How Stanford Took on the Giants of Economics - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/upshot/how-stanford-took-on-the-giants-of-economics.html <comment><USER2> I like Stanford, but as I read this article I couldn't shake the feeling that all of these gigantic academic dinosaurs are headed for extinction and simply don't realize it yet.

The very force that has fueled Stanford's prestige — the dynamism of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs — may ultimately strike the fatal blow against the existing university system. Anyone who bothers to look can recognize the gross waste and inefficiency in the existing arrangement that the federal government subsidizes through student loans: Education is more expensive than ever, and there are cheaper and cheaper alternative sources of information.

We have already reached the point at which you can educate yourself outside of the legacy institutions. In the future, someone smart will devise a better way to demonstrate the existence of the relevant skills to employers. The residual prestige of schools like Stanford or Harvard may seem durable, but it could evaporate overnight if suddenly all of the smartest kids in the country realized that ____ education startup was providing them a better opportunity for future advancement.

I predict that once this cultural phase shift occurs, the field of economics will also begin to decline, because so much mainstream economics research offers zero actionable insight for private actors. The parts that thrive will presumably be those with practical applications, like finance.

<comment><USER3> You're conflating the educational and research objectives of universities. Much of the tech industry's disdain for academia stems from negative personal experiences with taking courses at top universities, typically due to a lack of caring on the part of instructors, who are more interested in working on their research (that disdain is then compounded by experiencing the rapid social/economic impact software engineering in the tech industry can have, particularly when compared to the slow progress of academic research). This perspective is understandable, and top universities should hire dedicated instructional faculty for all the lower-level undergrad classes, and leave the researchers to their own devices.

In any case, the presence of undergrad students on campuses has surprisingly little to do with the goings-on of academic research, although they may occur in the same geographic locales and have some common actors. The widespread success of MOOCs (which now seems quite unlikely) would have a negligible impact on academic research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's not like Stanford had a sub-100 program and then started recruiting the best faculty. Some might even argue that Chicago (including its business school) has been just as influential as either Harvard or MIT. The top programs are Stanford, Chicago, Princeton, Harvard, and MIT. Penn, Berkeley, Yale and a few others are also in the conversation. Good for Stanford that they made a couple of senior hires, as they've strengthened one of their fields, but this isn't big news. Stanford has never been an underdog.

<comment><USER5> This might be a little off topic but I heard on the other hand that Stanford's business school was an underdog pre 1990s. Do you know if there's any truth to that?

<comment><USER6> In the early 80's when I graduated Wharton, Stanford wasn't even on the radar at all at least from my recollection.

Stanford picked up steam post Internet because of it's relation and proximity to Silicon Valley.

If that wasn't the case, they wouldn't have to raid to attract talent now. You don't see Harvard or MIT raiding anyone in the fields that they are dominant in after all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Newspapers only know how to tell a few different narratives, so they feel the need to hammer everything into one of them.

In this case it's "plucky underdog takes on established titans", which you have trouble hammering into the narrative when your "plucky underdog" is Stanford.

<comment><USER8> Are you saying there is no story here?</comment></comment>


Computing's Fundamental Principle of No Learning - <AUTHOR> http://www.sicpers.info/2017/12/computings-fundamental-principle-of-no-learning/ <comment><USER2> Related: [https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/of-mice-and- men/](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/of-mice-and-men/)

It's a podcast from the excellent 99% Invisible that talks about Douglas Engelbert's (of Mother of all Demos fame) vision for computing that expanded human capabilities through systems that required mastery, and how that vision has been replaced by things this "principle of no learning."

<comment><USER3> Is there a more specific quote by Engelbert? I don't remember reading that in his 1962 paper, but maybe I need to go back and read it again.

<comment><USER2> I didn't quote him. My comment was just a summary of the podcast synthesized with this post (since it coined a more compact term for the concept).

<comment><USER3> Ah, too bad, that would be an awesome thing to put in a paper!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem is not that apps are usable without learning. The problem is that the "power user" features are removed instead of just hidden.

It is a great achievement that apps have sane defaults and dead-simple workflows for those who do not care to learn anything more complicated. It is a damn shame that those who want or need more power simply do not have access to it. More applications need an "expert mode".

</comment><comment><USER3> Programming by demonstration can solve many of these problems by substituting real action for the apprised abstraction. For example, one could drag and drop some item, capture that action from a log, and then repeat that action in a script.

<comment><USER5> This! This! This! This is the workflow in the 3D modelling/animating program Maya -- every UI action is backed by a MEL (Maya Embedded Language) command, and is logged (it reads like a shell script). It's very easy to perform a task, copy-paste the log, parameterize it, and add a new shelf or inspector for the new compound task. I've seen technical artists without programming backgrounds adapt to this very quickly, and create amazing extensions to the base application. I wish every program worked this way.

<comment><USER6> Blender does the same thing. Every executed command get added to the info log as regular python snippets that can be copy/pasted into a script or the python console if/when you need to automate something that you have just done via the GUI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure I understand what is meant here by the "principle of no learning." Is it a rule that an interface should not require training/learning in order to use?

</comment><comment><USER8> The People, Places, Things metaphor was evident in the early versions of Microsoft's "Metro" interface on WP7. The form it took was "Hubs". It didn't win. Maybe because it was never practical to build complex workflows on a phone...or maybe because building complex workflows is complex and therefore statistically unlikely to be preferred _in any context_ to brute force most of the time.

<comment><USER9> On the desktop, Lotus Notes was a popular complex workflow builder for a time in the 80s and 90s.

<comment><USER10> And people fucking hated it.

<comment><USER9> I thought it was great for building custom workflows, and I don't know that anything has replaced it since. People seem to hate Lotus Mail in favor of Outlook, for some reason.

I always thought Microsoft was way behind Lotus in the workflow department, but people were used to MS products. Maybe it got worse over time with IBM's mismanagement, and I haven't used it in 15 years.

I recently had to cobble together a worfklow in Drupal, and it was terrible in comparison to what could easily be done in the late 90s with Notes (which did have a web front end by then).

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

*> The Taligent frameworks look [...] like fairly standard 1990s OOP-in-C++ which almost certainly makes them less fun to use than modern Qt.

What exactly does the author mean with that? In how far does Qt deviate (for the better) from classic OOP?

</comment><comment><USER10> The author of this article is obviously a programmer who spends much of his time engaged in programmer status games showing off how smart he is. What he _doesn 't_ understand is what it's like for the people who do the vast, vast bulk of computing: ordinary working-class folks found in the cubicle farms and factory floors of the world. Their jobs are simple: enter new purchase orders or inventory shipments, type up letters, etc. They don't _need_ a powerful tool, and if they have to do much learning then they can't be as productive as quickly. Apple and Microsoft are building software for this crowd because it is -- by far -- the biggest potential market for computers, and their software has vastly expanded the set of people who might become computer users -- or even programmers. Easy-to-use software has benefits for programmers and other knowledge workers too: less of a cognitive burden means more of your brain can focus on performing the task instead of wrestling with the tool. This is why Emacs is doomed to failure: IDEs are simply far better at onboarding people towards programming, and those people tend to stick with what they know rsther than struggle with an ancient, confusing UI. (Vim appears to have been spared for hipster-cred reasons.)

<comment><USER12> The point of powerful tools and metaphors is not snobbishness, its so these activities can be automated and made easier, eliminating drudgery and reducing mistakes.

Sometimes that process can be done by the people on 5he factory floor (through excel of course, and, _pace_ your own comment, admins famously writing their own macros in Emacs), but mostly it's via other folks being able to write stuff for them.

And the tragedy produced by this "no learning" premise is that most people who operate computers spend their time imperfectly translating and t4ansferring from one silo to another</comment></comment>


The Particle Zoo: Subatomic Particle Softies - <AUTHOR> http://www.particlezoo.net/ <comment><USER2> Wow! The full set is $355 + shipping!</comment>


Running an IBM System/370 on a Raspberry Pi Zero for 5 Years - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1257832168455208963 <comment><USER2> Maybe NJ government should hire this guy</comment>


A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future - <AUTHOR> https://sourceforge.net/blog/brief-history-sourceforge-look-to-future/ <comment><USER3> Personally, I feel that the SourceForge brand has _negative_ value right now. For me they burnt almost all of their goodwill during their long, long period of neglect and stagnation, then went sharply negative when they started distributing malware.

I'm willing to give the new team the benefit of the doubt; let's just assume they want to create a high quality product. That's great, but I think the first step is starting over with a non-tainted brand.

It may make sense to migrate existing projects and accounts across, or even to build on top of the existing code base, just don't call it SourceForge.

<comment><USER4> Completely agree. Sourceforge, the brand, is so tainted I can't even read this on my phone, since a content blocker List I have installed has apparently blocked the entire domain. The brand has been shit in my own mind for a while. Not even going to bother reading this. Why does it still exist? Replaced by GitHub, Bitbucket, and Gitlab.

<comment><USER5> There's still old source code on Sourceforge that hasn't been moved elsewhere.

