Dropbox Could Have One of 2017's Most Interesting IPOs - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603204/dropbox-could-have-one-of-2017s-most-interesting-ipos/?utm_campaign=internal&utm_medium=readnext&utm_source=item_2 <comment><USER3> The fact that Dropbox's revenue is well above Box's if the rumors in the article are true is a great positive sign. As is being cash flow positive which would indicate that if they are burning cash it isn't at the rate of 2x revenue that Box has been a victim of.

However, the vision they are selling will not come to pass. That of them being a collaborative platform. Google docs, slack, and a myriad of other tools have already taken that place and there isn't a large enough disruption in Dropbox to unseat that.

In the meantime Dropbox's core offering of syncing and sharing files seamlessly as well as providing more security minded options for businesses is something that no one else has quite gotten right.

Box targeted the high-end enterprise users and Dropbox ceded that market to them rather early on. But the massive number of individual users coupled with SMBs that do not need the complexity that Box entails is a large market. The only question is are those two markets combined larger than the enterprise market that Box is chasing.

According to the revenue reported it seems that currently on the revenue side it is.

And given that investors do value profitability and with only a 200 sales person team their burn should be within controllable limits should make them overall both on the profitability and revenue side more attractive than Box.

However if they grew revenue from $400 -> $750 they simply do not have the growth trajectory that gets Wall St excited because due to their maturity and larger revenue you get a more consistent view point into their future growth.

Then again if they are compared more to Atlassian that is trading at 10x revenue then they certainly maybe get justified in their close to $10B private valuation.

<comment><USER4> | In the meantime Dropbox's core offering of syncing and sharing files seamlessly as well as providing more security minded options for businesses is something that no one else has quite gotten right.

There is absolutely no mention whatsoever neither in the article, nor in your analysis above about Owncloud.

Owncloud (or any OSS fork thereof) is an existential threat to Dropbox's core offering: while the consumer side is not yet price-competative, it can already be one-click deployed by many VPS providers. And the business case for hosting mission-critical data onsite, or at least own leased equipment & encryption is strong, and enjoys economies of scale.

<comment><USER5> I went on a little adventure the other week of setting up my own NAS server, and checked out Owncloud and competitors. Even ignoring issues like feature parity and third-party app integration, I think the setup costs of something like this are still _way_ too high for consumers. While VPS providers may make this process easier (even deploying complete Dropbox clones with no tech knowledge required), they'd still be doing it at a significant disadvantage to Dropbox's scale and expertise. It was clear to me very quickly just how much work has gone into giving Dropbox the level of polish it has. Note that this doesn't even address other competitive moats such as brand recognition and distribution partnerships.

Not saying that Dropbox doesn't face business risks -- but I think the open- source alternatives will not be the biggest risk ulttimately in the mainstream market.

I do think they will face margin pressures as long as Google/MSFT/Apple/Amazon believe this to be too important of a market to cede to Dropbox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I talked to a friend just before Christmas whose firm made a good portion of their returns on the insight that VC firms, IPO participants and the market in general all have gaps in how they evaluate the worth of a company and the fact that this gap has grown significantly in the past 5 years.

Previously, companies went public much sooner and you could expect a match, not an exact one, but in the same ball park, between the VC valuation and wall street valuations. This helped lead to rising share prices after the IPO.

Now with longer gestation periods leading to more fund raises, the VC's get paid, but its the IPO participants and the employee's who get screwed. Once a company is public its GAAP that matters and GAAP analysis usually assigns a revenue multiple to a company that is based on its sector and assumed growth. This multiple is almost always much smaller than what the company's publicly stated valuation.

This leads to a bunch of broken IPO's as companies stretch to IPO at a certain price to meet mezzanine level funding requirements. If you can get borrow, almost certainly dependent on how much you pay on commissions to brokers, then atleast up until this year you could have made decent money shorting most tech IPO's, most other industries don't yet suffer from a phobia of becoming public.

<comment><USER7> I've gone through 6 startup IPOs since 1999 in the valley, and have watched as it went from a way to reward employees to a whole lot of voodoo bullshit. I'm a little stunned when I see people still talking about the startups they work for and possibly making it big - that doesn't happen anymore. You are being lied to.

<comment><USER8> if the founder(s) of the company got really rich, but the company is still owned by VCs, there is almost definitely "voodoo bullshit" going on.

it's customary to take some money to alleviate the everyday financial stresses of life and to maybe buy a decent house because people have families, but the original intent behind the IPO was designed to align everyone's incentives. when they aren't aligned i.e. when there is a super-class of owners that already cashed out, it's going to end badly for the people who aren't in control.

everyone who got in early is already rich or completely exited, and more idiots keep piling onto the funding rounds... hmm... what does that sound like?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Dropbox is anti-SaaS -- it expects users will have more 'files' and use more storage, but users are actually moving to SaaS services where the concept of files just doesn't exist.

Many usages from hackernews readers are too techy and not for consumers -- like cross-platform or using as git repo. iCloud, Google Photos, Facebook and YouTube took majority of consumer storage needs aka large photos and videos.

I think enterprise market is their best bet but Box /Google/Microsoft are dominating in this space.

</comment><comment><USER10> Dropbox is one of those products that is just a pleasure to use (like Stripe). Sync works seamlessly. I've tried all other alternatives and gotten back to being a paid customer of Dropbox. I think it also boils down to most of your employees being passionate, smart folks from MIT, CMU and the like. Good luck to them with the IPO.

<comment><USER11> I was initially ecstatic about Dropbox, but they seem to be at best stagnant in terms of functionality.

It was my solution for having access to all my photos on all devices, but then they canceled Carousel with the promise that its functionality would be rolled into the main app. That hasn't happened. The photos feature on iOS is pathetically limited, with slow loading times, no way to organize photos (you can't even access albums you create on desktop), and inadequate sync functionality. The web client isn't much better. What exactly are all those engineers doing with their time?

I am increasingly wary of Google, and do not wish to give them all of my photos. What solutions am I left with? I don't feel like my asks are a tall order for a company of Dropbox's size. I basically want what the old Picasa desktop app provided, except synchronized between all my devices.

I can't possibly be the only one with this problem: an ever-growing library of photos and videos, scattered across various phones, DSLRs and computers with the need to organize them and share them easily. I am happy to pay.

<comment><USER12> For your usecase, Prime Photos [1] from Amazon, where they meld the traditional album and folder metaphors with auto-classifying ML -- the latter which you can luckily turn off if it creeps you out, unlike with Google.

But this is an under-served market and many people would pay to some paltry amount a month to have their family photos (or professional photographs) kept safe in the Cloud. Unfortunately most cloud storage providers are chasing the (presumably much more lucrative) enterprise market with document-editing and office-y features.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/photos/home](https://www.amazon.com/photos/home)

<comment><USER11> This looks interesting, I wasn't aware Amazon had entered this space. I'm not sure I trust Amazon either, but at least they're explicit in their desire to take my money in exchange for products and services.

Edit: it doesn't appear to provide any ability to organize photos yourself?

<comment><USER12> For the time being you can freely switch two different interfaces for the same backend: Prime Photos and Amazon Drive [1]. It's clunky. Cloud Drive was their first pass, Photos is their second and is barely a few months old, and I'm not whether the old interface will be disabled for Photos users at some point.

The uncertainty about the product direction is a bit off-putting, but it works decently well for my use-case [2], even if now you can't get that particular tier without Prime.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home](https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709221#12709936](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709221#12709936)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Being the one cloud service that sync across Linux, Windows, OS X with a native client, Dropbox is the service I'd like to give money for about 100GB of space for a couple of bucks a month, but I just don't need 1TB for $10 a month. So instead I use Google and wait in vain for a native Linux client that's probably never coming.

<comment><USER14> Pro is $8.25 / month for 1TB on annual billing. I rarely see monthly pricing for under 5$. So, I don't think it's going to drop much at this point. [https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans- comparison?_tk=dbv1](https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans- comparison?_tk=dbv1)

IMO, 1TB is completly reasonble. You can get ~10 GB of storage several places for free which covers most things and minmaxing 2-3$ per month is generally a waste of time.

<comment><USER15> What a lot of us want is more granularity. I'm totally fine with their per-GB pricing, but if I (as a personal user) want more than 1TB, it is literally impossible to buy it from Dropbox. I would have to upgrade to a business plan, which makes no sense as I'm not a business.

Basically, there are only 3 Dropbox tiers: 0, 1TB, or infinity.

<comment><USER16> I gave up and just started using AWS S3 directly. I use a few GB, pay a few pennies for storage, a few more pennies for bandwidth if I'm moving stuff around, and that's it. I've never paid more than $10/month, and it's usually under $1/month.

<comment><USER17> that defeats the whole purpose of dropbox though. You can have a cheap ftp server for $10/year if you look hard enough.

But the argument for dropbox is that you have a client for almost every platform you can use. With S3 you'll have to use a 3rd-party software, which might not function properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > In addition to selling utilities to keep digital files safe and accessible, > Dropbox intends to offer software that businesspeople use for hours each day > to create content and get work done.

Aaaaagghh!!!

Just... no. Dropbox used to do one thing well (modulo creepy stuff [1]): sync a directory across multiple computers. This wasn't so hard to do, but shockingly, Apple and Google didn't just implement this feature and make them obsolete. They could have been satisfied with owning that market, but now they want to create yet another office suite? Ugh...

[1] [http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/20/dropbox-now-asks-for- acces...](http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/20/dropbox-now-asks-for- accessibility-permission-in-macos-sierra-and-os-x/)

<comment><USER19> Of course, you have to grow. You have to move into new areas. That is what everyone does, that is how the world works.

