I'm a millennial and my generation sucks - <AUTHOR> http://nypost.com/2016/07/04/im-a-millennial-and-my-generation-sucks/ <comment><USER2> I'm baffled that this sort of discourse is considered acceptable. Not in an "I-feel-appalled" sort of way, but in a very literal, "why doesn't society treat this like racism or sexism" sort of way.

If someone wanted to argue that intergenerational differences are significant, they'd have to contend with the fact that the ratio of intragenerational:intergenerational variance is far smaller than intrasex:intersex or intraracial:interracial variance, and commit themselves to also being a racist or a sexist.

It's routinely taught in org-psych and related fields, for example, that different generations have X characteristic that makes them better or worse suited to a particular role. Imagine the uproar that would ensue if we taught that "women are better at teaching professions while men are better at science", or "you should prefer asian employees in STEM roles vs black employees".

Maybe someone would then say, "hey, our condemnation of racism isn't based upon some ANOVA or arbitrary significance test- we aren't racist because Every Human has intrinsic worth." In which case, we can stop promulgating this antiscientific ingroup/outgroup hysteria and just focus on the Every Human part.

<comment><USER3> I've never considered an association between intergenerational conflict and it's typical blanket statements, as being in line with interracial and sexist prejudice.

Though now you've brought it to my attention. Intergenerational conflict really is just another form of bigotry, why isn't is condemned publicly as such?

<comment><USER2> I think societal condemnation is inconsistent, poorly calibrated, and largely rooted in exogenous/historical factors.

The outrage over isolated killings of charismatic megafauna is matched only by the indifference to extraordinarily large-scale habitat destruction that sees multiple species go extinct every day. See also factory farming.

The incredible revulsion we feel toward an individual pedophile is diluted over an entire industry of child sex trafficking until it reaches homeopathic levels.

I think the condemnation of racism and sexism were basically gavaged into society by social movements and brave people fighting for their rights. While this was definitely an incredible step forward, it did little to neuter our base instincts for prejudice; we were instead outfitted with a sort of pattern-matching, Pavlovian hair-trigger that fires whenever someone says the word "black".

It's said that society progresses one funeral at a time, and that could be the reason why intergenerational prejudice has had no champion. Who will fight for Gen Z once they're dead?

<comment><USER3> I'm not capable of putting words together to express how much your comments rang true on the discussion of prejudice (though societies whimsical nature towards one mega fauna dying vs deforestation, a sexual assault vs. the Catholic Churches paedophile circles) was far too raw.

So instead, I'll digress to the stereotype of my generation and settle for a hasthag.

#mindblown

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The one photograph shown of the writer, in a suit, on a rooftop bar in Manhattan looking perplexed at life. Shows us his privilege and/or success, neither of which come easy to the majority of his peers within what he calls a self entitled generation.

The writer, as some one who allegedly is '... Interested in other people'; has an extremely elitist attitude with a matching level of arrogance. He's an old soul, eh? He looks and sounds like a straight down the line dickhead from my perspective.

Though I'd gladly see less selfie sticks and Kardashians from my generation. The consumers of those products are hardly just us. Have you seen what media our teens now consume? Our parents are more than capable of zoning out at the next Stupid Shore. Is that the responsibility of social media? Our parents? The schooling system?

Articles on generational discussion are deliberately polarising. In the same light as left vs right, secularism vs. religion, socialism vs. capitalism.

No discussion. Just perversion and conflict.

Edit: formatting, grammar.

</comment><comment><USER4> The intergenerational complaining seems wrong regardless of direction: The millenials complaining that the boomers ruined their world, and the boomers complaining about the Gen X slacking and millenials' self-absorption.

Take any group that's large enough and you can create stereotypes to make them ugly in your eyes.

Each generation brought and brings new things, discards things valued by earlier generations, and moves forward as best it can.

Help, contribute, learn to love those outside your age group and outside your values and we'll all be better off.

</comment><comment><USER5> Good lord, I didn't know the New York Post had gone full Onion. I'm scared that someone will think this is a real article.

<comment><USER6> Well, judging by the 10 upvotes it has here on HN, it looks like at least ten of your fellow hackers are pretty dumb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nit-pick...

The Baby Boomer's didn't invent the transitor, first computer, first personal computer (Altair), the cell phone or the basic internet protocols. That claim rightly belongs to the previous generation.

</comment><comment><USER6> Oh boy! Another well-written and carefully-reasoned piece from the NY Post!

What a crock of shit. There's always been social cachet available for people willing to piss on their own generation; this is neither novel nor particularly well executed.

<comment><USER8> A double crock even - I'm a slacker member of Generation X.

I'm used to being ignored by Boomers, who think our arts and culture were nothing like the glory of the 1960s. But this article doesn't even acknowledge we exist!

It characterizes Millennials as: "entitlement, dependency, nonstop complaining, laziness, Kardashians"

Except for the last, those are _our_ stereotypes.

Joking aside, there's indeed nothing novel. People in the 1940s make the same complaint about the youth of their time; who expected everything to be given to them on a silver platter.</comment></comment>


Show HN: React UI Builder Demo On-Line - <AUTHOR> http://umyproto.com/react-ui-builder/

<comment><USER2> Do you see this becoming an entire 'Visual Studio' style suite of tools?

It's a fantastic tool. Right now, I'm mostly creating individual components (or groups of components rather that perform one functionality) and exporting them to a larger project/app.

Do you think things such a drag and drop functionality will be implemented? Or is the view that most would prefer not to have this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Drag & drop is not precise in positioning of the elements on page. So, I developed this approach which turned out more productive.

Could you describe your development process using the tool ? It would be helpful for improving the builder for such process as you have.

<comment><USER2> Sure, at the moment, I'm creating a new project and arranging elements on the page to design one group of components (for instance, the main table panel of my monitoring app).

I then start with the "deepest" children that I want control over (beyond them just being Bootstrap components) and begin creating components, each time including children. I generally put everything into a single group. When I am finished, I just take that group's folder and add it to my components/ folder of my project. I then do all the functionality in my text editor (Sublime).

A few caveats to keep in mind:

\- I filed issue #24 on Git which you fixed, thank you - very helpful. I have react-ui-builder running on an ec2 instance so I can switch to it between computers and do not have to worry about running the server locally.

\- I am a data scientist/statistician (both in my job role and by training), however, I build internal applications for all sorts of visualizations/dashboard monitoring purposes. I do most of my backend programming in Python (Flask) and have been using React for the front.

I hope this helps. On the flip side, I'd love to hear any tips to improve that workflow. Currently, I'm using react-ui-builder as a sort of "component factory" but I'd be open to using it more extensively.

I'm hesitant to suggest component placement features as this might just be coming from my inexperience building interfaces but a few sticking points I've ran into:

\- The 'wrap' component button is useful. It would be helpful to have an equivalent 'get wrapped' button (ie. insert child).

\- The up/down arrows for moving components work well as does the 'move cursor one parent up'. It would be useful to be able to do this with a component as well. (ie. make it a child of the following component or make it a sibling of its immediate parent).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you a lot, I love you defined the builder as component factory, let me use it as expression or slogan. As for your workflow with builder I think it's suitable for big legacy projects, and I will think how to make easier to export group of components as library or whatever can be injected in outside.

Also if you have any projects, which has useful components or just a whole project which is doing something useful please din't hesitate to upload projects into our gallery.

Also if you whant to propose some ideas to me, please write to me directly in any way convenient for you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to hire and retain smart people? - <AUTHOR> I am self taught web developer and relatively good at what I do but certainly not very good. I am building a solution to a problem I face everyday and would eventually need skilled and smart people to join me, what tip would you give to hire and retain people who are much smarter and better than me at certain tasks? <comment><USER2> This is a question that is asked quite often, there are in fact entire books dedicated to this very question. Be that as it may, in my opinion I think the answer is quite simple and not nearly as multidimensional as some would lead you to believe. Not to say that there are not multiple things you need to have right, I am just saying that it is not as many things as some would have you believe.

It is only an opinion as will be any answer you get but be that as it may, mine would be to do just four things religiously. 1\. Pay them what they are actually worth or someone else will 2\. When they talk, you listen 3\. When they give advice, you take it 4\. Give them the ability to make the right decision without having to get constant approval from you or anyone. You have stated that you are looking for people smarter and better than you so this should not be anything for you to be concerned about.

I hope you find these people and that you can keep them. It is tough to do as everyone else is looking for them as well.

<comment><USER3> This is a really good advice!</comment></comment>


Distraction free writing and the simplest blogging platform in one - <AUTHOR> http://throwww.com

<comment><USER2> I really like the design and look of throwww, and I don't mean to pick on it - but every time I see these minimalist low-friction writing engines, I feel like a very big thing is missing; facilitating editing, and encouraging a greater purpose for text.

Something I'm reminded of every time I reach the bottom of a pg essay, or every time I look back on the writing I'm most proud of, is that time was taken to consider and craft the text. Crucially, the text - and its ideas - was shared with others, feedback was gathered, and the text further refined.

