The Nerd Parent's Guide: When and how to introduce your kids to Star Wars - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheNerdParentsGuideWhenAndHowToIntroduceYourKidsToStarWars.aspx <comment><USER2> Why not just let them discover it for themselves like they would any other movie?

It's a famous movie about spaceships , aliens and lasers; I had parents with no interest in Sci Fi and I still saw it by the time I was 9, as well as playing all the old school SW video games (XWing, Rebel Assault , Tie Fighter).

What always surprised me is that the star wars films have a "U" rating here in the UK (which means suitable for everyone) rather than at least a PG (meaning suitable for older children with parental discretion) considering the amount of violence.

<comment><USER3> You ask: Why not let them discover it for themselves?

In our social circles, many kids see Star Wars before age 5 and most have seen it by age 6. For many, that will be their first exposure to violence and evil. Depending on your values around violence (graphic or otherwise) and evil, you might want your kids to discuss and assimilate what they're seeing in a thoughtful manner.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. Star Wars was coming up at school literally every day. This was their first exposure to anything close to "evil" and certainly their longest exposure to guns/blasters. It's a War Movie, no question. Going from zero violence to two hours of violence without explanation is a lot for a little mind. I just chose to eek it out in bits and provide context.

The best part of this experiment/experience was that we ended up talking in aggregate for at least 3x longer than the length of the movie. A _lot_ of good discussions came out of this that wouldn't have had we shown the movies all at once. Little people need time to absorb, consider, argue, dream and understand complex stuff.

<comment><USER2> It seems surprising that Star Wars was so many peoples first introduction to anything violent or "evil". I remember watching things like Ninja Turtles, He Man and even Loony Tunes cartoons which all contained violence and villains long before SW.

<comment><USER4> Funny that you mention Ninja Turtles as both boys watched the 90s live action version of TMNT and while there's a lot of ersatz kung fu neither of them thought of the bad guys as truly malevolent and weren't put off by the violence. I think it's the introduction of guns/blasters and swords that are demonstrated to do real damage where things get dodgey.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I appreciate the amount of thought and effort he's putting in here, I'm not entirely convinced that its needed based on my own experience and childhood.

The first movie I was ever exposed to in the theatres (note, I didn't say 'watched' since I was a whole 8 months old) was Return of the Jedi. During the remainder of the 80's as I grew up, I was well familiar with Star Wars. I had some of the action figures, and the original trilogy was frequently aired in our house. By the age of 5, I could almost recite the scripts.

Nothing was cut. Han shot first. Ponda Baba lost his arm in the Cantina. My father loved horror, scifi and fantasy and wanted to share it with me.

Parents today seem way too concerned with shielding their children from the world. I'm glad in the 80's that my parents didn't. By the time I was 6, I had my own pocket knife, soldering iron (lead solder too!), chemistry set, etc. My parents _never_ censored/monitored my computer use (largely because they knew it wasn't possible). I was online in some capacity (BBS, Compuserv, etc) at a very young age. Never had any problems.

Disclaimer: I am not a parent. I hear things change when you are.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. I definitely watched star wars in its entirety including the entire cantina scene at least by the age of six. The dark parts were disturbing but I don't think they were a problem.

There's an important early lesson these helicopter parents are losing by not exposing kids to a little PG movie violence, that my parents explained to me well - its fantasy movie violence for entertainment and not real. God forbid one of these kids goes over to a friends house who has less supervision and they pop in a DVD of _Hostel_ or something. With all the violence and gore in modern movies its probably a pretty good idea to prepare them for all the crap they're going to get exposed to later in life

<comment><USER5> Perhaps slightly OT, but I think its easy for us as adults to thing we'll 'know' what our children will find scary or disturbing. The two film scenes from me being 5-6 that I remember always scaring me were things that most adults wouldn't probably find that scary. They were Bruce Banner turning into the Incredible Hulk and the Jabberwocky scene from Alice in Wonderland.

Children are complex, and I think rarely can we assume to know what they'll think. Its why we laugh so much when they say funny things- we can't predict them.

<comment><USER4> Very true. In this case I assumed that burnt bodies of parental figures and traumatic amputations were too much for a 4 year old. It's possible he could have not sweated that at all and been freaked out by the Jawas. Parenting is a gentle balance and a series of judgement calls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't really get this at all.

I saw Star Wars when it came out, at the cinema, and it was great. But that was 35 years ago. There have been a ton of films made since then and the original Star Wars is OK, but nothing great. It should just be one film among many that children get to see.

If I were a teen today then I'd likely think of the Harry Potter films as the defining films of my childhood and maybe when I grew up I'd be deciding on when to tell my children about Harry Potter and working out how to watch them etc. Or perhaps it would be some of the Pixar films.

I enjoyed Star Wars when I was a child; but today's children don't need to be introduced to it as if it were some sacred document.

<comment><USER4> Sure, I never said it was a defining film (although it's arguable so), only that my kids were super-interested in it and that they'd been pushing to watch it. My thoughts were to wait until they were older to see them as they are VERY intense compared to the Pixar movies they've already seen. Given that they REALLY wanted to see Star Wars I decided to show them in a controlled way, that's all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't. Let your kid have his own childhood, they don't have to relive yours.

<comment><USER9> Just because the Star Wars films are old, doesn't mean they're not great entertainment. Why should they be forbidden from watching them if the kids are of a suitable age, and they want to watch them?

<comment><USER8> I never mentioned forbidding anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting, especially because it gives a pointer to the excellent idea of Machete Order: <http://static.nomachetejuggling.com/machete_order.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Our kid had us read to him every part of the Star Wars story multiple times before we just let him watch #4 a week ago. It accomplished the main objective laid out in this nice article: Timing it so they're able to "discuss and analyze the themes appropriately."

I too feel movie #1 is one to skip, but for a different, simpler reason: It's about political maneuvering, which is very difficult to explain to kids. My 7 year old son still doesn't fully get it after reading the book several times and me attempting to explain in several different ways why Palpatine's strategy was so effective (cause wars in order to steadily increase his power). He needs a foundation of more basic political concepts before he can get these subtleties. My wife even had trouble understanding the movie when she first saw it. Without understanding what the story is about, it has the feel of random mayhem.

Back to the main point: There's indeed a lot of violence and our family was one of the last holdouts among peers. We knew many kids who had seen Star Wars before the age of 5, and we also know a lot of kids who think of killing and violence as trivial everyday things. Like the author of this post, we didn't want our kid to be brought up like that so we went through he effort of reading and thoroughly discussing the books.

edit: minor cleanup

<comment><USER11> Alternatively, the rise of Palpatine _is_ contrived.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This guy's kids are 4 and 6 and they don't use the computer OR play video games? Tough for me to take this seriously when Star Wars seems more developmentally important to him than essential technologies that will help his kids succeed.

<comment><USER13> Children's minds are built to soak in information. You could wait until a kid was 10 to introduce them to computers and they would still blow your mind with what they could figure out and do.

I highly doubt that holding off on video games and computers will be a detriment in the long run.

<comment><USER4> I'm counting on that.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Non-audiophile looking for first quality headphones - <AUTHOR> In a recent HN post I saw people mention Bose as a less desirable brand for headphones. I've always thought it was the better brand likely due to marketing.
I'm not looking for any brand bashing, but more of what I should look for that will help make an educated decision when purchasing a nice set of cans.
Thanks HN! <comment><USER2> If you are concerned about technical details, try [1]. I spent hours on this site when looking for a pair of wireless headphones - I got tired of dealing with the myriad of other (pseudo)review sites plugging specific brands that were more just marketing copy and so obviously untrustworthy. In the process, I learned about features I had no idea existed and ended up buying something slightly more expensive than I normally would buy, but it will cover all my possible needs.

[1] [https://www.rtings.com/](https://www.rtings.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> What did you end up going with?

<comment><USER2> I got the HD 4.40 BT from Sennheiser. I thought I'd buy something cheap (under $40) but ended up wanting NFC connectivity, cable connectivity, low enough latency to watch videos (did not realize that was a big issue)...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I concur that Bose isn't great for sound quality. Their noise-cancellation is quite good although others have caught up/surpassed them.

I'm a bit of an audio snob so don't do wireless. The Sony MDR-7506 is my default go-to. It's light and has the best midrange/mid-high detail and tone.

I do keep a pair of Bose QuietComfort for plane trips and office privacy (wearing better quality earbuds underneath).

I can't deny the convenience of wireless and will likely get the Sony which offers a wireless/wired combo in the same model.

</comment><comment><USER4> Go read guides at head-fi.org, there are multiple budget-conscious (as well as very hi-end) discussions for all kinds of applications. Very good forum.

Start here: [https://www.head-fi.org/articles/headphone-buying- guide.1416...](https://www.head-fi.org/articles/headphone-buying-guide.14163/)

My personal favorite for price/convenience/sound currently is Fiio F9 Pro.

</comment><comment><USER5> Do you have a budget? I got pair of Audio-Technica headphones that weren't very expensive and suit me pretty well. Do you care about noise-cancelling or other fancy features?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to spend under 300, and noise cancelling would be nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like Panasonic ErgoFit RP-HJE120 Earbud Headphones. It's super cheap, sounds incredible and nearly indestructible. Great for gym or any outdoors work.

</comment><comment><USER7> For Bluetooth I've enjoyed Sony Mx wireless version. Has Boise cancelling and quite good from a sound perspective</comment>


Rockstar approach for dealing with cheaters: have them play together - <AUTHOR> http://techli.com/2012/06/rockstar-cheaters-max-payne-3/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've often thought that all multiplayer games should allow to register users as bots that will compete with each other. I believe it would be greatly beneficial for AI research.

