_You_Buddy.22_.2811_March_2007.29)

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=404227395387111085#>

(AFAIK not released outside of Britain due to footage rights issues, a real shame.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this is a better way of thinking about it than "greed". The next natural conclusion that follows is that _nobody actually knows how to fix this_. It may even be an intrinsic attribute of a growing economy; it may literally be impossible to avoid, short of not having a growing economy.

Centralized management makes the lockstep-motion problem _radically_ worse, solving the positive feedback problem by nearly eliminating feedback and cutting straight to the failure case. ("But the central planners can use feedback!" - not on even _remotely_ the same level of granularity, by definition of "central".) Cutting down the positive feedback loop powering the bubble pretty much inevitable involves cutting out the positive feedback loop driving the economy in general. What's left, really?

Rather than preventing crashes, we probably ought to focus on having the wisdom to be prepared for them when they come.

<comment><USER7> Some people are against having a growing economy. Obviously the economy cannot grow indefinitely.

<comment><USER8> As long as the population grows or technology keeps improving, an economy can continue to grow.

<comment><USER7> Fine, but obviously the population is going to stop growing.

<comment><USER9> Why?

Or, perhapse "Why is that obvious / why is it a necessity?"

If humanity expands into space, there is absolutely no reason for the population to ever stop growing. Space contains more energy, more living space, and more resources than we could possibly use.(1)

In fact, give the release of resource constraints, there are good arguments to keep growing--"given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" applies to more than just software. More people is a _good_ thing.

(1) For a really good treatment on this, read Professor John S. Lewis's _Mining the Sky_ [http://www.amazon.com/Mining-Sky-Untold-Asteroids- Planets/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Mining-Sky-Untold-Asteroids- Planets/dp/0201328194)

<comment><USER7> I would have responded earlier if I had noticed this.

You're right that it's not quite a necessity. It's concievable that population growth could continue, albeit at a very slow rate, until people are ready to colonize space. I don't doubt that humans will figure out how to do that-- if they survive long enough.

But it seems likely to me, maybe even obvious, that at the current rate of growth people are going to commit evolutionary suicide long before that becomes possible. This because the earth is _very_ limited and recently economic growth has been really fast. In addition to the Club of Rome stuff recommended above, check out: Capitalism Nature Socialism, a pretty good journal which often discusses these issues, and Beyond Growth by Herman Daly.

Edit: note that it was I who upvoted your comment.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the upvote. I had actually wondered--is there any way to know who has up- / down-voted a comment?

As to the growth issue, I'm not quite sure what you mean by "evolutionary suicide." My first guess would be that this term applies to a species that fails to adapt to a changing environment or, in the case of a sentient species, chooses to consciously direct its evolution in a direction that renders it unfit for its environment. That doesn't seem like a good fit for your argument though, so I think what you likely meant was that the population will outgrow the available resources, and there will not be enough food / energy / medicine / etc for everyone. If I'm wrong, please correct me.

Assuming that this is what you meant, I see several implicit assumptions that are worth examining. They are:

1) Humanity does not currently know how to colonize space.

2) It will be S years before we colonize spaces, and S is a large number ("a long time"). This probably means decades, possibly centuries, although you don't specify.

3) The current rate of worldwide population growth will be sustained into the indefinite future.

4) The resources of the Earth are too limited to support the world population that is projected to exist in X years, where X is a small number of decades.

5) X years < S years.

6) Our current knowledge of the Earth's resources is complete and correct.

If any of these points prove incorrect, I would be hard pressed to agree with your argument.

Considering some of the news reports I have seen in the last year or two, I suspect that there might be more resources out there than we think, and that space colonization might be closer than we think:

\- Yesterday's NY Times carried a major article about a new technique for natural gas recovery from shale.

\- I am aware of at least one study that shows a space elevator could be built for about the price of Boston's Big Dig (i.e. ~10-20B). With such a construct in place, the two major hurdles in space development (launch costs and risk of catastrophic launch failure) go out the window. Even if that study was low by an order of magnitude, it's still something that any G8 government could afford, as could a conglomeration of major corporations.

\- JAXA (the Japanese NASA) is currently working on a solar power station project. If powersats prove out, they will represent a major incentive to start building up space infrastructure, which will naturally lead to more people staying in space longer, which will naturally lead to colonization.

\- It is pretty clear that population growth tends to level off and even decline once a nation reaches a certain standard of living and life expectancy. Europe and Japan are good examples of this: negative population growth and/or aging populations. More people aren't the problem, they are the solution: we need more minds coming up with ideas, and more hands producing wealth world-wide.

<comment><USER7> You're right. That's what I meant by evolutionary suicide, and my argument (well, it's not really mine) relies on all six assumptions, more or less.

Although:

Colonizing space and colonizing space to the point where you don't need to worry about earth's carrying capacity are two quite different things. Energy and minerals might be obtainable from space somewhat soon. But we can't eat rocks or sunlight.

I don't claim population growth will be sustained into the indefinite future. I claim that it will be sustained until it stops, and that how it will stop is a question of serious concern.

As I see it there are several possibilities: 1.Population growth continues apace and, due to reproductive time lag, there are suddenly far too many people on the earth. This has a quite catastrophic domino effect and an appalling number of people, maybe 100%, die. 2.Population slows and then stops, but people's lifestyles get more and more decadent and far too many resources are transformed into far too much waste. Something, or many things, run out and disaster ensues. 3.Both population growth and resource consumption naturally find some sustainable level. Maybe that would be somewhere below where it is now. Maybe someone would invent something fabulous, say a glass elevator like in Charlie and the Great Glass elevator, and there is room for lots more consumption and lots more people.

Obviously, I prefer the third option. Maybe it will be that. I'm just sufficiently unsure to be worried about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Failure is a feature of capitalism. It is to be expected.

However, what shouldn't really happen is a cluster of failures. That's caused by misinformation in the pricing system. Real saving rate doesn't matched up with interest rate, so people are being fooled by non-existent capitals.

At least that's how I understand it.

<comment><USER8> As Marx correctly understood, capitalism is best likened to a force of nature: it doesn't have any moral basis and can have both morally positive and negative consequences. This is why we need governments to keep capitalism in check: unchecked capitalism also leads to activities we find morally unacceptable. Like evolution favors only those traits that add reproductive value, capitalism favors only those activities that increase capital. This may mean obtaining a monopoly, deceiving customers and competitors, employing slaves and generally any other activity we disapprove. In a fully rational market, the customers would not accepts those practices, but as Keynes said: _the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent_. Moreover, capitalist principles cause an important part of the customers not to care about the immoral consequences: they don't see them because the market isn't transparent or because they do not want to see them. We therefore cannot trust the market to merely expose the positive sides of capitalism. Failures, even clusters of failures, are to be expected and can only be avoided by government intervention. As long as a government lauds the free market and has the irrational expectation that the market will straighten itself, we will continue to suffer the consequences of unchecked capitalism.

