How to Onboard Software Engineers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fogcreek.com/how-to-onboard-software-engineers-interview-with-kate-heddleston/ <comment><USER2> Kate Heddleston is freaking awesome, if you don't know. Her talk at Pycon 2015 about diversity in engineering environments is fantastic. Well explained in language free of activist rhetoric -- it was a pragmatic and thoughtful speech. Her blog expands on much of what she covers and should be read.

On the topic of on-boarding -- _super_ important to get right! The idea of _making_ your people the best they can be is lost, I think, on our generation. My grandfather-in-law was a mechanical engineer at Chrysler back in the day when they had a special school they ran to train their new recruits. When he started he had no idea of how cars worked but they picked him up from school and gave him the training he needed to become an important figure in their company.

Focusing on hiring the best because hiring someone mediocre will damage your business is negative thinking that can kill your on-boarding, and thus your culture and business. I've worked at places with terrible on-boarding and it was a fight just to get some direction and support for your work. Getting the attention of management was something you wanted to avoid which led to people becoming complacent about their work and its quality.

Great article. On-boarding is important to get right.

<comment><USER3> Regarding the negative thinking, this is a really important point. Consider these two alternative attitudes when on-boarding a new employee:

1\. Let's evaluate to see whether the new developer is good enough, so we can fire fast if our expectations are not met.

2\. Let's figure out how to help this developer achieve his/her maximum potential for adding value to the organization. If for some reason the developer is unwilling or unable to develop to a level that makes a positive contribution, then we consider separating.

I find the second approach much healthier for the employee and the organization.

<comment><USER4> False dichotomy in my world since I employ both 1 and 2 with a very, very lenient set of guidelines for 1. Some things do not manifest in an interview, and that's where during the first couple weeks I check for some basic professionalism. Things like: 1\. Are you responsive to e-mails or IMs at all? I don't mean are you answering e-mails constantly and within 10 minutes each time, I mean "do you answer e-mails when you are asked for a response?" 2\. Do you ask questions at all? If it's day 7 and you still don't have access to Github because you never asked "So where do I, you know... push code?" I have to wonder what you were doing from days 1 to 6. 3\. Have you confirmed what your expectations are if they are not clear to you? I give a basic 1-day project fully expecting it to take a bit longer, but if it takes a whole week and you're silent, I have to ask why you think it's ok that you have no idea what's going on and that it's ok. If I suspect they're not pulling their weight, I'll give a project where they will immediately be blocked and require assistance if they spend more than 10 minutes investigating the issue. This also helps me determine if someone is simply really, really shy or if they're just not doing any work.

And lastly, reaffirm that you've done 1 to 3 and communicate clearly that those are the expectations before you fire the person for being pretty much dead weight.

You can't figure out how a lot of people will work until they actually start a job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Onboarding is a people/process/docs/technology problem. To the limited extent that it is a technology problem, you _really_ can't go wrong with a) treating it like it is an actual shipping product of the company (implying a minimum standard of care like e.g. a repository, documentation about it, and a dedicated place to put issues) and b) actively maintaining something with the goal of getting someone up-and-running _quickly_.

None of my projects are at the point where you can just "vagrant up and go", but the next-best thing has been READMEs in the relevant repositories with exact lists of "Type this, type this, type this, type this. You now have a fully-working system running on localhost and you should be able to type this to get a full green test suite. If you can type this and it does not come out green, fixing that is more important than anything Patrick is doing right now."

Here's, for example, what we have for getting someone up and running on Appointment Reminder (in preparation for me soon no longer being the engineer who keeps all of that system in my head): [https://gist.github.com/patio11/a0b1063c5d33b5748da6](https://gist.github.com/patio11/a0b1063c5d33b5748da6) Feel free to steal ideas in terms of level of detail or useful things to include. (A lot of the magic is in the rake commands like "setup_site", which take care of "All that crufty configuration stuff which you would otherwise need a senior engineer to do for you prior to actually seeing the page render correctly on localhost:3000.")

Quick hack which helped us on making sure this guide was actually accurate: we had two engineers coming into the project at the same time. I wrote down everything _I_ thought they needed to know. Engineer #1 implemented to the document I had written, filled in the blank spots where he needed to ask questions, and then we committed the readme. Engineer #2 then had to do it off the readme _without_ asking me any questions. Given that he was actually able to do this, we have high confidence that there is not at the moment anything rattling around in my head which is absolutely required to get up-and-running and documented nowhere else.

<comment><USER6> To make app setup even easier, you can write out scripts that bootstrap the application:

[http://githubengineering.com/scripts-to-rule-them- all/](http://githubengineering.com/scripts-to-rule-them-all/)

<comment><USER7> Scripts like that need to be able to recover from a very wide range of error modes caused by subtle differences in how target machines are setup - or at least fail in a reasonably obvious way.

Writing such a script is significantly more time consuming than writing a README, and for it to be worth the effort, it should be expected to save a fairly high multiple of the time it takes to write, debug and support. For GitHub, that multiple is definitely very high, for Patrick, it might not even be greater than one. YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish everyone took onboarding seriously.

I worked for one company for a month. From the get go they had 100+ staff but no onboarding. Nobody knew how to set up the development environment or even get the application working on the company laptop. Nobody could show me how to VPN to client sites or show me how the software worked. I was meant to support it...

I was in my manager's office every day letting her know hey I really need assistance here, nobody seems to have time, nothing is working, I'm not learning anything and this needs to improve.

She'd tell staff to assist and they just wouldn't. And rinse wash repeat the next day.

A month in we are in a meeting and some difficult software issue comes up and it's assigned to me to fix. I mention that I don't have it running, don't know how to use it, have no method of finding who the customer contacts are to call them and will sound stupid not understanding anything, but also haven't been shown how to connect in. That I'm happy to shadow someone else and learn it.

It felt shameful but I knew it was the right thing, I had a year of extensive help desk experience under my belt including programming and other development, bug fixing, accounting, you name it, I was even team lead. I was used to dealing with multi million dollar clients and had no qualms about doing so... but this place was dysfunctional.

Anyway the boss stared me in the face in the meeting and called me a liar, to shut up and get to work. I was stunned. I repeated myself and she turned to my coworkers who claimed they had "showed me everything". I hadn't spent more than 5 minutes with them in the entire month and had been in her office every day. She told me to start pulling my weight and stop lying.

I walked very calmly to the office printed out a resignation and left my keys and walked out the door. I didn't get paid (a funny side effect of walking out of a job) and the move left me penniless and ALMOST homeless.

Luckily I got a job just in the nick of time shortly after, at twice the pay, and being treated like a human being. I removed that place off my resume and rarely discuss it because it's so humiliating.

I still remember the recruiter calling me screaming how unprofessional I was - he only cared about his lost bonus. I explained I was extremely professional but that after being humiliated and called a liar in a meeting and having none of the promised training, or anything remotely capable of making me a functional employee, there was no recovery.

Now I take onboarding very seriously.

<comment><USER9> > I didn't get paid

Wait, you didn't get paid for the time you had been their? I'm pretty sure that is a violation of labor law, at least in any state in the US.

<comment><USER8> It's law in Australia. If you do not serve a notice period you owe the company wages for that period. 1 month wages minus 1 month notice = 0. Most people have no notice periods, serve their notice period, or get approval not to serve it at all.

In this case though (when I followed up with accounting) they confirmed they wanted to step on my neck.

Even now the entire situation seems utterly surreal. I've been through a few companies since then and never had any problem, I'm the likeable hard working quiet person. I guess they just really didn't like me!

Anyway I remember walking out of that office in tears and feeling that no matter what happened I could cling onto whatever self worth I still had. I didn't know how bad it was about to become. But I came out okay in the end :-)

<comment><USER10> Why didn't you give them 1 month notice then?

They would probably fire you immediately anyway and you would get paid.

<comment><USER11> What would you do if they kept you for the month?

<comment><USER10> Do what they ask me to do, read HN and search for new job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm in the midst of being onboarded at a very large healthcare organization. In addition to the complex SOA infrastructure, we deal with a multitude of databases, accessible through many different methods, from a number of vendors. There's a ton to take in—not to mention the business complexity inherent to the organization as a whole.

Heddleston's point about having less-senior people do the mentoring is especially apt. While I've received support from everyone in the team, the most helpful person has actually been an intern with only a few years of programming experience under his belt. While I have over a decade more general programming experience than he has, he knows a lot more about the specific domain, and has been an excellent teacher. I feel that this arrangement has been beneficial for both of us—as I've gained domain knowledge, he's gained confidence and depth in his own knowledge.

