TDD is horrible while learning a new language - <AUTHOR> http://peterevjan.com/posts/7 <comment><USER2> I'll generalize this and say that TDD is terrible whenever trying to learn new tools. It seems to work really well when you're using the same tools you've always used--frameworks, plugins, gems, libraries, architecture, server stacks, whatever--and the only new area of research is the domain logic and implementation thereof.

I'm running into this exact thing right now on a new project that uses some tooling I haven't used before, and I'm doing an awful lot of yak-shaving. Some of it I would have done anyway just writing code with the new tools, but writing effective tests really does require a certain base comfort with the tools.

<comment><USER3> It feels like yak-shaving, but when you're learning a new language, that yak- shaving helps you dig into areas of the language (and it's infrastrucutre) that you wouldn't otherwise know about. It will pay off in the long run.

Your productivity is down, but that's expected, you're learning a new language.

<comment><USER2> Not always the case. While it's true that my total knowledge is going up, it's going up slowly because I'm trying to learn two things at once instead of learning one thing and then another.

Consider someone who wishes to learn how to drive a car and also how a car works under the hood. Learning how to steer and learning the complete function of the steering apparatus at the same time is not as effective (for me at least) as learning how to drive in one session with the mechanism either not explained or vastly simplified. At another time, I can learn about steering mechanisms and hear all about power steering and differential gears and what- not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> i disagree. unit tests _help_ when learning a new language, because you can write a test for one very specific piece of functionality and then use it to test whether you've got things right.

in the example given, don't mock out the file system, just use it. hard-code your paths. you can go back and fix that later - what you're doing now is getting basic tests sketched out so that you can learn.

so you're confusing "learning a language" with "writing a complete, portable system". of course you can't do the latter while doing the former - you need to make compromises. but ignoring tests is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. perfect is being the enemy of good.

[and i am not just bullshitting here - last week i was learning go and this is exactly what i did. the go getting started docs are very clear about how to run tests, and having tests to check i was understanding really helped.]

<comment><USER5> I think there is a middle ground. I absolutely agree with the author that test driven development sucks when learning. But that's not to say never write tests while learning. There's a huge different between writing some tests and test driven development.

When learning, I often find it's most helpful to just plunge in, then when something isn't working, go back and write tests to try and hone in on the problem. Then more tests to make sure my solution works for edge cases. I find this is helpful even when I'm not learning a new language, and just when I'm trying to do something new enough that I can't see the outline in my head when I start.

It's odd how sometimes TDD helps you break down complexity into manageable chunks, and sometimes it front loads complexity, and forces you to solve problems you aren't capable of handling quite yet. Whenever TDD is making me bang my head, I tend to skip it for the moment and come back to it when it's helpful again.

<comment><USER6> I have the following rule of thumb: I write the test in the moment when I know for sure how an Interface/Feature should behave.

If i know it before the implementation, I write the test first. Most of the time, I start programming and write tests for everything that gets nailed down. If I am in completely new ground, I start playing and do not test beyond "run and see".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I also find TDD to be rather useless when you haven't quite figured out what your architecture is going to be yet. My general process is model -> test -> code. If I can't yet determine my model because my knowledge isn't deep enough yet, the tests are all garbage that will have to be rewritten anyway.

I get the argument of tests as interface specification, but I just don't buy it. Some people may not like to model outside of code, aka UML or variants, but any reasonably complicated system needs a high-level concept drawn up before you can safely start pushing through individual components.

I love TDD for known problem/known solution scenarios, but I've found it to be a pretty bad time sink for unknown solution combinations. YMMV, and I think everyone finds their own comfort zone with TDD after some experimentation. The big lessons for me were that [x] testing is a net time saver versus the spray and pray code like hell strategy (yes, this makes sense before you realize you're not a programming messiah after all!) and that taking the perspective of a code consumer helps you write more fluent APIs.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm religiously devoted to TDD and understand the 'dirty' feeling that comes from writing any code without it.

But its totally fine to learn new languages and try out new stuff without it. TDD only needs to be enforced on code going into production.

<comment><USER9> Do you do any TDD training/coaching?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a fair argument to make: "Remove unnecessary layers or complexity when learning new languages." And I also don't TDD when learning a new language - in the beginning.

However TDD (when done pragmatically) is actually a great way to dive into a language. The thought process of mocking the file system is actually _where_ you learn about the language/libraries/frameworks. You have to understand those APIs a little bit before you can properly mock them.

 _... like how do I run the tests?_ I run into this a lot when I code as well. But I have to remind myself that I don't need a runner from a framework in order to do TDD. Don't even need a framework.

There is nothing about TDD that says you have to use any unit testing library. It's a process. And if understood properly and used pragmatically can be an excellent way to learn a new language.

</comment><comment><USER11> Some people try to force/shame TDD on others because it's more "efficient". "You're going to have to do it anyways." they say. Well, it's your mind and it's your time not theirs. Only you will know what's right for you. If TDD doesn't work out while learning a language then drop it. If it works out then great. I'm sensing this TDD arrogance that really pisses me off. It's not the only way to write a program. It all depends on who/what the program is written for.

<comment><USER11> In addition, I leave you with this:

<http://programming-motherfucker.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the better approach would be something to break each piece down into something that can be ingrained over time. I find it much better to hack at a language in a text editor and compiler first, then move towards an IDE if applicable. Sometimes I find that I get more comfortable in a text editor and the IDE is just more overhead than I need. I think something like this would be a better approach:

1\. (If Applicable) How do I compile the code? What is the shortcut?

2\. How to I get something to display on the screen/website?

3\. How do I build unit tests in this language?

4\. How do I run the unit tests?

5\. Are there any tools like AutoTest available?

6\. What are the preferred source control tools?

7\. What frameworks are there? Are any of them by far the leader?

This can be expanded as far as you want to take it, but I think this approach would make things a little easier to swallow. By focusing on one question at a time, I believe someone would be less likely to bite off more than they could chew before they were ready for it.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that feels this way. Anytime a decent amount of "newness" creeps into my process I find TDD difficult. I usually resolve this by doing a spike, figuring out what I need to do, throw away that code and then do it again under TDD.

</comment><comment><USER14> Developer uses wrong tool for the job, complains on blog. When you're learning a new language, learn the language. The code you're writing during learning probably isn't worth keeping around anyways (it's likely non-idiomatic and carries over habits of other languages).

Once you feel comfortable and want to write something a bit more stable, bring in unit tests if you feel the need. I find tests great for establishing how I want the API to be since the test is API-in-use and quickly shows flaws in ease-of-use. But, if you're just learning you don't need that extra layer on top of all the other things you're trying to learn.

<comment><USER2> _Developer uses wrong tool for the job, complains on blog._

True, but isn't that helpful? There are loads of people who don't know that TDD may be the wrong tool for the "learning a new language" job. Now they know that if they're banging their head against the wall, it may not be them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I learn new languages by writing tests to test my knowledge of new language.

</comment><comment><USER16> Apparently _TDD_ is a _test-driven development_.

<comment><USER17> I had the same problem, even though I know what test-driven development is. It's good practice to expand an acronym at least once in an article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I disagree. Code unsuitable for learning makes for hard testing. For a reasonably good version, try <http://rubykoans.com>.

</comment><comment><USER19> depends..

I have found that when learning a new language that if I have someone's unit tests it makes it easier. BUT, I have a few languages of exp such as C/C++, COBOL, assembly, Pascal, Forth, Java, Groovy, Python, etc.

In most cases, TDD is not to be used with beginners unless its used as pair programming. In fact if you read back when TDD was established that was one of the use cases for paired-programming..

</comment><comment><USER20> I think this is a specialized instance of the general advice to not test code which has not yet been written. If you're writing a test ahead of the code which it tests, you'd better have every single line of that code already written in your head.

<comment><USER21> TDD has red:green testing a central principle.

You're SUPPOSED to write the test ahead of the code which it tests.

<comment><USER20> One is also supposed to never change the test after it has been etched in stone, especially in BDD, but good luck getting people to follow that rule, especially in this modern age of Agileish development cycles. TDD, if practiced exactly as originally described, ends up being a drain on resources. You care more about the tests than about the code being tested.

As a now-classic example, observe a TDD master struggling with Sudoku: <http://xprogramming.com/articles/oksudoku/>

<comment><USER21> > to not test code which has not yet been written.

You're not doing TDD if you're writing tests afterwords, you're just writing unit tests. I'm not trying to dissuade you from that but just pointing out you're using the wrong term if you're not doing that.

I'm not a TDD proponent for most types of work that aren't heavily interfaced based, webservices to iPhone apps, I TDD them, but the actual app internals? Only on certain parts.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Like-A-Bossify images - <AUTHOR> http://likeaboss.herokuapp.com

<comment><USER2> Congrats! You may wanna add viewport statistics to your GA code:

[http://wishfulcode.com/2011/11/02/measuring-viewport-size- wi...](http://wishfulcode.com/2011/11/02/measuring-viewport-size-with-google- analytics/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Looks cool. I'll look into it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Screen-scraping that image-by-subdomain thing and then adding meme text on top of it. This is pretty much what I'd expect from a heroku app.

<comment><USER4> <http://likeaboss.herokuapp.com/crapping>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Example: <http://likeaboss.herokuapp.com/nuclear></comment>


Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - <AUTHOR> http://www.hpmor.com/ <comment><USER2> Somebody should print this out and send a copy to Bill Gates so he can put it on his '5 books to read this year' list!!!

