If MBAs are useless, we're all in big trouble - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/79042/if-mbas-are-obsolete-were-all-in-big-trouble/

<comment><USER2> I am probably never going to do an MBA (probably because life in unpredictable), but, as a business guy with programming skills, I strongly advise the "tech guys" not to close doors on anybody. If they come with a suit and they look like they are going to drop a ton a BS on you, just listen and then ask them to prove themselves somehow. If they ask you money and they don't want to prove themselves first, then you should send them the high way.

And, I know HN is strongly skewed on consumer SAAS, but there is a world of companies with big money working on 10 to 20 years old software that would love to pay for stuff that works and allows them to save costs. Easiest way to get to this gold mine is actually sympathizing with the business people, not "enemyzing" them.

</comment><comment><USER3> MBA here.

I agree and I disagree. The MBA itself is pointless without considerable effort of the student to learn things related to startups.

MBAs teach you to be good middle to upper management in an organization with some structure. It teaches you how to navigate and mold an existing structure as needed for the course of business. It doesn't teach you how to build a company from scratch.

I would argue that a skilled business professional is useless for some startups and necessary for others. Want to tackle enterprise software? A few of those MBAs can provide insight and credibility.

Web guys are useless in a native world. Cocoa guys are useless in a Windows world. XAML guys are worthless in an Cocoa world. Right tool. Right job.

<comment><USER2> I agree, although not 100% on the enterprise software point. I am the first to say you need a business guy for that, at least to correctly figure out the needs, but I don't see why an MBA here would be better than a business guy with experience.

<comment><USER3> Did you notice I didn't directly say you need an MBA? I said they could be helpful. An MBA is like a CS degree. Do you need a CS degree to be a good programmer? Does it help?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've noticed that the radio and TV are full of commercials that say "Get your MBA at $school today and become a success tomorrow!"

It seems to me that whatever the MBA may have been worth at one point, it's now worth about the same thing as A+ or Network+ certification. This feels like a rerun of the early 2000s when the job market was flooded with people that have bootcamp certificates but no real knowledge/experience/drive.

</comment><comment><USER5> Anybody going to do a quantitative analysis on the impact of having an MBA on startup success? Because I'd hate for something to get in the way of all these anecdotes.

<comment><USER6> sounds like something the startup genome guys could do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> TL;DR We're all in big trouble.

</comment><comment><USER8> ugh you beat me to it!

Truth is MBAs are inflated hullaballoo whose exorbitant price for offering semi useful drivel may have worked in the time of all-is-fine-and-dandy but in today's unstable economic world where lean is mean (in good sense) it's just anachronistic.

</comment><comment><USER9> I hate to say it but what does anything an MBA teaches have to do with being a good leader? Leadership can't be taught, it has to be learned. Those business analysis skills are just that, business analysis. I think the largest problems revolving around the concept of getting an MBA is the sense that with it you should be in a leadership role.I'd love that knowledge but I would never make the assumption that having knowledge means I am entitled to having a management role.

<comment><USER10> "You also need to secure scarce resources, develop cohesive teams, assemble collaborative networks and build lasting customer relationships."

The author assumes if you have an MBA, you are qualified to do these things. That couldn't be further from the truth.

<comment><USER11> LOL that's just the buzzword bingo version of post bachelors degree "successful" life. Figure out how to pay for B school while getting married and pop out some kids and keep everyone on track and happy and cooperative and tolerate the mother-in-law basically continuously and successfully.

Note that the skills are only present if at all in MBA grads due to filtering on the input side, not some magic pixie dust sprinkled on during classes or as part of the credential ceremony.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The hatred for "MBAs" has little to do with the degree itself.

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First, an aside.

Paul Graham was wrong about something. He wrote "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" (still a great essay: <http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html>). He was mostly right:

 _Being smart seems to make you unpopular._

Ok. Reading on...

 _Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. [...] But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult._

Agree so far...

 _So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. [...] Of course I wanted to be popular.

But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things._

Holy shit! This is right on. Go nerds!

 _I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. [...] An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.

[T]eenagers are always on duty as conformists._

Wow. This is some deep insight. Always on-duty as conformists... what does that seem like? (Hint: corporate work.) I'll get hack to that.

 _Nerds don't realize this. They don't realize that it takes work to be popular. [...] Likewise, popular isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you make yourself._

So far, Paul Graham is batting 1.000.

 _In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison._

Yes, this is true. I was somewhere around the 30th percentile of my HS pecking order and completely fine with that. I wasn't "cool" bit I wasn't unpopular, people respected me, I never got beat up. But if you wanted to be 98th, you really had to put a lot into it.

 _Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. [...] [T]hat's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen._

Yes. Go on...

 _Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after._

This is where Paul Graham is wrong. Yes, high school is horrible for the least popular couple percent. For most of us, even the nerds, it was fine. You don't lose your income if you're at the 30th percentile of the pecking order, and you have other things to focus on. You have things (e.g. college) to look forward to.

The Work World is more like high school than college or academia. Actually, it's worse than high school. In corporate Work, the popular kids are actually evil (in HS, most of them weren't; perhaps selfish and immature but not _evil_ ) and you lose huge amounts of _money_ when they fuck you over. Also, there is _no_ external definition of merit. In HS, you can work hard and get good grades and that gives you a signal that even though you're not popular, you're doing well in society's eyes. There is _nothing_ like that at Work. Your grades (performance reviews, job titles) are given by the popular kids who have no desire to be fair and who will be as _unfair_ as they can get away with if it helps them get ahead.

 _Adults don't normally persecute nerds._

Well, this is just not the case. Not in VC-istan, not in 99% of jobs even at "tech companies". The popular kids rule with an iron fist. They dress it up with a pseudo-meritocracy and "performance" rhetoric and credibility metrics and job titles, but it's just high school popularity, this time played for keeps. And yes, if you're one of those nerds who puts his head down and tries to be as good as possible at his job (instead of playing politics) you will be attacked in most environments. Why? Because an _actual_ high-performer scares the shit out of the popular kids.

 _[Y]ou can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders._

This is exactly how corporate Work works.

 _It's important to realize that, no, the adults don't know what the kids are doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to one another [...]

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. [...] Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it._

Office politics, right there. Managers (like HS teachers) are powerless to prevent it, because the information they get is filtered through the most intimidating/extortive subset of the people below them (who silence everyone else and become the real authority on "performance").

 _The inhabitants of all those worlds [e.g. high school] are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow._

Great insight. I agree. I disagree that Work is different for the vast majority of people. How do you get promotions? Or venture funding? Or just not fired when a "low-performer" witch hunt happens? Or get real projects where there's actual high-impact work available? Oh, right. _Popularity_.

 _Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time._

99% of office jobs. High school work isn't "pointless". It just has no impact on the outside world because _it's evaluative_ by design. That's how bottom- rung corporate work is, too. They aren't giving you work because it's important. They give you undesirable and unimportant stuff, for a dues-paying period of a few years, in order to evaluate you for eligibility for real work. Getting out is based on popularity, not merit.

It's worse at Work because, in high school, real effort is made to make the work at least marginally engaging and _educating_. At Work, no one cares. The Work is _supposed_ to be dogshit. It wouldn't be a test if you were learning something from it.

 _Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world._

This is where Paul Graham gets it wrong. The high school popularity game is the more "real world"-like game, not the nerd be-smart-and-do-great-work game. Who is going to get the boss job, the well-connected idiot or the hard worker? The former, even in "tech". Your boss gets to tell you what to do because he has more credibility ( _popularity_ ) with the organization.

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Okay. I'm not dissecting this to pick on Paul Graham. His essays are insightful, inspiring, and extremely well-written. He gets a lot more right than he gets wrong. He also wrote this 10 years ago, before the Social Media Douchepocalypse was even on the radar. I just think that he had a very unusual set of experiences that led him to conclusions closer to how the world should be than what it is actually like. Now, I'm just as biased. Remember that I'm the Hacker News anti-Christ. I think of Paul Graham as someone very like me with a radically _opposite_ set of experiences. In his world, brilliant hard- working people are rewarded. In my world, base about 20 years later after "the cool kids" had set up permanent camp in something (Silicon Valley) that was originally by us and _for_ us, such high-quality people are exploited, and often treated very badly by people who see them as a threat. He and I are both right, over what we've seen. We just have small data sets. Unfortunately, and I hate that this is true, I think my conclusions are more representative of what people face today.

What could this have to do with MBAs? It's a euphemism for "the popular kids". I know some great people with MBAs, but when disparage "MBAs" as a class, we're talking about the well-connected talentless smiling idiots who are competing with us for venture capital, managerial position and favor, and visibility. Even on our fucking territory (software and technology) they are _fucking demolishing us_. It's not even a fight. We're just getting trampled because we don't know _how_ to fight.

