Ask HN: I want my tech lead's job - <AUTHOR> Tech lead was promoted from individual contributor during a time the company was struggling to hire. He didn't want to be the lead but succumbed to the pressure (and the inevitability of looking bad and never be able to grow within the company).
Long story short, he's terrible and it shows. The team is a mess, lots of silos, morale is low, difficulty in meeting commitments, etc.
I think I can do better (and have done at other companies but was hired as an individual contributor here) and I also think no amount of coaching can help him after all these years.
What do I do? <comment><USER2> You're going to want to change your mindset from "I want _their_ job" to "I want to be a tech lead". Some things that you can do:

1\. Observe and understand what the mistakes exactly are that they are making. Note the consequences. Understand what types of "mistakes" are high-impact versus low-impact. Be humble and approach with an open mind, there's lots to learn about yourself and understanding what are mistakes with remedies and what are stylistic differences.

2\. Offer assistance to the lead and do your best to make your team successful. A rising tide lifts all ships.

3\. Make your career goals explicitly clear to your manager. Find ways to work together collaboratively to make your career successful and mutually beneficial there.

To reiterate — be humble. "No amount of coaching" has classically not been true in my experience. Usually what the case ends up being is that the organization has multi-layered problems and people are stuck in unsupported positions with less control than you might think. I don't mean this in a derogatory way — I too started moving into tech lead roles with a similar mindset. Defeating that mindset is absolutely a prerequisite to being ready to be a true, good lead.

<comment><USER3> >> Offer assistance to the lead and do your best to make your team successful. A rising tide lifts all ships.

It doesn't work like that in practice. If you're much more skilled than the tech lead and the CEO/CTO is not promoting you. You need to leave ASAP because they will never promote you and you're wasting your time; if that situation ever happens in a company, it means that the company doesn't value talent. Maybe the CEO/CTO is friends with the tech lead or there is some other reason but whatever that reason is, there should be no substitute for talent.

If you're truly talented, then find another company which follows this philosophy.

<comment><USER2> So I am actually speaking from personal experience so this does 100% happen, we could have a discussion about the relative occurrences, but I don't even know that those numbers exist.

I understand that certain personality types really latch onto this idea of the ladder climbing thing as a battleground where you need to shove people off to move up. Shit, I was that person once upon a time! But it doesn't have to be that way. You can do what I say, and things will work out more often than not. When they don't work out you'll have accumulated good will & tradable skills along the road. And you may even feel like a better person for it.

<comment><USER3> My experience with many different companies for over a decade is very different. Most of the companies I worked with were cut-throat and treated everyone as disposable; even their top talent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> People seek leadership, regardless of who provides it. That said, don't be a dick and actively undermine the tech lead with the team (especially behind his/her back), that makes you just as bad or even worse.

That said, you can start providing leadership by helping people get back on the right track, and help work on team morale. You should "help" the tech lead even if they don't want it (aren't asking for it) by helping people get organized, see the true schedule and make sure work is done timely as best you can. Help people see things can be different, everyone just has to get on the same page etc. Challenge the tech leads timelines/estimates directly but not by being actively confrontational but showing why you feel the estimate is low or wrong. For example, if you and the team feel it is a 4 week effort for a feature set but the lead is saying 2 weeks, challenge the details on why it should be 4 weeks, bring up all the time sensitive tasks he/she is glossing over. Doing this in a meeting with the team and tech lead during planning is good, as long as you are doing it respectfully and with the goal of getting the best result -- the team will support you if you are right. You won't be able to fix all problems, but you can have a huge impact on a team if you demonstrate and provide leadership. I have personally done this in the past and it makes a huge difference for teams.

Work on the team morale by talking to people about non-work things, get to know them and use some humor and get people having some fun. It amazes me how many engineering leaders just don't get how people work & function. Getting people to smile and have a little fun makes a huge difference in how they work and who they will support.

If the leadership team above your tech lead is decent, they'll see the differences and you will likely be moved to a different role where you can have a bigger impact. Don't hide that you are helping (you have to be your own cheerleader to some degree) but don't run around beating on your chest either. Humble but not hiding is how I like to describe it.

</comment><comment><USER5> First, how do you know it's the tech lead's "fault" and not an issue with company culture? Yes, your tech lead may indeed not be the best lead ever, but only too often is this a reflection of overall company culture.

Second, how do you know he's uncoachable? Have you tried? Does the company even offer coaching for new managers? I've run into this far too often that as great engineer, somehow you're supposed to know how to manage people and it shows.

Third and most importantly, given the environment why do you think you can do better? You say you have worked at that level before so obviously you have some experience, but do you see all the obstacles that your current tech lead is facing?

Here's what I would do, based on the fairly limited information you provided:

\- Help your tech lead. Make her/him look at least better and try to see if you can affect team culture and morale. Unless it's a company culture issue, this should get recognised (often with a promotion) and you can get a better idea if it's actually an issue with your lead and not the company. It sounds like you came onboard after their promotion so you might not know what sort of dumpster fire they inherited. What I wouldn't do is play political games to undermine the lead - if I as a manager would find out about something like that, you'd be out the door quicker than you can say "but they don't know what they're doing".

\- Second, I'd keep an eye out for other job opportunities. It sounds like the issue may well be considerably bigger than an involuntary tech lead. Sometimes you got to know when to bail.

<comment><USER6> I agree with all of this, additionally, if a manager reads HN this is a great question to poison the well.

"Look manager, HN thinks that the bad (by fiat from the OP) team lead should be removed."

I personally know people playing such games.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You asked for opinion and here's mine: leave the team or leave the company.

With the limited amount of info that you're providing, it looks like you're trying to fight a decision that upper management made. Not only you don't like this person, but you crave his/her position. This won't end well IMHO.

Specially, if you're in a corporate environment, you'll most likely achieve nothing and you may demoralize yourself further.

<comment><USER8> I agree. I would say schedule a skip-level meeting with his manager and express your concerns. Ask him to be open and honest. If his manager does not recognize or is not willing to make the change, then either leave the team or the company.

<comment><USER9> Yes, its quite possible the next layer up know there's a problem and want to fix it, but don't know they have someone willing to step up if they moved the original tech lead somewhere better suited to their talents

Alternatively they may know about similar position elsewhere they could move you to

Finally they may think you're a total muppet and think far too highly of yourself, which is useful to know (you either are a muppet, or you need to leave the company)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If your colleague doesn't want the role, and is struggling, just go talk to them. Maybe it's some sort of sharing of the responsibilities of the role between the two of you. Maybe you both work with their boss (your boss too?) to transition them out of the role. Maybe they tell you "no, I got this", which informs some of the next steps you need to take.

I've seen the exact situation you're describing a few times, and in each time the person was happy to abdicate. While that's not always going to happen, sometimes people are happy to get the relief of not carrying that burden anymore.

Best of luck!

<comment><USER11> I agree. Where I work being tech lead is mostly a chore, an extra really ill- defined work load that doesn't even pay extra (being prepared to take up the role when asked is something expected of people being paid as medior/senior developers).

Talking to tech lead may lead you to the conclusion that you should just work on improving what you think needs improving, it's possible that actually wearing the "tech lead" hat is more trouble than it's worth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reads exactly the same as "I want this girl, but she has a boyfriend". And the answer is exactly the same: you likely can't -- maybe you can, or maybe you can't, but you'll end up wasting a whole lot of time and effort on something that is not worthwhile.

There are other fish in the sea. Time to start looking for a new position.

<comment><USER13> >This reads exactly the same as "I want this girl, but she has a boyfriend".

This is exactly how it reads -- OP sounds like he has a streak of arrogance and entitlement.

<comment> why-oh-why That's not how it sounds to me. It's entirely possible that someone less competent is in a position higher than yours.

Also modesty won't get you anywhere in your career.

