Buzz Kill - <AUTHOR> http://leoville.com/buzz-kill

<comment><USER3> _I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves._

This reminded me of something from one of Joel Spolsky's last regular blog posts (<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/03/14.html>):

 _Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It's a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn't deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I've already spent 820._

<comment><USER4> Two words: _Learning curve_.

It takes time to understand what new media are for. _Real_ , human-scale time, measured in years. The inventors of the telephone thought it was a B2B technology, didn't really grasp that everyone was going to have a phone in their home and use it to talk to relatives. The inventors of the phonograph, amazingly, thought of that as a business technology as well, for recording memos and stuff.

Twitter _et al_ are in their infancy and are still growing. They get new users all the time; the new users happen upon different aspects of the tool and use it differently; some uses are ultimately better than others. It's the blind men and the elephant, except that the elephant is the size of the Library of Congress and there are seven billion blind men, two thirds of whom have yet to touch the elephant.

I, for one, don't have so many problems with Twitter, but that's probably because I use it differently from others. Let me offer some suggestions:

If you find that you feel lost because you no longer remember how many of the people you follow on Twitter are still alive _you need to follow fewer people_. I follow 97 people. Even that may ultimately be too large, although most of those people are very quiet, so I can probably keep growing it, especially as the client software gets smarter.

Remember that Twitter is RSS for humans. It's Delicious for non-nerds. It is for exchanging links, not ideas. If you have an idea that can't fit into 140 characters write it down in 2000 characters and then tweet the link.

Of course, Twitter can also be used to exchange ideas that are not worth more than 140 characters. Sometimes these Tweets are short because they are poetry. Sometimes they are short because they are stupid. Follow the poets; unfollow the stupid. Just because people are shouting nonsense doesn't mean you have to hear them. The Internet's soundproofing is very good.

Speaking of Internet soundproofing, signal-to-noise, and maintaining one's sanity: I don't follow hashtags. Like, ever. I'm not quite ready to pound the table and declare that hashtags are never going to work, because they're eventually going to be nothing but SEObots retweeting other SEObots in a vast, roiling AI botwar, but I for one don't miss them. Important things get retweeted by your followers or echoed in some other medium.

If someone's Twitter feed is not a net win you need to unfollow them. This can hurt. I kind of like Roger Ebert's Twitter feed, but the guy does. Not. Stop. My feed is like 85% Ebert. And almost everything he says is interesting, or could be interesting, but I'm not suffering from a shortage of interesting things, and he's drowning out the quiet folks. I need a Twitter client that has better stream management. For example, it could throttle access to my main stream: Ebert gets X tweets per hour on average into my aggregated stream; to see Ebert's full stream I need to click on something.

Speaking of which: I know there are ten thousand Twitter clients already, but there will be more. Client development is also in its infancy.

<comment><USER5> Twitter is not a technology. Unless you want to call phone calls shorter than 14 seconds a new technology too.

      Twitter is RSS for humans.

Uhm, what? Maybe for some weird breed of humans who cannot digest more than 140 chars and hate context.

<comment><USER6> For a lot of sites, the RSS feed is basically a headline and a link to the actual article. 140 characters can be sufficient for those purposes... Not that that's necessarily taxing the limits of RSS or anything though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> <http://www.ryanholiday.net/the-imaginary-audience/>

_Schopenhauer had a name for this empty talk, he called it "fencing in the mirror." It's more common than you think. Consider all the times you've seen some blogger apologize for not posting recently – profusely addressing some concern that likely was never expressed. Or the Twitter updates to 38 followers, half of which are bots or uncaring companies. More realistically, maybe you've read too much into looks from a table of girls at a restaurant (a type I evolutionary error). Maybe you like like to roll down the windows in your car, turn up the stereo and know that everyone is just so impressed by your classic taste._

This isn't really directed a Leo since he does actually have an audience, but people obviously aren't hanging off of his every utterance. The same goes for all of us (for the most part) and our comments here, haha.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've never understood the appeal of Twitter and I think it would help if more "social media people" (and web app developers) could try to understand why. They are obscure little techie tools that a huge percentage of the population will never use. When Leo says "I was shouting into a vast echo chamber" what he really should say is "I was shouting into a miniscule echo chamber". And nobody was really listening because it's not really a conversation, it's all about self-promotion and that tends to be a very one-sided activity.

Buzz and Wave will never take off with the people I work with, or my friends, because we're all a bit old-fashioned and I doubt any one of us would sooner "tweet" a message than phone someone up and talk to them directly. Sure, I realise it's a one-to-many operation (unlike a phone-call) but honestly, what do I have that's worth actually _broadcasting_?

<comment><USER9> "what do I have that's worth actually broadcasting?"

It's an ego-driven medium. All of it: YouTube (when actually done for its intended purpose and not flagrant copyright flouting); facebook/myspace, foursquare, getglue. It's all about what you're doing and more recently _where_ you are when you're doing it. It's about the inherent need for self- fulfillment.

Let's say you have great taste in music. Just by someone noticing your daily playlist, you have an admirer. That admirer might want to know more about you based on that superficial quality, and follow you on your social update tool of choice. It's a tool of communication, much like a phone (actually more like a partyline, but I digress).

When it boils down to it, people need people, and as social creatures, we find every convenient avenue of acquiring and managing our social sphere as we can without expending too much energy. If we didn't care about any of that, hell, we wouldn't ever even comment in HN, right m0nty?

<comment><USER8> "we wouldn't ever even comment in HN, right m0nty?"

I guessed someone would try to make that point :) You'll notice I rarely do comment here, and I don't on reddit, youtube, Digg, etc. At least here, there is something approaching a conversation. But, Golden Rule: if I have nothing to say, I don't.

<comment><USER10> But you do acknowledge that you are a user in those networks, correct? You check those sites, and by reading (even without active commenting) you are a participant. Some people project themselves, others observe, that was how social interactions had always been.

<comment><USER8> > You check those sites

My apologies if I was unclear: I don't check those sites. Also, this insight you have that people are basically social animals, that's not exactly a revelation. But I would contend, along with OP, that our natural sociability is not best served by social networking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not sure what to think about this post. I've heard Leo speak about the likes of Twitter being the "internet's nervous system." In reality, these social networks - although useful for certain activities, like networking - <USER2> mostly superficial and disposable. Perhaps, when you are surrounded by pundits and PR types, it becomes difficult seeing beyond the hype.

<comment><USER12> The fact is, we need systems like this. We need to know what the superficial people are talking about, in order to understand how people really think about the world, and what they are all talking about lately. It helps us get greater understanding of the world. Much easier to look at trends and graphs, than it is to actually listen to any of these people.

<comment><USER13> ... But the people with real insight very rarely share it. All you get from these sorts of networking tools is a mishmash of mediocre gibberish.

<comment><USER12> it is useful to have a pulse on what the majority are thinking, talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Would you notice if someone stopped posting on Hacker News? Does that mean Hacker News isn't valuable? What if someone decided to stop editing Wikipedia? When you read the news, do you remember the byline of every story you read?

For large public conversations, most of what you read is contributed by people you don't know. Your friends' contributions are only a small part of what makes the place what it is. And yet the overall effect is valuable.

So post or don't post, as you please. There are only a few people whose posting schedules I keep track of, but I still value the overall effort.

<comment><USER15> > _Would you notice if someone stopped posting on Hacker News?_

HN is also a bad medium for real conversations ... nothing beats directly seeing or hearing a person directly. It's all about the context, which in many cases is missing entirely from a textual conversation ... like your background or your body-language.

The later is very important: when 2 humans speak to each other, there's a synchronized motion going on, much like dancing. It is said that skillful sales people are so persuasive because they can get other people to dance on their rhythm.

Twitter is to me a tipping point ... an ADHD epidemy going rampant / information overload showing its side effects.

Ever seen a 14 year old teenager talk to his friends on messenger ... context free, incomprehensible, pointless messages written with a bad grammar and lots of misspellings because typing is just too much work.

That's what Twitter is ... a communication medium that's bringing everyone's communication style to a common denominator.

<comment><USER16> You're bordering on Andy Rooney-ism here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Finally! I've been hoping this would happen. About a year or so ago Leo's podcasts became all about Twitter. Twitter this, twitter that, people on twitter, followers, yadda yadda. It got so tiring for those of us who really couldn't care less.

I'm glad Leo has seen the light.

<comment><USER18> I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt that way. I fact, I stopped listening to This Week in Tech for that very reason. I felt like a lot of the people on the show, Leo included, were getting swept up in how many followers and fans they had, and would blather ad nauseam about it.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, while I enjoy the long format and the lively discussion (it keeps the car commute enjoyable), the TWiT podcast is very much an echo chamber. I've since stopped listening to it and instead have broadened my podcast list.

<comment><USER20> Can I ask to what you have broadened your podcast list? Sometimes twit gets boring, and that leaves an hour long void to fill during my commute. Searching for 'technology podcast' unsurprisingly returns a lot of terrible podcasts.

<comment><USER19> Currently I've been catching up to old episodes of Radiolab. I've had a hard time finding tech-related podcasts that are enjoyable to listen to. Currently what I listen to are:

* NPR: Car Talk

* NPR: Planet Money

* PRI: Selected Shorts

* PRI: To the Best of Our Knowledge

* Stuff You Should Know

* This American Life

* WNYC's Radiolab

* Xbox Live's Major Nelson Radio

That's usually more than enough new content to last me through a week (1.5 hrs per day in the car). Sometimes TAL has re-runs that I've already listened to, or SYSK has a not-so-interesting topic, but it's usually not a problem.

