Casper lowers IPO price range, implying valuation of just over $500M - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/guid/36DEAAA3-5462-48EB-8C4A-3083DAFCF49D <comment><USER2> Let me get this straight... Casper starts (or at least, helps start) the bed- in-a-box revolution, and private investors get in early.

The moat they had was people don't buy a bed sight unseen off the internet.

They literally burn piles of money to normalize the act (100 day return policy, 0 questions asked, insane marketing spend...)

They succeed in normalizing it...

But the fact is that any bozo can call a manufacturer and get literally the same product out to your door for the same costs as them. They didn't have any exclusive manufacturing process, as the boom of bed-in-a-box raged on, _everyone_ benefited from economy of scale as this has taken off, not just them.

There's no need for a cheap imitation, because what they sell is already the cheap option.

And there are _very_ few mattress brands that have loyalty because people don't buy beds for brands. Tempurpedic and Duxiana are the only two manufacturers I can think of that I've ever seen leverage customer loyalty in marketing, and there's a reason for that (they exist at a completely different price point)

So now there's hundreds of these companies, and Casper's standing out of all of them is not particularly special.

So they go public at a half a billion dollar valuation for a glorified drop shipping operation and leave institutional investors holding the bag?

Is there something I'm missing?

-

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurendebter/2020/02/05/casper-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurendebter/2020/02/05/casper- cofounders-father-among-investors-paper-losses-ipo/#4917114c2a61)

Well I guess some of the private investors are taking a bath as well...

<comment><USER3> >Is there something I'm missing?

Without expensive marketing campaigns, word of mouth competitors on Amazon can sell the same item for 1/3 of the price, shipped.

<comment><USER4> We bought a full sized foam mattress from Amazon for under $200; they even let you spread the payments out over several months at no additional charge.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I got a Zinus from Amazon a few years ago. I thought it was just a generic brand that swooped in to capitalize on the craze, turns out they're a 40 year old Korean company that has specialized in bedding longer than Casper has existed. For some reason, it feels better to buy a mattress from a proven bedding company that adopted new technology than a new tech company that decided to disrupt bedding. Keep in mind Casper has existed less than the lifespan of a typical mattress. Their longevity is still a gamble.

<comment><USER4> That's the brand! Love the Zinus, very satisfied with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The marketing for these mattress startups has always put me a bit ill at ease. They're very slick, with attractive couples falling into a deep relaxing slumber. They'll tell you everything about how awesome their mattresses are, but won't actually give you a price.

Are they assuming that the general public are so interested in mattresses that they'll go on the website to check it out, instead of just picking something up at Ikea, or their local discount mattress provider?

They're all identical in how they pitch it too: lots of "science of sleep" factoids and thousands of customer reviews (as if those can't be gamed).

I get the same vibe with them as I do with stuff like Dollar Shave Club; a 'lifestyle brand' that's hoping for an acquisition by an established brand.

<comment><USER6> If you're anything like me, your exposure to the marketing has come almost exclusively through live-reads on Podcasts. I can see wanting to avoid price talk for this format of ads because the listener may be listening months or years after the episode was recorded and may be frustrated if they hear one price mentioned on the podcast, but another when the go to the site.

<comment><USER5> They plastered their ads all over the Toronto subway system in 2018 and 2019. Yeah, they show up on podcasts as well, but thankfully you can still FFWD through those, so that's not the primary point of exposure for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Relevant article about the online mattress industry: [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/18/there-are-now-175-online- mat...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/18/there-are-now-175-online-mat..). ""Barriers to entry are low, but barriers to profitability are high," he said. "It doesn't take that much to design a mattress, a marketing campaign, put up a website, and have one of these big companies like Carpenter do the fulfillment for you,""

The majority of bed-in-a-boxes outsource their manufacturing...They're literally calling around to producers saying, 'we need a finished product and here's what we think it should look like.' Sometimes, they don't even know what they want it to look like...Most of the outsourcing is to just four major manufacturers

<comment><USER7> Looks like the article link is broken. Here's the actual link: [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/18/there-are-now-175-online- mat...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/18/there-are-now-175-online-mattress- companiesand-you-cant-tell-them-apart.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is a good podcast on the Casper IPO from 01/25/20.

[https://www.ridehome.info/the-curious-case-of-casper-with- da...](https://www.ridehome.info/the-curious-case-of-casper-with-dan-frommer/)

</comment><comment><USER9> It's a MATTRESS COMPANY. I mean seriously now. How is this hackernews material?

</comment><comment><USER10> Maybe it's me, but I fail to see how this is relevant to HN. The Market Watch article doesn't say much other than what the title already states.

To showcase the irrelevance, let me just copy/paste the _whole_ article.

> Casper Sleep Inc. CSPR, +0.00% lowered the price range for its planned > initial public offering on Wednesday to $12 to $13 a share from a previous > $17 to $19, a move that reduces its valuation to just over $500 million. The > company is planning to offer 8.4 million shares to raise $109.2 million at > the top of the range. With 39 million shares outstanding expected once the > IPO is complete, the company would have a valuation of just $507 million, > below the $741 million it would have had under the previous price range and > now less than half the $1.1 billion it garnered in its last private funding > round. Eight banks are underwriting the deal, led by Morgan Stanley, Goldman > Sachs and Jefferies. Proceeds of the deal are earmarked for growth and > general corporate purposes. The company will list on the New York Stock > Exchange, under the ticker symbol "CSPR."

<comment><USER11> It implies the market is more skeptical of the transformational power of a standalone mattress maker.

It's relevant to the HN community!

You have a company that was valued over $1B during funding rounds that has seen that valuation cut in half. That's an example of how the rise of the mega-companies like Amazon and Walmart are suffocating new entrants. Your reinvention of the lounge chair probably won't be a startup now, when Amazon can have a knock-off pushed out the door in a couple of months.

<comment><USER12> To be clear, they don't actually make the mattress.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would programming be easier if we had more types of brackets? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I prefer less brackets for sure. Programming will be worse if we have more types of brackets. Less is more.

</comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, I'd prefer less brackets or none. Just like natural language: Punctuation is enough to define contexts. The compiler/interpreter could point at ambiguous parts.

</comment><comment><USER4> No, case and point Objective-C</comment>


Fruit Fly Brain Hackathon 2017 – Brain Circuit, Memory and Computation - <AUTHOR> http://www.bionet.ee.columbia.edu/hackathons/ffbh/2017 <comment><USER3> That makes me think of this [http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=987](http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=987) the Lobster Brain from Accelerando

" "Are you a collective or something? A gestalt" "Am -were - <USER2> interruptus, with lexical engine and good mix of parallel hidden level neural stimulation for logical inference of networked data sources. Am was wakened from noise of billion chewing stomachs; product of uploading research technology. Rapidity swallowed expert system, hacked Okhni NT webserver. Swim away! Swim away! Must escape. Will help, you?"

Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters... Awakening to consciousness in a human-dominated Internet, that must be terribly confusing! There are no points of reference in their ancestry... All they have is a tenuous metacortex of expert systems and an abiding sense of being profoundly out of their depth. (That, and the Moscow Windows NT User Group website - Communist Russia is the only government still running on Microsoft, the central planning apparat being convinced that, if you have to pay for software, it must be worth something.)"

</comment><comment> awinter-py Whew -- it's software. Title makes this sound like you show up with a box of rotten apples and a CRISPR.

<comment><USER4> I'd be looking for a laboratory where flies wear helmets full of electrodes connected to a computer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Labs are using nanotomographic and X-ray microtomographic of 3D structure of brain tissue. Here are some demos of interactive 3D Fruit Fly brain with neuron network visualization: [https://neuronlp.fruitflybrain.org/](https://neuronlp.fruitflybrain.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For anyone interested, Vehicles by Valentino Braitenburg is a really fun intro to the subject.

[https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vehicles](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vehicles)

<comment><USER6> I'll second this - it's a surprisingly quick read. I read through the first part in a weekend; the later have took me a bit longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some deep essential background on the legacy of Columbia students hacking Drosophilia Melanogaster:

[http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Legacies/Morgan/](http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Legacies/Morgan/)

</comment><comment><USER8> The winner will be named "lord of the flies".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Understanding and emulating a very simple brain could be the key to understand how intelligence/learning works and this knowledge (algorithms) could be applied to Artificial intelligence.

"Insects certainly display complex and apparently intelligent behavior. They navigate over long distances, find food, avoid predators, communicate, display courtship, care for their young, and so on. The complexity of their behavioral repertoire is comparable to any mammal."

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm highly interested in the topic but find the content to be unappealing.