When we gripe about MBAs, we're not talking about something that has anything to do with the coursework. It's the attitude of entitlement that comes with having a globally visible and permanent "I'm One of the Cool Kids" credential, and the connections that come with it. You have to be smart to get into a good PhD or JD or MD program. To get into a top MBA program? Family connections or work experience (read: high-status jobs, meaning popularity) will suffice. It's not what people learn in MBA programs that we have a problem with. We just don't like these fucking invaders. And we shouldn't like them. Technology is _our fucking turf_ , fuckers. Get off our territory or I, for one, am ready to attack.

<comment><USER13> _> Technology is our fucking turf, fuckers. Get off our territory or we will rape your shit for breakfast._

Maybe this kind of phraseology is part of the reason you keep getting passed over for promotion.

<comment><USER12> I am using such "phraseology" because we are at war with the upper class whether we want to be or not. What we call the "technology industry" is one of the hottest battlefields out there. The well-connected/zero-sum evil (the current social elite) are taking on the hard-working-and-talented/positive-sum good and while we had no choice in starting the fight, it is in our territory and we must end it. This goes back to what your Dad probably told you about fistfights as a kid. "Never start a fight, but end one." On your terms.

Every time a great company (e.g. Google) becomes a closed-allocation nightmare festival with satanic innovations like calibration scores, that's another seaside city lost to the horde.

 _You may not be interested in war, but it is interested in you._ \-- Leon Trotsky

I am sick of watching our territory get taken by smiling assholes who have nothing to offer the world, and whom any properly masculine society would have done something about decades ago. I'm fucking disgusted and ready to fight. If that means I occasionally swear a blue streak, who fucking cares? The only thing that matters is defeating these assholes with such force that they _never_ fuck with us again.

<comment><USER13> I honestly agree with you, at least with a lot of it. Can you think of any constructive ways forward, short of developing a striking new range of organic lamppost ornaments?

Maybe engineer-led companies could establish some kind of guild where they publicly pledge never to implement certain kinds of corrosive management practices. Good hackers could then just refuse to work for firms who aren't signed up, and firms could be ejected if they were seen to be breaking their promises.

The problem with schemes such as this is that the psychopaths will inevitably infiltrate it and use it as another way to exert control. I'm sure many people can suggest examples where this has happened before.

Perhaps this could be guarded against by making some kind of radical transparency part of the conditions?

<comment><USER12> _Can you think of any constructive ways forward, short of developing a striking new range of organic lamppost ornaments?_

Sure, but this is several questions. In the very-long term, society will need to implement a basic income due to widespread structural unemployment. There will always be differences in social status and popularity contests, but once we get to a state where low social status means you're on a 3-month waiting list to go to Mars instead of dying of starvation or health insurance, I'll say we've won as a species...

But let's stay out of society-wide political changes none of us can hope to control.

I like to _think_ that I'm doing my part. I'm exposing The Lie to be a lie, and that's huge. Most people are terrified to speak the truth about ex- employers, as if it would blacklist them forever. (Having done it, it's not _so_ severe that you starve, but yes, you do lose opportunities and I recommend a different road.)

Bringing down The Lie is the first step. Evil credibility systems come down once people stop believing in them, but people still do. If you apply for a job, you often deal with reference checks where "we have to speak to a manager". That's profession of faith in a credibility system that, to be blunt, deserved to die out decades ago.

The thing is, most companies operate on the assumption that 10% of managers are horrible people and therefore if someone drew 3 or 4 duds, the problem is with the employee. But technology draws in psychopaths who want to take advantage of head-down hard-working nerds and it's more like 50% who are evil and 30% more who are decent people but just not competent (and their teams get eaten by young-wolf conflicts as evil asserts itself from non-managerial corners.)

So, it's several orders of magnitude more common for good people to end up with fucked-up career histories than we think. That's _also_ why we have such an age discrimination problem in our industry: by 35, you've had a real career history, not this VC-istan dream where no one fucks you over and ruins your reputation. Almost no one is courageous enough to speak about this, though.

Exposure of truth is key. When I "leaked" Google's calibration scores-- secret performance reviews that enable managers to keep good engineers captive on shitty projects by giving a positive verbal review and a negative (secret) numeric one that makes them immobile-- note that I didn't think I was leaking _anything_ ; how can something known by 50,000 people be secret?-- I did a lot of damage to the company's image. That wasn't even my intent. If I had known that a leak of calibration scores could cost Google millions, I wouldn't have done it. I would have threatened to do it unless given certain considerations (transfer within the company to a better manager). Luckily, I can't be sued because calibration scores aren't a product and exposing how a company treats its employees is unambiguously legal. Unfortunately, I've had a number of powerful people come out to fuck up my career.

The first step-- and we can legally do it-- is exposure. Companies and managers that ruin smart peoples' reputations careers, or (much more commonly, because most targets of this extortion cave) threaten to do so to get something, should be exposed with such harsh light that the world loses faith in them outright.

How did I cost Google millions (potentially; I don't think anyone knows the real figure) by leaking calibration scores? The fuckers who run the world now, they _need_ us (talent). They need talented people to have faith in what they are doing. If they didn't, no one would give a shit that I leaked calibration scores and no one would try to fuck up my career years after the fact. If we burn down the facade of this economy of lies and fear down and expose the rot within, then we can right the power relationship.

Also, I don't actually support violence against the rich or well-connected _because_ they are such. (That's just envious malevolence, and as evil as what we need to fight.) However, I am 100% in favor of making violence legal against certain types of social violence-- especially career blacklisting. As far as I'm concerned, if you "pick up a phone" on a private, powerless, employee-level person, or if you ruin someone's career with a bad reference, and the targeted person acquires proof of what happened, it should be legal for that person to use violence, up to killing, in retaliation. It should be obvious that I don't support killing the well-connected just because they are such. If you have social connections, then fine; good for you. If you use them for bad purposes (e.g. you "pick up a phone" and make someone unfundable or unemployable) your skull gets broken, and you might die painfully because examples must be made. That is how it should be.

I support radical honesty and the most honest way to deal with passive- agressive socially violent people is to kill them.

Ok, that's an ugly topic so I'll stop there. In any conflict, I view violence as a last resort. It means that one party failed to be human. Violence is sometimes acceptable and very rarely _good_ but it is always hideous so I generally don't like it.

We _are_ in violent conflict with the upper class. 45,000 Americans die of health insurance (either the lack of it, or horrible coverage) every year. Also, 9/11 wasn't Arabs vs. Americans. It was an upper-class well-connected douchebag from the second-richest family in Saudi Arabia killing 3,000 middle- class office workers (who don't matter to such people, because they're middle- class schmucks) to make a political point. We are at war. It's not a war of countries. It's a war of classes and it's global. Bin Laden and the Bushite neocons are on the same side (upper class). Whether middle-class Americans die or Iraqis is irrelevant to them. They do not all like each other (I'm sure Bush was convinced that bin Laden is a mortal enemy) and Illuminati-style conspiracies do not exist; but when they compete with each other, they do it in a way that makes _us_ lose.

 _However_ the good news is that we (at least, you and me, personally) don't necessarily need to be violent. We in the cognitive 10^-k percent for some self-flattering k, we have options. We _can_ escape and _outperform_ them. We don't have to live in high-COL cities and work in VC-istan companies where the founders treat us like garbage because they have connections (read: they went to MBA school with VCs, and know disgusting secrets on powerful people they can use to "call in"/extort favors) and we don't. We can get away from those assholes-- possibly moving to a low-COL city, because we'll probably have to use our own capital-- pool our resources, and start fucking building things that actually solve peoples' problems and make the world better. _We_ (talent in general, not just programmers) are what the world needs. Money is just an accounting trick to keep it going. We have the real stuff and it's time to start acting like it.

 _Maybe engineer-led companies could establish some kind of guild where they publicly pledge never to implement certain kinds of corrosive management practices. Good hackers could then just refuse to work for firms who aren't signed up, and firms could be ejected if they were seen to be breaking their promises.

The problem with schemes such as this is that the psychopaths will inevitably infiltrate it and use it as another way to exert control. I'm sure many people can suggest examples where this has happened before.

Perhaps this could be guarded against by making some kind of radical transparency part of the conditions?_

You ETA'd this after I wrote my original reply and I'm not going to give it the same long-form answer, but... yes, these are very good ideas.

Here's a post I wrote about something that, if I could get the resources (unlikely, but who knows) I would want to build: [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/update-on- wha...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/update-on-what-id-like- to-build-april-28-2013/) . What I really think would be a great contribution to the world is to shine some light on which companies and managers help peoples' careers and which ones harm them.

<comment><USER14> > if you ruin someone's career with a bad reference . . . it should be legal > for that person to use violence, up to killing

It should be legal to kill someone for giving you a bad reference? OK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Says the guy with an MBA.

<comment><USER16> my thoughts exactly. the only folks who seem to value mbas are other mbas. i don't even think i can accept the defined success criteria outlined in the article (un-sustained long term growth) much less the premise that only mbas know how to achieve it.

