Ask HN: How to induce productive mania? - <AUTHOR> When I first started programming, I fell in love.  Over a period of roughly 3 months, I maintained what can only be described as a productive mania.  I had a very positive mood, elevated energy levels, intrinsic motivation, and an overwhelming, driving, sense of happiness.
I would spend hours, and hours, pouring over documentation, absorbing everything I could.  I applied what I learned in projects that were relevant to me.  Every day I was EXCITED to wake up, and learn more.
That was 5 years ago, and I still look back on that time and wonder HOW?  HOW did my own body, naturally, without drugs, go into a state of HYPER productivity and HYPER positive mood?  Is it not possible to induce that state again somehow?  If I was capable of it once, why can't I control it? <comment><USER2> When I get like this I can write code and design systems as easily as breathing, but only for short stints, and once I go to bed and get a full nights sleep I'm done for a couple days.

It's like hyper vigilance but all I see is the computer, it's awesome (probably unhealthy), but I can't turn it on and off. There are triggers that usually work though.

If I stay up playing past 10pm it almost always turns on, and all of a sudden it's 4am and I've got standup in a couple hours, but I got a shit load completed.

I used to be able to take a lot of uppers, like smoking and drinking too much coffee/red bull, and that would stretch it out, but I can't do that anymore because I want to live past 40.

So now I get the effects over shorter periods of time, and really only when I stay up late.

I also find that when I'm really exhausted from lack of sleep, it actually kicks in faster, but when I do that, I just end up sleeping all weekend because I invariably end up working on something until 4am every day.

I'm still trying to figure out how to attain that extreme level of focus at will but it feels like it would require me to stop focusing on computers/electronics to try to figure it out, and that simply won't do.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mention something interesting:

"... and really only when I stay up late"

My "productive mania" that I mention in this thread, was predominantly late at night. I've always been something of a night owl, and at the time in my life where I began programming, I was able to stay up very late, and sleep in late.

Sometimes I wonder if productive mania is attainable only when you're functioning day-to-day, in your 'ideal' sleep cycle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why I can not control what you mean:

1\. Not much free time to code besides job, family and life.

2\. Not possible while coding at work. That stuff is just too random and boring to be exciting.

So I suppose to induce "productive mania" you could:

1\. Get big chunks of free time.

2\. Do stuff you are excited about. Do them because You want to and not because of some other goal (like getting money, attention, rewards etc.).

I manage to get that for very small scripts that I program in order to get some small things done for me personally. Those things (I hesitate to call them tasks or projects) are always done quick, work like a charm and do exactly what I need. It gives me a good feeling.

<comment><AUTHOR> You touch on something important.

"Do them because you want to, and not because of some other goal like money attention, rewards, etc."

This is an important preliminary step, toward productive mania, I believe. It's not clear though how to induce this. Are we really in control of what we find intrinsically motivating?

Let's say I have a programming project I'm working on. I'm excited about it, but only moderately so. I have a goal of turning it into a business, and making a moderate passive income from it. How can I turn this decent energy and motivation, into something explosive?

It would seem that I need to muster some intrinsic motivation, some desire to work on the project just for the sake of working on it, not for completing it, or making a business from it. I'm not sure how to accomplish that, or if it's even really possible when you're doing something that isn't entirely novel and new.

It's easy when something is new - You're intrinsically motivated to pursue it because it's, novel and exciting. But when you've done something before, it's less simple to find that intrinsic motivation.

<comment><USER3> My conclusion about motiviaton in general, after investigating this matter for a couple of years (not scientifically but nonetheless):

Intrinsic Motivation can not be created artifically.

Its funny, because I just recently found a little "trick" that somehow motivates me a little. I found this after I made a lot of lists of things, that I really like to do and during the course of it I realized that all of these things are really just fun and could never be turned into a job or towards creating a side-business (like watching movies, listening to music, hiking etc.). So most of the software projects, no matter how fun they are at first, include some unexciting parts and turn into work. The trick: I say to myself, when I have done boring task X, I will be allowed to do real fun stuff Y. I then try to imagine myself doing fun stuff Y and pretty fast I get into a good productive mood. (Sorry for the long introduction)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Try building something instead of learning something.

Also while programming I find I can stay productive if I always leave my project workspace where there's a bug or half-implemented feature I can start the next day.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this is good advice, and you're hitting on one aspect of my aforementioned 'productive mania'. When I started programming, I almost immediately went into building projects I was interested in, would use personally, and friends would use. That probably hard a big impact on why I was SO driven, SO productive, and SO energetic.

I try and work on projects like that nowadays, but I can't hit that extreme level of productivity and excitement. It seems that another aspect of that mind state, was that the 'newness' of programming coupled with the success I was having at it BUILDING something, brought heightened mental activity.

I just wish I could tap into that nowadays. Unfortunately, it seems like the brain comes alive most, in a novel environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're working on something hard, and you're working on something you care about, and you're pushing the limits of what you're capable of (but stopping short of being overwhelmed completely), you can do this.

But most of the time, several of those factors aren't ones you can control. The reality is that we have to work on mundane shit that we don't care about pretty frequently. Learning how to do that is much harder than learning how to be maniacally into something insanely cool.

</comment><comment><USER6> There was a book written to answer this exact question by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It's titled "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience"

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent, just bought it on my kindle. Thanks for the reference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You're hyper-productive when you feel you're working towards the goal of making your future better

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's a pre-requisite yes, but there's more to it for sure. I have a project I'm working on right now, and I get decent motivation and energy since it's a goal of mine, and it will make my future better... But I still struggle some days to even get started. And I have nowhere near the energy, creativity, and endurance, that I had when I started programming.

It would seem then that the "manic" and "hyper" part of the productivity, may be contingent on the novelty of the pursuit, as well as a handful of other factors?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Coffee, Energy Drinks</comment>


PacVim – PacVim is a game that teaches you vim commands - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jmoon018/PacVim <comment><USER2> See lots of people suggesting random things to learn vim, I'll throw one more on. Just run _vimtutor_ in your terminal. I ran through that two times and felt comfortable enough to switch to it

</comment><comment><USER3> Vim should be learned by blood sweat and tears Or you could just curse the random box you ssh into for not having nano

<comment><USER4> > Vim should be learned by blood sweat and tears

or learned via nethack.

To be honest, I know vi and emacs, and curse fresh Linux installs for having some weird editor with completely foreign control keys. :) Dunno if it's nano or something else, but it's mildly annoying to me. I tend to just uninstall it rather than muck around with the "alternatives" system.

<comment><USER5> Try openbsd then.

Default editor is mg, which is basically a micro-emacs reincarnation

<comment><USER6> The default editor is vi.

<comment><USER7> Ed is the standard text editor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A thread from 2018: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17077668](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17077668)

</comment><comment><USER9> Quite worthwhile: [https://vimvalley.com/](https://vimvalley.com/)

I have no connection whatsoever with the author, but VimValley was a great way to get into [http://spacemacs.org/](http://spacemacs.org/)

<comment> ethan-sorrell It's worth mentioning that registration is required to access a few trial tutorials with depth akin to vimtutor, then the full course is $99.

<comment><USER9> And also worth paying, in my opinion.

<comment><USER10> Worth paying $100 to access a tutorial? When the program itself comes with a tutorial built in? Can you give a quick review of what makes this tutorial worth $100 versus any other free or cheaper tutorial?

<comment><USER11> There's a lot -- I mean, a _lot_ \-- that the built-in Vim tutorial doesn't even try to cover. It was enough to make me feel like I was "good enough" with Vim, even though I rarely used it for editing anything more substantial than git commit messages and config files, and if that's what you want out of Vim it's fine! But I bought the ebook version last month of _Practical Vim_ when the publisher was running a "Christmas in July" sale, and it is kind of mind- blowing. (How did I not know about the ":find" command, and why do I need the ctrlp.vim plugin now that I do?)

As to the question about the $100 tutorial, though, that's... well, a lot, but I suppose it depends on whether "Vim Valley" takes an approach that "clicks" for you in ways other things don't. _Practical Vim_ is $23 for a DRM-free ebook, and it has a lot of hands-on exercises; I learn pretty well that way, I've found.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. I did the built in tutorial and read a bunch of online info on Vim but never really grokked it for _years_ until I decided to really focus on it for a while. There are a few concepts like talking to Vim like a person (which I included in the free portion of the course) that really helped it click for me.