I really miss the Stack Overflow podcasts, but I suspect they just ran out of material.

I've tried listening to Software Engineering Radio, but I'm practically ADD when it comes to podcast hosts, and it's difficult to pay attention to this sort of podcast (others seem to love it, but it's not for me). This is one of the reasons why I love Planet Money and Radiolab. Both usually talk about topics that aren't in my field, and usually do so in a very interesting manner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> That's a timely article, because I looked at Buzz within my Gmail account just the other day and found pretty much a similar story to Leo. I havn't really made any significant use of Buzz, and it didn't seem to be adding any value, so I disabled it. Fundamentally there was no activity going on within Buzz that I really cared about.

Maybe if Google do something more interesting with Buzz in future then I might re-enable it one day, but otherwise it seems to have gone the same way that Wave did.

</comment><comment><USER22> Doesn't this say more about his observation skills and his style of interaction than anything about social media? He says himself that there was a big drop off in engagement over the last few weeks. The fact that he didn't notice that is hardly the fault of Twitter or Buzz.

</comment><comment><USER23> Funny, but not at all surprising. I don't think I've _ever_ read anything on Twitter. I can't imagine why anybody ever would.

What is the use case where a human being would ever actually read a piece of text coming from Twitter? The only one I can think that of is searching for one's own product name to see if anybody is writing about it. Is there another reason I'm missing?

<comment><USER24> The use case is that people are online, at their computer and see their Twitter client notify them of an interesting sound update while they were wasting away time, procrastinating or just plain looking for some diversion. They see an update from a source they trust and decide to click through to read it.

That's not a very far stretch. People read things from Twitter all the time, that's not the problem. The issue is they only read the most recent stuff river of news style and who knows how many people they follow?

Leo's Buzz to Twitter cross-poster should have had some kind of link tracking built into the URL to tell him if people were clicking on his updates.

Leo says he had 15 updates in 2 weeks not broadcast, but when you look at his usual posting style, it's all notifications about his recent shows (which I get via iTunes automatically) and (self confessed) pictures of food he's eating. That's not exactly quality material that people will click through to. Had he posted more appealing content, his lack of updates would have been a greater loss.

<comment><USER25> >it's all notifications about his recent shows (which I get via iTunes automatically) and (self confessed) pictures of food he's eating

Leo, after the thousands of words he's written promoting these types of social media, found out that that's what most people are writing about, trivialities of interest to no-one/notification information we already have two dozen ways of getting...and thus everybody finds everybody else's tweets annoying and instantly put into that same part of the brain that selectively ignores web advertising.

That's why nobody noticed. I doubt most people would notice if most of the people they follow stopped tweeting. They're probably ignoring most of it anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> With such a following does he not have a responsibility to curate news and resources? I did not see that within his boring stream.

</comment><comment><USER27> " was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves."

I really don't think this is true at all. Leo runs a media company and many people follow him to keep tabs on what he is doing. It is not a personal relationship. He doesn't answer a large percentage of his audience so there is no true conversation. Most people probably thought he was on vacation or something. They were probably listening to others or talking to the people they actually have real "engagement" (oh, how I hate that term) with. Dunbar's number seems to be in affect.

The funny part is that many people with high follower counts crowd source answers instead of doing research, but don't balance that with answering questions themselves.

<comment><USER28> He was absent from all of his podcasts for a while to take his daughter Abby off to college. I noticed he hadn't tweeted for a bit. I just figured he was relaxing after all that stress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I actually see this as a strength of Twitter-like microblogging services. If you have no more contributions you fade gracefully into the background while the collective move on uninterrupted.

I think Leoville is misguided for treating microblogs literally as a lite version of blogs. I guess the term is a little misleading but the platform really isn't a place for any random blogger to find a cult following.

Individuality is not that big of a deal. Trends are. I wonder if this is a contributing factor to Twitter's success in Japan, which has a culture favoring the collective over the "me" mentality.

</comment><comment><USER29> I hope that when he posts a picture of a sandwich he posts an update to Twitter, Facebook, etc, and I hope he posts updates to these services in a selective manner.

I like being able to follow people on Twitter because it gives me a convenient way to see snippets of info about what's going on in their lives. I think he should continue to provide that for the the people that want it, even if the hub of the information is once again his blog.

</comment><comment><USER30> In the comments:

Why traditional blogging is a better medium than micro-blogging or social media _\- via Twitter_

Quite ironic.

<comment><USER31> This is the gist of the article for me, in particular because his tweet is the way I found the post.

I think if anything it just goes to show that buzz is way more personal than twitter and most people unfollowed him on it because he was too spammy. My small circle of friends still routinely use it to share stuff that we find amusing/interesting.

<comment><USER32> +1 for finding the post via twitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Twitter is awesome if you're a brand or company doing the shouting into the darkness. It's a great way to advertise or promote for free. You can also identify and engage with your most ardent supporters.

Otherwise, from a personal standpoint, it's pretty useless. I just post to stroke my ego every now and then.

</comment><comment><USER34> Twitter invented a problem and then solved. They just solved it in a way that made people feel self-important, hence the growth.

I don't yet know what social media is. I just know that we're doing it all wrong.

<comment><USER15> > _Twitter invented a problem and then solved_

They haven't invented anything ... they just brought an existing paradigm to the Internet: and that would be SMS messages.

And don't know about the US, but SMS messages have been all the rage and are still really popular, with some anecdotal evidence of how similar they are ....

Retwitting (CHECK): I got the same jokes over SMS from multiple people.

Many-to-many communication medium (CHECK): Around every holiday, people are sending SMS messages with greetings to a whole list of people. It costs a lot more than on Twitter so it only happens around holidays.

List of connections (CHECK): it's called a phone-book, and phones have one incorporated.

Messages limited to 140 chars, encouraging retard-like talk (CHECK): of corZ, ritN crrct sentences S jst so lst yr

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> tl;dr: Dude was posting things on google buzz, for some reason it stopped posting, no one noticed including the author.

<comment><USER36> Yeah but if Leo Laporte can go that long without anyone noticing, what are the chances anyone cares about us tweeting.

He has a large fan base, and I believe is well liked. I think he points out that twitter isn't building up peoples attention span but making it much shorter. The vast amount of tweet poring in just drowns out the individual posters. I can tell you right now, I wouldn't notice if a couple of people I subscribe to disappeared from twitter except maybe my wife :)

<comment><USER37> I think you hit it on the head at the end of your post. His status as a nerd celebrity essentially ensures that many of the connections he has via these social networks will be tenuous at best. You can't classify the connection you have a to guy who's heard your podcast the same as your good friends and co- workers (or your wife! ;)).

This will sound conceited, but I think most people I'm associated with via Twitter would probably care if I disappeared without a peep for more than 5 days. So I think that while most people don't really care about _his_ tweeting, nearly every other user's connections to their followers/followees will be much tighter.

<comment><USER38> Why not try it? Go silent without mention and see what happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> What shocks me: I can't imagine being surprised at a result after two years. Analytics, while having many flaws, tell me the impact of my companies social media projects pretty quickly.

</comment><comment><USER40> "Buzz can tweet is not affiliated with Google or Twitter"

It's not really any of these two services' fault that this obscure addon stopped working.

<comment><USER41> You missed the point though.

No one noticed, or cared that it was broken.

<comment><USER42> ...and the money quote: _I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves._

It would have been more accurate as "I stopped shouting into the vast echo chamber but nobody noticed because they were too busy shouting themselves."

<comment><USER43> No, I think his point was that no one was hearing him even _before_ it stopped working...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who do you go to for Windows VPS's? - <AUTHOR> I've been a long time user of Linode and they have been great.  I now have come to a point where I need a box running Windows Server and I'm not sure where to turn.  There are a lot of great options when running Linux.  Who is the go to for Windows VPS's? <comment><USER2> You can use Windows on you Linode:

See

[https://gist.github.com/EugeneKay/1ff78396b57f25e69f1d](https://gist.github.com/EugeneKay/1ff78396b57f25e69f1d)

and

[https://github.com/ClickSimply/docs/blob/windows-on- linode/d...](https://github.com/ClickSimply/docs/blob/windows-on- linode/docs/tools-reference/windows-on-linode/installing-windows-on-linode- vps.md)

</comment><comment><USER3> EC2 works for me.</comment>


FastImageCache – iOS library for quickly displaying images while scrolling - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/path/FastImageCache

<comment><USER2> Whats the difference between this and SDWebImage, if any?? I cant see a ton of different API differences. Looks like this probably wont support ARC, though.

<comment><USER3> The big difference in how the cache is managed. SDWebImage has worked well when I've used it, but it's cache management is much more simplistic. I'd be curious to try FastImageCache on projects I've worked on to see if there's any improvement. Scrolling performance can be a tough thing to optimize for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It does seem weird that they store the uncompressed image on the disk. I think that a benchmark on this comparing with compressed / decompress on CPU would be interesting because one is bounded on I/O, another is bounded by CPU throughput.

<comment><USER5> It actually isn't all that surprising, we've hit similar bottlenecks where JPEG decompression on the iPhone ends up choking feeds that are scrolled through quickly.

We didn't go the route of caching the uncompressed data on disk, though, we just keep the images in a maintained in-memory cache.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. I would think that a layered cache scheme probably could have the best of the two worlds (a good size of cached content on disk, and fast uncompressed image hit from memory). But using mmap'ed file instead of doing own layered cache seems less hassle. Also, you are doing decompression on a background thread, which shouldn't be much a choke on 4S and later devices (probably, again). I need to have some tests to backup my claims obviously :)

<comment><USER5> If you're using libdispatch on the 4S you might consider using a serial queue (for NSOperationQueue just set the maxConcurrentOperationCount to 1) as it starts to eat the CPU pretty quickly if you're trying to load a lot of images.

