I've been a self-employed independent creator for 10 years - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kadavy/ive-been-a-self-employed-independent-creator-for-10-years-i-don-t-recommend-it-a2ecc92d81a9 <comment><USER2> I am in my 11th year as a fulltime freelancer. It is nice ride, interestingly I haven't had problem with things all wannabe freelancers expecting: all of my invoices get paid (with 99,9% of them on time), I was always able to cover my monthly costs with money coming from last month billing and I always found good clients.

During last decade I was able to do all the stereotypical things people imagine to do when they don't have to go to the office: waking late, spending year wasting time in SE Asia, traveling around the world, working from coffee shops, coworking places and even in my bed, I also started a startup (or five), had numerous side projects and whatnot.

So far so good, that digital nomad-remote freelancing thingy actually exists and it is actually quite easy to get into this lifestyle. The dark side of freelancing is that you usually get into quite boring and not that interesting kind of work: writing CRUD apps, maintaining old software and basically doing stuff that don't require a tons of deep expertise and continuous effort of highly skilled team of people.

For some people it doesn't matter, but if you ever want to work on some high tech stuff be worry, it is very hard to get back into game after years of freelancing, you might be destined to sling some basic apps for the rest of your life (which is actually what majority of devs do in their jobs anyway).

<comment><USER3> I've had a very similar experience. While I do agree that you end up with a lot of boring work, it really isn't tough to keep skills sharp either. It's probably worth setting time a specific amount of time for this very purpose. Establishing a 20% time concept is much easier when you are in control of your own hours.

I've found that as a freelancer while I haven't been working on cutting edge tech as much my social, project management, and business skills have all improved by leaps and bounds. This may be even more important than being familiar with the cutting edge js frameworks or slinging around some deep neural network models.

<comment><USER2> Well it depends on what you consider being interesting: finding work that let you use latest javascript framework or architecting micro services? Easy. Finding work that will let you spend years and years perfecting the way how to make query engine of specialised embedded database run faster? (my old job) Less likely.

It depends on your ambitions, lot of people would be happy to work on regular apps for rest of their professional life, some not. People just have to think about it as coming back into that "hardcore" sector is not easy after years of writing crud apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >"I just want to read about things that interest me, have conversations, use it all to inform my understanding of the world, and share what I've learned."

yep, this sums up my wants as well. the thing is, people don't pay for that unless you're already established or the thing you want to learn and talk about is hot. and hot things cool, so you'll need to find new interests that people find hot to learn about. etc.

but there's a huge upshot to self employment as i see it that the author didn't mention: you don't have to hide.

you don't have to hide your time from your bosses.

you don't have to hide your interviewing with other places.

you don't have to hide your sense of humor to avoid offending coworkers.

you don't have to hide your wisdom or knowledge for fear of messing up the office political situation.

you don't have to hide your true values anymore; you don't have to pretend to care about the company.

sure, you lose some stability, but who cares. stability is too often another word for stagnation.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like you've only worked for bad managers and companies, which admittedly isn't too hard to do in one's career.

There are employers that give the best of both worlds.

<comment><USER4> >There are employers that give the best of both worlds.

sure, i believe it. i may have even worked for one at some point.

but (straying from the original discussion substantially) that just trips other red flags for me, like selling your labor for a pittance while the company gets a disproportionate share of the value from your time spent with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting read but the title is unnecessarily clickbaity since the conclusion is, "If you are looking for security or reassurance, I do not recommend this line of work" \- which everybody knew already. In fact, contrary to the title, he does recommend it so long as you aren't looking for security and reassurance.

<comment><USER7> Oh boy, HN.

<comment><USER6> I enjoyed the post, but think I would've gotten more out of it if the title was more congruent with the content. I was expecting a lament or postmortem (which hooked me in), but the story was more like an exultation. Congrats on your success, I hope your upcoming book will help more people fruitfully pursue their dreams.

<comment><USER7> Glad to hear you enjoyed it. I guess I figured admitting I was scared on a regular basis, and wondering whether doing this might kill me would be considered somewhat a lament.

But of course I think I'm doing the right thing – after all, I've put everything I have into it. If I felt like I had a choice, I'd probably do something differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've never understood the irrational desire to quit your job.

Jobs are wonderful, magical things and I've been thankful to have every single one of them, even the ones that sucked, like that time I worked 12 hour shifts in a warehouse doing product assembly. Or when I had to deal with father as an electrical apprentice. Or when I was on the shit list in the military.

I guess it's because every job I've had, I've subjected to an intense inquiry on exactly what I'm getting out of the job. I'm very intentional about my work. For the warehouse job, I was saving up for a move. I knew exactly what I was doing and why.

When I see people with these crazy flights of fancy throwing away perfectly good opportunities to work and build incrementally to their dream lives, it makes me a little sad.

The very irrationality of his thought processes caused him to utterly fail to learn how to market his services, making him piss away a decade of what could have been fortunate prosperity.

Sure, he never starved. There was always some money coming in the pike. But he purposefully did not shoot for any more.

It's almost like these people hate money for some reason. He finally comes to his big life realization and then sees his path.

And when I read his big life realization, I was immensely struck by the fact that I want exactly what he wants. A nice, comfy lifestyle where I can have conversations, share what I know, and learn.

My job is the perfect tool to allow me to do that. I get all my money from _one place_. And I can have conversations, share what I know, and learn _at work_.

<comment><USER9> _> A nice, comfy lifestyle where I can have conversations, share what I know, and learn._

Yes, and you, unlike the author of this piece, appear to grasp the basic fact that _nobody will pay you for this_. So you have to make a living some other way, and use the leisure you earn to do this nice thing that you want to do.

<comment><USER10> Aren't there a whole range of media jobs that do just this, from blogger, to journalists, youtube hosts, or documentary makers, etc. It may be very difficult/risky to get to an independent financially sustaining position doing this, but it's not an impossible aspiration. I do think the author is downplaying the difficulty to even himself though.

<comment><USER9> The problem with all media jobs like this is that you are beholden to the media. You aren't self-employed in the sense the author of the piece is using that term; you don't have sole control over what you say, what you investigate, etc.

<comment><USER10> Even if you're self employed, you're beholden to your customers. With Patreon, you're beholden to your collective patrons. But maybe that was your original point that I misunderstood.

Still, I'd say in many of those jobs you have the self-determination to choose any topic. You just can't guarantee that there won't be any blowback of you pick some topic of controversy.

<comment><USER9> _> maybe that was your original point that I misunderstood._

Sort of. If you're a journalist working for a media company, from the viewpoint of the media company, the value you're producing isn't your content, except indirectly. The direct value you produce is in attracting eyeballs, and hence ad revenue. So if your goal is to produce value with your content and get paid for that, you're not going to achieve that goal working for a media company, except as a lucky side effect.

If you're self-employed and being supported by your readers (say, by Patreon contributions), then you are producing value with your content, directly. That was my understanding of the goal of the author of the article.

 _> I'd say in many of those jobs you have the self-determination to choose any topic. You just can't guarantee that there won't be any blowback of you pick some topic of controversy._

You can't guarantee no blowback if you pick a controversial topic no matter how you are getting paid. The difference is in how that plays out. If you work for a media company, your future depends on the people running the media company and whether they will support you. If you work for yourself, your future depends on your readers and whether they will support you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> His thesis statement is entirely misleading. He absolutely recommends it. The entire article reiterates several times how happy he was and continues to be that he passed up more secure opportunities again and again over the years.

Not sure why the clickbaity title was necessary.

<comment><USER7> How is it that you think I recommend it? It's a pretty genuine warning that it's a hard way to make a living.

<comment><USER12> I expected it to be about how you regret your choice and you would recommend this path to almost no one. This seemed to be what other readers expected too. But, instead, you talked about how happy you were with the choice. Also, you hedged your anti-recommendation quite a bit:

> "If you are looking for security or reassurance, I do not recommend this > line of work."

I don't think people proudly believe they want "reassurance", in many cases.

> "However, if you are burning with curiosity — if your heart and intuition > lead you to do things that don't make sense—well, then you don't really have > a choice in the matter, do you?"

I think people would much rather think of themselves as "burning with curiosity".

(Isn't curiosity cooler than reassurance/security? At least in the HN audience?)

I interpreted your closing statements, very roughly, as ~"Careful, don't do what I did if you're _normal_. Only do what I did if you're _cool_." So it was actually a recommendation, in my mind.

<comment><USER7> Ah, thanks for the explanation. I found the "clickbait" bit to be a leap (though you weren't the only person to say so). This is how I really feel about it. I wish I felt like I had enough of a choice in the matter to say "oh well, that was a mistake." If I felt like I did have a choice, no, I wouldn't recommend it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My main issue with freelancing is the quality of the most of the gigs. Sure, you can land a gig which would allow you to use your most favorite trendy JS framework, but in the end you'd likely end up building some variation of a CRUD app. It's extremely hard to land a project which would allow you to work in cutting-edge technological problems.