<comment><USER20> No, everyone does not do that and the rest of the world does not work that way. This train of thought is specific to capitalism (not to be confused with free market). Most large companies do a few things well and everything else mediocre or poorly. Most small companies do a few things well and everything else poorly.

The difference is a small company recognizes it can't afford to do those things poorly and won't pursue it. Large companies will keep dumping money into bad, poorly planned products. See Apple and cloud, Google and everything not Pagerank, Microsoft and mobile.

The world has more small companies than large ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd be very surprised if Dropbox manages to IPO at $10B valuation. The growth simply isn't there. They're big on platforms and markets with no growth but they're getting killed in growth markets. E.g. my cloud storage startup Degoo recently surpassed Dropbox on the Android grossing rank in India ([http://imgur.com/HsII1KK](http://imgur.com/HsII1KK)) and we're only 5 people.

<comment><USER22> Their revenue according to the article is $750 million a year. You really think that their P/E ratio is less than 13? Most tech companies trade at a P/E between 25 and 30 these days. I wouldn't be surprised if DropBox's valuation was around $20B.

<comment><USER23> As the other response said, you're confusing revenue with earnings.

Very few companies have a revenue multiple of 13x. Looking at this chart [https://blog.intercom.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/07/4-forwa...](https://blog.intercom.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/07/4-forward-revenue-growth-1000.png) it looks like Dropbox can expect something in the 6x-10x range, valuing them at $4.5-7.5B.

<comment><USER22> Seems that you are correct - earnings refers to profit (bottom line) rather than reveneu (top line). Thanks!

That being the case, DropBox probably isn't profitable yet which would throw their P/E through the roof and make that a useless metric.

Box is already public and it has revenue around $300 million and a valuation of ~$1.9B. DropBox will probably get a better revenue multiplier since their customer acquisition cost is lower than and their overall network effects and future outlook is better than Box. I'd place DropBox at a ~$6B valuation. Hopefully their revenue grows enough between now and IPO to support something closer to $10 or $12B.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm slightly shocked that tech-types who in general seem to be against mass state sponsored surveillance continue to support Dropbox. Dropbox appointed Condoleezza Rice to their board. Rice supports warrentless surveillance [1]. They've made no moves to encrypt data service side.

I hope their IPO fails spectacularly so that support of warrentless surveillance does not become the norm in tech companies.

[1] Condoleezza Rice ([http://www.drop-dropbox.com/](http://www.drop- dropbox.com/))

<comment><USER25> I think most people recognize that they don't necessarily agree with everyone, especially when it comes to politics, and that refusing to work with people because you dislike their politics is, in general, not a smart thing to do. Not to mention not supporting companies because one of their board members takes a position you dislike on an issue.

<comment><USER26> I'm happy to work with people whom I disagree with politically. But if you're concerned about privacy, giving all your files unencrypted to a company that is uninterested in your privacy (as demonstrated by their board) is just bonkers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> As a former Dropbox user, I can't imagine investing in them. For me, their plans are just way out of line with regard to pricing. So out of line that I'm going to go to the trouble of moving all of my stuff to Google Drive or OneDrive. And I hate their ransom policy of giving you free space for a while due to phone promotions or whatever and then taking it away. You are screwed and can't access your own stuff until you pay the ransom. I just don't think a company formed on those sorts of policies and pricing strategies is a good investment.

<comment><USER28> I agree. Dropbox are massively more expensive than competitors like Google Drive. I stopped using Dropbox years ago when I realised that shared files and folders take up quota for ALL people that have access to it. This is absurd, and is a terrible experience when you're trying to share something with someone and they then have to upgrade their account.

I used to love Dropbox, but the pricing model is terrible.

<comment><USER27> Wow, I did not even know about the shared part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> My primary use case for Dropbox, actually, is getting videos onto my iPhone. You can't simply drag and drop a video file into the phone as a mass storage device. With ITunes, the sync feature purportedly sync the video to the device, and consumes space accordingly, but there's no way to access the video on the device. It's actually way faster for me to upload a video to Dropbox from my computer, and download the video on the Dropbox app into my photos. The video quality is excellent, too!

<comment><USER30> What a magnificent Goldbergian solution! The needless complexity of simple tasks is sometimes breathtaking.

<comment><USER31> This is one reason why I sold my iPad. I just couldn't figure out its cloud storage system.

Android makes it so much easier - just install a file manager and you're good to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm moving away from Dropbox as a consumer. Google Photos [1] for jpg and video; Prime Photos [2] for raw and jpg. Uploading raw and jpg to google photos causes a lot of duplicates, plus it gets recompressed.

[1] [https://photos.google.com/](https://photos.google.com/) [2] [https://www.amazon.com/photos/home](https://www.amazon.com/photos/home)

</comment><comment><USER33> I predict the quality of free Dropbox service will go down (or not significantly improve) after they become publicly-traded, similar to what happened to Facebook, since the stockholders will force them to monetize the free accounts. They why I avoid using free but proprietary services.

<comment><USER34> The quality of the Pro service already went down considerably: it has advertisement for the business version in all places. I guess that they want to drive up value for the IPO.

I just don't understand why they are annoying Pro users. Not every Pro user uses Dropbox for company work. Not every Pro user is in a company/organization that will ever switch to Dropbox.

<comment><USER33> Maybe they annoy the pro users with ads for the business version because they know the pro users have money and are willing to pay...somewhat targeted advertising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> When they (finally) moved off S3 to their own setup it really said to me that they're going to IPO. Sure, a lot of companies the size of Dropbox (in terms of rev) do it, but a lot of those companies don't have profit margins that are directly related to S3.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've always wondered why BOX did their IPO before Dropbox. I know Box is two years older but it seems like age is only a relative determinant in IPO timing (FB IPO at 8 years, Google 6 years...).

</comment><comment><USER37> I wonder why we haven't seen good open-source imitations of Dropbox yet, and why there isn't a good open protocol for file sharing. The last such protocol I've heard of is WebDAV, but it seemed to have been neglected by OS implementers (Apple's implementation was particularly bad). Also WebDAV was missing many modern features.

<comment><USER38> I agree, and by no means is it a replacement, but [https://syncthing.net](https://syncthing.net) is pretty damn interesting if you want to control your own data. [https://www.syncany.org](https://www.syncany.org) [now abandonded] was a cool twist on the idea using cloud storage in a secure way.

<comment><USER39> I've been using SyncThing for a few years now and I'm mildly surprised that it is not more popular.

Though every time they release a new major version it breaks compatibility with the older major versions and this happens quite often. They need to stop doing that if they want mainstream adoption.

<comment><USER34> I think SyncThing also has the wrong model for mainstream adoption: you have to fiddle with host keys that you need to add to every peer. Bittorrent/Resilio Sync's model of using shared RW/RO/encrypted keys per share is much more intuitive.

There seems to be one open source project that aims to implement Resilio Sync's model:

[https://librevault.com](https://librevault.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Dropbox was definitely a good product and for the most part it still is. But with Google and Amazon going towards the free unlimited storage plans, I have my doubts on Dropbox from here on out. IPO just looks like a way out to me.

</comment><comment><USER41> I've been using Dropbox as a real handy remote git host using the fantastic git-remote-dropbox utility. It's really great to create a remote repo right from the command line and immediately push to it without the hassle of going to a site like GH or BB and setting up the repo first and all that jazz. Make DB worth the money I spend (and unlimited private repos, of course, and with easy sharing by many developers with Dropbox's shared folders).

[https://github.com/anishathalye/git-remote- dropbox](https://github.com/anishathalye/git-remote-dropbox)

</comment><comment><USER42> Does anyone here still use Dropbox?

(I signed up in 2009, and probably last touched it in 2011 ...)

P.S. their studiously ignoring user-side encryption was a factor - if I'm getting my files exposed, might as well go with the big default services.

<comment><USER43> I pay $100/year for Pro. Cheaper and easier to have 1TB of remote storage than SD cards, USB sticks, etc, and no excessive bandwidth charges such that AWS has.

EDIT: I don't care if my files are encrypted.

EDIT 2: Dropbox sync is rock solid. Every experience with the Google Drive sync client has been trash. I can (and do) pay for convenience.

<comment><USER44> Any reason that you use it over Google Drive?

<comment><USER45> 1: Trust: Google is primarily in the business of search, and Google Drive is one of many other products that Google has. The company has a history of deleting or ignoring products that are not performing, or even that are performing but not core. Meanwhile Google's core business or searching anything and everything makes their motivations for GDrive suspect. I moved my email from Google long ago for similar reasons.

2: Salience: Dropbox is in the business of providing the Dropbox service - <USER2> everything else is non-core. So if I pay for my service at Dropbox I would expect to be more important to them than to Google, who make far more income from advertisers. Meanwhile Google is famous for being hard to do business with for customers of all levels.

3: Simplicty: Dropbox just works, and very elegantly. It's the product of choice for a very large number of people and SMEs and getting it working outside of a corporate network is easy. Meanwhile Google products (and Hangouts is the worst here) are often inaccessibly appalling to operate for people who are not deliberately immersed in the Google ecosystem.

It's not perfect. I would like to see a far higher standard of security from Dropbox, and wish they had not wasted so much effort on non-core functions like photos. This trend appears to be getting worse - with the article stating "Dropbox intends to offer software that businesspeople use for hours each day to create content and get work done."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I find Dropbox by far the most straightforward and convenient of the cloud storage providers (DB, Box, iCloud, OneDrive, Google in order of exponentially increasing frustration level). But at the end of the day it's just a feature. I assume they haven't yet gone public because they have been tap dancing hoping to find a way to break out of the feature ghetto.

