Apology Critics Who Want to Teach You How to Say You're Sorry (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/06/these-apology-critics-want-to-teach-you-how-to-say-sorry.html <comment><USER2> I think a big problem with "apologies" nowadays is that they are often not apologies at all, but exercises in ritual humiliation.

True apologies (e.g. what passes between people who care about each other when one of them transgresses in some way) are conversations in which someone expresses concern for the injured party and makes it clear that they're unhappy about what they've done. They aren't structured or formulaic and might not even contain the word "sorry".

The kind of "apology" that parents force uncomprehending children into ("Say you're sorry!") is a totally different thing. We all remember going through it. It has nothing to do with genuinely understanding your duty and responsibility towards others, it's just a Pavlovian training device. Child misbehaves, parent humiliates child, child learns not to misbehave.

The social media public "apology" is even further removed from the real thing because it usually relates not to personal relationships and authentic emotional responses, but to making insincere sacrifices to the political correctness gods in order to limit damage to career/reputation/revenue/share price. There's no point critiquing them, except perhaps to evaluate them as some kind of dubious art form.

</comment><comment><USER3> One of my favorite courses as an undergrad at Syracuse University, was Laurence Thomas' Moral Philosophy course. I vividly remember a fellow student who said some really racist things, and then apologizing, and being surprised when after his apology, Thomas still let the student know that he had work to do, if his intention was to regain the respect of his fellow students and peers. Making an apology is the start of that work, but it is not instant gratification. Some of Thomas' works are quite relavent Living Morally [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0877227780/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_uU.P...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0877227780/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_uU.PBbMQZW7KF) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Thomas](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Thomas)

</comment><comment><USER4> I understand the frustration with egregious non-apologies. Many of those cases are not accidents; they are passive aggressive double downs.

But if an apology has even a shred of sincerity in it, I don't believe snarky critique is at all appropriate in any way. Saying "You apologized wrong" to someone who is trying to take positive steps is counterproductive, mean- spirited, and extremely poor etiquette.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure an apology for murdering my family would be heard without a lot of anger and resentment. Other concepts such as revenge, retribution and other sentiments would likely also come to into play regardless of sincerity.

You make a good point about the snarky critique though. Having looked through a few of the dead comments on this post, a lot of people are very rigid about sensitivity training. There are a lot of parallels with SJW causes in how this is being approached.

(I am not equating those parallels with the validity of sensitivity training, only the rabid nature of the defence against criticism thereof I have seen).

<comment><USER4> Yeah, and the proper response to that killer is not, "you apologized incorrectly". It's just completely irrelevant. The later half of my post assumed you are ready to forgive.

<comment><USER5> The Amish have industrial strength belief in the power of forgiveness. The mind boggles at the power of their belief. [https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2016/oct/02/amish-shooti...](https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2016/oct/02/amish-shooting-10-year-anniversary-pennsylvania-the- happening)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's hard to know what to say when you apologize. So I've learned how to say these words in a heartfelt tone (even while hanging upside-down out a window).

 _I 'm really really sorry. I apologize unreservedly.

I offer a complete and utter retraction.

The imputaion was totally without basis in fact and was in no way fair comment and was motivated purely by malice.

And I deeply regret any distress that my comments may have caused you or your family and I hereby undertake not to repeat any such slander at anytime in the future._

<comment><USER7> I was impressed by Robert Byrd's deep apology for having been once a member of the KKK:

"I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times ... and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened."

Very rare for any politician to apologize so completely and offer to apologize again if necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A real apology is an expression of regret and an appeal to mercy. It is not transactional or representative, it's an acknowledgement of a personal, transgression, and demonstrates a new understanding.

A lot of people aren't worth apologizing to, as the offense they took can often be attributed to a lack of charitable sentiment on their part.

An apology must be given freely, with no expectation, but also don't waste them on people without a track record of magnanimity. I've found people forgive honesty and honest mistakes. If you make a real mistake, people forgive you when you prevail over it, but bending a knee for posterity or to acknowledge authority is worse than not owning it because it rewards sanctimony and cant from bad people.

An apology is for accepting consequences you are prepared to accept, not for avoiding them or mollifying others. I don't agree with the professors approach.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting points in that article.

Having had a Christmas present rejected by a 10 year old I'm well aware of fake apologies. The kid, who had expressed interest in basketball multiple times, asked me a pointed "why did you give me a basketball?" Accusatory tone as if I had gifted him a turd. When suggested by the relevant horrified parent to apologise he laughed. Then later when forced to apologise he did so robotically. I asked him why he was apologising. "Because I had to". When I asked him if he understood why, he said no. Being the offended party I suggested he think about the why before he considered apologising. He disappeared for awhile then came back with a smirk on his face and apologised again. I asked him why he was apologising again when he didn't mean it. Again "because he was told to."

Delivery and intent actually matters.

Maybe this year a certain someone will get some coal.

<comment><USER10> You gave a gift they didn't like. They were rude about it. And then instead of accepting the poor apology of a child, and letting the parents deal with it, you critiqued the child's performance, which also was a refusal to accept the parent's attempt to take a step in the right direction. And you did it twice. And you hold enough of a grudge over it to share this story with the world.

I'm not sure that the child's apology was the only one missing from this story.

<comment><USER9> Interesting criticism. Perhaps more context would help.

They were rude about it. And it was appropriate to criticise the child and the parent. The parent was criticised as that child also did it to others up to that point. Other behaviours like bullying were also creeping in. They hadn't properly addressed it until I actually refused the fake apology. The child had behavioural issues that have now been positively improved through their deliberate effort in subsequent months. Evidence of this is has been seen by teachers at his school apparently. Definitely in his behaviour I've seen as well as his sister.

And he's on the school basketball team now. What a terrible present! Children dislike things for non obvious reasons. Just like adults.

The anecdote shows how an apology has impact. Perhaps you can't handle someone holding a boundary line on acceptable behaviour and this hit a raw nerve for you? I don't know.

The coal was a reference to Christmas, not a grudge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The only way to apologize is to show contrition. Anything else is only appealing to feelings and not to a change for a better future.

'Adds Ingall, "And send the staff through sensitivity training."'

I'd like an apology for this; sensitivity training is not a better future. (I'd also like an apology for the smart quotes, but let's deal with one thing at a time!)

</comment><comment><USER12> I made a 4 min. youtube video on this subject and the checklist basically was

      1. What did you do wrong exactly? No weasel words.
      2. How do you think that made them feel?
      3. Why are their feelings important to you?
      4. What are you committed to doing better in the future?
      5. What steps are you taking to make that come true?
      6. Why is it important to you to make take those steps?

Taking real responsibility is so rare these days, that a well formed apology on it's own, stands out and is rewarded immediately. Not only will you feel great speaking about your true feelings, you'll also have a plan to a brighter future and relationship with that person mapped out, so it's easier to follow.

When you know why your friends, family and lovers are important to you, and how you should treat them, and why it's important to you to behave a certain way towards them, great behavior flows more effortlessly.

<comment><USER13> Very nice!

Coming back to this discussion after a few hours, I see that many of the comments are more concerned with _not_ apologizing than on apologizing. It's your loss, folks!

Having the confidence to know when an apology is appropriate and to apologize properly and sincerely, is not a humiliation but a reflection of your own strength of character.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is some of this kind of apology parsing at the national level as well. China and both Koreas have at various points rejected several rounds of apologies by Japanese heads of state as insincere or insufficiently guilt- ridden. Some cultural critics, such as Ian Buruma, have suggested that the conflict arises out of expecting a "shame" society like Japan to act in similar ways to a "guilt" society like Germany. Others have taken a more cynical view, accusing Japan's historical victims of themselves acting in bad faith in rejecting Japan's official apologies (in the sense that by keeping the victim card in play, the historically aggrieved are able to extract more concessions beyond the ones that accompanied the initial apology). This dynamic is particularly marked in any discussion of comfort women.

