Thesixtyone Unveils a Gorgeous Redesign, Users Predictably Revolt  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/23/thesixtyone-redesign-users-revolt/ <comment><USER2> This is one of the most radical changes I've ever seen in a website- it seems like it would have made more sense to add it as a an option, and slowly make it the default. At the very least, they should have had a ton of tooltips all over the site. "Remember X feature? You can now do it here." GrooveShark did a great job of having little helpful popup boxes when they redesigned.

I can't think of a single site I currently use that could pull off such a massive redesign. It would be like Digg replacing the whole site with something from <http://labs.digg.com/>. Pretty? Sure. Usable? Not so much. Users don't necessarily dislike the new site, they're just confused.

And nobody likes to be confused.

<comment><USER3> Giving their existing users some direction would have been nice, but what a differentiation they've pulled off in a crowded market music streamers. I used the site a bit last year and wandered away. I use it most of the day Friday while at work, it was the first time I'd been back in months.

Basically, I think they may lose some of their current hardcore users, but they'll pick up a whole slew of new ones.

<comment><USER4> It may be different, but it seems like the last people you want to confront with differentiation are your existing users. I wonder if the best way to release such a radical redesign would be to _only_ default new users to the new interface. Let existing users opt-in to a radically different experience, in their own time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The new design is gorgeous, yes. No one is calling it ugly. But ugh, it is quite unusable.

<comment><USER6> I think it's usable. It's like a radio station that plays awesome music.

Of course, I never used the site before the redesign, so what do I know?

<comment><USER7> Before it was a place to interact with music lovers and music artists that you may have never met before (that is pretty much gone now).

Before it was a game, you start off with hearts and get more as you level up and listen to music, that is still there but because interaction is gone supporting artists with the game seems nonexistent and competing is nonexistent. (Not everyone played the game.)

Now (as you said) you have pretty pictures and a radio instead of basically an iphone/ipod with a bunch of contacts and connections to artists.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I saw the old version. It looked like a not-particularly-unique music- based social network, so I always bounced from the homepage.

I don't care about games, points, hearts, enthusiasts, community, or any of that -- I want good music playing in the background while I do other things.

IMO this new redesign is both unique and more accessible. If it's about music the music should be front-and-center, no? Sometimes you have to cannibalize your users to reach a larger audience.

I know I'm probably going to go to T61 every day, now. I've already bought two albums based off of what I found there, and before the redesign it was totally uninteresting to me.

<comment><USER8> I agree completely. I have found a few different artists already and have spent the entire evening on the new site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't know why the hell they didn't launch it as a second site under new branding -- there would have been no pushback at all.

Some people want a better MySpace, some want a better Pandora. There's no reason the two demographics can't have their own sites based on the same data.

<comment><USER10> This. It's different enough that it could have been successful as an entirely separate venture.

<comment><USER11> Running one site is hard enough, you would lose a lot of focus running two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A music-making friend of mine pointed me to the site about 6 months ago. I checked it out but not really being into his music didn't really see how this site was any better or more interesting than Myspace.

But when the redesign came out I stood up and paid attention, it just looks so great. For an artist who doesn't have the expertise or money to create a great looking website this is awesome, attractive and functional for sharing their music.

I sent it to a bunch of people I know who work at varying levels of the music industry and they felt the same, a few are creating pages now.

I'd say the redesign / relaunch has been successful in terms of user growth though more consultation with their existing community might have spared some of this backlash.

</comment><comment><USER12> This sort of things makes me wonder about the difference between business code and UI code and the effect of splitting them. Right now the argument is that it's too expensive to maintain two separate user interfaces. But as more and more pages start moving all their business code behind web services that might change (since the cost to maintain a UI would go way down)

You could even get situations where third party companies agree to maintain an older interface while paying the company a small cut.

</comment><comment><USER13> Dammit, all I wanted to see was the site, and now I'm hooked on a new band.

</comment><comment><USER14> I really like thesixtyone, but talk about TechCrunch astroturfing - are there really that many users to the61 that some of them being upset is a TC-worthy story?

</comment><comment><USER15> Never used the site before, but I kind of like it. Perhaps they pulled off a coup by getting all this press?

I like the idea of it just being a Pandora for indy music, the simple interface really appeals to me there. But ya, I never saw the previous version so who knows.

<comment><USER15> Ok I take it back.. (a bit)

How the hell do you buy songs? I mean this is supposed to be the point right? So I found an artist I like, shouldn't there be a really obvious way to buy the album/track? (or telling me it isn't available for purchase yet?)

That kind of makes my head explode.. I want to support the artist but it isn't letting me.. arr!

<comment><USER16> I'm new to the site (never heard of it before), and I just did exactly that. Ran across a song that's sorta cool... and... no clue how to purchase. ohh well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I enjoyed doing the quests when I first started using thesixtyone, which got me used to the features and the layout pretty easily.

I'm a bit surprised that they haven't done 'redesign intro' quests to acclimate people to the new design.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd be interested to know if they did any usability tests and what the results were. Even just the basic cheap usability tests like describe in Don't Make Me Think.

If anyone has any information on their testing process, please share!

<comment><USER19> You don't make leaps like that with "usability testing".

Despite a few obligatory niggles the design is a masterpiece, obviously coming straight out of the heads and hands of a few (or even a single) gifted individuals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This "controversy" will inevitably drive more new users to the site.

</comment><comment><USER21> what's wrong with just stick with old.thesixtyone.com ?

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm going to guess before even looking at that tab, and having never seen thesixtyone before and not knowing what it is:

Bright white background

Sans serif text forced everywhere

Font size forced large

Large colorful buttons

Text boxes with few labels so you're forced to guess if your input will or won't work

Doesn't work in elinks

Doesn't work on my Centro

<comment><USER22> Ah, that was the /old/ site (and I forgot "Facebook connect button"). The new one is even more incomprehensible.

That said, it's kind of fun, visually attractive (although incomprehensible), and I like the ANGLERFISH HAILEY WOJCIK song that plays on first load. (That's a verbatim cut and paste, and I guess I should say it's to their credit that cut and paste works at all. It's so old media, after all.) If I can budget some time for doing nothing but listening to music, I'll play with it some more. I don't think it's useful for people that don't have that time though.</comment></comment>


World's biggest airplane takes flight for the first time ever - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/transportation/2019/4/13/18309129/stratolaunch-worlds-biggest-airplane-first-flight-rockets <comment><USER2> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19659306](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19659306)</comment>


Avoid Windows Malware: Bank on a Live CD - <AUTHOR> http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/10/avoid_windows_malware_bank_on.html

<comment><USER2> > Virtually all of the data-stealing malware in circulation today is built to > attack Windows systems

Well, no shit. That's the point. If you're a malware developer, you're not going to spend X hours trying to find an obscure hole in *nix.</comment>


Ask HN: Is a team of work-at-home employees realistic? - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone,
I was wondering what you think about the feasibility of building a team consisting of employees who work at home. I don't mean a completely remote team;  I am talking about local people, and certainly with some measure of face-to-face meetings and physical interaction when that level of collaboration is required.  I just mean people who work mostly at home on a day-to-day basis.
As far as I can tell, corporate America is mostly terrified of telecommuting.  Admittedly, it can be legitimately said to pose some very real management challenges.  But no matter how much I consider that, I just can't see a justification for paying for office space and forcing people to spend time there for 8+ hours a day.  I think I agree very strongly with what PG has had to say on the topic of corporate office space and its relationship to talented individuals and their productivity.
I agree that it's harder to manage remote people, and I've certainly taken stock of the allegedly widespread tendency for remote workers to take advantage of their independence and lack of direct oversight.  And lack of consistent and direct communication can certainly be an obstacle.  But I think there are technological solutions to these problems:  better backoffice tools, better collaboration and messaging tools, VoIP, instant messaging, presence, good ticketing and workflow management systems, etc.  I think the technology is there to make up for the shortfall.
Now, admittedly, the angle from which I am approaching this problem is a little bit orthogonal to the typical dilemmas of web startup entrepreneurs.  I am 23, and at the moment, I am trying to grow my VoIP / telecom systems integration and engineering consultancy beyond a one-man show so that I can get to the point where I can be a product company.  In other words, I suppose it's fair to say I am taking the "consulting route" that PG speaks of in his various essays on startup funding.  Good, bad, I have various reasons for that, but the goal in the end is to end up with actual "deliverables" - no mistake about it.
Still, the reason I mention that is because consulting is a business model that lends itself to measurement of individual productivity a bit better than, say, a software startup.  Product development and engineering - pure CAPEX, none of which is directly rebilled or amortised any way (especially in a short time to market) - is a little more murky.  And certainly, there are some business models where almost the entire risk can be shifted onto the employee, as one sees with commission-only work-at-home salespeople.  In my case I think I'm in a happy middle.
Regardless, I'm not going to go all Japanese quantitative management on people.  I want to build a progressive and humanity-affirming company where people are happy and proud to work on interesting problems in the telecommunications space.  I am just wondering if I am being too idealistic here about remote work;  are people just going to take advantage of me, in the main?  Or is it reasonable to suppose that I should be able to afford them the benefit of working wherever they want as long as they meet certain criteria as far as productivity, availability, and good communication? (All my prospective employees are excellent written and verbal communicators, and I would not have it any other way.)
I am in Atlanta, a city notorious for its vast, empty suburban sprawl, unconscienable freeway distances, and gridlock traffic.  I really, really don't want to compel anyone to trek through this disaster of urban planning and infrastructure design to my office if there is no real point.
Does anyone here have experience building a team like this?  If so, can you share tips on what strategies you used to make it work better?
Thanks a lot! <comment><USER2> Absolutely this can be done and in my opinion is the best way to build a great software team. I am the CTO of Openair.com and this is how we have always operated. We have a dozen developers, about half in the Boston area and the other half spread across the US and we all work from home. Using this approach we have built a successful startup that has steadily and profitably grown every year for the last decade and we are now the dominant vendor in our space.

