How Rust Is Tilde's Competitive Advantage [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.rust-lang.org/pdfs/Rust-Tilde-Whitepaper.pdf <comment><USER2> So, I've been eyeing Rust for a while and have messed around with it a bit in my free time. Here are some things I'd want to know before trying it out on a large project:

1\. What development environment are other developers using with very large code bases? Is the tooling responsive?

2\. Using a language for a large project without some kind of async/await notation seems painful. How bad is it using only combinators for async (assuming you want to stay on stable)? And is there a date yet when async/await will be stabilized?

3\. Most of the code I write is in F#. The nice thing is, there is basically .NET library for everything under the sun. For example, over the weekend I was looking for a library that could decode OBD-II data from a car, and with a quick DuckDuckGo search I was able to find three or four. In a large-ish project, how often do Rust users typically find themselves coming up short for that kind of stuff? Obviously it varies a ton by domain, but maybe someone could tell me whether the answer is "you'll probably write all wrappers for 3rd party APIs yourself" or "there's a decent chance there's a library out there that you can adapt."

<comment><USER3> > Using a language for a large project without some kind of async/await > notation seems painful. How bad is it using only combinators for async > (assuming you want to stay on stable)? And is there a date yet when > async/await will be stabilized?

Can someone explain to me what async/await is, in the context of a language like Go? I've used Rust a fair amount, but Go has been my native language for ~5 years now.

With that said, aren't both languages synchronous languages where you can drop into another thread (or green thread) whenever you want?

What UX is improved by async/await?

Eg, in Go I never felt the need for async/await (as I've used in JavaScript at least). If anything, Go's is _better_ than async/await to me, because if I call `foo := bar()`, I don't have to know if `bar()` is an asynchronous function.. it just works. Is there something missing there?

Again, I use Rust and Go similarly in this post because Go is my frame of reference. I _thought_ they were the same on this front, though. No?

What's missing here? What am I missing here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, you are missing some details. But this is a _huge_ area, and it's hard to explain in a single HN comment. Basically, yes, the convenience of not needing to write async/await is useful, but in order to accomplish that, you need a bunch of other supporting decisions. These decisions make sense for Go, but do not make sense for Rust.

The first thing to say on this topic is that virtually all of this (including async/await) is a library in Rust, not a part of the language. You can build whatever model you want on top. The one I'm describing is the futures/tokio model, which is becoming the de-facto, default one. But if you want something else, you can do it! This already is a divergence from Go, where you have what the runtime gives you, and that's it.

Fundamentally, Go's model is cooperative coroutines, where the runtime does the pre-emption for you. (You can also call it yourself but as you note, this isn't usual.) It'll do this when you request something from the network, when you sleep, or when you use a channel.

Tokio's model, on the other hand, is single-threaded. Instead of a ton of gorutines, there's an event loop, and you place a chain of futures onto it. Each chain of futures can sort of be thought of as a goroutine, but it's also different. For example, Rust can know at compile time exactly how big each futures' stack is, and so can do a single, exactly correct allocation. Anyway, each future in the chain handles yielding for you.

Async/await, in Rust, is about making those chains easier to write.

Anyway, I hope that helps. Maybe someone else will have a good comparison too. There's a _lot_ of options in this space, and similar terminology that means the same, but slightly different things, so it can be hard to get your head around.

<comment><USER4> Technically you can get the convenience of not needing to write async/await, with the same runtime implementation decisions underneath as Tokio/futures. Kotlin is an example of this approach- its coroutines are state machines but with implicit awaits.

This can even be extended to "awaiting across function calls" with effect polymorphism. I haven't seen this done in this context, but it would allow things like passing an async closure, or a generic type with an async trait implementation, to a normal function and having it automatically become an async function instead.

The real choice between explicit and implicit suspension points is thus syntactic, not implementation-driven. The reasoning there is more along the lines of "I like to see where my function might suspend" vs "I don't want to pepper my code with `await`."

<comment><USER5> > I haven't seen this done in this context, but it would allow things like > passing an async closure, or a generic type with an async trait > implementation, to a normal function and having it automatically become an > async function instead.

I've done that a fair bit in Scala using HKT. E.g. superclass is written in terms of a generic monadic type, one subclass implementation uses Future (actually EitherT with Future), another uses identity, a third uses Writer to track statistics...

<comment><USER4> Ah, right. I guess I have seen this sort of thing in Haskell then as well. When implemented with HKTs it usually gets really messy with things like monad transformers, so I prefer to think of asynchronicity more in terms of continuations.

<comment><USER5> I find monad transformers much clearer than continuations; a monad transformer stack tells you exactly how your effects are going to be interleaved, which is necessarily complex, whereas a continuation could be doing anything at all, the way I see it.

<comment><USER4> No, continuations can be controlled similarly through effect polymorphism, which is what I was trying to describe.

The difference is not that continuations allow anything at all, but that your effects are commutative rather than layered like a monad transformer stack.

<comment><USER5> > continuations can be controlled similarly through effect polymorphism, which > is what I was trying to describe.

Fair enough, but you're effectively talking about a secondary, novel type system, right? One of the things I like about monads is that they can be just plain old values of plain old datatypes.

> The difference is not that continuations allow anything at all, but that > your effects are commutative rather than layered like a monad transformer > stack.

Yeah, monad transformers do feel overly cumbersome for the cases where effects do commute. The trouble is that some effects don't commute, and I've yet to see a formalism that had a good solution to distinguishing effects that commute from those that don't. (I read a paper about a tensor product construct once, but couldn't really follow how it was supposed to work in practice)

<comment><USER4> > you're effectively talking about a secondary, novel type system, right?

Yes, exactly.

The main reason I prefer language-level effects rather than monads is for composability with normal imperative control flow. Monads are written in terms of higher order functions passing closures around, and that gets _really_ messy in a language where you not only have early return and loops with break and continue, but you also have destructors that need to run as you enter and leave scopes.

You can add that kind of stuff as monads but it gets _really_ messy, and is basically completely untenable in a language like Rust that also cares about memory management. Even if Rust did have HKT, it would still be impossible to write a Monad trait that supports them all, for example.

This article makes some great points on the subject: [http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/2015/08/07/scoped- continuati...](http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/2015/08/07/scoped- continuations/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've come to realize that the main thing that is making me procrastinate giving Rust a proper go is entirely superficial at this point. Basically it looks like a "clever" programmers dream language - which is usually not my cup of tea. I'm also worried that larger projects ("real-world" projects, so not projects like Servo) will inevitably become an illegible mess when clever programmers makes the most of a clever language.

That said, I plan to push through this admittedly superficial barrier in the near future and hopefully calm this concern.

<comment><USER7> May you always work with clever programmers who make clever code simple.

<comment><USER8> Most "clever" programmers makes code a lot more complicated than it should be to show how "clever" they are. The more complicated the language, the more complicated code they will produce. I've seen this a lot of times.

<comment><USER9> At least some of those "clever" programmers will eventually become "wise" enough to avoid doing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > while the Java server could use up to 5GB of RAM, the comparable Rust server > only used 50MB

How...how is that possible? It just glosses over this interesting point. What does "comparable" Java code do to use 100x more memory?

<comment><USER11> Three things:

* Java tends to allocate things separately and manipulate pointers, while Rust allocates things inline. This introduces allocation overhead and eats up the space needed by the pointers themselves.

* Java uses a JIT, which consumes of memory for profiling state and for storing the resulting compiled code.

* A tracing garbage collector needs about five times as much memory as explicit freeing to reach the same performance. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_\(computer_science\)#Disadvantages)

* Like vegetarians, Rustaceans pay more attention to efficiency as a whole. This may give the appearance of Rust being more efficient, even if it's actually not.

<comment><USER12> Additionally things like Spring and dropwizard also add some overhead for better developer UX which rust doesn't have yet.

<comment><USER13> Spring is the new EJB. It's bloated and always amazes me on how complex it can get when you need to implement something not provided by Spring itself.

With Java 9 modularity and lightweight libraries like Guice you can get much nimbler apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Rust is much easier to teach than C or C++,

Not sure about that.

If you know C, which is easy to learn, you already know a lot about C++, or at least the parts that are used most of the time.

Learning about the borrow checker, match enums don't seem very easy at first, although they surely seem elegant and much safer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many Rust programmers never learned C, or have only a cursory understanding of it.

Most C++ people I talk to would strongly disagree that in C++, you should do things the C way.

<comment><USER15> The C way in C++ should only be used the same way as unsafe in Rust.

Very well hidden in safe abstractions, and validated by a profiler that they are actually better than the safer C++ alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is some cringe PR buzzword-heavy marketing. Not what I expected on rust- lang.org

</comment><comment><USER17> "Training existing Ruby developers to maintain safe C++ code would take too much time."

Wow. Just wow.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow, that paper needs a tl;dr.

<comment><USER19> Really? For a 6 white paper?

Fine:

Tilde built a server monitoring daemon with Rust and it's low resource and doesn't crash. Tilde thinks the Rust community & its resources make it easier to teach to new team members.

<comment><USER18> Yes, really. It's not the length, it's the density of interesting content.