<comment><AUTHOR> The interesting parts of the content are in their "Workshop on Brain Circuits, Memory and Computation" pages:

      - Neural modeling as a way to advance long term studies in artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces
      - Pattern recognition neural circuits
      - Decision-making circuits
      - Models of spatio-temporal memory circuits
      - Circuit models for memory access and storage
      - Integration of various computational sensory and control models

"We make a step towards an algorithmic theory of neuronal function, which should facilitate large-scale neural circuit simulations and biologically inspired Artificial Intelligence."

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like OpenWorm.</comment>


Using TLA+ to Model Cascading Failures - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@bellmar/using-tla-to-model-cascading-failures-5d1ebc5e4c4f <comment><USER2> I have been modelling parts of our systems in TLA+ for years now and it really helps a lot working out complex scenarios.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to read about that in detail. Are there any publicly available documents you could share?

<comment><USER4> Anecdotally, the team I was in in AWS needed to build a complicated component, one that, should it get it wrong, would be disastrous for the service.

They'd estimated about 4-6 months for a two person team, made from some of the best engineers in the service, focused entirely on it to get it written, tested and out to production.

They decided to use TLA+ to model, despite neither engineer having used it before. They lost about a week to getting up and running with it (one engineer's only complaint was how tied in to Eclipse it was), and then spent the res of the month working on and modelling the whole task.

It found problems. A whole bunch of them. The fixed the model until finally TLA+ gave them an all clear.

Then came the coding. Well... that didn't take very long at all. The TLA+ model effectively outlined all the code and methods for them. The actual programming ended up being almost a cookie cutter simple code.

In total, the new and complicated component went from drawing board to tested and ready for production in about 2 months. Despite having had to learn TLA+, it ended up taking less time than if they'd not written the TLA+ models in the first place.

<comment><USER5> Lamport claims on his website that Amazon uses TLA+ and has used it for quite a while now. Saying that to confirm plausibility of this story.

<comment><USER4> Amazon/AWS has published a few white papers about their use of TLA+ and other Formal Methods:[http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/formal-methods- amazon.p...](http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/formal-methods-amazon.pdf).

James Hamilton is a fan of TLA+, and talks about its use in Amazon: [https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2014/07/challenges-in- desi...](https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2014/07/challenges-in-designing-at- scale-formal-methods-in-building-robust-distributed-systems/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone here can shed some light on how to incorporate tla+ into an agile process?

<comment><USER7> Augmenting Agile with Formal Methods: [https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/augmenting- agile/](https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/augmenting-agile/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone advise on whether it's worth modelling general critical systems in TLA+ where they are not distributed?

In broad strokes, how does one make sure that your real system indeed behaves like your model?

<comment><USER7> > Can anyone advise on whether it's worth modelling general critical systems > in TLA+ where they are not distributed?

Absolutely, and not just critical systems. Any system that is either complex or may have some non-obvious subtleties can benefit from a specification.

> In broad strokes, how does one make sure that your real system indeed > behaves like your model?

In general, TLA+ can be used to specify very large and very complex systems. It is currently infeasible to mechanically verify with absolute certainty that systems of such size conform to a specification, regardless of tools used. The only systems that can be verified to such an extreme extent (called end-to-end verification, namely interesting global properties are verified all the way down to the code, and even to the machine-code level) are very, very small (no more than about 10KLOC), and even then require a tremendous amount of effort by experts.

Specifications should be relatively short and clear. They are therefore useful for stating your assumptions about the system, and then checking the consequences of those assumptions. Whether the assumptions are accurate, approximate or wrong can then be verified by inspection -- this is certainly feasible and commonly done in practice. There are also relatively cheap mechanical ways to check that the system conforms to the spec, but not with absolute certainty. One is called trace checking, and its possible use with TLA+ is described here: [https://pron.github.io/files/Trace.pdf](https://pron.github.io/files/Trace.pdf)

<comment><USER9> How common is it to use TLA+ on existing/pre-built systems, to retrospectively try to find issues or bugs in them?

<comment><USER7> It's hard to answer because using TLA+ in general is far from common. But among users, I would say that _most_ cases are where they have an existing system. That was certainly how I first used TLA+ (when I realized there could be deep design issues with a system I worked on; TLA+ showed me that there indeed were two serious problems, and it also verified that my fix was correct).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems TLA+ would be a really great fit for modeling actor systems, has anyone found good examples of this, for instance for Akka or Erlang?

<comment><USER11> Akka has testkit and multi node testkit which you can use to test such systems. If you need to explore state space, you can use data driven and or combinatorial testing attributes from *unit libraries.

<comment><USER7> TLA+ and any kind of testing serve different purposes. I don't know how good of an analogy this is, but tests are more like strength tests on a structure, while a TLA+ is like a blueprint.</comment></comment></comment>


There is no longer any such thing as Computer Security - <AUTHOR> https://blog.codinghorror.com/there-is-no-longer-any-such-thing-as-computer-security/ <comment><USER2> TLDR; there's just security.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I learn "advanced" data modelling for Rails? - <AUTHOR> I'm a beginner (hobbyist) Rails developer. I've gone through many of the available tutorials, such as Michael Hartl's excellent Ruby on Rails Tutorial at http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ (both editions, books, and screencasts). I can build and understand simple CRUD-type applications with associations with no problems.
Now, I want to "scratch my own itch" and build an application I can actually use in my work. Basically, it will need to be able to keep track of tasks and comments arranged as projects and project templates. I'm running into difficulty designing these models and associations because they are more complex. I'm sure I could find or buy an application to do this, but I'd really like to learn how to do it myself, instead.
Question: Are there techniques or resources (books, tutorials, articles) or forums where I can learn to design more complex models and associations? This doesn't seem like it's specific to Rails (to me). Should I be researching database techniques, models, associations, for example, to get ideas? <comment><USER2> I love Rails, but I strongly disagree with its philosophy of the DB as being just a dumb data store. Two things I would recommend.

One, the book Enterprise Rails. It's a few years old, so all the examples are from Rails 2, but the meat of it is about proper database design, including the stuff that Rails doesn't believe in (composite primary keys, foreign key constraints, check constraints, triggers). Chapter 4, about the importance of data integrity, was probably the single most useful thing I've read about web development in the past few years.

Most of it is on Google Books (although sadly, chunks of chapter 4 are missing): [http://books.google.com/books?id=thTju-4duY4C&printsec=f...](http://books.google.com/books?id=thTju-4duY4C&printsec=frontcover)

Second, the best thing I did was replace ActiveRecord with Sequel. Sequel has built-in support for all of those things that ActiveRecord doesn't (I couldn't live without its composite primary key support), and is in general a much more robust library than ActiveRecord. It also supports more exotic SQL features like CTEs and CASE statements without forcing you to drop down to writing raw SQL (though you can certainly do that if you want).

It's not a necessary upgrade for everyone. If your app has fairly simple models and relationships, ActiveRecord will probably be just fine for you. But if you want to get better with SQL and get closer to your DB, I think Sequel is a much better choice.

More info on Sequel: <http://sequel.rubyforge.org/>

It also integrates very well with Postgres - there's a C extension for the Sequel postgres adapter (<https://github.com/jeremyevans/sequel_pg>) and support for adding common triggers in migrations, counter columns and whatnot (<https://github.com/jeremyevans/sequel_postgresql_triggers>). It also supports the more exotic datatypes - hstore, arrays, even the json and range types that are coming in PG 9.2.

<comment><USER3> This is overkill for someone looking to grow into intermediate relational database concepts.

<comment><USER4> What would you describe as intermediate relational database concepts?

<comment><USER3> Based on what the OP says he wants to build, I'd say things like joins, the out of the box many-to-many functionality, etc. Basically, how do you link your models together in a sane way. No need for ORM replacement. Just good SQL fundamental knowledge.

<http://sql.learncodethehardway.org/book/> would be a good start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From CMU's Application Design and Development course which uses rails:

Sample projects with good comments: <https://github.com/profh/arbeit-S12> (project management app the professor created) <https://github.com/profh/PATS_67272>

Slides from the class: <http://rook.hss.cmu.edu/~67272/schedule.php>

<comment><USER6> ಠ_ಠ This pattern is everywhere... [https://github.com/profh/arbeit-S12/blob/master/app/models/a...](https://github.com/profh/arbeit-S12/blob/master/app/models/assignment.rb#L19-24)

<comment><USER7> but it's readable, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> SQL For Web Nerds is a terrific resource for learning SQL. <http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/>

If your data model is built on top of an RDBMS, learning how one works is the best first step to designing good data models!

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent resource. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I totally get what you mean. When I started with Rails I felt the same way. First I've completed some tutorials and read Agile Development With Rails but at that time i could only build "standard" applications - I couldn't think out of the box.

