Ask HN: I am considering leaving my start-up. Should I exercise my options? - <AUTHOR> I am an employee at a privately-controlled start-up. The company has a bright future, but I have been thinking of leaving to pursue other opportunities. I was an early hire, and have been granted options which, after a few rounds of investment and dilution, amount to a few percentage points of the company. The majority of my options have vested, and I could exercise them for an amount in the low five figures.
The company is aiming for an acquisition of at least $100M (and will possibly get much more), and I am optimistic about its chances of achieving that goal in a few years. Thus I feel that my options are potentially very valuable.
Questions:
1) Is it sensible to exercise my options now in this scenario?
2) It is possible that the company will take another round of investment prior to any acquisition. Should I fear that when I'm not around anymore, and the company has no incentive to treat me well, that my ownership will be substantially diluted? Can my future dilution be estimated or protected against?
3) Are there other ways to proceed? For example, should I attempt to get bought out now, somehow?
4) What other questions should I be asking?
If I decide to go down this road, I will seek professional advice, but I thought I would begin by consulting the smart people here on Hacker News. <comment><USER2> Tough call. Let me tell you two stories.

Story one: a friend of mine worked at a startup that lasted ~5 years. He left in year four and exercised his (substantial) options. The company was, as I understood it, pro-forma cash flow positive, in a bright industry. And indeed, just over a year later, they were acquired for many tens of millions of dollars.

Unfortunately, they weren't acquired for enough money to sufficiently offset VC liquidation preferences. To mitigate this problem, the company and its acquirer created an incentive pool to create a fairly decent "earnout-style" return for existing employees. Former employees holding common stock? Zilch.

Story two occurs right around the time I heard story one. A guy joins a startup, sticks around for just shy of four years, leaves with a nice chunk of unexercised options to start another company. "Buy private company common stock and wind up like person one? Never!" Besides, person two needed the money for the new company.

Fast forward five years, and company two is acquired at a... non-negligible... price per share. Person two is out a fairly big chunk of cash. Person two's old boss makes douchey comment on IM! Person two is sad.

Well, for a few seconds; then he's happy his friends did well. He also rationalizes:

* The investment at the time was anything but risk-free, even if the company was acquired.

* It's not like the money didn't get invested; it just got invested in a company that hasn't 10x'd the investment yet.

* The money that would have gone into exercising the options would have been locked up for five years.

Before I bought private company common stock, I'd want to know everything about:

* The number of outstanding shares and as much as possible about the terms the current investors have. What preferences do the VC's have? "We're shooting for 100MM" might be code for "We make fuck all unless we hit 100MM" --- and note that not many companies can pay 100MM for other companies.

* The likelihood of future investment rounds in the company, which will have deliterious effects on the value of your shares.

* How stable and reliable the management team is. Is the current CEO new? Is the company making its numbers?

If it's not "real money", _and_ iff you can't put the same money to good use in your new venture, I'd go ahead and exercise.

</comment><comment><USER3> The kicker here is usually the tax liability depending on your jurisdiction.

Would you be looking at a large tax bill in addition to the cost of the options? If you have to pay taxes based on the current valuation of the company even if you can't sell the shares then exercising becomes that much higher risk.

<comment><USER4> This.

The US tax laws in this respect are retarded; you have to pay taxes at the moment you exercise your options, regardless of whether you can resell them or not. In the previous bubble, it happened that people exercised options that made them tax liable for e.g. $1M (because e.g. an IPO made it worth $5M), but had a lockup of 6-months, which is quite common, and at the end of the lockup period, their stocks were worth less than $1M.

In some other countries, you only pay taxes when you actually see money. That makes a lot more sense.

And, Israel is now considering a new tax law which says an investment into a "startup" (whatever that means) is immediately considered a capital loss. Then, if it makes money, you have capital gain. for large-capital-base angels, it makes cash flow simpler, -- and in fact, if they elect to use it, they'll pay more taxes on their successes at the end. for small-time angels making one or two investments a year, it is a huge difference in cashflow. for the state, it doesn't matter in the long run, because it just gets the capital lost written down sooner than later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's another way to think about it: if you had a pile of cash in the low five figures, would you re-invest it to speculate on that $100M acquisition? Or would you take it and pursue other opportunities?

If the tax implications are ok, can you borrow funds to cover the discounted stock purchase price, sell the stock, pay back the cost basis, keep the profits and don't look back?

<comment><USER6> It's a privately owned company. The stock is worthless. He can't buy it and then flip it on the open market because there is no market.

<comment><USER5> Could he could sell them to another shareholder?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As others are pointing out, options and stock in private companies are, as a rule, worthless. (Unless you're the majority shareholder, and often even then.)

The only protection you have against having your shares be made worthless is that the company wants your ongoing goodwill, because you're a current employee in an acquisition. If you're an ex-employee, you've got no leverage whatsoever.

Suppose you owned 90% of a private company, and an ex-employee who resigned a few years prior owned 10%. You have an acquisition offer. Would YOU structure the deal so that the ex-employee got his 10%? Or would you structure the deal so that he got nothing and you got it all? There's no legal penalty for following either option. I think most of you reading this would invent some sort of rationale for screwing the ex-employee (he didn't stick around when we needed him, he didn't pull his weight, he doesn't deserve this payoff that I worked so hard for...), and would then proceed to do so.

</comment><comment><USER7> _Unfortunately, they weren't acquired for enough money to sufficiently offset VC liquidation preferences. To mitigate this problem, the company and its acquirer created an incentive pool to create a fairly decent "earnout-style" return for existing employees. Former employees holding common stock? Zilch._

This happened to me at the first startup I worked at. I lost $18K, which was about half the money I had at the time.

I don't know what to tell you. My other companies had reverse vesting... but those ended up being worthless as well.

My new rule of thumb is to not spend more than 5% of my cash reserves on an options exercise. (I have a lot more cash now, so this could still be a significant exercise)

</comment><comment><USER8> There's also a non-binary approach -- exercise _some_ of your options (i.e. not 0%, not 100%). Figure out how much money (e.g. $100, $1000, $2500, $10000?) you're comfortable losing entirely should the stock become worthless, and what percentage of your vested options that allows you to exercise, and use that as a starting figure. Then adjust that based on how much more risk you are willing to take because you really think the company will succeed.

</comment><comment><USER9> Has the company already received multiple serious acquisition offers and turned them down? Or at least some very serious interest from big companies? That's often the case with companies that end up selling for >$100M.

If that is the case then it's easy: do it. If they haven't then perhaps you should exercise half them as a hedge against kicking yourself later.

</comment><comment><USER10> you should sell them.... to me</comment>


In Memoriam: Merle Haggard, 1937–2016 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/04/08/merle-haggard-1937-2016/ <comment><USER2> Most anecdotes about pop culture are bullshit. But the one about the implosion of country & western music is very real.

The number of country acts that actually still create music different from pop/rock is so staggeringly small it breaks my heart.

The vast majority are a caricature that play pop with a twang.

That reality makes the loss of folks like Merle Haggard much more pointed. There hasn't been an effective passing of the torch.

It's akin to the loss of the last generation of traditional folk artists in the late 50s.

<comment><USER3> Adding to the list, mostly Texas artists but Guy Clark (leaving us soon), Robert Earl Keen, Slaid Cleaves, James McMurtry, Hayes Carll. These are true storytellers in the vein of Merle and worth looking into.

<comment><USER4> And female artists in a similar vein: Lucinda Williams, Brandi Carlile and Gillian Welch immediately come to mind.

A great site (IMHO) for keeping up with musicians in the style of these guys is Jessie Scott's musicfog.com. Jessie Scott was the program director for X Country on XM, before it was replaced with whatever Sirius runs there now and it was her programming that really expanded my music base (I would likely have never heard of any of these artists if not for X Country).

<comment><USER3> +1 for X Country and Outlaw Country on Sirius. Also, take any artist from the lists above, start a station on Pandora and you will get a wonderful lesson into today's musical storytellers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It didn't seem to be mentioned in the article, but Merle Haggard was there when Johnny Cash played ""Folsom Prison Blues" at San Quentin. That's what inspired him to be a singer:

[http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/inmate-merle- hagg...](http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/inmate-merle-haggard- hears-johnny-cash-play-san-quentin-state-prison)

<comment><USER6> Haggard: "Funny you mention that, Johnny."

Cash: "What?"

Haggard: "San Quentin."

Cash: "Why's that?"

Haggard: "The first time I ever saw you perform, it was at San Quentin."

Cash: "I don't remember you being in that show, Merle."

Haggard: "I was in the audience, Johnny."

[http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct- merle-h...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-merle- haggard-johnny-cash-20160408-story.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The interview he gave along with Sturgill Simpson might have been his last.

[http://gardenandgun.com/article/legend-and- renegade](http://gardenandgun.com/article/legend-and-renegade)

<comment><USER8> NPR's Fresh Air re-ran host Terry Gross's 1995 interview with Haggard last week. Available via podcast or I think this direct link to their embedded player will work: [http://www.npr.org/player/embed/473559002/473559008](http://www.npr.org/player/embed/473559002/473559008)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Americana acts are keeping a pseudo honky-tonk tradition alive, somewhat.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6LsnxaAcgE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6LsnxaAcgE)

"The society that supported it died out."

I'm slowly trying to get some Ernest Tubb and Ray Price on the setlist of the band I'm in but it's a hard sell. These are guys in their forties.