<comment><USER3> Wow, it's hard to know where to begin with this post. It seems strange to me that you're trying to use Marx to justify a liberal position. After all, Marx would be the first to disagree with you about the feasibility of using the state to check the market. Marx saw the state as little more than the 'executive committee' of the bourgeoisie, so using the state to check the market is just not going to happen until revolution leads us out of the capitalist stage of history.

Your equation of evolution and capitalism has a nasty heritage of Social Darwinist thinking. I think it's a misunderstanding of both evolution and of capitalism. Better not to make such an analogy.

Monopolies, deception, fraud, slaves, and so on are not at all unique to capitalism and have been with humanity throughout history. There's no compelling reason to believe that capitalism favors these practices for rational or irrational reasons.

It's not clear why the government is the only institution in society that can avoid failure. It's moreover not clear that the government doesn't play a role in setting up failures as a consequence of its intervention. Marx (or Lenin at the least) would certainly hold that it's the state that creates the very phenomena like monopolies that you decry as "irrational."

<comment><USER8> My intention is not to use Marx to justify anything; I just want to lay focus on something he and Engels got exactly right and which is being forgotten: capitalism is amoral (a term that is not be confused with immoral). As a result of this, parts of their analysis are extremely valuable and it's a damn shame the anti-communist tendencies have swept that under the rug.

By stating that evolution is an amoral process, I completely condemn any form of Social Darwinism: you cannot derive moral values from amoral principles. Evolution is completely amoral: that which reproduces itself, will continue to exist in some form, independent of our moral judgment about it. Social Darwinists are therefore guilty of the naturalistic fallacy

However, the same goes for capitalism: that which increases capital the most stays in the best position to keep increasing capital. Because of irrationality and a lack of market transparency, the best moral intentions on the part of individual humans cannot prevent immoral consequences from arising. I'm not saying any of those immoral consequences are unique to capitalism. I am saying they are unavoidable when you let capitalism go unchecked.

 _It's not clear why the government is the only institution in society that can avoid failure_

And I cannot prove it is. However, as far as I can see, no other institution has the power nor the mandate to guide capitalist forces. This is the exact reason you have things like the Federal Trade Commission and an Antitrust Division in the DoJ, both on a government level. Who else could do that job?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "What boosts a firm's stock price, and the boss's standing, is a rapid expansion in revenues and market share. Privately, he may harbor reservations about a particular business line, such as subprime securitization."

The problem is misaligned incentives. Cash bonuses paid out long before the consequences of decisions become clear create problems.

Financial institutions can partly remedy this by replacing annual bonuses with long-term reward schemes like that adopted by Credit Suisse in 2005. If a decision proves to have been reckless/short-sighted a few years on, bonuses can be retracted.

<comment><USER12> _If a decision proves to have been reckless/short-sighted a few years on, bonuses can be retracted._

Retracting something already given can be difficult, especially if the employee has moved on to another place. There are ways, of course, with "clawback clauses" and similar things, but that seems unnecessarily clunky if I understand them correctly.

Basing bonuses on long term performance after it has had long enough to play out and (at least most of) the consequences known may very well be a good idea though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Because much of the perceived value in capitalism is based on assumptions, and assumptions can change in value much faster than physical assets?

For instance, Detroit has not been a valuable place to have a business or home for decades but it has faded slowly, but the assumption that housing prices would go up forever was worth trillions, but as soon as it was disproved, those trillions disappeared fast.

<comment><USER14> Financial market affects today's economy a lot. There's a great demand for assumptions and forecast involved in financial services. However the reliability of today's forecast and analysis methods leaves a lot to be desired. This situation is the cause of the current crisis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The title of the article is "Rational Irrationality" and not letting the system to crash now, seems to me (and to many others) very irrational.

"too big to fail" syntagm does not look good either to the author of the article, in the end he says:

"As memories of September, 2008, fade, many will say that the Great Crunch wasn't so bad, after all, and skip over the vast government intervention that prevented a much, much worse outcome. Incentives for excessive risk-taking will revive, and so will the lobbying power of banks and other financial firms." ... "The next time the structure starts to lurch and sway, it could all fall down."

Bailing out big companies is not capitalism as we learned about it. And the bottom line is it hasn't crashed now, the governments did not let it crash. Whether this is good or bad, I guess we will see in the future.

</comment><comment><USER16> [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/05/091005fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/05/091005fa_fact_cassidy?printable=true)

I couldn't find the view on one page / print button for a minute. The above is the proper URL if you, like me, do not enjoy pressing next.

</comment><comment><USER14> Although capitalism is crash-prone to some extent it is the most reliable system mankind has ever come up with. It is arguably because it's idea of individual success reflects the nature of the animal the system is supposed to work on.

<comment><USER17> "its idea of individual success reflects the nature of the animal the system is supposed to work on."

I don't quite follow you. Please explain.

<comment><USER14> Sure, what I mean is that the pursue for individual success is a key feature of Homo sapiens species. Traditional capitalism declares it as its main trait. The fact that participants of a capitalist system are encouraged to act according to their natural behavioral patterns makes capitalism the most stable system ever known.

<comment><USER18> Capitalism is one of the few social constructs that encourages negative traits. Who is to say that selfishness is better than altruism? Altruism seems to be a human trait as well -- we do act altruistically on occassion. Is it impossible to build a financial system based on altruism? We tend to think quite highly of those who give of themselves more than take. Why don't we build a financial system that rewards those who think of others? Is such a system impossible?

Society rests on and perhaps morality itself is based on the repression of innate desires. Males have a desire to procreate, but rape is forbidden. We have a desire to promote the success of those with our genes, but discrimination is forbidden. I would say our society is better off because we shun, outlaw, and degrade the exercise of traits we would like to see less of in those who share our society with us.

Humans are at a crossroads here. We have the knowledge, the vision, and the power to evolve ourselves into the species we _choose_ to be. Why, if there is an alternative, would we choose to create a system that rewards those for behaving in a manner that we don't _like_ , in a manner that we would like to see _less_ of?

Imagine saying, "You're so greedy!" Now imagine saying, "You're so giving!" It's a totally different feeling. Imagine a society that promotes the giving over promoting the greedy.

<comment><USER14> Capitalism creates an environment where both positive and negative traits can be materialized. Everyone agrees that altruism is __better __than selfishness in moral sense. However one must be quite civilized and have high quality of life and standard of living to exercise altruism. Those whose individual demands are not met simply cannot afford altruism. A financial system aimed at rewarding those who think of others ( _surprise!_ ) exists right now. Those who have extra money, time or other resources can invest them in those who are in need through loans, grants and scholarships. I'm sure any innovative ideas in this area would be accepted by the HN community and society in general. This proves that the current society/economy is open for a change toward a more altruism-encouraging system.

Western society and morality is based on the relative tolerance to innate human desires and wishes in contrast to other cultures. That's why it has created a financial system that made the countries that chose it developed.

