Scaling Agile at Spotify (2012) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1018963/Articles/SpotifyScaling.pdf <comment><USER2> "But so far, based on surveys and retrospectives, the scaling model seems to be working quite well!". Statements like that remind me of a North Korean election - "SUPREME LEADER ELECTED JOYOUSLY AND UNANIMOUSLY!". Grunts that don't like the newest management fad / reorg aren't looked upon kindly

A great test for "could I work at this company?" is to ask "do they have full time Agile Coaches / Scrum Masters / etc.". If yes, then I'm moving on

<comment><USER3> I'm curious: Why do you consider Agile Coaches / Scrum Masters / etc. a red flag?

<comment><USER2> I despise Agile, and if you have people whose full time jobs are to enforce Agile, then it's a big sign that it's not an environment I want to be in

<comment><USER4> > if you have people whose full time jobs are to enforce Agile

...then you aren't whatever you call it, its _not_ Agile, which has, as its first value: _Individuals and interactions over processes and tools_

<comment><USER2> In the end it's impossible to criticize Agile because the way supporters frame it is that all good things are Agile, all bad things are not Agile and / or Waterfall. Goodness and Agile are inherently linked, so the presence of badness must mean that it is not Agile, or at least not properly practiced Agile.

Agile as it's practiced by 99% of practitioners is more like "processes and tools over individuals and interactions". Infantile retrospectives, constant stand up status meetings, status meetings dressed up as "grooming" and "planning" where the only real (non)decision that's being made is how many "story points" should be assigned. You can barely go to the bathroom without filing a Jira

<comment><USER4> > In the end it's impossible to criticize Agile because the way supporters > frame it is that all good things are Agile, all bad things are not Agile and > / or Waterfall.

Agile-as-defined is a fairly abstract set of priorities, it doesn't specify practices, so criticizing particular practices _isn 't_ criticizing it. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of it, still, particularly that its _too_ ill-defined to concretely implement.

Criticism of "Agile"-as-practices are generally misplaced, because there is no coherent unity in the practices people implement and apply that label too. Criticizing the various practices that people call "Agile" is better done by focussing on the actual practices that are being criticized than on "Agile".

At least, if one is interested in usefully sharing experience in a way that informs and advances quality practices. If one is merely interested in emotional venting, then "Agile" is a fine target.

<comment><USER2> > Criticism of "Agile"-as-practices are generally misplaced, because there is > no coherent unity in the practices people implement and apply that label too

72% of Agile practitioners use some form of Scrum. 80% do standups, 71% do "planning", 69% do retrospectives. That's a pretty coherent majority that engage in practices labeled Agile.[1]

Around 70% of Agile practitioners do these - does it have to be 100% before these practices are Agile? There ABSOLUTELY is a coherent set of implemented practices that are Agile

> Criticizing the various practices that people call "Agile" is better done by > focussing on the actual practices that are being criticized than on "Agile".

I did: "Infantile retrospectives, constant stand up status meetings, status meetings dressed up as "grooming" and "planning" where the only real (non)decision that's being made is how many "story points" should be assigned. You can barely go to the bathroom without filing a Jira".

You're proving my point that it's impossible to criticize Agile... But I will admit that (paraphrasing) 'All your criticisms are invalid because Agile is abstract!' is a twist! That's much more interesting than just screaming "WATERFALL!!"

If you had questions or criticisms of my criticisms, ask for clarification or make counter arguments - I want a good debate! It's intellectually light- weight to call someone emotional, while one is obfuscating and acting obtuse.

[1][https://www.versionone.com/pdf/state-of-agile-development- su...](https://www.versionone.com/pdf/state-of-agile-development-survey- ninth.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Still a great read. Probably the major reason why, when every year I cut down all my subscription services, Spotify remains.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there a Glassdoor kind of website that categorizes companies by the process they use? That would be pretty helpful...

<comment><USER2> It would be, until management sees the way that they're categorized and start faking votes / reviews. Then it would be an arms race on who can be the most Agile. Scrum -> Agile -> Agiler -> SUPER KANAGILEBAN MEGA!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Gah, OK time to switch to Apple music.

<comment><USER8> What don't you like about the document?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can I stop switching between projects, and actually deliver? - <AUTHOR> I am a software developer with a reasonably fulfilling job, which I perform well at.
During the day and evening, I come up with ideas on how to improve OSS software in various ways. All these typically need a prototype, blog post or contributing to an open source project.
I never do, however. Instead I move from idea to idea, never delivering.
How can I be more focused and keep my mind on one OSS project until some fruitful end? <comment><USER2> Presumably this 'lack of focus' isn't a problem in your day job.

First of all cut yourself some slack here - it's your spare time, and you hard enough already. You don't need to do more than you are doing, and honestly if you ever don't want to be coding in your evenings you aren't less of a developer or human being if you go and write a book or take a karate class instead.

That said, it's very easy to flit from starting learning one thing to starting learning the next, and it is fun to stay in one place long enough to be able to enjoy some flow in your evening coding.

I recommend that you hook up with someone who needs stuff and go make stuff for them. This can actually be very challenging because maybe what we do day to day as developers at a company is a different skill set to what that person needs. It gives you the chance to try stuff though.

Maybe a local charity needs a nice salesforce setup and some coaching on how to use it and fit its workflow. Maybe some scientists need an app for data collection. Or your local Forrest rangers could do with some custom maps. Once you're committed you're committed, and you'll learn something new for sure.

<comment><AUTHOR> > First of all cut yourself some slack here - it's your spare time, and you > hard enough already. You don't need to do more than you are doing, and > honestly if you ever don't want to be coding in your evenings you aren't > less of a developer or human being if you go and write a book or take a > karate class instead.

I have enough time to contribute to OSS, I just fail to do so, because I don't remain on the same idea for long enough.

> Maybe a local charity needs a nice salesforce setup and some coaching on how > to use it and fit its workflow. Maybe some scientists need an app for data > collection. Or your local Forrest rangers could do with some custom maps. > Once you're committed you're committed, and you'll learn something new for > sure.

The idea being that once I have identified a pressing need, I'll be more likely to stay on that idea? That sounds like it could work. Have you any experience with this approach?

<comment><USER2> Ha, the idea being that once you've said to someone that they you'll do a thing for them, the social pressure will make you complete it.

Recently I hooked up with some friend of a friend students who needed an app. I don't normally do that kind of work so it's been fun. That said, I'm in a non-programming job at the moment so it's easier to have the right kind of mental energy in the evening than it was.

A long while ago I went on a pair programming site and found another programmer who wanted help on their projects, and found the social aspect very focusing. We didn't get on, so that didn't work out, but it could have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Stick to a plan and try to gain a broader persepective of what your Company stands for. Break down a bigger goal into small steps.

BTW: For me this sounds like you have many possibilities but no idea what your direct Task is. Why do you go to work every day, what is the greater Goal?

<comment><AUTHOR> My performance in work is fine. I have ideas that are unrelated to work, that I want to implement in my free time. The problem is that I typically spend my free time just touching the surface of these ideas, rather than actually implementing them.</comment></comment>


Revisiting why incompetents think they're awesome - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/revisiting-why-incompetents-think-theyre-awesome/ <comment><USER2> 'Rather bluntly, Dunning himself said, "The presence of the Dunning-Kruger effect, as it's been come to be called, is that one should pause to worry about one's own certainty, not the certainty of others."'

For "presence" should we read "premise"? Yet something like "import" might be better still</comment>


Launch HN: EasyEmail (YC W18) – Gmail plug-in that helps compose emails quickly - <AUTHOR> Hey HN!
We're Fil, Lambert and Matt, the founders of EasyEmail (https://easyemail.ai). EasyEmail is a Gmail plug-in that helps you write emails quickly. We train our software with your inbox and quickly suggest what you should write based on your previous responses.
We started working on improving how email is used about a year and a half ago, when Fil was organizing the MIT Fall Career Fair, an event for 6,000 people and 450 companies. He was sending 200-300 emails a day and feeling suffocated by the volume. We started chatting about some sort of a solution, and after a long journey (including a car crash on the way to our YC interview!) we finally have a working product and some happy users.
Our current product is a Chrome Extension helps you write emails with two main components: autocomplete, and hotkeys.
Autocomplete searches through every sentence you've ever sent in the past and suggests 5 sentences you might say at this moment. An example could be me typing "how a" and the autocomplete suggesting "How are you doing?" together with 4 other sentences. This feature turned out to be harder than we expected because users say things that start similarly a lot (I have 207 unique sentences starting with "how a"). The question is how to sort all those sentences so they're most likely to choose one of the top 5. Our sentence-matching algorithm includes things like frequency, recency, and context from the email you're replying to.
Hotkeys are a quick way to enter snippets of text that you repeat a lot, but that aren't sentences, like a link that you send a lot, or pieces of text that you send often but don't merit a new template.
It's very exciting to work on this problem, because email is so universal. That also makes it very hard, because we need to satisfy a lot of different email users. There's also a lot of competition - most prominent is probably SmartReply by Gmail (those 3 buttons saying "sounds good" on your mobile app). The most important difference between us and them is that our suggestions are always personalized, since they come from your own mailbox.
This may sound like we're trying to remove thoughtful emailing by just making our users repeat the same sentences over and over again, but that's the exact opposite of what we're going for. Our initial users tend to already send repetitive emails, and we're just reducing the amount of typing they have to do. The goal is to give everyone more time to put into the non-repetitive parts of emails!
We'd absolutely love to hear your thoughts on the product and your experiences in this area. If you'd like to try out our product, it's easier to go right away to the Chrome webstore: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/easyemail-ai/giage.... Please let us know what you think! <comment><USER2> Congratulations on the launch!