Presumably other places we might see this is in how organizations of indigenous peoples in US, Canada, Australia, etc. respond to formal apologies from the national government that previously stripped them of their homelands, in the response by former colonies to official statements of regret from old imperial powers, and in the complex interactions between the descendants of slaves and the white establishment in the US.

<comment><USER5> Apologies are hard for governments and corporations as they can't usually die like a natural citizen so there is no "at least it's in the past" aspect. The "person" who did the atrocity is still at large. They are still in your face. Often still taxing you. This is the sharp edged aspect for most indigenous peoples. The face of the past oppressor is still around, making rules and likely interfering by whatever definition you like to choose.

Racism/slavery is an excellent example as it clearly shows the divide between the pain and the recovery as well as the apology and healing. Given that whites were also trafficked as slaves it's hard to reconcile the diversity training I've been to. Such training was essentially racist against anyone of white skin and asserted sole responsibility. What about the Arabs, Africans, who kept slaves? Africans of all colours hunted and gathered slaves for sale. I heard nothing of this in the history lesson in that training. The British were until recently paying off a massive debt due to a former government paying for the abolishment of slavery [1]. Slavery hasn't even ended. It's still a thing that needs to be fought. At least it's now illegal and socially unacceptable. Governments can actually say the situation has been amended.

Does mean making amends make up for the now-crime-but-previously-non-crime? Does a government making it illegal really help? The straightforward answer is yes, but a substantive lingering anger will still remain. And that is the difficulty. It never ends. So it never heals.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Slavery_Act_2015](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Slavery_Act_2015)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like what this article has to say. I would just add that before you apologize, you should think out what you did, how is was wrong and harmed the other and let yourself feel bad about it, and how you can stop yourself from doing the same sort of wrong thing in the future. Then just say all that to the other person.

</comment><comment><USER13> The key to a good apology is empathizing with the other party.

How have your actions affected them?

<comment><USER16> > The key to a good apology is empathizing with the other party.

We're reaching the Godwin's law here. A "good" apology is not always a good thing though. If you do apologize you should do it to the people you know and cherish, otherwise you might be apologizing to the worst human being on Earth and then face the even worse consequences. Rebuttal could be a good thing and it pays to be polite. Look here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_(dog)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_\(dog\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I learned from a communication class (I think Dale Carnegie) that it is not enough to say "I am sorry" or 'I apologize." You need another component: "I apologize. Please forgive me."

<comment><USER18> Note that you also need to at least attempt to not repeat the action. Too many people seem to get that wrong, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The upside is that if you learn to apologize with the sufficient apparent contrition you can get away with a lot of asking forgiveness rather than permission.</comment>


What is the YC Winter 2013 Application Deadline ? - <AUTHOR>

YC application deadline has been mentioned as Oct 30 on "http://ycombinator.com/apply.html", but after clicking on the actual application the date is Nov 2, 2012. Which one is the actual deadline for submission with an idea? <comment><USER2> You have apply.html cached. Nov 2.</comment>


Fur Affinity is currently under attack by a DDoS - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/1230536307790708738 <comment><AUTHOR> Probably of interest here given the tech/furry overlap.</comment>


Ask HN: Any other sites like TekPub to watch developers work? - <AUTHOR>

Watching Notch's code stream "Making Prelude of the Chambered" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhN35bGvM8c&t=10m05s&hd=1) was fascinating.<p>Are there any other sites like WatchMeCode.net. I'd like to watch developers screencast their workflows, especially for different languages. Watching a top OSS contributor work (jumping from IDE, to test, to GitHub) would be awesome. <comment><USER2> We do all kinds of screencasts - I'm editing one about ActiveAdmin on Rails right now, and we also have many other formats (.NET, some Rails) - not all just Javascript.

That said - Destroy All Screencasts is great (<https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts>), and PeepCode has terrific Play by Play stuff with Gary Bernhardt which I can't recommend enough: <https://peepcode.com/products/play-by-play-bernhardt>.

He also has Ryan Singer and Yehuda Katz doing their thing... great stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> PeepCode has a series called "Play by Play" (<https://peepcode.com/screencasts/play-by-play>) where you can see a lot of professionals solve a small problem in 1-2 hours. It goes through their thought process, design and implementation. I think I've seen Ruby, JS, Python and even C in some of those screencasts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Checking it out now.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> TekPub streams are mostly javascript. I'd like to see ruby devs at work. It struck me over the weekend as I was working on some 24 Pull Request projects. We should not only share our code, but our process as well.

Edit: RailsCasts are awesome, and episode 300 ([http://railscasts.com/episodes/300-contributing-to-open- sour...](http://railscasts.com/episodes/300-contributing-to-open-source)) is a great example. Any others?

</comment><comment><USER4> I run NSScreencast which covers all things iOS in bite-sized weekly videos. Check it out <http://nsscreencast.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link, will check it out.</comment></comment>


Language diversity & scalability: Tech and visitor stats for top sites - <AUTHOR> http://www.webforefront.com/performance/keytechnologies.html#table.hightrafficsites

<comment><USER2> As Michael Hartl [<http://railstutorial.org/book#sec:1.1.2>] said, you scale a site, not a framework.

Or language for that matter.

The details on system strategy, design and architecture are far more interesting and valuable than who is running what, other than appeasing unfounded fears.</comment>


Don't Panic! transfer.sh will live on! - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/storjproject/status/1060602489009893377 <comment><AUTHOR> Details:[0]

> _Don't Panic! transfer.sh will live on!_

> _After running and supporting transfer.sh for 4 years on my own, I'm happy > to announce we are partnering with Storj Labs to keep the project going. > From day one, the transfer.sh code has been open source. Storj has a > commitment to open source sustainability and reached out to help us find a > way to keep our project alive. Stay tuned for updates on the partnership > with Storj, but for now, please continue to enjoy the service!_

> _Blue skies, Remco Verhoef_

Full story[1,2]

[0] [http://web.archive.org/web/20181112142220/https://transfer.s...](http://web.archive.org/web/20181112142220/https://transfer.sh/)

[1] [https://old.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/9shdl5/transfe...](https://old.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/9shdl5/transfersh_will_shutdown_30th_of_november_2018/)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18331139](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18331139)</comment>


Want a high-performing developer team? Scrap the annual performance reviews - <AUTHOR> http://codingsans.com/blog/high-performing-developer-team-performance-reviews <comment><USER2> Anyone like these reviews? They are useless. Where I'm at now on a scale of 1 to 5, the company makes it impossible to get anywhere near a 4, let alone a 5. You could probably die working yourself to death on the job and still only be a 3.</comment>


Hacking with Andrew and Brad: an HTTP/2 client in Go [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG-UaBJXZ80

<comment><USER2> Amazing! Just the presentation style alone, pair programming, talking to the camera and explaining their thought process, dual computers. Wow, this is pretty slick! It is like having a mentor right there.

<comment><USER3> Glad you liked it! We enjoy making them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could I suggest also recording an episode when you actually gear up to merge this into master?

<comment><USER4> We committed it straight to master after we finished the video. The code has been worked on quite a bit since.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was referring to something which Brad mentioned at the start of the video. About making this client reuse an underlying connection for multiple requests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These are great. It's very valuable to see how you guys approach problems in Go, given that you're among the two most experienced users. Really hope you guys keep doing them.

</comment><comment><USER6> Really interesting to watch, thanks for doing this.

Anyone else really impressed by their development speed? I've not used Go and following someone else in an editor can be difficult, but it took me some effort to keep up: you guys never slowed down for nearly two hours!

Did you ever find out why ip.appspot.com yielded "Bad Request"?

<comment><USER7> TL;DR: Sending both `Host` and `:authority` headers is apparently against the spec.