<comment><USER14> If you interfere in a romance, their partner may break your nose. If you interfere with the healthy operation of your team, your boss may dismiss you.

If you cannot muster empathy for others, at least muster an awareness of the consequences of your actions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was in your exact same position. No amount of perseverance and high quality work convinced management I would be a much better fit than the current lead, even if it was obvious to everybody in the team.

It took almost a year, and the lead organically destroyed himself: the project became an unmanageable mess, people were uninspired and almost nothing was delivered. One whole year.

Management abruptly decided to fire the lead and gave me the opportunity: with bitterness in my mouth, I did it and the project was a success from every point of view: people were happy, the technical problems were solved with an eye towards scalability and future (unfortunately we had to throw away 90% of what was done earlier and rebuild it based on common building blocks idiomatic within the company), and I went to battle with management whenever unreasonable requests would come through in order to avoid engineers burning out.

It took several months of hard work: eventually, when the project was almost completely on track, they removed me and installed another lead, with the excuse "You have done a really fantastic job recovering the ship and we are really grateful! Now that the project is stable We are putting someone with better management experience so you can focus on what's important, the code". I kept asking for feedback, and received nothing but praises for "saving the project and inspiring the team". It left me baffled. I quit shortly after.

Coworkers later told me that they were quite uninspired by this new guy who introduced a very micro management style without having ever gained trust of the team, and several of them quit or moved to other teams. What a bummer.

I really will never understand why management doesn't strongly favor promoting from the inside and prefer taking chances with external hires with whom they spent 60 minutes interviewing and will most likely turn out to be bozos with an inflated resume (which is even harder to spot than engineers with technical skills) screwing up the team.

</comment><comment><USER16> Good tech leads lead by example in their IC role so they become natural successors into such a role. The give-me-your-job-because-I'm-better mentality rarely works and only causes resentment all around.

</comment><comment><USER17> If you want to be a tech lead and not someone's job all you have to do is go out of your way to own the things you are directly working on and go out of your way to help those who are working with you to achieve shared common goals. Once you have done this multiple times, its easy to schedule a meeting with your management and pitch the idea of you doing the same and more but this time with Tech Lead's title and if that doesn't happen go look out for opportunities outside your company.

<comment><USER18> It won't happen. People that do this are generally mocked as useful fools, it's a "Thanks, for setting your new expectations! Now enjoy living up to them for zero additional pay. When you get tired of it we'll be sure to punish you."

The OP should just offer to management to be a co-tech lead for additional pay, citing the belief that he can help and otherwise do nothing nefarious or antisocial and look elsewhere for work. He's already either viewed favorably or not by upper management, which will determine this. It's largely not performance based, he has to be competent, but liked. People won't agree with my idea because it's not "the ideal world and way it's supposed to be", but it's based off my very hard earned experience.

Two things are true in this industry, no one wants to pay and it's not a meritocracy. That's all smoke and mirrors, it's pure capitalism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Some things I wonder about:

\- You've done better at other companies – so why were you hired in the position you have now? Aren't you overqualified?

\- The evidence you provide for him being terrible isn't totally sound (The team is a mess, lots of silos, morale is low, difficulty in meeting commitments); could there be other factors here? Perhaps he's overloaded by his superiors?

\- Is the company successful despite his shortcomings? Does his team succeed more than it fails?

\- What makes you sure you've done better?

I think close to half of the devs (or more) that I've worked with have had issues with their team leads and thought they could do better. It's never that simple. For example, I was with a company once and the CTO was really struggling to manage individual wants and needs, began offloading sprint management to new team leads, and everyone thought he was really shitting the bed. It turned out he was working with some security auditors to get many of our systems vetted and ready for some high profile customers who had very strict, extensive requirements. The customers were bringing millions into our company and the CTO was making it happen, and everyone just assumed he was totally blowing it (rather than just wanting to help the guy out). He was also working on making us GDPR compliant at the time. What's your tech lead struggling with exactly? It could be legitimate.

</comment><comment><USER20> Start fixing everything you may think it's not done properly. Enforce roles and demand accountability from eveyrone, including commitments, sometimes, teams members are the ones hijacking the lead. Quickly get rid of rotten apples and get the team working again under a new flow that makes eveyrone as much happy as possible to do.

</comment><comment><USER21> I was in this very same situation for several years with a manager who just clearly didn't have what it took to manage people. He grew, as a result of being on a small team early, to oversee the largest team in the company only to eventually lose all of his direct reports and become an individual contributor.

The problem was (and is) despite horrible performance over several years, he's still with the company making the same salary he was as a manager because he's friends with the CEO.

I was able to make it to a prominent role within the company by playing ball and pulling levers at the right time, so it _is_ possible, but the moral of the story is if you work for a company that rewards that sort of underperformance, it's likely always going to be a problem as long as leadership remains the same. You're probably better off to search for a new role - which is exactly what I ended up doing in the long run anyway.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm in roughly the same boat though rather than "take their job" I was trying to create a new position and split the existing team in two. Ultimately this hasn't worked out (the conversation has been going on for months and no end in sight) and now I'm actively seeking new opportunities.

It's pretty shitty working in a team where the leadership is utterly ineffective. Ultimately it's managements decision and more than likely they will back the existing structure even if it has problems.

</comment><comment><USER23> Help the person. Try to see if he/she is willing to listen to you. If you help him do his job better it could get noticed. Even if its not, you can put it in your cv and use it at interviews for similar positions. Doing this might get you fired (i mean if i was under attack this way and would have the authority to do it, i would), but as long as you are 'trying to help' you always have cover so it's worth a shot.

</comment><comment><USER24> Depends 99% on your relationships on how to proceed.

Assuming good ones, I'd tell the truth to the leads boss. Say you think the lead is struggling, way you think you could do better, and in the meantime provide as much help to both the lead and the leads team as possible.

If you tell your boss you're going to take a more active role and it things start smoothing out, you'll have a very good case.

</comment><comment><USER25> Talk with the lead. Share your concerns, as a member of the team, about how the team's needs are not being met. Be specific. In this situation, you did or didn't do something, and it had this effect.

</comment><comment><USER26> Maybe your current tech lead doesn't like being lead? I'd talk to him and ask him how he is doing and see where that leads. (combine with other incredible advice from other comments)

</comment><comment><USER27> One of the most diplomatic ways to deal with a problematic manager is to help them find a new job.

</comment><comment><USER28> OP sounds like he/she wants the title more than the responsibility. Software is a team game.

</comment><comment><USER29> You talk to him and everyone else with decisions power.

</comment><comment><USER30> quit. 100% serious. there is nothing to be done here.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'd advise giving your current lead every benefit of the doubt to figure out if the problem is truly a mismatch of their skills to leadership or if there's something happening beyond your team. In the latter case you may not want the job...

Your lead was around when hiring was tough. Moving from IC to eng lead is the clearest growth path for an IC that I can think of, so I'm not sure that aligns with their rationale of "never be[ing] able to grow within the company." Knowing nothing about this person, I think there's a chance there's information you don't have here (not your fault, you weren't around to get it!). "I'm a better IC than lead" is a solid political answer--and it's true for many/most? of us. But it's also a _safe_ answer.

Why were jobs unattractive to external candidates during the time he was hesitant to take on engineering leadership? If the answer is "no one wants to relocate to our un-hip city" that's understandable. Most other reasons? Dig. Keep in mind this person, regardless of skills fit or raw coding prowess, has been exposed to different information and experiences at the company than you have. They have insight into culture and middle management that you might not.

Part 2, to actually answer "What do I do?" \- OK, so you gathered data and the lead is indeed simply not a good fit in their role. Every other team around you is firing on all cylinders - in fact they whisper about your team's localized problems. Everyone on your team would be supportive of a change. What then?

