Why do incompetent managers get promoted? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@lancengym/why-do-incompetent-managers-get-promoted-815165a03bee <comment><USER2> I don't agree with anything in this article. Incompetent managers get promoted because the things they are competent at are not the things their employees want them to be competent at. There is a dichotomy between traits that get people promoted at large companies and traits that make a good manager from the perspective of subordinates. Those traits only sometimes overlap. Thus the whole argument is predicated on a false definition of "incompetent".

edit: people might ask, so here's a list of things that, in my experience, get people promoted at large companies:

politics, self-promotion, networking, choosing the right (high-visibility) things to work on, taking credit, delivering new revenue and/or new marketable shiny products/services, having the right senior leadership mentors/wing- people.

Note how none of these really require that a person be good at actually managing a team of people effectively.

<comment><USER3> This raises a question in my mind -- do any of these traits actually make the company more successful? Or more generally, are traits that are undesirable to subordinates, yet desirable to higher management, actually good for the company, and are traits that the subordinates value actually detrimental to the company?

The reason I ask is that it would seem that natural selection would take over, and if a management style that employees feel good about actually helps the company thrive, then those companies that promote "bad" managers would go out of business and be replaced by ones that promote "good" management style.

<comment><USER4> In large companies the connection between personal performance and company results is incredibly weak.

At the lower rungs this is because of how little influence there is on the big picture. On the higher rungs this is because everything has been completely de-risked through outsourcing of responsibility, depersonalizing potential blame in case of failure while at the same time allowing full credit basking when things didn't fail.

<comment><USER5> This is how a Kodak can develop digital cameras yet go bankrupt when their revenue model breaks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > ...I'm not sure if every post will end up being occupied by an incompetent > manager, but I do think that when a lot of managers realized they've hit > their peak or comfort level, they then start to focus on playing politics > instead of delivering results to hold on to their position.

I have an alternative theory.

When you're a single contributor you have total control over your productivity and success, but very little impact on your the company's success. Then when you're promoted your control decreases, but impact rises. As you move up the ladder you are constantly trading control for impact.

Eventually you end up as CEO and these numbers converge with a large impact relative to a single contributor but little control over the success of a company. Little enough control that its sometimes hard to distinguish from noise. But your affect on perceived success drops off at a slower rate than actual success. This means to get promoted at higher levels it is more impactful to focus on perceived success over absolute success, and people who are better at this will have more luck getting promoted at high levels. Basically it's a lot easier to convince the board of AT&T that you're doing a 3% better job than to actually get the company to perform 3% better.

This would explain why most non-founder CEO's are so polished.

<comment><USER7> You are, at one point, using "large impact" and "control over success" as though they were obviously not synonyms.

But if control is "indistinguishable from noise" then it sounds like control=impact, which means I don't understand your overall point and distinction at all. It seems like it gets all muddled along the way.

<comment><USER6> By control I mean how much do your actions and ability affect the final outcome. For instance a great chess player will win far more often than slightly worse player. The players have almost complete control over the game. Chance, other players, etc have very little control over the game. But in a hand of poker a very skilled player will only win slightly more often than a worse player, so he exerts far less influence over the outcome of the game.

So I think of being an individual contributor as playing chess for $100 and being a CEO as playing a hand of poker for $100,000.

And to take this analogy further you gain a lot of information about a chess player's skill by whether he wins, but very little from a single hand of poker. Did the poker player lose because he got a band hand or because he's a bad player. There is a similar difference between CEOs versus developers. You can figure out if a developer is any good by seeing how successfully he completes a project or task. But it is very hard to figure out how well a CEO is doing by just looking at his performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how many people who reference "The Peter Principle" have actually read it?

It's short-- maybe 100 pages long-- and IMO not particularly good. It's essentially just a pile of brief vignettes about incompetent people being promoted, many of which feel like they were largely made up for the book. "There once was a guy named bob. He was bad at his job and got promoted. So there." \---- it is not quite that bad but it is also not obviously much better. Analysis is mostly limited to just repeating the headline thesis in a number of different ways.

I suppose it is a fine read if you were already convinced that its premise was true and just want the thrill of having your preconceived notions confirmed by a written page-- which I assume explains its commercial success. If you come into it with any doubts about the premise they will not be dispelled.

Perhaps you could say that by being constantly referenced in any related discussion, "The Peter Principle" by being unchallenging and agreeable while saying little of substance has fittingly risen to the level of its incompetence.

Having lived my entire life in a world this book existed in, perhaps I just don't Get It... maybe there was a time where this idea had to be repeated a dozen times before people would accept that it was a thing that happens, even sometimes. If so, then I suppose it served its purpose. I don't, however, think it has much to offer the reader now.

<comment><USER9> I've read the book. It's a funny and insightful idea that could be expressed in one page. The author cleverly turned it into a book and made some money.

You don't have to read the book, but like so many "laws", there's a kernel of truth that's worth knowing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How many times do people who are good at their jobs get promoted just because there isnt anywhere else to go? You cant make any more money at the level you are without switching companies so you get stuck going into management.

I got promoted to being a manager of a small group just because there wasn't anyone else to do it and I am completely incompetent as a manager of people. I don't enjoy it and didn't ask for it. It is only a source of my continued disappointment in my lack of competence. It does however pay better.

<comment><USER11> It is even worse. For companies without SME tracks, SMEs find themselves getting almost no raises or comp despite contributing to more and more revenue and/or important/complex work. Then you see stupid things happen, like they find need for and hire 2 or 3 people just so they can justify a 5% raise. Then they find need for and hire more people to justify another 10% raise.

Suddenly you have a company with many FTEs doing almost no meaningful work, existing just to justify tiny increases in the manager's comp. This is really an HR issue -- ultimately they set a set of rules and people play by those rules.

Forward thinking companies I've seen have SME IC tracks where you can grow comp by contributing to more and more influential projects w/o forcing a management track.

<comment><USER12> What does SME, FTE and IC mean?

<comment><USER13> Surface Mount Electronics, Field Transistor Effect, Integrated Circuit

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are solutions to this problem.

My favorite was outlined in [https://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules- Differently/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules- Differently/dp/1531865208) \- namely treat different kinds of jobs as different skillsets and take away the perverse incentive to switch to one you might not be qualified for. Specifically, moving from being an individual contributor to a manager should come with an immediate _pay cut_. (With opportunities for a pay raise down the road if you prove competent.) And there should be a promotion track for individual contributors. Furthermore, most managers should manage someone who is higher paid than themselves.

When the perverse incentive is taken away, people are more likely to switch jobs because they think that they will be good at the new job, and not because they want to be important, well paid, or whatever.

But this does require a mindset from managers that they are in charge, but not necessarily more important. Which is a cultural shift that is easier in some organizations than others.

<comment><USER15> That's a laudable but terrible way to get better managers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've witnessed this first hand so often that I'm well aware of what it's caused by: overload at the top.

The end beneficial owners of a business have limited power over it. They exert weak control remotely. Usually this amounts to no more than "hire someone to run the business, reward him based on profits" (and sometimes barely even that).

That person, the CEO, also has limited control. He only has so much energy and time in a day.

Meanwhile, parasitism is the norm. The easiest way to get a promotion is to simply do less work and do more of what you want. Spending all day in meetings sounding important, going on junkets, playing around with new tech for fun, puttering around with emails instead of impactful work, etc. Then you're getting the same pay for less work.

Therefore it requires constant pressure from the top to retain alignment of the staff with profitability. How effective the CEO and his team is in suppressing politics, suppressing friendship based (vs meritocratic) promotions, suppressing false work / lazing (meetings & makework etc), will always hit a limit. It's just as much an area of ongoing development as anything else in business -- how to maintain the productivity of small teams as the organization grows and vice becomes harder to suppress.

So I think this is more likely the cause than people being promoted to the point of incompetence -- the organization grows to the limit of its leader's ability.

</comment><comment><USER17> In my experience, incompetent managers often don't realize they are incompetent. They are confident and exhibit traits that do not harm others.

Competent mangers often are aware of their flaws and capability gaps. They work too much and are often overly critical of themselves and their projects.

<comment><USER18> That sounds about right. Also it doesn't matter if they're incompetent so long as their bosses find some use for them. That is, if most of their employees think they suck, but their bosses and grandbosses are happy with them, then they get promoted.

<comment><USER19> Exactly! When things cannot be measured we are left with perception only.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've distilled the following maxim from my workplace experience.