Some discussion on /r/golang : [https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/2x626t/hacking_with...](https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/2x626t/hacking_with_andrew_and_brad_an_http2_server/coygpij)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I commented something similar on the first installment of this, but again, in general, regardless of language or content, it's always nice to watch/listen to people pair up on something and compare it to how I work (either alone or with someone else).

</comment><comment><USER9> Loving this video so far - showed it to my wife and described it to her as "check out this video... two dudes sitting on a couch programming, but they are really smart dudes tackling tough problems so it's fascinating", needless to say, she was amused.

This reminds me of Peepcode's play by play, but they're building real things.

</comment><comment><USER10> Go is such an elegant and compact language.

</comment><comment><USER11> Slightly off-topic, but the use of 'an' as the indefinite article in the phrase 'an HTTP' always seems really weird to my brain.

In Ireland we seem to learn a less "rounded" version of the letter H when we learn the alphabet - I assume this comes from Irish language pronunciation. It sounds much more like "hay-ch" than "aych", really emphasising that initial 'h'.

So, thinking about it, I guess 'a HTTP' probably sounds pretty weird to every other native English speaker in the world :)

Anyone else out there prefer 'a HTTP' over 'an HTTP'?

Back on topic: I really enjoyed the last two hacking sessions, it's really edifying to see the process. More please!

<comment><USER4> You're in the minority with your pronouncation of 'h', but are far from alone: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H#Name_in_English](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H#Name_in_English)

<comment><USER11> Thanks! Fascinating. Good to know I am not alone :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Would love to see this being done in other languages!

</comment><comment><USER12> Go really simple and elegant language! Good video.

</comment><comment><USER13> This was awesome. Do more please.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is wonderful, and as a side effect clearly shows that emacs is much better than vim.

<comment><USER4> Well, it was Brad's machine, so my vim environment wasn't set up as it is normally. Not really a fair comparison. :-)

<comment> vhost- Phew! I thought Acme had ruined you and you were all about that no-syntax highlighting.

What did you use to switch between emacs and vim? It seemed like a quick hot- key.

<comment><USER15> > and you were all about that no-syntax highlighting

He is. He usually does not use syntax highlighting: [https://twitter.com/enneff/status/571067872291594240](https://twitter.com/enneff/status/571067872291594240)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This was fun to watch. Thanks, fyi video card is full at 1:42</comment>


Ask HN: any hierarchical checklist software? - <AUTHOR>

I need, for my day job, to be able to track the very same work breakdown for 5 to 10 different projects in parallel. The work breakdown is very structured, hierarchical.
But I cannot find a way to track to do items in a structured/hierarchical way.
Does anybody know a (good) hierarchical checklist software ?
<comment> Example of what I am looking for (it's really a simple thing, but I cannot find it):
[ ] is a checkbox Using the car work breakdown example here:http://www.expertprogrammanagement.com/2010/03/wbs-work-breakdown-structures-everything-you-need-to-know/
Make a car [ ] -- Make the engine [ ] ---- Make the cylinder  [ ]
---- Make the cam shaft [ ] etc. </comment><comment><USER2> ... Project?

Probably not the best ever at anything, but it does that and quite a lot of other stuff. You could skip the details you're not interested in ( resources allocation etc) and keep it simple.

Also, it fits great if your day job is a structured environment.

If it's not, or you use Mac (as I do) you can try gantter project, it's a google apps add-on. Great for collaboration.

Just my 2c...

</comment><comment><USER3> Notebook from <http://www.circusponies.com/> is great. Mac only.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Though I have a PC at work :/ I had a quick look at the site, but it did not look like a checlist software, more like a tool to take notes.</comment></comment>


React Native tutorial - <AUTHOR> https://chrysntm.com/single-screen-cross-platform-mobile-app-in-45-minutes/ <comment><USER2> You lost me at

      yarn add native-base --save

      npm install @expo/vector-icons --save

When I read `native-base` I was all: _ewww_. Everybody I talk to who used it in previous project regretted it and build back.

Second, the mixture of _yarn_ and _npm_ in the code snippet shows that the author either didn't understand what they are doing, or does not care to lead with a clean example. It's okay to stick with only _npm_ in a beginners tutorial.

Update: Also, why the Python prerequisite?

<comment><USER3> While I think you could've been a lot more constructive with this comment, you're right—it's clear the author is new to the practice.

I wish there were a way to encourage more people to write without simultaneously causing the spread of bad advice. At least, it does seem like good ideas mostly prevail?

Edit: upon actually reading the whole article, I gotta say, this is exceptionally low-quality stuff by HN's standards.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are you going to learn AI or Deep Learning? If so, how and when? - <AUTHOR> AI seems to be the next bubble within the tech industry, it's more like a mini bubble. We're all optimistic and bull on AI for the next 10 years thinking it will lead to something completely different. If it does, then most of us will have to specialize in something different. If it doesn't, then it's a bubble. So my question is:<p>Are you going to learn AI or Deep Learning? If so, how and when are you going to start? <comment><USER2> Read them and weep. [https://intelligence.org/research- guide/](https://intelligence.org/research-guide/)</comment>


Ask HN: What modern CSS framework do you use? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Since Grid and Flexbox became well supported enough to use there's no need for a CSS framework, so I don't use one. If I need a UI toolkit I use react.semantic-ui.com or bootstrap 4, but I prefer not to.</comment>


LyX – The Document Processor - <AUTHOR> http://www.lyx.org/ <comment><USER2> I love LyX!

The end-result of good looking LaTeX documents, without (most of [1]) the pain.

I recently adapted a colleague's document from LaTeX and it was simply easier to redraw a slightly complex table in LyX than to understand the table markup. I think he'd be disheartened to learn how fast it was to produce the table.

Writing math is also a no-brainer compared to LaTeX. Whenever my LaTeX-using colleagues see me writing stuff in LyX, and the screen is filled with semantics rules that basically look just like they'll look in the final PDF, they go "yeah, I really have to check out LyX some time..."

Mostly they end up never checking out LyX and sticking with LaTeX, to their loss, but I've managed to convert a few people over!

([1] the remaining pain is related to dealing with conference and journal style files, which often have quirks in LaTeX, and adding LyX on top sometimes demands an extra layer of adaptation.)

<comment><USER3> > I recently adapted a colleague's document from LaTeX and it was simply > easier to redraw a slightly complex table in LyX than to understand the > table markup. I think he'd be disheartened to learn how fast it was to > produce the table.

Can't you even import some of those?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is one of the finest pieces of open source software that I've ever seen. The documentation is very good and even succeeds at making LaTeX accessible to non-technical people.

I've been using it for years for pretty much everything that other people would use LibreOffice or Office for.

<comment><USER5> Not many pieces of OSS are on my list of "would continue to use even if all competing commercial offerings were open-sourced". LyX is on that list, beside Inkscape and Postgres.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I too use LyX a lot but it is a pig upon which we should not place too much in the way of lipstick. While it has all the power of LaTeX, it only succeeds in hiding the complexity some of the time and does introduce its own issues. To assert that it is easy to use is simply betraying personal experience limited to a relatively simple use case. Multilingual issues mean manual configuration of XeTeX + font hacks + painstaking per-phrase language markup for simple stuff like including quotes from foreign languages. It's often necessary to manually fiddle your LaTeX preamble, or drop little raw LaTeX boxes in the middle of your text. Seemingly basic features on other authoring platforms (timelines come to mind) are virtually impossible in LyX. That said, it's the only way to author some documents, is highly reliable, and well worth supporting as a project.

<comment><USER7> While LyX is not perfect and does not wholly encapsulate LaTeX in my experience it provides 99% of the functionality for 90% of the people.

While it complicates things a bit when dealing with custom or non-standard LaTeX layouts, it makes writing so much easier and more efficient.

