The $4 Million Complaint Call - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/ron-burley/4-million-complaint-call.html <comment><USER2> Reminds me of a support call with Ruth in Idaho years ago. It didn't result in $4M, but it wasn't small potatoes either.

Like Bob, she was new to computers. I spent 10 hours over 2 days walking her thru the basics of using a computer so she could use our insurance company software. She was very thankful.

So thankful she sent me a box containing ... two giant Idaho potatoes, nearly a foot long each.

I said it wasn't small potatoes.

<comment><USER3> I love this story and I don't care if it's true.

<comment><USER2> :-)

It is true. One potato was enough to supply all the mashed tubers for the extended-family Thanksgiving dinner. Bonus: we happened to grow a ginormous beet of comparable size, used at the same huge meal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While I thoroughly enjoy the heartwarming part, I don't think that's why it's good advice from a business perspective.

It's great advice because word of mouth is extremely important for a technical business selling to a small but lucrative market where buyers have alternatives (like hiring decisions). This will have less impact in large consumer sales where advertising matters, or when you have a market cornered.

It will work when you apply for a job or hire someone. You're selling to a small market - the few employers you speak with. They have some alternatives, but if someone they know and trust (Bob, in this story) raves about you from first-hand experience, it matters quite a lot. Likewise if someone tells me how awesome it is to work with a particular person or group, I am much more likely to take that job among competitive alternatives. Treat your employees like crap and all you'll get are crap new employees, etc.

We don't all run businesses in small lucrative markets. But we do all apply to jobs from time to time, where previously helped or pissed off people will make a huge difference.

<comment><USER5> This is dead on. It's a mistake to read this and take away some homey homily about how "every customer is a snowflake!" -- the point is that you should correctly value the passionate customer. Your marketing and outreach and customer service departments should understand the relative values of "bought it, loved it!" and "bought it, so?" Those relative values will vary from product to product/industry to industry

The comment below at this time ('survivorship bias') is also correct, but only if it's interpreted as a touching anecdote rather than as crucial customer- behavior information for his market segment. Understanding the dynamics of how your customers make their purchasing decisions seems like a better lesson to take from this.

(Not the same for every product, either! E.g., my being passionate about Cheerios does nothing for General Mills, really...)

<comment><USER6> ya know, I just don't agree with anyone who posts here and uses the word "customer." Yea, Bob was a customer but he is also a human being. Less we forget this and remember we are working with other people then you don't need to worry about "snowflakes" or whether you're customers are happy or not. Just treat everyone you come in contact with with respect & regardless of how you met (business or otherwise) and this world would just be a much better place.

<comment><USER7> Thank you for using the word human.

I'm all about the "Don't kiss others' booties on the off chance that it will come back to you" because if you're doing it for that reason, you're doing it wrong.

Just treat people well, take everything one step at a time, and look at it from their vantage point. These things in mind and everyone will walk away from the table happy the majority of the time.

If your customer service reps are trained, mature and willing then there's no difference between the experience with them and you.

<comment><USER8> > Just treat people well, take everything one step at a time

You can only take so many steps each day. Forfeit too many steps for some guy who won't pay off and you lose out.

<comment><USER7> Sometimes I wonder what it's like to pretend that you aren't affected by the mannerisms and maturity of all living human beings. To believe that there's a good rationalization to finding a short cutoff of helping people.

This article's true evil is this: He puts helping the guy with a technical problem as a favor, not as a simple kind duty.

We don't want to spend everyday as tech support, that's reasonable. But if people were better educated instead of taken care of, perhaps they wouldn't need as much.

<comment><USER8> The "duty as favor" part of your comment was very insightful. This is a recurring theme in all actions that ultimately cost the person performing them without foreseeable payback. This is, in my experience, displayed by people with shaky moral fundament and questionable values. There's always speak of how e.g. "white lists", the inclusion in which is awarded to persons or companies that act correctly, is detrimental - because they should not be handling incorrectly in the first place, and being normal should not be incentivized.

However, when you're running a business, especially during its infancy, your values need to be questionable and questioned in order for your approach to adapt to the environment. Following questionable values in this case is not only admissible but even required, and you'll need to reinvent yourself quite often. There is no "normal" when you're trying to break the mould.

Definite upvote from me for bringing this up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It all depends on the customer. Bob was apparently a nice guy who just needed a lot of help. I'd have helped him.

Had Bob been a jerk and constantly harassed the support staff with problems that were of his own making, then I'd have gotten rid of him. Probably. There could be circumstances.

Anecdote time: I worked at an SaaS company. 1 customer was constantly flooding our system via an automated system he had written. It caused quite a lot of downtime and breakage. And he was a jerk.

My bosses hated him. He was nothing but a pain in their necks. I loved him. He constantly stressed out our system and showed me the bottlenecks. I used it to fix all kinds of problems years before they became a problem for other customers. Any time he caused a problem, we'd lock his account, fix it, and then unlock him again. Sometimes days later.

Eventually, he caused enough problems that they dumped him.

Fast forward years later, and now our regular customers were using the system as hard as he was. Many of them. Now, if the system broke, we had no spare capacity. Everything was harder to fix.

I will probably never forget his name and the lesson I learned about how useful a 'bad' customer can be.

<comment><USER10> This is interesting, I mean a user (aka customer) of a system pointing out the bottlenecks (or loopholes) of your system. I'll remember this incident of yours. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is effectively gambling with your time. You only have a limited amount of time available each day. The minutes or hours you spend on the phone with a single customer, walking them through things like how to install Windows, are minutes or hours you are not using to build things that could reach all of your customers.

You could luck out, and that time you spent with a single customer could end up like this, with a $4 million check. Or that call might go nowhere, and because you've neglected other parts of your business and your other customers to cater to the extensive needs of a few, you may find your entire venture collapsing.

There are arguments to be made around where this line should be drawn, but helping each and every customer with all of their problems — even when they are unrelated to your actual product or service — is too far in one direction.

EDIT: At the end the article points out that not all calls can be treated this, but that "you never know" which should. But, "some things are really important but there's know way to know which", is not helpful in any useful sense.

<comment><USER12> Interesting take on it, which I disagree with.

This isn't "gambling with your time" this is "making good on your customer's commitment". And your note triggered a really interesting visceral reaction in me.

You can look at life as a series of choices you make and a scoring system by which you evaluate the quality of those choices. Typically a positive scoring system is used so the higher the score the 'better' the decision. It is often the case that people are judged by their scoring system.

Examples of scoring systems might be "how much money did I get out of that decision?" or "How many people are better off based on that decision?" These being centered on the individual describe the 'greedy bastard' archetype and the 'saint' archetype. Most people have a more nuanced system which combines the scores of several systems (is this good for my company? my career? my personal wealth? my celebrity? my family? my community?) which they weight sort of like the ice skating scoring system in the Olympics.

The point of the article was that if you're committed to your company and your company's success, then you decide to do what ever it takes to solve your customer's problems. That is because they took a chance on your product and you want them to be ok with their choice. Its an anecdotal story which illustrates a principle, of customer focused execution.

When you look at successful companies, you will see that they share this principle. And companies that do not, can be disrupted (like the US car industry in the 70's, the airline industry in the 80's, etc etc). There isn't any gambling involved. Anytime you spend extra time with your customer you _win_. That customer will relate that experience, win, they continue to buy your products, win, and they stick with you if you accidentally screw up somehow, total win.

<comment><USER13> > if you're committed to your company and your company's success, then you > decide to do what ever it takes to solve your customer's problems.

> Anytime you spend extra time with your customer you win.

I don't think that anyone actually adopts this position. You would probably not become a kidney donor for your customer, or pay them $10,000 because they confess to you in a support call that they recently became unemployed. You would not build a new software application just for them. You would not even add a feature to the product just for one customer! (At least at the consumer software level.)

It's fine to make exaggerated statements because our society requires exaggerated change. But there is a big difference between saying that Time Warner, AT&T, et. al., need to get better about customer service, vs saying that patio11 or Peldi do.

I guess the fundamental problem I have with your position is that you are preaching a message that lots of people in Fortune 500s should hear (and won't), to a group of people that are probably treating their customers too well already, and are perhaps feeling guilty that they do not do even more for them, and are thus primed to further the error. So in that specific sense, I think this advice is dangerous.

A much better approach would be to advocate a scoring system that takes into account more of the actual benefit of customer service, e.g. realistically estimating the marketing benefits, considering the product feedback benefits, and so on. The value of customer support may vary greatly with the kind of market you are in, for example.

<comment><USER12> Ok, lets look at that for a moment.

This comment: "I don't think that anyone actually adopts this position. You would probably not become a kidney donor for your customer, or pay them $10,000 because they confess to you in a support call that they recently became unemployed. You would not build a new software application just for them. You would not even add a feature to the product just for one customer! (At least at the consumer software level.)" seems a bit like reductio ad asurdum right? Of course you wouldn't donate a kidney. The argument goes you solve their problems _that are blocking their use of your product._ In the anecdote the customer Bob didn't have quite the computer skills they needed, but those skills were essential to being able to run the product platform. So our author helped them develop those skills. Note that this person has already paid for and bought the product so they are already a customer.