<comment><USER17> Didn't some guy just kill himself a while back because he didn't have the training to so much as read a balance sheet and ran his company into the ground? While MBAs may not be the best entrepreneurs, they are more valuable in keeping large, mature organizations up and running than Joe Nerd and his series of weekend projects. Hell, that's the very purpose of an MBA.

<comment><USER16> it doesn't take an mba to read a balance sheet. a bachelors in accounting is enough to be a cpa. and you don't have to be a cpa to read a balance sheet. perhaps it takes an mba to manufacture a fake balance sheet that will pass wall street muster though.

> they are more valuable in keeping large, mature organizations up and running > than Joe Nerd and his series of weekend projects

this is the same premise as the article. who says an organization has to be large to be successful?

<comment><USER18> > this is the same premise as the article. who says an organization has to be > large to be successful?

The people who invested in it.

<comment><USER16> investors want a return on their investment.

i believe the technical term would be ROI otherwise known as rate of return not the rate increase of the rate of return or ROI.

an investor who demands constant growth in their rate of return on an investment is either irrationally optimistic or stupid.

<comment><USER18> There are a variety of terms describing how to measure the success of an investment. Return On Investment (ROI) is one of those.

The most important measure is arguably NPV (Net Present Value) because it takes in to consideration the size of the amount of money you get back after adjusting for the required rate of return.

As an extreme example, imagine if I gave you the option to get a 1000% on a $1 investment. But, the entire investment could only be $1, in otherwords, you couldn't make a $1,000 investment and get $10,000. The most you could make is $9.

Now, imagine if I told you there was a 3% chance that you would loose 50% of your money, and a 12% chance that you would get just your money back and an 85% chance you would make 1,000%!

On the face of it, it sounds like a good deal, you have a really strong possibility of making a 1,000% return and a really small possibility of losing some money.

But, what if I told you that it would take you 10 hours to figure out whether my return estimate (1,000%) and probabilities, 3%, 12%, 85% were accurate? Would it be worth 10 hours to make $9?

Obviously it wouldn't unless your current hourly wage were less than $1 an hour.

That is one of the reasons VCs do not invest in businesses that don't have the possibility of becoming huge. There is really no reason for them to spend the time on figuring it out. It is also the reason that in order for a business to be "successful" the people who invest in it, must end up owning a part of a very large business.

Small businesses can be successful for the individual entrepreneur, but they are not investable.

Also, you don't become a CPA from just doing an accounting undergrad, you also have to have work experience in public accounting in most states. But, I do agree that you don't need an MBA to read a balance sheet. A few months of self study should allow you to understand the basics of financial statements. A few years of working with them will get you pretty good at analyzing them and may even give you the experience to construct them.

<comment><USER16> > Small businesses can be successful for the individual entrepreneur, but they > are not investable.

^ ---- by VC's

well that's a good way of explaining the VC's perspective on what to invest in. whether that is a wise and sustainable strategy or good use of resources or not is a different matter. But in present company you will win that argument. Doesn't make it true though.

On CPA's I wasn't implying that all you needed was an undergrad to get it you have to take the state exam at least. I was attempting to prove an mba is not required to make some sense of financial statements because it seemed that is what MisterBastahrd was implying.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, MisterBastahrd is wrong about an MBA helping that much with accounting anyway.

An MBA is really an introduction to a lot of different business topics rather than helping an individual master them (bad name IDK?). In business/life etc. it is as important to know what you don't know, i.e. that you are shitty at accounting, or that investing is a very deep knowledge business etc. than almost anything else.

An MBA really helps you learn what you don't know so you can study it later. Accounting is complex and to be really good at it, it takes years to master. Reading a balance sheet is straight forward until you realize that you don't know exactly how everything on there got there and you don't know how the statements link together, nor do you know what a healthy balance sheet looks like over a non-healthy balance sheet etc.

Technologists on HN wildly misunderstand the world of finance and business just like we misunderstand the world of programming.

I comment on business topics and read without commenting on technical topics. I can't imagine hiring someone without an MBA for a business position unless it was really basic or unless they had deep experience in the same field. An MBA can seriously jump start business knowledge. Getting one in your mid to late 20s is a huge help at that point in your life if you are interested in business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wrote a related post a while ago to answer to anyone who says MBAs can't start companies: <http://wannabevc.wordpress.com/2011/10/15/mba-startups/>

<comment><USER19> It really felt like you were scraping the bottom of the barrel to list companies founded by MBA's. It only illustrates the point that MBA's don't do startups.

The only one founded in this decade is zynga, which is widely considered to be poorly managed.

I'll give you sun though, and even electronic arts.. founded by trip hawkins. Although EA only hit it's hay days well after trip left the company, and he was responsible for some really spectacular fuck ups afterwards (see: 3do).

<comment><USER20> I would surmise that MBA's are more or less capable of doing startups, but don't have the incentives: with a huge debt load, they're better off with something that's guaranteed to pay a lot, like, say, a job in finance.

<comment><USER6> Tell me about it. Large amount of MBA debt, just about to leave job to do startup full-time. Not easy with that debt millstone around my neck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think non-business people frequently make the error of lumping all MBAs together; practically speaking, there's a decent gap between the top three programs (HBS, Stanford GSB, & Wharton), the rest of the top 10-15 (Kellogg, Berkeley, Sloan, Booth, UCLA, etc.), and there's a pretty massive gap from there to everyone else.

I think folks often make the assumption that MBA program quality follows a similar distribution to undergraduate education, but unfortunately there's a much steeper falloff from the top few schools.

</comment><comment><USER22> What I don't like about this article is that it suggests that you are forced to choose: either MBA or "new methods of innovation, like the lean startup, accelerators, hackathons and growth hacking". First it seems that the author doesn't fully understand the quoted buzzwords. But that's not the point. The important thing is that Lean Startup is a methodology that can be supplemented by knowledge nad (hopefully) skills that you get during MBA studies. Who said that these things are mutually exclusive?

</comment><comment><USER23> The article is a very good demonstration of why MBA's are generally considered useless. Lots of buzzwords with little seasoning.

</comment><comment><USER24> In my experience, it all depends on the individual. It doesn't matter what degree they have. If they have work ethic and ambition and they love what they do, you absolutely want them on your team.

<comment><USER25> Agree. Much (if not all) of the stigma that MBA's face is due to the people who traditionally get MBA's, not what the program 'turns you into.' And for the most part, that's what the article says. To be honest, I'm an engineer with a technical degree, but I'm probably planning on getting an MBA to help foster business skills and gain insight into a lot of different areas of business.

It's tough, because right now I know you're thinking that all of that can be done at a startup - and you're right. But I think that startups needs to look in the mirror too. The xxxx-hacker model has created a relatively disconnected culture. Sure, 'disrupting -whatever' sounds neat, but for the most part you're just polluting cyberspace with another worthless app.

Anyways, I feel everyone needs to stay humble and hard working. There is no right path, and both sides (and all sides) will undoubtedly need each other in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I was a professor in one of the better MBA programs.

(1) Students. The students were good, both when they entered and when they left.

(2) Courses.

Accounting. Except for students who already knew accounting, the accounting courses likely helped all the students who wanted to be in business. But the undergraduate accounting courses did, also.

Likely if wanted to sit for the CPA exam, then would need more study. My undergraduate school had nothing on business, but if a student wanted a CPA then there was a nice woman in town who gave tutoring, had the study materials, etc. One student worked with this woman in the summer after her Bachelor's, took the CPA exam, and made the highest score in the state. So, if want to sit for the CPA exam, then just do the studying and take the exam, whether have had a business school course in accounting or not. Qualification: That CPA example was from over 10 years ago; the CPA exams may have changed a lot since then. If want a CPA, then should look carefully into the CPA exam process.

Statistics. There was a course in statistics, but I was not impressed with it. The students didn't learn enough about statistics to be anything but dangerous if they tried to use the material on anything important. And the course didn't do much for the student's 'skills' at using statistics software packages. Statistics is taught better, of course, in a department of statistics but commonly also in good departments of sociology, psychology, economics, and agriculture.

There is a lot that can be done with statistics, and to some extent now with 'big data' and more in statistical software, more is being done. But the MBA statistics course was only a weak start for powerful uses of statistics in the future.

Optimization. There was a course in optimization, mostly linear programming. Occasionally in a real business that is powerful, valuable material.

The intention of the accreditation system to ask for such a course was to jump start more 'quantitative' management, i.e., 'management science', via linear programming and optimization more generally. And there are some applications, e.g., there is a chemical engineering professor at Princeton who has apparently some good uses for optimization in the petroleum refining in Houston. And optimization for airline plane and crew scheduling is a solid application.

Linear programing and other parts of optimization long were the basis of a major fraction of the Nobel prizes in economics; the connection with any real economy or business was mostly in the eye of the beholder.

Mostly mathematical optimization still has yet to catch on strongly more generally. Maybe in the future with more data, software, and computer automation optimization will have a new day. So the teaching of optimization was something of a long shot bet on the distant future.