Low-friction composition is important; it's a huge boost to have a simple clean slate with which to begin. But often once that initial effort is over with, good writing becomes a work of careful refinement. Here's some things I haven't found in any platform that would be great;

1\. Full revision history. Every keystroke I've made, every tiny little edit should be saved. Everything. In order. Everything. This is a small data problem.

2\. Once I create some text, I'd like to be able to share it privately with my trusted testers and feedbackers. They should be able to highlight text and make notes in-place. If I trust them enough - or they are an actual nominated human editor - they should be able to edit the text.

3\. Some guidelines for good clear writing are automatable. An editor could tell me when a sentence is getting very long. An editor could detect obscure or imprecise words and suggest alternatives. An editor could detect repetition of mundane words or phrases. You get the idea ... the point is that real work can be done here.

4\. It would be nice to be able to make margin notes, and to track goals. It is common to sketch out in advance the purpose or goals of a text; the outline and key points to be included. It'd be neat to be able to check them off as progress is made.

Or in summary; it'd be nice to see a tool that took as its goal that writing itself can be made more effective, rather than merely prettier.

<comment><USER3> " _1\. Full revision history. Every keystroke I've made, every tiny little edit should be saved. Everything. In order. Everything. This is a small data problem._ "

A 'replay' function would be good as well. I have a feeling that what I _actually_ do when editing is different to what I like to _think_ I do. This feeling is based on some screen videos I did a little time back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Woah just happened to come across this! Thanks for sharing, akos.

I built (and am continuously working on) throwww. Let me know if you have any questions. Also here's kind of a mission statement of sorts <http://throwww.com/a/1>

<comment><USER5> I wrote a post last night and "saved it" so that I'll continue to work on it later. Its non-existent now. So, drafts don't exist? What does the "save" button do then?

<comment><USER6> Looks like you need to bookmark the url that is generated when you save. It's probably still in your browser history (with the same title of as your post).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pretty minor detail, but got me thinking. I like that the site has a Markdown video tag using the following form:

        |video|(http://youtube.com/watch?v=abc)

Haven't seen that in any other Markdown implementations (always hate having to copy the embed code in for Tumblr's half-assed version of it). Is it new to Throwww or is it from another Markdown variation?

<comment><USER4> I added it in addition to markdown. It's a python package I found a while back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really, really like the interface. I'd love to use it for my blog, but I'd want a self hosting version. I've been burnt too many times by hosted/proprietary writing platforms.

If you're not keen on self-hosting, I'd want: \- the ability to export to an importable format (eg, wordpress's WXR). Exporting html/text is all well and good, but I need to be able to migrate \- other stuff I'm sure you've thought about, like custom domains, custom URLs (eg /this-is-the-post-title) etc \- discoverability of other users/"blogs" on the network

Nice work though. I really like it.

<comment><USER4> Hey benrhughes, thanks for feedback. I put together this update on where throwww is going. I think you'll like the direction :)

<http://throwww.com/a/45r>

<comment><USER8> Excellent, looks great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why would someone publish his writings when the website does not even publish Privacy Policy and Terms of Use?

* Who owns the content ?

* Are they going to keep there for lifetime?

* How would you make money and let us write? In future they can monetize on my content.

btw, let me admit, I created one for linkback <http://throwww.com/a/41k>

</comment><comment><USER10> Would be nice to randomize the url id so that you cannot see all the posts that have ever been written just by doing +1 on the number.

Also, I usually stick to Wordpress because you can embed code. Any plans to allow syntax highlighting?

Thanks!

<comment><USER4> A front-end dev friend of mind asked for code-embedding/syntax highlighting too! I'd be happy to add it if I can come up with an elegant implementation. Is there a "markdown" for code that you know of?

<comment><USER11> Github uses Pygments: <http://pygments.org/>

I don't know what language you're using, but here's a Ruby library for it: <https://github.com/tmm1/pygments.rb>

Edit: Scrolled down and saw Django. Pygments is native to Python, so you might be in luck if you want to use that.

<comment><USER4> Awesome, thanks. Will definitely add code support in coming days/weeks.

<comment><USER12> <http://alexgorbatchev.com/SyntaxHighlighter/> is a great place to start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is great! I've been thinking about writing down some of my experiences and thoughts lately, but didn't want to go with some full-blown blogging platform. I considered just having a github repo where I would just push up my *.md files, but this is even easier.

My only concern is my ability to get content back for archiving. Is there a way we could export the articles to some simple format? Either markdown or even just a plain text file?

<comment><USER4> Thanks! I made throwww for the exact same reason. Nothing quite fit my use case.

As for your concern. A few users have requested a "download" feature to archive their posts. The features I'm planning on adding in the short term include

* "Download" support. Probably XML or RTF options.

* RSS

* "Discover" page with curated/voted posts. Kind of like user pages (e.g., throwww.com/u/sfard) except with content from several users

* subdomain user support (i.e., username.throwww.com)

* Potentially "groups"

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I shared my thoughts about some features I would love to see in the future: <http://throwww.com/a/2r4> ;)

<comment><USER4> favorited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, very handsome. I like it--I was just wondering what platform I could use to share thoughts that are a bit longer than a tweet but maybe don't merit a full blog post with all the bells and whistles.

My only gripe is that when I clicked on my profile it said, "This guy hasn't written anything yet." which was slightly off-putting as I am not actually a "guy."

<comment><USER4> Wow, I just realized how androcentric that is. I just changed it.

<comment><USER14> Cool, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you're interested in these new blogging services, check out Medium[1] which is built by the same guy who build Blogger, and Feathers[2] which is also in the "distraction free blogging" space. I like this trend of minimalism and clean layouts but I do not like the same idea being repeated over and over again without good execution (How do I view posts? Where is the post index? Where is the submit button? Where is the privacy policy and ToS? How will you attain user engagement with such an app? Who owns the content?). More importantly, what does your application offer that other applications in this space do not?

[1]<http://medium.com/>

[2]<http://feathe.rs/>

<comment><USER7> Considering that both of those are in private betas, I can't say either is really relevant to someone wanting to use a service right now. Kudos to sfard for actually launching something.

<comment><USER4> avolcano, your comment makes me so happy. Nothing wrong with other blog platforms. I wont bash them. I'm just building throwww as something that I hope has value for people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Seems to me like a web browser is the last place you'd be able to pull off distraction-free anything.

<comment><USER17> you could use one of the various strategies for disabling access to distracting websites (hosts file, rescuetime, et al) while you were using this if it's really an issue. I think "distraction-free" was referring to the fact that the interface doesn't distract you with a bunch of bells and whistles though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like it.

But I was a bit surprised to see a commenting system in it. This isn't what I expected after having read "Why I Made Throwww" [1]. A blog-like commenting system is not what I would associate with simplicity, nor "the purity of just a message".

Also, a little idea for easy improvement (IMHO): display the length of the text, i.e. the number of words and/or the time to read (e.g. based on a naive average of 250 words per minute [2]).

      [1] http://throwww.com/a/1
      [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_%28process%29#Reading_rate

</comment><comment><USER19> What I always check first for these tools, is support of partial unicode. And almost always I am faced with total ignorance of such. It's 21st century, guys.

Post: <http://throwww.com/a/3nr>

Screenshot (Chrome, win64): [http://www.flickr.com/photos/laacz/8357406754/in/photostream...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/laacz/8357406754/in/photostream/lightbox/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Hey everyone, thanks for the feedback. Based on what I've been hearing lately, I wrote a small article about throwww's direction. <http://throwww.com/a/45r>

Comment if you want anything you don't see. Not promising it'll get built, but it might be something I haven't considered.

Thanks again.

</comment><comment><USER20> Looks great!

The problem with all blogging platforms though is that we always focus on making the writing experience better rather than making the audience experience better.

Give me this simplicity, plus a built in way for me to get eyeballs and I'm all yours!

</comment><comment><USER21> Very cool, this could be what svbtle should have been.

If you implement the things like trending and subdomain user blogs (with things like domain hosting add-ons in the future) I could see it being a very useful blogging alternative.

Nice work.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, here's where throwww is going. You might like. <http://throwww.com/a/45r>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks very clean. I wonder how do I upload images? Or is this only for pure text blogging?

<comment><USER23> There are a handful of very popular sites for uploading _and hotlinking_ relatively small (under 2MB) images. Right now, imgur.com is probably the best-known.

<comment><USER22> I think it would be better if the site handles all that for me. Having to switch to another site for uploading images is kinda 'distracting' to me.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Throwww was never originally supposed to have image support, but it seems pretty needed now. I'll add to to-do

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Pretty awesome, I love the simplicity.

Curiosity. What have you used technically?

<comment><USER4> Thanks. Django + Postgres + Javascript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Very sweet interface and love the look. What is the market for these type of services though? Who uses them and why? I can't seem to think of a lot of use cases personally and hardly ever see anything linked from one.

</comment><comment><USER26> Add full-screen button for complete distraction-freeness. And there are some server errors, not sure why <http://throwww.com/a/337>

</comment><comment><USER27> love the user page and writing experience.

quick thoughts:

formatting would be a distraction

include "media box" (music/img/url/vimeo)

would be nice to get lost inside of throwww following threads, authors, subjects... or else make twitter serve as the navigation through different "throwww's"

maybe instead of downloading the posts, they "evaporate" within... 2 days? temporality is cool and goes along with the name.