Edit: schpellings</comment>


Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel - <AUTHOR> http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html

<comment><USER2> "Emace: A pretty good operating system, but it could use a better text editor."

I can't trace the source of this quip but I'm glad someone has set out to prove the first part of it...

<comment><USER3> You can't trace it because everyone on the internet has said it at least once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't it possible to do that with any program with no external dependencies?

<comment><USER5> Yes, it is. I've had embedded systems boot straight into busybox like shells for example. Even more fun, the system didn't have a BIOS at all (it was hard wired to just jump into a location in flash, were we placed the Linux second stage boot loader to uncompress the kernel image to RAM, which then executed the shell immediately. Even the shell was really mostly there to aid debugging - in production use it'd immediately spawn the main app for the system.

As long as the kernel has whatever drivers you need compiled in instead of as modules, and as long as your app either doesn't directly or indirectly spawn lots of child processes or if it does it takes care of wait()'ing for them, and as long as you don't need any getty's (without spawning them yourself) there's no problems tearing out everything and replacing it with a self contained static app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is actually a easier way to do this. Pass this parameter while in your boot loader

        init=/usr/bin/emacs-nox

This will fire up emacs instead of init once the kernel is done booting up. You also need mount, but you can run that within emacs.

</comment><comment><USER7> Who would have known... it really is an OS.

<comment><USER8> Lots of Lispers and Smalltalkers would roll their eyes at this. (Some CS research history: Both those languages _were_ OS.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Single threaded OS?

<comment><USER10> M-x shell or M-!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You could use vim as init as well, it just wouldn't be as much fun, since you couldn't do any programming.

<comment><USER12> Actually, vim has a programming language built in to it: vimscript. So you could certainly program from it.

And that's not to mention the various other programming language interfaces vim has. If you've compiled vim with the right options, you could use Perl, Python, Ruby, or Lua from within vim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sounds about perfect for netbookin'.

<comment><USER14> except you'd have a devil of a time dealing with wireless networks</comment></comment>


Incremental Clojure log classification: rationale and libraries used - <AUTHOR> https://www.queuemetrics.com/blog/2017/04/18/Clojure-for-log-analytics/index.html?lid=H008 <comment><USER2> Did not know about Clash. Will look into it.</comment>


KISSMetrics or Mixpanel? Why I Made the Decision Before Seeing the Product - <AUTHOR> http://matchist.com/blog/mixpanel-or-kissmetrics-why-i-made-the-decision-before-seeing-the-product/

<comment><USER2> If you're wanting/demanding a meeting or call the next day and that's your main decision making point, I imagine that you might be a high-demand customer.

Also, maybe KISSMetrics make themselves this initially available to everyone - which is why they have the time to respond quickly to you initially, but then backend support is slower. Or all levels of their support are good because they're an older company and have had time to evolve to that.

You can't really know.

MixPanel did respond in the same day, they just weren't available immediately.

<comment><AUTHOR> this is one data point regarding how initial perceptions of customer service can influence buyer decisions.</comment></comment>


Does Working From Home Work? Evidence From a Chinese Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://www.econ.brown.edu/econ/events/bloom.pdf <comment><USER2> As someone who has mostly worked from home for the past decade:

1) Really long commutes for the sake of my butt keeping a seat warm to keep a manager happy are dealbreakers. I have never made such a job work out for me. At the most recent example, my brief position at Google involved a 1-hour commute each way only to spend 8-10 hours in a dead-silent office, where no one significantly interacted and for which I was forbidden to telecommute by my mostly absentee manager, ever. Loved the food and the gym though.

2) Working at home 3-4 days a week is productivity Nirvana for me leading to patents, promotions and pay raises lather rinse repeat.

3) Working utterly and completely from home eventually leads to a sense of isolation and depression.

4) Despite #3, I prefer to do crunch mode work in isolation because I'm easily startled and prone to the excessive use of colorful metaphors when under the gun. My cat doesn't mind. My dog doesn't care. But I suspect coworkers in proximity would fear for their lives.

<comment><USER3> _3) Working utterly and completely from home eventually leads to a sense of isolation and depression._

I did that for about three months straight and I agree with the assessment. At my new job I work 3-4 days a week in the office and 1-2 days at home. I find a mix of office and home to be a good balance, though I do find the commute an utter waste of time.

<comment><USER4> Is this the case with an active social life as well? I don't find that most of my socializing and interaction comes from my co-workers (who are significantly out of my age range).

I've never worked from home, but I'd really like to. I like to think as long as I still socialized after work (happy hour type stuff, kickball league, etc.) I wouldn't feel the isolation and depression.

<comment><USER5> You underestimate how much of your social interaction comes from your coworkers. I've been remote for 3 years now, and my social network has atrophied to nothing, with the exception of some superficial interactions on facebook with people I used to see every day. To be fair, I have been traveling pretty consistently since I started this arrangement, and nobody wants to be friends with a transient. I mostly cope by working out several hours per day, but I'm at the end of my rope and all I really want is to settle down (as soon as I find a mid-sized city with year-round perfect weather, cheap cost of living, and a thriving community of creative technical professionals ;)

edit: That being said, I'm not sure I would be able to return to regular office work and all the social posturing that comes along with it.

<comment><USER4> I certainly interact with my co-workers at work and talk about the normal stuff (sports, news, politics, etc.), but outside of work I see my co-workers 0% of the time, unless I coincidentally run into them.

My outside of work socializing is simply people I've either met on my own or through the 2-3 people I knew in the city befor I moved here 2 years ago.

I would recommend Honolulu for your relocation, but cost of living is a little steep (but manageable...and worth it) and our tech community is definitely in the development stage (though it is existent and fairly active).

EDIT: I want to clarify that I probably do underestimate the benefit of my work interactions. The reason I go out and socialize so much is that I find myself feeling isolated and lonely on nights/weekends where I choose to stay in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Gotta applaud this Chinese firm for using scientific experiments rather than gut feeling to decide on important policies.

However, please don't take far-ranging conclusions from this experiment. Call- center work is a fairly specific type of work with extreme values of "noise" and "distraction". For other kinds of work, the results might end up vastly differently.

(Also, the Chrome spelling correction sucks. Just sayin'.)

<comment><USER7> I was looking through it hoping to find some amount of detail on collaboration from home (Skype, Google Docs, etc). I guess call centers don't need this quite as much as engineers would. I'm not sure how applicable this would be for a job like I feel many corporate types on HN (like myself) work. Programming (or other engineering) at a startup is different from programming (or other engineering) at a corporation, and I need significant face-time with my coworkers and people outside of my team just to get the most basic work done. As an anecdote, I get significantly less work done on the one day a week (today) when 90% of my coworkers work from home just due to the fact that I often need to collaborate with them.

(Also, I've often wondered why Chrome's spell checker can mark a word as wrong, but when I copy it into Google search, Google knows it's spelled right. Should be the same system, I would think. The word uninstall comes to mind, I see that red squiggly right now.)

<comment><USER3> It's interesting that you say that because I have the opposite experience. When I'm at the office I find that people around me talking causes a significant distraction. I use noise-canceling headphones almost all day at work just to block out the noise.

In addition, I sit right next to a QA guy that works on my product and I can easy waste half a day dealing with his issues and questions.

I find that I get significantly more work done while at home because I don't have the distraction of coworkers tying up my time. I also find I tend to put in at least an hour more a day because I work when I would normally be commuting.

<comment><USER2> My experiences are similar. But I suspect putting in a day or two a week listening to your QA guy might be a good thing in the long term.

<comment><USER3> It has it's pros and cons, that's for sure. In some ways it's very good and in other ways it can be distracting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I frequently speak with people in my neighborhood about my experience of working from home, and they say: "I don't think I could handle it."

For me, it's just a different type of distraction. When I got bored when working in an office, I would take a break, go get a drink, walk around and see what everybody else was up to, and then go back to work refreshed.

From home, when I get bored, I get up, get a drink of water, play with my kids for a couple of minutes and then go back to work refreshed.

All that being said, I'm not sure this particular study has much to say in the way of helping those of us who do knowledge work from home. Call center work seems like it's different enough that I can see the type of work invalidating the applicability of this particular study to our particular line of work.

<comment><USER9> Call centers are a very different type of work than most office work. And different types of call center work have very different implications. The company involved in this study was _CTrip – China's largest travel agency_. [I think] Travel agencies are usually speaking with happy customers planning vacations. Tech support, customer service, and telemarketing call center employees would have had a _significant_ reduction in utilization in this study.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's the payload for those not wanting to hunt for it in the paper:

"We find a highly significant 12% increase in performance from home-working, of which 8% is from working more minutes of their shift period (fewer breaks and sick-days) and 3% from higher performance per minute. We find no negative spillovers onto workers left in the office. Home workers also reported substantially higher work satisfaction and psychological attitude scores, and their job attrition rates fell by over 50%."

<comment><USER11> Somewhere (can't recall) it was said that those who predominantly worked from home, while effective as a workforce, suffered from lack of visibility and thus tended to not get raises or promotions as much as those who remained in the office (I assume this was normalized for responsibility/position).

<comment><USER12> IIRC that was mentioned here and was most likely to occur in teams where just a few worked remotely while the majority came into the office and interacted with management. The same thing will happen if you come to work, quietly do your job, quietly leave and don't interact with management.

Management won't promote the person they don't remember.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how much improvement in morale can be attributed to not having a commute. I wonder if people who have a short walk to work are even happier than people who work from home, broadly speaking.