There are two ways to achieve success in this world:

* Be exceptionally skilled at something

* Be unscrupulous

Those traits certainly aren't mutually exclusive, but the counterexamples of folks that have achieved success without either of them seem to be few and far between.

[Obviously we're excluding folks that are "gifted" success.]

<comment><USER21> The reason you don't usually see both at the same time is that you don't need to be unscrupulous (which can backfire) if you are exceptionally skilled.

Vice versa if you are unscrupulous there's a good chance you can get by without becoming skilled at anything... so you don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Usually it's competence at climbing the ladder rather than doing the work. I've seen people shoot up here who do super dishonest things like throw out all the engineers' estimates, make their top estimate down based on when they want to ship and would look best to senior management, then they just throw whatever engineer wasn't their friend under the bus when of course the deadline wasn't met. Meanwhile for their friends they'll move mountains to avoid including any negative feedback in their reviews, etc.. So rising in management here is all about optics and alliances. That guy keeps getting bigger and bigger departments put under him, and even acquisitions made to give him more heads, and he's super dishonest and terrible at the actual tech job stuff of doing things like making accurate estimates.

</comment><comment><USER23> Competent or incompetent, it seems to me like the people who get promoted (especially at a higher level) are the ones who tell the best stories. Those stories might be true or false, good for the team and organization long-term, or perhaps it only benefit the storyteller and the listener in the moment.

Much of what we wish were attributable to objective measurements of contributions just breaks down to the competing stories we tell each other. The objective data is just there to support the stories, but it rarely stands on its own.

</comment><comment><USER24> My incompetent manager got promoted because higher level people on the team left.

It's a viable career strategy. It's hard to hire, so if you stick around you'll have more responsibility fall into your lap.

The other thing I notice is that he's great at kissing butt.

As an aside, my advice to people stuck under a crappy manager is to get out ASAP. You can even switch teams and be under the same skip manager.

</comment><comment><USER25> This article definitely resonates with my experience of 20 years in the engineering and research and development.

Bad organizations tend to promote based upon faulty metrics and, commonly, people are promoted to their natural level of incompetence or are promoted a single level when the best organizational fit may be a 2-3 or three level promotion. e.g. from principal engineer to director of new product development.

Good organizations work hard to figure out peoples strengths and what they enjoy, and then play people in their natural positions (as best as possible).

Someone else wrote in this post that they got promoted from an engineering position to managing a small team and they hate it and don't feel like they are doing a great job. I can relate... a good engineer might not make a good team manager. You need a lot of strengths to team/people manager that a lot of engineers don't even want to have: attention to other people's details, high emotional IQ, enjoy Gantt charts, well organized, to name a few.

... but that same engineer discussed above might make a great director or CTO (or consultant to the CTO, etc.) where they are applying their technical knowledge to investigate technology, plan strategically, and chose technical directions that have immense impact on on the company's future.

I have heard many a "CTO/chief scientist type" describe how much they hate detailed project planning and paying attention to all the little details people are supposed to be working on. But I know good managers who love that stuff.

</comment><comment><USER26> In larger organisations the main criteria I've noticed for people being promoted is that they _want_ to be promoted and spend most of their time sucking up senior managers - actual performance in their current role frequently has nothing to do with it.

<comment><USER27> Fully agree with _want_. But it doesn't have to be an ass-licking contest: if there isn't an oversupply of interested candidates just signalling that you're not overly opposed to the idea of switching into management can be enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Read _The Gervais Principle_.

[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais- principle/](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/)

<comment><USER29> Read it the last time it was mentioned here. It makes me sad and a little paranoid

<comment> blaser-waffle It's a great read -- utterly dark and hilarious -- but don't take it too seriously. The author goes out of his way to keep things cynical, and though he uses The Office as a set of examples, he neglects a lot of scenes in The Office that completely negate his points.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Because they are useful to do the "dirty" work. I realised that when I started running my company. There are good employees and bad ones. It's emotionally hard to fire the bad ones, but if we are separated by a few managers, it's easy to make the cold rational decision and let those managers do the rest.

<comment><USER31> it was a interesting realization when I came to terms that a great many roles in our society exist because emotions are hard for people to deal with. So we "outsource" some large percentage of it to someone to be a buffer and absorb/redirect some of it so that the rest of the process goes smoothly.

Its present in some aspects of nearly every field and while its frustrating to those of us who like to think that we're more rational, it is more likely a genius hack of the human system that lets us get things done at scale/speed than otherwise.

<comment><USER7> People often say that "homo economicus" is not at all like real humans, but there's a lot of machinery to close the gap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Sometimes they do (get promoted) and sometimes they don't. The reasons are as varied as the people who hold the positions. That said, this article seems to be tinged with disdain for managers. Many people believe they are smarter or could do a better job than their manager. Most of those people would be wrong, but it's easy to hold irrational beliefs when you don't really know what you're talking about and have no desire to find out.

</comment><comment><USER33> An interesting (albeit long) take on this comes from Venkatesh Rao and is called the Gervais Principle [0]

VERY long story short:

\- The people at the top (what he calls Sociopaths although not necessarily in a negative sense) need a layer of people below them to both do the work and take blame for when things go wrong

\- The people in the middle (he calls them Clueless) need to be hard working and smart BUT, crucially, not smart in a "political power" sense. In other words, you want them smart enough to do the work but not smart enough to figure out they are being used.

\- The people at the bottom basically do the minimum to get by and are just there for the paycheck (he calls them Losers)

It's the middle layer that most people think of when they think of "why is a manager incompetent?". The smarter folks have put that incompetent person there precisely because they are not smart enough to figure out "the game".

[0] [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais- principle/](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/)

Summary of the Principle: [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/02/04/the- genealogy-of-the-g...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/02/04/the-genealogy-of- the-gervais-principle/)

<comment><USER7> "but not smart enough to figure out they are being used"

As if, if they were smart enough, they would do...what?

The implication is that you can't have a stable situation in which people are being "used" with their knowledge. That doesn't make sense to me.

My perception is that what keeps the system stable is that different classes of people have different value systems, and they accordingly dehumanize other types, which keeps them from encroaching on others' territory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Often, they get promoted to get them out of the way of day-to-day work and into pie-in-the-sky land where they can't be a drag on the real work of the company.

It's best formulated as the Dilbert Principle

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

<comment><USER35> In Russia (I guess from Soviet times) there's a similar saying, 'a good engineer won't get promoted.'

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> this is such a blanket statement. i use to have a manager that was an unbelievable programmer and dba. he was an absolute pleasure to work with and THE best manager to date i have ever had. this dude deserved the promotion. he applied the principals he knew as a programmer so things got done and the timelines weren't unrealistic at all. he also respected us and didn't forget where he came from.

</comment><comment><USER37> It really depends a lot on the company, both its size and culture, but at least in some companies I think incompetents get promoted because ultimately many execs have an inflated sense of ego and like to promote yes-men instead of people with a more critical mind.

</comment><comment><USER38> Here is some real practical advice (since the article is missing that):

One of the big hotshots in your company likes cycling? Well, you like to go cycling too! Let's go cycling together in the weekend!

Become friends with one (or multiple) of the big bosses, and your career is set. And it's probably going to be a clique of higher ups, since they are all buddies at this point.

Golf is not as popular in Europe as in US, but it's still a place for the higher up's to socialize.

Humans are mainly emotional, not rational. They will promote their friends first. Whether this is good or bad is not the discussion, it's the reality of human nature.

</comment><comment><USER39> > _In practice people gravitate to, hire and promote individuals they like to > be around, not people who demand accountability....especially when the ship > is smooth sailing._

> _However, when a company needs to grow or is in a crisis, CEOs or the Board > would often hire highly competent and pushy executives, to crack the whip > and fix the boat. Accountability and performance become important > attributes._

This is super interesting. But I can't seem to grasp actually choosing to promote the more likable person over the more competent, unless the competent person was downright unlikable.

<comment> blaser-waffle 40 hours a week is roughly a 3rd of your working week. Like a full 1/3 of Mon- Fri is spent working. For executives and managers, those working hours are probably greater -- like 50+ sometimes.

If you're looking at spending 1/3 of your life sleeping, and another 1/3 doing work related stuff, why not spend it around people that are tolerable to be around? That's a huge chunk of your life.

Imagine spending 25 years working with assholes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> As a skeptic, the title begs the question: _do_ incompetent managers actually get promoted? How do we know this?