</comment><comment><USER2> This has been posted before: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4106880></comment>


Schools warned over hackable heating systems - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42355665 <comment><USER2> >Even so, the company suggests the discovery highlights that building management systems are often installed by electricians and engineers that need to know more about cyber-security.

Or maybe if you release a product with a network jack that replaces a legacy item you put safeguards in place and don't expect your customer to hire a electrician who also happens to have a cyber security degree...

</comment><comment><USER3> It'll continue to be a systematic issue until there's an "event" that makes international headlines. I work for a small industrial control company and even the mentality of my coworkers is the security I enforce is an "inconvenience" to their jobs.

I've started training another young engineer in training in the work I do since I can't keep up with the workload and he's questioned every single piece of my setup guides to deal with security. "Why do we need to do it this way? Isn't it easier to skip that?" "How come we block this? Why is that feature disabled?" etc. etc.

Heck, I've found that vendors are frequently pretty upfront about their devices and hide no secrets that their devices are exploitable if you go against their recommendations for basic security. But as soon as a know-it-all hears of how convenient opening a firewall port is or enabling config access from the public interface its a fight to explain to him why it's a bad idea. Maybe it hasn't blown up _yet_ but we don't want an incident before we do it the right way.

<comment><USER4> When I was a wee lad just out of college I worked in a relatively shitty job that was basically 1/2 tech support consulting and 1/2 software development. My boss insisted that every single server we managed have the same 7 character root password (both our own and for clients) and that those machines be exposed to the open internet (with root ssh and other remote access protocols enabled!) accessible via that password.

Since a number of those machines were inevitably pwned, and had to be cleaned up by none other than yours truly, I learned the extremely painful lesson of what happens when you sacrifice security in the name of usability (it was so easy - you only need to remember one short password!)

As an aside - he was just as bad a boss on the software development side of the job.

On the bright side it was interesting observing how various automated attacks succeeded in installing botnet C&C software, and how it worked to conceal itself.

Edit: Of course I'll never know about the most sophisticated versions that escaped my detection :) Fortunately that was more than a decade ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> These kinds of attacks are already happening. It has actually happened in the apartment area where I live:

We have a hot water central heating system that distributes heat to the apartments buildings. To improve efficiency, this system was upgraded with "weather forecast" functionality. The supplier stated that this system would _not_ work behind NAT or a firewall, and required a public IP address, so it was connected directly to the ISP's switch.

A couple of years later, in the summer, the system got cracked and the heating system was turned on and the system temperature was increased to the maximum. Because all radiators have (analog) thermostats on them, it didn't affect the indoor temperature, and it took a week until it was noticed.

If nobody had noticed, it would have resulted in a huge district heating bill. And if done on large scale, I guess it could overload or underload power plants (if using electric heating). So I disagree that there are little incentives (to bad guys) to crack heating systems.

</comment><comment><USER6> _It would be relatively easy for mischief-makers to switch off the heaters... The risk is limited because ... it should be possible for building managers to notice what is happening and manually override_

If you really wanted to be malicious, you would curtail fresh air, rather than cut off heat. It would be harder to notice, and would give you an attack that didn't depend on cold weather.

And arguably the long-term consequences would be greater. The kids who got cold would bundle up and complain, leading to a (possibly energy-wasting) fix. The kids who got a low-grade headache and fatigue every afternoon might conclude "I'm just not cut out for learning."

<comment><USER7> hilariously evil

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Damn, the future of IoT is so exciting.

Hackable fridges, microwaves, showers...The possibilities are endless. Maybe Anon can hack Ajit Pai so he only has cold showers from now on :P.

</comment><comment><USER9> "What the hell is going on?"

"Pool on the roof must have a leak."

</comment><comment><USER10> I think the ridiculous overdeployment of software might be some kind of elaborate joke. I mean, really, hackers can take out the heating systems of schools from across the globe? That is too stupid to have been done by accident and too convenient to not be made up. Somebody is laughing their ass off over this. Aliens maybe?

<comment><USER11> In grade school (well before the internet/IoT age) the central heat would be blasting well into spring and the central air would run well into winter. The thermostats installed in every classroom did nothing at any point in the year.

The excuse for this was always that "the district controls it from downtown."

I don't know whether or not that was true, but a hacker certainly couldn't have done any worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I guess we'll have to revert to controlling our HVACs via Amiga:

[http://woodtv.com/2015/06/11/1980s-computer-controls-grps- he...](http://woodtv.com/2015/06/11/1980s-computer-controls-grps-heat-and-ac/)

<comment><USER13> And our repair shops will have to be equipped with Commodores: [https://sploid.gizmodo.com/this-old-ass-commodore-64-is- stil...](https://sploid.gizmodo.com/this-old-ass-commodore-64-is-still-being- used-to-run-an-1787196319)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> >Mr Munro said it had taken him less than 10 seconds to find more than 1,000 examples.

I, too, can use Shodan.

</comment><comment><USER15> Future generations are going to marvel at our stupidity in creating IoT, if we survive this phase so that future generations can be born.

</comment><comment><USER16> Did they not watch Mr. Robot?</comment>


Lynne Tye makes $300k from Key Values on her own - Pete-Codes https://www.petecodes.io/how-key-values-make-revenue/ <comment> Pete-Codes Lynne is one of my big inspirations.

A self-taught developer AND a solofounder AND self-funded.</comment>


Semantic Web is dead. Long live the AI - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cabeda/semantic-web-is-dead-long-live-the-ai-2a5ea0cf6423 <comment><USER2> Whoever wrote that has zero idea of what the semantic web was/is.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was me that wrote the article. If you have time could you elaborate? I'll gladly read and hear anything that proves that what I wrote is completely wrong</comment></comment>


Ask HN / Review my startup: Transloadit - <AUTHOR>

Transloadit is offering file uploading and processing as a service.
http://transloadit.com/
At this point we handle image resizing, video encoding and storage in your own Amazon S3 bucket.
We just launched 1 week ago and have started to sign up the first few customers.
If you are potentially interested in our services, please take our 8 question survey:
http://tinyurl.com/369un29
And of course, ask me anything! <comment><USER2> Pro:

\- The idea is sound. Value-added services like this are exploding all over the web

\- The value-prop is clear

\- The feature set is clearly explained

Con:

\- As others have said, the pricing would work better as pennies per upload -- makes it cheap for rapid prototypers, whom are going to be a big part of this market

\- Uploading via a third party raises privacy issues, even if you're not providing storage

\- I suspect the market here is too small: it's the gap between people who know how to integrate your product and people who know enough to build it themselves. However, it's a big Internet and I've been wrong before about the sizes of markets (for instance, Tumblr!)

So go for it, and good luck :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Pricing: We are going to make things cheaper.

Privacy issues: It's basically not much worse / better than using co-located servers.

Market size: Since you mention Tumblr, they have actually switched to one of our competitors for video encoding recently. It's a really a very hairy problem, so any company that does not see it as a core-aspect of their business should be a potential customer.

Thanks for the feedback : )!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting!

My first impression of the homepage is that the graphics are a little all over the place (in terms of consistency, not layout). Your logo has a pretty slick look to it, while the large balsamiq image is rough and 2D, and the "Let us do the processing" images are somewhat rough and 3D.

The forgot password page layout looks off to me, the recover button is displaying to the upper right of the email label.

The signup link at the bottom of the login page directs to a different account creation form than the signup links on the plans/pricing page.

"Proceed to enter credit card" seems a bit rough or robotic (can't really think of a good word to describe it honestly), maybe it could be changed to something like "Proceed to finish signup".

Although I didn't look too deeply, the docs look great!

PS: I'm not a designer, I only pretend to be one on the internet, so take all of that design advice with a grain of salt.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for the suggestions, what browser are you using?

I agree that our visuals are not the best - hopefully we can add a real designer to our team at point.

<comment><USER3> I checked both Chrome beta and Firefox 3.6.3 and they're both showing the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well done Felix!

1\. Great intro and explanation of everything.

2\. Remove the plans. Charge per transload.

3\. Add a form to test-drive a transload.

4\. Add a real-time stat to the front page: number of transloads since you started reading this page (or something to that effect).

5\. I like the "Let us know what pricing you would like." idea.

6\. Build your own feedback form. Just a simple textarea with a button. Don't make the user search through a forum to check for duplicate questions before giving their feedback.

7\. Re: "We are also the first commercial software / infrastructure as a service product built on node.js." I know of a web-based app launched on Node in April but you've probably been going in beta longer.

8\. Could you figure out a way to be able to just start using transloadit without signing up (with some kind of expiring mechanism for accounts which don't go through with a deferred registration)?

<comment><AUTHOR> 2\. and 3.: We are working on that, right now

4\. We've processed ~4.000 uploads so far / 60.000 internal jobs (each time a robot touches a file). Great idea, we'll add that.

7\. We are the first one that charges money for the service. Let me know if I'm wrong and I'll change that : )

Using without an upload: Maybe, has a lot of potential abuse. We'll consider it so

<comment><USER4> Re: 7. Yes, the app (<http://sexbyfood.com>) also charges. "one of the first" would be lol.