If you're going to go to your direct manager or skip-level and ask for a bigger role, make sure you have a good argument _from their perspective_ of why. I'm sure this is in the 80,000 negotiating books that are out there that I haven't read a single one of. Doesn't matter how you see the world, it matters how they do.

Knowing nothing about how awesome you're doing in your current role: what have you done for the company recently? Do skip-level managers know you? Do you have a reputation as a problem-finder and fixer who can work across teams and just gets things done? Have you been owning projects mid-level managers have heard of, even if you're not team lead? Are you "the hero of GDPR compliance" or even "person who wrote the extension that fixes my email nit?" If so, awesome, say that. "I think I'm a better candidate than person X" and "I had a similar role at my last company" are less likely to meet the bar.

If your team's problems are affecting your personal output, then unfortunately that's going to make your case a little more difficult :(. If that's true, try to find a role that lets you show IC skills at the "very good" level (need not be "incredible") while also adding an informal leadership merit badges here or there and getting at least some reputation beyond your team. That's what I've seen in pretty much every case of IC getting leadership responsibilities (which isn't a formal promotion at our company).

Just get enough info in advance to be 100% sure you _want_ the job :).

Semi-related concern if you did take on this team's leadership: are there coworkers that think they could do better than you if you did get promoted? That can cause some people to find other opportunities. Make sure you'd be ok with that.

</comment><comment><USER32> hire a hitperson

<comment><USER33> commit the crime, but describe it with politically correct words.</comment></comment>


BMW's Apple CarPlay annual fee is next-level gouging - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/bmw-carplay-fee-highway-robbery/ <comment><USER2> German vehicles are very beautiful, but they are meh. Seriously all style, low tech, high cost.

Japanese vehicles. No style, low tech, reliable.

GM and Ford. Style, high tech, risk into reliability.

The appeal is just like buying an Apple or Nintendo product. Its the brand name you pay for, not the features.</comment>


Deutsche Bank to Pay Record $2.5B to Resolve Libor - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-23/deutsche-bank-to-pay-record-2-5-billion-to-resolve-libor-probes <comment><USER2> > The Justice Department levied a $775 million penalty and will install a > monitor at the bank for three years to ensure compliance with the terms of > the deferred prosecution agreement.

These deferred prosecution agreements are horrible. Every major bank has SEVERAL of them. Deter much? Absolutely not. Here's what a recent editorial in the Financial Times had to say about this [1]:

In the US, the most blatant expression of the failure to rein in the financial industry is the use of deferred prosecution agreements. These are deals which, despite sufficient evidence for criminal prosecutions, allow wrongdoers to pay fines and make commitments to improved conduct in return for avoiding the admission of criminal guilt.

In an important speech last Wednesday, US Senator Elizabeth Warren condemned the widespread use of DPAs against financial industry lawbreakers. Her main argument is that DPAs' main punitive tool — fines — have far too little deterrent effect. A fine paid by a corporation is essentially a raid on its shareholders' funds. What is more, the lag from the commission of a financial crime to the implementation of a DPA is long. Both mean that even huge fines (some have been in the billions) are highly unlikely to make much difference to the economic prospects of the responsible individuals when they decide whether or not to break the law.

To put it simply, too many get away with cheating. Criminal prosecutions would stand a better chance of holding culpable individuals to account — and therefore to discourage wrongdoing in the first place. Deterrence aside, there is also an important democratic value in lawbreakers being publicly branded as such.

So Ms Warren is right. DPAs, originally intended to deal with low-stake crimes with little chance of repetition, have become a blight on a financial sector that has proved capable of crimes that are neither low-stake nor one-off.

[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f26a9acc-e515-11e4-a02d-00144feab7...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f26a9acc-e515-11e4-a02d-00144feab7de.html)

<comment><USER3> The Economist also raised the point recently that these "offers" from the Government are essentially shakedowns, the risk to the bank if they actually fought the charges is so great that it is never in their interest to do anything but pay up. When you consider that States as well as the Federal Government are capable of doing this the potential for shenanigans increases.

In both cases justice is not done, wrongdoers not actually punished etc.

<comment><USER4> It's bad for everyone - it's not fair to firms, and justice isn't served. But follow the $... The states get a lot of income, and executives stay out of jail. If every bank is getting shaken down equally, no exec loses relative to their peers.

This isn't to say that I condone the bad behavior. If anything, I am amazed that more people haven't gone to jail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This should be a larger fine. People need to go to jail. These people corrupted of the primary substrates of the financial system. This shows how endemic the corruption is and how little our system punishes people for cheating. Either the populace really doesn't care, or else the system is corrupt and the financial people have undue influence on the government. Either way, it is bad and it needs to change.

<comment><USER6> 13 people charged here: [http://www.sfo.gov.uk/press-room/latest-press- releases/press...](http://www.sfo.gov.uk/press-room/latest-press- releases/press-releases-2014/libor-investigation-further-charge-.aspx)

two more here: [http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-former-rabobank-traders- in...](http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-former-rabobank-traders-indicted- alleged-manipulation-us-dollar-yen-libor-interest-rates)

<comment><USER5> Looks like the trial is underway or so [1]

Still, only 13 people charged in what as institutionalized corruption. I believe the leaders of these companies were knowledgeable about what happened, or should have been.

[1] [http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/20/rabobank-libor- all...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/20/rabobank-libor-allen- idUSL2N0WM2AC20150320)

<comment><USER7> Should have been, yes. Actually knowledgable - not in a million years. Those who sit on the Group Executive Committee are extremely far removed from the day to day goings on. Running a 100k+ person bank with 4 completely different divisions is totally different from running a desk. The odds that someone on the GEC even knows the name of a person on a desk lower than MD or D is slim to none, unless that person is an absolute rockstar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it's important to know what Libor is and how it's determined.

> Each morning, just before 11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time, a group of major > banks are asked the rate at which they could borrow funds from other banks. > The banks confidentially send their results for each of the 15 loan > maturities - ranging from overnight to one year - to the market intelligence > firm Thomson Reuters. The organization throws out figures in the highest and > lowest quartile and averages the remaining half. [0]

The rate is used to determine the interest paid on some mortgages (adjustable rate mortgages) as well as some securities (floating rate, pegged to Libor and swaps). You don't need to know too much about finance to suspect that the method of determining Libor (informal polling of banks) is ripe for manipulation. I don't think the manipulation was biased in any one direction but probably biased based on the particular banks opportunities for that day. Anyone investing in these products or with floating rate mortgages should (in theory) understand how their products work and understand the implications of the method that Libor is set.

This isn't meant to excuse collusion. Just because something is completely transparent and easily gamed doesn't excuse dishonesty. My comment is just meant to temper the response and perhaps consider a better system for determining benchmarks.

[0] [http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/12/how-is-libor- dete...](http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/12/how-is-libor- determined.asp#ixzz3Y8kc1mbR)

<comment><USER6> > but probably biased based on the particular banks opportunities for that > day.

Not the banks, individuals. The people doing the manipulating were paid on P&L from particular sub-sets of the bank's overall position (their 'books'). So it is entirely possible that while those people's P&L went up on a given day, the bank's overall P&L went down.

<comment><USER9> And the counter party's pnl went up

<comment><USER6> The bank as a whole has thousands or millions of counterparties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is for the regulatory investigations. There will also be private civil suits. Those will be made difficult by the need to prove damages: [http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-06-27/calculating-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-06-27/calculating- the-cost-of-the-libor-scandal-to-investors).

</comment><comment><USER11> Banks should receive trading sanctions too (like doping bans for athletes). If all they have to do is pay their way out they will always take the risk of doing illegal business and hope to get away with it. This risky behaviour is so ingrained in the financial industries culture that it's clear the default approach of high risk actions while hoping for the best isn't going to go away without more and more serious deterrents.