I think that a big part of this is not setting expectations too high—no matter how senior the new employee is. While I have a fair amount of experience, the expectation in my new position—both from me and from the team—is that it will take me a while to get up to speed,(especially given the complexity inherent to the role), even though I'm not coming in as a junior dev. Therefore, I don't feel the need to pretend that I'm an expert in something that I'm not, and there's no ego hit when I'm being mentored by someone who is technically my junior.

In my city, it seems like most everyone is looking for senior devs—to the point that they leave positions unfilled for months rather than hiring someone they don't consider senior enough. This is madness, and damaging to the industry as a whole. We need to focus more on efficiently developing talent, and Heddleston seems to have some great ideas for doing so.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think outside of the day-to-day (you need to know Python, here's how to get Vagrant running, this is how you submit a code review) there can also be a gap in cultural onboarding. For example, someone moving from a large tech company to a startup has certain norms and expectations that they may slowly re- evaluate (if they actually do) over a number of weeks or months, potentially harming the product and even their own career -- for example, "that's not in my job description" doesn't fly at a startup but can be a protective reflex at a large company. (One may argue someone with this attitude may not be hired at a startup in the first place, but sometimes the attitudes and expectations aren't so upfront and clear-cut, and are hard to test for at interview!)

Would love to find some examples of great cultural onboarding where it's not just the "what" of the work that a new hire learns, but also the why and how, to avoid implicit assumptions and biases from day one...

</comment><comment><USER14> I ran twitter's new engineer training for a long time, and much of this rings pretty true to me. I would only add 3 things: -1 the skill of teaching is approximately orthogonal to domain knowledge, and the difference between a decent and very good teacher is huge, both in terms of student-reported happiness and in terms of retention of the material covered. -2 history with the company tends to be very valuable, in that new hires are often curious about _why_ the company decided to build system X as it was. My goal was that teachers should be able to answer most such questions accurately, and truthfully say that they didn't know in the other cases. I found (anecdotally, because this data is hard to capture) that the student-reported quality of a class was generally proportional to the maximum length of question/answer/followup q/answer/... chains. -3 the onboarding process is an extremely powerful propaganda platform. During twitter's long transition from ruby to scala, (before I ran it) there were a series of presentations that were forward looking to the point of inaccuracy: they described as existing in the present that which we hoped would one day exist. This confused a bunch of new engineers when the rainbow unicorn scala world promised them did not materialize. On the positive side, many of them were then motivated to help build a scala world.

</comment><comment><USER15> Somewhat OT, but maybe related.

Does anyone actually work as a QA for documentation? I've been in many projects where "just read the docs" or "go read this doc", and... nearly always it's out of date, or missing _key_ information (like who wrote it, who to contact for access to systems in the document, etc) or so scantily written as to be useless.

Saying "I wrote docs" but having them be abysmal seems to be the norm. People now accept that having unit tests for code is a thing (not always done, but at least a thing) - is there an equivalent for documentation?

<comment><USER16> I'm surprised literate programming[0] never really caught on.

Rather than have separate documentation, the paradigm is completely different. Source code generation is interspersed with the abstract flow of thoughts that one usually has while developing.

This style of coding seems to be natural to me, as many algorithms are a set of discrete steps in an abstract sense. Implementing concrete steps and then describing their abstract counterparts seems sort of backwards to me.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> great point about onboarding providing a high ROI, it's something I haven't thought enough about. this is a particularly useful part: "The best person to help someone set up their development environment is the last person who joined, regardless of seniority."

<comment><USER18> As a corollary, the best person to review your documentation for accuracy is the new hire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> An inability to bring on new talent, junior or otherwise, is a symptom of lacking essential documentation. If I can't come into your office and have a copy of your software running or successfully compiling on my machine in less than an hour, something is very wrong with your documentation, tooling, or (lack of) build process.

"Here's Jim. He's our Widgitsoft guy. He's the only one who works on Widgitsoft. The system is entirely undocumented because Jim knows everything. Yeah, development has been slower than expected lately. Yeah, it would be nice if we could bring on a contractor when necessary, but getting to that point would be a lot of work, and we'll always have Jim."

<comment><USER19> _If I can 't come into your office and have a copy of your software running or successfully compiling on my machine in less than an hour, something is very wrong with your documentation, tooling, or (lack of) build process._

So that's why your first project here is going to be writing up some stuff so that it's easier to bring future people on board!

<comment><USER9> > So that's why your first project here is going to be writing up some stuff > so that it's easier to bring future people on board!

Has "get started on a new project by first writing up the documentation" actually worked for anyone in either a company or an Open Source project? If so, I would really like to know how because I keep hearing this advice but I suspect it comes from people who've never done it.

<comment><USER20> I started a job a few months ago and pretty much the first thing I did was improve the getting-started documentation, and the next thing was to improve the build process so there was less documentation needed. Worked for me.

Putting yourself in the mind of a reader is really hard. And documentation, which is necessarily duplicative, can easily become out of date. So yeah, I think novices are often the best people to write novice-targeted documentation, because they understand the reader's needs quite well.

Personally, though, I'd be a little embarrassed to assign a new arrival that if there were absolutely nothing. I think the process is a lot easier if they have some starting point for the docs, even if it's just some headings and bullet points. I'd also sit nearby and give them strict instructions to stop me at any point they were confused so that I could get them back on track. But I think it's a pretty good task on arrival.

<comment><USER21> I did this, sort of, but had an interesting problem. Once i'd rewritten the onboarding documentation (because it was given to me as four or five different PDFs, which really isn't that useful, and doesn't tell you what you specifically will need to have set up), there was no place to put it; there were 3 wikis, none of which anyone really looked at other than for their own stuff. New hires wouldn't know where to look to find these onboarding docs and nobody else would know either.

So it just floated around and new hires basically started with the PDF all over again.

<comment><USER20> In our case, we just checked in the docs as part of the project. That's not always the best reader experience, but if they have the code, then they're sure to have the right version of the docs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is timely, as I've just gone through the worst onboarding I've ever experienced. It took two very long days to install an OS on a machine and get it to boot (I had to assembly my computer and then use the corporate installer, which failed multiple times with errors like "an unknown error occurred"). It then took me about a week to run the local project's "hello world" (I was initially pointed to documentation that had been deprecated for months, and then when I found the right documentation it was incomplete and out of date). The actual process to get there was hilariously baroque; for example (if my email records are correct and I didn't get duplicate emails from the system), I must have clicked through 18 EULAs to get a subset of the permissions I need. I promise, that's worse than it sounds since the form to do so took more time to click through than you can imagine. It was a month before I could effectively do any work at all.

I originally thought that I was just unlucky, but when I asked around I found that I had an above average experience, at least among people near me who started recently. Unlike many other folks, I was actually able to get a username/alias, a computer, and an office. I don't know what folks without a username do since they can't even start clicking through the necessary EULAs to get permissions to do stuff, let alone do any actual work.

I'm not sure how it is in other parts of the company, but if you imagine that it's similar and do some back of the envelope math on how many people get onboarded and how much losing a month (or more) of time costs, it comes out to N million dollars for a non-trivial N. And that's just the direct cost of the really trivial stuff. It's hard to calculate the cost of the higher level stuff that's mentioned in the article, but I suspect that's even more expensive.

<comment><USER23> So your all individualy developing locally on your machine instead of on a server that you all use? - I think that's your problem right there

<comment><USER24> I'm curious, what subset of the software development world are you working in? "Developing locally on your machine" is and has always been standard practice in every part of the industry I have encountered.

<comment><USER23> Every project I worked on at BT (15 years) and all the webdev work it makes no sense to have 20 different pcs all developing and trying to merge the code at the end.

You remove the risk of subtle differences between developers pc's

if your only developing standalone apps I could see it but Microsoft doesn't develop windows or office that way.

<comment><USER24> Perhaps I just don't understand what you're describing, because in my experience it is completely normal to have developers working on 20 different PCs and all merging code as they go - that's what version control systems are for! I can't really imagine how else you would do it. Do all the devs really mount a shared filesystem with a single copy of the code!?

Or do you mean that the devs all still have individual copies of the source tree, but they do all their work by remoting in to some big monster server and building/testing there? That sounds.... um.... ungodly slow. Though I suppose if you are talking about webdev, perhaps there is no build step, so it might not suck _quite_ as much...?

It sounds like a very different world, and I'm struggling to understand what you mean.

I never worked on Windows or Office, but I did work in devdiv for a while, and at that time Microsoft certainly did develop Visual Studio in the traditional way. There were build farms, to be sure, but they were used for occasional checkpoint builds and for testing. For daily work, we ran the ol' edit/compile/link/run/crash cycle locally, on our own dev machines.