<comment><USER19> Yeah man, learning to scan a paper for interesting content is definitely a skill worth developing!

<comment><USER18> I suggested it because it'd help other people not waste the time scanning the paper for the same minuscule amount of not-that-interesting content. But at least it gave you the opportunity to contribute your interesting comment. Yeah, man!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Home Depot hourly employees to receive up to $1,000 bonus due to tax reform - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/25/home-depot-to-award-hourly-employees-1000-bonus-due-to-tax-reform.html <comment><USER2> "Up to" meaning if you have 20 years of working there.

They've extracted so much excess value from their employees that this is basically a laughable insult. Their rank and file will lose much more than they will ever gain.

"Investing in their employees" my ass.</comment>


If By Bigger, You Mean Smaller, Then I Agree - <AUTHOR> http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2010/06/if-by-bigger-you-mean-smaller-then-i.html <comment><USER2> Reserves seems like a weird way to measure a company's size. After all, we're talking about potential here, not past revenue, total worth of equipments, employees etc or other assets...

</comment><comment><USER3> That's pretty disappointing. I've met David Brooks and listened to him speak on a couple of occasions. For a conservative, he's usually pretty level- headed.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Why David Brooks should not be employed by the New York Times, episode 978.</comment>


Uber CEO Says He'd Buy 500k Self-Driving Cars From Tesla Motors - <AUTHOR> http://learnbonds.com/rise-of-the-robocar-uber-ceo-says-hell-take-500k-tesla-motors-self-driving-cars/119632/ <comment><USER4> Let's say this happens _fast forwards to the future_.

Now Uber is saddled with a huge inventory of aging vehicles needing maintenance and all the other associated costs that come with that (repaid centers, staff, etc.).

A new company "Hypercar" or something is formed that let's people "ride-share" their own personal self-driving Teslas...making maintenance and upkeep the car owner's responsibility. Hypercar splits fairs with the owners.

<comment><USER5> In this scenario, Uber should be able to maintain their own cars at a lower cost than individual car owners can, due to their scale. They would also probably be able to buy the cars for less to begin with.

Keeping in mind that Hypercar would have to pay car-loaners at least the amount that the car loan is costing them in maintenance & depreciation (or else who would loan their car), Uber would come out ahead.

Maybe in the short-term, this Hypercar company could rely on car-loaners to underestimate maintenance/depreciation costs but surely that would only last so long.

<comment><USER6> Isn't your last sentence also entirely true of Uber's current business model?

if "Uber should be able to maintain their own cars at a lower cost than individual car owners can", then Uber should be buying cars _today_ and leasing them out to their contractor drivers. Truck fleets do this, pretty much, so it's not a completely crazy idea. Uber isn't doing that, which suggests that Uber thinks its a better deal for them to have their drivers shoulder the ownership, maintenance and depreciation costs of the capital. Why does self-driving change this?

Only reasons that seems to make sense is because people think that Uber is only compensating their drivers for their labor - but they're not; they are compensating them for their labor as a driver _plus the lease and use of their car_.

<comment><USER5> Without self-driving cars, there's not a good way to have contract drivers who can just work whenever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't the more natural play for uber to position themselves in the market for enabling early purchasers of self-driving cars to offset the cost by having their car go out and be a taxi when they're not driving it?

Uber got where they are - managing a massive fleet of vehicles - not by purchasing cars, but by getting other people to purchase cars on the assumption that uber would help them turn that investment into an income stream. Self driving cars raise the prospect of me being able to turn my car into an income stream without me even having to go out and drive it.

If uber do it right, people will buy fleets of self-driving teslas just so they can rent them out via uber, and uber won't have to invest a penny in depreciating vehicle hardware.

<comment><USER7> >Uber got where they are - managing a massive fleet of vehicles

Uber does not manage a massive fleet of vehicles. They don't have to service these cars, pay insurance on them, fill them up etc. They are just middle man that links people with cars with people without them.

<comment><USER6> They 'manage' a massive fleet of vehicles in that I can ask uber to send me a vehicle, to my specifications, and they will do so.

The clever part is that, yes, they don't own them. That was my point. Like, my entire point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is so trolly. I don't mind the headline even, but it's literally a hearsay quote. That's just the tip of the iceberg:

"Tesla Motors now has a huge incentive to get the RoboCar on the road by 2020, but Mr. Musk will need to get the laws rewritten in order to make that happen."

Sorry, I laughed so hard at this line. Before, he was working really hard to get them on the road, but now that Uber is "willing" (again, not even a quote, just a summary of something Jurvetson said that Kalanick said) to buy a decent number that they can't even afford EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED!

<comment><USER9> likely Uber needed some favorable press and getting into a headline alongside Tesla was a cheap way of doing so, committing to a non existent product is about as cheap as you can get

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've said this before but it strikes me as under appreciated that Uber's main enterprise value is their network of drivers and their logistical expertise in managing and coordinating that network. Once self-driving cars become mainstream, wouldn't that start to erode the value of Uber's critical dominance in this area? A generation from now if I'm choosing between self- driving fleets of cabs from Uber, Lyft, Google, Facebook+Ford, and some Tesla joint venture, wouldn't prices suffer significant downward pressures? The best operators can still make a nice profit but nothing like the monopolistic profits Microsoft, Google, and Facebook extracted from OS, search, and social which seems to be required for a sustained multi hundred billion dollar valuation.

<comment><USER11> There'd still be a lot to differentiate on if you remove the driver - <USER2> quality (nicer/bigger/quieter cars), speed of journey (who has the best routing algorithm that uses the most real world sensors to route around problems), the most cars (so your wait is shorter), the most reliable network (plenty of redundant cars waiting if yours breaks down), the best app features, and so on.

Removing the driver won't be the last innovation these companies do.

<comment><USER12> Google has an advantage over Uber in all of those respects though - <USER3> capital, more experience building highly-available services, better routing algorithms, better contacts with carmakers, owns both the OS that the app will run on and the map data that they use to navigate, etc.

<comment><USER13> All of that pales in comparison to the fact that google has a direct line to more users. They can auto update their apps and allow people to book a driverless car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Self-driving cars may be too expensive for one person to own soon after they are available.. It will take a lot of time and resources to build these machines to be safe and reliable, and companies will need to recuperate the costs in some way. On the other hand, most families will not need as many cars as they do now, so the demand will be lower than most people expect, which will raise the price. We can also expect companies to be the first users of self driving cars, as it will make more financial sense for them, so many suppliers will move to service businesses like Uber. Companies like Uber and Lyft will lobby lawmakers to make it harder for people to own self-driving cars, and effectively make it unaffordable to most. In short time Car-As-A- Service will become reality. In the name of safety and cost reduction, many roads will be closed to regular cars, effectively making it pointless to own a car.

Source: Crystal Ball

<comment><USER15> Meh. Apparently retrofit kits will be $2000 two years after self driving cars are on the market (source: that company that drove one from la to ny a few months ago, forgot the name) so cost isn't going to be a biggie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ah, the old valuation chestnut. There ought to be a journalism ethics rule prohibiting use of the word "valuation" with respect to previous transactions unless every such transaction was purely for common equity. The only idea sillier than that every (or any!) investor actually values Uber at $50b is that they can get their hands on $20b to buy 500,000 fully autonomous cars in 2020. No part of this assertion is sane, and no part will come to fruition. The cars Uber would need won't exist in 2020, and probably not in 2120 either. To the extent that someone does manage to build one, it won't be available for anything like $40,000, and it won't be built in any quantity. Uber itself may not even exist in 2020, and if it does it will likely be a shell of its former high-flying self, reined in by the same regulations its direct competitors all have to abide by.

Utter rubbish.

<comment><USER12> I'm curious - do you live in Silicon Valley? Because I see self-driving cars so often here that it's a non-event, and half the time, there's nobody touching the steering wheel. My former boss has ridden in one, and there were signups for an employee beta-test program before I left Google a year ago. I could easily believe that they will be in the hands of consumers by 2020, and I could believe they'll cost $40K once the sensors they need are in volume production. The technology's a lot more advanced than the handful of press articles make you believe.

<comment><USER17> > Because I see self-driving cars so often here that it's a non-event

No, you don't. You see cars which have a hands-free driving mode. Every single one of them still _absolutely_ requires a driver.

I've been closely involved in automated transport for years, and the current hype cycle is getting exhausting. There are several orders of magnitude of difficulty between a car which allows drivers to take their hands off the wheel some of the time (or even most of the time), and a car which does not require a driver. We are _many_ years, and possibly decades, away from the latter.

<comment><USER18> Removable steering wheel..that's kind of funny:

[http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/25/googles-latest-self- driving...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/25/googles-latest-self-driving-car- prototypes-are-now-on-mountain-view-streets/#.bvfsiu:d5xf)

We are certainly still in the "Every single one of them still absolutely requires a driver." phase. Given that you've been in the automated transport field for years, and I haven't, I won't make any comments about the many years/decades timeline, except to say that, in general, the pace of technological growth in many areas has surprised me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> But...Uber's core competency is _organizing_ drivers & vehicles _without_ hiring/owning them. I'm leery of companies making dramatic change to their core; owning a fleet of a half-million vehicles is quite different from just telling them where to go.