</comment><comment><USER28> I used this tool only to share my comments

<http://throwww.com/a/3h8>

</comment><comment><USER29> OK, I give up. I don't see any save button. I don't see any way to post. Lost one test file already.

<comment><USER30> Scroll down my friend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't like the textarea field, if I write too much it scrolls and hide what I previously wrote.

</comment><comment><USER32> Personally, I found the lack of an interface he most distracting part. It just didn't feel right.

</comment><comment><USER33> everyone can delete other people's posts? (in anonymous mode)

<comment><USER4> No... only your own.

<comment><USER34> If you guess someone else's url and they haven't logged in, you can in some cases delete their post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> yet another paper plane logo :-)</comment>


Will it happen one day: you open HN in the morning then... - <AUTHOR> https://www.evernote.com/shard/s299/sh/a979e6e0-c79d-4123-af7e-09878a4728f4/a976d5f5204b42865784b0f607ef75c4 <comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure I'm not the only one waiting for it :)

<comment><USER2> +1

PS: Hey victor :)</comment></comment>


VirtualOffice is a branded Zoom background builder, check the beta now for free - <AUTHOR> https://www.virtualoffice.design/ <comment><USER2> I'm really sorry since it looks like somebody put effort in the marketing for this but I feel like 15 years ago this would have been a PHP script somebody uploaded somewhere for free use.

Are dark patterns like "532 / 1000 Free Branded Offices Left" really necessary? Shilling another paid service to do a trivial task ( [https://www.remove.bg/](https://www.remove.bg/) if you don't have a transparent logo) seems less than helpful either.

Content wise: These stock photos would feel really awkward as a webcam backdrop, none of the three I see there make sense, in terms of perspective, for that use case.

Just in case these votes are serious: [https://unsplash.com/](https://unsplash.com/) folks. Grab one, slap your logo on there, done.

<comment><USER3> No idea what you are talking about I loved it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A more technical post would get more traction here. How are you calculating where to put the logo, a 3D model or gut feeling? Illumination? Do you support crappy lens or you hope the lens are good enough to get an ideal perspective?

Also, please not don't use new accounts to praise your product.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow that's so cool thank you!

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome! Downloaded all3 of them!</comment>


Medium: Software developers can survive the coming tech crash - HN-VIC https://medium.com/@uptimevic/how-software-developers-can-survive-the-coming-tech-crash-796dd8dc5a7e <comment> HN-VIC OP/Author here. We have been working on INTUITION.DEV open source for almost a year. First we started with a generator: SASS to css and Pug to html. Then we added a WebAdmin editor so you can edit the pages/app. Then we added other needed things.

Commercial low-code all use their own specific proprietary language that may not work for SEO and may not cross-compile to mobile.

Is it ready for use? INTUITION.DEV has already been used and tested in a commercial project that allows a market researcher to send and analyze surveys—and, everything works!

But documentation is lacking and may not be as smooth as other early-stage open source projects. At least you get the idea, and you can write a generator and then add WebAdmin editor and you have a decent productivity tool.

I started working on INTUITION.DEV after I was convinced that low-code tools in the hands of end users may make them more productive than a professional developer using currently popular approaches.

Happy to answer questions.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Being among the last of the University trained COBOL developers and having made my career during the client server era and the internet age I can personally attest to the complete accuracy of the author's statements and I agree with his forecasts. The business people we tech's work for are all about faster, cheaper and more effective systems that produce cost savings, revenue and increased organizational effectiveness. Low code tools that abstract away the complexities of the trade support these goals. I believe low code tool expertise to be of ever increasing significance to the developer as are data skills. AI or at least the ML component of it is completely dependent on good data and your ability to wrangle it.

</comment><comment><USER2> The idea of quickly delivering a version 1 that customers can start to customize is solid. Having something to iterate on is the first step.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm developing on INTUITION.DEV and it is very nice tool to use.

</comment><comment><USER4> Its looking better everyday!</comment>


Semantic Search Engine Omnity Reckons It Can Beat Google - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/semantic-search-engine-omnity-reckons-it-can-beat-google <comment><USER2> So you have to upload all your docs to their cloud? Are they going to team up with dropbox et al or compete with them?</comment>


Spanking for Misbehavior? It Causes More - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/spanking-for-misbehavior-it-causes-more-1513267680 <comment><USER2> Non-paywall: [http://archive.is/qeMa6](http://archive.is/qeMa6)

I find this really interesting. There is kinda this pre-disposition to "I was spanked as a kid and I turned out okay" combined with the whole "entitled/snowflake" rubbish that would keep people from really looking at this type of parenting technique.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is software quality an afterthought for many people/companies? - <AUTHOR> I've seen many discussions around this topic lately, but I'm particularly curious to understand why most people think that software/code quality is something secondary and could be addressed late in the process, for instance with peer review.
Why isn't the idea that software quality starts way before you write any line of code the predominant mindset amongst engineers / the industry?
I have the feeling that most companies don't hold discussions about what software quality means and how it should be measured.
To which extent do you agree or disagree with this feeling? <comment><USER3> Software development is, apart from a few rare outposts like GOV.UK, conducted in the private sector for a profit.

That means that the _number one consideration_ for the software is profitability. For internal-only software, this means that cost is the prime consideration.

In support of that, often software startups are trying to capture a winner- takes-all market, so _time-to-market_ is critical.

Thirdly, consumer protection law is weak in the US, and product liability is almost nonexistant for software everywhere. The _cost_ of failure is very low even if you leak all your customers' data or your product ceases to work after 18 months because you've "pivoted".

Fourthly, a lot of software is ""free"" or ad-funded. This further weakens the cost of failure.

There are techniques for delivering extremely high quality software. Few sectors of the industry care about them because it's not required and is unprofitable, but the aerospace people can usually get it right and the security people can usually get it right (when dealing with security products, not general purpose junk like Flash).

The automotive industry is kind of on a boundary. The Toyota "unintended acceleration" bug revealed some tremendously poor quality software. This is one of the main worries about self-driving cars: how minimal is the quality assurance going to be?

<comment><USER4> "aerospace people can usually get it right "

Are you refererring to adherence to standards like Misra and DO-178B or something else?

<comment><USER5> Adherence to standards is a means to an end, but it is neither an end in itself, nor a guarantor of that end.

<comment><USER4> Sure, stupid tools are pointless. But usefull tools...

If the point is to reduce the number of errors then it helps to at least have a checklist of the errors, and someone reminding the team of the checklist. Checklist process is one of the easiest quality and safety tools to implement.

Having a premade checklist that makes sense in the form of a process plan makes things easier.

<comment><USER5> Exactly - a means to an end.

I'm not sure why you are mentioning "stupid tools", whatever they are - <USER2> would not even be means to an end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To most businesses, the core objective is creating a profitable business, and most other objectives, including engineering, marketing, support, and yes, in many companies even things like customer and employee satisfaction, are secondary to that, and only really prioritized to the extent that improving those areas also improves the bottom line (I would in fact argue that this is true of almost all companies, and that the difference in whether they prioritize customer and employee satisfaction or not, is mostly a matter of whether they look at the impact on the bottom line in a short-sighted manner, or in a more long-term way).

So in regards to your question, it would seem that the market reality is that a lot of the time, it is better for a company to have a quickly-cobbled- together piece of software that mostly does what the customers want (and maybe get to the market first) even if it is low-quality, than it is to have a piece of high-quality software that does less, or is finished later, but is maintainable, and potentially scalable in the future (which you'll never get to enjoy because the worse-is-better people already conquered the market).

<comment> alok-g >> piece of software that mostly does what the customers want even if it is low-quality

The state of the software is currently much worse in my opinion.

Quality is not easily quantified while the price is. Metrics at the customer end are hard to collect (it requires software development too, raising the costs), and in the current state of the art, it also requires having customer support staff too which is still costlier. As a result, quality does not even gets quantified properly. A natural result of which is quality reducing below what would customers desire.

This isn't much different than where quality of MP3 players, laptops and smartphones was headed. Perhaps quality then was being measured just by percentage of customer returns, not by customer satisfaction. Steve Jobs then changed the game. Apple's products would just "feel right" to the customers. Apple iPod took over the market even after being much costlier. It then took a couple years for the rest of the laptop/smartphone manufacturers to catch up.

<comment><USER7> _This isn 't much different than where quality of MP3 players, laptops and smartphones was headed. Perhaps quality then was being measured just by percentage of customer returns, not by customer satisfaction. Steve Jobs then changed the game. Apple's products would just "feel right" to the customers. Apple iPod took over the market even after being much costlier. It then took a couple years for the rest of the laptop/smartphone manufacturers to catch up._

"Feel right" is definitely a kind of quality that software can compete on. I'd probably put Chrome in this category (relative to other browsers that were around at the time it launched). Sublime Text, maybe. Blizzard games (especially those of a certain era).

Note, though, that this quality is principally about doing _what the users want_ and being pleasant to use while doing so.