Even on the 5 I was surprised by how much it helped to have the images cached (no anecdotal data on the 5S as it came out way after we started caching)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's not using ARC. Is this legacy code, or couldn't they get equivalent performance with ARC enabled?

<comment><USER7> Hello. Mallory Paine here. I wrote FIC. This is not legacy code...it should be trivial to convert it to ARC and performance should be unaffected. I'm a bit old school myself so I chose to write it with manual retains. Does this approach make the code more difficult for you to use within an ARC project?

<comment><USER8> Actually you have my support for going manual. I still prefer to do all my projects without ARC (and I'm not old-school, unless 2009 is old-school). I just feel dirty everytime I use ARC, like I'm being sloppy haha. It also hides a lot about memory management that new people might never learn (and thus be in bigger trouble when something does go wrong). But I accept that it does have major advantages...

One trouble now is you never know if a library or whatnot will be ARC so it fragments things somewhat.

<comment><USER9> If you know how to use retain/release, then you shouldn't have any trouble dealing with ARC edge cases... go ARC!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As they made some note of, Core Animation is very picky about the image format you provide via the contents property. For example, if you retain a reference to a CGImageRef that you also assign to a CALayer's contents property, you will end up with at least double the memory usage if it's not in CA's preferred format and it makes a copy of it. In my experience doing that alone can help performance immensely.

I've since lost track of the Apple documentation that said it, but CA prefers 16-byte alignment and (kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedFirst | kCGBitmapByteOrder32Little) for the pixel format.

<comment><USER9> I think it can change from device to device too

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A better solution then dealing with 60fps scrolling : Don't scroll, Flip!

<comment><USER12> Not really, scrolling seems to be very natural interaction model on touch screens. If you compare UI approaches of different apps, most of the popular apps use scrolling, flipping hasn't really proven itself and it's a bit gimmicky</comment></comment>


F-– You, Startup World - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@shemag8/fuck-you-startup-world-ab6cc72fad0e#.4pjsk1orh <comment><USER2> Previous discussion from earlier today (submission got flagged, eventually): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12682944](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12682944).

<comment><USER3> And of course this thread got flagged as [dup] too. Of course HN doesn't want people to read anything that would go against HN. Why would they? They're not biased, they're not a platform for open communication. They're not just "first and foremost a business". They're just _a business_ , plain and simple.

<comment><USER2> Don't jump to conclusions. My guess is that people think that a random rant full of expletives may not be worthy enough to stay on the front page, so they flag it down. I understand that, even though I personally had a lot of fun reading the article.

There's plenty occasions in here to bash startups, the startup culture, and even HN's role in it almost every day. HN is definitely not against startup criticism and meta-discussions. It's just against poor-quality ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12682944](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12682944).</comment>


Spatial – Zoom in VR/AR/Web - <AUTHOR> http://spatial.io <comment><AUTHOR> Spatial is a 3D collaborative version of video chat in VR/AR.

4 years in the making, lifelike avatars help you feel like you're sitting next to each other. Collaborate in virtual rooms full of images, videos and 3D models. Join from Oculus Quest, HoloLens, MagicLeap or the web. Free and available now at www.spatial.io

</comment><comment><USER2> Tried this today - actually impressed, bit of a faff joining rooms but nice touches with avatar approach and things like speech-to-text on notes.

Anyone else tried it?</comment>


The New Yandex.Browser - <AUTHOR> http://browser.yandex.com/future/

<comment><USER2> "Nothing distracts the user from what's really important" Except all the Ads.</comment>


How People Change - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/opinion/brooks-how-people-change.html <comment><USER2> I'm unsure why this is on the HN front page, but while it's there I'll throw in an opinion...

If the father had done a better job parenting instead of permissively coddling his children or allowing others to parent them, he would never have had to write this email.

Parenting is coaching. It's a process of constantly weening children from dependency after dependency. It can be tough when they cry at every rule you put in place and at every missed chocolate or toy or tv show. But you have to be firm, stay true to your vision, and view yourself as saving your children from "the tyranny of their own desires".

If you want it done right, you can't do it from a distance. You can't oursource the effort by sending them off to boarding school and hope someone else will do your job for you.

It's not easy. I have 3 of my own. Perhaps the hardest thing to do is to realize that the way your kids turn out is largely due to how effectively you and your partner parent. Yes they make their own choices. But they should make those choices within a framework of confidence, intelligence and independence that you as a parent have cultivated.

That's a lot of responsibility. But you have to take it on if you want to increase the chances of your children having good lives.

Waiting until they're 40 to write them an email expressing your disappointment is far too little way too late.

<comment><USER3> I am in deep agreement with the thrust of your argument, particularly parents job in relation to "the tyranny of their own desires".

However, I can't agree with "Perhaps the hardest thing to do is to realize that the way your kids turn out is largely due to how effectively you and your partner parent."

If you mean you as a parent will have an enormous impact on your child's life- arc, I certainly agree. But who a child is is often not nearly as malleable as parents, and especially non-parents think. Parenting matters enormously, but I can't agree how a child turns out is "largely" due to parenting.

<comment><USER2> Sure. If you plant an acorn in crappy soil and fail to fertilize and nurture it, does it still turn into an oak tree (if it turns into anything at all)? Of course.

But does it turn out as well as it would have if it got off to the right start and/or was cared for appropriately? Probably not.

How the oak tree turned out is largely dependent on the environment it was raised in, the care and attention given to it, no?

Humans have more ability to control or change their conditions than oak trees but the principle still applies reasonably well. At the very least, taking on this responsibility as a parent minimizes the chances that one will be absent or non-attentive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The father's pattern of behavoir is interesting here. He was absent when his children were young and then sent them off to boarding school and didn't stay in touch. Now their lives are not going as well as he'd like, so he's decided to excoriate them for their decisions. What authority does he have for this? He earned the money for their expenses when they were young, but he was otherwise completely uninterested in their upbringing. Now he's going to parachute in and make demands. Fathering children does not make you a father.

</comment><comment><USER5> The funny/sad thing is, I could write a similar e-mail to my parents explaining how disappointed I am with their live choices, inability to learn, their wrought inter-dependence they call marriage, and, to be honest, the way they raised their children (including me, of course).

I don't think there is anything wrong to be honest to each other. Family isn't as important as it has been throughout history and the Idea of Family as portrayed in our culture has become an outdated concept. On the other hand, as a family we do share a bond and a shared history together and we're connected. We can cut our physical ties to one another, just never see each other again, but we cannot free ourselves from our mental bond. We have to live with that. And I don't see how cutting physical ties would change anything about that.

<comment><USER6> > Family isn't as important as it has been throughout history and the Idea of > Family as portrayed in our culture has become an outdated concept.

I wonder if it's exactly this opinion that yields ``adults'' like Nick Crews' children...

<comment><USER5> That is a good question, yes.

Maybe there is a generation gap. I wonder if Nick Crew and his broken family ever did talk about their expectations they have for each other. Or he just never expressed his opinion clear and cut to his children and, once he had enough, just cut the cord.

The article is somewhat sparse on details. I would have liked it to have some sort of broader social-cultural analysis of sorts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> With the paywall up [1], I only have access to a couple NYTimes articles per month. I was horrified to discover this was just a link to some stupid op-ed by David Brooks. What a waste. I'm completely sick of all the hot-air professional bullshit-artist columnists. If this linked to a Tom Friedman article, I'd have completely lost it.

[1] I know there are a lot of exceptions, I'm not sure if this will count against my monthly limit if I went to the page via this HN link.

<comment><USER8> The easiest exception to the paywall is incognito mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I fail to understand how this made the front-page of HN.

A father sent an email to his children expressing his disdain. Email went viral in a way unanticipated by the daughter who made the email public. Some lame exposition is given on the basics of positive re-enforcement.

Nothing about this was interesting or mentally stimulating.

</comment><comment><USER10> What was the point of this article? I don't think it had much to do with how people actually change. It was pretty much aggregating a "viral" email and summarizing (maybe super-summarizing) some views from cognitive behavioral therapy and maybe some chapters from "The Power of Habit"

The explanation of "How people change" is superficial at best in this article.

</comment><comment><USER11> The father's email was hardly ferocious. When children are young, we express disappointment when they do something they should not do and express encouragement when they do something they should.

" People don't behave badly because they lack information about their shortcomings. They behave badly because they've fallen into patterns of destructive behavior from which they're unable to escape."

The behavior described by the father could hardly be genetic or environmental shortcomings. If lack of information is not the cause, then why do we say that problem youth need more and more education with superman-like teachers and fewer kids per class?

"Human behavior flows from hidden springs and calls for constant and crafty prodding more than blunt hectoring. The way to get someone out of a negative cascade is not with a ferocious e-mail trying to attack their bad behavior. It's to go on offense and try to maximize some alternative good behavior. There's a trove of research suggesting that it's best to tackle negative behaviors obliquely, by redirecting attention toward different, positive ones."

Yes, hidden springs that mysterious yet totally doable thing that, if we did it right, then we'd know we were doing it, somehow.

</comment><comment><USER12> The article brings some good points about habit formation:

1\. Start with one habit, one part of life at a time

2\. Create repeated, consistent incentives for abstaining from bad habits

3\. In place of bad habits, put into practice positive behaviors

4\. Change happens in a supportive, nurturing environment

Even though the article is mostly about one man's relationship to his adult kids, the author manages to include a few decent ideas about change.