Highly recommended!

</comment><comment><USER3> Was wandering is there a printed version?

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't think there's a print, you can get an EPUB here: [https://leanpub.com/hpmor/](https://leanpub.com/hpmor/)</comment></comment>


Google Xi: A modern editor with a back end written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://www.github.com/google/xi-editor/ <comment><USER2> _> >>[Design Decisions] ...The back-end needs to be extremely performant. In particular, it should use little more memory than the buffers being edited. That level of performance is possible in C++, but Rust offers a much more reliable, and in many ways, higher level programming platform..._

Google not prepared to eat their own [gopher-flavoured] dog food then?

<comment><USER3> Despite the misleading title and URL, this is just a side project from one person at Google.</comment></comment>


Buck: a high-performance build tool - <AUTHOR> https://buckbuild.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> (from Facebook)

I just learned about Buck from the Yoga post on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13124584](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13124584)</comment>


Microsoft slaps product activation on Mac Office 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9193578/Microsoft_slaps_product_activation_on_Mac_Office_2011 <comment><USER2> I'm sorry, but $150 for three computers isn't exactly draconian.

What the article doesn't say is that the 2008 license may have allowed 6 installs, but you could only use 3 at the same time on the same LAN.

And if you already a valid product key, who waits 15 days to activate it anyway? This is a lot of fuss about nothing.</comment>


How to win at roulette - <AUTHOR> http://samverhasselt.com/post/57381842788

<comment><USER2> There is no way to win at roulette. There is no way to win at roulette. Repeat after me, there is no way to win at roulette.

Place a bet on black and if you win, then quit playing roulette for the rest of your life. Then you can say you went out a winner.

Also, anyone who knows anything about roulette wouldn't have made it past the chart showing double zero roulette. Why would you play on a double zero roulette table? Find a single zero table.

You might be able to create a bit more interesting results by playing one of the handful of no-zero tables. Google them. Even in this case your expected win rate over the long term is zero.

<comment><USER3> > There is no way to win at roulette. There is no way to win at roulette. > Repeat after me, there is no way to win at roulette

That's not quite correct. If you gather enough data about a given wheel, you can exploit biases to get an advantage. Roulette wheels are not perfect random number generators. This has been successfully exploited in the field [1].

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEgOQs93W1Q](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEgOQs93W1Q)

<comment><USER4> Biased roulette wheels are basically a thing of the past. Now they are hooked up to electric monitoring system (that also do the fun LCD displays above them), monitor balance and track every winning number. If the computers notices a significant irregularity, they swap it out due to an abundance of caution, re-balance it and replace all the frets.

The "unbalanced wheel" thing never really worked very well -- as it couldn't easily remove the houses MASSIVE 5%+ edge (00). Now, back in the day damage frets(frets divide the numbers) could be a rather astounding in cheap backwater casinos with worn wooden frets. If you noticed them, you could bet the opposite side (ball, even slowly was likely to coast over smooth worn frets) and you could crush the casino. Today, the combination of electronically monitored balance, irregularity tracking and strong metal frets make this more of a historical thing -- but had to be fun back in the day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_\(betting_system\))

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks (to you and others that mentioned it) for bringing this to my attention. I'd never heard of the Martingale betting system.

Knowledge is power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Start with $10,000, make your initial bet as $10, and walk away after winning $100._

Or take the $10,000, put it a CD paying 2%, and do twice as well, guaranteed.

</comment><comment><USER7> You should add how many games it takes to meet your target.

The one thing with Roulette is that it can get very boring very quickly!

I worked on [this][1] product in a previous life. They knew that you only had a certain attention span, so obviously the more you played, the more they took.

In the short term, the house always wins!

      [1]: http://www.shufflemaster.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=1171:rapid-roulette&Itemid=903

</comment><comment><USER8> I can speak from experience - you'll be very surprised how an unlikely string of reds comes up when you're just betting black. Almost like it's rigged or something. Just sayin'.. .

</comment><comment><USER9> Seems good in theory, but you will go broke using Martingale.

<comment><USER10> I believe people can go for a while winning using the technique though, which builds a self-reinforcing "I can't lose" feeling. Eventually house odds and the table limit will work against you though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Win at the roulette <=> run the table.</comment>


Show HN: Remove Water from Images - <AUTHOR> https://seabetter.com/ <comment><USER2> Just tried with a random stock image, results were not significantly better [https://www.leisurepro.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2017/09/s...](https://www.leisurepro.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2017/09/shutterstock_325504112.jpg)</comment>


More spring cleaning out of season at Google - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-spring-cleaning-out-of-season.html

<comment><USER2> When I read the headline but before I read the article, I had the gut "Great, what thing is Google killing now that I'm going to miss" reaction.

After reading the article, I can safely say they're making the right decision killing off all these services (Google Bookmarks Lists, Google Friend Connect, Google Gears, Google Search Timeline, Google Wave, Knol and Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal) as part of their effort to streamline Google. I'm guessing we're nearing the point where we'll start seeing some random projects coming out again, but until then the more people they're putting towards spdy and WebP the more I'm returning to being a Google fan-boy!

<comment><USER3> I only wish they could put a few more people working on Go, but not too many, wouldn't want to dilute the amazing talent of the current team :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hope that, after the pruning process, some more 'random, rhizomatic' growth is allowed. You can't always tell what's going to be valuable ahead of time. And sometimes interesting connections happen when smart people are allowed to work on important projects.

<comment><USER5> Google is very much a random, rhizomatic company. For the project I'm working on, we have all sorts of different groups who are working on random bits of functionality (some of which overlap with and duplicate each other) that we need to integrate into one big whole. If anything, I think Google runs the risk of not having enough organization and unity.

<comment><USER6> Every large organization has departments that overlap and duplicate. The problem is when there is a gap that no one is working on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm probably in the minority, but I'm sad to see Google Wave finally die (at Google, anyhow). Still, I imagine this streamlining is ultimately good for the company and will result in higher quality for Google's remaining products.

</comment><comment><USER8> One of the coolest things on that list is the "RE<C Initiative" <http://www.google.org/rec.html>

Some of it's videos have 8 (now 9 I guess) views. I'm confused as it's not a major project and hardly anything to cancel. This must be the most press it's ever had.

<comment><USER9> Internally at Google it was a lot bigger deal, mostly because of the huge power budget of data centers.

Personally, I'm surprised they killed it. The team was fairly small, and they had made some good progress on various initiatives. Perhaps if they had moved them under the Google Power company [1] it would have made more sense.

[1] [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/google-applies- to-b...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/google-applies-to-become- power-marketer/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Glad to see Google focusing their resources on more critical projects such as Android and Wallet.

</comment><comment><USER11> It is good to focus. I get that Google can only do this by killing projects that are not working.

The problems that many of these killed initiatives are trying to solve, often have successful solutions being built outside of google. Google Wave, for example. If Google doesn't have the right team working on a project, I wonder if other teams inside Google have chances to take on failed projects before they are killed. Another team might make it work.

<comment><USER12> It is sad, though, when Google entering the market killed a successful solution built outside of Google. Google Wave, for example.

<comment><USER13> What did Google Wave kill?

<comment><USER12> Etherpad and any other web collaborative text editors businesses.

<comment><USER14> I think 'kill' is a strong term to use. Although the original Etherpad service was terminated some time after aquisition, the source was released in December, 2009 :

<https://github.com/ether/pad>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Someone should build a website to maintain all the projects Google killed. They might not be suitable to Google but someone else could build on the ideas.

<comment><USER16> I'm sure it varies by project, but as has been said before when Google kills things, a lot of their projects require the core Google infrastructure (BigTable?) that isn't open sourced so it isn't possible to spin the project out.

<comment><USER17> I wonder if I'm the only one who thinks that Google could make a lot more money, and have a lot more impact, if they opened up the "core Google infrastructure" for [paid] uses by outsiders than Google AppEngine is ever going to get them.

<comment><USER18> App engine at this point is pretty much all their infrastucture opened up - you got short/long running processes, big table, blobstore, and map reduce. You don't get c or assembly but you get golang which is pretty close.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Too bad about the bookmark lists, I've found some interesting ones. They were coming up for query-by-a-handful-of-examples (à la google sets and grids), just not very well known.

</comment><comment><USER20> It makes sense, if you think of how many engineers that saves them and conversely, how much more work they'll be able to get done elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER21> This was the first time I'd even heard of Google bookmarks. Which is kind of annoying since for the last 6 months or so, at least once a week, I'd wished that something like that existed (instead of my hilarious google doc full of urls).

So off I go looking for it... not listed under more... or even more. Go google for it (duh), find it... and WHOA blast to the past. Doesn't even have the black bar shoe horned in.

<comment><USER22> You might like Pinboard ("Social Bookmarking for Introverts"):

<http://pinboard.in/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Could this mean there is still hope for Google Code Search? I hope so!

</comment><comment><USER18> There's an also another thing that nobody seems to be discussing. What is that google is secretly cooking up in the google x lab. Larry and Sergey are ambitious guys, and the fact that they're shedding energy plan and knol, and that sergey isn't focusing much on google+ (the massive facebook threat) but instead on x lab means they've got to be gearing up to drop a serious scifi bomb on the scale of the google car (or bigger).</comment>


Robots really are coming for your job, and there's nothing you can do about it - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/08/robots-job-supreme-court

<comment><USER2> Yes you can robots cannot program themselves or repair themselves.