I hope you take to heart the privacy concerns here. In case you haven't come across it, here's a useful thread from last year about Unroll.me's datamining and selling of customers' inboxes, and the general trust problem for services like yours:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14179077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14179077)

Frankly I'm not sure what it would take to convince me to open up email text access to a 3rd party service at this point.

You have to convince me not just that you (Fil, Lambert and Matt) are trustworthy, but also that the three of you can't be bought out by someone less trustworthy (bearing in mind that your customers may well be worth more to a shady business than they are to you!), and also that you're competent to run a hugely valuable database without ever making a mistake (quoting tptacek in the above thread: in your place, "I would be terrified.")

I don't know how you would crack this, but on the risk-of-hacking side as a user I might be looking for technical reassurance -- say, that you're running entirely locally instead of storing my email on your server in the first place, or that you're only using temporary email access to store sentences with k-anonymity or client-side encryption, and that your privacy model has been published in detail for review.

On the risk-of-purchase side you could look at Keith Porcaro and Sean McDonald's idea of the Civic Trust, where a private company's data is owned by an independent trust that can protect the interests of your users, separate from the vagaries of your business model:

[https://medium.com/@McDapper/the-civic- trust-e674f9aeab43](https://medium.com/@McDapper/the-civic-trust-e674f9aeab43) [http://digitalpublic.io/](http://digitalpublic.io/)

My feedback here may amount to concern trolling, since I'm over on the paranoid end of potential customers these days and probably not your target audience -- but I'm passing it on in case it's helpful ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! That's extremely useful - definitely not concern trolling. We recognize how important email is to our users, so we definitely want to resolve those issues!

We're incorporating some of the things you've already mentioned (client-side decryption, better sanitization), but we'll be a lot more cautious moving forward. You brought up really excellent points, so thank you for sharing those with us!

<comment><USER3> I could definitely use this tool but the privacy concerns would need to treated as be your #1 selling point along with user side encryption. The encryption could cost more but once a competitor arrives with these two necessities, I will sign up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Understood! We'll be working on this asap :) Really appreciate your feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is the plan to make money off this? Sell what you read in my emails? Charge me a monthly fee at some point? Also my initial reaction was that I wasn't aware that composing an email is slow.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working on a business version of the product, which will be a monthly fee on a per user basis. We're unsure of the exact pricing yet.

It definitely isn't slow for all users! However, there are some that send so many emails that any incremental speed-up is very helpful. Plus, we're looking to start working on mobile, where it should be most useful!

<comment><USER5> I think it's more than incremental speed up - it's the amount of mindspace it takes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting, I haven't really thought of it that way. Do you mean we essentially lower the barrier to you starting to write an email?

If that's the case, that's a fascinating insight - thank you so much for sharing it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Have you read Avogadro Corp ([http://avogadrocorp.com/](http://avogadrocorp.com/) )? That novel is based on the premise of a tool that is intended to help you write well-crafted emails yet quickly gets out of hand.

I'm not suggesting at all this will be the case here but this seems related and might be an interesting read.

<comment><USER7> That was my first thought as well.

My second thought was the Cory Doctorow story which predicted that the first true AI will be the result of a machine learning spambot and a machine learning antispam bot getting stuck in an arms race.

This tech would make for an excellent means for spammers and malware authors to bypass spam filters easily.

1)Infect user. 2)Generate new content based on old emails. 3)Infect everyone. 4)Repeat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh man hahah, that's gotten dark real quick! Promise we're not trying to do that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone who runs a support team I saw this and immediately thought "this needs to be a zendesk app."

There is a lot of knowledge hidden in support ticket replies but it's didficult to know what other team members previous answers would be useful to crib from without guessing search terms. Heck you may even forget exactly how to find your own answer from a few months ago.

On top of that there are concepts we have to communicate all the time as building blocks of a reply, which is where it seems this service may thrive. Let me know when you need beta testers for the zendesk version :-D

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome insight, thanks so much! I'd love to chat with you about that - anything you're specifically looking for out of the product?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> OK, I'm loving a couple of things:

1\. As someone in sales, there are a truckload of emails I send out each day. Contrary to what a lot of people think, no, we don't send out templated stuff blindly. I think EE should be able to help me shave off about half an hour in think-time in a a day. Huge.

2\. Organic-ish. Early days, I know, but I'm hoping that EE won't devolve to a glorified SmartReply with additional text templates.

3\. There's a roadmap for pro-users. Which means at some point of time, there _might_ just be an Outlook/Polymail plugin(please say yes). Which is when I absolutely win. :-) Also, it's nice to be relatively assured that your data isn't likely to be sold.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! so happy to hear you've enjoyed it so far. We've got a ton of additional things coming up for you, and no, they're not going to make us SmartReply!

Almost definitely a yes to an Outlook extension coming up - we're just making sure now that we're doing a good enough job on Gmail before we start porting over to another platform :)

Hey - any chance you could email me at email@example.com? I'd love to set up a phone call to hear how we could be better for you. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What is on the roadmap for this service? You have hotkeys and autocomplete which means I can write emails more quickly. You have access to my email / history of digital life (contacts, relationships, connections, brands I am willing to let get into my inbox, etc): what will you do with this data to further improve the email experience?

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent question! We're already starting to work on calendar integration to help you out with scheduling. Over time, we plan on improving more and more parts of your email - task management, figuring out which emails are the top ones for you to read and reply to, who you should reach out to etc. That's just a few ideas that we've been thinking about - would really love to hear if you have any suggestions!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I find a couple things irksome, if not malicious.

1\. The link to the privacy policy comes AFTER you take all my data. 2\. If I uninstall your extension you have it programmed to give me an exit survey, but it doesn't prompt me to revoke access for your app from my account? So you can continue to read all my communications. At the very least tell me how to remove it when I uninstall your extension, or fill out your exit survey. Don't just hide the fact that you retain access indefinitely. 3\. You are appending your marketing to the bottom of every email regardless if it used your product or not. Thats crap, I don't want to spam every single person I communicate with. Let me opt in, or only append when your plugin is used.

I get its a prototype, I get the "potential", but it seems you put 0 critical thought into making the app safe.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for all the feedback, I really appreciate it.

1\. We're sharing our privacy policy on our chrome extension webstore page - did you manage to see it there? If not, we should definitely do a much better job presenting it, so thank you for pointing it out.

2\. So sorry, definitely don't want to hide anything! We'll push out the changes asap to show our users how to remove your permissions. We stop looking at your data once you uninstall (even if you don't revoke permissions).

3.Sorry about that! You can remove it easily in the "EasyEmail" control panel - just hit "Settings" and you can uncheck the button

4\. We'll keep getting better! Thanks for pointing out that we're suggesting some generic sentences - this tends to happen when the user didn't send a lot of emails from a given email address (which means there's not a lot of data to learn from.)

Again, thank you so much for your feedback. We'll get right to fixing all the problems!

<comment><USER11> Hey, Didn't see it on the webpage store. I expected it to be on the welcome message I saw in the store. Probably due to similar experiences.

Yes, you need to remove permissions. That is absolutely imperative. Do you delete the data after uninstall?

Perhaps give an option checkbox in your initial walkthrough of the app to allow the footer only on emails using EasyEmail.

I retracted #4. The first email I got after the loading robot screen made me think the "learning" was complete. I got an email much later saying it was complete. The UX confused me. Perhaps instead of popping up generic message before the learning is done, you can show a message, still analyzing data. So I cannot in good faith comment on the suggestion quality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it, makes sense. I'll make sure to update that soon! Thank you for the suggestion.

We delete data the second we don't have access to users' account. However, we don't store any new data after you uninstall us. The reason is that there's actually no way of tracking who uninstalls us - Chrome Extensions are not providing any real support for it. We're looking into it, and will retroactively remove all data from users who uninstalled us.

Brilliant idea! We'll make the checkbox more visible! Got it, sorry about that. Please let me know what you think once you get some time to play with the extension! Thank you so much again for the feedback, it's incredibly valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is interesting to see Chrome Plugins being accepted into YC. Is the potential really worth a billion dollar market ? I would think that YC wants to invest in startups that could scale to high growth in a short span of time. Are Chrome plugins really worth that much ?

Or perhaps this is just the MVP and idea is to scale it further ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great insight! Chrome extension is our MVP actually - over time we will certainly expand to other platforms (or even have our own email client!). We're already in the process for setting up a Gmail Add-on ([https://blog.google/products/g-suite/do-more-your-inbox- gmai...](https://blog.google/products/g-suite/do-more-your-inbox-gmail-add- ons/))

It also seems like we can keep going with a Chrome Extension for a bit - Streak, MixMax or even Grammarly are good examples of companies who are focused around a Chrome extension.