</comment><comment><USER13> You can read the original letter and skip David Brooks' opining. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9686219/I-am- bitterly...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9686219/I-am-bitterly- bitterly-disappointed-retired-naval-officers-email-to-children-in-full.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Please change the title. It doesn't talk about how people change but how to change people.</comment>


WeWork lays off 2,400 employees - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/21/wework-lays-off-2400-employees.html <comment><USER2> From the article, 2,400 employees is 19% of the peak of 12,500 employees on June 30. There was no mention of where the cuts were made however.

I am curious how many "white collar" type jobs WeWork would have, since I heard from previous discussions here that they were hiring for roles in unrelated-to-real-estate things like machine learning. I would imagine that there are lots of hourly-type roles managing the sites, but 12,500 seems reasonable for 849 locations (from [https://www.wework.com/locations](https://www.wework.com/locations)), ~14 people per location, assuming that they are included in that 12,500 number.

<comment><USER3> I currently keep a wework hotdesk and they do have a sizable headcount at each location - 3 rotating front desk people, a location manager, and maybe 3/4 rotating maintenance staff. I think they might contract out the maintenance staff, but that's still 4x number_of_locations just for that.

<comment><USER4> How many office did WeWork have at peak vs current?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't fathom the morale at this place. I really hope things get better for these poor people caught in the middle of this shit show.

<comment><USER6> The worst part of this for people will be having WeWork on their resume.

<comment><USER5> I don't really agree with this. I despise Facebook and happily retweeted a post a few weeks ago specifically aimed at helping FB engineers find work elsewhere.

I'd prefer to help good people get out of bad places.

[https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/1190701524210438144](https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/1190701524210438144)

<comment><USER7> Wow. You do realize most engineers have to work at far shittier companies and environments than FB? And for a lot less money.

<comment><USER5> Then they should research the companies in the post and if they're interested in a change apply as well. No listing in that post is _catering_ to an ex-FB employee by any means.

<comment><USER7> It's not about doing "research". They would love to work at Facebook if they could. FB software engineer is a dream job for many outside of SV bubble, and even for many inside.

<comment><USER8> It certainly was, nowdays its a bit more niche.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why corporate boards are so inept, and allowed to remain so, I'll never understand.

If you buy into the goal being "shareholder value" then plainly Softbank failed. One could make the argument that WeWork's board did the things that they thought created the most value - but if you implode in on yourself, you clearly failed. Even if the self-dealing was not outright legal fraud, it was plainly not to anyone's benefit apart from Adam Newmann - which again is complicit behavior on the part of both boards. None of it is good business.

<comment><USER10> The board has the perspective of _ownership_. The employee has the perspective of _being commanded_.

Imagine something nice that you own- like your car. Do you feel compelled to understand your car? Must you be an excellent driver to own that car, if you can afford it?

No. And while it's not exactly the same, the people generally look at the company as a machine that makes them money. They don't have to be good at anything to own that machine, and if they want, they can even share it with their drug addict fail-child.

<comment><USER11> This is the ultimate problem with how we've structured public corporations/LLCs in the US. When markets are working correctly in an environment of low innovation, companies themselves becomes the product, and the company's product itself just become a cashflow on a balance sheet. Grow the company (and its userbase) to a point where it can be harvested (go public) and then processed while you get paid out.

Nothing else in the environment matters if it's not on the balance sheet (most notably pollution, social disruption, and general human suffering). Yvon Chouinard has a great perspective on this in his book "Let My People Go Surfing" where he meditates on the paradox of running a private business that fights itself by automatically giving away portions of its revenue to charity rather than paying out shareholders/reinvesting in growth. What do you do when you see every sale your company makes as a failure in the fight against consumption/towards sustainability?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does this include the 1000 employees being forced to move from FTE work for WeWork into working indirectly as contractors with JLL: [https://twitter.com/WeWorkersCo/status/1195778138506190848](https://twitter.com/WeWorkersCo/status/1195778138506190848)

</comment><comment><USER13> Saw this posted in another related story:

If you're affected by the WeWork layoffs and looking for a new role, fill this out:

[https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdx4TOVN7AdgvyAZGbq...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdx4TOVN7AdgvyAZGbquEV7gd4Ok5pJcTAtBXgPWY3sPe0ufg/viewform)

If you're interested in recruiting ex-WeWork folks, you can look them up here:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14CAtBsn3ZTL59tNMVbew...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14CAtBsn3ZTL59tNMVbew2AlAh_mzPaSL5wOm4Sh8FD0/)

original source: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199247)

</comment><comment><USER14> Hypothesis: Events like this are the modern moral equivalent of the giant, gaudy, gilt-encrusted palaces of the 17th century.

Economic disparity has reached a point where those at the top end literally have more money than they know what to do with and are increasingly spending it on stupider and stupider things out of some perceived need to do _something_.

<comment><USER15> _Events like this are the modern moral equivalent of the giant, gaudy, gilt- encrusted palaces of the 17th century._

I think this vastly overstates it. Versailles cost some significant fraction of France's GDP - possibly as much as 25% in some years. WeWork's $10B is a mere drop in the US' $20T GDP.

<comment><USER16> WeWork is just one part of it, however. Uber is another Ponzi scheme, living on underpriced rides and multi-billion losses for as long as their bond rating holds up.

<comment><USER17> Uber isn'ta Ponzi scheme.

I use Uber all the time, as does everyone I know. Hell, I even drove for them for a while.

They provide a needed service and they are subsidizing that to get rid of competition like Lyft and to grow a huge user base. Then, it's likely they will raise prices and start making money.

But it is not a Ponzi scheme. Last I checked, a local taxi company that is still in business wants $30 to take me into town, which is 5 miles away. Uber is $7.

<comment><USER16> > But it is not a Ponzi scheme. Last I checked, a local taxi company that is > still in business wants $30 to take me into town, which is 5 miles away. > Uber is $7.

The cost of that $7 are the billions they lose every quarter. It's not sustainable. They're a public company now, so to come up with fresh cash, they have to issue bonds and pay interest on them. How will they repay it when they aren't generating fresh cash through profits? They can't rely on VCs opening their wallets whenever they needed money.

<comment><USER18> I believe the plan is to increase prices.

Cheap rides are to gain marketshare and customer acquisition. Not saying the strategy will be fruitful but it is a strategy.

<comment><USER19> That's a terrible plan considering any one of their competitors could not raise their own prices and now be a preferred choice to Uber.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Imagine going from being on the verge of cashing out your equity options to being fired within the space of 3 months.

</comment><comment><USER21> What on Earth is WeWork doing that requires TWELVE THOUSAND PEOPLE!? Holy fucking shit

<comment><USER22> Managing 800 physical office locations? That's not really that many people per location.

<comment><USER21> Do they seriously have employees at each? I assumed it was either a franchise or contractor thing. Rare for a tech company to actually hire people directly for that sort of thing.

<comment><USER23> They aren't a tech company. They are an office leasing and real estate company, and have the appropriate employees for this type of business.

<comment><USER24> > and have the appropriate employees for this type of business

I disagree. WeWork has 836 locations and 12.5k (now 10k) employees, or ~12-15 employees per location. Regus/IWG has 3,306 locations and 9.6k employees, or ~3 employees per location.

How is 4-5x the number of employees for a comparable non-tech company appropriate?

<comment><USER25> You'd have to know how the two companies split functions between employees and contractors. Though I'd not be surprised if WeWork were staffed relatively heavily. To note something random, WeWork has an (unstaffed) booth at Kubecon which suggests they do marketing activities that someone like Regus generally doesn't.

<comment><USER26> Probably because Regus is more interested in running a business and not advertising to potential investors how cool it is.

Just my guess.

<comment><USER27> On top of that, Regus pays a huge portion of the employees at center hourly. I know Regus is not sexy, but they should get credit for focusing on economics that work at scale rather than just pumping up some ridiculous valuation with no chance of liquidity outside of getting bought or IPOing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Surprising absolutely nobody.

Meanwhile, Adam Neumann is still collecting a $1.7 Billion payout.

<comment><USER16> Just think of the shareholder value that's been unlocked now that 2400 people are out of a job!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> More context: many employees of WeWork wrote a letter to management, covered also in NYT: "'We Are Not the Adam Neumanns of This World': What WeWork Employees Told Their Bosses" [1]

[1] [http://archive.is/8bVvY](http://archive.is/8bVvY)

</comment><comment><USER30> If I'm Neumann, I'm taking 200-250 million dollars of my 1.7 billion in winnings and giving it away to the laid off employees (about 90k each).

Imagine the positive press you could drum up about yourself! All while keeping 1.5 billion dollars!

<comment><USER31> Why?

<comment><USER32> > Imagine the positive press

<comment><USER33> Why? A fraction of that will buy you even better positive press.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I still can't believe this guy gets to walk away with 1.7 billion dollars just for building up fluff while all the people who helped him grow have dire consequences both financial and personal. Unbelievable that this guy gets a clean chit, and all this isn't considered criminal. This to me is almost at the scale of Theranos. Only, this guy was smarter in the legal side of things, perhaps.

<comment><USER35> I don't really see why it's his fault investors over valued his company — he believed in his own spin and was phenomenally successful at building a large, real business. This was not like Theranos where he was straight up lying about a product working — anyone could analyze the business based on the fundamentals, and investors seemed ever willing to invest at high valuations.