Robots lack self awareness, common sense, compassion, empathy, any emotions, and the slight change in programming can ruin their work.

I always made my living doing quality control and security checks, I would get hired to fix the mistakes of other people who attempted to write a program but it was of low quality, slow, and insecure.

Robots can program, but not very well. Sure you got autogeneration like Ruby on Rails but it still needs to be modified to be security and do more advanced things. Sure there are other tools that autogenerate code, but it still needs to be modified.

I used to fix problems in code written by people who got the work offshored to them. Now these nations they work at have improved their economy so the labor costs more, so businesses are turning to robots that work for free.

Not just physical robots, but web robots and software robots. The whole idea is to automate everything so that human beings are no longer needed. But when you automate things without common sense, empathy, etc people start to notice what is wrong.

For example I signed up to a website that had a web based chat with therapists, after a few questions I learned I was talking to a web chatbot. One who didn't know who Maslow was, one who had a picture taken from photo stock and used on other websites, one who was claimed to be a certified therapist, but seemed to know next to nothing about therapy or human beings. That website quickly went out of business, but when one fails, there will be several more to take the place and tweak the web chatbot so it appears to be more human. Won't pass a Turniing test, won't have empathy for the patient, nothing more that an Eliza BASIC clone ported to a new language and modified. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA)</comment>


The Only Flowchart You'll Ever Need - <AUTHOR> http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2006/12/12/the_only_flowchart_youll_ever_need

<comment><USER2> John von Neumann invented flowcharts, and they were in a sense the first real high level language. Of course, the "compiler" in this relationship was the human, who would translate a flowchart into alterations in relay switches (or other bare metal hackery)...which themselves don't have a step-by-step logical quality.

Flowcharts were 100 percent obsolete when Fortran and COBOL came into use. However, some managers still insist on the presence of them in design documentation. This is, perhaps, the single greatest indicator of incompetence available to us.

</comment><comment><USER3> The last diamond (good story) makes it special.</comment>


Using BitTorrent Sync to live-edit or deploy websites - <AUTHOR> http://antler.co.za/2014/06/using-bittorrent-sync-to-live-edit-or-deploy-websites/

<comment><USER2> This is a bad idea for several reasons.

The first issue is security. Loads of text editors create temporary files (.swp, .php~, etc) in the same directory as the file you're editing. These can render as text instead of going through php, thus revealing things like database secrets and such. Now, this problem won't always occur and can be configured around.

However, perhaps the bigger problem is that this is simply a bad workflow when a better one exists. For "live editing", run a local webserver. Don't expose your playing around to the world, potentially breaking your site for others. Heck, if it's a static site, just run "python -m SimpleHTTPServer" if you like. Second, for deploying, you should have a better process than "sync this directory". Specifically, you should have git hooks that handle deployment if you want don't-think-about-it instant deployment. Preferably you have CI that deploys after it passes a few tests. Using git also has other benefits like letting you have commit messages, easy rollbacks, different branches (which you can auto-deploy to test / dev / etc).

Basically, the problem with using Dropbox or BTSync to edit websites is that you rarely want to throw partial changes to the world, and file sync programs like to sync as often as possible. It's a cool idea, but those sync programs simply don't replace proper version control and CI.

I'd even prefer rsync if you're not using version control simply so you can control _when_ it syncs and setup complex excludes / shell scripts to run around it. You could easily have a script that runs a minimizer and then rsyncs the output while having rsync exclude any potentially accidental files. You can't do that nearly as easily with the workflow the author is talking about.

<comment><USER3> I used to sync my publish folder with btsync but after facing issues, looking into proper tools now. Also i am a newbie, so instead of chef or puppet, I am looking into CI tools and their deployment capabilities now. As far as i know, tools like chef provides you full server configuration management. I am guessing with EC2 custom AMIs and Teamcity i will be able to pull it off. What do you think?

<comment><USER2> I've never used Teamcity, but it looks nice. I do agree chef/puppet can be overkill when you can just do custom AMIs. Definitely make sure you're using proper version control... Honestly, you don't give enough information for a proper opinion, but it'd probably be more informative to just do what you think is best and see how it works out. Ultimately the best workflow is the one that works (even when things go wrong).

<comment><USER3> What more info you would like to know? We already have SVN in place. We are developing asp.net web app, and currently i manually migrate changes to release branch and publish from that branch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So I am big fan of BTSync, it works really well and displaced used of DropBox mostly. I use DB only with apps on ipad that have that integration.

I think both use dropbox or btsync for this is a little weird. I wouldn't do it. It is not hard to publish sites.

</comment><comment><USER5> We're looking at deploying a static site generator - but one issue I've run into is how to allow our content folks to use the system. Ideally, the files would be stored in Github and then, on commit, the result are compiled and pushed to a staging server. We've been looking at Jenkins for managing the process, but it seems a bit heavy handed - anybody have any other suggestions?

</comment><comment><USER3> I was using it to deploy my web apps, and keep my 2 servers in sync. But lately i am facing issues with it. Once in a while my bittorrent sync on server shows No device connected, even if my local machine is online. Thankfully i am using ec2, so spinning up a new instance from few days old AMI is easy and usually btsync starts to work again on the new server. Now looking into different solutions.

<comment><AUTHOR> A commenter on my blog post suggested Syncthing ([http://syncthing.net/](http://syncthing.net/)) as an alternative.

<comment><USER3> I remember seeing this earlier. Looks good. But i am looking towards solutions which can be integrated with our version control. Maybe Chef or Puppet

<comment><AUTHOR> Have a look at Docker ([http://www.docker.com/](http://www.docker.com/)), I was introduced to it recently and it looks like a powerful yet simple alternative to Chef or Puppet.

<comment><USER3> Docker is linux only, and we are a windows shop. So docker not an alternative for me</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Business model for my web-based mockup tool - <AUTHOR>

About two months ago I launched jMockups, a web based high fidelity website mockup tool [1]. I've been working on it pretty heavily over the last few weeks and am starting to see a bit of traction, which I'm thrilled with.
That being said, I haven't had a lot of success making money from it yet. The current business model is to offer three mockups for free and charge $19/month for unlimited. Compared to the price of Photoshop (which is my main competitor), I thought this was a pretty good choice. But so far most people stop at three or less. I believe this is partially due to the tool not being good enough yet and partially due to the fact that most people don't need to create more than three mockups at once (there's nothing preventing you from deleting one of your mockups and staying below the freemium limit forever).
I'm about to launch a tool that lets you import your website directly into jMockups. Using the jMockups editor, you'll be able to quickly experiment with new designs, new features, etc. It's going to save you a load of time vs manually recreating your site with jMockups or experimenting with new designs via code.
Which brings me to my question: With the launch of this tool, I could change the business model completely:
Option 1) Keep the current model (3 for free, $19/mo for unlimited) and let people use the import tool for free, thereby encouraging them to create more mockups. Over time as the tool keeps improving, I expect the conversion rate will improve a lot.
Option 2) Let people create mockups for free ($0 for unlimited) and charge people for using the import tool (maybe like $10/import). I make a lot less per paying customer this way, but the existence of a quality, free mockup tool could help it gain a lot of traction.
It's a major decision and I'm not sure what route to go. I've asked a few folks and gotten very different opinions--what would you do and why?
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1829657 <comment><USER3> Taking a stab in the dark about your typical use case:

How about option (3) - make the import tool free but make _sharing, creating multiple mockups of the same page or even saving to come back to later billable_. Basically, minimise friction in getting users to start using the tool and then charge them at the point it becomes useful.

The "import your existing" page sounds like the kind of potential killer feature that deserves its own landing page too: mocking up from scratch and easy "on-the-fly" rearrangement of existing pages have different use cases and value propositions.

-

I also think you've oversimplified the pricing for the original service. Faced with a choice of 3 for free or "unlimited" for $19 per month, most people are going to think they fit into the cheaper bracket.

If you end up with something remotely close to the old model, try something along the lines of: $19/mo Standard - up to 10 mockups $49/mo Pro - <USER2> mockups

Given the more expensive choice, the "Standard" option suddenly looks relatively inexpensive, and you might still get "Pro" signups for more cash. Although the actual numbers might want a bit more thought than my arbitrary increase. Possibly you should consider making the "also there's a free plan" a footnote and definitely reduce the mockups covered by it down to one or two.

Probably the two pricing models can coexist, as a design/consulting firm might find $19 or even $49 per month to be cheaper than paying per mockup shared.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoa -- excellent feedback. Thank you.

Creating multiple mockups of the same page isn't viable because you can copy and paste the contents of one mockup to another. Also, it takes some time to create a decent mockup, so a one-time-use scheme would be hard to implement. Charging for collaboration might be viable, but my gut says there's a better way to make money.

I feel like the import tool is huge too and I'm not sure how to sell it. I could reposition jMockups as a tool that lets you redesign your existing site --that might be an option. I've kind of been going down the hybrid path: Create a site from scratch _or_ redesign an existing site (that was going to be my landing page headline, almost verbatim). But that's exactly focusing on a niche...

Regarding pricing, I think a free version is essential. Yes there's a demo video and yes there's a demo mockup, but I'm not sure a lot of folks would commit to $x/month without creating at least one mockup of their own. I could reduce the free limit from 3 to 1, but I'm not sure that's the best solution either. But I think you're right that a higher priced plan is a good idea, both in terms of its value and in terms of making the cheaper plan seem like a better deal.

Again, really good feedback. Appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh, that thing is cool! I'll probably use it to mock up my next site.

