How Google bought Waze - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-bought-waze-the-inside-story-2015-8 <comment><USER2> Waze disappoints me because it's a great idea in what appears to be the classic Google death cycle. They haven't added anything in years except for ads, the long-standing UI blemishes are never fixed, and recently the servers have started returning errors regularly, which probably means they're about to discontinue it.

<comment><USER3> It makes a lot more sense to roll Waze's features and data into Google Maps, unfortunately...

<comment><USER4> They need to integrate more. Google Maps is too conservative with its routing, it tends to stick to highways if at all possible. Waze is far more aggressive, it uses surface roads and side streets to get you out of traffic and to your destination faster, usually 10-15 minutes faster than Google Maps does on my commute home.

<comment><USER5> " Google Maps is too conservative with its routing, it tends to stick to highways if at all possible."

and waze is far in the other direction, often telling people to get on and off highways repeatedly to save 30 seconds.

In fact, waze _estimates_ it will save time, but in practice, it rarely does for me.

The routing of either is just a cost model for the same path finding engine. Maps seems to try to avoid various types of road transitions, assuming that it's traffic data isn't perfect and these things have some cost (IE traffic lights, etc, which are not accounted for except as average traffic speed) Waze seems to simply assume the apparently shortest fastest path will actually turn out that way.

Waze is often wrong, Maps rarely is. When Waze is wrong, it often takes only as long as Maps does or longer, (i've had Waze tell me to take routes it claimed were 5 minutes faster, that were 10 minutes longer). Maps is usually accurate, but it may leave something on the table.

I'd still rather have the second. Trying to pretend you have good data when you don't doesn't lead to good results. (IE garbage in, garbage out).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a bit of a shame that they're not independent of Google, but I would have sold out too for that sort of money. I use Waze everyday to avoid traffic and even when I do end up in a jam it lets me know how long I've got to sit through it.

<comment><USER7> Well thanks to antitrust concerns they are pretty much independent and it still has the same awful UI and bugs of the app before it was sold. Really wish it could benefit from Google Maps (especially for POI search!).

<comment><USER8> I think you can do Google POI search from within Waze, no? IIRC you can select from sources like Yelp, Google, Waze's own db etc...

<comment><USER7> It does give you some options, but then it starts to feel like you're doing the work instead of Waze (why can't they diff the results and just show you the POIs?). The predictive search is just awful, you'll see results from all over the country (and sometimes world!) when you're looking for something a few miles away. There are frequently duplicates in the list and adding to the issue is that the list view also contains so little information that it's hard to see if the result is the one you're looking for. Google Maps absolutely blows away Waze in terms of search UI.

Other gripes:

It suggests using HOV lanes despite not knowing if there is someone else in the car, that can dramatically effect routes (say route A is faster only if you can use the HOV lane).

For ferries (I live in Seattle) it doesn't count the time on the ferry which can give you wildly incorrect time estimates. There's also not a way to ask for a route that doesn't include a ferry (sometimes you can drive around). For example Google Maps suggests 1:04 to get to a spot on Bainbrdige for me right now where Waze says 25 minutes. Considering the ferry ride itself takes ~30 minutes...

<comment><USER8> I agree they need to revamp their HOV situation. In my case, I have a car with an HOV sticker and I don't know if it's measuring HOV lane traffic separately from non-HOV traffic (huge difference in the Bay Area on the 101)

@jonknee is your name jon kneeland? I'm a John Kneeland. Small world!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found waze pretty bad at directing you to your target and pretty amazing at locating jams. I stopped using it for directions when I visit Israel although many people there use it religiously. Google maps on the other hand was great at taking me there, but less so knowing about the road conditions. After the buyout I noticed Google maps gets a lot better at knowing if the road is blocked by traffic and how long a stretch of jammed Road takes to clear. I think that marriage worked well, at least for my driving experience.

<comment><USER10> Yes, Waze is a religion in Israel, perhaps because traffic conditions there are so unexpected. While on vacation there recently I downloaded the app, but found it unusable. The amount of noise in the UI - alerts, ads, IMs from other drivers - is unbearable.

I find that Google Maps is simple, clean, and quite accurate in predicting time to destination. Plus, now it displays traffic jams and incidents signaled by Waze users.

<comment><USER9> Ads are also a religion in Israel. But the last place I want to see them is when I'm driving. Turn right here to save 5 shekels on some lotion. No thanks, and now I've missed my turn...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For driving near Paris, Waze is incredibly effective. I think it is caused by the mass effect: Paris is a permanent traffic jam and many people are using waze. In less crowded area, data access is not reliable. As a result waze behaves badly, worse than a ordinary GPS with traffic information.

</comment><comment><USER12> The part about dilution was interesting. I looked at several tech startup IPO filings and it "appeared" to me that most founders ended up with 4 to 7% in equity. Also in nearly all cases, there is one VC who owns more than 20% of the company.

<comment><USER13> Pretty standard in my opinion. Depending on your negotiability, you're going to get diluted 10-40% in every round. Do that a few times, and you can see where one ends up :)

<comment><USER14> Better to have a little piece of a really big pie, than to have a really small pie all by yourself.

<comment><USER15> Kinda pathetic though, isn't it? A group of people devote their lives to a product, working round-the-clock for years, and then reap ( _relatively_ ) tiny rewards compared to the money man.

<comment><USER16> What money man are you referring to exactly? Most of the actual money in these situations comes from massive institutional funds where there is no individual man.

<comment><USER15> The fund, the firm, and the individuals who led investments. No?

<comment><USER16> Those individuals make far less than founders in a successful outcome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One of my closest friends was the founder / CEO of Trapster - Pete Tenereillo - who was crushing Waze for years in total MAU.

Trapster was originally positioned @ speed trap avoidance but as they grew to tens-of-millions of users their feature set more closely mirrored Waze (or vice versa?).

Trapster was eventually scooped up and killed by Nokia (1), is there any true competitor to Waze @ this point?

(1) [http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/01/trapster-shutting- down/](http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/01/trapster-shutting-down/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I would like to give a counterpoint to the opinion that Google Maps' quality has dwindled, from a developing nation perspective from having used it in India, Kenya, Ethiopia and South Africa.

Google maps in these countries has easily slipped inside the daily behavior of people in these countries in a way that is heartening to see - Drivers use it, students use it, hotels use it to show the way about town, bus drivers use it. It is amazing how accurate it is in these countries. I am thankful it exists.

<comment><USER19> Can you start turn by turn navigation in those countries? In Vietnam, although the maps are more than good enough, you can only preview a route, you can't actually start the route tracking. This is very frustrating if you're on a motorbike where the voice instructions and vibrations would be very useful.

<comment><USER20> In Kenya, you can use turn-by-turn navigation on Google Maps, and it works very well, especially within Nairobi. Other towns may not be covered as well (I think), but it works excellently (voice instructions, etc) in guiding you on highways between towns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I use Waze every day, but I fear that Google will eventually kill off their Windows mobile app because they despise Microsoft. Right now they have just stopped updating it. A shame, really, because it's a solid app.

<comment><USER8> It will eventually break once they evolve the server-side APIs enough. Foe example, I doubt the Symbian client still works...

The really annoying things is that even after Microsoft makes it painfully easy for Android apps to be brought into Windows 10, Google probably _still_ won't do it.

<comment><USER22> Maybe Microsoft should make it painlessly easy instead?

I depend on Waze every day and its issues are nothing compared to value it provides. Unfortunately it's not integrated into my Model S so sometimes I drive with both the "native" Model S GPS (= Google Maps) and Waze so I can benefit from the greater maps on the 17" screen as well as the better directions from Waze. It's mighty confusing though.</comment></comment></comment>


Game mechanics for thinking users - <AUTHOR> http://pietro.open-lab.com/2010/11/09/game-mechanics-for-thinking-users/

<comment><USER2> I've used game mechanics to help several business applications I've written.

The most successful example was a workflow application that a team of customer service reps use to answer tickets. The system categories tickets and rates them for severity. Severely rated tickets get a big threat score and go higher in the queue. The system graphs the threat level of open tickets, and shows a google-o-meter to say whether things are looking bad, ok, or great, and then we named those states "Godilla, Pony, and Unicorn". We graph the overall situation over time. So users can see their impact on successfully answering and closing tickets. Each time a user worked a ticket, they could see the little needle rise a little higher, closer to unicorn status.

Productivity skyrocketed as users worked their butts off to keep things in "Unicorn" status.

Users could also see what other teams members were working on in real time-- whether they had a ticket open, and how long it had been open. This helps establish a culture where you want to keep working, because you can see how hard other team members are working.

These mechanics really helped the team stay motivated and working. Without software like this, it can feel hard to stay motivated to work on an endless stream of workflow. It helps combat the feeling of pointlessness when answering so many similar tickets.

The system that I described is currently being used at a major virtual world company for answering customer service tickets. One of the people that used it loved it so much that he got the google-o-meter needle graph that I used tatooed onto his arm, with the word Unicorn written under it.

</comment><comment><USER3> When I read the article it reminded me of some ideas I had for for UI design. I get really frustrated in my IDE when I have to click on a folder or a file and it is so small. It seems that systems could build statistical models of what I do all day and resize icons based on what I am likely to click. There seems to be this area between 100% automation and doing things manually that isn't well designed for. Another example is when I have to go and look at log files, I have to click on these tiny folder icons but I do it every day ... why can't the system predict that and make the folder icon larger? Or how about while I'm in the IDE only show things that make sense at that point in time? You might say well there are thousands of things you can do in an IDE but I know that I do about 15 or 20 things day in and day out. I know I could use macros or something but that would be unique to each tool and would have a very stitched together feel to it.