 _"Males have a desire to procreate, but rape is forbidden. We have a desire to promote the success of those with our genes, but discrimination is forbidden."_

Morality restricts certain ways in which a human can fulfill their needs. However rape is not the only way to procreate and discrimination has very little to do with promoting the success of one's genes. Today's social and financial system is successful among other factors because it provides equal and legitimate ways to have sex or multiply for everyone.

We are at crossroads, we have opportunity to choose the way financial system would look like in the future and that's why it is especially important to understand why the current financial system is successful. It is, despite difficulties, which, for example led only to a 2% drop in US GDP growth rate in 2008 compared to 2005. The GDP is still increasing! You can have look at [http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=353&co...](http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=353&count=all) (US GDP statistics) to see how stable economy is. These disturbances are annoying, but their impact on lifestyle is minor.

 _"Imagine saying, "You're so greedy!" Now imagine saying, "You're so giving!" It's a totally different feeling. Imagine a society that promotes the giving over promoting the greedy."_

What does this have to do with the initial argument? Could you please point out where I disagreed with this?

<comment><USER19> > _However one must be quite civilized and have high quality of life and > standard of living to exercise altruism._

Not necessarily. There are plenty of people that have nothing that still devote time/money into helping others before themselves.

I hate to reference the Bible, but there was a parable in there about a woman donating 2 cents to the poor verses wealthy men donating piles of money (I think this was 'bags of silver pieces or something like that). She gave more than they did if you consider the percentage of their total assets/worth that was donated.

<comment><USER14> I wouldn't rely on poor people's altruism as on a valuable contribution to others. Even if giving those 2 cents was an important decision for the woman considering her poorness, the piles given out by a richer man were much more valuable. It is absolute value of a contribution that matters for a receiver of good here.

<comment><USER19> That may be, but the original statement said that one needed to be 'rich' to exercise altruism, and despite the downmodding of my previous comment that point still stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The real reason it is so crash-prone => fiat currency and a fractional reserve banking system.

<comment><USER21> The vast majority of economists do not believe this to be true.

<comment><USER19> The vast majority of economists thought that such a crash couldn't happen. They thought that it was impossible because we are so much smarter now than we were back in the 1920's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> pat explanations were getting old a year ago. please don't upvote this crap.

<comment><USER23> I have been seeing a lot of these "Look at this forgotten/unknown economist who predicted/explained everything!" type of articles. Yes, they are probably almost always wrong, but how is everyone on HN supposed to know?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anything run by greed is crash-prone.</comment>


Ask HN: When will clipboard support finally come to browsers? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on a project where automatic copy & paste would come in very handy. A simple Clipboard API with Clipboard.set and Clipboard.get would be awesome - but browser simply don't support it yet - not even Webkit!
I read a lot about security concerns, but seriously, we are already able to record the microphone and webcam using JavaScript with the user's approval. Why isn't there any way to do the same for the clipboard?
Thanks in advance for your answers :) <comment><USER2> Well the security concerns are VERY valid, in theory after getting your permission to access the clipboard I could poll it every X milliseconds and fire off whatever I get to a third-party service. If you look at Flash's implementation for getting data from the clipboard[0] you can see they mention all sorts of limitations like "Because of security restrictions on accessing clipboard data, this example does not work in Flash Player. In Flash Player, you can only call the getData() method of the Clipboard object in a paste event handler.". I can see there being support possibly for setting the clipboard via JS but I'm struggling to find a good reason to want to get the clipboard data? Why not have the user just paste it in a textbox and listen for on change or something like that?

[0] [http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionsc...](http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/desktop/Clipboard.html#getData\(\))

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, good point on getting the clipboard data. But what about setting it? I don't see a big security concern there.

Also, what if the user has to give permission to read the clipboard per default, but he can also check 'Always allow for this tab'?

<comment><USER3> No thanks. I definitely don't want a site to have the ability to set my clipboard. It will be much easier to help spread malicious links (visiting a site using paste and go). Plus what about the annoyance of having something in your clipboard that you were going to paste somewhere then due to visiting another site it gets wiped?</comment></comment></comment>


Visual programming means anyone can be a coder - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528796.800-visual-programming-means-anyone-can-be-a-coder.html <comment><USER2> If you are a skeptic on this, I really urge you to listen to Bret Victor. I have generally been skeptical of these kinds of things in the past, but just in the last week Bret Victor's talk (<http://youtu.be/PUv66718DII>) combined with his excellent 2006 paper that digs into related concepts (<http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/>) has made me re-think that position.

One of the key points in his talk that made me think about this more is that there are whole avenues of exploration that are completely inaccessible when the feedback loop is as long as it is with current programming techniques.

I think it depends highly on the kind of programming you do. The more closely related your programming is to math (e.g. engineering simulations or stats), the less likely you are to see an issue because you're directly manipulating the "stuff" you're working on. But if you write software that operates more in the human space (e.g. something like an email client), then you're acutely aware of how far removed the code is from the user and what the program does. You basically have to keep a giant mental model in your head as you code. That is a huge cognitive load that all of us take for granted as part of "programming" but why must this be so?

<comment><USER3> I'm skeptical because I remember the RAD tools of the early 00s that were going to let businessmen program.

Oh, and who can forget the wonderful workflow systems that were all the rage soon after? There seemed to be a new one released every week.

I invite you to go try MS's WWF, that's 'visual'. What a nightmare that is.

They don't work. You need a programmer involved because edge cases rapidly become complicated and that's the hard bit, not visualizing a workflow. And these tools deprive you the programmer of the fine grained control you sorely need or worse generate code that's so hard to read and work with that it's faster coding from scratch even for amateurs.

I love Bret Victor's vision, but because of what it means for programmers, not the fuzzy 'creatives' in the article. I know some animation guys and yes, you can visually automate things like animation now, but logic flow? No.

Though I think we should keep trying.

<comment><USER4> I met with Bret Victor for lunch while visiting SF a few years ago and I specifically argued against visual programming languages making anyone able to program. I mean I know that some people are more inclined to think in blocks and visual metaphors (Hell most programmers draw out ideas constantly cause we do too) but any sufficient program eventually gets complicated enough that visual programming kind of breaks down unless it gets more and more abstract to make reusable components and modules that you can navigate too etc. I pushed at the time and I'm not even sure he remembers at this point but for augmenting text based programming and making what's happening more visual and real-time. Which seems to be some of the direction he's taking which is combining his great ideas in visualization with traditional text based programming environments. I was also a huge fan of Javascript as the lingua franca despite it's deficiencies because web based IDEs and examples were inherently so much more shareable than code you had to download and try (There could be ways around this such as a desktop repository of code viewer, but that's a friction point to people actually checking out demos/examples interactively ala JSBin as such.)