Since it's the kind of thing I'd use once every few months or less, and I'd use it for one project at a time, I'd probably pay $10 to $20 one time for 3 or 5 mockups. Then, I use the best one mockup to make a site and quit needing the service for a while. I don't need three free ones since the demo gives me a really good idea of what I'll be getting for my money. Does that kind of pricing scheme sound reasonable?

PS - after I buy that package, email me a few months or a year later to see if I'm ready to mockup another site. Also, refer me to someone who can take the mockups, improve them, and make websites out of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good ideas. And that's one thing I forgot to mention: Most individuals don't need to create mockups often enough to need a SaaS plan. Design firms and larger companies might, but they're also going to need an exception tool, which jMockups is not... yet.

When you say you'd pay $20 for 3 to 5 mockups, how would you expect me to implement that? $20 for maybe a month of use? That's pretty much what it is now :) But I know what you're saying.

The reminder email is a great idea too if I went down this path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Have you spoken to Peldi of Balsamiq? Sure, you're competitors, but I bet he will be happy to give some advice and share some experiences. With your import feature, you could possibly become a good complement to their product.

Regarding your pricing, have you considered not having a free version at all? It sounds like your initial users may be poor startups, which is probably not the best target market. If you raised your prices, you could target more appropriate customers.

Also, check out BidSketch by Ruben. His customers might be yours too.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you consider Photoshop your main competitor, I think you need to do significant customer development; this seems to me a very wrong strategic framing of your product. There are many competitors that would be more appropriate to think about - off the top of my head, Axure and Balsamiq come to mind - and I think examining how they do things would give you a much better idea of how to create a business around your tools.

<comment><AUTHOR> Photoshop is to _high fidelity_ mockups as Balsamiq is to _low fidelity_ mockups--would you agree?

Axure (software based, one time $589 price) is in there, but I don't think nearly as many people use it as Photoshop.

That being said, some more time on customer development is a great idea.</comment></comment>


Hey Siri: An On-Device DNN-Powered Voice Trigger for Apple's Personal Assistant - <AUTHOR> https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/10/01/hey-siri.html <comment><USER2> This is interesting and a feature that I didn't know about, and Hey Siri will often not trigger in the car for me while driving. Now I know to retry and I'll have a better chance at triggering Hey Siri.

"We compare the score with a threshold to decide whether to activate Siri. In fact the threshold is not a fixed value. We built in some flexibility to make it easier to activate Siri in difficult conditions while not significantly increasing the number of false activations. There is a primary, or normal threshold, and a lower threshold that does not normally trigger Siri. If the score exceeds the lower threshold but not the upper threshold, then it may be that we missed a genuine "Hey Siri" event. When the score is in this range, the system enters a more sensitive state for a few seconds, so that if the user repeats the phrase, even without making more effort, then Siri triggers. This second-chance mechanism improves the usability of the system significantly, without increasing the false alarm rate too much because it is only in this extra-sensitive state for a short time."

<comment><USER3> This is brilliant. Apple could also cut out the "hey" part to make it more natural.

"hey Siri... Siri"

<comment> crooked-v "Hey Siri" has always seemed like such an awkward phrase to me. "Alexa" flows so much better, besides the general awkwardness if someone in the room has that name.

<comment><USER4> Alexa is actually a difficult word to pronounce for non-English speakers.

<comment><USER5> Really? Are these non-European languages that you're referring to, because many of the European languages have their own versions of the name Alexander for both men and women, so I'd imagine Alexa wouldn't cause too many issues.

<comment><USER6> The 'x' in 'Alexander' is (typically) voiced, where that in 'Alexa' is not. I can see that making a substantial difference for speakers of languages where those phonemes are differently composed.

<comment><USER7> What do you mean by voiced? I put the stress differently, but otherwise I would pronounce Alexa as Alexander cut short. I can imagine the vowels being pronounced differently in various accents, but I can't imagine an accent where the 'x' in those two names are different.

<comment><USER6> "Voiced" in the phonetic sense [1], i.e., spoken with the vocal cords vibrating. Voiced 'x' sounds like the /gz/ in "eggs", /ɛgz/; voiceless 'x' sounds like the /ks/ in the American English pronunciation of 'x' itself, /ɛks/.

Many, if not all, American English dialects pronounce the words in the fashion I describe. In them, the name 'Alexander' would be

        /ˌæ.lɛˈ(gz)æn.dər/

while 'Alexa' would be

        /əˈlɛ.(ks)ə/

\- in both of which, the phoneme corresponding to the letter 'x' is parenthesized.

Generally in English 'x' is voiced when it precedes a stressed vowel, which it does in 'Alexander'; in 'Alexa', 'x' precedes a reduced vowel, and therefore would always take the unvoiced pronunciation. (It'd sound very odd to an anglophone ear otherwise - say /əˈlɛ.gzə/ one time out loud and see if you don't feel the same.)

That said, it wouldn't be incorrect to pronounce 'Alexander' in American English with an unvoiced 'x', as

        /ˌæ.lɛˈksæn.dər/

but, while I believe some dialects of English may default to this pronunciation, certainly not all do. (Neither of the dialects I speak does so, at the very least.) This pronunciation also produces a "hitch" or break in the word between the unvoiced 'x' and its preceding vowel, which would tend to make it a little odd both to hear and to say.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_(phonetics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_\(phonetics\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I own multiple iOS devices, a few Echos, and a Google Home. One of the things I noticed after getting an Echo was how much more fluid and simple it was invoking the "assistant". Simply asking, "Alexa, what's the weather today" just seemed so much more natural than having to prefix everything with "Hey" or "Okay".

Using Siri or Google Assistant for more than one question at a time quickly makes me feel like I'm going insane. "Hey Siri.. Hey Siri.. Hey... Hey..."

I'm hoping Google and Apple fix these subtle annoyances. Or maybe it's just me.

<comment><USER9> Isn't part of the point of the prefix to avoid collisions with sounds that are part of everyday speech not intended for the assistant? "Alexa" becomes problematic when Echo is used in a office/home in which someone is named Alexa -- among the top 100 most popular female baby names since 1995 [0] -- which is why the wakeup word can be changed to "Echo" or "Amazon" or "Computer".

But the sound of the wake word, whether it's just "Alexa" or "Hey Siri" vs "Siri, doesn't seem to deal with the main issue of your complaint, which to me is how limited "conversation" is with the assistant.

If you ask Alexa for the weather, you'll still have to say her name for any followup questions within that immediate context, i.e. "Alexa, what's the weather today? Alexa, what's the weather this weekend?".

Though there are a few functional exceptions in which Alexa will prompt you for additional information without needing to be re-awakened, e.g.

You: "Alexa, set my alarm for 6 'o clock"

Alexa: "Is that 6 'o clock in the morning, or in the evening?"

[0] [https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/index.html](https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/index.html)

<comment><USER10> I always felt that Siri was named with the intent that it could be used as a wake word (so you could say "Siri what's the weather today?") because Siri itself is a rare given name and [si ri] are sounds rarely said at the beginning of a sentence.

And then at some point Apple realized they had to make a longer wake word to cut down the number of false positives ("Siri" -> "Hey Siri", from 2 syllables to 3).

Google probably went through the same process ("Google" -> "Okay Google", from 2 syllables to 4).

Amazon probably deliberately chose a 3 syllable name with "Alexa" for the same reason.

I can imagine future improvements where we can have the originally imagined wake words "Siri", "Google" and "Alexa", and at that point I would be most happy with "Siri" because it would be short and not-corporate.

<comment><USER11> Siri (the company) was a spin-off from SRI – Stanford Research Institute.

The initial product, before the Apple acquisition, was an iPhone app with a chat interface. I don't recall that it supported voice input.

It is still possible that the founders were thinking ahead to voice input and wake words when they named the company.

<comment><USER12> The technology was initially developed under the DARPA CALO research program ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pretty cool how they reduce the power consumption - when it first came out, "Hey Siri" required your device to be plugged in:

> To avoid running the main processor all day just to listen for the trigger > phrase, the iPhone's Always On Processor (AOP) (a small, low-power auxiliary > processor, that is, the embedded Motion Coprocessor) has access to the > microphone signal (on 6S and later). We use a small proportion of the AOP's > limited processing power to run a detector with a small version of the > acoustic model (DNN). When the score exceeds a threshold the motion > coprocessor wakes up the main processor, which analyzes the signal using a > larger DNN.

> Apple Watch uses a single-pass "Hey Siri" detector with an acoustic model > intermediate in size between those used for the first and second passes on > other iOS devices. The "Hey Siri" detector runs only when the watch motion > coprocessor detects a wrist raise gesture, which turns the screen on. At > that point there is a lot for WatchOS to do—power up, prepare the screen, > etc.—so the system allocates "Hey Siri" only a small proportion (~5%) of the > rather limited compute budget. It is a challenge to start audio capture in > time to catch the start of the trigger phrase, so we make allowances for > possible truncation in the way that we initialize the detector.

Another interesting nugget:

> There are thousands of sound classes used by the main recognizer, but only > about twenty are needed to account for the target phrase (including an > initial silence), and one large class class for everything else. The > training process attempts to produce DNN outputs approaching 1 for frames > that are labelled with the relevant states and phones, based only on the > local sound pattern. The training process adjusts the weights using standard > back-propagation and stochastic gradient descent. We have used a variety of > neural network training software toolkits, including Theano, Tensorflow, and > Kaldi.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just because (judging from the comments) non-iPhone owners may not be aware, this isn't a new feature in the iPhone _at all_ , Siri has had voice-activated prompts since late 2015 [0]. What it looks like is the team finally got the OK to share technical details about how this works with the public, and that's what we're seeing here.