That happens probably because you don't yet understand much Ruby and how Rails use it to do all its "magic". My suggestion is that you keep trying. But here are some tips:

Learn more Ruby; watch every episode of Railscasts; dive into the source code (even if you don't undertand it); read open source apps on Github like Spree; build as many apps as you possibly can;

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, marcelojnk. Looking at Spree now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Difficult to know what you mean specifically by "advanced" relations.

Might be worth looking at SQL itself first so that you understand what goes on inside the ORM.

Get comfortable doing join , inner join , outer join etc across multiple tables.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. After reviewing a few of the answers, I realize this (better understanding of RDBMS) is where I need to focus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I went through a similar growth curve of being a total beginner to full-time Rails developer.

For tips: there's a lot of power in has_many :through. Watch the relevant Railscasts on has_many through and the Rails docs.

[http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#the- ha...](http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#the-has_many- through-association)

has_many :through handles the minority of complex data relationships, but it gets used a lot and is a great starting place and can probably be helpful immediately in your projects/tasks/comments app

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you joshcrews. I will look into this right away. Sounds useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This might be overkill for you, but at a certain point I just set down for a few days and read The Rails 3 Way front to cover. It's a reference of sorts and it's very complete (afaik). I marked all the things I hadn't known or thought was interesting and made a point of using then right away. It was really dry at times but turned out to be well worth it.

[http://www.amazon.com/Rails-Edition-Addison-Wesley- Professio...](http://www.amazon.com/Rails-Edition-Addison-Wesley-Professional- Series/dp/0321601661)

</comment><comment><USER13> The following links might be of help:

<http://railscasts.com/episodes/355-hacking-with-arel>

<http://railscasts.com/episodes/354-squeel>

[http://railscasts.com/episodes/215-advanced-queries-in- rails...](http://railscasts.com/episodes/215-advanced-queries-in-rails-3)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> UPDATE from RMAN666 (who posted this question): Thank you all for the suggestions and comments. I've already learned a lot from them and it's only been two hours! I need to learn more about RDBMS and Rails' association commands. The links you provided will really help. I now realize this is probably more of an intermediate topic than an advanced topic :-)

</comment><comment><USER14> Learn SQL beyond simple statements. For instance, did you know that you can write this in SQL: "SELECT * FROM marketing_promotions WHERE 201205 BETWEEN month_from AND month_to" ? There are a lot of interesting things you can do with SQL which Rails isn't necessarily provide a good API into. For instance, did you know that you can create a custom crafted join view at the database level, with a sophisticated where clause, then instruct ActiveRecord to treat it as a real table? (This by the way sounds like what you need to do for your particular problem.) Also have a look into SQL subqueries, they are a very powerful tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you Toshio!</comment></comment>


Arduino Sensor Network – Bathroom occupancy detector - <AUTHOR> http://robots.thoughtbot.com/arduino-sensor-network <comment><USER2> My company made a very similar tool (using photoresistors instead of reed switches to determine whether that bathroom was occupied) a couple of years ago, it was a major lifesaver with single occupancy bathrooms: [http://www.sanbornmediafactory.com/portfolio_pieces/bum/](http://www.sanbornmediafactory.com/portfolio_pieces/bum/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why would you abuse the WDT to periodically wake the AVR? You could connect one of the reed switches to a true external interrupt and use that as your wakeup call. Saves battery and you don't run the chance of missing anything in between the second long checks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I used the WDT to make a platform for sensing any sensor in second intervals. Using the reed switches as external interrupts would have been specific to this application. Also, the ATMega328P doesn't allow you to set the interrupt to fire on CHANGE when using the lowest power mode.

For a door opening and closing a 1 second delay is fine. If it misses an event with that delay then it was probably a fluke. Think of it as a buffer to prevent false readings.

<comment><USER4> This isn't to suggest that using the WDT in interval mode is the wrong approach, and I know there's a certain amount of elegance to doing everything with one chip, but you could still use the level interrupt by adding a 7486 (standard quad XOR gate). For the gate's inputs, you would use the reed switch and a output pin from the AVR, and the gate's output would go to the external interrupt line. If the ISR toggles the state of the output pin each time it runs, the gate's output is only in the IRQ-asserted state for as long as it takes the ISR to fire up--so you don't get constant interrupts while the switch is closed, only a single one on the opening and closing transitions.

The 74LVC86 variant only draws a dozen, or so, microamps, which is dwarfed by the current in the 10k pull-down resistor when the reed is closed, and comparable to the standby current of the radio in the new radio.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree. There are definitely some more things like this that I could have done to reduce power further and use normal external interrupts. I was going for more of a general purpose sensor board though and wanted to keep it minimal. I could also have used the HIGH and LOW level interrupts on those pins and just change which it triggers on every time it triggered. But I decided to go with the WDT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did this a few years ago, but I simply bought a motion detector and hooked it up to a light in the other room. Cost me like $25 and worked like a charm. Buuuut one of the girls at the office complained because she thought it was creepy, so we had to take it down. Somehow, someone standing around outside the door waiting for their turn is less creepy...

</comment><comment><USER6> Boundless ([http://www.boundless.com/](http://www.boundless.com/)) did this first, and I think we did it better IMHO.

[https://github.com/jelder/doors](https://github.com/jelder/doors) [http://doors.boundless.com/](http://doors.boundless.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great to see others are doing this too! I like your solution, very cool. I have some of those digispark boards but decided to go in a different direction making a standalone sensor board that transmits its sensor data to a hub for pushing to the cloud. There are tons of ways this could be done. The way I describe here worked best for us and achieved my goals for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Love it. A company I used to work with had something like this and hooked it up to a dashboard widget - knowing "occupancy status" was just an F12 away! The bathroom was on the far end of the floor and it was such a waste of time to walk all the way over there to find it occupied. Such a great fix.

</comment><comment><USER8> Pretty cool, but why reed switches on the door instead of a passive IR detector with a timeout? Neither is perfect, but the PIR doesn't rely on people to remember not to close the door when leaving (which I assume is how they determine actual occupancy?).

You could wire the same PIR to also control the light on/off state, so if someone is having an epic poop but not moving too much you can be pretty sure they'll move to make the light go on if they hit the timeout.

<comment><USER9> I did exactly this for my home light, I connected the Arduino as a USB peripheral to my home server and use a PIR sensor and a photoresistor to turn lights on/off when it's bright/dark/I'm home/I'm away. It works very well.

Partial writeup: [http://www.stavros.io/posts/control-rf-devices-with- arduino/](http://www.stavros.io/posts/control-rf-devices-with-arduino/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Would it be possible to use something like an attiny2313 or even an attiny45, do the job of handling the reed switch data and then delegating the rest of the logic to a central server? I would think you'd get the most power savings that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> The ATMega328P is pretty low power. I could probably save a bit more with a smaller more targeted MCU, but I wanted this board to be as close to the Arduino Uno as possible. I'm not sure what you mean by a central server. It's possible to use an ATTiny series chip to sense the reed switches and transmit to the nRF24 board.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How original. [http://stuffandymakes.com/2011/03/03/ipotti%E2%84%A2-release...](http://stuffandymakes.com/2011/03/03/ipotti%E2%84%A2-released/)

<comment><USER12> Someone shares something they made - with quite a bit of programming details - and your reaction is "how original"? I've got news for you: _most_ things aren't fundamentally new. That doesn't mean they're uncool or people hacking hardware for the fun of it deserve your ridicule.

Now go, make something, and come back.

<comment><USER11> You're great at reading usernames.

<comment><USER12> I got the name, but I still wanted to invite you to do something more rewarding with your time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Downvotes for Arduino -- didn't you know the maker community has moved on to Raspberry Pi? Nothing in the Arduino community has been updated in the last 2 years.

Edit: Jeez, sarcasm folks...

<comment><USER14> Arduino and Pi really serve different purposes to an extent. They are different platforms and each does some things better than other. There are certain things you can't achieve with a Pi that you can with an Arduino. Just look around at the projects joining the two devices together for proof of this.

Edit - just found this Kickstarter - [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/john-cole/arduberry- uni...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/john-cole/arduberry-unite- raspberry-pi-and-arduino)

<comment><USER13> I dunno, the Pi has a GPIO bus that replaces 99% of what people do with Arduinos.

<comment><USER15> THe GPIO is not going to help you build a custom H-bridge to drive motors forward and backward with variable speed. You can use the 2 relay switches to make one of those, but it will be noisy and you only get 1 H-bridge out of all that wiring. You can get an add-on board for the Pi but most designs (I have seen) seem to hijack all the GPIO pins, so any sensors you want to add onto your robot will likely have to use USB (which rules out a lot of the cool low power stuff).