What other platforms do you think we could focus on? Where would you like to see us most?

<comment><USER13> A lot of action nowadays happen on Mobile. How would this help with that?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're already developing a Gmail Add-on, which will work on mobile! We're looking to go into mobile as soon as possible

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd like to see you auto suggest frequent attachments. In some ways this should be a more accessible feature, and certainly useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really great idea! I put it down so that we can work on it in the near future. There seems to be a lot of privacy issues with attachments. Do you have any suggestion on how you'd like us to deal with it? Is it something you're worried about at all?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been testing easymail for a couple weeks (the gmail add-on and the chrome plugin). So far a very positive experience - saves me time on repetitive emails. Looking forward to updates & more AI.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear we've been useful! Looking forward to more feedback in the future :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would love to use you service but it is not acceptable for me to share my email contents with someone else. Look at how mega cloud storage are protecting users files

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry to hear that! I'd love to find out more about how we could resolve that issue.

Privacy and security are extremely high on our priority list since email is such an intimate communication channel.

<comment><USER17> > I'd love to find out more about how we could resolve that issue.

Perhaps you could have a privacy policy which clearly states no text from user emails will be looked at by humans.

It's possible, though not easy, for a limited form of client-side encryption to be used while still offering autocomplete; e.g. if each word is encrypted client-side with a per-client secret, an encrypted "next word" could be determined and returned without the server ever knowing the specific words and sentences it operated on (other than length). There are other caveats here.

> Privacy and security are extremely high on our priority list

The lack-luster privacy policy doesn't show that at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> So sorry about that - we'll make sure to improve our privacy policy to reflect that better. Thank you for pointing it out!

We're working on client-side encryption right now actually, which will further help us be better about your privacy.

The only people who can read email sentences are our researchers - and even then the sentences are not identifiable. They are obviously bound by very restrictive NDAs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is awesome guys. To reply to all the people that are like this is not a big enough problem, tell them that this is the start and then tell them what is the next stage of your company.

To me, it sounds like a personal assistant that can automatically reply for you to fairly complex emails. We get SO MUCH email, maybe this will actually help us manage all that.

It is a very powerful idea, all the best to you.

<comment><USER18> > personal assistant that can automatically reply for you

That would make me redundant. 4 hr work week, I am coming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm very apprehensive about using something that _doesn't_ charge me but reads my e-mail.

Then again it's a gmail plugin :P

<comment><AUTHOR> We just released it two weeks ago, so we're just looking to get loads of feedback as we're improving our tech to finally create a business version of it.

We've got no plans whatsoever to sell anyone's data - we'll be a good ol' regular SaaS product for business with a free version for personal use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Do you have numbers around how often autocomplete is used? For example, using your "how a" example, what percentage of time will a user select a suggested autocomplete?

<comment><AUTHOR> We get used in 15% of emails on average. That number tends to vary a lot from user to user though - we've got a few users who use us in 80% of their emails, and some that use us very sporadically.

We don't have a number for the percentage of usage for what the user specifically types, but it sounds like definitely something we should have, so thanks for the suggestion!

<comment><USER17> > We don't have a number for the percentage of usage for what the user > specifically types, but it sounds like definitely something we should have

It sounds like a violation of user privacy. Data-collection and privacy is a fine line, and I'm pretty sure any numbers related to specific text users type in private communication being surfaced up to humans is across that line.

I'm fine with my phone keyboard suggesting next words. I would not be fine with a human looking at the data model for specific sentences and words, even in aggregate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you elaborate on that a bit? There's no one looking at your data in real time.

I'll make sure we review the privacy policy once again - you've been bringing up some extremely useful points, so thank you so much!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Do you guys feel like your product could replace mail merges?

</comment><comment><USER22> Just added the extension. Curious why you need access to my calendar?

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, what are your initial thoughts? Would love to make it better for you. We'll be rolling out calendar integration in a day or two, so stay tuned

<comment><USER22> I'll give it a fair shake, then report back :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, looking forward to it!

<comment><USER22> So far, I find it marginally useful. The replies it suggests are either too specific (e.g. "We have" -> "We have been working on it since"), too trivial ("Thank y" -> "Thank you!"), or contain artifacts ("ph0rque" -> "phorque <").

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Whats the difference between Launch HN and Show HN?

</comment><comment><USER24> No love for Firefox?

<comment><USER16> Yes... curious about it too. I am seeing many of my colleagues switch from Chromium to FF. The new version is a magnitute faster than anything I have used. Fun fact - Edge browser on Android is actually my default browser for the last 2 months and I love it.</comment></comment>


Google's Flutter = React and Java Swing - <AUTHOR> https://codeburst.io/googles-flutter-react-java-swing-8174c8d9d402 <comment><USER3> Flutter is an amazing project. It feels like an futuristic version of the Android SDK. Everything is a widget and it has a catalog of amazing widgets. These conform to the Material Design guidelines. It makes it very hassle-free to make a functionally great and beautiful app. You write your Flutter app using Dart. The Dart code is compiled to native code. The more I work with Dart the more I like it. The IntelliJ Flutter plugin makes for a tight and great integration.

Right now the weak point of Flutter is that there aren't many plugins for utilizing platform specific features. This always the fault line with these cross-platform frameworks. These will come I'm sure of. It's relatively easy to write a plugin which is a great plus.

I've done native development on both Android and iOS. Tried Cordova-based development. Lastly React Native. Out of all these I like Flutter the most. You will make a beautiful app with much less work compared to native development and other alternatives. The performance is also fantastic. Flutter uses its own high-performance rendering engine to draw widgets. Almost the entirety of Flutter is written in Dart; also the lower parts. This is important for development because nothing is closed off. With everything being written in Dart it gives you a high degree of control.

My early work so far using Flutter;

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.me.tvligen...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.me.tvligenu) (Danish television listings)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.kjeldsen.et...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.kjeldsen.etherexplorer) (Ethereum blockchain explorer)

<comment><USER4> > Flutter is an amazing project. It feels like an futuristic version of the > Android SDK.

This is how I would like to have seen ChromeOS being implemented, a fresh revisit of the Smalltalk experience but using Dart instead.

Instead they created a browser window manager.

<comment><USER5> At least that "browser window manager" came with lots of useful tools to solve problems with the computer, based on a wide ecosystem.

"Smalltalk Revisited" doesn't solve any problems per-se, and would be firmly stuck in the chicken and egg corner that produced way too many stillborn projects in IT.

So, Chrome OS implementing Dart might have been interesting, but on the other hand, as soon as there was talk about adding Dart to the web platform, there were all those rants about "Google is monopolizing the web!!!!11". I guess it's hard to please everyone.

(disclosure: I'm on the Chrome OS firmware team. Although while "Chrome", there's definitely no Javascript or Flutter involved. My team's code needs to run in the absence of arbitrary amounts of RAM [edit-to-add: which means I have no stake in the game of which language has a hipster-compatible garbage collector])

<comment><USER4> So let me tell you that I don't see any value spending money on ChromeOS as it is, and there is hardly any computer store in Europe selling Chromebooks.

When they try to sell them, it is a single model on a corner of the shop with increasing discounts until someone finally takes it away, or they return the unit back.

So from European point of view those "lots of useful tools to solve problems with the computer, based on a wide ecosystem." are nowhere to be seen.

> My team's code needs to run in the absence of arbitrary amounts of RAM

Chrome's memory usage on the process system monitor shows a different reality about that code.

<comment><USER5> I think I missed the real meat in this comment in my other response, so here's attempt #2:

> So from European point of view those "lots of useful tools to solve problems > with the computer, based on a wide ecosystem." are nowhere to be seen.

These "useful tools" are web sites (and web apps). By providing excellent support for these, the devices are immediately useful. Much better than hoping that another ecosystem like Android's can be jumpstarted.

The average user buys a (hypothetical) Dartbook: Looks for some Dart app. Gets frustrated by the lack of choice. Returns the device.

The average user buys a Chromebook: Browses their favorite websites (and face it: 90% of contemporary computer use is _just_ _that_). Reasonably happy customer (unless they insist on installing "TuneUp Utilities" because they always do that).

That's what I meant with the availability of lots of useful tools to solve problems with the computer (in that case, a Chromebook), repurposing a wide ecosystem (the entire web, basically).

From your other comments on this site (eg about the Atom editor), you seem to be fundamentally opposed to html/js as a platform and with that sentiment, Chromebooks must look anathema to you. Alright, that's one position to take. But what use would be a Dartbook to you? You'd probably complain (with full reason!) about its inability to run emacs just the same.

<comment><USER4> > These "useful tools" are web sites (and web apps).

Web browser app....

> The average user buys a Chromebook:

And returns it back after discovering it cannot install his/her favorute software and requires a permanent internet connection to make anything useful with the device.

> The average user buys a (hypothetical) Dartbook: Looks for some Dart app. > Gets frustrated by the lack of choice. Returns the device.

The return rate of those devices running Android is quite big apparently.

> But what use would be a Dartbook to you?

The same as my tablet and mobile phone running Android.