In my opinion the tab completion in the Bash shell is an example of game mechanics used outside of a game.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Much of what I read under game mechanics (but not what I read about game design) treats users as basically moronic conditional-reflex slaves. Conditioning users to trivial games is not the only possible usage of game mechanics for function and design._

I think this is a profound observation. I think a part of the attraction of P2P is that it can introduce real complexity into a game. I dislike being treated like a patron of a resort casino.

<comment><USER5> _Civilization_ creator Sid Meier says that a game is a series of interesting decisions. I've always liked that view.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments; interesting to see the power and variety of game mechanics applications - for thinking users!

</comment><comment><USER6> Game mechanics are one of those things that I can recognize, but am still a total sucker for. Any time something can be quantified, compared, and put up as a leaderboard, I'm pretty much instantly, hopelessly addicted.

This is one of the greatest realizations that Microsoft has come to with the XBox.</comment>


New study shows nuts reduce cardiovascular disease risk up to 55% - <AUTHOR> http://www.anti-agingfirewalls.com/2013/12/01/nuts-over-nuts/

<comment><USER2> Note that these results are not the results of controlled experiments. The people who were eating nuts had other attributes that could have accounted for their better health:

 _Specifically, several confounding variables in the data could have accounted for part of the "nut effect". The confounding variables included BMI, smoking, and exercise. Those that consumed nuts and ate a Mediterranean diet also had a lower BMI, a lower waist circumference, were less likely to smoke, and were more physically active. These factors may have "skewed" the results in favor of the "nut eaters."_

Also, the people who eat more nuts are probably eating _less_ of something else. Since nuts are frequently eaten as snacks, it's likely that they're eating nuts instead of sugary, processed food like cookies or candy. So the improved health could be the result of what they're _not_ eating rather than what they _are_ eating.

Edit: Reading the article reminded me of this paper:

"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" (2005)

By John P. A. Ioannidis

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/)

There's also a discussion of Ioannidis' work here:

"Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science" (2010)

[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies- dam...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies- and-medical-science/308269/?single_page=true)

<comment><USER3> There's another thing at play as well: what's "nuts"?

It's more of a linguistic categorization than anything else.

And even though they may share some dietetic properties, well, Brazil nuts are one thing, Almonds are another, Pistachios are another.

<comment><USER4> And peanuts are not even nuts! (But legumes.)

<comment><USER5> Glad to see we're reading the same mag ;) [http://www.thepaepae.com/wp- uploads/2013/12/Your-wrong-magaz...](http://www.thepaepae.com/wp- uploads/2013/12/Your-wrong-magazine.png)

<comment><USER6> I think that factoid is pretty widespread actually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If this is true, squirrels should be immortal. Seriously though, nuts are quite hard to digest - you shouldnt really eat a lot of them especially when you are old - digesting nuts puts excessive strain on your liver, etc.

<comment><USER8> Boiled peanuts are anything but hard to digest. It appears the mode of preparation or consumption determines the level of strain it puts on the digestive system.

BTW i have a 90yr old dad who consumes roasted and salted peanuts daily. YMMV

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not even having read the article, I just want to express my disgust towards the often used "up to x" type statistics and their deceptive misguiding nature.

<comment><AUTHOR> Submitter here - guilty as charged. Apologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So was the low fat recommendations by the health establishment one of the more epic failures in human history?

</comment><comment><USER11> Then nutella is healthy ? I can put back [http://www.nutelladay.com/](http://www.nutelladay.com/) in my bookmarks ?

<comment><USER12> It's unlikely that the effect of its 13% hazelnut content offsets the over 50% pure sugar.

But then, the very idea of "healthy" and "unhealthy" foods is a fallacy. What's healthy or unhealthy is your diet in its entirety.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are peanuts really nuts in this context? The article mentions them, but my understanding is that they are legumes, not nuts.

<comment><USER14> The study actually distinguishes between "tree nuts" and "peanuts", with separate variables for each.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seems quite speculative, as mentioned in the comments. How are the nuts prepared?

</comment><comment><USER16> I just knew dough nuts are ought to be healthy!

</comment><comment><USER17> This is nuts.</comment>


XPS 13 developer edition 7th generation available - <AUTHOR> https://bartongeorge.io/2018/01/04/xps-13-developer-edition-the-7th-gen-is-here/ <comment><USER2> I regret buying a maxed out XPS 13 a year and a half ago.

My list of problems:

* Coil whine

* Noisy fans

* Heat issues

* USB-C port has a bad pin (only works in one orientation with pressure)

* Charging port inconsistently charges

* Bad cell in the battery, so it suddenly shuts off without warning when on battery

The charging issues started just around the 12 month mark, so I quickly sent to a repair center under warranty. They returned it with a note that said "mainboard replaced", but nothing had actually been replaced. Same bad pin on the USB-C port (everything I plug into it only works "upside down", and that port is part of the mainboard), same dust in the ports as when I mailed it, etc. By the time they shipped it back, the warranty had expired.

If you're going to buy one of these, I recommend buying an extended warranty. I do also recommend the touchscreen. I've heard the i5 versions have less problems, I would probably take the performance hit next time if it meant a more reliable and longer-lasting machine.

<comment><USER3> Dan, I apologize for your experience. If you ever run into something like this again, besides contacting support directly, you can ping @dellcarespro on twitter and, if its related to the developer edition or project Sputnik you can loop me in @barton808. thanks!

<comment><USER4> So you're on the team? Here's a perspective from a potential buyer. Apple having truly jumped the shark on their MB Pros, I've been mulling on and off about what to do when it's time to replace my current 13" MBP. An XPS 13 or 15 w/Ubuntu is definitely on my radar. But I am a bit scared off by reliability & quality reports. They're only anecdotal & biased samples of course, but there's not much else for a poor consumer to go on.

It might be worth your team's while addressing these perceptions in some way. I don't know what to suggest (your job not mine!) other than chiming in now and then in places like HN, but it might merit some thought on your part.

One thing that reduces consumer risk when buying Apple is their genuinely frictionless returns policy. It really is feasible to buy if you're unsure & just return within a couple of weeks, no questions asked. I haven't looked, but imagine Dell's terms are similar. If so, this might be worth highlighting.

<comment><USER5> If you are going Dell I think the best bet is to try the Precision 5000 series (pretty equal to XPS 15) and 7000 series (heavier and bulkier but you can really spec these things out). I have an XPS 15 (9550) and I really cannot recommend them. Lots of problems.

At least the Precision line is the buisness line which means better support, preinstalled with Linux (so its tested well) and probably from what I have read better tested/built due to being a business line. I like supporting Dell on this venture b/c they are sticking thier neck out a little by even supporting/preinstalling Linux as a big name OEM provider.

The Lenovos are great too, but I wish they would officially support Linux and offer Linux preinstalled as an option so you don't have to pay for Windows.

<comment><USER6> My work laptop is an M3800, though the newer one is the 5510. Pretty solid machines in my experience. We did after market upgrades to some very fast SSD (sorry don't remember which).

That said- I'm staying with the m3800 as long as I can. It's a few years old and my battery needs replacing, but otherwise is very capable. Some people have had docking issues on and off with the 5510 (occasional crashing, though I think it's a driver/software issue), but more importantly it has the awful "Nostril Cam" which is annoying for video meetings.

In general, fast, light, good battery (for perspective, mine lasts 2-3 hours now, vs 5-7 when I got it), useful ports. The keyboard is not the best (home/end/pgup/pgdn keys are fn+arrow instead of dedicated) but very usable. I hated the glossy screen at first, but touchscreen is surprisingly useful and I got past it. I just keep a microfiber cloth in my laptop bag now.

<comment><USER5> yeah "up the nose" cam is one of the more annoying features of these Dells :( Also the non-dedicated pgup/dwn/home/end is another annoyance - I guess I got use to it after a while

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Max 8gb for regular display...

I mean, who uses touch screens for development? I can't really imagine a scenario where it would be helpful for me. Maybe when doing work in Illustrator and Photoshop, but I usually use a different machine for that anyhow, because of Adobe's lack of Linux support.

I don't want to pay for something I won't use.

I am otherwise actively looking for a laptop. System76 does not have European keyboard layouts, otherwise I would go with them.

<comment><USER8> There's no simple/easy way to disable the touchscreen in Linux distro's, too.

<comment><USER9> If you're okay with scripting it, you could just `xinput disable ...` the touchscreen's input device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My XPS 13 9350 is undoubtedly the best computer I've ever owned. I don't seem to have this coil whine thing or I just don't notice it. The 8GB of RAM has served me well and I'd never want to sacrifice any of the battery life for increasing that - it's an ultrabook after all. I've always run Ubuntu and while I did have problems with WiFi and resuming when it first came out, they are both rock solid now. I have never tried to use the webcam, I don't even know if it works, so I'm happy with the design choice to minimise the top bezel. I personally see no reason to buy the new model but only because this one is so good.

<comment><USER11> Coil whine can easily be tested with this website (probably not a good link if you have epilepsy or Chiari malformations)

[https://thume.ca/screentunes/](https://thume.ca/screentunes/)

In my experience virtually all LCD displays have it to some degree, you just don't notice it except with certain patterns (like that one) that interact with the scanout mechanism.