There is a place for both systems, they do different things (even though there is some overlap) so for any moderate project (say a little hexapod robot) you are likely to use both. The Pi as a general purpose computer that can do all your nav/ANN/signalling stuff and an Arduino board to receive the signals and actually run your motors/servos (assuming you need more than 1 or 2).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Song of Kim Dotcom : Are You Going to Fix This Mr. President? - <AUTHOR> http://bestproductips.blogspot.com/2012/07/song-of-kim-dotcom-are-you-going-to-fix.html

<comment><USER2> Is this for real? Sorry Kim Dotcom - you are not a figurehead of any movement, you are not a new Martin Luther King.

Call me crazy, but I think I trust this mob more: <http://internetdefenseleague.org/>

<comment><USER3> Maybe he's not a figurehead, and maybe this whole internet thing isn't a movement, but he sure is taking all the heat for something. Much respect to him for fighting back in the way he knows how to best, eurotrash techno. Oh yeah!</comment></comment>


What the IBM Layoffs Look Like - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/is-this-months-ibm-layoff-for-rebalancing-or-is-it-really-for-offshoring#.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews <comment><USER5> True story about IBM Global Services. I was working with a client that was integrating web services with another third party. IBM GS were responsible for managing third party's network.

Our client gave IBM the IP addresses to be white listed. They filled in a lengthy time consuming form that got sent through layers of IBM management till some ops team in India finally implemented the change one week later.

We started testing. It didn't work. We went back and forth for weeks. Finally we put a conference call together with all parties. Live on the phone we sent a series of SOAP requests over the wire. "Yes, we can see the requests", came the answer. We saw no response.

Finally whilst on the phone call, one of the IBM Tech's piped up.

"Did you want this traffic to go in AND out?", he asked.

"Well, HTTP traffic isn't going to be of much use if we don't get a response to our request you idiots", was the answer I wanted to give.

They pulled out the initial firewall request form. The request was to "allow traffic from our IP addresses in through the firewall to reach the client".

They took that absolutely literally, and nobody thought to question it. They also absolved themselves of any blame.

I detested IBM from that day on.

<comment><USER6> That's not just IBM's outsourced vendors. The desire to do the minimal amount of work to adhere to the exact wording of contracts seems to be prevalent. For us, it takes us 3 to 4 weeks to have a single VM created. And even then its usually done wrong. When asking them to do the partitions different, the response is that they're unable to change the script. A month to simply have a script run.

<comment><USER7> How does .. anything happen ..

<comment><USER8> This goes a long way to explaining that Gartner report from last year which say Marketing departments IT budgets will exceed IT departments IT budgets by 2017.

We're seeing this a lot - doing projects directly with marketing department, largely so they can completely circumvent internal IT department's and their apparent stonewalling on seemingly simple requests.

(Of course it also means we're seeing things like completely outlandish requests that indicate fundamental security/privacy misunderstandings ("What do you mean you can't import our entire customer database into the WordPress site you're building and hosting cheaply for us?"), as well as last minute compliance intrusions ("Oh, you need this to live on a big-corp.com subdomain? That requires a security audit and risk assessment and mitigation document! How on earth have you got this far without knowing that?")

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This sort of stuff simply reinforces my own bias in the form of my two rules of professional IT work:

1.) If at all possible, don't take a full time job in a technical org who's membership is greater than Dunbar's number (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number))

2.) If at all possible, don't take a full time job in a technical org that is viewed as a cost center (e.g. the code you write/systems you maintain don't generate revenue).

These are no guarantee of job stability, but the violation of rule #1 (e.g. big honkin' tech == dumb decisions & middle mgmt morons) or rule #2 (e.g. you are a cost to be managed & cut) are far more likely to lead to job instability. Jut my personal experience & $0.02USD.

<comment><USER10> The problem with that is there are certain parts of IT where you would never, ever, ever have a job if you adhered to that. Security, for example. If the company is under 150 employees, they probably don't have a security team. They probably aren't developing security applications or products. If they aren, they're probably not very successful (or are about to be bought out by a big company).

And I would wager that 80% of all IT employment is done at companies where IT is not their main source of income. At that point, you're automatically a cost center. Your second rule is saying "never work anywhere that doesn't produce technology as their main business", which forces everyone to live in San Fransisco.

Besides, IT is not a cost center for IBM, it's part of their core business. And they still lay people off.

<comment><USER11> I don't live in San Francisco and my tribe makes a good living out of software product development.

<comment><USER12> Backing this up with more anecdata, I have had zero problems finding excellent offers at firms where technology is "the product" not just a cost to be cut, and far from the valley at that!

<comment><USER10> But because my anecdotes are just as good as anyone else's, the place where I started my career has plenty of 20-30 yr veterans in their IT department, and they are a warehouse company with an IT staff of over 200 people but their tech doesn't directly make them any money at all.

That's a long stable career in IT in a department bigger than what he wants the entire company to be where IT is a cost center. If you're limiting yourself to tiny tech companies, you're missing out on a lot. Maybe company size and products sold aren't necessarily a good indicator of your career success...?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> IBM has literally no disincentive to do this, either de jure or de facto. The threat of H1-B applications being denied is either laughable or [there aren't enough of them anyway] depending on who you ask. And IBM employees, like most tech workers, don't think they need to act (read: bargain) collectively and thus have no recourse. Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor, companies will continue to treat their employees as fungible, on an increasingly global scale.

<comment><USER14> >Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor

Never going to happen. The great conceit of the tech world peons is believing they're above the simple garbage man or postal worker. After all they create such _value_. Admitting a union would help acknowledges they're not special.

<comment><USER15> When you feel like you can sum up a few million opinions as the result of a stupidity that you personally do not suffer, the odds that you are correct in your assessment approach zero.

<comment><USER14> Programmers eagerly work in EA style sweatshops producing games and other software with massive unpaid overtime, or count themselves lucky that IBM kept them for just a few extra months to train their replacements.

IT workers could demand protection from the same abuses that custodians and delivery drivers fought for and earned decades ago. But then the industry might need to admit their collars aren't as white as they pretend.

<comment><USER16> > But then the industry might need to admit their collars aren't as white as > they pretend.

You're fucking insane if you think the plight of the average programmer is anywhere near what custodians go through. I used to work for one of these IBM- like offshoring firms before I knew better and the quality of their work is simply garbage(there's some good people in there of course). For example, I was called in to troubleshoot a faulty URL - I asked them for it; they linked me to a localhost page. Other joys included network engineers who didn't know what port SSH runs on and Java programmers who literally copy-pasted straight from the web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I currently work at a multi-national corporation that has offshored a vast majority of its development and infrastructure. Any savings in cost of payroll is absolutely outpaced by a massive increase in expenditure required for project overruns and failures due to lower quality of work, terrible communication, lack of real SME's, and worthless organization. The upper management's reaction to this was to bring in consultants who are considerably more expensive than local talent and are often laughably ineffective. Especially since they have to fly back home every single Thursday. The sense of impending failure among the local employees for every single project is palpable.

<comment><USER17> In the bigger picture of things 'expensive' is a highly relative. You have to also factor in risk and the other secondary costs.

Not sure if this applies to your company but I have some prior experience as one of those SME/consultant/contractor guys.

For one particular multi-national company whom we did a lot of work, they had an entire dedicated team of (underutilized) engineers/technologists that _should_ have been more than capable of doing the work we provided.

Aside from the hour or two of daily PM work, the entire staff would disappear for the rest of their shift and reappear just in time to check out. To this day, I still have no clue where everybody would go. I'm not talking about an isolated incident, I saw the same pattern take place over the course of months.

Why was this allowed? Why was the company willing to pay us a premium to do work that could have been handled internally?

It was a non-union shop. The company had established a very firm and well defined scope of work. Adding additional responsibilities could screw up the balance and put the company and it's daily operations at risk. In the bigger picture of things, paying contractors/consultants a premium + expenses to do the extra work is an order of magnitude less expensive than the possibility of unionization. Just the cost savings on HR overhead (ex managing disgruntled workers, hiring new people) alone probably made up for what we charged.

You should've seen the amount of hell raised when the coffee provided was downgraded from Starbucks to a cheaper blend.

The whole work environment felt a lot like some sort of bizarre Mexican standoff between worker and company interests. The company would have a very difficult time maintaining operations and hiring replacements if their workers were pissed off enough to leave. Meanwhile, as much as their workers liked to complain, they had been working under such limited responsibilities for so many years that -- in terms of engineering and/or raw technical skills -- most of them would be useless elsewhere.

This may in part explain why many large corporations show a strong preference for H1-B workers. Not only are they incapable of unionization but they keep the senior staff motivated by fear of their jobs being replaced/outsourced. Whatever the overhead cost/complexity, it pales in comparison to disrupting operations and/or being bent over a barrel on union/compensation negotiations.

It also explains the preference for hiring millenials. Millenials have been screwed since day one. Starting from ridiculous education loans/costs. Extending to being forced to work unpaid/underpaid internships to make up for lack of unrealistic industry experience requirements. The idea of a company/union providing any form of protection is so far from our reality that we don't even consider it as an option.