Having a fast algorithm that shows that P = NP might get optimization going again in business. For problems where would want such an algorithm, commonly can do well now, but the work is mostly one problem at a time, slow, expensive, and risky, and a fast algorithm that shows that P = NP might do wonders for 'ease of use'.

Also if optimization becomes more important, then the work will likely be done by specialists from departments of applied math, civil engineering, etc. in specialized groups or outside companies. So, for an MBA, optimization would be mostly only to make them an 'educated consumer' rather than an actual practitioner.

Finance. The finance course would be good for someone who was still struggling with compound interest but would not help much in serious work at, say, the CFO's office of a major company, Goldman Sachs, or a hedge fund. The course did mention the Sharpe capital asset pricing model. Of course the linear algebra and statistics needed for the Markowitz model would be a struggle! For stochastic differential equations for 'continuous time finance', that is not very popular in the US, in business schools or anywhere. There are a few professors -- Karatzas at Columbia, Avellaneda at Courant, Cinlar at Princeton, Shreve at CMU, Merton at MIT, a few more.

Labor Law. The course in labor law might be good for someone who never heard anything about such issues, but the professor teaching the course had never negotiated an actual labor agreement. One of my students had negotiated labor agreements for his family's business and had bad things to say about the labor law course.

Organizational Behavior. Some guys with backgrounds in psychology and sociology were teaching the organizational behavior course. My brother, Ph.D. in political science, also taught such a course in a program of public administration. One of the ideas is 'goal subordination' where a middle manager is motivated to act in ways that give him a short term advantage at a long term cost to the business. Not very deep material but maybe worthwhile.

Generally college and university courses can be good if they are intellectually challenging and, thus, help the student learn how to work hard and think, work, and write carefully, but the business school courses were not very challenging in that sense.

The business school was respected in a radius of 200 miles or so: Significant businesses, some nationally known, would come and recruit.

Likely some of the students met other students who would likely be useful to them in the future.

The business school full professors, chairs, and deans really didn't have any very clear idea just what the business school should teach, especially at the MBA level. The most important influence was to try, although not very seriously, to do 'research' as in physics envy. Contact with actual businesses was discouraged. E.g., there were plenty of talks by graduate students and professors with solutions looking for problems but essentially no talks by business people with problems looking for solutions. E.g., the idea of having the business school be a 'research-teaching' hospital for real business problems was not attempted. The school didn't want to be clinical as in medicine or even practical as in engineering but, instead, pure white as driven snow theoretical as in mathematical physics.

Generally the 'research' was too far from business to be at all promising for any practical impact in the foreseeable future. The best research I saw there was by a professor taking a novel approach to attacking essentially the question of P versus NP, but that work really belonged in, say, a theoretical computer science department or a math department.

Business schools struggle: If they just go for physics envy, then they are mostly watered down versions of social science. Indeed, long the 'great leader' architects of business education believed that business school should be 'applied social science'. That's asking a bit much of social science!

If business school gets really close to business, then it becomes much like learning, say, the grocery business by starting as an apprentice in the produce department -- students shouldn't have to pay tuition for that.

In effect some of what is needed is for some professors to look at the world of business, get a good 'organization' or 'taxonomy' of its parts and pieces, study those to identify where might find some powerful, fundamental principles, and then do research on those principles. That is, the effort would be to look at business and 'formulate' characterizations and useful, powerful theories. So, that would be trying to make something clear and precise out of business that rarely looks either clear or precise.

In biology, such work was long just 'descriptive' but eventually some very interesting science. In physics, too: The motions of the planets were fairly easy for apparently nearly any civilization to observe, and there were efforts to explain the motions for hundreds of years before (dates from Wikipedia) Copernicus (1473 - 1543), Tycho Brahe (1546 - 1601), Galileo (1564 - 1642), Kepler (1571 - 1630), and finally Newton (1642 - 1727) got a good, really profound, solution. Such work is not easy to do.

For students, the business schools at Harvard and Stanford seem to be highly respected in some areas, e.g., investment banking, parts of management consulting, venture capital, and private equity. It may be that an MBA from one of those schools would do enough to 'open doors' and 'make connections' that the effort would be worthwhile for the student. Still I question if much solid material was learned in the courses.

One way to look at business school is as an 'effort' to make progress against the apparently messy world of business. Yes, it might be nice if business school taught enough to really understand business quite comprehensively and make getting wealthy routine. But it turns out that nearly any advantage, even one that is seemingly small, could, at some point in a business career, result in some large gains.</comment>


The Sure Thing (How Entrepreneurs Really Succeed) by Malcolm Gladwell - <AUTHOR> http://www.allianceofceos.com/documents/forum/2010-01-Malcolm%20Gladwell%20-%20The%20Sure%20Thing.pdf <comment><USER2> _Ingvar Kamprad, arranged to get his furniture made in Communist Poland for half of what it would cost him in Sweden... Would we so revere risk-taking if we realised that the people who are supposedly taking bold risks in the cause of entrepreneurship are actually doing no such thing?_

Only Gladwell could:

1\. Be dazzled by the _innovation_ of something as ordinary as wage arbitrage, and yet

2\. Think that opening a factory in a communist country is not an example of "risk taking".

 _Long after he became wealthy, he would take the bus to his offices in midtown, and the train out to his summer house on Long Island._

Surely a man of the people would take public transit to his mansion!

<comment><USER3> I agree with you on that. The Ikea anecdote was really not well fleshed out at all. Not only does it not really come inline with the essay, but it's barely explained and touted throughout the paper as a name-drop.

I also thought the detail that he rode his bike around the Hamptons as a testament to his thrift was dubious. So someone who buys a house in the Hamptons is thrifty because he rides a bike? Could it be that he's biking as some sort of recreation perhaps? Big loss only driving the Lexus in a and out of the area.

<comment><USER4> > Could it be that he's biking as some sort of recreation perhaps?

He could be trying to impress someone. Maybe there's a bet involved. Maybe he's trying to affect bicycle sales.

People do things for many reasons. However, observers are really bad at figuring out said reasons.

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error> for some related discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The first key idea is that the successful entrepreneur is one who executes transactions where she has a different model of value than the other party. This is why it pays to wonder about the things "you can't say" and pay attention to the fringes.

I think that the predator mindset is also key. If one is running scared with the herd and if one's hope is based on a vague notion or an outside chance, then one is the opposite of a predator. (The dot-com and Web 2.0 booms were full of groups with this mindset.) If one has an insight that others do not and prepared to execute on it, then one is like a predator stalking prey.

How does one study and internalize such a mindset? Is there a safe way to practice it?

<comment><USER6> An evolutionary mindset is probably more effective. Instead of saying "What can I prey on," you can say "What ecological niche is under-exploited or improperly exploited?"

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure it's necessarily more effective. Perhaps it's less sinister sounding. The problem with ecological niches as a mindset, is that some ecological niches are quite small.

Then again, perhaps it's a useful metaphor, in that ecological niches are not static. In the case of social news/networks, sites often started out quite small, then changed their ecological niche over time. In fact, one can argue that reddit.com, Digg, MySpace, Facebook all shifted in this way.

The pattern I see here, is that the ecological niche viewpoint is more strategic, whereas the predator/prey viewpoint is more tactical. When one is planning a site's entry into a certain market, one can choose a small niche that can be strategically grown into a larger one. When one is executing on that entry, look for a place where your understanding of the value proposition is better than those on the other side of your transaction. (Perhaps this is what Facebook's founder was thinking when he made that comment on people giving him their data.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would recommend reading the whole thing, but the second paragraph on page 7 is packed with real world advice. This is what it says _failed_ entrepreneurs do most:

\- Wildly under-capitalized

\- Organize as a sole proprietorship rather than a corporation

\- Don't write a business plan

\- Start from scratch

\- Sell to consumers rather than businesses

\- Under-emphasize marketing

\- Don't understand financial controls

\- Try to compete on price

<comment><USER8> > \- Wildly under-capitalized > \- Organize as a sole proprietorship rather > than a corporation > \- Don't write a business plan > \- Start from scratch

These sound like they probably correlate with noobishness, as in by the time you know what you're doing you probably have more money available and are more familiar with complicated corporate structures (and more afraid of lawyers) and have been taught to like business plans.

> \- Sell to consumers rather than businesses

"Ninety per cent of the fastest-growing companies in the country sell to other businesses; failed entrepreneurs usually try selling to consumers, and, rather than serving customers that other businesses have missed, they chase the same people as their competitors do."

Most failed new businesses try selling to consumers; but how does this compare the the fraction of all new businesses that try selling to consumers? Most fastest-growing businesses are in B2B; is the market growing or are they cannibalizing their competitors?

> \- Don't understand financial controls

Does this mean budgeting and such?

> \- Under-emphasize marketing > \- Try to compete on price

These sound reasonable, in that I wouldn't expect them to be confounded by being a strong demographic selector like the first items.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> html version is here: <http://www.gladwell.com/2010/2010_01_18_a_surething.html>

</comment><comment><USER10> It's a pdf...