 _"I guess the fundamental problem I have with your position is that you are preaching a message that lots of people in Fortune 500s should hear (and won't), to a group of people that are probably treating their customers too well already, and are perhaps feeling guilty that they do not do even more for them, and are thus primed to further the error. So in that specific sense, I think this advice is dangerous."_

I disagree with that too, consider the AirBnB case of the customer who had her apartment trashed. That was a case where a non-fortune 500 company initially took the position of 'do what is best to protect the company', got a ton of criticism for it, and then turned around and focused more on making the customer whole before counting costs on the company. The latter was much more successful, and AirBnB has remained a steadily growing company. And they learned from that experience both how to be more customer focused and how to protect themselves in the future. If you have one customer, or ten, or ten thousand, every time you help one of them through a problem of using your product your company and your product gets better.

There are some great examples of great customer service in many YC companies and amongst folks here. There are also some less than great examples.

Then you finish with this, "... to a group of people that are probably treating their customers too well already, and are perhaps feeling guilty that they do not do even more for them, and are thus primed to further the error." which completely jumps off the rails. Small companies are busy places, and if the customers aren't having problems then generally they aren't taking any resources away. Its good to periodically poll them and ask how they are doing but there is never a risk of deciding to go just go out looking for customer problems to solve, if the company is focused on getting the product out the door.

So I started at Sun on the Monday after they went public. They were still a pretty small company < 2000 employees they were not a fortune 500 company yet, but they were very customer focused. I joined Network Appliance the Monday after their first layoff in their history, they weren't a fortune 500 company yet, but they were customer focused. My point is that being customer focused isn't something you 'add on' when you get big, it is something you 'build in' when you are small and you nurture. I strongly believe it contributes to the success probability.

<comment><USER13> > seems a bit like reductio ad asurdum right?

That's because the grandparent's claim _is absurd_. Grandparent was actually claiming that _you should do anything_ for a customer. I'm not exaggerating its position at all; that's actually what grandparent said. Absurd position yields absurd counterargument.

With AirBnB, you have an example of one small company that needed to hear the customer service message. But one example is not much of an argument when somebody posits a _general trend_.

I can defend the trend easily: a small company depends much more on customer service than a large one does. The first group of customers is make-or-break; once you reach a certain funding level, pleasing every single customer is less of an issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> even if it had not led to the $4M account (which was an unpredictable, lottery-ticket sort of occurrence), the author identified an excellent "selfish" reason to take the call and spend time with bob - they explicitly designed their software as easy to use, so the travails of an actual person in the industry, who was using their software for his day-to-day business and having problems with it, would have been incredibly valuable user feedback.

this is true even if the specific problems bob was having (windows startup options) had superficially nothing to do with their software - if you take a step back, they were all things he needed to do to get their product up and running properly, and were therefore worth taking a look at to see if things could be made easier for the next customer.

<comment><USER8> Who doesn't design their software to be easy to use? This sort of claim is a catch-all.

<comment><USER14> there's often a power versus ease-of-use tradeoff

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Survivorship bias.

Meanwhile, at the other companies where CEO was too sleepy to make good decisions because he was up all night helping customers configure Windows... well, we don't hear those stories, because they folded.

Edited to add: not to denigrate what he did here. He did a nice thing, and it's laudable to be a good person who helps people, whether or not it's the optimal way to spend your time.

<comment><USER16> We have made our first two customers extremely happy with our late hours and endless customer support. We also spent so much time customizing our product for them, we've had to invest 6 man months(so far) trying to get back to a stable product, on one codebase, that works for them AND new customers without direct engineer involvement in each turn up... it has been a mess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's a bit of confirmation bias going on here. I'm a huge advocate of going the extra mile to help out a customer, but I could easily imagine a story where a company wasn't able to focus on its profitable customers because it was so inundated with supporting unqualified users that it didn't have the time and resources to close a $10M sale.

"We would have chosen to go with ACME Technologies, but when we had challenges with the installation their staff was so tied up offering Windows tutorials that we could never get the help we needed to do a proper implementation. It's a shame as their product did appear to have the edge."

<comment><USER18> Not to mention that if you're not providing 'free' tech support (as in, free to the company), 2-hour calls at 2am on a Sunday morning gets expensive fast.

I used to work for a company that worked in sleep medicine, so we had the wonders of a busy night call schedule. Our CEO boasted of our support record (wilfully ignoring actual data) and would demand to know why we didn't do a 2am drive to a customer having difficulties like he did back when he was operating the business out of his garage. It didn't slow him down much when we pointed out that the lab having problems was literally on the other side of the continent.

Support is a bit like healthcare - there is always more demand than there is supply. The trick is how to triage it appropriately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love stories like this. A couple of others that come to mind with a similar theme:

A bank was going to turn down an account for some long-haired young man in jeans who wanted his statements forwarded all over the place. Then some young employee told the middle-aged manager he was a wealthy rock star who needed his bank statements available while touring.

Some young bank teller with an attitude was being an ass to a guy in coveralls or similar, covered in paint and looking kind of like a day laborer. He finally got mad and said he would move his accounts if he did not get treated properly. She continued with the attitude and told him "Go ahead". He was the owner of a construction company and his accounts were worth millions. (Edit: And, yes, he moved them.)

<comment><USER20> Bah, that's a wimpy version. The story I heard was he bought the branch and fired her.

<comment><USER19> Well, that's the way I (mis?)remembered it. But have an upvote. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This makes for a heartwarming magazine article but I don't think it's good advice.

If you don't set boundaries with your clients, they will set them for you. Which means calling the CEO at 2 AM on a Saturday.

The sentiment of always respecting your clients is a good one, but allowing yourself to get roped in on issues that you shouldn't is a surefire path to burnout and losing money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Depends on what kind of clients do you have. If you have individual clients then yeah, it may be a waste of time sometime. But if you have institutional clients (other companies), like this startup had (broadcast stations), then I think it's worth going the extra mile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I paid for college working as an Order Entry operator for a division large office supplies store (you know, the kind of place where you go when you want to buy paper and... staples). We got a memo from the CEO every couple of months. I can quote the most memorable one in it's entirety:

[Grainy photograph of photocopied email with effusive praise from the Purchasing Director at a Midwestern life insurance company, which had just opened a $300,000 a year account with us, about his purchasing experience with $COMPANY.]

Bob is talking about the $22.69 order he made of balloons for his daughter's birthday. Treat every order like Cindy treated that one. Keep up the good work. -- CEO

<comment><USER23> Isn't it likely that is the only order that CEO ever made personally? And he happened to catch Cindy on good day?

My only takeaway from this is if you want orders to be taken from CEOs by pleasent happy people, hire pleasant, happy people to work for you.

Is that what you meant?

<comment><USER22> Sorry, wasn't clear, let me elaborate: prior to the Director of Purchasing at $CUSTOMER deciding to award $COMPANY a $300,000 a year account, Bob Smith (who happens to be DoP at $CUSTOMER when not doting on his daughter) was in a bind with regards to shipping time frames on birthday balloons, and Cindy (a lovely lady who makes $10.50 an hour and whose good days were best described as "the ones ending in Y") overrode the computer's heuristics for shipping methods, shipped $25 of balloons in a $50 envelope, and called the warehouse personally to make sure it ended up on the very last van for delivery in time for the birthday the following day.

Working in seasonal order entry is a very cruddy job, by the way, but I'll give it to $COMPANY: they _genuinely believed and practiced_ all the words that everyone repeats about customer satisfaction.

<comment><USER23> Thank you. Now the world would be a fairer place if 10.50 an hour could be supplemented with x% of 300,000

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> IMO providing quality service and tech support is _the_ most cost effective thing you can do to market your business bar none.

It's shockingly rare to get good proactive customer service nowadays that by giving it a little attention, you can easily give yourself a competitive advantage of your entire industry.

</comment><comment><USER25> Only slightly flammable honest question:

If it was so lucrative to take calls at 2AM, why don't they offer that kind of service after anymore?

<http://support.bsiusa.com/>

:{-

<comment><USER26> My guess is that they've improved their training support, like with the "remote control software" option under Platinum Tech Care Plan. Early on it's cheaper to provide phone support to a small number of customers then it is to set up a comprehensive training program.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> How many companies, even small ones, have that kind of support?

<comment><USER27> Small companies can afford to do this much better than big ones, since they're often doing it in house. "White Glove" customer support is one of the few things you can do to beat the big guys when you're first starting out.

Joel said it best: Remarkable Customer Service, as in service so good that people actually _remark_ about it.

<http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html>

<comment><USER28> The first software company I worked for (approx 15 employees) had a system where the devs each spent one day every two weeks on the support desk (we also had a full time support person). We probably scored 1/12 on the Joel test[1], but we definitely knew our customers pain points - the insight I gained from the delta between my understanding of a product and a customer's understanding of the same product has been invaluable.