I'm personally loving what Kahn academy is doing that John Resig credits Bret Victor's talk on Inventing on Principle (<http://vimeo.com/36579366>) as a major inspiration. See article where he announces and explains their in browser interaction learning of CS course material: <http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs/>

In closing to name a view limitations of most visual programming languages: the naming problem (Most parts of your system need to be named in order to be able to talk about them), text based is stronger at this. Instantiation of reuseable code is pretty abstract to do visually. Eventually all programming gets complicated enough that text based approach really is easier to work with. Not to mention all the tools you can't leverage comparitvely to text based such as version control, REPLs, etc. I guess I think visual programming is idealized and people are spending all this time learning something that isn't as useful to know in the long term compared to traditional programming because all the important platforms have much richer support for text based programming (iOS, linux, C/C++ for games). But combining visualization of code execution is the perfect balance and would lead to basically replacing much commenting with an actual intuitive visualization of runtime complex structures/state. And definitely real time feedback of tuning /visual parameters is great. In the game industry all of this is very standard and I do feel there is a little more awe for his work than would be given by your typical graphics, art tool, or demo scene programming devs. Most game development toosl for say level editing and animation are all highly visual and real time interactive. Same goes for any serious AI dev they have debugging tools for visualizing all planning for entities communication, path planning, animation states, and more.

Anyway, just my thoughts. Still think Bret Victor is one of the most compelling thinkers in this space.

<comment><USER5> Intuitions and anecdotes are fine, but there is actual research on visual programming languages, as well as on computer science education.

Visualizations, animations, and metaphors do help beginners learning programming and understand programming concepts. Scratch is currently probably the most well known tool for beginning students to use for programming (used with kindergartners all the way up to college freshmen).

<comment><USER6> Some people are helped by visual metaphors. Others learn by hearing; other by reading.

And then there was that thread about some people never, ever 'getting it' and being as hopeless after a semester class as the first day. I've even met folks who, after years of computer classes, still hadn't figured out that code is executed in sequence.

<comment><USER5> Actually a lot of research over the past few decades has shown there is not really evidence for 'learning styles' - that one person might be a visual learner, and another an auditory learning, and so forth.

Learning isn't just about sensing (hearing, viewing), anyway, it is more about action. What are the students actually doing, and what can students do with a particular tool. Actually everything we perceive is tied to what we do (see: enactivism, embodied cognition, ecological psychology).

Many students aren't 'getting' programming in CS classes partly because it is not taught well (if instructors switched from lectures to active learning techniques, student retention and learning might double or triple, based on research in other domains), partly because the tools themselves are not designed especially well or are not designed with beginners in mind (including python and java), partly because it is often taught devoid of any context (see, situated learning and situated cognition), partly because of low student self-efficacy (what you mentioned - thinking they just can't learn this stuff), and tons of other reasons.

<comment><USER6> Oh come on - I personally know people who've hired readers in college because they absorb more efficiently through hearing it spoken aloud. Others despise pictures - they want written descriptions. Some the other way around.

Rationalize it any way you want - they learn faster and better one way than another, measurably.

And about bad teaching: the whole class gets it, but a few. The teacher is clearly not addressing their needs, but they are also clearly not doing it 'wrong' - many do understand just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Because since everyone can hold a pencil or paint brush, everyone can be an artist!

That's obviously true, but the emphasis must still be on the "can". There's nothing stopping you, but there never was. The difficulty in programming is not writing words, it's understanding what the machine can do and how you can use that to do what people want to get done.

</comment><comment><USER8> The essential difficulty in programming is not to do with syntax. That's just the first thing an "outsider" sees that makes it seem unapproachable. The programming-for-the-rest-of-us thing has been tried more than a few times. Outside of specialized domains, I don't think it has ever gone anywhere.

<comment><USER9> Also, "visual languages" even when restricted to very specific domains (think of DSP blocks, a tried&tested domain where visual languages are abundantly abused) tend to get very messy already when only very simple logic is involved. I wouldn't classify simple IFS systems in recursive painting programs to be "programming" at all. Where's branching, for instance?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think that exploring alternative ways of creating programs is an excellent worthwhile activity. But while it might "open up" programming as discipline for _some_ people that would otherwise not do it, it doesn't follow that "everyone" will be able to program.

LabVIEW is an example of a visual programming language that has been around for 20+ years. It is very popular in manufacturing test and laboratory applications. It was supposed to make certain kinds of programming accessible to non-programmers. Did it do that? To some extent, yes. However to do anything even remotely large or complex with it you're still stuck with the same old problems of software development that the general public sucks at. The best LabVIEW "programmers" _are_ "programmers".

<comment><USER11> > However to do anything even remotely large or complex with it you're still > stuck with the same old problems of software development that the general > public sucks at.

Except that bad LabView code takes spaghetti code to a whole new level: <http://img.thedailywtf.com/images/201104/labview.jpg>

<comment><USER10> Indeed! I've seen stuff much like that. Not pretty. A prefect example of why visual programming is no silver bullet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think that VB6 was probably one of the most productive programming environments ever, until a project grows larger than a couple of business rules. You cant deny the immediacy of dragging a text box, a button and some other controls onto a form and having an "instant" application to automate things.

I've used a variety of "visual" tools for designing everything from ETL tools to synthesizers. They are great for POC designs, but I generally find them difficult to use for the complex stuff. Configuration and properties and logic are much more suited to code in my very biased opinion. :)

</comment><comment><USER13> When I hear "visual programming" I tend to think of Microsoft IDEs or GUI drag-and-drop tools, but this article cites a really interesting project posted previously to HN (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3951255>). It's kind of mind-bending from a UI standpoint. See:

<http://recursivedrawing.com/draw.html>

Not so sure that it will really "democratize programming"

</comment><comment><USER14> We do not need to invent visual programming languages that will "encourage" people to program. Most people are quite capable right now.

Its motivation that matters - and until it is taught to 5 year olds as a matter of course, then seeing the world eaten by software will provide motivation enough.

Imagine you lived next door to that Gutenberg guy and his new-fangled press. You would want to be learning to read _now_ \- not waiting for someone to invent the comic.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't think the audience for this exists. People with a mind capable of programming are also capable of learning syntax, especially since there are so many languages now with lightweight syntax. I fear these attempts shall remain confined to educational toys for kids, which are really cool, but I don't see them used widely in schools.

<comment><USER16> I'm a programmer. I started learning syntax as a kid. I write code all the time. I adapt to new language concepts and syntax. I can use vim effectively. I can tolerate an IDE.

I still cannot get ideas out of my head and into the computer as fast as I "need" to. I believe something graphical, visual, or the like is going the right direction. I want graphical touch programming (not typing syntax) for organizing logic into programs but I need the power to manipulate details.

To me, it's not a question of ability to learn syntax, it's about speed- how fast can I get this great new idea into an app? I believe ultimately it will be by manipulating objects on a touchscreen or in some 3D holographic thing.

<comment><USER17> It would indeed be great to have some "higher bandwidth" way to interact with a program under development. And better graphical tools could clearly increase the bandwidth _out_ from computer to programmer.

But for bandwidth _into_ the computer, there's still nothing that can compete with text. Consider the space of meaningful words you can type at 100wpm, and how awkward it would be to offer a similar number of choices at a similar speed on two (or even three) dimensional display.

<comment><USER6> Depends on the language. Writing boilerplace C++ header files, which duplicate everything in the source is certainly a low-yield way to communiate with a computer.