<comment><USER14> I can't find a citation, but I believe that I read that a 20 minute addition to your commute has the same long-term quality of life impact as losing function in a limb.

This is for two reasons: firstly, the long term impact of losing function in a limb is far less than people think, and the long term impact of an increased commute is far more than people think.

<comment><USER15> I'm having trouble seeing that. When the company I worked for moved 15 miles closer to home, my commute dropped from about an hour to less than 10 minutes. It had very little impact on my QOL.

Likewise, when I decided to move 20 minutes farther away, my QOL actually improved, since I liked the area I lived in much more and there was more stuff to do after work.

<comment><USER16> How could having nearly 2 hours extra each day NOT improve your QOL? That really surprises me.

<comment><USER15> Because when it was taking me 1 hour to get to work it was about 20 minutes walking to train station, wait 5-10 mins for train, 20 minute train ride reading books/magazines, 5-10 minute walk to work. Fairly enjoyable.

After the move, it was about a 7-12 minute drive to work. Much shorter, but I liked being able to walk before and I could read or nap on the train. Had I been driving to work (instead of taking the train) before, it would have been a 1-2 hour stressful commute in heavy traffic.

As I read what I just wrote, I wonder if the reason for the "loss of limb" comparison is that the 20 minute commute they used as a reference is in heavy traffic. I have a 35-45 minute drive to work 2x a day now and again, dropping it to 15 minutes wouldn't be a big deal for me, but it is a very relaxing commute mostly along country roads where I get to drive at a consistently high speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting initiative, but I see many issues in the study:

\- As others have mentioned, it is not generalizable to other types of jobs. Call-center work may be improved when working from home, but what about other types of jobs requiring more interaction/communication

\- But the biggest issue I see is with their mention of a "Randomized experiment". Well, technically it is randomized _among those who volunteered_ for the experiment. So from a causal inference perspective, the results generalize only to the population of employees who volunteered, not to the entire company.

More generally, one of the problems with these types of study is that the best it can give is an average gain from home working. But suppose the gain is null. It doesn't mean that this is not a viable option. Maybe there is a huge variance in the gain, depending on the individuals: maybe the gain in productivity is huge for some employees, while it is negative for some others. This could depend on the employee's self-discipline (whatever that means), his family situation (single/married, how many kids), where he leaves, is he introvert, etc... A useful study would be to randomized the assignment, stratifying by according to these covariates, in order to learn more about their effect on the performance of the employees.

</comment><comment><USER18> "The frequency of working from home has been rising rapidly in the US"

I don't understand why they even mention the USA. Do they try to extrapolate that USA workers would react the same way Chinese workers did? I'm don't know if they would but it is reasonable to fear that the very different cultural environment could affect results. Or not, we don't know. Hence my question.

<comment><USER19> A lot of classical psych studies get completely different results when run in non-Western societies (I'd link but Wikipedia cites a print publication |:). There's a tendency to view everything in the West as "the default" and deviations from that as culture bound. So to answer your question, it would be a pretty tenuous extrapolation from Chinese to American workers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I hope this is followed by similar studies for teleworkers in different professions. This specific study isn't generalize-able; it focuses on teleworkers where work units come directly to workers in short, easily measured spurts (unlike most IT positions, which often involve multi-day tasks).

The next step is to perform the same sort of analysis where workers complete multi-day projects and communicate asynchronously with co-workers (email, issue trackers). Workers that only WFH one or a few days a week (as opposed to all the time or none) are also worth looking at; instinctually, I'd think this group would be the most abusive.

Further, it sounds like the telework involved is relatively pleasant -- CTrip is a travel agency, which I imagine involves happier customer calls than ones to the phone company. The study might not even be representative of all call- answering telework in China, which is a pretty narrow focus.

</comment><comment><USER21> I tend to reply to "Does working from Home work?" with "Does working from Work work?"

Having spent a few years in a corporate environment, and many more as a consultant in other people's corporate environments, I can tell you first hand that the amount of work you do has very little to do with where your chair is located.

Either you are the type of person who gets stuff done, or you aren't.

There are huge distractions everywhere you go. People who get things done incorporate them into their schedules & stay productive. Others use them as a welcome escape from actually working.

That said, home workers are 1) monitored more closely and 2) fresher from not having to deal with commutes, so no surprise to see the numbers show them as "more productive"

<comment><USER22> Your post comes across as very cynical, and I disagree with it completely. The type of environment someone is in _always_ has an effect on their productivity. In my case this effect is huge. For example, I build software demos for a living (Sales Engineer at a software company), which requires big chunks of uninterrupted time. I cannot find that at work, even with noise- canceling headphones. If I'm at home though, or even a coffee shop, I get in "The Zone" very easily and can stay in it for quite a while before needing a break. This way, I've built demos in one day that would otherwise have taken me over a week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The most recent Freakonomics on Marketplace segment focused on this study:

[http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/08/23/there%E2%80%99s-cake-...](http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/08/23/there%E2%80%99s-cake- in-the-breakroom-a-new-marketplace-podcast/)

</comment><comment><USER24> In my opinion, as a a worker from home now for several years it is the best thing ever.

BUT, it is a skill that you have to learn. I had to read and watch-attend many productivity programs for "getting it".

Probably I will get a job teaching people how to do it in the future, because as networking speeds increase to Gygabits/second (thing google fiber in every house ten years from now), having instant hidef video would mean even more jobs would be possible from home.

</comment><comment><USER22> Another benefit of working from home is not having to worry about preparation rituals such as shaving or making sure you have clothes to wear. These are fairly important for me. On rare occasions I get to work from home, I find that being able to jump straight to work after I finish my breakfast is very refreshing. Said breakfast also tastes better since I had more time to prepare it.

</comment><comment><USER25> I seems to work more when I am home.</comment>


Stanford to Offer Joint Computer Science MS/MBA Degree Program - <AUTHOR> http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/stanford-offer-joint-computer-science-ms-mba-degree-program <comment><USER2> bout time</comment>


The cult of ignorance in the United States (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sott.net/article/313177-The-cult-of-ignorance-in-the-United-States-Anti-intellectualism-and-the-dumbing-down-of-America <comment><USER2> actual original article is here:

[https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired- success/201407/an...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired- success/201407/anti-intellectualism-and-the-dumbing-down-america)</comment>


Point and Spring Simulation - <AUTHOR> http://www.ichub.io/p/physics

<comment><USER2> Calling requestAnimationFrame again after drawing the previous frame gives smoother results, no need for setInterval. You can know how much to update the physics by seeing how much Date.now() has changed since the previous frame.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion, I implemented it: [https://github.com/ichub/physics/commit/5b875ea2d5e3dfa3f5a0...](https://github.com/ichub/physics/commit/5b875ea2d5e3dfa3f5a0da5ba2e701c977de94cd)</comment></comment>


David Graeber: Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit - <AUTHOR> http://www.thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars/print <comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's long. But it's a lot more thoughtful than the usual "where's my jetpack?" article and makes a number of points that seem to confirm the general world-view of the startup community.

Graeber is an academic, mostly known for his book "Debt: The first 5000 years" and his (somewhat vague) role in coordinating the Occupy movement, yet most of this article could have been written by Peter Thiel:

 _Breakthroughs will happen; inconvenient discoveries cannot be permanently suppressed. Other, less bureaucratized parts of the world—or at least, parts of the world with bureaucracies that are not so hostile to creative thinking—will slowly but inevitably attain the resources required to pick up where the United States and its allies have left off. The Internet does provide opportunities for collaboration and dissemination that may help break us through the wall as well. Where will the breakthrough come? We can't know. Maybe 3D printing will do what the robot factories were supposed to. Or maybe it will be something else. But it will happen._

</comment><comment><USER2> Good stuff all around, the really interesting ideas are in the last third but read the whole thing to see how he gets there.

Gives me more to think about than most anything else I've read of late.</comment>


The Power of 10: Rules for Developing Safety-Critical Code (NASA/JPL) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Developing_Safety-Critical_Code

<comment><USER2> the pointer rules are interesting, they make also difficult use after free exploits I think, which is nice:)</comment>


The Nature of Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html <comment><USER2> Been lurking here for awhile, but this article compelled me to finally register. It's the best introductory article I've ever read for any language. The XML analogy instantly illuminated the basic Lisp ideology for me, and it's a great example of how seemingly obscure language concepts can make immediate sense when presented in a familiar way.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen "Learning Lisp is an uphill battle. Even though in Computer Science terms Lisp is an ancient language, few people to date figured out how to teach it well enough to make it accessible. Despite great efforts by many Lisp advocates, learning Lisp today is still hard."

I agree. I'm going from newb to lisper, and it hurts.

<comment><USER3> Learning Lisp is hard up front but makes things easy later. Last week we got a digital photo frame to see how well it worked with ourdoings.com and found that, though it worked, 4 new RSS feeds would be a big win. I implemented them in about 20 minutes in Scheme. Added few lines to the codebase. In other languages I would have been tempted to cut/paste.

For more on the photo frame and RSS feeds, see

<http://ourdoings.com/2008-03-01>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Code is also always data! Does it mean that data is also always code? As crazy as this sounds this very well might be the case."

My programming languages professor (a Scheme fanatic) expressed a similar sentiment. I recall, however, someone posting this "programmer hierarchy" recently:

<http://bc.tech.coop/blog/061226.html>

I find it funny that the hierarchy has "Lisp programmers" at the top and "people who insist on calling HTML a programming language" on the bottom, yet the people I've seen arguing for the programming language status of HTML are predominantly Lisp programmers.