<comment><AUTHOR> Alright, can't verify it - but I changed our post : )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the site. Very nice job. I don't know how big your market it is. It appears to be targeted at developers, but we are the ones most likely to roll our own solution to this type of thing. I think I would be more apt to want to buy a one time license and run the software myself, then to commit to a monthly service fee.

Perhaps you should looking at a consumer market where you would do the work and then host it yourself for them giving them a link, or publish it to a subset of popular sites (facebook, flickr, youtube, wordpress, etc.) Your typical users on these sites will not/cannot leverage libraries to do what your service does. Make it easy for them to just upload & publish so they don't have to think about it.

Just my thoughts.

<comment><USER6> _I like the site. Very nice job. I don't know how big your market it is. It appears to be targeted at developers, but we are the ones most likely to roll our own solution to this type of thing. I think I would be more apt to want to buy a one time license and run the software myself, then to commit to a monthly service fee._

When you're launching a startup where video encoding is _one_ of the core component you don't really have the time to roll your own solution.

Doing an automated solution to encode videos is not easy and it takes time.

Having easy and cheap solutions like this make you gain valuable time in the early stage and even later.

 _Perhaps you should looking at a consumer market where you would do the work and then host it yourself for them giving them a link, or publish it to a subset of popular sites (facebook, flickr, youtube, wordpress, etc.)_

Thats exactly what Particles do, they have two services ; one for encoding (heywatch) and the second one spread the videos to multiple services and provide analytics (Heyspread).

<comment><USER5> I was referring to leveraging an existing solution (open source or otherwise) when rolling your own solution. Not re-writing from scratch

I was involved in a start up a while back where video encoding was a tiny part of what we were doing and while it was painful to get working, I don't know if we would have committed to a monthly service.

Take my comments with a grain of salt since I'm not your target customer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On my list of things to do today is build an image upload page for user profile images. I've been looking at using imagemagick.

Maybe it's just me, but I have a bit of a NDH attitude towards this kind of service, and particularly at the pricing you are offering.

I'm not saying you won't be successful, that's just my two cents.

I suspect it is going to take me a few hours to figure out the imagemajick stuff. These seem to be quite a few tutorials on how to use it with Rails, so we'll see.

You aren't offering storage, and I actually think that is a good thing, as I wouldn't trust something like user images to a 3rd party start-up.

I guess I'm really wondering who your target market is.

I don't think (but I could be wrong) that the code to handle this sort of file-upload stuff is weeks worth of work. So if I can get it done in two hours, lets say that costs a company $100, and that is code we own, run on our servers, and the only further cost is storage.

If the target market is non-programmers, are you offering enough features to make managing photos and video easy enough for them?

I can encode videos on lots of sites for free, and get them served without paying any storage or bandwidth fees.

So if we just focus on photos, and the heavy lifting you are doing is the resizing and thumbnails, is that something that a newby would want to do? Or is it something that is so complicated that a programmer wants to avoid doing it?

I think what you are providing is some very basic tools, which is good because it is easy to understand, but I just don't know if the tools you are providing are compelling enough.

I guess I'll go code up what I need for my service, and if it isn't done by this afternoon, maybe you'll have convinced me that I need your service.

But I think that may be a challenge you're facing. Do most programmers think they can do this on their own?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you, image resizing is simple enough that an average programmer can get it done. The reason we are offering it, is because it fits very naturally with our architecture, and people who handle video through us will probably also like us to handle their images.

We do a few tricky things so. HTML5 multi uploading is one of them. We actually start resizing images as they come in, that means by the time you are done uploading 100 images, we are done resizing them. Another thing is upload progress without flash, that will usually require a custom-compiled web server of some sort. And there is meta data extraction and uploading to S3. If you just need a fraction of all of that, sure - we have little to offer. But we'll try even harder to make people regret their decision to "build it themselves" in the future : ).

Let me know how far you get this afternoon!

Edit: Our pricing will go down substantially. We basically decided to launch with the highest price we may get away with in order to go down with pricing over time instead of up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do other people hate the vertical Get Satisfaction tab as much as me? I think it really interferes with this design (and many others).

<comment><USER9> You're not alone. I hate that thing, and I hate the fact that when you do actually fill out a suggestion, it forces you to create a login in order to submit it.

<comment><USER10> At least I know I'm not alone =). I [x] out that stupid box when it takes longer than 1 second to load, because apparently older versions are not asynchronously loaded, they are loaded at the time you click the feedback button.

It bothers me how it takes you to a new page, bothers me how you have to sign up _to do them a favor!_. Hey hey , I am trying to help YOU out here!!

I guess that's why HN is so nice, we all already have accounts to run our mouths with.

Getsatisfaction and uservoice seem to make money hand over fist, so clearly I am wrong, and clearly people love this stuff, but that just makes me all the more annoyed out how out of touch I can be with the rest of the planet.

Am I really that weird?

p.s. I think Facebook user interface for _anything_ other than writing on the wall is horrific ... andd .... I don't even have a "real" fb account =\

The end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am a designer so I'll just talk about the design.

It is excellent, the only change that you really must make is to add a "sign up now" button near the top (above the fold). Everything else is great design- wise.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That's a great suggestion! Glad you like the design : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm always curious to know why every startup launches with a "Most Popular" plan.

Isn't that lying to your customers?

<comment><USER13> I'm wondering if something that said "Best Value" would be most honest. Or similar remove the "Most Popular" wording and just make that option bigger.

I suspect the answer to your 'wondering' is that the startups have copied what 37 Signals is doing.

<comment><USER4> If one plan is "Best Value", it implies the others are not.

"Most Popular" is right. It simplifies the decision-making process on behalf of the user. It leads and reassures and solves the "what do other people choose" problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is interesting. Having been part of a startup which focused on video upload, encoding and streaming I think there is a market for this service. Past experience has shown me that one of the unplanned significant overheads of a service like this is the myriad of esoteric codecs out there and what they do to ffmpeg and related encoding tools. There is always a source or device that produces a video file which causes ffmpeg to hang or segfault on transcoding, or to output a flawed transcoded file with poor video or no sound, etc.

I'm curious how you deal with these 2 issues. The first issue being an infrastructure issue, where incoming media can cause problems for your tools, the second is a quality issue, where the output your tools produce may not be what the customer expects.

What is your plan to handle these 2 problems?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. This is exactly the reason we are doing this, video uploading and encoding is one hell of a nasty problem - something people would be glad to knock of their todo list.

In terms of dealing with the 2 problems: We've been working on this startup for 1.5 years by now, so we learned _a lot_ of the things that aren't working by now : ). Basically we fix problems as they come in, try to get advice from the right people, and be smart about the way we deal with the command line tools. Thanks to node.js we can easily "time out" on hanging FFMPEGs and detect other weird error conditions.

Anyway, I think our competition is ahead of us in terms of the encoding, but we'll catch up to them! We got the lead on uploading for the meantime : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really like the website, the API is well documented and the features looks good.

In my company we're currently using heywatch for encoding and after a rapid calcul it looks like you're cheaper.

We're paying 5c the video encoding and 10c for HD quality.

I'll have a deeper look this week.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll probably even lower our pricing in a few days, so we'd definitely love to talk! My skype is 'transloadit' !

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Question: Is there a more secure way to set the parameters other than have them in a hidden form field? It appears that the end user can set the parameters just by changing POST values. I'd prefer that not be the case.

<comment><AUTHOR> 2 things. Step 1 is to "sign" your post using our authentication:

<http://transloadit.com/docs/authentication>

Step 2 is to use our templates to hide your params entirely from the eyes of your users. Templates use 256 bit AES encryption:

<http://transloadit.com/docs/templates>

HTH : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Clicky: <http://transloadit.com></comment>


Finally, usable GCM cipher suites in SChannel - <AUTHOR> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2929781/en-us

<comment><AUTHOR> They did not add ECDHE with GCM though.</comment>


Show HN: Navi – painless routing & SEO with vanilla create-react-app - <AUTHOR> https://frontarm.com/articles/announcing-navi/ <comment><USER2> just use rendora or rendertron and solve the SEO problem within minutes. No need for native SSR anymore if you just care about SEO

</comment><comment><USER3> Why would I use it over next.js? Next.js now offers a static mode that exports for static hosting.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a few reasons, for example:

\- You can eject (which gives you more control)

\- There's a lot less configuration involved

\- It's easier to integrate with the rest of the react ecosystem, as Navi is just a small library

\- You can bolt this on to an existing create-react-app project</comment></comment>


Elite MBA Programs Report Steep Drop in Applications - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/elite-m-b-a-programs-report-steep-drop-in-applications-11571130001?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> I was ready to rant about my own experience with MBA students put in pseudo management situations who can't iron their own shirt or couldn't schedule people's hours at a Wendy's... but then I realized this article is about Elite programs.

So I wonder are the Elite programs significantly different than other programs?

One of my biggest problems encountering MBA students released into the wild is that so many have limited life experience. It's really hard to explain to a fresh MBA guy that you can't schedule people only when it is convenient for him / how to cultivate personal / professional relationships / how to just theorize customer's responses to various changes (like thinking beyond saving 1%) and etc. It's just so hard to teach folks who haven't the experience these things that being a good manager isn't just pulling the mechanical leavers of management because "i'm the boss" and how to really understand what leadership is when they haven't experienced it much from the other side.

I haven't encountered many from the best programs and I always wonder if they require some REAL work experience where they had real responsibility first / etc.

<comment><USER3> Not to defend MBAs here, but doesn't a big portion of the blame fall on organizations that are clearly putting too much weight on their candidate's degree and placing them in jobs they're not (yet) qualified for?