Graphics could help there; let me drag methods up and down the hierarchy and have it automatically refactor (change arguments and scope of references without me typing). Create new fields with a right-click and choose a type with a default name; drag a reference to a closure etc.

Even this: if I could navigate different views on the same source e.g. without comments; without debugging prints and asserts; with references and scopes delineated. This can make it faster to find where to type. But I guess thats bandwidth out again; ok.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> May be a bit off topic. But I do notice that those people who are not tech- savvy or totally computer illiterate tend to use the term 'coder' a lot to refer to us who can program. Is there a subtle difference in meaning between a 'coder' and a 'programmer'? Or is just myself being a bit over-sensitive?

<comment><USER19> Perhaps people see "coder" as a larger term encompassing programmers (where "program" would be an application), scripters (things like javascript, php, python) and maybe hackers? I'm not sure.

<comment><USER20> I think they're both just general terms that are roughly analogous. I think coder and [moreso] scripter both seem just ever so slightly negative, though that may be a subconscious association with terms like 'code monkey' and 'script kiddy.'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What I think is missed by a lot of people here is the opportunity for 'visual programming' to help with visual tasks, which is a lot of what people do on computers (making games, CAD, maps/GIS, images, 3d models, etc.). It will help because at the moment there's no way to 'see what you are doing' and code/program it at the same time in any of these areas in a realtime way. When this changes it will cause massive ramifications through these industries.

I do agree though that the title is a ridiculous assertion though (because everyone can already program, and visual programming is in no way going to stop people from having to become domain experts to do anything really interesting).

</comment><comment><USER22> I remember the first time I learned Excel after graduating college with a Computer Engineering degree from UIUC. When it finally clicked for me what functional programming actually did, how every problem can be reduced to a series of relationships, I looked back on my computer sciences classes and thought WTF.

So flip the concept on its head: writing imperative code with lines of characters means that almost nobody can be a coder.

After wasting most of my life chasing bugs down rabbit holes, I can honestly say that I'm not joking. Visual programming may suck now, but someday it's going to run circles around the crap we're stuck with today.

</comment><comment><USER23> Nothing against the artist or his project (which sounds kind of cool), but really, the title of the NS article is kind of ridiculous, now isn't it:

"Visual interfaces for writing musical notation means anyone can be a composer."

"Drag-and-drop interfaces for text composition means anyone can be a writer."

"Magnetic poetry kits on every kitchen refrigerator door mean..."

</comment><comment><USER24> Jonathan Edwards of MIT's CSAIl published a Manifesto of the Programmer Liberation Front a while back that makes an interesting case for exploring alternatives like graphical programming for replacing text-only languages.

</comment><comment><USER24> Manifesto of the Programmer Liberation Front: <http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=5%252523comment-151>

</comment><comment><USER17> The real value in tools like these is pedagogical. They don't replace "real" programming, but they may introduce a wider audience to the concepts needed to do real programming.

</comment><comment><USER25> Yet another headline totally unsupported by the original source.

</comment><comment><USER26> Alan Kay means anyone can be persuasive, but wrong.

</comment><comment><USER27> About time!

<comment><USER24> Alan Kay and others pioneers brought us object-orientation almost 40 years ago now, a set of organizing abstractions to enable people to conceptualize systems that could map to real world domains. What if there are even a higher order of abstractions that could place systems into semantic contexts? Perhaps this is where graphical abstractions could be useful to manage this complexity through visual constraints, thus transition the software engineering 'art' towards a true systems engineering 'discipline.' What fundamental properties restrict software engineering from such higher order tool evolution considering that visualizations have been applied to virtually every other scientific, business, and art domain?</comment></comment>


Wired Test-Drives Boeing's New 787 Dreamliner - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/07/boeing-787-dreamliner-flight/

<comment><USER2> I guess the main concern here is the ease with which modern airliners can be flown under normal circumstances.

As operation becomes easier, training can also become easier and, more importantly, cheaper. This results in less rigorously trained pilots. Also, fewer people will fail an easier training program, resulting in pilots with less natural talent making the flight deck.

Modern aircraft are extremely reliable, but the AF447 incident (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AF447>) showed that when the automatic systems fail, in this case due to iced-up pitot probes, the humans in the loop failed to control the aircraft resulting in hull loss.

The Wired article points out the differences between the Airbus side stick and Boeing yoke, additionally with Boeing the autothrottle physically moves the thrust levers. But pilots with thousands of hours flying benign routes are considered experienced, yet are also unable to recognise a stall, a fundamental hazard to safe flight taught very early on in flying training.

The issue seems to be an incongruence as technology outpaces training.

On AF447- "Pilots a generation ago would have done that and understood what was going on, but [the AF447 pilots] were so conditioned to rely on the automation that they were unable to do this. This is a problem not just limited to Air France or Airbus, it's a problem we're seeing around the world because pilots are being conditioned to treat automated processed data as truth, and not compare it with the raw information that lies underneath." William Voss, President, Flight Safety Foundation ([http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/05/air-france- crash...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/05/air-france-crash-ruling- pilots))

Great aircraft, lets hope the training keeps pace.

<comment><USER3> The AF447 crash was an example of exactly why the Airbus side stick model is flawed compared to the Boeing yoke.

In AF447, one of the pilots had a nose up input held during a stall. Because the other pilots couldn't see his stick, they weren't aware of his inputs. Also, at certain times, the other pilot was giving contradictory (nose down) inputs to the aircraft. This input was averaged (read: canceled) with the other pilot's nose up input.

The side stick has two problems: 1) Lack of awareness of what inputs are being given to the plane by other pilots in the flight deck. 2) The computer has to make decisions about how to resolve contradictory inputs.

<comment><USER4> But you know that nowadays even Boeing is using fly-by-wire? So the only difference is the input device which more a question of convenience or personal preferances. basically it all comes down to training, experience and system knowledge. The make of your aircraft is secondary.

by the way, the A330 has a pretty good safety record. We shouldn't judge one approach based on one single incident no matter how severe.

And even it came ultimately down to a pilot error, in order to make plane crash it takes a whole chain of events. In AF447's case the pilots reaction was the last straw, yoke or side stick.

<comment><USER5> Forget the fly-by-wire, the crucial difference here is that the input devices on the Boeing craft _move together_. If the AF447 crew had this feedback the accident most likely would not have happened.

<comment><USER4> Hard to tell afterwards. A botched-up situatation is just that, botched-up. During the AF447 accident so much things went wrong that's almost impossible to single out one that could have prevented it.

Being in aerospace, I slowly get fed up by all this "My airplane is better than yours and that would have happened if yours had what mine has" discussions. I know it is kind of OT right now and that it's HN here and not a pilots forum but I consider it just childish. It's the final report of the authorities that counts, nothing else.

Enough said on AF447, I think the 787 is one pretty plane. What I'm cusious to see is whos bet is right, Boeings' on more point to point flights or Airbus' on the more traditional hub-spoke structure. Just hope Boeing is getting the Dreamliner industrialized and built with less pain than Airbus had on the A380. It slowly becomes a shame how much problems aerospace companies have with that in the last decade.