<comment><USER20> Netflix's core competency was mailing DVDs.

<comment><USER21> And they went _from_ having their business depend on having a physical inventory _to_ a (more) purely software model.

The idea that Uber would thrive in going from "Hey, dude, sign up and you'll be on the road," to "First we're going to place an order for a $40,000 capital investment that is all risk to us if it doesn't pay out" is _completely insane_.

Not to mention that they will have literally no differentiating feature from any competitor who is interested in making the same investment, so they have no way to support any kind of large profit margin.

And all this assumes that people won't just want to own their own driverless car, which is far from certain.

Uber _has_ to say that driverless cars will be wonderful for them, because large amounts of the people who might want to invest in Uber are also convinced that driverless cars will be here in three years.

<comment><USER22> Uber currently pays its drivers 70-80% of its revenue... A self-driving car makes that 0%. Not to mention marketing costs to get new drivers, all those iPhones, etc. Uber's revenue run rate is expected to hit $10B by the end of this year. That's a lot of cash sitting on the table that could be used to finance driverless vehicles.

<comment><USER21> Uber also is currently much more expensive than car ownership, and if a relatively low-cost driverless car gets on the market, there is literally no incentive for most people to ever use Uber rather than owning their own driverless car.

So in the event of driverless cars, Uber will have to slash prices -- and, unfortunately for them, a self driving car does not in fact claw back all of their driver's revenue.

Now, there are plausible scenarios (though it's by no means guaranteed) in which driverless cars vastly increase the size of the rides-for-hire market, so even if Uber has to take their current margin on lower-cost rides and pay for inventory, you could imagine that working out overall well for them.

But if it's such a great business to be in, why won't they face competition? There are plenty of companies that are deeper-pocketed than Uber. There are in fact plenty of companies with stronger brands than Uber. And the geographical opportunity to compete locally is pretty brutal.

What's Uber going to compete on?

Size of inventory? That drives up costs (when we're already stipulating that they are paying billions in new costs).

Price? That drives down revenue (when we're already stipulating that they're slashing prices).

Cleanliness, as various people have suggested? That means they have to get into a whole new hyper-local physical business with its own logistical problems, and why should we imagine that Uber can build the best car-cleaning business of its field? What about Uber makes us believe they're the best at that? Is this even a field that can be usefully competed on? Are people willing to pay top dollar for a really really really clean car, or does everyone bring together a basic cleaning service and, whatever, it's all good to the passengers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm interested in a Tesla (or any electric car). I drive more than 100 miles from home maybe once a decade, so range is not a problem--I can just rent something with more range when I need it, if the electrical infrastructure isn't up to the journey.

But I'm not interested in the high Tesla price. I would be interested perhaps in a used Tesla. I've never bought a used regular car before, because regular cars can require a lot of maintenance when they get old and I don't want to deal with the hassle and the unpredictable expenses. Electrics are simpler, though, so I think a used electric might be OK.

I'm sure there are plenty of people like me.

So here's my suggestion to Tesla (and other car companies that might make self-driving cars). Make a ton of self-driving cars. Run your _own_ Uber-like service with them (but be legal, and feel free to put Uber out of business as a side effect).

Besides providing taxi service, these cars will serve as roving showrooms for your cars. Many people will ride them as taxis, and then consider buying one when they buy a new car.

When a given car has been used for a few years for the taxi service, retire it, tune it up, and offer it for sale used to get people like me as customers.

Heck, put a "buy it now" button _in_ your taxis that lets a passenger buy that particular car. It would then take them to their destination, return to your service center, get its sale tune up, and then the next time the buyer calls for one of your taxis you would send his car to him, and it would stay with him after that.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think Uber will be disrupted/destroyed by something more driver friendly. They offer nothing that will keep a contractor loyal. All it would take is another 'app' that offers more autonomy and a larger share of the profits. Uber's 25% (is this correct?) take for a software infrastructure and brand is outrageous and probably causes a lot of resentment among drivers.

Of course, we are talking about self-driving cars here so I'll just shut up. :D

</comment><comment><USER25> A self-driving car would not necessarily be great for Uber. What is the taxi service currently providing? A way to order/pay for/sell a cab ride, and vetting so you don't feel uneasy with the driver.

Take out the driver, and anyone could offer their car as a cab. The app to do so could be Uber, but it the bar is lowered considerably if it's purely a way to book a car.

<comment><USER26> I see what you mean. If I own a self-driving car I can pimp it out while I'm at work, cutting out Uber.

And I thought Uber was pretty weak compared to YellowCab on driver vetting?

<comment><USER27> Yes but _how_ would you pimp it out? ;)

You'd put it in a marketplace with an app for people to order the rides...:P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Uber has been investing heavily themselves in self-driving cars. They know that Tesla won't have a product available to buy in 2020.

And here's the source quote:

"Jurvetson said Uber CEO Travis Kalanick told him that if Tesla cars are autonomous by 2020, Kalanick wants to buy all 500,000 that are expected to be produced."

<comment><USER16> He also told him, seemingly apropos of nothing, that "if [his] grandmother had balls, she'd be [his] grandfather." Unfortunately the meaning of this exchange was apparently lost on the journalist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think the change from drivers to driver less cars is a large enough one for people to accept and get used to, that it would make sense for uber to have their own small fleets of self driving cars in test cities, so that customers would get used to the self driving car concept in an environment where they could more directly provide feedback to the ones responsible for the car (uber in this case). It would also allow uber to work out issues that may arise from the change. I agree with others who say that this eventually leads to people having their own cars be taxis when not in use, I just consider the idea of uber managing their own small fleet a step towards that.

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't understand why they'd do this. My understanding is that the Tesla self-driving cars are not end-to-end autonomous like Google's. What benefit would they be to Uber in this case?

<comment><USER21> The whole article basically says that Travis says that he'll buy half a million Tesla cars in 2020 if Tesla can actually make the cars fully autonomous by then.

Fully driverless cars are still not going to be a good thing for Uber.

<comment><USER31> Why do you say fully driverless cars are not a good thing for Uber? Most of what I've read on the topic says otherwise.

<comment><USER21> There are a ton of reasons:

1\. Uber currently has the ability to grow and move at software speed. Other people buy the cars that it uses and assume the risk. If it needs to pull out of a city because of hostile regulation or whatever, its drivers are left holding the bag. Going from that to being a company with an expensive and gigantic physical inventory would be incredibly painful for it.

2\. Driverless cars are the end-point of the commoditization of the rides-for- hire market. If you're buying a Tesla that drives itself, anyone else who provides the same Tesla provides exactly the same level of service to your customer. You can only compete on price or availability -- but availability now means buying expensive physical inventory, so both means of competing are now super, super expensive for Uber.

3\. All of this assumes that it _even makes sense_ to have a rides-for-hire business in a driverless car world. It's possible it will, but we don't know that! If the sensor package of driverless cars is relatively cheap and relatively durable in value, then probably driverless cars will actually drive business away from rides-for-hire and towards car ownership.

<comment><USER31> That's just not convincing.

1\. The recent California ruling might minimize this. If drivers are employees, it's not nearly as easy to leave them holding the bag. The physical inventory of cars is also a competitive advantage. If you want ride that's great, because I happen to have 5 cars in your neighborhood right now...

2\. That's no different then the current position. I can use Uber, Lyft, a taxi or buy a car myself. And like now, the competition is on who has a car close to me and who has the _cleanest_ car. I could personally compete with Uber by have one well maintained clean car with a mint on the dash, but I could only afford one.

3\. Sorry, but I think you're arguing against #1 here. Uber having a large fleet of cars with the logistics to handle them would kill my small business's desire to own cars. The goal with driverless cars is to keep utilization as high as possible; if Uber can keep their cars at 95% utilized they will probably be cheaper than my car which is about 5% utilized.

<comment><USER21> Dude, I don't know what to say.

Your point 1 is "Maybe Uber is going to get a huge kick in the teeth right now, so then the later kick in the teeth will... pale in comparison?" But actually they aren't terribly related. You get why startups exist in the computer sector and not in the traditional manufacturing sector? It's because growth is so much easier in the computer sector. The marginal cost to add a customer in software is tiny. The marginal cost to add a customer in a business with physical inventory is much higher. Going from software to physical business is not to be desired.

Your point 2 is yet more awful for Uber: Great, they get to compete on cleanest car? So now in addition to having to buy these very expensive depreciating assets, they also have to add local employees everywhere to actually clean them? Wasn't the advantage here going to be that they took the cost of "paying people" out of the equation? Uber's growth is going to be based on their ability to build out a really competitive cleaning service? Does that sound like a business you want to invest in?

Point 3 is interesting:

So, look, people who were already of the opinion that there's too much car ownership have gotten excited about the potential of driverless cars to increase car utilization. But "increasing car utilization" isn't a goal of normal people. "Saving money and/or receiving more value" is the goal.

A heavily utilized Uber car is cheaper on some margins than a lightly utilized personal car (that is, it's cheaper based on time-based depreciation and on parking fees). It's more expensive on other margins (it drives more miles per passenger served than the personal car, so its fuel costs, maintenance costs, insurance costs, and milage-based depreciation are higher). And of course Uber has to make a profit, so that's an additional cost as well.

