Stop The JerkTech - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/03/go-disrupt-yourself/ <comment><USER3> God yes. The whole point of commerce is the creation and exchange of value. The great startups have been great because they create massive amounts of value in the world.

Startups like this don't create value. They just shift the value around. In the case of these startups, they shift the value to rich people while pocketing the cash. They are essentially parasitic.

Not only is that a dick move, it's dumb for a startup. Google can earn $60 billion in revenue per year because they create even more value than that for its users and customers. Startups that don't create much value have very limited opportunities for capturing value. As the parking app show, regulators are perfectly happy to ban things that don't create value, especially when they have obvious negative externalities. That's what happened to the entire telemarketing industry for example.

So please, people: focus on creating value, not just on whatever bullshit will bring a few dollars through the door.

<comment><USER4> Just to be clear: I agree with your point on focusing on creating value. And after I read your comment, I agree that none of the startups in the articles are truly creating that much value.

However, is it that simple to qualify when you're creating value? If I had read the article before HN's comments, I'd have thought the startup is cool (admittedly trivial and silly, but we have a lot of those nowadays), rather than parasitic. I'd have thought it's just a clever hack in helping more efficient distribution - in the true spirit of capitalism. Yes, while it would shift the value to rich people, it also free up the rich people's time, so they (rich people) can create more value. Assuming that rich people is richer because society decides that their time is more valuable, they can create more value in the same amount of times of some other poorer people.

Of course, that might be not morally justifiable. But creating value and being morally correct is orthogonal.

I'm not living in SF the SV area, but I've a few friends there. Every time they talked to me about startup ideas, I've always felt off about those ideas. I kept telling myself that trivial value is still value, and potentially if it can help many people, the net gain would still be large. How do I know where to draw the line?

Edit: it seems like quite a few people have problem with my post, so let me rephrase the middle paragraph a bit:

Ignoring the mentioning of rich/ poor, parking spot is a commodity. And just like other commodity in life, everyone values it differently. What's wrong in letting people paying for what they think it's worth for? The rich will always have advantage in buying commodity, and that's a fundamental issue in our society, but that's an entirely separate problem to fix, and the solution isn't telling people to stop producing commodity, or distributing them. In this specific case of parking lot, it's bad either way because a private company is skimming profit from public space.

<comment><USER5> "Assuming that rich people is richer because society decides that their time is more valuable, they can create more value in the same amount of times of some other poorer people."

are you fucking kidding me? why would you assume that?

<comment><USER6> Economic theory. A rich person earns more money per hour than a poor person (by definition). Money is a representation of value (by definition). In Economics, value earned is at least proportional (if not equal) to value created. So a rich person creates more value in the same amount of time than a poor person. Their time is literally more valuable.

In theory there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

<comment><USER7> _Economic theory. A rich person earns more money per hour than a poor person (by definition). Money is a representation of value (by definition). In Economics, value earned is at least proportional (if not equal) to value created. So a rich person creates more value in the same amount of time than a poor person. Their time is literally more valuable._

The assumption of a rich person being rich because of the value created may sound plausible, but is empirically falsified for at least the USA and Germany. Statistically, a rich person is rich because she inherited.

<comment><USER8> I don't know about Germany, but for USA it is does not appear to be true. Which data your based your claim on?

Here: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2012/04/20/most- wea...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2012/04/20/most-wealthy- individuals-earned-not-inherited-their-wealth-2/) it says only 6% of wealthy people are wealthy by inheritance.

Here: [http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2008/01/14/the-decline-of- inheri...](http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2008/01/14/the-decline-of-inherited- money/) they arrive at the same conclusion (minority got wealthy by inheritance).

<comment><USER7> Sorry for the late reply, I didn't recognize your answer earlier. Is there some comment notification option on hn that I missed?

The forbes article you quoted is a bit problematic because the data given are voluntary answers. In studies like these there always is the problem of a potentially skewed return rate: Given a return rate of 30%, what is the wealth inheritance quota of the other 70%? My speculation would be that someone who is proud of the fruit of his own hard work (the quoted local business owner) is more likely to answer such a survey. On the other hand some rich person who found a clever way to unofficially inherit parts of the own wealth while avoiding the correlating taxes won't answer such a survey.

At least the second of the blogs.wsj.com studies is self-selected, too. I couldn't find the papers for the two other quotes because the sources were too vague.

It's better to use data sources like tax income of states. IMHO even better is the concept of social mobility (the wikipedia article is quite good: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility)), as it also encompasses factors like the parents' social contacts and educational chances. The studies cited there all use official, non-self- selected data and sometimes even proper longitudinal studies. In the results presented there the USA has the the lowest intergenerational vertical social mobility of all researched OECD countries (i.v.s.m. means the probability of a child to get into a higher (or lower) class than its parents live in).

An example for Germany: The probability of a child of workers to get a degree from a university is 17 times lower than that of a child with academic parents (source: [http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/geschlossene-gesellschaft- uber...](http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/geschlossene-gesellschaft-uber-die- verteilung-von.media.09812bea2e59b93a7e5a15894f44b32d.pdf)).

Yes, social mobility is not the same as inherited wealth, because it's a result of a combination of inheritance and other factors. On the plus side, the empirical data it's based on is of comparibly high quality. The problem is that monetary (as opposed to social etc.) wealth is pretty hard to measure even given government data. In Germany for example the data for people having income is more or less 100% available. But the richer you are, the less probable it is for you to have income: The money then comes from capital gains, rent etc. These are way harder to measure, e.g. the capital gains could get collected by a corporation and not an individual. The corporations money only gets tapped on demand (=saved inside the corporation hull until retirement). And the child of the owner has a counsulting contract with that company. Legally, thats not inheritance at all, but practically it pretty much is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Whenever I hear about these I always wonder what the people that found them are thinking. I mean, what type of person would you have to be to decide to try and screw over the restaurant industry (which already has historically low margins) just to make a buck? I can't even imagine how many fake reservations they would need to create to make that idea worthwhile for them. And what investors would give them money to do so?

<comment><USER3> I mentor at startup events, so I know exactly what kind of people they are.

The good ones are people who just haven't thought it through. They've found some sort of demand, and they're doing the standard hack-the-system thing that the startup culture trains them to do. Once it's rolling, it's like Mencken said: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

The bad ones are the sort of entitled douchebags that would have previously gone into investment banking or some other industry where the money's great and ethics aren't emphasized. But now startups are the high-status, high-money thing, so that's what they're after.

<comment><USER10> _" It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."_

Because nearly every internet business gets it's revenue from advertising, a lot of good people jump through hoops to convince themselves that they have not made a deal with the devil. The downvotes[1] come fast when I point out this moral and cognitive dissonance, usually without any counter argument since they just want me to go away.

When I talk to anyone who's livelihood doesn't rely on advertising or marketing, there is near unanimous agreement that advertising is fundamentally manipulative and dishonest.

Besides the social cost of Advertising, there many other costs[2]. The idea that advertising gives us free web content and services is utter bullshit.

-

[1] The cowardly downvotes with no counter argument have already started. Upton Sinclair is the actual source of the quote at the top. A wise man who got a bunch of downvotes in his time.

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7767811](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7767811)

<comment><USER11> > When I talk to anyone who's livelihood doesn't rely on advertising or > marketing, there is near unanimous agreement that advertising is > fundamentally manipulative and dishonest. Besides the social cost of > Advertising, there many other costs.

Such as? Keen to hear. :)

Also, what would you propose in lieu of the current advertising supported model that is dominant today?

<comment><USER3> For me the biggest problem with it is the enormous waste of talent. If we banned all advertising tomorrow, nothing particularly bad would happen. People would still learn about products; companies would still gain and lose customers. Indeed, that whole process might be more effective. But suddenly the US would have $500 billion or so worth of labor and goods to devote to some purpose that is actually productive.

Actual smart humans waste their entire lives doing something that adds zero net value the system. When I think of my friends in advertising, it always makes me a little sad. What good things could they have done with their lives?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The restaurant issue I'm somewhat conflicted about -- I don't know enough about the business so some of my thoughts maybe impossible for various reasons. If people are willing to buy reservations, why not just charge more for the food until there is no waiting list? Or just charge for reservations (or at least those at preferred times) and keep the money for the restaurant? Whats the inherent reason that reservations have to be free with no charge to cancel?

As for parking, the sooner cities get rid of hidden car subsidies the better. Artificially low priced street parking and building codes mandating garages are some of the more insidious subsidies that make everyone pay for those who drive. If the spots went for market rate, these apps wouldn't exist and the extra money could be used to improve public transit.

<comment><USER13> Right - what I get from the parking stuff is just how undervalued parking actually is, and just how poorly cities deal with it.

The restaurant one is dodgy though. I could approve of a system where they've paid the restaurant in order to sell on a reservation (so the restaurant gets something even if there are no takers) but as it stands it's just a con.