In an alternate scenario: an MBA gets hired to fill a position below management and the higher-ups get a clear picture if they're cut out to manage operations, only awarding the MBA a promotion to management if/when they prove themselves.

<comment><USER4> This is true, however typically the people who make that call are from the same background (MBAs themselves).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The same folks here who crap on MBAs, will also get super excited about Y Combinator Startup School, despite both of them teaching about business.

Lets go through the Y Combinator Startup School curriculum and I'll put the MBA version in square brackets[].

Startup School 2019 Orientation: How to Talk to Users [ _MBA: Business Communication, Marketing /Strategy_], How to Evaluate Startup Ideas Pt. 1 [ _MBA: Marketing /Strategy_]

WEEK 2: How to Plan an MVP [ _MBA: Marketing /Strategy_], How to Set KPIs and Goals [ _MBA: Accounting, Operations, Human Resources /Leadership_], Analytics for Startups [ _MBA: Statistics_ ],

WEEK 3: Nine Business Models and the Metrics Investors Want [ _MBA: Marketing /Strategy, Finance_], How Investors Measure Startups Q&A,

WEEK 4: How to Launch (Again and Again) [ _MBA: Marketing /Strategy_], Growth for Startups [ _MBA: Marketing /Strategy_],

WEEK 5: Startup Finance Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them [ _MBA: Finance_ ], How to Work Together [ _MBA: Human Resources /Leadership_],

WEEK 6: Building Culture [ _MBA: Human Resources /Leadership_], All About Pivoting [ _MBA: Marketing /Strategy_],

WEEK 7: How to Improve Conversion Rates [ _MBA: Marketing_ ], Startup Pricing 101 [ _MBA: Marketing /Strategy, Finance_],

WEEK 8: How to Prioritize Your Time [ _MBA: Human Resources /Leadership_], How to Evaluate Startup Ideas Pt. 2 [ _MBA: Marketing /Strategy_],

WEEK 9: Modern Startup Financing [ _MBA: Finance_ ], Advice for Hard-tech and Biotech Founders [ _MBA: Case-studies_ ],

WEEK 10: How to Lead [ _MBA: Human Resources /Leadership_], Startup School 2019 by the Numbers, Parting Advice, GRADUATION

<comment><USER6> I don't see a lot of people crapping on the _content_ presented at MBA programs. MBA-style case studies are actually pretty fun. The thing they're crapping on is the average quality of the _people_ that come out of these MBA programs, _as a group_.

If the people coming into your program are largely pampered, entitled idiots, and as an institution, you throw away your old work experience requirements so that you can rake in those sweet sweet MBA loan / trust-fund dollars, then you shouldn't be surprised when you start to get people who can't tie their own shoelaces out the other end, and you'll have nobody to blame but yourself when people start to question the value of an MBA or when enrollment starts to drop.

Startup School _currently_ appears to self select for a more intelligent and thoughtful cohort. This may change in the future, and I'll happily update my heuristics if / when that happens, but for now assuming lower quality from an MBA grad than from someone who worked through Startup School _without any additional information_ doesn't seem that unreasonable to me.

<comment><USER6> To add a bit more here:

You should _really_ try to get as much additional information as you can about someone instead of judging them on a heuristic alone. Just a 20 minute conversation can be incredibly revealing if you're good at talking to people (which admittedly, is not a common enough skill).

While MBA programs produce no shortage of head-scratchers, I also know several MBA grads who are sharp as a tack, who are no-nonsense hard workers, and that any ambitious company would be lucky to hire. The problem is that all of them ended up at the big management consultancies.

And this is by design -- the consultancies realized that they can go chumming for suckers at the top business schools to get respectable looking worker bees, and business schools used this fact (the "prestige" and the high initial salaries) to market their programs and to justify tuition increases. This vicious cycle has completely eaten the elite business schools and now they're basically just feeders for management consultancies and banks. The success metric of every elite business school is the number of graduates they manage to shovel into these jobs.

But you don't need an MBA when all you're doing is parroting back whatever your employer's client wants you to tell them -- you mostly just need to look the part and have enough social graces to make the client feel like they're interacting with "one of their own" (read: someone from their class / social circle). So it's not too much of a leap to see that letting in a trust-fund kid with zero skills or experience is totally fine by bank and management consultancy standards -- they grew up around other rich people! They're perfect! Even though they're not so great for people like you and me, who might prefer someone who can think and act strategically over someone with upper-class social graces.

And the management consultancies really are a sucker's game. It's not _actually_ "up or out" as is commonly suggested... It's more like "you make partner, and pay yourself disproportionately more for all the work that everyone below you produces, or you realize that the 'rainmakers' are taking advantage of you and you quit." But the realization can sometimes take a decade or longer as you suppress your gut feelings and get used to a pseudo- lavish lifestyle that the next-best-option-that-actually-allows-you-to-use- your-brain might not be able to cover.

It's the same story with big-name law firms. The salary distribution for law school graduates is bimodal -- $60-70k for grads of lower-tier schools or for grads who don't make the cut with the big firms or who go into public service, and $155,000 +/\- ~$500 at all of the prestigious law firms (or whatever it was last year + 2.5%). But you'll be putting in all the hours and doing all of the real work for the next 10-20 years while some partner wines and dines and takes home $20 million a year off of your labor.

This is why I generally don't advise people to go to business school. While I know plenty of people who would probably gain a lot from a rigorous business school curriculum, everything about the program -- their classmates, the faculty, the internship, even the calculus when evaluating their offers -- will push them into making a decision that I think many of them will regret 10 or 20 years later. Most of the people who have asked me about this are quite smart. When I ask about their motivation, the common factor is that they want more leverage on their brain power. They want to continue to be the intelligent person that they are, but they want to magnify their output, or be taken more seriously. Contrary to some tropes, I haven't found many that just want to make more money at any cost. They certainly don't want to be "takers" (from "makers vs. takers"). But the management consultancies and the partners that run them -- remember, this is the pinnacle of success for these schools! -- are the massive fat cats of the "taker" world. Not only do they take actual money that should really be going to the smart people doing the work, they also take these people away from more productive and more satisfying opportunities elsewhere in society.

It's been interesting watching the career progression of friends and acquaintances from my parents' generation who worked at these sort of "make partner or die trying" pressure cookers. Four or five made the equivalent of partner at their firm, made obscene amounts of money, neglected their children (who are now in law school after years of rebellious misbehaving), are now empty nesters with a 15,000 square foot nest, and are largely miserable. Basically everybody else who left (after sticking it out for 5-20 years) wishes that they had left sooner. Sure, they made good money, but in their environment it was never enough, and they never got to use their skills in a way that had _any_ sort of outcome, let alone an outsized one. It was all just extreme busywork.

I'm hopeful that at least some of the drops in business school applications are from people seeing this shell game for what it really is. The business school curriculum is interesting and can be quite valuable. But the big management consultancies can go die in a fire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems that almost all the comments are about the downfall of MBAs.

The actual article - not the title - says applications rose in Europe, China and quite dramatically in Canada. If applications rise by 9% in Canada while they decrease by 9% in the US, it's quite a good argument for the thesis of the author which is that immigration restrictions are responsible.

It used to be easy to get an MBA in the US then get a job as a foreigner. I have a friend who got a Masters in the US from an elite uni, worked in New York for 3 years, applied and lost thrice the H1-B lottery to later move to London. Many Indian and Chinese nationals leave for Canada instead of waiting more than a decade to get a Green Card. Getting an education in the US with the intention to access its job market is less attractive now.

<comment><USER8> Well, I know this sort of sentiment is usually dismissed as xenophobia but… where's the evidence that this is a bad thing _for U.S. citizens_?

<comment><USER9> If it is international students that are applying elsewhere, that could lead to a drop in diversity at these universities. There have been studies that confirm students do better when learning with a diverse set of peers [1], but these studies were on elementary aged students. I'm curious if that applies to college / master's programs too.

From the article:

Students can learn better how to navigate adulthood in an increasingly diverse society—a skill that employers value—if they attend diverse schools. Ninety- six percent of major employers, Wells, Fox, and Cordova-Cobo note, say it is "important" that employees be "comfortable working with colleagues, customers, and/or clients from diverse cultural backgrounds."

[1]: [https://tcf.org/content/report/how-racially-diverse- schools-...](https://tcf.org/content/report/how-racially-diverse-schools-and- classrooms-can-benefit-all-students/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Applications are still growing, the highest was Canada with 9.4% growth between 2018 and 2019:

> Applications to U.S. business schools, including M.B.A. programs, fell > sharply, while rising in Canada, Europe and China.

just not in the US:

> "There's perception, which we absolutely pick up in our data, that the U.S. > is not a welcoming environment," said Sangeet Chowfla, GMAC's chief > executive.

<comment><USER11> After working with so many MBAs from prestigious schools I find it very hard to take this kind of title at face value, before seeing the person in action. Most had an MBA at 23 years old, basically jumping straight from university classes to MBA classes with nothing in between. At best the MBA did not bring anything. At worst it made some feel so entitled that they actually performed far worse. I fail to see the added value in this and most of them failed to show it.

Given that this was happening in very large companies and involved studies in prestigious schools but nothing practical to show for it, in the end I can only assume many of these are just CV fluff.

<comment><USER12> CV fluff is the important bit.