I believe that this approach creates a work environment that allows us to attract and retain great developers. The kind of developer that really likes to write software and has the maturity and discipline to manage their own time and decisions.

Some implementation notes:

1\. We release a new version every two months, the continual releases keep everyone on track with constant customer feedback.

2\. We all see and read the check-in diff's, absolutely the best way to know what someone is doing and how well they are doing it.

3\. There are great developers outside of the traditional Valley/Boston/Austin areas and a telecommuting team lets you find them and hire them.

4\. After about 6 months it becomes very clear who can handle the telecommuting setup and who can't.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is only tangentially related to your post, but why does corporate America have such an aversion to telecommuting?

I was by far the most productive employee in my group at the large bank I worked for previously. I outproduced others, even while taking the hardest problems -- and we had a pretty good metrics systems, so I wasn't just gaming it.

But when I asked if I could work from home when I'd decided to move, the answer was an emphatic, "No."

So, they'd rather lose their most-productive employee who also would've been far more productive at home and then have to hire a probably-inferior replacement?

Makes no sense at all, yet so many companies are like this.

<comment><USER4> _why does corporate America have such an aversion to telecommuting?_

It's a limitation of the OS that is built into humans. This is what you get when you try to build a global economic system out of bright, talkative monkeys like me. It turns out that -- amazingly! -- this can be done, but we find it much easier if we employ hacks that leverage the features of our underlying monkey OS. And -- even more amazingly! -- it turns out that we can go even farther: Using our most advanced mental and physical tools, we can do a pretty good emulation of disembodied brains sitting in the _nth_ dimension. But the abstraction leaks. Especially when we have to interact with other people who haven't been fully schooled in the art of communicating with ghosts.

If dolphins ran the world, corporate boardrooms would be full of water. But monkeys run the world, so:

\- Businesses are run as hierarchies, because the monkey OS is designed to manage bands of around ten or fifteen individuals. Beyond that, it operates in terms of _alliances_ ("this platoon is allied with that platoon") and _rivalries_ ("our platoon is doing its job, but that one isn't"; "our platoon is falling behind and will be targeted for cutbacks, so work hard and watch your back"; "let's all get together with Platoon Three to kick Platoon Four's obnoxious butt").

\- Your status in the business world is judged based on the size of the conference room that you need to hold a physical gathering of your team members, and on the size of the contiguous physical territory that your team occupies and patrols on a daily basis. If you sit alone at your desk with the speakerphone on and claim to be conducting a meeting with fifteen colleagues, people will subconsciously think of you as a psychotic, or (at best) as a spooky witch doctor who channels the spirit world.

\- There's a tendency to defer to people with grey hair, and/or people with lots of followers or lots of stuff that has taken time to accumulate, like corner offices or expensive desks.

\- Talk is cheap. Many people will _say_ they're your ally, but when a fight arrives they will not be there, or they'll discover some really interesting thing going on atop a nearby tree, or they'll hang back and not really fight very hard. You need to motivate them by _really_ befriending them -- talking about their kids or their pets or their hobbies, bringing them little gifts. And by physically surrounding them with other friendly allies, such that they cannot easily flee without losing face. And by keeping them close enough to be able to slap them upside the head when they seem to be shirking.

\- To really convince someone -- to really communicate at the highest level -- you need to be standing close enough that you could, in theory, pick fleas off of them.

Unfortunately, though humans are becoming better and better at understanding all this stuff and transcending it when necessary [1], we're never going to completely eliminate these tendencies. Unless the lizards rise up, overthrow us, and take back the planet. At which point they will have complaints of their own. ("Dear Gator News: How come companies always insist on holding meetings on rocks in the bright sunlight? I'm much more productive in my moonlit office, where I can sit on my dual 27-inch space heaters.")

\---

[1] Such as: When trying to write software, which is an act so unnatural to us monkeys that only some of us can do it at all, and many of us are doing it wrong. And it requires all kinds of mental tricks and energy and focus just to manage that much.

<comment><USER5> Very well done! If you had a blog, I'd read it.

I think that getting to the psychology of the problem as you are attempting (or succeeding) is a very worthy task that lots of people need to be working on.

I'm no water vapor ignoring tree-hugger, but the inefficiency of our current work system where people heat and maintain homes that are empty for 12 hours a day, go to office buildings that are empty for 12 hours a day, using a car that they use for two hours a day, to do work that could be done at home, is insanity.

Why do we tolerate this as companies or as employees? We can seriously look for solutions, or we can wax cynically about "the man". One path leads forward, to a solution.

If your hypothesis is correct, there are compromises we can do, to satisfy the inner-ape, while gaining some efficiency.

\- We can remove people's personal effects from their work areas, so multiple people can work in that cube. On Monday and Tuesday, it a marketing guy. On Wednesday and Thursday, it's an engineer. On Friday and Saturday, it's an accountant. Let groups that never interact anyway, REALLY not interact, and as a bonus, you reduce your necessary office space by 2/3rds while still maintaining ape bonding time for two days a week. The other three days of work, people work at home, freeing up our highways by 2/3rds as well. Actually, we free up our highways by 3/5ths (math left as exercise for the reader) because now we have staggered our weekends a bit. Nobody works on Sundays still, but accountants work on Saturdays.

Would there be tons of coordination hassles, with accountants needing to talk to engineers about their annual budgets? No, not really. Because our whole premise here, is that none of this face time is actually needed from a business standpoint. Internet and telephone would be just fine. It's needed at a deeper level, among team-mates and up/down hierarchies, but it's not needed from one tribe to another.

The accountant tribe and the engineer tribe will never form an alliance, they are evolutionary enemies. Why force them to live in the same jungle?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have to disagree with you on the personalised work areas. As the sibling poster pointed out, having those types of effects and environmental settings in a space that is definitively yours is highly conducive to productivity, a sense of organisational inclusion, and overall satisfaction and comfort.

No, I'm not saying that people that have personal effects in their cubes are all eminently satisfied; the point is that they would be even less satisfied if they were crammed into even smaller and yet _more_ generic spaces, or in spaces of which they could not claim even a provisional kind of ownership and which did not have any qualities of (semi)permanence.

I've had several jobs where the business owners didn't really want to spend money or time setting up any kind of meaningful barriers, even something so rudimentary and otherwise disheartening as a cube farm. Everybody basically got to sit in a large, contended, noisy and alienating open space at some kind of rickety, smallish plastic table. It was not feasible to define one's "space" in such a setting. Everyone felt like a temp. I don't think it helped anyone's morale, ability to concentrate, or productivity. It's a terrible idea; "open spaces" do not mean "open companies," to paraphase Joel Spolsky's biting criticism of open-area interior design thought in corporate circles.

In the jobs in which I and almost everyone I know has had, there is a clear and identifiable positive correlation between the amount of privacy and personal space in which they got to tailor their work environment to their preferences and the overall investment they felt in the company, its culture, and of course, the work. While, of course, environmental attributes cannot smooth over a crappy place to work, they can make an enormous difference in the level of psychological investment an employee has in a place that is -- by all other metrics -- decent.

I think the one exception to this may be in that I definitely think there is a market out there for creating workday "hubs" for freelancers and WFH employees to get away from the house (and small children, if they have them) and other environmental obstacles and show up with their laptop and set up shop. It could be something as simple as a glorified coffee shop whose table arrangements and interior design lends itself better to that than the average one. Make data ports and power abundantly accessible and you've got a winner. (Of course, you've somehow got to persuade these people to keep buying something all day, which is the problem coffee shops typically run into with students, freelancers and other people who spend all day there with their laptops. Perhaps there is an opportunity to charge a decent membership fee for a cool, happening freelancers' "club" of this sort. I'd pay $100/mo to be able to go somewhere close-by and ambiently pleasant with my laptop and partake of great bandwidth, numerous power and data ports (then I could bring a little SIP phone), and coffee and other beverages on tap or heavily discounted.)

<comment><USER5> Guys, my whole plan was getting you into your homes for three of your five day work week. You are utterly bombarded with "artifacts", "personal effects", etc. at home.

This is a compromise between the insanity of commuting, from a business standpoint, and the necessity of commuting , from a tribal and social standpoint. As is the case with compromises, it's not going to be up to your idea of perfect, but what it allows, is, with the sacrifice of your personal items for two days a week, you still get your tribal/social time with your team, bosses, and subordinates while at the same time, freeing our society of much of the inefficiency of the current system.

@fish, if you're uncomfortable with your explanation of why we insist on driving to office buildings in an age when it's not necessary, than fine. But it doesn't matter. The fact is, we are, and it's probably for reasons just as mysterious and ingrained into our genes as your idea. So, that's all we need to know. We apparently can't beat it, so we must adapt to it, rather than bemoaning the state of things, which you were not doing, which is why I liked your piece. Instead, we can implement a hack like this to allow us to have some of our cake, and eat some of it too.

<comment><AUTHOR> That makes sense.