There's a ton of free info on Vim around and it's perfectly viable to learn it on your own that way, it will just take a lot longer. Obviously I'm biased, since I made Vim Valley to be exactly what I think is the fastest and most enjoyable way to learn Vim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you have docker installed, you can run it (nearly) instantly with:

         docker run -it --rm freedomben/pacvim

<comment><USER14> I'd recommend --rm too so that the container is removed afterwards instead of sitting in your `docker ps --all` list.

<comment><USER13> Yeah definitely. I edited and added it. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've gone through a number of tutorials, games, and articles, but I still think the best resource I've found so far is actually a book, "Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought": [https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Vim- Edit-Speed-Thought/dp/1...](https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Vim-Edit-Speed- Thought/dp/1680501275/) . The book focuses on use cases which is a refreshing approach to Vim.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is what I used to learn vim [https://vim-adventures.com/](https://vim- adventures.com/)

Edit: Huh, looks like it doesn't work anymore. :/

</comment><comment><USER17> It doesn't actually run _in_ Vim though. I imagine a (keybinding-agnostic) Emacs version could be created.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is interesting, but it really needs a proper release with compiled executables for Windows / Mac OS / Linux! I appreciate there's a Docker option... but it's a game!

</comment><comment><USER19> "In the map text file, the walls are denoted by ampersands #" That isn't right, isn't it?

</comment><comment><USER20> Awesome. It would be a great hack to reimplement this in VimScript.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's 2019 and people are still needing to learn vi. It's not the people, it's vi.

<comment><USER22> When I see colleagues using their editor of choice, they're typically only using the basic features. The pro features that significantly speed up your editing flow remain undiscovered.

When I point out a faster way to accomplish a certain thing that is typically found in all editors, which often even is placed behind the same keyboard shortcut, they're like "oh, that's cool, I didn't know you could do that!". And that's without me knowing or having used that specific editor.

So I'd say it's the people, not vi, as it applies just as well to other editors or IDEs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why do this game when you can just get woken up on call at 3am with a laptop that you wiped and put Arch on last night for kicks?</comment>


CSS Realistic Text  - <AUTHOR> http://codepen.io/lbebber/full/byClL

<comment><USER2> I have one question, how does this syntax (the dollar symbol) work?

        $perspective:1200px;

Is it like "define" ?</comment>


Pure CSS3 Star Wars Lightsaber Checkboxes - <AUTHOR> http://codepen.io/ncerminara/pen/KzurJ

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys. This is my first post, but anyways, here's a fun little code snippet I made today bored that demos the CSS Checkbox "Hack".

The Checkbox Hack basically allows you to create simple click events in your HTML document without the use of JavaScript. It's done, like this:

        input[type=checkbox]:checked ~ div {}

Pretty interesting, but not really practical for cross-browser support (IE9 and below).</comment>


Ask 37signals: How do you process credit cards? - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/753-ask-37signals-how-do-you-process-credit-cards

<comment><USER2> At my work, we were pissed off at effortlessE, whose POS we were using. In about a week and a half, during the Christmas season, two and a half developers wrote us a new one. It's been running for three weeks now with barely a hitch, and it's much better than the old one.

I was surprised at how easy it was.

<comment><USER3> You will love this to! Looks like the are begging now?

"A company with three years of profitable operations needs funding for Nationwide Launch. Posted By: Ray Hayes Company: effortlessE Category: Funding Needed Location: San Diego, CA (United States) Post Date: 8/9/2007 12:32:01 AM effortlessE is a web based retail solution provider, including Point of Sale, ecommerce, credit card processing and custom solutions.

effortlessE LLC (effortlessE) is a Business-to-Business (B2B) application service provider (ASP) supplying turn-key retail and eCommerce solutions based upon the latest technology and utilizing web-based applications. With state- of-the-art software and hardware in our 24x7 computing facility, effortlessE also offers web hosting, web development, live chat, and custom web-based platform development.

We provide a subscription based retail solution to small and medium retailers. We offer a low cost option to more expensive hardware based solutions. We offer an even more amazing savings to multi location and franchising retailers. We also provide a one of a kind real time integration of web and retail operations and sales. This model provides for guaranteed long term recurring revenue for effortlessE while our competitors have to rely on new sales for 100% of their revenue."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The biggest challenge is when you are from outside of the US, and on top of that, from a developing country that is frowned upon.

My country isn't even supported by PayPal. Now that sucks. Let alone almost every merchant account provider in the US. And we were rejected by an "international merchant account provider" with a "100% acceptance guarantee".

Oh well, all these things will never make sense to someone from the US, where you can actually take things for granted.

</comment><comment><USER5> You could consider invoicing via Amazon FPS or YC's own TextPayMe ( <https://textpayme.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/index.htm> )

</comment><comment><USER6> this is old, boring and obvious news/content.

I get clients online monthly with payment processors and live payment gateways and explain it to them a lot clearer and more concise than this article (and they arent web geeks that read 37signals blog).

Good rule; If it isn't Auth.net or Verisign it probably sucks.

<comment><AUTHOR> So get off your ass and write something better!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> activemerchant ftw!</comment>


Erlang in Anger – Erlang ebook [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://s3.amazonaws.com/erlang-in-anger/text.v1.0.3.pdf <comment><USER2> Here's a link to the book's home page, where you can also find a link to the author's other free eBook ("Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!"):

[http://www.erlang-in-anger.com](http://www.erlang-in-anger.com)</comment>


What Happens When Cars from Mexico and the US Collide Head-On - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2016/11/watch-happens-cars-mexico-us-collide-head <comment><USER2> The article fails to mention that Nissan will no longer be producing the Tsuru

[http://jalopnik.com/nissan-will-finally-stop-building- the-19...](http://jalopnik.com/nissan-will-finally-stop-building- the-1992-sentra-in-me-1788243196)</comment>


Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA Dosed S.F. Citizens with LSD - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-03-14/news/cia-lsd-wayne-ritchie-george-h-white-mk-ultra/ <comment><USER2> Unabomber was also a victim of MK-ULTRA

<comment><USER3> Ok, you'll need a source to make claims involving either the Unabomber or MK- ULTRA.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the best open source tools you use in your organization? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> RT from BestPractical [https://www.bestpractical.com/rt/](https://www.bestpractical.com/rt/). Extremely extensible and robust, can be used for all kinds of things beyond just ticket tracking (change control approval workflows, knowledge bases, asset tracking, CRM and automation plugins). The king of ticket trackers, could be at the heart of any organisation.

Prosody [https://prosody.im/](https://prosody.im/). Open source XMPP server with support for MUCs and all the usual XMPP stuff. Best way for teams to communicate. Extend it with plugins for your NMS and so on to get alerts in realtime.

Nagios [https://www.nagios.org/](https://www.nagios.org/). Solid (if a little fiddly) monitoring / alerting solution. Works best if you write your own plugins and use check_by_ssh instead of NRPE.

bcfg2 [http://bcfg2.org/](http://bcfg2.org/). Configuration management that makes sense. Tidy and well defined "model" for how configuration should be managed, sensible defaults and a bunch of useful powerful features.

I could go on but there are some of my all-time favourites.

</comment><comment><USER2> Come on folks, don't just list the command line tools that come with your Linux distro :)

Let's talk about the big packages that bring value to organisations.

</comment><comment><USER3> Rails

ElasticSearch (And Kibana, holy shit)

MySQL

React

Ractive

Ubuntu

NGINX

Redis

We stand on the backs of giants. Yet, for some reason, corporations feel entitled to not give back. Modern computing lives by open source. Companies should be obliged to contribute similarly.

<comment><USER4> If only there were some mechanism whereby value was traded fairly... :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Phabricator for task managment, project management, and code reviews. It's open source, great software, and has a fun personality great for internal use.

<comment> thomas-b Same here, really great as it packs a lot. The new Gitlab 8 with the CI integrated is great as well but we preferred Phabricator for the extended feature.

Ultimately we decided not to embrace fully yet the Phabricator CI (harbormaster/drydock) as it's been changing a lot (it's a prototype after all) and breaking frequently so we have a mix of Harbormaster and Jenkins which works very well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A bit different from the rest, is `repo`, from AOSP: [https://source.android.com/source/downloading.html](https://source.android.com/source/downloading.html)

We run dozens of microservices and have nearly 100 git repositories. Using `repo`, every dev has every repo in consistent (relative) path from each other. It also greatly simplifies cross-cutting changes across repositories, and staying in sync (`repo sync` updates all repos all at once.)