<comment><USER12> To be sure, what you're hearing from that website is not _coil whine_ (inductor phenomena), but mechanical resonance caused by piezoelectric effect on solid state MLCCs[1] charging/discharging in your monitor during frame refresh.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_capacitor#Microphony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_capacitor#Microphony)

<comment><USER11> In common parlance, I'm not sure there's a distinction between coil whine and capacitor whine. That is probably not something you can distinguish without taking apart the component in question.

<comment><USER12> If by _common parlance_ you mean amongst _not_ electronics engineers, then I can see where you're coming from. The miscommunication that I'm seeing is asymptotic to the common misuse of Baud as a universal measure of bitrate...or in programmer speak, char and uint8 as immutable equivalents. From a hardware design perspective, qualifying the whine with _coil_ transforms the remark from generally descriptive to technically specific with distinct implications.

Disassembly may not be required to trace root cause with high probability depending on the type of hardware exhibiting the issue, e.g. on a laptop, manifests upon affixing power adapter (as some have described) or tracks display pattern (as parent link).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My first Dell as developer machine is XPS 15 9560 but it is in no way a developer machine: \- The thunderbolt dock wire out and laptop USB C are on opposite hands. I have to place my laptop on top of the dock like a giant book resting on a brick.

\- Awful coil whine on the power adapter.

\- Touchpad is annoying to use when clicking moves the finger resulting in wrong place click.

\- Had to replace Killer wifi card with Intel's, Dell's support was top notch here.

\- If you don't have nails, opening lid can be an unusual experience, especially when laptop is sitting on top of the dock.

Coming from Thinkpad W530 and miss it but our company switched from Lenovo to Dell

<comment><USER14> I have a 13" 9360 and have similar concerns. I just replaced my Killer WiFi, but Bluetooth is still broken. I think I just haven't found the right driver yet. Did you get it working under 16.04? The touchpad is a mess, I mostly use an external mouse. I don't know why Apple seem to be the only ones who can get touchpads right.

But even with the above, I do like my XPS and would buy it again. The compact size and light weight are great, much lighter and more compact than my 15" Macbook Pro, which mostly sits on my desk in a dock.

<comment><USER15> The touchpad problems are well documented, e.g. [https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=197683](https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=197683). If your XPS is still under warranty you can request touchpad replacement referring to the thread I linked to above. I'm just scheduling mine, hope it fixes the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Where's the fucking USB ports?!? I have literally used or observed zero USB C devices till now. I've seen newer phones but who plugs phones into computers anymore? The main issue is flash drives, external HDDs, mice, keyboards, LTE modems, Kindle, and so on. None of those are available in type C variants and I don't want to be inconvenienced by my new laptop. If I wanted to hurt myself I'd just buy from Apple!

<comment><USER17> I'm really happy about USB-C. Since I got a new Macbook I only carry a single power adapter when traveling, plus an adapter dongle for legacy devices (Headphones, Kindle, Shaver, ...).

Same for use in the office: a single cable connects you to power, an external display, Ethernet, etc.

It's true that most external devices are still USB-A, but that's not Dell's or Apple's problem. It's a chicken-and-egg situation and somebody needs to start.

USB-C is the superior connector: longer lasting, reversible, works for charging, alternate modes, etc.

<comment><USER18> My macbook's usb-c charger constantly loses connection, a slight tug and it falls out.

<comment><USER16> Magsafe is such a great connector. Incredibly stupid to get rid of it.

<comment><USER19> I agree.

However, I do think it's funny that the one time Apple switches to an interoperable standard, people complain about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Only 16 gigs of RAM? Why do companies still hold that limit in 2018? I was hoping for 32 gigs back in 2015.

<comment><USER21> Expected the new XPS to have a developer flavor soon, but also expected it to be limited to 16GB still. Was not surprised since the Windows version has the same limit.

Went ahead and purchased a 32GB System76 Galaga Pro last week with the same i7-8550U available on the XPS. It's a slightly larger 13", but feels a lot closer to my 5th gen XPS 13 than the MacBook Pro the Galaga replaces. Comes with a retina-like matte IPS 3200x1800 screen that is a joy to use. No touch, for better or worse. Keyboard layout is actually superior to the XPS for development with dedicated home/end/pgup/pgdn buttons. Pop!OS is nice and worth a spin, plus it has XPS levels of support under Ubuntu 16.04 which is available pre-loaded. Camera is in a much more useful place than on the XPS. It's also cheaper at most configurations.

Downsides are a smaller battery (probably to make room for both an M.2 SSD and a 7mm 2.5" drive bay) and a touchpad that while multitouch and decent isn't as good as the XPS touchpad. Also, while the screen hinge feels more solid than the XPS's, it doesn't go back as far as I would expect. XPS uses better materials in spots, like soft touch carbon fiber in palm.

So far I'm extremely happy with the Galaga Pro and would recommend to anyone who wants a small powerful laptop like the XPS 13, but is turned off by its 16GB limitation.

<comment><USER22> You could go precision though. Which is what I did. Precision 5520 has an Ubuntu option and works flawlessly with Linux. 32-64g of DDR4 and 12h of battery with the 9cell upgrade

I should know. I've been using one for nearly a year.

<comment><USER23> What's the added weight of default 3 cell to 9 cell battery? Last I checked you could only upgrade to 6 cell.

Holding out for next generation of Intel (or, now, AMD) CPUs before picking up another Precision. Great, beastly powerful machines, have been running Fedora since 2010 on Precision line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Very cool, but as an owner of the Cube Thinker/i35--which has the same exact 3000x2000 3:2 aspect ratio display as the Surface Book (but costs $500)--I can't imagine why any developer would put up with a 16:9 display.

Specially if you have "developer" in your product name, why can't they figure out that 16:9 is not the best aspect ratio for everyone?

I write code the whole day, not watch movies. That huge extra vertical space _does_ make a difference.

<comment><USER25> Not seeing a major difference between 3:2 and 16:9 aspect ratio displays, what am I missing?

[http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/panasonic- lx100/z-lx10...](http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/panasonic- lx100/z-lx100-aspects-vs-gx7.png)

<comment><USER24> Huge difference.

If you're in a country where they sell the Surface Book, go take a look and you'll immediately notice that there is a _lot_ more vertical space.

<comment><USER25> Did you even look at the graphic I linked to? If so, there's no need to "go look" at anything, since that graphic very clearly shows there's not a major difference.

<comment><USER26> The graphic minimizes the apparent difference by splitting it between top and bottom and maintaining the same diagonal size. 3:2 gives 18% more vertical space in the same width [https://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2013-02/lets- get-rid-...](https://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2013-02/lets-get- rid-169-laptops-forever)

If you're doing primarily vertical tasks (coding, web pages, etc.), the taller aspect ratio can be really helpful.

That said, I've mostly made my peace with 16:9. Write shorter functions (that's good anyway) and throw bars over to the side instead of top and bottom.

<comment><USER27> Aren't screen sizes typically based on that diagonal size (i.e. a 15" screen is a diagonal 15")? If so, doesn't that make parent's link more accurate?

<comment><USER26> Screen sizes are reported on the diagonal, but the makers are not constrained to maintain the same diagonal size with different apsect ratios. For instance, the pixel Chromebooks have 12.82" and 12.3" diagonal screens. I've never seen a 16:9 laptop with those sizes.

And specifically for an xps 13 device, where they trim excess bezels, etc., the keyboard width becomes the limiting factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Yay Dell! So far I like this series. Coming from years of Macbook laziness and returning to my Linux desktop roots I just bought in to the Dell XPS 15 9560 on sale at Christmas. No regrets thus far, it's nice. However, I don't need 32GB RAM and as I am setting up Gentoo and ZFS root and am very busy (lost two days to flying this week already) I have not yet completed setup, so there may be some iceberg issues... [https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Dell_XPS_15_9560](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Dell_XPS_15_9560)

</comment><comment><USER29> I've been using Dell's Linux computers for 10+ years, and I'm very happy with them. It's great to get a system that ships with Linux out of the box.

I don't like having the camera in the lower left corner, but I don't use it much so it's not that big a deal.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm a happy XPS 13 9360 (i7-8550U, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD) user and have mixed feelings about the latest XPS 13. Biggest reason why I opted for the XPS 13 is the size -- it is literally the smallest 13.3" laptop on the market.

My 2 cents based on the stuff I read online:

\- The new one is even smaller and lighter, a big plus in my book.

\- USB-C exclusively seems good and bad at the same time. Three USB ports on 9360 all charge my phone at different speeds (two USB-A, one USB-C): Android reports "charging slowly", "charging" and "charging rapidly" depending on the port, and I _love_ having the option of charging my phone slowly, as the battery loses less capacity over time that way (due to reduced stress and heat). I don't mind having USB-C dongles around, but it would be great if all peripherals moved to USB-C, therefore having a USB-A port would be convenient, despite USB-C being progressive and pushing the market to switch. I see it as a good intent on Dell's part.

\- Dislike microSD port. SD cards are faster and cheaper compared to microSD and with the new laptop one physically can't fit an SD card in it. So one would have to use an SD -> USB adapter, which most likely has USB-A on the other end, plus a USB-A -> USB-C dongle. Ugh.

\- 4K screen not really needed. Not a big difference on 13.3", uses more power and QHD+ on 9360 can use nice 2X integer scaling -- shady fractional not needed.

\- Equivalent configuration of my 9360 costs more than 2000 USD, tax excluded. I paid ~1400 USD for mine with the tax included, a non-refurbished model.

<comment><USER31> I've been waiting for the 9370 announcement and today I bought a 9360 :)

The bigger battery is nice, USB-A is nice. The weight is the same. Don't care about placement or camera. And the slower RAM doesn't bother me.

