Jeff Dean's Lecture for YC AI [video] - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/jeff-deans-lecture-for-yc-ai?src=hn <comment><USER2> The notion of running one giant model that has many sub-talents is epic. I can imagine that all the disparate models they run today could fuse into a giant network that melds predictions and guides computation as required by the task. That seems like a very Jeff Dean scale endeavor.

<comment><USER3> He is referring to this paper [https://research.googleblog.com/2017/06/multimodel-multi- tas...](https://research.googleblog.com/2017/06/multimodel-multi-task-machine- learning.html)

Where they used one model to do image recognition, speech recognition and translation in the same network.

<comment><USER4> He also mentions sparsely activating only the neurons that matter, which they explore in [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.06538.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.06538.pdf)

Personally I didn't find it very satisfying, I imagine something more fundamental and self referential.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As somebody who's recently starting to learn more about ML, a lot of the work of an ML engineer does seem to be automate-able (not doing research or pushing boundaries but just applying ML to some product need). For example, choosing hyperparameters, evaluating which features to collect, etc seem to be things that can be automated with very little human input.

His slide on "learning to learn" has a goal of removing the ML expert in the equation. Can somebody who's more of an expert in the field comment on how plausible it is? Specifically, in the near future, will we only need ML people who do research, due to the application being so trivial to do once automated?

<comment><USER6> You will still need data engineers to build the whole data ingestion and processing pipeline (although that can be easy if standardised tools are available, such as spark, it's still a challenge in many cases).

<comment><USER5> Right, but I'd consider that falling closer to the realm of general software engineering -- similar to tasks of collecting analytics of users or building infrastructure to get data from point A to point B.

Maybe that currently is some parts of the job of an ML engineer. But if that's the _only_ part, I don't think that role should be called one of ML engineer anymore

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If Tensorflow becomes the default library for Deep learning, is this a good thing or bad thing? Does it help in that all researchers can focus on what's important (the data and results) or does it hurt in that Google now controls an important paradigm for the next generation of computing?

<comment><USER8> PyTorch is becoming much more popular among researchers, even if TensorFlow use is widespread among data scientists.

Would it be bad if TensorFlow became the default library for deep learning? For companies that aren't Google, yes. Many organizations don't like how Google's controlled Android development.

But I think an important part of Dean's lecture are the slides that talk about making ML/DL expertise obsolete. That's the future, whether you use TensorFlow or not.

<comment><USER9> It's cute, but isn't going to completely obsolete ML/DL expertise. (And believe me, as a prospective supplier of DL compute, I would love for the answer to be "more compute").

To give you an idea of how much compute it took, they spent _two million dollars_ for one run on a relatively toy dataset, CIFAR-10. Imagine how much it would take on an imagenet sized dataset! Can your company afford ~$20 million+ per dataset?

I _do_ think that hyperparameter twiddling aspect might get automated, but believe me, that is much welcomed by the DL research community! I would much rather spend my time on new ideas rather than trying ten different initializations :)

<comment><USER8> Sure, but that's $2m of today's compute on today's chips. The constraints on chips and cost are moving, and Google is pushing them.

<comment><USER9> Sure, so it becomes ~$2 million for an imagenet scale dataset with TPUs and ~$200K with our chips. Still pretty expensive :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a ML enthusiast, this is incredible to watch!

I'm completely blown away that Google was working on full-scale physical architectures that were optimized for these problems. Talk about being two steps ahead of the game!

<comment><USER11> Smart people, combined with piles of cash, gets you ahead at almost anything...

Sadly there's still a lot of smart people without access to cash (academics), and piles of cash without smart people to get the value out of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If a doctor misdiagnosis an eye ailment, they might end up with a malpractice lawsuit. If an ML program misdiagnoses an eye ailment, what is going to happen?

<comment><USER13> The commercial entity backing the ML program should be responsible. If one doesn't exist then the comparison fails, as one would presumably not be willing to trust the competency of a public domain ML program without a true, commercially and medically backed "second" opinion (algorithmic or otherwise).

Perhaps one day, ML programs running eye diagnostics will be as cheap and disposable to use as pregnancy stick tests: "Point and diagnose."

<comment><USER14> Yes, the commercial entity backing the ML program, and possibly multiple associated entities would be held responsible, or at least dragged into litigation. You can get insurance companies to write custom policies for such things, but I dont think there has yet been a standards-setting case -- anyone know of existing or in-progress case law in this arena?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Once, in early 2002, when the index servers went down, Jeff Dean answered user queries manually for two hours. Evals showed a quality improvement of 5 points.

<comment><USER16> I never thought Jeff Dean jokes would be a shibboleth but here we are.

<comment><USER17> I could imagine there being external Jeff Dean fans, but yeah, that jargon

<comment><USER18> [https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean- facts](https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-facts)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Guide on creating quality Material Design icons - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/materialup-exploring-material-design/tips-thoughts-on-creating-quality-material-design-icons-4b02b8d0bdd5

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys! Here's an insightful interview of Michael Cook from Cookicons (cookicons.co), which includes a 10 step guide to design quality icons.</comment>


How the Internet changed the way we read - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/how-internet-changed-way-we-read/ <comment><USER2> _" The truth is that most of us read continuously in a perpetual stream of incestuous words, but instead of reading novels, book reviews, or newspapers like we used to in the ancien régime, we now read text messages, social media, and bite-sized entries about our protean cultural history on Wikipedia."_

In other words, instead of reading stuff written by Important Academics like the author ("a lecturer in the English department at the University of California Irvine. .. BA in comp lit from Oberlin College , a MFA in fiction from the University of Notre Dame, and a MA in English and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from USC"). they're reading stuff by Other People who Shouldn't Count. Aw. Weep for the irrelevant academic.

That's not the problem. The problem is the decline of journalistic reporting. Journalism was all those reporters who went out in the cold and rain and small-arms fire to where something was happening. They knew people who worked in factories and union halls and police stations. They were accustomed to digging out news. ("News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity." \- British tabloid owner, circa 1900.) They sent back stories with Who and What and Where and When and Why.

There are still some of those people left. They work for the very few remaining news organizations that can afford them. The rest rewrite press releases and pontificate. They work for Demand Media and Aol, churning out glosses on the work of others and carefully watching their page hit statistics. That's the problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> The thesis is that we read small bits of text all day, rather than books.

If anyone has a graph to show a decline in book consumption, I'd be interested to see it.

In my personal experience, I am much more aware of all sorts of books that I would like to take a look at, and it is much easier to do a quick search.

There are many more places that I see book recommendations. Reviews and mentions are much more plentiful. And of course tech books have exploded in the post-internet era.

My book consumption (reading) is way up because the all the local libraries are connected in a network that pools all their catalogs, and I have an enormous selection of books.

My book buying is probably about the same, but more informed since I can be more careful about the books I want to have permanently.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, we've all heard this a thousand times... on random websites like the "Daily Dot" and from the dozens of writers who capitalize on internet backlash.

Yes, we all suck at reading, the internet is destroying America, the good old days when everybody was reading Serious Novels and Coherent Arguments and the New Yorker is gone forever and youth culture killed my dog.

Marshall McLuhan was way ahead of these guys. He was brought up with literary print culture, and he went through a phase of fear and loathing the emerging electronic culture, but then he realized he was ranting and raving to no good and adopted a different attitude.

From the McLuhan Playboy interview:

> _You see, I am not a crusader; I imagine I would be most happy living in a > secure preliterate environment; I would never attempt to change my world, > for better or worse. Thus I derive no joy from observing the traumatic > effects of media on man, although I do obtain satisfaction from grasping > their modes of operation. Such comprehension is inherently cool, since it is > simultaneously involvement and detachment. This posture is essential in > studying media. One must begin by becoming extraenvironmental, putting > oneself beyond the battle in order to study and understand the configuration > of forces. It's vital to adopt a posture of arrogant superiority; instead of > scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one > should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes. They respond > beautifully to such resolute treatment and soon become servants rather than > masters. But without this detached involvement, I could never objectively > observe media; it would be like an octopus grappling with the Empire State > Building. So I employ the greatest boon of literate culture: the power of > man to act without reaction — the sort of specialization by dissociation > that has been the driving motive force behind Western civilization._

> _The Western world is being revolutionized by the electric media as rapidly > as the East is being Westernized, and although the society that eventually > emerges may be superior to our own, the process of change is agonizing._ I > must move through this pain-wracked transitional era as a scientist would > move through a world of disease; once a surgeon becomes personally involved > and disturbed about the condition of his patient, he loses the power to help > that patient. _Clinical detachment is not some kind of haughty pose I affect > — nor does it reflect any lack of compassion on my part; it's simply a > survival strategy. The world we are living in is not one I would have > created on my own drawing board, but it's the one in which I must live, and > in which the students I teach must live. If nothing else, I owe it to them > to avoid the luxury of moral indignation or the troglodytic security of the > ivory tower and to get down into the junk yard of environmental change and > steam-shovel my way through to a comprehension of its contents and its lines > of force — in order to understand how and why it is metamorphosing man._

[https://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview- mar...](https://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall- mcluhan/)

<comment><USER5> That's a great quote. McLuhan had a genius for that kind of objectivity, so I'm not sure your comparison is entirely fair.