I also use it to manage my dotfiles: github.com/grahamc/manifest

Second: Go.CD ([https://www.go.cd/](https://www.go.cd/)) -- applying build templates to our 100 repositories has greatly simplified our management of the repositories. Using pipelines has added deep visibility into what is deployed where. I love Go.CD.

</comment><comment><USER7> HAProxy: [http://www.haproxy.org/](http://www.haproxy.org/)

The configuration language leaves much to be desired ... but it's otherwise a fantastic piece of software. It's the most configurable, full-featured, stable, and fast proxy server I've ever worked with.

<comment><USER8> What does it have over nginx?

<comment><USER7> Depending on what you care about, either everything or nothing. Some interesting things I find useful:

* Multiple load-balancing schemes (round robin, least conn, first, balance-on-src-ip, balance-on-uri, balance-on-uri-param, balance-on-header-value, etc)

* Advanced health-checking (out of band, script-based, remote socket based, HTTP send/expect, etc)

* Really, really easy HTTP request and response manipulation

* Generic counter support - think something like "rate limit request based on the average number of requests over the last 5 minutes that all had this random URL param". That's a contrived example, but it's easy in HAProxy.

* Fantastic ACL support. You can even dynamically update them on the fly based on a response from an upstream server, if you so wanted. Not that you should, but you could.

Honestly, you can do most things you'd need in nginx these days. But HAProxy tends to do it just as well, and in a much, much more flexible manner. And in some ways, the ACL support and terseness of the configuration allows you to write out really complex behavior in ways that would be annoying or difficult in nginx.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For us the list is very long, beginning with debian and ubuntu. Elasticsearch, redis, haproxy, mongodb, postgressql ... really too many to list. Of these certainly elasticsearch, redis, and haproxy are best in class in my opinion, and all the tools we use are proven performers with solid community support.

</comment><comment><USER10> The question needs expansion. What is the OP's definition of best? Why does it matter to the OP that it's open source (would your org contribute back)? Would specific family of licenses matter? And in what problem domain do the tools be used for?

I'm guessing most of HN's audience would be using some form of OSS. The coverage of the comments here is large: devops tools, programming tools, libraries, productivity, etc.

Our own org uses a lot of open source components, from desktops, office suite, dev environments, server OSes, programming platforms, libraries, databases, CMSes, heck, does Android count?

More context is better.

</comment><comment><USER11> <sigh> Not a _single_ tool we use is open source. Mainly because with an open source application there's no one source for security to go to and ask for a letter certifying the safety of the software.

I wish I were kidding.

<comment><USER3> no linux servers anywhere? No open source network infrastructure?

<comment><USER12> Perhaps they use commercial distros, like RedHat and buy a support contract.

<comment><USER11> It's an entirely Windows shop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> GCC GDB VTK OpenCV

I work for big monolithic company (not a software company). Most of the libraries and dev tools the engineers in my dept use are open source unfortunately the environment they run on isn't.

</comment><comment><USER14> Spark has improved our ETL jobs by orders of magnitude, both with respect to performance and ability to engage our workforce (mostly Python programmers).

Previous tools that improved workflow: docker, nginx.

<comment><USER2> What is Spark? Google turns up a bunch of projects called that.

<comment><USER15> I assume they are talking about Apache Spark [http://spark.apache.org/](http://spark.apache.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> ZeroMQ, React, Node.js, Nginx, Redis, PostgreSQL, and of course Linux. Together they make a great platform for building quality apps very quickly (which is the point of our organization).

</comment><comment><USER17> Kubernetes has been amazing for us. Getting better every month.

More recently, Drone for CI has been a quantum leap in usability for us over Jenkins. Built on top of Docker, has service container support built in, and has the unique feature of plugins-as-Docker-containers (so you can write them in any language): [https://github.com/drone/drone](https://github.com/drone/drone)

Ansible, ramping up with some Terraform and really loving it.

</comment><comment><USER18> If you haven't heard of Heka ([http://hekad.rtfd.org](http://hekad.rtfd.org)), you should check it out.

</comment><comment><USER19> Oh man sentry is pretty awesome.

[http://getsentry.com](http://getsentry.com)

</comment><comment><USER20> Lots of Node & NPM. Also Grunt, Brew, Ant, Maven. Not to mention the rest of the stacks.

</comment><comment><USER21> Blender. For fully programmable 3D rendering, including command line only.

</comment><comment><USER22> Node, React/Native, Angular, Spring, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, Docker, Vagrant, Consul, Spark, Kafka, Too much to name...

</comment><comment><USER23> git

</comment><comment><USER24> Ansible, Redis, Postgres, Django, Linux, Nginx, Spark, Git, AngularJS, Elasticsearch. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER25> GCC

</comment><comment><USER26> GitLab

</comment><comment><USER27> Git,Debian,Ruby on Rails,PostegreSql,Redis,nginx primarily.

</comment><comment><USER28> Ubuntu, HAProxy, Ejabberd, Redis are the solid standouts.

</comment><comment><USER29> mrtg/smokeping, netdisco2, nfdump/nfsen and previously request tracker, Nagios and racktables

</comment><comment><USER30> WordPress

</comment><comment><USER31> ssh, openvpn, ansible, git... bash :)

</comment><comment><USER32> Git

Eclipse

Vagrant

Bash

Pmwiki

Ubuntu

Nginx

Apache

MySQL

Maven

Puppet

</comment><comment><USER33> GNU Make.

</comment><comment><USER34> docker

</comment><comment><USER35> loomio & cobudget

<comment><USER2> Do you run your own loomio or use the hosted service?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It has been my observation that when many folks ask for open source software, what they really want and mean is free(as in beer) software.</comment>


An Imperial Palimpsest on Poland's Electoral Map - <AUTHOR> http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/12/15/348-an-imperial-palimpsest-on-polands-electoral-map/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm not much of a fan of politics on this site, but I thought this was just "interesting", rather than something likely to provoke the libertarians (or non-libertarians) into reliving that timeless debate about how much the government ought to be involved in the economy.</comment>


We Were Sued by a Billionaire Political Donor. We Won. Here's What Happened - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/mother-jones-vandersloot-melaleuca-lawsuit <comment><USER2> They won, but in the final section the judge had this to say:

"This decision grants summary judgment in favor of the Mother Jones Defendants. Even so, the Court finds Mother Jones' reporting styles, and indeed the general trend in political journalism, troubling. The Court record and, in particular, [an email from Mother Jones reporter Stephanie Mencimer], illustrates Mother Jones' determination to present a biased article by offering a skewed view of the Plaintiffs.…"

"Mother Jones describes its articles as 'smart, fearless journalism,' 'ahead of the curve' and 'about reporting.' Contrary to its perception of itself, this case illustrates the non-objective bias of Mother Jones and its approach in seeking out only the negative to support its position; resorting to sophomoric bullying and name-calling to lead the reader to adopt its particular agenda."

"The Founders of this country expected that democracy would thrive only if the press was not hindered in its reporting upon the actions of government and the governors, James Madison, in 1825, wrote: 'The diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.'"

"But the journalistic model revealed to the Court in the record of this lawsuit is anything but a 'guardian of true liberty.' Instead, it is little more than mud-slinging, advertised as journalistic fearlessness, which offers very little in the way of a complete or balanced picture for its readers. Instead of being a leader in educating the people about civil discourse in an era of increased political polarization, the press in general, and Mother Jones in particular, leads the way in demonizing, rather than fairly discussing, those whose points of view differ from its own."

<comment><USER3> So odd, because in the end, you could add the following:

"However, every single one of the Plaintiff's claims (that MJ was defamatory, libelous, derogatory or otherwise) is found to be without merit."