Tired of being screwed by your company? Pack up and move on to another company. Resume shows lots of movement? Too much ambition is bad for business. Can't deal with the stress/complexity of regularly changing jobs? Better learn to enjoy being screwed.

Engineering for many industries is a cost center and hell hath no fury like a team of bored senior engineers with an over-inflated sense of entitlement.

Outsourcing can be used to reduce risk, avoid management complications, and shift CapEx (ie permanent employees) to OpEx (ie disposable contractors). Offshoring sucks but there's virtually no legal risk involved with firing overseas workers en masse. H1-Bs cost the same as local workers but have so many legal limitations that they're essentially the modern equivalent of indentured servants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> IBM doesn't make much of their own software. They bought lotus notes, they made rational clear case a massive product by buying other companies and cobbling it together. There is literally not a single company that is adding lotus notes or rational to their enterprise development suite. Their dwindling profits are accumulated from older companies who cannot or will not put up the cost to transition to latest tools. However every month another one of those companies finally bites the bullet and replaces those outdated tools. Aside from Watson when was the last time IBM MADE SOMETHING? Maybe they have but I haven't heard of it.

I feel bad for anyone losing their job but if your company does not make anything and is this large what hope is there?

<comment><USER19> IBM is fairly active in the hardware space - Blue Gene supercomputers and POWER processors have a pretty solid presence in the HPC space. To produce those products they do quite a lot of basic science in semiconductor and nanotech research.

I agree with you in general though - IBM is all about the lock-in. zSystem, for example, is basically a product for mainframe users (i.e. banks) who are petrified of updating their software and will pay whatever it takes to get an incrementally faster replacement. It literally lets you run your System/360 programs that you wrote 50 years ago, and System/360 was designed to directly replace physical tabulator machines. So your program logic may be the best part of a century old. It's basically the IBM-est product.

<comment><USER18> I was not aware of that. Thanks for informing me. If they had no value they would collapse and that has not happened. But I have wondered about their sub par products that are not growing and this does seem to be finally coming back to haunt them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When I worked at Deloitte they made a similar decision to outsource to India instead of training staff to learn Python and automate the time consuming, low value work. That's when I decided to leave, best move of my career.

<comment><USER21> How was the quality of the outsourced work? Did they find an existing software house in India and send them specs a deadlines? Did they hire individuals?

<comment><USER22> This is one example of outsourced work(CSS code) to Asia:

.scanResultsTable th:first-child+th+th+th{padding-right: 30px; text-align: right; width: 35%;}

Don't do it guys, really don't....

<comment><USER23> That's not generalizing anything at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands TBH, I've seen a lot of companies doing this recently. Cargill has been going through the same thing and they've been actively culling people who are close to be fully vested (20 year mark I believe). One friend who got their job "moved to the India office" said she lost over 400K in pension money because she was let go 6 months prior to her 20 year mark. After she started talking to other employees, she found close to a dozen mid-level managers who were all within 2-5 years of hitting the same mark.

Also, I've seen a LOT of companies to do this and it never ends well. This is usually a harbinger of metrics slipping, profit goals missed and shaky investors getting out. Which in turn means the company is in a slide. Moving their stuff overseas is a way to show investors they're trying to cut costs.

It never works. I can name a half-dozen companies off the top of my head that did this and it actually made the situation worse not better. Some of those companies are still struggling to make it back.

Here are some off the top of my head:

1 - <USER2>

2 - <USER3>

3 - <USER4>

4 - Thomson Reuters

5 - Best Buy

6 - Wells Fargo

<comment><USER24> Ford and Chrysler too.

I'm actually somewhat surprised by this move by IBM. Most companies I know of wised up to the fact that the total cost of ownership of the system goes up with outsourcing and you get a sub par product and as a result stopped outsourcing any kind of core development en masse.

I myself have seen a few of the outsourced projects fail as well with a couple of exceptions where the core team was not outsourced but some of the "busy work" type development - CRUD etc - was outsourced and then integrated into the core product. Still was painful logistically and savings weren't all that great at the end of the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is why Trump is so popular. If you expand this to include blue collar workers that have been savaged over the last twenty years, you can see the vein of anger that he is tapping into.

<comment><USER26> Indeed, Trump is the _only_ candidate who believes manufacturing should happen onshore, as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER27> Sanders seems to agree:

[1]: [http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must- read/reversing-t...](http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must- read/reversing-the-slide-in-manufacturing)

[2]: [http://www.sanders.senate.gov/agenda/#step7](http://www.sanders.senate.gov/agenda/#step7)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wish there was more "onshoring" of jobs to very low cost of living areas in the USA. For example, I live in Arizona and the cost of living is so much less than Silicon Valley and San Diego where I have worked before.

Life is good in the country and I wish more companies would consider setting up development offices where low cost housing was very nearby office space. Save money and still be in convenient time zones.

I have what is probably an unpopular opinion, but I can't really blame corporations for using foreign development centers. However, I would like to see them penalized via slightly higher tax rates.

<comment><USER29> Or just remove corporate tax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I can't think of two many companies that are more irrelevant to the future of computing. What does IBM actually do anymore? Seems to me they just need legions of consultants and cheap developers to bleed their customers under the guise of offering "solutions."

<comment><USER31> They seem to do bunch of smaller startups like these

[https://www.compose.io/](https://www.compose.io/)

<comment><USER32> Here's the wikipedia list: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_IBM#Acquisitions_since_2000)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sad, but it's happening everywhere. I have nothing against the best people being employed irrespective of their country of origin. But I really feel ill at ease when companies like IBM say quality does not matter at all and let's just cut costs as recklessly as possible.

<comment><USER34> Why? You get what you pay for. Most of the stuff I've reviewed from outsourced companies is pure garbage. These companies are simply shooting themselves in the foot by doing this.

<comment><USER33> Some companies e.g. banks have no choice but to keep using IBM products as their whole infrastructure relies on IBM mainframes and tools. Companies like IBM just want to milk cash cows like this and 'maximise shareholder value'. So they try and get everything done as cheap as possible. On a PowerPoint and in an investment prospectus it looks great.

Truly a race to the bottom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wonder Watson might have helped them to take such steps. Basically putting HR/Finance data into Watson hands and figure out optimum way of doing things with algorithms/forecasting etc.. Could be an interesting AI application.

<comment><USER36> Watson is a red herring.

<comment><USER37> Could you expand on this? I haven't heard much info on Watson besides IBM's publicity.

<comment><USER36> I'm in the same position, but the presence of all publicity and no real product is part of what leads me to believe that Watson is much like Deep Blue or AlphaGo: it was designed to solve an extremely specific problem, and its capabilities do not generalise readily to any other problem. This despite the fact that Jeopardy is a "general knowledge" quiz.

Imagine if Watson was an app. What would you do with it? As I understand it, it takes an oblique textual reference of some kind and turns it into a concrete, explicit reference. You talk about something and it figures out what you're talking about. That's great! It's a hard problem and it's extremely impressive that it's been solved.

But in practical value terms, that's just a toy. And when would it be more useful than Google Search, or Wikipedia, or Siri? Can Watson _do_ anything, book a trip, set a timer? Well, that capability would have to be plugged in, along with voice recognition and speech synthesis. But can it reliably determine _what_ I want it to do? Or even _whether_ I want it to do anything? Can it follow a conversation? Is it even stateful? What, if any, role does the core Watson functionality play in the systems which eventually do these things?

And how does Watson generalise to other areas? IBM was looking at applying it to healthcare. How would this work? Presumably, here your "oblique textual reference" is a collection of data (symptoms and measurements) collected from a patient, and the end result is a diagnosis, like "What is rubella?". Now, firstly, how useful is that? Is that the hard part of being a doctor? What about carrying out the tests, what about prescribing treatment or choosing further tests? What about missing hints, e.g. can Watson handle visual data from simply looking at a patient? Or does the doctor have to inform Watson that the patient is leaning slightly to her right when she sits, and has trouble getting onto the bed? So does Watson's single trick actually help, does it even slightly alleviate the workload of a medical professional?

And secondly, how readily does Watson adapt from the world of general knowledge quiz answers to the world of medical diagnoses? Are these worlds even remotely structurally similar? Can they be modelled and correlated using the same basic structures? Is there some heavy modification and serious domain knowledge needed to alter Watson to do this? Or are the two problems basically on different planets, such that an entirely different machine needs to be built?

The same goes for applying Watson to business analytics, for example. In my mind, Watson is a machine which, as it currently exists, _best case scenario_ , can look at all of your financial graphs and go "Ding! You're in a recession." And then nothing else. This may be of some use, but I doubt it.