If there were an easy way to attach to S3, iot devices, etc (credentials management is a pain) they could probably go out on the strength of that.

</comment><comment><USER47> dropbox lost me when i started to get hyper targeted spam to email addresses i only used for dropbox and haven't used for years. they seem to use a remarkably persistent cookie syncing technology.

<comment><USER48> DropBox was hacked in 2012 (and all email addresses were leaked)[0], so you might have just been getting spam from regular spammers that got a copy of this list.

[0]: [https://www.troyhunt.com/the-dropbox-hack-is- real/](https://www.troyhunt.com/the-dropbox-hack-is-real/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I use dropbox with Zotero almost every day. You can get them to play together relatively easily, using Dropbox for syncing pdfs, and your Zotero account for syncing the references. This was my initial motivation for using Zotero, as other reference managers, such as Mendeley, which made not using Mendeley's storage very difficult.

It is very convenient to be able to add references at work, then come home to find it all up to date on my home PC.

Dropbox integration with the camera on my phone is something I also use a lot. Take a photo of something in the lab, it is waiting for me on my PC by the time I am back at my desk.

The only thing that I really find lacking is a linux armhf cli client...

</comment><comment><USER50> Dropbox's growth potential (revenue-wise) is finite. Their IPO will be similar to Twitter's (though maybe not as bad).

</comment><comment><USER51> Of all the major players, Dropbox has the sanest cloud storage API. That says a lot.

</comment><comment><USER52> I use owncloud -- done.</comment>


AppShare – App Portfolio for Developers - <AUTHOR> https://progressiveapp.store/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the J2ME era of feature phone apps with over-stretched images and obtuse or confusing user interfaces when it doesn't fit on the user's screen.

I think I appreciate the AppStore and Play Store even more now after seeing this.

<comment><AUTHOR> what device are you using?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone want to sightsee around the valley on Monday? - <AUTHOR>

I'm in town for Startup School and plan on siteseeing around the Silicon Valley area tomorrow, Monday. I don't have any specific targets in mind, though I'll probably check out Mountain View, Palo Alto, etc.
If you're in town and want to tag along, I'd love to have the company. I can pick you up if you need it. I have room for 4 others in my rental car.
For those familiar with the area: what spots do you recommend checking out? <comment><USER2> I'd recommend driving up Page Mill and then turning right and driving along Skyline till you get to Skylonda. Skyline runs along the ridge of the Santa Cruz mountains, so you can see the Valley on one side and the sea on the other.

I'd also recommend visiting Palo Alto and Stanford. The main downtown of Palo Alto is University Ave. Copious free parking. The best cafe IMO is Coupa, on Ramona just off University. If you want to explore a bit, walk south on Waverley or Bryant. Great frozen yogurt at Fraiche, on Emerson 2 blocks south of University.

The original home of Shockley Semiconductor is still there, on San Antonio Road in Los Altos.

Woodside is sort of interesting. Buck's is the big landmark in the town center. Good brunch.

<comment><USER3> +1 for going up to Skyline. Make a stop at Windy Hill, make the short hike up to the top of said hill, and you'll be rewarded with amazing views. On a clear day, you can see from San Francisco to San Jose, from the Diablo Range to the Pacific Ocean. Beautiful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Computer History Museum is pretty cool.

If you know someone at Google, Cisco or any other big ones see if you can tag a tour around with them.

Lick Observatory in the mountains to the east, awesome drive up <http://tinyurl.com/130crazyroad>.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks -- I suppose I'm more interested in seeing businesses. For example, does Google offer tours of the Googleplex?

<comment><USER5> The last time I heard this question asked, the answer was "no". Apple also won't allow you to tour their campus. I've spent time inside Cisco, NetApp, and Sun, and in addition to the fact that I don't think they tour either, I can tell you you probably don't want to bother. The truth is, most of the big tech companies are cube farms.

<comment><USER6> Yes, the most interesting thing about the offices of highly successful geniuses is that they look a lot like the offices of everyone else.

Indeed, the geniuses themselves also look a lot like everyone else, unless your definition of "everyone else" doesn't include geeks.

It's kind of like the rule that you have to judge a restaurant by the food rather than the decor: You judge a software company by the software, not the offices.

<comment><USER4> You are correct, offices are indeed boring... but server rooms and farms are a beautiful sight to see. At least at Cisco, the server rooms span the entire length and width of a usual building... it looks like it never ends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apple's right off the De Anza exit from 280. The main apple building is pretty cool, a perennial geek photo op, and there's an Apple store that sells T-shirts and other merch.

There's a decent Muslim Chinese place within walking distance on Stevens Creek, and I like Gochi Japanese Tapas on Homestead.

There's a Fry's in between Cupertino and Palo Alto, on Sunnyvale. If you don't have a Fry's where you live, it's worth visiting, even if it is a generally horrible place to shop.

I cannot fucking stand Palo Alto as a community, but Stanford campus is fun to wander around.

Generally, you should try to get out of South Bay as quickly as you can; either go west, to Half Moon Bay and then down to Monterey (stop at any beach), or into the city. I liked Zeitgeist, the bar, when I lived there --- it's on 14th and Valencia --- but it may suck now.

<comment><USER7> I second going to Fry's.

For beach trips, I'd recommend Capitola.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hate to say it, but most of the valley is just cubefarms in nondescript office parks. A tour heading south on 101 of the more interesting bits could be:

Oracle campus - one of the more eye pleasing campuses from the outside (the inside of the buildings is awful - don't bother going in). Off of 101.

Palo Alto (downtown + Stanford) - take 101 exit to University Ave, drive through University Ave (slowly) to Palm Drive, park in the Oval at Stanford and check out the old courtyard. Stanford is a beautiful campus (at least the old part). In Palo Alto downtown a large number of deal meetings happen at University Cafe (on your right). The original Google offices and the former Facebook offices are all within 2 blocks of the Romona/University ave intersection. Special trivia note: the Persian rug dealers also run an investment group (Amidzad) and the Plug-and-Play Tech Centers (startup friendly office spaces). They got stock in Google when GOOG wanted to rent some of their space on Univ Ave.

Googleplex - take Rengstorff exit off of 101. Buildings 41/42/43 are the core Google campus and the old Silicon Graphics campus as well. You may be able to walk through the center of the campus without being hassled by security. Much better if you can get someone to invite you in for lunch. LinkedIn is at the end of Sterlin Ct (right near the Googleplex). Formerly buildings #7 and #8 of Silicon Graphics campus (the whole Sterlin Ct area was SGI for 10+ years). *) Lion and Compass Restaurant in Sunnyvale (Fair Oaks Ave exit North). <http://www.lionandcompass.com/> The building is the original headquarters for Atari. (underwhelming, but a nice bit of trivia)

Apple campus - cupertino (off of 280 near De Anza) - not all that interesting, but at least you'll know where it is.

Sand Hill Road - on the way back up from Apple stay on 280N and exit onto Sand Hill Road. This nondescript road is home to Stanford Linear Accelerator and across the street (left side as you go downhill) most of the more famous VC firms all have their headquarters (Sequoia, etc). It's not much to see, but if you're there around lunchtime, head over to the Quadrus Cafe and have a bite surrounded by whatever VCs aren't doing lunch meetings that day. (warning: boring).

However, I besides Stanford Campus, I might suggest skipping all of this and just heading down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium (if they're open), the 17-mile drive, Natural Bridges in Santa Cruz and maybe swing by Bonny Doon to get some wine on the way back up. During sundown, the ridge above the valley on Skyline Blvd is beautiful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the excellent advice -- about the head out that way now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> * Stanford (esp. around the oval, but you can walk south of there to check out campus)

* The Googleplex

* Apple's Infinite Loop HQ

* Downtown Palo Alto (coupa cafe) -- (not so much downtown MV)

* Buck's in Woodside

* If you want, hiking in one of the regional parks in the hills (I know San Antonio, but all of them are nice)

* Coffee cake at Hobee's

* Yelp works well for food spots around here

* The Tech museum in downtown SJ

<comment><USER9> Buck's is definitely worth the stop. At Stanford in the Gates building they have one of the original Google machines (LEGO!). If you're in Palo Alto for lunch I recommend the Peninsula Creamery, they have the best sandwiches in the area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You mentioned in the comments you wanted to tour businesses...

...and I can second that businesses like the Googleplex and Apple HQ sound interesting but they're pretty boring cube farms.

If you know someone who works at one of the companies ask if u can have lunch with them at Apple or Google's cafes - pretty cool. But don't expect to get a tour of the offices (cube farms) - most companies are highly secretive of their workplaces and employees are not allowed to give grand tours.

Googleplex is more interesting when they have events but they tend to do that less now.

For startups, for me more interesting things are happening in The City (San Francisco). Take a trip up here and hang out in SoMa - many startup people hang out in cafes like Centro, Epicenter, Ritual Roasters, Maxfields, etc.

