What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite - <AUTHOR> https://blog.usejournal.com/what-microsoft-got-right-about-power-users-but-not-quite-8efa8de59408 <comment><USER2> Why is this blog post so negative? Microsoft are trying and giving all of the developers the tools to help affect the project along the way.

The Terminal project was only announced 1 year ago[0]. As I understand it, they had to more or less split how the whole conhost.exe work in order to allow Terminal to even exist. The settings UI is far from sexy, but they're working on it[1]. I think it's impressive to know that 6 people did that in a year[2].

Regarding the slow startup of WSL2, yes it is slow to start, but would you rather have to wait 5x for a git clone command[3]? They even have a deep dive into how files are save in WSL1 which can be related to how it works in WSL2[4]

I completely disagree with the conclusion of performance is not Microsoft's concern. The comparison is to GNOME3 which was released in 2011. 9 years of development compared to 1 year. "The polish just isn't there"

[0]: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/introducing- windo...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/introducing-windows- terminal/)

[1]: [https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1564](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1564)

[2]: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows- terminal-...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows- terminal-1-0/)

[3]: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing- wsl-2/](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/)

[4]: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/a-deep-dive- into-...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/a-deep-dive-into-how-wsl- allows-windows-to-access-linux-files/)

<comment><USER3> M$ will only open source things that don't make them their money, while at the same time, tricking developers that they care by appropriating the communities work and extracting as much value out of Linux for free as possible, for their own benefit. Providing second rate hybrids masquerading as innovations, is all they can really do, to keep people locked into Windows. I stayed on Windows desktop for 20 years even while using linux for servers, and just gave it up this year. Linux has its own problems but if I disagree with the status quo of programs, I can either switch to another distro, mod the open source code myself, or file a bug report so a real person actually does something about it. This is too little, too late, from Microsoft, and accepting it now will just lead to the demise of Linux.

<comment><USER4> I have trouble believing that Linux's demise is remotely possible at this point. Too many huge tech companies have made their beds with it for Microsoft to be able to change that.

Linux desktop has the opposite problem: it's always been niche for mainstream users because its app ecosystem has never been good enough and it's often finicky to set up, even if its support for developers has been great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I actually don't get Powertoys at all.

They provide basic functionality I would not even class as for power users. Yeah, they are nice, they were nice in win95. Why do I need a separate Program 25 years later to rebind some keys or switch windows, yet every new win10 version tinkers with cortana? People say it would add "bloat", but somehow basic functionality beneficial to many users is bloat while candy crush and xbox whatever is not?

It is just so weird that after decades, basic functionality like bulk renaming files that should be in explorer is still considered a "power user" feature.

<comment><USER6> It is not weird at all once you realise who Microsoft's management wants as its customers. The business people at MS really do not expect nor want customers to be fiddling around with technical stuff. They want customers to see MS as the one who can solve all problems. The business people at Microsoft prefer non-technical customers. Technically-minded customers are not the ideal customers for Microsoft. A great example is Mark Russinovich. They had to hire him to keep him quiet and under control. He had become a problem solver for too many technically-minded customers.

In the mind of the Microsoft business person

Clippy: "Yes."

PowerToys: "Why?"

<comment><USER7> In 1995 this might have been a true statement. In 2020 Microsoft has seen the writing on the wall and realized that to stay at all relevant they need a seat at the table for cloud services. The only way to succeed at that is to win over the ultimate power user, developers.

WSL{1,2}, Windows Terminal, SQL Server on Linux, too many intiatives to count all focused on catching up to the reality that webservices and infrastructure are built on Linux. Whether you believe they'll succeed or not they are most definitely trying.

<comment><USER8> Microsoft feels very schizophrenic at this point. On the one hand I think there exists a faction that wants to move more into the open ecosystem. On the other though there appears to be an entrenched faction that's hell bent on retaining as much proprietary status quo as they feel they can get away with. Thus the command line is still incompatible with any Unix shell, the SQL syntax subtly different to make it a pain for those coming from other databases, proprietary sockets, threads API's and so on. It's possible to make a Windows ecosystem interact with the rest of the world, it's just a big pain in the butt caused by an endless stream of small pains.

<comment><USER3> MS is so large, one hand doesn't know what any other division is doing, and their community interaction is horrible because they make more money when people are ill informed and just go with the flow. So even if 10% of the company is "new blood" and was pushing open source out the back door for the past 5 years, the upper management is just now catching on that "hey maybe they were right".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > But the first launch of the Linux subsystem after system reboot is > unbelievably slow.

Proceeds to provide a video showing a 3s startup time to illustrate the unbelievable slowness that happens once after a reboot.

I suspect the favorite activity of the author is therefore to reboot their computer, and to quickly rush to WSL2 after that. In which case I agree the user experience is not ideal.

<comment><USER9> Continuing to read:

> Why is it animated? Or, even if it is, why is animation so slow?

Given it is not animated on my computer, I suspect it is animated when Windows is configured to have animations...

(and it if this theory is good, it is nice that they respect the disabling of animations, by the way, in contrast with the... Start Menu!)

<comment><USER10> > by the way, in contrast with the... Start Menu!

Well, good news! I don't know when this might've changed (I have animations enabled), but I just tested it on Windows 10 2004, and the start menu doesn't animate with animations off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems like a joke article. The 'long' startup time appears to be a second or two.

The slow animated menu is quick - I'd like to see someone actually select a menu item in the time it takes for it to drop down. The animation doesn't impact usability. All a bit bizarre.

<comment><USER12> The article sucks. I was hoping for a serious critique of Microsoft's new direction and the architecture of WSL2, .NET Core, etc., but it's just a handful of very trivial performance gripes, along with things the author simply doesn't understand, like the default application registered for *.json files being Notepad only until you install something better.

I wish there was a higher bar for upvoting articles besides "it bashes Microsoft, to the top with it"

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I tried WSL2 for about six months.

I'm really glad that MS is investing in this and it's an aspect that has been long neglected. If you're a developer, and unless you're using MS stack (.NET), the experience has been always subpar.

I have to agree with the author that the experience is not quite there yet. But a lot of progress has been done. And I hope the progress continues and maybe in the future I'll try it again.

For me there is not a single deal breaker, but it's just a thousand paper cuts. Removing those will take time. Some of the annoying things I encountered:

1\. Overall slowness. It's not only startup, it's in general. Not only on heavy tasks like parallel compiling, but even for lightweight stuff, you immediately notice when you try a real linux.

2\. Some config like setting up ssh-agent correctly are hard and different than a real linux. No idea why.

3\. Windows Terminal development is quite fast, and sometimes things change or break. For instance, the background color of my terminal suddenly changed and I had no idea why. After some googling and modifying config, it was fixed.

4\. The fact that it required to sign in for Windows Preview program. (I think this is not required anymore) but it was very annoying as it requires very long updates that require like a million reboots. No idea why Windows has to reboot so many times for a single update. Additionally, after every update there was always surprises. From the harmless Edge popping up from nowhere asking you to become default browser for the nth time, to some hardware misconfiguration. Nothing too bad, but annoying.