</comment><comment><USER41> In many situations a manager inherits a team of individuals. He is then judged as a manager by how well he gets these individuals to co-operate and perform. If one of the individuals is totally incompetent, it reflects poorly on the managers employee evaluation if he is unable to bring this employee's performance up. His alternative is to get him promoted off the team. I have seen this on a number of occasions.

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder how much of this is just another form of the Fundamental Attribution Error? Everyone thinks they are the competent ones, surrounded by incompetent people that are bringing them down and preventing them from being truly excellent at their jobs. Sure, I fail to deliver things, but that is because of reasons x,y,z; my manager, on the other hand, struggles because they are incompetent.

</comment><comment><USER43> is can far easier to promote either up or across rather than push them out as many are loathe to work with HR to push out incompetent or under performing.

then of course as others have mentioned, having no where else to promote someone other than to manager. we used to joke where I am about 15 year longevity reward was the manager title

</comment><comment><USER44> Is the hypothesis that _most_ managers that get promoted are incompetent, or is the question really "Why do any incompetent people get promoted?"

Easy enough to quote dynamics / principles that might lead less capable people to more often be promoted (managing up, kissing up, some Peter principle- related skill limitations) but at the same time as in any field most managers will fall in the middle between excellent and abysmal, and probably be "just OK."

So maybe a simple answer is that the "mean" manager is below our expectations, therefore most managers will be below our expectations?

</comment><comment><USER45> > _In a big company which is established, nobody likes being made to work > harder. Everybody is just an employee, sometimes all the way up to the CEO. > So a pushy and outperforming executive rocks the cushy lives of everyone._

oh.

</comment><comment><USER46> This reminds me of the old SGI postmortem memo [0] which said "optimists tend to be promoted". I've seen the exact scenario described in the 'management issues' section of that memo played out several times, so it resonated with me when it came out and I still see it happening today.

[0] [http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix- haters/tirix/embarrassi...](http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix- haters/tirix/embarrassing-memo.html)

</comment><comment><USER47> Most often what lowr employees think are parameters for promotion are NOT the real parameters for promotion.

If sycophancy is what it takes to get promoted, the real criteria is sycophancy and not technical merit. There are no incompetent managers being promoted, only good/bad values (again, depends on the perspective of the lower rung employee), in the company.

</comment><comment><USER48> All this remind me of a quote by an old friend from a long time ago: life is mafia, freedom is to get fscked on your own.

</comment><comment><USER49> > _For example, he talked about a phenomenon of being "kicked upstairs". This > is when a person gets promoted as a sort of encouragement, because higher > management wants to show other staff that they too, could be rewarded with > progression._

This has always had the exact opposite effect on me.

</comment><comment><USER50> I saw many people getting promoted for being loyal and on very good terms with the leaders.

</comment><comment> Iwan-Zotow Because they have yet to reach their level of incompetence (aka Inverse of Peter Principle)

</comment><comment><USER51> I once held a presentation titled "How come my boss is an utter idiot" and used "Parkinson's Law", "Peter Principle" and "Dilbert Principle" as source

<comment><USER35> What did _your_ boss say about it?

<comment><USER51> well, coincidentally it was in the transition between two jobs (the presentation was not in the company itself)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I think this is quite true... in my company they started creating "coheading" (2 bosses) also in small department or units and this makes the whole process faster and more evident!

</comment><comment><USER53> Everyone is familiar with the Peter Principle at this point. I believe there is something to it, but it doesn't explain what we find in modern companies. It's too passive a mechanism to explain the malevolence that typically quickly develops in most successful companies.

The Gervais Priciple seems to much better explain the modern organization:

 _" Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves."_

[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais- principle-...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or- the-office-according-to-the-office/)

</comment><comment><USER54> This is why McKinsey, others have "Up or out" policy. In theory, it can prevent all this bs. In practice, hopefully it prevents a lot of it

</comment><comment><USER55> Because they go along with the plan of upper mgmt.

</comment><comment><USER56> Depends on what the company rewards. That manager is probably very competent at that particular thing.

</comment><comment><USER57> Team succeeds? Take credit. Team fails? Blame them.

</comment><comment><USER58> "Incompetent Manager" is a pleonasm.

</comment><comment><USER59> To get rid of them.. a incompetent person is basically organizational tech debt.. and if you can move the tech debt away from you, abstract it.. the organization can recover and be more effective again. So up s/he goes, to be encapsulated in a personal little pearl of people, while to organisms capability suffer less.

Also remember, if you wouldnt promote the person away from you, you would basically demote or keep him around, neutral-moted. So your lack of support creates a antagonistic figure in your workplace.

So lets play nice, push the hr-failure to the waterhead, where they can pea- cock around with a harem of secretarys, and hopefully do neither good nor harm.

</comment><comment><USER60> Cluster B personality disorder</comment>


Why buying Bitcoin without purpose is for sharks and sheep. - <AUTHOR> http://benguild.com/2013/11/14/bitcoin-is-for-sharks-and-sheep/

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty sour about not buying in early and I'm rather egg faced about laughing at all the pushers back when.

Yet I still find these people pretty funny.

Is it me or is it strange to compare a currency against a company. Sure a country backed currency is like an Apple or a Google but this currency isn't backed by anything. Your be better off comparing it to the USD. /smirk</comment>


A Google intern built the AI behind these shockingly good fake images - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90244767/see-the-shockingly-realistic-images-made-by-googles-new-ai <comment><USER2> "Our largest models each require 512 TPUv3s."

[https://twitter.com/ajmooch/status/1046556635446079488](https://twitter.com/ajmooch/status/1046556635446079488)</comment>


Programmer's Nightmare – Ruby Prank - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/BenMiller3/Programmers-Nightmare <comment><USER2> Critique:

1) no LICENSE file

2) not configurable

3) not idiomatic ruby (e.g. camelCase not snake_case)

4) overtly complicated. A better, and shorter version, is:

        bad_whitespace = " "
        ARGF.inplace_mode = ""
        ARGF.each_line do |line|
          print line.gsub(" ", bad_whitespace)
        end

5) bad commenting. The style of commenting each line for what it does is often silly. Something like "fileModified.close # Close file" tells me exactly nothing more than reading the code. Having "noisy" comments makes important comments less obvious, and thus actually makes the overall commenting worse.

This is a sign of a college coder who had some class where the teacher said "you're required to have at least this much commenting", or a beginner programmer.

And finally, this is obviously a dumb toy program.

This isn't useful to show-hn. This isn't anything novel, or even interesting. It's not hard to do. It's poorly implemented and not portable (really, why require the user to edit the filename? ARGF exists for a reason).

This was also submitted by a new hn account mere hours after it was created (clearly by the author). I have no problem with showing off your own work, but at least let it cool down to see if it's a good idea; see that other people think it's interesting or useful in its own right.

I consider presenting an essentially 5-line program that is not generally useable or insightful as being basically spam.

I do recommend keeping on programming and, once you've got a project you're proud of that has seen some use besides yourself, seen at least one other happy user, and relates to HN's interests, post away!

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity (haven't done ruby for awhile): is your line-by-line implementation safe? Is it guaranteed that the lines are identical in the output file besides the character you're replacing? I'm thinking different CR+LR combinations. What if the final line is not terminated by newline? Doesn't print always add it?

<comment><USER2> You're thinking of 'puts' which appends a newline.

'print' does not

The code does handle/preserve all the cases you mentioned (\r\n, final or no final terminating newline, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Even worse, we actually had a regression at work caused by a zero width space sneaking into some code. Most editors won't even display anything for that character, even the code review tool we used didn't!

In the end I configured Emacs to highlight all unicode characters, trailing whitespace and tabs bright red. I also had it render zero width characters as normal spaces, otherwise they were still invisible. [https://github.com/kzar/emacs.d/blob/master/init.el#L181-L19...](https://github.com/kzar/emacs.d/blob/master/init.el#L181-L191)

<comment><USER5> Sounds like some evil plan StackOverflow could use: inserting those characters randomly in the answers' codes to deter copy-pasting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Along the same vein: Things to commit just before leaving your job - [https://gist.github.com/aras-p/6224951](https://gist.github.com/aras-p/6224951)

</comment><comment><USER7> Why would you want to do that with ruby script instead of your favorite editor, or tr/sed on the commandline? And why would you write a "Close file" comment before file.close?

