Signs That Apple Customers Are No Longer Special - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/8-signs-that-ap.html

<comment><USER2> I've been using Macs since the 68k days and I have been waiting for this to happen. Apple makes, in my opinion, wonderful products, but they'd always been so niche and have to act that way. That meant product introductions at fan events (Macworld), outrageous pricing, etc. We're seeing that change and it's great. Apple is pushing products out when they're ready, their products are more competitively priced, they're more open than they have been in the past, they're selling through normal channels rather than exclusive retailers like they did in the past. . .

It's great!

</comment><comment><USER3> Owning a mac is still a cultural statement, like an Obama bumper sticker or worrying loudly about Global Warming in public. I even know poor humanities graduate students to pony up the extra $300 for a mac, because that's what they are _supposed_ to own. Macs are common possessions of workers of DC non- profits, despite their meager salaries. It's a token that proclaims yourself to be part of the well-educated, hip, cool culture.

Owning a PC? That would be as much of a faux pas as owning a large vehicle, working a blue collar job, living in the suburbs, or voting republican. You certainly won't improve your chances of getting invited to the cool parties by doing that.

I do admire Apple for consciously making itself into a subcultural icon. Few brands are as successful as Apple. And as they have hooked themselves up to a subculture that is ascendant, it is a good strategic move.

Edit: It is possible that in the future that Apple will make the jump like Starbucks did to be a universal brand and not just a brand of the hip subculture. I consider Starbucks to be one of the greatest marketing successes of all time; at first a cool urban delicacy, later reaching the other half: the suburbs, the parents that may send their kids to the military but never to grad school, the PC owners, the small business owner (think "Joe the Plumber", not Steve Jobs), people who never worry about "materialism" or "consumerism", the Republicans. Sarah Palin and Bono, investment bankers and environmentalists have their favorite latte. Of course, the cool hip culture tends to lead the rest, so that's a good strategic place to start.

I don't see any signs that Apple has made this jump yet. I certainly don't think my blue collar dad even considered a Mac when he bought a laptop, even though I am certain that he would have had an easier time learning its user interface.

<comment><USER4> Some of those people, including poor people, pony up an extra $300 because they consider the value of the mac to be, say, $1000 higher. If you spend 1000 hours a year using a computer, and a mac is 50 cents an hour nicer to use, that's $500 per year.

Whatever you think of the mac experience, some people do find it significantly nicer, so for them it's worth buying.

Also, Macs don't necessarily always cost more.

<comment><USER3> There are also plenty of people happy to be typing their essays in Microsoft Word for the Mac, rather than Microsoft Word for the PC.

<comment><USER5> I've used Word on both, and Word on Mac is better. It's not particularly good, but it's got a lot going for it - namely, a de-emphasis on over-the-top menus for sidebars - and it takes advantage of a lot of the neat Mac stuff that Windows can't do. It's still really ugly, especially compared to Pages, but it's better.

<comment><USER6> I've used Word on both, and while I like the UI better on the Mac, it lacks VBScript, which completely rules it out for many users, and is much slower than its Windows counterpart.

Pages has a great UI, but doesn't do enough. There are an insane number of features that Word has, that even a high school student would need, that are entirely absent from Pages (a robust referencing system, for example).

What I would pay big money for is something that has the functionality of MS Word Mac, without the bloat, and as speedy as Pages.

<comment><USER5> I'm sure it'll come along eventually. And absolutely, Word on Windows has some good stuff too. My point was, the program on two different operating systems is quite different, so it's not worth judging somebody based on their liking Mac Word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I didn't buy my Macbook to "feel special". I bought it because Windows sucks.

<comment><USER8> I wish I could buy ThinkPad with Mac OS X.

<comment><USER9> I wanted to do that too but ended up just getting a new macbook pro unibody. My time is worth more than messing with a nonstandard install.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A company can't give off that aura when their products sell 100s of millions. Apple maintained it for longer than anyone else ever did though.

<comment><USER5> Did they ever really _have_ that aura? I mean, I'm a Mac fanboy. I've argued with you about Apple a thousand bajillion times on this site. I watch the keynote. But I never got into it because it was a cult thing. I got into it because every blog I liked reading took some time to talk about loving Apple (Shaun Blanc, John Gruber, John Welsh, even Paul Graham), and so I took some time out to try the computers and I really loved them, and still do. When I argue Windows with friends, it's usually because they make the argument that a Mac is not inherently better than a PC, and I happen to disagree. There's nothing pretentious about that, it's just an argument that happens.

Somewhere along the line it got decided that there's a fashion statement being made with Macs. I don't really see that. I think a certain type of person that's obsessed with aesthetic does _like_ Apple, because it's clean, but was there ever a feeling that using Apple products made a person special? Because I've never noticed that, and yet it's brought up and constantly mocked. I don't get it.

<comment><USER10> Their brand clearly inspires a lot of cultlike devotion. Charismatic leader, followers who overlook their own flaws and magnify those of everyone else, feelings of persecution (fading since Microsoft's antitrust suit ended).

OSX users often look down on Windows users, as if they just don't know better. They say things like "OSX is inherently better than Windows" without specifying what it's better at or pausing to consider that there are many reasons to choose an OS, and by a very large number of metrics (compatible programs, compatible hardware, price, variety, ease of finding someone who can help you with problems, etc.) Windows crushes OSX. In fact, by almost any easily quantifiable measure, Windows is better.

Apple's been the hip underdog, ironically largely because of spending billions of marketing bucks to style themselves that way, and I think Steve Jobs's tyranny over the tech-related media.

I'm not saying any of that about you personally, but things like Digg turning into an extension of Apple's PR don't happen to any other brands at all, not even ones like Toyota or Lenovo that consistently make top quality products. The fervor indicates there's a lot more to the fanboyism than just "Apple makes good products." They've struck a chord. Their marketing over the past 5 years may be the best in the entire history of capitalism.

The problem is that Apple users includes everyone who owns an iPod or iPhone, most of whom don't use any other Apple products. You can't keep the underdog luster on the company as a whole when you achieve ubiquity, but they still do with their computers.

<comment><USER5> _In fact, by almost any easily quantifiable measure, Windows is better._

Unless you go by customer satisfaction, wherein Apple trounces competition in both hardware and software.

I get what you're talking about. I just think that cultism stems less from a blind devotion to the "specialness" of the computers, and more from a general appreciation of them. I think OS X is better than Windows, and I've tried a few times to specify why, but mostly it's a combination of a lot of little things that are all very good, rather than any particular feature which crushes Windows. (I don't use Dashboard or Spaces, for instance, haven't turned on Time Machine for a while, and I'm not a big Unix person, so the big crowed-out features aren't it. But I still am absolutely certain that the OS is better quantifiably.)

The problem is that it's _not_ easy to explain. There's a logic behind it, but it's a difficult one that depends on a bunch of little factors rather than one big one. That gets interpreted as cultism and fanboyism, but there's more to it than that. And I don't think that "special" ever had anything to do with it. Apple doesn't sell "special."

<comment><USER10> How do you quantify customer satisfaction? It's murky at best. Not only that, it's an unfair comparison since you're comparing one OEM against a range of OEMs. There's no doubt that there are a lot of garbage Windows PCs built. That doesn't say anything about the OS other than that they license it out liberally.

You'd also be comparing one OEM that makes much more expensive PCs than most of its competitors. It's like comparing Accura vs. Ford.

And if you did quantify it, which is impossible to do meaningfully, wouldn't that take into account the fact that cult members would feel much more satisfied even if all other things were equal? That's what being in a cult is about. I would bet the average Scientologist feels much more satisfaction about their religion than the average Catholic. That doesn't mean it's better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Excellent. Right now then, we're at the point in history we'd be at if things had gone to plan for SGI with the Indy, a Unix workstation as a desktop computer for the masses. Which is, umm, 15 years ago...

<comment><USER12> Wasn't the Indy $15,000? Even accounting for Moore's Law it would have been hard for SGI to go mainstream.

<comment><USER11> Contemporary fully-loaded Macs were comparable.

<comment><USER12> I don't know about that, but even so, making the cheapest SGI comparable to the most expensive Mac wasn't a recipe for mainstream success.

<comment><USER13> Well my dad bought a color Macintosh II for $9,000 so I'd say the prices were moderately comparable. It's crazy to think how expensive computers were back in the day. And $9,000 in 1980's currency is probably like buying a $18,000 computer today. With that much money, you could buy nine 1U fully decked 8-core machines today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The point is valid, the "signs" to back it up are tenuous and the attempts at humour lame.

While I don't disagree with the author's premise the article probably isn't worth your time reading.

<comment><USER5> Here's a question that _isn't_ addressed: does being special _matter_? I thought the point of capitalism and competition was how good products were, not how special you felt using them.

<comment><USER15> How special you feel using a product is part of what makes it good. Where "special" can mean a lot of things. Don Norman covers this very well in _Emotional Design_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The first Mac I actually owned was an SE. Since then I've owned five more Macs. I bought top-of-the-line Macs when people were telling me that Apple was about to go out of business. I developed a lot of software for the Mac.

I'm all about developing for .NET now; Apple is toxic to developers.

<comment><USER11> Apple has gotten a lot better since the days they pulled crap like abandoning APIs as soon as anyone started developing on them. Remember OpenDoc? And if you think IB is stagnant, remember MPW?

<comment><USER16> Ah, MPW. An environment that even made CodeWarrior look good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Honestly, who cares? Why are so many inane articles submitted to HN?