<comment><USER11> I don't know why you're being downmodded- you were right to point this out. Thank you.

Someone who can: please fix the title, per the guidelines.

 _If you submit a link to a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title._

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, my bad. I tried editing the link, but was unable to find the editing page. Thanks to the person who put in the scribd link

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> wasn't this in Outliers?</comment>


Casually removing root files - <AUTHOR> https://ervinb.github.io/2017/08/16/casually-removing-root-files/ <comment><USER2> _> The only requirement is to have write permissions on the parent directory (and the execute flag on the parent directory)._

 _> The $HOME directory naturally fulfills both of these requirements from the user's perspective._

Note that there's nothing special about the user's home directory here, it just happens to normally have u+wx. It's entirely possible to have the user's home _not_ owned by themselves; you might want to do this for example if you have a restricted user who you don't want messing around with their dotfiles.

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this just a roundabout way of saying that you can remove files from a directory you have write access to? What's the relevance here?

<comment><USER4> The point seems to be that this isn't expected behavior in most people's minds, and that if someone truly wants to allow users to write to a directory, but not allow them to delete a file, that file must be flagged immutable. Just a quirky edge cases that people might not know about.

<comment><USER5> It is expected behaviour if your mental model is accurate enough.

My mental model is that a directory is just a special file that links to other files.

Adding or deleting a file to a directory is just a case of writing to the "special file" to add or remove links to other files.

<comment><USER6> But if the file you are removing is the only reference (i.e. hard link) to that inode, you're not just modifying the directory's contents; you're also removing data from the filesystem as a whole.

<comment><USER7> Note that something else also happens to the inode when it's not the only reference: removing a file changes the "nlink" counter on the inode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My use case for `chattr +i`: an rsync backup, on a cronjob, into an external drive mounted at a given point. Make the mountpoint directory `+i` so that the root-run rsync doesn't blindly fill up your root filesystem with the backup target, if it gets run while the external drive isn't mounted.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for this tip! I've been achieving this by pointing a symlink at a subdirectory that only exists when the external drive is mounted, and having my backups target that symlink. But this seems cleaner.

<comment><USER10> Me too. Not sure why using an immutable mountpoint is better than a possibly broken symlink, both result in a write failure. I like the symlink, because it's visually obvious when it's broken in the shell, and I can keep my real mounts under /mnt or /pool etc while also putting the target (symlink) in /home/user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's pretty cute. `chattr +i' can be pretty handy for preventing misbehaving tools which must run as root from mangling your precious files. Also for messing with people on multi-user boxes :)

As a tiny issue, in the 3rd snippet, '/home/user/shoe/little-rock' should be left-shoe, no?

<comment><USER12> > _As a tiny issue, in the 3rd snippet, '/home/user/shoe/little-rock' should > be left-shoe, no?_

Yes, that part probably doubled the time it took me to read the first part of the post, because I had to double-check everything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys for pointing that out! I just updated the text.

<comment><USER13> The 'any permissions' link is broken, too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed. Thanks a lot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >Listing a directory's contents is controlled by the execute flag.

 _Listing_ is controlled by r--. _Access to content items_ is controlled by --x.

<comment><USER15> Indeed.

\--x in the context of directories is typically called "search" permission rather than execute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a sort of fundamental thing about POSIX: file data is attached to a pretty bare data-structure (the thing a Linux inode/BSD vnode points to), while most of the metadata is instead held in the individual dirents referencing that inode/vnode. creat(2), rename(2), and unlink(2) don't have to touch the file they're affecting; they just modify the contents of a directory, with [iv]nodes being allocated or destroyed through reference- counting as a side-effect.

To put that another way: when you delete a file in POSIX, you're not writing to the _file_ , you're just writing to the _directory_. (Think of a directory as just a file containing a stream of dirent data—if you have write permission on it, you can modify the dirents.) After you remove a dirent, the _kernel_ then goes and cleans up the file if its link count has become zero—and, obviously, the kernel has permission to do that.

</comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me of the time (albeit my memory is hazy) of an issue of having to set `chattr -i` on .ssh files because even though I had the right chmod permissions SSH still would not read it. It was quite painful to figure out and I can't recall if I googled it or read it in the man pages.

I believe it was because I had done something funny with the home directory and the user didn't fully own it (I believe it was a home media server).

I guess apparently some SSH versions expect `chattr -i` or I guess the parent directory to be owned completely by the user (I have been meaning to look into this some day). Maybe it wasn't -i .. maybe it was +i?

<comment><USER18> The .ssh directory and its contents must be non-writable by anyone but the user. That means the group must not have write access, even if the user is the only person in the group. Commonly, there is a group for each user with the same name, so the "fred" user will have a "fred" group with only the "fred" user being a member. This group mustn't have write access. Also, private keys must be unreadable by anyone but the user. You don't need to make the files immutable.

<comment><USER17> It wasn't chattr.

It was this problem with SELinux: [https://stackoverflow.com/a/21636460/318174](https://stackoverflow.com/a/21636460/318174)

        restorecon -R -v /root/.ssh

I was confused because I have used chattr with ssh files before just for added security. My memory was also hazy because I don't know much about SELinux. Hopefully I didn't misguide anyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> chattr appears to be a Linuxism, but TFA doesn't mention that.

<comment><USER20> BSDs also have a command that does the same thing, but its called chflags

[https://man.openbsd.org/chflags.1](https://man.openbsd.org/chflags.1)

[https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=chflags](https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=chflags)

[http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?chflags](http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi- bin/man-cgi?chflags)

<comment><USER21> AFIACS, chattr(1) can be compiled on BSDs too; and then it uses the chflags(2) syscall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > _If the Rock Tamer, really didn't want anyone to mess around with his rocks, > he would've done:_

> _# chattr +i /home/user/left-shoe/little-rock_

Or more traditionally, chmod +t /home/user/left-shoe

though that would affect other files.

</comment><comment><USER22> I was using chattr +i as a quick workaround to the fact that Ubuntu overwrites Xorg.conf every time you restart it, which overwrote my nvidia GPU overclock settings. Setting +i made it immutable.

<comment><USER23> You should be using /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/*.conf for that.

<comment><USER22> No, this path will not work. If anything it should be /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d

<comment><USER24> If you're using Slackware, or another sane distribution, /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ is where you put user-specific X configuration. Making the config immutable would prevent overwrite.

Making local edits in any part of /usr/ is extremely frowned upon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is only true for some filesystems. ext4 notably doesn't acknowledge -i attribute

<comment><USER26> Not true. Immutable works just fine on ext4.

[https://pastebin.com/beuimxR8](https://pastebin.com/beuimxR8)

<comment><USER21> Indeed. The list of all supported attributes is in the manual page:

[http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man5/ext4.5.html#FILE_ATTRIB...](http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man5/ext4.5.html#FILE_ATTRIBUTES)

<comment><USER25> Ah, you're right, I mis-remembered: """ The `c', 's', and `u' attributes are not honored by the ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems as implemented in the current mainline Linux kernels. """

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If one must install grub to a partition (e.g. on a first-generation Mac Pro), one is advised on the ArchLinux Wiki to use chattr:

Warning: GRUB strongly discourages installation to a partition boot sector or a partitionless disk as GRUB Legacy or Syslinux does. This setup is prone to breakage, especially during updates, and is not supported by the Arch developers.

# chattr -i /boot/grub/i386-pc/core.img

# grub-install --target=i386-pc --debug --force /dev/sdaX

# chattr +i /boot/grub/i386-pc/core.img

in case of partition or a partitionless disk is that GRUB relies on embedded blocklists in the partition bootsector to locate the /boot/grub/i386-pc/core.img file and the prefix directory /boot/grub. The sector locations of core.img may change whenever the file system in the partition is being altered (files copied, deleted etc.).

The workaround for this is to set the immutable flag on /boot/grub/i386-pc/core.img (using chattr command as mentioned above) so that the sector locations of the core.img file in the disk is not altered. The immutable flag on /boot/grub/i386-pc/core.img needs to be set only if GRUB is installed to a partition boot sector or a partitionless disk, not in case of installation to MBR or simple generation of core.img without embedding any bootsector (mentioned above).

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB/Tips_and_tricks](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB/Tips_and_tricks)

<comment><USER28> This is a very useful trick, and allows for the design of ridiculously simple bootloaders. If you +i vmlinux, IIRC you can fit a loader for it into 448 bytes.</comment></comment>


Ban Facial Recognition at Festivals - <AUTHOR> https://www.banfacialrecognition.com/festivals/ <comment><USER2> Why are most of the tweets mentioning deportation? Surveillance aside, since when has it been a human right to attend a festival in a country you are not allowed to reside in?

<comment><USER3> Someone always makes this comment every time illegal immigration is mentioned as if the law is the final word on what is just. And then they'll complain about someone going to prison for being a whistleblower or pirating movies or cheer on the protestors in Hong Kong.