I got the updated version with an 8th gen that has win10 pre-installed, since the 9360 with 8th gen is pnly with win10. That's OK, was planning on setting up dual boot anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm guessing that nobody wants to buy new CPUs until a whole new architecture is available. Bad luck in the timing.

<comment><USER33> I'm not sure we can call it bad luck, since Dell has a lot of control over the timing of their product releases.

<comment><USER34> I doubt the people working on this knew about the embargo. Most people didn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The hardware is lovely but the available configurations make me sad. For compiling the projects I work on, I need an i7 and 16 GB of memory. But this configuration only comes with the touchscreen, which is not only useless but destroys battery life, has a far inferior viewing angle, and adds an obscene amount to the cost. Amusingly, the config that I want _is_ available, but not to me, because I'm not in Europe. I would buy this in a heartbeat otherwise.

<comment><USER28> Re: touch. I just bought an XPS15 with 16GB for 1900AUD. It has touch, which I don't use. The viewing angle is wonderful, basically 360 degrees with no degredation and in this respect is no different to my 2013 Macbook Pro. AFAIK from reading other people's setups (see external resources at [https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Dell_XPS_15_9560](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Dell_XPS_15_9560) ) you can disable touch to save power.

Re: cost. Macbook Pro in similar power range is like 3500AUD. So I'm not complaining.

Re: grunt. I also compile stuff sometimes (Gentoo user!) but generally don't need so much RAM. If you really need fast high power compilation consider a decent CI setup with on-demand cloud instances instead... means you don't need to pay over the top for occasionally used local grunt. Also works for others on the same project and enforces clean operations patterns (continuous deployment / effective build documentation).

<comment><USER35> Thanks for the advice, glad to hear dissent about the viewing angle (I've only seen the touchscreen in person once, and maybe the lighting was just bad in that instance). But the cost is still a sticking point, because for me this isn't competing with a Macbook Pro; it's competing with the older refurbished laptop from an arbitrary manufacturer that I got for $0 from a friend and that I currently use solely for Linux dev. I don't have a lot of income to dedicate to Linux development, so if I'm going to upgrade at all it has to be a compelling proposition from all angles (and it occurs to me that at this point I might as well wait until Ubuntu 18.04 LTS arrives anyway).

<comment><USER28> There is no reason to be poor with your knowledge. Do yourself a favour and invest in good hardware, it's a matter of ergonomics, focus, health and motivation not simply economics. Usually you can get a tax writeoff and it signals to clients you invest in your own tools and professional development as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> My biggest problem is that with these screens Linux hiDPI support for fractional scaling is just bad. Sure, you can hack it. And unity, for it's failings, pretty much just works. But the rest of the space is horrendous.

<comment><USER37> With 4K using 2x integer scaling should be fine, shouldn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> 8GB of RAM? Seriously? That's a non starter for me as a developer that works on multiple projects daily. At any given moment I'm running 3 or 4 backends, an equal or greater number of front ends, test suites, a vagrant VM... I can barely get by with 16.

<comment><USER39> Um, what? You can have 16gb.

<comment><USER38> I see that now under the search options. When I clicked into purchase the displayed models, it showed a static 8GB with no option to modify. My mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Why can't I get 16gb ram and have a 1080p screen? Is the touchpad still terrible? Does it still have coil whine?

<comment><USER41> > Why can't I get 16gb ram and have a 1080p screen?

I'm guessing there isn't much demand for lo res screens on high end laptops. I think that's probably especially true for machines that are mostly about working with text. Who wants to look at jagged type?

<comment><USER42> The fact that it's available in Europe but not NA is a bit odd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've had so many problems with my XPS 13 that I bought in 2016 that I will never buy another one. Killer WiFi card was utter crap, laptop has issues going to sleep and waking up when closing the lid (sometimes it would hang on the the dell screen when trying to wake up and never recover), etc. Purely anecdotal, but a hard pass for me. Lenovo is my new laptop brand of choice.

<comment><USER44> Which lenovo product would you recommend for a linux laptop?

<comment><USER45> Ubuntu on Thinkpad T series works well, e.g.

[https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201702-25371/](https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201702-25371/)

They are rugged and have a good keyboard. You can find a brand new at 70% of a Dell XPS price (at Lenovo's outlet / eBay / BHPhotovideo).

<comment><USER44> Woah I didn't know Canonical certifies Ubuntu on certain hardware. That's incredible, I love linux but I'm not a sysadmin and I've been burned before by hardware manufactures publishing windows-only driver binaries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Does it still have that awful coil whine?

<comment><USER47> Quoting Barton George:

> We are definitely looking into the coil whine issue, this has senior > management visibility, and pursuing several avenues for the current system > as well as solutions going forward.

Source: [http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os- applications/f/46...](http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os- applications/f/4613/p/20014657/21005539#21005539)

<comment><USER46> That is from June, this is the latest from December:

[http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os- applications/f/46...](http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os- applications/f/4613/p/19992655/21038056#21038056)

A motherboard change and a BIOS update (2.4.2) are supposed to lower the noise as much as they can, while still deeming it "working within specification". Users report the 2.4.2 update didn't help much or even made it worse.

<comment><USER48> This update (without motherboard change) did help by making the fans run less often, which doesn't seem to be causing overheating issues or me

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'm optimistic about this product line but I don't think it's there yet. I have a 13" 9360 and while the price was good, it does feel under-powered, specifically the 8G maximum memory configuration with the non-touchscreen.

Mine does have the "coil whine" thing, although it doesn't really bother me since I'm usually wearing headphones when I use it. But overall, the build quality is just pathetic compared to my Macbook, and this is supposed to be a competitor. The touchpad is way worse, the carbon fiber thing is cheesy, the awkwardly fat bezel at the bottom of the display is silly, the fact that you need a $100 dock to connect to external monitors is ridiculous, the webcam is weirdly placed in the bottom left of the display, there are just a bunch of strange/bad design choices.

That was all the bad things - otherwise it's better than any non-Macbook I've used. It's lightweight, small, gets the "little notebook you can take anywhere" niche fairly well. I hope they listen to feedback and iterate, but I can't say I'd eagerly recommend it.

<comment><USER50> > The fact that you need a $100 dock to connect to external monitors is > ridiculous

I think you're overselling this a bit.

I've got a USB-C dongle that with USB-A, HDMI, Network, and VGA, and a USB-C to DisplayPort cable that is entirely passive. I don't remember how much I paid for them, but it was much less than $100 combined.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I settled on the 13.3" form factor 6 years ago, but the lack of all dedicated PgUp, PgDown, Home, End, Ins, Del keys puts me off (I'm very used to copy/paste with Ctrl/Shift-Ins and whole line selection). Well, I'm sticking with the small ProBooks and Lenovos for now.

<comment><USER52> Keyboards are variable beasts, even at 13.3".

My ThinkPad 13 has all those buttons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Selling a laptop with 4gb in this day and age is a joke, right? Especially a developer edition? Why bother. Even the Apple Macbook (not pro) come with at least 8gb.

<comment><USER53> I raised an eyebrow at that as well. I guess it was to squeak in under the $1k mark but it seems like an odd decision for a machine being targeted at developers

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I notice a design trend with these slim notebooks. First time I noticed it was in a Asus and then in XPS - the edges of base of the laptop are shown very thin. But that slimness is just for the visual effect and if you look at the thickness of the base from the cross section you will realise it's actually as thick all across as at is the hinge and the edges were chiseled out 1 inch (or so) towards the middle on all three sides (except from the hinge) just to make the laptop appear thinner than it actually is.

XPS is a great laptop, I have briefly used it at work, but this tactic (marketing design tactic?), at least to me, feels sometime like deceiving. Kinda off-putting. I have also used Thinkpad Carbon in the past and if I remember correctly it was as slim as it looked.

</comment><comment><USER55> Why is it said to be for developpers and have a 16/9 screen?! Is Apple the only one to understand dev needs (screen needs at least)?

<comment><USER56> I think these wide ratios became popular, not because of video but because of ability to ship less screen and still claim to have a certain diagonal size. Saying 13" at 16:9 is much less area than a 3:4 screen at the same diagonal measurement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> How is the trackpad on these? I still haven't seen a non-Apple laptop where the trackpad comes even close to the Macbook.

<comment><USER14> It's a mess. Palm rejection is terrible. I use a wireless mouse with my XPS 13.

<comment><USER58> On Ubuntu?

I dual boot with windows and while your statement is 100% factual with Ubuntu, it seems to be better handled on windows. This appears to be a software issue; admittedly one which I think that they should be dealing with as a matter of urgency.

At least disable the thing while typing, Dell.

<comment><USER14> Yes, on Ubuntu. I should have clarified that. And yes, when typing, the touchpad should be disabled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I can't tell you how much I would love a Linux laptop, so much has been solved around power consumption and battery life, wifi stability, and so on. The one show stopper continues to be spotty HiDPI support for essential apps like The GIMP — the menu and fonts stubbornly stayed at 1x resolution and the icons were teeny. Ugh. Had a 9360 for a short time before reluctantly returning it.

So for me it's a Samsung Pro Chromebook as a daily driver and a 2015 Macbook Pro for development and graphics work.

How are things six months forward? Any better to completely working vs. 'closer and it'll be done soon'?