This along with heavy prison sentences all 'round should help curb the corruption a little.

<comment><USER3> The problem with trading bans is that they effectively kill the bank, or a substantial chunk - which then causes all the knock on effects of a bank failing which might very well be more expensive to the Government / society in the long run. It all comes back to "too big to fail".

<comment><USER11> They could be forced to split off the culpable area of the business and sell it at a below market value or even free price.

<comment><USER12> That's probably a good solution if your intention is to destroy any trust that's left in the banking system.

<comment><USER11> I have zero trust in the banking system or even the monetary system as it stands. I only partake because I have no other viable choice. The system is so flawed that it's doomed to fail. It's not a question of if but when.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you want change, look at Elizabeth Warren's two strokes and you're out proposal [0]:

[0] [http://www.vox.com/2015/4/15/8420789/elizabeth-warren- prosec...](http://www.vox.com/2015/4/15/8420789/elizabeth-warren-prosecutions)

</comment><comment><USER14> Another reason not to applaud: the U.S. and UK governments have been furiously manipulating interest rates themselves since 2008, through the big bond purchases that drive short-term rates near zero. These policies didn't help the economy as much as hoped. They also destroyed small savers' ability to earn interest. But the politicians pressed on anyway.

What if the government fined itself $25 billion and distributed the money to the public? I'd like that settlement more. By contrast, this Libor settlement actually taxes the public -- because the ultimate owners of bank shares are our very own pension funds or 401ks -- and then gives the $$ to the government. Meanwhile, the rogue traders get no punishment whatsoever.

I can't find anything in this deal to like.

</comment><comment><USER15> Another issue (in addition to executives not going to jail) is that monetary fines are inefficient against large corporations, especially banks, because if the fine is significant, it hurts a whole economy. A possible solution could be equity fines, but that's not yet practiced anywhere.

Edit: an equity fine would be if a corporation is forced to make more stocks, which are taken as a fine and sold.

<comment><USER16> I guess it doesn't count as moral hazard when the banks have no incentive to refrain from behaving poorly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Somebody please name names here. While the crimes did occur at Deutsche Bank, it was actual human beings that were the bad actors.

Who fixed the rates? And why aren't they going to jail?

</comment><comment><USER18> For a big bank, that's pocket change.

<comment><USER19> Not exactly, no. This is somewhere between 2 to 4 quarterly profit for DB.

<comment><USER20> This reduces their taxable income, so part of it is a benefit to DB so the real number they pay is around ~67% of the headline number. We also have no idea how profitable LIBOR manipulation is over several years. I can imagine incredible lucrative.

<comment><USER21> Actually, at least for the US, fines paid to governmental agencies are generally non-deductible and so DB will take the full brunt of the fine to the bottom line.

<comment><USER20> I agree in theory but in practice, it's not always the full amount but you get things like BofA deducting $12bn pre-tax from their $17bn mortgage settlement[1] or JPMorgan able to deduct a large amount of their $13bn fine[2]. There is always a loophole somewhere.

[1][http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2014/08/21/bofa- grabs...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2014/08/21/bofa- grabs-12-billion-tax-write-off-from-17-billion-mortgage-settlement/) [2][http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/business/dealbook/deutsche...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/business/dealbook/deutsche- bank-settlement-rates.html?ref=dealbook) [3][http://www.newsweek.com/2014/11/07/giant-penalties-are- giant...](http://www.newsweek.com/2014/11/07/giant-penalties-are-giant-tax- write-offs-wall-street-279993.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> and yet no single conviction for any bankster involved in all of these corruption scandals. Just fine the shareholders and fill the pockets of the fat cats in the govt to buy their silence and let the executives go free to keep plundering people's money.

A win-win for all except for we the people!</comment>


Senior Huawei Official Acknowledges Clandestine Access to Mobile Networks - <AUTHOR> https://www.lawfareblog.com/senior-huawei-official-acknowledges-ability-clandestinely-access-mobile-networks <comment><USER2> The title of the article significantly twists the statement of the unnamed Huawei official.</comment>


This Device Can Charge Your Smartphone Or Tablet Up To 92% Faster - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/plxdevices/legion-meter-charge-your-smartphone-92-faster

<comment><USER2> _" The user selectable mode dynamically converts any USB port to optimize the charge speed by signaling your mobile device to safely draw the maximum amount of charge possible."_

So, your laptop claims it can safely give you 100 mW, but this device tells your phone "go ahead and draw 500"?

I doubt that is safe. There will typically be some room above what the laptop claims to be able of, but it may also decrease power to other plugged in devices ("my USB disk is unreliable when I use this charger") and might even fry your laptop (I would expect modems laptops to have guards against that, though)

</comment><comment><USER3> PLX devices have an exciting product and they use kickstarter.com as a marketing tool.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't believe people are dumb enough to throw 250k at this.

</comment><comment><USER5> No, not smartphone or tablet, I think you mean just iOS devices, which makes it a lot less interesting.

<comment><USER2> _" The charge accelerator circuit has two modes of operation. Apple mode and Android mode."_

Still not 'any', but quite a bit more.</comment></comment>


Did you fall for the Google Chrome iOS smoke and mirrors? - <AUTHOR> http://www.allthatiknow.com/2012/07/did-you-fall-for-the-google-chrome-ios-smoke-and-mirrors/

<comment><USER2> It's unusual for Google to compete solely on UI/UX but there it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if Google Chrome for iOS was some joke? I've got to believe that no Google developer in their right mind would have taken ownership for this kind of project! It is a 5 minute app!!!

<comment><USER2> Well to be fair to Google - UIWebView wraps WebKit and Google is a contributor. So - technically speaking - Google has written a lot of the guts of Chrome for iOS.</comment></comment></comment>


Bureaucracy Isn't Inevitable – How Airbnb Beat It - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/review/bureaucracy-isnt-inevitable-heres-how-airbnb-beat-it/ <comment><USER2> It isn't "is the organisation a bureaucracy" it is "how bureaucrasised is the organisation" \- Cole, Management: Theory and Practice.

His words in the article reflect the last 20 years of management theory. Notice he uses the phrase "unproductive bureaucracy". Weber introduced the word in 1947.

Drucker: Business is driven by marketing and innovation, everything else is a cost.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

<comment><USER3> These days it feels like it is 99% marketing...

<comment><USER2> It is, but I think you mean advertising shenanigans.

Marketing starts with deciding what to produce.

<comment><USER4> > Marketing starts with deciding what to produce.

Sounds like a one liner intended to boost the self-worth of marketers. There's nothing wrong with what the average marketer does, so no need to make it into something it isn't.

<comment><USER5> Too many people view marketing as what you do _after_ you've built the product. Any company worth its salt understands that its also crucial _before_ you've built the product.

<comment><USER3> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0)

The first part should be fitting...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thought this would be an article about getting through regulatory bureaucracy - which is one of Uber's greatest strengths IMHO.

This article mostly regurgitates old advice about good hiring and company cultural policies. I'm disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think the only point to remember: Build a team of trustworthy people.

It's way harder than it seems to hire the best...

<comment><USER8> Indeed the _only_ point. I've worked in, for and with many different organisations in the past 30 years, and I've only seen two real patterns: A) hire great people, or B) create the perfect bureaucracy.

Everything else is just running around putting out fires, no matter what label you put on it.

Now you will of course never be 100% successful with either A) or B), but pick one and aim for it, and don't get distracted by miracle management method #99999 just because you don't get it perfect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are no numbers on the size and scale of the team or the organization, would have put a better context.

<comment><USER10> Good point. A lot of this is based on growing the engineering org from ~40 => ~200 over the last couple years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I first heard that description of why bureaucracy occurs in the 1980s, from Jim Huff, who was both an EDS executive and a reserve Naval officer.</comment>


Those Win9x Crashes on Fast Machines - <AUTHOR> http://www.os2museum.com/wp/those-win9x-crashes-on-fast-machines/ <comment><USER2> The original Mac does a calibration of the floppy drive motor during boot to measure jitter.