<comment><AUTHOR> (original submitter here)

I care. I care about end-user personal computing trends.

They a) amuse me and b) affect my income. That's why I submitted, to see discussion on a topic I am interested in.

Quoting from <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site."

<comment><AUTHOR> I see downmods on above comment without explanation. On a whim, this prompted me to say a little more:

The more OSX crosses into mainstream consumer territory, the better. I only run Linux myself, but having been a long time developer and troubleshooter for Windows, I am seriously psyched about seeing the OSX market grow and grow. Getting over the stigmas of "coolness" and elitism is a good step in a positive direction. Whether you like it or not, these stigmas are out there (I doubt people frequenting this website were lured into Macs for this particular aspect of them).</comment></comment></comment>


Y Combinator StartupSchool Startup -Founder(@) -  Launches Linkedin for Founders - <AUTHOR> https://www.founderat.com <comment> 100-xyz Got a "Content Encoding Error" when trying to activate account via email. May I suggest, testing well before launching?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi

Thanks for the feedback, my understanding is that the team had been working on bugs and changed server hence the error which they have said has now been resolved

</comment></comment><comment> 100-xyz Looks like an interesting idea. Will join. Good luck!

Some of your links sometimes fail with a "Secure Connection Failed" error. Not consistently though!!!</comment>


How do you get over the fear of quitting your job to start a startup? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-get-over-the-fear-of-quitting-your-job-to-start-a-startup

<comment><USER2> My own hack: I've started bootstrapping in a totally unknown country. This way, even if the project fails, I won't feel like I've lost my time or my money, because of the great time I had discovering a new country.

Besides, choosing a cheap country to live in means you have more runway to bootstrap. Here in Vietnam, I spend less than $700 / month, so I have almost no money concerns.

I've written about it here: [http://gregschlom.com/post/2300487726/geographic- arbitrage-h...](http://gregschlom.com/post/2300487726/geographic-arbitrage- hedging-your-risk-as-a-startup)

<comment><USER3> This is exactly what I was thinking of doing! I was looking at Costa Rica. The one problem, is I can't see this working well with a b2b type business that requires a lot of travelling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Or you could take a less risky route: work on it at night and on the weekends until you start making enough money to quit your job. That's what I did.

</comment><comment><USER5> This gets more difficult the older you get - corporate job, kids, mortgage, etc...

I dropped out of college during my last year because I couldn't handle the thought of not putting 100% of my chips down on my idea. After all, the university will always be there to collect tuition.

It has taken me over 3 years of blood, sweat, tears, missed payroll, busted relationships and credit card debt to get to the awesome place I am now: great salary, 13 employees, two awesome VCs backing me and the team.

It's been one hell of an experience, but i encourage anyone able to take the risk to do it. I've learned 10x what any MBA student would in just a few years.

</comment><comment><USER6> Personally I just rephrased it...

 _How do you get over the fear of working jobs like this for the rest of your life and not doing what you know your heart wants to do? Quit and start a startup._

Works great if you're me. Your results may differ.

</comment><comment><USER7> Stop thinking, just do it. The worst might be to spend a couple of months working on a project you love; the best might be to spend a couple of years working on a project you love.

</comment><comment><USER8> What's the fear? Most startups fail, so you should be mentally ok with failing. (Of course, you should try with all your might to succeed, but just realize that even ALL your might may not be enough. :)

Save up enough money to self fund for a while. Put a lot of effort into it, learn a lot, do some cool stuff, and consider that worth your investment. If it succeeds, that's a great bonus!

</comment><comment><USER9> Best way is to save up enough money to live off of for at least a year.

</comment><comment><USER10> Just think of the fear as practice for all the times at the startup you'll be terrified that you've wasted N years of your life on something that suddenly looks bleak. Then try to erode it with rationality, or just think about how much fun being successful will be instead.

</comment><comment><USER11> Very interesting point of embracing the fear associated with starting a startup. I thoroughly believe in working with individuals who have something to lose; without fear true motivation and commitment are far from commonplace.

<comment><USER12> > without fear true motivation and commitment are far from commonplace.

This is an alien mindset to me. Fear has never motivated any of my longer term planning or actions. Maybe if I had a family whose life and welfare depended utterly on my success in a risky endeavor, it would be different. But people in that position rarely found startups. Lost opportunities is the larger if more abstract issue for younger would-be founders, who often enjoy a surplus of appealing options.

<comment><USER11> I find the possibility of failure very real; it is this possibility that serves as one of many factors that motivates me. I realize that I almost see it as a game: the opportunity to lose makes me more competitive. This line of thinking is analogous to a poker game: no one is competitive unless the chips are worth something. Could you elaborate on your lost opportunity point? Are you suggesting that the inability to focus on a particular idea can be crippling?

<comment><USER12> I interpreted your 'fear' to mean a kind of desperation. My point about lost opportunities was that your average startup founder is not at a loss for options, so desperation is not the driving force of his day to day work. I'm a very competitive guy as well, but I wouldn't put that down to anything like fear. In competition I'm motivated predominantly by the positive side of winning rather than the negative side of losing. That's the case even if I go all in.

It's always interesting to hear of someone else's experience with these matters because it's all too easy to forget how different we all are. Thanks for weighing in.

<comment><USER11> You as well. I suppose I'm just rather nervous about pursuing this. I'm just about to graduate from college and have decided to pursue my startup idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Simple. Wait until you reach such an extreme of boredom that the fear evaporates.

</comment><comment><USER14> What is the worst case scenario? Your startup fails and you get a job again? If the worst case scenario is that you're back where you are right now, then it's not a big leap to make.

<comment><USER15> That's not the worst case scenario, that's the second best case scenario (the best being that your startup succeeds). The worst case is that you spend a lot of time floundering unsure if your startup will succeed or not. Meanwhile your debt is growing, your eating bologna sandwiches every night, your relationship with friends and/or family is strained because you're in a bad mood all the time or because you've borrowed money from them. Then you decide that your startup has failed and you try to move back into corporate jobs except it's harder to find one this time because you've got the experience of an entrepreneur not of a recent graduate or because the economy is down and demand is low, or a number of other reasons. You're going to find a job but it's taking longer and that debt number keeps growing. Your dream has turned into a nightmare that'll take 5-10 years to pay off.

 _That's_ the worst case scenario, and a good reason to take the decision very seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> These are my thoughts, although I'm still figuring things out and haven't had break-out success yet.

1\. Launching a startup is a big deal. It's a great thing to do, but it's not for everyone and it shouldn't be taken lightly. If you're young and considering doing this, try working in one first. Start with one that has already raised capital and can pay you reasonably well-- no, you won't make the $85-100k available in corporate jobs in take-home cash; although if the company's successful, you'll do a bit better than that-- and learn on someone else's dime and risk. This means you _won't_ get all the glory if the startup's a home run. It does give you a chance to learn what startups are about. If you can't find a startup you like, find a larger corporation and become an "intrapreneur".

2\. Network and learn in your 20s. Zuckerberg is the exception, not the rule. Most successful startup entrepreneurs are going to be in their 30s; and most of those people spent their 20s diligently (and invisibly) working hard to learn about technology and also about people. Meet venture capitalists and see how they think. Meet (and become one of) the smart programmers you'll want to hire and see how they see the world. You're going to need a strong network if you want to do a startup because (a) you'll need meetings with investors and clients, and (b) you'll need a safety net if the startup doesn't work out.

3\. Remember that startups aren't _that_ much riskier than corporate jobs. The five-year survival rate of new companies isn't the infamous 10%, at least not when discussing serious technology companies with tech-savvy, full-time founders. It's actually about 50%. Now consider a corporate job: a lot of people end up "pigeonholed" with low visibility and minimal chances of advancement (once new people are being hired into the spots you deserve, this has happened to you) in corporate jobs. They fall off the "fast track" and will never get back on. This has more to do with political luck than skill or work ethic, and what are the odds of it happening? About fifty-fifty, after 5 years. So it seems to be a constant that any time you take a new job, there's about a 50% chance that you'll either lose that job, or it won't be worth it to come in to work, 5 years later. When you're young, the half-life of a job is probably less than that. In this light, startups aren't actually that dangerous. If you're 22 right now, there's over a 90 percent chance that you _will_ lose a job involuntarily (layoffs, health problems, political misfortune, business failures) in the next 40 years. It turns out not to be such a big deal.

<comment><USER17> To your thorough response, i would simply add that experience with large established companies is a good way to get an understanding how these behemoths operate, what the typical pain points they have, and how mature companies establish processes for everything.

Moving on to a startup as an employee, esp. an early one, is also a great experience and usually gives you experience outside of your specific discipline (e.g. developer). Everyone wears multiple hats, you operate in a small environment, and you'll be privy to VC meetings/ pitch decks/ cap tables/ board meetings/ etc.

Networking throughout those experiences will serve you well when the time comes to start your own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> a) Redefine failure for yourself. Failing is not getting what/where you want. b) Don't fail.

</comment><comment><USER19> If your heart tells you too, then you won't feel fear.

If you do feel fear, don't do a startup :-)

<comment><USER20> This is ridiculous.

Most people experience fear and anxiety when approaching risk, even if it's a risk they're absolutely willing to take. This whole "fear means you're not ready" meme only discourages people experiencing normal human emotion.

Well, screw that. If you feel fear, remember that all of us do, and if you're ready _go for it!_ Don't let other folks tell you the stars will align and you'll magically "feel right" because _you won't_ and it's no reason to hold back.