Check upcoming and facebook for events that might be going on, but Monday is a quiet day usually.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hacker Dojo <http://hackerdojo.com>

<comment><USER6> I had a very fun midnight visit to the Dojo after the HN party in the YC offices ended last night. Was greeted by hackers who were celebrating the publication of their new book on Xen. Was offered pizza and brownies and silly conversation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't know if you're avoiding a longer drive, but every time I visit San Francisco I have to get a view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the city from Battery Park. I did last night, after the Dropbox party and before my plane took off.</comment>


Ask HN: Best cross-platform code editor? - <AUTHOR>

I am kicking around the idea of moving off my Visual Studio IDE and into something more vendor-neutral and cross-platform. Specifically, I'd like to eventually starting coding F# in mono, and I figure changing IDE/Text Editors might be a good start for that. I can learn the new editor while I'm in windows, then it'll be easier to pick up once I make the move to linux.
I need something that is able to handle multiple files, can highlight language syntax (to keep from typos). F# language syntax highlighting would be awesome, but that's probably too much to ask.
It'd be really cool if the editor would integrate with git and ftp and have a macro system -- great to use for blogging.
Any ideas? So far I can't find anything that meets all the criteria: the short list is Vim, Emacs, and JEdit.
I'm really not crazy about any of those -- looks like going back to 1980 for me -- but I'm interested in what the community thinks.
Any other editors I might be missing? <comment><USER2> I recently switched from TextMate to MacVim. I had used vim and xemacs over the past two decades that I've been exposed to Unix system, but never put in the effort to really master them. I'd used various IDEs and editors, and was pretty happy with TextMate, but the long wait for TextMate 2 really showed me the importance of well-supported core tools; as a developer you can't get more core than your text editor and the emacs/vim communities are second only to Linux in terms of breadth and depth.

The reason I went with vim is because I believe it is as close to an optimal editor for arbitrary code and text as you can get. My first impressions were that emacs was about power through customizability, and vi was about raw efficiency. Customization is important, but personally I prioritize powerful editing slightly higher because it makes it easier to jump into new languages, and is particularly useful with sysadmin duties. Being skilled with vim pays dividends with every single new language I learn and technology I deploy, most of which are not important enough for me to invest in editor customizations. Now for my bread and butter language (Ruby/Rails in my case), investing in customizations is worth it, but even so, I will probably never go down the full-blown IDE road (unless the IDE is built around vim as a first-class citizen).

Not that I don't think true IDEs can't beat vim/emacs in productivity. It's relatively easy to become more productive in specific environments such as Visual Studio or IntelliJ, however that productivity falls off a cliff as soon as you leave the comfort of a properly supported language. At the end of the day, the promise of extreme productivity in producing reams of Java code is little comfort if I will be clumsy jumping into a language like Haskell where reams of code aren't necessary; I just don't want my incentives weighted that way.

Now as to the cross-platform issue, this is one of the most important to me, in large part because of the large number of servers I find myself logging into. However it's not just the MacWinLin axis, but also the temporal axis as well. Vim and emacs aren't going anywhere. They are too well-designed, and have too much mindshare to go away. Short of massive advances in AI and/or raw thought-input no one is going to come up with a more efficient general purpose keyboard editing than these tried and true methods. That's not to say that IDEs or editors like TextMate aren't bringing new advances to the table, but the best ideas will always make their way back to vim/emacs or vice-versa.

The learning curve of vim is indeed steep, and becoming fluent in its rich command set is a life-long project. That's okay because it's one of the few technologies that you can be sure will still be in widespread use 50 years from now. The cost of learning is heavily amortized and the interest heavily compounded. Overall it's the surest technology choice I've made since jumping from svn to git.

<comment><USER3> I completely agree with you, except that I value customization higher than you do, so I choose emacs.

Have you considered VIPER mode for emacs? I know it's not complete VI emulation but it's pretty close. If I was to start again (with no muscle memory built up) that is absolutely the way I would go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Emacs. I've used to to code in Vim/Gvim, but I switched to Emacs just to try and learn about Lisp. Emacs has tons of interesting "plugins" to add, and actually I'm using emacs as my Organizer (using org-mode) too. Emacs hasn't anything to envy to any of those bloated IDE's like Eclipse or VS. I recommend to you: * <http://www.emacswiki.org> * <http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/> Steve Yegge has a lot of articles about Emacs/Elisp and it has been a excellent source of information to me.

<comment><USER5> I was a long time vim user too. I switched to emacs after witnessing slime and clojure. I can't image life without org-mode anymore.

<comment><USER4> :) Agree. Org-mode is great! It's extremely simple and the best of all is that save everything into plain text files that you can track with any version control system.

<comment><USER6> Org-Mode can be easily considered a killer app for Emacs <http://orgmode.org/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Vim. Emacs. There's very, very little they can't do. Once you get over the initial bump, you'll find that the main reason why they (seemingly!) haven't changed much since 1995 is simply that they didn't have to.

</comment><comment><USER8> Gvim/MacVim for me.

I was on the Eclipse wagon for a while. Where Gvim finally clicked with me was (1) when I discovered Pathogen for more easily installing plugins, (2) discovering NERDTree, and (3) when I finally got the idea to use something like github or even Dropbox for storing my .vim folder and my .vimrc/.gvimrc files, and just symlinking them into place on each machine.

</comment><comment><USER9> Emacs. While it might look dumb or something from the 80s at first, once you discover its true power, you'll be hooked forever.

Using it since the autumn of 2000, never failed me, no matter what crazy thing I wanted it to do.

<comment><USER10> I've used Emacs for years. In my current job I also have occasion to use IntelliJ IDEA for debugging. It amuses me to note that where Emacs was once derided for being large and slow ("Eight Megabytes And Constant Swapping" was one user's take on it, back when 8MB was a lot), now it is the smaller and faster choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Both Vim and Emacs have some very nice features. Compared to a full-featured IDE, yeah they do look a bit old school. Even so, you can be incredible productive in either of them. I use Emacs myself, and I can't imagine trying to live within the constraints of an editor that I can't extend.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm in love with ActiveState Komodo, and it works great on both platforms (and mac as well). I'm not sure if it has macros, but everything else you mentioned is right there. The editor is free, and the IDE version is not too expensive.

<comment><USER13> From the Komodo help:

 _Creating Macros

Macros can be created by recording keystroke and command sequences, or written from scratch in JavaScript or Python using the Macro API._

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> After years of using fancy 'modern' IDEs, I've gone to using Vim. (GVim/MacVim, actually.) I haven't found any features they lack that other IDEs have... And I suspect if I found one, I could code it up myself, if nobody else did it.

<comment><USER15> visual c++ debugging ? it has this?

<comment><USER16> For vim there are some plugins, but it's probably not that mature. Emacs has good integration with gdb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Emacs, because you do more writing of non-code than you realize. Emacs is good for the sort of prose to code cross-writing; each interspersed with the other, mixed with markup and semantic info (like "TODO") that we all do.

</comment><comment><USER18> Emacs is the obvious answer, and there's nothing "1980" about it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Pick either Vim or Emacs and you'll cover 99.99999% of any possible raw text editing scenarios you can think of.

Here's some F# highlighting for vim: <http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2162>

Jedit is ok, but I found it quite slow compared to vim. My own personal favourite is vim (as you can probably tell) but Emacs has some interesting extras that make it worthwhile learning too (such as org-mode).

</comment><comment><USER20> F# is going to be tough, but take a look at the Netbeans / Eclipse IDEs. A bit easier to set up, especially if you're migrating from Windows to a graphical linux system like Ubuntu.

Vim and Emacs are great, but I would seriously consider a good IDE. The advantages of built-in project management is not to be underestimated. It's not something that's so ridiculously important later on, as you can obviously use something like git on its own to manage it, but initially it is fairly invaluable.

</comment><comment><USER21> I use Geany. It's not particularly featureful but it has some code completion, tabs, and highlighting support; the only thing I really miss over classic "power editors" is the deep programmability, which I don't actually like most of the time. I like sensible defaults so that when I reinstall there's zero hassle and I can just work immediately. (but I will admit to envying some of the more whiz-bang stuff that you get by bothering to really learn Vim/Emacs.)

</comment><comment><USER22> A lot of people are recommending you learn emacs. I do too but I want to add that emacs is very hard to learn since it feels so foreign at first so don't get discouraged, take it a little bit at a time.

I used to use vim and tried switching to emacs to see what it was about. On my first try I despised it. After my second, I fell in love and can't stand to use anything else anymore.

ps: Control-x-c is to quit ;-)

</comment><comment><USER23> Another bump for the emacs/vi couple; I use emacs.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm using NetBeans, which does a great job as IDE and vim as simple code editor.

</comment><comment><USER25> MonoDevelop

</comment><comment><USER26> to add some more diversity: i settled on using jEdit.org on mac, linux, windows. it runs pretty much on anything that has Java (like irix). Nice plugin system, solid file/folder handling. Give it a try.

</comment><comment><USER27> Jetbrains idea

</comment><comment><USER28> Komodo Edit

</comment><comment><USER29> Vim is awesome. You can do anything.</comment>


Senate Leaders Unveil Bill to Repeal the Affordable Care Act - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/us/politics/senate-leaders-unveil-bill-to-repeal-the-affordable-care-act.html <comment><AUTHOR> Link to the actual bill (PDF): [https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/SENATEHEALTHCARE...](https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/SENATEHEALTHCARE.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> > The bill, drafted in secret, is likely to come to the Senate floor next > week, and could come to a vote after 20 hours of debate.

I fully support the repeal of the ACA, but allowing only 20 hours to read and analyze a bill of this size and magnitude is criminal. Our legislative process is a joke.