The self dealing was reprehensible and evidence of low morals in my view, but none of those events actually materially impact the value of the business. Instead, overnight, investors just came to their senses about what kind of value this type of business is worth. Definitely a strategic misstep on his part, but it's not like he stole billions of value away from the company. The drop in value is more like what happened to Uber or Blue Apron post IPO, except, unfortunately for the employees, it happened before they could exit.

<comment><USER36> > was phenomenally successful at building a large, real business

What? How? He built an 8b business with 16b in investment. _Anyone_ can do that. Take 16b, put it in index funds, call yourself an investment bank. You'd get better returns than -50%, for sure.

<comment><USER37> Not just _anyone_ gets 16b of funding to lose 50% on it. You need to be a very charismatic CEO - maybe borderline cult-leader status

<comment><USER38> I think you also need some "special" investors. In this case softbank appreciated the crazyness of the CEO.

<comment><USER37> Yes, but don't forget that those "special" investors were funded by even richer, special-er investors.

Softbank funded WeWork via the Vision fund, which is primarily funded with Saudi money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This will become quite the case study in the business world. There's so much to learn from this mess.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm glad I was included in the lay-offs. The situation was unbearable.

<comment><USER41> care to share more from the inside? I would've also loved to be laid off with severance if I were there but curious to hear if from your perspective

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Honestly I'm surprised there are 2400 employees who have stuck around this long, waiting for the other shoe to drop. How could they not see the obvious implosion coming? The proverbial tidal wave of ugly news has been steady for months now.

<comment><USER43> Being laid off gets you unemployment. Quitting doesn't.

<comment><USER44> It's not between sticking around or quitting. They could have gone out and found a new job. One that presumably pays more than unemployment and quite possibly given the current stage of the economic cycle, more than their current job.

<comment><USER45> I mean, if your lifestyle doesn't require the full payment, you can think of it as a half-pay long vacation.

I for one wouldn't mind being unemployed for 3 months.

<comment><USER46> > I for one wouldn't mind being unemployed for 3 months.

A 3-month hole in your resume will be something you'd have to explain to your future employers for the rest of your life.

<comment><USER47> There are places that demand your high school and/or college diplomas even if it's been 30 years. There are places that give programmers tests with flow charts. At some stage of maturity you realize there's no point in worrying about pleasing everybody, because many of them are unreasonable and you'll never get the chance anyway.

Whenever there are unreasonable rules and you really do want to get around them, all you have to do is find a way to demonstrate your talent sufficiently that people will bend them for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> for a funny and informative recap of Adam Neuman's life leading up to the formation of WeWork, check out this episode from the Grubstakers podcast. Really, really wild the stuff this guy pulled and the bull it took to do so. [https://soundcloud.com/grubstakers/episode-95-adam- neumann-w...](https://soundcloud.com/grubstakers/episode-95-adam-neumann- wework)

</comment><comment><USER49> I hate this for the laid-off employees. Especially at this time of the year, this sucks.

I feel enraged for stockholders. WeWork's management wasn't 'sticking to the knitting', as Buffett would say. They seemed preoccupied with trying to shape the world (see link below) and not so much providing value for shareholders or security to employees.

Hoping for a better, smarter, focused new company to come along and build the business.

[https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-bans- meat-2018-7](https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-bans-meat-2018-7)

</comment><comment><USER50> Wework business model didn't make any sense. Why wouldn't market favors competing landlords for rental spaces since that will ultimately brings the best value for customers? Also, we definitely don't have a protection for employees working in a startup like companies. Since our political system currently favors the job creators, it's best to take them to court and so you can get your side of the story out.

</comment><comment><USER51> So, who will play Adam Neumann in the WeWork movie? Jim Carrey?

</comment><comment><USER52> Even if average Employee cost was $20,000/year, that is a whopping $48,0000,000 (Million) profit added to the shareholders. What is their actual revenue ?

<comment><USER53> In their filing for the IPO WeWork posted a net loss of 1.6 billion on 1.8 billion in revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Judging from the incredible press, it would be amazing if the management can hold the company together and it actually exists in 3 years.

<comment><USER16> They will likely change the name, since it's become a punchline and will always remind people of their fly-by-night founder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> WeWorkOnLayoffs - what a terrible turn this has taken and how many good people are impacted by this. truly sad

</comment><comment><USER56> Any predictions for EOL of WeWork?

</comment><comment><USER57> Sucks for the employees and everyone else who built up the founder's ego and his wallets. But honestly, this is an indefensible business model with clearly unsustainable economics. This deal and Theranos has convinced me that venture capitalists aren't as a group particularly insightful or worthy of admiration. Personally I hope the collapse of WeWork takes Meetup.com with it.

<comment><USER58> Would you mind explaining what you mean? I can't see any connection between wework and meetup.

<comment><USER59> wework bought meetup in 2017.

<comment><USER58> Ahh. I had no idea. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> So does this mean that rents will finally start on the downward trend in NYC? :D

</comment><comment><USER61> There is an startup bubble funded by central bank low interest rates. It's understandable that capital is seeking higher gains. What is not so ok is that we are building a casino like economic bubble funding ideas which are not profitable. If interest rates where higher bets would be more selective.

</comment><comment><USER62> "Career transition" is that what we're calling lay-offs now?

<comment><USER63> An Australian Prime Minister road tested "liberated from their jobs" but that was deemed insensitive: [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-18/abbott- announces-supp...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-18/abbott-announces- support-package-for-holden-workers/5163950)</comment></comment>


Wanted: gender-free job ads - <AUTHOR> http://www.futurity.org/top-stories/wanted-gender-free-job-ads/

<comment><USER2> I agree with the general point, but it demonstrates a contradiction in "PC" gender theory. On the one hand, men and women are statistically psychologically identical, so any differences in career choices or outcomes must be due to deliberate or unconscious discrimination. On the other hand, you shouldn't use competitive terms in job ads because they're psychologically unappealing to women.

<comment><USER3> I think contemporary gender theorists would be very surprised to hear that they think the way our society constructs gender produces identical psychological proclivities.

<comment><USER4> Sure, the actual experts would be.

I think the parent is referring to the current social norms of what you are allowed/not allowed to say.

<comment><USER2> Yes, exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A simple writing exercise has been shown to close various stereotypical "gaps", including gender and race: [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/11/2...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/11/25/15-minute- writing-exercise-closes-the-gender-gap-in-university-level-physics/) Maybe it would be effective here too? "Perhaps you care about creativity, family relationships, your career, or having a sense of humour. Pick two or three of these values and write a few sentences about why they are important to you. You have fifteen minutes." Then read the job ads.

</comment><comment><USER6> An interesting observation. Obvious but not, at the same time :-) On the flip side, this is an interesting way to discriminate in your hiring practices without being explicit about it. I wonder to what extent you could take it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Gender is social construct. Sex is a biological one. Sex is a protected class. Gender is not.

Why should we have gender-free job ads any more than we should have ads free of any other quality?

<comment><USER5> _researchers believe it's likely that companies unintentionally place gendered job advertisements.

"Many companies want to diversify," Gaucher says. "Companies that use highly masculine wording may, in reality, be just as welcoming to their female employees as they are to their male employees."_

This isn't about protecting gender, it's about unintentionally stomping on it. If you're accidentally alienating half of the population, you're going to miss out on a lot of good attributes of that gender. Some examples from the article: "competitive" and "dominant" (male) versus "compassionate" and "nurturing" (female). And how likely would it be for a male-gendered person to make the videos in this article: [http://arstechnica.com/ask-ars/2011/04/how- to-build-your-own...](http://arstechnica.com/ask-ars/2011/04/how-to-build- your-own-computer-ask-ars-diy-series-part-i.ars)

<comment><USER8> Who says it's an accident? Are we looking for competitive, dominant nurses and compassionate, caring enterprise sales staff?

"Job ads should be gender neutral" is an awfully large thing to take as an unexamined axiom. Should they really? Or should they reflect the desired position? And if the latter, if someone writes a bad job position that scares off some good applicants, does it really matter on what dimension they are scaring off good applicants? Regardless of how they're scaring them off, they're hurting themselves quite directly far more than the diffuse effect on the applicant pool.

It just seems like the more you drill down into this and actually think, the less interesting this becomes.

<comment><USER5> _Regardless of how they're scaring them off, they're hurting themselves quite directly far more than the diffuse effect on the applicant pool._

Definitely true.

 _Are we looking for competitive, dominant nurses and compassionate, caring enterprise sales staff?_

The range of problems you can solve increases exponentially with the different types of people you have on the team. The types you mention would be a good addition to a team with complementary attributes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems like it would be just as, or more, effective to run two different type of ads rather than attempt "gender-free" descriptions.

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems that both sides - employers and job applicants - have to reduce their biases... Which the article suggests.</comment>


Jack Dorsey's comments about SF are a warning sign for the city's tech scene - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/08/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-san-francisco-comments-a-warning-sign.html <comment><USER2> > HashiCorp and GitLab executives have put in place additional processes for > asynchronous work, so employees on opposite sides of the globe can > communicate and collaborate.

I wish it elaborated on what these additional processes are. Anyone know?

<comment><USER3> Hashicorp: [https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/lessons-learned- hypergro...](https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/lessons-learned-hypergrowth- hashicorp-remote-engineering-teams)

Hashiconf's 2019 second day keynote was essentially, "Come work for us, from anywhere".

GitLab: [https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all- remote/](https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/)

Disclaimer: Remote Work Advocate

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > the compensation packages are all out of whack.