<comment><USER3> Parking isn't undervalued. People just pay in time, not money. Better to say that it's inefficiently priced. Shoup's "The High Cost of Free Parking" is the bible on that: [http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated- Edition/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated- Edition/dp/193236496X)

<comment><USER13> It's totally undervalued. Ask the average person if they think the price of parking is right and they'll probably claim it's outrageously high, when the existence and apparently enough-to-be visible success of this app prove the opposite is true.

<comment><USER3> You're making the same mistake I pointed out above. Ask people how they feel about getting a good parking spot and you'll clearly hear that they value it. Or measure the amount of time they spend driving around looking; it's a clear demonstration that they value parking.

They do, however, expect it to be free. It's not a normal market.

Note that the same is true about love and sex. Most people value those things highly, but you won't discover that by looking at what they pay for it.

<comment><USER14> > Note that the same is true about love and sex. Most people value those > things highly, but you won't discover that by looking at what they pay for > it.

That's a great analogy in general, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> People keep using the phrases "the rich" and "the wealthy" in connection with this parking app (I heard this same phrasing on the NPR story about it last night), as though having a smartphone in the US and using it for parking is a sign of wealth.

Firstly, a Virgin Mobile (no contract) Android phone is $30. Gas is well over $3 a gallon near SF. If you can afford to drive a car (even assuming it was _given_ to you and you therefore have no payments), you can definitely afford a smartphone.

Secondly, the company rep was quoted as saying that the highest price ever paid for a spot was $15. Is this is steep price to pay for a couple hours parking? Sure. Is it only for the wealthy? No, I'm thinking not.

The reservation thing is much more of a "jerktech" startup because of the potential harm to the restaurant[1], but the parking startup seems like a win, all considered: people who care more can purchase certainty, and people who don't care as much couldn't be certain of getting a parking spot even before this, so...

[1] though they could just require showing photo ID in the reserved name to effectively combat this, at least for a while.

<comment><USER16> I see your distinction between the two, and agree that the restaurant app clearly hurts the restaurants. But the parking app hurts every other driver in the city who doesn't take part. I really don't see how using auctions for every parking space is better for the whole than keeping public parking what it is now (public).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Don't concert ticket re-sale sites like StubHub encourage and take a cut > from scalping? Yes, and I'm not a big fan of them for that reason. If the > demand for a band's ticket is high, they're the ones that should be making > the mark-up, not some sleazy guy with 20 computers who bought 40 tickets the > second they went on sale to turn around and flip them. But at least that guy > has to bet his own money that he can resell a private commodity he bought.

This is a weird opinion. This kind of resale is common in markets where producers would rather guarantee selling their entire product at a certain price as opposed to risking overpricing. Same reason many farmers sell off crops immediately to middlemen instead of trying to maximize price selling directly. They aren't being exploited, they're hedging risk. I would imagine that centralized ticket websites like StubHub also improve the venue's distribution in this case. If venues don't like resellers, they can follow Louis CK's actions[1].

[1] [http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/07/03/louis-c-k-sees- ticket...](http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/07/03/louis-c-k-sees-ticket- scalping-drop-over-96-by-switching-to-selling-tickets-himself/)

<comment><USER18> The author isn't linking StubHub to these other startups, rather, they're saying "at least that guy has to bet his own money that he can resell a private commodity he bought."

<comment><USER17> Yes, I'm glad he isn't dismissing them. I'm just saying that it isn't as simple as returning profits to the producer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Drivers selling parking spaces in San Francisco are potentially open to fines of $300 according to the city attorney.

It seems very _polite_ that they're going after sites like Monkey Parking instead of simply reserving spots for $5 or $10 and then busting the sellers at $300 a pop.

I suppose that in that case, Monkey Parking would just become a component in an entirely different sort of ecology.

</comment><comment><USER20> > Thankfully the city of San Francisco is fighting Sweetch and Monkey Parking > with cease-and-desist orders.

The city of San Francisco should be fighting Sweetch and Monkey Parking by cutting out the middleman and drastically raising their parking fees.

<comment><USER3> They're doing some of that. But there's a problem with that: plenty of people who live here can't afford a sudden major bump in living expenses. In the long term, correct pricing is part of the solution. But in the short term, it'd be unfortunate to solve the problem by screwing poorer people.

And anyway, this could be a temporary spike in demand. Once places like ZipCar and Uber get ahold of self-driving cars, I expect there will be a big decrease in car ownership.

<comment><USER20> Politically impossible, but my blanket response to "how will this affect poor people" arguments is "give them money" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income)

<comment><USER21> This concept is basically becoming a meme.

<comment><USER22> So is legalize weed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> That's one reason I use unexploitable public goods, like public tranportion, and go to salad bars not trendy enough for some kid to want to scalp.

<comment><USER24> That in and of itself is a good reason for great public goods. They are, or should be, by definition 'unexploitable'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Seems like reservation hop is engaging in deceptive practices. I bought tablesniper.com ~5 years ago with the same idea but didn't proceed after talking to attorneys.

</comment><comment><USER26> Just wait someone realizes that it costs less for a driverless, electric car to sit in a traffic jam than a car park.

<comment><USER27> Then they can have a fleet of them which go into traffic at peak hours & allow people to bid to have them removed from traffic. ;)

<comment><USER28> "What is your business model?"

"Extortion"

"Well, it is a time-proven way of making money; and you may go to jail, so I can see you are not afraid of risk... like a true entrepreneur!"

<comment><USER29> MafiaJoy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I dislike all of these companies, but I'd have put it all differently:

The first one, Reservation Hop, is simply indefensible because it relies on fraud. It's deceiving restaurants into thinking the person asking for a reservation is a real person. Not only does it involve lying, but it's fundamentally different from scalping a ticket because if no one "buys" the reservation, the restaurant gets nothing and was perhaps force to turn down legit customers, whereas the scalper actually paid for the ticket (though it may have been inefficiently priced, see below for more on that). It also creates no-value-added intermediary in the process. It's just a dick move all around. I do suspect that a trade group for the restaurants could get Reservation Hop cease-and-desisted, but the general solution here is for restaurants to take a credit card as part of the reservation process.

The parking ones are a bit different, in that they're taking advantage of _inefficiently priced parking_. Ever notice how it's really hard to find a spot on a street full of first-come-first-serve, inexpensive parking? It's for the same reason there are long lines and empty gas pumps before a storm with anti-gouging rules in effect, or in stories about the Soviet Union. You can park there for long periods of time even though you may not have a pressing need for the spot, whereas people who have such a need can't get one. Normally we manage such supply and demand issues through prices, so if you need a spot badly enough you might be willing to pay for it and one will be available because most people aren't. [1] What happens almost inevitably when you have an inefficiently distributed good is a secondary market or some sort of cultural mos, both of which are usually ethically dubious. In Boston, people "reserve" spots by putting cones or lawn chairs in "their" spots and expect you to respect it less you get your car keyed, thus compounding the inefficiency. There are places where you can pay for people to "hold" your spot, and I've had someone try to sell me theirs once. These companies are filling in exactly there, except with technology. To be clear, I think these companies are pretty crummy. But my point is that they're the almost inevitable consequence of a pretty terrible system for allocating resources. I.e. if we want to fix this, the best way to do it is to fix the underlying problem rather than shaming businesses like this. EDIT: to be clear, I'm not against shaming them if it makes you feel good; I just think it's not _the solution to the problem_.

Even though that description overlaps in places with the article, I like my framing a lot better. The article is coming from this place where entrepreneurs are expected to be these angels descended to Earth to fix all the "common man's" problem through innovation. Then we immolate ourselves because the community/scene turns out to be full of non-special people who are sometimes kinda shady and take advantage of bad policy and lax enforcement to make money, just like people in all other walks of life. (In an age where so much relies on technology, I don't even think it's reasonable to think of "startup tech stuff" as a scene or a space or a community at all.) Maybe it's fun to wring your hands about it and I can see a publication like TC likes to see things through that lens, but I don't think it's a very helpful way of approaching these problems if your real goal is to solve them.

[1] An important question here, given the context, is doesn't this just help the rich get parking at the expense of poor people? Well, yes, it kind of does. On the other hand, if you can't find a spot, it doesn't help poor people much, except insomuch as poor people may be willing to spend a longer time trying to park (in which case, we're making them pay for it with their time, which doesn't seem good either). But more importantly, if we want to make things easier for poor people, we should give them money so that they can do what they want with it (including parking!). That's way better than making parking artificially cheap, because a) it's a lot more flexible from the poor person's perspective and b) it distorts the allocation of resources way less.

<comment><USER31> >>The parking ones are a bit different, in that they're taking advantage of inefficiently priced parking.

The reason parking is priced the way it is is because it is a _public good._ The only thing "efficient" pricing would do is give wealthy people a massive advantage over the consumption of that good. You might like to live in a world where only rich people can afford public parking - I don't.

That's exactly why the SF government is taking an issue with these startups: they skew the game in favor of those who have money. For the usage of private property, such as houses, this may not be a huge deal. But public parking by definition belongs to the public: everyone should have an equal chance at consuming it. Fairness trumps inefficiency.