An issue which I commonly see in these threads is the black-and-white antogonization of "working for the man" and being a "free man". It's almost like you are either a mindless 9-to-5 drone or you "escaped the system", and working for yourself, even though you might be scraping bahts eating ramen in Chiang Mai.

</comment><comment><USER14> Does the "making things" thing ever get you down?

Getting intimate and sensitive with a dead dead medium, dead stuff that you try to arrange into something pretty.

Obsession as lifestyle, deforming your soul.

Pandering to moneyed children to pay your bills.

I have some experience with this and I gotta say it gets me down. Do you relate?

<comment><USER15> I share this sentiment as well - when I work for a bank, at least I get a sense that I'm working towards something meaningful (matching investors with opportunities). On the other hand, working on another video game or novel that no one wants or needs sounds depressing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This sentiment may be unpopular here, but I think it is probably difficult to pull this off and have a family simultaneously. Having the luxury of following your interests comes from someone putting a roof over your head and food on your plate during your formative years. Quite likely, your parents made it possible (through their sacrifice) for you to receive an education and give you access to the social network that put you where you are today. If you do follow your dreams while having children, I hope you are able to provide them with a foundation for their future success.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have to say I'm a bit surprised he moved to Colombia. My aunt lived through her teenage years in Colombia, and even though she has family there she absolutely refuses to go visit because of how horrible it was.

I'm sure it's changed since she lived there, but it's not like she's been isolated from the country's happenings the last 30-some years. (I mean, she has family and friends she can call or message.)

<comment><USER18> The healthcare situation in the US is horrible enough for this. Mind, I'm from Brazil and even though we're a shitty third world piece of crap sometimes, we still got free universal health care and great 100% free public universities. It baffles me that a country as wealthy as the US does not provide such basic things to its citizens. I guess it's a matter of the mindset on priorities? War > Health? I went to Cuba once, where people are objectively very poor, and still I had no issues being seen by a doctor at a local clinic for free when I had an eye emergency even though I was just a tourist. I live in Europe now, where general quality of life is much better than where I lived in Brazil and it terrifies me that other Brazilians often look to the US as something to strive for rather than Europe in our next developments. I've heard of multiple cases before of people with bad health who simply had to flee the US and move somewhere else more social so they wouldn't die or because they had already gone bankrupt paying for health services. It's a shame, really, the US definitely has enough money and would be able to provide their citizens more humane care, but this is not an unsurprising story. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It takes a certain kind of person to be a freelance anything. If you're not that kind of person, you're likely not to be a success.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been creating content for a few years, but I've been self employed for a really long time.

The author's comments on Louis CK was very relatable. I've had the same exact thought processes and conclusions.

I haven't hit that point where things start to grow exponentially but I really feel like that's how it goes. Unfortunately it's ultra dangerous in the tech field because creating a course on XYZ will be outdated by the time you "make it" (and to create content like that might be 3-4 months of ~80 hour weeks).

My plan is to keep creating content until something sticks.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm sure it's easier for me to find a part-time job than living from my art/curiosity. Better 1/2 the week lost to work, than all the art lost to comercial compromises with little pay.

I will do full time for a year or so to get some credability and save some money. I'm just not sure yet how to find an ok 2-day job that pays ok. Maybe consulting would be worth an attempt, but I guess I'd need to network a lot for that.

</comment><comment><USER22> I sometimes wonder if a better solution to this is to accept a less demanding job and fill your free time with your creative endeavors.</comment>


When Those Who Know Won't Share - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/business/when-those-who-know-wont-share.html?ref=science <comment><USER3> Went I went to the US(Boston, from Europe) I was surprised by the behavior in University given by the intense private competition.

It is not the difficulty itself, as it is probably harder to study engineering in Europe or Asia, but the competitive mindset, "every man for himself".

This has advantages, like taking plagiarism very seriously, but also terrible disadvantages, like not working well in groups.

People like Japanese or Chinese are trained in working in groups with disrespect for the individual. The American culture is the polar opposite, they worship individuals disrespecting the team, e.g you wont ever hear them talking about Edison's team(of which Tesla was one of its members), or Steve Jobs'.

Americans love to believe that there is a person that does everything.

Having said that, in some companies they don't share because of fear.

If you create a community like Microsoft's four years ago in which for every team, the "least qualified"(even if all of them are great) is fired, you create a culture of threat and terror, and people are going to protect their selves.

You have also to take care, not putting too many leechers in the same place as the seeders, or the seeders won't be able to solve problems(that they love to solve) because they are babysitters of the leechers full time(something they hate to do).

Some companies do not understand the last point, then they comply about people not sharing.

If you put together a team that admire each other, they share naturally.

<comment><USER4> > _If you create a community like Microsoft 's four years ago in which for > every team, the "least qualified"(even if all of them are great) is fired, > you create a culture of threat and terror, and people are going to protect > their selves._

The other side of the very same coin is when you award top X% people for performance. When you fix the reward/punishment pool, people have much less incentive to work together, because every help you give to someone else is reducing your own chance of success.

I'm not sure why people set up such incentive structures. Is it greed? Or some kind of stupid belief that a little bit of competition will help? Yes, if you let every good performer get a bonus regardless of how many others are also getting it you'll have to pay out a lot of bonuses, because you'll have a lot of good performers. But isn't it exactly what you want to have?

<comment><USER5> I recently watched an interesting video of an austrian economy professor, who came to the conclusion that our current competition based society is in effect because in the past competition was crucial to survive, and thus people competed. Our current generation competes because we grew up in a competitive society and in order to be truly cooperative, cooperation needs to become a part of our "memes". Here's the video, unfortunately in German and no subtitles are available yet: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oouoee9UvEc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oouoee9UvEc).

I think the main problem with group bonuses is that those who know/think they worked harder will feel treated unfairly. I have no information on how group bonuses are perceived or what their effects are. However, I personally think that the main problems come from teams who don't share the same spirit/culture and thus, those problems also exist in individually rewarded teams.

<comment><USER6> "I think the main problem with group bonuses is that those who know/think they worked harder will feel treated unfairly."

Individual bonuses, if they befall the wrong individuals or are percieved to be unjust can destroy the will of the entire group or organization. I would claim that for expert organizations the risks of individual rewards outweight any benefits they may have. Group bonuses or company wide profit sharing spread general goodwill. Continuous performance is what counts in the long run. Continuous performers will get their reward in the form of raises or promotion. In theory, at least. Note: I'm from an egalitarian nordic country, culture probably affects my perception.

<comment><USER5> I'm from Germany and bonuses and wages are something we don't talk about with many people, let alone colleagues. I even had a paragraph in my last working contracts that forbade me to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've initiated large knowledge sharing projects before, and they all failed because at the time I didn't realize the problem was not a lack of medium for sharing but a lack of will to share.

This covers the problem where someone hides the very simple knowledge which keeps them employed (documentation being the enemy of job security) but the worst is having a culture where if you share something that is later found to be even slightly wrong it will be used against you. For sharing to work you have to be tolerant of the right sort of mistakes.

<comment><USER8> I suspect that most knowledge sharing projects fail because people are not incentivized to participate and have other things to do that are perceived as more productive or where there is more (any) pressure to get them done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Put in incentives to reward people on team outcomes versus solely on individual outcomes"

This. You get what you incent. If people are rewarded for working together, they will work together. If they are rewarded for individual contributions, they will optimize for that.

Now, it can be tough to measure and reward team effort, bit if that is what is important, figure it out!

<comment><USER4> There is a third way. Evaluate and reward people for their individual performance, but _don 't make people compete by limiting the prize pool_. That is, everyone who reaches certain performance level get a fixed bonus, independent of how many others also receive it. This way, no one stands to gain anything by witholding knowledge, and everyone has an incentive to help everyone else because they can except to be helped in need as well. You also somewhat avoid the free rider problem, because people won't keep helping those who are clearly just lazy.

Anecdote time! When I was a student, performance scolarships at my faculty were distributed this way. There were set thresholds, and if your grade average from the previous year was above a given threshold, you got +X money in scolarship. We were all extremely cooperative. People helped each other all the time, we pooled notes, scans, bootleg textbook pdfs, previous year's exam questions, we passed this knowledge down to younger students, who in turn passed them further after adding more materials of their own. We'd happily help each other get better grades.

You bet there was a lot of us on those scolarships. And people who came from the outside were extremely surprised about how friendly and helpful everyone is.

After I left, my faculty was forced to make scolarships work the way they work at every other faculty/university - i.e. make only top X% of students eglible for rewards. This instantly killed teamwork dead. I know few people who are still studying and they say there's a clear and visible difference now. People no longer share things. They don't care about recording exam questions for others, they don't coordinate the whole year to win something. Students stick to small groups and are antagonistic to others. If they help at all, they do it to the degree it doesn't endanger their own chance for scolarships.