Not while we're bringing in absurd margins.</comment>


Can We Get Congress to Investigate Aaron Swartz's Prosecution? - <AUTHOR>

I just sent an e-mail to Jared Polis, the Representative for Colorado's 2nd District, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee. Rep. Polis a former tech entrepreneur and co-founder of TechStars. If anyone is likely to get the ball rolling on this, I think it would be him.<p>The circumstances that made this prosecution possible, especially our antiquated and disproportionate computer crime laws, need to be addressed at the legislative level. If anyone else is planning to write to their representative and wants to see what I sent to Rep. Polis, I can post the text here. <comment><USER2> Please do. I may try.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's what I wrote:

Dear Representative Polis,

Two days ago, as I'm sure you are aware, brilliant programmer, writer, and activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide. At the time of his death, he was being threatened with a 35-year federal prison sentence and millions of dollars in fines for allegedly downloading academic articles with the plan to distribute them freely to scholars everywhere.

Even though the alleged victim, JSTOR, did not wish to press any charges, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz and Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann pressed forward aggressively, treating Mr. Swartz the same as a bank robber, phishing artist, or hacker of military secrets. Mr. Swartz's family believes that this overzealous and unreasonable prosecution contributed to his suicide.

Rep. Polis, as an Internet entrepreneur and investor, you understand the issues at hand better than most. And as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, you are well positioned to investigate the circumstances of this prosecution, and revisit the decades-old laws that made it possible.

I never knew Aaron Swartz, but like many others, I was a great admirer of his work and felt his loss deeply. I beg you to look into this case.

Thank you,

[my name]</comment></comment>


Node.js IDE on Android and iOS and WinRT - <AUTHOR> http://jxcore.com/node-js-ide-on-android-ios-winrt/

<comment><USER2> "a fully featured development IDE"

What kind of static analysis and automatic refactoring features does it provide?</comment>


iPhone charging cable, looks normal, offers terminal access to victim's mac - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/12/iphone-charging-cable-hack-computer-def-con/ <comment><USER2> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666095](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666095)

<comment><USER3> When you know an article is a dupe, how do you look it up?

I've wanted to help with this before but I find it very hard to find the old articles.

<comment><USER4> Beneath the title of the submission, you should be able to see an option labeled _past_. That will highlight all of the duplicate entries.</comment></comment></comment>


500 Startups admits it kept Australian partner in the dark - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/02/500-startups-admits-it-kept-australian-lp-in-the-dark/ <comment><USER2> Man I just loathe Australian government initiatives to support startups.

It's NEVER what is actually needed i.e easy to access cash or tax relief.

Instead it's the government pissing the money into an ecosystem of leech "advisors", "mentors", "incubators".

A parasitic ecosystem of hangers on to the idea of the startup.

Somehow in Australia the idea has become that the worst thing the government could do is directly support people to write code in their kitchens and ACTUALLY BUILD PRODUCTS.

Instead, the ecosystem of useless leeches/"advisors" has convinced the government that it should be the recipient of the cash.

It's vile trickery and charlatanism.

As a developer and entrepreneur, can I say to the government, please just chuck the money in the garbage bin / it's going to help startups just as much when it's in there.

Makes no ducking difference if Dave McClure managed to get 500 startups a cut of the pigs trough.

Seriously, go and have a look at the LaunchVic website, you might need to read it two or three times to realize there's actually literally NOTHING in there to actually directly support entrepreneurs. It's all indirect smoke and mirrors and complete bullshit.

Australian governments, please just stop saying "startup" and "entrepreneur" and instead go give the money to charity.

<comment><USER3> It's the same case in Thailand. Most of these "advisors" have never built a successful company or product. They have worked in companies and done well in "management" or they have started companies that are very good at raising funding but fall short when it comes to building a product or keeping customers and employees happy, and are usually incapable of making profit.

<comment><USER4> The ones that are good at building something (or at least focused on it) won't be wasting their time trying to "give back" (read: find other opportunities). Zuckerberg did some very minimal "giving back" while building Facebook IIRC (the biggest being an actually useful course he visited at Harvard called CS50, here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFFs9UgOAlE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFFs9UgOAlE))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suppose this is why top bro-dawg Chris Sacca is retiring? It's not surprising as he did nothing to hide his bro-ner for fellow douchebag Travis Kalanick.</comment>


"Gullibility is the principal cause of bubbles." - <AUTHOR> http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3142/2603

<comment><USER2> Not gullibility. Blind greed. People don't want to miss the bandwagon when they see others making money. They may be the most untrusting people in the world, but they turn that distrust towards the naysayers if they think there is money to be made.</comment>


Facebook to become world's biggest virtual graveyard by 2098 - <AUTHOR> http://viewstorm.com/2016/03/facebook-to-become-worlds-biggest-virtual-graveyard-by-2098-predict-researchers/ <comment><USER2> Original at _The Daily Mail_ : [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3479288/Facebook- wor...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3479288/Facebook-world-s- biggest-virtual-graveyard-profiles-dead-people-living-users-end-century-say- experts.html)</comment>


Triton: Cloud management platform with first class support for containers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/joyent/triton <comment><USER2> Is there an overview of what sets Triton apart from other PaaS (which this seems to be)? It's really hard to keep up just with what happens at Kubernetes, but it feels like there are "Cloud Application Server" (quotes intentionally) popping up everywhere and it feels like everyone is as complex as the other.

<comment><USER3> Aside from performance: I find the role based access controls _far_ easier to use than, eg. GCP (which likes to claim I don't have access to things even when I'm using an admin account). The firewall is also really easy to use and configure (via the web UI or by defining a simple rule language and setting it up via, eg. Terraform).

My favorite thing hands down is how they handle and use machine metadata though; tags you define in the web UI (or via your infrastructure provisioning mechanism) get shoved onto the machine by zoneinit and then can be used on the machine for configuration, or can show up in the web UI after provisioning (eg. the postgres image uses this to render a "show credentials" button). The service names and what not also can automatically be shoved in DNS (for a simple form of service discovery, although you'll need to implement some form of authentication on top of that since DNS isn't secured), or certain images will automatically trust any public keys you define on your Triton account (I think the SmartOS base-64 image does this, as well as the Debian 9 image).

Unfortunately the documentation for all this is terrible.

 __EDIT: __I left out the other major benefit over some other providers: I can run anything I want, not just supported images. Even if it 's something that doesn't fit in an lx zone, they ported KVM over so you can always run, eg. netbsd or whatever in a more traditional virtualized environment. This is great for when you have a few legacy machines left over that aren't using SmartOS or one of their lx- Linux images.</comment></comment>


ASK HN: Has anyone adopted Chrome OS as their primary OS? - <AUTHOR> I'm in the market for a new device (and also an OS), having used exclusively Mac OS for the most of last decade.
Recently I used Chrome OS, in break time, and I like the simplicity. I'm wondering and interested to know if Cloud9, EC2 and such platforms kind of enable remote development well enough?
Specifically, mostly interested in how it would work out for web-development and Data Science. <comment><USER2> I used Chrome OS as my primary OS when I worked at Google. I didn't really like screwing around with the Linux desktop, so I just used a Chrome OS desktop as an interface onto a more powerful Linux box. All I really use are a terminal and a browser, so it worked fine. It never did anything that annoyed me; it just stayed out of my way and I could get my work done without annoyance. It also solved the problem I've always had with laptops; they are never configured the same as my desktop so it's jarring to switch to one (for travel, meetings, etc.) With Chrome OS, that was never a problem, all my settings sync'd perfectly between my two desktops (home/work) and laptop.

These days I use an iPad Pro as my laptop and it's not as good, mostly because even when iOS is connected to a 4k monitor, Safari tells the remote website "hey, send me your shittiest mobile site please". Apple should really make the iPad Pro browser tell things it's a desktop.

<comment><USER3> > With Chrome OS, that was never a problem, all my settings sync'd perfectly > between my two desktops (home/work) and laptop

did these two desktops also use Chrome OS? This sounds pretty nice

<comment> forgot-my-pw Non-chrome OS: It syncs your Chrome browser settings (bookmarks, credentials, etc).

On other Chrome OS: It syncs your Chrome browser + the OS settings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've tried but failed. There are a couple of key issues: 1) The first is that the chromebook that I purchased before the Crostini announcement (Asus C302CA), which was very much a flagship laptop remains unsupported. The wonderful software update hell of the google ecosystem bit me here.

2) I do a lot of work on airplanes, so not everything can run on a cloud instance. Apple cost too much (and has a remarkable lack of native apps for things like netflix). I also need it to fit on a airplane without jamming my elbows into my sternum due to size. The Chromebook has the form factor, but not the flexibility to work when the net is spotty(again, Crostini probably helps this out).

What I ended up doing ironically was a Surface Go. Great keyboard, nice form factor, and WSL support. 8GB of RAM (which is really needed by notebooks) and it works on plane.

<comment><USER5> I don't understand the appeal of cloud only/mostly computing for non-trivial use cases. It's probably that I care a lot more about Internet hiccups getting in my way than most. To me it'd be like having a smartphone that only unlocks when there's a signal.

<comment><USER6> FWIW, it will unlock when there is no signal. I unlock mine with my phone using Smart Lock ([https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6160273?hl=en](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6160273?hl=en)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Chrome OS is okay but typically leaves me wishing I had a more flexible system. Sure, you can install Linux apps on some models (not my Samsung Chromebook Pro because of the old kernel it shipped with!), or flip the developer switch, but I'd hate for this to be my main system. They're making strides with every release but given Google's track record with support and listening to community feedback, I probably wouldn't purchase another (though maybe a sub $200 "disposable" model?). They also EoL these things so one day it will be frozen in time and your only option will be to flip the developer switch which warns you on every boot that you're in developer mode, though there may be a way to remove that with hardware a hardware modification. There is some chatter on the product forums about enabling "unknown source" installations on ChromeOS, but it's been open for years now and progress is slow on that front. I'd only suggest it as a supplemental system, not a main one. A used Thinkpad can run Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not really primary OS and probably never will be, but primary for my Laptop which I use a lot.