But I guess those two days you'd spend in the office would have to be largely in meetings and other things that capitalise on the "social" opportunity, with the idea that you'd be focusing purely on actual implementation (or whatever the work you do is) the rest of the time. Is that realistic from a scheduling perspective? Seems like corporate life always brings a steady composition of both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> pg, please re-visit the decision to have the post's text in gray-on-gray. It's awful for long initial posts like this one. No doubt I'm not the only one that selects the text to get it the slightly better yellow-on-black. It makes me less likely to bother reading the text through no fault of the writer.

<comment><USER7> It would also be nice if URLs in the body render as hyperlinks so I can just click on them instead of tedious copy/paste + enter.

<comment><USER6> True. Although are you aware you can select the text of the URL and, in Firefox 3, drag it up to the tab bar and either drop it on an existing tab, e.g. the current one, or drop it slightly to the right of the right-most tab to create a new one. If doing the latter, you should see a downward pointing arrow when you're over the drop zone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> GitHub doesn't have an office, nor are we in any hurry to get one. We work out of our apartments and 1-2 times a week we'll hang out at a cafe and get dinner/drinks afterwards to discuss broader ideas. The company was built with the sort of people that can work autonomously, so while we stay in constant communication with Campfire, it's not a situation where you need to look over the other guy's shoulder to make sure he's still doing a good job. Until that's no longer a reality, I see no reason for an office; it's money better spent elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER9> To make this work, you need frequently-measurable goals, even if the measurement is subjective.

This isn't a matter of trust, it's a matter of motivation.

It can be something squishy like, "Let me take a look at what Bob's checked in so far this week", or something more quantifiable, like, "Bob has closed _n_ tickets today".

[Even if you don't have a hard number of how many tickets someone should close in a day or week, you can generally eyeball it and if there's a discrepancy, look at the descriptions to see how hard the problems were].

It's best to make this as transparent as possible to all members of a given team, and provide a system of rapid feedback and especially fast positive feedback for all progress.

Try and keep communication focused on whatever channel everyone actually likes using. If you're using a wiki, trac, and basecamp to keep track of overlapping items, quickly ditch whichever ones nobody actually uses.

If you can keep everybody motivated, communicative, and measurably productive, then you will actually be far better off than large traditional companies that rely on the ass-in-chair visibility metric to determine whether "work" is working.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't have any experience building a team like that, but i recently moved from a full time work-at-home freelancer to a part time work-at-home freelancer when i took on a full time job.

I can honestly confirm that my productivity has decreased by more than 50%. One part of it is because of the wasted time in getting to the office and back. Another bigger part is because programmers work in an open space plan. Some other parts would be office politics and so on...

Working in a home office was so much better than i often ended up working 16 hours a day prior to a project deadline and not mind(i used to enjoy what i do).

We used to communicate all the time via IM, via email, and via skype. And of course make full use of collaboration tools. Also, me being in a different time zone helped the process a lot.

So yeah, some people will take advantage of this situation. But then again, bad people will try to take advantage of any situation. It is up to you to recognize those people and stay away from them.

</comment><comment><USER11> Teleworkers appreciate terseness.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hehe. Well, I guess that's one thing they won't appreciate about me, then.

Hopefully I'll find other ways to make up for the loss. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yes, it can be but it depends on your circumstances. My shop has done it very successfully for 16 months.

But there are a number of critical issues to consider.

The physical organisation of a workspace is a function of communication. Place those people who communicate a lot physically together because informal conversation is a lot cheaper than formal conversation.

When you are writing software you therefore have to have the specifier and the coder co-located. Open Source projects work very well because (in the vast majority of cases) they are copying existing software. So sitting at home working on a clone of Microsoft Word - the specifier (a copy of Microsoft Word) is sitting next to the coder.

When writing original software where the specification/product development is the core task this will be much harder - it may be impossible unless your specifier is an expert business architect, software architect and designer and can produce build-able specs and your team are capable of reading and implementing them on sight.

You must also choose your toolset correctly to generate a high volume of informal communication, so: * central SVN * centralised mailing list (no point-to-point e-mails) * continuous build with statuses

Essentially on the software development side the complete open source software development stack is optimised for this stuff, so its a doddle - your work has an observable daily heartbeat. For other sorts of work (say sales, order fulfilment, HR, finance, etc, etc) it is much harder because the core stack doesn't exist - you will have to create it.

The final thing you will have to do is be rigorous on formal comms. You will need to have an all hands call every working day. Sometimes 5 minutes, sometimes 35 minutes. You will need to organise face-to-face meetings regularly, Xmas dinners, launch parties, drinks and stuff.

It can be very effective at reducing costs but it is a considerable management challenge and you need to think of it as such. If you adopt a "hey we don't need no steenkin management bullshit, we're way tool techies, hey!" you're probably doomed anyway.

</comment><comment><USER13> Telecommuting can work well for established teams who have a history working together. But if the team doesn't have any history together, you might consider getting office space for 6 months to bond a bit and then do the work at home thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> To overcome the lack of history together it seems like one has to substitute other forms of bonding experiences; occasional lunches together, conference calls, heavy use of messaging and email, and just making the effort to talk to the people a lot and really get to know them.

My concern isn't so much whether these things are qualitatively equal to the team-building experiences of being stuck in a room(s) together as whether it can work, in practise as well as in principle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My personal experience is that this can work great, but not if you're talking 'ordinary' employees, you'll have to do a good bit of screening to get people with the right mindset. Some are stellar at it, others will not be able to handle the freedom. For those individuals that can not handle the freedom it is better to have a per-job style payment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course. That is presumed. I am confident I have found the right people; I really believe they "get it."

What I wonder is whether this system will somehow fail to produce the results I need despite that.

<comment><USER15> It does work, I've been working from home for almost 2 years - leading a team who partly work in an office and partly work at home.

Not everyone may want to work from home though.

Campfire + VOIP works well to manage everything.

We all run on a central network using VPN but we're slowly starting to use more external services - and I hope we can ditch the VPN for most stuff in a few months - using Google Apps, Github and some proprietary web apps.

It gives more time to work as you're not commuting and if you have a young family it means you get to see the kids more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not everyone may want to work from home? Really?

While, admittedly, I've met some people that consciously or unconsciously value the social and possibly collaborative aspects of working in an office with others, they tend to be the kind that just get their social needs fulfilled at work without doing a whole lot of actual work. There are some exceptions in passionate people who are also extroverted and aware of the extrinsic dimensions of what they do, but they are not common enough to be statistically meaningful in my experience.

Can you elaborate more on what kind of person you think wouldn't want to work from home? I've hardly met anyone who wouldn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The company I work for was, until recently, completely WFH, with ~20 or so people. (In the US. In Europe, its HQ, there was always an office, and in other satellite offices.) One of our WFH US locations is, in fact, Atlanta.

It works fine, _IF_ you can find the right people. Not everyone can work from home. Not everyone wants to.

Our biggest hurdle was training. We had nowhere really to meet to get the new guys up to speed after they were hired. In Atlanta there are plenty of "remote working" locations like ROAM, Jelly organizations, etc.

We have since leased a small office, mainly for this purpose. But it provides a place to "land" when we need to, and for those of us with families, a place to get OUT of the house once in awhile to get work done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you tell me more about these "remote working locations?" What is ROAM/Jelly/etc?

<comment><USER16> Sorry, I missed your request.

<http://roamatlanta.com/> <http://wiki.workatjelly.com/JellyInAtlanta> <http://wiki.workatjelly.com/JellyInRoswell>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yes it can be done. We have a setup like this, but we try to spend 2-3 days in the office a week and a minimum of one (Thursday) for everyone.

The key thing has to be communication and the ability to maintain motivation. We use Google Apps Premier to handle most of the comms, motivation is maintained through electric shocks... ok, maybe it's more regular meet ups and social events as well as making sure everyone has and gives feedback on everything.

There's a golden rule of recruiting that becomes even more important for telecommuters: Don't hire pricks. It doesn't matter if they're rock starts in their given field or if they're able to do something you otherwise can't. Don't hire 'em - they'll cause more problems than they solve.

</comment><comment><USER18> That's how we're running our start-up (which, admittedly, is still quite small). We (the "active shareholders") meet physically once a week, but have no central office.

As for the development team (3 people), one of us actually lives in the States most of the year, so we don't meet physically very often - instead, we have iteration meetings 3 times a week on Skype. Tasks are broken down so that they fit into 2-day chunks of time to make it easier to measure progress.

There are certainly challenges, but I think if you're in the same geographical location they're not too hard to overcome. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't think it's harder to manage remote people. In fact a random Jim Collins (ugh) quote applies - "If you have to actively manage someone, you've made a hiring mistake" - people who have a history of working remotely are much more likely to be self-driven and disciplined.

</comment><comment><USER20> Hi,

I am trying to do the same thing. Does anyone have any good recommendations for online collaboration solutions? For example I currently run a virtual private server to serve my email, wiki, website, git etc. I think it's still good for these things, but I might switch to say, Google Apps for email + the collaboration. Basecamp seems like an option but they don't provide email. I have also found hyperoffice. They provide email + collaboration. I haven't had the time to evaluate any of these yet. Do you have other recommendations? What do you think of VPNs?

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER21> Check out the book "Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It" about the "Results-Only Work Environment". It's mostly a case study of how Best Buy implemented a workplace culture that made office hours optional.

Maybe also the books of Ricardo Semler, a business owner who did similar things.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is there some particular reason a lot of you recommend Campfire over, say, running an internal Jabber server?