Some of that is 100% stagnant, some of that is lightly maintained with a bug fix once every few years, and a little of it is somewhat actively maintained.

I always thought that Freshmeat, while not a hosting site and therefore not comparable, was an ok brand, and didn't necessarily have to go inactive, even though, yes, it couldn't keep up with everything. It could've continued to play some interesting role.

<comment><USER6> I was just thinking of Freshmeat, that was a big loss to me as I found it much easier to navigate compared to SF, at least back in the days: I rarely used SF in like 10 years and stopped completely after they added malware to archives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> History of SourceForge according to me:

\- forced users to look at ads and go through two steps in order to download projects

\- when that was not enough, injected malware into the files users were downloading

\- irrecoverably lost project information

I don't think they can do anything to salvage their image at this point. The last incident didn't even inflict too much damage because there wasn't much left to SourceForge.

<comment><USER8> Many years ago me and a friend wrote an open source game and we hosted the project on Sourceforge. This was some time in the late 90's. The project got dropped as so many others do because both of us found more interesting things to do.

Now, if you were in this situation and you decided to come back to the old project a few years later (we're now in the early 2000's) wouldn't you expect to be able to continue where you left off?

Not so with Sourceforge. I found that the entire project was deleted. I contacted them and got the answer that it was indeed deleted because it hadn't been touched in however many years it had been.

To give credit where credit is due, they were actually able to recover my code from a backup and restore the project.

The point of this post was just to point out that they've done some user hostile things for a very long time.

<comment><USER9> >Now, if you were in this situation and you decided to come back to the old project a few years later (we're now in the early 2000's) wouldn't you expect to be able to continue where you left off?

That's unfair. Back then, storage was expensive, backups were expensive, bandwidth was expensive, server CPU time was expensive. You can't fault them for removing unsupported projects in an era when Microsoft and Yahoo were only giving you 10MB of email storage (you might get an extra 15MB for $10/mo) and similarly aggressive purge policies.

<comment><USER8> That's a fair argument, but couldn't they at least have sent an email about it?

<comment><USER9> I don't disagree with that. That would have been the right approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> To me, this is just another website. There is no history, that was burned when it became an enormous cash grab. I understand they've been making a lot of changes, but if they want tabula rasa, then they have it -- and they have to offer something that entices people to use the product, not rely on the name they inherited.

<comment><USER4> As someone else already pointed out, I don't think they'll be able to rely on the name as it's been severely tarnished beyond repair. They'll have to rely on something that is significantly better than what the GitHubs, Bitbuckets, and Gitlabs are offering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> At least it does not belong to Microsoft yet. That seems to be important for some people. ;-) (I actually laughed when I saw that SourceForge has a GitHub importer now... SourceForge! Ha!)

On a more serious note: SourceForge has surely improved a lot, including not shipping malware anymore. The only things that I'd improve are:

1) More reliable SVN servers. Yes, I "still" have SVN projects on SourceForge because I lack motivation to change either the VCS or the hoster. But SourceForge's servers sometimes don't like my attempts to pull from or push to them. I blame the server admins, not the VCS.

2) A better code view. Just like Bitbucket's, SourceForge's code view (especially for diffs) is a mess. That's the one big thing I always liked with GitHub: Reading and comparing commits is perfectly clean.

3) A better project page. It always takes me a while to find the "Code" link on those - although it's always in a similar place.

Good luck, SourceForge.

</comment><comment><USER12> In the late 90s, I was part of a project, which later became a non-profit called Tux.org, who was trying to be an umbrella organization to help Linux related FLOSS projects. We weren't quite at the model of a fiscal sponsor, but Tux had mirrors of projects and the goal of helping others.

Then Sourceforge came out and I remember as a 20 year old trying to talk with them about where they saw themselves in the community, and they were basically dismissive of the work that we were doing.

Nonetheless, they had (at the time) flashy software that made them attractive and many projects used them. They were genuinely the Github of their day.

The ultimate lesson of Sourceforge is three fold for me:

1\. Never trust a commercial entity that you aren't paying to be your single repository

This applies to Sourceforge and Github, ultimately.

2\. Never use proprietary software as your core

Sourceforge, like Github, was proprietary and used that to keep people in. Like Github, the interface to the internals were FLOSS (Subversion in SF's case, git in Github's case).

2\. We need better verification/validation methods to handle malware

We need verified builds

</comment><comment><USER13> who even owns sourceforge now? it's like coming across an antique toy, who knows how many garage sales and antique stores it must have been living in over the decades - a quick google reminds me it's been at least owned by VA Software, Geeknet, Dice.com (!) and now apparently some company called BIZX. from a usability standpoint, including the release process, the mailing list, and everything else, the site was always of course awful, which wasn't so unreasonable in 2002 but as the years and owners went by it just got worse and worse. Along with the ads/malware, I took issue with it's silly practice that you could never delete a project from it, because that would somehow be denying the fact that you've promised your project is open source. Never mind this means if you wanted to move to some other platform that an ancient fossilized version of your code would stay on Sourceforge forever and confuse users who were unfortunate to find it there first.

<comment><USER14> One of the principals posts about sourceforge occasionally:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=loganabbott](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=loganabbott)

There was an article about their (last?) acquisition a couple of years ago where they commented at some length.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11092219](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11092219)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If SF wants to attract developers, they should support alternative version control systems like fossil and darcs. I can't think of any reason to use SF for a new project except possibly that you use mercurial and don't like bitbucket. The market for git hosting is extremely competitive and they don't bring much to the table.

<comment><USER16> That means a UI that has to take into account the idiosyncrasies of different tools. It seems like a recipe for disaster, if focus is what SF needs now.

<comment><USER11> It works for Bitbucket (Mercurial and Git, although they don't advertise Mercurial nearly as much as Git).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wish them good luck and hope they can be a good competitor to gitlab and github. Some competition is always good. I do hope, as unlikely as it is, though that they move away from the Ad based revenue model.

I personally, am not interested in returning to SourceForge due to all reasons articulated in other comments.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hi, president of SourceForge here. Glad this is trending, albeit a few months later. These articles seem to trend on HN every few months, with many people not realizing SourceForge changed ownership in 2016 and that the new team's been working hard on improving.

To be clear, we had nothing to do with the bundled adware decisions of 2015, and when we took over in 2016, the first thing we did was remove the bundled adware, as well as institute malware scans for every project on the site.

We're working hard to restore trust, so if we win some of you back that would be cool. However, we're just focused on doing right by our million daily users.

</comment><comment><USER19> Recent history of SourceForge: they migrate data centres, and some things got broken and went missing for several _months_ , and in one of the two cases I've checked ended up just disappearing completely, though that _could_ be the project's decision (specifically, when audacity.sourceforge.net started working again, it didn't actually, because links that used to work just redirect to the project page).

</comment><comment><USER20> Sourceforge is something I used extensively, they burned their reputation. I don't care about new management or new owners. I will never use their site again. When I find a package or library that is available only hosted there, I look for an alternative. That is how bad their reputation is.

<comment><USER21> What's your FOSS alternative to FlightGear? MinGW? TortoiseSVN? PortableApps? Code::Blocks? 7Zip? QBittorrent? DeSmuME? WinSCP? XAMPP? Boost? The list goes on and on...

These are all applications I've used that distribute through SourceForge. This isn't a snarky comment; It's a legitimate question. I use most of these programs a lot, and if SourceForge's brand is so tainted, what is one to do? (Never using these programs is not an answer)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've used SourceForge for a while for my hobbyist game development. I've never had a problem with them product wise; their tools work well and they're really making solid progress on the redesign.

The malware incident was really bad, but I'm surprised more people won't give them a look given the fact it is new ownership and a much smaller team.

What's strange, to me, is that last week there was a thread with a majority of commenters defending Microsoft and their new attitude towards open source, when Microsoft has been making terrible products whilst being hostile to developers and consumers alike for decades (just my opinion).

Everyone has different grudges for different reasons, I guess. It's a tough and complex problem as a business.

<comment><USER23> > defending Microsoft and their new attitude towards open source

What's odd about that? Isn't their new attitude better than the old, and perhaps "good enough" (at least compared to other giants)? Are you saying nothing they do should be considered good enough by devs, based on the previous history?

<comment><USER22> Personally, I'm a big believer in second chances in any facet of life, but people seem to act the way you're describing to Sourceforge, despite giving a pass to other entities. It's all a matter of personal perspective.

<comment><USER23> I can see the point of both views but I do think the behavior of sf was worse than that of ms (in the case of sf it was a criminal breach of trust).

In any case it does seem like a double standard to not accept the "new people, new philosophy, new chance" in either both or neither case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love the guy challenging the big companies and so want them to succeed. But, when I look at their site I wonder about so many things:

\- What do VoIP and Internet Speed Test have to do with what they do.

\- I wish they have a business model that is not selling ads or my personal information to others. As long as they do that, it is hard to trust them, especially with their malware past.

\- Who are their target users, is it me (a developer) or someone else?