<comment><USER60> > The one show stopper continues to be spotty HiDPI support for essential apps > like The GIMP — the menu and fonts stubbornly stayed at 1x resolution and > the icons were teeny.

just put Xft.dpi: 144 (or more) in your .Xresources. (at least for menus & fonts)

Here's how it looks for me at 192: [https://imgur.com/9KKhpZq.png](https://imgur.com/9KKhpZq.png)

<comment><USER61> Toolbars and brushes don't scale?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'm surprised that only the touchscreen editions are UHD. I'd have guessed developers would prefer UHD, but no touch. Am I really missing something? Do people really prefer touch (or, FHD)?.

<comment><USER63> The other horrible part of the touch screen is that it is super glossy. To get 4k I had to buy a touch screen and put a matte film on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> It sure would be nice if someone like dell could at least insert Coreboot, or preferably Libreboot on these babies. They probably have enough heft to make such a change (I hope :).

</comment><comment><USER65> Interesting competitive profile. I'd guess the most direct comparison for people who want a really small machine running a non-windows OS would be the i5/8/256/non-touch/$1175 xps13 vs the m3/8/256/$1300 macbook. That's not bad at all---I'd consider trading a half pound or so in weight and some display resolution for a faster processor, bigger screen, and a hundred bucks, so long as battery life and reliability hold.

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm confused in the color options. I went with the top spec one, Silver is only option. I go back to New XPS 13 (non-developer) and go top spec again. Silver and Rose Gold available. What happened to black/carbon fiber? Is it just for lower configurations? I'm glad they added Silver (options and all), but I like black better. Especially with the camera (I'm guessing) below the logo.

</comment><comment><USER67> I looked at the i7/16GB/512GB/UHD version, it's over $2K.

Why not get a Surface Book instead for $1600?

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0163GNS5S/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0163GNS5S/)

Or Gigabyte Aero?

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MY2YYKB/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MY2YYKB/)

<comment><USER68> I know for my part, I wanted a Gigabyte Aero earlier in the year, but went with something else. The reason was the Gigabyte Aero wasn't available. I guess it had sold out fairly quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Very happy with my 6th gen dev edition. Only issue is the basically unusable camera, but that looks like it's been partially mitigated.

</comment><comment><USER70> Did DELL finally put some resources into their Linux software team? I bought a 2015 XPS 13 Developer edition and had a very bad experience with the software. The setup program crashed. And the drivers were bad: wifi slow, suspend/resume sometimes crashed, touchpad would register clicks while I typed, video playback randomly stopped working. I spent about 8 hours researching and finally got it usable. The remaining issues went away gradually over 6 months. After that experience, I believe that DELL doesn't care enough about making a great product to hire good software people, or is incapable of selecting good software people, or doesn't allocate enough money to hire enough software people.

Another problem is that all of the CPUs are 15W TDP. That means they have 1/3 the CPU power of a desktop. They are unsuitable for running heavy VM-based integration tests, video editing, and other things I want to do with my primary computer.

</comment><comment><USER71> Anyone know what WiFi cards they're using this time? The original ones used Broadcom, which sucked on Linux. The DE versions briefly switched to Intel cards, which were great, and have built-in support in the Linux kernel. Then they switched to some off-brand wifi cards called Killer for the later lines.

<comment><USER72> The announcements I read said Killer and Intel. Not sure who gets which. Killer is Qualcomm FWIW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I regret buying the 9560. Changed the screen under warranty 4 times and it either had a pink tint (twice), uneven backlight or backlight bleed. In the end I was just tired and decided to keep it as it is. My girlfriend got a MBP recently. This is when I realized how spending $2100 on XPS was not very smart.

</comment><comment><USER74> The XPS13 9350 is nice, I had no issue except that I swapped the Wi-Fi card for an Intel as it was badly supported when I first got it (Self installed Ubuntu before any Dell Linux support).

I fried the headphone port because the office wasn't grounded and had a shock, but everything else works well after 2+ years.

</comment><comment><USER25> Why does the XPS keep putting the camera at the base the screen instead the top of where it is on most laptops?

<comment><USER75> To have a smaller bezel at the top because most of their target audience doesn't use the webcam anyway.

<comment><USER76> Business folks have to put tape over the camera half of the time anyway so Dell puts only minimal effort into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> I've never had anything but bad experiences with these sputnik machines. They're underpowered, the one I had required custom drivers that were always awful to get into any distribution but Ubuntu, and I've never been a fan of the keyboard.

But people seem to love them. I don't really get it.

<comment><USER78> +1 on the keyboard. Keyboards are so harsh ... so little travel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> > As of today, the new XPS 13 developer edition is available online in Europe > in the following countries:

> UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland (French and > German), Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark

Yet another company that doesn't want my money.

<comment><USER42> > Beyond the thirteen countries above, there is a much longer list of > countries where the 9370 is available offline. (I'll be posting this list in > the next few days.)

<comment><USER79> Yes I saw that, but I don't expect it to be any different from earlier models, meaning I still won't see it on sale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> How's high DPI support on Ubuntu nowadays? My last experience (2 years ago?), everything was super small and when I tried changing the scaling it wasn't pixel-perfect. Literally had to return the laptop and get the 1366x768 version.

<comment><USER53> It was better before the switch to wayland/gnome in 17.10. In 17.04 they actually appeared to have fractional scaling working pretty seamlessly in Unity (not sure exactly what they did to accomplish that), but with the most recent version they are back to integer only.

That being said, gnome is expected to have factional scaling support under wayland for 3.28, scheduled for, iirc, March.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Should I hold off on buying a computer until this spectre and meltdown issues are fixed?

<comment><USER82> That will take a year no?

<comment><USER83> A year would be a fairly aggressive timeline. Ultimately SPECTRE et al are just exemplars of a class of exploit that I'm not sure anybody has seriously thought about how to deal with systematically. I've done the "daydream off for five minutes and try to solve the problem" a couple of times and I generally get to "let's design a new CPU from the ground up, using an entirely new set of formalisms"[1] pretty quickly, which is, ah, let's say, not a one-year effort to get it into customer hands. Timing attacks _suck_.

[1]: By this I mean that in general, our formal systems dump time as a consideration as quickly as they can. The systems designing the CPUs themselves don't, of course, because time is a big deal in making a modern CPU work at all, but otherwise, we dump it as a consideration as quickly as we can, for lots of reasons, like not overspecifying a system and overconstraining it, and because it's really, really _hard_ to keep track of time, and generally doesn't bring value commensurate with that complexity. Having built our stack of software and formalisms without very much thought about tracking time precisely, we generally only once at the very end recapture some time information, when we care, via O() analysis, and generally via the use of a whole crapton of explicitly-approximated values, which for what we care about is almost always good enough.... until timing attacks. Timing attacks _suck_. I think we're just barely beginning to come to grips with how much they _suck_.

<comment><USER84> My day dream for fixing Spectre is as follows: Basically double the amount of L1 cache (where the second half doesn't need to be as fast as actual L1 cache), make only the first half usable as cache. When an instruction the CPU speculatively executes an instruction which would replace the content in its L1 cache, first copy the existing content to the second, usually unused, half, and _then_ replace the content of the first half with the new data. Then, if the CPU decides that the branch was correct, just do nothing; if the CPU decides that the branch was incorrect, just copy back the "backup" of the original cache. Copying the cache to and from the "backup" would obviously have to be done really quickly with dedicated hardware, and not be done by going through each byte and copying it, but that should be possible.

Another solution I've thought of, which should probably be easier and/or cheaper: When speculatively executing an instruction, just don't write to cache at all. This would potentially make the speculatively executed instructions slower, but I can't imagine it would have a big effect.

Of course, both of those solutions would just mitigate this specific attack. You're probably exactly correct that timing attacks are going to continue to be a big problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> Maybe next years we can get one of the Zen APUs.

</comment><comment><USER86> Excited to see them shipping this with a quad core processor (and with 8 MB cache!). My previous-gen XPS 13 9360 has a dual core w/ 3 MB cache (I don't think quad core was offered?) and it has painfully poor performance.

</comment><comment><USER87> Did they solve the not-so-well-known problem of Content Adaptive Brightness Controll (CABC) not being disableable for FHD models? People do not speak very much about this, but for me it's actually a game changer. I was so close to buy one of those new xps 13" during holiday sales, but when I read that they do not simply allow you to disable the CABC option on FHD models (whereas you can on QHD models by updating the BIOS), I completely changed my mind on Dell models - actually, CABC was just part of the reason, the others being coil whine, quality control issues, no sane ports...

<comment><USER88> There appears to be an official Dell tool to disable CABC on the FHD now. I'm happy about that. Going to give it a run in the morning.

[https://github.com/advancingu/XPS13Linux/issues/2#issuecomme...](https://github.com/advancingu/XPS13Linux/issues/2#issuecomment-356363099)

[http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/drivers/driversdet...](http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/drivers/driversdetails?driverId=312K3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> I'm really worried about the Killer (seriously?) WiFi card in this one. I have the 9350 with the Intel card, and although it's perhaps not as super-fast when playing Call Of Medal Of Honor 17 online....well, this is a _developer_ machine, dammit. I want reliability, not an extra 0.00001 packet per second or whatever they're claiming. They might as well overclock the video card, because that's what gamers want. Seriously, Dell, what the triple fuck? What was wrong with Intel cards that .... _worked_?

</comment><comment><USER90> I have the 1st gen XPS 13 developer and I'm happy with it. The build quality isn't as good as Apple, particularly the touchpad is notably inferior, and the right speaker died a long time ago. From time to time, I need to open it to remove dirt from the fan, and that's about it. 5 years later, works perfectly.