It's something that you can definitely focus on deliberately in your work and projects, but I'd argue that a lot of the current mantras that get recited when software quality comes up (test coverage, continuous delivery, maybe even code reviews) are not especially helpful for achieving this kind of user- perceived quality. Maybe even a distraction, in some cases. Getting your code in front of users and listening to feedback can help, certainly. But having a strong, clear, vision of what you're trying to build in the first place might be even more important. And I don't think that's something that's achieved with tools and processes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Companies do care about code quality, but it's not the same kind of quality. This is the purpose of QA. Every company that has a QA team cares about quality at least enough to hire a full-time person responsible for it.

When developers talk about "quality," they mean tech debt. Addressing tech debt is problematic for businesses because it's something that never ends. You allocate one month for tech debt and the devs will ask for two. Allocate two and they will ask for three. There is no agreed-upon standard at which devs will stop and say, "Now our code is clean."

Add to this the fact that there are many developers who just always seem to have an agenda about the code they're working on. They never work a project except they're dying to add some pattern or change some aspect of the code, even if it's something that they used to favor a year ago.

<comment><USER9> I've managed developers for the same software product (accounting system) over the last 15+ years. That amount of time gives you some perspective.

A common thing that new hire developers do is call for "a complete rewrite", they do this because when they first approach a large old code base, its daunting and seems impenetrable. Of course they are right, but naive in thinking a "rewrite" will help. Any new rewrite will eventually just grow to be just as impenetrable once all features and edge-cases are accounted for.

Fundamentally, any software product is trying to model some aspect of the real world...and the real world is messy, very messy. Governments pass laws that contradict each other, some laws change drastically state by state, employees try new and novel ways to embezzle, different languages and units of measure exist, changing prices for commodities can suddenly cause complete upheavals in manufacturing process, etc. All this must try to be accounted for and its nearly an impossible task.

The bugs that persist are almost never "I click Button A and it does the wrong thing", but almost always "In case that Situation A + B + C all simultaneously exist, the result as interpreted by Agency X is not optimal". Obvious and real bugs get squashed pretty quickly, but those complex situational bugs can linger for a long time. As a manager, you sometimes just need to shrug, because the effort required to fix each and everyone of these would produce little to no tangible business value. Moreover, an environmental change could come along to render your "fix" invalid anyways.

Sometimes even during design discussions we are completely aware we are creating "a bug", but the decision is made that the amount of people that want both Feature A and where Situation B exist will produce relatively little overlap. Most often we just design a manual workaround, instead of trying to completely eliminate the bug.

I'm always refreshed and excited by dealing with young devs, particularly for their zeal to fix problems, simplify things, and generally improve the product. Yet, I do feel a bit of sadness in that I know reality is going to temper their enthusiasm after a decade or so. Reality is a very hard thing to model with any semblance of being "bug-free".

<comment><USER10> > once all features and edge-cases are accounted for.

But one of the benefits of a rewrite is that you can dump all the features and edge-cases that are no longer required. Or fold old edge-cases into new generalities because the business has changed since then.

> the real world is messy, very messy.

Cannot disagree -but- it's nowhere near as messy as the people (often those who are to blame) defending the byzantine software stacks using that argument.

> reality is going to temper their enthusiasm after a decade or so.

I've been doing this professionally for two decades and my enthusiasm for "chuck it away and do it right" hasn't waned one bit.

<comment><USER11> >> reality is going to temper their enthusiasm after a decade or so.

>I've been doing this professionally for two decades and my enthusiasm for "chuck it away and do it right" hasn't waned one bit.

I think it's probably somewhere in between the two extremes. I think you should have good unit tests and then refactor parts of your code where you see better generalities, or where basic code cleanliness was disregarded before.

But throwing all of it away is rarely possible without endangering the profitability of the company for a while.

<comment><USER10> > throwing all of it away is rarely possible without endangering the > profitability of the company

Well, obviously I don't mean "turn it off and wait for the new system to be finished". You build the new one whilst the old one is in maintenance mode and swap in new bits as and when you can.

For example, at current $WORK, the backoffice system is a horror show of overcomplex PHP that is riddled with bugs and no-one really understands how it all works. Replacing that would be a huge boon both humanly and monetarily to the company because CS use it heavily every day.

<comment><USER12> > You build the new one whilst the old one is in maintenance mode and swap in > new bits as and when you can.

Continuous incremental improvement of a production system may, over time, have the same net effect as a an idealized big-bang replacement, but it's a very different process (it's usually what people who are saying you should never do a ground-up replacement prefer instead, because actual big-bang replacements, unlike idealized ones, are usually a shitstorm: and the reason is that they are usually done to the kind of systems you describe, overcomplicated key systems with inadequate documentation or institutional memory, and they are done instead of trying to get a firm grasp on each component of the existing system before replacing that component. And so they end up, at best, being exceedingly well designed, but overlooking key elements of business function discovered and implemented, but not durably documented, in the original system.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Clients don't care about quality, they care about features, so management doesn't care about delivering quality, they care about delivering features, so engineers aren't allocated enough time to care about quality, only features. And then it's still the engineers fault when everything explodes or takes 10x longer than it should to rework or expand a feature later.

Basically it comes down to management that is willing and able to tell a client no, or convince the client to budget to do things right, and not management like my current company, which has in the past threatened to disallow even unit test writing and code review as slowing the process down too much.

"Code quality is time and money you're saving your future self" is an argument that only makes sense to people who write code, apparently, until you actually lose a client to avoidable problems.

<comment><USER14> > Clients don't care about quality, they care about features, so management > doesn't care about delivering quality

Up to a point, as soon as you start losing market share to competitors because your customer complains your application crashes every other day. Suddenly, the focus switch back to quality. (Until the next cycle).

What is frustrating as engineer is to release something you know you'll have to fix in 6 months after a customer's complaint. But maybe from a sales point of view that was the right decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In Peopleware, Tom DeMarco thinks it's because a business's customers will tolerate lower quality software, so there are diminishing marginal returns to revenue as investment in software quality continues. He predicts that while this management style works wonderfully for the bottom line in the short run, it causes long-term ailments such as team dissatisfaction, overly complex architectures, and other issues that may be more expensive overall.

Quality and security become increasingly important as we depend even more on software systems for essential functions such as cars, power grid management, agriculture, etc. Unfortunately, this situation is all too similar to how many opt for the emergency room over preventative care.

We should also consider that many businesses wouldn't exist if not for lax quality requirements for software products. How many product V1s are chock full of bugs and exploits, and to what extent is that okay? What about open source? As usual, it's pretty complicated.

<comment> finance-geek To take this a level higher -- managers are often rewarded on quarterly or annual targets, not long-term targets. When it managed a large software team, it was very difficult to budget time/money for quality -- if I did, peers would swoop in and try to take my position under the guise of "he's overspending for the task." It takes good, strategic prioritization _all the way up the management chain_ to build quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Because of the fact that software is seen as a cost center rather than as a means of production. If you were to factor quality in right at the start most projects would never be approved and so we try to 'fix' the problem at two minutes to twelve.

This is also a large factor in why software projects tend to overrun both in terms of time and budget (the other large factor is bad project management).

</comment><comment><USER17> Code Quality (CQ) is an ideal.

Your feeling about the magnitude of the issue (most companies) is wrong. Programmers discuss CQ principles among themselves. However, the discussion becomes more challenging with management.

Management is responsible for accomplishing business objectives. Development and testing timeframes are at odds with business objectives. Adopting CQ delays product. If you're going to delay product, but the product will be beautifully efficient, idiomatic, elegant and possibly a little faster than the first pre-CQ version, you're not going to win an argument in an organizational context where delivery timelines matter.

Time and effort are not a programmer's friend in a task-driven organizational setting. Fortunately, real-time linters tell programmers not only about material errors but present stylistic warnings (such as Python pep8 linters). Further, static analysis tools such as Quantified Code [1] conduct an in-depth analysis of code and suggest stylistic improvements. I suspect that this is an area where machine learning will advance Code Quality further. Maybe, just as there are language servers, there will be code quality servers.

It is worth noting that the QuantifiedCode entity shuttered in the Summer of 2017. It's not clear why the company closed-- did they fail to monetize automated code review? Were they acquired?

In conclusion, the more you can automate code quality-related improvements, the more likely you can promote your Code Quality ideals.

[1] [https://github.com/quantifiedcode/quantifiedcode](https://github.com/quantifiedcode/quantifiedcode)

</comment><comment><USER18> Minimum Viable Product

In fact these days, people kinda know what they want, but really only understand what they want when they have something in front of them. I'd go so far as to suggest you can over-engineer a solution too easily and then spend a lot of time refactoring it. YMMV

</comment><comment><USER19> A thought: The slightest design flaw or manufacturing flaw in a microprocessor or memory chip can reduce its value to zero. Generally, flaws in software are easier to correct and don't have the same catastrophic effect on value.

<comment><USER19> With respect to quality, some software is so fundamental and widely used that flaws are noticed immediately and fixed. Examples include microcode, firmware, operating system kernels, compilers, and embedded databases such as SQLite. Flaws in low-level software are generally much more destructive to value than flaws in high-level application software.