<comment><USER6> It's a mistake to look at Chromebooks as consumer products.

I have bought Chromebooks for my employees. They can access business resources without me having to worry about them getting hacked and leaking proprietary information and passwords to production systems. Chromebooks are cheap, unsexy, and can't run fancy games. These are all pluses.

Chromebooks are the 3270 of the present day. They're for the average customer service representative, not for the home user.

<comment><USER7> I don't agree. Chromebooks are wonderful for the elderly and folks who don't need a traditional OS. They can browse the web, read email, watch videos, without worrying about drivers, virus, downloading gigs and gigs of update every years for features they don't care about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone feel a tinge of guilt using the amazing technology that Google provides?

I think Google is overall a pretty "evil" (I use quotes because the term is loaded, and the reasoning is too long to easily state) company. IMO Google is, at best, hard-to-trust, and at worst adversarial in many of the decisions they make. But I sure am excited when it produces technology like Android, Golang, Flutter etc and makes it free to use.

Personal opinions aside, what they've done here is managed to create a _full- measure_ cross platform mobile application, and they have the resources that warrant taking them seriously. All the other options are either half measures or require such a drastic shift/ongoing support that I hesitate to use them, to list a few:

\- Cordova/Phonegap (half-measure)

\- React Native (Facebook is your benevolent dictator)

\- Lambda Native (convince the team to go full lisp, and hope/build support as the platforms change under you)

\- Native (learn all the ins and out of 2+ different platforms, and hope to be prolific, because you'll likely not be expert in either one)

I just wanna know if anyone else has this dilemma/thinks about this.

IANAL, but the license ([https://github.com/flutter/flutter/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/flutter/flutter/blob/master/LICENSE)) is basically MIT + don't put google's name in your product... Maybe I'm thinking about this too much

<comment><USER9> I feel like Google generally takes the right side of things. Defensive patents, tight security, easy to use, friendly products. Their stuff is mostly open source and free. TBH Google are relative angels. Microsoft before them had shitty products and strongarmed other corps to get what they wanted. Actively sued based on dumb patents. And Apple only turned "privacy" into a thing they supposedly cared about when people started being concerned about Google's powers. They're not actually sincere about it, it's marketing like everything else.

Sometimes I think people forget the history of how and why Google got where it is. They've had some snafus, but for the most part just been a freaking awesome company from the start who puts out amazing, free things, and push OS and CS research forward.

No, I have no guilt using anything they make.

<comment><USER10> > They're not actually sincere about it, it's marketing like everything else.

Really? How do you explain Secure Enclave, end-to-end iMessage encryption and lots more? Not to mention the tough stance they publicly took against FBI wanting special OS version to crack terrorist phones?

<comment><USER5> To play the devil's advocate:

> Secure Enclave

ARM TrustZone. My 2005-era low-end devices have that. Hardly Apple's idea.

Microsoft did ground work in that space for ~2 decades by now. It's called TPM and has a bunch of advantages by being a discrete component. It's also an industry-wide initiative and open to all.

> end-to-end iMessage encryption

Perfect for locking down the ecosystem.

> tough stance they publicly took against FBI

Posturing (on both sides: The FBI knows that they're SoL on getting such favors, with or without writing whiny op-eds on how they're incompetent).

You'd have already seen leaked versions of the "special OS versions to crack" had the other vendors budged to such demands. They might just discuss matters with the Feds without inviting the press.

<comment><USER11> The Secure Enclave is not ARM TrustZone. The SEP is a discrete component.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Dart? Sorry I'll have to pass. On top of Elixir, Go, and JS fatigue, I don't think I have any more room left for another language to "try".

But if it was Polymer with native iOS/Android support, now then this would've been a different story! When I compare all the recent front-end frameworks, Polymer still is the most appealing to me, I wish it had a bit more steam behind it.

<comment><USER13> Dart is quite similar to Java. If you are already familiar with Java I believe it will take you very little time to get started with Dart.

FWIW, I was able to write two small but useful program in Dart in one day, without any experience with the language at all:

\- A script to convert CSV file to SELECT ... UNION ALL SELECT ... statements

\- A script to parse my timesheet (in Emacs' org-mode) & insert it into my client's timesheet database

I just used these 3 resources:

[1] Dart language tour [https://www.dartlang.org/guides/language](https://www.dartlang.org/guides/language)

[2] Standard library introduction [https://www.dartlang.org/guides/libraries](https://www.dartlang.org/guides/libraries)

[3] Standard library reference (like JavaDocs) [https://api.dartlang.org/stable/1.24.2/index.html](https://api.dartlang.org/stable/1.24.2/index.html)

[4] And the pub package manager [https://www.dartlang.org/tools/pub](https://www.dartlang.org/tools/pub)

<comment><USER14> It's really easy to get started with almost any language, the problem is becoming an expert in it. How can somebody become an expert on the nuances of JS, Typescript, Dart, etc not to mention libraries and APIs of each? And that's just for the frontend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It is very exciting to see more people write frameworks using "React" ideas. This will make React and similar frameworks better!

It seems like one of the biggest ideas that flutter brings to the table is a different approach to component libraries. It makes sense that there is a need for this given that larger companies that invest in React tend to have their own tailored component library that people outside of those companies generally don't get to take advantage of. The startup costs to developing your own library of React components and their CSS/Native wrappers are high.

That being said, when I think of prebuilt component libraries (eg, bootstrap, swing) I generally think of components that are too familiar for users and a crutch for developers to allow them to quickly develop interface code where they may not be an expert. In a high quality app, I would expect widgets to follow the patterns that other apps on the platform follow. Won't this be difficult for a framework like Flutter which will have to re-create each of these native widgets (as apposed to React native where they are just wrapped in a JS layer)?

Regardless of these qualms, I'm excited to see more well funded frameworks enter this space because I'm sure that all users of frameworks in this space will benefit. I will be on the look out for more complex uses of this framework to see how people overcome these types of issues!

</comment><comment><USER16> The biggest problem with Flutter is that of developer reluctance - <USER2> because of Dart. And ever more so _now_ because Android adopted a small, scrappy company's homegrown language (Kotlin) instead of Google's own.

I'm kind of wondering what are the political fault lines inside Google around the Dart, Flutter and Android ecosystem.

If Kotlin gets adopted server side at Google as well (which is fairly likely considering Google is already using the JVM), then why would people bet on Dart ?

Is Dart 10x better than Kotlin ?

<comment><USER17> Search trend comparison of Dart vs Kotlin vs React Native:

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0h52xr1,%2...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0h52xr1,%2Fm%2F0_lcrx4,React%20Native)

Interesting that there's heavy kotlin searching mainly in Russia

<comment><USER18> Not really that surprising to me, Kotlin is named after a Russian island, so naturally their non-developer populace will use the term more than the rest of the world and the programming language was created by JetBrains, a Russian company, so I'd also assume there's probably some elevated interest for Russians in something successful that's also "home grown".

<comment><USER19> Technically, JetBrains is a Czech company with offices in Russia, among a half dozen or so counties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > So they can look like iOS native widgets or Android native widgets. This is > basically the exact same approach as JavaSwing.

Hang on, he's saying it's like Java Swing as if that's a _good_ thing?

<comment><USER21> Yeah, funny, isn't it?

I wish we had a variation of Deplhi's VCL for web/java/etc. instead of all these monstrosities that make life miserable instead of taking 5 minutes to make a solid UI.

<comment><USER22> Can you elaborate on which part of Delphi's VCL you are looking for?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Link: [https://flutter.io/](https://flutter.io/)

</comment><comment><USER24> The floating 'open in app' on this page is really bad. Please stop doing that. For fucking crying loud, don't mix text with bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER25> It looks fantastic, but with Google I always wonder about their long term commitment to stuff like this.

<comment><USER26> Well, they state that they are using it in their own production apps. They did the same with Angular from basically day 1. And it started as a 20% project for Igor(sorry if I'm remembering that wrong). Nearly seven years later and here we are at Angular 3, I'm sorry 4. It all depends on adoption.

<comment><USER27> >Well, they state that they are using it in their own production apps. They did the same with Angular from basically day 1.

This reminds me of a question I've had before: exactly what production apps does Google use Angular for? Have they rewritten Gmail to use Angular? Or Calendar? Or Docs? I'm too lazy to dig into the obfuscated source of any of these to figure it out for myself. Does anyone know what apps Google actually uses Angular for?

<comment><USER28> I can answer this for AngularDart. That one is used for AdWords, AdSense, AdMob — these 3 alone bring 75%+ of Google's revenue —, a company-wide CRM, Fiber, Shopping Express, Wing, ...

No Gmail, Calendar, Docs, or any other consumer app so far.

Disclaimer: I work on the Dart team.

<comment><USER14> Aren't those the same apps that claim to use GWT?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is Flutter tied to Dart, or are there good C bindings so I can use whatever language I want?

I've never understood the obsession with creating a whole language around a library (R, Matlab, Magma, Javascript, Wolfram...) so that I'm essentially forced to use that.

<comment><USER4> Bravo, you just discovered how language adoption works.

Also as an addendum, C is a language designed around an operating system.

If it wasn't for UNIX's adoption, C would have been a footnote in the history of systems programming languages.