</comment><comment><USER5> you know. the first course of the computer science degree at my undergraduate university (rice). was a lisp course. and though i wasn't one of the many who griped and groaned about working in something other than c/c++ or java, five years later and i'm only starting to appreciate the perspective it's given me.

</comment><comment><USER6> There was a good thread last week about learning Lisp:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=125766>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126186> (a child comment on that thread that summed up a lot of the ideas).</comment>


How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/how-your-cat-is-making-you-crazy/8873/

<comment><USER2> previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3573694>

</comment><comment><USER3> For God's sake, not again.</comment>


Nick Denton speaks about Gawker redesign - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/#!5772769/gawker-201

<comment><USER2> Why oh why lifehacker do you always redirect me to uk.lifehacker.com and lose the article I was trying to look at.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's still incredibly annoying, in my opinion. I used to love lifehacker, too.</comment>


EA certainly isn't making it easy to give Dungeon Keeper a low rating on Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/iPad/Dungeon+Keeper/news.asp?c=57158 <comment><USER2> Get rid of ratings altogether. Period.

I want to see usage statistics:

\- How many users are continually coming back to the app?

\- How many times a day/week/month, on average, is the app opened?

\- How long is the average "session"?

\- How many days is the app used after it's initial use?

\- How long does an app stay on the device before it's deleted?

These stats are more objective and less manipulable -- and therefore, more valuable -- than user reviews/ratings.

And I realize that the value of these will vary app to app -- i.e. the stats of a productivity app can't be compared to the stats of a casual game -- but it gives me a much better idea of how an app is being used, and therefore how I might use it vs. reviews/ratings.

<comment><USER3> This doesn't account for apps that are unusually efficient. My bus app allows shortcuts on the home screen to arrival times for a stop, so each day I spend under a minute with it open, yet it's a better app than a clumsy interface that would waste two minutes.

<comment><USER2> I think this would still address that (and I mention this in another response below).

As someone deciding between the two, I will see that you keep coming back to the app, even if you don't use it for a very long time.

Versus the other app that you averaged a longer session, but stopped using after a shorter period.

<comment><USER4> We'd have to be careful of apps that game the system by installing some super- small/innocuous service that would hit Google Play once/day just to keep your usage statistics falsely high -- even when you don't open the app yourself.

I don't know enough about the guts of Android to be sure you could do this, but it seems likely.

<comment><USER2> Ideally, usage would be handled by the OS, and it could actually distinguish between running in the background vs. being active. Background usage would be discarded, ideally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is not unique to EA. It's a well-known pattern:

[http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2012/05/21/manipulating...](http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2012/05/21/manipulating- app-store-reviews-with-dark-patterns/)

<comment><USER6> Yes, e.g. Firefox for Android does very similar thing: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774479](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774479) Standard tactics, nothing special.

<comment><USER7> It's shady no matter who does it, IMO, and I'm surprised that nobody working on that issue had a problem with it. I hope it was at least discussed on a mailing list or something.

<comment><USER6> It seems there were objections about ethics in another bug: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=787860](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=787860)

<comment><USER8> I'd rather see UI like:

      [I love it]                |
      [I ran into a problem]     |     [Review on Play Store]
      [I have an idea]           |

With this UI, [I love it] doesn't lead you to the play store, it just sends a signal back to Mozilla.

Alternatively, offer this UI up front:

      [Send feedback directly to Mozilla]
      [Review on Play Store]

and nest the "I love it/I had a problem/etc." behind that first option, with no redirects to the play store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is the reason EA aren't doing this on iOS because it's against an App Store policy or they're afraid of being removed/rejected?

<comment><USER9> It arguably contravenes the Google Play Store policies too.

 _" Developers must not attempt to change the placement of any Product in the Store, or manipulate any product ratings or reviews by unauthorized means such as fraudulent installs, paid or fake reviews or ratings, or by offering incentives to rate products."_ [1]

[1] [http://play.google.com/about/developer-content- policy.html](http://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html)

<comment><USER10> What they're doing violates none of the aforementioned clauses.

<comment><USER11> They clearly "manipulate any product ratings" by dishonestly filtering their users which would rate the game well, and those that wouldn't.

This manipulates the product ratings by only letting 5 star ratings go through.

<comment><USER12> It's not like they're preventing you from rating the app however you like from the app store -- same as any other app. They just aren't actively pushing unhappy users there.

It's dishonest manipulation to ask happy users to rate you and unhappy users to email you?

<comment><USER13> Of course it is. What else could it be? It's dishonest, highly immoral manipulation.

<comment><USER10> I don't think that asking for feedback is highly immoral, but that's just imo.

<comment><USER13> Asking for feedback? Oh, that's a terribly nice way of framing it.

This is a dishonest filtering mechanism that is deliberately set up to manipulate people. To refer to this as merely asking for feedback is highly disingenuous. You are missing the point.

Asking for feedback is ok. It might be annoying for users to be disturbed by a dialog, but morally there is nothing wrong with it. I don't think anyone was arguing that.

But this dialog is not merely asking for feedback. It does manipulative filtering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find this story quite sad because the original Dungeon Keeper predated app stores, shady rating techniques and was really awesome. (This: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Keeper](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Keeper) )

</comment><comment><USER15> I know it's "cool" to hate on EA, but assuming this isn't against any Google Play terms of service, I actually think it's a great idea for any developer.

With that said, it's obviously not in the end user's best interest in terms of seeing a true rating prior to download an app. It merely helps the developer to achieve higher ratings, more users as a result, and if they actually care about the feedback, then improving their product as well.

<comment><USER16> It's a clever "hack" but it's completely black hat IMO.

I would definitely not encourage other devs to do the same, rather I think Google should crack down on those behaviours for the good of the users.

<comment><USER17> There is a number of frameworks to encourage ratings, and they range from honest requests "you've been using this app for a while, would you like to rate it now?" which Appirater does, to a number of shadier ones like the one in this post.

<comment><USER16> I think it's interesting that, besides selecting who gets to vote, they ask for the rating very early in the game.

I assume at this point you don't need to pay anything to progress correctly in the game, so they want you to rate it before you get to see the pay2win aspects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think where they cross the line is not making it an option to still leave a 1-4 star review via the app. It makes perfect sense to steer those users towards giving you direct feedback, but you should still provide a path to the app store for a review regardless.

If you _are_ actually listening to feedback and iterating on the game, the new version will bury the old reviews anyway.

</comment><comment><USER19> Timeline of my last 30 seconds: Elation that there was a new Dungeon Keeper, one of my favorite games from the 90s. Vague remembrance that EA bought Bullfrog. Thoughts of it probably being terrible in the same freemium/iap way that the Simpsons is. Validation of fears and dissapointment.

</comment><comment><USER20> There's a similar phenomenon I noticed when dealing with employees of companies that use follow-up customer surveys to gather feedback on their employees.

When you are finished with your tech support call, or car rental, or whatever they will ask you something like 'were you completely satisfied with my service today'? Completely satisfied is then the label for the highest rating on the follow up survey. The benefit to the company is that it gives you an opportunity to express any unhappiness and get it fixed, and the benefit to the employee is that you are more likely to put down completely satisfied if you've already said you were (because of priming).

However, this case is a bit more shady because the probability of the follow up survey is being effected by how you respond.

<comment><USER21> Presumably, that only has repurcusions within that individual company - e.g. some employees get rewarded for deception. Whilst that's still bad, and the company is obviously harming themselves in the long run, it's a lot less immoral than rewarding deception across an industry, between different companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Filtering by rating definitely feels shady, would it be less shady if the question was "Do you like this app? Yes/No" and then the suggestion to contact the developer or the "Would you like to rate this app question?"?

I haven't yet added "a please rate this app" pop up to my app [0] but the rate of organic reviews has fallen, none in the last few months so I think I need to actively drive reviews.

[0] Fast Lists - [https://itunes.apple.com/app/fast-lists-checklists- for/id481...](https://itunes.apple.com/app/fast-lists-checklists- for/id481282554)

</comment><comment><USER23> If I was building that rating dialog I'd want to still give the user the immediate ability to rate the app on the second '1-4 stars' popup, so that's the only thing that makes it devious.

Otherwise, this is actually a pretty good idea, speaking as a developer who has received low ratings for things I could have easily explained to the user if they had used the 'feedback' feature. Something like this would be a good way to remind the user they can actually interact with me and I will respond, at a point where they might need it.

</comment><comment><USER24> There's a (somewhat) similar technique used in Ember for iOS ([http://www.tuaw.com/2013/12/06/apps-clever-feedback- system-h...](http://www.tuaw.com/2013/12/06/apps-clever-feedback-system-helps- happy-users-tweet-while-angr/)).

I don't think I have a problem with it, though, at least while the current App Store review process is as it is (unable to reply to reviews, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER25> Was kind of surprised after reading an article complaining about how ridiculously overpriced the upgrades were, agreeing, and then seeing it at the top of the play store chart for some category. Play store has an incentive to make as much money as possible too... Oh well. Looking for quality human engagements in the games section wasn't exactly the best first decision in the tree.

</comment><comment><USER26> Off topic but kind of related:

Although this is certainly not without some moral issues I do think we need a better rating system for raters too.

I.e. it would be great if reviewers themselves were rated across their ratings so you can see how critical in general they are.

I.e just like you see what how a product have been rated on average it would be nice to see how the specific reviewer rates on average.