<comment><USER22> Yes, not having to install or maintain an internal Jabber server, plus a number of convenience features an internal Jabber server would not have out of the box. Filed under "I've more important things to do other than bitching about spending a few bucks a month with a Campfire account" :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't saying it was the right thing to do.

Just wondering.</comment></comment></comment>


Armstrong on Erlang's Text Capabilities - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/erlang-programming/msg/a5c0e9585d148294

<comment><AUTHOR> The most interesting part is the link to <http://www.sics.se/~joe/ex11/download/release-2.5.tgz> which includes Armstrong's emacs.erl clone! (in the widgets directory)</comment>


Creating a range in JavaScript, cleverly - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18947892/creating-range-in-javascript-strange-syntax <comment><USER2> Creating a list of integers is much more difficult in Javascript than it should be. I've tried to solve that specific problem with this proposal: [https://github.com/johnhenry/make-numbers- iterable](https://github.com/johnhenry/make-numbers-iterable), but after some initial feedback, I plan to make it into a more general range operator proposal before attempting find a TC-39 champion.</comment>


Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel in China [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIj8rRBknAs <comment><USER2> I am underwhelmed by this presentation. It feels pretty shallow and spontaneous. The advice on how to spot a promising team seemed fair, whereas the run down of Japan's economy was cringy to say the least. Question #1 was simply great though:

        ...you cannot go and just copy stuff."

        Q: Are you not just copying LinkedIn here in China?

<comment><USER3> Perhaps this will quench your thirst, A Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen debate from a different forum, the Milken Institute.[1] Some profound insights in there.

[1] Copy of In Tech We Trust? A Debate with Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen

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

edit: Appended

<comment><USER4> Over and over Thiel cites wages, mean wages, stagnating during the period while Andreessen counters with GDP growing. Both are true. Women entered the broader workforce en masse. Wages were down because of oversupply of labor, nearly doubling the workforce without doubling consumption.

Thiel really comes off dishonest, trying to make a big deal that it wasn't just median wages, mean wages stagnated--as if that proves it wasn't just a change in wealth distribution.

In actuality, there was a change in wealth distribution and median wages fell and mean wages stagnated, _and_ the economy still grew because "wages" ignores people who aren't employed (or seeking employment?), and a hell of a lot more people became employeed during the time period. Really one of the most frustrating talks I've watched.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ironically being on Youtube this is a pain in the ass to view from here in China. Could someone issue a summary?

<comment><USER6> [https://www.techinasia.com/thiel-hoffman-china- talk/](https://www.techinasia.com/thiel-hoffman-china-talk/)

<comment><USER5> The actually China-focused portion seems fairly small and self-evident.

<comment><USER6> I think the title of the post gives an impression that the talk is about China but it's infact about entrepreneurism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
      Does China need to do anything new or is it good enough for
      china to simply copy things that have already worked. ~ Thiel

Wow, that was quite blunt and critical! I think what defines individuals and societies is how they react to it.

<comment><USER7> If you're late to the party of course you are going to "copy" others, that's what all the big SV companies did to get started. They go on and on about how innovative they are, but in reality the secret of SV is rather commercialization. Which is exactly what China is doing. Chinese companies are already beating SV on some fronts, like drones. He's just upset because China is challenging the exceptionalism of SV.

<comment><USER8> This comment sounds interesting at first, but on closer reading just makes grand claims without backing them up.

The tell is at the end: "He's just upset because China is challenging the exceptionalism of SV." You couldn't possibly know such a thing, therefore you've made it up, and that boomerangs on the rest of the comment as wishful thinking. That's not what we're looking for in HN comments. We want solid critique, not cheap shots.

<comment><USER7> It's an opinion. It would be very tedious to preface everything with "I think". It seem very common here to ask that everything be backed up if you don't agree with it, but don't ask the same thing if you do. Instead of dismissing comments, it would be better to ask for clarification or state why you are disagreeing. Especially as a moderator.

The accusation that my comment is "made up" is unfair, not only because it's only as made up as any opinion, but because you make that conclusion based on your disagreement with one of my statements. That is a fallacy if anything.

My opinions both about copying and commercialization in SV is well founded on texts like "A General History of Silicon Valley" [0]. That China is doing the same thing SV did in the beginning, is based on my experiences in Shenzhen. The example of drones is based on the great interests in drones in the US[1] and the success of DJI[2]. My last opinion is based on conversations I've had with people from SV, who quite often judge China by very different standards than the US. "ageek123" made a fair argument opposing this.

If there's anything that is frustrating on HN, it's not accepting that people have a difference of opinion, background and experiences. Things aren't given the benefit of the doubt to the extent they should, but instead downvoted, flagged, spammed into "controversy" or moderated. This creates an environment where discussions end up being about the "lowest common denominator".

I also find it somewhat strange that after more than five years on HN with essentially no interaction with moderation, a couple of days after I e-mail about moderation you make this comment which seems more "aggressive" than usual. Instead of things like "makes grand claims without backing them up", "couldn't possibly know such a thing", "you've made it up", "wishful thinking", "not what we're looking for" and "cheap shots" how about you either disagree[3] if you disagree or do moderation on point if you're doing moderation. "Please substantiate your critic so people have a chance to reply on something other than opinion" seems quite apt. Not that this is a common standard on HN, but at least it would be making HN better.

[0] [http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/sv.html](http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/sv.html) [1] [https://hackaday.com/tag/drone/](https://hackaday.com/tag/drone/) [2] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2015/05/06/dji-drones- fr...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2015/05/06/dji-drones-frank-wang- china-billionaire/) [3] [http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html)

<comment><USER8> Opinions aren't a problem. The problem is the combination of dismissiveness ("go on and on", "he's just upset because") and lack of substance. Perhaps you have a solid case that SV's early history is analogous to China today. That would be very interesting [1]. And there's nothing wrong with just summarizing; not every comment needs to be a treatise. But you expressed it in the form of what pg calls a middlebrow dismissal. That's what I objected to, not your opinions.

Taking potshots is easy and feels good, but degrades the discourse. This is a tragedy of the commons and we all need to consciously work on reducing it, not least me. This would also be excellent for the diversity of opinion you mention, so I don't see any conflict here.

I didn't mean to pick on you personally. I'm not really following your more general complaints about HN, but if you want to explain them further you're welcome to email us.

[1] Out of curiosity, I took a look at the SV history website you linked to. It gives rather an opposite impression to what you say. For example it says that SV was involved in Farnsworth's invention of television in 1927 (I found that quite surprising), that Stanford was a "major center of innovation" in the 1930s, and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> paraphrased: "If you hear someone describe their startup with trendy buzzwords (big data, SaaS, social, mobile, cloud), you should think _fraud_ and run away. The fact you're using trendy buzzwords is an indication you aren't differentiated. You're a buzzword, so many other people are doing the exact same thing. Why are you special? Stop coping others."

 _If_ China were to start routinely cranking out highly valuable startups, you know reporters would call them Dragoncorns or Unidragons or something.

<comment><USER10> Well, there are a lot of highly valuable tech companies coming out of China. They're just not doing new things (0-1), but copying (mostly US) companies, often making them better.

Baidu, Alibaba, WeChat, Qihoo360, etc.

Although, tbh, Alibaba is pretty unique, and a lot of the video companies in China were dramatically different from stuff I've seen elsewhere. I think "China just copies" is overblown.

The China cheap-hw-production ecosystem is kind of a novel thing just by virtue of scale, too.

<comment><USER11> I was under the impression that WeChat falls under the 0-1 at this point.[0] Although to be fair, marketplaces have existed for centuries. I suppose sometimes it's hard to tell where the line is. They're certainly innovating though.

[0] [http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile- first/](http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been wondering more and more lately why tall, rich, white guys in suits have so many "insights". What exactly has Thiel done lately that warrants treating his opinions any differently than some other tall, rich, white guy's opinion? Other than just investing in companies is he really building anything?

Given that he is so far removed from the actual making of things maybe we should stop paying so much attention to him and folks like him in general. Having money and investing is nice but as far as insight is concerned I'd look elsewhere. In fact many of the points he makes just sound hollow, e.g. Microsoft Windows is the last OS, Facebook is the last social network, Google is the last search engine, Japan is not innovating, being contrarian is a sound business strategy, short term iteration + long term vision is a good thing, etc.

<comment><USER13> And the same goes for Hoffman. He's partly responsible for LinkedIn, which is in my opinion one of the most disgusting (in terms of their data collection, creepy analysis, and overall recruiter-heavy membership) companies that has ever been created, I don't understand why anyone (apart from the type of people who join get-rich-quick pyramid schemes in Las Vegas conference rooms) would want his advice.

<comment><USER12> Yup, linkedin from the perspective of a software developer is a pretty horrendous product both in terms of usability (dark UI patterns) and recruiter spam. I'm sure there is some value in having an account but I was not able to find any value.

I think most recruiters rightfully assume that if you have an account then you secretly want to be contacted and I'm sure most programmers feel like rockstars for being wanted so badly and being spammed with "opportunities". I closed my account a while ago for philosophical and practical reasons. I have yet to find a good professional network for programmers but given the state of the programmer job market I'm not feeling left out for not having a linkedin account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm just going to make it a policy to flag pointless posts like this. They add nothing to the discussion here. This is not "content" by any reasonable definition.

<comment><USER8> That is a sure way to lose your flagging privileges. Assuming we're talking about the same video, it's plain as day that this is relevant content for HN. You may not like it; that's not an acceptable reason to flag it. Flagging is for stories that don't belong on HN in the first place.