</comment><comment><USER8> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10437619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10437619)

</comment><comment><USER9> git checkout - uf</comment>


Bitcoin, a service and the micro-micro-economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.bitcoinbulletin.com/2011/03/29/bowling-for-bitcoins-meet-the-trader-04/

<comment><USER2> Allow me to extol the virtues of bitcoin over the current credit-card/banking based payment system.

1)Hard money, once you receive payment in bitcoin it stays with you, meaning no chargebacks(Paypal, credit cards, looking at you).

2)Fast payment, you can recieve payment within minutes of it being made(sometimes faster, but more on this in a moment).

3) Low barriers of entry, to start accepting bitcoin you don't need a bank account, or even your own computer. You can use one of a number of free(or cheap) online services such as mybitcoin.com or just go ahead and install it on your machine.

4) No red tape, this is slightly related to the above but important enough to warrant it's own point. With bitcoin there are no forms, no regulations, no paperwork. You can send bitcoin to anyone, anywhere, anytime, any amount and no one will care or track you, or freeze your account or any of the other issues when dealing with the current banking system.

5)It's the most innovative financial ecosystem on the planet and evolving damn fast. Because there is no regulation, it's easy to start writing applications that use bitcoin. Services and goods are springing up at an astounding rate.

Now you may say that payments take minutes, but creditcards are instantanious this is true (to a certain extent, at least with payment confirmation). However because of the flexibility of bitcoin, it's ease of development a technical solution to this issue will arrise in the near future(next two to three months).

Right now bitcoin is small, but it's growing fast, real fast, and faster than the growth of bitcoins themselves or even it's users are the services and goods that are springing up around it.

In a years time bitcoin is going to be so easy to use people like your grandmother are going to wonder why they ever bothered with credit-cards(or online banking) at all.

Sexy no?

<comment><USER3> _1)Hard money, once you receive payment in bitcoin it stays with you, meaning no chargebacks(Paypal, credit cards, looking at you)._

I read this as: "If you give bitcoins to someone in exchange for goods/services and they don't deliver, you're screwed, your money is gone, there is no-one you can talk to". That sounds like it's good for sellers and bad for buyers.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, this is what makes no sense to me. In a f2f transaction, I exchange money for goods. In a virtual transaction, it creates a fundamental asymmetry if the money transfer can't be reversed, since you have no way of verifying the _other_ part of the transaction, i.e., that the goods were actually shipped.

The bitcoin proponents make a big deal that transactions can't be reversed. But if you continue reading the FAQ, they also make a big deal about the fact that you shouldn't deal with people you don't trust and that it's your responsibility. I'm sorry, but that doesn't make sense to me. If transactions were only done between trusted parties, there wouldn't be a need for chargebacks _either_. You want to put the responsibility entirely on the customer, who has no practical ability to judge trustworthiness of an online retailer.

An escrow service doesn't make sense either. Then I have to trust _that_ service. Maybe if some well-known non-bitcoin entity offered such a service, I would be inclined to trust it. But for now, it doesn't seem to me that any of the bitcoin entities have enough to lose to convince me that they're not front ends for scamming operations. I mean, Bernard Madoff and Enron were scams, how in the world could I judge that these operations aren't?

It's true I don't have much trust in the government to go find my money when my wallet's picked out of my pocket. But I _do_ have some trust in that if a store front just took customers' money without giving anything back, they would be shut down pretty soon.

No, what's needed is a scheme which not only ensures the currency transaction, but the _entire_ transaction. It seems that, at least for digital goods, one should be able to design a system where the good is encrypted, and the use of your key to decrypt it simultaneously effects the currency transaction. Still doesn't ensure the content is what they said it would be, though...

<comment><USER5> _chargeback_ is a cost. That cost is then passed on to consumers.

It's a tradeoff.

<comment><USER3> I agree. But the people promoting Bitcoin act as if there is no tradoff, as if there is never any benefit to anyone (except the greedy paypal companies) to chargebacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People who grow interested in participating in the bitcoin market because of this or other articles about the currency should be aware that at its heart it is a very speculative market. The price of a bitcoin in USD has risen dramatically through most of its life while lacking economic fundamentals for why it should.

Indeed, the money supply in the bitcoin market increases steadily over time, this should be inflationary, causing the value of BTC to fall. The fact that it doesn't speaks to how thinly traded the BTC markets are, and that there are simply more buyers than sellers interested in BTC - primarily due to articles about bitcoin that drum up interest, and due to speculators participating in the market.

Bitcoin values are very loosely coupled to fundamentals - you can't buy food, energy or commodities with it. In general you need to transfer it back to a fiat currency to do anything classically useful with it. Currencies that either rapidly appreciate or rapidly depreciate are both ill suited for any kind of real commerce - people need relatively stable pricing to conduct any kind of direct business in fiat money. While there are certainly examples where fiat currency runs away in either inflationary or deflationary ways, central banks, charged with protecting their currencies often take dramatic steps at times to prevent moves either way.

In these ways bitcoin currently resembles either a pump and dump scheme the tulip bubble. Which it is depends on whether you believe the people driving the rises in pricing are intentionally exploiting the press and thin nature of the market, or if most of the participants are simply along for the speculative ride.

Of course, it is in the rational best interests of anyone who holds bitcoin to disagree with this assessment. That said, I do genuinely welcome any kind of informed debate on the issue.

<comment><USER7> _Of course, it is in the rational best interests of anyone who holds bitcoin to disagree with this assessment._

No, it is in the rational best interests of anyone holding bitcoins to have the most accurate assessment possible of their future value.

If that assessment suggests the future value will go down, it is in their rational best interests to sell bitcoins.

<comment><USER6> Good point. I didn't mean to say it is in the rational best interests of anyone holding bitcoins to not understand the market forces involved. You make a good argument that it is in their interests to understand what they hold. However, if you buy my argument that the BTC market is nearly wholly speculative at this point, it is probably not in the interests of speculators holding BTC to have it publicly understood as this would seem to lead to an evaporation of upward pressure on the market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this a legitimate attempt at a currency or a political statement?

Also, what's the exchange rate between bitcoins and Flooz?

<comment><USER9> Start a bitcoin to flooz exchange and find out ?

The difference is bitcoin is decentralized while every other internet currency has been reliant on a single entity to issue it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks like the article made the author some bitcoin on witcoin too [http://bitcoin.witcoin.com/p/862/The-story-behind-witcoin- an...](http://bitcoin.witcoin.com/p/862/The-story-behind-witcoin-and-other- projects-of-mizerydearia)

</comment><comment><USER10> Your two cents worth literally; although at the current Bitcoin exchange rate [1] a typical post/comment/vote on witcoin.com costs USD 0.079.

[1] <http://www.bitcoincharts.com/markets/>

<comment><USER11> or USD 0.0079

Also, each category has its own prices. Some categories post/comment/vote costs at current Bitcoin exchange rate are USD 0.0000000079.

<comment><USER12> This brings up a little facet of bitcoin that I'm /really/ not crazy about: The smallest possible unit is 0.00000001 BTC. With a fixed cap of 21M BTC, requiring that each transaction be for at least 4.8*10^-16 of the total possible amount in circulation seems like a questionable choice at best.

<comment><USER13> If it becomes a runaway train towards this endpoint, this would give bitcoin >10x current M1, while retaining the ability to pay in $.01 increments.

This should be sufficient for the near term ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Unfortunately this model doesn't seem to work. If you look at what's getting votes it's things like pictures of girls and kittens.

<comment><AUTHOR> It may not work. It's still too early to tell. If you look at other content sites that have tried to pay out to contributors (think Mahalo), their models didn't work either. Huffington post finds more success by paying nothing.

<comment><USER14> I think the problem here is that the introduction of payment changes the psychology from one of sharing information to one of maximizing income (gift Vs capital). In the latter mode of operation the quality of the information is a secondary concern.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had similar misgivings/feelings while using the product. However: Two observations: 1.) they did include user-selected charities lately in their distribution of "upvote" profits; 2.) The point is less about making money, more about adverse selection (keeping out trolls). Nobody could subsist off of this in any real kind of way. If they did--the value they would have to provide would be immense.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A website built with React and Elasticsearch for exploring Magic cards - <AUTHOR> http://mtg-hunter.com <comment><AUTHOR> This is the second website I've ever built. My first one was also a React project, a few months ago, but with a single json file as a 'database' and a much smaller scope. In this case I've used searchkit ([http://searchkit.co](http://searchkit.co)) to build a more sophisticated product, while learning about elasticsearch queries, typescript, and too much css to think about.