\- Why do they equate free to open source. Free means so much more in for developers. I use open source despite it being free to use, but because I know I can use it in interesting ways if I need to.

</comment><comment><USER25> While redesigning the site was undoubtedly a good step, it still feels a bit "off" to me, anyone else?

<comment><USER26> It feels like it was designed in 2001. I don't think anyone cares about "history" as much as they care about the fact that the brand is old and tired, and even looks it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> No compelling differentiation, literally just worse than all alternatives.

<comment><USER28> There's still a lot of tools that exist nowhere but sourceforge because they were abandoned by the developers years ago

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > We've already seen a huge surge in projects being imported to SourceForge > from GitHub in the last few days

I wonder why?

</comment><comment><USER30> > Comments disabled

That pretty much says it all.

<comment><USER11> SourceForge is controversial. I doubt they'd want to moderate the inevitable discussion. Nor would you.

<comment><USER31> If you want to rebuild trust, you need full free and frank dialogue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> If you "browse projects" on their website, they offer you categories, like ERM, CRM, HR, Ecommerce, Accounting.

They just don't work developers, they work for (unsuspecting) ERM software users, in capacity of an open-source app store. That's why it can succeed - <USER2> one makes a CRM software, he might mirror there in hope to be stumbled upon by category browsers.

edit: some grammar

</comment><comment><USER33> I dont see any reason for this to still exist now that git is a thing... all github would have to do is make their release pages a bit more friendly to non devs and it would demolish sourceforge completely.

<comment><USER34> I don't think developers would ever pick SF because of how user friendly the release page looks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Nah. Bridges burned.

<comment><USER36> New ownership — they didn't burn the bridges but I agree that I think the name is too tainted now.

<comment><USER37> Did the new ownership fire every developer and middle manager? If not, that means there are folks at the "new" sourceforge that are perfectly happy bundling malware with OSS downloads. It was not addressed in the article at all so I'm not buying what they're selling.

<comment><USER38> They do mention removing bundled installers and implementing virus scans, both of which seem targeted at removing malware from the site.

<comment><USER39> I think the issue was that people who thought that bundling malware was ok, are still employed there.

<comment><USER11> Not necessarily with any responsibilities though.

<comment><USER40> If you're employed somewhere, you have responsibilities. Otherwise what's the point?

<comment><USER11> If I'm a mere employee, my chance to decide about what happens around me (or on my employer's website) might be limited.

<comment><USER41> I'm a mere consumer, and my only option in reaction to the abdication of personal responsibility is to never use the product again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Real networks

Sourceforge

\- Companies that torched their reputation by treating users like s#^t. Straight malware. Seriously, they would have been better off going quiet and then building back up later / selling a higher quality brand.

Developers are valuable to the big players - why drive them away with malware - seems like the malware was targeting wrong market.

And yes, I was part of friends and family IPO at SF.

</comment><comment><USER43> Too late for a future - I suggest a rebrand.

</comment><comment><USER44> Sourceforge was briefly free software, proprietary, unpopular and then now kinda-free but nobody trusts them.

<comment><USER18> Huh? Still completely free

<comment><USER44> It might be free now, but I believe there are some non-free parts. For a long time it was proprietary.

<comment><USER18> Nope it's still free and has always been free. And it's built on Apache Allura which is open source.

<comment><USER44> There were years when it wasn't free and there was a proprietary enterprise edition sold for on-premises usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Sourceforge is one of the sketchiest/spammiest looking sites I've ever been to.

</comment><comment><USER46> One of the guys who started SF taught me about Linux :)

<comment><USER11> Is that a good thing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> This sentence: "We have the most robust search and discovery system of any open source repository on the web, and offer an unparalleled experience for end-users looking for software binaries they can download and install with the click of a button."

<comment><USER48> What's wrong with it? GitHub's search isn't great, as I'm sure you're aware.</comment></comment>


Danger: This Mission to Mars Could Bore You to Death - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/magazine/danger-this-mission-to-mars-could-bore-you-to-death.html?pagewanted=all&utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer831bd&utm_medium=twitter&_r=0

<comment><USER2> Is it really that far of a stretch to consider giving astronauts video games? What else are you going to do with massive amounts of computing power and tons of time?

<comment><USER3> Then they play Doom the whole time, and end up bored when they finally get to Mars and there's no portal to hell to contend with.</comment></comment>


Does Microsoft have its mojo back? Can it keep it? - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2010/09/24/does-microsoft-have-its-mojo-back-can-it-keep-it/

<comment><USER2> Microsoft was once charming and sexy?</comment>


Raptor Announces "Blackbird" Micro-ATX, Low-Cost POWER9 Motherboard - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raptor-Blackbird-Announced <comment><USER2> Oh man... if this is real, and if the price is anything approaching reasonable, this could be HUGE for advancing POWER. I've wanted to see the day when I could order up an ATX POWER motherboard, slap it in a standard case, add CPU and RAM, and have a working system for, well... pretty much forever.</comment>


Microsoft Silverlight vs Google Wave: Why Karma Matters  - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zoho.com/general/microsoft-silverlight-vs-google-wave-a-study-in-contrasts

<comment><USER2> Here's where I see the fundamental difference between Microsoft and Google:

Google has a conference, well known to all and sundry. Google plans a big reveal. Microsoft plans a big reveal to steal some thunder. Normal PR all around.

But look at the scope of the two reveals. Google essentially plans to reboot the entire mechanism of interpersonal interaction on the internet. Whether it will ever work, catch on, or even be useful it's without question astonishingly ambitious. Arrogant even. "We're so smart we'll tell you how you should be talking to each other." Love, hate, angry blog posts are generated in abundance.

Microsoft launches a new search engine. Which, to be fair, seems like a quite nice new search engine. But where's the ambition? Where's the absolutely insane, balls-out wtf? Even if the Zune was better than the iPod it would be a clone. Even if Bing is better than Google it'll be a clone. Even if the Xbox is better than the Playstation it still won't be __qualitatively __different. Sure some of them may succeed and none will likely fail completely but it's hard to see the ambition in any of them.

<comment><USER3> I'm surprised you didn't make the larger point: this is true for every product Microsoft has ever made. Copy, improve, persist. Basic, DOS, Windows, Office, IE, etc.

They are not a creative company (or as Jobs would have it they have no taste - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upzKj-1HaKw> ).

Their business does not revolve around creating new things but about copying and improving things that already exist in the market. And to be fair, this strategy has worked out quite well for them so far, so why would they change course?

<comment><USER4> It worked for shrinkwrap software, where release cycles are large. It has not worked for web software, where releases can happen daily. They can never catch up.

<comment><USER5> It worked for shrinkwrap software _when they had an OS monopoly they could abuse to drive their competition out of business_ , and likewise _it worked for their OS business when they could negotiate illegal anti-competitive terms and conditions with their licensees_.

I'm sure they have done some great work, but it is hard to look at their track record and figure out how much of their success was earned on the merits of their products and how much was earned on the "merits" of their business practices.

<comment><USER6> It also worked before they had an OS monopoly. After all, that's how they got their monopoly.

<comment><USER5> Ah, no. They rode IBM's success to their monopoly and even in their first business dealings they had anti-competitive goings on. For example, it was possible to purchase an IBM-PC with DR-DOS instead of PC-DOS, but you ended up paying for PC-DOS _and_ DR-DOS, so it was always cheaper to stick with PC-DOS.

Again, I'm saying that it is hard to look at their success and disentangle their products's merits from their business practices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A fairly well written post, i'm in full agreement.

While Microsoft may have some great technology in their portfolio, I simply don't want to use much of it because of how little I can trust them.

In Google's case, they're not really asking me to trust them so much, by documenting and open sourcing many of the technologies they're trying to push, I can at least feel like I have some degree of protection.

If there was a 'Google Silverlight' (as hypothesised in the article) it would probably be under consideration as a platform for the next version of my product but Microsoft's Silverlight falls very much short.

</comment><comment><USER8> The only reason google looks good in this article is because it is compared with microsoft. google is the new microsoft, I would be cautious when it comes to partnering with them.

What do folks here think?

<comment><USER9> Justifying a lack of trust in Microsoft because of 'karma' isn't a correct analysis, I feel. The author completely fails to discuss .NET -- a very powerful and complete software platform that many companies rely on and use effectively.

The crucial point is the one that he glosses over in the last sentence in the second-to-last paragraph; that Microsoft's incentives aren't aligned with Zoho, while Google's are. Google has every incentive in the world to get more people on the Web and make the Web a more powerful platform. In the end, Google has an incredibly powerful, benevolent brand, but they act in the way any rational corporation will.

<comment><USER7> The article doesn't discuss the technical merits of each company's offerings, rather their approaches.

.NET might be a very powerful and complete software platform that lots of people rely on.. but it's still a proprietry piece of technology that requires (and maybe even demands) putting a great deal of trust in Microsoft's hands.

He makes this point clear in his discussion of Silverlight. He's not dismissing it on technical merit (where it may have plenty) but on the different approaches Microsoft and (in a hypothetical world) Google would take to it.