So, the accusation is that there is mud to be slung, and that the mud slung was accurate, just not balanced - and it's only MJ that might have an issue with portraying themselves as balanced, which, if problematic, reminds me only of a certain TV networks "Fair and Balanced" sloganeering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _millions_ in legal fees :(

Can they sue Vandersloot for legal fees? If this was a small magazine or newspaper, they wouldn't have had the resources to fight back and would've lost

<comment><USER3> Precisely the point (as raised by the article) - that individuals couldn't have fought this (indeed MJ covered another journalists legal costs when he was named as an individual defendant), and how Vandersloot avoided suing anyone with enough resources to fight back even more aggressively.</comment></comment>


Is Free Market Good for Public? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> Some people seem to believe that markets need to be free. They are against interference of the government to dictate what participants can or cannot do. This concept of a free market generally leads the privatization of the governmental function. They think therefore it's best to deregulate as much as possible.

I have to say that this is a ridiculous idea considering unfairness in our society.

It is a proven fact that most rich people are rich for the simple reason that they were born into a rich family, while most poor people will remain poor throughout their lives simply because they were born into a poor family. Imagine the world where education, healthcare, public safety, criminal justice, national security and immigration are all up for sale(although it's already happening in some countries...). This makes our level of inequality worse than ever because the more money can buy, the more affluence matters.

What we need to do is not to discuss about the extreme logic between libertarianism and conservatism, but to decide what money should and should NOT be able to buy.

Seems to me that free market believer doesn't realize that there IS a regulation that they value because they take its legitimacy for granted. For example, there are many things that we are not allowed to trade. Human slaves, human organs, electoral votes, government job and legal decisions, university places or uncertified medicines although they were legal before.

On top of drawing the boundary of the market, government needs to design the rule to prevent corporations from behaving unethically. History tells us that corporation behave unethically without interference of the government. Actually, we have been fighting for that. Thanks to our ancestors, in a labor market, it is not allowed to have a child labor, and a minimum wage is protected by the government.

People who believe in free market merely oversimplify things to make it easy to understand for them. What we truly need is a market with well-designed rules.

<comment><USER2> I will answer seriously, but i must reprimand: you open up a post with a question, and your first comment already scorns and shows contempt for one of the two possible answers.

If you want to truly hear the other side, you can expose your opinion as well as separate the issue at hand, being more inviting.

Also the question itself lacks specificity. Is saying "No" meaning that you need to have a centralized market a.k.a. communism? Because if you are asking "Is communism the best for the public" you will get a very different answers.

Be that as it may, I will still try to answer some points you raise here:

> It is a proven fact that most rich people are rich for the simple reason > that they were born into a rich family, while most poor people will remain > poor throughout their lives simply because they were born into a poor family

This is a given, but its not necessarily bad. In communism, everyone is born poor! We all agree that we want the best for our own children, and thats precisely what happens when you give your kid a house, a college education, etc. That some are better taken care than others is not a drain on society in anyway, its actually great.

> Imagine the world where education, healthcare, public safety, criminal > justice, national security and immigration are all up for sale(although it's > already happening in some countries...). This makes our level of inequality > worse than ever because the more money can buy, the more affluence matters.

All the things you say are always better for people with money than for people without. Literally every single one. But that doesn't mean it makes inequality worse, it can actually be making it less. A rich man that needs a security guard incurs an expense that goes to someone that wouldn't have that job otherwise. Or pays for a doctor that will devise a treatment that will be useful for other patients as well, etc.

Regarding the insistent of inequality, i'd give you this thought exercise: do you prefer everyone had 2 apples, or everyone had 3 apples and one person had 1 million apples?

> What we need to do is not to discuss about the extreme logic between > libertarianism and conservatism, but to decide what money should and should > NOT be able to buy.

That's your opinion. I personally do not trust governments with my money, so i don't like them deciding what to do or not to do with my own labor. At least, libertarianism is not forcing you to do anything.

> Seems to me that free market believer doesn't realize that there IS a > regulation that they value because they take its legitimacy for granted. For > example, there are many things that we are not allowed to trade. Human > slaves, human organs, electoral votes, government job and legal decisions, > university places or uncertified medicines although they were legal before.

Oh boy. Free markets is about the liberty of exchange between a buyer and a seller, not the absence of law. Libertarianism is be very well against slavery. Human organs is kind of interesting, and votes also (i personally think votes should be able to be bought/sold, and can only imagine we think ill of that because of things from the past). But overall, the free markets is precisely about the rule of law and the absence of violence and coercion.

> On top of drawing the boundary of the market, government needs to design the > rule to prevent corporations from behaving unethically. History tells us > that corporation behave unethically without interference of the government. > Actually, we have been fighting for that. Thanks to our ancestors, in a > labor market, it is not allowed to have a child labor, and a minimum wage is > protected by the government.

I once read about the case of street car companies complaining against segregation law, because it was just not good business. Jim crow's laws were designed by government, against the interests of corporations!

As I mentioned in the before post, libertarianism and free market ideologues generally agree on the need of laws.

Labor laws is a can of worms for a discussion at this level, it can take a long time to discuss: its been argued many times that minimum wage harms the poorest, and i can assure you there are definite externalities to unions and syndicates.

<comment><USER3> You start your comment with: _I will answer seriously, but i must reprimand: you open up a post with a question, and your first comment already scorns and shows contempt for one of the two possible answers._

And then you go with: _In communism, everyone is born poor!_

Out of curiosity: Is an average kid born in Cuba poor compared to an average kid in US or Europe? I understand that living without internet access to us, is like living without oxygen, but I've heard that the _happiness index_ in Cuba is pretty compared to US/EU. Their healthcare system for example, seems to be orders of magnitudes better than the US or the NHS (UK).

ps. I'm taking Cuba and not former USSR countries on purpose. I believe that Cuba had a more successful version of communism.

<comment><USER2> Granted, the phrase has some comedic exaggeration, but in our worldly experience, communism may have reduced some extreme inequality(emphasis on may, since the ruling class in communism is always pretty rich), but it did so by decimating the middle class.

For all the comparisons of Cuba and other capitalist countries i will make one argument that encompasses all the other: "See how people vote with their feet". How many people move TO cuba and how many people move out OF cuba.

That should be enough to measure the relative expectation and standard of living of Cuba and the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A free market is one where two or more parties are free to exchange goods and services voluntarily, thereby determining prices through the forces of supply and demand. The nature of these transactions must be voluntary in order for it to be considered free market exchange.

So, in my view, your question the following: is there a time when two or more parties wish to voluntarily exchange goods or services, but given the circumstances of the exchange, government has a duty to forcibly intervene, thereby preventing the exchange?

Many are tempted to point to fraud, pollution, or other unjust conduct as evidence that the free market does not work. However, each of the examples that one could give would involve an exchange where one or more parties _did not_ voluntarily engage in that exchange, and therefore, the injured party would have a right to seek damages from the offending party. In a free market, I am no more justified in destroying your garden or selling you snake oil as a cure for cancer than I am in any other market system.

Therefore, I maintain that there exists no exchange that warrants government intervention given that all parties involved engage in the exchange voluntarily. We should conclude that the free market is good for the public and that it is the only market system that equally and evenly respects the rights and autonomy of all members of society. To that point, I conjecture that it is immoral to forcibly intervene in such an exchange since doing so would obstruct the autonomy of two or more moral agents, which I believe to be supported by Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative.

</comment><comment><USER5> A free market is good for the public. An entirely unregulated market is not.

A lot of people, especially in the U.S., seem to have trouble understanding that a regulated free market is in fact not an oxymoron. Others have trouble with the notion that a regulated market is not the same as a command economy.

An unregulated market suffers from externalities; power and information imbalances; prisoner's dilemmas; tragedies of the commons; and other failures that are detrimental to the public.

These failures are more common in, and cause more problems in some sectors than others. For instance, a free market doesn't do a great job of distributing health care, and externalities distort an unregulated market for energy; but market forces seem to do a pretty decent job when it comes to production and distribution of clothing.

Moreover, a free market can over time result in socioeconomic inequality that in the long run erodes its own consumer base.

So yes, for most (but not all) goods, a free market is better for the public than a command economy. But a free market requires regulation and taxation in order to remain robust and continue to be beneficial to the entirety of the population it serves rather than just those at the top.

</comment><comment><USER6> A free market is an example of a non-linear dynamical system. Chaotic fluctuation is the most common expression of such a system. In my lifetime I have seen the the U.S. economy fluctuate wildly. I have seen lives and enterprises destroyed and families suffer great hardship and broken dreams, and in contrast I have seen equivalent periods of wonderful prosperity.

How can you say that policies regarding a huge complex system like the economy are "good" or "bad". Some situations are favored some are harmed. Even comparisons _between_ policies are suspect.