What is it? Basically, it's a site that lets you impose tons of filters on search results, all of which help to explore the vast array of Magic: the Gathering cards that exist. It also shows a breakdown within those filters so you get an idea what you're looking at. (For example, there are 2427 cards that are pure red, represented by setting 'Colours' to red and 'Colour Count' to 1. If you look at the Type filter, you'll see 1361 of those are creatures. Of those, 403 of them have power 2. In the Subtype filter, it shows that Humans have most representation at 265, followed closely by Goblins at 241.)

I've had a lot of design and feature feedback from people so I've already got a good amount of fixes and new features to add. It's been a good experience so far, learning how to make this (except, really, css). In particular, the searchkit devs have made this much easier by helping me out with questions and such, especially concerning elasticsearch.

</comment><comment><USER2> Do they still launch new cards every year? Without searching too much I see many cards from the time I played Magic, around 2001~2: [http://i.tcgplayer.com/7539_200w.jpg](http://i.tcgplayer.com/7539_200w.jpg)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh yeah, about 1000 new cards a year. They're up to 16171 total now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Isn't a 3mb index.js a little bit too much? Time to dive into minifying and gzipping :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it probably is. I've not made a production-ready site before, so there's plenty more for me to do. Didn't even know minifying and gzipping were necessary things yet.</comment></comment>


Pathscale compiler becomes open source - <AUTHOR> http://www.pathscale.com/ekopath4-open-source-announcement

<comment><USER2> The code is available at <https://github.com/path64></comment>


Href.cool's Links of the Decade - <AUTHOR> https://href.cool/2010s <comment><USER2> Scrolling is extremely slow for me on the page.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's must be the page title - which is done in WebGL. Can you let me know your rough system specs? It could also be the amount of embedded stuff...

<comment><USER2> base-model mac mini 2011.</comment></comment></comment>


Why X Is Not Our Ideal Window System (1990) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.std.org/~msm/common/protocol.pdf <comment><USER2> _I have never seen anything fill up a vacuum so fast and still suck. \-- Rob Pike, on X

Steve Jobs said two years ago that X is brain-damaged and it will be gone in two years. He was half right. \-- Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie is twice as bright as Steve Jobs, and only half wrong. \-- Jim Gettys_

</comment><comment><USER3> X is a great example of good enough software. It is there and does what it should. Any candidate to replace it should, at least, be out there and do what it does.

</comment><comment><USER4> 1990!

I have yet to come across _anyone_ who thinks X is great...

Yet, somehow, despite all its shortcomings, intertwined hairballs, and sedimentary layers of ancient code, X has survived for decades and gradually become widely used in free open-source desktops. I'm typing this on a state- of-the-art (ha-ha) Ubuntu Linux 16.04 desktop running Unity on top of... X.

Now we're all hoping Wayland will successfully replace it.

Is X another example of "worse is better"?

[https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html](https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse- is-better.html)

<comment><USER5> I'm not hoping Wayland will replace it...

"Is Wayland network transparent / does it support remote rendering?

No"

Then it is useless to me. As crappy as X is (and I agree that it sucks pretty hard), at least it works for my use cases.

<comment><USER4> No worries, you will be able to run X on top of Wayland.

Quoting from [https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8](https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8) :

 _" This doesn't mean that remote rendering won't be possible with Wayland, it just means that you will have to put a remote rendering server on top of Wayland. One such server could be the X.org server, but other options include an RDP server, a VNC server or somebody could even invent their own new remote rendering model. Which is a feature when you think about it; layering X.org on top of Wayland has very little overhead, but the other types of remote rendering servers no longer requires X.org, and experimenting with new protocols is easier."_

No, the irony is not lost on me.

<comment><USER6> It seems like they don't _want_ people to use X on top of Wayland but are trying to assure people that a distro shipping Wayland wont break their ability to ssh -X.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> X may be crap, but it's more resilient crap than any other windowing system has proven themselves to be so far.

</comment><comment><USER8> What I wonder is who came up with naming the local machine the 'server' and the remote (who runs the software) the 'client'

<comment><USER9> It is completely logical: a server manages shared resources (in this case, the displays and input devices of your local machine) so they can be used concurrently by multiple clients (your applications, which are not constrained to be on a single machine.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So I wonder how many of these issues have been fixed since then?

<comment><USER11> In case you don't know, Wayland is the replacement... [https://wayland.freedesktop.org/](https://wayland.freedesktop.org/)

<comment><USER8> and it only took 27 years!</comment></comment></comment>


The world's longest train journey now begins in China - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/11/21/map-the-worlds-longest-train-journey-now-begins-in-china/ <comment><USER2> My friend just took a train journey from London to Hong Kong.. They obviously switched trains a few times, but essentially, the entire trip was on trains. He said it was amazing

<comment><USER3> How expensive is such a trip?

<comment><USER2> Just got this email from my friend

All in, it was just under £10k (for two people)

Trains London to St Petersburg

London to Brussels - £100 Eurostar Brussels to Cologne - 58 Euro - Bahn.de (about £45) Koln to Prague - 138 Euro - Bahn.de (about £109) Prague to Krakow (three trains) - 488PLN - Polrail.com (about £92) Krakow to Warsaw - 140PLN - Polrail.com (about £26) Warsaw to Minsk - 698PLN - Polrail.com (about £132) Minsk to St Petersburg - £284.72 - realrussia.com

Accommodation Krakow - £68.22 lastminute.com Accommodation Warsaw - £38.76 lastminute.com

Other nights from London to St Petersburg were on trains

Tour - £5995 -all trains from St Petersburg to Hong Kong -all accommodation from St Petersburg to Xi'an -more than half the meals (apart from when on the train) -transfers to and from all stations -all guides and tours -all visas

Accommodation Hong Kong - £304.96 - Not sure where booked

Spending money - £1640

Flight HK to Melbourne - $HK9076 (about £746) Travel Insurance - $AUD324 (about £172)

Total: £9753

Polrail.com and realrussia.com are agencies and so added about 25-30% on top of the ticket prices, but the Polish and Russian rail websites aren't in English so didn't have much choice there. The Polish accommodation was pretty swanky and right next to the stations, there were much cheaper options, but splashed out a bit. Travel insurance was required for our visas; we had trouble finding anyone to insure us because we weren't finishing where we departed from. Spending money was under what we budgeted. The tour was obviously the big expense, doing it ourselves would have been a lot harder, but would have saved a lot of money, but then we'd have to have gone and lined up to get visas whereas they did that for us. Also having someone standing on the platform with a sign with our name on and then being driven to our hotel was pretty cool :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> They've also proposed a China-Russia-US Railway that have an under water channel between Russian and Alaska. That would be the longest under channel if it were to be built.

<comment><USER5> I doubt they'll do that anytime soon. There are no continental railways to connect to in Alaska, and not much demand for one.

<comment><USER6> Freight?

Whenever I have something shipped from China, the tracking shows something like China -> Alaska -> California. (Of course, bulk goods go by boat, but a train could be a nice middle ground.)

<comment><USER7> The great circle air route between Chinese manufacturing hubs and SFO passes quite close to Anchorage. Not sure why they stop there--refueling isn't necessarily needed so it's probably a hub to offload some cargo for points further east. Going up through Russia and under the Bering Strait would actually go quite a ways north of that route all other considerations aside.

<comment><USER8> Refueling isn't necessary (there are daily nonstop flights from Washington, DC to Beijing, for example) but having an intermediate stop may allow them to carry more cargo on each flight, as air freight is probably weight constrained rather than volume constrained, and less fuel would mean more weight left for cargo. (I could be wrong on that, of course!)

<comment><USER7> Looks like you're right: [http://www.adn.com/article/20130630/fedex-cut-trans- pacific-...](http://www.adn.com/article/20130630/fedex-cut-trans-pacific- flight-anchorage-cargo-hub)

It also looks as if the FedEx was using planes that didn't necessarily have as much range as typical passenger aircraft today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, I have seen it today in Madrid.

I wish it had passengers cars so I could travel on it one day.

The great thing about remote working is that you could do these kind of things, it will probably need expensive satellite Internet though...

</comment><comment><USER10> This blog chronicles the author's journey from Vienna to Pyongyang, all by train: [http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/](http://vienna- pyongyang.blogspot.com/)

It's pretty interesting, especially how he got to spend 36 hours in North Korea without a guide.