Microsoft was to other OS and software vendors in the past, what Google is to Microsoft now. They're just using more open policies for some of their products to gain an advantage for their core business.

Don't get me wrong, i'm not calling either company good or evil.

I'm also undecided whether a company can be good or evil. There's illegal and unethical, sure but good and evil just depend on how you view a company's motivation.

Microsoft's goal is to keep you in their ecosystem, Google's goal is to sell your eyeballs to the highest bidder.

<comment><USER6> _Microsoft's goal is to keep you in their ecosystem, Google's goal is to sell your eyeballs to the highest bidder._

Here's a thought.

Msft know their goal: Keep you in their ecosystem. This has been their goal forever. The market for OS/Office & the rest of their old products, was pretty much destined to grow over 20 years. Keep your 90% share of a growing market and you grow.

Google don't know their goal. They make money on search. Search works and they still have power. They're still not making much from platforms or webapps or online publishing or any of the other noteworthy things they do good work on.

The search business is pretty much at perfection right know. But the odds that search will be (a) as important in ten years and (b) exclusive Google property in ten years is not a 1/100 bet. The strategy for increasing the odds in Google's favour is not clear. While they might imporve the monetisation slightly, I don't think the search market will grow that much. Keep your 90% share of a flat market and you don't grow much grow. You can still lose market share though.

Maybe this accounts for part of the difference between the two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Google is no Microsoft, but they aren't all that innocent either

<comment><AUTHOR> maybe, but name one instance where they have screwed over one of their partners.

<comment><USER11> How about their users?

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/magazine/23google.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> the "maybe" was for the "china" thing. But it is a big maybe. Here is why

AFAIK Google didn't hand over any user info to chinese authorities. They just merely censored the results. Between getting no access to google and having censored results, even if i was chinese I would have preferred getting the censored version.Why? because google is not used to find the censored topics. It is used more widely to get information on non censored topics. The loss of the world's biggest search engine would have been quite bad.

Also, google stood up to the US authorities when they demanded handing over user info while yahoo and MS happily handed it over.

So in my eyes, google has not screwed over its users or its partners. The biggest crime they may have committed is pulling the plug on some services ot letting some rot (feedburner). But those are free services and if it doesn't generate profit for them, they are right to pull the plug. In most of the cases they allowed the user enough time to get their data off the pulled service.

You can bash google for all you want but I think it is on very flimsy grounds.

<comment><USER12> I'd say the biggest difference between Google and Microsoft would be in the arena in which they play.

Google has everything on the web. They _can_ change whatever they want whenever they want and since it is web-based, you will have no option but adopt to whatever changes they have decided they want to go trough with. If they decide to obsolete a product, you no longer have access to it. You're pretty much on your own when it comes to replacing whatever you just lost.

With Microsoft it's all on _your_ server. If they decide to change, alter or obsolete anything, it's up to _you_ to keep up with them. If you don't approve of changes, you can remain on the platform you are currently running, if that makes you happy. While not free of risk, it at least lets you remain in control of what you are running.

In short, depending on either of them involves risks, and what you consider to be least acceptable is entirely up to you, your business and your priorities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> May be because collaborations often turn into an acquisition.</comment>


You Should Use VS Code If You're a Python Developer - <AUTHOR> https://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/why-you-should-use-vs-code-if-youre-a-python-developer <comment><USER2> Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick to PyCharm/IntelliJ.

At least the latter is using RAM & battery life to do useful things, instead of just running a browser and a glorified web app.

Also, it feels like an insult to say Sublime feels "old and hacky". If using 500+MB of RAM for something Sublime gets away with 100 (or less) is considered hacky nowadays, then I'm not sure what to say. VSCode doesn't seem to do anything groundbreaking either - I had all of those features thanks to Sublime plugins _since 2014_.

<comment><USER3> You should try running some tests what consumes less memory/battery. PyCharm is absolutely the worst. And Sublime not always winning agains VS Code, if you try to install (or disable) some plugins.

<comment><USER4> I think their point was that even if PyCharm uses more, the intelli-sense and IDE features are more advanced than in VSCode, where all your RAM is consumed to run Electron.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> By the way, Kenneth, if you are around we've had some feedback waiting for you on your pipenv plug-in, but haven't heard back from you: [https://github.com/wbond/package_control_channel/pull/6989](https://github.com/wbond/package_control_channel/pull/6989).

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't think there's anything stated in the article that I can't get with other IDEs. It reads more like an advert than a real blog article. So sorry, but no, I'm not going to switch to your favourite IDE.

<comment><USER7> > The VS Code Python team has put forth lots of effort (and worked with our > team, quite closely) to support Pipenv projects out–of–the–box.

What a coincidence!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> PyCharm also has these features. It's very solid

<comment><USER9> I gave PyCharm a go just about a year ago. Honestly, i think the UI in just about all of the JetBrains products are super sluggish and laggy and very long start up times, even on the top end Macbook Pros, especially compared to the experience that VS Code manages to provide. And on top of that i feel like there's already more useful extensions in VS Code.

<comment><USER3> Still the worst of all the editors. It will eat up all the RAM for no reasons. Also looks absolutely alien and uses very different shortcuts than all the other macOS apps. IntelliJ is very own world of java crap.

<comment><USER10> I've noticed that programs from that part of the world are more likely to use custom controls rather than stock ones. They always end up working a little diffferent than everything else in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You should use Pycharm. Ive used sublime and vs code as Well but i keep comming back to pycharm.

It seems recently microsoft has been on the offensive when it comes to promoting vs code for python, but honestly everyone I talk to who's tried both PyCharm and vscode prefer the latter. My guess is PyCharm just isn't throwing the same amount of money at bloggers and "influencers".

<comment><USER3> No one should use PyCharm. It is slow, ugly, resource hungry and expensive. Amazing "argument", right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really like VS Code feature wise, but always come back to Sublime or Vim because I feel there is a lag when typing. In comparison to Sublime, there is no lag when typing (or less lag).

<comment><USER13> I got it to lag really badly a couple of days ago where I was just sitting waiting for it to complete words. Had to restart, but other than that one time it has felt fine.

<comment><USER14> It could be some extension, I have had vs code lag really badly in the past (almost a year ago) when I was using the java support extension by Red Hat, I have even had JVM crash while using that configuration. Now I have only a few extensions enabled at a time based on the workspace and do not have performance problems. I have also switched to NetBeans for java development since Apache has taken stewardship of the project. It is a really great and under appreciated IDE :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can I run python script on selection of text in vscode yet? That's a breaking feature for me, vim does great job with this. It's really handy when transforming documentation into code.

</comment><comment><USER16> related: [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/pythonengineering/2018/09/0...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/pythonengineering/2018/09/05/python- in-visual-studio-code-august-2018-release/) / [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17925842](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17925842) 3 days ago

</comment><comment><USER17> How about a comparison with PyCharm?

</comment><comment><USER18> How is it in comparison with Atom/Nuclide? How about debugging inside VS Code?

<comment><USER3> It just works! Also, I feel like VS Code is much faster than atom at this point</comment></comment>


What the hell happened to Apple guys? - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/04/what-the-hell-h.php

<comment><USER2> > Remember how Apple guys used to be? Hip, smart, creative -- perhaps a subtle > hint of smugness and self satisfaction -- but fiercely free thinkers?

Uh, no? Thats the marketing image that apple always portrayed as a 'lifestyle' brand. Some amount of their customers certainly liked to think of themselves that way, but simply owning a premium piece of hardware does not make you any of those things.

Nowadays apple is a wildly successful consumer products manufacturer, owning the same phone as all of your friends does not make you a 'fiercely free thinker', any more than having a blueberry iMac in 1996 did.

 _edit_ added a bit more, but removed it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, I think this reaction to the Apple location issue show a lack of perspective. Apple stores the location of nearby cell towers and access points on your phone.

Cell phone providers store your actual location for a period of many months.

 _This_ is bad, terrible, uber-creepy: [http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2011-03/data- protecti...](http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2011-03/data-protection- malte-spitz)

What Apple is doing now is not even in the same ballpark.

<comment><USER4> How is it not in the same ballpark? It's the same data being quietly collected without consent from the same people for various vaguely articulated purposes and being kept for extended periods of time. How is this different? It's the same game, only the team colours have changed. In fact, it's plausible that the cell phone companies have a more legitimate interest in tracking location since understanding where devices are used is fundamental to their business of providing cell phone service. Furthermore, there are other implications to having location data cached on the phone since the border guards in a number of countries including the US are authorized to snoop on any devices they find. The phone company data would (at least theoretically) require some kind of court order.

<comment><USER5> So seriously? you think that the risk I might go through a border crossing and have data that I know is there taken without warrant is the same as cell phone companies holding the same data (it's just the other end of the connection) and being able to sell it, provide access to it, whatever without any oversight on my part at all?

I can wipe my phone data, I know if someone has gotten a warrant to see it.

and lets face it if you use a phone and a credit card your broad movements (which is all you can tell from this data) can be worked out anyway. If you don't want someone to know your location then this is small potatoes in the ways you are going to need to change your behaviour

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wait… Apple was collecting the location data? I thought it was just being synced to your computer. Anyone know either way? A reference would help, as well.