Incentives matter. Also greed/stupid costs savings on the part of people setting up incentive structures matter too.

<comment> rational-future > don't make people compete by limiting the prize pool

That is an interesting idea and it probably works in some rare situations. But unfortunately, most of the time, we only have limited resources and so a limited prize pool. The question, for managers/politicians/capitalists, usually is how do we get maximum motivation out of a limited rewards budget.

<comment><USER4> I don't a reason why it should work only in rare situations. This seems perfectly suited for companies - after all, you make money directly off increased productivity of each of your workers. Just keep the reward smaller than what you'd expect to gain from increased productivity, and it should be possible to sustain this system.

<comment> rational-future I have run a few small companies (up to 30 employees/contractors), and FWIW my experience doesn't match your assumptions. At the end of a year you've made a limited amount of profit and you want to distribute part of it to the personal. The most efficient way I found is to give 80% to the few top performers - the people who work 100+ hour work weeks or have more connections (sales) or are smarter (IT). The others you can easily replace plus bonuses don't seem to increase much the productivity of the averagely lazy. Surely this is just another anecdote.

<comment><USER4> I haven't run any company myself so I'm just theorizing here anyway. Thanks for sharing your experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Missing in the article is when you have more information about a generic request that your partner actually needs.

It's OK for me if a partner discards half of a serve-yourself email, which was easier to write than doing the whole expert-system style Q&A until you narrow the answer, but there's always the worry that it will be perceived as wasteful -- from the other side's point of view that unused information may equal to days of study and research, or as confusing noise that would delay a solution if it had to be grokked.

I could see someone in a very large team eventually resorting to simple answers, just for the sake of not snagging the business flow. Maybe adding invitations to request further info about certain parts would be in order.

</comment><comment><USER11> I had an interesting chat with a colleague the other day (team lead) who asked me to pair up with a permanent employee rather than a contractor on a development task, so that my knowledge of the particular system I was working on would stay in the company. I noted that in reality, the only member of staff I could safely count on to stay at the company was called 'wiki'.

<comment><USER12>
      > I noted that in reality, the only member of staff I could
      > safely count on to stay at the company was called 'wiki'.

True, but that flies in the face of Agile™ dogma: " _The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation._ "

Plato similarly argued against literacy. He didn't tell me that face-to-face; someone wrote it down.

<comment><USER13> It was Socrates that argued against literacy and Plato who wrote it down.

 _" Nothing that has ever been written whether in verse or prose merits much serious attention."_

I also think that Plato writing it down was one of the earliest post-modern jokes.

<comment><USER12> I've always thought of _this_ Socrates as a character in Plato's works inspired by the person, with the degree of fidelity unknown.

<comment><USER13> That is a reasonable interpretation, especially since Plato was not present in the dialogue between Phaedrus and Socrates, so the whole thing is either fiction or a dramatised retelling. However, this lends credence to the idea that Plato was being partly humorous about his own work, when he wrote down the section dealing with writing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have a burning curiosity to know if there are any out there who are not very competitive (such as myself) who don't mind sharing and then get treated as a fool because I share knowledge so freely? It doesn't really bother me since I consider solving the problem the most important part of the job but it seems to happen at each job I've had in software development.

<comment><USER4> I'm extremely anticompetetive and if I know something that could help someone, I share without thinking (and often help if I have time to spare). Fortunately I haven't experienced any negative consequences of this yet - quite the opposite, I tend to end up in friendly groups in which everyone helps others.

I think such pay-it-forward behaviour is contagious, so it is a small way to make the world a better place.

<comment><USER14> Yeah I definitely have no problem helping someone, as long as it doesn't take away time for me to do my job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is just unprofessional behaviour.

Passing on knowledge and helping each other succeed is just part of the job. I'm glad I haven't had the misfortune to work with people who deliberately obstruct each other.

<comment><USER16> You've obviously never worked in an environment with intentionally ignorant or lazy workers. I'm all about sharing knowledge and supporting your teammates. But I've recently discovered people who are simply leaches. They've discovered that they can get by on generosity of others. My boss sat me down earlier this year and reprimanded me for spending too much time essentially doing other people's work for them. It never occurred to me that people would do this intentionally but now that it's been pointed out to me I see these people everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It would be interesting to look at the places where sharing has been very effective (Wikipedia, linux, open source software in general, etc.) and see if we can learn anything from them about structuring things in such a way to facilitate sharing. I guess it's mainly an issue of aligning incentives... people who keep more to themselves are more likely to look intelligent and be promoted/acknowledge by their bosses (or they think that's what will happen at least).

<comment><USER18> I wouldn't call those places where sharing has been very effective. A certain level of knowledge is shared due to it's nature: open source, sometimes remote, sometimes volunteer run. But beyond that, domain experts who do not share their knowledge publicly or very freely are just as common as anywhere else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I ran into this phenomenon first had recently when working on a knowledge engineering project. The idea was to use a rule based system to enhance network troubleshooting. The "experts" who had the knowledge were very suspicious and reluctant to share their knowledge because they thought eventually they would be "replaced by a machine". But I also noticed that they were very proprietary between each other as well or others, especially people they considered "outsiders", outside of the little cabal they had set up. It was a very interesting dynamic. It reminded me very much of a sports metaphor that the most valuable players are the ones that make their teammates better. I can definitely saw the antithesis of that in play at this particular organization. I think it would be a major challenge in implementing AI in certain situations.

</comment><comment><USER20> Often this is not an intentional action on any one actors part - its an institutional thing - I work for a major european telecoms vendor, and inside my company almost no one has big picture visibility, projects are sliced up so many ways from sunday, that to get something that even resembled a big picture you need to talk to tons of people and maintain a large social network (the good ol' boys network).

The natural reaction to this lack of visibility is to create process for everything, and major european telecoms company is a very process oriented company, everything has a process, and a document thereof (assuming you can find the document, remember the part about poor visibility) - they are also very very fond of one-size-fits-all solutions to problems, so everyone gets the same laptop build, no matter who your end customer is, or what your job is (from field engineers to accountants).

The key to productivity is knowing when it's best to let the process, no matter how slow moving it is - bump and grind along at its own pace and become a self resolving problem, and when to directly (and openly) short circuit it, whereas other times you might want to call on the 'good ol' boys network' to solve a problem or get information.

To defend this way of working - there is some logic to these systems, they provide stability and a largely autonomous system that (albeit slowly) will provide a resolution to most of the problems the business will run into - <USER2> fail worst when dealing with rapidly emergent problems, exigent circumstances, when expanding to a new line of business or any time you run into a problem that can't be grouped into a existing category. Even a process driven environment however has some ability to adapt, even if it does fall completely outside the system at first, and so long as you have a reasoned argument, people often won't tell you no either (even if they might sit on your request for a bit), so while I dislike the amount of red tape at times, I've also learned how to work thru it, and around it when absolutely needed.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is called the "Tyranny of Competence", here's a related excerpt from the book "Deep Change" ( [http://books.google.com/books?id=NDkvbRX9dGQC&pg=PA115&lpg=P...](http://books.google.com/books?id=NDkvbRX9dGQC&pg=PA115&lpg=PA115&dq=Tyranny+of+Competence&source=bl&ots=KpQ1mvIR5t&sig=rkDgOhSisZ5oILIhsVuvgecSm70&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QNZDVPL9EK6CigKJjoCQBQ&ved=0CF8Q6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=Tyranny%20of%20Competence&f=false) )

The arguments for competence are powerful and often overshadow or mask a problem area. An example of such an argument is the comment along the lines of, "We couldn't survive without Mary. No one else can sell that thing, and it represents 30 percent of our business." This statement is often so self- evident that no one thinks to point out the cooperative effort that should be the essence of the organization has already ceased to survive. People come to work, but there is a lack of communication, commitment, and cooperation. The process of slow death has set in.

In one organization, a man of enormous technical competence was allowed to gain a lot of power, and many of his actions poisoned the climate in the workplace. People around him hated to come to work and went to great lengths to avoid dealing with him. Their bad feelings, irrationalities, and inefficiencies were costing the organization large but undocumented sums of money. Finally, the situation grew so bad that people united and demanded change. A senior person intervened in this Tyranny of Competence and tried to coach the man. The recipient found the feedback incomprehensible and argued that he was doing his "job" better than anyone else in the place. The organization was simply out to get him for personal and political reasons.

Note the accuracy of his argument. He was doing his "job" well, and the organization was out to get him for political and personal reasons. The problem was his definition of the word "job". His job did not include relating to other people. Organizational relationships, with their interactions and political processes, are as real as physical objects. Not disciplining oneself enough to maintain good relationships is, in fact, destructive behavior.