5\. (This one very subjective of course) The windows UI overall is, how to say it, a mess. Font rendering is awful. The mix of old style UI with new style UI is horrible. Some settings will be in new style, some other settings will be in old style.

As I said, I might try again in the future. But now I switched to Fedora and I'm really really happy with Gnome 3 and good old real Linux. I still have the Windows partition just in case, but I haven't booted in a while.

<comment><USER14> > No idea why Windows has to reboot so many times for a single update.

It's an interesting tangent, but Insider Preview updates are fascinating from a technical standpoint. Nearly every single one is installed closer to how Windows' big "Feature Updates" work (as essentially full Windows images that get built to a new folder, all the old things installed back into it, then the old Windows folder archived or removed) than old school sets of patches to individual files. It's been interesting as an Insider since very early in Windows 10's life to see how much faster these updates have gotten over time. Installing _lots_ of updates this way on Insider Preview machines seems to have helped a lot make the big "Feature Updates" themselves faster/better/more reliable. It's maybe not as obvious to someone installing a big Feature Update at most twice a year, but as a long time Windows user and having seen the gradient of change in Insiders Preview (and read some of what I could in their discussions on the technical efforts on blogs), it has been fascinating to watch.

WSL2 should be out of preview in the soon-to-be-rolled-out May 2020 feature update.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think this site might want to reconsider using Medium. All of the animated screenshots were covered with ads in Safari on iOS, with no apparent way of getting past them. I had really no idea what they were talking about.

<comment><USER3> You might want to reconsider using Safari on iOS...

<comment><USER16> Why?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What an incredibly petty set of complaints.

\- "It takes ~3 seconds for WSL2 to start up the first time"

\- "Windows Terminal [gasp] _has animations_ "

\- "The new spotlight search isn't already _flawless_ "

\- "File explorer right-click menus have... too many _things_ in them"

(Paraphrasing, of course)

And I honestly wonder if the flickering thing is a problem with the author's GPU or something. Seems to happen everywhere and I've never seen it on my machine.

<comment><USER3> I agree, but its a personal blog that got self-posted to HN, its just his opinion man. You can disregard it if you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It'd be nice if it were faster, but considering the usefulness of WSL, I'm cool waiting ~3 seconds for the terminal to load the first time after boot.

<comment><USER19> 3 seconds for a virtual machine (wsl2 under the hood is hyperv) is quite good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you have VS Code installed, the JSON configuration for the Windows Terminal won't open in Notepad.

<comment><USER21> The config file still seems like a cop-out for "we couldn't be arsed to build a GUI settings editor". Excusable at alpha/beta, not a final release.

Command prompt & Powershell both have GUI settings editors.

<comment><USER20> VS Code's configuration is a GUI skin over JSON, so that's probably what they should do with the terminal as well.

<comment><USER3> Yea. But that was added later, and theres still important JSON build-system files that you need to edit manually to this day. JSON isnt descriptive enough to auto-translate the raw files into a functional GUI. They seem to think its better off as text, but that goes against everything else on Windows mentality, and its not documented properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> We are 30+ years and Windows Task Scheduler is still broken. Compare that to simple .txt files to schedule anything you need in Linux. Windows took the UI path for users and that's OK, but most of Power users are still much better off with text files and simple utilities (like crontab) that work. This type of ecosystem is completely broken on Windows, I don't think it can be fixed, it is too much of a paradigm shift. On the same token trying to do good UI/User experience is still too hard on Linux. I take no issue with Windows, business users, friends and my parents are probably better off with it, but the "power" stuff? Please don't.

<comment><USER23> How is Windows Task Scheduler broken?

<comment><USER24> Can't bulk-kill processes, for one. Not searchable, for two.

<comment><USER23> Haven't used it in a long time, but looking at it now, the GUI is definitely clunky and those features are missing.

Wasn't there another GUI during the Windows XP days?

<comment><USER14> That MMC snap-in hasn't changed much in the NT era of Windows. You might be recalling 95-ME's even worse task scheduler?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > That is how long it takes to start WSL terminal for the very first time > after reboot

That speed extremely impressive. Not sure why he's comparing it to how long it starts to run a linux terminal on his linux machine? Shouldn't he be comparing it to how long it takes to e.g. start a different type of VM on windows, or how long it takes to cold start a Wine thing on Linux?

</comment><comment><USER26> > Open or save file Dialog is just the worst in all regards.

I guess the author never used any Gtk+ 3 file dialog :-P. Honestly the fact that you can perform actual file manipulation, use shell extensions (e.g. version control overlay icons), etc put it above pretty much every other file dialog except perhaps KDE's (but AFAIK even that doesn't have all the functionality you'd see in a regular file manager window).

Having said that, yes, it is unnecessarily slow and not because of the features above since some applications use older versions of the dialog that still have these features but appear instantly. Not sure why the "full fledged" version is slow.

</comment><comment><USER27> The history of Microsoft is the history of workarounds on top of workarounds, year after year, rinse and repeat. Here's a novel thought: instead of providing yet another iteration of workarounds for the power user, how about just fixing it for every user.

Take for instance the Start Menu. When the Win-X "quick access" menu was added years ago, it was essentially an admission that the Start Menu is not the best way to start at least some things. It didn't really get much better since but the Search and Run functionality was integrated into it. Now one of the PowerToys replaces the Win-R menu as a yet another clumsy attempt at fixing the Start Menu by bypassing it. And it seems no new functionality beyond what is already implemented elsewhere is being added, except everything will of course get a different alternate look. Some more discussion about it here: [https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/44](https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/44)

It looks like there isn't anyone at Microsoft who can take a look at the big picture and decide what they actually want to accomplish with the UI in the medium run. Different groups of people come and go, keep adding different things, abandon them, after a while somebody else starts off with yet another approach in parallel without drawing any conclusions from the failed previous one, etc. The lack of co-ordination really amazes me. Microsoft used to once advertise with the slogan "Where do you want to go today?" These days it seems to me they're not going anywhere, just running in circles.

<comment><USER14> I think it's an interesting refutation to Google's "one search box to rule them all" philosophy. Over the course of Windows Vista through 8.1 Microsoft _attempted just that_ at a consumer scale that Google could only wish they could impact "where they live". (As much as people assume people live in the browser, Windows is still Windows.) The evidence mounted up _overwhelmingly_ that people didn't want just one search box, that Google is wrong (they've yet to unify their search boxes like they claim to philosophically anyway), and that the context of where a search box appears _matters_ , and so Windows 10 has seen the re-separation of search boxes.

One of those "context" switches that Microsoft finds is a useful context to know is "power user" versus "regular user": regular user Start Menu versus power user Win+X, regular user Search and Run versus power user Win+R/PowerTopys Run. (At one point in Windows 8 Microsoft tried to use the Win+R shortcut for something that wasn't "power user run a thing" and nearly saw a revolt.) It becomes a self-selecting "reveal" of different feature sets to match what features the user thinks they are ready for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> that are actually the small little things which are fast on a Mac. This seconds of thought are also clearly visible on some Ubuntu machines... Gnome is not always optimized and Snap programs make you think your laptop is frozen.