One way to get the best of both worlds is to write the document in LyX until it is almost done (except some weird layout things for journals) and then export it to LaTeX and give it the final touches there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> (Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of [https://www.overleaf.com](https://www.overleaf.com), which is an online LaTeX editor with a rich text view that was inspired in part by LyX.)

I've written several papers in LyX, and I think it was a great way to get started with LaTeX. The main trouble I had with it was collaboration --- since it was a desktop app that not many (possibly none?) of my colleagues used, I couldn't really get anyone else to contribute, except by asking for them to provide text and then mostly manually inserting it back in to LyX.

In the end, they convinced me to just write LaTeX source into an EtherPad, which was fine once I got used to it. And Overleaf is basically just a refinement of this idea.

I hope that Overleaf's rich text mode also helps people climbs LaTeX's notoriously steep learning curve, and I hope it saves them from some of the collaboration problems that I had when I was doing the same. We have some evidence that it is helping, such as these high school students who somehow managed to write a 300 page report in LaTeX using Overleaf [1]. I think that's amazing!

[1] [https://www.overleaf.com/blog/289-the-nano-ninjas- building-r...](https://www.overleaf.com/blog/289-the-nano-ninjas-building- robots-an-all-girls-first-tech-challenge-team-number-stem4girls)

<comment><USER7> You can (on windows at least) install a portable version of LyX onto a directory on your USB stick or network folder, give it to your colleagues and they just run it from there.

LyX supports change tracking similar to other wordprocessors so you can see who edited/added/deleted which part of the document.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've never liked LyX, it removes the benefit of not worrying about formatting that LaTeX is made for, while still being significantly harder to use than Word. It fills an awkward space between WYSIWYG and markup without the benefits of either.

I eventually settled on Texmaker as it incorporates all the features to allow me to write documents quickly, while still maintaining the LaTeX way of doing things.

<comment><USER10> How does it remove the benefit of not worrying about formatting?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Really love lyx. Used plain latex for a while, but for me LyX really hits the sweetspot between writing latex in vim and word-like WYSIWYG.

Lyx and Zotero+LyZ made for a quite fine thesis workflow. LyX files are plain text and thus easily managed in git.

<comment><USER12> I disagree about the git part. Or at least mine is not configured as it should. Lyx, by default at least, wrap the line to the 80-char limits which make a change (of a removed -or added- coma -or word-) several breakline due to the shift. Which makes the `git diff` almost unreadable and the change hard to find.

<comment><USER13> For a single person document git is probably overkill - but due to the fact hit is available everywhere it _is_ an easy way to have a history of your changes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I used LyX mostly in my university year after Word crashed and took down a glorious formula document I needed for a test. LyX was better for editing math and the documents looked gorgeous without me needing to know what made them so nice.

I then started to hack on it and did some code (InsetGraphics), most likely since then that code was replaced already but it was fun and the community around it was amazing.

I'm still using it from time to time to create great looking documents when corporate doesn't require an official Word template.

</comment><comment><USER15> Always liked and used LyX, and never looked back. LaTeX is not for humans in my opinion, nobody should ever write LaTeX by hand.

<comment><USER16> I was introduced to latex by a German student in my telecoms lab. Armed with a handful of examples I wrote all my papers from then on in Tex. The thing that really struck me, I concentrated on the content not the formatting. Word etc require so much fiddling to get it looking right, it takes energy away from actually writing your paper!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This looks interesting, but the Ubuntu stable release is asking me to download 1.2GB of packages! Holy crap. I'd like to try this out but why on earth is this bigger than the actual distro?

<comment><USER18> You can try adding --no-install-recommends which gets it down to 55 MB, though I balked when it asked me if I wanted to install unauthenticated packages.

<comment><USER19> That sounds like a local caching issue — an `apt-get update` first usually fixes that for me.

Or, you have a third-party APT repository specified in `/etc/apt/sources.list{,.d/*}` that you didn't install the keys for.

Or the NSA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As a layperson, why would I use this rather than just open MS Word? Is there any benefit for me, considering I'm not writing Math?

<comment><USER14> I like the look of a LaTeX document better than that of a Word document by a mile.

You can probably get a Word document to look great as well but in LaTeX it happens by default. It actually provides you proper typographical advantages without you needing to know anything about them.

<comment><USER21> And then you can use the package Microtype and then the LaTeX output turns into pure buttery smooth readability.

<comment><USER22> Very interesting.

Here's a page showing the effect of using microtype, and some tips of usage: [1]

[1] [http://www.khirevich.com/latex/microtype/](http://www.khirevich.com/latex/microtype/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have had decent experience using [https://www.sharelatex.com/](https://www.sharelatex.com/)

I compile my cv using latex. And once I had to make a few changes to my cv. So I used their service from my office. It worked pretty well for my use case.

PS: I have no affiliation with them.

<comment><USER24> I've used sharelatex when collaborating on a small paper. It's REALLY useful to live-edit a latex document in parallel with other people, and see changes live. The chat being able to embed latex is super useful.

Besides that, though, it's just OK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Lyx helped me type everything during my lectures & seminars in the University. I was typing about 30%-40% faster than anyone else was writing (including complex equations).

At the end of the Semester, my notes were the only searchable ones (not to mention easiest to read) :)

</comment><comment><USER22> Slightly offtopic. I've always wondered why LaTeX doesn't value "composability". When putting some environment inside another environment, it's always a surprise whether it works or not (or even, whether it compiles).

At least, that is my experience.

<comment><USER13> Is postscript composable?

<comment><USER22> Postscript is very much like SVG. I would say it is very composable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> TeXmacs is better. Check out this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlcqGRv7xhc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlcqGRv7xhc)

Unlike LyX, TeXmacs actually has WYSIWYG editing. LyX only provides a rough approximation of the output.

Moreover, the real-time typesetter in TeXmacs rivals the output of TeX/LaTeX. In some ways, it is better.

<comment><USER27> TeXmacs is great--you can precisely and effortlessly write equations (and tables) that would be a huge pain to generate in Lyx, Word, and especially LaTeX. Jupyter-style embedding of live Python/Octave/Matlab (and more?) consoles into the document is pretty awesome, too.

That said, I never use it for a document I'm going to send to collaborators unless they are really onboard with it first.

1\. Emacs keybindings/window layout. If you aren't used to thinking in buffers and don't know which is the meta key, this can be very confusing.

2\. TeXmacs uses TeX, not LaTeX, in the backend, though there are export/import commands. Makes it necessary to do some wrangling to get documents to match prescribed formats.

<comment><USER26> TeXmacs doesn't use TeX. Rather, it has its own real-time typesetting engine that produces output of quality comparable to TeX.

<comment><USER27> Ah, turns out it only uses TeX fonts and implements its own typesetter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> FYI: They are currently preparing the release for version 2.2 which supports Retina on OSX.

</comment><comment><USER28> Oh sweet, was looking for something like this, just didn't want to look for it yet.

Thanks a bunch.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think LyX is a great idea, but I had a couple of problems with it:

1\. Support for the Greek language is not good

2\. Found it difficult to manage and create my own templates

</comment><comment><USER30> A decade ago, LyX was my gateway to LaTeX. It was really fun to use it to create beautiful documents.</comment>


Amazon Elastic Transcoder - Watermarking, Bit / Frame Rate Control - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/07/amazon-elastic-transcoder-watermarking-bit-frame-rate-control.html <comment><USER2> I'd love for there to be an AWS _photo_ transcoding service as well. If you have a large site, creating your own photo transcoder workflow is not a big deal, and you can make it elastic by combining a bunch of other AWS services, but for a small web site it's a different picture.