How does that all play out? You can add up the hypothetical costs fifteen different ways based on different assumptions, and come up with whatever numbers suit you. The truth is that nobody knows how the cost of ownership of driverless cars is going to break down yet.

But I will tell you one thing: No car, Uber or otherwise, is going to be 95% utilized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Fun fact: if Tesla remained at the same manufacturing speed they're at today, it would take them 10 years to fill this order.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think this quote was meant to be taken as a bit sarcastic, in an "I'll eat my hat" kind of way. Uber recently poached a bunch of the top people from CMU's robotics department and has announced plans to lease a 53,000 square foot facility. They have no plans to wait for Tesla.

</comment><comment><USER33> Isn't Google ahead of Tesla in self-driving cars?

<comment><USER22> By a wide margin, but Tesla actually makes cars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Litigation risk. Uber now hides behind "just a contractor". Unless they don't actually own the cars, they're liable...

</comment><comment><USER35> There is some real news here: Uber (probably) does not believe its autonomous vehicle program will be successful before 2020.

<comment><USER36> I've heard directly from an Uber's exec himself that he does not feel safe getting into a driver-less car.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> At $30,000 each, that's 15 billion in cost. That's a lot of money to raise for depreciating assets.

<comment><USER22> They would finance the vehicles and pay for them with the revenue they produce. Rental cars are actually a pretty good case of this for conventional vehicles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Why shouldn't Tesla take their self-driving cars, make an app and "Uberify" it.

<comment><USER39> In a word, specialization. Worrying about self driving cars is probably enough of a challenge, but that's my best guess.

<comment><USER38> I don't think so. It will boil down to fleet management. Tesla is bypassing the middle man to sell cars directly. If we combine self driving cars and Uber, then most of us will not be buying cars and instead will be renting by usage. So why shouldn't Tesla bypass the middle man again and reap the profits?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> More proof that CEOs are grossly overpaid. Who needs that many cars? Just disgusting.

<comment><USER8> trolololo</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does one get certified as an ETHICAL hacker ? - <AUTHOR>

   I am a fresh graduate and not much of a programmer.
 I love the Unix environment though and have been hacking
 around with the likes of Solaris and Ubuntu poring over the
plethora of documentations available. I seek to attain a
certification in say Solaris 10 and also probably Red hat
which is more commercial. But I have come across these ethical
 hacking certifications which I found to be rather expensive.
 But I need fellow hacker opinions on how I should go about
these certifications. Are these legit and do they have
placements ? I intend to make a career in network security.
Please advice <comment><USER2> Depends what you want.

If by 'hacker' you mean security, then there are certs for that. Or start hanging around, reading and practicing security stuff.

If by 'hacker' you mean a good programmer (that's probably what the hacker in hackernews means), then you don't need a certificate for that. Just do lots of programming.

</comment><comment><USER3> Look at jobs adverts for the type of job you want and see what they ask for cert wise, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> How about - PhD, focus on security?</comment>


Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer's Turnaround Flounders - <AUTHOR> https://recode.net/2015/10/19/yahoo-talent-exodus-accelerates-as-marissa-mayers-turnaround-flounders/ <comment><USER2> One of the most visible signs of Yahoo's weakness was its strategy to hire big media stars...I'm aware that Yahoo News brings in a godly amount of pageviews to articles on its site...but that hasn't translated to giving a more noticeable platform for its media stars. Since Yahoo hired Katie Couric, who was once a huge star on network news, the most I've seen her name in the wild is in Reddit ads promoting her interviews. I can't think of any other popular news organization that has had to resort to Reddit ads to promote its stars.

And remember David Pogue of the New York Times? His opinion was always spread widely when he was at the NYT...I've literally never seen any thing that he's written tweeted in the wild since he's been at Yahoo (though once in awhile I'll check in to read his stuff, which is actually still quite good and better than the NYT's current tech columnist).

I know cultivating a media brand is different than building and maintaining your core engineering team...but the media push was one of the big initiatives from Mayer and it went pretty badly.

<comment><USER3> These hires were part of Yahoo's content creation strategy which also included producing TV shows. They just wrote off $42 million for the TV shows[1]. These expensive celebrities are probably next as I doubt they can justify their cost on a shrinking platform.

[1] [http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/yahoo- misses-q3-earning...](http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/yahoo- misses-q3-earnings-marissa-mayer-narrower-product-focus-1201622483/)

<comment><USER4> I watched a few episodes of Community from the new season. Yahoo butchered it. That show suffered multiple bad decisions and quality went up and down like a yo-yo, but Yahoo's attempt at reviving it is by far the worst. If this is representative of the majority of their attempts at content creation, I can see why they would want to step away from that.

<comment><USER5> Community Season 6 was actually pretty good. Especially compared to "The Gas Leak Year." It was designed to close the series gracefully, after actors were already exiting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious: how bad is it to leave a new job soon after starting (because you realize the product isn't as great as what you thought it would be/too much competition in space)? When you are a high performer, you really don't want to waste everyone's time if you end up in this bad situation. What is the professional thing to do?

Asking because the article mentioned some people staying only for a few weeks. In a small startup, not seeing traction would be reasonable cause for departure since your paycheck directly depends on it. In a large company, things are not always interrelated in the short term. So there is more time to try out things. I guess the question is: how long should one try to make a new job work?

<comment><USER7> It only really matters in the eyes of potential future employers, so consider how it looks to them. Having done interviews and resume screening myself, I wouldn't balk too hard at one quick departure, but I would want to hear a good explanation for why you left so soon. The job and/or company being very clearly something different from what you were told would be a good one.

Multiple quick departures in a row are kind of a red flag for somebody looking to hire a full-time employee, as opposed to a consultant of some kind.

<comment><USER8> It matters to the people you leave, too. When people spend a lot of energy recruiting you, doing due diligence on you and you on them, it (hopefully) builds a fair amount of trust and mutual respect. When you leave after a short time, that trust is violated, often in both directions. Barring something somewhat unusual ( _cough_ Clinkle _cough_ ), people are generally going to be very transparent with people they hire to help with a turn-around. When you have every opportunity to determine whether or not you're up for a challenge and then 3 months later are like "nah, actually, too hard" it will probably have some effect, at least with people that were closely involved in your hiring.

<comment><USER9> I've also seen where people come into a role being promised autonomy and once they start finding that they're stuck into a pre-existing strategy or hierarchy that doesn't want to change.

<comment><USER10> Trust has already been broken there. If the job is a bait and switch, why would you expect someone to stay if they have other options?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There was a pretty good long-form piece about Yahoo News in The Baffler a while back [1]. It was by Chris Lehmann, a former YN editor. Although one expects that there's going to be a certain amount of one-sidedness in an account by an employee that was let go, it makes a pretty compelling case that one of Yahoo's flagship properties was disastrously mismanaged. He's highly critical of Mayer: "When editorial knowledge is deployed to elevate advertising, it stops being either editorial, or knowledge; it's hackery, sold out to the highest, or just the bare middling bidder. [...] Under Mayer's leadership, the company has brought this ugly art form to sophisticated new heights — and in the process blown through all the basic rudiments of journalistic ethics." There's definitely some corroboration for that view point, BTW. [2]

And it wasn't just the way the firewall between editorial and advertising was dismantled by Mayer. He documents the atrocious working conditions, the extent to which the executives Mayer hired to manage YN had no idea what they were doing, YN's reliance on gimmicks to try to juice page views (which didn't even work), and the way the site's editorial mission seemed to shift from week to week. Lehmann tells a particularly hilarious story about a Yahoo exec trying to pitch a Crossfire-type blog where a rightwing blowhard and a leftwing blowhard would argue with each other. The exec really wants to hire Robert Novak, not realizing the guy had died two years ago.

Anyway, after reading this and then reading the OP...not surprising.

[1] [http://thebaffler.com/salvos/purple- reign](http://thebaffler.com/salvos/purple-reign) [2] [http://deadspin.com/dan-gilbert-didnt-like-a-yahoo-blog- post...](http://deadspin.com/dan-gilbert-didnt-like-a-yahoo-blog-post-so- yahoo-dele-1685364080)

</comment><comment><USER12> Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the whole "work in our offices or quit" memo sent to virtual employees a while back not paying the dividends she had hoped. Adding insult to injury, perhaps her build-out of a full private nursery in the executive suite staffed with her personal nannies while simultaneously requiring staff to stop working remotely, even part time, had a deleterious impact on morale and work-life balance for those who cannot afford a team of private caretakers for their own families while they commute potentially for several extra hours each day.

Perhaps we are just now starting to see the effects of potential internal management hypocrisy with all these departures, especially the ones that only lasted a brief time.

Of course, this may be speculation on my part, but I can't see how decisions like those would encourage people, especially high performers, to stay long term if this is indicative of Yahoo management philosophy.