<comment><USER23> You can have your own source control at the server level and every one logs into that server just run an X Server on your PC. And yes you should be developing on exactly the same hardware its going to run on.

All you need to set up a new user is a bog standard pc and a new account set up on the server.

Its a lot easier to keep dev test and live identical than 20 or so developers pc's

And even when we did local development (oracle forms) all the code was checked in to a central server which was used to produce a daily build.

How do you think IBM mainframe development is done?

<comment><USER24> Thanks for explaining. That's certainly a very different way of working from anything I've ever encountered. I don't know enough about mainframes to even wonder how things are done, it simply isn't part of my world at all.

I come from a personal computing background, where it really doesn't make sense to talk about "developing on exactly the same hardware it's going to run on" because you cannot know in advance what that is going to be. The kind of thing you are talking about makes even less sense in the embedded world, where cross-compilation is the rule and the target machines are likely not capable of self-hosting a toolchain at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Standout quote: "People think that confidence follows skills, but it's usually the other way around where skills follow confidence." This is a fact that really needs to be more widely acknowledged. (It also casts the microagressions that have the effect of chipping away at the confidence of women and minorities in a rather uncomfortable light.)

</comment><comment><USER26> I really like this article.

I've been learning to interviewing potential hires. One of the questions I ask is, "Do you have any questions for us?" The questions can tell a lot about the prospective hire.

Turn this around: "What is your onboarding process?" is a great question from prospective hires.

This past year, having taken a number of short-term contracts at small teams, I've learned the hard way how to survive getting thrown into the deep end. You have to get really aggressive about communication, especially on a remote team. A lot of expectations can get lost. It's possible to survive and thrive without a good on-boarding process, but you have to step up and assume that responsibility yourself.

This isn't everyone's thing, and often feels like straying into rude, invasive behavior -- and from the startup's perspective, you lose a lot of great people too -- so asking this question will give the prospective hire an idea of whether they are getting set up for failure. Even an honest answer from the potential employer, "We don't have one, we are very busy and everything is really chaotic here" will tell you a lot about expectations (for both parties) within the first couple weeks of starting work.

And obviously, if the potential employer gives some BS in lieu of a straight answer, why waste time joining?

</comment><comment><USER27> I think lack of onboarding is probably one of the biggest problems with open source projects as well. You can't expect to get new contributors, if you have no documentation on how to setup a development environment, which tools you use and how the project is structured.

</comment><comment><USER28> On this subject, 10% of Airbnb engineers started last week: [https://twitter.com/mikecurtis/status/633759315480805376](https://twitter.com/mikecurtis/status/633759315480805376)

Kind of crazy...

<comment><USER29> How many engineers work at Airbnb? If there were 18, that would mean they hired 2. That's not that crazy.

<comment><USER5> I'd ballpark it as "several hundred." (Edit to add: this was a guesstimate based on "having a sense for this sort of thing is a key job skill for me." I then went looking to firm up the guesstimate. Data points in favor: 400 people match a search for "Airbnb engineer" on LinkedIn. A recent post shows a photo of their data science team with ~30 people on it; on previous experience with software companies, I'd have difficulty thinking there aren't at least 5+ much larger teams.)

More broadly, I think people consistently underestimate how much you can get done with a very small team at a startup and, simultaneously, underestimate how many engineers it is possible to throw at a single product.

<comment><USER30> What. My ballpark would have been five or less + maybe 200 support people to handle all the issues with having that many customers.

It is a relatively simple website that allows you to search apartment listings - essentially a very pretty CRUD app.

What are the rest doing?

<comment><USER31> Hmm, lets see I would guess they at the very minimum have a: -Web team -Mobile team -Data team -Infrastructure team -Tools team

So assuming at least 5 people per team thats already 25 people ... why is it so hard to understand that building anything at scale involves lots of man power?

<comment><USER32> Is AirBnB "at scale"? Why does it need to be?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The form of the interview was a bit weird: All the questions seemed to be entirely predetermined, with no follow-up questions and no opportunity for the answers to guide the direction of the interview. But on the other hand they were open-ended enough that it was more like a talk where the interview questions were hardly needed – essentially:

      So I heard you like x.
      How did you get started with x?
      Tell us a few things about x.
      In addition to those things, could you tell us something more about x?
      Is there anything else you want to say about x?

But very interesting nevertheless! :)

</comment><comment><USER34> I really enjoyed this video as I am currently looking for programmers and coders. I am leaning towards female engineers as I am a proponent of diversity and that I want to produce gender neutral software for my market. My goal is to hire the "right" people who can objectively work together while also producing software that takes multiple points of view into its development.

</comment><comment><USER35> I don't agree with all the advice, but I do think it's a good message. My favorite part is actually on pre-onboarding: "If everyone has to come in and manually set up everything, what you have is this super painful onboarding process that's just going to bottleneck your company."

</comment><comment><USER23> My Induction at my first job after being issued with my labcoat was an hours instruction on how to boot the PDP11/40 and I was told ah the company library has a book on FORTRAN go and learn it :-)

</comment><comment><USER36> I wish the article would start by explaining what the hell "onboarding" is, since I've never heard that word before...

<comment><USER37> "Onboarding" is getting new people up to speed. It's often used in the context of new employees and sometimes new users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Great discussion. I actually didn't know fog had a large blog section with podcasts/videos. Will be listening to these now :)

</comment><comment><USER39> I really, _really_ like this post. It applies to us product management dweebs too.</comment>


The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives - <AUTHOR> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/the-crisis-of-the-humanities-officially-arrives/?src=me&ref=homepage <comment><USER2> From the article: "if your criteria are productivity, efficiency and consumer satisfaction, it makes perfect sense to withdraw funds and material support from the humanities".

I think I've said it before: if we'd let engineers design our homes we'd all be living in barracks. Education isn't supposed to be about about creating jobs _alone_. I for one hope that the current economic crisis & utilitarian backlash doesn't strip away all funding for the arts & humanities.</comment>


A Growing Problem in Real Estate: Too Many Too Big Houses - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-growing-problem-in-real-estate-too-many-too-big-houses-11553181782 <comment><USER2> Fixed title: "Too many expensive houses"</comment>


Ask HN: Are Adobe Acrobat updates a security hole? - <AUTHOR> tl; dr: It seems like it'd be easy to spoof a "software update" dialog, and thereby install arbitrary malicious code.
The reason I ask:
Very often, a dialog appears that says something like, "There is a security update to Adobe Acrobat...Do you want to install?" And if I say yes, the next dialog prompts me for my password (I'm on a Mac, FWIW.) and if I give it the password, it moves forward and installs the new software.
(The frequency of the updates also seems suspicious; I understand that pdfs are a prime vector for malware, though I don't understand why.)
Anyway, my main question is: How do I know that this is legit? Since I always have a browser open, it seems credible that someone could craft a pop-up window to mimic the Adobe Updater dialog. (I have a pop-up blocker, but imagine that it would be possible to get past that.)
Am I right to be concerned about this? And if so, what to do?
Forgive me if this is I naive question; I'm no expert about security matters. <comment><AUTHOR> Microsoft products also seem to request frequent updates. But I've only noticed those happening when I launch one of their applications, which makes it seem marginally less threatening to me.

</comment><comment><USER2> If you're worried about it, close the dialog, then fetch the newest version manually.</comment>


Many PS4 units dead on arrival - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/PlayStation-4-Launch-Edition/product-reviews/B00BGA9WK2/ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending <comment><USER3> I find it interesting that as of now with 516 5 star reviews and 332 1 star reviews (and very few 2, 3 or 4 star reviews) the average still shows up as 3.5 stars. It's interesting since the lowest value possible is 1, so more realistically it's not 3.5/5 but 2.5/4\. I'm wondering if this makes a psychological difference and if less people would buy something on amazon if they changed their rating system to go from 0 - 4 stars.

<comment><USER4> This has always bothered me, both on Amazon and the iTunes app store. No lie, when I published my first app, one of the comments was "I'd rate this zero stars if I could." and my first thought was actually "wait, why can't you?"

Overall, I think YouTube was on the ball by switching to a "Thumbs up, Thumbs down" rating system. "Out of five star" rating systems are always sabotaged by the fact that most people think in absolutes: Either something is the bee's knees or it's fried shit on a biscuit. Given that most people vote this way, up/down vote systems are better at giving an honest impression of how people feel about something.

<comment><USER5> I find the 5 star system on Amazon useful. I don't always look at the average rating, but rather the distribution graph of ratings.

For example, one common shape looks like this:

       5 stars: |||||||||||
       4 stars: ||||||||
       3 stars: ||||
       2 stars: ||
       1 star:  |||||||

There's way more 1 star than 2 or 3. That usually indicates the product shows up DOA for a lot of people, or is otherwise probabilistically totally unsuitable for some group of people.