[1] <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > There's a moral to the story: Every customer needs to be treated with > respect, and no customer should be left dissatisfied. I'm not saying that > every customer call is crucially important. But some of them certainly > are–and you never know which one might be your "Bob."

I'm sorry to correct this, I really am. To provide apple as an example of how the 'bob' issue scales. It isn't about treating customers with respect, it's about treating the customer better than the competitor. Your competitor may respect the customer, as does you. How do you differentiate? If you're aiming for higher cost you need to go better quality of service.

I was in a meeting the other day and I spoke candidly to the customer about differences between our penetration test reports and most others. At the end of the day it boils down to relationships and the investment in them. The customer might not be aware they're paying for that, but that's a factor in every business. For us, that means we invest more in relationships and doing things our customers want than publishing research at conferences on the vulnerability du jour. Does it make us less known? Yes. Does it make us less loved? No. I find it hard to believe that there are many companies that have used us and thought, "There was an average company", and that's why bob thought the guys in TFA were so good. It wasn't that they were actually good, it was that they exceeded expectations, which is the goal we should all aim for.

</comment><comment><USER30> As a support manager, I was ready to tweet "Always Listen to your support manager" until I saw it was $4MM in revenue...

This is one of the reasons that is hard to adopt the "80/20, walk the difficult customer" approach; I have seen the right manager turn a bad client into a good one too many times. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

</comment><comment><USER31> The only thing worse than a customer that constantly calls and requires attention is one that doesn't call at all and finds your product or service useless. If the customer is bothered enough to spend his/her valuable time on your product, that means you have some value. I would much prefer this over a customer who doesn't trouble themselves to spend any time at all on my product and then mysteriously cancels later.

Yes, customer support has a cost. So does marketing and getting customer feedback as part of an MVP process. While I cringe when customers are demanding, I also realize how valuable it can be. But I make sure they pay their bills as well. And if I have a support contract, I make sure they buy it -- even if they squeeze the value of that to the last drop.

</comment><comment><USER32> Some people advocate firing your troublesome customers.

This is an example of why you just might not want to do that.

<comment><USER33> There are 2 types of troublesome customers, ones that need extra help using your product and ones that want you to bleed (i.e. they want free stuff or competitors that want you to lose).

I _love_ customers that need extra help because I discover all kinds of things that can be improved with my products and I usually gain insight into a whole demographic that I didn't previously understand.

<comment><USER34> > I love customers that need extra help because I discover all kinds of things > that can be improved with my products and I usually gain insight into a > whole demographic that I didn't previously understand.

This is a great attitude, and unfortunately quite rare in the dev community. It's very difficult to see what is cumbersome about a UI if you have been navigating cumbersome UIs your entire life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> For every Bob there is a metric ton of idiots that feel _entitled_ to support and won't give much thought to you answering their calls in 2AM on Sunday morning.

Being extra nice to customers doesn't preclude to using some common sense.

</comment><comment><USER36> Stories like this (as well as the HN comments below which basically agree with my way of thinking) make good interview topics. Best way to find out how someone thinks is to tell them a story and see how they respond. Not ask them a question because then the answer is to obvious. Whether it be a person you are on a date with or a job interview.

While some people are sharp enough to see around the corners and figure out the end game not everybody is.

</comment><comment><USER37> Well, don't bother visiting that on a mobile. The entire page loads, and _then_ you get redirected to a mobile version ... which is broken. Pathetic.

<comment><USER38> Same here; maxthon on android.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This was a nice story and at the end I couldn't wait to get to the comments to hear that this was wrong and customers are in fact sh!t. I wasn't disappointed. Coming from having some customer issues of my own recently it was nice to read a genuine feel good story. Even if it just a fairy tale.

</comment><comment><USER40> Great story.

I always appreciate a company that has top rate customer service.

Amazon.com is the best example I can think of these days.

Comcast is the worst.

</comment><comment><USER41> Hope I'm not a customer of the commentators declaring they don't have time or resources to help all customers who ask. If you don't, you're not holding up your end of the bargain.

</comment><comment><USER42> That is just an awesome story. Goes to show that one of the most important things a new business should provide is unbelievably good customer service.

</comment><comment><USER43> That's not a complaint call, it's a support call.

I used to enjoy this type of article, now the thought process is about the likelihood of it happening to your company.

</comment><comment><USER44> I love that story, thanks for sharing

</comment><comment><USER45> Incredible story. Treat your customers like they're everything, because at the end of the day they are.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is a really great story

</comment><comment><USER47> Nice story however you would only commit to this level of customer service if you had the time, patience and suitable customer base. I don't think many would be spending hours with a customer for a low value product or where little value can be derived.

This situation paid off, however you never know if the directors or companies may have discovered the business through other means.

I know this all sounds cynical but it's a careful balance of sensibility.

</comment><comment><USER8> TLDR: Yet another story about how someone lucked out, and therefore you should follow their flawed approach, because they think the chance to luck out like they did is 100%, whereas in fact it is 0.00001%.

The blog poster's dream world: we have randomly lucked out by having a single annoying customer who we stuck with against better judgement, and the frog turned out to be the prince six months after we cupped its balls on a Sunday at 2 am.

In reality: if you spend your time indulging annoying customers there's a 99.9999999% chance they'll just keep being annoying customers. You will piss off everyone at your company for indulging in the annoying customers' ridiculous requests, and if you're on my support team I will fire you, because you have better things to do, such as supporting people that respect the privacy of people they do not know.

If Bob called me at 2 am, there's a non-zero probability the outcome would be him having a lot of bad words to spread about me. You know what? It's probably worth it, because I don't want good word of mouth spread by people clueless enough to call me at 2 in the morning. My experience here? In over a decade of working freelance, therefore needing a new job every several weeks, I've never had bad word of mouth stop me from getting a job. And I have had to shut down a lot of Bobs, quite often in a fiery fireball of very, very satisfying fury. In retrospect, most Bobs have never amounted to much at all, and I often wonder why I hadn't cut them off much earlier. Think Bob would have stood up in that meeting, and said, "oh yeah, totally go with those guys you plan to, because that one company you're not thinking of using wouldn't speak to me at 2 am"?

</comment><comment><USER48> I wish at&t would read that.

</comment><comment><USER49> On that note — avoid Yellow Cab. They don't give a hoot about either customers nor cab drivers.</comment>


SPHINCS-256 NIF for Erlang - <AUTHOR> https://lab.baconsvin.org/ahf/sphincs <comment><USER2> Anyone have recommendations for learning material in regards to building elixir bindings for existing C code? After coming across this technique, it makes sense why certain libraries meant for Nerves all seem to look the same haha.</comment>


Why are Stumblers so elusive? - <AUTHOR>

I get 200+ uniques a day from StumbleUpon but < 5 will sign up on our website compared to 1 in 5 that find us by other means.<p>Anyone else see/explain this pattern? <comment><USER2> I'd be lying if I said I could explain the pattern, but I could offer my opinion as a Stumbler. When I Stumble, I'm often feeling a little ADD and won't even let your page fully load unless it catches my eye quickly. I'll stumble through 300 or 400 links in a day and maybe even ever see 50 of them. Note that 50/400 = 1/8 and that, if we assume 1 in 5 who actually see it sign up, we get 1/40. And 5/200 = 1/40.

Whether I'm typical enough for this to explain anything is unknown (though, unlikely (I assume most stumblers don't do 300-400 pages in a day, but if they similarly don't even bother with a page unless it captures their attention the same 1/8 ratio may apply)), but I imagine it at least partially explains the issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> btw: The 1 in 5 I mentioned, I meant to say they log more than 5 pageviews, not actually sign up, that's a bit higher.

Thanks for the insight...something I implemented today was a special fast loading landing page when I see the stumbleupon.com/su/8caRbY/xxx.com/ or stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=??? referrer coming in. Hopefully this will help.

In it, I try to explain in SU terms what we do and how we can compliment SU.

So it's 8pm PST right now, the SU heard is starting to stream by, lets see if my landing page helps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Stumbleupon isn't really that good for the actual stumble, but is great in terms of google juice you get as a result (I always pick up new keywords after an article is stumbled). I also noticed people tweeting my articles and posting them on other social bookmarking sites too.</comment>


Jamie Dimon says if you're 'stupid' enough to buy Bitcoin, you'll pay the price - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/13/jamie-dimon-says-people-who-buy-bitcoin-are-stupid.html <comment><USER2> It's funny that he says it's worthless and has no value but in the same interview says its great for people in Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. I believe he just made the perfect use case for it without even knowing it. People want a currency that isn't controlled by the government and isn't tied to the whims of central banks who can inflate it and make it worthless at will. And like Gold, it really is limited... it's right there in the code. It's also not easy to generate, so there is no "just print more". Just my 2c. though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bitcoin seems to have made lots of "stupid" millionaires in the past months. I would like to be that stupid.

<comment><USER4> Better have a way to dump it quick and have already sold put option hedges.