<comment><USER19> You are taking fear as a sign of shyness, which is a romantic view of what it really is. Fear results out of a subjective mismatch of your own perceived skills vs. the task ahead.

If in doubt (fear), you should probably spend more time and resources working on your skill set and finding out how (and if) you can be up to the task.

While "Just go for it" will certainly do if you know the guy personally and you're convinced that all he need is encouragement, generally stated (like in this thread) it is bad advice lacking both facts and perspective.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Prevent Your DDD App from Blowing Up by Implementing CQS/CQRS - <AUTHOR> https://khalilstemmler.com/cqs-article <comment><USER2> Somehow this article misses key steps in the logical proof of the need not to expect any data as a result of command. It's quite hard to understand the way of thought going from unspecified heisenbug to thesis about difficulties with reasoning about state.

I doubt that such proof can exist and that even such purism makes any sense: why adding another round trip between client and server? What architectural problem justifies doubling the number of requests?

<comment><USER3> > What architectural problem justifies doubling the number of requests?

Simplicity. If I create some "component" that declares what its data from the server needs to be (some subset of the domain), then it knows how to read/load the data to display (query). The component can do any commands where the user wants to change some domain entities/state and I don't need to care about figuring out how to update my local state with some response from the individual command. I can just ask the server "give me the updated state", which is the same subset of the domain you declared for that component. There's much less chances for things to go wrong in this design since there is only one code path for updating the components state.

<comment><AUTHOR> "There's much less chances for things to go wrong in this design since there is only one code path for updating the components state" ^ - well said! I'm going to update the article to be a bit more clear about that.</comment></comment></comment>


Factor programming language (modern Forth) - <AUTHOR> http://factorcode.org/ <comment><USER2> <http://factorcode.org/littledan/dls.pdf>

[http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffactorcode.or...](http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffactorcode.org%2Flittledan%2Fdls.pdf)

Good introduction to the language for beginners.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank for that pdf, reading it right now. Having a bit of Forth experience probably helps tremendously in reading it.

I noticed the 'pipeline' vs 'function call' equivalence a couple of months ago and I'm still working out all the implications of it.

It may be that stack oriented languages and functional languages are a lot closer to each other conceptually than you'd normally think they are and I think the pdf you linked here illustrates that nicely.

Also there is some equivalence between a process pipeline and either of these two. (for instance 'cat file.txt | grep x | wc').

Even if it uses a series of inter-process communication the effect is much the same. In factor that you could code up words for 'cat', 'grep' and 'wc' and then it would probably look something like this:

      :cat (filename -- lines) ascii file-lines;

      "file.txt" cat
      x grep
      wc

Not sure if that's exactly correct but it seems a trivial expansion of the example in the pdf, more complicated pipelines would simply require more steps but the principle remains.

<comment><USER3> _stack oriented languages and functional languages are a lot closer to each other conceptually than you'd normally think they are_

Yes. In fact, here's something to think about.

Imagine a dialect of lisp where every function takes a known number of arguments. You could hard-code this per function, for example saying that + always takes exactly 2, or you could do it by keyword args, or you could make every function take a quoted list, or maybe some other ways.

In this lisp dialect, parentheses would be superfluous (except to specify quoted lists).

If you wrote it backwards, it would be a forth.

For example, let's say * and + take exactly 2 args each.

        (* 3 (+ 1 2)) ; lisp
        * 3 + 1 2     ; trivial variation if arity is always known
        2 1 + 3 *     ; valid in almost every forth dialect, RPN calculators, etc.

Likewise, it would be ugly, but we could imagine a shell-like language that used dash-flags for all args such that you never had to make a pipe explicit:

        cat --file=foo sort -n head

Instead of:

        cat foo | sort -n | head

If you wrote this backwards, it would basically be an ugly forth dialect with keyword args.

Basically, if you don't use assignment, you can chain things up however you please. If your syntax chains in one direction, you're arguably writing some kind of bastardized lisp; if it goes the other way, it's arguably a forth dialect. This is why I capitalize Perl and Python but not forth and lisp ;).

<comment><AUTHOR> there is one huge advantage to the 'forth' way of doing things, you can start processing left-to-right as you read in the data. This makes it possible to stick a forth 'processor' on the other end of a wire and to parse / run the code as it gets pushed down the wire without needing backing store the size of every possible input.

For a 'lisp' like structure you'd need at a minimum enough storage to get all the way to the innermost expression before you can start to interpret the data.

Normally not much of a problem, but if you were to make a fabric that consists of little processors stuck together with comms wires the forth way of doing it could be an advantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> loup-vaillant No way. This language has been around for all this time, and it's only submitted now? Any idea why it took so long? Are there any other submissions about Factor in HN?

<comment><USER4> This link has been submitted a total of five times, including a previous time by jacquesm:

<http://searchyc.com/submissions/factorcode.org>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, that must have been when I first ran in to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting that the x86 32 bit version only supports processors with SSE2. SIMD support in the language?

<comment><USER6> SSE2 is great for more than just SIMD. It gives you additional registers, allowing the compiler to generate more parallel scalar operations. Visual C++ with /arch:SSE2 will happily interleave x87 instructions with SSE2 instructions, which looks strange but works well.

You may also want to use SSE2 for saturated scalar additions or prefetches.

Very few people have x86 processors that don't support SSE2 these days. In our tests at IMVU, I think less than 1% of our customers didn't support SSE2, and it was only that high due to the Athlon XP.

In short: when starting a project targeting x86 today, default SSE2 on.

<comment><USER7> Under what circumstances does Visual C++ still emit x87 instructions? I'd think that other than legacy support, 80-bit long double arithmetic, and the 32-bit ABI (float return values are passed on the x87 stack) there's no reason to use x87.

<comment><USER6> From <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7t5yh4fd(VS.80).aspx>

The optimizer will choose when and how to make use of the SSE and SSE2 instructions when /arch is specified. SSE and SSE2 instructions will be used for some scalar floating-point computations, when it is determined that it is faster to use the SSE/SSE2 instructions and registers rather than the x87 floating-point register stack. As a result, your code will actually use a mixture of both x87 and SSE/SSE2 for floating-point computations. Additionally, with /arch:SSE2, SSE2 instructions can be used for some 64-bit integer operations.

In addition to using the SSE and SSE2 instructions, the compiler will also use other instructions that are present on the processor revisions that support SSE and SSE2. An example is the CMOV instruction that first appeared in the Pentium Pro revision of the Intel processors.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Digg to address censorship – sure they will - <AUTHOR> http://www.fvrte.com/archive/2008/02/23/digg-to-address-censorship-ndash-sure-they-will.aspx

<comment><USER2> Stop spamming your blog.

Thanks.</comment>


Creating Heatmap from Scratch in Python (2018) - <AUTHOR> http://www.geodose.com/2018/01/creating-heatmap-in-python-from-scratch.html <comment><USER3> I like seaborn's jointplot()[1] function for generating plots like this. I actually prefer the "hexagonal bin" plot, but jointplot() can also do kernel density estimation like this post does.

Hexbin example: [https://seaborn.pydata.org/examples/hexbin_marginals.html](https://seaborn.pydata.org/examples/hexbin_marginals.html)

KDE example: [https://seaborn.pydata.org/examples/joint_kde.html](https://seaborn.pydata.org/examples/joint_kde.html)

If you are doing any exploratory analysis using scatterplots, I highly recommend that you also generate hexbin plot or heatmap. Far too often it turns out all of the points are concentrated in a small area of the plot, but that's not always apparent on a scatterplot.

[1] [https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.jointplot.html](https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.jointplot.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Please be aware that you MUST NOT use this for geographic coordinates such as "GPS" or "WGS84" latitude & longitude pairs. Depending on the longitude areas are of different sizes. You must use code that knows about that or your results will be utterly wrong.

<comment><USER5> This would only skew density maps not counts maps.

<comment><USER4> Well, this is about density maps unless I overlooked something?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I much prefer kriging, which seems to better model sparse areas. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriging) too bad there are no image comparisons for those methods. Main difference - instead of sum of distances with cutoff, you make sum of values weighted by distances for each map point.

<comment><USER7> What you describe sounds more like idw than kriging.

<comment><USER6> Indeed, I've started with nice images on web which were described as "kriging", then went on to page about kriging, seen some general ideas and implemented what I thought would be fast, simple and work. That way I had something which looked right for my application (visualising district heating temperatures in city), but only now I know how it's really called. Still better looking that heatmap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Neat...I just wish there was an easy way to give the basemap library a 3-item tuple with (lat, lon, value) and have it automatically do a heat map and not just plot the points. That is an option in some software.

<comment><USER9> I have something of the sort. Give it later, lon and a value, it performs cubic interpolation and forms a heatmap. Some of the code is specific to my application but I'm sure you can reuse.

[https://github.com/rraks/sigcatch](https://github.com/rraks/sigcatch)

Open to contributions.

<comment><USER8> Thank you! I'll look.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel like these days we should be creating more user-friendly graphs - <USER2> for the creator of the graph and for the reader. I created this graph of the Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 earlier today ([https://kyso.io/KyleOS/atmospheric- co2-concentrations#code=h...](https://kyso.io/KyleOS/atmospheric- co2-concentrations#code=hidden)). Would love to see the OP's heatmap recreated with plotly.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're making heatmaps with GIS data, give some critical thought to the interpretation of the map to make sure you're not just doing this: [https://xkcd.com/1138/](https://xkcd.com/1138/)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is really cool. Thank you for sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> you're welcome</comment></comment>


The Rise And Fall of Languages in 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/229100358;jsessionid=S2HMJB000P3PBQE1GHPSKHWATMY32JVN?actionType=twdl <comment><USER3> "Over the years, the index has been both praised and vilified. The latter by language adherents who are unhappy over the decline of their favorite idiom."