There is no way to rationally sum up the net effect. Those who try are expressing a political preference couched in terms of pseudo-economics.

A thoughtfully administrated mixed economy offers some hope of dealing with these issues. There are no magic bullets.

</comment><comment><USER7> The free market should be questioned AFTER the current rules of said market is questioned. Rules can create inequality quicker than anything else.

</comment><comment><USER8> In a truly free market with no government interference there would be no fiat currency, no tax, no property laws, no central banks etc. The capitalists would hate it.

Not saying I'd advocate that scenario.</comment>


EU official used colorful, simplified cue cards in trade meeting with Trump - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/policy/finance/international-taxes/399042-eu-official-used-colorful-simplified-cue-cards-to-explain <comment><USER2> I guess these cards might also be useful to help see through a drunken haze.

<comment><USER3> Comments (and articles) like this are a-ok, but even the slightest deviation from the ultra-left bias gets flagged or removed within minutes or hours. All while self-congratulatingly blasting against right-wing opinion bubbles? Okay then

<comment><USER4> I'm on the left side of the political spectrum, and I find it fascinating when right-wingers spot "ultra-left bias" in forums that I find balanced or right- leaning.

<comment><USER5> Yup. It does entertain me, especially as my own experience of HN is center- right at best.

<comment><USER6> HN can be pretty schizophrenic. It often seems to switch depending on the topic, and topics where the various 'groups' collide can be very interesting (or frustrating).

I like that kind of diversity as long as it doesn't lead to flamewars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They may be dumb or an asshole or wrong about X, but they're still your brother/sister. I don't mean Trump, I mean Americans, being a subset of humanity. At the very least, they're people you're better off working with in whatever common ground you have, than fighting endless and unwinnable battles about someone being stupid or ugly as a distraction from how badly things are, and how muddy and muddled the road forward is... it's really incredibly sad to see that nation so torn up. Not over nothing, but also not over anything that warrants _this_ , and the way it's treated. Just like Brexit, I get no joy from it. It just sucks, and instead of a growing opportunity, it's just used for more wounds. As if people really want it to get even worse; because whatever the lips say, that's what the hands are _doing_ says.

How much has been _achieved_ by the eye rolling and talking _about_ "the other side" (no matter by whom and at what "side") since Trump was elected? What has been rationally been recognized as a problem, and what steps have been taken towards solutions? Where have people made an effort to hear others, instead of their bubble? I'm sure there are people outside the limelight who actually did do these things, but from what I see being surfaced most of the time, it's kind of a shit show.

I'm sure it's a scene in a movie or ten, where parents have a real bad fight, but then realize that screaming at each other is something their kid should not see, because regardless of who is right, or who wins, or whatever, seeing them sink so low can do a whole other set of damage. This feels like that movie for me, for too long now. Be wary of things that are hard or impossible to come back from.

I'm not one who gives a crap about badges or offices, but even I feel uneasy how the office of the President of the US is being damaged by this. I say by this, not just "by Trump". You have to think of the future, too. And by this I do not mean "no criticism", that is 100% not my point. Adults do have discussions, and they fight, but being demeaning about it is orthogonal to that and not good ever, in no context. And also no matter how wrong or dumb or how much of an asshole someone is. Actually: The more they are, the more you should "win", and the more important it is for that to be clean and fair, and for that to allow them a route to "join the win" by actually coming around from their own volition and voluntary insight.

I'm not American, I never was in America and there has been no president during my lifetime I _really_ liked. I could not care, but I do. Because " _any man 's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind_" as John Donne wrote, and this can't go on. You are better than this, all of you. Roughly speaking, "you" _invented_ being better at this, ffs. So take care, of yourself and each other, and as in _actually_ do that. Please.

Sorry for it being so jumbled, not sorry for ranting... I adamantly believe in the importance of this thing I don't know how to put well.

<comment><USER8> Hacker News is a welcome respite from traditional American news sources whose sole purpose today is wall-to-wall Trump coverage. Leave it to HN commenters to find a long-term thoughtful and productive point of view when a Trump story finally does make it up through the ranks.

I know when you say "brother/sister" you're talking in the abstract, but the problem is that intra-familial political divides are increasingly uncommon, I.e. Trump voters are unlikely to even be my third cousin. A recent precinct- by-precinct 2016 election map published by the NYT showed that it's likely I'd have to drive up to 30 miles to find a precinct that swung the other way, so they're not my neighbor either. Major protests, which remain one of the more productive tools of political communication because they require actual human effort, happen in large cities and end up preaching to the choir, effectively. The "Other Side" receives news of the worst elements of these protests in coverage designed to make them angry, /because that's what news coverage today is designed to do/. People read the news to get mad about something. They click on the story that's likely to have the juiciest arguments. And it's not the media's fault - yes they choose what to publish, but they have to maximize profits and therefore clicks.

I think what people don't get, or keep forgetting or whatever, is that Trump won because of the Midwest. Yes, he carried a bunch of traditional red states that were going to vote for him anyway. But he won because he convinced swaths of workers in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that he would fight harder to keep their jobs around than his opponent. And he's basically stuck to that promise, whether or not what he's doing will actually help them in the long term, or if he even understands the basic tenets of global trade (as this article seems to insinuate he doesn't).

These are the people who are being alienated by Democrats' efforts to unseat Trump at any cost, instead of pushing their own solution to the changing economic environment. What they'll likely say in 2020 is "so he's racist and sexist- but I still have a better chance with him than you."

As much as I'm nervous about the country being run by somebody who appears to be incompetent, ego-driven and lacking long-term strategy, I'm more nervous about what the left's candidate will be in 2024. In other words, if Trump is the response to 8 years of Obama, what will the response to 8 years of Trump look like?

Not sure where this is going so I'm gonna stop.

<comment><USER9> > I know when you say "brother/sister" you're talking in the abstract, but the > problem is that intra-familial political divides are increasingly uncommon, > I.e. Trump voters are unlikely to even be my third cousin. A recent > precinct-by-precinct 2016 election map published by the NYT showed that it's > likely I'd have to drive up to 30 miles to find a precinct that swung the > other way, so they're not my neighbor either.

In the vast majority of districts, even in California, Trump scored ~32% on average. That means, minimum he scored ~13% (ie. 1 in 8 voters), average 32%, and up to 80%.

The above statement is bullshit. In your immediate environment, at the very least 13% of people voted for Trump, and very likely more. The odds that you don't know, have as a neighbor, or are family to one of them, seem very remote indeed.

That anyone in California (who would like to remain there) lies about their political preference ... seems a much, MUCH more likely explanation.

So, the real situation (again, with overwhelming likelihood), is

1) If you take the 8 houses around yours, one voted for Trump, absolute minimum. More likely 3 (in California, which would be the minimum). Out of your family, 1 in 8 voted for Trump, minimum (given that it will be skewed to the older ones, lets say, one of your parents, two of your grandparents seems a good guess).

2) These people clearly feel that you would react unreasonably if you found out, and that's why you don't know. Given how you describe Trump voters, I can certainly see why they feel this way.

But of course, I get that it's very comforting for you to think like this, even if it's extremely unlikely to be true. By the way, wasn't the whole point of Democrat values that people can have whatever political views they want, and you should support them regardless ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know this is meant to feed into the whole 'Trump is an idiot' meme but is it really that unusual? My CEO doesn't have the time to read a half dozen 100 page reports - he wants a two-page memo; he doesn't want a 200 slide deck, he wants me to report the essentials on a couple of slides. Key points, summaries, icons, top-line and bottom-line numbers - seems pretty normal for briefing someone with a lot on their plate.

<comment><USER11> I feel like my expectations for a president have been unrealistically set by the TV show the West Wing where president Bartlett is often staying up until 3am reading hundreds of pages of policy reports, not getting into Twitter fueds and refusing to read anything handed to him.

<comment><USER2> Reagan took a pretty relaxed approach by all accounts.</comment></comment></comment>


Autodesk announces 925 layoffs - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/03/autodesk-announces-929-layoffs-10-of-its-workforce-as-part-of-restructuring-plan/ <comment><USER3> Just in case people are not familiar - Autodesk owns a considerable share of cad market (which is far more encompassing than just Autocad) and they've palmed few of the biggest 3D modeling suites - Maya, 3DMax and (sigh ) XSI.