A coworker recently got the 6th generation model. No problem. Slightly better build. Excellent battery life and performance.

These are definitely reliable workhorses.

</comment><comment><USER91> I bought an XPS 13 with Ubuntu preinstalled. Had trouble with a loud fan as well as the headphone jack not functioning correctly when using any headphones with a headset. Spent quite a bit of time troubleshooting with tech support and was ultimately told, otr, that the computers are shoddily manufactured and I'd be better off with a Latitude. Switched, still not thrilled about the battery but it works well otherwise!

<comment><USER92> the support is clueless, loud fan and headphone jack can be fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> I've seen quite a few developers buy and use these with mixed results. One key thing I've seen that people have really struggled with is multiple external monitors. For that to work you usually need some USB C dock which is a nightmare.

Personally I've had much better results with Lenovo T and X series because they typically have more conservative hardware that is better supported by upstream Linux. Also their dock is not USB C.

</comment><comment><USER94> Dell is doing a great thing here by leading the charge on Linux laptops but I'm so glad others realize what utter pieces of shit their laptops are quality wise.

Just because dell finally made a laptop that looks decent and wasn't built to be 15lbs doesn't mean the quality has improved here. Their desktops are fine.

I've also never dealt with a worse company with regards to repairs and service.

Do yourself a favor and buy an X1 Carbon, the 5th gen rocks and the 6th is coming soon.

</comment><comment><USER95> Still no support for 32gb of ram?

</comment><comment><USER96> Why do the euro models feature completely different (and arguably better) configurations?

I have one of these from a couple generations back and absolutely love it. My only regret is getting the high end model with the touch screen and high-res screen. I've heard 1080p has better battery life and I've spent more time I'm proud to admit dealing with the hell of configuring apps to not look like garbage on a high-res screen.

</comment><comment><USER97> Congrats to the team! I love that this project has been so successful. My M5510 DE has been my daily driver for almost two years now.

</comment><comment><USER98> I really wanted an XPS 13 with a 3840x2160 screen. Now that it's available I've been turned off by the meager performance gains for casual gaming on an integrated Intel GPU. And then there's Meltdown/Spectre.

AMD isn't safe either but I'm looking at the new HP Envy x360 15" with Ryzen inside.

Someday, maybe - RISC-V and less disappointments.

</comment><comment><USER99> Comments on this thread say that less memory helps battery life.

Are there motherboards that would allow the OS to power-save memory modules at times, and power them back up at others (perhaps user-configured)? If not, I wonder why..

<comment><USER39> Having more of the same type of memory would not make a lot of difference.

Using different types or ram (such as you have to do to get 32gb) which is not low power will make a difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> Love my XPS 13 but hate Ubuntu. I've never tried replacing it with Fedora or something different because of all the custom firmware. Has anyone had any experience with this? Was it a pain?

</comment><comment><USER101> I'm kind of blocked from buying an Ubuntu laptop because I want to do video editing for Youtube too. iMovie is free on the Mac, is there even a $300 software on Ubuntu that would be suitable?

</comment><comment><USER102> No USB A ports?

</comment><comment><USER103> With Meltdown and Spectre, and CERT's statement that only replacement of CPU will solve those, it's hard to think about buying any computer for the next little while.

</comment><comment><USER104> I ordered a Dell XPS 13 Developer edition in 2013. I picked Ubuntu Linux and the email confirmation said Ubuntu on it. Wait a week, it arrives, it runs Windows. Ugh.

I was so confident that we had moved past it being this hard to buy a linux laptop, in 2013, but I guess not.

All of my friends made fun of me for trying to buy a linux laptop. I ended up failing as hard as possible, being out thousands of dollars while I waited for the refund. Eventually I gave in and got Mac from the store, which I'm still using today. I desperately wish I could have got an XPS 13, but they took my money and gave me the wrong product. It's too risky to try it again.

<comment><USER105> Maybe I'm missing something, but if they sent you an Ubuntu-compatible laptop and just forgot to install Ubuntu on it, can't you do that yourself?

It's not the installation by the vendor that makes the Ubuntu support novel, it's the hardware selection and official support, right?

<comment><USER104> This voids the warranty of the machine.

You also do not get their professional support this way, which was the primary reason I was attempting to purchase the computer in the first place.

<comment><USER37> > This voids the warranty of the machine.

That shouldn't be the case: [http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os- applications/f/44...](http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os- applications/f/4457/t/19585015)

> You also do not get their professional support this way

Why not? How do they know you got one with Windows if your invoice says Linux?

<comment><USER104> I purchased the computer as my first computer to do work on for my startup.

Item number 1 is _not_ going to be: reformat the computer, risking the warranty, reinstalling the OS, removing the professional support that I have wanted my whole life but never received, and spend weekends getting WiFi to work with an external card since there's no way the WiFi would work on the Ubuntu install on the Windows machine, I was told. I called their support and they clarified for me that I would not be able to get WiFi or their professional support once I changed the OS. I got 10 minutes of use out of the first paid professional support I ever got in my life, and they told me that there was no solution to my problem and that I would not be allowed to call them again if I proceeded.

It's insane that I'm expected to do all of that to a machine that should have been productive for me on day 1. It would have been weeks of work to get ready to work. Not the plan.

I bought a machine to use professionally for work and Dell screwed me by giving me the wrong product, taking my money, and refusing to return it for about two weeks.

The whole thing was an absolute disaster and I will never buy a Dell again.

<comment><USER105> I understand the frustration but it seemed like you're overreacting: it's not hard to install Ubuntu, in fact it's preferable (if you ask me) so you can choose packages.

I also don't think it would void support - then no one could re-install. And how would they know you re-installed anyway?

Honestly Linux might be a pain for you to use day-to-day if installing from scratch seems like a big chore; either that OR you're misreading how Dell support would react. The third possibility is that Dell support is disastrously bad, and fragile, and no one should buy Dells. I'm slightly skeptical of option 3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> Anyone know if the ram is replaceable or if it is soldered to the board?

EDIT: Talked to support and they said the ram is soldered to the board.

</comment><comment><USER74> The link on the page bounce me back to the generic dell page? Are they blocking by country?

Anyone has a link to the 16GB version 9370 dev ed.?

</comment><comment><USER107> My newly found issue with Dell and the XPS 13 9360 series is their insane costs.

Dell you see wont give you an indication of cost, instead you must send the laptop back at a cost of £40.

Stupidly I thought they'd be fair, but no they came back with a quote for £626. They had no interest in offering a discount - so I told them to send it back and get shoved.

£40 was the cost of my laziness. Now I'll just DIY for significantly less.

Worth baring in mind if you're not confident repairing the machine yourself.

<comment><USER108> It's hard to evaluate this without context. What was wrong? What were independent repair shops offering?

<comment><USER107> The LCD panel had cracked, digitizer was fine.

Long story short, the quickest, easiest fix is to replace the entire display + chassis.

In Singapore I was quoted $500sgd but I wasn't sure how long I was hanging around for so I didn't want to risk it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> I regret buying my XPS 13. The battery dangerously expanded, warped the keyboard, and Dell refuses to fix it.

<comment><USER110> I had the same issue with the XPS 15 9550, but they replaced it out of warranty.

<comment><USER109> The XPS 15 had a "known issue". Dell refuses to admit an issue with the XPS 13, so it refuses to replace the battery out of warranty, despite the safety concern.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> But did they fix the key repeat issues ?

<comment><USER112> Still have this problem on my Dell Precision 5510. Latest BIOS update somewhat made it happen alot less often though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> Why do they only offer 1080p and 4k? Something in the middle makes much better sense.

<comment><USER61> They used to offer 3200x1800 which was nice. 2x @ 135ppi iirc

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> Add an nVidia GTX 1050, 32GB RAM and you would have had me at XPS.

</comment><comment><USER115> Awesome! Any timeline for the XPS15 (or precision)?

</comment><comment><USER116> Still has a nosecam

<comment><USER18> You mean chincam?

</comment></comment><comment><USER117> The RAM is soldered on and you can't get more than 16 GB of it? This sounds like a MBP, I guess I'll pass.

I've a 5+ year old ThinkPad that has had 32 GB in it since the day I got it.

<comment><USER118> Can't replace the HDD either in those. And forget about a proper docking station a la TP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER119> SSD maxes out at 512GB, Ram at 16GB... no go.

</comment><comment><USER120> I was kind of hoping for a Ryzen version...

</comment><comment><USER121> Spammy popup for mobile at this site

</comment><comment><USER122> i really wish there was a 15".

</comment><comment><USER123> IMO, it does not make sense to buy any of those new models: whether it's Dell, HP, or else--before we see models with 32Gb of RAM. It's been told here over and over since 2016 when first Touchbar MacBook got released.

It's 2018 and all of us, including manufacturers, are locked with 16GB of RAM and those upgrades look like a joke. Within last month I noticed myötähäpeä when someone asks me for laptop advice.

Hopefully this situation will make enough professionals pissed off so both them and manufacturers would look into RISC. It's going to get worse before it gets better.

<comment><USER124> Most vendors are looking to prolong battery life and increasing RAM will do the exact opposite.

Most software is still 32 bit and can't take advantage of the added memory. Even apps that can still don't really need that much. Workloads requiring gobs are RAM are niche and 8GBs works well for most people.

My personal server with 16GB of RAM runs at around 48% utilization hosting 16 sites, multiple databases, a transcoding media server, and a transcoding DVR. My work issued laptop with 8GB of RAM is running under 75% utilization. My development VM with 6GB of RAM is only running at 75% utilization.