Many of McLuhan's comments that seemed cryptic and oracular in the 1960s sound commonplace now. It's astonishing how much he figured out decades before the mass internet.

<comment><USER4> It's hard to find anything by McLuhan that isn't a great quote!

I vaguely remember some interview where he expressed a bit of dismay at being received as a wild and out there psychedelic preacher when he was really doing his best to express the trajectory of media and the world as he saw it.

Of course he must have delighted in the way he used language so prophetically and aphoristically, and he did make huge claims every other sentence. He seemed to talk like that naturally; if you listen to live interviews, he's the same way.

Tons of fact recall like Chomsky, spectacular persona like Zizek, and futuristic like Kurzweil—it's weird he isn't more popular here. Maybe it's because if you like him people think you're a hippie.

<comment><USER5> McLuhan was a remarkable combination of conservative Catholic and pop culture proto-troll. His relative obscurity now is probably a reaction against his original celebrity. Many academics were shocked and embittered by that, and there seems little incentive to treat him seriously yet, so the attempts that I've seen to rehabilitate him as a thinker are so far still marginal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On a related note. Does anyone have any references to how english grammar is changing because of this.

<comment><USER7> On a related note to your related note, there's long been a difference between written language and spoken language [1]. Written language tends to be more complex, since it's easier to pause and think about what you're going to say, and it's still easy to understand because the reader can read it over and over again. Some writers find it difficult to write dialog for this reason, it's such a shift in format. Spoken language also tends to run on with incomplete sentences because people want to hold the channel open for themselves while they are forming a thought, but others also want to break in for their turn.

Now with the Internet and texting, of course you get plenty of regular, formal written English like I am doing right now. But you also get a new shorthand, and new information being presented. its like omg lol and you don't need punctuation

just send another text

this is how we pause for...

dramatic effect

It might be too early in the development of the Internet and smartphones to really key in on any sort of new grammar rules, but it's really worth thinking about. Plenty of times I find myself thinking "should I write haha or lol or just send a smiley", so there will be some rules shake out of it for sure.

[1] [http://www.omniglot.com/writing/writingvspeech.htm](http://www.omniglot.com/writing/writingvspeech.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> tl;dr?

<comment><USER9> We're skimming good material as we are skimming this bad article.

<comment><USER8> I just want the tl;dr to save time :)</comment></comment></comment>


Ten years on LinkedIn - <AUTHOR> https://evertpot.com/10-years-of-linkedin/ <comment><USER2> I personally got contacted by Facebook, Google and LinkedIn themselves on LinkedIn with job opportunities.

I worked for LinkedIn for a bit and am now working at Facebook.

While I visit the site/app only every other week, I still think it's very valuable to connect to people I talked to at meetups and that I would like to stay connected with somehow. Some of the people I'd like to stay in touch with, don't have at twitter account or are so low frequency that I'd miss things I care about. I probably wouldn't connect with them on Facebook since to me it still feels a bit too "personal".

Considering that LinkedIn was instrumental in the two biggest "moves" in my career and fills a good niche for me, I personally like them as a network.

I agree that the UI is a bit annoying at times, but they're way better than they used to be in that regard. I don't even mind recruiter emails. I have a bit less than 5 years of experience, so I still think it's a bit flattering to receive them :)

<comment><USER3> While I don't want to be presumptuous it sounds like you are ostensibly just super talented and, at this point, have some solid accomplishments.

So while linkedIn may have opened doors, it is pretty unlikely through something like HN or your own irl network, you wouldve ended up unsuccessful. My own feelings towards linkIn aside, anecdotally it certainly seems that it was useful for you. It certainly has the ability to provide great things, or speed up connections/opportunity.

I agree with the article in that it is a soft requirement for a lot of things:

Entrepreneur: Helpful for hiring, networking looking at competition, finding investors.

Freelancer: Getting gigs, proving reputation.

Bigcompany: online presence, hiring.

Recruiter: obvious.

Etc.

So while you certainly aren't unique in finding value in linkedIn, it is utterly painful to use and sometimes i feel like if I put my cursor in the wrong place I'll accidentally agree to realtime uploading of all my data & that of my friend.

As an aside, it really can't survive much longer:

* Users hate using it

* it is totally unpleasant and insisistant on you conforming to what it demands.

* signal to noise is so out of alignment it is painful.

* Companies have to deal with the need to be on the platform and endorse enployees who are incentivized to self-promote sometimes to the company's detriment.

* I personally, and I largely suspect this to be very common, have connections I don't know. Either we have drifted apart, were breifly engaged in something, or I was just to lenient with accepting/reaching out.

* Increasingly, it is becoming less profitable as it struggles to give away enough data to be useful, but hold back enough to upsell premium packages.

While facebook certainly seems to care little about privacy, there is a compelling engagement and feeling of human connection that is just not there with linked in.

They should just sell to salesforce, that way the data and privacy could stay just as exploitive, but they could allow users latitude to enjoy/benefit from it a bit more.

<comment><USER4> _Users hate using it_

That may very well be, but I have never heard anyone say this except on HN

<comment><USER3> You might very well be correct. However, (and I don't love FB) when is the last time someone in real life called you over to look at something on linkedIN?

Professionally, it is dangerous as you can't show coworkers the great job you found. Most of the articles are advertisements or a logo and smiling people holding laptops, and the jobs (as all sites) are just crawled from every other companies site.

I can only assume that if I have to pay to send you a linkedIn mail we're not connected, and if we are connected I would send you and email.

So, the only reason I go on linkedIN, is because it is too hard to write a crawler to parse what I can only imagine is like 10K LOC of JS, and copy paste the source into my crawler to pull the info. Also, for potential investors & enterprise customers to view these profiles is $80 a month. So the top people who don't want to talk to us get unsolicited inbound emails from us because linkedin sold them out for $80 a month.

so yes this is HN, and yes I bloody hate LI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I agree that there are many problems with LinkedIn, but my (contrarian) view is that it is still useful for me:

\- contact information for professional contacts in one place, updated by them

\- job offers (yes, mostly good or at least decent)

\- can look up people to see their experience and common contacts

\- updates on what previous colleagues are up to.

More here: [http://henrikwarne.com/2013/08/21/linkedin-good-or- bad/](http://henrikwarne.com/2013/08/21/linkedin-good-or-bad/)

<comment><USER6> I don't know what LinkedIn you're using that provides you with job offers, but the one I'm on has only lead to recruiter contacts which may or may not lead to interviews, which (so far) have never lead to an actual job offer.

LinkedIn is great if you just want to endlessly socialize with recruiters. Don't worry about finding them: They'll all try to connect with you and chat you up about one of their jobs that is just like the one you have but at another company. Hell, you might even get an interview out of it, but good luck turning that into an actual job in today's picky environment.

And if any of those LinkedIn recruiters are reading this, Try This One Neat Trick That Candidates Love: Instead of approaching someone with a job posting that's basically what he did 2 years ago or what he's doing today, approach him with what he might want to be doing 2 years from now. You'll get better responses, I guarantee it.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "LinkedIn is great if you just want to endlessly socialize with recruiters"

Why do you socialise with them? Every few days I check in and accept all connection requests (almost all recruiters). I have email notifications turned off so their messages to me just get ignored. Then when it came time to find a job I replied to three or four of them with my requirements, picked a few companies I liked from each, and had interviews setup. Much more efficient than me having to find these companies myself.

<comment><USER7> That is exactly how I got my current job and how I continue to use linkedin too. It's extremely effective. 3+ recruiters a week, just let em know that now is not a good time but in the future. Network grows and more recruiters hit me up per week. Offers quite a bit of mental security knowing I have an army of recruiter contacts waiting to do my bidding so I can say fuck you to my current job if I wanted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The problem with LinkedIn is that they have multiple, conflicting business models each of which are too successful to kill outright.

1\. They have an advertising business, that sells to marketers. 2\. They have a recruiting business, which sells to recruiters. 3\. They have a individual (networking) business, which sells to individuals. 4\. They have a sales business, which sells to sales people.

While they all have a core basic similarity (use a rich database of professional people), when it comes to monetization of this core platform, there are little conflicts that add up over time. For example, for #2, they should make it as easy and free and valuable for people to join and update their profile. But then that conflicts with #3 a little bit, because a valuable feature is looking at other people's full profiles -- but that means you can't charge for individual subscriptions. And so forth.

</comment><comment><USER9> "I don't have one because of principles" is an excellent answer. It's the answer I give whenever someone asks me for anything social media related whether the context is social or professional. You may be surprised to hear that I've experienced zero consequences for it.

<comment><USER10> I'm slightly on the fence with this one. Often employers are looking for someone "normal" who will fit into a team in a "normal" sort of way; and having a LinkedIn account is certainly "normal" (given the number of people who have them). On the other hand, obviously some employers are looking for someone weird and exceptional, and, on that basis, are prepared to have to deal with Richard Stallman and his problems with parrots ([https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/forum/#!msg/mysoci...](https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/forum/#!msg/mysociety- community/zkyZpOXjgoQ/_8xyXSxv9zYJ)).