<comment><USER20> I've fixed bugs in postgres that were more than 10 years old...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I working in consulting, and in a lot of cases while we're well intentioned in delivering quality software, we're forced to fight against clients in time, budget, scope creep etc.

Sadly, things sometimes get rushed out the door and it's not until some time has passed that they realise the enormous tech debt they've incurred.

<comment><USER22> In my experience managements set the budget and timeline before anybody has adequately evaluated the work that needs to be done. Typically there isn't enough time nor money to support quality engineering practices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How do you define software quality? Just off the top of my head, I can think of:

* Defect rate (does it do what it's _meant_ to do?)

* Does it do what the _user_ wants? (not always the same as the above...)

* Is it pleasant and efficient to use ( _definitely_ not the same as either of the above).

* Is it developed in a way the management are comfortable with? (which often seems to lean towards sufficiently "under control", replaceable developers).

How do you balance these? The answer will be quite different depending on whether you're landing on Mars or writing a free-to-play game.

<comment><USER5> I think there is room for some balance. If not doing what the user wants is not part of the defect rate, then maybe you are not defining defects properly. According to the principle of the separation of concerns, management's other issues are best considered as non-quality constraints on the overall process. That leaves the user experience - but what user does not want a product that is pleasant and efficient to use, all else being equal? (But beginning, casual and experienced users have different ideas of what his means, so it is probably better to treat it as a separate concern.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Feature creep and timelines are in my opinion the root cause of lower quality software. Most engineers sit down planning to develop clean efficient code but that generally takes more time than they are allocated. As the deadline draws closer new features and edge cases are often added in by either management or the end user.

Often these new features were not accounted for in the original design and in order to fit them into the system in a nice and clean manner, a large rewrite of certain modules and/or database tables is required. Due to time constraints and developer fatigue this is not possible and the mindset of "Just get it done" sinks in. This is no one's fault just a harsh reality of writing software where timelines and profits are a factor.

No one wants to be the guy that hard coded several edge cases into an otherwise clean module but it happens and it happens often as "Just get it done" takes hold. I think a good developer just accepts this, and makes sure to do a good job commenting their code. This especially happens during customer acceptance testing. Customer brings up a feature that they never mentioned before, they want it now. Management and/or your bank account says just give it to them. You hard code it in.

The circle of life

<comment><USER24> I don't understand why people have a problem with hard-coding features. The argument is that it creates more work later. But this is a fallacy as the work "later" is not guaranteed to be necessary or requested. The idea that all software has to be abstracted, configurable, and future-proof to be "good" is just wrong. We hard code features all the time on my project. The earth keeps on spinning, the company makes money, and the code is usually removable with a single 'git revert' when the time comes to clean up. That time may never come, which is fine. That is the natural way. Nature has yet to do 'git revert male nipples' or 'git revert human appendix'. Both are dirty hacks left in by mother nature.

<comment><USER25> Your comment reminds me of the time I spent reading Chuck Moore's writings and learning forth. One of the main things he endorses is keep it simple. Don't do things because you _may_ need them. You don't need it now, so don't do it now. Factor your code later, or rewrite it if you have to. But there's little point implementing something that may not be useful in the future (or whose complexity costs aren't amortized over enough uses later).

I can abstract out some feature into a handful of classes, and then use that in one place in my code. Was it useful? Probably not. Now I use it in 20 places. Was it useful? Almost certainly. But if I don't have multiple places to use the abstraction, it probably isn't worth developing today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> You don't make money building good or bad software. You make money with mainteinance contracts.

That's what my CS 101 professor told us our fist day at the university. Heresy! you might think. But it is true.

Making software is a one-off cost for the customer. Maintenance is recurring income for you.

Custom software is Capex (Capital expenditure: investment). Mainteinance is Opex (operational, aka expenses). All Capex you spend will be in your books for several years (usually 3-5). Opex is fort the year only.

A lot of customers will happily like to pay high mainteinance fees if you can convert those fees to development of new features (in case there is little or no debugging/improvement to do).

</comment><comment><USER27> "If you don't ship it you can't sell it."

Now tell that to any sales team and they'll tell you to hold their beer. The problem is, now they've sold your vaporware and you _reallly_ need to ship it, now. Like, yesterday.

</comment><comment><USER28> Anything that you're not explicitly optimising for, you're optimising against.

And companies are built to optimise other stuff.

</comment><comment><USER29> They must believe that the consequences for making it an afterthought are not severe. Depending on what they are building they might be right or wrong about that.

I find that in bigger teams with more complex projects that are sold to the customers it's not usually an afterthought, they take quality seriously usually, at least relatively. I can understand why it's an afterthought for a small startup trying to see if they can even get customers but they have to be careful too, if they do get traction then quality should be taken very seriously. I can also understand why it's an afterthought for some internal tooling, the consequences aren't severe.

I run a cloud based automated test reporting app called Tesults ([https://www.tesults.com](https://www.tesults.com)) and I've worked as a software development engineer in test at large tech and game companies. Based on my experience reporting is definitely an afterthought and this makes testing in general an afterthought sometimes. You need a way to keep on top of failing tests and have some measure of the problems that are being discovered. Especially when it comes to the modern agile style way of working where constant check-ins are made.

Another issue is that a lot of testing now (particularly for performance and automation in general) requires testers to be engineers and in some organizations this still isn't understood. The manual testers are still required of course for UI/UX testing but there is definitely a shift in this area and in games at least it's taken a long time to understand that.

</comment><comment><USER30> Unfortunately most of the business people are in a hurry to release a new feature or version.

There is a misconception that code quality comes in a price of developing time but in my experience I have released much faster the final product when I use unit testing, incremental releases, use code reviews and other techniques that help maintain the code quality high.

By not using these techniques you get faster initial release but a much slower final, bug free, release.

</comment><comment><USER31> Human nature.

Quality in general has always been an afterthought by many if not most people and companies. Always will be.

Some people are just not quality people. But when they find their way into important corporate positions their "leadership" effectively puts a major obstacle in front of any inherently higher-quality operators or teams underneath, restricting the flow of true available quality towards the clients, customers, and shareholders that could otherwise benefit.

Probably why I named my first company Quality, just like so many other companies in so many fields of operation, because it's not an afterthought to me.

Combined, all us "Quality" oriented companies who try to choose this as a differentiator still make up a small minority and are always under continuous pressure to compromise this most elusive feature, sometimes necessary to compete or even survive in situations where higher quality is not fully valued. More often there is downward pressure when lower quality becomes overvalued, as we see this trend growing in the 21st century.

It's tough for so many people to tell the difference between low and high quality anyway, especially for those where it's not even an afterthought.

</comment><comment><USER32> Businesses* don't care about quality until it's too late.

They pay lip service to it, sure, but when it comes down to it most don't care enough until it actually starts to affect the bottom line. And longer, more expensive development processes are already affecting the bottom line, so come on, get it out the door!

Plus a lot of engineers see quality considerations as a drag. If they can find a home in a company that doesn't want all this "extra" stuff done then, well, this is what you get.

There are notable counter-examples in companies - Big Blue has a huge focus on quality, and their teams put a lot of effort into it (note I am saying nothing about usability here...) which is possible because a lot of stuff there moves slowly anyway. It's also because IBM are very, very good at measuring their cashflows and costs and have figured out just how much lack of quality can impact their bottom line.

There are also many individual engineers in smaller companies who put quality up front, and try their damnedest to push it through even where the business may not really care.

( * mostly SMEs are terrible for this, IMHO, though one or two large corporates I've worked with haven't been that great either)

</comment><comment> Chiba-City Many software companies fail outright. Other enduring bad software delivery outfits enjoy specific types of subsidies or captive pricing powers until they fail. Those are different cases.

Outright unsubsidized failures that never deliver any product to customers are mostly functions of communicative challenges. The opacity of costing for simple speed/space or protocol adherence engineering decisions is easy to underestimate. Business actors will nod and agree to anything that sounds good and give wrong signals. Others wave hands frantically around every buzzword and easy windfall demanding features. Many purchase agents subject to hype have no idea what they are buying and fetishize wasted software LOE. Training is routinely shortchanged for industries with high turnover.

Accept failure and then low quality as the norm. Then seek team members, suppliers, channel partners and customers around new or rekindled software with needs to focus intensively for 2 months and then 24 months. Most enduring software requires stakeholders more than customers. Leave other endeavors up to researchers and understand what capital resources amplify or do not amplify.

</comment><comment><USER22> If software is created within a profit oriented organisation, then there is a rush to get stuff out the door. Quality is seen as an expensive intangible. Managers are focused on time to market - the shorter the better and costs - the lower the better.

When software is created without a profit motive, then it is to coolness of the idea that motivates the creators. Focusing on quality would only slow down the "creative" process.

</comment><comment><USER33> Management incentives and profitability aren't aligned to software quality...until they are (see: Equifax), and _perceieved_ software quality is given priority over actual software quality. Also, if your product is a monopoly or relatively monopolistic, then software quality literally doesn't matter because customers don't have a choice...until they do (the very definition of disruption)

</comment><comment><USER34> Design by committee vs design by vision. Takes guts to have strong opionions and stick to them.