<comment><USER29> Well, yeah, but wouldn't you agree this is a sad state?

Also, C as a "portable assembler" kind of make sense as a lingua franka, because every language has to go through assembler before being executed at some point.

<comment><USER4> No, because adoption needs to be driven by an actual need of some sort.

A programming language doesn't get adopted just for its grammar and semantics alone.

Regarding the benefits of C as portable Assembly, I advise you read about the programming languages and operating systems designed in the 60's, 10 years before UNIX was created.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Any idea when this will be in beta? That looks way more interesting than React Native to me.

<comment><USER31> Unless you want to run your code on the web as well, I guess ...

<comment><USER32> If you write the web version of your app using AngularDart, you could probably share a fair amount of code between the two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm looking forward to the first library/tool/support project called Shy

<comment><USER34> Or port it to a different language and go with the deep cut, Zephyr.

Makes a lot of sense because reactive programming is inherently lazy. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Looks very nice. Any indications that is or will be possible to make non mobile apps? Or that it will have bindings to other languages?

Dart is a huge step up from JS, but I can see how other languages would be a nice fit too.

</comment><comment><USER36> My first problem with Flutter is that it doesn't unify web and native development, so it fails to solve the big problem immediately. If you can deliver web and mobile from the same codebase, you can deal with the "long tail" of users (and web users too). React Native (not that I have any great love of React) and its clones are working towards supporting all platforms.

My second problem with Flutter is the writer's apparent biggest positive feature — Dart. (I love how he naively states that Dart was conceived as a language to transpile to Javascript; it was conceived as a _replacement_ for Javascript with transpilation as a stopgap.) I think Javascript is a fine ("good enough") language that (a) works almost everywhere and (b) is evolving at a more-than-sufficient rate. I have no desire to drink Google's Kool-aid. (Go, OTOH, I am fine with.)

But then I get to "Building Layouts with Flutter":

[https://flutter.io/tutorials/layout/#step-1](https://flutter.io/tutorials/layout/#step-1)

This makes the articles I've read on "thinking the React way" seem mild in comparison. In exchange for having to restrict your layout ideas to the stuff that will work in Flutter (which first entails somehow grokking what works in Flutter), you have to go from visual concept to hierarchical breakdown and then translate that into code in less than intuitive ways, and then when your graphic designer decides that such-and-such needs to be 2 pixels lower or the stars should get bigger in the middle, you're still going to be hosed or inserting fixed height shims all over the place (and how will that look on a tablet?)

This API seems too high level to produce polished products. Of course it's alpha so blah blah blah but being able to quickly produce generic stuff is not a proof of concept, especially if you can't then refine the generic stuff to the nth degree.

<comment><USER22> (I work on the Flutter team.)

> This API seems too high level to produce polished products.

You can target whichever level of Flutter's APIs that you want. Almost the entire stack is in Dart, from the compositor, to the layout engine, to the animation logic, to the composition (widgets) layer, to the material widgets. If one layer is too high level, you can go down one level and work directly there instead.

The lowest level (the C++ layer) is literally just the Skia API, the Dart core APIs, a text rendering API, and a message-passing API for talking to your Java/Kotlin or ObjectiveC/Swift code. Everything else is layers you can directly poke at from Dart, written in Dart.

<comment><USER36> Thanks for addressing this specific issue (and hey, Hixie!) Obviously, I don't know much about the APIs so I'll take your word for it.

I guess my first objection (doesn't unify web development) stands, but that can be addressed in future (and presemably Dart will work just dandy with Web Assembly).

I assume my other objection can be addressed by simply building layouts directly and not using the autolayout stuff if you don't want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Finally a cross platform framework that makes sense! Writing your own UI elements using the platforms graphics primitives makes a lot of sense.

It will be interesting to see how it works in practice.

</comment><comment><USER38> My years of toil with Java Swing makes me shudder every time i hear its wretched name.

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder about accessibility of flutter widgets though, since they aren't just wrappers for native widgets.

Looks like it's still not accessible [https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/10562](https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/10562) The issue was brought up a year ago too [https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/flutter- dev/xwUJ7D...](https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/flutter- dev/xwUJ7DzIFlk)

<comment><USER40> Adam Barth from the flutter team responded last time this came up:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14433320](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14433320)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> > There are no external UI DSLs (i.e. html or xml files). > The entire UI is > written in Dart. This, for me, is a > big win.

This view amuses me. It is obviously held as an opinion, and isn't one I disagree with; but goes heavily against what everyone was aiming for with the likes of HTML. To the point that it is kind of hard to believe I'm seeing it.

I give it about 4 months before there is a UI language that is not "code" that is usable here. Pushed by the other side.

<comment><USER42> HTML was designed to create documents, though - not UIs. That also happens to be the core of a lot of problems with it (that, IMO, are overblown).

A lot of the struggle/difference between JS frameworks is this disagreement about where things fit on the document vs app scale, IMO.

<comment><USER41> And to an extent, I fully get what you are saying. However, the entire push of HTML/CSS is not much different than the push of LaTeX over TeX. Or any number of other examples. (You can almost draw the line at people wanting a fully declarative language for content being the problem. I'm sympathetic to that view. I haven't explored it enough, yet.) People want to find a very hard separation of presentation from content.

And to an extent, this makes sense. However, ditching HTML and similar tech seems excessive to me. The largest problem with HTML is so many people try to appease the flow and native layout of the elements. This leads to a massive bloat of markup to create what is actually easy to describe using minimal markup and liberal usage of absolute/relative positioning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > React Native uses native widgets. This means you have to create separate > apps for Android and iOS.

I've never used any native widgets in React Native. Didn't even know they existed. I create and style all widgets I want from scratch so they obviously look the same on both Android and iOS. I thought that was how everyone did it. What am I missing?

<comment><USER44> All of the built-in React Native components are wrappers around the corresponding native widgets: [https://facebook.github.io/react- native/docs/components-and-...](https://facebook.github.io/react- native/docs/components-and-apis.html)

You can also integrate other native widgets not designed first and foremost for React Native [https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/native- componen...](https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/native-components- ios.html)

<comment><USER43> Thanks. What's the benefit of using the built-in Button component? The only reason I could see is that you actually want them to look differently on Android and iOS. I've heard the sentiment before but I don't fully understand it. For example, when I build an app I want it to look like my app, with its own distinct graphics, and not like a generic system app. Why go through the hassle of making two different UIs when you can just go with your own?

<comment><USER45> Accessibility is a big one. When your buttons are actual UIButtons, they get treated as such by the iOS accessibility system.

Most developers don't consider accessibility at all because they don't need it themselves. But there are millions of iOS and Android users who do need it, and they might be thankful that you've made their life easier with your app.

Following platform standards makes things easier for users. Users don't care if your app has distinct graphics.

<comment><USER43> Thanks. Is that's really what's happening with React Native's built-in button though?

[https://github.com/facebook/react- native/blob/master/Librari...](https://github.com/facebook/react- native/blob/master/Libraries/Components/Button.js)

        if (color && Platform.OS === 'ios') {
          textStyles.push({color: color});
        } else if (color) {
          buttonStyles.push({backgroundColor: color});
        }

Looks like they are just styling them differently to make them look like system default.

<comment><USER45> Sorry, I don't know how React Native does it, although my understanding is that Button components do end up as real platform buttons.

Generally speaking, UIButtons have important semantics that are easy to miss if one just reproduces the appearance using custom graphics. The same applies to other standard controls too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Something i don't get : does this mean the flutter team will have to redevelop all the gui features and new components of every single new version of cocoa touch, every year, within the timeframe of the beta and the actual release of the new sdk ? And do the same with android sdk ?

Or, will you end up with old looking interfaces and wait anxiously for someone to update the gui component library ?

Because except for creating its own ui paradigm, that will look different from both ios and android, i don't see another option.

</comment><comment><USER47> At this point we should probably make a framework for implementing the native features in these systems, so the next Cordova/Ionic/Xamarin/React Native/Flutter doesn't have to start from scratch every time and take 2 years to re-build nearly the exact same ecosystem for native features.

As a plus we could consolidate all that brainpower spread across different cross platform native feature libraries to make these native features less buggy, more featureful and more maintained.

</comment><comment><USER48> how's flutter's interop with java/kotlin/swift/etc? Would I be able to use existing libraries from those lang.s?

<comment><USER49> [https://flutter.io/faq/#can-i-interop-with-my-mobile- platfor...](https://flutter.io/faq/#can-i-interop-with-my-mobile-platforms- default-programming-language)

<comment><USER48> hm... is it something like IPC? By 'message passing', would it be ok to use a java image-processing/video-processing library?

<comment><USER22> (I'm on the Flutter team.)

IPC is "inter-process communication". This message passing is same-process.

We haven't yet proved that it's sufficiently performant for extremely latency- sensitive work, and we currently copy the bytes for the messages when switching so it's not very suitable for high-bandwidth work like video where you're sharing the bytes between Dart and Java.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> A lot of the praises of Flutter in the article can be said about Tk. I guess I ought to have a look.