If the number of star ratings follows a more normal curve like the following, then I'm more confident in the quality of the product, even if both have an average 4 star rating:

       5 stars: |||||||
       4 stars: ||||||||
       3 stars: ||||
       2 stars: ||
       1 star:  |

<comment><USER6> This would make a fascinating study of reliability - can you determine statistically if a product will be reliable based on rating distribution.

You could study Amazon, App Store ratings, etc. Cool insight!

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't take any rating metric seriously unless it accounted for how long they've owned it. Plus there's the difference between "I've owned 12 lawnmowers and this one's pretty okay, only broke down after 1.5yrs, 3 stars" and "this is my first lawnmower, used it once, it's amazing, never going back to cutting my lawn with scissors, 5 stars". Plus niche sites sometimes have better reviews for the same products (newegg).

All that said, _there is information_ to be harvested in some of these reviews.

<comment><USER8> Good point about niche sites and the length of ownership. I've noticed that a number of starts on products like top rated power supplies goes down after a year an a half or so. While you might be getting a newly released power supply with 500 reviews averaging closer to 5 stars, after 2 years, you will notice that same product with 1600 reviews averaging at below 4 stars, because owners probably came back and updated their reviews.

It would be interesting to see a trend line of change in sentiment about a products over time, using existing data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Apparently it's an overheating issue[0]. The 'red line of death' is not a sign that your PS4 is dead, but a sign that it needs to shut down to cool off.

If that is happening immediately on boot, then hopefully the temp sensor or overall temp system is flawed and can be fixed either by a Sony patch or really quickly in their manufacturing process. Hard to believe something like that slipped through the cracks.

Reminds me of Dave Baggett's recent story[1] about how when you jiggled a controller stick during save, cross-talk on the motherboard would end up causing your memory card to become completely erased. I'm no EE but I wonder if there is something really strange at play here ... like perhaps old wiring in your home. I only say this because I can't imagine a really straightforward reason for this to be happening, unless they have a bad batch of temp sensors?

Fortunately iFixit has taken apart the PS4 already, so we can take a look inside the chassis[2]. There's a lot of talk there on the 'revolutionary' cooling system. There's a giant fan/heatsink combination for the CPU, and the exhaust air seems to flow over the PSU to cool it passively. There's another fan beneath the motherboard which looks pretty small.

Could also be a case of left-over tape or manufacturing material, like we saw with some of the Macbooks coming off the assembly line. There was a piece of plastic/tape coviering the exhaust vent that caused the fans to quickly go full speed and the system to get real hot. I can't find a reference to it anywhere though.

In other news, I'm anxiously awaiting my Xbox One pre-order and hope that it doesn't have any of the same issues :)

0\. [http://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps4/basic/partnam...](http://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps4/basic/partnames.html)

1\. [http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DaveBaggett/20131031/203788/M...](http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DaveBaggett/20131031/203788/My_Hardest_Bug_Ever.php)

2\. [http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/PlayStation+4+Teardown/19493](http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/PlayStation+4+Teardown/19493)

<comment><USER10> _Apparently it 's an overheating issue[0]. The 'red line of death' is not a sign that your PS4 is dead, but a sign that it needs to shut down to cool off._

The Amazon reviews are complaining of a blinking _blue_ "light of death," which I don't see described in the manual you linked to. "PS4 blue light of death" returns over 2 million Google results already.

 _I 'm no EE but I wonder if there is something really strange at play here ... like perhaps old wiring in your home._

I really don't think so.

<comment><USER11> "PS4 blue light of death" returns 101 results.

If you mean searching without the quotes then that is just stupid since Google will return results that match only one of the search terms.

<comment><USER12> PS4 "Blue light of death" ~ 18k results.

<comment><USER11> Seriously ? Do people not understand how Google works ?

Search for PS4 "Blue light of death". Click on Page 10. You will see results about Wii U / Epic 4G blue lights of death. Google stopped requiring pages to have all search terms a long time ago now.

<comment><USER13> Seriously, not everybody will have the same results from google for the same search, don't you know about the filter bubble [1]?

Then again the number of google result never was a very good indicator even less since google search started removing search features and return only a single page of supposedly relevant results.

[1]:[http://dontbubble.us/](http://dontbubble.us/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I read a comment earlier that made a good point that unlike the console launches of the previous generation in 2004-2006, we now have access to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to vocalize and demonstrate our complaints worldwide.

It makes the vocal minority much more vocal.

<comment><USER15> If you clicked on the link above, you will see that nearly 40% of the Amazon reviews are 1*. There is a good chance that most of those people received a dead PS4. Agree that not everybody who received a good PS4 left a positive review but this certainly does not make it looks like a minority.

<comment><USER16> Definitely reaching there - you can't assume a large majority of people who ordered from Amazon are leaving reviews. You already know that people without a working console will no doubt go leave a review, so the sample is significantly skewed.

We won't know if this is a real problem until Sony says something.

Disclosure: I ordered my PS4 from Amazon in June, received it yesterday, it works fine...and I have no reason to write a review about it.

<comment><USER17> Also, it looks - at a glance - like more of the 5* reviews are from verified purchasers than the 1* reviews. Presumably a bunch of people who didn't buy from Amazon and had a DOA PS4 went onto Amazon and posted an angry review, but people who got a working one had no reason to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Manufacturing defect with the HDMI port is causing damage to HDMI cables. Amazon should really send an email out about it to people who ordered, there is an easy fix.

<comment><USER19> What's the fix?

<comment><USER20> Kotaku documented it, push down the HDMI pin with something.

<comment><USER21> Yeah this is the link [http://kotaku.com/good-news-about-our-once-broken- ps4-146481...](http://kotaku.com/good-news-about-our-once-broken- ps4-1464813671)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The problem with those reviews is those whose console is working are not complaining. Are there any hard numbers on the proportion of dead consoles? Have Sony commented on this issue?

<comment><USER23> As of right now, there are 323 1-star reviews.

Sony sold "81,639" PS3 consoles on that unit's launch day.

So if Amazon shipped 81,639 PS _4_ consoles, this would be a failure rate of 4.0 units per 1000, or 0.4%.

Microsoft noted at one point during the Xbox 360 launch that the industry standard failure rate was between 3 and 5%.

Presuming that same 3-5% is the failure rate for the PS4, and that 100% of DOA customers posted a 1-star comment, Amazon sold between 6,460 and 10,766 PS4 units.

I would hope the failure rate is closer to 0.4% than to 4.0%, but I can't even hazard a guess at Amazon's sales volume, so this is where the hard numbers stop.

(ps. I didn't check my math closely and I'm walking out the door, feel free to correct me in replies and I'll edit later to reflect.)

<comment><USER24> Re: 'Industry standard' error rate.

I admittedly haven't worked in manufacturing at anything even resembling that scale, but I did spend a summer working for a company that assembled, sold, and installed PCs to local small businesses and (particularly) school districts. A 4-5% failure rate, at the point of installation, would have been absolutely inconceivable in that job.

Sure, there were _lots_ of failures, most caused by assembly errors, some caused by damage during assembly, some due to component failures, but the _vast_ majority were caught before the trucks were loaded. One guy with a rolling swivel chair and several industrial-sized KVM switches can verify that 500 _(what you might expect for several computer labs across a single school district, for school districts the size we were dealing with)_ or so PCs will more or less work in really just a few minutes. I would assert that this sort of manual sanity checking is the sort of operation that is embarrassingly parallelizable too. Two people can check a batch of 1000 just as fast as one person can check 500. 20 people should be able to do 10,000.

And this was a small operation. Were we larger, it may have made sense to look into more automation.

Between those checks, and when they were hauled into schools and plugged in? Nothing much about a tractor trailer ride is going to make a PC go DOA.

So I guess my question is, what sort of QA are they doing at the factory to get a 4-5% DOA rate? Or if the QA is fine, what the hell is happening during the shipping? Are the devices overly fragile? If they are being damaged during shipping, could the same damage occur in the home?

<comment><USER25> Not that this happened with my fiancé's PS4, but OnTrac (a CA/NV? local carrier that Amazon often uses) has employees with an infuriating habit of throwing packages over gates.

And I don't mean soft padded envelopes that really won't suffer from being thrown over the gate, but boxes including (from the last six months) computer equipment, a sunrise alarm clock, glass canning jars, bottles containing liquids, and more. hurled about 8 feet (to clear the gate) and down onto the stone behind it. The place I lived at before, they threw a box hard enough to leave a mark on the door. Then I have to waste my time complaining to OnTrac and Amazon about the broken glass and non-functioning equipment and return and replace it hoping the next delivery guy doesn't screw it up. Some days I feel like Amazon uses too much padding for something so trivial, and then I realize I have to deal with OnTrac and then there cannot be enough padding for my packages.