At almost every company, the primary background motivation is not getting fired. Virtually no one even aspires to great work let alone takes the risk to have a vision.

This is pretty rational. There's just no incentive to risk your neck pushing for quality when you'll just end up working a lot harder for little reward.

</comment><comment><USER35> Software quality is one of my main professional areas of interest.

I agree with the general sentiment. Things have improved in recent years though, in part on account of movements like software craftsmanship, habits like clean code and also because software is becoming more easily and more rapidly testable due to better testing frameworks.

Testing frameworks are only one part of the equation. As you stated correctly software quality starts at the beginning i.e. with the requirements or rather even earlier when defining your values and expectations for your project and the software you create for it. There's no shortage of tools for this aspect of software quality either. Those are less rigorous though and emphasise communication rather than true / false (test succeeded / failed) outcomes. Communication is a vital component of good software quality but it has a way of becoming an end in itself rather than a means, e.g. in the form of pointless, cargo cult meetings.

Furthermore, in order to accurately measure software development outcomes it is essential to have clearly verifiable acceptance criteria. Defining those can be time-consuming.

Simply put, software quality requires investment, both in terms of time and money. Not investing in software quality means taking on massive technical debt. It's unfortunately still a common practice because often a lack in quality will only come back to bite you after some time. It's relatively easy to temporarily cover up and paper over quality deficiencies by implementing workarounds or simply by putting in extra hours. Those temporary measures aren't sustainable in the long run though. They just lead to more technical and organisational debt. Ultimately that debt can become unmanageable.

Much like in the boiling frog parable that increase in debt happens very gradually so it's often not perceived as a problem until it's (almost) too late.

</comment><comment><USER36> If you think about it, software quality is not something that is ever visible or measurable from the outside.

Theoretically, you could write software by just having an incredibly long list of test cases and a random string generator.

The quality of that code would probably be terrible, but it would still work as long as your test cases are restrictive enough.

<comment><USER5> > If you think about it, software quality is not something that is ever > visible or measurable from the outside.

If you have mistaken issues of style for issues of quality, than that might seem to be the case. True quality in software is measurable primarily in the defect rate, and secondarily in the amount of effort needed to enhance it.

> Theoretically, you could write software by just having an incredibly long > list of test cases and a random string generator.

Putting aside the time and concurrency issues, the quality would be determined by the correctness and thoroughness of your test cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The problem is, money loss through poor software quality is (and maybe can) not be calculated in a way that, for example time (for development) can be measured. Often the arguments for increasing software quality, for example through refactoring parts of a codebase, are therefor not fact-based, but mostly vague. This is often not enough to encourage the decision-makers to invest in good software quality.

Apart from that some people might deliberately choose to not care about good software quality. But in my opinion this is often a sign of missing/poor education/experience.

</comment><comment><USER38> Adding to other answers, I have noticed this behavior very common in startup scene, where many of them are not actually building a brand for lifetime, but to quickly add pleaothera of features so that they can be sold at a good price.

</comment><comment><USER39> The difference in money, and perhaps more importantly, time, between great software and good-enough software is large enough that most companies will require good-enough.

There are two big trade-offs in time alone: missing the chance to be first to market (mongo vs rethink comes to mind, albeit not quite accurate), and the need to get feedback early and often enough to pivot if the idea isn't quite right.

Then the layers of lava come- not enough time to rewrite everything now that the domain is better understood, the prototype becomes the foundation, and cruft builds up.

</comment><comment><USER40> If you embrace the idea that software development is a process of figuring out what to do - there is just no place for quality at the start, only for throwaway prototypes. And you have to avoid any rigidity at that stage, as it only slows the development down. Quality should be introduced later, once you know for sure you would need a production quality implementation of something. Maybe check out whatever Fred Brooks wrote about this.

</comment><comment><USER41> I wrote an article detailing why companies acquire technical debt/bad software. It's typically sacrificing quality for short term gains. [https://medium.freecodecamp.org/what-is-technical-debt- and-w...](https://medium.freecodecamp.org/what-is-technical-debt-and-why-do- most-startups-have-it-9a54458daabf)

</comment><comment><USER42> Any organization that has a "normal" modern development process (Code reviews, Reasonable test suite, continuous builds, static analysis etc) has a decent focus on quality. That doesn't mean quality has the focus it needs within the organization but at least its then not secondary or a focus for late in the process.

</comment><comment><USER43> If it's MVP let it loose.. poor quality can also serve as a nice auto- obsolescence accelerating the upgrade cycle

</comment><comment><USER44> >I have the feeling that most companies don't hold discussions about what software quality means and how it should be measured.

I have instead the feeling that the matter is endlessly talked about in meetings but noone actually puts in practice the "good intentions" discussed (for the one or the other reason).

</comment><comment><USER45> My feeling is that this type of secondary thought will be seen more often in places where management has less experience with programming. Also, it will happen more in places with less process in place.

If you cannot manage the complexity of the software developed, you increase the risk of creating lower quality software.

</comment><comment><USER46> When it comes to controlling costs, reducing quality is one of the few levers we have. When it comes to developing software the trade-off we're making is usually not whether we make low or high-quality software, but whether we make low quality or no software.

</comment><comment><USER47> In my experience, it seems like people who don't have much hands on experience are leading the show, and don't realize the value in well designed, clean code in minimizing bugs and and decreasing development and maintenance cost in the future.

</comment><comment><USER48> A lot of views here are based around a capitalistic rational. Though true, I think there are many companies out there that value certain types of cultures, and some of those cultures include good quality software design.

But this is certainly not the majority.

</comment><comment><USER49> Time is money and fast cheap and good often beats slow expensive and great in business.

</comment><comment><USER50> Quality has an extremely broad definition. Everyone cares about quality, just not perfection. At some point, your defect density is acceptable.

</comment><comment><USER51> Because _your_ code is fscked, and _your_ code is fscked, in fact all yours codez are facked!!

:points madly around the room:

</comment><comment><USER52> Did you ever hear: "I love to code", "Writing code is so much fun" ?

Software is not made by grownups. And for the most part the development is not managed by grownups. The problem is that so many can get away with childish behaviour.

<comment><USER7> This doesn't quite say, but seems to imply, that if all software was written by people punching in and our every day and having no fun whatsoever, software quality should improve.

I'm unconvinced by this argument. Maybe compliance with "best practices" would improve a bit, but I see very little evidence that the results would be good for the average user.

I'm pretty certain, for example, Rich Hickey was having fun at least some of the time when building Clojure -- his belief in it is palpable whenever I've seen one of his talks -- yet it's an incredibly well-thought-out, solid piece of software.

Lots of classic games were passion projects of an individual or a very small and close-knit team. Whether that's "quality" I guess depends on perspective. For me, a lot of classic games very definitely were, though (and a bug or two doesn't necessarily detract from the overall experience).

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Here are just some causes (IMHO) of poor quality software:

1\. Creative and intelligent people are forced into an industrialized process of distributed micromanagement (Scrum) which stifles their ability to create a truly wonderful product and instead leaves them feeling lost and producing their worst work.

2\. Idiots are running the show.

3\. Quality is seen by the above-mentioned idiots as a threat to the deadline, whereas the reality is that low quality spreads like cancer and kills projects before they can deliver unless a series of miracles occur, in which case they deliver over time, over budget, descoped, and full of bugs.

4\. Implementing non-functional requirements (i.e. the environment in which features exist) doesn't visibly demonstrate progress to stakeholders, so this activity is deprioritised in favour of building features so there will be something to demo at the next showcase and the project manager can keep his job. At some point, as developers try to implement non-functional requirements, they're faced with features that haven't implemented the non- functional parts and features that have to be rebuilt after the non-functional requirements are implemented. After some time, the developers "come clean" to the project manager about incomplete features when, in fact, those features couldn't be completed at the time because the environment in which they are supposed to exist barely existed itself.</comment>


Middle-aged vlogger who used filter to look young caught in live-stream glitch - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-49151042 <comment><USER3> Wow, this shows how out of touch I am with social media and technology. I know that Apple's 3d-camera phones enable chat via Animoji, but that applies a cartoon image across your face. I didn't realize reality-enhancement filters (e.g. face thinners) were good enough to work in real-time? I'm confused because the links in the article just show the woman's real face [0], and not footage of when the filter was actually working. I guess I expected to see the glitching in real-time, like the "Mission Impossible" hallway scene [1]

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8m4jYaALIA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8m4jYaALIA)

[1] [https://youtu.be/qtA0JS1lBaY?t=359](https://youtu.be/qtA0JS1lBaY?t=359)

<comment><USER4> Reading the article it appears that everyone knew that this was a filter. She asked for 100k donation to reveal her face, but no one donated this much yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know this is tangential to the whole thing, but this is a cool feature of the Chinese language:

>The story has been incredibly popular across Chinese social networks with more than 600 million people reading posts that use a hashtag which translates to "female vlogger experiences bug showing her old lady face" and more than 50,000 using the hashtag itself.