Secondly, you absolutely do not want to start ranting about "principles" or "ethics" during an interview - or being overtly negative about fairly common- place things - unless you're pretty sure they're looking for RMS and your beard is looking exceptional that day.

But, all that said, I think you could probably get out of a "Why don't you have a LinkedIn profile?" scenario in a fairly anodyne way just by saying something like, "I'll be honest, I used to have one, but I got sick of the spam."

<comment><USER11> I have literally never been asked about LinkedIn in an interview.

What other high school cliquey things do you expect on an interview?

<comment> m-i-l I've never asked about LinkedIn in an interview. However, I do sometimes look up candidates prior to interviewing them, and admit to being slightly curious if I can't find them, although would not let it count against them. Conversely, I have also seen a few candidates look me up on LinkedIn prior to their interview, which I generally take as positive sign, because it shows they are trying to prepare.

<comment><USER12> For quite some time I was trying to get people to look at my actual resume instead of its shadow on linkedin and I couldn't get people to do it because they would google my name and the first link would be on linkedin so they would never bother to look beyond it. As soon as I closed my linkedin account all of a sudden people started looking at my actual resume and my code on github. I don't regret closing my account and forcing people to do some legwork to find my qualifications instead of doing the lazy thing and stalking on linkedin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I find LinkedIn very useful. I use it before every external meeting to get background on the others, and provide my profile to offer the same courtesy.

The frustration is that it could be so much more. They have the richest demographic of customers and the worlds best human capital map. They could be doing so much more than paid Lead Generation for salespeople and recruiters. (And this is coming from someone who has used it for both)

<comment><USER14> Agreed on all counts. I don't use it before every single meeting, but it's helpful to see who we have in common, etc.

And yes, it could have been (or could be) so much more than just recruiter- oriented. Something as basic as letting me keep notes about my relationship with someone - where did we meet, who introduced us, etc - would have made them truly indispensable to an entire generation.

<comment><USER15> It's interesting you say this, as that exact functionality got implemented very recently.

[https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/43370/~/ad...](https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/43370/~/adding- notes-to-a-contact)

<comment><USER14> and... I went to the site and poked around before I posted that, just to make sure it wasn't already there. If it's there, it's super non-obvious, as in, I didn't see it, and I was looking for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> From an employee's perspective, rather than contractor, I feel that it's _fear_ that keeps me on LinkedIn.

"What if I lose out on an opportunity, or seem strange, because I'm no longer on LinkedIn?"

<comment><USER17> Funny because I feel the same thing even if I've never gotten a job through linkedin. Even never a job interview. I think I'll delete my linkedin.

<comment><USER18> Easier is disabling your profile. You keep your contact network and but no longer appear in search results and can only be viewed by people in your network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Probably the main reason why the poster should better continue using LinkedIn:

[https://evertpot.com/resume.html](https://evertpot.com/resume.html) 404 File not found

<comment> L-four [https://evertpot.com/resume/](https://evertpot.com/resume/)

<comment><USER20> But the link is broken in his home page:

        If you're into that sort of thing, you could take a gander at my
        resume.

<comment> L-four Your are correct

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Those articles are useful: everytime someone mentions LinkedIn, I remember to check my account.

Without them, I'd pretty much never open the site.

<comment><USER22> Except recently social networks, such as LinkedIn, takes note of any inactivity and will send periodic "enticer" emails in an attempt to increase you engagement with their site.

<comment><USER23> Facebook is terrible for this. I thought I'd opted out of all communications, yet I still receive these enticer emails and also things about how my "business page" needs updating.

The only reason I still have a Facebook account is "in case" I ever need to contact some of those old associates or school friends (a bit like hoarding old computer parts - I might need them one day!). I still have a LinkedIn account because I changed industry and thought I should at least have some way of contacting old business associates if I ever needed a way back.

Otherwise, I'd have deleted both accounts. They are of no practical use to me on a day to day basis, and I only hold on to them for a "just in case I need to contact someone" situation.

<comment><USER24> You can deactivate your Facebook account. You won't get the enticer emails and if you ever need to look up some contact info, you can just activate it again.

<comment><USER25> Or you can just message them with your email and ask for their contact info.

I did this a few years ago. Have a nice list. Never email any of them :-/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I remember being utterly turned off by LinkedIn when I saw two of my colleges a few years using a script to approve everyone's "skills" (or whatever they call it) everyday in order to be more popular or whatever.

I thought if everyone is just gaming it like that, the whole platform is totally worthless and even worse.

Needless to say, I now have a very minimal presence on it and never anymore link with recruiters as they will suck you dry timewise.

<comment><USER27> That skill endorsement interface is like a videogame that I play every few months. I hit the affirmative button on people I like without really looking at the skills too closely. I have to have a really low regard for someone to not just give them a skill recommendation.

It's really just a "Hey" that I'm sending to some long-lost co-worker's mailbox. Often, endorsing someone will spur a reconnection or an email conversation with that person that I otherwise might not have had.

I would never consider the linkedin skills recommendations when looking to hire someone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I use LinkedIn (tech recruiter) daily but I have most of the features blocked.

I use my personal network or inmails (paid for by my employer) to contact people and my personal page is a landing page for developers.

I disabled the scrolling facebook like front page and I use buffer to post articles for me during the workday.

It's mostly helpful for getting job offers and generating interest in yourself. Even I get multiple recruitment messages a day so I can only imagine what developers inboxes look like. The problem for some people who haven't found it useful is most recruiters only target the young developers who look like they will be easy placements.

<comment><USER29> I like the idea of using my LinkedIn page as a way to highlight interesting articles to spark conversation. I'm not aticvely recruiting at the moment (but I do use Linked In when I am), so I could see having already built a "community" of my peers on MY page would beuseful for both recruiting for my current team, and also any future job searches I embark on. Where did you come up with the tweaks for your own page? I'm curious if there is a tutorial for this, or if you just kind of stumbled on to it? I did a little search for "linkedin disable scrolling", hoping to fin a MySpace style skinning tutorial, compelte with embedded HTML, but had no such luck.

<comment><USER28> I actually asked someone here on Hackernews and they let me know its fairly easy to block the scrolling function of LI's homepage by using uBlock.

I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn (3 hours on average a day) and early in my career when I was avoiding making cold calls I found what made other peoples LinkedIn profiles stand out and copied them. Now my profile is a personalized and tweaked version of the 100's of interesting profiles I've viewed.

I do a lot of profile optimization internally for my company and team but I have thought about making some type of public guide or offering a service but it seems like there is no good way to edit or suggest edits to a profile without actually logging into someones account and that raises obvious recruit risks for most people.

However If your interested I can send you the powerpoint deck I use to give meeting on this topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I never understood the criticism of LinkedIn. It's the least intrusive of all the networks I am in and probably the most valuable when I look at who it gives men access to and it allows others who look for someone like me to find me.

I've been on linkedin almost from day one and I still haven't found anything even remotely comparable to Linkedin in value. It's like the google of professional networks. Sure you can use other networks that will make you feel like you are missing something.

<comment><USER31> _" It's the least intrusive of all the networks"_

Are you joking? I've never been on LinkedIn and still get spam from it constantly (though less nowadays than few years back).

<comment><USER32> Have you tried using the "unsubscribe" button?

<comment><USER33> Why should people "unsubscribe" from email they didn't explicitly sign up for?

<comment><USER34> So they hopefully stop getting it.

<comment><USER33> Or they confirm the email address is live and they get lots more?

Standard advice for years has been don't unsub from email you haven't subbed to.

<comment><USER30> For actual spammers yes. Linkedin isn't a spammer in that category.

<comment><USER33> Linkedin is sending bulk email to people who have not opted in and who have not confirmed the opt in.

That's pretty much the definition of spam. It's unsolicited, it's bulk, it's email.

<comment><USER30> Yes but the question was whether you had opted out.

I haven't seen anyone claiming Linkedin keeps sending after that but I might be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I realised yesterday that its been almost exactly ten years since I _stopped_ using LinkedIn!

</comment><comment><USER36> I have been a linkedin user for about 10 years as well. Here are my thoughts:

Useful parts of linkedin (not that many):

\- Ability to connect with people you have worked with and keeping in touch with them. Knowing who is doing what profesionally in your circle. This is useful if you know how to use the network to your advantage.

\- Decent Job offers from good recruiters once in a while (very rare but it does happen). I call this "Good Recruiter spam"

Things that suck about linkedin:

\- Endorsements

\- Horrible UI and dark patterns.

\- Bad recruiter spam. Basically the generic copy/paste messages or my favorite "I would like to connect with you on linkedin" generic message when trying to connect. Really ? You want to connect with a stranger but cannot bother writing why ?

\- Groups (just another way of spam)

\- The "App" spam on mobile phones. No linkedin, I don't want to use the App. Let me open linkedin.com ON mobile. there is such a thing right ?

<comment><USER37> I read a lot about recruiter spam but don't personally receive much of it. Most recruiters who contact me have reviewed my profile and present a job opening that aligns with my skills. Granted, I've never actually taken a job presented by a recruiter, but don't receive so many off-base contacts that I find them any sort of burden.