Really? That's the best defense that can be brought for the methodology - <USER2> textbook ad hominem attack?

<comment><USER4> Criticism merely reinforces the uncomfortable truths that the programming elite have silenced for so long! Anyone who asks for reproducibility in science is part of the conspiracy too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought TIOBE was vilified because it does a really bad job of measuring what it claims to measure.

</comment><comment><USER6> This paints a very different picture: <https://github.com/languages>

edit: I realize this is measuring something different, but it suggests that the reports of the decline of Ruby and JavaScript could be wrong.

<comment><USER7> There are two major problems with this:

Any project which has html documentation, which contains javascript, gets counted as javascript.

git and github in particular seem very popular in some communities (ruby is a good example) and less so in others (C++ comes to mind, as one I am familar with).

<comment><USER8> BitBucket seems to have a lot of Python projects hosted there which might take a chunk out of Python's share on Github.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Alternative opinion: <http://langpop.com/>

<comment><USER10> The langpop link is interesting because it does an analysis by source. If you are familiar with Craigslist, you can see some of the problems with the methodologies. The SF Bay Area is heavily into web development, so PHP is no surprise. But C and C++ are second and third and essentiallt tied. That much C development going on? Not really. The majority of listing have C\C++ some where in the acronym stew, just to indicate that they want real programmers. So what were companies hiring a year ago, when last I looked? PHP, Java, C#, Ruby, and C++. All the rest was HR noise. But it's more interesting than nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Allright, who has been playing with the random number generator?

One thing you'll have to do before looking at the data presented here (if you want to give it a second look) is to take into account that there is a lot more to programming than just web programming.

But even with that in mind I have a hard time seeing Assembly on the rise and JavaScript dropping and named in one breath with delphi.

And I'm not a fan of any of those (ok, maybe assembly), so that can't be it.

If you want to skip the article to go right to the data it's here:

[http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....](http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> Ada, RPG on OS/400 and Transact SQL? Really?

Anyone risks a hypothesis on why this happened in 2010?

<comment><USER13> Lot defense work, people not replacing OS/400 machines and still needing new features, and MS sold a lot of databases this year[1].

[1] If you go through your corporate approval process to replace mysql because your mad at Oracle, don't be surprised if SQL Server walks in the door.

<comment><USER12> Why would I want to replace MySQL. It's GPL. Larry may scream all he wants and business will continue as usual. The worst that can happen is to use a forked version.

Drizzle is very interesting, BTW.

<comment><USER13> Welcome to the wonderful world of corporate America, a good Microsoft salesman, and listening to the tech press. :)

<comment><USER12> It never ceases to amaze me how resilient corporations are, given so many decisions are delegated to the people least qualified to make them.

The only reason I read mainstream tech publications is to know which silly ideas I will have to demolish in the near future because some clueless PHB decided it would be the next great thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yes and if you believe their data, Pascal and ADA are also on the ascendancy.

<comment><USER15> I can see some rationales for both modern Pascal dialects and Ada as application languages. Foot-shooting is less readily achieved than in C or C++, and the compilers and libraries are mature, so you can do some pretty heavy lifting. As well, Oracle is scaring people away from the JVM, so where the answer for a lot of apps used to be "Java, period," now we're probably seeing more investigation of alternatives.

<comment><USER16> I can't imagine anyone being chased away from Java by Oracle's IP claims would run to Java. They are such different languages, so much so that this assertion is as audacious as claiming people who recently quit smoking are becoming addicted to cabbage and other leafy vegetables.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ugh, Tiobe. I wish we could come up with a better measure for this. I don't really feel that Tiobe's index is worth anything at all.

</comment><comment><USER18> JavaScript with a double-arrow drop in 2010?

<comment><USER12> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiobe_index>

"Tiobe programming community index is an ordered list of programming languages, sorted by the frequency of web search using the name of the language as the keyword"

Maybe people are searching more for specific frameworks and libraries instead of the language. I work mostly in Python and it's been a long time since I last googled for "python". These days I google for "django" or "appengine".

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Because obviously the most popular languages must be the best ones.

<comment><USER4> ... and obviously it's trivial to filter out false cognates when analyzing search term volume.

... and obviously it's statistically meaningful to compare year over year trends without accounting for changes in global search volume.

... and obviously you can trust an index even if it doesn't know the difference between a web browser and a language implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I fear that attempting to name the "best" languages is just as fruitless as trying to name to the most "popular" languages.</comment>


Dockerless, part 3: Moving development environment to containers with Podman - <AUTHOR> https://mkdev.me/en/posts/dockerless-part-3-moving-development-environment-to-containers-with-podman <comment><USER2> At my company we did our own docker execution environment. We generally like docker's layers and packaging, but dislike the runtime.

With AWS you already have a virtualization, why do we need another layer?

We packaged a super slim Linux with an init that just has some minimal code reading out of AWS EC2 user info the conf. Downloads docker hub image and runs it as a process.

No virtual networking or ssh access. No magic. Just a process on an aws ec2 instance.

<comment><USER3> It sounds very inefficient to be honest. Containers don't add much overhead - they are essentially processes that run in constrained environments (see [http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man7/namespaces.7.html](http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man7/namespaces.7.html)).

Why dedicate an entire ec2 instance to a single container?

<comment><USER4> It wasn't that long ago that we were doing service-per-VM and really OP has just described an implementation of that strategy with containers.

You would scale the virtual machines to try and reach optimal resource usage rather than pick a standard fleet of virtual machines for all workloads and let a scheduler do some kind of knapsack scheduling based on available resources.

<comment><USER5> Comparatively, service-per-vm approaches are very wasteful and ineficcient, moreso if a container orchestration system is used to manage the deployment. It makes no sense to fine-tune VMs just to match the resource requirements of a single process, particularly as they change over time and as that approach leads you to a collection of custom-tayloted VMs that are needlessly cumbersome to manage and scale.

Meanwhile containers enable you to run multiple services on the same VM, scale them horizontally as you need on the same pre-determined amount of resources, use blue/green deployments to spread your services throughout your VMs automatically, and achieve all of this automatically and effortlessly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm dense about alt-containers but why? Is this all about Docker security issues? Is Docker too passé now that it's in production everywhere? Why should I spend money on not using Docker in 2019?

<comment><USER7> > Why should I spend money on not using Docker in 2019?

You should use what works for you - ultimately you know your context and circumstances better and you can make the decisions that affect you/your team better than any of us.

HN is not an indicator of industry trends, but more of a set of interesting articles and viewpoints that come together, though you will often see authors and commenters pushing hard in certain directions.

In this instance, have a look at the author's part 1 under 'Reasons to switch', see if any of the reasons given work for you.

[https://mkdev.me/en/posts/dockerless-part-1-which-tools- to-r...](https://mkdev.me/en/posts/dockerless-part-1-which-tools-to-replace- docker-with-and-why)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing that, it provides a lot more context. I don't run a lot of containers, but the few I do I've naively run on an EC2 VM and ran into many issues with the docker daemon. I've since embraced Fargate and haven't looked back. This takes me back to those hours spent troubleshooting (PSA: don't use snap to install docker if you want to have a good time) and see the appeal in a daemonless container, and the root access definitely is a concern as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For a while I could understand divergent ecosystems for container architectures. But all Redhat did was reinvent tooling, and not particularly to any significant advantage. I feel like all these tools were the brainchild of Dan Walsh as a rogue marketing campaign via Redhat to compete with Docker. All these articles are the same... How to replace your exact Docker workflow with Buildah! Now, less than ever, am I incented to use any products that come from Bluehat.

<comment><USER9> I was never happy with the way docker was designed - it tried to steal too much work from the operating system. Docker should never had logging framework not should it be a daemon+client talking over socket, creating permission, indirection and async problems.

Docker is straigh hostile to systemd, tried to bite part of its responsibilities and does not cooperate with it in many parts.

If you want to run a docker image as a system service, its much easier to do that with podman - the docker image will inherit the system.limits and will behave like a Type=simple service with proper start/stop control and logging.

\-- add: worth noting, that podman and buildah are very alike "docker" and "docker build" up to the point that you can do alias docker="podman" and can expect all the docker features work. they consume the same docker files, they build the same OCI images and can use the same registries. trying podman/buildah/scopeo really got me thinking - where's the moby inc. business? how can they commercialize a commodity?

<comment><USER10> > I was never happy with the way docker was designed - it tried to steal too > much work from the operating system. Docker should never had logging > framework not should it be a daemon+client talking over socket, creating > permission, indirection and async problems.

> Docker is straigh hostile to systemd, tried to bite part of its > responsibilities and does not cooperate with it in many parts.

you had me until the rationale for this was protecting systemd, which is doing the exact same thing..

<comment><USER9> i had a specific operating system that already come with systemd. and all our company's programs are packaged as systemd services. i dont like the way systemd treated system.limits, udev, logind, dbus that is impossible to remove and logging that is worse than rsyslog, but hell, we already paid the price for adopting systemd, why paying extra for docker exibiting same behavior?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If only Minikube could support installing rootless Kubernetes directly in Podman containers on Linux. I love the concept of Podman, but without an easy installer for Kubernetes it seems mostly pointless for most use cases.