This man eventually left his job, convinced that he had been politically rejected (which was correct) for unjust reasons (which was incorrect). The day he went down the stairs for the last time, people came out of their offices, held hands, spontaneously danced, and sang, "Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead!" They discovered that this irreplaceable person was indeed replaceable. The top executives marveled at the increase in overall performance. They vowed not to make the same mistake again.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is a very one sided article from the perspective of the higher management.

The real contradistinction is that organisations try to reduce costs of the "workforce". The employees try to maximize their income and value. It is true that the maximalization can also occure on group level and that this is not contractually or formally supported in our current economic model. But treating employees as costs individually or as a group will shift the problem.

It can be questioned that it is not such a radical zero sum game but at the other hand it feels like this is the most effective and simple behavior.

The inverted question is, what do organisations do to maximize the income of their employees?

</comment><comment><USER23> Ironic that this article in particular should lie behind a pay wall.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's also disappointing when you try to share things with people and they're not interested. Then later on they say "well I don't know how this works!"

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm surprised that this is surprising.

That said, there's a difference between malicious "holding out" and being reserved with political information. I'm not going to hide something that's purely technical, but political information is (a) dangerous to share, and (b) often incomplete, meaning you could unduly bias someone with your own half- knowledge. Besides, while everyone will "listen to" a gossip, no one will _ever_ defend one.

However, there's a certain room for reciprocity. If I trust that someone will look out for me, I'll look out for him or her. Your odds aren't good, in the long run, if you try to walk through this world alone.

I think of modern corporate life as post-apocalyptic, like in _The Walking Dead_. The HR drones who implement stack-ranking, the mindless backstabbers, and the self-destructively sadistic middle managers out there are the zombies. In numbers, inferior but ravenous beings like zombies can overwhelm the living and strong, and they do so, so often, that they're a primary landscape feature of this new world. (One place where this metaphor breaks down is that it's not clear, in the real world, who are the living and who are the zombies. But bear with me.) For those who haven't figured it out, zombie horror is _really_ about "tyranny of the majority", which is a formidable enemy within an organization.

You have to know who your friends and your enemies are, and sometimes you have to make decisions quickly. While you "fight" the zombies (except, you do it by making them click on ads and mindlessly support brands you invent, not killing them) you also have to fear the living.

If our parents and grandparents knew what little politicians and fire-starters we are, as a generation, they'd be horrified. We're not actually _morally_ any worse. In fact, we're probably better in many ways (less racist, less sexist, and unlike the Boomers we didn't _cause_ widespread organizational failure because we were still children during the Reagan Era). We're just post- apocalyptic (and OK with that). We know that the people in power aren't looking out for us, so we don't give a shit about them. Compared to our elders, we care more about _people_ who we actually know and can (sometimes) trust, but less about organizations and society.</comment>


Clever comic strip explains Wall St. meltdown - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/guesta9d12e/subprime-primer-277484/

<comment><USER2> FFS, not that one again. I've seen it about half a dozen times on reddit, and once already on YCNews.

<comment><AUTHOR> Debated whether to re-post or not, but given the unprecedented fallout from the previous week, I thought it was timely. I always point folks to this when they start asking about the subprime mess--it's much more engaging than some of the long, dry articles around.

Apologies to those seeing it again. Hopefully it reached some new eyes.

<comment><USER3> It did. I thought it did a good job explaining things, even though it was a little (ok, a lot) childish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> hey if you've seen it no need to leave a comment about seeing it. I've seen it and loled again.

</comment><comment><USER4> fuck you.

fuck you.

lulz

</comment><comment><USER5> _Bad assumption my frigid Norwegian ass! What about the AAA rating from the agencies?

They fucked up too.

[...]

Well that's just great, asshole. What am I supposed to tell my villagers?

Tell them you fucked up._

It's not every decade that real estate takes a strong economy (3Q 2007) and throws it immediately into the toilet. This is what Bushonomics gives us: our recoveries are jobless and flaccid, and our "slowdowns" are disastrous, even when they fall short of being numerical recessions.</comment>


Academia is not Broken.  We are. - <AUTHOR> http://curryhoward.blogspot.com/2010/05/academia-isnt-broken-we-are.html

<comment><USER2> This totally makes sense: education isn't job training.

So maybe it's not for everyone, but for me it's a short time in my life where I can study Elementary Theory of Numbers alongside Cognitive Neuroscience and Computational Genetics and Life Forms without worrying about paying the bills.

Learning how to do a job isn't too hard. You learn on the job, anyway. This is true for computer scientists as much as it is for neurosurgeons (residencies).

School builds a foundation, and hopefully increases your interest in learning. It has mine.

<comment><USER3> And how do you decide what job? I've changed jobs and fields so often, there is no way you can prepare for that. Yet all the education I got has been instrumental in being able to adjust, evolve and assimilate new knowledge.

<comment><USER4> "I've changed jobs and fields so often, there is no way you can prepare for that."

I'm a grad student in English lit, and I tell my students that their wisest course of action is to study math and reading/writing. Those two skills are applicable to almost any other domain, make picking up other skills easier, and relatively few people really understand either.

<comment><USER5> 3 Rs, reading (w)riting and (a)rithmetic.

I've been a proponent of teaching that and rhetoric for a long time.

<comment><USER6> This sounds very much like the medieval trivium: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium_(education)>

<comment><USER5> That would be the point, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This!

 _The entitlement of success that seems to follow from attending college is what's broken. The expectation that you will get a cushy 9-5 job in return for that diploma is what's broken. It in essence is a laziness of the mind, an unwillingness to chart out one's own path, the very idea of which is quite unacademic._

Totally spot on. I have friends with this exact mentality. From this crisis we face today - employers will recognize this fact and stop hiring bullshitters. Luckily nature has corrected itself for millions of years.

<comment><USER8> "From this crisis we face today - employers will recognize this fact and stop hiring bullshitters."

If you are prepared to put money on that, I think that you may end up poor ;-) Bullshitters are, as a class, the _most_ successful people in history, I would guess. Politicians, high-ranking clergy, business men, aristocracy, etc. would mostly fall under that umberella, and have managed out society since it started. The last 100 years or so have been the most meritocratic we've ever seen, and I would be surprised if we don't slide back a little soon...

<comment><USER9> "The last 100 years or so have been the most meritocratic we've ever seen,"

Not true. Society nowadays in the US is actually relatively immobile, compared to the 19th century.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_f...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_figures#New_World)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_Vanderbilt>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jacob_Astor>

All five were from poor/middle class backgrounds. Compare to Bill Gates, whose father was a name partner in the largest law firm in Seattle, Preston, Gates & Ellis, and whose mother knew the CEO of IBM.

<comment><USER10> Those appear to be a list of anecdotes as opposed to a real analysis of who becomes wealthy and the means of their families in America. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with the social science literature to fix the reference problem, but at least from the survey work presented in "The Millionaire Next Door", many of the wealthy American surveyed there did not appear to be from family money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The truly great innovations are done by people who are interested in a problem and want to solve it. Rarely is it done for money. It is in the best interest of society that the people who are creative and smart have an avenue to explore that creativity without too much risk. This means lowering the cost to higher education and constricting the amount of people who go to college. The best math grad students want to go to MIT, Stanford, Berkley, etc. because that's where the other smart people are and the environment fosters development. If we lose this then it will be a long term disaster for the nation.

The goal needs to be to get universities back to allowing problem solvers solve problems and not become factories that churn out workers.

</comment><comment><USER12> There was a frontline episode last night on Education, Inc. (i think it was called) and I think it presents a dangerous trend -- though not for the reason Frontline said.

Our _country_ is broken.

Many of the for profit institutions (like university of phoenix) are being sued because the people who got educations there aren't getting jobs, though they are still saddled with tens -- even hundreds -- of thousands of dollars in debt, much of it from Federal Loans. They can never escape this debt. Frontline basically argued that the colleges were accepting people into their institutions who wouldn't be able to get jobs that would enable them to pay off the loans. How could they decide something like that??

Whose responsibility is it to get a graduate a job? If a college graduate can't get a job, I believe it is largely the responsibility of the student. There are no guarantees in life and the dangerous trend we see is one where we are requiring companies to protect people from themselves. We are removing responsibility and accountability from individuals and putting it on corporations who sell them things. The same thing is happening with home loans people took out, but can't repay.

People are being raised without the critical thinking skills needed to make good decisions and why should they? They aren't being held accountable for those decisions either -- the tax payer pays. And really, why shouldn't they default -- they get a free home, a free education. The derelicts are being rewarded! Why aren't we rewarding those who make _good_ decisions??

Our society is broken, because parents are failing. Schools are failing. Greedy corporations are prospering. Whose fault is it? Is it the parents, the schools, and the individuals -- or the corporations? Is society to be a parent for people like this?