For me photo transcoding comes in batches that take 5-15 minutes to process, a few times per week. This work bogs down the tiny instance, so I have to keep around a medium instance just for the occasional conversion work, but 99% of the time it's a waste of hardware. It's also a waste of my time having to write code to deal with things like iPhone picture image rotation and so on.

<comment><USER3> Have you looked at PiCloud? It looks like exactly the base you want to build on. They run AWS instances, but charge by the millisecond. You can run one up just for the 5-15 minutes it takes.

Or if you want to get fancier, try their queues [0], they've got an example of doing image processing to explain how it works. Essentially, you set up your processing pipeline attached to a queue. You then drop messages on the queue whenever you want to do work, and they spin up one or many machines (controllable by you) to process the data. Then after 20 seconds of nothing new appearing on the queue, they turn them all off.

They'll even give you 20 hours of compute time free, every month.

Edit - if you don't want to build it, drop me a message, I can do it.

[0] [http://blog.picloud.com/2013/04/03/introducing-queues- creati...](http://blog.picloud.com/2013/04/03/introducing-queues-creating-a- pipeline-in-the-cloud/)

<comment><USER2> I'll spend some more time on it, but right now it looks like another platform I need to learn, which I don't have time for.

What I want is a service that takes this URL and returns a resized JPG:

      http://SimpleImageService.com/resize
      ?account=DenisM
      &source=http://s3.amazonaws.com/DenisMsPictures/Image1.TIFF
      &size=400x400

That's it. I'll drop this into my app and forget about it. Set the prices at your AWS cost + 25%, and send me the bill at the end of each month.

<comment><USER4> That's exactly what Stupeflix Tasks will do in a few weeks, along with video thumbnails strips, thumbnailing of videos at any point in time, video uploads, audio waveform, text to speech, video reverse etc. The beta doc is at [https://stupeflix-tasks- api.readthedocs.org/en/latest/versio...](https://stupeflix-tasks- api.readthedocs.org/en/latest/versions/index.html) , feel free to give me some feedback on it ! And if you want to do way more than just transcode, but create completely your video from images / music / videos , you can use the video rendering service at [http://developer.stupeflix.com/](http://developer.stupeflix.com/) . It will migrated to the Tasks api too.

(Disclaimer : I am the CTO )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The big thing that's tripping us up with using Elastic Transcoder is that there's no way to see how much billed time each encoding job took. We factor our encoding time in to what we bill our customers.

They've been iterating quickly and we're so close to being able to use this, but the billing thing is a big hurdle for us.

<comment><USER6> Amazon Elastic Transcoder provides the video duration for transcoded jobs through the API and the AWS Management Console. See [https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1958](https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1958) for more info.

<comment><USER5> As an addendum for everyone else, the ET team has been super helpful, and is much more active in their support forums than most of the other AWS teams. These guys seem eager to earn your business, and have iterated quickly.

Big thanks goes to them for moving fast, getting involved, and acting [quickly] on user feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If there's anyone out there watching, I would love it if there were a similar AWS service just for audio transcoding (mp3, flac, etc.). Obviously I don't know what all is happening behind the scenes, but it seems to me that a lot of the infrastructure would be reusable.

<comment><USER8> I would also love it if streaming transcoding were possible with this API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would this support streaming? What about multiple outputs?

A bunch of gamers have issues live streaming to youtube and twitch. Each requires special (different) encoding parameters for streaming, and youtube needs each resolution streamed separately. This, along with separate streams for twitch and youtube murders most people's bandwidth not to mention a home computer's encoding capacity.

Most of the time they end up choosing only one site and a specific resolution and miss out on a large portion of their fan base. (People have a wide range of quality preferences/bandwidth requirements, in addition to being on different sites.)

Someone should use this to build a super easy multi-output streaming transcoder for youtube / twitch.tv / etc.

<comment><USER10> > _...have issues live streaming to youtube and twitch. Each requires special > (different) encoding parameters for streaming, and youtube needs each > resolution streamed separately. This, along with separate streams for twitch > and youtube..._

This isn't a sales pitch so much as an offer to chat about it and see if we could help turn a service we provide into a product that meets this need.

For years we've provided this as a "private label" service to major media companies that need to provide one single broadcast quality live stream and have it delivered to thousands or hundreds of thousands of end users on Windows and OSX (RTMP), Android (RTSP), and iOS (HLS), in bitrates ranging from 300 kbps to 6 megabits, while also pushing the full array of bitrates to YouTube, Hulu, etc.

The problem is that this is not cheap. Pulling it off with low latency and across a full array of formats and protocols tends to require dedicated hardware (depends on the source material, talking heads easier than sports, for example). But our approach does cost significantly less than trying to use AWS instances, and if the community of broadcasters or viewers was large enough, it might make sense for us to open up this private label service to individuals.

Feel free to ping me if someone wants to talk about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If the team is reading this thread: we cannot find a transcoding service that will output to intermediary codecs (non interframe codecs). We need to take 4k video in photojpeg, red, and prores and at least turn that into different resolutions of photojpeg. The output videos need to be of sufficient quality to use to produce commercial video, though not necessarily at the full 4k (or higher) res.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder what strategies will be used by video start-ups who seem to be using AWS EC2 to cope with unexpected competition from AWS. AWS Transcoder seems to be getting better and their rates are pretty aggressive.

</comment><comment><USER13> I am obviously behind since I didn't know about this service, but does anyone know whether they offer any sort of audio watermarking similar to the video watermarking service?

<comment><USER6> By audio watermarking, do you mean corrupting the audio with periods of silence/tone/noise that repeat, or do you mean a forensic watermark for audio fingerprinting purposes?

<comment><USER13> I meant mixing in a looping track the length of the main track ("brought to you by Mr X's Audio Tool", "this is a SAMPLE...", etc)</comment></comment></comment>


Lloyd S. Shapely, 92, Nobel Laureate and a Father of Game Theory, Has Died - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/15/business/economy/lloyd-s-shapley-92-nobel-laureate-and-a-father-of-game-theory-is-dead.html <comment><USER2> When I was in UCLA's Statistics program, I did an independent study class with him, where we met in his sunny office once a week. At the time, I had only a vague idea of his reputation -- he was just "that guy who had his own theorem," who was excited to answer my questions about game theory.

I asked him to give me an intuitive explanation of Nash's theorem, and, while the details are lost to memory, I remember having one of those thrilling epiphanies as he explained how it followed from Brouwer's fixed point theorem.

There was supposed to be required coursework, but every week I'd come into his office and ask questions like that, and we'd end up talking the whole time, often long after the hour was over. Grades and homework didn't seem to matter much to him. It's incredible to think now how much excitement and passion he mustered for the curiosity of a novice.

RIP, Prof Shapely.

</comment><comment><USER3> correct headline should be Shapley, not Shapely

<comment><USER4> Indeed. (Though who's to say the man wasn't shapely.)

I remember the Shapley-Shubik power index [1], used to measure someone's voting power. Roughly, you imagine the voters vote one at a time, imagine all possible orders in which they could vote, and count the percentage of permutations in which your vote is the one that makes the step from "less than majority" to "majority". (The subject of the vote is a binary choice.)

I remember thinking the Banzhaf power index [2] was better. I learned about all this from a CTY summer class called "Game Theory and Strategy". I didn't know how to program back then, and I might profit from rethinking the concepts...

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapley%E2%80%93Shubik_power_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapley%E2%80%93Shubik_power_index)

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of his contributions:

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

And an application that builds on his work;

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

</comment><comment><USER6> I knew him for over 15 years... we was a very interesting fellow... he was a diligent mathematician - I think this quote also applies to him: "...it's not that i'm so smart it's just that i stay with problems longer..."