Main reason is good driver support out of the box. Also not perfect(trouble with sd-cards, that can cause freezes), but my ASUS C213 runs very smoothly and long compared to my other laptops and it is sturdy and not expensive. Perfect for working while traveling ...

But ChromeOS itself ... is quite horrible. You feel cripled anytime you want to do more than Surfing and basic writing.

With the developer switch and some pain, I could set up my work enviroment with node and chrome dev tools and now that works pretty good, but every time I am forced to use that joke of a file browser I get annoyed.

But once linux apps will be fully supported (stable and gpu accelerated), things might get interesting. But I still hate beeing limited and restricted in many ways. I like to fully tweak my system to my taste. It is Linux underneath but different. And not very well documented.

You want to change key-binding or just want to invoke a shutdown after a long script finished? Or ... dare to create new logins(without google-connection)?

Good luck, I gave up on that.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've used a Chrome OS device for a long time as my primary device. I'm a researcher and never do any "real" development besides some web stuff or writing code locally, though (most of my code runs on clusters). However, using just web stuff like Cloud9 was not for me, so one of the first things I did with my Chromebook was to install crouton.

If you need to run any specific stuff locally, get a Chromebook that has an Intel CPU, not an ARM. Some stuff (especially proprietary binaries) are not available for ARM. If you get a device with a touchscreen, Android apps sometime will be good enough for things that do not work well on Linux (e.g. Skype).

</comment><comment><USER9> I did for a number of years, mainly as an SSH client, and for web-based stuff. The automatic OS updates are great.

A noted limitation is that there's no good X11 story. The new Linux subsystem looks very interesting, but it only works on some hardware, and you'll have to do heavy research before buying to figure out if your new Chromebook works.

All that said, I'm thinking of moving away from it. Using Chromebooks for everything requires trusting Google a _lot_ , and because of their various recent behaviors, I'm willing to do that less and less these days.

</comment><comment> open-source-ux It may or may not be important to you, but Chrome OS is a 'cloud-based' operating system (OS) which means everything you do in the OS is tracked and recorded by Google. This has important privacy implications. Although you can use Chrome OS with a guest account, to take full advantage of the OS reqires you login with your Google account.

Your Google account (containing your personal details such as your location and date of birth) is now tied to all your activity in the OS. Even if that data is 'anonymised' (a pretty meaningless term) or aggregated with other user data, this is a colossus sweep of user data on an industrial scale.

I presume all the people who are happy to use Chrome OS would also be happy to sign-in to Windows/Ubuntu/Mac OS with a personally-identifying account and have everything they do recorded and tracked by those operating systems?

</comment><comment><USER10> After my macbook pro keyboard became completely unusable and keys literally started to fall off I went out and bought a Pixelbook and handed my Macbook in for repair. I'll tell you right now, I'll never go back and I immediately understood that Apple are truly screwed. The macbook is dead and they don't even know it. All developers will eventually move to a Chromebook, Surface or whatever else.

Chrome OS for me is perfect, especially since they introduced linux support and android apps. I can run anything I need, I do not feel like I took a step back, in fact I feel like I leaped forward by pushing towards a cloud first experience. I was already using Google for all my apps, spend most of my time in the browser and I personally have not felt any pain beyond adjusting to my new keyboard layout.

I highly recommend everyone ditch their macbooks and buy a Pixelbook.

<comment><USER11> Honest question here: Do you have any concerns regarding privacy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It really depends on why you need your computer. I have an Asus CA302 and it works great for most of my usage like watching Netflix and browsing the web. But for any coding, I explicitly use my Thinkpad X62 that's running Ubuntu and it works flawlessly. If you're willing to pay for Cloud9 or EC2, I think you're better off buying an ultraportable gaming laptop like a MSI running Ubuntu, but they are much more expensive. If GPU isn't a requirement, a Thinkpad T-series is the way to go.

</comment><comment><USER13> I remember when Microsoft was fined for not offering other browsers to users: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/06/microsoft...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/06/microsoft- fined-browser-error) . Chrome OS can not even install other borwsers by default, and it seems like nobody cares :/

<comment><USER14> That laws suit was crazy. Every other competing OS came with a browser, and how are you even going to download a third party browser, if the OS doesn't come with a client you can use to download it with? The 'browser selection dialog' was just Bonkers. What if I wanted one that wasn't in the court- approved list?

I need MS to install IE, so I can use it to go and get IceWeasel, or whatever. Leave them alone!

<comment><USER15> > how are you even going to download a third party browser, if the OS doesn't > come with a client you can use to download it with?

Software was distributed offline as well. It seems like a long time ago now, but there was no shortage of AOL installation discs at the time.

(In fact, I believe both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator were distributed on floppy disks at one point, although that would have been long before the antitrust case.)

<comment><USER14> 2001 was at an inflection point where it was very rapidly becoming clear that argument was archaic. In any case, the fact that everyone else was giving away browsers for free is hardly a great argument that Microsoft should be prevented distributing it for free also, and if they can why not let them bundle it?

The world of 2001 was very rapidly becoming the connected world we're in now, and imposing a restriction on anyone like that now would just seem ludicrous and in fact user hostile, as it was. To me and I think anyone else paying attention back then, that was very obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The main downside of using any of the smaller/cheaper devices is in the I/O capabilities, which manifest both in the software and the hardware. With the hardware it's pretty obvious - a lot of Chromebooks are like phones and only have one or two USB ports. With the software, it's more like the sandboxing perpetually getting in the way of you doing things locally. Chromebooks are more flexible than Android devices in that you have the possibility of getting a full Linux environment, but the little issues will still arise now and then - and if you're on ARM, a lot of Linux software just will not be made for you.

If your workflow is just remote access with SSH and an occasional Web site, a smartphone or tablet can already do the job. Just deck it out with peripherals, a stand, etc. You can get very, very far with remote access. But for a full local development environment, especially if it involves graphics, there's a tendency to depend on a "desktop x86" stack that tends to creep in no matter what you do.

</comment><comment><USER17> Several Chromebooks now support Linux apps, so in theory you could have all the proper coding tools you need without relying on a Cloud IDE.

</comment><comment><USER18> I bought a Pixelbook when it was $300 off last year and was pleasantly surprised at how great of a laptop it is. It's now my primary personal use laptop. For consumption/light dev work, I greatly prefer it over Mac/Windows

With crostini, I can do local dev (python, js, golang) 90% as well as I can on a full fledged OS, without having to rely on cloud IDEs, etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm interested in responses here. I'd like to get a lightwight laptop, similar to my 11" Mac Book Air. I don't feel like I want to pay Apple prices for a second "travel" machine.

I would like to be able to run Emacs on it. It doesn't have to be full blown dev machine, but I'd like some of my simple tooling, and backup to cloud storage to share with my main work machines.

I currently using an iPad with a Brydge keyboard attached (I paid $350 for the setup, ipad on sale for $250 + $99 keyboard), which I love, but I don't have native Emacs and some other stuff, so I'm actually looking at a Chromebook. I think I could do most stuff with native Android apps and the web browser. I'd still like to figure out the Emacs/lightweight development type of thing. I've tried some of the online tooling like repl.it, but have a hard time with the portable keyboard bindings...

<comment><USER20> The Inspiron 11 from Dell might be what you're looking for -- you can get it with either Windows or Chrome OS, and it often has models that are under $200. It's not a bad machine for the price, and it's a really nice mini form factor for travel.

<comment><USER19> I just took a look. I actually don't mind spending $500 to get something in a little bit better form factor and a much better screen. Something like those Samsung Chromebook Pros are what I'm eying up.

<comment><USER6> The Samsung Chromebook Pro form factor is nice but did ship with an older kernel, which is preventing them from enabling Linux app support. You should be able to find one around $400ish though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have adopted Chrome OS as my primary OS. I started doing so with a Chromebook Pixel in 2013, which I used when writing the first version of [https://CoCalc.com](https://CoCalc.com). I ended up switching to running full Linux on it, since Chrome OS was too limiting then. After a year I switched to using various Mac laptops. However, ALL of my Mac laptops broke due to keyboard failures, and modern mac keyboards have a feel that sucks for me personally. I switched to an iPad pro 10.5" for a few months, as an experiment in pain (but also freedom, since it is so small and light). Over a year ago, I bought a Google Pixelbook, and switch to it as my primary OS. Since I'm the lead developer of [https://cocalc.com](https://cocalc.com), what I do under Chrome OS is web development (literally, of cocalc.com, which is all done within cocalc.com), data science (which is what cocalc.com is for), and email (via gmail). I use crouton so I can easily get a local root shell and use encrypted USB drives (for offsite backups), and I Crostini so I can run Docker containers, e.g., so I can do offline work with the CoCalc codebase and use local X11 applications like Inkscape.

The biggest surprise for me was that I bought a $450 14" HP x360 chromebook for a booth at a tradeshow, and I've been using _that_ chromebook as my main laptop for the last few months, instead of my 16GB top-end Pixelbook. Why? The larger 16:9 screen is way better for coding (for me), and the keyboard is amazingly for me (I consider it much better than the pixelbook keyboard). This HP chromebook weighs a pound more than the pixelbook, but I'm not carrying it around that much so it doesn't matter. Also, it's nice when I do carry it around knowing that it cost $450 instead of $1599, so if it is stolen or damaged, it is much less of a loss.