I'm willing to bet most MBA students directly from undergrad with no work experience between are only getting an MBA either because:

1) they couldn't get a good high paying job right out of college.

and/or 2) they read that an MBA is a good investment, and MBA students on average make $X more per year (without doing their MBA calculations and doing the time discount and opportunity cost to figure out it's propbably not worth it).

<comment><USER13> Well, as to #2, if you get an MBA right out of college it's theoretically more likely to be worth it, simply because the multiplier effect has more years to work with

<comment><USER14> Actually, it was the first exercise we did in my EMBA finance class :D

Even with an EMBA, which happens later in a career, the NPV is quite positive.

<comment><USER12> Did you use a bell curve to figure out if it's worth it -- on average -- or did you use a madelbrot curve? Unless you go to an elite school, and the tuition is cheaper than anywhere I'm aware of, you're either 1) banking on being on the good side of the curve, 2) imagining there's a gaussian distribution to salaries (which there isn't), 3) enrolled somewhere very elite or incredibly cheap, or 4) vastly underestimating how much you could be earning presently -- which if you got enrolled in an elite school, you probably could've gotten an elite job...

<comment><USER14> Nothing that fancy, we just looked at the average case using a conservative estimate of salary increase after an MBA (something like + 30% 3 years after, so way below what the FT figures show for instance), and a conservative starting salary.

Note that this was an executive MBA, so the base assumptions are a little different; in particular, attendees have a pretty good idea of what they're worth on the market and the effect of the EMBA is pretty well quantified: most EMBA participants change jobs/companies after the program, usually with a nice salary bump (although of course signing up for an EMBA in the first place is a good indication that you're willing to invest in your career, so at least part of that progress would have happened in some way or another even without the EMBA).

In my personal case, the salary increase is close to 100% 5 years after enrollment - so the investment was well worth it.

To answer the rest of your questions, the program was in the FT top 10 (now at #12 or so) and tuition was around 50k€. Yay for European business schools :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hasn't there always been an inverse correlation to people going back to school and the economy?

Currently, the economy is doing very well, so people are less inclined to go back to school. Once the economy turns and unemployment rises, then I'm sure the MBA applications will rise.

<comment><USER16> This seems like a good point; ( _speculating_ ) especially if an MBA is viewed asa means to earn more in a declining economy. I don't know much about the programs and the expected increase in salary upon completion.

<comment><USER17> MBA or other Master's degrees are ways to buy time to wait out a bad economy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Having started my own company and done everything from doing coffee runs for my team to writing investment briefs, I'm not sure what an MBA would teach me?

Not being snarky, genuinely curious as to what benefit I could derive as I've always seen as something that I'd eventually pursue.

<comment><USER19> MBAs are a gatekeeping mechanism for the rich

<comment><USER20> This is pretty damn false. Most state schools offer online MBAs for extremely affordable tuition rates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm a Software Engineer by trade but now run an interactive agency. I got a night MBA at a local state school (actually got tuition covered by my company) while still working as a Software Engineer and wondering if I wanted to stay on that path indefinitely.

Did my MBA qualify me to run a business? No but that being said I found a lot of what I was taught really valuable in providing a baseline of getting me past not knowing what I didn't know. Marketing and Accounting classes were really interesting and provided some value. Innovation classes also provided value.

Its a strange degree because of its broad nature it doesn't provide a singular skill (sans specialization) to lean into but it does provide a lot of valuable knowledge and while it's not something that will "get me a particular job I did find the experience valuable.

<comment><USER22> I have a computer engineering BS and got my MBA from a full time, two year program without financial assistance.

The price of the program has been a very difficult burden in retrospect. I would have financed it differently and made different spending decisions if i could go back.

But the education was as parent describes, offering a very useful set of skills, from business presentation, teamwork, research and finance.

Things that inherently are not a part of YC startup school, (I just graduated from that with EasyALPR)

Startups require a whole other set of skills, but what they teach in MBA is valuable—-so long as it is financed carefully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a good thing. People are realizing that a $500,000+ upfront cost (tuition + 2 years' lost income) had better have an an astronomical ROI. In many cases, it doesn't.

Anecdotally, I went to undergrad at a school with an elite MBA program. It seemed to me that the only hard part of the MBA program was getting in; the MBA students were essentially paying to have a 2 year networking party. Their experience was like being in college, except they had money to spend and grades didn't matter (due to a grade non-disclosure policy for MBAs).

Because of this grade non-disclosure, the MBA was significantly easier than the undergraduate degree. Many classes had an undergraduate section and a MBA section - the same material taught by the same professor. After the midterm and final, the professor would post the median test score and standard distribution in order to establish the grading curve. The median score for the MBA section was consistently 1.5-2 standard deviations below the undergrad median.

Sometimes a class would be offered to mainly MBAs, but a few undergrads were able to enroll...this was always great for your GPA.

<comment><USER24> I have several friends with top tier MBAs. They all got them in an effort to jump from the sell-side to the buy side, and most saw salary increases from 300-400k to 600k-1M+. The ROI on that specific career move is pretty clear and is really the only path I would personally justify for an MBA.

They all say the course load and work is a joke. It's mostly an accreditation to the buy side hiring process and networking.

<comment><USER25> I don't know about your friends but the average salary out of an elite b-school is something like 160k in the best of cases [1], not the ranges you mention...

Either they're total outliers, or you're talking about something like an exec MBA, or something else altogether.

[1] [https://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate- schools/top-b...](https://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top- business-schools/articles/mba-salary-jobs)

<comment><USER26> Who cares about average salary?

The two most popular post-mba paths are investment banking and consulting, I know exactly what the post-mba IB comp is:

1st full year associate: 150k base, 70-100% bonus

VP comp is easily above 400k

Consultants make $165k+ base with slightly smaller bonuses out of school

The numbers schools put out are not contextualized. The high paying roles out of the top ~20 MBA programs command total comp that is almost totally unacheivable as an employee, even in tech, especially if you don't want to count on equity appreciation.

<comment><USER25> The article does say "salary and bonus" though... So if the figures are true there must be a good number of people not getting close to this.

And regardless, still a far cry from what OP was claiming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have an MBA from on of these schools and I can tell you that it's virtually worthless. I went at night because my boss made me and paid for it. (Yes, doing classes from 6-9pm a couple nights per week for two years was miserable) People who quit their jobs and forgo income and instead take on debt to go full-time are insane, the only point is to basically relive college and party 4-5 nights/week. Frankly, I don't see the point of any post-graduate degree in something that's neither specific nor complex.

<comment><USER28> "Frankly, I don't see the point of any post-graduate degree in something that's neither specific nor complex."

This is a useless metric. I have a PhD in something that is specific and complex and never could find a job.

MBA is generic. It may not pay off but you can play in many fields.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's easy to hate on MBAs, but unethical people are unethical no matter the degree.

My general observation is most people aren't good with finance or the numbers behind their business. Having a 2nd tier MBA Doesn't help. People who list MBA after their name rarely have it either. People from top tier MBA programs have a fighting chance. They may not have technical or leadership skills but they can talk the language of business. That helps to get into the C Suite, or sell to the C suite. (If that's not the goal, it's a bad degree)

<comment><USER30> I've met a lot of jerks with MBA's, its not the MBA though, it's just that they're jerks. Unfortunately there's no check for that on the entrance exam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> One of the more interesting (to me) effects of the dot com crash was the evaporation of all the hot shot MBAs looking to find a technical co-founder who could make their lead-into-gold business plan work. Perhaps the dying of the unicorns has taken the shine off "making it big in Silicon Valley" once again. That and the softening housing market might almost make you think we were headed into the next 'down' cycle.

I also learned from that experience that understanding value chains, organizational dynamics, and market positioning were in fact a very real and solid component of company success. There are good MBAs and there are bad ones, just like there are good and bad engineers, or chefs or lawyers.

If the drop in applications mean that it isn't considered the next "get rich quick" exit then I think that is a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER32> Isn't this old news?

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903532804576566...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903532804576566611053380594) (2011)

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444433504577651...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444433504577651962999932518) (2012)

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/wharton-applications- drop-12-ov...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/wharton-applications-drop-12-over- four-years-1380238730) (2013)

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/m-b-a-applications-decline- for-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/m-b-a-applications-decline-for-third- year-in-a-row-1505727000) (2017)

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/red-flag-for-u-s-business- schoo...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/red-flag-for-u-s-business-schools- foreign-students-are-staying-away-1493819949) (2017)

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/m-b-a-applications-keep- falling...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/m-b-a-applications-keep-falling-in-u- s-this-year-hitting-even-elite-schools-1538366461) (2018)

</comment><comment><USER33> Frankly speaking, I don't have MBA nor am I in Management. Infact, I can't afford to get MBA. But as a Developer, even I recognize the need for MBA grads from elite schools especially as Company scales in size. You can definitely have CEOs / founders who are like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates but reality is, once your corporation gets big enough, even if the CEO doesn't have MBA, they will probably hire army of elite MBA grads to formulate and execute successful business plans.

</comment><comment><USER34> Good news. These programs are cash cows and the vast majority who apply for MBA do it for the wrong reasons (networking and a big name school on their resume). There are lots of MBAs from elite schools in my company and the gap is huge. Some are great but some are completely useless. Anyone can have an MBA from an elite school. You just need the money and be willing to spend it on a degree. (sorry MBA graduates, I know you gonna downvote this comment :))

<comment><USER35> >Anyone can have an MBA from an elite school. You just need the money and be willing to spend it on a degree.

This is not true at all. Regardless of the value of the degree/experience, elite MBA programs are still difficult to get into and have low acceptance rates.