</comment><comment><USER7> Brilliant man. He is highly revered on my alma mater's campus. RIP.</comment>


Google+ Hangouts May Have Gotten Good Enough to Lure Facebookers - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/09/google-hangouts-may-have-gotten-good-enough-lure-facebookers/42730/

<comment><USER2> The article is confusing. Why does it mention Facebook right in the headline? Hangouts looks like a replacement for Skype and real life. I can only imagine an effect on Facebook if G+ lures _many_ people into moving their personal face-to-face social time online.

That said, Skype needs competition, so I don't mind...

<comment><USER3> People use skype and facebook for the same problem - keeping in contact with family and friends.

<comment><USER2> Right. Then why is it luring Facebook users, not Skype users, or business users that don't use FB right now? I think the headline implies the wrong premise again, that FB and G+ cannot co-exist. I think they can and will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure about Facebookers, but as someone who was about to sign up for a (fairly expensive) Webinar package, it has at least given me pause for thought.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hangouts has lured most of my team to Google +, at least for quick stand-up type meetings. I have two guys who have Google Apps accounts and can't yet use Google + for whatever oddball reason that Google hasn't fixed that.

</comment><comment><USER6> strange that the hangouts api doesn't support simple message broadcasting. instead it maintains a shared state object. anyone know why? you could hack message broadcasting on top of the state object but that seems awkward.</comment>


Do not use Amazon chat support. This just happened to me. - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wBWozVOKXmyFbskKkpRXX2IK3d3N3zcv3BwdAJ711cQ/edit <comment><USER2> This isn't exactly fair. You flew off the handle when somebody took longer than they should have and started swearing at them. You should have asked much earlier to speak to someone else or simply started from scratch.

I understand that you're probably worried about your account but this is no way to treat customer service representatives, or anybody for that matter. Next time, take a minute to calm down and think carefully about what you want to get out of the chat, then try with a different person. Even Amazon isn't infallible when it comes to customer service.

<comment><USER3> I can understand his exasperation. The responses he was getting from the Amazon employee were unacceptable. They didn't even try to understand his problem, or even his name and gender. They're better off with no support than this crap.

<comment><USER2> I can also understand the way he feels but this is no way to deal with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sorry, she came out as an inexperienced (perhaps first days on the job?) tech support person, and you came out as a royal dick.

You could ask to talk to someone else before, in the first case of incompetence.

Or you could easily hang up, and try again, which would have given you another support person to talk to.

</comment><comment><USER5> My takeaway here is to reflect on how I would have responded to this service incident had it happened to me in person vs. online. I know I would be much less likely to yell and swear in person and I definitely wouldn't wait an hour before asking politely to be assisted by someone else.

</comment><comment><USER6> Every time I've used Amazon chat support I've had a great experience. I'm pretty sure everyone has had one bad support experience with a company regardless of whether it was chat, phone, or in-person.

</comment><comment><USER7> How do we know this actually happened?

<comment><USER8> How do we know anything actually happens?

<comment><USER4> We see it with our own eyes or are given proof of it. A one sided rant is not "proof".

<comment><USER9> But how do we know we're not dreaming? How can we be sure reality is... real?

<comment><USER4> Why do you have to? In either case, the story will or will not be consistent, which is all that matters?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Welcome to 24/7 customer service - a sales rep handling multiple chat sessions and failing to context switch between them.

</comment><comment><USER11> Surely Amazon doesn't employ staff that can only use the shift key when caps lock is on? And what is with the habitual ".."? I can't imagine that any review of the chat logs of this person would call them acceptable - it looks like you're talking to the most vacant of teenagers.

</comment><comment><USER12> FYI, any dots in your gmail address are immaterial, so you didn't need to have this conversation in the first place. [https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10313?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10313?hl=en)

<comment><USER5> That's true on Google's end. Is it true on Amazon's end? Do they view firstname.lastname@example.com and firstname.lastname@example.com as separate email addresses?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is technical support bliss compared to the 8 or 9 occasions I have had to deal with Adobe support.

Adobe still owe me around £30 (for reactivating a deactivated subscription and charging me), but I dread another 90 minute support call dealing with them...

</comment><comment> nezza-_- I totally understand why you started 'screaming' at him. This guy is the cliche of why people hate tech-support. I was just waiting for him to 'accidentally' delete your account.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wish the transcript had timestamps. After each message from the rep took anywhere between 5 and 15 minutes. Total conversation was just shy of an hour. I tried to remain calm for a while but this was just nuts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Step 1: Register email@example.com Step 2: Have amazon AND google delete firstname.lastname@example.com Step 3: Post customer support chat transcripts Step 4: ??? Step 5: Profit

</comment><comment><USER15> How the heck did she get hired? Interestingly, there were no canned responses like you usually see from Tech Support. I wonder if this is Amazon trial'ing something new?</comment>


Ask HN: Scraped 20k unique hiring manager emails. What do I do? - <AUTHOR> So long story short I scraped a bunch of email addresses that were being loaded into my web browser insecurely. I reported the issue to the company, and it is now fixed. I have on record from the company that nothing I did was, "illegal or unethical".
I wrote a blog post where I looked at all of the data I scraped. The stuff I looked at was pretty interesting. I am hesitant to publish this, because I feel I have ventured pretty close to black hat territory. I definitely broke the companies private policy while doing all of this scraping. They said I should not publish the blog post. I have considered reaching out to these hiring managers, but I am unsure if that would be a good idea.
What is the best way to leverage this into employment offers/interviews? I graduate from a state school next spring. <comment><USER2> Not totally following, how were you getting the addresses in the first place.</comment>


Tesla fired hundreds of employees in past week - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-jobs/tesla-fired-hundreds-of-employees-in-past-week-idUSKBN1CJ00L <comment><USER2> To give a scale, Tesla has more than 30 000 employees [1]. That is just a little above 1%.

[1] [https://electrek.co/2017/06/01/tesla-elon-musk-employees- har...](https://electrek.co/2017/06/01/tesla-elon-musk-employees-hardcore- tesla-killers/)

<comment><USER3> I found that number surprising, although I also know very little about what it takes to manufacture things. Any idea what the employee breakdown looks like in terms of profession and area of focus (since they have solar city too)?

<comment><USER4> No more than 3k would be working on the assembly operations, and maybe a good deal less (based on knowledge of other automotive assembly operations).

That 3k would include line assembly workers, material delivery, quality inspectors as well as skilled trades like electricians, pipe fitters, tool and die makers (for stamping operations)

Another 1-2k assembly staff (IT, Quality Engineers, Controls Engineers, Material Coordinators).

Tesla does a lot of in-house component manufacturing, so that may be another 3-10k (I'm including gigafactory in this estimate, but I have no real clue here, as I don't know how much of this they actually do).

Then you have people like automotive designers, engineers, and buyers, no real clue here, but almost certainly less than 2k.

Then you have corporate functions: accountants, hr, IT, other back office, another 500?

Then you have the sales side - not sure how they structure this, but they have a lot of show rooms with a good number of people working them - another 1k?

3 + 2 + 10 + 2 + .5 + 1 = 18,500

They're doing a lot of plant construction and equipment installation; generally in the industry most or all of that is outsourced, but Tesla seems to prefer strong vertical integration, so maybe those are straight Tesla employees as well.

<comment><USER5> 1k seems pretty low for sales staff if we really are including the showrooms. I'm counting ~100-110 showrooms listed on Tesla's website, so that would amount to 10 people per showroom. Doable, I guess, but still low.

Are janitorial/maintenance staff considered to be employees in this count? Or are they contracted out?

<comment><USER4> Janitorial would almost certainly be contracted out at any other automotive company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's interesing that the company can just decide not to report this as a mass layoff. While the performance reasons for letting someone go may be true, it seems like an easily exploitable loophole.

Model 3 production rates were missed by a wide margin, so at least a few people should have known that management would react.

<comment><USER7> Do public company actually have an obligation to report mass layoffs?