<comment><USER21> I'd love to see something similar, but far less complicated and open to gaming - trusted reviewers such as friends and known industry names; the latter being akin to how reviews used to work before crowd-sourcing broke them. Imagine how much better apps and games could be if there was some form of accountabilty for quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Devil's advocate - most rating behavior tends to be "interrupt driven". I.e. if stuff is working correctly, the user just carries on, but if stuff is broken, the user gets frustrated and leaves a negative review (what else can they do?).

The net result is your reviews will be negatively biased...unless you do something about it like this.

</comment><comment><USER28> I fucking love Dungeon Keeper. Why would anyone want to rate it anything but 5 stars? I have to side with EA on this one. ;) [Well, Bullfrog actually.]

Oh of course I'm joking. If the mobile app doesn't live up to the original PC game, then fuck it.

<comment><USER29> You haven't seen the videos describing the new mobile version of the game? If you like the old game, you'll LOVE the _videos_ of the new one!

[http://youtu.be/GpdoBwezFVA](http://youtu.be/GpdoBwezFVA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's a similar self-selection filter as dyslexic Nigerian scams utilize, you have to be a certain type of person to go for this. To actually submit a rating, a G+ using certain type of person...

</comment><comment><USER31> Ah, people are still discussing EA's good practices.</comment>


Top Reasons to Use Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://blog.modulus.io/top-10-reasons-to-use-node

<comment><USER2> >Using Node.js allows you to use the same language on the client, on the server, and in the database. You can keep your data in its native JSON format from browser to disk.

Ok. Now tell me why _that 's_ necessarily better.

</comment><comment><USER3> These are all really, really weak arguments for using Node. It's annoying to see them parroted again--can we do better?</comment>


Engineers Shouldn't Write ETL - <AUTHOR> https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2016/03/16/engineers-shouldnt-write-etl/ <comment><USER3> I've worked in a hedge fund in the past, where my role sounded a lot like what the author describes as a "Data Engineer". I would have thinkers, ie people with a lot of financial experience, come up with ideas on which datasets we want to import from which vendors, and how we should handle the 80 different types of corporate actions that are contained within this dataset.

I sometimes gave my own suggestions on how to improve upon their ideas, but for the most part, I was happy to focus on implementing their ideas, in the most clean, elegant, robust and testable manner possible. I was happy to do the "plumbing" work of improving upon our tech stack and architecture, in order to make the entire system better functioning and easier to maintain.

According to the author, I'm supposed to resent the fact that I'm a "doer/plumber", and not a "thinker". In reality, it was the opposite. Do I really want to spend my entire day reading the Bloomberg manual and figuring out which tables/columns will give us the data we want, and the nuances of what this dataset does and does not cover? Sorry, I have zero interest in doing that.

I enjoy programming. I enjoy system design. I enjoy building stuff. I have zero interest in becoming an expert on how to interpret the Bloomberg symbology file. Besides, if I ever left the financial industry and joined a tech company, that knowledge will become completely useless.

Did I or anyone consider myself to be a "menial" plumber? I don't think so. I was getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, because the "thinkers" recognized the value that I brought to the table. They appreciated that I could quickly and robustly implement the ideas that they had, and keep the system running smoothly without hiccups. They recognized anyone can do a "good enough" job, but it's much much harder to find someone who can do a _great_ job. And for my part, I was perfectly happy to be that guy.

If you're someone who wants to expand your breadth and take on more "thinker" responsibilities, more power to you. But just don't forget that there are people like me out there too. There's no shame in being an excellent "doer".

<comment><USER4> What's funny to me is how many incompetent "thinkers" appear in meetings. Obviously, thought (even removed from implementation entirely) often has immense value. Eg, many people spent a lot of time thinking about arithmetic, linear algebra, floating point, compilers, and now I can go run whatever cool algorithm on my computer. But I continually seem to run into these people who seem borderline incompetent at anything but spewing out whatever pops into their head. Half is nonsense, one-quarter would be actively destructive if you tried to implement it, they always seem to know everything about everything but whenever it's something you know really well you can tell that they are very confused, etc. when I meet these people now I just think "oh, you're one of those guys who is good at saying a lot of things" and then move on. Oh well

<comment><USER5> You see that a lot with 2e people -- bright people with some weaknesses or a disability. That could account for how negatively you have experienced this. Many 2e people have never really been taught good ways to handle the combination of big strengths and big weaknesses.

I serve as a sounding board a lot for my oldest son and that works well, but it's not uncommon for such people to just be trying to meet their own need to process information and/or feed their ego, oblivious to how it impacts other people and not really welcoming of the feedback they really need for this to be constructive. A good sounding board doesn't just listen, they ask pertinent questions and make insightful comments that help move the thought process along.

Sometimes when I meet people like that, I'm able to direct the conversation to a more constructive back and forth of that sort. But some people just know they have this need to talk, they have a lot of baggage that makes them openly hostile to meaningful feedback and they crave validation. Anything other than praising their half-baked ideas is met with toxic reactions. In such cases, the best you may be able to do is basically make a few polite noises and then disengage as quickly as possible.

<comment><USER6> What does "2e people" mean in this context ... That's not a term I've run across before?

<comment><USER5> Twice exceptional.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional)

<comment><USER7> (mobile link! D; )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> ETL means "Extract, Transform, Load" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load)

<comment><USER9> Thank you. I think that is good practice to introduce abbreviations correctly. Even that it is easy to forget when you work with them all the time.

"How do I introduce an abbreviation in the text? The first time you use an abbreviation in the text, present both the spelled-out version and the short form." [https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/abbreviations/](https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/abbreviations/)

<comment><USER10> Or, you know, actually _use_ HTML with the <abbr> tag ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think this diagnoses the problem well, but ignores an obvious solution.

A team of one data scientist and one engineer, completely responsible for building a model, and seeing it through into production, meeting all applicable SLAs and performance metrics.

Or maybe it's two data scientists and one engineer, or one scientist and two engineers, whatever is required.

The point is to have a small team you can hold completely accountable for their output. They sink or swim together, so there is no debating whether the scientists or engineers get the credit or take the blame. They are assessed by the effectiveness of the end product they produce.

<comment><USER12> Small teams are awesome in so many scenarios. I recently wrapped up a 4-week proof of concept for a client on knowledge management and discovery using NLP.

I was able to work with someone apt at machine learning while I focused on building out the UI and backend. We delivered a first release about 3 days after we started, giving ample time to seek feedback and let the users shape the direction.

<comment><USER13> In 4 weeks, I was able to create a data mart that had self-healing (we had issues with Python/events missing data which should have reached the existing data warehouse) and the physical data models in it sped up an existing 6 hour ETL task down to 0.15 seconds AND speed up a production query that took 5 seconds per click down to 0.07 seconds.

No team needed or proof of concepts. Actual working data models, up to date tables + ETL code in production.

Background is DBA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a great read, and this is a critical sentence:

> We are not optimizing the organization for efficiency, we are optimizing for > autonomy.

Efficiency is for production pipelines where the product is thoroughly defined and production costs eat deeply into profit margin. Most software organizations have massive margins - but only if they get to the right product. Organizing people for ownership and autonomy engages their creativity, but also ensures that the org can move forward even when one side or the other falls behind.

</comment><comment><USER15> > There is nothing more soul sucking than writing, maintaining, modifying, and > supporting ETL to produce data that you yourself never get to use or > consume. Instead, give people end-to-end ownership of the work they produce > (autonomy).

I think this is more the point than "engineers shouldn't write ETL": the engineering-related department consuming the ETL's output should likely be the ones writing/maintaining it. Or, perhaps more generally: don't delegate entirely to another team if the team that cares about the result is capable of meeting their own needs.

<comment><USER16> This quote is ridiculous. Some people enjoy plumbing high speed reliable/transparent data pipes. I could care less what goes thru the pipes I make.

<comment><USER17> The unglamorous ETL work is the config and query writing to apply infrastructure building blocks to particular pairs of tables, not the creation of the generic infrastructure.

<comment><USER18> Exactly. They are talking about manual, custom, one-use ETL that needs to be maintained forever. Don't nobody got time for that.

On the other hand, sometimes you can't get away from that because different orgs/humans generate trash data in idiosyncratic forms. Things will get much better once we pry all the human hands off of data and let engineers redesign all of them across the world. Not going to happen soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Guess that didn't last cause look they are hiring data engineers

[https://www.stitchfix.com/careers?gh_jid=1252958&gh_jid=1252...](https://www.stitchfix.com/careers?gh_jid=1252958&gh_jid=1252958)

</comment><comment><USER17> The author completely lost me. Analysts produce reports. Data scientists produce models. We don't ask a data scientist to produce a model unless we have a serious intention to put it in production. There are significant engineering challenges in taking a model from the data scientist's batch-mode workbooks and Hadoop queries to a reliable near-real-time online service, and the relationship can get dysfunctional, but it has nothing to do with data scientists being BI in disguise.

</comment><comment><USER20> > March 16, 2016

It's 2018. A lot has changed since 2016. The line between sw engineering & data engineering is much thinner.

<comment><USER21> I'm curious what innovative tools have emerged in the past two years that changed the dynamic?

<comment><USER22> Not sure what the author was referring to but, Airflow has gotten better / gained wider adoption during that time and my team started using DBT which saved a bunch time and was new during that period.