<comment><USER7> It talks about it in the FAQ they put out. Crowd sourced database and all. They are even talking about building a product based on the data with regards to traffic and directions.

<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/04/27location_qa.html></comment></comment>


PureScript 0.13 Release - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/purescript/purescript/releases/tag/v0.13.0 <comment><USER2> I noticed a few languages removing support for octal and binary literals. I wonder why. I find them useful and the parser overhead seems minimal to keep them around.

<comment><USER3> We found no usages of it in the wild. If there is real-world need for them, we'll consider adding them back.

<comment><USER4> FWIW I use binary literals a bunch in python, either when working with binary file formats or with bitfields.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I'm not saying there aren't usages for them in general, but PureScript currently occupies a niche that doesn't get down to the level of binary file formats. This change is more about "only supporting what we need to right now", rather than "we don't like binary literals". As noted elsewhere, it's not difficult to add support for them when we need to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are there other languages that make an opinion on tabs/spaces? This seems nice.

> The only whitespace now allowed in code is ASCII space and line endings. > Since you must use indentation to format PureScript code (unlike Haskell), > we felt it was best to be more restrictive in what you can write instead of > allowing potentially confusing behavior (implicit tab-width, zero-width > spaces, etc). You can still use unicode whitespace within string literals.

I'm also wondering about the removed literals.

<comment><USER6> I think Elm have similar rules, the official code format tool is very opinionated.

<comment><USER7> I can attest to that, elm-format is an excellent tool and it is great to have a standard code formatter, one less thing to worry or argue over when writing code!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If PureScript is Haskell, TypeScript is ML

Lately, TypeScript has become more scalable across existing npm libraries and also introduced new advanced types. It looks like Microsoft guys learned a lot from C# and F# type system and feedback from their users

[https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/advanced- types....](https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/advanced-types.html)

<comment><USER9> I had the impression:

ClojureScript == Lisp

PureScript == Haskell

Reason == ML

TypeScript == C#

<comment><USER8> Yes. I agree. It was started like this.

But now Typescript 3.5 is also influenced by F# which is close to ML.

Just look at those advance types and their allowed composition which Typescript supports in its latest release and you will understand.

<comment><USER9> Yes, feels kinda overloaded to me...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What happened to the original author of PS?

[https://github.com/purescript/purescript/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/purescript/purescript/graphs/contributors)

<comment><USER11> I don't speak for Phil, but I do work with him at Lumi where we use PureScript for almost all frontend. It's been really fun to show that PureScript can be used successfully in production.

You can see some of our tutorials and open source projects here: [https://www.lumi.dev](https://www.lumi.dev)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Syntax question, after looking at a couple of examples: Long wished more languages had a 'where' clause (suspect it could be really nice to have in Python), but why the 'where' at the end of the initial 'module' line? I guess it's doing something consistent, but it does look a bit odd

<comment><USER3> It's something that comes from Haskell. The `where` keyword always starts a new layout/indentation context. It's not strictly necessary and there are ways around it, so it's just a point of consistency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> what is scary about all these TypeScript, PureScript, Elm, etc, is that for variety of reasons, any one of these can just come and go. coffeescript anyone?

i'd tread very carefully and wisely before choosing any one of these paths.

it only makes sense imo if you come from Haskell, Clojure, or some other ML background to have an explicit interest in these languages.

<comment><USER14> Coffeescript did not offer anything but different syntax. It hasn't improved the semantics of the language. Some people liked it and some didn't.

Elm, PureScript, and Clojurescript are fundamentally different languages. Javascript today has bloated, and it keeps growing. Experienced developers tend to dislike it. Newbie developers struggle with it. It is no longer "a small language with a low entry barrier". ECMAScript specification is already bigger than Java's.

PLs of today and the next couple of decades will be striving for optimizing for programmer's productivity, performance, or correctness of the program. Javascript today does not fit in any of these categories. So it is only natural - the trend of using alt-js langs will only grow.</comment></comment>


Toys Are More Divided by Gender Now Than They Were 50 Years Ago - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/toys-are-more-divided-by-gender-now-than-they-were-50-years-ago/383556/ <comment><USER2> At my son's elementary school the PTA would have raffle fundraisers where you could buy an arm's length of tickets and deposit them in bags attached to gifts.

It's an interesting game, to me, to choose items that are easy to win and that I want. It's one of those things like stock trading or poker where I haven't talked about the theory of it because it is a zero sum game and I don't need competition.

Anyway, something I noticed is that the most popular toys are the most gendered ones. (e.g. the girls will stuff the bag in front of the hula hoop, the boys will stuff the bag in front of the sports gear.) Pretty clearly gendered stuff appeals to the kids and their parents. I avoid it, even if I want it (even the Hula Hoop), because there is no way I can win it.

</comment><comment><USER3> My daughter shows a preference for cute/pretty toys and girly colors (we didn't push this on her, she just did it) but also for toys that do things or let her build, design, etc.

Unfortunately the majority of the girly color cute toys are inert and non- configurable and the majority of the toys that do stuff have boyish designs. We've found good toys for her but we have to dig and often order online.

<comment><USER4> Suggestion: real tools for sewing.

Cooking is good too, but she can probably already borrow those tools.

<comment><USER3> We do those things. She also does like an electronics kit we got, so it's not exclusive. But she prefers the girly colored legos. :)</comment></comment></comment>


Coursera—new online classes - <AUTHOR> https://www.coursera.org/courses#201204

<comment><USER2> This is ridiculously good. I would sign up for all of these courses if I had the time to. I have signed up for three courses from Udacity, so I guess I'll take a few Coursera courses once I'm done with them. I'll also have a lot more time in the summer.

MIT has been offering a lot of free material online with its OCW initiative, and there have been other such resources out there for quite a while. However, to live in such a time when courses from some of the best universities in the world are offered for free to millions of people in a format specifically tailored for this medium is nothing short of extraordinary.</comment>


Ask HN: New startup, how much equity for the idea - <AUTHOR> How much equity should the originator of the idea be offered, assuming they do nothing else except conceive of the idea? Also assuming there is one other technical co-founder who does all of the development, devops, marketing, sourcing out other tasks, etc. <comment><USER2> There is a huge gulf between "Facebook clone, but for Babies." And "my idea is based off of research I did in my graduate program plus a lightweight non-prod quality library I wrote in Python"

<comment><USER3> But prototype is more than an idea though

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think it makes sense for everyone who's active in starting a company to get an equal split of the equity. Starting a company is as much about the work you're going to put in as it is about what you're bringing to the table. It also makes sense to eliminate any areas for friction, you'll probably have plenty of friction as it is.

If the idea person isn't going to be a part of the team I would actually be hesitant to give them any/much equity. But that the depends on the idea. Trivial ideas are a dime a dozen, but some ideas require deep knowledge about specific fields of industry, in such a case the idea is worth more.

Also, what is your relationship with the idea originator? Friendships are worth more than equity.

Anyway, I would probably give no more than 10% for just the idea. If the idea person wants more I would try to get them involved in the company or simply not start the company. There are a ton of great ideas to be had.

By the way, every time I tell someone I'm an app developer they say they have a great idea for an app. I rode with one cab driver the other day who said he had an idea for an app and "it's like Uber but with one difference, but if I tell you you'll steal it and become a billionaire". Sure pal, good luck with that.

Edit: spelling

</comment><comment><USER5> What's your idea? Tell us and we'll tell you.

That was a joke by the way, but a half hearted truth into saying ideas are worthless, it's execution that's important.

Also - typically you see a technical and non-technical founders the non- technical will take on anything they are capable of doing - e.g. marketing, or at least managing the marketing (doing it too initially)

If you're just giving an idea and are then hands off, I'd maybe give you 5% equity. Maybe.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the non-technical founder essentially handed the idea off to the technical founder and was like "hey, here's an idea, if it makes money, throw me some equity". They don't want to participate or be involved in any meaningful capacity and I expect that they simply would like to make some money if the idea does end up going somewhere simply for having the idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If an idea is literally all they bring to the table and it doesn't have a patent or anything around it, I would give them something like an advisory role and 2% equity.

If they don't like this, just take the idea and start the company without them if it's a good idea. A person with an idea that cannot execute on it has no leverage.

I don't know why you would be generous with this person. They will have no risk and no skin in the game, so why give them a big reward?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I want them compensated in some way but I feel like anything more then 10% is way too much. They're of the type that they simply want to sit back and "get rich" but aren't technically-minded and I get the sense that they don't really want to be involved.

It wasn't so much "let's start a company" but more, hey here's an idea, if it takes off, throw me some equity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is a cultural fiction in SV that gets repeated that "ideas are worthless".

Folks also love to say "execution is everything."

Keep in mind, this idea tends to favor capital and insitutionalized power.

Executing a bad idea isn't valuable and can cost you lots of money, time and opportunity.