<comment><USER2> Where I live, work permits are so easy (or automatic through the virtue of being in Schengen area) to get that illegal immigration basically does not exist, so the whole idea is vague at best to me.

<comment><USER4> If you are in Europe, how can you not be aware of undocumented refugees from North Africa and Syria? What you are saying is completely delusional.

<comment><USER5> Where in Europe are you talking about? The majority of immigrants in any EU country come from other EU countries. Of the remainder, less than 10% arrived as refugees. The vast majority of refugees (over 90% I'd guess) are documented and those from Syria or North Africa constitute only a fraction of all refugees.

The average European is highly highly unlikely to have ever encountered an undocumented refugee from Syria or North Africa.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, but you have no clue how many undocumented immigrants are all around you. Just because most of them are white you don't notice them in streets and they work shitty and hard jobs so you don't meet them either... I personally know like a dozen guys from Serbia and Bosnia who live in Austria and Germany illegally, and that's a dime a dozen. Us, Albanians and Turks are for EU what Mexicans are for US...

<comment><USER5> Sorry but an anecdote about your personal experience isn't very convincing.

What would be convincing would be a reference to a source with numbers/data to back up your claim.

The most recent Europe-wide figures are pretty out-of-date but indicate estimates of between 0.3% and 0.7% of people living in Eureope being irregular/undocumented ([http://irregular-migration.net](http://irregular- migration.net)). This is much less than the comparable estimates for the US, for example.

<comment><USER6> I never claimed there's more illegal immigrants in the EU than in US. I said that there's more immigrants than it is maybe perceived by most, especially tourists. For instance in Austria more than 20% of population are legal immigrants. In Switzerland it's more than 30%. About half of them come from other EU countries, and most of them are concentrated in big cities. [1]

Regarding the illegal immigration situation in EU is very different from US because the laws are different. In EU state helps immigrants so they're incentivized to register, and also it's easier to get permits. According to the official DHS report [2]: "Of the total illegal alien population in 2015, nearly 80 percent had resided within the United States for more than 10 years", which is super uncommon in EU, they'd be legalized by that time.

So just comparing the numbers doesn't tell the true story, but according to the official report from Austria [3]: "Irregular residents account for between 2.9% and 1.1% of the total population.", so 10x more what you suggested. They also note in this report: "As there are strong incentives for immigrants to register in Austria (e.g. certificate of registration as a prerequisite for application for state benefits), the majority of immigrants are on record at the registration offices. In contrast, very little information is available about irregular immigration." And Austria is one of the stricter countries in this regard.

[1] [https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics- explained/pdfscache...](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics- explained/pdfscache/1275.pdf)

[2] [https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/18_1214...](https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/18_1214_PLCY_pops- est-report.pdf)

[3] [https://bmi.gv.at/Downloads/files/Bericht_des_Migrationsrats...](https://bmi.gv.at/Downloads/files/Bericht_des_Migrationsrats_PDF_komplett_ENG_23_3_17.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Festivals should just start inviting bounty hunters instead of using facial recognition.

Or maybe they could just put shock collars on every attendee in case they begin to act in an unacceptable manner.

In fact, once it's proven to work at festivals we can extend this to schools!

<comment><USER8> It will probably be proven to work in schools first as most parents don't think children should have privacy anyway

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are people debating a lot of big issues in this thread.

I just don't want a facially-tagged database of me doing my shitty drunk dance moves at shows ... is that too much to ask?

<comment><USER8> At least with implants we could opt-out

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ironic how they want your name and address and phone number for a petition to protect your privacy.

<comment><USER11> It is to prevent claims that the petition count is fraudulent.

Voluntarily providing your identity is different having it involuntarily collected.

<comment><USER12> To be fair, going to a music festival where you know you have to give camera consent is also voluntarily. Doesn't mean you can't complain about it.

<comment><USER11> In a strictly legal sense, you may be right, but in a practical sense, I disagree. A form which asks you to actively supply information is different from overlooking a short passage in a very long, intentionally complicated ToS weeks before walking into a venue.

Further, collecting contact info aligns with the data subject's goal, i.e. an impactful petition. With FR used for security, the goals are also aligned, i.e. a fun event. But for immigration control or marketing, the data subject does not benefit and may even be harmed by the data collection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I always thought of festivals as an escape with like minded people. Privacy should be upheld.

</comment><comment><USER14> Burning Man wants to use facial recognition? Uh... guess it's time we all got gas masks.

<comment><USER15> I can't see how the org would choose to use facial recognition.

I can see how they would not explicitly ban participants from including it in art. New rules can take a while to be formed and it is only if there is a real need.

I can also see LE using it or requiring its use—but that could happen at any of these events.

This is sort of an alarmist site / concept given only five out of the large list "might" use it.

<comment><USER16> > I can see how they would not explicitly ban participants from including it > in art. New rules can take a while to be formed and it is only if there is a > real need.

Banning it in art would also make art that is explicitly about facial recongnition pretty much impossible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What is the original intent of the use of facial recognition at festivals? Is it drug trafficking tracking? Terrorism tracking? Satisfaction tracking?

<comment><USER18> It starts off with obvious and socially acceptable uses of technology, such as stopping terrorism. Over time, though, the application of technology like this will be used to target people for lesser offenses. Unpaid parking tickets, for example.

<comment><USER11> To whit, in China it is now used to issue jay-walking tickets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The arguments here are that the tech doesn't work as well with people with dark skin and maybe it will be used to deport visa overstays or undocumented / illegal immigrants? Is that it?

</comment><comment><USER20> Do undocumented workers avoid Las Vegas casinos because of all the cameras? This seems like a solution to a problem nobody has.

<comment><USER21> They are very clear this is to prevent future problems. It's a problem that (most) people don't have yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone see any evidence for this website's claims? It literally just says "big companies are investing in this". No sources quoted, no evidence of how many groups, to what extent, or for what actual purposes.

Basically, this looks like a FUD campaign to work the outrage machine to get more followers and donations (and e-mail addresses)

</comment><comment><USER20> Should festivals ban facial recognition, I imagine pickpockets would be a lot more into them.

</comment><comment><USER8> For obvious reasons, people didn't like microchip implants so we just invented face recognition

</comment><comment><USER23> I want to be surveilled everywhere I go, because I trust corporations and the government to safeguard that information and never abuse it. After all, corporations and governments have never acted against the best interests of the people in the past, so there is no risk in them having a live-updating data set on the locations, activities, companions, and sentiments of every American.

Is that what people think? We are letting this shit run wild on us, and if the future is anything other than a bonafide utopia (spoilers: it's not going to be that), people are going to pay for our present naivete.

<comment><USER24> Playing the devil's advocate here. Suppose in the perfect world we got to design ideal surveillance, how would it work?

You could track every person and item in public space and automatically fine a percentage of net income for violations. Think in terms of enhanced red light and speed cameras.

The system would store everything encrypted in a distributed system. Data would automatically get wiped out after 30 days. The public would be able to verify this (open source code and public access logs)

Any humans accessing the feeds would need a court order specifying time span + place + item being searched for and a good reason why. The court orders would be also be publicly accessible. May be a blockchain which is append only and distributed. Some form of hard mechanisms to prevent anyone being above the law. If anyone abuses access, they'd stand a trial too)

Access would would blur out all other faces other than person being investigated.

Basically what I'm saying is let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Good Surveillance may offer the means to quickly find violators and deter crime. A car got stolen. Boom, easily identified. A kid got lost/kidnapped. Instant search. Some asshole didn't cleanup after their dog pooped. They think twice. Littering in public space. Nay nay.

Whether we like it or not, with the advance of cheap cameras, cheap processing power and advanced computer vision algorithms/neural nets. Surveillance is coming. It's a god like power.

I believe we should at-least be having conversations on safe and trust worthy surveillance.

Facebook/Google already know what everyone is doing. We don't know what they are doing with our data. The information asymmetry is a problem.

<comment><USER23> > I believe we should at-least be having conversations on safe and trust > worthy surveillance.

Yeah, we should, but we aren't. Or, at least, the people actually involved in advancing the state of surveillance either aren't participating in such conversations, or are there for appearances only and don't really give a shit what the other participants have to say.

You don't have to be paying much attention to see that there's basically zero accountability and zero effort to protect the public in what I guess I might call the surveillance-industrial complex.

Believe me, I see the theoretical potential and value of surveillance for keeping people safe, but it's sort of like the idea of a benevolent robot dictator who makes perfect decisions to maximize good and minimize bad. Even a shaky first-pass implementation of such a thing is way beyond our capabilities, and if done even slightly wrong it could be a global catastrophe. Surveillance is a bit different because we're starting to have the technology to make it happen, but we don't have the social machinery necessary to do it effectively or responsibly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've always used the number of Spanish speaking radio stations on the dial as a litmus test for how much illegal immigration exists in my city. First generation and second generation don't typically listen to to the Spanish speaking stations, so the demand is being driven by the initial immigrants, the majority of whom are illegal (in my city).