</comment><comment><USER51> The title led me to believe this is about a java.awt.geom and Swing port to Android.</comment>


Vote Lafayette to Help Gamification Bring About Positive Social Change - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/19/vote-mayors-challenge-fan_n_2716857.html?utm_hp_ref=tw We're working with our Local Acadiana Open Source User Group, so please give us feedback and vote!
Additional Information  - https://www.facebook.com/beejhuff/posts/131621353670742
http://acadianaos.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Additional Info - <https://www.facebook.com/beejhuff/posts/131621353670742></comment>


Google Fiber Is Coming to Salt Lake City - <AUTHOR> http://googlefiberblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/google-fiber-is-coming-to-salt-lake-city.html <comment><USER2> Real world speed, hard wired. [http://www.speedtest.net/my- result/4084419705](http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4084419705)

[https://instagram.com/p/oRf3z3hgzW/](https://instagram.com/p/oRf3z3hgzW/) [https://instagram.com/p/wBzu2SBgxW/](https://instagram.com/p/wBzu2SBgxW/)

<comment><USER3> You can't really call it real world speeds when latency is less than a millisecond, then you've hardly even exited the internal backbone of your ISP. Generally when accessing things abroad or somewhat far away the throughput will drop to 150-500Mb/s. So, not bad at all, but don't expect those speeds everywhere.

On a side note, my current ISP just started rolling out 10Gb/s here. The geek in me really wants to get it, but I'm having a real hard time even making up excuses for the added cost, around $700, compared to $40 for gigabit.

<comment><USER4> > Generally when accessing things abroad or somewhat far away the throughput > will drop to 150-500Mb/s.

Isn't that usually caused by TCP and bandwith-delay product and not the connection itself?

<comment><USER3> A combination of that and congestion on transit providers, I think.

The biggest issue with a really fast connection is that your wireless becomes the bottleneck, even if you buy really expensive gear.

<comment><USER5> wireless and fiber? that's like putting ice cubes in wine

<comment><USER3> Sure is, but it's kind of impractical to always have a wire connected to your laptop. Sort of defeats the purpose of a portable computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Living in SLC, this is super exciting. I cannot wait to ditch Comcast (who has raised my rates for the same service every 6 months over the past 2 years) as soon as conceivably possible.

<comment><USER7> Cable pricing is odd... it constantly rises, but is reset to a promotional price whenever something changes (or threatens convincingly to change). It's common to call, and say you want to cancel because the price went up, that you're switching to satellite or something. That usually works.

I'm on Time Warner, and I just happened to move apartments, and I got the price reset without really asking for it. Some sort of "new service" treatment even though I only moved to a new address in roughly the same city.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Right now I am living in third world country, So believe it or not , Imagining internet speed more than 2 mbps is kinda hard for me , So I have question from those have Google fiber or any internet connection with speed more than 100 mbps , Can you download file from torrent ? how much your speed is ? How about ordinary web server's,Do they support download speed more than 30,40 mbps ?

<comment><USER9> I usually get 8-9 MB/s file downloads with a 100Mbps connection. I think the speed is actually limited by the laptop's slow HDD.

<comment><USER10> Considering that 100Mbit/s is 12.5MByte/s, the speeds you're seeing aren't horribly distant from your "up to" speed.

[For reference's sake, 8MByte/s is 64Mbit/s and 9MByte/s is 72Mbit/s

<comment><USER11> The usual rule of thumb I've seen for incorporating protocol overhead is to divide by 10 instead of 8: a 100Mbps connection can usually download about 10MB/s in practice (over http, scp, rsync, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I know that Google bought a fiber build in Provo. Did they also/just now buy an existing one for SLC? When I was at Neumont, I was sad that the fiber in Sandy didn't come across I-15 to South Jordan.

<comment><USER13> I'm assuming this is a new installation potentially piggy backing off of some dark fiber. I'm wondering if they are partnering with XMission.

<comment><USER14> > I'm wondering if they are partnering with XMission.

Very unlikely, as Pete Ashdown (founder/owner) was recently discussing XMission investigating rolling their own fiber until wind of Google Fiber came up:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/SaltLakeCity/comments/2yl51u/does_xm...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SaltLakeCity/comments/2yl51u/does_xmission_make_enough_profit_to_eventually/cpal5tj)

<comment><USER15> Pete blogged about it today[1]. Sounds like his plan is to basically sell VPN services for Google Fiber customers who are concerned about privacy.

1\. [https://xmission.com/blog/2015/03/24/google-fiber-in-salt- la...](https://xmission.com/blog/2015/03/24/google-fiber-in-salt-lake-city-2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder what this means for the metro Provo/Salt Lake Area. I live in between the two cities and would love to have access. Has Google expanded to the metro areas of other Google Fiber cities?

<comment><USER17> It means lots of competitors will be upping their Mbps sometimes double while they get their own Gb services in. Cox here in Phoenix doubled speeds and since Google Fiber announced Phoenix, Scottsdale and Tempe they all are the focus for Cox's new Gigablast service.

Google Fiber not only brings Gbps broadband they are encouraging it elsewhere in those cities and surrounding areas. I just wish Chandler was in the announcement as we were one of the first 4 cities to get cable broadband in the 90's largely due to Intel. The cities that Google Fiber picks are getting better internet just by being announced from Google and competitors alike.

Broadband cable during inception in the 90's was such a big leap it was almost magic from 56k to up to 6mb down when you were new on a node. It was unreal and the cable companies were heroes. They could have kept going, there are still only a small percentage of channels used for data/broadband. They can compete now but haven't, all that wasted on channels noone watches.

Now it feels like cities are winning the Google Fiber bandwidth lottery because broadband providers have been throttling in their extract phase for so long with no competition. Google Fiber is spreading competition and better internet almost as magically as the cable companies did with broadband in the 90s.

<comment><USER15> Comcast doubled their speeds throughout the Salt Lake metro area a few months back (around the same time Google announced Salt Lake City as a potential Google Fiber location). I'm on a 100 Mbps download now. It's a nice consolation prize for those of us between Salt Lake and Provo because while we aren't on the Google Fiber roadmap we still (seemingly) reap some of the competitive benefits of it being nearby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think the LDS church leaders helped this along. They have a lot of people around the world logging on to LDS.org to stream church videos.

<comment><USER19> I'd have to disagree. I don't have any insight into the church office building's internal network, but I do know that they already have massive lines going into the church office building and the surrounding Temple Square area. The church itself has no need for more fiber. Even if they did, they showed no desire to help UTOPIA along (they even have the capabilities of becoming a private leaser), so what makes you think they would want to pipe their traffic through a third party advertising agency?

Secondly, Salt Lake City proper, where I live and where this announcement is declaring the buildout initiative, is very much not-mormon. The number of people logging on to their site to stream videos is minuscule compared to the number of people in the surrounding suburban sprawl. Google Fiber isn't coming to Salt Lake Valley, it's coming to the City. This won't help them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does this have anything to do with the existing Utopia network or will it be a completely separate build-out?

I was in college when iProvo was building out, but it didn't live up to the hype. Over 10 years later and the dream of fiber in the front range is finally coming to fruition.

<comment><USER21> Completely separate. Pete Ashdown of Xmission (Utopia) has expressed annoyance[1] that SLC approved Google but not Xmission, which has been providing services to the city since its birth. I tend to agree with him, but any news like this is good news, and maybe it will introduce more competition.

[1]: [https://xmission.com/blog/2014/02/19/google-fiber-in-salt- la...](https://xmission.com/blog/2014/02/19/google-fiber-in-salt-lake-city)

<comment><USER14> Pete's post today says he'll be getting Google Fiber to his house (and encrypting everything through Xmission):

[https://xmission.com/blog/2015/03/24/google-fiber-in-salt- la...](https://xmission.com/blog/2015/03/24/google-fiber-in-salt-lake-city-2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looking to the future, what is being done about in-home distribution? Ten years from now, are we going to find ourselves with 1Gb/s fiber lines to our houses, and still dependent on oversaturated 54Mbps WiFi to get to it?

What I'm getting at is, have we had any related push to wire up more homes with cat6a (or something of that nature)? It isn't quite as future proof as fiber, but it's cheap and 10Gb/s should keep up for a long time.

<comment> SG- You know 802.11g released in 2003 offered maximum theoretical speeds of 54Mbit. It's been 12 years now and Wifi has evolved quite a bit since and will continue to evolve.

802.11ac can currently do a maximum of 1300Mbit.

<comment><USER22> The unfortunate key here is "theoretical". 802.11g is old, and it's true I don't have any g-only devices left. But I do have a lot of wireless-N devices that max out at 72Mbit, and interference is a frequent problem.

WiFi has evolved, yes. But my 900Mbps router paired with a 450Mbps wireless adapter still underperformed my 10Mbps powerline network for network drives & filesharing, and interference frequently drops WiFi speeds to a tenth of their intended speed.

It has a valuable place, but so do hard lines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder what are the considerations when Google decides the next city for Google Fiber? Some people mentioned NYC's bureaucracy, I guess the existing infrastructure is also another factor, Google would of course want to make larger impact. Now it seems that they are targeting middle-level cities (especially southern ones).