Since most companies fail to make a profit, I suppose we could argue that most execution is worthless too.

So ideas can be seen as an exponent of sorts. An idea with a greater than 0 value will be useful for a team that can execute. Execution being equal, ideas are everything.

But not only that, the people and contexts that create great ideas are even more valueable.

Creativity is a resource that is always needed.

Uncreative people don't like this at all, so they often try to devalue the power of ideas.

Of course they are also the ones who will try to execute on them.

Smart people understand the value of both. They also understand their own worth. They don't need to devalue or belittle others in order to create partnerships.

There are plenty of brilliant idea generators who are paid handsomely simply for generating ideas and licensing them to existing companies.

</comment><comment><USER8> zero</comment>


Apple gives you a TRUST rating – it's based on your phone call and email habits - <AUTHOR> https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/7303020/apple-trust-score-phone-calls-emails/ <comment><USER2> Metadata is surveillance. And in almost all cases, is more invasive than content. People are convicted all of the time of evidence based on metadata.

Apple's very good at winning over the public and implementing something like this and have it accepted en masse.

</comment><comment><USER3> > This score is sent directly to Apple when you make a purchase.

1\. So someone else is telling you whether they are trustworthy? Shouldn't it be on the servers?

2\. If you establish trust on your device, and someone gains access to your device without your permission, what good is knowing this is a trusted phone? It's still fraud.

</comment><comment><USER4> Today's discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18031249](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18031249)

</comment><comment><USER5> So according to the article, Apple just following Google, it just doesn't "read" your data but will analyze your metadata and judges you, yay.

</comment><comment><USER6> Apple, as always, is so full of shit when it comes to privacy.

"Don't buy Android phones if you don't want big brother type surveillance from Google, buy Apple for China-esque social scoring surveillance. Oh, and we have no use for this score expect fraud prevention, trust us"</comment>


Court orders web-blocking monitoring site to be blocked - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/court-orders-web-blocking-monitoring-site-to-be-blocked-160213/ <comment><USER2> Just like surveillance ([http://www.ianwelsh.net/the-logic-of- surveillance/](http://www.ianwelsh.net/the-logic-of-surveillance/)), censorship has its own logic. First, we censor all the information about censorship, the same way that we first put every anti-surveillance person under surveillance, and the spammers and telemarketers threaten to put people who complain about spam and robocalls and scam calls on the spam and telephone number lists.</comment>


MT-DNN Achieves Human Performance in General Language Understanding Benchmark - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/stevengu/2019/06/20/microsoft-achieves-human-performance-estimate-on-glue-benchmark/ <comment><USER2> It seems since submitting that they are no longer the leader on the GLUE leaderboard - [https://gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard/](https://gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard/)

<comment><USER3> In fact the article was published on June 20, while the XLNet submission that dethroned them was already on June 19. I guess their publishing pipeline doesn't allow last-minute amendments.

<comment><USER4> The relentlessness of the pace of ML remains breathtaking.

Microsoft: We beat human performance and lapped everyone else!

XLNet: Hold my beer.

Code: [https://github.com/zihangdai/xlnet](https://github.com/zihangdai/xlnet)

Description: [https://towardsdatascience.com/what-is-xlnet-and-why-it- outp...](https://towardsdatascience.com/what-is-xlnet-and-why-it-outperforms- bert-8d8fce710335)

Paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.08237.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.08237.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Notably, this result would be very hard for Microsoft to achieve, or indeed even reproduce fully in-house, because it requires more memory than GPUs have. GitHub mentions that TPUs are pretty much table stakes to train this.

<comment><USER6> > because it requires more memory than GPUs have

could you elaborate? TPU V3 unit has 16GB of memory, and old V100 also has 16GB of memory. Plus TPU has extra memory consumption for mandatory tensor padding, which GPU doesn't have.

<comment><USER5> The XLNet GitHub elaborates pretty well, no need to duplicate it here: [https://github.com/zihangdai/xlnet](https://github.com/zihangdai/xlnet)

<comment><USER6> There is no elaboration of your statement there. It says it is hard to reproduce results on single 16GB GPU, but nor they used single TPU in their result. They explicitly state that large number of GPU required: "Therefore, a large number (ranging from 32 to 128, equal to batch_size) of GPUs are required to reproduce many results in the paper.", and they used around 200 TPUs themself according to their publication.

<comment><USER5> Yes, it boils down to using either a single machine with multiple TPUs (and therefore doing things "the easy way" and relatively quickly) or having to use 128 GPUs (up to 8 per machine) and working with a single sample per GPU, really, really slowly. Given that a single model often requires dozens, if not hundreds of training runs to figure out hyperparameters that achieve a SOTA result, this means that with TPU you can do this, and with GPU you aren't even going to bother training something this big because it will take forever, and someone with a TPU will figure out something better by the time you're done. Which is what happened in this case, it looks like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of their test sentences was interesting:

>For example, the task provides the sentence: "The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they [feared/advocated] violence." If the word "feared" is selected, then "they" refers to the city council. If "advocated" is selected, then "they" presumably refers to the demonstrators.

<comment><USER8> This sort of sentence is exactly the point of the article. See: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_Schema_Challenge](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_Schema_Challenge)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems like this is largely due to improved Winograd Schema results. I wonder if those questions made it into the training set in some form.

</comment><comment><USER10> Disclosure: I work at Azure on Machine Learning

Hi all! Please let me know if you have any questions - happy to direct them to the right people! Thanks!

(Email in my profile)</comment>


Tensorflow 1.13.0 Released - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/releases/tag/v1.13.0-rc0 <comment><USER2> This isn't the release per se (i.e. not on PyPi), just rc0.

What's the status on Python 3.7 support in TensorFlow? I'm surprised that wasn't in this release.</comment>


Join the Race: Why HR Needs to Embrace the Digital Age - <AUTHOR> http://cactussofthr.info/blog/2016/11/29/why-hr-needs-to-embrace-the-digital-age/ <comment><USER2> Does this mean we're seeing the end of days where I upload a resume, click submit, and then get presented with an entirely new form to manually type everything already present on my resume? Can we finally kill the Taleo job application?

Didn't read the article, I just saw "HR" and "Digital Age" and had an involuntary conniption...</comment>


Ask HN: How to focus when looking for a new job? - <AUTHOR> I decided to look for a new job about 2 months ago and I can't seem to get any work done at my current job. The interviews are so stressful that it leaves me with no mental space to concentrate. I'm completely checked out.<p>Any tips on how to manage your current job while searching for a new one? <comment><USER2> Been there; here's some amazingly stupid advice works on the mental game -- start physically working out @ mid-day. Hit the gym, go for a run. Does wonders to clear the mind, better than meditation > [http://www.foreverbemoved.com/get-head- body/](http://www.foreverbemoved.com/get-head-body/)</comment>


The Test Passes, Colleges Fail - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/opinion/18salins.html?em <comment><USER2> Statistics FAIL.

>So, here is the question: do SATs predict graduation rates more accurately than high school grade-point averages?

That's only relevant if colleges plan to ignore GPA in favor of SAT.

The right question: Do (SAT, GPA) pairs predict graduation rates more accurately than GPA alone?

</comment><comment><USER3> The SAT's not great, but it's the least broken component of the US college admissions system by far. High school grades would be better, given that a 4-year window of performance ought to trump any evaluation over 3 hours, but there's a lot of variance in high schools, and a lot of them aren't challenging at all.

Detractors of the SAT don't realize that, without it, it would be impossible (rather than merely extremely difficult) for students to be admitted to elite schools without coming from wealthy or well-connected families. Colleges, understandably, don't trust grades from no-name high schools, and anyone who doesn't realize that the extracurricular/"holistic" aspect of the process is thinly-veiled socioeconomic selection (in favor of the rich, plus a few token poor, the latter being usually mountain-state whites) is not paying attention.

<comment><USER4> Of course, given that the SAT is fairly coachable, the students whose parents are aware of this, and willing and able to pay for the coaching (i.e., usually parents of higher socioeconomic status) will have a substantial advantage.

<comment><USER3> This is why I qualified the SAT as merely the "least broken" part. Rich parents can buy extracurriculars (internships at prestigious museums, etc.) to the nines. With the SATs, there are limits on how much improvement coaching can bring. A rich kid with a 100 IQ will never break 1400(/2100) on the SATs, even if he has the best tutors in the world.</comment></comment></comment>


Opium, Empire, and India - <AUTHOR> https://pointsadhsblog.wordpress.com/2017/04/04/opium-empire-and-india-part-i/ <comment><USER2> This might be interesting to readers : ibis trilogy from amithav ghosh [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibis_trilogy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibis_trilogy)

<comment><USER3> it sure is a great historical fiction! in another HN thread I too suggested this for readers interested in drug trade during colonial India.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Having never tried any hard drugs or the mentioned concoctions, pardon my basic question -- what effects does consuming opium have? Is it like consuming modern day heroin? Does it imitate what people feel after smoking pot? Just trying to understand why people consumed it -- the article mentions pain relieving uses as well as 'taking the edge off' uses.