Ref:

[http://gawker.com/5987043/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer- installed-...](http://gawker.com/5987043/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-installed-a- nursery-in-her-office)

[http://gawker.com/5986462/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-no-more- wo...](http://gawker.com/5986462/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-no-more-working-from- home)

<comment><USER13> The buzz about their work from home program was that people were abusing it and not doing actual work. I agree, they should be able to work from home, but when she did this, she was basically firing a buncha losers. They should allow people to work from home again, though.

<comment><USER12> What proof is there that these people were "losers" and slackers as you put it?

Either way, you're right about needing to open it back up. The impact to morale overall must have been huge when these people had to scramble to protect their livelihood.

<comment> Paul-ish It appears there were at least some insiders who agreed that there was a lot of dead weight [1]. What I wonder is who's budgets these people were on? Shouldn't it be in some organizational unit's interest to cut people who are not productive, regardless of where they work from?

* [1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-yahoos-confess-marissa-may...](http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-yahoos-confess-marissa-mayer-is-right-to-ban-working-from-home-2013-2)

<comment><USER14> > Shouldn't it be in some organizational unit's interest to cut people who are > not productive, regardless of where they work from?

Well... if you have, say, 80 people working for you, and you discover 15 are dead weight... cutting them would mean you can do your division's job with 65 people. You wouldn't have any room to argue for budget increase. That's a cynical view, but one I've seen played out a couple of times over the years in my travels.

<comment><USER15> Firing people is emotionally taxing. That's honestly probably 85% of the reason why shitty employees can keep their jobs. Managers hate firing people and most will procrastinate endlessly if that option is available.

<comment><USER16> This is great news, I'm saved!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "another worried about the ability of managers to stanch the flow of valued employees."

 _That_ is the problem right there: shitty managers at Yahoo. I spent a few years there, and despite being in the industry for many years, I've yet to find a more dysfunctional setup. Managers have absolutely _zero_ accountability at Yahoo. In any other place, if engineers start leaving a manager, it would be cause for concern; if too many do so, the manager is axed. But in Yahoo, shitty managers hang around, hopping from project to project, biding their time till they can find a new project to shit on.

And the tech stack?!? Don't even get me started.

Yahoo needs to cut out its management layers, and reduce the manager headcount by 75%. Only then will it start turning around.

<comment><USER18> what is the tech stack...

<comment><USER19> Primarily Yahoo Pipes with a PHP and COBOL backend. All stored in Microsoft SourceSafe, if the project you're working on is even using a VCS.

<comment><USER20> I don't know if you're serious.

<comment><USER21> He is bad at joking. E.g. Where do you think Hadoop comes from?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What does Yahoo do?

Microsoft has Windows, Office and Xbox.

Amazon has massive web server and product distribution platforms.

Apple has OS X and iPhone.

Google has Android, search, ads, and an online office suite.

What does Yahoo do? I guess they have some long-time email users and a well- liked stock tracking platform?

<comment><USER23> Google (as opposed to Alphabet) really only has Ads, everything else is just to help get those ads in front of more people more often.

In the sense that both Google and Yahoo are mostly focused about showing adds, they are not that different. Google has just more means of showing ads that are more effective, and viewed as cooler by its users.

<comment><USER24> > _Google (as opposed to Alphabet) really only has Ads, everything else is > just to help get those ads in front of more people more often_

Actually they have like ~1.37 Yahoos worth of non-ad revenue[1][2]

[1] [https://investor.google.com/earnings/2015/Q2_google_earnings...](https://investor.google.com/earnings/2015/Q2_google_earnings.html)

[2] [https://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=92308...](https://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=923083)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Going back on my time-machine, I recall when she was first hired.

Silicon Valley was abuzz with excitement, thinking Yahoo would once again become a tech-juggernaut that it once was, competing with Facebook, Google, etc.

Truth be told, the previous CEOs geared up the company to be more like Buzzfeed than like Google, making Yahoo a media company.

Granted, Yahoo would never be in the same circles as the common tech- juggernauts, but this is the natural evolution of companies.

Monsanto once used to make poison, now they force their fake-seeds to feed the world.

Deep down, we all wanted Yahoo to go back to being something, afterall, it was a cool company once upon a long 1990s time ago, but Mayer was probably the worst hire of them all.

In the end, it doesn't matter though. She has a vested interest somewhere north of US200million and her failure at Yahoo will be celebrated when Twitter hires her as "Head of UX" once someone like Carl Icahn buys Yahoo shares to spinoff Alibaba faster and then spinoff: Yahoo Finance (Bloomberg), Flickr(Facebook), etc.

<comment><USER26> Nah, she'll become a VC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Jon McCormack: At the end of last year, Mayer scored a coup in the hiring of > the Amazon star to be in charge of all of Yahoo's mobile engineers. He only > stayed a few weeks.

Ouch.

<comment><USER28> I don't know anything about him, but I would love to hear the story about how bad/hopeless a situation must need to be in order to warrant leaving so soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Every body can sail a ship in good waters.

She has been a CEO of a publicly traded company for 3 years. One that was "seemingly" in trouble. 3 years is a long time for a company that was founded 3 years ago. Yahoo is 21 years old and still alive (and somewhat doing well).

</comment><comment><USER30> I've got a lot of respect for Yahoo's ability to survive despite being such a value destroying machine.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is what happens when you read a childrens book in front of all your employees [http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-childrens- book-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-childrens-book-bobbie- had-a-nickel-2015-1)

</comment><comment><USER32> Maybe Twitter/Yahoo should team up or Snapchat. Get these teens some ads. Yahoo's mobile strategy is a struggle, maybe some partnerships are in order.

I honestly believe Mayer could do it but since none of their apps are FB/Instagram/WhatsApp nor do they have the traction as these juggernauts, I'd suggest a partnership.

Come on Yahoo. Find a niche, make some money.

Losing these talented people. Maybe it's because they didn't perform or didn't realize the large task they they'd be responsible. Or maybe Mayer only hired them to steward a certain project (this wouldn't explain the quick exits but not all of these exits are quick). Mayer is a work horse. The issue might be with the hires and the difficulty of tasks.

<comment><USER33> I think that was the idea behind the Tumblr acquisition.

It's just really, really hard to buy something "hot" without killing it (by external reputation/customer satisfaction or internal employee exodus)

Off the top of my head I can only think of two that worked (Instagram, WhatsApp) and Facebook deserves huge credit for that.

I don't think my own employer (Nokia), even in its heyday, ever successfully acquired and integrated a company.

<comment><USER32> I agree that is what was behind Tumblr. But it's my belief that integration will take time. Yahoo could get ahold of some of the mobile ads, they've been investing heavily in mobile development. Twitter is about to make a big push with Dorsey (he's smart enough to know that's where he competes) and so is Snapchat, which is why I mentioned them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> OK, armchair CEOs: how would _you_ turn Yahoo _!_ around?

<comment><USER35> If this still holds true: [http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/study-gmail- users-you...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/study-gmail-users- younger-better-educated-than-aol-yahoo-users/)

Then I would swing right and turn Yahoo into the Fox News of internets.

Get bunch of Radio talk show hosts and conservative commentators, give them multiple platforms and let them loose.

Get some cheap TLC reality shows that are exclusive and really try an appeal to Yahoo's current demographics.

Instead of trying to appeal to the educated and affluent already entrenched in Google and Facebook, you invest in what you have and expand that market.

This will create growth and momentum in the company. Once you have that, you compete with Google and Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What exactly did she turn around? Yahoo still feels like a hot mess.

</comment><comment><USER37> I feel bad about such news. Ever since Marissa Mayer came they were starting to fix things with their services. Like for example Flickr was resurrected. If Marissa Mayer will leave, or if they narrow their focus, Flickr is probably not that profitable so it can stagnate again or be sold or killed. Which would be a shame.

</comment><comment><USER38> Once Yahoo was willing to stop development of their own search engine and ad platform, I knew they were doomed.

Yahoo's ad service was a lot nicer than MSFT Ad Center and nearly as nice as AdWords. They gave up on one of the most strategic positions they had.

There is a pile of other stupidity there before and after that others could speak about, but with Yahoo making a deal with Google, it will only continue to be dumb.

I believe the entire culture, history, and everything at Yahoo is predisposed to failure and is beyond fixing. It's like a losing sports team who has a history and culture of losing. It takes an entire overturning of everything usually to fix it.

<comment><USER17> > Yahoo's ad service was a lot nicer than MSFT Ad Center and nearly as nice as > AdWords. They gave up on one of the most strategic positions they had.

You can thank Carol Bartz for that. She should be enshrined in the same pantheon as Carly Fiorina.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is this one of those glass cliffs?

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

<comment><USER40> Men have no exclusivity on being bad CEOs. Look at Carly Fiorina.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> For something to flounder doesn't it have to first exist? There was no turnaround.

<comment><USER42> Don't know why you're getting "greyed out", but without writing an essay about it, this

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is really too bad for diversity.

>>Just last week, Yahoo lost two senior women execs — development head Jackie Reses to Square and marketing partnerships head Lisa Licht.

Before that, another exec once close to Mayer — CMO Kathy Savitt — left for a job at a Hollywood entertainment company, although sources said that was due in part to increased estrangement between her and Mayer.