Bitcoin is less risky used as an ephemeral CC and cash replacement.</comment></comment>


The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 <comment><USER2> Since this is Hacker News, I'll point out a way that this applies to programming: code standards and reviews. Time after time throughout my career, I've seen the most picky, idiosyncratic programmers impose their will on the rest of the project by their simple willingness to block commits until their whims are satisfied. Since review etiquette usually precludes a third person overriding another's pending objections to approve, the impasse is usually resolved by acceding to the bikeshedder's preference in the name of progress.

Sometimes this enforcement of the most restrictive standard is a good thing, forcing people to write code that's safer, more testable, more portable, etc. More often IMX, it's just enforcing arbitrary choices and rewarding poor collaborative behavior in the process.

</comment><comment><USER3> 2 years ago, 214 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16454645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16454645)

3 years ago, 55 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12285545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12285545)

4 years ago, 53 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567630)

4 years ago, 20 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10687471](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10687471)

If I remember rightly, there was some interesting discussion of how accurate the claims made here were when it previously appeared on HN.

<comment><USER4> Maybe we should put some of these perennial favourites on a schedule, we could use spaced repetition so they come up for discussion just when we need them.

<comment><USER5> Seems like an incredibly efficient way to farm karma. Identity posts in this category (3+ posts, each a year apart and gaining 50+ upvotes) and post them once the time is right (including the right time of the day — I remember seeing some analysis on this, and my own analytics show that SF/SV is a very large portion of HN traffic)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had a low opinion of Taleb before, but this essay is actually pretty good.

Edit: but it's not new. The idea that concentrated interests > diffuse interests was formulated by Olson in 1965, see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action)

<comment><USER7> Its game theoretic framing of group decision making is seminal.

I've participated in a handful of standards committee type orgs. I so wish I had read Logic of Collection Action earlier. It might have saved me a great deal of heart ache.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The title might suggest a poorly ranty written essay, but I was actually positively surprised and thought it was a very interesting read.

I didn't know the author before, but looked him up and he seems to be a well known author of some very influential literature: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb)

Hope that motivates hackers here to give this blog post a read.

<comment><USER8> I am surprised you have never heard of Taleb before. He is quite controversial, but often deeply original and almost never boring. You should read "Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder" which imho is his best book. "Black Swan" is more well-known, but I was a slightly disappointed by it.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I am surprised you have never heard of Taleb before. He is quite > controversial, but often deeply original and almost never boring.

Yeah, probably fault due to my own ignorance/bubble in which I live. But I like reading controversial but cleverly put together essays. I like it when someone challenges my own views with a well thought through argument, because that is the best way to either learn something new, or at least learn to understand other people better. So either way I feel like I always walk away as a winner whether I agree or disagree in the end. Thanks for the recommendation!

<comment><USER9> > _But I like reading controversial but cleverly put together essays. I like > it when someone challenges my own views with a well thought through > argument,_

Try Chesterton then. A little old but still relevant. E.g. could try Heretics.

<comment><USER10> Or Unpopular Essays by Bertrand Russell.

Or almost anything by Orwell; his crankiness knows no limits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The minority tyranny described in the article reminds me of the hidden power of the owner of any system. For example, a large technology company may own and operate a repository benevolently and graciously, but it always retains the power to make exceptions. So there may be an ecosystem of smaller businesses that grow up on that platform but if any of them interfere with the broader interests of the platform owner, the rules may change (subtly or not), in a unique action to save the owner's interest. This is an attribute of most platforms tools, currencies and systems, and I think is an important if unexamined feature of them.

</comment><comment><USER12> After just reading the linked articles / chapter I was thinking: This is an interesting approach to look at the situation. After reading a couple of posts on this blog I can't shake off the feeling that the objective of his writing is being divisive to sell content.

While his models provide an interesting lens they are applied selectively. Instead of looking at the picture holistically by examining if the mechanism he describes can be found everywhere (e.g. on both sides - and I believe it can), there is one side that has feature x and the other that hasn't.

If you look at the Brexit article in the same blog, he is eager to point out the mistakes of the intellectuals who are against Brexit. But he looses no word about the fallacies that made people actually vote for Brexit.

</comment><comment><USER13> Linux users are a minority, still we don't have a practically usable Linux on mobile phones.

<comment><USER14> Are they intolerant as well? Just being minority doesn't cut it.

<comment><USER15> It's actually the reverse that happened. Windows was the "intolerant" option by the virtue of games almost universally being Windows-only. Only recently, as an increasing number of games is being released cross-platform, there's an uptick in Linux use on personal desktops/laptops.

In the phenomenon described by the article, "minority" is the part that piques interest, but it's the "intolerant" aspect that's doing the real work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would have expected this to be proof-read, as it is a direct excerpt taken from a book, but it is filled with mistakes. Spelling, grammar, word order...

Maybe it is an excerpt of the first manuscript of the book.

Other than that, I find the concept very interesting, but quite intuitive too.

<comment><USER17> Thought the same. It needs a good editor to take things out, his thoughts on lemonade aren't really necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If this were true, then India would be a fully vegetarian country. Except it is not, and it is quite routine to find meat and fish served at public events here.

(FYI, the actual stats are that only 30% of Indians are vegetarian, although the proportion varies quite a bit from state to state. Some states in the north are about 70% vegetarian and other states in the east are nearly 100% non-vegetarian. Your anecdata about how you couldn't find meat at a particular event should weighted appropriately based on these stats.)

<comment><USER4> That doesn't seem to be a pure invalidation. Food that is not vegetarian is not the only food served to non-vegetarians since most people prefer a variety of meat and non-meat options when dining. Add to that the way food is prepared and served as separate dishes and that most vegetarians don't have a hard rule about not eating food that was near meat or slightly in contact with meat. It's easy enough to provide options for everyone when serving dinner or stocking a store so it is not necessary to make special affordances for vegetarians.

<comment><USER18> His argument is not that minorities are also provided options suitable to them when it is economical to do so. He makes a much stronger claim -- that minority preferences will "win".

He supports this by using the anecdotes about how airlines don't serve peanuts and how he had a social encounter where only kosher food was served. And from these two incidents, he jumps to the claim that "Europe will eat halal."

Notice he doesn't make the claim that Europe will increasingly offer halal food as an option. That would be a plausible result of having more Muslims in Europe and would in fact be equivalent to the Indian scenario where people are given a choice of vegetarian as well as meat options. But he says Europe will eat halal! If that were true, we should've seen India eat only vegetarian food given we have way more vegetarians than Europe has Muslims and yet that has not happened. Is this because Indian vegetarians -- of which I am one -- are uniquely tolerant, or is it because he is absurdly overstating his case? I think it's the latter.

<comment><USER19> Neither halal-approved meat nor kosher-approved lemonade fundamentally change the taste and appearance the consumed product. The only costs to providing those options are an extra non-governmental "tax" in how the food is processed, regulated, and approved, and that cost is much less than the cost of not selling to those will only consume kosher/halal, or providing a second set of approved options to them.

There's no such thing as kosher/halal pork, and no such thing as vegetarian- approved filet mignon steak. People who can will still eat their pork and beef, rather than succumbing to the no-pork, no-meat practices of the minorities.

<comment><USER18> I think we're both saying the same things.

I said in my response to abiro that "easily accommodated minority preferences are often accommodated". Which is obviously true.

But that is a very inane and obvious claim, and not at all what NNT is saying. He claims the minority will "win" and that is not a claim he's able to support in any meaningful way. Unless we're redefining the the word "win" to mean something totally new and different, I think he's overstating his case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Someone needs to tell Taleb there is a field called Social Psychology where everything he is raving about is formally studied under the heading of Conformism or Group Dynamics.

For those actually interested in this stuff, beyond Taleb's stand-up routines, look up the work of Kurt Lewin, Stanley Milgram, Solomon Asch, Phil Zambrado or Mel Slater. It's much more thought provoking.

These are very interesting times, because we finally have tons of data on how groups form, grow, break, merge etc And the ongoing merger of social psychology, political science, network theory as seen in the emergence of computational social science depts, doesn't just tell us how things work, but how to change and regulate the behavior and actions of groups. Early days but full of promise.

<comment><USER21> _Someone needs to tell Taleb there is a field called Social Psychology where everything he is raving about is formally studied_

He's a smart guy, so he's no doubt fully aware of all the people you mention. He's also equally aware that he sells more books than all those people combined by probably a couple of order of magnitude.

<comment><USER22> Aware? Sure. But I think the comment is directed at a lack of understanding. That is:

Understanding > Knowledge

Taleb hammer is economists. All his nails are defined by that hammer. Yes, it's one way of trying to manage thoughts about the __complex__ world around us. But it's not complete. It doesn't always work. That hammer has blindspots.

You'd think Taleb would know this as well. But his hammer doesn't change. The least he can do, as every good argument should, is to mention the blindspots and how others might have insights. He leaves that out of the picture.

Given Taleb's theory...ironic, huh?