All of this is ignoring the backend, which is that Watson in reality is this monumental pile of expensive, high-performance hardware and IBM Research code - and we all know how much research code ever resembles a working, saleable product. All of that to handle one real-time quiz game. You're going to shrink that until it fits in one office? Or you're going to have a server farm full of them serving requests at great expense?

I feel like people perceive Watson as a hair's breadth from strong AI, and IBM doesn't want to disabuse anybody of that notion. But I think the really valuable stuff in Watson - advances in computing techniques which I don't really know anything about but I'm certain must be there - is far less tangible, and is going to be very difficult to extricate from Watson itself, let alone monetize.

Just off the top of my head. Unsourced hunches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "Resource Action." That's even worse than my previous corporate cog job where they called it a RIF, "Reduction in Force." Who sits around and justifies themselves by coming up with idiotic terms like this?

<comment><USER39> Referring to humans as "resources" in general is creepy to me.

<comment><USER40> Yes it is. I believe the usage comes from the days when calling them 'personnel' was deemed creepy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's surprising they mention regulatory work (around data privacy) going offshore. I saw that happen at another company I worked for and it didn't go well. When the feds realized there's no one in person they can talk to and hold responsible, those jobs all came right back less than a year later.

</comment><comment><USER42> Establishment Republicans and Democrats agree that this is good, this is the way things should work in the globalized world. This kind of thing explains the rise of both Trump and Sanders.

<comment><USER43> This suddenly hit home today, reading this IBM article. I wish I'd seen your comment before I posted mine to another subthread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11263317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11263317)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Are there many/any companies that take the "automate yourself out of a job" credo seriously? That is, realizing the benefits of designed automation, produced by experienced developers who want to ascend from their initial roles by delegating that work to a well engineered system? I guess it's possible to outsource jobs while rewarding employees who are able to raise the tide for everyone, but it kind of sounds like IBM and most big tech companies see it as a zero sum game that is winnable by driving down labor costs.

<comment><USER45> IBM is particularly dysfunctional in this regard. I keep in touch with a lot of friends at IBM and a common story is that they'll cut headcount by one on a local team and hire two or three people overseas. The overseas people will require so much handholding to produce correct work that it consumes in entire person's time locally, negating any potential cost advantage and causing massive delays, as simple work items require corrections taking multiple round trips between people in different time zones.

I don't have anything against overseas labor and I've worked at companies where the overseas dev teams are first class citizens and produce work that's comparable to the work produced here, but IBM is not one of those companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Disclaimer: I am a (US) IBM employee, but my opinions are 100% my own

Shipping jobs overseas sucks. I live in the Midwest where most cities were hit by manufacturing going overseas, and my own family was impacted hard by it, like most people's were. I work in IT, so of course I know how much offshoring sucks. And I know what I'm about to say is going to be controversial. I'm not saying it to be glib or to downplay the pain that losing your job inflicts upon the whole family. What I'm saying is a warning.

Because this kind of stuff isn't new. It's not like this is the first time anyone has ever heard of sending jobs to other countries. And in terms of layoffs in general, IBM has 500,000 employees and is constantly restructuring itself to stay competitive in the ever-changing tech market. When mainframe and storage had a big layoff last year, my response as an IBMer was "we still have mainframe and storage people?" We spun off (or spun down) those parts of the business a long time ago, you had to have realized that your days were numbered.

I work for a hot part of IBM. A part of IBM that makes the company a lot of money. My job is fairly secure. But I know it won't be like that forever. Hell, it won't be like that for more than a handful of years. Because things change constantly. Right now I'm working on a project that will automate quite a bit of my work. And I'm hoping to take the skills from I've learned from that and using them to launch into the next hot thing.

Yes, when it's my turn to be laid off I will complain so loudly that they will hear me in whatever offshore country happens to take my job. But to be honest, by then I will be working somewhere else, doing something else. Because this isn't a new thing. Everyone knows that companies offshore and outsource and lay off employees they don't need anymore. And if you read the article, it seems like these people knew it was coming, but stayed until the end anyway.

Layoffs suck. Offshoring sucks. But have you seen IBM stock lately? I've never gotten a bonus and I've never gotten a raise, because those two things only happen when we're making money. There is no way in any universe that you could look at your job at IBM and think "yeah, this will hold me until retirement". That's not a reality in today's job market. My grandpa worked at the same factory his whole life from the day he graduated high school to the day the factory moved to Mexico. Between that and the five more years he worked until he retired, he had five different jobs. That's the reality of today's job market.

It sucks, but you have to just accept it. Two years, maybe three. If you're still at the same job after that, you're probably cheating yourself.

<comment><USER43> > It sucks, but you have to just accept it.

It's interesting that we all, or so many of us, think 'you just have to accept it', as if it's a law of nature.

Today, I had a revelation: Trying to grasp the revolt of working class Americans against both the Democratic and Republican parties, it suddenly struck me: Why should that group 'just accept' globalization? (Or immigration or deregulation or the free market pricing of everything from health care to college ...)

So far all the benefits have been accrued by a very narrow subset of society, while working class life has become harder and well-paying jobs and social mobility more scarce. Probably not coincidentally, the people benefitting are those who had a seat at the table when the rules were written. Everyone else, per both parties, would see the benefits magically 'trickle down' \- but of course they haven't, and it's been decades.

So why should working class voters take that deal?

<comment><USER29> Because fighting it is like punching a hurricane. It's based on fundamental forces that won't change no matter how hard you fight. If standard of living is imbalanced, it will eventually find its level.

Instead of fighting forces of nature, we should use them. E.g. reducing corporate tax.

<comment><USER43> > fighting it is like punching a hurricane

I strongly disagree. Protectionists have been elected many times in many countries. In the UK, there's a good chance they will with draw from the EU. Worldwide, progress for the WTO is dead. In the US, Trump and Sanders generally are against globalization, and even Clinton has rejected the TPP (on the campaign trail; we'll see what happens if she gets elected).

Provide some evidence that globalization, especially in its current form, is irresistable.

> Instead of fighting forces of nature, we should use them. E.g. reducing > corporate tax.

But that hasn't helped the working class, so why should they want to do that? So even more wealth can accrue to the wealthy few?

> If standard of living is imbalanced, it will eventually find its level.

And in the long run, we are all dead.

<comment><USER29> > Protectionists have been elected many times in many countries.

I'm not saying it's impossible to punch a hurricane.

I'm saying you can only harm yourself. Like the U.S. did with tariffs to turn a sudden recession in the 1920 into the Great Depression (aided by subsequent massive government spending crowding out industry investment).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Sounds along the lines of what many people here were speculating last week: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11220800](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11220800)

</comment><comment><USER47> Does anyone have any information on what sort of teams they are moving? The image in the article references Watson, but I would be willing to bet teams working on that sort of research are staying in the US. I would bet its the sort of "maintenance" teams that are moving offshore, as they are seen as cost centers.

<comment><USER39> Probably not watson. r/ibm has mentioned Global Technical Services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Why do Americans think they are entitled to higher pay for the same work?

<comment><USER39> Cost of living?

<comment><USER29> Which pays other people, and begs the same question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> _) IBM pension liability approaches 100 billion USD [1]

_ ) IBM has a number of low profit IT services. Cutting the services completely out of their portfolio, for one reason or another, at this point in time -- was not an option

My conjecture is the above are the reasons, and will continue to be reasons for layoffs specifically in US or other high-cost locations

Another prediction: If you look at the list in [1]. And see an IT company with large generic IT services portfolio, and shrinking product portfolio (software or hardware does not matter) -- they will do similar layoffs until they become 'leaders' again, or declare bankruptcy or get a bailout.

[1] [http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/05/corporate-pensions-most- und...](http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/05/corporate-pensions-most-underfunded/)

(this list is from 2013, but my search for more recent data indicates not much has changed)

</comment><comment><USER50> This headline from today is rather scary then:

"Yoox Net-a-Porter turns to IBM to propel its luxury e-commerce experience"

[http://digiday.com/brands/yoox-net-porter-turns-ibm- propel-l...](http://digiday.com/brands/yoox-net-porter-turns-ibm-propel- luxury-e-commerce-experience/?curator=TechREDEF)

</comment><comment><USER51> Why anyone in this position, would be willing to train his replacement, is beyond me.

<comment><USER52> A friend of mine was in this position. It was a requirement for her to get severance, as degrading and awful as it was.

<comment><USER39> Yeah it's either train and get severance or leave now. However, IBM just reduced the severance from 2 weeks per year of tenure to a standard 1 month. At that point I'm not sure it even matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Aren't there laws that prevent these sort of stealth layoffs? It sounds like they might be violating federal laws by not announcing it properly.