In computer science, technology is changing so fast, it's almost impossible to teach kids what they need to know 4 years from now. Memristors? Cloud Computing? Mobile apps? NoSQL, who knows? My university didn't teach me anything at all about databases, but yet employers want universities to teach kids how to code in Ruby which didn't even exist when curricula were set years ago.

Point is, it's a dangerous trend to absolve the individual of the responsibility to think for themselves. The U.S. was founded on individual freedom, but when you don't have individual responsibility and individual accountability -- you lose individual freedom.

</comment><comment><USER13> Here is what I dont get. In the US we complain about higher education Academia yet millions of foreigners go to our schools. I saw a stat where the majority of Engineer graduates are foreigners in the US.

They are using the very system that we complain about to benefit them and their country.

<comment><USER14> This is largely because people don't come from China to major in Women's Studies, Philosophy, or Anthropology. They come to major in things which will reward, with nearly 100% certainty, a career immediately after leaving school which pays excellent wages by Chinese standards.

(A very minor portion of the whinging about US academia is about degrees which formerly lead to very well-paying careers but have been coming under pricing pressure, such that they now merely are comfortably middle class. This is the case in many of the hard sciences. Most of the whinging comes from holders of degrees which prepare them fabulously to whinge and not so fabulously to do anything else.)

(Full disclosure: I have a degree in making things and another degree in making things up.)

<comment><USER15> That's a very unprogressive thing for you to say.

<comment><USER16> I have a degree in both CS (making things) and Philosophy (making things up) and I _completely_ agree with patio11's comment. Progressivism has nothing to do with it. Majoring in Art History (where there are 12 job openings a year) and then getting a job as a barista at the local coffee shop doesn't make you the bastion of progressivism.

<comment><USER15> There are more valuable things to life than money. I challenge this reactionary view that the worth of a person's contribution to society can be measured by their salary. If a person chooses to enrich humanity's lot by providing value outside of the marketplace, it is the responsibility of society to support them. By refusing to do so, we all become poorer.

Moreover, I note a trend in the fields of study that are being praised: they are all dominated by men. We praise male fields and dismiss female fields. I wonder if this doesn't reflect some deeper, troubling biases of our culture.

<comment><USER17> _I challenge this reactionary view that the worth of a person's contribution to society can be measured by their salary._

If their contribution is greater, then why isn't somebody willing to pay them more? If there was such a trove of hidden value, you would think that some greedy capitalist would snap it up and exploit it.

 _If a person chooses to enrich humanity's lot by providing value outside of the marketplace, it is the responsibility of society to support them._

This isn't a question of differing philosophies and values. This is just objectively wrong. In the degenerate case, if we all decide to become poets, then who is going to farm the food to feed us all? This should clue you in to the fallacy of your statement above. The _marginal_ value of an additional poet is lower than the marginal value of another farmer, or another assembly line worker, or another programmer.

Moreover, there is no such thing as "outside the marketplace". There is more to the market then just financial transactions. Everything we do: how we elect to use our time, the care we invest in a relationship, everything, is a decision about how we use our limited resources (time and attention in my two examples, but the potential list covers literally everything). And we necessarily make those decisions by weighing what we expect their costs to be versus what we expect to derive from them. And _that_ is what the study of economics is about -- money is only the smallest part of it.

 _I note a trend in the fields of study that are being praised: they are all dominated by men. We praise male fields..._

Holy mackerel, what a mouthful. You've got to be trolling, but I'll bite anyway.

Let's start with the fact that YOU are the one that's characterizing things as "male" or "female"; I don't see anyone else doing so. Of the three cubicles bordering on mine, two of them are occupied by females; shall I call software development a "female" field? If not, then why would I ever praise it?

But your statement is its own dis-proof. You (and the rest of the "progressives") are praising what you label "female fields", and implicitly condemning the "male" ones. Doesn't this show _a priori_ that we don't universally favor one or the other, but rather have, as a society, a diverse set of opinions?

Finally, I'd like to retell an old joke from my (engineering) college:

 _Scientists learn to ask "why does that work?". Engineers are taught to ask "how does that work?". Accountants learn to ask "how much will it cost?". Liberal arts majors are trained to ask "do you want fries with that?"_

It's a little cruel, but still funny, I think.

<comment><USER18> _If their contribution is greater, then why isn't somebody willing to pay them more? If there was such a trove of hidden value, you would think that some greedy capitalist would snap it up and exploit it._

You should ask a postdoc making ~30k a year to do cutting edge science the same question. They could triple that tending bar.

<comment><USER17> There's no mystery here, I already gave the answer in my previous post. Quoting myself:

 _there is no such thing as "outside the marketplace". There is more to the market then just financial transactions. Everything we do: how we elect to use our time, the care we invest in a relationship, everything, is a decision about how we use our limited resources (time and attention in my two examples, but the potential list covers literally everything). And we necessarily make those decisions by weighing what we expect their costs to be versus what we expect to derive from them. And that is what the study of economics is about -- money is only the smallest part of it._

Those postdocs derive greater satisfaction from doing their science than they would by tending bar. In their own internal calculus, the rewards of their career are greater than the simple money equation.

Progressives like to think they're being deep and insightful when they observe that there's more to the world than just money. But it's not news to anyone, least of all to economists. This is embodied in the concept of _utility_. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility> :

 _Utility is usually applied by economists in such constructs as the indifference curve, which plot the combination of commodities that an individual or a society would accept to maintain a given level of satisfaction. ... [Quoting Paul Samuelson] "Utility is taken to be correlative to Desire or Want. It has been already argued that desires cannot be measured directly, but only indirectly, by the outward phenomena to which they give rise: and that in those cases with which economics is chiefly concerned the measure is found in the price which a person is willing to pay for the fulfilment or satisfaction of his desire."_

Thus, in the case of your hypothetical postdoc, the opportunity to do his (or her) science is worth $60K. (I oversimplify due to things like _marginal utility_ , but that's the gist)

<comment><USER19> Good job regurgitating micro econ 101. /sarcasm off/ In all seriousness trying to discuss utility of a general group of people (or even a specific person) is doomed to failure. Utility is a nice round theoretical construct for trying to talk about why consumers make the decisions they do.

However, there is a lot of evidence to show consumers do not make entirely rational choices. Even if they did, trying to determine a utility function for a consumer would still fail. For instance, can you even with certainty determine your own utility function. I know I can't.

Now lets pretend a consumer does in fact only make rational choices, and their utility function for every conceivable situation is known. I have distinct, although unproven, suspicion that determining what choices the person would make through their day would be NP-complete as their present choices would effect their future choices. Thus all possible outcomes would have to be considered far into the future if one truly wanted to maximize utility.

Therefore, assuming what I have just said is fairly logical, it is impossible for a rational consumer to exist even if their utility function is known, since it would be impossible to for them to compute any given choice in a finite amount of time.

In conclusion any discussion that touches on "utility" or assuming a group of people is making "rational" choices is doomed to failure. The truth is we don't know why any given person make any given choice.

Also you seem to ignore the important of positive externalities in your arguments. I believe this is where you disagree with other posters.

<comment><USER17> _there is a lot of evidence to show consumers do not make entirely rational choices. Even if they did, trying to determine a utility function for a consumer would still fail. For instance, can you even with certainty determine your own utility function._

Of course; I never claimed otherwise. It's certainly true that any person's utility function is at least partly unknown to them, and in any case changes over time. As a result it has little value as a _predictive_ tool. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Ludwig von Mises attacks this head-on in _Human Action_ (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Action> ).

It's undeniable that at any juncture, the action that a person takes is based on some judgment, conscious or not (and quite possibly mistaken), that the chosen action delivers a greater utility than its alternatives.

Thus, the hypothetical postdoc-cum-bartender is deciding -- for reasons that we don't know, but real all the same -- that he would prefer to do his research over bartending, even to the extent of giving up $60K to do so.

Who are we to second guess his decision? Precisely _because_ , and not in spite of, the fact that his reasons are inscrutable, we can only assume that he's making the best call he can. By what right can we override it? And more to the point, if his/her university is providing such a valuable career for him, who are we to say that they must sweeten the pot and throw in even more money?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I agree 100 percent. The reason one gets an education is because you want to find out what interesting things there are. If everyone had the same education there would be no job competition. The problem with most of today's education systems is that everyone gets treated the same. I have found this out first hand, but i was lucky enough to have a high school computer and robotics teacher that let me explore things i found interesting for credit. To make this possible we had to pretend that it was a regularly scheduled class, otherwise the administration of the school would have never let me build robots, program IRC clients or play with rapid prototyping. I learned more about research and the way things worked in the two semesters i was with this teacher than i did in all of my other schooling.

<comment><USER21> >but i was lucky enough to have a high school computer and robotics teacher that let me explore things i found interesting for credit.