If you are implementing an emulator, you must insert some jitter to the emulated floppy drive.

Because if there is no jitter, the ROM's calibration code does a division by zero and crashes.

<comment><USER3> While perhaps not so great from a defensive programming perspective, Mac OS feels like a different case since it's only designed to run on specific hardware.

Modern Mac OS also has all sorts of "bugs" that Hackintosh users need to patch or otherwise work around. Since we're doing something that was never intended, I don't really see these as flaws in the OS.

<comment><USER4> I would still consider them to be timebomb bugs, though. Even if you're developing for a restricted set of hardware, newer versions of that hardware could very easily violate some corner-cutting assumptions in the future. I would rather spend a little more time now to get something right and future- proof, rather than pass the problem onto future-me, who likely won't have the context anymore to find the issue quickly, or, worse, future-someone-else, who doesn't have the context at all.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Yeah, over a long enough time window I think portability and correctness will always come back to bite you. Apple could've saved time by making Darwin only handle one processor nicely, but then the Intel transition and ARM additions (iOS is still Darwin, after all) would've hurt more. Windows coasted on x86 for a while, but now that they're targeting ARM I'll bet they're pretty glad that it was originally built to be portable. Code that only works on the exact system you need today might be good enough sometimes, but if you survive long enough you'll want it to be more flexible than all that.

EDIT: I should add, this applies to applications, not just OSs. If you're an Android dev - will your app run on Android 15? Will it work on ChromeOS? Will it run on Fuchsia? If you're writing Windows software - will it run on ARM? If you're making webapps - does they work on Firefox? And maybe it's not worth the effort, especially if you don't plan to be selling the same software in 5 years, or maybe you think you can just deal with those things when you get there, but if you plan to still be in business in a decade then you should plan accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a patch for this problem, which is particularly useful if you want to run Windows 95 in a virtual machine. [https://winworldpc.com/download/c39dc2a0-c2bf-693e-0511-c3a6...](https://winworldpc.com/download/c39dc2a0-c2bf-693e-0511-c3a6e280947e)

Indeed, there's a pre-made VirtualBox image pinned to the top of Reddit's /r/windows95 if you are lazy.

</comment><comment><USER6> Holy shit. I feel like this neatly explains why Windows 95 was an utter crash- fest on the computer I bought just before my freshman year of highschool. With an AMD K6-2 running at 350Mhz, it was the first computer I had that was all new components instead of the franken-sytems built from a dumpster-dive base and other dumpster-dived components grafted on. The shop I bought it from initially put 95 OSR2 on it. And it did like to crash. It wasn't until I started using Windows 98SE that I started to see anything resembling stability, and not need to re-install every other month.

If only I had known about AMDK6UPD.EXE back then and been able to understand the reasons behind the crash and why the patch fixed things.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have to admit I find this type of article about old computer/software quite interesting as recently I discovered a backup of mine that contained source code I wrote in 1993. I was writing assembly language back then. Using a really great library called Spontaneous Assembly. First version 2.0 and then 3.0. SpontaneousAssembly 3.0 added support for easily writing TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) code.

Back in the early 1990s I was in college and working in the computer lab. So I wrote various little DOS utilities to help us better manage the computers and the interaction with Novell Netware.

Due to this reminiscing I have even purchased a few tech books from that time. MS-DOS Encyclopedia, Peter Norton's Programmers Guide to the IBM PC, and some others.

I only wish I still had a copy of SpontaneousAssembly 3.0 as it would be fun to recompile some of my old code!

<comment><USER8> For those who got curious like me have a look at: [http://300m.us/docs/computing/SA-3.0a/TOC.htm](http://300m.us/docs/computing/SA-3.0a/TOC.htm)

I am not familiar with how libraries work in the US. Can anyone get a library card with Library of Congress? They have the floppy images:

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/spontaneous-assembly-for- cc-a...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/spontaneous-assembly-for-cc-assembly- language-library-for-80x86-based-ms-dos-systems/oclc/32314029)

EDIT: [http://300m.us/docs/computing/](http://300m.us/docs/computing/) Has a link for purchase which 404 but to an existing site. Maybe Kevin is the friendly type?

<comment><USER7> Yeah I have emailed Kevin Crenshaw but he stated the project is "abandonware" at this point. He said to search for it online. So far no luck with version 3.0. It would have been fun to try playing with some old code in a VM :)

I don't live anywhere close the the Library of Congress, so not easy for me to get a copy there :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >"It was somewhat unfortunate that this was called an "AMD fix" (the file containing the solution was called AMDK6UPD.EXE), even though Microsoft was clear that this was not a problem in AMD CPUs but rather in their own code."

I'll bet the AMD name was suggested by producers and/or management at the protest of engineering, with the argument that the public knows this as an AMD problem and so it's better to call it that regardless of the technical reality. I've seen this logic many times in my career and do understand there's some rationale to it.

<comment><USER10> Could it be simply because since the bug primarily affected AMD CPUs at the time it would make it easier for everyone if the update was called the "AMD update" as opposed to some cryptic name like "network stack delay loop update"?

<comment><USER11> I figure it's for the same Microsoft×Intel mutual-back-scratching reason that made Microsoft try to charge $35 for the fix: [https://www.theregister.com/1998/11/26/amd_posts_windows_95_...](https://www.theregister.com/1998/11/26/amd_posts_windows_95_k62/)

<comment><USER12> Ah, yes, The Register.

 _Faced with the Great Satan of Software 's apparent refusal to admit its mistake and eliminate the charge, AMD has made the fix available from its Web site free of charge._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is exactly the same timer loop problem as was found in Turbo Pascal around the same era: [https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/12111](https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/12111)

<comment><USER14> I think you could solve the problem by pushing the "turbo" button on the computer case that would reduce your cpu frequency to something like 8 mhz.

<comment><USER15> All turbo buttons I remember specifically clocked down to 4.77 mhz - apparently the original 8088 frequency?

<comment><USER16> I recall having a turbo button on a 386-based computer that halved the speed - I don't recall if it was from 40mhz to 20 or from 80mhz to 40, something like that. I also recall seeing computers of that era which had a mhz display on the front to show the current processor speed.

<comment><USER17> The highest clocked 386 CPU, and one of the most popular ones, was the Am386DX40, so your computer would likely have had a 40 MHz part.

It is a common misconception is that the MHz displays from this era had any kind of communication with the CPU or motherboard. They don't -- they are dumb devices that can switch between showing two arbitrary patterns on the LED display and are "programmed" by painstakingly setting jumpers on the back. Often when using 2-digit displays for computers with 3-digit clock speeds they would be programmed to display "HI" and "LO" instead of a number.

So when your display showed "20" that doesn't mean the CPU was running at 20 MHz. It might have been, because 386 CPUs always ran at the bus speed and 20 was a common 386 speed, but things get a lot more complicated when you move to the 486 platform with internal clock multipliers.

My 486 DX4/100 (33 MHz bus speed, 3x multiplier) has a turbo button that when disengaged lowers the effective speed of the system to something _roughly_ like a 486 DX50. But this is not an exact science and does not in fact mean that the CPU is running at 50 MHz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > According to the Pentium Processor Family Developer's Manual Volume 3: > Architecture and Programming Manual (Intel order no. 241430), the LOOP > instruction. The absolute best case when the branch is taken is 6 clock > cycles. The Intel manual notes that "[t]he unconditional LOOP instruction > takes longer to execute than a two-instruction sequence which decrements the > count register and jumps if the count does not equal zero".