<comment><USER3> A proper way of repealing it would be a one-page document that states all Federal regulations of the healthcare insurance market are repealed, and States are barred from interfering with that market; with an annex listing which past laws are no longer in effect. A second page to void tax incentives or special treatment related to health insurance (so that employees and independents have access to the same health insurance options, at the same cost, and employers stop providing health insurance servitude as part of employment contracts) as well as abolish all subsidies and protections of the pharmaceutical + medical-device industries. The third page can specify how and when Medicare will be phased out. It should take at most 30 minutes for a layman to read and understand.</comment></comment>


Mark Zuckerberg Answers Q&A in Mandarin at Chinese University - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10101708164336771 <comment> ezequiel-garzon Even if Zuckerberg's main motivation was to learn his wife's language, I believe this will effectively raise the bar for CEOs in the years ahead. I wouldn't be surprised if this seemingly unnecessary skill could signify new business opportunities for large corporations.

<comment><USER3> It's quite similar to businessmen in the '80s learning Japanese. If you do a lot of business within a country, you are somewhat disadvantaged if you have to rely on a translator.

<comment><USER4> J. Paul Getty learned arabic to help his oil deals...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gonna be a bit of a douche, but...

Why do we go googoogaga over an English speaker learning a foreign language to a competent level, when this is something millions of people do regularly? Mark isn't the first person to learn a language in the middle of a busy job and life schedule.

Doucheness not quite over - it's a big achievement, yeah, but Chinese isn't actually that hard, it's a bit of a myth perpetuated because (a) there's not enough people learning it (b) a lot of teachers are quite shit in my experience (c) hand writing is difficult. in reality spoken Chinese is very simple, grammar is easy, common vocabulary is easily learnt and repeated frequently....

<comment><USER6> You won't find a finer example of white privilege.

No one cares if a Chinese CEO (or anyone for that matter) speaks English, no matter the difficulty and effort the learning entails. Contrast this indifference with the flattery of the converse in this thread, and it's quite illuminating of the world we live in.

<comment><USER7> It's not hard to understand someone speaking poor English, and we're used to encountering ESL speakers. On the other hand, if I make a mistake in Japanese, especially when writing, nobody can understand me. It takes a lot of practice to get from being able to use a convenience store to having any kind of conversation.

Some of that is because they're not used to non-native speakers, but much of it is just the structure of the language and room for error-correction. I'd assume it's the same for Mandarin with so many short words and tones.

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't really agree. Mark makes lots of grammar, vocab, pronunciation and tonal mistakes and the audience seems to understand him with no problems. Spoken Chinese isnt tgat hard and in some ways is much more forgiving than English for non native speakers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've lived in China 5 years now and our skill levels are comparable so I'm pretty impressed. It's really just basic conversation but the Chinese people will love him for getting this far with it. This along with move to join Tsinghua board will create massive goodwill for FB.

<comment><USER9> oh man, this doesn't give me much hope. I'm visiting China next fall and was hoping I could have a good handle on the basics by then. I'm learning via Pimsleur and right now I can only say strange phrases like "Would you like to go to the hotel with me?" and "How much money?" I'm joking slightly, I've learned a little bit more than that. But I swear Pimsleur targets their lessons at single men trying to meet foreigners.

<comment><USER10> So, my thing about Pimsleur is that I assume they intend for you to supplement it. For instance, given what you've learned already, you can probably say, "I would like to order two beers." but CANNOT, if you rely solely on Pimsleur, say "I would like to order seven beers." Because they teach you some sentences and what they mean but don't teach you basics.

Languages are vast oceans of meaning and composition -- 90 hours simply is not enough for Chinese (or any language, really, reality itself is too complex to describe with a system that simple).

I'd recommend learning the characters using Heisig's Remembering the Hanzi (this should take about 100-200 hours), and then shifting to HSK (which should be pretty easy post-character learning) + full sentences.

If you like Pimsleur, keep with it, although I get made fun of for sounding like a northerner a bit from using it for pronunciation help when I was beginning. :)

<comment><USER11> > I assume they intend for you to supplement it.

That is true, but it provides a pretty good foundation. Most other methods don't focus enough on listening and pronunciation.

> "I would like to order two beers." but CANNOT, if you rely solely on > Pimsleur, say "I would like to order seven beers."

That doesn't match my experience with Pimsleur. Have you completed a Pimsleur course?

I've done Hebrew and I'm now doing Arabic. Pretty much every new sentence is used as a template and repeated with multiple variations. E.g. in Arabic, numbers are inflected, and they teach you that right in the first unit. So if you know how to say "two beers" then you know how to say "seven beers". It's definitely not an audio version of a phrasebook.

> I get made fun of for sounding like a northerner

Being made fun for sounding like a native is a win on my book!

<comment><USER10> Hahaha so, not sounding like a native so much as adding r sounds everywhere, which makes you sound a little silly in the south independent of how good you are. Imagine a four year old speaking in a southern drawl here in America, it'd sound pretty odd. See wikipedia's: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhua](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhua)

My comment about those two sentences is specifically applicable to people who have done the first dozen or so lessons of Pimsleur's Mandarin Chinese I, which literally contains the sentence "I would like to order two beers" but doesn't cover the numbers until... not sure, I learned the numbers on my own and was liable to have skipped that part if it came later, but I don't remember them in Pimsleur at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Highly impressed. I used to brush him off as just another wunderkind who got lucky. In retrospect, his business acumen, especially when acquiring Instagram for a then pricely sum of a billion dollars has made me realize that he truly is special.

<comment><USER13> Not just instagram. We should not forget to mention Whatsapp, internet via drones and Oculus

<comment><USER14> Whats App was a huge mistake though. That data is not worth Billions.

<comment><USER15> To summarize Marc Andreesen: When I heard about the Whats App deal, I thought, wow it's worth that much. That must be what it's worth. Should I believe someone on the internet, or Mark Zuckerberg, who had painstakingly researched it, has access to the real financials and bet his own money and the future of his company on it.

<comment><USER16> Implying that business leaders don't make billion dollar mistakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Regardless of his technical achievements, learning a second language ( and such disconnected one ) is super impressive. Great job.

<comment><USER18> Hmm dude, everybody here who is not a native English speaker knows at least a second language on top of his mother tongue. I'm French, fluent in English and conversational in Spanish and German and I don't think it's so impressive.

Chinese on the other hand is a bit tougher because the writing is so different.

<comment><USER19> 3 languages for a french person? I'd say that's unbelievable.

<comment><USER20> This is such a ridiculous comment...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The guy just seriously raised the bar for qualification as a "scrappy founder"! This will be widely replayed in China, he will be 2x the rock star that he already is. Maybe he can Jack Ma can do English/Chinese practice together online?

<comment><USER22> I don't think Zuck has been a scrappy anything in years. I'm pretty sure you're disqualified from "scrappy" once you make your first billion. (Possible exception: Notch.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Appraisal of the quality of Zuckerberg's Mandarin: [http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/10/22/mark_zuckerbe...](http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/10/22/mark_zuckerberg_speaks_mandarin_like_a_seven_year_old)

<comment><USER24> Wow, well that site was designed by a bunch of dicks. If you scroll down too much to read the article it throws a whopping great big nag screen at you insisting that you register (for free) to continue reading. Then, when you close the wretched thing, using the provided X, it just dumps you on to their home page.

It's like they thought to themselves 'How can we do a paywall but replace all of the users usual disappointment with utter irritation?'

<comment><USER22> Blocking "foreignpolicy.com###TB_iframeContent" in ABP seems to take care of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A review of his Mandarin based on a close listen of the first 5 minutes of the video and listening to the rest in the background while I type this (let me know if it changes later):

tl;dr - Definitely ILR 1+, probably an ILR 2. Pronunciation needs a ton of work, but that's not the only aspect that is measured when analyzing speech. The foreign policy article (linked in another comment) is overly critical, imho.

Detailed:

ILR LEVEL

He's definitely at least an ILR 1+. He shows signs of ILR 2 characteristics (and is probably an ILR 2), but it's hard to tell if he can sustain them in a wide range of contexts. While his pronunciation needs A LOT of work, the language itself is comprehensible to a sympathetic native listener. I strongly disagree with the Foreign Policy article that says it was "terrible". I would say that it's actually kind of amazing given that he's the CEO of a huge company. I would roughly say that he is on par with a good / above average 3rd year student at a school with a really good Chinese program. The original article says 2nd year, but this would be a superstar 2nd year student who was either a heritage speaker or had spent a lot of time in China (e.g., as a homestay or study abroad).

DISCOURSE STRUCTURE AND STYLE

He is able to sustain the dialogue for a long time. He is able to circumlocute decently (this really opens up the ability to communicate), but I would really like to see his range of circumlocution. He is able to string together his sentences in moderately cohesive paragraphs. He does not demonstrate the ability to combine paragraphs cohesively at a high level (signs of an ILR 3), but I don't think the tasks really required it.

His style of answering questions was very American -- very direct. I don't think that a Chinese speaker who has lived exclusively in China (i.e., not educated or trained in the "West") would answer the same questions similarly. In this case, I actually think that it's best for him to answer in an American way even if he could answer in a Chinese style, but that's a different and longer discussion.

Early on when he tells the story of his wife and her grandmother, he really comes across as quite charming.

GRAMMAR

He does decently enough. There are errors, but it's not hard to understand what he is saying -- especially for a sympathetic native listener. The sample didn't really demonstrate a wide range of grammar, but the tasks didn't necessarily require a wide range. He is able to say complex sentences (i.e., two independent clauses), and he is able to speak in different timeframes (normally tenses, but Chinese tenses are not like English). This all points to a solid ILR 2, but grammar is definitely not the toughest part of Mandarin.

VOCABULARY

He has a decent vocabulary -- it's solid for the task. I wonder what his vocabulary is like outside of the topics of personal bio information, Facebook, and Facebook business. If he wants to get to ILR 2+ or ILR 3, he will need to work on the accuracy and diversity of his vocabulary.