<comment><USER12> I'm pretty sure (though it's been a while since I worked on it) that the usernetes project gives you all of the helpful scripts you need to get rootless Kubernetes running. I don't think you really need MiniKube to support it unless you have some specific requirement to use it.

<comment><USER11> I still haven't found an easy and reliable way to do this. Do you have some simple instructions, cause it looks way more complicated than it should be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great article. FYI: OpenShift 4 uses podman as run command instead of docker.</comment>


Free Trade with China Wasn't Such a Great Idea for the U.S - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-26/free-trade-with-china-wasn-t-such-a-great-idea <comment><USER2> I am very afraid about this narrow point of view about US worker, the real questions is: "how many people had their life improved or worsened all over the world." Maybe it improved the life of many more Chinese than it did worsen that of people from the rest of the world, that would be a net gain. There is a bright side: lower cost tool become accessible to poor countries, and China is using its money to invest in abandoned Africa. (I'm not sure it's a net gain, but looking at American workers is certainly not the way to evaluate the situation)

<comment><USER3> It is absolutely the right view to take _for US workers_ and _for the people that politically represent them_.

<comment><USER4> Yes moreover, you can be assured workers in China (of any other offshore workers in any other country) are not feeling sorry for the jobs blue collar workers in the US lost.

They rightly feel they earned their jobs. And rightly Americans feel their jobs were taken. Same coin, different sides.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Ask any economist what issue they agree on, and the first answer you're > likely to hear is "free trade is good." The general public disagrees > vehemently, but economists are almost unanimous on this point.

I've never heard an economist claim free trade will lead to lower unemployment. I've heard that it will lead to more efficient markets. But efficiency != equality, and its completely possible the gains go to the top while the losses go to the bottom.

<comment><USER6> agree.

essentially it's not the job of market players to create fairness[1]. it's the job of the society around it - may it be local or global

[1] i would even go as far and saying that the player's desire is even unfairness (skewed in the players direction)

<comment><USER7> fairness is subjective, free markets arnt inherently fair. they exclude externalities like equality, environment, and other things that are valued by individuals that are ignored in the markets models.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the same effects will be seen when automation really starts hitting. Net gains will go to a few while many people will end up unemployed, with the overall effect on society being potentially negative due to higher unemployment.

That's why initiatives like basic salary, pioneered now in Finland and also seemingly by Y Combinator - are so important.

Also I think huge opportunities are missed by not focusing on retraining people to industries where they can add value.

Freely available high quality education/(re)training across all age groups will pay itself back many times over.

<comment><USER9> MOOCs _are_ freely available high quality education.

<comment><USER8> MOOCs are great, and will play a huge part.

Still there is much more that could be done, MOOC's are not the solution for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You cannot make decisions in a vacuum. If the US did not engage in free trade with China, and instead placed high taxes on Chinese manufactured goods then Russia or the EU would have led the electronics and people-intensive manufacturing companies. Can you imagine Apple trying to compete states side? Impossible. Global US market share would have plummeted.

Did engaging in free trade with China negatively impact low-skill workers? Absolutely. But the answer to that is not to try to stop competition, it's to create more training programs and wealth redistribution. Furthermore, there are _plenty_ of jobs China can't take (construction, fruit picking, etc) but instead of wages for those jobs going up, America allowed Mexican workers (illegals, temporary foreign workers, and low skill legal migrants) to compete with an already over competing sector of the American workforce.

When farmers would remark that "Americans don't want these jobs" that is such a load of bullshit. Of course Americans want those jobs. They just don't want them at $5/hour. What should have been allowed to happen is that supply and demand should have done their thing and there would have been many hard, but good paying, low skill jobs in America.

<comment><USER4> If the minimum wage went up to $15 hr the beneficiaries would be low skills Americans and you'd see a steady outflow of low skills foreign workers who now take up that sector.

In addition you'd see much more in the way of automation as people become too expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Free trade is good for the collective world, but has negative effects locally and regionally.

That's why free trade agreements are so hard to negotiate, they screw people in one place while benefiting others in another place.

China, and the world, are better off, but tell that to the guy who has to feed his family but he lost his job as a manager at a factory in New Jersey. Not exactly easy to do.

<comment><USER12> In the general case, most of America is better off too. The downside would be _very_ localized.

The research being cited here is very specific to the current situation with China, and they recognize that themselves. The key difference (they believe) is that the China is so huge and has transformed so rapidly.

In normal circumstances, things would have happened slower, and the employees of affected industries would have had more time to seek alternatives, or to retrain, and so the impact on them would have been less negative.

This whole thing should make you ask why America was at a disadvantage because of the speed of Chinese transformation. In particular, what is it that's slowing America's ability to pivot? I don't have specific evidence to answer this question, but I believe the answer can be found by looking at our regulatory load, and how the difficulty of jumping through regulatory hoops is always increasing - compared to the Chinese, who in this respect have additional degrees of freedom.

<comment><USER13> This paper shows how there's negative affects from free trade with China, and your conclusion is "oh it was negative with China, but all those other free trade deals were positive"? Sorry, but NAFTA was a massive job killer. Just ask anyone in Detroit.

Also, the idea that China has no regulation on business is ridiculous. Obviously you've never worked there!

<comment><USER12> _but all those other free trade deals were positive_

In economics, "free trade creates additional wealth for all involved" is closer to consensus among economists than is "the Earth is warming" is among climatologists. The paper [1] that the OP references does itself say that their conclusion is peculiar to the circumstances of China:

"While these results do not at all suggest that international trade is in the aggregate harmful to nations--indeed, China's unprecedented rise from widespread poverty bears testimony to trade's transformative economic power-- it makes clear that trade not only has benefits but also significant costs."

 _but NAFTA was a massive job killer_

As it happens, Don Boudreaux [2] just published something relating directly to this:

"since NAFTA took effect Mexicans have invested more – 59 percent more, to be precise – in manufacturing activities in the U.S. than Americans have invested in manufacturing activities in Mexico."

Quoting Confucius again:

 _Obviously you 've never worked there!_

No, I haven't. But I've been there many times, and know many people who do work there. What I've observed myself is that for the average person on the street in Shanghai - say, someone making and selling pork buns, or a farmer bringing in a cart of vegetables from the country - there seems to be a significant laissez-faire attitude. At a larger scale - what we're talking about for international trade - my perception is that while China may have many barriers, knowing the right people and being able to "grease the wheels", makes things proceed relatively easily. In America our regulations are taken much more seriously - we don't have anything like their degree of corruption, but we also don't have that as a means to get around onerous rules.

[1] [http://www.ddorn.net/papers/Autor-Dorn-Hanson- ChinaShock.pdf](http://www.ddorn.net/papers/Autor-Dorn-Hanson-ChinaShock.pdf)

[2] [http://cafehayek.com/2016/01/which-way-flow-the-equity- inves...](http://cafehayek.com/2016/01/which-way-flow-the-equity-investments- in-manufacturing.html)

EDIT: formatting

<comment><USER13> _In economics, "free trade creates additional wealth for all involved" is closer to consensus among economists than is "the Earth is warming" is among climatologists._

Except for, you know, the economists who penned the study that is the topic of this thread, along with plenty of others. On top of which, whenever someone spouts this falsehood, invariably it's economists who are looking at very narrow definitions of free trade, or very narrow definitions of "creating additional wealth". Is free trade good if the only gains in wealth go to a few people while most workers lose their jobs? Maybe the GDP increased, but for your average person it wasn't good.

The study does not say that the conclusion is peculiar to China, just that not all trade agreements are in aggregate harmful. Yes, China benefitted, but if it takes a population to be at starving level poverty to benefit from free trade, then I think your average American would say "no thanks".

Investment is not the same thing as employment. Mexicans may invest in American based companies, but those companies can outsource every last one of their employees if they so desire. Not to mention he says himself _I realize that 5 of 21 years is too small a portion of time from which to draw any conclusions._ Conservative estimates of job losses from NAFTA are in the realm of at least 700,000. It's pretty obvious that job losses are part of the deal when the government created the NAFTA-Transitional Adjustment Assistance Program to help people deal with losing their jobs as result of NAFTA!

There are many regulations in China. Sure there's more corruption there than here, but you seem to be advocating for America to become a more corrupt environment to improve America's "ability to pivot". Do you really think the brown paper bag economy is the way to go?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I once had an angry argument on reddit about the whole "globalization is reducing world poverty" thing.

I find this argument to be a very weird one. How can you compromise your own citizens for the sake of other countries, while you obviously have no power over their course in history? What sort of government compromises the well- being of its citizens and the health of its economy for the benefit of other countries ? Since when does international trade regulations involve plain altruism and sacrificing your own?

What shocks is how you can still find many videos of Milton Friedman defending free trade, but to that point it almost sound like propaganda. I vividly remember that video when he went into a big asian city while praising the free market.

For example, seeing how much electronics are built in China, what is preventing the Chinese government to put heavy tariffs on those exports? I guess China doesn't have a monopoly on electronics, but I'm still a little curious.

<comment><USER9> > Since when does international trade regulations involve plain altruism and > sacrificing your own?

International trade is not based on plain altruism. On both sides of the trade, some people benefit and some lose, but the net gains at both sides are positive. The article focuses on those hurt in US, but it does not mention how the US capitalists, consumers and workers not competing with China benefit.