Apart from video editing or data analysis, what sort of workloads would a user be running on a laptop that demand every ounce of RAM you can give them?

<comment><USER125> Two 32-bit apps on a 64 bit operating system (and everyone is running a 64-bit OS now) can each use 4 GB of physical RAM. They're each in virtualized address spaces.

A typical example of a workload that would use more RAM would be a bunch of big Excel documents open, a couple Chrome windows each with a bunch of tabs, Outlook and a chat app running in the background, and a profession-specific app like Visual Studio, Labview, Photoshop, Quickbooks, Solidworks, or whatever your specific job requires. Which represents just about every use case there is. This results in a consistent 70% usage on the 16 GB desktops across our office...and also about 90% usage on the older 8 GB machines.

Like Parkinson's Law for computers, apps expand to use the computing power available to them. And if you want this machine to be usable 2-4 years down the road, you should desire the possibility of increasing to 32 GB.

<comment><USER124> I think you're describing very atypical usage.

Labview, Photoshop, and Solidworks are not typical applications, they're highly specialized and the only apps on your list that require 64 bit. I would expect anyone using them to have a high spec machine.

Quickbooks and Visual Studio are 32 bit only apps and typically very memory efficient. I currently have Visual Studio open with a 17 project solution running the Interactive Debugger and it's only using 450 MBs.

Office comes in a 64 bit flavor but Microsoft recommends you use the 32 bit version. They only recommend 64 Bit if you're using exceptionally large datasets or handling large image assets. Office Apps are very memory efficient and typically use less than 200 MBs each unless opening exceptionally large documents.

The biggest memory hogs these days tend to be browsers and even then you have to open a lot of tabs.

That being said, on Windows you need to look at Available Memory and not Free memory when calculating utilization, I believe it was Windows 8/2012 where they hid Free memory and only display Available Memory because Free Memory is a misleading metric. Windows will also always page certain things to disk even if you have plenty of Free/Available memory.

Boosting Disk I/O and CPU speed is where a user will see the biggest benefits these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER126> Last year I was in the market for a new laptop for the first time since 2011. I really wanted an XPS 13 because it was Linux first and cheaper than a MBP. Generally what put me off was various issues relating to coil whine and general "lack of craftmanship" expressed by reviewers. The dell xps subreddit was a nightmare to read.

In the end I got a MBP and have no regrets, OS X is easy to use and Apple has always gotten the physical aspects of the MBP right. I'll consider XPS again in the future (~2-3 years) but doubt they'll be able to get to the craftmanship level of Apple.</comment>


No Gitlab, That's Not How Remote Works - <AUTHOR> https://workremote.us/no-gitlab-thats-not-how-remote-works/ <comment><USER2> > "where people are paid for how good they are – not where they happen to > live. In cloud/remote work – location is irrelevant – so we need to get out > of the habit of setting wages locally."

How delightfully techno-optimistic and short-sighted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why do you think it's short-sighted? Can you tell me one good reason for not going global with remote work?

<comment><USER2> What's your baseline for setting said wages? San Francisco, with its famously unreasonable rent to income ratio? Or should we set it to a global average?

"Remote work" is available to a vanishingly thin section of population, even those working in programming/software development/whatever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Short answer: Pay-rate should be decided based on actual skills, not zip code.

Long answer: I'm looking at it from a different perspective, why people have to live in SF? The cloud-wages concept is mostly applicable for knowledge workers, I agree, and it's a limitation. Pay-rates should be decided based on objective test results and skills. I strongly object to the "vanishingly thin" part. For setting the average, I think market dynamics will do its job and find a range that is lower than insane SF rates but still super attractive for people who happened to live outside of the US and capable of getting the job done.

<comment><USER2> So what should be the basis for setting that wage? Someone earning $100,000 per annum would be in the top 0.01% of people in, say, Poland. In Vietnam, add a few zeros. In Finland, top 1%, and that's a developed Northern European country.

What does an influx of super-rich tech remotes settling in, I don't know, Thailand do to the local economy?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is happening as we speak, in the past couple of years, I've visited Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Egypt, Brazil, and Turkey for meeting with senior software engineers primarily.

In Ukraine for example, knowledge workers working remotely for US and Western European companies are actually one of the highest-earning social groups. Same for Egypt, Brazil, Russia, and Turkey. Local economies are benefiting from the USD flow and more importantly, the knowledge/experience flow.

I genuinely believe that there's no such thing as "engineers/designers/etc from X country is better than Y". There are only skilled individuals and the competition for hiring them will be brutal in the next 5 years.

Five years ago, it was almost impossible to find a great software engineer from emerging markets for a remote position. They were literally asking "are you guys some sort of Nigerian scam?" People started to believe that working remotely is actually possible and paying much better than their shitty local average.

I must say, I really enjoy your smart questions, thanks for the great convo buddy.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, you too.

My worry comes from the asymmetric nature of the flow of currency on a population level, leading to (further) inequality. That's the gist of my problem. Not to say that we should be paying peanuts for workers in poorer countries, mind. We absolutely should be paying the value of the work done, but the truth is, purchasing power is different in different countries.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed and when you pay them better, in time, more and more highly skilled individuals from these markets are going to join your remote organizations. I think it's a healthy and fair competition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Actually I would expect also that companies with HQ in San Francisco pay SF wages also when they have offices in Europe/Asia/Africa as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. Transparent cloud wages based on skills is the solution.</comment></comment>


Show HN: FrappeBooks – Free and Open Source, Modern Desktop Accounting for SMB - <AUTHOR> https://frappebooks.com <comment><USER3> I'll admit I've been a little depressed about the state of open-source software lately - especially when it comes to GPL licensed projects.

So to see a new project like this - one that isn't just developer tooling or bleeding edge new-tech experimentation for nerds - it's refreshing! There's nothing wrong with the other sorts of projects - but good GPL software that is actually useful out of the box to average people - that's the dream. At least that's the dream that drove me into this industry in the first place. Thanks for creating and sharing your work.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, from the looks of it, one or two decades more and some flavor of Linux will be the only surviving major GPL software.

[https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog- whitesource/t...](https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog- whitesource/top-open-source-licenses-trends-and-predictions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the same people who also made ERPNext, "the world's best 100% open source ERP" which was built in their own (open source) web framework called ... Frappe [https://frappe.io/frappe](https://frappe.io/frappe)

<comment><AUTHOR> We have been doing ERPNext for 10 years now and a lot of what we did with Frappe Books is based on that learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just opened a new entity and was looking for an accounting package that was not Quickbooks. It turns out the hardest integration for accounting software isn't some file format or API - its accountants. In the US at least, Quickbooks is the defacto standard, and I've had a terrible time trying to find somebody that is willing to deviate from it.

That said I am open and eager to try something new. I really respect the Frappe and ERPNext team, and enjoyed this home page a lot so I downloaded it to my Linux box. I had some really odd UI glitches from the start, mostly just with electron window management (setup screen is not resizeable, then I accidentally resized the main window to 1 px wide). I found that the date picker was hilariously wrong - it would show 30 or 31 for all dates of the month except for the first row, then jump back to the prior month every time I selected a date. I could not remedy this with manually typing in a date entry. Screenshot: [https://imgur.com/a/7XjT9i3](https://imgur.com/a/7XjT9i3)

Other little issues: \- no app icon on Ubuntu (gnome) desktop \- I wish the account names were 'frozen' to the left side of the P&L and Balance Sheet reports. I have to scroll left and right to read the reports. \- I kind of need a description line on my invoice line items, or I'm going to need to make a ton of items, which will kind of mess up reporting. \- Some of the UI and language isn't really customized for US norms. Its not a big issue but sometimes feels awkward.

I hope this is helpful feedback. I'm going to talk with my accountant soon and see if they would be open to trying something new, but until then I'm stuck with Quickbooks. I just can't stand paying for a product that is chock full of ads for other products, and which walls off competitors by design.

I do love the stack, and would like to be able to just keep the sqlite.db in Dropbox and share with my other machine and accountant.

Best of luck. I could definitely see myself paying for this in the future, preferably one time or annually.

<comment><USER7> As an accountant (working on becoming a software developer), I've started to develop a reluctance to working with different tools because there are so many bad ones out there. Sometimes clients don't realize how bad they are, because they don't use it as much as accountants do, or they don't use the same parts of the software that accountants do (for example, bookkeeper uses data entry side, client uses report reading side) so they aren't bothered by the same issues that really slow you down when you're spending all day working with a tool.

I'd be open to working with an open source tool, but it sounds like some of the little issues you already noticed imply there'd be a lot more issues with smooth usability.

Odoo is also an open source accounting program, that's been around for awhile, aimed more at ERP side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This looks great. Is there any plan to add time tracking? It's the only reason I'm still with my current *books hosted solution, even though I'm not particularly happy with it.

<comment><USER9> This is the first thing I looked for - timetracking is critical for freelancers and contractors. I use freshbooks.com and generally like the product, and love the support. Wish they had a way to import time entries from CSV though..

It's probably like the old excel joke - everyone only uses 20% of the features, but every user uses a different 20% ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I use Quickbooks Self Employed and would love to migrate, but absolutely require three of their features before I can:

\- Automatically pull transactions from credit cards and banks.

\- Allow me to manually and automatically tag transactions as business and personal and which tax deduction category it belongs to (rent, apps/software, computers, utilities, etc)

\- Estimates my quarterly federal tax payments based on income and transaction deductions.

Any support for those features?