<comment><USER32> I think the point re rich-vs-poor is that efficient pricing should be decoupled from wealth redistribution initiatives. An inefficient allocation of resources only has the _side-effect_ of kind-of sort-of assisting the poor. The real solution is to efficiently allocate resources, and then separately take action to correct economic injustice.

<comment><USER30> I wish I'd used those exact words in my clumsy footnote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wonder if this is conceptually similar to "Tragedy of The Commons." ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons))

I can't really see how these services are not just the exploitation of services for the public good. Pretty disgusting behaviour.

<comment><USER34> Not really - the tragedy of the commons is the examples of oceans fisheries or trash on the street, where any one person doesn't have enough ownership to care enough to ensure continual sustainability. Ironically, this is if anything, a counter to the tragedy of the commons (albeit an awkward fit) - they're trying to price something that has an assumed value people took for granted. Again, I'm not saying its something great, but its not this concept.

<comment><USER35> No, unpriced public parking is a GREAT example of a tragedy of the commons situation. Un-owned property is used inefficiently. This is a fundamental economic principle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I completely agree with this article, but wonder if it's inevitable for someone to jump in and try to make profit off of services for the public good if there are people out there willing to pay for it.

For example, if we had sufficient parking in the city, these startups would never even cause a blip. Someone must have been driving around for half an hour looking for parking and then thought to themselves that, at that point, they would pay someone good money to just be able to find a spot - <USER2> suddenly the idea for a business was born...

<comment><USER3> I think it's great that people want to solve problems, but this isn't actually solving the problem. It's shifting the problem from rich people to poor people.

In contrast, there are plenty of startups that are actually making the parking problem better. City CarShare and ZipCar are reducing the number of cars in the city by having cars available on demand. GetAround and RelayRides are upping the number of drivers per car. Uber and Lyft (and taxis and transit) let you get somewhere without having to park at all. Parking Panda and Park Circa are turning unused private parking spaces into publicly available inventory. Even Amazon is helping: part of what makes happy to do without a car is the fact that they will make almost anything I want show up in a couple of days.

<comment><USER37> Yeah. The real solution to parking in SF is to have fewer people driving, which would involve improving the public transit options.

<comment><USER38> Always struck me as off is SF that has a trolly buss system why they didn't extend that with trams for longer distance commutes.

Or did NIBY residents stop any such developments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It seems that the part of young generation is extremely demanding. So demanding that they misunderstand "communal" with "my". I am part of generation that is happy to destroy public property just because they can. Generation that sells what is rightfully owned by all. Its sad that mentioned startups are more like vultures rather than tigers.

Good that someone finally publicly named those companies.

<comment><USER40> Oh, please. Every generation had people selling common goods. The "tragedy of the commons" wasn't exactly coined last year.

The reason these companies are made of young people is because they're tech startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> There is certainly a high level of jerkiness in making fake reservations, but I think it's overblown in the article. If a restaurant is exclusive and popular enough to require reservations, and people are willing to pay $5-10 for a reservation, why don't they just charge $5-10 for reservations themselves, or require a small membership fee to make reservations, or start rejecting customers who can't prove they are the "Dick Jerkson" who made the reservation, etc? (That last one would only need to be a temporary measure, as most people are going to ditch the app after being turned away once or twice.)

<comment><USER42> I don't understand your logic. Just because countermeasures could exist, it doesn't mean that the original offenders aren't so bad. Nor does that place any new responsibilities on the restaurant, to piss off their customers who by now might have been going to the same restaurants for decades, with the informal system.

Furthermore, an ID check isn't as painless and easy to implement as you say. Often, other guests arrive before the person who made the reservation. Public figures make reservations under assumed names. And the name on someone's ID may not match the name they typically use (read patio11's brilliant piece [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/)).

And then there's just the offensiveness of requiring people to carry ID in the first place.

<comment><USER41> I'm not saying the app is less bad because countermeasures exist, only that the app is not as bad as the article makes it out to be, _and_ countermeasures exist. Restaurants constantly have to adapt to changing conditions, which is how they end up with reservation policies in the first place.

The point of the ID suggestion (which was only one idea) would be to somehow identify users of the app, let them travel all the way to the restaurant with their date or client, and reject their reservation. This will kill the app faster than begging the developer to be less of a jerk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The good news is that while markets can be irrational in the short run, eventually things that create no value ARE weeded out.

And the restaurant industry for one, while very competitive, is also a fairly tight-knit community (due to the rigours and stress involved in the business), and word gets around fast. I'm sure cities will also crack down on auctioning public parking spots, to the extent that it will be an unprofitable exercise.

</comment><comment><USER44> Early squatting on parking spots - like when a company is early to offer people social networking or online video, and they can then charge people endlessly based on their proprietary spot for activities that should remain free - public domain video and human interaction? Yeah, the parking guys are the only exploitative, piggybacking guys around on the web.

</comment><comment><USER45> Regulate or save your breath. Jerks don't care whether people think that they're jerks or not.

</comment><comment><USER46> The reservation is obvious bullshit, but I just don't see a problem with selling your parking spot.

<comment><USER47> The problem is it's not _your_ parking spot, but public property.

<comment><USER48> Possession is 9/10 of the law. ;)

EDIT: Probably down voted because of length, but I'm pointing out that this is an opinion lots of people have, and there's a reason it exists as a truism. If you pass a law against apps like this, how could you possibly enforce it? The seller's car is already in the spot, and police can't get a real time notification that he's using the app. By the time they realize what happened (if ever) the spot has been sold.

<comment><USER37> Hence why they go after the "racketeers" \- the one facilitating it in an organized way.

<comment><USER3> And of course you can subpoena the racketeers, follow the money trail, and ticket both buyers and sellers. According to the city attorney, it's a $300 fine: [http://www.sfcityattorney.org/index.aspx?page=599](http://www.sfcityattorney.org/index.aspx?page=599)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Frankly there is no need to keep beating the drum about these startups. This is at least the 4th article about the parking apps on HN's front page in the last couple weeks. It's also been on TV.

This is not not _deeply interesting_ anymore, and as such I am flagging it. I hope others will do the same.

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the reservation thing, while being a bit sketchy in that the guy uses a fake name, doesn't seem as abhorrent as people seem to be making it out to be. If the guy was printing money hand over fist like an evil villain that'd be one thing, but it sounds like a weekend hack. An experiment. You know, the type of thing we encourage here so as to learn something. He cancels the reservation if nobody buys it. He's focusing on restaurants where demand outstrips supply (by definition.) My guess is the net effect of this experiment is probably increased revenue for the restaurants involved. It would be interesting if he presented numbers.

It's an interesting experiment. Should it be literally turned into a business, as-is? No, because it requires a) lying on the phone and b) leaves the possibility open that restaurants are going to leave money on the table, so beyond being unethical you probably don't want to make enemies of the people who are providing the service your customers are paying for. It's not viable, and it's both dumb and unethical to form a serious venture around as-is. But let's admit it, he's found something interesting that perhaps with some tweaks could be turned into something disruptive. In the startups I've worked stuff we ran small stuff like this all the time: things that we'd never try to scale since we were breaking the rules a bit, but we were trying to learn something and knew the way we were executing on it "in the small" did not cause any real harm.

But if we are going to just hang people out to dry immediately for releasing small experiments to test gaps in the market or test boundaries, then we've lost what it means to be a hacker. I don't like the idea that my entire reputation can be ruined if I launch a weekend hack that ends up on valleywag and starts a hate train fueled by wider hatred around the tech industry. Part of the reason startups work is because you can bend the rules a bit while you are small and under the radar while you look around at the edges for the opportunity for a real business you can stand behind. But with Twitter and the tech press even single individuals no longer seem to be able to stay off the radar if their experiment will drive clicks from angry readers and re-enforce their stereotypes about the tech scene.

</comment><comment><USER51> How about stop the circle jerk.

They are parasitic, arguable, but so what if they are? People dislike that, so what?

What is the story here exactly? It seems to me it's just link bait with everyone agreeing they dislike these apps.

It's an article saying being rude is bad. I don't see why people think this article has value other than they get to throw in a me too.

And at the end of the day, I'd imaging most people here are also working for parasitic companies who just hide it a bit better. i.e. Advertising including SEO. This to me is more of a real story.</comment>


66M-year-old deathbed linked to dinosaur-killing meteor - <AUTHOR> https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/03/29/66-million-year-old-deathbed-linked-to-dinosaur-killing-meteor/ <comment><USER2> That's an absolutely incredible find!

I looked for the PNAS publication at [https://www.pnas.org/](https://www.pnas.org/) , but it doesn't seem to be out yet.</comment>


The myth of whiteness in classical sculpture - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-whiteness-in-classical-sculpture <comment><USER2> This is a textbook example of the trope _reality is unrealistic_ [1]. Those sculptures look kitschy and childish when painted. Seeing them that way destroys my childhood image of the ancient Greeks. It's so strange!