I'll give you that the title "The Secret of Unicorns" was asinine, but that's just the usual linkbait and fixing it just the usual moderation.

<comment><USER14> No, it's my opinion that it doesn't add any intellectual content of any kind. You can disagree, of course, but flagging is supposed to be for that purpose, just as you say. You think your opinion is plain as day, but others disagree and very few upvoted this. Yes, the title is what set me off initially, but you seriously need to put effort into ensuring the discourse here does not degrade into a spiral of fluff. Just read the other comments in the thread. I wasn't alone.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple two-step protection won't protect your data - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/icloud-users-take-note-apple-two-step-protection-wont-protect-your-data/

<comment><USER2> What exactly would be the benefit of two-factor if you aren't in physical possession of your device? If someone had your username and password two- factor wouldn't protect you anyway because the code would be sent to it.

<comment><USER3> Google's two-factor auth has several backup mechanisms: you can print a list of single-use codes[1] or use a backup phone[2].

[1] [https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1187538?hl=en&top...](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1187538?hl=en&topic=2784804&ctx=topic) [2] [https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1188780?hl=en&top...](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1188780?hl=en&topic=2784804&ctx=topic)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How disappointing, we're at a time where security is a major impact on our lives. Why would they not at least try a little harder to make us feel secure at least a little? Ah well, there's always flip phones.

</comment><comment><USER5> What is the point of a May 2013 article? Do we believe nothing has changed in between?

<comment><USER6> Nothing has changed, this is how Apple's 2FA still works. It's relevant because this is how the celebrity hacking happened this weekend: their passwords were brute forced, and they didn't need to break the 2FA as well because it is only needed to make purchases.</comment></comment>


Oroville Dam: Photos reveal extensive damage - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/02/28/oroville-dam-operators-stop-flow-down-spillway-see-extensive-damage/ <comment><USER2> Full title: "Oroville Dam: Photos reveal extensive damage as operators stop flow down _spillway_ "

The _dam_ is undamaged, as far as we know.

<comment><USER3> From a systems perspective, spillways are part of what constitutes 'the dam.' Systems perspectives form the basis for life-safety decisions. The definition of 'is' in 'What is a dam' might make for interesting legal arguments, but the spillway and the bedrock and the water are all part of the operational definition of a dam.

<comment><USER2> The title was _changed_ by the submitter to make it _less_ accurate.

<comment><USER3>
      $ echo 'Oroville Dam: Photos reveal extensive damage as operators stop flow down spillway' | wc -m
      82

Something had to be left out to meet the 80 character limit for submission titles. (82 is 81 + null). Omitting the subordinate clause seems not unreasonable _to me_. YMMV.

<comment><USER2>
      $ echo 'Oroville Dam: Photos reveal extensive spillway damage as operators stop flow' | wc -m
      77

Pretty obvious solution.

<comment><USER3> Not very Pythonic, however.

<comment><USER2> I'm guessing the emergency spillway was originally implemented in BASIC.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Digg's Miserable Business Model, Losing Millions of Dollars - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/diggs-miserable-business

<comment><USER2> Digg raised $40mm in VC. VCs don't give you money to put in the bank... they give you money to hire people and invest in things that might be profitable in the future.

Yes, Digg could probably have bootstrapped. But they didn't, they raised money, and once they did that, the money that the VCs gave them was meant to invest, which is guaranteed to mean that the company shows a loss.

<comment><USER3> If there was something useful for Digg to be spending that money on it's one thing, but using more people to do the same thing causes failure. IMO the goal should be to be profitable based on your income stream. With new capital you can setup some R&D or spend that money on new projects outside of your core company or advertising etc, but you need to avoid supporting the core of your company with new capital. That way you can cleanly dump everyone that's not part of making money and not kill the company.

PS: Every dollar you spend that's not supported by revenue should get the company more than one dollar in profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As far as I see Digg has about 10 times the staff of Reddit. That seems a bit excessive to me. What are all these people doing?

<comment><USER5> seriously, Digg just spends too much money. I guess that's fine and all for expansion when the VC money is coming in, but they spent $10.4 million in the first three quarters of 2008? Doesn't that figure seem insane for a company like digg?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> On those numbers Digg has revenues of approx 3 US cents per unique visitor. Not too bad, surely? How much could they charge for advertising?

It costs Digg about 5 cents per visitor. Where is that going? Seems excessive for bandwith + servers. The content is user generated, I cannot believe that they are spending much of that $14m on development or administration.

<comment><USER7> It REALLY depends on page views. Unique visitors has nothing to do with revenue. 3 cents per visitor is very low if they have high pageviews per, which I'm guessing they do.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I was thinking unique visits, rather than visitors - my mistake. They probably have a lot of people who visit daily, so the number of visits is easily hundreds of millions, page views could be billions.

<comment><USER8> 3c per visit sounds excessively high. How often do you click on advertisement?

<comment><USER7> It's 3c per visitor. If it were per visit, they'd be rich.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> they have too many employees, my guess its an inferiority complex....big site? means you need to have big company to back it up...meanwhile 1 person sites like plentyoffish are raking it in w/o huge costs

<comment><USER10> Exactly. Same can be said for Facebook. These sites only make economic sense if they can be run by small staffs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> 1\. Collect an audience of rabidly anti-commercial poor adolescents.

2\. Put up banner advertising.

3\. ???

4\. Profit

<comment><USER12> The same reason why I don't believe Facebook will ever reach real profitability - their primary audience is a bunch of poor, broke college students, not to mention ones who are generally anti-corporate.

<comment><USER13> What about when they grow up?

<comment><USER14> One analyst put it best: "Who the hell thought it was a good idea to try to monetize the space where someone publicly breaks up with their fiance?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The advice in the article seems good.. digg.com/movies ads related to movies/blockbusters digg.com/music music ads .... ads targeted according to categories...

</comment><comment><USER7> If you're going to editorialize in the link title, at least spell properly. Or did you mean they're just taking the money to the park and setting it free?

</comment><comment><USER16> Misleading title. The article actually compares digg to sites with a _similar_ model and points out how much more profitable they are. Titles matter...

Also, digg's design is poor. It has too much space spent on borders. With a cleaner interface, it would have more add space to monetize.</comment>


Complexity - Making the Simple, Impossible - <AUTHOR> http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/complexity/

<comment><USER2> Why didn't he just call the phone number on the bill? Banks buy and sell pieces of each other all the time. Calling "the bank" and hoping to find someone who knows something about your account is incredibly naive. I guess he needed that kind of naivety to create Dilbert. Maybe guys like this are able to point out the weird things we've adapted to because they aren't able to adapt themselves. Seriously, it takes a kind of mad genius to think that a randomly chosen customer service person in MegaCorpBank would have the means to access his account information or even figure out which piece of MegaCorpBank he has an account with.

</comment><comment><USER3> All of the examples presented are cases of under-modeled, under-specified systems. If bank products were well-modeled, consistency rules were part of the system specifications, and each of the bank's products was represented with a common drill-down ("Show me when the customer agreed to these terms") API which could be wired into the CSR app, then Mr. Adams might have had one less example.

As a side note, given how much Mr. Adams can likely charge for incremental work (custom art as the given example), why does he not hire a high-end secretary to sort these things out for him?

</comment><comment><USER4> My Mum wanted to copy music onto her multi-gigabyte Sony Walkman mp3 player. I simply showed her every single step to get the job done, and she wrote it all down, and all she has to do now is consult her notes. This is a Windows machine - I was just showing her how to rip a CD without installing iTunes (I think we used Windows Media Player).

My point is that anyone can learn a complex system if taught right. Reading the manual is no small luxury, and without the ability to learn a system, you are helpless to the bad guys who want to keep you in the dark.</comment>


SEO Backpack - <AUTHOR> http://seobackpack.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there, I am the Maker of SEO Backpack.

As the world of SEO/SEM is very important for growing your business or startup, I created SEO Backpack and listed all tools you will ever need based on my last 3 years of experience.

Feel free to submit your own tools, and any feedback is well received.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is just a thin site containing lists of affiliate links. It'd be much more useful if you had actually compared the tools you're linking to and/or ranked or rated them on the functionality they offer.</comment>


Video player webtorrent with subtitles - <AUTHOR> http://andreapaiola.name/niagara/ <comment><USER2> God works in mysterious ways. Last night I remembered that someone, some time ago, showed on HN a JS library to handle video torrents. I thought: well, I should fork it and add a subtitle function. Now I see Andrea's work. Sweet!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Thank you for the comment. Obviously the big feature here is the subtitles integration... I'm Italian and I usually use Italian subtitles for Britain and american series.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Tried different magnet links, all resulted in the same movie ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Webtorrent or BitTorrent?

[https://github.com/feross/webtorrent/issues/369](https://github.com/feross/webtorrent/issues/369)

Many magnet links are not compatibles right now...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Do you like it? I found it very easy, but I'm biased...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Great fun for a one day (weekend) project!</comment>


Which Interventions Can Be Paid For: The Explanatory Power of "Prasad's Law" - <AUTHOR> https://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2019/12/which-interventions-can-be-paid-for.html <comment><AUTHOR> The title for this submission is taken from the bottom of the post itself. The original title is "Which Interventions Can Be Paid For: The Explanatory Power of Prasad's Law'", which doesn't seem to adequately convey that the blog post is about health care interventions, and how US healthcare happily pays for marginally-effective interventions (ex: chemotherapy) before providing things that people actually need (home assistance, meal delivery, rides, etc).