</comment><comment><USER11> Hey, this is cool, I'm looking to switch from a proprietary accounting app to something open-source.

It being open-source is important mainly because accounting apps UX usually sucks for some specific types of data entry and I want to be able to fix that for my use cases to get the annoying job done faster and get back to programming.

I immediately hit some dealbreakers with Frappe though (and filed them as issues, hopefully they are useful), most importantly that I cannot figure out how to delete General Ledger entries (if it is possible at all), see [https://github.com/frappe/books/issues/129](https://github.com/frappe/books/issues/129).

In terms of product feedback, I also recommend that you add a "spreadsheet mode" in which you can quickly and immediately edit most of the ledger data in one view, (without having to open popups and so on), with effective search- and-replace. That is a key accounting tool feature to get things done fast. For example, I currently use Banana ([https://www.banana.ch/en/features](https://www.banana.ch/en/features)) which is spreadsheet-based and pretty effective for this task (but could still be a lot better).

</comment><comment><USER12> How do they pay that many people giving away software?

This is amazing I just don't understand how they do it?

<comment><USER13> [https://erpnext.com/pricing](https://erpnext.com/pricing)

They offer paid support and hosting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> out of curiosity how do you guys make money?

looks like you guys have a big team and have been running for a decade now doing open source stuff

<comment><AUTHOR> We are just under $1M annual revenue, so not really making a lot of money, but not to bad either. Since we are bootstrapped, so no really pressure to grow exponentially. From very early days we had paying customers (just enough to support a lean team). Our major growth has come in the last 2 years, where our team size grew from <15 to >40.

So we are based in India so salaries tend not to inflate too much. We also pick raw talent and nurture them (and also pay above market), so it just about works!

Having said that, I think the market for products like ERPNext (our flagship) is huge, in the tens of billions. Looking at our current traction, we really hope we can make the product good enough for enterprises to switch to this. I see a huge potential revenue in support, assurance, consulting when it comes to it. So its a waiting game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Two notes.

Fiscal year end start or end normally is sufficient to define the fiscal year. Why is both a start and end date needed for the fiscal year here? That's usually an immediate tell that system was designed by programmers not accountants.

Why can't users type in a fiscal year - the date picker is broken, the size of the date picker jumps around for different months, lot's of repeating dates etc.

The system allows datepicker to pick odd fiscal year ends (ie, leap years and mid month dates) are these fiscal years properly supported?

ERPnext looks great though - I look forward to trying it and supporting it - <USER2> imagine it's more refined!!

</comment><comment><USER16> Just want to say this is an awesome work and much needed product in the market.

Hope you get good leads for ERPNext premium offerings through this. It's important for more open source projects to flourish in the market.

</comment><comment><USER17> Can you import your old data from Quicken? Or Quickbooks? Or GnuCash?

</comment><comment><USER18> This looks great, we've been a long time ERPNext customer, but we really only use the accounting and invoicing systems. This might be a better fit for us.

</comment><comment><USER19> I absolutely adore the Hergé style art on the home page!

<comment><AUTHOR> Made by the amazing team at Timeless [https://timeless.co/](https://timeless.co/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How does this relate to ERPNext? Is this just a packaged ERPNext installation? Is there any way to replicate this with standard, hosted ERPNext?

<comment><AUTHOR> No this is a fresh implementation and completely in Javascript. ERPNext is a client-server application based on Python.

There were a couple of itches we were trying to scratch. First we realized that a _lot_ of people were looking for a good free accounting application and ERPNext was just too heavy. Also we realized that cloud is a bottleneck. Most SMB owners can't manage a cloud or write a simple Shell command.

The only way to truly build decentralized solution was Desktop. Also we realized this was a big gap in FOSS offerings.

This is just the first version, we do plan to add inventory and other capabilities overtime.

<comment><USER21> Did you evaluate existing FOSS solutions like GNUCash or KMyMoney? Would be interesting to see what you found lacking.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, mostly a modern user experience. Also the web stack is much more accessible there are many developers who are already familiar with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is there an online version of this? I see one of the "features" is that it's not cloud-based, but it is a web app... so can I self-host it, or would I be stuck with Electron and sharing files on a thumb drive like a caveman?

</comment><comment><USER23> Looks fantastic! Cheers for good work.

Any plans to develop something like it for personal finance?

</comment><comment><USER24> Much needed desktop app for accounting!

<comment><USER20> Don't get your hopes up, it's Electron.

<comment><USER25> So what ?

<comment><USER4> [https://medium.com/@dhormale/install-pwa-on-windows- desktop-...](https://medium.com/@dhormale/install-pwa-on-windows-desktop-via- google-chrome-browser-6907c01eebe4)

No need for Electron fat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Great job! Can it sync between devices (to avoid to lose data if my computer die)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! It is single threaded. Since it is a file based system (sqlite), so you can put it on your favorite cloud backup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This looks nice! Do you mind me asking what you used to build your desktop client?

<comment><USER28> If you look at the package.json, it looks like they used electron and vue.js. [https://github.com/frappe/books/blob/master/package.json](https://github.com/frappe/books/blob/master/package.json)

<comment><USER27> Ah great, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I just came here for the awesome name of the product :D</comment>


3 lessons engineering should learn from sales and upper management - <AUTHOR> http://blog.in-sight.io/3-lessons-engineering-should-learn-from-sales-and-upper-management/

<comment><USER2> Metrics are very hard to apply to engineering, and software development in particular. This has been shown many times. Metrics became all the rage with statistical process control, where you monitor production of widgets. The problem is that engineering is by definition not creating the same thing over and over again - if you think it is, go use Excel to send email, and word for web browsing. There are lots of similar things among different pieces of code, and hence design patterns. But good metrics have proven difficult. Lines of code produced turns out to cause people to add redundant comments, and if you exclude comments it causes other things. Closed bugs/issues is better, but to be really effective you need to identify how new bugs are introduced. Some people create as many as they close and that would look good if you monitor closures. Other things have been tried with varying success. The core problem is that engineering is not a well defined process and never will be.

Another way to look at is this: none of the marketing metrics he mentions have anything to do with peoples performance. Click rates are a measure of the effectiveness of a marketing strategy, not necessarily the effectiveness of a person in marketing. You use that data to drive decisions about how much to spend on different marketing activities. The equivalent for engineering is to determine how much to spend on each developer. In other words, who to keep and whom to fire, and that shouldn't be a really dynamic process. Even if you had good metrics on development, what knob are you going to turn to cause a change in those metrics?

</comment><comment><USER3> "1\. Start tracking and improving performance based on relevant metrics

I'm talking about bounce rates, conversion rates, click rates, followers, value per visit, return on investment on ads, customer satisfaction, and so on.

Granted, some of those are vanity metrics, but we'll touch on that another day."

"based on relevant metrics"; "some of those are vanity metrics"; rage quit.

Aside from that, the point he's making is superficial. There are certain, very important, things that are extremely difficult to track back to a simple metric. This argument comes up all the time in code refactoring. You can't tie a refactor back to a trackable metric like what he's pointed out. However, refactoring code can lead to many performance boosts, such as decreased bugs and faster development of future features. But this is very difficult to attach a number to. You can't say "for every X lines of code we refactor we diminish future feature development by 10% and reduce bugs by 50%". It's just not possible.

Also noting that things like "customer satisfaction" or "number of bugs reported" weren't on this guys list of "relevant metrics".

Neither were items like "employee happiness" or "pride in your work".

Look, I'm a big fan of data-based decisions, but that can't be the end-all-be- all of your decision making process. Honestly, just the first point of this article makes it sound like working for this guy would be like working in a development sweat shop.

So, nope, not even reading your other 2 points because your first one is just that bad.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Monitoring the software engineering process" is quite literally management's job. If they can't be bothered to do it and I'm supposed to do it for them, I'd like a raise. A big fat one. And the title and expense account to go with it.

Oh, that's not in the cards? Do your job, then. Figure it out. If you can't perhaps you're not fit to manage engineers.

Software engineering is an empirical process, not a deterministic one. Can't handle that? Get out.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's their job, but sometimes it's easier to argue or prove your point with some clear graphs and objective metrics. I see it as a tool to improve for developers and as an objective view of what really happened.

Sure it helps managers do their jobs, but I think that in some cases we might not even need a manager at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the metrics idea for developing may have value, but I also feel you could start to answer some of these questions simply by asking the developers. We tend to know if we're all of a sudden spending our time just on bug fixing. Or if a project keeps going back and forth between development and QA or management. We can often tell when something isn't efficient. At that point, it comes down to making some tough and potentially uncomfortable decisions to change the process across the team as necessary. This change is often difficult to make happen. Perhaps metrics will help convince non-developers to get on board?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are absolutely right, managers could ask developers for those metrics. It's actually how it's it's done right now, in my experience.

The value I see for developers is to get some objective metrics on a feeling they have. If they think something is inefficient, they should be able to be able experiment with their process. But that needs to be done a bit more objectively.

I think developers could also use this as proof that that the problem is not always with the team but sometimes it may come from management.

The scope creep is a good example of this. A manager keeps adding stuff to the current iteration and the dev team gets swamped. A widget could clearly show the impact of that scope variation.

I see value for the dev team, end-users and management if it's done right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > What if we had a nice way to figure out whether: ...metrics...

Microsoft's Team Foundation Server has a lot of this built-in. Check out Visual Studio Online, I believe they have a free level.

The way I was taught Scrum was this: metrics are there to help the team become more efficient, not for performance evaluation purposes.</comment>