I will not be surprised at all if the DOA rate takes into account factors like that.

<comment><USER26> OnTrac likes to just leave packages in front of my door. On Market Street in San Francisco and mark the packages signed by "Door." Once in a while they'll ring the doorbell, but often I'll just find it there. So far, no one has stolen anything, but boy does it make me nervous.

<comment><USER25> Oh man. I live on Market too. OnTrac has done that same exact thing before, and sometimes I only discover it because someone passing on the street or a neighbor rings my doorbell to let me know I have a box outside. They also don't seem to be able to read, as they will accidentally deliver packages to xx30 when we're xx20 and vice versa.

I hate them so much. I go out of my way to leave terrible feedback for shipping on every OnTrac package I get at this point. Their reps keep telling me they're not going to do it any more and still it's such terrible service that I would cancel Prime membership if it wasn't for most packages being delivered by UPS/FedEx/USPS.

<comment><USER27> Here on the East coast we have LaserShip, which sounds like pretty much the same deal. They once delivered my package to a city 30 miles away to a family with a completely different name. Amazon loves to use them here too. It's a bit distressing that they don't exercise better oversight over their shippers, given how central that is to their business model.

<comment><USER28> I have had lasership make mistakes couple of times (dropping of at the neighbors, claiming no answer when never attempted).. I complained to amazon about the shipping and I have not received any shipment from them via Lasership after that. I am a prime member though. (not sure if that changes)..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> There appears to be multiple issues going on that are probably all being filed under the console being bricked. HDMI seems to be causing problems where the console won't show a picture but everything internally is still working. There is also a safe mode you can go into that is fixing the issue for some. And finally there are some that are really just bricked which is probably accurate to the 0.4% rate that Sony claimed.

Also FWIW I received one from Amazon and everything worked fine out of the box.

<comment><USER29> From an Amazon review:

You can return it to Amazon or Call Sony @ 1(800)345-7669 to schedule a replacement. Mine is broken like everyone elses.

If your console light turns white (and doesn't get stuck at pulsating blue), it could be the HDMI cable or connection issue. Fix with a pin (see Kotaku's article).

If it stays blue and pulsates, try safe mode (turn off system completely, then hold down power for 10 sec and wait till you hear beeps). From here Sony can help you troubleshoot if you wanted to call in. If it wont even boot to safe mode, it's bricked. You can try to troubleshoot on your own if you're adventurous: 1\. Hold down power button until the unit powers off and the light goes out. This took about 10 seconds. 2\. From power off, enter Safe Mode by holding down the power button until you hear beeps. Release power button after the second beep. The Safe Mode menu will appear with a list of options. 3\. Select Option 4 to restore PS4 to factory defaults. Once it's done, the system will restart. 4\. In our case, after the reboot, the PS4 automatically entered Safe Mode. This time, they had us select Option 6 to Initialize the PS4. Note that by doing this, you will lose profiles and settings so just be aware that you are basically starting over. Once it's done, the system will restart. 5\. When the PS4 comes back up, it will take you through the initial setup again as if it's being booted for the first time.

If you can't get the PS4 to boot into safe mode, it's not your HDMI port. it's an internal issue and you'll have to send it to Sony to be fixed.

<comment><USER30> This is the article relating to the pin:

[http://kotaku.com/tips-for-using-the- playstation-4-146522878...](http://kotaku.com/tips-for-using-the- playstation-4-1465228783)

"A thin piece of metal in the port got raised when we put an HDMI cable in—at least that's what we think happened. A Sony official fixed the unit by pushing the metal down with a pin."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> That's just how Xbox people think.

[http://www.southparkstudios.com/full- episodes/s17e07-black-f...](http://www.southparkstudios.com/full- episodes/s17e07-black-friday)

<comment><USER32> Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> At least you know right away that they're dead.

It'd be more annoying 6 months down the road.

<comment><USER14> Or worse, the Xbox 360 RROD issue, which was an _inevitable_ ticking time bomb that could blow at any time.

<comment><USER34> Idk, I've never had that happen, while some people have had it happen over and over. From my perspective, it doesn't seem any more inevitable than the console becoming obsolete.

<comment><USER35> Really? I've had that happen on five different units I (or my brothers) have owned. Given, after our first "new" one rrod'd, we started buying refurbs. From what I've seen, though, it really is inevitable, and I've just started expecting them to die at some random point. My current one has lasted two years, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Amazon's packaging also seems to leave something to be desired: [http://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/1qrawl/this_is_how_my_b...](http://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/1qrawl/this_is_how_my_box_arrived_from_amazon_it_is_no/).

<comment><USER37> Official Amazon packaging video from that Reddit thread shows problem with lack of cushioning on bottom:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSHX- iHJEWM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSHX-iHJEWM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> There may well be widespread issues but this link just shows that some people have issues which given the volume of PS4s was kind of a given.

</comment><comment><USER39> If the failure rate was as high as the Amazon reviews suggest it seems like there would be more news about this even from the mainstream non-tech media by now. Lots of people get pretty fanatical about video game brands so I personally wouldn't trust any of the Amazon reviews good or bad. Remember Amazon allows anyone to write a review of any product -- purchased or not.

<comment><USER40> > there would be more news about this even from the mainstream non-tech media > by now.

"By now"? It's one day after release on a weekend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> There are some rumors claiming that interns at Foxconn sabotaged a few PS4s: [http://corruptedcartridge.com/ps4-sabotaged- news/](http://corruptedcartridge.com/ps4-sabotaged-news/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Was it better on previous models ? I wonder Sony isn't suffering from off- sourcing issues. Instead of in-house easily controlled circuitry, the cheaper off-the-shelf approach might cause higher rates of failures.

</comment><comment><USER43> Seems like the fact they sold 1 million units in 24 hours in NA alone should put these DOA failures into perspective. It's a tiny, tiny number of consoles not working vs those that are.

</comment><comment><USER44> Don't they do burn-in tests on consoles so they know it works before it ships?

</comment><comment><USER45> If this is the ps4 launch imagine the xbox one...

</comment><comment><USER46> So rushing to stand on the cutting edge might result in bloody feet - <USER2> thunk it?

<comment><USER47> I don't think something as super-mass-market as a gaming console qualifies as "cutting edge". (You could make an argument for the PS3's Cell processor, I suppose, but that's hardly relevant here.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> doesnt this happen release cycle ?

</comment><comment><USER49> MS PR in action?

They've got previous: [http://m.slashdot.org/story/181735](http://m.slashdot.org/story/181735)</comment>


We Need to Literally Declare War on Climate Change - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/135684/declare-war-climate-change-mobilize-wwii?utm=350org <comment><USER2> How's that war on drugs going?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great for private prisons!</comment></comment>


Tell HN: Phone numbers are reused by telecoms as early as within 30 days - <AUTHOR> Reminder since government and companies are going backward here using phone number as the only verification point for logging you into sensitive services.
I got a new phone number few days ago and I can actually access someone else's account on a few apps.
(Not to mention, I have been getting spammed by everyone the guy signed their number to. Gonna switch the sim.)
Telecoms here also deactivate your number if you don't recharge it within like few months which I got close to. I almost always use wifi and being dual sim, I never needed to recharge the other one. <comment><USER2> Which country?</comment>


Stock market's eerie parallels to September 2007 should raise recession fears - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/stock-markets-eerie-parallels-to-september-2007-should-raise-recession-fears-2019-09-18?mod=mw_theo_homepage <comment><USER2> There is no question that pattern recognition is important in financial markets, as similar market conditions frequently cause participants to employ similar strategies in an attempt to get good trading results.

Having said that, U.S. business networks bring analysts on who will say something like the following, "Of the six times we found that similar conditions existed since 19-whatever, four times this was the result, one time this was the result, and the other time this was the result."

See [https://www.cnbc.com/kensho/](https://www.cnbc.com/kensho/) for examples of such analysis.</comment>


Funny or Die's Matt Klinman: "Facebook has destroyed independent digital comedy" - <AUTHOR> http://splitsider.com/2018/02/how-facebook-is-killing-comedy/ <comment><USER2> I agree very much with the interviewee that Facebook is a cultural wasteland, that provides one of the most enervating experiences on the internet.

I think as a young person he doesn't realize how it was a cultural anomaly that small time content producers could make money through independent production of mass media.

Historically, from the development of mass media as an actual business category, getting your content distributed at all was tightly controlled by corporate "gate keepers" and was frankly a far more limiting situation for content creators of all stripes.