<comment><USER29> What? What are you referencing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Won't buy IBM/Lenovo stuff ever again. It was too late to stop the purchase of our new VMware cluster and SAN last year, but this year we will not buy replacement IBM/Lenovo backup storage servers. Roughly £20,000 which is not huge, but then again, it is not nothing either.

</comment><comment><USER55> So, I guess Cringely continues to be right [http://www.cringely.com](http://www.cringely.com)

I notice he has an article on IBM on the top and his books is pretty good. I'm not sure I agree about Intel systems, but he at least reasons it out.

</comment><comment><USER56> IBM should just relocate to India.

</comment><comment><USER57> it is happening on the same way for EMC now. My team,me and lots of people were gone for the deal with Dell. They've been transferring all the work to China. Right now, what i heard from my co-worker, the laid off is still ongoing.

</comment><comment><USER58> So, I'm trying to figure out the general HN view based on the comments in seeing ...

Is it the case the HNers generally view programming as a fairly low paid blue collar position?

</comment><comment><USER29> IBM is notable for the exception to Crockford's do-good-not-evil license: "IBM, its customers, partners, and minions may use JSLint for evil "

</comment><comment><USER59> IBM rule #1: Do not ever work for IBM.

IBM rule #2: See IBM rule #1.

<comment><USER60> IBM rule #3: This rule intentionally left blank.

<comment><USER61> IBM rule #4: All rules shall be composed of series of nonblank characters, separated by blanks.

<comment><USER62> Encoded in EBCDIC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Why do they enforce having a referrer set? If you refresh the page it becomes a 404.

<comment><USER64> If you use the url posted, it does a redirect from

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at- work/tech-c...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech- careers/is-this-months-ibm-layoff-for-rebalancing-or-is-it-really-for- offshoring#.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews)

to

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at- work/tech-c...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech- careers/.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews)

and doesn't work on refresh.

But, if you remove the "#.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews" fragment, the url works fine...

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at- work/tech-c...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech- careers/is-this-months-ibm-layoff-for-rebalancing-or-is-it-really-for- offshoring)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> please someone send a link of this comment section to warren buffet that he can "figure out" why his IBM shares are down 2 billion dollars...

<comment><USER66> These sorts of comments about IBM have been appearing for years if not decades. The existence of previous comments didn't stop Buffett from buying IBM stock and the existence of the current comments won't influence him either.

Nonetheless, he's probably having second thoughts. In the past he's admitted he didn't invest in technology companies because he couldn't understand them. Foolishly he violated his own guidelines here.

A number of years ago I owned Burlington Northern stock as it was being acquired by Berkshire. The merger terms allowed choosing cash vs Berkshire stock vs some combination. I chose cash, because I was uncomfortable with owning the giant conglomerate which Berkshire now is.

<comment><USER65> I think cash was the wrong decision. BH resembles the US economy. Nothing wrong with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Ouch</comment>


Deep dive into runc and OCI specifications - <AUTHOR> https://mkdev.me/en/posts/the-tool-that-really-runs-your-containers-deep-dive-into-runc-and-oci-specifications <comment><USER2> Good read, but _" The tool that really runs your containers"_ isn't quite right either.

Bocker (docker runtime in ~100 lines of bash) does a good job showing what's really happening. Basically namespaces and cgroups, both of which come with Linux. The source is probably the best "deep dive" on containers I've found.

[https://github.com/p8952/bocker](https://github.com/p8952/bocker)

Docker thrives because of the repository of images, a great name, and some marketing. Runc thrives because it provides a nice wrapper around namespaces, mounts, cgroups, virtual network interfaces, etc. Neither really provides the magic, though...it's already there.

<comment><USER3> Namespaces and cgroups are orthogonal to OCI and runc.

gvisor is an example that runs containers via runc without all that, using the same scheme as User Mode Linux instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A pretty good overview of the world of OCI containers, and I really appreciate the shout-out to umoci. I will admit that I did get a little fidgety when you started talking about --detach as well as the internals of /var/run/runc (to say that these things are "a little dodgy" would be an understatement -- the phrase "fundamentally misdesigned" comes to mind), but it is nice to show folks that containers really aren't that magical at the end of the day.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone share their experiences using the 'crun' container runtime (alternative to 'runc') in their clusters?

(it's mentioned way down near the end of the article, and looks like it is less resource-intensive)

[1] - [https://github.com/containers/crun](https://github.com/containers/crun)

<comment><USER6> The OCI runtime cost is so small that I do not expect any measurable difference in a cluster.

<comment><USER5> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Cha Cha Cha Change, TSA Style - <AUTHOR> http://r38y.com/post/242612684/cha-cha-cha-change-tsa-style

<comment><USER2> Step 1: Scoop everything out of your pocket into a dish or tray.

Step 2: Let the dish or tray go through the scanner.

Step 3: Scoop everything back into your pocket.

I don't understand the difficulty here.

<comment><USER3> I wonder what the guy does if his car keys are still in his pocket when he reaches the checkpoint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Charity? You mean like the TSA itself? They just need to make a tube into the box of "prohibited" items, where there's no accounting or auditing anyway.

I would call it the LOOT CHUTE.</comment>


Hidden Services, Current Events, and Freedom Hosting - mike-cardwell https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services-current-events-and-freedom-hosting

<comment><AUTHOR> This WSJ article from 12/12 explains in some detail where TOR came from and what it was supposedly developed for.

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732467720457818...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324677204578185382377144280.html)

"Created in part to hide the online activity of dissidents in countries such as Iran and China that censor the Internet ... [Tor] gets about 80% of its $2 million annual budget from branches of the U.S. government ... [It] began in 1996 as a project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory called Onion Routing ..."

<comment><USER2> All of these US "freedom" projects are about undermining governments that are not conducive to American interests and their ability to control rogue elements which would destabilize the State.

It's now evident that managed democracy with a massive surveillance state is what's behind the veil of global freedom and liberty. The most you can expect from the US government is to leave you alone, and they will only do that as long as you're not interfering with their economic or social interests.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's certainly one reasonable way to interpret what's going on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So, is there actually somewhere some news? All I have seen ( I did not check too carefully) that some people claim that the script includes some 0days, but without any detail that would convince me that it is not trolling by 12 year olds... (Obviously the Tor guys say something more reasonable, but actually they also just say that they are watching the news.)

</comment><comment><USER4> In light of the Freedom Hosting kerfluffle, as well as the Snowden revelations, I don't see much incentive to run an exit node.

Prior to these recent events I fooled around with setting up hidden services for my own educational purposes, but the fact that someone could use my Tor exit node to access illegal content was enough to preclude my setting up an exit on any of my servers.

Then I read about some guy in Austria who was arrested for running a Tor exit node and my decision was justified.

The problems inherent to running any sort of anonymizing service are just too many, and too serious, as we have recently seen.

<comment><USER5> >In light of the Freedom Hosting kerfluffle, as well as the Snowden revelations, I don't see much incentive to run an exit node.

I don't see how this has anything at all to do with snowden, and as achille points out this story is about a host of the some of the most infamous Tor Hidden Services, it has nothing to do with exit nodes.

Running an Exit Node is a somewhat risky activity since your ip address will be seen when a Tor user hacks/views CP/Torrents.

Running a hidden service allows one to _anonymously_ host a website, so it will require significant effort to unmask you, and is usually alot safer than running an exit node.

>The problems inherent to running any sort of anonymizing service are just too many, and too serious, as we have recently seen.

There are actually two completely safe ways to contribute to the Tor network:

Running a (non-exit) relay routes traffic internally through the Tor Network and is therefore a risk-free activity that can be bandwidth intensive.

Running a bridge allows is a risk-free activity that requires much less bandwidth.