Apple doesn't usually do tech writeups; I imagine a pinhead at the corporate level decided it wasn't worth the risk of leaking any "secret sauce" until now.

0: [https://www.cultofmac.com/390181/5-ways-hey-siri-will- change...](https://www.cultofmac.com/390181/5-ways-hey-siri-will-change-your- life-for-the-better/)

<comment><USER15> That pinhead was Steve Jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pretty cool of Apple to post such technical blog posts as this. I love it when companies do this.

<comment><USER17> Indeed. Quietly but surely, Apple is changing its corporate policies around developers. We used to never see Apple developers at conferences with an official affiliation, let alone having them onstage as a speaker. I once ran into an engineer at a Ruby conference in which the guy demurred who he worked for, and when he finally told me he worked for Apple, he had to remind me the whole "what I say does not reflect nor represent..." preamble. That was as late as 2014.

Great to see such corporate changes toward developer-friendliness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great explanation, this technique has a lot of applications for extracting event triggers out of audio streams. Even though I've trained my iPad repeatedly though it still is a bit to eager to answer to others who talk to it (either on purpose or by accident).

At some point I expect Apple to design an audio neural network processor to put on their CPU chips which will allow them to do both phrase recognition and highly accurate speaker dependent text to speech on their devices. It will be yet another way that people who don't build silicon won't be able to compete.

</comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone know of papers and/or example implementations of similar DNNs for accoustic modeling using tf or some other framework?

<comment><AUTHOR> Google's Deep KWS paper [1] is kind of similar, although they don't use an HMM.

[1] [https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/42537.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there any open source projects to do this? I mean just the triggering part, not the command recognition later.

<comment><USER21> There are Snowboy and uSpeech on Github. Haven't used them yet.

<comment><USER12> Snowboy isn't open source, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Your connection is not private

Attackers might be trying to steal your information from machinelearning.apple.com (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). Learn more NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID

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You don't have permission to access ".../machinelearning.apple.com/2017/10/01/hey-siri.html" on this server. Reference #...

</comment><comment><USER23> 2012: OK Google / 2014: Alexa / 2017: Hey Siri

<comment><USER24> Hey Siri has been an iPhone feature since the 6s, which came out in 2015.

<comment><USER16> It's a feature on older iPhones as well (such as my regular 6) but requires being on a power source since those lack the specialized, low-power chip.</comment></comment></comment>


Book Report: Purple Cow - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sharememe.com/2008/10/02/purple-cow-book-report-for-web-entrepreneurs/

<comment><USER2> I do wonder how these Godin posts make it up to the top - especially this one.

It's an old book, the message is fairly generic, and almost everybody knows what it is. The review is bland and offers no further insights.

It makes the front page.

</comment><comment><USER3> Like Squidoo? Er...

<comment><USER4> no, its not like squidoo at all.

ive been fortunate enough to have used sharememe and its quite different. i wont spoil the surprise but im looking forward to hearing great things!

<comment><USER3> Haha no I'm saying Godin often makes up or magically changes the meaning of all these words/phrases (Purple Cow?!) and then doesn't even follow his own advice. Squidoo isn't awesome, or amazing, or wonderful; it's an abortion.</comment></comment></comment>


Top 50 Student Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.tech.co/top-50-student-startups-kairos-society-2013-02?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TechCocktail+%28Tech+Cocktail%29

<comment><USER2> It's like the author picked it for diversity of location of the founders. It's hard to believe that these are the best??? I have heard of many, many startups that could be equal to this list.</comment>


Facebook tax court trial begins over Ireland offshore deal - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-tax/facebook-faces-tax-court-trial-over-ireland-offshore-deal-idUSKBN20C2CQ <comment><USER2> The headline is inaccurate - the IRS did not sue Facebook today. This was the first day of the trial. The lawsuit was originally filed in 2016 and widely discussed at that time.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/irs-wants-facebooks-records- on-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/irs-wants-facebooks-records-on-transfer- of-assets-to-ireland-1467923716?mod=article_inline)

<comment><USER3> Discussed at the time on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12193216](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12193216)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To those mentioning that Facebook's revenue is $70b: their net income is only around ~$18b.

This would be half of Facebook's net income for an entire year, which is substantial. It's a big deal to them.

<comment><USER5> That's what the point of punishing companies for hiding money in tax heavens is. If they got fined $10M it wouldn't be much newsworthy

<comment><USER6> Making someone pay the taxes they owe is not a punishment.

<comment><USER7> I doubt facebook committed a crime here. The right way to address tax avoidance is to change the law, not to punish companies that comply with the law through arbitrary levels of complexity.

Even if everyone in the room is aware that facebook is practicing avoidance, avoidance is still legal and categorically different than evasion.

Now- The right way to figure out whether this was a crime seems to be by examining the fair value of the intellectual property sold to Facebook's Irish subsidiary. I hope the discussion here can center around this.

<comment><USER8> I think there's room to argue that intentionally shipping all your IP to a lower tax country then charging the main company (that developed that IP in the first place) high fees to use that IP as a way to shift profits from higher tax areas to lower tax areas could constitute fraud. Either they sold/transferred the IP for way to little or they're charging themselves way too much because it's advantageous for taxes.

<comment><USER9> Here's the million/billion/trillion dollar question: how much is a brand worth? Clearly it is worth something. Facebook can do the most inane thing, but if they put their brand on it then it will have some value.

To me this is the flaw in corporate taxation. I don't think you can ever work around this as long as you allow free trade. It just makes sense to tax them in other ways instead and perhaps simply get rid of corporate taxation itself.

<comment><USER10> Could the US simply impose a tax on _all_ corporate profits, including international profits, for any company with any sort of nexus or business activity in the US? US citizens are basically already treated this way as individuals.

I imagine it would allow the rate to be drastically lower since the tax base would be so much larger. And while megacorps would obviously grumble, it would still be a profitable decision to pay the tax and remain in the US market given how lucrative it is. It would end all these country-to-country shell games once and for all, and would also provide some natural advantage to smaller homegrown companies that haven't gone international yet.

<comment><USER11> If I understand right, US citizens only owe income tax if what they already paid is less than the US rate. (Edit: "IRS Form 1116. If your income was taxed by a foreign country, you can subtract that tax from your US tax")

If something similar were applied to the tax on corporate profits, then it would not change much, as the US rate (21% I think) is pretty low by world standards. But there are exceptions, like Ireland (6-12%, IIRC).

But isn't the Irish company a different entity anyway? How far down the chain of ownership / authorized-importer-relationship would such a rule go?

<comment><USER10> "If I understand right, US citizens only owe income tax if what they already paid is less than the US rate."

I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that unless there's a tax treaty specifying otherwise (which we do have with many countries), all personal income over the "foreign earned income exclusion" (roughly 100k) is subject to income tax just like US-derived income would be. (Edit: just saw your edit about Form 1116... thanks, I didn't know about this. But I guess my point still applies in that, tax credit aside, you are still considered to be under the authority of the IRS even if your life and all your income are elsewhere.)

"If something similar were applied to the tax on corporate profits, then it would not change much, as the US rate (21% I think) is pretty low by world standards. But there are exceptions, like Ireland (6-12%, IIRC)."

Right, but if we taxed all international profits, it could probably be very low (maybe < 5%?) while still generating as much or more revenue, since there would be no way to avoid it. And it would be a naturally progressive tax since it would by definition hit multinationals the hardest.

"But isn't the Irish company a different entity anyway? How far down the chain of ownership / authorized-importer-relationship would such a rule go?"

My thinking is that perhaps we should end this silly game of international subsidiaries being treated like separate entities for tax purposes and just tax the aggregated profits of the parent entity, regardless of where in the world or under what subsidiary they are realized.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure it's so easy. If you own 51% of a company, which owns a slice of a company, which does business in America, does this grant uncle same the right to collect 5% of your profits? Sounds pretty imperial.

Here's another idea though: Arrange things so that the taxes owed depend on the goods sold, not on any ownership structure. Don't sell goods in the US? No problem. Sell mostly in the US? Who cares about your office in the Bahamas. This probably means abolishing the tax on corporate profits, as _where_ these occurred seems to be basically an accounting fiction. Which is fine, we also don't tax windows anymore.

<comment><USER12> >I'm not sure it's so easy. If you own 51% of a company, which owns a slice of a company, which does business in America, does this grant uncle same the right to collect 5% of your profits? Sounds pretty imperial.

Well, you run into that kind of issue when you allow spontaneous incorporation. If anything, incorporation should likely be handled a bit more like immigration in the sense you recognize an entity incorporated somewhere else instead of whipping up a brand new separate legal fiction, Company X,<Your Country edition>.

This would create a mechanism through which issues of taxation could be resolved through tracing the "heritage" of a corporation, then leaving the divvy up of tax extracted value to be sorted out by internation tax agreement.

It certainly sets up a pleasing symmetry in process between dealing with Corporations and people by my estimation, and cuts down on the attractiveness of creating corporate hierarchies with the direct intent to play shell games with your taxes.