This blog makes points that seem to get to the heart of my own observations of the United States' health system problems. Some months ago I responded here to say "IMHO, health care in the United States is used as a job project, to provide jobs for all the people who used to build stuff" [1].

I think 'wealth transfer' is a better explanation than 'job project' to explain why the US health system is dysfunctional.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20313720](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20313720)

<comment><USER2> Ironically, the submitted title was so "clickbait"y that I didn't follow the link. But after reading your comment, my interest was peaked and I found it enjoyable

<comment><USER3> WordBot: _Did you mean: "piqued"?_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I read this like, "Obviously, that's how it's designed." The title does not shock me as a revelation like it's meant to but rather a fact. A rather obvious one to everyone but those who perpetuate the fallacy.

<comment><USER5> It's obvious to those who perpetuate it too, they just see this fact as a feature, not a bug

<comment><USER4> That's true. I digress. It's evidently more obvious to those who perpetuate it and designed it as such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I read this like, "duh, no shit."</comment>


Show HN: Program to download every message and file from a slack team/room - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/andrewarrow/localsdata <comment><AUTHOR> it puts everything in `~/.grepslak` room by room, so if you want to search multiple rooms because you know a message is in like one of 6 rooms but you can't remember which, download all 6 rooms and grep just the contents of those 6 rooms.</comment>


Why No 2D Userspace API in Linux Direct Rendering Manager? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ffwll.ch/2018/08/no-2d-in-drm.html <comment><AUTHOR> For me, I think it's one of the greatest unfortunate event in the age of modern desktops.

In the late 1990s, on a Pentium MMX computer without a GPU, it was possible to have a reasonably usable desktop by utilizing simple 2D operations: 256 ROPs, line drawing, rectangle filling/copying, and mono-to-color expansion. They were usually a subset of Direct2D specs, and implemented by the vast majority of graphics chips, like NeoMagic or Trident.

As the processing power have greatly increased, today, it's almost impossible to use these machines anymore - simply moving a window will put the CPU in 100% load. Because today's desktops use composite window manager, it's already impossible to translate a window move to an exact RectCopy command.

Even if composite is not used (and ignoring all the complexity of modern highly-abstracted GUI systems where you cannot say the boundary of a window is a line), we still cannot accelerate it, because the entire 2D graphics stack was simply thrown again, there's no standard 2D APIs for applications or developers to use. X Server still has EXA, but it's again, is not a modern framework, and it's not possible to run X without using root.

I have a little non-x86 laptop with a 2D blitter, the graphics is nearly impossible to use, and things are getting worse and worse day-by-day. On the other hand, if you port Windows 95's graphics stack on it, it should be perfectly usable.

In the end, I think it's the unfortunate result of economics - sure, there are still many uses of running GUIs/desktops with 2D blitters, but the benefits of supporting it greatly exceeded the cost. A GPU is much cheaper.</comment>


Merrill Lynch Is Fined for Doing Nothing - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-23/merrill-lynch-is-fined-for-doing-nothing <comment><USER2> Doing nothing? This is essentially what MF Global did ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MF_Global](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MF_Global)), except for the minor detail of then putting their customer's cash in _for sure_ money losing investments, and then doubling down.

Amazingly, it is claimed that MF Global's US customers were made 98% whole, after of course a long delay, and overseas customers 74% whole, see the end of the introduction of the Wikipedia article. But a near total loss was expected for a long time, and no doubt more than a little arm twisting was involved in retrieving the money, what we believed to be the denouement of MF Global was a grave threat to futures trading in the US.

</comment><comment><USER3> They're not fined for doing nothing, they're fined for willfully evading the requirements for having capital on hand through what amounts to magic tricks.

<comment><USER4> Right, the headline might be read as "Fined for doing nothing (When they were supposed to be doing something and instead took insane action to get out of their responsibilities while also paying off their friends to the tune of almost a million a person)"

Doesn't get those clicks though.</comment></comment>


Uber, Google, Facebook: Your experiments have gone too far - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/19/uber-google-facebook-experiments-gone-wrong/ <comment><USER2> This article is all over the place. It just felt like complaint soup.

They start on about Uber and Lyft causing increased traffic and then turn to complain about the tech busses (a measure to reduce traffic!) in the same breath.

I don't really see what the Facebook ads story adds to the local politics angle.

Did the author have a source for the waymo car "causing" another vehicle pinwheel (I assume this means spin out) and fleeing the scene? That seems really serious.

As for the scooters, another clean solution to reduce traffic, but people throw a shit fit cause they're tech.

Don't get me wrong, these companies are awful. Ads are psychological warfare, Facebook has done actual experiments to affect people's moods. So many of these products are designed to be addictive, capturing our attention for their profit. As well, the pervasive surveillance state that smart phones, apps, and data collection has created. This doesn't address any of that, instead it's just SF political pandering.

Edit: The article has like / share buttons for basically all these companies at the bottom of the page.

<comment><USER3> > Did the author have a source for the waymo car "causing" another vehicle > pinwheel (I assume this means spin out) and fleeing the scene? That seems > really serious.

It was from a New Yorker story this week where there were emails from Lewandowski discussing an accident. This is linked in the post so I don't know how you missed it.

<comment><USER2> >This is linked in the post so I don't know how you missed it.

It's almost as if my brain is trained to completely ignore underlined text from all the sites that use it for inter-linking spam. Seriously, didn't even notice it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> full disclosure: I used to work at Uber.

I'd be interested in hearing more about the claims made at the beginning of the article and the sources of those.

I moved to SF in 2012 when uber was barely a thing (still only black cars) and haven't noticed the traffic being worst. I've also not noticed any parking spots that are now free (but even if this happened, isn't that a good sign?).

To the opposite, and again my own sources are biased since I worked at Uber for a while (i'm not anymore), but I've heard a lot of studies proving the opposite - reduced traffic, better for the environment, etc.

As an example, I googled "how many cars per day in SF" and the first thing I found is that 110 000 cars cross the golden gate bridge alone. I'd assume the Bay bridge is seeing at least that if not twice. So the argument that 5700 more cars because of Uber and Lyft in the city are the cause of traffic seems a little short sighted. It's also the same argument that was made by De Blasio a few years ago about NYC and studies proved that it was false.

I'm not saying the article is lying or anything, and again, I'm very biased, I'm just surprised to see an article from Engadget making such claims without links to sources/studies. The author saying "I'd realized congestion in San Francisco had gone insane" doesn't convince me this is particularly true...

<comment><USER3> There was a study that came out in August noting that Uber & Lyft are infact causing congestion: [http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf](http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf)

Summary via NPR: [https://www.npr.org/2018/08/01/634506179/ride-hailing- servic...](https://www.npr.org/2018/08/01/634506179/ride-hailing-services-add- to-traffic-congestion-study-says)

<comment><USER5> heh. Do we really need a study to know that having cheaper taxis causes congestion?

<comment><USER3> Well considering the claims by Lyft & Uber that they'd reduce congestion, I'd say yes a study would be warranted to highlight if it's true or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish we could start putting more ideas and investment into the physical world of roads, trains and bridges now that we have the information part doing well. Sadly it won't happen for decades with the current political situation poisoned by the extreme right.

</comment><comment><USER7> to endgadget: your clickbait experiment worked. thanks

</comment><comment><USER8> Tl;Dr: writer complains about local politics and is afraid for his job and it's all the fault of big tech companies.

Very SF-local story, too, I don't understand why it's in a globally targeted publication.

</comment><comment><USER9> The same writer would likely be happy to defend the point of view that if you don't like how a platform is treating you, like banning you for your views, then you can just leave.</comment>


Linux Beats Mac Dramatically In Humble Bundle Total Payments - <AUTHOR> http://www.thepowerbase.com/2013/03/linux-beats-mac-dramatically-in-humble-bundle-total-payments/

<comment><USER2> Probably people buying from their Android devices being counted under the 'Linux' flag?

<comment><USER3> Sounds reasonable. And with that, it's hard to extrapolate useful and fair conclusions. Since Humble Bundle purchases can't work towards iOS unlike Android, that ignores a huge market segment.</comment></comment>


Using Twitter as Your Database - <AUTHOR> http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/using-twitter-as-your-database-2/ <comment><USER2> The Times continues to impress me with their adaptation to digital news. Back when they introduced their new subscription service I had a very poor opinion of the them (I even wrote an article[1] for my school paper about it.)

Now I subscribe, and it's worth every dollar (at least on a student subscription :) I appreciate it when the Times is more conservative on the whole "social media" idea. Compared to CNN, which is so full of webby 2.0 qr twat crap, it's great. And blogs like the Open impress me in showing they are using some cool technologies (Sinatra) to make a better experience (election tracking).

[1] <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5055192/10111NYTSubscribeOpin.pdf>

<comment><USER3> Besides that they can't shake the concept of a paywall, the NYT is indeed one of the newspapers that does a good job online. I should _hope_ so, given their size... I remain unimpressed and even puzzled by the poor state of the website of the average local newspaper. I see it as more than the NYT has done a great job, the industry on average has done an abysmal job of creating useful well designed online services - therefore, ones that have modern websites like the NYT stand out.

<comment><USER4> The NYT has great set of dev's, including the DocumentCloud folks who have open sourced a ton of their tools (<http://www.documentcloud.org/opensource>). I presume this work comes out of their Interactive News team which features folks like Jeremy Askhenas.