<comment><USER21> There are two "Nassim Taleb's" out in the world. Taleb the academic and Taleb the pop-culture author and their writing styles are completely different. The former actually tries to make a coherent argument while the latter is basically competing with Gladwell to sell as many books as possible and gives zero fucks that not all his arguments stand up to scrutiny. Perhaps that is Taleb's attempt at being Antifragile.

<comment><USER22> > " gives zero fucks that not all his arguments stand up to scrutiny."

Gives zero fucks his arguments are not arguments at all. What a shame.

Yeah Gladwell. Comes up with a theory, then cherry-picks for studies that support it, but never mentions anything that doesn't.

<comment><USER23> Seems like a pretty wide sweeping generalization to say his arguments are not arguments at all.

What is your specific bone to pick with Taleb?

<comment><USER22> I was commenting on the comment, and rephrasing a bit for accuracy. That is, if you're being selective about the facts you present and you're not concerned about how solid your position is as a result, then you're not making an argument. Your intellectual laziness should not be rewarded.

Ultimately, you're just spewing bullshit, and in many cases just trying to use to reputation as a (cheap) substitute for truth and fact. Again, such intellectual laziness should not be rewarded.

I'm not sure why we're grown so tolerant and accepting of what so often amounts to raw bullshit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It seems to me that the minority can dictate things that are inconsequential to the majority.

Take the halal example: as the author says, the kosher eater won't eat non- halal food, but non-kosher eaters don't mind eating halal. If it wasn't so, I don't think a Kosher minority would be able to impose anything.

Seems like the author is picking and choosing examples.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wrote a post few month ago on how the minority rule could be leveraged to bring privacy to personal payment apps: [https://agost.blog/2019/06/mapping- crypto-minority-rule/](https://agost.blog/2019/06/mapping-crypto-minority- rule/)

</comment><comment><USER19> >> (even airplanes had, absurdly, a smoking section)

Even more absurd, when growing up in Brazil, the smoking section on the airline VASP (Viação Aérea São Paulo S/A) was the entire left side of the plane, i.e., to the left of the central aisle ... just an entertaining aside.

</comment><comment><USER26> > Which explains why it is so hard to find peanuts on airplanes

Malaysia Airlines happily gives out small pouches of salted peanuts to every passenger.

<comment><USER27> He's probably speaking mostly of European airlines.

I flew from London to Florence last year. A passenger had peanut allergies. The flight did not serve any food at all because they can't guarantee any of their food doesn't contain peanuts. Peanut particles easily spread inside airplanes because air is recycled.

<comment><USER28> Particles don't spread easily, the air is filtered aggressively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> @dang article is from 2016</comment>


Patent threat means developers are pulling their apps from the US app stores - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2011/jul/15/app-developers-withdraw-us-patents

<comment><USER2> This is why it won't really matter in the end of Microsoft will push for getting patent fees from Android manufacturers. They will simply start selling Android phones in USA, and to spite them they will use WebOS in USA.

This way, Microsoft won't get _anything_ \- neither money from patents, nor from their own mobile OS.

</comment><comment><USER3> Whilst I'm not pulling, for a couple of months I've decided not to push them there.

This whole cloud of uncertainty needs to go away.</comment>


Neuroscientists Influence People's Moral Judgments by Disrupting Brain Region - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100329152516.htm

<comment><USER2> The more I read about the brain and experiments like this the harder I find to believe in free will.</comment>


Ask HN: Favorite talks on 2012? - <AUTHOR>

Since most of us have some spare time now, could be interested to watch a few. Any recommendations for online-accessible talks?<p>Mine is: JavaScript is the New Punk Rock http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN8Eg1K9xjE <comment><AUTHOR> clickable: JavaScript is the New Punk Rock <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN8Eg1K9xjE></comment>


Google search results getting worse - <AUTHOR> https://productforums.google.com/d/topic/websearch/jdI4HV81Ugk <comment><USER2> It is kind of annoying that pi.hole blocks access to google ads in search results now that there are more ads than organic results. I'm not giving up pi.hole though.</comment>


Findings from the A List Apart Survey, 2008 - <AUTHOR> http://aneventapart.com/alasurvey2008/

<comment><USER2> Eric Meyer talks about the neat CSS used to generate the graphs from tabular data here:

[http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2009/04/07/findings-of- the...](http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2009/04/07/findings-of-the-a-list- apart-survey-2008/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Summary: We're a diverse group of 20-something year old white males.

;-)</comment>


The Author's Dilemma – Why Most Business Books Suck - <AUTHOR> http://infochachkie.com/whybusinessbookssuck/ <comment><USER2> More correctly, this article is about why most business books suck for entrepreneur's looking for clear, actionable advice.

The post does do a good job of summarizing the different types of business books.</comment>


Innovative Android/iPhone app uses camera and flash to check your heart rate - <AUTHOR> http://androidandme.com/2010/08/applications/check-your-pulse-with-instant-heart-rate/ <comment><USER2> Looks like an interesting application, BUT: it wants full network access. Why does this application need network access? We really need to start asking questions like that...

<comment><USER3> _Why does this application need network access?_

By the looks of it, to serve up ads and to send back usage statistics.

<comment><USER4> Yup upon install it says explicitly it uses Flurry analytics to monitor usage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool! I remember building one of these in school, except we used Matlab and an infrared emitting led and an infrared detector.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've not used this app but this is definitely possible and has been covered in the literature. The final link is to a paper presented recently which actually proposes using a mobile phone for this.

Would be interesting to see what other information can be extracted from optical signals. Tricorders can't be that far off now.

[http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-18-10-1076...](http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-18-10-10762)

<http://vassilios-chouliaras.com/pubs/c51.pdf>

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2717852/>

[https://embs.papercept.net/conferences/scripts/abstract.pl?C...](https://embs.papercept.net/conferences/scripts/abstract.pl?ConfID=11&Number=1251)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a neat idea and one I was both surprised and excited to find in the app store when I was looking for such a thing. Sadly it fails in implementation, it just doesn't work terribly well, I almost wonder if they are just faking it and have some heavy bias to report 80 bpm, since that's believe for most.

But in my experience at least, when you compare it to a real heart rate monitor, it is always quite off.

</comment><comment><USER8> Bought it, was skeptical. However, it seems to perform as advertised. Compared with a manual beat check and it was only off by a couple.

</comment><comment><USER9> Seems to be the same tech as Nintendo's Wii Vitality sensor, according to this summary of the patent:

[http://www.siliconera.com/2010/10/07/nintendo-patent- shows-w...](http://www.siliconera.com/2010/10/07/nintendo-patent-shows-wii- vitality-sensor-game-example/)

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be cool if someone with a real heart rate meter could run some tests to see how accurate this is. For what it's worth, I couldn't get it to work. The values fluctuated between 50-150 and refused to settle on any value.

<comment><USER10> Seems to work perfect for me; it reported 68, and I counted 66 manually (by counting the number of beats myself in 10 seconds and multiplying by 6). For reference, I have an iPhone 4 and it utilized the flash.

<comment><USER11> Only counting 10 seconds worth reduces your precision pretty substantially. I generally count for a minimum of 15 seconds, with 30 being typical.

<comment><USER10> In any case, the software also shows a visual indicator of when it detects that your heartbeat, and it graphs your heartbeat over time. It's obvious from feeling your pulse while using it that it's correct, at least in my case with my phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If they're doing this correctly they could also tell you your blood oxygen level. Blood Ox would be much more useful to a larger range of people.

<comment><USER13> how would that work? I can understand how pulse is detected, as you are measuring the differences from second to another and finding a pattern. But how would you know what correlates to a particular level of oxygen in a particular person?

<comment><USER14> From what I've read it simply takes the ratio of absorbance from the systole and diastole and considers that a stable non-linear estimator of %SpO2. The device itself needs to be calibrated to get the non-linear fit in place, but each individual is assumed to be (in gross measure) similar enough to get meaning out of it.

Of course, there's going to be huge variation across finger types, blood volumes, lighting conditions, placement. I wouldn't consider them to be accurate much more than those impedance-based body fat percentage computers. In both cases, huge discrepancies from healthy values are still telling despite small-scale noise.

<comment><USER13> hmm, me thinks huge variations may be bigger than small-scale noise.

thanks.

<comment><USER14> Not to be contrary, but that's what I said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does this really work? I wonder if it works with equal accuracy for people of different color or skin types.</comment>


Raped girl, 17, dies from legal euthanasia in Holland - <AUTHOR> https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9221159/depressed-girl-17-dies-at-euthanasia-clinic-in-holland-after-suffering-unbearable-pain-since-childhood-rape/ <comment><USER2> From a purely psychological perspective, might it have been useful to teach her assassination techniques to balance the situation? Could that have mitigated some of the PTSD? Surely there must be some stats on victims turned contractors. Asking the psycho-analysts and contractors here.</comment>


Atlassian's new terms forbid benchmarking - <AUTHOR> https://community.developer.atlassian.com/t/about-the-new-software-terms-scent-of-intel-re-performance/24041 <comment><USER2> Can we please talk about how terrible BitBucket is?