<comment><USER8> Yes, it's the WARN act:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988)

California also has their own version: [https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and- samples/hr-...](https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr- qa/pages/californiawarnact.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Tesla has a hearing before the National Labor Relations Board in November for charges that company supervisors and security guards harassed workers distributing union literature. Tesla denied the accusations. Openly pro-union workers were among those fired this week. Some believe they were targeted." \- Local paper [http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/13/4819750/](http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/13/4819750/)

Edit: Added more lines from the preceding paragraph

<comment><USER10> > _pro-union workers were among those fired this week. Some believe they were > targeted_

I hate sneakily-worded sentences like this.

Also among them, were women, hetrosexuals, and probably one or two Vietnam veterans. Some believe they were targetted.

<comment><USER11> How's it sneaky? Business management and shareholders routinely try to shut down unionizing all the time throughout the last two centuries. My buddy is a manager at a national retail chain and often comments on how _proactively_ anti-union they are, just like their competitors.

Other demographic groups like the ones you pointed out really don't have that same collective effect on the bottom line for shareholders across industries like those that unionize, whose only trait in common is that of a provider of labor.

<comment><USER12> It's sneaky because it suggests that people were targeted because they were pro-union, without going so far as to make a claim of fact (which would open them to libel claims).

<comment><USER13> If the shoe fits.

<comment><USER12> Be bold. Make the claim, or don't make the claim. Half-heartedly making the claim is shoddy journalism.

<comment><USER14> "Be bold. Make the claim, or don't make the claim. Half-heartedly making the claim is shoddy journalism."

No.

It would be impossible to verify and to say with certainty the fact that Tesla was targeting Union folks - if this were true.

Second - the journo is communicating the opinions of others, not his/her own.

There would be Musk, and a very small handful of trusted lieutenants who would have been behind it (if it happened).

But - one could look at the totality of those who are fired - and find that 'most of the vocal union bakers' were let go.

So what does this mean?

It doesn't prove anything - but it looks pretty bad, doesn't it?

So a journalist talks to some of the current or laid off workers, and they say 'off the record' \- that this has happened, and 'we think they did this to kabosh the union agenda' \- well, then it's reasonable.

If the journalist is just 'making it up'\- that would be a deep dereliction of their duty.

But if 'some were actually saying' this, in this journalists interviews, then it's fair for them to say.

And it would be irresponsible for the journalist to say 'Musk specifically targeted Union advocates' unless they had some pretty good evidence that this were true. Which would be very hard.

<comment><USER12> > But - one could look at the totality of those who are fired - and find that > 'most of the vocal union bakers' were let go.

I don't object to statements like that. Your proposal actually make some attempt to quantify proportionality. The article did no such thing: "pro-union workers were among those fired this week." It doesn't say "mostly pro-union workers were fired" or "most vocal pro-union workers were fired." It isn't reflecting someone else's opinion. It's just an attempt to fit a narrative around zero evidence. If they had interesting evidence, they would report that instead!

> It doesn't prove anything - but it looks pretty bad, doesn't it?

No! Because they didn't actually make any interesting statements of fact. Just that _some_ pro-union employees happen to be among the 1% of fired employees, like you would expect in a population of hundreds.

> And it would be irresponsible for the journalist to say 'Musk specifically > targeted Union advocates' unless they had some pretty good evidence that > this were true. Which would be very hard.

But they are suggesting it anyways. I think that is similarly irresponsible.

Probably they don't want to spend the time gathering statistics before they rush to be the first to publish on this story, but in preliminary reporting like this, I think they should be hesitant to suggest a narrative they haven't made any attempt to confirm.

<comment><USER14> Journalism is hard.

They're not paid a lot, and they have to churn out stories.

They don't have the resources to hire PI's and do interviews, follow people around.

It's just a dude (or dudette) who might have time to ask a few questions, and then put out a story.

So that's it.

I wish it could be more, but what they've done is within reason, so long as it's valid and they're not making it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Though Tesla cited performance as the reason for the firings, the source > told Reuters he was fired in spite of never having been given a bad review.

Highly odd for a company that's just starting production of its highest-volume product ever.

Is there something about Tesla beyond the hype we should know? If I were an investor, this news would have me quite concerned.

You would think they can't hire fast enough.

<comment><USER16> I would bet it is related to the mismanagement of the German automation plant that Tesla acquired about a year ago (on mobile, too hard to post links, maybe someone wants to help).

The plan as I understand it was to use the technology at this company to speed up production but it hasn't been going as planned, in large part due to misunderstanding of cultural differences i.e. No one is going to be happy here in Germany if you start changing the terms of contracts that were supposed to last for the next few years and people in general don't respect abusive bosses. Unemployment rate is 3%, no need to (and lower for highly skilled workers). And you can't just tell people to not take vacation because production is behind, you'll get laughed at.

<comment><USER17> Grohmann Engineering.

And yes, this has happened a few times now - American corp buys some German corp and replaces managers with American ones (or American-styled ones) and a few years later no one in the industry wants to work for them any more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What's the general impression of what it's like to work for Tesla? I've always gotten the impression that they work their employees quite hard, and that they can afford to do so since there are a lot of talented people who are intrigued by their specific mission. That sounds similar to what I've heard about video game development. I'm sure it's a crude oversimplification, and my only anecdata is one acquaintance who worked in accounting at Tesla and had worked straight through Christmas two years in a row.

</comment><comment><USER19> WARN Act:

 _[A] US labor law which protects employees, their families, and communities by requiring most employers with 100 or more employees to provide 60 calendar- day advance notification of plant closings and mass layoffs of employees, as defined in the Act. In 2001, there were about 2,000 mass layoffs and plant closures which were subject to WARN advance notice requirements and which affected about 660,000 employees._

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retrai...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988)

<comment><USER20> Your link indicates they aren't covered by the WARN act. It is fewer than 499 employees and less than 33% at a single facility.

<comment><USER19> Ah, good eyes. I wasn't sure quite what the threshold was.

I've seen companies get spanked for a pattern of layoffs which stay just below the threshold, so there's that. If there's a plausible case that this is targeted at union organisers / organisation, there's that as well, though prosecution at the national level strikes me as unlikely, even with Musk's testy relationship with the Trump administration.

There's also California law to contend with. Same article:

 _California requires advance notice for plant closings, layoffs, and relocations of 50 or more employees regardless of percentage of workforce, that is, without the federal "one-third" rule for mass layoffs of fewer than 500 employees. Also, the California law applies to employers with 75 or more employees, counting both full-time and part-time employees._

<comment><USER20> I am entirely unfamiliar with California's regulations.

But, unless the penalty is insignificant, it seems unlikely that they'd flagrantly violate the law. It seems very likely that they were advised by legal council and followed those recommendations. The visibility of Tesla makes me suspect they are very likely to be aware of both optics and law.

Disclosure: I am invested in Tesla and have been since the early days. However, I've made every effort to remain objective,

<comment><USER19> I don't know if Tesla did or didn't follow legal requirements.

I am, however, pointing out that there are in fact legal notice and procedural requirements to be followed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Gaming industry style? Milestone reached, instead of thank you, get off my lawn?

<comment><USER22> What milestone? Tesla is a growing company

<comment><USER23> The Model 3 is a pretty important part of their auto strategy. Especially given how badly GM beat them to the bunch and how aggressively Toyota is moving on them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is anyone else being redirected to a "congratulations you won" type website hosted on cloudfront.net? I'm using Safari, iPhone 6s, iOS 11.0.2, T Mobile, in NYC (only happens on LTE, doesn't happen on wifi network)

<comment><USER19> Check your DNS provider. Google seems better (18.104.22.168, 188.8.131.52), OpenDNS possibly.

I used to get those every so often. Since I've been massively firewalling sketchy domains, not so much.

(About 33k entries, mostly based on uBlock and other blocklists.)