<comment><AUTHOR> Contrary to release notes latest Gnome 3 in Ubuntu 20.04 is slower on my machine compared to the previous one in 19.10. That's why I switched to XFCE which is super snappy. Not i3 snappy, but really close. I've also experienced increased startup time with Snap, Flatpak and AppImages regardless of DE.

<comment><USER29> > Not i3 snappy

i3 isn't even snappy, the default application launcher can take up to 10 seconds to open on my old laptop.

There is a faster application launcher you can use instead, but you have to hunt through github issues to find out about it. The i3 project maintainers seem to actively object to telling users about 3rd party components and simultaneously refuse to integrate them or improve the default behaviour.

<comment><USER20> Are you talking about dmenu? That's always been fast on my machine (sway, not i3).

<comment><USER29> Yup, although it's i3 not dmenu causing the problem.

[https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/949](https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/949)

Reported 7 years ago...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Recently Windows team made a few stunning announcements

More and more telemetry in each subsequent OS release. The fact I had to flip 6 switches off during OOBE on a brand new MS Surface followed by a "hosed" Windows Update run tells me they still haven't figured out what their power users want.

</comment><comment><USER31> You can't whinge about time spent on animations and then also complain about flickering. Teams being told that design doesn't matter is why so few developers on windows and linux care about flickering at all.

Although I definitely agree that it's absurd that in 2020 an operating system doesn't have a standard built in way to reconfigure key shortcuts in any application installed.

</comment><comment><USER32> Can windows terminal be used remotely? The only remote terminal I am aware of in windows is remote powershell but it sucks badly. It takes ages to come online after a reboot, is unencrypted by default, and because of security issues cannot interact with windows update.

<comment><USER33> Yes, you can do that with ssh even from cmd.exe. Windows ships with an ssh server too, you just have to enable those features.

<comment><USER32> Thanks. I wasn't aware of that. But it looks like it is a recent thing only available on the latest version of windows server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> For such a powerful power user, it seems that the author never had any JSON editors set up on his environment, removed the default keyboard shortcuts from Terminal, and couldn't figure out how to customize the context menu. Hmmmm.

</comment><comment><USER35> "It doesn't have no syntax highlighting," ...[scrolls down] (Blockchain engineer): ahhhhh, ok

All jokes aside, author: "no" should be "any" in this sentence. Double negatives are rarely used in English.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Putting ads in your 3 second blog animations? Really? Comes across as incredibly trashy.

Unrelated to the article, sorry. I have never seen this before...

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry for that. As Streamable states: ads will be shown as soon as video becomes popular. But they didn't state exactly how popular. I couldn't find any other convenient method to embed small animations with fine quality and ability to pause them. Any recommendation is appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Comparing with my current macos build, it seems like a bliss to use really.</comment>


Mark Karpelès, ex-CEO MtGox – AMA - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/89o16y/im_mark_karpel%C3%A8s_exceo_of_bankrupt_mtgox_ask_me/?st=JFL67ETU&sh=202cdb9c <comment><USER2> > Japanese bankruptcy law has a particularly nasty outcome here, and I want to > address this up front. As creditors claims were registered, those claims > were registered in the valuation of Japanese Yen on the bankruptcy date. > That's the only way Japanese bankruptcy law can work (most bankruptcy laws > around the world operate this way for that matter). This means that the > claims can be paid back in full, and there will still be over 160,000 > bitcoin and bitcoin cash in assets in the Gox estate. The way bankruptcy law > works is that if there are any assets remaining after the creditors have > been paid in full, then those assets are distributed to shareholders as part > of the liquidation.

> That's the only way any bankruptcy law can reasonably work. And yet, in this > case, it produces an egregiously distasteful outcome in that the > shareholders of MtGox would walk away with the value of over 160,000 bitcoin > as a result of what happened.

Hilarity ensues.

<comment><USER3> That's amazing. He screwed up and lost so much of the customers' money the company so much they had to go into bankruptcy, which pegged the company's debts at the bitcoin-to-yen rate of 2014. The company has over 200,000 bitcoins.

So the rise in value of bitcoin has made Mt Gox extremely valuable in bankruptcy (possibly more valuable than if it were properly managed from the beginning) and now Mark Karpeles is a billionaire. Is that a correct understanding?

<comment><USER4> That's just for the bankruptcy case. There are other cases/class actions on the way.

<comment><USER5> Bankruptcy in the US (which is of course different than Japanese bankruptcy) may discharge those contingent liabilities as well, IIRC from law school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how many people want to find this guy for personal vendetta's. His life must be a living hell

<comment><USER7> To me the lesson from all of this is, this is why financial regulations exist. Many nations have gone through this same thing with their own currencies, and the end result is something like the US FDIC, where properly regulated banks have their balances backed up by the federal government and if the bank goes out of business everyone gets their money back.

Many people I know who are opposed to this kind of regulatory structure have invested in some way in BitCoin due to their lack of regulatory structure, and some of them have been burned by it.

You can hate the guy for his mistakes, but ultimately this would have been far less likely to happen with a stable currency backed up by a stable regulatory body.

<comment><USER8> It's ironic because cryptocurrencies were made to eliminate third party risk.

Another take away from mtgox was to keep your coins on your local, not on an exchange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't really understand his sentiment. It's not like he's stealing a billion dollars from charity. The people who lost out will get their money. They were speculators at the end of the day, and I don't really have much sympathy for them with regard to their loses of 10x gains.

I guess he might still be facing jail time or threats from the the community, so he has to put on some type of sympathetic face.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is coinjar related in anyway to mtGox?

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting that he makes an AMA appearance, roughly a month after the BBC File on 4 (top quality investigatory journalism) piece: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tdyjz](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tdyjz)

<comment><USER12> He's been active on Reddit for years (he deleted history). Doing the AMA is related to the recent actions of the trustees to liquidate a large portion of Bitcoin. The amount liquidated is apparently enough to reimburse account holders with the USD value of the BTC lost at the time. Mark has no control over the trustee actions.

The details of the liquidation are unclear. It's reported that they weren't sold directly on the market, but nevertheless extra supply has almost certainly had a dramatic effect on Bitcoin price. It's one of very a few examples of a particular action/event having a direct impact on price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://i.redd.it/l578yxh3c3xz.jpg](https://i.redd.it/l578yxh3c3xz.jpg)</comment>


Ask HN: Do you work in a company that will fire you for average performance? - <AUTHOR> I heard in NPR today that Netflix fires people that are average and only keeps those that are exceptional. Does any one have any experience working in such a company? When I heard about netflix, it seemed like life would be very stressful if you always have to worry about getting fired. But on the plus side, you get to learn a lot and work with exceptional people, which is a great way to learn. ANy experiences or opinions? <comment><USER2> In general, performance reviews are great in theory, but fall down in application. Theoretically, a review is a time to talk about the great work you did, what you learned, and what your goals are. Your manage can respond will honest feedback and a merit increase.

The reality is reviews are a part of a process, and your rank in them depends in part on the quota set by HR. Most of the time, HR wants employees to fit within a bell curve for rankings. In some extreme examples, people's reviews were based on a predetermined track and not on actual performance.