</comment><comment><USER11> I look forward to a tunnel under the Bering Strait, and trains running from Miami to Madrid via Alaska and Yiwu.

</comment><comment><USER12> The article never mentions energy efficiency. How does such a rail trip compare to a mega freighter in joules per ton? The ship has to go through Malacca and Suez, of course.

On many routes in the US barge transport is still much more efficient than rail.</comment>


More than 31,000 scientists sign petition denying man-made global warming - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/2053842/Scientists-sign-petition-denying-man-made-global-warming.html

<comment><USER2> According to to the petition's website [1], of the 31,000 'scientists' (they seem to define this very broadly, most do not have PhD) only 39 are actually climatologists.

[1] <http://www.petitionproject.org/qualifications_of_signers.php></comment>


There Is No Now - <AUTHOR> https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2745385 <comment><USER2> There was, but you just missed it!</comment>


Partial Google Services Outage? - <AUTHOR> I'm getting 502s from drive and people can't hangouts me. A few people on twitter are experiencing the same thing. Anyone here having google services issues?<p>http://downdetector.com/status/google-drive <comment><USER2> It looks like they have updated the status page and posted information on the issue: [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/storage/17002](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/storage/17002) [https://status.cloud.google.com/](https://status.cloud.google.com/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Google status pages can be found at the following URLs: [https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status](https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status) [https://status.cloud.google.com/](https://status.cloud.google.com/)

Also note that this could be an issue outside of Google's control(network provider in between them) if you do not see any changes in the status page 30 to 60 minutes from now. I did check their social media outlets but do not see anything on any services being down. If they are any issues being worked on, there should be more news about it shortly.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm unable to OAuth in to a variety of Google Services e.g. Asana, FullStory. They all result in some kind of failed auth banner no matter how many accounts I try.

At work, our applications uses Google Calendar V3 and is seeing a ton of 503s in all environments (dev, staging and production).

Where does Google update the status of their APIs?

</comment><comment><USER4> Filed a github issues about a Firebase service outage, turns out it was something related to Google Auth outage</comment>


RuboCop: Is it time to change the name? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop/issues/8091#issuecomment-640158172 <comment><USER2> I'm actually dumbfounded that nobody has brought up the themes of the movie RuboCop is (almost) named after. RoboCop (at least the original movie) seems pretty in line with many progressive ideology criticizing privatization of police and other government functions, criticizing militarization of police, and lampooning gratuitous violence.

Spoiler Alerts: The story of RoboCop is the story of a police officer overcoming systemic corruption within the police force after he is literally dehumanized and turned into an excessively violent killing machine. The main crux of the finale is that RoboCop needs to get around his programming that prevents him from arresting other members of the police corporation which pretty poignantly mirrors the many issues involving police policing other police. While the main character is a "good cop" in this movie, I don't think anybody will walk out of that movie thinking that police systems are not deeply flawed and corruptible destructive.

RuboCop as a linter is very much in line with the ideals of what a cop should be, and what a cop will be after reform (hopefully). RuboCop finds structural problems, gives out warnings, and helps the community of whoever works on a codebase work together in harmony.

<comment><USER3> The author actually says the same about the movie in his ps.

> P.S. I haven't seen RoboCop in a while, but I have a vague recollection he > was a good guy, who was fighting against the oppressive system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> /sigh. Just buzzards circling around an opportunity to signal they're 'doing something'.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's a very strong feeling of virtue signalling in these github comments. "Woke" developers which have never heard of RuboCop before.

<comment><USER6> Don't forget those offended by master/slave architectures, blacklist/whitelist, etc. The world is getting stranger by the minute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> coding-bunny solved this in the comments:

      echo "alias ruby_lint=rubocop" >> $HOME/.bashrc

...unless your objection is that _other_ people will see this suddenly problematic word.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's why you have to move out of the github. It already looks like Facebook, what happens next?

</comment><comment><USER9> My first thought was that this proposed name change is a bit silly, because "RuboCop" is clearly an homage to RoboCop, a movie that -- yes -- portrays a "good cop" but overall is very critical of the police system in America.

My second thought is that as a white, middle-class American, I can't rely on that kneejerk reaction.

I'm very lucky in that I live someplace where _my_ group is not disproportionately targeted by the police. There are a lot of people in America and elsewhere in the world who can't say the same.

Will changing the name solve anything? No.

But is it a tiny _positive_ step with very little cost? That is the bar that needs to be cleared.</comment>


Respects Your Freedom Certification - <AUTHOR> https://ryf.fsf.org/ <comment><USER2> Is [https://ryf.fsf.org/products](https://ryf.fsf.org/products) meant to eventually replace [https://h-node.org/hardware/catalogue/](https://h-node.org/hardware/catalogue/) ? The latter appears to have way more devices on it.</comment>


Show HN: Snapbugz – The easiest way to discuss bugs. - <AUTHOR> http://www.snapbugz.com/ <comment><USER2> > " _Your browser is too old for Snapbugz._ "

Latest Chrome probably shouldn't have this.

> _" As not yet seen on:_"

Putting this at the bottom of the page with a list of popular website's icons is disingenuous to say the least.

It's also not clear to the user, but this service silently proxies any site you go to with little concession for what the user might be doing. Given that they're already being so unpleasant with the bottom links, I wouldn't hesitate to think that they are capturing user content as well. Even if they aren't collecting private data, they're stripping SSL data and serving it back up in plain text.

Completely unacceptable.

<comment><USER3> With Firefox 27 (or Safari 7.0.1) on a MBP running Mavericks I get the error:

"Bummer! Creating a Snapbugz currently only works on desktop computers."

<comment><USER4> Where can I discuss that bug? ;)

[http://i.imgur.com/IGuNEzT.png](http://i.imgur.com/IGuNEzT.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> For all having this "desktop" issue on real desktops - please give us more information via hello @ snapbugz.com. Kudos!

<comment><USER4> My suggestion is instead of chasing UA sniffing (which is a losing proposition), just give up on blocking "mobile" or any kind of browser.

FWIW my mobile browser is just as capable as my desktop and as long as you don't block zooming I can deal with an "unoptimized" layout.

<comment><AUTHOR> The creation part of snapbugz is just not ready for mobile/touch usage as UX patterns on the annotation part are different. However, the result / collaboration part is already finished: [http://www.snapbugz.com/p/88a7a69a](http://www.snapbugz.com/p/88a7a69a)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm against bug-tracking systems that fork a program's (or web-site's) own bug-tracking system. You end up with multiple problems:

1) The same bug in both places, with different buy useful discussions in each. How do you merge these two bugs? How do you mark one as a duplicate?

2) The developers of the program (or web-site) probably don't know you exist, so while there might be a great discussion related to the bug, the person who can actually resolve it doesn't know.

3) Assuming you're not the only "foreign" bug-tracking system for a program (or web-site), how do you interact with the other "foreign" systems?

4) There's no barrier to entry, so there's no incentive to creating anonymous bugs or to using the platform to rant at the developer.

You're not alone with these problems - GetSatisfaction and UserVoice have the same issues. My suggestion would be to create such an amazing bug-tracking system that the developers _WANT_ to use it as their primary source. Then get bought by Github.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your points.

Indeed we tried to solve some of your points at [http://usersnap.com](http://usersnap.com) (the technology behind snapbugz). We integrate with different, existing bug trackers but made the experience that there are many people who still rely on email as a bug tracker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the fun feature when I type the site's own URL into the search box. First a message that reads "Do you really want to see the internet implode?", followed by a redirect to the "Google into Google" sketch from The IT Crowd[0].

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

<comment><USER7> I didn't. I actually wanted to report a bug with their site, that it lacks any explanation of what it does and why you'd want to use it (eg, does the feedback actually go anywhere?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pretty asinine that I can't even read about what snapbugz is in my mobile. It might be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I'll never use it, because I tried to find out more info and got slapped in the face for it. If it were of interest, _then_ I would email myself a reminder to use it on desktop.

<comment><AUTHOR> Creating on mobile is on our agenda for the next week. In the meantime, have a look at the result page for mobiles please: [http://www.snapbugz.com/p/88a7a69a](http://www.snapbugz.com/p/88a7a69a)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I tried one of our sites, we force https, it seems the 's' is stripped and loading fails. If the site is about discussing bugs, I would think a target market is web applications, pretty much all of which will be using https.

<comment><USER10> And most bugs are often found before going into production, so client's will be accessing the site behind an IP restriction or HTTP auth most likely.