<comment><USER11> I think you are saying that buying or selling shares should be as difficult as immigration? Or only if the buyer and seller are in different countries?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am willing to bet Facebook did not pay Irish taxes on US income, but failed to pay US tax on non-us income, which is a different thing, as the US have signed treaties with the EU preventing them from taxing revenues that an company have already paid taxes on in Europe, so the IRS suing Facebook from headquartering in Ireland would be an severe treaty violation and is likely not what is happening in the real world despite it being an obvious angle for fox to try and push to their audience.

The problem with Facebook/Google taxation(the EU is even less happy about it) is that is that by moving the money through Ireland(who dont tax corporate transaction, only Irish revenue) the profits end up in limbo somewhere in the Atlantic where nobody gets to claim taxes on them.

It is essentially the reverse of what the EU is suing apple over as apple insists that their profits is taxable in the US despite not paying tax on their IP related profits in California.

<comment><USER14> if Ireland isn't taxing the revenues, then it's not a break of the treaty for the us to tax them. No?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We changed the URL from [https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/facebook- faces-tax-co...](https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/facebook-faces-tax- court-trial-over-ireland-offshore-deal) to one with the same text and no autoplaying video.

<comment><USER15> aka we hate certain outlets and don't want to drive them views.

keep it up, dang ;)

<comment><USER3> That's not it. There have been plenty of submissions from that site ([https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=foxbusiness.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=foxbusiness.com)) and plenty of major threads: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=foxbusiness.com%20points%3E30&sort=byDate&type=story)

We don't care about site quality, we care about article quality: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%20%22article%20quality%22%20%22site%20quality%22&sort=byDate&type=comment).

Most major media sites have some good articles and many bad articles, in HN's sense of good/bad, so nearly all of those get mildly penalized on HN: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20sites%20penalize&sort=byDate&type=comment). But there are plenty of ways for that penalty to get overridden by software or users or moderators.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Doesn't almost every multinational use this arrangement, commonly known as the Double Irish? Why is Facebook getting called out specifically?

Surprised the article doesn't mention this.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement#Multi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement#Multinationals_that_used_Irish_BEPS_tools)

<comment><USER17> Regardless of any particular politics, they seem like a politically expedient target. _Everybody_ hates them (while using their products, which is funny), and they aren't a big government contractor.

<comment><USER18> Some of us do not like the dumpster fire and do not warm ourselves with it.

<comment><USER19> Also the fact that everybody hates and uses it would be ironic and sad, not funny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> People looking at their personal income tax return: Woah, this is more complicated than I expected - should probably pay a professional accountant to sort this out for me

People reading news articles like this: Look at these stupid professionals arguing about how international tax law in the $XB range when one side is so obviously wrong, and the correct outcome is really straight forward.

<comment><USER21> If a professional accountant told my buddy to do one weird trick to completely eliminate the lion's share of his tax liability, and he did it, and then the IRS went after him, I'd feel entirely comfortable judging both my buddy and his accountant, even if I didn't know the precise details.

<comment><USER22> Then you'd be judging a lot of people wrongly, because that sort of thing happens all the time for entirely legitimate reasons.

For example, at various points there have been federal tax credits for installing solar panels on your house or buying certain types of green cars. For a lot of people the credit would exceed their federal tax liability for the year. You're prepared to send them all to jail for that without looking at the details?

<comment><USER23> I think by implying that the IRS went after them, the "weird trick" was not as legal as previously anticipated, despite being guidance from a professional.

Appealing to popularity wouldn't make it anymore legal than appealing to professionalism.

<comment><USER24> > I think by implying that the IRS went after them, the "weird trick" was not > as legal as previously anticipated, despite being guidance from a > professional.

That's about as legitimate as "the police investigated them, so they must have done something wrong". That kind of argument has _huge_ problems.

<comment><USER21> Sure, but it wasn't that kind of argument. It's not about trusting the police/IRS, it's about distrusting loopholes.

I'm about as sympathetic to Facebook here as I am to the people who claim that under the maritime act of 1776 their car is a ship and therefore the police can't arrest them for speeding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is this actually illegal though? Or is it just clever exploitation of the rules? Tax avoidance is not the same as evasion.

<comment><USER26> Well, I guess it depends on the interpretation of the rules. The point of contention seems to be the valuing of assets, which of course FB has incentive to not value highly:

> The IRS argues that Facebook understated the value of the intellectual > property it sold to an Irish subsidiary in 2010 while building out global > operations, a move common among U.S. multinationals. Ireland has lower > corporate tax rates than the United States, so the move reduced the > company's tax bill.

The value of intellectual property is kind of a murky thing, especially before it is fully monetized. So I guess the question comes down to: Did FB executives knowingly undervalue the assets to save money on taxes? Is there a paper trail to that effect?

<comment><USER27> Part of the problem is, it's not a legit, best price, arm's-length, market price. Facebook:Ireland is just a sock puppet for Facebook:USA, and the latter has no intention of selling it to a true outsider.

OTOH, if FB:USA sold the rights to FB:I for $1, knowing it would pay billions to license those rights the next year, I don't get how that can be a proper valuation, even without a clear price discovery mechanism.

<comment><USER22> The real issue is that "market price" legitimately has an amount of slop in it that can eat the company's entire profit.

Suppose it costs $50M in salaries to create intellectual property which is then licensed to customers for $500M. Which one is the "market price"? It was sold for both prices, once by the employees to the company and then by the company to the customers. But the difference is a factor of ten.

More than that, the difference can be justified. When the $50M is paid, you don't know whether anybody will buy it. Maybe you'll make a billion dollars, or maybe you'll make nothing and just flushed $50M down the toilet. Or maybe you'll make a profit but the profits are spread over future years whereas the work was paid for immediately, so in an arms length market transaction you would expect the price paid to be discounted for the time value of money.

So they pay $50M for something they go on to sell for $500M. Which one is the market price? Both of them.

This obviously leaves more than enough slack for chicanery.

<comment><USER28> That is not how IP valuation works. The internal cost is not the measure; the potential or actually sales/licensing value of the IP is the measure.

<comment><USER22> What measure? It's two different transactions that occur under different terms at different times.

Suppose some code is written by an independent contractor instead of your employees. The contractor is in San Francisco. The San Francisco office pays the contractor, then does nothing more than immediately sell the rights to the code to the Ireland office for approximately the same amount. You just demonstrated that that was the market price -- the contractor was willing to accept it in an arms length transaction with an independent third party. The Ireland office could have just as well paid the contractor directly. What value is the San Francisco office supposed to be adding that justifies being awarded a significant fraction of the total revenue?

<comment><USER27> "Sell" is a four-letter word. Was that an actual _market transaction_ where the seller got the highest price they could, and said price was evaluated by the buyer against alternatives? No, of course not. It was a dictated sale, precisely to present a fiction to the tax authorities.

You can only use a sale price to justify a valuation when it's under those circumstances, or a good-faith approximation of such circumstances.

In normal circumstances t would make no sense for FB to take on the risk of hiring a contractor and justify the RoR to shareholders knowing they could only immediately sell for exactly what they paid. That's not how sane businesses operate.

<comment><USER22> > Was that an actual _market transaction_ where the seller got the highest > price they could, and said price was evaluated by the buyer against > alternatives? No, of course not.

Why not? The San Francisco office doesn't have any monopoly over the contractor. It doesn't have anything the Ireland office wants that nobody else could provide. So what is it doing that justifies it receiving a significant premium?

> You can only use a sale price to justify a valuation when it's under those > circumstances, or a good-faith approximation of such circumstances.

How isn't the transaction between employee and employer any different? If there were two otherwise identical jobs doing the same work and one paid more, the employee would choose the higher paying one, so it's not unreasonable in general to assume that what the company paid the employee was the market rate to have that sort of work done.

> In normal circumstances t would make no sense for FB to take on the risk of > hiring a contractor and justify the RoR to shareholders knowing they could > only immediately sell for exactly what they paid. That's not how sane > businesses operate.

But they do know that. The Ireland office is willing to immediately pay them the full amount they're paying the employees, so the US office is taking no risk. No risk, no reward; thin margins are the norm in that sort of transaction.

<comment><USER28> You keep trying to make logical arguments about a very small portion of the entire transaction without looking how that transaction relates to much larger business concerns.

The law, tax, business, and reality doesn't work that way. They make policy based on a view of the entire forest, not on the gnarls in a single tree branch.

Territory matters when you're talking about taxing value creation. It always has. If you're arguing against that you're literally arguing against thousands of years against human history. The short answer: it's this way because humankind fought a lot of wars to make it this way, and trying to change it could result in more violence.

 _How isn 't the transaction between employee and employer any different? If there were two otherwise identical jobs doing the same work and one paid more, the employee would choose the higher paying one, so it's not unreasonable in general to assume that what the company paid the employee was the market rate to have that sort of work done._

No, it's not reasonable to make that assumption based on the facts. The employee/business relationship is not related to the value of product created by the employee. This is literally not how any business works. If it was, then most tech startup employees would get paid below minimum wage. FAANG programmer salaries would start in the low millions after a year or two on the job. Mid-level attorneys at most law firms would be making a cool million each year. Backoffice employees at any company wouldn't get paid at all, because they don't contribute to the creation of products.

 _But they do know that. The Ireland office is willing to immediately pay them the full amount they 're paying the employees, so the US office is taking no risk. No risk, no reward; thin margins are the norm in that sort of transaction. _

Valuation isn't about what the Irish company _would do_. Valuation is about how much the IP would be worth on the open market, to unrelated third parties who might not have insider knowledge of the actual cost of creating the IP, and thus who base their offer prices on the value of the IP to their own interests.