Netflix's policy is just HR marketing. If all you do is keep your 4 and 5, then what makes those people 4 and 5 will start to become 2 and 3. It's a moving goalpost, and sounds like an effort to increase productivity without increasing compensation.

I may be jaded.

<comment><USER3> If you fire all the 1's, 2's, and 3's, you have to hire people to fill in those positions. And in one year, the whole group gets re-evaluated, including the new hires. I'd think it would take quite a few cycles before the people who were 4's and 5's became 2's and 3's, while maintaining their same levels of productivity.

I think GE was well known for doing a similar practice under Jack Welsch and they still had plenty of long-term employees. I don't think the system is particularly desirable though.

<comment><USER4> Culling the bottom 10% is great when you measure accurately and you have 15% dead weight. But what about when those conditions are not met?

<comment><USER5> Legend has it that Vancouver's billionaire tycoon Jim Pattison ...

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

... used to have a policy in effect in his car dealerships that the worst producing salesman would be fired every month.

For instance, this is remarked upon in this National Post article:

[http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=fb5f68f1-5946-4b46...](http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=fb5f68f1-5946-4b46-8a1b-6428db31d1d7)

(search for word "salesman"). I think, no conditions were applied. Worst just meant not as many sales or as much revenue as the second worst salesman.

<comment><USER6> Can you volunteer as tribute, though?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I work in a law firm that will fire great attorneys. It's part of the big law business model. Up or out and very few get up'd into partnership. So eventually you get fired (after 8-12 years depending on firm.)

So I know eventually my ass will get fired. It's just a matter of when.

I don't really understand it. But it's how the industry works.

Edit: 8-12 is for unambiguously great attorneys. A lot of decent attorneys get shown the door after 4-6 years. People who can't hack it (usually because they won't put up with be worked like a slave) will only make it 2-4 years. A lot of people quit.

<comment><USER8> At 8-12 years do you get paid more than a new hire? Seems a "good" way to keep costs down, having the bulk of work done by the new guys - and a few partners to oversee everything.

The downside is the average experience of your employee is going to be a lot lower, but that must not be the top goal of the law firms that employee this.

<comment><USER9> Just one example of a big law firm in NY:

[http://www.lawfirmstats.com/firms/Willkie-Farr- Gallagher/all...](http://www.lawfirmstats.com/firms/Willkie-Farr- Gallagher/all-offices/compensation.php)

Newly hired attorneys make US 160k, while those 8 years in typically make US 280k.

There's a little bit of movement if you've changed firms, but there's a good chance if you work for a big law firm you're in this ballpark.

A partner's comp is structured differently.

<comment><USER7> If you add in bonus, it's there is an even bigger difference. This past year first years got 15k bonus, and 8th years got 100k.

combined: 175k for first, 380k for 8th years.

<comment><USER10> To your point below, I suspect the 8-10 year person is creating more value with less supervision than a new hire. Being able to manage a project/client solo, even a small one, makes your work incremental revenue to the firm. More so if you're involved in bringing in the business....

I have new hires; they take a LOT more supervision... and our group's output is limited to the speed at which our senior folks can originate projects...

<comment><USER8> I mean I would rather have 2 10 year experienced developers than 3 brand new developers, even if the cost was the same.

But maybe law firms do not think this way..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Each quarter Yahoo employees are rated and placed into one of five categories: misses, occasionally misses, achieves, exceeds, greatly exceeds:

[http://pastebin.com/KEQjYynr](http://pastebin.com/KEQjYynr)

A number of my boss's reports had landed in the achieves category for all of 2014, but nonetheless received a communication from HR this past April that they were in the bottom 5% of the company for 2014 and at risk for termination if their performance did not improve. This surprised my boss and the reports.

Obviously if you're in the bottom 5% you're well below average. The question is how you can consistently be ranked in the middle category yet nonetheless be in the bottom 5%. That would seem to make the quarterly ratings a rather pointless exercise for communicating to employees what their ongoing performance is.

<comment><USER12> Sounds like Marissa Mayer took Google's stack-ranking machinery and replicated, awful detail by awful detail. What a queynte.

At Google, the bottom categories are rarely used and "Meets Expectations" is a huge window (3.0-3.4) from the 3rd to 65th percentile. Since you only get your bucket, your manager could be saying that he's giving you a perfectly respectable 3.4, while actually raping you in the ass with a 3.0.

Often, you have managers who give the 3.0 and 3.1 to keep reports immobile (they can't transfer) while conveying that they are getting average or average-plus scores. But whenever there's a witch-hunt-I-mean-dishonest- layoff-I-mean-"Low Performer Initiative" those people given 3.0s get hit with PIPs, which is not what even their managers wanted.

<comment><USER13> We've banned this account. Calling Marissa Mayer a cunt is an egregious violation of the civility that HN requires. (Using an archaic spelling doesn't change that, it just makes it weird.) No one gets to do this here.

I told you just three days ago that if you wouldn't or couldn't stop doing this, I would ban your account [1]. This comes after more warnings, reminders, cajolings, and please-dont's than anyone has received in the history of HN by a long shot. It's painfully evident that you won't or can't stop, and it's time we applied the rules equally.

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994684](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994684)

Edit: the parent comment was killed by user flags. We didn't delete it or moderate it.

<comment><USER14> The real reason why michaelochurch was banned: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10011017](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10011017) .

<comment><USER13> No. I don't know what that comment means, but presumably it's a sophomoric joke, and we don't ban people for that.

The reasons are the ones I gave and have given many times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I worked in a company like that. Everyone was ranked against their peers, and if you were below ~40% more than two years in a row, you were "counseled out."

I didn't find it stressful. Partly because I was never in danger, and partly because I knew what I was getting into. But I think it's a bad practice, mainly because it just doesn't work. Empirically what I've observed is a bunch of people in the wrong role, not the wrong company.

It's expensive to fire people: companies could save a lot by making lateral moves easier, and doing better internal matchmaking. As in matching people <\--> responsibilities, not like... dating :).

<comment><USER4> How did you find enough new hires to replace the massive attrition? Or did high achievers alternate between working hard and slacking off?

<comment><USER8> What is the normal tech company attrition? I would think 20-30% seems normalish, but I never had full HR docs of a fortune 500 company or anything to look at. Generally a bunch of people quit after 1 or 2 years - if not you stayed for 10-20. If most of the fired people were the going to quit anyways people, no big change. (But i assume at least some of the low performers are the 20 year vets as they are burned out)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Imo it's just marketing.

They want to be known as a place where only exceptional people work in the hopes that they'll get higher quality hires.

In reality they'll fire people for the same reasons any other company does

<comment><USER17> All our programmers are above average. LOL. Garrison Keillor maybe helping with their PR?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have a theory that the talent level at most companies has almost nothing to do with ridiculous HR policies, but rather two things:

1) Project/Field 2) Name brand recognition

The game industry has a lot of overqualified people on very poor salaries in poor conditions because games are sexy. Google has both sexy projects and name brand recognition, which allows them to recruit top level talent despite the fact that their interview process is absurd and frankly, pretty insulting to qualified professionals (can you imagine doctors or lawyers going through similar processes?). Reason being, having google on your resume opens a lot of doors, and there's a chance you get to work on something really cool.