I met their research dev team some years ago and was pleasantly surprised by how good they were.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely, the NYT web site is very, very good. I've been quite impressed by a few of their slick special features.

That's what I'd expect from one of the top 5 newspapers in the world, though. What I'm wondering about is why the average newspaper for a town of 1,000,000 in the US has such a clusterfuck disaster of a website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We did templates for city-level tweets. E.g. Twitter in London: <http://tlondon.linkstore.ru>

</comment><comment><USER6> This is neat, but I've always considered Delicious (despite the recent ownership troubles) to be a sort of databasey type service.</comment>


Ask HN: What should every programmer know about memory nowadays? - <AUTHOR>

Ulrich Drepper's 2007 series of articles, What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory, is widely considered a must read. However, it was written 8 years ago (a lifetime in the tech world). What changes should the modern programmer be aware of? <comment><USER2> Programmers need to stress more about their own brain's memory speed and optimization that the pc's..</comment>


Ask HN: Buying a wireless N Router with USB and Wireless Print Server? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking to gift a new router for my Startup family with my little savings. I'm low on budget. Currently we are having a Basic Netgear wgr614 Wireless G-Router.
I need a very customizable router i.e supporting Tomato/dd-wrt and Wireless N Surfing, has Qos Bandwidth Management, and has USB ports - for Centrally sharing Portable HDD's also USB ports for a Print Server. Will save lots of time to my startup.
I can only think of Asus N16 router, which has all this options available. Any other router suggestions? Cheaper and more versatile? <comment><AUTHOR> Link for Asus N16 router - [http://www.amazon.com/RT-N16-Wireless-N-Maximum- Performance-...](http://www.amazon.com/RT-N16-Wireless-N-Maximum-Performance- single/dp/B00387G6R8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321602290&sr=8-1)</comment>


Woz talks iOS 7 and PRISM in an off the cuff airport interview [video] - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/15/woz-talks-ios-7-and-prism-in-an-off-the-cuff-airport-interview/ <comment><USER2> That's how a reasonable american feels about this. Imagine what is now being felt by people who aren't U.S. citizens, who aren't protected by the U.S. constitution, but who use the same services and who now have their personal data under the noses of the NSA! Imagine how we feel every time Obama or other U.S. government officials try to reassure americans that it's okay and everything is all right because U.S. citizens are protected!

As Woz predicts, most people outside the U.S. are going to ignore this just as most people inside the U.S. will. Some might even laugh! "Haha. Look at the silly americans. They're acting like a banana republic again!". However, at least some of us feel deeply betrayed. Gmail, facebook, and other social/cloud services run by U.S. companies might be constantly trying to sell us stuff, but until now we could reasonably expect U.S. companies to behave according to laws we expect from a free and open first-world democracy. Instead, now we have found out that U.S. laws are being applied to force these companies to violate our privacy, and if we're not U.S. citizens we have absolutely no idea how far it goes.

Facebook: goodbye.

Dropbox: goodbye.

Gmail: goodbye.

Sadly, that's only the start. I'm Canadian. After the patriot act was passed, there was some concern about the privacy implications North of the border. For example Canadian banks, such as CIBC, often outsource some financial services to U.S. companies, and the patriot act greatly reduced the requirements for gaining access to our personal information through this conduit. When this happened it greatly concerned some people, but most of us laughed it off and said that we didn't need to worry if we didn't have a shady account in the Cayman's!

No longer.

CIBC: goodbye.

Am I overreacting? Am I paranoid? The sickening thing is I have no idea what the U.S. will do with all this information about me they have access to. They have no accountability to me and under their laws I have no rights. I am a non-citizen on foreign soil. I am _the_ _enemy_. I can either try to ignore this or I can start avoiding companies that have anything to do with the U.S. as much as possible. This protects me and allows me to exert the only influence that I, as a foreigner, have on the U.S.: I can deny U.S. companies my money.

<comment><USER3> FWIW you're not alone in feeling like this. Fortunately I deleted my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts years ago, but losing Google services is going to hurt. It also feels a little futile since my country, like yours, participates in Echelon so I'm not sure how much material difference it really makes. However I have absolutely no control over US policy, and the only thing I can do is hope to motivate Google to lobby for a sane internet by showing them that they are directly affected by the US administration's actions. That, and donate to the EFF.

It's a shame, because there's a lot I really like about Google as a company, and I really think that they're trying to push the bar when it comes to privacy (elliptic cryptography etc) and I love things like Project Loon. But at the end of the day they're screwed for me by the jurisdiction they operate under.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Passing the Patriot Act must've been the most _anti-patriotic_ thing the US has ever done. It destroyed Americans' beliefs about what it means to be American, and it also destroyed the foreigners' belief and hopes about America, too.

As a non-American, that's how I see it, and that's why I was hoping Ron Paul became president, because I knew he was probably your only hope to keep America what it used to be, and revert this awful trend of the government killing every American value and the American Constitution.

The worst thing about "tyranny" or anything similar, is not the _tyrant_ himself. That's the _easy_ part, because he can at least be removed. But what do you do with the destroyed culture? The culture that you have free speech and rights to privacy, and the culture that authorities need to respect the _spirit_ of the law, not just the letter (while always seeking loopholes, so they can still "respect" the letter of the law, but do whatever they want. And what do you do with all the _millions upon millions_ of people that _believe_ in the "new" culture, of spying on everyone, and so on?

Once the culture is changed, it takes decades to bring it back.

<comment><USER5> _Passing the Patriot Act must 've been the most anti-patriotic thing the US has ever done_

I'm not defending the PATRIOT Act by any means but I think calling it this makes you a prisoner of recency. I don't understand how someone could genuinely compare the PATRIOT Act to things like the Trail of Tears, Jim Crow, or Japanese-American internments.

<comment><USER6> The Patriot Act is a precursor to worse things than these. We are just beginning to see their manifestations. It is still early...

<comment><USER7> I dunno, the Trail of Tears was pretty bad. I would hope the patriot act doesn't lead to a genocide of 60,000 people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What he says about the picture of the USA during the cold war, that's what we all thought around the world, especially in Germany.

A few people criticized the imperialism, but most people just saw the USA as an example of how the free world should function.

This was shattered during the time of George W. Bush. He ruined it. We all mourned 9/11\. We were at shock and couldn't realize what happened. There were minutes of silence around the world. And George W. Bush ruined it. Destroyed the trust and solidarity.

Then came Obama. We thought he will bring peace and undo any wrongdoing of the former government. He even got a Nobel Peace Prize because we thought it was inevitable that things get better.

And now?

<comment><USER9> In Europe i am hoping that Germany will lead the way. The German people seem to care most about personal freedom. If they can convince the government not to give in to outside pressure to take away more and more liberty it could become not only the economic but also moral leader of Europe.

<comment><USER10> > The German people seem to care most about personal freedom

That may be the case, but they still don't manage to get rid of their corrupt CDU/CSU politicians who are also most active in implementing US- and US- friendly policies in Germany.

My belief is that with proper education, people would find out on the long run how governments should behave and what policies should not be tolerated. But for some reason, education is no longer a priority for these governments, I wonder why...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No dazzling insights, but Woz's obviously genuine character always gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. Such a lovely guy.

</comment><comment><USER12> When Woz talks about being proud that American soldiers didn't torture, I feel like I'm listening to a simpleton who happens to be utterly genius but was still brainwashed into seeing any agressive war as commendable.

But then he impressively says some very radical things, such as comparing America to the Stalin-and-on's Soviet Union, which I know many see obvious holes in (e.g. no dictator in America has killed tens of millions of dissidents or forced a territory to starve, though we are obviously committing other atrocities). He mentions property ownership but he chooses the cloud as an example which seems to loop him back to talking about privacy, though I was really interested to hear if he had an explanation for saying private property beyond what is convertible to digital is somehow threatened in America.

He's wonderful though.

<comment><USER2> There's a vast difference between a state whose agents sometimes use torture illicitly and a state whose policies officially sanction and prescribe torture.

There was probably a gradual shift towards the use of torture in U.S. intelligence culture such that Bush's policies were just a rubber-stamp after the fact. The use of techniques such as the "Bell telephone hour" during the Vietnam war were heavily encouraged by pressure from above on intelligence agents to gather confessions and enemy troop positions in quantity, veracity being heavily undervalued. However, even during this period, being caught (by the wrong people) was a danger. It was very much a situation of, "I don't care how you do it so long as you do it, but don't _tell_ me how you did it and, for pete's sake, don't get caught!".

The knowledge that torture was not officially sanctioned, even if routinely ignored, still served to restrain its use. That's why Bush's rubber stamp is still a truly heinous and evil thing. It's the difference between agents re- purposing telephone equipment in the field and permanent torture facilities. To a prisoner, it's the difference between hours of torture and _years_. That's why I'm still upset with my own government for handing over prisoners to U.S. forces in Afghanistan despite knowing full-well what treatment awaited them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> With Woz We Stand

</comment><comment><USER14> Evil, is what Woz says is evil.</comment>


Introducing BigML's Free Machine Learning Sandbox. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bigml.com/2012/07/04/introducing-bigmls-free-machine-learning-sandbox/

<comment><USER2> "What's the difference between development mode and production mode? The most obvious difference is that in development mode, you won't be charged a single credit. The flip side is that your datasets are limited to 1 Mb. That naturally also limits your model training data to 1 Mb."

Good concept, but 1MB is too tiny to risk the time investment necessary to learn your system.