> what is preventing the Chinese government to put heavy tariffs on those > exports?

Chinese governments not only do not place tariffs on their exports, but also subsidies the exports. That is, the goods exported from China is cheaper than those sold directly in China. They do it for their own self interests.

<comment><USER13> Many proponents of free trade argue that we should be pro free trade because it benefits the poor people in places like China. The OP is referring to that argument.

As for why this study didn't focus on the benefits - maybe because there weren't any? Or maybe it's because the benefits mostly went to the executives of large multinational corporations who are lobbying for these deals?

<comment><USER9> > maybe because there weren't any

The other comments have said plenty about the benefits, the most obvious being how cheap your daily goods are nowadays, effectively boosting the purchasing power of every American. In addition, had computers and smartphones not been so cheap because of the Chinese workers, the whole Silicon Valley bubble probably would never have come into existence.

> it's because the benefits mostly went to the executives of large > multinational corporations

Why should the benefits of the executives be discounted? Perhaps you believe that the rich should not be made even richer; rather, the poor should receive the most benefits. Then why do you think that American workers, orders of magnitude richer than the Chinese, should be made even richer?

<comment><USER14> > Then why do you think that American workers, orders of magnitude richer than > the Chinese, should be made even richer?

Because that's in the interest of their fellow citizens, since those citizens can vote to influence decisions that concern them, not the chinese. I don't think an american want a chinese to fail, but I don't think an american citizen really holds the fate of chinese people, and I don't think anybody should pretend otherwise. That's mainly about doing things that concerns you, and things that you can reach. The state of the chinese economy is in the hands of the chinese.

What I mean is that those decision are beyond the grasp or citizens and politicians. People should care about their own first, others second. Trade is fine, as long as there is no loss on your side. Maybe some want to believe that the world is one uniform place, but the reality of politics say otherwise. Sometimes you have to come back to basic strategy and realities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Mediocre article, and the authors tone is really unpleasant. Donald Trump could have written this.

<comment><USER16> Here is the actual paper: [http://www.ddorn.net/papers/Autor-Dorn-Hanson- ChinaShock.pdf](http://www.ddorn.net/papers/Autor-Dorn-Hanson-ChinaShock.pdf)

Here is some discussion on Marginal Revolution: [http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/01/aut...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/01/autor- dorn-and-hanson-on-what-we-know-about-china.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't think that anybody ever claimed that free trade was going to be a Pareto improvement[1]. It is going to nearly always be a Kaldor-Hicks[2] improvement, though, which means you _can_ make everybody better off by doing free trade then taxing the free trade winners and giving the money to the free trade losers.

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

[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaldor%E2%80%93Hicks_efficienc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaldor%E2%80%93Hicks_efficiency)

<comment><USER18> Did you miss the whole "it will be bad for the workers but good for the consumers" then? Because it was repeated incessantly even though it is immediately obvious to anybody that the average person, will be better off having a good job than being able to buy cheap crap from China.

<comment><USER19> It's also immediately obvious to anyone that the average person in America has a job which is much better than the assembly line drudge work outsourced to China, and the argument being made is that US economy has the additional funds (if not the political will) to compensate the relatively small number of people who are unable to find any work since their manufacturing roles were outsourced, especially since the dollar can purchase an awful lot more consumer goods than it used to be able to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Both the post's title and the linked article's thesis aren't supported by the evidence. The article first proclaims the unanimous agreement among economists about the benefits of free trade. It then dives into the details of _one_ study who seems to contradict this consensus, and then proclaims that no real consensus exists, and even if it did exist, it's wrong.

2 things:

First, a couple of economists disagreeing with the mainstream, among the thousands of economic researchers, does not break a consensus. If we were to wait for unanimous agreement before embarking on any policy, we would never get anywhere. As the author himself admitted, there is a very strong and prevelent belief among economists that free trade is good for America and for the world in general. That should be good enough, despite a few dissenters believing differently.

Second, the study linked does not disagree with the consensus at all! All the study claims, is that a small portion of the population has not benefited from free trade. With any substantive public policy, this will _always_ be the case. Imagine if California declared tomorrow that only people who've lived in CA for 5 years can work as programmers. Such a policy would be horrendously bad for Americans and Californians in general. But it sure would make life great for a small number of unemployed programmers who are currently living in California.

And so it is with free trade as well. It may benefit some and not benefit others, but the overall economic benefits far outweigh the costs, both for Americans and for the world in general. Even when considering those not benefiting from globalization, we can and should help them better by using the increased economic rewards that come from free trade, to build a better social safety net and education/training program for the unemployed. That would the positive step forward, not walking down the destructive path of protectionism.

</comment><comment><USER21> Free-trade moved manufacturing over seas, but the types of industry that grew domestically required fewer workers with greater skill sets.

Free trade has certainly caused problems, but domestic efficiency improvements have exaggerated those problems.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is pure bogus. Without free trade with China most of today's smartphones would simply be too expensive, in the reach of only 1% of the people (yeah, that number is taken out of my a.s, but you get the idea). With no smart- phones there would be no "unicorns", there would be less profits for FB, Google and Apple itself.

And there's also the fact that you cannot "price in" into any economic equations the improvement in life conditions brought in to the general public by the use of smart-phones.

Economics as a science needs a total re-think, or at least they should tone down their end-of-the-world statements.

<comment><USER13> Funny, there's other products like cars throughout the years that were manufactured entirely in America and amazingly most people could afford to buy them - not just the 1%.

The idea that without free trade with China only the 1% would be able to afford smartphones is total nonsense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Economists are frauds.

</comment><comment><USER24> Free trade puts the benefit of corporations before the benefit of nations.

<comment><USER25> Depends if you consider only your nation and your people important. If you place more value in humanity itself, then free trade puts the benefits of corporations _and humanity_ before the benefit of nations.

<comment><USER26> Only if free trade implies open borders. Capital mobility without labour mobility is a severely imbalanced market and hard to pass off as a benefit to humanity.

<comment><USER25> We have free trade, but no open borders. Yet it has caused huge benefit to humanity.

So I would change your statement as well.

Free trade is a huge benefit for humanity as a whole.

Open borders may or may not be a huge benefit for humanity, as we have not tried it yet. The current economic migrant crisis will be a good starting point for an investigation and we will see if they integrate well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Article is interesting for the part it leaves out. Unions essentially inflated the cost of labor so much that doing the work in another country and shipping it across an entire ocean before redistributing it to various points across the country was CHEAPER that manufacturing it closer to the central point of domestic delivery.

That is the point that always gets left out. Cause and effect is a very real thing.

EDIT: This was apparently controversial. Voted up quickly and voted all the way back down at the same speed.

<comment><USER19> Unions didn't create the cost of living differences between the US and China. The average Chinese worker earns less than $5k per annum, and that's despite unusually long work weeks and sustained wage growth over the last couple of decades. The average US worker isn't a union member but couldn't live on $5k per annum

<comment><USER28> Cost of living differences are real but almost always overstated. It isn't as though a family in China can live the same lifestyle as a middle class American on $5k/year because everything there is so much cheaper. The average Chinese worker is very poor by US standards, even after taking into account cost of living differences. In fact, if you swapped a family with a cash income of $5k/year from China to the US, in many way they'd be better off as they'd have access to more and better socially provisioned goods and services.

When you make this sort of argument you are implicitly saying "Chinese people don't mind being poor as much as Americans do" even if that's not what you meant to say.

<comment><USER19> I agree cost of living differences are complicated and even low paid Americans expecting to drive a car to work, for example, plays a big role in pushing salary expectations up at the bottom end. But I don't think there are many parts of the US where you can comfortably rent a house and feed a family on $5k per annum. And I don't think most assembly line workers in export processing zones in China earn anywhere near that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Making Windows Media Center available in Windows 8 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/03/making-windows-media-center-available-in-windows-8.aspx <comment><USER2> Interesting:

 _"we've decided to make Windows Media Center available to Windows 8 customers via the Add Features to Windows 8 control panel (formerly known as Windows Anytime Upgrade). This ensures that customers who are interested in Media Center have a convenient way to get it. Windows Media Player will continue to be available in all editions, but without DVD playback support."_

I guess "a convenient way to get it" should read "a convenient way to buy it". I wonder how well that will go with their customers when they want to play a DVD a few weeks or months after installing Windows 8.</comment>


Warren's Antitrust Proposal: Break Up Big Tech or Just Regulate It Better? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/04/warrens-antitrust-proposal-should-we-break-up-big-tech-or-just-regulate-it-better.html <comment><USER2> I'll take Big Tech over Big Govt any day because one doesn't have a fleet of attack drones

<comment><USER3> "Big Tech" knows where we live, owns "our" data. "They" don't need attack drones, maybe?

The real point to be made, imo, is that busting up the Big Bell into the Baby Bells, and so on, did not really address the issue: regionality does not provide for "competitive markets", multiplicity of players in the field is what makes for "choice" and "competition", and keeps folks honest, we have to hope.

Therefore, anti-trust could be about enhancing entrances and exits (startups, refinancings/redirections, retirements), or changes in management, i.e., effective "regulation" could be more like "market development" or influence, rather than "being a lid on the jar", "turd in the punch bowl", mostly a tariffing and acquisitions/merger blocker or allower.

If Big Tech and Big Govt want to smooth the path into the future together, without taking individual political freedoms away from folks, that is definitely possible, given the motivation and will to make that happen. Without the motivation and will, it's not going to happen, no matter how possible it is.