I'm not longer a developer, however, so I do wonder how much of the spam is concentrated just of filling technology positions. Dev positions are not easy to fill in just about any U.S. market, so it makes sense why they'd be so aggressively sought after.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> A candidate with active LinkedIn profile can be seen unfavourable in many industries as peeps spill too many details of projects in order to glorify their profile, one can learn a lot about competitors ways of working and technology just by reading employee profiles. Not on LinkedIn, one headache saved...

</comment><comment><USER39> I feel bad for those people who don't know how to turn off email notifications from LinkedIn, either by having their email client remove them or by some setting on LinkedIn.

We often forgot the burden of online life of those without technical skills. Imagine having all those LinkedIn mails end up in your inbox.

</comment><comment><USER40> I left LinkedIn 10 years ago. I'm still receiving emails.

<comment><USER41> I've never been on LinkedIn and I received email from them harvesting other peoples' address books, and nothing short of shouting at them made them stop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> > My only issue is that I feel, as an independent contractor, I'm obligated to > maximize my potential in acquiring new customers.

I don't know if it's an obligation, I think it doen't become suddenly okay to spam people whenever it's in your interest.

</comment><comment><USER43> I've found LinkedIn to be very useful for keeping track of former teachers and managers. For example, a tutor who helped me a great deal in 1980 is now the head of his department and I have watched the slow but steady decline of a former manager who was a real challenge to work with.

I also use it to keep track of former colleagues who were difficult to work with and avoid applying for jobs where they are working now. Even if I don't end up working with them again, it's an indication to me that those companies have a defective HR department so they've probably hired other difficult people too.

</comment><comment><USER44> Is "here's my resume, I'm not on linked-in" really not good enough for some people? I've not encountered any problems with it. If asked why, the "dark patterns" page can be mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER45> LinkedIn was never good.

No seriously, I remember reading articles about their shady behaviour from the very beginning. They were never useful for any kind of social interaction and from as far as I remember, their website was terrible.

<comment><USER46> I can't even remember at this point how long ago I deleted my linkedin profile; it was never anything more than a spam factory in my experience. What surprises me is not that they're still terrible, but that they are still - somehow, years later, despite seemingly everyone in the industry knowing they are a complete waste of time - not yet out of business.

<comment><USER47> It's most astonishing to me that anyone even still uses LinkedIn.

I deleted my account 5 years ago and my career didn't suddenly grind to a halt. Nobody has ever even asked me once for a LinkedIn profile nor turned me down for a job because I didn't have one. I must live in a different bubble from all the people in this thread insisting that it's a requirement at every turn in their lives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Someone should make a linkedin clone that isn't shit.

<comment><USER49> Honestly if LinkedIn with all of their money and resources have failed to work out how not to be shit I doubt anybody is going to succeed.

<comment><USER50> I think your counter-point almost shines a light on the approach that might actually work / not-be-shit: Spend time and resources on product functionality as goal #1, not monetization, for a lean, effective information platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Last paragraph is most salient. LinkedIn is an inadvertently maimed social construct, the (soon to be) missing link between a resume or cv and whatever comes next.

Facebook can be opted out of without THAT long of a sidelong glance because it's an overlay of something more temporary in life - a yearbook, or little black book.

Just try saying to a prospective client/recruiter "oh, having a resume/cv is for the naive unwashed masses" ... because that's what most would hear.. the rest will probably be the best candidates ever (if they sincerely agree)

</comment><comment><USER52> I totally agree with you, except for the "not leaving LinkedIn" part. I closed my account about 1 year ago after having to deal with spam, bad UI, and useless connections.

Also removing your profile from the network is a bad use experience: I had to send a customer support request to close it because I had more than 500 connections.

I think that I will build something in the near future because I like the idea of collecting connections and achievements concerning my professional career, but I'll never use LinkedIn again.

<comment><USER53> I also shut down my LinkedIn account. While I was using it, I was never able to get it to completely stop sending me emails. My workaround was to create a filter in Gmail to immediately toss anything from LinkedIn. After a few years of this and recruiter spam on the site itself, I decided it wasn't worth it. Dark patterns, privacy concerns, spam, and worthless recruiters - why bother?

As an additional bonus, I can now view some people's LinkedIn accounts without giving myself away. So I get to look people up without any of the downsides. I guess this benefit will disappear if people start to abandon LinkedIn, but for now it's nice to be able to creep on people anonymously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I hate using it. I'm a Junior Dev and I get about 10x the amount of recruiter and random adds than I did at my last job finding start-up dealflow for an investment platform.

The issue is they built a revenue model that rewards quantity over quality for content and that prioritises recruiter and sales lead generation over individuals using it to keep in touch with their professional network. I've never used it to find or move jobs.

I was trying to think about how they might be able to reverse the spam factory it's become and I don't think it's possible without a different revenue model.

I'd be interested to see if they start to move towards the 'Linkedin Qualifications' platform idea - if you use Linkedin for e-learning it would give you a reason to use the site every day, you would be tied in as you not only display your existing qualifications there but they also award them and it would let them generate revenue from users (charging for the courses) without the reliance on the premium 'here you can spam people' accounts.

This opinion piece on Tech Crunch nails why this happens is pretty accurate too > [http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/23/linkedin-problems-run- deepe...](http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/23/linkedin-problems-run-deeper-than- valuation/?ncid=rss)

</comment><comment><USER55> I still find amusing how much faith people put into LinkedIn. I gave myself some (very) fake awards, and yet I had people come up to me and ask about them. I also tried to get people to endorse me for procrastination, but couldn't find a contact willing to use their account for something not 100% business.

I have no idea how they managed to get such a high reputation.

<comment><USER56> "I also tried to get people to endorse me for procrastination"

I will.

<comment><USER57> The right answer is "I've been meaning to endorse you but I've been really busy and I'll get to it real soon now".

Speaking of procrastination, the original author should consider that procrastinating is observationally the same as not using. The original author is of the strange binary opinion that having an account means having to use the service. There's nothing wrong with setting up an account then basically abandoning it. Thus no weird interview discussions about "no account". I'm part of the post-FB, post-linkedin, post-twitter generation and I don't use those services more than once a year or so, but I do have accounts specifically designed and curated for the amusement of older HR-types. Aside from social media job descriptions, no interview ever ended early because "I don't goof off online very much". So set up the account and procrastinate at using it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I still have two requests that are invisible and can't be removed. They been there since the start. Pretty much says it all.

</comment><comment><USER59> Depressingly I thought to quickly compare how long my account has been active ... on a mobile what should have been a quick check resulted in an invitation to install an application (no thanks), a request for info on my education (no thanks), and some suggestions on who I may know and wish to bother.

Still couldn't find the account inception date. Gave up.

</comment><comment><USER60> LinkedIn is awesome. Every great biz opportunity in the last 10 years has come from it.

My only comment is they could do better by cutting down on recruiter spam and poorly thought out sales pitches.

Just increase the amount of money to send unsolicited emails, especially to more senior people.

Maybe they could have a chat with Amazon as well. Those people abuse LinkedIn way too much.

</comment><comment><USER61> I get several legitimate job hits a month from various recruiters... I kind of like to keep linked-in current and updated just in case my industry folds again... makes it quick and easy to ping the dozen or so hungry recruiters and get myself placed elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER62> Reading this, I wondered how long I've been on LinkedIn. I hardly ever use it, so I surfed over to find out.

Oh. My. God. This site is like visiting GoDaddy to try to buy a domain, except worse. It's almost entirely dark patterns. Every time I clicked anything, the file upload dialog on my computer popped up.

Now I'm really conflicted about continuing to use it. Seems like I'm stuck -- been on almost 11 years now, and I've built up quite a network. But who wants to put up with that kind of suck? What kinds of professionals would use it regularly? It's not very reassuring.

</comment><comment><USER63> Oh another HN post hating on LinkedIn/twitter/fb? How original.

</comment><comment><USER64> I can bear with the bad UI and the dark patterns but I'm more and more baffled by the stream of junk that my news-feed has become. I know that it depends on who I add and who I (un)follow but I have little time to be picky or manually curate content I want to see, like most people on HN I presume, and this gives me a very bad impression of tech recruiters and LinkedIn itself, the same way I've lost hope in getting anything worthwhile from my FB news-feed.

<comment><USER65> LinkedIn is good if you ignore the "news feed".

Use the contact list, because people update their contact info, you can contact all acquaintances easily without having to keep track of their contact info yourself.

Keep your resume up to date. Looking for a job, somebody asks you for your resume? Point the to LinkedIn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> LinkedIn helped me make a career move. I am using it for my next move. Recruiters should be looking into stackoverflow careers as it showcases the real you.

</comment><comment><USER67> I don't really understand the hate towards LinkedIn. I've connected with a lot of companies on LinkedIn. Even had LinkedIn itself, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft reach out to me with job opportunities on LinkedIn. Yes they employ dodgy UI practices but the service they provide has been invaluable with little to no effort on my part.

</comment><comment><USER68> I deleted all endorsements, posts and removed all friends and follows about a year ago when they announced they were making it harder to get your data out of the Linkedin network. I created another throwaway account with a different email just so I could view peoples full profiles.

Haven't regretted it.