<comment><USER3> It's 1MB per resource. You can create as many resources as you want. To try bigger sizes you also get 400 credits for free. What else can you ask for?</comment></comment>


Why do browsers not use SRV records? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9063378/why-do-browsers-not-use-srv-records

<comment><USER2> DNS often being the slowest link in the perf chain, adding another set of (recursive) queries to a cold HTTP request is asking for too much. This could mean up to a second more lag for transcontinental links.

And for what gain? Now we can host our httpd on random ports, which for some reason we managed to not need for the past 20 years.</comment>


Ask YC: Hacker Groups (please help me fill out) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Hacker_Groups <comment><USER2> List of Hacker Spaces: <http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces>

You'll find mostly everybody from last week 25c3 conf there

<comment><AUTHOR> I added a link to this site at the top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A question I find connected: What defines a hacker group?

Presumably in this site's context, what's meant is the nerdy end of web entrepreneurship. There are a number of events here in town which have elements of web, nerd, and entrepreneur, but don't really capture what comes to my mind when I think of a hacker meetup.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm surprised there is no group in the Washington DC area.

<comment><USER5> Indeed there is; <http://hacdc.org/>

I'm thinking of checking it out in the spring .. if they'll have me.

<comment><USER6> I have visited HacDC a few times. Since I don't actually live in DC, I tend to just go when they have events. The people I've met there have always been friendly, and all of their events are open to the public.

They just started getting off the ground last summer, so it's not nearly as fancy as CCC or NYCResistor. Still, they put together some pretty cool stuff. Last time I went, I got to meet Mitch Altman.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sweet, just added: <http://utahcodemasons.blogspot.com/> we are having our first meeting this thursday at borders in provo at 6:30pm if anyone on here is interested. We are thinking something akin to the free hackers union.

</comment><comment><USER8> You can add Aus ( <http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach- australia?hl=en> )

\- Melbourne <http://melbourne.siliconbeachaustralia.org/>

<comment><USER9> wiki what?

<comment><USER10> What a pleasant find - there are still wikis that can be edited without creating an account first!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Do you want hacker groups or entrepreneur groups? They're different beasts but also useful. Perhaps a different page for the entrepreneur groups.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hacker groups, as this is Hacker News :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> HackerSpaces, two in the UK. Hacker Groups, two in the UK. I see PG's essay on moving to where the things you want to be part of are in a different light now compared to when I first read it.</comment>


Six Ways a Russian Hacker Attacked My Website - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/nastyox1/six-ways-a-russian-hacker-attacked-my-website-4657#comments <comment><USER2> The most interesting thing about this article is the discovery of the open FTP server that the hacker was using to verify the attack. I imagine the hacker doesn't own this server either but has compromised it earlier.

But anyone who has runs a site knows that attacks like this happen all the time. I own a small low-value static site that gets about 50 legitimate hits on a good day and the logs reveal that I get attacked several times an hour by automatic exploit scanners. It is just constant and doesn't even include the SSH attacks.

Anything on the internet is going to be targeted - no site is too small or obscure.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting. Fascinating that this is such a problem. I was watching a video of George Hotz about comma.ai tech where he was essentially saying that no one will bother hacking into your car if it's self-driving. Makes me wonder if that's actually the case. Probably depends on the difficulty but this is above my paygrade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why have you linked to the comments rather than the article? Is there a reason?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh darn.. Yes, the reason is I'm a fruitloop! Sorry about that!

<comment><USER3> Easily done. I always double check the URL after submitting, just in case it's not what I intended.

But easily done ...</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where's your overnight business/app/framework today? - <AUTHOR>

People often post messages on HN announcing the launch of a new business, a new app, a new framework, etc that they created in a weekend.<p>I was curious to hear from people who have done this where their business/app/framework/etc is at today.  I know each response could be a case study in itself, but it would be interesting to get a quick update and lessons learned. <comment><USER2> This was just posted: <http://blog.mozilla.com/webdev/2012/03/21/rapid- prototyping/></comment>


Nobody Is Using Google+ - <AUTHOR> http://uk.businessinsider.com/google-active-users-2015-1

<comment><AUTHOR> Data analyst / OP / Space Alien Cat here.

Methods: [https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ)

(linked in the article)

Pastebin of the 4215 "active" profiles sampled for activity. In quotes as some actually _aren 't_ though they passed my initial regex screen.

[http://pastebin.com/tmdcsKLZ](http://pastebin.com/tmdcsKLZ)

Source for the sitemaps is the G+ robots.txt file:

[https://plus.google.com/robots.txt](https://plus.google.com/robots.txt)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd also strongly recommend for potential critics:

90-9-1 rule: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_\(Internet_culture\)) [http://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation- inequality/](http://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/)

Random sampling and error size: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_sample](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_sample) [http://www.randomsampling.org/](http://www.randomsampling.org/)

An independent estimate for number of G+ profiles, team includes a present Google Employee (per his G+ profile page). Validates my 2.2 billion number (via Thomas E. Hanna on G+):

[http://plus.miernicki.com/](http://plus.miernicki.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> That G+ is likely to fizzle is much less interesting to me than why a company with the might of Google was unable to make it work. I suspect that G+'s seeming fate is not particularly surprising to anyone in the tech sector under the age of 40 or so.

Social media technologies are about as remarkable as email accounts in the year 2015. And switching to G+ is the social media equivalent of switching to hotmail, at least in terms of public perception. And since public perception means a lot in a world where you have about 30 seconds to change minds, the G+ ship sailed several years ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> _why a company with the might of Google was unable to make it work_

Social is hard. Really hard. I've mused on that rap a lot myself.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure why G+ should succeed. It's one of those, "Who ordered that?" propositions. I don't understand, does Google want to be all things to all people? I would rather that they brought self driving cars to commercial fruition as soon as possible, rather than try to clone Facebook, Twitter, Amazon or Apple's flagship products. Roll out Google Fiber everywhere, or at least in the Bay Area. Give us something we really need rather than uninspired versions of existing products. Total lack of focus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Doesn't it seem a little odd to qualify G+ usage by public data numbers? I get that that it's what you have available, but if you used that method you'd probably conclude that Facebook has a fraction of the users they actually do, too.

I have no doubt that G+'s active usage numbers are weaker than Google would like, but it seems like quite the chasmic leap to declare that nobody's using it based on that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Drunks, keys, and streetlights: it's where the light is.

Yes, that's a weakness of the study (I'm the numbers guy), but it's also what's available. It also allows for direct comparisons with other platforms offering public posting. And in the face of a dearth of quantified metrics from Google, offers a data point.

<comment><USER5> And there's a reason why Google is hiding or manipulating their numbers. They're poor. If they were good, you know darn well they'd be bragging about them. So they play tricks and games to try to hide that data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, quite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So bloody what.

I use G+, I like G+, it does what I need, Google haven't messed with it too much like FB does all the time.

Use whatever tool you like for the task.

What's with all these articles saying how no one is using G+, I assume they think Google are going to shut it down? Why would they, they can target me and create a profile around me....

Meh.</comment>


Joyent deprecates no.de and partners with Nodejitsu - <AUTHOR> http://www.nodejitsu.com/?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRokvajBZKXonjHpfsX96%2BgkUaGg38431UFwdcjKPmjr1YsGSdQhcOuuEwcWGog8ygNBH%2B6B#/joyent

<comment><AUTHOR> Text from the email just sent to no.de customers:

Greetings!

We are emailing you with some great news. Joyent Cloud is partnering with Nodejitsu to provide a new Node.js development environment that improves on Joyent's existing no.de service. You can sign up for the new service by clicking here.

Below is an FAQ explaining what this partnership means. Thanks for reading!

Q: Can you explain the Joyent Cloud / Nodejitsu partnership? What does this mean?

A: Joyent Cloud and Nodejitsu are partnering to deliver a Node.js development environment that will leverage the development and management tools of Nodejitsu and the Joyent Cloud infrastructure to deliver high-performance Node.js applications. Nodejitsu will run a significant part of its infrastructure on the Joyent Cloud. This will provide a superior continuum for Node.js apps spanning development, test and production phases of an application life cycle.

Q: I have an no.de account. How does this new arrangement affect me?

A: The new arrangement does not affect you whatsoever. You can still use your existing no.de account as outlined under the Terms of Service of the free program. While we think those who check out the new Nodejitsu development environment will want to switch over from no.de immediately, we do not have plans to make changes to the no.de service at this time.

Q: I want an no.de account but couldn't get one before because the system was over capacity. Can I get one now?

A: You won't be able to get a no.de account, but developers wishing to access a full-featured Node.js development sandbox should sign up for the new Nodejitsu / Joyent service.

Q: How do I move from the no.de environment to the Nodjitsu environment?

A: All Node.js code deployed in no.de should run equally well in the new Nodejitsu sandbox. If users are on no.de v2, the only significant changes are the switch from "git push" to "jitsu deploy", Nodejitsu's deployment tool. Jitsu deploy will walk you through all necessary changes configuration changes. For more information on how to use jitsu deploy, click here.

Best Regards, The Joyent Team

</comment><comment><USER2> the only constant is change.</comment>


A secure captive portal browser with automatic DNS detection - <AUTHOR> http://blog.filippo.io/captive-browser <comment><USER2> So does this actually bypass the captive portal, or just secure your connections after logging in?

<comment><USER3> Neither, if I understand it correctly. It provides a secure environment for logging into the captive portal (rather than using the OS-built ins), without having to disable/change other network/security settings (DNS/HTTPS Everywhere).</comment></comment>