In english, you're never going to get a twitter trend of #FemaleVloggerExperiencesBugShowingHerOldLadyFace. Does anyone know of research looking at how more compact languages influence trending? It seems neat.

<comment><USER6> Good chance it's actually just 6 to 7 syllables long. So, not just writing but compact speech too.

<comment><USER7> It's #女主播直播出bug秒变大妈脸# [1]. 12 syllables. I can get an English translation down to the same syllable count: #StreamingBugTurnsVloggerGirlIntoOldWoman It obviously still takes up more horizontal space; to fix that you'd need to use a font that squeezes about 3 Latin letters into the same space as one Chinese character. However, the gap in information density isn't actually that large, because Chinese usually requires slightly larger fonts to achieve the same legibility.

It's maybe also interesting to note that hashtags are delimited by # on both ends, because there are no spaces between words you could use to find the end.

[1] [https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=231522type%3D1%26t%3D1...](https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=231522type%3D1%26t%3D10%26q%3D%23%E5%A5%B3%E4%B8%BB%E6%92%AD%E7%9B%B4%E6%92%AD%E5%87%BAbug%E7%A7%92%E5%8F%98%E5%A4%A7%E5%A6%88%E8%84%B8%23)

<comment><USER8> Hmm... You could save another syllable by changing StreamingBug to StreamGlitch, which is also more idiomatic. Same number of characters though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is just a form of digital makeup. I predict that using a young attractive avatar will become the social norm and this sort of thing will be entirely unobjectionable within a decade.

<comment><USER10> David Foster Wallace predicted not only that, but its rise and fall. [http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527](http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527)

<comment><USER11> Great Read!

I'm reminded of a Nebula(?) Award winning short story about hive-rats interacting with nobility in the 'future'. The nobility is shrouded in apperance/voice/stim tech such that the AIs are more the person than anything. A princess is brought to the under-city by her father to a shop that can fix the princess' tech, as it is malfunctioning. The daughter of the shop owner tries to peer into the princess' life and psyche as the shop owner tries to fix the princess. The princess has implants that stimulate her face, voice, and body to say the right things at the right times, to move the right way, that changes her face via lightsheets to be most beautiful to the observer she is with, that causes her to say just the right thing at just the right time and be increbily witty. But the daughter of the shop owner tries to peer through the tech to see the woman behind the veil. She discovers that the person behind it all is nearly mute and has the intelligence of an infant. The tech had been installed before ego formation and the person behind it all didn't really exist. She discovers it is also true of the man that brought the princess down to them too. The entire nobility is essentially faking it.

I am SO sorry that I cannot find the link to the actual story. If anyone has the title or author, I would love to know!

<comment><USER10> Do report back if you find it! I'll check it out.

Part of the premise of the Deus Ex games (thinking specifically of Mankind Divided) is "augmentations" that can make people better in all kinds of ways, but are generally only available to the wealthy elite which leads to all kinds of trouble. What happens when the "elite" don't just seem better - <USER2> objectively (and universally) _are_ by real measures. Longer and more accurate memories, longer life spans, more knowledge of their surroundings, better judges of character, stronger, faster, smarter - etc. Not necessarily "faking it" they really do remember more, but that's because they can store their memories in a chip in their head. All at a cost that prevents the 99% from having these advantages. (Though, the progress made by these folks can be broadly beneficial.)

Yes, yes, I know somebody is already itching to comment that this is present state - I'll leave you to it.

<comment><USER12> It vaguely reminds me of Ann Leckie's Ancillary books, which if I recall correctly have the rats, underworld, technology, and more, but it might not be it as it doesn't have the light sheets etc, I think... I'm trying to figure out where I've heard this one before, it sounds familiar...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of the time a "cute anime girl" streamer had a glitch that exposed him as a fairly typical otaku hikikomori using motion capture software to puppet the character (and presumably some sort of voice synthesizer to provide the dialogue).

<comment><USER14> Do you have a link? I'm amazed by the fake video generation we have now, I wonder when we'll start seeing it used for spam and (mal)advertising.

<comment><USER15> This one. You can search for the articles when searching for "Nora Cat".

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3iwL9Yz8LcKkJsnLPevOTQ/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3iwL9Yz8LcKkJsnLPevOTQ/videos)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> > her fans urged her to show her face and remove her filter but she refused, > instead apparently saying: "I can't show my face until I receive gifts worth > 100,000 yuan ($11,950). After all, I'm a good-looking host." Followers began > to send her donations with the largest reported to be 40,000 yuan ($5,813, > £4,780) during the session.

> The story has been incredibly popular across Chinese social networks with > more than 600 million people reading posts that use a hashtag which > translates to "female vlogger experiences bug showing her old lady face"

> many live-streamers simply sing karaoke in their bedrooms, or eat snacks for > hours on end.

<comment><USER16> I want an interview with someone who is willing to donate over a thousand dollars to a person they're watching talk on a webcam.

<comment><USER17> Go on some of the most popular Twitch.tv channels, you'll see lots of that happening. Too many to count on two hands. It's unbelievable and quite sad.

<comment><USER18> > quite sad.

I wonder if you can expand on that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Observers generally experience sad feelings from seeing someone waste resources, and experience anger when someone is taken advantage of, probably because we perceive _our_ risk increasing (in a tribal sense). Soliciting (and receiving) outlandish "donations" from strangers can look like both a waste and a con.

By tribal risk increasing I mean that if Ogg loses his harvest fording the river, now the tribe has to feed him. Or if Ogg is swindled out of his pelt, now the tribe has to worry about him freezing _and_ make sure nobody else falls victim. In context, this is when your uncle Ben donates to some internet personality and then has trouble making ends meet, and you might have to step in to assist him.

A third unrelated explanation is relative value, where the observer might feel upset watching someone throw good food to a dog, rather than giving it to a starving person nearby because the observer feels the starving person is more deserving of the resources than the animal. In context, this is when your uncle Jerry donates to some internet personality instead of using the money to help you or some other more deserving local charity case (not using that pejoratively).

<comment><USER19> > from seeing someone waste resources

I think the word "waste" really doesn't apply to just shifting money between people. Although there may be waste elsewhere (or it may be just unfair).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The article links to this video of the incident:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8m4jYaALIA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8m4jYaALIA)

Without video of the filter in action, I'm skeptical of the claim.

It seems plausible that the person on the left is using a filter of some kind.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, the tech is not at the level of side by side images shown in the video. Only at the level of taking forever to replace a face in another video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Oh dear, these filters are now so sophisticated and realistic, that they are able to distort reality and can fool anybody. It is getting easier to fake anything these days, and I can only see this being common place in the society dependent on social media being a source of news online.

The importance of the 'Don't believe everything on the internet' advice is becoming increasingly important these days, as there are many Wizards of Oz out there hiding behind the computer screen and Instagram/Snapchat filters.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think a reading of the relevant passage from David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" (from 1996) re: video conversations is appropriate here.

[http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527](http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527)

<comment><USER24> I was actually looking through the comments to see if someone would reference DFW videophony.

<comment><USER25> Same - exactly where my brain went.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> When you reward people for their physical appearance (and certain standards of beauty), it is no surprise that they take advantage of technology to look as expected by the public.

<comment><USER27> To look at it another way, some people have a natural advantage in life that they did not earn. This helps even that playing field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's bias for good looks. And cosmetic/health industry spends billions of dollars on marketing to re-enforce and further strengthen the bias. So is it any surprise people would want to game it to get a better chance of success.

</comment><comment><USER29> I have trouble believing the fans didn't know at some point. The article implies they didn't, but also isn't specific.

Perhaps they knew but and the mystery was part of the show?

I haven't seen any software generally available that wouldn't be somewhat obvious that it is in use.

</comment><comment><USER30> "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." \- Oscar Wilde

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm a guy and I have no idea why some guys throw ridiculous money at good looking girls online. You have no chance of meeting them, let alone anything else. If anything, throw money at not so good looking people, their lives are harder on average.

<comment><USER32> It's the same reason people blow tons of money at strip clubs. They want someone to like them, they don't care if the feelings are fake. Some of the popular streamers also do fan meetups for their biggest donators, where they'll go on a single "date" with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm impressed by how far technology has become to the point that she could do this.

<comment><USER34> Right?! I think there's lots of honest debate to be had about how superficial we are, but honestly, my reaction to this is "That worked? wow!"

This is exactly why I have problems with all the "AI / self-driving cars / CRISPR / etc" articles that correctly point out how long we've spent with revolution "just around the corner"....that corner might be far away, or it might be close and there's every reason to be skeptical of any given claim. But when it happens, it WILL be dramatically rapid, and poo-pooing the idea of thinking about it in advance just leads us to a society that was warned long ago of a coming adjustments yet is always somehow surprised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This should send a clear message to all those people trying to look younger: use makeup.

<comment><USER36> Yeah, here's a great makeup tip: draw a 3d barcode or marker on your face so that the tracking doesn't fail as easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> All I see is a filtered woman on the left and a different unfiltered woman on the right, the whole time. At what time does the glitch occur?