<comment><USER17> Airflow makes the distinction wider, as creating data pipelines requires even less software engineering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've worked in BI (end-to-end - data modelling, reporting, ETL, etc.) for more than 10 years now across various organisations and since "data science" became all the rage, I had the pleasure to work with a few data scientists. From what I've seen so far, they are very good as statisticians (some of them university lecturers) but when it comes to building ETL pipelines, I don't think any of them could actually do it properly. Properly as in an ETL process which connects to various data sources, writes to logs, is repeatable, restartable and so on. It is not easy to get to know how to build a proper ETL process and it is not easy to learn how to "do data science" correctly as well. I see it as more productive (from my personal experience) to let the "data engineers" do the "data engineering" work - build data models, ETLs, etc. and let the "data scientists" do the "data science" work - build and fiddle with statistical models. Just like with a "full stack" developer, and the separation of work between "back end" and "front end" developers, it might be better to let each do what they do best unless you have people who can do both properly (but often it's hard to find them and they would actually be better in one area or the other). The frustration between the two camps - <USER2> "engineers" and "scientists" is usually due to mismanagement (distinct teams doing each bit separately, coordinated by one to many management layers) rather than suboptimal division and allocation of labour. Small teams of two to four people which contain the correct mix of experts would benefit from the strengths of both data professional types, and would avoid the problems around syncing the effort.

</comment><comment><USER24> Lots of people want their key discipline to be the centre of the universe, you see it across designers, content creators, engineers, testers etc.. The key to any team in my experience is to have a healthy mixture of specialists (narrow scope, high resolution) and polyglots (wide scope, lower resolution), and to promote collaboration as much as possible..

</comment><comment><USER25> Can't this whole thing be boiled down to "DevOps for Data Science/Engineering"?

Different parts of the org with different skillsets and cultures practicing empathy for each other by communicating interests in version-controlled code, allowing for guard-railed autonomy, which leads to business agility.

Yep. Sounds about right.

> Optimize for autonomy not efficiency

Optimizing for efficiency without considering the cost of work in progress (WIP) (irrelevant ETL models), rework (unscalable models), or unplanned work (unscalable models that make it to production) results in company silos (data engineering, infrastructure engineering) cheering local maxima while covering their ass in the face of a business that's suffering from a long lead time. Two teams with two backlogs will accomplish work exponentially faster compared to three teams with three backlogs.

It boggles my mind how books like The Phoenix Project are not required reading.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's a bad situation in your typical enterprise, but it's even worse where I've spent my career: working with realtime industrial data. I became convinced that building time series data pipipelines was a bad idea after many late nights in the office fixing fragile systems that couldn't handle real- world complexity.

As fun as it is to build with and learn new technologies, it's a bad idea to build data pipelines unless you have a lot of resources and good leadership that can make peace between all the different people who touch the data.

Unfortunately in the world of sensors and equipment there aren't many solutions, so I started a company (at [https://sentenai.com](https://sentenai.com) ) to save others from my years of struggle. It turns out it's even harder to build a _general_ time series data pipeline solution, but we're making progress.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone have experience with ETL as a service like StitchData (not related to stitchfix)?

The startup I'm employed at needs some data analysis, but it is not big data, simply a way to unify analytics into a queryable database. I'm not looking forward to writing any ETL code, and was hoping someone here had a tool to help.

<comment><USER28> I would highly highly recommend ETL as service, after adopting it recently. It substantially changes your relationship with your data sources in a really positive way. And frankly, ETL for common data sources is code that you just don't need to write.

I would say that you should pilot with a few ETL vendors. We currently use Fivetran, they're fine but we've had enough burps that I cannot cold recommend them over other vendors. I cannot for the life of me remember the details, but I think we went with them over Stitch for pricing reasons.

<comment><USER29> I'm Fivetran's CEO and I just want you to know, whatever "burps" you experienced, these things keep me up at night and the whole team is always striving to make the pipeline "just work". The whole vision of our product is that you should be able to plug in and get a perfect mirror image of all your data sources in your data warehouse. Anytime we fall short of that it drives us crazy.

<comment><USER30> Do you have a forum or suggestions tool at all? Fivetran has been amazing for our new datawarehouse and we're very pleased with the service, but there are a few little (non-bug) things that would have made it even easier.

<comment><USER31> You can email me: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Autonomy means the data scientists own that code as well. All the way into > production.

This does not strike me as a great idea.

<comment><USER33> Yep, data science and software engineering are two very different disciplines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> As an undergraduate who is about to graduate with a degree in "Data Science" this post encapsulates a lot of my worries as I move into the work world. Should I focus on being a "thinker" a "doer" or a "plumber"? For the first three years I was planning on being a CS major until I was denied from the department: now the data science major is my only hope to graduate. I feel as though my programming skills are solid: but not good enough to be on any sort of fast paced infrastructure/devops team. On the flipside: I feel as though I am so far behind on stats/math knowledge that it's pointless to try and become a data scientist/analyst. I've thought about data engineering (the 'doer') as a happy compromise between the two. However there are barely any intern or entry level data engineering positions that I can find. The ones I do find require knowledge of so many frameworks that I don't know where to start. Additionally, I'm not even sure if data engineering even is a happy compromise, especially after reading the post. Time is ticking, and sooner or later I'm going to have to figure out what route to take, and how I want to specialize. I go to a hyper competitive university in a hyper competitive region of the country and I'm starting to feel like I'm falling behind and getting lost.

If any of you older/more experienced engineers and scientist have advice or wisdom for me, I would very much appreciate it.

<comment><USER35> A bit OT, but as a more experienced engineer who dropped out of school to start a company, I'm curious: why weren't you able to get into your school's CS program?

Don't worry too much about "falling behind". There will always be time to learn more math or a new framework. Worry more about finding that first job, any job, then you can branch out once inside the industry. Networking beats recruiters beats sending a resume, so try to find a friend who already works where you want to be.

<comment><USER34> I did poorly on a math class that was required to declare the major. It's ironic since now that I'm in the data science major, I have to do even more math classes and less programming classes.

I would love to do my own startup. I have a few ideas floating around. But I feel like I lack the discipline to sit down every day and force myself to work on them without external deadlines/pressure.

In terms of jumping into the tech industry: I understand the advice about looking for any job when starting out. It just seems that even a lot of the entry level jobs are very specialized.

<comment><USER35> I'd recommend against doing a startup straight out of school unless you get accepted into a notable accelerator with a solid cofounder. Apply for the seemingly specialized jobs anyway, the worst they can do is say no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> arrogant and pompous uses of terms "mediocre, soul-sucking, etc etc", while the fundamental ideas of the article range from trivial to minimal-value

</comment><comment><USER37> Previously.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11312243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11312243)

</comment><comment><USER38> My father in law is such a "thinker". He has been since the 70s and worked on all kinds of projects from IBM Mainframes for up to Hadoop and Kafka for Insurance Companies and Telkos.

It's ridiculous to me how hard it is for him to find a new job at 60. He financially doesn't have to, but he wants to train younger guys on how to deal with all the weirdness one encounters in ETL Jobs.

</comment><comment><USER39> _Report Developers, on the other hand, are folks who have made a career around designing reports in a specific tool (e.g. Microstrategy, et al). They are specialists._

Is this the common perception, because it really doesn't line up with my experience?

<comment><USER40> At least in my Org Reports are pretty much an after thought left to the data engineers (like me) to "take this metric I've developed" and display it on the morning report.

Writing/updating a report is easiest part of my job it's the data that goes into building it that is hard translating the "simple metric I've developed" and getting it to run in a robust automated and sane fashion is the difficult part.

The complexities in my org are two fold.

Firstly the infrastructure people don't get data - at all. They speak PLC's and HMI's to them it's all OPC and magic A2A messaging takes care of everything. All data is time series to them and it all goes into an historian (which is basically a giant ring buffer i.e it gets flushed periodically) anything beyond that is past their level of expertise.

The data needs to be batched together the time series information has to be processed into "event frames" \- this data was all part of this sequence of conveyor belt movements for example. Then you need to link it to related events etc and archive it in some kind of sane fashion so that in six months time if there is a product defect or something like that you can trace the entire series of event frames for that particular production batch.

Secondly the people the article calls "data scientists" (in my org these are Engineers - real ones of the Chem and Mech variety) don't know anything about databases or handling data they prototype their metrics in Matlab, Fortran, Excel and the like.

You really need someone to translate their code into something sane that can be automated. Engineers are not taught to code at all. I know I studied engineering at university Fortran is the lingua franca. Code is just a way of representing mathematics. Asking these people to do all the data processing pipeline is just not going to happen. It's not their job. They write the simulations and models they have the domain knowledge thats whats important for them to be worrying about.

<comment><USER39> Ok, I think I'm getting the specifics of this situation. So, we are talking about internal reports, not something that could actually get in the external customer's hands.

<comment><USER40> Yes this is internal stuff. I work at a large industrial manufacturing plant.

Reports that go externally are done by certified people. (Laboratory technicians for product specifications and finance analysts for stock market stuff).

<comment><USER39> I've done external reports for clinical trials and agriculture, and I guess they weren't as up on getting certifications. Thanks for the very detailed replies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> > We strive to lead the business with our output rather than to inform it

I think the business hires data scientist to be informed. Not to make business decisions on their behalf.

> Data scientists love working on problems that are vertically aligned with > the business and make a big impact on the success of projects/organization > through their efforts. They set out to optimize a certain thing or process > or create something from scratch. These are point-oriented problems and > their solutions tend to be as well. They usually involve a heavy mix of > business logic, reimagining of how things are done, and a healthy dose of > creativity

Again, I'm confused? That sounds like the data scientists should have majored in business then. If data scientists start doing that, what will all the other business folk do then?