It fits right in with my struggle to imagine the 19th century and early 20th century as being anything other than black and white, since almost ( _exceptions exist_ [2]) all of the photos from back then were monochrome.

[1] [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnreali...](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnrealistic)

[2] [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alim_Khan_(1880%E2%8...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alim_Khan_\(1880%E2%80%931944\),_Emir_of_Bukhara,_photographed_by_S.M._Prokudin- Gorskiy_in_1911.jpg)

<comment><USER3> In addition, it's also hard to imagine how they looked to people then. By which I mean that people would not have seen so much other color in their everyday lives -- obviously trees & flowers were as now, but paint and dyes were expensive and nowhere near as bright & varied as today.

<comment><USER4> It would probably have had the same effect as cool computer animations have on us now "wow that's cool!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For more examples of what this might have looked like, see the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the statues on the pediment are painted in the old style:

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pediment,_Philly_Art...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pediment,_Philly_Art_Museum_%281%29.jpg)

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pediment,_Philly_Art...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pediment,_Philly_Art_Museum_%282%29.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER6> Another thing that was "whitened", or rather, polished: medieval armor. A lot of it was painted, but the paint was removed by collectors and "conservators" in the 19th and 20th century.

<comment><USER7> Source please! I'd like to read more.

<comment><USER6> I don't have a book reference, but this talk by Tobias Capwell is my source: [https://youtu.be/COAIQPsgZWY?t=2311](https://youtu.be/COAIQPsgZWY?t=2311)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to see the pyramids when they were first built. They are still very impressive 4000 years later, but to see them when just completed, with the golden top and the polished limestone and all the other decoration that probably existed then...

The massive structures still remain, but they must be ruins compared to their past splendor.

<comment><USER9> Ditto Hadrian's Wall [0] in the UK. It's still impressive as it cuts across the Northern moors, but is a mass of grey stone. Back in the day, it was believed to have been plastered and whitewashed, creating a stunning 70 mile long visual marker of the Northern extent of the Roman empire

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadrian%27s_Wall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadrian%27s_Wall)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "As the artist and critic David Batchelor writes in his 2000 book, "Chromophobia," at a certain point ignorance becomes willful denial—a kind of "negative hallucination" in which we refuse to see what is before our eyes. "

It's interesting to note that this psychological phenomenon has occurred much before the prevalence of social media, and hasn't changed in how significant the cultural influence is of the phenomenon. I'm pretty interested if there's any solution at all to it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Professor Bond and this finding are discussed as a case study of 'polarization cycles,' where innocuous claims somehow give rise to controversy in the book "Coddling of the American Mind." (this is obliquely referenced around the middle of the OP). For those interested in these online social dynamics I'd highly recommend the book.

</comment><comment><USER12> The Enlightenment, among many other things, was characterized by a movement toward simpler styles of attire, especially among men of higher means - i.e. no more high heels worn by men. That sort of dress became seen as superfluous.

It was also the beginning of the modern sciences using rational methods, including the modern study of ancient art and archaeology.

It wouldn't surprise me, therefore, if Enlightenment scholars and those who followed interpreted ancient aesthetics through their more recently acquired sense of style, or really projected their style on the ancients, since it would have flattered them to think that they shared a style sensibility with the ancients.

As a contrast, in India, where the Enlightenment arrived relatively late, the color intensity of ancient aesthetics has been preserved to a far greater degree.

</comment><comment><USER13> >> In the nineteen-thirties, restorers at the British Museum polished the Elgin marbles, the most treasured sculptures from the Acropolis, until they were as white and shiny as pearls.

As good an argument as any for the Greeks getting them back from those ignorant barbarians.

<comment><USER14> > ignorant barbarians

Anything the British have done to the Elgin marbles pales into insignificance compared to the _actual blowing up with explosives_ of the Parthenon at the hands of the Ottomans/Venetians in 1687.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Quite a bias article with a political axe to grind starting straight away with the title. I thought hyper-political articles weren't allowed here?

<comment><USER16> > political axe to grind starting straight away with the title

Yes someone absolutely didn't read the article nor look at the examples of the paint remains found on the statues.

> Incredibly bias article

The reason the whole idea of color and whiteness was presented was to answer the question of why did people remove the color from the objects and why wasn't it common knowledge about how they were actually painted objects.

Political against Alt-Right? I have a political ax to grind against Alt-Right and so should you.

<comment><USER17> > The reason the whole idea of color and whiteness was presented was to answer > the question of why did people remove the color from the objects

Extremely unconvincingly, though; the linguistic accident that we use the same word ("white") to describe a shade and an ethnicity is doing most of the rhetorical work. None of the reconstructions shown in the article looks particularly "non-white". Doesn't it seem more plausible that people removed traces of colours because, as even the article acknowledges, they make the statues look gaudy and childish?

<comment><USER3> It is a bit strange how the article veers between ethnicity and paint. I mean both are interesting, but the fact that we came to think of the naked marble of these statues as the canonical version seems largely unrelated to whether the greeks were, well, greek.

(And to other questions, like how did their society think about these things, and how much has post-classical migration changed the makeup of the people living there. IIRC the African component of North-Africans has increased a bit.)

There is one picture in TFA of an African-looking child. And interestingly they say that this effect was often conveyed by choosing to work in basalt, as well as painting with darker colors. I guess these must be fairly uncommon, I can't recall seeing any in museums?

<comment><USER18> The skin tone of Greeks themselves got a huge injection of germanic whiteness after Rome fell and the Italy was taken over by Lombards and Normans.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. And of course some of what was Greece has now became Turkey, and for which enough Turks must have shown up to switch the language... I don't know the current data here but I'm sure it's improving rapidly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This has been known for some time...

</comment><comment><USER20> If they weren't faded from their tacky paint jobs perhaps the classics would never have gained popularity.</comment>


A correction about file system compression on the Alpha AXP - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170831-00/?p=96915 <comment><AUTHOR> In which Raymond retracts his claim that "Windows file system compression had to be dumbed down." Discussion of that article on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12846104](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12846104)</comment>


When Coding Is Criminal - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-when-coding-is-criminal/ <comment><USER2> If coders are liable for a consumers use of the product, will that put other industries producers in jeopardy of legal trouble?</comment>


Ask HN / Show HN: follow HN users + profile page - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
I have made a script where you can follow HN users on http://www.nou.nl/hn/. Once you follow users, you can see those users on the frontpage with their last submission or comment. You can also click on the username to see the last 10 submissions and last 10 comments.
I have made it for myself, but am wondering if other HN users would like to use this. If so, I can rewrite the script somewhat, because now I am using cookies and calling the HN Search API (received help from Andres Morey; thanks!) for each user you follow. I would then also add some features, like recommendations who to follow, how many followers a user has and how many a user is following, extended profile page and more.
Remember: this is a test version, so don't enter too many HN users or actually start using it, because it is not production ready (for example, 10 followed users will take more than 4 seconds to load the homepage).
Hope to hear your comments! <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable URL: <http://www.nou.nl/hn/>

</comment><comment><USER2> How are you determining karma?

I followed myself (since I know my own user name :)) and the karma displayed differs from what I see on HN.

I'm guessing you do periodic data fetches and there's a lag.

<comment><AUTHOR> The karma is retrieved from the HN Api. So if it differs, the API is not updated yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Click tip: Submit this to email@example.com so that's it's added to the official list of cool apps. If they decline, just keep polishing it!

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd like to see this implemented in the real HN to a certain extent. I'd like a way to save links for later without bookmarking. I'd also like a way to watch certain submitters and topics, but I don't want HN to become a reddit.</comment>


The Fall of Eclipse (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://movingfulcrum.com/the-fall-of-eclipse/ <comment><USER2> I actually question whether the real story is the fall of Eclipse or the rise of Intellij.

My impression (as someone who used both) is that Intellij IDEA was significantly better than Eclipse (to the extent that I went out of my way to be the sole developer who used it on a team of Eclipse users) but that it was not widely used. Then they decided to release the community edition which enabled people to try it without making a financial commitment. (The "free trials" they had before weren't achieving this -- people knew that any time spent climbing the learning curve would be wasted if they didn't shell out money.) Once people had a chance to see it, they chose Intellij in large numbers because it was a superior product.

For ME, the lesson to take away here is not that Eclipse should have had a more polished project and a more organized organization, but that Intellij was enormously successful because they released an open-source version of their product, and to wonder whether a similar opportunity applies to my own products.

<comment><USER3> I think it was both: the community edition was certainly a big win _and_ Eclipse got worse. I distinctly remember Eclipse getting horrible before considering other options and finding out about IntelliJ CE.

<comment><USER4> Did it get horrible, or was it always horrible and the sharp edges finally knawed on you until you looked eleswhere?

I know when I first picked up Eclipse I was blown away by the power(coding in mostly Kate at the time...), some level of rose tinted goggles as first introduction to a proper IDE.