<comment><USER5> As a controls and human-factors engineer, I think the subject is highly relevant and very interesting.

There is a large and distinct difference in the flight control mechanism of these two airplanes. It's been discussed over and over, and the transcript of the voice recorder and control logs show there there was a distinct discrepancy happening in the cockpit while the plane was going down:

 _"As the plane approaches 10,000 feet, Robert tries to take back the controls, and pushes forward on the stick, but the plane is in "dual input" mode, and so the system averages his inputs with those of Bonin, who continues to pull back. The nose remains high._ " [1]

So, being in aerospace, is this subject annoying or something that is normally not discussed?

[1] [http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/what- really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877-2)

<comment><USER4> I'm not a avionics engineer. But at least under my collegues this is discussed. Unfortunately with a clear preference of the Airbus approach with some "conaisseurs" in between baseing their preferance of the Boeing yoke on aviation tradition. But I guess that's normal for the EADS.

Maybe the controlls were a factor in that crash, but for me it's just two different philosophies. Only my personal opinion and I'm no position to judge that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"Simulated engine failures were performed in just about every conceivable situation, including take-off roll, before nose rotation, during rotation, after rotation, during the climb, during the landing and during both compensating and aggravating crosswinds. The result is an airplane that is as boring as possible to fly, even in emergencies."_

I wonder how the system reacts when it gets false information about an engine failure. I mean, it's great when the computer is able to react to actual failures; but I'm also worried about how it reacts to bad sensor data. Sure, it's good engineering practice to defend in depth and eliminate single points of failure, but reading about the Air France crash, cascading errors don't seem to be properly dealt with.

<comment><USER7> I agree with the concern for cascading failures but I'm not sure I agree with the comment re: Air France. There was no error cascade there as far as I can see. The pitot tubes froze and the when the aircraft lost airspeed data it did what it was designed to do, turned off auto-pilot and gave control back to the pilot. The pilots were the ones who failed to understand and manage the situation from there on, relying on a computer that was unable to provide data.

Perhaps (said with a little tongue in cheek) it wouldn't be a bad thing if the computers flashed up a big "I don't know!" on the screens so the humans would know to look elsewhere for their information. Just a thought. Then again the humans need to know how to get the data in other ways too.

As my auto racing instructor used to say, "It was a failure of the squishy bit between the steering wheel and the seat".

<comment><USER8> Do you know why the plane doesn't use GPS as a backup method for airspeed measuring?

<comment><USER9> Because airspeed is relative to the speed of the air around you (not relative to your position on the earth).

The pitot tubes (which caused the initial problem by icing over) are there to determine exactly that.

<comment><USER8> Doh! Finally, it makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In-cabin humidity will be a huge plus... less flight dehydration (one of the main reasons flying leaves us feeling like crap)

</comment><comment><USER11> Alas the 787's expectations are too high, as the aircraft is basically an update of the Boeing 767. As with all launches, there's a lot of hype and Boeing has certainly made a big deal out of it, but it's not a radically different experience for passengers. While aviation buffs will know better, I think most of the flying public are expecting an improvement on the 777 and unfortunately it's not – at least from the passenger's seat.

<comment><USER12> What about the air pressure difference? As someone that works in a high rise, and has allergies, ear discomfort is a very daily thing, and sometimes downright upsetting when flying.

<comment><USER2> Yes, the 787 will have a max cabin altitude of 6000ft. Other airliners work to 8000ft. The upshot is denser, more refreshing, air which makes for a comfortable and less fatiguing journey.

<comment> excuse-me The upshot is "potentially" denser more refreshing air - the airline still gets to decide how much fuel (=$$$) it's wants to 'waste' refreshing that air.

<comment><USER13> This is (almost entirely) a myth.

<http://www.salon.com/2009/09/25/askthepilot335/>

<comment> excuse-me It's a myth that the pilot can "turn up" the amount of oxygen.

But the ratio of fresh air that the airline has selected depends on how much fuel that they want to waste heating the -50C fresh air to cabin temperature, and how much humidity they want to put on the airframes life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm disappointed in the minimal amount of innovation we've seen in airplanes since the 70s. That's great that it is 20% more fuel efficient, but we're flying with basically the same tech that we did 40 years ago. Can Elon Musk please build us a hypersonic jet liner!?

<comment><USER15> Hypersonic? Innovation in airplanes has been rather high, just not in making them go faster.

This is similar to complaining we don't have 10ghz processors. Yes this is true, but as it turns out thats a hard problem and we can work around it elsewhere.

Hypersonic presents a completely different set of problems in things like materials, design, shockwave management, etc.... That and it likely isn't profitable. Better to design fuel efficient jets that fly closer to the speed of sound than another concorde.

<comment><USER16> I think it's just a point of diminishing returns, really.

Range keeps going up. Now you can fly a big airliner between pretty much any two large airports on the planet, if you can sell the tickets for that route. The trip takes a max of, what, 20 hours or so? Cutting that down to, say, 6 hours just doesn't win you that much. Sure, there are some people who would really benefit, but I'd wager that the vast majority of travelers either get almost as much benefit from the 20-hour trip as they would from the 6-hour trip, and the vast majority of people for whom the 20-hour trip is too long to be useful would also find the 6-hour trip to be too long to be useful.

The world is only so big, and at some point, making the stuff go faster doesn't get you all that much. Personally, if I magically had the choice, I'd _much_ rather fly on an airliner that traveled at current speeds but was more comfortable and didn't have security nonsense surrounding it than on a hypersonic airliner with the same ergonomics and security nonsense we have right now.

<comment><USER17> I agree that comfort is the issue. The airlines squeeze so many seats now into coach that for tall or larger passengers it's very uncomfortable for cross country flights. I'm 6'2" the space under the seat in front of me is always taken up by someone's carry on bag.

Two hour flights are no problem, the five hours cross-country is ok, but any long haul in coach is pretty miserable.

<comment><USER18> What, really? I've _never_ had someone in front of me use the space beneath their seat. That's my space! (I'm also 6'2" and only bring a small carry-on because I need that space for legs.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


List of BBC Web Pages Removed from Google's Search Results During July 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/3908a03d-5a47-4a27-bda3-5e3766bfe9b2 <comment><USER2> This shows up again that the "right to be forgotten" is again primarily being used by the rich and powerful to whitewash previous crimes. One example which occurs multiple times in the BBC article is the disgraced but wealthy former UK cabinet minister Chris Huhne, who was released early from luxury prison and parachuted into a cushy job in the industry he was supposed to be regulating as a minister. He and his partner have repeatedly tried to use the courts to silence media coverage of them, and the courts have ruled against them every time. So now they've gone to Google instead for a cover up with less oversight.

<comment><USER3> > Chris Huhne

mentioning his name here will make this thread undiscoverable through search engine?..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google need to pay more attention to Chris Huhne.