No matter how much I hear about illegal immigration being cracked down upon, the Spanish speaking radio stations aren't being converted to another format, so there's still enough advertiser demand to pay for the station. That can only happen if the advertisers are finding a large enough customer base to justify their costs.

If these radio stations then sponsor concerts, it's likely that the attendees will have a high illegal immigrant percentage.

Should the government be able to mass survey the Spanish speaking population attending these concerts, looking for immigrants who have not turned up to their deportation hearings?

I applaud the government for being that efficient with my tax dollars (I expect this method is much cheaper than others), but should they be doing it? Probably not.

Now what about facial recognition for known terrorists at large sporting events in order to prevent an attack? Maybe?? At music festivals? I can see the argument there too.

<comment><USER26> Known terrorists shouldn't be free in the first place, least of all in an Western country. And if they are free I suppose that are actively on the run (hence the "known" part) so I don't think they're in the mood for a concert or a Ligue 1 match. As such whenever the powers that be use the terrorists line for stuff like this I call them bullshitters, because that's what they are.

<comment><USER27> Terrorists attend these events to, you know, commit acts of terrorism, not enjoy the music.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, you're talking about unknown/not-yet terrorists, but I expect that people that have actually committed terrorist acts in the past to be either behind bars or reformed (spending 20-25 years behind bars may make you change your mind about killing inocent people the next time). By definition, people that have not yet committed any terrorist acts are not, well, terrorists, thinking otherwise risks making us dive into thought-crime territory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> >which puts music fans at risk of being unjustly detained, harassed, judged, or even deported.

Lost me at deported. Why is this hypothetical music fan in this country illegally? And why is it so important to allow him to stay?

<comment><USER4> In many places you can be arrested and/or deported for saying the wrong thing, being seen at the wrong place.

Basically you are arguing that cultural organizations should support the police state.

<comment><USER29> As someone that believes in substantially increasing legal avenues for people to reside in the US, I do not agree that we should constrain law enforcement.

We should fix the damn laws, not make a conflicting hodgepodge of regulations meant to mitigate ones we don't like. Putting police and law enforcement in the middle of a political debate is a recipe for disaster.

<comment><USER4> Given that legal immigration (and from PR to citizenship) is being increasingly choked off by unilateral executive action, and many norm busting actions are undertaken by ICE, can you understand why people feel that counteracting efforts must be taken?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Trying to ban FR seems to be a solving the privacy problem in the wrong way. Instead of banning FR, what should be fixed is the misidentification problem or the issue that come out when the FR become public.

<comment><USER31> This problem needs to be tackled from several angles, I think. Omnipresent cameras, linked to FR systems, are just as big a problem as misidentification.

<comment><USER32> Can you explain the problem in more detail?

<comment><USER31> The problem with omnipresent cameras which are nowadays able, through facial recognition systems, to track any number of people fully automated?

Which problem do you _not_ see with that?

<comment><USER32> The one making the claim is the one burdened with the justification.

<comment><USER31> Ok, I will give you two examples, but you will need to use your brain to try to adapt the problems to other situations. Can you do that? Great!

Example 1: So, let's say you're on a festival where cameras and facial recognition systems are used "for safety purposes" and everybody is feeling really safe because of that. Now some crime happens, like sexual assault or whatever. Nobody really saw the culprit and there's no usable evidence on the victim or crime scene, but cameras filmed him when he flew from the scene.

The images are not the best. It was dark, he ran quite fast and he was also wearing a black hoodie. Facial recognition systems worked hard on every frame of the video material and are somewhat sure (90% probability) that you are the sexual offender. You also happen to have a black hoodie with you and you were not with your friends when the assault happened.

Obviously you will tell the police that you were on your way to the toilet and that's why you split from your friends for half an hour, just as the crime happened. But what reasons do they have to believe you? The software solution is quite sure of two things: You are the suspect (90% probability) and the system found nobody else that matched the video frames. So, it can only be you, right?

Well, seems like you could go to jail for some time before the real culprit is found. Or maybe you will be convicted for something that you have not done. That is a real possibility when law enforcement starts replacing "real" police work with automated solutions which are prone to errors.

Will those systems even say that they are only 90% sure? Or will there be pressure on the manufacturers of those systems to only deal in absolutes and have great hit rates?

Example 2: You're on this march against right-wing politicians. Police is using cameras to watch the march and is also using facial recognition technology to save who attended the march, in case something happens. Your face is detected and linked with your personal information because a reference picture of you is already present in the passport database, which the police obviously has access to. Police says that the data will be deleted after the march, but somehow it's saved for testing purposes in a MongoDB hosted on AWS and never got deleted after all.

Elections come and go and now those right-wing politicians your protested against are in control. Or some hackers stumble over the database, copy it and sell it to whomever is willing to pay for that. Or some corrupt members of the police get payed a nice bribe for a copy of that list and they don't really care about "that data". Nothing of that really sounds unlikely in this day and age.

In any case you are now on a list of "political enemies" because you were on that march. Nobody knows what will happen with you from here on. Maybe you will just lose your job when working in a public institution, because there is somebody more "loyal". Or you simply don't get promoted anymore, although you are doing really great work. But maybe you end up on some kind of bounty list for some ultraradical people, who knows.

Just look over to Hong Kong. Would you really feel well when the Chinese government knew that you were attending the protests against the government?

From here on you might think about more examples where facial recognition could go really wrong for you, although you did nothing wrong.

<comment><USER32> > Ok, I will give you two examples, but you will need to use your brain to try > to adapt the problems to other situations. Can you do that? Great!

There's no need to be uncivil or rude.

Let's take Example 1.

It would indeed be problematic if we convicted people based solely on the algorithmic conclusion of a machine. But thankfully, we still have jury trials in the U.S.; it requires a unanimous verdict to convict someone; and it requires a level of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt."

It's important to understand that a machine is not a witness. It can't be cross-examined. So whatever result it produces is evidence. How strongly that evidence is believed is up to the jury; and a good defense attorney is going to do whatever it takes to attack the machine (using expert witnesses and so forth) to introduce reasonable doubt if its conclusion is incorrect. The defense attorney is also going to introduce whatever other exculpatory facts and witnesses they can find.

In your example, if a sexual assault occurs, the victim is likely to testify. Without the victim's testimony identifying the defendant, and without any corroborating DNA evidence, the defendant is likely to walk, even with the machine saying it's 90%+ probability match.

In any event, I think what's needed here is some additional law forbidding the sole use of FR data as evidence used to convict a defendant. That, I think, would help assuage most people's concerns -- even though I think it unlikely that a conviction would result this way anyway.

A really important fact that you're not considering is that FR has a strong potential to _prevent_ false identification. Many studies have shown that eyewitness identifications, including line-ups, are extremely unreliable; and yet, we've been using them for decades to convict people. And we've released innocent convicts many, many times, sometimes decades after imprisonment, when it turned out the witness was lying or simply had a faulty memory. And in your example, if you in fact went to the toilet during the crime, the cameras would be able to corroborate that.

OTOH, if a machine strongly disagreed with the eyewitness, I have little doubt that the defendant would be dismissed.

Example 2 is a bit trickier.

You don't need FR technology to have a police state: North Korea has had one for nearly 70 years without one. East Germany had one for over 40 years (see: Stasi). There are cruder methods than using FR technology; spying is a very old game.

So, FR can help enhance control for regimes that are already inclined to preventing freedom by making it much more economical than having a spy network, but it's by no means necessary. Besides, you can trivially foil FR by wearing a mask.

I don't know how to prevent a police state, other than to employ violent resistance, and even that doesn't always work. I don't think anybody knows. But if you want a prevent a police state, I think banning FR isn't really going to help. At least so far, history shows that many police states resulted from democracies or republics ceding control under some sort of "necessity."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Facial recognition is just math. Why are people trying to classify certain matrices as illegal?

It seems this was a convincing argument for a lot of people in regards to encryption. Facial recognition is math just as much as encryption is.

<comment><USER34> >Why are people trying to classify certain matrices as illegal?

Certain encryption algorithms, which are at their core applied math, are still illegal to export to this day to certain countries such as Iran. They are regulated and banned under the same treaties that apply to nuclear weapons.

If you publish an app to Apple's App Store, for example, you have to sign a waiver explaining if your app uses encryption (such as for SSL/TLS) before being allowed to publish in international markets.

Not saying it is right, but there is definitely legal precedent to ban mathematical knowledge at the international level.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The ban is not going to happen. It's an issue of public safety and venue liability. FR use at video game conferences is a must, because every one has a series of morons threatening the venue, the conference, and the host. It is very difficult today to host any type of public event without multiple individuals taking their displeasure to extreme levels and making threats they might carry out. For such reasons, FR is booming.

<comment><USER36> what changed? FR didn't exist 10 years ago but the events did so why do the events need FR now?