So I don't know anyone that works at Netflix, but I would believe they have mostly above average engineers not because of this bizarre practice of firing "average" people, but because they have enough recognition to find above average people in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER19> _But on the plus side, you get to learn a lot and work with exceptional people, which is a great way to learn._

Exceptional at politics and boss management.

</comment><comment><USER7> That certainly colors the year long parental leave program Netflix just rolled out.

Yea take a year, no problem!

But remember, we fire average people! Do average people take a year? You decide for yourself!

</comment><comment><USER20> "average" with respect to the company, or the population of programmers as a whole? If normally distributed and sufficiently large, you'd be getting rid of half your company under the former. The latter seems like a tough thing to measure to begin with. I can't imagine either really being the case.

Though it does sound somewhat similar to the concept of "stack ranking", which a few companies (such as MS) are notable for having used as part of their annual review process in the past.

Stack ranking has always sounded to me like an absolutely poisonous thing to implement in an otherwise healthy office. But if the organization knows that it needs to implement a reduction in force regardless, then I guess it might make sense if management does not have a feel for who their best engineers are.

<comment><USER21> The advantage of stack ranking is that it's a formal process, and one in which managers' behavior is more measurable and reviews are definitively scheduled. It also aligns employee churn with performance to some degree, moving weaker hires out and encouraging better hires to stay, again via a formal process.

What it reduces is the tendency of less formal processes to give raises to those who ask and to stiff those who don't and to throw up the "your salary is confidential". All those things it avoids are known to create a high potential for bad company culture and moral.

<comment><USER22> Considering the quality of software and innovation produced by MS while stack ranking was in place, and the drop in software quality coming out of Google after its own version of stack ranking was introduced, it seems unlikely to be effective.

As I understand it individuals were stack ranked within teams, so even if a team outperformed the company or industry average, individuals were still tagged as underperformers.

And generally it became a matter of politics, popularity, and self-promotion, not objective competence - which is hard to measure anyway.

To me, it seems like a fast road to madness.

As for Netflix - I can't imagine any company needs to be staffed entirely by ninja rockstar code demi-gods. Many development projects are mundane and by the numbers, and basic competence is fine. If you want to be disruptive, hire a core of creative innovators who can code. They probably won't be ninjas, but for product development, talented customer-oriented innovators are a really good thing in any business that sells stuff to real customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you eliminate the "average" segment of your staff, then the "exceptional" team members become the new average, and you terminate the next average group, you eventually wind up with one - maybe two.

<comment><USER24> If you eliminate the "average" segment of your staff, then you fire good staff next time around.

Alternatively: if you eliminate the "average" segment of your staff, then you fire their "average" replacements next time around?

<comment><USER25> In practice, many firms eliminate the "average" section of staff and replace with fresh grads who aren't particularly likely to be better than "average" but are cheap.

Rinse and repeat often enough (and preferably with an incentive scheme that justifies average starting pay and ridiculous working hours with the promise of fantastic rewards _if you manage not to get fired for the first three years_ ) and bizarrely, you get a reputation for high standards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash I work in academia, where things move slowly. When lag is expected, turnover is expensive. Also, it being a university, my employer is much more concerned with educating us and broadening our skill sets, rather than discarding employees like a half-eaten slice of pizza that didn't quite have as much pepperoni as you wanted.

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks like Intel sure does...

[https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/3fvss3/r...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/3fvss3/regarding_recent_intel_layoffs/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Have you ever met someone who was a hobbyist or amateur engineer at best, but always has grand ideas about how things _should_ work? But has no idea of the type of investment or execution it would take to pull off. That is what I think of whenever I hear management strategies like these. It is like the management version of the compost fueled cars guy:

[https://youtu.be/DkGMY63FF3Q?t=10s](https://youtu.be/DkGMY63FF3Q?t=10s)

Deciding that you only want the best people is easy. Is there really a business out there who decides they want terrible staff? Determining who those people are is extremely difficult. Even if you are successful in identifying the best people, can you keep them? Whenever I find exceptional people, it takes more than 'not firing' them to keep them.

More realistically. Policies like these aren't designed with any idea of identifying or retaining talent. Instead they are usually a means to affect work culture. Like grading on a curve. It makes everyone work harder.

</comment><comment><USER28> I would be worried that it make performance management of _managers_ difficult. Which is to say a manager who fires people as a way of preventing themselves from being fired. The trick being "Yeah, last quarter did kind of suck but we fired that loser Bob, this quarter will be great." In fact there are a couple of reasons why the quarter was poor, it could have been poor Bob but it could also be the manager isn't cutting it. Unless the group has the option of voting the manager out of the organization, the whole "save the best, fire the rest" algorithm has problems. Or more accurately it has a blind spot with respect to management.

The interesting question for NetFlix will be how durable it will be as a structure. My impression is that it selects for the wrong attributes in management. But time will tell.

<comment><USER21> Because there is a structure, I suspect stack ranking makes it easier to identify empire building. Highly ranked individuals should exhibit behaviors that correlate with their high ranking such as moving to more challenging work within or without the team and company. High ranked individuals should be the sort of people that the next couple of layers of management are aware of because they create value and solve hard problems. High ranked individuals should be the ones other managers are trying to poach sideways. High ranked individuals should be the ones that the manager relies on to explain technical detail to upper management layers. They should natural have a particular kind of visibility on email strings.

Any culture where a manager can explain away a bad quarter by blaming their underlings is already screwed.

<comment><USER28> I agree with that last bit, but there is anecdotal evidence from employees that there is some validity to keeping a ready supply of people you can jettison out of your group in order to maintain altitude.

<comment><USER21> If I put myself in the shoes of a good manager, what do I do under stack ranking?

If my team is strong bottom to top, I try to find soft landings for my lower ranked employees because...well making people successful is what good managers do and concern for people as individuals beyond instrumental value is also a positive trait and it just seems fair and right in a karmic sense of the world.

On the the other hand, if the bottom people aren't really strong, a good manager gets cover for going against their positive traits.

<comment><USER28> As with most things, it works great with the design ideal person in the key positions. All organizational structures can work fabulously well when all you have are good managers and employees[1]. The question then is how does the organizational structure/guidelines deal with bad actors? All management structures include some sort of performance management, both for individual contributors and managers. Generally there is an incentive plan, a retention plan, and an attrition plan. You provide incentives to encourage people to perform beyond their own expectations, you provide a retention plan to keep the people who are delivering day to day, and you provide an attrition plan for helping people who aren't working out into a position somewhere else where they have a chance of being more successful. This is just management 101, the trick though is forced attrition and grain level boundaries (outlines of various attrition pools).

Forced attrition plans set up the dynamic that you find yourself in a pool of peers and you know that no matter what, every year one of you is going to get let go. You don't want it to be you, you know that you can be meeting all of the objectives of the organization and still be "the guy (or gal)" because no matter what, someone is going to get picked. My assertion is that bad managers, ones who embrace behaviors that good managers do not, can find ways to protect themselves at the expense of the good managers. It isn't good for the company of course, but the dynamic is already launched into motion. Given a very small epsilon that bad (in this case unprincipled) managers are probabilistically slightly less likely to lose their jobs, the system will slowly over time select for effective, but morally ambiguous managers. This is a very common evolutionary experiment folks run in simulation all the time. The smaller the epsilon the longer it takes, but it always happens.