<comment><USER44> How is that bad for diversity? Reses landing at Square is not a bad thing for diversity. The others don't seem like they'll land at bad spots either. They were poached or left of their own accord, not fired. If Yahoo's the only game in town, then yeah, it's bad for diversity. But Yahoo's not the only game in town.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who Is Selling? (Apps, Sideprojects, Sites – February 2018) - <AUTHOR> Trying something new:
Please lead with the site URL, domain, webapp or app link that you're selling, some basic info about the stage it's in (pre launch, launched, has traffic, has revenue etc), and how to contact you for more details.
Submitters: please only post if you built and run the service (or otherwise are empowered to sell it). If it isn't a household name, please explain what your project does.
Readers: please only email submitters if you personally are interested in buying! <comment><USER2> [http://instasaber.com](http://instasaber.com) (app store: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/instasaber/id1316793122?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/instasaber/id1316793122?mt=8) ) InstaSaber is the most advanced augmented reality lightsaber app out there, using Machine Learning + ARKit. Yes, it is completely pointless, but I promise it's a few minutes of fun : ) . Free to download, $0.99 cents if you want to upgrade. firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://farts.io](http://farts.io)

No app, just the domain. You and I both know it's a goldmine waiting to happen. Help me fund my next project and also get the best domain you'll ever own.

<comment><AUTHOR> remember to include your email!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://gaiaeternal.itch.io/domino- playground](https://gaiaeternal.itch.io/domino-playground)

I personally guarantee that this is the highest-quality PC game about making binary logic circuits with dominos in existence.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice - dont forget to include your email address!</comment></comment>


Playback and Login Issues on Soundcloud - <AUTHOR> http://status.soundcloud.com/ <comment><USER2> I use soundcloud all the time and although I love the concept and access to new music, the app makes no sense. Adding songs to playlists is too difficult, "liking" songs and reposting them is too difficult, nothing flows smoothly.

As time has gone on I think soundcloud has got crappier and crappier. Not too mention that using it at the gym with your phone strapped to your arm sucks. I am sure many people use soundcloud on iphone at the gym and I bet they all think it sucks too.

Now that soundcloud has ads I see room for competition. The app sucks and the only saving grace is the user base. It is no longer the cool underground place to listen to hot new tracks. It is now a crappy memory hogging ad spewing vibe ruining music player. Hopefully somebody who has the cash to pony up for music hosting servers will come by and re-do a simpler version.</comment>


A clever way to fight IE6 - <AUTHOR> http://igorpartola.com/web-development/a-clever-way-to-fight-ie6

<comment><USER2> I run a web design company and as part of the discovery process, we ask questions to figure out whether or not big corporations, schools, gov. agencies, etc, are part of their core target audience. We also look at their existing analytics data if they have it. If they have visitors using IE6, we just assume that we're going to need to support IE6 and adjust the price according. There is no good reason to make the customer feel bad that they have to pay more because their clients are using a dipshit browser (most of them are probably being forced to do so.)

Now if I determine that their core audience won't be using IE6, I explain the issues pertaining to IE6, how it takes more time to make everything work as intended and give them the facts of browser/version distribution. If they want, we'll support IE6 for them (because we are here to help them make money and even though I hate IE6, I'm not religious about the hate) for the extra cost.

<comment><USER3> I'm confused. Are you or are you not notifying your customers of the added expense of supporting IE6? If you are, then I don't see how your method differs from what is stated in the post. No one is making their client "feel bad" about a business decision. Whether or not they do is more a function of how that unfortunate news is delivered, or perhaps whether or not they irrationally view IE6 support as mission-critical.

<comment><USER2> If we determine that it's in their best interest to support IE6, we don't line-item IE6 support (i.e. we don't say IE6 will cost you $xxxx extra.) We simply quote them a price that includes that cost (i.e. your website will cost $xxxx.)

If we determine that support IE6 will likely not matter, we break it out as an extra line-item cost and give them the option to support IE6 by paying extra. We explain the facts of their situation and let them make the decision.

It's not about making them feel bad. It's just human nature. It's just a more pleasant experience just paying a price and knowing it'll just work instead of having to pay more than the regular price just to make it work.

<comment><USER4> I see what you're saying, but it might still be useful for them to know what trade-offs are being made.

Like, "for this site and audience, we recommend supporting IE6. But FYI, that does eat this much of our costs, which can't be spent on shiny new features for modern browsers. So maybe for other projects, if you do something that targets a different audience, we'll want to make a different trade-off."

If I were the client, I think I'd appreciate that info. It might affect what types of sites I want to launch, for example.

<comment><USER5> If big companies are part of your core audience, they are part of your core audience. At that point IE 6 support is not optional, nor is pushing back on it going to make a difference. All you'll do is cause annoyance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I went into this expecting the latest "show a message to the user urging them to update" technique, but I was pleasantly surprised.

I wonder if it goes into the territory of browser support a la cart ordering though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think so. As a consultant you can always structure your products in a way where the core browsers are always included, but the weird ones are extra. Naturally, the always-included ones will be the more standards compliant ones since chances are that if it works in, say, Safari it will also mostly work in Chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is the way I've approached the issue for sometime, and the analogy I always use with clients to explain the additional cost is one of translation. Most browsers speak english, or some basic dialect of english. I can deal with those dialects. IE6 speaks Chinese. It costs more money to translate the site into Chinese. People seem to understand that analogy.

<comment><USER8> IE6 speaks Latin - both are seriously outdated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe you could turn this idea into a new monetization technique for content websites. Free for most, but IE 6 users have to pay to view your content.

<comment><USER10> but the underlying problem is that IE6s are still sticking in big enterprise/workplace where they do not have a choice of uninstalling it.

<comment><USER11> Actually, the biggest pool of IE6 users are people from poor countries running pirated copies of Windows XP with no access to automatic updates.

<comment><USER12> They have access to Firefox's and Chrome's automatic updates!

<comment><USER11> Just like everywhere else, they'll use what comes with the OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> IE6 is the new NN4

To be fair though, NN4 support was a massive pain, getting people off it even more pain.

(for those that got into webdev post-2002 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator> )

<comment><USER14> True. NN4 was the reason I moved to Flash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Many users of IE6 have no choice of browser. It's either IE6 or nothing. They're forced to use it because many large companies have IE6 as they're single browser on the desktop. Forcing an upgrade of all the clients in a company to IE7, 8, or another browser can be a large effort. The end users have zero control to upgrade their own browser or install other software.

An upgrade also requires that all internal applications built for IE6 are also updated. That's an even larger headache if one or more of those applications were built by an external vendor. I know a large company(4500+ employees) that recently upgraded from IE6 to IE7 internally. It was a MAJOR effort at significant cost to make this change.

At this point its naive to think that majority of IE6 usage is based on the individual home or business user who has control over their workstation and could upgrade with the press of a button.

If you choose to dump support for IE6, understand that you're making the choice against some large organizations. And make sure you communicate this to your clients as well if you're building a site for them. If you're ok with that, go for it. Charging more to support IE6 is reasonable, but make sure you're clear with your clients that there ARE reasons to support IE6. Let them make an informed decision rather than based on the bias of a developer who doesn't want the hassle.

<comment><USER16> "that recently upgraded from IE6 to IE7 internally"

Why on earth didn't they go ahead and make the jump to IE8?

<comment><USER15> Again - when you're dealing with outside vendors and you have internal applications which rely on browser compatibility you can only move to IE8 if the applications support IE8 - which they don't. So, IE7 is the current ceiling. It sucks, but it's the reality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This shouldn't classify as clever, it should be standard practice. Supporting IE6 is more difficult than other browsers, and the usefulness is highly dependent upon the specific site's demographics et al, so putting the decision to the site owner and making clear that IE6 support translates to either sacrifices in other parts of the project or increased total project cost is very much the correct course of action.

</comment><comment><USER18> I do this as well, and have had the same experience. IE 6 support is suddenly no longer as important. I explain that I'll put a message up that directs the user to either upgrade their browser, install Chrome Frame or browse at their own peril.

</comment><comment><USER19> Of course the problem with this strategy is that you may not be in a vacuum. If I'm a competing shop I simply say that I'll do it all for a price somewhat south of your +IE6 price.

And if I have some experienced webdevs who have done this type of stuff since forever, the cost is already largely locked in. Sure I may not be "helping the web" (whatever that means), it may mean a substantial boost in revenue.

<comment><USER20> I'd rather miss a job because I was too expensive than get it just because I was too cheap.

<comment><USER19> I'd rather be rich making 30% margins than broke because I charged 200%.

<comment><USER20> I've run a small web-dev business for 12 years and regret every time I've dropped my price to lock in a job.

<comment><USER19> Then you've dropped too low. You certainly don't do it for $1. But I've found that whenever there are other companies with ideological bents (like anti-IE6) I can almost certainly always crush them economically and with respect to quality.

<comment><USER20> Competing aggressively on price, more often than not, attracts a certain type of client. If you're taking the cheap option now, you'll often fight over every cent going forward and be pretty miserable to work with.

If someone is desperate for work, they might need to make sacrifices to keep busy. I'm not, so I try not to.

<comment><USER19> It's not all that aggressive. If your intention is to effectively price out technology X (IE6), I can almost always beat your price by a good mile, and I'll make a point of it.