I do find it remarkable that Facebook has figured out a way to obtain the vast majority of the add revenue for the content that streams through their platform.

There are some unique aspects to the current structure, compared to earlier media business structures, that come from the incredible scope these advertising driven platforms have built.

Ultimately, I do think it's a "tragedy of the commons"situation, or at least a variation, where the market structure prevents optimal payments flowing to the creators, who are in fact appreciated by many. The only way around this would be some form of class organization by creators, a syndicate, Union, coop, cartel, something.

The problem is that such a structure will be worked around by the many hungry and talented people out there who will sacrifice far more than you can believe for the chance to practice their craft.

<comment><USER3> I'm not saying the current system is perfect, but a lot of these "gate keepers" are performing useful functions. Particularly for things like books and movies a major publisher or distributor gives some level of quality assurance. They also handle a bunch of stuff that you wouldn't expect an author or independent filmmaker to be good at.

<comment><USER4> A good critic or festival programmer provides far more signal about quality than a publisher or distributor ever does.

Sometimes gatekeepers are providing specialized services that creators might not be good at or interested in.

In any event, Facebook manages to insert itself as a middle man while simultaneously lowering quality.

<comment><USER3> I meant that having a publisher or distributor provides a lower bound for quality, not that it indicates high quality. There's plenty of crap published by legitimate publishers and plenty of movies not worth watching. But the quality is even worse among the people who self-publish (talking about averages obviously, not outliers).

And for books critics typically only review books from established publishers. Films might be a bit better in terms of allowing unknown directors to be discovered because of independent film festivals, but the barrier to entry is obviously higher.

I agree about Facebook though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I always enjoy reading the opinions of people who aren't in tech. It always reminds me how little the world really understands the devices and programs they run every single day and how much of a bubble I live in. At the point where he said there should be a law that recommendations need to be made by humans it's like dude, there're 2 billion people using this site, that ship has sailed, we're at tragedy of the commons-level shit right now. I do agree with him for the most part though, I just can't see a solution other than users not using Facebook anymore or somehow banding together and forcing the recommendation engine to show us higher quality content by only clicking on higher quality content which is a sadly far-fetched idea at this point. I can only hope that people start to limit themselves.

<comment><USER6> Facebook just persists on the inertia of the network effect its leveraging. The only thing that will ever stop them is actual updates to anti-trust laws to stay in step with the current state of the industry.

It's bullshit that a single company should get to pick winners and losers in the economy. We get squeamish about allowing our (barely) democratically elected government do that so I don't understand why proponents of free- markets think it's fine to let an unaccountable corporate entity exert the same kind of influence.

<comment><USER7> > The only thing that will ever stop them is actual updates to anti-trust laws > to stay in step with the current state of the industry.

It's silly to think that only government intervention could change the status quo. Who do you know under 40 who likes using Facebook? They are susceptible to competition from the market, like everyone else. Ask IBM and GE how quickly ubiquity can evaporate.

<comment><USER6> They're big enough to buy out any actually threatening competitors. A duopoly or a small oligopoly aren't much better.

As for IBM or GE, buddy it took almost an entire generation for their stranglehold to break down, and in fields with much lower barriers to entry than this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> He didn't articulate it well but the issue is the lack of organic reach given to page posts these days. Facebook has decided that fan page owners should pay to access their own fans - which negates the entire point of having a page or fans in the first place.

The issue for Facebook is that as more and more publishers leave because they are getting no organic traffic, people will spend less time there. So this whole money grab may eventually backfire on them. If all publishers leave and only the social functions are left, is Facebook as attractive anymore?

This is of course anecdotal, but many of my friends have not posted on there in years, and the ones that have average a post or update maybe every few months. That's hardly worth sticking around for unless other interesting things remain in the ecosystem. I'd say that while people are jumping ship, 2018-2019 might be the first time that it is at least within the realm of possibility that someone could start a viable Facebook competitor. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.

<comment><USER9> This is one of the reason why e-mail is still relevant in marketing: no gatekeepers asking you to pay for access to your audience.

<comment><USER10> Modulo that the email marketing companies (such as MailChimp) that most successfully navigate the harsh waters of spam folder avoidance with the major email providers, enough that you can mostly assume your audience receives the marketing emails, are themselves approaching something of a monopsony and are in the process of becoming gatekeepers asking you to pay for access to your audience.

<comment><USER9> You absolutely have a point, but the dynamics are different. Multiple such companies compete to be your e-mail sender. No one is competing with Facebook to receive money from companies who believed they could reach their audiences inside Facebook.

<comment><USER10> Sorry, didn't intend to derail here with whataboutism, was thinking about unrelated problems to the ones at hand in this article. There are too many hard problems to deal with right now, and we can't fight them all at once, presumably.

Anyway, you are right, walled gardens are always going to be harder to fix than the network dynamics of what should be a more open and decentralized system than is maybe presently the case in practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This whole debate seems to be missing the point. There has never been a world where independent content creators have been able to monetize what they do on a massive scale and collect most of the revenue.

At a large scale, the owners of the distribution eat most of the pie. That's true because of basic comparative advantage and the advantages of scale even though they are entirely dependent on the individual content creators to get anything at all from their distribution. If the content creator wants to collect most/all of the revenue, the pie is small.

<comment><USER12> No, he's saying the internet upended the old funnel model by providing democratized global distribution to anyone, but now Facebook has not only largely reversed progress, they've done worse by profiteering on content they've assumed effectively zero cost, risk, or effort in distributing.

Furthermore, they've destabilized democratic societies and radicalized neighbor against neighbor (speaking locally & globally.) Again, all the while, profiting from their carelessness, suffering few, if any, meaningful consequences.

<comment><USER11> Sure, but that's fundamentally untrue. Facebook has gone to considerable effort and cost and taken great risk to build their network so that they can then monetize content that gets distributed on their platform.

I'm not a fan of Facebook btw, but just that the argument the guy is making fails on basic economics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The way I see it isn't Facebook that's killing comedy, it's the internet itself killing ways to monetize online comedy.

The guy considers memes to be the future of internet comedy, well there are millions of people making them for free. And that just makes it harder for someone to monetize comedy. Additionally, all this free content being consumed by peoples is eating in the market share of more serious (professional?) sites like Funny or Die and the Onion.

<comment> Tech-Noir He's not saying memes are the future of comedy, he's complaining that people are making jokes for free:

> the whole point of [Pitch] is to pay people for jokes because I hated seeing > people just giving work away for free

Perhaps people _want_ to crack jokes for free, because it makes them feel good. Not everyone wants to monetize basic human interaction.

If anything is killing anything it's _monetization uber alles_.

So instead of people cracking jokes on internet forums or their local pub, he'd prefer it if they confined their material to his app instead, so he can financially benefit from it.

That's the thing about a lot of Facebook haters. They don't really hate Facebook, they hate that they're not Facebook.

<comment><USER14>
      If anything is killing anything it's
      monetization uber alles.

I believe the traditional logic is:

1\. X is good.

2\. To achieve the best X, we should allow our best X people to dedicate their lives to it full time.

3\. That means paying and equipping them, which needs revenue.

4\. Therefore things that increase our revenue are good and things that decrease our revenue are bad.

where X is almost anything in the entertainment industry, and quite a few things outside it too.

<comment><USER15> Ain't it funny though when people are for of a free market when it works in their favor, but against it when it doesn't? I.e. when you undercut someone else's price, that's a market miracle! When someone undercuts you, that's a race to the bottom, and a clear sign of the end of the golden age...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The problem is that facebook changed their business model (so you have to pay for people to see your content - he calls it payola), and a lot of content providers did not change their business models away from expecting free publicity from facebook. Really, all funny or die needed to do is to switch to a mailing list-type setup, where they actually can reach their customers without paying auction prices for every message. They should basically have given up on facebook as a means of reaching new customers, except for signing people up to their mailing list-type setup, and then trimmed operations to work at whatever scale that business could support, with the knowledge that they could grow that operation on a monthly basis to eclipse their facebook viewership.

More content providers need to recognize that facebook sees their relationship as being zero sum, and that facebook controls all the cards in their own game, so it doesnt matter how many impressions/views you can get from facebook - they are the ones who benefit. You get to pay content generation costs.

<comment><USER17> I think it is a lot more fundamental than this. Facebook spent _years_ building the unsexy stuff : a delivery platform that reaches eyeballs. Not only it works but it dwarfs all other delivery platforms.

It was being _laughed_ at by all serious content creators who thought they had avenue, the content and the brand loyalty. Now we clearly know that there's only one Facebook and there are tons of content creators and those content creators are 100% interchangeable according to the general public as the layoffs in content creator space indicate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _The other solution, which seems crazy, is for there to be a meta organizing > campaign, where media companies band together and refuse to post on > Facebook, essentially going on strike and withholding their labor until they > are compensated._

But why are media companies still posting on FB today, if they don't get compensated for it?? What's the point? Eyeballs with no revenue??