<comment><USER3> In my experience, Eclipse used to be good and it suddenly became horrible, and it was pretty clear when this happened: around the "Juno" major redesign (which, like I mentioned elsewhere, was both a huge redesign _and_ lacked any kind of serious testing because of budget problems).

It wasn't a gradual, this-is-slightly-becoming-worse affair. It was abrupt. Eclipse really did jump the shark, and you could see the shark flying in mid- air :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I still remember when Eclipse jumped the shark. It was always a complex and somewhat bloated IDE, but once you learned how to use it, it was fast and had plenty of useful features, refactoring was a breeze, etc.

Then they did that major UI redesign TFA mentions. I remember thinking "I can't believe nobody cares that this is slow, nothing works and the UI is unusable. It used to work!". Then I read the Eclipse forums and found out that there was a major UI redesign _with no automated testing and very little manual testing_ , and the reason was "unfortunately there's no budget for testing". This was the word of the actual official devs, by the way. They decided to do a massive rewrite without testing. It boggles the mind. I guess the lesson here is "don't redesign something if you can't test it works", which really shouldn't be a surprise to any software developer.

Then the other nail in the coffin was when refactoring in Scala was so broken as to be unusable -- yes, I'm talking about Scala IDE, the "official" Eclipse- based IDE for Scala. Refactoring methods was sometimes so broken it actually inserted gibberish; I don't mean it got confused, I mean it actually inserted unparseable code, random parens and extraneous symbols. It was embarrassing. I think it got better later, but by that time I was already using IntelliJ CE.

<comment><USER5> Everyone blames the Eclipse foundation, but really they set the bar high. The only IDE to rise above it has been Intellij imo.

They missed the boat on JS. That was a big issue for me as a full stack dev. When it became clear they were going to drag their feet forever on updates to JSDT and not support the plethora of languages that suddenly seemed to come from nowhere, I had to bite the bullet and go to Intellij.

Eclipse is like a nice house in a neighborhood that needs some serious renovations. Intellij is move in ready with gleaming countertops, fresh floors, new appliances etc. Can you tell I'm house hunting?

<comment><USER6> Netbeans was also a lot better than Eclipse IMO (though worse than IntelliJ). For Java and friends, anyway; I've never really used any of them but IntelliJ for non-JVM stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I use both. Jetbrains is better, but it costs money. Its worth it to save the time figuring out eclipse. I use eclipse because I'm maintaining some tomcat code, and the code live in an eclipse project world. Eclipse works and once set up it does it job well. The truth is its just too complex. I still can't get it to work with Git. Eclipse is free (since I use it professionally I donated.)

one example in Jetbrains I can rightclick a file or folder in the navigator and search there or inside there. Eclipse(oxygen) there is a search menu with 12 items. Most of those pull up a dialog box with 7 tabs, most of which have some sort of search option which I hope have sane defaults. Sure its more powerful, but its way more than I need 99% of the time.

<comment><USER8> " Its worth it to save the time figuring out eclipse."

We talking about people making 100k+ but are worried about spending a few hundred for a better tool. It just shows that the same amount of money is valued different in a different context. Spending 500 more for a better laptop is being questioned and two days later you got to dinner with some VPs and they blow more than $200 per person for wine and food.

<comment><USER9> I don't know specifically about InteliJ, but the product price is usually the lowest cost of a closed source solution. I work in a government owned company. We have strict procurement rules that we must obey to buy things. Beyond the procurement bureaucracy, now we have to manage how much licenses we have. The install of a new instance in a user machine must be tracked. A user can't by himself install the software, we must have specialized persons to do it. To setup test and/or disposable environments is a hell. If we reach the maximum of licenses, a high payed employee must spend time searching for who is not using the software to uninstall, and surely the person won't be available.

The price is probably the lowest cost of a closed source solution.

<comment><USER10> We had a similar experience with a closed source profiler. We paid for it, and the vendor repeatedly sent armies of sales engineers and even a core developer to help us use it.

Because of licensing enforcement mechanisms (we had a site license, FFS), we couldn't figure out how to push it as part of the product to test or production clusters, so we just use perf, even though it has maybe 1% the functionality, is frequently wrong, and we desperately need the 99% missing functionality.

<comment><USER8> You definitely have to be careful. Some vendors are awful. Jetbrains is pretty easy though. Pay your subscription and you are ready to go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Still have no idea how to use Eclipse after 10 years. Vim, Emacs, VS Studio, VS Code, a few proprietary ones - very easy to figure out.

Eclipse seems to be a magical combination of hard to use, slow, and hated.

Was there a golden period? Was it great for awhile, and now is past it's prime, like MS Word?

<comment><USER12> Eclipse is a direct descendant of IBM Visual Age for Java, which branched from VA for Smalltalk.

VA was an excellent tool for Smalltalk insofar as it allowed you to work with a big soup of classes, abstracting away source files to the point of near invisibility.

Fitting Java required a bit of shoehorning, and I must admit VAJava was an acquired taste for me. I had to sink or swim as VAJ was the official tool of my job work environment.

Having grokked VAJ, Eclipse was a godsend for me. It was similar enough that I had little learning curve, coming from VAJ; and it was a complete, professional IDE for $0. At the time Eclipse was gifted to the Java community, the alternatives were either costly or minimalistic and crude.

Eclipse continued to get noticeably better from release 1.0 to the early 3's, and I was honestly excited about each major upgrade. I would say that yes, this was Eclipse's Golden Age.

<comment><USER13> IIRC, One of the Gang of Four was the project manager of what became Eclipse afterwards. That and the rest of the environment brought a fair share of bad design choices. Have you ever tried cooying an Eclipse workspace in a different directory, you would recognize the pain.

<comment><USER14> That's Eric Gamma. And I believe he developed the Monaco editor, which is/was the core of Visual Code, and is part of that team now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm really grateful to the Eclipse Foundation because they changed my life giving a scholarship to a little kid in Europe that pretty much never had left his home and flying me to San Jose. Changed my life.

But they truly killed Eclipse. Eclipse probably never had to go beyond being what it was at the beginning, a wonderful IDE.

</comment><comment><USER16> I started using IntelliJ in 2008 (so it was at version 8 I guess) and I liked it so much more back then. So many awesome features presented in ways that make sense.

With Eclipse, I was stuck by the following weird design decision: All your personal preferences such as keybindings were not saved globally but as part of your current project. What were they thinking? Who would want different keybindings for different projects, think of the muscle memory! Maybe there is a use case for having some specific keybinding for a particular project, so they could have made a way to override your global settings in such case... but not make the very first thing you do, customize it to your liking, a very weird thing different from how every other program works.

<comment><USER17> Eclipse Keybindings are stored per workspace. A workspace can be used to develop multiple projects.

<comment><USER16> You're right, I remember it now. I used the wrong terminology in that case. Honestly, the end result is the same. I'm sure there were reasons to use multiple workspaces for different pieces of code and the same user of the same program would still want it to look and feel the same rather than getting thrown the defaults back in your face when starting a new workspace...

<comment><USER18> You can easily import your preferences into your new workspace.

I mean, it's not even difficult to find, File>Export and File>Import.

<comment><USER19> But why are they separated by workspaces in the first place?

<comment><USER18> I use different workspaces for different projects because of differences between code formatting. One project uses 3 spaces and the other uses four spaces. One has curly braces on the same line and the other on their own line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I personally like eclipse more than Intellij IDEA. I tried using IDEA for a month and even after getting used to the shortcuts I found eclipse more productive and hence faster. I did not benchmark for my usecase. The most frustrating part of Intellij was a 2 second pause whenever I tried to run unit tests even though I turned auto-compile on. Eclipse feels way more responsive to me for refactoring and running tests.

EDIT: Although I would like to add that I liked Intellij VIM integration more. I have been using Vrapper for Eclipse and it is decent but not many people are contributing to the project for a while which raises doubts on it's sustainability: [http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/](http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/)

</comment><comment><USER21> "That era is now over."

Not sure that is true (pedantically), as my son is building Minecraft modules in CodaKid, and they have him using Eclipse, I'm sure b/c it's free: [https://codakid.com/](https://codakid.com/). (They have great classes, FWIW/IMO, not affiliated.)

I also don't get all of the "Eclipse is super-hard to use" comments in the thread.

Look, I love LPS and think that now that we have the luxury of local cross- process wire calls and being fast enough to provide butter-smooth IDE features, that is definitely the way forward as a cleaner, less-coupled architecture.

But whenever I pop open Eclipse, it's still faster, runs tests faster, debugs faster (for Java code), than VSCode does (for TS/JS code). Perhaps its Stockholm syndrome, but as a user I really don't think it's that bad.

Where I believe it is bad, and the OP alluded to this, is on the internals/plugin side of things; it sounds like life as an Eclipse plugin developer really, really sucks (see ScalaIDE/etc. pain), and given that the pre-LPS architecture of every IDE was "in-process plugins", that, IMO, is what really "killed Eclipse"/it's momentum.

Especially with open source, where people have to enjoy what their doing to contribute, and AFAIU I don't think I've heard of anyone every enjoying Eclipse plugin development.