No syntax highlighting on diffs, horrible defaults (closing development branch when you merge into master???), not being able to make a PR after you make one commit to a branch without refreshing and loosing your message, inconsistent code formatting that is just horribly broken in general, weekly downtime that's not reflected on their status page, having to manually press a button to see updated diffs after updating a branch, no support for signed commits, API support lacking in the weirdest places, random failings in commit webhooks, etc etc.

God I hate it.

<comment><USER3> I've also tried the 10 user licenses for both Jira and Bitbucket servers. I absolutely loathe Jira. I respect its vast featureset, but user experience as a programmer has felt absolutely abysmal. The React redesign only confused me more. To find the Kanban boards, you had to hit the search button! I hope Jira has improved since last time I used it, but I have to say I'd probably prefer just about anything else at this point.

As for Bitbucket.... It works, but I can't think of a whole lot it does that GitLab doesn't do better.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, Jira is horrible. Between the workflows, search filters (create one, apply it to a board, but then you can't edit it?) and everything else, it's really clunky to use.

I've done test runs with other tracking software, and I can't really find anything better. Every tool sucks in its own way. Do you have a recommendation on something that you've found that's better than Jira?

<comment><USER5> I like Phabricator, it doesn't offer as much combustibility as Jira but the options it does have are good for software development workflows. Plus it is open source which is always a bonus

[https://phacility.com/phabricator/](https://phacility.com/phabricator/)

<comment><USER6> Is this link a joke? Reading down the page it gets progressively snarkier, definitely in a way that leads me to think this is satire.

<comment><USER7> The phabricator people used to have extremely bad taste in diffs and version control. See eg [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20756320/how-to- prevent-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20756320/how-to-prevent- phabricator-from-eating-my-commit-history)

(I think you can turn most of the annoyances off. But it leaves a bad impression. They also seem to like PHP.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not allowing people to talk about how you application performs is not compatible with GitLabs value of transparency. I've added a commitment to always allowing people to do this to our stewardship promises [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/commit/da81150e...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/commit/da81150e8e834bf59ad3f2f24bde6417ef32aa31)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for adding that!

This is a bit offtopic: (OP here) the reason why I was even reading Atlassian's terms is to understand what kind of language is used in enterprise self-hosted software because I need one for my own product. I really like GitLab's open core model (as long as the core is still perfectly usable), and I was wondering if I could ask you some questions about it as I'm looking to adopt something very similar? Could I contact you over email about this?

<comment><USER8> For sure. Maybe you want to talk to Jamie, she knows most about this. Her email is jhurewitz at our domain.

Please have a [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ea/#pick-your-brain- meetin...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ea/#pick-your-brain-meetings) (public video) so others can benefit as well.

Please reference the url of this response in your email to her.

<comment><AUTHOR> Brilliant, thanks a lot Sid!

<comment><USER8> You're welcome. Jamie just updated our terms to allow benchmarking explicitly [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/merge_requests/...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/merge_requests/14975/diffs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's a benchmark for you, Atlassian: your software is slow as molasses and getting worse with each redesign.

<comment><USER10> It seems like they're balancing features with speed. In order to get a bunch of extra features, every page load needs to be 200mb of extra crap that 99% of users won't use 99% of their page views.

Oh and hamburger menus are hiding the key features you DO use every page view.

<comment><USER11> Why doesn't JIRA offer a native desktop app? Everyone using it is on PC, Mac or Linux right? And then a cut-down iOS (iPhone and iPad) app covers the rest?

<comment><USER12> A few colleagues use a Visual Studio extension, although that seems to be mostly handy for time-tracking and limited interaction with issues. It's also stuck in a UI that goes back to 2008, so perhaps rather fitting ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is also very similar to the clause that allowed Larry Ellison to allegedly try to have a professor fired for benchmarking Oracle: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886333](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886333)

I was just going through theirs (and other) terms and conditions to understand what kind of legalese goes into these and I was appalled at this. While these terms aren't effective until after 01-Nov-2018, I tried searching online to see if there was any discussion about how stupid this is, and this unanswered forum post came up.

I have no idea how this is still considered acceptable.

<comment><USER13> It's not, the Consumer Review Fairness Act prohibits this practice.

<comment><USER14> That's the first I've heard of the CRFA - thanks for mentioning it.

I was curious whether or not the CRFA could be overridden by contract terms, but the FTC claims quite the contrary: [https://www.ftc.gov/tips- advice/business-center/guidance/con...](https://www.ftc.gov/tips- advice/business-center/guidance/consumer-review-fairness-act-what-businesses- need-know)

<comment><USER15> A contract provision that is unlawful can't be enforced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've submitted many benchmarks over the years for new jira and confluence UI "upgrades". I've received responses to the tune of, "our developers don't see that behavior issue on Windows" even though the test systems I used were Linux based and clearly stated as such. Speaking frankly, the new jira ui is fucking shit and makes my job slower due to the fact that pertinent information is obscured and only clearly displayed when I click "use old interface". This means that I must first wait for the whole page to render, click a link, and wait for the entire page to redirect to the old UI and render again. Multiply this for every single ticket I have to open and you can see the minutes tick off the clock.

<comment><USER17> Where is the "old interface" link?

<comment><USER16> For me, it's in the top right corner of every issue.

<comment><USER17> Huh, I haven't seen a link like that in months. Unless... is it inside that "..." menu?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I feel like there is a subtle pattern of attitudes and behavior that I pick up on from Atlassian. It's almost as though they don't get that they need to keep working to innovate and please their customers to stay relevant. Look at what happened to Hipchat, and what I'd argue will eventually happen to JIRA.

<comment><USER19> >eventually

This happened like 2 years ago at least, every update to Jira makes it slower and less usable, I have given them this feedback many times, and I suspect I am not alone, and they simply do not care. Until they see subscriptions drop, they will do nothing, they are like Rational Software or CA when they hit the big time and started buying up all their competition.

<comment><USER20> Which CA are you referring to here?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Jira + Confluence Clouds Performance Problems are the Number One reason for our company to actively seek for ways to get the Atlassian needle out of our arms. It's really tough once you've invested the time to get Jira just the way you org works, but the Issues are just piling up and the complaints grow louder each month.

<comment><USER22> What sorts of issues? For me, performance _is_ the issue, I've never found JIRA buggy or inadequate, and I'm generally able to find a given ticket and interact with it in the expected way.

<comment><USER23> > I've never found JIRA buggy

I'm not sure how you can have used the UI and hold this option. I feel like I've been greeted by the same basic bugs time and time again, like clicking on an issue ans it not opening until the second click, or opening the previously viewed issue.

<comment><USER9> It loses drags too. Just awful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have used JIRA for 5 years and came to it begrudgingly when the project was complex enough. It handled the complexity, details and customizations of the project well enough though.

It's funny reporting benchmarking is being banned. The guise of web apps being too complex to be reasonably communicated is laughable.

There is a 15 year old bug open to reduce the flood of emails Jira can create from updates. JRASERVER-1369 [1] could be it's own community.

With minimal java/jvm tuning experience, it seems likely the oncloud product is aggressively cached and resource throttled. Once a page or filter has loaded, it generally loads quicker.

The speed of an on premise install of JIRA compared to the cloud can be staggeringly faster.

One solution might be for some clever person to first crawl an entire Jira or Confluence site, and then continually ping all the pages to keep the system performing better.

[1] [https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-1369](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-1369)

</comment><comment><USER25> [redacted by author request]

<comment><USER26> Atlassian employee here. JIRA's backend is not Node based. It's mostly Java. We do use Node for other products, including Trello, and it's more than fast enough.

<comment><USER27> I think of Atlassian as the Trump of software.

It's slow, annoying UX, and very inconsistent.

But for some reason businesses like it, it is what it is and as an employee I have little choice so I have to bear with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's obvious they know they have performance problems. They think they can keep it secret by pulling this kind of crap.

<comment><USER29> It's no secret. We're trying our best to drag our 15+ year old codebases into the modern age. We're hiring if you want to help! [https://www.atlassian.com/company/careers](https://www.atlassian.com/company/careers)

<comment><USER30> Then what's the deal with these terms?

I would have serious reservations about working for a company that bans publishing benchmarks of its software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> After 4 years of dicking around with Jira/Confluence, we finally got rid of them last month. Haven't looked back since.

<comment><USER32> What did you replace it with?

<comment><USER33> Not parent, but we replaced Atlassian with Github and Pivotal

<comment><USER34> Tracker is one of our best ambassadors, I think.

I miss it sorely when working with Github Issues.

<comment><USER33> Tracker?

<comment><USER35> Pivotal's project management software

[https://www.pivotaltracker.com/](https://www.pivotaltracker.com/)

<comment><USER33> Oh wow. So yeah, I guess we call it pivotal so much at work that I didn't even realize it was actually called Pivotal Tracker.

It's a great product. The speed and ease of use is amazing.

<comment><USER34> Looking at the Tracker website, it's interesting that we play down the connection back to Pivotal.