<comment><USER5> "Narcotic" means numbing, and that's an accurate description IMO. Reports of euphoria are exaggerated. It feels good if you are feeling pain or malaise and it takes the pain or malaise away. Otherwise it doesn't feel like much.

<comment><USER6> > Reports of euphoria are exaggerated.

No, they aren't. It depends a lot on the person, the specific narcotic, and the quantity taken. Some (most in my experience) people feel intense euphoria, others don't.

<comment><USER5> The "euphoria" is situational. It's like alcohol. Drinking alone is usually not much fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Surprised not to see a mention of the Tatas here.

<comment><USER8> Can you shed some more light on why the Tatas should be mentioned in the article?

As far as I can tell from Part 1 of the article which is posted, the discussion is more of society's use of Opium through the latter part of the millennia. It doesn't go into any specific purveyor of opium products except for the regulation and subsequent clandestine production after prohibition.

> By Regulation XIII of 1816, opium cultivation was legalised in Bengal under > the supervision of the Commercial Resident of Rungpore. The control of the > Opium Department went from the Board of Revenue in the Customs, Salt and the > Opium Departments by the Regulation IV of 1819. In 1850, by Act XLIV, the > Customs, Salt and Opium Board was merged in the Board of Revenue at > Calcutta. In 1797, prohibition was imposed on the private cultivation of > poppy in Bengal proper and in Behar division of the province. It was then > that the attention of the Government proper was being met by 'systematic > smuggling and clandestine production'

I am really curious about the Tata family role in this that you allude to. Please elaborate.

<comment><USER9> From your tone, it sounds like this is a known controversy in India. Could you elaborate?

I know nothing about the Tatas' origin, although it's hard to miss the importance of the modern Tata Group. Wikipedia says that the family fortune was founded by Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, who had some wealth from his father Nusserwanji and parleyed it, through trade, into enough capital to recondition a cotton mill.

Are you saying that Jamsetji's trading company dealt in opium? That his father's business was involved in it? Or even both? If so, looking at things from a United States perspective, I'd find that a little heartening. I'd always seen the opium trade as a matter of pumping money from undeveloped China to already-rich London and Boston; if there was going to be an opium- for-silver trade regardless, at least some of the silver went to somewhere else in need of capital.

<comment><USER10> > I'd always seen the opium trade as a matter of pumping money from > undeveloped China to already-rich London and Boston;

Like most things, it's a little more complicated than the packaged narrative. Prior to the introduction of opium to the Canton trade, pretty much all of the goods that were imported from China by foreigners were paid for with silver - mostly from Mexico and Potosi or Japan - as there was very little that Europeans could find or produce that would sell in China's largely self- sufficient economy[1]. By the late 1700s, Britain, Portugal and the Netherlands were shipping millions of silver Dollars into Canton for silks and tea and such every year. China vacuumed up so much of the world's silver supply that it severely distorted the exchange rates in the Qing bimetallic currency system. Up until the opium trade got going, China had a massive, massive trade surplus. A lot of that wealth did get squandered - probably the poster child would be Heshen[2], a Manchu official that siphoned off a fortune estimated at fifteen times the annual tax revenue of the Qing Empire, or Wu Bingjian - one of the primary Chinese merchants in the Cohong system, who was so wealthy he personally contributed a third of the indemnity stipulated in the Treaty of Nanking[3].

[1] I don't have a link, but it is hilarious reading some of the early official records of the English East India company, and their utter inability to find anyone who would buy the woolens they initially tried shipping as cargo.

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heshen#Fall_of_Heshen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heshen#Fall_of_Heshen)

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

<comment><USER11> Yes...this is a pretty concise history of the situation, but I feel it needs at least a passing mention of one of the "evilest" government-sponsored wars in the history of mankind, the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century.

What made these particular acts of aggression so odious was, as I discovered in shock several years ago, they were not fought for the obvious reasons you would think; that the Chinese has opium and the British sent some military to take it from them. The reality is much more hideous then that.

As the previous poster mentioned, the British had little the Chinese wanted to trade for, and the Brits wanted Chinese tea in huge quantities. What the British eventually settled on was Afghanistan opium, which the Chinese had a taste for. The problem started when the Chinese leaders, seeing the destruction that opium addiction was doing to their people, tried to stop the trade of opium and reign in the millions of ruined lives it was causing.

The British responded, rather poorly I'd say, by going to war with the Chinese _to force them to continue to trade the opium for the tea and thusly keep their people enslaved to the drug_. It's a rather unbelievable premise for going to war actually, but in 1839 that's what they did.

They won, thus insuring several more generations of totally ruined Chinese addicts. I always think that this pretty much represents government and big business working in tandem at its most evil worse.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can time travel be possible .... ever? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> No

 _Edit_

The theory on time travel is incomplete. We need the unifying theory first if we are to make any assessment about General Relativity's and Special Relativity's projections about inertial frames.

Special Relativity says that the fundamental laws of physics should be the same across inertial frames. I suspect that our next great Physical theory will do to this idea what Relativity did to Newtonian physics. The answer will be, "well, most of the time".

<comment><USER3> Haven't Einstein, Hawking, and others made statements that the only indications that time travel is impossible are the issues of time paradoxes and because we haven't seen any evidence of time travelers? I thought besides those issues, they felt it should be theoretically possible?

<comment><USER2> Yes, and 300 years ago there was no Universal speed limit. Hawking has stated that he has no theoretical objections to time travel, but thinks that there is probably a theoretical reason for why it isn't, he just doesn't know what that might be.

Let's not forget, the brightest minds in the world, self admittedly, don't know that much about how the Universe actually works. There are theoretical objections to time travel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We already can travel to the future. The faster you move through space, the slower time moves for you. So astronauts have travelled a few nanoseconds into the future because they travel so fast orbiting the earth or going to the moon.

Travelling back in time is another issue. Supposedly time reverses when moving faster than the speed of light, but we don't how to do that.

<comment><USER5> > We already can travel to the future.

And we're doing it all the time.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I guess that is true. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In theory, but we will have to pass the speed of light. That will take some time.

<comment><USER7> >That will take some time.

Sorry, but isn't that fundamentally impossible?

<comment><USER3> NASA doesn't seem to think so:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4534359](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4534359)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6238297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6238297)

but the OP is talking about traveling forward through time by going near light speed, which isn't really relevant to a warp drive.</comment></comment></comment>


Beautifully Simple Lego Ad - <AUTHOR> http://soursquid.com/beautifully-simple-lego-ad

<comment><USER2> Almost Apple-like in its simplicity</comment>


Why the Cure for a Sluggish Economy Is Actually Longer Vacations - <AUTHOR> http://www.cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/why-the-cure-for-a-sluggish-economy-is-actually-longer-vacations <comment><USER2> "The story of secular stagnation is that we have too little demand to keep the economy and the workforce fully employed."

The standing assumption here is that it is obviously Right and Good for everyone to have a job and work and that the Government must, at all costs, do everything in its power to create jobs so that everyone can work. However, not everyone wants to do traditional work- some want to be caretakers to their family, some want to pursue alternative lifestyles such as homesteading, and yeah some just want to be supremely lazy. Assuming that it is always ultimately Right and Good to have jobs for everyone regardless of inclination and ability leads to crazy finagling to "create" jobs and to never even consider eliminating jobs by any means (such as dismantling Government agencies that have been shown to be completely useless _cough cough_ TSA _cough cough_ ).

Personally, I think having a base income for everyone in the US would boost the economy way more than job creation and assuming everyone should work. Eliminating homelessness, poverty, and hunger would ensure that every person in society lived at a high basic level of existence and would free up time, effort, and money that is currently tied up in serving the poor, hungry, and homeless. However, I cannot see that ever becoming a reality in the US so the point is probably moot.

<comment><USER3> A basic level of income is just cutting out the middleman. "Make work" jobs are just a moral fig leaf that governments put on top of basic income because an unconditional basic income inevitably causes an uproar. "Why, I got a degree that interested me and am working a job I enjoy and making a lot of money, but that guy? He gets a trifling amount of money a year just to sit on his ass! Why, the indignity!"

Most economists agree that directly handing money to people is completely effective economic policy. For cultural reasons, though, we have the fig leaf.

<comment><USER4> Most things we need people to do are not enjoyable. There has to be a way to get people to do the work that sucks.

The two methods we have found are physical coercion or financial coercion.

<comment><USER3> Yep. I'm a software engineer and like it, but you could pay me enough money to clean latrines instead. Minimum income probably will raise the price of shitty jobs. This will probably just speed up automation, but no one wanted those jobs anyways.

<comment><USER4> I think you have it backwards.

If all jobs got roughly the same remuneration, most people would take the easy fun job, as much as they claim otherwise.

People don't leave their jobs as parking lot attendants because they're not challenged. They leave because they want to buy a new TV, a car, and some fly threads.

If I could make as much reading all day in a little box, occasionally handing people their change, as I do in tech, I'm going to that parking lot.