<comment><USER24> It's gotta be legal and infrastructural challenges. Don't know if you've been to SLC but aside from its downtown it's a very very spread out city. I don't know the numbers but I imagine the ppl/m^2 is less than 2,000 maybe even under 1,500.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> 2014 potential cities map [http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7PjU- KYQDWo/UwToJwZHrAI/AAAAAAAAOD...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7PjU- KYQDWo/UwToJwZHrAI/AAAAAAAAODw/fu-aao_DTOU/s1600/1200map_updated_green2.png) for evolution.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is awesome! Great to see it coming to my city. I hope I fall under their area.

</comment><comment><USER27> Google announced this back in 2013.[1] And in 2014. We went through this with Verizon FIOS, which got a lot further than Google has before Verizon gave up expanding it. Google has only a few little projects. Verizon FIOS covers 12% of the US population.

Sonic.net is bringing gigabit fiber to San Francisco.[2] Construction is underway in the Sunset District. Next, Bernal Heights and the Castro. Also, Berkeley. Already operational in Sebastopol, Brentwood, and Santa Rosa. Sonic may have more actual users than Google does.

[1] [http://anewdomain.net/2013/04/07/how-does-google-fiber- work-...](http://anewdomain.net/2013/04/07/how-does-google-fiber-work-optical- fiber-infographic/)

[2] [https://www.sonic.com/gigabit-fiber- internet](https://www.sonic.com/gigabit-fiber-internet)

<comment><USER11> > Sonic.net is bringing gigabit fiber to San Francisco.[2] Construction is > underway in the Sunset District. Next, Bernal Heights and the Castro. Also, > Berkeley. Already operational in Sebastopol, Brentwood, and Santa Rosa. > Sonic may have more actual users than Google does.

All of them in California. Those of us outside Silicon Valley would like fiber too, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> With the ridiculous caps on upload and download speeds, this certainly sounds like a gift from Santa.

</comment><comment><USER29> It sucks. I live right in between Provo and Salt Lake City, and I can't get it. _sigh_

<comment><USER30> Ironic given the concentration of tech companies in the in-between zone. (Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> When is it coming to NYC?

<comment><USER32> So far, every single Fiber city is in a red state: GA, TX, NC, KS, TN, UT. My guess is you'll be waiting a long time.

<comment><USER33> Pretty sure Google Fiber doesn't have much to do with politics. Correlation does not imply causation. However, I do agree that it will be a while until NYC gets Google Fiber.

<comment><USER34> Actually Google has made it pretty clear that it does have to do with politics; specifically, how easy the local/state governments make it for them to roll out fiber. It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that red states may have a lighter regulatory/more pro-business hand.

<comment><USER35> Red states also seem to be more in bed with the entrenched ISP monopolies. The states which are prohibiting municipal broadband are all red states.

<comment><USER36> It may be less about being "in bed" with the ISPs than the philosophical point of view that internet service is properly a private sector concern, not a governmental one.

<comment><USER31> All the "philosophical" views become rather hypocritical when those who have them receive a lot of money from monopolists who want to prevent competition. So stop the nonsense please. It's not about any philosophy. It's about money.

<comment><USER32> Source?

<comment><USER31> [https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?type=C&c...](https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?type=C&cid=N00003105&newMem=N&cycle=2014)

<comment><USER32> Worth reading the footnote:

> This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2013-2014 election > cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came > from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or > owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals > include subsidiaries and affiliates.

<comment><USER31> _> The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families._

And that makes a difference how exactly? ISPs are owned and controlled by various family clans and key people there.

In the end, the result is that politicians are paid to push the agenda of existing monopolists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Lots of network infrastructure in Provo - like bringing gold to a golden city.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'd certainly run everything over a VPN or proxy to keep google's snooping to a minimum.</comment>


Dear Computer Industry, Please Embrace ESATAp - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zorinaq.com/dear-computer-industry-please-embrace-esatap/ <comment><USER2> While it would be nice, I don't think this will actually ever happen. USB, especially 3 is "good enough" for most use cases and more flexible. My biggest complaint about eSATA has always been that it didn't have an integrated solution for power. Probably the biggest reason it didn't take hold in the first place.

Today, your better bet will be Thunderbolt (if that ever really sees wide adoption).</comment>


Ask HN: Can you be sued for stealing an idea? - <AUTHOR>

(This is a throwaway account)
I'm a software freelancer and I quote lots of small projects for random clients (maybe 4-5 a week).  The vast majority of these (more than half) fall through, typically because I'm more expensive than outsourcing.
There have been a couple of projects (maybe 2) in the course of a hundred over the last 6 months or so that might actually provide a decent ROI if I were to personally pursue them.
To be clear, I'm not talking about stealing anybody's detailed design. For instance, a client might come to me with "Build a teleprompter" and I go from that sentence (and maybe a use case or two) to a UI design and a quote, and they decide to pass on hiring me.
In the absence of any written agreement about their "idea", what would be the legal risk of pursuing these?
Alternatively, what can I do going forward to minimize my legal risk? <comment><USER2> If I am not mistaken, the reason why VCs don't sign NDAs is because they get presented with so many of the same ideas that they don't want to get sued for stealing ideas, when really they are not.

Having said that, if you didn't sign any written agreement, I think you're probably in the clear.

Ideas are commodities, execution, however, is not.

</comment><comment><USER3> For me personally, it is unethical, then again I have more ideas than I reasonable have time to pursue, so I really don't need someone else's. I would also think of it this way, if word got out that you are stealing ideas then your freelance career is dead.

As for legally, you should consult a lawyer but if it is not in writing, they are going to have a hard time proving that you had a confidential agreement.

</comment><comment><USER4> No written agreement, but did you have a verbal agreement or imply you would not use what they disclosed against them? If so, I would advise letting go of the idea.

Of course, if they fail to move on it in a reasonable amount of time, all bets are off.</comment>


Google Stakes Its Future on TensorFlow - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608094/google-stakes-its-future-on-a-piece-of-software/ <comment><USER3> As a former Google Cloud employee, I think "stakes its future on TensorFlow" is overstating things. Maybe "Google executes clever strategy with TensorFlow, reaps rewards" is a better headline.

This is exactly the same strategy that Google is running with Apache Beam / Cloud Dataflow - make an API that can run anywhere, then make it trivial to use that API on Google Cloud. I think TensorFlow is doing better than Beam because TensorFlow is more of an advance over the previous state of the art than Beam was, and because Google has managed to grow a community around TensorFlow.

<comment><USER4> > _Google has managed to grow a community around TensorFlow_

I agree with your post.

But speaking about the community part, I am still irritated that there's no official support for running TensorFlow on ARM / Raspbian / Raspberry Pi. Maybe I'm an outlier, but to me it looks like such an obvious choice. Here's a platform that lots of people are using for automation and robotics and computer vision, and it could be their first contact with machine learning, and you could basically lure them all in if you gave them an official release.

Sure, there's someone on GitHub who provides unofficial packages, and props to him for the awesome work...

[https://github.com/samjabrahams/tensorflow-on-raspberry- pi](https://github.com/samjabrahams/tensorflow-on-raspberry-pi)

...but I'd really like to see Google stepping in here and doing the obvious.

I've opened a feature request a while ago. Google closed the ticket, no explanation:

[https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/5729](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/5729)

<comment><USER5> The trend in this field is to do both training and classifying remotely on a desktop. It's hard to see the benefits of keeping everything on the same chip. The primary reason would probably be latency in classification. One would have to argue that remote is slower than local computation.

Remote involves sending the inputs/receiving the outputs and having the computation be done on a desktop, which even at its most basic, is going to be more powerful than an embedded. Local involves no communication, but has to use slower computational system. Since the typical input/output is on the order of a few MB, data transfer latency is likely to be low. Considering deep nets require significant number crunching for evaluation, the advantage by using a faster machine might make up for the data transfer losses. Thus while there might be benefits here, they aren't going to spectacular.

<comment><USER6> In practice, there isn't always "a desktop" available, and so the choice is between "a server" and "locally"; the latter avoids network connectivity requirements and privacy implications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> AI is the future of Computing. TensorFlow has established itself as the standard for machine learning. It has an amazing community, and love from researchers as well. TensorFlow, along with Kubernetes, are positioning Google Cloud as a strong contender in Cloud Computing Space. With Cloud TPU and Cloud ML, Google has leaped few years ahead of other AWS and Azure.

<comment><USER8> But the funny thing is that lock-in is very low in this space, at least for the actual ML part. 90-99% of the work in ML is in acquiring and cleaning the data, feature engineering and so on. Once you have your training data in good shape, the ML engine is basically pluggable - the only barrier to switching from Azure, Google, AWS etc is the cost of moving the data, if you store it "in the cloud" in the first place. The winner won't be the slickest API - <USER2> will be whoever makes it easiest to migrate your data in, whether that's a traditional DW, sensor data feeds or whatever. If you keep the data on-prem you could switch with relatively minor effort.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure how much work you do in this area, but the only ML models that are pluggable and easily moved are ones that are relatively outdated, widespread, and thus provide little benefit over your competitors.

ML moves fast, and to keep up, you need to be using a flexible yet powerful framework or you will run into major slowdowns in implementation time. Tensorflow is that framework, and, by the way, it also happens to have the best support for actually deploying your models across datacenters.