Which I guess makes sense, Pivotal as a whole is aiming more towards capital-E Enterprise.

Our headline products, for reference: [https://pivotal.io/products](https://pivotal.io/products)

<comment><USER33> I will be honest, I was completely unaware of your other products, not that I would be your target audience. That being said, thank you for not pushing your other products on tracker users. That was something that always annoyed me with Atlassian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I question companies prohibiting basic human rights. Free speech is a basic human right.

Link to UN human rights [https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human- rights/](https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/)

Right number 19. Article 19. "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

So its a basic human right to be able to express how fast or slow Atlassians products are.

Further First Amendment to United states constitution

Amendment I

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." [https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment](https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment)

</comment><comment><USER37> Wow, I last used Jira a long time back when it was pretty much new and loved it and I loved the values Atlassian had. It was far better than anything I'd come across before,

Kinda shocked to see all the negative posts on here. How can a product fall so much?

<comment><USER38> To be honest, most companies using Jira never actually configure it to match their requirements. That's not really their fault, Jira is a beast and quite a lot of time needs to be put into getting it just right.

Jira's always been hard to get going with, and it's still way better than pretty much everything else (once configured), but they are _really_ bad at actually making it easy to use.

<comment><USER39> The (extremely large) company I work for has a product management team that customizes Jira to match what it wants which does not work at all for anyone else. Upper management of course doesn't understand anything about software development and just wants to see meaningless burndown charts. I am sure its possible to set up Jira is a useful fashion but damned if I have ever seen it done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Are there any examples of companies taking action when these kinds of restrictions are ignored?

I would have thought terms like these would prompt people to release benchmarks for the sole purpose of generating bad PR if the company actually took action.

</comment><comment><USER41> Two companies, everything else being same; One with JIRA, the other GitHub Issues wrapped with Waffle, the choice would be a very simple one.

Oh and [https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion/status/98160924222131814...](https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion/status/981609242221318145?s=19)

</comment><comment><USER42> Not suprising considering how terrible their products are. You don't need to benchmark them to know they're slow.

<comment><USER11> I'd also add that Atlassian are a well-known user of immigrant labour under an Australian visa scheme similar to the H1-B. They are hugely pro-immigration publicly also. (Despite this, their founder just bought a huge mansion in a very expensive part of Sydney completely protected from population growth due to restrictive bylaws).

I'd propose that they are hiring cheap workers just to keep the ship afloat, rather than to radically improve it.

<comment><USER29> I'd propose that you're wrong - with relocation and visa costs it's significantly more expensive to bring in someone from overseas. Not to mention it's frequently 3-4 months after interviewing before they can start, as opposed to 3-4 weeks for a local hire. We hire as many local people as we can, the interview process isn't any different.

The other aspect of the founders believing in the importance of being able to hire talent from overseas is actually at the higher levels - the local talent pool of managers with 10+ years experience running large SaaS orgs is pretty small, given the industry here is fledgling. We've developed our own leaders internally, but there's no substitute for bringing in an external hire to develop the next generation of leaders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Recently there was some discussion about how restriction like these are void in the EU, see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18064772](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18064772)

I always wondered how or if it is possible to place arbitrary restriction on software use.

Also I wonder if a clause like this would be binding for tech journalists who run a benchmark because essentially they don't really agree to the license when they are testing software.

</comment><comment><USER44> > Cloud terms Para 3.3

> Except as otherwise expressly permitted in these Terms, you will not [...] > (c) use the Cloud Products for the benefit of any third party;

What does that even mean ? "benefit" is such loose language. Can I not use JIRA to build anything that 'benefit's my customers? Can someone with experience working on such terms throw some light on this ?

</comment><comment><USER45> This is hilarious.

At one point I was writing test automation against their JIRA Cloud offering, because they didn't provide an analog to their authentication API in the JIRA on-prem version.

To get the tests to pass, I had to create a jiraRetryFixture and when that didn't work I wrote a preflight check which would just skip those tests if it wasn't available.

</comment><comment><USER46> Slow/frustrating UIs can be one of the biggest barriers to productivity.

At Monolist ([https://monolist.co](https://monolist.co)), we're building a streamlined task experience that integrates deeply with Jira (and Confluence) Cloud specifically so you don't have to deal with these painful UIs.

</comment><comment><USER47> What's a decent alternative to Jira for support/workflow (non-software)?

</comment><comment><USER48> Is Atlassian still a thing? Why?

<comment><USER49> No serious alternative to jira (if you have one, I would _love_ to know about it).

Hard to find a decent alternative to confluence for an internal wiki, particularly one with a good ACL system. We need certain customer details locked to just the people servicing those accounts.

<comment><USER50> Youtrack

<comment><USER49> thank you

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The HN title is misleading: the terms do not forbid benchmarking, just public dissemination of the benchmarks. This is a standard software EULA clause.

One reason we decided to keep this clause in the Caddy EULA (which I should clarify here only applies to official binaries, not the open source, Apache- built binaries you can make yourself) is because we found out that very few people are expert enough to benchmark correctly. I've read a dozen Caddy benchmarks, for example, that turned out to be based on false assumptions or had hidden factors or were simply not reproducible (and not just by me).

Benchmarking requires expertise that, it turns out, very few people have. I don't think I even have enough skills to do it correctly and meaningfully.

Also, web servers are complex enough (in terms of both configuration and all the layers involved with networking stacks) that one correct benchmark is not generally useful to the next person.

Spreading wrong performance information can hurt a business. It's not that there's anything to hide or any desire to take away your freedom -- and I would normally be one to assume the worst from any large company -- it's just business: they don't want the risk of bad PR based on a possibly false premise, especially when that information tends to only create negative hype rather than actually being useful.

Anyway, this link doesn't seem like news. Just usual HN hype.

<comment><USER52> > Benchmarking requires expertise that, it turns out, very few people have. I > don't think I even have enough skills to do it correctly and meaningfully.

Very important and often overlooked point.

But I wonder, why not forbid public dissemination of _inaccurate, non- reproducible_ benchmarks?

> Spreading wrong performance information can hurt a business.

Wouldn't that be libel? (IANAL)

<comment><USER42> Expertise so rare it seems Atlassian themselves don't have it.</comment></comment></comment>


Who is developing or playing around with AIR? - <AUTHOR>

With the recent AIR SDK 1.0 launch, I am curious to who is playing around with it. Any body building apps? porting Applications? For fun? Please post links/your work, If you would like to share. <comment><USER2> I think it looks interesting and I will be giving it a trial starting sometime next week.

One potential indicator for future acceptance of this technology is the number of books scheduled for release during 2008 featuring Adobe Air - just take a look at the Amazon list. While certainly not a foolproof indicator it does show just how many authors and publishers are prepared to bet something on future take-up.

</comment><comment><USER3> Didn't we just spend the last N+1 years desperately trying to avoid client- side downloads and installs? Seriously though, maybe in a few years, if and when the runtime comes pre-installed in most OSs/browsers (or something similar).

</comment><comment><USER4> Been playing around with the new AIR / EXT app, "Simple Tasks v2"

<http://extjs.com/blog/2008/02/24/tasks2/>

pretty sexy stuff!

</comment><comment><USER5> Waiting for Linux release to play around with it...

<comment><USER6> There is a engineering release of the Linux Air release! A friend forwarded me the limited release announcement. But, I'm not sure how'd you get a copy?

<http://timony.com/mickzblog/2008/02/16/adobe-air-for-linux/>

"Q: Is this a public announcement? A: No. This announcement is intended only for Adobe prerelease members.

Q: What exactly are you announcing? A: We have posted the first engineering builds of the Adobe AIR runtime installer and SDK for Linux. In addition, we have posted several applications. You should consider these builds only alpha quality.

Q: Is the AIR on Linux feature complete? A: No, please see the release notes for what's currently not implemented. For example, key features such as printing, hardware acceleration, badge installation, keyboard accelerators and screen API's are not yet completed. For a complete list, please see the release notes ... "

<comment><USER7> [http://www.jamesward.org/wordpress/2008/02/20/adobe-air- on-l...](http://www.jamesward.org/wordpress/2008/02/20/adobe-air-on-linux-pre- beta-testers-needed/)

<comment><USER6> Cool, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I will strongly recommended you to take a look at jnext (<http://www.jnext.org>) free, open source and cross platform - and most of all it is powered by the community and none of the giants

</comment><comment><USER9> Waiting for Silverlight. Hoping to frontend a new product with it. WPF is my fallback.

</comment><comment><USER10> We're using AIR for a fairly large project.</comment>


Building an RC Plane from a Wall Heater - <AUTHOR> http://www.avgeekery.com/eat-your-heart-out-macgyver-he-built-a-rc-plane-from-a-broken-wall-heater/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me of article I saw years ago, making spoof of Popular Mechanics of 1960's:

Build an Intergalactic Radio Telescope In Your Backyard Using your Son's Tricycle, Save Billions!

TLDR: No, he didn't build an RC plane from a wall heater.