PRONUNCIATION

This is easily his weakest point. He has a HEAVY American accent. He mispronounces a lot of words. His tones are WAY off. He seems completely unable to say English loan words in Chinese (e.g., Facebook, Google, etc.). It's actually kind of hard to listen to. That being said, I would say that it is all comprehensible to a sympathetic native listener.

SUMMARY

Overall, really good for someone who is not studying full time and has a very involved full time job. I wonder how much of it was practiced or rehearsed -- a lot of the questions are ones that he definitely _should_ practice (e.g., the story about why he started studying Chinese), since they are standard questions that would be asked to him and/or the Facebook CEO. Regardless, speaking in a foreign language to a large group of people is not easy, and he came across really well.

RECOMMENDATIONS

He can work on his pronunciation in several ways:

\- Listen more. Even if it's on in the background, it will help. Right now, I don't think he has a good intuitive sense when he is mispronouncing a word.

\- When working with a teacher, do lower level language tasks, and act like a native speaker whose voice/accent he likes. Research suggests that this lowers affective filters for pronunciation.

\- Work with suprasegmentals with a pronunciation program that visualize what he's saying. It can be enlightening.

\- Practice over pronouncing words. If he does what he perceives as a "caricature" of pronouncing the word, he will probably be closer to accurate.

Other than that, listen more, read more, and I think he will become a rock- solid ILR 2 with room for growth if he wants it.

That's my quick-and-dirty. I am very interested in the informed opinions of others.

<comment><USER26> "His style of answering questions was very American -- very direct."

I'm interested in more expanded thoughts on the above. In what way are non- Americans less "direct" than Americans? Is about politeness/rudeness, or something else? Wouldn't that make miscommunication more probable?

<comment><USER25> Great question, and it's a tough one to answer.

First, this is not an issue that's purely "American vs non-American". It's a US compared to Chinese. As a contrast, Russians tend to be very direct even though they are very much non-American.

In this specific case, it has to do with his speech acts and his audience. This is a _huge_ topic, so I will only scratch the surface.

A simple and clear example would be how he answered the "Why are you studying Chinese?" question.

Mark answers with a touching story about his wife and his wife's grandmother. To an American audience, this is very personable, and it is very plausible.

My brief take on a "Chinese-style CEO" answer would be something like this: "Well, Chinese is important for everyone to know. It has a long and storied history, and it is undoubtedly the most important language for people to know today and moving ahead into the future. As the CEO of a large American company, I think that it is only prudent that I learn the language of one of our most important audiences." I don't think a Chinese-style answer would even bring Priscilla's heritage into the response for a number of reasons (e.g., they already know, it's personal not business, etc.).

For reference, my hypothetical response is a kind of DST (search for "DST LOL") that is common in some cultures, even if it is blatant DST.

Note that speech acts are important in all cultures, and that my Chinese example could easily be used in an American context. The important thing to ask is "What am I trying to say in the big picture?". Engineers tend to go for the direct answer, but it's not always the most appealing for a given context.

<comment><USER27> >For reference, my hypothetical response is a kind of DST (search for "DST LOL") that is common in some cultures, even if it is blatant DST.

How about you just tell us what the fuck "DST" means?

<comment><USER28> It seems to mean "sucking up". And I think it stands for "Dick Sucking Technique", coined by this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz7TWpRXyRY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz7TWpRXyRY)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Guess the self study has gone well. It appears that he struggles at times but never reverts to English. Betting this video will be widely shared in China.

<comment><USER30>
         It appears that he struggles at times but never reverts to English.

Funny enough that all the questions during the Q&A session were in English, but he managed to answer them all in Mandarin.

<comment><USER31> Is there a translation?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Chinese is considered a hard language to learn for Westerners. As a fellow founder I find this really impressive.

</comment><comment><USER33> Is Facebook blocked in China these days? It used to be. Must be weird to be there representing a blocked company.

<comment><USER34> Facebook is not uniformly blocked everywhere in China. I have friends in different regions of China occasionally gain access.

As for Zuckerberg's Mandarin, well done, but he needs to work on his accent and tones.

<comment><USER35> It's the official position of the Chinese Government that Facebook is not allowed in mainland China. That is plainly the case, and has been for many years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> his tones are off, but he has a pretty impressive vocabulary

<comment><USER37> I took Chinese in high school and did ok. Didn't use it and have tried to pick it up twice as an adult and have yet to get the tones down in conversation.

Put a book in front of me, I can get it. Let me listen to someone speak it and I am lost.

Any ideas on how to conquer that fault?

<comment><USER38> Watch reality Chinese television with subtitles. You get both the visual confirmation alongside the sound. They can be kind of a drag to get through (esp if you're used to HBO-level stuff), but the benefit of reality TV is that you can miss parts of a conversation and not be completely confused as to what's going on as there is no real plot.

<comment><USER39> I find it really hard to watch foreign TV/Movies with subtitles because I lose almost all of the audio, and am pretty much just reading the whole time - <USER2> of least resistance to understanding, I guess.

<comment><USER40> I think he's referring to Chinese subtitles. Almost all television in China is subtitled with Chinese characters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I think he is very sincere in his motivation to learn Chinese and its brave to get up there because to us he sounds pretty foreign. People laughed because it's endearing to listen to, not really funny. To me languages are a lot like programming in that if you can get enough to hack around the problem you are half way there. Honestly its not about the $, because if you speak Chinese it doesn't make you Chinese in a Chinese's eyes, just curious and disciplined.

Just want to add that when I started learning Chinese people made it out like some impossible dream, and when I started to learn to code it was the same (maybe because I have long blonde hair and look like I'm from Florida or something). Truth is its not as hard as you think to become ok, but very hard to master. So if you are reading this and you ever thought seriously about studying Chinese but "don't have the time"... well, Mark makes time, and if you're reading HN regularly then you are definitely smart enough :)

</comment><comment><USER42> I think it is also worth nothing that Zuckerberg is (perhaps was?) quite talented at Latin and nearly went on to study Classics at Harvard.

</comment><comment><USER43> Ohh sh!#$, now _my_ mother-in-law is going to expect _me_ to do the same!! :)

</comment><comment><USER44> You can see a surprisingly small bone conduction transducer behind his right ear at 5:13. I assume he's just repeating what he's being told.

No, I'm kidding, but this is impressive.

</comment><comment><USER45> If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. - Nelson Mandela

</comment><comment><USER46> This is a working translation of Zuck's Q&A at Tsinghua. Hope it helps those of you who are curious about what was said!

[https://medium.com/unbabel-news/b4cb8f223df2](https://medium.com/unbabel- news/b4cb8f223df2)

</comment><comment><USER47> I was expecting something very impressive when I started the video, annnnnnd... nope. The interviewer speaks to him like he's a little boy (I know, this is the same pace my Chinese teacher was using in my classroom for the first 2-3 months).

And I agree with a lot of comments here: a foreigner speaking fluent English seems normal, yet an American babbling in Chinese seems outstanding...

</comment><comment><USER48> Jack Ma speaks fluent English, Mark speaks 國語. I think it is all about business & $.

<comment><USER49> Jack Ma was also an english teacher

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Is there a version with English subtitles?

</comment><comment><USER51> Would someone please translate the jokes?

<comment><USER52> I know a tiny bit of Mandarin and listened to the first couple of minutes. The first three big laughs seem to be when he looks unsure when asked why he decided to study Chinese, when he says that his wife's grandmother was shocked to hear him speak Chinese, and when he says that Chinese is hard. It's not so much that he tells jokes as that he has an encouraging, sympathizing audience (but what do I know, maybe there are jokes later).

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> What is the best way to learn Mandarin?

<comment><USER54> Move to China.

Also, read this for some good language learning advice: [http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2010/01/koreans-english- acqui...](http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2010/01/koreans-english-acquisition- and-best.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Does anyone know how he did it?

</comment><comment><USER56> I find it highly ironic that he's giving a talk there, when China's blocking his site.

</comment><comment><USER57> Kudos.

<comment><USER58> It's very impressive

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> impressive.

</comment><comment><USER60> A German professor once told me German is actually harder to learn than Chinese.

<comment><USER61> Of course a German professor would say that. (-: I've taken years of both languages in high school and college, and I'd have to disagree with him. An example of the difference in difficulty is that when you learn German coming from an English background there are only four more letters to learn (ä, ö, ü and ß), whereas there are 214 Mandarin radicals to memorize. And these radicals aren't even the entire "alphabet", they're just the basis that all characters expand upon.

Also, Mandarin is a tonal language, along with having vastly different grammar than Germanic languages. While English has plenty of influence from Romance languages, most of it is strictly vocabulary; English, at its core, is a Germanic language. Thus it'd be rather hard to prove that German is more difficult for an English speaker to learn than Chinese. However, I would love to hear his arguments to the contrary, or anybody else's for that matter!

<comment><USER62> I know almost no German, but I learned French to fluency and know spoken Mandarin somewhat well.

I think that talking about the relative difficulty of a language as a whole is not really workable. There are different aspects which order differently.

For example, if you already speak English then you'll find German vocabulary far easier to learn. There will be a lot of shared or similar words that you can build on. In Mandarin, there are almost no common words, so you basically have to start from scratch.

On the other hand, Mandarin grammar is pretty simple. No conjugations, no genders, just slightly different word order from what you're used to. If you know how to say "I eat noodles" and you know how to say "yesterday" then you know how to say "I ate noodles yesterday". We spent a long time learning how to conjugate the various past tenses in French class, and I believe German is similar.

I think there's no contest when it comes to reading and writing. Learning to read and write Mandarin is almost like learning a whole separate language from the spoken version.