</comment><comment><USER69> I'ts just a spam machine for me, all I seem to get are "are you or anyone in your network looking for a job" communications.

That plus the fact I have to be ever so careful to never hit that "search for contacts in email" button that randomly pops up

</comment><comment><USER70> LinkedIn is not that bad. Indeed it is very useful. I was contacted by many head hunters on LinkedIn and got jobs. (But I got no response when I apply for positions on LinkedIn.) LinkedIn is really a good place for head hunters.

</comment><comment><USER71> I quit linkedin back in 2012 when they got hacked and lost people's passwords.

</comment><comment><USER72> I am constantly surprised that Facebook doesn't get in LinkedIn business and destroy them completely.

Resume builder seems like a feature away.

</comment><comment><USER73> Who is building an alternative to LinkedIn?

</comment><comment><USER74> So everyone agrees LinkedIn is shit and should be abandoned if only because every clickable icon in there is booby-trapped, yet the consensus seems to be "I'll keep using it because peer pressure and network"?

Apt summary of the perverse aspects of the so-called "network effect" if i've ever saw one...

<comment><USER75> Everyone in this thread acts like LinkedIn doesn't know _exactly_ how bad they are.

They are the perfect amount of bad for the sake of their business: Their minefield of garbage makes them loads of money, but it's not so bad that a successor can unseat it (ie not at MySpace levels).

LinkedIn does a fantastic job of living on that edge. If they keep being shitty but not _super_ shitty, they'll continue to win.

<comment><USER76> Meh, I for one deleted (not just disabled) my linked in a few months ago. I realized I never made any connections on there that served me in any way. The shit wasn't bad enough to stop me from signing up, but after years it accumulated enough to make me leave.

If other developers like myself leave, then the recruiters who pay premium to be able to spam developers like myself will leave to. Then the model collapses.

In fact, the apps that don't bullshit me are the ones I use most (gmail, hn, craigslist, podcast websites).

<comment><USER77> I suspect the next successful business network will be more compartmentalized by industry. Sort of like how github is more or less becoming a business network for developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> I stopped using LinkedIn for the same reasons I stopped using Facebook. It's really hurting to see your friends getting married, getting awesome jobs paying $300,000 to be a cloud engineer or whatever the fuck, or the sheer amount of entrepreneurial/business pornography that LinkedIn peons _love_ to circle jerk.

On top of that the near non-cessant spamming from job recruiters "HEY BRO YOU WANNA JOB BRO PAY REAL GOOD", seeing ex-coworkers humble brag.

It's a cognitive dissonance at best, you expose yourself more to the non stop flow of information, you are going to get burnt out.

After quitting LinkedIn I feel great like there was a huge baggage following me around. With all these crazy shit going on around the world like people getting doxxed and swatted, I just don't feel safe to expose information voluntarily _just because all the monkeys are doing it_.

Monkey see, monkey do. A human may see what other humans are doing but the higher consciousness will lead to contrarian behaviors.

</comment><comment><USER79> I've always thought that LinkedIn really does not have "market fit" and could be so much more of a professional tool and resource. It's like LinkedIn is stuck in an old paradigm of social networking and can't find a way to move forward and innovate or see a path forward.

Maybe that's why they are having such a difficult time and are hitting a wall and the stock took a dive.</comment>


How a comedy slogan became a symbol of protest - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2017/02/father-ted-going-america <comment><USER2> I feel like there's a new kind of protest now, that's almost more of a party. It started with Anonymous' birthday protests - where people brought actual cake to Scientology centers - and then the Occupy movements took it a bit further.

There are still classic protests - the women's marches are a great example - but it's like there's this idea now that a protest can also be a fun event.

</comment><comment><USER3> My grandmother hated that show. She said she disliked how father hacket (the old drunk) was treated. But i suspect some of the catholic humor struck a little too close to home.

For those who liked it: check out "black books" which the makers did between father ted and the it crowd. Same humor. Same trio of characters. Same irish bits. One of the writers said he did all he could to avoid another "drunk irish" character ... but it couldnt be avoided and does crop up in all three.

</comment><comment><USER4> Father Ted is a great, great show, btw, well worthy of watching every episode.

<comment><USER5> Worth re-watching with the directors commentary also.

Linehan and Matthews are two very smart guys!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "<Insert Irreverent Thing Here>" is the new symbol of protest. Every protest I've seen has had a slew of various comedic signs and slogans.

<comment><USER7> My favorite is "They said there would be cake."

<comment><USER8> As always, the cake is a lie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the same show, I´ve been remembering the line "I heard you're a racist now, father" quite often these days...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zkL91LzCMc&t=1m14s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zkL91LzCMc&t=1m14s)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm in the process of registering a semi-satirical political party and "down with this sort of thing" was the first official slogan I listed - it's so ingrained in the culture here now

</comment><comment> 97-109-107 Relevant read Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? Memes, Design and Politics. by Metahaven [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17797884-can-jokes- bring-...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17797884-can-jokes-bring-down- governments-memes-design-and-politics)

</comment><comment><USER11> FYI: It's "Down With This Sort of Thing" from Father Ted, for anyone feeling to lazy to push the web button above.

</comment><comment><USER12> My guess is that it's Irish emigrants carrying the placards. It's sort of an in joke.

<comment><USER13> Possibly, but no need to assume the placard-bearers are Irish. Father Ted was a joint Irish-British production and was very well-received in the UK when it came out.

<comment><USER12> It was a regular fixture on student demos in Dublin about 10 years ago, never really saw it on British demos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Of all the varied protest signs that have made an appearance, this article makes it to the front page of Hacker News?

What is it with developers and their obsession with European comedy?

\- Monty Python

\- UK Version of the Office

\- Eddie Izzard

\- John Oliver

<comment><USER15> I can't speak for everyone but the main difference between American popular comedy and European comedy is that the European comedy is drier requiring more thought and understanding. Thus making it more attractive to me as I enjoy that level of effort.

Disclaimer: I run a comedy group and am a software developer.

<comment><USER16> You should try German comedy. English is too full of puns, so makes humour too easy.

<comment><USER17> If you think English has too many puns, I suggest you try Japanese. So many words with the same or similar pronunciations, it's just beautiful.

True story: Larry Wall went into an Indian restaurant in Tokyo. He pointed to the bread and asked the waiter, "Naan desu ka?"

<comment><USER18> Was there a convenient picture of a panda for the waiter to point to in reply?

<comment><USER17> ^_^

Not sure, I wasn't there. Larry told the story to me at a YAPC::NA when we were having a conversation about multilingual puns.

<comment><USER19> If you're into Japanese puns, bread, and anime, Yakitate Japan will be right up your alley, and the whole series is legitimately available to watch free on YouTube: [https://youtu.be/Tyb7ri8EcOo?list=PLrrh84y760v8QyC5bDENLId-P...](https://youtu.be/Tyb7ri8EcOo?list=PLrrh84y760v8QyC5bDENLId- PNqNDpOgG)

<comment><USER20> Sadly not available everywhere: [http://imgur.com/a/oxIgt](http://imgur.com/a/oxIgt)

(UK).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Chrome gets extension sync - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_chrome_gets_extension_sync.php

<comment><USER2> I would love to do this without sharing my extension data and bookmarks with Google. They already know what I search for. I don't really want them to know my favorite porn or cooking websites.

How difficult would it be to add a different provider for Chromium sync, or make a small server component that would allow anyone to decentralized-ly be their own provider of a sync repo for their browsers?

<comment><USER3> How selfish of you, to save the good porn sites for yourself

<comment><USER2> Uh, at least among male internet users I am a small minority. I wouldn't worry about my collection, heh. Besides, they're still there and finding is half the fun.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Asset Hub, a Collection of Redistributable Creative Commons Works - <AUTHOR> https://assethub.io

<comment><AUTHOR> The blog post announcing Asset Hub: [https://medium.com/@assethub/asset-hub- day-one-51fb4505a28c](https://medium.com/@assethub/asset-hub-day- one-51fb4505a28c)</comment>


A Map of Trees in London - <AUTHOR> https://www.treetalk.co.uk/map/#xyz=8.2/51.508/-0.128 <comment><USER2> Current discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23078682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23078682)

<comment><USER3> Comments moved thither. Thanks!</comment></comment>


The bad news from Apple's quarterly results - <AUTHOR> http://www.247wallst.com/2008/04/the-mac-apples.html

<comment><USER2> Douglas A. McIntyre: Always bet against him.

Best line from this: "The PC and Windows had done too good a job." Yes, that's exactly why Apple saw 51% growth in Mac sales - because Windows has just been doing too damn good a job. Just to push his ignorance to the forefront, also tries to directly compare 2008 Apple with 1980's Apple and 1998 Apple.

Granted 1998 may have been an important year in Apples history but they never experienced volume and popularity like they have in 2005-Present. Apple is the biggest brand in tech right now. Trying to compare that with where they were in an infant PC market in the 1980's or when they were trying to resurrect themselves in the mid-late '90's is simply idiotic. He also fails to understand the impact that the young generation of computer users will have in the long-term. How many 20-something college students or IT-types are there that are pretty Apple-savvy. A lot. There is little doubt that this will seriously impact the work computing environment on some level. If any company in this discussion has hit a glass ceiling, it's clearly Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not well written, but there is a kernel of truth in there: Apple has not even scratched the surface of the corporate computing world.