Longer version: He used a salvaged centri fan and some of the wire from an old wall heater. The rest is exactly what one would expect. Commercially purchased parts including foam panels, RC Tx/Rx and batteries, and a manufactured foam wing, along with various parts from a couple boxes of old RC parts in the basement and some tape and glue.

I wanted to see a flying space heater, by gosh!</comment>


Google reveals global human trafficking helpline - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/google-launches-global-human-trafficking-helpline-and-data-network/

<comment><AUTHOR> So Google doesn't only care about providing faster Internet to Americans or how many ads you click....

However,I bet this will be far less popular than the Google Fiber news.</comment>


A computer science professor's never-ending H-1B fight - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9110379 <comment><USER3> I recently read an article about visas for foreign nurses on businessweek. President Obama is quoted: " "The notion that we would have to import nurses makes absolutely no sense," Obama said at a health-care forum in March. "There are a lot of people [in the U.S.] who would love to be in that helping profession, and yet we just aren't providing the resources to get them trained—that's something we've got to fix." "

(the link is [http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jun2009/...](http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jun2009/db20090619_970033.htm))

It's interesting that our president, who supports an increase in H1Bs for the high tech industry, would take this position where it comes to nursing.

It's made me very cynical. Ultimately, this all comes down to power.

Nurses have a shared experience (a specific education requirement), as well as a specific licensing procedure that can be used as a gateway. They also don't compete with each other the way programmers do (yes, programmers share knowledge, but a nurse a kaiser clearly isn't competing with a nurse at beth israel the way a programmer at google competes with one at microsoft).

Nurses also have a very, very powerful union, and society pretty much backs them up, as the profession is held in high esteem. If a hospital tried to bring in foreign nurses, engage in "knowledge transfer", and then fire the older americans with higher salaries, the union would vote to strike, the hospital would cease to operate, the public would back the nurses, and management would completely capitulate.

I don't even know if Obama sees the potential inconsistency. That's what power does. People often don't see themselves as "capitulating" to power. Instead, they respect power, and negotiate accordingly.

I used to be much more in favor of "free markets". I still am in theory - <USER2> I say is "I'm all in favor of free markets - if you find one, please let me know, I'd love to participate". But at this point in my live, I've concluded that working in a "free market" is like wandering around the wild west without a gun. Sure, it'd be nice if we all put down our arms, but if you're the only one who does this, you're just a chump. To me, that's what free markets are - a chump's game.

I applaud Prof Matloff for fighting this. People who have read my posts probably know that I'm in favor of a small number of visas for very talented people (in any field), but I think we're unintentionally eradicating our home- grown STEM (science technology engineering mathematics) workforce. The last line is especially chilling - parents in Silicon Valley know what's going on, and they no longer encourage their children to pursue the field. I actually think that this, in the long run, will severely hurt the US economy, and we're doing it to ourselves. Yes, allow talented workers to come here. No, don't issue so many visas that young Americans are rightly deterred from entering the field.

<comment><USER4> I was with you until the last two paragraphs. After that point, you got it all backwards. Let's see:

 _that's what free markets are - a chump's game_

You're blaming the wrong thing. I believe you mean to say, "pretending that the markets we have now are free is a chump's game." Is this the sort of hypothetical story that you have in mind:

"Joe the programmer has gotten laid off from three companies that ended up going out of business while watching insurance giants and bankers get bailed out by the government, seeing people in licensed professions (lawyers, doctors, nurses) remain secure in their lucrative jobs, and observing that government employees never get fired, have great benefits, high pay, and low levels of work and stress."

If so, you can make a case that Joe is a chump. You could argue that he should be using force to get a better deal at the expense of others rather than naïvely working to increase total wealth. But in any case, the problem has to do with the breakdown of the rule of law, disregard for property rights, and neglecting to observe the hidden costs. Free markets have nothing to do with this.

 _Yes, allow talented workers to come here. No, don't issue so many visas that young Americans are rightly deterred from entering the field._

The American economy has grown to its present level because smart, hardworking people built companies in America -- not because people who were Americans at the time of their birth built companies. How would America be any better if Sergey Brin's father had been one of those marginal cases you had decided to keep out? It's easy to forget that if we keep out X Indian individuals, some Y of those individuals might go on to build the next Cisco -- and if they're excluded from America, that company might be built in India. The other governments of the world would love it if we further closed our borders (to any degree).

<comment><USER3> <the problem has to do with the breakdown of the rule of law, disregard for property rights, and neglecting to observe the hidden costs. Free markets have nothing to do with this.>

I agree, 100%. I phrased that badly. The chump's game is blithely accepting the markets we have as "free".

<it's easy to forget that if we keep out X Indian individuals, some Y of those individuals might go on to build the next Cisco -- and if they're excluded from America, that company might be built in India.>

That's true. But the US takes 1.2 million immigrants a year. I consider that to be a high number, but that's really just a matter of opinion. But we (almost) all have our limits. Should we increase it to 2.4 million so we don't lose the marginal cases? Even if we do, there will _still_ be marginal cases. So then should we increase it to 4.8 million/year? I'm sure we could find takers. Eventually, we have to accept that as a practical matter, some of the people who want to come here aren't going to get to - and some of them would have been truly excellent Americans.

<The other governments of the world would love it if we further closed our borders (to any degree).>

On this one, I completely disagree. Seven of the top 10 users of the H1B visa are actually Indian outsourcing firms. They use the visa to cycle a worker through the US to learn the job, then bring that worker back home to outsource the job. India actually gets quite angry with the US when we talk about limiting H1B visas.

<comment><USER3> Lastly, a big problem I have with the current visa situation is that it creates a market distortion by bringing in hundreds of thousands or engineers/programmers while leaving other fields completely protected. Imagine if the united states banned all foreign grown lemons but allowed in all foreign grown avocados. Well, you could say that by removing all tarrifs from avocados, we've increased free trade. But you can bet that any farm outside the US hoping to access our market that can shift production to avocados will do so, and any farm in the us that can shift to lemons will do so as well.

This is what we've done to engineering. If you make it easy to come to the US as a programmer, but not as a lawyer, you distort the market. You should absolutely expect this to deter americans from engineering and encourage them to go into law.

<comment><USER4> I agree with that. Anywhere the government coerces the market you're going to get distortions. Is playing favorites the worst type of market distortion? That's hard to judge, but it is probably the most egregious.

I don't think that immigration or foreign competition is the primary driver behind the decline in American engineering (if there is such a thing) though. The other mistakes we've made completely dwarf any effect this would have had:

Our fiscal policy over the past few decades has made debt our primary export. Wall Street firms can make more money just dealing in US Treasury debt than the profits of all the successful companies in Silicon Valley combined.

Steadily increasing regulation (SOX, whatever nonsense comes out of the current situation, etc.), litigiousness (often spurred by statue law: sexual harassment claims, hostile work environment, discrimination, etc.), and complicated tax code has made lawyers and CPAs more in demand, while licensing keeps their numbers down.

The increasing nationalization of health care has misdirected a shocking amount of resources into this industry.

All in all, the major reasons why a smart, rational young person, who is primarily motivated to make a buck, should go into law, medicine, banking, (or politics!) have almost nothing to do with immigration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He presents a lot of good ideas, but I'm weary of singling out H1B visa holders. It seems the US immigration policy is counterintuitive to just about every other countries' visa policy. It is hopelessly complex and random. It rewards family connection over any valuable skill. I could sponsor a distant cousin and he would get in before a highly talented programmer who doesn't have any famillial connections in the US.

And as a programmer I feel like my best years are starting to be behind me. I've still got a fresh mind, but when I leave the office my wrists are killing me. I've just entered my 30s and I'm already telling my wife I don't know how long I'll be able to do the job I love. I won't discourage my son form seeking the same profession but I don't know if I'll have the same passion to encourage him in this profession. I sometimes wonder if programming will evolve to fit the human body or if the body can cope with the intricate work of banging at a keyboard constantly.

<comment><USER6> > He presents a lot of good ideas, but I'm weary of singling out H1B visa > holders. It seems the US immigration policy is counterintuitive to just > about every other countries' visa policy. It is hopelessly complex and > random. It rewards family connection over any valuable skill.

That paragraph is much too weak.

H1Bs are a small fraction of US legal immigration. Illegal immigration swamps legal immigration.

We could increase H1B by 10x and easily have less total immigration.

The advocates for increased H1B are being played.

We've had the bait and switch game on immigration before. We gave amnesty supposedly in return for effective enforcement. We didn't get enforcement.

As to the whole "jobs Americans won't do", I've done farm labor. Also, when one of the meat packing plants lost many of its "undocumented" workers, folks who actually had a legal right to work in this country applied.

<comment><USER7> Just to boost your "Americans doing jobs Americans won't do" anecdote with a bigger one (at least in these hard times):

[http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=118219&pr...](http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=118219&provider=top&catid=188)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article is from last year. The Durbin/Grassley bill he talks about came and went, but it's back this year. Here's a pretty decent discussion:

<http://seeker.dice.com/olc/message.jspa?messageID=128406></comment>