<comment><USER34> Yes, saying "everyone can get into" is an exaggeration. However, low acceptance rate doesn't mean much given the pool of candidates who compete to get in is limited to people who are able and willing to spend $100K on an MBA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm not sure what an "elite" college teaches that a "regular" college doesn't.

Maybe quality of student is better, but the content seems negligible.

Heck I find the personalities of young "elite" grads need additional shaping in the real world.

<comment><USER37> Elite schools move much faster and cover more material than a regular school would. Obviously with the smarter kids at the elite school they can get more advanced.

<comment><USER38> Do you have any examples of this? I don't feel people I have met from elite schools actually know more material theory then from other schools. If I look at online courses the content of those from elite schools doesn't differ much from courses I have taken in a non-elite school.

<comment><USER37> Not macro, no I don't have examples. Just my personal observation based on classes I took at an "elite" college vs. the ones taken by a friend at the state school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've taken the route of a "build your own MBA", seeking out various industry certifications to validate my learning. I flirted with an MBA program for years, but none offered the flexibility I was seeking in terms of honing a skillset around what I'm going for in my career.

</comment><comment><USER40> Is it just me, or is the comment section all about hating on MBAs, when the article is about how these elite programs are losing out due to changes in US immigration policies?

<comment><USER17> When an article is behind a pay-wall you will have people commenting based on the title alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Appending '?mod=rsswn' to the url is not bypassing pay wall anymore.

[http://archive.is/IpPls](http://archive.is/IpPls)

</comment><comment><USER42> How bloody surprising.

My own experience:I have an associate degree, I cannot apply to anything because I don't have a bachelor degree, yet my current stakeholders are CxO, or I am basically a tech lead. I would love to do a MBA or a master degree but continous education is out of reality.

And mooc are useless in this regard : sorry but even if you pass our Mooc "degree", you still need a bachelor to register to the master through the mooc pathway, screw that.

</comment><comment><USER43> Good. The rise of the MBA has seen the downfall of quality.

"Business Administration" is not something that can be taught in such a generic way that an MBA qualifies you to actually run a business.

In particular, the rise of Financial "Engineering" has led to huge inequality and the total disconnection of "Wall St" from "Main St" such that their relationship has been completely inverted.

<comment><USER44> It's not really that generalized as you can pick 1 or more majors and focus on what you want to learn most. Not to mention each MBA school has different characteristics, attracting different candidates and campus recruiters. Stanford and Booth couldn't be more different if they tried.

MBA graduates are also not fit for running literally any business. The only thing employers know is that if you come from a top 10 MBA, you probably check the box on being pretty smart (the GMAT is a tough exam) while also possessing soft skills, being personable, ready to meet with clients or manage people and probably well-connected. It's a pedigree that allegedly excludes the dumb rich kids

Now your claim about Wall Street is just uninformed FUD. Most people on the street do not have an MBA, let alone one from a top school, particularly on the Sales & Trading branch of Wall Street that is usually what people associate with poor ethics and exploiting Main Street

<comment><USER45> I can accept the pretty smart part (I've never seen the GMAT but I'll accept it for the sake of argument) but what part of getting an MBA filters for "possessing soft skills, being personable, ready to meet with clients or manage people and probably well-connected"?

<comment><USER46> > what part of getting an MBA filters for "possessing soft skills, being > personable, ready to meet with clients or manage people and probably well- > connected"?

MBAs at the top schools demand intense team work. Without it, you won't pass.

My MBA experience was INSEAD, in France. For the first 3 terms (of 5), all work was done in teams of 5. The school chose the teams explicitly to maximise the chance of conflict (by maximising differences in background, nationality, prior education, work experience, age and gender). The professors then threw tons of work on us. A well-functioning team could just about cope. Totally impossible if working individually.

So we had no option but figure out how to work together, maximise the combined value of each person's skills, and rely fully on each other.

A few teams exploded spectacularly. But most of us learned how to work as a team and succeed under intense pressure.

<comment><USER47> HBS still does this, as far as I know for first years ("learning teams"). Although you may be evaluated individually, success or failure is a team effort when everybody brings something to the table.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I'm about to start a non-US MBA with an entrepreneurship/startup focus, night school so that I can keep working and earning during the degree. Total cost for me out of pocket, for two years of tuition, after various state (non- employer) benefits, is roughly $3,500. Full cost for two years is a tad under $20,000. I have the time, I'll pick up the networking and the skills, I can pay for it out of pocket and without debt, so for that price - why not?

If I was faced with a six-figure price tag, I'd self-educate. The Internet is a powerful resource. "Networking" isn't worth the cost of tuition when people will come banging down your door to work with you after you've developed a strong and proven track record for results.

</comment><comment><USER49> Funny that UIUC's online iMBA on Coursera is exploding. I've read they went from >100 to >2500 students in 4 years. That could have some effect on the market?

<comment><USER50> In addition, UIUC closed their in-person MBA program not long ago. Maybe a sign of things to come?

[https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/05/28/illinoi...](https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/05/28/illinois- will-end-residential-mba)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> A good MBA program will essentially teach people about the anthropology of complex human organizations.

For example: how do you create or (even harder) change a culture that is secretive towards one where people share more to improve rates of innovation?

How do you organize people to optimally interact?

How do you determine the potential value of expensive research projects (to see if it is worth doing)?

Then you go over case studies over the last century and 'hope' to learn something.

</comment><comment><USER52> I wonder if this means it's any easier to get in. I guess that would defeat the whole "networking" part of it.

</comment><comment><USER53> What value does an MBA provide today?

It used to be a way to accelerate a career path, but is that even the case anymore?

</comment><comment><USER54> Based on the abstract (paywall), this is the much predicted impact of the hostile environment being created in the US.

Since MBAs especially are largely network building institutions, this is a situation where the clear losers are gonna be the educational institutions and the US, because the Chinese and Indian students who would have otherwise built an American network when trying to create their own businesses, largely in their own countries, will now be building a Canadian one instead.

</comment><comment><USER55> Anybody has link to a non paywall version?

<comment><USER41> [http://archive.is/IpPls](http://archive.is/IpPls)

<comment><USER56> Thank you, sir/madam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> [http://archive.is/IpPls](http://archive.is/IpPls)

</comment><comment><USER58> In line with economic cycle. People go to biz school during downturns when there are no good offers

</comment><comment><USER59> I love these articles opining the end of thr MBA. All grad schools see a drop in applications during times of low unemployment. Law is the same. This is not due to any other factor, as much as people would like to believe.

<comment><USER60> There are also a number of quality universities shutting down their MBA programs as well. It's not just because of the unemployment rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> They're blaming immigration and not the economy this time?

<comment><USER62> My graduate program (computer-y, not MBA) has seen a huge drop in international applications. That was the large majority of our graduate program, and after 2016 those applications have dropped about 75%.

<comment><USER63> Meanwhile in Canada, international applications to McGill have shot up 50%.

The driving factor is pretty obvious....

<comment><USER64> > The driving factor is pretty obvious....

As a Canadian I am stumped, surely people don't like cold weather :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> This is good news for the planet's health.

Hopefully state legislatures, university administrators, and bankers will get the signal-- the tuition versus value equation is makes less and less sense. Especially with many free & low cost self-taught education options online, and the debt burden facing millennials.

<comment><USER66> lmao, care to elaborate?

<comment><USER65> yep-- The economic ethics and models espoused by business schools focus on an economic system where companies are expected to maximise short-term gains regardless of consequences.

A focus on profit over everything else. It's a matter of law as well-- heads of companies are legally compelled to prioritize shareholder value.

<comment><USER67> > It's a matter of law as well

That is simply not true. It's merely cargo culting the Friedman doctrine. It has no basis in corporate law, and never has.

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

<comment><USER65> I think you're right that it is a misconception that there is a legal obligation to put shareholder value (profit) first. It seems that it's more of a doctrine.

I was wrong to state it as a claim without any backing to my claim.

From what I am reading online (I am not a lawyer), it stems from a court case "eBay v. Newmark"

"The Delaware court's decision in eBay v. Newmark has been viewed by many commentators as a decisive affirmation of shareholder wealth maximization as the only legally permissible objective of a for‐profit corporation."

[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/basr.12108](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/basr.12108)

"A 2010 decision, for example, eBay Domestic Holdings Inc. v. Newmark, held that corporate directors are bound by "fiduciary duties and standards" which include "acting to promote the value of the corporation for the benefit of its stockholders.""

[https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are- co...](https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations- obligations-to-shareholders/a-duty-to-shareholder-value)

<comment><USER67> That's very disturbing as there seems to be no basis in statute (IANAL either). Course being Wiley I can't read beyond the abstract.

The FT has run frequent articles particularly, but not solely, US and UK focused that appear to contradict that, including some quite in depth pieces.

Not the most definitive of the many they've run, but from first page of search a US-centred piece from a US author, who's also a US lawyer:

 _But the controlling legal rule is universal and rock-solid: in every US jurisdiction, boards are allowed to use their "business judgment" to pursue ESG (environmental, social, and governance) principles for the purpose of creating long-term corporate value_

Which is what you'd reasonably expect, as short-term pursuit of shareholder value can be of extreme detriment to the longer term prospects of the company - and therefore shareholders.