[1] Sometimes that leads people astray into thinking it is their organizational structure, not their people, which accounts for their success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think it's wrong. It creates an arrogant, elitist culture within the company. Also I don't think anyone in the world knows what an 'exceptional engineer' is - If there even is such a thing.

If you put too much pressure on engineers to produce lines of code, they will optimize for that at the expense of quality/maintainability of the project.

I have worked for a number of startups which advocated the practice of 'cutting corners'. I think it doesn't work in practice because technical debt tends to creep up on you much sooner than you think. Unless the whole company's future is hinging around meeting a specific deadline for a specific feature, then there is no excuse for cutting corners.

I think the personality of the engineer is much more important than their skills. I have worked at companies that fired people after the first month - This is ridiculous.

You wouldn't fire a business executive after 1 month on the job because of poor growth metrics - The downtrend is probably a flow-on effect from past periods of mismanagement. This is exactly the same in engineering. You can't measure the consequences of technical decisions until many months of even years after they are implemented.

While you might think you're firing 'bad engineers' \- You are in fact just firing random engineers based on random events like market timing, which team they are part of, direction of the wind, phase of the moon, etc... Just chaos.

</comment><comment><USER30> The question is also very much, how performance is measured. I saw performance measuring that was on the level of "solved tickets" \-- with some special cases: E.g. when you did all the research and somebody else closed the ticket (with minimal effort), it was his.

There where plenty of fraudulent abuse of this system and in the aftermath, I guess it would have been better to flip a coin!

In such a system, the performance measuring as such, is undermining the corporate culture.

</comment><comment><USER31> "Fire you for average performance" is a bit of a loaded term and implies a certain unfairness or vindictiveness.

I'd rephrase that to be– do you work in a team with uncommonly high standards? I'd imagine this to be the case at any cutting-edge company. Consider say, the special forces in any military. If you don't meet the grade, or you don't carry your fair share of the weight, you don't get to stay. That's just tha name of the game. I assume that this must be the case at all the exciting companies– Tesla, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc etc.

It's not stressful if the expectations are set in advance, and the precise conditions for firing are clearly stated, and you get the feedback and assistance you need to stay afloat.

I work with a small team that prides itself on being results-oriented, and I love it. As far as I can tell, everybody we hired is hired because they bring their A game.

I'd much prefer this to being a part of a team that "carries" people who don't perform.

Of course, we've all also heard horror stories by now of ridiculous young founders who come up with extreme ideas about productivity, 80-100 hour work weeks and whatnot. Sustainability is important.

</comment><comment><USER32> My company will fire you for average performance. They do it quite pointedly. One day you're at your desk, and an HR rep with an armed security guard will come and get you. They'll escort you to an office, explain that you're being terminated, and remind you that you're an at-will employee. They'll give you some forms about insurance, and then the guard will walk you to the door. They do not let you clean out your desk. They not let you say goodbye to anyone. Sadly, this is the same procedure that my company uses if you give notice. They do not except two weeks notice. The same day you give notice, or perhaps a day or two later, you will go through this ritual.

To your point, I work for a sales organization. It doesn't matter if your performance reviews are outstanding. If you go more than a couple of weeks without results, the director of sales operations begin sending you nasty emails. Within a month after that, your escorted out the door.

This might be just the sales world, but at some point people deserve to be treated like human beings. Not like replaceable cattle.

</comment><comment><USER33> The keyword you're looking for here is "topgrading". Basically it's management social darwinism that breaks down a team into "A Players" "B Players" and so on with the end goal being to weed out anything below "A-" by applying extra pressure on them until they either turn into "A players", or quit. Firing is a last resort. Netflix in particular is well known for encouraging people to voluntarily quit if they can't hack it.

The question is of course if all the "A Players" live and breath the company, voluntarily coming into the office on weekends, doing conference calls at 4AM etc - and you are the kind of person who values their family for instance, and wants a little work life separation, what score do you get? What happens if when offered a year long paternity leave, you actually take them up on it? How hostile will the environment be at the company when you return? Or what happens if you have a medical problem that impacts your job performance? And so on...

But, to answer your question... I once got sucked into a management overhaul at a company that used Netflix-style topgrading as justification for a wave of layoffs. The whole self-deportation aspect of it doesn't work very well - people dragging their feet in a job are often reluctantly there because they need things like medical insurance, have bills to pay and families to feed. Being able to just up and voluntarily quit a job because you're "not a good fit" is a luxury. So everyone who was a "B Player" (aka in a role that wasn't well defined) got put through hell for a month then fired, and then the remaining "A Players" lost morale and took up the voluntary quitting aspect. So basically it backfired into brain-drain and a chronic "A Player" retention problem.

</comment><comment><USER34> Old but good post ("where everybody is above average"): [http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake- wobeg...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobegon- strategy.html)

<comment><USER35> Interesting post, I hadn't seen that before. Here is another factor to worry about: If you hire too many mediocre programmers, the good ones will leave. (Trust me, they can get jobs easily.) You'll be stuck with the mediocre ones.

[http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis- the-d...](http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-dead-sea- effect/)

I think the NetFlix strategy is partly a response to this.

People pretend there is a 10x difference between programmers. I assure you that is way too low. The difference is actually Infinite, because contributions can be negative (I've seen a bad programmer set back a project by 6 months). Even worse, a programmer can create a toxic atmosphere, causing good programmers to leave.

I like the NetFlix strategy. Some people are just a hell of a lot more productive than other people. (Example: [http://bellard.org/](http://bellard.org/) )

<comment><USER34> _I assure you that is way too low. The difference is actually Infinite_

Exactly. There's also the case when someone is highly productive but only for _themselves_. They create all their own tools, their own environments, their own platforms, they follow their own homemade software development practices, use their own testing tools, and none of it integrates with the rest of the world. But, because one person made everything, that _single_ person is super productive (as long as they never step outside their own platform). They don't need documentation because they made everything from the ground up and their systems reflect their personal brain state.

Then you have to ask, even though one person is 10x, does it really help if nobody else can integrate with their work? Then every request, feature, bug fix is a bottle neck of 1 person no matter how much outside help you give them.

Your link also relates a lot to social platform evaporation: [http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software- sundays-2-the-...](http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software- sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/) — all the good people leave because too many mediocre people become a burden. Now you're left with a platform for ants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> That doesn't seem to be true: [http://www.quora.com/Does-the-Netflix-work- culture-create-a-...](http://www.quora.com/Does-the-Netflix-work-culture- create-a-culture-of-fear-amongst-its-employees)

<comment><AUTHOR> "Whenever I started feeling like I was falling short of what the company required from me, I viewed it as an opportunity to learn and grow, instead of blaming the culture for my anxiety"

\- I would argue that the way this guy thinks is a personality trait. I like the way he thinks. Does this mean, if you are going through some tough time in your personal life and can't put in as much hours, places like netflix is not for you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I worked at one of the worlds largest investment companies. Everyone in each group was reviewed and then fit to a bell curve. All compensation, title, and responsibility issues take the bell curve into consideration. This had the effect of making it possible to get fired for being "above average". If you have a group of 5, and they are the best employees in the company (all above average), well, a couple of you will still get, at the least, substandard raises and bonuses or, at the most (generally in times of cutbacks), fired. This is not uncommon for similar companies.