Data scientists should just build out reports that provide valuable insights and potential patterns that can help make business decisions. The difference with prior reports engineer or data analysts or wtv, is that a data scientist is assumed to be able to generate statistical analysis or/and pattern analysis over the data. While prior, a data analyst only needed to perform basic versions of that which did not go beyond what SQL could do.

The data engineer should enable the data scientist to perform this analysis by both working with the software engineers to acquire it safely, securely, reliably and at scale. And working witj the data scientist in order to apply his statistical analysis efficiently and at scale to a possibly very large data set. Finally, he might need to work with both software engineer and data scientist to setup real time or close to real time versions of the analysis.

All result from the analysis should be presented (aka reported) to the business. The data scientist can suggest interpretations or ideas to address findings, but it's the business role to make tactical and strategic decisions about business processes and products.

And if you're doing ML as part of a process, then you need a ML scientists. Say you need to build out voice recognition, or the likes. Basically comp sci or math majors with ML masters or PHDs.

</comment><comment><USER42> Different parts of engineering require different skill set.. Someone has to do the data engineering part (be it the data scientist, data engineer, ops, whatever..). This requirement hasn't changed since 2016: 50 to 90 percent of time is spent "Cleaning" Data for Analytics. You just need engineers with the right skills and tools to help reducing this time and get things done.

[https://s3.amazonaws.com/xplenty- assets/infographics/raw_dat...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/xplenty- assets/infographics/raw_data_cleaning_is_killing_bi.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER43> It's _not_ in my experience performant but Pentaho is definitely ETL-for- dummies easy to use. Similar to your average user pivoting data in Excel rather than learning Python or R, sometimes having a tool with suboptimal performance is better than optimizing an adhoc or short term process.

<comment><USER44> If you're looking for a _real_ ETL-for-dummies, take a look at my EasyMorph ([https://easymorph.com](https://easymorph.com)). We've made a number of simplifications that specifically target "dummy" users, e.g. columns may mix values of different types (text, numbers, etc.).

<comment><USER45> Thanks for developing easymorph! Free version helped me through my bachelors degree. It's my go-to tool to introduce people to ETL and similar concepts.

<comment><USER44> You're welcome! Great to hear it happened to be of help :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I wrote plenty of ETL. Maintained high throughput using whatever I could find. Then I got another job and had to write ETL for AdTech, where the volume is unlimited. Nothing about it is surprising or hard. Engineers are great at handling known data and transforms, then adapting to unknown data.

</comment><comment><USER47> I see this every day in my job. He so nailed the problems. Data scientists must be made responsible and accountable end-to-end for their solutions. And they must be grilled on operational deployability and maintanability before, during and after deployment. They have to become accountable.

</comment><comment><USER48> I often really enjoy it when I get a chance to do ETL work. The 'T' in ETL can many times involve some pretty fun and creative challenges. And even in the general case there is something really satisfying about putting together a clever and well constructed ETL pipeline.

</comment><comment><USER49> (2016) tag.

</comment><comment><USER50> The counterpoint to this, and the economic value therein is PG's Schlep Blindness piece.

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

</comment><comment><USER13> ETLs, physical data modelling and data marts/warehouses used to be handled within database admin's task in small to medium sized companies and largely with ETL tools or just SQL.

<comment><USER51> Yup. That's been my experience. The DBA used to handle all these tasks and as of I don't know a 5 years ago, it's been segmented into data engineering. I think in this case it's a good thing. I always considered that a non- administrative tasks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> > Enable Everyone to be Best in the World

This particular line really rubs me the wrong way.

Do the best you can... You won't be the best in the world, but you can still have a positive impact.

</comment><comment><USER53> Article from 2016

</comment><comment><USER54> There's a huge difference between writing ETL to apply business logic vs. grab the data from a common API like Google Analytics. There's no tool in the world that can write all the logic you need to transform data the way your organization uses it unless you have an extremely simple, common use case.

What this article is really saying is that replicating your data from source apps shouldn't be manually coded. The harder part still needs someone to write code so business users don't need to.

</comment><comment><USER55> This article matches my experience exactly. Some companies will hire a "data scientist" on pedigree. They will be low on skills and high on charisma. The engineers are burdened with implementing the ideas as well as shoulder the failure of the algorithms. "You spent the last few months implementing algorithms and none worked?". Very little blame will go to the data scientist. In tons of cases data scientists are more like product managers.</comment>


Free Official MSIE VM's for Linux and Mac - <AUTHOR> http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads <comment><AUTHOR> For a long time I was critical of MS for forcing developers to use their VirtualPC VM's because it just wasn't realistic: people use VMWare and VirtualBox as well as Macs and Linux. It was always an example of MS's frequent "plays poorly with others" behavior. Kudos to them for making it right.

<comment><USER2> What do you mean by "forcing"? I'm running Windows XP on VirtualBox without any problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you wanted to legally run multiple versions of IE without having to have multiple Windows licenses for every combination (e.g. IE8/XP, IE8/Win7, IE10 Win7, IE10 Win8, etc...) you had to use the MS-provided virtual machines. However, these were only ever made available as VirtualPC images. So there was no way to run them, even on Windows, without all sorts of machinations (some of which may have violated the ToS).

<comment><USER3> I was always impressed that Microsoft let you use Windows in a virtual machine on another platform at all (not all their competitors do). But then I realised that it made business sense for them.

<comment><USER4> Which competitors don't? The only competitor that comes to mind is Apple and they don't block this either -- though I believe they were the last holdout. Nor does Google, in any capacity, with Android or ChromeOS.

Edit: I am _dead wrong_. Apple only permits the virtualization of OS X on Apple hardware, per the EULA. It does not permit the virtualization of OS X on non-Apple hardware.

[http://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/OSX1082.pdf](http://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/OSX1082.pdf)

<comment><USER3> You still can't run OS X on non-Apple hardware can you? I'd love it if they changed that.

<comment><USER5> Sure you can. They have 10.8 VMs for VMWare Workstation. I'd recommend at least 8gb of RAM for smoother access though.

<comment><USER6> "They" being someone that posted an image on bittorrent? Apple doesn't license OS X for VMWare anywhere except Apple hardware. You can't even run a 10.8 guest on a 10.7 host per their license, which is really annoying.

<comment><USER7> VMWare ESXi (and Fusion too, I expect) runs legitimate installations, with no hacks required, as long as it's on Apple hardware. You need the InstallESD.img file from the OS installer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8>
      LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx
      LinuxVirtualBox.part2.rar
      LinuxVirtualBox.part3.rar
      LinuxVirtualBox.part4.rar
      LinuxVirtualBox.part5.rar

Why? Why the proprietary rar format? I mean, is there any reason to actually use rar over even "only" xz nowadays or for big downloads, zpaq (lrzip is probably not mainstream enough I guess)? And 1000 megabyte parts? Why?

<comment><USER9> Although they come from Microsoft, I don't feel enormously comfortable doing this:

        chmod +x LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx; ./LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx

<comment><USER10> I was assuming the built-in NSA access was making people uncomfortable. ;)

<comment> trust-me Naah, only good people get to rise to the top of the US politics. They would never abuse your data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> OK, now I've got a pretty solid IE test setup, how do I go about testing Mac browsers (eg Safari) without a Mac? AFAIK the Mac OS X license says it can't be virtualized under non-Mac hardware. It looks like the only options are to use remote testing services, buy Apple hardware or illegally use Mac on a non- Mac host.

<comment><USER12> [http://browserstack.com](http://browserstack.com) ?

I'm not affiliated with them or anything. Just started using last weekend and liked it a lot.

<comment><USER11> I use browserstack a fair bit already (and have used saucelabs in he past). These remote testing services are really great and cover 80% of my testing needs. However what they don't do is let you get a true feel for what it's like for an end user to interact with the site due to the latency. This becomes more apparent with interactive web apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Classic example of UX nightmare: So I follow the link, I see a button that says get free VMS. I click it. I then can't figure out what I'm meant to do. I stare at some weird quickstart offer. I give up. I come back to HN, and think - how come others have managed to download their images. I go back, I realise that the button just activates a dropdown/rollup (and it's already in the dropdown state, so clicking the button rolls it up!), and then finally I get to the VM images. To be honest, It would be easier to just have an apache directory index, with folders and a load of accompanying checksums. I got there in the end.

The other thing that I failed to notice, was that this was actually a Microsoft site! Why not hang off of their domain name? How am I supposed to know this is official?

<comment><USER14> While I see your opinion, I think it is largely confused. That button you pressed is greyed out, as it has already been pressed.

Actually, part of the issue is that the original poster provided a deep link into the site, which maintained the user's state, viewing the download flow.

The big blue button asking you to "Select desired testing OS" was not obvious?

<comment><USER15> Took me a second to understand what the two blue dropdowns were for.

To me the "desired [for] testing OS" would refer to the guest OS running IE. "Select host OS" would have made a lot more sense to me.

Or just list the 9 options as links on the page and let me click them like any normal web content.

<comment><USER13> Does it say that? It reads 'Select Desired Testing OS', which is an odd phrase. It could read 'Select desired testing (host) OS'. But may aswell just read 'Select host OS', as you suggest. Seems to be a classic case of Microsoft changing terminology, and just confusing everyone further down the line in the process.

You could spell out what a host OS is on a descriptive help text next to the form control.