He was convicted for perverting the course of justice. He got an 8 month sentence. He was a public figure in a position of responsibility when he committed this crime. The judge in the case said that Huhne risked a damaged image if he admitted to the driving offence. The crime came to light after he had an affair - his partner sought revenge by revealing his part in the crime.

These are not trivial things. This is not the everyday mistakes that regular people make. This isn't a kid doing stupid shit.

It is right and proper that the search results are not subject to right to be forgotten, at least until the conviction is spent.

[https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/r-v-pryce-huhne- sentencin...](https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/r-v-pryce-huhne-sentencing- remarks/)

[https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/r-v-vasiliki-pryce-and- ch...](https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/r-v-vasiliki-pryce-and-christopher- huhne/)

<comment><USER5> What is Google supposed to do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting that the top stories are related to a former cabinet minister being jailed for perverting the course of justice.

Part of me says that there's a public good argument for a search engine consisting solely of news stories which have been removed from Google.

</comment><comment><USER7> Amusing but not surprising that the 2018 list of removed URLs is in this list.

</comment><comment><USER8> A disproportionate amount related to convicted criminals: rapists, fraudsters, murderers.

Seems like a popular service for such folk.

Who'd have thunk it.

<comment><USER9> There is a lot of that, but I also see stories about people who have been held by the police and then let go, and people who have been interviewed about stigmatised health issues.

It's reasonable that they don't want these stories to be the first thing potential employers see when they google them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> YouTube has been censoring sports-combat-robot videos (AKA "battle-bots") from YouTube because apparently their animal-fighting-detection algorithm is mistaking robots for animals. Battle-bot fans are pissed and are testing alternatives to YouTube.

Google has been under pressure by politicians to "clean up" violent and privacy-related content, and it seems they decided that false positives are a smaller risk for their business than letting riff-raff through.

<comment><USER11> Totally unrelated to this topic which revolves around the "Right to be forgotten".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if someone can build something similar to [https://haveibeenpwned.com/](https://haveibeenpwned.com/) to preserve those pages and create a centralised archive?! Otherwise murderers and fraudsters get a clear start

</comment><comment><USER13> Are there other lists of removed pages? Is there a way of searching inside such lists?</comment>


What Is Zero UI? (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/3048139/what-is-zero-ui-and-why-is-it-crucial-to-the-future-of-design <comment><USER2> I really hate the corner of the tech industry that takes old ideas and renames them and then goes "hey look at this new trendy idea I thought of!".

Just because you move the user interface off the screen and into physical space doesn't make it "Zero UI". People have been designing ways to interface with machines in physical space ever since somebody figured out how to put a handle on a rock and make it a hammer.

<comment><USER3> I could have left this comment on a number of comments here. These are an ugly artifact of hn's eagerness to call bullshit on anything and everything. "Zero UI" is a convenient shorthand for saying "interactions with technology not involving a traditional 2d box-based user interface. Zero UI is a lot quicker to say. That's what words are all about. You have a problem with language? Go debunk something that actually needs to be debunked instead of leaving one of the same 10 crabby, predictable comments that are already in this thread.

I have no clue if "zero ui" is actually a good thing or whatever, but I know that your comment and the rest like it add nothing new to the conversation.

<comment><USER4> Does yours?

<comment><USER2> I wrote the parent comment, and I actually think his reply was worthwhile. Ideas are things that should be challenged IMO

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a huge proponent of the Zero UI movement. I gave a talk last year at a local Google DevFest about a CMS I created for a Priest friend's Church that didn't have any user interface to speak of. It relied on Google Drive to host all the files that the staff and teachers at his Parish needed to edit, and all they needed to do was leverage their existing knowledge of the OS's file system and Microsoft Word to do it. A script runs every half-hour to update the static site based on the changes to and additions of files in their shared Google Drive account.

All of the pictures come directly from their Facebook account via the Facebook API and the weekly PDF newsletter is sent using Mailchimp and pulled from their Google Drive as well. They went from almost no engagement from the staff to close to 100% engagement after we implemented the system.

Before that the site was built on Drupal and needlessly complex. Nobody used it. It's so easy to forget how daunting learning another user interface can be for the average person. We may think we're being clever when we create our beautiful snowflake UI's but all we're doing is adding more work to somebody's already full plate (and K-12 teachers' plates are overflowing). There's a lot of cognitive overhead that comes with things like remembering username/password combinations, how to upload files to a website (or understanding what that even _means_ ), navigating around a website, editing text in something other than Microsoft Word, and other skills and knowledge we take for granted.

With the Google-Drive-As-A-CMS implementation, none of the teachers had to learn anything new. They simply needed to leverage skills they were already expected to have (filesystems, Word, Excel, Powerpoint).

I'd love for more of us software developers and designers to take a step back and ask ourselves the question "am I making my user's life easier, or am I adding complexity to it?". The honest answer might give us pause.

<comment><USER6> > I'm a huge proponent of the Zero UI movement. I gave a talk last year at a > local Google DevFest about a CMS I created for a Priest friend's Church that > didn't have any user interface to speak of. It relied on Google Drive to > host all the files that the staff and teachers at his Parish needed to edit, > and all they needed to do was leverage their existing knowledge of the OS's > file system and Microsoft Word to do it. A script runs every half-hour to > update the static site based on the changes to and additions of files in > their shared Google Drive account.

Shouldn't you call it "integration" instead of this buzzword ? The user has an existing system and ecosystem of tools and you just wrote a script to integrate your program with these existing tools ?

If I use emails or SMS to update a blog online I didn't invent anything, I just didn't code the email client , the SMS client or the phone the user takes advantage of.

Business integration is what people have been doing since the beginning of modern development there is no new movement, tech, trend, or paradigm here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The thing about alternative modes of user interaction, which seems to be most of what we're really talking about here, is that we didn't get to where we are today by accident.

As long as humans have eyes and trichromatic vision similar to what we have today, a 2D RGB display is going to be a useful medium for presenting information for us.

As long as humans have ears, audible presentation and vocal interaction are going to be of limited usefulness because they are so disruptive for _everyone else_.

As long as humans have small, light fingers with fine motor control, devices like keyboards and mice and joysticks and trackballs and touchpads and touchscreens are going to be useful for controlling a system.

As long as humans have big, heavy arms with imprecise muscle movement, 3D spacial interactions with sweeping, dramatic arm movements will belong in the movies, where the hero can find the bad guy in a few seconds instead of three days of tedious searching.

No doubt presentation and interaction methods will continue to evolve, but fundamentally we humans will probably still have the same senses and motor skills in ten or twenty years that we have today, so radical change seems unlikely in the near future. It's also hard to believe that either natural language processing or data mining and predictive systems will advance so much in the next few years that they will supplant other means of interacting with technology rather than supplementing them, so again it's hard to see established tools like keyboards and screens going away any time soon.

<comment><USER8> People also forget that vocal communication is "imprecise and slow". Even with the most powerful AI on the planet--other humans.