You were lucky - the only thing that saved me from giving up entirely in high school were a few good books I found by browsing MIT's OpenCourseWare pages and other places. My high school was full of corrupt assholes who spent all the school's funding on elaborate sports complexes for our shitty sports sports teams, so that all the funding to our science, math and tech clubs dissolved and the library only had a few outdated dictionaries and some terrible fiction books.

But I'm not bitter. (;

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I went to college because I loved computer science, but while there I was in class alongside many students (at least in the required courses) who were just there for a good job, and I never had a problem with any of them. In fact, college did pretty well for most of them.

I've never been dissuaded from thinking that there is a place for people-who- just-want-good-jobs in colleges. There are plenty of opportunities for people who wanted to go further in computer science, I don't know of any college with a good computer science programs that's lacking in high level math and AI courses.

That said, I absolutely agree with "The entitlement of success that seems to follow from attending college is what's broken. The expectation that you will get a cushy 9-5 job in return for that diploma is what's broken." People need to decide up front if their priority _is_ a 9-5 job and plan accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm not too impressed.

For now I'll leave it by just point out that there are only 4 top US CS schools, not 5 (in west to east order, Stanford, UCB, CMU, MIT).

<comment><USER24> What? There exists a "top 5" for any ranked list with 5 or more entries.

Anyways... I am sure he was referring to those 4 + either UIUC or Cornell.

<comment><USER25> UIUC and Cornell are both historically strong. UW (Washington) and UCSD (San Diego) both seem like exceptional up and comers that are probably much better schools than historically ranked.

With that said, there's a pretty big dip from #4 to #5.

<comment><USER23> " _[...] there's a pretty big dip from #4 to #5._ "

And that is exactly my sub-point. The fact that no one can list a clear #5 probably proves it.

Going further, it you agree with the above there's no sense in making a top 5 list, so replying to joeyo, it's not axiomatic in terms of cardinality. It only makes sense to list the top 4, and then something like the top dozen or so.

My greater point is that someone who doesn't know this isn't likely to make good judgments on the topic of this essay.

<comment><USER26> For law students and lawyers, there's a "top 14". This is because the USN&WR top 10 has varied over the years, but the USN&WR top 14 has been stable for practically forever. The same is true of 17, 18, and maybe a couple of other integers.

So "top 14" is the meaningful distinction due to this observed property of 14 in the rankings, which could be an artifact of chance. But it has become self- perpetuating at the prestige drop between #14 and #15 is enormous. Also, law as a profession cares obsessively about where one went to school. Attending #14 means you went to a "national law school"; #15 makes it very difficult for you to get a good job more than 200 miles from your law school.

I wish I were making this up. I'm not.

<comment><USER23> Hmmmm, all the talk about the I-95 Supreme Court would support what you're saying.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Where is Ryan Bates? - <AUTHOR>

Ryan Bates (https://twitter.com/rbates) was one of the main reason that Rails was so easily adopted. His tutorials where excellent. We want him back! Does anyone know what he is up to? <comment><USER2> There is like a MILLION of these threads: [https://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.c...](https://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+ryan+bates&oq=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+ryan+bates&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.11269j0j8&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8)

I get it - I fell the same way - but it feels a little clingey now!

<comment><AUTHOR> You are probably right. It is clingey. I promise to let go! My question was more a reflection on what is it that may burn a programmer out. In this case it is more than just a mere programmer, it was someone with great communication skills. A rather rare combination.</comment></comment>


Newbie Freelance Web developer - <AUTHOR>

Hello Everyone,
I am Computing Graduate who is looking to build up my portfolio. So currently targetting smaller websites (1-5 page websites) as I am trying to have a good portfolio soon. So If you want to grab a great rate for your personal/business websites now is the time to get in touch with me. I will be increasing my rates after my first 5 projects. I got one already.
I dont mind to do a bigger project like e-commerce sites as I do have a network of good freelancers who will be working with me.
Thanks . <comment><USER2> I need help installing a webapp & the tomcat server it runs on in order to facilitate setting up a self-service rental booking webportal provided by the webapp. The docs are somewhat greek to me, & I'm currently stuck- support is nonexistant. It's probably easy to someone else. There's also a need for a landing page that features the webportal function, to be integrated into a temporary single-page home page, which is currently under development by others. I imagine there could be a tab on the interim homepage to link to the page that'll feature the self-serve booking function. If you're interested, please reach me by email: info (at) superior-sound-systems (dot) com. Thanks

</comment><comment><USER3> It might be helpful to leave your contact email.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, my email is firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


Spaces: A New Way to Connect with Friends in VR - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/04/facebook-spaces/ <comment><USER2> If there's a bull case on FB to me it starts with the release of this Facebook Spaces beta.

Spaces - or something like it - along with an eventual great set of AR glasses or contact lenses - is the end game.

There's no question the long goal for corporate AR is to digitize the entire physical world, catalog it, and then sell outrageously effective ad inventory / flair against everything that we see.

Using a fairly controlled VR environment as the beta case for this to get us all hooked is a huge step in the right direction and they already own the entire social graph to execute in this direction.

I don't know whether I should be excited or terrified that it's FB leading this effort.

They have the scale to execute, they have the technology to support the crucial relationships but they are SO FUCKING INVASIVE into our lives as a company.

Raph Koster's lecture at GDC got some fairly broad attention on this concept, although his was geared more to the potential negative consequences, but it's still 100% worth a watch for anybody interested in the space.

[https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/03/05/slides-for-still- logge...](https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/03/05/slides-for-still-logged-in-my- gdc-talk/)

<comment><USER3> _> > There's no question the long goal for corporate AR is to digitize the entire physical world, catalog it, and then sell outrageously effective ad inventory against everything that we see._

From working in industrial AR for awhile, this is a tiny, _tiny_ tip of the iceberg. The (actually very reasonable) buzzword bingo is smart contracts + blockchain + reality capture + HMI = rather a lot more than better advertising.

<comment><USER4> what do smart contracts and block chain have to do with AR?

<comment><USER3> AR is a human interface (transparent head mounted display) plus reality capture.

HMD lets humans interface with the world of the computer. Reality capture lets the computer interface with the world of humans.

Reality capture feeds smart contracts; if the AR cameras see you're low on some stock, "the computer" can order more, and direct the people to pick them up. Smart contracts are a reasonable mechanism for doing that.

Block chain is a shared ledger that's suitable for multiple entities tracking anything (say, reality) together, and a communications medium that's good for things that need to be auditable (say, tasks).

<comment><USER5> Do block chains necessarily require wasting as much electricity as bitcoin mining?

<comment><USER3> No. Think of blockchains as formalizing consensus reality. Each block, some "lucky" processing node (miner) somewhere gets to determine what that consensus actually is. The various techniques (proof-of-work, -stake, -etc) more or less make it hard for a bad actor to be that "lucky" node.

BC does this by letting everyone submit answers, but making it really hard (computationally intensive, aka, burn electricity) for your answer to the be the one that's accepted.

PeerCoin (to pick one) does this by making your likelihood of being The One correlate with your investment in the worth of the coin (literally how many of the coins you control). If you're the One, either your answer is accepted, or you're selected to give the answer, and then it's accepted - I'm not sure which.

You can also limit participation in your blockchain in combination with these; for example, a closed (invite-only) bitcoin would still burn electricity, but not nearly as much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >We want Facebook Spaces to be a comfortable place for everyone. You have control of your experience, including the ability to pause at any time. Pausing moves you into a quiet space where you can take a break away from other people and activities. You can also choose to mute your friends or remove them from your space. Facebook Spaces is all about connecting with friends and family that you know and trust, and we're committed to making VR a positive place for all.

The psychological implications my goodness...

<comment><USER7> umm the muting part reminds me of the black mirror episode "white christmas". Hopefully it doesnt come to that

<comment><USER8> Muting is absolutely necessary. Play any online video game for 5 minutes and you'll understand it's a necessity.

<comment><USER9> As a general concept I agree, but this is limited to your facebook friends. This isn't randomly joining a multiplayer server, this is intentionally adding friends to a space. Ostensibly, you should know them. Adding muting capabilities seems like some weird power play that'll just lead to bullying. If you don't want someone there, just remove them. Hell, unfriend them.

<comment><USER10> And you've been able to mute people in various group voice chat programs (made for talking with friends) since forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I see Facebook are still pretending the HTC Vive and SteamVR is not a thing.

Oculus need to support other headsets or they are going to fall even further behind. Win the mindshare where you can, because you are certainly not anywhere near winning the PC-VR space.

<comment><USER12> Yep.

All they have to do is release Facebook Spaces for the HTC Vive. Why not? Why tie themselves to only one VR platform? That would be like Facebook only supporting iPhones.