There's a lot of societal level contributions that "Big Tech" has not figured out how to build and maintain, such as the appropriate freedom of speech while also providing privacy and safety online. There's simply a lot to be "regulated" or defined as a requirement of "Big Tech" by society. The Amish and their careful approach to technology bears review and some amount of emulation, as I see it. ymmv. Thanks for reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The best part of an emergent global economy is that any single government can only over-reach so much before the country's GDP plummets in the global ranking, leading to revolution or collapse.</comment>


Uber's C.E.O. Choice Faces a Question of Ambitions - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/technology/uber-new-ceo.html <comment><USER2> No new information for HNers. 90% is about his seemingly risk averse nature solely based on his decision to stick to merchant model. Pass on the article if you already know the story.

</comment><comment><USER3> This may be the CEO most deserving of whatever he is paid, ever.

He's tasked with righting a ship that's leaking everywhere–a board embroiled in litigation, a former CEO still in a position of power, and resenting his ouster. Employees who, by now, are self-selected to consider any moves to heal the toxic culture as assaults on themselves.

Meanwhile, they've spent $1200 of investors' money on every user they currently have (including the expensive failed adventures in China and Russia). It isn't quite clear if they're profitable anywhere, or if they're continuing to be a program to distribute wealth from the bottom (drivers) and top (investors) to the middle class rivalled only by the New Deal.

What's still ominous is the complete lack of a moat around their business. Every driver and every customer is a free app install away from giving any competitor a shot. Their autonomous car project is in deep trouble–even if the Waymo lawsuit doesn't kill it, it now seems certain that a lot of assumption were optimistic–exemplified by Apple's demotion of its competing project, and the fact that the far superior technical effort by Google hasn't produced anything market-ready, yet.

But even if, it was always counterintuitive for autonomous driving to be a driver (heh!) for Uber's future: if there is one hard problem that Uber has arguably solved, it's managing a fleet of drivers and their cars, with all the trouble such a huge workforce of mostly low-income people with low job attachment brings. It is this core competency of Uber that would be rendered worthless by autonomous vehicles.

Instead, car rides in such an environment will be bare-knuckle fight, requiring efficiency in the face of barely-existing margins, and deep pockets to survive phases of intense competition. There is nothing that could stop any business with money to burn to put a few dozen cars into whatever happens to be Uber's most profitable market at any given time and reduce their margins to 0 or less overnight. After all, it doesn't take that many cars to provide service within the not-that-large area people spend their daily lives in, and any number of competitors can create beachheads by convincing a local community to give their app a try. The competitors start $1200 ahead, which translates to two years of free service at the $50/month the typical Uber customer spends.

As long as personal car ownership is still a thing, autonomous driving will actually turn every owner into a competitor. Your car sitting around uselessly during your workday is suddenly just a click away from going to work itself, thanks to the car manufacturer's preinstalled sharing network. They'll take 15% to process payments, but it'll be insured, cleaned after every 5th ride, and back at your office fully charged at the preselected time. Of course the manufacturers will also just let their inventory loose in any area that is potentially profitable. Their capital costs are lower than Uber's, they get the cars at internal prices without dealer markup, they have access first to any new car that people may want to try–oh, and they'll even accept running at a slight loss when they can convince themselves that taking a ride in their new car may convince people to buy it.

Meanwhile, what is Uber but a bro-themed map app with a balance sheet in Ferrari red?

<comment><USER4> Where's the competition then? Uber's platform is miles ahead of everything else, Lyft included so if its just a map app with balance sheet where are the competitors?

<comment><USER5> Umm, there's a reason they've pretty much exited every other international market. Russia - Yandex, China - Didi, SE Asia - Grab, India - Ola, Germany, Uk etc. Lots of competitors. It's only NA where they're a clear leader.

<comment><USER6> You're grossly overstating things.

17.5% stake in Didi Chuxing is nothing to scoff at, especially considering that Uber has done better than both Facebook and Google as far as China is concerned. Apple is the only US tech company that is really succeeding in China.

33.6% stake in YandexTaxi and international Uber users can continue to use the app to hail Yandex drivers when visiting Russia. That's also far far better than Facebook and Google have fared in Russia.

In India, Uber is beating Ola. In Latam, Uber is easily beating both 99Taxis and EasyTaxi. In the Middle East, Uber is beating Careem. Uber is absolutely dominating in Mexico and other Latam countries.

Besides Didi Chuxing and YandexTaxi, the only international competitor doing well relatively against Uber is Grab, and AFAICT, Grab's success relative to Uber is largely isolated to Grab's home country Malaysia and Indonesia where they have invested most heavily. If you take all of Southeast Asia, it appears to be neck and neck.

Uber is doing well in relatively well in Europe all things considered, and winning in Europe is just a matter of time. I highly doubt the local taxi offerings will survive autonomous vehicles.

<comment><USER7> Gojek is also crushing Indonesia. They started a bankless payments system and are expanding beyond just rides now, pretty cool stuff that dominates in their own market.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tinyproj - Week One Recap - <AUTHOR> http://tinyproj.tumblr.com/post/10532332195/week-one-recap

<comment><USER2> One of the problems I had was that the link to learn more about a project sends the email. I was curious, and there wasn't much (immediate) explanation of what the consequences of the link were, so I clicked.

Yes, one of the pages that's linked in the sent email is to the guidelines saying "don't click unless you're actually interested", but the consequences of clicking links isn't explained _before_ the project list is presented.

(In much of the web, links don't have side effects. Things that do are typically buttons. Maybe this is a design issue?)

EDIT: Grammar, clarity.

<comment><USER3> You're right -- it was a big issue for folks, which is why I ended up scrapping it in lieu of the new process:

\- you get the project email and click "learn more" \- that takes you to a page w/ details and an "i'm interested" button \- clicking that button tells the project owner \- the project owner then chooses to initiate contact further (which is why it's helpful to have a URL on your account.) \- _that_ is what sends the first email

It was intended to both cut down on project owner email overload as well as fix the confusion around what exactly happens.

Also, I plan to let folks attach a blurb of text as to -why- they're interested in a project. Should be an interesting experiment.

<comment><USER4> To be honest I prefer the way it was before. Clicking the link would send the email. That was the beauty of it. Cluttering the interface with webforms all over the place will just make your service more like dozens of other out there. Of course, you would have to require good descriptions from the project owners.

But I still love the interface love the simplicity of the interface. Email, never gets old.

<comment><USER3> I hear you. I'm going to leave it as is for the next send and watch what happens. I think it's still sufficiently simple right now, since it only adds one click (which I think could be called a confirmation click) to the intro experience on the talent side. Time will tell, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love how this is progressing. One bit of feedback, I would love to see more legitimately "tiny" projects become available-- most of those sent out every week are $500-$2000 and require multiple week commitments. If there's a market for smaller projects or libraries that need work in the $100-$500 range, I would snap up those in my spare time. Obviously those kinds of projects have to exist first to be listed, so not much of a feature suggestion so much as a general desire :)

<comment><USER6> I'm sure you will find no shortage of $100-$500 projects on sites like odesk. There's a threshold at which it seems to not be worth the time though.

<comment><USER7> Many of those projects are poorly defined and ask too much work for the payment. The OP is asking for projects at a lower cost and lower time commitment, not devalued work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I absolutely love this project and I really hope that the momentum that it has found will be preserved. Anything that helps the web to become a marketplace, especially for labor will have a huge impact in the long run.

<comment><USER3> I'm thrilled to hear that. It's been really interesting to watch, and even though I only have a week of data to play with, I'm fairly certain there's something bigger at play here. Just a matter of tuning the product, continuing to grow on both sides, and start to figure out how to solve the biggest issue right now, which is helping people make sense of the tons of intros they get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> By the way, I'd be happy to do ten bucks off any approved projects that mention HN.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looking forward to hearing back from some of the intros for work I've requested. I can't believe each project gets so much attention. Pretty competitive!

Seems like a fantastic resource though, I'm excited to see how it progresses, and I can't wait to get the next email.

<comment><USER3> Thanks a bunch. I'm amazed that the intros/project is averaging so high, too. I'm actually thinking of trying out some kind of VIP thing, where you could pay a few bucks a month to get the email a few hours early.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The guidelines sensibly mention to use a contract. Does tinyproj have anything to assist there? I've used 99designs once before and it was good that they took care of the contract between designer and client.

<comment><USER3> Actually yes. Working on this over the next few weeks. If it works as expected it will be a few clicks and out comes a contract.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cool! Thanks for releasing your data. (We're playing in the same space at gun.io - I think they call this 'validating the market.')</comment>


Riding Gravity Away from Doomsday - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.08130

<comment><USER2> Apparently some people thought this was a sokal style hoax when it came out:

[https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=7626](https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=7626)

 _" There are rumors going around tonight that there's been a hoax perpetrated on the arXiv, something like the Sokal hoax. This has to do with an hep-th posting entitled Riding Gravity Away from Doomsday, which has appeared under the name of a very prominent string theorist, Ashoke Sen, winner of the $3 million Milner Fundamental Physics Prize. What I'm hearing is that no one can believe that Sen could possibly have seriously written something this silly, so it must be some sort of hoax. Speculation is that the hoax could have been carried out to make the hep-th moderators look bad, by showing that they'll agree to anything, no matter how absurd, if it invokes the Landscape and the multiverse. Some think that Sen's account must have been hacked and then used to post the nonsense paper, others think that Sen himself is behind the hoax, having had enough of the Landscape business. I'll update this as more information becomes available."_

It's also a more boring version of the plot from Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan.