But, anyway, LPS to rescue: democratized IDE development, all from within the safety blanket of your preferred language.

<comment><USER5> I find those who think it's harder have never used it or bother learning it. I find complexity to Intellij a similar level.

<comment><USER22> > I find complexity to Intellij a similar level.

Yeah. I recently had to use IntelliJ after a long period of using Eclipse. IntelliJ does some things better and some things worse, but IMHO, its strengths weren't compelling to override its weaknesses.

> I find those who think [Eclipse is] harder have never used it or bother > learning it.

I find that very easy to believe. Some developers just don't seem to want to learn their tools, some want to be elitist about their tools, and the intersection between those sets is embarrassingly large.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm okay with Eclipse. Here's why. As a consultant working at clients typically there's enough lockdown where I end up having to use Eclipse. Because of that I haven't had much opportunity to actually use Netbeans or IntelliJ at a client. So like someone mentioned below I just sucked it up and dealt with it.

It's not perfect and I definitely get some cryptic errors but I'm actually pretty happy with it now. You should definitely add some plugins to make life easier. I like the TypeScript plugin by Palantir, SonarLint for Eclipse, DevStyle by Genuitec, and the Gradle Buildship plugin. eGit seems particularly buggy but I like it. If anybody has any alternatives I'd love to hear about it.

<comment><USER24> Have you ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Back then, Eclipse was this big, bloated and slow IDE. IntelliJ was slim, fast and much more intuitive and powerful in terms of refactoring, etc. Today, IntelliJ is big, bloated and turning slow.

Which IDE will be the next big thing?

<comment><USER26> There are multiple ways to vastly increase Intellij performance. They also have 'Auto-share Settings' feature so you can keep a whole team in-sync with them through a repo.

tweaks like:

\- they added their own custom property that speaks for itself: 'editor.zero.latency.typing=true'

\- it runs on a JVM, so update the JVM settings. (Like most apps, they ship with defaults that assume you're running your IDE on something with the memory of today's phone)

\- disable all unused plugins

This comment might seem like evangelizing but I find Intellij to be what an IDE should be in many ways. It would be nice if there was a feature to use more performant settings. But that's likely a rabbit-hole to auto-determine for all variety of customer env. Maybe something to make people aware of their options at least would be a middle-ground.

<comment><USER27> Isn't zero latency typing enabled by default now? I can't find the documentation now, but I clearly remember reading that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't really find this convincing. It seems like the data comes from a survey conducted by ZeroTurnaround which isn't really scientific evidence. I have a feeling that there is still going to be a significant market for a full featured, free Java IDE for a long time to come, though that's also an unscientific opinion :)

</comment><comment><USER14> I remember back in the late 90s I had bought some Borland JBuilder IDE (shrinkwrap, at software store of course), so when Eclipse came around it was awesome.

And don't forget how ugly those Swing-based IDEs were because of the ugly, non-cleartype fonts in IDEs like Intellij. Eclipse used SWT which used native widgets if possible.

Eclipse had a plugin for just about everything, but the plugin-hell got to the point that I ended up having many installations of eclipse because the plugins for various languages, frameworks wouldn't play nicely with each other.

But one thing that always drove me crazy about Eclipse that never got fixed was the intellisense/code completion. They could never get it work without pushing some key combination instead of being able to autocomplete on the fly like Intellij, Visual Studio. So you either had to wait to get to the dot to some code completion or manually press ctrl-space which drove me crazy. I read that there was some strange architectural issues deep in the bowels of Eclipse that prevented anybody from fixing that, but who knows.

By the time Eclipse 4 came around I didn't really have a need for it anymore, but remember that they were pushing that web-based IDE and didn't think that spending limited resources for that was a very good idea.

But I'm happy that Eclipse was out there and thanks to all the devs that made it happen.

On a side note, is Netbeans much of a thing anymore? I'm guessing after the Oracle takeover, it fell to the wayside, but it was probably on the downslope even before then. That was a snappy little IDE though.

</comment><comment><USER29> Netbeans was better/easier to use than Eclipse for a long time in my opinion (100% accept that isn't worth a whole lot). I vaguely remember that in about 2010/2011 trying to use the maven and git plugins for eclipse together and hitting a lot of errors. Netbeans wasn't perfect but it worked AND used the system installations of git/mvn. Also, Ive never understood why Eclipse insists (at least last time I used it) on importing files/directories into some sort of workspace decoupling the files you see in the IDE from those on the disk.

Switched to jetbrains IDEs now though ha

<comment><USER30> I studied Java then taught it for a couple of years about 2001/2\. I even got the Sun Java Certification. As luck would have it, I never programmed professionally as Java developer. Last year I decided to contribute some patches to a Business Intelligence (BI) tool written in Java. I could only afford a few hours a week. I tried Eclipse, didn't get anything done for a month. Switch to Netbeans, and was able to contribute my first patch within a few hours. Most things just worked, I didn't have a good handle on the intricacies of Netbeans but I was productive. I know Oracle is "evil" but that didn't stop us using Java. Not sure why Netbeans usage is higher. It really is a good IDE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Eclipse has for years felt like someone generalized both IBM and Java's beliefs and built an IDE.

That's good for some types of coding, but bad for others.

... then the nail in the coffin was going down the rabbit hole with plugins. The bazaar model only works if you have enough shopkeeps. (No offense intended to the gracious maintainers of Eclipse packages, but many could do with a LOT more people helping)

<comment><USER32> Actually Eclipse was a product that IBM designed in the 90' : VisualAge (I used it at that time, it was really slow on an average computer).

In the 2000 IBM renamed it "WAS" and it was its main studio for J2EE (Websphere) developpers. Some people really liked it.

Then IBM opensourced it as "Eclipse". This name was perhaps a pun on "Sun".

<comment><USER31> I think most people are aware where it came from. ;)

<comment><USER33> Been a Java developer since 1999 and have used everything, MS Visual J++, JBuilder, NetBeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ. Sadly I just got the "joke" :( Never put two and two together, I just thought it was a cool name...

<comment><USER34> What happened to JBuilder? I had used for a while earlier. Seemed good then. (ex-Borland fan here.) Did it get messed up in the general mess up that Borland (aka a few other corp names over the years) did to their once-good products, or was it some other reason?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Meh. I still find Eclipse to be far superior to Intellij. I gave Intellij a try last year and just didn't find anything appealing about it.

OTOH, Eclipse, while different releases have been better or worse than others, and despite a rough period starting with the whole "Eclipse 4" thing, the Oxygen version has been very nice. I started with a RC of Oxygen and it's worked so well I never even bothered upgrading to the actual release version.

The only thing that really annoys me about Eclipse is that they killed off the TPTP sub-project, and I really liked their profiler back in the day.

</comment><comment><USER36> I stopped using eclipse because scrolling became super janky on mac after an update. Seven years on, the bug is still open: [https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=366471](https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=366471)

<comment><USER37> Weird it's oetfectly fine on my MacBook Air

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I feel like VS Code is on it's way to becoming the next generation of Eclipse. It's a great platform, but now it's practically just a plugin framework. I'm hoping the maturation of the open source world will have us not repeat the same mistakes.

Classic Eclipse plugins were all either created by big software vendors who wanted to create a good developer experience for their products or eager amateurs who were scratching an itch. VS Code plugins are more like good open source projects that have contributors and reviewers and frequently sponsors. Microsoft is strongly supporting it, but not with a heavy hand even if it cannibalizes some Visual Studio sales.

<comment><USER39> In my opinion, The problem with Eclipse is not that it turned into a plugin framework, but that it ended up being an IDE framework.

Too many knobs. All IDEs are customizable to some degree, but they try and maintain a general sense of coherence. Eclipse, not so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I wonder how much of this was due to android no longer shipping it's SDK as an eclipse plugin, but moving to android studio

<comment><USER41> This. That said, the gripes listed in the article are minor to working with Android Studio and gradle on a medium sized codebase. Yuck

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm using Intellij now, but used to work with Eclipse. And one thing that I miss is quickly starting tests. In Eclipse it feels like tests start without compilation and I get instant feedback. With IDEA you have to wait a second or two before it starts running the tests. I know it doesn't feel like much, but it's really annoying if you are doing TDD.

I started using IDEA because I wanted dark theme and Eclipse didn't have it. Probably even now you can't get nice looking dark theme in Eclipse, not sure, correct if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER43> I recently started using VS Code for the same reason - we're doing a lot of Ansible playbooks and Kubernetes manifests and editing yaml with Eclipse's dark theme results in a lot of charcoal text on a dark grey background.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Quite a bit of negativity around Eclipse found here, below are a few of my perspectives.

Eclipse is one of those tools that I've found to give dividends over the years, I mainly used Eclipse CDT for C/C++ development, and then moved on to Scala and the normal Java based Eclipse. There's also DBeaver for Database work.