<comment><USER35> Yeah, 10 years ago a venue receiving threats had to purchase additional insurance, hire additional security, and run a SWAT team like surveillance operation. After that became routine, every venue that can host any gathering of any size became a security sink that ate attention and distracted potential opportunities as public levels of casual violence simply skyrocketed to the levels we see today.

<comment><USER37> Can you point me towards any sources that show skyrocketing levels of casual violence?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


MIT can now see through concrete walls - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/100395-mit-can-now-see-through-concrete-walls

<comment><USER2> FYI: MIT Lincoln Lab is not quite the same as MIT. Think JPL and Caltech.

Edit: I should have added that MIT LL has a long history of work in microwaves, going back to the invention of radar in WW2.

<comment><USER3> The above is correct. The lab is an FFRDC managed by MIT. It's a really great place to work! I'm in the computer security group and we're hiring for full time and summer internships. There's a description of my typical day in my profile. I'd love to chat with anyone that is interested at firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Commercial through-wall radar back in 2005, but using UWB instead of S-band: <http://www.cambridgeconsultants.com/news_pr150.html>

It's not clear what the advantage of using S-band is. Higher resolution, perhaps?

<comment><USER2> Narrow band electronics are a whole lot easier, and with a lot longer history. Source power is also easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Where I live we simply use windows rather than radar for looking through walls.

I understand that there are law enforcement and military applications for this kind of tech, but I really wonder if we need to add the ability to see through walls to the long list of privacy invading technology that is already available.

There are very few good applications for this technology and lots of bad ones.

<comment><USER6> Stopping scientific discovery because you (or anyone) believes the result will be abused is a bad idea IMHO. Also while you're imagining snooping police, I'm imagining rescue workers locating survivors of a building collapse.

<comment><USER7> The tech will probably have some peaceful uses, but I don't think they will outweigh the uses for military, law enforcement, espionage etc.

More generally, I think it's a mistake to believe that tech advances are always good overall. An extreme hypothetical example: advances in torture technology. A real-life example: television.

<comment><USER8> Pragmatically though, you'll never be able to stop new advancements from seeing the light of day. Blocking MIT from researching this won't stop the NSA or defense contractors, and even with a fair government, it wouldn't stop criminals. So far, the best path for dealing with potentially dangerous tech has been to keep it open and studied.

<comment><USER9> I'm skeptical. If it were very simple in terms of materials to create, say, biological weapons of mass destruction, I'd be in favor of keeping the knowledge under wraps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "the researchers are now working on the output imagery: instead of blobs, they want each moving target to be represented by a cross" -- That can't really be that hard to implement. I'm sure they have bigger issues than this to deal with.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, that's what I thought, but the press release suggests that it's harder than it sounds: [http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/ll-seeing-through- walls-1...](http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/ll-seeing-through- walls-1018.html)

"To understand the blobs requires a lot of extra training."

<comment><USER12> I suspect the real problem is just that those images are _so_ noisy - in the demo with two people moving around, for instance, it's almost impossible to tell at times whether there's one, two, or more blobs. Certainly it wouldn't be very reliable from a single frame, you'd have to use the movement information.

Personally, I wouldn't waste my time on that, that's a rather straightforward image processing problem that could be made much easier by improving the output quality of the machine, which I imagine would be necessary anyways for this to see any real use in the field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The military application is obvious: wallhack!

Support for it in FPS games will be instant.

<comment><USER14> FPS games have had wallhack support since Counterstrike was released.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems that the real breakthough here is the cost of production? Seeing through walls is certainly nothing new and I thought that the latest and most promising technology for doing this was using Terahertz radiation: [http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/terahertz- detectio...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/terahertz-detection/) [http://www.hightech-edge.com/terahertz-remote-sensors- detect...](http://www.hightech-edge.com/terahertz-remote-sensors-detect- objects-behind-inside-packages-pockets/8958/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Self-criticizing voice says "And you can get Django to work."

</comment><comment><USER17> That's exciting, however they seem to still have a lot of work to do and one big challenge : miniaturization.

<comment><USER2> I don't know the details, but it looks like an array of S-band horns. Those won't get smaller without changing the frequency.

[http://www.q-par.com/products/horn-antennas/2-18-GHz-wide- ba...](http://www.q-par.com/products/horn-antennas/2-18-GHz-wide-band-horn- antennas)

btw: I would also guess S-band was chosen for a reason. Three are all sorts of atomic vibrational resonances as you scale up in frequency, which might make it harder to get the desired view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder what could be seen through a normal wall of wood and gyproc or brick.

<comment><USER19> In most parts of the world, especially war-torn developing regions, a concrete wall is a "normal wall".

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> An invention solely for military purposes? Sorry but I have to say no.

<comment><USER21> A lot of inventions were initially for military purposes. I for example can see this used by firefighters and in disaster area after earthquake.

<comment><USER20> Why cannot it be invented in this positive context in the first place then. I can imagine the reason is money and in that sense it just shows how screwed up our world is.

<comment><USER22> Developing new tech is expensive. The military has a lot of money. Firefighting departments don't traditionally have trillions of dollars to spend on R&D.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Schneier on Security : The Problems with Unscientific Security - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/the_problems_wi_1.html#comments

<comment><USER2> Basically right. And I would also use "the problem with unscientific ___" in a lot of other areas.</comment>


Shapeways: Manufacturing in the Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2013/04/19/shapeways-manufacturing-in-the-cloud/

<comment><USER2> Shapeways has a whole library of items that other people have designed that you can print. I ordered several as stocking stuffers at Christmas. Holding them in your hand is a good way to get what this whole 3D printing thing is about.

The items I ordered:

<http://www.shapeways.com/model/24470/gyroid.html>

[http://www.shapeways.com/model/335195/the-code-prize-fire- co...](http://www.shapeways.com/model/335195/the-code-prize-fire-colour.html)

[http://www.shapeways.com/model/683524/super-mario-mobius- str...](http://www.shapeways.com/model/683524/super-mario-mobius-strip.html)

<comment><USER3> My favorite was Rocket Espresso Cup : [http://www.shapeways.com/model/577677/rocket-espresso- cup.ht...](http://www.shapeways.com/model/577677/rocket-espresso-cup.html) . Too bad it can't be ship outside USA.

<comment><USER4> That's awesome but it's not even on Shapeways anymore, it's actually made the jump to traditional manufacturing. And for some reason, it _still_ cannot be sold outside the US. WTF?

<comment><USER3> It's available at other store like ThinkGeek where it can be shipped outside USA ($26 in case, France !). Search 'Blast Off! Espresso Cup Set'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's the full post from Shapeways' Blog:

[http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/2029-Advancing-the- Mi...](http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/2029-Advancing-the-Mission-of- Shapeways-3D-Printing-for-Everyone.html)

\- 1,000,000 Parts Printed

\- 60K uploaded monthly

\- 10K unique shops

\- $500K earned by shops in 2012

</comment><comment><USER6> URL is wrong, here it is: [http://cdixon.org/2013/04/20/shapeways- manufacturing-in-the-...](http://cdixon.org/2013/04/20/shapeways- manufacturing-in-the-cloud/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I find sculpteo is a way better service. <http://sculpteo.com>

<comment><USER8> I second this. <http://i.materialise.com/> is decent too, but Sculpteo is the best I've used. Their standard service is very fast, and the prices for the small stuff I typically print is much cheaper than the others.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Tenreads – Ten top stories everyday on everything you love - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tenreads/id922554873?mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN. This is Gokul, one of the guys behind Tenreads. I thought I'd just share our story with the Hacker News community and gather your thoughts on what we have built.

The Internet has become a noisy place to be in. Cat GIFs, listicles and click- baits have taken over your news feeds and you're drowning in the content gushing out of the world's firehose - Twitter. We simply want to help people cut through this noise.

Tenreads keeps you updated on what's happening everyday on the things that matter to you, without bogging you with the things that don't.

</comment><comment><USER2> I've been using tenreads on the web for almost 6 months now - great way to get my morning news fix. Only complaint is sometimes the articles don't pick up the best cover image... Hope it's fixed with the iOS update.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks good and isn't it very similar to news-in-shorts?

if you would like to share, how is the curation done?

Thanks and all the best with loads of success :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey hi, really sorry about the late response; been a little off the grid now.

The way I see it, News in Shorts and Tenreads are attempting to solve the problem of information overload, right? And there are two ways to go about it - either reduce the amount of content in each story you have to read, or reduce the number of stories. They take the former route and we take the latter. As far as curation is concerned, right now we are mostly concerned about how many outlets are writing about a particular subject, and how many people are sharing a particular article on that subject. We have a list of 200 odd publishers across a couple of dozen categories, that we handpicked and monitor everyday just to maintain the quality of content that comes through.</comment></comment>


Best Places to Launch a Career in 2008 - <AUTHOR> http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/career_launch_2008/index.asp

<comment><USER2> #29 - nice.</comment>