Their DWG format (Autocad's native databaseformat) is a binary blob that still has a huge impact in construction industry and is a major PITA unless one is using Autocad tools.

They are a huge player with many expensive software suits. But they are not very innovative.

<comment><USER4> > _They are a huge player with many expensive software suits. But they are not > very innovative._

Compared to what? "Disruptive" social sites and Uber for X?

There is orders of magnitude more computer science innovation in Autodesk than in the average "unicorn".

<comment><USER3> "There is orders of magnitude more computer science innovation in Autodesk than in the average "unicorn"

I was under the impression that they've bought most of their marketable innovations. I realize this was not a fair comment to current employees there - yes, the software suites are impressive and Autocad reseachers have produces very nice things. I would still categorize them as a huge corporation with vested interests rather than an innovator in themselves.

Now, offering stable products is a good thing for many people. Owning DWG gives them an underhanded advantage though, and slows down the evolution of computer assisted design as a discipline, IMO. The DWG situation weights more in the anti-innovation camp more than a hundred clever Maya plugins.

DWG is considered a "standard" while effectively it's just a black-box binary blob. The prevalence of the DWG format means that either new players in CAD need to licence the RealDWG suite from Autocad, they can use third party reverse-engineered libraries like Teigha or they can hack their own. Teigha has been at it with several hired developers for a decade and they still lack bug-free support for the format. The fun part? Autocad can very well deny RealDWG to anyone they don't like. How's that for a market space for disruption.

It's nice to see there are new things happening in CAD world like OnShape ([https://www.onshape.com/](https://www.onshape.com/)) that is not yet bought by them :)

<comment><USER5> As someone who works with AutoCAD nearly every day, I would love it if they opened up the DWG format. There are quite a lot of tools that AutoCAD produces to customize AutoCAD though.

Interestingly AutoCAD was originally written in lisp and a lot of the drawing objects are represented (or can be accessed) as lisp lists in AutoCAD's own lisp dialect (AutoLISP). It's pretty confusing for anyone not familiar with lisp though and fairly limited compared to other lisps (no macros, as far as I could tell, though I'm sure someone could probably find a way to implement them)

<comment><USER6> I doubt that Autocad was ever written in Lisp.

Autolisp was added to Autocad when it already existed. They took the free XLisp (written by David Betz in the early 80s) and integrated it into Autocad. The XLisp of that time was a small Lisp dialect written in C.

Some years ago the old Autolisp implementation was replaced with a different (but compatible) Lisp implementation, which Autodesk bought. That was then called Visual Lisp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really wish all the various companies that use 3D modeling and animations software would fund and/or contribute to Blender (or some other open source 3D app)

Maya and 3dsmax are great and arguably better than Blender but it seems like if they pooled their resources they could change that and everyone would be better off for it.

<comment><USER8> Part of the trouble is that the FBX format in parts of these industries is like the DOC(X) and XLS(X) formats in office productivity software: _everyone_ uses it, so if you want to use a tool that doesn't reliably convert to/from it losslessly you are at risk of severe friction when working with others. And like DOC(X) and XLS(X), it's a proprietary format, which creates various complications for anyone who wants to create and maintain any sort of conversion tool.

Another part of the trouble is that Blender suffers from some common ailments in the FOSS world, notably a lack of UI refinement, stability, and documentation. While there are people trying to improve these things, and over time they are making some decent progress, and it's not as if the Autodesk products themselves are perfect on any of these counts, on balance there is still a much stronger ecosystem around the incumbents. A challenger like Blender needs to be not just playing catch-up but dramatically in the lead to shift this sort of market.

<comment><USER9> > notably a lack of UI refinement

That's a common misconception. Blender's UI is extremely simple and innovative.

<comment><USER10> Back in 2011 if you googled "blender is ", you get these autocompleted options:

blender is slow

blender is too hard

blender is hard to use

I know this because I was so frustrated as a newcomer and took a screenshot that I still have today.

Now if you google "blender is " today, you get these:

blender is hard

blender is damaged

blender is confusing

blender is free

blender is slow

In 2013 Andrew Price led an effort to work with the Blender community to point out why so many people have difficulty with Blender's UI. Check out the video & transcript here: [http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/fixing-blender- part-1-wh...](http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/fixing-blender-part-1-why- its-broken/)

Despite being a thoughtful and very patient man who made a great case, Andrew was met with a lot of pushback from the community that already thought Blender's UI was easy and usable. Unfortunately in the years since not a whole lot has changed (some improvements like tabs, context menus, and not assuming users have a numpad and 3 button mouse).

Blender tries to be everything to everyone - a game engine, a sculpting modeler, a mechanical CAD modeler, a video editor, and a dozen other things. What you actually get is a mess wrapped in a UI that is alien to everyone except for the initiated. There's a reason why Autodesk and others have so many individual products catered to industries and use cases - it's because there's simplicity in specialization.

<comment><USER7> Blender definitely has a non-standard UI. There are settings that make it more "standard". You can set it to "Maya" mode for example.

But, pretty much all 3D software is hard to use and takes several weeks to understand. I spent at least 3 weeks on both Maya and 3DSMax just going through the manual a chapter at a time and working through the tutorials back in the day. There's just too much to do in current 3D software and there's no escaping that all of them are huge huge apps.

Maybe VR or AR will finally fix this?

Note: I'm not apologising for Blender's strange UI. It put me off Blender for years and I'm sure it still puts people off. That said, a few months ago I tried it again and found the "Maya" option which at least meant I could click on objects to select them and have the camera controls match. The rest is still overwhelming but that's true with all top end 3d packages.

<comment> Arcanum-XIII First time I tried to do anything with Maya it was hard as hell. Then it get easier and easier and... then I was able to move to 3D Studio, or XSI, or even Softimage 3D (maybe not the deepest nurbs setting ok). They mostly all work the same, except for some outliers (because they go another direction, like in ZBrush, if it can even be compared), and after all that, you have Blender. It's not just strange : it's often backward, borderline, annoying. A bit like Gimp is not working like Photoshop, or Corel Draw, or... it's Gimp. Some people love it, Lots don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a lot of seething anger for Autodesk. They have managed to achieve mindshare lockin for so many people when doing certain tasks (primarily AutoCAD variations), but their pricing is horrible on budgets. $210 monthly cost for a single Autocad license?!

Thankfully, avoidance of their ecosystem has pushed me further into Blender which I am loving more and more, but on the business side I still quietly mumble curses at them.

<comment><USER12> $210 a month is _low_ in that industry. Seriously. Solidworks, CATIA, and NX are all significantly more expensive.

<comment><USER13> Which is, perhaps, arca's point---the whole industry might be over-priced for the cost to provide the software. It's scary to think how much ground people could cover in 3D design if the pricepoint for getting in wasn't prohibitive.

Blender offers a counterweight against the price running too high.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> All I can add is that Autodesk has the best office layout that I am aware of. In 1990s.

In their HQ, every single employee got a little glassed in office with enough room for a desk, chair, and 2 chairs IN front of the desk. There was room for an employee to bring in a sleep bag and sleep if necessary with some privacy.

IMO much better than this open office stuff. Hopefully they still have that.

<comment><USER15> Wow... I wish ADSK had offices like that. Our office in San Francisco is now a completely open office. I don't like it much. At least Management was very thoughtful when they introduced it.

<comment><USER16> Our office (ADSK) in San Francisco filled in all the open space with vacant desks, removing every possibility to decompress away from your desk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wonder how many of the layoffs will be from QA?

Fusion 360 is the buggiest shipping product I've ever seen. Really hoping they don't lay off _any_ QA staff. But, seeing the shipping product so far, I'm not optimistic. :(

<comment><USER18> A department where I work (in a place that employs 1500 computer users) purchased an upgrade to Autocad one year that was a total mess. After a couple of weeks their tech support suggested we reimage the computer and start fresh. We stood our ground, stating that we weren't going to reimage a system for 5000 dollar software that can't upgrade from the previous version of itself. We were going to make them work for that money.

<comment><USER19> I'm curious how that turned out. Did they solve the issue?

<comment><USER18> They did. I believe they had to uninstall the previous version and delete a lot of leftover registry keys and files. Amazing how uninstalls never really uninstall the thing. Never understood the logic in that. I've seen companies (like HP and Kofax) have to make cleanup tools for their own software because the uninstalls don't actually remove everything. I wonder if they contract their installation components out to third parties that screw it up.