[https://www.ft.com/content/6e806580-d560-11e9-8d46-8def889b4...](https://www.ft.com/content/6e806580-d560-11e9-8d46-8def889b4137)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I used to think lawyers were the class of people most damaging to society. (As the political class.) Now after some recent up close and personal exposure to MBAs, I'm not so sure. It's a shame because it's a degree that attracts a lot of smart people due to its market value...</comment>


A Web IDE for Teams using Golang - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/b3log/wide

<comment><USER2> I don't want to sound arrogant, but can someone please try to explain to me what is the appeal of web-based IDEs for non-web development? The "feature" bullet points from their site do not really speak to me, and it overall still seems like a solution in search of a problem. I'd seriously like to hear some stories from people who use such solutions and environments.

The only reason I can think of for the existence and continuous implementations of this idea is when you regularly develop on different machines where you can't set up development environments. And here again I can't imagine why such a thing would ever happen to a typical programmer, let alone to a team of developers (presumably at a company).

<comment><USER3> For me it would be instant, remote collaboration. Unfortunately no web-based IDE offers that, as far as I know. Google docs for code anyone?

<comment><USER4> SageMathCloud ([https://cloud.sagemath.com](https://cloud.sagemath.com)) offers collaborative editing of files, IPython and Sage notebooks, and latex documents, and terminal sessions. Really, it's like a collaborative unix account. It doesn't have a debugger, etc., so it's definitely not a full-blown ide, but it does have syntax highlighting and a shell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I also don't want to sound arrogant, but I would like to address this point:

> Text editor (vim/emacs/sublime/Atom, etc.): For the Go newbie is too complex

Text editor may be hard(?) to setup for a go newbie, although I do not personally agree with this statement, but at least local shell + text editor + command line compiler is a _well known and understood stack_. A newbie having a problem with it can always ask for help - coworkers, friends, online, etc., and solution is always within her control.

Replacing this stack with a web-based one will change a set of known problems into a set of unknown problems, outside of _anybody 's_ control, except for the _b3log_ and their team. And their software is fresh and untested, and surely contains a lot of bugs, as any new code.

I'm not sure that sounds like a good value proposition - not to me.

<comment><USER6> On the other hand, it's likely (if their system is at least as good as cloud9) that if someone has a problem, they can provide a link that will literally show it exactly as they see it, and it'll almost certainly remove one of the most common problems of getting started which is weird environmental problems on the users computer. When cloud9 first came out, for a long time it was by far the best way of developing node.js code on windows.

I still have weird environment and cygwin/msys issues on windows when trying to set up Idris or rust or even some node packages that insist on compiling native code on install.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A couple of comments:

1) There are a few comments the question the appeal of web based IDEs. My view is that this because IDEs are generally quite refined pieces of software: the people who use them are also authors, etc. It's hard for a new IDE of any type to compete with that at the start.

HOWEVER, Web-based IDEs have some very attractive features. The ability to always have it available and customised to how you want it, with state shared across multiple computers is very attractive. Remote compilation and dependency/library management is much nicer than local, especially with the integration automatic versioning. Shared, multiuser coding spaces are also much more natural.

2) Regarding this IDE: I'd love a good Go IDE. The thing that stopped me diving deeply into Go last time I tried it was that I missed refactoring support. At least it seems to have autocomplete.

<comment><USER8> 2) i have a kickstarter coming in a few days =]

<comment><USER7> Probably should put your email in you profile so people can email you to beg for details...

(The HN email field is private - it has to go in the "About Me" section)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wanted to ask why Go is so popular in China, but then I found this: [http://herman.asia/why-is-go-popular-in-china](http://herman.asia/why-is-go- popular-in-china)

On reddit: [http://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/23c7y0/why_is_golang...](http://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/23c7y0/why_is_golang_popular_in_china/cgvkppp)

</comment><comment><USER10> When they mention LiteIDE has no modern interface, is that just colour scheme and icons? I've created my own modern theme for it. Should I share that?

</comment><comment><USER11> Hacking Go from a Chromebook; definitely gonna look. Neat if it runs happily as a local server under crouton ( [https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton](https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton) ).

</comment><comment><USER12> I created a new Terminal.com snapshot to try this this IDE. Feel free to take a look at [https://www.terminal.com/tiny/BRIrX20hCQ](https://www.terminal.com/tiny/BRIrX20hCQ)

</comment><comment><USER13> I think it looks pretty cool. I think I'll try to set it up and have it as a backup option when all I have is a browser.

</comment><comment><USER14> Someone throw this in a docker container and make it easy to play with.

/lazyweb

</comment><comment><USER15> From [https://github.com/b3log/wide/blob/master/editor/editors.go](https://github.com/b3log/wide/blob/master/editor/editors.go): // 编辑器操作. (...) // TODO: 目前是调用 liteide_stub 工具来查找声明,后续需要重新实现

This is not an isolated example. People, please. For open source code stick to english in the code. Otherwise, you needlessly exclude anyone who doesn't speak your particular language.

I was about to dive into the code thinking "this thing looks cool, maybe there's something to learn from it". This turned me away instantly.

<comment><USER16> With the abundance of online translators this should not be a problem. This is what Google translate makes of it:

        // Editor operations (...) // TODO:.
        Is currently calling liteide_stub tool
        to find statement, the subsequent need to reimplement

Baidu translate:

        / / editor operation. (...) / / TODO:
        is now calling the liteide_stub tool
        to find the following statement,
        the need to re implement

Between the two of those it is clear what this comment means. Had they written it in 'Chinglish' the result would probably be similar, but in that case nobody would know exactly what they meant, not even those who read Chinese.

<comment><USER17> Writer friendly comments/documents....

I am guilty of them also. A lot of time after 6 months, 1 year and I go back to the source/document I wrote, I have hard time out my writings.

I think the reasons are a lot of sentences/paragraph we wrote are highly dependent on the contexts of author's mind and the state of that particular moments of developments. It might just make sense within those contexts. When one forgot them or other try to read sentences out of the context, it become very difficult to understand.

I have some documents on power management code related to particular SOC + linux kernel + .ko + user app + pm scripts. They are very hard to understand for myself after a few months.

I don't know the best way to solve this.</comment></comment></comment>


Kivy – Open-source Python library for rapid development of applications - <AUTHOR> http://kivy.org/ <comment><USER2> I've tried it, but the resulted built size is huge. How could a Hello World application (built for android) took 15 minutes to build, and about 60MB in size ?? Why not those measurement been told in the main site to tell other to try and use ?

<comment><USER3> The actual apk can be as small as 5-6mb, but yes it's too big. Ideally common files to all Kivy applications (the python runtime and libraries) would only exist once, but that's a problem people can't quite agree how to solve. [https://github.com/kivy/python-for- android/issues/202](https://github.com/kivy/python-for-android/issues/202)

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure apps can have dependencies, so that looks like the best solution. Yes, users will be annoyed, but I think it's still better than various other "hacks".

<comment><USER5> QT has tried that on Android and it's an exceedingly poor solution. Almost no user will click to download additional files -- they've been (rightfully) conditioned to view this as a suspicious technique.

As long as you blacklist unneeded libraries on Kivy, you can get the size down to 5 - 10 MB. I personally don't believe this download size is such a problem for users (many native Java apps are upwards of 5 MB).

What _is_ a problem is the start-up time and battery usage, both much harder problems to address. Because they require the Python interpreter, Kivy apps take significantly longer to start-up, and use significantly more battery power than Java apps. I have some hope that Micropython may eventually offer a solution to this for Python on Android, although porting Kivy to Micropython will be a major task.

<comment><USER6> I think startup time has good for very annoying, with android devices of 3 years go, to nearly forgettable, with more modern, high-end devices. I've witnessed nearly instant startups, with devices as the Note 2, not saying it's a solved problem, the cpu speed and even more the read/write speed of the internal storage will have a lot of impact especially on the first start (unpacking python and deps).

For battery usage, i'd love to see data for this, i think drain will come from the amount of action you put in your interface, as well as background processing you'll do, kivy itself, being opengl and cautious about what to update when changes happen, shouldn't add a lot of overhead on this.

I don't think porting to micropython is considered an option, usually, when we want more efficient code, the solution is to do less python, more C, we have a nice integration with Cython, and don't hesitate to go with it as soon as needed.

<comment><USER6> "has gone from" >_<.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 2048 app that use Kivy on android [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.meltingroc...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.meltingrocks.kivy2048)

</comment><comment><USER8> I have a couple hymnal apps in the Play Store built with Kivy, and reviews suggest that performance is a problem for some people, especially scrolling through long views. I'm in the process of rewriting them using HTML and JavaScript in a WebView.

That being said, Kivy is really nice to work with; the documentation is good and it's a well thought-out library. I'd enjoy using it for future apps that don't happen to have long views to scroll through.

<comment><USER6> Did you use ListView, or did you roll your own ScrollView managed content? We are sorry about the state of ListView currently, and plan to redesign it soon, it's really not optimal currently, and not offering a very useful interface either, so maybe you could fix you issues just putting a GridLayout in a ScrollView and fill it as needed (i documented a way to do a publisher/consumer using threads on my blog, it's efficient for these kind of things).

[http://blog.tshirtman.fr/2014/1/14/publisher-consumer- model-...](http://blog.tshirtman.fr/2014/1/14/publisher-consumer-model-in- kivy)

<comment><USER8> Initially I used the ListView, but found performance problems on every device. I then rolled my own using a layout in a ScrollView, and it's better, but still troublesome. I'll compare what I've done to what you wrote about and see if I can improve matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've always been confused about open-source projects that go big on marketing themselves.