More importantly, if the Irish office was always going to reimburse the US office for hiring the US contractor to create the IP, that trail of paperwork says the Irish office was the actual creator of the IP, because the US office was just acting as its agent in hiring the contractor. And that's a very different scenario than what you were originally talking about. (And side note: backdating legal documents to suggest this was the contemplated transaction all along is a crime in both the US and Ireland likely to result in prison time if the IP has any significant value.)

<comment><USER27> You must have the patience of a saint, to untangle and address the parent's arguments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does anyone else feel weird to be rooting for the IRS?

We tend to get smashed if they suspect our deductions was only 85% kosher. Facebrick, goog, apple, amazon, yeah. Focus there and everywhere there are overseas tax-dodges with high priced lawyers and accountants.

</comment><comment><USER30> Is there a reason why Mike Schroepfer is being called to testify? Boz makes sense given that he ran ads for years, Naomi Gleit and Javier Olivan led parts of the growth team for years, but Schroepfer is the CTO. Not entirely sure why he'd be called while Sheryl Sandberg isn't (or any number of people who actually worked directly on revenue)?

<comment><USER31> Probably because the tax avoidance scheme involves shifting intellectual property and technology to overseas subsidiaries and then charging the parent company a large royalty.

Schroepfer would be asked to testify about the actual source and work product that led to the intellectual property transferred to the Irish subsidiary.

<comment><USER30> Got it, that makes sense. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Surely this is more about political coercion than tax? Amongst all US companies that offshore profits, including the likes of Halliburton, Facebook has been singled out because the US administration wants the company to do it's bidding regarding policy and algorithms for political advertising? Especially considering all the other political reprisals and pardons that are in the news, following the impeachment acquittal. I expect this story to quietly disappear, or some mild fine to result, followed by a not-so- mysterious tweak to how political advertising is handled on the platform. I don't expect it reduce large corporation tax evasion as much as people are crowing here.

<comment><USER33> A lot of unfounded speculation in your comment. It seems more politically- motivated than rooted in facts.

Secondly, have you done your research? Surely Facebook is not the only company being targeted by the government right now. I can assure you that, surely there are more.

Thirdly, as much as I might dislike an administration, I won't take the giant, speculative leap as to assume that I know exactly what they're thinking.

Fourthly, if this "quietly disappears", why would you automatically assume the administration's involvement? Again, there are presidents I strongly dislike, but part of remaining objective requires grounding your position in fact. Facebook has world class lawyers. Having worked in the legal field for numerous years, I am more than positive that Facebook has made many things "quietly disappear" on their own.

<comment><USER32> I understand that lawyers are taught to think logically and to support their arguments, so I would appreciate your analysis on our exchange, which looks to me like this:

MY COMMENT: question / observation / speculation / hypothesis-with- circumstantial-evidence-to-support-speculation / expectation / expectation

YOUR REPLY: assertion / speculation

question / speculation / assertion

personal observation

question / self-evident-assertion / assertion / assertion

The main complaint to my comment was about unsupported speculation, which I don't see, instead I do see it in the reply. I genuinely want to do better if I should.

<comment><USER34> >"Especially considering all the other political reprisals and pardons that are in the news"

What news are you talking about? Whatever news you're watching is only giving you one perspective on events, so this "observation" is not helpful on its own.

The rest of your comment is similarly rooted in assumptions and speculation borne out of a hostile media's interpretation of recent events, so the conclusions you're reaching are built on a far less sturdy foundation of "evidence" than you may think.

<comment><USER35> The media is supposed to be hostile. They are always hostile to the administration. It is their job as one of the checks on power enshrined in the constitution. Why do you think freedom of the press is in Amendment one?

<comment><USER34> That's not always the case. The mainstream media - both the news media and entertainment media more broadly - was extremely accommodative and deferential to the Obama administration largely because he was on the mainstream media's political "side".

Given this, many actions taken by the Obama administration that would have dominated the news cycle as impeachment-worthy if taken by the Trump administration were simply ignored or brushed aside by the Obama administration's media allies.

<comment><USER36> > The mainstream media - both the news media and entertainment media more > broadly - was extremely accommodative and deferential to the Obama > administration

You don't watch FOX News much, I assume

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Comes down to what was the value of Facebook's intellectual property when it was sold to its Irish affiliate. The IRS is saying they valued it much too low to their benefit.

</comment><comment><USER38> The main issue I see with all these tax avoidance measures is they are all based on not realizing profits in the tax year they were earned (and realistically it'll become tax evasion in spirit if not by legal definition when a future govt lowers taxes or offers amnesty).

Obviously a short comment isn't going to have the rigor needed to solve such a complex problem or figure out appropriate exceptions. Having said that I honestly believe appropriate governance laws that recursively apply to subsidiary and owned companies would be a very effective (even if not perfect way) for a single country to start realizing tax on their multi-nationals before the much slower wheels of international agreements can grind the problem away.

My poorly thought out solution is along the lines of:

Any company owning shares in another must attempt to vote every year that that the subsidary (or just invested in company) company pays out a dividend proportional to net profit and 3rd party investment since the last such passing vote.

Any subsidiary incorporated by this company must apply these rules and any investment in the company is taxed when the subsidiary incorporates or buys stock in another company.

They must also attempt to vote that any company they have shares in follow these same rules.

No temporary transfer of shares or proxy appointment should effect the outcome of these mandated votes.

I'm sure there are issues with my implementation of this idea such as longer planning of a warchest for growth or perhaps intuitive structures such as a subsidiary that manages all international subsidiaries but it was more to highlight a particular structure than to be exhaustively tuned.

</comment><comment><USER39> Large corps can afford to figure out ways around the tax law internationally, while countries take a long time to legislate internationally.

Easier for states to retaliate by suing, or otherwise fining, like google in the EU [https://www.wired.com/story/eu-hits-google-third-billion- dol...](https://www.wired.com/story/eu-hits-google-third-billion-dollar-fine- so-what/)

potentially cheaper than paying taxes?

</comment><comment><USER40> Facebook converts to scientology.

</comment><comment><USER41> Reality is companies know that even if they have to settle in court they still save BILLIONS. Companies can't loose until laws drastically change here.

</comment><comment><USER42> What would be the alternative to the current taxation scheme of digital goods?

Could we imagine the tax rate being weighted by the revenue made in a specific fiscal area? Lets say that if FB makes 40% of its revenue in the US where the corporate tax rate is 27%, the IRS could tax FB profits at a 11% rate (27% x 40%).

<comment><USER43> You still have the issue of who collects.

The UN or (better, maybe) WTO should broker an international framework for digital tax enforcement.

<comment><USER44> Okay, but if I'm producing widgets, every widget I produce is transported over roads and uses public resources. So you can make the argument that because each transaction uses those, a sales tax is justifiable. On the other hand, if I'm serving web pages, the marginal cost in public resources of each new page is zero. Is there any reason for taxing those other than "wanting a piece" of that?

<comment><USER45> Is serving pages what FB does?

<comment><USER44> Basically, yeah. It's just a web app. Unless that was supposed to be taken as Socratic and you think it does something more?

<comment><USER45> I guess it was somewhat socratic. Monetary value is being extracted from UK users. Presumably that value would have not existed without physical,legal, political etc. infrastructure maintained by the state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> key bit, many comments here instead are unrelated speculation

>The IRS argues that Facebook understated the value of the intellectual property it sold to an Irish subsidiary in 2010…

</comment><comment><USER47> Why would the IRS have to sue? They're the IRS, they have the authority to levy backtax and if Facebook doesn't like it, _they_ get to sue.

</comment><comment><USER48> I truly wish that the corporate tax rate was 0. Not 25, not 15, but 0%. Then all of this ridiculous nonsense around crony capitalists lobbying for special tax breaks, "double Dutch Irish sandwiches", and the insane discrepancies between big business and small business in regards to tax games would all go away. Just increase capital gains to match income tax and be done with all of this bullshit. Amazon pays an effective rate of 0% anyways.

<comment> coral-snake How would you avoid companies-as-expense accounts? If I form "Coral-Snake & Co.", wouldn't I be able to pay 0% taxes by just directing all income/expenses into that shell?

(Granted, I don't understand basically anything about tax law, so maybe this is already a well-defined problem with a well-defined solution.)

<comment><USER48> This is already doable with a multitude of ways. If I have profits, and I direct them to a business, then argue plausibly that my life expenses (lunches, travel, cars, computers) are for my business, I can write off all those expenses against my profits. Business owners do this all the time.

<comment><USER49> Business owners that do that had better be very careful and keep plenty of documentation. There are legal "tests" (read requirements) that must be met for those lunches, travel, cars, computers, etc. to be considered an expense. In many cases, any "non-business" use/benefit/enjoyment renders the entire expense not a business expense. Yes, it is not so rare for small business owners to play loose with the rules. And then they get audited and end up paying a lot in back taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> > "Facebook Ireland and Facebook's other foreign affiliates - not Facebook US > - led the high-risk, and ultimately successful, international effort to sell > Facebook ads," the company said in a pre-trial memorandum.

This is hilarious! Does anyone really believe the pretense that these are multiple different companies?

<comment><USER31> The US should have a tariff on intellectual property royalty payments from wholly-owned foreign subsidiaries of American companies.

<comment><USER9> This seems like it could actually work. If you made this tariff equal to the corporate tax rate then won't you generate the same amount of taxes?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Huh? Hasn't everone know that for years? Maybe a decade?