This makes me wonder about three-instruction sequences of increment / decrement / jump-if-nonzero, and one-instruction sequences of jump-if-nonzero. What's the point of having the unconditional LOOP instruction in the first place?

<comment><USER19> Compatibility?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Turbo Pascal, known for its awesome one pass compiler, had the same issue

[https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12111/why...](https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12111/why- did-ms-dos-applications-built-using-turbo-pascal-fail-to-start-with-a-divisi)

</comment><comment><USER21> We still face a related class of problem today. The x86 PAUSE has wildly varying throughput. On most Intel parts it is 1/8 or so, but on Skylake Xeon it's 1/141\. On Ryzen its 1/3\. I've seen code that makes assumptions about how much real time must have passed based on PAUSE loops.

<comment><USER22> > I've seen code that makes assumptions about how much real time must have > passed based on PAUSE loops.

Note: here, the PAUSE instruction is not the problem at all, but the "code that makes assumptions."

Because the "seen" code is not named, I assume it's something internal for some company?

<comment><USER21> Yes, private code. Basically there was some mutex fairness thing that was written on a SKX and on a Zen CPU where PAUSE is 50x faster it didn't have good fairness, it was too tight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The last time I benchmarked it, which was at the beginning of the i7 era, LOOP was just as fast (within the margin of error) as dec/jnz - Intel probably doesn't want to be seen as slower than AMD and didn't care about that timing loop anymore.

<comment><USER24> Couldn't they just microcode it to that?

<comment><USER25> That's not how microcode works, but yes - the instruction decoders and retirement logic are capable enough these days that you can have it decode into the same sequence of μops, which is almost certainly what happens.

Note that it's not exactly the same thing, because an interrupt can happen between the decrement and jump for the two-instruction case, but not for the LOOP case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> i love this site. os/2 was such a huge part of my life in the 90s and the sole reason i love computers back then. it's great that this site has preserved so much history of it.

<comment><USER27> Serious question, what was OS/2 and who used it?

<comment><USER5> Wikipedia's OS/2 article is comprehensive.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2)

tl;dr A graphical OS developed by IBM that succeeded DOS and competed with Windows. Notably, it featured pre-emptive multitasking before Windows did. It was not a success in the home market but was reasonably successful in big business, especially finance, for a short amount of time.

<comment><USER11> And still exists today as ArcaOS!

[https://www.arcanoae.com/](https://www.arcanoae.com/)

<comment><USER28> I have an open source project, where someone decided to compile it on OS/2.

They send me the binaries for OS/2 for every release till 2016

Apparently modern C++ and Qt run there without issues

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've written this kind of code myself, where you measure a time delta and divide something by the delta. It's always something that sticks out though, that you might divide by zero (especially if you did it in Java!).

The article says it would have been picked up in code review, and I agree. But it just seems odd that it wasn't changed right there. Why not just write to loop so that it keeps looping as long as the divisor is below some number like 10ms? You also want to minimise the estimation error, which is easier to do if you divide by a slightly larger number. Consider a loop that takes between 1 and 2ms to finish, your estimate will be either x or 2x.

</comment><comment><USER30> Do drivers or other kernel code still have this kind of delay loop in current operating systems, or is everything interrupt-driven now?

<comment><USER31> I thought that was the point of BogoMips [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BogoMips](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BogoMips)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Would it have been possible for Microsoft to test for something like this, or would it be possible today? For example, is it feasible to slow down time to simulate an impossibly-fast CPU?

<comment><USER32> You can do that for linux userpace apps using the "faketime" utility. It just intercepts that calls that try to find out the actual system time. Not sure how that would effect kernalspace, since the kernal is sort of the thing that decides what time actually _is_.

<comment><USER3> > Not sure how that would effect kernalspace, since the kernal is sort of the > thing that decides what time actually is.

Yes, I'm imagining you'd need to be in a virtualized/emulated environment of some sort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Be happy that it only crashed. It could be worse.

We once got a couple of high end motherboards for AMD processors, back in the Win98 era, and I tried to install Win95 on one of them. The box said that Win98 was required, but it couldn't hurt to try, right? Maybe there would not be drivers for some of the peripherals, but all I needed was the CD-ROM and hard disk to work.

Install is going fine until it is time for it to reboot. That failed. It didn't even get to the BIOS initialization screen. It appeared to just be dead.

Figuring we just got unlucky and got a defective motherboard or processor, I tried installing on the other one so I could get on with my work.

That one died too.

Eventually I found something about this on the motherboard maker's support site. The problem was with the device probing during install.

What I'm about to say is not made up. As unbelievable as this might sound to people who grew up with more modern PCs, at one time they really did work as I'm about to describe.

The early PC buses had no built-in way for the host to identify what cards were plugged into the expansion slots. Typically, an expansion card would have a set of jumpers or DIP switches that could chose between several sets of possible addresses for the card's registers to appear in I/O space.

The user was expected to keep track of the settings of all cards they installed, and adjust the jumpers appropriately to avoid conflicts, and record the settings in a config file that the drivers would read to find out where their card was.

Later buses, such as EISA and later PCI, provided ways for the host to find out what is there and how it is configured. But operating systems still needed to support the old bus, and they wanted to make this as user friendly as possible.

So systems like Win95 would have a device probe during install that would try to identify what is on your old bus. They would do this by very carefully probing the I/O address space.

For example, suppose you know that a particular network card if present has to be at one of 8 addresses, and you know that after power on or reset that certain bits will be set in its status register and certain bits will be clear. You can read those 8 possible addresses, looking for the right bit pattern. If you don't find it, that particular network card is not present. If you do find it, you can do more tests to confirm it.

Some of those other tests might involve writing to the device registers, and seeing if it responds the way that network card should.

This is obviously risky. What if it is not that network card, but rather a disk controller card that just happens to have a register that after reset has the same bit pattern you expect in the network card status register? The thing you write then to verify it is the network card might be the "FORMAT DISK" command to that disk controller.

And so you had to be very careful with these probes. They had to be done in a safe order. You'd need to probe for that disk controller before you probed for that network card.

Those new motherboards contained peripherals that Win95 did not know about, and so the Win95 probe procedure did not know how to avoid doing bad things to them.

One of those peripherals was the built in interface for flashing the BIOS EEPROM. The Win95 device probe ended up overwriting the BIOS.

<comment> 555-5555 It's unfortunate (though understandable) that you bricked both before discovering the root cause. I remember hot-swapping EEPROM chips to repair a bricked motherboard from a similar era.

While attempting to upgrade the BIOS, something went wrong. Most likely there was a bad sector in the boot floppy I used. The result was an unbootable machine. Solution? Swap in a working EEPROM chip from a compatible motherboard. Boot to a floppy disk that has a BIOS imaging utility and image file. Hot-swap the bad EEPROM chip back in. Re-flash the BIOS. Or, if you had money, you could sometimes purchase a pre-flashed replacement EEPROM chip.

I don't miss those days, but am fortunate to have experienced them. It forced us to learn more about how a computer really works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> >"The issue also illustrates how seemingly solid assumptions made by software and hardware engineers sometimes aren't. Software engineers look at the currently available CPUs, see how the fastest ones behave, and assume that CPUs can't get faster by a factor of 100 anytime soon."

Disagree. Where I've worked (Oculus/Facebook and EA) we would never allow such assumptions in code reviews, regardless of how unlikely the failure may be. You never allow div/0 unless it's mathematically provable to be impossible. I'm sure other orgs have the same code review policy, and static analysis these days would also catch it.

<comment><USER34> > we would never allow such assumptions in code reviews

Right.

Today we have the benefit of hindsight, we know how fast processors have become. In the Win3.1 era, noone sane would have predicted this. Even Moore's Law applied to transistor counts, not processor speeds.

What you should ask is: what other assumptions are you implicitly making that you are not currently aware of?

<comment><USER35> > In the Win3.1 era, noone sane would have predicted this.