Building a good community around open-source projects holds obvious advantages as you'd always need contributors to push the project through its future generations.

As far as I can see, Kivy is supported by a group of independent developers. Kivy (as a group) must have spent money in marketing the product, launching developer contests, publishing books on Kivy (I've seen a couple books on Kivy by O'reilly), and other stuff. I'm just curious to know in what other ways, apart from the need to grow the community around your project, does marketing your open-source project help? And is the money put into marketing the project contributed by the creators themselves?

<comment><USER10> > Kivy (as a group) must have spent money in marketing the product

I don't think kivy (as a group) does anything except recently the contest, and things like maintaining a g+ account, mailing list, posting on hn or reddit if something intersting happens etc. - were you thinking of anything in particular here?

> launching developer contests

This was funded entirely from sponsorship, you can see the list on the contest page ([http://kivy.org/#contest](http://kivy.org/#contest)).

> publishing books on Kivy (I've seen a couple books on Kivy by O'reilly)

Publishers commission books because they think they will make money, not because kivy pays them to - actually, I don't think any of the core developer team have been directly involved in kivy books.

> and other stuff

Honestly, not really - I can't think of any other expenses except small things like powering the website server.

> I've always been confused about open-source projects that go big on > marketing themselves.

I don't think kivy is really big on marketing itself - if anything, maybe the opposite. I've wondered before if its relatively unknown status (compared to phonegap etc) is at least partly because we don't advertise much, though it may just as well be that more people are interested in html.

Things like the developer contest are great to build interest and get the word out that kivy exists, and as you said yourself have obvious advantages in maintaining and growing the community - if this is 'going big' on marketing, I don't think that term is very meaningful.

<comment><USER6> I confirm there was no money directly spent on promoting kivy. Most of our communication has been directly with the community, through help on irc/google-groups/SO and other places. We did start to improve communication on twitter/g+/facebook, but it's really on our own time, not paying any agency or specialist of these things.

For books, while we were contacted by a few publishers, none of the core-dev authored any, yet. We tried to give a hand, however, reviewing the books when we could, i personnaly reviewed O'Reilly's book, pointing out a few mistakes to the editor, and gave it a good review, as it was, in my opinion, a well written book with very good exemples and explanations. As it seems usual, i got a free book and a little payment for this (that i didn't expect at all when doing it, my motivation was that there was a need for good kivy books).

And i agree we should do more, if not on marketing, at least on communication (there are a few markets that kivy can fully or partially cover already, we don't want to limit these options, just help it grow where users want to use it), but users need to know about it, and to easily get a good understanding of what's possible to do with it. We have a lot of recurring questions about that, as well as people discovering us and asking why they didn't heard about us sooner.

I do think the community could be way bigger, but we need to adapt the tools we use to communicate, irc works very well up to the hundred of connected users we have, probably less at more, and waste a lot of energy in saying the same things over and over again (although the direct interaction with our users is highly appreciable), SO seems to make reuse of explanations much more common, and is sometime more effective than direct documentation.

Anyway, i'm getting away from the point, will cut it there. :)

<comment><USER11> What about a Google group? That is, basically a mailing list, but without the mails, for those (such as me) who get too much mail already. Google groups is the best form of community communication out there if you ask me.

... and, maybe a "community" link on the kivy page, to quickly find out how to get in touch with others in the community. Would help a lot I think.

<comment><USER10> We actually do have a google group (actually more than one) - [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/kivy- users](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/kivy-users) is the most active, and works well. Maybe we need to make that clearer as well!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's an application my co-worker built using Kivy. [https://github.com/aigarius/photoriver](https://github.com/aigarius/photoriver)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I found this in my logs from 2013 and it looks really nice now.

Another example app with Kivy + SQLite: Image Viewer and Organizer, [https://github.com/gau-veldt/ImageOrg](https://github.com/gau-veldt/ImageOrg)

This is also interesting: [http://libnui.github.io/nui3/](http://libnui.github.io/nui3/) I'm not exactly sure anymore about the relation. Is Kivy based on libnui?

<comment><USER13> Kivy looks very nice but NUI is a very different beast (I'm the author). The main difference being that even though NUI is a complete multi-plateform framework that uses OpenGL for rendering, it has a strictly C++ API.

If you want to see apps built with NUI I just released reChord: [http://bit.ly/rechord](http://bit.ly/rechord) And also some very nice music apps with NUI: [http://intua.net/products/beatmaker2/](http://intua.net/products/beatmaker2/) [http://www.whitenoiseaudio.com/apps/genome-midi- sequencer/](http://www.whitenoiseaudio.com/apps/genome-midi-sequencer/) [http://www.whitenoiseaudio.com/apps/bleepbox/](http://www.whitenoiseaudio.com/apps/bleepbox/)

<comment><AUTHOR> In the GitHub description ([https://github.com/kivy/kivy](https://github.com/kivy/kivy)), it says about Kivy:

"Open source software library for creating NUI applications, running on Windows, Linux, MacOSX, Android and iOS"

I guess that is why I searched for NUI and I probably found your lib. I don't remember that I have heard that term "NUI" before.

<comment><USER13> I've been using the name for 13 years or so but a number of other libs started using the acronym unfortunately (New UI, Natural UI, etc.). I should have been more vocal and public about the lib from the beginning :-).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Messed with Kivy about 6 months ago, while I love what it is, it suffers from PyGame'ism. Yes you can write games and such, but the end result always just feels bloated and performance hungry. I ended up going with Corona ([http://coronalabs.com/](http://coronalabs.com/)), and it is/was awesome for the game I was building.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wrote a Kivy app for a multi-touch table a few years ago as my Masters project in CSE.

I appreciated being able to develop on my Mac, run it on the table using Windows, and even got it running on an iPad.

Getting the environment set up to deploy to iOS was complex (especially cross compiling non-standard Python libraries), but it has been a few years.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there any plotting library I can use with Kivy?, something of the likes of D3.js ([http://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery](http://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery))

<comment><USER17> matlibplot is one of the best and most extensive plotting libraries. You also have d3py that is a d3.js implementation in python. Do a google search for python graph or python plot and you will find plenty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anyone tried Kivy for game development? I'm interested in brushing up my Python and was thinking about making a game that could be OpenGL accelerated, and it seemed like a good match.

<comment><USER6> Yes, you can see examples of games done with kivy in the two contests (kivy.org/#contest), and there are also a few games on the market, it's also interesting to look at kovak's efforts on kivent.org, a 2D game engine built on top of kivy and cymunk, which seems like the way to go for games with a lot of actors.

<comment><USER18> Cool, thanks! I'll have a look at that. Does the kivent.org stuff support Tiled?

<comment><USER10> I don't think it does right now, but it should be pretty easy to add this kind of support.

<comment><USER6> There has been at least one user working on it, for kivy, so maybe it'll available soon, either as 3rd party package, or as a PR to either project (though it would probably make more sense on kivent).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice.

I may try this on my daughter who has been asking to get into programming. I remember the buzz I got building simple visual apps in VB. This feels similar.

</comment><comment><USER20> Anybody knows of any app built for iOS using Kivy ?

<comment><USER10> There's a (probably not exhaustive) list at [https://github.com/kivy/kivy/wiki/List-of-Kivy- Projects#kivy...](https://github.com/kivy/kivy/wiki/List-of-Kivy- Projects#kivy-apps-in-the-apple-app-store) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Would it be correct to say that Kivy is the Python equivalent for Ruby Shoes? In which aspect the one or the other is more powerful?

<comment><USER22> Can you write IOS and Android Apps with shoes?

<comment><USER21> They won't be native apps anyway but browser based apps, so as new Shoes is going to use Javascript (via Opal) and HTML as a rendering engine, then yes you can. Any other actual differences or points of strength worth noting?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Apart from the size issues mentioned below, how does this work on Android? Is it better than PhoneGap etc and closer to native apps?

<comment><USER10> It compiles the python interpreter for android/arm, then bundles this all together in an APK - along with much of the standard library and any extra modules the user wants. It also includes a java bootstrap app that interacts with the system, but does essentially nothing except initialise and display an opengl surface that kivy renders to - along with running the python interpreter on the user's kivy code.

This bootstrap is invisible to the user, you don't need to touch the java to use kivy. That said, kivy has some cool sister projects for using the normal java api - pyjnius for accessing java classes directly from python, and more recently plyer to provide a more pythonic wrapper to common things like vibration, sensors etc.

(The above is also mostly the same for the ios build process).

> Is it better than PhoneGap etc and closer to native apps?

I would say more that it is just different, with advantages and disadvantages of its own. It doesn't use native widgets (though it's possible to create and use them in some ways with pyjnius), so it isn't different in this sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think for 2D related apps/games which do not require the native OS UI controls this is a good choice.

</comment><comment><USER22> I never was able to run it on my computer unfortunatly(mackbook ,bootcamp,windows 7).

But it looks great.</comment>


Opera's work to reduce Chromium's memory use - <AUTHOR> https://dev.opera.com/blog/reducing-memory-use/ <comment><USER2> > Our vision is still the same: get the web into the hands of everyone, > regardless of their device.

the only code base that i can run on all my devices, is firefox. -- an old opera fan</comment>


Lenovo reveals new Moto watch in its full glory, before official reveal - <AUTHOR> http://www.lenovo.com/images/homepage-banners/lenovo-launch-y-gaming.png

<comment><AUTHOR> Full URL: [http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/ifa/2015/#!products?0=2](http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/ifa/2015/#!products?0=2)</comment>