Migrating your data into some cloud provider is irrelevant and consumes maybe 3% of the total effort involved. Data is maybe 10%, and the rest is developer/research time.

<comment><USER8> The quality of the ML model - provided is of the right family in the first place of course - might move you a few percent. The quality of the data you feed it - by an order of magnitude or more. That's why real data scientists spend the vast majority of their time on prep work.

<comment><USER8> Replying to myself with an example of easy portability [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14728591](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14728591)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This seems like a pretty good "fluff piece" about Google's cloud strategy, which hinges on cloud-based machine learning. I've heared the same from Google employees I've talked with. Interesting quote:

> "The head of Google's cloud business, Diane Greene, said in April that she > expects to take the top spot within five years..."

<comment><USER11> See also "The Submarine":

[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One thing I keep wondering as a daily TensorFlow user: If Google is staking its future on TensorFlow, why is there such slow development on the Java/C++ version, which would be relevant to lots of enterprise users?

Namely, full support of symbolic differentiation and all operations and optimisers ported. Having to define everything in python and then load the graph definition into a poorly supported C++/Java wrapper is incredibly tedious.

Surely, hiring 5 engineers per language team and having them port and maintain versions would not be a big stretch to the budget.

Or is this an intentional strategy where the lack of language support forces users to deploy their models on Google cloud workflows in lieu of being able to easily integrate them into their big data pipelines (mostly JVM based)?

<comment><USER13> Not intentional. It's a question of resource allocation and not impairing velocity.

Most ML researchers and leading-edge folks want Python, and there's always a lot of demand for making things faster/easier/etc. Adding more first-class languages is on the "should do" list, but it adds a long-lived support burden to keep the language bindings in sync with the core. There are some fairly deep questions about how to make it _easy_ to have good, first-class language support across many languages without multiplying the work by a factor of N. For example, Andrew Myers is spending some time on the team and has been working on beefing up the Java support, but as you can probably infer from this PR, it's ... complicated. The discussion in this PR is a pretty good glimpse into some of the underlying issues surrounding first-class language support.

[https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/pull/11251](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/pull/11251)

So - your concern is absolutely founded, and is taken very seriously, but is treated cautiously for bigger-picture reasons. I'd expect continued progress on this front, but I wouldn't expect it on very short time horizons.

<comment><USER12> Thank you for the response - I appreciate the complexity, I had just been wondering if there was actually a full time team on it.

From my limited insight (we collaborate with Google Brain), it was my impression that the core problem around such questions is that most research engineers with the expertise to do this are (and I understand this very well as a researcher) more interested in doing research than do full time language porting, and I would expect that to be the case for almost anyone with the expertise.</comment></comment></comment>


Response to exercise is not genetics-dependent - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/well/move/best-exercise-strength-fitness-twins.html <comment><AUTHOR> >Fitness and strength responses to distinct exercise modes in twins: Studies of Twin Responses to Understand Exercise as a THerapy (STRUETH) study

[https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1113/JP280...](https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1113/JP280048)

</comment><comment><USER2> Actual title is "What's the Best Exercise for You? Twins Can Provide an Answer". The submitted title is false; genetics plays a huge role in response to cardio (see the Bath paper).</comment>


The disgrace of the legal services market - <AUTHOR> http://truthonthemarket.com/2010/09/29/the-disgrace-of-the-legal-services-market/

<comment><USER2> The article was insightful, and describes some of the problems, but is short on solutions. A seemingly good solution would be to allow limited-scope representations with more frequency that is common at present. In Texas, this is permitted by Texas Disciplinary Rule of Professional Conduct 1.02(b) states, "A lawyer may limit the scope, objectives and general methods of the representation if the client consents after consultation."

However, many lawyers are still hesitant to "help out" citizens who want to handle a case themselves but just need pointers. This is in part because many state bars historically don't condone reduced-fee or "partial" representation.

It's assumed by many that if a lawyer helps someone with a case, no matter how slightly, they have created an "attorney client relationship" and are then obligated to provide full representation for that case.

Obviously, a lawyer isn't going to be comfortable doing an hour or two of work if it means he or she will be committed to being "on the hook" for the entire rest of that matter.

My 2c is that we need clear-cut rules for the legal profession that allow limited scope representations without implied obligations of full representation. You can sort of get there now in some states by being very clear in your representation agreement, but the fear of the state bar or an upset client bringing a grievance is a significant concern.

But, with a limited-scope representation you have to think about how that sort of thing gets explained to a client.

For example, assume

a) the client is defending him/herself against a lawsuit b) a lawyer agrees to "give" the client four hours of consultation on the case at half their normal rate c) the client goes into court and loses

Does the client now have the right to come back and sue the lawyer because they didn't learn everything in the 4 hour consult that they would have if the lawyer had been on their side full time? Is it malpractice for the lawyer to cut off the representation when the second hand ticks past 4 hours? What if the lawyer knew that there were other issues that would take eight hours to explain? Are they now obligated to provide another four for free?

It's those kind of questions that have led many bar associations to draw relatively bright lines in the sand, even if they seem to be inefficient and draconian.

In the end, I think limited scope representation should be allowed, as long as the expectations are clearly communicated up front. But, that's easier said than done.

<comment><USER3> If you think about it, medical doctors face almost exactly the same problem. I think medicine has handled things a little better by creating a system of referrals and domain experts and by training specialized workers (nurses and paramedics) with clearly defined roles that do a large part of the work under supervision at lesser cost.

Legal 'nurses' (paralegals with specialized training in certain areas of law) might help things immensely.

Doctors have a PR advantage though. Most people think of doctors as highly scrupulous individuals and give them the benefit of the doubt. The way some lawyers (and whole branches of legal practice) have conducted themselves have lead to a bit of a PR problem. A law practice has the (often unjustified) whiff of dishonesty and underhanded dealing to it, not unlike used car salesman. People just expect to be overcharged and undeserved and are more than eager to cry foul whenever they don't get the outcome they desire. This makes lawyers extra (perhaps over-) careful. This will probably need to be fixed as part of the solution.

Medicine has set up an exceptional system to distribute expertise efficiently and to diffuse and insure against its outsized liability that the law profession might do well to investigate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Government licensing is a surprisingly pervasive way of driving up wages in a profession. In my home state of Maryland, you need a license from the state in order to be _a barber_.

Lawyers have it especially good for a couple reasons. First, they (and thus their interests) are well-represented in the ranks of people who make laws, so the laws on who gets to practice law are very restrictive. Second, legal services are one of a small handful of things that you can be forced to spend money on. Nobody forces you to buy an iPhone. But getting sued is something that happens against your will, and when it happens you have little choice but to spend money on a lawyer.

<comment><USER5> Ha you think that is bad - in Florida you have to get a license to be a floral decorator.

I do wonder how they got that one past the law makers.

<comment><USER6> It's amazing what you can get people to do by sending them some flowers.

<comment><USER7> Or sending them an AwesomenessReminder :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The most bizarre aspect of law school is that students take on enormous debts even though they don't actually learn how to _practice_ law. It isn't the sign of a healthy market when there are a huge number of people who can't afford representation _and_ a huge group of unemployed lawyers.

</comment><comment><USER9> To give any legal advice, you must be a licensed attorney, which requires that you pass the bar exam, which requires (in most states) that you attend an ABA accredited law school. This system limits the supply of lawyers, which drives up their wages. That's bad. But what is also bad is that it allows the ABA to impose its priorities on law schools. (<http://goo.gl/tosb> etc.)

And don't even get me started on the restrictions on law firms taking outside capital.

<comment><USER10> Are you saying there's a _scarcity_ of lawyers? Last I saw, the ABA said there were >1.2 million lawyers in the USA, or one for every 255 people.

<comment><USER11> +1, a lot of top tier graduates have been having trouble finding positions the last couple of years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am on the board of housing nonprofit. Despite being real nice, we still have to take people to court to get an eviction processed occasionally. $250 a pop. $250 to fill out a form and bring copies of the lease and late notice to the courthouse.

If I recall correctly we can only recover ~$60 of court/lawyer fees from the debtor so it is often cheaper for us to ignore a debt.

Part of the problem for us is that our general manager is a lawyer, so he puts a premium on "building a relationship with a legal professional". I suspect this is the case for the rest of the market where in house counsel is reviewing compensation for the firm they just left.

<comment><USER11> This is one of my pet peeves so I need to elaborate a bit.

In our jurisdiction, renters have some decent protections which make it a pain in the ass to evict them (as it should be). Unfortunately, because of the ridiculous lawyer fees everybody but the lawyers lose. By the time a renter reaches eviction they have racked up so many lawyer fees that even if they can now pay rent they won't be out of the hole. Their credit is going to be ruined anyway so they skip out and don't bother paying what they owe to the landlord. So now the renter has screwed up credit and loses their home, and the landlord has an empty apt, loses out on rent and lawyer fees while the renter could have paid off the debt!

In other words, the lawyers charge so much they make the law irrelevant. No one wants to get them involved at all. There are many people in my life I love who happen to be lawyers, but there are lawyer jokes for a reason.</comment></comment>