</comment><comment><USER38> But, wouldn't it be that per definition that the most people are average? You can only be exceptional compared to something that is not exceptional

<comment><USER39> > But, wouldn't it be that per definition that the most people are average?

That depends _which_ average. The usual "average" (arithmetic mean) isn't defined in a way that any actual individuals in the sampled group have to be at the average. (Some other "averages", like the mode, must be represented, but even with the mode it only is the most common single value, its quite possible, and normal, to have more not at the mode than at the mode.)

While empirically lots of things are distributed so that the area _near_ the arithmetic mean on the most common scale is most heavily populated, there are cases where that isn't the case on any scale, e.g., bimodal distributions where the values cluster at two extremes and the average is somewhere between them.

> You can only be exceptional compared to something that is not exceptional

Yes, but a firm could in theory (if it could measure performance of its own staff and in the marketplace accurately enough) fire people who are at or below the _market_ average, and only retain those of above _market_ average performance, and everyone there (that survived those performance reviews) would be (by their most recent measure) above average -- exceptional, in that way -- for the market. (And this is true for any definition of "average" you want to use.)

This seems to be what Netflix is suggesting that they do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> My only experience with rated evaluations at a larger company were pretty ridiculous; I was rated a 4.5/5 by my immediate managers, but the higher-ups decided that everyone should be nerfed to between 2-3. Otherwise, they'd have to pay people. I'd bet netflix does a little better of a job but I'm sure it's mired in politics and other bullshit

</comment><comment><USER41> Sales for a publically traded company. If you don't show growth above average, you will be fired. Unrealistic quotas and complete ignorance of market conditions (quota is the same in a boom or bust) leads to high performance standards. It's a constant high pressure environment and most people quit before they are fired to avoid the shame of a firing.

</comment><comment><USER42> No. I work for a very large organisation. There have been cases of staff who did virtually no work at all and it was still a couple of years before they were fired.

</comment><comment><USER43> Have they clarified that those they retain are exceptionally high performers? Or their performance could simply be exceptional in some other regard...</comment>


Facebook tipped to outshine MySpace - <AUTHOR> http://business.smh.com.au/business/facebook-tipped-to-outshine-myspace-20090211-84qt.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone who has used both Facebook and MySpace over the past few years knows why Facebook won: much less intrusive advertisements and a simpler design for non-technical users.</comment>


While Mozilla executives make millions of dollars, Mozilla layoffs employees - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/christi3k/status/1217542576141524992 <comment><USER2> It would be hypocritical for them to ask engineers to _reduce their salaries_ , but layoffs are different: Mozilla's decisions here are consistent with:

\- money being tight

\- people currently earning fair salaries, however you want to define them

\- the executives being required

Yes, you can obviously question the number of executives, but that's just the usual, somewhat tired, pointy-haired-boss cynicism.

Asking them to earn less than their fair market value isn't going to work considering the competition. _Which is why these executives also did not ask these former employees to make any such compromise_.</comment>


Cloud Computing's Other Achilles' Heel: Software Licensing - <AUTHOR> http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2009/01/27/cloud-computings-other-achilles-heel-software-licensing.aspx

<comment><USER2> This is absolutely true - currently enterprise licensing is often (almost always) braindead.

I've often been forced to put in a new J2EE cluster (for example), because licenses are CPU based -- if the license is expensive it doesn't add up to run at 10% utility on a large, shared cluster. To get bang-for-license-buck you're forced to run on only dedicated hardware.

Really annoying because it destroys economies of scale - you have all this bity infrastructure. Not only is this a pain to maintain, but it also means that you generally end up with more infrastructure, and use more energy, can't virtualize, etc, etc.

<comment><USER3> By no means a new problem. At my last company, one project I was tangentially involved with had a 5-node VCS cluster comprised of quad-processor machines running a wide variety of apps, one of which was Oracle. Oracle could obviously only be running on one node at a time on a maximum of 4 processors... Oracle wanted paying for 20 licenses anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Software providers need to move off of core-based licensing both due to how CPU evolution is going wider (multi-core) faster than it's going deep (GHz), and due to the cloud computing aspect.

A small post I made on the topic:

[http://www.digitalsanctuary.com/tech-blog/java/atg/rant- abou...](http://www.digitalsanctuary.com/tech-blog/java/atg/rant-about-core- based-licensing.html)</comment>


Bookless Public Library Opens In Texas - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/09/14/222442870/bookless-public-library-opens-in-texas <comment><USER2> Also known as the internet. j/k

It's a great idea. What I'd love to see is a way for you to be able to check out physical books in ebook form, maybe by scanning their ISBN while you're browsing the stacks.</comment>


Great Seal bug - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Seal_bug

<comment><USER2> Bet me to it by 6 minutes :)</comment>


How Dropbox sacrifices user privacy for cost savings - <AUTHOR> http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/04/how-dropbox-sacrifices-user-privacy-for.html?showComment=1302661727678

<comment><USER2> The author points to the behavior as a "flaw", but I disagree. There's no defect or bug in the software, it's an architectural design. It would be a flaw if Dropbox claimed that each user's data was individually encrypted with a private key tied to the user's account credentials, but I don't think that claim was made. I, for one, think that the deduplication is actually a huge benefit, saving time and bandwidth in unnecessarily uploading files.

As the author suggested, the only way to ever ensure that you're files are inaccessible to anyone but yourself is to encrypt them locally with something like EncFS or TrueCrypt.

<comment><USER3> Maybe from the perspective of Dropbox it's "an architectural design", but from the perspective of a user facing an RIAA lawsuit, it would be a flaw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Its a pity this wasn't upvoted more ... I guess we'll have to wait for an incident of this to actually happen before people come back to this post to ooh and aah over how prescient it was. Good writeup.</comment>


Julian Assange Was Expelled for Exposing Pres. Lenin Moreno's Corruption - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/MashiRafael/status/1116334415096025089 <comment><AUTHOR> Someone--guess who :)?--leaked some emails, business accounts showing corruption and a photo of the President, Lenin, eating a lobster breakfast in his bed. Looks like Ecuador is going through austerity measures so doesn't look good.