<comment><USER24> Any way to do this for LTE on a non jail broken phone?

<comment><USER19> Not off the top of my head.

I've discovered that Android _does_ seem to have dnsmasq installed by default in explorations of my own non-jailbroken phone. Though I've not configured it.

Most of this I deal with at the router, using wifi.

AT&T in particular are _exceptionally_ bad about this based on my exploration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> And yet they failed to fire the worst-performing employee of them all.

<comment><USER26> Amen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Maybe it's about cutting costs for new project ramp up, or maybe they are trying to get rid of leakers / security threats / bad eggs, or both.

</comment><comment><USER28> Wow love to here the inside scoop on this. Anyone from Tesla want to comment. Accountability for late shipments?

<comment><USER29> Or it could just be trimming some fat.

<comment><USER30> "Trimming fat" is a funny euphemism for sending people into unemployment.

<comment><USER31> Not all people add value to an organization, and they might stop adding value too. Unfortunately, it's not possible to know this for sure prior to hiring, so the only realistic way to maintain the organization is with constant pruning.

<comment><USER32> I think this is a bit of a fallacy. You don't have to always be firing some percentage of your workforce. While hiring the best is not easy and you may need to let people go you also shouldn't just constantly be on the hunt for the next head to chop. I have seen the effects of stack ranking and it's not pretty.

<comment><USER31> I don't mean to suggest that there needs to be a set percentage that must be fired at some set time interval, but I do think that new hires don't always work out, and people can change from being a value adder to a value detractor, especially once you get to the huge numbers of employees that some companies have.

The process of evaluating the people that make up the organization should be under constant improvement though, and again, simply because of dealing with large numbers, there might be a few false positives, but on the whole as an organization, management should be on the lookout for who isn't performing.

<comment><USER32> I disagree with the adversarial approach to management you seem to advocate at the end of your comment. I think it can create a toxic environment where management focuses on failures and ignores success. If someone has to be let go that is a failure at the management level or at the recruiting level and the goal should be to minimize it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's important to keep in mind that Tesla (like Walmart, Whole Foods, and Amazon) has been targeted by big labor for infiltration and union formation [1] [2]

This is not necessarily because working conditions make workers feel that they would prefer the tradeoffs of unionization, but simply because Tesla is much more competitive without its workforce unionized, and so labor groups that are entrenched in legacy car manufacturing wish to prevent Tesla from accelerating those companies' decline.

In many states labor unions have significant power granted by favorable laws that far exceed the market power they derive simply from organizing labor and leveling the playing field a bit. [3] [4]

So while I strongly support organized labor in abstract [5], it's difficult to blame Tesla for wishing to make its workforce less vulnerable to attack from big labor. Like many interest groups, big labor is mostly concerned with its own survival [6] and growth, and is not really about the workers at all.

For example, when Borders Books employees went on strike, it was the big labor groups that sponsored ruffians to join the employees on the picket line and make the strike much more aggressive. Similarly, whenever you see an inflatable rat alongside striking workers, chances are that rat was brought in by big labor to help dramatize the strike effort. [7] They also help name and shame fellow employees who aren't enthusiastic about the union to exert social pressure to make it form.

1\. [https://groundswell.org/whole-foods-employees-move-to- unioni...](https://groundswell.org/whole-foods-employees-move-to-unionize-but- im-conflicted-about-it-heres-why/)

2\. [http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Union-Organizers- Targ...](http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Union-Organizers-Target- Amazon-com-Labor-hoping-2695088.php)

3\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_labor_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_labor_law)

4\. [http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-charged-uaw- employees-s...](http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-charged-uaw-employees- supressing-unionization-efforts-2017-4)

5\. While labor laws came to exist for good reason and helped improve living standards quite a bit, they went too far and tried to address too many issues via labor laws. Many things that are given to workers via labor laws should be given to all citizens, whether employed or not. Labor laws should not create an incentive for firms to eliminate unions, and should not act to correct social inequality. If such measure are needed they should happen via other laws.

6\. [https://www.unionfacts.com/employee/Air_Line_Pilots/TIMOTHY/...](https://www.unionfacts.com/employee/Air_Line_Pilots/TIMOTHY/CANOLL/)

7\. [http://mentalfloss.com/article/28466/story-behind-giant- infl...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/28466/story-behind-giant-inflatable- union-rat)

<comment><USER34> > significant power granted by favorable laws that far exceed the market power > they derive simply from organizing labor

That is the whole point of unions, yes.

Union membership/power has been steadily decreasing over the past 50 years. To me, it seems disingenuous to refer to "big labor" as if they're some sort of powerhouse given the way that corporate interests have been chipping away at them.

Also, not that I have any proof that they are, but firing employees for being pro-union is illegal.

<comment><USER33> > Union membership/power has been steadily decreasing over the past 50 years. > To me, it seems disingenuous to refer to "big labor" as if they're some sort > of powerhouse given the way that corporate interests have been chipping away > at them.

Some states have passed less union-friendly laws, and firms have located to those states and have massively invested in robotics and automation simply to avoid the morass associated with having a unionized labor force.

When unions are too strong (such as they have been in the past) they take too much for their own members at the expense of the health of the firm, and the firm dies.

In the case of the automakers and the auto worker pensions, the pensions were negotiated as defined benefit plans and backed by the PBGC. Lawmakers failed to require firms to pay adequate PBGC premiums, and so when the companies failed taxpayers are left holding the bag.

Workers need to have power, but unions are on the decline because they got too greedy and resulted in massive (and inefficient) economic shifts to route around them. Thus they are less relevant now than in years past, but significant harm has been done. This is not just the fault of the unions, but of the politicians and firms that colluded to make the pension deals possible and who refuse to let dying firms simply die.

Unless we want to go back to a world where everyone aspires to become a "lifer" at a firm and retire after holding one job for his/her whole working life, unions really can't offer much. The economy shifts much more rapidly now and I'd be shocked if skills that are highly marketable this year are still marketable in 10 years.

<comment><USER35> I'm sorry, but as someone who's reflexively pro-union and admittedly not versed in the issues you're talking about, you'll need to provide some better references for me to understand what you're talking about specifically. The citations you've provided don't back up your claims at all -- I don't doubt that Tesla and the like are targeted by unions, but you'll need to reference more than the US labor law and one guy's salary to convince me that they do more harm than good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Paid Tesla actors are gaming the comments.

Hacker News is influential. Votes can easily be gamed. Fake accounts are easy to make and hard to track.

Noise is added to mix good info with misinformation to confuse and frustrate people sifting through comments trying to make sense of things.

These people will make weaker arguments against Tesla's actions so those arguments can be easily discredited. People making stronger arguments against Tesla will be clumped with them.

Trolling increases noise and frustration. It makes people not want to read or post adversarial comments.

Denigrate, dismiss, discredit.

Sort comments by old.

One of the top 3 upvoted comment is usually gamed, because it makes the most lucid argument (it was pre-written; look at timestamp) and is seen as the most solid piece of info amid the noise.

<comment><USER36> They're not alone. I spent about five hours (across several meetings) trying to convince a CFO that giving an employee no annual increase was a negative signal. I think he only gave in when he realized I wasn't going to let it go.

<comment><USER32> Is a complete lack of empathy required in order to reach that level?</comment></comment></comment>


How to Disagree - shivam-dev https://how-to-disagree.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting concept, but the impact sure is inaccurate.

Ad hominem, name-calling and responding to tone are extremely effective, as most readers simply aren't prepared to do critical thinking.

<comment> shivam-dev Yeah, the intention was to point out the positive impact contributed to the discussion. Perhaps value seems to be a better term for it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Intel Compute Stick Licence Plate Detection - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/s3nh/licence-plate-tf <comment><AUTHOR> Model zoo like training pipeline using open sourced licence plate dataset.</comment>