It's not the blue-collar jobs you'd have trouble filling. It's the lawyers, doctors, accountants, and so forth.

Outside of the hobby careers (like tech, architect, etc.), most white-collar jobs suck terribly.

<comment><USER5> We have a glut of lawyers already. Many people who have a law degree currently don't practices because there are more people who want to be lawyers then positions.

Doctors we won't have a problem with because supply of doctors could drop significantly and medical schools would still be full.

Most accountants I know like accounting, and would not quite their job in order to make 10k to sit on their butt.

I also think your view of being a minimum wage worker is very idealized one.

Having worked many minimum wage jobs in college I can tell you I would require a significant raise to work any of them again. Being constantly screamed and cursed at by middle managers, standing for 8 hours straight without a break, not knowing what your schedule looks like in a week, working until midnight, occasionally working 12 hour shifts. No thank you. I would much rather write software, do accounting, or be a doctor.

People don't work shitty jobs because it's easy they work shitty jobs because they didn't hired for a better one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is maddeningly wrong. Case in point: The US Small Business Administration approved $19b in loans to small business in 2014, or less than half what the Obama Administration loaned just one company - General Motors.

This is less than 1% of the increase in US depository institution (Bank) excess reserves since 2011.

The SBA 2014 amounts are only half what the US provides in foreign aid to other countries.

It represents only .25% of the total value of QE2.

The US can only claim it is serious about economic recovery when it redirects its misguided intervention into its economy, to the sector that creates the most jobs and individual wealth - small business. Until then all the liquidity the USGOV and Fed has and continues to manufacture will be sequestered in large company balance sheets, in offshore tax havens, and on bank balance sheets typically on deposit at the Fed.

Insanity.

</comment><comment><USER7> I thought they were going to present a case that vacation increases overall employee productivity over the long run, which would have been a lot more interesting. I'd rather see more research into productivity and vacation as well as more education so companies realize they can get more bang for the buck just by changing how they treat employee downtime.

Having government come in and force companies to pay more in wages overall doesn't seem like the best idea. Many companies, especially young companies struggle to keep their head above water and even small changes in wages can push them into closing up shop. There is no discussion in this article about any potential negative consquences. Magically, we'll increase every company's expenses and they will hire more people and no company will fold because of it. This is not a realistic scenario they are presenting.

<comment><USER8> The productivity aspect is most interesting to me. Otherwise it's a financial loss as increased vacation raises costs; the work still has to be done. If the productivity gain offsets the cost, then it's definitely an idea to explore.

<comment> guard-of-terra Financial loss to whom?

Productivity is not just what people do. It's mostly about the economical environment around them. Same number of similarly-capable people will have one productivity in SV, other productivity in China, entirely third one in Kenya.

There all "kinds" of work around us. Maybe you get access to better work that far outweights the tiny decrease of time you dedicate to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Give people more time to invest in things they'll have to spend money on and they will spend more money?

Who'd have thunk.

Not gonna buy a boat for 10 vacation days total per year.. Why would I?

25 days on the other hand.. That's a solid three extra weeks of boating. Might buy a boat.

<comment><USER8> Who pays for that vacation? France has very generous vacation and their economy is stagnant. They even have a 35 hour workweek established based in the same premise. It hasn't worked. The economy is growing less than under Sarkozy.

We could also make the argument that cutting taxes would spur more spending. If you increase my disposable income, I'll buy some new studio monitors and an Allen & Heath mixer.

Just increasing vacation time results in a higher labor cost and thus raises prices, negating the benefit.

<comment><USER10> France's 'standard of living' (measured in material goods) is quite high globally-speaking and not significantly lower than that of the USA.

If you include intangibles like quality healthcare and reasonable amounts of vacation time, then I'd argue that France is far wealthier than the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Offtopic, but what is the CSS trick they are using to handle zoom? I've got JS disabled and when I zoom the page the spammy sidebars vanish. I am not familiar with this and it references 18 CSS files, making it tedious to dig through the source.

<comment><USER12> Chrome's inspect element found a `.span2.hidden-phone.hidden-table` element, which is styled with a media query from a CSS file called `bootstrap- responsive.css`.

<comment><USER11> Thanks, that made it much easier to drill down. Specifically there is

        @media (max-width: 701px) { ... }
        @media (min-width: 700px) and (max-width: 1100px) { ... }

And that toggles the visibility of some classes. I didn't realize CSS3 supported that sort of logic. Guess I shouldn't have been surprised given the Turing Completeness proof...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is wrong. Here is the author's main point:

 _Policies aimed at shortening work hours can have a dramatic impact on imbalance of supply and demand. If the amount of vacation time is increased an average of one week a year, this amounts to a two percent reduction in supply of labor._

Government-mandated longer vacations are not actually reducing the supply of labor. It doesn't make people disappear. It just makes them work harder for the rest of the year to make up for the extra week of vacation. Combine that with stagnant demand (no rises in income = less consumption and also less tax money = less govt spending) and you haven't solved anything.

The real cure for a sluggish economy is a large-scale, man-fought war (barring any kind of nuclear event). War simultaneously boosts demand as the government ramps up spend across a bevy of sectors (industrial, aerospace, medical, food, science, tech) and the labor force decreases for obvious reasons.

Longer vacation is a much nicer and more politically correct thesis though.

<comment><USER14> This is obviously not true for the majority of jobs. You can't work harder to make up for your vacation when the job requires your presence (eg waiter, policeman, etc...).

Even for people who _could_ work harder to make up for lost time, I don't agree with the assumption that they would. Remember, everyone has that vacation time, and is required to take it. There's no need to work harder to make up for it.

<comment><USER13> See my response to karlmdavis - my original comment was poorly phrased.

I'm assuming they would work harder not because they were happy and motivated by getting a longer vacation, but because the firm might go out and hire someone who _would_ put in the extra work due to the oversupply of labor and the undersupply (and shrinking due to automation, mismatched skills) of jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What about adjusting employee exempt status for inflation? At present, if you're paid a salary of more than $23,660 per year, your employer isn't required to pay overtime; raising this to a sane figure ($70,000?) would create a lot of jobs and improve quality of life for employees; I think there was a discussion of this on HN last year.

<comment><USER16> > What about adjusting employee exempt status for inflation? At present, if > you're paid a salary of more than $23,660 per year, your employer isn't > required to pay overtime;

That's only true in certain exemptions, such as the computer-related occupation exemption and the executive/administrative/professional exemption. FLSA exemptions have either both a kind-of-work and pay qualification (as for the computer occupations exemption), or just a kind-of-work qualification (as in the motor carrier exemption), none have just a pay qualification.

> raising this to a sane figure ($70,000?) would create a lot of jobs and > improve quality of life for employees

Alternatively, it would _eliminate_ a lot of the jobs in the covered areas that are currently paid less than the new threshold. (I tend to think it would be a net win overall, but it wouldn't be one sided in its effects.)

<comment><USER15> I hadn't known about the kind-of-work exemption -- although some things I've read pointed out the "executive" issue relating to classifications of managers.

As for whether it would eliminate or increase number of jobs of a given type, that depends on how many companies could afford to pay their employees better while still having sustainable business models; I'm not equipped to say how many would.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So, instead of increasing demand we decrease supply by having people work and thus produce less?

Simplifying that, we will gain more by producing less?

<comment><USER3> No, this is basically just a way of increasing headcount without increasing production.

They're basically arguing that e.g. instead of 10 workers producing 10 widgets, you have 12 workers produce 10 widgets with each of them taking more vacation. Labour costs go up, some more wealth gets shifted back to labour, and this increases aggregate demand without changing supply.

<comment><USER18> But it _never_ works like that. If I have a company, I'll hire as many people as can produce more for me than they cost me. If you reduce the amount they can produce, that means that _I will hire fewer people_ \- not because I'm evil and manipulative, but because that's the way the economics works out for me, the employer.

<comment><USER19> If they still produce more than they cost you, then you should hire more people. There certainly is a threshold where people become too expensive but the questions is when this is reached. looking at sky high corporate profits these days I think people produce much more more value than they are being paid.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to get Sh*t Loads of Customers & Users for Every Thing You Do - <AUTHOR> http://www.64notes.com/how-to-get-loads-of-customers-users-for-every-thing-you-do

<comment><USER2> Why does this remind me of Steve Martin's "You can be a millionaire and never pay taxes! First, get a million dollars..."

Is there any new information here? Any fresh perspective? Or just an overly large promise combined with a couple of platitudes, some clip art, white-on- black Helvetica and a Steve Jobs reference?

<comment><AUTHOR> Lol, I don't know what you are talking about. Is that a book?

Ermm... this one is different I guess. Check it out? But yeah it has Steve Jobs reference. He is "that" evil, you see.

<comment><USER2> The Steve Martin stand-up bit I was referring to went something like:

"You can be a millionaire, and never pay taxes again! Yes, you can be a millionaire, and never pay taxes again! First, get a million dollars! Then, don't ever pay taxes again!"

It was funnier when he said it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha! It was funny when I read it :P</comment></comment></comment></comment>