Still, it seems many Youtube personalities are still making money from the videos they post on YT. Why can't others do the same?

<comment><USER19> > Eyeballs with no revenue?

Presumably so. Recognition/fame/having a loyal following are going to be of great value to modern stand-up comedians. I imagine Facebook's non-monetized videos are more of an issue for someone using online videos as their primary source of revenue (i.e. YouTube personalities).

My understanding is that the music industry has been that way ever since music recordings could be published - top musicians make most of their money from performances, and only a small amount from royalties, but without the recordings they'd never have the large performances.

<comment><USER20> Actually the Grateful Dead pioneered this approach. People thought they were crazy giving recordings away.

<comment><USER21> Which works if you have a secondary method of making money (live shows, merch) which I doubt a lot of people making short comedy videos do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Tech-Noir Unlike others here, I don't sympathise with this at all, so this may be unpopular with some people.

The complaint however seems to be: "we wanted Facebook to serve our interests, but Facebook wanted to serve their own interests for some inexplicable reason, so they suck".

I loathe Facebook and think the internet and the world would be a better place without it. I also - for that reason - _don 't fucking use it_ (support it) and certainly don't work on content and then put it on Facebook, because it's bleedin' obvious you don't get to 1.5 billion users by supporting other sites.

To cap it all, after all his whining, he's _still_ a Facebook user to this day, simply kidding himself that he's sticking it to the man by impotently criticising it. As if anyone at Facebook cares what you do, so long as you do it on Facebook.

Facebook is - still - not the internet. If you don't like Facebook, don't use it, and definitely don't put your hard work there.

Meanwhile, if people stop visiting your site, maybe look closer to home instead of trying to lay the blame elsewhere.

He's basically a million other dinosaurs who had early success with something and is now reduced to self-pity about the 'good old days' because his 15 minutes are up, and people have moved on to something else.

Funny or die? Adapt or die.

<comment><USER22> Your are twisting what the person said and then presented it in different way to make it look awful. His main point was that, facebook is getting all the profit instead of content creators. And they are getting sacked. Your comments are derogatory in this topic.

<comment><USER23> But who's forcing the Funny or Die guy to put content on Facebook?

<comment><USER24> Nobody, but if they didn't then somebody else would put their content on Facebook and claim the income.

<comment><USER25> How does somebody like NetFlix deal with it? (E.g. a half hour show Standups.[1])

Does a pirate post the Netflix clip and therefore Facebook+pirate make money off of it? Or does Netflix issue a DMCA takedown so fast that it's a non issue?

(I realize that FunnyOrDie is voluntarily placing their show on the Facebook platform (and also _paying_ Facebook to place their content there) ... but let's hypothesize what options FunnyOrDie has to keep their content off of Facebook.)

[1] [https://www.netflix.com/title/80175685](https://www.netflix.com/title/80175685)

<comment><USER24> I guess either Netflix's legal department gets on it or, more likely, the reuploader makes money off it.

According to [1], "Of the videos on Facebook, 72.5% are pirated. "According to a recent report from Ogilvy and Tubular Labs, of the 1,000 most popular Facebook videos of Q1 2015, 725 were stolen reuploads," says Hank Green. "Just these 725 'freebooted' videos were responsible for around 17 BILLION views last quarter."

Admittedly that's 2015, entirely unfactchecked by me and (I've just learned) Facebook now has some new rights management tools, not sure how the land lies right now.

[1] [https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-freebooting- wha...](https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-freebooting-what- marketers-need-to-know/)

<comment><USER21> They are doing exactly what YouTube did to begin with, "suffer" high levels of piracy to get people using the platform, slowly bring in tools to combat the piracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How about a federated subscription? Form some kind of single login subscription model that supports several websites that are not necessarily corporately affiliated. The more sites in your federation the more clout it has. It could follow the fremium model to not turn everyone away yet allow the majority of good content to have a monitary return. I see this as an another potential answer to declining newspaper quality. The interent hasn't broken the law that says you get what you pay for.

<comment><USER27> I think you just described flattr or patreon.

<comment><USER26> Thanks for that. I wonder why it isn't interesting for major newspapers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I feel like the whole LEAN mindset is also pushing this. Everyone is metrics, everyone is stats, you chase the numbers and fail to realise you might be making all your users miserable yet trapped.

</comment><comment><USER29> "I was just angry and frustrated and sad that you can't make cool shit for the internet anymore and make a living".

The internet existed before people made money from it. Plenty of cool shit back then.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think saying it destroyed independent digital comedy is extremely incorrect.

Memes have taken off and are now the primary form of digital comedy. They're cheap to create and distribute(both photo and video forms). Memes are alive and well and very much a form indepdent digital comedy. Memes are wildly popular.

Sometimes, most of the time?, memes are funnier than longer form digital content.

I think Funny or Die didn't evolve quick enough so wants to place the blame on Facebook and while I think some of what he says is undeniable true, how do you explain memes?

</comment><comment><USER31> I quit facebook years ago for this reason. Many people quit facebook for privacy reasons my main reason to quit was that facebook was consuming the open web. Where many businesses etc were using facebook as their main web presence. It allowed them to have low cost web presence but to me this was going to lead to death of the open web.

</comment><comment><USER32> i wonder if someone has researched the eternal september problem in depth to prove if there is or there isn't a solution.

<comment><USER33> The solution for colleges was to only allow a limited number of admissions at one point in the year. Perhaps that could work again, have some number of spots to be filled that is a fraction of the current population and prioritize applicants based on their ability to perform some action such as writing a coherent essay or proving some stake in the community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> s/Comedy/Online short-format video content/g.

Facebook desperately needs to fix this situation - they've grossly mishandled their video solution in order to try to beat YouTube, and it's costing content creators billions. I can't imagine it will be too much longer before these people figure out a legal class and file a blockbuster lawsuit over it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Time for Steemit and D.tube

</comment><comment><USER36> > they are favoring things that are clickbait, things that are optimized for > Facebook, low-quality things that appeal to the lowest common denominator > and, honestly, just things at random

Isn't that the Internet nowadays? I mean the article headline is a good example. The correct version might have been more explanatory about the content like "interview with" or "Funny or Die lays off" or even about "online comedy" but they still went for a more click baity headline about Facebook killing all the comedy in the world.

</comment><comment><USER19> TL;DR: Comedy isn't dying - that's just clickbait bullshit - but Facebook is making it difficult for independent comedy websites to survive, and content- producers can't monetize.

The article fails to distinguish the web from the Internet.

Interesting read, though. I would've thought it would be in Facebook's interest to become a good 'hub' for comedy. Maybe things will improve. (Ideally of course, things wouldn't 'improve' in the direction of silos like Facebook.)

<comment><USER37> > Interesting read, though. I would've thought it would be in Facebook's > interest to become a good 'hub' for comedy.

It is in Facebook's interest. I'm sure Facebook would be willing to spend money to make Facebook offer a better comedy experience for their users. But why would they pay comedy producers when plenty of equally high-quality comedy is submitted there without them paying anything? As for offering a consistent interface, that's a feature rather than a bug, and as a Facebook user it's one I appreciate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Another way I think Facebook is killing comedy is the outrage every time a comedian makes an edgy joke. I recognise this isn't solely caused by or limited to Facebook, but social networking is definitely a contributing factor.

<comment><USER39> I don't know if you're referencing anything specific, but comedians being edgy has never been an issue. Comedians being edgy to cover for their lack of humor is.

I've never been offended by a topic, but I have cringed at a lot of extremely bad jokes.

<comment><USER40> Top comedians seem to disagree with your absolute assertion.

[https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/10/living/seinfeld-comedy- colleg...](https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/10/living/seinfeld-comedy-colleges- feat/index.html)

Also, I seemed to have missed that vote that granted you the role of humor police, judging all that is and is not funny.

<comment><USER39> The point of an algorithm is it can work regardless of what values you put into it (my opinion or someone elses).

It's entirely possible that I don't have a good/common/high brow/low brow/whatever sense of humor (though I obviously think I have a great one), but the entire point I was making was:

Am I as a comedian approaching this subject in the service of my joke/keen insight, or am I doing it for shock value/to be "edgy"?

I guess the audience can never truly know, but that doesn't change the fact that it is often varying degrees of obvious.

<comment><USER38> That sounds like how a developer would approach comedy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> > It's the Jurassic Park lesson: Just because you can do something doesn't > mean you should.

I sympathize with the main point in the article. But this statement is stupid in the extreme. You should do everything you can.