I once met with someone in charge of big chunks of IT for VW who was quite the Mac fan, but had an interesting perspective on why they couldn't even really consider them:

Apple has positioned itself as a luxury item (and much of their strategy depends on that image) and as such can't play in the commodity market. They create artificial scarcity. They have real production limits. They don't have the support infrastructure to deal with large corporate customers.

His line was, "What if I call them up tomorrow and order 10k machines? There's no way they can fill it in a timely manner, much less support us after the purchase."

Interesting, certainly.

<comment><USER4> "Apple has not even scratched the surface of the corporate computing world"

Apple actively subverts any desire the corporate world may have to switch. Unreliable supply chains, a lack of scheduling, unpredictable design decisions, &c. I know their sales people feel the frustration that their corporate clients feel: they -want- to be able to sell 10 million in product annually to a single client. But, for instance, this last year their educational deployment was MONTHS delayed because of the new iMac.

I wish this were the exception: it's the rule. And that's great if you're selling 'cool', it's not great if you're selling 'reliable'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "iPod sales sales have slowed considerably. They were up only 8% in the quarter. to 10,644,000. With almost 150 million sold since the product was introduced, it is surprising that the music player has held up that well. The product saved the company from obscurity but its best days are over."

Interesting statement, and a noticable lack of facts to support that statement. With 150 million iPods sold, there are about 6 billion people on this planet that don't have one. If Apple managed to sell 10 million iPods last quarter, why would it not do the same this quarter?

</comment><comment><USER6> This also seems relevant to the discussion of the relative strengths of the Mac and PC markets right now:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aQ7_...](http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aQ7_iN1SxJ.c&refer=worldwide)

vs. Apple's Best. Quarter. Ever.

</comment><comment><USER7> Gruber posted an apt response to this on Daring Fireball, I thought. <http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/april#thu-24-mcintyre>

</comment><comment><USER8> What a terribly-written post.

<comment><AUTHOR> The writing is a little off compared to his usual stuff, but it still raises a valid point: Apple can only grow so big if they can't get companies/schools to start buying Macs.

Personally, I think it'll be a while before this happens, if it happens at all. Too many of the people who control what computers those companies buy don't see Macs as 'real' computers.

<comment><USER6> "The writing is a little off compared to his usual stuff, but it still raises a valid point: Apple can only grow so big if they can't get companies/schools to start buying Macs."

It's worthless because he gives no facts or useful figures to support his hypothesis.

1\. Schools ARE buying Macs. Pretty sure they displaced Dell to become number 1 in that market again (or was that just laptops?).

2\. How big is big, exactly? How much of the consumer market can they realistically get? Once upper level managers decide they need the cachet of a Mac laptop precisely because of its must have status as a consumer item, how are the IT guys going to tell them they won't support it and keep their jobs? There's some evidence this is happening with iPhone already.

"Too many of the people who control what computers those companies buy don't see Macs as 'real' computers."

Those are probably people who are very cognizant of the stock market, and judge the appeal of potential suppliers at least in part by what the vendor's stock price is doing. In the media, "Vista is a failure" and "Apple is the hottest company in tech" are strong memes right now. I guarantee you that the "decision makers" are very aware of them.

Also, the unstated idea that Apple needs to overtake Dell and/or HP for its stock to continue to grow is badly mistaken. When you have 3.5% world wide share, a single percentage point of increased market share is a huge increase in revenue and profit. Add to that the fact that Apple's share of the market is mostly among the most profitable customer segments. Much of Dell and HP sales are for product lines with razor thin margins. So, no, it is not necessary for Apple to rival the dominant players in corporate sales to continue to grow.

UPDATE: I totally left off the fact that Apple is really the most successful 21st century consumer electronics manufacturer, and are almost certain to introduce entirely new product categories. They won't all succeed, but given Apple's track record it would be foolish to bet that none of them will.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.) - <AUTHOR>

Hello!
Every once in a while, I like to offer my time to help other passionate people be a little more successful with their goals. If there's anything I can help you with, just ask here. No strings whatsoever.
If you'd like my help: Be specific about what you're trying to fix/solve/accomplish...your goal. The more details you provide, the better I can help you out.
I've done this before a few times now, and it's worked out well for everyone. Check out some of the previous "No strings" sessions I've done to get an idea of how I can help. (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mikegreenberg)
I will try to help all requests made before the end of today and will attempt to complete by the end of Sunday. Be patient and check back. Please keep requests to tasks I can do in ~15 minutes. I'll spend more time willingly, but smaller requests lets me help more people! Thanks. :)
Cheers!!
PS: If you'd rather give than receive: Go find someone else to do something nice for...like give them a back rub. Or, you can help be an early tester of a lightweight address book I'm building inside Chrome... If you're interested, visit my quietly launched site: http://yourglimpse.com (PS: This "No Strings" offer is a week late because I was busy building this prototype at http://hackdayfoundation.org! Hope you like it!) <comment><USER2> I recently started an open source application relating to web crawling / data analyzing, is there anything small that you could do to get my project a few eyeballs, I know its raw at this point but I work on it at least a few days a week and would love to have someone else interested in it to at least bounce ideas off it so the more exposure the better: [https://github.com/devs1010/WebGatherer---Scraper-and- Analyz...](https://github.com/devs1010/WebGatherer---Scraper-and- Analyzer/wiki/Intro-to-WebGatherer-Application)

Thanks

</comment><comment><USER3> I would appreciate it if you could give me some feedback on my side project: <http://www.gotcheapbooks.com>. I am a developer and I am trying to learn more about design and usability. Please give me suggestions regarding the following:

\- What can I do to improve the design?

\- Any suggestions for making it more user friendly?

Thank you for your help and have a great weekend!

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/book/> This is a great resource I give out to anyone interested in learning about designing on the web. They cover basic principles, how it all works together, even a case study at the end. Highly recommended.

There's nothing painfully wrong with your current design, especially if you're a developer with little existing knowledge. I would add more whitespace into your front page. The elements feel as though they are sitting on top of each other. Adding some breathing room will also help your visitors scan the page more easily.

I'm not much of a designer and have stronger programming sense. But I know what looks good. So sometimes, I'll go through my bookmarks, RSS feeds of idea sites, or check out website templates to get ideas. I might even take one and tweak it to my own tastes.

Also, see if you can go to a hackathon nearby and find an awesome designer to work with. Make sur eyou sit next to him and casually watch how he works. I did this last weekend it was an awesome way to observe a designer working within in his element.

From a usability point of you, your approach is direct and intuitive. Everything does what it seems like it should do. I wasn't surprised by anything. The interface is really snappy. Took a look through your javascript and you have excellent, well organized, well documented code. Beautiful!

Regarding improving your user experience... take a cue from Google and see if you can implement a realtime search as the user types. People are suckers for instant gratification. Maybe you can tie into a book preview service and offer an inside look of the books from the search page? I don't know, just a few off the wall ideas.

Great job with this otherwise! Hope this helped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a sales founder at a 3 month old b2b saas startup. We make listing online classified ads effortless. Our focus is real estate companies and auto dealerships. We have 4 customers in Florida. Can you refer us any more business?

<comment><AUTHOR> Email me an informational url about your business and contact info I can pass along to a few people in those industries. If I think you'd be a good fit, I'll certainly share service with them.

@nobulb.com prepended by my initials.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Aloha!

Would love your FB on our new email marketing software (www.redcappi.com).

And speaking of "doing nice", we contribute a minimum of $2 per paid account to Charity:Water for clean water!

Mahalo!

<comment><AUTHOR> It's great that you donate a portion of your revenue to Charity:Water! Here's some feedback...though it's vague, you didn't specify any specific part of your site for me to address:

\- The color of red in your logo at the top doesn't match the red in your footer. (Minor, maybe, but this was screaming at me.)

\- The overall design could be balanced a bit better. The area at the top which summarizes your business is quite spacious, whereas the content underneath (Stroll, Explore, Create, and Story sections, etc) feel cramped. Consider a CSS grid layout to give your elements and position some "visual rhythm" (or a consistent visual feel that allows the eye to casually consume content without jarring distractions and interruptions within the layout). <http://960.gs> or <http://blueprintcss.org> is quite nice for this.

\- RedCappi seems to be two products in one (with a tab on the right allowing the user to switch information between the two products. This is not very intuitive and I'd be willing to bet that the majority of your web builder traffic is a lot less than your email marketing traffic. Consider separating the two products more clearly and giving each their own space on your domain. This will improve SEM/SEO as well as help users to more quickly find the information they need.

\- WAY too many pricing plans. By offering so many options, you are probably scaring your customers away from making a decision they (may or may not) have to live with. Everything starts out free for your customers anyway, so why not just let them grow their plan as their needs require it. You can mention limitations, but I wouldn't throw prices in their face unless they're looking. And when the only thing between plans that change is the number of contacts allowed, make the plan configurable with a slider. MUCH easier to understand for the user and they can play around with the slider to fit their plan (giving them the perception of more control, which they'll love). Heroku does this if you want an example. (<http://www.heroku.com/pricing>)

\- I like the idea... I'm not doing too much email marketing so I'm not certain what are strong features, what is done well, etc etc. I was looking for screenshots or a tour but couldn't find anything of the sort.