That's a bold claim!

We went from 4-8MHz 286 chips to 20-50MHz 486 chips in the decade leading up win3.1's first release. By the time we were approaching windows 95, pentiums were up to 133MHz.

Those chips _already_ had really fast branch instructions.

So you're already staring down the barrel of calibration taking 15 milliseconds. It's a reasonably obvious step to consider LOOP being a cycle faster than adding and branching, which takes you all the way down to 7 milliseconds.

So taking that all together, x86 clock speeeds have doubled 3-4 times in the last dozen years. A chip could come out tomorrow that takes 15 or even 7 milliseconds on the calibration loop. Your code breaks if it hits 2.

I think someone sane could have predicted the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I somehow cannot believe that nobody had mentioned the first significant instance of similar crash at least for the DOS days: Borland's CRT.TPx/conio.a which consistently caused division by zero on anything faster than Pentium MMX. At the time the wisdom was that anything over 200MHz is too fast, but in reality anything AMD with "Pentium Rating" over 200 was fast enough to cause consistent crashes and 266Mhz Pentium MMX was slow enough that it mostly worked (and anything i686 consistently crashes).

<comment><USER20> I mentioned :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have used Windows 98 SE on CPUs up to various Pentium 3s. There was a problem with big (above 512MB) RAM volumes but it was easy to solve.

I was only forced to switch to Windows XP when I upgraded to Pentium M (Dothan) - besides the Safe Mode I could find no solution to run Windowes 98 on it.

I would gladly return to Windows 98 now if my hardware and software supported it.

<comment><USER3> Why do you prefer Windows 98 over XP?

<comment><USER37> It was much more a clean-and-simple design. The less complexity and useless (to me) features an OS has - the more I like it. Of course I mean the way it works, not the way it looks.

It also took so little RAM and HDD it would altogether fit in a humble corner of my today RAM - I don't really get it why does modern software need so much more.

<comment><USER38> "Clean-and-simple design." OK. So you like an OS with no meaningful memory segmentation (you could hop into kernel mode by modifying a register), awful multiprocessing support, and absolutely no defense in depth against the truckloads of malware that are all over the Internet?

That's certainly a take.

<comment><USER37> It was totally enough for a personal computer. Certainly not enough for a server. I only ran trusted software and could do whatever I wanted. As for the Internet - it's a browser's job to sandbox the JavaScript.

<comment><USER38> So no defense in depth and an uncritical reliance on browsers to be perfect?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Run 10000h (1,048,576) iterations of the LOOP instruction.

If you wondered about this, 10000h appears to mean "100,000 hexadecimal". I assume it was intended to say 100000h.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your favourite open-source hardware project? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Micropython: [https://micropython.org/](https://micropython.org/)

The author started with an ambitious undertaking-- re-write cpython to a memory-optimized version useful for writing to embedded devices. The project has developed over the last few years and the team creating it has gone a long way.</comment>


Capstone, Intel XED, and Zydis, which is faster in decoding x86? - <AUTHOR> https://qyx.me/2018/11/12/capstone-vs-intel-xed-which-is-faster-in-decoding/ <comment><USER2> I wonder how diStorm compares; it's been around for a very long time, is known for being quite fast, and appears to still be updated recently: [https://github.com/gdabah/distorm](https://github.com/gdabah/distorm)

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know whether it is reliable and precise? Any well known project uses diStorm?</comment></comment>


How mosquitos deal with getting hit by raindrops - <AUTHOR> http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/24/raindrops-keep-falling-on-my-head-a-mosquitos-lament/ <comment><USER2> Of course the video doesn't show anything interesting, the mosquito's leg is hardly even grazed. I was definitely hoping for the version where a drop smacked the insect dead on target. Fairly strange for a lab result - if that's the only video that was captured, it really doesn't seem to divulge much at all. Where's the cool video? :D

<comment><USER3> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ88ny09ruM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ88ny09ruM)

<comment><USER4> Direct hit just after the minute mark: [https://youtu.be/LQ88ny09ruM?t=1m3s](https://youtu.be/LQ88ny09ruM?t=1m3s)

<comment><USER5> Watching it several times, it looks like only the left most mozzie came out unscathed. The other two took it hard and went down... definitely didn't 'walk off the bus' :\

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >A study says a mosquito being hit by a raindrop is roughly the equivalent of a human being whacked by a school bus, the typical bus being about 50 times the mass of a person.

That is not a sensible comparison. When you scale something mass changes as the cube of dimension. Strength changes as the square of dimension. So small things are inherently stronger with respect to their mass.

<comment><USER7> [Citation Wanted]

Very believable; how does the math work out?

<comment><USER8> Galileo. _Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences_. 1638.

It's known as the square-cube law.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square- cube_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square-cube_law)

<comment><USER7> Thanks - I hadn't realized that muscle strength was proportional purely to cross section.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > But because our mosquito is oh-so-light, the raindrop moves on, unimpeded, > and hardly any force is transferred. All that happens is that our mosquito > is suddenly scooped up by the raindrop and finds itself hurtling toward the > ground at a velocity of roughly nine meters per second, an acceleration > which can't be very comfortable, because it puts enormous pressure on the > insect's body, up to 300 gravities worth, says professor Hu.

Interesting article, but in the span of one paragraph here we have confused velocity, acceleration, and pressure - and there are similar errors in the following one. For an article about physics, I would expect this to at least be proofread.

The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: [http://harmful.cat-v.org/journalism/](http://harmful.cat-v.org/journalism/)

<comment><USER10> From your link:

> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in > a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and > read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about > Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what > you know.

Which is of course intriguing, since cat-v.org hosts frothing-at-the-mouth vitriol about topics like women in tech and gay marriage in the always trustworthy and well reasoned medium of reposted reddit and slashdot comments. And presumably I'm supposed to click over to the technical stuff with a straight face.

<comment><USER11> It's telling that you'd apply a derogatory label and attack the source medium rather than say anything of substance about the content that offended you.

cat-v is chock-full of food for thought. You don't have to agree with any of it and in fact disagreement is a large part of the site.

"Other than total and complete world domination, the overriding goal is to encourage and stimulate critical and independent thinking."

</comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-levin From an io9 article on the same research:

>> [Hu] and Dickerson constructed a flight arena consisting of a small acrylic cage covered with mesh to contain the mosquitoes but permit entry of water drops. The researchers used a water jet to simulate rain stream velocity while observing six mosquitoes flying into the stream. Amazingly, all the mosquitoes lived.

The researchers used _simulated rain drops_ on _six_ mosquitoes. There are more than six species of mosquitoes. They controlled for wind effects (which are part and parcel of rain). So they excluded horizontally travelling raindrops. My immediate reaction to the conclusion that mosquitoes can fly in rain was "Really? Not always". Here is a methodologically lacking and wholly unscientific anecdote: I have lived in Johannesburg my entire life, where mosquitoes are quite prevalent during the summer months. When it is raining heavily (it is usually quite windy as well), the local species of mosquito that feeds of humans do not present a problem as the number of airborne mosquitoes tends to zero.

<comment><USER12> ^This

I live in a mediterranean zone near a huge lake and during summer mosquitos are your every night companions (specially if you're working during late night hours). But when a summer storm brews the mosquitos disappear for two or three days. Why? This has been for me a recurrent question, and the answer has been always obvious: few of them survive being hit by raindrops.

You can make 1000 theories about how our tiny vampire friends deal with raindrops, but it's pretty clear that intensive rain (>3hours) wipe out mosquitos population for several days...

<comment><USER13> I also agree.