My guess is that the higher-ups are suffering from the sunken cost fallacy, and think that they have to stay exclusive to the Rift to justify their Oculus purchase. After all, if they support the Vive, why did they need to purchase Oculus in the first place?

<comment><USER13> Why not an open API for that matter? What if I want to use my Virtuality HMD, hacked PowerGlove and surplus Ascension Flock-of-Birds rig to drop into a VR world? Why shouldn't I be able to do that if I have the equipment and skills to get it to work?

BTW - I actually do own all of that equipment (collecting older VR gear is a side hobby of mine).

An open API will allow for any VR gear manufacturer to participate.

Think about it this way - what if in the beginning, Facebook only supported Dell branded PCs - or more realistically, only Mozilla on Linux - back when they started? Do you think they'd have been as successful? No way to know, of course, but only supporting one (or a few) manufacturer's devices doesn't seem like the best way forward for quick market saturation.

Whereas an open api would allow for far more people to get into the game; and if things started to take off, you would also see new independents spring up to sell lower cost HMDs, VR rigs, tracking systems, etc as demand heated up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Be Yourself in VR

If second life shows anything, people want to be someone else in VR.

<comment><USER15> If anonymous Youtube comments show anything, some people want to be complete assholes in VR.

<comment><USER16> So are they being themselves, or someone else? :)

<comment><USER17> It _was_ named "iD Software," after all...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> the seriousness that vr and vr social apps are addressed with is dumbfounding to me. watch the video at the bottom of the page -- this is a huge joke. nobody will ever put on a headset and grab their controllers when they could just use skype. skype, which is much less hassle and gives you a real face to face experience with the other persons actual face. vr/ar contact lenses are never coming within a window of time that any of us care about. vr in general will remain a useless gimmick for longer than any of us are willing to wait, probably well past all of our deaths. im sick and tired of vr hype.

<comment><USER19> I've always found Skype/Facetime/etc. to be off-putting - if only because by looking at the person I'm talking to forces me to appear to look under them (looking at the screen vs looking the camera). During interviews, I make the conscious effort to look at the camera so as to present a more normal eye contact for my viewer, but this undercuts my ability to read their physical responses. If I had true-to-size representation of a person, either in VR or with a 2D screen, that allowed me to use natural eye contact and body language I would use it far more often.

<comment><USER20> anecdote: a week ago I tried to get on Skype with a coworker, he couldn't hear me. we hop on google handouts, now I can't hear him. we ended up just falling back to a phone call.

I don't find the life sized hologram thing to be that valuable. I would much rather all that money go into a zero-latency, high quality video/audio experience. life sized holograms don't solve this fundamental quality of communication issue.

am I just being a curmudgeon?

<comment><USER21> Reminded the good old-fashioned scene from HBO's Silicon Valley [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2prsYbV1TkM](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2prsYbV1TkM)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is super, super weird but could be huge.

It's very Black Mirror, it sort of makes me uncomfortable but I can't explain why. I think it could be a much better version of what Facebook is trying to be, but .... something's off.

</comment><comment><USER23> Very interesting. At this point, there may be many smaller startups that are more innovative or have higher quality VR apps, but if they are competing against FB's massive hold on all aspects of everyday life, there isn't much doubt who the winner will be.

More experienced peers, who lived in times when IBM or Microsoft seemed to be all-pervasive (like FB/Google are today): Do you think these companies will fade away in the next few decades? Or they will go on to be 100-year old companies, like today's car/oil companies.

<comment><USER24> I'm maybe not _that_ experienced, but I do think that FB/Google are fundamentally different. Microsoft and IBM's 'products' depreciated very quickly. 5-year old software just isn't worth as much as brand new software (especially during that era.) Data, on the other hand, is like a wine that just gets better with age. FB's info about you only gets more valuable the longer they keep getting it. As long as FB/Google have active users, the moats around their businesses will likely seem impenetrable.

<comment><USER17> People age and die, though. I doubt FB will implode like MySpace, but oldsters like me, who got tangled up in its webs back when it was only open to ".edu" addresses, will die off. Then FB will have lots of data on corpses, which can no longer click on ads. It can frantically copy rivals for awhile, but once the first generation of kids stops bothering to sign up, it's on its way to the nursing home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I watched the presentation. The most striking feature is that the avatar is created automatically from profile photos. It's probably possible to game the system, but the default is an avatar that looks like the real person. Compare this with Second Life avatars, if you've been there 10 years ago: they defaulted to some different 20-25 yo person. Not that the avatar of the speaker didn't look younger than she was, but it was still her.

I think this has to do with making Spaces a "comfortable place for everyone", where you recognize your friends and don't mingle with strangers. It means it's an extension of the real world and actually many of the Spaces in the video were overlays over the real world. It goes more in the direction of augmented reality than virtual reality.

They also presented some interesting stuff in the areas of object recognition, 2D pics to 3D scene transformations, interacting with objects in those scenes, simultaneous localization and mapping (setting virtual objects precisely at a position). Technologically they were the most interesting announcements, in my opinion.

The news about Messenger were somewhat underwhelming: smart replies, M suggestions, game challenges, chat extensions. Interesting but not ground breaking. I'm still waiting for end to end encryption to chatbots (encryption is granted on the network but FB's servers see the messages in clear) and for WhatsApp bots.

<comment><USER26> That also removes a layer of anonymity which, in theory isn't needed because you would be conversing with family and friends. But the second you get other people in the mix, you'll really wish you had the ability to NOT look like yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This looks exactly like every other social VR app, and is probably ripping off elements from several. (Of course, one could argue that social VR has been borrowing from Facebook all along.)

</comment><comment><USER28> I can't wait until cyberspace _literally_ becomes a consensual hallucination.

</comment><comment><USER29> Do they have psychologists or psychology department in VR team/department?

After facebook era, I don't really buy what facebook is building. That doesn't seems to be a right social network (driving people crazy, lonely, unhealthy addicted, etc.)

If we are going to go full healthy virtual world, please think carefully.

I used to live in a city (Bangkok) that has most active facebook users in the world. The society is sick. When everyone is psychopathic, no one knows who is. That's bad to me, then I moved out to a peaceful city in the northeastern, closed facebook account. Life is going normal now.

<comment><USER13> > The society is sick. When everyone is psychopathic

Can you elaborate on what you mean here? In what way is the society of Bangkok "sick and psychopathic"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> These avatars creep me out.

<comment><USER31> I'm surprised they are so creepy looking. You'd think Facebook could afford a decent illustrator to mock up the avatars? But knowing Facebook they're probably algorithmically generated avatar images...

<comment><USER32> "Uncanny valley"

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

<comment><USER33> Uncanny valley is not the explanation for all creepy looking models. It is specifically a problem with very realistic looking models and textures not being quite right, for a variety of reasons. These models are not attempting to be realistic, nor are they particularly close.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Facebook is an advertising platform, their main goal is to get new accounts and usage. They are going to get a lot of mileage with this via the API.

Developers will create useful and unexpected applications with this and in order to use the new apps you will need a facebook login.

It generates new users for them and helps to prevent someone else from stealing their user base.

</comment><comment><USER35> I mean (besides it being Facebook), this is all well and good, but I don't see this being mainstream until VR headsets see some sort of mainstream. I guess this is some kind of chicken and egg problem, and Facebook wants to be at the forefront either way, but I can only see this being a very niche blend of Skype.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is a pretty clever way to avoid the uncanny valley for VR videoconferencing. I assume we're a long way from photorealistic avatars based on the holoportation demo from MS.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0)

<comment><USER37> The Holoportation video feels a lot less cringe worthy and cheesy to me. At least there's a lot more body language that's being captured, which feels more natural. Their example of being able to record real life in 3D, play it back, and walk around in the experience also seems more innovative. But of course it's much further away from being ready to use unlike Spaces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > _It's easy to create an identity that represents the real you in Facebook > Spaces. This helps people recognize you and makes VR feel more like hanging > out in person._

Can someone remind me if they still require you to go by your full legal name, or do they let you identify yourself the way you prefer to?

</comment><comment><USER39> While this probably is the future some day, I suspect that it will flop in the interim—creating a sort of _Google Glass_ effect that turns people off to VR.

I'm sure they don't have many choices from a technical perspective, but the cartoon avatars are kind of creepy if not cringe-inducing.

</comment><comment><USER40> This would be a great way for people with mobility issues to be included in activities.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's like those services that popped up in the 90s that tried to translate things into the internet age. Like the service that would use your printer to print an entire newspaper for you ever morning.

</comment><comment><USER42> Wow, those avatars actually look more obnoxious than the Nintendo Miis.

</comment><comment><USER43> It's a cool gimmick -- and bordering on being a SecondLife spin-off -- but it won't ever replace face-to-face interaction, with digital models.