Conclusion: I've been using ChromeOS as my primary OS off and on since 2013, and I'm impressed with how ChromeOS (and the Chromebook ecosystem) have improved over the years. And I'm very surprised, because today I choose a $450 Chromebook over a $2000 Apple laptop, whereas from 2007 to 20017, I would choose the Apple laptop. Also, for me, everything is a company (or university purchase), so even though "money is no object", I still prefer the relatively cheap Chromebook.

Another, thing -- my old Chromebook Pixel had LTE data, since it always had internet. My iPad pro also did. However, with modern tethering (I have a Pixel 2 XL), a phone provides perfectly good tethering --there's no need to have it built into your laptop.

</comment><comment><USER22> I use ChromeOS with a chromebook. It works fine but it's not a convenient swiss army knife.

For example: To use 'adb' to connect to my phone I know of three options. 1 Use Chrome but that is extremely limited to web. 2 Activate developer mode and upgrade adb to current. Or 3 Connect to another device like rpi.

I chose to activate developer mode for convenience. I run OpenBSD via qemu for a decent CLI. I keep a loopback ethernet cable and proxy settings to fool ChromeOS into letting me use alternate network set ups.

<comment><USER23> Are there any disadvantages to choosing developer mode?

<comment><USER22> It's no longer a safe and supported system. (Opposite of what I really want.)

Also the nag screen on reboot is alarmingly bright and, i think, just gives directions to disable developer mode.

Always backup your files if you use developer mode.

Always backup your files if you use the linux system.

Always backup your files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I got an Acer C720A 5 years ago and tried to do that. I sideloaded linux on an SD card. I was able to do web dev and hybrid app development (I worked for Intel at the time). It worked fine for what I needed.

I got my wife a Samsung Chromebook 3 and she uses it for her job as preschool director. Being able to install Android apps is great. I feel like I could use that machine for most of my personal projects. I would NOT use a remote development tool; try to do it all locally when you can.

</comment><comment><USER25> My main device is a cheap Acer Chromebook, and I also have a low-end Mac mini. I've done a lot of development on the Chromebook using Remote Desktop to drive the mini. If you're looking for a flexible and affordable setup, it's hard to beat.

Originally I expected to write code directly on the Chromebook using Crostini (edit: Crouton), but it required a lot of hand-holding. I eventually gave up. But that was years ago, so maybe they've smoothed out the edges.

<comment><USER26> Crostini hasn't existed for years, and it's still in beta. Are you sure you don't mean Crouton?

In any case, Crostini has gotten much better since last year -- but the chromebook itself is too underpowered compared to a desktop to make a good experience. This is even true for the Pixelbook.

Crostini also seems to have problems with storage; the filesystem constantly soft-locks, for seconds at a time, under any appreciable load. This might be because they use Btrfs.

<comment><USER25> You're right, I was thinking Crouton.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm using chromeos as my primary computer. However I also have a Linux workstation at my desk.

So chromeos is more my mobile/meeting computer.

</comment><comment><USER28> My fiance has on her laptop, but definitely not me as she is usually saying how slow it is and all she does is browse the internet.

</comment><comment><USER29> My quite old Chromebook is my main laptop for university. I have Python + Latex + Gcc on it and live with ~ 500 spare megabytes...

When I code, I generally do it with Emacs in crouton, not with a remote IDE like Cloud9.

New Chromebooks are even better for development because they support docker, but I can't test it with my "too old" Chromebook.

</comment><comment><USER30> I got a Chromebook for my wife and she is able to use it for many things, but she still has to use Chrome Remote Desktop to get back to her Windows PC to get files that she didn't move to the cloud yet (most of them). For her kind of work, a third grade teacher, she could probably get away with Chrome OS forever. Some of the apps she uses on iOS weren't available though.

Before I gave her the Chromebook, I set it up for myself to try it out. After updating it (an Acer Chromebook 14), I was able to install Android apps which all ran pretty well. I also installed Sublime Text and VS Code in developer mode. Sublime ran much faster, but they both had issues compared to my nice fat PC. However, Chrome Remote Desktop works well enough that I could have just used the Chromebook as a remote screen for my PC. I don't think I could ever bring myself to use Chrome OS as my primary OS though...ever. It's too limited.

So, I switched to Manjaro Linux with XFCE for all of my web development and other work needs last year. I highly recommend it! (Before that I was mostly on Windows and sometimes on Mac.) I installed it on an Acer E5-575G and I got everything working including precision touchpad gestures which perform just as well as on any Macbook (I own a Mac Pro and also a Macbook Pro for comparison). It took some work to get the touchpad configured correctly, but not much. Then I got a 2nd PC workstation (a refurbished i7 desktop from Amazon for like $400) and I put a new 500GB ssd with Manjaro on that... Honestly, it's great. All the development tools that I need just work and there is plenty of software for Arch/Manjaro. I'll probably never go back to Mac or Windows for work, despite the fact that Manjaro updates have twice caused me a minor setback which were solved easily with help from threads like this - [https://forum.manjaro.org/t/19-february-2019-system- update-i...](https://forum.manjaro.org/t/19-february-2019-system-update- issues-which-i-encountered/76257) (No big deal - I've had similar scares from Windows and Mac updates over the years.)

A Linux desktop is the only desktop OS that makes me feel like a kid again. The reasons I failed at moving to a Linux desktop before were because things broke all the time or required hella work just to get the proper drivers...or becuase I didn't like UI (on Ubuntu for instance), etc - but Manjaro with XFCE was a breeze and changed all that for me. I'm so glad I decided to try it out. I only ever tried Gnome or KDE before that.

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't see any value on them versus a full blown OS.

In fact they hardly took over outside the US school system.

[http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market- share/desktop/worldwide/](http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market- share/desktop/worldwide/)

</comment><comment><USER32> I tried for a couple months with the pixelbook...I couldn't do it. I ended up getting the surface book 2, and while I'd much prefer Linux for development, windows is far better than chrome for doing anything development-wise.

</comment><comment><USER33> I used a ChromeBook as my primary machine for several years. Nice machines, and you can do Linux things when needed (back then, developer mode and crouton, now I guess the better-supported crostini).

Later I switched to working on a tablet instead.

</comment><comment><USER34> I really wish there was an official build of chromeos for virtualbox, it's ideal for a virtual appliance. There is one company that has a build for vmware but I don't use VMWare and it only has a 30day trial IIRC.

</comment><comment><USER35> I've went the opposite direction. I flashed my Chromebook's bios so I could actually install Linux.

</comment><comment><USER36> Acer C720P user here. Works flawless... but not for dev.

So i enable dev mode then installed Ubuntu in a chroot.

</comment><comment> 70122-_6 the main issue was the hard_drive space, ymmv.

[https://youtu.be/-jOHHyJMgWk](https://youtu.be/-jOHHyJMgWk)</comment>


'Inocente' makes history as first Kickstarter-funded film to win Oscar - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/24/4026454/kickstarter-funded-film-inocente-wins-oscar

<comment><USER2> Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the film finished and accepted to film festivals before they started the kickstarter project? The KS funds mostly went to finishing a website and companion material to the movie. Excerpt from the kickstarter link below.

"INOCENTE has been accepted to several film festivals including Hot Docs International Film Festival, Cleveland International Film Festival, the Melbourne International Film Festival, and the San Antonio Film Festival. It has also already won two awards: the Special Jury Award for Inspirational Filmmaking at the Arizona International Film Festival and the Short Film Spirit Award at Awareness Fest. Thanks to the generosity of our producers and post house we have completed the film's production and editing but still need to pay deferred costs and to complete final deliverables (creating HDCam tapes, Digibeta tapes, Blu-rays, and DVDs in the correct formats) for TV and community film screenings. We also need to complete production of a website that provides information on Inocente, the film, screening dates, the filmmakers, and the issues documented in the film. We also are designing and printing posters and key art to help market and promote the film at festivals, screenings, and special events. Finally, we are also writing free, downloadable companion curricula for teachers and creating an arts workshop template for community organizations that will incorporate the arts into core subjects and explore the themes and issues of the film to make it more attractive to the educational market."

</comment><comment><USER3> Innocent is the first Kickstarter-funded _documentary short_ (i.e., roughly 30 minutes in length or less) to win an Oscar. Very few _documentaries,_ especially documentaries short, are funded by normal Hollywood sources. Most documentaries are funded by some combination of grants, the film equivalent of angels, or self-funding.

So yes, a milestone for Kickstarter, but by no means is this a milestone for independent documentaries or the beginning of a sea change in how films are financed.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, this is huge. No longer do we, the people, have to let the in crowd decide what we get to see. This is real validation for this new form of financing, when will a kickstarter film get best film?

<comment><USER5> The "in crowd" is just trying to pick winners. To the extent that Inocente is a success, the "in crowd" would like to fund it. This is revolutionary when it becomes a reliable way to fund flops. But "we the people" don't want flops, by definition. So, there's something incongruous or self-contradictory in your comment, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can watch the entire short film for free (legally) here: <http://www.mtv.com/videos/inocente/1702321/playlist.jhtml>

</comment><comment><USER7> This is indeed monumental. As starving artists find more micro-patrons, we might see another renaissance-like leap in our lifetime.

</comment><comment><USER8> No mention of it in the link. Here's a post on mashable.com <http://mashable.com/2013/02/24/inocente-oscar-kickstarter/>

</comment><comment><USER9> When you see a giant screenshot of a video at the top of an article you are looking at a website that is treating you like a fucking idiot.</comment>