> _" And yet (you probably haven't looked, but trust me), when it's raining > those little pains in the neck are happily darting about in the air, getting > banged—and they don't seem to care."_

I have looked and I don't trust you. I live in Brazil where mosquitoes are present all the time, even in the city (obviously, on a smaller scale than places closer to nature). I do notice that whenever is raining there is a sharp drop in mosquitoes number flying inside our homes. They don't completely disappear, but is notorious they are in much smaller numbers. As this is common knowledge over years and years, across basically all the people, I don't consider it anecdote, but empirical observation.

I cannot answer if that is because raindrops kill them, or they just preserve themselves sheltered in their nests, or they breed less in rainy days, or whatever. But the article (not sure about the research) is based on a false premisse.

<comment> daniel-levin Well, no, it's not empirical until we design some experiments to test the theory, make predictions, test them, come up with potentially observable data that would falsify our hypotheses, publish our results and let them be peer reviewed, reproduced elsewhere etc... The jump from anecdotes to empiricism is a large one that is not to be undertaken lightly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Had the raindrop slammed into a bigger, slightly heavier animal, like a dragonfly, the raindrop would "feel" the collision and lose momentum. The raindrop might even break apart because of the impact, and force would transfer from the raindrop to the insect's exoskeleton, rattling the animal to death."

Has anyone actually done any research on dragonflies being hit by raindrops, or is this just speculation?

</comment><comment><USER15> The drawings in this article tend to be absurdly large, with the outcome that the document is, transferred, around 23MB, for no good reason. _Sigh._

<comment><USER16> Because editors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > In most direct hits, Hu and colleagues write, the insect is carried five to > 20 body lengths downward

> If you want to see this for yourself, take a look at Hu's video

What? Nothing like that happens in it.

<comment><USER18> Are you confusing wing span with body length?

In the right hand panel of the video, the insect certainly moves several body lengths, and is still moving downwards at the end of the clip.

<comment><USER17> No, it says "20 body lengths downward, and then [...] gets up and "walks" to the side, then steps off into the air". In other words 20 body lengths while being in the raindrop, which doesn't happen in the video. In fact, the raindrop barely touches it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If it wasn't for the cute child like drawings this would be a truly terrible piece of link bait. As it is it's still pretty and, and I expect better from NatGeo.

Anyone who lives in a mosquito heavy area knows that mosquitos (like almost all airborne insects) go into hiding during heavy rain and/or wind.

</comment><comment><USER20> Does this places a reasonable selection pressure on the kinds of flying insects we can have?

Big enough to shrug off a raindrop hit, or small enough to surf along the surface tension until it can slide off?

<comment><USER21> Butterflies just seek shelter.

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-do- butterflie...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-do-butterflies- do-wh/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It would appear they haven't yet evolved to deal with being hit by cars quite as gracefully.

<comment><USER23> I think this can be approached the same as the "ants can lift 50 times their own weight" bit of trivia. It doesn't translate to "if a human were as strong as an ant he'd be able to lift an elephant" because size doesn't scale that way. Ants and mosquitoes get away with larger forces relative to their mass because the skeleton and muscles needed are still within reasonable material and fuel costs. A human-sized animal that wanted to survive being hit by a car would need to spend much more energy per mass than the insect does.

<comment><USER24> I think theVirginian was commenting about mosquitoes getting smashed on a car's windshield, not about cars and humans.

<comment><USER23> Oh, right. I thought it was a reference to "the equivalent of a human being whacked by a school bus" from the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I just realized how making things fun and funny can help to teach anything. The drawings and the comical tone made this seem so approachable. I wish they had a series of 1000 of such lessons I could read.

<comment><USER26> Here's his old blog on NPR: [http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/](http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/)

Probably not 1000, but perhaps getting on for it.

<comment><USER25> Thank you for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not really important but.. "nine gravities _(88 /m/squared)_"

I don't get it, the scientificamerican blog that they are quoting has the right units, where did they come up with this?

</comment><comment><USER5> > But because our mosquito is oh-so-light, the raindrop moves on, unimpeded, > and hardly any force is transferred.

So if the mosquito's weight is insignificant compared to that of the heavier and denser water drop and that's what keeps it from having the force transferred, would this equally apply to hailstorms? (Where our mosquitoes are pelted by small hail balls the size of raindrops)

<comment><USER28> You don't really find mosquitoes where you're likely to find hailstorms.

<comment><USER29> In Spain we definitely have mosquitos, and most Augusts we have these summery storms, sometimes bringing also hailstorms (sizze varies though between drop sized ice and golfball sized ice)

<comment><USER28> You find them in these areas. When it gets cold there tends to be far fewer of them.

And compared to the equators its nearly incomparible.

<comment><USER30> Cold isn't required for hailstorms. The ice forms at altitude. We have a lot of hailstorms in the spring and summer in Colorado, and while it isn't the mosquitoiest place I've _ever_ lived, there _are_ mosquitoes.

<comment><USER28> Compared with where its mosquito haven like by the Equator?

I suppose raindrop vs hailstone is a reason is one of the reason's the density issues are so different.

<comment><USER30> Yeah. Mosquitoes are densest in the tropics where hailstorms are rare, but just about everywhere on earth short of Antarctica has _some_ mosquitoes. I'd think mosquitoes would meet hailstones occasionally, though I can't really see the mosquito surviving it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The article embedded a short video. Here's longer video with explanations: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ88ny09ruM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ88ny09ruM)

</comment><comment><USER32> Can't help but immediately notice: "Drawing by Robert Krulwich"

<comment><USER33> Yes, Robert Krulwich has joined the Nat Geo Phenomena blogging platform [ [http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/blog/curiously- krulw...](http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/blog/curiously-krulwich/) ]

<comment><USER34> I think the commenter meant that Krulwich actually illustrated the piece too. Who knew Krulwich could draw!

<comment><USER33> Ah, I see. My bad.

Yes, Krulwich does draw pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> if you like watching slo mo videos, recommend this channel: [https://www.youtube.com/user/theslowmoguys/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/theslowmoguys/videos)

</comment><comment><USER36> so if mosquiotos are oblivious to rain is there some way to make artificial rain with different properties that could destroy mosquitos en masse?

<comment><USER37> Yes, it's called poison and it's being done a lot.

[http://www.local10.com/news/plane-to-spray-for-mosquitoes- ov...](http://www.local10.com/news/plane-to-spray-for-mosquitoes-over-south- fla/27244642)

Ah you mean different mechanical properties ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Send this to Bill Gates, that guy _HATES_ mosquitoes.

<comment><USER39> A man who thought, "When I'm a billionaire, I'm going to dedicate my life to getting rid of those nasty fuckers (mosquitoes)" and then _did_ it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> very interesting article. It is a pity that his column has no rss feed.

</comment><comment><USER41> A commenter on the site says that some type of mosquitoes (Texas) are used in oil drilling. I tried googling "texas mosquitoes oil drilling" and variants, but didn't find anything.

>"Why, one species even secretes an enzyme to dissolve the organic matter in blood leaving only the iron in haemoglobin. Then another enzyme causes the iron atoms to join to form biological drill pipe! These structures are known to be as much as 6 inches in diameter and to extend a mile deep."

Is there something to it or he just went to on the internet to tell lies?

<comment><USER42> That is a joke that makes more sense once you've been bitten there.

<comment><USER43> In Texas, we'd call that a tall tale.

<comment><USER44> Up north a few winters back the weather was so cold that words froze up as you talked. People had to stand around a fire to have a conversation. When spring thaw finally came the sound of all the melting conversations was deafening.

Then there was the time that Pecos Bill lassoed and rode a twister, but that's a tale for another time.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chicago Seized and Sold 50,000 Cars Over Tickets Since 2011, Owners Keep Debt - <AUTHOR> https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/chicago-seizes-and-sells-cars-over-tickets-sticking-drivers-with-debt/1d73d0c1-0ed2-4939-a5b2-1431c4cbf1dd <comment><AUTHOR> There is a business opportunity somewhere in here.</comment>