I can go through your crappy PowerPoint deck in 5 minutes, or I can listen to you drone on badly for 60 minutes.

I ban PowerPoint from meetings where I need communication to occur explicitly because of this. Of course, if we're just "flying the colors" for management, then PowerPoint is required.

<comment><USER9> > _People also forget that vocal communication is "imprecise and slow". Even > with the most powerful AI on the planet--other humans._

This.

It drives me nuts that some people still think a voice recognition interface -- even if that's at all possible in the more general case -- is necessarily the best UI. Or gestures. Look, in a lot of cases I wouldn't _want_ to have a person listening to me while I explain what I want done as I wave frantically. Humans are notoriously bad at understanding some sorts of instructions. Why would I want to introduce this ambiguity to my computer?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article from 2013 does a good job describing the problems with "zero UI": [http://www.elasticspace.com/2013/03/no-to-no- ui](http://www.elasticspace.com/2013/03/no-to-no-ui).

<comment><USER11> Hm, I wasn't sure at first but that's actually pretty compelling. It seems like there are some good ideas in the NoUI movement, but you still need to let the user know what's going on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Keyboards are here to stay, most likely. They're hilariously good at their job, especially when mix-and-match use of language is present or a made-up word is involved.

</comment><comment><USER13> In terms of things like the Amazon Echo, it is not Zero UI, but more like Zero Visual UI. There is still a user interface, you just can't see it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Think have to give some credit (lets say LOTS) to Kai Krause of Kai's Tool fame.

At his talks he would espouse about zero UI way back when, just a black screen, and nothing else. That's it. We all would just go WOW! We were blown away.

I think now he lives in a castle and just meditates all day __ or something like that. :-)

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


Ask HN: Company acquired by private equity firm. What to expect? - <AUTHOR> I work for Mcafee Which Intel sold to a private firm, TPG? As a senior engineer, what should I expect now?<p>Should I prepare my resume and start looking elsewhere? Any point in holding on to see what TPG wants from the company? <comment><USER2> The new firm will be looking to reduce costs 1st. Expect reduction in benefits and perks, work increase and layoffs. The goal is to keep it for a few years until they can sell it at a profit or go the IPO route.

It's not always a bad thing. They want the company to succeed so they can get their money out. Just make sure you thrive along with the company and don't become redundant - don't be scared, be proactive.

<comment><USER3> I worked for a company that was bought by private equity. Your management screwed up and couldn't figure out how to make money with this division. A takeover by PE is rarely done if business is going well.

This comment is accurate. To add, these PE firms will chop up your company and "unlock hidden value" by selling subdivisions to other companies. They sometimes do some "financial engineering" to load up the company with debt. Take a look at what happened to Freescale.

My suggestion is to develop your skills and to move to another company when you find a better opportunity. If you feel you are going to be laid off, then act sooner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes, prepare your resume. I don't know specifically about TPG, but in general the MO of private equity firms is to cut costs, which means layoffs and removing perks. Reasons to stay? Buyouts or bonuses.

</comment><comment><USER5> The following is my experience with it. Feel free to skip over it. The short version is: Expect a tough time unless you are senior management. Unless you really like your job or are stuck, update your resume and start looking around.

I recently left a company that was taken over by a private equity firm at the end in 2014. I stayed for roughly 1.5 years post-acquisition, but decided I had to leave about a year after the acquisition. I stuck around for that year because I was doing some interesting work and I wanted to see what a private equity firm would do. Just for reference, the company had roughly $1B of revenue and about 3500 employees worldwide.

WheelsAtLarge said "The goal is to keep it for a few years until they can sell it at a profit or go the IPO route." If you look at every future decision the company makes through this lens then every decision makes sense. In the grand scheme of things, what the firm wants to do it smart. They are taking a company that is struggling (for whatever reason) and they streamline the products, people, processes, etc, fix it, and make it easy and appealing to sell/IPO. It's painful but it needs to be done. At a company level it's good. But for the individual person it can be very difficult.

Within 3 months of the acquisition we had a round of layoffs, benefits cut (doubling of healthcare premium and an introduction high deductible plan), and frozen or shrunk budgets. They also started a process of restructuring teams/the organization and consolidating where they could.

Throughout the first year a lot of people left company. It got to the point where people just feared Friday or end of the Month/Quarter because of the goodbye emails. At some point the goodbye emails stopped and you found out people left when your email bounced or somebody when a project suddenly got reassigned to you.

Over the next year they revealed the strategy of which product were be focused on and cut. Some products had severe reductions in resources and basically went into maintenance mode. Many of these decisions were good.

A little after the first year post-acquisition they had another round of layoffs. This shocked a lot of people because when you combined the initial layoffs with the number of people who left, we were understaffed in a lot of departments. Every quarter the CEO said headcount was below target and we needed more people. The second round of layoffs felt stupid and brutal, and was purely about the numbers. This caused more people to leave.

There was another trend in the company. It because obvious that only senior management was worth rewarding and retaining. Everybody else was a cog in the machine that is a tech company. A team would need to lose 2-3 people before they would let you hire a single person. And the only people you could hire was somebody with 0-2 years of experience. We'd lose 3 great people with tons of experience and could only replace them with somebody straight out of college because "they were hungry and had high potential." The end result was predictable. The good people were overworked and frustrated, and the new people got very little support and they struggled.

I left because I was badly overworked and was provided zero incentive to stay despite telling people how unhappy I was. I thought if I worked hard and did well I'd be rewarded. It was astonishing how little they cared about people under senior management. I felt like they were incentivizing people to leave so they could replace them with inexperienced people just to show buyers how low their employee costs were. Morale was really bad outside of senior management and all we got were platitudes.

I wish I could say this was unique to myself or the company I worked for. I went on Glassdoor at one point and looked at other companies that had been acquired by the same firm. All of the reviews basically say the same thing and you can see a similar progression of what transpired.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the detailed writeup. Anything I can do to excel here? I have spent 4 years with the company and am now in a senior architect role. Wouldn't want this to go to waste. Have never received bad rating, have good relationships with managers and people generally accept me as a doer and go-to guy.

<comment><USER5> I forgot this. If you are serious about staying with the company, move into or work with a group that is visible and known to the higher ups. Usually this happens when the manger is very good at managing upwards.

In my last company many good people who got fired were in groups that did great work, but did not have a strong manager. Strong managers advocate for the group and show off what the group does. They make the group visible in the company and bring interesting work to the group.

If you feel like you are just an ant in a group that nobody knows about, it's easy for somebody else (probably somebody who have never even heard about) to draw a line through your name in an excel sheet defining who to keep and who to cut.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Probably broad-ranging redundancies? Seems to be relatively common after large acquisitions, regardless of product or industry.

</comment><comment><USER7> Unfortunately you should expect to get fired.

<comment><AUTHOR> Care to elaborate?</comment></comment>


Show HN: 7M Company Dataset Free CSV File - <AUTHOR> https://www.peopledatalabs.com/company-dataset <comment><USER2> Looks like spam... whee....</comment>