<comment><AUTHOR> For full HTTPS / IP-Restriction / Auth / external bug tracker support, please have a look at [https://usersnap.com](https://usersnap.com) \- this could fit your professional requirements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Images didn't seem to load in the produced screenshot, though they did load in the preview where I marked the area. Unfortunately I could not snapbugz [http://www.snapbugz.com/result/minichan.org/a5a77fcb-f86a-4a...](http://www.snapbugz.com/result/minichan.org/a5a77fcb-f86a-4ad6-acc0-62eae7df6d91) as instead it took me to [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxLmLUT- qc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxLmLUT-qc)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like the page minichan.org does a referer-check for all images to prevent hotlinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Love the "As not yet soon on:" logos at the bottom which tweets to those publications about Snapbugz. Great marketing hack.

</comment><comment><USER13> Seems somewhat similar to how Google did it for Google+ in the early days. I'm surprised it took this long for someone to replicate that feedback system to be honest. I thought it was brilliant from the moment I saw it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have a look at [http://usersnap.com](http://usersnap.com) :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Please stop the background requests to tons of 3rd party servers. It's such an unhealthy trend. (Now that we know that everybody and their mother tracks and profiles us all the time.)

</comment><comment><USER15> If you type snapbugz.com into snapbugz.com, you can break the Internet. So please, no one try it—even for a joke. It's not a laughing mater. You can break the Internet.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For all on mobiles - here is an example result page: [http://www.snapbugz.com/p/88a7a69a](http://www.snapbugz.com/p/88a7a69a)

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder how many bug reports Gizmodo.com is going to have...

<comment><AUTHOR> a lot. really a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I thought this was for discussing bugs in bug trackers like bugzilla. Then I thought this was related to FogBugz, but it's neither.

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks very useful to me.

One things I would do is make the permalink visible as soon in the flow as possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the input!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So, how does one render a website properly into a PNG? Headless Chrome?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's done by Usersnap: [https://usersnap.com/](https://usersnap.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Easiest way to discuss bugs

Not on mobile it's not

<comment><USER21> I thought it was neat that they let me email myself with a reminder. This is an MVP, it's just the right response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> this is very cool, I definitely plan on using it.

just curious, why only store the bug for 7 days?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can extend the storage time by inviting others to discuss - 1day per invite. (If you already have sth like a bug tracker / pm in place - look at [https://usersnap.com](https://usersnap.com) ).

<comment><USER22> nice. Is the storage time simply an up-sell mechanism? or is there a technical issue at play? again, just curious.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, no technical issues :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chip wars: China, America and silicon supremacy - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/12/01/chip-wars-china-america-and-silicon-supremacy <comment><USER2> Full disclosure, I work for Intel.

We have a fabrication plant in Chengdu, it's public knowledge that this fab is helping to manufacture products built on the latest process technology. As I've come to learn more about China's tactics when dealing with foreign companies it's become of great concern to me what this plant means for our future. I don't think it would be far-fetched to assume that some very protected and valuable IP has leeched through our doors and into China's hands. In all honestly I really can't fathom how the American government let this deal occur.

EDIT: To add more information [which is all public knowledge so if you're reading this Intel folks don't track me down! :)] its a packaging / assembly plant working on CoffeLake, which is 14nm++, CPUs are NOT fabbed there as Congress forbids it. My concern is more about the ability for the Chinese to potentially reverse engineer these products at assembly and derive IP. Also.. our packaging technology is pretty advanced so I'm concerned with even having an assembly plant there as well.

<comment><USER3> From people I've talked to who do manufacturing in China...if you aren't literally watching every single employee, every single moment, your IP is being stolen.

<comment><USER4> I've considered leveraging this in electronic manufacturing. Send design off to be cheaply fabricated, wait for it to appear on aliexpress as a clone with all BOM cost optimisation done free. Buy bulk lots and resell in local country. Bingo!

<comment><USER5> I agree. Doing this now for 5G "mesh" based BTLE devices which I hope will drop dramatically in price. Working out low-cost PMIC, crystal and passive component compatibilities for US based chipsets is a bit of a regulatory issue, but the "clones" iterate so fast I expect them to have complete designs available by mid-2019 and hope to make the money on the software / data.

<comment><USER4> Interesting. I suppose your value add could be EMC, packaging, support and infrastructure on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "America has legitimate concerns about the national-security implications of being dependent on Chinese chips and vulnerable to Chinese hacking."

I've lately been having this fantasy, or day dream perhaps, where China or the US declares war on the other. The world cowers in fear at the impending catastrophic conflict, yet as the hours drag on, it becomes clear that nothing is happening. It turns out that the only net effect of the declaration of war is that 10 minutes later, every piece of military equipment either country has was bricked by the other's hackers and both militaries are now more-or-less sitting on their butts, twiddling their thumbs.

In which case the victory goes to Russia, I suppose.

<comment><USER7> Cixin Liu (of Three Body Problem fame) has a new novel called Ball Lightning that talks about this exactly. Not a great book in terms of character development or plot, but is chock full of intriguing military + technology scenarios. Worth a read.

<comment><USER8> Fantastic read. The scale of the problem escalates so suddenly, I always love how ambitious the scope of his stories are.

<comment><USER9> He makes me not care about character development, the science is so titillating on its own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've personally observed this 'war' from a couple of angles. First is in the process equipment required to fabricate the chips. China has endeavored to create its own chip equipment industry, the way that Japan did in the 80s and Korea did in the 90s. I was personally involved in development of 3 product lines by a Chinese capital equipment firm, that have been in development for 10 years. They were a customer for our system component. To kick start the effort, they paid expert, targeted process consultants from the US. To date, none of the 3 have cracked into volume shipments to the fabricators. Ten years in, both Japan and Korea had built equipment that could at least compete domestically. In Japan's case, internationally. The Chinese progress was stifled by ineffective engineering management that ultimately drove our program manager to resign.

Recently, I visited Korea and was told that Chinese semiconductor companies are recruiting semiconductor process engineers from Korea, paying them 3-5x their Korean salary under 5 year contracts, effectively buying out their career. This could be an effective approach to garner the technical expertise needed, but I wonder whether it will simply repeat the outcome of the equipment effort: Experts were brought in and paid well for their knowledge, but it could not be realized due to business cultural or management style constraints.

This is my personal and obviously limited experience, but in the end, fabricating semiconductors is a multidisciplinary endeavor of great complexity. Success depends equally on commitment, pragmatism and effective collaboration, as it does on technical excellence. That is the price of entry to leading edge technical achievement and I'm not sure the Chinese industrial firms are there yet.

<comment><USER11> You need customers who use your equipment to close the product improvement cycle. Both Japan and South Korea have (or had) competitive chip manufacturers who could help their domestic suppliers improve. Chinese equipment makers don't have such luxury. Their potential fab customers are hobbled by US export control and are surviving on thin margins. So they couldn't or at least haven't been able to get into the positive feedback loop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'll repeat it again, my solution would be: Support for Made in India 2025.

Greed won't disappear, but you can shift the balance to a more western friendly country.

They are already destroying a lot of countries. They borrow money to them, so the Chinese can build their infrastructure. But there are almost no locals involved, so all the artificial inflation goes to China. The belt is just an excuse for colonizing the world ( or at least the harbors, strategic airports that they themselves have built, see Sri Lanka, they are the first to comply).

I think a lot of those countries that built a dam with Chinese money forget that maintenance costs a lot also. Reference: FIFA football stadiums

Ps. Feel free to share your concern

<comment><USER13> They are adopting the USA's playbook.

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man)

According to Perkins, his role at Main was to convince leaders of underdeveloped countries to accept substantial development loans for large construction and engineering projects that would primarily help the richest families and local elites, rather than the poor, while making sure that these projects were contracted to U.S. companies. Later these loans would give the U.S. political influence and access to natural resources for U.S. companies

India would do the same if it had the capital resources.

<comment><USER12> The USA playbook is only 30% of China's, they are literally bankrupting them off everything.

\+ There is a difference, companies can have PR issues now without just paying off some key figures ( internet). Not saying that it's not possible, but it should be ( and is) harder than the pre & internet age.

China hasn't got that problem, because they control their internet. And trying to control yours ( free internet through satellites)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a big deal. The US already lost its consumer electronics industry. China's plan for 2025 is to have no dependence on foreign sources in certain technology areas, including semiconductors. Who will buy from Intel then?