Hope this gives you a good start. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have Mozilla Firefox as my browser. I had Autofill with IE, to fill out forms, name, address, ect... but cann't find a way to fill in the blanks automatic with Firefox What gives do you know?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is Mozilla's support doc for the autocomplete that's built into the browser. <http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Form%20autocomplete>

Here's a plugin that will work just as well. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/autofill-form...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/autofill-forms/)

These were both found with a search for "firefox autofill". <http://google.com></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes - <AUTHOR> A lot of people ask us why their submission gets kicked off the front page.  The answer is almost always that it trips our voting ring detector.<p>Please occasionally read /newest so interesting stories that don't solicit upvotes can still get on the front page. <comment><USER2> Sam I think you have great power to give /newest more views if you'd consider minor redesigns.

Perhaps you could dither stories so the front-page list goes top/new/top/new/top/new, etc, but that is potentially very messy.

Or perhaps instead, the front-page can show 30 top stories, then a line break, then 30 new stories, all on the front page. Long-scrolling pages are in fashion, after all.

These aren't well-developed ideas, but the point remains that the inertia of being one click away means that a huge percentage of people will never even _look_ at /newest, never-mind up-vote interesting stories.

Please consider changes to modify the median behavior. It's within your power and would do us all good. It's worth an experiment, isn't it?

<comment><USER3> Just splice a random /newest entry into a front page on every load.

This gets extra eyes on them and helps float good stories up. Optionally mark them green, just like HN currently marks noob users.

<comment><USER4> If you have ideas on how to improve the front page, a great thing to do is to send them to firstname.lastname@example.com. Dan and Nick are super responsive, and you might be able to have a more productive conversation in email than on a thread.

<comment><USER3> Posting it here helps accumulating other people upvotes, which, presumably, Dan and Nick can see on their end. It also opens subject to a wider discussion, which is hardly a bad thing. Meta threads are pretty damn useful if you ask me.

<comment><USER4> I agree, and I actually like the meta-threads, but I've had much more success talking to Dan privately than I have in trying to motivate changes with public comments. I think if you're really serious about a suggestion, mailing Dan is the right way to go.

If there's one consistent thing I've read from Dan in his tenure of publicly moderating the site, it's "please mail firstname.lastname@example.com about this stuff". I'm just heading him off here. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some observations:

1\. Almost no one reads the new page. For proof, go to the new page and count up the total number of votes that all the stories on the new page have received in the last hour.

2\. There is a VERY short time window (typically about an hour nowadays) during which a story either gets enough votes to end up on the home page (half a dozen or so seems to be enough) or drops off the first new page, after which it will never be seen again.

3\. Once a story arrives on the home page, there is a very good chance that it will stay there for a while (longer than an hour anyway).

4\. As a result, there is an EXTREMELY strong incentive when one has posted a story to send out an email to one's friends saying, "I just posted this to HN, please take a look and upvote it if you think it deserves it." [1]

5\. A story that gets a lot of votes as a result isn't necessarily a bad story. So a voting ring detector is likely to generate false positives.

6\. Simply asking people to go read the new page isn't going to fix the problem. Figuring out what to do instead isn't easy.

\---

[1] Last year I did an experiment where I wrote a series of six blog posts all related to a single topic. I posted all six to HN. Three of them I sent out an email announcement, and three of them I didn't. The first three all ended up on the home page, ultimately garnering many tens of votes. The other three never got a single vote.

<comment><USER6> Low vote counts on the new page don't prove nobody goes there. An alternative explanation is that 90% of the new page is crap that really doesn't deserve a single vote. (Just did this experiment, and only found one of the 30 submissions interesting enough to even click on).

It is true that you need to get something like 5-6 votes in the first hour to get to the front page. But that's not a very large amount, and it's definitely possible to get across that threshold without soliciting for votes, so clearly there are a decent amount of people reading /newest. (About a third of my submissions made the front page, and it's kind of obvious in retrospect why many of the others failed. I never asked anyone to vote for any of those submissions).

<comment><USER5> > Low vote counts on the new page don't prove nobody goes there.

True, which is why I did that experiment. The odds of getting the results I did by accident are one in 64, which counts as a statistically significant result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd be curious to hear more about how YC companies handle voting so they get their content on the front page. From what I've heard, they get a lot of help to promote content.

Totally makes sense seeing as HN is built around YC, but in that light makes it a bit disingenuous to ask the community to not solicit help from _their_ group to promote content.

<comment><AUTHOR> YC companies complain the most often because they trigger the voting ring when they ask their batchmates to votes them up :)

<comment><USER8> As a counter argument, I haven't seen _any_ ycombinator company NOT make it on the front page. I am not saying this is a collusion or anything but wanted to point out that there are people with knowledge who do this all the time and can get away with it because they know how it works. They would send a message like "Please go to HN and look for such and such title and vote it up. I can't post the link because of voting ring algorithm". And I see these people always show up on the front page. When this is the reality, how can one NOT do this? The people who try to play fair are the ones who will lose. I agree with you that it's not good to ask for upvotes but people who already know how it works will keep doing it, and the people who don't will just lose like they always have. Also I wonder what you do with those YC company guys who complain about getting detected as voting ring. Do you just let their posts stay buried or do you give them a second chance? If you are going to ask people to cooperate, I think it's crucial to have some transparency. Otherwise, no matter what you ask, nothing will change.

As a person who discovers lots of cool projects through showHN posts, I hope you could come up with a solution for this, really.

<comment><USER9> I realize you may discount this, coming from HN staff, but I'd like to try to ease your worries a little.

> there are people with knowledge who do this all the time and can get away > with it because they know how it works.

I believe you that people say they know, but unless I'm extremely mistaken, most really don't. We see evidence all the time of people trying (but failing) to sneak around HN's anti-ring systems. That's not to say some don't succeed. Some probably do. I'd like very much to get better at catching them.

> And I see these people always show up on the front page.

When you see that, we'd like to know about it. There is a lot that we can (and will) do to investigate those cases. Don't forget that even when the ring detector misses something, there's still a lot of data we can look at if we know to. So please, everyone, email email@example.com when someone is gaming HN.

Our goal is to have the best stories on the front page [1]. We don't all agree about what the best stories are, but I think we can agree that they're usually not ones that are only here because someone is promoting something. When we say we want people to vote for things they're interested in, that's not the kind of interest we're talking about.

> Do you just let their posts stay buried or do you give them a second chance?

Good question. We occasionally override the ring penalty when a story has clear merit for HN. (I've commented to that effect in perhaps a dozen of those threads.) But that goes for any story, not just a YC co's. And we're pretty stingy about it.

[1] That's also, by the way, our primary idea of how HN as a forum can help YC's business interests. If HN has the best quality content, the best quality people will want to be here, and some of them will start startups that YC funds. I'm not saying we do have the best quality content—there's a lot to be desired. I'm saying that this is HN's global optimum and we're not interested in trading that away for something less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I usually read the newest page, but usually it has a lot of 1-point stories, and many of them are almost-spam or almost-dupe.

Another user proposed a newest page with a >2-points filter (someone else think that it's interesting). See for example [http://hnapp.com/filter/d3a308f2ac9a071c0bf174e0c1a8fd22](http://hnapp.com/filter/d3a308f2ac9a071c0bf174e0c1a8fd22)

<comment><USER11> How does anything get on that list then if nobody ever sees the 1-point submission (without asking for votes).

<comment><USER12> exactly. that's the true terror of pagerank -- not that spammers are putting in millions of junk links, but that it makes legitimate people stop linking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Please occasionally read /newest so interesting stories that don't solicit > upvotes can still get on the front page.

In theory this is good, but in practice it's hard. Here's a suggestion for how to make it easier in practice: redirect 1/3 of the visits from the start page to /newest. As a regular and medium-karma user, I would know why this happens, and I personally wouldn't mind it.

</comment><comment><USER14> I prefer /newest. I'd rather see stuff unfiltered. Plus you can comment on stuff without 150 other comments. so it feels like your comments are heard.

<comment><USER15> I think they're read more than one realizes even if it doesn't gather upvotes

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> On a full sized monitor, most titles go only about halfway across the screen. I think with a little tweaking, you could have two columns on the front page: One with the current front page code, one with the newest stories. You might have to have titles wrap for longer titles or make some other tweaks to make this work. But that might cut back on the need to ask folks to look at new stuff.

Generally speaking, if you can write the code, you can make the rules people have to follow (though it does require some deep thinking, data, etc at times). If you want to compel x behavior, then compel it. If you want to forbid y behavior, then deny the ability in some way where possible. Writing the code makes you "god" for your little world: You decide the local "physics". Deciding the local physics is going to generally get you better results than asking people to please do x or please don't do y.

<comment><USER17> I did something similar for an RSS reader I was building based on bayesian filtering, a col-4 column on the right with the "live" feed and a main col-8 column with the filtered feed, meaning all the matches. It looked pretty good in landscape mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What does count as a voting ring?