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm curious to know how this gels with the Trump administration's recent criticism of European countries trying to claw back tax based on revenue generated in their countries... .

</comment><comment><USER53> These tax dodges are corporate shenanigans, and to me it's no different than tax evasion.

<comment><USER54> But if you as a citizen owe 1000USD, you'll be pursued more.

Its completely messed up, but that's the current rules of the system. Without going into politics, they play by the stretched rules.

<comment><USER55> >But if you as a citizen owe 1000USD, you'll be pursued more.

Is the IRS really auditing people over $1000 in taxes (under $4000 of revenue/income)?

<comment><USER56> My experience with tax collectors is that they pursue those owing between 10K-500K intensely.

Once it gets into 7-8 figures, you can VERY easily pay proportionately less than the poor suckers caught in the 10-500K net.

<comment><USER57> Just curious, how have you come by this experience? Does the irs release full audit rates?

<comment><USER56> Been in both situations and did a lot of research on what was possible negotiating. There is public information out there which they try to suppress (imagine if the public knew that the guy who owed 10 mill, got away paying 5 mill after years of not paying anything even after the IRS marked them).

<comment><USER57> Can you point me to the dat? Sounds like a fascinating dataset.

<comment><USER56> It's not a dataset, remember, they don't want this information out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Zuck is being brought to heel before the election.

<comment><USER59> Really now? Social media played a large part in the election of the current regime, so why would they go after FB?

<comment><USER58> Why do you think it's the "current regime" that's going after FB? Before Barr, the "current regime" couldn't even launch investigations into fake "dossiers" and things of that nature, and this stuff with FB started back in 2016. Could be the deep state. Could, in fact, be both, competing with each other. Not being able to control public opinion is a pretty terrible thing for all of them. In the good old days you could resolve all this shit quietly by having a few conversations with the owners of the "free" press. Nowadays Zuck is less compliant.

<comment><USER60> Typo: fake "investigations" into dossiers.

<comment><USER58> But the dossier was literally fake, and moreover, paid for by the Clinton campaign.

<comment><USER61> Is Steele's dossier what we're talking about? What I'm finding squares with my understanding that almost all of it's 1) pretty solidly corroborated, or 2) isn't confirmed but is plausible as supported by surrounding events, often with a lot of smoke-but-no-as-yet-discovered-fire sorts of public info surrounding it. Where's the info so thoroughly discrediting its claims that it makes sense to call the whole thing "fake"? Again, what I'm seeing (normal-ass sites and Wikipedia, not like The Nation or something, if that's a concern) strongly supports pretty much the polar opposite of that, and even a fairly strong refutation of much of that would still leave so much that labelling the whole thing "fake" would be unfair. What's up?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Does anyone here agrees we would be better off with anarcho-capitalism system?

</comment><comment><USER63> Time they do something about those offshore profits...Of course this is probably just a political move, but again everything on that level is political...

</comment><comment><USER64> Curiously, I can't find it neither in CNN business nor in CNN tech, at least on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER54> The number is big, but simular to when they faced the 5Bn file for antiprivacy in SF also, it's not that big of a deal for Facebook.

In 2019, Facebook's revenue amounted to 70.7 billion US dollars, up from 55.8 billion U.S. dollars in the previous fiscal year.

Thats revenue.

[https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FB/facebook/revenu...](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FB/facebook/revenue)

<comment><USER65> 9B out of 70B revenues is a pretty big deal imho, what about profits ?

<comment><USER66> Net income for 2019 was ~18 milliards (or billions for you Americans) so it's half of that!

<comment><USER67> All English-speaking countries have adopted the short scale.

Since we're not using French, it's 18 billion.

Or you could follow SI recommendations and say 18G$. Pretty sure this crowd would know what you mean.

<comment><USER66> I should stop making jokes on this site :p

<comment><USER67> I dunno, I thought 18G$ was funny... ymmv

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Facebook made $70B in 2019. This fine amounts to about 7 weeks of their time.

During the time it takes for the trial / etc, they'll make enough money to pay the full fine.

That's just revenue, obviously they'll have other expenses... but still, this isn't as large of a hit to them as $9B sounds.

<comment><USER69> > Facebook made $70B in 2019. This fine amounts to about 7 weeks of their > time.

You're talking about revenue, not income. Facebook's _income_ in 2019 was $18.5 billion. It would be a substantial hit.</comment></comment>


London bike courier wins 'gig economy' legal battle - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/fff3a320-d43b-11e6-b06b-680c49b4b4c0 <comment><USER2> People who sue gig economy companies like this ruin it for everyone else. Some people want to have a relationship with their employers where the set their own hours, work one week and not the next, or just work a few hours a week. When gig companies get pushed into being traditional employers through legal action the have to convert to having traditional labor practices. Fixed number of hours a week, setting their employee's schedule etc. If someone doesn't like the arrangement with a gig company, then don't work there! Don't take the job then sue to ruin the arrangement for everyone else.

<comment><USER3> What if the person has no choice but to work in insecure employment? And you have a family to support? In the UK life is pretty bleak for the unskilled or the unlucky. Your job options are either a zero hours contract, or you go gig. In both cases you have zero security, get screwed if you have an accident, and likely earn below subsistence. This is why there are so many food banks in the UK. Gig and zero hours are exploitation of desperate people. I have seen so many deliveroo riders in London having accidents, knowing they won't get sick pay, it's quite frankly disgusting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Respect to the woman bringing the case forwards. I can't imagine how tough life is working for these companies, at minimum wage or below, in dangerous conditions. She must have been working insane hours just to get by, and to be involved in a complex court case on top of it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I get a paywall for this article. Is there a workaround for this site?

<comment><USER3> Think you can get 10 free articles per month if you sign up. FT has always had a paywall, very good newspaper.

<comment><USER2> You can use the 'web' link in the comments to drill into the article via Google search results.</comment></comment></comment>


The Age of Analytics: Competing in a Data-Driven World (full report) [PDF] - <AUTHOR> http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Business%20Functions/McKinsey%20Analytics/Our%20Insights/The%20age%20of%20analytics%20Competing%20in%20a%20data%20driven%20world/MGI-The-Age-of-Analytics-Full-report.ashx <comment><AUTHOR> There's also a 28-page _Executive Summary_ (PDF):

[http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Business%20Function...](http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Business%20Functions/McKinsey%20Analytics/Our%20Insights/The%20age%20of%20analytics%20Competing%20in%20a%20data%20driven%20world/MGI- The-Age-of-Analytics-Executive-summary.ashx)</comment>


Social media is giving us Trypophobia - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/27/social-media-is-giving-us-trypophobia/ <comment><USER2> I honestly can't see the comparison the author is drawing to trypophobia. Seriously, am I missing something? Or does this writer just not really understand trypophobia?

<comment><USER3> The best this article does is imagine the world of Facebook as a wall of a million eyes which would definitely bother a trypophobe. It's actually pretty hilarious in that it takes a bunch of words to talk about how bad social media could be for us but doesn't show how it's GIVING people a fear of things that look like a lotus flower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Trypophobia is a proposed phobia (intense, irrational fear, or anxiety) of irregular patterns or clusters of small holes or bumps." (wikipedia)

<comment><USER5> I read the whole article waiting for them to define this term - which they never did.

<comment><USER6> i gave up reading after the first few paragraphs. The author might have had an insightful point at the end but man.. they could have been much more succint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An awfully sesquipedalian way of saying what could be said much more succinctly. Social media is an echo chamber that surrounds us with information that confirms our biases.

<comment><USER5> > sesquipedalian

This is my new favourite word.

<comment><USER8> One of my favorite irony words. Like monosyllabic or ineffable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What a horrible moan fest of an article.

The trypophobia comparison is nonsense and the author is obviously just trying (and failing) to include a memey word in the hopes of minor virality.

And it's always fun to hear 'reveal the algorithm' as though it's KFC's blend of spices.

Also complaining about the societal impact of bad content, then complaining that good content is sometimes inaccurately caught in a filter is just insane. The filters are either too strict or too soft, they can't be both at the same time (human reviewers follow rules just like algos).</comment>


Show HN: We built a platform to share a hotel room and split the cost - <AUTHOR> https://roostgo.com <comment><AUTHOR> We believe that most things in life are better when shared, including travel. We launched Roost a few weeks ago with the goal of making quality accommodations affordable for everyone. We help travelers, mainly Millenials and Gen Z, find 'travel buddies' and save 50% on their hotel costs.

The problem is that hotels are nice but often too expensive, and hostels are well...hostels. Right now, we are focused on event-based travel like Music Festivals and conventions, places where lots of young, like-minded travelers congregate.

Sharing a hotel room is not a completely new concept. The way people currently find roommates and split hotel costs is outdated, unsafe, and inefficient. Travelers post on sites like Facebook and Reddit. There are no safeguards and finding out basic information is hit or miss. Comparing candidates and figuring out who has to front the bill and worrying about getting repaid are hassles. Roost is unique because we streamline and standardize this whole process for you. We help you safely choose your ideal roommate AND we take care of booking your hotel room. We make both of these things quick, easy, and secure.

Please check it out. We'd love your feedback and are happy to answer any questions. If there is an event or city you think we should add, please request it here: [https://www.roostgo.com/request- destination](https://www.roostgo.com/request-destination)

PS: We're offering $50 off coupons for a limited period of time. Please leave a comment if you'd like one.</comment>