Someday Foxconn will figure out how to do without Apple in phones.

<comment><USER15> I'm always fascinated by all the economists who write articles detailing the cost of protectionism to the American economy but I've never seen an article discussing how much Chinese economic policy costs them. Maybe I'm reading the wrong journals.

<comment><USER16> Protectionism is only bad when you have the upper hand.

The way to develop a powerful industry is protectionism. When you have achieved it, the way to avoid others develop powerful industries is free trade.

It was not by way of free trade that the USA, Germany or Japan developed.

<comment><USER17> The costs of protectionism are typically diffuse and difficult to pinpoint. They take the form of higher prices and reduced choice.

Here's one example. Chinese consumers use Alibaba, not Amazon. They use QQ, not Twitter. They use Baidu, not Google. In all of those cases, the foreign brands are higher quality products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Story that all chinese technology is stolen is not true. They have lot of talent and hardworking folks in cutting edge technology. Vast majority of employees in US chip companies doing cutting edge technology are also Chinese. Most of US engineers chase easy money in web technology etc. Same concern was raised by Peter Theil about VC investing not in hard tech. Ycombinator is also classic example of investing tons of money in only short term tech. Most of silicon tech needs 5-7 years or even more.

<comment><USER12> You are Chinese? Raw guess.

But the entire setup of China is made for stealing tech from companies who invest there, this doesn't mean anyone isn't hardworking or hasn't got any talent. I know Chinese are hardworking.

Also, hardware needs a lot of capital in Western countries, workers are expensive.

Starting for yourselve ( with software) and gradually growing is a lot "easier" if you aren't rich.

<comment><USER19> > You are Chinese?

Do not go down that road, please.

<comment><USER20> Oh please. The Chinese always sprout up to defend and pretend, that the unsavory aspect of Chinese industrial espionage is American/western propaganda. Happens all over the place on the Internet.

<comment><USER19> We have a lot of experience with this, and I can tell you what is far more common: people projecting manipulation and astroturfing onto legit users who in fact are merely expressing an opposing point of view. Hauling out this accusation without evidence is poisonous to discussion. That's why the site guidelines ask you not to post such insinuations. Please read and follow them from now on: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Following the site guidelines also means not using flamewar tropes like "Oh please", and refraining from nationalistic flamewar in general. "The Chinese always sprout up" is a pretty gross thing to see here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> When your industrial based depends on cheap labor, like in China, it's always possible to compete by legislating wages down. You can solve your economic woes with a stroke of a pen.

But people have to live shittily.

When your industrial base depends on IP, like in the US, it's very challenging to defend secrets, especially in a free society. Competing on IP alone is very risky. You have to spend exorbitant amounts of money on security.

But at least I can live wherever I want, freely vote for who represents me, don't get sent to prison camps to make living space for the ethnic majority, have pretty clean air and water, aspire to treat the downtrodden humanely, treat people who aren't my blood relatives humanely, trust my social systems, travel freely, say whatever I want, and do something with my life other than engineering, making money or achieving subsistence survival. The investment in human capital, that makes American labor so expensive, makes it durably valuable regardless of technology, government or foreign relations.

Wait isn't that supposed to be the tradeoffs part?

<comment><USER2> Great response dude. I'm so concerned because China is moving up the economic ladder when it comes to production. China is no longer a place where the British own the land and the people make T-shirts. These guys are stepping it up, China is making phones.. cars.. they have their eyes set on aerospace, they are building islands in the sea and infrastructure on other continents. Look at what China is about to do to Africa, seems downright colonial. China has taken blue collar jobs in America. Are they now about to start making microprocessors? We have one of America's greatest sources of IP generating talent (Google) ready to risk it all and re-invest in the country, China is about to become an equal power. We don't seem to be prepared.

<comment><USER22> What is China doing to Africa? And how is that any different than what US does to any other region in the world. Even though America is a democracy it has not really promoted democracy overseas. Apart from earlier itself being involved in wars now instead many bad foreign leaders are supported by US politicians and leaders. Allies which have been behaving badly for long time.

US greatest talent is (perhaps was) it's ability to attract the talent of the world and creating great value out of it. This happened primarily during and after the world wars was as many nations were becoming more hostile places and American open culture and values became a refuge for many. US will only truly lose it's leadership position when it gives up on moral leadership.

<comment><USER23> "attract the talent"...this is no longer the case. I talk to 50+ (new) senior engineers/month (for the past 6 years) and there has been a serious mind shift in the last couple years. I now hear things like "hasn't immigration become impossible to the US" and with increasing remote work, people are happy/prefer working from their home countries (better tax structures, they actually make more money). While this won't hurt US in the short term, the next generation of top startups might not be in Silicon Valley.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> From a global perspective (rather than US- or China-specific), what exactly is the cost of IP theft? Obviously, the reduced incentives to do R&D (if you cannot monetize it as well, you'll invest less). That by itself could be pretty devastating.

On the other hand, what are the advantages of IP theft? One that I can see is that it creates more competition. I don't know if it helps much in the long run though: if the competitors are just copying the leader, it's probably not adding any value.

Any other pros and cons?

<comment><USER25> The more general cost is if your country ignores IP while another doesn't you have an immense competitive advantage if the country you are "stealing" from can't in some way punish you economically for it.

I'm personally an IP abolitionist but can recognize that China is abusing its position here. It doesn't hurt the US nearly as much as it does Southeast Asia, India, Japan, Korea etc that by and large obey US IP law. That was in part what the TPP was meant to enshrine in more formalized, consistent, and persistent terms - the Asian nations agree to obey US IP imperialism while the US gives them advantageous trade opportunities over China. A large degree of why it was so heinous was because of how biased it was in favor of the US because of how desperately the countries surrounding China wanted a competitive edge over their ability to ignore US IP.

In many ways Trumps China tariffs are giving a lot of these nations what they wanted without getting anything in return from them.

<comment><USER24> I agree that IP theft hurts countries that don't partake in it.

However, I was asking about the effect on the world as a whole. Taking some wealth from one country and giving it to another isn't directly changing the amount of wealth in the world. But some second order effects may come into play that do change the global wealth.

<comment><USER17> The reduced incentive for innovation from US firms hurts global wealth just as much whether the IP copycats are in the US or if they're in China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A bit of unrelated, but since it is important for chips development posting it here. There is an initiative [1] to make FPGA/ASIC design tooling more universal and interconnected with sharing the LLVM-like low level intermediate representation (HDL), which is more powerful than Verilog or VHDL. At this point many people see FIRRTL[2][3] as a viable candidate for this position, with some enhancements.

[1] [https://github.com/SymbiFlow/ideas/issues/19](https://github.com/SymbiFlow/ideas/issues/19)

[2] [https://bar.eecs.berkeley.edu/projects/firrtl.html](https://bar.eecs.berkeley.edu/projects/firrtl.html)

[3] [https://github.com/freechipsproject/FIRRTL](https://github.com/freechipsproject/FIRRTL)

</comment><comment><USER27> HN may be interested in the longer briefing that this editorial is based on - [https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/12/01/the- semiconduc...](https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/12/01/the- semiconductor-industry-and-the-power-of-globalisation)

</comment><comment><USER28> For all the comments I see about China stealing IP, just remember, IP can be stolen anywhere, even in America.

We have a couple production plants in China. I haven't seen any concrete evidence that the employees are stealing IP. And if they are, they do a poor job of reproducing it because they're almost never as good as the real thing.

Not to say it doesn't happen, but I just find it humorous that a lot of buzz is around China precisely because most manufacturing is from there and not other nations. There's also a lot of claims in reports, but no hard proof.

There's also no examination of the victims practices or its done very poorly. Not practicing good IP protection like obfuscation in your code, encryption, anti-tamper mechanisms which, from my experience, many American companies don't practice, is just asking for trouble. They may be doing this, but its never mentioned in news articles.

Of course, given enough time and resources, most things can be cracked. However, that's no excuse to make it easy.

<comment><USER29> The last part sounds like blaming the victims.

<comment><USER30> Pointing out something a victim can do to secure themselves isn't "blaming the victim".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Reverse engineering may not work always

        When the LS 400 was disassembled for engineering analysis, Cadillac engineers concluded that the vehicle could not be built using existing GM methods

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexus_LS#Industrial_significan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexus_LS#Industrial_significance)

</comment><comment><USER32> Hardworking, ambitious, and honesty: you can have only two. now pick.</comment>