<comment><USER20> Check this out: [https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/mats/program_install_and...](https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/mats/program_install_and_uninstall)

I believe that's the right tool. It's a somewhat 'magic' uninstaller.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, Visual Studio is definitely the right candidate for a cleanup tool. I guess Microsoft learned their lesson. It's a shame every vendor doesn't put as much effort into cleaning up their crap as they put into the installer, but maybe they figure if you're removing it then they couldn't care any less about you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Going to plug freecad - [http://www.freecadweb.org/](http://www.freecadweb.org/)

Of course its not Autodesk, it does not have millions of active subscriptions pumping money into it. But it is pretty fun to play with, I made a 3d model of my house in it about two years ago. For recreational CAD it is more than sufficient.

<comment><USER22> I've been using this for woodworking projects. I have 0 CAD training, and after watching a couple youtube videos, I was able to get it working decently. In my limited experience, CAD is hard to just dip your toe into for small projects, but this bridged that large gap reasonably well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I had an interview for a contract as a front end coder before Christmas and got offered the position at the end of the interview - he asked all the right questions - but after Christmas the contract details were taking a while to sort until I got a call saying the offer was rescinded. It seems this is why!

</comment><comment><USER24> One of the better websites on the internet, from the founder of Autodesk: [http://www.fourmilab.ch/nav/topics.html](http://www.fourmilab.ch/nav/topics.html)

Suggested starting point: [http://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/atlast.html](http://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/atlast.html)

He recounts lots of Autodesk history. An early software company success story, from the days before the www.

Highly recommended.

<comment><USER25> You beat me to it. Fourmilab is the backbone of my www. Been visting for twenty years - the site is still recognizably itself, and though at a somewhat slower page nowadays, still regularly manages to come up with interesting new stuff. It's a treasure trove. Everyting public domain'ed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> My father is a quantity surveyor and Autodesk rules his industry. If you're making, sending or receiving technical drawings of buildings you use Autodesk software (and/or PDF unfortunately). From watching him work I think the biggest feature they are missing is integration with smartphones. That might sound cliche but for a surveyor having an app that helps you measure rooms (like one of these[1]) that tightly integrated with Autodesk software would be hugely useful.

Edit: Another thing they are missing out on is some kind of storage system that integrates with Autodesk. The industries Autodesk are invested in have huge archival needs, and most smaller practices have an old server in the corner running a Windows shared folder that someone set up a while back with an unbelievable volume of huge AutoCAD files clogging it up. Companies would pay a lot of money for an integrated system like that, where they don't need to worry about it and it's easy for their non-technical staff to deal with.

I also remember seeing the old AutoCAD logos around the house when I was a kid and even installed a trial on my first computer, but had no clue what the hell to do. Growing up around anyone in the surveying industry is awesome - <USER2> use _huge_ A2/A1 pieces of paper for drawings which quickly become outdated and those are super fun to play with when you're younger (paper planes, massive large-scale drawings etc).

1\. [http://houseit.com/blog/2015/01/top-5-room-measurement- apps/](http://houseit.com/blog/2015/01/top-5-room-measurement-apps/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I would say that Autodesk problems are more macro than micro: construction sector didn't fully recover from 2007 yet. All related companies cut costs as much as they can. E.g Nowadays is possible to buy a good Autocad clone for literally 10% of the price. By the other hand, BIM, a place where Autodesk has some competitive edge (Revit) is mostly useful for large scale buildings.

</comment><comment><USER28> Looks more like activist investors threatening the board if they don't slash and burn to increase short term profits.

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-autodesk-restructuring- idU...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-autodesk-restructuring- idUSKCN0VC1OR)

</comment><comment><USER29> Looks like this is to focus on their subscription model or something along those lines.

Haven't tried Autodesk's subscription, but I will say that I (unlike many I know...) am extremely happy with Photoshop CC. $10/mo is trivial for something like Photoshop, and it still works without an internet connection, so I'm not sure what all the hate is about. General mistrust of the business model?

<comment><USER30> For me, the hate is about several things:

(a) CC's price make sense only when compared to the price of upgrading the Creative Suite at every release (under the old model). But I did not do that; I used to upgrade every two/three releases: the Suite is mature software and in most cases there is no need to be on the cutting edge. By the way, I work in the design industry and this was standard practice. So for a lot of people the subscription model is much more expensive.

(b) With perpetual licenses, one can stop upgrading and he will still be able to open the old files in the future if a need arises. With the subscription model, you are locked out of your own files. (Ironically, it has been noted, cracked software is more reliable, as it lasts forever).

(c) Generally, then, this policy is clearly about Adobe's monopolistic greed and nothing else. There was no regard for the wish of users, as perpetual licensing was suppressed after CS6.

Because of all this, I have put Adobe in my personal blacklist. I discourage people from using their products when possible.

<comment><USER31> You're right - for a professional it is more expensive and it absolutely was a move by Adobe to capture more of the value of their products (read: increase profit).

The flip side of the argument, of course, is that more profitable companies have more room to innovate and experiment (Bell Labs, Kodak, Google, etc.) and Adobe isn't exactly resting on its laurels and allowing their products to stagnate. There is a valid argument about the additional engineering time being devoted to the necessary anti-circumvention and subscription services instead of better products for customers, but I'm not sure those criticisms stick in this particular case. I don't do much design work, so I may be wrong here, but my understanding is that Adobe products are the industry standard because they are unquestionably the best tools to accomplish most tasks.

<comment><USER8> _...Adobe isn 't exactly resting on its laurels and allowing their products to stagnate._

The thing is, if Adobe had been consistently developing valuable new functionality and making it available in newer versions, their customers would have been paying them to upgrade in the previous model as well. The fact that so many people didn't see enough added value to buy each major upgrade suggests objectively that the products _were_ stagnating.

Contrary to your argument, it therefore seems that having customers locked into the subscription model so the money is coming in anyway is a _dis_ incentive for Adobe to do better now, at least as long as the industry momentum and relative lack of competition keep customers signed up.

 _I don 't do much design work, so I may be wrong here, but my understanding is that Adobe products are the industry standard because they are unquestionably the best tools to accomplish most tasks._

How Adobe products came to dominate parts of the industry is, as usual, a combination of actually being good at what they do and other, more commercial factors. However, the switch to a subscription model has opened up interesting and viable opportunities for disruption in the market. Credible competition is starting to appear and apparently do quite well in some niches previously dominated by Adobe's big titles, so that "unquestionably" is looking more questionable by the day.

<comment><USER32> Also note, Adobe's products are known to be some of the most pirated pieces of software around. During my high school and college times, everyone I knew owned pirated copies of Photoshop or Creative Suite. Same folks now just pay the monthly fee to have the fully updated and activated product because they can't be assed to fight activation issues periodically.

<comment><USER8> That might be even worse news for Adobe, though. It's hard to find reliable information about how successful their SaaS model has been, but the most plausible arguments/data I've seen would suggest they have very roughly half as many CC subscribers by now as they sold full copies of the main CS6 suites. IIRC the figures did not take into account sales of individual CS product licences, nor allow for existing customers who had say CS5 or CS5.5 and had chosen not to upgrade to CS6.

If that is anything close to accurate -- and I stress the "if", because the data is probably at least third-hand here -- then Adobe would have lost more than half of their previous customer base in the transition, and still not regained them several years later. If a significant proportion of those they have gained are ex-pirates, that's an even stronger suggestion that their own permanently licensed products prior to CC might still be their biggest competition.

The situation with pirates seems less relevant for most of Autodesk's products, as their market is much more likely to be professionals than hobbyists anyway. But the implications of earlier permanent offerings potentially representing ongoing competition for their new subscription-only model even several years later would be just as unpleasant as they are for Adobe. Anecdotally, one of my companies has some big name Autodesk software for use with a specific part of what we do, and we've just decided that we'll make do with the existing systems and not buy any more or any updates if they're only going to rent new versions to us and won't let us buy any more copies of the existing version we already use. If significant numbers of larger businesses that already have spare capacity in their volume licensing deals decide to take a similar approach, that definitely won't be good news for Autodesk's new strategy, but I guess time will tell.