EDIT: Sen responds here: [http://www.hri.res.in/~sen/](http://www.hri.res.in/~sen/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Am i the only one who thought of Interstellar after reading the abstract ?</comment>


Ask HN: What are some good web experiences you've encountered recently? - <AUTHOR> Put bluntly, I'm losing my faith in the web and its ability to provide thoughtful experiences, in general. I'm hoping you can share some good experiences you've come across that show care when into them, versus the garbage I seem to run into most often.
Many sites I've been visiting recently have fundamentally broken user experiences, and it's frustrating to think that even though we've come so far, a large portion of the web still acts like it was written by people who just learned how to program.
In the past four hours, I've come across these issues:
* Logging into a home security camera vendor's site to contact its support team, so I can delete my account (why I have to log in to do this is beyond me). I've forgotten my password, so I go through the workflow to create a new one. When I click the submit button, I get an error simply telling me, "Something went wrong, please contact support," which is what I was trying to do in the first place!
* Evaluating a well known language learning tool, and clicking on the first lesson. The page transitions briefly into the lesson page, then quickly snaps back to the list of lessons. This keeps happening, until I try disabling Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection, which makes the workflow succeed. I realize this could be ETP being overzealous, but a broken site because Google Analytics, et al., aren't being loaded seems like an oversight.
* Using a major DNS management vendor's portal to update a record. I click "Sign In" on the homepage and since I have a session, the portal shows me my dashboard. But there's a popup in the center of the page telling me my session has expired and I'm redirected back to the sign-in page. Why taunt me with my dashboard if I'm to be immediately signed out and redirected?
The list goes on, and it's not just small companies. I'm hoping to get a list of positive experiences together so we can bask in how good things CAN be, when given the care they -- and we -- deserve. <comment><USER2> Electricitymap.org is a beautiful visualization of electricity production in the world map.

</comment><comment><USER2> Dynalist is pretty awesome. I have started to use it for everything.</comment>


(Includes interview w/ YC's Inkling founders) Web 2.0: Return of the dot-com - <AUTHOR> http://www.suntimes.com/business/363986,CST-FIN-Net30.article <comment><AUTHOR> Here's the Inkling interview:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

 _Adam Siegel, 33, founder of Inkling at inklingmarkets.com, an online predictive market._

 _Didn't the Internet craze die back in 2001? Why launch an Internet business?_

The Internet craze didn't die in 2001. Companies with no path to profitability, no plan, and excessive irrational behavior died in 2001. The possibilities of the Internet in relation to consumer behavior and transforming business are still as potent as ever.

 _Where did your idea come from?_

Our idea came from doing consulting for several large companies and working in one for several years. We watched the lack of quality information flow between the hierarchies. We saw how people with relevant knowledge, whose input should be key in strategic decisions, were completely left out of the process, and we saw broken business processes for innovation and coming up with new ideas. We also read a lot about collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds, paired our understanding of those two worlds, and out came the idea to do Inkling. We certainly weren't the first to say prediction markets should be used by corporations, but we think we're taking an approach that sets us apart from our predecessors and current competitors.

 _What is your elevator pitch?_

Inkling helps you capture the collective wisdom of a diverse group of people to give you insight about what may happen in the future vs. relying solely on high paid consultants or individual experts. This is important because it can help you mitigate risk, make better strategic decisions, spawn innovation and entrepreneurship, and change your corporate culture.

 _How is your proposition different from earlier generations of online business?_

Online business services, beyond eCommerce solutions, still usually required an expensive consulting component. There also was not traditionally a focus on ease of use. We've tried to address both by creating "do it yourself" tools to allow anyone to manage their own prediction marketplace. We've taken something as complex as trading in a stock market mechanism and made it easy enough for our Mom's to use. Related we've obsessed on our user-interface and iterate on it constantly to make sure people can use it. After all, you can't say you sell software that helps you capture the wisdom of a crowd if the crowd can't use your software.

 _How will you make money?_

We make money by selling service agreements to large and small businesses to set up and maintain prediction marketplaces. We also do a fair amount of customization work for our larger clients.

 _Why will you succeed? What are your biggest successes so far?_

In less than a year we have attracted several thousand users to our public marketplace and have about 20 clients. We are working with Abbott Labs here in Chicago, ABC-KGO in San Francisco, the Government of Singapore, AlderTrack, think tanks, a video game maker, and an array array of small businesses and non-profits. We think we will continue to see success because of our well designed product and because we think this is a blue sky market that people are just beginning to think about as a way to changing the way they do business. We also think we're going to be successful because we are largely self-funded. When the success of your business means you can or cannot pay the mortgage and your bills, it makes you a little hungrier.

 _What is your age and previous business experience?_

The two co-founders of Inkling are Adam Siegel and Nate Kontny. We are 33 and 29 respectively. Adam worked at Accenture here in Chicago for 10 years in the Accenture Technology Labs and was a senior manager when he left. Nate worked at Accenture as well in the same group and left as a consultant to work as a senior developer at Digital River.

 _Have you received funding? If so, how much and from whom?_

We received a small amount of funding (18k) from yCombinator when we incorporated but have taken no funding since.

</comment><comment><USER2> What's interesting is that the average age of the founders listed in the article is just over 27 years of age. Youngest being 20, oldest being 37.</comment>


Wearing a mask = being more confident. - <AUTHOR> http://sahillavingia.com/blog/2010/11/05/wearing-a-mask-being-more-confident/ <comment><USER2> If the internet has taught us anything, it's that anonymity makes people comfortable doing things they otherwise wouldn't dream of.

<comment><USER3> I believe you are referencing the GIF theory.

<http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/>

</comment></comment><comment> m-photonic I read somewhere that there was a period in the 18th century when Venetians started wearing Carnival masks year round (ie, not just during Carnival). I can't find my original source, but Wikipedia offers something along similar lines:

"It tends to be the main type of mask worn during the Carnival. It was used also on many other occasions as a device for hiding the wearer's identity and social status. It would permit the wearer to act more freely in cases where he or she wanted to interact with other members of the society outside the bounds of identity and everyday convention."

(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_of_Venice#Bauta>)

</comment><comment><USER4> Taking this a step further, when it comes to sales, the type of "mask" you use often is the phone. Over the phone, your presentation (your tone, speed, diction) can change depending upon the person on the other end - as it should.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true. It applies to emails too.

However, often the customer "forgets" that leading to mindless bashing, but I guess that's a compromise. :)

<comment><USER5> Great point about emails. At my last office, there was a guy named Robert who was a VP. He was usually a casual guy and signed his emails with "Rob"

But, anytime he'd ask someone for a favor or give instructions in an email, he'd always sign with "Robert M. Lastname III, Vice President"

Tacky, but material for countless inter-office jokes.

<comment><USER6> Hence the old joke about having a Ph.D. being most useful when you have to write a letter to your bank.

<comment><USER7> Speaking of which: a long time ago, I worked at an office supply company and had the privilege of attending a lecture by a guy who had made selling paper his life's work. I send maybe two or three paper letters a year, and if they're designed to go to a human being I _always_ write them on paper which _screams_ I Am The King Of Papers. (I didn't believe such a thing existed, but try putting one sheet of it on a table with 40 sheets of assorted office paper. Anybody can pick it out, instantly, from several feet away.)

It costs about $15 for less than a ream and is usually sold as something like "resume paper" (300 sheets -- a ream is 500, a carton is 10 reams, and a carton of generic office paper should cost around $30 ~ $40). One pack will last you about a decade. For those of us in the Internet generation, if you have a call to send someone paper, that probably means you are doing Serious Business. The ROI on influencing Serious Business is just astounding.

<comment><USER8> Resume paper sounds like the Monster Cable of paper.

<comment><USER9> I don't think that's an accurate analogy. It doesn't matter what your digital cables are made of, so long as noise doesn't go above the threshold.

Cheap copier paper, on the other hand, looks and feels like crap. The only reason you print stuff on paper is to communicate with another human being, and the paper is part of the message.

I wouldn't quite go as far as the business cards scene in American Psycho (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoIvd3zzu4Y>) though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm sure there are similar effects behind the armour of business suits.

</comment><comment><USER10> I made it halfway through Meisner training in acting before life got in the way.

One thing I got out of it is this trick of overlaying my avatar in the virtual world with an image of somebody else, often a cartoon character.

It may sound crazy, but I gain the ability to do all kinds of things that I wouldn't do otherwise: for instance, my most powerful character greatly increases my animal charm and also my functional (physical) flexibility. (mostly because she can play through the pain) Unfortunately she's not a very nice person in she's got high blood pressure.

</comment><comment><USER11> While I did not notice this myself, a past girlfriend said I acted differently and felt more comfortable when I was wearing my glasses, as if they were something to hide behind.(compared to when I was wearing my contacts).

<comment><AUTHOR> Anecdotal evidence wins again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> No, wearing a mask can cause you to be more confident. It's not a guarantee.

</comment><comment><USER13> for example, bank robbers

</comment><comment><USER14> or just be confident instead of using a mask as a crutch.</comment>


TIPS and TRICKS for Strong Passwords - <AUTHOR> https://www.codecnetworks.com/blog/tips-tricks-strong-passwords/ <comment><USER2> absolute rubbish, just perpetuating the same nonsense that requires all those social-engineerable "I've forgotten my password" features</comment>