The learning curve was steep, mainly around setting up projects so the compiles happened outside the IDE. I mainly used Eclipse to discover the code (call hierarchy was a godsend) and for finding definitions, autocomplete etc...

Over time though the investment has paid of, going from Java, to C/C++ to Scala, to DB work (dbeaver) all have Eclipse underneath it and the same principles apply.

A few free plugins like Vrapper that give Vim emulation are also super nice.

A huge plus is that if/whenever I switch jobs, I don't need to harass anyone in the finance department over licenses. This scales up from the scrappiest of startups to the largest of red-tape laden mega-orgs.

Eclipse has fallen out of fashion but I doubt it'll die, its one tool in my toolbox I can always reach for.

</comment><comment><USER45> Totally disagree. IMHO I've tried both IntelliJ and Eclipse and felt IntelliJ to be really complex and non intutive. I can do tasks very quickly in Eclipse using shortcuts I'm familiar with. I also often feel the features of IntelliJ are over exaggerated and almost all the things can be done in Eclipse if you know how to use it. Once, I sat with a dev who was trying to evangelize IntelliJ in our workplace (and influence our manager to purchase licences)and explained alternatives in Eclipse for almost all the 'awesome' features he showed in IntelliJ. He simply didn't know what eclipse could do. For me Eclipse starts really fast, I really like the UI better than IntelliJ. I believe Eclipse provide really awesome features for a free software and on the otherside IntelliJ doesn't provide enough features for it's heavy price. It seems many programmers (not all) these days feel fancy about boasting they use a paid IDE to hide their actual incompetence in programming. ( Ps: opinion only from java perspective)

</comment><comment><USER46> In the embedded world I keep getting run over by vendors peddling Eclipse IDEs that look beautiful and support a nice dark theme that I really miss but not enough to say goodbye to IAR and a fast development environment that avoids most of the java overhead. Can't ever seem to have a powerful enough machine to run Eclipse satisfactorily.

<comment><USER47> I switched to Eclipse for a year, then switched to codelite which mostly does what I need it to.

I'm also not happy with embedded vendors constantly pushing Eclipse based IDE's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> > One only has to look at the TypeScript support in WebStorm as an example of > how bad things can get.

I'm a bit surprised by this statement. I've been using TypeScript in WebStorm/PyCharm for quite a while and have been really happy with it. Are there some big flaws I'm not noticing or specific valuable features that they're not adding? Compared with JS and Python, TypeScript coding feels much nicer (as you'd expect when comparing typed vs untyped languages). Comparing with IntelliJ Java, TypeScript support is maybe slightly less magical in one or two areas but seems pretty much on par. I haven't used VSCode enough to have a great comparison, but my impression is that WebStorm is a little more laggy but is more fully-featured.

Edit: I guess since the article was from a year and a half ago, that line may just be out of date.

<comment><USER14> If you look from a maturity of the Java ecosystem perspective, then even now there's a point to be made.

Even compared to Java IDEs of a decade and a half ago, the refactoring, and other smart-assist facilities in Typescript editors/IDEs is rather weak.

Of course, Typescript isn't generally, totally statically typed, so that brings a whole set of challenges. And Typescript's type system is very complex these days.

But I agree Webstorm (and really the whole suite of Intellij IDEs) does a great job with Typescript. I think only recently in the past month or so, VS Code has gotten unused imports checking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> > Eclipse 3.x was a fast, native looking IDE

That is not how I recall it.

</comment><comment><USER50> I used Eclipse and my memories are hours spent to install some plugin (sometimes as necessary as Maven or Subversion support), typing some repository address, etc. Running something with apache tomcat was a quest. Sometimes things broke and you had to clean/redeploy it again and again until it worked. When I installed Idea and everything just worked, it was a truly superior experience. Idea is one of very few software products that I bought and continue to buy. I just really respect Jetbrains developers.

That said, there were few things that I liked in Eclipse. Errors were easier to work with. Also I could run uncompileable Java code and I liked it (Eclipse skipped bad code and throwed exception there).

</comment><comment><USER51> > In my teenage years, having Eclipse as a completely free top notch IDE was > instrumental in me learning to program. It meant a poor student could use > the exact same tools as a professional. That era is now over.

That does resonate strongly with me. I learned to program when Eclipse was (surely according to the graph) the most popular java IDE. It was at that point a good IDE for Java as well and I was quite happy with it.

But after having used IntelliJ for three years now, I really would not want to go back to Eclipse. I had to use it some months ago when I was helping a student with a project, and it does look quite bad compared to IntelliJ.

<comment><USER50> You can use Idea CE, it's even open source. It does not support enterprise stuff like Java EE, but modern Java can live without it, run embedded Jetty, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Recently i changed to Netbeans having been using Eclipse at work for years and was pleasantly surprised. Much faster than eclipse, no constant lags and freezes. At home i use IntelliJ. Never looking back to Eclipse.

<comment><USER30> I share your experience. Netbeans mostly works out of the box and it seems much easier to configure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> When did Eclipse not suck in comparison to Intellij? I've been using Intellij since 3.x, and every time I looked in on Eclipse, there was simply no comparison. Intellij had a far more cohesive design -- at least for me, it worked the way I expected, whereas with Eclipse, I had to spend time hunting for what I wanted to do. Intellij has always looked better. And it has always (up to the last time I looked at Eclipse -- five years ago?) had a much better understanding of the language, and doing the right thing in context.

</comment><comment><USER54> 41% is hardly "lost", its still a significant market share.

One nice thing about Eclipse is that its free and there a ton of plugins for almost every language out there. I use Pycharm as my primary IDE but I still have Eclipse installed in case I want to do something in Perl or Java. And to be honest there are always a couple of little features here and there that I miss.

</comment><comment><USER55> I've always felt that if there was an Eclipse 'lite' it would garner lots of attention and be the go-to Java IDE for lots of developers. Eclipse got waaay to big and slow and had several bugs where the solution was always 'restart Eclipse'.

That being said, programming in Eclipse reminds me of simpler times where I would program just for fun.

</comment><comment><USER56> I find the passion behind IDEs a bit bemusing, I've never really felt the strong benefits of IntelliJ over Eclipse, although using Eclipse for quite a few years means the burden of changing is reasonably high. IntelliJ certainly had very vocal advocates, the Thoughtworkers I worked with pushed it very, very hard.

Eclipse I find to be a mixed beast; if you get it into your 'sweet spot' or ideal configuration, it can be perfect. Mine is Gradle based projects (the integration seems to work fine, or use the CLI), and keeping things simple with POJOs, a bit of Spring Boot etc for more complex things. I've worked with truly horrible projects/configurations e.g. Websphere Application Developer which is/was based on Eclipse but with everything and the kitchen sink bolted on. It was slow, buggy, took 30 minutes between firing the IDE up and being able to work etc. EJB's, DB2 database access etc - just a nightmare.

So to me they're both sort of what you make of them; I find the Eclipse plugins to meet all of my needs well, the times I've tried IntelliJ or paired with someone that uses it, I don't agree with the purported benefits.

</comment><comment><USER57> I use eclipse because it is better supported by most companies. In my company they already know about eclipse complexity and have tools to help with it. Intellij might be better, but in many places you need to be the local guru, which is fine if you want the extra responsibility.

</comment><comment><USER58> \- intellij: As a developer and linux user I dont see the point of paying for an IDE rather than putting the effort in improving an open source one. Therefore, paying for an IDE/editor is fundamentally wrong for me.

</comment><comment><USER59> Intellij has always been way better than Eclipse, but for a long time you had to pay a small amount for it. People looking at dollars rather than bottom line foolishly chose Eclipse.

<comment><USER60> Or people caring about software freedom. To this day you have to agree to a Privacy Policy to be able to use Intellij which is why I personally stick with Eclipse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> No one talks about Netbeans! I used to love Netbeans :(

</comment><comment><USER62> Being used to Visual Studio, every time I needed to use Eclipse I kept wondering how Java developers could tolerate such an environment. Now I know ofc some of it is due to less familiarity and exposure, but it realy felt like stepping back 15 years in time each time I launched it.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure in what way your Eclipse experience was so atavistic, but I'd like to point out that at least for several years I was aware of, Eclipse had a significant competitive advantage:

Incremental compilation.

You could make a small change, do a Ctrl-S, and Eclipse would compile the change nearly instantly, where all competing products (that I was aware of, correct me if you know better) needed to fire up a Java compiler and feed it at least all changed source files. For me, this was difference of 2 seconds versus maybe 20-30.

<comment><USER14> And not only that, but but being able to debug and change code without restarting the debugger was something I was always envious of coming from the .NET side of things.

Java Hotspot has always been a huge productivity booster.

<comment><USER47> I think that's supported for 32bit applications in the paid version of Visual Studio. At least it was 10 years ago for C#.

<comment><USER14> With a whole laundry list of restrictions of what can and cannot be changed while running.

I think they've retrofitted Mono to run in interpreter mode or something in order to get around those restrictions

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Great write up on Eclipse. I also loved the IDE back in the day. It was the closest thing to Visual Studio that was available for free.