[http://inapapers.org/index.html](http://inapapers.org/index.html)

[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6919797/Was- Julian-...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6919797/Was-Julian- Assange-expelled-embassy-leaked-picture-lobster.html)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/world/europe/ecuador- assa...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/world/europe/ecuador-assange- wikileaks.html)

<comment><USER2> I don't know, everything about this story is strange. Last year the Ecuador embassy cut off Assange's internet access, then Wikileaks began giving public statements that it was sitting on a trove of documents concerning Moreno and the Ecuadorian government that many people interpreted as a veiled threat. Shortly after, Assange's internet access was restored and Wikileaks never released the alleged documents. The documents were obviously released anyways but there's no clear evidence that Wikileaks or Assange was involved. I'm guessing whoever was the original source for the documents released it themselves after Wikileaks declined to. This isn't the first time Wikileaks has been implicated in selectively releasing information for political purposes. Wikileaks also declined to release a massive collection of documents concerning corruption in the Russian government for unknown reasons during the same period it was releasing sensitive documents leaked from the CIA and NSA. Those documents were also released by the original sources after Wikileaks declined to release them.</comment></comment>


FTC Announces Winners of "Zapping Rachel" Robocall Contest - <AUTHOR> http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/08/ftc-announces-winners-zapping-rachel-robocall-contest

<comment><USER2> I work in the telecom space. I was previously over the carrier network at MagicJack and oversaw about 600 million minutes a month of telecom "traffic". I can say that the awareness is a step in the right direction, but these "solutions" are anything but a solution.

I don't think it's as simple as people think - for example, simply make sure the person owns the CallerID. At what point in the call stream would that be validated? You have to think that, when a call is made through a typical VoIP provider, it is most likely passed through 10 carriers (through arbitrage long-distance, then IXCs, then tandem/CLLI/POI CLLI).

I believe a good step would be to simply let the FTC trace using the CIC code that all carriers send over the PSTN/traditional telecom network. That way, the FTC could track a particular call or number through all the carriers until it reaches the originating information. The FTC has the capability to do that now, and based on the number of subpoena requests I've received (about 10/day), they actively do it.

The problem is that the companies doing the "illegal" robocalling (business to consumer/DNC or TSR violations) are overseas. There is no way, IMHO, that it can be stopped as long as long-distance providers exist.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, if these were real solutions, I'd pay a lot more than $3K to get the details on them. I've spent far more than that on the problem.

At one point we were doing around a billion calls a day by a customer that swore they had nothing to do with dialer. They mixed the traffic very skillfully, so they always kept their overall statistics just at the contractual limit.

Blocking repeated source numbers just means people start making up numbers. At that point, you can't really block things. You could perhaps get a score of the likelihood of a call being legit, and perhaps retroactively you could determine a bunch of calls had a high amount of dialer. But I don't think it's possible to find an algorithm that has a good-enough accuracy rate to do real- time blocking.

Of course, from a telecom perspective, I don't really care about the content of the call. I just want the avg duration to not be so low that other carriers get upset. To that end, simply making sure dialer customers don't hangup immediately seems to suffice.

<comment><USER2> Michael,

You are exactly right. All the traditional means (like blocking a callerID) is far past it's useful time. The dialer companies are getting smarter as well. It's BIG business for them, so it's worth the money to figure out solutions.

Also, it's very difficult to error on the side of caution - you do not want to block a normal phone call, or your upstream will stop sending you calls and you lose money.

Typically, a dialer customer will hangup once an answering machine is detected (usually around 2 seconds into the call) - causing lots of short duration calls. What the dialer customer's are doing now, is simply holding the call open for longer, to raise their overall ACD. It's a tough game. The moment telecom carriers start caring about what the call is (call types, information in the call, etc) - they become liable.

<comment><USER3> That's the thing I don't get - if a dialer customer doesn't immediately hangup on answering machines, and gets past the 6-second mark, "magically", everyone stops considering it dialer. Their rates then drop dramatically. That is, the dialer people are literally costing themselves more money by aggressively hanging up.

OTOH, it seems like a lot of people in telecom can't do simple math. For instance, the desire of customers wanting to buy flat rate for a very non-flat area. It's trivial to show that they'll never end up paying less on a flat rate, but they still insist.

If the stats are good, then why would any carrier care about the content? A lot of dialer is legal (like political dialer).

<comment><USER2> You got it! Political surveys as well as B2B. It makes no sense that it's magically non-dialer since 75% of the calls are now 12 seconds instead of 6 seconds :P

People don't understand that flat-rate in this day in age means "I will send you all of my calls that are above the flat-rate, to your flat-rate" \- aka LCR'ing the flat-rate. The whole industry has changed so much in the last 4 years. I am excited to see if the $0.0007 flat intercarrier FTC ruling will ever go through.

You are right - if the stats are good, the carrier doesn't care. The stats are the ONLY thing the carrier can control, and should control, imo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My home phone routes callers not on a white list to a message to "press 1 to ring the line", then drops them into voice mail if they don't do so. A blacklist requires callers to "press 1 to leave a message." Voice mails are transcribed and e-mailed to both me and my wife.

Since implementing this about a year ago, I've had zero robocalls actually ring my home line. Previously I was getting 7-10 per week.

Implemented using Anveo call flow.

</comment><comment><USER5> I personally find the following low tech method effective for me:

o All home calls go to voicemail without exception. We pick up if we recognize the voice or the caller. No one seems to mind except my mother-in-law. She's gotten used to it though. I've also noticed everyone below a certain age rarely uses voice.

o I've added every number with which I regularly interact to my cell address book. If a call comes in from an unknown number, it goes to voicemail without exception.

YMMV.

Being both a math and a tech person, I would like to do a cost and effectiveness study comparing the purely technical solutions from the contest with solutions like the above.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting prize money amount of $3,133.70. I assume this is supposed to reference leet?

</comment><comment><USER7> The ease at which caller id is spoofed could be solved by the carriers. If sent called id information doesn't match line termination information (geo location and owned phone numbers) block the call.

<comment><USER8> This, just like IP spoofing is something that should be straightforward to correct. However, the carrier in both cases has incentives to continue allowing it (getting to charge for minutes, or bandwidth).

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't say that carrier's have a large incentive. Dialer or robocall traffic is normally frowned upon in the telecom community. We charge per minute, and dialer traffic is the worst offender or taking up large amounts of resources, while providing very little minutes. To give you an idea, a typical robodialer user may have 30% of their calls answered, and an average call length of 16 seconds. Whereas a "retail" or normal long-distance customer has an 85% answer ratio (ASR) and a 2+ minute average call length/duration (ACD). All of the tier-1 telecom carriers have strict rules AGAINST this type of traffic. From a business perspective, a single T1 (23/24 channels), I can get ~200-300k minutes/month worth of usage. With a dialer customer, I can expect about 40k minutes/month</comment></comment></comment>


Adam Carolla Interviews OK GO (audio) - <AUTHOR> http://www.adamcarolla.com/ACPBlog/2010/03/31/adam-and-ok-go/

<comment><AUTHOR> Direct link to mp3: [http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/nyc.podcast.play.it/...](http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/nyc.podcast.play.it/media/d0/d0/d0/dU/dI/d8/dY/UI8Y_3.MP3)

Really great interview about work, creativity, success, the music industry, etc. Very informative, with several funny parts.

Some interesting points:

\- two of the guys have known each other since they were 11

\- before the treadmill video, they had a video on iFilm that got 400K views - that's how they got the idea to do internet video

\- record labels are useful because they give you the time, freedom and $$ to do stuff like buy 8 treadmills and spend three weeks choreographing a music video

\- the internet stuff doesn't make enough money for their label so they need to find corporate sponsors. Different set of problems</comment>