With that said, I don't do web development :-)

<comment><USER20> We'd be going after different markets. The shops trying to beat a price by a mile are in a lower tier.

<comment><USER19> I think you underestimate the huge price differentials for almost no difference in quality. In fact often quote the opposite. I've seen a factor of 5x in price difference in some cases with virtually no difference in portfolio, mockups, or code quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Be careful what you wish for.

This reminds me of former NFL great and Monday Night Football announcer Frank Gifford. At one time, he charged $10,000 per corporate appearance. The grind was wearing him down, so he doubled his rate to reduce volume. Funny thing happened though, the higher rate made him _more_ desirable to corporate program directors and his demand actually _increased_.

I wonder how applicable this phenomenon is here. You could easily become known as the "ie6 web design experts" who corporate drones turn to first. Sure, you'd make tons of money, but is that what you really want?

[EDIT: Lots of us are constantly dealing with the trade-off between whoring ourselves out for high paying shit work and doing what we really want. Just sayin'.]

<comment><USER22> Q:"sure you'll make a ton of money, but is that what you want?"

A: "yes, that will be fine."

<comment><USER23> I think you're letting the allure of the money downplay the costs of actually doing the work. It's not like one client is going to hand you a duffel bag full of $100 bills, you do the conversion once, and then you're set for life. It's going to be a seemingly endless line of enterprise clients who already have a history of not keeping up with the times.

The amount these clients pay, while substantial, probably won't provide you with the "fuck you"-money needed to never have to do it again.

<comment><USER24> Do people really go into web design to get "fuck you" money?

<comment><USER25> Not smart people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've made the same suggestion to my company and we are going to adopt a pricing policy for IE6 in our future product releases (B2B). The bottom line is that it costs us more to support IE6 and it's a sunk cost. We've eaten the cost for a long time because we care about making our customers happy no matter the circumstance. However, on the verge of IE9 and HTML5, supporting IE6 is starting to show measurable effects on our development velocity, capability, and agility which impacts all of our customers regardless of browser.

I suspect many IT depts and software companies are eating this cost and it reduces the impetus to upgrade browsers. Business cares about the bottom line and they won't consider changes unless they see line items that will affect it.

</comment><comment><USER27> When all else fails, make it about money.

I actually have a friend whose design shop has been doing this for a while. It really drives the point home.

The issues with getting large corporations to finally upgrade are moot. The consumer/home user is already abandoning IE6 because people like us are advising them to. Large companies aren't going to incur the cost of an upgrade until they _have_ to. They don't have to as long as people keep supporting IE6. With the current amount of web traffic coming from IE6 hovering around 12% (last time I checked) it really depends on whether or not an organization _needs_ to reach those visitors with an experience that is on par with users of other browsers. Putting a price tag on it is perfect.

</comment><comment><USER28> We don't support IE6.

If a client wants IE6, why not tell them to spend that money developing an accessible version of the site? There are going to be more disabled people visiting their site then IE6 anyway:

IE6 stats: <http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_explorer.asp>

Paper on percentage of disabled rising from US Dept of Commerce: <http://www.census.gov/prod/3/97pubs/cenbr975.pdf>

Based on IE5 degradation in usage and extrapolation of the IE6 stats, it may only be ~3.5 years (~summer 2013) before IE6 drops to ~0.3% usage.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think we should remember why IE6 continues to burden us. All those companies spending millions adding Citrix and MS Terminal services to their network many years ago need a few more to get their ROI back. In these cash strapped times I can't see an already over stretched IT department putting together an operating system upgrade for 600+ desktops.

I develop a web based app and it's a nightmare adding those awful hacks to get IE6 to play ball. However, many companies are stuck with IE6 and do you want to alienate a potential customer(s)?

Microsoft.. you _were_ an arsehole.

<comment><USER30> _In these cash strapped times I can't see an already over stretched IT department putting together an operating system upgrade for 600+ desktops._

You assume that it is the decision of the IT department. I would imagine that the IT department would have _less_ headaches by updating

<comment><USER29> I don't mean the IT department upgrading their own computers, they probably already done so, I mean as a company. If they run an old citrix or MS TS then they're locked into XP. I've seen this first hand. A lot of global companies haven't upgraded to the latest version and continue to run Software that even Microsoft no longer supports!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I used to do html/css layouts very frequently just a few years back, and after tracking my hours to determine this, I found that coding for IE6 idiosyncrasies essentially doubled my html/css dev time.

So I'd have a layout done and ready to go in Safari, Opera and Firefox (Chrome wasn't on the market then) in 4 hours, and it'd take another 4 just to get it working correctly in IE6.

Luckily though, I billed hourly (so it was never really a problem), but it just amazed me to realize how much money clients were throwing away trying to support IE6 at the time.

</comment><comment><USER15> Many people keep talking about "driving the point home" like the majority of people using IE6 are doing so by choice. Gmail doesn't work, Youtube soon won't work, site after site that people use for personal browsing are limiting IE6 users or shutting them out. Which begs the question why are there still IE6 users. I propose the simple answer - the majority of IE6 are corporate users. Those who have no control over their browser.

I'm not going to be redundant, but I spelled this out further down the page and I think it's been mostly ignored. If you want to cut off corporations using IE6 from getting to your site - go for it. Just be aware and let you clients know this is what they're doing.

</comment><comment><USER32> I work as a product designer for different web apps. We just support the latest build of IE, Chrome, Fx, Opera, Safari - that's still alot of differences.

IE 6 should be ignored.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is what we do too, but this isn't going to kill IE6. It's not a problem that sites support it, it's a problem that large companies and non-techies don't want to or know how to upgrade. What I do for all my sites is add <http://pushuptheweb.com/> to all my pages and customize the message to say they're not getting the full experience and that their browser may be unsecure.

<comment><USER34> I disagree, I think that techniques like this do contribute to killing IE6. The reason that corporations don't upgrade their browsers is pretty simple: they don't have to. As it stands now, IE6 is "good enough" for their employees to do whatever it is they need to do.

The more websites that drop IE6 support, the more IE6 becomes "not good enough", and the more pressure accumulates for corporations to upgrade. Right now it's more practical in many environments for the IT group to stick with IE6 than upgrade. The day it becomes more practical to upgrade than stay put is the day IE6 dies.

<comment><USER35> The UK Government decided that it will stay with IE6 for the forseeable future:

[http://www.hmg.gov.uk/epetition-responses/petition- view.aspx...](http://www.hmg.gov.uk/epetition-responses/petition- view.aspx?epref=ie6upgrade)

Claiming:

Security: "Complex software will always have vulnerabilities and motivated adversaries will always work to discover and take advantage of them. There is no evidence that upgrading away from the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer to other browsers will make users more secure. Regular software patching and updating will help defend against the latest threats. The Government continues to work with Microsoft and other internet browser suppliers to understand the security of the products used by HMG, including Internet Explorer and we welcome the work that Microsoft are continuing do on delivering security solutions which are deployed as quickly as possible to all Internet Explorer users."

Cost: "It is not straightforward for HMG departments to upgrade IE versions on their systems. Upgrading these systems to IE8 can be a very large operation, taking weeks to test and roll out to all users. To test all the web applications currently used by HMG departments can take months at significant potential cost to the taxpayer. It is therefore more cost effective in many cases to continue to use IE6 and rely on other measures, such as firewalls and malware scanning software, to further protect public sector internet users."

Pretty hard to argue against without deteriorating into a "no it isn't", "yes it is", which gets us nowhere.

So with the UK government, and it's 'standards' for it's various departments, standing firm, cautious businesses will follow the same path as well.

The more websites that drop IE6 support, the less people will use those websites. Facebook and Youtube are fairly safe in ignorning IE6 since that makes it easier for businesses and government departments to stop non-business use of their infrastructure.

Talk of raising prices to cater for IE6 suit me just fine. I've been dealing with IE6 since it was launched, so I'm fairly fluent in dealing with the issues it has. It's part of my job as a web developer, to build websites that work in web browsers.

Supporting IE6 isn't a big deal. It's all about clean separation of layers, progressive enhancement, and a decent understanding of IE6's foibles. Unless you've chosen to use a framework or code-generation toolkit that gets those basics wrong, and prevents you from fixing the corresponding HTML, CSS and JavaScript layers.

<comment><USER36> Those arguments can be used to put off adopting any technical advance. While it may be wise not to follow a policy of early adoption, eventually there's a tipping point that will force one to embrace the present. The disadvantages of protecting IE6 will soon outweigh any advantage of using it. Hopefully, the UK government will be lucky when it pins itself to the next platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The company i work for has been doing this for quite a while now, unfortunately our clients mostly just pay the extra...

</comment><comment><USER38> What is the price increase to add IE6 support? 100% more? 50%? Does it even matter, in terms of this approach?

</comment><comment><USER39> Back when IE6 was the best browser available, I used this exact technique to kill off Netscape 4 requirements.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't see why we are supposed to fix this problem. It's so much easier for Microsoft to do something about it,

I mean seriously...how hard is it for them to add "Run as IE6" mode to IE9?

That way companies can run their internal crap as "IE6"...and can browse the web as IE9.