Also noticed that there's no VMWare option under Linux - why would that be?

Plus the blue font isn't really dark enough to read.

Great to see some md5s though!

Another niggle, which I totally missed the first time is that if you select the wrong option navigate away from the page. And then use the back button - you are back to square one. Which is a good reason why this type of download page just doesn't really work.

<comment><USER15> Disclosure: I work at MSFT, though not on this.

> It reads 'Select Desired Testing OS', which is an odd phrase.

Right. I read that with the implied [for]. Even still, it's odd.

My workflow is: I already have a _host_ OS. I _desire_ to download a VM image running an _OS on which_ to _test_ my site in IE.

> Seems to be a classic case of Microsoft changing terminology, and just > confusing everyone further down the line in the process.

I can't imagine there's any malintent here. Just some website editing by folks who are not immersed in the cross-platform virtualization terminology.

> You could spell out what a host OS is on a descriptive help text next to the > form control.

Anyone doing virtualization ought to know what 'host' and 'guest' mean. Just use the standard terms, overexplaining it just confuses it. But that's just my own bias.

> Also noticed that there's no VMWare option under Linux - why would that be?

Probably they just didn't get around to testing that case specifically. The VMware images for other host OSes might work just fine.

> Great to see some md5s though!

Death to MD5! :-) SHA-2-256 FTW. Better yet, GPG and/or Authenticode sigs.

> Another niggle, which I totally missed the first time is that if you select > the wrong option navigate away from the page. And then use the back button - > you are back to square one. Which is a good reason why this type of download > page just doesn't really work.

Flippin' gratuitous Javascript. :-)

<comment><USER13> Cheers for the response.

I should have said 'Great to see some checksums!'.

(I looked high and low for checksums for my Windows 8 download, and what I did find didn't match what I had. Gives you a little piece of mind after a 7hour download, and a crashed OS!)

<comment><USER15> Definitely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is great -- it's about time they made these available for VirtualBox etc too, and on a proper, user-friendly page. (Previously they were just for VirtualPC, and required a bit of tricky configuration to get working in VirtualBox at least.)

</comment><comment><USER17> I've actually been using the Windows 7 / IE9 version of this for a while. There is a nice simple install w/snapshot that I utilized on both my Ubuntu machine and my Mac. It takes a snapshot before powering the machine so once your 90 days is up, you can just roll the snapshot back.

[https://github.com/xdissent/ievms](https://github.com/xdissent/ievms)

Edit: I mainly use IE to interact with work's IE-only CRM/ticket system.

<comment><USER18> Dynamics CRM? If so don't install IE10 as they don't play nice.

<comment><USER17> BMC Service Desk. I also worked for a company that used Siebel. With Siebel, I could actually get that to work with IE6 under Wine, but it would peg one of the CPU cores at 100%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Do they expire? Previousy IE VMs from Microsoft were only valid for ~90 days or something and required re-downloading (and then re-configuring all settings which was pita).

<comment> trust-me And often MS people would forget to upload updated VM.

<comment><USER20> The great irony is I ended up hacking legal VMs. At least they're better about it now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The only thing weird I found about this, is the win8 ie10 vmware for mac on microsoft.com comes with a boot virus, or so says Avast. It reports it has Kampana-37XX. Screenshot: [http://i.imgur.com/wXOu3uJ.png](http://i.imgur.com/wXOu3uJ.png)

</comment><comment><USER22> It's about time. The "Grab them all with cURL" instructions are also a nice touch.

<comment><USER23> I had no idea curl supported that kind of syntax. Neat.

<comment><USER24> It's actually bash syntax (the curly brace part):

        $ echo a{b,c}{d,e}

<comment><USER25> FWIW it's also available in zsh and ksh93.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I got the previous images the last time this site came up. Using Hyper-V that comes with Win 8 [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/07/bringing- hyper...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/07/bringing-hyper-v-to- windows-8.aspx) to run them. Works a treat. VMWare workstation is also very good though.

<comment><USER26> I've been using VMWare Workstation for about a decade now... I've tried a few other VM platforms, and they've all not been quite as usable imho... I will say their support of ESXi updates, and pretty much dropping VMWare Server has been pretty bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> If you have access to a windows box, here's a better solution: Install IE10 and use the dev tools (F12). there you can set browser emulation to IE 7,8,9,10.

doesn't include ie6, but not many people still use it: [http://www.ie6countdown.com/](http://www.ie6countdown.com/)

<comment><USER28> IE10's dev tools emulation is not perfect, and has its own set of quirks. _Especially_ as it relates to the JS runtime[1].

[1] [http://alexjmackey.wordpress.com/2012/10/19/how-accurate- ie-...](http://alexjmackey.wordpress.com/2012/10/19/how-accurate-ie-dev- tools/)

<comment><USER27> thanks for the tips guys, i guess i have to give the ie7 one a download :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Have any of you actually used these? To start off they are a pain to download/setup, come on Microsoft, you make the freaking OS and you can't package it any better? Second, these VM's are constantly complaining about not being activated. I understand that MS can't just rip that part of the OS out however it's a massive slap in the face to have them act like they give a shit about web developers and then have them provide sub-par VM's. I can pirate the OS and make my own (better) VM's which is really sad if you ask me. Also I have had the VM's shut down on me multiple times to go "update".

TL;DR: These VM's suck and you are better off pirating the OS and making your own VM's.

<comment><USER30> This free Honda Civic sucks, you'd be way better off stealing a Ferrari.

That's some pretty odd logic. What about buying the OS? Since you're, you know, using it for work? Is that not an option? The ROI would be pretty high, I'm guessing. If I only had the on-screen keyboard, my solution would be to buy a keyboard, not shoplift one.

<comment><USER31> > his free Honda Civic sucks, you'd be way better off stealing a Ferrari. > That's some pretty odd logic.

It is indeed, mainly because your analogy is so awful. You might as well have said:

"This free cake sucks, you'd be way better off beating someone to death with an elephant."

It would be equally stupid but at least it has cake in it.

<comment><USER30> I don't understand where stealing the better service comes into the flow of thought.

Free service is bad. Solution, buy better service? Why is the solution steal better service? It's immediately convenient and cheaper, but the long term seems disadvantageous to multiple parties.

<comment><USER31> > I don't understand where stealing the better service comes into the flow of > thought.

A Ferrari is a service now? Or have you given up on your analogy? In either case, accepting something that's freely given isn't stealing.

<comment><USER30> What? I didn't imply accepting a gift was stealing, I said that if you got a free gift, didn't like it, and wanted something better, the obvious next step is to buy something better. Yet joshstrange's _immediate_ next step is to steal the better thing. Not to even look for a price quote, but immediately to steal it.

Normal thought pattern: "I want something decent. I will see how much it costs and perhaps purchase it."

Abnormal thought pattern: "I want something decent. I will steal it."

Why does Microsoft owe us anything? If we want to do business on Windows, and support IE, the obvious and legal thing to do is buy a copy of Windows and use it. Not bitch because they're not giving us the best possible stuff for free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I like this because I'm interested in creating more cross-platform projects.

By that I mean, not only does this webapp work on recent versions of Internet Explorer, but a developer can easily get up and running on it using windows (as well as Linux or OS X). I don't want a situation of "you should really be using this OS to develop on this project, and not those other ones".

I don't want to go out and pay for windows just to do this. It's not my primary OS, and it isn't going to be. But I do want to be able to say, "you can easily develop and run my app on Windows". Having something like this from Microsoft might be just the push I need to make that happen.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is rather old news - but it seems it's new to some.

I put together some setup notes for Linux with Virtual Box (Ubuntu in my case) in a Gist, as I found some of the Microsoft setup notes were lacking:

[https://gist.github.com/magnetikonline/5274656](https://gist.github.com/magnetikonline/5274656)

</comment><comment><USER34> Is it me or does this design make your head spin in circles, too? Not really a relevant discussion of the topic at hand, but damn... This is one of the worst designs I've experienced in a while, in a brain-is-so-confused-my-eyes-are- crossing, kind of way.

</comment><comment><USER26> I find it funny that the Linux platform dropdown doesn't offer the VMWare VM...

</comment><comment><USER35> How does this compare to what you get when you run the ievms script?

[https://github.com/xdissent/ievms](https://github.com/xdissent/ievms)

<comment><USER36> I'm pretty sure they are sourced from the same VM's.

The only notable difference is that ievms converts (or did when I tried it last) from the VirtualPC copy - MS is now allowing these for download in other formats (Parallels/VMWare/Virtualbox) without needing to convert.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Does anyone use this Browserling? [https://browserling.com/](https://browserling.com/)

</comment><comment><USER38> Except these stop working after 90 days.

<comment><USER39> Its a virtual machine though, just make a snapshot once you have it booted and working as you'd like, and roll it back when you're done. If I remember, that was Microsoft's recommendation as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Do these still have time limits on them?

<comment><USER41> Yes, but you can just re-import the image every so often. They're meant to be transient VMs for testing, so blowing them away every 90 days shouldn't be a problem.

<comment><USER39> You can also just snapshot them, and roll-back when you're done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I had been using these to game my Dropbox account:

1\. Configure the VM up the point of signing up / downloading the client. 2\. Change the PC Name & spoof a new Mac Address in the VM. 3\. Sign up under a referral code. 4\. Rollback to the snapshot in step 1.

<comment> trust-me How about: 1. Use your technical skills to built something of value. 2. Use a small part of the inevitable monetary reward to pay Dropbox.</comment></comment>