</comment><comment><USER64> Personally, I've found the opposite. IntellJ is clunky and Eclipse is easy to use. The new version, oxygen, In particular.

</comment><comment><USER65> For PHPers and lovers of Free Software, Eclipse and PHP Developer Tools (PDT) are very fine tools. Long live Eclipse!

<comment><USER66> Eclipse PDT (ex)user here. PDT worked like a charm until eclipse Mars. PDT on Neo and Oxygen are pretty bad: PHPCS / PHPMD is a nightmare to configure and xdebug sometimes works, sometimes not.

I had to change to PHP Storm, which is, IMHO, the best PHP IDE so far, and worth the price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> TL;DR: Author doesn't like the new look of Eclipse's rewrite and therefore, without further evidence, claims it's dead. There's really not more than incomplete opinion in this article.

There might be a real discussion here, though. E.g. as far as I know anybody who ever tried IntelliJ loved it so much that he never wanted to switch back to Eclipse. In the circle around me, 100% of people. Other people may see different outcomes. But still both Eclipse and IntelliJ where both kind of considered leaders in the Java IDE market for a long time. So it might be really interesting to discuss the strenghts and weaknesses of both.

Also a good discussion could be had how the path to Eclipse 4 developed and how things might've been done differently. That would require analysing other IDEs like the Microsoft's as well.

So, you know. Quite a wasted opportunity, right here. If someone reads this and felt like upvoting, could you put into a few sentences why?

</comment><comment><USER67> Article Header needs (2016) next to it.

<comment><USER68> Updated. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> that's due to decreasing demand in java.

<comment><USER70> Do you have any evidence to back that statement up? Java seems to be as popular as ever.

<comment><USER71> While it may be hard to show that Java's demand has decreased - and overall it may well not have since many companies which were using Java will continue to do so just by inertia - but for the latest generation of programmers, specially ones focused on ML / Data Science, Java feels like ancient history

<comment><USER12> Yep. As a professional developer, I'm way over being excited and enthusiastic about Java; on some days, and having sampled more modern languages, I downright hate it. My guess is that the grandparent poster is mistaking this disillusionment for a decrease in demand.

Like COBOL, I believe Java will continue to be the bread and butter of application programmers long after crossing popularity curves with a dead slug.

<comment><USER72> What's a good replacement for Java that has static typing and tool support? Is there one yet?

<comment><USER12> On the JVM, the most solid contender is Scala. It's "better" than Java in a number of ways. Personally, I'm a bit turned off by the very intrusive role of the type system. You may find a bit less tool support than for Java (no surprise) and some of the clever functional-style code you write may run slower than less elegant corresponding Java code. Still, there are a lot of adapters, some big names, and they get stuff done. Scala being "harder" also allegedly attracts smarter developers.

Another statically typed language, non-JVM, with decent momentum is Go. It's like C with a slew of sorely needed improvements. Very straightforward and there's often a single, obvious way to get something done. As a result I find I'm very productive in it. Performance is topnotch too. Tooling is quite good. I'm not sure it replaces Java as an "Enterprise" language for large-team projects though.

Kotlin is another "better Java" language on the JVM. Pleasant enough to work with, but not as large an adopting community. Tooling is good if you like IntelliJ.

C# is Microsoft's challenge to Java. Has borrowed some good ideas from Java and extended them, interfaces well with Windows (obviously). Tooling is good if you like Visual everything and Microsoft.

Now may be a good time to switch to a language that more fully embraces functional programming. F# and OCaml are possibilities, Erlang has a great rep for stability, and Haskell is said to be very powerful but with a daunting learning curve.

I'm experimenting with all of these and have the damndest time making up my mind. There's kind of an embarrassment of choice.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hundreds More Artists Whose Tapes Were Destroyed in the UMG Fire - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/magazine/universal-music-fire-bands-list-umg.html <comment><USER2> This is a follow-up to an article that was previously discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20154327](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20154327)</comment>


As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/technology/coding-boot-camps-close.html <comment><USER2> [https://cdn1.nyt.com/images/2017/08/11/business/00bootcamp3/...](https://cdn1.nyt.com/images/2017/08/11/business/00bootcamp3/00bootcamp3-articleLarge.jpg)

Html / JS on the board is described as "Ajacks"

<comment><USER3> Teams pick names for their group projects. There name is clearly ajacks, playing of of "Ajax"... And possibly they have 2 people on their team named jack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good. Selling false hope for $26k is cruel even by my standards. And you're not going to become employable from a boot camp unless you either already knew a lot or are supremely talented.

</comment><comment><USER5> There is nothing special about learning to code. Learn the fundamentals, learn the math, learn how a computer works,practice, success. Seriously, if you want to be good at anything, it's always the same analogous steps.

<comment><USER6> Are you a promoter for one of these boot camps?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Even humanities graduates can learn how to code in a few months and join the high-paying digital economy. "

How sad are things getting. A humanities graduate, with deep knowledge about interesting topics, encourage to become a cheap code monkey, just because it pays more than his/her original career.

<comment><USER8> Things "getting"? Uhhh what? In what time period was it not common for people to pursue the paths in life with the greatest material reward?

<comment> Sol-Savage "with deep knowledge about interesting topic," is significant. It's funny how the trumple generation loves to ommit words. 'You know what I meant!' 'I know what you mean! '

<comment><USER7> Care to explain? English is not my native language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The promise of a full time employment through any course is plain wrong.. a course is to save you time and effort .you can learn and get a job without course too.. just think course is 40 percent time saving ..</comment>


Jobs tears into Google in upcoming biography - <AUTHOR> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45006227/ns/business-us_business/t/jobs-tears-google-upcoming-biography/#.TqSiLOunnXU.hackernews <comment><USER2> The book is now available in Apple's iBooks Store. (just downloaded it, reading it now.)

<comment><USER2> Here's a Steve Jobs quote I just came across in the book:

"We thought about whether we should do a music client for Android. We put iTunes on Windows in order to sell more iPods. But I don't see an advantage of putting our music app on Android, except to make Android users happy. And I don't want to make Android users happy."</comment></comment>


So, Bitcoins are becoming popular very fast - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/trends?q=bitcoins

<comment><USER2> As far as I'm concerned, if the Bitcoin to fiat exchange rate can stabilize sufficiently, then it becomes a better online currency that any single nations currency at the moment.

Better because of reduced fraud and reduced transaction fees.

I don't see any fundamental reason why this can't happen with a non-government crypto currency, but it will take some time... and there will be a lot of booms and busts along the way.

The biggest risk is sadly the US government declaring it illegal.

</comment><comment><USER3> The people who are pumping up BitCoin now are the same people who pumped up SecondLife.

<comment><USER4> If secondlife wasnt centralized, this might be a valid argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Because they're getting a lot of publicity and people think "Ohhh this seems easy, I wonder if I can get rich on this"

That's been my experience talking to people at work anyway.</comment>


The 10 worst unicorns of 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/24/somewhere-way-way-under-the-rainbow-the-10-worst-unicorns-of-2015/ <comment><AUTHOR> The article is interesting. But if TLDR, then here is the list:

Fab

Evernote

Good Technology

LivingSocial

Pure Storage

Gilt Groupe

Dropbox

Box

Theranos

Square</comment>


Seth's Blog: Change your pricing - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/01/change-your-pri.html

<comment><USER2> Isn't this the same idea as saas?

<comment><USER3> and having a girlfriend as opposed to paying the usual hooker?</comment></comment>


What I want to say to all MBAs - <AUTHOR>

Doing a SWOT analysis of a business opportunity is nonsense. It gives an unrealistic view of who your customers are and what really matters to them.<p>Your customer isn't a walking database of businesses and their competitive advantages. They're working from incomplete information. All they care about are their wants, and their needs, and their aspirations. <comment><USER2> The SWOT is a pretty simple analysis. I don't have an MBA, but see no problem in creating a simple SWOT for certain purposes and to help layout a problem/solution.

Much like a business plan (or even an executive summary) just going through the process is often good practice as it may bring things to light that you might not have considered or make you look at things differently.

Though I've seen quite a bit of useless activity from MBAs, I think your anger in this regard is misguided.

Ignore the MBAs and do you thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not supposed to be perfect.

But you'd bloody well suck it up and get used to doing them and pitching them, because they're expected.</comment>


Should you go to SXSW? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/03/22/the-magic-midnight-mind-meld/ <comment><USER2> Best summary of bubble/non-bubble debate I've read yet:

"Maybe," says Naval, "Certainly valuations are creepy up quickly in all stages of deals. On the other hand, 10 years ago when we all felt like this last time the total market size for any company was at maximum 100 million potential users. Now we're in the billions of users. Facebook connections alone bring 500 million, Twitter 200 million. 10 years ago we only connected for brief periods of time when we were at our PCs. Now we're connected to apps all the time, everywhere we go. So maybe there's a bubble. It's hard to say. But we're also looking at unprecedented opportunity."</comment>