I think the easy grammar helps give Mandarin a big advantage, especially if you're learning it for casual conversations. But that advantage is greatly reversed in other areas. Much will depend on what the individual language learner finds easy and hard to learn.

<comment><USER63> > On the other hand, Mandarin grammar is pretty simple. No conjugations, no > genders, just slightly different word order from what you're used to

That's interesting to me as this week I stumbled into Afrikaans, which likewise lacks genders and conjugations and only apepars to have two tenses ( present and perfect ).

Which makes me wonder why other languages have evolved to such levels of complexity, since it seems entirely possible to conduct the affairs of a state without have a distinction between 'I eat' and 'he eats'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I don't know why people keep saying that this is very impressive unless he was learning Chinese as he was also running Facebook. His tones and grammar still need a good amount of work. I feel like I am not getting the impact since I go to a university were 15% (very rough estimate) of the student body take four years of Chinese in about 2 years (all languages are compressed to 2 years at Princeton).

edit: After reading more comments, I understand that it is rare, but I can't say it is a much more significant achievement than if he learned another language such as German or Arabic.

<comment><USER65> It's because he was learning Chinese as he was running Facebook. He just started just a few years ago [http://www.news.com.au/technology/facebook- founder-mark-zuck...](http://www.news.com.au/technology/facebook-founder-mark- zuckerberg-determined-to-learn-chinese-language/story-e6frfro0-1225940614496)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> What surprises the most that he is able to distinguish sounds that are effectively all same for most non-Chinese people. Research says our ability to distinguish sounds in other languages ceases after first 8 months and that's why it's harder to understand someone talking in foreign language.

Did Zuck had any exposure to Chinese as a kid? Any info on how he learned Chinese? My guess is that he probably decided to talk with wife and relatives only Chinese for a long period of time. According to many this is the best way to learn new language (as opposed to passively watching videos and audio tapes). Another guess is that he may have some really top Chinese teacher giving few hours of tuition per week.

<comment><USER67> _Research says our ability to distinguish sounds in other languages ceases after first 8 months and that 's why it's harder to understand someone talking in foreign language._

For me this obstacle went away with sufficient immersion and practice. I started learning Chinese at age 19, the following year I went to China as an exchange student and studied Chinese / Mandarin full time. By the time I came back I was fluent in the language, more fluent than all of the second- generation Chinese-Americans I knew, and with a native-sounding accent, although my vocabulary was still not quite native-speaker level.

I don't know exactly what Zuck is doing to study, but what I did was I went to school in China and spoke almost entirely in Mandarin all day, wrote essays in Chinese, read news articles and novels in Chinese, made Chinese friends, dated Chinese women (and eventually married one).

You really have to _live_ in a foreign language for a period of several years in order to truly learn it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I wish the exoticising of the East would just go away. This mystique associated upon the Chinese language is horribly old-fashioned. It comes up far too often ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7624342](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7624342))

Of course, we should always encourage ourselves and others to learn foreign languages, even if only to dabble.

Unfortunately, this is just gimmick, and bad gimmick at that. Compare to a completely normalised (and far more impressive!!) display of Chinese-language skill. It's implied that they're mostly housewives: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5na5nHZsww#t=5m30s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5na5nHZsww#t=5m30s)

<comment><USER69> I think you're missing the point.

The number of Westerners who become conversational in Chinese is astoundingly low compared to vice-versa. It's known to be quite difficult. Being able to publicly answer questions at a Q&A without falling back to English once is a feat that takes years of learning and practice. It is amazing to me that Mark has been able to find the time and dedication for this while simultaneously running one of the most successful tech companies ever.

This isn't on hacker news because the East is exotic or Chinese language is mysterious.

<comment><USER70> It's interesting sometimes it's harder to go from language A -> B than B -> A.

If you're born Japanese then you lost the language lottery. Japanese has a limited set of sounds and there are very few close languages grammatically; Korean being the major one. So even the global language, English, is a massive challenge. It's easier for a Chinese person to learn Japanese than the other way round. (Japanese speakers at least have a big leg up on reading Chinese)

I wonder if it's easier to go from Chinese to English, they certainly have more sounds/tones an English speaker will have never spoken. In reality, major different is probably a power difference, it's a lot more useful to know English than it is to know Mandarin in the general case. (If a Chinese student goes to France they'll be using English)

<comment><USER68> Interestingly, in the video linked above, I think the Japanese panelist is one of the more natural speakers.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5na5nHZsww#t=16m15s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5na5nHZsww#t=16m15s)

<comment><USER71> She could be mistaken for Taiwanese with that accent. In other words she's 100% naturalised.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Aloha point-of-sale system - <AUTHOR> https://tedium.co/2020/02/27/aloha-pos-system-history/ <comment><USER3> Kind of an odd article. There's a lot of POS systems out there, and Aloha isn't be best, or the most popular, or the most innovative, or the newest, or the first. There's a lot of competition in the space, but no context is given. It's just... "Hey, did you know POS software is a thing? Well it is! And one of them is called Aloha. The reason Aloha is so great is that it's AMAZING! Did you know Aloha is made by a company that once employed Thomas Watson?!"

Feels more like a corporate press release than anything trying to inform people.

(That being said, I work for a company that integrates with Aloha, among many of their competitors, so maybe I'm not the target audience here.)

<comment><USER4> yes there is indeed like a bajillion of POS systems. I'm the founder of one of them [https://www.waiterio.com](https://www.waiterio.com)

I found ridiculous how there is a bajillion and everyone is claiming to be the LEADER IN THE INDUSTRY or 1# POS SYSTEM

It's a big market, there are a lot of restaurants and there is space for a lot of software. As far as I experienced there isn't a lot of virality in growth due to referalls since it's a B2B so no winner takes all happened (despite what some POS would like to make you believe).

<comment><USER5> I'm not in the service industry and I've seen it in enough places to have noticed it. I couldn't tell you the name of any other POS system (though the aloha bouncy screensaver is particularly notable)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Aloha has the advantage of not being "cloud-hosted". You know, the ones where you stand in line at checkout waiting while the terminal talks to some overloaded server far away? That's modern "cloud" point of sale. Aloha has a little box under the manager's desk running the terminals.

<comment><USER4> Founder of one of those cloud-hosted POS [https://www.waiterio.com](https://www.waiterio.com) Yes having no internet or slow internet with a cloud hosted POS is big trouble.

I foresee the cycle of innovation will be: 1) offline (PAST) 2) cloud-hosted (PRESENT) 3) cloud hosted but with full offline support (FUTURE) This way we'll have the best of both worlds.

What's good about cloud hosted POS you ask? Well they do update easily. So you are not stuck with the same system with 90s UIs.

Also by upgrading faster and being connected to the internet the POS is able to interface with external systems. Currently 99% of restaurants use a separate tablet for each online delivery service (deliveroo justeat foodpanda...).

<comment><USER7> > What's good about cloud hosted POS you ask? Well they do update easily.

This doesn't require "cloud" at all, just network connectivity. Software auto- updaters are no more complicated than zero-downtime cloud deployments. Especially in fully controlled environments where issues of users randomly switching off autoupdates or blocking Internet connectivity are probably nearly non-existent.

I'd argue that the software is more resilient if it runs locally. One can argue that cloud can be updated "in realtime" but live code updates had existed since forever (at least since eighties, with Erlang/OTP), and running locally makes things robust against network outages (or degradation) - <USER2> is probably way more frequent issue than getting the latest updates immediately.

<comment><USER8> Nobody wants to update a POS system "in realtime" \- meaning while someone is actively using it and processing transactions. Just like nobody wants prices of items to change mid-transaction. It is impossible to explain these kinds of events to customers (sorry, but five of your eight Cokes are 20 cents more because we happened to be too slow to scan them and a price change came in between). In countries employing strict fiscal rules governing electronic cash registers - which are more and more on a global scale - stuff like that may even be illegal to do.

This is one of the reasons why that entire "cloud" SaaS thing is a bad fit for PoS systems to start with. It doesn't stop cloud apologetes to still develop and market such systems and customers who drank the cloud kool-aid to buy them, but what people actually want in that business when push comes to shove is a locally-installed system that is seamlessly offline-capable in all its core features, can send transactions out and receive new master data in real- time while network connectivity is available and can be updated easily and ideally via a centrally controllable and plannable process. And that have actually been bog-standard features for PoS systems for at least a decade or two, long before all that "push everything into the cloud" hype started.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Growing up and living near Dayton, Ohio, I just take for granted that most people know about NCR (National Cash Register), and the people associated with the company.

NCR was involved in work to crack the German Enigma code during World War II, building on the work done at Bletchley Park (which built on Polish work before the war)[1]. As time has passed and the secrecy associated with the work has been lifted there have been a number of interesting stories about locals (or their parents / grandparents) who worked on the project.

Wi-Fi arguably owes its existence to WaveLAN[2], developed by an NCR subsidiary in the late 1980's.

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

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

<comment><USER10> One interesting point in the article is that Thomas Watson worked for NCR and was eventually fired. He went on to help build IBM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd like to plug this wholesome POS that's not just full of features but also free to use [http://keyhut.com/pos.htm](http://keyhut.com/pos.htm)

<comment><USER12> This kind of looks like the POS that Fry's uses. Always found it fascinating that they used a terminal-based app in like the 2000s

<comment><USER13> Yep, that's the first thing I thought. The system that seems to require 100 keystrokes to do a price match.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've used many point of sale systems, and in my experience, POS usually stands for three other words.

I found Aloha great in some respects (usability on the floor) and poor in others (inventory control). Haven't found a perfect system yet!