If I post a link to HN on twitter and people upvote the submission coming from twitter,does it count as a voting ring?

<comment><USER19> It's probably better to up vote from the feed. When you click on a link from the feed, you're generally going directly to the article. You hit the browser back button to get back to hackernews; chances are if the article seemed interesting, you would then hit the up vote button. When's the last time you hit the up vote button on a comment page?

<comment><USER20> Almost all my upvotes come from the comments page. If an article looks interesting, it gets opened in one tab, followed by the comments page to see what people said about it. Look at the article, then go to the comments, may as well upvote whilst there.

<comment><USER21> I do similarly except that I just start with opening comment pages in different tabs, then go through them one-by-one, opening article from the comment thread, and upvoting there if I find it interesting. Saves me on number of tabs opened at the same time, which matters for me because in Chrome, after you hit ~ two dozens of open tabs, the favicon disappears which makes them pretty much unusable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Of course, the alternative is just to submit something to HN and..... hope for the best? Sure, THAT sounds reasonable to a bunch of type-a founders.

I think it's reasonable that somebody promotes their HN post. The takeaway is just to be careful about how you share and how widely and with whom.

I made the front page last week (for a few hours) for a side project that I launched with a friend. Several up-votes shortly after we posted it got us to the bottom of the front page, and organic traffic took it from there.

</comment><comment><USER23> I remember the early days of digg and people tend to see social news sites as a mechanism to get a wave of traffic. What they don't always think about is providing value to the social sites.

HN is probably better than most about not letting much crap on the home page, but these sites are almost universally terrible at surfacing new content so that it has a good opportunity to get up voted.

The selfish human response is to get your friends to vote for you (just like you get your friends to vote for you in real life actually). It's just that there are so few actual people looking at the submitted stories that it wouldn't take much to astroturf your way on to the front page without a voting ring filter.

The best solution is very likely to have a better interface for surfacing submitted stories to a wider audience. Or, incentivize people to actually look at the new section. Maybe extra points for voting or commenting before it hits front page.

I don't think it would take much to solve this problem, but this isn't a policy or filter problem, it's a human problem and your system needs to work with the user psychology that naturally exists on HN (and similar sites).

Reddit seemed to solve this by making subreddits a bigger part of the site, but I don't know how HN would incorporate such an idea without losing the site identity.

</comment><comment><USER21> This post just motivated me to go through /newest and upvote few things. Thank you.

Everyone, let's take a minute now and go through the new submissions and move some fresh things onto the front page. Let this also become a habit, until mods tweak HN interface to reduce the effort it requires.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is there actually any dataset of upon which the accuracy of this detector is measured and improved? Or is it just some hard-coded rules?

For example, does it really differentiate between people who ask for votes, and people who just vote up the content of someone they recognize?

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder how many false positives there are.

</comment><comment><USER26> If the OP is still reading, why didn't this at least get onto the Ask HN page? I wasn't asking for upvotes, but it seemed to fall like a stone without ever having a chance to get views... ?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7948001](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7948001)

</comment><comment><USER27> If legit submissions are getting booted by your voting-ring detector so often that you need to ask readers to take action to prevent it, then the detector is broken. It's not the readers' responsibility to change our habits to make up for your broken mechanisms.

</comment><comment><USER28> Currently, it seems you need either a lot of good luck or upvoting friends to make it to front page. Why not use some categorization so every link makes it it's category's page and has chance of reaching front page?

</comment><comment><USER29> Sam, Does saying "discuss on hn: link" at the bottom of a blog post violate your voting ring detector or any other terms of service? I couldn't find anything about that.

</comment><comment><USER30> What do you think about soliciting upvotes by sending people to /newest? Among other things, as a side-effect they might upvote other stories as well.

</comment><comment><USER31> What gets me is that unless you are really interested in GO, Haskell, dislike Microsoft, think you can write a real encrypted instant messaging system in JavaScript crypto, and have a libertarian leaning you will never have enough karma/points to downvote other people.

It encourages group think in the extreme.

Also, at around 180 gold stars/dingles it just stops.

I mean seriously...there is a vast amount of consensus around a set of things here that are just impermeable. Yes I have read "the approach to comments" and it sounds like you guys think that "resisting decline" means everyone basically has the same opinion but everyone gets to restate it to each other in "civil" and interesting ways.

EDIT: You also have to really be into crypto-currency...it also helps if you mention hayek while talking about it. You rebel.

<comment><USER31> And so now i'm being downvoted, because you know...disagreement isn't cool.

How can I save this...Who wants to talk about Rust? Huh? Anybody? Bitcoin? That god damn NSA? Amirite?

<comment><USER32> Complaining about downvotes isn't cool either.

<comment><USER33> Not if what a downvote means changed that drastically recently. I _never_ complained about downvotes, because I believed in the community collective wisdom. However, in the past few weeks, I've seen many cases of downvotes being used to basically communicate that "I disagree with you and your six- paragraphs, coherent, civil post, which is even on-topic, but I'm too lazy to write my own comment explaining why, so have a downvote."

I'm seriously thinking on putting some effort into collecting some examples and starting a discussion on the topic, because it's IMHO very bad tendency.

EDIT: Although in the case of your parent post downvotes are understandable.

<comment><USER34> pg has said many times in the past that it's OK to downvote for disagreement -- even if a comment is civil, coherent, on-topic, etc. (I usually prefer to voice disagreement in such a case, but don't always have the time/energy.)

It's usually self-correcting. A lot more people can upvote than downvote, and most people don't like seeing good comments in the gray.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> _Upvoted_</comment>


Git: Deletion of merged branches taken beyond shell hacks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hartwork/git-delete-merged-branches <comment><USER2> Instead of re-packaging various git commands, I'd like to encourage people to contribute their ideas and skills to the actual git project. Send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com, volunteer to help, and ask for advice and direction. Git needs you!

<comment><USER3> Maybe? We've had mentorships over the last couple of years trying to introduce some crypto features to Git, and they've been rebuffed.

<comment><USER4> What sort of features?

<comment><USER3> git-dids.

2019: [https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/INTERN/Git+signing+with...](https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/INTERN/Git+signing+with+DIDs)

2020: [https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/INTERN/Git+Commit+Signi...](https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/INTERN/Git+Commit+Signing+with+DID%27s%2C+Part+Deux)

<comment><USER5> Interesting hyperledger is backed by the Linux Foundation.. which is a front for large corporations to try to gain control over linux/FOSS/etc hmm

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does this have any advantage over git trim?

That's worked really well for me

[https://github.com/foriequal0/git-trim](https://github.com/foriequal0/git- trim)

</comment><comment><USER7> Not so fancy, but a one-liner

      # Remove all local branches for which there is no remote
      git branch -r | awk '{print $1}' | egrep -v -f /dev/fd/0 <(git branch -vv | grep origin) | awk '{print $1}' | xargs git branch -D

<comment><USER8> The <() is a Bashism isn't it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. See "Process Substitution" in "man bash". It works great, e.g. with diff (or meld):

      # diff -u <(echo $'one\ntwo') <(echo one)
      --- /dev/fd/63  2020-08-13 16:14:44.449379498 +0200
      +++ /dev/fd/62  2020-08-13 16:14:44.450379506 +0200
      @@ -1,2 +1 @@
       one
      -two

<comment><USER8> Gotcha. I wanted to know if it was POSIX compliant (it wasn't clear to me last time I looked it up).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Amazing timing! I was just auditing a colleague's (admittedly fairly well- written) shell script for this purpose. Nice to have this alternative.

</comment><comment><USER10> why not just set `git config fetch.prune true`?

<comment> brown9-2 I don't think this detects a branch that can be deleted after a squash merge to master

<comment><USER10> as long as the remote branch is deleted it does. Both github and gitlab can delete branch on merge

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> requires a python installation which brings a lot of stuff and new vulnerabilities... instead, see the other post about contributing straight to the git project

<comment><USER12> yeah it's been awhile since I've set up a python-ready environment, and trying to install this reminded me of the challenge of just getting to the expected starting point.

      $ pip install git-delete-merged-branches
      zsh: command not found: pip
      $ brew install pip
      Error: No available formula with the name "pip"
      pip is part of the python formula:
        brew install python
      $ brew install python
      ...
      OK
      $ pip install git-delete-merged-branches
      zsh: command not found: pip

      (look up how to install pip)
      $ curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py
      $ python get-pip.py
      WARNING: The scripts pip, pip2 and pip2.7 are installed in
      '/Users/{me}/Library/Python/2.7/bin' which is not on PATH.
        Consider adding this directory to PATH or, if you prefer to suppress this warning, use --no-warn-script-location.
      Successfully installed pip-20.2.2
      $ pip install git-delete-merged-branches
      zsh: command not found: pip
      (walk away)

I know there are solutions to all this, and it's mainly that I don't already have my $PATH set up the way that pip expects, etc, but really??

<comment><USER13> And - somehow this installed Python 2 in 2020.

<comment><USER14> No, it doesn't. Parent commenter has been macOS stock Python instead of the Homebrew one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> this script just removed my local, never pushed, never merged branch

<comment><AUTHOR> Which script are you referring to?</comment></comment>