</comment><comment><USER44> I can definitely see some usecases of these experiences. Not wanting to sound too negative, I would prefer to meet the people in person and drink a beer, eat a meal than to lounge around in some virtual room. I see the allure of it if you are staying in a place that is hard to reach. But travel itself is also an experience that can be enjoyed - even more so if it is far away and exotic.

<comment><USER45> _Not wanting to sound too negative, I would prefer to meet the people in person and drink a beer, eat a meal than to lounge around in some virtual room._

Sure. But once you've had the experience of your circle of friends dispersing to different cities, the appeal becomes immediately obvious.

<comment><USER44> Actually I am in this position. I rather visit the people and enjoy a weekend with them than put on a VR headset. Also it's a great excuse to go away for a weekend. And if it has to be something interactive I found video conferences quite practical. Also if a meeting is important I prefer to be present than remote because it is easier to gauge reactions of people.

<comment><USER46> I've got a circle of friends I see more often than anyone else, but only on TeamSpeak whilst gaming. I would absolutely love to visit them, but we are all without exception too poor to do any such thing, so it's impossible.

I suspect this will play into the success or failure of Facebook Spaces. How many people are on Facebook with enough tech to do this (in its crude low-poly way) but who are also far too poor to flit about physically visiting those they love?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This looks like it will have the same problem as early bluetooth headsets: you look crazy using them. As well as they can get it to work and as popular as it becomes among early adopters, it will never really catch on with the general public because most people are too afraid of looking like an idiot to use it in public.

<comment><USER15> I dunno, this seems to be more useful when you're chilling at home chatting with your friends on Facebook Messenger. It doesn't matter how it looks if it's just you in the living room.

I'd say the real problem is that chat is good enough - it's why Google Hangouts never really took off as a place to "hang out"

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> So avatars are limited.

Makes sense, but it could also open up a way to sell premium avatars. Or really, rent their use.

If I could design my own avatar, then pay $10 a month for it to be approved and then available to just myself in various online spaces, that would be very cool.

<comment><USER49> straight out of neuromancer

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I hope I'm wrong but I think we'll look at this in 5 years and laugh.

<comment><USER38> I don't think it'll take that long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> oh great. now my kids have even less of a reason to go outside. thanks fb!

</comment><comment><USER52> Second Life v2?

<comment><USER53> The company behind Second Life is already working on a VR-centric "Second Life v2", with what seems to me a more interesting vision of the metaverse than Facebook Spaces.

[http://www.wsj.com/video/creating-virtual-reality- worlds/E18...](http://www.wsj.com/video/creating-virtual-reality- worlds/E180E596-4DBA-4F53-B2D2-7A3A3D702D0D.html)

There's also High Fidelity, an open source, distributed VR metaverse started by the founder of the same company.

[https://highfidelity.io/](https://highfidelity.io/)

<comment><USER54> It's not called "Second Life v2" it's called Sansar.

<comment><USER53> I didn't mean that literally, although it _was_ originally announced as "Second Life 2".

<comment><USER5> Not "Third Life"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> If you want to try it out, but have a Vive... apparently ReVive works.

</comment><comment><USER56> I'd really like them to offer their avatar system for other applications. Identity is so much part of social VR and it would be great to share it between apps.

</comment><comment><USER57> Available now on the Oculus Store™ with Oculus Rift®!

</comment><comment><USER58> Increasingly relevant:

[https://theintercept.com/2016/12/23/virtual-reality- allows-t...](https://theintercept.com/2016/12/23/virtual-reality-allows-the- most-detailed-intimate-digital-surveillance-yet/)

Emotion detection as a service? I'll pass.</comment>


Using node.js for the Wiimote - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/05/11/using-node-js-for-the-wiimote/

<comment><USER2> If anyone has any questions I'm happy to respond in here as well.</comment>


Canadarm: a JavaScript logger that works for you - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cerner/canadarm A blog post with more details can be seen here:<p>http://engineering.cerner.com/blog/javascript-logging-we-can-do-better/ <comment><AUTHOR> You can see a blog post in more detail here:

[http://engineering.cerner.com/blog/javascript-logging-we- can...](http://engineering.cerner.com/blog/javascript-logging-we-can-do- better/)</comment>


Ghost in the Cell - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/10/16447264/prison-hacker-recycled-computer-fraud-ohio-marion-transkiy <comment><USER2> The debate surrounding the ethicality notwithstanding, it seems like an incredible waste of talent and ability to lock up someone with this kind of mind and work ethic. If for no other reason than this, I hope we can at least have a meaningful conversation about justice reform and the prison-industrial complex.

<comment><USER3> That's an interesting way to look at it.

Apply your comment to Harvey Weinstein and see if you can give him a pass on an "incredible waste of talent and ability"

<comment><USER2> Advocating for not locking people up isn't equivalent to arguing that there should be no enforcement of law or punishment for crimes committed, or as you say, giving someone "a pass". This seems to me an example of a false dilemma (logical fallacy). There are other strategies available besides either incarcerating someone or doing nothing at all.

I simply think that in general locking people up is inefficient, ineffective, and immoral. There are certainly exceptions IMHO; I'm not an absolutist on this. But I think the actual cases that justify incarcerations are a small percentage of what we currently have.

<comment><USER4> The argument for not locking up was that "he works hard and has great mind".

Imo, both are weak argument to treat that person any different if that person really commuted crime that would put less great hacker to prison.

<comment><USER2> No, the argument for not locking up was that he is a human being and has rights, and incarceration is a barbaric practice that doesn't work anyway (if the stated goal is rehabilitation, which it usually is).

Hard work and a great mind have nothing to do with the justification for not imprisoning him. Those come into play when considering the waste to society as a result of locking him up. I can see how the two positions were conflated, but hopefully this clarifies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Brady alerted the staff, and a lieutenant squeezed into the cramped space, > snapping photos to document what they'd found. A couple of inmates pulled > down the computers, and carted them away. Brady later told investigators > that he didn't realize just how troubling the discovery was. "It didn't > click for me that, oops, this might be a crime scene until after we had > found everything," he said. "And a couple days later, I went, 'Ah, shit.'"

really? you found a lowly computer sitting in a ceiling in a prison and he didn't think much about it?

<comment><USER5> Brady was the IT guy, thinking about crimes wasn't his gig. The inmates weren't going to say anything. If the lieutenant mentioned is a police LT and not just a generic term for assistant, then it's the lieutenant's fault for not mentioning that it was obviously illegal.

I think the distinction that needs to be made is that hiding a computer in the ceiling is breaking the prison's rules, but not illegal in itself. There is no law saying that felons can't access the internet- that prohibition only happen in specific cases related to computers (fraud, child porn distribution, etc.). It could have been that the inmates were just browsing the internet, which isn't illegal. Brady the IT guy didn't think that convicts have less to lose and are more likely to conduct actually illegal activities with their computer network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The buried headline here is that the AFL-CIO apparently used prison labor.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think one of the takeaways here is that "the virtual world" and "the real world" are not as separate as many people seem to think. I used this fact to good effect to escape homelessness. But, like anything, it can be used for either good or ill.

We should perhaps be more mindful of that then we seem to be, on the whole. It is a central element of a lot of complaints about things like Facebook. What happens online has real world consequences, contrary to what a lot of people would like to assert when they are being assholes somewhere on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER8> For a minute I thought this was about genetics (I'm listening "The Selfish Gene"[1] audiobook).

[1] [http://a.co/i5iN6Jm](http://a.co/i5iN6Jm)

<comment><USER9> An affiliate link? :/

<comment><USER8> No, it is not. I gain nothing from this link, I just like the subject and the audiobook is very good.

<comment><USER9> > senderCustomerId=A15Z0B2L8G0ZY

> Let Paulo know I've redeemed this audiobook.

I'm not super familiar with audible but it seems like it could be.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Epic Hunt for a Lost World War II Aircraft Carrier - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/magazine/uss-wasp-lost-world-war-ii-aircraft-carrier.html <comment><USER2> It'd be nice if some of the airplanes scattered around the wreck could be raised and preserved.

</comment><comment><USER3> The exploration ship is the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RV_Petrel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RV_Petrel)

</comment><comment><USER4> Beautifully written - worth a read.</comment>


Next-gen Intel notebook chips to exceed 3.0GHz - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/02/18/next_gen_intel_notebook_chips_to_exceed_3_0ghz.html <comment><USER2> They're at 2.8 GHz now, so I rate this rumor "duh".

</comment><comment><USER3> Moore would be spinning in his grave.</comment>


Classifying software systems - <AUTHOR> http://aryehoffman.com/entry/classifying-software/ <comment><AUTHOR> Not all software is the same from a development perspective. Yet it seems our industry often talks of architectures and paradigms, as though they are applicable to all. Our media is filled with "what is best" and "what should I learn next".

Isn't it necessary to at least identify the type of software undertaking involved, in order to determine what architectural and programming approach should be used?</comment>