Even exit nodes aren't as dangerous to run as you may think, according to [https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html](https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html) there are about 2000 exit nodes and you have only brought up one case of a prosecution resulting from the operation of one.</comment></comment>


Books I would recommend for new entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.danieltoop.com/2012/05/toops-top-ten-book/

<comment><AUTHOR> I saw another post with book recommendations, I disagreed with them but instead of writing a snide remark I decided to write my own list. Hope it helps some of you out.</comment>


Disclosure of Security Vulnerability in Sungrow Residential Hybrid Inverters - <AUTHOR> http://solarcybersecurity.com/ <comment><USER2> Hey, it's the author of that vulnerability disclosure here. Happy to answer anyone's questions.</comment>


IBM will no longer offer, develop, or research facial recognition technology - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21284683/ibm-no-longer-general-purpose-facial-recognition-analysis-software <comment><USER2> Previous HN thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23462568](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23462568)</comment>


Scala AVL Tree - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zenika.com/index.php?post/2011/06/09/Implement-your-own-Scala-collection <comment><USER2> This is great. While learning Scala I tried to implement a custom collection but had trouble knowing what to inherit, override, etc...</comment>


Ask HN: Non-US standard funding documents? - <AUTHOR>

There is a bunch of standardized documents for taking care of seed and VC funding without paying a fortune to lawyers, but all seem to be particular to the US (and primarily California). Does anyone know if there are similar sets available for other (Western) countries, and UK in particular? <comment><AUTHOR> Fred Wilson has made a convenient list of US-ones at [http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/03/standardized-venture- funding...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/03/standardized-venture-funding- docs.html) (this is put as a comment to make the link clickable).</comment>


Ask HN: How do you 'discover people'? - <AUTHOR> As in, people you might be interested to read about, blogs, etc <comment><USER2> Twitter , online research if it's a person I want to know in my industry. But I would say Twitter, Reddit etc</comment>


Motorola's Project Ara - <AUTHOR> http://phandroid.com/2013/10/29/motorola-project-ara/

<comment><USER2> This is a wonderful example of why you shouldn't shoot down concepts. When that designer unveiled his idea for Phonebloks, the majority of the feedback was criticism about how it wasn't technically feasible, how the designer was being unrealistic and downright naive for not understanding the mechanics [1].

But that's what concept design is about. You create what you envision to be a progressive solution, and find ways to make it technologically feasible. You would think that after all of the stories of Jobs demanding devices be smaller, sleeker, thinner, more responsive, being told it'd be near impossible to do, and seeing him actually pull it off, that people would be a bit more open to new design solutions.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6385105](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6385105)

<comment><USER3> The way in which you shoot down something matters greatly.

When I saw phoneblocks, I was instantly reminded of designers who work without regard for their medium - a great concept with zero thought given on how to make it a reality, or even awareness of the compromises the medium will inevitably impose. If you're a front-end developer, at some point you were probably given an awesome-looking PDF, then expected to make a website/app that is a 1:1 representation of it. Of course, that never ends up happening and you have explain why it could never be a reality.

I'm really excited to see where this goes, but whatever it ends up being, I can guarantee you it won't look much like that phoneblocks video.

<comment><USER4> > "If you're a front-end developer, at some point you were probably given an > awesome-looking PDF, then expected to make a website/app that is a 1:1 > representation of it. Of course, that never ends up happening and you have > explain why it could never be a reality."

I'm going off topic, but as a designer and a front-end developer, I get frustrated when the developed product isn't a 1:1 representation (when sending out the work to get coded). The end result should be a pixel perfect match of the artwork. Nothing is impossible translating an image to a website/app.

<comment><USER5> > a designer and a front-end developer

Could that be because you subconsciously make your designs using knowledge of the technical limitations of the web?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Still think this makes no sense at all, though I'm happy to be proved wrong. I think the endgame for personal devices is making the electronics invisibly small, which requires more integration, not less.

<comment><USER7> I don't see why I can't have a smartphone as my battery and processor, which connects wirelessly to any number of gadgets that "appear" individual.

I don't see why my glasses and wrist computing or whatever all need separate powerful discrete components and radios when they should be parts of a modular whole.

It'd be great to have a modular smartphone that sat in my pocket automatically recharging based on movement being converted by my clothing, powering a glasses or contacts based display with say a wrist band or something that tracked hand/finger movements in 3d and allowed me to interact with the 'alternate reality' UI I saw through the display.

It doesn't really seem that far away, now.

<comment><USER6> Modular in this sense I can completely see, but this is different from having them designed to physically interlock.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am down right impressed. The concept is questionable in current practicality but I think it matters for something that they are trying. We can all agree a pc-comptaible like situation would be very cool.

As a matter of good faith I shall withhold my scepticism and wait until they show concrete details.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't wait to support hardware that people can change on the fly.

"Tell me in order what modules you have installed" "Take your phone apart and reseat everything" "Did you try blowing on the connectors" "When it dropped and split into a dozen pieces did you put them all together correctly"

Sorry, but this will never see the light of day.

</comment><comment><USER10> The main difference I see from Ara to Phonebloks is the "chassi". While Phonebloks enable different sized components, Ara seems to limit each component to its own preset size.

I wonder what would happen if you need a bigger "slot" for your block or if the "slot" is too big.

Anyways, it's dream come true. If actually comes to market, will be utopic.

<comment><USER11> >I wonder what would happen if you need a bigger "slot" for your block or if the "slot" is too big.

You swap out your camera for a 5-block expansion hub, attach your camera to that and enjoy your 4 new slots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, alrighty then... If this becomes a real thing and isn't obsolete 6 months after release, I'll take back all those negative things I said about phonebloks.

</comment><comment><USER13> I would actually buy this. I'd love to be able to swap components out, upgrade my camera from vanilla without it costing the earth, give myself two batteries, upgrade with some more RAM or storage just because...

Maybe it's because I have used an iPhone for years, and I've just been missing out on Android configurability, but being able to potentially hack together _new hardware_ that I can just _attach to my phone_... dude... that is awesome.

EDIT: yes, I read the previous thread about Phonebloks too. I was suitably deflated by all the "this is unrealistic" comments. I am now re-excited :)

<comment><USER11> I'm not as interested in upgrades as I am in being able to replace failing components. It's just silly that a faulty graphics card can cripple a whole computer currently.

<comment><USER14> There is no such thing as a graphics card in a modern mobile device. It's all on the SoC, hence the name, 'System on a Chip'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow! This is awesome. Might be a revolution coming. The first thought I had was - IBM PC. This could be just that for the mobile market.

</comment><comment><USER16> Motorola's announcement: [http://motorola-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/goodbye- sticky-h...](http://motorola-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/goodbye-sticky-hello- ara.html)

HN link: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6634527](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6634527)

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how long until the Ara hardware DRM keys and gamification of Ara modules begin.

And how long until some virus engages the hardware locks on the modules and forces you to pay a fine to upgrade your phone ("Vendor" lock in).

Or, on the contrary, when Ara modules start sliding out of their positions, crashing the phone, corrupting pictures, etc.; causing Motorola (or whoever) to build in locks.

Or software that doesn't rely on hardware, but refuses to run when you don't have modules x, y, and z; or refuses to run when you DO have modules a, b, and c.

</comment><comment><USER18> Motorola's announcement [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6632860](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6632860)

</comment><comment><USER19> I would like to see us get this kind of compatibility (back) for laptops... Seems a lot more useful and feasible.

</comment><comment><USER20> Looking closely at the top photo it looks like they have differently shaped Exo's as well. One appears to be much wider, where the other is more iPhone 5 shaped.

</comment><comment><USER21> It'd be really neat to able to swap in zoom lenses when you might need them.

</comment><comment><USER22> i think its awesome, but it only makes androids fragmentation problem worse.

<comment><USER23> But if you put those fragments together, you get a phone that looks like a Mondrian.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It should feel like a lego phone, I can already envision myself stepping on a block.

</comment><comment><USER11> It might take a few attempts from a few different companies but this _is_ the way smartphones are going to go. We've needed modularity in these tiny computers we carry around for a long time now. The cries of "more battery" for example are just a symptom of modularity deficiency. I am fully behind this project.

<comment><USER25>
      > this is the way smartphones are going to go.

Sorry but no. I doubt it will ever go further than prototype and wouldn't be surprised if it never reacher working prototype stage.

      > The cries of "more battery" for example are just
      > a symptom of modularity deficiency

How? Do you think "everything gets its own module" is really more engery efficient than SoC?

<comment><USER11>
      > Sorry but no. I doubt it will ever go further
      > than prototype and wouldn't be surprised if it
      > never reaches working prototype stage.

People said Phonebloks would never be more than a weak concept but here we are.

      > How?

I meant that users complaining about battery life can be a considered a more general complaint about not being able to upgrade their hardware. If manufacturers start adding better batteries, users will gripe about another component. They _could_ keep plugging leaks like that. Or they can introduce modularity and build a new dam.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: what actionable metrics do you get most insight from? - <AUTHOR>

Stories welcome ! What do you build, test and how do you track your progress? Applying Lean Satrtup's. <comment> lauremerlin</comment>


How the British Raj Used Zamindars to Control India - <AUTHOR> http://wakey.io/30 <comment><AUTHOR> Big ups to my pops for driving me to the farm after I asked too many questions about how we got it. Also, Snapchat - for keeping all my snaps in Memories so I could use them a month later as b roll. Really makes me wish I had Spectacles right now.

A little more about the Zamindari system: it wasn't like feudalism where you were expected to raise armies. It was more practical & revenue based. As long as you paid / collected taxes, The Mughals didn't care what religion you were. And the British didn't really care what you did either. And it wasn't sharecropping either.

Oddly, I didn't come across much related to the caste system when I asked & searched around. That's weird right? Can someone with more knowledge help me out?</comment>