<comment><USER38> If you're talking about the YouTube video, I don't think they captured the glitch from A to B, just the unfiltered capture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Everyone is presenting false versions of themselves, especially the people who present themselves as a true version of themselves.

I'm admittedly quite sadenned by the continued commodification of female appearances in this manner. I am curious if male vlogging has similar tricks to get more $$$.

<comment><USER40> I don't agree with this. At least except not in the most pedantic philosophical sense. My role models were people who acted the same when they didn't know anyone was looking, or there was no reward. They didn't put on fake personas or dramatically code switch. They didn't primp and accessorize to meet some vain expectation. They were of course respectful of others expectations and wouldn't go to a funeral in pajamas or anything selfishly ridiculous, but they were genuine, empathetic, kind....honest. I try to emulate them the best I can. Any human failings in that trying is not at all the same thing as the fraud that this article and so many perpetrate to gain something.

<comment><USER39> The examples you provide are more exaggerated than I am saying. Even your greatest role models have probably genuinely thought harm to others in flashes of anger, done things to people that they later regret, have their moments of genuine cruelty to other. But interacting with them doesn't mean you get a list of all their sins and insecurities at the time, and neither are you obligated to them, which makes them seem untarnished by all their bad things they done, thought, believed, so on and so forth. And they won't tell you either, not until you get to really know them.

<comment><USER40> As I said, the normal human failings/thoughts/emotions are not the same thing as this articles premise. I also do not accept that everyone has moments of cruelty. Cruel thoughts are not the same thing. We all think things and choosing how we react is the difference. I feel that trying to claim even the best people are secretly hiding evils is an attempt to feel better about one's own feelings or actions. I am confident in the examples I look up to be sure I "know" their true natures.

<comment><USER39> My agrument is not the article's premise applies equally to everyone in severity. My argument is that people are never who they present themselves to be. This is due a variety of things, a mix of intentional avoidance of topics and impossibility to completely share a lifetime experience with another, atomic human mind.

That you assume this claim is itself a deceptive act is an easy cognitive shortcut from parsing that I could be potentially as honest as you in my viewpoint. Why do that?

<comment><USER40> Because I don't see the fact that we have to present ourselves to the outside world with some form of restraint or self censorship to function (your technically correct "not who we appear to be") as remotely the same thing as fraud designed to manipulate/profit. I don't think it's reasonable at all to put those in the same box as some proof "everyone does it".

<comment><USER39> The requirements of society are to practice restraint and portray ourselves at our best. It's manipulation, mutually agreed upon and without negative connotation. Being able to observe extreme and moderate things at the same time doesn't make them completely different actions that aren't at all related.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This sounds like the setup for a Black Mirror episode.

</comment><comment><USER42> Why does it matter if a cam girl is not who she presents herself as?

</comment><comment><USER43> And why not.

Getting plastic surgery is also used to make people look good and it has become a practical necessity for any aging female performer. Filter is cheaper.

<comment><USER44> But isn't this just reinforcing that necessity?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's interesting BBC noticed so called four great sorceries of Asia (亚洲四大邪术). Applying digital makeup to someone to the point that his or her mama couldn't recognize the person is certainly one of them.

</comment><comment><USER46> I wasn't aware technology had progressed so far that retail consumers have access to this kind of software for live video. I would be very interested in what kinds of software these people are using.

<comment><USER47> Yes... The screen shot in the article looks a lot more like the 'filter' in use is actually another actress. Though I'd love to be proven wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I want to live in a world where everyone is confident in themselves and doesn't care what others think about superficial details outside of character.

In the far-far future that may never come, I imagine people exist in a virtual continuum and can change all aspects of their appearance such that they never feel slighted by their perceived place in a fitness gradient they cannot change.

Maybe technology is helping us get there. Or maybe it's showing the deep facets of our evolutionary makeup and our learned societal pressures, and we're incapable of doing anything but pay it lip service.

Being human animals kind of sucks, because intellectually we strive for more. But we're tied to these basal frames.

<comment><USER40> On casting Sir Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard:

Reporter: "Surely by the 24th century, they would have found a cure for male pattern baldness."

Rodenberry: "No, by the 24th century, no one will care."

I doubt even a few hundred years will wash out vanity and the worst parts of us, but here's to hoping.

<comment><USER49> I have lots of gray hair before 40 and don't even think of dyeing it.

Of course, this is not so different than vanity on my part, as I'd be mortified if I was dyeing it and someone found out...

<comment><USER50> I shave my head, but I dye my grey beard. I know it probably looks like a "dye job" but so what? Is it any different from tattoos or other body modifications? And I can undo it by growing it out.

<comment><USER49> My argument is that I have the same basic impulse, it is just that I respond differently to it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Uber will partner with University of Arizona for self-driving car research - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/25/9207229/uber-university-of-arizona-tucson-autonomous-self-driving-cars <comment><USER2> How long before the entire department is offered a gold mine and acquiring them ala they did with CMU?</comment>


CA lawmaker introduces bill to require digital receipts, printed only on request - <AUTHOR> https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB161 <comment><USER2> There are a number of outlets that allow e-mail receipts, but they always have terms you have to agree to and then you get spam and have to unsubscribe from their lists ... each time.

This proposal seems to be missing a lot of important details. How will the receipt be transferred? Can it be done via NFC, without requiring tracking data?

<comment><USER3> If the consumer doesn't request a paper receipt and won't give an email or phone number, she then creates an automatic violation. "So, just _give_ me this $5 item, or it will cost you more in fines."</comment></comment>


Free unlimited file sharing service by BitTorrent, Inc. - <AUTHOR> http://www.getshareapp.com/?from=hn

<comment><USER2> nice! now what's their business model?</comment>


Judy, an efficient sparse dynamic array implementation - <AUTHOR> http://judy.sourceforge.net/ <comment><USER2> I've always thought Sean Barrett's take on Judy Arrays was a really good exemplar of casual computer science writing:

<http://nothings.org/computer/judy/>

 _There are a few potential disadvantages to keep in mind about the Judy approach. Its author argues that approaching the problem as engineering means accepting that complexity is how you get good performance; simplicity is for theoreticians. But this complexity leads to things like a data structure with 20,000 lines of code designed on the assumption that a cache-line is 64 bytes being used primarily on machines with 32-byte cache lines; a redesign optimized for 32-byte cache lines would come close to starting from scratch._

...

 _If your data is strictly sequential; you should use a regular array. If your data is often sequential, or approximately sequential (e.g. an arithmetic sequence stepping by 64), Judy might be the best data structure to use. If you need to keep space to a minimum--you have a huge number of associative arrays, or you're only storing very small values, Judy is probably a good idea. If you need an sorted iterator, go with Judy. Otherwise, a hash table may be just as effective, possibly faster, and much simpler._

 _Furthermore, there aren't many ways to improve Judy, but there's a lot of room to improve hash tables_ ... read the article for the rest of this (very good) graf.

Oh, and if it helps his credibility any...

<http://nothings.org/computer/knuth.jpg>

:)

<comment><USER3> I ported his test suite to the gnu toolchain at: <http://www.uucidl.com/git/?p=hashperf.git;a=summary>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> According to Nikolas Askitis' PhD thesis, Judy Array actually underperforms Burst trie (also a sorted collection) by significant margins in both space and time. Burst trie is much easier to implement (a few hundred lines of C++ or Java code) and tune but he has so far refused to release his code for people to independently verify his claims.

cf. <http://www.naskitis.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Judy arrays are really great. I have a local cache implementation in erlang which uses them: <http://github.com/cliffmoon/cherly>

Even with a small number of items they are relatively fast, however they do not really start outperforming ordinary hash tables until you get above around 100,000 or so items.</comment>


BulletProof Meteor - <AUTHOR> https://bulletproofmeteor.com/

<comment><USER2> Very cool! Love the meteorhacks blog, loving Kadira, and at first glance this looks like it will be really helpful as well. IMO Arunoda and people like him are big reasons why the Meteor community seems to get a lot of positive attention.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)</comment></comment>


WebKit World Clock - <AUTHOR> http://onotakehiko.com/webkitclock/#newyork "...you can see it with Safari and Google Chrome." <comment><USER2> As the name suggests, really only works in WebKit. I initially tried it in my current browser of choice, the latest Opera, and sure enough doesn't render properly. Tried it in Chrome and looks great. Good job.

<comment><USER3> Really bad on Firefox, too, but that is indeed to be expected. It'd be nice to have a non-WebKit-only version eventually, perhaps, to challenge <http://everytimezone.com>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm very sad that I dont understand how the globe is being drawn.

Teach me please

</comment><comment> spyne-02139 looks great. The jet was a really nice touch. Had to <ctrl-f> to find the city I was looking for, consider alphabetizing? You did? Oh and you thought it would better to group them by region? I can see how that would make exploring the time zones more interesting, but I was looking for a city when I landed at your site :) sortby(region|name). What's that? You think that would clutter the interface; I suppose you're right, it is pretty slick the way it is.</comment>


Burning Man for the 1% - <AUTHOR> https://theguardian.com/business/2016/may/02/further-future-festival-burning-man-tech-elite-eric-schmidt <comment><USER2> EVERYONE there is in the global 1%.</comment>