<comment><USER33> You might be interested in this analysis: [http://tomtunguz.com/adobe-saas- growth/](http://tomtunguz.com/adobe-saas-growth/)

Looks like the transition has been good so far.

<comment><USER8> FYI, I found this one, which cites more recent data from Adobe themselves: [http://prodesigntools.com/creative-cloud-one-million-paid- me...](http://prodesigntools.com/creative-cloud-one-million-paid-members.html)

Given this one links to data straight from the source, I'm going to assume it's reliable and therefore the previous report I mentioned with lots of caveats was actually off by about a factor of 2-3.

The most interesting detail here might be that while they've been steadily increasing their subscriber base for CC so far, they're also still only at around half of their previous installed base for Creative Suite even today, around 3.5 years after launch. To put that in perspective, a little under half of that previous installed base was on CS6, while a modest majority were still on CS3-CS5.5. That suggests it may become harder for them to continue growing their CC subscriber base at the same rate if they approach a saturation point within the industry or at least within those parts of it willing to keep spending money on regular updates.

The other thing we should probably consider is that Adobe had almost a free ride in the early days of CC, as there was relatively little serious competition left in the industry. Now they're starting to face credible threats, albeit mostly on a small scale or in specific niches for now, and if they lose mind share and eventually the critical mass that means everyone has to use CC because everyone uses CC, that could cause them some problems.

The next couple of years will be interesting for them. Presumably time will tell whether they can find ways to drive significantly more people to regular subscriptions than they used to get upgrading anyway, and whether they'll be able to hold off any emerging competition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> One of the best game engines? What?

It might be nice, but I haven't actually met or heard about anyone who would be using it.

<comment><USER35> Goat Simulator.

<comment> david-given Goat Simulator is Unreal Engine 2.

<comment><USER36> Unreal Engine 3, actually. The generation (with various iterations) from Unreal Tournament 3, Gears of War, and Bioshock Infinite.

Unreal Engine 2 would be from the period of UT 2k4 and Killing Floor.

<comment><USER37> Unreal Engine 2 is still quite heavily used especially platforms quite heavily, UT2004 was UE 2.5.

AAA console PC titles also still use it I think the most "recent" ones would be Bioshock 1 and 2. [https://www.unrealengine.com/showcase/bioshock-2](https://www.unrealengine.com/showcase/bioshock-2)

Since UE 2 was ported to IOS (Don't recall if it has an Android port also) it actually became quite popular both in porting old games and in making new ones since it's a bit more optimized and is considerably easier to use than UE 3/4.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> IT doesn't help that their cash cow (media and entertainment) has been rather anaemic, along with autocad and other mains stays starting to see real competition.

<comment><USER39> Media and entertainment has never been their cash cow. It is a small and not very profitable part of the business. The money rolls in from products like AutoCAD and Inventor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I have never worked at a company that was more than 150 people, let alone having enough people that they could _lay off_ 925.

</comment><comment><USER41> > Unity and Unreal, which make their respective offerings available for free

The personal edition of Unity includes a splash screen and cannot be used by a commercial entity making over $100,000 a year.

[1] [http://unity3d.com/get-unity](http://unity3d.com/get-unity)

</comment><comment><USER42> Every four years they seem to do this. No surprise here.

</comment><comment><USER43> They should have done online subscriptions a while ago?

</comment><comment><USER44> That "A" logo is too close to Google's AdWords logo for my liking.

<comment><USER45> I'd say you've got it backwards - Autodesk began using the 'A' logo in the early 80's and shipped on 5-1/4 floppies - at a time when very few computer users had mice, tablets, and (VGA/EGA) graphics-capable displays.

<comment><USER44> I see how that reads now; I wasn't intending to say who had it first, just saw Autodesk for the first time and that popped into my head.</comment></comment></comment>


A Faster vs. Better Approach to Reach Your Programming Goal - <AUTHOR> http://adityamukherjee.com/geekaholic/archives/410

<comment><USER2> "It's the same as saying that a sentence is not a sentence unless it makes sense."

This sentence no verb! This sentence no verb!</comment>


How we fight credit card fraud at Watsi - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/TW9hNoH.png

<comment><USER2> For people wondering "What possible reason would someone run fraudulent credit cards through _a charity_?", the answer is:

1) Most stolen credit cards are sold, generally in large blocks.

2) The value of a stolen credit card is highly dependent on a few factors, including most saliently age since acquisition (since they're increasingly likely to be discovered and canceled over time) and whether they've been recently vetted or not (since otherwise the market is a market for non-working lemons, where you cream off known-good cards and sell known-bad cards).

3) Putting a transaction through any merchant which actually runs the card and returns a result will successfully vet the card. Charities, Internet startups, and Internet startup charities are all known to have lower-than-average risk screens in place, so they're preferentially abused for this.

A credit card fraud ring used BCC for same reasons earlier this year, by buying it through our Paypal buy now button. We reversed ~60 transactions before I (apparently?) successfully convinced the Paypal live security team to bring the hammer down on them.

P.S. Watsi folks, you should talk to Gumroad or SiftScience. Both of them are YC companies (so I rather suspect both would help you out under a frieNDA or something) and both have ideas which would work for you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Any background on what this is about?</comment>


Why does mobile have to "win"? - <AUTHOR> http://andyfleming.com/why-does-mobile-have-to-win/

<comment><USER2> I think this focuses a little too much on phraseology and not enough on why people are saying it. The way people use computers is changing fast, and it's going to look a lot different than it does now. It's not comfortable but it's happening. I was going to say more but I think this is just an ad for something the author is working on. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly, it's a rant I felt compelled to share. The note at the end isn't overbearing IMO, and helps show practically how this affects what I'm working on.</comment></comment>


Wearing Out My Delete Key - <AUTHOR> http://jamesgolick.com/2008/8/4/wearing-out-my-delete-key

<comment><USER2> Kismet...I think Jeff was expressing much the same sentiment in his last Coding Horror piece: <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001160.html>

<comment><USER3> Yes. But this one is expressed more clearly, more directly, and without the sensational headline hyperbole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does no one write code in their head before putting it in the editor?

<comment><USER5> I think people used to do that in the days of punched cards.

More seriously, I have been known to spend weeks thinking about the code I'm about to write, but I only really think about the general form and structure of the code. I don't really get too into issues of the precise syntax until I start actually "putting it into the editor".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nail.head(hammer)

This has been the most effective approach for me as well, and likewise, I didn't really discover it until I started working in Ruby, and interestingly enough, now that I'm a lot more willing to hack a solution together and refactor the hell out of it, my C programming has gotten a lot better as well.

Even though I still have to force myself into this behavior most of the time, the productivity benefits are pretty unquestionable.

<comment><USER7> The danger is that you have to discipline yourself to refactor -- you can't just stay in hack mode or it's Big Ball of Mud time. Hack-and-refactor is a straight and narrow path. It's hard for analytical modelers like me to commit to the hacking part; it's hard for go-with-the-flow cowboys to commit to the refactoring part.

<comment><USER6> Actually, my problem is disciplining myself to hold off on refactoring. But I understand what you mean -- there are far too many people who aren't interested in going back over stuff they've already written.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The "ship it" rubric very often trumps the refactor debate; coders and managers tend to see the refractoring entirely differently.

<comment><USER9> What James is referring to is not necessarily stripping out big pieces of code when they've been working in production for a while. Rather the point is that in a given coding sprint, he gets the first thing that works going, then starts from there and rewrites them better if need be. So it's just an approach to developing a given method or class rather than refactoring for the heck of it.

<comment><USER8> I know what he's referring to.

You're a coder. I'm a coder. James is certainly a coder's coder. But stop thinking like a coder for just a moment, though.

Having (functional) product out the door (faster) beats having (better) code in the market (later). Every time.

Do I defend this? Yes and no.

Have I experienced this? Yes.

Wearing my manager hat, the product ships. Code refactoring is extremely difficult to justify.

Wearing my coder hat, I refactor and re-comment and rework and update the test cases while I still remember what I was doing with the particular routines. Then I move on.

This is the age-old conflict between better and faster; elegance and schedule. It's why managers and coders are so often in conflict, too.

<comment><USER10> True, but code is rarely ever shipped then abandoned. Refactoring is (hopefully) all about making code more manageable and as reusable as possible, not attaining some sort of aesthetic elegance.</comment></comment></comment></comment>