<comment><USER41> It seems to me that installing Firefox is easier than risking an update to IE9, yet corporations won't do that either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The company I work for simply have ask if the client requires IE6 support, but states that they "recommend not supporting the 9 year old browser". That seems to discourage all but government clients.

</comment><comment><USER43> Title should be changed to "Fight IE6 by overcharging your client for the headache"

</comment><comment><USER44> This is exactly what I do and it works!

</comment><comment><USER45> Let's make some money and support IE6!

</comment><comment><USER46> Danm, I was hoping he wrote a virus that upgrades IE.

</comment><comment><USER47> I aprove of this technique.

</comment><comment><USER48> Or you could just give them a 101 on web standards, while giving the main points why you wont support IE6. It almost depends on your clients. ie: Since most MLS programs are still in the dinosaur age, most Realtors use Windows, and good % of them still use IE6(I've seen the analytics), crazy eh?

I just wont support it. Update your OS/Browser!

<comment><USER49> Governments and other big organizations REFUSE to update their browsers because they need IE 6 to support legacy software (I used to work in provincial government in Canada: I know). Spouting off about "web standards" (whatever that means to a client) is worthless -- they'll tell you it still looks wrong.

Tell them IE6 costs extra and at least your trouble will be worth your while (or you can skip IE6 dev time). It's not unlike paying more to the mechanic who works on vintage Mini Coopers versus new BMW ones; the vintage skill is more specialized and harder work in lessening demand.

<comment><USER48> I agree with charging extra. It's a good tactic to see if they understand, as they certainly will understand spending more money, vs supporting web standards.</comment></comment></comment>


Trump-appointed regulators reject plan to rescue coal and nuclear plants - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/01/08/trump-appointed-regulators-reject-plan-to-rescue-coal-and-nuclear-plants/?hpid=hp_no-name_no-name%3Apage%2Fbreaking-news-bar&tidr=a_breakingnews&utm_term=.ed1edbed6973 <comment><USER2> This is a relief to hear.

I personally would be happier if there were national incentives to keep nuclear plants and _not_ coal operating as long as safely possible. Even completed, operating nuclear plants are losing money in competitive markets where gas generation has made big inroads. Nuclear has a much lower emissions profile than gas generation, comparable to the lowest-emission renewable sources. Some states like Illinois and New York have made efforts to support nuclear for that reason.

Today's reactors will have to retire eventually, but while we're still burning coal in power plants it's a shame to retire them any earlier than technically necessary. Decarbonization will go better if renewables are nibbling away at fossil generation share and not being responsible to fill the hole left by prematurely retired reactors too.

<comment><USER3> > I personally would be happier if there were national incentives to keep > nuclear plants and not coal operating as long as safely possible

Why? I get coal, but why not operate the nuclear plants if they are already running?

<comment><USER4> I think you're misreading. GP is saying that plans to keep nuclear plants operating are good but plans to keep coal operating are not.

<comment><USER2> Correct.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using Firebase with ReactJS - <AUTHOR> https://www.firebase.com/blog/2014-05-01-using-firebase-with-react.html

<comment><USER2> I was thinking when react first came out it would make a sweet combo with Firebase. As React is just a V in MVC, there is an M shaped hole for Firebase to fill, with the huge bonus of a distributed real-time M. Angular + Firebase is really cool too, but you end up with two Ms (which to be fair, is pretty well managed by the three way binding in AgularFire)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions on the ReactFireMixin I made.</comment>


Thalmic Labs ending sale of Myo armbands - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@srlake/ending-sales-of-myo-preparing-for-the-future-281af9bbcac2 <comment><USER2> I was in the same YC batch as Thalmic, and 2 years before that I did a PhD in neuroscience at a lab where one of the projects involved recording from forearm muscles using _implanted_ electrodes. Even when you have the electrodes inside the arm you see a ton of signal from other muscles and it's quite hard to unscramble useful information in a single trial. After demo day I was kinda surprised they raised so much money, anyone who had done forearm EMG work would have told you that you just can't get good enough signals at the surface to do what they're proposing. But I've since learned that a lot of VCs just don't do scientific diligence, they invest based on people and markets. And in spite of my skepticism I too was hoping that Thalmic had figured out some killer special case of blind source separation and the Myo would work beautifully.

<comment><USER3> Yep; I bought a Myo arm band and it's completely useless; I spend a few hours trying to change its location over my arm guessing there was something wrong about how I was using it and unable to do even trigger the most basic demo gestures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I figured there was a new product launch coming soon, they recently rented a large storefront in my neighborhood in Brooklyn and have been building it out like a flagship retail store. Curious choice of location if you ask me, I think their broker oversold this part of Brooklyn as the new Soho, which it is certainly not in terms of foot traffic and tourists.

Anyhow, I was not terribly impressed by the initial product and fairly shocked with how much money they raised after it. Interested to see what's next.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've worked a lot with EMG and EEG, and always wondered how they got past the huge problems with variation, lack of sensitivity and reliability. From this and what I've read from users it looks like they didn't actually get past them.

</comment><comment><USER6> I do wonder what the impediment to continuing sales is. Was the armband a loss leader of some sort? Were the sales not high enough? Were there widespread product failures?

It always seemed like a rather neat concept, but I generally noticed that even out of all the people I know who love playing with cutting edge prosumer tech like this, none of them had a Myo armband. I do wonder if perhaps they found no real market for the technology and are intent on actually pivoting to something else...

<comment><USER7> I own one of these (I went to a lot of hackathons in college, and Myo armbands were one of the prizes that were given out like candy).

Unfortunately, it's just not good enough. Whether it's their choice of EMG sensor or that EMG technology just isn't there yet, the Myo's gesture detection is both incredibly limited (five or six simple finger-and-hand gestures, when I used it last) and not very accurate. It's a neat little device and I had a lot of playing using it for the first 30 minutes, but it's firmly in the "curious toy" category.

<comment><USER6> Hmm, so the product doesn't have much potential in its current state. I suppose it would be difficult to improve far beyond that using the same technology - perhaps they'll try and move to some sort of AR based solution?

The concept seems really neat and it'd be a shame if it all ended up not working out.

<comment><USER8> Seems like vision based detection would be both easier and better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish this article said more about _why_ they're stopping sales and their experiences supporting the device with customers.

Its easy to assume sales were flat/declining - but with recent news about their north glasses; maybe its redirecting resources ??

<comment><USER10> Were the bands ever more than a fun parlor trick? Are there any current serious examples of their value? (Genuinely asking, I've looked on the surface and can't separate the real stuff from the marketing stuff)

<comment><USER9> Good question - Although my snap judgement is similar - I'm loath to judge too harshly having not used / touched the device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ugh. I still have mine. I ordered two. One is still unopened. My forearm got too sore trying make a fist, or spread it for the gestures. If it was more sensitive, it was too easy to inadvertently trigger an action.

If anyone wants to buy them off of me, lemme know.

</comment><comment><USER12> There wasn't a big enough market for their futuristic arm band without clear use cases (or reliable functioning), and I'm not confident it would be any different for their smart glasses coming out next.

What's bothersome is the large amount of VC funding [1] that went into these guys. After they blow it, investors will be wary which will further retard progress in the field of HCI technologies.

[1] [https://www.canadianbusiness.com/innovation/thalmic-labs- int...](https://www.canadianbusiness.com/innovation/thalmic-labs-intel-amazon- funding/)

<comment><USER13> Well, they are still peanuts compared to Magic Leap, stuff like Leap Motion and other high profile busts ...

And yes, I am worried about this too - VC cash gets burned and nothing of consequence will be delivered, all the while projects with real applications but less quick talking/hype and buzzword spewing CEOs are struggling to find funding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well, we need some duds to get the big wins. This is just a sign of a more than healthy industry (taking risks and sometimes failing). No need to feel bad.

</comment><comment><USER15> So no more Myo armbands from now on? I presume they're working on their smartglasses now</comment>


Dwellable founder gets résumé from developer who claims he created Dwellable - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2013/dwellable-founder-rsum-iphone-app-developer-claims-created-dwellable

<comment><USER2> Misleading headline. It should be "Someone adds fake job to his resume and gets busted". But I guess that would get less clicks.

<comment><USER3> That would underplay the story too much. The person who had their work claimed by someone else found out and broke the story. The only misleading word is "from".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would actually love to know the true percentage of resumes falsified by programmers today? Surely plenty of other people are lying about education or relevant work experience just to get past an HR filter (not that you can justify it easily).

</comment><comment><USER5> so recruiter didn't pay attention to that part?

<comment><USER2> _" a recruiter friend passed on a résumé from an individual who claimed to have created [...] Dwellable"_

That person didn't apply for a job at Dwellable. That would have been pretty idiotic. It sounds like a recruiter who just happened to know the actual founder of Dwellable came across that resume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> maybe the guy meant he created airbnb and got confused, since they're the exact same service.</comment>


Froxii.com is looking for a cofounder to help cure loneliness - <AUTHOR> https://featuredfounder.io/founders/david-paykin-froxii.html <comment><USER2> If you shave your neck I have some European friends I can introduce you to.</comment>