<comment><USER42> I'm pretty sure you can jump off a high building, but I would not recommend that you actually do it.</comment></comment>


Earpod Apple online store reviews - <AUTHOR> http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD827/apple-earpods-with-remote-and-mic High reviews for new earpods <comment><USER2> I bought a pair yesterday, and in my opinion they really are that good.</comment>


Differentiable Image Parameterizations - <AUTHOR> https://distill.pub/2018/differentiable-parameterizations <comment><USER2> Hi! I'm one of the authors. We'd be happy to answer any questions. :)

<comment><USER3> Hi colah3, I was wondering how you're able to propagate the gradient through the renderer. What I mean is:

f(X,Y,Z) = (x,y) (Mapping from 3D to 2D using renderer)

g(x,y) = (u,v) (mapping xy and uv)

h(x,y) = (r,g,b) (actual rendered image)

p(u,v) = (r,g,b) (texture map image)

gradient from upper layer is going to be wrt h(x,y) - dL/dh(x,y). How do you propagate this to get dL/dp ?

(Please let me know if this is explained in detail somewhere. Thanks!)</comment></comment>


California is ready to recognize a third gender - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/california-non-binary-gender-identity-recognition?utm_term=.oaYYavdJ0z&ref=mobile_share#.daXORx6oyK <comment><USER2> Is there a reason why gender is so important to demographics/government bodies in general? What would be the downsides of just not caring at all about this information, just like we don't care at all about so many other pieces of information that people consider a core part of their identity?

Given how complicated the biological reality of it all is (see [0]), why try to model it at all? This seems like a case where we desperately try to make neat categories for the data to fit because we really like having neatly defined labels for everything, even though it just ends up more confusing in the end.

Curious to hear any thoughts on this.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a reason it's very important to me (and thus part of why I submitted it): my whole life, people have expressed confusion about whether I was male or female, regardless of how I was dressed or attempting to present at the time. I'm biologically male (in terms of plumbing; I have no idea about my genetics) but it doesn't matter whether I've been a long-haired hippy, or wearing a conservative haircut and dressed in a business suit. One time I went into a menswear store to purchase a tie, while wearing a suit and carrying my briefcase (I worked for a very conservative accountancy firm at the time), and the salesperson asked 'can I help you madam?' with no trace of mockery or irony. Even at times when I've had a beard people had questioned whether I was a woman transitioning to a man or a lesbian in drag.

Episodes like that are harmless and often amusing, but people's confusion frequently manifests in more negative ways. I've really lost count of the times people have come up to me on public transit or crossed the street not just to ask, but to _demand_ that I dispel their confusion about whether I was male or female. I'm not a flamboyant or extroverted person that dresses in flashy clothes or engages in provocative behavior, and often my inability to give a clear answer on demand was the result of startlement as much as disinclination. On maybe 10 different occasions I've been physically attacked, without warning or provocation, and not because of being in some atypical environment like a nightclub with drunken patrons, but in broad daylight just walking down the street.

As regards my unwillingness to state this, it's not rooted in politics or anything like that. I grew up in quite a conservative environment, but from a very young age I was conscious of not being like other boys, or wanting to be. Of course I was subject to a lot of homophobic slurs in school, but this never bothered my too much - partly because I'm not homosexual and partly because it was so long ago (I'm 46) and in a conservative place (the west of Ireland) that I wasn't aware of homosexuality or any homosexual people and so didn't have any strong opinions about it as a child. Int he 1980s I became more aware of it from television and shifts in the cultural landscape and as soon as I was old enough I lit out for London. Though I joked with my first girlfriend about me being a lesbian, I really didn't have any reference points for my gender ambiguity, and not being homosexual I never got very involved in that social scene. I'm not transgender either - I thought seriously about the idea and researched it as I gradually became aware of the issue, but that didn't seem like the right fit either and since I like sex I didn't want to take on the risks of sexual reassignment surgery in case it messed up my ability to enjoy that.

So I was resigned to just being a sort of in-between unclassifiable person. I can't do anything about the shape of my face or my body type (I'm 5'8" and 125 pounds despite being very fit and able to lift my own body weight). Most clothes I buy require alteration to fit properly, so for the last few years I've just given up and wear stretchy ygoa garments the whole time. I always identified as male for bureaucratic administrative purposes because it was just simpler and easier, and trying to to explain my personal oddity to bored bureaucrats simply didn't seem worth the effort. It was rather depressing and psychically exhausting, but I just accepted it as my bad luck, to the point of not even bothering to bring it up with psychiatrists I've consulted for depression or other problems. I'm not that gregarious so I've never been part of a social scene where there were a lot of peers to discuss it with, and up to today I've only discussed it any detail with maybe 5 people in my whole life.

I had no awareness of this pending legislation and just sumbled across it today by chance, but after picking my jaw off the floor I immedaitely contacted my state senator and asked her to support it (and if you live in California, I'd be very grateful if you'd take 5 minutes to do the same: [http://www.ca.gov/Agencies/Secretary-of-State/Agency- Service...](http://www.ca.gov/Agencies/Secretary-of-State/Agency- Services/Look-Up-My-Representatives)).

 _This seems like a case where we desperately try to make neat categories for the data to fit because we really like having neatly defined labels for everything, even though it just ends up more confusing in the end._

That's ironically amusing to me, having spent my entire life being put into neat categories when I never asked to be classified as one thing or the other at all, and derived no measurable benefit from it. If it helps, perhaps you could think of this proposed new category as equivalent to 'decline to state.'

It won't make that much practical difference in my life - I'll still get queried on a regular basis and occasionally hassled or assaulted for my ambiguous appearance, regardless of any choices I make about how to present myself; again I have no control over my facial features and body type unless I throw down large sums of money for major cosmetic surgery and hormonal treatments (in either direction) that I don't want in the first place. But I would very quite happy to receive some official acknowledgement of how I exist in the world. I hope this sheds some light on the subject, which I agree is quite difficult to fathom for the majority of people.

<comment><USER2> Just to be clear, I absolutely include "male" and "female" in my remark about making arbitrary categories; my interrogation was concerning why not make it "decline to state" for everyone by default.

Thank you for taking the time to write and share this.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome. I don't really know the history of how these categories got formalized, I suppose it goes back to the origin of passports or somesuch. Now you've gone and piqued my curiosity :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good. This makes a massive difference to those it affects.

</comment><comment><USER4> What a waste of time and money for everyone

</comment><comment><USER5> I've always identified myself as non-binary, but I have no problem with selecting 'female' in questionnaires, because that is what my parts are. Unless you had a surgery or a genetic disorder (is it possible even?), it is binary and objective, disregard the feelings. So what is the fuss about? Some teenagers's hormone freak-out?

</comment><comment><USER6> ...but what about a fourth gender? Or a fifth?

</comment><comment><USER7> What is it, "it?"

<comment><AUTHOR> You could read it as both, neither, prefer not to say, or whatever you prefer. I posted elsewhere on the thread about my own experience, and I don't have strong preferences about what pronouns people use. Where I grew up the 'singular they' was a common pronoun that existed long before gender politics were A Thing, as in 'I saw someone walking down the street and then they got into a car and drove away.' Hope this helps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems California really has it's priorities together.

<comment><USER9> Governments are huge organizations that handle many things, and is full of many different departments. It's not like someone was going to fix the drought today but got tied up with this instead.

<comment><USER10> Very true, but think of all the litter on beach that wasn't collected instead.</comment></comment></comment>


HTML5 and CSS3 Advent Calendar - <AUTHOR> http://html5advent2011.digitpaint.nl

<comment><AUTHOR> We're looking for more cool examples. So if you have suggestion, please tell us!</comment>


Zillow CEO: We wasted too much time on social networking - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/11/04/amid-roaring-successes-zillow-and-yelp-ceos-reflect-on-stumbles/

<comment><USER2> I agree with him in regards to selling your house. More than likely your social circle isn't going to be the one buying your house.

But as a buyer, I sought out my friends advice: anyone have any experience with the neighborhood? The county? The new commute? My friends know what I like to do on the weekends, so they'd be a good second voice on "if you move there, you're an additional 10 miles from the fooble court", etc. When I was buying, I know there were several times my friends brought me back to earth. They kept me grounded.

I can see Redfin benefiting from social more than Zillow...</comment>


Gumroad – Transactions, art, and keyboard mashing - <AUTHOR> http://codeinsider.us/i/3.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have included a bit more of the detail Tuhin told me in the interview, but the Euclidean-distance model for keyboard mashing is part of the fast-fail antifraud layer, - failing fast on email@example.com is cheaper than making a network request to a 3rd party processor to see if the data is valid.</comment>