<comment><USER15> As someone who has _no_ experience in POS systems at all (other than using them as a customer I suppose) what are your pain points with them? What would you change/add/remove?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "often still looking like it was designed in 1998"

Apparently that's not a blocker, since Toast, built in the last few years, looks almost exactly the same: [https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iKMT21ZfDyp...](https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iKMT21ZfDyp4/v0/1400x-1.jpg)

<comment><USER17> Is this even a bad thing?

The users of this software are "professional" \- they interact with it anywhere from dozens of times a day to literally their entire shift. As such, the primary UX concerns are going to be speed and accuracy. Though having lots of buttons doesn't fit the slick/minimalist styling a lot of current apps go for, it's undoubtedly faster to use and easier to learn.

I'd expect the most common operations to take 1 or 2 interactions (presses), and the least common shouldn't take more than 3 or 4. It should also be easily discoverable, From just looking at the screenshot, and having almost no experience with PoS, I'm pretty confident I could use it immediately with no training and actually place an order for someone.

That said, Aloha in particular could probably benefit from some tweaking by a graphic designer - even just some minor changes to the color palette, spacing and border styles could make it much more visually appealing, without losing the current UX.

<comment><USER18> > I'm pretty confident I could use it immediately with no training and > actually place an order for someone.

From experience I can tell you right now that POS software (officially stands for "point of sale", but in my mind most of them actually mean something else) violates pretty much every single expectation and convention you'd find in desktop software UIs.

In fact, I'd argue it's easier for someone who's never been exposed to computers to learn it than for an experienced computer user, as the novice would learn from scratch while the experienced user would expect the POS to behave like most desktop computer software which usually isn't the case.

I think part of the problem is that most POS software is designed to replicate a physical machine which has physical constraints such as a fixed number of buttons and small display area. In contrast, a computer can display anything and rearrange its UI depending on the context. Example: most POS software has a specific way (usually a button) to put an order on hold and be able to start ringing up the next customer's items while the existing order is invisible in the background, because on a physical POS there's no way to just duplicate the keyboard and screen and become two POSes side by side. On a computer however, the same is trivial by just having 2 tabs, both with the POS UI but containing the different orders. Most people would immediately recognise and understand (because of prior experience with browser tabs) without a need for training

<comment><USER8> And most people would be irritated and ring stuff up into the wrong "tab" multiple times a day, because people are bad at multitasking.

There is a reason why most POS software is intentionally restrictive and violating many common UI imperatives. Many common UI design rules are not governing the case of a user who is specifically trained to use a certain system, but must then use it in stressful situations at maximum speed and minimum error rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Has anyone encountered/used a good open source POS system? The most promising one I found in a quick search was [https://github.com/opensourcepos/opensourcepos](https://github.com/opensourcepos/opensourcepos)

</comment><comment><USER20> My first restaurant job used Aloha. I loved Aloha. It did everything I needed it to do. I worked front of house on the floor and it was great. I worked back of house and it was great. I worked bar and it was great. THEN! We were bought by Darden and had to use their in-house system. It was hot garbage compared to Aloha.

</comment><comment><USER21> I worked on that, jesus fucking christ the amount of shit that i've seen

<comment><USER22> I'd love to hear stories! I used it in many restaurants between about 2001-2013, and have to say besides probably less than 3 outages, I never noticed a single issue due to software (how it was set up by mgmt is another issue but never got in the way that much). Probably the worst problem was with touch screen calibration, but even having to touch an inch down and to the left of what I needed, I could still fly through the UI.

I remember designing my own POS/inventory tracking concepts, and thinking back on it, knowing what I know now after about the same amount of time as a professional developer as I spent in restaurants, I'm impressed with how well it performed IME.

So for all the pain I'm sure you felt, still, hats off to you!

<comment><USER23> One story that comes to mind is the difficulty of change management. It's possible to configure Aloha locally but beyond a certain number of locations a configuration tool called Configuration Center is used. It basically stores configuration information on a server (as a tree with the rough idea of inheritance) that stores connect to and pull down into the various configuration formats used.

In the tool there isn't a concept of approvals. We had an admin disable receipt printers at all stores. There wasn't a reliable global refresh so we had 10 people logging in remotely (through another horrible tool that was a front end for a reverse VNC connection) and calling stores to reset their configuration which brought their system down for 2 to 10 minutes during a Friday lunch rush.

We fixed this with process but NCR made it easy to shoot oneself in the foot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So that's what they call this software.I think I've seen it at least in every second establishment out there.</comment>


Google Officially Deadpools Gears For Safari. - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/20/google-gears-dead/

<comment><USER2> Before Chrome, I was a heavy Safari user. I'm rather happy that they are shifting resources away from Gears towards standard compliance. Then maybe those who need the power of Gears can stop running Safari in 32-bit mode. I'm also excited about what this means for offline GMail and Mailplane.

Gears Team Blog post on the matter: <http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/hello-html5.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a good move just because there is so much confusion caused by Gears existing. People seem to be going out of their way to misunderstand that Gears is implementing bleeding edge HTML5 features in a way that can be added to other browsers.

The only browser that needs such a plugin is IE, and Chrome frame now fills that same gap.

</comment><comment><USER4> A win for HTML5.</comment>


11 Link Usability Tips - <AUTHOR> http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-10-24-n27.html <comment><USER2> "Have you seen those links which open an info box when you hover over them? Snap.com, for instance, offers such a service. I suggest not to use it; it might be fun once, but it gets very annoying very quickly for your audience."

Very annoying is an understatement.

Also, numbers 5 and 6 can conflict with each other at times. I'm not always certain which rule to favor, but maybe that's part of what makes UI design so interesting.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gah - Tip #1 blows. Don't be all usin' non-breaking spaces to pad out your links (or anything, for that matter). Use proper styling.

Like, say:

a.directory { padding: 0px 5px 0px 5px; }

That way both sides of all your links have enough padding to make them easy to click on, and you don't get those ugly underlines on the sides, like "_I_".

</comment><comment><USER4> 12\. Never link to a page using javascript. I really hate this one, when you want to open the link in the new tab and instead you have to open it on the same tab and then hit back to the original page. I've been forced to write Greasemonkey scripts for sites I use often...</comment>


Guangzhou streetcars powered by supercapacitors that charge in 20 seconds - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2015/10/22/450583840/in-d-c-and-china-two-approaches-to-a-streetcar-unconstrained-by-wires <comment><USER2> The important detail is that they charge for 20 seconds in each station, that are approximately 700m away. It looks interesting, but the method is useful only for a tramline, not for normal cars.</comment>


13-Inch MacBook Pro Display Backlight Service Program - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/support/13-inch-macbook-pro-display-backlight-service/ <comment><USER2> Have y'all noticed how they always create these programs for models that existed the year before the problems surfaced? I noticed this for the 15 inch model. (Not so) clever way to absolve themselves of blame for future models that actually manifest the problems!</comment>


Thunderbird's Future: the TL;DR Version - <AUTHOR> http://mesquilla.com/2014/07/31/thunderbirds-future-the-tldr-version/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=thunderbirds-future-the-tldr-version

<comment><USER2> They should work on the Thunderbird address book. This part of the program is totally broken: -only 2 eail addresses per person -if you have activated automatic adding of an email address to your address book when sending a mail it is not case-insensitive. You get multiple entries: email@example.com, firstname.lastname@example.com, email@example.com</comment>


Ask HN: How do you identify people with a strong work ethic? - <AUTHOR> Is work ethic something that can only be seen by working alongside someone? <comment><USER2> What exactly do you mean by "a strong work ethic"?

I ask because I thought opening up this post that I was going to start with an easy answer, but the more I thought about it, the less I was sure what "work ethic" even meant.

So, I looked it up:

 _" The principle that hard work is intrinsically virtuous or worthy of reward."_

So, I came to this post/question absolutely certain that "a strong work ethic" was absolutely something I agreed with and would look for in myself and colleagues. Now, I am not so sure.

Is "hard work intrinsically virtuous"? Is working harder rather than smarter more worthy of reward? There are plenty of jobs where real unpleasant, hard work is required yet is often of little value. The architect will get more reward than the foreman who will in turn get more reward than the person spaying gunite. Life seems full of counter examples to "hard work is intrinsically virtuous".

Even when comparing people in the same job...

Would I rather work with a partner who was "lazy" and produced 10 widgets because they knew how to best use their tools, or would I rather work with someone industrious who produced 10 widgets through sheer force of will? I think the first one rather than the second.

Ultimately (to try to actually answer your question). If I did not know a candidate or their actual "work ethic", I would ask them to tell me about a time/job/project/assignment that was a (potential) failure and what they did during and after the project as it was ending. What did they personally do to mitigate the failure and after the project had ended what did they personally take away from the post mortem.

<comment><USER3> This. What's a strong work ethic and why is it important to you? What makes you think the vast majority of people's work ethics are insufficient for your purposes such that you have to specifically look for people with stronger ones?

Have you had a problem with hiring people who slack off and get nothing done? Are you asking how you find people who will work 80 hour weeks for months on end without overtime and without quitting on you?

<comment><AUTHOR> My goal is to find other freelancers to work alongside that have a similar work ethic. I want to find people who will collaborate and take ownership of a project on an equal level. Ideally people who aim to deliver not just a functioning "widget", but the best widget the client has ever seen.

<comment><USER4> It sounds like you want to ask

1\. What motivates them.

2\. How they communicate in the face of roadblocks.

\-----

I suspect you want to do more thinking in order to be more precise about what you really want.</comment></comment></comment></comment>